The Enchanted

by Charlotte Bingham

  Now, for want of anything else to do, and because he was anxious to avoid being waved at again by Lady Frimley, Grenville went to the looking glass over his chimney piece and regarded himself carefully.

  For someone in his mid-forties, he was good-looking in an unremarkable sort of way. Tall, slim, hair greying a little round the edges, what he liked to think of as honest eyes, hands perhaps slightly too heavy to be those of a patrician, but at least the signet ring was on the correct finger, the little finger of the left hand, and the Asprey’s cufflinks in his striped Turnbull and Asser shirt were of a discreet medium size and fashioned from old gold, unlike the overlarge decorations sported by so many of his peers. Looking at his mirrored image he had no doubt in his mind why he passed so easily as a gentleman. He looked like a gentleman.

  Yet he had a problem, which he was pondering once again as he stood carefully sipping his gin and tonic, and this was the fact that in many ways he was now possibly a little too successful. He badly needed some sort of stimulus; he needed to feel energised again because, quite frankly, at the moment he felt nothing at all. That was the trouble with all this achievement. Being fairly wealthy and successful seemed to mean that he now felt less about everything, which was very disappointing. Grenville had always thought that the more you had the more you would feel; he had imagined success brought more colour to your life, yet this seemed not to be the case with him. It had merely brought a feeling of emptiness, as everything in which he invested went up and up, and his clients became so fat and content they ceased even to ask after their investments, and consequently about him. Instead he imagined them all sitting around congratulating themselves on their perspicacity and innate brilliant business sense, ignoring the fact that it was he who had precipitated their success.

  ‘What one needs,’ he said to himself, back to idly staring out of the window now that the coast was clear of Lady Frimley, ‘what one needs is for something to happen which is out of the general run of things. One really needs a chum or two to come in with one on something stupendously trivial, perhaps. One needs a silly situation, instead of a pounds, shillings and pence one. One needs to do something totally frivolous instead of always doing the sensible thing. Ah, yes – yes, but what?’

  The fact that he could find no answer to his own question made Grenville feel even more like an old bachelor who had been too busy making money to realise that life was passing him by, not to mention someone whom others had passed by as well. It made him feel unwanted, which in fact he now wondered whether he truly was. Except for the money he made for people, he was not actually needed by anyone, not as a person. If he dropped dead tomorrow the most that his acquaintances would say at his memorial service probably would be that he was a good sort of chap, splendid with the old lucre, but lived just for his work really. Reason why he never married probably, and had so few close friends – too caught up in his work.

  The telephone rang and the sound brought him out of his long reverie. When he picked up the receiver he heard a voice which immediately brought even further dejection, at once making him feel like a lonely little boy all over again.

  ‘Hello, Mummy,’ he said, hoping he had contained his small sigh of anguish. ‘How are we today?’

  Chapter Four

  The Singleton

  Lynne carefully crossed her long and elegant legs, hooked a tress of blond hair back over one ear and smiled at her solicitor. He too smiled but with less brilliance, and Lynne was unsurprised to see that he had coloured a little, too. Mr Morgan was a short, curly-haired Welshman much prone to embarrassment. They were an odd duo, but however different their natures might be, between them they had at last got Gerry on the run, so much so that it had now become one of their running jokes, like something out of a British situation comedy: I say – we’ve got old Gerry on the run, what?

  Certainly, whenever Lynne entered Mr Morgan’s office she was always happy to share their jokes in order to take her mind off the stale and musty smell of the room, as well as off Miss Fanshawe, Mr Morgan’s squat, bespectacled secretary who kept peering through the glass partition that divided her office from his. She actually watched them so closely, and with such regularity, that Lynne had come to the conclusion that the secretary thought that she might have some kind of designs on her boss, which added to her amusement.

  On this particular visit Miss Fanshawe was at her spying in spades, constantly up and down from her desk to pop into the office wearing her best Does Mr Morgan need me? expression. But as it happened Lynne was in far too good a mood to mind if Miss Fanshawe stuck her nose right against the glass partition and left it there. Today was a marvellous new day. Lynne stroked her pale grey cashmere shawl-collared cardigan, which exactly matched her new pale grey T-shirt, thinking that if she now played everything right today really could be the first day of the rest of her life.

  She stretched out her legs once more, noticing happily that they shone with that well-known iridescence provided by only the most expensive hosiery, stockings that beautifully set off her pleated white linen skirt and white Victorian-style half-boots. She was just the right mix of expensive clothing and startling good looks, and the best thing of all was that once again she knew it. Small wonder then that Mr Morgan kept feeling his shirt collar as he doodled on the legal pad in front of him.

  ‘But to come to the point, Mrs Fortune—’

  ‘It would appear you’ve just broken yours,’ Lynne said, smiling. The solicitor’s eyes had caught her legs and the point of his pencil had snapped on the page.

  He laughed awkwardly in acknowledgement and plucked a fresh pencil from the mug on his desk. ‘Very good, Mrs Fortune – yes, very good indeed.’

  ‘You know, now everything is being so nicely wrapped up, Mr Morgan,’ Lynne said, ‘I think I shall miss hearing all about you and Mrs Morgan hitchhiking around the States and visiting sites of special interest, I really will.’

  ‘Oh, you’re far too kind, Mrs Fortune.’ Mr Morgan dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. ‘But before we get distracted, I really must come to the point,’ he repeated, doing his unsuccessful best to refit the left lens that had just fallen out of his glasses. ‘I have to say you have been the very personification of patience, Mrs Fortune, through what has been a very difficult and I dare say often unpleasant time for you.’

  While doing her best to look duly grateful as well as understanding, Lynne privately wished that her lawyer wasn’t so long-winded. He really had no need because, as both of them knew, hers was a pretty straightforward case. Yet still he droned on about nothing very much in particular, so to escape from the monotony she allowed herself to indulge in a recap of the events via which she had come to find herself closeted in a stuffy, overheated, dusty and dreary office with someone as boring and embarrassed as her solicitor.

  It had happened when she had gone away for two days’ pampering, not as a self-indulgence but as the result of a surprise birthday present from her adored husband Gerry.

  Have some seriously wicked days enjoying yourself at the Lakeside, my lovely. Pamper, pamper, pamper! And come back looking even more sexy – as if that were possible! A ton of love, Gerry xxx

  So Lynne had turned up for her pre-booked stay at the Lakeside Beauty Spa, where, after being toned, massaged, plucked, pummelled, beautified and coiffured, she finally considered she’d had enough, not only thinking that the spa had done everything it could for her but also a little resentful of the staff’s slightly high-minded attitude. She decided there was too much emphasis on the body’s being a temple and not enough on life’s being a bowl of cherries, the latter summing up a philosophy to which Lynne was more than a little addicted. So she decided to bail out early and return home to surprise her beautiful Gerry, a man she reckoned was just about the best and the sexiest husband a girl could have.

  Full of good and loving intentions she stopped off in Bath to shop for Gerry’s favourite food – fillet steak, which she’d serve with a Béarnaise sauce, baked potatoes
and a tomato salad with mozzarella and follow with his addiction, chocolate mousse – as well as flowers, vintage champagne, and an expensive bottle of claret. With all her goodies packed in the boot of her blue sports car, she had driven smartly off home, easing down only when she reached their automated gates and remotely controlled garage doors, driving in as slowly and as quietly as she could in the hope that if Gerry was around she’d surprise him. The house was so designed that she could unload the shopping straight into the kitchen or if necessary into the deep freeze in the garage, yet another of the luxuries and blessings she thanked her darling husband for.

  So, having happily stowed away her shopping, delighted to be home and feeling suitably primped and pampered, Lynne had gone looking for her husband, who she thought must be somewhere about because his car was also in the garage. Upstairs, she finally went along to their second-floor bedroom suite, with its brilliant yellow Cole’s wallpaper and its balcony overlooking the garden – and surprised him.

  He was in bed with her best friend Maddy, and they were all more than a little surprised. In fact it was hard to tell which of the three of them got the biggest shock.

  Afterwards she had wished she’d been able to think of something crisp and cutting to say, but all she could do was stare in momentary horror before turning on her heel and fleeing back downstairs, her eyes flooding with tears.

  She also found herself wishing she’d made a real scene, but unfortunately making scenes was just as much not her thing as finding something witty and crisp to say at moments of distress. She hadn’t quite said that to Mr Morgan when he had asked her what her reaction had been. She just said she thought that since the deed had already been committed it was better simply to walk away from it in as dignified a manner as possible, although in fact her departure had been well short of that. During her confusion she had lost a shoe on the staircase, which caused her to slip and fall and slide the rest of the way down to the first floor on her backside. Then she had walked into the doorpost, and finally she had managed to engage drive in her car rather than reverse and put a serious dent in her front bumper before regaining her senses and reversing out of the garage, after which she had driven way too fast back into Bath and checked into a hotel in a quiet part of the city for a very long think. At first her thoughts, predictably enough, had all been the heartbroken how could he? stuff, self-pitying reflections that quickly turned to the angry how dare he! bit, and finally became quite practical as soon as she realised that there was no use in thinking that a man who had strayed once would not stray again, and at the earliest opportunity.

  Her mother had always told her, drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, that the rule was one strike and they were out. ‘Believe me, Linnet,’ she’d say. ‘Believe me, girl, it’s the only way.’ And now Lynne – who privately had always thought her mother’s creed to be a little unforgiving – found herself agreeing absolutely with this point of view: one strike and out. Most certainly did she not want to spend the rest of her life pretending not to notice that Gerry was at it again … and again. She’d seen quite enough, up front and very personal, of what infidelity could do to a woman. It had most certainly done it for her poor mother – spelt out in great big capital letters.

  Being married to the two-timing so-and-so that was Lynne’s father had driven her mother quietly mad, no question about it. Possibly its most useful result had been the piece of worldly wisdom she had passed on to her daughter; it was her tragedy that she had learned it too late to put it into practice herself. A life spent always wondering where a man was and why, or whom he was with and why, or simply whether or not he had just told her the truth instead of yet another lie, had without any exaggeration made her mother paranoid. In the end she had not known which way to turn, whom to trust, what was the truth, or whether there was any security to be found anywhere, which was obviously why she had finally chosen to take what she thought to be the only way out.

  ‘I still don’t know why she did it,’ Lynne’s father kept saying at the funeral.

  ‘You might not, Dad,’ Lynne had replied. ‘But everyone else seems to.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning Mum got tired of covering for you, Dad, you know? She just ran out of that kind of energy – always making excuses for why you hadn’t turned up for dinner, or were late back for my birthday, or, even missed your son’s eighteenth altogether, know what I mean? People get fed up with it – worn out, if you’d rather – and it becomes too much. So you decide you can’t go on, so you don’t. Got it? But don’t you worry, Dad. You’re on your own now, and here’s hoping you find out just what it’s like yourself. And who knows? You might end up feeling just the way poor Mum did.’

  Then she’d left him to it, all alone – turned on her heel and walked out of the graveyard and into a brand-new life of her own with Gerry.

  A brand-new joke rather, she had told herself as she sat privately reflecting in the room she’d taken in the Bath hotel, and not exactly a good one. In fact it was a joke in the worst taste possible because even Lynne, who as she herself well knew was not exactly the brightest bunny on the block, now saw that within a few months of her mother’s death she’d fallen into the trap. She had only gone and fallen in love with exactly the same kind of man as her mother had loved, in other words her father. She’d fallen for a two-timing so-and-so who obviously couldn’t wait to get her out of the way so he could lay someone else. As she stared out at the hotel’s fine gardens below her window, her normal resilience had suddenly vanished, the world turning into just one large room with only her in it, a room with no walls and no other people. She found herself sitting in the darkness of space.

  But as the light faded and only the sounds of distant city traffic, punctuated occasionally by the wail of ambulance and police sirens, floated up to her room, she found her centre once again and steel entered her heart.

  ‘Let’s face it, Linnet,’ she told herself, pouring herself a drink from the mini-bar. ‘If and when push comes to get out, maybe it’s better to get tough rather than angry. Being angry and staying angry’s too bloody tiring.’

  Getting tough meant resolving to take her husband Gerry not just for everything he had, but for everything he was even thinking of having. Lynne determined to skin him, skin him so badly that dear sweet little ex-best friend Maddy, she of the innocent eyes and ways and the little girl looks, wouldn’t be able to get a postage stamp off him, let alone another pair of Janet Reger silk knickers.

  So she had steered Mr Morgan’s boat and steered it well, the end result being that her divorce settlement meant Lynne would never have to work at all, at least not in the remotely foreseeable future. The sum settled on her ensured she could not only afford to live, but afford to live very well, enjoying herself in more or less any way she wished. The world was not merely her oyster. As far as she was concerned, it was to be her playground.

  ‘I have to say I feel that their final offer is really quite generous,’ Mr Morgan told Lynne now as she studied the papers in front of her, getting up from his chair and coming round to Lynne’s side of the desk as if to go through each point carefully with her, but really simply so that he could be that little bit closer to her.

  ‘Generous, Mr Morgan?’ Lynne laughed. ‘It’s fab.’

  Mr Morgan nodded, and then sneezed, whipping out a spotless white cotton handkerchief, which had Monday embroidered on it, even though it was now Friday.

  ‘You’ve done a great job, Mr Morgan, really good.’

  ‘Really?’ Mr Morgan replied, putting Monday away and looking down at her over the top of his glasses. ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘I really do. Straight up.’

  ‘I’m so glad. Thank you, Mrs Fortune.’

  ‘I think you’ve done such a good job, in fact’ – Lynne folded the papers up and slipped them into her bag, shutting it with a snap – ‘such a good job that I am going to take you out to celebrate. You were dead right to go for a lump sum, Mr Morgan, reall
y spot on. No haggling and no bargaining, just down and dirty. So come on. A glass of the bubbly certainly beckons.’

  She turned and smiled, the first true and heartfelt smile she had given in months.

  ‘It is a little early in the day for me, Mrs Fortune,’ Mr Morgan said with a sad smile and a series of quick nods to indicate his regret. ‘Still only a quarter to twelve.’

  ‘Yes, well, time to live dangerously, Mr Morgan,’ Lynne told him, on the move now and taking his arm. ‘Now the harvest is in.’

  Leading him past an astonished Miss Fanshawe and a couple obviously waiting for the next appointment, Lynne marched Mr Morgan smartly out of his office and across the road to a wine bar, where she ordered a bottle of their best champagne.

  ‘You know what this means, don’t you, Mr Morgan?’ she asked him, as she sipped her drink, displaying even more leg than Mr Morgan had seen before, thanks to the height of the bar stools. ‘It really means no more worries. It means I do not have to think about where next month’s rent’s coming from; it means I do not have to think I’m going to be forced to find me some rich old sod – sorry, I mean bod – some rich old bod to be nice to, just so that I can keep my head above water.’