Old Sins (69 page)

They came down from Oxford, Charles with a First, Phaedria with an Upper Second, and a great sense of sadness. They knew their time together was over; they would always be friends, and have a large place in one another’s hearts, but the real closeness, the sharing of a life, had to come to an end. It had had its roots in the fairy tale of Oxford life and now that the real thing had to begin, they had to part and start again.

Charles bought a flat in Fulham, fairly near Phaedria’s father’s house, and began work in the City; Phaedria settled back into her role of surrogate wife and, while she was wondering what she might enjoy, did a secretarial and a cookery course. Her father liked Charles, they all had dinner together once a week; and very often on Saturday they would ride together in Richmond Park, and when the next season began she would go and watch Charles play polo and spend the evening and occasionally the night with him. Her father never inquired into the relationship, or showed the slightest concern
about it; the real world never seemed to him nearly as interesting as his current literary passion (at this particular time a painstaking study and biography of Prosper Merimee, a nineteenth-century French novelist and literary hoaxer, guaranteed to sell, Phaedria imagined, all of fifty copies) and he was simply content to see his beloved daughter so happily settled with so charming a partner.

Phaedria occasionally wondered if she was ever going to find a man who would charm, delight and amuse her as much as Charles did, who would be as important to her, who would love her as much, and at the same time fulfil her needs in a slightly more conventional way, but it seemed a prospect so remote, so extremely unlikely, set so far into the future as to be not worth troubling about. For the time being, she had Charles, she loved him and she trusted him, and she enjoyed being with him, and that was quite enough.

She felt she was happy.

One night, just about a year after they had come down from Oxford, Charles took her out to dinner; he was tense and awkward with her, and for the first time since they had met there was no fun, no gossip, no chat, no intimacy in any of it. After they had finished their meal Charles ordered brandies, sat back in his chair, looked at Phaedria very straight and said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘I can see that. What is it? You seem like a man with a heavy burden.’

‘I am.’

‘Well, lay it down on me, for goodness’ sake. There isn’t much you could tell me that would shock me.’

‘This will.’

‘Oh, Charles, come on. What? What could it possibly be?’

‘You’ll hate it,’ said Charles miserably, draining his glass and signalling to the waiter for another.

‘I doubt it.’

‘You will.’

‘OK, then I’ll hate it. I’m hating this more.’

‘I’m getting married.’

Phaedria gasped. She couldn’t help it. The shock was physical and frightful. She closed her eyes, swallowed, and
then, with an enormous effort, opened them again. She felt sick, cold, frightened. She drained her glass and rested her head on her hands for a moment. Then she looked at him.

‘You can’t.’

‘I can. I’m going to.’

‘Why?’

‘So many reasons. The usual ones. Cowardice. Ambition. Loneliness.’

‘You could marry me in that case.’

‘No, Phaedria, I couldn’t,’ said Charles, taking her hand. ‘I love you. I couldn’t inflict such a thing on you.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ said Phaedria, snatching her hand back again, her body rigid and tense, anger suddenly surfacing, ‘stop talking in such riddles. I can’t stand it. What’s all this about?’

Charles sat with his head bent, staring into his brandy, and told her. His father, who still terrified him, and still provided most of his income, had heard a few rumours. Dempster had run a couple of stories about the surprisingly artistic Mr Fraser-Smith, and his lack of a regular girlfriend; someone had seen him coming out of one of the gay clubs; a friend of his father’s had observed him dining late one night with a man who was most assuredly not one of Charles’ usual circle. Old Mr Fraser-Smith had confronted Charles, questioned him closely and threatened him with public disgrace and disinheritance if he wasn’t married in six months.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Charles, call his bluff,’ said Phaedria. ‘This is the eighties. What does it matter?’

‘I’ve told you how much it matters,’ said Charles. ‘A lot. I’m sorry, Phaedria. I’m ambitious. I’m extravagant. I need a lot of money. And like I said, I’m often lonely.’

‘What a shame,’ said Phaedria bitterly. ‘What a lousy, bloody shame.’

‘Phaedria, don’t. Don’t be angry.’

‘For God’s sake, Charles, I am angry. I’m more angry than I ever thought possible. We were friends, Charles, we were more than friends, we were everything. We loved each other. I trusted you. I trusted you with everything. I would never have betrayed you. Not for anything. And then you throw this lump of garbage at me, and tell me not to be angry. Jesus Christ. Who’s the lucky girl?’

‘You don’t know her.’

‘Well, that’s a good thing. If I did I just might go and tell her the facts of life. She must be extremely simple.’

‘She is.’

‘Oh, Charles, how can you be so cretinous? What hope of happiness can there be in this? What are you doing to your life?’

‘Preserving it.’

‘You’re not, you know. You’re turning it rotten. It’ll putrefy and stink. If I wasn’t so sorry for you, so dreadfully, dreadfully sorry, I’d go and tell your father exactly what I think of him. And you. As it is I’ll just leave you alone. All of you. To a lousy, fearful, hopeless future.’

She stood up. ‘I’d like to tell you that I hope you’ll be happy. But I can’t. Because I know you won’t. Goodbye, Charles.’ She fumbled in her wallet and pulled out a twenty-pound note.

‘This is for my dinner. I’d hate you to waste any of your precious money on me.’

Charles caught her arm. ‘Phaedria, don’t. Please please don’t.’

‘Charles, there’s nothing else I can do. Now just let me go and get on with your own fucking life. And I do hope you manage to do a bit of that. Otherwise she’ll need to be very simple indeed. Now let go of me or I might tell everyone in the restaurant what we’re quarrelling about.’

She hadn’t seen him since; three weeks later Dempster announced a huge and delightful surprise for the friends of Charles Fraser-Smith who had seemed destined to remain a bachelor for life; he had become engaged to Serenity Favell Jones, who had spent the last two winters as a chalet girl in Gstaad, and was now beginning a new career in an art gallery in London.

The wedding was planned for September, and the blushing bride was hoping for ‘a huge family’.

At least Charles had the grace not to invite Phaedria to the wedding.

She did recover in time; she thought it impossible, but she did. For a long time she was so unhappy that she dreaded waking up every morning; she ached physically all over, she had no energy for anything, she put on weight, she had trouble sleeping.
Anything that reminded her of Charles, the sight of a blond head, an old E-Type parked by the road, a report of a polo match (the game was much in the news on account of the heir to the throne being so besotted with it), all threw her into such a pitch of misery and pain that she felt literally ill and faint. Most of her friends, assuming that her unhappiness was caused by having lost Charles to Serenity, tried to distract her with other men, throwing dinner parties and arranging trips to the theatre. It was dreadful. Her father, jerked into reality by her grief, abandoned Prosper Merimee for a few weeks, pronounced Charles a bounder and took her away for interminable weekends to divert her. In the end, she realized she had to get out of London.

She settled on Bristol because the parents of an Oxford friend lived there in a big house in Clifton, and let out bedsits to students. What she had seen of Bristol she liked; it was architecturally nice, very lively, and near enough to the country to be able to ride. She moved down with no clear idea of what she was going to do, but she had her typing and her shorthand skills, and she knew she could support herself. She did a series of temporary secretarial jobs, found some good stables, began to ride regularly and bought her own horse, slowly formed a new circle of friends and, without being fully aware of the process, began to heal. She knew she was better when she woke up one morning and began to think about a proper job. She had not got a good degree and had an expensive education in order to do typing and filing for a series of people who had less than half her brains.

Two things really interested her: one was fashion and the other was journalism. ‘And you know the rest,’ she said to Barry one night, over the hundredth or so half of bitter, ‘and here I am.’

‘And I’m delighted you are,’ he said fondly, patting her hand. He had a great deal of time for her. She wasted no time whatsoever on self-pity.

Phaedria gave quite a lot of thought to what she would wear to persuade Sir Julian to talk to her exclusively. She was clever with clothes; she had never had any money to spend on them but she had that eye for shape and length, a flash of colour, an
unexpected accessory, that ability to haul together three or four disparate items of clothing into something coherent and original, that is called style, and that is as ingrained and inborn an ability as it is to sing in tune or to spell correctly.

It was no use today, she thought, trying to dress up. Multimillionaires would not be impressed by Wallis copies of Jean Muir or even Jaeger. Better dress down and chic, she decided, spraying herself in Guerlain’s Jicky, the perfume she always wore, and pulling on a cream silk shirt and a pair of straight-legged Levis out of the wardrobe; she added soft brown leather calf-length boots, a wide brown belt and a soft leather jeacket she had got second hand in the flea market in Paris; and after a moment’s hesitation she put on an antique gold chain and locket Charles had given her when they left Oxford and which she had never worn since the night he told her he was getting married. She felt the occasion warranted not only the locket but the emotional effort required to put it on. She hauled back her cloud of wild dark hair and tied it with a brown and cream Hermes scarf her father had given her for her birthday; and then after a moment’s consideration set it free again; put on a very little brown eye shadow and a slither of lip gloss, and then slung a notebook, a pen and three pencils into the canvas and leather fishing bag she used for both handbag and briefcase.

‘Right,’ she said, smiling at herself pleasedly in the mirror. ‘Sir Julian, here I come.’

Julian was still, in the middle of the morning, feeling acutely irritable. Sitting in the new, lush plush office of Brian Branscombe, recently appointed M.D. of Morell Pharmaceuticals, he poured himself a third coffee and looked morosely across the Avon estuary. He wasn’t looking forward to the ceremony ahead. Not only was he host to a hundred or so local and not-so-local figures – the Mayor of Bristol, various bankers and businessmen who had been involved in the construction of the plant, and representatives of the pharmaceutical industry – but a strong contingency of journalists as well. He was very hostile to the press these days, hated even to see his picture in the papers and had done ever since the entry of Jamil Al-Shehra into his life, and he was particularly hostile to mass press conferences. On the other hand it was better than
trying to deal with the interminable queue of journalists individually. There had been some request for an exclusive interview today: the women’s page editor of some Bristol paper. He’d refused, as he had refused all such requests for some years; he’d met so many of the breed and hated it: middle-aged, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, life-beaten women with ginny voices and bags under their eyes. He was quite sure Phaedria Blenheim – what a ridiculous name, she must have made it up – would be exactly the same, and he had no intention of talking to her.

He settled down to the press release; his own PR outfit had prepared it and had done a fair job. Lots of finance stuff, lots of new technology, perhaps slightly too heavy implications of do-goodery (combating unemployment, intensive medical R & D), but it never really did any harm, and a gratifying shortage of anything remotely personal. Well, he would cut the tape, make a short speech, answer a maximum of six questions, attend the lunch briefly and be back in the helicopter by two o’clock, with an urgent meeting in London as his excuse. It didn’t sound too bad. He even managed a smiie as Branscombe came in, and stood up, buttoning his jacket and adjusting his tie.

‘OK, Brian, let’s go and get it over with. I do congratulate you on your work here. You’ve done a brilliant job getting it open on – sorry, ahead of – time. How did you do it?’

‘Thank Mrs Thatcher,’ said Branscombe with a grin, ‘she’s done more to motivate the work force than any person or thing since the industrial revolution. What with the fear of unemployment, and the reinvention of the work ethic, the managerial classes are laughing. Now do you feel you’re sufficiently briefed on this conference?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Julian with a sigh. ‘More than. And Brian, can I make it absolutely clear, no exclusives. Whatever the excuse, or rationale, I refuse to speak to a single member of the press on a one to one basis today. I don’t have the heart or the stomach. OK?’

‘OK, Sir Julian,’ said Branscombe. ‘Understood. It’s a pity from our point of view, but I do sympathize. I’ll see you’re clear by two-thirty.’

‘Two,’ said Julian, ‘sharp. OK. Now let’s go and get it over.’

He actually always gave a good performance on these
occasions. His charm and his capacity for lateral thought tended to cut neatly through the tedious razzmatazz of a mass conference. By the time he had unveiled the plaque (less pretentious than cutting tape, he thought to himself as he did it, but still bloody silly), made his short speech and answered five of the six journalists’ questions he had promised himself, he felt himself on a downhill run; had actually picked up the sheaf of papers in front of him on the table and smiled charmingly at the assembled company and the Mayor and local dignitaries sitting behind him on the conference platform, when a female voice rang out through the hall.