Those Wicked Pleasures (40 page)

‘I want to make him a gift, not only of me, but of something erotic that can inspire our sexual life. Something beautiful but raunchy – outrageously raunchy – only not vulgar or crude. It is, to be blunt about it, Sir Mundie, pornography I am after. Hard-core, to be tailored for us, just this man and myself and the private world we will live in. And when I thought of that and where I might find it, I remembered this house and you. I want to buy a collection of sexual toys, beautiful pornography, literature, and eighteenth-century Japanese prints, Chinese
objets d’art
… anything you might suggest. Pots of those unguents I have used in the past, for me, and something just as sensitising for my partner.

‘And I saw here in this house the most amazingly erotic film. To this day I have only to recall scenes from it to excite me enough to want a man. And Jamal told me it made a man crazy with passion to explore every aspect of the erotic, whatever tore away the veil of sexual reality and left a man exposed before his own desires. You sold a copy to him and it became, at times, a part of our sexual intercourse. I want a film such as that for my friend.

‘And for myself, some pearls. I had some once. A very unusual string of pearls that I am sure Jamal could only have purchased here. And other things for our mutual pleasure, but most important for my friend’s. I want to make love to him just as much as I want him to make love to me. To give him more sexual joy than he has ever dreamed possible. I would like you to help me accomplish that.’

Lara felt extraordinarily sexy just talking like this. She felt that this unattractive lump of a man, in spite of his looks and his coldness of heart, recognised what was happening to her. Perhaps he too was becoming sexually excited by her confession. But her fear was tempered by the realisation that, whatever this man was or was not,
he would be the only person she would ever talk to about her love-affair. That once she left his house, the outside world would be non-existent for Lara and Evan as a couple. Talking about that to Evan, rationalising it to herself was one thing. Expressing what was happening to her to another human, even one as unsavoury as Sir Mundie, confirmed how great a responsibility she had committed herself to.

She snapped back from that realisation at his words: ‘I remember you. With pleasure, I must say again. And I envy your new lover. You have an appetite for sex that any man would like to feed. And you are brave and courageous.’

‘Will you help me?’ she asked, a tremor of emotion evident in her voice. The emotion was for Evan. And for whatever impulse of maturity had brought her on this errand of love.

‘An older man, you say? A gentleman you are seducing. A man of some years who sees in you all the sexual delights that will make him young again, rejuvenate him for as long as he has left. Yes, I’ll help you. But you will have to trust me on some things. Things you may think too depraved for a man like him. But you’d be thinking like a woman in love, not like a libertine. I can assure you I know about these matters. As his appetite grows, as his fantasies flower, you will use everything.’

Only when she was out in the street and some distance away from Cadogan Square was she able to get some control over herself, she was so charged up by Sir Mundie and the collection of erotica he had produced for her and Evan.

Lara had her skiing holiday with Julia. She and Evan spoke several times during that period. The telephone
conversations, although not overtly sexual, were tense with sensuality and rife with innuendo, for both of them. She had assumed they would meet before her return to the States, but it did not happen. The circumstances of their lives kept them apart, but love and respect kept building within them, and desire held them together, if not physically, at least emotionally.

Lara was giving Bonnie a tennis lesson in the indoor court at Cannonberry Chase. It was rapidly becoming a farce, with Karim running all over the court picking up tennis balls and throwing them over the net. Nancy arrived and called Lara off the court. ‘Mr Smith is on the telephone.’ Lara turned to tell the children she would be back, only to see Bonnie trying to teach Karim how to hold a racquet. She felt very lucky with her children, that they were so close and happy. Sad, though, to think how quickly they were growing up. ‘Go ahead, Mum. I’ll take care of Karim,’ called Bonnie.

‘What did I catch you doing?’ asked Evan.

‘Playing tennis.’

‘I can get away if you can? Five whole days together.’

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow, or the next day. It’s really up to you.’

‘Tomorrow.’

He laughed. ‘I love you.’

‘Oh, good. I hate one-sided love-affairs. Where?’

‘Wherever you would like to go. I want to make you happy.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Tuscany.’

She knew that was home for him – somewhere near Siena – but that Tuscany was never to be on their itinerary. ‘And where do you have to be in five days’ time?’

‘Oxford.’

‘What will give us the most time together?’

‘The least amount of travel.’

‘I’ll take the first Concorde to London.’

‘A country-house hotel. Or shall we rent a cottage?’

‘I have a house in Gloucestershire. About an hour from Oxford.’

‘Is it secluded? I want you all to myself.’

‘Secluded and dilapidated. I’ve always meant to do something with it.’

‘Perfect.’

‘I’ll pick you up at the airport.’

After three days, Lara and Evan knew that they had found their ideal hideaway. It was a large and wonderfully beautiful house set in parkland that gave them all the privacy they could want. It was more beautiful than Lara had remembered it. Evan took to the place, at once. The caretakers, who had been there for more than thirty years, were gratified that at last Lara Stanton was taking an interest in her inherited estate. Thus inspired, they made the couple comfortable, creating for them lordly English menus, the meals of yesteryear when the house had been famed for its hospitality. Though they had acquired a proper democratic disrespect for their lords and masters, they knew how to act like the old-time staff of a country house. During that five-day stay they were hardly seen and never heard. They disappeared into their cottage as soon as dinner had been served, and the house became a home for Lara and Evan.

By day they took long walks exploring the estate and learning from the farm-workers and managers. The more they were together, the more they liked what they discovered in each other. At night, and not infrequently by day, they indulged themselves in sex. It was Lara who showed Evan the other side of himself, and he was
happier than he had ever been, than he had ever expected to be at this late stage of his life.

It was during those five days together that she presented him with some of the gifts she had bought for him from Sir Mundie, always careful to make her presentations at the correct moment. Just as she had suspected, they excited his longing to shed layers of selfhood in the blinding release of sex. He was besotted by his sexual life with her, and always amazed at how much she wanted him, at the lengths she would go to in satisfying him. How willingly she would slip with him beneath the waves of bliss he had for so long neglected. He owed her his new sexual life. And she gave and gave of herself to him, unselfishly, as she had rarely given herself to any man. He used her shamelessly to extend his sense of himself, and their intimacy. They thrived on the emotional rewards of their love affair.

Lara made her first home because of him. She found restoring the house in Gloucestershire, though a major undertaking, a worthwhile one. In time it would be a miniature Cannonberry Chase on the other side of the Atlantic. But for several years it would be home to them when they were together and wanted to play house. And playing was exactly what it was. Evan was always insistent that Lara and he be realistic about that. He always insisted there be no illusions.

But there was more to their life together than uninhibited sex and building a secret world for themselves. They learned much from each other, forcing themselves to vary their idyllic togetherness with visits to the theatre, opera or concerts. They explored each other, too, in discovering what each thought and felt about the paintings in the galleries or museums they visited. They took off to go skiing together in remote places where they would not be recognised, and they indulged in travel
whenever it was possible for Evan to get away for any length of time. They were very cautious about being discovered, more because of Lara than Evan. As he had told her the first year they were together, ‘Scientists and Nobel Prize-winners are not movie-stars. Our light fades quickly, usually long before the next prizes are awarded. But glamorous society women like you sparkle for most of their lives. Especially intelligent ones who work for the betterment of the world. After a time we will have to be cautious, more for your reputation than mine.’

And that had turned out to be true. They travelled the world together, yet still managed to keep their private lives a secret. They went to Brazil, to the rain forests. Because of him and some of his ideas about the place, she became determined to help save more of the forest and its Indians. They went to Hawaii, where together they designed a guest-house, a retreat for them in that first paradise she had purchased. When they were not in residence she allowed it to become a retreat for other recipients of the Nobel prize. If the razzmatazz of the prize didn’t terminate their ability to generate ideas, maybe they’d have another world-saving thought in her very own Hawaiian think-tank. It was an agreeable dream, anyway.

The years seemed to fly by. Her happiness made her life easy, and that inspired her to do more for the earth. She took a greater interest in the administration of the farm in Kenya. There she had a colonial house on the side of a mountain, and there they lived for a few weeks as husband and wife when their busy lives allowed it. They were never indiscreet, never broke their ground-rules. She was not tempted to be unrealistic or greedy about their relationship.

He took great pride in the successes she had achieved since they had been together. Happiness allowed her to
give herself to many more projects than she had before. And if she loved him as she did, she had good reason. He never abused her, or her love for him. He was adamant about certain things. That if the grim reaper should take him, mourning was out, forbidden. Let her put her grief to work. Such talk hurt, but she knew he was right. The greatest lesson she learned from the five years she was with Evan was about her own vital erotic being: that she could give much, and love well. She had made him happier than ever she had made the other loves in her life. And she learned to appreciate herself more for it, and because his richness of spirit illuminated her own.

The family, Julia, Jamal and Sam, saw the changes in her. They never questioned, never criticised. Reticence maintains good relations. But they were all aware that there was someone in her life, someone who could give her more than any of them had been able to give her. A man of evident worth. He had presided over an impressive expansion of her life since she had been with him and they had nothing but admiration for the way she was handling it.

Julia remained her best friend. Lara had told her, as she had told David and Max and Henry, just once, that there was someone, that she was very much in love. ‘It’s very private, we will never go public. There will be no marriage, no children, no friends. It is a totally selfish, passionate love affair. He makes me happy in a way I have never been happy before. That’s it. I don’t ever want us to talk about it again.’

Though Lara’s clandestine love affair did not interfere with her relationship with Julia, it did change. These were not the days of her running to her friend, weeping and moaning. Nor the happy-go-lucky times of when she was married to Sam. Nor was Julia being used as the prop
Lara had needed while she went through her divorces, court battles, dead-end love affairs. These were the upbeat years.

If that was true for Lara it was doubly true for Sir Evan Harper Valentine. During the five years they maintained their affair, he and Lara averaged about three months together each year, sometimes no more than a day or two at a time. During their time apart, he did what Lara did: devoted himself to his family and his work. But not necessarily in that order. He amazed people during that period in his life. He felt a surge not only of love and spirit that he had long thought dead in him, but also of bold and creative scientific thinking. It culminated in not one but two breakthroughs in genetic research that were to be the crowning glory of his work.

Chapter 27

Lara was in Paris with Evan. They were in the oak-panelled crimson-carpeted bar of The Raphael, their favourite hotel in the city. They enjoyed its quiet elegance. You defied death circling the Arc de Triomphe and rode the short distance down the Avenue Kléber to the blond stone edifice of The Raphael. Then you plunged into the long panelled entrance hall across black and white marbled squares, softened by oriental carpets of faded grandeur. You risked hell to stroll in heaven, French-style.

Two faded Parisian beauties of a certain age sat quite near them. Lara had been eavesdropping on them. In advanced years they were quite obviously still playing the coquette, or so snippets of their chat indicated. Evan touched Lara’s arm, seeking her attention. She placed her hand on his and smiled at him.

‘I would like us to go to Tuscany together.’

That came as a surprise. ‘I know I said that we would never go to Tuscany together. I’ve changed my mind.’

‘Well, maybe we should think about it some more.’

‘All right. We will think about it, but not for too long. Do you promise?’

‘I promise,’ she answered.

‘I must leave you now, just for an hour. What will you do?’

‘I could be quite happy just waiting for you here.’

He kissed her, reminding her quietly that he loved her. Another kiss and he was gone. She watched him walk away. Why, after all these years, had he suggested that they make a trip to his beloved Tuscany? He had not mentioned it since they had first made love at The Connaught in London. Their talk the following morning had been of Tuscany.

She had asked him where he lived in England. London? And he had replied: ‘Some people who live in England manage not to live in London. But, darling, I don’t live in England. I keep, as a
pied à terre
, rooms at my college in Oxford. It’s convenient when I give seminars there, and it’s close to the English laboratory I work with. But England is not my real home, only my second one. The family house is in Tuscany and that’s where I live. Where I call home.

‘We are one of those English families that can boast an Italian branch, founded in the early eighteenth century when members of the family made the Grand Tour. We stayed on and multiplied on both sides of the Channel. I have dual citizenship. So did my father, grandfather, and various ancestors. My father was English and a quarter Italian, my mother wholly Italian, a Colonna. That’s my other life, Lara, and I will never take you there. Much as I might like to. No overlapping of lives, we promised ourselves.’

Nearly five years on he had suggested this trip. Why? He was not usually a man to break rules. The waiter arrived to refill her glass with champagne. Lara leaned back in her chair and distracted herself with a few moments of people-watching. Then his suggestion came back to her. She quickly put the questions out of her mind. It really didn’t matter. She would not go. No overlapping of lives. Their rule had worked for them. In the years they had been together they had come to know
very little about each other’s lives apart. They each knew something of the other’s work but she had no idea about his wife, his children – even if there were any. No more than he knew about Bonnie and Karim or any of the Stantons.

Lara marvelled at the love they still felt for each other. It seemed as new and fresh as ever, the more solid for the giving and sharing, the sex life still fiercely erotic. She had seduced him into a world of erotica that suited him.

She thought about the time she had told him of her experience of being a voyeur in the museum. She had described in detail Max fucking the Chinese twin. It had excited Evan’s imagination and he had said, ‘All that intense sex, real life being played out beneath the petrified remnants of a culture of death.’ Once imagined, hard to forget. Two years later, he had taken her exactly the same way in a deserted corner of an exquisite temple deep in the desert in Upper Egypt. She had found it more thrilling than she had imagined it could be. She had had to bite into her hand to subdue cries of uncontrollable passion.

She saw him coming towards her now through the bar, still looking handsome and conservative as a man of his stature would be expected to look. A grey flannel Savile Row suit has long been found a fair disguise for the fires of lust. She smiled, and from across the room his craggy face gave a grin in response.

‘You were thinking?’ he asked as he sat down.

‘Hardly thinking. Wondering. How much you gave that dragoman to leave us alone in that temple in Upper Egypt?’

He began to laugh, and some colour came to his cheeks. ‘We must do that again. If I can afford it, that is.’

Then, quite sheepishly, he produced a small parcel.

‘That was where you went! To buy me something. Any special reason why?’

‘I think you might guess. And, if you can’t, it’s the kind of gift that speaks for itself.’

He ordered a malt whisky. Lara began to unwrap her gift. ‘No, not now! Unless you want to ruin our reputations, you’d better wait. Open it upstairs in the bedroom.’ He was looking embarrassed.

They lunched in the dining room together. Afterwards, in the plush privacy of their room, she opened her parcel: wickedly sexy black silk and lace lingerie, as only the French can make it. Elegant but scantily provocative, the maker’s name synonymous with such garments. She dressed for Evan in this teasing undress and they made love. After a long travelling holiday together, they preferred to spend the last evening alone. Dine in their rooms and make relaxed love – unless, as sometimes, outrageously erotic lustful sex took them over. As at The Raphael that afternoon and evening.

One of the best things about their relationship was that, when they parted, there was never sadness, just separation. Evan took Lara to Charles de Gaulle airport to see her off to New York. Later he was to meet several colleagues and then travel with them by train to Milan to accept yet another prize for his work on genetics.

They kissed goodbye and when she left his arms, they gazed at each other. Suddenly he changed. The sensuous smile went right out of his eyes – they looked, for a moment, quite empty. She had never seen him like that before. It wasn’t sadness, nothing like that. She felt almost sick at the change in him. He seemed to pull himself together then and shake off whatever it was. The light came back into his eyes. Relieved, Lara hurried away from him. She took but a dozen strides before she dropped the shoulder-bag she was carrying on to the pavement and turned to run back to him – just in time to see him rush out of the long black Mercedes towards her.

He picked her up in his arms and kissed her passionately, telling her, ‘I have no idea what all that was about. Think about Tuscany. Tuscany with me. Call me when you get home.’

The following day, she tried him several times, and there was no answer. At first it didn’t bother her. She went out to buy Bonnie a pair of roller skates, and to see Steven. She tried Evan again from Steven’s office. Still no answer. He and his associates obviously felt they had something to celebrate down there in Milan. She put the abortive calls out of her mind. But later, while she was walking up Madison Avenue, it occurred to her that something was wrong. In the five years they had been together not once before had she had to ‘put him out of her mind’. There had never been cause.

She saw a call-box just off the corner of Madison. She felt she could not wait until she got home but rushed into the box. The machine, of course, was out of order. She stopped in the first shop she came to, a shop she had never been into. It sold nothing but pearls. It didn’t allow customers to use the phone. She told them it was an emergency. Just saying so seemed to confirm her fear. But shop policy was shop policy. She left the pearl emporium, riled by their meanness. She was feeling quite strange but in control. Only a few blocks from the house she saw another empty booth. Now she was obsessed with getting through to Evan. This one was working. Relieved, Lara sensed that this time she would get an answer. She dialled the number. The line clicked, and then there was Elspeth on the phone. Lara gave a sigh, and thought herself foolish, behaving like a drama queen.

‘Elspeth, it’s Miss Jones.’ She smiled to herself; she always did when she supplied her pseudonym to Elspeth. It just wasn’t adult behaviour, never mind the circumstances. ‘May I speak to Mr Smith? I have been
calling all day. Have the phones been out or something? This is the first time since I’ve known him that he has not been on the other end of the telephone when he said he would be.’

Silence. She tried again. ‘Elspeth? Elspeth, are you there?’

Lara heard sobbing. The sound that told her what she needed to know. But still she must hear it all. ‘Elspeth, speak to me. Where is he? Elspeth, he would want you to tell me.’

At last the PA spoke. ‘I know. I’m so sorry. Oh, I’m so sorry.’

‘He’s been hurt. Where is he?’

‘Paris. An accident. Mr Smith is dead. Please, I can’t talk now, Miss Jones.’

Lara could not breathe. She must get some fresh air. She couldn’t step out of the booth. Her legs felt rooted. She began to shake so violently that she could not get the door open. She was struggling to stay conscious. She pounded on the glass wall of the call-box. People passed her by. They ignored her. Finally she managed the door. Once she had it open she took great gulps of air. She was in a nightmare. It couldn’t be real and yet she knew that it was all happening. With clenched fists she flung her arms out and beat the glass walls of the telephone booth. She let out a horrible scream of despair. Her knees buckled, and she folded, half in the call-box, half out on the pavement. Blackness, nothing.

Evan’s death shattered Lara physically and emotionally. Those first days after her collapse entailed round-the-clock nursing, but the drugs and intense psychotherapy she received made only small inroads in getting her back to normal. In death as in life, Evan Valentine’s love for Lara reached her through the intervention of Elspeth, his
personal assistant. She arrived at Cannonberry Chase, after discreet arrangements had been made by Nancy. The two female guardians of the couple’s secret, who had on occasion been in contact, now worked together to implement the last wishes of Evan Harper Valentine.

Although the family realised that Lara was unwell, in those first weeks of her illness only Nancy, who had been in her confidence, knew the true nature of her breakdown. By Lara’s and Nancy’s request the family was kept very much in the dark about just how ill she was. Not too difficult, with Henry and Emily having left after the tennis tournament for the house in the South of France; Elizabeth and her family and any number of Stanton wives and children were in England. Only David, John and Steven, with sundry Stanton grandchildren, were drifting in and out of Cannonberry Chase. So only Lara’s cousin and two brothers suspected things might be far worse than they seemed. They questioned little, nor did they interfere. But they knew Lara well. When told that she was upset over the death of an old friend, they began to assume that a friend so mourned could only have been the secret love of her life, the love who had made her so happy for several years. They stood silently by, available for her as they had always been. It was the wise David who said, ‘She’ll heal. So long as our La is in her beloved Cannonberry Chase, she’ll rally. This place is like mother’s milk to her.’

Who knew that better than Lara herself? She would lie on her chaise or sit in a chair looking out across the chase, her mind a blank, all desire gone. Only the soft warm breeze with the scent of the ocean in it, the leaves on the trees, the chirping of birds, sounds of children playing somewhere, reminded her that she was alive, that she might still love again. Only Cannonberry Chase cut through the shock and trauma of her loss.

She was sitting in a chair by the window when Nancy arrived with Coral and the nurse. The three women fussed around her, leading her from the window to her dressing-table where Coral brushed her hair. They chose a fresh dressing-gown for her, some rings for her fingers, a pair of gold earrings and a bracelet. For days they had been dressing her, hoping that she would take some interest in herself. The only time she did was when Bonnie or Karim came in for a short visit. But she was so heavily sedated they were not allowed to stay for long. Now they slipped a pair of pale grey satin slippers, with pretty silk flowers of the same colour, on her feet. She walked on the arm of her nurse to the chaise where she lay down. She looked up and saw Coral wipe a tear from her cheek. All she said was, ‘I wish I could cry.’

Nancy sat down at the foot of the chaise and said, ‘Elspeth is here.’

Lara blinked several times and rubbed her forehead, trying to comprehend what Nancy was telling her. She looked at her and then at the nurse, who had a syringe at the ready. ‘Elspeth’s here. Are you sure, Nancy?’

Her secretary felt encouraged. Lara seemed to understand and to be taking the news well. She was coming back, albeit as though through a dense fog, but returning nevertheless. The nurse nodded as if giving permission for Nancy to carry on.

‘Yes, very sure. She would like to talk to you. Would that be all right?’

Lara felt as if her head was filled with cotton wool. She shook it in the hope that she might be able to think more clearly. She looked at the three women and said, ‘Well, for a start, Miss Hicks, you can put that away.’

‘Are you sure, Miss Stanton?’

‘Quite sure.’ Then, turning to Nancy, ‘Please, I must see her at once.’

When Elspeth entered the room, Lara tried to rise, but it was impossible. She fell back among the cushions, and the little colour that she had in her face seemed to drain away.

‘No, I don’t think this is a good idea,’ said Miss Hicks.

‘For me it is. This is important to me. Please.’ There was something, a hint of strength in her voice, a sign that the redoubtable Miss Hicks had been looking for since she had taken the case on. Encouraged, she agreed to leave Lara alone with her visitor. Announcing, ‘I will be in the bedroom, if you need me,’ she retreated with Lara’s staff.

‘I never expected we would meet. We lived our affair from day to day and I just thought it would go on forever. I never thought beyond that.’ Lara hesitated for a few seconds and then continued: ‘I’m sorry. What I meant to say was …’ She seemed confused. She hesitated once more, for some time, and then she was more under control. ‘Thank you for coming.’