The Flower Garden

by Margaret Pemberton

  Reluctantly he let her go. Before he did so, he gripped her shoulders tightly, his eyes sombre.

  ‘Don’t panic or go back to your role as senator’s wife, Nancy. If you do I shall only take you away by force.’

  A smile hovered around the corners of her mouth. ‘Like your grandfather did the Condessa de Gama?’

  ‘I’ve never understood old Leo more. From now on his photograph will have pride of place on my desk.’

  They laughed.

  The chauffeur cleared his throat impatiently as he waited at the Daimler’s door. The freezing cold was striking up into his boots and he had seen too many ladies leave at midday in evening dress to take any special interest.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said, her laughter dying.

  ‘Au revoir,’ he corrected, taking her hand and kissing it, palm upwards. ‘A week on the Cape is long enough for you to think. If you’re not back by next Saturday I shall come for you.’

  Her spine tingled. ‘Yes,’ she said. For a wild impulsive moment she hesitated. She could stay with him. They could leave for Mexico or the Caribbean within hours. They need never be separated again. She thought of the ensuing scandal and Jack and her father. It made no difference. Then she thought of Verity.

  ‘A week,’ she said, and stepped into the Daimler.

  Five minutes later Ramon drove a two-seater Austin Swallow through the maelstrom of New York traffic to the Ritz-Carlton apartment occupied by Mrs Chips O’Shaughnessy.

  ‘How dare you walk in here as if nothing had happened? You leave me waiting nearly two hours! Two bloody hours! And now I’m supposed to forgive you and say it doesn’t matter. Well, I won’t. I never want to see you again in my life! We’re finished! Through! Kaput!’

  All the time she had been spitting out the words she had been pacing the floor like an enraged cat, her eyes flashing, her arms, with their multitudes of bracelets, gesticulating angrily. She caught sight of herself in the mirror and tossed her golden curls. Her bosom heaved in a tight-fitting dress and on the final word she stood arrogantly before him, one hand on her hip, knowing how every line of her body showed to advantage.

  There was a mocking gleam in his eyes and instead of seizing her brutally and making savage love to her as she expected, he merely blew her a kiss.

  ‘As you say, my sweet: finished. Through. Kaput. The European in me prompted me to deliver the news in person, but you have done it for me with far more style and panache.’

  ‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’ Gloria forgot her poise. She had a sudden feeling of anxiety.

  He shrugged. ‘Who knows, my sweet. Acapulco, Tobago …’ He laughed, white teeth gleaming. ‘Paradise.’

  She was at the door before he reached it, her eyes wary. She had seen him in many moods but never one like this. She ran her tongue nervously around carmine-painted lips.

  ‘I’m sorry I was so angry.’ She pouted prettily. ‘Silly me, getting so cross when I’m sure you couldn’t help it.’ She stepped towards him and raised her hands, circling his neck. ‘Little Gloria has missed you dreadfully. Aren’t you going to let her show you how much?’ She pressed herself against him and he clasped her wrists and removed them as if they were something distasteful.

  ‘No. I hate prolonged goodbyes.’ He brushed her out of the way and opened the door.

  ‘You can’t go!’ It was a shriek.

  Ramon noticed how ugly she looked when she was not trying to please. The painted lips were a bloody gash across her face. Her nostrils were pinched and white and her excessively plucked brows made her small eyes even smaller.

  ‘Don’t treat me like one of your little lap dogs, Gloria,’ he said, his voice deceptively soft, ‘or your gullible husband. Our affair, if such a loveless relationship can be described as such, is over. I would prefer it to be an amicable arrangement but I don’t give a damn if it isn’t.’

  ‘It’s that Marinsky whore, isn’t it?’ All self-control had deserted her. She rushed at him with blood-red nails and he seized her wrists so cruelly they nearly snapped.

  ‘Sofka Marinsky is no more of a whore than you are. And she does have one very strong advantage in her favour. She has breeding. Something that none of O’Shaughnessy’s money will buy you.’

  ‘I knew it was her!’

  He flung her away and she went sprawling across the floor.

  ‘As a matter of fact it isn’t. It happens to be someone to whom the word “whore” could never apply in a million years. Which rules out any friends of yours.’

  ‘Wop!’ Gloria screamed, all pretence to gentility deserting her as the door slammed behind him. ‘Dirty, half-breed wop!’ And then she pummelled the floor in a storm of tears and drummed her feet on the lilac carpet until the banker in the suite below rang for room service to complain about the noise.

  Nancy was deeply preoccupied as she bathed and changed and prepared to leave for the Cape. Only when Morris informed her that there had been a Washington telephone call for her did she emerge from her reverie.

  ‘Did my husband leave a message as to when it would be convenient to call him back?’

  Jack’s Washington schedule was notoriously tight and Nancy had no intention of wasting time in trying to contact him if he was in a meeting.

  ‘No, madame. It wasn’t Mr Cameron who phoned. It was Miss Geeson.’

  ‘I see. Did Miss Geeson leave a message?’

  ‘Yes, madame. She wished to tell you that the senator is flying to Chicago tonight and will be out of contact until Friday.’

  ‘Thank you, Morris.’

  Nancy allowed Maria to settle her fur around her shoulders and drew on her gloves. There was a meeting of businessmen in Chicago to discuss the latest Federal plans for increasing employment. It was a matter of more importance than a distraught wife. She had needed him and he had failed her.

  She stepped out into the dazzling light of the snow. Perhaps he had asked Syrie to telephone while they had been in bed together. She could imagine it quite easily. ‘By the way, Syrie. Phone Chambers about the new Appropriation Plan. Stall that idiot from Pennsylvania and tell Nancy I’ll ring her when I’m back from Chicago.’

  No doubt Syrie kept a notepad and pen beside the bed. She was efficient enough to do so. She shivered momentarily and stepped into the Rolls. She had promised herself that she would think of nothing until she reached Hyannis. Not Jack. Not Dr Lorrimer. Not even Ramon.

  Collins tucked a sealskin-lined rug around her knees. It was almost impossible not to think of Ramon. She could feel his presence as if he were in the Rolls with her. She closed her eyes as they sped under the Lincoln Tunnel. She was in love. Totally, utterly and irrevocably in love. In the early years she had believed herself to be in love with Jack. Now she knew she never had been. He had never sent her senses reeling or initiated her into an understanding of her own passionate nature. In her ignorance she had thought herself frigid. If she never slept with another man again, she would know it was not true. She was grateful to Ramon and she liked him as well as loved him. She liked watching him move; she liked laughing with him; listening to him; talking to him. He had asked her to go away with him and she knew that she would. She had only a few months of life left and she was not going to waste them sitting in her lonely New York mansion waiting for Jack to call. Hyannis would be no different. It was the place she instinctively fled to because it was the place she regarded as home. It was where she had spent the major part of her life bringing up Verity. But Verity was thousands of miles away now and no longer needed her. All that Hyannis could now offer was long walks on the beach and lonely rounds of golf on the Coonamessett links. She would go with Ramon wherever he asked her, but first she would set her affairs in order. She had made no will and she was a wealthy woman. From her grandfather she had inherited investments in railroads, banking, tobacco and even cotton. Patrick O’Shaughnessy may have made his money by building up a food empire, but he had distributed the profits in a whole range of other ventures. With her
canny father as adviser, Nancy had never gambled on margin. The Wall Street crash had left her virtually unscathed. The first thing she would do when she reached Hyannis was to summon her financial advisers and lawyers from Boston and settle her affairs. Jack and his family had more than enough money of their own. The noughts after Mr Cameron Senior’s estimated wealth left even Nancy blinking. Verity was the one who needed the bulwark of her money. Verity and her titled husband living in an unstable Europe.

  Nancy had listened to her son-in-law’s effusive admiration of the German Chancellor and had not been impressed. She had heard different stories from Rosa Goldstein, her dressmaker. Rosa was Jewish and no longer visited her homeland. None of Dieter’s passionate avowals that the Treaty of Versailles had treated Germany shamefully and that the Chancellor was right to adopt conscription in defiance of it, could make Nancy forget her friend’s face when she had returned from Berlin only months earlier.

  ‘It is no longer possible to be a Jew in Germany,’ she had said sadly. ‘At the last dinner party I attended one of the guests said that the heads of all leading Jews should be stuck on telegraph poles the length and breadth of the country.’ She had shrugged. ‘I hated myself because I said nothing. I did not say that I was Jewish. I tried to ease my conscience by telling myself that I had no wish to cause embarrassment to my host, but that was not the reason. I am a coward, and Germany is no place for a Jew to be a coward.’

  Nancy had taxed Dieter with Rosa’s allegations and he had laughed and said that her friend was reacting hysterically to Jewish propaganda. The Chancellor would make Germany great again and families like his own, who had suffered defeat and humiliation in the last war, would once more regain their dignity and be strong.

  For Verity’s sake Nancy hoped that he was right. Jack had cupped his after-dinner Grand Marnier in his hand and said blandly that Jews were notoriously paranoid. If Hitler was feverishly rearming Germany and filling the minds of his countrymen with nationalistic nonsense, it was none of their concern. Verity could return to America at a moment’s notice. Let Great Britain do the worrying. Her father had been angry and had called his son-in-law a fool. Baldwin, he had said, was short-sighted and an appeaser. Pouring oil on troubled waters was not the right action to pursue when the waters were troubled by a man as vitriolic as the German Chancellor.

  Nancy had often wondered about the alliance between her father and her husband. Privately they fell out whenever they met, but publicly Jack Cameron had the Mayor of Boston’s wholehearted support. She supposed her father would have given it to any member of the family who had a chance of becoming president.

  They were in Connecticut and travelling at a sedate pace towards Bridgeport. She remembered the way Ramon had driven the Daimler and suppressed a smile. There was nothing cautious in Ramon’s nature.

  The slim gold watch on her wrist showed her it was just after two o’clock. Twenty-four hours since she had stood in Dr Lorrimer’s office and been dealt the most devastating blow of her life. Bridgeport came and went and Nancy stared musingly out of the windows at the rolling countryside. None of her initial reactions remained. They had been supplanted by quite different thoughts and feelings. On her semi-conscious trek through the snow-filled streets of downtown Manhattan there had been times when she had thought she was losing her mind. She had been faced with death without any preparation, and the prospect of falling headlong into that dark void, of the uprooting and rending apart of her body and spirit, had filled her with a fear that had been total. Hard on its heels had come the realization that she was to die without ever having really lived. That had been the harshest truth of all. Now everything was changed. She was in love and she was loved, and love had transformed her. Unbidden, the scripture saying: ‘Perfect love casteth out fear’ came into her mind. She was no longer frightened. Death would come when it would come, as it would if she had been perfectly healthy and had stepped off a sidewalk and under the wheels of a tram.

  There were people of her acquaintance who would die suddenly and tragically long before she did. Three of her friends and a cousin had died in the last year. A yachting tragedy in one case; a motor crash in another. A liver rotted by alcohol had killed off Oonagh Manning at twenty-six, and an overdose of sleeping tablets had been Lola Montgomery’s last cry for help. The frenetic pace of their lives was conducive to early death. Lola and Oonagh had died unprepared.

  It had never been Lola’s intention to succeed at suicide. She had lain on her scented lace pillows, seductively posed in a thigh splitting negligée, confident of being found. Only she had not reckoned on the vagaries of her lover. He had promised to come for her at six o’clock and had been sidetracked at the Waldorf by friends. As Lola slipped peacefully into the eternities, he was drinking Gin-Slings and arranging a game of baccarat with Teddy Stuyvesant.

  She was luckier. She had been given the chance to evaluate her life and it had been shown to be sadly lacking. She had lived out the roles she had been given – dutiful daughter, faithful wife – and they had brought no deep happiness. Openly embarking on an affair with Ramon Sanford was something she would never have had the courage to do before. Years of remembering who she was would have seen to that. They crossed into the Cape and, on the right, Wequaquet Lake shimmered beneath a coating of ice. Whoever she had been before, it was not the person she was now.

  She would do nothing intentionally to hurt anybody else. Jack’s horrified reaction when she told him she was leaving him would be precipitated by fear for the future of his career, nothing else. Besides, she already had a scheme in the back of her mind whereby his career would not be harmed. She had plenty of time to think it out in full. A whole week. In that time she would also speak to her father. He could hardly be critical of her. His marriage to Gloria could quite easily have severed all contact between them. Certainly, Gloria had done her best to see that it did so. Only Nancy’s basic good sense had enabled her to forgive Chips for choosing as a second wife a girl twelve years her junior and forty-six years his, and one who couldn’t possibly give a damn about him: only his money.

  There were thick trees on either side of the narrow road and then the white clapboard houses of Hyannis. A few miles further on the Rolls turned down the drive that led to Ocean View, and for the first time since Verity’s marriage Nancy did not feel a sense of loss as the large, rambling house came into view.

  It stood high and lonely on the edge of the dunes, couch-grass reaching up to the very edge of the carefully tended lawns. It was the gardener’s constant request that a wall be built, separating his province from the encroaching beach. Nancy would not hear of it. The way the house merged into the desolate landscape was the reason it had so attracted her; she loved the heaving vastness of the Atlantic; the cries of the seabirds as they wheeled above her head on her daily walks along the shoreline. She stepped out of the warmth of the Rolls and into the bitter wind blowing in off the sea.

  Mrs Ambrosil, her housekeeper, stood at the porch to meet her. ‘I hope you had an enjoyable stay in New York, madame.’

  The Ford containing Maria and Morris drew up smoothly behind the Rolls.

  ‘I had a very enjoyable stay, thank you,’ Nancy said, a secret smile curving her lips as her fur was removed and she stepped towards the glorious heat of a log fire. ‘And now I have some telephone calls to make.’

  She kicked off her shoes and reached for her telephone book. First her lawyer and accountant; then Jack and her father. The next few days were going to be busy.

  Chapter Four

  Chips O’Shaughnessy sat in the Georgian grandeur of his Beacon Hill dining room and surveyed the array of newspapers littering his breakfast table.

  A local paper, not known for its sympathy for the mayor, had given prominence to the obituary of two septuagenarians. The next column featured an article on Mayor O’Shaughnessy’s decision to run for re-election and wrongly gave his age as seventy, not sixty-nine. The allusion was clear. ‘O’Shaughnessy shakes them again’was th
e headline in a paper more favourably disposed towards him. ‘No retirement for Boston’s ebullient mayor’ it continued. The accompanying photograph was one of Chips and Gloria attending a Boston Symphony concert. Chips grinned. His jaunty figure didn’t look a day over fifty and the sight of Gloria would more than dispel any attempt to depict him as an old man on the border of senility. No old man would be able to keep a man like Gloria happy. That was obvious to the meanest intelligence.

  The paragraphs in the The Daily Globe and The New York Times did not give the same pleasure. One read simply that Mrs Gloria O’Shaughnessy had attended Mrs Astor’s fancy dress ball in the company of Mr and Mrs Haverstock, Commodore Stuyvesant, Nina Gradzinka and the Russian conductor Felix Zapolski. There was no inference as to who Gloria’s escort had been. The Tribune carried a photograph of the event. Gloria was absent from the throng of partygoers entering the Astor mansion. Other faces were familiar. Chips took his black fountain pen and ringed one particular face in heavy black ink. The Globe carried a list of people who had attended Sybil Nawn’s exclusive birthday party at the Ritz. Among the list of names was that of Gloria O’Shaughnessy. That was to be expected. Chips had not only known that she was going, but had insisted that she do so. Howard Nawn contributed heavily to Democratic Party funds. What caused his shrewd blue eyes to glimmer brilliantly was another name further down on the guest list. This time there was no accompanying photograph. Simply the statement that Ramon Sanford had escorted Princess Marinsky and that the couple were shortly expected to announce their engagement.

  Chips snorted in derision. There was as little chance of a Sanford being harnessed as there was of a blooded stallion.