by Maggie Ford
It seemed to happen so quickly. As he turned his face to hers, looking for her lips, she found herself offering them and in the silence of the room they sank down on the settee, as he fondled her breast, the low cut décolletage of her flimsy evening dress offering no resistance to his manipulating hand; feeling it urgently travel down over her body to find her eager and willing, moments later having her gasping with the joy of being taken by him, being loved once more.
It wasn’t until it was over that she felt the guilt; visions of Anthony racing through her brain like little attacking demons, making her suddenly leap up from the sofa and flee from the room, leaving him staring after her.
What his expression was she had no idea for she hadn’t been able to bring herself to look back at him. All she heard was his voice trading after her: ‘What is it, Madeleine? What have I done?’
And her reply, high-pitched, sharp, fragmented like shards of glass as she came to a halt the other side of the door: ‘You’d – best – go! I’m sorry – it was a mistake!’
Reaching her bedroom, closing the door behind her, she didn’t hear him leave; he must have let himself out so quietly with no maid to open the door for him. She had no staff, just a woman who came in daily to cook and generally clean and tidy the apartment before going home. For parties she hired temporary staff.
Why was she thinking this when the more important concern was that he would never set foot here again? Not after the way she’d run from the room, crying like someone who’d been raped, making him wonder what on earth had upset her.
How could she have been so damned foolish, allowing a mere twenty-one-year-old to make love to her and her almost eight years older? Yet it had been so wonderful for those brief moments, so overwhelming, making her forget all about Anthony for a short while, and she had been so starved of love all these months.
Questions had begun to plague her: how could she have treated the poor devil like that? He must have been so embarrassed, bewildered, feeling so awful. She’d have to phone him tomorrow morning, apologize. But it may be better if she didn’t – let sleeping dogs lie. Yes, that was best.
Thinking all these things, she ran herself a bath and lay there soaking in the hot water, trying to push away the voices in her brain: Ronald; Anthony – poor Anthony, leaving him like you did, you needed him. But Ronald…
He’d made her feel wonderful, for a moment or two she had forgotten the pain of no longer having Anthony to hold her. How could she have treated him like that? Yes, she would phone him tomorrow. She had his telephone number. She would say how sorry she was to do what she did. It would make him feel better. He would understand, might even want to see her again. There came a tinkling excitement in her stomach as that thought touched her.
She went to bed, falling into a deep, dreamless sleep, next morning waking to her new resolution. But instead of her telephoning him it was he who telephoned her.
Why she had expected to hear Anthony’s voice as she unhooked the receiver and put it to her ear, she wasn’t sure, but she felt that tingle in her stomach again as the voice, young and light, said: ‘I’m really sorry I offended you last night, Madeleine. I honestly didn’t mean to. It just happened. I hope you’ve forgiven me.’
‘You didn’t do anything for me to forgive,’ she burst out hurriedly. ‘It was me. I should be the one to apologize. I don’t know what came over me. I still don’t.’ She was gabbling. ‘I’ve been so worried that you’d taken offence. You left before I could say sorry for running off like that.’
‘Fine, fine!’ he interrupted. ‘So I’m not in the dog kennel then?’
‘Not at all. I was my—’
‘Then can I see you again? Perhaps this afternoon?’
She took a deep breath, trying to keep her voice level. ‘I’d like that.’
‘Then we can both apologize face to face,’ he said brightly, sounding so young, so vital.
‘Yes,’ she breathed, not quite knowing how else to answer.
‘Then shall I see you around five o’clock? I have to be somewhere during most of the day. Maybe we could have dinner out together somewhere?’
‘That would be lovely!’ she exclaimed, feeling suddenly like some young girl herself.
‘The only trouble is, at the moment I haven’t got the wherewithal,’ he was saying. ‘My parents provide me with a monthly allowance but it hasn’t arrived yet.’
‘No bother,’ she cried eagerly. ‘I’ll stand us dinner somewhere really special.’
‘Thanks so much, Madeleine,’ came his voice, a little subdued as if he felt a weight of guilt. ‘I’ll repay you the moment my allowance arrives. See you around five o’clock then.’
The phone clicked off, leaving her gazing at it before putting it back on its hook. Five o’clock was far too early to go out to dinner. What would they do in the meantime? But she already knew. They’d sit together and talk as they had done last night, and then… This time she wouldn’t suffer the qualms she’d had last night. She recalled now how expert he’d been for one his age. This time she would forget Anthony. Her being in this situation was his fault.
From now on she would lead her own life. From now on she meant to enjoy it to the full. Sod Anthony!
Twenty-Seven
‘I can’t go in this thing!’ Ronald was saying in a peeved tone.
Standing at the door to her bedroom, he was holding out the evening jacket for her to scrutinize. Since last year’s Christmas party, he’d worn it several times to different evening events. Now she looked over to him as he hovered, his handsome young face flushed from his hot bath – loving the water to be as near to scalding as skin could bear – but looking ever so slightly peeved, and a pang of love swept over her as Madeleine threw him a smile.
‘Why ever not, darling? What’s wrong with the jacket?’
‘Well… look at it!’
Only half dressed herself, still in her slip, she had no qualms about him seeing her like this, not after his living with her these past three years. Tomorrow night was New Year’s Eve. They’d be off to a huge party to dance away the hours through to 1929, returning home to make love and sleep in each other’s arms until mid-morning. Nineteen twenty-nine in two days’ time!
Where had those last three years gone, such fabulous years, she and Ronald now an item. It didn’t matter he was almost eight years younger than she. Everyone accepted it or maybe they kept their views to themselves but he had made her feel twenty-one again; not as she’d felt when she’d been twenty-one and married to staid old James, nearly three times her age, feeling guilty every time she threw a party, and his reminding her that England was at war, men dying, women made widows – not an appropriate time to hold parties. She had felt young again when she and Anthony had got together behind James’s back and later after James’s death. But that was then. Now she was with Ronald – lovely, young and vibrant Ronald.
He moved further into the bedroom, holding out the jacket for her to see. ‘Look, both elbows are becoming so rubbed it won’t take long for everyone to notice. Shouldn’t my new evening suit be ready by now? We ought to have ordered it earlier. I’ll look like a pauper in this.’
‘Where’s your other one?’ she asked, coming over to examine the sleeves. ‘The one I bought for you a couple of months ago?’
She didn’t mind buying him things. She loved buying him things, seeing his young face light up, to immediately grow solemn as he apologized for not being able to afford whatever it was himself. All he had was that poor apology of an inheritance his parents had so niggardly provided when he had turned twenty-one – not enough for a flea to live on. She bought him things because she loved him. She’d buy him the moon if she could.
‘The lapel got stained with that caviar, you remember. And we forgot to have it cleaned. But I can’t go in this one.’
‘No, you can’t.’ She thought a while. ‘Then we’ll go right now and gee them up – tell them we’ll cancel it if it’s not ready by tomorrow morning.’
It was wonderful to see his glum face brighten as he came towards her, letting the jacket fall to the floor.
‘You’re so good to me. Honestly I don’t deserve you,’ he said, like some young kid.
Then far from a young kid, he took her in his arms, holding her to him, pressing his lips to hers as he eased her backwards against the edge of the bed to lower her body on to it, his own holding her there, moments later to have her gasping beneath his expert love-making.
No one, not even Anthony, had ever made her feel like this. Inflamed by his energy, she knew she would give him her last sou to have him take possession of her as he was doing now.
He would never know how he had changed her life. No more attending charity committees, attempting to fill her time, counting the hours when she was alone as she had done after leaving Anthony; no more horrible dreams – they disappeared the moment Ronald moved in permanently on her persuasion just two weeks after that first Christmas; no more trying to plan parties all on her own. She still threw her famous dinner parties and evening parties but more often now she attended other people’s, she and he together.
Out almost every evening, afternoons, weekends, it didn’t matter that he’d hardly a penny to his name while his parents lived half way across the world, well and comfortably off, not one thought for him. He’d never explained why and she never asked, feeling it was probably too painful for him to recall much less talk about, though sometimes she felt curiosity eating at her.
When on one occasion she had tried to question him, that gentle character of his seemed suddenly to change, his face becoming set, his lips tight and grim and his lovely brown eyes hard until she felt alarmed and said no more. Moments later he was his sweet, gentle self again. She never tried to probe again. It was best to let sleeping dogs lie as it were.
What did hurt was seeing him so grateful for everything she did for him, for the things she bought him. She continually found herself assuring him that she enjoyed – no, more than that – loved spending money on him and not to worry about it.
‘I adore doing it, buying you things,’ she told him, ‘seeing how happy you look. I get so much pleasure from the pleasure on your face, my darling. So please, my love, don’t deny me that.’
‘I won’t. But it’s not fair.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, darling, you deserve it for the joy you’ve given me, the happiness I get out of it, knowing how you were treated in your life.’
He would nod soberly and say no more, sometimes falling quiet which would worry her a little.
But he’d soon perk up and become his old self once more. That was another thing. He never sulked for long, seldom stayed in the doldrums for long. And he made her feel young again. She loved it when his youth showed through. Yet it was his very youthful moments that changed her. He made her feel like a girl in her teens, the two of them going here, there and everywhere, running about like kids playing chase, getting up to silly antics, laughing, always laughing.
It was only when they were alone in bed that maturity took over – in the way he made love; in the way he never allowed himself to be so carried away as to overlook taking care of the precautions needed. Though he usually made it light-hearted, getting her to help him with what was needed; it became a procedure which usually ended in the senses of both being heightened almost to breaking point in their need for each other. Life was so wonderful. He was so good for her. With him nothing would ever go wrong. She was a wealthy woman, lucky with her investments and making money enough for them both.
There’d been a time when she had thought her life was over, that she’d never be happy again. That was now a thing of the past. If she ever thought of Anthony, she’d immediately shrug the thought off, thrust aside that brief second of anger and think of her life now. She was happy. Anthony could do whatever he liked, be wherever he liked, go with whoever he liked; it was no longer any of her business.
Then out of the blue… ‘I ran into your Anthony the other day.’
It was February. She and Ronnie, as she often called him, had been together over three years and Anthony was no longer her Anthony, despite the woman’s remark. So how could his name suddenly turn her mind back, right out of the blue, to prompt this sudden sharp pang of emotion?
She’d been on the way to her hairdresser’s, wondering why she was bothering in such weather, her head bent against a high wind, not so bad as that reported in the newspapers this time last year, when she’d been stopped by a female voice calling her name.
It belonged to a woman she’d not seen since she and Ronnie had taken up with each other. Gertrude Peel and herself together with several other friends would meet a couple of times a week for morning coffee. They’d all known Anthony and had sympathized with her over the break-up, she feeling entirely alone, grateful for a little company to get her through those long hours. These days she no longer had need of company and coffee mornings.
‘I thought it was you, my dear,’ chirped Gertrude as she came up to her through the thin crowd who’d braved the weather to shop. One hand was holding on to her fashionable domed suede cloche hat lest the wind take it, the brim like a downturned sail, the whole thing almost covering her eyes, not a strand of hair visible. The other held a couple of wide paper bags that threatened to break free from her grasp and sail away on the wind.
Though in her early forties she was dressed like a young flapper: her loose-fitting, wrap-over coat unnecessarily short, its fur collar and cuffs almost drowning her spare frame, its pockets way below the hips. Madeleine also dressed in the height of fashion but she was some ten years younger and still looked well in young clothes. She still did look young and just as well with Ronnie by her side.
‘Delightful to bump into you, my dear,’ Gertrude was saying, ‘and so unexpected. Simply ages since I saw you last! But what terrible weather,’ she twittered on, seeming ready to start a lengthy conversation. ‘This awful wind – almost as bad as last year after that awful winter we had – all that snow. And that flooding they had then, all those poor people washed out of their homes. Still that was last year. But you, my dear – you look so well, so wonderful. I heard about you and that new young man of yours. I must say, from looking at you, he seems to be doing you a power of good.’
Madeleine nodded, but Gertrude was still rattling on. ‘We must have coffee again some time. I still see several of the old faces – we still meet. But perhaps you’re too busy these days. You would appear so low spirited when we used to meet. But you had reason to be didn’t you, poor thing?’ Hardly pausing for breath, she went on, ‘By the way, I ran into your Anthony the other day. He seems to be getting on well too – with a lovely girl. We had a brief chat. They looked very happy and settled, and so it seems are you, my dear, from what I hear and—’
‘Sorry, but I have to go, Gertrude,’ Madeleine cut in. ‘I’m late for my hairdressers.’ She saw Gertrude beam widely.
‘Hardly worth it this weather. But do let us catch up with each other again, have coffee and a chat. I’ll tell the others I met you. I am still at the same address, dear, so you can always get in touch. See you soon then.’
‘Yes, bye then,’ Madeleine said, hurrying off, Gertrude having leaned towards her to bestow an air kiss just short of her ear.
Pushing through the indifferent shoppers, hardly aware of them or the noise of traffic or the buffeting wind, the hairdresser’s forgotten, she was aware only of this weight on her heart, Anthony’s face, and such a longing to see him again that she was almost on the verge of tears. How could she have walked out on him as she had, let all this time go by until it was too late to ask him to have her back – he was now with someone else; herself forgotten.
By the time she found a taxi to take her home, she’d sternly pulled herself together, set her mind to Ronnie. She had been having a wonderful life these past three years and until Gertrude Peel had spoken to her saw only happiness stretching ahead, everything in the past swept away, all her heartaches behi
nd her, so why was she fretting now?
Even so it was hard not to think of Anthony – he and that young woman whom Gertrude had seen him with. Was marriage on their agenda? Something he had shied away from with her. Did they have their minds on starting a family? Something else that he had made clear he did not exactly look forward to. True, she too had now given up thoughts of children for the time being, having too good a time at the moment, so she could understand how he had felt, enjoying his life too much at the time.
Now the thought crossed her mind that maybe she and Ronnie might move towards a more permanent arrangement. But it couldn’t wait too long. He was twenty-four now but in a couple of months she’d be thirty-three and time was passing. But in broaching the subject, he might back off, saying that he could never afford to get married. To say she’d pay for the wedding would make him feel belittled and what man wouldn’t be? Fine when it was small things like clothes and jewellery and such, but something so very important and showy, she couldn’t see him accepting that.
There was one way out of it. She could arrange for him to come into her stock broker business, or maybe if she invested some money for him. She knew what she was doing here. What they reaped would make him feel easier in his mind, able to put his hand in his wallet for his own money rather than she having to put it there for him in the first place.
A few days later she told him of her plan. Immediately he protested as he usually did whenever she offered to do something for him.
‘All I seem to do is sponge off you,’ he said in that humble tone that always tugged at her heart strings.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she told him. ‘You can’t go anywhere without money in your pocket. And who else can help you on that score – certainly not your parents.’
It was the wrong thing to say, she knew that immediately. ‘I don’t want to talk about them!’ he said sharply, putting an end to it.
This evening they were going to the Savoy to see The Gondoliers, he rather liking Gilbert & Sullivan. She’d already bought tickets, good seats, but there’d be drinks to pay for in the interval and supper afterwards. She handed him thirty pounds which as always he took as though it seared his hand, hastily pushing it into his wallet, stuffing the thing into his breast pocket as if it had been stolen.
