A lone drop of rain plopped on to his forehead and trailed slowly down his face. ‘So we’re back to that, are we? Back to blackmail.’
‘It’s not blackmail, Charles. The baby’s part of me already. We’re indistinguishable. I can’t offer you anything unless you accept my child as part of the deal.’
Deal, thought Charles bitterly. So she was using his words now. It didn’t make it any easier. It wasn’t just a matter of accepting a baby he didn’t want, but conniving at cuckoldry, deception, the mocking laughter of a man who had pre-empted his own wife’s womb. Another sixteen years of grappling with a child who wasn’t his. Yet, what was the alternative? Loss, emptiness, scrambled eggs, hotels.
He looked up at the sky. Even the nearest pinprick star was a million million miles away. How could one five-foot-nothing wife, one tinpot infidelity, matter so hugely when he was only a speck, a whispered syllable in the five-act cosmic drama? The sky seemed to shrug. A splatter of raindrops spat rudely in his face.
He got up from the bench and turned away. Frances was only a shadow now, a dark smudge muddying the moonlight.
‘Look, forget Oppenheimer,’ he said roughly. ‘I’ll manage on my own. Get in the car and I’ll drive you back to Acton.’
Chapter Seventeen
Laura appraised her slim white hand in the silver-framed mirror of the Guildford jewellers. It was wearing five rings.
‘This one,’ she said, discarding the rest and handing Charles a narrow platinum band, studded all the way round with diamonds.
Charles whisked out his American Express card, then replaced it in his wallet. This time, he’d better pay by personal cheque. He didn’t want Laura’s snide remarks about expense-account jewellery. She was no fool. Even the ring she’d chosen was by far the most expensive. It fitted best, she said, but she knew as well as he did that size could be adjusted.
That was the last of the shopping, thank God. He’d trotted after her into boutiques and beauty parlours, emporiums and fashion houses. His credit cards were wilting with the strain. Laura herself was blooming. She festooned him with the heaviest of the packages, tucked her free arm through his, and squeezed it.
‘Do you realize, Charlie, this is the first time you’ve ever granted me an entire day with you. The most I’ve ever been allowed before was four and a half hours, and that was Only because your plane was delayed.’
Charles frowned. He preferred not to be reminded that he was missing a briefing with the President of Amalgamated Automobiles, and had left the licensing of a new off-shore bank to an incompetent colleague. It was madness to take a weekday off, and double madness to waste it in a one-horse town in the backwoods. He’d presented Laura with the gift of a whole day and let her plan it, almost sure she’d settle for their usual hotel – a light lunch, an afternoon of love, followed by the crucial conversation which was the whole object of the exercise. He’d hardly expected her to plump for this provincial shopping spree, followed by a matinée of Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre. A matinée, for God’s sake! He hadn’t been to one since the school expedition to Lady Windermere’s Fan, and that was unendurable – three hours of coach parties rustling chocolate papers.
‘I suppose I must thank Frances for this unexpected favour,’ Laura was carolling, as they laboured down the High Street. Every time she took a step, her bulky paper carriers banged against his thighs. ‘So, she’s not come back?’
‘No.’
‘You’re sorry, aren’t you?’
Charles didn’t answer. He had no wish to broadcast his private affairs to the whole of West Surrey. He had hoped for a quiet stroll and a serious discussion in the secluded castle gardens, but every time he tried to steer Laura castlewards, she commandeered a lingerie department, or stormed a cheese counter, disgorging little snippets of his confidential life to grocers and salesgirls; mixing adultery with marabou and pregnancies with Pont-l’ Evêque. He steered her off the main road, down the narrow, winding path which led past the church to river and theatre. Here, they could talk more freely.
‘I was wondering, actually,’ Charles cleared his throat, ‘if you might – er – have a word with Frances for me.’
Laura unlatched her arm. ‘Do your own dirty work!’
Charles plunged after her, across the road. ‘Look, Laura, there are some things only a woman can say to a woman.’
‘Balls! You sound like some soft-shelled Agony Aunt on the worst sort of women’s mag. Why in God’s name should I be the one to persuade Frances to return to you? It’s preposterous! Using your mistress as an unpaid marriage guidance counsellor.’
Hardly unpaid, thought Charles, shifting two of the more substantial packages to his other arm. If they didn’t talk now, Shakespeare would monopolize the whole afternoon, followed by at least an hour of Laura as theatre critic, and any chance of sorting out his future, with or without her, would vanish in a mixture of Clive Barnes and G. Wilson Knight. He glanced nervously around, but only the gravestones were listening. ‘No one’s talking about Frances coming back. All I’m suggesting, Laura, is that you try to persuade her not to have the baby – in her own interests. If she goes ahead with this pregnancy, she’ll ruin her life.’
‘And yours!’ sniped Laura.
Charles strode towards the dead end of the river, a stagnant cesspool which coiled up almost to the theatre entrance, littered with chocolate wrappers and empty cans. The Yvonne Arnaud had once been an idyllic spot, not this tinny monster of a building, drowning in duckweed.
Laura was right. Of course his life would be ruined by Frances’ pregnancy. A runaway wife and an illegitimate kid hardly helped to boost a man’s career. Clients expected a tax and finance consultant to be a solid, conventional citizen, a family man with no messes in his life. And for fifteen years, he’d obliged them. Or he and Frances had. Frances had never let him down before. She’d always been serenely in the background, an unobtrusive presence, serving and supporting him, making the right remarks to the right people, choosing careful clothes and correct opinions, never late or shrill, rude or stupid, rebellious or unreliable. There was truth in the accusations she’d hurled at him at Croft’s. Yet, until this incident, he’d never even thought about her side of things; just taken her for granted as another creditable aspect of himself – his good taste, his impeccable education, his congenial, British-Standards-tested wife. But, now, she had ripped the whole facade to shreds and left him in a cloud of shame and scandal. Gossip and tittle-tattle would creep up on his life like poison ivy and stifle his good name, lose him all respect, deny him new commissions. Yet it was only now he missed her, admired her even, in some perverse fashion, for standing up to him. He was furious with himself for not having valued her more highly, for perhaps even causing her to leave. And he was furious with her for risking and ruining everything he’d spent a lifetime carefully constructing.
Laura came up behind him, wrinkling her nose at the stench from the water. ‘Don’t sulk, sweet, it spoils your profile. Look, I can’t talk to Frances, anyway. No one can. She’s obsessed. She’s always had this thing about babies. She’ll never mention it directly – that’s not her style. But she’ll force the conversation round to motherhood in general. Can career women be totally fulfilled? Is it selfish to be sterilized? You know the sort of thing. I think she sees me as an authority on professional childlessness. Laura Doesn’t Want One – is that monstrous, miraculous, or merely public-spirited? She never could decide. That’s why she’s pregnant now, I imagine – in order to find out. You can’t stop her, Charlie. This baby’s more than just a set of random genes. It’s an intellectual exercise for Frances, a holy grail, a ritual, a philosophical experiment.’
Charles stared at a rusty pram, half submerged in the water, and coated in slime. ‘Perhaps she isn’t pregnant. I mean we’re all assuming it, but there’s no real proof or …’
‘Oh, come off it, Charlie! She’s got all the symptoms, hasn’t she? And considering she’s taking a ferti
lity drug … A friend of mine was put on Clomid and conceived the very first month. Triplets, actually.’
Charles shut his eyes. Christ! Magda multiplied by three. They were bound to be all girls – six women in his life, all manipulating him, mopping up his strength. But could he trust what Laura said? Wasn’t it in her interests to keep Frances pregnant, so the field was free for her? She had often hinted that their relationship should be more permanently established. Her husband was a farce and a nonentity – no risk there. But he wasn’t sure he wanted Laura on the front page of his life. He’d considered it, of course – in his position, one had to consider everything. Laura had advantages, maybe more than Frances, and her gelded womb was not the least of them. But she wasn’t Frances, and somehow that mattered fundamentally. He had tried to set the whole thing down on paper – pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses, but there were no conclusions; just an aching hole where Frances should have been.
Laura was nudging him in the back with her bag of French cheeses. ‘Come on, darling, let’s go in. I’m dying for a drink.’
The bar was closed, and a queue from the coffee lounge snailed out almost to the foyer. They joined a battalion of blue rinses and pink plastic hearing-aids.
‘It’s Senior Citizens’ Day,’ Laura whispered. ‘They get in for 40p for these Thursday matinées, plus a free issue of Rowntrees fruit gums to keep their dentures busy.’
Charles ran his tongue round his own strong even teeth. His poker-faced business suit looked out of place amidst that gaggle of Crimplene cardigans and cut-price perms. There was hardly another man around. Only women survived old age – that was obvious. They killed off their men like black widow spiders – a night of love, followed by extinction for the male, while the female swelled and gloated in cannibalistic pregnancy.
The queue was hardly moving. There were not enough staff, and the counter had been incorrectly sited. Give him a week, and he’d re-plan the entire theatre, streamline the catering, sack incompetent bunglers, and ship the whole huddle of geriatrics back to their bingo. Instead, he was dragging his feet behind some octogenarian crone who was whimpering for Horlicks, and wouldn’t accept a no, or a lemon tea.
He removed Laura, himself, and his over-priced ham sandwich to the far corner of the lounge. Even here he was cramped. The chairs were too small, the tables ridiculously low, and he was still assaulted by bunioned feet and bossy handbags. It was a woman’s world, like the real one. Yet, all the more reason why he had to have a woman in his life. He had no intention of landing up as a freak, or odd man out, a pathetic divorcé, living on his own, patronized and pitied. It was undignified, inconvenient, and strictly incompatible with his business obligations, especially those to Oppenheimer. You couldn’t invite a millionaire to dinner, and then present him with baked beans on toast. And, since Frances had refused to rescue him from the tin-opener, then Laura must oblige. She was a dab cook and a dazzling hostess, and with any luck, she might have the weekend free. He glanced across at her. She was stealing the ham from his sandwich, leaving him the crusts, stencilling scarlet lip-prints on his clean white handkerchief. Once he was sure of her, there would have to be changes – a more unassuming brand of lipstick, for a start, and an embargo on his linen.
‘I was wondering, darling, whether you might be available this Saturday?’
Laura lit a cigarette. ‘Another matinée? You are brave! We haven’t survived this one yet.’
‘No, not theatre, dinner.’
‘Lovely, darling! Except I’m already dining. Clive got in first, I’m afraid. He’s booked a table at the Mirabelle.’
Charles coughed through her smoke. What the devil was she doing, dining with her own husband? If it hadn’t been the Mirabelle, he might have persuaded her to cancel it. But Laura was particularly partial to their contrefilet de boeuf Richelieu. So as far as Oppenheimer was concerned, he was still to be a laughing stock, a deserted husband, a clumsy, bungling cook.
‘Why not ask Frances? She should be eating for two, in any case. I shan’t object. Just be sure you don’t choose the Mirabelle. Foursomes are so boring.’
Charles banged down his coffee cup. The warning bell was sounding and a disembodied voice urging them to take their seats. Laura squeezed his hand.
‘You could always accept the baby as your own,’ she whispered. ‘Had you thought of that?’
Charles stormed up the stairs behind her. Of course he’d thought of it, and every other damn solution – resident nannies, early boarding school. If he wanted Frances, that was the price he’d have to pay for her. She herself had Magda to contend with.
No, Magda was a teenager, not a babe-in-arms. He’d never inflicted her infancy on Frances. No broken nights or piles of dirty nappies. Magda was just a visitor, and almost grown up. But Frances had a smelly, screeching urchin squatting in her body, kidnapping her life, her looks, her love, for at least another twenty years. Easy for Frances to talk about having both their children, as she’d done at Croft’s, but in actual cool objective fact, she’d proved herself incapable of coping even with one. She was idealizing Magda because she was a hundred miles away. If the kid came home again, the rows would resume, and Frances’ milk-and-water fantasies about their united family would dribble away in nagging and recrimination. The same with the baby – blissful when it was only a whisper of cells in her womb, but nine months on, there would be blood and puke and shit to contend with. Of course the tie with a child was precious and unique – he’d told her that himself. But it was the concept, the ideal of parenthood, rather than the endlessly bleating and excreting reality.
He glanced up at the stage. Somehow they had reached their seats, squashed between rows of dotards, sucking toffees and adjusting spectacles. How in God’s name could he concentrate on one of Shakespeare’s lighter comedies, when his mind was primed for a five-act tragedy, a battlefield, a blasted heath? His problems had even spilled on to the boards. When the curtain rose, Clive was up there, tripping about in purple knee-breeches and a fair moustache. The programme called him the King of Navarre, but only Clive would preen and pontificate like that. He and his Elizabethan gentlemen had vowed to abjure the company of women, and devote themselves to learning. He envied them. Women were not only a snare and a distraction, but a source of everlasting complication and deceit. No man could even know whether the child a woman bore him was genuinely his. All the guilt and obligation he’d felt towards Magda might properly belong to that legless, lecherous Jew the kid had mentioned.
The irony was, he’d tried to get rid of Magda, even when he believed she was his own. He’d branded Frances a murderer, yet it was he who had bribed both women to destroy their babies in the womb. Both had refused. When Piroska handed him that blue-eyed, puckered creature, wrapped in a blanket (‘She’s got your mouth, exactly,’ clucked the midwife), he’d felt horror and shame that this was the life he had wanted to snuff out. He tried to forget the incident, but somehow it had fuelled his guilt during the whole of Magda’s childhood, and had finally persuaded him to take her in this summer, when Piroska returned to Hungary. But if she weren’t his child in the first place, then the whole affair was doubly ironical, hopelessly confused.
Why, all delights are vain, but that most vain,
Which, with pain purchased, doth inherit pain.
He jumped. The actor had swept downstage, almost to the footlights, and seemed to be speaking to him alone, his sardonic blue eye fixed on Charles’ own. He had all but forgotten he was at a play. The Kingdom of Navarre kept turning into Richmond Green or Streatham Maternity Hospital. The three French ladies he had been promised in his programme had all changed their names since it was printed. No longer Maria, Katharine and Rosaline, but Laura, Frances, Magda. Rosaline was almost Magda’s double, the same dark, rebellious hair and secret swelling breasts.
Christ! If only he could exorcise his daughter – feel either simple love for her, or straight resentment at being made a fool of. But to desire the kid, for God’s sake,
he hardly dared admit it to himself. He had even taken to fantasizing about her, imagining her sprawled naked on her bed, or wearing only a wet, transparent T-shirt. Somehow, her body was always fused with Laura’s, to form some tantalizing female paradox – the virgin seductress, the voluptuous innocent. It was shameful, decadent, and almost proof he couldn’t be her father. Could any natural father stoop so low, mix his own daughter’s body with his mistress’s, and then enjoy them both? He glanced sideways at Laura, sitting rapt beside him, the pale foothills of her breasts teasing him in the darkened auditorium. She always wore her blouses unbuttoned to the cleavage. Magda chose harsh, mannish shirts and fastened them to the throat. It was only he who swapped her round with Laura, unbuttoning, revealing …
He leaned forward and fondled Laura’s knee. He must make her real, disentangle her from Magda. Or banish both of them and try to concentrate. Laura would quiz him on the play, even quote from it. How could he confess he’d hardly heard a word? Hanging on to all that painted verbiage was like a drowning man pausing in his struggles to admire a sunset. Endless strings of empty words, gin-fizz emotions frothing out of cardboard hearts. Up on the stage, the king and his three young lords were already reduced by Love to dribbling fools, their vows forgotten, creeping through the undergrowth, composing sonnets. Junes and moons and panting bosoms of the deep …
Twaddle! Or was it? He himself had never composed a love-letter in his life. Was that a virtue, or a failing? He didn’t even know. Business was such a burden at the moment, it was all he could do to write his monthly financial reviews, let alone a sonnet. Even now, he should be closeted with the President of Amalgamated Automobiles, not this besotted King of Navarre. Perhaps his energies were failing. Once, he’d had time to mug up all the plays of Shakespeare, prided himself on knowing every last scraping and scruple of the footnotes, even the textual variations between Folio and Quarto. Now he felt only boredom and distaste, watching those clowns mortgage their studies and seclusion for a farthingale.
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