‘Anyway, nothing to worry about,’ the voice was going on cheerfully, ‘it’s a nasty break, but clean, it will soon mend, as long as he understands he has to rest.’
‘I’m sorry?’ said Chloe, trying not to sound stupid. ‘Did you say break?’
‘Yes, my dear, he’s broken his ankle. Slipped on this miserable ice— Are you all right, Mrs Windsor, you’re not crying are you? He really is fine.’
‘No,’ said Chloe, ‘no, I’m not crying. I’m afraid I’m laughing.’
‘It really isn’t funny, you know,’ said the voice reprovingly. ‘He’s in quite a lot of pain.’
‘No,’ said Chloe, ‘no, of course it’s not funny. I’m sorry.’
She got out her car and drove to the hospital; it took ages, in the near-Christmas traffic. When she got there Piers was sitting in Casualty looking very white and very angry.
‘What on earth have you been doing? Hours ago they said you were on your way. I could have got a cab home long before this.’
‘Oh darling, I’m terribly sorry. The traffic was awful. And your poor leg. Is it very painful?’
‘Very. So stupid. And here I am about to go into rehearsal for Othello. All the times I could have done it, staging ridiculous fights, and I have to slip on the pavement of the Strand. God.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Chloe, stifling the uncharitable thought that he would have minded a great deal less if it had been broken in rehearsal and he could have made a wonderful publicity story out of it. ‘Never mind, darling, I’m sure it will soon heal. Can you walk?’
‘No, I can’t. But they said they’d lend us a wheelchair. Good thing I hadn’t got one before, I’d have felt even sillier sitting in that for an hour.’
‘Piers, I’m really sorry. Look, I’ll get a chair, and we’ll go home. You’ll feel better then.’
‘I don’t suppose I will,’ he said, glaring at her. He clearly felt the whole thing was at least partly her fault.
Chloe, released from a greater guilt, was happy to be castigated. ‘Please forgive me, darling,’ she said, ‘I’m so terribly sorry.’
She finally got him home, and up to bed. Pandora went into paroxysms of sympathy and sat by him, stroking his hand and putting cold compresses on his forehead; Ned and little Kitty were kept carefully out of the way.
Chloe called Roger Bannerman, the GP; he prescribed some strong pain-killers, told Piers he had to stay in bed for at least two days, and that he’d be back in the morning and then walked down the stairs with Chloe.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ he said, ‘well, not with the ankle. Worst he’ll endure from that is a little inconvenience, and some enforced rest which will do him no harm.’
There was something in his voice that disturbed Chloe; she looked at him sharply. ‘Is there something else I should worry about?’
‘Well, he seems rather frail to me. It’s what – a month since I’ve seen him, and he does seem to have lost more weight. And I don’t like that cough. Oh, I know we’ve done X-rays and everything, but it hasn’t really cleared. I wish you could stop him smoking.’
‘I wish it too,’ said Chloe. ‘But he says he needs it. He says if he didn’t smoke he’d drink still more.’
‘Well, that might be better. I’m surprised it doesn’t affect his precious actor’s voice, the smoking. I know he only gets through twenty a day, but even so, it can’t do it good.’
‘He says it does. He says it gives it timbre.’ She raised her eyes to the ceiling and then smiled at Bannerman.
‘He’s not worried about anything, is he?’
‘Well – you know. Only the usual things,’ said Chloe hastily, praying that it were true. ‘Othello. He was very upset not to have got his knighthood this time. Took that terribly hard. But otherwise: no, I really don’t think so. He’s seemed much more – well, steady lately, actually.’
‘He’s not worried about money, is he?’ said Bannerman suddenly.
‘No. Not as far as I know.’ Chloe was genuinely surprised. Of all the things that troubled Piers, money had never even been on the agenda. There had always seemed plenty; he spent it with something she could only describe as determination. ‘In fact he’s just bought three more horses. One absolute dead cert Derby winner, I’m told, a gorgeous grey he’s potty about.’ She laughed. ‘No, honestly, I don’t think so. Why?’
‘Oh – just something he said. About my bill. It was meant to be a joke, but I thought it was a bit heavy. I wondered if he was – well, trying to open up a discussion.’
‘I’ll see if I can sound him out,’ said Chloe.
‘Well, take it steady. And I’ll be back in the morning. Don’t fuss over him too much. It isn’t necessary or good for him. It’s only an ankle.’
‘Try telling Pandora Siddons Nightingale that,’ said Chloe darkly.
‘Come on, darling, time for bed,’ said Chloe. ‘He’s all right without you now for a bit.’
Pandora looked at her, her grey eyes, so exactly like her father’s, slightly hostile. ‘I could stay,’ she said, ‘I could sleep on the floor. In case he needed anything in the night.’
‘Darling, I’ll be here if he does,’ said Chloe firmly. ‘And besides it’s very late and you have school tomorrow.’
‘I could stay at home.’
‘No, Pandora, you couldn’t. Now, come along, let’s get you into your bath.’
Pandora slithered off her chair, blew Piers a kiss and walked slowly to the door, where she stood gazing back at the bed, her small face a mask of tragedy. Chloe tried not to feel irritated with her and failed.
‘Pandora! Come along.’
She sat down rather wearily when she had finally got Pandora settled, and flicked through the television channels, more to distract herself than anything else: she longed to phone Ludovic, but didn’t dare. But the ten o’clock news, a rerun of the Forsyte Saga and a documentary about the new phenomenon, world chess champion Bobby Fischer, did nothing for her and she started worrying about Piers instead. And then moved inevitably on to herself. He was very thin; every so often she would notice it herself, but he seemed perfectly well, and fit; he went to the gym twice a week and played squash at the RAC Club as if possessed. His lungs surely couldn’t be too bad if they could support him through that sort of thing. And he’d seemed much steadier and more stable lately and, surprisingly, almost coolly untroubled about the Phillips book; that baffled her, but he refused to discuss it, said it was in good hands, and that he had more important things to worry about. He had been very upset about once again not getting his knighthood, but he’d been more or less promised he’d get it next time around. He’d been showered with honours throughout his career, three Oscars for the Dream, a BAFTA award, and the Evening Standard Best Actor for Uncle Vanya: he could scarcely claim disappointment and failure.
Their private life was something rather different, of course: Chloe realized somewhat to her shame that evening that she no longer knew how Piers viewed their marriage. It seemed years since they had had a serious, constructive conversation about it. There was too much to be afraid of behind that conversation, too much darkness, too much mistrust. At times she would remember how fiercely, how passionately she had loved him once, and believed him to have loved her, and the change, the sad sorry change, made her literally weep. She imagined, although she did not know, that he viewed her dispassionately, as the mother of his children, the keeper of his houses. Someone he was fond of, someone fairly if not entirely suitable, someone certainly necessary. That she did know: how necessary she was to him. Not just to care for the children and the houses, but to provide substance to the fantasy of their happy, stable marriage, his image as a redblooded, entirely heterosexual male. Without her, he would be frail, suspect, vulnerable; it would be a heavy blow to deal.
But it had to be dealt. She knew th
at: she could not stay with him for ever, could not live out the rest of her life with someone she did not love, who did not love her. She had to go, she had to be with Ludovic, and she had to tell Piers she was going; she could tell, if only by a dusting of occasional darkness, like wispy clouds drifting slowly up on a perfect summer morning, that Ludovic was growing just a little impatient. If he knew that she was pregnant, he would be considerably more so, she thought distractedly, looking down at her entirely flat stomach, thinking almost fearfully of what lay there, growing steadily, determinedly, of the havoc it would cause. Every time she had seen him, in the three or so weeks since she had discovered the fact, she had determined to tell him, and then her courage had failed her. Not on her own account, but on his, and on Piers’s and the truly terrible storms the news would unleash. Well, she had a little time: it was less than three weeks since she had missed her period, Ludovic was not familiar with pregnancy, did not know of minor things like gently swollen, tender breasts, an increased need to pee, a tendency to be over-emotional. But she knew them: experiencing them for the fourth time, there had been no doubt, no doubt at all for her, not from the very first day. Well, it was her own fault: she was notoriously bad at remembering to take her pills; no doubt, she thought, deeply Freudian. She hoped Ludovic would be understanding, would not be angry, or accuse her of trying to trap him. She didn’t think he would; he would probably be delighted, and a wonderful father. Which was more than she could say for Piers, with his outrageous favouritism of Pandora, his virtual lack of interest in the other two.
And Pandora was a worry, so precocious and difficult, and Piers was no help with her, no help at all, he just laughed at her tantrums, her ridiculous behaviour, and gave in to her, refused to allow Chloe to discipline her at all much of the time. On the other hand, in spite of everything, Pandora was a nice little girl at heart, and very loving; she was clever and very talented; after the Dream came out, there had been lots of offers for her, but part of the bargain Chloe had made with Piers had been that she wouldn’t appear in anything again until she was at least a teenager, and he had for the most part kept to it. There had been a small part in Chekhov, and a tiny TV appearance in Black Beauty, but that had been all.
‘I don’t like theatrical brats either,’ he had reassured Chloe, smiling rather weakly at her as he convalesced in the house lent them by a friend in Palm Springs, ‘but Pandora won’t be one, she’s too sweet and bright and intelligent, and anyway I won’t allow it. We’ll keep her ordinary, darling, don’t worry.’
So Pandora went to Kensington High School with a lot of other ordinary little girls, and led a perfectly ordinary little life; but the fact remained that she was not ordinary, she was exceptionally lovely to look at, and exceptionally bright: she could read at three, was writing little stories already and had a photographic memory that could commit any number of facts to heart in no time – and she also led a very high-profile life. Nothing Chloe could do would persuade Piers not to have Pandora at the dinner table from time to time, at rehearsals, interviewed, photographed, quoted even: and at nearly five, she was self-confident, socially accomplished, and had a rare penchant for telling jokes – not the usual five-year-old lavatorial variety, but stories she had heard her father tell, word for adult word; her delivery was brilliant, she knew exactly how to time a punch line, how to get everyone’s attention. Her adoration of her father was almost, Chloe feared, unhealthy; not serious at the moment, but there would surely be trouble when she was an adolescent. Chloe looked ahead to clashes of will, female rivalry, side-taking, and, horrifically, possible separation from her father, by way of divorce, and shuddered.
Ned and Kitty were easy children: less remarkable, less gifted. Ned at three was a sweet little boy, with dark floppy hair and his mother’s steady brown eyes and gentle disposition, while Kitty was too young to be anything much at all, apart from a roly-poly carrot-top, with immense blue eyes with which she surveyed the world from within a permanently dirty face. However hard Chloe and Rosemary, the nanny, tried, Kitty’s face was permanently coated with dust, with honey, with egg, with mud, and washing it was apparently a complete waste of time.
But oh, God, it was not just herself she would be tearing from her marriage, but those children: and how would they, and especially Pandora, be able to bear it?
Now, because of this new baby, the break would clearly have to be hastened. Piers would know the baby was not his: Ludovic would want to claim it, and all that it implied. She could not hide very much longer. But if Piers was ill, as Roger Bannerman seemed to be implying, if his ever-fragile emotional health was at risk, then how was she to do it to him? Not for the first time in the last few months, Chloe longed for Joe, to talk to, to confide in, to consult; she missed him terribly; but Joe was avoiding her, avoiding all of them, partly because of the break-up with her mother, partly, she feared, because of the book. Joe without doubt knew more about the book than he would reveal, and he chose to deal with the problem by not confronting it, refusing to discuss it. It was horrible. Oh God, thought Chloe, throwing her head back in the chair, closing her eyes, that book: it was like some awful bird of prey hovering over them, casting a huge dark shadow over everything they did.
Chloe suddenly realized she was getting sleepy; she would go to bed, forget everything. Even her new baby. She tried not to think about the baby too much. Ludovic’s baby. Tried to keep it as something detached from herself; otherwise it would overwhelm her. When she did allow herself to think about it, to envisage it, to imagine it, bearing it, suckling it, caring for it, loving it, seeing it smile, hearing it cry, watching it sit, crawl, stagger, laugh, her eyes filled with tears of almost unimaginable love.
So don’t, Chloe; don’t. Don’t think about it. All it is at the moment is a missed period, a nausea, a problem. Not a baby. She stood up to go to the kitchen, to make herself a hot drink, and on the way passed Piers’s study. She heard Dr Bannerman’s words again: ‘Does he have money troubles?’ and felt a disproportionate stab of anxiety; it would do no harm to assuage it, she thought, just for her own peace of mind. She didn’t usually interfere in Piers’s private things, but if he was unwell and worrying, if this might, God forbid, be going to trigger some new crisis, she should know about it.
She went to his desk, looked through the papers on the top of it. Nothing there, no bank statements, nothing. She tried the middle drawer: rather a lot of bills, unpaid, but that was typical of Piers, didn’t mean anything, he was hopeless at administration and his accountant was in permanent despair about him. Bank statements? She opened the next drawer: a mass of letters, unfiled, cuttings, reviews, destined one day for his scrap books, but no statements, nothing of any kind.
The bottom drawer was locked. Well, that was frustrating, but not surprising. It was all part of his near compulsion to preserve much of himself for himself. In the early days, she had been deeply suspicious of it, thinking it to relate to his sexual behaviour, but in fact it seemed a perfectly harmless quirk of his personality. He hardly ever told her where he was staying, when he was out of town, and she had to find out, if she needed to (always embarrassed), by phoning theatres, his agent, or his part-time secretary, nice Jean Potts; usually there was no reason, no reason at all for such nonsense, and he would be doing nothing more sinister than simply sitting alone in some perfectly respectable provincial hotel, reading, learning his lines, watching television. It was something she had learnt to live with, if not accept.
She went out now to the kitchen, where his keys hung on a hook; a large number and it took five minutes to try them all in the desk. None of them fitted. Chloe sighed. Oh well. She was probably worrying about nothing. He had never indicated for a moment that she should spend less money: rather the reverse. She heard him calling her, fretful, irritable, and ran up the stairs: he wanted whisky in hot milk, more painkillers, ice for his ankle. It all seemed a lot more pressing than where his bank statements might be.
; At Bannerman’s insistence, Piers took a month off the Othello rehearsals. His plans for Othello were ambitious; he planned to play Othello and Iago on alternate nights, with Ivor Branwen, the sensational Welsh actor, risen to fame and acclaim with petrifying speed, playing opposite him. There were among the critics some more acerbic spirits proposing the view that Piers Windsor felt threatened by Branwen and was doing this audacious thing in order to lay the ghost.
They spent Christmas at Stebbings, and Piers gave Pandora a new pony, a beautiful little grey which he had christened Oberon, Ned an electrically powered miniature Range Rover and Kitty a doll’s house as big as her small self. He gave Chloe an antique gold bracelet, a painting he had commissioned of Stebbings, and a very beautiful and ornate eighteenth-century French clock. He didn’t seem to be overworried about money.
But he still didn’t make love to her, or even join her in their bedroom.
Chloe spent quite a lot of the holiday making excuses to go down to the village where she could phone Ludovic from the public phone box; he was away for two weeks after Christmas, sailing in the Caribbean. Chloe spent the entire time sick with terror and jealousy, absolutely convinced he would fall in love with someone else. When he finally got back and phoned her to tell her he loved her and had missed her almost beyond endurance she burst into tears and put the phone down on him.
AN Outrageous Affair Page 70