Something Dangerous (Spoils of Time 02) (13 page)

Venetia, shocked into silence by this, sent him away and spent the rest of the night sobbing in Adele’s arms; the next morning, her father came into her room again, pale and exhausted-looking and asked her what she really wanted. ‘I can’t bear to see you so unhappy, it breaks my heart.’

Venetia said what she really wanted was to marry Boy ‘and I’m sure he wants to marry me, it was just a shock, and Mummy getting hold of him like she did before he came in to me, and telling him what he was to say, you know how she always gets her own way. I can’t have this horrible thing done, I can’t, I can’t just – kill our baby, throw it away, I shall – I shall kill myself if you try and make me.’

Oliver was silent; sensing he was halfway persuaded, and putting to use the skills she had been practising all her life, Venetia threw herself into his arms, gazed up at him, her great dark eyes beseeching behind her tears.

‘Please, Daddy, I know you can put it right, I know you can make Mummy see sense, you’re the only person she ever listens to, and Boy too, please try and do what you can for me.’

Oliver patted her head gently and said he would, told her to try and get some sleep and left her in Adele’s charge; Adele, sent to reconnoitre, reported loud shouting from behind their parents’ door, ‘But I couldn’t really hear a word and I was too frightened to stay for long.’

Oliver failed to change Celia’s mind; two days passed; dreadful days of tears, recriminations, reproaches. Celia became more implacable by the hour; Oliver was increasingly miserable; Boy stayed away.

Then, on the third day, Lady Beckenham arrived to visit her granddaughters.

‘Your mother doesn’t know I’m here,’ she said, ‘but I was concerned for you. Silly girl. We never learn, I’m afraid,’ she added rather unexpectedly.

‘Who?’ said Venetia, blowing her nose. She was very fond of her grandmother.

‘Women. We go on and on making the same mistakes, generation after generation. Men as well, I suppose, but it’s women who pay the price.’

Venetia was too weary and too sick to enter into what seemed like a surprisingly intellectual discussion and lay back listlessly on the sofa.

‘What do you want do do?’ said Lady Beckenham.

‘I want to marry Boy, of course. And he wants to marry me. He said so,’ she added, editing the truth with a skill that half her father’s staff might have envied.

Lady Beckenham looked at her. ‘I’m not at all sure he’d make you a very good husband,’ she said. ‘His father is a disgrace, the mother is no better, there’s no real class there, and the money’s new.’

‘I know all that. And I don’t care about class and new money and all that sort of thing.’

‘Well, you should do. It’s very important. Probably why your mother is so against this marriage.’

‘No,’ said Venetia, ‘she says I’m too young and I don’t know what I’m doing and she knows Boy isn’t the right husband for me.’

Lady Beckenham looked at her, and then suddenly and most unexpectedly, burst into her rather loud laugh.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s rich, I must say. Very rich. Coming from your mother. Dear, oh dear.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Venetia.

‘Oh – you’ll find out one day, no doubt. I don’t know what to think, Venetia, about all this. What would be best. I might have a word with young Warwick myself.’

‘Oh please don’t,’ said Venetia, alarmed.

‘Why ever not? I’ve known him all of his life. And his father. Dreadful man, bought his title you know. All that nonsense about services to his country is just so much poppycock. Services to the government’s coffers rather more like it. He used to play cards with Beckenham, always cheated, and then tried to get out of paying his debts. Tried to diddle old Bertie Dunraven, who really couldn’t afford it, out of two thousand pounds. Disgraceful, with all that money. Not many people know that of course. You’d regret having him as a father-in-law, Venetia, I can promise you that.’ She bent and kissed her. ‘Now you try and get some rest. You look dreadful. Adele, go and make her some hot milk.’

When she had gone, Adele looked at Venetia. ‘What was all that about, do you think?’

‘What?’

‘You know, all that about it being rich coming from Mummy stuff. And women making the same mistakes down the ages, or whatever it was she said.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Venetia, wearily. ‘Oh God, I think I’m going to be sick again. Adele, could I have some water? Not milk, for heaven’s sake.’

After she had brought in the jug of iced water, Adele went out of the room and stood for a while on the landing, looking thoughtfully at her mother’s study door. Then she took a deep breath and went in.

Ten minutes later, she hurtled into the twins’ sitting room.

‘Venetia, you won’t believe – you just won’t believe this.’

Venetia had been half asleep; she looked at her wearily. ‘What is it?’

Adele was holding a large, parchment envelope; she started pulling out the contents. ‘Just – just look at these. And think. About what Grandmama said. Mummy and Daddy’s wedding certificate. See. And here, look, Giles’s birth certificate. Dated just six months later. What about that?’

Venetia looked at her sister, colour in her face for the first time for days.

‘Well,’ was all she said. ‘Just wait till she gets home, that’s all I can say.’

Three days later,
The Times
and the
Telegraph
had announced the forthcoming marriage of Venetia, daughter of Lady Celia and Mr Oliver Lytton and Mr Charles Henry Warwick, eldest son of Sir Reginald Warwick.

But how awful, Venetia thought almost sadly now, sitting at her dressing table, applying vanishing cream to her face, lest it might lose some of its bloom and Boy’s attention with it, if her mother had indeed been right and she should not have married Boy at all. Which, in her most secret self, she was beginning to fear. Since Henry’s birth, his absences from home had increased; he appeared very pleased with his son, visited him and Venetia several times daily – but that was what it felt like, she realised: a visit. After which he was inclined to disappear for several hours – not only from the room but the house.

She had tried taxing him with it, but he was infuriatingly and charmingly vague, insisting he was merely trying to give her time to recover; she felt frustrated, enraged even, but it was impossible to make any impression on his smooth, bland surface. She felt lonely and miserable much of the time, still too weak to re-enter the real world, go out, have fun, organise the life she was supposed to share with Boy; Adele was once again her main companion.

Adele, whom she had hurt so badly, she knew, and who had forgiven her so bravely and generously. Then she thought of Henry, the new beloved, with his dark hair and dark eyes, and the wobbly, difficult smile that he was beginning to master when he gazed up from her arms and her heart turned over and she knew that whatever Boy did to her and might not feel for her, and however unhappy and lonely Adele might be also, it was worth it. Anything was worth having Henry. Anything at all.

‘There’s trouble on the way. I mean really on the way. Getting close.’ Dudley ‘Duke’ Carlisle sat back in his chair and looked at Laurence. They were lunching at the Yale Club, that bastion of tradition and privilege near Grand Central station; Duke was rather fond of Laurence. Twenty years his senior and with three wives to his credit, he was a stockbroker; richer by the day as well as being in possession of a vast, private fortune, he had met Laurence at a Wall Street function and invited him to a reception at his recently purchased Fifth Avenue mansion, only a few hundred yards from Elliott House, where Laurence lived alone and in equal splendour. His patrician air and old-money Washington accent belied a total greed and ruthlessness more suited to a friend of Mr Al Capone than a member of the East Hampton golf club. His present wife Leila, an ice-cool blonde, had been rather taken with Laurence and had gone so far as to make the fact plain, but Laurence knew which of the Carlisles was of more value to him and had made it equally plain that he was not interested.

‘You mean more than a recession?’ said Laurence.

‘I do. A crash, and a huge one. It’s inevitable, the overheating is too great. The financial press is predicting it now as well. I had dinner with the editor of the
Commercial and Financial Chronicle
last night. He says Wall Street has taken leave of its senses.’

‘Interesting.’

‘Not a tremor like last March, an earthquake. It won’t steady again.’

‘And – what would your advice be?’ said Laurence.

‘Sell, obviously. But quietly, day by day. Don’t want to set any panics in motion. It could be, of course,’ – he looked at Laurence – ‘a time when selling short should be considered.’

‘Indeed? Well, I would obviously consider it. I had thought also – perhaps you could give me your reaction to this – that one might be a little, shall we say, ahead of the financial trend. When the collapse does actually begin. Offer to buy certain stock from certain clients at a fair price. To save them from serious difficulty.’

Duke Carlisle looked at him intently for a moment. Then he smiled. ‘While supporting that stock temporarily yourself for a day or two? Inflating its price, exceeding your own estimates? So that the final price is – a little unfortunately for your client – higher than the one you paid him?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Very clever. Worthy of both your father and your grandfather, if I might say so.’

‘Thank you.’

‘And move your own money out of the country, Laurence. Fast.’

‘I have already done that, to a large extent.’

Barty thought she had never been so happy. She had a job she loved, the independence she had always craved, a home of her own – and now she had a friend in London, a true friend of her own age, and a friend, moreover, who was absolutely nothing to do with the Lyttons, and who Barty could claim as her very own. She was called Abigail Clarence and she lived in another flat in another house in Russell Square. Barty had entered her life by way of a collision of her bicycle and Abigail’s as they both arrived home from work; Abbie, as she liked to be called, was extremely clever and rather beautiful in an unconventional way; she had straight dark brown hair, cut into a Dora Carrington bob – ‘I actually modelled it on Christopher Robin’ – very large green eyes, and a rather hawk-like nose which somehow suited her high cheekbones and angular jaw. Her mouth was very wide, and when she laughed which was often, revealed surprisingly perfect teeth; she was tall and rather athletically built and spent many of her weekends exploring the home counties on her bicycle.

She was the freest spirit Barty had ever encountered, astonishingly unencumbered by prejudice of any kind, class, intellectual, even racial. One of the most wonderful things about Abbie, in Barty’s eyes, was not so much that one of her own great friends was a working-class Jewish girl called Rebecca from the East End of London, but that Abbie herself was as blithely unaware of Rebecca’s origins as it was possible to be. She liked her just as she liked Barty: because of her personality and what she was.

Abbie was also a great advocate of sexual freedom; ‘If everyone slept with everyone they wanted to, it would free women from the tyranny of marriage, and probably improve marriage altogether. After all, there’s much more to it than sex; my way people would concentrate on the other, more important things. Women don’t get all fussed if their husbands eat somewhere other than at home, why should it be any different with sex?’ Barty felt this was a slighty impractical theory, but she didn’t say so.

She was the daughter of two Fabians – ‘and don’t ever let anyone tell you they’re proper socialists, Barty, they absolutely are not. Obsessed with class, all of them’ – and it was through this revelation that Barty’s own history had come out. Not everyone, as Abbie pointed out, her green eyes dancing with amusement, knew about one of the most famous Fabian women of them all, Maud Pember Reeves; ‘Come on Barty, tell. I know there’s more to you than meets the eye.’

And reluctantly, her hands twisting with embarrassment, her head bowed with the old mortification, not meeting Abbie’s eye from the beginning of the story to the end, Barty told. When she had finished, Abbie put her arm round her and hugged her.

‘I cannot believe,’ she said, ‘that you’ve come through all that and stayed so – so normal. Being practically stolen from your mother by some wicked lady bountiful—’

‘She isn’t wicked,’ Barty protested, ‘she meant it for the best.’

‘They all do. It was wicked just the same. How terrible for you. Well done, old thing. Well done.’

Barty felt a sudden and unaccountable need to defend Celia. ‘She was – very, very good to me, you know. My mother adored her. And Aunt Celia—’

‘Is that what you had to call her?’

‘Well – yes. Anyway, Aunt Celia took care of my mother in lots of ways: paid for doctors and so on, especially at the end of her life when she was so ill, arranged for me to go and visit them all the time.’

‘Oh, how kind,’ said Abbie, her voice sharp with malice.

‘It was,’ said Barty again. ‘I can’t let you get this thing wrong, Abbie. And if Lady Beckenham, that’s Aunt Celia’s mother, hadn’t taken care of Billy, my brother, given him a job in her stables, no, don’t look like that, he’d be out on a mat now, begging, like all the other poor wretches who came home without limbs. And I love Wol, that’s Mr Lytton. He was so kind to me. So don’t judge them all too harshly.’

‘I don’t,’ said Abbie, ‘not really. I can see they meant well. And OK, in lots of ways, you did benefit. St Paul’s and so on. I had lots of friends there, you know. Even came to the odd concert – I probably saw you. Even so, most people just would not have survived that. Bully for you, getting out too. Into the flat. Bet Lady Bountiful didn’t like that.’

‘No, she didn’t. But only in a nice way, she said she’d miss me.’

‘I expect she does. I would. Fancy her being sent to your mother by dear old Mrs P R. I don’t think that study of hers she presented to the government did any good at all, you know. However many statistics about poor families it contained. Still, a good effort. My parents adore her.’