AN Outrageous Affair

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘I think it is, yes,’ said Joe.

  After supper that night, Chloe was sitting in Piers’s study, rather helplessly going through the chaos on its surface, trying not to think about what lay within, when she heard someone behind her; she looked round. It was Fleur.

  ‘We have to talk,’ she said. She looked interestingly nervous.

  ‘I don’t see why,’ said Chloe. ‘What about?’

  ‘About everything. I feel so terrible about Piers’s death –’

  ‘Yes, well, you certainly didn’t help last night,’ said Chloe. ‘But I don’t think you should blame yourself.’ She sighed, looked coldly at Fleur. ‘If any one person was to blame it was me.’

  ‘No,’ said Fleur, ‘Chloe, that isn’t right. I know it isn’t.’

  ‘I don’t think,’ said Chloe more coldly still, ‘you know anything about it.’

  ‘Oh all right,’ said Fleur. ‘Have it your own way. I just wanted to talk about it. That’s all.’

  ‘Yes, well, I don’t want to talk about it. Not to you,’ said Chloe. She looked at Fleur and said suddenly, ‘I just don’t know how you could do it. Have an affair with my husband. Knowing who he was.’

  ‘Well – I know it sounds terrible. But –’

  ‘Fleur, it was terrible. Absolutely terrible. I can’t even begin to conceive of how anyone could do such a thing. As far as I can make out, you deliberately seduced him, with some extraordinary end in view.’

  ‘It was not extraordinary,’ said Fleur, and Chloe could hear the tremor in her voice, see her trying to control it. ‘It mattered desperately to me.’

  ‘Yes, well, a lot of things matter desperately,’ said Chloe, ‘but we don’t have to behave as badly as you did.’

  ‘Chloe,’ said Fleur, ‘don’t you understand? I accept it was terrible. I’m here to say I’m sorry. That I feel terrible about it. Truly deeply terrible.’

  ‘Oh, do you?’ said Chloe and suddenly anger ripped through her, hot, violent anger. ‘You feel terrible, do you? Well, that’s awfully sad, Fleur, but how do you think I feel? My husband has killed himself, God knows why, but certainly all this appalling family feuding hasn’t helped. How do you think my children feel? Pandora loved her father more than anyone in the world. She is never going to get over this, never. How do you think we’re all going to start living again? It’s nice of you to say you’re sorry, and I really don’t blame you for any of it, but I don’t believe you have the faintest idea how we’re all feeling and I find it faintly insulting that you should imply that you do, imply that you’re part of it even. I understand you’re leaving in the morning, and I think that’s a very good thing. And then I hope I never see you again,’ she added. She heard the words with some surprise, and even regret: words she would never normally use, coming out of her mouth seemingly of their own volition. She felt annoyed with herself; it seemed so important to keep calm.

  ‘I’d echo that,’ said Fleur. ‘Well, I certainly will go. I shall go back home and try to forget any of this ever happened.’

  ‘How fortunate for you that you can. Sadly, my family will have to live with it for the rest of our lives. Which I can’t expect you to care about very much. Although you should. Blood being thicker than water and all that.’

  ‘Now why the fuck should I be concerned about your family?’ said Fleur. The tension in the room was mounting now; a lifetime of suspicion, jealousy, hatred, heating it. ‘What has your family ever done for me?’

  ‘It certainly hasn’t done you any harm,’ said Chloe.

  Fleur was silent.

  Point to me, thought Chloe. She found greatly to her surprise that she was rather enjoying herself, that she felt better suddenly.

  ‘I’ll tell you what harm it’s done,’ said Fleur, and her voice was very low. ‘It’s pretended I wasn’t there. Your mother – my mother – gave me away when I was born, sent me to the other side of the world –’

  ‘With your father.’

  ‘OK. But could you do that? Give away one of your children?’

  Chloe hesitated.

  Fleur tore into her. ‘You see. And then she never came near me again. For years and years, all the time I was growing up, she never wrote, never visited, never even sent a Christmas card.’

  ‘Fleur,’ said Chloe, touched for the first time by this terrible raw anger and pain, ‘Fleur, I don’t know a lot about it, but I think that was the whole point. She had to cut you out of her life in order to be able to cope with it.’

  ‘Cope with you, you mean. You and your brothers and your father. You grew up with a father and a mother and I grew up with no one. Except my grandmother. And even she died.’

  Chloe was silent.

  ‘That’s what you did to me,’ said Fleur and her voice was rising now. ‘And do you know what Joe Payton said to me when I found you’d been married? Which I might say I had to read about in a magazine. Nobody thought I might like to know, would need to know even. I asked him what your precious husband thought about me, about my existence as part of your extended family. He said, “Well of course we didn’t tell him.”’ She paused and her face was flushed, ugly with rage. “Of course.” That’s what he said. “Of course we didn’t tell him.” How do you think that made me feel about you? About all of you? That of course I was so unimportant, so of course your husband, my sister’s husband, didn’t need to be told about me. Don’t expect me to feel any remorse, any loyalty to any of you. I owe you nothing, absolutely nothing.’

  ‘Well, there’s clearly no future in this discussion,’ said Chloe rather wearily. ‘It’s like the angels on the head of the pin. We could carry on indefinitely. Maybe we should change the subject altogether.’

  Fleur stared at her. ‘I always knew you’d be a bitch,’ she said conversationally. ‘A spoilt, superior bitch. It’s good to know I was right. I really wanted to try to talk to you this evening. Let you know how sorry I was. How bad I felt. But I shouldn’t have bothered. It was just a waste of time and effort.’

  Chloe stared at Fleur. I don’t like this girl, she thought. She was just as dislikeable, just as hard and tough as she had expected. She didn’t like the thought that she was her sister. She didn’t like it at all.

  Fleur stared back at her, her dark blue eyes blank.

  Beautiful eyes, in an exhausted white face. Idly Chloe wondered where they came from, those eyes. From Fleur’s father, she supposed. The man her mother had loved. Who had fathered the daughter her mother had loved. She sighed, impatiently, and stood up, signalling to Fleur that she had had enough. And then something happened, as she stood there, waiting, looking at her; they became darker, larger, those eyes, and then they filled with tears. Large brilliant tears, that rolled down the white face with a strange precision. Fleur brushed the tears away impatiently, looked down, turned; walked towards the door. As she did so, Chloe heard a new sound, a strange, distressing sound. It was a sob; a painful, difficult sob. It was followed by another. And another. Chloe stepped forward; she felt deeply, horribly distressed. She cursed her distress, but she couldn’t help it.

  ‘Fleur,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry. If I upset you. Don’t cry.’

  Fleur turned on her, her face so distorted with rage that Chloe was quite frightened.

  ‘So now you’re sorry,’ she said. ‘Your turn to say it. And what are you sorry for, Chloe? For being born, being loved, having a mother and a father who loved you?’

  ‘Oh, please,’ said Chloe, ‘not again, please, Fleur, not again. That particular record is beginning to sound a little cracked.’

  She turned away, to the window; she did not see Fleur moving towards her, raising her arm, but she felt the blow, felt it on her shoulders, turned, felt the second, on her face. She sat down abruptly on the sofa, shielding her head as Fleur continued to hit her, to punch her, hurting her hands, her arms; looked up
again, caught a flailing fist in her eye. She was frightened, felt utterly helpless, unable to move; and then she heard footsteps in the corridor and Fleur’s name being called, and then the door opened and Reuben came in.

  He stood staring, taking in the extraordinary scene, Chloe being hit about the head by Fleur, her face covered in tears and blood, one eye swollen, warding off the blows.

  He walked in, grabbed Fleur by the shoulders. ‘Shall I get someone?’ he said to Chloe.

  To her own immense amazement, staring at Fleur as she did so, at her contorted, desperate face, Chloe said, ‘No, no, Reuben, don’t. It’s not nearly as bad as it looks. Fleur, if you’ll just sit down and – and leave me alone, Reuben, maybe you could fetch us some tea, and we can try – try to sort this out.’

  Fleur sat down, abruptly, and buried her head in her arms; Chloe fished a handkerchief out of her pocket, handed it to her, waited for Reuben to return. He came in, set down the tray, and said, ‘Should I stay?’

  ‘No,’ said Fleur and Chloe in unison, and ‘OK’ he said easily and went out again, closing the door behind him.

  ‘He’s nice,’ said Chloe slightly distractedly. She couldn’t make out why she didn’t hurt more, why the eye Fleur had been punching, her jaw weren’t agony; it seemed very strange.

  ‘He is. I was going to marry him, but I’m not now.’

  ‘Why not?’ She suddenly wanted to know a lot about Fleur, to understand her.

  ‘I didn’t love him enough.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Chloe. She handed Fleur a cup of tea. ‘I seem to have spent the last twenty-four hours giving you cups of tea,’ she said slightly irrelevantly.

  ‘You look terrible,’ said Fleur suddenly. ‘You should get some ice for that eye. I’ll go. Chloe, I’m – I’m sorry I went for you.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Chloe, surprisingly cheerful. ‘I didn’t seem to mind. I hit you yesterday, after all. Maybe we’re making up for all the fighting we would have done, if we’d grown up together.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Fleur, smiling slightly reluctantly, ‘hey, that’s a neat thought. I like it.’

  Chloe looked at her. ‘All my life, or anyway, all the part of my life I’ve known about you, I’ve hated you. Now, suddenly, it’s not quite so easy. I’m not sure why.’

  ‘I don’t see why you should have hated me,’ said Fleur truculently.

  ‘Fleur, don’t be ridiculous. You’ve got this all wrong. You were there first. My mother loved your father. She didn’t love mine. She never liked me. She still doesn’t. She puts up with me. And I suppose it would not take a psychiatrist to tell us why.’

  ‘If your mother – our mother – loves me,’ said Fleur, ‘she has a strange way of showing it.’

  ‘She is a strange woman,’ said Chloe. ‘She never told me about you, you know. I found out quite by accident. When I was fifteen years old. Hard to understand, quite such stupidity.’

  And ‘Silly bitch,’ they said as one, and then stared at each other in amazement that they should have come so close in so short a time, and then both smiled, and relaxed, lay back on the sofa together, talking, talking about their mother, who had been so little use to either of them, in such completely different ways, proffering reasons, theories, explanations as to why and how she had behaved as she did, and they felt the first tender, cautious roots of friendship beginning to form between them.

  ‘Could you tell me about your father?’ Chloe said suddenly. ‘I used to think about him such a lot, wondering what he was like, wondering why she had loved him, done what she did,’ and Fleur, falteringly, reluctantly at first, then more surely, began, wishing Chloe to understand about him, to explain that anyone, anyone at all would have fallen in love with him, and as she talked, she became a child again, a fiercely loyal, adoring child, describing the handsome, charming, amusing, wonderful man who had been her father, and the dreadful pain and grief she had known when he had gone away and left her alone, telling her it was only for a few months when actually it had been for ever.

  They exchanged many things, that night, putting together things they had been told and had found out for themselves, pieces of fact, half-formed stories, theories, fantasies, and at the end of it, they each understood at least something of what the other had endured and felt the seeds of sympathy for it, and when Chloe finally said, exhausted, that she must go to bed, she lay awake for a while, soothed from her raw misery, and then fell asleep with comparative ease, without having to take the pills Roger Bannerman had prescribed for her.

  ‘Holy shit,’ said Magnus Phillips.

  He had been watching a six o’clock news magazine on television, in an effort to distract himself from his boredom and discomfort; after the usual predictable items about crime increases, lonely old ladies, inflation record highs, interviews with disgruntled miners and a couple of stories about beauty queens and the final of the Miss Great Britain contest, the announcer said, ‘And finally today, the funeral of the actor Piers Windsor who died last week on the very day after his investiture by the Queen at Buckingham Palace as a Knight Commander. The funeral took place at St Paul’s in Covent Garden. All the great names of the theatre were there, and of course Sir Piers’s family. His young widow, Chloe, led the mourners with her small daughter Pandora, who spoke her own small tribute to her father, along with some of the finest actors on the British stage.’

  What had elicited Magnus’s expletive, however, was not the sight of Chloe, dressed in black (and looking extremely beautiful), nor Caroline (who still, he noted, looked wonderful, and was clutching Joe Payton’s hand very tightly in an interesting way), nor the great clutch of famous faces, following her out of the church, not even little Pandora, gravely, exquisitely pale, wearing a black dress with a white collar, her red hair tied back with a black Alice band, but the person standing beside Chloe as she stood in the sunlight, looking very frail, very vulnerable, waiting for her car. A female person, very tall, with dark hair slicked back, wearing a black dress, soberly long, and a sombre expression; a person whose body language told him very clearly that she and Chloe were (however briefly) surprisingly close; a person he had imagined to be in New York (although he had put in several calls to her, without success); the person he wanted to see more than anyone in the world, the person he cared about more than anyone in the world, the person he knew for a fact could never belong to him, was going to marry some idiot with an idiotic name – and the person he found it imperative that he should see once more, just once more, however fruitless it might prove to be.

  ‘How was the funeral?’

  Fleur looked at Reuben; her head ached, she felt exhausted and sick. How was the funeral? How was any funeral? Especially any funeral such as this, hugely attended, beautifully staged: a theatrical event, a happening. A blend of emotion, of shock and grief matched with pride and love. Exquisite music, perfectly trained voices, wonderful words; a lovely young wife widowed, a beautiful young family orphaned. Friends, so many friends, filling the church, grieving, shocked; even Guinevere had come, sweetly sad, even Piers’s teachers at RADA, people who had worked for him, dressers, voice coaches, cleaners, stable-lads. All knowing they would be welcome, all a tribute to his greatest gift, to make people feel (however falsely) he cared. And a little girl, in love with her father, standing staunchly before them all at the lectern, reading the last verse of the 23rd Psalm in a clear, steady voice, and saying at the end of it, ‘My father was clever and brave and he made us all happy. We shall miss him, but we shall remember him always and love him. Please try not to be sad.’

  None of them had cried until then not even Chloe; she had stood, dry-eyed, Joe on one side of her, Ludovic on the other. She had been immensely brave, very strong. Fleur, standing behind her, had seen the tremor go through her as the coffin was carried in, but after that she had stood, rock still, dry-eyed. Until Pandora had spoken, had walked so bravely, so tiny s
he was, up to the lectern; scarcely visible over it, she had stood there, had demonstrated true grief, true courage, and then Chloe had cried, wept, biting her lip, fighting back the sobs, struggling to keep the sobs silent; and Joe had cried, too, and so had Fleur, partly for the child in the church that day, partly for another little girl, at a smaller, shabbier funeral, experiencing exactly the same loss, precisely the same grief, for a father, the most important, best loved figure in her world, gone, lost for ever.

  ‘Oh,’ she said to Reuben, ‘oh, it was beautiful. Very sad, but beautiful. You should have come. Chloe would have liked you to come.’

  ‘No,’ he said, looking very sad, ‘no, I shouldn’t have come.’

  ‘That was terrible,’ said Caroline. Her face was drawn, her eyes sad. ‘I felt so bad.’

  ‘Now why, on God’s earth, should you feel bad?’

  ‘Oh Joe, I don’t know. If I’d been a better mother to Chloe, made her more secure, feel more loved, would she have married him? Maybe not. And then it might not have happened.’

  ‘Caroline, the man was a wreck. He had cancer, he would have died anyway. He had countless other problems, God knows what. You cannot take that on yourself.’

  ‘Well.’ She sighed. ‘I’ve been a terrible mother anyway. To both those girls. I can’t pretend otherwise. I’ve made a hash of it all, Joe. Of everything. Including our relationship.’

  ‘Our relationship was fine,’ he said, ‘wonderful. Until that bastard Phillips came along.’

  ‘Yes, I know. That’s my point. I threw it away, our wonderful relationship. For a little – well, frisson. And was responsible for all this mess, with the book.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Joe easily. ‘He’d have written that book anyway. Nothing to do with you. Don’t flatter yourself, Caroline.’

  ‘I’m not flattering myself,’ said Caroline indignantly. ‘I’m insulting myself if anything. You haven’t been listening.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Joe humbly. Then he grinned at her. ‘That’s better. You sound more yourself.’