‘No – yes. No. I –’ Maddie shook her head and hunched her shoulders a little. ‘I was all right as I was. Just thinking of the good parts, the happy days, the wonderful things that happened to me. Never the other – Jay was wonderful. I loved him so much –’
Slowly the rocking began, at first almost imperceptibly, and then more and more definitely, and Annie let her shoulders slump. She knew what this meant: another panegyric about Jay and his good looks and his wonderful lovemaking and the joy he gave her. It would go on for an hour or more before Annie would be able, slowly, to persuade her to change tack and talk of the events in her life instead of about her feelings. When she did that the truth about Jay always emerged. The man she described and gloated over was a very different one from the man who came snaking his way out of her stories, and it was that man Annie wanted to know about. Now, she looked over her shoulder out of the window to the dampness of the dull July afternoon outside and decided it was worth trying, just once more at least, to get more out of Maddie, including the ‘bad things’ about which she had hinted and then refused to speak. And she turned back to her and reached out and touched her rocking shoulder and said what she had said so often during the long months since she had embarked on this damn fool exercise.
‘Tell me what happened next, Maddie. Tell me all about it.’
25
May 1953
‘I won’t have it,’ Jay said. ‘I’ve told you, Maddie, and I don’t want to talk about it any more, for God’s sake. I won’t have it.’
‘It wouldn’t make any difference to you,’ she said, trying to sound reasonable rather than wheedling. ‘I promise you, you’ll never even see him. I’ll have the room fixed up so that he can stay there all the time. I’ll get a nurse in at night as well as for the day, it won’t make any difference to you –’
‘Nurses at night, as well as – listen, that costs money! It’s crazy. Leave him where he is, Maddie. He’s okay there.’
‘Money! Jay, for God’s sake, we can pay for that much for him! The business is his, after all –’
He whirled on her then. ‘The business belongs to the person who does it, right? And who is doing all the work right now? Is he, that – is he doing the work? No. I am. So don’t give me any stuff about how the money gets spent. It’s mine. I make it. And if –’
‘All right, all right!’ she said and put up both hands. ‘I meant no harm. I only meant that he started it and –’
‘And I’m carrying it on. Listen, what’s the matter with you, Maddie? I know you’re a crazy kid, but this is getting ridiculous.’ He came and sat down beside her and slid one hand up her leg under her skirt in a conciliatory fashion and the bright green felt lifted and eddied over her knees as she leaned a little closer to him. ‘His brains have gone like scrambled eggs, he doesn’t know what time it is, for God’s sake. What difference will it make to him to have him here at the house? None. But to me? A lot. It won’t be nice for the boys – they shouldn’t have to be around an old man like that – and he’s in good hands there at the hospital. They take good care of him, we visit often – you’re there as much as you’re here sometimes – leave him in peace, honey. Don’t go spoiling things here.’
It was hard to concentrate on what he was saying. Lately her physical need for him had increased and deepened; it was not at all like those dreadful grey days after Buster’s birth when all her hunger had gone out like a candle. Almost from the moment that Danny had been born she had been desperate for Jay, had wanted to make love at every possible opportunity, and now, a year later, it was still the same. She wanted him at any time she could have him and now she slid down on the sofa a little so that it would be easier for him. But he just laughed and kissed her nose and then stood up and went back to the fireplace.
She sat and looked up at him and opened her mouth to start again and then closed it. It was a dreadful situation to be in, but what could she do? If Jay was so certain it wouldn’t work, then it wouldn’t. Big as the house was, she wouldn’t be able to keep Daddy out of his way, and if Jay got angry he’d just go out more and that was not to be thought of. She shouldn’t have mentioned it this morning; she should have known it would annoy Jay. But Daddy had been so particularly miserable last night that she had had to promise him she’d try to arrange something. So what else could she do? She felt like a piece of meat being torn between a pair of lions, so all she could do now was smile brightly and say, ‘All right, Jay. But at least let me arrange for his own nurse there for him. It won’t cost too much and that might help him to feel a bit better –’
‘That’s a pleasure,’ Jay said handsomely. ‘Believe me. I don’t want to be mean, but there are things that are possible and there are things that are not. A nurse is possible. Look, I want to talk to you about the business of the bleachers. I got the offer of two blocks, down the end of the Mall. What do you think? Should I take them? They want a bloody fortune – and how much can I ask for ‘em if I do?’
She sat up straighter and tried to set her mind to business. Ever since they had got back from Boston and discovered just what a tangle Alfred Braham’s affairs had been allowed to get into, while he struggled to deal with Ambrose and his problems and then had become ill himself, Jay had been like a new man. All the way over on the ship from Boston, he had been taciturn and remote, spending every day playing poker and coming to their cabin so late and so drunk that there had been no loving at all, only head-holding and vomiting and a good deal of stertorous sleeping, and she had been frightened then, very frightened. Had the bubble burst? Had their wonderful marriage, for which she had struggled so hard and done such dreadful things to her family, gone sour and died on her? She had spent the six nights at sea weeping into her pillow, terrified to think of what was to come, sickeningly aware of the fear that she was pregnant again, so soon, and worn out with the way Buster woke every night as soon as she managed to drift into a shallow sleep. It had been a hell of a journey.
But once they had arrived and moved into the Regent’s Park flat and he had gone to the office in Great Portland Street to see how things were, he had been galvanised.
‘The place has just been ticking over,’ he had told her jubilantly when he had come back to find her in a heap on the sofa, having just come back from visiting her father in hospital. ‘Just ticking over with a half-witted secretary fielding phone calls and any amount of business waiting to be done –’ And he had gone rushing away again, to immerse himself in it all without even asking her how her father was.
How her father was. Sitting now and staring out at the dripping garden while Jay went to find the map that would show her the stands he had the chance to get on the Coronation route, she thought of her father and again the ugly tightness came into her throat. It was like a band of thick gristle that pushed a lump into her gullet so that sometimes she almost felt sick with it, and it came whenever she thought of him.
Alfred, the swaggering, cigar-puffing Alfred of the gleaming ridged black hair and the tramlined forehead, Alfred, so muscular and strong and so very Daddy, to look as he did now, collapsed in a wheelchair with his head poking forwards like an old tortoise and his eyes, once so bright and shrewd, looking dead and milky blue and leaking with gummy matter, while his lower lip hung open so that he drooled a little on the right side where all the lines had been smoothed out until he looked like a sagging old doll that had been left out in the sun too long – she shuddered as she thought about him, and then, as Jay came back into the room, pushed the thought away. Later, when Jay was busy, later she’d think about Daddy.
Together they sat in their big living room, on the tasteful white leather sofa, poring over the map that Jay spread on the smoked topaz glass coffee table and decided they would take the stands that had been offered to Braham’s Export Agency Ltd by one of Alfred’s old business cronies who had an in at the Ministry of Works, and resell them to American tourists at three times the recommended rates.
‘It won’t make me any big mo
ney,’ Jay said contentedly. ‘But it’ll make a few bucks, enough to cover expenses. And I’ll lay on something special in the way of refreshments and see to it that Declan sends the people we want to do good business with. It can be a real investment –’
‘Then why not have them as guests? Why make them pay for the seats? Let ‘em come to the Coronation for nothing,’ Maddie said.
He shook his head at her, half amused, half irritated. ‘I thought you were a businesswoman, Maddie. Listen, what matters most? Something you get given or something you have to pay big for? I know the answer to that if you don’t. I’ll get ‘em all over here, the Flannerys and the Martyns and the Costellos and those guys Pa did so well with a couple years back – who was it, they were brothers, Italians – Giovale. That was it, the Giovale brothers –’
Maddie’s brows creased. ‘The Costellos?’
‘Yeah, you remember Cray Costello, don’t you? Guy we did the beach development with at Wollaston? According to Declan that’s well on schedule. About four months, it should be operational and then the money’ll really start rolling in –’
‘You’ll just ask Cray to come?’ She hoped she sounded casual.
He shrugged. ‘Whoever. I’ll leave it to Declan. I’ll send him a cable tonight then, as soon as I get confirmation I got these bleachers for sure. Listen, I’ve got to go. You’ll be in the office later?’
‘You want me there?’
It mattered to her to be told, suddenly, how important it was to him that she worked beside him and she sat there with her green felt skirt in a circle around her and looked up, hoping her beseeching need didn’t show on her face. It might irritate him to know how much she wanted his approval.
‘Of course I do! That stupid cow Murchison is off sick again. That woman has three periods a month, I swear to you. If I could only get someone better – it’s crazy, the way it is these days, no decent help to be had anywhere. Listen, I’ll be back from lunch about two-thirty, three – I’m eating with Perry Burns, he’s got a load of stuff, all sorts of things, coming in from South Africa and I can do a nice deal with him. You be there when I get back, okay? Then we can settle this business and one or two other things. So long, honey.’
And he was gone, his long legs in their beautifully cut grey flannel trousers almost twinkling with his haste and she followed him out of the living room into the broad hallway and stood on the step as he climbed into the Bentley and drove himself away with a casual flip of one hand out of the window. She waved back and then as the car disappeared round the corner with a spit of gravel under its wheels, stood on the porch staring out at the dripping front garden. Behind her she could hear the day really getting going; the hum of a vacuum cleaner from above as the daily from the council estate started on the stairs and Buster’s voice shouting something at Jenny, truculent and shrill, and she tried not to listen. Buster was not the easiest of children at the best of times, and this new nanny seemed to threaten to be as bad as the rest of them, overly keen on her own way and not at all interested in dealing with small boys as high spirited as Jay encouraged Buster and Danny to be. She smiled then as she thought of Jay with the boys. He was undoubtedly all a father should be, as far as the children were concerned. They would land on him squealing and shouting, even two-year-old Buster pretending to box with him, and Jay would let them roll him on to the floor and wrestle and box back as the nanny stood stony-faced and disapproving at such lack of control and then would scoop them up and take them away, shouting and wailing, when Jay had had enough. But he was a good father and he loved them. She was sure of that.
And he loves me too, she whispered inside her head, staring out at the laurels and the rhododendrons that lined the gravel drive, with their leaves dripping mournfully in the eternity of rain that had ushered in the year. Floods everywhere according to the papers. All the preparations for the Coronation and nothing but rain – and she wrenched her thoughts away from such trivial nonsense and tried to deal with the bad feelings she had, pushing the thoughts around her head to try to uncover their roots.
Jay’s refusal to let her bring her father here to their house in Stanmore to be looked after was a particularly painful one. But that was nothing new. She had been trying to persuade him to agree to that ever since they had moved here a year ago, but he had never been anything but adamant. She had been stupid to start again this morning; she had only done it because Daddy had been so piteous in his pleadings when she had gone to see him in his nursing home yesterday afternoon, so incoherent with his hatred of the nurses and the routine of the place, so desperate to get out that what little control he had over his speech was lost altogether and he had babbled and shouted and babbled again. Of course she had had to ask Jay. And of course she had known he would refuse.
And had known too that she wanted him to. That was the worst part of it; she wanted to take care of her father, wanted to do something to ease the guilt that was always there hovering just below the surface when she saw him in that state, wanted to be rid of the conviction that it was all her fault, but she knew she couldn’t bear to have him in her house with them all. Jay was right about that. It would never work.
And anyway, she thought confusedly, it says it in the Bible doesn’t it? People have to cleave to their spouses, not to their parents, and never mind that commandment about honouring fathers and mothers; and she almost shook herself with irritation. What was she doing, for pity’s sake, thinking about religion of all things? She’d better watch it. She’d get as bad as Blossom if she didn’t take care, and that would be to get as gaga and revolting as Daddy had become. Oh, indeed, indeed, Jay was right. He couldn’t live here.
So it wasn’t that that made her feel so wretched this morning; it must be the weather, she thought, and turned to come back into the lounge, shutting with a thump the big studded oak door that tried so hard to pretend it was Jacobean, and then going through to the living room to look around it critically. The style she had chosen for it was right, she told herself with satisfaction for the umpteenth time; the white leather sofas she had had specially made had been worth the vast price she had to pay for them. And why not? When she thought of how much money Braham’s was making under her and Jay’s control, they had a right to spend some. And she had her inheritance from her mother now, too, so there was no cash shortage. It was pouring in, that was what it was doing; she had every right to be a little extravagant, and she walked across the thick carpet, only one shade darker in its off-whiteness than the sofas and armchairs, and went to the kitchen to talk to the au pair who did the cooking in the middle of the most lavishly equipped modern kitchen in tasteful greys and reds that she could provide for her. Only nursery lunch today, and no dinner tonight because she and Jay were to go to a charity ball at the Grosvenor House, so the girl needed to be warned not to get over-excited about what she could make.
But all the time as she went through her normal wife-and-mother routine, going on after leaving the kitchen to talk to Jenny about the children’s day, she worried away at the back of her mind for the source of her uneasiness. And eventually found it.
Of course she had known what it was all the time, but had been trying to ignore it. Had Jay been genuinely casual when he had spoken of offering tickets for the Coronation to the Costellos? Had the name been dropped in among those others as a matter of unimportant course? Or was he thinking about the tall girl she had seen that afternoon, all that time ago, on the day when she had first heard of what had happened to Ambrose? It was crazy, she told herself as she dressed to go up to town to the office, stringing pearls around her throat so that they filled the scooped-out neckline of her skinny black sweater and pulling on her oversized coat, the one she had bought from Jacques Heim when she had last gone to Paris, collecting her long-handled umbrella without which no one was dressed this year, leaving the house in a flurry of last-minute instructions, quite, quite crazy. Why worry about a girl three thousand miles away and all that time ago in Boston when there was so much else
to worry about?
Grimly she threaded the roads down through Stanmore village and on to the Edgware bypass that would lead her into the Finchley Road and on to Great Portland Street, and tried not to think about what was behind such a stupid notion, and eventually, as her white MG was caught in a traffic jam at Swiss Cottage, gave up the struggle. The fears that were really trying to beat at her awareness at last came pushing out of the morass of other thoughts with which she had tried to suppress them and stared her bleakly in the face.
Barbara Morton had told her so casually, at a charity dance last week, with so little malice, almost as a by-the-way, that she had seen Jay in Bond Street having tea at Barbellions with a girl with red hair, ‘and my dear, the most pointed breasts I have ever seen in all my life. Do ask him who she was so that I can ask her where she buys her brassieres,’ she had said and gone bopping away, leaving Maddie feeling cold and sick.
It wasn’t the first time, that was the trouble. There were other tales other friends had told her, some casually like Barbara, some with that edge of mischief that gave them so much pleasure and her so much fear. Mostly she managed to ignore them, for wasn’t Jay as eager in bed as ever he had been? However difficult he might be about timekeeping, however often he came home so much later than she had expected, or not at all, phoning casually later to say he’d gone on to dinner on some sort of business deal, she had always had the comfort of knowing that as soon as they were in bed, Jay was Jay, wanting her and making sure he had her. There could be nothing at all to worry about, she told herself again and again. Not with the business doing so well. Yes, there was Daddy’s illness, which seemed to drag on and on unendingly – and she pulled herself away from the implications of that thought very smartly – and the ever-recurring problems of finding new nannies for the boys, but that was all.
Maddie Page 27