The mood of quiet contemplation was shattered. “No. Never.” Kitty looked extremely pissed off.
“No. Well, I suppose I didn’t. It was a bit of a sore point with the family.”
“We are your family, Martin,” she told him, her violet eyes flashing. “We three in this room.” She looked to me for support as I prayed for the chintz sofa to swallow me up. “And as we knew nothing of this romance, how could it be a sore point with us?”
Poor Martin realized then what a tight corner he was in. Aunt Camilla’s funeral file was set aside along with Kitty’s glasses. He was holding a shovel and standing in a hole and he knew it. He had that look about him of a man who has suddenly realized he doesn’t have the ability to climb out on his own. He looked at me to throw him a rope, but Kitty’s accusatory gaze was tightly fixed. She was twitching now, like a tiger flexing its muscles before thrusting itself on its prey.
Martin coughed before beginning his explanation. “Quite. Well, there was talk of some fellow. Oliver, I think he was called. I don’t think old Cam ever really recovered.” He pressed his thumbs to the bridge of his nose as if he had a headache. “There was even talk of marriage, I believe, but no formal announcement was ever made. I was only a young lad, four or five, maybe even younger, when I first heard my father mention it. I might have got it wrong, I suppose,” he suggested hopefully.
“And you never mentioned her broken nuptials to me, your own wife, because…?” I could tell by her controlled tone that Kitty was wildly annoyed. I thought of all the times she had bemoaned my aunt’s spinster status, frequently comparing me to her, berating me in front of her, holding her up as an example of what happens to those that lead the unromantic life. I think Kitty was thinking the same thing. My mother can be insensitive but she doesn’t set out to be. I am certain of that. Now she was feeling that she’d misjudged Camilla and she was blaming Martin.
My father blustered, “I don’t know that I felt certain of my facts. As I said, I heard rumors, whispers in the nursery. It had all happened long before I was born, even. Once I saw a photograph when I was visiting her as a boy. It’s not here now, I noticed that as soon as we arrived. It used to sit on her bedside. His name was Oliver, I only know that because it was written on the photograph. I remember reading it out loud. She became very cross. I asked my father about it but he wasn’t disposed to discuss the issue. Bit of a dipso by all accounts. Couldn’t say no to a drink. We might have a hunt round here for the photograph,” he suggested, as if finding the snapshot of Oliver might mitigate his crime.
Kitty interrupted again but I wasn’t paying attention. Besides, I knew all the signs…there was a row brewing and I was only in the way, so I let myself out, as I’d let myself out a thousand times as a child. They wouldn’t even notice I was gone. I set off across the village green. There was a bandstand in the middle where I took a seat and wished I smoked. On the chair graffitied with declarations of teenage love, I looked up at the stars in the clear night sky, waiting peacefully for Camilla to join them.
She’d always called Richard Oliver, and because I don’t smoke and because I was cold and feeling alone, I called his mobile.
He rejected me.
twelve
It was not uncommon for men and women of Henrietta’s class to take lovers after marriage. Henrietta and her husband were unexceptional in this way; both had affairs, always conducted with the utmost discretion.
Henrietta’s husband, Charles, had numerous lovers, though he always claimed he loved none as he loved his darling Hen. Apart from Edward, Henrietta had very few lovers, and one is left wondering whether she took them to bed for her own pleasure or for Edward’s pain. Certainly the letters she wrote to her sister makes it apparent that while she was discreet about her affairs where her husband and the public were concerned, conversely she made certain she informed Edward of her every affair, sometimes in lurid detail.
Secret Passage to the Past:
A Biography of Lady Henrietta Posche
By Michael Carpendum
“I was with Sally when you called,” Richard whispered when he called me back the next evening as I was traveling back to London.
“Is she with you now?” I asked, terrified he’d say yes but knowing he wouldn’t, even if she were. I needed to talk about my aunt’s death, and the person I needed to talk to was the man who had promised to love me through sickness and health, better and worse.
He sounded furtive as he replied. “No, I’m at a friend’s dinner party. I can’t talk now.”
I didn’t mention anything about the lack of voices in the background because he’d probably have an excuse for that, or worse, accuse me of prying, so instead I asked if I could drop in on him later.
“Not tonight, I’ve got a big day tomorrow,” he explained.
I closed my eyes and rallied myself to save what little dignity I had and say, “Okay then, goodbye.” I definitely wasn’t going to plead. I never plead. “Only, I really need to see you,” I pleaded (there was even a little whiney note on the end). “That is, it would be lovely to see you,” I added brightly, in my best CCC style.
“Tell you what, I’ll come to yours on the way home from work tomorrow, around six-thirty?” He made it sound as if he was doing me a huge favor. He didn’t at all sound desperate to see me.
But I said yes anyway, even though an irritating voice in my head was yelling no. It was the irritating voice of Lola the professional, the voice of Lola, senior events manager, who had organized an event at the club that was due to kick off at six-thirty. It was one of my outside events—that is, outside my club duties—but the clients had paid to hold the party at Posh House. This meant I received a fee from the client and a small fee from Posh House.
It wasn’t a particularly grand affair, but it was a prestigious client I wanted to impress. The Darague Chain, who owned some of the trendiest five-star resorts in the world, were launching a new one in Jamaica that they wanted their exclusive London client list to know about. Although it wasn’t too large, I knew from experience that these sorts of events were particularly challenging as they mixed alcohol and canapés with speeches and dull presentations.
After a few glasses of wine and a half hour spent listening to boring speeches, the guests would inevitably peel off slowly, like a dwindling herd of buffalo, and it was my job to make sure they didn’t stampede. I would normally arrive early at these sorts of events because nonmembers attending functions at the club had an unnerving knack for creating bad feeling amongst the members.
As it was one of my own events, I couldn’t call in sick, so I hazarded (something I never do!) that as long as I asked one of the reception managers to keep an eye on things for the first hour, I’d be there by the second hour. The reliable Carl was duty manager that evening and Charlie wasn’t due to drop in that night, so I should be safe. I spoke to Carl the next morning before going to sleep and he assured me it would all be fine. I told him I owed him one. Sorted.
Richard didn’t arrive until seven-thirty. We had a long slow kiss at the door. Jean was watching the news. We were the perfect family. I told him about Aunt Camilla and he was really kind, sitting me on his lap and stroking my hair. Jean hippity-hopped over for a sniff and then hopped over to her little litter hutch. “Isn’t she a good rabbit?” I remarked.
“Who?”
“Jean, our rabbit,” I said, pointing to her in case he confused her with his other rabbits.
He scratched his head as he watched her bustling about the room. “Sorry, I keep forgetting.”
“That’s horrible,” I scolded, giving him a playful smack. “Don’t you remember you bought her for me on our first-month anniversary?”
“’Course I do, Lolls, I was just teasing. I said close your eyes, hold out your hands and say rabbit.”
“She was so tiny then.”
“They were good times,” he agreed. “But…”
I didn’t want to hear the word but. I wanted to put my hands over my ears and say, “La,
la, la, I can’t hear you.”
“I told Sally about what happened…you know, with us the other night. Well, I had to, basically, as she caught us at it. And I feel terrible, Lola. The guilt, it’s killing me. I’m sorry, I just can’t do this.”
I interrupted. “I should really be going to work,” I told him in my husky sex-siren voice as I moved my mouth over his. He returned my kiss for a while but then he pushed me away. “I can’t, Lolly. This is wrong.”
“Fine,” I said, climbing off his lap and gathering up my things. I was really late now. “I have to go now anyway, do you want to meet up later?”
He looked like a man in horrible pain. “Lolly, I’m sorry, I’m just confused. I don’t want to hurt Sally. Fuck it, I don’t want to hurt you, but well, we already know we didn’t work out, and well…”
My phone rang. I pushed reject and slipped it in my bag. I was glad of the interruption. I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. I wanted to stop him before he said something I’d regret.
“Lola?” he pleaded, standing up to grab me.
I threw his arm off my shoulder. “I have to go,” I insisted as I went into the bathroom and brushed my hair. Richard was still in the living room, but the flat was so small I could hear his every move. I could almost hear his every breath.
“You can see my position,” he continued. “Sally has just moved in. Before you rang me up that night, I was so certain she was the one, and then…” He put his head in his hands and groaned. His groaning thing was really beginning to get to me.
“As I remember, the night I rang, you were ‘freaked’ by her request to move in!” I reminded him.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he replied. “It’s all fucked up. We can’t go back. Can we?”
I closed my eyes and splashed my face with cold water. La, la, la, I can’t hear you.
“Well, can we?” he asked.
I knew what he wanted me to say, he wanted me to agree that “No, we couldn’t go back.” He wanted me to be the one to set him free. He wanted me to take the blame and make him feel okay. There was nothing left to say apart from the obvious, so I applied my makeup as the phone started up again in my bag.
“Do you want me to get that?” he asked.
“Leave it,” I told him. “It’ll be work. I have to go.”
He put Jean and me in a cab and waved us off as if we were his wife and child off for a big adventure. I checked my miss calls and saw I had four new messages. I was still listening to the panicked pleas of Carl—message three, when I arrived at the club.
“The police are in the back room interviewing Miss Hickory and the two staff who witnessed the assault,” Carl explained as he escorted me through to the bar where the incident had taken place. “I don’t think Miss Hickory wants to press charges, but the police may decide to anyway. She’s very distressed. I had to call Charlie, Lola. Sorry.”
“I know,” I reassured him. “Look, this is totally my problem and I’m sorry to have put you through this.”
Even from my vantage point at the bar doorway I could hear the patrons discussing the fracas. Torna Delz, a D-list celebrity, and her personal trainer had been invited by Darague to the event. Torna and her trainer were more famous for their bad drunken behavior and Torna’s weight problem than anything they actually did. They had recently been the basis of several tabloid exposés.
Predictably, after having far too much to drink at the launch, they’d grown bored with the speeches and made their way into the members’ bar. After a few more drinks, Torna, imagining her boyfriend, Keith, to be eyeing up one of the members—the glamorous author Tabitha Hickory—had thrown her drink over the author and flung a punch, which missed. In an attempt to restrain Torna, Keith accidentally hit poor Tabitha on the ear, knocking out her earring and bruising her lobe. It wasn’t a serious injury but it was my fault.
Charlie tapped me on the shoulder. He was wearing a loose T-shirt and a pair of chinos, his hair was wet. He must have been at the gym. I was so used to seeing him in his owner-of-the-club uniform—i.e., long sleeves—that I was surprised by his tanned athletic upper arms.
“Upstairs,” he ordered.
This was very bad and we both knew it. I knew it because it was my fault, there was no way around that, really, but then once we reached his office I threw my arms around him and cried, “I’m sorry, Charlie, but my aunt just died.”
His body relaxed and his tone softened. “Oh, Lolly, I’m sorry.”
“I’m so upset, I couldn’t come in.”
“Not to worry, my love, sit down and have a cordial.”
Aunt Camilla’s death might not have been the direct reason that I was late, but I found once I started talking to Charlie my misery was real. I poured out all my feelings, all the things I had wanted to tell Richard but hadn’t had a chance to. I sobbed about the story of Aunt Camilla’s death and how close I’d been to her and how she had never married because the man she loved, Oliver, was a dipsomaniac, and how she must have thought Richard was too because she called him Oliver and now she was going to be shot up into the sky in fireworks and she’d arranged the whole fete down to the last detail.
Charlie listened to the story, which came out of me in a torrent of half sentences and lengthy sidetracks. He stroked my back, comforted me and told me all was forgiven. If I was a cat I’d only have eight lives left.
Later, the police asked to speak to Charlie and I waited in his office and tried to compose myself while he went down. As it turned out, Miss Hickory wasn’t going to press charges, her ear was slightly bruised; however, a report of the incident would be filed and no doubt something would appear in the papers. It wasn’t what Charlie wanted for the club but he didn’t say anything further to me about the matter.
After the situation had been dealt with, Charlie and I went down to have dinner in the restaurant. In the secret passage on the way down, I told him what had been going on with Richard and how I still thought I might be in love with him but that he had someone else. Charlie didn’t say much, but in the silences I could hear some of the things I was saying echoing back at me, and I started to feel really stupid.
“Speaking of exes,” Charlie added at one point. “Here come Hamish and Jeremy.” Hamish waved and headed toward us. “I almost forgot to mention, Jeremy asked about you today. Seems he spotted you that night when we were playing secret agents behind the drinks station.”
“Pull up a couple of chairs,” Charlie insisted after the “hellos” and “God, I haven’t seen you for ages” had been dispensed. I began to feel uncomfortable, sitting between my two exes, so I suggested we invite Elizabeth and Clemmie. I was worried that Charlie might mention something about Richard and I knew that Elizabeth would circumvent any attempt to revisit the Richard issue. Clemmie was already on a date, but Elizabeth said she’d see us in five. Then I had this horrible vision of Richard turning up—after all, Jeremy and Hamish were his mates. Oh, I just wanted to die.
Jeremy told me I looked gorgeous, which made me feel a bit better.
I laughed and Charlie told them that we’d had a bit of trouble at the club earlier in the evening, and that I was a bit upset about my aunt’s death. Both Hamish and Jeremy were very sweet.
“Well, you look amazing,” Jeremy insisted, and by the way he smiled at me, I suspected he was flirting. I often think that flirting is the ability to make someone feel as if they’re the only person in the room, which was how Jeremy began to make me feel. That was why I fell for him in the first place. He had the same easy charm as Charlie, so that even the maddest silliest things made you feel that he really got you, the way no one else ever had.
Sadly, this didn’t carry through to the bedroom; sex with Jeremy had always been less than earth-shattering. Hamish was talking to Charlie and as I leaned in to listen, I realized that Jeremy and I were still locked in one another’s gaze. I blushed. I hadn’t meant to stare, I was just in another world, but I knew that the look held significance for Jeremy.
“So how’s the estate?” I asked Hamish, throwing the full force of my attention on him.
“Oh, didn’t you hear, I’m selling up. Stony broke, don’t you know. Not a penny to be made up there. Money just pours out of you like sweat. To tell you the truth, I’m bloody sick of the whole shooting match. If I see another sheep I’ll go mad. No, I’m back in London now, trying to find something to do, living in my old flat on Ladbrook Square. You know it.”
Oh, I knew it. I knew it intimately. Knew every corner. Back in college we’d come to London every chance we got and spent the entire weekend there, in bed.
As if reading my mind, Hamish added, “We used to shag like lunatics in those days. Don’t know where we got the energy.” He put out his cigarette and shook his head, as if remembering a particularly lively shag.
I was so relieved to see Elizabeth walk into the restaurant that I jumped up and waved at her dementedly. But if I thought that would dilute the atmosphere, I was wrong. The first conversation Elizabeth initiated required Hamish telling his whole story again.
Elizabeth laughed as genuinely as she could—I guess to break the tension, which was so palpable it was like a sixth guest.
The whole evening was like that; every time I tried to steer the conversation onto something general, I ended up in a quagmire of memories. Charlie was looking at me significantly, but I had no idea what significance his looks were hoping to convey.
I kept mouthing the word What? but he’d just shake his head, nod at Hamish and Elizabeth and shoot me another unintelligible significant look. At one point I kicked him, but I missed and got Jeremy, who wrapped his leg around mine in a sexual way.
I suppose I’d asked for that.
Then Hamish asked Elizabeth if she’d like to go for a walk around the square with him and she agreed, giving me a look that I couldn’t interpret, and suddenly Charlie’s hints made sense.
“I’ve got to go check on Jean and do a bit of paperwork myself,” Charlie added awkwardly as he fled the table, and suddenly Jeremy and I were left there alone, with the dessert plates being removed. I didn’t know where to look, so I was immensely relieved when Charlie came back, until he said, “I’ll look after Jean tonight if you two want to go off somewhere.” Then Jeremy gave Charlie a wink, which I presumed was some sort of Masonic code the two of them had developed over their long years of friendship. Charlie didn’t wink back, though he looked over at me and smiled a sort of sad smile. Maybe I was becoming an object of pity to him, and if that was the case, I only had myself to blame. I’d behaved ridiculously over Richard, and Charlie knew it. But I was determined that all that was behind me now.
Sex with the Ex Page 12
