Wicked Pleasures (84 page)

‘Well she did,’ said Angie. ‘It worked.’

Late that autumn, Baby started going to the bank only three days a week. His other hand was beginning to be affected, the slight slurring of his speech was an occasional embarrassment and if he was tired it got worse. He was increasingly irritable and bored, and sat around the house roaring at anyone who got in his way.

It was Max who cracked that particular problem too.

‘I just might shoot myself one Monday soon,’ Angie said to him cheerfully over the phone, when he rang to ask her how things were.

‘Why specially Mondays?’

‘Baby is just impossible on Mondays. He used to love them, getting back after the weekend, after the break; now he just sits and suffers, and makes sure I suffer too.’

‘Tommy’s at home on Mondays too,’ said Max after a pause. ‘Maybe he and Uncle Baby could get together. Tommy’s got some ghastly new friend, a frightfully rich Arab called Al-Mahdu, who arrives with plastic bagfuls of money, and takes Tommy shopping with him. I’d much rather he was with Baby.’

‘Yes – but exactly in what way?’ said Angie doubtfully. ‘I don’t really want Baby sitting around waiting for casinos to open.’

‘Well – no.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘Leave it with me.’

Two Mondays later, Angie came in from her office at four, to find Baby looking radiantly cheerful.

‘Tommy came to see me today. He’s a nice guy really, you know. I know he’s a bad lot, but I like him.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. He’s going to buy me some games.’

‘What sort of games?’ said Angie suspiciously.

‘Computer games. There are the most amazing ones around, you know, real brain taxers. And then you can get backgammon, and a version of roulette –’

‘Baby, you are not to play roulette with Tommy Soames-Maxwell. I forbid it.’

‘Angie, I swear to you we won’t play for money. Well, not big money. I think we can have a really good time. And –’ He hesitated. ‘Those things are so easy to use, I can do it with my good hand. So don’t go getting all schoolmissy about it.’

‘I won’t,’ said Angie. She turned away, so he wouldn’t see the easy, endless tears starting in her eyes.

And so it was that every Monday afternoon and sometimes on Thursdays too, Baby Praeger and Tommy Soames-Maxwell would sit in the drawing room in Belgrave Square playing backgammon and roulette and Dirty Scrabble for comparatively modest stakes and for hours on end.

‘I really don’t know what I’d do without you and Tommy,’ said Angie to Max. They were having a drink after work one Monday; they quite often did, knowing their respective partners were very happily occupied with one another, knowing there was absolutely no hurry for either of them to get home. ‘Or how I can thank you.’

She smiled at him and raised her glass, thinking how of all the family, apart from Alexander, she liked him best. He was such fun, so unfailingly good-natured, such good company. And he always looked so terrific; now that he had given up the modelling and no longer wore his hair slicked back in that awful trendy way, and just wore normal clothes, not those endless designer sweaters and ridiculous boots, he actually seemed twice as attractive. She looked at him now, lounging in his chair, wearing a beautifully cut dark grey suit and blue shirt, his fair hair just a little too long, the oddly dark shadow of his beard just beginning to show, his blue eyes snapping at her appreciatively, and she thought if she was – what – well, fifteen years younger she could fancy young Viscount Hadleigh rotten. As it was, of course, she simply regarded him in a rather maternal – or aunt-like – light.

‘You could put in a good word with the family for old Tommy,’ Max was saying slightly gloomily. ‘They all loathe him.’

Angie thought privately, despite Tommy’s kindness to Baby, that they loathed him with good reason; she saw him, as they all did, as a living time bomb, waiting with a deadly patience to go off. But she smiled at Max and said, ‘I’m afraid the family don’t regard me with exactly rose-tinted spectacles either. But I’ll do what I can. Obviously.’

‘Thanks,’ said Max. He looked at her sharply suddenly and said, ‘Don’t you ever wonder about it all? Our motley collection of fathers and all that?’

‘Not much,’ said Angie briefly. ‘The way I grew up, most people had a motley
collection of fathers. I suppose it’s a bit intriguing, why it should have happened, but actually, Max, I have more important things to worry about.’

‘Sure.’ He grinned at her. ‘My big worry, between you me and the gateposts of the old stately home, is that Gemma might make something of it all.’

‘Gemma?’ said Angie. ‘Why should she make anything of it?’

‘Well,’ said Max, looking slightly awkward, ‘I think she likes who I am. And all that.’

‘Yes, but she doesn’t have to know, surely?’ said Angie.

‘Well not now,’ said Max, looking more awkward still. ‘But she might. If things got – well, more serious.’

‘Oh,’ said Angie, staring at him. ‘Oh, I see.’ There was a strange sensation somewhere in the area between her throat and her stomach; she asked the waiter to bring her another drink.

Going home in the cab she realized what the strange sensation had been. A strong and quite irrational sense of dislike for Gemma Morton.

In spite of his conversation with her, Kendrick had clearly not broached the question of an engagement with Alexander. Georgina had not mentioned it either; Kendrick had left at the end of the summer, and Angie saw Georgina, on her visits to Alexander, mooning about more theatrically than ever. She had once hinted to Alexander that he might perhaps find Georgina just occasionally irritating, but he had been quite shocked.

‘I enjoy her company more than anything in the world,’ he said. ‘With the possible exception of your own, of course. I can’t think what I’d do without her. She is inordinately thoughtful and kind, and extremely mature for her age. No, she’s a sweet child, Angie. My other two might well have something to learn from her.’

Kendrick and Melissa were coming over for Christmas; Freddy had begged pressure of work. Angie, knowing it would make Kendrick happier, proposed spending Christmas at Watersfoot; that way he would be able to spend a lot of time with Georgina. Baby complained, saying it was too much hassle, packing everything up; Angie told him she had never personally observed him packing so much as his own toothbrush, and ignored him.

They all went over to Hartest for Christmas Day; Alexander phoned Angie and said it would make his Christmas if they would come, that even Max would be there, that Nanny and Mrs Tallow were bored and lonely these days and had not nearly enough to do, and a family Christmas would keep them happy for months. He particularly requested that Mrs Wicks should come. Angie accepted gratefully, never having cooked a Christmas dinner in her life, even while reflecting aloud to Baby on the odd attitude of the upper classes towards their servants, and the fact that they seemed to be invited as much as cannon fodder for Nanny and Mrs Tallow as to give pleasure to Alexander.

‘More like the cannons themselves, I would say, to consume the fodder,’ said Baby. ‘And there’ll be plenty of that.’

Having given in to the suggestion that they should go to the country, he was in a benign mood. The progress of his illness had temporarily halted; he was no worse, and even managed to persuade himself from time to time that he was slightly better.

‘He isn’t,’ the doctor had said to Angie, ‘but it will do him no harm to think so.’

Mrs Wicks was very excited at the invitation, and had bought an entire new wardrobe for the holiday; Clifford had to spend the day with his elderly mother and she had not been looking forward to it.

‘He didn’t seem to mind my not being there at all,’ she said to Angie crossly. ‘Sometimes I think he prefers his mother to me.’

Angie told her she thought that was very unlikely.

She was very surprised that Max was joining them and said as much when he picked her up from her office on Monday en route to collect Tommy from the house in Belgrave Square; he looked at her, his blue eyes innocently blank, and said he couldn’t imagine why. ‘Christmas is the time to be with your family.’

‘Yes, I know, but Tommy’s your family too isn’t he? Or so you’re always telling us. What about him, all alone on Christmas Day?’

Max shot her a look of sharp dislike and said Tommy was spending the day with some old cronies at the Dorchester: ‘He doesn’t mind at all. And Gemma and her parents have a house in the Cotswolds and they’ve asked me there for Boxing Day.’

‘Oh I see,’ said Angie, ‘still playing the perfect son and heir then, Max?’

Max stared at her and then put his foot down very hard on the accelerator of Charlotte’s car. ‘It really is nothing to do with you, Angie, if you don’t mind my saying so,’ was all he said. But the hostility she felt emanating from him was very strong. Perversely, she found it exciting.

They had a very good Christmas Day. Mrs Tallow cooked a superb lunch, they all played a lot of games, and exchanged a great many presents under the tree in the Rotunda, and then Nanny, to Angie’s intense relief, pronounced the twins as overexcited and removed them forcibly to what she still called her nurseries.

‘Bossy old bag,’ said Mrs Wicks under her breath to Angie, who told her to shut up and remember where she was; Mrs Wicks said that Nanny had gone to some pains to make her aware of where she was and that she had no right to be there. ‘She actually started rambling on about people being born on the bottom end of the bed,’ she said. ‘I had to keep trying to tell myself she’s a bit touched, just to stop myself from hitting her.’

Angie, realizing that Nanny had actually meant the wrong side of the blanket, and all too sure that she was not in the least touched, hastily agreed that she was. ‘At least she’s taken those children away. Let’s be thankful, Gran. I’m going to have a sleep myself. Baby looks worn out as well.’

‘Baby’s fine,’ said Mrs Wicks, smoothing her white and gold dress, and
patting her red curls. ‘We’ve had a very interesting talk about Florida. It sounds lovely. I thought I might take Clifford there after Christmas. Get him away from that mother of his. You should get Baby some Dubonnet, he seemed to prefer it to his wine. Earl Alexander looks very nice in that jumper, doesn’t he?’

The jumper was one she had knitted herself from a pattern in
Woman’s Own
, in a striking pattern of red holly leaves and reindeer heads on a green background; it was a measure of Alexander’s regard for both Mrs Wicks and possibly herself, Angie thought, that he had insisted on wearing it right through lunch.

‘Very nice,’ she said. She had given up trying to correct the endless variations Mrs Wicks made on Alexander’s title.

‘I’m going for a walk,’ said Max. ‘Anyone coming?’

He was standing by the fireplace in the library looking absurdly handsome and slightly dishevelled after acting as horses in a very good-natured way for the twins. Angie looked at him and felt a piercing thrust of sexual desire. She had tried without success that morning to celebrate Christmas with Baby in a way just slightly more carnal than opening parcels, and failed miserably.

‘I will,’ said Melissa.

Angie had been about to volunteer herself, and promptly shut her mouth again. She had no wish to tag along while Melissa flirted with Max. She at least had carte blanche to do so.

Kendrick asked at the end of the day if he could stay the night at Hartest. ‘Georgina and I want to ride first thing, and it seems sensible.’

The excuse was so transparent that everybody laughed; they both looked awkward.

‘Of course you can,’ said Angie. ‘I’ll come over and fetch you both some time after lunch. You haven’t forgotten we have to go and have drinks with our neighbours in the evening, have you? They specially asked for you, Georgina. They said they knew you when you were four and really wanted to see you again.’

‘Fine,’ said Georgina. She smiled at Angie, a sweet, rather careful smile. ‘I think I might go and see Martin and Catriona in the morning. They’re always on their own at Christmas. It can’t be much fun.’

‘We should have asked them,’ said Alexander, looking stricken. ‘I didn’t think.’

Angie thought of the romantically tortured-looking Martin Dunbar and wished he
had
thought. ‘Haven’t they got any children?’ she said.

‘No,’ said Alexander, looking particularly vague. ‘I believe there was some problem.’

‘What sort of problem?’ said Melissa. She had been sitting half asleep, lolling against Max, her head resting on his shoulder, but the hope of a conversation that might be remotely sexual had woken her up. ‘Is he – what’s it called – impotent?’

‘Melissa, please!’ said Baby. He looked embarrassed. ‘I do wish you’d learn to behave yourself and think before you speak. Please apologize.’

‘I can’t see what for,’ said Melissa. She looked sulky. Angie sighed. So far Christmas had progressed fairly peacefully.

‘For raising a subject that is most unsuitable, and for possibly offending most of the people present,’ said Baby. ‘Now say you’re sorry.’

‘Sorry,’ mumbled Melissa.

‘Anyway,’ said Alexander, breaking into the silence, unusually tactful, ‘as far as I understand Catriona was unable to have children. Very sad, as Martin particularly loves them so much. He often told me how much he would have liked a big family.’

‘That is sad,’ said Georgina, ‘I didn’t know that. And he’d have been the most wonderful father. He’s so gentle, and so understanding.’

‘Too much of that can be a bad thing,’ said Mrs Wicks briskly, putting down one of her interminable glasses of Dubonnet. ‘We’ve all been a bit too gentle and understanding with those twins today, Angela. We should take them home.’

The twins had found the piano in the library and were standing at it, banging their fat little fists on the keys; Angie looked at them, laughed, and said slightly reluctantly, ‘You’re right. Come on, Baby, pick up your sons and walk.’

Baby stood up and promptly sat down again. One of his legs seemed to have given way.

Driving over to see Alexander the next day, Angie felt extremely overwrought. The shock of seeing Baby’s leg give way, the strain of being with Baby’s children, her growing awareness of her attraction to Max, her own sexual hunger had all conspired to upset her badly. She had lain in the bath for an hour that morning, masturbating, trying to calm herself, but it hadn’t really helped; the emptiness inside her seemed bigger, angrier than before.