Wicked Pleasures

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘Very good,’ she said when they had finished. ‘But I’m surprised you haven’t learnt a new number by now, Charlotte. Don’t you go to your dancing classes any more?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Charlotte, ‘but I don’t have a partner to practise any new numbers with. Well, not a decent one.’

  Fred III smiled at her, and pulled her onto his knee.

  ‘That’s my girl,’ he said. ‘A good partner’s everything. That’s what Ginger used to say.’

  There was a silence; it was broken by the sound of Baby snoring. Fred looked at him with distaste.

  ‘Baby,’ said Mary Rose, in a voice that was quiet, yet piercing enough to splinter glass, ‘Baby, could we all have some more to drink, please.’

  Baby woke up and shambled out to the kitchen; Betsey looked distressed. ‘I think he’s probably had enough to drink already,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, he’s all right,’ said Fred, ever contrary. ‘He drinks a lot, but he knows when to stop.’

  He looked briefly at Virginia; there was an uneasy silence.

  ‘I think,’ she said, feeling the tears stinging behind her eyes, ‘I think if you’ll excuse me, I might go up to bed. I’m terribly tired. Max had me up at half past five this morning, singing nursery songs.’

  ‘Of course, dear,’ said Betsey, ‘you do look tired. Freddy, will you come over here and show me what you’re doing?’

  ‘I can’t make it come out,’ said Freddy, showing her the solitaire. There were five solitary marbles impossibly far apart.

  ‘Hey, that’s not very clever,’ said Fred. ‘Charlotte can do that in a trice, can’t you, honey? Show Freddy how you do it.’

  Charlotte took the solitaire board from Freddy, smiling at him rather complacently as she put the marbles back in position.

  ‘It isn’t very difficult,’ she said, ‘look.’

  Sixty seconds later she had reduced the board to one solitary marble, positioned dead centre. Fred III was smiling triumphantly. ‘Isn’t that just something? She showed me that this morning. Charlotte honey, would you share your secret with me?’

  ‘Only if you promise to play golf with me in the morning.’

  ‘I will. I promise.’

  Mary Rose looked as if she might be sick.

  Sometimes, Virginia thought as she went out of the room, sometimes she could actually sympathize with her.

  Alexander did not behave well either. He was plainly and painfully bored. He didn’t like sailing, he didn’t like Baby and Mary Rose’s friends – rich, clannish, painstakingly Old Money, the wives as earnestly cultured, as painfully devoted to their roles as Mary Rose, the men an uncomfortable blend of ferocious ambition and locker-room camaraderie; they all moved through the days together, in a close-knit, rather self-conscious group, arranging the next day’s sailing and tennis and drinking before they parted each night as if in terror of a day’s solitude. He spent much of the time mooching around or swimming on his own or with Georgina, patently very much his favourite, and refusing to take any of the other children with him, saying it was too much of a responsibility, and that in his opinion there should be one adult to each child in the sea.

  Virginia announced that she had to go to New York. ‘And then on to Long Island,’ she said to Alexander over supper. ‘There’s a problem on that cottage at Sag Harbor. I’ll be gone the rest of the week. Is that all right?’

  ‘Not really,’ he said, looking at her oddly, ‘but I suppose it will have to be.’

  ‘Yes, Alexander, it will.’

  Left without Virginia, Baby felt oddly lonely. He suddenly realized how much he was missing Angie. And he was worried about her on her own in New York. She had been to England to visit Mrs Wicks, and she and Suze had been on holiday in France, which he had paid for, glad to be able to rid himself of some of the guilt he felt at enjoying the time with his family; now she was back in the city.

  ‘I’ll have to get back to work by then, Baby. It’ll only be a week before you get back, and then we can have the most wonderful, noisy, exhausting reunion. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.’

  ‘I can’t help worrying about you, Angie. You seem very vulnerable to me. I don’t quite know why.’

  ‘I don’t know why either,’ said Angie.

  Friday was a perfect morning, mistily golden, the sun forcing its way determinedly through onto the just-blue sea. It was clearly going to be very hot. Baby woke up early, found himself feeling more optimistic and calm than he had done for almost the whole of the past month, and decided to go for a swim. The children were all up and in the kitchen, being fed by the harassed nurse; Freddy and Charlotte demanded to be allowed to go with him.

  ‘Sure,’ said Baby good-naturedly. ‘I’d be glad of the company.’

  Freddy was good at swimming; it was the one thing he could beat Charlotte at. The surf was quite big, and there was a strong undertow to the waves.

  ‘Be careful,’ Baby warned them, ‘don’t go out of your depth.’

  Charlotte rather uncharacteristically did what she was told, but Freddy swam out, bobbing over the breakers, diving under them, riding in on them, laughing with pleasure. Baby’s heart contracted with love as he looked at him; whatever he had to endure at Fred’s hands, at Mary Rose’s, it was worth it, to see the children happy, to know Freddy’s future was safe.

  Later, they sat on the deck, wrapped in huge towels, drinking hot chocolate. Alexander had appeared, smiling. He seemed better humoured than he had done for weeks.

  ‘Virginia just phoned. She’ll be out here first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘She all right?’

  ‘Yes of course she’s all right. Why shouldn’t she be?’

  ‘Oh – I – just wondered,’ said Baby. ‘She was looking a little pale.’

  ‘She’s fine,’ said Alexander shortly. Then he appeared to pull himself together again. ‘I’m going for a bike ride. Anyone want to come with me?’

  ‘I would,’ said Baby, ‘but I’m bushed with that swim. You kids want to go?’

  ‘I will,’ said Charlotte. ‘OK, Daddy?’

  ‘Of course. Go and get dressed.’

  Baby looked after him curiously as they set off, Alexander in front, laughing over his shoulder at Charlotte, wobbling wildly on her bike. He really was odd, so buttoned up and tense most of the time, so difficult to talk to. Maybe it was being English.

  Baby sighed and settled himself on the deck, throwing off the towel, stretching out his long legs in the warm sun. Only three more days of this, then back to New York. And Angie. Life, he thought, as he relaxed into a sleepy, warm, half-suspended state, was still pretty good.

  Later he swam again. Then he went to the tennis club, played three sets of tennis, and chatted to his friends over a couple of sodas rather than beer: aware as he did so that he was trying to get himself into prime condition for Monday and Angie. The thought of Angie, so near in time now, made him frantic for her; in an attempt to soothe his hungry senses, he stopped worrying about his health, drank the best part of a bottle of Californian Chardonnay with a very late lunch, and lay down in the hammock in the back yard, confused and conflicting images of Angie’s small neat body bobbing in the waves as Freddy’s had done that morning. He put a sunhat over his shorts, in case anyone might notice the enormous erections these visions were responsible for, and drifted off to sleep.

  He was awoken by the phone ringing. It was Fred.

  ‘Get back into New York will you, Baby, right away. I do mean right away.’

  The dreadful, ghastly terror that it was something to do with the bank, some dreadful, crass thing that he had done: the sensation of dropping into a great white vacuum of panic. And then an almost worse horror at Fred’s next words, in his most icy, contemptuous tones.

  ‘You’re a cheat, Baby. A cheat as well as a fool. Does Mary Rose have any idea what kind of a skunk she’s married to? After all she’s done for you.’ And then the dreadful, fiercer panic as he realized it was Angie Fred was talking about,
him and Angie, that he knew, that someone had told him. And then, as he was hastily throwing some things into a bag, trying to think of some reason he could give Mary Rose for needing to get back to New York at three on a Friday afternoon, Virginia on the phone, her voice thick with tears and pain, to say it was she who had told Fred, she he must blame.

  ‘But I had to, Baby, I simply had to, you’ve got to understand, I’ll explain when I see you. I’ll meet you at Grand Central. Oh, Baby, I’m so sorry, so terribly terribly sorry.’

  And then the long journey into the city, fretting and fuming on the ferry, feeling so physically sick on the train that he spent half the journey in the rest room, sitting on the toilet, his head in his hands, arriving at Grand Central finally as New York fell into dusk, still almost unbearably hot and humid; Virginia was there at the station, ashen, her lips oddly as white as the rest of her face. She was in Fred’s car with Hudson at the wheel, and Baby sat away from her in the back seat, his hostility and his nausea growing, listening while she told him what had happened; someone on Cholly Knickerbocker’s column had called Betsey just before lunch and asked for Fred III. ‘And of course Mother said he wasn’t there, he was in the office, and this guy said he would try again there, but he’d been out just earlier, and he was very anxious to get hold of him. And Mother said why, and he said well, he didn’t know if she had heard any of the stories that you were running around town with an English girl half your age, who used to work for me. And Mother said obviously, of course not, that it was total nonsense, and where on earth had this story come from, and the man said from a good friend of Fred Praeger Senior, and could Mother have Dad call him right away after he got in from the office so he could check it out. And well, Baby, that was what panicked me, both of us, that Dad was going to find out, either from a friend or this journalist. And he so obviously had the story 100 per cent right, all the details, it wasn’t some kind of stab in the dark, and we felt, Mother and I, that somehow we had to get to him before anyone else. To try and make him understand.’

  ‘Well,’ said Baby bitterly, ‘you seem to have done a good job there. Virginia, for Christ’s sake, why didn’t you call me?’

  ‘I did. I did call you. You were at the tennis club. Freddy said no one knew exactly when you’d be back. And then – well, I agreed with Mother I should talk to Dad before the press got onto him, and I called his office and found out where he was having lunch, and went to meet him at the restaurant. Baby, don’t look at me like that, time was running out, I just had to get to him.’

  ‘Didn’t you think of calling Angie?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Virginia, looking at him with the first glimmer of defensiveness, ‘of course I did. She wasn’t there. In the apartment.’

  ‘Well of course she wasn’t. She was at work.’

  ‘No, Baby, she wasn’t at work. They said she had called in sick two days ago.’

  ‘Well –’ Baby’s face had gone, impossibly, even whiter. ‘Well, I expect she’s with a friend.’

  ‘I expect she is.’

  ‘So you just told him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All about it?’

  ‘Well – some of it. Most of it. Yes. Yes, I did. I’m terribly, terribly sorry.’

  ‘And you didn’t even think to call Cholly Knickerbocker first?’

  ‘Baby, there didn’t seem a lot of point. You know what these people are like, the more you say, the deeper you get in. I thought Dad would probably be able to fix it, anyway.’

  ‘Virginia, there are some things no one can fix. Not even Dad.’

  ‘No. Well, maybe not.’

  Fred tore into him. He told him he was spoilt, and self-indulgent as well as a fool; that he had no self-control, no dignity, that he was lucky that the story had not come out before; that he deserved none of the considerable advantages Fate had seen fit to send his way.

  ‘I should disinherit you for this,’ he said simply. ‘Just throw you out. You don’t deserve that wife of yours, your family, certainly you don’t deserve Praegers.’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ said Baby, stung suddenly beyond endurance. ‘You’re being extremely naïve. Do you really think I’m the only married man in New York City having an affair?’

  ‘I’m not interested in all the others,’ said Fred. ‘You’re my son, and I don’t like scandal. You seem to me to be getting increasingly like your grandfather and it scares the hell out of me, Baby. It really does. I don’t want to leave Praegers in the hands of an incompetent libertine. And if you must have an affair, you could at least choose some woman from your own class, someone who might employ a little discretion. Not some cheap girl who used to work for your own sister.’

  ‘Please don’t describe Angie as cheap,’ said Baby. He was angry now, a flush rising in his waxily pale face.

  ‘Of course she’s cheap,’ said Fred. ‘And where is she anyway? I’d like to see her. I have a few words to say to her as well.’

  ‘Look,’ said Baby, ‘I know you think you run this family. That we all do what you say –’

  ‘Baby, I don’t just think it. It’s a fact,’ said Fred briefly.

  ‘Well, maybe. But the rest of the universe just may not be quite so impressed.’ He felt sick as he said this: he had never stood up to his father in quite this way before. ‘What makes you think Angie is going to do what you say?’

  ‘She’ll do what I say,’ said Fred simply.

  ‘I don’t think she will. This isn’t what you think. A quick fling. I love Angie. And she loves me.’

  ‘Oh really? Well, we shall see. Where is she, anyway?’

  ‘She’s – out of town.’

  ‘Well,’ said Fred, ‘I think we’d better get her back in, don’t you?’

  Angie arrived, very composed, after a three-day break ‘with a girlfriend’ in Florida. She was carefully dressed for the occasion in a very short but strangely modest-looking grey flannel dress with a white collar, her hair tied back with a black velvet ribbon; she sat with her hands in her lap, listening carefully to what Fred had to say, without even glancing in Baby’s direction.

  Fred’s proposition was simple: she was not to have anything to do with Baby in the future, in any way whatsoever. She was not to talk to the press; she was not to talk to anybody. Those of her friends who knew about her relationship with Baby were simply to be told that Baby had terminated it.

  ‘It would be better,’ said Fred, ‘if you left New York altogether; went back to England. What would you feel about that?’

  ‘I’d hate it,’ said Angie simply. ‘I like it here. I like my job. I have – friends here. I don’t like England any more.’

  ‘Well, we shall see about that. I would be prepared to make it worth your while, if you were to go back there.’

  Baby felt an outrage so violent it was a physical force, thrusting itself in the depths of his stomach. ‘Dad!’ he said. ‘Don’t talk to Angie like that. Don’t.’ Fred looked at him. ‘Why not?’ he said quite mildly.

  ‘Because she’s not used to it. You. It’s a fearful insult. Angie and I are – were – very deeply involved. You can’t just – buy her off. I won’t let you and she won’t let you.’

  Angie shot him an odd look. Then she turned to Fred again.

  ‘So – what happens if I don’t do what you say? If Baby and I were to decide to stay together.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Fred with great finality, ‘oh, that’s completely out of the question.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Completely.’

  ‘Baby,’ said Angie, ‘what do you have to say about this?’

  ‘Well,’ said Baby, ‘well I –’

  ‘Good God,’ said Angie, ‘you’re going along with it, aren’t you? Doing what Daddy says. Like a good little boy. Poor Baby. Poor little defenceless Baby.’

  ‘Angie,’ said Baby, ‘you don’t understand.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I think I do.’

  ‘No,’ said Fred, ‘not entirely. The thing is,
Miss Burbank, if Baby’s marriage ends, if this – relationship continues, then Baby loses his position at the bank.’

  Angie stared at him, an incredulous expression in her green eyes. Then she half smiled at him.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said, ‘you’d actually disinherit him, because he’s been screwing around a bit! Mr Praeger, you really do need to come into the twentieth century, you know. It’s archaic. It’s absurd. Baby, you’re not going to accept this, are you? I mean it doesn’t even matter about me, but you really have to learn to stand up for yourself a bit.’

  ‘Angie,’ said Baby, and he spoke very quietly, and he didn’t look at her, ‘Angie, I have to accept it. I’m married to Mary Rose, and I have my future and, far more importantly, my son’s future to consider. I can’t put that at risk. I really can’t.’

  ‘So that’s what the deal is, is it?’ said Angie. ‘You stay with Mary Rose and stop sleeping with me, and you keep the bank for yourself and Freddy. And if you don’t? If you stand up for yourself, start behaving like a grown-up?’

  ‘Then he doesn’t keep the bank,’ said Fred smoothly. ‘I should change its share structure, pass the majority over to the partners.’

  ‘You’d really do that?’ Angie stared at him.

  ‘Oh yes. Yes, I’d do it tomorrow. This family is very important to me. And Mary Rose has been magnificent, she is prepared to stand by Baby.’

  ‘You mean she isn’t prepared to go through a divorce? Well Baby, you really have sold out, haven’t you? I suppose it’s understandable really. You’re what – nearly thirty-five now, aren’t you? A bit late to start again, I suppose, to be poor, struggling, rejected. Without your beautiful houses and your fancy clothes, and people at every turn running round after you, doing your bidding. I suppose nothing could really compensate for that; certainly not me, it seems.’