Wicked Pleasures (93 page)

‘Chuck hates Baby,’ said Angie slowly. ‘And he hates Fred the Third as well. Ever since – well ever since. But surely Freddy would know. Bit intriguing, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I would. There’s something else, apparently.’

‘What?’

‘Is there someone called Chris Hill?’

‘Yes. He’s the chief trader. In New York.’

‘Well, apparently he’s been negotiating to move to Gresse.’

‘Gresse! I don’t believe it. Chris Hill lives and breathes Praegers. He’s been there all his life. He’s a senior partner. Why should he move to some bank twice the size, where he won’t mean anything to anyone?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Tommy. ‘You asked me to find out what I could. I have. Now how are you going to thank me?’

‘How would you like me to? Apart from buying Buckingham Palace for you?’

‘Hartest would do. No, take me to some very flashy restaurant for lunch. I feel like showing off.’

‘OK. You’re on. How’s your autobiography going?’

‘Fascinating. I’m halfway through chapter one.’

‘My goodness.’

They went to the Ritz for lunch. He was waiting for her at the table as he always was: he had been raised as a gentleman, he said, and he didn’t keep ladies waiting. Angie looked at him and sighed. He really was a very attractive man. Now that he had lost some weight, was living more healthily, he looked wonderful. He was tall, almost as tall as Baby, with dark dark blue eyes, and very long, girlishly curly eyelashes. He had passed those on to Max. His face was thinner too, almost gaunt; his nose was aquiline, his cheekbones chiselled, his mouth curving and sensuous. He was Max, grown up, grown older, but not old; Max with a lifetime of experience, Max with a little wisdom, a touch of common sense. But not a lot.

Tommy smiled at her, kissed her on the cheek.

‘Why the sigh?’

‘Oh – nothing.’

His eyes moved over her appreciatively, lingering on her mouth. ‘You look good, darling. Very good. In fact I can hardly keep my hands off you.’

Angie smiled, thinking how much more welcome that kind of information was than that she looked tired or thin, or that she was being wonderful.

‘Let’s have some champagne,’ she said, ‘you’ve done me good already.’

But halfway into the lunch her mind started to wander; she was still much beset with the puzzle about Chuck Drew and Chris Hill.

‘You’re not listening,’ Tommy said plaintively. ‘I was telling you all about my days with the dying dynasties of Palm Beach …’

‘Dying dynasties! Tommy, honestly. What nonsense you –’ Then she suddenly clutched his arm, and went quite pale. ‘That’s it! Tommy, that’s it.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘That’s it. Of course! Praegers! It’s a dying dynasty. Isn’t it? Fred the Third is eighty-three this year. Baby is – well Baby is dying. Freddy’s only – what, twenty-five or something. Charlotte is even less experienced. It’s all very very fragile. It’s my guess those partners are up to something. Think they can get hold of the thing.’

‘But darling, I thought Praegers was family owned.’

‘It is. I haven’t got any of their bloody shares, even. And don’t think I haven’t tried. No, but Tommy, just think. What if something happened to Fred the Third now, before Baby died? Never mind if it’s been left to Charlotte and Freddy. The clients would be nervous. They’d all threaten to move. There’d be a vote of no confidence, wouldn’t there? Suppose Fred didn’t even die, suppose he had a stroke or something. Of course. Drew and the others could swoop in, and then maybe – I don’t quite see how Chris Hill moving to Gresse fits in, but I’m sure there’s an answer. God, what a plan. It’s really clever.’

‘I can’t think old Praeger wouldn’t have thought of this,’ said Tommy. ‘He’s not a fool, surely?’

‘No, but he’s very arrogant. And he thinks he can run the thing for ever. I must talk to Charlotte quickly.’

Charlotte listened to everything Angie had to say very carefully. Then she said, ‘Maybe we should go to New York and see Grandpa and talk to him. Together. Don’t you think?’

‘Maybe we should,’ said Angie.

But they didn’t go.

Baby grew suddenly worse. Angie, watching him all through the next Sunday, noticed a new weakness, an increased difficulty with breathing. She called the doctor; he came at once, examined Baby, and then walked into the drawing room looking grave.

‘I’m afraid he is very ill now. He has a chest infection, quite slight in fact, but because the muscles are so weak, it’s causing the breathing problem. I can treat that of course, with antibiotics. But it’s his heart that is really letting him down. It was weakened by the coronary years ago and now it’s failing. I’m sorry, Mrs Praeger. Very sorry.’

It was the flowers from Mary Rose that finally made Angie cry. Until then, until she read the card, she remained icily brave, smiling graciously at all the callers, receiving phone calls, making arrangements. She insisted on the funeral being in the country, in the same church where she and Baby had gone to have their marriage blessed, only six months earlier. She said she knew it created logistical problems, but that Baby would have liked it.

She invited quite a lot of people to the funeral, friends, colleagues, family.
She said she knew Baby would have liked that too, and the party she held afterwards, for over fifty people, with a buffet lunch, and a pianist who played all the music Baby loved best, the great early jazz numbers, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart. She said Baby’s life had been one long party, and she saw no reason to let him down just because this was one he couldn’t personally attend. She told everyone they were not to wear black, and they were not to expect an ordinary funeral; and indeed hardly anyone did, but when she made her entrance in the little church dressed in a brilliant red, rather short dress, with only the black ribbon holding back her hair to add a note of sobriety, there was a moment of almost tangible shock. Spike and Hughdie, who were still too small to perceive death as anything more than a rather temporary affair, stood on either side of her, dressed in pale grey linen coats, looking self-important, turning round constantly to beam at everyone in the congregation. She stood otherwise alone in the front pew; Freddy, Kendrick, Melissa and Fred III stood behind her, together with the nanny, poised to rush the twins out if necessary.

Betsey had not come; she had been ill with angina, and the doctor had said that the strain of the journey and its dreadful purpose would kill her. She had argued fiercely and then suddenly capitulated and submitted to the shot of Valium he gave her with almost visible relief. Fred stood in the church, impassive, his back very straight, his head erect. He was now burying his second child and the pain was almost unendurable; but Fred had a courage and a toughness that seemed increasingly invincible. Only when Melissa slipped her hand into his, as the choir and the vicar came into the church, did his eyes fill briefly with tears. Then he shook his head impatiently, like an old war horse, cleared his throat and sang ‘Lord of All Hopefulness’ louder than anyone else in the church; although at the last line, ‘your peace in our hearts, Lord, at the end of the day’, his voice faltered, and he fished his handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose rather loudly.

The service was very short, very simple; some prayers, a brief address, on Baby’s courage and the example he had set; and one choirboy sang, most beautifully, ‘I Know that My Redeemer Liveth’. Angie stood dry-eyed throughout, occasionally smiling down tenderly at one or other of the twins. But when Freddy read, as the lesson, St Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, his own voice shaking slightly as he finished on ‘the greatest of these is love’, she sat down abruptly and took both of them onto her lap, and little Spike looked up into her face and smiled with an expression of such trust and tenderness that everyone observed it through a blur of tears.

Later, when everyone had gone, Angie walked the quarter mile through the fields to the little church. It was a surprisingly bright evening, the end of a short winter day; the sun, sharply etched in orange, was slithering towards the dark hills. She walked over to Baby’s grave, trying to believe and failing utterly that he was finally gone, had left her alone, that she was now to live in a world that did not contain his smile, his voice, his silly jokes, his love for her. She stood there, looking down at the freshly dug earth, seeing him again, as she had
last left him, trying to smile, his courage and his gaiety infectious, intact, against all the horror, the misery, of what he had had to endure. She thought of him as he had been, when she had first known him, that evening when he had met her at the airport, smiling at her, telling her that Virginia had told him to meet her, saying, ‘Now that I’ve seen you I can tell you I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,’ his eyes, laughing, appreciative, moving over her, arousing her, disturbing her even as he stood there, long before he touched her even, and she thought of him on their wedding day, in his wheelchair, looking at her with infinite love and pleasure as she hurled her arms round his neck in the church, and kissed him. She thought, too, of the months she had wasted, distanced from him, before she had known he was ill, and wondered how she could not have known, not have realized, when she had loved him so much; and tried to set the thought aside, knowing what useless, hopeless grief that would release. And then she moved forward slowly, looking at the flowers, reading the cards, trying to absorb what they said, what they really meant.

There were hundreds of them, great bouquets from his colleagues, a tiny bunch of white roses from Melissa – ‘Darling Daddy, with my very best love,’ a mass of lilies from Betsey and Fred –‘Baby. With pride and love. Mother and Dad,’ her own red roses, exactly like the ones she had worn in her hair at the wedding –‘Baby. Thank you for everything. Angie. With my love.’

Dozens more, from the boys, from Charlotte and Georgina and Max, from her grandmother, from Nanny, Mr and Mrs Tallow, the staff in London and at Watersfoot, on and on they went, endless rows of them, all beginning already to curl, to wither in the frost. And then at the end of one of the rows, a simple bunch of cream roses, with a small card written in black in a perfect italic hand; she bent down to read it.

‘Baby,’ it said, ‘With love, for happy memories. Mary Rose.’

And Angie stood there, and thought of Mary Rose, her happy memories so far in the past now, three thousand miles away, for she had refused to come; utterly alone, with no one in the world to comfort her, grieving for the young strong man, grown sick and old, who had married her and given her three children, and for a while had loved her and then had turned away; bereft she was, and half forgotten, those children far from her side, and Angie’s heart quite suddenly fractured into grief and pain and she stood there in the almost darkness, sobbing quietly but with a dreadful, absorbing intensity, and she did not stop and she did not move until the red sun had begun to vanish and a sliver of new moon was rising tentatively in its place.

Georgina, 1986–7

She had written Kendrick a note, sent it to Watersfoot so that it was waiting for him when he got there.

‘Dear Kendrick,’ it said, ‘I’m so very sorry about your father. I know how much you loved him. Maybe we can talk after the funeral. Send my love to Angie. Georgina.’

The first time she saw Kendrick was as he left the church; he helped to carry the coffin out, but not even the grief on his face concealed the lash of emotion in his eyes as he looked at her, explored her face. She was wearing one of her voluminous long dark dresses, and she was very pale. She met his gaze steadily, her expression quite unchanged; she did not smile, nor did her face soften in any way. She was standing with Alexander and Charlotte and Max; she felt oddly detached from them, strangely vulnerable.

She watched him, imagining, enduring with him, the dreadful wrenching grief of saying finally goodbye to his father, of seeing his coffin go into the earth; and at the gathering at the house he avoided her, afraid, she knew, to so much as say hallo lest all the repressed emotion should find voice. But afterwards, when all the guests had gone, and Angie had walked down to the church alone, and Charlotte was marshalling her party to leave for Hartest, he came up to her and said, ‘Please stay.’

She nodded, spoke to Charlotte, kissed her father and went back into the empty drawing room at Watersfoot; Kendrick walked in behind her and closed the door.

‘Well,’ he said, strained, awkward with emotion, ‘well, how are you?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

‘Oh, good. Yes.’ He nodded. There was a silence.

‘I’m so sorry about your father,’ she said, ‘so sorry.’

‘Yes, well. It’s certainly better for him.’

‘Yes. Yes, I suppose it is.’

‘I’ve missed you,’ he said suddenly.

‘I’ve missed you too.’

‘I’m – well I’m sorry things turned out how they did.’

He sounded very final; Georgina, who had been half expecting a gesture, a word that might mean he was retracting all that he had said, looked at him warily.

‘Yes. I’m sorry too.’

‘I just felt – well –’

‘I think I know how you felt, Kendrick. You made it very plain.’

‘It was important to me.’

‘What was important to you?’ She could feel all the wrong emotions rising in her, hostile, awkward emotions, a recreation of her stubbornness on the dreadful night in May.

‘That I – that we – well, came first to one another.’

‘No matter what?’

‘Yes, no matter what. It’s the only way to function, Georgina. The only way I could see our lives developing together.’

‘Well,’ she said, crushing determinedly the very large painful lump rising in her throat, ‘then it’s just as well we’re not going to live our lives together, isn’t it? As we would never agree on that? On something so crucial.’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ he said quietly. ‘You don’t feel any different then?’

Georgina looked at him. The past five months shimmered before her eyes, with their odd mix of misery and happiness, the loneliness, the courage she had found and the fear of what might lie ahead. She looked at Kendrick, whom she had loved so much, and she longed more than anything in the world to tell him what had really happened, what she truly felt. She walked over to the window, looked out at the darkness, thinking, trying to form the right words. It was a long silence; Kendrick broke it.