Old Sins (63 page)

‘My father told me it was an Anglicism,’ said C. J., smiling at her. She looked very good; she was wearing a white silk shirt and a pair of tan leather jodhpurs with high boots; over her shoulders, slung casually, was one of Edina Ronay’s fair-isle sweaters. She was leaning back in her chair, her long legs thrust out into the aisle between the tables, threatening to trip up the waiters as they hurtled past; almost for the first time he realized she was a very attractive woman in her strong, slightly forbidding way.

‘How are you feeling about your father now?’ asked Roz. ‘Awful still?’

‘Pretty awful.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s not so bad for me, I guess. It’s my mother who’s really doing the suffering. She’s been so brave. She loved him so much. They were just all the world to each other. I guess not many people grow up looking at a happy marriage. It’s a great privilege.’

‘One I wouldn’t know about,’ said Roz, sad rather than angry for once about her parents’ spectacular inability to form satisfactory relationships with anyone, let alone one another. ‘Is she all right? How does she cope?’

‘Not too badly. The girls are all in New York, and they see her a lot, and I go over quite often and call her all the time. But it’s no use at all, really. It’s Dad she wants. I’m just glad I was doing what he wanted me to do when he died.’

‘That’s a very unselfish sentiment. What a nice person you are, C. J.’

‘You sound surprised.’

‘Not about you. But I’m always surprised by niceness.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘I haven’t met an awful lot of it.’

‘Are you feeling better?’ asked C. J., anxious to change the direction of the conversation.

‘What do you mean?’ She looked suddenly defensive.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said C. J., confused and nervous again. ‘I guess I shouldn’t have asked. Here’s our food. Can we have some more champagne?’ he said suddenly to the waiter.

‘C. J.!’ said Roz. ‘What lavish behaviour.’

‘My father always said champagne was cheaper than psychiatry,’ said C. J., smiling at her, ‘and it worked a darn sight better. I think he’s right.’

‘Do you need psychiatry? Do I?’

‘I do,’ said C. J., looking suddenly serious. ‘Or something like it. I’d be in analysis if I was in America.’

‘C. J., what is it? No, you don’t have to tell me. I’m prying. I’m sorry.’

‘No, I’d like to,’ he said and to his total embarrassment and misery his eyes filled with tears. He blew his nose. ‘It would be a relief, in a way. Although you’re the last person I expected to tell.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, because you scare the shit out of me.’

‘So I see,’ said Roz, ‘and it’s deeply flattering. Now come on, C. J. Just forget I’m so terrifying and you don’t like me and all that and just spill the beans.’

C. J. looked wretchedly down at the table. ‘I – well, I think – that is, since Dad died – I – well, I don’t have any sexual feelings at all. It scares me, Roz, it really does. I don’t fancy anyone. I don’t even want to fancy anyone. I’m not suggesting I’m impotent or anything drastic like that, I just feel – dead.’

‘You mean sexually dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about emotionally?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well I mean, don’t you think about girls and falling in love with them and all that sort of thing?’

C. J. looked at her, surprised. He had not expected Roz to look at his problem with such sensitivity and imaginativeness. ‘Well, I worry about it. About not being in love. Not being able to be. But I haven’t met anyone for ages who made me even think positively about it.’

‘You mean you haven’t met anyone you like enough, or fancy enough?’

‘Both.’

‘How awful.’

‘It is.’

‘No dreams even?’

‘No dreams even,’ said C. J. sadly, and then suddenly he smiled. ‘What a strange girl you are, Roz.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you’re so tough and clever and ambitious –’

‘And terrifying.’

‘And terrifying. And yet you seem to understand the most surprising things.’

‘Like what?’

‘Well, loneliness. Isolation, dreams. I mean that really is strange. For you to talk about dreams.’

‘Oh, I’m a mass of contradictions,’ said Roz, just slightly bitter. ‘I’ve just been through the mill myself, C. J. That’s how I know what you’re talking about. I dream a lot. In fact I get all my sex in my sleep at the moment.’

‘Well,’ said C. J. ‘At least you’re getting some.’ And totally unaware of the comedy of the situation, he heaved a shuddering sigh.

Roz sat there and a whole range of emotions filled her. She felt sadness for C. J. and pity; she felt remote and sad for herself; she felt a strong urge to giggle; and strongest of all and quite unbidden, she felt a great lick of desire. And she knew precisely what she would have to do.

‘C. J.,’ she said almost briskly, ‘drink your coffee and take me home. I’m very very tired. Could you call a taxi, do you think, while you’re paying the bill? I’m going to the loo.’

C. J. looked after her miserably as she disappeared. He had made a fool of himself, but at least she was clearly not going to attempt to comfort him or offer any advice. He should be grateful for that. And frightening as she was, he did know she wasn’t a gossip. His misery was in safe hands. He paid the (enormous) bill, collected their coats and was standing in the doorway when Roz appeared, looking briskly cheerful, in a cloud of perfume. ‘Got a taxi?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

Inside the flat, which surprised him by its lack of style, its blanket decor of beige and white, its dull, born-again Conran furniture, its dearth of pictures and books, Roz kicked off her shoes, threw her coat on the sofa, put on a record – the LP of
Forty-Second Street
– and disappeared into the kitchen.

‘Make yourself comfortable, C. J. That’s what they say, isn’t it? I won’t be long.’

C. J. paced up and down the sitting room. ‘Evening shadows fall!’ cried the record player provocatively. He felt sick. He felt like a rabbit in a trap. He would have bolted if he’d had the courage, but he didn’t. He wondered how he could have been quite such a fool, and had just decided to put in for a transfer to Sydney in the morning when Roz reappeared with two mugs of coffee.

‘OK. Now I want to go over that list of designers just once more. I think we may have rushed it.’

C. J. felt a surge of gratitude. She was a clever girl. She knew exactly how to defuse the situation after all. He relaxed suddenly.

‘I felt that.’

‘What?’

‘You relaxing.’

‘Ah.’

‘Now, don’t go all tense again, C. J. Get the list.’

‘OK.’ He went out to the hall where he had left his briefcase. When he came back she stretched out her hand.

‘Here you are.’

‘Thanks. Now then,’ she said, patting the sofa beside her. ‘Let’s see. Are you quite sure about Jean Muir?’

‘Quite.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Why?’

‘Too subtle. Zandra certainly. Belinda Belville almost certainly. But I’m doubtful about Jean. Give me your hand, C. J.’

He was so relaxed, he gave her his hand without thinking. Roz raised it to her lips and he looked at her, startled.

‘Roz, don’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t like pity.’

‘You’re not going to get any.’

‘Ah.’

The record had mercifully stopped; all he could hear, thundering somewhere inside him, was his heart.

‘Kiss me.’

‘Roz, I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘You know why not.’

‘I don’t. Kiss me.’

‘No.’

‘Then,’ she said taking his face in her hands, ‘I shall kiss you.’ And she leant forward very very slowly and kissed him very gently. ‘Was that so dreadful?’ she said, drawing back.

‘Not dreadful at all.’

‘I liked it too. I shall do it again.’

And she did.

‘How was that?’

‘It was great,’ said C. J., and then suddenly drew back from her and collapsed into the corner of the sofa, roaring with laughter.

‘C. J., what is the matter with you?’

‘This is too ridiculous. It’s like a re-run of
Some Like It Hot.
You know, when Tony Curtis has told Monroe he’s impotent and she’s really trying to get him going, and he keeps saying “Nothing” every time she asks him how he feels. It’s just ridiculous!’

‘Well, thanks,’ said Roz, slightly nettled, but then she started to laugh too, and fell against him, and then she turned her head up to him, and pulled him down against her. And he kissed her again, and then again, and ‘Still nothing?’ she said, apeing Marilyn Monroe’s baby voice, and ‘Yes, something,’ said C. J. in a thick American accent and then, his eyes still full of laughter, he pushed her upright and raised his hands and unbuttoned her shirt and began to slide it off her shoulder, and as he looked at her breasts naked under the silk shirt he felt at the same time a dreadful stab of terror and panic and a great lunge of desire, and he stopped smiling altogether and froze quite quite still.

‘Oh, C. J., don’t be afraid,’ she said in a voice so soft he would not have believed it of her, and she took his head in her
hands and pressed it very tenderly against her breasts, stroking his hair, and as he took one of her nipples in his mouth, played with it, teased it, she began to moan, very very quietly. And then suddenly he felt everything was totally out of control, and a white-hot need came into him, that was blind, driving, deadly. He was tearing at her clothes, and his own, and kissing her everywhere, her face, her shoulders, her breasts, her hands, and drawing her down on top of him. He felt her thin back, her tight hard buttocks, and then her soft moistness, so tender, so yielding at first, and then so hungry, and so strong; and he turned her and entered her with a great surge of triumph; he had only been in her for the briefest of times, it seemed, settling, searching and feeling her juices flowing to meet him, when it was over, in a shuddering agony of relief and the months of misery and loneliness were wiped out and he lay weeping on her breast. And Roz lay too, hardly begun to be satisfied, aching with hunger, weeping for the loss of Michael for the first time for months, but smiling nevertheless; and in her ears she could hear, as if she was in the chair on the other side of the room, her mother saying, ‘Find some milksop of a man who would do exactly what you told him.’

She looked up into his slightly anxious brown eyes and smiled, and reached out a hungry hand, cupping his balls, caressing them with light, feathery strokes. ‘C. J.,’ she said. ‘Do it again. Now. Before I scream.’

C. J. did it again.

C. J. did not do quite what she told him. At first. After a heady two months, when they saw each other three times a week, in secrecy, and went to bed together whenever they could (and during which time she managed to improve his performance considerably), Roz asked him to go to Paris with her one weekend, ostensibly on business, booked them into the anonymity of the Paris Hilton, and on Saturday morning, after some particularly satisfactory sex, proposed to him. C. J. refused.

‘You know as well as I do, Roz, it wouldn’t work.’

‘Why wouldn’t it work?’

‘Because you’re the boss’s daughter, for a start. And you’d boss me to be going on with. And we’re too unlike ever to make a go of it.’

‘You once said,’ said Roz, bending down to kiss his flat stomach, ‘that you wouldn’t mind me being your boss.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t, in a business context. But I don’t want to be bossed in my marriage.’

‘Maybe I could learn not to.’

‘No, I don’t think you could.’

‘C. J., I really think we could be very happy.’

‘I don’t.’

‘But why not? I fancy you rotten. I enjoy your company. I’ (and there was a fraction of a second’s hesitation) ‘love you.’

‘No, Roz, you don’t. And I don’t love you.’

‘I see.’

‘Rosamund, I adore you. I think you’re a terrific lay. I admire you. But I don’t love you. You can’t have thought I did.’

‘God in heaven!’ said Roz. ‘How I hate being called Rosamund. It always heralds disaster. And I did think you loved me.’

‘Roz, I never said –’

‘Oh, go to hell,’ said Roz angrily, climbing out of bed. She went into the bathroom, reappeared dressed and made up, and walked over to the door.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To see Annick. To discuss sales figures. That’s all I’m really fit for, isn’t it? Work. Let’s keep things in order. Goodbye, C. J.’

‘Roz, please!’

She was gone, the door slammed after her. She took a taxi to Annick’s flat and stormed up the stairs.

‘My goodness gracious, Roz, whatever is it? What is the matter?’

‘Nothing! Everything!’

‘Have a drink. Tell me.’

‘Thank you. I’ll have a brandy.’

‘Before lunch! This must be bad.’

‘Oh, it isn’t really, I suppose,’ said Roz, sinking into Annick’s deep leather armchair with a hugh sigh. ‘It’s the old story. I want to marry someone and he doesn’t want to marry me.’

‘Not – not Michael Browning?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Roz, with a wry grin. ‘He wanted to marry me. It’s ironic, isn’t it, Annick? He would have married me and it
would have been disastrous for me. This one would work, and he won’t. And I don’t know what to do.’

‘Forget him,’ said Annick. ‘There is no point in marrying someone who is not right for you.’

‘I think he is, though, that’s the point.’

‘Well,
chérie
, even if he is you can’t force him. And besides, Roz, why are you in such a hurry to get married? It is not so very long since you finished with Michael. You have your career. I don’t understand.’

‘I don’t quite myself,’ said Roz slowly. ‘I only know I really really want to be married. I want to be wanted, and I want everyone to know I’m wanted. A lot of people thought Michael ended our relationship. I don’t like that. And I’m afraid of being alone. Ever since Michael I’ve been afraid of being alone.’

‘And your career?’

‘Oh, that’s no problem. Of course I want my career. But I want to be married too. I want it all, Annick. We all do, our generation. Don’t you?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Oh Annick, what am I going to do? How am I going to persuade him?’