Old Sins (25 page)

But it was actually quite all right. She need not have worried: on either count as it turned out. Julian simply could not afford to lose her, as a considerable force within the company – and at that particular point in time he did want to have any long-term commitment. His marriage was still alive, and if not well, certainly not sick enough to abandon, and he most emphatically did not want to subject himself to the scandal and trauma of a divorce. He had made these things charmingly and patently clear to her over lunch on the following Monday; he had told her she was the loveliest thing that had happened to him since he had arrived in America, that if she had enjoyed Friday’s encounter even half as much as he had, then she was a very lucky girl, and he hoped that she would invite him to dinner again very soon; and then, lest she might find this ever so slightly dismissive, he had told her that he would like her to work closely with the advertising agency in future, as he wanted her input and visual judgement in that area.

‘This has nothing whatever to do,’ he added, raising his glass to her and smiling, ‘with the great pleasure you were able to give me the other evening. It is because I think, I know, that you
are an extremely talented person, and I want your expertise wherever it is needed. Also I happen to consider that your talents don’t stop at what is known as the creative area. You have a commercial sense as well.’

Camilla’s heart had thudded, her pulses had raced, far more pleasingly, more passionately than they had when she had been in bed with him. This, she thought, meeting his eyes with an expression of absolute pleasure and confidence, was what was really important to her. Everything else came an extremely bad second.

Nevertheless, over the next few weeks she and Julian were together almost all the time – day and night.

She felt absolutely no guilt whatsoever about Eliza: her attitude towards her was completely dispassionate. She could clearly see that Julian did not love her and she felt besides that Eliza did quite well enough out of her marriage as it was, without demanding or even requiring fidelity from her husband. She studied her with great interest when Eliza finally came to New York, rather as a biologist might a rare, hitherto undiscovered species; she noted her great beauty, her unmistakable chic, her rather naive if sparkly manner; she probed her conversational skills, she analysed her cultural and intellectual abilities, she examined her grasp of the affairs of Julian’s company and found her wanting on almost every count. It seemed quite incomprehensible to her that a woman in Eliza’s position should not be totally au fait with every possible aspect of her husband’s world: not only in the broader matters, in the workings of the cosmetic and retail industry, but also in the minutiae of the people he employed and their role within the company. That seemed to Camilla to be the very least a wife should offer her husband; if she did not, then she deserved absolutely everything she got.

It did not occur to her that Julian saw to it quite deliberately that Eliza was able to offer almost nothing.

Eliza, left alone in London, was not only lonely; more miserably, more significantly indeed, she felt isolated, shut out; she tried very hard at first to persuade Julian to tell her about his project in New York, she asked him endless questions, even tried to make suggestions of her own about what the store
might be like, what it might sell, what she would like herself to find in such a place. But Julian would not be drawn, answering her questions as briefly as possible, ignoring her suggestions, and totally rejecting any requests she made to accompany him on one of the many trips. He would phone her quite often when he was there, asking how she and how Roz were, he would send her funny cards, he would have flowers delivered, and he would return to her with his arms full of presents, impatiently ardent, with a string of funny stories and amusing gossip; but of what he had really been doing, actually achieving, she learnt almost nothing. In the end, inevitably, she came to reject the presents, to resent the gossip, and to find the ardour unwelcome.

‘Eliza,’ said Julian in an attempt at lightness as she turned away from him for the third night in a row, ‘forgive me if I’m wrong, but you seem to find me marginally less attractive than you did a short while ago.’

‘Yes,’ she said flatly, ‘yes I do. I’m surprised you have taken so long to be aware of it.’

‘Do I have to look to myself for the reason? Am I growing fat? Boring? Perhaps if you would be kind enough to enlighten me I might be able to do something about it.’

‘No, Julian,’ said Eliza, turning over on to her back and looking at him, her green eyes hard and oddly blank, ‘you’re not in the least fat, and I don’t suppose you’re boring. Although it would be a little hard for me to tell.’

‘I don’t quite know what you mean.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ she said. ‘Don’t be so dense. I see so little of you, and talk to you so seldom, how can I possibly know what you’re like any more?’

‘That’s not fair. You know how busy I am. And I took you out to dinner this evening, and devoted myself very thoroughly to your interests. Which were, I have to say, a little less than riveting. A nursery school for Rosamund, I seem to recall, and the advisability of refurnishing Marriotts throughout. Oh, and of course your latest purchases from M. St Laurent.’

‘Shut up, shut up!’ cried Eliza, sitting up, her eyes stinging with sudden tears. ‘How can you possibly expect me to have anything to say to you that you might find interesting when I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re doing from one week’s end to the next?’

‘Other wives seem to manage. To occupy themselves with something more than total trivia.’

‘Julian,’ said Eliza, controlling her voice with an effort, ‘I don’t want to have to occupy myself, as you put it, with anything. I want to be busy with you. With our marriage. I want to be involved.’

‘Eliza, we’ve been through this before. I have not the slightest desire to have you mixed up with my company. I want a wife, not a business partner.’

‘And how can I be a wife when I don’t even know what kind of areas your business is extending into? I don’t want to work for your lousy company, but I would like at least to be able to answer people when they ask me what you’re doing in New York, and whether the cosmetics are doing as well there as they are in London. I’ve never even been to New York, I don’t know what it looks like, and I’m expected to be able to comment on the comparative merits of Bergdorf’s and Saks. How can I begin to understand what might be worrying you, interesting you, exciting you, when you answer me in monosyllables and treat me as if I was some kind of half-witted child? You diminish me, Julian, as a person, and then you expect me to be wholly responsive to you in bed. Well, I can’t be. Don’t ask me any more.’

There was a silence for a moment. Then Julian got up and walked over to the door.

‘I think I’ll sleep in my dressing room,’ he said, ‘I won’t say if you don’t mind, because clearly you wouldn’t.’

‘Don’t you think?’ said Eliza sitting up in bed, tears streaming down her face now, ‘don’t you think there is at least something in what I say?’

‘No,’ he said very finally. ‘No, I don’t. I married you because I thought you could offer the kind of undemanding support and understanding I desperately need. I was obviously wrong.’

‘You were,’ said Eliza, a cold calm descending on her, ‘and I wish to God you had looked for it in somebody else.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘on that note I will say good night.’

She thought with some satisfaction that for the first time she had managed to hurt him, however slightly.

He never apologized or referred to the conversation again. But he came in two days later with an envelope which he tossed
down on to the dinner table, and looked at her with a slightly odd expression in his dark eyes.

‘I wondered if you might like to come to New York with me next time I go. I’m thinking of getting an apartment there and it would be very nice if you could help me with it. There are a few photographs in there of the site for the store. I thought it would amuse you to see them.’

Eliza looked at him, unsmiling, slightly wary. ‘I’d like that very much. Thank you.’

‘Well,’ he said with a sigh, ‘I hope you’re not disappointed.’

She wasn’t. She thought New York was wonderful. She loved the wide, windy streets (it was autumn), the sculptured beauty of the skyline, the pace of life, the glamour, the shops. Most of all the shops. They drove up Fifth Avenue the first evening past Lord and Taylor’s, Saks, Tiffanys, Henri Bendel, Cartier, Bonwit’s, and at every one she grew more excited, twisting and turning in her seat like a small child at a party. Then she caught a glimpse of Julian’s face, oddly severe, almost pained, and remembered she was supposed to be presenting him with a more sophisticated, intelligent front.

‘I’m sorry, Julian. I’ll calm down tomorrow. But it’s like seeing a fairy tale come true, and I know that’s a cliché, so don’t tell me, having heard of all these places for so long and suddenly they’re really there. And this is where your store is to be?’

‘Yes,’ he said, motioning the driver to pull in, pointing out to her the corner where the building stood. ‘Look, there, see, that place there, just past Gucci.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘yes, I do, and it’s lovely. But isn’t it –’

‘Isn’t it what?’ he said, and there was ice in his voice.

‘Well, a bit small.’

‘Eliza, that was the whole idea. That it should be small. Not large and lavish and predictable. I thought you realized that, at least.’

‘No,’ she said, her voice small, her excitement gone. ‘No, I didn’t, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.’

In the morning, his mood still distant, he took her round the building briefly, then said he had a series of meetings and would see her for cocktails.

‘Not lunch?’

‘No, Eliza, not lunch. I have to take three buyers out.’

‘I could come too.’

‘No, you’d be a bored.’

‘Julian, I promise you I wouldn’t be bored.’

‘Eliza, I’m sorry, I just don’t think it’s a very good idea. You have plenty to do. You can start looking at all those apartments. Make a shortlist, and then I’ll look at them.’

‘Look on my own?’

‘Yes.’

She sighed. ‘All right.’

She worked hard that day; she looked at seven apartments, drew up a comprehensive list, with an outline of the advantages and drawbacks of each one, and presented him with it at dinner.

‘There you are, Julian. I think the one on 57th is the best. Lovely and near your building – what are you going to call it, by the way?’

‘What do you mean? Juliana of course.’

‘But it’s more than Juliana. I think it should have a name of its own. That will give it an identity.’

‘Eliza,’ said Julian with a sigh, ‘Juliana has plenty of identity.’

‘Yes, but it’s a cosmetic. The store will have much more to offer than that.’

‘And what sort of name do you think it should have?’

He spoke as if to a child, humouring her, not as if he wanted to hear the answer.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Something beautiful. Something classical maybe. Something out of mythology perhaps.’

‘My darling, I don’t think you know what you are talking about. It really would be much better if you confined your efforts to finding our apartment. But thank you for the thought.’

Even when he had actually called the store Circe, he failed to give her any credit for it whatsoever.

The store finally opened in the spring of 1959 with a party that was lavish even by New York standards. It was devastatingly beautiful throughout, a shrine to luxury and vanity; it was also an extraordinary tribute to Julian Morell’s taste, commercial instinct and crushing determination to get what he wanted.

The party he threw to open it was more like a theatrical production than a commercial launch. Lucky (as he so often was) with the weather, it was a tender spring evening, and still just light when the huge white doors of Circe were opened to New York for the very first time. A wide awning stretched from the door right across the sidewalk; looking up through it, all that could be seen from the street were banks of white lilies and what appeared to be a million dancing candles. A string quartet played at the top of the beautiful double curving staircase, a jazz trio on the second floor, amidst a tumble of furs, and in the main room on the ground floor where the huge cases of jewellery, all the colours of some exotic darkened rainbow, shimmered against the candlelight, a pianist in white tails sat at a white grand piano and played the music of Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin.

Champagne flowed ceaselessly, recklessly, into white glass flutes; the cocktail waiter from the Savoy had been flown in from London for the occasion and the canapés were entirely black and red caviare, smoked salmon, Mediterranean prawns, monster strawberries dipped in chocolate.

‘Well, it was certainly worth coming for these, anyway,’ remarked Susan Johns to Letitia through a mouthful of several of them. ‘What a party, Letitia. Is New York always like this?’

‘A bit,’ said Letitia, who was enjoying herself more than she could remember for years, and had already received several invitations to supper after the party from attractive smooth-faced, grey-haired suntanned almost indistinguishable gentlemen. ‘I must say, Susan, I was a little opposed to this store, but I do think I was probably wrong. Julian has done something quite remarkable. I think it will be a great success.’

‘Let’s hope,’ said Susan. ‘It’s cost enough. And in terms of Julian’s time as much as money. Letitia, is that perfectly beautiful woman over there, talking to the pianist, Camilla North? The designer lady? The one we’ve heard just a bit too much about lately?’

Letitia looked over at the piano and at the undeniably beautiful Miss North, tall and very slender, with a mass of wild red hair and large brown eyes, dressed in a long slither of black satin that clung somewhat tenuously to her surprisingly full bosom.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, that’s Camilla. And she is beautiful, I agree. Very clever too, I believe. But if you’re thinking what I think you might be thinking, you’re wrong. No sense of humour whatsoever and a dreadful tendency to bang on in that heavy American way. She is absolutely not Julian’s type.’