Wicked Pleasures
Authors: Penny Vincenzi
Tags: #FIC000000, #FIC027000, #FIC027020, #FIC008000
No Angel
Something Dangerous
Into Temptation
Almost a Crime
The Dilemma
An Outrageous Affair
Windfall
Forbidden Places
Another Woman
For Paul. With love.
This edition first published in hardcovder in the United States in 2012 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
For bulk and special sales, please contact
[email protected]
First published in the United Kingdom in 1992 by
the Orion Publishing Group
Copyright © 1992 by Penny Vincenzi
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-197-7
The heart is deceitful above all
things, and desperately wicked.
The Book of Jeremiah
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I owe a great many thanks to a great many people, for their help to me with writing this book.
Primarily a large number of people working in the Square Mile and on Wall Street who not surprisingly prefer to remain anonymous, but who gave me an enormous amount of their time, and fielded my endless questions with patience and good humour.
Three books were also outstandingly valuable to me and I would like to thank their authors: Ken Auletta for the
Greed and Glory of Wall Street
, Dominic Hobson for
The Pride of Lucifer
and Bryan Burroughs and John Heylar for
Barbarians at the Gate
.
Much gratitude also to Ivan Fallon, who was generous enough not only to point me in several important directions but to give me several pages’ worth of ideas.
For help on the New York half of the book, I could not have managed without Betty Prashker, who chauffeured me all over the Hamptons on what must have seemed to her a very long weekend. I would have been lost without Robert Metzger and Bunny Williams who allowed me to quiz them about their dazzling lives as interior designers in New York, Jane Churchill who gave me the same privilege in London, and Jose Fonseca and Dick Kreis of Models One who have forgotten more about the modelling business than I shall ever know, and were good and kind enough to share it with me.
On matters of technical expertise, legal, financial and even mechanical, I owe a great deal to Sue Stapely, Mike Harding, Peter Townsend and Paul Brandon. And to Shirley Lowe, who presided over the book’s christening.
There have been wonderfully crucial supplies of nuts and bolts from Lyn Curtis, Pat Taylor Chalmers, Katie Pope, Caroleen Conquest and Alison Craddock. Not forgetting some absolutely vital input from my bank manager, Peter Merry.
Wicked Pleasures
could not have been written at all without Rosie Cheetham, friend and editor, who wields a brilliant, creative and most inspiring pen; my agent, dear Desmond Elliott, who encourages, guides, cheers and cajoles: and most of all, my husband Paul and my four daughters, Polly, Sophie, Emily and Claudia, who have a great deal to put up with, never complain about it, and are always there when I need them.
OREWORD
I always felt that writing
The Spoils of Time
was a piece of total self-indulgence. I had long wanted to write a trilogy because the worst thing about finishing a novel is saying goodbye to the characters; and I thought if I could carry on for two more books, I wouldn’t have to. And it was marvellous, creating those characters, and watching them fall in love and get married and have the babies: who two books later were major characters in their own right. I loved the way the family grew, along with the story, and how a small decision or chance meeting in the first book could lead to a hugely important event in the second, and then the third. I enjoyed the tangled threads of the different generations, the criss-crossing of the different branches of the family.
And I savoured the great span of time I could cover, the Lyttons moved from the luxury of Edwardian house parties to the poverty-wracked slums of London, were involved in the suffragette movement, savoured the excesses of both the twenties and the thirties, fought in two World Wars, escaped from war-torn France, and throughout it all, carved out a success for their publishing company on both sides of the Atlantic.
Most of all I loved the Lytton family; and especially, of course, Lady Celia Lytton, the difficult, despotic glorious matriarch, her lovers, her children and her greatest love of all, the publishing house. I do not feel I invented Lady Celia; I felt she was there, waiting for me to write about her. From my first meeting with her when she was a young girl, to my last when she was a great-grandmother, she held me spellbound; fortunately, if I miss her too much I can pick up one of the books and discover her all over again.
As I very much hope you will do too.
—P
ENNY
V
INCENZI
,
London
BRITAIN
Virginia, Countess of Catherham,
American heiress
Alexander, Earl of Caterham,
her husband
Charlotte and Georgina Welles and Max, Viscount Headleigh,
the Caterham children
George,
son of Georgina
Harold and Mrs Tallow,
major-domo and housekeeper at Hartest, the Caterham family estate
Nanny Barkworth,
the Caterham family nanny
Alicia, Dowager Countess of Caterham,
Alexander’s mother
Martin Dunbar,
estate manager at Hartest
, and his wife Catriona
Lydia Paget,
obstetrician
Angie Burbank,
assistant at Virginia’s interior design company
Mrs Wicks,
her grandmother
Clifford Parks,
friend of Mrs Wicks
M. Wetherly Stern,
hotelier
Charles St Mullin, barrister,
a friend of Virginia’s
Gus Booth,
a director of Praegers London
Gemma Morton,
model and debutante, friend of Max
AMERICA
Frederick Praeger III,
New York banker
, and his wife Betsey, Virginia’s parents
Baby Praeger (Fred IV),
her brother
Mary Rose,
his wife
Freddy, Kendrick and Melissa,
their children
Madeleine Dalgliesh,
an English relative of Mary Rose
Pete Hoffman,
a senior partner at Praegers
Gabriel (Gabe),
his son
Jeremy Foster,
a major client of Praegers
, and his wife Isabella
Chuck Drew,
friend of Jeremy Foster and partner at Praegers
Tommy Soames-Maxwell,
gambler, a friend of Virginia’s
None of Virginia Caterham’s children knew who their father was.
‘They think they’re my husband’s of course,’ she said, smiling rather defiantly at the psychiatrist. ‘They have no idea there’s anything remotely unusual about their background. I keep thinking I should tell them – and then losing courage. What do you think?’
Dr Stevens looked at her thoughtfully. He really had hoped she wouldn’t be back. She had been doing so well. But if it had taken a relapse to get her talking, to make her reveal the reason for the drinking, then perhaps it was worth it. They had never got this far before.
‘Lady Caterham – how old are your children now?’
‘Well – Charlotte’s thirteen. Georgina’s eleven. And Max is eight.’ She looked very frail, sitting there in the big chair, almost childlike herself, wearing a full skirt and a large loose grey sweater.
Her heavy dark hair fell forwards over her face; she pushed it impatiently back, her large tawny-coloured eyes – extraordinary eyes – fixed on his.
‘And – are you close to them?’
He was playing for time; trying to decide how to play it.
‘Yes, very. Of course Charlotte is a little awkward. Well, it’s a difficult age, you know. And I’m away quite a lot, with my work. It’s very important to me, my work. But – yes, I think we’re close.’
He changed tack.
‘Lady Caterham –’
‘Can’t you call me Virginia? You did before.’
‘Virginia. What was it that made you start drinking again? When you’d done so well for so long. Do you know? Can you tell me?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘whatever makes you? It’s never just one thing, is it? There were lots of things. Too many to talk about now.’
‘But Virginia, that’s what I’m here for, to talk about them.’
‘Oh – I don’t know. I was lonely. Despairing.’
‘About what?’ he said, very gently.
‘Dr Stevens. Please answer my question. About the children. I need to know what you think. I really do. Before we go any further.’
‘Well,’ he said carefully, ‘well, it’s very hard for me to say. There are so many imponderables. Does your husband know that you – that there have been other men in your life?’
‘Oh Dr Stevens, of course he does.’ She smiled at him almost cheerfully. ‘I would say that’s almost the whole point of our marriage. That there were other men in my life.’
Virginia, 1956–7
Nice girls still didn’t in 1956. And Virginia Praeger was a very nice girl.
What annoyed her, and most of her contemporaries, was that nice boys did.
She remarked on this fact to her brother, Baby Praeger, as he drove them both out of New York in the crisp April dusk and towards Long Island to spend Easter with their parents in the Hamptons: it was so terribly unfair, she said suddenly, she sometimes felt her major memory of her first year at Wellesley had been of pushing eager, sweaty hands up out of her bra and down out of her panties, and being made to feel guilty about it, and then hearing girls talking about however virginal you might be on your wedding night, of course you’d want a man with some experience, one who’d know what he was doing.
‘You’re allowed to sow your wild oats. Why can’t we sow a few?’
‘Because you’re female,’ said Baby, easing his new and infinitely beloved Porsche Spyder into fifth gear and a speed nudging 100. ‘Look out for cops, darling, will you?’