Wicked Pleasures (16 page)

She had called her baby, a boy, Kendrick. Everybody thought it was a terrible name, but Mary Rose had been studying Gaelic during her pregnancy, and discovered it during the course of her reading; she would inform everybody who could be coerced into listening that it was derived from two words, cyne, which meant royal, and ric, which meant power. Baby said he didn’t quite see the connection, but never mind; he told Virginia he was very proud of his baby who looked far more like him than Freddy did. They had all come to Hartest for Georgina’s christening.

When Georgina was just six months old, Virginia was pregnant again.

She knew it was a bit soon; but she kept saying to Angie and Alexander and her mother and anyone else who cared to listen that she felt time was running out on her, that if she didn’t have a boy soon she’d be too old. It was useless everyone pointing out that she was only twenty-seven, that she had plenty of
time, she became fretful and tearful and said no, no she didn’t. Another girl would mean another two years passing; this time, this time she had to have a boy.

Lydia Paget tried to reassure her, to calm her, without success. ‘At this rate, you’ll have serious postnatal depression again, if the baby isn’t a boy. You must try and relax about it.’

Alexander had gone to see Lydia with her, an almost unheard-of event. She supposed it was a measure of his concern. ‘I have tried to reassure her, Mrs Paget,’ he said, ‘believe me. It seems to matter to my wife far more than it does to me. I have told her over and over again that I am quite content to see Hartest in the hands of my daughters, but she simply won’t believe me. Or chooses not to.’

Lydia and Virginia both stared at him.

‘Forgive me, Lord Caterham,’ said Lydia, ‘but this message most assuredly has not got through. Your wife seems to feel she’s failing you. She’s the first Countess of Caterham for two hundred years, I understand, not to have a boy. There’s a very strong male strain running through your family.’

‘Yes,’ said Virginia fretfully, ‘I’ve been terribly unlucky.’ She felt irritable, uncomfortable somehow. She wished she could have a drink.

‘I don’t see it as unlucky,’ said Alexander. ‘I am just sorry that you do. It is truly of little interest to me. Well, naturally I would like a son. But I would rather you were happy and enjoying your pregnancy. It’s much more important, isn’t it, Mrs Paget?’

‘Alexander,’ said Virginia, ‘I really don’t think you should lie to me like this.’

‘I’m not lying to you,’ he said, with his most gentle smile. ‘I mean it.’

‘There you are, Lady Caterham,’ said Lydia, smiling too. ‘Now you have it from the highest authority. Try to relax about it.’

‘I can’t,’ said Virginia. She felt terribly angry suddenly, betrayed. ‘Come on, Alexander, it’s time we went home.’

It was a very long pregnancy. She didn’t work very much; she insisted on going to London, sitting in the office, but she was too tired most of the time, and she worked a very short day. Angie kept things ticking over, and did her best, but the business suffered. Virginia didn’t care. She was increasingly uninterested in everything except herself. She was bored, irritable, difficult. She neglected the girls. She could hardly bear to speak to Alexander. She was highly critical of Angie and all her efforts. Alexander kept urging her to give up work, to stay at Hartest. It made her furious; the conversation always ended in an ugly scene. Only when she had had two or three glasses of wine was she tolerable company.

She even quarrelled with Nanny. It was unheard of, and it was over Charlotte’s bedtime. Virginia had insisted on keeping her up and was lying on her own bed with her, reading her stories. Nanny had said she must go to bed, it was after seven, and Virginia had said no, that she wanted Charlotte to stay with her. There was a scene; Charlotte was finally taken away screaming.

Half an hour later Nanny came back.

‘I know you’re not yourself, madam,’ she said, ‘but that’s all the more reason
to leave me in full charge of the girls. I’m not as young as I was,’ she added with her usual glorious lack of logic.

Virginia picked up her book. She ostentatiously opened it and turned the page, ignoring Nanny totally.

Later she phoned her on the house telephone.

‘Nanny darling, please come down here. I want to say I’m sorry.’

‘I’m busy just at the moment,’ said Nanny firmly. ‘With the children’s ironing.’

‘Please, Nanny.’

‘I’ll come down later, madam.’

‘Nanny, I’ll be asleep later. I’ve just had some hot milk. It won’t take long.’ She could hear the tears in her own voice; could hear Nanny relenting.

‘I’ll be down in a minute, madam.’

She said she was very sorry to Nanny; she said nobody understood how frightened she was, how worried. Nanny patted her hand and said she did. Then she picked up the empty cup and moved towards the door. She looked at it and stopped suddenly, turned back to Virginia.

‘Excuse me for mentioning this, madam, but I don’t think whisky is very good for you at the moment. Not even in hot milk.’

‘Oh Nanny, really. Don’t be such an old misery. Just a little drop, to get me off to sleep.’

Virginia went into labour over a month early. She was rushed to hospital. Lydia Paget only arrived for the final half hour. It was a harder birth than Georgina’s, but it was still over in six hours; the baby was placed in an incubator.

She lay in bed in a state of almost awestruck happiness. She had done it. She had had a boy. She had accomplished what she had had to do. She was the mother of a son. Her own personal miracle had been worked. She didn’t have to worry any more.

Lydia Paget came to see her. ‘The baby is a little distressed. But he should be all right. Thirty-four weeks isn’t too desperate these days.’

The next day they wheeled her down to see him. Her son, the small Viscount Hadleigh, heir to Hartest.

She looked at him as he lay in the incubator, and felt frightened. He looked very vulnerable. He was moving restlessly about, and his arms and legs were particularly thin, his joints oddly large. ‘It’s because he’s premature,’ said the nurse in charge of him, seeing her shocked face, ‘that he’s so thin. It’s in the last month they gain some fat.’

He had a shock of black hair, and his eyes, oddly small even in his tiny face, looked unseeingly out at the world.

In spite of her fear, she smiled tenderly at him. ‘Hallo, Baby Alexander,’ she said. ‘Be strong, won’t you? Be strong for me.’

She felt she could do anything now. Anything. She was going to be a good wife. Be nicer and more companionable to Alexander. She was going to be a much
better mother. Play with the girls. Spend more time with them. Make sure they were happy with their little brother. Make sure they didn’t realize that he was a hundred, a thousand times more important than they were.

And she would give up drinking, most definitely she would give up drinking. And give up her work too. And she would take an interest in the estate and the farm. Just start being a better person, being good. She had to show her gratitude to God somehow.

Alexander, Viscount Hadleigh, died two days later. The paediatrician kept telling her there had been nothing he could do, could have done. It was not just that he was premature, that would have been nothing, he had other problems. He had a heart defect, and a slightly cleft palate; he wasn’t able to suck properly, and some of his joints were malformed. Privately he told Lydia Paget that it was a clear case of foetal alcohol syndrome. The mother must have been drinking a great deal. Lydia, who had observed all the signs for herself and known there was nothing to be done, but who had hoped that somehow the little boy might survive anyway, nodded and went to see Virginia again, to see if there was anything, anything at all she could do for her.

Virginia was sitting in her bed, just staring out of the window. She turned to look at Lydia as she came in.

‘It was my fault, wasn’t it?’ she said, in a dreadful dead voice. ‘My fault. The baby died because I’ve been drinking too much. I should have stopped, I should.’

‘Well –’said Lydia helplessly, ‘well maybe it didn’t help.’

‘Lydia, it wasn’t that it didn’t help. I killed him. I drank him to his death, my baby, my poor poor little tiny baby.’ She started crying, sobbing, clinging onto Lydia’s hands; after a while she said, ‘I hate myself, Lydia. I hate myself so much. Oh Lydia, if only you knew, if only –’

‘I know,’ said Lydia, stroking her hair, ‘I do know.’

‘No, Lydia, you don’t, you can’t. You haven’t ever done anything so awful, so wicked. Have you?’

‘Well – I don’t think that’s very important. What I’ve done or not done. Did you – did you see the – the baby today?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I’ve seen him. I was holding him when he died. I felt – I owed it to him. He was so tiny. He hadn’t any love in his life at all. Any physical closeness. They said I could hold him. That it wouldn’t do any harm, to take him out of the incubator, not any more. So I did.’ She was crying again now, tears falling freely down her face; talking feverishly, urgently. ‘And I was holding him, talking to him. I really thought it might help. In spite of what they said. He felt rather cold and I held him very close to me. He felt so tiny too, almost like a little bird. I asked them to bring some more blankets for him. They were a while finding one. Do you think it might have saved him? If they’d brought one sooner? He was so cold. His feet were so cold.’

‘No, I don’t think it would have made any difference,’ said Lydia very quietly, speaking with difficulty, ‘not by then.’

‘Well, I just wondered. He was so peaceful, once they took him out of the incubator. He was very restless before. I don’t think he was suffering, though. Do you? You don’t think I did the wrong thing, do you? Taking him out of the incubator. You don’t think he might have lived if he had stayed there?’

‘Oh no,’ said Lydia, ‘no, I’m sure he wouldn’t. But I’m sure he wasn’t suffering. And it must have helped him so much, to be held by you.’ She had tears in her own eyes now. ‘It would have soothed him. Comforted him. I’m sure you did absolutely the right thing.’

‘I thought he’d just gone to sleep. Well, he did at first. His eyes just closed. Then he was very still. But he was still breathing. I kept hoping, you know, right until the end. Even after he stopped breathing. Somehow I went on hoping. I asked them. I made them make absolutely sure he was dead. The – the stethoscope looked so big on his chest. It was such a tiny chest. So tiny and thin. Too tiny, I suppose.’

‘Yes,’ said Lydia. ‘Yes of course, he was. Too tiny altogether.’

Alexander, Viscount Hadleigh, was buried at Hartest, his grave, with its oddly pristine little headstone, looking shockingly raw and hurtful among the old, weathered ones.

‘It will weather too,’ Alexander had said to Virginia, ‘it will fade, in time. Like our grief.’

‘I don’t want it to,’ said Virginia.

The tiny coffin set with a crown of white roses was carried into the chapel by Alexander alone. The only other person there was Nanny; Virginia had forbidden even Betsey to come.

‘This is for us to bear alone,’ she said simply to her mother on the phone. ‘No one can help.’

After the service Alexander carried the coffin out again, out of the chapel, towards the space under the yew tree that had been prepared for it; she saw him set it down as tenderly as if it had been a live baby. She picked a white rose from the bunch of flowers she was carrying and laid it tenderly on the coffin and kissed her fingers and laid them on the coffin too; and then she learnt what it truly meant to feel your heart break.

‘Virginia, you need help,’ said Alexander. They were breakfasting in the house in Eaton Place; it was a cold January day; the children had been sent on an extended visit to their grandparents in New York. Virginia couldn’t cope with them, and it was felt that they were better removed from the entire situation. Nanny had gone with them, but returned after three weeks, her lips very tightly folded, saying that Mrs Praeger seemed to imagine she could look after the children herself with the help of some foolish girl, and there was certainly no place for her in such a household. She made it sound as if Beaches was a brothel. Alexander told her not to fret, that he was sure the children would be fine, and that they would soon be home now, anyway. Virginia was much better. He didn’t sound at all convinced when he said it.

Virginia had gone out to the kitchen and returned with a glass of orange juice; he had asked if he could share it with her and she had said quickly no, no, she would fetch him one of his own, and gone back out of the room. Alexander tasted the orange juice; it was thick and sweet with gin.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘oh, no, I’ll get over it. Don’t rush me, Alexander, it’s only just two months since the baby died. I’ll be all right.’

‘I didn’t mean help getting over the baby,’ he said, ‘I meant help to stop drinking.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘oh for God’s sake don’t start on that. Why does everyone keep talking as if I’m a drunk?’

‘Because,’ he said simply, ‘because you
are
a drunk.’

Virginia stared at him. She knew how terrible she must look. She had turned away from her own reflection in the mirror that morning. Her face was white and puffy; her dark hair, although freshly done, was dull and lifeless. She was very thin, her golden eyes dull and dark-rimmed. But that did not mean she was a drunk. It did not.

‘Don’t dare to say such a thing to me,’ she said. ‘I am not a drunk. I may get a little drunk at night. God in heaven, I need something to dull the way I feel. But I am not a drunk. Now if you will excuse me, Alexander, I’m going upstairs.’

‘Virginia,’ he said, ‘you are a drunk. And if you had not been a drunk all during your pregnancy, that baby would still be alive.’

‘Oh,’ she cried, and it was a wail of pain, ‘don’t, don’t say such a thing. He wouldn’t, he wouldn’t. It’s a cruel, wicked lie. I won’t let you even think such a thing.’

‘Virginia, it’s true. If you don’t believe me, ask Mrs Paget. Ask the paediatrician at the hospital. You killed that baby, and if you’re not very careful, you’ll kill yourself.’