AN Outrageous Affair

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘Why, Sol?’ said Fleur innocently.

  ‘Got an idea. That’s all. How about next Wednesday?’

  ‘Next Wednesday’d be good. You’d better ask Reuben yourself though.’

  ‘I already did.’

  ‘Great,’ said Fleur.

  She rang Reuben.

  ‘What do you think Sol wants?’

  ‘Us,’ said Reuben.

  ‘Yes, but what for?’

  ‘Himself.’

  ‘Uh-huh. What do you feel about that?’

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Terms. Got to go.’

  ‘Bye, Reuben.’

  ‘These are lovely, Fleur,’ said Bernard Stobbs, smiling at her over her roughs and her copy, which talked of quite complex things like cubism and impressionism in a way that even a six year old would not only understand but be intrigued by. ‘Charming. I couldn’t be more pleased.’

  ‘Good,’ said Fleur, smiling at him. If she were to move, either to a different group, or to whatever Sol Morton had in mind, she would miss Bernard Stobbs more than anyone.

  ‘Can I buy you lunch?’

  ‘That would be lovely. But I mustn’t be long.’

  ‘We won’t be long. I don’t like long lunches. They send me to sleep over my books. How does pasta and Pellegrino sound to you?’

  ‘Like a lovely cookery book. You should do one.’

  ‘What a nice idea.’

  Over their lunch, he chatted, charmingly, about his new range, his latest bestseller (a biography of Callas), his pleasure in sponsoring a children’s art exhibition to tie in with his new range of books. Then he said, ‘I don’t really like the way the publishing industry is going these days. Very cut-throat, very scurrilous.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ said Fleur. She was winding a long strand of fettucine round her fork; it was giving her trouble.

  ‘Yes. There is some new book coming out, sounds little better than tabloid journalism, doesn’t deserve the name of a book. Half the houses in New York are scrabbling over it. English, which makes it worse: I like to think there are some gentlemen left in the business over there.’

  ‘Doubtful, I would think,’ said Fleur briefly.

  Bernard Stobbs looked at her amusedly. ‘You sound very cynical, my dear.’

  ‘I feel it,’ said Fleur, ‘about the English. Hypocrites to a man, in my experience.’

  ‘Dear me.’

  ‘Anyway, what is this book about?’

  ‘It’s about an actor. Well, that’s only the half of it, obviously. All kinds of – what shall we say – subplots.’

  ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘Oh – only the outline. Sent me by the author’s agent. Which was very uninformative, as these things always are. Designed to get us all salivating.’

  ‘And you remained dry-mouthed, I hope,’ said Fleur, smiling at him.

  ‘I certainly did.’

  ‘Who’s the actor?’

  ‘Oh, he’s very famous, a great classical actor. It’s very depressing really, if half the innuendoes in this thing are true. You might have seen him, he’s done some Shakespeare on Broadway and he did that film, that was so very beautiful, of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Piers Windsor, you must have heard of him. Good gracious me, my dear, you’d better have some water. I didn’t think people could choke on pasta.’

  Magnus Phillips was sitting in his study transcribing some tapes, and smiling pleasedly as he did so, when Richard Beauman’s secretary phoned him to say she had received a call from a girl in New York called Fleur FitzPatrick and was it all right to give her Magnus’s address and telephone number?

  Magnus said it was perfectly all right, and experienced such a rush of adrenaline he felt physically light-headed.

  He waited, frantically impatient, for her to call: she didn’t. He decided she must be writing and shadowed the postman down the street every morning for a week. But there were no letters from New York. He called Beaumans every day, asking if she’d phoned, even though he’d been assured they’d let him know the minute she did. He pestered his agent, asking him if he was sure, quite quite sure there hadn’t been any messages for him, that no one had let this precious call through. They were sure. Quite sure. Christ, he’d been trying to find the bloody girl for six months; how could God, fate, whatever, do this to him, dangle her in front of him and then snatch her away again? He even thought of phoning Caroline, but decided it was too dangerous. Caroline had cut him out of her life with a ruthless thoroughness that had impressed him.

  ‘You are disgusting,’ she had said simply, standing in the doorway of his house, refusing so much as to cross the threshold. ‘I’ve never known anyone truly rotten before. It’s been an interesting experience. Goodbye, Magnus. Don’t ever try to contact me. If you do I shall call the police.’

  He felt he should have found it amusing, and was surprised and upset to find it hurt. Quite a lot.

  He was actually finding the book quite hard to take. The truths he had unearthed in his research for it, even thus far, had shaken him. More than once he had been tempted to jack the whole project in, to say it simply wasn’t worth the angst. But then he would go back and read what he had actually written – about half the length now – and look at what he was yet to write, and it was so exciting, on so many levels, that he couldn’t quite bring himself to jettison it. It was like writing a thriller. Or rather living a thriller. And he still wasn’t finished. There were huge holes in its fabric, unresolved mysteries, unexplained actions. God, he needed to find the daughter. To get her theories, to test them against his own: to have her views of her father, simply to know how much she knew, what lies she might have been told as well as what truths. It was all important, all frighteningly relevant.

  He was lying in the bath, nursing a hangover, one morning in early October when he heard a taxi pull up outside. Good: that would be the roughs for the cover of Tinsel, as everyone called it. The publishers had promised them first thing this morning. There had been endless arguments about it. More schemes had been put up for it than there were chapters, ranging from straightforward photographs of Piers, to montages of Hollywood, with every possible variation in between. There had even been a montage of Hollywood interspersed with a montage of Piers’s life. The latest idea was the Hollywood sign, bedecked with tinsel; Magnus felt they were at least getting warm. The bell rang once; he sighed, settled more deeply in the bath. It was too good to leave. They would leave the package on the doorstep: the taxi company knew to do that when there was no answer.

  The bell rang again, strongly, imperious. Bloody man, must be new. He climbed out of the bath, cursing, dragged on the towelling robe he had stolen from the Bel Air Hotel – well not exactly stolen, they’d written the usual ‘we know it must be a mistake’ letter and he’d sent them a cheque for an absurd number of dollars, far more even than if he’d bought it in Harrods – and ran down the stairs, shouting, ‘All right, all right,’ at the front door.

  As he opened it, and drew breath to complain, to curse, to threaten to shoot the messenger, he stopped, halfway through the first obscenity, shaken, shocked, stunned into silence, and stood there, absolutely still, finding it hard momentarily even to breathe. For on the doorstep stood a girl, a girl of considerable beauty, young, young enough to be his daughter, tall and very slender, with almost black hair tumbling in tendrilly layers on to her shoulders, and very dark blue eyes, fringed with immensely long black lashes, Irish eyes; her face was unmistakably Irish too, pale and delicately boned, with high cheekbones and pointed chin, and the expression on the face was interesting, wary, challenging, confident, all at the same time. It was familiar to him, that face, and he could not for a moment think why and then it came to him, hit him with a force that was even stronger than the sense of her immense sexuality and his
attraction to her. For it was a face that unarguably and greatly resembled one that he had been poring over for months, in old Hollywood photographs, old film magazines.

  ‘Magnus Phillips?’ she said, and he nodded, his eyes still fixed on hers, and she said, holding out her hand, ‘My name is Fleur FitzPatrick. I’ve come to talk to you about your book.’

  ‘I’ve come to talk to you about your book,’ said Fleur again, settled in the Charles Eames chair in Magnus’s black and white study, a large mug of coffee in her hand.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘so you said. How did you hear about it?’

  ‘From one of my clients.’

  ‘What do you do, Miss FitzPatrick, that you have clients?’

  ‘I work for an advertising agency. In New York.’

  ‘That sounds very smart.’

  ‘It is,’ she said briefly.

  ‘And what does this client do?’

  ‘He’s a publisher.’

  ‘Ah. Well, I’m glad my book is the talk of literary New York.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘No. But it seems that it possibly is.’

  ‘I want you to tell me about it.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t do that.’

  ‘Mr Phillips, you have to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because – because it concerns me.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘Neither of us are going to get very far,’ he said with a smile, ‘if we continue in this rather negative vein.’

  Fleur looked at him. He reminded her of Sol Morton. Sol Morton gone first class. Not the sort of class Julian Morell and Nigel Silk had, but hard-edged, fine-tuned, thousand-watt, hundred-per-cent brainpower class. He was also one hundred per cent sexy. He bothered her; bothered her senses. She tried to put that thought aside.

  ‘Well, I could tell you a little,’ she said. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘OK. And then I could tell you a little. At least we’d be making progress.’

  ‘I – know Piers Windsor,’ she said.

  Magnus Phillips’s face showed nothing; no shock, no surprise even. He merely nodded. ‘Right. Well?’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Do you know him well?’

  ‘Pretty well.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Am I to understand you mean know in the biblical sense?’

  ‘I – know him pretty well,’ said Fleur briefly. ‘We don’t need to get any further than that.’

  ‘OK. Right then. Now I’ll swap that for a bit of information. I know who you are.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I said I know who you are. I mean really who you are.’

  Fleur felt rather breathless suddenly, odd, almost frightened. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Your mother is an English lady called Caroline Hunterton. Your father was an American actor called – well, really he was called Brendan FitzPatrick. Known as Byron Patrick to his fans. More was the pity.’

  ‘Fuck,’ said Fleur. ‘Fuck me.’ And then, greatly to her own distress, she burst into tears.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said a little later, when Magnus had supplied her with a large box of tissues, and a fresh cup of coffee, a part explanation. ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For crying. And for swearing. I always swear when I’m excited.’

  ‘I don’t mind either of those things,’ he said.

  ‘What I cannot understand,’ she said, blowing her nose loudly, ‘is how my mother came to tell you about me. I’m the skeleton in the family cupboard. Nobody, just nobody, gets to be told about me.’

  ‘Well, let’s say it slipped out.’

  ‘How well do you know my mother?’

  ‘Probably as well as you know Piers Windsor,’ he said and grinned at her, conspiratorially. ‘Or rather I did. She’s a little – cross with me at the moment. I suspect that may get you swearing again.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘not quite.’ There was a silence. Then, ‘Shit,’ she said and grinned. ‘Does – does Joe know? About you guys, I mean.’

  ‘I’m afraid he does. They’re not – together any more. You didn’t know that?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about them,’ said Fleur. ‘Any of them. I told you. They like to pretend I don’t exist.’ She got up and walked over to the window, and stared out. When she turned again, her face was white and strained. She looked less in control. ‘So can we talk about the book now?’ she said and her voice was a little shaky.

  ‘Well – maybe. What exactly do you want to know about it?’

  ‘What exactly it’s about.’

  ‘Ah. Well, now we seem to have come full circle. Because I can’t tell you. Honestly I can’t, because I’m still finding things out.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘About Piers Windsor. About his life and his wives and his past.’

  Fleur looked at him very directly. She waited for a moment, gathering her courage and then she said, ‘I think there’s a chance that my father figured somewhere in his past. That their paths crossed.’

  There was a long silence. She sat there, listening to it, watching him, trying to decipher at least something that was going on behind his dark eyes. Magnus looked back at her, his face absolutely blank; then he reached out, picked up a pack of cigarettes from the desk. He held them out to her.

  ‘Want one?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Fleur.

  He lit one, looking at her through the smoke; she managed somehow, still, not to move, not to speak. Finally he said, ‘I think there’s a chance of that too.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. She felt very sick suddenly, rather scared.

  Then he said, ‘We could talk about your father. Who I happened upon in Joe Payton’s book. I imagine he must occupy a great deal of your thoughts.’

  ‘Well,’ said Fleur, ‘he certainly does. But why should you say that?’

  ‘I would imagine you must be – what? Twenty-five years old?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And for at least ten of that twenty-five, I would imagine you’ve been feeling pretty upset about your father. Nice guy like that. And how he died. In such a – well, a horrible way. Wanting to know exactly why it happened. Why he got into that mess. And then maybe be able to put the record straight.’

  Fleur sat and looked at him, and wondered how it was that this total stranger, who she most certainly didn’t trust, who she felt could not possibly be up to a great deal of good, whose existence she had not known of until a few days ago, should understand, should know how she must hurt, how much she must hurt, how long she had been hurting; and it was as if she had been locked up in some dark, airless room for a very long time and now someone had come along, opened the door, and she had stepped outside into the sunlight and the sweet fresh air. She sat there staring at him, with a sense of such gratitude, such astonishment that it clearly showed in her face, for he said, half laughing at her, ‘What did I say?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘oh, nothing really. Everything. Not many people kind of grasp it.’

  ‘I’m surprised,’ he said, ‘I’d have thought it was fairly – well, obvious.’

  ‘Not so,’ said Fleur briefly.

  ‘Doesn’t your mother understand? Or the nice Mr Payton?’

  ‘No. They don’t.

  ‘How extraordinary of them,’ he said. ‘Look, I’m going to have some breakfast. Well, some toast and marmalade. Do you want some?’

  Fleur realized suddenly that she was ravenous. ‘That’d be good,’ she said.

  Sitting in the kitchen of his house (which was, like his study, very modernistic, all stainless steel and marble: marble floor, marble surfaces), watching him eat slice a
fter slice of thick toast spread with thicker marmalade, she felt oddly relaxed, warmed, easy. She tried to tell herself it was dangerous, that she should be feeling nothing of the sort, that a man like Magnus Phillips who wrote the sort of books he did, who was clearly at war with her family (if you could call them her family which she actually didn’t), who had had an affair with her mother, who was writing a scurrilous book about her sister’s husband, a man like Magnus Phillips, clever, ruthless, albeit charming, was not to be trusted for one thousandth of one second. But she found she was not listening to herself too carefully. Maybe it was because she was tired, maybe it was the emotion of the past hour, the series of shocks she had received; whatever it was she felt soothed, softened, she just wanted to stay here, talking to this man, telling him things, telling him about herself, telling him everything he might wish to know, and more besides. And she also felt there was a great deal she would not need to tell him, that he would understand, would not need to have explained.

  He looked up finally from his fourth slice of toast and licked his fingers, one by one, and said, ‘I really should go and get dressed. I don’t usually entertain strange women in my kitchen wearing virtually no clothes.’

  ‘Oh really?’ said Fleur, smiling at him.

  ‘No, really,’ he said. ‘Make some more coffee if you like,’ and he disappeared up the stairs.

  She wandered around the kitchen, taking in the clues it offered: a row of cookery books (mostly virginally unused), a notebook and pen set neatly near the phone, a pile of newspapers (The Times, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Mail, the Daily Worker) and of magazines (New Statesman, Private Eye, Nova, Campaign) on the table, a heap of unopened letters, many of them plainly circulars, a large wine rack filled with bottles, including a great deal of champagne, a set of framed black and white photographs, signed by David Bailey, not of glamorous model girls, but of men she mostly didn’t recognize, apart from Mick Jagger and David Hockney. There was a bulging address book by the phone, and she was just idly starting to flick through it when Magnus Phillips appeared again, and picked it up rather firmly.