Wicked Pleasures

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘I’m sorry to be a party pooper,’ he said, ‘but I honestly think that I shan’t be good for much. I was working until three this morning, and that walk this afternoon, and this marvellous claret has made me rather sleepy. I’m so sorry …’

  He went upstairs to bed at ten thirty; they all assured him they were tired too, and were delighted to have an early night. Fred waited until he heard the door shut and then said what a pity Baby hadn’t been there, to make the evening go. Virginia, who had allowed herself to fantasize that Alexander might have been planning to get everyone into bed early, so that he could come and find her when they were all asleep, waited staring into the darkness for over an hour and a half and then cried herself to sleep.

  Baby and Mary Rose arrived next day at lunchtime, late, and clearly in foul tempers. Betsey was tense, she had insisted on a formal four courses in the dining room, rather than a light lunch on the porch, and everyone pushed most of the food around their plates and returned it uneaten. Fred III was irritable because his golf game had gone badly; Madeleine Dalgleish had gone for a walk in the morning, got back late and was still flustered; Baby was morose; Mary Rose sat next to Alexander and flirted with him until Virginia thought she really might be sick; and Virginia herself was awkward, afraid to say anything in case it sounded crass or – worse – a piece of competing flirtation.

  After lunch they all went and snoozed on the porch; Fred, miraculously restored, woke them all at four and said who was going to walk. ‘I will,’ said Alexander. ‘I’d like that very much.’

  ‘Good. Virgy baby, are you coming?’

  ‘No,’ said Virginia, closing her eyes again. She had an appalling headache.

  They got back an hour later, beaming.

  ‘That was great,’ said Fred III happily. ‘Nothing like a walk. And you know what, Virginia? Alexander here has a real passion for Busby Berkeley movies. Well, why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Virginia, feeling foolish. Her headache was no better. ‘I told him we’d do “The Tops” for him. Go and get your tap shoes, honey. Baby, come on, to the piano.’

  ‘Oh Dad, I can’t.’

  ‘Course you can. Come on.’

  Baby got up good-naturedly and stumbled sleepily towards the house. ‘Come on, Sis. Keep the old man happy.’

  ‘No,’ said Virginia. ‘No, honestly. I just don’t feel like it. Alexander doesn’t want to see me dancing. And don’t call me Sis. You know I hate it.’

  ‘Oh, I’d love to see you dance,’ said Alexander, smiling at her. ‘Really. Please, Virginia. It sounds as if it would be wonderful.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ she said, getting up reluctantly, seeing that giving in was easier than resisting. ‘But all right.’

  She got through it. She felt stupid, ridiculous even, but she got through it. Baby played carefully, following her, seeing she was nervous; Fred III was in great form. Afterwards Alexander clapped and said, ‘That was wonderful. You have a real talent,’ and she felt sillier still. She was just bending down to undo her tap shoes when she saw Mary Rose lean towards him and whisper something in his ear. He smiled at her. Virginia froze, locked in a dreadful misery and jealousy. Babe gave her a gentle shove. ‘Go on, Blessed. Move.’

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ said Virginia furiously.

  ‘What did you call her?’ asked Mary Rose, intrigued.

  ‘Blessed,’ said Baby, who was still drunk from lunch. ‘With two syllables, as you can hear. It was a nickname from college, wasn’t it, darling?’

  ‘Baby, please shut up,’ said Virginia. ‘Please.’

  ‘How intriguing,’ said Mary Rose. ‘What did it mean?’

  ‘Oh, it was short for –’

  ‘Baby, please –’

  ‘The Blessed Virginia.’

  ‘Sounds all right to me,’ said Alexander politely.

  ‘No, that’s not all of it. The Blessed Virginia, our Lady of Tomorrows. It was a reference to Virginia’s extremely virginal state. At the time. She was famous for it. Of course nobody knows if –’

  ‘Baby!’ said Fred sharply. ‘That will do. Virginia, go and find Beaumont and ask him to bring in some drinks –’

  But Virginia was gone. Flying out of the room, across the hall, up the stairs, hot, ashamed, blinded with tears, her humiliation total. She ran into her room, slammed the door, locked it, threw herself on her bed. Some great wave of hurt had caught in her throat, she couldn’t even cry. She just lay there, hurting, mortified, not knowing what to do. After what seemed like hours there was a knock at the door.

  ‘Virginia. It’s Baby. I’m sorry. Please let me in.’

  ‘No,’ said Virginia. ‘No. Go away.’

  More silence. Baby’s footfalls receding. Then different ones, slower, more tentative. A gentle knock.

  ‘Virginia. It’s Alexander. Please open the door.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I shall stay outside until nature drives you out.’

  She lay for a moment, thinking. Then, half smiling blotchily, half shamefaced, she went to the door.

  ‘You’d have had a long wait. I have my own bathroom.’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  He put his arm round her, walked her to the bed. She sat down heavily and he sat down beside her.

  ‘I don’t see why you’re quite so upset. It didn’t seem such a bad nickname to me. Rather sweet in fact. You should have heard some of mine.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, smiling shakily again, ‘you and your childhood.’

  ‘Yes, well you know what I think about yours.’

  ‘It wasn’t just the name. It was – well, everything. Having to dance for you. Baby winning as usual. Vile Mary Rose.’

  ‘Vile?’

  ‘Vile. She always puts me down. She hates me.’

  ‘She seems all right to me. A little icy perhaps.’

  ‘Oh well. I can see you like her.’

  ‘Not particularly. The people I like best in your family are your mother and you.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said dully.

  ‘You’re not so – well, so sure of yourselves.’

  ‘Oh.’ There was a silence. Virginia wondered if this was the nearest she was going to get to a declaration of love. Probably.

  He suddenly turned her to face him, looked into her eyes.

  ‘Are you still a virgin?’ he said.

  Virginia was stunned, literally deprived of breath. She stared at him. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’d like to know.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s a very personal question.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes it’s a personal question, or yes you are?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘I thought you were,’ he said. ‘Look – there’s no real connection. But will you marry me?’

  Chapter 3

  Virginia, 1960

  They were to be married the following April in New York. Betsey and Fred begged and pleaded with her to have the reception on Long Island, but Virginia refused. She didn’t explain why: that the wedding, however careful she was, would seem like a carbon copy of Baby’s to Mary Rose. If it had been possible, she would have married quietly in a register office, or run away to England, but Alexander said countesses had proper weddings, with their parents’ blessing. He appeared not to fully appreciate the oddness of his own mother’s missing the ceremony.

  Alexander was a wonderfully attentive and considerate fiancé: he insisted on speaking to her father, on their talking to her mother together; he went along with Betsey’s insistence on an engagement party, flying back to New York after a brief trip home to see to matters there; he was charming to all the endless Praeger relatives; he took her to Van Cleef and Arpel’s to choose a ring (‘nothing flashy,’ she said, ‘nothing like Mary Rose’s,’ and the result was tiny rings of diamonds round tinier ones of ruby, and then still smaller ones of sapphire, specially commissioned to her rather rambling description), he
went along with all Fred and Betsey’s suggestions for the wedding (service at St John the Divine, luncheon for four hundred at East 80th, the conservatory extended by a marquee).

  Alexander’s contribution to the guest list was modest: immediate family none (he was an only child, his father dead, his mother, he explained carefully, eccentric, rather frail and virtually a recluse); he invited an ancient maiden aunt, his widowed godfather and two dozen close friends with their husbands or wives. ‘It’s either that, or we charter a jumbo jet and bring the whole of England,’ he explained to Virginia. ‘I am planning a huge party when we get home, two actually, one in London, one at Hartest to introduce you to everybody, and we shall have to have a jamboree for everyone on the estate as well. Much better to wait.’

  Virginia, mildly surprised, particularly by the non-attendance of his mother, agreed; she was too happy and too much in love to push him or question him on anything.

  ‘Can’t I come over before the wedding?’ she said. ‘Can’t I come and see Hartest? Meet your mother? I really would be much happier.’

  ‘I don’t want that,’ he said, kissing her. ‘I want you to come to it as my bride, as the Countess of Caterham, mistress of the house. I want it to be perfect. For you. And for me.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, kissing him back, ‘I like the sound of the mistress bit, at least. But your mother – surely, Alexander, if she won’t come to the wedding, I should go and meet her. It seems so wrong that she won’t set eyes on me even until after we’re married. I can’t believe she wouldn’t feel happier that way.’

  ‘Virginia, you must let me be the judge of my mother’s behaviour,’ said Alexander, and for the very first time she saw a chilliness in his eyes. ‘She is a difficult and very private person. She doesn’t like people. She certainly doesn’t like crowds. At the moment, I have to say, she is expressing a little – hostility towards the idea of my marriage.’

  ‘Hostility? Oh, Alexander, why?’ said Virginia, a cloud of anxiety drifting across her bright happiness. ‘Do you know? And don’t you think she’d be less hostile if she met me, if I made the effort?’

  ‘No I don’t,’ said Alexander. ‘I’m sorry, darling, but I really do urge you to trust me on this one.’

  She never forgot her first sight of Hartest House. Alexander had brought a great stash of photographs from England for her and she had looked at it in silence and awe: a great, perfect palace of a house settled exquisitely into the lavish, rolling Wiltshire countryside.

  ‘Adam said what he worked for was movement in architecture,’ said Alexander, ‘a sense of rising and falling: Hartest for me does not just move, it flies.’ A wide house, it was, perfectly proportioned, built in the Palladian style, with curving porticos, wide terraces, tall windows, the whole centred around a rotunda which formed the heart of the house, echoed in the great dome on its roof; ‘and here, you see, in the rotunda, one of the most famous double flying staircases in England, people come from all over the world to see that staircase’; and the grounds were as exquisite, miles of parkland, studded with sheep and deer, a Palladian bridge set at one end of the lake –‘there are black swans on that lake as well as white’, a river curving languorously through woodland (‘the Hart, our own river’); ‘the photographs cannot do it justice,’ said Alexander, ‘the stone is pale, pale grey, the colour of fine mist, and even on a dark, rainy day it seems somehow to shine.’

  ‘I cannot imagine,’ said Virginia, laughing, ‘what my mother will say when she sees these. I think she’ll have a coronary.’

  But Betsey didn’t. She looked at the pictures in silence and then at Virginia, and then she said quietly, ‘It’s a very big house for a little girl.’

  She was very subdued for the rest of the evening. It was left to Fred to admire the house (and insist on putting a price on it) and for Mary Rose to exclaim over its ‘exquisite proportions’, its ‘magnificent grandeur’ and its ‘overwhelming vistas’. Baby was totally silent on the subject.

  Baby was totally silent on the subject of the wedding altogether. He kissed Virginia when she told him, said he hoped she’d be very happy, and that Alexander was a lucky man, and never said another word about it, apart from discussing his role as best man (an extraordinary request, it was felt, from Alexander, who must have had a close friend of his own, but which Betsey insisted was an example of English charm and thoughtfulness, involving his new family) and initiating Alexander into such American marriage rituals as the Bridal Dinner (which was held at the Racquet Club) attended by the bride, groom, ushers and attendants, and where lavish gifts were exchanged. (Virginia gave her bridegroom a gold watch on a platinum chain from Cartier; the twelve small flower girls were all given gold link bracelets, the twelve ushers Gucci belts; Alexander presented Virginia with a small Victorian locket which had belonged, he said, to his mother. Betsey was a trifle embarrassed by the modesty of the present and kept telling Fred afterwards that the English were different.) The bachelor dinner for twenty-four, also thrown at the Racquet Club, was a subdued affair; Alexander promised to do his best to enter into the spirit of the thing, he told Virginia, but was done for by midnight. ‘The guy’s got no balls,’ Baby reported to Mary Rose in the morning; Mary Rose told him not to be disgusting.

  As the months went by, Virginia felt herself in an increasingly dreamlike state. She tried to continue to work, but it was difficult; in any case she had to wind her business down. The initial intensely romantic passion she had felt for Alexander did not fade; she was obsessed by him. But beneath the passion, the romance, just occasionally she felt an odd unease, a disquiet which however hard she tried, she could find no substance in, no reason for. It was certainly not because of any fault, any lack of tenderness or lovingness on his part: quite the reverse. He loved her, adored her even, and he told her so every day, often several times a day; he was almost absurdly romantic, writing her long letters whether he was in England or New York, sending her flowers on every possible pretence of an anniversary (a month since we met, a week since we became engaged, six weeks since we bought the ring, two months since you said you loved me). He was a passionate reader, and he liked to read aloud to her, particularly poetry; Donne, he told her, came closest to his heart, to describing how he felt. He had the beautiful elegy ‘On Going to Bed’ (the one containing the words ‘Oh, My America! My new found land’) written out most exquisitely by a calligrapher, and framed for her; he commissioned a portrait of her, in the dress she had worn when he met her, and had a miniature painted as well, which he carried with him everywhere, ‘in my breast pocket, next to my heart’. And yet, despite his undoubted and great love for her, despite her own intense feelings, there was this slight unease somewhere in her consciousness. Trying to analyse it one evening, after he had gone back to his hotel, she decided the nearest to it was a sense of fantasy, a lack of reality in their relationship. Then she stifled the thought, told herself not to be absurd, that the life ahead of her was indeed perfect, or as near to perfect as real life could be, and that she was crazy to be looking for flaws in it.

  The other thing which disturbed her a little was his extraordinary passionate love for Hartest. He spoke of it as if it was a person, a woman, or perhaps a beloved child. His voice changed when he talked of it, became deeper, more resonant; and once, when she dared to criticize his attitude, even to tease him about it just a little, he became angry and cold.

  ‘Hartest is all the world to me,’ he said, ‘I love it more than I can possibly describe. You have to accept that, learn what it means to me.’

  ‘More than I do, I sometimes feel,’ said Virginia, ‘and what would you do if I didn’t like it?’

  ‘I have to tell you I think I would find it hard to go on loving you,’ said Alexander, smiling rather coolly at her.

  ‘And if you had to choose between us?’

  ‘I’m afraid that would be intolerable,’ he said. ‘You take me, Virginia, you take Hartest. It is part of me, part of my heart.’

  ‘So
it would be Hartest, not me?’

  ‘This is a ridiculous conversation,’ he said, and his eyes were suddenly quite hard. ‘Absurd. But of course,’ he added hastily, his voice deliberately, amusedly lighter, ‘that would never happen, I would never have to choose. I love you, and you are going to be there, at Hartest, it will be your home as well as mine. You will love it, Virginia, I promise you that.’

  The conversation was disturbing – almost, when she dwelt on it, alarming; but she crushed the emotions. She was hardly going to give up a wedding, a marriage, a bridegroom of such near perfection, for a few puny anxieties.

  Virginia’s dress, made by Ann Lowe, who had made Jackie Kennedy’s, was a ravishing flood of white lace, the skirt composed of descending myriads of frills, each one trimmed with tiny pink rosebuds. The skirt became a train which followed her for almost twelve feet down the aisle of the cathedral; she wore a veil that covered her face as she came down the aisle, the diamond-drop tiara that had been in the Caterham family for two hundred years, woven with real pink rosebuds, and the look of love as she put back the veil and faced Alexander brought tears to the eyes of almost every woman in the church and a few of the men as well. Even Fred cleared his throat and blew his nose loudly.

  Fred’s speech was surprisingly mawkish; he told several anecdotes about Virginia, extolling her talents and her charm, said she would always be his little girl to him, and that New York would be a sadder place without her. And then switched the mood and made everyone laugh by suggesting to Alexander that he might speak to the Queen of England and see about a royal warrant for the bank, and said he was thinking of buying a small tiara for Betsey and an ermine robe for himself to wear on special occasions in the future. Alexander promised to see what he could do, said he would pick out a tiara personally ‘although Betsey could hardly look more regal than she does today’ and then spoke so tenderly and movingly of his love for Virginia, and his immense gratitude to Fred and Betsey for giving her to him, that even Baby was mollified.