Old Sins (40 page)

‘OK. Here it is. It was only once. Long long ago. It wasn’t an affair. Honestly. I didn’t love him. Just – just a one-night stand.’

‘I see.’

‘But – well, yes, I got pregnant. I didn’t think I could. I thought it was me that couldn’t conceive.’

‘How unfortunate for you.’

‘Yes, well. Anyway, that was it. I never ever slept with him again.’

‘Did you see him again?’

‘Hardly.’

‘Who was it then?’

‘I can’t tell you that.’

‘You have to.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Then,’ he said, ‘I shall tell Miles.’

‘Why?’

‘Because,’ he said, looking at her with infinite distaste, ‘you deserve it. And he would have a right to know.’

‘But you won’t if I tell you?’

‘Possibly not. It would depend who it was.’

‘That isn’t logical.’

‘I know. This isn’t a logical situation. Do you want me to tell him?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Then you tell me.’

Lee looked at him. There was a long silence. Then: ‘All right. It was Hugo. Hugo Dashwood.’

‘Dear God,’ said Dean. ‘How bizarre. How unsuitable. The perfect English gentleman. Fucking my wife. Giving her a bastard baby. And never having the decency to own up.’

‘He didn’t know.’

‘He didn’t?’

‘No. I never told him.’

‘Good God.’ He turned and looked at her. All the violence, all the anger had suddenly drained out of him. He looked suddenly years older, very frail and vulnerable. ‘You’re quite a woman, aren’t you? All these years. Never told him.’ There was another long silence. ‘Imagine it being Hugo,’ he said. ‘The last person I’d have suspected. Not British, that sort of thing. Not British at all. I always liked old Hugo too. Thought he was my friend. Oh, well. At least I know. I feel kind of better now. You should have told me before. Right in the beginning.’ He sighed. ‘I feel very tired. I think I’ll go up to bed. Good night, Lee. I’ll sleep in the guest room.’

‘All right,’ she said, disconcerted by this sudden return to normality. ‘Shall I bring you some more tea?’

‘No. No thank you.’ He sighed and stood up, doing up his trousers, straightening his shirt. His eyes were full of tears; he put his hand up and brushed them away. ‘I still love you,’ he said. ‘Very very much. I always knew you were too good for me. Good night, Lee.’

‘Good night, Dean,’ she said, afraid to break the spell. ‘Good night.’

He went upstairs. She heard him going into the bathroom, heard the guest room door open, the bed groan as he fell on to it. Somehow, within her aching, trembling body she found the strength to pick up the empty bottles, to straighten the cushions, to turn off the light. It was only half past ten; it felt as if days had passed.

As she went up to her room she could hear his snores begin; he would not wake now. She would decide what to do in the morning. She went to bed.

In the night the snoring stopped. Going in early in the morning, to see if he was all right, she found him absolutely waxen – white and still, scarcely breathing, beyond help. He had taken her bottle of tranquillizers from the bathroom and swallowed the lot, washed down with the remainder of the bourbon. The verdict at the inquest was suicide whilst temporarily deranged.

Whichever way you looked at it, she thought, she had killed him.

London, 1970–71

ROZ WAS IN
love.

She was not in love, as most of the girls at Cheltenham were, with one of the spotty boys of fifteen or sixteen, one of the band of girls’ brothers, who accompanied their parents down to school on Open Day or to collect at the end of term: brothers were, as far as Roz could see, arrogant, stupid and tedious, with nothing to say to anyone except ‘Good term?’ or ‘Er – hallo’ according to whether they were greeting their sister or their sisters’ friends. Nevertheless their prospective arrival caused much giggling, and brushing of hair and excited anticipatory remarks like ‘I bet he won’t remember me,’ or ‘Gosh, my brother’s not a patch on yours,’ and the young Ladies of
Cheltenham went through a formalized mating ritual on their arrival which consisted in the main of their faces blushing scarlet, their voices rising an octave or so, and their eyes rolling rather strangely as one brother or another was introduced to, or reminded of, them; and if things were going really well, proceeded to suggest that perhaps they might see them during the holidays, at some intimate event like a horse show or a family skiing trip.

Roz did blush at least a little when confronted by her love, but her voice did not rise, and her eyes did not roll strangely, she was able to look at him, and even answer him when he spoke; but the things that happened to her heart in his presence were much the same as those that happened to the young ladies: it leapt, it lurched, it rose in her throat and threatened to deafen her with its pounding.

And her love, while not being aware of her feelings, was certainly not indifferent to her: he spoke to her, he inquired after her health and her progress, he remarked on how tall she had grown, and quite often on how much he liked what she was wearing. This was not, it has to be said, because he returned her affections: it was because he was employed by her father and he was in love with her mother.

David Sassoon was the only son of a modestly successful, fiercely proud, Jewish businessman, and having been quite exceptionally good-looking and sexually precocious, he had been expelled from a minor public school, St Michael’s in Gloucestershire, for being found in flagrante with one of the housemaids at the age of fifteen. This had nearly broken his father’s heart, and he had been sent to the local secondary modern in North London to complete his education and learn a few more lessons besides, including, his father hoped, that of humility and the folly of lost opportunity.

David was not, however, so easily defeated; he passed his School Certificate with distinction and became, against every possible odds, the hero of his year; the boys were impressed by his ability to beat even the most savagely raised bully in a playground fight, and the girls by an equally daunting ability to make three hours in the back row of the cinema, or a sojourn in the park with a couple of bags of chips, an experience of high sensual pleasure.

After school he went to St Martin’s School of Art where he took every possible prize and graduated with the highest possible honours, and got a job in a large and fashionable design studio in London; six months after he arrived he was put to work redesigning the packaging for a range of preserves for one of the huge grocery chains. His designs were promptly accepted and put on display; he was then asked to look at the image of the canned goods.

The product manager of canned goods was a beautiful, and recklessly sexy, girl called Mary; before long Mary had not only taken David into her bed and her elegant young person, but had become pregnant by him. What nobody had thought to inform David of, least of all Mary, was that her father was the chairman of the supermarket chain.

This being the late fifties, and abortion being not entirely easy to organize without the passing over of a considerable sum of money, Mary felt obliged to confess all to her father; the consequence was that not only was David fired from the account, but the design company as well, and found himself looking for a job without any kind of reference.

Fortunately for him, Mick diMaggio, on a trip to London, happened to be in the Juliana offices one day when David was making his somewhat wearisome rounds of the studios and offices of London; Mick told Julian he should hire him immediately, Julian said he didn’t give a monkey’s why David didn’t have any decent references as long as he had not actually been caught with his hand in the till; and David took the job as assistant design manager in the packaging department with a huge sigh of relief and a resolve never to be found again with his hand in anything, including a till, unless he was one hundred per cent certain he could not be reproached for it. He had learnt something else about himself through this rather salutary experience: that he was savagely, almost ferociously, ambitious. He, and his work, he now knew, had to be very, very successful indeed – so successful that nothing of a personal nature could threaten it.

Some designers work with their creative instincts alone, some give more emphasis to commercial demands. A few manage to use both, and throw something else in as well: Mick diMaggio himself, looking at David’s work, put a word to it:
guts. David Sassoon took risks on the drawing board. He used colours, shapes, typefaces that had not been seen in association with cosmetics before. They were not brash, or vulgar or in any way shocking, they were beautiful and desirable, but they were also absolutely stunningly new, fresh, rethought. Under David, Juliana took an entirely new look, while perfectly retaining its air of exclusivity, extravagance, desirability. A new Sassoon-styled counter display for Juliana making its appearance at Harrods or Harvey Nichols was a major attraction in itself, and the windows he created every Christmas to promote
Je
and
Mademoiselle Je
in all the big stores, including Circe in both New York and Paris, owed more to the cinematic style of Mr Busby Berkeley than anything taught at art college about window display.

Five years later David was creative director of Juliana, reporting directly to Julian and with a seat on the main board; he had a flat in the King’s Road and a white Mercedes convertible, he spent his nights dancing at the Saddle Room and the Ad Lib, high temples of the shrine immortalized in
Time Magazine
as swinging London, with a string of beautiful girls, each one with longer hair, legs and eyelashes and shorter skirts than the last. He knew everybody in London worth knowing: the terrible trio of photographers – David Bailey, Terry Donovan, Brian Duffy – and their ever-changing coterie of divinely long-legged huge-eyed companions; he knew Barbara Hulanicki and her husband Stephen FitzSimon, and indeed had worked with them on some early designs for the first Biba; he knew Cathy McGowan, the star of
Ready Steady Go
; he knew all the most brilliant fashion journalists of the day, Grace Coddington of
Vogue
, Anne Trehearne of
Queen
, Molly Parkin of
Nova
; he knew Mary Quant and Alexander Plunkett Greene; he knew Twiggy and Justin de Villeneuve.

He bought his clothes from Blades, he had his hair cut personally by Vidal Sassoon, who was, they were both at great pains to assure everybody, absolutely no relation, he ate at the Arethusa club, and at Nick’s Diner, the ultimate gourmet experience in the Fulham Road for young London; his life was a hyped-up fairy story of success and fame, and he was deeply in love with it.

He was also exceedingly good-looking. He had dark curly
hair, a slightly swarthy freckled skin, and dark eyes that it was impossible to meet without feeling infected by the naked, unashamed, joyful carnal knowledge that filled them. He was fairly slim, and although he was not very tall, only about five foot ten, he was a curious combination of both graceful and powerful, which emphasized his extraordinary sexuality. David Sassoon did not just look sexy, as one tender young model of seventeen confided to another in the ladies’ room at the Ad Lib club one night, he felt sexy. ‘And I don’t mean he has hard-ons all the time, he just only has to touch your hand and you start thinking about what it would be like to be in bed with him.’

Nevertheless, his reputation was surprisingly blemish free. He flirted with, he courted, he enjoyed women; but he very rarely took them to bed until he knew them almost as well as they knew themselves.

This was partly because of a deeply held belief of his that women were only satisfactory as sexual partners if they felt at ease; and partly because he was absolutely terrified of finding himself unwittingly in yet another compromising situation. In David Sassoon’s opinion, and indeed his experience, sod’s law operated more painstakingly in the bedroom than anywhere else; and he had no desire to see his meteoric career blacked out by the consequences of a night’s pleasure, however intense, in the company of a lady who might be the wife, daughter or mistress of someone who employed him.

Eliza Thetford, however, having seen David across the room at a party Julian had thrown to celebrate the launch of his first health farm (now that he was no longer married to her, and indeed was at one husband’s remove from her, Julian perversely greatly enjoyed her company and her attendance at his parties, had set her sights on him rather firmly. She was talking to Letitia at the time, with whom she was still the very best of friends, when she saw him, and decided she would greatly like to get to know him.

‘Letitia,’ she whispered, ‘who is that perfectly glorious man with the black curly hair and the divine beige suit? The one who looks a bit like Richard Burton, only with dark hair.’

‘Oh,’ said Letitia, following her gaze and then looking back at her amusedly. ‘That’s Julian’s latest discovery. His new
creative director in London. Awfully clever. A bit abrasive. His name’s David Sassoon. Do you want to meet him?’

‘Of course.’

‘He’s very dangerous.’

‘In what way?’

‘You know perfectly well what way.’

‘Then I certainly want to meet him.’

‘On your own head be it.’

‘It’s not my head I want it to be on.’

‘Eliza! How coarse!’ But she was laughing.

David Sassoon in fact proved the opposite of dangerous at first. Eliza was disappointed. He bowed over her hand, looked into her eyes with his burning brown ones, and immediately made her feel half undressed; he chatted amusingly with her, danced with her once or twice, told her she was the most beautiful woman in the room, and that he included the ravishing Miss Julie Christie and the divine Miss Penelope Tree in that statement, and then vanished without trace. ‘Rather like a male Cinderella,’ said Eliza plaintively to Letitia at the end of the party. What David was doing, however, was what he had been doing all his life, safeguarding his own position – or not shitting on his own doorstep as he described it eloquently if inelegantly to his best friend and workmate over lunch next day.