Something Dangerous

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘You know, I was too frightened of Celia to say almost anything at all to her when I came over. She is the most terrifying woman I have ever met.’

  ‘Oh, Kyle, do have a little tact,’ said Felicity. ‘Celia has been like a – well, a very close relative to Barty. I don’t suppose she finds her in the least terrifying.’

  ‘I do,’ said Barty simply, ‘we’re all absolutely terrified of her. All her children, all her staff. Even though we all love her.’

  ‘And – Oliver?’ said Felicity. There was an interesting note in her voice suddenly: softer, almost wistful. ‘Is he terrified of her too?’

  ‘No,’ said Barty firmly. ‘Wol isn’t terrified of her at all. He’s the only person she listens to. Or rather takes any notice of. Him and Sebastian.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Felicity, ‘yes, Sebastian. Is he still part of the family?’

  ‘Not so much. Since his wife died. He’s become very reclusive. Poor Sebastian. Even Aunt Celia can’t do anything with him. She used to go and see him quite often, she was really terribly fond of him, you know—’

  ‘Yes,’ said Felicity and her eyes were amused, ‘yes, I did know. Oliver did tell me about him.’

  ‘And he was always at the house, all the time. Now he hardly ever comes. It’s horrible. I feel so sorry for him, and yet – it’s so hard to help.’

  ‘I like Sebastian,’ said Kyle, ‘I think he’s terrific. And my God, I wish we published him at Macmillan. He must be worth his weight in gold.’

  ‘Well that really is unthinkable,’ said Barty laughing. ‘Sebastian is Lyttons. We couldn’t imagine life without him. Him and Meridian.’

  ‘I wonder—’

  ‘Well don’t.’

  ‘Very well. And how is dear old Giles, and his new wife and family? Maud always thought, you know, that he and you—’

  ‘He’s very well,’ said Barty, cutting into this smoothly, ‘and very happy. And the baby is so sweet.’

  ‘And how is he doing at Lyttons? I don’t suppose Celia is allowing him to make a lot of headway there?’

  ‘Kyle!’ said Felicity. ‘You really are outrageously rude. Do please show a little more consideration for Barty’s feelings.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Barty, ‘Giles is doing very well at Lyttons. Celia and Wol are very pleased with him.’

  It wasn’t true of course, but she felt she owed them all, and particularly Giles, some loyalty.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. Now what about—’

  ‘Kyle, if you don’t mind, I think I’d like to leave now. I told you, I’m terribly tired.’

  Lucy’s pretty little mouth was just slightly turned in on itself, her eyes, as she looked at Barty’s, very sharp. She’s jealous, thought Barty, she doesn’t like me being the centre of attention; she enjoyed that fact, it amused her. And it was certainly a novel experience.

  She went to sleep thinking about Kyle and how very different he was from the shy, rather subdued boy she remembered from childhood; it was extraordinary how people changed as they grew up.

  Jamie was lovely too, full of charm; the only person she now really wanted still to meet – and probably never would – was the wicked Laurence. That really would be interesting.

  LM had given a great deal of thought to Jay’s future and whether it might – or indeed should – lie with Lyttons. One thing was quite certain: Jay and Jay alone would decide. He was extraordinarily decisive about everything and strong willed with it; if he had made his mind up on a matter, nothing and nobody could change it. Just like his father, LM often thought.

  He had left Oxford with an upper second in history and what he referred to laughingly as a first in rowing; he had been in the second eight and would have made the first had not a bout of influenza interfered with his training. He had also, Adele often said, got a double first in girls.

  Girls adored Jay; it wasn’t just his dark good looks, or his slightly jokey charm, it was his interest in them. In them and what they were doing. He could often be found at parties, not dancing, not drinking – although he did both with great enthusiasm – but sitting in a corner with some girl talking to her intently: and not about the sort of things girls expected to find themselves discussing with a man.

  ‘It’s not fairy talk,’ Adele explained to Venetia, who had a specially soft spot for Jay, ‘not clothes and stuff. But it’s still a bit – different. For a man. Like what they want to do, what they think about things, whether they plan to get married, whether they want to have a career or just babies. He really, really wants to know. It’s not a fake thing. And the girls love it.’

  The girls did; they found it irresistible. If Jay had tried to evolve a formula for a successful sex life, he could hardly have done better. He had had his first serious girlfriend at seventeen, had had several full-blown love affairs while he was at Oxford and had even considered marriage to one girl who had been there with him. That had ended in tears on both sides, to LM’s immense relief; she had liked the girl, but her ambition to be a doctor and work overseas with one of the missions seemed hardly compatible with any future Jay might have. He had no serious girlfriend at the moment, and neither was he sure what he wanted to do; as a result, he was working for Lady Beckenham at Ashingham. The house was being re-roofed and she had told him if he was prepared to work hard and muck in he could join her team of labourers.

  ‘But no slacking, I want you up there in all weathers, and no rushing off to London for some party or other either.’

  Jay said he wouldn’t do any such thing and told her she wouldn’t regret it; and in fact he did work extremely hard and was the only roofer out one morning when the slates were so icy that everyone else refused to work. He didn’t rush off to London either; but he and Billy Miller, who had always been good friends, spent a great many very happy evenings at local dances and hostelries, and acquired a certain local notoriety when they both drank so much one night they passed out and were still on the bar floor in the morning.

  Lady Beckenham, summoned to collect them, told them they should both be ashamed of themselves and that she’d expect them to do a full day’s work just the same; Jay, sitting up on the roof, nursing a red-hot poker headache and struggling not to vomit, earned her respect by not coming down until darkness fell.

  ‘No need to tell your mother,’ she said, ‘it will only upset her. Next time get yourself home before you pass out.’

  She was very fond of Jay, and always had been; ‘I never met your father,’ she said, ‘but I gather he was all right.’

  That was Lady Beckenham’s description of anyone she considered a social inferior but of whom she wholeheartedly approved.

  ‘I don’t know, Mother, I really don’t,’ had been Jay’s last words to LM when she asked him about joining Lyttons. ‘Publishing is all right, but I really like doing things with my hands. Practical things. You know?’

  LM said she did know and added that old Edgar Lytton, her father, the founder of Lyttons had been very practical and had worked as a bookbinder: ‘And of course you know what your own father did.’

  Jay nodded; he had been told a great many times.

  ‘But it does quite appeal, just the same – publishing, I mean. And I’d like the idea of a family firm. Continuity and all that. Part of why I like history, I suppose. Let me think a bit more, Mother, there’s a good chap. I’ll decide as soon as I can. By – let’s see – New Year? How’s that?’

  ‘Your Aunt Celia is very keen for you to come on board,’ said LM.

  ‘I know,’ said Jay, ‘she’s made that fairly clear to me as well. It’s one of the things that’s holding me back. Just between you and me.’

  LM said nothing but she knew what he meant; that being one of Celia’s favourites – like Barty – made for a difficult life at Lyttons. Given that Giles so clearly was not.

  Helena’s pregnancy this time was not so easy; she was not so easy either, Giles had observed. She was querulous, argumentative and critical of him, to the point where he would
make some excuse to avoid sitting with her after supper if they were alone. He could do nothing right; she argued with his political views – his lukewarm socialism disagreed with her staunch conservatism – his management of their affairs, his views on little Mary’s upbringing, his clothes, his friends. Giles, never self-confident, would have found it unbearable had he not been able to tell himself that it was simply due to her condition. When she had had the baby – obviously a boy since it was both larger and more active than Mary had been – she would revert to her usual, comparatively easy self.

  Just the same, feeling incompetent and denigrated at home as well as at Lyttons was extremely demoralising; he wasn’t sure these days where he was happier. Or perhaps less unhappy.

  Even the prospect of a new year, which he was usually able to pin rather childlike hopes on, failed to lift his spirits.

  ‘Happy New Year, Barty. You look so extremely beautiful. And it’s lovely to have you here.’

  ‘It’s lovely to be here. Thank you.’

  ‘Do I get a kiss? I really want one.’

  ‘Of course.’

  She found Kyle attractive, but not dangerously so; he was not for her, he was too easy, too naturally charming.

  ‘He wasn’t always like that,’ Felicity had said one day, when she remarked upon it, ‘he was a shy child, a rather awkward young adult. Well, you probably remember him. But then, thanks largely to Oliver, he found what he wanted to do, which wasn’t going into the family business, as we had wrongly assumed, and you know the rest. Oliver got him his first introduction, his first job, I suppose, and from the very first day, he did well. And we just watched him change and – and discover himself, and this extraordinarily confident and charming person emerged. So, if thanks are due to anyone, it is to Oliver.’

  She clearly adored Oliver; it rather amused Barty. She was always saying how kind he was, how charming, how thoughtful, how interesting; Barty often wondered how she would view the anti-social, deliberately obtuse, almost querulously stubborn creature they all had to live and work with.

  Of course Wol was charming as well as those things, and she adored him, but he could be extremely difficult. But then that was family life: as Venetia often said with a quick, sad sigh, you never knew anyone until you had to live with them. And it would be deeply disloyal and indeed pointless to rob Felicity of her illusions.

  They were celebrating New Year at a charity ball at the Plaza. Barty, who usually hated such things, had enjoyed herself immensely, without quite knowing why. She had even allowed Maud to persuade her to buy a new dress – very grand, the grandest she had ever owned, black crêpe, very narrow, with long sleeves sliding off sexily bare shoulders; it flattered her long neck, her long, graceful shape. Robert had given her an exquisite gold and crystal pendant for Christmas; she was wearing it for the first time.

  ‘It is at exactly the right length for you,’ said Jamie laughing, ‘settled there, just above your bosom. People can have a good stare, while pretending to admire the pendant.’

  He had quickly become an elder brother to her; she enjoyed him immensely. She had even had her hair done: ‘I know you always do it yourself, but you can’t tonight, not with that dress,’ Maud had said, and took her to her own hairdresser, who had swept it back into a mass of curls and studded it with tiny diamanté flowers.

  ‘It can’t be you,’ said Maud, examining her as she joined her in the drawing room for champagne with Robert and Jamie before setting out. ‘You look quite, quite different.’

  ‘Oh, don’t say that,’ said Barty. ‘I don’t like not being me.’

  ‘An astonishingly beautiful you, but you just the same,’ said Robert. ‘Don’t worry about it. Now let’s drink to the New Year. A good one, I hope. The country is turning around, I feel it, indeed I know it. Roosevelt has worked miracles and will work more. I think we should drink to him as well as to the New Year.’

  They all dutifully drank to the President, but afterwards, Maud whispered to Barty, ‘He does get a little carried away, dear Daddy. Hardly miracles, as we all know.’

  Barty was continually touched by Maud’s distress at the plight of New York’s poor, used as she was to living with the Lyttons with their blithe ability to sweep such disagreeable things out of their collective consciousness. She was also mildly amused by the way in which Maud appeared to hold her stepbrother almost solely responsible for the crash; ‘I know, I just know there must have been things he could have done, people he could have helped.’

  ‘Well maybe he did,’ Barty said, but Maud shook her head vehemently.

  ‘Not him. In fact, he laid off lots of his own people, clerks and so on, from Elliotts. But he’s richer than ever, there was an article only last week saying he’d bought some new yacht. I hate Laurence, I really, really do. If ever, if ever he came to this house, I would get him up here on to the terrace and push him right off.’

  Barty, knowing both events were equally unlikely, nodded sympathetically and even offered to help.

  She was distressed herself at the poverty that lay beneath the glossy rich surface of New York; at the beggars on the street corners, the long, long breadlines, the faces of the desperate men who queued outside the factories and warehouses for a possible few hours of work. It was far worse than anything in England; she knew there were people living in desperate poverty in the North and in the mining valleys of Wales, but in London at least things were not so overtly bad.

  Maud, with her serious goodness, tried desperately to help in whatever way she could; she organised concerts and dances in aid of the unemployed and their families, collected discarded clothes from her wealthy friends and distributed them to the various charitable agencies, and even worked at the soup kitchens herself one evening a week. None of it properly appeased her conscience.

  There was a gramophone record which was played over and over again on the radio – as the Americans called the wireless – around the time Barty arrived: it had been made by a young singer called Bing Crosby and had made him famous almost overnight. It was called ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’, the story of a young veteran of first the war and then the railroad companies, now forgotten by society. Remembering her own brother’s struggles and misery immediately after the war, Barty was moved to tears many times.

  She was very impressed by President Roosevelt’s ‘fireside chats’: regular broadcasts to the American people about his plans, his hopes and his sympathies with them in their plight. People found him absolutely irresistible; he was a natural broadcaster, and what he said went straight to the hearts of his listeners. Barty tried in vain to imagine Ramsay MacDonald speaking so easily and naturally to the English.

  After the dinner which was extremely lavish, there was dancing, first to a classic dance band and then a jazz one; after the midnight fireworks over Central Park, a swing band took over; Barty stood tapping her feet as they moved into ‘Lullaby of Broadway’.

  ‘May I have this dance?’ said Kyle, bowing to her, and ‘Yes,’ she said, laughing happily, curtseying, ‘of course you may.’

  Barty loved dancing but she had always been overshadowed by the twins, who were superb, and even by Celia, and had always been rather diffident about displaying her more modest skill.

  But ‘You dance so well,’ said Kyle, ‘really, really well.’

  So well indeed, and so suited to him, that people stood on the edge of the dance floor pointing them out to one another, other people stopped to watch and as the number ended, the floor was virtually empty and there was a small round of applause.

  Flushed and embarrassed, laughing, Barty tried to walk away, but Kyle pulled her back; the band was playing another of her favourites: and they were just moving on to the floor when Lucy appeared. She was flushed and breathing rather hard.

  ‘Kyle,’ she said, ‘that was the first dance of 1936. I thought you’d want to have it with me.’

  ‘Oh, dearest – I – that is – well – ’ Kyle looked rather helplessly at Barty; she smiled
with infinite sweetness at Lucy and said, ‘Of course. He was only dancing with me because he couldn’t find you. I want to go and talk to Jamie, anyway.’

  But Jamie was not to be found; suddenly she could see no one she knew and felt slightly foolish. She decided to go to the Ladies’ room, women’s classic refuge in times of such trouble.

  She studied herself in the mirror with some interest: she really did look, she decided, as unlike the Barty she knew and approved of as possible. Who was this glamorous, expensive creature, slightly flushed, brillianteyed, clearly affected by more than a little champagne, and hugely irritated at having lost her dancing partner?

  Half amused, half shocked at the transformation, she smoothed her hair, renewed her lipstick and swathed herself in scent – ‘My Sin’ by Lanvin, bought for her and the evening as a joke by Maud – and returned to the dance floor.

  ‘May I have this dance?’

  Barty looked round; a man stood behind her, the most physically attractive man she had ever seen in her life. He was tall and athletic-looking, his shoulders were broad in his exquisitely cut tail-coat, he had dark red-blond hair and eyes that were almost aquamarine-blue; and a mouth that was – well, Barty had read of sensuous mouths and never actually known quite what it meant until that moment. This mouth was sensuous, it demanded and spoke of pleasure, even as it smiled slowly at her. His smile changed his face absolutely; his expression in repose edged on boredom, was supercilious, almost. When he smiled – a slow, oddly reluctant smile, that looked as if it had been dragged out of the heart of him – it warmed, eased, came alive. And she stood there staring at him, and feeling a little odd, and telling herself it was the champagne and knowing it wasn’t just the champagne.

  ‘Well? Do I have an affirmative answer? Or am I to assume from your silence that you mean no. Either way, I’d like it settled. If you don’t mind.’