A Question of Trust

by Penny Vincenzi

  Johnathan said he was very surprised, and that surely all her old friends would be there. ‘Doesn’t matter to me, of course, I’d love not to go, so yes, make whatever excuse you like.’

  Which she did, saying that things were very busy on the farm, and it would be very difficult for Johnathan to get away.

  She was busy trying to be a good wife, for a while anyway, so time spent quietly together in Yorkshire was what she thought of as goodwill in the bank. She was waiting for a suitable moment to tell Johnathan that not only had she been booked for a three-day session, shooting evening gowns and furs for the all-important September issue of Style, the biggest issue in the year, where advertisers spent more money than all the others put together, but she’d been asked to go to Paris in January to shoot the collections. Every time she thought about that, her skin crawled with excitement. She had never ‘done’ Paris, and although she knew it was desperately hard work and you had to work through the night quite often, and you got to see almost nothing of Paris apart from its photographic studios, it still gave you a cachet, a standing as a model that nothing else could do. If you’d never done Paris, you just weren’t quite the thing; and Diana wanted to be quite the thing more than anything. She thought, all other things being equal, he would agree. The only thing was that Johnathan was becoming increasingly insistent on their having another child.

  Jamie, he said, was alone too much, needed a little brother or sister. Diana didn’t point out that it would be about three years before the little brother or sister became any kind of a companion for Jamie, by which time he would have gone away to prep school anyway. She wasn’t exactly a good wife, so the least she could do was give him another baby. But if she was pregnant, she wouldn’t be going to Paris. Using contraceptives was out of the question – he would know; she would just have to hope.

  And Johnathan did seem very determined. He came home earlier, spent more time with her when he was there and actually managed to persuade his mother to let Diana take over some of the farm paperwork, so that she was more involved – which she had always wanted, and argued (to herself at any rate) that their marriage would have been far happier for it. As Sir Hilary was worse, and very frail and in need of more care, Vanessa was actually quite grateful. There was no help for it, Diana thought, she’d just have to do what Johnathan wanted. She had sufficient sense of fairness to see that. The sex as always was dull – but more frequent.

  At first she was lucky; her next period duly arrived and Johnathan, grateful that she was patently trying to do what he wanted, agreed, a little sadly, that she should go down to London for the three-day shoot for the September issue.

  She had the most marvellous time. She was recognised now as being, if not one of the top models, then very high in the second division. Of course she wasn’t Barbara Goalen, whose elegant dark beauty was rather similar to her own, and who dominated the field, along with the other greats, Anne Gunning (fortunate, Diana often thought, that she had chosen to work under her unmarried name) and Fiona Campbell-Walter; but she had a reputation for incredibly hard work, and also for her skill at doing her own hair and make-up imaginatively. Moreover, she would help other, less talented, and newer girls do theirs. John French had once actually called her the Monet of the make-up box; she was incredibly proud of the title.

  He wasn’t shooting the September issue, of course; he was booked exclusively for Vogue. But there was a new photographer on the scene, American, whose photographs had the look of Irving Penn; one interview with him in the Sunday Times said he had the gift of sprinkling his pictures with glamour dust. He and Diana had developed a rapport and he booked her whenever he could. As always in such partnerships, a kind of alchemy worked between them; their sessions were charmed. No photographer could draw out Diana’s glamour, her gift of making it sex-charged, as Freddie Bateman could. And he was young and attractive, with thick blonde hair and a preppy glamour of his own: and most assuredly not queer. Diana fancied him wildly, and he her. Nothing had happened yet, but it was said in the business it was inevitable.

  The pictures they produced were extraordinary. He didn’t go for anything excessive – no wild exteriors and settings like the young Norman Parkinson – and his style was quite formal in the beginning at any rate, his posing careful, his lighting in the John French mould, bleaching out imperfections, enhancing bone structure; but with Diana there was a rawness, almost an insolence, that he brought in as well. She stared directly into his lens, hungry, sex-charged, and yet untouchably beautiful. When Freddie Bateman arrived with the contacts he knew perfectly well what treasure he was delivering; he stood, arms folded, smirking with excitement, while Blanche Ellis Brown, examining them, was to be heard shouting with excitement.

  ‘Darling,’ said the editor, putting her head round the door, ‘no orgasms in the office, please!’ But called over to the table, given a magnifying glass, she was as excited as Blanche and said there were at least three covers there, and she had no idea which to choose. The art director was called in; usually very cool, he became quite noisy and voluble himself, and suggested they used two pictures on one cover – that, in itself, would cause a huge stir.

  Blanche was so excited she called Wendelien Bellinger to see if Diana was still in London and if she’d like to come over and see the pictures. Diana, who wasn’t going back to Yorkshire till the morning, said a whole herd of wild horses wouldn’t keep her away and abandoned Wendelien and her new baby with a certain guilty relief. When she arrived there was something of a party going on; Blanche had produced a bottle of champagne, and both Freddie and Cedric, the art director were there; they all raised their glasses to Diana and, struggling to appear cool, she took her glass and smiled at Freddie with a look of complicit satisfaction. He returned the look rather seriously and kissed Diana on the cheek. ‘She’s one hell of a broad,’ he remarked to the room in general.

  Diana rather liked being called a broad; it had unladylike, raunchy connotations. It wouldn’t have gone down well at all in Yorkshire society, she reflected.

  ‘Thank you,’ was all she said; but when the champagne was all gone, and Freddie suggested they went on and shared another bottle at the Connaught, where he was staying, she said she couldn’t think of anything she’d love more.

  ‘You sound so ridiculously English,’ said Freddie, laughing, and Diana said what else should she sound like, and he said he had no idea but the way she looked in the photographs, a Brooklyn growl would be quite appropriate.

  ‘I don’t think I’m sure what a Brooklyn growl sounds like.’

  ‘Come along,’ he said, holding out his hand to her. ‘Let me give you a lesson. And maybe we’ll have Martinis, rather than more champagne. It’ll help get you into character.’

  Blanche and the other two exchanged glances and expressed huge regret that they were unable to join them; but when they had gone Blanche said anxiously that maybe one of them should have gone ‘to act as chaperone – she is a married woman after all’.

  ‘Blanche, darling,’ said Cedric, ‘you just saw before you the beginnings of a great affair. Do you really want to see it stillborn?’

  ‘Well, yes, I do,’ said Blanche. ‘I feel highly responsible.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so silly. Diana Southcott is a very sophisticated, hard-headed young woman. Perfectly capable of saying no all by herself. Or choosing not to.’

  ‘Well, exactly,’ said Blanche.

  Chapter 26

  1951

  The wedding somehow got into the papers. Well, one paper. The Daily News. Quite a prominent item, quarter of a page complete with picture, there it sat on page 4, captioned, Tom Knelston, marked out as a young man to watch in the political scene, was married on Saturday to Alice Miller, a nurse at St Thomas’ Hospital.

  Everyone had been surprised by the choice of Josh as best man, even Tom himself. But time had been pressing on him, and a decision had had to be made, and suddenly he thought that Josh would be as good as anyone; he liked him a lot, h
e had met him the night he had properly met Alice, and he was a cousin of Jillie’s.

  His brothers thought he was selling out to what they thought of as the opposite side. The Sunday lunch had been a fairly dismal failure, despite Alice’s superhuman efforts to make it work. The brothers were uncomfortable and silent, and their wives likewise. Tom’s sisters made a big effort and really liked Alice, thought her efforts to greet Mary and make her feel at home and welcome were touching and genuine, and were fascinated by her life as a nurse.

  It was actually Donald Herbert who suggested Josh as best man. Tom was having a drink with him one night, voicing his concerns about who he might choose. The real subject under discussion was the forthcoming election, which Donald was cheerfully certain would be won by the Tories and an apparently revived Winston Churchill, but Tom’s forthcoming nuptials were clearly rather in the forefront of his mind and the vacant position of best man in particular.

  ‘He’s good fun, you get on well, you certainly share political views, you both love Real Ale. Why don’t you think about it? Or I could do it,’ he added.

  Tom had an uneasy feeling Donald was not entirely joking.

  Alice didn’t really mind. She liked Josh and thought he was fun, and had forgiven him for the Battersea funfair debacle. ‘I think it’s a lovely idea,’ she said to Tom.

  And really, how much did it matter? She had had a wonderful wedding day, the sun shining, Tom looking amazing in his morning dress, and telling her he loved her at least ten times, both in his speech and quietly, in odd, unexpected moments of privacy; then again when they finally arrived at their honeymoon destination, a pretty, secluded cottage they had rented for a week, on the south Devon coast near Kingsbridge. She had half hoped for a fancy hotel, but Tom had said it was asking too much of him and his principles to stay in some lackey-filled establishment. ‘I would just feel too uncomfortable, Alice, I’m sorry.’ The Millers, who were giving them the honeymoon as a wedding present, were probably more disappointed than Alice was, but they clung tenaciously to the bridal suite for the weekend at the Salcombe Bay hotel, saying it was too late to cancel. It was rather wonderful, filled with huge vases of flowers and a bottle of champagne on ice waiting for them, with its huge bed, and balcony overlooking the estuary. Tom submitted to this with a good grace and, extremely clearly, enjoyed his four-course dinner and the dancing afterwards, in the hotel ballroom; he fell asleep very suddenly as soon as they got into bed, which was a bit of a disappointment to Alice, but she went out onto the balcony and looked at the moon shining on the water, and although it was hardly a substitute for sex, she felt extraordinarily happy and blessed. It was only when she got back into bed that the anxiety came to her unbidden as to whether he slept through his wedding night to Laura: and then she couldn’t sleep for hours.

  ***

  The cottage was lovely, though, and seemed to act on Tom like an aphrodisiac; they spent most of the week, it seemed to Alice, in the big bed in the small, whitewashed bedroom, the windows open to the lovely sea-washed air.

  Chapter 27

  1951

  She couldn’t be pregnant, could she? Not so easily, so swiftly, so terrifyingly soon?

  What was she going to do? How was she going to cope with it? Who could she tell? She felt totally trapped, her mind and emotions twisting and turning this way and that, the terror as responsible for the sickness as her hormones and the tiny, life-engulfing creature growing inside her.

  Alice was also pregnant: joyfully, radiantly, nervously pregnant. She was also surprised at the speed of their accomplishment. It would probably have been wiser to wait a little longer, to complete the purchase of the small house they had chosen in Acton. But Tom was so keen to start their family, and she had deliberately left her Dutch cap behind for their honeymoon. She’d hated it from the beginning, it was the opposite of romantic. She’d just assumed she should go back to it once they were home again. Which indeed she did. And when Alice, too busy to notice, passed the date of one period and when, two weeks later, she threw up horribly when she woke, she blamed the chicken she had eaten the night before. Then, finding nothing to blame the second morning, she looked a little nervously at her diary as she sat on the bus (still feeling fairly queasy) on her way to St Thomas’ and realised that, yes, the dates at least fitted perfectly.

  She told Tom that night and he was overwhelmed with a beaming, almost exultant pleasure; entirely untinged – as she had feared it might be – by anxiety, or even, far worse, by thoughts and memories of Laura and Hope.

  ‘Now look,’ said Alice, after absorbing this joy and finding it increased her own a hundredfold, ‘we can do a test. This frog thing, you know –’

  The frog thing, the Aschheim– Zondek test whereby her urine would be injected into a frog and two weeks later, if indeed she was pregnant, it would start laying eggs, was revolutionising anxiously pregnant women’s lives, reducing the two-month or so wait for certainty to as many weeks.

  ‘What you must do is tell Sister immediately – you need to establish your leaving date.’ Alice, who was dreading this, knew what must be done. ‘And Alice, I do want you to look after yourself, very carefully. I don’t want you working and getting overtired, which you know you do.’

  ‘All right,’ said Alice, recognising the first signs of anxiety in him, the legacy of the three miscarriages for poor Laura. ‘I promise.’

  And the third morning of horrid noises in the loo left them both in no doubt; there was a small new Knelston on its way.

  Diana felt very much in need of the frog’s services. Too afraid to go to her GP or even the local hospital, she went to an expensive private clinic in York where the smooth, rather smug gynaecologist there rang her two weeks later to confirm her pregnancy. Johnathan still had no idea; he was usually out long before she woke, and conveniently, she was usually sick mid-morning, rather than first thing.

  Because she had to talk to someone, she went to London for two days, on the pretext that her mother was unwell, and stayed with Wendelien; unwise for many reasons, not least that Archie, Wendelien’s baby, was at an enchanting age. Diana loved babies anyway; she had enjoyed Jamie’s babyhood hugely, once the birth was over. Wendelien, of course, counselled termination: ‘It’s the only thing, darling, you can have it done really well in a nursing home. Only one night there, and then you can go home again, feeling fine, all over.’

  ‘Yes, but it might not be Freddie’s. In fact, it’s quite unlikely – it’s probably Johnathan’s. He’s been very ardent, desperate for another baby.’

  ‘Diana,’ said Wendelien, ‘you really can’t know that.’

  ‘I know I can’t know. But—’

  ‘And what does Freddie look like?’

  ‘He’ s – oh, well, he’s blonde and—’

  ‘Diana,’ said Wendelien severely. ‘Johnathan is dark. You are dark, Jamie is dark. Eyes?’

  ‘Freddie’s? Green.’

  ‘Yours – dark. Johnathan’s dark.’

  ‘Yes, all right,’ said Diana irritably. ‘I get the message.’

  ‘And – time in your cycle?’

  ‘Oh, right in the middle. But then, I practically seduced Johnathan the night I got home, I felt so guilty and bad. So—’

  ‘I still think you can’t risk it. How on earth are you going to explain a green-eyed blonde to Johnathan? Well, look, I can help with places. It’s not a problem. So go away and think about it. But please, darling, be sensible. There can always be other babies.’

  ‘I know,’ said Diana. ‘But Wendelien, I just don’t know if I could do that. Just get rid of it. As if it was a bit of rubbish. It’s so brutal.’

  ‘And telling Johnathan you’re having another man’s baby isn’t?’

  All the way back to Yorkshire, Diana sat motionless, staring out of the window. Of course Wendelien was right; a termination was the only safe, sensible thing to do. Johnathan would never know, would never have to cope with the pain of what she had done. Her marriage would be sa
fe – he would quite likely divorce her if she told him. They could start again, immediately; probably in two months she’d be safely pregnant again. By him.

  It wasn’t as if she was in love with Freddie Bateman, nor he with her. He was gloriously, wonderfully sexy and exciting and it was so flattering that he fancied her. They’d had a heavenly time, but God, how could she have been so stupid.

  But she knew. It had just been too much for her; irresistibly too much. Years of boredom in Yorkshire, a dull husband she wasn’t in love with, who made the sex act about as thrilling as a bowl of unseasoned porridge. To be suddenly with someone who made her feel alive and hungry in every tiny unexplored corner of her body, someone funny and appreciative, someone who lived the dream of the new world she had just found herself in, this glorious world, all glamour and style and wit and charm, someone moreover with whom she could bring something to that world, who raised her beauty and her own sexiness to new, dizzy heights, who made people exclaim over her and adore her, and desire her. How could she have said no to him, as he plied her with cocktails and racy gossip and then flattery and dirty talk, and finally, first suggestions, then pleas, then increasingly open insistence that she go up to his room and thus his bed? Where, for the first time in her life, she discovered what sex could be for her, how she could climb and reach, and fly and soar, how she could laugh as she rode the pleasure, and cry as she came, how all her thoughts and emotions, her past and her present, could fuse into this one amazing thing. How at last she knew what she could do and be.

  For Freddie, it had been nothing like that. Another lover, another conquest, no doubt all of them beautiful – some more than she – some more sensuous, some more experienced, some undoubtedly younger. They had made a little magic, no doubt of that, rather as they did when they worked together, for what did he do then than make love to her with his camera, and she, responding through his lens, drove him on? But that had been the end of it until the next assignment, the next assignation; he would recoil at what she had to tell him, if she did, and so of course she would not.