Objects of Desire

  The woman, a brunette not nearly as pretty as Sally, but well turned out, said, ‘I love it.’

  They saw Piers approaching and the women kissed the air on either side of the other’s face, the girlfriend farewell. They greeted Piers, and the other woman left. He thought rather hurriedly.

  ‘Do you know what Evelyn said when I told her you’ve dumped me?’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t put it that way.’

  ‘How would you like me to put it?’

  ‘We’re leaving each other on amicable terms because there is no future for us.’

  ‘Maybe not for you, Piers, but there was for me. Don’t look so worried. I lied. I’ve been kinder to you than you deserve. Amicable was the very word I used.’

  ‘You know that it’s right for us to go our own ways, you just don’t want to admit it.’

  Sally had a conspiratorial look about her. It prompted him to ask, ‘Evelyn looked at me as if I were the enemy, I can’t help but wonder what else you’ve told her and the army of girlfriends you run with?’

  ‘That you’re sending me on a trip round the world as a consolation prize, to ease your conscience, because you think I need a change of scene as well as a change of life – so I can’t make lunch next Thursday.’

  ‘Change of scene, change of lifestyle, Sally, and well you know it. You make it sound like a penance. You don’t have to go, you know, you can spend the rest of your life lunching with the girls at San Lorenzo.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Piers, if I don’t like Page Cooper, whoever she might be, and her travel plans, I will be lunching at San Lorenzo next Thursday.’ And she started to walk past him.

  He stopped her with a hand on her arm, ‘You’ll like Page Cooper, she’s not at all what I expected.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope she’s not what I expect her to be like.’

  Piers placed his arm round her. Looking down at her, he said, ‘I’ll wait here in the car for you, Sally. Friends? We were never each other’s great love, you know that as well as I do. We just suited each other for a long time. It’s not me you’ll miss, it’s the lifestyle you got used to. Friends?’ he queried again.

  Sally knew he was being honest and genuine; she wanted him to be less honest, less genuine, and less right. He was one of the great catches in the bachelor stakes on the English aristocratic circuit and she had lost him, he had wriggled off the hook. She felt her failure and the loss too deeply to talk of friendship now. She did hope that Page Cooper was all right, though, because the truth was that it wouldn’t be easy facing those girlie lunches, having to get a job, going on the open market for a new man in her life. Travel, all expenses paid, did sound like a penance but was her best option until everyone got used to her break up with Piers, and especially Sally herself.

  ‘Maybe,’ she told him, and hurried away.

  Piers watched her walk into the hotel. She would be all right. He had no doubt they would some day be friends again. What she could not understand, what he had always understood, was that they had been friends who fucked well together, had good times, nothing more than a happy-go-lucky couple who ran with a fun crowd when it suited Piers, and where Sally ran alone when it suited Piers.

  Sally had come a long way in the years since he had picked her up at the Dior counter in Harrod’s. He smiled to himself, remembering how enchanted he had been by her Lancashire accent. It somehow didn’t fit the pretty, petite, soft and sexy look of her. Even now he found her northern accent, though fainter after living in the south and running with upper-class-accented girlfriends for so many years, sexy and appealing. She had stood out from the other sales ladies plying their wares under the bright lights for not being heavily made up and looking just a little vulnerable. Piers had always had a fondness for vulnerable women.

  He took a cigar from the case in the inside breast pocket of his jacket, a silver cutter from another pocket. Cutting the tip of the long, slim, hand-rolled Havana cigar, the same brand his father had always smoked, he dropped it in the ashtray. He turned the cigar slowly as he placed the flame of a match to it and puffed. It burned evenly just as the flame reached his fingertips and died. He lit a cigar in exactly the same way his father had. Piers did many things precisely as his father had, he was very much his father’s son.

  He turned to look over his shoulder through the rear window of the car. If Sally was not coming through that hotel door that was a good sign. She had taken a look at the women and had liked them enough to sit down and talk to them. He would give her fifteen minutes. If she was not out by then, he would leave a message with the doorman that he had gone to White’s, his club, and would see her later at home.

  He turned back in his seat and relaxed. Home. It brought a smile to his lips. Not the four-bedroomed Hays Mews house, once large stables that had belonged to the family’s eighteenth-century Charles Street town house, where he lived when he was in town, but the house he really considered home, Chalfont, a crumbling mansion with a fifteen-thousand-acre estate less than two hours from London. His smile was in memory of the first time he had brought Sally home for Sunday lunch with the family. Well, the family and sixteen others.

  Chalfont Under Edge was not quite the picture postcard image of the perfect Cotswold village but close enough. Its residents took a snobbish pride in being part of Wiltshire and not the tourist-ridden Cotswolds. Piers had pulled his black two-seater Jaguar up before the village pub, the Horse and Hounds, for a drink before going on to the house. It had been packed with people. Heads had turned and the pub had fallen silent when Sally entered but then the chatter and buzz resumed the moment Piers entered behind her. There were pats on the back, handshakes, greetings for him. He had ushered her through the pub to the bar and ordered them drinks. Piers introduced Sally to the publican Jim Withers, the barmaid Sheryl, and several other men standing at the bar.

  ‘The crowd from the house has been and gone, Piers.’

  ‘Were there many, Jim?’

  ‘Quite a few.’

  He had turned to Sally and said, ‘Chalfont has a good table.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means, Piers.’

  ‘It means people like dining at my mother’s table because she serves good food and wine in abundance. The flowers, table settings, silver, even the guests, are never boring or mean.’

  She had smiled at him. It had been an enigmatic smile and when he held the car door open for her he had asked, ‘Why did you smile when I told you Mother had a good table?’

  Quite charmingly she had risen on to her toes and kissed him on the cheek, answering, ‘You’re a real toff, so very upper-class sometimes, and I love it. I suppose I’ll love it even more when I can stop thinking it’s a joke you’re playing on me.’

  He puffed on his cigar and opened a window. He could still be amused by remembering those early days with Sally. His mind drifted back again. They had only known each other a few weeks that first time he had brought her to Chalfont.

  He drove through the massive ornamental iron gates swung back on stone plinths topped by weatherworn lions with broken tails, the odd leg or ear missing too. The five-hundred-year-old trees and parkland with its lake, the crumbling stone bridge over a stream that fed it, a gentle rolling landscape that Capability Brown had had something to do with, a private English parkland that had seen better times and many more gardeners, was still a place of majestic beauty. The Jacobean stone house, mellowed by the centuries, with its towers and turrets, its lead domes and roof and its many chimneys, was not huge by stately home standards but reeked of history and upper-class privilege. To most first-time visitors it brought gasps of astonishment, admiration, wonder.

  But not to the Lancashire lass, Sally Brown. She was a girl who took everything in her stride. She showed none of the awe that many other girls had when he brought them home for Sunday lunch. Her only comment had been, ‘This house suits you. What fun to be born in a house like this.’

  His mother and father had been alive then. His mother, Lady Elspeth,
not a great beauty by any standards in her youth, had never improved as some women did with old age. She had, however, been a woman of infinite charm, and famous for her independent spirit and eccentricities. It had been from his mother that he had inherited both his fun-loving nature and his desire for solitude, as and when he wanted it.

  Lady Elspeth’s comment, the only one she had ever made to him about Sally, was: ‘She is a nice young thing, Piers. When you’re through playing with her, see you don’t throw her away like a broken toy.’

  His father was a handsome man whom Piers admired and resembled not only in looks but in spirit: they shared the same wanderlust, always a challenge to be taken up, an exploration to organise, an expedition to join, some romantic adventure to embark on. That had been his father’s life, and he taken his family with him sometimes, his son certainly from a very young age. Before he became a cabinet minister, he had been an unofficial emissary who travelled abroad to sort out problems for Queen and country. He had been charming to Sally, and when he and Piers had taken an after-lunch walk to the folly on the edge of the lake, had told his son, ‘You are like me in so many ways, my boy. In my day there were showgirls, actresses, pretty things like your Miss Brown. They’re usually more clever than you think.’

  And Sally had been clever, very. She had understood his character and had inched her way into his life by seeing to it that he didn’t have to think about her. Sally was just there. Not at all obtrusive but there, a presence in his life that he hardly had to think about. His friends, the women as well as the men, travelling companions and literary associates, all became her friends.

  Harrod’s had soon been left behind. She had been nineteen when he had picked her up at the perfume counter and six weeks later he allowed her to move into his London mews house. He liked keeping her. Every day she learned a little bit better how to fit into Mayfair society and his world, and bettered herself effortlessly. He liked her, respected her for that, that she was changing her life, up-grading herself without losing the essential character he was so attracted to. And she did it without making a great issue of it, that was important to their relationship. How clever she had been to know that. He had been amused by the frivolous life she had chosen for herself: the gossiping, the lunching with girlfriends. Her life became one of shopping, beauty salons, hairdressers and dressing up, most of all just being pretty and amusing and there for him when he wanted her.

  He had always known what she was and was not to him, and it had been to his credit that he had never allowed her to become a house slave. She never had to clean and cook for him nor play valet in exchange for his keeping her in style. The sexual favours? That had always been a tricky one, though less tricky when after a few months they realised that was what kept them together. All the rest was trimmings.

  They lived separate lives and had a life together, and that suited him. Sally came and went as freely as he did. There had been many times during their life together when he had extended invitations and she had accepted to go with him on some of his expeditions or adventures. When he had climbed the Eiger, she had watched him through a telescope from a hotel in the valley and waited for him to return. She partnered him in a motor race of vintage cars through five countries. And if she didn’t go with him she was always waiting where he’d told her to be. But there were other times when he was away without her for months on end: his expedition up the Amazon, or the year he entered the Whitbread Round the World Race, to come in second. The years of Sally just being there slipped by.

  Often when he was away he would forget that she existed, and yet at other times, such as when he made a camel trek across the Sahara, he had dreamed about her. For days afterwards he had thought about her, how he spoiled her, and how much she enjoyed it. He thought of her lunching with the girls and the shopping and waiting for him to return, how she had ambitions for nothing more. What a boring life she led, and how happy she was with the life she had made for herself, and he was pleased for her. But out in the desert that night she suddenly became a cause for concern when he saw that they had nothing in common, not even love.

  It had been during that same night, under a sky black and silky-looking, not unlike silk velvet, and studded with millions of bright stars, that memory brought his mother back and he remembered how she had been with Sally. She had liked the same things in Sally that he had: her lack of guile, simplicity, self-awareness. Lady Elspeth befriended Sally. It was she who sent her to Winkfield to learn flower arranging, she who by example taught Sally the manners expected in upper-class circles, but never by instruction. His mother had chosen to sit on the lawn and drink with Sally and Piers’s sister Caroline during her last days when pain had been her constant companion.

  That night all sorts of memories came flooding back to him. How proud he had been to have Sally Brown standing with the family at his mother’s open grave. And then later, after his father’s death when he had inherited the title and Chalfont which he had always adored and had now become the centre of his world, Sally had taken up residence with him as she had done in London, remaining in the background of his life.

  Now, sitting in the car awaiting her return, he remembered that extraordinary night in the desert where he had felt closer to God than ever before. The past had flooded in and the future had somehow presented itself as a blank. When new beginnings became something essential, like a new dawn.

  There was an inch or so of ash on the end of his cigar. Very carefully he deposited it in the ashtray, and sighed. He felt such relief that Sally was still inside the hotel with those women. The rest was up to her. He felt a sudden surge of elation at being free from Sally; at their, each of them, being able to get on separately with new people, and intimate relationships governed by love.

  Piers gave the doorman a message for Sally and walked away from the Connaught to Berkeley Square and then up Bruton Street heading for his club. He kept looking at the attractive women passing by, and each time he registered some interest in one, it brought a smile to his lips.

  Women. There had been so many lovely women in his life, even during the years he had lived with Sally. But never when he was in England. In England she had been there, ever present and satisfying. The other women were in other places: all sorts of women, objects of his desire, mini affairs and one-night stands and call girls. He had never been averse to paying for sexual favours: an elegant and expensive prostitute who guaranteed great sex – why not? His was a voracious appetite for women. Not a man who thought about love or romance, yet he was a romantic.

  He had a penchant for the exotic and the erotic in women, but women such as that jarred the emotions, signalled involvement, something that took time and energy and reached into the core of his being. Something to flirt with but to be cautious with, on guard against, because that was the sort of woman he could give himself up to, reveal himself to. He had always shied away from relationships that might develop into commitment of the heart and soul, ones where he might not be in control, hold the power and the passion. Not yet. He was not ready, too promiscuous, too hungry for new and exciting sex – and he had Sally Brown waiting at home.

  Walking down St James’s a woman dropped a parcel and he bent down and picked it up for her. Their eyes made contact. She had the same colour hair as Page Cooper. She thanked him and rushed away. Page Cooper was that sort of erotic woman, sensuous and as liberated sexually as he was. A man can sense that in a woman. The other woman, Anoushka Rivers, he had for a few seconds tuned into. There was a woman he would like to discover, peel away the layers she was hiding behind. He sensed she was a woman with a sexual secret and he would have liked to discover it.

  Piers had always seen women as no less interested in all things sexual than he was himself. Most only pretended differently, and enjoyed it in various degrees as their right as much as his. Sally and sex … There had always been something about Sally and sex for him. He had but to look at her and lust came into it. He liked fucking Sally. Her enthusiasm for sex was th
ere and though she could lose herself in it, after a few years he understood that it was for Sally as superficial as the rest of her life. Good, great for him, was what seemed to matter to her. After that discovery, he wondered just how much sex really mattered to Sally, but not enough to speak to her about it.

  What had made life so easy with her had been that she didn’t love Piers for himself but for the good times they had together, because he had added so much to her life. That was what made her wanting to marry him and have his children so impossible, so unworthy of her. It was also what made him realise he was yet to have a love relationship with commitment that was worth building on.

  SALLY BROWN

  Chapter 10

  Anoushka and Page watched Sally Brown cross the room and make direct for their table. Having met her lover, she was not at all what they expected. Though neither woman said anything, the look that passed between them sent out that message.

  ‘Disappointing?’ mumbled Page under her breath. But before Anoushka could whisper her impression, Sally spoke to them with a smile that was friendly, sweet even.

  ‘Hello, I’m Sally Brown, here about the ad in the International Herald Tribune.’

  There seemed little to do but ask her to join them, though Page thought it a waste of time. This girl on face value did not seem to be someone she wanted to spend any time with.

  ‘I’m Page Cooper. You’re very late but do sit down. Are you habitually late?’

  ‘Yes, I would say so,’ she answered, not looking at all contrite for having kept Page waiting.

  ‘They say that’s indicative of something.’

  ‘More or less indicative than being always punctual?’