Wicked Pleasures (4 page)

Betsey would upbraid Fred for his insensitivity, and bend almost double over-praising everything Virginia did – but it didn’t help. Even her looks, which were stunning – her waterfall of thick, dark hair shot with auburn, her perfect
heart-shaped face, straight little nose, sweetly curving mouth, and her extraordinary large, brown-flecked golden eyes (‘Like a lioness’s’ as Betsey remarked gazing into them enraptured soon after the baby was born) – did not please him. ‘Bad luck,’ he would say, ‘Baby getting the Praeger looks. Virgy takes after my mother.’

Her father’s dismissal of everything she did, every accomplishment, every talent, hurt Virginia every day of her life. In theory she should have hated him and hated Baby; in fact, against all logic, she loved Fred more than anyone in the world, and tried to please him – and hero-worshipped Baby. It said a great deal about a certain insensitivity in Baby that he remained oblivious to much of her anguish.

Fred’s occasional anxiety over his son was currently greatly eased; Baby had fallen in love with a most suitable girl, who was having a gratifyingly sober effect on him. Mary Rose Brookson, whose father was in real estate, had an icy beauty, spoke five languages and had graduated Phi Beta Kappa in Fine Arts and English Literature; she would have had a sobering effect on anyone. Virginia found Mary Rose at best awe-inspiring and at worst dislikeable: Mary Rose went to a great deal of trouble putting her rather ostentatiously at her ease, and asked her slightly patronizingly about her studies whenever she saw her. But Virginia could also see that she was a most restraining influence on Baby and his excesses, and should she be given the opportunity, would be the perfect consort for Baby, queen over his dinner table, make all the right contacts and connections. And no doubt provide him with several very aristocratic heirs to the dynasty.

Virginia’s future too was not exactly unsettled; Fred III had drawn up a settlement on her that made dizzy reading for any prospective suitor. $1m when she was twenty-one, in stocks and bonds, a further $1m in trust until her twenty-fifth birthday and a 2½ per cent share in the bank’s profits when she was thirty or when Baby inherited it, whichever came later.

When Virginia was seventeen she came out, presented by her father at the Junior Assemblies Infirmary Ball. She was among the two or three most beautiful girls there (and even Fred went so far as to tell her she looked very pretty). But Baby, who was also there, was easily the most handsome man. Blond, blue-eyed, with a knee-weakening smile and shoulders broad enough to lay a girl on, as some wag had once said, he was, not unnaturally, the focus of the mothers’ attention as well as their daughters’. And although he got very drunk and spent half the evening trying to get Primrose Watler-Browne’s knickers off in the cloakroom, nobody ever heard about it; Virginia, who was quietly and discreetly sick in the ladies’ after her two glasses of champagne had mixed rather badly with the glass of Dutch courage in the form of a beer Baby had given her before they left the house, was severely reprimanded by her mother who heard about it from another debutante’s mother.

But if nothing could shake Virginia’s adoration of her brother, at least the feeling was mutual. Baby might not have been aware of her problems, but he
loved her dearly in return, and one of the most important things he had been able to do for her was make her early days at college happy. When she arrived at Wellesley, he went out of his way to take care of her, to introduce her to all his friends and to see she had a really good time. Virginia was not one of the stars of her year, but she was quietly happily popular; and removed from a constant position under Fred III’s heavy eye, happier and more confident than she had ever been.

Baby Praeger and Mary Rose Brookson became officially engaged at the end of August. There was a lavish party for them to celebrate, and Mary Rose stood hanging onto Baby’s arm in a rather predatory way throughout the evening. People kept saying how well matched they were, and what a perfect couple they made, but Virginia found it harder and harder to agree; Baby was so warmly, easily charming, and Mary Rose was tense and almost painfully formal. She was undoubtedly beautiful, but in a slightly chilly way; she had ice-blonde hair and pale blue eyes, and her fine, fair skin showed tiny blue veins through it on her temples. She was extremely thin, and very chic; she dressed for the most part in stark, rather severe clothes, but for the party she wore a dress from Oleg Cassini in navy silk chiffon, small-waisted and long-sleeved, draped from the waist; everyone said it was gorgeous but Virginia thought it was a middle-aged dress. Betsey had a very large photograph framed for the upstairs drawing room at East 80th; every time Virginia looked at it she felt depressed.

The wedding took place in June of 1957, at St Saviour’s East Hampton, and in a vast cream and peach marquee on the lawn of the Brookson house near the South Shore; Mary Rose wore cream silk with real cream roses in her hair and looked charming. Virginia, who was the only grown-up attendant, was totally eclipsed by the ten tiny flower girls, none of them older than six, dressed in cascades of cream and pink frills. Mary Rose had insisted that Virginia’s dress was exactly the same, despite her plea for something simple, and in all the wedding photographs she looked, despite her determined smile, uncomfortable and overdressed.

The best man, Bink Strathmore, Baby’s room-mate from Harvard, had just got engaged himself and was so deeply in love he could hardly bear to stand away from his fiancée and close to Virginia for even the duration of the photographs; and when Fred III got up to make a speech (despite the irregularity of such an event) he made a great deal of how proud he was of Baby, a perfect son, and how equally proud of Mary Rose, her charm, her beauty and in particular her brains, and if ever a female was to persuade him that she be allowed to enter the board rather than the boardroom of the bank, it would be her. ‘Which is not to say that even in a hundred, a thousand years such a thing will happen,’ he finished to much laughter and applause.

Later, he led Baby to the piano, his tap shoes in his spare hand, and asked Virginia to come and dance with him. She was in fact a brilliant tap dancer; it was her one accomplishment that Fred III was truly proud of, and he made her teach him to tap dance too. Virginia and Fred Praeger doing ‘You’re the Tops’,
accompanied on piano by Baby, was one of the more privileged sights of New York. Charmingly, graciously, but firmly this time Virginia refused. Fred had to do ‘You’re the Tops’ on his own.

It was the first time she had ever got the better of him; the pleasure of that slightly eased the pain she had endured all through the long, humiliating day.

Virginia went back to college feeling depressed. She felt she had lost Baby and it was time she had someone of her own. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, in Fine Arts, and spent the summer attending the weddings of her friends. By October she felt she could have conducted a wedding ceremony and organized a reception for five hundred in her sleep.

‘So what did you think of Mary Rose’s apartment?’ said Charley Wallace to her at a drinks party in the Hamptons one golden autumn Sunday. Virginia had not intended to go to the party, she had promised Baby a game of tennis, but she had had a headache and pulled out of the game, and then been dragooned by Betsey into accompanying her to the party.

‘Well,’ she said carefully, for Charley was a close friend of Mary Rose’s, ‘it’s a very nice apartment. Very nice.’

‘Yes, but isn’t she just the cleverest thing to have found Celia before anyone else?’

‘Celia who?’ said Virginia, slightly absently. She was wondering if she could possibly persuade herself that Charley with his dropaway chin and braying laugh was attractive (given that he was about the only unmarried or un-aboutto-be-married) man in New York State and possibly the whole of the United States of America that autumn.

‘Celia del Fuego,’ said Charley, and then seeing Virginia’s blank look said, ‘Don’t say she didn’t tell you? Most people can’t stop boasting about using her.’

‘Charley,’ said Virginia, ‘this is very intriguing. Exactly who is Celia del Fuego? Some smart new shrink or something?’

‘No of course not,’ said Charley, ‘Mary Rose is far too together to need a shrink. Yet anyway,’ he added with a just slightly sharp twitch of his mouth; Virginia promptly decided she liked him more than she had thought. ‘Celia’s an interior designer. Really terribly smart. She’s done Bunty Hampshire’s house, and Sarah Marchmont’s apartment, weren’t you at college with her sister, oh and she might be doing Kenneth’s new salon, and they say that Mrs Bouvier, you know, Jackie’s mother, has been talking to her. And her stuff’s all over
House and Garden
, apparently.’

‘How on earth do you know all this?’ said Virginia curiously. Charley didn’t seem quite the kind of person to know about fashionable designer people.

‘Oh, my mother’s having her penthouse done,’ said Charley, ‘and Celia’s going to do it for her. That’s how I found out she did Mary Rose’s. Maybe Mary Rose doesn’t want you to know. Maybe she wants you to think she did it all herself. Promise you won’t tell her I told you.’

‘I promise,’ said Virginia absent-mindedly. She found the concept both of Mary Rose employing an interior designer and then keeping quiet about it
highly tantalizing. It was very unlike her. Maybe it was because she felt as an expert on the visual arts she should be able to handle her own decor. Virginia stored the information away for future use; and resolved that on Monday morning, she would look up Celia in the classified section of
House and Garden
, and arrange to go and see her. She wasn’t sure why, but she found the prospect intriguing.

She met someone else at the party at the Hamptons that day: Madeleine Dalgleish, English and a distant relative of Mary Rose, but scarcely recognizable as such, and greatly more engaging. She was scatty, more than a little shy, and slightly odd-looking, very tall, and almost gaunt with dark, deep-set eyes and a large, hook-like nose; she had been charmed and touched by the attention and genuine interest shown in her by a young woman who she was assured by her hostess was not only the greatest heiress of her generation but also inexplicably unattached.

Virginia had found her much the nicest person there and spent much of the party chatting to her, careful to avoid too much discussion on the subject of Mary Rose until Madeleine Dalgleish said, with the suggestion of a twinkle in her eye, that she was relieved to find all young American women were not as daunting as her own third cousin.

‘I was always rather frightened of Mary Rose,’ she said, holding out her glass to be refilled for the third time in the conversation (which was no doubt, Virginia thought, contributing to her frankness), ‘even when she was quite a little girl. She was always so extremely sure of herself. Although I’m sure she’ll make a wonderful wife for your brother,’ she added hastily.

‘I’m sure she will too,’ said Virginia, and changed the subject as soon as she decently could onto which parts of New York Mrs Dalgleish had and had not seen.

‘I’ll tell you where I’d really like to go,’ she said, ‘the Stock Exchange. My father was a stockbroker and I spent a lot of my childhood in the gallery at the London Stock Exchange. I’d love to compare notes.’

‘Well you must let me take you,’ said Virginia. ‘I spent a lot of my childhood in the one here. Why don’t we go along before lunch tomorrow? I don’t suppose it’s very different.’

‘How very kind,’ said Madeleine. ‘I’d love that, and you must let me buy you lunch afterwards.’

But the visit never took place; Madeleine had had to rush home to England to her young son, taken ill at Eton with appendicitis, and had missed the promised tour. She phoned Virginia, expressing genuine regret, and said when she returned, she would contact her again. Nine months later she was back, phoned the delightful Miss Praeger as promised and invited her to lunch at her hotel.

Virginia often reflected how frightening it was that her entire destiny had swung on the thread of fate that had given her a headache and sent her to that party.

Virginia, 1958–9

‘There are two kinds of designer,’ Amanda Adamson said to Virginia, inspecting the patina on a Louis Quinze table closely as she spoke. ‘The major firms, like ourselves, and Macmillan and Parish Hadley, with a great many social clients and a considerable weight of staff, and then the small individual with the right contacts and a bit of luck.’

She straightened her sliver-thin body, in its Dior chemise-line dress in herringbone tweed, and glared at Virginia, her expression making it extremely plain what she thought of the smaller individuals and their dependence on luck. ‘Now if – and I do mean if – you join us, you will be a very small cog in a very large and powerful wheel. But that does not mean you will not be important. Our clients, coming as they do from the highest social spectrum, are used to everything, and I do mean everything, being The Best. From the china in which they are served their tea in this office, to the manners of the delivery drivers.’

‘Yes,’ said Virginia humbly. ‘Of course.’

Amanda Adamson sighed. ‘Most girls don’t of course recognize the good from the indifferent these days. I have to say that as your mother’s daughter, with your educational background, I am inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps you’d like to tell me why you want to pursue a career as an interior designer.’

‘Well,’ said Virginia simply, ‘I like beautiful houses and beautiful things, and I like people, and I – well I think it would be fun,’ she finished lamely. Amanda Adamson looked at her more severely still.

‘My dear girl,’ she said, ‘this business is not, I assure you, about fun. Decorating is big business. I run this company like a Wall Street broker house. I have a staff of twenty. I have a highly complex financial system. I never go over budget, I always deliver on time. I have furniture delivered here on memo, that is to say, on approval, worth thousands of dollars, and I have never returned anything even slightly damaged. I have clients right across the country. Only last week I arrived in Colorado with four forty-foot trailers of furniture. It may be satisfying, but it is not fun.’