Another Woman (9781468300178)

by Vincenzi, Penny

  Tilly

  Far away in Paris, Tilly Mills, despite every resolution to the contrary, heard herself saying that yes, she would like to go to Les Bains Douches with the new big screen hotshot, Jack Menzies, who might have a face like an angel with a past as Arena had put it last week, but also had a serious personal hygiene problem. She knew it was crazy, that she had an early call, that it had been a tough day, that if Mick McGrath should be there he would kill her, that she had been late the night before, that it might hit the papers and upset Rufus, but she had to do something to distract herself from the thought of what was going on in England. The frenetic atmosphere of what was still considered one of the chicest discos in Paris would surely take her mind off the twin spectres of a self-congratulatory James Forrest leading his younger daughter down the aisle, watched by roughly 300 adulatory friends and family (Rufus Headleigh Drayton amongst them), and the colour and added interest she might have brought to the occasion had she yielded to temptation and Rufus’s fairly intense pressure and attended the wedding. She could have been there right now, in England, a few miles (or not even a few miles) from the heart of the Forrest home, casting a six-foot-one-and-a-half-inch shadow over James Forrest’s happiness.

  ‘Shit,’ she said aloud, ‘shit, shit, shit,’ then she stood up, tugged her Lycra dress down so that so long as she stood absolutely straight it just covered her buttocks, and sashayed across the room towards the exit, feeling rather than seeing every pair of male eyes (and a good few female ones as well) fixed upon her, and sensing rather than hearing her name being passed from mouth to mouth, table to table, and then as she hit the street, walked through the door of the restaurant followed by Menzies and his minder (Christ, what was she doing with this Hollywood riffraff when she could be with Rufus?), met the inevitable wall of flashbulbs, went into further automatic pilot, and in one swift movement smiled at them, made some crack about giving them a flash and slid into the Menzies limo. And wondered as it shot off into the night, not for the first time, how she imagined she could possibly move with any degree of permanence from this world into the sweetly ordered, old-fashioned one inhabited by Rufus Headleigh Drayton.

  Theo

  Theodore Buchan, sitting alone in the bar of the Royal Hotel, Woodstock, embarking on his fourth Armagnac, and waiting with a fair degree of impatience for his fifth and fairly new wife Sasha to return from what she still insisted on calling the girls’ room – he must have a little chat with Sasha about the things which were beginning quite seriously to irritate him – was also concentrating his formidable energies on not thinking about the wedding at which he was to play a considerable part the next day.

  ‘Of course you must come,’ James had said, when Theo had first tried to make excuses, offering perfectly genuine-sounding alibis in the form of conferences, company launches, merger announcements, a long-postponed and promised honeymoon with the new Mrs Buchan. ‘Of course you must come. Cressida is your goddaughter for Christ’s sake, and you’re my oldest friend, and how could you even think we could do any of it without you? How could I get through the day even? Besides, you love weddings – even when they’re not your own. And since when, Theo, could a conference, let alone a honeymoon, not be put off?’

  He had been genuinely and deeply hurt; Theo had recognized the fact, promised to come and spent the following months preparing himself for the ordeal.

  The wedding itself of course would be wonderful: the daughter of one of his oldest friends marrying the son of another. Dear old Josh, who’d been at the International School with him, with whom he’d gone on sexual rampages in Geneva, whose best man he had been at his wedding to Julia. That marriage had lasted. Only Josh’s second, and the first had been very swiftly over. And Julia was a good wife to him, of course. That helped. Intelligent, (whatever the Forrests thought), gracious, a little intense – but then she was an American – and very sexy. Very very sexy. There’d been that rather strange incident one night when Josh was away – Theo wrenched his mind away from the incident: one of the few times he felt he had behaved really well – and she had been a terrific mother to Oliver. Although she did rather over-love him, Theo felt. But the boy had survived her spoiling, was really very nice indeed. A perfect husband for Cressida. The whole thing was nearly perfect. The only thing that could have improved on it would have been Cressida marrying his own son, his beloved Mungo, named by his doting parents after an obscure Scottish spirit in honour of the country of his conception, but that would have seemed almost incestuous, so closely had they grown up together. Worse still, if she’d fallen in love with – Theo switched his mind away from the one unthinkable, the one he and James never even spoke about, and concentrated instead on Oliver. Charming, brilliant, good-looking Oliver. A little lacking in humour perhaps, but still a golden, blue-eyed boy. Literally as well as metaphorically. Not only graduated summa cum laude out of Harvard medical school, not only winner of a research scholarship to the Mount Sinai, but a superb sportsman too, played tennis for Harvard; wasted, in a way, on the medical profession, but he would no doubt make a fortune out of his specialty, as they called it out there. He was already doing brilliantly.

  Funny how history repeated itself. The gynaecologist’s daughter marrying the gynaecologist – and this was third generation. Well, at least Cressida was Oliver’s first choice, the love of his life. Not entirely predictable, perhaps, gentle, sweet little Cressida – several people had remarked that Harriet seemed more his style: hopelessly wrong there of course, but then people were usually wrong about such things and few people knew and understood Harriet. But certainly he needed a Cressida, a loving supportive wife, someone who could run his home, entertain for him, back him up, raise his children perfectly. And Cressida was extremely socially accomplished: despite her gentleness, she wasn’t shy, and she was very efficient – although undeniably impractical: it was a family joke, Cressida’s physical incompetence, it wasn’t just that she couldn’t change a plug or thread up a sewing machine, she could never even get the right station on the radio, or fill up the windscreen wash on her car. But she was superb at persuading people to do things for her, at delegating; she would be a perfect wife. For a rich man. Not so good for a poor one, maybe. Well, that was all right. She wasn’t marrying a poor man.

  Funny, how marriage as an institution went on and on. People said it had had its day, that everyone simply lived together these days and so on and so forth, but the fact remained that in the end they usually wanted to formalize things. He’d read somewhere that statistically there were more marriages than ever. Well, thought Theo, waving at the barman – Christ what was Sasha doing in the lavatory, giving herself a blowjob? – he certainly kept up the batting average. Five was quite a good total. It was his compulsion to own things, of course, that had led him to it: companies, houses, paintings, cars, horses, all neatly packaged up and labelled ‘property of Theodore Buchan’. And women. He’d tried not owning them, tried just having mistresses, but it never worked. Most recently and most terribly it hadn’t worked. He was too possessive, too distrustful to love and let go, in that awful modern psychobabble phrase. It was fine, having a mistress as well as a wife, you could love her and let go, although even then he found that painful, when he was very involved with them, with the mistresses, and they started having other relationships. That was how he’d arrived at marriages three and four: both wives had originally been mistresses that he hadn’t been able to face losing. Then somehow there’d still been something missing in the relationship, risk, intensity, and he’d had to find a mistress as well … and so it had gone on. Until – well, until. And then there’d been Sasha and she’d gone straight to ranking as wife. He’d met her at a race meeting in Longchamps, she’d been with someone he’d been trying to do a deal with, and he’d taken one look at her, so edibly delicious, so perfect, with her peaches-and-cream skin, her tumbling hair, and a body that he could see would soothe and ease him out of the considerable pain he was in, and he’d had to have her. S
he was lonely, she told Theo, her blue eyes wide with innocent distress (and so was he, rawly, desperately lonely), and she didn’t like being on her own, she was no good at it, she really needed someone to care for. And Theo had offered himself up to be cared for, and that had been that. And without looking too far forward and by sheer force of will refusing to so much as glance backwards, he had married her. And it had worked to a surprising degree. Theo was still slightly shocked at how well it had worked. And he’d managed to avoid thinking too much about what had happened before until tonight. And tomorrow. When he had to confront it, face it, face – well, face the whole damn thing. He didn’t know how he was going to handle it. He felt, if the truth was to be told, shit-scared. Which was a situation Theo wasn’t used to at all.

  He waved at the waiter again, asked for a cigar; he was just drawing it into life when Sasha came hurrying across the room, slightly flushed, freshly made-up, hair reshaped, a cloud of that heavy sexy smell she wore – what was it called? Obsession, great name – hanging about her. She sat down beside him, kissed him, took his hand, smiled into his eyes. Theo looked at her, at her swelling breasts in her black dress, at her perfect thighs, disappearing into her short skirt, at the delicately rounded stomach, and felt his erection beginning to form, to stir with its profoundly powerful precision. He didn’t say a word, just stared at her for a moment, stood up quickly, pulled her up almost brutally, and then dropped her hand and stalked out of the bar and into the lift. She followed him, half anxious, half excited; he stood aside to let her pass, then shut the door and pushed her against the back of the lift. His face must have been easy to read, for she smiled at him, very slowly and confidently, and pushed up her dress; she was wearing no pants, no tights.

  Slowly, gracefully, like a dancer, she raised one of her golden legs and wrapped it round his waist; Theo felt her hand unzipping his fly, reaching for his penis. His blood sang, his entire energy focused on her, on reaching into her; and as he felt her, sank into her wetness, stood there braced against her, feeling the glorious pulling pleasure so intense it was near to pain, holding her small buttocks, kneading them, reaching for release, he was able for a brief but timeless time to forget, even to care about, what he had to face the next day.

  Susie

  Susie felt terribly tired. Like James, she looked enviously at Merlin sleeping so very soundly in his corner. The day seemed to have gone on forever. Normally she never felt tired, certainly not in social situations; she tried to ignore the fact now, afraid of its implications, concentrated even harder on Josh and the stories of his youth. She liked Josh; he was so uncomplicated, so charming – and so very good-looking. Susie could never understand why women said they didn’t like good-looking men. In her experience, they were no less interesting and no more conceited (which was the charge women tended to set against them) than plain men, and at least you could enjoy the looks if they were being boring.

  Alistair was good-looking; it had been a factor certainly in her decision to marry him. She really couldn’t see why that was so terrible. If you were going to live for the rest of your life with someone, you wanted them to be the kind of person you’d be happy with; Susie would not have been happy with a physically unattractive man.

  She looked at him now, being charmingly attentive to Maggie, and thought how good he was. He found Maggie something of a trial, she knew, although he greatly enjoyed her cooking, and had had two helpings of her salmon en croûte that evening, and one and a half (mindful of Susie’s watchful eyes) of the chocolate mousse. He was always telling her how wonderful it was to be given things like cream and pastry and roast potatoes, after the food he got at home: it was one of his jokes that even the water in Susie’s kitchen was low-fat. Just the same, he looked wonderful on the low-fat water, ten years younger than his fifty-nine years, his dark brown hair still thick and hardly grey, his lean body muscley and strong, his blue eyes brilliant and amusedly alive. In fact she had to admit he actually looked a lot better than James these days. James had put on a lot of weight lately, and he often looked terribly worn. He did now; well, that was partly her fault. Perhaps she shouldn’t have told him. But if she hadn’t, Rufus might have said something; not the kind of thing James would be able to handle in the middle of his daughter’s wedding day. And he had other things on his mind as well, poor Jamie: Maggie increasingly – what? – difficult, his practice increasingly demanding, and shorter term, there was tomorrow to worry about. Not that anything major would, could possibly, go wrong, but he had a speech to make, hundreds of guests to receive, a strung-up wife to steady, a daughter to lead down the aisle. Not easy, any of it.

  She saw Janine looking at her, smiling, and smiled back. Dear Janine; how lovely she was still, and how very Parisienne, with her jet-black bob, her pale face and dark eyes, and her tiny, trim figure. She was dressed in a plain linen shift, made Maggie look very gross; Susie wondered, as she so often had, if Maggie had any idea that Janine had been Jamie’s first love, had schooled him in sexual matters when he’d been a raw boy of eighteen and she a sophisticated woman of thirty-three. And then decided she couldn’t possibly. Maggie was a darling, but she wasn’t overburdened with intuition. Thank God … Susie looked at her watch: almost half past ten. It was getting late. The bride should be getting her beauty sleep. She looked as if she needed it; beneath her happiness was a heavy shadow of tiredness.

  Although Harriet looked a lot worse. God, she was thin. Even to Susie, who saw thinness, not cleanliness, as next to godliness, Harriet looked thin. And pale and exhausted. Poor little thing. She had a lot to carry in that business of hers, and no help from anyone really. Of course she wanted it that way, had turned down a lot of offers of partnership (including a very generous one from Theo), had a seeming obsession about making it on her own, (and you didn’t need to be a psychoanalyst to work out that one, Susie thought), but when things got tough she must surely yearn for an arm to lean on.

  Thinking of arms made Susie suddenly sharply aware of her own, aching dully (probably it wasn’t, probably entirely psychological) and the phone call she had to make in the morning. She’d almost decided to leave it until the day was over, but she liked to face things, did Susie, liked to know what she was up against. If the news was there, she needed to hear it: for better or for worse.

  The phrase, singing through her head, made her think again of the morning, of Cressida’s wedding day, of the need for them all to go, to leave the family in peace. She stood up, held her hand out to Alistair.

  ‘Darling, come along. We should get over to the Beaumonts. And Cressida should go to bed. Maggie darling, wonderful meal as always. You really are marvellous, feeding us all, tonight of all nights, when you’ve so much else to do. Thank you. Cressida, sweetheart, sleep well. And you too, Harriet, you look exhausted. Maggie, send her up to bed. Goodnight, everyone, see you in the morning. Merlin, darling, don’t get up, you’ve been having such a lovely sleep. I’m so glad you got back in time, from – where was it? Ecuador?’

  ‘Peru,’ said Merlin. ‘Think I’d have missed this? Told the pilot chappie I’d give him a bit of a bonus if he got us down ahead of time.’

  ‘And did he?’ asked Harriet, taking the glass of wine her father had handed her, sitting down between Susie and Alistair in an attitude of profound weariness.

  ‘No. Useless these commercial chaps. No fire in their bellies. No incentive I suppose. Still, at least we got here. Susie, you’re not going, are you? Night’s still young. Hoping to get that husband of yours to play chess with me. What do you say, Alistair?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Merlin, I’d have loved to, but Susie has other plans for me,’ said Alistair. ‘Rufus, are you coming with us or what?’

  ‘I’m not sure – Mungo, what do you think?’

  ‘I think we should get Oliver safely back to his hotel,’ said Mungo. God, he was delicious, thought Susie, looking at him, smiling at him (few people could look at Mungo without smiling), trying to analyse for the hundredth time what made
him so extraordinarily attractive: the nearest she had ever got was to express it as a kind of messed-up perfection, as if something had got hold of the genes that had given him his straight, heavy dark hair, his deep brown eyes, his square jaw, his aquiline nose, his classic mouth and shaken them vigorously so that they fell back not exactly true, the hair determinedly untidy, the eyes just slightly too deep-set under the winging brows, the nose a trifle flaring, the mouth a millimetre fuller (and therefore infinitely sexier). He was, she had to admit, in a different league of looks altogether from her own beloved Rufus; Rufus, who might have been sent from Central Casting to play the archetypal Englishman, blond, tall, slightly languid, not overtly sexy at all. Mungo was all about sex; Janine had once remarked laughing that he made the simple act of handing you a cup of tea into an invitation to bed. And yet it was apparently so unstudied, so unselfconscious, as undeliberate as breathing or blinking (while at the same time of course you knew he was aware of it, knew what he could do to you, should he so choose); that was its greatest charm. Lucky boy, she thought: dangerous boy. As dangerous as his father. He saw her smiling at him now, smiled back, just at her, for a brief, intensely attentive moment, then at all of them again, around the room. ‘I’m taking my best-manly duties very seriously, you see,’ he said.