Richard and Hamish returned as the entrée plates were being removed. They were both very involved in some convoluted story about property prices in London.
“So Marcus got here okay, then?” Charlie inquired coolly.
Richard sneered. “Oh, shut up, will you, Charlie.”
Everyone was laughing about something else, ignoring the tension between Richard and Charlie, but I didn’t find any of it in the least bit funny. I looked about the table at all my friends in their white finery. Everyone seemed to be happy apart from Richard and me. I looked at him now as he necked his champagne. I always knew Richard took cocaine, lots of people in the media world took a line here and there, but I was angry that Richard would summon his dealer to my aunt’s funeral and that he couldn’t go without it for one lousy weekend.
“Just off to the toilet,” Richard declared as the last drop of champagne was lost down his throat. He seemed completely oblivious to what I was feeling.
“I’ll join you,” said Charlie.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t mind a line myself,” said Hamish, but Charlie put his hand on his shoulder and pointed out that they couldn’t both go.
“Fair enough,” agreed Hamish, and I noticed Elizabeth gave him one of her lovely flirty smiles.
So here I was with my three girlfriends and my two ex-boyfriends while my future husband was riding the dusty wagon with my boss.
“We’re an odd little group, aren’t we?” Hamish said a short time later.
Jeremy agreed, but in such a way as to make it clear he didn’t think we were odd in a good way.
The plates were cleared away and still Charlie and Richard hadn’t returned.
Hamish was starting to fidget. “They’re taking a while, aren’t they?”
I stood up and said I’d go and check on them.
“I’ll come, too,” insisted Hamish.
The four Portaloos were outside on the edge of the green, with a small queue beginning to form outside each one. I joined one queue and Hamish joined the one beside me. “You don’t suppose they’re doing the lot, do you?” I ignored him, keeping my eye on the Portaloos to see who was coming out. After someone had come out of each of the loos, Hamish and I decided to go and look for them. We didn’t have to look far. Richard was lying in a fetal position on the grass behind the loos, moaning.
I crouched and saw his nose was bleeding.
“Oh my God, who did this?” I asked, cradling him in my arms. Hamish went back to the loos to wet his handkerchief so that we could clean Richard’s face up.
“That fucking boss of yours, who do you think?” he told me angrily.
“What? Richard, what is going on, really?” I asked, stroking his hair. “This isn’t about a bloody membership subscription.”
Half an hour later, I was sitting in a taxi with Hamish and Richard, taking Richard back to my parents’ place, when Aunt Camilla was shot off into the stars. I pressed my face against the taxi’s window and watched silently as she filled the sky and as the last spray of diamante frosting melted into the night.
“There goes one of the greats,” the driver said more to himself than anyone else, and I began to cry, for her and Oliver, and for me and Richard.
eighteen
“I must resign myself at last to Edward’s addiction. He has lately been so drugged that his skin has developed a yellow pallor. Sometimes I find myself counting his breaths while he sleeps, afraid that he will stop. He weighs so little now, that I can quite easily carry him into bed. He is like a child and an old man in one body. He has the most frightful dreams and sometimes when he stares at me after waking from one he has no recollection of who I am. Indeed, I have to struggle to remember that beside me is the man I have loved since childhood.”
Extract of a letter from Lady Henrietta Posche to her sister, Elizabeth
When I woke up the next morning Richard was already up preparing breakfast. His face didn’t look too bad; in fact, the only evidence that he’d been in a fight was a slight redness around his nose, as if he had a cold. Kitty and Martin wandered into the dining room holding hands.
“Your face doesn’t look as if it will even bruise,” Kitty assured Richard as he poured her tea. He looked slightly annoyed rather than relieved by her observation, so I waded in to his defense.
“It was still horrendous of Charlie, though!” I pointed out loyally as I sipped my tea. Truthfully, I was still vexed that Richard hadn’t as yet offered a reasonable explanation as to why Charlie would want to hit him.
“Never had Charlie down as a pugilist,” Martin mused, as if he kept a logbook of pugilists in his study.
Richard went, “I suspect he’s losing it slightly.”
“He seemed very much in charge of it when I spoke to him,” Kitty argued.
Richard sat down and added calmly, “I’ve heard the club’s in trouble.”
“That’s ridiculous!” I said, reddening at the attack on me, because that’s what it amounted to. I was, after all, the person in charge of promoting the club and ensuring its success.
Richard took my hand in his. “I’m not suggesting it’s because of you, Lolls, he’s just not that good at the financial side. And if you ask me, he’s jealous.”
Kitty snorted, “Jealous of what?” It was a bit rude, but she had a sort of point. I mean, Richard wasn’t someone that aroused jealousy from someone like Charlie, who was just as good-looking, richer and madly popular. She patted her platinum hair then admired her exquisitely manicured nails. “Perhaps I shall have Elsa in to do my nails today.”
But Martin seemed to realize what Richard was really saying. “Are you suggesting that Charlie’s jealous of you and Lola, Richard?”
Richard replied, “He’s more or less said as much. I mean, it’s obvious the way his eyes follow her around.”
I balked at the sheer madness of the idea. “That’s ridiculous, I’ve known Charlie for years, we’re just good friends. There has never been the slightest hint that he feels anything other than professional respect for me,” I told them indignantly. “Besides which, I’m not his type.” I was about to say his type was leggy blondes but stopped myself in the nick of time.
“Is he your type, though?” Kitty inquired vaguely.
I looked at Richard for help but he was studiously reading the paper. I suspected it could be written in Chinese for all the information he was taking in, because it was obvious he was listening intently to the conversation.
I pretended to ignore Kitty’s question, but Kitty wasn’t letting me off that easily. Her eyes were still fixed on me and try as I might to look away, I knew she wasn’t going to let her question go unanswered.
Eventually I rolled my eyes and groaned. “Don’t be idiotic, Kitty. The point is, I don’t see how I can continue working with him after this episode.”
Kitty laughed. “An episode makes it sound like an ongoing soap opera, darling.”
“Well, it’s not,” I told her firmly. “Now, can we drop this discussion about Charlie, it can hardly be making Richard feel very comfortable.”
Richard looked up from his paper. “You won’t need to work at all now, not with your inheritance.”
Kitty and Martin looked at one another significantly.
“I like working,” I argued. “I was thinking of starting up my own PR company. Lola PR. I have enough contacts and—”
“Lola adores her job,” Kitty waded in, for once not pronouncing the word job as if it was something distastefully shady.
“You could always come into business with me,” Richard offered. “I need a good PR.”
I blushed as another look passed between Kitty and Martin.
“I don’t do IT PR, though.”
“Sounds like a nasty disease,” Kitty said as another significant look passed between her and Martin.
“Maybe we should be heading off,” I suggested, not wanting to go where Kitty and Martin’s look was heading.
“Yes, we want to miss the traffic,” Richard ag
reed.
As we gathered at the front door for our goodbyes—apart from Richard, who was outside putting the bags in the boot—Kitty took my hand. “Have a talk with Charlie about all this before you do anything rash. There’s usually two sides to every story, darling.”
“Well, whatever his ‘story’ is, I can hardly work for him when he feels this level of violent animosity toward my husband, can I?”
“He’s not your husband yet,” Martin reminded me.
Kitty kissed me. “Be true to your heart, darling, let your heart guide you, not your head.”
I finally began to relax on the drive back. Richard was very good at taking my mind off my worries. He began by doing impressions of the different drivers we passed, and soon my mind was off the issue of Charlie and back on how much I loved Richard. We were much better together when we were on our own, I decided. As we drove into London, he suggested we go back to his place instead of mine. I agreed immediately. We swung round to mine first, though, and picked up Jean’s little house and a change of clothes for me and arrived in Shepherds Bush around four o’clock.
“Excuse me, Jean, would you mind waiting in the car for a moment?” Richard asked politely.
Jean gave him one of her huffy looks, which he took as a yes. Then he picked me up out of my seat and carried me inside, all the way up the narrow steps, where he opened the door and walked with me in his arms over the threshold.
He kissed me long and tenderly on the lips and I felt so light I didn’t even notice when he put me down on the floor. Delight turned to shock, though, as I looked around my new surroundings. The house was virtually devoid of furniture; it was as if Richard had moved out.
“You’ve been robbed!” I gasped.
He laughed nervously as he took my chin in his hand and raised my face to his. He kissed me on the mouth. “Not quite robbed,” he said, looking at the floor like a child about to be chastised. He didn’t seem as surprised as I was.
“What do you mean, not quite? Where’s all your stuff?”
“Sally must have already been around.”
“What do mean. Are you saying she stole it?”
“Not stole it. Not quite.”
“But if she took it, that’s theft. You should call the police,” I insisted.
“Calm down, Lolly. Look, most of it was hers anyway. I didn’t think she’d pick it up this quickly, that’s all,” he said, running his hands through his hair anxiously as he surveyed the room. All that remained was the large ghastly lurid abstract painting that was still on the wall, an old standard lamp I recognized as the one he’d owned when I met him and a few boxes.
I sat down on the floor and tried to absorb what he was telling me. “But you only just asked her to move in. What happened to what was already here before?” I questioned.
“Ah well, I wasn’t quite honest about that, see, Lolly.” He sat down on the floor beside me and took my hands. “Actually, the thing is, it was me who asked to move in with her. I had a bit of a problem with the business recently. The truth is, I virtually lost my shirt in a software venture, so I asked if I could move in with her.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I remember the morning I rang you up you told me the two of you had had a row because she’d asked to move in with you!”
“Mmm. I did say that, didn’t I?” He looked ashamed.
“But it wasn’t true, though?”
“We had had a fight, that was true, but it was over me moving out not her moving in.”
“So why did you lie to me?”
He ran both his hands through his hair. “She had a problem with my cocaine. I didn’t want to go into it all. Look, can’t we go on from now, from this moment?”
I wanted to say that it was him with the cocaine problem, but there were other more pressing issues to clear up. “I’m not understanding this at all, Richard. I need more.”
He nodded as if accepting this point.
“Whose place is this now?”
He put his head in his hands. “Okay, truth? You want the truth?”
I wasn’t sure I did but I nodded anyway.
“She owns the house. That is, she did own it, she’s since put it on the market. The buyers have already exchanged, but she’s told me I can stay on until just before completion to sort of watch the place.”
I wasn’t liking this. Where once there had been questions without answers, now every question seemed rhetorical. “So you lied to me from the very beginning, basically.”
He was still running his fingers through his hair. “Look, Lolly, you called me out of the blue. I wasn’t planning any of this. You caught me by surprise. Obviously I didn’t want to go into the whole complicated business of what was happening between Sally and me with my ex-wife. Be fair, at that point I didn’t think we’d be ending up like this, did I? I just wanted to get you off the phone that morning!”
I felt sick. “I’ve got to get out of here.” I stood up to leave.
He grabbed my hand. “Lolly, please don’t go.” I looked down on him, stretched out pathetically in this empty room. He looked as if he was about to cry. “Please, Lolly, I need you.”
“Richard, I can’t deal with this. I can’t—”
He grabbed my hand. “Lolly, please. I know I’m fucked up. Do you think I don’t know what a mess I’m in, with my business, with you, with the drugs? I don’t know what to do about anything anymore…apart from you. When you came back into my life, I finally saw what it was I really wanted. You’re the only thing in my whole fucked-up existence that makes sense to me. I love you, Lola, that’s the only thing I’m sure of anymore.” Then he began to cry. “I’ll get help. If you stay with me, I’ll get off the coke, I promise,” he pleaded.
So I stayed. Apart from anything else, going would have meant a scene, and I was too tired and too shocked to deal with a scene, so I went outside and retrieved Jean from the car, snuggling my face in her soft fur. She looked at me with her worried little face and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that we’d be spending the night in a house without Sky News. Maybe that was how Richard had lied to me, I tried to tell myself, not because he was a duplicitous arsehole like it seemed, but because he didn’t have the heart.
I spent the night in the empty house that belonged to Leggy Blonde. While Richard spoke of his despair and made promises about solutions, I cried and nodded, and despite my fears, I chose to believe him.
Lying in bed that night—in the bed Sally had been kind enough to leave—I began to think of her not as Leggy Blonde but as a girl who’d loved a man who, let’s face it, was a lying cokehead. A lying cokehead I loved. Because I did love him. It was as complicated and as simple as that.
Neither Jean nor I could sleep. She was hippity-hopping around the room, frustrated by the lack of news headlines, and I was lying awake wondering what I was doing and what I was going to do. Richard, on the other hand, snored obliviously in the deep sleep of the innocent.
I stroked a lock of hair from his eyes and kissed his forehead. He looked so vulnerable when he slept that I was duped into believing he was the man I knew he could be, rather than the man he really was. Perhaps I’d always been duped where Richard was concerned, but I was in too deep not to make myself believe that whatever problems we had we could solve together. That’s what marriage was all about, after all.
So I pushed aside any second thoughts I might be having and convinced myself that as long as we loved each other everything would work out, because I would make sure it did.
nineteen
Despite the decline in Edward’s health, evidence shows that Posche House parties continued to define fashionable London. If anything, the parties became more outlandish; fancy-dress parties were frequent and the guest list was a who’s who of London life. Lady Posche was considered unusual in her class in that she rarely left London, although her husband, Charles, was a keen lover of country pursuits and spent a good deal of time at his rambling estate in Norfolk. Yet the two never broke their h
abit of writing to one another daily, and their letters are full of declarations of love. Perhaps the true reason Henrietta couldn’t leave London was that she could not bear to be away from her lover, Edward.
Secret Passage to the Past:
A Biography of Lady Henrietta Posche
by Michael Carpendum
I awoke around midday. The revelations of the day before drained into my consciousness like swamp water. I had gone out with a determined plan to win my ex-husband back. I had delved into the past and got far more than I bargained for. Now I knew how Alice in Wonderland felt as she fell down the rabbit hole.
I think the word is fucked.
Richard had already left for work. There was a note on the pillow where he’d slept, a Post-it that read, Sorry, R x.
Downstairs in the empty kitchen there was an Alessi kettle on the marble work top but no food for Jean and no tea or coffee for me. I had thought of this house as Richard’s own when I first came here, but now as I looked at it, stripped of all the decorative efforts of a woman I’d dislodged from her own home, I felt deeply depressed and a little bit afraid. I envisaged her arriving unexpectedly, the way axe murderers do in movies.
I didn’t delay another moment, gathering Jean and all our things together for a hasty exit. Laden with all our belongings, I struggled out, slamming the door on the empty house, and set forth into the street in search of a cab. It took forever to find one, and when I did, the driver forcibly embroiled me into a diatribe against London traffic, his wife, and how they both wanted to move to Spain but he hated the dogs and cats that were everywhere. I’ve never even been to Spain and I don’t know what their views on rabbits are but I felt it was best to go along with whatever he said. Jean was unnerved, though, I could tell.
My mobile battery had run down over the weekend, so when I arrived back at my flat, I plugged it in to recharge and climbed into the shower. While I was toweling myself down, I checked through the messages, and as I was listening to one from Clemmie, the doorbell rang.
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