BY THE SAME AUTHOR
No Angel
Something Dangerous
Into Temptation
Almost a Crime
The Dilemma
An Outrageous Affair
Sheer Abandon
An Absolute Scandal
Windfall
Forbidden Places
Copyright
This edition first published in hardcovder in the United States in 2012 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected]
First published in the United Kingdom in 1994 by
the Orion Publishing Group
Copyright © 1994 by Penny Vincenzi
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval
system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the
publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection
with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-4683-0017-8
For my family, all of it,
with much love
Contents
By the same author
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Prologue
The Evening Before
Chapter 1
The Wedding Day
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
The Next Day
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
As always there are people without whose help this book could not have been written.
In no particular order, but with equal gratitude, for their knowledge, expertise and patience in the face of my interminable questioning I would like to thank Felicity Green, Caroline Baker, Karen McCartney, Sian Banks, Sandra Lane, Robert Carrier, Stephen Jones, Mary Anne Champy, Ursula Lloyd, Tony Rossi, and Dr David Storer.
Nobody could enjoy more inspired publishing; could I thank in particular Susan Lamb for constant emotional as well as practical support; Katie Pope and Caroleen Conquest for exemplary patience and attention to the nuts and bolts which would otherwise surely all have fallen out; and Rosie Cheetham, who is everything an editor should be: patient as well as hard-headed, inspiring as much as truthful, and above all optimistic in the face of such considerable odds from her author such as ever later delivery, much noisy anguish and a complete inability to predict even in the vaguest terms how the book might finish.
And as always, a special thanks to my agent Desmond Elliot, who is also the wisest, funniest and most wonderfully encouraging friend.
Prologue
It was going to be the perfect wedding.
Of course everybody always said that about weddings, but nobody sitting round the great pine kitchen table of the bride’s home that perfect July evening doubted it for a single moment. How could they? When the couple themselves were so patently and blissfully happy, sitting together, holding hands, smiling round at their families, at indulgent fathers, proud mothers and assorted friends smiling back at them. When the sun was finally setting on a perfect day, night drifting over the deep Oxfordshire valley, with just a touch of mist promising another still more perfect one tomorrow, the thick, rich scent of the roses drifting in through the open door? When Maggie Forrest, mother of the bride, could finally relax, knowing that everything was in order, the pink and white marquee up and decked with flowers, the tables half set, the champagne (vintage) delivered and in crates in the utility room off the kitchen, the food in the process of being transformed from dozens of pounds of salmon, chicken, beef, mountains of strawberries, raspberries, eggs and cream into the most splendid wedding feast by the caterers, and the cake, four exquisitely iced tiers, standing on the dining-room table?
What could possibly go wrong now? they might have asked one another. For such a perfect match, between Cressida, younger daughter of the immensely successful and distinguished gynaecologist James Forrest, and Dr Oliver Bergin, also a gynaecologist, only son of Mr and Mrs Josh Bergin of New York City. Cressida, so pretty, with her fair English-rose beauty, so enchantingly mannered, so extremely well suited to the life and husband she had chosen; and Oliver, so dashingly handsome, and almost too charming for his own good, as Maggie Forrest had remarked, laughing, to Julia Bergin on the first occasion they had met. The guest list was long, but not too long, just 300, for Cressida had insisted on being married in the little stone church in Wedbourne where she had been christened. All over England the women on the list had been buying dresses, choosing hats, mulling over the wedding lists (the General Trading company and Peter Jones), and checking on their husband’s morning suits; and the chosen eight whose small children were to be attendants had been trekking up and down to the London studio from where Harriet Forrest, Cressida’s older sister, ran her fashion empire, and where the dresses had been made – not Harriet’s usual sort of thing, but charming nonetheless, sprigged muslin Kate Greenaway style for the girls, white linen sailor suits for the boys. Cressida’s dress had been made at the Chelsea Design Company, a wonderful creation in heavy cream silk, studded with pearls and with the palest, tiniest pink silk roses drifting down the train. It hung upstairs now in the attic room that Maggie used for sewing, swathed in its muslin cover, the veil beside it in a box, waiting for its tiara of fresh flowers to arrive in the morning, along with her bouquet (cream and pink roses) and the baskets of daisies and scabius that the attendants were to carry into the church. In the dining room of the Court House the presents were stacked, ready to be shipped over to New York, when young Dr and Mrs Oliver Bergin settled into their new home in East 80th. Marvellous presents: glasses, china, linen, silver, all listed, the thank you letters long since written.
A few miles away in Oxford the string quartet that was to play at the wedding was practising a rather difficult Mozart piece which the bride had specially requested; the vicar of St Stephen’s, Wedbourne was running through the few wise if predictable words he always spoke at weddings and the organist was rehearsing the choir, and in particular the dazzling-voiced small boy he had just discovered in the neighbouring council estate, in ‘Love Divine’. A few miles away in the garage of the Royal Hotel, Woodstock, the silver vintage Bentley belonging to the bride’s godfather, the famously powerful and rich Theodore Buchan, was being given a final and quite unnecessary polish.
Everything ready; everything perfect. For a perfect wedding for a perfect bride.
The Evening Before
Chapter 1
Harriet
Late, she was going to be late, for the bloody pre-wedding supper. God, her mother would never forgive her. She could see her now, carefully serene smile growing tense as she looked ever more frequently at the clock, could hear the barbed comments, about how she, Harriet, was always late, always had so much, so many terribly important things to do; and her father would be trying to calm her, to make light of her lateness, and Cressida would be saying of course it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter at all, everyone else was there, telling her mother not to fuss, but making in fact the lateness more noticeable, more important. Well, it was all very well for her mother and for Cressida. They didn’t really have immense claims on their time. They didn’t have to worry about leaving London mid-week for a Thursday wedding. Thursday! Why not a Saturday like everyone else? Of course her mother had worked very hard on the wedding, but it had been the only thing she had had to think about, and Cressida’s job with her Harley Street doctor was hardly stressful, she could take time off whenever she needed to, at the bat of her long eyelashes. They didn’t have a business to run, collections to design, stock to deliver, books to balance. Or not balance. Harriet suddenly felt so sick, so frightened that she braked violently and pulled over onto the hard shoulder. She sat there, breathing deeply and slowly, hauling herself together. Don’t panic, Harriet, don’t; don’t look down even. It’ll be all right. Well, it probably won’t, but you’ll be all right. It’s not a hanging offence, going bust, going bankrupt. It may be the end of a dream, but she could survive that. She’d survived the end of others after all.
Her head ached, and her throat felt dry, scratchy; it was a bit like a hangover. Only she hadn’t had a drink. She’d wanted to have a drink all day, several drinks, but she hadn’t. She’d had to keep her head clear for the endless phone calls, the faxes, the decisions. All to no avail, it seemed. She was almost certainly done for: stymied; defeated. She needed more money than she could possibly even imagine getting hold of, within twenty-four hours, and the one person who might be able to supply it was the one person she couldn’t possibly ask. So that was that really. She just had to face it, and rethink the rest of her life. Harriet looked at herself briefly in the rear-view mirror; the events of the day showed with awful clarity on her face. It wasn’t just that she was pale, most of her make-up gone, her hair uncombed, not even that she looked tired; her dark eyes were heavy, her skin somehow dull, her mouth drawn and taut (rather like her mother’s, she thought with horror, consciously relaxing it, forcing a fake smile into the mirror). Her mascara had smudged, adding to the shadows under her eyes, and the collar of her white linen shirt was crumpled. Her earrings were hurting her; she pulled them off and felt her ears throb painfully, and for some reason that was the last straw and she felt hot tears stinging behind her eyes.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Harriet Forrest,’ she said aloud, wiping them irritably away, ‘don’t start crying now, just because your ears hurt.’ And she turned on the engine again, pulled back onto the road and put her foot down, forcing her mind away from the day behind her and on to the one ahead. Her sister was getting married, and she had serious responsibilities, not the least of which was to get to the Court House as soon as ever she could. Sitting on the M40 feeling sorry for herself wasn’t going to solve anything. Against all logic she felt suddenly better, more in order, better in control; she was even able to appreciate the beauty of the evening, the darkness settling onto the shadowy Chiltern hills. It would be nice to see everyone, especially Rufus and Mungo, and Merlin would be there, bless him, she hadn’t seen him since he got back from Peru, although she’d heard him talking on Start the Week or something, his wonderfully strong voice sounding more as if it belonged to a twenty- than an eighty-year-old. And then she switched on the radio, and Pavarotti was singing ‘Che gelida manina’ from La Bohème and that really was too awful, too cruel, and although she did not stop again, she saw the last twenty miles of her journey through a dreadful haze of pain.
‘That was mean of You, God,’ she said aloud again, as she finally turned the Peugeot into the gravel drive of the Court House. ‘You really had it in for me today, didn’t You?’
James
James felt a rush of intense relief as the lights of Harriet’s Peugeot beamed into the darkness. It wasn’t just that he had been, as always, worried about her, for she drove much too fast (and in that way, as in many others, she was very much his daughter, the carrier of his genes), it was that her arrival would create a stir in the room, a regrouping, would make it possible for him to leave it, to escape briefly from its claustrophobic perfection. He was finding it almost physically stifling, having enormous difficulty in sitting still; indeed had got up so often to refill the glasses, to offer more coffee, to pass fruit, cheese, biscuits, that Maggie had finally said sweetly, but with a just discernible touch of irritation, that he was making everyone feel exhausted, and that he should relax and let people help themselves. As if she of all people knew about relaxing, with her overcontrolled calm, her near-manic, all-encompassing smiles. Susie, for all her energy, her eager vitality, had a well of calm within her that was truly restful. He looked at her now, as she sat chatting easily, happily to Josh Bergin, to Cressida, to Oliver, and wondered resentfully as he had a hundred, a thousand times if Alistair recognized his intense good fortune in having her as his wife. She had taken that marriage in all its distinct lack of promise and turned it into something happy, constructive, strong. He had never in all the years heard her complain about, even belittle it; it was her job, her career and she had been hugely successful at it. And now, by some extra-ordinary, almost evil quirk of fate, it was threatened. She had come over to him in the garden where they’d been having drinks in the scented early evening, before supper, her dark eyes just a little wary, and said, ‘Jamie, we have to talk.’ And a little later, while Maggie was putting the final touches to her supper, and Alistair was, in his beautifully mannered way, helping to carry glasses in from the garden, he walked with Susie through the rose garden and she said, her voice half amused, half anxious, ‘Jamie, you’re not going to believe this, but Rufus tells me he wants to get married.’ And he said, ‘Well, is there any great problem in that?’ And she said, ‘Just possibly, yes, there is. He wants to marry Tilly Mills. I’m not sure quite why, but I think it might very well open a rather large can of worms, don’t you?’
And ever since he had been so afraid, so deeply uneasy, that he had had trouble swallowing Maggie’s perfect supper, and had been more consumed with longing for a drink than he could remember in the whole of the – what? – twenty years that had passed since Tilly Mills had been born.
It was the forced inactivity that was so frightful, his absolute powerlessness to do anything about it. Any other night, he would perhaps have talked to Rufus, questioned him casually, gently about his life, about his plans, would have been able to form at least some impression of how serious things really were. But not tonight, with all the family gathered for his daughter’s wedding, when he had so many other worries and concerns, slight in absolute terms, but of immense importance in the immediate future, and so he had simply had to sit and watch Rufus, as he sat at the table, displaying the slightly old-fashioned charm that was his trademark, talking with huge and courteous interest to his mother, (he was famously devoted to Susie), to Julia Bergin, to Maggie, to Janine Bleche, Cressida’s French godmother (amazingly glamorous still, even if she was over seventy), and know that before he could explore the matter any further, at the very least twenty-four hours would have to elapse. It was almost unendurable.
He looked with intense envy at his godfather, slumbering sweetly in the corner by the Aga: Sir Merlin Reid, famously eccentric explorer (and making discoveries still, even in his ninth decade, wit
h the world so much smaller, so much more familiar than when he had begun his travels, sixty-five years earlier). Merlin had cut short his last expedition (travelling the Central Cordillera by mule) in order to be at the wedding. He had never married himself, had said no woman would stand for him, nor he for any woman, but James was a son to him, and Cressida and Harriet granddaughters: he would not have missed being in the family, he said, at this time for the world. He was still, in his eighties, wonderfully erect and youthful, his white hair thick, his blue eyes brilliant; he was much given to bargaining for everything, not only in the souks and casbahs and bazaars of the world, but in Harrods and Sainsbury’s and even on British Rail.
‘Give you five guineas for that tie and that’s my last word,’ he would say to some flustered young salesman, or, ‘If you think I’m paying twenty quid to travel twenty miles you can think again, fifteen’s my last offer,’ and just occasionally someone would give in to him, either to humour him, or to amuse themselves, would sell him a shirt for half price or give him two pounds of apples for the price of one. He had never managed to persuade British Rail or London Transport to drop their rates for him, but London cabbies occasionally would, especially if he had regaled them with some story of his travels, a journey into the unknown or a brush with a hostile tribe which they could pass on to other customers.
The passionate envy James felt as he looked at Merlin now was not only for the sweet sleep he was so patently enjoying, but for the long peaceful life, devoid of any complexity or wrongdoing, that lay behind him. Merlin might have risked acute danger at the hands of hostile tribes, deadly wildlife and savage environments, but he knew nothing of guilt, of remorse, of wrecked relationships, of ruined lives.
And then James thought that there was at least one thing he could do, that would make him feel a little better. He could tell Theo. As he had done in every other crisis of his life. He would call Theo at his hotel – the bugger should have been here anyway, what was he doing for Christ’s sake, spending this important evening alone with his new little bimbo of a wife? Despite everything James grinned to himself at the thought of what Theo was almost certainly doing with the new little bimbo – and talk to him. Not now, of course not now. But first thing in the morning while everyone was busying about, occupied with things like hair and flowers and dresses and hats, he would go and talk to Theo, lay his troubles before him, and ask him what he thought he should do. Theo would have an idea. Theo always did.
Another Woman (9781468300178) Page 1
