Wicked Pleasures

by Penny Vincenzi

  Or ‘Martin, this is your grandson.’ Or ‘Martin, shall I start calling you Daddy?’ No. Not really.

  The whole thing was immensely difficult. And delicate.

  And then she had the idea of calling the baby George. It was a nice name anyway. It suited him: he looked like a George. Martin would be sure to comment on it. And then she could say – well, she wasn’t sure what she’d say, but she felt the conversation would take care of itself after that.

  The relief was so intense she finally fell deeply and sweetly asleep and had to be shaken awake by an irritable staff nurse saying if she wanted to do the night feeds she must wake up and do them, otherwise they’d give the baby a bottle.

  She told Charlotte first. Not about Martin, but that the baby’s name was George. She wanted to try out her reaction. It had been typically bossy.

  ‘Georgina, you can’t give your baby the same name as yourself. You just can’t.’

  ‘Yes I can. It’s a nice name.’

  ‘But it will be so confusing. You’ll be sure to call him Georgie and –’

  ‘No I won’t,’ she had said, very firmly. ‘That’s the one thing I won’t call him. He’s called George.’

  ‘Well I think it’s very silly,’ said Charlotte.

  Georgina looked at her awkwardly. ‘There is another reason,’ she said. ‘What other reason?’

  ‘Charlotte, I – I know who it is.’

  ‘Who who is? Georgie, do stop talking in riddles.’

  ‘Who Georgie is. Who – oh Charlotte, do stop being dense.’ And she sat up in bed and pushed her hair back irritably, her eyes fixed on her sister.

  ‘I’m sorry, Georgina, I don’t –’ and then Charlotte had stared at her, awed, almost afraid to say anything, anything at all. And finally she said, ‘You mean, you know who your – your father is?’ She spoke in a whisper, looking anxiously over her shoulder at the next bed; as it was occupied by an Indian girl surrounded permanently by an enormous number of relatives, it seemed unlikely they would be overheard.

  ‘Yes. Yes I do.’ Georgina smiled at her, feeling as she had once when she had rushed in from school and up the stairs to tell her mother she had won the art prize. ‘I do. And it’s – Charlotte, you’re not going to believe this, but – promise me you won’t argue, because I do know –’

  ‘Georgie, for God’s sake, tell me. I shall hit you in a minute.’

  ‘It’s Martin.’

  ‘Martin! Martin Dunbar! Oh Georgina, that’s nonsense. Of course it isn’t. It can’t be. Martin, but he’s so –’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Well he’s so – shy.’

  ‘So am I. And he’s tall, and terribly thin, and he stoops.’

  ‘So do lots of people.’

  ‘I know, I know. There’s more. Listen.’

  She told her. About Martin’s kindness and concern, his monumentally courageous act of visiting her in hospital, the way his attitude towards her had become so paternalistic.

  ‘Yes but darling –’

  And then the more important things, the name, Angie’s conviction he had been in love with their mother.

  ‘Don’t look like that, Charlotte. I know. OK? I just know. Can you tell him, please, that I’ve had the baby. Tell him it’s a boy, but not what the name is.’

  She decided not to tell Max. It was too much like hard work. She just let him tell her that calling the baby George was a bloody silly idea and left it at that.

  She had a very shrewd idea that Nanny had at least had her suspicions. She had nodded slightly grimly when Georgina told her the baby’s name and said,‘Very suitable.’ On the other hand, it could just have been Nanny.

  She wondered if Angie might put two and two together and make one of her very neat fours. She was so sharp and shrewd. But if she did she didn’t show it. She just nodded and said, ‘It’s a sweet name,’ and asked Georgina if she’d like to borrow her nanny for a few days, or come and stay with her. Georgina often felt bad these days about not liking Angie more.

  She had been so pleased when Alexander had appeared in the ward, she burst into tears. He had come and put down his huge bouquet of flowers and taken her in his arms and kissed her and told her he loved her and he was sorry he had been so stupid and that she was a clever girl and he loved her and begged her to go home to live at Hartest with the baby. She had said she loved him too, but that she wanted to stay in London; she would go down every weekend, she said. She had wondered if there might be some reaction about the baby’s name from him; but there wasn’t. He had simply said he thought it was charming that she liked her own name so much she wanted to perpetuate it.

  When she had finally – well, hardly finally after only three days – capitulated and gone home, Alexander had been visibly moved. She had sat in the library, by the fire, feeding the baby, and he had sat opposite, watching her, his eyes soft with tenderness, and perhaps a slight sadness. ‘I only wish your mother could have seen this,’ he said. He hardly ever mentioned Virginia; Georgina was surprised.

  Nanny had received them both with immense relief, and had George tucked up firmly in the crib, his disposable nappy replaced by a good strong terry towelling one, his Babygro by a Viyella nightie before Georgina could turn round.

  ‘I’m very pleased you’re here,’ Nanny said, ‘I was worried about him up in London with that woman.’

  She made it sound as if George had been conducting a wild and unsuitable love affair; it was a while before Georgina realized she had been referring to Mrs Wicks.

  Martin hadn’t visited her in hospital. She had been, against all the odds, surprised and, she had to admit, disappointed. She kept telling herself that one visit to London in a decade was probably as much as he could reasonably be expected to make and certainly to a maternity hospital; nevertheless it hurt. Then the day before she was due to come out, a big bouquet of flowers arrived, from him and Catriona, and a card from Martin, saying, ‘Dear Georgina, We are both so pleased. I very much look forward to seeing you when you come down to Hartest. Do be in touch.’ From Martin, under the circumstances, that was quite a big gesture.

  She had finally seen him when she had been back at Hartest for about three days. She was sitting in the nursery, winding George, when she heard a car on the drive; she looked out and saw it was his Land-Rover.

  Georgina felt slightly sick and faint, rather as if he had been her lover. She gave George a final pat on the back, wrapped him in his shawl and walked rather slowly down the stairs. When she got to the bottom Martin was nowhere to be seen. Feeling silly, she went through to the front hall, and heard him talking to her father in the corridor. She followed their voices.

  ‘Hallo,’ she said. ‘Hallo, Martin.’

  ‘Georgina, darling, can’t stop now,’ said Alexander, ‘crisis in the dairy. Two of the cows are sick. Martin came to alert me. Martin, hang on a minute, I’ll just call Bill Withers, see if he can get up here.’

  He disappeared into the gun room; Georgina looked slightly awkwardly at Martin.

  ‘Hallo,’ she said.

  ‘Hallo, Georgina. How are you?’

  ‘Oh – feeling much better. A bit tired, you know, but all right. Look, this is my son and heir. Isn’t he beautiful?’

  Martin looked at the baby and there was a very odd mix of expressions on his face: tenderness, happiness and something close to awe, but most of all, an intense and burning interest, a searching of the small features, an almost fervent study of everything about him. It was that more than anything else which told Georgina she was right.

  Finally he turned to her and said, ‘And what are you going to call him?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, her heart thumping almost painfully, ‘I’m going to call him –’

  And then Alexander had reappeared, flustered, impatient. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘Withers is meeting us there.’

  And Martin was gone.

  It was a week later that she met him again; she had (greatly daring, for Nanny disapproved, saying
it wasn’t natural) bought a sling, so that she could walk about with the baby strapped to her; she was wandering down the path towards the stables, and he was hurrying up it, towards the house.

  ‘Hallo,’ he said, ‘you’re looking better.’

  ‘Thank Nanny. She won’t let me near him half the time. So I get lots of sleep.’

  ‘Can I walk with you a little?’ he said, looking slightly awkward. ‘Of course. I thought you seemed in a hurry.’

  ‘Oh – not really. I was actually thinking I might see you. At the house. I had an hour to spare.’

  ‘Oh.’ She smiled at him, confused, feeling herself blush. This was crazy; she was acting (again) as if he was a lover. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘come with us. We’re on our way to the stables. Or maybe the lake.’

  ‘The lake’s a longer walk,’ he said. ‘Let’s do that. If you feel up to it.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You were going to tell me the baby’s name,’ he said, ‘the other day.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘so I was.’ There was a pause: come on, Georgina, get it out. ‘He’s called George,’ she said and met his eyes very steadily.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, and then, his expression quite unfathomable: ‘After you?’

  ‘Well – partly. It’s a nice name. And it’s –’her courage failed her –‘oh, I don’t know. Do you like it?’

  Martin Dunbar stopped walking. He turned and faced her, and he looked immensely sad and oddly amused at the same time. ‘I like it very much. Very much indeed.’ There was a long long silence. Georgina stood staring at him, her heart thudding. Finally Martin said, quite casually as if remarking on the weather, ‘Nobody else really knew this, but your mother used to call me Georgie.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Georgina. ‘Yes, I sort of guessed that. It’s why I gave him the name. Actually.’

  Martin didn’t say anything; but he looked at her, sharply, searchingly, and then he smiled at her, a radiant, all-consuming smile, and put his arm very gently round her shoulders.

  ‘I’m very proud of you,’ was all he said.

  They walked for nearly an hour, talking, talking. It was very easy. He didn’t ask her any of the crass questions, how long she had known, or how she had guessed, and she didn’t ask him how any of it had happened. He just talked to her about Virginia and how much he had loved her, what a special person she had been, how good a friend; he said that of course Alexander and Catriona had never known, never suspected how close they had been, and it was far far better that they never should. He said that watching Georgina grow up had been a great joy to him; he said she had always been his favourite.

  She told him that it was lovely for her that he was so near, especially now that she had George, and she was so pleased she had come home to Hartest. She said she hoped they would see more of each other in the future, and she said how silly it was that you could live next door to someone and not see them for weeks on end. She asked him if he thought Catriona would mind if she brought George to the house sometimes, and he said that Catriona would be delighted. It was so sad for her, that she had been unable to have children, he felt terrible for her; of course she had always rather assumed it was his fault. They had never, he said, with an embarrassed smile, gone in for any of those awful tests: just agreed to live with it.

  ‘I’m so please you came back to Hartest too,’ he said, ‘it’s lovely for all of us. I was so afraid I was going to lose you.’

  Over the next few weeks they grew closer. They walked together, they sat and chatted sometimes in the house while Martin was waiting to see Alexander or when he had left him; she took George down to the house to visit both him and Catriona. Once or twice, greatly daring, she met him in Marlborough and he took her to lunch in a pub. ‘It’s a great treat for me to be able to spoil you,’ he said. He absolutely accepted and supported her decision to have George, and moreover not to tell Kendrick about him. ‘If the relationship wasn’t working, then it’s far better to be on your own.’

  She wondered at first how he equated that philosophy with the condition of his own marriage, but she came to see that against all the odds, that was a relationship that did work, in its own way, that was perfectly happy.

  She discovered that he liked, cared about many of the same things as she did: music, paintings, beautiful houses: ‘Even thought ours is so ugly. I had a little trouble coming to terms with that when we first moved in; but Catriona liked it and I’ve grown accustomed to its face.’

  He told her things she had never known about her mother and which it was good for her to hear: about how fiercely loving she was towards them all, how loyal to Alexander (‘She never would hear a word, not a word of criticism about him’), how courageous. He defended her when Georgina said she was always going away, leaving them all: saying her work was important to her, that she had a great talent, that it gave her the strength to go on fighting her alcoholism, her sense of failure, her feeling that her father was always disappointed in her.

  He told her charming anecdotes about her mother, illustrating her charm, her talent for the small, thoughtful gesture (‘Catriona once confided in her that she loved Scottish dancing, and every year on her birthday your mother would give a small party and after supper we would all dance, you were always away at school’), her beauty (‘People just used to stare at her, Georgina, people who didn’t know her well, she really was lovely’).

  She never asked quite how and why it had all happened, and she never told him about Charles St Mullin and Tommy or discussed Charlotte and Max in any way. Partly because she was too shy, too fastidious to do so, and partly because neither of them saw a need to transgress the shadowy but strong boundaries they had set up. Within those boundaries she felt safe, reassured, happy, they contained everything she felt she needed to know, and they neither damaged nor threatened Alexander in any way. She could see that it was odd of her to be able to accept them, accept the boundaries, that most people would have been obsessed with curiosity, but she was grateful that she was able to do it. Beyond them was danger: and she had no wish to court it.

  And the best thing of all, perhaps, was that Alexander had absolutely no idea that she had found her other father, solved her own mystery – or how extremely happy it had made her.

  Chapter 54

  Max, April 1987

  The sun was streaming in through the chapel windows. Gemma’s veil swept almost the length of the aisle. Her dress by Anouska Hempel was in cream silk, hung with a thousand drop pearls. She carried only a white prayer book, with a trailing garland of lily of the valley; her eyes were cast modestly downwards.

  ‘You’ll have to liven up a bit, darling, you look like a fucking nun.’ Nige Nelson was scowling at the polaroid he had just taken. ‘And those shoes are all wrong. Too high. Got any others?’

  The fashion editor, who was young and terrified of Nige, rummaged through the heap of plastic bags. ‘These?’ she said. ‘But they’re still high.’

  ‘Useless. Why don’t you girls ever learn? Gemma, have you got any, darling?’

  ‘No,’ said Gemma loftily. She sounded cross. ‘Max, there wouldn’t be any in the house, would there?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. Not really Georgina’s thing, white satin high heels.’

  ‘What about your mother’s things? There are lots of her clothes still there, aren’t there? I saw them the other day.’

  Max felt a bolt of rage. God, she was insensitive. ‘I’m sorry, Gemma, but I’m not about to go rifling through my mother’s clothes, just to provide accessories for some lousy fashion shoot.’

  ‘Oh shit, let’s just go with it,’ said Nige wearily. ‘It’s getting late, the light’s going. Come on, Gemma, nice smile at your bridegroom, darling.’

  Gemma gazed adoringly into the eyes of the Moss Bros clothes horse beside her.

  ‘Too virginal,’ said Nige. ‘Come on, darling, work at it a bit. Now where’s the fucking crimper gone? Outside having a joint, I suppose. Oh there you are. Can we have a b
it more hair? And the eye shadow’s too bright. Tone it down, will you? Quickly, for Christ’s sake. Otherwise I’ll have to use artificial light, and my turd of an assistant’s forgotten a cable.’

  Max was beginning to seriously regret offering the chapel at Hartest to Brides Magazine for the day.

  He drove Gemma back to London in a sulky silence. She was animated, overexcited. ‘That went well, didn’t it? It was so lovely, standing there, thinking of our wedding. I think when I marry I might get my dress from Anouska, what do you think?’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ said Max.

  ‘Nige is a pig, but he’s a brilliant photographer. I’m sure they’ll be really great. Your father might like to have some, don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t think, no,’ said Max. ‘I think he’d hate it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, forget it. If you don’t know, there’s no point my trying to explain.’

  ‘You’re in a nice mood,’ said Gemma. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘The matter,’ said Max, ‘is that I found I didn’t actually like having the chapel filled up with a load of creeps and perverts, and –’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Gemma, ‘you gave your permission. And they’re not creeps and perverts. They’re good fun. Which is more than I can say you were today.’

  ‘Well I’m extremely sorry. I hadn’t realized my role was anything other than janitor.’

  ‘I’m going to go to sleep,’ said Gemma, curling up in the corner of her seat. ‘There’s no point talking to you. But let’s hurry. That party starts in an hour. We’ll miss the whole thing if we’re not careful.’

  ‘Good,’ said Max.

  Max had been with Praegers just over three weeks now; he had a salary that was roughly half as big again, a very generous bonus package and a 1 per cent share in the bank, which Fred had made an extremely vague commitment to increase at some unspecified time in the future. Nevertheless he wasn’t altogether happy; he missed Jake and the other lads at Mortons, and he missed something else as well, something indefinable. Gabe Hoffman, over on a short trip, told him what he thought it probably was as they talked briefly one night, waiting for Charlotte to finish work: ‘You have to know you’re on a solid base. Old Fred is a megalomaniac tyrant, but he knows how to run a company. I guess Gemma’s dad is the same. Praeger UK is a bit of a leaky vessel, I’d say, and now you’ve got a dodgy crew moving in. It’ll probably get fixed up in time, though. Don’t worry.’