Old Sins (18 page)

Hunting weekends at Marriotts were legendary; right through the winter the Morells entertained, large house-parties to which came not only the hunting community but Julian’s business associates, many of whom had not been any closer to a horse than donkey riding in their childhood, and their socially climbing wives, all thrilled to be included in what they felt was a very aristocratic occasion, but totally unequipped to participate. Because she did not hunt herself, Eliza found herself forced to entertain these people, and on many a magically beautiful winter afternoon, the red sun burning determinedly through the white misty cold, the trees carving their stark black shapes out of the grey-blue sky, when she longed to be out alone with Clementine she found herself walking along the lanes with two or three women, listening to their accounts of purchasing their winter wardrobes or their cruise wear, or playing backgammon indoors with their loud-voiced, red-faced husbands.

She loved Marriotts, rather to her own surprise; she had thought to have become a completely urban person, but she found herself missing the rolling downs of Wiltshire, the huge skies, the soft, clear air, and she looked forward to the weekends more than she would have imagined – especially the rare occasions when she and Julian were alone, and could ride together on Sundays, chatting, laughing, absolutely at peace, in a way that was becoming more and more rare.

In the summer of 1955, though, she had to stop riding altogether; she was pregnant.

Eliza had very mixed feelings about her pregnancy. She didn’t like babies at all, or small children; she had no desire whatsoever to feel sick or grow fat, and she resented the curtailment of her freedom for nine months. Nevertheless she had not been brought up the daughter of even a minor strand of the British aristocracy without knowing perfectly well that it was the function of a wife to bear sons, and especially the wife of a rich man; she had a strong sense of the continuity of names and lines and she was still country girl enough to be totally relaxed and indeed cheerful at the actual concept of giving birth and mothering.

As it happened, relaxed and cheerful though she might have been, she was so tiny, so sliver-thin, that Rosamund Morell was
born by Caesarean section after almost two days of quite excruciating labour, and Julian was told firmly and bluntly by the obstetrician that he was lucky his wife had not died, and that another child would undoubtedly kill her. Rosamund was therefore an important baby; the heiress apparent to a fortune, and an empire, with no fear of being usurped by a brother at any future date, and the unrivalled focus of her parents’ love and attention.

Los Angeles, 1957

LEE WILBURN HAD
just come in from the beach when the phone rang. It was long distance. ‘Santa Monica 471227? Mrs Wilburn? Will you take a person to person call from London? From Mr Hugo Dashwood?’

‘Yes, yes I will,’ said Lee, pushing her hair back from her face, feeling her heart pound, her knees suddenly limp.

‘Lee? Hello. It’s Hugo Dashwood. How are you?’

‘I’m fine, Hugo, thank you, how are you?’

‘Very very well. I’m coming to New York next week. Can I come over the following weekend and see you both? Will Dean be there?’

Lee thought very quickly. ‘Yes, to both. You’ll be very welcome. Come on Friday night if you can get away. I’ll – we’ll look forward to seeing you.’

‘Yes, I should make it. I have an early meeting on Friday morning, then I could leave. I’ll get a car from the airport, don’t worry about meeting me.’

‘OK. Bye, Hugo.’

‘Goodbye, Lee. And thank you.’

She put the phone down; she was shaking all over. That had done it; there was no going back now.

She walked slowly through into the kitchen and poured herself a cold beer. Then she went into the living room, opened the
full-length windows and looked out at the ocean for a long time. It was the most perfect of Californian evenings, the sky a bright, almost translucent blue, the sun sending a golden dusting on the sea. The beach was still busy, the white sand covered with people; the surf was gentle, almost slow-motion. Lee never got tired of this view, this time; relaxed and at peace from the sun and the sea, she would sit there, enjoying it, drinking it in, and go into an almost trancelike state, wishing she need never move again. A lot of her friends were taking up yoga and meditation but she never could see the point in that. Half an hour on the patio with a beer and the ocean, and she felt as relaxed as anybody.

The phone rang again, disturbing her peace; she frowned, went into the kitchen and picked it up, aiming her beer bottle at the trash can as she passed. It missed, and slithered into the corner.

‘Hi,’ she said into the phone.

‘Lee? Hi, honey, it’s Dean. You OK? I’ll be home in a couple of hours. It’s going to be a great weekend. You missed me? I sure have missed you.’

‘You know I have, Dean,’ said Lee, smiling into the phone, and it was true, she had. ‘And I have your favourite dinner for you.’

‘You’re my favourite dinner. Now honey, you haven’t forgotten I’ll be away next weekend, have you? I’ve tried to wriggle my way out of it, but I can’t. Is that really going to be OK?’

‘I think I can just about handle it. We’ve got this one after all. Don’t be late, Dean.’

‘I won’t.’

She put the phone down, left the beer bottle where it was (she was not an over-fastidious housewife) and went slowly through the hall and towards the stairs. She caught sight of herself in the long mirror at the end of the room: long streaky blonde hair, blue eyes, freckled face, wearing denim overalls and an old white shirt of her husband’s. She looked like a college kid, not a married woman about to commit adultery . . . she grinned into the mirror and went on upstairs.

Standing in the shower, alternating the hot and cold water (it
was good for the bustline and the skin – and the bowels, Amy Meredith had told her, for heaven’s sake, now how could that be true? Stimulation, maybe – ) soaping the salt out of her sun-drenched skin, she wondered what actually brought people to the edge of adultery, or tipped them over it and into the bed. Not unhappiness, she couldn’t claim that; she and Dean were perfectly happy, had been ever since they married seven years ago. Boredom? No, not really. Of course after seven years drums didn’t roll and stars leap out of the sky every time she saw him, and the earth didn’t exactly rock around every time they had sex, which anyway wasn’t very often these days, nor very satisfying either, but he was still fun, still jokey, and she still enjoyed his company. So – what? What excuse did she have? I’m just bad, maybe, she thought, stepping out of the shower and wrapping herself in a huge white towel. I’m greedy. I want more than I ought to have. It was not an entirely nice thought. She drenched her skin all over with body milk (otherwise it got so dry and flaky) and then sprayed herself liberally with Intimate, the new Revlon fragrance she liked so much; it was sexy and it stayed with you, didn’t fade like a lot of those much more expensive ladylike scents. She felt very interested in sex at the moment. She supposed it was because of Hugo Dashwood and the way he was disturbing her; anyway, so far it wasn’t doing Dean any harm, she could hardly keep her hands off him, and he wasn’t to know that it was a different face from his own that swam into her head as he laboured over her, grunting with pleasure; a thinner, more handsome face, with brown eyes, and a beautiful dancing smile.

She studied herself in the mirror, as she stood there naked; her body was pretty good still, she thought, it didn’t look twenty-nine years old, tall (five foot eight), slim (a hundred and ten pounds), with a stomach so flat it was practically concave, and surprisingly, lusciously full breasts. Her bottom was her greatest pride: flat and neat, firm as a drum; she worked hard on that bottom, she did exercises twice a day, and swam for at least half an hour. It wasn’t a particularly sexy bottom – men fondling it hopefully at parties were slightly repelled by its firmness, its lack of yieldingness – but she didn’t care, and besides her breasts made up for it. The line of her bikini was dramatic: clearly carved out of her suntan. It was quite modest,
her bikini; she didn’t really like the ones that were cut so low you could see the line of the buttocks disappearing into them. Kim Devon’s was like that and Lee thought it was vulgar. She wondered if she ought to trim her pubic hair for Dean’s return; it was looking shaggy, and he did like things to be neat. That reminded her, she must clear up the kitchen a bit, pick up that beer bottle, wash the floor. Although, she thought, smiling at herself suddenly in the mirror, she could easily distract him away from the kitchen floor.

Which did mean trimming the pubes, she supposed . . .

She and Dean had met Hugo Dashwood at a conference in New York on advertising a couple of months ago. It had been a real treat for her to go; Dean was away such a lot, in his job as representative for an own-label marketing company, and not to have to stay at home and on her own for once, and to see a bit of New York, was just too good to be true. The conference was at the Hyatt, and the delegates were all scattered round the city; Lee and Dean were staying just off Broadway; it was an undeniably tacky hotel, but as Dean kept pointing out to her it was all a freebie, and tackiness was the last thing in the world Lee cared about anyway.

The wives had their own programme for a lot of the time, and she had taken the Circle Line tour, gone up the Empire State and explored the wonders of Bergdorf’s and Macy’s (ducking out of the more cultural outings on offer, like the Museum of Modern Art and a tour of New York’s churches) but on the first day there had been a buffet lunch, so that they could all get to know one another; she hadn’t actually taken too much to many of them, older than she was, most of them, formally and forbiddingly dressed, and very self-consciously good American wives, talking with huge and ostentatious knowledge not only about their husbands’ companies, but the advertising industry in general, exchanging telephone numbers and addresses, discussing their husbands’ career patterns, comparing company benefits, and constantly interrupting the men’s conversations to introduce them to their own newfound acquaintances. Lee could positively feel them looking her up and down, examining her and discarding her, as being young, flighty, and altogether too attractive to be included either in the earnest merry-go-round or the introductions to the men, and
decided she preferred her own company; she was standing in the queue for the buffet waiting for Dean to finish an interminable conversation with someone about the rival virtues of supermarkets and drugstores as an outlet for cotton wool balls when a voice that was just like English molasses, as she confided to Amy Meredith later (‘If you can imagine such a thing, all dark brown and treacly, but so refined’), asked her if she would be kind enough to keep his place while he went and retrieved the book he had been foolish enough to leave in the conference hall. ‘I don’t want to lose it, I am enjoying it immensely, and besides, I’m on my own here, I’m not fortunate enough to have a wife to keep me company, and I may need it if I can’t find anyone to talk to during lunch.’

‘Oh, my goodness,’ said Lee, ‘we can certainly help you there, my husband and I, but do go and get it anyway, before they clear it away. I’ll hold your place.’

She looked at him thoughtfully as he disappeared into the crowd; he was exactly as she would imagine an upper-class Englishman to be (she could tell he was very upper class, he spoke with that David Niven accent everybody had in English films, with the exception of the comic characters, rather clipped and drawly at the same time). He was wearing a grey pinstriped suit, a white shirt, a white and grey spotted tie; he was tall and very slim, with long legs and the most beautiful shoes, in very soft black leather. His hair was dark and slightly longer than she was used to, and he had velvety brown eyes and the most beautiful teeth. She couldn’t, she thought, have possibly asked for a more desirable lunch companion, and felt pleased that she had decided to wear her red sheath dress and pin her hair up in a French pleat, so that she looked more sophisticated rather than leaving it hanging down on her shoulders the way Dean liked it.

He was back in a minute, with a copy of
The Grapes of Wrath
tucked under his arm: ‘I’m mugging up on my American social history,’ he said with a smile. ‘Marvellous book, I suppose you’ve read it?’

‘Of course,’ said Lee earnestly, remembering how she had picked her way painfully through it in high school, and rewarded herself for finishing each chapter with a chapter of
Gone With the Wind;
‘I loved it, of course.’

‘Of course,’ he said solemnly, ‘and do you read a lot, Mrs –’ he peered at her name badge – ‘Wilburn?’

‘Well,’ said Lee carefully, ‘quite a lot. Of course I don’t have a great deal of time. But I do enjoy it. When I do.’ Jesus, she thought, how do I manage to talk such crap?

‘And why are you here?’ he asked her, moving into safer territory. ‘Are you one of the delegates?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said, charmed and amused at the same time, that he should think her of sufficient status and intelligence to warrant her own place at a conference. ‘I’m here with my husband.’

‘And what does your husband do?’

‘He’s a sales representative. He works for an own-label marketing company. He’s very good at his job,’ she added, mindful of her shortcomings as a professional wife.

‘I’m sure,’ he said, ‘can you point him out to me? Where is he?’

‘Over there,’ said Lee, pointing to Dean who was furiously distributing his business cards as if they were leaflets on the subway, to a rather unenthusiastic-looking group. ‘He’ll be over in a minute. He wouldn’t miss a lunch.’ She looked at Dean rather thoughtfully, trying not to compare him unfavourably with the Englishman. She was very fond of him, but nobody could call him a dresser; he had bought a new suit in Terylene mohair for the conference, it hadn’t looked too bad in the shop, but here it seemed rather too bright a blue, and it had a slightly tacky sheen on it. And then there was his tie: it was a real mistake, that tie, much too wide, with that awful splashy pattern on it – the English tie, she noted, was discreetly narrow. And she really must, the minute they got home, start doing something about his weight. He must be thirty pounds over now, and rising; apart from looking bad, with his beer belly sticking out over his trousers, however hard he tried to hold it in, it wasn’t good for him. Amy was always going on about cholesterol and the dangers of heart disease, and telling her she should give Dean more vegetables and feed him bran for breakfast. And however trying he might be at times, she certainly didn’t want to lose him; she must try to be a better wife.