Wicked Pleasures (48 page)

‘Christ almighty,’ he said, turning away from her finally, angry to feel tears at the back of his eyes. ‘What is my life coming to, that I can’t even fuck you properly?’

Angie’s small hand stroked his shoulder, reached for his hand. ‘Baby, don’t. Don’t put yourself down. You’ve been very ill. I thought I’d lost you that day. You’re having a tough time at work. Let’s both be patient.’ She clambered over him, smiled into his eyes. ‘I’ve waited a very long time for you. I can hang on a bit longer.’

Baby sighed and folded her into his arms. ‘I love you so much,’ he said, ‘I wish we had some kind of future together.’

‘Well, I don’t think we do,’ said Angie lightly. ‘Less than ever now. I mean your dad is back in the driving seat, isn’t he? So he certainly isn’t going to take kindly to news of me.’

‘He’s only there very temporarily,’ said Baby, trying to believe it himself, ‘but no, you’re right, it would be a disaster if he heard anything about you – about us – at the moment.’ He sighed heavily. ‘Angie, you’re terribly thin. Have you been eating properly?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Of course I have. I’ve been worried about you, Baby. And missing you. I told you. Now look, let’s not waste any more time talking about what we can’t have and enjoy what we can. Just relax, Baby, and try to be happy. Let me see what a little therapy can do …’

She wriggled down in the bed, started tonguing him. Baby looked down at her golden head, and tried obediently to relax. It wasn’t a total success, but it was better than the first time.

Maybe everything would be all right.

He didn’t see her nearly so often these days. He wasn’t able to make his trips to London and Paris. He got tired easily. Mary Rose was watchful. He suggested (at his doctor’s genuine instigation) that he should start running again, and Mary Rose said it would be a wonderful idea and she would come with him. Baby had always hated running, but never as much as now, as he panted round Central Park with Mary Rose just behind him, shouting encouraging remarks, thinking of what he had been doing at this time a year ago.

Max, 1983

It had indeed been a wonderful evening; everybody said so. Alexander had appeared genuinely to enjoy himself, and had even danced several times, twice with Mary Rose, albeit with a slightly distant expression; Baby, who had been subdued but cheerful, had danced every dance, mostly with friends of Charlotte and Georgina; Georgina’s new boyfriend, a fellow architect called Simon Cunningham, told her he had never known what love meant until he had seen her standing on the steps of Hartest in her red dress; Melissa was invited to go upstairs with at least five boys and refused all of them; and even Freddy appeared to be enjoying himself and became very slightly tipsy on the excellent Bollinger which Fred III had insisted on supplying in excessive quantities for the occasion.

‘I want my favourite grandchild to be launched on her adult life in style,’ he
wrote to Alexander when he accepted his invitation to the ball, ‘and it can be one of my presents to her. I know you farmers are having a hard time of it.’

And Max, who had behaved perfectly and never left the dance floor for long enough (in his own words) to smoke a joint, get drunk, or get anyone’s knickers anywhere near down, had hated every minute of it. He hated everything these days; he was bored, lonely and frustrated and he couldn’t see what was to become of him. He had scraped through his O levels and got five C grades; he had no interest in taking his academic career any further, and very little interest in doing anything at all.

Having two brilliant sisters who knew exactly where they were going made it worse, of course: Georgina had gone through a bad patch briefly when she had been expelled from her school, but she was doing extremely well now with her architecture, and of course Charlotte, bloody Charlotte, was doing wonderfully as always, with her fantastic future laid out before her, and all she had to do was simply step into it and reap the rewards.

Max was very fond of Georgina, but he found Charlotte hard to love. She was so bossy, so sure of herself, so permanently in the right. He wondered if she had ever been to bed with anyone. Presumably she had, she was twenty-one years old, but it was almost impossible to imagine. Max cheered himself up briefly, as he watched Charlotte dancing (she even seemed to do that better than anyone else), picturing her having sex with someone: telling them exactly what to do, how to do it, how long to take over it, when to finish, and what to say when it was all over. And God help the guy if he didn’t quite deliver to her brief. He knew that some people thought she was very sexy, but Max couldn’t see it. Too confident, too self-contained. Georgina, now she was gorgeous. She radiated sexiness, although in a very off-beat way. She was a bit skinny for his personal taste, but she had that kind of frail look about her, and a sort of – what? A restless quality that was very attractive. If she wasn’t his sister he could really fancy her. Max sighed, remembering, as he did possibly a dozen times a day, always freshly painfully, that she was not his sister. Or not entirely.

He was still finding it almost impossible to come to terms with the news about his parenthood. The shock he had experienced when Charlotte had told him, in her brisk, matter-of-fact manner, as if she was giving him some kind of medicine that he needed, had been horrible. For weeks he had not slept properly. He would wake up two or three times a night, feeling afraid, lost, in some sort of swirling nightmare. It was as if all the security, all the love he had been surrounded by through his childhood had been taken away from him, and he was totally alone in the world.

He thought of the mother he had known and loved so much, whose favourite he had been, and it was as if she had never existed. She died for Max not that night of the car crash on the M4 but in the lounge of the hotel in Ireland, while Charlotte told him that Alexander was not his father. He had cut her out of his life from that moment, determinedly not thinking about her, struggling to wipe out even the smallest memory of her. He had taken her photograph from the frame by his bed, and torn it up; he had ripped snapshots of her out of his photograph albums; he had thrown away all the letters she had
sent him, and that he had kept since he was eight years old; and he had sold, in an act that had hurt him horribly, the gold watch she had given him for his twelfth birthday, and the gold cufflinks she had given him when he had gone to Eton. He had taken them to a dealer in Swindon and accepted the absurdly low price the man offered without a moment’s argument and then persuaded Tallow to put the money on a horse for him. The horse had obligingly lost and he had seen that as a fitting end to his mother’s gifts to him.

And then he was estranged from his father; they communicated as little as possible, barely polite strangers. Max found it hard to explain to himself, let alone anyone else, the hostility he felt towards Alexander. He knew he should be feeling, as the girls did, sympathy, tenderness, loyalty. Instead he felt contempt and a strong sense that Alexander was to blame. If your wife was sleeping around, you put a stop to it; you didn’t endure it, bring up her illegitimate children, continue to protest that you loved her. It was all so bizarre, so ugly: the mystery of it haunted Max.

He would have liked to talk to the others about it, but he couldn’t; something stopped him. He didn’t want them to know how badly it hurt, how unbearable he found it. He preferred to present his careless, tough front, and try to believe in that himself. He had spoken the truth when he had said he had got expelled from Eton on purpose; he had done it partly because it seemed suddenly and unbearably claustrophobic and partly to hurt Alexander. He wanted to reject everything to do with him.

Except, as he had said to Charlotte, his inheritance. For some perverse reason, Max was very determined to make sure he stayed the heir to Hartest. He didn’t feel about it the way his father did, always drooling over it, and Georgina too, but he did like it: it had style, and Max liked style. And he liked privilege too, and status; and even more he liked money. There was no way he was going to lose all that, just because he was, strictly speaking, illegitimate. It was that word that hurt Max most. Illegitimate. Every time it entered his head, it was like a physical pain.

It was hurting even during Charlotte’s birthday ball. He had set it aside determinedly and went and asked Melissa to dance with him. She was clasped rather tightly in the arms of a handsome boy, but she promptly disentangled herself the moment she heard Max’s voice. Melissa’s adoration of Max was a joke in the family, but Max found it oddly comforting.

The dance finally wound up at four; the family regrouped for brunch at noon next day and sat discussing it over croissants, scrambled eggs and a great many cups of strong coffee.

‘What a charming man your neighbour Mr Dunbar is,’ said Mary Rose to Alexander. ‘I was telling him about my book on eighteenth-century watercolours and he seemed extremely interested.’

‘I didn’t think old Martin knew about anything except horses,’ said Max, ‘he certainly married one. The only thing missing last night was the nosebag.’

‘Don’t be rude, Max,’ said Alexander. ‘Catriona is a very nice woman and she was extremely kind to me – to all of us – when your mother died.’

Max scowled at him. Georgina leapt into the silence, rather uncharacteristically: ‘Martin is amazingly knowledgeable about all sorts of funny things,’ she said, ‘I often talk to him about houses and things, he really likes them. He loves Hartest.’

‘Well you’d think he might have found somewhere a bit nicer to live himself,’ said Charlotte, ‘that house of theirs is a horror. Inside as well as out.’

‘Yes, well not everyone is born with a silver stately home in their mouth,’ said Max, who had actually often remarked on the ugliness of the small 1920s farmhouse the Dunbars lived in, but would have argued that black was white and then that it was black again if Charlotte had made a statement to the contrary.

‘I like it,’ said Georgina staunchly, ‘it’s homely and cosy. And I like them both very much. Especially Martin. He’s so gentle.’

‘Charlotte,’ said Melissa, who was growing bored with the conversation, ‘Charlotte, who was that perfectly dreamy black boy you were dancing with such a lot? I tried and tried to get to meet him, but he was always dancing.’

‘Oh, that’s Hamish,’ said Charlotte. ‘Hamish Mabele.’

‘He didn’t look like a Hamish,’ said Melissa.

‘Well he is. His father is a king somewhere in middle Africa, and he was at Cambridge and he became very keen on Scottish dancing, joined the Muckleflugga which is a club and when his first son was born he gave him a Scottish name. I think there’s even a Mabele tartan.’

‘Golly,’ said Melissa, ‘I’d like to see him in a kilt. Or better still without a kilt.’

‘Melissa, do be quiet,’ said Mary Rose.

‘A prince!’ said Betsey. ‘Well that was one I missed.’

Betsey had had a particularly good time; she had met, as she told them completely unabashed, three baronets, a countess and a duchess. ‘And she, the Duchess that is, told me she had had dinner with Princess Diana last week, and that girl is just darling apparently, so shy and natural.’

‘And is Prince Charles darling too?’ inquired Fred mildly, winking at Charlotte.

‘Well I’m sure he is,’ said Betsey.

‘He’s very nice indeed,’ said Simon Cunningham, who was eager to impress anyone to do with Georgina, ‘my father is an artist and had a painting in this year’s Academy, and I met Prince Charles at the Private View. He’s charming, very gentle and courteous. You’d like him, I know. Maybe next year you should come, I’m sure we could arrange a ticket for you.’

‘Oh God,’ said Fred, ‘you’ve done it now, Simon. She’ll be putting in calls to you twice a day for the next twelve months, reminding you.’

Betsey looked hurt; Max, who was very fond of his grandmother, went over to her and put his arms round her shoulders.

‘I think Prince Charles would be really lucky to meet you,’ he said.

‘Me too,’ said Baby, who had been very quiet right through the meal. ‘Look, I’m sorry to break up the party, but I have to leave you for a while. I have a meeting in London this afternoon.’

‘You do?’ said Fred. ‘Who with?’

His voice was mildly hectoring; Max noticed that Baby stiffened suddenly, shot him a look of great distaste.