The Flower Garden

by Margaret Pemberton

  Was this what Jack had expected of her? This shameless physical response? If so, no wonder his disappointment had been so bitter.

  She hadn’t thought of him for hours. Her throat tightened and she felt suddenly dizzy. She was Nancy Leigh Cameron, not a jumped-up tart from the Cotton Club or a nymphomaniac socialite. Others might be able to conduct a scandalous love affair for the benefit of the world’s press. She could not. She was being groomed to become the next First Lady of the United States. She began to laugh hysterically.

  ‘This is crazy. Insane. Please take me home.’

  ‘I will. After.’

  There was an edge to his voice that sent her pulses racing.

  ‘No.’ The hysteria had died. She felt as if she had been caught in a whirlwind and tossed ruthlessly to earth.

  ‘No.’ She was calm; utterly deflated. ‘I owe you an apology, Ramon. I don’t indulge in casual love affairs. I was emotionally distressed this evening and allowed you to take advantage of it. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be.’ His hand left hers as he changed gear and the wheels screamed as the Daimler swerved to a halt outside a glittering apartment block. His face was impassive; his eyes unreadable.

  ‘I do indulge in casual affairs,’ he said as the engine died and a uniformed doorman approached the great glass doors from the warmth of the interior. ‘I’ve indulged in them for the last seventeen years. Tonight, for the first time, I realized I was capable of something deeper. Something unimaginable. I’m not going to sacrifice it for any sudden panic of propriety on your part. You want me as much as I want you. I can see it in your eyes and I can feel it in your body.’

  He touched her bare shoulders and she jumped as if it had been a live switch. ‘I don’t know how the hell it happened.’ His voice thickened as he pulled her to him. ‘But I love you and I’m damned if I’m going to lose you now.’

  ‘I can’t …’ She was held captive against his chest and she could feel the heavy slam of his heart against hers.

  ‘You can,’ he said softly. His lips touched her eyelids, the corners of her mouth, her throat. He lowered his head, kissing the crevice of her breasts. ‘You will.’

  She pressed her lips to his thick black curls, burying her face in his hair.

  ‘No …’ she whispered and it was the primeval protest of invitation.

  Silently he opened the Daimler’s door and escorted her through the brightly lit lobby to a sumptuously gilded lift.

  She was trembling. She had never been unfaithful to Jack. She had never wanted to be. Words from a fifteen year old row rang in her ears as the lift slowly ascended. She had just discovered that Jack was having an affair. It was the first one she had been aware of. She had cried and expected him to beg forgiveness. He had not done so and her tears had turned to bewilderment and then to anger. ‘I don’t sleep with other men!’ she had shouted. He had turned to her and there had been pity tempered by resignation in his voice as he had said, ‘Of course not, Nancy. You don’t enjoy sleeping with me so why should you sleep with anyone else? There’s no virtue in abstaining from a vice you have no desire for.’

  The lift gates were thrown back by a hand accustomed to control.

  ‘It’s not going to be how you think …’ she said desperately.

  ‘It’s going to be everything I think.’ He smiled as he opened the door. ‘Why is it I’m always contradicting you?’

  She didn’t answer.

  The whole vast room and the rooms opening from it were covered in ankle-deep white carpet. The walls were white, the ceiling, the leather chairs in strangely geometric silver frames. Even the flowers were white: orchids and lilies and freesias flown in from Florida. On the far wall there was one single violent blaze of colour. Red and orange and screaming pink seared a huge canvas. Nancy had never seen anything like it before. It was of nothing recognizable and yet it portrayed all the things she lacked: passion and wildness and joyous abandonment.

  Not looking at him she said simply, ‘I’m no good in bed. I’m sorry.’

  He said, amused, ‘You told me that when you told me not to touch you.’ He was dimming the lights, moving smoothly and leisurely. ‘Since then, I’ve touched you several times and you haven’t objected.’

  ‘That was different. I was upset and you were comforting me.’

  ‘I’m no expert at comforting women,’ Ramon said gravely and with more than a measure of truth. ‘But I doubt if the action usually has such results on the comforter or comforted!’ His smile was tender. ‘Stop being afraid, Nancy. There’s nothing to be afraid of,’ and gently and easily he lifted her in his arms and carried her through to the bedroom.

  She buried her face in his neck and her feelings of shyness and inadequacy ebbed away. Her longing for him was so intense that there was no room for any other emotion. His dinner jacket had been discarded. Only one lamp gleamed and as he moved towards the giant windows his frilled shirt was opened to the waist, exposing a strong chest with a pelt of darkly curling hair.

  He pulled the cord, the heavy white drapes swishing back, revealing stars and moon and a scattering of lights. He didn’t want to take her in the darkness. He wanted to see the fear chased from her eyes.

  He moved across to her unhurriedly and her heart began to race. Slowly he slid the straps of her evening dress down and over her shoulders, letting the golden material slip over her breasts and hips till it dropped lightly to the floor. With superhuman control he continued to take his time, handling her with the soothing gentleness with which he would approach a frightened horse.

  His hand travelled up the length of her leg, skimming her hip bones and cupping her breast. She shivered, but not with the revulsion she was accustomed to. His mouth came down on her hairline, brushing it with feather-like kisses. Her fingers burrowed deep in his hair. She wanted his mouth on hers and moved her head voluntarily so that their lips met and parted and left her filled with longing.

  ‘Love me,’ she whispered.

  He only smiled, his hands caressing the high roundness of her breasts. ‘I will love you, Nancy. I do love you.’

  ‘Oh God,’ she said, and arched her body to his.

  This time his kiss was deeper, his tongue exploring hers, his hands sliding down to where she waited willingly.

  With every passing second her senses were heightened as he undressed without haste. In the moonlit room his skin gleamed bronze, his muscles hard. She drew in a quick breath. It had never occurred to her before that a man’s body could be beautiful.

  ‘Now,’ she said urgently and he laughed softly.

  ‘I thought you didn’t like to be touched.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ she said, ‘not before.’

  He touched her with his hands and his mouth, and when his body pinned hers down and he entered her, she was as ready for him as he was for her. She flew higher and higher until, in the same split second, they reached a mutual ecstacy of momentary disintegration. They were no longer two separate entities, but one. She heard her own cries and her face was wet with tears. He kissed them away, trembling, murmuring words of love he had never uttered before. It was a long time before he parted from her. When he did they lay in each other’s arms, close and not speaking. At last, almost as a gesture of homage, he kissed her forehead. ‘Nothing will be the same, Nancy. Not for either of us.’

  ‘No.’ There was nothing else to say. She felt no need to ask about Princess Marinsky or Lady Linderdowne or any of the other women he was so often seen with. She felt no insecurity or jealous doubts.

  After a while he gently disentangled himself from her arms and walked naked out of the vast bedroom. When he returned he was carrying a bucket of ice containing a bottle of Dom Perignon. As he poured the champagne it splashed on her breasts and he kissed the droplets away.

  She held him close. ‘I feel like a girl of seventeen.’

  He smiled the slow, lazy smile that turned her heart over. ‘You looked it before. You don’t now.’

  ‘What do yo
u mean?’ Her eyes widened in apprehension.

  He laughed and reached for his glass of champagne. ‘I mean you had an untouched look that sat oddly on a woman of thirty-five. Innocence is for the young. Maturity is for something a little better.’

  ‘Was it so obvious?’ She drank from her glass, her body pale against the satin sheets.

  ‘To me, but I doubt if anyone else realized the reason for your continued girlish prettiness.’

  He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her deeply. ‘Immaturity often has that effect.’

  ‘And was I immature?’ It was a startling thought. She ran three homes, she was the mother of a seventeen-year-old daughter and the wife of a prominent man …

  He laughed. ‘Sexually, though God alone knows why. You’ve all the easily stirred passions of the Irish.’

  Her soft lips curved into a smile of utter intimacy. ‘They’ve never been stirred before.’

  He took the glass from her hand. ‘You’re only just beginning to learn.’

  Later, lying together in the darkness, she said, ‘You still think I’m pretty, don’t you? My finding myself hasn’t changed that, has it?’

  Unseen by her, he grinned. ‘Every last trace has vanished,’ he said gravely. ‘You’ll never have that virginal look again.’

  She bit her lip and involuntarily tightened her hold on his hand.

  He laughed softly and rolled across her, winding her hair in his hands. ‘No more immature, girlish prettiness, Nancy. Only beauty.’

  Desire ran through him like a hot, swift current. ‘Incredible, devastating beauty.’

  This time he abandoned the unbearable restraint he had previously exercised. His lovemaking was passionate, savage in its intensity. She heard herself utter cry after cry and marvelled at her own joyous abandon. Her response to him was without inhibition. It was deep and wild and the cool, passionless Nancy Leigh Cameron was dead for ever.

  ‘I never knew it could be like this,’ she said as Ramon poured the last of the champagne into their glasses. She gave a small, self-deprecating smile. ‘Do I sound an awful fool?’

  ‘You sound totally honest. It isn’t a quality I’ve met in a woman before.’

  They sat in silence for a little while, the night sky slowly turning to a pearly grey.

  ‘I’ve never slept with anyone apart from Jack. But then, you know that.’

  He did, and he remained silent. He could quite easily have pointed out to her that her previous feelings of sexual inadequacy were entirely her husband’s fault, but it would be far better if she reached that conclusion herself.

  ‘I remember once, not long after our marriage, I skated around the subject with a woman friend. Loretta had been married twice and was notorious for her lovers. She obviously didn’t object to something that was a complete mystery to me and I thought that talking to her might help me. I could already sense that Jack was becoming dissatisfied with what he called my passivity.’

  Ramon’s face was inscrutable. He remembered Loretta Dettarding clearly. It was ten years ago, and she had been as near to a nymphomaniac as any woman he had ever met.

  ‘She merely patted me on the cheek and said that all women found sex the most frightful bore and that I must do what other women did, and pretend.’

  Ramon’s lips twitched. If Loretta had been pretending then she deserved an Oscar.

  ‘Did you believe her?’

  ‘Yes I did, but I was only eighteen.’ She began to giggle. ‘After I read the details of the Dettarding divorce I wasn’t too sure. Entertaining two men in one bed seemed to be taking pretence to unreasonable limits. Only by then it was too late. Jack had already written me off as absolutely hopeless.’

  She leaned back against the pillows and tucked her hands behind her head. It was a spontaneous gesture that raised her breasts in a way that made Ramon catch his breath.

  ‘It was only a month after Verity was born. A week after our first wedding anniversary. Jack wasn’t a politician then. He was still heading the family bank in New York. Jack’s valet had emptied the pockets of one of his suits and had left the contents on a bedside table. Whether intentionally or not, I never knew. I didn’t mean to look but a lipstick mark on the back of an envelope is a fairly unsubtle way of sealing it. She was one of my friends. We had dined with them the evening before.’ Some of the old pain had returned to her voice.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it. When I showed him the letter it was even worse.’ She was silent for a few minutes, remembering. ‘In my naivety I thought he would be as shattered as I was. That he would be terrible distressed and ashamed. I suppose I saw myself as being noble and forgiving him and carrying on with life a little older and a little wiser. Only it wasn’t like that.’

  The room was ethereal in the light of early dawn.

  ‘He was annoyed at being found out, and he never even suggested terminating the affair. In the end my tears gave way to bewilderment and then to anger. I remember shouting in utter incomprehension that I didn’t sleep with other men.’ She smiled sadly.

  ‘I didn’t understand the look he gave me, but I do now: he said I was frigid.’

  She leaned close against Ramon’s chest, his arm protectively around her.

  ‘And so it went on. One affair following another. Always discreetly, of course. Jack already knew what he wanted and he was a senator by 1925.’

  ‘And what did you do?’ His deep voice was compassionate.

  She shrugged imperceptibly. ‘Very little. I did pluck up the courage to speak to my doctor but that was an utter failure.’

  Some humour had returned. She put her arms around his naked chest, savouring his warmth.

  ‘He told me there was no such thing as frigidity. That it was a new-fangled idea he had no time for. He said I’d been brought up to be a lady and that I was a lady and he couldn’t understand why I should want to be anything else.’ She giggled. ‘He said that Rudolph Valentino had a lot to answer for and that I’d nothing to worry about where Jack was concerned; that he was too discreet to allow his “flings”, as he called them, to ruin his public life. I didn’t give a damn about his public life; it was his private one that was putting me through hell. After Loretta and the doctor I’d run out of sources of help. I began to spend more and more time at the Cape with Verity. Jack drove up from Washington a couple of times a month and I was always in attendance at any public functions. We were held up as a shining example of happy American family life. So much so that I almost believed it myself. After all, we never quarrelled or suffered any of the domestic dramas that so many of our friends experienced. Jack had his life and I had mine.’

  ‘Living alone with a child, like a widow or an unmarried mother?’ he said, his voice betraying the anger he felt.

  She laughed throatily. ‘You make it sound as if I was scrubbing floors. I was living in the greatest of luxury, flying to Paris twice a year for the Collections, taking Verity to Cap d’Antibes, playing hostess to President Coolidge.’

  ‘And sleeping alone.’

  ‘President Coolidge never propositioned me,’ she said and he laughed as he pulled her down against him.

  ‘And in between Paris and the Riviera and Calvin Coolidge?’

  ‘Things you’ve never heard of.’ She slid her hands down over the strong smooth curve of his spine. ‘Strawberry festivals and clambakes; blueberry picnics and summer theatres; swimming galas and yachting regattas; games of softball, quilting pageants …’

  ‘Dear God,’ Ramon said, with devout fervour. ‘Is that what having a child entails?’

  ‘Not for anyone else that I know,’ Nancy said with candour. ‘They have nannies, private tutors and finishing schools. By the time they make their offsprings’acquaintance, they have generally reached a civilized eighteen or nineteen.’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it,’ Ramon said, and proceeded to make love to her again as the sun rose above the glittering shafts of the skyscrapers.

  As the city hummed into life below them,
they slept: Nancy protectively curled in Ramon’s arms. Once she stirred and he kissed the pulse beating in her throat.

  ‘I love you,’ she murmured, and drifted back into sleep as he cupped her breasts in his hands.

  It was midday before they dressed. Ramon’s manservant had left them a lunch of paté de foie gras and cold meats and a chilled bottle of Sauterne.

  ‘Come away with me,’ he said. ‘I’ve a home in Acapulco and one in Tobago.’

  ‘And Portugal?’

  ‘A family mausoleum.’ He grinned. ‘And Madeira is now Zia’s province. I’m barred from it until I change my ways and marry a suitable woman. Come to the Caribbean with me, Nancy.’

  Unbeknown to her, it was the first time he had ever asked for anything.

  She shook her head. Her ease and vulnerability had gone. The gentleness remained but was tempered with a new-found self-assurance.

  ‘Not yet. I have things to do. Jack to see. Most of all, I want to be on my own to think.’

  ‘And you can’t think with me?’

  She laughed. ‘No. I can only think about you.’

  He kissed her and her fingertips touched his cheekbones wonderingly. Leaving him, even if only for a little while, would be the hardest thing she had ever done. ‘I’m going back to the Cape. Today.’

  ‘When you return it will be to me.’ It was a statement of fact.

  She did not reply but said only, ‘I love you,’ as he slipped her fur around her shoulders.

  The mid-morning air was crisp and sharp. She refused to let him drive her home and insisted that his chauffeur did so. New York was a hotbed of gossip and she had no desire for it to tarnish their relationship. They would be like lambs to the slaughter when the story did break. Until then she wanted to hug the knowledge to herself. She had no wish to have it desecrated by innuendo and rumour.