Something Dangerous

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘He telephoned you? I don’t believe it,’ said Barty, thinking back to the fateful evening when Abbie had first met Boy. ‘I seem to remember him giving you his card.’

  ‘Well – yes. Yes, all right. I did ring him. But only about the bursary thing.’

  ‘Oh Abbie,’ Barty would have laughed if it hadn’t been so serious. ‘And then what? Did you accept his invitation to dinner when it came? Or did you tell him you couldn’t even consider it not only because he was married but also to one of the Lyttons? Given my relationship with them? I wonder.’

  ‘Oh, Barty, Barty, I’m so sorry.’ Abbie was contrite suddenly, and in tears. ‘You’re the only person I’ve been worrying about. Truly. I don’t care about Venetia, spoilt rich creature with nothing in her head but clothes and the servant problem. No wonder Boy finds her boring—’

  ‘How do you know that? Did he tell you?’

  ‘He – implied it.’

  ‘I see. Well, I don’t see Venetia quite like that. She is rich and she is spoilt. But she’s also rather vulnerable,’ said Barty.

  ‘Oh really?’

  ‘Yes. She was married at nineteen, a mother at nineteen for God’s sake. Boy has fooled around ever since—’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Abbie’s voice was suddenly wary.

  ‘I just – do.’

  ‘You said you didn’t know.’

  ‘No one’s actually told me, if that’s what you mean. But of course I – picked it up. I thought he was behaving better lately actually. Venetia’s seemed happier. Anyway, this isn’t getting us anywhere. But you’re all right, aren’t you Abbie? With your nice little house in Clapham and your Uncle David’s money, I don’t know how you could lie to me about it, I really don’t.’

  ‘It wasn’t a lie,’ said Abbie. ‘I was left some money. I wouldn’t take that sort of money from Boy. I wouldn’t dream of it. But he wanted me to move away from Russell Square for obvious reasons.’

  ‘He might have bumped into me, you mean?’

  ‘Well – yes. So he helped me get a mortgage. I didn’t have quite enough. Nothing more than that.’

  ‘On very favourable terms, I daresay.’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ said Abbie.

  ‘I won’t shut up. I think it’s despicable, what you’re doing. Absolutely despicable.’

  ‘But why?’ Abbie’s expression was genuinely puzzled. ‘I still don’t think I’ve done anything so wrong. Venetia doesn’t know, I’d never tell her, never break her marriage up, I’m probably improving it for her, keeping her husband happy.’

  ‘Oh really,’ said Barty, ‘don’t expect me to fall for that old line. Of course you’re not improving things for her. You’re helping Boy to cheat on her.’

  ‘He’d cheated anyway. You said.’

  ‘And what did he tell you? That he’d never done it before, that his wife didn’t understand him, all those pathetic lies? Oh, I can see, yes, that’s exactly what he did say. God, Abbie, how could you fall for it? He’s such a rotter, such a selfish rotter.’

  ‘I know he is,’ said Abbie unexpectedly, ‘it’s one of the reasons it sort of seemed – all right.’

  ‘And Venetia?’

  ‘I told you. I’d never do anything to hurt her.’

  ‘God help me,’ cried Barty, ‘except sleep with her husband. I would never have believed you were so twisted, Abbie. Or so – bad.’

  Abbie suddenly dropped her head into her hands.

  ‘Stop it,’ she said, ‘please, Barty, stop it. I can’t stand this any longer.’

  She started to cry: heavy, wretched sobs. Barty sat looking at her; she felt no sympathy for her at all. Finally she said, ‘I’m going home. I don’t know what I’m going to do. You’ve made my life absolutely impossible, Abbie. I can’t ever remember feeling so awful.’

  For days she suffered, unable to think what to do. Every time Celia or Oliver called her into one of their offices she expected them to have found out, every time her phone rang, especially at home, she thought it would be Venetia, saying how could you have done this to us all. She didn’t want to see Abbie, she dreaded seeing Boy, most of all she dreaded seeing Venetia. Once Adele phoned her to say she wanted to ask her something and Barty was nearly sick with fright; but it was only to see if she would be able to attend some function. Barty said she wouldn’t and Adele was clearly a bit miffed.

  In the end, worn out, sleepless with indecision and despair and a sense of double betrayal, she found help from the most unlikely source: Sebastian.

  He found her in her office one lunch time, asked her if she’d like to join him for a sandwich and was clearly distressed when she burst into tears.

  ‘Barty, this won’t do. You’re the family rock, whatever is it?’

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ she said in between sobs; he lent her his handkerchief, put his arm round her and when she’d finished crying, insisted she came out with him anyway.

  ‘I suppose it’s some man,’ he said and Barty said yes, it was; he went on lending her clean handkerchiefs of which he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply – ‘I used to lend them to Celia in the days when she cried’ – and saying he really thought she’d feel better if she told him about it: and finally, desperate for advice and comfort, thinking he was the nearest to a dispassionate adviser she had, she did.

  He was wonderful: calm, sensible and hugely pragmatic.

  He told her it was nothing to do with her in the strictest sense, and that she should do absolutely nothing. ‘You can bear no guilt, you have no moral responsibility. There is no point telling Venetia, she will be dreadfully unhappy. Time enough for that when and if she finds out. Which she may never do. You would be amazed how long it can take for this sort of news to arrive at what you might call its true destination. And I’m sure the relationship won’t last very long anyway. I can see you feel betrayed by your friend, but there is little to be gained by berating her. She is a very selfish and self-indulgent young person, hugely attractive as she is.’

  ‘You think so, do you?’ said Barty, blowing her nose.

  ‘Oh I’m afraid so. She’s not just physically attractive, she has that kind of enterprising spirit which demands sexual interest.’ He sighed. ‘In another life, I would have found her intriguing enough to want to know as well.’

  She was silent for a while: then ‘And Boy? Should I tell him? That I know?’

  ‘Absolutely not. That would implicate you dreadfully.’

  ‘And – how do you view him?’ said Barty. She was beginning to feel better.

  ‘Oh, Boy is a law unto himself. Not unlike Abbie in many ways, attractive, charming, selfish, looking for pleasure. Of course he’s a renegade, but – well, in many ways he’s not such a bad husband.’

  ‘Sebastian! I can’t let you get away with that, it’s a terrible thing to say. He’s an adulterer.’

  ‘Not the biggest crime in the book, my darling,’ he said after a moment, ‘really not. As perhaps you will come to appreciate one day.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘He takes care of Venetia, and she is an irritating, rather empty-headed woman, much as I love her. He’s generous, he’s a wonderful father, he’s unfailingly good-natured. Of course in lots of ways, what he’s doing is very wrong. I’m not suggesting he should be honoured for it. Just that it could be worse. Anyway, it certainly isn’t anything to do with you. Your best route, indeed your only one, is to keep quiet, and learn to live with it. It’s a hard lesson to learn, that one, but a crucial one. And if it does come to light, ever, and anyone throws any blame in your direction, I shall make sure they understand and take it back pretty damn quick. All right? Now dry your eyes, I haven’t got any more hankies. And you’d better be getting back to Lyttons, or Celia will be after us both like an elegant avenging fury. I’m in trouble enough already, the book’s terribly late. Normally she doesn’t complain about that, but this time she’s after me. Come on, darling, one day at a time, that’s my motto. Always has been.’

&
nbsp; ‘Oh Sebastian,’ said Barty, giving him a kiss, ‘I do wish—’

  ‘No don’t,’ he said, ‘don’t say it. Please, please, Barty, don’t say that.’

  Celia was trying very hard not to scream. It was driving her mad. The negativity and blindness, the refusal to face facts and see things as they were. She looked at Oliver, wearing the expression she had always most hated, that of vague superciliousness, his mouth folded stubbornly in on itself, his pale-blue eyes meeting hers in absolute defiance, and thought she had never been nearer to just walking away, out of the room, out of Lyttons, out of what was left of her marriage.

  ‘Oliver, please, please at least think about it. Properly.’

  ‘There’s nothing to think about.’

  ‘But there is, there is. Paperback editions are not a ridiculous idea. In fact, I thought of it myself as long ago as the war, when we were so up against it.’

  ‘And you dragged Lyttons down by publishing cheap populist rubbish?’

  ‘I—’ Let that pass, Celia, don’t rise to it, don’t tell him yet again that actually you saved Lyttons. ‘But the time wasn’t right. Now it is. I think we ought to do it.’

  ‘And I don’t. I don’t trust Allen Lane, I’m not at all sure he’s the sort of person I want to go into business with.’

  ‘Well he’s the sort of person I want to go into business with, because he’s brilliant. What harm can these editions do?’

  ‘Immense harm to our main business. Cheapening books, underselling ourselves, we’ve got enough to worry about with this dreadful new book club, the Readers Union, or whatever they’re going to call it, selling books on an instalment plan.’

  ‘Oliver, please. Please just see Allen Lane. Do you really want to be the only publisher who won’t go in with his scheme?’

  ‘I won’t be. Don’t be absurd. Selling books for sixpence.’

  ‘Well Jonathan Cape is going in with him, the publisher of the moment, as The Times called him, if you remember.’

  Oliver looked away; that had hurt. There had been a time when Lyttons had been the publisher of the moment, widely acknowledged as such, the golden early days of Meridian and the Buchanan saga; it had been a great source of pride to him.

  She saw the hurt and moved in on it.

  ‘Do you want to be the publisher of yesterday, Oliver? Do you really?’

  ‘I would prefer that to being a rash, foolhardy publisher, risking the fine traditions that we have always had. Penguin! What a name for an imprint. It’s got nothing to do with books. Unless they are all to be on the subject of natural history.’

  ‘Oh, Oliver! You’re being deliberately dense. Look, why not just a couple of books? We don’t need to go overboard. He’s offering publishers £25 for each title, and then a farthing royalty. He’s going to be publishing ten each month for an indefinite period. It’s going to cause such a stir. And don’t you see, it will introduce people to books, it won’t alienate them.’

  ‘For nothing. Or next to nothing.’

  ‘Oh, please, Oliver. Please.’

  ‘I’m sorry Celia, no. And in case you think I haven’t given it my full attention, I did discuss it with Edgar Greene. And Giles, they both thought it was a very dangerous notion.’

  ‘Edgar Greene! He was born middle-aged. And I don’t recall you using Giles’s disapproval as a reason for not doing something.’

  ‘Giles has a very sound business brain. As I keep telling you. Have you spoken to LM about the paperback books?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She said she wasn’t convinced,’ said Celia reluctantly, ‘but she said she was open to persuasion. But Jay thinks it’s a wonderful idea, she did tell me that—’

  ‘Jay! A boy of twenty-one.’

  ‘He’s the future, Oliver. And I hope he’s going to come and work for Lyttons too.’

  ‘Well maybe he is, but I don’t think we need take a major publishing decision on the strength of his say-so.’

  ‘And Venetia thought it was really clever. She suggested the Buchanans as a sort of set. I thought that was really interesting—’

  ‘Celia, when did Venetia display the slightest interest in or instinct for publishing?’

  ‘Actually,’ said Celia, ‘several times lately. In fact I’m beginning to wonder—’

  ‘If you mean that absurd idea of a Lyttons book club, I have never heard such nonsense. Totally impractical.’

  ‘Gollancz are doing one.’

  ‘I am aware of that, Celia. Dreadful rubbish. No, I’m sorry, I can’t agree to it. Now I have a great deal to do. If you will excuse me, my dear.’

  Celia walked out of his office, slamming the door. She had been slamming that door for a great deal of her life; it seemed to sum up the vast and increasingly unbridgeable gulf between his vision of publishing and Lyttons’ place in it and her own.

  Luc and Adele were walking hand in hand down the Champs-Élysées; it was autumn, and the leaves were beginning very gently to turn. The light, more tender and gentle than in the spring or summer, flattered Paris, softened it: not that it needed flattering, Adele thought, its beauty was extraordinary, the intimacy of its small and charming side streets set close to the sudden, dazzling splendour of its open spaces, the bustling pavement life lived out against the grace and elegance of its arcades and squares, and the great river winding through it, so much a part of its beauty, always present as somehow the Thames was not. She was in love with the city as much as she was with Luc, it had become her emotional home; she told Luc that as they sat down at a café, and he ordered her the grand café au lait that was still her favourite, she had been unable to convert to the small pot of blackness that was Parisian coffee.

  He kissed her and said the city suited her and she suited it, they were equally beautiful; she smiled at him, rather helplessly.

  She was absolutely and passionately in love with him; she could not imagine even the possibility of a life without him at its centre. She had set aside all caution, all moral scruples, all her personal ambition, albeit modest; she did not care any more that he had a wife, a wife moreover to whom (he explained to her as gently as he could) he must remain married for the rest of his life. It having been a Catholic marriage.

  She knew there was no question even of any kind of discreet formal arrangement. As long as she remained with Luc and in love with him, she was agreeing to something that she would have thought quite absurd only a few months ago, and a situation that her sister considered incomprehensible, that her parents found distressing, and that caused her friends to doubt her sanity.

  ‘What you don’t understand,’ she said to all of them patiently, ‘is that Luc is what I want. All I want, all I’ve ever wanted. It’s no use me demanding he divorces his wife and marries me, because he won’t. So either I live without him or carry on like this. And I don’t want to live without him.’

  She was, to an extent, a victim of the French culture, and of love and she settled into making the very best of it; but when she was being most honest with herself, she also knew that Luc was taking advantage of her situation, of the unlikelihood that she would move permanently to Paris and make her home there, that an important part of her life was still based in London. She knew (and Venetia had underlined this) that she was hardly conducting her life as a modern young woman should, that she had apparently laid aside dignity, self-respect, independence even. It meant very little to her; the only thing she cared about was Luc, being with him, enjoying him, learning about him. That he was undoubtedly selfish, selfabsorbed, duplicitous, mattered very little to her either; nor even that he was inclined to complacency, a quality which in other people she had always especially disliked. He was as he was, and she loved him, able to set aside his vices entirely, and consider only his virtues. She was unable, even to Venetia, to explain quite how this had come about; she had met other men, more charming, better looking, certainly more suitable than Luc, who had not had this effect on her. She knew that from the
time she had first set eyes on him, he had changed her in some strange, important way, she had become a different person, and he was essential to that person and to everything she thought and did. She supposed that might be one definition of love.

  She tried not to consider the future; she had set aside the past. She was no longer Adele Lytton, famous beauty, adored daughter, social success, brilliant stylist, sought after by the finest fashion editors, the cleverest photographers, she was simply Adele Lytton who loved Luc Lieberman and all the rest was of no interest to her at all.

  She did still work of course, would have found her situation harder to cope with had she not. She worked for Cedric, and for other London photographers and, quite often these days, in Paris, for the fashion and beauty editors of French Vogue and Femina. It was a fortunate time for her: the endless pages of fashion illustration so beloved of editors for the last twenty years were beginning to be replaced by photographs: Adele found herself working for freelance photographers like Horst and Durst, Hoyningen-Huene and the revolutionary Englishman Norman Parkinson. Parkinson and Durst, it was said, had taken Paris fashion on to the streets, they showed models getting in and out of cars, sitting at the pavement cafés, posed on the Parisian skyline; Parkinson had most famously photographed the American model Lisa Fonssagrives apparently dangling from a rooftop, the Eiffel Tower just behind her.

  Fashion had become altogether more accessible; the great Chanel had led the movement into real life, and now even Vogue began to cater for the mass fashion market, talking about such unthinkables as clothes for the working girl, and dressing on a budget. It was an extremely exciting time to be in her business.

  Adele had no proper base in Paris, but stayed in hotels when necessary, spending a fortune on fares; in London she still lived in Cheyne Walk.