Wicked Pleasures (31 page)

‘Yes, I have. But I never quite got over you, Charlotte. I’ve never forgotten that night at the party. Have you?’

‘No,’ said Charlotte. It seemed easier. What party? What was he talking about? Her head was spinning.

‘Come down and join me,’ said Toby patting the rug again. ‘Come and be comfy.’

Charlotte looked at him doubtfully. Then she sat down. Toby pushed her onto her back and began to kiss her. He had always kissed well; she remembered now. Not as well as Beau, but it was all right. She returned the kiss.

Toby’s hands began to move into her dress. She felt them caressing the mounds of her breasts; then confidently, deliberately on her nipples. Charlotte, briefly torn between enjoying the sensations he was evoking and a sense of disloyalty to Beau, relaxed suddenly. Beau was thousands of miles away. A little heavy petting wouldn’t hurt. Toby’s hands were under her dress now, exploring upwards, stroking her bare brown legs, working his way up her thighs. He reached her pants; she felt his fingers rather awkwardly, tentatively in her pubic hair. She squirmed, aroused in spite of herself, and Toby felt the signal.

He sat up suddenly, away from her, unzipping his fly, dragging down his trousers; Charlotte carefully averted her eyes.

He leant towards her again, started pulling at her pants; she smiled at him, and tugged them off herself. The combination of the drink and the sudden sharp reminder of sexual pleasure was too much for her. She lay back, her face, her eyes, her wild hair an irresistible invitation. She felt excited now, everything blotted out, except the hot, beating urgency of her own desire; Toby started kissing her again, and then as she thrust her body upwards, against him, entered her quite suddenly, hard and relentless. Charlotte closed her eyes again and abandoned herself to pleasure.

Only there was none. Toby thrust into her four or five times, kissing her frantically; she had scarcely begun to soften to him, to feel any kind of pleasure when he moaned, came and collapsed onto her. Charlotte lay in the moonlight, looking up at the sky, with a sense of total betrayal. Where was it, the joy she had learnt to experience, the mounting leaping heat, the tumbling explosion, the sweet peace? All she felt was a dreadful aching emptiness that was almost pain. She lay and she didn’t move and she felt quite sober, and deeply ashamed suddenly.

‘That was great,’ said Toby, moving off her, turning onto his back. ‘Really great. Are you all right?’

‘Er – yes,’ said Charlotte slightly uncertainly.

‘Sorry I didn’t put a johnny on. Got a bit carried away. But you should be all right, shouldn’t you? Dates OK?’

‘Er – yes,’ said Charlotte again. ‘I think so.’ Outrage was beginning to
replace the emptiness. There was no way she was going to tell Toby she was on the pill; let him worry for a while.

‘So was that OK for you? I thought it was terrific.’

Charlotte turned to look at him. She thought she had never hated anyone so much as she did Toby at that moment, lying there with a self-satisfied expression on his face, his trousers still around his knees. ‘Actually no,’ she said coldly. She sat up, looking around for her pants.

‘What? Oh sorry, darling. Look, don’t worry, it’s often not too hot the first time. You’ll get better at it.’

Charlotte looked at him in silence for quite a while, deliberately bestowing a lingering gaze on his small limp penis. Then she smiled, a tight, cold little smile.

‘Toby,’ she said, ‘I think you have a little to learn. A lot even, it seems. That was not the first time, you will obviously be surprised to learn; I am equally surprised that you should have thought it was. Moreover, I don’t think I have to get better at it, I have very often managed to enjoy it enormously. On the other hand, I think you need to get quite a bit better at it. Your technique, if indeed what I have just endured can be dignified with such a term, leaves a great deal to be desired. Now perhaps we could go home. I’m very tired.’

She stood up, pulling on her pants, and then walked towards the car; as she reached it, Toby grabbed her by her shoulders and turned her roughly round.

‘You bitch,’ he said, ‘you slut. You filthy little self-satisfied slut. Well, blood will out. It’s obviously all true.’

Charlotte stared at him. ‘I don’t have the first idea what you mean,’ she said.

‘Oh really? Well you would say that, wouldn’t you?’

‘Toby,’ she said, ‘please explain. And please let go of me. You’re hurting me.’

‘Oh, get in the car,’ he said suddenly, obviously regretting his words. ‘Just get in and let’s go.’

‘Toby,’ said Charlotte, ‘I want to know what you meant by that. What’s obviously all true?’

‘Nothing,’ said Toby. ‘Get in the car.’

Charlotte got in in silence. He started the car, backed up the track, and started driving fast along the main road. Charlotte looked at his face, set and white in the moonlight, and felt a great shudder of unease. She didn’t say any more until Toby pulled up in front of Hartest. Then she turned to him.

‘Toby,’ she said, ‘if you don’t tell me what you meant, I shall run up those steps and wake up the whole house and say you just raped me.’

‘You wouldn’t dare. They wouldn’t believe you.’

‘I would certainly dare, and they would believe me. I’m a very good actress, I have mud on my legs and leaves and twigs in my hair and certain irrefutable evidence in my body. My father would find it extremely difficult
not to believe me. Now then, just tell me what the hell you were talking about.’

‘Oh, Charlotte, don’t make me. Please. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s a little late for that. Toby, would you just begin, please?’

‘No.’

‘Right.’ She opened the door, stepped out and opened her mouth to scream. Toby, moving with impressive speed, dragged her back in and put his hand over her mouth.

‘Shut up. Just shut up. I’ll tell you.’

‘All right, I’ll shut up. Get talking.’

‘You – you won’t like it,’ he said.

‘I don’t mind.’

‘And it’s only gossip. Stupid Wiltshire gossip.’

‘Fine. I like gossip. Just begin, will you.’

‘Yes, all right, Charlotte. I’m only amazed none of it has reached you before.’

‘None of what?’

‘This. The gossip.’

‘Well it hasn’t. You’re in the privileged position of being Lead Gossip. Go on, Toby.’

‘Well – all right. Don’t blame me, that’s all.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it.’

There was a long silence. Toby looked frantically out of the window. Charlotte moved to open her door again. He grabbed her hand suddenly and held it, surprisingly gently.

‘I just hate this,’ he said, ‘hate having to hurt you. I’ve always liked you so much. I might not have shown it this evening, but I have. But – well, Charlotte, the gossip is that – well, you and your sister are not actually your father’s. And that your mother has had a lot of affairs.’

There was a long silence. A very long silence. Charlotte sat quite still, her face set, staring at him. She did not take her hand away. Then she said, ‘When did you hear this?’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’ve heard it a few times. Honestly. I’ve never said anything to anyone. Said I didn’t believe it, actually.’

‘Who have you heard it from?’

‘Oh – a couple of girls. You know how girls gossip.’

‘No, actually,’ said Charlotte.

‘Well they do. And I once heard my mother and a friend of hers talking, by the tennis court. Georgina was playing with someone, you weren’t there. My mother said how unlike the two of you were, and her friend said well, surely my mother had heard the gossip, that neither of you were your – were Lord Caterham’s children – Charlotte, don’t look like that, you and Georgina are amazingly different looking. That at least is true. And neither of you looks in the least like Max. Now he
does
look like your father.’

‘Yes he does,’ said Charlotte absently. ‘Exactly.’ She was talking oddly, as if in shock. ‘Well, you see, Toby, I look just like Grandma Praeger. Everyone says so. And Georgina, well she is like – well, all sorts of people. Granny Caterham
is very tall. And she has Mummy’s eyes. We both do. Lioness’s eyes, Grandpa Praeger says. So it obviously is nonsense. Just gossipy nonsense. Goodnight, Toby. Thank you for dinner.’

She got out of the car and walked very slowly up the steps and round to the small door at the side of the south front which the family often used, and went in without turning round.

Charlotte went downstairs to the kitchen and stood looking around her for a moment or two. She felt as if she had never seen it before; she felt as if she had never been in the house before, and that she did not know where she was.

Then she went over to a cupboard, got out a mug, and made herself some warm milk. She sat down at the table, staring at the Aga and thinking about what she had just heard, trying to process the information, trying to analyse her feelings.

Confusion, that was to be expected. Panic, also. But her major emotion was something that contributed to the panic, something that frightened her. It was a kind of calm, dull acceptance that what she had just heard made sense. A lot more sense than that they had all been adopted.

She hated the acceptance, hated recognizing it. But she did. And she wasn’t sure why. Most people, confronted by what she had just confronted, would have been outraged, indignant, denying it. Why wasn’t she? Her parents always seemed happy enough. Of course her mother was away a lot, but when she came back, her father was always so happy to see her, he was joyful, singing about the house before going to meet her. They never quarrelled, or hardly ever. He never for a single moment said anything remotely disloyal about Virginia; he went out of his way to defend her absences, to explain to them all why it was so important to her to work, to have a life of her own. And to make sure they believed that she loved them. And her mother also never ever spoke harshly about Alexander. She hardly ever argued with him, even. She was a little distant, of course, a little cool, but that was the sort of person she was. She wasn’t like him, openly loving, physically demonstrative. But she did quite clearly love him.

They often went off for long long walks together, around the estate, hand in hand, talking, endlessly talking. They were famous, those walks. Max particularly always wanted to go with them, and often he did, but sometimes they would discourage him, laughing, saying they wanted to be alone.

Of course her mother had had problems. There had been the drink, and revivals of the drink; but she had beaten that, and her father had been so wonderfully supportive over it. Surely, if a man’s wife was so compulsively unfaithful to him that two of her children were not his, or even one of them, that man would not stay loyally by her while she went on alcoholic benders for days at a time, got picked up by the police, was committed to clinics; surely he would take that as a reasonable excuse to end the marriage.

And she had been so terribly depressed after the first little boy was born, Charlotte could still just remember that, the endless crying, and the collapse on the grave, and then being sent away to America; and
she could remember how tender, how patient her father’s voice had been, never exasperated, never giving in, as her mother cried at the table, and in the car and all over the house. Surely he couldn’t have managed that, if there had been any doubt, any doubt at all, about the baby’s parentage.

And then there was Max. If ever a child looked like his father, Max did. The blond hair, the blue eyes, the long slim body. Obviously Max was his. So, clearly even if she and Georgina were some other man’s children, the marriage had been mended, sufficiently, to conceive Max. To begin again. And would that have been a possibility, if your wife had been so blatantly unfaithful to you?

And that was another thing. Alexander was so loving, so terribly terribly loving towards them, to her and Georgina. If he had a favourite, it wasn’t Max, it was Georgina. Surely he wouldn’t be able to do that, if he knew they weren’t his? Or suspected it.

Of course that was another thing. She hadn’t thought of that. She was assuming Alexander must have known, if it was true. But maybe he didn’t. But then, he wasn’t stupid. And if your wife was away a great deal and kept on getting pregnant and having children who didn’t look remotely like you, like anyone in the family, you’d have to be pretty stupid not to suspect something.

And then, for heaven’s sake, thought Charlotte, her mother was a sophisticated woman; surely if she had been having affairs all over the place, she wouldn’t have got pregnant. She would have been terribly careful, this wasn’t the nineteenth century. Erring wives just didn’t come home with bastard babies. A bastard baby, she thought: is that what I was? Am?

No, clearly it couldn’t be true. It didn’t make sense. It was a vile, filthy lie and one that her father had managed to rise above, because he was a gentleman and a loving husband and father, and to refute it, to force it into the open, to publicly deny it, would have been to perpetuate it, to give it credence in some strange way.

But then why had it started in the first place? And why then, why, why, did she still feel as if it did make some sort of sense?

Charlotte shook her head, put her mug in the sink and went slowly up the small staircase that led out of the kitchen. It came out finally on the first-floor back landing, and then there was another flight up to the second floor where the nurseries were and where Nanny slept. As the children had grown older they had been given bigger, grander rooms on the first floor, but the nurseries had remained, ‘ready for my grandchildren’ Alexander had said, smiling, more than once. Charlotte looked up towards the second floor now, thinking in a kind of wonder that she could never again view her childhood peacefully, happily, and sighed; she took her shoes off and went up. She smiled as she passed Nanny’s door; thunderous snores were coming out. She went into the day nursery, light with the brilliant moon, went over to the window, pushing absently at the rocking horse as she passed it. She stood looking down at the parkland; the moon was reflected in the lake, the swans slept on it, their heads tucked within their feathers, and the tall reeds at the side looked darkly mysterious, part of their own shadows. She could see every detail of the Palladian bridge and the wide stream flowing beneath it; a deer and her fawn,
awake in the moonlight, moved slowly across the park, towards the water. How beautiful it was, she thought, diverted from her unhappiness, not just the house, but all of it, the land, the whole small country that was Hartest, their heritage, that their father loved so much, that he invested all his energy and money and strength in. She leant her head against the window, drinking in the beauty, and tried to sort her whirling thoughts.