Wicked Pleasures (27 page)

‘Yes,’ said Charlotte, and she did. And she felt much better about it. For a while.

It was Max who raised That Question again. It was the Easter holidays after his seventh birthday, and he was being sent off to Hawtreys to board, as part of his
inevitable progress towards Eton. Max caused his tutors, as he did his parents, considerable anguish; although he was not brilliant or even clever he was certainly not stupid, but he was what his pre-prep headmaster had billed ‘creatively lazy’. Max (rather like his Uncle Baby) set fun at a high premium; he was immensely charming and good-natured, popular, and highly inventive, and he found school work tedious and pointless. Had he devoted even a quarter of the energy he put into avoiding it into his homework, Charlotte told him prissily from time to time, he could have been top of the class in every subject.

‘No I couldn’t.’

‘Of course you could.’

‘Well I don’t want to be a swot like you.’

Charlotte was always being accused of being a swot; to an extent it was true. She was awesomely clever, and she did actually rather enjoy studying; as a result she did so extraordinarily well that the girls in her class would refer to being ‘first except for Charlotte Welles’. She wasn’t just good at the sciences or arts subjects, she excelled at everything; in the end-of-year exams she had achieved the almost unheard-of distinction of full marks in Latin, maths and French. Maths was her overall favourite, she worked at it for recreation as well as study, working out complex equations and problems in the evenings at school while the other girls wrote to boys, or sewed or watched television.

‘I plan to run a business,’ she said when anyone asked her what she was going to do when she grew up. ‘Possibly a bank. Like my grandfather. Or I might be a lawyer.’

A boy at school called Fanshawe, Max reported, had also said they must be adopted, ‘Because we all look weird in different ways.’ Max had responded by hitting Fanshawe, who had started to blub and said he had heard his mother talking about it. Max said he quite liked the idea, it might mean he had a really interesting father, like a gypsy or a burglar, instead of a boring earl; Georgina looked upset and worried and said she was so frightened of anyone else being her parents it made her feel sick. Charlotte told them both to shut up and that it was all nonsense, that Virginia had told her so; but she still couldn’t quite shake the thought out of her head. It was no good talking to Virginia; she had got so cross the last time (strangely cross, Charlotte thought, reflecting upon it again, almost – what? scared?). And it certainly wasn’t the sort of question she could ask Alexander. There must be some other way.

Virginia was in London for a few days; Charlotte waited until everybody was busy one morning then went into her mother’s study, and opened the bottom drawer of Virginia’s desk very slowly and carefully, as if its contents might sting her – like Pandora and her box, she thought, irritated with herself at her fear. Her hands were clammy and shaking slightly; and she closed her eyes briefly before taking out her own file, the one labelled Charlotte, and opening it. Her birth certificate was right on the top.

‘So you see, it’s true. Mummy wasn’t lying. You can tell Fanshawe, Max, and hit him again if you like. We’re all in order, parents definitely Mummy and Daddy, everything’s fine.’

‘Was it your idea to look at the birth certificates?’ said Georgina. ‘You really are clever, Charlotte. You’ll have to be a detective when you grow up.’

‘Oh no, I’m going to run a business,’ said Charlotte. ‘A huge powerful business. I should like that.’

‘You should get rid of that stupid Freddy,’ said Georgina, ‘and run Grandfather’s bank.’

‘Yes, it’d be easy,’ said Max, ‘he’s such a wimp. You could push him in the lake and he’d drown, or get him up a tree and he’d never get down again, and he’d starve to death.’

Charlotte looked at him thoughtfully. ‘I think there are rather better ways than that,’ she said.

Baby, 1978

It was Fred III’s birthday. His seventy-fifth birthday. And it was being marked by his retirement. There had been a farewell dinner two days earlier with his colleagues, friends, compatriots and admirers on Wall Street. And now tonight, a huge party for family and friends at the house on Long Island.

And then he and Betsey were going away on a long vacation, to Bermuda, so that, as he put it, he wouldn’t be messing things up for Baby his first few days alone at the bank.

Baby could hardly believe it was finally happening. Just when he had given up all hope, Fred had walked into Baby’s office one morning and simply said that he wanted to spend more time on the golf course and would retire in three months’ time, on his birthday. Just like that. And then walked out again, and Baby had heard no more about it for three days when he had announced it to Pete Hoffman (son of Nigel, long since retired) and the other senior partners at the end of a meeting, as calmly as if he had been telling them their half-yearly bonuses were up or he was taking another day off over Thanksgiving.

Baby hadn’t even dared tell Mary Rose until then; that night he went home with a vast bunch of red roses in one hand and a bottle of very best Bollinger in the other.

‘I did it,’ he said, simply. ‘Correction. We did it.’ She didn’t even need to ask him what he meant.

Every day since then he had been terrified, terrified his father would change his mind, terrified that he would do something stupid, terrified there would be another stock market crisis that would make Fred feel he had to after all stay on and just ‘see it out’, his favourite expression. But the days had turned into weeks, and nothing had happened to change Fred’s mind; and in the last month he had given a series of luncheons for the major clients, the senior partners and Baby, telling them of his decision. The partners had been apparently pleased and highly supportive, pledged their help to Baby, and privately told one another behind extremely closed doors that it was about time too. Pete Hoffman had been particularly delighted; strange, Baby thought at first, until he realized that Pete’s son Gabriel was about to leave Harvard and take his first faltering steps into Wall Street. Fred III had taken against Gabe; he said he was too much impressed with himself by half. As Fred never changed his mind about anyone, this clearly did not bode too well for Gabe’s future with Praegers; with Baby in charge, there could be a better outlook for him. Baby thought Pete could sweat on that one for a bit. He wasn’t too sure about Gabe himself. He could hardly believe it was happening at last. That the
bank was to be his. To run, to shape, to work on. Now that it was so near a reality, the prospect excited him more than he would have believed.

And now, here it was, the Saturday before the Monday, and he was moving out of the Heir’s Room, which would stay empty for a few years until Freddy settled in, and into the dark, massive office with its great mountains of bookshelves, its ancient desk that Frederick I had brought up from Atlanta with him, its ticker-tape machine, silent now, in the corner, its beautiful lamps, switched on night and day – and its memories. They were almost tangible, those memories, Baby thought; he had watched his father standing very still in the doorway for the last time yesterday, reliving so much: his early days, the crash, the accession, the day when Jicks Foster’s call came through – ‘Fred? Fred Praeger? Fred, I need a bank,’ the arrival of Miss Betsey Bradley in the steno pool, the war, the depression, the frenetic growth of the city, and behind and beyond them all, a backdrop to those memories, the vast, almost fearsome ebb and flow of money into the city, the huge power it yielded, and its attendant hopes and fears, defeats and victories, that any good banker can stand in the street and smell and sense with a physical force. Baby’s only real anxiety now was the degree to which he could personally experience that force.

‘Baby, you look wonderful!’ said Virginia. ‘About five years younger.’ She had gone into the great yellow and white marquee in search of her children; the space was so big that it took her a few moments to see them all, hanging around the stage, fiddling with the microphone, studying the place cards on the top table. It was a mass of flowers, the marquee, all yellow and white also: great ropes of freesias twisted into moss and twined around the poles, huge urns set with yellow and white roses right around the perimeter of the room, and at either side of the stage, arrangements of smaller yellow and white flowers, all spelling out seventy-five on the tables.

Baby was standing watching the children, taking in the scene, with an odd expression: smiling, but oddly tense … It was true that he looked wonderful; dressed in his dinner jacket, his face bronzed and his hair bleached from the summer on Nantucket Island, his eyes very blue and clear, he looked as he had used to again, handsome, relaxed, happy. ‘You look like Prince Charming,’ she said.

Baby smiled at her. ‘Not so much Prince,’ he said, ‘King. At last.’

‘At last. I’m so happy for you, Baby.’

‘You look pretty good yourself,’ said Baby. ‘Incredible that you’re the mother of those two grown-up young ladies over there.’

Charlotte was sitting on the edge of the stage, swinging her slightly plump legs, clearly aware that she looked sexily ripe in her cream chantilly lace dress from Chloë, with its ruffled, tantalizingly low bodice, and full, just-short-of-long skirt. Her dark hair was brushed wildly full, her tawny eyes were outlined with kohl, and she wore very shiny pale pink lipstick on her sensuous little bee-sting mouth. She was a very pretty girl, Baby thought; and her looks belied her; anyone seeing her for the first time would assume she was a sweetly dumb little thing. It was an oddly dangerous combination, he thought, the baby face and the sharp mind.

He knew that really he should regard her with the same suspicion that Mary Rose did, knowing that she was the Crown Princess, the best-beloved grandchild, but she was such a disarmingly nice child, so unspoilt, so nicely mannered that he found it impossible to do anything but like her.

Freddy, on the other hand, viewed her rather differently, Baby knew. He couldn’t stand her. Right through their childhood he had hated her, for outshining him, for being cleverer, and braver, than he was, for bossing him about whenever she had the opportunity – and for being a great deal closer to their grandfather. Baby (who found his eldest son difficult to get along with, with his distant, rather jumpy manner, his shyness which manifested itself as coldness, his lack of any sense of fun) had tried to reassure him on this; to make him realize that he was the heir to Praegers, that no one could take it away from him, that his grandfather was a traditionalist and an accessionist, and nothing on earth would persuade him that Freddy should not have Praegers as his own in the fullness of time, that the constitution of the bank was such that the 30 per cent of the shares that would pass to Freddy on Fred III’s death were as safely and assuredly his as the 50 per cent that would become his own. But Freddy was still uneasy. He was afraid and suspicious of Charlotte, afraid and suspicious of her power over his grandfather, and nothing his father could say would assuage the fears.

It was taking Freddy a long time to grow up physically, Baby thought; maybe that was a lot of his problem. He was nineteen now and he still looked like a boy rather than a man, and he had none of the exuberance, the air of self-confidence that both Fred III and Baby possessed in such exceptionally generous quantities. Kendrick was more of a classic Praeger, bigger, bolder, more instantly charming, but Baby found him harder to understand. He was very artistic, and he dressed rather flamboyantly whenever he was allowed, which wasn’t often; he was due shortly to go away to the Lawrenceville School, which he was privately dreading, being very unsporty, but which he professed to be looking forward to greatly. He was only modestly clever, and he worked very hard for his just-above-average grades, but he had one outstanding talent and that was for drawing. When he grew up, he said, he was going to be an architect, and he spent a lot of time, whenever he was there, making painstaking sketches of Hartest, which he loved. He had so far displayed no interest in girls whatsoever; the terrifying thought occasionally entered Baby’s mind that Kendrick might be gay. He crushed it ruthlessly, but it wouldn’t quite go away.

‘Hi, Daddy. You look really handsome. Oh, Charlotte, that is one great dress.’

‘Thank you, Melissa. You don’t look too bad yourself.’

Charlotte jumped off the platform and gave her little cousin a kiss. Melissa (born a neat nine months after Angie’s departure from Baby’s life) was dressed up in a myriad of frills, a large pink velvet bow holding back her golden curls. She was at eight an enchanting child, sweet-natured, friendly, easy-going, and everyone loved her: ‘The only one of the batch who seems to be Baby’s,’ Virginia had remarked to Alexander once; he looked at her and laughed and said he thought Melissa was prettier than Baby, but even he – who found any children, apart from his own, tedious – liked and played with his little niece.

‘When will the people start coming?’ Melissa asked Baby as her brothers joined them.