An Absolute Scandal Read online

  And then they reached Paddington Station, and she saw Miranda’s mother pulling in just in front of them, and hooting, and after that in the hassle of getting her stuff out and assuring her father that there was no need to come to the platform with her, and hugging him and telling him she loved him, and saying goodbye to Carter, and waving and blowing her father kisses, she put it right out of her mind.

  “Eat your breakfast, Emma, there’s a good girl. Otherwise you’ll be late for school.”

  Debbie Fielding said this every morning and at exactly the same time (8:15), just as she said, “Have a good day, both of you,” to Alex and Richard, after giving them both a kiss (at 8:05), and, “Yes, Rachel, you do have to go to play school” (at 8:40).

  Sometimes she thought she might as well have made a recording and just let it run each day, apart from the kissing, for all the notice anyone took of her or the response she got. Well, Richard smiled and said thanks, and plonked Alex’s cap on his son’s head, but Alex just heaved his schoolbag onto his back, Emma continued not to eat her breakfast, and Rachel continued to argue and say she didn’t want to go to stupid play school. Just the same, by 9:30 Debbie was usually safely back at home on her own, apart from the dog and the cat.

  It was her favourite moment of the day, that, the house briefly hers, nobody arguing with her or asking her for things or saying could she discuss something with him—that was Richard and usually when she was absolutely frantic and trying to get Emma off to ballet or Alex to judo or Rachel out of the bath.

  What she did next was have a bath; she knew this was recklessly extravagant, in terms of time, but it helped her cling to her sanity. Quite why she found it so hard to remain sane she wasn’t sure; she often said if there was a prize awarded for the most boring family in the British Isles they would win it. Three children, one cat, one dog, one car, house in the suburbs—well, she clung to the thought that Acton wasn’t quite the suburbs, it had a London postcode, after all—father headmaster of the local junior school, mother full time at home, editor of the neighbourhood watch newsletter, deputy chair of the local National Childbirth Trust (NCT).

  And how had that happened, Debbie wondered. How had the Debbie who had been the groundbreaker of her year at school, first to go to a music festival (Glastonbury in 1971, at the age of sixteen and without telling her parents—that had resulted in what she called house arrest for a month and which she swore was worth it), first to sleep with a boy, first to go on the pill, first to smoke pot, and who had been so excited on the morning of her first job, as runner for a local radio station, that she had been literally sick—how was it she had turned into this dull and dutiful person?

  She had got two As and a B for her A levels—and moved from her grammar school in Kent to Birmingham University to read English. Where she found herself less of a groundbreaker but blissfully happy, released finally from the claustrophobia of only-childhood in her aggressively suburban home, into a paradise of like-minded, freethinking, pleasure-seeking contemporaries. She joined the debating society and several more ridiculous ones, like the Druids, partied furiously and almost failed her first-year exams. Sobered by that experience and a warning that she might lose her place unless her performance improved, she attached her nose firmly to the grindstone, and apart from a much-reduced social life, worked harder, and wrote endless pieces for Redbrick, the student newspaper.

  And in that calmer, better-behaved phase she had met Richard Fielding, who was the antithesis of everything she liked or admired: public school, modestly good-looking, painstakingly polite, absolutely decent—it was an old-fashioned word, but suited him perfectly—bit of a swot, a reject, as he put it, from Cambridge, as if it mattered. He was reading English as well, and he was awesomely clever, regarded as a near-certainty for a First. Debbie found herself listening to him as he talked and argued in tutorials and in the student union and in debates, and gradually she became intrigued by him. He was very intense, very serious; that intrigued her too, used as she was to boys taking nothing very seriously at all, except sex and drink and various attendant pleasures, and he was able to surprise her too: a bit of a rock music buff, and the proud owner of a Harley-Davidson motorbike. Sitting behind him, holding him round the waist, as the world was reduced to a throbbing, scary blur was oddly erotic; after only the second outing she went to bed with him. He wasn’t fantastic at sex, indeed rather dull compared to some of the boys she had known; but he had given the matter of her pleasure very careful attention and worked hard on it, as with everything he did, and that seemed rather engaging.

  By the end of the second year they had become accepted as a couple, and he took her to meet his parents one weekend. They lived on the Gower peninsula in southwest Wales, an astonishingly lovely piece of countryside, unspoiled and untamed: where wild ponies roamed the moorland and lanes, where hawks hovered over the hills and sheep grazed the grassy cliffs high above the sea. Broken Bay House was a great heap of a place, quite isolated, high on the cliffs with an incredible view of the sea. It was large and rambling (and very cold), badly in need of painting, full of battered old rugs on stone flags, and lumpy sofas and jugs full of dried flowers everywhere, and real fires blazing, which warmed your front and left your back freezing. The kitchen was the only cosy room, because of the Aga, and they ate there, at a wooden table which was so big it could seat eight and still leave quite a long expanse at one end to be covered with letters and newspapers and books and catalogues of things like agricultural shows and art auctions. There was a vast garden with a large population of hens at the vegetable end and a stable yard with three horses: and an old Rolls tucked into one of the stables. They were obviously rich, Debbie thought, and wondered why they didn’t get central heating put in. She liked William, Richard’s father, he was sweet and old-fashionedly courteous, but Flora, his mother, frightened her a bit, she was so sure of herself. She wore long flowing skirts and shirts and very large sweaters, and her hair was always tumbling down from the knot she tied it in; she was nice to Debbie, but slightly patronising. Debbie could tell she thought she was common.

  “How interesting you should say that,” she would say when Debbie ventured an opinion on anything (which wasn’t often), clearly implying it was not a view she would ever hold herself. Richard was their only child. “Do you remember so and so?” she’d keep saying to him, recalling some event. “Wasn’t that fun?” And it made Debbie feel somehow excluded.

  She came away freshly anxious about a relationship with a person and a life so alien to her.

  By the time they graduated, they had agreed to live together; only six months into her new life with the TV company, which she had absolutely loved, she was pregnant. It was the result of a reckless weekend away when she forgot her pills, and with only a brief backward glance at her putative career in television, she declared herself astonishingly happy about it, and they agreed to get married.

  And it was only now, her questing spirit tamed by family life and routine, and cast in the role of head teacher’s wife, that she looked back and realised how much she had changed. She had made one very brief break for freedom when she ran away to join the women at Greenham Common with her two elder children, in order to protest about the arrival of American cruise missiles, and returned cold and filthy after four days to a rather smug Richard, but that was all.

  As she lay in the bath that morning, Debbie knew exactly what she had to do that day: cooking a lasagna for an NCT quiz event tonight; writing her newsletter; collecting Rachel from play school and taking her to a party; meeting Emma and Alex from their respective schools; taking Emma to the dentist and Alex to judo—more snooty, unfriendly mothers to face down—and then tea; supervising homework (while wishing Richard could at least do that instead of disappearing into his study to do paperwork); and then the bath round, and getting Rachel into bed; and being ready, complete with lasagna, to go out, all by 7:30. And she realised there didn’t seem to be a single moment in all this for attacking the high wall of iron
ing awaiting her.

  As she pulled on her bathrobe, the phone rang; she’d been waiting for some news of a recent series of break-ins from the neighbourhood watch chairman for her newsletter.

  “Hi, John,” she said, but it wasn’t nice John Peters, it was Flora. She still had an extremely uneasy relationship with Flora; she made her feel inadequate, and thus touchy and perverse.

  Flora Fielding had been widowed five years earlier, when William had died suddenly of a heart attack, but while genuinely grief stricken, she went on determinedly and bravely with her life, refusing to move out of the house, as Richard felt she should, continuing to ride and hunt, and returning to her career as a photographer.

  She worked only in black-and-white and specialised in seascapes and architectural photography. She didn’t get a great many commissions, but it didn’t matter, it absorbed her—along with her horses and an extremely active social life—and she certainly seemed to have no money worries. William had been a very successful accountant, as well as having family money, and he was also a Name at Lloyd’s, Richard had explained to Debbie; she didn’t really understand what that meant, except that it appeared to be a club for posh, rich people and was very financially desirable.

  One of the things Flora insisted on was paying for the children’s education. “I really want to do this,” she said to them firmly, when Alex was coming up for seven. “I don’t want them going to some useless place where they can indulge in free expression or whatever the latest fad is and come out at eleven with ghastly accents, not able to read.”

  Debbie was not even made part of this discussion, which enraged her; it seemed not to occur to Flora that Richard was the headmaster of what she would certainly consider “a useless place;” and indeed he would not have been, had he not failed to beat two other contestants at a prep school in Chiswick.

  “First rejected by Cambridge, then rejected by Grange House,” he said to Debbie, trying to make light of it. “What next?”

  Debbie told him he would be much more use to the community at St. Luke’s Junior; she would have greatly preferred Alex to be going there as well. She hated Flora paying the school fees. It meant permanent gratitude, and the right for Flora to interfere constantly in the children’s progress. Not that she often did: although she did insist on doing spelling tests and tables in the car which made Debbie want to scream. Certainly they were both doing very well, roughly a year ahead of their state-educated counterparts; Debbie tried to concentrate on that and to feel genuinely—rather than resentfully—grateful to Flora.

  Flora was still beautiful, tall and slim, with wild dark curly hair; the children found her huge fun to be with, playing endless games of tracking and hide-and-seek with her and clambering over rocks and up cliff paths. “You mustn’t mollycoddle them,” she would say to Debbie, who fretted while they climbed on a particularly hazardous pile of rocks, or waded screaming into the freezing Easter sea, their Wellies filling inevitably with water. “Children have an inbuilt sense of self-preservation.”

  Debbie didn’t feel any amount of self-preservation could save a small child of seven from falling off a pony or getting swept out to sea in a rip, but she wasn’t allowed to say so; it irritated Richard. He had grown up doing all those things, and he liked the idea of his children doing them too.

  Flora did other annoying things, like keeping the children up hours beyond their bedtimes. “Rules are made to be broken,” she would say, ignoring Debbie’s request for a cooked tea for them, and serving dinner up for everybody at half past eight. “It does them good to eat with the grown-ups, teaches them far more than just lying upstairs in bed.” She even suggested after-supper games of Scrabble to keep them up later still. Of course, it didn’t matter in the holidays, but it did make the children overtired and overexcited, made them question Debbie’s own rules and argue with her endlessly.

  And she just wished it could be her mother sometimes instead that they rushed to the phone to speak to, or begged to be allowed to stay with; but then her mother was a hopeless grandmother, always full of excuses about her arthritis and her husband’s blood pressure preventing her from having them to stay.

  “Debbie, it’s Flora,” she said now, her plummy voice brisk. “How are you?”

  “I’m very well,” said Debbie, feeling instantly wrong-footed; the children still hadn’t written their thank-you letters after their visit at Easter, and it was ten days since they had all got home. “How are you? Flora, I’m sorry the children haven’t—”

  Flora cut in. “I’m fine, thank you. Absolutely fine. I’d like to speak to Richard, please. Is he there?” There was a moment’s pause, then she said, “Oh, stupid of me, he must have left for school.”

  “Yes,” said Debbie, “yes, he has, I’m afraid. I’m sorry. You could try phoning at break, but they—”

  “No, no, it’s not that urgent. Perhaps you could ask him to ring me. What time does he get home? Around four, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Is it anything I can help with?” Which of course it wouldn’t be.

  “Oh—no, thank you. No, it’s fine. Thank you, Debbie. Such fun at Easter, wasn’t it?”

  “Wonderful,” said Debbie, “and like I said, I’m so—”

  But Flora had rung off.

  Sometimes, Debbie thought, making a face at the phone, she really did feel like the hired help.

  Chapter 2

  22 APRIL 1988, EVENING

  The thing to do was tell Nigel. Tell him she was going to have lunch with one of the traders at McArthur’s who had phoned that day at lunchtime and issued an invitation which she had found it impossible to refuse. Which had been rather silly of her: but she could say that Blue had helped with the Big Bang book and now he—he what? Wanted to know more about publishing? Not likely. Perhaps she’d better not tell Nigel at all. The best thing would be just to have the wretched lunch and that would be that. No, the best thing would be to cancel the lunch: not go. Or—

  “Lucinda, you’re not listening.”

  “Sorry, Nigel.”

  He had been as near as Nigel ever got to being cross—which was more like extremely irritable—about her opening the Lloyd’s letter. She wasn’t quite sure why. She supposed it was the contents. They had visibly rattled him.

  “It’s fine, of course,” he said, “we can afford it. In actual fact, it won’t cost us very much at all, I can write it off as a tax loss. It’s one of the joys of Lloyd’s. And given how much we’ve had out of them over the years, it’s—it’s fine.”

  “Oh, good. Well, that’s all right then.”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at him, as she ladled out the lasagna. “So why are you worried?”

  “I’m not worried. Not at all.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Well, it’s just that I’ve never known it happen before. I suppose it was inevitable, sooner or later, although one was rather led to believe that it never would.”

  “Really?” Could anything ever be that safe? Surely the whole thing about any money-making enterprise was that sometimes you did come unstuck. Otherwise everybody would be extremely rich. “But surely they must have warned you it might?”

  “Well, they did,” he said irritably. “And of course it could happen in theory, but it never has, that’s the point. Well, not since the mid-sixties, anyway. They’re too clever, too ahead of the game.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Lucinda, please. I do know what I’m talking about.”

  She suddenly felt fiercely cross with him. “It seems,” she said, “that maybe you don’t. Surely nothing can be absolutely one hundred percent certain. It can’t be, you can’t just know that you’re going to get x thousand pounds every year, no matter what happens.”

  “Lucinda, you really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said, stung. “Well, I don’t know anything about Lloyd’s, but I haven’t been listening to Daddy for years and years, talking about the stock mar
ket, without taking some of it in. You seem to think I’m a complete idiot. And how much is it anyway? Obviously enough to worry you, I can tell.”

  “I think we’d better stop this conversation,” he said. “It’s going in a direction I don’t really like very much. I’ve been a Name for more than fifteen years, and my father was for twenty years before that, and it’s served us very well indeed.”

  “But that’s the last thirty-five years or whatever. This is now. It seems to be changing.”

  “Lucinda, please. Can we stop this?”

  “I don’t see why. You started it. I mean, you started wanting to talk about it. And I really want to know what the problem is.”

  “There isn’t a problem. I’ve spoken to my Members’ Agent, and he assures me it’s a one-off. In fact he actually advised me to push my underwriting limit as high as I could for next year. There is absolutely—absolutely nothing to worry about.”

  “Well, good,” she said, after a brief silence. She raised her glass and smiled at him. “And here’s to next year’s cheque.”

  He clearly was having difficulty smiling back at her. And he hadn’t told her how much it was. It was definitely not the moment to tell him she was going out to lunch with another man. In fact, she’d better cancel it first thing in the morning.

  “Your mother phoned,” said Debbie, as soon as Richard came in. “She wants you to ring her.”

  “Oh. OK. Did she say what it was about?”

  “No. The summer, I expect.”

  “Right. I’ll just make myself a cup of tea and—want one?”

  “Please.”

  He disappeared into the study; she heard the phone on the extension click as he picked it up. Twenty minutes later she needed to call Sue at the NCT about cutlery for the evening; she picked it up. She could hear Richard’s voice.

  “Sorry,” she said, and put it down again. Twenty minutes was a long call, even for them.