Into Temptation (Spoils of Time 03) (41 page)

‘Honestly Mummy, I feel perfectly all right. I’m sleeping, you see, that’s what’s made all the difference, not the other pills at all. Sleeping and getting back to work. You of all people should appreciate that.’

‘Of course. Maybe I should come with you.’

‘No,’ said Adele firmly, ‘I don’t want to sound ungrateful or unfriendly, but I want to go on my own. For the first time for months, I feel I can stand on my own two feet, and I want to do it. Sorry Mummy.’

‘That’s perfectly all right,’ said Celia coldly, ‘I’m growing used to rejection.’

Charles Donald Patterson, the letter said. Forwarded from the old address in Gramercy Park. On the back of the envelope was printed: St Anthony’s, Thorncliff, Westchester Co., and underneath that, Care for the Care-less.

It was a good copy line; Izzie would have admired it. Barty supposed it was an appeal. Only – whoever it was from obviously knew Charlie personally. It didn’t say The Occupier, or even just Mr C. Patterson. Only a very few people knew Charlie’s middle name. He hated it so much, he kept it very quiet. In the early days she had teased him about it.

But – maybe it was a care home and maybe it was where Sally Norton was now. Maybe she had left that other address, in Sheepshead Bay. In which case, the letter should be opened. They might want money, they might want to contact Charlie, Sally might be ill. Barty had agreed to save his post, and take it down to South Lodge at the weekend. Only it was beginning to look now as if she wouldn’t be going, she was terribly busy. A quiet weekend on her own would clear a vast backlog, of neglected manuscripts, letters, thinking, even.

She wondered if she should phone him, ask him what he would like her to do. But that would mean a protracted argument about her not coming. Not today. Maybe tomorrow, when she had quite made up her mind . . .

She put the letter down on the kitchen table, on the top of the pile of newspapers, and went to work.

When she got home, both the pile and the letter was gone; she asked Maria what she had done with them.

‘Thrown them out with the garbage, Mrs Ell—Patterson.’ Like the Mills, Maria had problems with her new name. Like the Mills, she didn’t seem to like Charlie very much.

‘Oh Maria! There was a letter on the top, didn’t you see it?’

‘I did, yes, but I thought as you put it right there, along with those old envelopes, you didn’t want it.’

‘Well, I did,’ said Barty, distressed. ‘You really shouldn’t have done that.’

‘Mrs Patterson, I am very busy today. I have one of my heads, and how I am supposed to know what you thinking?’

‘Maria, it’s not very difficult to know a sealed-up letter shouldn’t be thrown away.’

‘It was not for you. Was for him. For Mr Patterson. I thought—’

‘Yes all right. Well, where is the garbage, have you put it out?’

‘In the garbage bin.’

‘Can you see if it’s still there, please? I hope the dustcart didn’t come today.’

Maria shrugged, went out of the back door, looking upset. She came back a few minutes later, holding the letter. It had bits of raw carrot and onion adhering to it.

‘Here,’ she said, holding it out to Barty disdainfully, ‘here is.’

‘Thank you, Maria. Very much. Oh, dear, it’s a bit of a mess.’

Maria shrugged again.

And since the letter obviously was going to be illegible within a very short space of time, liquid from other pieces of unpleasantness having seeped on to it, Barty decided she should open it. It couldn’t be that personal or that important after all.

Only it was.

Adele was flying out of London on Saturday, had booked herself into the St Regis Hotel. She didn’t even tell Barty she was coming.

‘If I do, she might let it slip to Geordie, and I do want it to be a surprise,’ she said to Venetia. ‘It’ll be more fun that way, he won’t be able to get all defensive or anything. I’ll telephone her the minute I’ve seen him, obviously. I’m longing to see her. And Izzie of course. And to meet Charlie, what a lot of excitement. Now, it’ll be hot over there, won’t it? Lots of nice silk dresses and things, I think. I can do some shopping, what bliss. And maybe go out to South Lodge for a few days, that’d be lovely. I just can’t wait.’

Barty arrived at South Lodge late on Friday night. She had told Charlie she was coming, she didn’t want him accusing her of being underhand, of sneaking up on him.

The girls rushed out when they heard the car, hugging her, kissing her; they both looked tanned and well, Jenna’s face covered with its summer uniform of small, dusty freckles. Charlie came over to her as the girls released her and gave her a hug.

‘Darling, it’s so good to see you, I was afraid you wouldn’t come at the last minute. We have some supper waiting, don’t we girls, and such plans for the weekend.’

She didn’t want to spoil her arrival with any kind of uncomfortable conversation; she sat in the kitchen with them, eating clam salad and crusty bread and drinking soda. She had refused wine, although the bottle of Muscadet which Charlie had on ice for her looked terribly tempting; she wanted to keep her head clear.

After she had finished, she sat with them in the den for a while, discussing the next day – sailing, a picnic on the shore, maybe a ride – and then stood up.

‘I’m really tired. And it sounds like we have a busy day tomorrow. Would you excuse me? Charlie, are you coming?’

The girls kissed her, and said goodnight; she led the way upstairs to the guest room. She had been half afraid, had been dreading, indeed, that Charlie might have moved into the main bedroom in her absence, but the door to it was shut firmly; his things were scattered round the guest room in their usual disarray.

‘You are so untidy,’ she said, smiling, kissing him, so that he didn’t get defensive.

He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender and grinned back.

‘I confess. I am. But you knew that. Darling you look so tired, why don’t I run you a bath, so you can relax before we go to bed—’

‘Yes, maybe. Later.’

‘Later?’ He smiled at her again. ‘You have plans right now?’

‘I do – yes. But not—’ she stopped. ‘I want to talk to you about something.’

‘Yes?’ He sat down on the bed; he was holding a glass of bourbon on ice, he looked totally relaxed. She thought how perfectly and quickly he had assumed the summer uniform of the Hamptons, the Madras shirt, the khaki shorts, the boating shoes. He looked in fact very handsome, tanned, his hair cropped shorter, the dark brown already streaked with the sun.

‘Charlie,’ she said abruptly, ‘what exactly does being an old boy of St Anthony’s, Thorncliff mean?’

And the tanned face turned white, the dark eyes no longer smiled, as he looked at her; he took an enormous slug of his bourbon and stood up, went over to the window.

‘How did you find out?’ was all he said.

It was actually a very sad story; his parents were not the charming middle-aged couple standing in the garden at Summit, New Jersey. That was a family he had worked for as a gardener while he had been at college. His mother, Nanette, had been a waitress in a bar in Queens, his father a drunken, unemployed labourer who had beaten her up several times before leaving her, just a year after the wedding, on hearing that she was pregnant with Charlie.

Nanette had waited several weeks before accepting that he was not coming back; in any case, being a good Catholic girl, as she put it, there was no question of an abortion. Charlie was born in the state hospital and for almost three years she managed, somehow, to support the two of them. Not without difficulty; Charlie was left alone every night in the room she rented, while she went to work in the bar; during the day she took a cleaning job and paid someone to care for him. She went without food herself to support him; but after a horrendous interlude when he managed to tip over the cot into which he was tied every night for safety and fell, pinioned and screaming in pain from a fractured leg, she gave in and delivered him to St Anthony’s, a Catholic orphanage in Thorncliff, Westchester County, recommended by the priest at her church.

It wasn’t a bad place, a big house in the country, cold and sparsely furnished, but there was no physical abuse, as there was in so many Catholic institutions, and Charlie was adequately fed and clothed; but there was very little affection. For a couple of years Nanette visited him occasionally; then she managed to find herself a husband, whose only condition in marrying her was that Charlie should not have to live with them.

He was old enough to have developed a strong bond with and love for his mother; he missed her dreadfully. He would sit for hours, weeping, banging his head against the wall by his bed; after her increasingly rare visits he became very withdrawn, would refuse food for days and sit sucking his thumb, his eyes blank wtih despair.

But gradually he settled; one of the younger nuns, a pretty Irish girl who looked after the younger children, developed a great attachment to him, and would nurse him and sing to him at night, when he was crying. Later, as he began to grow up, she continued to take an interest in him and encouraged his fondness for music and for art, and, rather oddly, for cricket, for which she had a passion. When Charlie was ten years old, she died of TB; his grief was terrible.

There were only about fifty children there and they were taught by the nuns; they tried hard, but a lot of the boys ran wild and some of them, as they grew up, got into trouble with the police. Charlie didn’t run wild, and he didn’t get into trouble; in fact he was discovered to be rather clever. He was often top of the class; this gave him the only real satisfaction in life he had ever known. When he was fourteen, he went to the local high school, where he continued to succeed; at eighteen he won a scholarship to Columbia University, where he studied math and politics. Academic success came easily to him; he never had to work as hard as his peers, he had a superb memory and a gift for encapsulating knowledge, both of which stood him in very good stead at examination time.

Very few of the children at St Anthony’s went to college at all; to have acquired a place at such an establishment as Columbia was a truly great achievement. He was very hard up; his scholarship only covered his fees and he lived in a run-down apartment two miles from the university. At night he worked in a bar. At Christmas and Thanksgiving he had nowhere to go, except his room; he worked all the hours he could to stave off loneliness, but it was pretty bleak.

He was moderately happy; he had some good friends. But for the first time he also began to realise how disadvantaged he was. It was not just being poor, it was having no background. No parents, no family, no personal history. He told everyone that his parents had both been killed in a motor accident. It was not entirely convincing. The less kind, better-off students looked down on him, sneered at his cheap clothes, at his accent, at his lack of social status.

It was a friend at college who told him about the jobs to be had on the coast in Maine; he had worked there the year before, in one of the country clubs. ‘Mostly in the kitchen, but sometimes I got to work behind the bar. It was a breeze. Hard work, but boy, what a place.’

Charlie made his way to the coast, hitching lifts on trucks, and went from bar to bar until he got a job. And there he discovered a new tribe: indolent, self-indulgent people, Ivy League, old money, who appeared to have so much in return for so little – and he knew that was what he wanted.

He learned fast: how to dress, how to speak, how to get his hair cut, how and what to drink. He was a quick study; in two years he felt he could pass for one of them: or nearly one of them. Certainly not an abandoned child born into poverty and brought up in an orphanage. He was tall, good-looking, and he wore his clothes well; once away from college, he reinvented himself.

The nice couple from Summit, New Jersey, became his parents, both dead; St Anthony’s became a modest prep school in Hudson Heights; Columbia remained Columbia, spoken of no longer with pride, though, but with an affectionate disparagement – ‘It’s a funny old place, everyone there is terribly worried about their future prospects!’ And Charles Donald Patterson, bursary student, became Charlie Patterson who soon began to make his way in the real estate business . . .

‘So,’ said Barty, when he had finished, had refilled his glass for the third time. ‘Is there any more?’

‘No. You know the rest.’

‘Oh, I do?’

‘Yes. I met Meg, I married her, we had Cathy, Meg died—’

‘Did Meg know? All this?’

‘Kind of.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

A long silence; then, ‘She did know, yes.’

‘But Cathy doesn’t?’

‘Of course not. We agreed never to tell her.’

‘But why?’ said Barty. She felt physically dizzy, weak with shock. ‘What’s so wrong with it, what is there to be ashamed of?’

‘Oh Barty. Surely you can see—’

‘No. No, I can’t. Look at me, at my background, I’m not ashamed of it.’

‘Yes, well you were wanted and loved. Your father didn’t desert your mother, he wasn’t violent—’

‘He was, sometimes.’

‘That’s not violence. And you didn’t grow up in some crap institution, didn’t have the occasional friend who ended up in prison. What do you think it would do to a little girl, knowing all that about her father?’

‘Not a lot, I would have thought,’ said Barty, ‘Cathy adores you, she thinks you can do no wrong, I’d have thought she would be proud of what you’ve achieved.’

‘And what’s that? What exactly am I supposed to have achieved? A twobit, mostly unsuccessful company, a minus bank account. Not a great deal to be proud of there. I’m not risking it, and if you tell her, I—’

‘Charlie, of course I’m not telling her. I can’t believe you said that. How can you even think such a thing?’

‘Sorry,’ he said. He still hadn’t met her eyes.

‘So – you told Meg?’

‘Yes. Well, she found out after a while. She saw some papers, some letters from my real mother to St Anthony’s—’

‘Before you were married?’