The Dilemma

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘She sounds very interesting. I’d like to meet her.’

  ‘Why? I’m sure it could be arranged.’

  ‘Well you know what they say.’

  ‘No,’ she laughed. ‘What do they say?’

  ‘They say first look at the mother,’ he said, his eyes half serious, probing into hers, and then in a gesture that was almost shocking in its unexpectedness reached out and very briefly touched her cheek. ‘And now I must go.’

  She sat staring after him, feeling quite extraordinarily disturbed.

  Next day, a phone call announced some flowers for her in Reception; she went down to two dozen red roses. Pinned to them, in his own writing, was a card from Bard Channing. ‘I’d like to proceed to a second interview.’

  Francesca crushed an impulse to phone immediately, hung on until the end of the day. Then: ‘The flowers are lovely,’ she said, ‘but I really am suited. I told you. Thank you anyway.’

  ‘I have another job for you,’ he said.

  ‘I know, but I don’t want it.’

  ‘Not that one. In my company, in the advertising department. We could talk about it. Over lunch perhaps. Tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m busy for lunch. I’m sorry.’

  ‘All right. Some other time, then.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  He was hugely dangerous. She thought of his hand on her cheek and longed to see him again; she said goodbye and put the phone down quickly.

  Two weeks went past, then: ‘Francesca? This is Bard Channing.’ ‘Oh – hallo, Mr Channing. I don’t really – ’

  ‘Please call me Bard. You calling me Mr Channing makes me feel old. Which you no doubt think I am.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Of course you do. Now I was only going to suggest that I took you to lunch. And that you brought your mother. I would really like to meet her.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Francesca. His power to discomfit her was impressive. Perversely she quite liked it. Patrick Forster spent his life doing the reverse, and it irritated the hell out of her. ‘Oh, well I – ’

  ‘Good. Now I can do Wednesday this week, or Thursday or Friday next with a bit of juggling. I’m sure your mother is worth juggling for. Does she still work at Harrods?’

  ‘No, she came into a bit of money and now she’s a lady who lunches economically. Her description, not mine.’

  ‘I like her more and more. And we can talk some more about your job at the same time.’

  ‘Which one?’ said Francesca.

  ‘Either,’ he said. ‘They’re both still available.’

  Rachel and Bard ignored her through most of the lunch (the Ritz – he had told her to ask her mother where she would like to go). Rachel turned up looking dazzling in an ivory slub silk suit, an absurd red feathered hat set on her silvery fair hair, red high-heeled shoes, all new, Francesca thought, silly woman, bought to impress him. Her love for her mother did not blind her to her faults. She watched Bard Channing being most willingly charmed, delighted even, by her still considerable beauty, by her determined flirtatious flattery, her transparent efforts to please him, the superior being, the male, her large blue eyes fixed on his face, her small hand every so often touching his, and she sat, at first amused and then irritated, drinking rather too fast, feeling like a foolish schoolgirl, while they gossiped about rather remote mutual acquaintances, discussed times past, laughed at jokes she didn’t understand and generally made her feel just slightly less important than the waiters. Towards the end of the meal she began to sulk, then finally (tears stinging behind her eyes) excused herself, saying she had to get back to work; they smiled at her briefly and returned to their conversation, scarcely seeming to notice her departure.

  She was hurling things around her desk later that afternoon, nursing a very nasty headache, when Reception rang to say Mr Channing was downstairs. ‘Tell him I’m in a meeting,’ said Francesca, and rang off. Two minutes later the phone rang again; it was Bard Channing.

  ‘I just wanted to say I could see that wasn’t very nice for you and I’m sorry. It was just that I liked your mother so very much, and – ’

  ‘That’s quite all right,’ said Francesca coolly. ‘You obviously have a great deal in common. Next time you can just go out on your own. Now you must excuse me, I’m very busy.’

  ‘Francesca,’ said Bard, and there was just the slightest touch of menace in his voice, ‘Francesca, I really don’t have time for this sort of thing. I get quite enough of it at home.’ And he put the phone down.

  It was five years before she met him again: he did not after all place his business with GHG, and Francesca left there after six months to go to another agency called Manners Bullingford as a trainee account executive. She was happy there, absorbed, felt she was actually getting somewhere; she became engaged with just the merest shadow of misgiving to Patrick Forster and married him on a sparkly April day in 1988 at Battersea Old Church, to which occasion her mother wore the white slub silk suit she had bought for lunch with Bard Channing. As a result Francesca thought of Bard rather more than she might otherwise have done; and she continued to do so from time to time right through the first three years of her marriage, which was perfectly happy but somehow not totally and properly satisfying. She and Patrick had a pretty little house in Fulham, two cats, a Shogun, gave dinner parties once a week and had sex rather less frequently.

  At the beginning of 1988, Patrick announced that it was time they started to think about having a family; Francesca thought of her burgeoning career (she was now an account director at a highly successful, high-profile agency called Fellowes Barkworth); of the occasional doubts she still had about her relationship with Patrick; and slightly to her surprise of Bard Channing, and told Patrick she thought it was too soon. Patrick was clearly disappointed, but said he was prepared to wait a little longer.

  It was a dark, heavy November afternoon when she was called into a meeting to discuss a new business pitch; the project was to raise the profile of and develop a corporate image for a property company which owned several of the new Amercian-style shopping malls; the budget was large, the creative work challenging. The company was the Channing Corporation.

  The entire group was to go to Channing House the following week for a presentation; Bard Channing himself would not be there. ‘Far too high powered,’ said Mike Fellowes, the account director, ‘but we’re seeing a couple of his henchmen. Just as well, I imagine. From all accounts, Channing’s a bit of a brute.’

  ‘Not true,’ said Francesca.

  ‘You’ve met him?’

  ‘I’ve met him.’

  ‘Good Lord.’

  She smiled round the group, and made it clear that was the end of the discussion.

  She found herself dressing with particular care for the presentation at Channing House, in a new black crepe suit from Nicole Farhi. As she sat at the dressing table, doing her make-up, she looked at the picture of herself and her mother taken on some hotel terrace when she had been twenty-one, a lifetime ago it seemed, the untidily lovely person she had been then, the wild permed curls tumbled on her shoulders, the sunfreckled just-slightly-plump face grinning over the huge cocktail in her hand, and compared it with the sleek, glossy creature in the mirror, with her sharply etched cheekbones, her perfect creamy skin, her sleekly carved dark hair, and sighed just briefly, wondered exactly how happy she was and why indeed she should be wondering that today.

  Bard was not there, as they had been told; the presentation went well. They were given a boardroom lunch; after it, Francesca excused herself and went in search of the Ladies’. And walking back along the corridor, found herself face to face with Bard Channing.

  ‘Well,’ he said, smiling at her with patent and extraordinary pleasure. ‘Can it be true? Francesca! How very nice to see you. You look – ’

  ‘Older?’ said Francesca, smiling.

  ‘Grown up, I would say. And even more beautiful. I like the hair. Almost as much as I did before,’ he said, and grinned at her.r />
  ‘Thank you,’ said Francesca carefully. It seemed the only safe thing to say.

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I – my agency and I – are doing a presentation. To your publicity people.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. I knew I should have come. And are you now very important and high-powered?’

  ‘Very,’ she said, laughing.

  ‘Good. The vacancy for that other job is still open by the way.’

  ‘Oh really? I’m pretty well suited now. Thank you,’ she added carefully.

  ‘Does that mean you’re married?’ he said.

  ‘Yes it does.’

  ‘To the posh young man?’

  ‘To the posh young man.’

  ‘And are you happy?’

  ‘Oh yes. Very happy.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, and there was a flicker of something behind the dark eyes, not as strong as pain, shock perhaps, distaste, ‘well, that’s extremely unfortunate. My fault entirely, I shouldn’t have left it so long.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ said Francesca. ‘How are your daughters?’

  ‘Oh – difficult. Particularly Kirsten. The battles increase. She’s dying to be a model, and I’ve told her she has to go to university.’

  ‘She could do both,’ said Francesca, ‘lots of girls do. You should let her try. It’s a horrible life, unless you’re incredibly successful, she’ll probably be most grateful to get back to her studies. I’d have thought that would be much better than forbidding it.’

  ‘Still wise,’ he said, ‘even though the shoulders are slightly older. I would never have thought of that. Could you recommend an agency she should go to?’

  ‘Yes of course. Ring me at my office, here’s my card, I’ll give you a couple of names and numbers.’

  ‘Thank you. I will. Nice to see you again.’

  He smiled at her, and then looked at her, the dark eyes suddenly serious, and reached and touched her face, very briefly, as he had that night in the Connaught. It had the same profound effect on her.

  He phoned her two days later for the numbers and then a week after that to tell her Kirsten had been signed up by Models One. ‘And she’s being almost polite to me. Can I buy you lunch to say thank you?’

  She hesitated briefly, knowing full well what might happen if she said yes. She said yes, and it did.

  She learnt much of him over that first lunch: how life had been at once kind and unkind to him, had given him a wonderful mother and a dreadful father (‘Like me,’ she said, smiling at him: ‘Yes, but your father didn’t knock you about,’ he said, not smiling at all); had given him a brilliantly fast, deductive brain and a dyslexia so severe that everyone except his mother had thought he was ineducable until he was at least nine; had sent his father off to Germany where he had been most mercifully killed; had rained bombs down on the little house in Dalston where he had lived with his mother and grandparents, had killed the grandparents and put his mother in hospital and had then sent him off, an evacuee, to the wilds of Suffolk to some kind and gentle countryfolk, who cared for him until the war was over and had put some stability into his turbulent little history; had failed to provide him with a job, even in the surging boom years of the ’fifties, for who would take on a boy without a single examination to his name, and whose handwriting on letters was a laboured ungainly sprawl when so many grammar-school boys were filling in application forms in perfectly formed, neat handwriting; and had then finally set him down in a pub one night next to a rather pushy young estate agent who told him his firm was looking for a junior negotiator, and he had been taken on by them at an appallingly low salary, but on a fair bit of commission of which he had, to his own great surprise, earned rather a lot; and that he had then proceeded to the just-beginning-to-boom commercial sector. At this point the story became a little vague, but he had proceeded to junior partner there, and gone finally into business with one of his own clients (having found, through another chance meeting in another pub, a derelict building in the City for which he had been able to negotiate an absurdly good price), and from then on (he told her with a charming blend of arrogance and self-deprecation) it was all absurdly well-documented and she could read about it for herself. And of course she had read about it long ago and had had it revised for her before the presentation: the runaway success in the first property boom, when there had been so great a dearth of commercial property – largely due to the Socialist government that had tried and failed to stop speculative development with a rash of new planning regulations – his survival of the first big crash of 1973, his swift move into the Middle East, his going public in the 1980s, his continuing steady growth, and his situation now, settled comfortably around the middle of the Sunday Times list of the 250 richest people in the country, with a publicly quoted company worth £100m, 35% of which was still held by him and his partners in the company.

  Fate had been equally quixotic with his personal life; had sent him first a wife who had been loving and lovely and had died after bearing him a still-born son, when their only other child Liam had been just seven years old, and a second who was as unstable and faithless as she was charismatic and beautiful; had endowed him with considerable charm and a magnetic sexuality, but really very little in the way of looks, and a height that could only optimistically be described as five foot ten inches and was actually nearer five-eight and a half.

  He was (she also discovered that first lunch, and indeed consequently), while being without doubt the most arrogant, the most egocentric, man she had ever met (and, he told her, almost certainly the worst-tempered), also funny, intensely charming, and had a curiously old-fashioned chivalry about him; he walked on the outside of pavements, held open doors for her, saw her into the car if he was driving it himself, pulled out and pushed in chairs with great thoroughness.

  ‘I’ve been well brought up,’ he told her almost indignantly when she remarked on this. ‘My mother, like yours, is wonderful. Although rather different,’ he added, smiling, ‘and I want you to meet her. She has to approve all my wives.’

  ‘I’m not going to be your wife, Bard.’

  ‘Francesca, you are.’

  ‘I love you,’ he said after a second, rather unseemly lunch (also at the Connaught) where he had spent much of the time with one hand on her thigh (evoking, with that simple act, a more frantic desire than Patrick had ever managed in the whole of their sexual lives), and the other alternately holding hers or gently massaging the nape of her neck. ‘I really love you.’

  ‘Bard, don’t be absurd, of course you don’t love me,’ said Francesca, clinging with some difficulty to the remnants of common sense, ‘you don’t even know me. And I don’t know you,’ she added, ‘which some people would consider at least faintly relevant.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, and there was a distant expression in his eyes, a darkness, a brooding that she had not seen before (but was often, increasingly, to see again), ‘I am best not known too well. But I’m sure that doesn’t apply to you. Come and live with me, and then I can get to know you.’

  ‘Bard, I’m married.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘You’re not. You’re divorced. That’s totally different.’

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘Of course you see why. You’re being ridiculous.’

  ‘I am not being ridiculous,’ he said and he bent over and kissed her hand, one finger at a time, and then, his eyes very serious, very tender; ‘I love you. Come to bed with me.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Well, upstairs. I have a room.’

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ said Francesca.

  ‘Well, I could get one.’

  ‘Bard no. Really. I can’t.’

  ‘Don’t you want to?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘I’m lying,’ she said, and laughed. ‘But I’m not going to.’

  It was another week before he finally talked her i
nto bed; a week during which he bombarded her with flowers, with phone calls, with letters, with faxes, all declaring overwhelming, undeniable love; finally she heard herself on the phone to Patrick, telling him she had to attend an out-of-town meeting, and wouldn’t be back till the morning.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she said, hating herself as she spoke what was nearly the simple truth, ‘new client. You know what that means.’

  And she lay in bed with Bard, in a four-poster bed in a hotel somewhere in Oxfordshire, discovering sex as if for the first time, discovering passion, discovering herself, hearing her own voice crying out, greedy, primitive, joyous, and knew she was properly in love.

  It took a while to accept the fact, longer to tell Patrick. Guilt and affection for him consumed her; she struggled, toiled over her marriage for months, told Bard she must forget him and he her, left him three times and went back four. It was only when she was more by careless design than actual accident, pregnant with Bard’s child, pregnant with Jack, that finally she knew she had to give in, bow to the inevitable.

  The first year with Bard was extraordinary: a long, exalting exhausting series of dramas; of moving out of her small house, and into Bard’s huge one (an absurd, excessive mansion St John’s Wood which she initially hated and grew slowly fond of as she made it hers); of leaving her easy, undemanding life with Patrick and entering Bard’s difficult, overwhelming one; of the change from being in command of her life to being out of control of it, from knowing where she was and what she was doing to having no idea at all; the change from affection to love, from sexual pleasure to physical passion; and perhaps most shattering of all of it, from woman to mother. Her own mother had told her, but had not been able (of course) to prepare her for the overwhelming, unexpected force of the love she would feel, the fierce and total commitment to this small being, who first took over her body and changed it beyond all recognition, subjected her to much discomfort and indeed considerable pain, and who then lay in her arms and gazed squintily up at her through dark eyes that were exactly like his father’s, and proceeded from then to enslave her entirely, to disturb her sleep, invade her days, distort her emotions, and recentre her universe. Bard, who had seen it all before, was amused by her besottedness, at her surprise at it indeed, and even as he warned her that he was not to be moved too much aside, was still charmed by it. He was a most exemplary father to small children (while being a fairly disastrous one as they grew up), surprisingly patient, tender, insistent upon (once the birth was well over) being involved, oddly competent at such basic tasks as nappy-changing and winding, enormously proud not only of Francesca but at the change he had wrought in her.