Old Sins (54 page)

Should he do anything, say anything? No, it was all much too delicate. Better to stay quiet. If it was ever really necessary to come forward, he would. If there was any more trouble. Or if anyone ever really needed to know.

London and Eleuthera, 1973–6

ROZ HAD NEVER
expected to feel pity for her father; nevertheless that was the emotion she was currently experiencing whenever she thought about him. And as always she thought about him a great deal. Everything seemed to have gone wrong for him, and, what was worse, his misfortunes were enduring a rather high profile. Araminta Jones had pulled on her hot pants and thigh-high boots one morning and stalked out on him finally, her exit from both his life and the company having been preceded only a few months by that of Camilla, who told him in uncharacteristically few words that she was not prepared to play understudy to anybody and certainly not a self-obsessed girl of twenty-three with the brains of a flea. Moreover – she had also told him, in only slightly more words – she was not prepared to work any longer towards the success of his company, and was setting up her own advertising agency in New York. There was considerable speculation as to which of her two defections had hurt Julian more. He had also apparently lost the close and happy relationship he had had with Susan for so many years; they were almost estranged,
communicating rather stiffly and formally when it was absolutely necessary. It seemed to Roz that he could never have needed her friendship more.

The new ethical pharmaceutical wing of the company, founded upon millions of pounds’ worth of investment and a fanfare of publicity, had had a spectacular flop with its first big product launch; and the fact that Eliza was in the throes of a wildly successful, much-chronicled love affair with the son of one of the richest of the oil-rich sheikhs did not help either.

There was another, more intimate problem Julian was undergoing at the moment, which Araminta could have borne testament to but mercifully did not, and which Susan’s rejection had exacerbated; the end result was that he looked exhausted and haggard, and was bad tempered and totally unpredictable both at home and work.

It was Letitia who alerted Roz to the problems – with the exception of the intimate one, which not even she could have known about, or even suspected – and suggested she should talk to him about them.

‘I can’t possibly, darling, he’ll just feel I’m interfering as usual. But you could, he needs to talk to someone, he’s awfully low. And after all, you’re eighteen now, quite grown up, and he loves you so much, you could be exactly what he needs.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Roz shortly. ‘Loving me, I mean. But of course I’ll talk to him. I’m going to stay with him at Marriotts this weekend. I’m so absolutely sick and tired of Mummy and her lovesick Arab, so it’ll be an ideal time.’

‘Thank you, darling. And you’re wrong, you know. He does love you, more than anyone or anything else in the world.’

‘Does he?’ said Roz, looking at her rather coolly. ‘Well, maybe. He has had a very strange way of showing it, that’s all I can say.’

Letitia sighed. ‘I know. Poor Roz. I’m afraid you’ve had a very difficult time.’

‘Oh well,’ said Roz briskly. ‘I expect it’s done me good. Some people would say I’d had a marvellous life. Just a poor little rich girl, that’s what I am, I suppose.’

Her father did seem acutely depressed. He drove her down to Marriotts in his new Mercedes (one of the things which had been most revealing about his low morale had been the fact he
hadn’t bought a rare car for six months), hardly speaking. Roz, who was not a chatterer herself, sat in silence beside him and wondered what on earth she could do for him. Apart from anything else, she reflected, it was going to be a very dreary weekend. She might even have to send an SOS to Rosie to come and join them.

Poor Daddy. Well, he was getting on a bit now. Seriously old. Nearly fifty-four, he still looked very good, of course, his hair was hardly grey at all, and he had never put on any weight. He dressed well, too, she had to admit; always in very classic clothes, but with a dash of style to spice them up a bit; right now, she thought, in his cream silk shirt, open at the neck, his beige linen trousers, his brown Gucci loafers, he looked really terrific. She told him so.

He smiled. ‘You don’t look so bad yourself. Although a bit as if you ought to be scoring a century in that sweater. I like those wide trousers, they remind me of when I was young.’

Roz took this to be a clue: he really must be feeling his age. And it was no wonder Araminta had finally gone off with her ghastly photographer boyfriend, she was only about twenty-four herself. It had been bad that, not least because it had affected her contract with Juliana. Nigel Dempster had imparted the news to a few close friends and several million of his readers in his column only that week.

‘About Face’, the story had been headed, and gone on to say that the ‘ravishing Araminta Jones, the model daughter of “Buster” Jones, food broker millionaire, who has embodied the high-class image of Juliana cosmetics for over three years now, and been a close friend and constant companion of its chairman and founder Julian Morell, has left these shores and the modelling business to seek a second fortune, as an actress in New York. Her friend, the photographer Barry Binns, East End Boy made very good, has a studio in New York, and the two are planning to take the new world by storm together. This is a double blow for Mr Morell, as Miss Jones has managed to find a let-out clause in her contract and has informed him that she is no longer available to work for him. She tells me, however, that there has been no ill feeling between herself and Mr Morell, and that he completely understands her ambitions to further her career.’

Well, Roz thought, it might not be an ideal subject, but it was something to start on. ‘I hear Araminta has left you,’ she said casually, pressing the button to lower her window.

‘She hasn’t left me, as you put it,’ said Julian irritably, ‘she was never with me. Roz, please don’t let that window down, it’s so dusty and fumy on this road, the air conditioning is perfectly adequate.’

‘Sorry. Of course I didn’t mean you personally, I meant the company. Does it matter terribly? I suppose it will hurt Juliana badly?’

‘Of course not. A company as large and important as Juliana hardly needs the attentions of some self-centred fool of a model girl to keep it afloat. Of course it’s annoying, we shall have to find someone else, but we can make something of that publicity-wise.’

‘Oh well, that’s all right then.’

‘Yes.’ He was silent for a while, then said suddenly, ‘How’s your mother?’

‘She’s fine.’

‘I hear she lost a great deal of money on that film she got involved in.’

‘Yes, well she was really silly to be taken in by that phony director guy. Anyone with half a brain could see he wasn’t ever going to get all those people like Dustin Hoffman and Ryan O’Neal, and then when he didn’t, and all the others pulled out, it was too late, and she’d handed over the mega bucks. She says she doesn’t care, it suits her to be poor. And she still thinks it will all come good.’

‘I really don’t think,’ said Julian drily, ‘your mother has the faintest idea what it means to be poor.’

‘No. Do you?’ She looked at him with the blank, slightly amused stare so like his own; he met it briefly and smiled for the first time that day. ‘Better than she does. But no, not really.’

‘Anyway, she’s frightfully happy with Jamil. She says this is the real, the great love of her life, and nothing else matters.’

‘Tell me about Jamil. Is he fun?’

‘Great fun. Terribly good-looking. I don’t usually like Arabs, but he is gorgeous, just like Omar Sharif.’

‘How nice. Does he do anything? Apart from gamble at Les A every night, and pay court to your mother?’

‘Not a lot. At the moment, he’s buying a house here and some horses, he’s the most marvellous horseman, we ride together in the park sometimes. He plans to settle here. His great ambition is to send his eldest son to Eton, and he wants to live like an English gentleman. Mummy’s teaching him.’

‘Well,’ said Julian, ‘that must be extremely nice for them both.’

‘Yes, and one day, he wants to have a pharmaceutical company. He says he wants to put his money to good use. And establish a foundation. You know, like Wellcome, or Glaxo or something. Or yours, I suppose,’ she added with an attempt at tact.

‘Yes, I do know.’

‘He’s very very interesting. I really like him. He says if he does get a company established, there will always be a job for me. I’d really like that. I find that field very interesting.’

‘Rosamund,’ said Julian, ‘you know perfectly well you will always have a job. More than a job. Let’s not talk about you working for anyone else, please. Morell’s will be yours one day, and it is clearly absurd for you to even consider any alternative, however short term.’

Roz opened her mouth to say she sometimes thought she would very much like to consider it, and then, in a rare moment of sensitivity, shut it again.

The weekend was not a success. Roz had no practice, no experience of intimacy, she had coped with the neglect of her parents over the years by distancing herself from them, and she was incapable now of reaching out and extending love and comfort to her father when he had so relentlessly deprived her of it. She tried again asking how he felt, even ventured an inquiry after Camilla, who had visited him in London recently, but he made it plain he did not want to discuss anything more personal than his new brood mare’s recent confinement, and her plans for the rest of the summer.

‘I’m going to Colorado with Rosie again, as you know, and I thought I’d spend a few days in Wiltshire, and then Susan suggested we went to one of the Greek islands for a week.’

‘Susan! Susan?’

‘Yes. Why are you so surprised? You know how much I like
her. She’s probably my favourite person in the whole world, apart maybe from Granny Letitia.’

‘Thank you, Roz. Look, if you don’t mind I’d like to get back to London this afternoon, not wait till Monday morning. I have things to do.’

‘Fine.’

They drove back even more silently than they had come. Roz, only dimly aware of how badly she had rubbed salt into almost every one of her father’s wounds, set off on a shopping spree to furnish her wardrobe for the general delights of Colorado and the more specific ones of Rosie’s stepbrother with great relief; Julian withdrew still further into his depression and ill temper and after two weeks of living like a recluse in his study at Hanover Terrace, firing a constant barrage of buckshot into the company in the form of memos, cancelling, changing, criticizing, rejecting, everything anyone was doing or had done, took himself off to his house on Eleuthera in the Bahamas to everyone’s intense relief.

When he returned, he had Camilla North with him, and soon after that several trunkloads of her possessions were moved into the house in Hanover Terrace, including a large container full of her linen sheets.

People reacted in very different ways to the fact that Camilla North was at last formally established as Julian’s mistress. Letitia was outraged; Susan was hurt almost beyond endurance; Eliza was amused; but the person most deeply affected, and indeed shocked, was Roz.

Roz had thought herself freed from Camilla, that the woman’s absence from her father’s life had been at his volition, the result of having finally come to his senses. She did not know that the boot had actually been on Camilla’s slender, aristocratic foot, and had been planted firmly behind her father when Araminta Jones entered his life; she had heard how Camilla had resigned from Morell’s, and set up her own very successful advertising agency in New York with some amazement (blinded as she was to Camilla’s talents by her strong dislike); and she had thought that that had been the end of a rather long and dreary chapter in her life. Now she had to face not only Camilla’s presence again, but the fact that her father clearly
wanted it, enjoyed it, and indeed could not manage without it. It changed the part of her life that she spent with her father greatly for the worse; it changed her perception of him in much the same way; and it reinforced her determination not to work for him after she had left Cambridge, as everyone insisted on assuming. Camilla was not, to be sure, working in the company any more, and was spending at least three quarters of her time in New York, although there was talk of her setting up a London branch of North Creative, but the fact remained that there she stood, a beautiful, self-satisfied, humourless testimony to Julian’s dependence on her, and Roz did not know how to bear the thought of it.

Camilla on the other hand was perfectly happy. For the first time in her life she had a cause, she was genuinely needed, and she was finding it intensely rewarding.

The cause was Julian’s impotence.

God alone knew (and Julian) what it had cost him to tell her about it. Camilla found the thought quite overwhelming; and unemotional as she was, she had felt tears pricking at the back of her eyes as she sat, hands in her lap, listening carefully to him as they sat on the veranda of the house in Turtle Cove, Eleuthera.

He had phoned her at her parents’ house in Philadephia, where she had been staying for a week, avoiding the intense heat of New York, and first asked her, then begged her to come down and stay for a few days.

‘I need you, Camilla,’ he had said, and she could hear the genuine emotion in his voice (so rarely there). ‘I need you very badly. Please, please come.’

And so she had flown down to Nassau, and he had met her there in the small plane he kept on Eleuthera, and taken her to Turtle Cove and shown her very formally into the guest bedroom, and said he would be waiting for her on the veranda with some extremely good and cold champagne when she was ready; she emerged quite quickly, looking ravishing, in a jade green silk pyjama suit from Valentino, her red hair drifting on her shoulders, and after she had had half a glass of the champagne, and he had had about three, he began to talk to her about his problem.