An Absolute Scandal Read online

  “Yes, I do know that. I mean, we can afford it, obviously, it’s fine this year, but—”

  “But?”

  “I have a horrible feeling,” he said, “that this is only the beginning.”

  Chapter 3

  CHRISTMAS 1988

  “Oh my God. Oh, God. Oh—my—God!”

  She could hear herself shouting, she was somewhere outside herself, yet still there, inside it, inside the pleasure, the wonderful, soaring, bright, dark pleasure, riding it, savouring it, on and on, as long as she needed.

  And then it was over. Gently, sweetly over. She collapsed slowly, back into normality: her body, fractured by delight, easing together again.

  “Oh dear,” she said.

  “Why d’you say that?”

  “You know. I mean, oh dear, that was so lovely and now it’s over—our lovely little Christmas is over.”

  “Doesn’t have to be. I’m sure they’d let us keep this room over Christmas. They’re not fully booked, I asked.”

  “Blue, don’t be silly.”

  “I’m not being silly, I’m being sensible. Look, you got to do it sometime. Why not now? Then we could enjoy Christmas. I’m not looking forward to it either, round my mum’s with about a hundred kids.”

  “It sounds lovely to me,” she said wistfully.

  “Well, we could go there together instead. They’d be pleased to see you.”

  “I bet they wouldn’t!”

  “No, they probably wouldn’t,” he said cheerfully. “They’d feel they had to be on their best behaviour with a princess in their midst. No, much better stay here.”

  “Oh, how I’d love to,” she said, “how I’d love it. This lovely place and you, and—oh dear.”

  She looked round the room. He had booked it for just twenty-four hours, 22 December it was; in a charming hotel in the Cotswolds, full of wood fires and leather chairs and flouncy chintz blinds. She’d invented (for Nigel) a booksellers’ Christmas party that she’d had to go to; had left London very early in the morning and she and Blue had had a late breakfast, gone for a (very short) walk, come back and had champagne in bed and then a room-service lunch (smoked salmon and caviar) and then more champagne in bed and so much lovely sex. And now she had to go back to London (she probably wasn’t fit to drive, although she’d only had about three glasses altogether), collect Nigel and all the presents from the flat, and be driven down to his cousins in Norfolk for a very long cold Christmas.

  “Well,” said Blue, “like I said. You got to do it, Lucy girl. Go on, bite the bullet.”

  “I can’t. Not at Christmas. It would be too cruel. Christmas is special. It’s about family and being together, and—”

  “Yeah, well, why can’t we?”

  “Because we can’t. It would be very wrong.”

  “And what you’ve been doing so far is very right, is it? I don’t know, Lucy, seems to me you’ve got your morals in a twist.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’m totally awful.”

  “Not totally,” he said, and slithered down the bed, started lazily tonguing her.

  She tried to push him away, laughing. “Blue, no, no, oh God, Blue, no, I mean yes, yes…”

  Driving very slowly and carefully on the M40, she looked down on the black Chanel box with the white ribbon he had presented her, holding a diamond-studded watch on a pink strap, absurdly vulgar and beautiful, that she could hardly ever wear: she had said that, even as she kissed him over and over again. “You can wear it when you’re with me,” he said, kissing her back. “It can be your fucking watch, for telling the fucking time.”

  She wondered, as she was always doing these days, how she could possibly have become this dreadful, deceitful, totally amoral person. Who regularly had sex with her lover, who lied to her boss as well as her husband (she had an idea that Graham suspected what she was up to and was rather amused by it), who was actually now seriously beginning to contemplate leaving her husband for her lover.

  That had been quite a new thing, the contemplating; for several months she had just told herself she was having an affair, that it was terribly wrong of her, but at least Nigel had no idea, he wasn’t being hurt, rather the reverse since she was so naughtily, dreadfully happy and in consequence incredibly nice to him. The only person to be hurt would be her when she ended it, which she would, and she’d deserve it and it wasn’t for long anyway. She’d end it and go back to being a respectable wife and have a baby—only of course that was one of the worst things she was doing; she was taking the pill. Which she hadn’t for nearly two years, ever since she and Nigel had decided to try and have a baby. “Try” being the operative word; they certainly hadn’t succeeded.

  She’d gone to her doctor of course: who’d examined her, got her taking her temperature, making sure she was ovulating, all that sort of thing. So they’d just started stepping up their efforts, as Nigel called it, at the right time, still unsuccessfully, when she’d met Blue. And after a shockingly short time, started to have an affair with Blue. And obviously, going back on the pill. She was so terrified of Nigel finding them that she kept them in the office.

  She still wasn’t sure how Blue had done it: persuaded her into bed. She’d had that first lunch, and it had been totally respectable really; they’d gone to Claridge’s, “Thought I’d better bring you somewhere you’d feel at home,” and afterwards he had kissed her in the taxi, but not too much, and she’d told him it had been lovely, but she couldn’t possibly have lunch with him again, and he’d said bollocks, course she could, and somehow very weakly, she’d agreed to just one more. Well, it was so exciting and it made her feel so different, sort of sleek and confident and properly grown-up, and surely everyone should have one fling in their lives; in no time now she’d be living in the country with a small baby, and as flings went, two lunches weren’t that serious, and she’d been absolutely resolved it would be the last.

  Only he’d spent the next lunch—at the Dorchester this time—doing the most disturbing things to her legs under the table, and she’d been positively squirming with pleasure, and so she’d agreed to yet another lunch; and then the night before, she and Nigel had had a row, quite a bad one, about not going skiing, again, and she’d been really cross with him and she’d told Blue about it. “He doesn’t like skiing, you see. And I love it. And he’ll never ever agree to go. It’s not fair, I go on his beastly shooting weekends, which I really don’t like and—”

  “How old is he, your old man?” said Blue suddenly.

  “Oh—he’s forty-four next year. Blue, please don’t do that”—one of his hands was under the table, moving relentlessly and determinedly up her thigh—“but I do sometimes feel it’s all give on my part and no take.”

  “Sounds like it,” he said. “Lucy, why haven’t you had no kids? I’d have thought it high on the agenda, specially hubby getting on a bit.”

  “We just haven’t,” she said, blushing. “It hasn’t—well, it hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Oh right.”

  “Blue, please,” she said, for his fingers had now moved into her knickers. “Please don’t, we’ll get thrown out.”

  “No, we won’t,” he said, “but maybe we should move upstairs.”

  “Upstairs? What do you mean?”

  “I got a room up there,” he said. “Booked it.”

  “What for?” she said, shocked.

  “What do you think?” he said, giving her his widest grin. “For us. For us to have sex in, to be precise.”

  “I don’t believe you. They wouldn’t let you book a room here for—for just the afternoon.”

  “I didn’t—I booked it for twenty-four hours. Don’t look scared, you don’t have to stay the full time. Come on, finish your fish. It’s good for you. Then I tell you what, we’ll go up there, just have coffee and a brandy, and I swear I won’t do anything you don’t want. How’s that? Your call, you know you can trust me.”

  For some reason—curiosity, a desire to appear sophisticated—sh
e did; and discovered that she couldn’t even trust herself.

  “You never come before?” he said, as she lay, wide-eyed, wild-haired, sweating, almost shocked, after her baptism into pleasure, and, “Yes, of course,” she’d said indignantly; but she hadn’t. She absolutely hadn’t. What she had known with Nigel—compared to this—was like, well, it was like pedalling earnestly uphill rather than flying down, with the wind in her hair, like—

  “I don’t know what you’re thinking about,” he said, grinning at her, “but I could tell you liked it. Am I right or am I right?”

  “You’re right,” she said feebly. And grinned back.

  So of course she’d had to go on the pill; because obviously it was going to go on for a bit. And when it was over, as it absolutely would be, she would come off it again. She would just have this quick, wicked fling and then…

  Only she had to go and fall in love with him. And he with her.

  She really did love him; she loved everything about him and she could see that what she felt for Nigel wasn’t love at all. It was fondness, a desire to be settled, a recognition that Nigel was exactly the sort of man with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life. What she felt for Blue was wild, uncomfortable, disturbing, exhilarating—and absolutely wonderful. And it wasn’t just sex; he made her laugh, and he made her feel more confident. He clearly and genuinely found her interesting, he was always asking her opinion on all sorts of things, and listened carefully to her answers—unlike Nigel, who only seemed to ask her out of politeness. Blue was a rabid Tory, found her watery liberalism extremely amusing—and he was fascinated by her job, the people she met, the books Peter Harrison published. “I’m totally uneducated,” he was always saying. “Don’t know nothing. You know what Princess Diana said, about having a brain the size of a pea? Mine’s a petit pois.”

  She had laughed at that and told him it was rubbish; and it was true. He might only have two O levels, might have left school at sixteen, but his brain was like a razor—quick, considering, uncompromising. Given an education, she told him, he could have been a professor. “No thanks. They don’t make half a million a year, professors don’t. Least, not when I was last looking.”

  “Do you really make half a million a year?” she’d said awed, and he’d said well maybe this year only a third, due to the crash, but usually, with the bonuses added in, yes, easy.

  She in turn was fascinated by his work: he had told her only that he played what he called “racing demon” with the stock market every day; he bought and sold shares, and got paid a commission. “I work solo, in a manner of speaking. The bank just backs me. I make a lot of money for them, and a fair bit for me.”

  “And—I thought you all got sacked after the crash?”

  “Some did. If you was making enough money, they kept you on. I make them a lot of money. And you know something, Lucy? For every loser there’s a winner—that’s my philosophy. And so far I’ve lived up to it.”

  He certainly seemed to have limitless money. He had a small house in one of the new developments near Limehouse, with pale polished wooden floors and a lot of leather-and-chrome furniture; he had a Ferrari, he went off on skiing weekends to the French Alps, and he had a Windsurfer and a Jet Ski, which he kept down at Poole, and “one leg of a racehorse,” the other three being held by colleagues in the trading room. He had a roomful of incredibly expensive designer-label clothes of which he was absurdly proud: “Got this at Gucci on Saturday,” he would say, doing a fancy pose in a leather coat, “and d’you like this suit, Armani, bought it twice, once in black, once in navy.” He spent a fortune on drink, he and his fellow traders; where their manual-labourer or market stallholder fathers would go to the pub after work, the sons went to places like Corney and Barrow or the Colony Wine Bar and got through countless bottles of champagne and then bought hundreds of pounds’ worth of wine to consume over their dinners as well. Lucinda, raised in a culture that considered the overt display of wealth not only vulgar but close to immoral, was fascinated by the whole thing.

  But Blue wasn’t just clever and successful, he was sweet-natured and thoughtful and insanely generous. And he loved her.

  It had never occurred to her that he might be genuinely fond of her, until one early evening, when they had gone back to his apartment and were lying in his vast bed sipping champagne. They had just had some rather good sex and she was tired and a little sad, bracing herself to return to Cadogan Square and Nigel, when he suddenly said, “You know what, Lucy?” And, “No,” she had said, “I don’t,” and he said, “I love you more every time I see you. Wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but there you go.”

  She had been so shocked that she’d dropped her glass and the champagne went all over the bed.

  “You love me?” she said.

  “Yeah, course I do. Come on, Lucy! You must’ve realised that. Why d’you think I’ve been doing all this, taking me annual holiday in days off, missing out on trades—I love you more than I’d ever believed I could. Well, I hope you love me. I’ve been wasting me time otherwise. And quite a bit of money as well.”

  And, “Yes,” she said, bursting into sudden, sweet tears, “yes, I suppose I do. I hadn’t realised—yes, I must do.”

  And now, a couple of months later, being married to Nigel was beginning to seem rather pointless. Whether she had the courage though to give it all up—and it would mean all: friends, family, job possibly—she really didn’t know. She’d think about it properly after Christmas.

  Elizabeth always cursed having to spend Christmas in the country: it had begun eight years earlier when Simon had bought Chadwick House, on the strength of a spectacular bonus, and had said that it was made for Christmas, with its huge fireplaces for hanging stockings, a great big hall for a really show-offy tree, and a hedge-lined drive that was made for stringing fairy lights along, and—just about everything really.

  It was a beautiful house, redbrick, early seventeenth century, with an orchard and a walled vegetable garden. There was a tennis court and a swimming pool, and a stable block and paddock to house the love of Tilly’s life, which at that time was a sturdy little New Forest Pony and now was a beautiful bright bay gelding called Golden Boy.

  It was tucked into the South Downs, and convenient for Bosham where Simon kept his favourite toy—his sailing boat, a Contessa called the Lizzie. Chadwick House was a huge extravagance, as not only a housekeeper but a gardener-cum-groom had to be employed to look after it. Simon was very fond of telling people they went there every weekend, but they didn’t, especially now Tilly was at boarding school, but they all moved down there for the whole of the summer holidays—Simon and Elizabeth commuting—and for Christmas as well. And sometimes even Easter.

  And Elizabeth did like it and enjoyed it; especially the summer; loved giving big garden parties and barbecues, and having friends to stay. But Christmas was different: and however magical it was, it did mean, for her, doing everything twice.

  The house in London had to be decorated, you couldn’t live in a house through December and give a party in it, as they always did, without making it look festive, having a tree, all that sort of thing. Then on about the twenty-third, the cars had to be packed up with all the food and presents and crackers and driven sixty miles down the road to Sussex, where she had to set about transforming Chadwick House into something out of Dickens.

  However much Elizabeth said every year that they would arrive for lunch, they never managed to drive away from London until after two, and so they got there as dusk was falling, and while Simon and Mr. Ford got the tree up, and Toby and Annabel strung the lights along the hedges, and Tilly had a rapturous reunion with Boy, Elizabeth unpacked the endless clothes and presents and food and wine, and tried to enjoy it too. And by the time they had eaten their first dinner, in the kitchen, in the glorious bone-warming glow of the Aga and had their first Christmas bottle of champagne, she did.

  It made Christmas much more special, giving it its own setting, as it were
. And there were all the lovely traditions—midnight service in the village church, the long tramp over the fields on Christmas Day, carol singing on the green, the Boxing Day meet. And this Christmas especially she felt it was wonderful to get away. It hadn’t been exactly an easy year…

  It was well known that advertising was the first budget to be cut when a company was feeling the pinch: and there was a lot of pinching going on. The economic climate was not good, whatever smooth story was being put out by Nigel Lawson. But with an agency the size of H2O you could afford to lose a bit. Just the same, everyone was on edge, every account review carrying an implied threat, and everyone told to economise where they could. Even the Christmas party had been a more modest affair than usual, held in the office rather than at their “local,” as Peter Hargreaves, their very hands-on chairman, called the Ritz. “I think there are better things to spend twenty grand on than that. Especially since after an hour or so nobody can remember where they are.”

  And she really felt she was beginning to recover from what she had managed to think of as the other business. Painful and humiliating, far more than she would have imagined. But—she’d survived it. Hadn’t she?

  Thank God Christmas was over, Annabel thought; it was the first one she hadn’t properly enjoyed, which seemed a bit sad, really. Her father was edgy, and kept on and on about money, it was so boring; their mother had been hyper-bossy and control-freaky—if you didn’t want to play games, for God’s sake, why should you, it was everyone’s Christmas, not just hers—and even Toby had been kicking the furniture a bit. Only Tilly had been really happy, earnestly practising her jumping and her dressage every day on her beloved Boy.

  She was just longing to see Dan. They’d had a long phone conversation on Christmas Eve, and another rather shorter one on Boxing Day, but that was about it. She was starved of him; she’d only seen him once since she’d got home from school as a matter of fact, and then only for an hour. She wanted to see him properly: all of him. She wanted to be in bed with him.