Wicked Pleasures (37 page)

‘Of course not,’ said Nanny, almost primly. ‘Why should he?’

‘Well because we’re –’

‘his children’ she had been about to say, and then stopped.

‘It’s a grown up-matter,’ said Nanny, ‘not for children.’

‘Oh Nanny, we’re not children. And we need to know.’

‘No you don’t,’ said Nanny. ‘You want to know. You’ve forgotten what I always told you, Georgina, there’s a big difference between want and need.’

‘Well I think we do.’

‘Well I can’t tell you,’ said Nanny, ‘I promised your mother I’d never tell anyone.’

‘But we know, Nanny.’

‘Only as much as you need. How did you find out anyway? And when? You should have told me before.’

‘Oh – Charlotte heard some gossip. From Toby Lavenham. She asked Daddy, and he said it was true. It was just before Mummy died.’

‘I never liked that boy,’ said Nanny. ‘Too well mannered. And your father didn’t say any more than that it was true?’

‘No.’

‘Quite right.’

‘Oh Nanny!’

Nanny looked at her and her face was softer suddenly. ‘It can’t have been easy for you,’ she said, ‘and I’m sorry. I often said to her ladyship that she should tell you herself. She said she would when you were older.’

‘Well, she didn’t,’ said Georgina slightly bitterly, ‘and as soon as we found out she went and died.’

She started to cry again and moved across to put her head in Nanny’s lap; Nanny put down her knitting and stroked her hair.

‘Poor little girl,’ she said, very gently.

After a while Georgina looked up at her. ‘I can’t believe that you know. That you knew all the time. Oh God. And you won’t tell me any more? Any more at all?’

‘No,’ said Nanny simply. ‘It’s not for me to tell you.’

‘Well – all right. We can leave that for now. But Nanny, the thing is, what I was going to say, I was feeling so lost and alone and I suddenly feel I know who I am again. Having this baby. Can you understand that?’

‘No I can’t,’ said Nanny, stern again. ‘I certainly can’t understand how you can contemplate having a baby. Without a husband. At your age.’

‘I don’t quite see what my age has to do with it,’ said Georgina. ‘But anyway, I can and I will have it. I’d have thought you’d like the idea, Nanny, of having a baby to look after again.’

‘Well I would like a baby,’ said Nanny, ‘if it had a father. Who is the father, Georgina? Someone at that school? I never did like the uniform.’

‘Er – yes,’ said Georgina carefully, aware even in her euphoria that Nanny would not be able to cope with the news that the father of her baby could be any one of three boys, ‘yes. Someone at school.’

‘So he’d marry you, would he? I don’t know if we’ve got time to organize a wedding.’

‘No, Nanny, he wouldn’t marry me. Definitely not.’

‘Well he should,’ said Nanny, ‘and I shall tell him so myself.’

‘No, Nanny, you can’t. I’m not going to tell you who it is.’

‘Well your father will want to know.’

‘Yes,’ said Georgina with a sigh, ‘I know he will. Look, Nanny, I will tell him, I’ll have to, I know. But not for a day or two. Is that all right?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Nanny, ‘as you’re not eating.’

The logic of this was too difficult even for Georgina to follow. She stood up and gave Nanny a kiss.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

Lydia Paget phoned the following day. The test had been positive. ‘As I thought. Now, Georgina, I am relying on you to contact me when you feel ready.’

‘Thank you,’ said Georgina.

‘And could I just say – and you can tell me it is none of my business – that any girl as young as you, even as financially fortunate as you – should not enter into motherhood lightly. It really might be better – to consider a termination.’

‘It
is
none of your business,’ said Georgina cheerfully, ‘and I don’t mind a bit. But honestly, Mrs Paget, I wouldn’t dream of having a termination. I really want this baby very badly.’

‘I’m sure,’ said Lydia, ‘and I can understand that. But do you think it wants you? In your present situation? Think about that one, Georgina. Please.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ said Georgina, ‘but I won’t change my mind.’

She was very brave about telling her father. She told him every-thing. That she didn’t know who the father was, that she could only narrow it down to three; and that she couldn’t possibly therefore – how could she – tell any of them. And that she was going to have the baby and that there was nothing he could do to persuade her otherwise.

Alexander listened in silence. He didn’t shout, he didn’t rant or roar. He just listened carefully and attentively, looking at her all the time in a cold, detached way. She had never seen him like that, never known him anything but warm and loving and good-humoured, or normally naturally angry, as he had been when she had been first expelled. It was very frightening.

When finally she had finished, had said, ‘And Mrs Paget can help me where to have it and so on,’ he said, ‘Georgina, there’s very little I can do about all this. You can stay here, of course, and your child as well. I am not going to cast you out like the father in some Victorian melodrama. But don’t expect me to forgive you. Or to love it. I’m afraid you are no daughter of mine.’

And ‘No,’ she had said, illogically wounded by his reaction, ‘no I’m not. Maybe that’s why it has happened.’

‘No of course you are not,’ he said, ‘you are not my daughter. Not my own flesh and blood. But I have always loved you so much, been so proud of you, you have been, God forgive me for admitting it, my favourite. There are other things apart from genes and chromosomes that form us all. To me, you were
my daughter. My beloved daughter. I stress that you were. This has made me feel otherwise.’

And he turned and walked out of the room.

She had a termination in the end. She thought and thought until she could think no more, on a rack of guilt and grief, and then, shaking with violent misery, she phoned Lydia Paget and asked her to arrange an immediate operation. ‘And don’t, don’t tell me I’m doing the right thing,’ she said. ‘or I shall go quite quite mad.’

‘I won’t,’ said Lydia, ‘I promise. And I won’t allow anyone else to tell you so either.’

It was painless, easy, swift. Georgina would have preferred that it could have been otherwise. She felt she owed it to her baby, that she loved so much, to suffer something for it, in killing it. It seemed an ultimate betrayal to throw it out of her warm, nurturing body, carelessly, painlessly, without so much as a breath of discomfort. She lay bleeding in the narrow bed in the clinic after she had woken up, willing her body to suffer. It wouldn’t.

‘I want it to hurt,’ she said, clinging to Nanny’s hand later, when she came to visit, tears streaming down her face. ‘Can you understand that? I want it to hurt. I can’t stand it not hurting.’

‘It’s hurting all right,’ said Nanny, pushing back Georgina’s hair. ‘It just isn’t hurting the way you want it to.’

Georgina stared at her. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes of course. You’re right. How wise you are, Nanny. What would I do without you? What would any of us do?’

It did hurt, after all, in the end. She got an infection, developed a high fever, and lay for days with a temperature of 105, rambling, calling for her mother, for Alexander, for Nanny.

‘She did it for you, you know,’ said Nanny. ‘You will remember that, won’t you, Alexander?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, I’ll remember it. I promise.’

Slowly, she grew better. After a week she was sitting up in bed, drinking the sweet weak tea she was addicted to, pale, but recovering.

‘That’s better,’ said Nanny, coming in to collect her cup and a plate of bread and butter which Georgina had requested. ‘You’re on the mend.’

‘Yes. I’m so glad I was ill. It’s made me feel better. Less guilty. You know.’ She smiled suddenly. ‘I sound like you, Nanny, don’t I?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Nanny. ‘Your father’s looking very peaky.’

‘Yes, I know. He came to see me earlier. We had a talk. He said he hoped I would forgive him.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I said there was nothing to forgive. It’s very sad, and I still feel wrenched in pieces, but I could see in the end I had to – to do that for him. He’s done so much for us all our lives, just loving us. I’d never realized before.’

‘I had,’ said Nanny.

‘Yes, well of course you had. You’re old and wise.’ She smiled, and sighed in the same instant. ‘I’m not doing very well, am I, Nanny? But it isn’t easy. Any of it. You know.’

‘Yes,’ said Nanny, ‘yes, I know.’

‘I’m so jealous of Max,’ said Georgina, suddenly starting to cry again, looking like a stricken child, ‘so terribly terribly jealous.’

‘You mustn’t be,’ said Nanny, taking her in her arms, stroking her hair, patting her shoulder. ‘There’s nothing really to be jealous of. Nothing special about boys,’ she added darkly.

‘Well of course there is,’ said Georgina, looking at her puzzledly, brushing away her tears, ‘something to be jealous of, I mean. Surely you must be able to see that.’

‘Why?’ said Nanny. ‘I don’t see.’

‘But you must,’ said Georgina. ‘It’s different for him. Quite quite different.’

‘No, Georgina, I don’t,’ said Nanny, and her faded blue eyes were genuinely puzzled. ‘No, I don’t see at all, I’m afraid. Why is it different for Max?’

Charlotte, 1981–2

‘I’m beginning to think Daddy must be mad,’ said Charlotte. ‘Or maybe that we’re all mad.’

‘Maybe she drove him mad,’ said Georgina, ‘with her behaviour.’

‘What on earth do we do now?’

‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

They were sitting in the library at Hartest, watching the August rain falling determinedly down. ‘Thank God for Nantucket,’ said Georgina moodily. ‘It’s been doing this for weeks.’

It was the day before they were all leaving for America and Charlotte had only just returned from her travels; Georgina had had to wait for an agonizing six weeks to talk to her. The one time she longed, ached for her sister’s presence and counsel had been when she had been wrestling with her conscience over her pregnancy: and that had been the one week in the whole summer when Charlotte had not called.

Charlotte was filled with remorse, savagely sorry for her beleaguered sister. ‘Oh, Georgie, if only I’d been here. I wish I’d known.’

‘Well, I was all right. I had Nanny, she was so wonderful. She’s such a mass of contradictions, you’d have thought she’d be shocked, and she was just a rock. The most disapproving thing she said about the whole thing was that she never liked the school uniform.’ She grinned at Charlotte. ‘Yes, I did it for Daddy. I suddenly saw how much he had done, loving us, caring for us, never letting us down, never letting Mummy down, never giving us the slightest idea for an instant that we weren’t his. And I thought what having the baby would do to him, and I thought, well, I just couldn’t. However much I wanted to. I mean I can always have other babies –’

‘Georgina –’ said Charlotte, ‘I’m not going to read you a lecture. Of course I’m not –’

‘You’d better not,’ said Georgina, slightly grimly. ‘You’d bloody better not.’

‘I’m not. I just said I wasn’t. But I do think you’d better get yourself sorted.’

‘If you mean the pill, I have. Lydia Paget put me on it.’

‘Good. But not just that, you can’t really go round sleeping with every man with an erection you come across.’

‘Why not?’ said Georgina. ‘It’s fun.’

‘Yes, well it may be fun. But you won’t do yourself any good, apart from getting a foul reputation and probably VD into the bargain. OK? Find someone you at least like, and stay with him.’

‘Yes, miss,’ said Georgina. She scowled at Charlotte and then grinned.

‘Sorry, Georgie. Lecture over. I suppose,’ said Charlotte, carefully causal, ‘I
suppose, if we’d still had Mummy, none of it would have happened.’

‘Possibly not. But God knows what dreadful genes she’s passed on to us. It seems to me – well, never mind.’

‘That you might be following in her footsteps? Is that what you’re afraid of ?’ She had been hoping to lead Georgina into this thought.

‘A bit.’

‘Well, don’t be. That way lies madness. We’re obviously a mass of rogue genes, all of us. We can’t let them be an excuse or a justification for anything we might be doing. We’re ourselves. That’s all we know. We have to make do with that. Now look, what are we going to do about Max?’

‘Tell him, I suppose. We have to.’

‘Well, yes. But when? He’s still awfully little.’

‘Charlotte, he’s not little. He’s fourteen going on twenty-four. And awfully worldly. I dread to think what he and that little sexpot Melissa are going to get up to all day long on Nantucket.’

‘Well, yes. In some ways. In others he’s a baby.’ Charlotte sighed; she found her attitude towards Max ambivalent. On the one hand she disapproved of him dreadfully, on the other she doted on him. ‘But – oh, I don’t know. I mean does he really have to know yet? Tell me again what Nanny said. How it came out.’

‘Well I was just saying how I was jealous of Max, I was very upset anyway, and she said, why, and I said because it was different for him, and she said it wasn’t any different for Max at all. And then realized she’d told me something I didn’t actually know, and got in a frightful fluster and said she couldn’t say any more, that she’d promised Mummy never to tell. Poor Daddy. Poor poor Daddy.’

‘Yes.’

Charlotte was silent, and then she said, ‘Well, let’s not tell him yet. Little bugger’d probably only use it as an excuse to do even less work than he’s doing already. And there’s no gossip about him. At least our mother had realized the wisdom of choosing blond blue-eyed lovers by then.’

‘Oh don’t,’ said Georgina. Her face suddenly looked very tender and vulnerable. ‘Don’t. I hate it all so much.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. So anyway, we can afford to wait a bit. I really don’t think I can face talking to Daddy about it.’

‘No. No nor can I. I feel he’s more and more in a world of his own. So – we leave it for now? Telling Max?’

‘Yes. I think so. But I’ll tell you one thing. I’m getting increasingly desperate to know more about my – my father. I really am. And I’m going to find out. It may take years, but I’m going to find out. I don’t know how I’m even going to begin. But I am.’