Old Sins (135 page)

‘I kept thinking about you.’

‘Miles, I – I don’t think we should carry on with this relationship. Not at all.’

‘OK.’ He shrugged, smiling at her. ‘If that’s what you want.’

‘Well it’s – it’s not what I want. But I just feel things are complicated enough. And there’s Candy.’

‘Roz, I told you last night, she’s three thousand miles away.’

Roz felt a mild irritation. ‘I know she is now. But she won’t always be. I don’t want to play any more of those games. And somehow this doesn’t seem quite the time for this kind of thing. And anyway, I don’t like our relationship being reduced to a one-night stand.’

‘Do we have a relationship?’

She felt foolish, disadvantaged.

‘No, of course not. You misunderstood me.’

‘Pity.’ He moved over, stood behind her, kissed her neck. ‘I was hoping we did.’

‘Miles, please don’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘I just told you why not.’

‘Oh Roz,’ he said, ‘you are much too serious. And besides . . .’ He was still behind her, he slipped his hands under her robe, moved them up to her breasts, started gently, tenderly massaging her nipples. Roz felt a lick of fire shoot down, in a white hot line, to her abdomen, her vagina; she squirmed, pressing her buttocks back against him. They were almost the same height; she felt his penis hard, pressing against her; she felt dizzy, odd. She fought to retain some self-control.

‘Besides what?’

‘You are just – well, sensational. I can’t think about anything else.’ His hands moved down, pressing, massaging her stomach, his fingers began to probe her pubic mound, seeking out, reaching into her, finding her clitoris. She put her head back against him and moaned.

‘Miles, please.’

‘Please what?’

‘You know what.’ She turned round, took his head in her hands, kissed him savagely, pulled off her robe. He entered her as she stood there, his hands on her buttocks, holding her to him, pushing, urging her into an almost instant orgasm. Roz cried out; the wild, strange cry oddly at variance with the sober quiet of the room.

Minutes later, she was lying on the floor, white faced, blazing eyed, holding out her arms; Miles knelt down, looking at her tenderly.

‘Tell you what,’ he said almost conversationally, as he sank into her again, ‘at least now it’s been a two-night stand.’

Pete Praeger met Phaedria at Heathrow; he said nothing, merely took her hand, as if he was an old friend, and led her to the car.

‘Do we – do we know any more?’

‘No more. She’s just about the same. Come on, we have to get you there.’

He drove so fast down to Eastbourne that Phaedria would, under normal circumstances, have been frightened; as it was, watching the speedometer needle on the Mercedes climb steadily from 90 to 100 to no, 115, she felt a strange relief. Neither of them spoke, just stared ahead.

As they reached the outskirts of Eastbourne he said, ‘This is bad, look at the traffic.’

‘Oh, Pete, just do what you can.’

‘I will.’ He put his foot down again, weaving in and out of the lanes, hooting; suddenly, inevitably, they heard the wailing of a police siren The police waved to Pete to move over; fuming, swearing, he got out.

‘Morning, sir. Do you know what speed you were doing then, in a built up area?’

‘Yes, officer. I do.’

‘Could I see your licence please, sir.’

Phaedria got out. She looked terrible, her face white, her eyes dark and shadowed, swollen with all the tears she had shed, her clothes crumpled.

‘Officer, please. Please let us go. I can explain.’

He looked at her, initially hostile, then sympathy dawning. ‘What is it?’

Phaedria took a deep breath. ‘My baby is very ill. In intensive care. I just flew in from the States. I have to get there. Mr Praeger was only doing what I asked.’

The policeman looked at her. He frowned, then he opened the door of the police car, his face impassive. ‘Get in, madam. You too, sir, if you’d be so kind.’

‘But I –’

‘Madam, please don’t waste time. You were only doing ninety. We can do a hundred and ten with the siren on.’

They were waiting for her when the police car drew up outside the hospital; they had radioed that they were coming. Eliza and Nanny Hudson, standing there. Phaedria fell out of the car. ‘Eliza, Nanny, what is it, what’s happened?’

Eliza looked at her, silent for a moment only, but to Phaedria it seemed like an hour, a week. Then she smiled. ‘Thank God you’re here. She’s all right. Phaedria, she’s going to be all right now, they think, but she needs you, she needs you so much. This is Mr Dugdale, he’s been so marvellous. Come on.’ And she took Phaedria’s hand, and pulled her, after Mr Dugdale, down the corridors, down the stairs and into a side ward, where Julia lay.

She was half asleep, she was breathing heavily, in her oxygen hood, restless, whimpering from time to time; as her mother came in she looked at her, and opened her large dark eyes very wide, and almost visibly relaxed, and smiled, a quiet, peaceful smile.

‘Oh, Julia,’ said Phaedria. ‘Oh, Julia.’

‘She’ll be all right now,’ said Mr Dugdale.

Letitia, beaming radiantly, went to find Roz, who was lying rather uncharacteristically on her bed.

‘Lovely, lovely news. Julia is going to be all right. She’s much better. She has to stay in hospital for a few days, but she’s all right. Phaedria’s safely back with her. Poor girl, that must have been a terrible twenty-four hours.’

‘I’m glad,’ said Roz, ‘really glad. It’s been a nightmare. I’m sorry I behaved so badly, Granny Letitia, I was distraught.’

‘That’s all right, darling. I understood. Come and have some lunch. Where’s Miles?’

‘Oh, talking to Peveril, I think. They get on really well. It’s so funny. Miles is planning to take him to Malibu.’

‘Well, I don’t think he’ll be able to do that unless he promises to take your mother as well. So are you feeling better, darling?’

‘Oh,’ said Roz, just a little too casually. ‘Much much better, thank you Letitia.’

Peveril was beaming at the table. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘good news at last, eh? I’ve hardly slept myself for two nights.’

‘Nor me,’ said Letitia, ‘I had to take a sleeping pill.’

‘Oh, you should never do that,’ said Peveril, relieved to have the conversation back on a normal plane, turned away from sickness and drama. ‘Dreadful things, those pills. Shouldn’t take them. I never take anything. Sleep like a baby, as long as I have my nightcap.’

‘What’s your nightcap?’ asked Roz interestedly.

‘Two hot toddies. They have to be good and strong, mind, two pegs of whisky in each one.’

‘What’s a peg?’ said Miles.

‘A large double. Chota peg is a single. Old Indian measure. My father always used the term.’

‘So you have four double whiskies before you go to sleep every night?’ said Roz incredulously.

‘That’s right. In hot milk, of course. Mind you, it doesn’t always work unless I have a couple of brandies after dinner. But I never take a pill. If I really can’t sleep I go out on the battlements and play the bagpipes for half an hour or so. Never fails.’

‘I must try that,’ said Letitia. ‘I often can’t sleep. Mind you, I daresay then the other inhabitants of Chelsea might have trouble sleeping.’

She sparkled at Peveril and he winked back at her. They were very fond of one another.

‘Stop flirting with my grandmother, Peveril,’ said Roz, laughing. ‘We don’t want anything like that in the family.’

London, 1986

‘
SO WHAT HAVE
you decided to do, Miles?’

Candy looked at him over the heap of bags in their room at Claridge’s. She had come back tired and irritable after what had seemed like a very long week, trying to console her father for the loss of Dolly, trying to persuade him to go home to Chicago, trying to talk him round to the idea of her and Miles getting married straight away.

‘You’re too young, Candy, and that’s my last word. You don’t know your own mind.’

‘I don’t think knowing your mind necessarily comes with age, Daddy. Did Dolly know her own mind? Do you?’

‘Shut up, Candy, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘OK. OK.’ She was not afraid of her father exactly, but she knew she couldn’t budge him, once he had made up his mind.

She tried another tack. ‘Miles is a really good prospect, Daddy. He has a great deal of money now.’

‘Yes, and a great deal of money and no work to do spells one thing, and it ain’t happiness. Unless that young man gets himself some proper gainful employment, you are not going to marry him. Why can’t he work in that company over there? It’s a wonderful opportunity. There has to be something wrong with a man who has so little ambition.’

Candy sighed. She would have died rather than admit it, but she was beginning to agree with him.

Miles looked at her thoughtfully. Easygoing as he was, he was beginning to find her nagging irritating. He was actually beginning to find her rather irritating altogether. She seemed shallow suddenly, uninteresting, lacking in emotion and depth. He knew it was unfair of him to think that way, that it was not Candy but he who had changed, but he couldn’t help it. On the other hand something had to be settled; they couldn’t live at Claridge’s for ever; it wasn’t exactly cheap.

Roz’s intelligent, quirkily lateral mind kept intruding into his thoughts over Candy’s prattle, her cool amused green eyes
looked at him, when he was actually meeting Candy’s Bambi-like blue ones, her greedy outrageous body even invaded the bed as he lay caressing Candy’s pert little breasts, bringing her to swift, easy orgasm. In the weeks she had been away he and Roz had been to bed together twice more, once in Scotland, once in London, drawn irresistibly, inevitably towards one another by the promise of an intense powerful pleasure neither of them had ever known before. Each time they had agreed it should not happen again, each time had come laughingly together, saying why not, just once more, what harm did it do, it had to be good for them, it was just fun, just pleasure, just the satisfaction of two exceptionally hearty appetites, and each time, as they parted again, they knew, without saying a word to one another, that it was rather more than that.

However, something had to be resolved, if not for Candy’s sake, his own. And besides there was the question of money. The extremely generous loans Henry was arranging for him (on Roz and Phaedria’s instructions) could not go on for ever. He was getting through a monumental amount of money, by any standards. And he was actually growing weary of living at Claridge’s and shopping; he didn’t exactly want to work but he didn’t want to be idle in London, or indeed anywhere elsein the world, except California.

But whatever he did or did not decide, he was not going to be pushed into it by anybody, least of all Candy. If there was one thing that turned Miles into an immovable object, it was the sense that there was an irresistible force coming at him, hard, trying to carry him along with it. As Hugo Dashwood had discovered to his cost, some years earlier.

Dark blue eyes met light with an expression of rare hostility.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I haven’t. Stop bugging me, will you? Just leave me alone.’

‘Miles,’ said Roz, sinking on to the chaise longue in the window of the Cheyne Walk drawing room, ‘are you any nearer making a decision?’

‘Nope,’ he said shortly. ‘Can I take a glass of wine?’

‘Of course. Give me one, will you?’

He poured two glasses from the chilled bottle and carried one over to her, careful not to touch her. The atmosphere
between them now was so febrile that he knew if he so much as brushed her fingers with his they would be in bed in minutes.

‘Thank you. Don’t look so cross. It doesn’t suit you. That’s my prerogative.’

‘Sorry. This is all getting to me. And I’m homesick.’

‘Of course you are.’

‘I still kind of favour the consortium. It would let me off the hook. But I worry about the long-term effect on you. And Phaedria.’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Roz darkly, ‘I can take care of myself. And certainly don’t worry about Phaedria. We have every evidence she can do the same.’

‘Yeah, I guess so. It seems kind of wrong selling out of the family.’

‘I think it’s probably the best possible thing. Fresh blood and all that. The company is the nearest thing to incest this family will ever know.’

‘Maybe.’

‘What about working here?’

‘Well,’ he said carefully, ‘I don’t really know. I’ve kind of grown warm towards the idea. It might be fun, just for a bit. And it would please Candy. But – well, she’s pushing me real hard and that makes me cross. And besides –’ He looked at her.

‘Yes?’

‘Well, I don’t know if I could handle working with you all the time.’

‘I think it would be fun,’ said Roz.

‘It would, I mean I’d like it in that way. But – well, I think things might get out of hand pretty quickly.’

‘You mean we’d be screwing all the time?’ Her expression was amused, confident.

‘We’d be wanting to, I guess. And if I was married to Candy –’ his voice trailed off.

‘That would never do.’ She stood up, holding out her hand. ‘Right now you’re not working for the company. And you’re not married to Candy. This could be our very last chance. Shall we, Miles? For old times’ sake?’

He took the hand, kissed the back of it, turned it over, kissed the palm. Then he looked up at her and smiled.

‘Yeah, OK. Just for old times’ sake.’

‘Miles,’ said Phaedria, ‘do you have any idea yet what you want to do?’

He had come to her office to have the promised lunch; he sat watching her while she sorted the files and papers on her desk into some sort of order, flicked idly through telephone messages, signed the letters Sarah had left for her. He thought how sad she looked, how thin and drawn.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t have an idea. You’re still keen on this trust fund thing?’

‘Yes. Even more now.’

She spoke without thinking.

‘Why now?’

She flushed. ‘Oh – nothing.’

‘Did New York go wrong?’

He sounded so sympathetic, so genuinely concerned, that as always she couldn’t be cross.