by Caro Fraser
He picked up the first and read it as he wandered over to his jacket to fetch a cigar. ‘Viscountess Brankin and the Committee of the Holland Park Branch of the NSPCC request the pleasure of Leo Davies’ company at a private view of recent paintings at the Corcoran Gallery, Draycott Avenue …’ he read as he lit his cigar.
He walked back over to the table and sat down. Yes, that would do. Carrie Brankin had been trying for years to pair him off with every good-looking girl in every season. He smiled as he looked at the card. To his certain knowledge he had never taken a woman to any of her functions. The sight of Rachel would certainly get her going. Not only was she beautiful, she also, as Leo was well aware, had a way of looking at him that seemed to lay her sweet soul bare. Women noticed these things. Viscountess Brankin, and others, would notice. Love undisguised, mused Leo, blowing a little cloud of smoke into the air, suppressing the slight touch of guilt he felt at the thought that Rachel must ultimately come to grief in all this.
He picked up the next of the cards and took a drink of brandy as he surveyed it. Gilt-edged, with embossed gold lettering. Too, too much, he thought, reading it. No, not that. He picked up his pen and wrote a brief, polite note declining Mr and Mrs Ronnie Cosnansky’s invitation to a charity auction in aid of Ethiopian famine relief.
The next was square and stark, decidedly reserved. This has to involve someone under twenty-five, thought Leo. He was right. He read it, smiling, pondering its possibilities. A party to celebrate the twenty-third birthdays of Tatiana and Sooty Dewes-Potter at La Poubelle in the King’s Road. Why on earth had they invited him? Possibly Sooty Dewes-Potter still fancied her chances after that bash at the Cadogan Hall, where she’d had far too much champagne and had insisted on sitting, giggling, on his lap. Her blusher had come off on the front of his shirt – another perfectly good dress shirt completely ruined. Mrs Grant, his daily, had said not even the laundry would get that out. He tapped his chin with the card reflectively, then reread it as he drank some more of his brandy. Yes, why not? Not worth wasting a whole evening over – apart from which, he did not think he could bear the company of assorted twenty-three-year-olds and middle-aged hangers-on for more than half an hour – but they could look in for a while after dinner. Keep a high profile among the Sloanes.
Now, the next one looked interesting. A twenty-first-birthday drinks party for the daughter of Mr and Mrs Archie Revel, sponsored by the MP for South Reading, Mr Charles Poole. No – not more young people, and certainly not the House of Commons. He glanced again at the card. Anyway, it clashed with Sir Basil’s drinks party. He scribbled a hasty note of polite thanks and regret, then picked up the last two invitations.
One was to a retrospective of the works of Richard Diebenkorn at the Wattis Gallery, and the other to a performance of Don Giovanni in Lincoln’s Inn Great Hall in aid of the Prison Reform Trust (£50 a head). He sighed and picked up his cigar again. On the one hand, and under normal circumstances, he would have dismissed the latter out of hand and accepted the former with relish. On the other, half the judiciary would be at Lincoln’s Inn, wives as well. Women were important – they saw and remembered so much. An ideal opportunity, one he could not afford to turn down.
Oh, hell, he thought, dropping both invitations onto the pile of those he intended to accept, if he had to sit out Mozart in the draughty grey gloom of Lincoln’s Inn Great Hall, he deserved the Diebenkorn retrospective by way of reward, if nothing else. Anyway, Rachel would enjoy it.
He finished his cigar, then drew a few sheets of his thick ivory-coloured notepaper towards him. He answered all four invitations, then opened his diary and filled in the dates. He surveyed December with good-humoured resignation. What a nice, frothy social confection of a month it was going to be. He closed his diary, yawned, and finished his brandy. It would be quite a relief when Christmas came, and he could make his solitary way to Wales and his mother, a momentary escape from the pretence, the reality. He scarcely knew which was which any longer.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Thereafter, Leo devoted as much spare time and attention to Rachel as he could. He rang her at the end of that week and took her to the theatre on Saturday and to supper afterwards. On Sunday he picked her up from her flat and they spent a long, lazy Sunday lunch together with the newspapers in a restaurant tucked away in the back streets of Chelsea, a warm, scruffy, informal haunt where Leo was obviously known and liked. In fact, it seemed to Rachel that Leo was known and liked everywhere he went. She marvelled at his urbanity, his easy charm and effortlessly amusing conversation, but above all, she marvelled that he had chosen her, out of all the women in his obviously large social circle, to spend his time with. For once in her life she did not look ahead, she did not hedge her life around with domestic chores and work from the office to keep the spectres of the past and the future at bay. She simply lived for the moment, content to be in his company whenever she could, to watch and listen to him, to talk with him and see him smile.
Leo was careful to try to keep the sexual temperature down. Making love to the girl was, of course, an inevitable part of the whole affair, but he felt there was no point in expending excessive energy until one absolutely had to. Sex of the everyday, pedestrian variety, as Leo saw it, was not his strong suit and, pleasant though she had been to make love to, he felt she was unlikely to turn out to possess the outrageous and imaginative libido of someone like Sarah. So although he kissed her when he saw her and when he left her, and occasionally in between, if she looked as though she needed it, he took things no further.
This got a little difficult the following Wednesday night, after they had been to David Liphook’s for dinner. Leo found the evening interesting. Catherine, David’s girlfriend, was one of those impressionable girls who take their colour, chameleon-like, from the surrounding company, and she was sufficiently struck by Rachel’s beauty and attractive hesitancy of movement and speech to adopt a little of it herself. Leo spent an amusing couple of hours watching the normally gregarious Catherine unconsciously aping Rachel’s slow smiles and tentative gestures, even down to the faint hesitation before replying to a question. Although in his heart he slightly despised women, Leo loved to watch them, to divine their petty motivations and intrigues.
He felt it was useful, too, that David and William Cooper, another member of chambers, should bear initial witness to his relationship with Rachel. David was one of the most notorious gossips in the Temple and, like all good gossips, had an excellent eye and ear for emotional intrigue. And so Leo was careful, in his own discreet fashion, to behave as one who loved and was loved. He needed to strike only the very smallest spark, he realised, for her response to him was so obviously charged with affection. It was so prettily done, her smiles so sweet and open, that Leo was almost touched by it.
So much so that when he kissed her goodnight in the car outside her flat, he found himself responding completely to the fervour of her kiss and the warmth of her embrace. She was too loving, too abandoned for it to be otherwise. He sat back in the shadows and looked at her, his breathing rapid.
‘Please, Leo,’ she said, ‘please come in. I don’t want you to go yet,’ she whispered, twisting the lapels of his coat in her fingers, then leaning forward to dab kisses on his chin and cheeks before fastening her mouth hungrily to his again.
He considered the matter as they kissed. If he slept with her tonight, then it was the start of that part of the affair which would demand most of him, in terms of performance, in bed and out of it. He would rather that didn’t happen just yet, for once the going got heavy, all kinds of things could start to go wrong. And he didn’t want that. This had far too important a purpose to serve.
She pulled herself gently away from him and murmured again, ‘Please.’
‘Rachel,’ he said, looking into her eyes, which were soft with desire, ‘there’s something I want you to understand.’ He timed his pause carefully, then spoke again, as if with some difficulty. ‘When we slept together last time, it was �
� well, the circumstances that evening were very peculiar. But it was as though we’d started this relationship at the wrong end. I know a lot about you’ – he reached out a hand and stroked her hair, his eyes scanning her features – ‘but I still don’t know all the small and wonderful things that people should learn about one another. Me about you. You about me. That takes time. I want us to have that time. I want this relationship to be based on something enduring.’ I can hardly believe I’m saying this, thought Leo, continuing to stroke her hair. She picked up his other hand between hers and kissed the back of it lightly as he went on. ‘I’m a bit old-fashioned, I suppose,’ he said, astonishing himself, ‘but I think that’s the way it should be. Between us, at least. I want to woo you.’ He leant forward and kissed her briefly, softly. ‘Win you.’
She said nothing, merely gazed back at him. You don’t have to do any of that, she thought. You have me. I’m won, utterly and completely. But his words made her feel so safe, as though whatever future they might have together was assured, that she simply nodded. Then, after a moment, she said, ‘Yes, I understand. If that’s what you want.’
‘It’s what I want,’ he said softly, and kissed her again.
Well, he thought, as he watched her walk to her flat, then turned his car round, he may have lied his head off, but at least it meant less of a chance of the thing going wrong. As long as it remained on its present level, those dangerous little seeds of intimate passion could not be sown. Leo knew only too well the kind of monstrous, unexpected weeds they could grow into.
Rachel smiled to herself as she got ready for bed. He was being old-fashioned about it, particularly after that other night, but she rather liked it. It meant he set some store by their relationship. She paused as she pulled her nightdress from beneath her pillow. The odd thing was, there was absolutely nothing about Leo that made you feel he was at all old-fashioned. Not in any way …
So entirely absorbed had Leo become in his own affairs that he had forgotten about Anthony. From the very first evening that he had taken Rachel to dinner, he had dismissed Anthony from the picture altogether. It was typical of his character that, in serving his own interests, Leo concentrated only on those people and things which were of immediate relevance to him. That Rachel had been seeing Anthony, albeit on some tentative and uncertain basis, was no longer important.
It was unfortunate, therefore, that Anthony should have been in El Vino’s with Michael Gibbon and David Liphook on the Friday following David’s dinner party.
‘Yes,’ David was saying in reply to a question from Michael, ‘it went very well, actually. I cook rather a neat coq-au-vin, if I say so myself. And, amazingly enough, I actually managed to persuade Leo to join us.’
‘Really?’ said Michael, taking a sip of his wine.
‘Well, quite – I wouldn’t have thought that Catherine and I were sufficiently socially elevated for him to bother with. I mean, you know what he’s like. He seems to go to every smart party in London. Catherine even found a picture of him in Harpers & Queen once, grinning away, with some horse-faced woman gazing at him adoringly.’
Anthony laughed delightedly. ‘I hope you’ve still got it. I should love to see it.’
‘Oh, I tell you, he’s everywhere,’ said David cheerfully, his face pink from the wine and the exertions of the week. David believed in maximising everything, from his consumption of food and wine to his capacity for hard and relentless work. ‘And you should have seen the girl he brought with him. I’ve never met any of his girlfriends before, but this one was an absolute stunner. No wonder he seemed a bit dippy about her. I mean, Leo’s not one to wear his heart on his sleeve, but you could tell from the way he looked at her and spoke to her that it’s a big thing.’ He drained his glass. ‘Shall we have another bottle? Your shout, I think, Michael.’
Anthony looked bemusedly at David as Michael went off to order another bottle. He supposed that David didn’t know Leo was gay; as far as Anthony was aware, no one in chambers did, apart from himself. Leo was the kind of man who lived an entirely private life away from work. No one knew Leo as Anthony had known him. Nonetheless, he was intrigued by what David had said. And he remembered, too, the attractive woman Leo had brought to that May Ball a couple of years ago. Maybe it was the same woman. Maybe there was more to Leo’s infinitely complex personality than even he, Anthony, had guessed.
‘Tell me some more about this woman of Leo’s,’ he said. ‘Did she have blonde, sort of shortish hair—’
David shook his head by way of interruption. ‘No, I know who you’re thinking of. That woman he brought to the do in Inner Temple. No, it wasn’t her – anyway, she was just a friend, so far as one could tell. Ah, good!’ He glanced up as Michael arrived with another bottle. ‘This girl was dark – a lot younger than him. About my age, I’d say. Long hair – really good-looking. She’s a solicitor.’
‘What’s her name?’ asked Anthony, into whose mind a tiny, freezing doubt had crept.
David took a sip from his fresh glass of wine. ‘Rachel. Can’t remember her second name, offhand. Anyway, Rachel. Cracking girl. I reckon, believe it or not, that it could be serious.’
‘I – ah – don’t somehow think,’ said Michael in his nervous, rather distant voice, the voice of infinite tact and courtesy which had beguiled so many unsuspecting witnesses during many a devastating cross-examination, ‘that Leo is likely, at his time of life, to be thinking of settling down. I’ve known him for some time, and his interests are too peripatetic, I would say, for anything, or anyone, to hold him for long.’ There was a gleam of something like irony in Michael’s bespectacled eyes.
But Anthony was listening to none of this. He was aware of David’s mouth moving in reply, as his own fingers tightened round the stem of his glass. Rachel. No – it had to be someone different. It couldn’t be her. But how many solicitors were there in the City of London called Rachel, beautiful (even allowing for David’s notoriously indiscriminate enthusiasm for the opposite sex) and with long dark hair?
‘It wasn’t Dean, was it?’ Anthony interrupted David, his voice even and calm. ‘Her name wasn’t Rachel Dean?’
‘What? Yes, yes it was. Do you know her?’ asked David, seizing avidly on the possibility of more gossip.
With as much self-possession as he could muster, Anthony sat back in his chair, took a sip of his wine and said, ‘Yes. She instructed me on a case not long ago. I’ve met her a few times.’
‘Isn’t she amazing?’ pursued David. ‘If it weren’t for the fact that she’s obviously stuck on our dear Mr Davies, I’d recommend you to move in there and do a spot of poaching. As it is, I don’t think you’d stand a chance.’
A pain seemed to have gripped Anthony’s heart, and to be tightening with every word he heard. She must have been lying to him, all this time – all that stuff about give me time, I’m not ready for a relationship … Christ, what a fool he’d been. And Leo – Leo with his wordly-wise advice, standing smiling at him over the top of his glasses in the clerks’ room, as Anthony had told him he loved her. Just a light-hearted remark, but how it must have amused Leo.
Then another voice, chasing the last, told him that it was all nonsense. It could just be coincidence. Maybe they knew one another, maybe … No, he had mentioned Leo’s name too often; she’d had every opportunity of saying that she knew him. Anyway, surely they hadn’t met until recently, when he had introduced them at the Guildhall. He suddenly recalled the moment vividly.
Now he was confused. If it was true, then why? Why would Leo – Leo who had tried to make Anthony his lover not so long ago – want to do this? To make him jealous, to hurt him? No, there was none of that left between them. That was all history. This was something new and incomprehensible.
He swallowed the contents of his glass, pushed his chair back and smiled at his friends. ‘I have to be going. Sorry.’
‘What about this second bottle?’ asked David in surprise.
Anthony shook his head. ‘No more for
me, thanks. Got to go. Have a good weekend.’ And he picked up his coat and left quickly, before he had to hear any more about this impossible thing. Leo and Rachel.
Their names kept repeating themselves in his head, marching in step with him as he strode through Clifford’s Inn and through Inner Temple, down the lane to the Embankment. By the time he had got onto the tube for South Ken, he had calmed down somewhat. He would ring her. It probably hadn’t been as David had said. Anyway, he would ring her. No doubt it was all fine, just a coincidence. But doubt and jealousy flickered up like flames inside him each time he told himself this.
Adam was in when he got home. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘your mother rang.’ He glanced at Anthony’s grim face as Anthony flung his coat over a kitchen chair. ‘I’m making some chilli. You want some? Debbie and John are coming over.’
‘No thanks,’ replied Anthony. He stood for a moment, wondering whether to ring her now or later. He felt his heartbeat quicken at the thought of that phone call. Something told him that he was going to hear the worst. His limbs felt stiff with tension, with nervousness.
‘I’m just going to make a phone call,’ he muttered, leaving the kitchen and going into the living room.