Wicked Pleasures
Page 25
‘Yes he does,’ said Charlotte absently. ‘Exactly.’ She was talking oddly, as if in shock. ‘Well, you see, Toby, I look just like Grandma Praeger. Everyone says so. And Georgina, well she is like – well, all sorts of people. Granny Caterham is very tall. And she has Mummy’s eyes. We both do. Lioness’s eyes, Grandpa Praeger says. So it obviously is nonsense. Just gossipy nonsense. Goodnight, Toby. Thank you for dinner.’
She got out of the car and walked very slowly up the steps and round to the small door at the side of the south front which the family often used, and went in without turning round.
Charlotte went downstairs to the kitchen and stood looking around her for a moment or two. She felt as if she had never seen it before; she felt as if she had never been in the house before, and that she did not know where she was.
Then she went over to a cupboard, got out a mug, and made herself some warm milk. She sat down at the table, staring at the Aga and thinking about what she had just heard, trying to process the information, trying to analyse her feelings.
Confusion, that was to be expected. Panic, also. But her major emotion was something that contributed to the panic, something that frightened her. It was a kind of calm, dull acceptance that what she had just heard made sense. A lot more sense than that they had all been adopted.
She hated the acceptance, hated recognizing it. But she did. And she wasn’t sure why. Most people, confronted by what she had just confronted, would have been outraged, indignant, denying it. Why wasn’t she? Her parents always seemed happy enough. Of course her mother was away a lot, but when she came back, her father was always so happy to see her, he was joyful, singing about the house before going to meet her. They never quarrelled, or hardly ever. He never for a single moment said anything remotely disloyal about Virginia; he went out of his way to defend her absences, to explain to them all why it was so important to her to work, to have a life of her own. And to make sure they believed that she loved them. And her mother also never ever spoke harshly about Alexander. She hardly ever argued with him, even. She was a little distant, of course, a little cool, but that was the sort of person she was. She wasn’t like him, openly loving, physically demonstrative. But she did quite clearly love him.
They often went off for long long walks together, around the estate, hand in hand, talking, endlessly talking. They were famous, those walks. Max particularly always wanted to go with them, and often he did, but sometimes they would discourage him, laughing, saying they wanted to be alone.
Of course her mother had had problems. There had been the drink, and revivals of the drink; but she had beaten that, and her father had been so wonderfully supportive over it. Surely, if a man’s wife was so compulsively unfaithful to him that two of her children were not his, or even one of them, that man would not stay loyally by her while she went on alcoholic benders for days at a time, got picked up by the police, was committed to clinics; surely he would take that as a reasonable excuse to end the marriage.
And she had been so terribly depressed after the first little boy was born, Charlotte could still just remember that, the endless crying, and the collapse on the grave, and then being sent away to America; and she could remember how tender, how patient her father’s voice had been, never exasperated, never giving in, as her mother cried at the table, and in the car and all over the house. Surely he couldn’t have managed that, if there had been any doubt, any doubt at all, about the baby’s parentage.
And then there was Max. If ever a child looked like his father, Max did. The blond hair, the blue eyes, the long slim body. Obviously Max was his. So, clearly even if she and Georgina were some other man’s children, the marriage had been mended, sufficiently, to conceive Max. To begin again. And would that have been a possibility, if your wife had been so blatantly unfaithful to you?
And that was another thing. Alexander was so loving, so terribly terribly loving towards them, to her and Georgina. If he had a favourite, it wasn’t Max, it was Georgina. Surely he wouldn’t be able to do that, if he knew they weren’t his? Or suspected it.
Of course that was another thing. She hadn’t thought of that. She was assuming Alexander must have known, if it was true. But maybe he didn’t. But then, he wasn’t stupid. And if your wife was away a great deal and kept on getting pregnant and having children who didn’t look remotely like you, like anyone in the family, you’d have to be pretty stupid not to suspect something.
And then, for heaven’s sake, thought Charlotte, her mother was a sophisticated woman; surely if she had been having affairs all over the place, she wouldn’t have got pregnant. She would have been terribly careful, this wasn’t the nineteenth century. Erring wives just didn’t come home with bastard babies. A bastard baby, she thought: is that what I was? Am?
No, clearly it couldn’t be true. It didn’t make sense. It was a vile, filthy lie and one that her father had managed to rise above, because he was a gentleman and a loving husband and father, and to refute it, to force it into the open, to publicly deny it, would have been to perpetuate it, to give it credence in some strange way.
But then why had it started in the first place? And why then, why, why, did she still feel as if it did make some sort of sense?
Charlotte shook her head, put her mug in the sink and went slowly up the small staircase that led out of the kitchen. It came out finally on the first-floor back landing, and then there was another flight up to the second floor where the nurseries were and where Nanny slept. As the children had grown older they had been given bigger, grander rooms on the first floor, but the nurseries had remained, ‘ready for my grandchildren’ Alexander had said, smiling, more than once. Charlotte looked up towards the second floor now, thinking in a kind of wonder that she could never again view her childhood peacefully, happily, and sighed; she took her shoes off and went up. She smiled as she passed Nanny’s door; thunderous snores were coming out. She went into the day nursery, light with the brilliant moon, went over to the window, pushing absently at the rocking horse as she passed it. She stood looking down at the parkland; the moon was reflected in the lake, the swans slept on it, their heads tucked within their feathers, and the tall reeds at the side looked darkly mysterious, part of their own shadows. She could see every detail of the Palladian bridge and the wide stream flowing beneath it; a deer and her fawn, awake in the moonlight, moved slowly across the park, towards the water. How beautiful it was, she thought, diverted from her unhappiness, not just the house, but all of it, the land, the whole small country that was Hartest, their heritage, that their father loved so much, that he invested all his energy and money and strength in. She leant her head against the window, drinking in the beauty, and tried to sort her whirling thoughts.
Charlotte made her way wearily down the front stairs and along the landing towards her own room. She felt desperately tired and rather sick.
On the wall, outside her mother’s room, was a painting that had been done of her and Georgina and Max eight years earlier by the celebrated portrait painter Leopold Manners: she and Georgina dressed in cream lace dresses, Max in a blue velvet page-boy suit with a lace collar. It was a very flattering portrait; Leopold Manners had not made his name and his fortune by telling the truth about his subjects, and she looked a great deal slimmer than she had actually been, and Georgina (who had then been at her plainest and scrawniest) a great deal softer and prettier. Only Max stood there as he had truly been, a ravishing small boy, with a mop of ash-blond curls and huge blue eyes. But oh, God, thought Charlotte, switching the picture light on to study it more carefully, oh, God, they all looked so different. Nobody, nobody, had they not known, would have thought them brother and sisters.
‘For God’s sake, Mummy,’ she said aloud as she finally got into bed and lay wide awake, staring at the ceiling, ‘for God’s sake, if you had to commit adultery, couldn’t you have been a bit more careful to choose lovers who looked at least a bit like Daddy?’
Chapter 12
Charlotte, 1980
‘Georgie –’
‘Don’t call me that. You know how angry it makes Mummy.’
‘Georgina, Mummy’s not here. Plus ça change.’
‘What’s that meant to mean?’
‘Nothing,’ said Charlotte wearily. ‘Just that she’s not here, to be angry. She’s away. As usual. That’s all I meant.’ She put her hand up to her reddened face where Georgina had struck it. ‘That hurt, you know.’
‘Good. That’s what I intended. I wish I hadn’t come home.’
Georgina picked up a sugar lump and started dipping it into her tea. She was always doing that, eating sugar. Charlotte watched her, resentment added to her misery and guilt. It wasn’t fair. If she ate sugar lumps she’d be a size sixteen instead of just squeezing into a twelve.
‘Charlotte,’ said Georgina, ‘are you somehow implying that because Mummy’s always away, your foul story must be true?’
‘No I’m not. I don’t think.’ Charlotte spoke slowly. ‘Although it’s what you might call circumstantial evidence.’
‘Oh for God’s sake. Don’t start talking your legal jargon.’
‘Sorry. Georgina, I can see why you’re so upset. But can’t you also see why I had to talk to you?’
‘No. No I can’t. I really, genuinely can’t.’ She embarked on another sugar lump.
‘Look,’ said Charlotte patiently. ‘You would have found out. Honestly. I mean you would have heard the rumour. Just like I did. And it would have been horrible for you. As it was for me. I’m sorry, Georgina, I just had to talk to you. I felt I was going mad.’
‘Well I still don’t see why you should think it has to be true.’
‘I’m not sure myself,’ said Charlotte, ‘but I just do.’
‘What about Max? He’s clearly a Caterham. You’ve only got to look at him and Daddy together. They’re terribly alike.’
‘Yes,’ said Charlotte, ‘I agree. I don’t think there’s any doubt about Max’s parentage.’
‘It’s much worse than the adoption idea,’ said Georgina with a sigh.
‘And that’s another thing,’ said Charlotte, remembering. ‘Mummy was so funny about that, so cross. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but lots of children think they’re adopted, and their mothers don’t fly off the handle. That was obviously why. Raw nerves.’
Georgina looked at her, weary suddenly, her aggressiveness dispersed. ‘Is it really going to do any good, digging over all this dirt?’
‘I don’t know if it’ll do any good, exactly. But don’t you feel that really, really we ought to know? It seems pretty crucial to me. I want to, if you don’t. If I’m not Charlotte Welles, then who am I? And did Daddy know? And if he did, why did he put up with it? I just have to know, Georgina. I really do.’
‘I hate it,’ said Georgina. ‘I simply hate it. And now what are you going to do,’ she said, angry again suddenly, ‘go to Daddy and say, “Hey, we just heard you’re not our real father. We’d like to hear more about it, please.” Or “Mummy, we understand you’ve been having affairs, and conceiving babies all over the place, would you be kind enough to let us know who our fathers are?” ’
‘Well, don’t you want to know?’
‘I know who my father is,’ said Georgina, her face closing again, ‘it’s Daddy. I know it is. I couldn’t be anybody else’s. I know I couldn’t.’
‘Yes,’ said Alexander, ‘yes, I’m afraid it’s true.’ He smiled at Charlotte, a shaky, careful smile. ‘I’m more sorry than I can ever tell you that you had to find out this way. I had always hoped, prayed, that the gossip would never reach you. I suppose it was stupid. Naïve. But then I could see no alternative.’
‘You could have told us the truth,’ said Charlotte. She was flushed, angry. ‘It would have spared me, and still more spared Georgina a lot of pain. It was a horrible thing to happen, Daddy. Horrible.’
‘Darling, I can see that. I’m appalled by it. By what you’ve been through. And I have to say I do wish –’ He looked at her very seriously – ‘I wish you’d come to me before you’d spoken to Georgina. Together we might have been able to make it easier for her. She’s very young still. And we’ve always been so close. It must have been a terrible shock.’
‘Yes it was. Terrible. Well, maybe I shouldn’t have talked to her. But I had to talk to someone. And she is the person most intimately concerned.’
‘Well,’ said Alexander, ‘I think I am fairly intimately concerned myself. If I might say so. But I can see, darling, you did have to talk to someone. And that you’d have wanted to discuss it with her. Of course I can.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ said Charlotte, a note of exasperation in her voice. ‘Why?’
‘Darling, how could I? How could I? At what point? How would I have known? When you left school? Sixteen? When you reached puberty? When you learnt the facts of life? Impossible. I just kept putting it off. And praying. As I said.’
‘You could have done something,’ said Charlotte stubbornly. ‘You could have told us we were adopted, at least.’
‘I wouldn’t have wanted to do that,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to lie to you.’
‘Oh thanks,’ said Charlotte. Her voice was bitter. ‘That was really nice of you.’ Alexander was sitting at his desk. He leant forward and took one of her hands. ‘Darling, don’t be angry.’
She turned on him, her face white and tense. ‘Daddy, of course I’m angry. What do you expect? I’ve just discovered I – Georgie and I – are the victims of a monumental piece of – of fraud. That we’re not who we thought we were. That we’re illegitimate. And you have never taken any steps to protect us from the knowledge. And then you tell me not to be angry.’
‘Charlotte,’ he said, and there was great pain in his voice, ‘Charlotte, you might spare a thought for me. In all this. How do you think it has been for me? Living with this all these years. It hasn’t been easy. I love you both very very much, and I would hate you to think otherwise, but dear God, it hasn’t been easy.’
He sounded angry now; she looked at him, startled.
‘No,’ she said, ‘no I don’t suppose it has. I’m sorry. I haven’t thought about you enough. What – what did actually happen? I mean how did it happen?’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I don’t really want to have to go into all the details. It would be painful for both of us. But your mother has always been – well, independent. You know how much time she spends away from me. From us. And she is – well, very attractive. Very sexually attractive. I found it hard to hold her. From the beginning, I’m afraid. But I loved her and I went on forgiving her. In so many ways she was a wonderful wife, you see.’
‘Oh wonderful!’ said Charlotte. ‘Superb. Daddy, you should have divorced her.’
‘I couldn’t,’ said Alexander simply. ‘I really couldn’t. I didn’t want to lose her, I didn’t want a scandal, and you see –’he looked at her almost shamefaced –‘I would have looked terribly terribly foolish. To have admitted that she had lovers so very early in our marriage. That may sound very silly to you, but I was brought up in a very different way. Appearances were important to me. To my family. To – Hartest.’
‘Oh.’ She looked at him and her heart softened, started to ache for him. He looked so infinitely sad and humiliated suddenly; she put her hand out, tenderly, onto his.
‘Poor Daddy.’
‘Well. I expect I was foolish. Weak. But there it is. What we – I – decided to do seemed simplest. At the time.’
‘And at least you had Max.’
‘What? Oh, yes, of course, I had Max. He was my son.’
‘Daddy –’
‘Yes, Charlotte.’
‘Daddy, I hate to ask you this but I simply have to. Who – who was my father? And Georgina’s? What was he like? Where is he? Please tell me. I need to know.’<
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‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I really do not know.’
‘That’s absurd. You must know.’
‘No, no I don’t. I didn’t want ever to know. I told your mother that it was the only way I could stand it, never knowing, who she had been – who – well, it was the only way I could go on. And go on loving her. I did, you know. I still do. Very much.’ He suddenly put his head in his hands; a sob broke in his voice. Charlotte put her arms round him.
‘Daddy. Daddy, don’t. I’m so sorry, so terribly, terribly sorry. Don’t cry, please don’t cry.’
He put his arms round her then and clung to her, as if she was the parent and he the child. ‘I’m sorry, Charlotte,’ he said, ‘so terribly sorry. Tell Georgina how sorry I am. Please tell her.’
There were still ten days before she had to go up to Cambridge. She couldn’t imagine how she was going to get through them. She fixed her mind on getting there, on starting a new life; somehow, she felt, it would matter less there, she would be safe, a different person, she could escape from it all. She and Alexander hardly spoke, read at mealtimes, avoided one another after dinner. She knew she should go back to Georgina, report on the conversation with her father, but somehow she kept putting it off. She couldn’t face another scene and she felt she had handled the last one completely wrongly.
Georgina phoned from school a couple of times, sounding almost cheerful. She said she wasn’t thinking about it, and she was quite sure it was all evil gossip. Charlotte, sounding noncommittal, said she was glad Georgina was feeling better.
What she longed for, and yet dreaded, was her mother’s return. She wanted to talk to her, and yet she was afraid to, wanted her reassurance and was terrified of not getting it. Virginia was due back just before she went up. ‘I’ll be able to drive you up, darling,’ she had said gaily on the phone, last time Charlotte had spoken to her, before her dinner with Toby. ‘We can have a lovely day together.’
‘Yes, sure,’ Charlotte had said, aware she was sounding cool, still upset that her mother hadn’t come back with them to see Georgina and more importantly Max back to school. God in heaven, how was she ever going to be civil to her now, if that had upset her? And yet – yet, she wanted to see her so much, wanted to talk to her, wanted – yes, wanted to fight with her if necessary. It would be healing, comforting. Just to unscramble not just the story, but her own emotions.