Wicked Pleasures

by Penny Vincenzi

  Maybe everything would be all right.

  He didn’t see her nearly so often these days. He wasn’t able to make his trips to London and Paris. He got tired easily. Mary Rose was watchful. He suggested (at his doctor’s genuine instigation) that he should start running again, and Mary Rose said it would be a wonderful idea and she would come with him. Baby had always hated running, but never as much as now, as he panted round Central Park with Mary Rose just behind him, shouting encouraging remarks, thinking of what he had been doing at this time a year ago.

  Chapter 22

  Max, 1983

  Five hundred guests [confided Jennifer to her diary and her readers in Harpers & Queen magazine] attended the brilliant dance for Lady Charlotte Welles given by her father the Earl of Caterham, and held at Hartest House, the exquisite eighteenth-century Caterham family seat. The dance retrospectively celebrated Lady Charlotte’s twenty-first birthday and was the first big party to have been held at Hartest since the tragic death of the Countess of Caterham three years ago. Lord Caterham, who has been increasingly reclusive recently, was looking relaxed and handsome, receiving the guests on the South Front of Hartest with his elder daughter. Lady Charlotte, who left Cambridge earlier this summer and is confidently predicted to achieve a double First in Economics and Politics, is to take up residence in New York in the autumn, where she is to join Praegers, the merchant bank founded by her great-great-grandfather in 1872.

  Lady Charlotte, who was looking very beautiful in a white tiered lace dress from Yves Saint Laurent, danced the night away with friends from both sides of the Atlantic. Her sister, Lady Georgina Welles, who is studying architecture at Bristol University, was also looking quite lovely in her red Emanuel crinoline, and their brother, the Viscount Hadleigh, was turning all heads in a genuine Victorian tailcoat. Other members of the family present included Mr and Mrs Praeger Senior, Mr ‘Baby’ and Mrs Mary Rose Praeger and their children Mr Frederick Praeger and Mr Kendrick Praeger and Miss Melissa Praeger, a delightfully pretty and well-mannered young girl who told me she hopes to train as a dancer when she is a little older at New York’s Juilliard school. All in all it was a wonderful evening and I met many friends, both old and new.

  It had indeed been a wonderful evening; everybody said so. Alexander had appeared genuinely to enjoy himself, and had even danced several times, twice with Mary Rose, albeit with a slightly distant expression; Baby, who had been subdued but cheerful, had danced every dance, mostly with friends of Charlotte and Georgina; Georgina’s new boyfriend, a fellow architect called Simon Cunningham, told her he had never known what love meant until he had seen her standing on the steps of Hartest in her red dress; Melissa was invited to go upstairs with at least five boys and refused all of them; and even Freddy appeared to be enjoying himself and became very slightly tipsy on the excellent Bollinger which Fred III had insisted on supplying in excessive quantities for the occasion.

  ‘I want my favourite grandchild to be launched on her adult life in style,’ he wrote to Alexander when he accepted his invitation to the ball, ‘and it can be one of my presents to her. I know you farmers are having a hard time of it.’

  And Max, who had behaved perfectly and never left the dance floor for long enough (in his own words) to smoke a joint, get drunk, or get anyone’s knickers anywhere near down, had hated every minute of it. He hated everything these days; he was bored, lonely and frustrated and he couldn’t see what was to become of him. He had scraped through his O levels and got five C grades; he had no interest in taking his academic career any further, and very little interest in doing anything at all.

  Having two brilliant sisters who knew exactly where they were going made it worse, of course: Georgina had gone through a bad patch briefly when she had been expelled from her school, but she was doing extremely well now with her architecture, and of course Charlotte, bloody Charlotte, was doing wonderfully as always, with her fantastic future laid out before her, and all she had to do was simply step into it and reap the rewards.

  Max was very fond of Georgina, but he found Charlotte hard to love. She was so bossy, so sure of herself, so permanently in the right. He wondered if she had ever been to bed with anyone. Presumably she had, she was twenty-one years old, but it was almost impossible to imagine. Max cheered himself up briefly, as he watched Charlotte dancing (she even seemed to do that better than anyone else), picturing her having sex with someone: telling them exactly what to do, how to do it, how long to take over it, when to finish, and what to say when it was all over. And God help the guy if he didn’t quite deliver to her brief. He knew that some people thought she was very sexy, but Max couldn’t see it. Too confident, too self-contained. Georgina, now she was gorgeous. She radiated sexiness, although in a very off-beat way. She was a bit skinny for his personal taste, but she had that kind of frail look about her, and a sort of – what? A restless quality that was very attractive. If she wasn’t his sister he could really fancy her. Max sighed, remembering, as he did possibly a dozen times a day, always freshly painfully, that she was not his sister. Or not entirely.

  He was still finding it almost impossible to come to terms with the news about his parenthood. The shock he had experienced when Charlotte had told him, in her brisk, matter-of-fact manner, as if she was giving him some kind of medicine that he needed, had been horrible. For weeks he had not slept properly. He would wake up two or three times a night, feeling afraid, lost, in some sort of swirling nightmare. It was as if all the security, all the love he had been surrounded by through his childhood had been taken away from him, and he was totally alone in the world.

  He thought of the mother he had known and loved so much, whose favourite he had been, and it was as if she had never existed. She died for Max not that night of the car crash on the M4 but in the lounge of the hotel in Ireland, while Charlotte told him that Alexander was not his father. He had cut her out of his life from that moment, determinedly not thinking about her, struggling to wipe out even the smallest memory of her. He had taken her photograph from the frame by his bed, and torn it up; he had ripped snapshots of her out of his photograph albums; he had thrown away all the letters she had sent him, and that he had kept since he was eight years old; and he had sold, in an act that had hurt him horribly, the gold watch she had given him for his twelfth birthday, and the gold cufflinks she had given him when he had gone to Eton. He had taken them to a dealer in Swindon and accepted the absurdly low price the man offered without a moment’s argument and then persuaded Tallow to put the money on a horse for him. The horse had obligingly lost and he had seen that as a fitting end to his mother’s gifts to him.

  And then he was estranged from his father; they communicated as little as possible, barely polite strangers. Max found it hard to explain to himself, let alone anyone else, the hostility he felt towards Alexander. He knew he should be feeling, as the girls did, sympathy, tenderness, loyalty. Instead he felt contempt and a strong sense that Alexander was to blame. If your wife was sleeping around, you put a stop to it; you didn’t endure it, bring up her illegitimate children, continue to protest that you loved her. It was all so bizarre, so ugly: the mystery of it haunted Max.

  He would have liked to talk to the others about it, but he couldn’t; something stopped him. He didn’t want them to know how badly it hurt, how unbearable he found it. He preferred to present his careless, tough front, and try to believe in that himself. He had spoken the truth when he had said he had got expelled from Eton on purpose; he had done it partly because it seemed suddenly and unbearably claustrophobic and partly to hurt Alexander. He wanted to reject everything to do with him.

  Except, as he had said to Charlotte, his inheritance. For some perverse reason, Max was very determined to make sure he stayed the heir to Hartest. He didn’t feel about it the way his father did, always drooling over it, and Georgina too, but he did like it: it had style, and Max liked style. And he liked privilege too, and status; and even more he liked money. There was no way he was going to l
ose all that, just because he was, strictly speaking, illegitimate. It was that word that hurt Max most. Illegitimate. Every time it entered his head, it was like a physical pain.

  It was hurting even during Charlotte’s birthday ball. He had set it aside determinedly and went and asked Melissa to dance with him. She was clasped rather tightly in the arms of a handsome boy, but she promptly disentangled herself the moment she heard Max’s voice. Melissa’s adoration of Max was a joke in the family, but Max found it oddly comforting.

  The dance finally wound up at four; the family regrouped for brunch at noon next day and sat discussing it over croissants, scrambled eggs and a great many cups of strong coffee.

  ‘What a charming man your neighbour Mr Dunbar is,’ said Mary Rose to Alexander. ‘I was telling him about my book on eighteenth-century watercolours and he seemed extremely interested.’

  ‘I didn’t think old Martin knew about anything except horses,’ said Max, ‘he certainly married one. The only thing missing last night was the nosebag.’

  ‘Don’t be rude, Max,’ said Alexander. ‘Catriona is a very nice woman and she was extremely kind to me – to all of us – when your mother died.’

  Max scowled at him. Georgina leapt into the silence, rather uncharacteristically: ‘Martin is amazingly knowledgeable about all sorts of funny things,’ she said, ‘I often talk to him about houses and things, he really likes them. He loves Hartest.’

  ‘Well you’d think he might have found somewhere a bit nicer to live himself,’ said Charlotte, ‘that house of theirs is a horror. Inside as well as out.’

  ‘Yes, well not everyone is born with a silver stately home in their mouth,’ said Max, who had actually often remarked on the ugliness of the small 1920s farmhouse the Dunbars lived in, but would have argued that black was white and then that it was black again if Charlotte had made a statement to the contrary.

  ‘I like it,’ said Georgina staunchly, ‘it’s homely and cosy. And I like them both very much. Especially Martin. He’s so gentle.’

  ‘Charlotte,’ said Melissa, who was growing bored with the conversation, ‘Charlotte, who was that perfectly dreamy black boy you were dancing with such a lot? I tried and tried to get to meet him, but he was always dancing.’

  ‘Oh, that’s Hamish,’ said Charlotte. ‘Hamish Mabele.’

  ‘He didn’t look like a Hamish,’ said Melissa.

  ‘Well he is. His father is a king somewhere in middle Africa, and he was at Cambridge and he became very keen on Scottish dancing, joined the Muckleflugga which is a club and when his first son was born he gave him a Scottish name. I think there’s even a Mabele tartan.’

  ‘Golly,’ said Melissa, ‘I’d like to see him in a kilt. Or better still without a kilt.’

  ‘Melissa, do be quiet,’ said Mary Rose.

  ‘A prince!’ said Betsey. ‘Well that was one I missed.’

  Betsey had had a particularly good time; she had met, as she told them completely unabashed, three baronets, a countess and a duchess. ‘And she, the Duchess that is, told me she had had dinner with Princess Diana last week, and that girl is just darling apparently, so shy and natural.’

  ‘And is Prince Charles darling too?’ inquired Fred mildly, winking at Charlotte.

  ‘Well I’m sure he is,’ said Betsey.

  ‘He’s very nice indeed,’ said Simon Cunningham, who was eager to impress anyone to do with Georgina, ‘my father is an artist and had a painting in this year’s Academy, and I met Prince Charles at the Private View. He’s charming, very gentle and courteous. You’d like him, I know. Maybe next year you should come, I’m sure we could arrange a ticket for you.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Fred, ‘you’ve done it now, Simon. She’ll be putting in calls to you twice a day for the next twelve months, reminding you.’

  Betsey looked hurt; Max, who was very fond of his grandmother, went over to her and put his arms round her shoulders.

  ‘I think Prince Charles would be really lucky to meet you,’ he said.

  ‘Me too,’ said Baby, who had been very quiet right through the meal. ‘Look, I’m sorry to break up the party, but I have to leave you for a while. I have a meeting in London this afternoon.’

  ‘You do?’ said Fred. ‘Who with?’

  His voice was mildly hectoring; Max noticed that Baby stiffened suddenly, shot him a look of great distaste.

  ‘A guy from Hambros,’ he said. ‘Things are very interesting over here at the moment. Something he refers to as Big Bang is on the horizon.’

  ‘What’s Big Bang?’ said Max. ‘Sounds like fun.’

  Baby laughed. ‘’Fraid not. It’s what’s going to happen in 1986, when the fixed commission system on the Stock Exchange here ends. It’s just been announced by Cecil Parkinson in the House of Commons, apparently. The old-fashioned brokers will lose their monopoly to buy and sell shares and it’ll be a free-for-all. More like what we have at home. Very exciting. I want to hear more about it.’

  ‘Oh really?’ said Fred. ‘You must tell me more about your plans.’ Again the hectoring voice.

  ‘I don’t have any plans,’ said Baby. He looked very sombre suddenly. ‘Unfortunately. Anyway, I’m off. Charlotte darling, could I borrow your car to drive to the station? I may be quite late back.’

  ‘Of course you can,’ said Charlotte. ‘Just remember it’s only a Mini now, Uncle Baby, not one of your Mustangs or Porsches.’

  Bossy cow, thought Max.

  ‘Max, telephone.’ Georgina’s voice pierced his sleep; he had sat down by the fire in the library after lunch and drifted off. I must be getting old, he thought.

  ‘I’m asleep. Who is it?’

  ‘Some man.’

  ‘I’m still asleep.’

  ‘Don’t be so lazy.’

  ‘Georgina, take his number, there’s an angel. I’ll call him back.’

  ‘Oh, all right.’

  ‘It was some photographer guy,’ said Georgina, sitting down on the footstool by his chair. ‘Apparently one of the press photographers at the dance told him to ring you.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake. I don’t want to buy any of his rotten pictures.’

  ‘I don’t think he wants you to. He wants to talk to you. Do, Max, he sounded really nice. Here’s the number.’

  ‘I’ll call him,’ said Melissa brightly, ‘I love photographers. They’re so sexy.’

  ‘Melissa, you think milkmen are sexy, and solicitors, and window cleaners and accountants and art historians and insurance salesmen,’ said Charlotte, laughing. She was sitting on one of the windowseats, reading. ‘Go on, Max, ring the guy up. I’m curious.’

  ‘OK, I will. Later. I have some serious revision to do.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Georgina, ‘what on earth about?’

  ‘The female anatomy. I’m going riding with Sarah Elliott.’

  ‘You’re disgusting,’ said Georgina.

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  He phoned the number while everyone was having tea; he went back into the dining room doing an exaggerated, campish walk, trying not to look as excited as he felt.

  ‘Hey, guess what? He was a fashion photographer. He wants to take some pictures of me. He says I have – wait for it, everyone – a great look. What do you think about that?’

  ‘I think it makes me feel sick,’ said Georgina. ‘You’re not going, I hope.’

  ‘Of course I am. Why not?’

  ‘Oh Max, really,’ said Charlotte. ‘He’s probably some social-climbing gay who fancies you.’

  Max, who had actually only been half serious about going to see the photographer, promptly decided nothing would stop him.

  ‘You’re such a snob, Charlotte,’ he said.

  ‘And you’re not, I suppose,’ said Charlotte. ‘Max, you’re not serious about this, are you? Whatever do you think Daddy would say?’

  ‘I couldn’t care less about what he’d say,’ said Max.

  He never called Alexander anything these days unless he had to.


  The photographer, whose name was Joe Jones, was out when Max turned up at his Covent Garden studio next day. A girl dressed entirely in black with white spiky hair and long green fingernails looked up coolly from reading The Face when he walked in.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve come to see Mr Jones,’ said Max.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To have some pictures done.’

  ‘Are you a model?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Max gave her his most dazzling smile; she met it blankly. ‘Who’s your agent?’

  ‘I haven’t got one.’

  ‘I should get one if I were you.’

  She went back to her magazine.

  Max was not used to this kind of treatment.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t have a great deal of time.’

  She shrugged. ‘I can’t conjure him out of the blue for you.’

  ‘But didn’t he say I was coming?’

  ‘No. Not that I remember.’ The magazine had re-engaged her interest. Max began to feel irritated.

  ‘There must be somewhere you can contact him.’

  ‘No, there isn’t. He’s on location.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  The girl looked up again. Her blank brown eyes flicked briefly and contemptuously over Max. ‘It’s out,’ she said, ‘out working.’

  ‘I think,’ said Max, ‘you should take my name. And tell him I came. And if he wants to see me he can contact me. I really don’t have the time to hang around here all afternoon.’

  She shrugged. ‘Fine.’

  ‘Well shall I give you my name?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘It’s Max Hadleigh,’ said Max. ‘Viscount Hadleigh actually,’ he added, thinking to impress. It was a very big mistake.

  ‘Oh really?’ she said, and for a moment there was some emotion behind her eyes and her lips twitched. ‘My goodness. Do I curtsey?’

  ‘I must say,’ said Max, ‘I think you’re one of the rudest people I’ve ever met.’

  ‘I can live with that,’ she said. ‘Cheers. I’ll tell him you came.’