Something Dangerous Read online

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Oliver, ‘I fail to see quite why Giles should be deserving of such sympathy.’

  ‘Daddy! Of course you can see. Mummy never loses a single opportunity to put him in his place, make it clear she’s boss, at the office as well as here.’

  ‘Adele! That was quite uncalled for. I think you should apologise.’

  She looked at him, serious, almost shocked just for a moment, then the small, beautiful face melted, broke into a sweetly flirtatious smile.

  ‘Daddy, don’t be silly. I didn’t mean it. I was only joking, you know I was.’ She jumped up, went over to him, kissed him quickly. ‘Don’t be silly. Of course Mummy’s not the boss. You are, everyone knows that. You couldn’t think I was serious. Goodness, I wouldn’t have said it if I was. If you see what I mean. But – well, Giles is so nervous about his new job. And Mummy going on at him doesn’t exactly help. Does it?’

  ‘She wasn’t going on at him,’ said Oliver firmly, ‘merely making sure there was no problem.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ She sounded contrite. ‘Sorry. Sorry, Daddy. It’s sort of hard for us to understand, I suppose. Not being part of Lyttons ourselves. How important it is that everything goes well.’

  ‘Adele,’ said Oliver, ‘nothing would make me happier than for you to be part of Lyttons. Or at least to think you would be one day. As you very well know.’

  ‘And maybe we will,’ said Venetia. ‘Let’s hope.’

  ‘Let’s hope,’ said Adele, echoing her, giving her father another kiss. ‘One day.’

  He smiled at them both and stood up, scooping up the daily papers. ‘Well, we shall see. Meanwhile, you must enjoy yourselves as much as you can. Time for such self-indulgence is far too short. Now I, too, have work to do. What are your plans for the day? Some important shopping, no doubt.’

  ‘Desperately important,’ said Venetia.

  ‘Absolutely desperately,’ said Adele. ‘Big country house party on Saturday for a start. We need new shoes, we’ve danced all ours through. Bye, Daddy. See you later.’

  Left alone at the table, they looked at one another.

  ‘Poor old Giles,’ said Venetia.

  ‘Poor old boy,’ said Adele.

  Giles walked briskly along the Embankment away from Cheyne Walk, away from his parents, wishing passionately he was not going to see them again in little less than an hour’s time. He felt angry; angry and depressed. He had been working at the House of Lytton on Paternoster Row, unarguably one of London’s great publishing companies, for almost two years now, rising in its hierarchy from post boy to clerk to the trade counter to junior editor; the rise had, of course, been swift, hardly a proper apprenticeship, but he had still had to go through it.

  ‘It’s important you do,’ Oliver had said, ‘you have to understand what every phase in the process means, how it forms the whole.’ And of course Giles agreed with that, he had not expected to come in as Mr Lytton the Third, and start publishing his own list on day one. He had worked with a will, had enjoyed it, especially his time as a looker-out on the trade counter. He wasn’t sure why, but it seemed to him a most satisfying part of the publishing process, collecting books from the great store in the basement of Lytton House and bringing them to the counter at the front of the building for the collectors, as they were called, from the various bookshops to take away.

  He had made friends, had enjoyed the others seeing for themselves that he was not stuck up, did not consider himself too good for such lowly tasks. But this new phase was much more interesting; it wasn’t difficult in itself, it was largely mechanical. Spotting the typesetters’ errors, the misspellings, the wrong placing of punctuation marks, and then copying the corrections from one master proof on to other secondary ones, was more like proper publishing, reading each new book as it came off the presses, discovering exactly what lay behind the titles in the catalogues, the endless editorial meetings, the discussions as to whether this or that cover might be more suitable, the growing excitement that accompanied a new publication.

  He enjoyed it all really; and he didn’t mind working late, he didn’t mind working hard, he didn’t mind being told to do something again and again, he didn’t even mind being told he had done something wrong. Or stupid. What he did mind, almost unbearably, was his mother and her overpowering presence, her interference in everything he did. When his father pointed out mildly, or even firmly, that he had sent a second proof down with errors still on it, he felt mortified, angry with himself, apologised and put it right; but when his mother leaned over his desk, watching him as he marked up the proofs, pointing out a mistake he had missed, when she had stood in the reception area of Lyttons, studying his piles of books, checking them against the orders that lay on top of them, when she had come into the sales office and said she would like to go over some invoices with him personally, ‘just to make quite sure they’re absolutely correct’, he almost felt like crying, or even on extreme occasions, shouting at her. It did not seem to be her desire on those occasions to help him to do things right, rather to point out that he had done them wrong; or was in serious danger of doing them wrong; and to make sure that everyone in the place saw her doing it, saw her stressing her superiority over him, heard her correcting him, observed her making it clear that he was frequently, so frequently at fault, that he might be her son, but she was not prepared to tolerate his ineptitude.

  Her own perfectionism, her attention to detail, her almost visionary capacity for predicting literary taste, were legendary in the industry at large, let alone within Lyttons; she was talked about, admired, adulated, a legend in her own time. And it was well-earned that admiration, that adulation; the beautiful, brilliant Lady Celia Lytton moved among the great literary figures of her day, took her place alongside the greatest editors, the finest publishers, the most brilliant authors. And that was quite right and as it should be, Giles knew; his own father admired and respected her skills as much as anyone. But it did seem to him that she could afford to be at least a little generous in furthering the ambitions and supporting the career of her own son: rather than crushing them at every turn with something so fierce and ferocious he would have called it jealousy, had not the very notion seemed absurd.

  ‘I think we’re getting it,’ said Venetia, bursting into the small sitting room that she and Adele shared, ‘isn’t that thrilling?’

  ‘Don’t tell me!’

  ‘I am telling you. I heard Mummy talking to Brunson. She said to be sure to see he kept the area in front of the house clear this afternoon. Now why else should he do that?’

  ‘Can’t think. Does sound promising, doesn’t it? Oh, how marvellous. Mind you, it is time. I mean—’

  ‘I know. Her very own too. Just for driving herself up and down to Oxford.’

  ‘Well, but we’d rather share, wouldn’t we? I wonder what it’ll be. I mean one of those darling baby Austins would be wonderful, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Utterly wonderful. Of course, a sports car would be more – dashing. Bunty Valance has got an Aston Martin, can you imagine. You don’t think we might—?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ said Adele, ‘we can’t really drive yet, they’re bound to give us something tame to learn on. Can’t be very difficult, can it?’

  ‘Of course not. Bunty said it’s simply a matter of being able to keep going in a straight line, and learning which pedal to stop and which to go.’

  ‘Well, there you are then. What heaven. I must say, I’m looking forward to tonight as well—’

  ‘Me too,’ said Venetia.

  Adele looked at her. ‘Especially seeing—’

  ‘Well – yes. I suppose so. I mean – yes. Adele, you do think—’

  ‘Definitely. Couldn’t have been more obvious—’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘Truly. And Babs says he’s left—’

  ‘But you didn’t say—?’

  ‘Of course not. Because she rather does—’

  ‘Herself? I thought so.’

 
‘But you’re much more—’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Not just think,’ said Adele. ‘I know.’

  ‘Goody,’ said Venetia with great satisfaction. This was the kind of conversation the twins had all the time; not quite telepathic, but truncated, a kind of verbal shorthand, phrases, subjects anticipated and therefore the need to actually speak them removed. It had driven two nannies and a governess close to madness; fascinated their friends, irritated their brothers, and absolutely enraged their mother, who could not bear to be excluded from anything.

  ‘I wonder what Maud’s doing?’ said Adele suddenly. ‘On her birthday.’

  ‘Still asleep, at this very minute I expect. It’s only six o’clock over there.’

  Maud Lytton was their cousin; born by some strange quirk of human biology exactly one year after them; they only met occasionally, but they were rather fond of her.

  ‘Of course. I always forget. One of these years we ought to spend the day together. She’s such fun.’

  ‘Bit of a long journey for a birthday tea. But – yes. It’s time she came over again. We should suggest it. Mummy’s a bit funny about her, though, isn’t she?’

  ‘Only because she’s American. She thinks they’re all common. She kept saying how absurd it is Maud being a debutante next year. Without any royalty or court to be presented at, just something called the Assembly or something.’

  ‘She’s so ridiculous,’ added Venetia with a giggle. ‘Mummy, I mean, and to think she used to be a socialist.’

  ‘Oh, I know. You should hear Barty and Giles on the subject.’

  ‘I’d rather not, I think. Come on, let’s go. Now, shall we have the Marcel wave or not?’

  Venetia hesitated. ‘Not today. We might not like it and that would spoil tonight. Next time?’

  ‘Next time.’

  They arrived back just before lunch. The morning had not been quite absorbed by the hairdressers, they had made a trip to Harvey Nichols where they bought each other a birthday present, a tradition since they had first had their own spending money at the age of eight.

  Today, the presents they bought one another were diamanté clips for their hair, Adele’s an arrow-like shape, Venetia’s a curving crescent moon; they agreed that they would wear them that evening. They went to their rooms to wrap them up, to exchange at gift-time (seven o’clock cocktails before dinner); they always did that as well, it made the presents more formal, more worthy of a birthday than if they just handed them to one another over luncheon.

  Luncheon they were taking that day informally, in the nursery dining room with Nanny; they adored her, and felt for her, bereft as she was of charges during the day now that Kit was at school. Kit was eight; unlike Giles, he had not been sent away to Prep school; besotted with her youngest, Celia had refused to part with him, to subject him to the brutality and misery she knew Giles had endured. Time enough for him to go, she had said, at thirteen, and the headmaster of the school she had chosen, a small establishment in Hampstead much favoured by the intelligentsia of the day, had said he was an absolute certainty for Winchester, and possibly even as a scholar; it was one of the innumerable sources of resentment Giles felt against his small brother.

  ‘Darling Nanny, it’s beautiful,’ said Venetia.

  ‘Absolutely wonderful,’ said Adele.

  They sat side by side on the nursery sofa, smiling at Nanny, holding her gift; it was a small but very pretty cut glass vase. She liked to give them one present between them for their birthday (although not Christmas), and their parents had very often done the same, one dolls’ house, one dolls’ pram (although twin style), one artist’s easel and box of paints, leaving it to others to supply the two dolls, the two pairs of roller skates, the two tricycles.

  ‘It makes sense, really,’ Nanny would say, ‘only one birthday, after all.’

  The twins never minded – as some did – being turned into one in this way; they saw themselves if not quite as one, then certainly two parts of a whole. They still liked to dress identically, partly for fun, partly because, as Venetia had remarked, ‘We always know exactly how we look. We don’t need mirrors.’

  This was a slight over-simplification, since they both spent a great deal of time looking in mirrors, but the fact remained that studying a possible dress or suit, hat or hairstyle on a living image made decisions a great deal easier.

  ‘We just looked at each other,’ Venetia had more than once said, ‘soon after we got to the party, and we knew we had to go home and change.’

  Usually they shopped together; but if they were out separately, they always bought two of whatever they chose. ‘Not so we can dress the same,’ Adele would explain patiently, ‘but because we know the other will want it too.’

  The hair clips they had bought that day were the occasional exception; deliberately chosen so that they could be swapped halfway through the evening; the childish fun to be had with that, begun in the nursery, was endless. They had always been sent to school with different coloured hair ribbons; amused and surprised that it should not have occurred to anyone that they would, they swapped them over whenever it suited them. It was a whole term before anyone discovered that the rise and fall in Venetia’s achievement in the private arithmetic lessons she so hated was due to the fact that on alternate sessions it was Adele who sat with the teacher; and their both achieving a distinction in their Grade One piano examination was not so much due to extra practice by the less musically talented Venetia, as to Adele entering the examination room twice. For such sins, they were punished, and quite severely, but to little purpose; they continued, with blithe disregard for such consequences, to exploit their situation.

  The only thing they could not bear, and the threat of which ensured good behaviour, was separation; when Adele was eleven months old, she had been rushed into hospital for one night, with (happily) misdiagnosed diphtheria. Left with a frantically distraught Venetia, Nanny had, in an inspired and legendary desperation at two in the morning, placed a mirror in her cot; Venetia had fallen asleep almost at once, cradling it in her plump arms.

  ‘So, what are you doing the rest of the day?’ asked Nanny now, heaping shepherd’s pie (another nursery birthday tradition) on to their plates. ‘Shopping, I suppose.’ She sounded faintly disapproving; she felt the twins were over-frivolous. In this she was not alone; their mother, who had confidently expected them to go to university, or to take a secretarial course at the very least, and then to show some interest in working at Lyttons, was much of the same opinion.

  ‘I find it quite distressing,’ she said to Oliver at least once a week, ‘that all those girls want to do is first buy clothes and then wear them. That expensive education, totally wasted.’

  To which Oliver would reply that one ambitious woman in a family was quite enough and that surely the purpose of education was to enrich the mind, rather than train it rigorously for some specific occupation. ‘Their education will be valuable to them whatever they do. Even,’ he added, looking wryly over his spectacles at her, half smiling, ‘if they settle for marriage as their career.’

  But Celia was not to be so easily mollified. ‘It’s appalling. They’re clever girls. I wouldn’t mind so much if they were stupid. Just look at Barty, not a day, not an hour wasted, she works so hard—’

  And Oliver would then say (skirting round the matter of Barty as he always tried to do) that she would mind very much if the twins were stupid, and that she should be a little patient. ‘They’re very young, let them have some fun. Plenty of time for them to develop careers if they want to.’ And he would then endeavour to change the subject.

  ‘No, Nanny darling, actually we’re not going shopping,’ said Adele now.

  ‘I’m pleased to hear it. Waste of God’s good time, shopping, if you ask me.’

  ‘You sound like Mummy. Why shouldn’t we shop if we want to?’ said Venetia, piling her fork high with shepherd’s pie. ‘Goodness, this is delicious, Nanny.’

  ‘Anyway,
we’re not going shopping because we’ve already done it. And had our hair done,’ said Adele. ‘So we’re staying in this afternoon and – well, just staying in. Getting ready for tonight.’ She looked at Nanny. ‘You haven’t heard any rumours about – about this afternoon, have you, Nanny?’

  ‘What sort of rumours?’ said Nanny. She sounded flustered. ‘And anyway, you know I’m always the last to hear anything in this house. Now, Adele, look what you’re doing, you don’t want to get gravy on that pretty dress.’

  The twins exchanged a look; Nanny’s inability to deceive over even the mildest matter was legendary.

  They were not too surprised therefore – although rapturously delighted – when Brunson called them downstairs in the middle of the afternoon, saying there was a delivery for them, and they opened the front door to see their parents standing in the sunshine, one on each side of a scarlet Austin Seven, and holding a banner across it which said Happy Birthday. The next two hours were spent weaving rather unsteadily up and down the Embankment, under the instruction of Daniels, the chauffeur; they came into the house at six, flushed with triumph and saying there was nothing to it.

  ‘And we thought we’d drive ourselves down to Sussex tomorrow afternoon,’ said Adele carelessly to her mother, pulling off her gloves, throwing them down on the hall table, ‘so much less trouble for everyone.’

  To which Celia replied that it would be a great deal of trouble for everyone if they had a crash and that they would not be driving themselves anywhere for several weeks.

  ‘That’s so unfair! Barty drove herself up to Oxford last term.’

  ‘Barty had had hours of driving lessons and had to satisfy both your father and me that she was competent before we allowed that.’

  ‘Billy told me she was hopeless,’ said Adele with great satisfaction.

  ‘Billy is her brother. He’d be bound to say something like that. Barty drives extremely well. Venetia, don’t make that stupid face. Really, it’s hard to believe you two are eighteen years old. Now, hadn’t you better go and have your baths? Your friends will be arriving in less than an hour. Not to mention – yes, Brunson?’