Something Dangerous (Spoils of Time 02) (22 page)

CHAPTER 10

‘It’s so terrible,’ said Maud, ‘so absolutely terrible. Those poor, poor people, they’re starving out there, you know—’

‘Oh, darling, not starving, surely,’ said Robert. ‘I know times are very hard but—’

‘Daddy, they are starving. Their families too. There’s just no hope for them, that’s the worst thing. Do you know how long men stand in the breadline every day? Four or five hours. Can you imagine that?’

Robert was silent; he looked at her feeling faintly uncomfortable. It was certainly true; there was terrible poverty in the city. There was a famous photograph of the great line of men winding round Times Square, where one of the newspapers had set up a soup kitchen, while the world bustled on past them in shiny cars and smart clothes, a pitiful symbol of waste and degradation. Men were so desperate for work, they stood on street corners, with placards round their neck, begging to be given a chance.

‘It is very – bad,’ he said finally, ‘I agree.’

‘Well, we should do something about it,’ said Maud.

‘Darling, what can we do?’

‘A lot. I would have thought. Those of us who are fortunate enough to still have food in our larders and shoes on our feet. We could take people in, surely, give them work—’

‘Maud,’ said Robert, ‘of course we can’t “take people in”, as you put it.’

‘But why not? We could easily employ several more people, we’ve got two enormous houses, for heaven’s sake. And you must be able to offer work, surely, labouring work?’

‘No, Maud, I can’t.’

‘But why not?’

‘I’ve told you. Several times. It doesn’t seem to have had any impression on you. Things are hard for me as well, all my contracts have been cancelled—’

‘Daddy, how can you say that? That times are hard for you. For us. When we waste more food than lots of families live on—’

‘Yes, and I thought you were taking much of that food down to the soup kitchen.’

‘I am, I know. But you hear such dreadful stories down there, of whole families going hungry, children without shoes, and these are respectable, hard-working people, reduced to total humiliation. Something must be done, and we ought to be doing it.’

‘Maud, when you are a little older you will be able to take a more realistic view of all this. All right, we are not facing real hardship. But I have lost a considerable amount of money. I really have. It would have been a great deal worse had I not been advised to move funds out of the country and to sell a little ahead of the real fall. We are living on the overseas investments I made and by a careful conservation of my assets. John is desperately worried about the immediate future, well, we both are, and far from taking extra men on, we’ve had to lay them all off. Jamie has lost his job—’

‘Oh, now that is really dreadful,’ said Maud. Her face was harsh with anger now. ‘Poor Jamie, with no job, nothing to do all day except play golf and eat lunch and arrange his weekend sailing—’

‘Maud, calm down. And anyway, this isn’t confined to the United States, it’s a global problem, that’s half the trouble.’

‘Yes, and in Europe, in England and Germany, they get money from the government. Here they just beg and starve. And I’ll tell you what makes me angrier than anything, it’s the thought of Laurence sitting there in that palace of his, apparently completely untouched by it all.’

‘I believe he has lost a lot of money, Maud. Almost all the bankers did.’

‘Well, that’s really tragic, isn’t it? That makes me feel truly heartbroken. Why didn’t he warn people, he and all the other bankers, why did they just go on and on taking their money? It’s wicked, dreadfully wicked, all of it, but the bankers and brokers, people like Laurence, are the most wicked of all. I feel so – so ashamed of him. Of being anything to do with him. It’s just as well I never have to see him. If I did, I don’t know what I wouldn’t do to him . . .’

‘
Meridian Times Ten
is – superb,’ said Celia. She spoke slowly, and with the kind of intense relief with which people relate an escape from a serious accident or the recovery from a near-fatal illness.

Oliver looked at her. ‘Thank God. How he’s done it, God knows.’

‘Oh, Oliver, don’t be absurd,’ said Celia briskly, ‘work is the great anaesthetic.’

‘Really?’ He smiled at her, his deceptively vague, sweet smile. ‘Well, I suppose you should know.’

She ignored this. ‘What I feared, most of all, was that the book would be bad. How would we have told him, what would we have done?’

‘Published it, I suppose. We could hardly have thrown it back at him. And every author is allowed one weak book. Even two. Reputation does a powerful promotional job.’

‘I know. But – well, I would have found it hard. To publish, I mean. To have risked poor reviews, all that sort of thing. There has been a three-year gap, after all. Expectation is high. And it would have hurt Sebastian horribly.’

‘Well, it doesn’t have to. Was he – anxious about it?’

‘Pretty anxious, yes. The usual author-neurosis to the power of ten.’

‘And have you told him it’s all right?’

‘Briefly. I’ve asked him to supper tonight. I hope that’s all right?’

‘Celia, if I said it wasn’t, what would you do about it?’

She looked at him for a moment, rather oddly; then, ‘But I knew you wouldn’t,’ she said.

‘To
Times Ten
,’ said Oliver, raising his glass.

‘
Times Ten
,’ said Sebastian. ‘I hope to God it’s all right.’

‘Celia says it’s marvellous.’

He was silent. Then, ‘She could hardly say it wasn’t. The way things are.’

‘My dear Sebastian, how long have you known Celia? When it comes to publishing, she is incapable of untruth.’

The faded blue eyes looking at Sebastian were very steady, with no amusement behind them; Sebastian was silent for a moment. ‘You’ve been so very good to me, Oliver. Better than I deserve.’

‘Well,’ said Oliver, his tone lighter, ‘we have to take care of our authors. Lyttons owes you a great deal.’

‘I only wish—’ said Sebastian, and then stopped. Oliver acknowledged the silence and lifted the bottle of port.

‘Another glass?’

‘Oh, I don’t think – well, a small one.’

Oliver poured him a large one.

Sebastian had been drinking heavily ever since Pandora’s death. No one felt it right or even possible to try and stop him. If anything was to ease his pain, then he had a right to it.

There had been dreadful days, weeks, months. For the first week or so he had lived at Cheyne Walk, never going to bed, sleeping briefly on the sofa, pacing the house, day and night, occasionally going out and walking with an almost savage speed along the Embankment and then returning to the house like some desperate, hunted creature in search of refuge.

Celia spent endless hours with him: Oliver would hear them talking behind closed doors, in various rooms, for Sebastian was unusually restless even for him, could stay nowhere for long. Generally, the conversations were quiet, but occasionally there would be a roar of rage through the silence, doors would slam, there would be hurrying footsteps, Celia’s voice rising and falling, sometimes as if in anger herself: and then the heavy quiet again.

Adele and Giles, afraid to be called to witness the agony Sebastian was enduring, stayed away from him as much as they could, only in Giles’s case mumbling sympathy and in Adele’s administering warm, but swift hugs and kisses and then withdrawing quickly and going to her room; Kit, however, was surprisingly and bravely forthcoming, went up to Sebastian the first time he saw him after Pandora had died and put his arms round him, and said, ‘I’m so, so sorry.’ Sebastian had stood for a long time, holding him, his great head buried in Kit’s hair, saying nothing and when he set him back and looked at him, there were tears of sympathy in Kit’s dark-blue eyes.

After that, whenever they met, in the hall or on the stairs, or even on the front steps where Sebastian liked to sit, smoking, staring at the river, Kit asked him if he would like to be alone, or have his company, apparently equally at ease with either answer. He would sit with him quietly when he was with him, not speaking unless spoken to, occasionally shifting closer to Sebastian and resting his head against him. ‘It’s so sweet,’ Adele reported to Venetia, ‘he’s rather like some adoring puppy when he’s with him. Of course, they’ve always got on terribly well. But Kit’s only ten, it’s amazing, really, that he seems to know what to do. I wish I did. Poor, poor Sebastian. I’ve never seen such misery, such absolute misery in anyone. It’s not just his face, it’s his whole body, he moves, turns his head as if even that hurt him.’

The funeral was the most terrible day any of them could remember; Sebastian so brave as the coffin was carried into the church, sitting utterly still as the service was read, just staring in front of him, with Celia on one side and Kit on the other; he had said he wanted no music as he could not have borne it, but the silence was dreadful, pain incarnate.

He remained silent until the last moment, when the coffin had been lowered into the grave; it was a beautiful afternoon, and somewhere in the churchyard birds were singing, and there was sunlight shafting through the trees, and even when he had cast the posy of the white flowers she so loved on to her coffin, he still kept control of himself. But at the dreadful finality of hearing her ‘committed to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’, he began to sob, loudly and horribly, and simply stood there, staring down at her, the last sight of her he would ever have, his great shoulders heaving and the tears pouring down his face like a small boy. And it was a small boy who took his hand then and kissed it very tenderly, and looked up at him with infinite anxiety, and then down again at Pandora, lying beneath her garlands of flowers, and rested his head against him, and they stood there, the pair of them, for a long time, Kit and Sebastian, holding hands while the birds continued to sing through the stillness and gradually Sebastian’s weeping quietened and finally Kit was seen to very gently lead him away.

It had been a blood clot that had killed her: travelling swiftly through her frail body to her heart. She died suddenly and quietly, a week after little Isabella’s birth, just as she had been told that in another week she might be allowed to return home. Sebastian had been with her, had gone over to the crib to pick the baby up at Pandora’s request, when he heard a faint sound from the bed; by the time he had reached her she was gone from him. It was not unusual after childbirth, the doctor said, struggling to calm Sebastian and to defend himself against the rising and violent tide of his anger, nobody quite understood why, there was certainly nothing that could be done to prevent it, it was undetectable and untreatable. Pandora’s pregnancy had been long and difficult, he said, and although she had been spared labour there had been the added trauma of surgery and, of course, considerable loss of blood.

And Sebastian, roaring and raging, had finally left the hospital, returning after a few hours threatening to sue, to commit violence, to take vengeance on the nurses, the surgeon, the midwife; only Celia had been able to calm him, to make him understand that nobody and nothing could have saved Pandora. The baby he had left in the hospital, refusing to have anything to do with her; he was literally unable to look at her. When finally he was forced to recognise that she must go home, that he had a reponsibility for her, he sent the maternity nurse and the nanny that Pandora had hired in his car to fetch her, and when the small sad little party arrived at the house, he went out immediately and did not return for many hours.

‘It’s dreadful,’ Celia said to her mother, after worried conversations with the nurse a few days later, ‘he refuses so much as to be in the same room as the baby, he can’t bear her near him. I can understand it, of course I can, but it can’t go on, he’ll go mad and the child will suffer.’

‘The child won’t suffer yet,’ said Lady Beckenham, ‘she won’t know. Give him time, Celia, let him begin to come to terms with it all. There’s no need to feel you have to solve it immediately. Tell the staff to look after the baby, that’s what they’ve been engaged to do, not worry about its emotional welfare. Too much of all that these days, if you ask me. All a baby needs is food and warmth, it’s no different from any other young animal. I always took a holiday away with Beckenham, after I’d been confined, for several weeks; you all seem to have survived. I think it’s a great pity, myself, wet nurses are out of fashion. Now stop fussing about the child and devote your attention to Sebastian. The other problem will solve itself.’

But in that she was wrong.

Kit had taken to visiting Sebastian occasionally at tea time, the house in Primrose Hill being only a short distance away from his school. One particularly lovely early autumn day, while they were eating tea in the garden, the nanny brought Isabella out and put her in her pram. Sebastian made a great business of going into the house and fetching some cake for Kit; when he came out, Kit was holding the baby, who was smiling up at him and tugging at his tie.