He looked down at his watch. It was ten past two. The first thing he had to do was check in with his superior at the Foreign Office, but he had no intention of being caught up in early-evening meetings. The time he had spent in Geneva, painfully aware that the League of Nations was spectacularly failing to either deter or to halt aggression, had exhausted him. What he needed was a hot bath, a light meal and a couple of large, restorative malt whiskies. Something that would have restored him even more than the whiskies was taking Daphne to bed, but Daphne was still on Crete, and would be for another long, tedious week.
‘I’m afraid it’s the usual crawl, sir,’ his chauffeur said apologetically as heavy traffic slowed them to a snail’s pace.
With a motion of his hand Sholto indicated that it didn’t matter. A sensible thing for him to do with the extra time he was being given was to reread one of the files in his briefcase, but as they all made such dismal reading he didn’t have the heart for it. What he needed to jolt him out of his sombre mood was Daphne’s lively sparkiness and, as that was denied to him, he decided the next best distraction would be an evening at his gentlemen’s club.
It was six-thirty and he had just stepped out of the bath when the telephone rang.
‘Darling! Surprise, surprise!’ Daphne’s husky voice was full of bouncy vivacity. ‘I’m in London. Isn’t that super? I was simply missing you far too much to stay away a moment longer.’
Relief and pleasure flooded through Sholto.
‘Splendid,’ he said, too sophisticated to allow the intensity of his feelings to show. ‘Where would you like to have dinner?’
‘Quaglino’s.’
‘Quaglino’s it is. I’ll book a table for eight o’clock.’
‘Super. Till eight, then.’
‘Till eight,’ he said.
Replacing the receiver on its rest, he secured the bath towel around his waist a little tighter and, whistling, poured himself one of his promised malt whiskies. The evening was going to be a good one. He grinned to himself as he walked in the direction of his bedroom. If the size of his erection was anything to go by, the evening was going to be stupendous.
With a fur coat around her shoulders, Daphne ran out of her block of flats, flagged down a taxi and, ten minutes later, was pressing a bell at the entrance to Sholto’s mansion block.
‘C’est moi,’ she said when he answered its ring, her voice full of excited anticipation.
‘Daphne? Why on earth . . . ?’
‘I’ve something to tell you that can’t wait till eight o’clock. Something absolutely blissy. Let me in, darling, will you?’
The door buzzer was activated and seconds later she was inside, blowing a kiss to the porter and heading for the ornately mirrored cage-lift.
Even before she reached the door of his flat, Sholto opened it to her, the top buttons of his shirt undone, his bow-tie hanging loose around his neck.
‘What news is so important it couldn’t wait another hour?’ he said, amusement thick in his voice as Daphne threw herself into his arms. ‘Is your mother getting married for the third time? Are you going to return to Crete as a full-time archaeologist? Have you fallen in love with a Cretan shepherd and are about to give up everything to live in pastoral poverty halfway up a mountain?’
‘Idiot,’ she said, and then, as the door closed behind them and his mouth came down on hers, was unable to say anything for several delicious, spine-tingling moments.
When he finally raised his head from hers, she said, her eyes sparkling, ‘My news is going to be an even bigger surprise than any of the far-fetched things you’ve thought of.’
‘Then it must be outlandish.’
He slid his hands down over the slippery satin of her evening gown and cupped the cheeks of her voluptuous derrière.
‘You’re making it very difficult for me to concentrate,’ she said in mock complaint, as he pressed her against the hardness of his erection.
‘I could make it even more difficult, but may I remind you that we have a table booked for eight o’clock, which is . . .’ he glanced down at his wristwatch, ‘in a little less than an hour’s time. However, if you’re not worried about being there for eight, then I’m not.’
‘We may not get there at all.’ She pressed the palms of her hands against his chest, her eyes meeting his. ‘Not after I’ve told you my news.’
‘Which is?’
She let the moment spin out, before saying simply, ‘I’m having a baby.’
The expression on his face didn’t change. ‘Not funny,’ he said, ‘though you were right that such a piece of news knocks my suggestions into a cocked hat.’
Realizing she hadn’t yet finished teasing him, he released his hold of her.
‘Do you want a drink, before continuing with this a little longer? A pink gin? And while I’m mixing it, why don’t I have another stab at guessing the cause of all this excitement? Is your father finally to get his heart’s desire and be made Speaker of the House of Lords?’
Just making the suggestion amused him. As with the Speaker in the House of Commons, the first requirement of the Speaker in the House of Lords was that he remain impartial at all times. And the 9th Earl of Dugdale was renowned for being biased, prejudiced and partisan to the point of imbecility.
‘No, he isn’t – or not that I know of. And I don’t want a pink gin. Not just yet.’ She wound her arms around his waist. ‘I wasn’t teasing when I said I’m having a baby, Sholto. I really am. I only found out a couple of days ago – and wouldn’t even have known then, if it wasn’t for a very wise old peasant lady who could tell I was pregnant, even before I realized I’d missed my last period.’
Very few people had ever seen a stunned expression on Sholto Hertford’s face, but there was a stunned expression on it now. With a nerve pulsing at the corner of his jaw, he said, ‘Say that again, Daphne. And this time say it very slowly.’ Her arms tightened around him. ‘Sholto, darling. I’m pregnant. And let me tell you that no one is more surprised about it than I am.’
‘Oh, I think they are.’ There was a note in his voice that was a world away from what she had been expecting. ‘I am, for a start.’
‘Well, of course you are! But when the news sinks in, you’ll realize it’s all rather blissy.’
‘Blissy?’ Incredulity took over from stunned disbelief. ‘Blissy? Are you completely out of your mind? How the hell can you possibly be pregnant, when you always took precautions? Or always said you took precautions?’
‘Well, accidents happen, and I expect I must have been so carried away in the heat of the moment that I forgot all about the pesky cap – and to be honest, darling, it isn’t such a great tragedy, is it? I rather love the thought of our having made a baby. Such a clever thing for us to have done, don’t you think?’ He unwound her arms from around his waist. ‘It’s a bloody fiasco,’ he said bluntly. ‘Hell, we’ve only been together again a few weeks. I’ll make all the arrangements, of course.’ He clenched his teeth, trying to control the anger and revulsion he felt at being, because of Daphne’s carelessness and foolishness, put in the position of arranging to have a child of his aborted.
If, of course, the child was his.
Under the circumstances, it was a reasonable suspicion to entertain, but he closed his mind to the possibility, almost as soon as it came. Daphne was a lot of things, but she wasn’t duplicitous.
‘I doubt there’ll be a suitable slot at St Margaret’s.’ A small frown wrinkled Daphne’s forehead now. ‘Christmas is always a preferred time of year for weddings, and we’re not in a position to wait long for an available date, are we? That being the case, we may have to settle for having the wedding in the Dugdale parish church.’
For a second Sholto was so disorientated that he felt as Alice must have done, when she tumbled down the hole in the wake of the White Rabbit. Then, aware of how hideously deep the gulf of misunderstanding between them was, he said tautly, ‘I’m not talking about arrangements for a wedding, Daphne. I
’m talking about an abortion.’
‘An abortion?’ Her disbelief was total. ‘But I don’t want an abortion! I’m happy about this baby. How could I not be?’
Sholto could think of a score of reasons, but instead of listing them, he said in a voice brooking no argument, ‘I’m on the verge of thirty, a member of the aristocracy – minor though a viscount may be, in your family’s eyes – a respected diplomat in His Majesty’s Foreign Office, with an outstanding career in front of me. So far in life I have managed – by hook or by crook – to retain a reputation unsullied by scandal, and I am not prepared to blight it by marrying because a shotgun’s been slammed into the middle of my back.’
Daphne stared at him, trying to make sense of what he’d said. For several seconds, as the world shifted on its axis, she struggled to unscramble his words and rearrange them, and to make the sense of what he’d said quite different. It wasn’t possible. She tried to suck air into her lungs and couldn’t. It was as if she was once again facing him in the Savoy’s River Room, knowing that he wasn’t going to change his mind; that the future she’d been so certain about simply wasn’t going to happen. He had let her down not once, but twice. And this time was far, far worse, for this time he was letting down their unborn child, too.
When she could speak, it was to say in a voice she didn’t even recognize as hers: ‘You don’t love me.’
It was a bleak, bare statement of fact. She lost her balance slightly and put a hand out to the back of a chair to steady herself. ‘If you loved me, you might very well be angry at my having been so careless – and at your having to marry me before you’d got round to thinking what a jolly good idea marrying me would be – but you would never, never suggest that I have an abortion.’
He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could do so she cut across him. ‘And I’m not going to have an abortion. I’m going to have this baby – and I’m not going to hide myself away. No doubt I’ll be the talk of high society, but do you know something, Sholto? I don’t care what people say. I never have. You may not want our baby, but I do.’
And she did what she had done a little over a year ago in the River Room restaurant.
She turned her back on him and walked out of the room.
He made no attempt to stop her.
He heard the hall door close. A couple of moments later he heard the sound of the lift gates rolling open and then closing; heard the unmistakable sound of the lift returning to the ground floor. He didn’t hear the double doors of the mansion block being opened and then closed after her by the porter, but he crossed the drawing room and, from a window that looked down into the street, saw her cross the pavement and flag down a taxi.
She was crying. He was certain she was crying.
‘Oh, God!’ he said savagely. ‘Oh, hell! Oh, shit!’ He spun on his heel and picked up the nearest thing that came to hand. It was the heavy cut-glass tumbler that had had whisky in it and, with all the force he was capable of, he hurled it against the nearest wall. The glass splintered and shattered; ten-year-old Laphroaig malt trickled down Italian wallpaper that had cost an arm and a leg at Harrods.
Sholto didn’t care. How could Daphne have been so careless about something so important? And why had she been so provocatively happy at having become pregnant? Why hadn’t she been able to see it for the disaster it was?
And it was a disaster. A mega-mega-disaster.
Any other woman, on realizing he wasn’t going to be so easily bamboozled into a shotgun wedding, would have been only too grateful to have had him make the arrangements for an abortion. Not that he’d made such arrangements before, because he hadn’t. He had always conducted his private life far too circumspectly for such slipshod, messy accidents to occur. Daphne, though, had been adamant that her Dutch cap was far less intrusive than old-fashioned French letters and, as he had agreed wholeheartedly with her on that score, he had been more than happy to let her take the precautions.
Except that she hadn’t.
He sank down on the sofa, his head in his hands. Not for a minute did he doubt that Daphne would stand by everything she had said. She wasn’t a woman for meaningless threats. If she said she was going to have the baby, then – gutsy, reckless and as uncaring of the consequences as she always was – she would have the baby.
He couldn’t even begin to imagine the consequences.
With perspiration sheening his forehead, he forced himself to imagine them.
His father and Daphne’s father were fellow members of the House of Lords. There were many occasions – pheasant-shooting in Yorkshire, for one – when they socialized together. Neither man would stand idly by while a grandchild was born illegitimately.
He thought of his career; the career that meant so much to him. There would be no continuing spectacular advancement in the Foreign Office, once it became known that he hadn’t made an honest woman of the Earl of Dugdale’s daughter.
And then he thought of something else – something that twisted his stomach muscles into heaving, griping knots. The Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony Eden, was a close chum of Percy St Maur. Once St Maur told Eden the situation – and he would – then Sholto’s career in the diplomatic service would be as good as over.
And for what?
His hands bunched into fists.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t care for Daphne. He did. Another year down the line and their engagement would, no doubt, have been announced in The Times. Six months later there would have been a high-society wedding at St Margaret’s, Westminster. There would have been a couple of hundred guests, including of course Sir Anthony Eden and, quite possibly, King George and Queen Elizabeth.
And it would all have taken place when he, Sholto, had been ready for it to take place.
He thought of his ancestor Tobias Hertford refusing, because of pride, to bow the knee to William of Orange. Tobias had not exactly ruined his life, but with a little less pride, he could certainly have risen to greater social heights than he had done.
Was he about to make the same kind of mistake Tobias had made? Was he falling into the ‘no one gives me an ultimatum’ trap again?
He groaned, thinking of his options, of which he could only see two. The first was to persist in the stance he had already taken. The results of this, where his career and personal reputation were concerned, were bound to be calamitous. The second was to marry Daphne, which – apart from the embarrassment of a precipitously early wedding – would not be very calamitous at all.
Slowly he unclenched his hands and, resentment burning in him like hot coals, reached for the telephone and took the receiver from its rest.
‘I never thought we’d be walking down the aisle as bridesmaids during our Christmas holidays,’ Ella said to Kate, as she settled herself in the front passenger seat of Kate’s father’s Riley.
Kate turned the key in the ignition. ‘According to Daphne, there were a ghastly forty-five minutes when she didn’t think she’d be walking down the aisle, either.’
‘Did he really suggest that she have an abortion?’
Kate let out the clutch and pulled away from the front of King’s Cross Station. ‘Apparently. But Daphne says that was just a knee-jerk reaction to the shock. By the time she arrived home, after telling him what he could do with such a suggestion and walking out on him, the phone was ringing; and seconds later he was making things right pretty damn quickly.’
She overtook a lorry and was then baulked as a bus pulled out in front of her. ‘Did your parents mind you taking three days out of your time home, in order to travel south to be a bridesmaid?’ she asked, hoping that getting out of London wasn’t going to take her longer than she’d anticipated.
‘No. They know how important it is that we are bridesmaids for each other.’
‘And Sam?’
Laughter was thick in Ella’s voice. ‘Sam wasn’t remotely understanding, nor was he mollified at being included in the guest list. There was an awful lot of talk about the high-handednes
s of the aristocracy; the impossibility of a country GP being able to drop everything at little more than a moment’s notice, for a top-hat-and-tails shindig in Wiltshire; how, even if he’d been able to accept, he wouldn’t have been able to lay his hands on a morning suit; and last, but by no means least, that even if he had been able to lay his hands on one, he would have looked like a stuffed penguin wearing it.’
‘So no top hat and tails at the Methodist chapel at Easter, then?’
‘Goodness, no, though I have a sneaking suspicion my future in-laws would quite like that kind of formality. I can’t imagine my dad or granddad in top hat and tails, though, can you?’
‘No.’ There was amusement in Kate’s voice as, still in heavy traffic, she continued heading west, out of town. ‘I can’t. What did you say, to explain the suddenness of it all?’
‘I told Sam the truth, and gave my parents and granddad the same explanation that Daphne’s parents – according to Daphne herself – are giving everyone: that her eighty-year-old grandmother has only a short time left to live and that, before she dies, she wants to see her granddaughter walk down the aisle as a radiant bride.’
The next day when, on the arm of her father and to Wagner’s ‘Bridal Chorus’ from Lohengrin, Daphne walked down the aisle of the fifteenth-century church she had been christened in, there was no hint of how little foreknowledge of the occasion there had been. The bride’s antique-lace wedding gown was the same gown her maternal grandmother had worn. Her veil was held in place by a coronet of orange-blossom, its long length embroidered with crystals and seed-pearls. Behind her, Kate and Ella were wearing dresses of eau-de-nil velvet made for them by a London dressmaker, and which they had only tried on for the first time two hours earlier. Pale winter sunlight streamed through the exquisite stained-glass windows. White hot-house roses filled the air with heady fragrance.
As Daphne relinquished her father’s arm and, at the foot of the chancel, took her place next to Sholto, Ella couldn’t help thinking about her own wedding, now only four months away. It would, of course, be very different from today’s wedding. Being a Methodist service, not an Anglican one, the liturgy would be far simpler and there would be far fewer people in the congregation: just her family and Sam’s, a couple of the friends she had grown up with in Wilsden and a clutch of Sam’s rugby-playing friends. It would, though, be perfect, or as perfect as a wedding could be, without any of her Cretan friends present.
Beneath the Cypress Tree Page 18
