The Decision

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘Juliet,’ said Charles, ‘we are not careful. We’ – he longed to say you – ‘are quite extravagant. Every month it’s the same, spending over what we can afford, I don’t want to spell it out—’

  ‘Well, I think you’d better. Otherwise I’ll never understand—’

  He spelt it out; she listened.

  Then, ‘Well, you’ll have to ask your father. He can make you a loan.’

  ‘Juliet, my father has no money whatsoever. I wish you could understand that.’

  ‘I don’t, to be honest. Living in that great house with your mother’s grand family—’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. That great house is falling down. There is no money to patch it up. My mother never even puts the central heating on, she doesn’t even have a cleaner any more, they’re stony-broke.’

  She stared at him. ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘Of course I mean it. I don’t know where this idea came from, that there was money in my family, I’ve told you often enough.’

  ‘Well, obviously you didn’t make it clear. I don’t know what Daddy will say.’

  ‘I don’t see what it has to do with your father.’

  ‘Of course it does. You’re his only son-in-law, he’ll be so disappointed in you. And if you’re going to start buying shares, you’d better consult him, he’s really clever at it, made a lot of money, although I’d have thought with you being a stockbroker, you wouldn’t have made such a stupid mistake.’

  ‘Oh, go to hell,’ said Charles and walked out of the house.

  He made an appointment to see the bank manager two days later; he asked Juliet, who didn’t seem remotely remorseful, to go with him. She refused.

  ‘I don’t see why I should put myself in such an awful, humiliating situation. It’s not my fault.’

  Mr Winston was sympathetic. ‘I know how easy it is for young people to get into this situation. But I can’t allow this to go on, Mr Fullerton-Clark. I’m afraid I’ll have to take a charge on your flat.’

  ‘But – it’s on the market,’ said Charles. ‘I’ve put down a preliminary deposit on a house.’

  ‘Cheaper?’ said Mr Winston hopefully.

  ‘Er – no.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to take the flat off the market again. In any case I couldn’t possibly give you any kind of guarantee to a building society. My advice to you would be to look for something cheaper, use the difference to pay off your debts. You can’t go on like this.’

  ‘Now I want you to listen to me very carefully.’ Jack Beckham glared at Eliza.

  ‘Yes. I’m listening.’

  ‘I’ve decided that I – I was mistaken the other day.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I perhaps shouldn’t have said what I did.’

  ‘Right—’

  ‘And – well, I have decided that we’ll leave things as they are. That you can stay in the job.’

  ‘Well, that’s very nice of you Jack. Er – what happens if I don’t want to?’

  ‘Of course you bloody well want to,’ he said.

  There were, he said, conditions. ‘I don’t want to hear anything about you being tired. I don’t want you to be away. I—’

  ‘Er, excuse me,’ said Eliza.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do we convert my office into a labour ward?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, if I can’t be away – I mean this baby’s got to come out sometime.’

  ‘Don’t be so fucking ridiculous. You know perfectly well what I mean.’

  ‘Ah. So I can have a day or two off?’

  ‘You can have a week,’ he said, grinning at her, ‘possibly with an extension for good behaviour.’

  ‘Right. OK. Well – thank you.’

  ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘you’re the best fashion editor in London at the moment. Everyone says so. And if I want you here, I suppose I just have to put up with your – your condition.’

  ‘I suppose you do.’

  ‘Now what do I do?’ she wailed to Maddy. ‘I’ve got my job back and I’m over the moon of course, and Matt won’t let me do it.’

  ‘Has he said so?’

  ‘What, since Jack told me? Of course not. I – well, I haven’t told him.’

  ‘You haven’t told Matt! Eliza, you know what he’s like, he’ll be even more livid when he does find out.’

  ‘Yes, all right. I’m just waiting for the right moment,’ said Eliza irritably.

  The fact of the matter was that she couldn’t bear to, in case he simply forbade her to accept. Her job defined her; it was what she was all about. She adored Matt, and she was incredibly happy about the baby: but if she was deprived of her work, a large piece of the jigsaw that was her would be missing.

  When Jack had told her she was the best fashion editor in London, she felt literally that she could have flown; she savoured those words, went over and over them in her head, she felt stroked and sleek and dizzy with them. They made sense of it all, the endless pressure for ideas, the tedium of looking at racks and racks of dull, unsuitable clothes, the fights with the art director, the battles with photographers, the absurd demands of models, the racking fear that a session wouldn’t go well, that the photographs wouldn’t do her ideas justice … suddenly none of that mattered. She had done it, she had made it all on her own, she was that most elusive, sought-after, fought-over thing, a success. It was a prize beyond anything she could have imagined. She could not, she would not, give that up. She would manage Matt somehow. Somehow …

  Mariella was coming to London on a shopping trip, not merely for her, but for Giovanni. Eliza was rather charmed that he bought his clothes in London – it was, Mariella explained, because he was not an aristocrat.

  ‘The old families dress in Italy and the new ones in England. That is how it goes. He has his shoes made in Lobbs, he buys his suits at Henry Poole, he has his shirts made in Savile Row. His ambition is to look like an English gentleman.’

  She invited Eliza and Matt to join them for dinner. ‘We are staying at the Ritz. I need to meet your husband. Shall we say Wednesday?’

  ‘Wednesday would be lovely,’ said Eliza, trying and failing to imagine Matt dining with the Crespis.

  It was a surprisingly successful evening; even though Eliza could tell that Mariella was struggling not to compare Matt unfavourably with Jeremy. She herself was very taken with Giovanni, who was tall, charming, and elegant, with thick silvery-blond hair and sculpted features. He was tactile without it being remotely disagreeable, frequently kissing Eliza’s hand, putting his arm round her shoulders and at one point patting the tip of her nose when she made him laugh. He told her that their villa on Como was always available to her if she was working in Milan; Matt had mercifully gone to the Gents at this point.

  Giovanni clearly adored Mariella and was to be seen constantly blowing her kisses across the table. He spoke perfect English, and had the stamina of someone twenty years his junior, suggesting a nightcap in the bar after dinner and would have, Eliza was sure, taken her up on her offer of a visit to the Saddle Room if Mariella had not reminded him gently that it was already almost midnight and he had an appointment with his tailor at nine.

  But the real love affair of the evening was between Giovanni and Matt, who formed a mutual admiration society, trumping each other’s stories of early successes, of risks run and dangers confronted, and agreeing that business was the most potent drug in the world.

  ‘Nice chap,’ said Matt as they sat back in their taxi. ‘Don’t know what my dad would say, me consorting with wops.’

  ‘Matt!’ said Eliza. ‘Honestly, you are so dreadful. Sometimes I think you do it on purpose.’

  ‘Course I do,’ he said and grinned at her.

  ‘My dear Scarlett (wrote Mrs Berenson),

  I do hope you are well and might consider again a visit here. It is so very lovely and you could meet our newest family member! David and Gaby’s daughter, such a beautiful little girl and named Lily, after me.
Such an honour! I was just so thrilled, you can imagine. Do come, we would all love to have you.’

  This hurt so much that Scarlett, after a sleepless night, called David in his office and told him she needed some more money. She actually didn’t, but frightening him was the only way she could find of getting any kind of revenge. It wasn’t much but it was something.

  Her project was going well; she was doing her research whenever she could and wherever her schedule took her, and had already signed up several small hotels, mostly in France and Italy. In a few weeks, she was returning to Trisos to do the same there.

  She had even persuaded a couple of small chic hotels in New York to come into her fold. The city had suddenly become accessible, with David Frost’s famous weekly trips, rocketing backwards and forwards across the Atlantic; going there was no longer an impossible or even distant dream.

  Just very occasionally she fantasised about sending people to the Southern States, including (obviously) Charleston; now that would really frighten David, she thought …

  Chapter 27

  ‘Daddy’s going to help,’ said Juliet. ‘He says he can’t have me humiliated like this, and he wants to talk to you about making you a loan.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, I see.’ He wasn’t sure he wanted help from Geoffrey Judd, and he longed to say that it was him being humiliated, not Juliet. But beggars, he supposed, couldn’t be choosers. And a beggar was what he seemed to be. Geoffrey Judd certainly seemed to think so.

  ‘I have to say,’ he said, glaring at Charles. ‘You’ve let us all down, especially Juliet. Managing your money isn’t very difficult, you simply need some self-discipline.’

  Charles longed to say it was Juliet who lacked the self-discipline. Instead he looked at his hands and metaphorically bit his tongue.

  ‘What’s more, I think we’ve all been deceived, leading us all to believe you owned that house, all of you, giving Juliet false expectations when it’s nothing of the sort.’

  This was too much. ‘I’m afraid, Mr Judd, you don’t understand. The house is owned by a family trust, holding it for my mother and then for future generations.’

  ‘Same difference as far as I’m concerned. And a drain on any resources you may have into the bargain. Well, none of my money is going into it, I can tell you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of suggesting such a thing,’ said Charles.

  ‘Maybe not, but the fact remains you’ve got yourself and Juliet into a financial mess, haven’t you? My daughter can’t have the home or the lifestyle she was very much led to expect. She shouldn’t be living in a flat at this stage of her life and nor should you, and you should be keeping her, not sending her out to work every day. She wants to have children, you know, like any young woman; she’s not going to get them the way you’re going on.’

  Just stay silent, Charles, don’t rise to this, it won’t be worth it, not in the long run.

  ‘Anyway, I’m prepared to make you a loan, to pay off your overdraft, so you can start afresh, get a mortgage on that house Juliet’s set her heart on. I’ll want a formal repayment plan, but I’m prepared to be reasonable about it, nothing too steep while you get yourself sorted out. How does that sound?’

  ‘That’s – that’s very generous of you, sir.’

  It really was all he could do; the alternative was quite literally bankruptcy, which would mean the end of his job on the stock exchange.

  ‘And I don’t want to hear that a penny of it has gone into that house in Wiltshire, do you understand. You go and talk to the trustees; tell them to find some way of putting it on the market. Right. Well, here’s a cheque. As far as I’m concerned, it’s worth it to see my daughter happy and secure and not fretting over money. In my family, that’s men’s work. Now let’s put together a schedule of repayments, shall we? What salary are you on?’

  Adrian had had another fall and broken his pelvis. Sarah rang to say that she knew he would love to see Eliza, ‘It’s been quite a long time.’ Eliza lost her temper and said she would have been down quite often if they hadn’t been so hostile to Matt; Sarah said she was sorry, but it had been a terrible shock about the baby.

  ‘Mummy, if I’d been pregnant with Jeremy’s baby you’d have been over the moon with excitement.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Isn’t it? Isn’t it really?’ There was a silence; then Eliza said, ‘Well anyway, of course I’ll come and see Daddy. I’d have come before if you’d asked me. I just felt so hurt. I can’t come this week; next Saturday all right?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. I had hoped Charles would be down, but he’s very much out of our lives at the moment, I don’t know what’s going on. Anyway Saturday will do. Of course. And if Matt wants to come, then he’ll be—’

  ‘Honestly,’ said Eliza, interrupting her, ‘I don’t think he will.’

  But Matt, unpredictable to the last, insisted that he would go with her.

  ‘I don’t want you driving all that way on your own. It’s not good for you to get too tired and long car journeys are probably not good for the baby, you getting all shaken about—’

  ‘Matt, that baby is safer right now than it will be for the whole rest of its life. It’s cushioned in God knows how much fluid, gallons by the look of me—’

  ‘Well, I don’t want you having a miscarriage on the side of the road.’

  ‘I hardly think you can prevent that just by being there,’ said Eliza, laughing.

  Matt’s devotion to his unborn child continued to surprise and delight her. He insisted on attending her appointments with the doctor, to her considerable embarrassment; the doctor clearly thought he was some unemployed lunatic who had nothing better to do. He had more or less auditioned all the hospitals and insisted that he would pay for her to have the baby privately if that seemed to be the best option. However, Eliza had established that one of the most highly regarded obstetricians in London, one Professor Anthony Collins, worked at the maternity unit of the Fulham and Battersea, an NHS teaching hospital, where he had established a culture of excellent education on all aspects of pregnancy and childbirth, including one evening which fathers were encouraged to attend, close family bonding and the admission of fathers to the labour ward if both parents wanted that. This was so revolutionary a notion there had even been letters to The Times about it. Eliza said hopefully she was sure Matt wouldn’t want it, and that he’d faint but he said he wouldn’t miss it for the world and that he wanted a grandstand view.

  ‘No,’ said Matt, ‘no, no, no, no, no. That clear enough for you? I’ll repeat it, just in case. No. You are not going to work when you’ve had the baby.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Eliza, no. I don’t know how you can even think of it. Don’t you care about the baby, don’t you think you’ll love him?’

  ‘Of course I bloody well care about the baby. Of course I’ll love it. Him. But I don’t see why that means I have to spend twenty-four hours a day with it – him. I love my work too, it’s so important to me, and we can get a nanny, the baby will be fine—’

  He stared at her for a moment in silence. Then, ‘Oh, no. You are not sacrificing that baby in favour of your career. Do you really think photographing a few frocks is more important than bringing up your own child? I’ve never heard anything so – so disgusting, frankly.’

  ‘Of course it’s not disgusting. And I don’t think my work is more important than my child. But I just don’t see how being away from it – him – for a few hours a day is so terrible. And I really don’t think I’m cut out for full-time motherhood.’

  ‘Oh, is that so. Well, you might have thought of that before you got yourself pregnant.’

  ‘That’s unfair!’

  ‘Is it? I don’t think so. I tell you what I think, Eliza, I think you’re so fucking impressed with yourself and your life as a lady fashion editor, getting your arse licked all day long by all that fancy riff-raff you seem to like so much, you can’t face giving it up. I’ve heard them at parties, and in the
office, oh, Eliza you’re so marvellous, oh, Eliza darling, what a wonderful editor you are, oh, Eliza you’re so clever. It makes me want to throw up. Well right now, I don’t think you’re marvellous or wonderful, I think you’re pathetic and self-centred and attention-seeking with a pretty rotten sense of values, and it’s not good enough. Not good enough for the baby and not good enough for me. So – is that quite clear?’

  She had walked out after that, and gone to the office, where she had smoked at least five of the cigarettes Matt had ordered her to give up and sworn and cried and talked to Annunciata and rung Maddy, both of whom agreed that Matt was a monster and was not to be given in to and she said of course she wasn’t going to give in to him, it would be marital suicide, she would do what she liked with her life and she even went out for a drink with Annunciata to give herself Dutch courage for the evening’s battle.

  It was a battle and it raged for days, and became very ugly. He told her she was disgraceful; she told him he was monstrous; he told her she lacked a sense of maternal duty; she told him he had no concept of the sort of person she really was; he said if he had, he certainly wouldn’t have married her.

  ‘I’m surprised you didn’t just get rid of the baby, I really am,’ he said, finally, ‘since it’s going to be such a burden to you. Maybe it’s not too late to do that now, Eliza. I’d investigate it if I were you.’

  Eliza walked up to him and started to attack him physically, flailing at him with her fists; he stared at her then turned in silence and left.

  He didn’t come back that night, spent it in the office; but as he sat at his desk, grey-faced and shaking with exhaustion the following morning, staring out of the window, and his misery so evident that even Louise was touched by it, Eliza walked through reception and into his office, shut the door behind her and told him she had decided that she would give up work when the baby was born.

  Jenny was having what she called a turnout. This mostly meant taking everything out of every cupboard and drawer in the office and putting ninety-nine per cent of it back again, all to a running commentary on her own progress. She was just debating with herself whether she should keep the envelopes with the windows, probably not, as she very rarely used them these days, ever since Mr Shaw had said they looked tacky, but then they could come in very handy if she ran out of the others, when the phone rang. It was Barry Floyd.