Old Sins (60 page)

Roz had been responsible for his invitation to Harvard; she had suggested to one of her tutors that he would be an interesting person as a guest lecturer (having heard her father and Freddy Branksome both mention him) and had consequently also been assigned the task of meeting him in the shabby splendour of
Boston station, escorting him back to the college, and attending the luncheon (along with several other carefully selected students) in his honour. She had dressed for the occasion with great care; she was wearing a white gaberdine jacket and jodhpurs from Montana, with very pale beige flat-heeled suede boots; her hair was tied back on her neck with a silk scarf, she carried a large, beige canvas bag from Ralph Lauren. She looked expensive, classy, stylish. Michael Browning’s first words made her feel less so. ‘You wouldn’t, I suppose –’ he said, ‘be the chauffeur from Harvard?’ He had got off the train and stood looking around him in his rather hopeless way; at first she couldn’t believe anyone so rumpled looking, so unimpressive, could possibly be the undisputed king of the cut-price foodmarket, self-made and self-hyped, she had heard and read so much about. However, there was nobody else leaving the New York train looking any more impressive, or rather nobody who was clearly looking for someone and waiting to be looked after, so she stepped forward and said, ‘Yes, I’m the chauffeur. Mr Browning?’ and he had looked at her very solemnly and said, ‘Miss Morell?’ and she had felt a strange lurch somewhere in the depths of herself and had led him to her car and driven him back to the college.

She knew precisely when she had fallen in love with Michael Browning, and it had not been the first time he had kissed her, nor when he had told her he wanted to go to bed with her more than he could ever remember wanting to go to bed with anyone; not even when he had told her she had a mind that was better and quicker than most of the men he most respected, or that if she should ever need a job, he would give her one at ten grand a year more than anyone else could offer. It wasn’t even when he said that he hoped his small daughter would grow up into just such a woman as she was; it was when he said, ‘Hey, are you Julian Morell’s daughter?’ and she had said, ‘Yes, I am as a matter of fact,’ and he had looked at her consideringly and very seriously, and said, ‘That has to be quite an obstacle race.’

Roz had felt at that moment that after spending much of her life trying to explain things to people who spoke another language she had found herself in a country that spoke her own; who understood not just what she was saying, but why she
was saying it; and she had actually stopped the car and looked at Michael Browning very seriously in a kind of pleased disbelief.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘did we run out of gas or something?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘no, I’m sorry, it was just what you said.’

‘About your father?’ he said, and smiled at her again. ‘Did I hit the button?’

‘Very hard,’ said Roz briefly, starting the car again.

‘You’re a terrible driver,’ he said after they had gone a few more miles in silence. ‘You drive like a New York cab driver.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.’

‘Well, you were.’

‘I know. It happens all the time.’

‘Can’t you control it?’ asked Roz, smiling in spite of her irritation.

‘It seems not. I’ve been in analysis and had deep hypnosis and electric shock treatment and it just goes right on.’

‘How unfortunate for you.’

‘I get by.’

‘So I understand.’

‘I do find the English accent terribly sexy,’ he said suddenly.

‘Really?’

‘Yes, I really do. It’s so kind of lazy.’

‘And do you find laziness sexy as well?’

‘Oh absolutely. One hundred and one per cent sexy. I have to tell you, you could make me feel very lazy,’ he added as an afterthought.

Roz felt confused, disoriented. The conversation seemed to be meandering down a series of wrong turnings, not at all the dynamic business-like route she had imagined.

‘Do you like giving lectures?’ she asked in an attempt to haul him back on to the main highway.

‘I don’t know. I never gave one before.’

‘Oh.’

‘It could be interesting. I’ll tell you afterwards. Do I get to see you afterwards?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose so. Briefly.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘briefly will be better than nothing.’

The lecture, unrehearsed, unstructured, often funny, told the
students more about food retailing than they had ever imagined they might need to know; afterwards he sought Roz out at the buffet lunch, gave her his card and told her to phone him next time she was in New York. Roz said she never went to New York.

Three days later she got a call from him.

‘This is Michael Browning here. I thought if you were never going to come to New York, I would have to come to Harvard.’

‘Why?’ said Roz foolishly.

‘Oh, just to take another look at you. Make sure I’d got it right.’

‘Got what right?’

‘Well,’ he said, and there was a heavy sigh down the phone, ‘it’s those legs of yours, really. They’re coming between me and my sleep. Were you born with them that long, like a racehorse, or did they just go on growing, like Topsy?’

‘I think,’ said Roz carefully, feeling oddly dizzy and happier than she could ever remember, ‘they were quite short when I was born.’

‘Well I would really like to take another look at them. And possibly the rest of you as well. Do you ever eat dinner?’

‘Just occasionally,’ she said.

When he was first getting to know her, Michael Browning had been unable to believe in the spoiltness, the truculence, the outrageous self-obsession of Roz.

He looked at her, and he wanted her, but he was not quite sure that he could take her on. Then he got to know her a little more, learnt of her wretched childhood, her totally unsatisfactory parents, the painstaking indulgence of her every whim that had gone on through fifteen years of recompense, and he had known that he could.

He treated her rough: at first. He told her she had no right, no one had any right to be so angry, so hostile, so aggressive, so self-pitying. He told her of girls he had grown up with, who had been raped by their mothers’ boyfriends, their own fathers before they had reached puberty; who had had to go on the streets every night to fill their bellies; who had had their first unanaesthetized abortions at twelve, their fifth or sixth at fifteen, and dared her to go on being sorry for herself.

Then, having broken down some of her defences, he set to work on the rest. Roz was sexually, as well as emotionally, a mess. The fearsome attentions of the Vicomte du Chene apart, her history was unhappy.

By the time Michael Browning came into her life and her bed, she had a great need for skill and kindness as well as passion. He provided them; he coaxed her and cosseted her, teased her and tormented her, took her and fulfilled her, night after glorious night. He taught her to know what she wanted and ask for it; he taught her to please him, and to please herself; he taught her to think about sex and to give it her attention, just as she did to food and clothes and work. He turned her into a sexual being aware of her own sensuality and what she could do with it, possessed of great pleasures and new powers. Despite strong desires and instincts of her own, she was, she felt, his creation in bed; she sometimes wondered uneasily if he wished her to become his creation in other things.

He flew in to Paris from New York at least once a month for the weekend, amused and charmed, for the time being at least, by her bid for independence. They seldom left her apartment off the Tuileries those weekends; occasionally he would, in one of the grand gestures he so excelled in, take her off to the South of France, or to London, or to Venice, ‘So that I can know you – in the Biblical sense – in another place. It might make a difference.’

Roz supposed she was in love. She had very little knowledge of love, although she had seen the worst excesses committed in its name; but if being filled with thoughts and concern and desire and joy by someone was love, then she felt she was experiencing it now.

She consulted another of her visitors, her mother, an expert she could only suppose, on the subject, but Eliza was charmingly vague.

‘I can only tell you, darling, you’ll know if it is. Not if it’s not. Not the first time, anyway.’

‘Oh, Mummy, surely you can be more precise.’

‘No, Roz, I can’t. There’s nothing precise about love. That’s what’s so dangerous.’

Eliza was in Paris shopping. They were lunching in the Hotel
Maurice. Eliza was picking her way painstakingly through a tiny grilled sole; Roz was eating a steak tartare with rather more enjoyment. Eliza looked at her; she had never seen her so happy. Her skin, her eyes, even her hair glowed; she was wearing a smudgy pink cotton sweater with a pair of full linen trousers from Ralph Lauren; a long rope of pearls round her neck. Eliza, more formally dressed in a short black linen dress from Valentino, looked equally relaxed; newly married to her Peveril in that summer of 1980, she was surprisingly happy. Letitia had been right; the pain had eased.

It had been a quiet wedding in the private chapel at Garrylaig; Letitia had been there, and Roz, and Peveril’s sisters, and Eliza’s parents, and that had been all. Eliza had worn a ravishing ivory silk dress by Yves St Laurent, and had managed not to look ridiculous with wild roses in her silvery hair, and Peveril had worn his kilt and a look of such love that Letitia had felt her eyes fill with tears. Perhaps, this time, the child had done the right thing. She looked at Roz, who was also looking softer, tender, moved. Whoever this man Michael Browning was, he was undoubtedly doing her good.

Eliza was now intent on doing up the castle which had had no mistress for ten years. Quite what the Earl of Garrylaig thought of the new furnishings and pictures that were finding their way on to his austere walls was doubtful; he had already learnt not to criticize his new wife, and as prettying up the place, as he put it, seemed to keep her happy, he held his tongue as century-old brocades were packed away and replaced with silks and chintzes, and cavernous halls filled with seventeenth and eighteenth-century sofas, chaises longues and escritoires. He spent more time than ever in pursuit of the grouse and the deer; what did it matter, after all, he thought, as long as his bride was content and out of mischief. She looked after him beautifully, pandering to his every whim, and seemed to find him agreeable and attractive. Peveril was well content and found himself looking forward to bedtime more and more.

‘You’re a fine filly, my dear,’ he would say, slapping her fondly on her tiny backside, ‘very fine. I’m a lucky chap.’

Which indeed he was, and Eliza felt perfectly entitled to regular trips to London and Paris to spend his money and see her daughter, with whom she was suddenly finding it easier to
communicate. She was rigidly faithful to Peveril, besides being truly fond of him, and she was enjoying being a countess and her new situation in life. She had fun shocking her Scottish neighbours and importing her London friends into the castle, and she was perfectly happy inflicting her slightly excessive taste on its decor.

‘It sounds dreadful, Mummy,’ said Roz after listening to her for most of lunch, describing the colour scheme for the main guest room, ‘more suitable for Surrey than Scotland. Pink chintz in a castle; it’s like poodle-clipping the deer. Whatever does Peveril think?’

‘Oh, don’t be so superior,’ said Eliza, more than slightly miffed, for she greatly admired her own taste. ‘Peveril likes everything I do for him. And he’s thrilled with the way the castle’s turning out. It was so horribly uncomfortable and bleak before. Well, you saw it; don’t you honestly think so?’

‘No, I liked it,’ said Roz. ‘I like austerity. And I think it has great dignity. You’ll take all that away if you’re not careful. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. How is my new stepfather?’

‘It does matter,’ said Eliza, ‘it matters very much to me. I’m putting a great deal of time and effort into that place, Rosamund. I don’t want doubts cast upon it by my own daughter. Anyway, I don’t see much evidence of any interior design skills in your own home, my dear.’

This was true; Roz, who was at last demonstrating some taste, albeit modest, for clothes, cared nothing for her surroundings and would have agreed to spend the rest of her life in a twelve-foot-square attic, provided it was warm and clean, had she been asked.

‘Oh, don’t be so touchy, Mummy,’ she said, ‘I’m sure it’s quite all right really, and I know Peveril thinks you’re wonderful. Have another glass of wine and let’s talk about something interesting.’

‘Like what?’ said Eliza, a trifle sulky.

‘Me.’

‘And what is so interesting about you?’

‘Well, I need a bit of advice.’

‘What about?’

‘A man.’

‘Ah. This Browning person.’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t really like what I hear about him, darling. He has an appalling reputation with women. What exactly do you want advice about?’

‘Michael has asked me to marry him.’

‘Oh, good God, don’t,’ said Eliza. ‘Whatever you do, never marry his sort. It’s quite wrong.’

‘Mummy,’ said Roz, half amused, half intrigued, ‘what advice to be dishing out to your only daughter. Do I just continue as his mistress, then?’

‘If you want to, if you enjoy it. You’re so lucky these days, Roz, not having to have at least one ring on your wedding finger before you can go to bed with anyone. When I was a girl, virginity was still almost obligatory for a bride. Have fun, darling. But don’t marry Michael Browning.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you’ll be divorced again in two years. Six months into the marriage and he’ll have a new mistress. Believe me.’

Roz sighed. ‘He says he loves me.’

‘I’m sure he thinks he does.’

‘He says I’m different.’

‘We’re all different. Take no notice.’

‘He says he wants to settle down.’

‘No man of thirty-five wants to settle down.’

‘He says he wants more children. I’d like that.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Rosamund, I can’t believe you can be so naïve and stupid! Why on earth do you want to go having babies at the age of twenty-four? It’s absolutely ridiculous.’