Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘No,’ said Cathy.

  Charlie did a lot more kissing, throwing in a few of the tricks he knew were good for raising the temperature, like squeezing her breasts and tracing whorls in her ear with his tongue. Cathy was far too strung out with anxiety to respond.

  ‘No, please, Charlie,’ she said, ‘I don’t like it.’ This was not the correct reaction. Most girls said no but implied that Charlie should not abandon hope – they said, ‘I don’t know you well enough.’ That was the approved code.

  Cathy wriggled away as soon as Charlie started snaking his hand under her skirt. At this point, the limited intellectual faculty possessed by Britain’s most eligible earl acknowledged the possibility that he was dealing with a girl of little sexual experience.

  ‘You’re not a virgin, are you?’ he demanded.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Cathy replied. He pulled away and took his hands off her.

  ‘But why? Don’t you want to lose it?’

  ‘No – not until my honeymoon. I want to wear white on my wedding day and deserve it.’

  ‘My God, how can you be so straight? For Christ’s sake, it’s 1965. Look, don’t worry, I’ll be very gentle, I promise. You’ll love every minute of it.’ He pulled her close to him again and pulled up her skirt with determination. ‘Let me make love to you, Cathy. You’re driving me crazy.’

  ‘No, Charlie, stop doing that.’

  ‘Why? Don’t you like it?’ He trickled his fingers up the inside of her thigh with all the erotic skill he could summon.

  ‘Of course I like it, but what’s the point if it’s not leading anywhere?’

  ‘Only because you won’t let it. Oh come on, Cathy. Let me turn you on. I’m a fabulous lover, everybody says so.’

  ‘Go and screw everybody then, if they like it so much.’

  ‘Well, you’re certainly a waste of time, aren’t you?’ he snarled crossly.

  Oh heavens, she wailed inwardly, there I go again. Why, why, why can’t I keep my big mouth shut? Charlie angrily marched her out to his car, and drove her home in hostile silence.

  But the next day, he called her again, and the next evening he attacked her again, this time calling her boring, straight and probably frigid. Cathy was unmoved. She knew Charlie could date dozens of exciting, switched-on and undoubtedly unfrigid girls if he wanted to, but it seemed wise not to tell him this.

  Then Charlie switched to the soft approach, and told her he loved her, that she was beautiful, that he’d never met anyone like her and couldn’t get her out of his mind. The last two statements were perfectly true. He was aroused and challenged by her virginity and his days at the bank were increasingly passed in daydreams about her ecstatic surrender to him. Behind these fantasies was his belief that since she was a virgin she would be absolutely overpowered with grateful lust once he had initiated her in the delights of sex.

  ‘You’ll always remember me,’ he told her with mysterious delight. ‘Girls always remember the first.’ He made a private joke of the idea of her passionate capitulation, but Cathy realized he was half-serious and would not play. He sent her flowers and took her to a chic little jeweller in Beauchamp Place where he bought her a heartshaped gold pendant studded with diamonds.

  On his vast, brown velvet sofa he persuaded her to undress little by little, kissed every inch of her and raved over the perfection of her body. Cathy’s anxiety faded and her body began to respond to his caresses.

  ‘You’ll be wonderful in bed,’ he told her. ‘You’re made for it, darling. It’ll be like fucking hot velvet. Oh God, Cathy, please.’

  ‘No, Charlie. For heaven’s sake, why can’t you understand that I mean what I say?’ She was sharp because it was an effort now to master her senses. Instantly Charlie was angry again, and dumped her back at Trevor Square.

  ‘Fear nothing, he’ll call,’ Lady Davina reassured her, knowing exactly what point in the game her protégée had reached.

  ‘I hope so. I do love him,’ Cathy sighed.

  ‘What you feel is irrelevant. We must make him love you.’ And Lady Davina made her return the diamond heart, then bought her a new dress, and took her racing to Royal Ascot, which Cathy found boring and exhausting. Charlie called the house every day, then in desperation called her at Bourton at the weekend. By the time Cathy was found, he was almost angrier than before.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he snapped, as if their estrangement had been her caprice alone.

  Infuriated as he was, Charlie never used force to get his way because he regarded rape as an admission of failure. He was coming to appreciate that Cathy had a strength of character which he had overlooked. She also had a sharp tongue and a disturbing propensity for telling the truth. Charlie’s sex life was operated for public effect, and he was afraid she might make him look foolish if he broke too many rules. Cathy had a core of still seriousness which a more sensitive man would have appreciated at once. Charlie had come upon it slowly, unsuspectingly, and it drew out of him the unaccustomed emotion of respect.

  He turned his frustration into humour. ‘This man will self-destruct in five seconds if you don’t sleep with him,’ he intoned like a robot, shuffling along the hall at Bourton.

  ‘Give me your body or I’ll join the French Legion,’ he demanded, flinging himself on to his knees at her feet in the drawing room.

  ‘If you don’t promise to sleep with me now I’ll take off all my clothes and dance on the table,’ he scribbled on a menu card during a particularly dreary house-party. Cathy laughed, loving him all the more, and relaxed with him so much that eventually one night, in his arms, she felt her body mysteriously align itself, tissue by tissue, into a perfect ring of ecstasy, and then convulse in an orgasm. Charlie was almost as impressed as she was. He had never been positively aware of a woman climaxing with him before, having always ploughed on more or less regardless of his partners’responses.

  ‘Oh God, this is such a waste, darling,’ he murmured as he lay next to her.

  Inside her own head Cathy heard the voice of Lady Davina counselling, ‘Never speak too soon. Make it clear you will only give yourself to your husband, then say nothing further. Just leave him to work it out.’ She sighed, depressed by the sadness following the release of her sexual tension.

  And so now she sank reluctantly on to his lap in an alcove in Bourton House and pulled away his fingers as they fumbled with the buttons down the front of her dress. ‘Don’t undress me here, Charlie. Everyone can see us. Stop it.’

  ‘Stopit, stopit, stopit!’ he squawked. ‘Who taught this bird to talk? Can’t it say anything else?’

  ‘You know I can’t. Oh please, Charlie, don’t start this argument again, not at my dance. I can’t bear it.’

  ‘You can’t bear it,’ he sneered, petulant and rejecting once more. ‘At least you’re getting your oats. Ungrateful cow.’

  ‘That’s not fair, Charlie.’

  ‘Well, you’re not fair, either.’

  ‘Yes I am. It’s my body, and my life, and what I choose to do with them is my affair and nobody else’s, and just because you don’t like it, you haven’t got the right to complain.’

  He stood up and glared at her. ‘Who’s complaining?’ Insultingly he thrust his crotch at her face, ‘I’m not complaining. Some day you’ll find out what you’ve missed.’ He spun round and walked away, leaving her feeling helpless and angry.

  The discotheque was throbbing at full volume in the ballroom, where Charlie hauled a bedraggled girl in a semi-transparent smock on to the dance floor. She’d been had by half the men in London already, he knew. Within three dances she had agreed to leave with him. In the carpark he suddenly shoved her down against the body of his Jaguar, and screwed her with violence.

  He drove back to London, making her roll joints, and then suck on his penis as he took the car around the clock. In his apartment, he demanded that she perform every degrading act he could think of, and a few she eagerly suggested in addition.

  In the middle of Sund
ay morning, he ordered her to leave without warning, and spent the rest of the day drinking vodka by himself. Next morning, he went to the bank with a vicious headache and a sense of self-disgust.

  He held out until Tuesday evening, when he telephoned Cathy and said. ‘I’m sorry, darling, I behaved like a spoilt child.’ Cathy said nothing, holding her breath. ‘Look, Cathy, I want you to meet my parents. Father usually has some people up to shoot at the beginning of August. Will you come and stay?’

  ‘I’d love to.’ Cathy didn’t dare say any more in case he heard the triumph in her voice. From that moment they both knew exactly where their relationship was heading.

  The Marquess of Shrewton, Charlie’s father, was a slender, colourless man whose chilly manner disguised much generosity of spirit. He liked Cathy immediately, which did not surprise her since most older men liked her, and he lost no time in talking to her about her relationship with Charlie, which did surprise her since she had expected this approach from his mother. Engagements, after all, ought to be girl talk. Lord Shrewton evidently saw this as a business matter. He looked at Cathy with intense curiosity.

  ‘I knew your father, of course,’ his voice was clipped and precise. ‘Terrible tragedy. What was behind it, did anyone ever find out?’

  ‘Money. He didn’t have much and he spent much more than he had.’

  ‘Didn’t the police have some suspicion about blackmail?’

  ‘We were told they did, but they couldn’t prove anything.’

  The Marquess was looking directly into her eyes. Suddenly Cathy felt as if she were being interrogated.

  ‘Wasn’t there some connection with Paris?’ he asked.

  ‘There was supposed to be, because he’d been in Paris on the day he …’ she paused, the grief making it hard to talk even though Daddy had died over a year ago ‘… the day he died,’ she finished, summoning all her self-control. Lord Shrewton said nothing but waited for her to continue. ‘The police said they couldn’t get any cooperation from the French, so they couldn’t take things any further. We didn’t think there was anything in it, anyway.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Who would want to blackmail Daddy?’ she asked, feeling pitifully young and naive.

  ‘You couldn’t think of anyone who might want to do that, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes,’ Cathy almost whispered. She sensed an odd, almost obsessive, quality in his questioning, but so many people were curious about her father’s suicide, though too embarrassed to question her, that it was almost a relief to be openly cross-examined. And, she acknowledged, he had a right to know all the material facts about her background.

  Suddenly Lord Shrewton stepped back and smiled with reassurance. ‘I should think you’re probably right. Your father was very well liked in the City, and the police aren’t always as clever as they think they are, in my experience. What about your father’s estate – it hasn’t been declared bankrupt, I take it?’

  ‘No, we missed that by the skin of our teeth. Daddy’s insurance policies were enough to cover what was owing, though they made an awful fuss about paying up. I think the accountants had to juggle the tax around. We had to sell a lot of things, of course. The house and everything.’

  ‘That’s too bad. But your mother’s coping well, I hear.’

  ‘She’s moved into a little flat in Brighton.’ Cathy hesitated. This was not the time to confess that if she married into the family she would be extending the blood tie to a chronic alcoholic, but not to mention it seemed like a lie. She compromised. ‘I think she gets very down sometimes.’

  ‘To be expected. Terrible shock. You realize you’re nothing like the usual run of my son’s girlfriends, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, so they tell me.’

  ‘They tell you absolutely right.’ A pale smile shone behind Lord Shrewton’s hornrimmed glasses. ‘Dreadful creatures, most of them. My wife didn’t share my opinion, but I couldn’t see any of them settling down to married life very well. Do you like children?’

  ‘In moderation.’ Cathy had no experience of children at all, but saw herself as a wife with two immaculate offspring in velvet-collared coats, shopping serenely in Knightsbridge and feeding the ducks on the pond in Kensington Gardens.

  ‘In moderation.’ The Marquess echoed her answer with irony. ‘If you want my advice you’ll get your family over with as fast as possible then get on and enjoy yourself.’ He made a vague gesture around the landscape outside the windows.

  Cathy understood him perfectly. What he was saying was that she could do what she liked as long as she gave him an heir to the title and estates. This implied that there might be something distasteful, or to be avoided, in marriage to Charlie, but Cathy was sure she had already seen him at his worst and was confident that he would change once they were married. Marriage to Charlie, as she imagined it, would be an endless tunnel of soft, pink bliss. If only he would ask her.

  The next morning, Lord Shrewton telephoned his solicitor in London and then went to find his wife in the winter garden where she was supervising the potting up of the next year’s bulbs. Charlie’s mother was a plump honey-blonde with a smile as rich as butter, which always seemed a little thinly spread when it was directed at her husband.

  He sat her down on the window seat and told her his plans. ‘It’s all settled,’ he began, characteristically abrupt. ‘I want to move quickly or the Bourton girl will think better of it. She’s sound and sensible, good family, apart from that business with her father; there’s no money, of course, but she’s the best we’ll get, in my opinion. Charlie seems struck, don’t you think?’

  His wife agreed with reluctance. ‘He’s gaga over all of them in the beginning.’ She disliked Cathy for exactly the same reasons that her husband favoured her; the Marchioness preferred her son to associate with trashy girls so that she could remain the queen of his heart. Cathy, because Charlie was powerfully attracted to her, represented competition for his affections.

  ‘Well if he’s gaga enough to marry her, we can redraw the trust, buy them their own London home and increase his personal allowance quite substantially. The lawyers agree with me that the main concern expressed in the trust document is safeguarding the estate as a whole, and when there’s an heir, the whole picture changes again.’

  His pale grey eyes were gleaming with relish for the unsubtle strategy he had proposed; Lord Shrewton was disturbed by what he could not control, and the notion that all the care he and his forebears had devoted to the establishment of the Coseley fortune might be dissipated in a single generation by the ungovernable stupidity of his only son had unsettled him profoundly for almost ten years. As in many British families, the Coseleys’ wealth was tied up in a tangle of legal arrangements, and an addition to the family could provide a useful way of extending this web and restraining the more spendthrift inheritors of the fortune.

  He had also observed that his foolish wife took a perverse pride in Charlie’s promiscuity. Although Lord Shrewton had consulted her out of innate courtesy, he allowed her no opportunity to object. That afternoon during the shoot, he paired off with Charlie and made plain the fact that the guardians of his inheritance were prepared to offer him a substantial bribe to marry Cathy.

  ‘Oh well, I suppose everyone’s got to make the same mistake once,’ Charlie acceded after a thoughtful ten-minute silence, in which he balanced the allowance on offer against the money he was accustomed to drop at chemin-de-fer. ‘And once I’m hitched you’ll all have to stop bleating at last.’

  The next day, the August sun blazed in a cloudless sky and the bracken gave off a rich fragrance in the heat. Long alleys had been cleared in the gorse for the convenience of the guns, and Charlie set off for the most distant of them with Cathy bouncing beside him in an old shooting-brake.

  Part of Charlie’s charm was his confident mastery of momentous occasions; where other, more sincere men were made clumsy and speechless by emotion, he was left in control by his lack of feeling.r />
  ‘Isn’t this bliss?’ he murmured at midday, pulling her close to him as they lay on the grass. Invisible in the blue heaven above them a skylark was singing. ‘I’d like to lie here forever with you.’ He kissed her lips, then her eyelids, then the hollow of her throat. They had almost finished a bottle of very fine champagne, packed in the lunch hamper in an antique silver cooling-jacket so that it remained icy enough to mist the sides of the silver beakers. ‘I love you, Cathy.’ He’d said it a hundred times before to other girls but she never suspected the fluent ease with which the words rolled from his tongue.

  Cathy nestled in his arms, expecting now to feel his deft fingers slip her blouse buttons undone, anticipating the delicious crawl of a caress on her sunwarmed skin. She could hear bees droning faintly, and, to her left, the gun-dog panting in the heat. I can’t stand much more of this, she thought, feeling the ache of desire begin again. Why didn’t Didi tell me it was going to be such hell? I want him so much I feel as if I am about to burst into flames. Instead of the expected moves, she felt Charlie take her left hand and kiss the palm of it, then sit up, and press the fingers against his cheek. With surprise, she looked up into his chalky blue eyes. ‘Darling, I want us to be together always, forever. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, Cathy. Will you marry me? Say you will, please, darling Cathy.’

  ‘What?’ She had visualized him saying the words so often, but now when she really heard them she could hardly believe it.

  ‘Not “what”, you idiot. “Yes!” Say “Yes, Charlie”.’

  ‘Oh yes, Charlie!’

  ‘Yes what?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll marry you.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘We’ll be married?’

  ‘Yes, and then what?’

  ‘We’ll have children?’

  ‘No, much more important …’