Wicked Pleasures Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  No Angel

  Something Dangerous

  Into Temptation

  Almost a Crime

  The Dilemma

  An Outrageous Affair

  Windfall

  Forbidden Places

  Another Woman

  For Paul. With love.

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcovder in the United States in 2012 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected]

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1992 by

  the Orion Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1992 by Penny Vincenzi

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-46830-197-7

  Contents

  Copyright

  By the Same Author

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  The Main Characters

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Epilogue

  The heart is deceitful above all

  things, and desperately wicked.

  The Book of Jeremiah

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I owe a great many thanks to a great many people, for their help to me with writing this book.

  Primarily a large number of people working in the Square Mile and on Wall Street who not surprisingly prefer to remain anonymous, but who gave me an enormous amount of their time, and fielded my endless questions with patience and good humour.

  Three books were also outstandingly valuable to me and I would like to thank their authors: Ken Auletta for the Greed and Glory of Wall Street, Dominic Hobson for The Pride of Lucifer and Bryan Burroughs and John Heylar for Barbarians at the Gate.

  Much gratitude also to Ivan Fallon, who was generous enough not only to point me in several important directions but to give me several pages’ worth of ideas.

  For help on the New York half of the book, I could not have managed without Betty Prashker, who chauffeured me all over the Hamptons on what must have seemed to her a very long weekend. I would have been lost without Robert Metzger and Bunny Williams who allowed me to quiz them about their dazzling lives as interior designers in New York, Jane Churchill who gave me the same privilege in London, and Jose Fonseca and Dick Kreis of Models One who have forgotten more about the modelling business than I shall ever know, and were good and kind enough to share it with me.

  On matters of technical expertise, legal, financial and even mechanical, I owe a great deal to Sue Stapely, Mike Harding, Peter Townsend and Paul Brandon. And to Shirley Lowe, who presided over the book’s christening.

  There have been wonderfully crucial supplies of nuts and bolts from Lyn Curtis, Pat Taylor Chalmers, Katie Pope, Caroleen Conquest and Alison Craddock. Not forgetting some absolutely vital input from my bank manager, Peter Merry.

  Wicked Pleasures could not have been written at all without Rosie Cheetham, friend and editor, who wields a brilliant, creative and most inspiring pen; my agent, dear Desmond Elliott, who encourages, guides, cheers and cajoles: and most of all, my husband Paul and my four daughters, Polly, Sophie, Emily and Claudia, who have a great deal to put up with, never complain about it, and are always there when I need them.

  FOREWORD

  I always felt that writing The Spoils of Time was a piece of total self-indulgence. I had long wanted to write a trilogy because the worst thing about finishing a novel is saying goodbye to the characters; and I thought if I could carry on for two more books, I wouldn’t have to. And it was marvellous, creating those characters, and watching them fall in love and get married and have the babies: who two books later were major characters in their own right. I loved the way the family grew, along with the story, and how a small decision or chance meeting in the first book could lead to a hugely important event in the second, and then the third. I enjoyed the tangled threads of the different generations, the criss-crossing of the different branches of the family.

  And I savoured the great span of time I could cover, the Lyttons moved from the luxury of Edwardian house parties to the poverty-wracked slums of London, were involved in the suffragette movement, savoured the excesses of both the twenties and the thirties, fought in two World Wars, escaped from war-torn France, and throughout it all, carved out a success for their publishing company on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Most of all I loved the Lytton family; and especially, of course, Lady Celia Lytton, the difficult, despotic glorious matriarch, her lovers, her children and her greatest love of all, the publishing house. I do not feel I invented Lady Celia; I felt she was there, waiting for me to write about her. From my first meeting with her when she was a young girl, to my last when she was a great-grandmother, she held me spellbound; fortunately, if I miss her too much I can pick up one of the books and discover her all over again.

  As I very much hope you will do too.

  —PENNY VINCENZI, London

  THE MAIN CHARACTERS

  BRITAIN

  Virginia, Countess of Catherham, American heiress

  Alexander, Earl of Caterham, her husband

  Charlotte and Georgina Welles and Max, Viscount Headleigh, the Caterham children

  George, son of Georgina

  Harold and Mrs Tallow, major-domo and housekeeper at Hartest, the Caterham family estate

  Nanny Barkworth, the Caterham family nanny

  Alicia, Dowager Countess of Caterham, Alexander’s mother

 
Martin Dunbar, estate manager at Hartest, and his wife Catriona

  Lydia Paget, obstetrician

  Angie Burbank, assistant at Virginia’s interior design company

  Mrs Wicks, her grandmother

  Clifford Parks, friend of Mrs Wicks

  M. Wetherly Stern, hotelier

  Charles St Mullin, barrister, a friend of Virginia’s

  Gus Booth, a director of Praegers London

  Gemma Morton, model and debutante, friend of Max

  AMERICA

  Frederick Praeger III, New York banker, and his wife Betsey, Virginia’s parents

  Baby Praeger (Fred IV), her brother

  Mary Rose, his wife

  Freddy, Kendrick and Melissa, their children

  Madeleine Dalgliesh, an English relative of Mary Rose

  Pete Hoffman, a senior partner at Praegers

  Gabriel (Gabe), his son

  Jeremy Foster, a major client of Praegers, and his wife Isabella

  Chuck Drew, friend of Jeremy Foster and partner at Praegers

  Tommy Soames-Maxwell, gambler, a friend of Virginia’s

  Prologue

  None of Virginia Caterham’s children knew who their father was.

  ‘They think they’re my husband’s of course,’ she said, smiling rather defiantly at the psychiatrist. ‘They have no idea there’s anything remotely unusual about their background. I keep thinking I should tell them – and then losing courage. What do you think?’

  Dr Stevens looked at her thoughtfully. He really had hoped she wouldn’t be back. She had been doing so well. But if it had taken a relapse to get her talking, to make her reveal the reason for the drinking, then perhaps it was worth it. They had never got this far before.

  ‘Lady Caterham – how old are your children now?’

  ‘Well – Charlotte’s thirteen. Georgina’s eleven. And Max is eight.’ She looked very frail, sitting there in the big chair, almost childlike herself, wearing a full skirt and a large loose grey sweater.

  Her heavy dark hair fell forwards over her face; she pushed it impatiently back, her large tawny-coloured eyes – extraordinary eyes – fixed on his.

  ‘And – are you close to them?’

  He was playing for time; trying to decide how to play it.

  ‘Yes, very. Of course Charlotte is a little awkward. Well, it’s a difficult age, you know. And I’m away quite a lot, with my work. It’s very important to me, my work. But – yes, I think we’re close.’

  He changed tack.

  ‘Lady Caterham –’

  ‘Can’t you call me Virginia? You did before.’

  ‘Virginia. What was it that made you start drinking again? When you’d done so well for so long. Do you know? Can you tell me?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘whatever makes you? It’s never just one thing, is it? There were lots of things. Too many to talk about now.’

  ‘But Virginia, that’s what I’m here for, to talk about them.’

  ‘Oh – I don’t know. I was lonely. Despairing.’

  ‘About what?’ he said, very gently.

  ‘Dr Stevens. Please answer my question. About the children. I need to know what you think. I really do. Before we go any further.’

  ‘Well,’ he said carefully, ‘well, it’s very hard for me to say. There are so many imponderables. Does your husband know that you – that there have been other men in your life?’

  ‘Oh Dr Stevens, of course he does.’ She smiled at him almost cheerfully. ‘I would say that’s almost the whole point of our marriage. That there were other men in my life.’

  Chapter 1

  Virginia, 1956–7

  Nice girls still didn’t in 1956. And Virginia Praeger was a very nice girl.

  What annoyed her, and most of her contemporaries, was that nice boys did.

  She remarked on this fact to her brother, Baby Praeger, as he drove them both out of New York in the crisp April dusk and towards Long Island to spend Easter with their parents in the Hamptons: it was so terribly unfair, she said suddenly, she sometimes felt her major memory of her first year at Wellesley had been of pushing eager, sweaty hands up out of her bra and down out of her panties, and being made to feel guilty about it, and then hearing girls talking about however virginal you might be on your wedding night, of course you’d want a man with some experience, one who’d know what he was doing.

  ‘You’re allowed to sow your wild oats. Why can’t we sow a few?’

  ‘Because you’re female,’ said Baby, easing his new and infinitely beloved Porsche Spyder into fifth gear and a speed nudging 100. ‘Look out for cops, darling, will you?’

  ‘You won’t get caught,’ said Virginia irritably. ‘You never do.’

  ‘I might.’

  ‘Well anyway, that’s a really logical answer. Like Daddy saying girls don’t go into banking. It’s just so stupid.’

  ‘Which do you fancy more?’ asked Baby. ‘Banking or sex?’

  ‘Banking,’ said Virginia promptly. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Sex. We could discuss a swop,’ said Baby, laughing. ‘You’re a fraud, Virgy, deep down, wild oats don’t actually interest you. Now how about the bank? Do you really want to get into all that?’

  ‘Well – maybe not. But I’d certainly like the option … Look out, Baby, there’s a cop coming up.’

  Baby swung over into the slow lane, the needle dropping with formidable ease. The cop pulled up alongside him, gave him a look to kill and sat alongside him for several miles before pulling off fast after a Merc that had leapt out of the twilight behind them and vanished again ahead. And Baby didn’t get booked. Didn’t get caught.

  It was true, what Virginia said, he never did. Right from the moment they had both been toddling about together, Baby had never got into trouble. If something got broken, if they were late back for tea, if they didn’t untack their ponies, if they didn’t write thankyou letters, if they got bad reports, if they forgot to walk the dog or clean out the rabbit’s cage, Virginia got into trouble and Baby, somehow, got off. It wasn’t that he lied, or pretended he hadn’t committed the crime; he was just lucky. Their father would have been out or away when he should have heard about the misdemeanour, or too busy to be bothered about it; or their mother would have been distracted, involved in one or another of her endless charitable causes; or Mrs Viney, their nurse, would have been doing something else as he scuttled in late; or the gardener would take pity on the rabbit and see to it instead of waiting for someone else to notice.

  But whatever the reason, Baby never did get into trouble.

  And Virginia did. In spite of being much loved, she was always in hot water. Especially with her father. And she was always permanently in Baby’s shadow: whatever she did, he seemed to do better. Which was strange, because she was cleverer. She knew she was. She was quicker than he was, faster on the uptake, her grades were consistently better, her successes more frequent, her failures fewer. Year after year she got straight As, while Baby’s results teetered between all right and mediocre. And yet, somehow, she always felt she’d failed. That was because of her father too; careless of, blind to, his daughter’s impressive talents and achievements, he would boast of Baby’s far less remarkable ones, and where there were none, would boast of that fact too. ‘Boy’s a lost cause,’ he would say, his eyes soft with pride as he looked at his son: and ‘No better at math than I ever was,’ looking to, waiting for, the laughing, flattering denial from his audience, and drawing attention to Baby’s talent for appearing to be clever, purporting to work, the dangerous, social skills that some feckless fairy had bestowed upon him in his cradle, making them seem a virtue, a skill in themselves. As indeed they were, and Baby knew they were, and he invested much time and trouble honing them, perfecting them, while Virginia watched, irritable, resentful, from behind the barriers of her own dutiful dullness.

  And then Baby was easier than she was, more socially accomplished: Virginia had pretty manners, everyone said, but she did not actually have
Baby’s charm, she didn’t sit at the centre of attention at parties, she wasn’t regarded as the one person who must be at a gathering to ease it into life, set a seal on it.

  Of course she was popular: very popular. There was no shortage of young men trying to make their way into her bra and her panties, and her social diary was not exactly bereft of social entries. Her friends said that was because she was not only very pretty but nice; her enemies (few, but articulate) maintained it was because she was an heiress to a fortune so big that even in a college where real money was in no way a rarity it was impressive.

  Frederick Praeger III was a banker. In the circles in which the Praegers moved, that meant he owned the bank. His father had owned it, and his grandfather had founded it, and it was confidently expected that in the fullness of time, Baby would take it on and be known no longer as Baby but as Frederick Praeger IV.

  The seeds of the Praeger fortune had been sown in 1760 by a bright sassy young man called Jack Milton who worked as a clerk for a small bank in Savannah, Georgia. He kept hearing talk of the money to be made from financing the Golden Triangle, a chain of trade in which a ship would leave Liverpool, England, loaded with metal boxes, and tin spoons and forks, and sail to the west coast of Africa, where the goods would be exchanged for slaves. The ship would then sail on to Bermuda, where the slaves (destined for shipment to the Southern states of America) would be traded for molasses; the third leg of the triangle saw the sugar sold back into Liverpool. It was perfectly possible and indeed normal to make 150 per cent profit on each leg of the journey.

  Jack Milton, who was a shrewd young man, talked to his superior at the bank about the feasibility of investing in the Golden Triangle at the American end; his superior, who was less shrewd, shook his head and said it sounded real risky to him. And there it might have ended, had Jack not found himself working late one night when the owner of the bank, one Ralph Hobson, had come back to his office, a little the worse for drink, to collect a box of cigars a client had given him. Seeing Jack at his desk, and impressed by his industry, and being in benevolent mood, he started talking to him, and Jack found himself discussing the Golden Triangle and its potential. Three months later, Hobson had invested in a small ship; nine months after that he saw his money quadrupled. He repeated the exercise, watched the bank’s profits soar and, being a fair man, gave Jack shares in the bank. In the fullness of time he made Jack a partner. Milton Hobson prospered; young Mr Milton and young Mr Hobson succeeded their fathers, and their sons succeeded them. They lived on adjoining plantations in Georgia, made additional fortunes from cotton, and owned a great many slaves. Then, early in 1850, Douglas Hobson contracted cholera and died, childless; Jeremy Milton found himself sole owner of the bank, with only daughters to succeed him. His wife had died bearing their only son, and the child had followed her after a very few hours.