She was having an affair with a married lawyer at the time. The arrangement suited her perfectly. It wasn’t really an affair, certainly not a love affair, certainly not on her side. She wasn’t so sure about him. She would have to watch that. But so far so good. After Marcus and then Michael, with the guilt of that still heavy on her shoulders, it was going to be a long time before she was ready for emotional involvement again. Sometimes she thought she never would be.
And she would not think about sex with Marcus.
She would not. Only of that last degrading night after which she had never wanted to see him again. Well, perhaps he had changed, but no, she would not even consider it. He would never change, would never lose his extreme sexuality, his brinkmanship. Anyway he was married. And she pitied his wife, or, if the truth be told, half pitied and half envied her. Enough. It was over between her and Marcus and would remain so.
Three weeks later Marcus called again. He had two tickets for a Broadway show. Would she like to go along? For old times’ sake, nothing more. He took her to supper afterwards at The River Cafe in Brooklyn, from which they could look across at the illuminated shape of Manhattan, then he took her home to her apartment in the chauffeur-driven limo which conveyed him around town nowadays. He was the perfect gentleman. From the foyer of her apartment block she watched his car leave, aware again of vague disappointment. This was ridiculous.
And so every two or three weeks Marcus would turn up and they would dine together or go to the theatre. They talked of his business empire. He appeared quite frank. Without embarrassment he discussed the suspicions voiced against him and dismissed it all as jealousy. He was convincing, as always.
Each time they met his manners were perfect. But there was no mistaking the longing in his eyes. She felt he was courting her, and she was right. Eventually one night he suddenly told her that he was divorcing his wife. Startled, she asked him why.
He shrugged his big shoulders. ‘It was another mistake,’ he said.
‘Is that all?’ she asked. ‘Simple as that? You make it sound like ordering the wrong meal in a restaurant.’
He shook his head. ‘Pamela wanted children. I thought I did too. Since seeing you again I have realised there is only one woman in the world I want to be the mother of my children.’
He looked at her directly. She did not want to meet his gaze.
‘I have changed, Jennifer,’ he said. ‘Sex isn’t everything any more. If I could relive one night of my life and do it differently it would be the night I lost you.’
She felt herself begin to melt. How was it that he could still do this to her?
‘I have always wanted to marry you. I still want to marry you,’ he continued.
Then he proposed to her. They were in his hotel suite. They were supposed to be going to the theatre. She bet he hadn’t even bought the tickets. It wasn’t going to be that easy, she thought, but she accepted that she was probably kidding herself.
‘You are married already, Marcus,’ she pointed out flatly.
‘I told you, we are getting divorced,’ he said.
‘You will never change,’ she said.
And her answer was no. No she would not marry him, even if he was free. He didn’t seem to listen. Typical Marcus. He was still staring at her, allowing his eyes to undress her.
‘I want you, Jennifer,’ he said. ‘And from now on it will be only you, I promise.’
She supposed it was inevitable. She allowed herself to be led into the bedroom. The sex was as extraordinary as ever; but he was more careful, more gentle, more affectionate. Maybe he had changed after all. Thankfully, he was just as exciting. He reduced her to a trembling wreck, unaware again of anything in the whole world except her own sexuality. Only he could drive her to those kind of extremes, only he could make her entire body shake with desire, only he could make her beg for more and more. It was just the same as it had always been, and she realised how much she had missed it.
The next night she went out with Marcus again.
He said he had been on to his lawyers in London. They reckoned they could rush the divorce through in a couple of months, and that did not surprise her. His name pulled strings and he had the knack of getting his own way fast – she knew that. She was afraid and excited all over again. Damn Marcus Piddell. She feared she was going to have to give him one more chance. She wanted to believe so much that this time it would be all right, yet she tried very hard not to let him see how close she was to giving in.
Eventually she confessed to Anna that she was seeing Marcus again and even that he had asked her to marry him – but she insisted that she was determined to turn him down. Her best friend was not convinced.
‘Poor bloody Lady Pamela,’ Anna remarked caustically. ‘Never stood a bloody chance.’
‘Nonsense,’ maintained Jennifer. ‘If Marcus goes through with divorcing his wife it will be absolutely nothing to do with me. Seeing him occasionally is one thing, but I have no intention of ever making any kind of commitment to him again.’
Yet she was kidding herself, and she knew it, even though when Marcus returned to the UK she was still refusing to marry him, and continued to resist through two more of his flying visits.
Then, on one of her periodic trips to London, just weeks after his first proposal, he took her to dinner at The King’s Head, a little pub by the river in Wapping. It was unlike him to want to dine anywhere that was not excessively trendy, but he knew how she liked cosy pub restaurants and perhaps he was hoping that the romance of a waterside setting might influence her. Maybe sensing that she was near to agreeing to share her life with him again, he asked her once more if she would marry him. She gazed out of the window wondering idly if Marcus had arranged the stunning full moon as well as everything else, and somewhere in the distance she heard her own voice saying yes.
‘You win, Marcus. I’m probably insane. But yes, I will marry you.’
They had not started the main course. He said nothing in reply. With a wave of his hand he gestured for the bill and paid it. His eyes were inside her head again, inside her body, drilling deep into her. She knew what was going to happen. She felt the old crazy excitement mounting. He took her by the hand and led her from the restaurant. Just down the street there was an alleyway leading to the riverside and he half dragged her into it.
‘We’ll get mugged,’ she protested.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not tonight.’
He led her down the alley until it turned abruptly to the left, into a dead end with the Thames on one side and a disused warehouse on the other. In a shadowed corner away from the glow of the moon, there was a boarded-up window with a wide stone ledge. He backed her against it and lifted her on to the ledge – it was just the right height. Vaguely she thought it was bound to be filthy and that would be the end of her Saint Laurent suit. His eyes did not leave her face as he plunged into her. No preamble. No need. Animal. Basic. He was urgent in her, still staring unblinking at her. Deadly serious.
‘From now on this is for you. Only you. No more games. Just you and me and this. Because it can only be like this for us.’
His words were staccato. It was over very quickly. He was making a point, he was consummating their new engagement. It was like shaking hands on a deal. The thought made her giggle. He was the only man she had ever had sex like that with. In a daft sort of way it was special to them, had been since the scramble by the dustbins at her school all those years ago.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
When they got back to his apartment Marcus apologised. Jennifer thought it was the first time she had ever heard him apologise for anything. And she had never seen him look so nervous. She realised how afraid he was of losing her again. He was afraid she had been offended by his alley antics. She had reassured him that she could never resist his gut sexiness – that had been his first appeal to her and it was not going to go away. They were two of a kind. It was just that this time there had to be limits or they would destroy themselves and the
ir relationship. He knew what she meant.
The skirt of her Saint Laurent suit, which had started the day a pale lemon colour, was indeed ruined – its seat now covered in grime.
‘Tomorrow we’ll go shopping. I’ll buy you the shop,’ he said.
‘Flash bugger,’ she replied.
But for the first time the thought crossed her mind that he probably could buy the shop if he wished. Extraordinary.
She never did go back to New York. Marcus’s divorce came through with the kind of smoothness Jennifer knew to expect from him. They were married in the West Indies in the winter of 1987.
‘I told you Lady Pamela never stood a bloody chance,’ said Anna McDonald. ‘And you owe me two lunches at the Connaught. One to cancel out the one I bought you when you married poor old Michael, and the other to settle our bet. I always knew I’d win in the end…’
Uncomfortably aware that her mother deserved far better, Jennifer had told Margaret Stone of her marriage plans on the telephone.
‘Yes, of course I understand you wanting to go away on your own to get married,’ her mother had said, while quite clearly not understanding at all. ‘I just hope you know what you’re doing this time. It would make a change, I’m sure…’
The lawyer lover and the New York apartment were all dispensed with by remote control. Jack at The Globe agreed to have Jennifer back in London as Features Editor, creating a vacancy to do so and pretending not to notice that she had more or less walked out of New York. But then, she was known in Fleet Street for having an impetuous streak, and only a combination of considerable talent and her likeableness allowed her to get away with it. Also Anna was absolutely spot-on right – Jack did indeed adore her, and who knew what other forces were working for her, thanks to Marcus? Even then that thought did occur to her.
One way and another it was an extremely neat operation. It would be, of course: Marcus was a neat man both physically and mentally. His house, his office, even his desk, were always immaculate, and so, Jennifer suspected, was the order of his mind. He never liked mess or loose ends. But she’d had enough of living in America anyway. London was home.
In the sunny splendour of Barbados’s Sandy Lane Hotel they drank too many rum punches and planned their new life together. They would have a baby before it was too late, maybe more than one. They were both ready. On returning to England they bought the house on Richmond Hill. It had plenty of room for a family. Once again they were the media world’s golden couple, only this time even more so.
Two years passed relatively uneventfully and things were still pretty good. But Marcus had changed in many ways. At first Jennifer was sure he was being faithful to her sexually, yet there was so much she did not know about his world. Just as before, he would sometimes disappear for hours on end, maybe a whole day, and nobody in his office ever knew where he was. She asked him about his Freemasonry and he admitted readily enough that, yes indeed, the Masons demanded a great deal of his time nowadays, especially since he was apparently now a member of several lodges and a grand master of more than one. But still she felt uneasy. A few times he said he was embarking on business trips abroad and she discovered by chance that his stories just did not add up. He told her that his business interests were so complex now he could not begin to explain, he could not stop to take anyone else on board. She accepted it more or less because she couldn’t face a confrontation and, looking back, she realised that she had not wanted to rock the boat. She had not wanted there to be anything amiss, she had not wanted another broken marriage. But she was uneasy. His telephone had a scrambler on it, for God’s sake, and, he never failed to take most of his calls behind a firmly closed door as far away from her as possible – just as he had from the very beginning of their relationship. But perhaps all men at his level of success needed to be discreet about their work, she thought to herself. He remained as plausible as ever. You didn’t discuss deals worth millions of pounds on open, unscrambled lines, he said, and there were some kinds of business so delicate and confidential that you did not allow anyone to overhear – not even your wife.
Frequently she would walk into a room when he was talking on the telephone and he would immediately hang up. Once or twice she picked up the phone when it rang and there would be no one at the other end. Classic signs of an affair. But she wanted desperately to trust him. She had thrown in her lot with him.
Their sex life remained as exceptional as it had always been. It was almost twenty years since they had first been together, and their desire for each other was as great as ever. Unusual, she thought. But in spite of the quality and frequency of their lovemaking, Jennifer did not become pregnant. Eventually she went to her gynaecologist for tests. Nothing indicated any reason why she should not have a child, but she was thirty-six years old and her body clock was ticking away.
‘It’ll happen sooner or later, darling, you’ll see,’ Marcus reassured her.
It didn’t happen and eventually her doctors asked to test Marcus. He agreed easily enough; it did not seem to occur to him that the problem might really be his.
Jennifer came home late one night to find him slumped over the kitchen table with a nearly empty whisky bottle by his side. It was the first time she had ever seen him really drunk. Marcus did not like to lose control. Except in bed. He stirred when she entered the room.
‘Wanna drink?’
She nodded and then sat down opposite him. He poured fine malt whisky into a crystal tumbler. Even in despair, Marcus would never allow his standards to drop. Not Marcus. She knew something was very wrong. She waited for him to speak.
‘You’re not gonna bloody believe this,’ he said finally. ‘I’m bloody sterile.’
His eyes were red and swollen. She realised he had been crying. She instinctively reached forward and held his hand.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.
They both knew it did. Probably more to him than to her, as it happened.
‘Biggest, horniest bloody dick in bloody town and it’s bloody useless,’ he muttered angrily. ‘Bang bloody bang. An’ all I fire is bloody blanks.’
It was after that that things started to go wrong. The matter was never discussed again. Nor were any alternatives like adoption. Marcus hardly ever seemed to want to talk to her about anything. He had a grimness about him that she had not been aware of before. For the first time ever the sexual chemistry between them began to let them down. Sometimes Marcus would come home very late and sleep in one of the spare rooms, saying that he had not wanted to wake her. She had been determined that this time she would remain faithful within her marriage. There really was little point in remarrying in your mid-thirties unless that was your intention. But she did stray once or twice. Not because she craved further sexual excitement, but because she felt so alone, so isolated. The emotional side of her relationship with Marcus had always been a little strange. There was no doubt of its strength. But it was all so closely entangled with the sexual magnetism between them. Love was not a word often mentioned. Jennifer had once told Anna that, when she finally married Marcus, her strongest feeling had been one of inevitability. It was her destiny, and whether she loved him or not, and of course she supposed she did, was irrelevant.
When they ultimately parted she experienced the same feeling of inevitability. Probably the way in which it happened was inevitable too. She had become pretty sure that Marcus was again indulging in sexual activities she would rather not know about. But nothing had prepared her for the revelations on that grey, chill October night in 1992.
She had to travel to Paris to negotiate the buy-up of a big Royal scoop with a French magazine, and she was booked on the last flight out of Heathrow. Minutes after the flight was called there was a bomb scare and the entire airport was cleared. She waited an hour or so in the nearby Hilton Hotel and finally decided she had had enough. She would take a taxi home to sleep in her own bed, and catch the first flight the next day.
As her key turned in the latch she sensed that
things were not as they should be. The hall was dark but there was a dim light showing through the cracks around the closed door to the living room. It was what she could hear that had turned her blood cold. High-pitched squeals, sobbing, and rhythmic grunting. She threw open the door.
A startled Marcus turned around so that he was looking straight at her. The expression on his face horrified her. His eyes looked crazed. His lips were pulled back over his teeth so that he seemed to be snarling, sweat was pouring from him, the muscles of his neck were bulging with his exertions. He was naked, and leaning over the sofa before him were two young Oriental girls, who were also naked. Marcus was still thrusting into the backside of one of them. Even as he looked into the horrified eyes of his wife, he could not stop his body carrying on with what it was doing. The girls also turned to look at Jennifer, and their faces showed pain and fear. They were weeping. Marcus had later claimed they were at least sixteen, but Jennifer remained sure that they were even younger. They were physically tiny and she knew how big Marcus was.
Jennifer took in the whole sordid scene in seconds.
Still clutching her overnight bag for the Paris trip, she bolted for the front door, slammed it behind her, and ran to the Porsche parked in the driveway. Although she had used taxis for her original journey to the airport, she found to her relief that her car keys were in her pocket. Hastily she unlocked the car door, slid behind the wheel, tossing her bag onto the passenger seat, crashed the gears into reverse and roared out of the drive backwards and at speed. She was fortunate that for a brief moment there were no passing vehicles on the road behind the house. Had there been, she would have smashed straight into them, because she had not looked in any direction. As she gunned the car forwards with a clumsy lurch, she was vaguely aware of the front door to the house flying open and a frantic Marcus, precariously clutching an unbuttoned overcoat around his nakedness, tearing down the drive behind her. Too late. Much too late for everything.
The Cruelty of Morning Page 16
