AN Outrageous Affair

by Penny Vincenzi

  He went out and posted the letter, picked up a packet of fish and chips and went home and thought about Caroline.

  He had really liked Caroline. He had been disturbed by Caroline. Sexually and emotionally she was strong stuff. She was also rather beautiful, with her pale skin and that glorious hair, and her racehorse-like body. And those legs . . . Joe gave up some time to contemplating Caroline’s legs. It wasn’t just their length. It was the way they moved. She somehow seemed to glide on them; they propelled her forward in one smooth easy movement, rather than in a series of steps. She should have been a model: she’d have made a fortune. Only clearly she didn’t need a fortune: had one already. Lady Hunterton! God. Joe had never had an affair with a real lady. He liked the idea. She was also clearly a mass of pent-up emotion, the lady; there was a tension about her, a sense of agitation. OK, it had been an emotive occasion, and a bloody awful shock, and in fact she had handled it well, taken the story on the chin. Poor cow. What a hideous filthy business. But he had the feeling that she brought intensity with her, to everything. Particularly to bed. And she was obviously frustrated. Probably hadn’t had a good old bang since her Brendan had left her. Poor woman, poor poor woman. Well, maybe he should regard her as a cause, see it as his duty to relieve her from her frustration. It would certainly be no hardship. But then it could all get a bit heavy. Partly the intensity and partly the old boy. Joe presumed he was old; he sounded old from the way she had talked about him. Maybe he should steer clear. He had got into terrible trouble with over-intense married ladies before. On the other hand, she had clearly found him sexy too . . .

  Most women found Joe sexy. It had led him into trouble, that fact, all his life: the first time when he had been only fifteen years old. Joe was the much loved younger son of rather elderly parents; his brother was nineteen years older than he was, and Joe had come as a considerable shock to his mother, Patricia, who had been serenely confident that the five months that had passed since her last period had signified the start of the menopause rather than the conception of Joe. It was only when her middle-age spread began to seem rather concentrated on her stomach and she noticed an increasing sensation of what felt like wind in her lower abdomen that she went rather nervously to her doctor and learnt that in a little less than four months she would be a mother again.

  Mrs Payton was delighted; Mr Payton, less so, and young Master Payton, about to go to university to read engineering, was embarrassed and appalled. From the moment he learnt of Joe’s existence Nigel hated him; he hated his mother’s swollen body, he hated her increasing ill-health, he hated the labour pains he was forced to witness (being alone in the house with her) until the ambulance arrived, and most of all he hated the thought of what his parents must have been doing to result in all this.

  Then Joe was a most beautiful child, everyone said so, with his blond hair and his most unusual green eyes, where Nigel was and always had been plain; Joe had charm where Nigel was shy; he was sunny where Nigel was dour. His parents doted on him, and Nigel’s steady but modest successes at university were totally eclipsed by Joe’s progress through sitting, crawling, walking and talking. The day Nigel brought the news home of his first job, the excitement was entirely pre-empted by Joe being able to ride his tricycle; his engagement to his long-term girlfriend was as nothing to Joe writing his name in joined-up writing; and the purchase of his first house was completely swallowed up by Joe passing his eleven-plus to the grammar school.

  Mr Payton was a clerk with the local council; the little family lived in a small, immaculately kept house in Croydon. They were hard up, but careful, and they could afford such essentials for Joe as his uniform and a bike, so that he could keep up with the other boys at the grammar school, although they never had a car or went away on holiday; sometimes in the summer Mr Payton would hire a car for a week, and they would go out for days. Joe never minded sitting in the back of the car while they drove slowly and carefully round the leafy lanes of Surrey, or out on to the Hog’s Back, picnicking on the running board and then climbing back in again; most boys of his age would have been wild with boredom, but he was perfectly happy, chatting to his parents, and looking out of the window, spotting car numbers and making a careful study of his particular passion which was motorbikes. He could tell you not only the make and the year of every motorbike that passed, but where it had been built, its engine capacity and the fuel most suited to its running.

  Joe was usually perfectly happy; he had a sunny, outgoing nature and nothing ruffled him. He didn’t much like his elder brother, but that was the only cloud in his sky. He worked hard at school, did well, was polite to his parents and their friends, and was constantly held up to other boys as an example of how they should behave. If he hadn’t been so patently normal and good in a fight, he would have been wildly unpopular.

  And then he discovered girls.

  By the time he was thirteen he was taking them to the pictures, and at fourteen delving into their knickers at parties or behind the bushes in the park. At fifteen he was relieved of his virginity in the bus shelter, by Denise Decker from the launderette; the experience of real sex seemed to him so wonderful it was all he could do not to burst into the front room and shout about it to his parents.

  Shortly after that he fell in love: the object of his passion was one Michelle Humphries and she was in the corresponding form to his at the girls’ grammar school. Michelle was very pretty with blonde hair and blue eyes; she was a hot-blooded young person, with a reputation for being something of a tease, but she was also known to have Done It on occasions with the right person and under the right circumstances. Joe Payton, already considered very much the heart-throb of the fourth and the fifth, could clearly be seen to Michelle to be the right person; unfortunately the right circumstances – the absence of Michelle’s parents at the cinema – changed to the wrong when the film was so popular and the rain so heavy that Mr and Mrs Humphries decided to return home again, and found their daughter in flagrante with Joe in her pink and white very virginal-looking bedroom. Once it was clearly established that Michelle was not pregnant, she was forbidden ever to see Joe again, and for their part the Paytons told Joe that should the incident repeat itself, he would have to leave school forthwith and forgo university.

  Joe’s sex drive and his outstanding looks being what they were, he was out of school, married with a pregnant wife and working for the local branch of Sainsbury’s within six months. He accepted this with good nature; he really hadn’t wanted to marry Sonia Rees, only daughter of Mr and Mrs Rees who kept the King’s Head, but he was prepared to meet his responsibilities, she was fun and they had a wonderful time in bed.

  They had a couple of rooms at the King’s Head which they could call their own, Sonia was still working at the hairdresser’s, and they were perfectly happy until she fell down the stairs one night and lost the baby.

  After that things deteriorated swiftly: Sonia became deeply depressed, Mrs Rees’s dislike of Joe became a pathological hatred, and a year after the marriage they were applying for a divorce. Joe was twenty when the divorce came through (having obligingly supplied the adulterous grounds), and had got a job in the accounts department of the Daily Mail. While there, he studied how the newspaper worked, made friends with some of the journalists, and in due course applied for and got a job as a junior reporter on the Sunday Dispatch.

  ‘And the rest,’ as he was fond of saying to anyone (usually female) who would care to listen, ‘is history. Moved on to the sports pages, had an affair with one of the show-business reporters, started reviewing films when someone else was too drunk to write it up one night.’

  He also got married again, under the misapprehension that his second wife was as enthusiastic about sex and him as she purported to be; when she proved to be equally disinterested in both subjects he returned (but not before putting considerable effort into his marriage) to his bachelor existence. He was divorced for the second
time on his twenty-sixth birthday. In and around his marriages, women continued to fall helplessly in love with him.

  Joe’s success with women was due for the most part to one simple fact: he liked them. The other factors in his personal equation: his considerable good looks, the sense of ease he carried about with him, his untidy, slightly shaggy appearance, and his tendency to cry at any moment of high, or even low, emotion, while all guaranteed to make any female want to be with him and take care of him for the rest of their lives, were as nothing compared with his patent pleasure in their company. Joe did not simply flatter women by telling them they were beautiful or sexy or clever, he did so by appreciating them. In an age where most men were still intent on hanging on to their superior positions in society, and treating most women like chattels or vessels or both, to find one who actually asked women their advice and took it, listened intently to their views on things, encouraged them to pursue their own careers, read their magazines, sat and watched them while they got dressed and made up their faces and did their hair with a kind of serious interest, sympathized with their PMT and their period pains, looked at babies in prams, and actually enjoyed going shopping and comparing this dress and what it might do for its owner with that one, was totally, seriously, and overwhelmingly irresistible.

  Joe switched on his television and opened another bottle of beer. He’d have a snooze in front of Perry Mason, and then go out. He’d heard there was to be a big party in Chelsea that night; he’d go down to Finch’s in the King’s Road and see if he could find it. Caroline Hunterton had aroused him; he felt in need of sex. And he plainly couldn’t have it with her. Or not yet . . .

  ‘Can I go up to a matinée this Saturday?’ Fleur looked up from I Love Lucy at her grandmother. ‘I’d really really love to go.’

  ‘Do you have any money? Because I certainly can’t afford to give you any.’ Kathleen sounded weary; it had been a long day. She really was too old to be standing serving in a shop, and the customers at the M & B clothing store in Sheepshead Bay weren’t exactly the most courteous or considerate.

  ‘Yes, I do. I got a whole lot babysitting last night for that putrid little creep of a child of Mary Donetti’s. First he screamed, then he ate, then he puked, then he filled his diapers, then he screamed some more. God, how I hate babies! I never, ever intend to have any babies.’

  ‘I’ll remind you of that,’ said Kathleen, ‘when you’re married and mooning over cribs.’

  ‘I do not intend to go mooning over a man, let alone a crib.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see. What is it you want to see on Saturday?’

  ‘Luther, I’ve heard it’s just wonderful. So would that be OK?’

  ‘I suppose so. Yes, of course. But I think you might switch that rubbish off now and go and do some studying.’

  ‘OK, Grandma. I will. And I’ll come and help you with dinner just as soon as you’re ready.’

  ‘You’re a good girl, Fleur.’

  ‘I try to be. Hey, did you hear about Clark Gable?’

  ‘What in particular about Clark Gable?’

  ‘He just died.’

  ‘He died! Well for heaven’s sake. And it only seems like yesterday he was carrying Scarlett O’Hara up the stairs in Gone with the Wind.’

  ‘Yes, Grandma, I know, but it was twenty years ago. Well, I don’t suppose he’ll be having some tacky funeral at the Wee Kirk of the Heather.’

  ‘Fleur, that was not a tacky funeral. It was – well, just how they do things over there.’

  ‘It was tacky.’

  ‘Well,’ said Kathleen with a sigh, ‘I don’t suppose it made any difference to your father.’

  ‘No. Which reminds me, I must write a letter to Miss duGrath. She sent me a really nice card for my birthday.’

  ‘Fleur, that was months ago.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. I’ll do it after dinner, I promise.’

  Fleur went up to her room slowly, her thoughts half occupied with Saturday’s matinée and half with her father. She liked thinking about him, and talking about him; it kept him alive in her. The violent, passionate grief had long gone, but she still ached in a small, sad place for him every day of her life.

  She paused in the middle of getting her books out, gazing out of the window, remembering the funeral. It had been tacky, it had, it had, standing there in the chapel, just her and Grandma and the aunts, a couple of people she didn’t know, and kind, lovely Miss duGrath holding her hand as tightly one side as her grandmother was the other, watching the coffin go through the curtains, and vowing, fiercely, wildly, savagely, that somehow, some day, she would get even with whoever had been responsible for his death.

  She still had only the haziest idea how it had all happened: he had been run over, she had been told, killed by a car on the highway, but she knew, she felt in every fibre of her aching body, as she stood with her head bent, holding back the tears with sheer willpower, that there was much more to it than that. She had heard people talking about it, had listened while Miss duGrath talked quietly to her grandmother in the next room while she was supposed to be asleep, heard her saying, ‘Well, of course, it was the story really, the story and the system, that was what killed him.’

  She hadn’t understood what they meant by either, the story or the system, and when she had asked her grandmother the next day on the plane home, she had told her she must have misunderstood, that her father had been knocked down by a car, and that was that; ever since, whenever she had broached the subject, it had been firmly closed again.

  And so she had had to wait; there was nothing she could do, she could see, until she was grown up, and when she was grown up she could find out what had really happened. Fleur was a pragmatic person; she could come to terms with anything providing it was clearly necessary. So she just concentrated on first getting over, and then remembering her father, and on doing well enough at school to be sure of getting into college and then getting the kind of job that would convert her from being a helpless, moneyless schoolgirl into a powerful rich woman. Powerful rich women could do anything, Fleur knew: and anything included wreaking revenge on whoever needed it wreaking on them.

  Fleur at fifteen was clever, ambitious and talented: she looked extraordinarily like her father, with his almost black curly hair, his dark blue eyes, his slender build, his considerable height. She was already five foot nine and rising, as Kathleen was fond of saying, and her height was largely in her legs, long, slender, colt-like legs. At the moment, the height was a disadvantage, for she towered over the boys, and they all went for little neat girls like Susie Coltretti and Maria Fendi, with their great breasts and tiny waists; but Fleur didn’t mind, she could see, simply by looking at their mothers, that in the fullness of time Susie and Maria would be fat instead of charmingly plump, their olive complexions adorned with already just-discernible moustaches, their rounded, swaying hips descended helplessly into great solid plateaux, and she would still be thin, lithe, rangily sexy, and she was content to wait.

  She was always top of every class, every subject; she excelled in maths, she had a grasp of physics and Latin that awed her classmates into silence, and she had never got below an A minus for English, but nobody minded, nobody taunted her with being a swot, because she was also brilliant at games; she could run faster and jump higher than most of the boys, and she could wield a baseball bat more ferociously and more effectively than most of them too. And then there was her power of mimicry: Fleur FitzPatrick, it was well known, could not just take off Mr Lowell the music master, she became him, with his careful, over-light walk, his waving hands, his slightly manic gaze, while her impression of Mr Hicks, the head, with his awkward, self-conscious air, his rather desperate way of looking round a room, was so exact that even the staff, confronted by it, would delay rebuking her (having found her, in flagrante, so to speak) for as long as they dared in order to savour its deligh
ts. Everyone said she should be an actress; but Fleur had seen enough, in her short life, of the problems, the deprivations, the heartaches of the theatre, and she had no stomach for any of it. She wanted to shine on a different stage: one where there was less competition and more opportunity. She wasn’t sure of the exact nature of the stage yet, but she knew she would find it.

  Luther was wonderful; Fleur came out of the theatre her head spinning with Osborne’s prose, Finney’s mastery of the role and the stage. Sitting on the D train, heading back for Sheepshead Bay, mindful of her promise to Kathleen not to be roaming New York after dark, she pondered on its Englishness and how much she had liked it, appreciated it. Well, she was half English: occasionally she allowed her mind to drift towards that fact, even explored it. She didn’t know much about her mother; her father had been economical, to put it mildly, in his description of her, promising to tell her more when she was older. And now she needed so desperately to know, needed to understand, to find out about what this mysterious, cold (for she must have been cold), unloving (and certainly she must have been unloving) person who had borne her and then rejected her, given her away because she was inconvenient, an unsuitable accessory to her life, and, all right, given her to her father, but what kind of mother gave her child away to anybody, particularly allowed her to be taken thousands of miles away from her caring and her love? Now she needed so badly to know what she looked like, sounded like, what sort of life she led, how she passed her time, what amused her, interested her, bored her, what she liked doing, eating, reading: and did she have other children and who was their father, and did they know, and what did they want to know about her? All these questions occupied Fleur’s attention to an increasingly considerable degree; and she could not see how she was ever going to find an answer to them. Normally, she didn’t even talk to her grandmother about it; she knew it distressed her, knew moreover that there was very little that even she could put into the rather fragile equation. But tonight, her head filled with English history and English language, an odd sense of estrangement somewhere in her heart, she felt she must confront Kathleen with it all, yet again, force her attention on to it.