Stephanie Page 9
‘I drove her back.’
‘She seems to be settling down.’
‘Yes, she’s settling down.’
He glanced at Suzanne, trying to concentrate on the normal. ‘Megson’s have agreed the date of the exhibition.’
‘What exhibition?’
‘Of my photographs. It’s June the eleventh.’
‘Good.’
‘We’ll probably give a party afterwards. My club’s a lot cheaper than Claridge’s and just as pleasant. It’ll be my first West End show.’
‘I know,’ she said with the same lack of enthusiasm.
Five years ago he had taken a great fancy to her and had charmed her into living with him and then marrying him. She had not been slow to be charmed, being an actress with dark good looks and a fine body but an awareness that none of the managers thought her talented. Her ambition to become a second Janet Suzman was rapidly failing, and Errol Colton had an engaging manner, a prosperous lifestyle and potential in plenty.
She could not complain that the potential had not been realised. Two years ago they had moved into this Georgian country house; they had built an indoor swimming pool, a tennis court and a croquet lawn and there were parties every other weekend. They had cars enough and more than their fair share of help; his daughter was a weekly boarder at Westonbirt; they had a pied-à-terre in London, they went frequently to first nights, and she could go as often as she wanted – though not accompanied by him – to the opera. It was very much of a success story.
Fairly soon Suzanne had discovered that she had married two men. One was Errol fronting himself to the world, or in pursuit of a woman, or entertaining guests, or joking with his daughter; the other was the man at home, where he was untalkative, indrawn, buried in his photography, moroseness never far away. The life he wanted to live was clearly that in which he promoted and projected himself, but this could only be maintained part of the time: then the batteries switched off. In spite of his muscularity, his maleness, his craggy good looks and volatile energy, she sometimes thought of him as a weak man. Underneath the macho image was someone who could turn and waver as the wind blew.
From the beginning she had resented his infidelities, but she saw it was part of the image he had created for himself. But this girl from St Martin’s had seemed more serious. She had seen Stephanie once, and thought her a high-living, high-flying, care-for-nothing sort of girl, just the type to hold a special fascination for Errol; but the most scaring thing about her was her youth. Suzanne was only thirty-four and was well aware of her own good looks and elegance. But she was also aware that in the prosperous ambiance she was living in she had allowed herself to put on a bit too much weight. This girl Stephanie had not yet reached the age when she even had to think about it. Thin as a wand, leggy, high-breasted, she was prancing through life like a mettlesome colt, unbridled, undisciplined. What a woman to lasso and bring kicking to the ground!
This trip to India had brought it all out into the open, made it in this strange inversion of modern morals curiously more ‘respectable’. Stephanie’s father, it seemed, was quite well off, but Stephanie herself might not be averse to marriage to a property tycoon. It was a good life he could offer her. Nor could one write down his own physical magnetism when he laid it on the line.
Last weekend had produced a bitter quarrel. In the quarrel Errol had dropped some hint that he might be breaking up with Stephanie, but with him you could never tell truth from lies. Now he had been away two nights and had come home in no conciliatory mood. He looked as if he had been in a road accident. Leave him alone now. Get out and say no more.
She stayed and said more.
‘I need money. Last weekend was expensive.’
‘You must have saved while I’ve been away.’
‘Can you give me any reason why I should have?’
‘How much d’you want?’
‘Five hundred would about cover it.’
‘What’re you doing, feeding the staff on caviar?’
She glanced at the letter lying on his desk. ‘ Has the girl been with you in London?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Does she write to you every night?’
‘I’ve said all I want to say about that. There is nothing new to add.’
‘Is she still playing hard to get or hard to get rid of?’
He turned on her angrily and then controlled his anger. The coke was helping. She watched his face change, saw the cocked eyebrow, the mouth guarding itself just in time.
‘Want a drink?’
‘I’ve had one.’
‘Well, have another.’
In the silence he went across and poured her a gin, splashed it with tonic, handed it to her. ‘There’s no ice here.’
She took it without speaking.
‘What did you say you wanted?’
‘Five hundred.’
He took out his cheque book and sat at the table, wrote in it. The chair creaked as he tore off the cheque and turned.
‘I’ve made it seven fifty.’
‘Thanks,’ she said.
He frowned wryly. ‘You look like Helen of Troy in a sulk.’
Her face did not change. ‘It wasn’t Helen of Troy who was let down. You ought to know with your Greek connections.’
‘Ah, yes. Ah, yes.’ He was feeling better every minute, a little more confident of his ability to find a way through the horrifying mess he was in. ‘I think I will have something to eat, now you suggest it. What have we got?’
‘Cold chicken. Smoked salmon. Or Janice can make you an omelette before she goes.’
‘The salmon will do. And see the bread’s cut thin; with plenty of butter. Is there any Vouvray?’
‘I’ll see.’
She turned to the door, holding the cheque between thumb and forefinger as if wet. She had not touched her drink.
‘Suzanne.’
‘Yes?’
‘Maybe there is something more I should say. I was going to leave it for a while.’ He hesitated. ‘ One makes mistakes. It’s not always easy to admit them.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as my affair with Stephanie. It’s coming to an end. But it’s not going to be easy for either of us.’
‘You dropped a few guarded hints on Sunday. Is there any reason I should believe them?’
He shrugged. ‘ I’m more than ever sure.’
‘Is she?’
‘I think so.’
‘Have you seen her?’
‘Not this week. I’m seeing her on Sunday. At least, I expect to.’
‘How nice for you both. Is this to be the great parting or the great reconciliation?’
They stood for a moment in another silence. Again he turned to the photographs, as if they were the one comforting and preoccupying diversion from reality. They all had to be sorted, chosen, before being mounted for the exhibition. He had to choose about seventy from more than a thousand, covering several years of his life. He thought to consult Suzanne about some of those of her that he wanted to show, but this was not the time.
‘I’m going to this birthday party of Tony Maidment’s – Sir Anthony Maidment – it’s his twenty-first at his home at Sutton David. Sunday evening.’
‘How should I know? Are you taking her?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then why aren’t you taking me?’
‘Because I expect to see her there. That’s when I intend to make the final break. I shall tell them that you have flu.’
‘Thank you very much.’ She picked up the drink now and sipped it. It was all too familiar, this fluctuation in his moods. When she saw him coming across from his car his face had alerted her to the prospect of some catastrophe. When she came into the room he had been sharp-edged as a knife. Now he was pulling out the stops for some sort of reconciliation. She was not deceived. She refused to be deceived. Because she wanted to be reassured she wouldn’t allow herself to be reassured.
She said: ‘Don’t you
care for her any more?’
‘It isn’t as simple as that.’
‘It can’t be.’
He met her look only for the second time since he came in. His eyes had their concentrated, attentive look, as if for the moment he was thinking only of her questions. Whether it was a trick or a trait it was difficult to resist. His sense of fun was even trying to break in, but failing – some darker bruising loomed too large in his mind. She folded the cheque. ‘And after this, if it does come to an end,
what next?’
‘Next what?’
‘Next woman. Girl. The next one you’re going to fancy.’
He shook his head from side to side. ‘I don’t know. Christ, each
time I tell myself … One lives and learns. It may be never.’
For the moment he believed it. After she had gone he stared at
the closed door and the sweat broke out on his forehead again.
He dabbed it away. Maybe it really would be never.
Chapter Seven
James Locke was on the Chelsea Flower Show Committee, and on the Monday of the following week he drove to a meeting of the organisers at the Royal Hospital. This year he had been invited to be one of the judges of the rhododendron exhibits. Since his own garden ran merely to twelve acres and had only been in existence twenty years, he felt this a signal honour. Among the other judges would be men and women who owned and tended some of the great gardens of England and whose ancestors had travelled to the Himalayas and Sikkim in search of new species. Some of these people still living had given their names to hybrids which had become known throughout the gardening world. James often thought that if you wanted immortality – at least the only kind in which he believed – you were much more likely to attain it by hybridising a particularly successful family of camellia than bothering to get your name in history books or have statues put up in Whitehall. Even a good rose had an extended life. Who, for instance, of her generation – though she was now defunct – had lasted longer than Frau Karl Drushki?
After the meeting he hobbled painfully to his car and drove to his club for a luncheon appointment with his old friend Colonel Henry Gaveston.
The hell with central London was that even with a disabled sticker it was almost impossible to get near enough to be within limping distance of the Hanover Club. In the end he parked on a double yellow line in Davies Street near a bus stop and hoped for the best.
Henry was waiting for him. A tall, ramshackle man, stooping, with a war-damaged shoulder and left hand, a lined and scarred face (scars coming from life and not from battle), yet handsome in an aquiline way with silver-grey hair that tended to fall across his forehead. They had been at school together and through some of the war, though Henry had been in the Irish Guards until the SAS came into being.
He had had a distinguished army career, serving after the war in Aden, Cyprus and Northern Ireland, but had retired early under a cloud, having proved too tough in Ulster to keep in line with government policy. Half-Irish himself – his mother had come from County Limerick – he had met terrorism with an iron fist of his own and was consequently now on the murder list of the IRA.
He was a Fellow of St Martin’s and had been appointed Bursar five years ago. He lived near Thame a few miles east of Oxford, dressed untidily, almost scruffily, and new undergraduates were warned of his habit of inviting them out there for the weekend and then expecting them to spend most of it working in his garden. He had married late, had a son still at university and a wife as untidy as himself who wrote biographies and was at present in America on a tour to publicise her latest work.
They did not join one of the general tables but lunched alone at a window table overlooking the garden. To talk to, Henry did not seem a hard man, any more than you would have supposed James to have been a brave one. They were two elderly gentlemen, lifelong friends, benevolent, easy talkers, easy in each other’s company, enjoying a meeting to reminisce, to swap confidences, to try out one of the better club clarets, to glance around the gracious Georgian dining room, to raise a hand in greeting to friends who came in and out.
Over the fish they talked of plants and gardens, of Evelyn Gaveston’s travels in America, of young Charles Gaveston’s preoccupation with the tenor saxophone. ‘ Of course at his present rate he’ll be independent of government grants or subsidies from me. In the group he’s formed he’s already making more money than I am paid for being Bursar of an Oxford college! But Evelyn and I would have liked him to spend a few years in the Guards first, whatever his choice afterwards. Young men can’t wait.’
‘We didn’t,’ said James. ‘But then there was a war on.’
They discussed a sciadopitys verticillata which Henry Gaveston had been growing for ten years but which had never got its roots down firmly enough to survive without a stake. ‘It needs guying,’ said James.
‘Yes, but why should it?’ demanded Henry. ‘It comes from a hilly district in Japan. It’s perfectly hardy. I’ve got no lime. Yet it flops around in every gale like a drunken sailor on a Saturday night.’
‘Ground soft?’ suggested James. ‘ So guy it. Get some of your conscripted young guests to do it one weekend. Otherwise you’ll lose it.’
‘Hell,’ said Henry. ‘ If you had to guy every pine tree my garden would look like a village fête.’
They discussed their old colleague Jock Armitage, who had announced his decision to resign his seat at the next general election.
‘Don’t think I could ever have gone into politics,’ said James. ‘ I always see both sides of things. I don’t claim this as a virtue; it may well be a weakness; but whereas in a war I can very easily say, “ My country, right or wrong”, in a political crisis I couldn’t always say, “ My party, right or wrong”.’
‘Both sides,’ muttered Gaveston, as the pork chops were served. ‘That’s what I could see in Ireland, for I love the Irish – most of ’em. But a few are dastardly, and them I would stamp on. World opinion be buggered.’
They talked of Scotland having won the Grand Slam and the game they had seen at Twickenham together earlier in the year. Only when the cheese was served did they come to the real purpose of the meeting.
‘Young Stephanie,’ said Gaveston. ‘You really worried about her?’
‘Not exactly worried but concerned. She came home the weekend before last, and I thought her more wired up than I’ve ever known her. We had a very good weekend – everything went apple pie – but underneath she was a bag of nerves. I didn’t fancy it at all.’
‘And you think it’s to do with drugs?’
‘That or a broken love affair. Or both. I don’t know how they interlock, or if at all. You saw her?’
‘I’ve seen her on and off for the last three years! A very nice gal, if I may say so, James, and you well know my susceptibilities. She’s been kicking up her heels recently – got into rather an odd set, in my opinion … though I don’t think there’s much harm in ’em really. So long as you were able to pay the piper … I assumed you knew about it and were willing to let her go on a slack rein. She never got into any trouble in the college, and I didn’t feel it was my business to interfere. Girls will be girls.’
‘But you saw her last week?’
‘Yes. After you telephoned I rang her and arranged for her to meet a woman called Sandra Woolton who’s a social worker and knows as much about drugs as anyone in Oxford. I understand they met and Sandra took your girl to a squat that she knows of near the river. They’ll let her into these places because for a while she was one of them. Then they went on to a pub Sandra knows of where dope is fairly freely traded in the back rooms, so that Stephanie could see how it all worked: needles and vomit and the rest; the place was raided after Christmas but it has all started up again. Now they’ve an elaborate system of warnings, with two Doberman pinschers to hold up the police for a few minutes while the dope is flushed away.’
James picked at a bit of cheese. ‘And when you saw her yourself?’
‘And what did you think of her?’
‘As you say – wired up. Talked too much. But James …’
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t know if you’re worried about this, but I could certainly detect nothing in her manner to suggest that she was on anything herself.’
‘Well, no, not really –’
‘I also asked Sandra, who’s far more up in these things than I am, and she’s certain there’s no sign of Stephanie being on anything at all.’
‘I didn’t think so. But thank you for the reassurance.’
Henry eyed his old friend. ‘I don’t think I should worry, old boy. She’s had this love affair you were telling me about which is in process of breaking up. She’s been slacking in her work. And Schools are less than four weeks off. Believe me, she’s not the first student to get het up. It would be a bit surprising if she were not!’
James nodded and sipped the last of his wine.
‘So I don’t think there is much to be even concerned about,’ Henry said. ‘If in Stephanie’s case it were really what it seemed on the surface, just a wish to know more about drugs and to make judgments about them, then I’m glad you let me know so that I could counteract Peter Brune’s heterodox influence.’
‘Heterodox influence?’
Gaveston pushed his boyish grey hair out of his eyes and laughed. ‘Oh, only in a manner of speaking. Peter’s a dear man. I’ve known him for ever – which is almost as long as I’ve known you. But in spite of helping to finance this clinic he has wayward views about legalising drugs and so abolishing the rackets that exist. Well and good, it’s a point of view. But all he ever sees, I’m sure, are his clean and carefully hospitalised patients in the Worsley Clinic. He is in some ways the typical liberal, working out the theory of a problem and coming to typically liberal conclusions. The world to such people is governed by theorems, and life must fit into these theorems, not be human and messy and contrary and individual and cross-grained and greedy and weak. So in their own minds they organise a perfect world, and if like Peter they are very rich, they can live in a way that pretends it exists. Ordinary people, alas, know different.’