Old Sins (33 page)

She hadn’t understood all the words, but she certainly understood the meaning; that whatever happened, one day her father’s company would be hers, because he thought she was the right person to have it, and no one, no one at all, was going to be able to take it away from her. It was something that made everything else worth while, the awfulness of her parents not being married any more, and seeing so much less of her father, and having to live with Peter Thetford and sometimes even his horrible little boys, with their very short hair and loud rough voices, the kind of boys Nanny Henry called her away from in the park, and also of not being able to live all the time with her
father: the certain knowledge that he loved her so much and considered her so special.

And then it was taken away from her.

They had got back from Sussex quite late one Sunday evening; her father had returned her to the doorstep, said she was very tired, and her mother had sent her up to Nanny Henry to get ready for bed.

‘Do you want a drink, Julian?’ she heard her mother say, and her father said yes, that would be very welcome, and where was the master of the house.

‘He’s driving the boys back home.’

‘Long way.’

‘Yes, but Margaret won’t have them put on the train, and she’s not prepared to come down and get them, so he doesn’t have much choice.’

‘I see. And how is the most promising young man in politics since Lloyd George? Or would Aneurin Bevan be more appropriate?’

‘Don’t be unpleasant, Julian, please. Peter is a very clever politician. And he’s doing well. Very well.’

‘Really? I had heard rather the reverse.’

‘Had you? Well your informant was clearly in the wrong.’

‘And how are you, Eliza?’

‘I’m extremely well. Very happy.’

‘Good. You don’t look it.’

‘Julian, you have no idea how I look when I’m happy. It was not a state I enjoyed very often during our marriage.’

‘Well, we won’t discuss that now. Roz doesn’t seem to like Thetford very much.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘What I say.’

‘How do you know?’

‘She told me.’

‘How dare you encourage her to talk about such things? To be so disloyal?’

‘I didn’t have to encourage her. And I think we should not get on to the topic of disloyalty. Otherwise I might find a few stones to sling at you of that nature.’

‘Oh, go to hell.’

‘Eliza, I do assure you there was no question of my prompting Roz in any way. She says spontaneously, and quite frequently, that she hates her stepfather and she’d like to come and live with me.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘What do you say back?’

‘What can I say? I can’t encourage her in that fantasy, can I? I’ve tried to make her feel more warmly towards him. Without success.’

Roz, listening on the first-floor landing, praying Nanny Henry wouldn’t stop watching
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
on her television and realize she was home, couldn’t actually remember her father ever trying to do anything of the sort; he sneered at Thetford a lot, and said how dreary he was, and how he wouldn’t know one end of a horse from the other and that sort of thing, but otherwise he was never mentioned between them, it was too depressing on her weekends away.

‘Julian,’ she heard her mother say, just casually, ‘Julian how would you feel about having Roz to live with you?’

Roz’s heart lifted, leapt; she had to bite her fists to keep quiet. She knew how her father would feel; he would love the idea as much as she did. She had always thought her mother would never consider such a thing. If she was willing to let her go back home, as she still thought of Hanover Terrace, then obviously her father would take her. She waited to hear him say it. To say, ‘Well of course I’d love it,’ or something like that. But there was a long, an endless silence. Then:

‘Eliza, exactly what do you mean?’

‘I mean what I say. I just think it might be better.’

‘For her?’

‘Well, yes. Of course for her. I mean she isn’t happy here, you’re quite right. And she doesn’t get on with Peter. She’s very awkward. She causes a lot of friction. There’s no doubt about it. She’s rude about the boys, won’t have anything to do with them –’

‘Good. Vile little tykes.’

‘Julian –’

‘Sorry.’

‘Well anyway, it’s all very difficult.’

‘For you?’

‘Well, yes. And for Peter. And I thought – well, of course I’d miss her, but, Julian, things aren’t going terribly well. If she was with you more, here less, just for a bit, then it would give us more of a chance. Nanny could come of course –’

‘Of course.’

‘I mean, I could have her when Peter wasn’t here. It would be better for her.’

‘Really? And for you. And most of all for him. Jesus, Eliza, what a hypocrite you are.’

‘Oh, I knew you wouldn’t understand.’

‘Oh, I understand, Eliza. Very well. Roz is making your idyllic new life difficult, and so the best thing is to get rid of her.’

‘I’m not trying to get rid of her.’

‘You could have fooled me.’

‘No, Julian, I’m not. But she does so much prefer you. She adores you. You know she does. And I just can’t do anything right for her. She’s –’ and Roz could hear the suppressed laughter in her voice, slightly shaky, but nonetheless there, ‘she’s just like you.’

‘Really? In what way?’

‘Oh, every possible way. Hard to please. Impossible to reason with. Shutting people – me out.’

‘Poor child. You make her sound very unattractive.’

‘Well, she isn’t very attractive, is she? At the moment? Be honest. She’s so morose and awkward.’

‘She seems fine to me. I would agree she isn’t very physically attractive at the moment. She’s going through a very plain phase, and she’s so big for her age. It’s a shame, poor child. She has enough problems.’

‘Yes, well, that will pass, I’m sure. So what do you think, Julian? Would you – could you have her for a while?’

Time had stopped for Roz, sitting on the landing in a frozen stillness, her legs cramped underneath her, her fists still crammed into her mouth to stop her making a sound. Surely this was it, the long boring conversation would finish, and her father would say yes of course he would have her, and probably tell her to pack up her things immediately, come back with him now. That was all that mattered, really; it had been very
unpleasant hearing him say she was plain (she didn’t mind her mother saying she was unattractive), but she had known really anyway, and if she could only go and live with her father, she would become more beautiful straight away. All the people surrounding him were, it was a kind of magic he seemed to work, and she would be happier and she would smile more so she would look prettier anyway. So all he had to say was yes: so why wasn’t he saying it?

‘No, Eliza, it’s absolutely out of the question.’ (What? What? Roz thought she must be hearing wrongly, that she was imagining his words.) ‘I couldn’t have her even if I wanted to, and frankly I don’t. I –’

But Roz heard no more. She got up, very quickly, and crept up to her bedroom and lay down on her bed fully clothed, with the eiderdown pulled over her, waiting for the tears to come. But they didn’t. She just lay there, silent, and as she lay, her numb legs, which she had been sitting on for so long, came back in a stabbing agony to life. The pain was so bad, she found it hard not to yell out. But it was nothing, nothing at all, compared to the awful, deathly cold hurt throbbing in her head and her heart.

She had learnt to live with it, of course. You could learn to live with anything. Obviously there was a reason for him not loving her, and she spent a lot of time trying to find it. Was it that she was not pretty? It could be. Her mother was so beautiful, and so was her grandmother, Granny Letitia, and her father was extremely good-looking; it must be horribly disappointing for them to have someone in the family who was so plain. Of course her father wouldn’t want a plain, an ugly person living with him; he couldn’t be expected to. Then maybe it was because she wasn’t clever enough. He was so extremely clever himself, and if he was going to leave her his company (only maybe he wasn’t now, maybe he had changed his mind) she needed to be extremely clever too. Of course he hadn’t said yet that he wasn’t going to give her the company, but if he didn’t think she was good enough to live with him, then he probably wouldn’t think she was good enough to have the company either.

Or maybe it was because she wasn’t a boy. He had never said he minded, but Nanny Henry (and quite a few other people,
mostly Nanny’s friends, but also the Thetford boys, and some of her mother’s luncheon companions, the ladies who arrived at half past twelve and stayed often till about four, drinking wine and eating almost nothing and laughing and talking endlessly) had said it would have been much better if she had been a boy and could take over the company. Or – and this was the most frightening thing of all – maybe he was planning marrying someone else, and having another baby with her. And maybe that baby would be a boy, or a pretty girl, or really really clever and then the company would go to him or her instead.

Nothing that had happened to Roz could compare with this in awfulness; not even the day that her father had taken her on his knee and held her very tight and said he was terribly sorry, but he and her mother were going to be living in separate houses from then on, because they didn’t get on very well any more, or when her mother had told her that she and Peter Thetford were going to get married and be together always. And the worst thing about it of all, she knew, was not finding out that her father didn’t love her; it was finding out that she couldn’t love him in the same way either.

She couldn’t talk to him about that of course; she couldn’t talk to him about any of it. She simply shut him out, and tried not to let him see how badly she felt. She didn’t want him to know what power he had to hurt her; she wanted him to think she didn’t care what he did. He could buy her as many dresses as he liked, and take her on trips to New York and Paris, and throw extravagant parties for her on her birthdays (one year he took her and her six very best friends to Le Touquet for the day in his own plane which he piloted himself, and bought them all lunch in a very smart restaurant there; another he hired the ballroom at the Ritz, and everyone wore long dresses, even though they were only ten, and instead of a conjuror which most of the girls had, they had a pop group who played all the top hits, and instead of it being in the afternoon it was from six o’clock till ten o’clock at night). He never stopped trying to please her; he got tickets for shows like
Camelot
and
Beyond the Fringe
and arranged for her to meet the cast afterwards, and to premieres of films like
Lawrence of Arabia
and
West Side Story
and even occasionally to the parties afterwards where the stars
went; he took her out to expensive restaurants (by the time she was ten Roz had eaten in practically every restaurant recommended by Egon Ronay – and complained in most of them); he took her to Disneyland; he did (as promised) let her drive some of the cars round the grounds of Marriotts on her twelfth birthday; he bought her not one but two ponies to replace Miss Madam when she was eight, one grey and one chestnut, because she said she couldn’t make up her mind between them, he had her to stay with him in New York most school holidays; and she had only to mention most casually that she wanted a puppy, a kitten, a new bicycle, a new stereo, and it arrived. And Roz would say thank you politely, formally, but never warmly, never showing her pleasure; and she got great satisfaction from seeing the disappointment, the hurt in his eyes. She knew he was desperate to please her, that he was frightened of making her unhappy, and she enjoyed the knowledge. It was the only thing that made her feel safe.

When Roz was nine years old Peter Thetford moved out of the house in Holland Park. She had stood at the window of her bedroom and watched him piling his things into the taxi that morning, and quite literally danced with pleasure. Her joy came quite as much from the fact that he was gone from the house as that her mother would be on her own, and it seemed to her just possible that she and her father might start living together again. The disappointment when they did not was almost as bad as the hurt when they first separated. ‘But why?’ she asked Eliza over and over again, crying in bed the night she finally asked if this might be possible, and beating the pillow with rage and despair when she was told it was not. ‘Why not? You’ve had a turn at being married to someone else, and you didn’t like it. Why not go back to Daddy?’ And Eliza had tried to comfort her, holding her, wiping her tears. ‘Just because I wasn’t very happy with Peter, darling, doesn’t mean I can just go back and be happy with Daddy. Life isn’t like that. But we shall have more time together, and you must keep me company now I’m on my own again.’

And Roz, remembering all the evenings she had begged her mother to stay in with her and not go out with her friends or with Peter, and Eliza had gone just the same, said, ‘Oh you’ll
find someone else to keep you company, I expect,’ and turned her face into her pillow and cried endlessly and refused to be comforted.

Her father had said much the same thing: that he and her mother just couldn’t get along any more and it was better they lived in different houses even though Peter had gone; and he said perhaps Roz would like to stay with him a bit more often now that she was a bigger girl and that he got lonely sometimes too.

‘No,’ Roz said, seeing a chance to hurt him, to show that she was in command of the situation, not him, ‘no, I want to be with Mummy, she needs me. Besides,’ she added, looking at him out of her green eyes with a blank expression so like his own, ‘you have Camilla to keep you company, don’t you? Poor Mummy hasn’t got anyone.’

Roz hated Camilla. She had hated her from the very first time she met her, when she had gone to stay with her father in New York when she was just seven years old. At first she had thought she was just a friend of her father’s, one of the many ladies he took out to dinner or the theatre and then didn’t see again – or not very often. But Camilla didn’t go away. She went on being around, first in America and then in London until Roz couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been there. One of the things she had most hated about her was how beautiful she was, with her goldy red hair and her bright red lips, and her long red nails; she could see that was why her father must like her, and it seemed so unfair that someone could be liked so much straight away just because they were beautiful.