Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  Charlie came home early from the bank, embraced her tenderly, begged her forgiveness and took her out to dinner at Alvaro’s, where they had shared many deliciously romantic evenings before their marriage. He apologized over and over again, calling himself all the names which Cathy had hardly dared imagine, and she forgave him.

  The next day purple bruising developed around Cathy’s eyes and he cheerfully called her ‘Panda’. It was hard to ignore the fact that her wretchedness turned him on. Cathy distracted herself by shopping and so came across the panic-stricken Monty in Harrods.

  With her sister once more by her side in life, Cathy’s confidence returned. ‘I’m going to fight those birds with their own weapons,’ she told Monty, her eyes sparkling. ‘You’ll see – once this baby is born, my poor little husband won’t know what’s hit him.’

  Their son was born ten weeks later, a little earlier than expected, in the middle of a rainy spring evening. Bettina did not bother to leave Brighton, Lady Davina regarded the whole affair with disinterest, and so Monty stoically took on the job of telephoning nightclub after nightclub until Charlie was found.

  Half an hour later he swayed into the ward with a small bunch of tulips. Even his mother and father, who arrived a little later, could smell the sickly combination of brandy and marijuana emanating from their son, but he leaned over the little Perspex crib making fond cooing noises and reassured Cathy with hugs and kisses, generally acting the fond father to the satisfaction of them all.

  Cathy called the baby James, which was quickly shortened to Jamie. His full name and title was James Charles William Mountclere Coseley, the Viscount Wheynough, but the weight of his lineage did not seem to trouble him. To Cathy’s surprise he looked around him with interest, thrashed his limbs with enthusiasm and frequently drifted into a sound peaceful sleep, his long black eyelashes curled on his round red cheeks.

  ‘Doesn’t he ever cry?’ Monty asked with interest, noticing that overnight her sister seemed to have acquired a lifetime of maternal experience and was holding the tiny body with suddenly practised hands. She never took her eyes off the little being that had so miraculously been created out of her own flesh. Love seemed a feeble description of the emotion which had now transfigured Cathy so that she looked almost like a different person.

  ‘He did cry this morning, when he was hungry.’ Cathy smiled softly as she turned the baby’s tiny shoulders this way and that to admire his quarter-profiles. ‘But he seems quite good-tempered. We’re going home tomorrow, aren’t we, Gorgeous?’ The baby bicycled his tiny legs with enthusiasm. ‘Look at his dear little fingernails – do you suppose I should cut them?’

  ‘Let me do it.’ Cathy gave Monty the minute pair of blunt baby scissors and one by one uncurled Jamie’s fingers and held them still while her sister snipped off the translucent crescents of nail. The baby snuffled at the sensation but did not cry.

  Looking thoughtful, Monty replaced the scissors on the night table and went back to the uncomfortable low armchair provided for hospital visitors. The two sisters looked at each other, both thinking of the child Monty had aborted.

  ‘I should feel sad,’ Monty said slowly, analysing her feelings. ‘I do feel sad. But it isn’t important, somehow. He’s important; it’s like your baby was my baby.’ Cathy smiled warmly, but searched her sister’s eyes to see if she had really looked into her heart. ‘Honestly, that’s how I feel,’ Monty protested, sensing the question in her sister’s look. ‘And there’s no need to ask how you feel, you haven’t stopped smiling all morning.’

  It was true; although her skin was drawn with the physical effort of her pregnancy and the baby’s birth, Cathy’s beauty now had a full-blown quality. Her finely drawn lips, their natural rosewood-red unobscured by lipstick, were relaxed and seemed softer and fuller than before. Although she was breast-feeding the baby, her breasts were scarcely larger in size, but their skin seemed fine and transparent, with blue veins faintly visible inside her ruffled, white lace gown.

  A nursery nurse had been engaged for the first month of the baby’s life, after which the Coseley family nanny, an elderly, imposing woman with wispy, white hair and a low-slung bosom encased in a grey serge uniform, would take over.

  With the weight of the baby off her body, the weight of inertia seemed to lift from her mind as well, and Cathy once more took control of her own life, which meant taking control of her errant husband. The first priority was to repair the damage which her pregnancy had done to her body.

  The only problem was that she was not terribly interested in Charlie. He seemed a petulant, demanding creature when his needs were considered in relation to those of her baby. She could think of nothing but little Jamie and it was a supreme effort to turn her attention away from her miraculous, adorable son.

  Lady Davina, having observed the dangerous phenomenon of maternal obsession before, paid her granddaughter a special visit.

  ‘Whatever you do, darling, do not get wrapped up in your child now.’ The advice was so emphatic it was almost an order. ‘You’ll lose everything if you let yourself wallow in all this baby nonsense. Your husband must be your first priority. Anyone can take care of a baby, after all.’

  Since Charlie had scarcely returned home for more than a few hours since his son had been born, Cathy reluctantly took her grandmother’s advice. She quenched all her inner misgivings, directed the nurses to bottle-feed Jamie, and booked herself into an expensive health farm the day she was allowed to leave hospital.

  The attendants at the health farm scoured her flesh to softness with salt rubs, oiled her face with creams, tightened her slack belly with electric currents and moved her sluggish bowels back to normality with a variety of disgusting but effective treatments. She passed the afternoons reading magazines, devouring articles called ‘Your Marriage: Keeping The Excitement’or ‘After The Honeymoon – Make Sure He’s For Your Eyes Only.’

  A fortnight later the size of her body had subsided; her waist was still an inch bigger than it had been before, but she did a hundred sit-ups every morning and was determined it would soon be back to normal.

  ‘Look at Mummy, isn’t she beautiful now?’ Nanny Bunting demanded, propping the baby up in his enveloping white shawl to gaze at her with his vague blue eyes. The old nanny had travelled up from Coseley and installed herself at Royal Avenue in Cathy’s absence. The nursery nurse at once took off in a huff but Cathy, wanting to concentrate all her energies on restoring her marriage, was grateful for the capable way the old woman took charge. A massive black perambulator was parked in the stairwell and piles of snow-white nappies filled the laundry room.

  Between 6 pm and 10 pm every evening Cathy heard Jamie crying in his nursery upstairs. ‘He’s a very wilful little man,’ the nanny told her, ‘exactly like his father at the same age.’

  Her household began to take on the orderly bustle she had envisaged in her engagement days, with the housekeeper tripping up and down stairs with the nursery’s meals and Nanny Bunting wheezing down herself in the afternoon when the little Viscount was taken out for a walk in the pram. The servants conducted petty feuds among themselves, squabbling over missing items of laundry and other trivia, until Cathy intervened.

  She went shopping, glorying in her restored slenderness and buying the kind of clothes she had seen on some of Charlie’s other women – tight velvet jeans, virtually transparent lace blouses worn without a bra, long, figure-hugging chiffon dresses with tiny buttons and puffed sleeves. She cooed and flattered her husband into a malleable mood and coaxed him into taking her out with him for the next evening of entertainment the bank’s clientele required.

  ‘You’ll be bored silly, darling; just wiggle your tits and take their minds off business,’ he instructed her, playfully pinching one of her nipples through its fragile screen of lace.

  In fact, Charlie was the one who found business dinners tedious. Cathy discovered that many of his clients were good company; some had been her father’s friends, who found it curiou
sly reassuring to meet the daughter of the suicide peer and find her unharmed by the scandal of her father’s death. Others were simply charmed by her, ridiculously flattered when she asked them to explain their conversation to her, and delighted to talk to a woman who was neither bored nor frightened by the world of finance.

  ‘See that young man over there,’ a senior stockbroker said to her in a Chelsea restaurant one evening. ‘Very interesting fellow – sign of the times, in a way. Most of us in banking have always been looking for the best long-term investment – young Mr Slater over there says he isn’t interested in long-term investments. Six months is all he’s interested in. Wants to take the money and run.’

  ‘So what does he invest in?’ Cathy stole a surreptitious glance at the tall figure with protruding ears who was deep in conversation with two other dark-suited men.

  ‘He’s an asset stripper. What his company does is buy up companies who’re in trouble and undervalued on the stock market. Then he simply scuppers the company and sells off the assets – usually the property’s the main thing. Property’s going up, you see, but that isn’t necessarily reflected in the company’s shares, so he can buy them up for less than they’re really worth.’

  ‘It sounds rather drastic.’ Cathy sipped her claret, swallowing it with displeasure. Charlie’s taste in wine was eccentric.

  ‘Drastic – yes. But he’s not short of companies to take over. Not enough capital investment over the years – there’s a lot of rotten businesses in Britain, resting on their laurels not looking to the future.’

  One of the other guests joined the conversation, his eyes fixed glassily on Cathy’s breasts, whose subtle exposure he had just noticed.

  ‘Rubbish, rubbish, don’t believe a word he says, my dear. You’re leading the young lady astray, George. Jim Slater’s not cutting the dead wood out of British industry, he’s just shuffling worthless paper. Don’t forget the man was a financial journalist before he got big in the City – he’s got the press in the palm of his hand.’

  At the end of the table Charlie sulked and drank steadily. His business dinners were normally all ribald jokes and hard drinking. His guests complimented him on his marvellous little wife as they climbed into their cars, but as soon as he was alone with Cathy in the Jaguar Charlie snapped, ‘You stupid cow, why don’t you keep your mouth shut? You make me look ridiculous, asking questions like a schoolgirl. It’s bloody bad manners to talk business at dinner. If you want to come out with me you can shut up and behave yourself.’

  He stamped on the brakes and stopped the car an inch short of a brightly painted Rolls Royce which was blocking half the road. ‘Damn!’

  ‘Oh, Charlie, it’s John Lennon’s car. I saw it in the papers.’ Cathy watched with apprehension as Charlie got out and walked towards the psychedelic vehicle, his hands in his pockets. He pulled out a half-crown coin and scored a long wavy line through the paintwork with its milled edge.

  ‘That’ll show John Lennon, whoever he thinks he is.’ At the far end of the short street, a policeman was watching them.

  ‘Spiv! John Lennon’s a spiv! Jim Slater’s a spiv! Guttersnipes, the pair of them. They think because they’re millionaires on paper that means something. They think they’re big men because they’ve made tin-pot fortunes in a couple of years. They don’t understand that making money’s easy – keeping it’s the trick. John Lennon will go bust before he dies and his sons will be right back in the gutter where he started, you’ll see.’ And he reversed inaccurately to the end of the street and roared away, still watched by the policeman, who also respected wealth of several centuries’standing.

  The more successful Cathy became at holding her own in his world, the more uncomfortable Charlie grew. He had no justification to exclude her from his business life, and decided to scare her away. He arranged a riotous all-male party in a private room with a dozen call girls hired through the notorious Paris madame, Madame Bernard. This proved vastly popular with everyone but his father, who rapidly heard the news.

  ‘That’s not our way of doing things, Charlie, I don’t want to hear of it happening again,’ he told his son at the weekend. ‘Your private life is your own affair, but I won’t have the name of the bank associated with any kind of scandal whatever.’

  ‘Sometimes he behaves as if our marriage were some kind of contest,’ Cathy said, visiting her sister one evening. At this period in their lives they spent many hours discussing their relationships with Simon and Charlie, wondering why love did not make them happy, and how they could turn their romantic yearnings into real life. ‘If something happens which I like, he just wriggles around until he finds some way of spoiling it, and then he’s happy.’ She stretched her legs uncomfortably, stiff from sitting on Monty’s Moroccan floor cushions.

  ‘Is he still fucking you?’ Monty pulled a cigarette out of the carved soapstone casket from Kashmir which stood on the low brass table.

  Cathy smiled with triumph, pushing her glistening curtain of Havana-brown hair back from her face. ‘Yes, quite a lot now, thank heavens.’ She sighed, drew in a lungful of unaccustomed cigarette smoke and coughed.

  ‘Sorry, I’ll open a window.’ Monty did this with difficulty, because she rarely opened the apartment’s windows. ‘You don’t sound very happy about it.’

  ‘Well, I try, but it does get boring.’

  ‘Do you have orgasms?’ Monty lay back and looked at the ceiling, wondering if a pendant lamp of pierced brass would look good hanging low over the table.

  ‘Well yes, but not very often. He doesn’t go on long enough.’

  ‘I don’t have them from fucking at all, only if Simon goes down on me,’ Monty sighed. She evaded making love now, feeling guilty and cruel every time Simon accepted her flimsy excuses. Cathy also sighed. She had fewer and fewer orgasms now and thought longingly of the days before she was married, when Charlie had tried to arouse her enough to make her forget her tedious addiction to virginity. She went through sex in an oddly detached mood now, as if all the sensations were coming through cottonwool. After every brief coupling with Charlie, she felt a dull ache in the region of her pubic arch.

  ‘I suppose I could ask Charlie to go down on me, but he doesn’t like what he calls fiddling about.’

  ‘Maybe you could go in for a bit of 69?’ Monty suggested.

  Cathy tried this. It was not a success. Her husband’s erection subsided in her mouth and he complained that she smelled.

  The only aspect of her life which was wholly delightful was her son, a robust, serious child with dark curls who crawled excitedly into her arms at every opportunity, twining his plump, starfish hands in her pearls and pulling himself upright on her lap. Cathy adored him with anxious reserve. It was so easy to love her baby son, but increasingly difficult to love his father. She felt confused. Surely Charlie should be the centre of her world?

  Nanny Bunting subtly discouraged her from taking any part in her child’s care.

  ‘Clumsy Mummy – Nanny do it,’ she would say, taking the bottle or the toy away from Cathy as if she too were a child.

  ‘We would really prefer it if we could bring baby down to Mummy in the afternoon, rather than her coming all the way up to the nursery,’ she said one day, and so Cathy received her child every day at 4.30, and somehow the whole house grew to regard the nursery as Nanny’s private kingdom.

  In the evening she still heard Jamie cry, sometimes for hours on end, and felt vaguely that this was wrong, but she knew nothing about babies and when she asked Nanny Bunting she was told, ‘Bless you, Mummy, all babies fret when they’re put down for the night. It’s nothing to worry about. Crying expands their little lungs.’

  One evening when Charlie was out she heard cries which she thought were louder and more desperate than usual, and at last went up to the taboo territory of the nursery to see if anything was wrong.

  ‘Now let that be a lesson to you, not to play with hot things,’ Nanny Bunting was saying, standing over the tiny figure of Jamie,
who was sitting in front of her by the wall, roaring his heart out.

  ‘Is everything all right, Nanny?’ Cathy hesitated in the doorway, feeling that she was intruding but alarmed at her son’s uncontrollable distress.

  ‘There, see what you’ve done, you naughty boy? You’ve disturbed Mummy and brought her all the way up here in the night. Isn’t that a naughty boy?’

  ‘Why is he crying so much?’

  ‘He touched my radiator, Mummy, and burned his little hand, but he won’t do that again in a hurry, will he? Clever little man knows it’s naughty to touch hot things, doesn’t he?’

  Cathy firmly picked Jamie up and held him close, murmuring soothing nonsense into his ear and wiping the streaming mucus from his nose and mouth with the hem of her white broderie anglaise peignoir. The baby’s frantic screams began to subside. Without a word to Nanny Bunting she took the baby out of the day nursery and walked him up and down the landing until he fell asleep on her shoulder. Clucking with disapproval, Nanny Bunting bustled into the night nursery to tidy the cot, and Cathy heard the old woman muttering angrily to herself as she carried the sleeping infant through the doorway. Oh dear, thought Cathy, I’ve offended her now.

  Next morning she told Charlie about the incident.

  ‘My goodness yes, I’ll never forget,’ he said, tossing aside the Financial Times. ‘She used to do that to us too. Make us hold something hot so we’d know not to play with fire. She made me hold the poker when the end of it was red hot.’

  ‘But isn’t that rather cruel?’

  ‘Nonsense. Didn’t do me any harm. She’s an absolute treasure, Nanny Bunting. For heaven’s sake don’t rub her up the wrong way, darling. I know you’re not accustomed to managing servants, but what on earth would we do without her?’

  A few weeks later the old woman had an attack of gout and could not walk. Cathy went up to see her, and found her sitting in state with her swollen foot raised on a stool.

  ‘Can you manage, Nanny? Would you like us to get in a temporary girl to help you?’