Into Temptation (Spoils of Time 03) (12 page)

‘Not a word I’d choose. Now off you go,’ said Celia, ‘you’ve done your duty, talked to your grandmother for at least three minutes. I hear there is some rather special young man here from Oxford. I would like to meet him before the evening is over.’

‘Well Granny, you can meet him. But you’ve got to be nice to him.’

‘My darling Elspeth, why shouldn’t I be nice to him, for heaven’s sake? I’m not in the habit of being unpleasant to people, surely?’

‘Of course not, but – well – he’s – well – ’

‘He’s what, Elspeth? Hunchbacked? Stupid? Ugly?’

‘No,’ said Elspeth, thinking that any of those defects might be preferable. ‘No, he’s – well he’s – ’ there was a long pause ‘ – not very posh,’ she said quickly. ‘He – well, he’s at Oxford on a state scholarship. From a grammar school. His parents keep a – a shop.’

There was a pause; then ‘How absolutely fascinating,’ said Celia. ‘Where is he? I can’t wait to meet him. Oh, not that desperately attractive young man over there, standing and scowling by the fireplace? He looks very uncomfortable. Take me over, Elspeth, and introduce him to me. I’ll have him at his ease in no time.’

‘And the extraordinary thing was that she did,’ said Elspeth, sitting bleary-eyed on her bed next morning, talking to Amy. ‘I thought she’d be wildly patronising, I was terrified, but an hour later they were still talking. He told me she was a fine and interesting woman, and very attractive for her age, and she told me he was a very interesting and attractive young man and extremely well mannered – and in spite of him swearing he wouldn’t even mention it, she had him telling her all about his ambitions to be a publisher.’

‘Why didn’t he want it mentioned?’

‘I think he felt we’d laugh at him.’

‘How horrible. Of course we wouldn’t.’

‘No, I can see it. Here we are, great literary clan at the top of the mountain; and there’s him, at the bottom, staring up. Bit intimidating. Anyway, apparently she suggested he read some manuscripts for her. You know that’s how she checks people out. I must say no one would think she’d retired, hearing her talk last night.’

‘No, Mummy says she’s slithering back, as she puts it, keeps appearing with manuscripts and books from the competition.’

‘Well, they all said she would. Anyway, Keir told me he didn’t know if he wanted to do it for her, but of course he will. It was amazing. Honestly, I think they’d have spent the whole evening together, if Daddy hadn’t broken them up.’

‘Well, good for both of them,’ said Amy. ‘I think he’s absolutely wizard, Elspeth. Very, very sexy. Have you – I mean – ’

‘No, I haven’t,’ said Elspeth firmly, ‘and not with anyone else either, nor am I going to, until I get married.’

‘Oh, you’re so old-fashioned. I’m just waiting for the first really good offer I get. All right, all right, only joking. I say, Adele and Geordie looked pretty glum, didn’t they? Apparently they keep having the most frightful rows over the terrible infant. Noni says it’s absolutely horrid and she keeps getting caught in the middle, because she can see all sides. Poor Noni.’

‘Poor Noni. Let’s ask her over for lunch today. Your new beau can cheer her up.’

‘Oh he’s not staying for lunch,’ said Elspeth quickly, ‘we thought the party would be quite enough for him. He’s off back to Oxford quite early.’

‘Honestly Elspeth, you’re mad. Anyone would think he had four legs. Or rather we all did. I bet you ten bob he wants to stay. He had a lovely time.’

‘Done,’ said Elspeth.

Ten minutes later there was a knock at her bedroom door; it was Amy. ‘You owe me ten bob,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I just met young Master Brown on the stairs and he most definitely wants to stay for lunch. And Mummy says yes of course we must ask Noni. So – cash or cheque?’

‘Cash,’ said Elspeth, slightly vaguely. The one thing she hadn’t expected was that Keir would fall in love with her family. It made her feel rather odd.

CHAPTER 7

‘Mother, I’ve found you a new beau.’

Jenna had taken to calling Barty ‘Mother’ lately. She said she was too old to say Mummy.

‘Really?’ said Barty, slightly wearily.

‘Yes. He is just darling. And so handsome. And he’s lonely, on his own, like you.’

‘Jenna, can we just get one thing straight. I don’t think I want a new beau. Thank you all the same. I have quite enough in my life with you and the business. And—’

‘Oh nonsense,’ said Jenna airily. ‘Think how often we’re on our own here in the evenings, and anyway, I heard you telling Billy you felt quite lonely sometimes. So you don’t have enough in your life at all. Now let me tell you some more, his name is Charlie and he’s tall, dark and handsome, and—’

‘Jenna, can we stop this right now?’ said Barty briskly.

‘But why?’

‘Because, as I said, I am not looking for a beau and if – if I was, I would consider myself capable of finding one all by myself.’

‘But you’re not. Otherwise you would have done. Now the whole point about Charlie is that he’s a widow like you.’

‘Widower,’ said Barty automatically.

‘That’s what I said. His wife died five years ago of cancer. And he has a daughter called Cathy who is in my class and my absolutely best friend—’

‘Jenna, your best friend is Melissa—’

‘No she’s not, she’s absolutely vile and I hate her more than anything in the world. Cathy is quite perfect, she’s new this semester at the Chapin, but I didn’t really get to know her before. She is so sweet, Mother, and she has very long fair hair, and really wonderful blue eyes, and she says she looks exactly like her mother. I told her I look exactly like my father. She misses her mother dreadfully but I just know she’d love you. So you see how perfect it would all be. Anyway, you’re going to meet Charlie very soon.’

‘I am?’ said Barty.

‘Yes. Because Cathy has asked me to tea on Thursday and I’ll stay on until later, and then you can collect me, instead of Maria, it really makes sense. She lives down in Gramercy Park, isn’t that really great, and then if you and Charlie wanted to go out for dinner, we could just wait for you at their house.’

‘Jenna,’ said Barty, ‘can I say again, I don’t want a beau, even if he is lonely and handsome and the father of your best friend and even if I met Charlie – Charlie what, by the way?’

‘Patterson. He’s in real estate, but he’s not doing so well, mostly because he’s so unhappy, Cathy says.’

‘Charlie Patterson, all right. I certainly won’t be having dinner with him. And it would still be better if Maria met you, because that’s her job—’

‘Mother,’ Jenna looked at her, her face at its smoothest and most innocent, ‘that is just absolutely the dumbest thing I ever heard. Of course you must collect me. And meet Charlie.’

‘Jenna, I am not going to collect you. Or meet Charlie.’

‘Hi, I’m Barty Elliott. Jenna’s mother. I do hope she’s been good.’

‘She’s been absolutely angelic. Or so I’m told. Hi. Nice to meet you. Charlie Patterson. Here, let me take your coat. Can I offer you a drink?’

‘Oh – no, thank you. We have to get right off. Jenna has homework to do and piano practice—’

‘Done it,’ said Jenna, appearing in the hallway with a little girl who did indeed have the largest blue eyes and the most sweetly innocent face Barty had ever seen. Trouble if ever I saw it, she thought, and dynamite when combined with Jenna.

‘You must be Cathy.’

‘Yes, I am.’ She held out her hand. ‘It’s so nice to meet you, Mrs Elliott. And we’ve done our homework and our piano practice, it’s true, and we’re right in the middle of watching a TV special, so there’s plenty of time for you both to settle down and relax over a drink.’

Charlie Patterson looked at Barty and smiled, clearly embarrassed.

‘Would you like a drink, then? Just a small one? Or a coffee, maybe?’

‘A – a coffee would be very nice. Thank you,’ said Barty. She felt irritable at being manoeuvred by two over-clever little girls and yet at the same time slightly intrigued by Charlie Patterson. He did seem rather charming and interesting. And although not quite as handsome as Jenna had suggested, he was very pleasant-looking, with dark, quite closecropped hair and smiling brown eyes behind tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses.

He reminded her of Geordie, and like Geordie, he was hard to age, but she would have put him in his late thirties. He walked with a slight limp; Jenna had told Barty it was the result of a riding accident. He was wearing jeans, and a sleeveless pullover over a blue and white striped shirt and no tie: all of them quite clearly rather old, the jeans washed out, the shirt slightly frayed at the cuffs. Jenna’s pronouncement that he was not doing terribly well at his real estate was – like so many of her pronouncements – clearly accurate. Barty wondered how he afforded the fees at the Chapin.

The apartment, on the first floor of a large brownstone, was charming: warm and lived-in, with a wood-panelled hall and a country-style kitchen-breakfast room with a big scrubbed pine table. The living room, into which he brought the coffee, was filled with good furniture, most of it clearly old, big, heavily cushioned sofas, long red velvet curtains, a slightly threadbare Indian carpet, and it had a great many interesting-looking pictures on the wall, many of them maritime. Beside the chair where Barty was sitting was a small round table, covered with photographs in silver frames; mostly of Cathy, from babyhood, but also several of Charlie and someone who she could only assume was Cathy’s mother, an ice-blonde, very pretty, with a stunning figure and the same angelic smile as her daughter.

Charlie saw her looking at them as he handed her the coffee. ‘That’s Meg, my wife.’

‘She’s lovely.’

‘She was,’ he said and smiled at her sadly. ‘Sugar?’

‘No, thank you. That’s great. I’m so sorry about – about your wife.’

‘Thanks,’ he said. There was a silence. Then, ‘So – you’re in the publishing business.’

‘I am. Yes. And you are in real estate.’

‘Correct. The girls have done their homework well.’

They both laughed; awkwardly.

It was quite an awkward occasion altogether; Barty was relieved when she had drunk a second cup of coffee and was able, without being rude, to say they really had to go.

Well, she had done it, she thought, as she swung her car out of Gramercy Park and headed uptown along Third Avenue, she had done what Jenna had wanted, met Charlie Patterson. Now the little girls could just continue as friends and there would be no need for any further meetings between the two of them. And she fancied that he, as well as she, would be hugely relieved.

The press had made a great fuss over the fact that Kit was now being published by Wesley. It was of course a wonderful story, on every level: professional, personal and familial. Most of the stories had been in the trade press, which had not been too harmful to Lyttons, but an interview had appeared that spring in the
Manchester Guardian
, in which Kit had stated that he had felt very strongly the need for a change of publisher, that he thought most authors did from time to time, that Wesley were young and stylish and seemed to be so clearly au fait with all the changes in publishing at that time, and that of course his decision had had nothing to do with his mother’s retirement: ‘Rather the reverse.’

This upset everyone dreadfully; Jay and Venetia for its implication that Lyttons had failed him editorially, Giles because it was such a strong statement of comparison in Wesley’s favour, and Celia because it seemed to her he was saying, with a hostility which quite literally winded her, that he would have left Lyttons whether she had been there or not.

‘I don’t understand him,’ she said to Venetia over lunch the day the article appeared, ‘how he can be so cruel. And so disloyal. He seems – well, he seems not at all the person I imagined.’

And Venetia, watching her grief helplessly, could only try to explain that from Kit’s point of view it was Celia who had been cruel and disloyal, not the other way around.

‘Well I can’t imagine why,’ said Celia, poking viciously at the
sole meunière
with her fork. ‘When did I ever put Kit anywhere but first in my life?’

‘Never, Mummy. Except maybe now.’

‘And why shouldn’t I have a little happiness, a few years of doing what I want for a change?’

This presentation of herself as a self-sacrificing victim had become Celia’s latest and most frequently played role; in the face of her history of most ruthlessly pursuing whatever she wanted, the family found it rather hard to take seriously. Venetia decided this was not the moment to argue with her.

‘Mummy he’s dreadfully hurt. He forgave you—’

‘Yes? He forgave me for what?’

Venetia sighed. This was another difficulty when confronting Celia’s grief; that she had never formally admitted to the facts surrounding Kit’s birth. If only Venetia could have said to her then: look, just think for a minute why do you think he feels like he does? How confused he must be by the great chasm you’ve created, between what he’s had to accept over these past few years and what you’ve done in the past few months. But she knew she couldn’t; this was her mother’s territory and absolutely out of bounds.

‘I’m sure he’ll get over it,’ she said finally, ‘just give him time.’

But Kit needed a lot more than time.

The second term was no better; but Lucas supposed it was no worse. At least he knew what to expect. At least he was beginning to learn how to work the system – and, moreover, to be grudgingly willing to do so – and he no longer had to endure the overtures of the other boys, trying to be friendly. Everyone disliked him, and that was that. He was bullied and beaten no less or more because of it; there was no one to console him in the intervals between such events, but he wasn’t looking for consolation. He was simply looking for time to pass. He felt he was living in a long, cold nightmare; the holidays – apart from the satisfaction of seeing his mother and Geordie growing increasingly cool with one another – were little better than the term, simply because he knew they had to end. He viewed each return to school with a nauseous dread: the first thing he thought of each morning, and the last each night. There was no escape anywhere; and his rage and misery grew.

He would talk of it to no one; his disbelief that his mother, whom he loved so much, could inflict this on him had set up a festering hostility towards her, worse in its way than the more straightforward hatred he felt for Geordie. And while he could see that Noni felt for him, struggled to understand and to express that understanding, his jealousy of her poisoned his relationship with her as well. That she should continue to be allowed to attend her day school, returning home each evening to the warm house, the privacy, the gentleness of her family, while he must endure the cold, the brutality, the absolute hostility of his environment, seemed to him an outrage of such immense proportions it could hardly be borne. As for Clio, the spoilt baby, with her entourage of nanny and nursery maid and two adoring, doting parents, he could hardly bear even to think about her.

And this term there was a new and ugly torture; there was a rising tide of anti-semitism in the school, and with his dark, unmistakably Jewish looks and his surname, Lucas attracted a great deal of it.

‘Lieberman the Jew boy’ or simply ‘Jew Boy’ became his nicknames, hissed across the dormitory in the darkness, hurled across the classroom or even the dining room if no masters were present. A few of the boys found it hugely amusing to say ‘Shalom’ and there were interminable jokes about his foreskin along with attempts made to study his penis to see if it was there. One night he came into the dormitory to find a crude paper
koppel
on his bed; he was held down while it was fixed to his head with paper clips; one of them dug so deeply into his head that in the morning there was blood on his pillow. He was accused of having been the cause of the last war and even the death of several of the boys’ fathers; violent savage taunts that hurt him almost beyond endurance. But he did endure them and he managed to remain silent; he had learned that response, defence, counter-attack were all useless. But the hurt and the misery became ever more ingrained; and he sometimes wondered, as he lay awake in the darkness, just how much longer this was going to have to go on.

‘Is this Barty Elliott?’

‘It is.’

‘Charlie Patterson.’

‘Oh – good morning.’

‘Good morning. Look, I wondered if I could collect Cathy this evening. From your house.’

‘Well – you can, of course. But I thought she was staying the night. It makes more sense, we’re a long way uptown from you.’

‘I know that. But she has a dental appointment first thing in the morning, I’d quite forgotten, down in Gramercy Park and I really need to have her down here in good time.’

‘Well that’s easy,’ said Barty, ‘I start work very early. I’ll bring her down in the morning. You can meet her at Lytton House, if you like. Far better than battling uptown this evening.’

‘How early is early?’

‘Oh, I’m always at my desk at eight-thirty.’

‘That is early,’ he said. ‘I can remember doing that. Such a good time of the day. No phone calls, clear head—’

‘But now?’

‘Well now, I have to get Cathy to school.’

‘Yes, I see.’ And take her to the dentist and the doctor and stay home and look after her if she was sick – and goodness knows what he did in the school vacations.

‘They have no maid,’ Jenna had reported wide-eyed, clearly seeing this as something on a par with having no clothes, or not going to school.

‘Anyway,’ said Barty, ‘come to Lytton House, we’re just south of the Block Beautiful—’

‘I know where you are,’ he said. ‘Cathy insisted we go and look at it.’

‘Oh.’ Barty felt slightly disconcerted; she wasn’t sure why; she decided not to bother to try and analyse it. ‘Well, then just ring the door bell. There’ll be no one on reception or anything, I’ll come down.’