AN Outrageous Affair

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘I don’t know what it is about you, but I’m prepared to invest a bit more time. How about dinner tomorrow?’

  ‘I can’t. I’m not coming to London.’

  ‘I’ll come to Suffolk. On my bike.’

  He arrived, dirty, sweaty, grinning, and produced a bunch of rather squashed red roses from his leather jacket. Caroline felt faint.

  ‘I need a shower before we eat.’

  She took him upstairs to the guest bathroom. ‘This was once the nursery bathroom,’ she said. ‘I lost my virginity in it.’

  ‘Lose it again.’

  ‘You can’t lose it twice.’

  ‘Yes, you can. It’s a rather neat little concept of mine. Marital virginity. First time you do it after you’re married. Or as good as married.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Caroline. ‘Not in here anyway. I like my comfort these days.’

  ‘Caroline, sex shouldn’t be comfortable. No wonder you look like you do.’

  ‘How do I look?’

  ‘Frustrated,’ he said.

  Caroline walked out of the room.

  He didn’t pester her that night; he bought her dinner, told her she was the sexiest thing he’d met for years, talked about the new book he was writing about an American ballerina – ‘not Piers, you see, not even Hollywood, you really should trust me – a bit.’ The dancer, he said, looked divine, like a piece of thistledown on the stage, and then she went home and indulged in troilism, one girl, one boy. And snorted cocaine. And had a long-standing affair with her father. And had the world at her feet, presidents, prime ministers, all inviting her to their parties and things.

  ‘It sounds like a horrible book.’

  ‘It’ll sell. I’m going now, I have to get back to London and write a story. I’ll call you in the morning. I really do wish you’d see sense over all this.’

  He roared off up the street, breaking the sweet silence of the Suffolk night, leaving her feeling fretful and unused.

  She struggled to remain loyal to Joe. He had been depressed, recently, more distant from her than ever. He had refused to talk about it, indeed about anything, even on the short holiday she suggested they took (as much to get away from Magnus and his importunings as a desire to help Joe). He hadn’t even been down to Suffolk at a weekend for over a month. Toby was working in Citibank’s New York office; Jolyon was living in London, at art school, studying theatrical design; Chloe, increasingly uncommunicative anyway, was in Los Angeles; Fleur had refused even to have lunch with her, when she went to New York.

  It was that as much as anything that made her give in to Magnus. What was she doing, trying to be good, to remain loyal to a family that didn’t want her?

  She rang him as he had told her to if she changed her mind.

  ‘I’d like to see you,’ she said.

  ‘Supposing I didn’t want to see you any more?’ he said.

  ‘I’d live,’ said Caroline.

  ‘I’ll meet you at my place tonight.’

  ‘No, I’m not coming to London. You can come to Suffolk again.’

  ‘All right. On condition we can use the nursery bathroom.’

  ‘We can use the nursery bathroom,’ said Caroline, weak, limp, liquid at the very thought of him.

  ‘It isn’t just sex,’ she said to him afterwards, when she was lying weak, almost tearful with pleasure, with fulfilment, ‘that makes me want to be with you.’

  ‘Oh really? What else is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. You make me feel – clever.’

  ‘You are clever.’

  ‘I know. I think I’d forgotten.’

  ‘Tell me about your family,’ he said the next morning, bolting huge mountains of toast and marmalade.

  ‘It’s very complex,’ she said, ‘it would take me weeks.’

  ‘We should have weeks,’ he said, kissing her. ‘I have to go now. I’ll see you soon.’

  They did have weeks. They tipped into one another: fervent, vivid, joyful weeks. Caroline felt young once more, raw with sex and desire.

  ‘I can’t think why me,’ she said one night, as she lay quiet at last after hours of shouting, crying, exultant love-making. ‘Why not some beautiful young creature?’

  ‘You’re beautiful, and I don’t specially like them young. Self-absorbed. You are a great woman, in and out of bed. You please me. I please you. As far as I’m concerned that’s a pretty good formula. Stop looking for trouble.’

  He was seven years younger than her, just forty. He was formidably clever; he could persuade her of anything. He came from a working-class family, his dad had been a lorry driver. ‘But he was a very well-read lorry driver, he was self-taught, a marvellous man. Hence the fancy name. I was named after a Norwegian medieval king who was known as Magnus the Lawmaker. I bet you never heard of him.’

  Caroline shook her head humbly.

  ‘My father always dreamed of me being a lawyer. That’s what he wanted for me. A judge really. Nothing second-rate. It was the best day of his life when I got the eleven plus, the second best when I got a place at Bristol.’

  ‘How about when you published your first scurrilous article?’ said Caroline tartly.

  ‘He’d died by then,’ said Marcus briefly. ‘Killed in a pile-up on the Ml in a fog.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yes. So was I.’

  Caroline sat silent, angry with herself at her crassness, wondering how she could put it right.

  ‘But actually,’ he added suddenly, ‘you’re right. He would have been very disappointed.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘She died when I was fifteen. Cancer.’

  ‘So it was just you and your father.’

  ‘Yes. And he wasn’t there much. He was always out on the road. Working.’

  ‘Difficult for you,’ said Caroline carefully.

  ‘Very difficult. But it taught me self-sufficiency.’

  ‘I suppose it would have done.’

  He had got a First in English and then moved up to London and got a job on the Daily Sketch.

  ‘I’m ideal for you,’ he had said to the editor at his interview, ‘I’m a socialist-voting Tory, an educated working-class man. Just what you need.’

  The editor, irritated at his arrogance, nevertheless agreed and took him on.

  He was a brilliant reporter; he could get a story out of anyone. He was ruthless; nothing, no shreds of conscience held him back. He could make the great seem mediocre, and the truly good appear hypocritical. No one could twist a quote like Magnus Phillips; no one could place a comment after an innocent remark and turn it to a death knell.

  He was tireless; he could sit half the night outside a house, waiting for his victim to return home, turn in a story, go to the all-night pub, and then be at his desk again at ten thirty. His heavy frame, his rather lumbering walk concealed a fierce, a restless energy; he could never sleep for more than four hours, could not sit at his desk for more than twenty minutes. He paced the office, while he wrote even a long story, often with a large whisky in his hand, smoking, scowling at people, returning to his desk and his typewriter every so often to beat out a few more sentences. For recreation he played squash with a ferocity that terrified his opponents, and rode his bike up and down the M1 at over a hundred miles an hour. He said it released his inhibitions.

  Women either found him dislikeable or irresistible, and occasionally both. He did not waste time on honeyed words, tender gestures; his approach to Caroline had been typical.

  He told her he had timed his approach to her very carefully. ‘Straight away, I wanted you. At the wedding. I kept getting a fucking great erection, sitting at your dining table. Listening to Piers’s wanky speech. But I knew it wouldn’t do me any good. Not even after the christening. You w
ere still looking just a bit too settled. So I waited. I’m good at waiting,’ he added with a grin.

  She liked him more as time went by. He had an odd set of morals, harsh and dispassionate, but they were at least consistent, and he had a fierce honesty. He was ruthless, unconcerned about the havoc he caused in people’s lives. He saw – or said he saw – no harm in any of it. He doorstepped, eavesdropped, inveigled himself into the confidence of neighbours, teachers, friends of his victims, and felt no compunction about any of it.

  ‘No compassion either?’ she had said once, shocked, in the early days.

  ‘Not really,’ he had said, grinning at her. ‘People set themselves up, they deserve to be shot down. If they have something to hide, I think they have a reason. Usually a bad one.’

  ‘But, Magnus, what about the children, the parents . . .’ She was thinking about Brendan.

  ‘Caroline, before people do something immoral or unfortunate, they should think of their children and their parents. I can’t be held responsible for other people’s irresponsible behaviour.’

  She learnt about him slowly; he had been married (once) to a girl from university, and divorced her a couple of years later. ‘She disapproved of me which I could forgive and I found her boring, which I couldn’t.’ He had lived with another girl for a long time and the reason for the termination of that relationship was more obscure. ‘It just didn’t work any more.’ She learnt in time that the girl had been having another relationship concurrently for months. Caroline suspected that being cuckolded had hurt Magnus more than simply losing out to someone else. And then a long series of semi-permanent relationships.

  ‘And now you. Very nice.’

  They were having dinner in London; Joe was away in the States.

  ‘I’m not even semi-permanent, Magnus. I’m a pseudo-married woman. In love’ – she felt, rather than heard herself stumble over the words – ‘in love with the man I live with.’

  ‘Bollocks. And.’

  ‘What about children?’ said Caroline after a pause.

  ‘Yes, well, what about them?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you have liked them?’

  ‘Not really, no. I don’t like children. I don’t have any egotistical need to reproduce myself. And I like to come first in relationships, which children certainly preclude. Tell me about your children. And why didn’t you have any with Joe?’

  ‘It was never that kind of relationship.’

  ‘Very wise. So tell me about the others.’

  ‘Other what?’

  ‘Relationships. And children. Caroline, you’re being very obscure.’

  She told him about William; and about Chloe and Toby and Jolyon.

  ‘So why did you marry this boring old fart of a bart?’

  Caroline was angry suddenly; she stood up. ‘Don’t use your tabloid language on me. I loved William very much. Goodnight.’

  He shrugged, watched her leave the restaurant.

  She drove home shaking with rage.

  At six the next morning the phone rang. It was Magnus.

  ‘I’m sorry. Sorry I offended you.’

  She was silent.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Just down the street.’

  She sighed. It was exactly the kind of behaviour she couldn’t resist. ‘All right.’

  He came in looking almost shamefaced. He was unshaven, filthy dirty.

  ‘I’ve been on the bike for the last three hours. I went down to Brighton.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ said Caroline.

  ‘I know it. Can I have a shower?’

  ‘Yes, all right.’

  ‘Want to share it?’

  ‘No. Absolutely not.’

  They stood in the shower together, the water thudding down; he held her, kissed her, differently, gently.

  He pushed her down; she was kneeling, kneeling in the warm waterfall; he knelt before her.

  ‘Sweet, sweet Caroline,’ he said, pushing her legs gently apart.

  She felt him moving into her; the water confused her, she felt strange, odd, removed from herself, aware only of his penis entering her, her vagina welcoming it, sweetly wantonly welcoming. She pushed herself on to it, on to him; began to rise and fall. Her climax came swiftly, sharply; his took longer, he knelt there, pushing into her, harder and harder, impossibly far, and when he came, she came again with him, following him, calling out with pleasure.

  The water ran cold; they wrapped themselves in towels, sat in the kitchen drinking coffee. She wondered how she could do this, in Joe’s home. She was shocked at herself.

  ‘Caroline, I’m tempted to say all kinds of things to you,’ said Magnus, reaching out a hand, pushing back her wet hair.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Caroline. ‘Please don’t. It’s too dangerous.’

  But she still didn’t tell him about Brendan, about Fleur.

  It was too precious, too secret, too much her own. And besides she still didn’t quite trust him. In any way.

  1969–70

  Fleur wondered what Piers’s fans would think if they could see him now: lying on his back, his mouth open, a whining snore coming from his throat, a slight dribble of saliva leaching from the side of his mouth. His hair, his wonderful gold-streaked hair, was ruffled sideways; the roots, she noticed with interest, were a shade or two darker than the rest, and studded with grey. Hardly Romeo: more like Romeo’s dad.

  She turned away, unable to contemplate him and what she was doing there with him, in the vast double bed in his suite at the Algonquin, and tried to decide whether she should strike now, today, this morning, when he woke up, surprise him, lash out, ask him, or whether she should continue to take a more subtle approach. Subtlety was palling; she had been working on him for almost a year, and despite all her efforts, he was still sticking to his story, that he had not been in Hollywood until 1959. Of course it wasn’t really a year: they had only met four times. And apart from the long weekend in California, all very short, overnight stops. Even the long weekend had been short, not even a weekend at all; he had been interestingly anxious not to stay in LA itself, but had whisked her off to Catalina Island and the wonderfully Victorian Glenmore Plaza as fast as was decently possible, and then had proceeded to leave her there for thirty hours, without explanation, saying only that he had to go, it was business, but he would be back. She hadn’t exactly minded, but it had been irritating and a big bite out of the weekend.

  If it had all been a bit more fun, she might have minded less; Nigel had at least had the virtues of generosity, and a sense of humour. Piers had neither. He wasn’t exactly mean: he always booked into expensive hotels and ordered the best champagne, that sort of thing, and he obviously spent a fortune on his clothes – his vanity was inordinate, womanish, he required admiration, appreciation – but he never gave her proper presents, just flowers, maybe a scarf. And there was certainly no humour: Piers’s idea of a joke was a long theatrical story about someone else going wrong.

  He was absolutely ghastly in bed; she had never thought to feel sympathy for Chloe, but the occasional pang did enter her, along with Piers’s very small, incompetent penis. He either came almost immediately, or went on seemingly for ever, with about as much imagination and variation as a truck on the highway; afterwards, in either case, he would lie looking pleasedly at her, telling her how wonderful it had been for him, and he hoped for her. He was better at the early bits, especially at kissing; she supposed he must have learnt a few tricks from his co-stars, and he made a great thing of talking in bed, both before and afterwards, which she imagined would be all right if you really liked him; it was all very poetic and supposedly flattering. Fleur just thought it was irritating.

  She had, with exquisite skill, got him talking about Chloe quite a lot; he obviously found he
r a bore and an entirely unsatisfactory wife. ‘Of course I adore her, but she is so very young, and unsophisticated, and she finds it terribly difficult, poor darling, to cope with all the social side of my life. And of course, she doesn’t really understand my work, how could she, and as if it mattered really. But I feel with you, Fleur, even though we’ve known each other such a little while, you actually can see what I’m trying to do, with this film for instance. I find that very exciting.’

  He plainly adored his children; or rather he adored Pandora: ‘I can’t expect you to appreciate such a thing, and it’s dreadful of me even to talk about her to you, but she is so exquisite, and so intelligent, has incredible sensitivity, for such a tiny little thing. I’m so proud of her.’

  Fleur found that really boring; but stories about Chloe were fascinating, even what she looked like. ‘She’s really very pretty, in that English rose way, a young English girl, that was why I fell in love with her, totally unspoilt. Not terribly clever with clothes, but I suppose that will come, poor darling. She’s wonderful with the houses though; we have such a pretty house in London, and of course my house in the country, I’ve had for many years, and that’s very much more mine, but even that I feel I can trust to her . . .’

  She was fascinated by his sexual inclinations. Her initial instinct that he had been homosexual had been not entirely correct: she was quite convinced that he had strong tendencies in that direction, but there was no doubt that he genuinely enjoyed having sex with her. Indeed he was, although not skilful, very highly sexed; he could produce an erection several times a night – not bad for an old guy, Fleur thought – and he was tremendously tactile, he liked stroking, kissing, cuddling even. She found that about the only engaging thing about him; she was sure a psychiatrist would have traced it all back to his childhood and the mother he so patently adored, but in the lack of anything more satisfactory, she read a lot of quasi-medical articles, mostly in magazines like Forum, about homosexuals and bisexuals and decided he was probably the latter.