Wicked Pleasures (8 page)

Virginia, mildly surprised, particularly by the non-attendance of his mother, agreed; she was too happy and too much in love to push him or question him on anything.

‘Can’t I come over before the wedding?’ she said. ‘Can’t I come and see Hartest? Meet your mother? I really would be much happier.’

‘I don’t want that,’ he said, kissing her. ‘I want you to come to it as my bride, as the Countess of Caterham, mistress of the house. I want it to be perfect. For you. And for me.’

‘Well,’ she said, kissing him back, ‘I like the sound of the mistress bit, at least. But your mother – surely, Alexander, if she won’t come to the wedding, I should go and meet her. It seems so wrong that she won’t set eyes on me even until after we’re married. I can’t believe she wouldn’t feel happier that way.’

‘Virginia, you must let me be the judge of my mother’s behaviour,’ said Alexander, and for the very first time she saw a chilliness in his eyes. ‘She is a difficult and very private person. She doesn’t like people. She certainly doesn’t like crowds. At the moment, I have to say, she is expressing a little – hostility towards the idea of my marriage.’

‘Hostility? Oh, Alexander, why?’ said Virginia, a cloud of anxiety drifting across her bright happiness. ‘Do you know? And don’t you think she’d be less hostile if she met me, if I made the effort?’

‘No I don’t,’ said Alexander. ‘I’m sorry, darling, but I really do urge you to trust me on this one.’

She never forgot her first sight of Hartest House. Alexander had brought a great stash of photographs from England for her and she had looked at it in silence and awe: a great, perfect palace of a house settled exquisitely into the lavish, rolling Wiltshire countryside.

‘Adam said what he worked for was movement in architecture,’ said Alexander, ‘a sense of rising and falling: Hartest for me does not just move, it flies.’ A wide house, it was, perfectly proportioned, built in the Palladian style, with curving porticos, wide terraces, tall windows, the whole centred around a rotunda which formed the heart of the house, echoed in the great dome on its roof; ‘and here, you see, in the rotunda, one of the most famous double flying staircases in England, people come from all over the world to see that staircase’; and the grounds were as exquisite, miles of parkland, studded with sheep and deer, a Palladian bridge set at one end of the lake –‘there are black swans on that lake as well as white’, a river curving languorously through woodland (‘the Hart, our own river’); ‘the photographs cannot do it justice,’ said Alexander, ‘the stone is pale, pale grey, the colour of fine mist, and even on a dark, rainy day it seems somehow to shine.’

‘I cannot imagine,’ said Virginia, laughing, ‘what my mother will say when she sees these. I think she’ll have a coronary.’

But Betsey didn’t. She looked at the pictures in silence and then at Virginia, and then she said quietly, ‘It’s a very big house for a little girl.’

She was very subdued for the rest of the evening. It was left to Fred to admire the house (and insist on putting a price on it) and for Mary Rose to exclaim over its ‘exquisite proportions’, its ‘magnificent grandeur’ and its ‘overwhelming vistas’. Baby was totally silent on the subject.

Baby was totally silent on the subject of the wedding altogether. He kissed Virginia when she told him, said he hoped she’d be very happy, and that Alexander was a lucky man, and never said another word about it, apart from discussing his role as best man (an extraordinary request, it was felt, from Alexander, who must have had a close friend of his own, but which Betsey insisted was an example of English charm and thoughtfulness, involving his new family) and initiating Alexander into such American marriage rituals as the Bridal Dinner (which was held at the Racquet Club) attended by the bride, groom, ushers and attendants, and where lavish gifts were exchanged. (Virginia gave her bridegroom a gold watch on a platinum chain from Cartier; the twelve small flower girls were all
given gold link bracelets, the twelve ushers Gucci belts; Alexander presented Virginia with a small Victorian locket which had belonged, he said, to his mother. Betsey was a trifle embarrassed by the modesty of the present and kept telling Fred afterwards that the English were different.) The bachelor dinner for twenty-four, also thrown at the Racquet Club, was a subdued affair; Alexander promised to do his best to enter into the spirit of the thing, he told Virginia, but was done for by midnight.
‘The guy’s got no balls,’ Baby reported to Mary Rose in the morning; Mary Rose told him not to be disgusting.

As the months went by, Virginia felt herself in an increasingly dreamlike state. She tried to continue to work, but it was difficult; in any case she had to wind her business down. The initial intensely romantic passion she had felt for Alexander did not fade; she was obsessed by him. But beneath the passion, the romance, just occasionally she felt an odd unease, a disquiet which however hard she tried, she could find no substance in, no reason for. It was certainly not because of any fault, any lack of tenderness or lovingness on his part: quite the reverse. He loved her, adored her even, and he told her so every day, often several times a day; he was almost absurdly romantic, writing her long letters whether he was in England or New York, sending her flowers on every possible pretence of an anniversary (a month since we met, a week since we became engaged, six weeks since we bought the ring, two months since you said you loved me). He was a passionate reader, and he liked to read aloud to her, particularly poetry; Donne, he told her, came closest to his heart, to describing how he felt. He had the beautiful elegy ‘On Going to Bed’ (the one containing the words ‘Oh, My America! My new found land’) written out most exquisitely by a calligrapher, and framed for her; he commissioned a portrait of her, in the dress she had worn when he met her, and had a miniature painted as well, which he carried with him everywhere, ‘in my breast pocket, next to my heart’. And yet, despite his undoubted and great love for her, despite her own intense feelings, there was this slight unease somewhere in her consciousness. Trying to analyse it one evening, after he had gone back to his hotel, she decided the nearest to it was a sense of fantasy, a lack of reality in their relationship. Then she stifled the thought, told herself not to be absurd, that the life ahead of her was indeed perfect, or as near to perfect as real life could be, and that she was crazy to be looking for flaws in it.

The other thing which disturbed her a little was his extraordinary passionate love for Hartest. He spoke of it as if it was a person, a woman, or perhaps a beloved child. His voice changed when he talked of it, became deeper, more resonant; and once, when she dared to criticize his attitude, even to tease him about it just a little, he became angry and cold.

‘Hartest is all the world to me,’ he said, ‘I love it more than I can possibly describe. You have to accept that, learn what it means to me.’

‘More than I do, I sometimes feel,’ said Virginia, ‘and what would you do if I didn’t like it?’

‘I have to tell you I think I would find it hard to go on loving you,’ said Alexander, smiling rather coolly at her.

‘And if you had to choose between us?’

‘I’m afraid that would be intolerable,’ he said. ‘You take me, Virginia, you take Hartest. It is part of me, part of my heart.’

‘So it would be Hartest, not me?’

‘This is a ridiculous conversation,’ he said, and his eyes were suddenly quite hard. ‘Absurd. But of course,’ he added hastily, his voice deliberately, amusedly lighter, ‘that would never happen, I would never have to choose. I love you, and you are going to be there, at Hartest, it will be your home as well as mine. You will love it, Virginia, I promise you that.’

The conversation was disturbing – almost, when she dwelt on it, alarming; but she crushed the emotions. She was hardly going to give up a wedding, a marriage, a bridegroom of such near perfection, for a few puny anxieties.

Virginia’s dress, made by Ann Lowe, who had made Jackie Kennedy’s, was a ravishing flood of white lace, the skirt composed of descending myriads of frills, each one trimmed with tiny pink rosebuds. The skirt became a train which followed her for almost twelve feet down the aisle of the cathedral; she wore a veil that covered her face as she came down the aisle, the diamond-drop tiara that had been in the Caterham family for two hundred years, woven with real pink rosebuds, and the look of love as she put back the veil and faced Alexander brought tears to the eyes of almost every woman in the church and a few of the men as well. Even Fred cleared his throat and blew his nose loudly.

Fred’s speech was surprisingly mawkish; he told several anecdotes about Virginia, extolling her talents and her charm, said she would always be his little girl to him, and that New York would be a sadder place without her. And then switched the mood and made everyone laugh by suggesting to Alexander that he might speak to the Queen of England and see about a royal warrant for the bank, and said he was thinking of buying a small tiara for Betsey and an ermine robe for himself to wear on special occasions in the future. Alexander promised to see what he could do, said he would pick out a tiara personally ‘although Betsey could hardly look more regal than she does today’ and then spoke so tenderly and movingly of his love for Virginia, and his immense gratitude to Fred and Betsey for giving her to him, that even Baby was mollified.

At seven, they went upstairs and changed; Virginia reappeared in a white Chanel suit, and what was known as a Jackie pillbox on her dark hair; they climbed into Fred’s Rolls and were whisked off to Idlewild Airport on the long haul of a flight to London and thence Venice.

Virginia went to her marriage still a virgin; it was Alexander’s wish, and her body would have had it otherwise, but her heart was touched. She was impatient and hungry (and relieved at her own hunger) but she waited. Alexander had become more ardent, since their engagement; he kissed her passionately, desperately almost, he caressed her body, her breasts, her thighs, tenderly, deliciously, gently, he told her how beautiful she was, and how desirable he found her, and she liked and enjoyed it, responding urgently to the kisses, but too shy, too afraid of appearing awkward, of offending him even, to attempt to return the caresses. But
she never felt he was in the slightest danger of becoming out of control, of breaking the discipline he had set upon them both; and even one night when they had lain for hours in one another’s arms on the couch in her sitting room at East 80th, and she had felt such soaring, stabbing hunger that she could hardly stand it, and had looked at him, her eyes huge and dark with sex, and said, half laughing at the situation, ‘Alexander, please, there is no need for this agony,’ he had set her away from him, and gazed into her eyes and said, ‘Virginia, there is. For me there is. I’m just an old-fashioned guy, as they say over here. I love you very, very much and I want you utterly utterly perfect on our wedding day. Please try to understand.’

They reached Venice exhausted. Virginia had not slept on the plane, or at least only very fitfully; her head throbbed, her back ached, her eyes were sore when she finally stepped out of the plane at Marco Polo airport. She was tired, fretful, hostile towards Alexander. Every time he touched her hand or tried to kiss her cheek she drew back; the magic of her wedding day, the love she had felt for him for the last six months, the desire that had been swooping through her increasingly strongly ever since she had set eyes on him, had all deserted her. She felt herself an icy, stony, exhausted shell.

And then as she stepped onto the landing stage where the water taxis waited, still silent, dull with tiredness, she saw it, the golden light of Venice, tipping onto the water, and she felt the gentle, pervading warmth of the Italian sun, touching her like a lover, and she looked out across the sea towards the tender, misty outlines of the city, and it touched her heart and she felt that in some strange way she had come home.

In the water taxi, following the white posts down the lagoon towards the city, struck with a joyous almost physical delight as it took substance before her eyes, golden and terracotta and white against the blue water, the bluer sky, disbelieving, almost fearful of its beauty, she turned to Alexander and smiled. ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘Right to make me wait.’

He took her hand, smiled back at her. ‘And this is only the foreplay,’ he said.

He had booked a suite at the Danieli in the old part of the hotel. ‘Chopin stayed here,’ he said.

Virginia leant out of the window, gazing enchanted out at the lagoon, weak with weariness and pleasure. ‘How wise of him.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘he lacked one advantage I have. He didn’t have you. Are you happy?’

‘Very happy.’

‘Come here.’ He opened his arms; she went into them. ‘I love you so much,’ he said. ‘So much. Later we will explore. I want to show you everything, San Marco, the Bridge of Sighs, the Doge’s Palace. All the clichés. But I expect you want to rest.’

‘Oh no,’ said Virginia, ‘no, I don’t want to rest, Alexander. I feel I could never be tired again.’

‘Then –’He looked at her, his eyes probing hers. ‘Then what would you like? Now?’ A smile played on his lips; he reached out and touched her face.

‘Well –’ and she looked down suddenly, confused, nervous, ‘well, I –’

‘You look nervous.’

‘Alexander, yes, yes I am.’

‘My darling,’ he said, leaning forward and kissing her gently, ‘there is nothing to be afraid of.’

‘No, of course not,’ she said, trying to smile. ‘It’s just that I – well, you wanted a virgin, Alexander. You have one. And we do tend to be a little fearful.’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I understand. And I am a little nervous myself. If that makes you feel any better.’

‘A little.’

There was a silence; she waited for him to make some kind of move, but he sat there, just looking at her, his eyes very tender.

There was a knock at the door. It was a waiter with champagne, and a huge dish of wild strawberries.

‘Put them there,’ said Alexander to him. ‘By the bed.’

‘
Si, signore
.’