Old Sins (28 page)

He looked up at her, his eyes full of anxiety. She trembled. A tender word, now, and she might give in. Fear made her harsh.

‘Just leave me alone, will you? I’d like to go back to bed. I don’t feel too good.’

‘What does Dean think?’

‘I haven’t told him.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I know.’

‘You don’t.’

‘But Lee, if it is Dean’s baby he would be over the moon. He’s always wanted kids. He was born to be a father. You should tell him.’

‘I will, I will. But I . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘I wanted to be sure.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of being pregnant.’

‘Oh, Lee, that’s ridiculous. You look terrible.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You know what I mean. And you woke me up vomiting this morning. He’s not stupid.’

Lee turned to look at him. ‘He is, quite. In some ways. I just told him I had a stomach bug. He believes anything I say. Anything,’ she repeated with an odd insistence.

‘And can’t he count either?’

‘He’s been away a lot. I’ll tell him soon. When I see the doctor.’

Hugo was silent again.

‘And is that all you have to say to me?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘You won’t change your mind?’

‘No. Why should I?’

‘Well, I’m sorry. More than I can tell you.’

Lee suddenly started to weep, huge shuddering sobs, burying her face in her hands. He took her in his arms then and comforted her as best he could, stroking her hair, holding her to him tightly, just murmuring quietly as if to a small child. She stopped crying, blew her nose hard, and pulled away from him, curling herself up into a small ball in the corner of the couch.

‘It would kill him, you see,’ she said very quietly, ‘if – if he had any idea, the faintest idea that it wasn’t his baby. He wants
kids so much. He’d like a dozen. It would be far, far worse than if he thought I’d just slept with someone. The fact that someone else could make me pregnant. He just couldn’t bear it.’

Another silence. Then: ‘Did you think about abortion?’

She looked at him hard, aware that he was leading her into a trap.

‘Why should I have an abortion? It’s Dean’s baby. I’m really very happy about it.’ She smiled, a bright tremulous smile. ‘I’m just a bit over-emotional. But I tell you something, Hugo, if you ever imply, by so much as a look, that you think it might – might not be Dean’s baby, I shall come to England and I shall find your wife and I shall tell her everything.’

‘Oh, Lee,’ he said, with a heavy sigh, ‘I won’t. Of course I won’t. I’ll do whatever you want. But you know I’m there if you need me.’

Lee wasn’t going to let him get off that lightly.

‘I’m afraid,’ she said, walking towards the door, and turning to look at him with infinite scorn, ‘I know nothing of the sort.’

She began to feel better quite soon after that. She couldn’t quite figure out why, but she supposed that having confronted Hugo, laid that ghost, she could only go forward, believing in what simply had to be the truth. Dean was so beside himself with pride and joy when she told him, he didn’t even pause to consider that their sex life had been a trifle spasmodic over the past couple of months. He even remarked quite spontaneously that it had been worth all the temperature-taking and counting.

He talked non-stop about the baby, what they would do together, he and his boy (he seemed to have no doubts at all about its sex), how they would fish together, play football, camp, ride, hike. Lee listened quietly. She was calm now, serene, happy. She looked beautiful. Pregnancy suited her.

Amy had taken her health in hand, and had her on an entirely wholefood diet, and a formidable array of vitamins and minerals to top it up. Lee swallowed them all obediently; she couldn’t quite see how seaweed and whale oil were going to do anything for her baby, but it was easier not to argue. Amy also insisted on her going to yoga classes, so that she could enjoy a painless, natural birth. Lee had serious doubts about how a
birth could be both, but she went to the classes anyway. She enjoyed the meditation part of it, and the part of the sessions which were set aside for visualization; you were supposed to visualize the baby emerging painlessly and easily from your body, but she used the time rather differently, and would sit in a trancelike state, fervently visualizing a baby girl with blonde hair and blue eyes, emerging as painfully and awkwardly as she liked; fervently dismissing any stray picture of a dark-eyed little boy that might drift into her head.

It had just become fashionable for fathers to be present at the birth. Dean was initially very enthusiastic, and attended classes with the other husbands, practising different breathing levels with Lee and learning how to rub her back, but after watching a film called
Happy Birthday
put on by the obstetric unit at the hospital for prospective parents, he became very quiet and told Lee in the car on the way home that he thought after all a father’s place was in the waiting room. Both the yoga teacher and the Natural Childbirth teacher were shocked and distressed and tried to persuade him to participate, assuring him he was going to miss the most important and beautiful experience of his entire life, but Lee didn’t mind; she thought she was going to have quite enough to put up with without Dean rubbing her back all the way through, which he did extraordinarily clumsily, and worrying if he was going to faint at the crucial moment.

In the event, she gave birth to her son with the minimum of trouble, albeit three weeks late; they placed him in her arms, and she looked down at the blue eyes, and stroked the blond downy head, and reflected that either she had been hallucinating in ever thinking that Dean might not have been his father, or that visualization was an extraordinarily powerful force.

Hugo Dashwood, arriving at his New York hotel one day in early January, found a card waiting for him with a California postmark. ‘Miles Sinclair Wilburn has arrived,’ it said. ‘Born January 2nd, 8.30 p.m. Weight 8½ pounds. A big ’un. Mother and baby well. Come and meet him soon.’

London, 1959

WHAT FATE HAD
in store for Eliza was not a job: it was something rather less predictable and came in the truculent form of Peter Thetford.

Peter Thetford was thirty-two years old, and trying rather too hard to reconcile a burning socialist ideology with a strong desire not only to achieve political power but to savour the good things of life, so far fairly sternly denied to him.

His father had been a Nottingham miner; Peter had been his fifth child, and had won a scholarship to the local grammar school, where, mixing with middle-class boys, he became totally obsessed with the essential injustice of British society and its caste system. He found the barrier thrown up between him and David Johnson, the local doctor’s son who sat at the next desk, not so much insurmountable as incomprehensible. He could play soccer with David, and score goals alongside him, could thrash him on the assault course in the cadet corps, get higher marks at mathematics, and alternate term by term with him, winning the form prize. Yet when he sought his friendship, tried to communicate with him, tell him filthy jokes, discuss the female anatomy, borrow the dog-eared centrefold spread of
Playboy
which went the rounds of the form every month, tried to join David in the group that went to the local youth club every Friday, he met a polite, slightly stilted rejection.

Then at Cambridge, where he won an outright maths scholarship, he comprehended it better and loathed it more. It enraged and embittered him that there was no equal ground between him and Anthony Smythe Andrews who had come up from Eton, and who was also reading economics; no way they could communicate except on the most self-conscious and false terms, and yet he was cleverer than Smythe Andrews, he worked harder, he had read more, they had passed the same exams, and indeed he knew he had done better, simply to get the scholarship from a position well back from most people’s starting line.

It was no use fighting it, he could see that, or at least not at Cambridge; no use trying to climb the fence, to become Smythe Andrews’ friend, because there was absolutely no basis for friendship. Smythe Andrews despised him, and he despised Smythe Andrews, not because either thought the other stupid, unpleasant or rude, but because each had roots in something the other could not begin to comprehend and indeed was deeply wary of.

Anthony Smythe Andrews knew he was Peter Thetford’s superior because he was born to a different class, spoke in a different voice, used different words and had different friends, who were all exactly like him; and when Peter Thetford won the Economics Exhibition at the end of the first year, and Smythe Andrews failed his first Tripos, it was Smythe Andrews who remained the superior.

The sense of isolation Thetford knew at Cambridge also had a profound effect on his sexual attitudes. There were very few working-class boys at the university in the late forties, despite Oxbridge, and certainly no working-class girls. The girls were an extraordinarily elite clique, all from intellectual, upper-class backgrounds, most of them witty and clever, eccentrically dressed, outrageously self-confident, with the power to pick and choose from quite literally hundreds of rich, amusing, charming young men. The social climate was heady, hectic, modestly promiscuous; the fact that you were sent down for being caught in bed, or even in the room of a member of the opposite sex after ten o’clock, was a considerable, but not total, deterrent.

It took a strong intellectual and sexual confidence to break into that set, if you were not born to it; Thetford had neither. The girls would in the early days politely dance with him, if they were asked, talk to him in the dining room, even invite him to an occasional tea party; but they were not, he recognized quite quickly, going to enter into any more intimate relationship than that.

Consequently he was lonely, isolated, and quite often angry; he would sit alone in his room studying at night, surrounded by the sounds of social and – more dreadfully isolating still – sexual pleasure down the corridors, and wonder not only how he could bear it, but why he should. His virginity accompanied
him back and forwards to Cambridge each term, an increasingly embarrassing burden which he was finally able to lay down in the bed of an art student he met at a Christmas party in Nottingham; they wrote to each other for a brief time into the following term, both anxious to pretend that they felt more than they did and that it had not just been a one-night stand. Shortly after he came down from Cambridge he met Margaret Phipps, a student teacher, for whom he felt quite a lot and in whose arms he enjoyed considerable pleasure; and in due course he married her. But he continued to regard sex as something inextricably bound up with class; as privileged territory, with access automatically granted to the rich and successful, the expensively educated, the socially secure; and denied, unless with-an attendant load of responsibility, to those who were none of those things.

Then he met Eliza Morell.

Eliza had been invited by Hugh Gaitskell to a party at the House of Commons ten days after she got back to London, and had been strongly disinclined to go, when Julian called from New York to say he would be away for a week longer than he had thought and that he was coming home via Paris in order to look at sites for a second Circe with Paul Baud.

‘Is that all right, darling? I can go later, if you’d rather.’

He sounded anxious, conciliatory. Guilty conscience, thought Eliza, good.

‘Of course it’s all right. Well, Julian, I’ll see you – when? Three weeks?’

‘Four. But Scott and Madeleine will be over before that, so they’ll be company for you.’

‘Julian,’ said Eliza, her voice trembling with outrage, ‘I am not so bereft of company in London that I have to wait for it to arrive from the United States. I’ll see you when you get back. Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye Eliza. Give my love to Roz.’

‘I would, if I thought she would know who it was sending it.’

‘Eliza, don’t.’

‘Goodbye Julian.’

She put down the phone, looked at herself in the mirror, and
sighed heavily. Then she picked it up again, arranged to have her hair done, and dialled through to Nanny Henry on the house telephone and told her she’d be out that evening.

‘This,’ she said to her reflection, ‘is the first day of the rest of my life. As they say in America.’

She went out feeling more positive than she could remember for months.

It was a good party. Eliza, her hair dressed by M. René of South Audley Street, piled high in the new fashion, and with a huge fake pearl pinned into the tumble of curls at the front, and dressed in a navy pleated silk on-the-knee dress from St Laurent with a wide cape collar, and extremely high-heeled, yellow satin shoes with pointed toes, was surprised to find she was enjoying herself greatly. The room was full of friends, all longing to hear about her trip, all blissfully unaware of what a fiasco it had been; she talked and laughed and told them how she and Julian had entertained most of New York at the opening of Circe and how she had met Cary Grant and almost curtsied to him in her excitement, and what a wonderful city it was, and how they must all come and visit them now that they had an apartment there, and how she would have stayed much longer if she hadn’t been missing Roz, when she suddenly became aware of a pair of dark blue eyes boring into her from across the room. The eyes were set in a face that was pale and rather thin with dark hair that was just a little too long flopping over the forehead; a face that wore an expression that was an extraordinary mixture of disdain and admiration; a face that was clearly not going to smile, or indeed soften unless she gave it considerable cause to do so.

‘John, who is that man over there, the one staring at me; the one with the ghastly blue suit.’

John Wetheringham, a senior civil servant, who was very fond of Eliza but feared sometimes for her worst social excesses in the presence of some of the more fervent socialists in the land, put a warning hand on her arm. ‘You mustn’t talk disparagingly about the Labour Party’s suits, Eliza. Not at a party given by their leader, anyway. That’s Peter Thetford. New MP for Midbury in West Yorkshire. Gave a very good speech on education the other day. Promising young chap. Want to meet him?’