‘Magnus? When were you talking to Magnus?’
‘Oh – the other day. Well, not the other day. The last time Chloe and Piers had a party. You must remember.’
‘No, I don’t really.’ His eyes were thoughtful as he looked at her. ‘But then I never remember anything much.’
‘No,’ said Caroline, ‘that’s true.’
Later that day, Chloe pushed little Kitty through the park, wondering how much longer she could stand it. The hurt, the humiliation, the rejection, the necessity to dissemble, and to people like Joe, people she loved and cared about. She thought of his concerned, troubled face when he had warned her about Private Eye, clearly having had to brace himself with several stiff drinks, and almost laughed. They evidently all thought she was a sweet, wide-eyed innocent still. If they only knew. How she really felt, what she really had to endure. Would they be shocked? Understanding? Supportive? Well, however much she could do with some support and understanding, she couldn’t run the risk of going looking for it. But it was very hard. The whole awful cycle was hard, from the beginning, the increased absences, the vague explanations, the elaborate excuses, to the end, the grief, the confrontation, the self-abasement, the promises. Half the time, she knew nothing happened more than a passionate flirtation, an emotional game very much like the one Piers had played with her in the early days; he had a near craving for flattery, admiration, appreciation. At other times the relationships proceeded, became more serious, more intense – and more often than not, then, were consummated. She found it less distressing these days, and more wearying. She had grown more tolerant towards the cause while increasingly intolerant of the effect. Most of all she was weary of the promises at the end, that it would never happen again, that he had changed, that he was truly contrite, that he would be faithful to her, that it was over. They left her unmoved, those promises, except in so far as she could hardly bear to listen to them. The early shock, humiliation at her discovery, had given way to a sense of resignation; there was nothing to be done, absolutely nothing at all, except leave him, and she was not prepared to do that. She still cared about him, she supposed – certainly cared about her children, about the family she had so longed for and was determined to preserve. They were still together: still a unit, still a family, still arguably even a happy family. She was going to keep it that way, was not going to have her children exposed to a broken marriage and all its attendant miseries.
But it wasn’t easy. In fact it was horribly difficult. Because her personal life and her family were everything to her, because she had no work, nowhere to hide, nowhere to bury herself and her hurt, she was forced to confront it, to live with it, all the time. There was no one she could talk to about it, no one even she could tell; it was too dangerous and so it went on like some awful wound, refusing to heal, that she had to conceal from everyone.
She astonished herself constantly by her ability to do so. She had at one stage become so helplessly unhappy that she had gone to a psychotherapist for help, a kind gentle woman who had waited patiently as Chloe had struggled against her own loyalty to tell her about Piers, about his sexual ambivalence, had finally eased it out of her, and had encouraged her to talk for many hours, for what amounted to days; who had urged her to try first to understand what Piers endured himself: an endless sense of frustration and longing, an uncertainty of what he really wanted, a lack of sexual fulfilment in everything he did.
‘He’s not a homosexual, from everything you tell me, especially his considerable sexual demands on you, he’s bisexual – as I might say we all are, to some extent – but with the constant dissatisfaction that implies: always looking, always searching; and there’s always something missing,’ she had said, and urged patience, kindness, tolerance, and tried to help her to reach an understanding of Piers and also to come to terms with her own unhappiness. She also suggested Piers might like to seek support and help himself; Chloe suggested it to him, freshly concerned for, sympathetic with him, in her new perception of his behaviour; and there had been rages, scenes, and finally tears for days. He had been down that road once, he said, with all its attendant miseries and humiliations, and it had yielded nothing. ‘Stop treating me like a bloody pariah,’ he had finally shouted. ‘I love you, I want you, a bloody sight more than you want me, I might add, what more do you want?’
Nothing, she had said, frightened, alarmed at his rage; nothing, of course, it’s all right, Piers, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have suggested it, and had lain in bed that night, as he made love to her furiously, frantically, hating it, shrinking from him, hearing her therapist’s gentle voice: ‘He needs to trust you, Chloe; above all, he is afraid you will fail him.’
She found a most unlikely ally in Liza Montague who met the issue head-on one day when she found Chloe in tears in the loo at a party. Piers was standing with his arm around Damian Lutyens, very drunk, a bottle of champagne dangling from the other hand; they were singing in high falsettos the old music-hall duet, ‘Tell me Pretty Maiden’. It was very funny; except that Chloe didn’t find it so.
‘Bit near the bone, wasn’t it?’ said Liza, cheerfully kind, after giving her a hug and handing her a handkerchief. ‘You poor little soul. I did tell David at the time we should have warned you, but he wouldn’t have it.’
‘I wouldn’t have listened,’ said Chloe, blowing her nose, smiling a rather wobbly smile at Liza. ‘I’d have thought you were yet another grown-up trying to spoil my happiness.’
‘Oh, how ageing!’ said Liza. ‘But that’s what David said. Listen, sweetie, it doesn’t mean a lot you know. He loves you very much. Very very much. He’s told me so. Many times.’
‘Has he?’ said Chloe, staring at her.
‘Yes, he has. You have to hang on to that. Either that or leave him.’
‘Oh, I’d never do that,’ said Chloe, ‘I don’t think. I believe so much in marriage, you know? And the family. I’ve got three children, I have to think of them. It’s just – well, so painful. I love him so much, still, and it seems such a dreadful rejection.’
‘Yes, of course it is,’ said Liza briskly. ‘But what you have to remember, darling, is that Piers is an actor.’
‘I do remember,’ said Chloe tartly.
‘What I mean is that you can’t judge him by conventional, traditional standards. You just can’t. Actors are gamblers. They gamble with life.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Chloe.
‘I mean that they’re risk-takers. If you’re successful in the theatre you’re extremely tough, extremely shrewd, extremely ruthless. You have a huge capacity to stay the course. The going is very difficult and you escape in various ways. Sometimes it’s drink, sometimes drugs, sometimes religion. And quite often sex.’
‘Yes,’ said Chloe. Her voice sounded very dull, very tired. ‘Yes, I can see that.’
Liza smiled at her. ‘David Niven once said this to me and it’s so true. With very great difficulty you climb to the top of the tree and you see a bough and you think I can stay there for a bit, just gently mop my brow, there isn’t much higher I can go, I’ve arrived. And then just as you settle down it breaks, snaps. Think of Piers on that bough, Chloe, waiting for it to snap. He’s living on the edge of everything. He can’t be a homebody. Even for you.’
Chloe didn’t like to say, when Liza was being so kind, that she thought there might be some middle course between being a homebody and having a large number of homosexual affairs, but she was oddly comforted by the conversation.
She was permanently and seriously tempted herself by Ludovic Ingram. He had continued, in his quasi-serious way, to declare an undying passion for her; whenever they met he implored her to run away from Piers, and marry him. She found him extremely attractive and his behaviour beguiling; trapped in a situation where her self-esteem was sent constantly plummeting, she needed a source of reassurance. He was not only excessively charming and am
using, he was very sexy; hungry herself, aware at least now that the sexual problems she had were at least partly due to Piers, and not some underlying frigidity, the thought of going to bed with Ludovic was at times irresistible. He had affairs, from time to time, and he always talked to her about them, as if he needed her approval, and assured her they meant nothing, that he was merely waiting for her. At times she believed him, certainly wanted to; he kept her physically at a distance, saying if he once so much as kissed her he would not be able to resist her any longer. But when sometimes they were dancing together, and she would be in his arms, acutely aware of the strength, the sheer physical power of him, she longed more than anything in the world to give in, to have an affair with him at least. Once, on such an occasion, he had looked down into her eyes and said, very quietly, ‘I mean it all, you know, Chloe. I am madly in love with you,’ and she had smiled up at him, slightly uncertainly, and had seen that a word from her and they would both be lost, and had fled there and then from the dance floor, and indeed from the party as soon as it was decently possible, afraid of herself and what she might do.
He had rung her in the morning, as light-heartedly flirtatious as ever, clearly to defuse the situation, had said he would continue his campaign, that he would live in hope, but in the meantime they would have to remain friends. And friends they were; but she trembled at the thought of what might happen if he knew exactly how unhappy and how unsatisfied with her marriage she was.
And then things threatened to get really out of hand.
It began when Flavia died: suddenly, quietly and sweetly as she had lived, she slipped out of life. Piers was away; it was an appalling shock to him. He cried for hours, like a small child: ‘I loved her so much,’ he said, ‘so very very much. She was always there for me. We were everything to one another for so long.’
Chloe didn’t know how to comfort him; she had never seen him so upset. For days he hardly came out of his room; he spoke a eulogy at her funeral and broke down before he had finished. Not even Pandora could distract him from his grief. Then he embarked on a wild round of socializing, in what she could only describe as excitement; not an evening, not a lunch-time even, could he bear to be with fewer than a dozen people. He insisted on her giving endless dinner parties, house parties at Stebbings at the weekends, accompanying him to gatherings all over the country, becoming ever more manic in his enthusiasm; drinking an enormous amount, and then falling into bed in a near stupor at the end of each day. Chloe was bewildered, sought help and advice from her therapist; she was soothing, comforting.
‘It’s his way of escaping from the grief. It’s not the best way, it means he hasn’t faced it. You must try and help him do that. Because one day, when he does have to do that, whether over her or someone else, he may not be able to handle it at all.’
Chloe often thought of her words in the years to come.
And then Piers’s escape took a different route altogether.
‘Chloe? Hi. This is Jolyon.’
‘Hallo, Jolyon. How are you?’
‘I’m fine. Is Piers there?’
‘No, he’s having lunch with some moguls. Talking about some Chekhov revival.’
‘Well, that’s exactly what I want to talk to him about.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘Well – well, he said I might be able to work on it.’
‘Jolyon, how marvellous. I’ll tell him you called. Maybe you could come for a drink this evening.’
‘OK. Fine.’
How sweet, she thought, Piers going out of his way to help her little brother. Really, in spite of everything, he was a truly nice man. She was lucky. In spite of everything.
Jolyon came for a drink that evening; Piers seemed delighted to see him, told him that yes, he had spoken to the designer and he could start working as soon as Lydia Wintour was free of a rather tedious opera set she was doing.
‘You’ll like Lydia,’ he said to Jolyon. ‘She’s wonderfully talented. She did the set for the Lady.’
‘I know,’ said Jolyon. He was scarlet with pleasure.
Chloe looked at him, smiling gently to herself. He was such a sweet boy these days, so gentle and self-effacing, and so phenomenally good looking, with his dark red hair and his brown eyes. So different from the ghastly Toby, who was every bit as dreadful as he had seemed set to be in his childhood: he had somehow managed to pick up every rogue gene going. He was large and clumsy and heavily built, with a florid face, small dark eyes and a rather loose, full mouth; and he was possessed of the extraordinary and rather oafish self-confidence peculiar to the more unintelligent ex-public schoolboy. He wore either very formal suits for his City job, or what he perceived to be the latest fashion in the worst possible taste, extra-wide flares, loud floral shirts and high stacked boots; his dark hair, which was just too wavy, was cut unfashionably short, with enormous wedge-shaped sideburns which looked as if they had been stuck on. He had a tendency to sweat and as he believed (and indeed had been heard frequently to proclaim) that any kind of cosmetic was strictly for woofters, he very often smelt strongly. Piers couldn’t stand Toby and had told Chloe he really would rather he came to the house as little as possible; she was happy to concede.
But Jolyon was a delight, a frequent visitor, much loved by his little nieces and nephew. He still nurtured a hopeless passion for Annunciata Fallon who, once Joe’s piece about her had failed to materialize, had ignored his existence, even if she was sitting next to him at supper, which she often was. Annunciata was one of Piers’s favourites, and a frequent guest; Chloe was baffled but no longer troubled by it. She found Annunciata tedious, complacent and self-centred, but she served a purpose in a tireless bolstering of Piers’s ever-hungry ego, and relieved Chloe of at least a little of that task. The theatrical ego never failed to amaze Chloe: the extra-ordinary combination of towering self-confidence and almost pathological self-doubt. Piers had often told her, and indeed so had many of his friends, Annunciata included, that all actors were desperately shy, that they were actors for that very reason, it gave them another persona to hide behind. Watching them at parties or round the dinner table, talking (almost always about themselves), pontificating, play-acting, she found the shyness claim laughable and indeed enraging. Shy to Chloe meant feeling sick for hours before a party, shrinking from making an entrance, dreading conversation with new people, and an almost physical condition that slowed the traffic of ideas from brain to tongue, so that you stood there, helplessly mute, pathetically dull, apologetic for your very presence, relieved when someone finally excused themselves from your side and moved on.
‘You are not shy,’ she had shouted at Piers one day, when she had been particularly anxious about a dinner they were getting ready for and he had told her not to complain and that he was as shy as she was. ‘You don’t know what it means.’
He had looked at her irritably, almost angry and said, ‘Chloe, I assure you before I go anywhere, anywhere at all, I am terrified. I shrink from a roomful of people.’
‘Oh, Piers,’ she said, ‘how can you say such ridiculous things, when the minute you’re anywhere you’re laughing, joking, telling stories, moving from person to person.’
‘You just don’t understand,’ he said. ‘All that time I am acting. Acting at not being dull. At being amusing. At being good value. It’s just as difficult for me, darling, believe me.’
‘I don’t,’ said Chloe, ‘I’m afraid. But never mind.’
Much of the time she felt her life with Piers was conducted from within the confines of a soundproof room, from which she struggled to communicate with him.
Jolyon left his scarf behind that evening. It was a very nice scarf, cashmere, brand-new by the look of it, from S. Fisher in the Burlington Arcade, not cheap, she thought, almost surprised: obviously a present from someone. He would be missing it. She put it in an envelope and addressed it to his flat in the
Fulham Road.
‘Rosemary,’ she said at breakfast, ‘could you possibly pop this scarf into the post for me on the way to taking Pandora to nursery school? It’s my brother’s, he’ll be missing it.’
‘I’ll take it, darling,’ said Piers, looking up from the paper, ‘I’ll be leaving first. Darling, you must read this piece about Peter Brook’s Dream. It sounds quite extraordinary, so different from ours. Terribly modern; the fairies are all to be dressed in sackcloth, apparently, and the set just a stark white box. Very clever I’m sure, but I wonder how dear old Joe Public will take it. I have a sneaky feeling they still prefer something like ours.’
‘Of course I’ll read it,’ said Chloe, knowing that she wouldn’t. ‘Are you doing anything special today, Piers?’
‘Oh – not really. Busy with Chekhov. I just long for Vanessa, but I don’t know if I can get her.’
‘Are you lunching with anyone?’
‘No, definitely not. Shackled up with a lot of very boring agents. Why?’
‘Oh – nothing. Just wondered. I might go and have lunch with a friend. That’s all.’
‘All right, darling. Good Lord, Jesus Christ Superstar looks set to break a few records. Clever young chap, that Lloyd Webber. We might ask him to dinner one evening.’
‘Yes, all right,’ said Chloe.
As she spooned egg custard into little Kitty at tea-time, there was a ring at the door. It was Jolyon. He was wearing the scarf.
‘Hallo, Chloe. I left my book behind last night. Steinbeck. Mice and Men. Have you found it?’
‘No,’ said Chloe, ‘but I’ll have a look. You seem to have left everything behind last night, Jolyon. How on earth did you get your scarf so quickly?’
‘Oh – Piers brought it to lunch,’ said Jolyon carelessly. ‘He was a bit cross with me actually, leaving it around.’
AN Outrageous Affair Page 58