Wicked Pleasures (15 page)

‘Nanny, this is Angie Burbank, who works for me so wonderfully,’ said Virginia, ‘I’ve told you lots and lots about her. Angie, this is Miss Barkworth, but you must call her Nanny, everyone does, don’t they, Nanny?’

‘They do, madam, and it’s something at least to be thankful for,’ said Nanny, slightly bafflingly it seemed to Angie, and Virginia laughed and said, ‘Nanny, you have lots to be thankful for, not least two dear little girls to look after, and where is Charlotte, I want Angie to meet her too.’

‘Charlotte is in the kitchen, madam, with Mrs Tallow, but of course we are
shortly to go for our walk,’ said Nanny, in tones that made it clear that a meeting of the United Nations would have paled into unimportance by comparison.

‘Yes of course,’ said Virginia, ‘well, we’ll go and catch her there quickly, Nanny – come on, Angie – and then we can have tea. You must be starving.’

‘I’m not, actually,’ said Angie, ‘but I’d love a cup of tea.’

‘Mrs Tallow will make you a cup of tea, she likes it really thick and strong like you do,’ said Virginia, ‘come on.’

She led the way through the great front doors and into the hall; it was large and tall and square and almost empty, save for a large table against one wall, on which stood a very large vase of flowers and a vast, rather shabby leather book, with ‘Visitors’
embossed on it in gold, curly letters. The room had a wooden floor and white and blue walls, covered with elaborate plasterwork
– Angie was too confused and nervous by now to take it in in detail, but she absorbed a welter of nymphs and urns and tumbling grapes – and a very large number of doors leading off it. Virginia led the way through one at the back and Angie followed her; beyond it was a second hall, the Rotunda, she later learnt, vast and vaulted, with a great deal of light tumbling from above; looking up, she saw that she was standing under the glass dome, which was glazed in a great spider’s web of sections. The room again was largely empty; there were a few chairs set about it, and a pair of matching tables at either side, and some paintings, and leading up from the back of it was a staircase, wide, curving, infinitely graceful and as far as Angie could see, completely unsupported.

‘That’s the famous flying staircase,’ said Virginia, ‘it’s pretty, isn’t it? Don’t ask me how it stays up because I don’t know, and don’t ask Alexander either, because he’ll tell you. Come on, down here to the kitchen and my darling Charlotte.’

A door at the back of the Rotunda led down a maze of steps and into a long corridor; this branched to the right into a longer one, with a ray of light and a door far to the end of it, and led at the left through a door into a kitchen which, Angie reflected, could easily have contained the whole of her grandparents’ house. The floor was stone-flagged and the walls were also stone, with windows set in them rather high, letting in a view of the outside at foot level; in the centre of the room was a huge scrubbed pine table set with a large number of chairs, and at one end was a massive fireplace hung with tongs and bellows and other implements which looked to Angie as if they had been designed for some kind of medieval torture, and an iron grate, filled with logs.

On the opposite wall were some sinks which looked almost as old as the implements, with scrubbed wooden draining boards and wooden cupboards and plate racks set above them; and next to the sinks was an Aga, its rail hung with a series of small pairs of trousers and socks, presumably Charlotte’s, airing off, and a big black cast-iron pot boiling furiously on the top.

But in spite of the size of the room and a certain potential for bleakness, it was warm and comfortable-feeling; two large shabby armchairs were set on either side of the Aga, one with a large ginger cat in it, and the air was rich with delicious smells, a heady combination of baking and roasting.

‘Mrs Tallow, hallo, this is Angie Burbank who works for me, and Nanny said Charlotte was down here.’

‘She was, your ladyship, but she’s just gone with Mr and Mrs Dunbar to see the lambs. They won’t be more than five minutes.’

Mrs Tallow smiled at Angie; she was round and cosy, with dark hair and bright blue eyes, dressed in a white overall, and looking much more like the conventional picture of a cook than Miss Barkworth was of a nanny. ‘Pleased to meet you, miss. Would you like a cup of tea and maybe a piece of cake or something? Charlotte’s been helping me, your ladyship, she’s a wonder in the kitchen, and she’s made a lovely little ginger cake, and I’ve just done it with butter icing.’

Angie sat in one of the big saggy chairs by the comforting warmth of the Aga, drinking a cup of very strong, very sweet tea and eating cake. Virginia, sipping a rather large glass of wine which she had extracted from the fridge – ‘Left over from lunch, Angie, don’t look like that’ – asked Mrs Tallow what she had planned for dinner the following day when her parents arrived – ‘My mother loves chicken more than anything in the world, if that might be at all possible’ – and then there were footsteps along the flagged corridor and a man and a woman with a little girl between them, holding their hands, appeared in the doorway. They were both very tall; he particularly so, with a hawklike bony face, light brown floppy hair, and very pale, large, almost sunken blue eyes. He was wearing a greenish-brown tweed suit, which was very shabby, and the collar of his cream woollen shirt was frayed. He had very large hands which were, she noticed, extremely beautiful, long-fingered and slender; his legs in the old, flapping trousers were quite incredibly long. He must have been at least, she thought, six foot six. His wife, or at least Angie presumed it was his wife, had a pleasantly plain freckled face; she was also tall, but more sturdily built and less shabby-looking, dressed in a woollen skirt and shirt with a sleeveless anorak over them, and a headscarf knotted over her fair hair. Round her neck was a string of pearls which Angie would have betted a year’s salary were real.

Virginia put down her glass of wine and smiled radiantly at them. ‘You are both so kind, to take Charlotte around with you so much. Angie, I want you to meet Martin and Catriona Dunbar. Catriona is my best friend in the country, she actually talks to me quite often, and doesn’t even mind that I don’t like hunting, and Martin is our estate manager, and keeps us all in order. Especially Alexander. This is Angie Burbank, my assistant in London. Equally invaluable.’

Catriona and Martin shook hands with Angie slightly nervously, as if contact with someone so patently not of their world might prove dangerous in some way.

‘How do you do,’ said Catriona. ‘Welcome to Hartest. We always think what Virginia does in London is so clever, don’t we, Martin?’

She seemed a very strange friend for Virginia to have, Angie thought; they could surely have nothing remotely in common.

Martin Dunbar took Angie’s hand in his large bony one. His handshake was surprisingly gentle.

‘How do you do?’ he said and his smile was quite extraordinarily sweet, transforming his face from gaunt and hawklike to almost boyishly soft. ‘It’s extremely nice to meet you at last, we’ve heard such a lot about you.’

Angie smiled at them both rather nervously, and wished she could think of something sensible to say.

‘We have to go, Virginia,’ said Martin. ‘I have to see Alexander, and Catriona is going shopping. Maybe I’ll see you later.’

‘Yes of course,’ she said, ‘come in for tea,’ and smiled at him – carelessly, almost coolly, Angie thought. They both walked to the back door; Virginia went with them, and then returned, holding out her hands to Charlotte.

‘Charlotte my angel, come and say hallo to my bestest friend, Miss Burbank. I think you may call her Angie, mayn’t she, Angie?’

‘Of course,’ said Angie, holding out her hand, ‘hallo, Charlotte, I’m very pleased to meet you,’ and then she remembered Suze had told her that was one thing you never said, and she felt embarrassed again.

Charlotte however was not yet too well versed in the niceties of English etiquette and didn’t seem too outraged; she smiled and took Angie’s hand and said hallo, and stood studying her face. ‘You’re very pretty,’ she said after a moment or two.

‘Well, thank you,’ said Angie, ‘and so are you.’ And it was true. Angie didn’t like children, she never had, she found them tedious and demanding, but she had to admit that Charlotte was an enchanting-looking little girl, just slightly tubby, with a mop of shining dark curls, and a cherubic face, dimpled and slightly freckled, with her mother’s tawny eyes, and a round rosebud of a mouth.

‘Do you work in London with Mummy?’ she said, and yes, Angie said, she did, and Charlotte told her she should come and work at Hartest, it would be much nicer, and then Nanny appeared in the kitchen doorway, holding a small duffle coat and a pair of red wellington boots.

‘Time for our walk, Charlotte,’ she said.

Charlotte smiled at her. ‘Can the new lady come too?’ she asked hopefully. ‘I could show her the lambs,’ but Nanny’s mouth folded in on itself more firmly than ever, and Virginia said no, not this time, Angie had come to see her and meet the new baby, and they were going to have boring talks about work, but they could all have tea together, if Charlotte was very good.

‘Come on,’ said Virginia when they had gone, ‘let’s go upstairs to my room, and you can meet Georgina, and then we can have a really nice chat. Do you mind the back stairs?’

Angie said not too terribly, and grinned, and they climbed two flights of dark winding stairs and went through a doorway onto a wide corridor flooded with light; Virginia walked down it a few yards and pushed open a door.

‘This is my room,’ she said, walking over to a crib set by the big bed, ‘and this is Georgina. Look, isn’t she heaven?’

Georgina, who was indistinguishable from any other small baby, being crumply, curled-up, snub-nosed and tight-fisted, was sleeping determinedly; Angie admired her as effusively as she could, and then turned to the window.
Virginia’s room was at the back of the house; the view was over miles of woodland, and then beyond that endless folds of fields; immediately below the window was a long terrace, with steps leading down to a formal garden, beds planted into elaborate shapes, and beyond them tall hedges surrounding what were clearly other gardens, elaborate symphonies of shrubs, and beyond them again long, deeply sloping lawns studded with masses of crocuses and early daffodils all the way to some hidden boundary –‘A ha-ha,’
said Virginia, ‘it’s like a huge ditch, it keeps the deer and sheep out of the gardens’ – to where the gardens met the park again. Some paddocks lay to the left of the house, where several horses grazed; just visible above the trees she could see more buildings, presumably stables. She made a supreme effort to say something appropriate, something sophisticated and gracious, and Angie Wicks spoke from her heart. ‘You lucky bitch,’ she said, and then realizing what she had said, clapped her hand over her mouth and looked at Virginia in horror. ‘Sorry, Virginia,’ she said, ‘I don’t know how that slipped out.’

Virginia laughed. ‘Don’t be silly. I don’t mind. Of course it’s much too much for anyone, and I certainly don’t deserve it. I feel guilty about it all the time; here I am with everything – except maybe a boy baby –’

‘Yes, but you will have,’ said Angie, ‘and now you say you don’t mind having another, it doesn’t matter, does it?’

‘Not really,’ said Virginia with just the slightest suspicion of a sigh. ‘No, no of course it doesn’t. Oh Angie, it
is
nice to see you, even if I do make you feel sick with jealousy.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Angie, ‘and I’m not even exactly jealous. Just knocked out by it all I suppose. You must be looking forward to seeing your mother,’ she added carefully, knowing that was what women always said when they had babies, although quite unable to imagine such an emotion herself.

‘I am, I am, I can’t wait. If only Baby could come too, but he’s still incarcerated with Mary Rose.’

‘And is the other Lady Caterham coming this time? Alexander’s mother?’ asked Angie carefully. Virginia’s face shadowed, then brightened very quickly and carefully. ‘No, she’s not. Well, it’s her loss. I actually wrote to her and told her the baby was called Georgina and her second name was Alicia, after her, and would she please come and meet me and her two granddaughters, and she hasn’t even answered. Alexander said she’d phoned, and said she couldn’t make the journey. So I just give up.’

Angie reflected that she would have given up too. The more she saw of the Caterhams, the less she realized she knew about them. And the more she felt she needed to know.

Virginia, 1965–6

She was drinking too much. She knew it, and she knew other people must know it, but she didn’t quite know if she cared enough to want to do something about it. She never got drunk, not properly drunk, but she was tipsy every night. And most lunchtimes. Fortunately she didn’t get unattractively tipsy, she stayed coherent, she didn’t knock things over, she just started talking rather freely, and giggling too much, and flirting outrageously with every man in sight. Since she was in such a privileged position socially, nobody minded this too much, the men enjoyed it, and the wives looked on fairly tolerantly for the most part.

But every morning she did have an awful headache and quite often she was sick; but they weren’t real hangovers, not like Baby had, when he stumbled out red-eyed and grey-faced, groaning and mixing up disgusting concoctions. A few cups of coffee and maybe a Bucks Fizz for breakfast if she was feeling really bad, and she was fine. So it wasn’t as if she had any kind of problem. She could stop if she wanted to, of course she could. She just enjoyed drinking, especially champagne. And she got very belligerent indeed if anyone suggested she enjoyed it too much.

Apart from the sense of unease about her drinking, Virginia was very happy. Georgina was a good baby, and she was enjoying her. Her joy and self-satisfaction at her easy delivery under the aegis of psychoprophylaxis was greatly increased at the news that Mary Rose had gone completely to pieces when she had her second baby, screamed so loudly all the other mothers in the hospital complained and finally had to have a forceps delivery under total anaesthesia.