When Roz was nine years old Peter Thetford moved out of the house in Holland Park. She had stood at the window of her bedroom and watched him piling his things into the taxi that morning, and quite literally danced with pleasure. Her joy came quite as much from the fact that he was gone from the house as that her mother would be on her own, and it seemed to her just possible that she and her father might start living together again. The disappointment when they did not was almost as bad as the hurt when they first separated. ‘But why?’ she asked Eliza over and over again, crying in bed the night she finally asked if this might be possible, and beating the pillow with rage and despair when she was told it was not. ‘Why not? You’ve had a turn at being married to someone else, and you didn’t like it. Why not go back to Daddy?’ And Eliza had tried to comfort her, holding her, wiping her tears. ‘Just because I wasn’t very happy with Peter, darling, doesn’t mean I can just go back and be happy with Daddy. Life isn’t like that. But we shall have more time together, and you must keep me company now I’m on my own again.’
And Roz, remembering all the evenings she had begged her mother to stay in with her and not go out with her friends or with Peter, and Eliza had gone just the same, said, ‘Oh you’ll find someone else to keep you company, I expect,’ and turned her face into her pillow and cried endlessly and refused to be comforted.
Her father had said much the same thing: that he and her mother just couldn’t get along any more and it was better they lived in different houses even though Peter had gone; and he said perhaps Roz would like to stay with him a bit more often now that she was a bigger girl and that he got lonely sometimes too.
‘No,’ Roz said, seeing a chance to hurt him, to show that she was in command of the situation, not him, ‘no, I want to be with Mummy, she needs me. Besides,’ she added, looking at him out of her green eyes with a blank expression so like his own, ‘you have Camilla to keep you company, don’t you? Poor Mummy hasn’t got anyone.’
Roz hated Camilla. She had hated her from the very first time she met her, when she had gone to stay with her father in New York when she was just seven years old. At first she had thought she was just a friend of her father’s, one of the many ladies he took out to dinner or the theatre and then didn’t see again – or not very often. But Camilla didn’t go away. She went on being around, first in America and then in London until Roz couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been there. One of the things she had most hated about her was how beautiful she was, with her goldy red hair and her bright red lips, and her long red nails; she could see that was why her father must like her, and it seemed so unfair that someone could be liked so much straight away just because they were beautiful.
Camilla came out to lunch with them twice in New York that first time, and although she worked very hard being nice to her, asking her endless questions about her friends and her school and her pony, Roz could see perfectly well she was bored, she had that look on her face that grown-ups always had when they weren’t listening to what you said, a sort of fixed smile with her eyes wandering round the room a bit. She didn’t like the way that her father looked at Camilla either, or the way Camilla put her hand over his and kissed his cheek, or talked for a very long time very seriously about something that had happened in a meeting that morning. Another night she went out to dinner with them; she was looking particularly beautiful, Roz thought – although she didn’t like to have even to think it – wearing a great big shaggy sweater in lovely blues and greens, with a V-neck, and rows and rows of beads, in a pair of very thin black velvet trousers, and sort of slipper-like shoes. Her father had laughed and told her she looked like a beatnik, and Camilla had got very serious and told him he was out of date, beatniks had been around five years earlier, and he had told her not to be so tedious, which had pleased Roz very much. They went to a restaurant called Sardi’s, which Roz liked much better than all the expensive places they had been to; she had a hamburger and a knickerbocker glory and felt quite happy until Camilla started talking to her again, and said she had a present for her and gave her a little box with a silver dollar in it made into a brooch.
‘That’s lovely, Camilla,’ her father said, ‘isn’t that kind of Camilla, Roz, what do you say? Put it on, darling, and let’s see how pretty it looks.’
‘Thank you, Camilla,’ said Roz carefully, aware that once again someone was trying to buy her and trying to make her like them, ‘but I won’t wear it now, it doesn’t go with this dress.’
‘Roz, you don’t know what does and doesn’t go with dresses. Put it on,’ said Julian. He tried to sound light and amused, but she could see the anger in his eyes and she felt just slightly frightened.
‘No,’ she said, bravely. ‘No, I don’t want to.’
‘Roz,’ said Julian, and he had stopped even pretending to be amused. ‘Put it on.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I won’t.’
‘Oh, Julian,’ said Camilla quickly, ‘don’t make a thing of it. If Roz doesn’t want to wear it I don’t mind. And she’s quite right, aren’t you, Roz, it doesn’t go with that dress. What a clever little girl you are.’
Something snapped in Roz; she could feel a hot rage sweeping over her, could feel Camilla thinking she was getting round her.
‘I’m not clever,’ she said. ‘I just don’t like the brooch. And I don’t want to wear it. I feel sick and I want to go home.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Roz,’ said Julian. ‘Apologize to Camilla and eat your food. We are not going home.’
‘I shall be sick.’
‘No you won’t. Now eat it.’
Roz ate in total silence; when she had finished the last mouthful she took a deep breath, and by sheer effort of will vomited the entire meal on to her plate again. It was a trick she was to learn to perfect over the years.
Looking at her father across the table, she was rewarded by an expression on his face she had never seen there before. It was defeat.
But she did not get rid of Camilla.
Later, Camilla often came to London, and stayed at the house in Regent’s Park, or even came down to Marriotts. Roz minded her being at Marriotts even more than in London, because she always thought of it as her father’s and her house, and Camilla absolutely ruined it. She was so boring about things and went on and on about whatever Roz said, even if it was a joke, or if they were playing a game like draughts, spending hours studying her moves, and if they went riding together, the three of them, Camilla was forever telling her little things she was doing wrong, like not sitting into the canter enough, or letting her pony trail his legs over a jump. She was meant to sleep in one of the guest rooms, but Roz had seen her coming out of her father’s bedroom more than once. She knew what happened when a man and a woman were in bed together, intercourse it was called, her friend Rosie Howard Johnson had told her, and she had also told her it could lead to the woman having a baby; Roz didn’t mind too much about the intercourse but the thought of Camilla having a baby made her feel very sick indeed. Apart from the fact it might be a boy, and that he might get the company, her father might love the baby more than he loved her. If he loved her at all. Sometimes for days at a time Roz managed to make herself forget that she had heard him refusing to have her to live with him, but when she thought about him sort of living with Camilla and possibly even having a baby with her, the pain came back so badly it made her breath go away and she felt as if she had fallen and winded herself.
Right from the very beginning of her relationship with Julian, Camilla’s main problem had been Roz. She could handle the highly charged matter of having both to work with Julian and sleep with him, and the inevitable speculation and tensions it caused; she could handle the fact that she knew she was not the only woman in his life; she could handle her slightly ambivalent attitude to her sex life. And she had no problem at all handling the question of Eliza. Through the divorce, which did not surprise her in the very least (except perhaps in that someone as frivolous and non-intellectual as Eliza sh
ould have captured the attentions of a politician), Camilla supported Julian admirably; she allowed him to talk as much as he wished: to question his behaviour, to examine his feelings, to express regret, anxiety, remorse (which he did occasionally and rather dutifully, as if he knew it was expected of him); she was careful not to criticize Eliza, and was even more careful to avoid any hint of an idea that now he was free he might wish to enter into a more serious relationship with her. And she took great care to allow him to spend more time with her than usual between the linen sheets, and to consciously express more affection and tenderness there than perhaps she had done in the past. In brief, she was the perfect mistress. But she was not the perfect stepmother.
Roz quite clearly resented her, feared the impact she might make on her life, and in fact (Camilla had to admit to herself) thoroughly disliked her. She was polite to her – just – but no more, she rejected her overtures of friendship, she cut any conversation with her down to a minimum and she made it perfectly plain that whenever Camilla was with her and her father she would much prefer it if she was not. Julian had taken an indulgent attitude to this at first, saying easily that Roz would soon get to know Camilla better and feel less threatened by her; later on, weary of the constant hostility between the two of them, unable to ease it in any way, he refused to discuss it or even acknowledge its existence.
The fact that she was not a pretty child didn’t help; she was not appealing, she did not enlist sympathy, she was big for her age, not fat, but sturdily built, dark-haired and slightly sallow-skinned, with a rather large nose and a solemn expression. The only thing that gave her face any charm at all was her eyes, which were green like her mother’s, large and expressive. But the expression in them was very frequently not in the least charming; she had a capacity to fill them with a kind of brooding intensity which she would fix on Camilla, or make them, like her father’s, an inscrutable blank.
She was obviously a clever child, and she seemed very self-confident. Camilla, studying her carefully, could see few signs of insecurity. She knew quite a lot about disturbed children, as she had done a psychology project about them at high school and had worked at a day centre in one of the poorer areas of Philadelphia; her thesis had won the psychology prize and left her with an abiding interest in the subject. Julian’s lecture on being tactful and patient with Roz had left her irritated. He had gone to some lengths to explain that at no time during Roz’s visits was she to stay over at the apartment or to appear anything more than ordinarily friendly towards him. Camilla had told him shortly that he would be fortunate if she appeared friendly towards him at all, ordinarily or otherwise, if he persisted in treating her like some kind of insensitive moron. In fact she avoided him altogether until Roz had been in New York for several days.
Later, as Roz got older and she herself became more involved with Julian, the problem increased. Roz was increasingly difficult to handle; both her parents spoilt her and were afraid of upsetting her, and Camilla could perfectly well see that she was fast reaching a point where nobody would be able to handle her at all – she was like a badly trained overexcited thoroughbred, she told Julian, and she needed a good long session on the lunge rein at regular intervals. She had been rather pleased with this analogy, but Julian clearly hadn’t liked it at all and told her shortly that handling children was extremely easy for people who hadn’t got any.
Camilla observed with a mixture of irritation and admiration Roz’s manipulative skills; she heard her on the phone one evening, telling her mother that she had been having the most wonderful time with Daddy and Camilla and didn’t really want to come home until the next day when in fact they had all spent a rather depressing afternoon skating at Queen’s and then having supper at a dreadful place called the Carvery where you could take as much of everything as you liked and which was supposed to be Roz’s favourite place. Roz had sat out most of the skating saying her ankles hurt, and had refused to eat anything at the Carvery except ice cream and roast potatoes.
Roz was just about nine at the time; Camilla rather bravely volunteered to take her home in the morning by taxi as Julian had several meetings, and on the way she asked Roz to show her Harrods and offered to buy her something. Roz had said she hated Harrods, it was a boring shop and anyway her mother had bought her so much lately she really couldn’t think of anything else she wanted; but then, as Camilla delivered her to a rather cool Eliza, Roz had said thank you very very much and could she please please go out with her another day and buy her a present for always being so kind to her in New York.
What Camilla felt within her most secret self – the self she crushed ruthlessly into submission most of the time and which only surfaced during the middle of the night – (like most obsessive over-achievers Camilla was a poor sleeper) was that her own rather irregular situation with Julian made her relationship with Roz worse. Had she been married to him, or even his permanent, long-term mistress, sharing his homes as well as his bed, then she felt that Roz would come to accept her, and she could have established a relationship with the child which had some stability. But Julian did not want that; he made it perfectly clear, they had a great many long conversations about it (usually at Camilla’s instigation) and agreed over and over again that the success of their relationship was based on their total freedom, and the lack of anything in it that smacked of obligation. Camilla was always at even greater pains to assure him and herself that this was precisely what she wanted; she liked him, she told him earnestly, and more than that, she was very fond of him, they had a superb working relationship and an equally superb sex life, they shared many other pleasures and interests, riding, design, fashion, and it would have been very foolish, very foolish indeed to have introduced any form of long-term commitment into what was a totally pleasurable and undemanding arrangement. But the fact remained that in the middle of the night, when the secret self was asserting itself and having its rather obstreperous say, Camilla knew much of this was quite untrue. She was indeed very fond of Julian, very very fond, and if she had been caught unawares and asked directly if she loved him she would have said yes. More importantly than that, there was a lot about him that she didn’t actually like very much, and particularly in the work situation. She found his ruthlessness with people, the way he used them and discarded them, very hard to accept: he would take an idea from someone and claim the credit for himself if it succeeded and make sure that everyone knew whence it came if it failed; and she found his deviousness almost intolerable. He had what amounted to a near compulsion to confuse people, to inform the creative team of some part of his plans and the sales team another, so that only he could bring the whole together. It caused uncertainty, ill feeling and mistrust among his staff; but what it did do was ensure his continuing indispensability, it kept him totally in control. Camilla saw through this, and despised it; she even challenged him on it. But he had a great talent for turning away criticism and disapproval; he would smile at her and tell her she was far too astute for her own good, that if there was one person in the entire company apart from himself who he could trust to know everything it was her, and although she knew this to be untrue she was quite unable to prove it.
Then there was their sex life; Camilla continued to try very hard to enjoy sex, and to improve her performance constantly for Julian; she never refused him if he wanted to go to bed with her, and she always told him afterwards that it had been absolutely wonderful. She hardly ever had an orgasm, or even came near it (although she became adept at faking); her sex therapist told her it was because she would not release her emotions, that she was afraid of her body taking her over, and gave her all sorts of exercises to do, both physical and mental, but it didn’t do any good. Fearing that it might be Julian’s fault and that they were incompatible, she took another lover from time to time, but it was no better, worse if anything; so then she was left fearing she must be frigid, which was worse still.
She knew what an orgasm felt like because her therapist had taught her to achieve i
t herself, but even that seemed to her a purely mechanical pleasure, rather like having a drink of water when she was very thirsty, or scratching an itch, it never approached the glorious abandon and heights that she read of and indeed which Julian seemed to experience when they were in bed together.
She had moved in 1963 from her apartment in the Village and had bought a studio in the upper Seventies; near enough Sutton Place and Julian for convenience, not too near for either of them to feel stifled. She loved the area, the quieter, sunnier streets, the expensive shops, the wealth of museums and galleries, the smart restaurants, the pastry shops, the sidewalk cafes, the entire atmosphere so much more cosmopolitan and civilized than the roaring, grabbing street life of mid-town Manhattan.
Her position in the company was unchallenged, and the most envious, the most malicious person could not but have acknowledged it had been earned, that her success was not dependent on her relationship with the chairman. After Circe’s launch, Julian made her design director of the company (stores division); when he opened another Circe in Paris in 1961 he put her on the main board. Two years after that he made her advertising director as well, and creative director of the company worldwide; this meant she had to spend several months of the year in London as well. She bought a tiny flat in The Boltons, and shared her life with Julian exactly as she did in New York; undemandingly, charmingly and affectionately. But she was very clearly, as even Letitia (who loathed her) acknowledged, in London to work and not as his mistress.
Old Sins Page 27