AN Outrageous Affair

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘Unfair,’ said Piers. ‘It got wonderful notices, the public simply didn’t like it.’

  His eyes were uneasy suddenly, even as he smiled: Magnus asked him what he thought they hadn’t liked about it.

  ‘Oh – chemistry,’ Piers said. ‘There are some things that just don’t work. That don’t seize the public imagination. This didn’t. I still don’t understand why; although I have to say that if the director had agreed to set it in the thirties, as I had originally envisaged, I think it would have worked better. But he held those particular purse-strings. Anyway, it’s all history now. Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Magnus. His face was very respectful; Joe suddenly decided he liked him better.

  ‘Well, I adored Angels,’ said Maria, ‘I thought it was desperately unfair. Never mind, Piers darling, we shall have our revenge.’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ said Piers and then Magnus said enough theatre chitchat and asked Joe how his Scandals book had done.

  ‘OK,’ said Joe briefly.

  ‘Did you enjoy it, Lady Hunterton?’ said Magnus. Caroline said yes, she had, very much, and felt uneasy suddenly, she wasn’t sure why.

  The conversation became more general and then Chloe and Piers went upstairs to change; Jack Woolf moved over to talk to Caroline, and Maria moved into an incredibly explicit conversation with Jack about mares standing for stallions, and a mare of hers who would never stand for the stallion, only the teaser, and Tabitha started chatting up the boys who, apart from the sick noises at the end of Piers’s speech, had behaved very well. Toby was growing into a distinctly plain young man. He was very tall and heavily built, and threatened to be fat (‘My father’s build,’ said Caroline), and he had thick slightly wavy dark hair and very dark brown eyes. He had loved Eton (unlike his brother) and Chloe was quite sure it was simply because no one dared bully him, on account of his size and his quite extraordinary self-confidence. Jolyon was smaller, slighter, and far better looking; he had his mother’s dark red hair, and his father’s rather diffident manner, and although his behaviour was appalling when he was with his brother, when he was on his own he was comparatively civilized. He even went so far as to say to Chloe on the morning of the wedding that he hoped she’d be very happy, and if Piers Windsor wasn’t nice to her he’d see that Toby knocked his block off, which enormously touched Jack who had been listening in the doorway, and for the first time in his entire life he felt a wave of affection for Caroline’s boys. Joe, who was chatting up Liza Montague with a view to doing a profile of her, was so benignly and magnificently drunk that he actually found himself managing to feel a wave of affection for Piers. And then very shortly after that Chloe and Piers were gone, lurching up the lane in the Rolls bound for Paris, waving and laughing and leaving everyone in that condition of flat euphoria that always follows a wedding.

  ‘Well,’ said Caroline, ‘more drink everyone? Coffee?’

  ‘Coffee would be wonderful,’ cooed Maria, ‘and then, Jack dear, we must go.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Caroline, disappearing into the kitchen.

  The kitchen was empty; released suddenly from the strain of smiling, of being gracious, of pretending to be pleased, she sat down suddenly at the table, and felt – most unusually, for Caroline hardly ever cried, always said Joe shed enough for both of them – tears filling her eyes.

  She thought of Chloe, offered up like a sacrificial virgin on the altar of Piers’s vanity, and thought how ill equipped she was to deal with it, and with a fervour that made it almost a prayer, hoped she would manage to be happy, somehow. And then, unbidden, came the thought of her other daughter, of how swiftly and effectively she would have dealt with Piers Windsor had he come her way; and she thought, too, that she had lost both of them now, and she felt a great ache in her heart, She rested her head briefly on her hands, and struggled to regain control of herself.

  ‘Caroline. You all right?’ It was Jack Bamforth; he had come into the kitchen in search of soda water.

  Caroline looked up and said, ‘Not really, Jack, no. I don’t know how she’s going to manage.’

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ he said, putting his arm lightly round her shoulders. ‘Tougher than she looks is Chloe. Always was.’

  ‘Oh Jack, I don’t know. She seems such a baby to me.’

  ‘Well, she would,’ said Jack, smiling down at her. ‘Always babies to their mothers, people are. But she isn’t, Caroline, and she’ll be all right, she’ll manage.’

  ‘Do you think so? I hope you’re right. God, it doesn’t seem a moment since she was born, does it, Jack? Or the boys. Longer since – since I had – well, since Fleur.’

  ‘Yes, well, that is a while,’ said Jack, patting her gently, rather as if she was a horse. ‘I was only thinking about that the other day.’

  ‘Were you, Jack?’ Caroline lifted a tear-stained face. ‘Were you really?’

  ‘Well, it was a bit of a time, wasn’t it? One thing and another. The baby being born, and then you marrying Sir William and then – well, as I say, it was a bit of a time.’

  ‘Yes, it was,’ said Caroline. ‘And now it’s all over. Jack, could you make some coffee? I’m just going upstairs to redo my face, I must look frightful and –’ She stood up and turned towards the doorway; standing there, an expression of considerable interest in his dark eyes, was Magnus Phillips.

  ‘That is one gorgeous woman,’ said Magnus to Joe. ‘All yours, I take it?’

  ‘Absolutely all mine,’ said Joe, draining half a tumblerful of brandy. He was very drunk; he needed to be, it was his only defence against his loss of Chloe, his fear and sorrow for her. ‘And absolutely all gorgeous too.’ He struggled to focus on Magnus. ‘Magnus, what are you doing coming and being here?’

  ‘Very old friend of Piers’s,’ said Magnus, enunciating with as much difficulty but rather more skill.

  ‘Old friend, my arse,’ said Joe. ‘Writing something beastly about him, are you?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Magnus, with an attempt at dignity. ‘Just a short piece for the New Yorker. Idea tickled his vanity. Good brandy, Joe. Lovely girl, the blushing bride.’

  ‘Lovely girl. I love her like my own. Wish she was. Wish she was. Have some more brandy, Magnus. All yours. All yours.’

  Caroline came in with the coffee and smiled composedly at everyone.

  ‘She is gorgeous,’ said Magnus again. ‘You must be no end of a fine fellow, Joe Payton. Having a woman like that.’

  ‘I am, I am,’ said Joe, beaming at him modestly. ‘No end of a fine fellow.’

  ‘Can’t believe she’s the mother of three grown-up children.’

  ‘Well, she is,’ said Joe, hiccuping gently, ‘their mother. All of their mother.’

  ‘And when –’ said Magnus, but Caroline, who had been watching them with a degree of intentness, came over and said, ‘Joe, the Woolfs are leaving, come and see them off,’ and Joe rose, extremely unsteadily, and went out to the drive to wave off the Woolfs’ pale blue Rolls which was marginally larger and certainly flashier than Piers’s.

  There was a great deal of going and goodbye-ing after that, and finally Magnus himself went upstairs again to change back into his leathers.

  He bowed again over Caroline’s hand in the drive, smiling at her, and she thought that he looked much more at home and interestingly less gangster-like in them than in the suit. He was also interestingly more sober.

  ‘I have so enjoyed meeting you, and being here today,’ he said and his eyes as he studied her were watchful. ‘And I’m sorry again I was late.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Caroline. ‘Are you sure you’re OK to drive or whatever you do on a bike?’

  ‘I’m fine. The air will sober me very quickly, I assure you. You are,’ he added, ‘the most beautiful mother of the bride I have ever been privileged enough to meet. I r
eally mean it. And thank you for your hospitality.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ she said, in tones that implied it had been nothing of the sort, and then added, looking at Joe who was walking rather unsteadily towards the house, in his plimsolls, his jacket on inside out, his arms round the two boys, ‘I must get Joe inside and into a horizontal position. Will you excuse me?’

  ‘Lucky old Joe,’ said Magnus. ‘I wish you’d get me into a horizontal position. Some time. Goodbye, Lady Hunterton,’ and he was gone in a roar and a belch of exhaust.

  Caroline went in to find Joe who was already asleep on the drawing-room sofa, and was not to be woken.

  She called the dogs and took them for a long walk. She felt uneasy about Magnus Phillips. She went over and over the conversation with Jack Bamforth in her mind, and told herself, tried to persuade herself, that the conversation had meant nothing, nothing at all really, to someone who hadn’t known about Fleur, about her history, and indeed managed quite effectively to calm herself. But then, unbidden, she would see again and again Magnus Phillips’s brilliant, fiercely interested face, his thoughtful, probing eyes, and even after she had come home, picked at the leftovers, got Joe up to bed, had a bath and read three chapters of Pierre Salinger’s brilliant book With Kennedy, she still felt chilled and troubled by what Magnus had overheard and what he might do with it, should he so choose.

  Background to Love and Marriage chapter of The Tinsel Underneath. First taped interview Liza Montague, long-term friend of Piers Windsor, wife of David Montague, conductor, since 1959. Agreed to be quoted.

  I first met him in – what? – 1953. He’d just met Guinevere, and they were still in the very first flush. My God, he was in love. Of course Piers is like that. Obsessive. He falls in love with someone – man, woman, child, idea, and that’s it. Nothing else matters. They met at RADA. I was at the Royal College of Music, and I’d met Guinevere at a Christmas carol concert. She had a lovely voice herself. Filled with music, very very Welsh. She should have trained as a singer, I often told her. One evening in the next term, I bumped into her at a concert. Oh, she said, oh, Liza, I’m in love. The birthday of my life is come. She does that, Guinevere, talks in quotations all the time. We all had supper together one night, at Jimmy’s. You know Jimmy’s? Underground restaurant, near Leicester Square, all tiled, like a men’s lavatory. Well, you like that kind of thing when you’re young, I’m afraid. Great food, really cheap. Anyway, I just wasn’t sure, you know? He was divine to look at, stayed so until he died, poor darling; and very charming. He had this way of asking very intense detailed questions, so you really thought he seemed absolutely fascinated by whatever you had to say. I swear he could seem entranced by your bowel movements, if he thought it was necessary. But it was all a fake, a trick; he’d really only be half listening. Women always fell for it. And the men if he put his mind to it. Anyway, he and Guinevere were completely gaga. Couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Darlings, I said in the end, why don’t you just go home to bed and have a good fuck? Guinevere said OK, they would, but Piers seemed slightly embarrassed. He hated women using bad language or even speaking very frankly. He was a bit of an old woman himself really, you know.

  They got married at the end of that year; Guinevere seemed blissfully happy with him still. It was such a strange wedding. Her family seemed slightly bemused by it all. Her mother obviously thought he was wonderful, but her father and her brother were more doubtful. And all the Welsh relations, well, it was a bit sad really. The wedding was at their home, but all us London lot trailed down and we’re rather noisy and flamboyant, you know, terrible show-offs, and I think the family just couldn’t really cope. Piers made this frightful speech, I wanted to die. He got up all filled with burning sincerity and said how wonderfully happy he was, and what a gift the Davieses had given him, and then he went over to Guinevere and said, ‘Thank you for marrying me, Guinevere.’ I wanted to be sick. And he was terribly over-dressed. I know it was his wedding, but it had been agreed no morning suits, and he had a grey suit on with a very long jacket, and a black velvet collar. He looked like a rather smart, posh Teddy Boy. It was very insensitive, that was the thing. And his mother, dear Flavia, she was completely overdressed too, in a cream lace suit. She sobbed into her hanky right through the service and then was terrifically ladylike and radiant right through the reception, even made a little speech, since Dad Windsor of course had long since disappeared. Straight out of Noël Coward. I did love Flavia, but she did spoil him so. It was where the whole trouble started really.

  I met my husband at their wedding; he’d come down with a party of other Londoners. He was standing next to me, while Piers made his speech, and he hissed in my ear, ‘Ridiculous creature, isn’t he?’ I had to agree.

  I didn’t see them for a year after that, I was touring with some awful company; then I bumped into Guinevere in London. She was a bit subdued, I thought; she said everything was fine, although things were tough. She said she was doing OK, getting the odd thing, but Piers was having more trouble. ‘He won’t go for the tiny parts, Liza,’ she said, ‘so half the time he doesn’t get any.’

  I asked her how the marriage was and she said, oh, wonderful, but that was it; she changed the subject and asked me about what I was doing instead. A few weeks later, they asked us to supper: it wasn’t very happy really. Piers was touchy and difficult; Guinevere had warned me not to talk about work, and I did try not to, but there really wasn’t much else. The main thing was that Piers seemed to have got rather – hostile is too strong a word – distanced from her. Distanced and critical. She couldn’t do anything right. The lamb was overcooked, the flowers were overdone, even the light bulb was too bright. And she was trying just a bit too hard. Darling this, darling that, sorry, Piers, didn’t mean to, Piers, when what he needed was a kick in the balls.

  After supper, Piers suddenly suggested to David they should go to the pub, which seemed extraordinary, in the middle of a reunion dinner, and I said to Guinevere when they’d gone, what on earth is going on, and she said, and I shall never forget it, oh, Liza, love cools, love cools. She wouldn’t talk about it any more; she said she was fine, just being silly, and we talked work after that. It seemed safer; what I couldn’t make out was whose love had cooled. Then.

  The men came back, looking more cheerful, and we all got very drunk, and then I didn’t think about either of them for another year, or not much because I was in Milan, doing rather well, and David was in New York. When I came home, I heard they’d split up. I phoned Guinevere’s mother, because I couldn’t find her in London, and she was really upset, said she would never have believed it of Piers, and I said what, and she said walking out on a pregnant wife. Well, of course, it wasn’t that simple – is it ever? – and it took me years to get to the truth of it, because Guinevere had lost the baby by the time I saw her, and was on a kind of fake high, playing Jennifer Dubedat at the Bristol Old Vic, and said she didn’t want to talk about Piers or anything to do with him. It had all been an awful mistake, and she couldn’t believe she had been so stupid. Later, years later, when I was having trouble with my own dear husband, and I was vulnerable too, she told me all about it, really told me, and I understood. But at the time he just seemed like a spoilt, selfish, arrogant child. Which of course he was; but it was a little bit more complex than that.

  And then I didn’t see him for years, because he avoided me very thoroughly; ashamed, and guilty I suppose. I didn’t want to see him anyway, I felt so angry, and so loyal to Guinevere. He only came back into my life when he was a film star; and then he felt he could get close, and talk to me, explain how he saw what had happened, against the background of his own success, rather than the failure. Which tells you everything about him, of course.

  He really was a very dangerously complex personality.

  1967

  Chloe stood in the foyer of the Princess Theatre, holding Piers’s arm, smiling into the flashbulbs, turning
her head to greet this person and that, and wondered what they would all have to say if they knew she had no knickers on.

  In every other way she was most carefully and elaborately dressed for the occasion: in a long white lace dress, hung with hundreds of crystalline droplets, high-waisted and stunningly low-cut to set off her newly magnificent cleavage, her dark red hair piled high and set with pearl droplets also, a glorious baroque pearl choker round her throat, her make-up, darkly dramatic, with double fake lashes on her brown eyes, professionally done by a girl sent from Harpers & Queen for a photographic session with Piers that very afternoon, all designed to distract from her hugely burgeoning eight-and-a-half-month-pregnant stomach. There was a white fox cape hung carelessly on her shoulders, white satin slippers just visible beneath the billowing hem of the dress; but knickers she wore none, had not indeed for some weeks now, as the task of putting them on had become increasingly difficult. She had intended to put some on tonight, and tights too, but after several minutes of struggling, first sitting, then standing, had given up; she would have asked Piers, but he was too ill with nerves, too engrossed with his own wardrobe – dinner jacket, genuine Victorian ruffled evening shirt, black velvet cape lined with crimson silk – to give her more than the briefest attention, to say ‘Yes, of course you do,’ in response to her shaky ‘Do I look all right?’ and certainly to get involved in the intimate indignities of pulling up her pants for her.

  Well, it was his night, the brightest yet in a brilliant history, the world première of The Lady of Shalott, the culmination of two years of work, of inspiration, the drawing together of the finest talents in the land, of writers, lyricists, composers, designers; of actors, musicians, dancers; he was offering it to the world, his creation, brought to birth from his own dazzling imagination, courage, vision – and steely, unflinching determination. Chloe looked at him, smiling the tight, taut smile that she had come to know so well and, sick with nerves and misery as she was herself, felt a great pang of compassion for what it concealed, a desperate, all-consuming terror that the Lady would fail, and he with it, and that all these people here, the glitterati of the theatre, the press, the innest of the in crowd, ostensibly come to share his triumph, would turn Judas and bear witness and even rejoice in his downfall.