The Dilemma

by Penny Vincenzi

  The noise came again, from Bard’s study. This was a far more immediate, real concern. Francesca got out of bed and pulled on a robe; it was a very hot night and she had slept naked. She quailed slightly at what she had to do, but knew, just the same, she couldn’t leave him alone. She walked quietly down the corridor, stood outside the half-open door. The noise went on; he didn’t hear her.

  She pushed it open carefully; he was sitting at his desk, his head buried in his arms, his great shoulders heaving. She went forward, moving very steadily, and when she reached him put out her hand, onto the shoulders, said ‘Bard’ quite quietly. She half expected a rebuff even then, was prepared to retreat; but he looked up at her, his face raw with grief, wet with tears, and suddenly put his arms round her waist, burying his head in her breast.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Oh God, Francesca, how am I going to bear this? I loved him so much, he was my only real friend, our entire lives were spent together, the business, everything was ours. I can’t do it alone, I can’t, I feel so alone, so utterly alone.’

  She couldn’t think of anything to say; she felt helpless, useless in the face of such pain. She held his head to her, stroking his hair, murmuring wordless nonsense to him as she did to little Jack when he had hurt himself, just listening, letting him talk.

  ‘It was such a good friendship,’ he said, ‘we were so good for each other. He taught me to be patient, to think before I spoke’ – you could have fooled me, Francesca thought – ‘to wait for people to make their own judgments, and I put some fire in his belly, gave him ambition, drive. He often said if it hadn’t been for me he’d have been a golf pro meandering round some course, spending his evenings at the nineteenth hole. Oh God, Francesca, and if he had, maybe he’d be alive now, maybe I drove him to it, drove him to his death, always forcing him on, demanding things of him, impatient when he was tired or wanted to move into the slow lane for a bit. Christ, what have I done, what have I done?’

  ‘Bard, you haven’t done anything. No that’s not true, you’ve done a lot, a lot for him. Duggie loved the company, loved being part of it’ – she pushed the memory of Teresa’s words away – ‘Do you think he’d have been happy being a golf pro?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I really do.’

  ‘For a little while, maybe. Then he’d have been bored, he’d have atrophied. Duggie liked the good life, Bard, as well as anyone. What you did was help him fulfil his potential, give him – ’

  ‘No,’ he said, brushing the tears impatiently away, sitting back in his chair, looking up at her, ‘no, that’s not right. He wouldn’t have been bored, and he wouldn’t have minded not being rich. He was a modest fellow, in every way, he had the sweetest, happiest nature. He’d have been perfectly happy in a little Tudor semi somewhere, I know he would.’

  ‘Well maybe. But – ’ ‘And now I’m on my own. Completely. As I should have been from the beginning, maybe. Maybe this is my punishment – ’ ‘For what?’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Your punishment for what?’

  ‘Oh – for everything. Everything wrong I’ve ever done.’

  ‘Bard, you haven’t done anything wrong.’

  ‘Oh really?’ he said, looking up at her. ‘And how would you know that?’

  Francesca didn’t know why, but she found the question frightening; then she told herself he was talking nonsense, that he was drunk . . .

  ‘Because I know you. That’s how. And I love you.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ he said, ‘Christ, I hope you do.’

  ‘I do.’

  He sat back and looked up at her for a moment, his eyes absolutely unreadable, and then he pushed aside her robe and cradled her breasts in his hands with infinite care, as if they were fragile, in danger of breaking.

  ‘Lovely,’ he said, ‘so lovely, you are.’

  He bent forward and kissed them, one at a time, his tongue lingering on the nipples, and then moved his mouth down, down to her stomach, her pubic hair. She felt his tongue working at her clitoris, felt the sharp, leaping streaks of desire; she closed her eyes, concentrating utterly on the moment, the sensation of it, the deep, rich, unfurling pleasure: and then he stood up briefly, dragging impatiently at his clothes, kissing her hard, fiercely, and then she was on him, astride him, his penis forcing into her, savagely, sweetly strong, and she rode him, rode the pleasure of him, felt each push, each thrust, felt herself growing, moulding round him, felt the great circles spreading, reaching on and on, out and out, felt herself travelling with them, with him, felt the great dark force of release begin, and she threw back her head and cried out aloud, heard herself, a strange wild cry, the cry of sex, the cry of love.

  She stayed there for a long while, holding him, holding him to her; in the months that followed she thought of it often, that night, an isolated piece of happiness preserved, suspended in time, to be looked at, treasured, wondered at.

  In the morning he came in, kissed her briefly, said he had to go; he had never followed her to bed, as he had said he would.

  ‘Will you be back tonight?’

  ‘Yes, but very late. Don’t wait dinner for me.’

  ‘No, all right.’ Her voice sounded even to her forlorn, disappointed. The distance between them was there again, increasing fast.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m not going to be around much for a while. Why don’t you go to Greece for a few weeks? The house is there, the staff are there. Take your mother maybe.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘it will be terribly hot and anyway, I don’t want to be so far from Kitty’s doctor. And I’m not getting on too well with my mother.’

  ‘Oh really? Why on earth not?’

  ‘Oh – she’s acting very oddly. I suppose she’s got some new boyfriend, won’t talk about it, doesn’t have any time for me, lied about where she was going one day, said she was going to stay with an old friend and she wasn’t there at all …’

  ‘Yes?’ He was bending over, putting on his shoes. ‘Well, she’s a law unto herself, your mother. Always has been.’

  ‘Yes. Incidentally, Bard, I’m sorry about her pestering you for money for that convent place of hers. I’ve told her to back off.’

  There was a silence. Then he said, very casually, ‘Oh, it didn’t matter. It was only a cheque. Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you later.’

  ‘Yes. And Bard – ’

  ‘Yes?’

  She had been going to say something loving, make some reference to the previous night, but his expression was impatient, distant.

  ‘Nothing. Doesn’t matter. Goodbye.’

  When he had gone she lay staring at the door after he had closed it, feeling absolutely desolate, no longer loved, warmed, comforted as she had done just a little earlier. And something worse even than desolate: she felt used.

  On the other side of London Gray Townsend was also lying alone in bed, also staring at a closed door, also feeling used, although less desperately, less unhappily so. Gray’s primary emotion that morning was bafflement, and the person who was baffling him was Kirsten.

  She had arrived for dinner the evening before, after the funeral, looking rather subdued, wearing a long, floaty skirt and a white linen shirt: almost girly, Gray thought, apart from the inevitable heavy boots. She was carrying a bottle of wine, and a bunch of flowers.

  ‘I thought this’d be nice. Toby left a few bottles and he never drank rubbish, and the flowers are to cheer your house up. Female-less houses are always so – oh. Oh Gray. You don’t need a lousy bunch of flowers. What a lovely house.’

  She had come into the hall; Gray was particularly proud of the hall, hated the way most people used them as little better than passages; had made a room of it, papered it with brown parcel paper (the striped sort, his own idea), set a low table just underneath the stairs, covered with small silver frames holding sepia pictures of his aunts and uncles and parents and grandparents as children: ‘Great for burglars,’ Briony had often said, ‘seeing them through the letterbox,’
but the burglars hadn’t seem to fancy them, nor the heavy brass pot containing the parlour palm that sat beside them, nor the rather nice Victorian watercolours of churches and country houses that hung on the walls, nor the extremely fine barometer gracing the far wall, nor the oak chest that stood at the bottom of the stairs.

  He followed her, smiling modestly as she moved from room to room, exclaiming with pleasure.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ she said again, wandering out into the conservatory, her tour completed. ‘How clever you are.’

  ‘I grew up,’ he said, ‘in a very ordinary little 1930s house. It was nice, but even then I knew how I would like it to be. Having my own house has been a great self-indulgence. Anyway, I’m glad you like it. Now then, glass of champagne?’

  ‘Please,’ she said, ‘I feel I need it.’

  And they sat down in the conservatory, and she smiled at him and said, ‘This is so kind of you, cheering me up like this.’

  ‘Not entirely kind,’ he said, ‘I plan to have a lovely evening.’

  He had cooked the promised steak and kidney pie ‘with only a few oysters’ served with potatoes so tiny they were like marbles and almost raw broccoli, and got one of his summer puddings out of the freezer; they had drunk the champagne and then moved onto Toby’s Burgundy which had indeed been extremely good, and had chatted easily about many things, but mostly their childhoods; his had been happy and entirely normal, he said, very dull really, only child, much loved, lived in a country town in Surrey, gone to Charterhouse and then to Warwick, got a 2:1 and then, with extraordinary ease, found his way into Fleet Street via a graduate training scheme. ‘I was on the Guardian, and I loved it, was a sort of jobbing general reporter, moved onto the arts page and then discovered Mammon, or rather Mammon’s pages, and felt I’d come home. Worked on the Observer, the Sunday Times, been on the News four years now. No real traumas, lots of fun, very uninteresting. How about you?’

  He had been afraid hers would be tedious, a catalogue of neglect and misfortune, but she was funny about it, sent herself up, describing the horrors of Nanny, of Benenden, even of her mother’s alcoholism with a sweetly considered maturity. She adored her brother, she said, while half resenting his charm. ‘Even my father thinks he’s wonderful’ – and loved Victoria ‘like an old mother hen. But the person I love best, I suppose, who we all do, is Granny Jess. She was so good to us, so loving and forgiving, so stern and strict, and she had such ambitions for us, encouraged us, urged us on. I don’t think there is anything, anything at all that she doesn’t know about any of us,’ she added, ‘and that includes my father. And nothing shocks her, and she never judges us. But even she was no match for the rest.’

  ‘The rest?’

  ‘Oh, you know, the bad things,’ she said vaguely. ‘I’ve failed her dreadfully I’m afraid, she so wanted me to be good.’

  Then, without warning, she started to cry, heavy bitter tears, her face dropped in her hands; Gray sat staring at her, and then tentatively put an arm round her

  ‘Kirsten,’ he said gently, ‘Kirsten, you must not be so hard on yourself.’

  ‘But I must,’ she said, ‘I’m dreadful, awful, so spoilt, and greedy, I use people all the time, look what I did to you. Oh Gray, I’m so ashamed.’ And she had buried her head in his chest and cried for a long time.

  ‘You don’t have to be sorry,’ he had said, smiling down at her, stroking back the wild hair, when she had finally stopped. ‘I’m over twenty-one, you know, I can take care of myself. I could have gone home that night, but I didn’t, I chose to stay. And it was very nice. Well, I thought so, anyway.’

  ‘Really?’ she said, looking up at him in a kind of wonder, hiccuping slightly. ‘Did you really not despise me afterwards?’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It was the last thing I thought to do. I think you’re lovely, and I was flattered and pleased, and you were very honest with me in the morning, you didn’t fudge it – ’

  ‘I’ll go to hell,’ she said miserably, chewing on one of her strands of hair, ‘I know I will, I was thinking about it this morning in that foul chapel; when I die, I’ll go to hell – ’

  ‘Kirsten, really! You don’t believe all that – ’

  ‘Of course I do. I’m a good – well, a bad – Catholic girl. I’ve committed most of the mortal sins already. There’s no hope for me.’

  ‘You really are ridiculous,’ he said and then, because she looked so sad, so forlorn, he bent to kiss her gently; and then, somehow, she had kissed him back, and then, well, then he had started stroking her breasts (which were rather clearly visible through the fine linen) and she had started to respond, and a little less than half an hour later, he was leading her upstairs. ‘This is not to make me feel better, is it?’ Kirsten had said.

  ‘No, it’s to make me feel better,’ he said, laughing, ‘but only if you really want to.’

  ‘I really want to.’

  It had been so different this time, so different from that wild, hard night; this time he had led and she had followed, her body soft, pliable, infinitely willing, wonderfully, gloriously responsive, her orgasms greeting his in what seemed an endless rising, falling, movement and stillness, capture, and release; and when finally they were done, she lay, smiling sweetly, her eyes closed, her hair splayed wild across the pillow, and said simply ‘Oh Gray, that was good’ and fell fast asleep.

  And then in the morning she left, quickly, almost hastily, still slightly distanced from him: said she had to get home, she had so much to do, and promised to phone him later in the day.

  Well, perhaps she would.

  ‘Francesca? This is Liam.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh Liam, hallo.’

  ‘You sound rotten.’

  ‘I feel it,’ she said. She was too miserable to pretend.

  ‘What’s the matter? Tell me.’

  ‘Oh – no. I can’t. I’m just being – silly.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ he said and his voice was very gentle, very concerned. A most poignant contrast to Bard’s brusque, impatient tones, an hour earlier.

  ‘Yes I am. I’m just – upset about yesterday. About the funeral.’

  ‘How was it? That was why I phoned.’

  ‘Oh – you know. Very dreadful really. So sad. And Teresa Booth delivered what Barnaby would have called a bollocking to us all. For cutting Duggie off, after she married him.’

  ‘What, in the church?’

  ‘Yes. It was awful.’

  ‘Golly,’ said Liam. ‘I wish I’d been there.’

  ‘No, Liam, it was awful. We all felt bad, I think. Because it was true.’

  ‘Did my father speak?’

  ‘Yes he did. Incredibly well.’

  She tried not to think about Teresa’s words on that particular subject. She felt better about that at least this morning, more able to dismiss it. But it was still there, at the back of her mind, troubling her.

  ‘He’s very good on those occasions,’ he said. ‘I can still remember when my mother died, how he spoke at her funeral. I was crying, all the time, and somehow I stopped then. He made me feel I could be brave.’

  ‘Oh Liam. I can’t begin to think how awful that must have been for you.’

  ‘Not good,’ he said, ‘but I got through it. Somehow.’

  ‘You must have been very good for each other. Comforting each other.’

  ‘Not really,’ he said, and his voice was cool suddenly, surprised. ‘I hardly saw him. He sent me off to school.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I was thinking about that. You were only seven.’

  ‘Yes. Yes I was.’

  ‘It must have been terrible. So – so bewildering.’

  ‘Yes. That’s exactly the word. I didn’t know who or where I was, what I was supposed to be doing.’

  ‘I feel a bit bewildered,’ she said, ‘this morning. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Well, come and see me,’ he said. ‘Tell me about it. It might help. And it would be lovely for me.’

/>   ‘Well – ’

  ‘Please! It would take my mind off this afternoon, too.’

  ‘What’s happening this afternoon?’

  ‘Visit from the big man, who’s had a look at my latest X-rays. Going to assess my case, tell me how it might turn out. Whether I’m going to have a limp for the rest of my life. Whether I’ve got to have further surgery.’

  ‘Oh, Liam!’ She hadn’t realised that was a possibility. ‘How horrendous. Well – yes, all right. Of course I’ll come. At about – ’ she looked at her diary, glanced at her watch – ‘eleven.’

  ‘I’ll be counting the moments.’

  ‘Mr Channing!’ said the Australian nurse. ‘You’re always on that phone. Come on, I’ve got to check that dressing. Good news about your leg, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Liam.

  ‘Well, that it’s healing so well, that you’ll be out of here in another week or so. I heard Mr Bertram telling you when he was on his ward round.’

  ‘Oh – yes,’ said Liam. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ He had been so engrossed in his fiction about further surgery he had almost come to believe it.

  Kirsten didn’t phone. But a letter came, three days later: ‘Dear Gray,’ it said, ‘It was lovely, and you’re very special. But this time, I do mean it. It’s wrong of me to use you like this. We can meet in a little while, when we have both recovered ourselves: meanwhile thank you again and again for being such a true, good friend. Kirsten.’

  A friend, he thought, a good friend; not a good lover even, simply a friend. And realised that there was neither future nor reality in their realtionship: he was, to her, a nice man, not of her generation, nor her way of thinking or doing things, and if he were wise, he would set all of it behind him. And felt not so much hurt, not used even, but dreadfully and deeply sad.