Another Woman (9781468300178)

by Vincenzi, Penny

  ‘Well, you can suggest whatever you like, Mrs Bergin,’ said Rufus, more determinedly equable than ever. ‘My only concern is for Oliver.’

  ‘Mine also,’ said Julia Bergin. ‘Now please leave.’

  They left, too exhausted to argue.

  ‘Weird,’ said Mungo, as he started up the Bentley. ‘Seriously weird.’

  Well, even this boredom, waiting for guests who clearly weren’t going to come, was better than being back in that nightmare room. Mungo wondered how, in fact, Oliver would be taking the news of Cressida’s disappearance; it was not something he would like to have to predict with any accuracy. But however it was, things were going to be difficult. Mungo was not too familiar with difficulty; if he saw it coming he moved swiftly and determinedly in the other direction. Certain things he had had to face, had had to deal with: his mother’s death, his father’s marriage to his next wife – and the next one, bitches both of them (but he approved of Sasha, she was a peach, pretty, fun, not too bright, kept his father permanently in a good mood; and he’d been so terribly down, so wretched in the time just before he’d met her, really not himself at all, Mungo often wondered if something had happened he hadn’t heard about).

  A couple of the schools he’d been sent to had been a bit grim, especially that awful English prep school stepmother one had insisted on, but when she went, so did the school. Since then life had been pretty much all right, he’d loved the school in Geneva, enjoyed the Sorbonne, and hadn’t even minded too much his father’s efforts to initiate him into the business. It had been boring and, he could see, frustrating for his father, but distressing it hadn’t been. He had tried most of its facets, the supermarkets, the foodbroking, the hotels, the chemical division, before sitting the old buzzard down and making him face the fact that none of it was for him. His father had been angry and bawled him out, but he was used to that; the rages, the threats of disinheritance (also uttered when he had some particularly large gambling debt to settle) meant no more than the ones he’d had to listen to when he had been naughty as a small boy: threats to beat him with a leather strap, to cancel his birthday or Christmas, to send his pony back, to confine him to his room for a week. None of them ever carried out: just a few hours of mild anxiety and then his father would come up to his room or out to the stables when he was sitting with his pony, and look slightly shamefaced and say ‘I hope you’re sorry, Mungo’ and Mungo would say, his eyes filled with the great tears he could summon at will, ‘Yes, I’m really sorry, Dad’ and he would get first a playful cuff round the head, then a hug, and his father would say, ‘Well, we’ll let it go this time. But never again, all right, never again?’ And he would hug him back, and say ‘Course not, Dad, never again,’ and there would be no more talk of punishment until the next time – and never any actual punishment at all.

  Looking back now, he could see he had got away with murder; he could also see why wives three and four had hated him so much. His father loved him best, and they knew it, better than them, better than the poisonous little sisters they foisted upon Mungo, Careena and Dido by wife number three, Christina by wife number four (still very young, Christina was, an overripe, overweight thirteen-year-old, sanctimonious and spotty, thank God her mother would hardly let her near any of them). He wondered if Sasha would have a baby: that would be good – Mungo liked babies. He had always imagined having lots of children. It was one of the things that just slightly troubled him about Alice …

  ‘I love your kids,’ he said to her, lying beside her on the pillow, looking at her beautiful face, her streaky blonde hair, her clear blue eyes with just a very few lines round them. ‘I think they’re great. Honestly. How do they feel about me?’

  ‘Oh Mungo,’ she said, putting out her hand, stroking his cheek, ‘they love you. Of course they do. You’re such fun for them. Like – well, like a big brother.’

  ‘Yes, well, that’s fine,’ he said, ‘but it isn’t quite the same as being a dad, is it?’

  ‘No, it’s not, but you’re not their dad.’

  ‘If we get married, I will be.’

  ‘Mungo, darling, can we not talk about getting married? It’s so –’

  ‘So what?’ he said, sitting up suddenly, ‘Alice, so what? I keep telling you I want to marry you.’

  ‘I know, I know you do.’

  ‘And you say you love me.’

  ‘I do love you, Mungo. Very much. But –’

  ‘But what? But you don’t love me enough? But you don’t want to marry me? But I’m not good enough for you?’

  ‘Mungo, maybe I love you too much. To marry you.’

  ‘But why, why? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Mungo,’ she said with a gentle smile, ‘Mungo, I’m thirty-nine. You’re twenty-seven. That is a great many years’ difference.’

  ‘No it’s not. It’s twelve years. It’s nothing, nothing at all.’

  ‘It isn’t nothing. I’m a middle-aged woman. You’re a very young man. If you were thirty-seven, and I forty-nine, that might be different.’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ he said, and panic rose in him, panic and fear of losing her, of not being able to keep her forever.

  ‘Then I’ll tell you,’ she said, her voice enragingly patient, reasonable. ‘You’re young and you have a right to a young wife.’

  ‘I don’t want a young wife. I don’t like young women.’

  ‘Mungo, that’s ridiculous. Of course you do. You want a young wife, who can give you children –’

  ‘You can give me children.’

  ‘Well – maybe, maybe not.’

  ‘I thought you were getting all that checked out.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, in theory I can still have babies. Or at least one baby.’

  ‘Well then.’

  ‘But in practice, it may not be quite so easy.’

  ‘Then,’ he said, leaning over and kissing her, ‘then we shall have to put in lots of practice. To make it easier.’

  ‘Oh Mungo. Darling Mungo. What can I say?’

  ‘Nothing. Just that you love me.’

  ‘I love you, Mungo.’

  ‘Now don’t say anything else.’

  And he slithered down in the bed again and began to make love to her. Making love to Alice was quite unlike making love to anyone else he had ever known. She was at once so gentle and so strong; she would lie, apparently passive, as he aroused her (and she was so deliciously, swiftly easy to arouse, fluid, soft, sweet), and so gloriously yielding as he entered her, unfolding to him in all her warm tender depth; and then suddenly she would change, would grow fierce, almost violent, would turn him on his back and mount him, plunging down on him again and again, using him, working at him. ‘Don’t,’ she would say, ‘don’t come, not yet, don’t, don’t,’ and he would lie beneath her, trying to wait, to distance himself from the leaping, desperate climax that grew, thrust, forced itself within him, up to her. ‘Wait’ she would say, command him, ‘wait,’ and would climb from him, kneel above him, tantalizing him with her wetness, her heat; and then finally she would fall onto him again, yelling, crying out with hunger, and come, over and over again, great unfoldings of tension, he would feel them, pulling, clutching at him, and then she would slowly fall again into stillness, and was the old Alice again, no longer predatory, no longer fierce, but the still, calm woman he loved. He loved them both, both his Alices, loved them with a binding love. She was beautiful and desirable and desiring; she was also fun and clever and wise. She was perfect; he loved her. And he wanted to marry her.

  He had met her over the New Year skiing in Val d’Isère; she was there with her children, staying with friends in their apartment. She was waiting in the queue for the ski lift, and the first thing he noticed about her was her perfume, which was one he knew and loved: strong, sexy, and very potent.

  They got talking: he liked her. He bought her a hot chocolate at the café at the top of the mountain; she was coolly, amusedly friendly. The
y did the long tough run down to the town together, and he was impressed by her courage and her skill, bought her a hot wine as the dusk fell, arranged to meet her for lunch the next day. She had a superb figure, and an extremely sexy voice, husky and low. They went over to Tignes for lunch, skied back into Val d’Isère together, met for dinner that night. By the end of the week, he was quite sure he was in love with her.

  She was divorced and lived in London with her three children; she worked as a secretary to a children’s charity, not for the money, but to amuse and interest herself. ‘My husband is very generous, but I’m easily bored.’

  She had been divorced for three years; her husband was an investment banker, now married to a girl younger than Mungo. The children (two girls and a boy, aged fifteen, twelve and nine) were remarkably nice and well adjusted: testimony, Mungo felt, to Alice’s skills as a mother. The eldest, Jemima, was at boarding school, Katy and William still at home. They lived in a pretty little mews house in Chelsea, just off the Kings Road; Alice had decorated it charmingly, and it had an enchanting tiny walled garden which was her pride and joy. Mungo went there very often for Sunday lunch, which was invariably delicious, always bearing expensive presents for everybody, and they would all go for a walk in Richmond Park or Kew Gardens in the afternoon with Lottie, the King Charles spaniel. It all seemed wonderful to him; he had never known ordinary family life. It became a tradition that he took them all out to tea somewhere afterwards; occasionally somewhere very special like the Savoy or the Ritz, but often somewhere quite ordinary, even occasionally McDonald’s. Jemima, who had her mother’s blonde beauty and was rather sophisticated for her age, liked the posh Sundays, and so did Alice, but the others preferred the more modest ones. Mungo liked going to McDonald’s best of all. The children had no idea how extraordinarily rich his father was, or indeed how serious he was about their mother; they just all enjoyed him, although Jemima had a rather half-hearted crush on him, which he encouraged, and when they got back on the Sundays she was home, he would give her what he called flirting lessons. She didn’t actually need them. And then, much much later, they would sit alone in the tiny garden, he and Alice, surrounded with the lush scents of her roses and lavender and stock, and drink the bottle of extremely good champagne he also always brought with him, and sometimes talk and sometimes be quite easily and peacefully quiet. To Mungo who had spent his entire life in a rather frenetic pursuit of pleasure those Sundays seemed almost magically sweet.

  He saw Alice in the week as well of course; he would take her to dinner or the theatre, and then they would go back to his flat in Sloane Street and experience some extremely joyful sex. She had refused to go to bed with him for quite a long time, telling him that it was foolish, dangerous even, that she did not want him reading more into their relationship than he should; but one night, after a particularly happy evening, when she was sitting on his small balcony, smiling at him, her lovely face soft in the dusk, he suddenly said, ‘I love you, Alice. I really do.’

  And she had said, ‘Oh Mungo, don’t.’

  ‘Don’t what, Alice? Don’t love you? Or don’t say it?’

  ‘Don’t even think it.’

  ‘But why?’ he said, hurt, shocked almost. ‘Why can’t I think it, when I know it?’

  ‘Because you don’t. You are a young, young man, free to do whatever you choose; you have no business to be thinking you’re in love with someone almost old enough to be your mother.’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ he said, ‘you’re not, and anyway, what I choose to do is be in love with you. I don’t want anything else. Please believe me.’

  He heard almost to his own surprise a catch in his voice as he spoke; looking at her, he saw her face soften into tenderness, concern, saw her almost speak, then hesitate. Mungo was a past master at manipulation; the years he had spent working on his father’s emotions had been a superb training. He found that the easy tears were still at his command; he looked at her, knowing his eyes, his dark brown eyes, were huge and dark with them, felt one even roll over and splash down his cheek.

  ‘Oh Mungo,’ she said, putting out her hand, wiping the tear away with her finger, ‘darling Mungo, don’t cry.’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ he said, ‘it hurts me so when you talk like that. Don’t you feel anything for me at all? Am I just someone to fill your lonely evenings?’ He wondered briefly if he had gone a little far there, moved into Act Two of the melodrama when Act One was not even complete; but ‘Of course you’re not,’ she said and her voice was at once also hurt, but full of tenderness. ‘I love being with you, spending time with you. But –’

  ‘But you don’t love me? Not in the least?’ Another tear, another splash.

  ‘Well – oh Mungo, don’t. I can’t bear it. Yes, yes all right, I do love you. Quite a lot. There now, I’ve said it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Why afraid? Alice, why afraid?’

  ‘Because I have no right to be telling you. Involving you.’

  ‘Alice,’ said Mungo, kneeling in front of her, taking both her hands in his. ‘I am involved. We’re both involved. We can’t help it. We’re in love with each other. And it’s wonderful. Nothing to be afraid of. Now, can we please do the sensible thing, and go inside and go to bed?’

  And ‘Yes, Mungo,’ she said finally, after an endless silence. ‘Yes, Mungo, of course we can.’

  She had been from the beginning appalled by his idleness, his willingness to live off his father; it was entirely due to her influence that he took the office in Carlos Place, started his estate agency only a month after their meeting. He knew very little about the business, but he had at least an instinct, a sympathy for it, and he hired a small but excellent team and bluffed his way along. There was after all no great hurry to get into profit; his father was so delighted by the whole thing, Mungo knew he would back him for five years if necessary. It was also due to Alice that he gave up gambling, apart from the occasional poker game, started drinking less and completely gave up even soft drugs. Alice felt very strongly on that subject; she said that apart from her own distaste for anything to do with drugs, she had the children to worry about, and any bad example they might be exposed to.

  ‘You’ve reformed me,’ he said to her one night, early in May, soon after they had first gone to bed together. ‘My father won’t recognize me when he next gets back.’

  ‘Where is he at the moment?’

  ‘Mexico. With Sasha.’

  ‘On holiday?’

  ‘Good God, no. My father doesn’t believe in holidays. Sasha’s honeymoon was twenty-four hours at the Bel Air, en route to San Francisco and a conference he was chairing on AIDS research.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound very romantic. Poor Sasha.’

  ‘Oh, she’s all right,’ said Mungo easily. ‘She has a great time. She just shops. She’s very good at that.’

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘I don’t think anything else. Well, you know, the usual things my father wants, looking great, being nice to him, sex, I suppose.’

  ‘I see,’ said Alice.

  She had known about his father of course; her husband had even, she thought, met him once or twice.

  ‘He must be quite a hard act to follow,’ she said sympathetically.

  ‘Oh, not really,’ said Mungo, vaguely, ‘I’ve never really seen myself as following him. Up to now.’

  He had started asking her to marry him in late May; initially she had assumed he was joking, then as she realized he wasn’t, had refused, resolutely at first, then slightly more half-heartedly.

  ‘It’s ridiculous,’ she kept saying, ‘I can’t even let you think about it.’

  Mungo told her she was in no position to tell him what or what not to think and continued to ask her. He asked her by phone, letter, motorbike messenger (cards accompanied by bottles of champagne, jewellery and the perfume he loved so much) and even by singing telegram. And in person on every possible occasion, and in every conceivable situation, in bed, over dinner, in t
he car, while they were out riding with the children (the children well out of earshot), at concerts and theatres, and once, most romantically, in his father’s box at Covent Garden. They were watching La Bohème at the time; Mungo did not greatly like opera, but Alice loved it and it seemed to him a most appropriate situation. He ordered a bottle of champagne for the interval and it was brought in by one of the uniformed lackeys, together with a dozen red roses and a note which he handed to Alice.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said laughing, kissing him, ‘oh God, Mungo, what am I to say to you? I can’t cope with this very much longer.’

  ‘Say yes,’ he said, ‘it isn’t very difficult,’ but she managed not to, managed to keep saying it wasn’t a good idea, that she really couldn’t, until finally one night he lost his temper at yet another refusal, stormed out of her house and walked very fast back to Sloane Street.

  When he got in, there was a message from her on his answering machine.

  ‘I love you,’ it said, ‘and yes, perhaps I will.’

  Now all he had to do was tell his father.

  Mungo moved into the shade of the lychgate. He was terribly hot, and thirsty as well. This was ridiculous. Nobody was going to come yet, nobody at all. He wondered if he could sneak into the pub for a quick beer. It would only take ten minutes. He was severely tempted. He looked up and down the lane: no sign of anybody, let alone wedding guests. It was as if the nightmare had stopped the whole world, held time still; there was a tiny drifting breeze ruffling the long grass just inside the churchyard, a bird sang half-heartedly in the hedge, the noise of a thousand bees at work in the perfect flower garden of the little cottage opposite the church: those were the only sounds, the only movements. It was almost spooky, the silence; the whole thing had somehow shades of a ghost story. It seemed as reasonable an explanation as any suddenly, something supernatural, Cressida spirited away perhaps, into some strange half-world. For want of anything better to do, Mungo moved into the churchyard, started reading the gravestones. He had never done such a thing before, was startled, instantly saddened by them, by the brutally brief lives ended there: a young couple dying in 1601 within days of one another, a young mother (twenty-four years old) ‘taken at Christmas-time 1797, mourned by her five beloved children’, of countless babies dead in the first year of their lives. A shadow covered the sun for Mungo; he sat down abruptly in the grass, thinking of Alice. Life suddenly seemed very fragile, happiness brief. They must be together quickly, he thought, must waste no more time. And then he heard a car coming down the lane and looked over the wall and it was Harriet’s with Sasha driving it; she pulled up by the lychgate, got out, leant on the wall.