The next day the doctor decided to operate on Cathy’s foot and remove the dead tissue. Ten days later he operated again. ‘You’re going to be with us for some time yet,’ he told her and she nodded, too woozy with drugs to take much interest.
Charlie at last came to see her with his usual bedraggled bunch of flowers, bought as an afterthought from the stall in Belgrave Square. ‘I love you, Cathy, I’ll always love you,’ he told her, kissing her hands and fingering the wedding and the engagement ring as he did so. The rings were becoming loose because she was losing weight.
‘That’s typical,’ Monty complained. ‘You get skinny when you’re miserable and I just get fatter.’
‘Well, you must be happy now, then.’ Cathy looked at her sister with approval. Monty was decidedly slim. She was wearing a pair of topaz velvet jeans and an antique cream lace blouse that veiled her breasts rather than merely covering them. Her hair cascaded halfway down her back.
‘Yeah.’ Monty suddenly realized that she was happy, but could not find a reason and did not want to dwell on it in the face of her sister’s desolation. ‘You’ll be back on top of the world once you get out of here.’
Was I ever happy? Cathy wondered when she was alone. She remembered the frothy excitement of her honeymoon and wondered if a feeling based on so much self-delusion could rightly be called happiness.
Charlie was soon appearing around the heavy hospital door almost every day, and she was disturbed to realize that she felt nothing at all for him; no love, no hate, not even contempt. She felt a little sorry for him, because Lisa, the Texan nymphomaniac, was clearly keeping him on his toes.
‘She’s always giving parties and she expects me to be in time and not get drunk,’ he complained. ‘God, I miss you, darling.’
When she had been in hospital a month the plastic surgeon came to see her. He was suave and handsome, like a drawing from a woman’s magazine romance, with humorous blue eyes and very white teeth.
‘What we’re going to do,’ he explained, patting what was left of her injured foot, ‘is re-align the bones and put a couple of pins in to hold them straight. Then we’ll take a skin graft, and then you should be able to start walking again.’ Cathy sighed. She wanted very much to go home and hold Jamie in her arms again. She had begged to see him, but her father-in-law had gently but firmly declined to bring her son to the hospital.
The first operation was a success, but the skin graft did not go so well.
‘You’ve got unusually strong skin for a European. It’s healing more as I would expect an Asian or African woman’s skin to do,’ he told her. ‘Eventually I’m hopeful you’ll get away with insignificant scars. But your general physical condition is so poor at the moment that you’ve no resistance to infection. We’ll have to try again. I’m going to prescribe some concentrated vitamins and some more iron for you.’
Later that day the surgeon reappeared with a basket of strawberries. ‘First of the season,’ he announced, putting them on the table beside her bed. ‘No sense in missing all the good things in life while you’re in here. Plenty of Vitamin C. I’ve told Sister you’re to eat the lot yourself.’
‘Do you give all your patients vitamins like this?’ she asked him, tempted by the smell of the ripe fruit which filled the overheated hospital air.
‘No – only the beautiful ones.’ He kissed her hand in a formal manner.
‘You’re a plastic surgeon – aren’t they all beautiful by the time you’ve finished with them?’
‘No. Not more than they were before I started, anyway. Most women are beautiful, they just won’t realize it.’ He sighed. He was a man who loved women and wished women loved themselves as much. ‘There’s nothing I could do to make a woman beautiful if she doesn’t see it herself. And there’s nothing that could disfigure a woman who believed she was beautiful, whatever she looked like in the mirror. You’re that sort. I don’t treat many women like you.’
Next day Monty came as usual, and remarked that Cathy looked better.
‘I think I’ve got a crush on the plastic surgeon,’ Cathy confided, half-serious.
‘Steady on. Don’t doctors get struck off the medical register and barred from practising if they start carrying on with their patients? Can I have the last strawberry?’ Monty peered into the almost empty basket.
‘He gave them to me last night. To be honest, I think he’s just trying to cheer me up.’
Monty appraised her sister fondly, and noticed that the drawn look had gone from her face and that her hair, although it was limp and unstyled, now had a hint of its former rich sheen. She was wearing the turquoise silk negligee, but the colour quarrelled with the amber tints of her complexion.
‘You look heaps better. What’s happening? Are they letting you out?’
‘No, I’m going to be in here for weeks and weeks.’ Cathy looked despondently at the rise in the blankets where the cradle, still protected her foot. ‘I’m going to be crippled, Monty. I’m going to have to learn to walk all over again, and I’ll never be able to run properly, or dance, or anything.’
‘Of course you will.’ Monty reached over and squeezed her sister’s hand, noticing that the fingernails, which had been bitten to the quick during the anguished period before her suicide attempt, were now a heroic millimetre in length. ‘You’ll be able to do anything you want to do, just like you always could.’
‘There’s one thing I’ll never do again, and you’re to have me committed to an asylum if I look like I’m going to do it.’ Cathy held her sister’s glance, and her eyes seemed deeper than ever with the shadow of pain behind them. ‘I’ll never, ever fall in love again, not as long as I live.’
Monty hesitated. Disclaiming love still sounded like a heresy to her. She drew back. ‘Famous last words, I bet you,’ she said, with all the optimism she could command. She knew that Cathy never committed herself to anything without being prepared to follow it through to the end.
The next day, Charlie called to see Cathy with a bottle of champagne. He tried to make her drink most of it then said, ‘I’ve got a bit of business to sort out – just sign this, will you?’ He put a pen in her hand and spread a sheet of paper on the table in front of her.
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing, just a trust document.’
She started to read the paper.
‘You don’t have to read it, just sign it.’ She ignored him and read the legal paper to the end. It was a consent to a divorce from Charlie, giving him custody of Jamie. Cathy read it again to make sure, struggling to control her emotions. She wanted to kill him, claw out his eyes and trample on the corpse, but hatred, she swiftly realized, would not help her to defend herself.
‘I suppose this is Lisa’s idea?’ she asked him cautiously, pressing the bell for the nurse in case he tried to hit her.
Charlie squirmed and tried to look appealing. ‘She wants to get married.’
‘More fool her. Why does she want my son as well?’
Charlie looked even more uncomfortable. ‘Well, you can’t look after him in your condition, can you?’
The nurse came in and Cathy told him to leave. Then she telephoned Pasterns, her solicitors, and the battle commenced. First Charlie’s lawyers sent a statement from him alleging that Cathy was mentally unstable and had ill-treated Jamie. Mr Napier from Pasterns came to the hospital, looking most embarrassed.
‘I didn’t ill-treat Jamie,’ Cathy protested. ‘It was that awful, senile old Nanny the Coseleys insisted I should have. I’ve never even smacked him.’
‘Can you prove this in any way? Anything written down, any doctor’s letters or anything?’
‘Well, our doctor will remember, I’m sure. And then there’s the girl who came to look after him when Nanny Bunting was ill. And the psychiatrist here will tell you I’m not unstable.’
They wrote to the Coseleys’doctor, who wrote back declining to give evidence. ‘It is my policy never to involve myself in the personal affairs of my patients,’
his letter said.
‘Can’t we sub-poena him?’ Monty asked Mr Napier from her perch on the end of her sister’s bed.
‘This isn’t Perry Mason, my dear. There’s no such thing as a sub-poena in English law. We might consider issuing a witness summons, but counsel will probably advise against it. Barristers are always very wary of a hostile witness. Can do more harm than good.’
‘How can he just refuse to give evidence, when they’re trying to take my child away from me?’ Cathy felt as if she were playing a game whose rules had not been explained to her.
‘I think he’s rather aware of which side his bread is buttered,’ Mr Napier said delicately. ‘He’s the family’s doctor, after all.’
Cathy privately carried cynicism even further. Pasterns were sending her bills every two weeks, instead of following their usual sleepy accounting procedure; she rightly took this as a clear indication that they did not anticipate winning her case. She had a distinct impression that to fight the richest noble family in England was considered sheer folly by the superficially attentive professionals in her employ.
Her temporary nanny had already been approached by Charlie’s solicitors, who sent her statement to Pasterns. It was very short, and simply said that her impression was that the Countess of Laxford took very little interest in her child.
‘No one will believe that girl – she was having an affair with my husband. I found them making love on the stairs in the middle of the night,’ Cathy told her lawyer with confidence.
‘Do you have any proof?’
‘What proof could I possibly have? I saw them with my own eyes and she ran off into the street half-naked.’ Her lawyer was being very stupid, Cathy thought.
‘My Lady, without proof there’s nothing to stop your husband denying it, and then it’s just your word against his.’ Mr Napier, in his turn, felt his client was being uncharacteristically obtuse.
There was also a statement from Nanny Bunting which stressed her credentials as a child-care expert of forty years’experience and described Cathy as ignorant, immature, a social butterfly and obsessively jealous of her husband.
‘The old …’ Cathy almost bit her tongue, trying to stop herself swearing in front of the prim young man who was once more extracting a document from his bulging black case.
‘And I’m afraid the trick-cyclist isn’t much help either.’ Mr Napier handed her more papers with a warning tone in his voice. ‘His opinion is that you’re severely depressed, out of touch with reality and generally unable to cope.’
Angry enough to ignore the pain in her foot, Cathy pulled herself up in her bed and scanned the paper. She saw the words ‘severe post-natal depression’, ‘unresolved grief reaction’and ‘probability of further attempts’through a mist of rage.
‘Don’t cry, darling Cathy,’ Monty soothed her. ‘You’ll only get lines around your eyes.’
‘Lines around my eyes! Who’ll notice them when there’s this to look at?’ Cathy made a despairing gesture to the ugly surgical boot which encased her injured foot. ‘And what’s the point of looking beautiful if all it gets you is a man like Charlie? I wish I’d been born ugly, then he’d never have fancied me. Why aren’t you saying “I told you so”? You saw through him right from the start.’
Monty ignored her, and handed her the walking stick with which she could hobble unevenly along. The boot, heavy and unsightly as it was, at least made it possible to walk after a fashion. Within a few days, Cathy learned to balance well on her damaged foot. She had lost the tips of her first two toes, her muscles were weak from disuse and her foot ached after every effort.
Money was instantly a problem. When she returned to her home she discovered that the bank had allowed Charlie to close their joint account, and requests for maintenance made through Pasterns were left unanswered for weeks. With icy composure Cathy took her jewellery to a well-stocked pawn shop in Victoria, and sold three large silver salvers she found in the pantry cupboard to a dealer in Chancery Lane. Two eighteenth-century French pastoral scenes, her wedding gift from Lady Davina, went to Sotheby’s. She had enough to live on, to pay a daily cleaner to keep the echoing house decent, and to settle her lawyers’bills.
There were more distasteful tasks ahead. Cathy swallowed her pride and her contempt and tracked down as many of her husband’s lovers as she could – five in all, grubby artificial blondes living on the edges of Chelsea in curiously similar little apartments, with cuddly toys on their beds and the same odour of long-term slovenly housekeeping optimistically smothered with expensive scent, lingering in their hallways.
Her first target was a bit-part actress, younger and more successful than April Henessy, and much less infatuated with Charlie.
‘You can count on me,’ she said at once, stubbing out a half-smoked cigarette. ‘I’ll give evidence for you. I’ll say whatever you want. I’ve always said I felt sorry for whoever was married to that flash bastard. He lost me the best part I ever had, you know – blacked my eye the day before we started rehearsals. I’ll never forgive him.’
‘The case will probably get quite a bit of publicity,’ Cathy warned her.
‘Right on!’ The actress screwed her left eye into a theatrical wink. ‘I hope you get a million, love, you deserve it.’
The next day Cathy was amused to see in a gossip column a large picture of the woman in a plunge-necked gown, above the headline ‘Earl’s Secret Love’. With renewed confidence she visited the remaining four women, but they all instantly refused to make statements confirming their affairs with Charlie. At the last apartment among the out-of-date invitations crowding the dusty mantelpiece, Cathy noticed a Coutts cheque for £1,000 bearing Charlie’s vestigial signature.
‘I feel as if I’m trying to fight the Mafia,’ she told Monty in a weary tone. ‘It was the same with the couple who used to keep house for us – Charlie’s just paid them all off. None of our friends will help, either. I thought they were my friends, too, but they won’t risk losing the Coseley money or the Coseley connections or the Coseley invitations just to help me get my son back.’
‘You miss him, don’t you?’
‘So much, Monty, so much. I hate being in that house. Every night I lie awake and think I can hear him upstairs in the nursery. Whenever the staircase creaks I think it’s Jamie coming down to see me.’
‘Shall I come and stay with you for a while?’ Cathy was thinner than ever now, Monty noticed.
‘What about Simon?’
‘He doesn’t need me – you do.’
By the time her divorce hearing was imminent Cathy could walk almost normally, and the surgical boot had been replaced by a pair of black patent shoes with grosgrain bows made for her with courteous care by her father’s former bootmakers, Lobbs of St James’s. Her barrister, a jovial man with iron grey hair and a substantial belly which strained at the buttons of his striped waistcoat, eyed her with satisfaction.
‘Very attractive, if I may say so. I like to see my clients looking their best. But if you take my advice you’ll come to the court looking as plain as you can. Don’t try to cover up your limp. Get rid of that Mona Lisa smile, too. Look as miserable as you can.’
‘Whatever for?’ enquired Cathy, straightening the skirt of the demure navy-blue suit she had bought for the occasion. It had a small lace collar which, she thought, added the ideal touch of fragility and flattered the sallow tint of her neglected complexion.
‘Setting aside the question of the custody of your son, any alimony you are awarded will be in a sum fixed by the judge according to his estimation of your prospects of remarriage. Look too pretty, or have a boyfriend waiting in the wings, and you’ll get a mere pittance.’
Cathy nodded. ‘And what about my son – do you think we’ll win?’ Jamie was all she cared about. Talking about alimony was a waste of breath.
He answered too quickly to suggest confidence. ‘The courts always favour the mother in these affairs but … ah … I could wish we had more evidence in this ca
se. Of course,’ he looked at her with sudden concern, ‘you appreciate that this case isn’t really about the boy at all, don’t you?’
‘Then what on earth is it about?’
‘The money, My Lady. Your son inherits directly from the Coseley trust, he’s a very rich young man, far richer than his father. Whoever gets him gets the loot.’
‘But my husband is a wealthy man already, and Lisa’s an heiress …’
‘Nothing rational about greed, in my experience. To him that hath shall more be given – the Good Book says it and it’s the way of the world. One can never be too rich or too thin, eh?’ He stood up to show her out of his chambers, keeping to himself the opinion that his client was much too thin and had an air of angry, demented bewilderment which was not going to help him demonstrate her mental stability.
Cathy saw Charlie, with Lisa clinging to his arm and a team of lawyers leafing energetically through their documents, at the far end of the vaulted Gothic corridor outside the court. His barrister was a clean-cut, expansive man whose air of authority immediately made Cathy’s lawyers look tentative and shabby.
At the end of the first day of the hearing they were all despondent. The judge clearly accepted the picture of Cathy as a neurotic, unstable woman which Charlie’s lawyers painted. There was a purposeful scuffle in the press gallery and next morning the headlines proclaimed: ‘Cruelty To Earl’s Baby’and carried pictures of Charlie and Lisa looking loving and of Cathy with her bowed head and walking stick, looking like a witch.
The morning mail lay beside the newspaper, and Cathy looked at it without enthusiasm. ‘All I ever get is wretched bills, now.’ She finished her coffee and stood up.
‘What’s this?’ Monty picked out a thick, grey envelope from among the bills.
‘More bad news, I expect. Open it, if you like.’
Inside the envelope was one piece of paper, a page from Texas Monthly magazine, part of an article about European aristocracy visiting the state. There was a picture of Charlie playing polo, and beneath it the news that the Earl of Laxford was shortly to take up residence in Dallas with his American wife.
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