Tell the Girl

by Sandra Howard

  I rose to clear the plates and Charles came over for the red wine. He stuck around while I saw to the veg and steaks, watching me. Not my cooking – he was looking at me, my face in profile, though not for any good reason, I felt, other than being companionable.

  ‘Max could never forgive Humphrey for being born first,’ I said, still focused back forty years. ‘He had a real chip about the unfairness of primogeniture.’

  ‘I remember he was always short of the readies,’ Charles said, ‘and trying to touch his big bro for a loan.’

  ‘Yes, it was a problem. Whenever Max made a good sale, a set of Coalport porcelain, some rare tapestry or other, he’d blow it all, buying me furs in the days when people did that, sapphire earrings, treating everyone in sight, trying to double it up on a horse. He was over-generous and loved splashing out, along with a Kennedy-style interest in girls.’

  We took the food to the table. Charles tackled his steak, but he wanted to talk – he had that look in his eye. ‘You know, the weekend at Mondstowe wasn’t the first time I’d seen you,’ he said, catching me by surprise. ‘I’d got a bit obsessed with you the year before, although only from afar. I hadn’t really seen you close up and in your full glory till we met at Mondstowe – and by then you were in your married bliss.’

  ‘The way Max carried on that weekend I hadn’t been feeling entirely blissful. But you’ve got me all curious. Where and when did you see me? I’m dying to know.’

  ‘It was in New York, in my journalist days when I was on the Dispatch. The paper didn’t go in for much foreign stuff, not many by-lines, but I wasn’t complaining, being based in Washington, and in and out of Manhattan. I saw you in the 21 Club. I was interviewing the New York Mayor, Robert Wagner, over a jammy expense-account dinner, and you were there in a party with Ari Onassis. Wagner had his back to your table, but I had a hard time of it, with you in my sights, trying to ask him salient questions, scribble shorthand and keep looking. Ari Onassis was being full on, making a play for you, and when he stuck his cigar down your throat, laughing, telling you to suck on it, I presume, I’d wanted to get up and punch him all the way to Greece. I had to come a bit clean with Wagner after that, and try to explain why I’d been black-faced and spitting venom right past his ear.’

  ‘My old lover, Gil, stuck his cigar in my mouth once too,’ I said, ‘but that was an intimacy thing, different, and I’d minded it with Ari.’ The thought led me to Matt. ‘I don’t suppose by any chance, if you were based in Washington – not that you’d probably remember – you came across a guy called Matt Seeley? He was on Pierre Salinger’s team.’

  ‘Nope, didn’t know him. Another of your lovers – a new one to me?’

  ‘Only very briefly, and not my finest hour; he dropped me and I hadn’t seen it coming.’

  ‘Seeley rings a faint bell. I had a friend in Pierre’s office and can remember his shock when a key player was killed in a car crash. I think the name was Seeley.’

  ‘Yes, Matt Seeley was Pierre’s number two. That’s sad, awful; he did love fast cars.’ I had a vivid flash of Matt on his knees in his Cannes’ hotel bathroom, the heady moment, his expert tongue. It wasn’t a fitting image, but memory was indiscriminate, neither conforming nor decorous. I sighed to think of Matt’s short life, and felt humble.

  ‘Out of mild curiosity,’ I said, bringing my mind back, ‘why haven’t you ever mentioned seeing me with Ari before?’

  ‘One or other of us was always married, and between times you seemed to think of me as a friend. It was about revealing my feelings, too – something I’ve never been good at.’

  ‘That’s certainly true. Now, how about some cheese? I brought back a Pont l’Evêque from France; it’s pretty pongy.’ Charles looked delighted. He was such a foodie – I longed to get him to Mougins. Perhaps there’d be a chance of it in the next few weeks. ‘I asked how long you can stay. At least through the weekend, I hope.’

  ‘I’ve been waiting to talk about that. You see, there’s a bit of a problem over it.’

  I tensed, drawing in my stomach with a sinking sense of dread. Surely Charles wasn’t going to say he’d found Mrs Horsey Right and this was a swan-song sweet parting? It would be my just deserts. I’d done it to him in the past, but he couldn’t spring it just like that, surely? It would be too cruel. My heart felt at one remove, out in the cold.

  ‘Go on then,’ I said, managing a stiff smile.

  ‘I’m a bit stuck for somewhere to stay for a while. You see, I’ve sold my house.’

  I gaped at him. ‘Is this for real? You’re not serious? Are you moving into somebody else’s rambling old frost-box then?’

  He smiled. ‘No, not that. I just wondered if I could bed down here for a week or two and discuss a few possibilities. My other two kids are holidaying, and staying at my sister’s isn’t really on.’

  ‘I don’t believe this, Charles. You can’t have sold your house! It was your grandfather’s before you – your great love. It had real meaning, and you treasure all that family stuff.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about stuff! I took a mountain of it to Herefordshire, more to my sister’s. The other kids won’t touch it, they’re into white walls and post-minimalism.’

  ‘But why, Charles? I don’t understand. You loved that house, every gap under the door, every cobweb, every stained basin and leaking tap.’

  ‘You were never going to come to live there – some of the time maybe, but you’re not a natural discusser of mole dispensing and turnip rot. Mothballs work best for moles, I’ve discovered, by the way, kinder than traps and fumigation. Anyway, when you went off to America and I felt you slipping away again, I knew absolutely how much I didn’t want that. I’d felt it before, when you married Edward; that had caused my own marriage, which had been a bit on the rebound anyway because of Max, to go more pear-shaped. So you see, selling the house was in fact an easy decision, I saw how very selfish I’d been, naturally expecting you to come to me . . .’

  ‘And if I hadn’t come back, wouldn’t you have wished you hadn’t sold it?’

  Charles rubbed his foot against mine and gave me a sly look. ‘Well, it’s a lot of upkeep and poor old Ollie’s half-blind these days . . .’

  ‘You mean all this lovey talk is codswallop, a load of crap! You’re just not getting any younger and finding it all a bit much – and blaming the poor dog! Perhaps we’d better get down to business. You can stay as long as you want – I’d even like it, even after that last little dig – but what about these “few possibilities” you said you wanted to discuss?’

  ‘Too many for tonight.’

  ‘But like? Come on, give me a taster.’

  ‘Well, there are plenty of permutations. We could set up together, that’s top of the list, or have separate pads and visit. If we went for my first option, of course, we’d have a whole new set of decisions to take. Whether you’d want to stay here, or have a similar penthouse, for example, which wouldn’t be ideal for me. I’d have to put my name down for an allotment. You could, of course, keep on this flat as an office and pied à terre, and we could look for a well-insulated house in the pampered south. Is that enough to keep you going?’

  ‘Just about.’

  ‘I’ll give you one more.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘We could get married.’

  ‘Sorry, no go with that one. I couldn’t possibly have a fifth husband. Four’s bad enough, five’s in the realms of farce. Couldn’t we be partners? It’s simpler for our children at this stage of life, I think. And I’d get quite a kick out of saying, when people like Ginny and Maynard Wilson invited me to one of their mind-numbingly conventional dinners, that there was my partner now, too. I wouldn’t be just a spare, fill-in female any more.’

  ‘That’s to suppose I’d want to go to a Wilsons’ dinner in the first place,’ Charles said. ‘And why should you either, when they’re such a yawn?’

  ‘To show you off, to laugh about it with you afterwards, to get new busine
ss, especially now I’ve taken Daisy on. It was at the last Wilsons’ dinner that I met her, actually. I was between Daisy and a dreadful city caricature called Godfrey Croft. And don’t you think a little give and take is called for over invitations, especially from one who’s just admitted to male selfishness?’

  I’d gone for the ripe smelly cheese; it was reeking between us. Charles leaned over it and held my face. ‘You’re never going to let me forget that, you’re storing it up for credit.’ He leaned further across to kiss me, undeterred by the cheese. ‘Partner is it, then?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Our children are married, they’ve seen sense.’

  ‘All credit to them. You should have asked me earlier, you missed your chance. I just wish Josh would get married or he’ll miss his, too. You know it was the night of the Wilsons’ dinner that Warren Lindsay offered me the Long Island commission, and on the very evening of meeting Daisy. Timing is all.’

  It hit me then that I had a tricky little conundrum, having promised to go back in October to finish the Great Maples job. I had to be professional; it had to be right. There’d be no need to see Warren if I went for the inside of a week, but it was his house; he could turn up any time, and would, I imagined, if he wanted to talk about progress with Willa – or lack of it. Charles, though, wouldn’t be over-keen on the idea either way.

  I told him the problem while he dug into the cheese, explaining that it had to be me; Daisy wouldn’t want to go anyway, I was sure.

  ‘Well, I’m coming too,’ Charles said. ‘You can tell Mr Lindsay that you’ve taken me on as a partner, part of the team, and I need to see the work. Perhaps we can have a few days in France before then and a few in New York afterwards, when you’ve done what you need. Coffee? I’ll make it. Then bed. I’m exhausted!’

  I smiled to myself, imagining Charles trying out his dry wit on Warren, showing a phony professional interest in décor; they might even become friends. ‘How did you manage to sell your house so quickly?’ I asked. ‘It’s not an easy market – or an easy house.’

  ‘With great good luck,’ Charles said. ‘A young American blonde, newly married to an English academic, Cambridge-based, came to see it. Quite a girl, she was, usefully rich, and she saw its point, rather remarkably. She was onto her mobile instantly.

  ‘“Murray, hon, this is just the Greatest with a capital G! You gotta get right on over here, like now, right this minute”,’ Charles mimicked, in a squeaky, girly American accent. ‘“You’ll love it! It’s got shutters and a darling folly, you can hunt ’n’ shoot and all that, and I can have a Labrador puppy and take long walks on the beach – and you’ll adore the garden . . .” ‘So the deal and the deed were done.’

  Charles’s luck with his sale was nothing to mine with him. He’d parted with his great love – his secondary love, so it now seemed, since he’d finally revealed some feelings – and I knew at last what I meant to him and he to me. Loving was different from being in love. It was a constant, someone to lean on, which is what we all need – the words of the Bill Withers song on the CD that Charles had played earlier in the evening.

  A thought flashed in. I remembered Warren once talking about both of us being in New York at the same time. ‘And to think we could have met then,’ he’d said. ‘What a missed opportunity!’ It applied much more poignantly and pertinently to Charles.

  I held his eyes. ‘Suppose you’d made contact when you first saw me with Ari all those years ago, Charles – come over, made some excuse and found a way through. You were a journalist, I’m sure you could have cracked it. How would it have been? Saved a lot of time, do you think, or would we have come unstuck?’

  ‘I’d tried to follow through. I dug around the next day, found out all about you, and discovered you were married. It seemed pretty final. I was in my twenties and shy, believe it or not – not a womanizer like Max, ready to chance my arm. And as to how it would have been,’ Charles said, ‘you’d had plenty of life to get out of your system, let’s face it. Better, I think, that we did things upside down, friends first, albeit for all our best years, then lovers, then an old unmarried Derby and Joan. Although,’ he added cheerfully, ‘I hardly see this as our twilight time, more the start of a new dawn.’

  ‘Trite, but I’m glad you said that. I’d like to think there was a bit of juice in us yet with all we want to see and do.’

  I’d had many questions in my head in my twenties. What would happen? Would my future flower beautifully? Or shrivel and end in a whimper? Now, with Charles at my side, it seemed what time I had left was going to be rich and full. I couldn’t wait to get on with it.

  Acknowledgements

  My warmest thanks are due to the many friends who have answered questions and listened patiently while I’ve reminisced at length about the sixties, and it’s been a delight to share memories with Sheran Hornby, Gloria Romanoff and Eileen Ford. Particular thanks, too, to Dorothy Wolfe, whose friendship and supportive help over the years has been invaluable I have leaned on two other friends most especially, over this book, and owe them the greatest debt of gratitude: John Sullivan, without whose support and forensic interest I would have lost much of my nerve, and Eileen Powers, whose colourful inside knowledge of the Hamptons and Long Island has been such a joy. Two wonderful sounding boards.

  Huge thanks too, to New York interior designer, Jennifer Powers, and Angelica Kavouni of Cosmetic Solutions in London, both geniuses in their respective fields, for their expert advice so freely given. I would like to thank Charles Villiers for generously bidding at a fundraising event to name a character in this book. He chose the name of a distinguished, but unsung ancestor of his, Charles Palmer, whose fictional recreation I sincerely hope doesn’t let the side down.

  Heartfelt thanks, as ever, to my editor, Suzanne Baboneau, to whom I owe so much, not least for her warm encouragement and unfailingly all-seeing eye, and my magnificent agent, Michael Sissons, without whose sagacity and guiding hand I would be adrift. A special thank you, too, to Fiona Petheram at PFD and the terrific team at Simon & Schuster for all their support.

  The patience of my family leaves me in awe. I love you all; I am lost in gratitude. You make everything possible.

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

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