Old Sins (30 page)

‘What’s the country?’

‘House in Sussex we’ve got. Sorry.’

‘That’s all right. So he has a sort of nanny of his own, this husband of yours?’

‘Yes. You could call him that. What a lovely idea.’

There was a silence.

‘Oh, goodness,’ she said, ‘I haven’t given us our food. How silly. Boeuf bourguignon. Do you like it?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, deadpan, ‘it makes a change from tripe. Just now and again.’

‘Shut up. What’s tripe like, anyway?’

‘Putrid.’

‘I thought it would be. Tell me,’ she added, pouring wine into his glass, ‘who looks after your children while your wife is teaching? Do you have a nanny?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘we don’t have a nanny. They go to a child minder. You won’t have heard of child minders, perhaps. They cost a little less than nannies.’

‘Oh, goodness, don’t start all that again,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think, I can’t help being tactless.’

‘I can see that,’ he said, and smiled. ‘It’s all right. I’m getting the hang of it. I’ll be eating my peas with a fork in no time now.’

Nanny Henry came into the kitchen. ‘She’s ready, Mrs Morell, if you’d like to come up. Or shall I . . .?’

She looked doubtfully at Peter.

‘No, Nanny, absolutely not. We’ll both come up. This is Mr Thetford, Nanny, an old friend.’

‘Pleased to meet you, sir,’ said Nanny Henry, looking at Peter with extremely ill-disguised distaste. Peter smiled at her and followed her upstairs.

‘She thinks I’m rough trade,’ he hissed, turning to Eliza who was behind him.

‘She’s right,’ whispered Eliza, ‘and she’s not used to it, I can tell you.’

The nursery was at the very top of the house. Roz lay in her bed, virtually submerged with teddies, sucking her thumb. She was not as pretty as Peter had expected; she was dark and her eyes were green and solemn in her pale little face.

‘Good night, my dearest darling,’ said Eliza, bending over the little bed, ‘sleep very very tight.’

‘Story,’ came the imperious voice.

‘Oh, darling, Mummy is very busy.’

‘No you’re not. I want a story.’

And so they stayed and Eliza told her a story, a charmingly dizzy tale about a bear that ran away, and Peter leant against the wall and listened and thought at one and the same moment how easy it was to make up charming stories when you hadn’t had to bath a child and put it to bed in between cooking the supper and tidying up the house and how totally enchanting Eliza looked as she told the story, and how he could have stood there for many hours just listening to her and watching her.

At the extremely happy end of the story, Eliza kissed Roz and then turned to him.

‘Would you kiss her too? She’s a bit starved of affection at the moment.’

And Peter moved over and kissed Roz’s cheek, and she turned over immediately and buried her face contentedly in her teddies, her thumb in her mouth; Eliza turned the light out and beckoned to Peter to follow her out of the door.

It was a strangely intimate moment; as they left the nursery, she took his hand and led him to the top of the stairs; he paused, half tempted, half terrified by her closeness, her readiness, her beauty, and he said to her, ‘How often have you done this sort of thing?’

‘Oh,’ she said, understanding completely what he meant, ‘never. Never before. I’ve never wanted to. It’s never seemed right.’

‘And what,’ he asked, brusque, impatient with himself and his insecurities, ‘is so different about this, about me?’

‘You, I suppose,’ she said simply. ‘You’re different. I trust
you. You talk to me. Now let’s go down and finish our dinner, and that perfectly gorgeous burgundy that Julian would begrudge us so much.’

Nanny Henry heard them go downstairs with some relief. She didn’t like the idea of hanky-panky on her nursery floor.

After that they spent a lot of time together. Innocent, unadulterous time. No hanky-panky at all. A private detective set to follow them would have found their behaviour rather puzzling, and his work extremely dull. Peter Thetford had most of his mornings free before going to the House; they went for walks in the park, for drives in Eliza’s car; took picnics to Hampstead Heath, and accompanied Roz to the zoo. They lunched together early, often at Hanover Terrace, sometimes with Nanny and Roz, occasionally alone; (but never, Eliza was careful to ensure, mindful of Peter’s insecurities, anywhere smart or expensive). Peter talked a great deal and Eliza listened.

It was on this that the success of their relationship was founded; they liked each other very much, and they were both intrigued and excited by the utter unfamiliarity of one another, but the novelty of being talked to at length, of being trusted with important conversation, overwhelmed Eliza.

‘You cannot imagine,’ she said to him one day after he had given her an exhaustive account of a debate on the crisis in housing in the House the night before, ‘how wonderful I find all this. Being told things. Not being fobbed off. Promise me not to stop.’

‘I promise,’ said Peter. It seemed fairly wonderful to him too; Margaret rarely had time to listen to him, and when she did, it was with half an ear on the children, most of the other half on what she was about to be saying back to him.

‘Have you told your wife about me?’ asked Eliza idly one morning as they wandered round the boating lake with Roz between them.

‘Yes and no.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I’ve told her I met you.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘She wouldn’t understand.’

‘Julian wouldn’t either,’ said Eliza. ‘I hardly understand it myself,’ she added with a sigh. ‘But at least we have nothing to hide.’

A few days later there was rather more both to understand and to hide. Eliza had been both relieved and puzzled by Peter’s lack of sexual assertiveness. She was so accustomed to infidelity in the marriages of most of her friends, she took it so for granted, it was so much part of a natural progression, an inevitable process, as love turned to indifference and indifference to boredom, boredom to diversion, that she found it extremely difficult to understand how a man who had been married for seven years, who was so undoubtedly sexually motivated, and who was equally undoubtedly sexually attracted to her, could spend considerable amounts of time with her and not so much as try to kiss her. She would have liked him to kiss her, and indeed to suggest doing rather more; it would have soothed her hurt feelings, stroked her ego, reassured her about her own desirability. She was also, she had to admit, feeling randy. It was several weeks now since she had had sex with Julian, and although she had learnt to take her pleasure in a rather irregular rhythm these days, her unhappiness and insecurity had made her uncomfortable and hungry. She found the thought of being in bed with Peter extremely arousing; there was a certain quality about him, an aggression, an awkwardness, which was sexually intriguing. She had been absolutely faithful to Julian, largely because she was frightened not to be. She had had the odd flirtation, the occasional passionate lunch, been kissed quite thoroughly from time to time; but that was all, and she surprised herself as well as her friends. But she did now want quite badly to be unfaithful. She wanted to know another man; it was as simple as that, and she wanted it not because she was bored or even unhappy, but because she felt so desperately inexperienced and so hopelessly vulnerable.

What she could not know, because he concealed it so carefully beneath his facade of aggression, was that Peter Thetford was terrified of making love to her. He was extremely inexperienced himself; he had only slept with two women in his
life, Margaret and the art student, and the nearest he had ever come to unfaithfulness had been a prolonged and drunken necking session with a journalist at one of the Labour Party conferences. Margaret was a conventional but undemanding wife in bed; confronted by any attempt on his part to explore, to innovate, she became irritable and uneasy. Consequently, Peter’s sexual performance was practised but proscribed; he was, however, quite highly sexed and he thought about it a lot and fantasized considerably; (he had developed a slightly unfortunate tendency to do this in the middle of his constituency surgeries when boredom was running particularly high; and would find himself sharply distracted from some tale of unjust landlord, or pillaging allotment holder, by a sexual image of such vividness that he had to pull several files on to his lap to cover his erection). But fantasies were one thing, reality another; he felt sick with terror as well as desire every time he contemplated Eliza’s sensuous mouth, her slender graceful body, and the undoubted hunger in her large green eyes. There was also her social status. Knowing her better, liking her more and more, he was still both overawed and angered by it. She had been born to class, confidence and money, and had acquired far more; his hostility to that, and his fear of it, held him back day after day. She was on the other side of all those closed doors and he still could not imagine himself walking through them.

And so he did nothing; and Eliza became increasingly frustrated and baffled – without being quite desperate or confident enough to initiate matters herself.

Besides, while Peter Thetford asked no more of her than her company, and her untiring ear, she was at least not threatened: she was safe. Safe from gossip, safe from rejection, safe from fear. There was the odd remark, the occasional rumour in those talkative weeks, but as they did nothing but wander about London, in the most public possible way, not even holding hands, for all the world to see, it was hard for anyone to work up much interest in their story. Even Letitia, arch gossip that she was, and deeply suspicious, could make nothing of the relationship; Eliza brought Peter Thetford to tea with her at First Street; for two hours he lectured them both on the subject of comprehensive schooling, produced pictures of Margaret,
David and Hugh for Letitia to see, invited her to a debate on the possibility of decimal currency the following week and then left alone to write a speech on teachers’ salaries.

‘I find it hard to believe,’ said Letitia to Susan (who was passionately intrigued by Eliza’s latest foray into socialist politics) later that week, ‘but I honestly don’t think he’s laid a finger on her. Most extraordinary. He’s very nice really,’ she added, forgetting who she was with, ‘in spite of his background. And I’m told he’s very clever. Dreadful suit though.’

‘I know you can never quite believe it, Letitia,’ said Susan mildly, ‘but quite a lot of people are nice in spite of their backgrounds. I’ve met several perfectly decent people in my time, you know, who had to wipe their own bottoms without a nanny to help them, from a very early age, never went away to school, never buggered the new boys . . .’

‘Oh, my darling, do forgive me,’ said Letitia. ‘I am so tactless. Oh, dear, what can I say? You know I don’t mean it.’

‘Of course I do,’ said Susan, and laughed. ‘But you’d better not make those sort of remarks in front of Mr Thetford. He wouldn’t know anything of the sort. Red rag to a bull, I’d say that would be.’

Ironically it was precisely that sort of remark that finally got Peter Thetford into bed with Eliza Morell.

They were in the garden of Hanover Terrace with Roz, one afternoon, about three weeks after they had met. Eliza was trying to make a daisy chain with a marked lack of success. ‘Here,’ she said, turning to Peter and laughing, ‘see if you can do it. Nothing brings back childhood like daisy chains, don’t you think? Daisy chains and tea on the lawn.’

It was an innocent remark and she meant it quite simply; but Peter was tired, he had had a worrying conversation with his agent about a forthcoming by-election and a rather too promising Tory candidate; he had to go up next day on the milk train to Manchester and take his surgery without so much as time for a cup of tea when he got there; his head ached, his speech was still not right, and he felt he was making absolutely no headway with Gaitskell in his long-term plan to move into the Department of Education. Eliza’s remark seemed frivolous and fatuous.

‘Your childhood maybe. Mine was rather different, you may remember. Tea was a big meal at six o’clock, round the table, with Father often still not washed after coming home from the mine, coughing his lungs up and spitting into his handkerchief. Not a daisy chain in sight.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ said Eliza, ‘I am so tired of that bloody background of yours. I’ll tell you one of the most important differences between your class and mine; we don’t keep on and on about it. It’s so boring. Don’t you think it’s time you learnt to behave properly?’

Peter looked at her and all the memories swam into his head: hot angry memories, of rejection, of loneliness, of a realization he was different, odd, not up to standard. Of other people laughing, talking, closing doors, leaving him behind. Of beautiful girls, self-assured, sexually arrogant, gently but cruelly turning him away.

He felt a shudder go through him, a savage angry shot of desire; he looked at Eliza, and he knew he had to have her, master her, bring her down; he stood up suddenly, his face livid, picked up little Roz and carried her inside.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ said Eliza, scrambling up after him, following him up the stairs, frightened, calling for Nanny.

Thetford took Roz to the nursery and ran back downstairs; Eliza was standing in the hall. He took her hand, dragging her towards him; she looked at him half frightened, half excited. ‘Leave me alone,’ she said, but he knew she didn’t mean it, she stopped almost at once even pretending, simply turned, and led him quickly, silently, across the hall and into her parlour and closed the door.

He stood back and looked at her; then reached out and unbuttoned her shirt; slipped it off her shoulders and bent and started kissing her bare breasts. He kissed them slowly, tenderly, licking the nipples, sucking them, working them with his tongue; on and on it went, insistent, hungry, patient; Eliza standing there, her head bent over him, her fists clenched with hunger and pleasure, felt soft, fluid with desire. He wrenched off her skirt, her pants; he was kneeling now, kissing, fondling her stomach, her thighs, his tongue suddenly, cunningly darting into her; she moaned, cried out, trembling violently with excitement, fear, desire.