The Dilemma

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘Oh. Oh, well, that’s good, then. I’m going to go and make a grave. Want to come and help? Oh, no, it’s OK. George is there, he can help. See you, Mum.’

  ‘See you, Jack.’

  She watched him go out of the door and her heart turned over with the familiar, painful, joyful love; she thought about the small boy who had once been Liam, and his sad tortured childhood, and about the sadness of his estrangement from his father, and the harshness of a man who could be estranged from his own son. And then she thought that since Bard was not going to be home until evening, she might go and see Liam; it would be at least something she could do. She phoned St Mary’s, asked to be put through to Liam’s ward. A nurse told her that Mr Channing was comfortable but still not at all well.

  ‘He said to thank you for the flowers if you called. They’re beautiful.’

  ‘Good. Has he had any visitors today?’

  ‘No, not today.’

  ‘Is his wife coming?’

  ‘No, she’s phoned through. It seems she can’t come till tomorrow.’ The nurse clearly found this hard to understand.

  ‘I might pop along myself for five mintues. If that would be all right. I am – family.’

  ‘Well, I’ll have to ask,’ said the nurse doubtfully. ‘Just wait a minute, can you?’ She came back after a lot more than a minute, sounding breathless.

  ‘Sorry, Mrs Channing. Sister says it’d be all right for you to come, as long it is only a few minutes. He does seem a bit better.’

  ‘Right. I’ll be there in about half an hour.’

  Liam looked ghastly. His face was greenish-white; one side of it was very swollen and both his eyes were black. He had a drip in his arm, and a tube coming out of his side, she presumed from the punctured lung. A large cage arched over his legs. He was very drowsy.

  Francesca took the hand on the dropless side and squeezed it gently. ‘Liam. It’s me, Francesca. How are you?’

  ‘Foul,’ he said. His voice was slurred. ‘Thank you so much for the flowers. It was really nice of you.’

  ‘My pleasure. Bard sends his best wishes.’

  ‘Liar,’ he said, and his face moved into what she presumed was a smile.

  ‘Well – you know.’

  ‘I do know. Was it in the papers?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. A couple.’

  ‘Let me tell you what the headline said.’

  ‘Liam, I don’t – ’

  ‘No, let me. It said something like “Tycoon’s unemployed son accused of drunk driving.” Am I right?’

  ‘Sort of right,’ she said. ‘Um – is Naomi all right? As she’s not coming in, I wondered – ’

  ‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘She’s just making a point, I think. About my behaviour. She wants a divorce.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Francesca. She felt very shocked; she didn’t know what to say. She looked at Liam; his eyes were closed again. Then she saw a tear trickling from under one of the lids.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Liam, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah. Me too. I think that’s why I’m here.’

  Sister came up to the bed. ‘That’s long enough, Mrs Channing,’ she said. ‘I did say only a few minutes – ’ She looked stern.

  ‘Yes,’ said Francesca. ‘Yes of course.’

  She squeezed Liam’s hand, and then suddenly bent and kissed his poor swollen face. ‘I’ll come again,’ she said.

  He smiled and then closed his eyes. There was a pause, then: ‘Please do,’ he said. ‘Please, please do.’

  Briony had moved out. Gray had sat and watched her all that afternoon as she packed, piling things into the huge boarding-school trunk she kept in the hall cupboard – I’m only taking my clothes, Gray, and my books and tapes and things, and my cushions, the rest is yours really.’

  He had protested, had told her she must take at least some of the pictures they had bought together, the tin signs in the kitchen, the birdcage that they had got in Camden Market and which housed the asparagus plant that trailed through its fine white bars, the New Yorker covers she had had framed and hung all the way up the stairs; but she had said no, she didn’t want them, they were part of their shared life, they didn’t feel like hers any more.

  ‘Well they’re not mine either, in that case,’ he said. ‘That’s silly, Briony, of course you must take them.’

  But she wouldn’t, had piled everything ostentatiously untidily into the trunk (it had taken him four years, and five holidays, to teach her to pack tidily) and had then sat on it, looking at him.

  ‘This is very sad,’ she said.

  But it was Gray who cried, in fact, not her: who when she had gone, driven away in her beloved Cherokee Jeep, to stay with her sister while she found a new flat of her own, had sat down on the big bed where they had been so lovingly happy, and stared at the wall, remembering Briony, remembering the way she looked, her long straight brown hair, her small, pale face with its large blue eyes, her slender, graceful body – one of the things he had most shrunk from when he thought about her having a baby had been seeing that body changed out of all recognition, the small breasts heavy, the flat stomach hugely swollen, no longer familiarly his, no longer a source of their joint pleasure but invaded by an all-consuming stranger. He thought of how she always came to greet him when he was late home, smiling with pleasure simply to see him, never stayed watching TV or chatting on the phone like other people’s wives and girlfriends, how she was always genuinely interested in what he had done that day, whom he had talked to, what he had worked on – ‘And then what happened?’ she would say, as he told her stories over supper, putting down her knife and fork to listen; he remembered how she was always just very slightly slow to get his jokes, anyone’s jokes, pausing puzzled while everyone else started laughing, and then would throw her head back and go into peals of such genuine mirth that everyone laughed at her as well as whatever had amused them in the first place; he thought of how good natured she was, never snappy, never complaining at the awful hours he kept, never all those things other women seemed to be, never moody, never pre-menstrual, never sulky, never bossy. What had he done, how could he have let it happen, condemned himself to loneliness, bleakness, an empty house, an unshared bed? But he knew, deep down, beneath the misery and the onset of loneliness and the fear of never finding anyone he loved as much, as tenderly, as happily as he had loved Briony, he knew he had still done the right thing. He would have lost her, if she had had a baby, as surely as he had lost her when she drove away from the house, away from him; she would not have been the same person, a stranger would have walked back into the house when she came home with her baby – their baby – and he did not want, could not imagine, living with that stranger. Those two strangers.

  What was the matter with him, he wondered, what strange bit of disharmony had settled in his genes that he had no wish for progeny, quite the reverse indeed, no desire to see himself reproduced, to see his foothold assured in immortality. He had had a perfectly ordinary happy childhood, with no traumas that he could think of, and had been a much-loved child. His parents had had an averagely good marriage, he had had no especially difficult love affairs. It was all quite beyond him really. Maybe if he went to an analyst or something, or did that rebirthing rubbish – but no. What was the point? He’d have to change and he didn’t want to change. Whatever the reason, however loony he was, he liked the grown-up life. He didn’t like children and he didn’t want to give his house, his lovely ordered, pristine house with its skilful mixture of styles, and his life over to them, their noise and their mess and their general disagreeableness.

  Nevertheless, the decision had been hard and telling Briony harder. He had thought about little else, after leaving Teresa Booth; her words had had a huge influence on him. He had really liked Teresa Booth. Underneath the sexy nonsense, and the undoubtedly ruthless streak, there was someone who was at least in part kind. Kind and thoughtful in its true sense. He wondered what on earth she would say if she
knew he had acted on her words, thrown out his girlfriend on her say-so. Probably be horrified. After drinking one bottle of wine, he rather wanted to tell her; after getting through the best part of a second, he knew he had to. If Duggie answered, he could say it was about the feature he was writing about timeshares.

  But they weren’t there; there was no answer. Probably away. He left a message on the answerphone, just to say he’d called, and could she give him a ring some time, and then phoned the number in Birmingham and left the same message there. She would pick it up when she got back and he could tell her then. There was no hurry. Absolutely no hurry at all. Briony was gone, gone for the rest of his life: not for the first time since he had told her his decision, had met those hurt, gentle blue eyes, heard her voice saying, ‘Well, Gray, I’m sorry, but I wasn’t playing games, I don’t think I can go on,’ had reached for her and felt her turning away from him, Gray buried his head in his hands and wept.

  ‘Don’t you believe me?’ said Bard.

  ‘No,’ said Francesca.

  ‘Silly bitch,’ he said, and kissed her. ‘Let me try again. I love you.’

  His hand was on her stomach, smoothing it, his fingers massaging the tender, responsive areas he knew so well; unwillingly, almost grudgingly, she rose just very, very slightly beneath them. He felt the movement, increased his pressure, probing downwards; she felt herself softening, easing dangerously; turned her head imperceptibly towards him, looked into his eyes. They were fixed absolutely intently on her face, great, dark, fierce eyes; he did not smile at her, did not even move a muscle of his face, just continued to study her, to gaze into her, as if he could learn more of her, important, crucial things.

  ‘I love you,’ he said again. ‘Christ, I love you. I love you so much. Never forget it, Francesca, never ever.’

  And then quite suddenly he was on her, in her, urgent, seemingly afraid he would lose her, lose the moment, driving, pushing, working at her and in her, kissing her, greedy, hard, holding her head in both his hands; she could feel him, feel his penis reaching in her, for her, and she could hold back from him no longer, could feel herself almost as if for the first time budding, unfolding, blooming, flourishing in great frondlike branches of pleasure, feel the lightness, the spangling of sensations spreading outwards and inwards at one and the same time, feel her arms, her legs, her entire body invaded with the violence of it, her mind bleached of everything but this great reach of pleasure that was at once so focused and yet so wide and wild and pervasive.

  She felt him come too, the deep, long throbbing of him, heard his groan, felt his hands lift himself up from her, looked at him, saw his head thrown back, raised upwards, and then almost at once, saw him look down at her, and smile, and say again, ‘I love you. I love you.’

  They had talked: not very much by absolute standards, a lot by Bard’s. She told him she had been to see Liam; he hadn’t said very much, except that he could not imagine why she should have done such a thing, and had, nonetheless, asked albeit rather grudgingly how he was.

  ‘I’ll write him a note,’ he said. ‘He won’t want to see me.’

  ‘He might.’

  ‘Francesca, he won’t.’

  She gave up on that one.

  He said then he had been thinking; that he could, after all, understand why she had been so upset; that what he had told her about Terri Booth had been true; that he could see finding her in the office had been a shock; and she had said (trying not to smile at the difficulty he had making even so minimal an explanation, so faint an apology) she was sorry if she had over-reacted, had seemed to him to be unreasonable in her distress.

  ‘The thing is, Bard, if you would only tell me more, I would be left to imagine less.’

  ‘But there is nothing to tell,’ he said, staring broodingly out of the window, ‘nothing that you need to know.’

  ‘It’s not what I need to know, it’s what I want to know.’

  ‘But I don’t see why you want to,’ he said, and there was genuine puzzlement in his eyes.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, laughing in spite of herself, ‘we seem to have a very basic problem here. I want to, because I am interested. Can’t you understand that?’

  And ‘Yes,’ he said finally, ‘yes, I suppose I do. But I spend so much of my time on that company, it is so very nice for me to come home and be free of it. I cannot, Francesca, I really cannot, start going through my day all over again when I get home. It’s more than flesh and blood – well, my flesh and blood anyway – can stand.’

  And she had to leave it at that: knowing it was unsatisfactory, but recognising at the same time that for now at least she must be satisfied with what he had presented her with. Which was an apology – of sorts; and which was an explanation – of a kind.

  ‘But Bard, I do warn you,’ she said, and heard her own voice, very solemn, totally sincere, ‘if I ever found there was something serious, something that mattered that you were keeping from me, then I would not be able to bear it.’

  She awoke in the morning, to find him already dressed. ‘I’m afraid I have to go,’ he said, and then, clearly with a huge effort, ‘I’ve got a meeting about Coronet Wharf this morning. With some potential tenants. It could run right over lunch. Which might make me late tonight. But I’ll ring you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘thank you for telling me. And thank you again for the suit. It’s beautiful.’

  The suit had been a present he had brought her back from Stockholm and only given her that morning: it was honey-coloured suede, very simple, exactly what she would have chosen herself. It was one of his more unexpected qualities, that he was able to buy clohtes for her, in exactly the right size, always in perfect taste.

  ‘You’ll look beautiful in it. I’ll see you later.’

  And he was gone, leaving her feeling at once slightly abandoned, and happier than she had for some time. He was difficult, impossible even, arrogant, manipulative – but at that moment she knew, clearly and sharply, with both her physical and her emotional self, exactly why she had fallen in love with him, and why she had agreed to marry him.

  And it came to her, as she lay there, that she would like to show him that she did love him, that she wanted to please him, to do something for him, and that quite soon now it would be his birthday. She would plan something special for that. Not a party, there had been the big one for his fiftieth and besides with Kitty being ill, the thought of organising anything major seemed horrendously inappropriate. But a weekend away – even twenty-four hours – on their own, that would be lovely. And Bard would appreciate it enormously. More than anything. She knew that. He often said (either wistfully or irritably according to his mood) that he had forgotten what it was like to be on his own with her. She would have to tell Marcia, enlist her help. She would phone her during the morning, while Bard was in his meeting.

  Half amused, half embarrassed at herself, thinking this was exactly the sort of thing that she would once have most disapproved of – being the sort of woman for whom social organisation was a major occupation – she got up, had breakfast with the children, and drove Jack to school, and when she got back suggested Nanny took Kitty for a walk. ‘It’s a lovely day, it will do her good. She looks so much better, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Well, she does,’ said Nanny, determinedly gloomy, ‘but I don’t like these drugs going into her. It isn’t natural. Not for a child.’

  ‘Nanny, of course it isn’t natural. But she’d – well, she’d be a lot more ill if we left her to what was natural. Anyway, a walk I think. You could go down to the park, maybe pick up Jack on the way back. The thing is, I have a lot to do this morning, and I can’t collect him.’

  She wasn’t often as firm; Nanny liked to plan her own routine, and it didn’t include walking in the morning, she preferred the afternoons, when she could meet her peers in Regent’s Park – indeed she never tired of telling Francesca that when Kirsten and Barnaby and Victoria had been little they had lived in Kensington and had bee
n able to go to the Round Pond every day, so much better for them. Francesca had never challenged her on why the air near the Round Pond should be better for children than that by the Regent’s Park lake, but she had promised herself that one day she would. She knew the real answer: that the best nannies, by nanny-standards, were by the Round Pond. But it would be fun hearing Nanny proffering something more acceptable.

  Nanny went off to get Kitty ready, disapproval hanging about her like a large, Norland-uniform-brown cloud; Francesca smiled at her broad, retreating back. Getting the better of Nanny even in the most minimal way made her feel good.

  She was just about to ring Marcia when her phone rang.

  ‘Francesca? This is Miranda Scott.’

  Francesca liked Miranda; she was a kindred spirit, and shared Francesca’s views on the basic futility, however pleasant, of their lives. She had been an interior designer, and still worked as a favour for friends; her husband was an extremely expensive gynaecologist, frequently described by Miranda as having been inside every woman in SW3. She was also a brilliant mimic; Miranda being Diana was more like Diana than Diana herself.

  ‘Hallo, Miranda.’

  ‘Look, I wondered if you could help. This dinner on Friday, with the auction, you know? We need a bit of press coverage, and I thought maybe you might know someone. Being in the meeja and all that. I tried Dempster, but he said it was a frightfully busy night and he hadn’t got anyone to send. Got any ideas?’

  ‘Well – I’ll have a think. I could ask my husband’s PR, she’s always full of ideas. I’ll get back to you.’

  ‘Good. Thanks. And you haven’t got any marvellous little extras for the tombola, have you? We need something small, couple of tickets for a theatre, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I’ve got a ghastly Hermès scarf my mother gave me for Christmas,’ said Francesca. ‘You can have that, gladly. Only one careful lady owner; never taken out of its box.’