Love Song

by Charlotte Bingham

He knew the woman was looking at him but he paid her no attention, putting down the menu card and nodding to the waiter instead.

  ‘I feel like a drink,’ he heard her saying, before he could get his order in. ‘You know? Do you know where the Carlton Hotel is? Care for a drink?’

  ‘Yes, but I shouldn’t,’ Alexander said, with only the suspicion of a sigh.

  ‘Sure you shouldn’t,’ the woman replied. ‘That’s why you will.’

  He followed her until they came to the exit into Brompton Road, always just a step or so behind her. For her part she never looked round at him once.

  ‘Don’t you want to do any more shopping?’ he asked, once he was beside her, both their hands on the doors to the street.

  ‘Afterwards,’ the woman answered. ‘If I shop before I have a drink I look at all the price tags. Afterwards, I don’t give a goddam.’

  Amazed at the change in himself Alexander realized that she was not the only one not to give a damn. As he followed her out into the rainsodden afternoon, neither did he.

  ‘They want me to come back again next week for the second lot of auditions, so I’m still in with a chance,’ Rose called to her mother before she had even reached Hope’s chair, sliding the rest of the way on the flat of her ballet shoes.

  ‘But that’s wonderful, Rose,’ Hope said, kissing her daughter. ‘Well done. So The Dying Swan wasn’t such a dead duck after all.’

  Rose looked at her mother with a frown. ‘You really are pleased, aren’t you?’ she asked. ‘I mean you really want me to go on dancing?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ Hope answered, only half listening. ‘You know I do. Now on with this cardigan – and your leggings. We don’t want you getting cramps.’

  ‘Can we ring and tell Dads that I’ve been asked back?’ Rose asked, turning a pair of anxious dark eyes on her mother.

  ‘Later, sweetheart. He’s got important meetings all day. And if you’re going to get in here, they’re going to have to be successful ones too. Places like this cost money.’

  And the Lord alone knows where that’s going to come from. Hope had long given up any attempt to try to persuade Alexander that they simply could not afford to educate the girls privately, because Alexander would hear none of it. As far as he was concerned the girls were Merriotts and Merriotts were educated privately; every one of his children should be given the best, up to and including their boy, when they had him.

  Hope, like many women married to men who play the money markets, had no clear idea of what her husband’s work exactly entailed. Ever since they married Alexander had taken over the running of their financial life entirely. All she really knew was that he worked with money – or rather in money, as Alexander called it – as a money broker at first, which was way beyond her financial comprehension, then as an investment adviser which she found a little less obscure, scheme-brokering to be precise, which it seemed meant finding the money to put into other people’s notional businesses. Finally he had graduated to something they called market-monitoring, which apparently involved listening to the financial bush telegraph and buying not just early, but before anyone else was even half awake.

  Originally he had worked from an office in a large block in a newly developed portion of the City, but Hope had never been there, and indeed by the time she suggested meeting Alexander at his office for lunch one day he told her that he had moved to another job in yet another large building, this time on some upwardly fashionable wharf where he had a telephone line, a fax and a secretary who answered his phone.

  At least the modernization of the five-bedroom semi-detached Edwardian house they had bought four years earlier was now practically finished, but here too Alexander had not skimped on the work, never once stopping to query the cost of anything. The result was a house which some of their older neighbours had more than hinted had no place in West Dean Drive, something which whenever they repeated it to each other always made Alexander and Hope laugh.

  It had all started off quite simply with a plan to convert the house with one eye on sympathetic restoration and the other on their immediate environment and growing family. Alexander, however, being Alexander, soon forgot all about his good intentions and proceeded to throw an inordinate amount of money at what was after all only a modest sort of house, built at the turn of the century for retired gentlefolk, not for Mrs Thatcher’s brat-packers. Within sixteen months they had added a hand-built and expensively tiled conservatory, put a pine-clad studio cum office in the roof, built on a morning room extension to the kitchen, knocked the two reception rooms into one large one, walled and floodlit the garden, painted the house bright yellow, sunk an illuminated ornamental fishpond in the front garden, replaced all the charming old leaded lights with picture windows and installed large pull-down striped awnings above them. Privately Hope felt that they had gone too far, spent too much, but to Alexander his house was a status symbol, and if he could not live grandly in an expensive house then he had to live grandly in a cheap one.

  Not that Alexander would not have far preferred to live in a large detached house with a swimming pool, and extensive grounds, and indeed, Hope realized long afterwards, he had, when he married her, believed that within a few years that would be the case. Since Hope was the only surviving child of her parents’ marriage, Alexander had taken it for granted that his wife would inherit all her father’s money. Hope’s father was a wealthy man, having himself come into a not inconsiderable sum from his own father, who had been a self-made businessman.

  To give him his due, Alexander was no snob, and had no prejudice against inheriting his father-in-law’s money from wherever it came. What mattered to him was that it was safe to assume that even were Hope perhaps not to be left the whole of her father’s fortune, she must at least expect a reasonable inheritance, and – when the size of the family fortune was taken into consideration – one surely large enough to pay for many of the things they found so hard to pay for now.

  So when Hope’s father had died prematurely only two years after she and Alexander were married, having long ago divorced Hope’s mother on account of her sudden and scandalous adultery, while she mourned the passing of a man who had hardly ever addressed a civil word to her, Alexander began to count his chickens. Unfortunately for them both, they did not hatch.

  Hope’s father left her nothing, or near to nothing compared to her husband’s expectations, but willed the bulk of all he had to his eldest nephew, his fortune therefore returning to a male, in line, it seemed with his own father’s wishes.

  Consequently, although to Hope it came as no surprise when she was told that her father had made no provision for her in his will other than a small bequest, Alexander was actually outraged. He urged Hope to contest the will, but there was little point in doing so, as their lawyer pointed out, since the will was in perfect legal order.

  ‘My father wanted a son, not a daughter. So why should he leave me his money? In fact I’m astonished he left me anything at all. What was his was his to do with as he wished. None of it by right belonged to me. I was only his daughter.’

  Publicly Alexander had pretended to understand but privately he had been infuriated, because although he had truly fallen in love with Hope, who was as intelligent as she was pretty, and whom he had loved and did love with all his heart, his attraction to her had been more than doubled by the apparent promise of a large inheritance to come.

  In fact so great had been his private anger that for many weeks after her father’s death, Alexander considered pursuing a claim against the estate on Hope’s behalf, and was finally only prevented from doing so by the death of his seemingly indestructible old grandfather. When his will was duly read, it emerged that he had left a fortune to Alexander’s father, who would duly pass that fortune to Alexander himself – but only upon the birth of a grandson who would continue the Merriott name.

  ‘Supposing Hope and I can’t have a son?’ Alexander had wanted to know. And in the long silence that followed he had heard him
self finally filling it with, ‘Well, if that happens, I suppose I could always divorce her, and try again?’

  ‘The Merriotts do not divorce, no matter what the fashion. There has never been a divorce in this family.’

  ‘So what next – just try again, I suppose?’

  ‘If you have twelve daughters, they will all be down to you. Produce a son and the money will pass to you. That’s how it is. The Merriott name goes on through the male line – the Merriotts have sons.’

  Alexander never told Hope of the condition in his father’s will, his private excuse being, as daughter after daughter was born within three years of each other, that it might put too much pressure on her. Besides, he loved her too much to want her to know just how much future financial happiness might be riding on the sex of their next child. He had reasoned to himself that it was bad enough having a baby; and since her refusal to contest her own father’s will he felt in some ways that she had forfeited the right to know about his father’s will. It was not exactly a revenge, but it was not exactly not a revenge either.

  Even so, his approach to this last pregnancy had been very different. This time he had tried to make it quite, quite clear that after such a long gap a son was very important to him, although he still did not think it right to indicate just how important, or just how much money might be riding on his wish for a male heir. Not a kingship perhaps, but an awful lot of money.

  ‘Guess what – Rose got called back!’ Hope told Alexander when he walked into the house an hour late for dinner.

  For a moment he stared at her blankly, not just as if he had no idea what she was talking about but – worse – as if she was a total stranger, before suddenly focusing himself, shaking his head and smiling his beautiful smile.

  ‘Darling – forgive me,’ he said, picking a cashew nut out of the dish Melinda had just brought in for him. ‘I have so much on my mind – and it really has been one of those days. The consortium I thought I had all nicely set up has gone cold on the project.’

  ‘Which project?’ Melinda asked, sitting down cross-legged on the floor in front of him.

  ‘Nothing you would understand,’ her father replied, holding up a nut and then throwing it to his eldest as if she was a dog.

  ‘Try me,’ Hope suggested before putting up a hand to stop Alexander throwing her a nut as well. ‘No, I didn’t mean that, Alex. Tell me which project is in trouble.’

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ Alexander sighed, before grinning boyishly. ‘There’ll be another one along in a minute.’

  ‘Project? Or consortium?’

  ‘Both. Tell me about Rose.’

  Hope began to, but Alexander’s eyes shifted restlessly after only a few seconds. He always found it very difficult to concentrate on any interests other than his own, and even as she was speaking his mind was shifting back to the wondrous afternoon he had spent with the woman in the phoney fox fur coat. A fantasy, a pure fantasy, had actually happened to him. The kind of fantasy that he had always thought never would happen, for he had married young, and until Imogen it had never occurred to him to have affairs. Now suddenly a whole new world seemed to be opening up for him out there, a world where, he realized, women did actually find him irresistible.

  ‘Early days still,’ he said, as Hope finished speaking. It seemed a pretty safe thing to say. ‘And I mean,’ he went on, quickly realizing that more was obviously needed, ‘I mean, that’s only one audition. And the competition is fierce.’

  ‘Still. I think Rose deserves to be congratulated.’

  ‘I think she deserves a medal,’ Melinda said. ‘I think things like that must be gross.’

  ‘Gross?’ her father wondered, lightly sarcastic.

  ‘Gross,’ Melinda repeated. ‘Having to dance cold like that. Uninspired. In front of a lot of people who are probably half asleep. I mean I think that’s pretty gross.’

  ‘Try another word, Melinda, something more fitting? Less gross.’

  ‘OK,’ Melinda shrugged. ‘Obscene?’ As Alexander shook his head, ‘Er – seriously gross?’

  Alexander sighed and raised his eyebrows at Hope as if it was her fault that Melinda could not think of more decorative words. ‘What, I wonder, has happened to our lovely language?’ he asked, his voice still light, his mind already straying back to the afternoon.

  ‘I know, Dads, but it actually is gross,’ Melinda insisted. ‘Having to dance like that. I don’t think that’s the best way to choose who’s good and who’s not, asking them to dance “cold”.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Her father nodded thoughtfully, then threw a nut up in the air for himself, caught it in his mouth and smiled at his eldest daughter. ‘But then life is notorious for not being fair, is it not?’ he asked, and looked at Hope, and then towards Letty who was sleeping outside in the garden in her pram, before reaching behind him for a bottle of whisky off the sofa table, at the same time asking Melinda to fetch him a glass.

  ‘Hmmmm,’ he mused some more, chewing another cashew before turning to ask his wife the date of her next visit to her gynaecologist.

  Hope looked astonished. ‘Macleod? Next week. Why?’

  ‘Just curious,’ Alexander replied, with a smile, as Melinda returned with a glass. ‘No, Mellie,’ he scolded. ‘A whisky glass.’

  Hope followed Melinda out, in order to bring Letty in from the garden. As she leaned over and looked in the pram her heart sank, as for one shaming moment she found herself wishing that the little baby looking back so sweetly at her over the edge of her covers had been born a boy – because there was no point in self-deception. It was patently obvious that Alexander was thinking of getting her pregnant yet again. Why otherwise should he have mentioned Mr Macleod?

  Chapter Three

  As always when something very important was being said to her, Hope was finding it difficult to concentrate on the real meaning behind the words.

  ‘I think you must consider that, given your particular history, all in all it would be better if there were no more children,’ the consultant told her. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.’

  ‘You mean I can’t have any more?’ Hope asked. ‘Or shouldn’t?’

  ‘You could conceive again, but it would be inadvisable, to say the least.’

  ‘Mr Macleod, I know that it isn’t what my neighbour would call politically correct to say so, but – my husband is very keen to have a son. Really keen.’

  ‘I know, Mrs Merriott, I am very aware of that fact. But each time you become pregnant, each time you try for a boy, the risks become greater.’

  ‘Of losing the child? Or risky for me?’

  ‘For both of you, really. The number of Caesareans you have had to undergo – that alone increases the risk factor. It’s bound to, I’m afraid. And unfortunately your first section was not very tidy, not a good job at all, I have to say. I’ve tried to tidy you up a bit since then, but a certain amount of damage has been done that cannot be undone. So all in all, were you to ask my advice, I would say that another pregnancy would be highly inadvisable.’

  ‘But I am still able to conceive?’

  ‘Of course you are – I would just recommend you not to consider doing so. It really isn’t worth the risk. I could make certain you don’t, if you like.’

  ‘By tying my ends up?’

  The consultant nodded. ‘Better to be safe in this case. Believe me. Particularly when fathers become so insistent on trying to achieve what is after all just some sort of ego trip. In my opinion, there are more important things in life than just reproducing ourselves, and I speak as the father of three girls.’

  ‘I’m not sure this particular father would thank either of us for thinking that.’

  ‘Well, quite, but it’s not this particular father’s body, is it? Or life. I could have you admitted straight away for this little op, which would end all your problems. You’d be home the next day.’

  ‘Thanks, but I think I’ll take the famous rain check.’

  ‘Of course.
But in the meantime do keep taking the pill. I’m serious. Either that or advise your husband to have a vasectomy. It’s vital you do not have any more children. Really.’

  * * *

  Alexander was home early for once, anxious to know every last detail of her consultation with Macleod. Hope gave him the sanitized version.

  ‘How long do we have to wait?’ Alexander enquired when she had finished her short résumé. ‘Exactly how long?’

  ‘Does it matter, Alex? There’s not a clock on it, is there?’

  Alexander smiled and stroked her hair, a habit of his which Hope loved. ‘In a way yes, my darling, there is a clock on it. There’s a biological clock.’

  ‘Mine’s still fully wound up as far as conceiving is concerned,’ Hope replied. ‘It’s just there are obviously certain difficulties, after so many Caesareans. Five is not quite on, according to Macleod. In fact he actually advises that you have a vasectomy.’

  Alexander had not thought of this. He laughed, making sure to sound quite at ease with the idea, while all the while his heart quickened at the suggestion, and the lost fortune that would result from it.

  ‘Of course, darling, but from what I’ve heard at the club, Macleod advises all the men to have one. He has a bee in his medical bonnet about it. It comes of seeing too many women having too many babies. He thinks Britain is going to end up like China – you know, chucking out all the unwanted baby girls, that sort of thing.’

  Alexander laughed but at the same time, to calm himself, he wandered around the kitchen fiddling with the inevitable bric-a-brac that had been left on the sides, tidying some items, straightening others which were already straight, while Hope started preparing the evening meal. Finally Alexander sat down in the dining area of their kitchen overlooking the garden, his drink in front of him, and turned to stare out of the window, losing himself in his thoughts. It had not occurred to him that Hope would be advised to persuade him to have a vasectomy.

  He was after all a Scorpio, and as such he relished intrigue and subterfuge, which was why he could not help himself enjoying the fact that Hope did not realize how much depended on the fruit of her womb, that she naively thought because his father lived very simply that he was not a rich man, and that Alexander merely wanted a son so that he could have someone to play cricket with. Much as Hope’s goodness sometimes irritated him, and difficult as he found her to understand, he nevertheless had to admire her lack of guile. The idea of divorcing her to produce a boy was not only against his father’s moral and religious code, it was against Alexander’s finest feelings. Despite his recent infidelities, he still loved his wife.