Katherine rushed at him. “Is Nicky all right? Is he okay?”
“Yes, he’s fine. No bruising, no soreness, nothing. But what about you? What’s that on your arm?”
“My very first riding injury,” she told him, holding out her cast with some pride. “Jordy says every good rider has at least one broken wrist in her career.”
“Oh, is that what Jordy says?” John asked, appearing in the doorway.
He had exchanged his white dress shirt for a ratty old sweatshirt and his suit pants for jeans, but he still looked tired. It occurred to me that seeing his daughters in the hospital must have been even more distressing for him, having watched his wife die in childbirth.
The vet heaved himself up and shook hands with John on his way out.
“Well,” said John, taking a scone and biting into it. I watched, wondering how he managed to avoid crumbs; my own shirt would be liberally speckled with the flaky morsels.
“Well,” he said again, carefully not looking at me, “all’s well that ends well.”
“Is that an apology, Lord Grey?”
“Why on earth would I need to apologize, Lady Grey?”
Katherine and Doris eyed us and exchanged glances. “Here they go again,” said Katherine.
“For yelling at me and blaming me,” I said.
“My dear girl, as I recall, you were only too eager to heap blame upon yourself, while—”
“And you were only too eager to—”
John held out his hand, interrupting me. “Peace, Lady Grey?”
It was an apology of sorts. I thought about his tense, strained face and his terror upon seeing two of his daughters lying in hospital beds.
I took his hand. “Peace.”
Chapter 39
THE NEXT MORNING, after another sleepless night—I kept seeing Katherine’s bleeding face and hearing Mary’s gasps for breath in my dreams—I called my aerobics friend Meggie and asked her to meet me for coffee.
She settled herself into the comfortable armchair in our village’s teashop and regarded me curiously. “What’s the emergency? Aside from the visits to casualty.”
“How did you hear about that?”
“Are you kidding? Lady Katherine and Lady Mary Grey both rushed to hospital in the same day? Everyone heard about that.”
The village grapevine seemed to be silent on the topic of the visits to the headmasters’ offices, at least.
“I don’t know what to think about John,” I said. “I just don’t know what to do.”
“What is there to think?” she asked in surprise. “He was quite sweet at the wedding. What are you talking about?”
I thought of his white anger the day before. His non-apology apology. My own guilt.
“I wasn’t watching Katherine carefully enough when she was riding, and I shouldn’t have left Mary alone with Doris when she was so upset, and . . . Jane and Henry got into some trouble, too.”
“And all of that’s your fault?” Meggie inquired. She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin and picked up her scone.
“Yes. At least John thought it was my fault. At first, anyway.”
“Kids have accidents all the time.”
“The perfect Pamela’s kids never have accidents.”
“That’s because she never lets them do anything! Come on, Jordy, you’re being ridiculous. You know perfectly well that kids fall off horses and lose their inhalers and get into trouble. How many times did you fall off your horse?”
“Hundreds,” I admitted.
“Well, then?”
But I couldn’t be consoled. In my heart, I knew that I had failed the children, who depended on me to care for them and keep them safe. In some important sense—some very, very important sense—they were my children. And I had failed in the most important job of any mother: keeping my children safe.
My self-imposed deadline of summer for a first draft of my memoir was fast approaching, so in a mood of self-flagellation, I set myself back to work on the book. I was slogging through Chapter Three, on front-running and other abuses in securities trading, and forcing myself to write five pages a day. Surely I could do at least one thing right! Pamela was busy doing battle with Lady Olivia over preparations for the gala, the aerobics ladies were busy with their own families as summer approached, and I had formed no other close friendships with women in the village. I would devote myself to my work and my children. Five pages a day, no matter how boring.
But I was coming to realize that from a distance, Wall Street just wasn’t that interesting. I had loved the excitement and thrill of the high-octane trading room—betting billions and making millions in one nanosecond—but now, removed from the intoxicating, heady thrill, I saw that derivatives trading was deadly boring.
And I suspected that John was right: All we did was push paper money around. What was the value in that?
I hadn’t logged on to www.hedgefundtoday.com in months.
John stayed home for the next week, and we were coolly civil in front of the children. I hadn’t forgiven myself for the Day from Hell, and hoping for some absolution, I asked John if he wanted to discuss it. He replied, aghast, “Good God, no! I just want to forget it.”
Katherine’s cast was covered in Sharpie signatures of all colors, and she flourished it jauntily as she scampered from school to games to friends’ houses. Mary had recovered well and was back to her running regimen with the track coach, Henry had become a school hero, and Jane refused to speak of the headmaster’s office.
So the children were fine—as John had said in his awkward attempt at an apology, all’s well that ends well. One day I wandered into his office after dropping everyone off at school and discovered him stretched out on the huge leather couch with the loudly purring Minou on his chest. He was stroking the kitten gently, his long, skilled fingers rubbing under her chin and caressing her soft stomach as she rolled over in an ecstasy of delight. I knew just how she felt.
John sat up hastily when I came in, almost as discomfited as when the children had found us in bed. But he was careful not to dislodge the kitten, who clung to his sweater and butted her head against his hand to demand more caresses.
I gazed at him, feeling a rush of heat from my head to my very core. “I thought you hated cats,” I said a little breathlessly.
“I do.”
“All evidence to the contrary,” I pointed out, my voice unsteady. I had never wanted anyone so much in my life.
I drifted toward him, and Minou, sensing a competitor for John’s affections, arched her back, spat, and sailed out the open window into the muddy meadow beyond.
My eyes met John’s, and his narrowed with speculation and interest as he took in the look on my face. “Lady Grey,” he said. “Do you want to be petted, too?”
I quickened my steps and flung myself onto his lap, straddling him and sliding my arms around his neck.
“That’s what I thought,” he said with some satisfaction, his arms drawing me close and hard.
I moved against him, and he murmured with pleasure.
“Jesus, Jordy,” he said, his breathing ragged and uneven, “I’ll pet the bloody cats every day if this is my reward . . .”
Urgently, I kissed him, cutting off his words and capturing his mouth with mine.
— – — – —
As we lay together afterward, I said to him, “Henry looks just like you when he has that mischievous sparkle in his eyes. Have you ever noticed?”
John shifted uncomfortably. “As I’m sure you’ve heard in town,” he said quietly, “I don’t know if Henry is my biological son or not. It seems unlikely, given that Aline spent most of the year preceding his birth in France. So, no, I’ve never seen any resemblance.”
“There are ways of finding out, you know,” I suggested tentatively.
He stared at me. �
�And why on earth would I want to do that? It couldn’t matter less. He is my son.”
That was true. Henry was his son in every way that mattered.
“You know,” I said aloud, “if that boy doesn’t carry your genes, then I’m the Mad Hatter. He talks like you, thinks like you, has the same expressions as you . . .”
“Oh, that’s just because he copies me.”
“No,” I said, suddenly sure.
John shrugged. “It couldn’t matter less,” he said again.
I had never liked him more.
— – — – —
The following night, we went to a dinner party at Lady Pamela’s house. The word “house” was a misnomer; her country manor was almost as big as Bradgate Hall, with about fifteen bedrooms and ten formal rooms and three kitchens. It was very formally decorated, unlike Bradgate Hall, in the manner of a gilt-edged mini-Versailles with ornate, ancient mirrors and hangings on the walls and elegant silken chairs and sofas. I found it hideously uncomfortable.
Perhaps John agreed; as we swept in through the grand double doors and a butler materialized to take our wraps, he muttered to me out of the side of his mouth, “Please plan to develop a headache as soon as pudding has been served.” I barely had time to nod in agreement before Lady Pamela descended.
Our fellow guests were other wealthy, titled residents of the county, as well as a group of Londoners staying in the area for a holiday weekend. There were eighteen of us at table, and all seemed to know each other well.
“Heard your gel took a spill off her horse,” one middle-aged gent with huge, swooping mustaches boomed down the table at John.
“Yes, she broke her wrist.”
A woman volunteered, “Broke my wrist half a dozen times! Get her right back on the horse again, that’s what I say.”
Heads nodded in agreement.
John glanced at me; we had been arguing over the topic just that morning. I wanted Katherine back on Nicky immediately, and he wanted her back on Nicky never.
Pamela murmured, “Perhaps she should take proper riding lessons? I don’t mean to criticize, Jordy, but surely with a qualified instructor—”
Unexpectedly, John interrupted. “Jordy is a champion rider. She was top three at U.S. Nationals two years in a row.”
I looked at him in grateful surprise. He refused to catch my eye.
Pamela’s husband, Hugo, was seated to my left and took over the conversation. “What about those tax reforms, eh? Are you going to redistribute all our wealth to the poor and needy, John?”
“Did you see that editorial in The Guardian?” chimed in a youngish woman. I knew her; she was Pamela’s best friend, Lady Isabel Cowther, a very yummy mummy in skintight black pants and a clinging silk blouse. She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety-five pounds soaking wet. “Why, if the prime minister listens to them, we’ll all be in the gutter, and they will be swanning it up in our houses.”
I listened, bemused. My mother and her friends were liberal Democrats by default (what else could one be on the Upper West Side?), and Kath and Charlotte were somewhat to the left of Che Guevara. This was a new take on things for me.
John said, “I can assure you that the prime minister does not take his marching orders from the editorial board of The Guardian.”
“My brother will ensure that none of us ends up in the gutter,” Pamela put in.
The conversation swung around to foreign affairs (quelle horreur! Why did we ever follow the Americans to Iraq and Afghanistan?), and I squirmed. Lady Isabel turned to me and demanded to know how we could have reelected Barack Obama after his disastrous first term, and I mumbled something noncommittal. My aunts had attended every pro-Obama rally in the Northeast.
“You don’t have much of a Noo Yawk accent,” said Lady Isabel to me, exaggerating so that she sounded like a gangster from the depths of 1950s Brooklyn.
Annoyed, I tried for amusement. “We don’t really sound like that,” I said lightly.
“Oh? That’s how Noo Yawkers sound in the movies,” she brayed.
I forced a smile.
“My husband and I watched a documentary on gangs in Chicago last week,” put in an older lady. “America is such a terrifying place! I should be frightened to set foot there.”
“So many guns,” murmured her husband.
“Frightful,” agreed someone else.
“I have come to believe that Americans are simply a violent people. Perhaps that’s why they waged such a bloody revolution against the Crown,” Lady Isabel’s husband announced.
Heads nodded all around the table.
“How many guns do you own?” the older lady asked me.
“None. I don’t know anyone who owns a gun.”
John smiled mischievously. “Yes, you do.”
I gaped at him. “Do you keep a gun in the house?”
He started to answer, but Pamela patted his hand. “That’s different; John has hunted all his life, like the rest of us.”
“Unlike Americans, we are not in the habit of putting machine guns in the hands of four-year-olds,” said another blond, stick-thin yummy mummy.
“Or stuffing them full of Big Macs and giant sugary drinks.”
“Or putting them in stripper costumes and parading them down runways.”
“Or invading every nation that annoys us.”
Everyone at the table was having a perfectly marvelous time, I realized. Except me.
“Honestly”—a woman turned to me—“you must be grateful to be raising your children here and not in New York!”
Indignant, I opened my mouth but then closed it again. Was she right?
Not in the wildly far-fetched descriptions of Americana (although visions of Duck Dynasty, Toddlers in Tiaras, and Real Housewives of Long Island floated uneasily in my brain).
But . . . I was glad to be raising “my children” here.
John asked, “Have we done with bashing America, then? What shall we discuss next? Religion? Politics? Sex?”
“Oh, I wish!” exclaimed the blonde, and everyone laughed.
Lady Pamela suggested, “Shall we adjourn to the drawing room for our coffee?”
Gratefully, I got up so fast that I almost tipped my chair over backward. I could feel that headache developing.
Chapter 40
JANUARY WORE ON into February, and the weather became, as the dinner party ladies would have put it, perfectly frightful. Wistfully, I remembered my teenage winters in Florida and summers in Southampton, where I competed in high-prestige horse shows on my way to the Nationals. I commuted from Manhattan to Palm Beach almost every weekend from January through March for shows, leaving the icy gray winters of the city for the sun-splashed Florida coast.
John remained in London for long stretches, citing the jam-packed parliamentary agenda and snow-covered roads, but the distance between us seemed to be emotional as well as physical. He was fond of me, I was pretty sure of that, but seemed to have no interest in deepening the relationship, in turning our sham “marriage” into a real marriage.
Of course, neither did I.
Only a few events broke the monotony of the dreary Cotswolds winter. I had coffee with the aerobics ladies every Monday morning, and they regaled me with stories, surely apocryphal, about the jousts between Lady Pamela and Lady Olivia over the planning for the gala. Meggie and the others were my source of normality and sanity in this strange new world; I clung to our coffees like a dying man to a raft. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I gave Katherine riding lessons after school. Since the fall, she really was concentrating much more on her riding, and I had hopes of making her into a real rider someday. Henry played indoor football on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and Mary ran on the indoor track three days a week with her inhaler close at hand.
One gray, misty morning, Jane crept into my room just after dawn wi
th a shamed look on her face. “Jordy,” she whispered.
I propped myself up on an elbow and forced my bleary eyes to focus. “What’s the matter? Are you all right?”
“Jordy, I think I got my period.”
“Oh!” Enormously relieved, I sat up and smiled at her. “Well, it’s no big deal. I have some pads in my bathroom.” (Motheringteenagegirls.com had advised me to take this precaution.)
She didn’t look reassured. “Doesn’t this mean I can get pregnant now?”
“Yes, but you have to have sex first.” If Jane was sexually active, then I was the queen mother.
“I know that, but getting pregnant seems so scary. I don’t ever want to have a baby.”
“Jane, sweetheart, you are a very long way from getting pregnant.” I thought of her mother’s death in childbirth and softened my tone.
She sat down on my bed and looked at me seriously. “Do you think that Lady Jane Grey was scared? Having her baby when she was a prisoner in the Tower?”
“We don’t know for sure there was a baby,” I reminded her.
“But still . . .”
But still. For the first time, I wondered about the fifteen-year-old girl—just a year older than my Jane—alone with a few uncaring servants and rough guards in the cold, dank Tower. Had her fears mounted as she helplessly watched her belly swelling, knowing that the baby’s father was already dead, executed after his father’s futile rebellion? Had she felt despair at knowing that she wouldn’t be there to protect her baby from the menacing forces that lay in wait beyond the Tower walls? At knowing that her execution would part them soon after the birth, assuming she lived through the ordeal?
Dear Lord, I hoped that her faith had carried her through.
I wondered how I would feel if I were taken away from these children, who weren’t even my own. I put my hand over Jane’s and squeezed it gently. “There are lots of ways to become a mother,” I told her quietly. “You don’t ever have to get pregnant. My best friend’s little sister was adopted, and she was absolutely adorable.”
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