Old Sins (17 page)

‘I am not a child, I am a woman, about to be married,’ she said. ‘I would be grateful if you would treat me as such.’

But it was one thing to say it, and another to confront, in the privacy of herself, the fact that she so patently appeared to everyone, most importantly the man who was about to be her husband, in such an insignificant light. It hurt her almost beyond endurance; in time she forgave them all, even Julian, but it changed her perception of him, however slightly, and she never quite trusted him again.

Susan Johns was not quite sure what she felt about Julian’s marriage; a range of emotions infiltrated her consciousness, none of them entirely pleasing. What she would most have liked to feel, what she knew would be most appropriate, would have been nothing at all, save a mild rather distant interest; the savage jealousy, the desire to impinge herself on Eliza’s consciousness, the scorn and disappointment at Julian’s choice of a wife, these were all undignified, unseemly and uncomfortable. He had told her over lunch one day; he had taken her to Simpson’s in the Strand, where he assured her she could eat a whole cow if she liked; over her second helping of trifle, finally unable to postpone the moment any longer, he had told her.

Susan pushed her bowl to one side, fixed him with her large, clear blue eyes and said, ‘What on earth do you want to do that for?’

Thrown, as always, by a direct question, he struggled visibly to find a route around it. ‘My dear Susan,’ he said, ‘what an inappropriate response to such romantic news. Are you going to tell me what it’s all about?’ He smiled at her carefully; she met his gaze coldly.

‘Don’t switch on your famous charm, please. It makes me uncomfortable. And I’m not hostile. Just – well, surprised I suppose.’

‘What by? I need a wife.’

‘Yes,’ she said, and there was a cold wall of scorn in her eyes. ‘Of course you do.’

‘Well?’

‘I just don’t happen to think that’s a very good reason for marrying someone.’

‘Susan, I’m not just marrying someone. I’m marrying someone who is very important to me. Someone I want to share my life with. Someone –’

‘Someone who’ll be good at the job?’

He looked at her, and for a moment she thought he was going to lose his temper. He suddenly smiled instead. It was the kind of unpredictability that made her go on, against all the evidence, setting a value on him.

‘Yes. If you like.’

‘Well, I hope you’ll be very happy,’ she said, scooping up what was left of her trifle.

‘You don’t sound very convinced.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because,’ she said, looking at him very directly, searching out what little she could read in his dark eyes, ‘you haven’t said anything at all about love.’

The house Julian bought for them was undoubtedly one of the most beautiful in London, one of the Nash terraces on the west side of the Regent’s Park, huge and spacious, with a great vaulted hall and staircase and a glorious drawing room filled with light that ran the entire width of the first floor and
overlooked the park. Eliza discovered in herself a certain flair for interior design, albeit a trifle fussy for Julian’s taste, and instead of calling David Hicks into her house to style it, like most of their smart friends, she set to work herself, poring over magazines and books, roaming Harvey Nichols and Liberty and antique salerooms herself, choosing wallpapers and curtain fabrics, innovatory colour schemes and clever little quirks of decor (setting a tiny conservatory into the end of the dining room, placing a spiral staircase from the top landing up to the roof) that made the house original and charming without in any way damaging its style. The main bedroom above the drawing room was her special love; she shared with Julian a passion for the deco period and there was nothing in their room that wasn’t a very fine example of that style – a marvellous suite of bed, dressing table and wardrobe by Ruhlmann, in light rosewood, a pair of Tiffany lamps by the bed, a priceless collection of Chiparus figures on the fireplace; a set of original Erte drawings given to her by Letitia who had once met and charmed the great man; and a mass of enchanting details, cigarette boxes, ashtrays, jugs, vases, mirrors. The room was entirely white: walls, carpet, curtains, bedspread (‘Very virginal, my darling,’ said Julian, ‘how inappropriate’). It was a stage set, a background for an extraordinarily confident display of style and taste.

On the spacious half landings she created small areas furnished with sofas, small tables, books, pictures, sometimes a desk, all in different periods: thirties for the nursery floor, twenties for the bedroom floor, pure Regency for the one above the drawing room. And on the ground floor, to the left of the huge hall, she created her very own private sitting room that was a shrine to Victoriana; she made it dark, and almost claustrophobic, with William Morris wallpaper, a brass grate, small button-back chairs, embroidered footstools, sentimental paintings; she put jardinieres in it, filled with ferns and palms, a scrap screen, a brass-inlaid piano; she covered the fireplace with bric-a-brac, collected samplers, draped small tables with lace cloths, and in the window she hung a small bird cage in which two lovebirds sang. It was a flash of humour, of eccentricity, and a total contrast to the light and space and clarity of the rest of the house. Julian loathed it and refused to set foot inside it.

‘That’s all right, my darling,’ said Eliza lightly, ‘that room is for me anyway, it’s my parlour. Leave me be in it.’

‘For what?’

‘To entertain my lovers, of course; what else?’

Then she was very busy buying clothes for herself; she did not only go to the English designers and shops, but took herself to Paris twice a year to buy from the great names, from Dior, Patou, Fath, Balmain, Balenciaga. She was clever with clothes; she had a very definite almost stark taste, and a passion for white and beige. She could look just as wonderful in things from the ready to wear boutiques in Paris as well; her beauty was becoming less childlike, but she was slender, delicate, a joy to dress, a favourite customer.

Then there was the social life; she and Julian began to give parties that became legendary, and she discovered she had a talent as a hostess, mixing and matching likely and unlikely people brilliantly. Her dinner parties were famous, a heady blend of names, fine wine and food and scandalous talk; Eliza Morell, like her mother-in-law, had an ear and an eye for gossip and a wit to match it.

She developed an admittedly rather gossip-column-style interest in politics and a liking for politicians, and the gossip of Westminster as well as of London society. She preferred socialists to Tories, she found them more interesting and charismatic; and she was amused by their intellectual approach to socialism which seemed to her to have so extremely little to do with reality. She met Michael Foot and his wife Jill Craigie at a party and liked them very much; they were in turn rather charmed by her, and accepted her invitation to dinner. Through them she met some of the other leading socialists of the day: Crossman and Gaitskell and the dashing Anthony Wedgwood Benn. Julian found her interest in such men and matters intriguing, amusing even, but he couldn’t share it. He told her that all politicians were self-seeking and manipulative (‘I would have thought you would have much in common with them, my darling,’ Eliza had replied lightly); the company he sought and valued, apart from amusing and pretty women, were businessmen whose time and energies were directed fiercely, determinedly and tirelessly to the process of making
money, building companies, creating empires. They seemed to him to be the real people concerned with reality; they did not theorize, they had no time to, they acted, they fought, and they won.

What he did not understand about Eliza’s interest in politics was that it was an area that, in their marriage, she could stake a claim in, something she could know about and enjoy that he did not. Letitia had been quite right, she did feel excluded, ostracized even, from the company, and she was often, before she made friends of her own, lonely, and worse than that, diminished. She tried to become involved, to make Julian discuss matters with her, take her on trips, but he discouraged her, first gently, then more vigorously: ‘The business is mine, Eliza my darling, my problem, my concern; yours is our home, and our life together, and in due course I hope, our family. I need a refuge from my work, and I want you to provide it; I really would not want you to be distracted from anything so important.’

‘But I feel shut out,’ said Eliza fretfully. ‘Your work is so important to you, I want to share it.’

Julian looked at her almost coldly. ‘Eliza, you couldn’t. It’s too complex, and it is not what I want from you. Now please, let us not have any more of this.’

And so she gave up.

She learnt very quickly too that she was not going to find very much true friendship from within Julian’s circle. The women were all ten years at least older than her, and although charming and outwardly friendly found very little to say to her; they were worlds of experience away from her, they found her lightweight, boring even, and although the Morells were very generously entertained as a couple and people flocked to their house and their parties, Eliza found herself excluded from the gossipy women’s lunches, the time-killing activities they all went in for – riding in the park, playing tennis, running various charity committees. She had two or three friends from her debutante days, and she saw them, and talked to them, but they had all married much younger men, who Julian had no time for and did not enjoy seeing at his dinner table, and so she kept the two elements in her life separate, and tried not to notice how lonely she often felt. But her political friends were a great
comfort to her, she felt they proved to herself as well as to Julian that she was not simply an empty-headed foolish child, incapable of coherent thought; and she also found their company a great deal more amusing and stimulating than that of the businessmen and their wives, and the partying, globetrotting socialites that Julian chose to surround himself with.

By the time they had been married a year, Eliza was learning disillusionment. In many ways her life was still a fairy tale; she was rich, indulged, admired. But her loneliness, her sense of not belonging, went beyond their social life and even Julian’s addiction to his work. She felt excluded from him, from his most intimate self; looking back over their courtship, she could see that while he had listened to her endlessly, encouraged her to talk, showed a huge interest in everything to do with her, he rarely talked about himself. In the self-obsession of youth and love she had not noticed it at the time; six months into her marriage, she thought of little else. She would try to talk to him, to persuade him to communicate with her, to share his thoughts, his hopes, his anxieties; but she failed. He would chat to her, gossip even, talk about their friends, the house, the antique cars that were his new hobby, a trip they were planning; but from anything more personal, meaningful, he kept determinedly, almost forbiddingly silent. It first saddened, then enraged her; in time she learnt to live with it, but never to accept it. She felt he saw her as empty-headed, frivolous, stupid even, quite incapable of sharing his more serious concerns, and it was a hard thing to bear. In theory he was an ideal husband: he gave her everything she wanted, he was affectionate, he frequently told her she was playing her new role wonderfully well, commenting admiringly on her clothes, her decor, her talent for entertaining, her skill at running the household; and he continued to be a superb lover; if only, Eliza thought sadly, the rest of their life was as happy, as close, as complete, as the part that took place in their bedroom. Even that seemed to her to have its imperfections, its shortcomings; the long, charming, amusing conversations they had once had, when they had finished making love, were becoming shorter, less frequent; Julian would say he needed to sleep, that he had
an early meeting, a demanding day’s hunting, that he was tired from a trip, and gently discourage her from talking.

She had nothing to complain about, she knew; many, most women would envy her; but she was not properly happy. She did not think Julian was having an affair with anybody else, although she sometimes thought that even if he did she could feel little more excluded, more shut out than she did already. But she did not feel loved, as she had expected, hoped to feel; petted, pampered, spoilt, but not loved, not cared for, and most importantly of all, not considered. It was not a very comfortable or comforting state of affairs.

She was surprisingly busy; as well as running the London house, she and Julian had also bought a house in West Sussex, Lower Marriotts Manor, a perfect, medium-sized Queen Anne house; it had fifteen bedrooms, a glorious drawing room, and a perfect dining room, exquisitely carved ceilings and cornices that featured prominently in several books on English architecture, forty acres, a garden designed by Capability Brown, and very shortly after they bought it, a stable block designed by Michael McCarthy, an Irish architect who had made a fortune out of the simple notion of designing stables for the rich that looked just a little more than a set of stables. The stables and yard at Marriotts were a facsimile of Queen Anne stables, lofty, vaulted and quite lovely. The horses which Julian placed in them were quite lovely too, five hunters and five thoroughbreds, for he had developed a passion for racing, and was planning to breed as well. Eliza had a horse of her own, an exquisite Arab mare called Clementine (after the Prime Minister’s wife) who she flatly refused to take on to the hunting field.

‘I want riding to be a pleasure,’ she said to Julian firmly, ‘for both me and Clementine, and we are both much happier out on the downs on our own.’

‘My darling, you can ride her round and round the front lawn, if that will make you happy,’ he said, ‘as long as you don’t begrudge me my hunting. So many wives get jealous.’

‘Oh, Julian, I have quite enough to keep me jealous without adding hunting to the list,’ said Eliza lightly; Julian looked at her sharply, but her face was amusedly blank, her eyes unreadable.