‘There’s no point.’
‘The things you said ...’ Almost exalted, she took hold of his chin and wrenched his face around, forcing him to meet her gaze. ‘They were true?’
‘You should have told me who you were.’
‘But this is who I am.’ She held out begging arms. ‘The same person I was yesterday ...’
‘You don’t understand. I fell in love with someone and now I find she’s someone else. I’m not blaming you Suze - Sylvie -’
‘Don’t call me that!’
‘But I feel completely thrown. You know my situation. I’ve nothing. Well, nothing compared to the Gamelins -’
‘Oh God ...’ Suhami cried out, jerking back her head as if from a blow. ‘Am I going to have this all my life? Gamelin Gamelin Gamelin ... I hate the word. I’d carve it out of myself with a knife if I could - I’d burn it out. Do you know what it means to me? Coldness, rejection, lack of love. You’ve never met my parents but I tell you they are hateful. All they care about is money. Making it, spending it. They eat and breathe and dream and live money. Their house is disgusting. My father is a monstrous man, my mother an overdressed dummy kept going by pills and drink. Yes! my name is Sylvia Gamelin and it’ll be the bloody death of me ...’ And she burst into a torrent of abandoned weeping.
Christopher seemed for a moment unable to speak. Then he stepped forward and folded her into his arms. After a long while he dried her tears, saying: ‘You must never, ever cry like that again.’
Chapter 2
Guy and Felicity Gamelin were in the doorway of their much-photographed town house near Eaton Square. The door, blinding pillar-box red, stood open beneath the Georgian fanlight. Smart bay lollipops grew in tubs on the black and white tiled step.
Guy and Felicity were saying goodbye. That is to say, Felicity was murmuring vexedly at the sight of her reflection in the writhing tangle of Mexican glass that was the hall mirror, whilst Guy fluently cursed Furneaux - at that moment stuck in a traffic jam in Chester Row. Neither addressed the other. Anything of import had long since been said. Or shouted, or shrieked and screamed. Now Felicity was careful, Guy indifferent. He had wondered once, on one of the rare occasions when he paid her any mind, why she bothered to go through this air-kissing, hand-waving ritual every morning, never thinking that his departure might be the one certain moment of satisfaction in a treacherous and hazard-ridden day.
Felicity shook out her silvery-tipped apricot mane and briefly imagined it netted in a Botticelli chignon of gold thread and pearls. Guy’s invective rose to fever pitch. He had a mind like a well-stocked cess pit and never minced his words, which were full of spite and filthily inventive. The car finally arrived and Furneaux, grey-capped and suited, stone deaf from choice, parked and got out to open the nearside door. Immediately a queue of hooting vehicles formed. Guy gave a ‘yah boo’ smirk and leaned on the Roller’s thickly padded door. It did not occur to him, thriving as he did in the narrow blank-eyed fastnesses of the city where respect was index-linked, that the queue might be under-impressed by the magnificence of his equipage. This tiny victory, the first of the day (for he had long since ceased to regard his wife as a foe of any merit), cheered Guy up considerably as he settled back into the ivory leather and lit the first of his forbidden Dom Perignons.
Left alone Felicity drifted into the drawing room. This time, these first few moments after her husband left, would decide the shape and flavour of the hours to come. And - she recalled his overnight case - the evening, too. She prayed for a good day. Not happiness, never that. Just a bland unfolding of ordered assignations hedged about with the usual conventions. Where ‘How are we Mrs Gamelin?’ and ‘Lovely to see you again’ were never spoken from the heart and so, thankfully, demanded no sincere response. She had all sorts of little dodges, fail-safe mechanisms to set her on the right path. Or at least keep her off the wrong one.
Charity lunches, private views, dress shows, tastings of exotic foods and fine wines. The invitations were always there. Come as you are and don’t forget your cheque book. Today was an auction of Russian icons and a yearling sale at Newmarket. Otherwise she might ring a gossipy acquaintance and ask questions about people in whom she had not the slightest interest. She would force brightness into her voice, and darkness out, like some effervescent actress/housewife in a washing commercial.
Her movements were becoming vague; a dangerous sign. Keeping busy, they had said at the clinic, was most important. By this she assumed they meant physically busy for her mind was never still. When she had first come home many people offered advice that frequently concluded with the words ‘Whatever happens you don’t want to go in there again.’ Felicity felt it impolite to disagree and could imagine the amazement had she told them the truth, which was that she had been as near to contentment in the hermetically sealed warmth and comfort to Sedgewick Place as she had been in her entire adult life.
Drugged at first, then gradually weaned into a more subtle dependence, each day had been one long highlight. Flowers would arrive followed by exquisitely arranged trays of delicious food. Smiling people bathed her, then combed her hair with slow languorous strokes. Doctors heard out her sorrows, and the cruelties of the outer world beat on the clinic walls in vain. Nothing was real. She felt like an imprisoned princess in a high and mysterious tower. The phenomenal cost had not even grazed the surface of her fortune.
They called it a nervous breakdown. A neat phrase explaining many antisocial actions - from bursting into tears at Harrods to clawing one’s face in a convulsion of self-loathing. She had done both and in the same day, too. A terrifying escalation of abandonment and despair. But that was all in the past. All in the past, Felicity.
She said her name aloud a lot. It helped to counteract the frequent sensation that she was constituted so vaguely as hardly to make a complete person at all. Artificially brisk, she strode down to the basement, her heavy cream satin robe slapping at her calves.
In the huge Italian-designed hi-tech kitchen, the smell of chocolate brioche hung melting on the air. Verboten if she was to stay size ten. Guy had eaten four. Weight looked good on a man.
He’d been lean and hungry when they’d first met; slinking round, low-bellied like a starving cur. All she’d had to do was crouch down, extend the palm of her soft white idle hand, show him the words ‘McFadden and Latymer’ and smile. In those days there’d been a quick lightness in the turn of his head and a neck-or-nothing set to his wide, slightly turned down lips. He’d reminded her of a handsome frog. A young Edward G. Robinson.
Felicity grabbed a still warm pastry and rammed it into her mouth, knuckling in the overhanging fragments, hurting her lips. She chewed and chewed and sucked and chewed, voraciously extracting all the buttery, chocolatey vanillary essence, then spat the pulp into the disposal unit and ground it away. Then she lit a cigarette and stared up through the basement bars at the sad pollarded plane trees. She pictured them growing straight and tall, tender leaves uncurling high above London’s muck and murk. All these poor things had were a few twigs sprouting from scaled over wounds. Someone walked by glancing down. Felicity dodged away and hurried upstairs.
Her bedroom was on the third level. She locked her door and sank, panting, on Guy’s bed as if she had been pursued. They still shared a room, whether out of cussedness or malevolence on his part she could never quite fathom. It was not a comfortable experience. Guy was restless, his face on the pillow usually expressing some extreme emotion. Sometimes he laughed in his sleep and Felicity was sure he was laughing at her. On his bedside table was a photograph of their daughter in a mother-of-pearl frame. Felicity never looked at it. She knew it by heart. Or would have done if she had a heart to know it by. This melodramatic reflection made her eyes sting with self-pity and she screwed them up tight.