Sins (35 page)

They were inside the house, his mother’s face shadowed with tension as a uniformed nurse came rustling down the stairs to meet them.

‘Not gone yet, has he?’ His mother had never been one to coat her words with honey.

‘No,’ the nurse confirmed, standing aside to let them go up. Oliver followed his mother, who merely nodded her head when the nurse called after her, ‘I’ll wait down here until you need me.’

The stairs were steep and they had to climb two flights of them. His mother reached the top without a change in her breathing, but he was out of breath, Oliver acknowledged. He was also desperate for a cigarette. If he’d ever thought of discussing with his mother the issue of exactly who his father was he hadn’t imagined her doing so in such a matter-of-fact, almost impatient and nonapologetic manner. There’d been gossip when he’d been a kid, hints and that from members of his family, but somehow he’d assumed that if his mother was aware of the gossip, she would be humiliated and embarrassed by it.

As his mother opened the bedroom door, Oliver could hear the laboured rattling breathing of the man lying propped up in the bed.

‘It’s me, Phil,’ his mother announced matter-of-factly.

A long thin hand, veined and fleshless, reached out across the bedclothes. His mother reached for it and held it.

‘Have you brought him, Eileen?’ The words were rasped and spaced out between what were obviously agonised breaths.

‘Yes, he’s here. Oliver, come over here so that your dad can see you properly.’

Reluctantly yet at the same time compelled by an urge he couldn’t resist, Oliver approached the bed.

‘You’ll have to hold his hand,’ his mother told him quietly, ‘he’s going fast, and he probably won’t be able to see you.’

Oliver’s first instinct was to refuse. The man he’d always thought of as his father had never shown him any physical affection, being more inclined to cuff him than hug him, but it still felt wrong to clasp in his own hand the hand of another ‘father’. But again, though, something stronger than that instinct drove him.

One part of Oliver’s brain somehow registered how similar to his own the other hand was, and similar too, the shape of the sunken eyes and the bold nose.

‘Oliver.’ The voice of the man in the bed, like the clasp of his hand, was stronger than Oliver had expected.

‘Your dad’s seen them photographs you bin taking that’s bin in all them fancy magazines,
Vogue
and that lot,’ his mother told him.

‘He’s a fine boy, Eileen. A fine son.’ Tears filmed the sunken eyes. ‘A son any man could be proud of, and I am proud of you, Oliver. Always have been, always, right from the minute your mother told me about you. Should have been here with me; would have been if things had been different.’ His voice had started to fade, the words spaced out more slowly, and dying away with every strained-for breath. His grip on Oliver’s hand slackened.

Oliver looked at his mother and then his father took a deep shuddering breath and called out, ‘Eileen…’

‘I’m here, Phil…I’m here.’

As she spoke Oliver could hear the breath rattling in his throat. He raised himself up off his pillows and then with a final gasp sank back on them.

His mother was still holding his hand, tears sliding down her face.

‘He’s left you everything,’ Oliver’s mother told him three hours later. They were sitting in the kitchen of the house where she had worked for so many years. The doctor had been and gone, and so had the undertaker, and now they were alone.

‘Thought the world of you, he did, right from the first minute you was born.’

‘Did he? Well, he had a funny way of showing it, didn’t he? Getting a kid off another man’s wife and—’

‘That’s enough of that. I’m not having you speaking ill of your dad, especially not now he’s dead. Wanted to marry me, he did, but I was already married, see, and like it says in the Bible, let no man put asunder them as God has joined together. Good to me he was,
though, always, and he made sure that you never wanted for anything. Remember that bike you had when you was ten?’

Oliver did. He had been the only boy in the street to have a brand-new Raleigh bike, and he’d been as proud as punch of it.

‘He got that for you, your dad. I wasn’t for you having it, on account of it causing gossip, but he wouldn’t be argued out of it. Wanted me to take some photographs of you on it–always wanting me to take photographs of you for him, he was. He wanted to send you to a posh school as well but I wasn’t having that.

‘Remember that fancy camera you wanted when you first got started? It was him that got that for you.’

‘I bought it second hand.’

‘Brand-new it was, and it was your dad that got it and me that told you that I’d heard that old man was selling cameras.’ His mother’s voice was scornful and yet proud at the same time.

‘He’s left you everything. He told me that. Said that it was only right. Loved you, he did, and no mistake.’ Her voice cracked. ‘Loved you like the sun and moon shone out of you. Always talking about you. Drove me mad sometimes, asking me questions about you.’

‘I never saw him, never spoke to him.’

‘It was for the best. I couldn’t have told you when you was a kiddy in case you said summat you shouldn’t have.’

Oliver stared at the kitchen wall. It was distempered a sickly green and the distemper was flaking in places. A man he had never known but who had been his father had lived here, thinking about him, loving him, wanting
him. He thought about the distance that had always existed between him and the man he had always thought of as his father, the sense of confusion and pain he had felt so often as a child, knowing that that father was irritated by him and resented him. A huge wave of loss swamped him. He looked at his mother. She had done what she had thought was right, he knew.

As her plane lifted into the steel-grey late February sky, Ella finally released her breath. There was no turning back or changing her mind now. She was on her way to New York and her new life there.

‘Well, well, if it isn’t
Vogue
’s much-admired Sixties Model Mother.’

Emerald, who had been trying her best to look interested as she watched her seven-year-old son running in his school’s end-of-term egg and spoon race, didn’t even bother to turn her head as she responded, ‘Don’t be tiresome, Drogo.’

Dougie had reverted to his real name on his thirtieth birthday, three years earlier, for no specific reason other than that he had wanted to reclaim a part of himself he felt that he’d somehow abandoned, and it had both amused and amazed him to be told by so many people whose opinions he valued, how comfortable they felt with the change.

Amber perhaps had said it best when she had told him affectionately, ‘Drogo–it fits you so comfortably, rather like a favourite jacket that’s been hanging in the wardrobe for ever because it felt a little too big, that you’ve suddenly rediscovered now fits you perfectly.’

Tiresome was definitely the right word for Drogo, as the family now called Dougie, Emerald decided, and it applied equally well to the way she was currently having to behave since
Vogue
published an article on the young ‘with it’ mother, using her as one of its examples of what modern sixties motherhood meant.

Of course, both she and Robbie were exceptionally photogenic. She felt so sorry for those women who produced ugly children; now she
did
look at Drogo. His children were going to be incredibly ugly if he did as everyone, including her own mother, thought he was going to do and proposed to Gwendolyn.

Who would have thought it, especially after the absolutely stunning models Drogo had dated over the years?

After she herself had turned down Drogo’s proposal of marriage, she had assumed that he would continue to beg her to marry him. Only he hadn’t. Instead he had virtually buried himself in his ducal and estate responsibilities, both in London and at Osterby, to such an extent that Emerald was glad that she had not accepted him. Who wanted to live such a dull worthy life? Certainly not her.

Naturally it had irritated her when, after Drogo had finally decided that he needed some sort of social life, he immediately became fêted and sought after by virtually every single society hostess, including those she thought of as her own particular friends. Equally naturally, that had led to them attending the same events and being in one another’s company, but whilst Emerald had expected to have Drogo following her around begging
to be allowed to pay court to her, instead he had made it very plain that he was grateful to her for turning him down, and had no regrets. Not that she did herself, of course. Now Drogo was very much a part of her mother’s family circle, always welcome at Denham, where he was a frequent guest and, to Emerald’s irritation, much loved by her own son, who practically worshipped him.

Emerald had no intentions of remarrying–ever. She liked her freedom and the right to order her own life. Having a man as an ardent lover was far, far better than having a man as a husband, and there had been plenty of men over the years who had been very ardent in their pursuit of her on their way to her bed.

Janey reckoned that if Drogo did propose to Gwen it would be out of pity because no one else wanted her. ‘She’s probably still a virgin,’ she had added. ‘Imagine!’

Emerald didn’t want to, but she
could
imagine the shame of still being virginal at the age of twenty-five when the whole of swinging London had fallen on pre-marital, post-marital and outside-marital sex like the starving on a banquet. Although she hadn’t said so to Janey, Emerald suspected that Gwendolyn wasn’t alone in her shameful virginity, and that it was a state that Rose also shared.

Emerald thought of herself as a woman who, because she had been married, was entitled to live a very different lifestyle from someone like her cousin Rose, who, quite obviously to Emerald, knew nothing about men because she didn’t have what it took to attract them.

Emerald enjoyed despising Rose almost as much as she enjoyed taunting her on the rare occasion when
they met, by flaunting her own social superiority in front of her.

‘Oh, no, Robbie, don’t let him overtake you.’ Emerald stood up on her toes to urge on her son but it was too late, Robbie had already allowed a determined red-faced little bruiser to push past him to the winning post. Emerald sighed. He had the double handicap of his own sweet nature and having been raised by Amber.

Normally Emerald did her utmost to avoid these occasions–grubby little boys and their dull parents were not her idea of fun–but on this occasion, with the
Vogue
article in mind, she had felt obliged to put in an appearance.

‘Darling, over here,’ she called out as Robbie looked round, searching the crowd. But either he hadn’t heard her or he was ignoring her because suddenly a huge smile crossed his face and he set off at a run, heading not for her, Emerald realised, but his grandmother.

‘Smart boy,’ Drogo, still at her elbow, murmured.

‘Well, that’s something your genes will have to work overtime to produce if you go ahead and marry Glum Gwen,’ Emerald told him smartly. ‘Imagine having children with those awful cold squidgy fingers just like Gwennie’s father’s.’ She shuddered. ‘You’ll have to be careful where they put them as well. You don’t want a quiverful of little coroneted thieves, Drogo, who all take after their grandfather. Everyone knows about the money Henry’s borrowed from people and never repaid. You should have married that last model you were dating, the one that went off with that pop singer.’

‘Same old Emerald,’ Drogo told her. ‘Always ready with
the bitchy remark. But I suppose that’s what happens to a woman when she’s been disappointed in love and life: she becomes all sour and bitter.’

Sour and bitter. He made her sound like a dried-up old spinster, which she most certainly was not!

She was only in her mid–well, OK then, her late–twenties, for heaven’s sake, and in the prime of her life. But as Max had rather unkindly reminded her last night, she was not eighteen any more and girls who were eighteen were far more forward and available than she had been at that age.

Max. The heat of last night’s desire had only been damped down within her, not extinguished, and the mere sounding of his name within her thoughts was enough to have her need for him clamouring into fresh life. Emerald had never wanted any man as much as she did Max. He both aroused and infuriated her. Every time she thought she had him mastered and under her control, he proved to her that she had misjudged her power over him. He angered her and aroused her in equal measure, and Emerald knew that she would not be content until he was down on his knees admitting to her that she meant more to him than any other woman had or could. Only then would she be satisfied. Only then would she be ready to give him up.

She was seeing him later at Annabel’s. She’d tried to persuade him to pick her up from her apartment so that they could arrive together and make a statement as a couple, as part of her ongoing fight to enslave him and bend him to her will, but he’d refused. Emerald wasn’t used to men refusing her. She was the one who did that
to them. With any other man she’d have sulked until he’d given in, but with Max she’d known that no amount of tantrums would work and that he wouldn’t back down. That alone had been enough to sharpen her interest in him.

Max was different from any of the other men she’d slept with. She’d known that he would be different from the first minute she’d seen him. That had been at Annabel’s too. Everyone who was anyone went there. He’d been with a crowd that had included members of the Tony Armstrong-Jones and Princess Margaret set. He’d stood out from the other men as well as slightly apart from them, in his mohair suit and well-polished Church’s brogues, his suit, like his smile, sharper and skilfully tailored to enhance his maleness.

She’d wanted him even then, caught off guard by the fierce surge of her own lust. He’d been with one of an endless stream of dolly-birds with equally endless legs who filled Annabel’s, and the beds of the men who went there.