She wondered if Roland Grant would press her to make some sort of commitment or, failing that, at the very least offer an indication of his hopes and intentions. But he seemed to pick up on her troubled indecisiveness and in the end made no attempt to put her under further pressure.
He took her hand in his before he left, thanking her for her hospitality, making it seem as though this evening had been nothing but a delightful social occasion.
Saul, as she had expected, declined to make any further comment. After switching off all the lights he sat down at the piano and began to play Debussy’s Clair de Lune. The wistful evocative melody stole through the silent darkened room.
Tara stood beside the window and watched his long fingers caressing the gleaming keys. Her eyes travelled upwards to move over his remote, carved features, pearled now in the moonlight. She felt a tremble of pure ecstasy. The continued mystery of Saul Xavier bound her even closer.
Later he made love to her with exquisite gentleness. She could think of nothing but his nearness.
She would think about her career the next day.
CHAPTER 19
The prospect of lunching with Saul at The Ritz gave Georgiana a good deal of anticipatory pleasure. It was some weeks since he had been in touch with her and she had begun to feel neglected.
In the beginning, just after he had cast her off, he had been very careful to maintain regular contact. He had made it his business to keep checking that she was not lonely, that she had enough social engagements and little trips to Europe and America to keep her happy. In fact it had seemed to Georgiana that he had cared for her well-being with a loving concern he had not shown her for some years.
She had liked the consideration and attention. It had been like a warm blanket of love and appreciation settling delicately around her. The pain of his rejection had begun to ease. And since she came to know Tara and darling little baby Alessandra she had discovered an unexpected new interest in life. There was such a lot she could show them – about being a female. Such a lot she could give.
Hunting out amusing little items of clothing for Tara had been a thoroughly enjoyable pastime, although it had not improved Tara’s taste in choosing for herself. And apart from buying chunky bottles of heady fragrances and lacy underwear, she showed no inclination to spend a lot of money – a diversion Georgiana had always found most delightful.
But it was little Alessandra who provided the most pleasure and satisfaction. Georgiana spent hours searching out clothes and books and toys for the baby. Lavish parcels were regularly despatched to the Oxfordshire house. And Tara always responded with a charming and grateful letter.
But as Georgiana’s links with the baby and Tara developed so her contact with Saul decreased. Georgiana knew that he was busy. She had read in the newspapers that he was to conduct several concerts at the Proms and planning to make a series of films with the Tudor Philharmonic playing complete cycles of the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies.
Even so, she was offended and troubled that she he had ignored her for so long. For whilst it was true that she was used to living her own life, and that she was more than relieved to have had the threat of sexual expectations finally lifted from her, she was still his wife. He still owed her some consideration.
Nevertheless being taken to The Ritz seemed some sort of olive branch, and she prepared for the event with great care. Facing him across the table, enjoying the soft fall of aquamarine blue silk around her flawless, toned body, she noted that he looked drained and tense. Older.
‘You will wear yourself out,’ she told him.
He made a low sound in his throat. It could have meant anything.
It would be all the sex, Georgiana decided. She thought about her husband’s sex life a great deal, gaining a quaking thrill of pleasure from imagining him and Tara in the act of congress. Tara was an earthy type of girl, with her strong short-nailed fingers and her small bosomy body. There was something primitive and basic about her. She was the sort of female designed for all the grunting, thrashing about and sweating of sex. Whereas she, Georgiana, was created from finer more delicate fibre. And pleased to be so.
‘You should take care,’ she said to Saul with a knowing smile. ‘Middle-aged men can die of heart attacks in trying to keep pace with a young girl.’
Dr Denton encouraged her in this new frankness. He had told her that she should give herself permission to listen to her inner thoughts, not to be afraid of them. Especially the thoughts about sex.
She could tell that Saul was startled, but he covered up well. ‘It’s kind of you to be worried about my health,’ he said drily. ‘But there is no need.’
He fell into silence. They progressed from the fish to the duck. He was not eating much, she noticed.
‘I want to give Alessandra a very special present for her birthday,’ Georgiana said. She began to tell him about her searches in little antique shops for Georgian jewellery. There was a chain and a pendant she had seen. It would make the perfect start to a collection that could continue through Alessandra’s childhood and youth.
Saul’s face went blank for a few seconds. Then he smiled at her patiently. ‘There is no need for you to buy Alessandra extravagant presents.’
‘I want to. There is nothing wrong in that,’ Georgiana told him with sweet conviction. ‘She should have some very special presents on her first birthday.’
‘Spend the money on yourself,’ he said dismissing the subject with that floppy wave of his hand she had seem him employ to dismiss countless orchestras on countless occasions. His smile indicated that the subject was really of little importance or interest to him.
Georgiana was not dismayed. She would do exactly as she liked.
The pudding arrived. Some exquisite dessert wine also.
‘Georgiana, I want a divorce,’ Saul said softly.
Georgiana froze. Her eyes widened and the irises shivered. Slowly she picked up her spoon and inserted a blob of lemon soufflé. She decided to say nothing.
‘Did you hear me?’ His eyes were hard.
She nodded.
‘Well?’
She shrugged. Ate another spoonful of soufflé. If she focused carefully on savouring the lemon tang, then the words Saul wanted to drop into her ears would simply float away into the air. They would have no meaning, no consequence.
‘Tara is expecting another baby,’ he stated evenly. He said these words in such a way as to suggest that they explained everything.
Her eyes slid from his in panic. Her breathing became jagged and jerky. Tara was having another baby. Georgiana must have a divorce. As simple as that.
Georgiana saw splinters of iridescent red light dance in front of her eyes. She blinked, feeling her insides swoop and glide in dizzy confusion. She stared at her plate, examining the scrolls of silver chasing on the handle of the spoon she had just laid down.
She screwed up her eyes, following the lines of one of the scrolls and detecting the shape of a feather. A perfectly symmetrical feather, the fronds precisely balancing on each side of the central spine. Beautiful, orderly and perfect. The red lights began to fade, and after a few moments went away altogether. She continued with her pudding.
The muscles in Saul’s jaw twitched with irritation. ‘Georgiana, you can’t just ignore this.’
She looked across to him and smiled, her blue gaze wide and fixed. ‘No,’ she said, agreeable and vague.
He sighed, reining in his mounting anger. ‘Do you want time to think about it?’ he asked. ‘I shall be more than generous with the settlement. You would be a very rich woman.’
She gave another shrug. Money was not an issue. She had always had plenty. ‘Yes, I will think about it,’ she said finally. She was pleased with the dignified way she had said that. Dr Denton would have been proud of her.
‘Thank you for the lunch,’ she told Saul as she offered him her cheek to kiss as they prepared to part.
‘And you will consider what I have said very seriously,’
he urged.
‘Oh yes.’ She laid an immaculately manicured hand on his arm and then she was gone.
Tara prowled the house; opening doors, going into rooms, coming out again, picking up a book, putting it down again. Settling to nothing.
She felt cruelly trapped – snared, netted and caged. She did not want to be pregnant again, not just now. She knew the exact moment of the conception. A new career and a new baby had been launched on the same fate-laden night – that of her concert debut.
She wondered if Saul had engineered it deliberately, recalling the roller coaster sex they had shared that night when she had been so swept away by his passion she had forgotten everything else, including birth control.
And if he had planned things to happen this way she had to admire his tactics. If he had wanted to keep her tied to him at home he could hardly have been more successful. Being pregnant, feeling sick for half the day and finding it hard to keep up her practice schedule had made the prospect of a budding career as a solo violinist vanish into a distressingly distant future.
Moreover her doctor had advised her against having sex, at least until the first few months were safely past.
Life was looking rather less rosy than it had for some time.
‘He wants to cut me out of his life,’ Georgiana told Dr Denton. ‘He can’t bear it that I’m friendly with the girl and wanting to buy the baby presents.’
Dr Denton pondered on Georgiana’s persistence in placing herself at the centre of things, how it did not occur to her to consider her husband’s many other motives in wanting a divorce. All those hours the doctor had spent with her and still she was as purely and unequivocally self-centred as a small child.
Whilst he waited for Georgiana to expand on her theme he took the opportunity to admire once again her elegant streamlined body which transformed even the simplest clothes into haute couture. He imagined the way heads would turn when she entered a room. She had exceptional physical beauty. And he was sure that what she possessed beneath her clothes was equally inspiring.
This afternoon her blonde hair was like an incandescent stream of gold lit from behind by the summer sun. She wore a dress of soft silk chiffon in a delicate pattern of fawn and ivory swirls. Her eyes were shaded with soft russet shadow and her shoes, lying beneath the chaise, were an absurd confection of creamy coloured straps perched on five-inch heels. Around her neck was a single serpentine chain of gold. She epitomized the essence of restrained good taste.
‘How can it be bad to buy presents?’ she continued. ‘My parents used to say giving beautiful presents was a way of demonstrating love. I remember once when we went to the seaside house in Cornwall my mother bought me a wonderful doll that walked and talked. It was to keep me company so that I would never be lonely in my strange bed when I went to sleep at night.’
‘You were their child, Georgiana,’ Dr Denton said softly. ‘That is why they gave you beautiful presents.’
‘Alessandra is Saul’s child,’ she replied. ‘And I am his wife.’ Her thin fingers plucked nervously at the folds of her skirt, betraying considerable agitation. The skin between her eyebrows puckered as they met in a frown of puzzlement. It was as though she were straining to hear whispered words that were just too faint to comprehend.
‘Tara is having another child,’ she announced suddenly. ‘Alessandra will have a little brother or sister.’
There was a silence which lasted for seven minutes. Dr Denton timed the period and declined to say anything. The light on his tape machine winked as it recorded emptiness.
‘Tara played at the Royal Albert Hall a few weeks ago,’ Georgiana volunteered. ‘People say she was quite good.’
Dr Denton saw an involuntary spasm cross her face. Despair? Envy? True pain?
‘But they say she would be nowhere if it wasn’t for Saul pulling strings for her behind the scenes.’
‘And what does Georgiana say?’
Another long silence. ‘I wasn’t there,’ she said eventually in a flat voice. She rubbed her hands across her forehead. ‘Saul’s agent wants her to build a career, to play at concerts all over the world.’
‘How does that make you feel?’ Dr Denton asked.
She appeared not to have heard his question. Her breathing was light and shallow: she was almost panting. Her fingers folded into tight balls and kneaded her closed eyelids. ‘I can see lights,’ she said. ‘They’re red and blue and gold – furry like the lights my mother hung on our Christmas tree at home.’
‘Do you have a headache?’ Dr Denton asked.
She shook her head. In a sudden, entirely uncharacteristic surge of activity she swung her legs over the side of the chaise and stood upright. Beads of sweat glistened on her face and the skin of her forearms. ‘May I have a drink of cold water please?’
‘Of course.’ Dr Denton crossed to the small refrigerator in a corner of the room and took out a bottle of mineral water. He filed a glass and gave it to her.
She drained it in one gulp.
He had not seen her so agitated before, flushed and in some disarray with her skirt tucked up nearly to her buttocks where the fabric still connected with the edge of the chaise. The sight of her like this had the effect of making him experience very unprofessional feelings towards her.
‘I think you should come again tomorrow,’ he told her.
She turned to look at him. She was like someone returning from a long airplane flight, disoriented and temporarily detached from reality. ‘Yes. Yes, I will.’
Sometimes she was astonishingly obedient Dr Denton thought. And very suggestible. It would be the simplest thing in the world to put her under hypnosis and seduce her right here in his consulting room.
‘You are very safe, Georgiana,’ he would tell her. ‘With someone who loves you dearly. Who would never do you any harm.’
He imagined himself talking very softly to her, crooning and rhythmic, his voice a mistily penetrating anaesthetic. He saw himself slipping his hand along the length of her calf, over her knee, up the taut slender thigh. Reaching beyond, finding the moist rosy flesh. Dropping words into her ear that would make that flesh wet with longing.
The thought provided him with some mild amusement directed against his own shockingly salacious feelings towards his most beautiful, supposedly frigid client. Feelings, of course, which must remain secret and undemonstrated.
He looked at Georgiana with a mingle of professional and personal concern. ‘Are you feeling better now?’
She had wriggled her dress down, stroked the folds into immaculate smoothness. She was slipping into her shoes, her long slender feet like those of a ballet dancer. She looked up at him and he was surprised to see her face suddenly transformed. A smile curved her lips and her eyes shone with an excitement and purpose he had never seen before.
‘Yes,’ she said simply.
‘Would you like my secretary to call a taxi?’
‘No. I think I’ll walk?’
‘Are you sure you are all right?’ He was startled to register the depth of concern he felt. Even though now she was smiling and outwardly quite recovered.
She gave a little chuckle and shook her head as though to say that there was no need to be worried on her behalf. As her fingers closed around the brass doorknob, she turned to him and said, ‘I’ve just thought of the most wonderful present to give Alessandra on her birthday.’
CHAPTER 20
‘God, I hate being a bloody brood mare again!’ Tara said, raging as she surveyed the mouth-watering buffet that Mrs Lockwood had prepared and felt the immediate need to throw up.
‘My darling, you’re such a little lioness when you’re pregnant.’ Saul came up behind her and slipped his arms around her hips, sliding them upwards and cradling her breasts with tender hands.
She wrenched herself from his grasp. ‘I’m going to be sick,’ she gulped, desperately swallowing down the wave of nausea. She raced to the bathroom and hung over the bowl retching. Only a thin white dribble emerged
but she felt bruised as if she had coughed up a three-course dinner.
Groaning, she turned the washbasin taps on full, scooping up handfuls of fresh water to splash over her face and wash away all the grim traces. The face looking at her from the mirror was putty grey and decidedly unappealing. The symptoms of this pregnancy were far more pronounced than her former one. Already her waist had disappeared and her stomach had begun to swell. Her breasts seemed as big and hard as grapefruits.
Heaving a sigh she squirted herself liberally with Miss Dior and went back to the drawing room which was now filling up with guests. Xavier had arranged a special party to celebrate the Tudor Philharmonic’s triumphant appearances at the Proms which had been ecstatically received by both the audience and the critics. His ambitions for the orchestra were turning into reality. Engagements and recording contracts were rolling in. And the sales on existing recordings had soared, bringing handsome financial reward to the players. The company was in decidedly buoyant mood. Tara glanced out of the window to count the number of Mercedes.
In addition to the players Xavier had invited a number of prominent soloists: a flamboyant bearded flautist, a brilliant bald cellist and a gorgeous Danish soprano. Tara went forward to greet them all. She was becoming skilled at playing the charming hostess.
Around ten o’clock when the consumption of supper was in full swing, the manager of the hired caterers and waiting staff glided softly to Tara’s side, whispering to her that there was an important phone call. She looked at him, startled.
‘Mr Roland Grant,’ he told her.
She picked up the phone in the oak-lined study at the back of the house. ‘Roland?’
‘Tara – I’m so sorry to disturb you at this hour.’
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