It was all too close to home, for heaven’s sake. Hadn’t he been duped himself, in the name of love? Crawling after one woman at Croft’s, playing truant for another, saddled with children who weren’t his. Even Laura guessed. He had tried to discuss Magda with her on the drive down to Guildford, but every time she said ‘your daughter’, he could hear the sarcasm glittering in her voice. Was every feckless father caught like this? You couldn’t win. If Magda really were his child, then he was an incestuous swine to take her to his bed in fantasy, and if she weren’t, then he’d not only been cuckolded, but squandered fifteen years of payments for her, in guilt and hard cash. The bills were getting steeper all the time. The nuns had sent the first account in advance, with extra charges for riding, tennis coaching, catechism classes. It hurt to have to pay for religious indoctrination. Though it wasn’t the money he minded – he’d pay for anything, so long as he was sure the child was his. But how, in Christ’s name, could any man be sure? If even Frances slept around, what hope was there that Piroska had been faithful?
Well, he wouldn’t be fooled much longer. He’d contact Piroska and insist she took her daughter back. It was not impossible. She’d already written and hinted that there were thorns in her Hungarian bed of roses. Miklos’ so-called wealth had materialized as three chickens and a goat, and the grandma was clinging grimly on to her life and property. Piroska needed cash. All he had to do was to make his cheque conditional. Bribery cost less than boarding school.
Maybe he’d even phone this evening, demand immediate action. He was weary of all the fuss and dawdle of foreign postal systems, the endless problems with a kid who had wrecked his marriage and shattered his self-esteem. He’d already lost Frances on account of her, and would lose Laura next, if he didn’t get things moving. Magda must be transferred to Hungary – and fast. It was the only possible solution.
True, there were still all the problems they’d started with – schools, foreign languages, housing, Miklos. But Magda would cope. She’d have to. She was so damned miserable already, a move could only benefit her. He’d barter a generous cash allowance for her immediate summons to Budapest. A telegram, perhaps? Yes, why not? A telegram from Piroska sent direct to the school. Piroska was hopeless at letter-writing, and Miklos might even talk her out of it while she sat chewing on her pen. But a telegram was instant and dramatic. He could more or less compose it for her himself.
‘Found new flat and fine school. Stop. Longing to have you join us. Stop. Come immediately.’ Not that he wanted to deceive the child. Perhaps he could find the flat and school himself, write to the Embassy, pull a few strings. Impossible – a Communist country, and Miklos breathing down his neck …
‘Miklos moved out permanently. Miss you darling. Plenty of room with Grandma for the two of us.’
No, he couldn’t lie to the kid. Christ! It was complicated. He couldn’t even concentrate, with those cretinous lovelords leaping about the stage, ranting on about Fevers In The Blood and Love Learned In A Woman’s Eye. He’d rather compose a thousand sonnets than wrestle with the guilt and deception of a dozen pre-paid words. Whatever he did, someone would be hurt.
He’d always prided himself on coping calmly in a crisis. This gibbering indecision was completely out of character. It was women again, wrecking his system, undermining his strengths. Was there really any need for frenzied haste and subterfuge? After all, the kid was safe at school. Couldn’t she stay there, and let the nuns put up with her, while he sorted out his other problems? He could wait till the Christmas holidays and take her to Budapest himself, in mid-December.
Frances would be four months pregnant by December – an obscene little bulge for everyone to jeer at. God Almighty! Every woman should be sterilized at birth. Laura was right, as she was so often. Of course it was safer never to risk a child. Perhaps he should settle for Laura and be done with it. No possibility of babies, then. A neat, uncomplicated, adult life, drawn up like a contract. Laura was a skilled businesswoman and would appreciate a fair deal, spelt out in all the small print. They could even live abroad, to avoid the scandal; retreat to a tax haven with a decent climate, and combine financial advantages with a quiet life. He didn’t want marriage, not yet. He needed time, and one last appeal to Frances. But meanwhile, Laura must be primed and feted, kept in hand as a reserve currency.
If those damn-fool lords could woo and win a woman, then so could he. Shakespeare had lavished twenty thousand words on nothing else. There was Berowne, the cynic, even he converted now, pouring out his love to a cardboard tree. He tried to concentrate. If he couldn’t write his own lines, the least he could do was listen to someone else’s. It was all part of the wooing. He leant back in his seat and closed his eyes.
There was only one interval. A visiting troupe of lutenists were playing Elizabethan songs in the corner of the still closed and shuttered bar. Laura stopped to listen.
‘I suppose they’re trying to compensate for a shoddy production,’ she whispered. ‘Total miscasting all round. Don’t you agree, Charles?’
He muttered something he half recalled from the Sunday Times review and tried to lure her past the countertenor, who was bewailing the pains of Love, in yellow velvet doublet and laddered hose.
‘I mean, fancy casting the King as a middle-aged bookworm, in spectacles. What’s the point of his renouncing love, if he’s past it anyway? Ice cream, darling?’
‘No thanks. Fresh air.’ He must entice her out into the garden, safely removed from all refreshments and distractions. She was still gabbling on about unsubtle lighting and anachronistic costumes. He chose the most secluded seat and enthroned her on it. They could hear the strains of the lute music echoing from the upstairs window. It should have been an idyll – river rippling in front of them, feet wreathed in flowers, ears lapped in love songs. But somehow, it was only another cardboard set, another bad production. The sky was pock-marked with clouds, the river sluggish and sludge-brown, brash French marigolds shrieking at shocking-pink petunias. He turned his back on the monstrous modern building glaring at them from across the river, and tried to blot out everything but Laura’s pale white hand.
‘Laura, darling, why don’t you wear your new ring?’
He removed the silver band from its plush-lined box and held it out to her. Berowne would have gone down on one knee, but this was stockbroker Surrey, not rutting Navarre.
She wasn’t listening, anyway. ‘What do you think of the Rosaline?’ she asked, swatting at a wasp. ‘A little too coy for my taste. But then, when you’ve seen Dorothy Tutin in the role, no one else quite measures up.’
‘No, I suppose not.’ He slipped the ring on the safe, largest finger of Laura’s non-marriage hand. The left hand, the dangerous hand, was already weighted down with Clive’s booty.
‘The set’s not bad. Though I had my doubts about all those dead leaves. I suppose they’re meant to symbolize the transience of love.’
Charles held on to the finger, pressed the tiny scratchy diamonds with his thumb. How could she keep jawing about symbolism, when he was more or less proposing to her? ‘Look, Laura, I want to make it up to you, not just with theatres and presents, but with time. You’re right – I have neglected you. But I intend to change.’
Laura had plucked a blade of grass and was tickling his face with it. Her laugh was like a scalpel cutting through his skull.
‘Good God, Charlie, so love’s labour isn’t lost! I do believe wily old Shakespeare’s made a convert of you. You sound worse than those love-lorn lords!’
‘Laura, I’m serious. You matter to me, darling, and I want to prove it. I know I’ve taken you for granted, but things will be different now. Look, why don’t we try and go away together. How about a weekend in Paris? Sometime in October, when the crowds have gone?’ If he promised her Paris, she might even swap the Mirabelle for Oppenheimer, this all important Saturday.
The wasp was wooing Laura from the other side. She sprang up, to dislodge it from her hair. ‘I’m afraid it�
�s a little late, my love.’
He stared at her scarlet back. She was wearing all red, too harsh for the faded afternoon. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s a very tedious journey from Johannesburg to Paris, darling.’
‘Johannesburg?’
‘Yes, my sweet. I didn’t really intend to tell you, in the middle of a matinée, but your sudden protestations of devotion have rather forced my hand.’
Charles made an angry swipe at the wasp. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘Relax, darling. They only sting you if you needle them. We’re emigrating to South Africa.’
‘Emigrating?’
‘Yes, next month. Houghton Drive, just north of town. Five bedrooms and a swimming pool.’
‘We, who’s we? What in God’s name are you saying?’
‘Well, me and Clive, of course. Who else?’
‘But I thought … Look, Laura, this is absolutely nonsensical! You always told me you had no future with Clive.’
‘Poor love! I have been disloyal to him, haven’t I? You’ve always encouraged me, but that’s only natural, I suppose. Clive’s very easy to insult – he’s also very easy to get along with. I never realized that before. Funnily enough, it was you who made me see it. Clive loves me, Charles. He needs me. You don’t need anyone. You use them. I don’t exist for you as a person; nor does Frances, or Magda, or that poor, godforsaken brat Frances plans to bring into this wicked world. They’re just inconveniences to you, cyphers to be slotted into your electronic calculator and assessed for their investment potential, or their scrap value.’ She was still stroking the grass across his chin, cruel steel against soft flesh.
‘When Magda loused you up, you handed me my cards. You didn’t need me any more. Or, even if you did, I might prove dangerous. You never wondered how I might feel about it. In fact, you drove me back to Clive. It’s probably better, that way. You stay with your precious daughter, and I’ll stay with my old man.’
Daughter! That tone-deaf, blue-jeaned urchin who had lost him everything – his wife, his pride, his sex, his self-respect – and now Laura. Turned him into a cuckold and a laughing stock. He could see her now, picking her nose on his gilded Grecian couch, disposing of her chewing-gum on the underbelly of his Sheraton writing-table, dissecting meatballs with her fingers, dribbling gravy down her breasts, rinsing out her stained and bloody panties in his own private bathroom. This was the brat who had driven away his mistress, his voluptuous, witty, stylish, two-faced turncoat of a superwoman, who had the cheek, the insensitivity, to betray him with her own husband.
Well, she’d have to go, his ‘daughter’. He’d had more than he could take. His so-called flesh and blood would be sent packing to her mother as soon as he could conceivably arrange it. He’d phone Piroska the moment he got home and more or less command her to send that telegram. Why should he fret any longer over threatened O-levels and damaged lives, lie awake agonizing over near-miss abortions, when the kid was almost certainly somebody else’s? Magda could no more share his chromosomes than Clive could share a bed with dazzling Laura. It was time that Jewish dwarf took on the burden. If he’d fathered the brat, well, let him worry about her. Only he’d better do it back in Budapest. Because that’s where Magda was going, as fast as a telegram could take her.
When he opened his eyes, the kid had already gone, packed off on an aeroplane, deported on a train. There was only Laura standing over him, tickling his neck with her cruel grass rapier. He almost slapped it off.
‘I simply don’t understand you, Laura. This doesn’t make any sense at all. You always made out your … your husband was some sort of spastic mooncalf!’
‘Come, my sweet, you’re exaggerating. I admit he’s not as bright as you are, but that’s probably an advantage. And – no – his seduction technique isn’t quite as slick and assured, but he’s loyal and loving and a lot of other boring, dependable, old-fashioned things.’
Charles snatched the grass from her hand and crushed it into pulp. ‘Seduction? What d’you mean? You always told me Clive was impotent.’
‘Did I, darling? Or was that what you wanted to believe? Even now, you’re not listening. The only word you heard was ‘‘seduction’’. You’re still comparing penises with Clive. Perhaps that’s what all affairs are based on – a sort of eternal cock fight, the lover gaining inches on the spouse. Well, I’ve finished with affairs. I’m off to Jo’burg to queen it on my floodlit patio, with my half dozen coloured maids. I might even go in for a family myself – adopt a little Bantu baby. I have to fill those five large bedrooms somehow.’
‘You’re joking …’ He couldn’t take it in – Clive screwing her, Clive zipping off to Jo’burg, Clive winning. Laura winning. Slipping in her insults, slapping him down.
‘About the adoption, yes. You know how I feel about kids. Clive and I don’t want any. Nor do you and Frances – if only you could see it. That’s another reason I’ve finished with you, Charles. I rather despise a man who doesn’t know what he wants, or where the hell he’s going. Clive’s always been clear about the basics. He wanted me – and not much else. No kids, no other woman on the side, no driving ambition. You want everything, Charles, and you’ll land up with nothing.’
The phrases slashed like knives. There was a tight ball, spring-coiled in his skull, a black sun scorching through his body, blistering his life, black humiliation mixed with fury.
Laura had sat down again, and was staring at her sparkling middle finger. ‘Funny, really,’ she taunted, in her Judas-kiss voice. ‘This is what they call an eternity ring. Perhaps you didn’t realize?’
He was silent, fighting a strong urge to tear the ring off, rip her strutting husband from her arms, blitz the prissy, preening house in Houghton Drive.
She was picking daisies now, white petals on her scarlet lap, pretending she was presiding at a simple country picnic, rather than a massacre. ‘How long is eternity for you, Charles?’
He didn’t answer. Two-faced hypocrite! She’d gulped down all the presents, grown fat and glossy on his jewels, allowed him to slip a ring on her finger, the very moment she was leaving him. He had given up a precious working day, simply so she could restock her wardrobe for Johannesburg; actually paid for the lingerie she was to seduce her husband in! And there she was, sitting demurely making a daisy chain, slitting the stems with her cruel crimson talons, in the same way she’d ripped his life apart, and smiling as she handed him the rejects.
It was all the more intolerable, because there was some truth in what she said. If only she’d accused him of stinginess or stupidity, he could have shrugged it off, but Laura had stabbed him in his most defenceless places. He could feel his anger ticking like a time-bomb. He must defuse it before it exploded in her face, blew up the whole of Guildford. Never before had he allowed himself to get so close to danger, to lose his self-control, throw away his shield and his defences. He shut his eyes, tried to concentrate only on the rhythm of his breathing, to count the notes in the rapture of a thrush’s song.
Laura’s voice had crept inside the song, and was wrenching it out of key. She was leaning over him, fastening the completed daisy chain around his neck. ‘Let’s not quarrel,’ she murmured, letting both hands tease and linger. ‘I still fancy you, you know – even in a twenty-minute interval, surrounded by Guildford’s geriatrics, and despite everything I’ve said. Crazy, isn’t it?’
He felt a twinge of answering desire, clogged with only half-extinguished fury. Laura’s thighs were spread apart on the seat, the flimsy fabric of her skirt straining over them. She wasn’t just a bitchy tongue – there was a body attached to it, and it was the body he’d desired in the beginning. He’d first seen her sitting in the Golf Club, flirting with a bar stool, her long legs looped around the rungs, taunting him in black stockings. Today, the stockings were a paler shade of oyster. He placed his hand on her thigh, felt it warm and silky through her skirt. His head was a spinning roulette wheel. He hardly knew which colour
would come up – the scarlet of desire, or the furious black of resentment and revenge. Even now, there was still some tantalizing overlay of Magda. He could feel the child underneath his hands, the long, sloping insolence of her legs, the swelling breasts pushing out her shirt, the neat, tight, dangerous, virgin bottom. Chewing-gum and nose-pickings hardly mattered any more – his hands were further down.
He sprang up from the seat, as if it had caught fire. Magda must go, if only for her own protection. If truth could be told in a telegram, it wasn’t Miklos who’d be cited, but his own vile, unpardonable obsession:
‘Magda, leave at once! Your brute of a father desires you.’
Except he wasn’t her father. He couldn’t be. Fathers didn’t feel such lust and murderous violence towards their daughters; want to fondle them and rape them, then bash their bloody brains in. He shuddered, felt like some foul debris chucked into a wastebin. Back in his office, he could still parade with rod and sword, still receive homage as monarch and Führer, but closed in the filthy dungeon of his mind, he was only chaff and scum. He was so exhausted, he felt as if he’d lived and laboured through all the centuries from Shakespeare’s to his own, yet this was a day off, a spree, a jaunt, a relaxation.
The interval was almost over. The lutenists had worked through Dowland, Byrd and Campian, and were now playing songs from the finale of the play itself.
When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight …
That’s all it was, paint. Even this theatre garden was plasticine and pigment. The tenor was flat in the upper register, the baritone had acne. He shaded his eyes from the pitiless purple-pink of the petunias, longed to lie down on the ground, and rot back into dust; or, at least, have Frances’ frail, familiar form beside him, her small, soft hands curled around his misery.
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