by Anna Maxted
‘So good to see you! Emily, this is James Claudderaugh – James, Emily, Emily, James – and Toby McIntosh-Forbes – Toby, Emily, Emily, Toby – and Rahdirahblahblahblah.’
‘Hi there!’ She showed her teeth and assessed his colleagues, discounting each as mating material in seconds: prematurely balding … eyes too close together … short like a tree stump … you have to be kidding me … end of message.
‘So what are you up to? Would you like to join us for dinner at Elaine’s? She’s a total star.’
Emily liked fast food, or health food; she did not enjoy wasting time in restaurants, nor was she interested in some fat old woman. Oh God, could it be that banking had turned Tim into a wanker?
‘Darling, there’s nothing I’d love more, but I have an engagement. And I have to fix this shoe. Although … I’m going to be at the Grand Central Oyster Bar around eight thirty.’ She smiled winningly around. ‘When you feel like eating clams, nothing else will do.’ She was a great believer in subliminal (or not so subliminal) suggestion.
Now we’d see. Would he ditch fat old Elaine and his ugly boy crew and haul ass across town on the vague non-promise of some horizontal action?
A thoughtful look crossed Tim’s face. ‘That would be splendid! You were saying, weren’t you, Toby, you were going to try and see a film’ – Toby’s face was fantastically blank – ‘er, you know, that one I’ve already seen?’ Still blank. ‘Elaine’s was as a matter of fact a mere suggestion … our plans were still vague …’ Light slowly dawning on the dim, rugby-crushed face …
‘Oh, absolutely!’
Emily winked. ‘Well, great. Goodbye, gentlemen. Tim, later!’
She lovingly prepared herself – a perfect parcel of temptation in a Dolce & Gabbana leopard-print silk baby-doll top with spaghetti strap halterneck, hotpants, a Christian Lacroix skirted trenchcoat, and black suede knee-high boots from Voyage – in her ‘deluxe’ room at the Paramount. She wouldn’t stay here again. The room, smart, stylish, modern, yada yada, was the size of a matchbox. She actually felt claustrophobic. Worse than that, she felt poor. My God, this must be what it was like to live in a council flat. Just hideous. How did people cope? The lack of air, it just about choked you. She kept bumping into furniture, it made her feel fat. A hotel that made you feel poor and fat – what a total failure of marketing. Mummy and Daddy’s hotels were palatial and stunning by comparison – presumably, people booked the Paramount only because the doormen were hot. There could be no other reason. Next time she’d stay at the Four Seasons: big rooms, onyx ceilings – the Four Seasons knew how to treat guests.
She arrived at the Oyster Bar early to arrange herself as she wished to be seen. Tim’s first glimpse of his future wife would be a classic pose, a 1950s starlet, perhaps, enjoying a cigarette, sipping a milkshake through a straw. Milkshake, not alcohol, even though she felt like a glass of red, because when Emily was up to something particularly devious, she liked to offset her behaviour with an outward show of innocence.
Tim arrived on the dot of eight thirty-five – she noted that he’d been home to shower and change. Cute.
He slid into the seat beside her and smiled. ‘How are you?’
‘Good,’ she said.
‘You’re never good,’ he said, grinning.
She gazed at him from beneath her lashes. ‘Today I am,’ she said in what she hoped was a demure voice. ‘It’s too cold to misbehave. I am going to eat some clams, catch up with my old friend Tim, and be at home in bed by ten thirty.’ She smiled. ‘Shall we order?’
The bugger was, Emily hated clams, but wanted to tease Timmy into a froth of desire that she would then frustrate. A goodnight kiss, then he would be primly turned away. She looked at the ‘raw’ section of the menu. ‘Raw’ was sexier than ‘cooked’. And ‘cherrystone’ – yeah, that would do it. Raw cherrystone clams, I mean, come on – if that didn’t suggest eating pussy then she might as well give up and go home. But … popcorn shrimp … mmm.
‘That tequila lime oyster shooter is calling my name,’ said Tim.
Willpower was just a positive spin on ‘self-denial’ and Emily was not a fan. ‘Would it be rude not to join you?’ she said.
‘Very,’ replied Tim.
One tequila lime oyster shooter led to another. ‘You know,’ Emily said with a sloppy grin, sprawling on the counter and gazing up at Tim – he was super cute, with his scruffy hair, and he was lean now, not skinny. ‘I do like the sound of raw cherrystone clams, and I will definitely order them one day, but right this second I think I should have a jumbo lump Maryland crab cake to soak up this booze. Because I …’
‘No indeed,’ agreed Tim.
She blushed. He thought he was getting some.
She ate half the crab cake; he ate the other half. At one point, she got some on her chin, and he reached out, wiped her chin, and sucked her bit of crab cake off his finger. She nearly fell off her chair – oh my God, how horny? OK, two years ago, it would have been disgusting, but now, now she was fifteen, it was totally hot.
It was annoying: in theory, Tim wasn’t that sexy. But in person, he just was, which made him difficult to resist.
‘Their dessert menu rocks,’ she said, clanking her bottle of Goose Island ‘Honker’ Ale (you had to order it, for the name, Tim said) against his. ‘Listen to this: honey pecan pumpkin pie … black plum almond cream tart … Florida key lime pie … New York cheesecake … chocolate mouse … I mean, chocolate mousse … chocolate mocha layer cake.’ She threw up her hands. ‘How the hell are you meant to decide?’
‘Order them all.’
Very ‘first date’ in theory, but in practice piggish and unattractive. ‘I will order one.’
Tim sighed. ‘You’re very monkish today. But OK. I say chocolate mouse.’
She refused to let him feed her even a spoonful. ‘I like to be in control,’ she explained. He was looking at her in that way. ‘What?’
He shook his head. ‘I need a cigarette.’ She watched him, tipping his head back to blow the smoke up towards the cavernous white-tiled ceiling. She wanted to lick his neck. Yes, she was prettily driving him to distraction. He smacked down a wodge of cash. ‘Babe, can we get out of here?’
‘You can see me home, if you like.’
His eyes said I’ll do more than that, and he let out a stifled groan and leaned towards her. She allowed his lips to brush hers. ‘No, you won’t, naughty boy,’ she breathed.
Exactly twelve minutes later, despite a wind-chill factor of minus three, Emily allowed Tim to fuck her up against a wall. It was her first time and it was glorious. She had known that sex would be amazing, but the feeling was beyond anything. It was heaven. She heard herself whimper and squeal with pleasure. After, she clutched him, trembling. He scooped her up and whispered, ‘Come on, girl, let’s do this properly.’ He paused. ‘All that clam talk just made me crazy.’
She giggled and hung on his arm.
And so, it turned out that, unwittingly, Emily had told the truth. She was at home in bed at ten thirty. She and Tim shagged like dogs until they fell asleep at four. And when Emily woke the next morning, she rolled on top of him and they started again. ‘You are very bad,’ she told him, ‘you have led me astray.’
If the sex hadn’t been so totally delicious and he wasn’t such a god, she would have hated him. She hated herself for being so weak, and even as Tim brought her off with his tongue and she screamed with bliss, she was raging inside: You idiot, Em, this wasn’t the plan.
Nor did she know it, but by midday she was pregnant – and that wasn’t the plan either.
PARIS, WINTER 1997
Jack
Maria watched as six degrees of confusion, disbelief, fear, amazement, shock and, finally, recognition passed over Jack’s features. Then, to her surprise – oh, this man always surprised her – he gently took her hand and kissed it. She had the feeling that it wasn’t enough and he wanted to slide off the bed and kneel before her.
‘Claudia’s real
mother,’ he gasped, and then he buried his face in her chest and cried. She hadn’t expected this reaction – she didn’t know what she had expected – and because she needed him to help her, she worried that he’d think the sex was a means to an end. It wasn’t. God help her, she was in love with him.
As a child, Maria had seen her three older cousins get engaged, one after the other, and imagined that each proposal was a grand surprise. Then, as little children often are, she had been horribly sexist, assuming that the decision to marry was entirely the man’s, that the woman’s only say in the matter was ‘yes’. More than that, she had assumed that the decision to love was entirely the man’s, and only if he said it was OK could the woman open her mind and heart to dresses and bouquets, confetti and cake.
She was stunned to discover when she met the man of her dreams that the love she felt was immediate, that there was no doubt of it being mutual, that of course she would be proposed to. Marriage was a certainty, not a surprise!
It hadn’t quite turned out like that.
But while a romantic heart can be crushed, it is almost impossible to kill, and now, over two decades later, Maria felt that long-forgotten emotion, strangely close to madness, consume her. It was unmistakably love.
The first time around, she had ruined it, and the reason was sex. She feared that history would repeat itself and the fact that she’d fucked him before revealing the truth, and what she required from him, would ruin it again.
She blurted, ‘I love you, you know. I didn’t mean to, but I can’t help it.’
He smiled at her. His eyes were still red. ‘I know you do. It’s OK. I love you.’
‘I didn’t mean it to happen this way,’ she said. He lit a cigarette and passed it to her. ‘I didn’t set out with this in mind.’
‘What’, he said, ‘did you have in mind? And’ – a harsher note entered his tone, as if some doubt had just occurred, or maybe it was her paranoia – ‘how did you know that Claudia was yours?’
She blushed, pulling the white silk robe around her. Suddenly, like Eve, she needed to cover her nakedness. ‘When you give up a baby,’ she began softly, ‘you are always looking. You never stop looking for your lost baby. I didn’t want to give up my baby but I had no choice. It was the seventies – it was the worst thing you could possibly do. I came from a proud family. They’d call themselves a good family … I was in love for the first time and I knew nothing, I was sixteen years old. I did what I was told and so I did … that. I didn’t even know that you could get pregnant the first time. I thought you had to have practised for it to … take. I let it happen, because I knew, on my mother’s life, that this was my man, that we were going to marry and live together loving each other for the rest of our lives. I was a very simple girl then. But teenagers think in absolutes. It’s all absolutely wonderful or bloody terrible. It got terrible. He got scared. I think he was scared of my father. He denied it was his. He was sixteen too. He had plans for his life, he wanted to be free, and it was so, so shameful. He just melted away, out of my life, and there I was, this big ball of disgrace. My own mother stopped speaking to me. I got sent away, to a relative, and when I had the baby, she was sped away. I didn’t even get to hold her. The doctors were cold, disapproving, but the women were worse. There was one kind nurse – one. I wanted to give my baby something of myself, and the only thing I had was the gold chain with a gold heart on it that my parents had given me for my sixteenth birthday. It’s very distinctive: my uncle was a jeweller, he had it made. I kept the gold chain, and the nurse pinned the heart to the baby’s vest. When you give up a baby, and you’re little more than a child yourself, you have no idea of what you’ve done, of the life-destroying enormity of your error. It’s only later that you realize, and of course by then it’s too late. I wasn’t allowed to know where my baby had gone, who she was with. I had no official way of finding her. But all through my twenties, I looked for my girl. On the street, on the bus, everywhere I went, I looked.’
‘But’ – she jumped as Jack spoke. She was no longer really addressing him, she was lost in her own world – ‘but, Maria, how would you even know if you’d seen her?’
‘I would have known,’ she said. ‘A mother … knows.’ She paused. ‘But, day after day, I saw babies and girls, everywhere, but not mine. And then’ – she shook her head, as if she still couldn’t believe it – ‘ten years after her birth, to the day, I was flicking through the Daily Mail, and there was a photograph on the gossip page, the one written by Nigel Dempster. It was a photo of you, and your … wife, and Claudia, and the caption said, “The Hon. Innocence Ashford and her multimillionaire husband, Jack Kent, take Claudia, their adopted daughter from his first marriage, to see The Nutcracker at the Royal Albert Hall to celebrate her tenth birthday.”’ Maria looked at him and smiled. ‘It could have been a coincidence,’ she said. ‘But Claudia was wearing a necklace. And on it was my heart.’
Jack shook his head. ‘That’s an amazing story,’ he said. ‘So what did you do? Did you try and make contact?’ He frowned. ‘I can’t remember but …’
‘No,’ she said. She smiled again. ‘Can you imagine what you’d have thought, if I had?’
He gazed into her eyes. ‘I’d have thought that you were a mother who wanted my baby back.’
‘And?’
‘I’d have thought you were a gold-digger.’ He paused. ‘Are you? Is … is that what this is about?’
‘Oh please,’ she said. ‘So I got all the information I possibly could, on you, and on Claudia. And, from that day on, I watched her.’ Maria looked down and picked at the gold embroidery on the bedcover. ‘She never looked happy.’ She looked up. ‘None of you did.’ She shook her head. ‘It was a lesson, to see a family, riding in the latest Rolls, dressed so beautifully, off to the airport to New York, or Bermuda, or Fiji’ – she grinned – ‘good old Nigel reported everything – looking so miserable. I wanted to rescue her, but I was terrified that she might reject me. It was better, it was safer, to watch and admire and love her from a distance. I told myself that it was too late to be her mother, but I could be her guardian angel. I mean’ – Maria laughed, and it was a bitter sound – ‘I just told myself that to make myself feel better. I knew I could do nothing for her, ever. I had nothing. I was in a world of pain, of my own making. It was torture. It still is.’
Jack squeezed her hand.
She cleared her throat. ‘Jack,’ she said. ‘I thought there was nothing I could do for my girl. But, oh God, it turns out there is. A couple of years ago, she got a job, didn’t she, at a newspaper. And then …’ Maria swallowed. ‘When I saw, I just … But I suppose in a horrible way … it’s natural. I’ve heard of it before. You’re just drawn … you don’t even know why. I couldn’t stop myself – I just wrote. I never have before, but it was a mistake. I need you, Jack. You have to stop this. Don’t tell her the truth. It would be too much. Just find a way.’
He was staring at her, incredulous. ‘Maria. I don’t understand. Find a way to stop what?’
She realized, with a lurch of nausea, that the whole business was so repellent to her, she had been circling it, like a frightened animal. So she told him. Then she watched as he ran to the bathroom and was sick.
LONDON, WINTER 1997
Claudia
Claudia walked into the office and gave Martin a crisp nod. She would remain professional. She would remain dignified. When your own thoughts were eating you alive, this was no easy task. For the last twelve hours, the words of the hand-delivered note had been circling her mind like a serpent.
Could it be from Innocence? Innocence had a violent dislike of other people being happy in their relationships; it made her feel inferior. If she saw a couple kissing it would ruin her day. Claudia hadn’t told Innocence but then her stepmother regularly had people followed. Innocence probably knew more about Martin than Claudia did herself.
Whoever it was from, the letter was a lie, a spiteful attempt at sabotage. But what if there was
something Claudia didn’t know about Martin? He didn’t talk about his past, but he’d hinted that there was something in it that he wasn’t proud of. A sex change? A sex change! No. She’d seen his particulars, there was no way they’d been fashioned out of a woo-woo. Claudia put a hand to her forehead. It was extremely hot. She should take a moment. She was becoming hysterical.
She gulped down her double espresso and snapped on her computer. She was a journalist, not some pathetic wimp. She would not condemn Martin without hard evidence. She would consider the facts. She was the one behaving badly: refusing to sleep with him for no apparent reason, forcing him to trust her, to believe that one miracle day in the vague future, they’d start bonking for Britain and never stop. If Claudia wanted to marry Martin – and she did, desperately – she must ignore the letter, and be patient, kind, loving in every other sense to show him that she adored him and wanted him, that she’d forgiven him for last night, was sorry for her own behaviour, and please don’t break up with her, because the day they married, she’d put the past behind her and snap into being the perfect wife. She couldn’t quite bring herself to go over to his desk, but she wrote him an email: ‘Forgive me, darling, I was horrible. It was all my fault – you are not to blame in the slightest. I overreacted and I totally understand your frustration. The truth is, every bit of you is desirable and gorgeous, I want you so badly, I have never loved anyone like I love you, and I did just want us to wait a little bit longer … until we are married, but I hate to make you sad, and hate you to think that I don’t utterly lust after you … so how about we meet tonight at my place? We could have a drink, then see what happens …’
Then she deleted that and emailed ‘Hi’ instead.
No response. Then, three hours later, he came over to her desk, where she was briskly inputting copy.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I have a job for you. Could be fun.’
