‘You’re early.’
Paula greeted William in the long hall of their Park Avenue apartment building with a kiss on the cheek, but her tone was less than warm. William tried to hide his annoyance as he glanced at the decorative striking clock behind him. It was five fifteen. He had made a special effort to get home before six and felt hurt that his wife had not appreciated the gesture.
‘Am I not allowed to come home early every now and then to spend time with my girls?’ he began, but was instantly interrupted.
‘Daddy!’
Casey and Amelia ran to their father, their white Dior socks skidding on the highly polished walnut floors. They grabbed his legs while he kissed them on the top of their heads; then he scooped them up into his arms.
‘Come and tell Daddy all about your new class,’ he laughed.
‘It’s nice,’ said Casey, wriggling free and skipping back down the hall.
‘Nice?’
Paula rolled her eyes. She made the girls read two items in the New York Times every morning and discuss them. Amelia always seemed out of her depth, much preferring the pretty pictures in the fashion reports, but she expected more of Casey than to describe her new class as nice.
‘No play-date this afternoon?’ William asked, setting Amelia down and walking through into the living room. It was a beautiful space, recently redesigned in the style of a boutique English country hotel. Antlers on the wall hung alongside Diane Arbus pictures on the Colefax and Fowler wallpaper. David Linley had designed the two bookcases that flanked the limestone fireplace and the whole space was softly lit and smelt of Diptyque figuier candles that Paula had shipped over in bulk from the company’s Left Bank store.
‘Mrs Wong is coming round for Mandarin class,’ said Paula, fluttering her hand in the air to summon Louise, their Australian nanny.
‘Louise, can you take the girls? They are still in their uniforms.’
‘How’s Casey been? She seems quieter than usual,’ asked William, sitting down on the velvet George Smith sofa and slipping off his brogues, rubbing his tired feet with his fingers.
‘She’s exhausted, poor thing,’ said Paula, perching on the very edge of the chair opposite her husband.
‘I guess having to make a whole new set of friends is going to be taxing when you are six.’
‘Well, there is another new girl just starting too,’ said Paula. ‘So hopefully they’ll bond. You know that Casey is very sociable.’
William crumpled his brow. ‘I just don’t see what was wrong with the girls being in the same class?’
Paula stood up and began smoothing fluff from the back of her chair.
‘Darling, Mrs Wong is due round any minute,’ she said, looking with disapproval at William’s bare feet. ‘If you want to lounge around, why don’t you go into the den?’
‘So we’re doing this Mandarin business,’ said William, ignoring her. ‘Mandarin.’
Paula lowered her voice. ‘I’m not sure Amelia is up to it, but Casey has such a way with languages that I thought the sooner the better.’
‘My question is whether they should be doing it at all,’ said William. ‘The homework load from Eton is already quite large.’
Paula opened her eyes in outrage. ‘Are you saying you don’t want to stretch your children?’
‘Paula, I’m saying that the girls are six.’
She looked away from him, angry at his questioning. The girls attending Eton Manor was already a compromise. For some reason, William had got it into his head that the girls might be happier attending Steiner schools. And how was that going to get them into an Ivy League college, playing with wood and knitting blankets until they were fifteen? She couldn’t understand her husband sometimes. What did happiness have to do with an education? Okay, so she loved Amelia, for all her faults, and she felt that one day she would model and marry well. But Casey, she had the potential to be brilliant. You only had to look at Ivanka Trump. A model, a socialite, and a Wharton Business School graduate to boot. Surely William could see the parallels in his own family? Brooke, of course, was beautiful. People fawned over her for her astonishing doe-eyed looks, yet it was Liz who seemed to generate a quieter, more genuine respect in the serious media outlets. You only had to talk to Liz for a few seconds to see her fierce intelligence, her knowledge of books, of literature, of wine. Of course, the ideal was to be both smart and beautiful, and Casey had that promise. One day, she might even take over Asgill Cosmetics, make something of it, then marry into the highest circles – possibly royalty. Why not, when Paula was doing her utmost to give her the tools for the job? For a second she felt annoyed that her efforts weren’t appreciated. Unlike most mothers on the circuit, Paula put in time with her children. She only had one nanny for the two girls. She took them to swimming lessons and ballet and art class at the Ninety-Second Street Y herself. Mrs Fortescue, a Juilliard-trained piano instructor, came by the house and Paula supervised the lesson, and when Paula didn’t have her one-on-one Pilates instruction, she took the girls to school. Once, when she had found Louise their nanny in the kitchen, crying over some boy, she had sat down with her, and Louise had told her that she was the most hands-on mother in all the Upper East Side. As if reading her thoughts, William stood up and came over to his wife, wrapping her in his big arms.
‘I know how much you do for the family, for the girls,’ he said. ‘I just don’t think we have to try quite so hard. If Amelia isn’t fluent in Mandarin by the time she’s ten, what does it matter? If she doesn’t turn out to be academic, what does it matter?’
‘I just want the best for them.’
She looked down at a photograph of the twins on the coffee table. It was beautiful. Shot at Christmas by a photographer who worked for Vogue Bambini. She did, she only ever thought of them. William felt her tension and held her tighter. At that moment, Paula sensed that he did understand and it almost made her shiver. She had never told William the whole truth of her past. He would never know how a ten-year-old Paula, in bed at night, would cover her ears to the sound of her mother having sex with men from the bar and later … well, she had tried to shut that out completely. But William still knew enough. He knew about her childhood in a trailer park. He knew how her mother had died of MS when Paula was barely nineteen and how she had turned to modelling as her way out of poverty. He knew all these things, and yet he still loved her, not less, probably more. It was just one of the reasons she had never left him, never tried to work her way up the social ladder by judicious marriages. Breathing deeply, she allowed herself to settle into his arms, smelling the crispness of the cotton and reminding herself, how, in her own way, she loved him too.
‘Look. I’ve got something to tell you,’ said William finally.
She pulled away from the embrace and looked at him nervously. ‘What is it?’
‘I’ve made an appointment with Dr Flasco. Right now he’s the best fertility specialist in America.’
‘Oh William, we don’t need a fertility specialist,’ she said flatly.
‘Honey, we’ve been trying for nearly eighteen months and nothing.’
Paula looked away. ‘We haven’t exactly been trying that hard.’
‘Well, that wasn’t for lack of me trying,’ he said with a laugh.
She glanced back at him, wondering if he was making a point, telling her that he knew. No, that was not William’s style, although, should he choose to complain, she really couldn’t have blamed him; their sex life had dwindled to almost nothing and, when they did have sex, Paula wasn’t exactly enthusiastic. She didn’t want to encourage him. Of course, there was little chance of her falling pregnant because of her hormone injections, but her doctor had warned her that she should not take them for longer than eighteen months – a period that was drawing to a close. What would she do then? She took a breath to compose herself.
‘We’ve had this conversation time and time again, darling. I wanted a gap between the twins and the next one.’
‘The twins are six, Paula. Do you want them to be starting college before we try again?’
She flashed a look at him. ‘Don’t push it, William.’
The smile fell from his face and she felt a stab of guilt. The poor guy didn’t know the full story, how could he?
‘It’s fine for you,’ she said quietly. ‘You don’t have to go through the pregnancy, the nine months of worry, terrified that there will be something wrong, worrying when they kick, worrying when they don’t. And it only gets worse when they are born.’
‘But honey—’ he began, but she cut him off, snatching the photograph up from the table and showing it to him.
‘Look at them!’ she interrupted. ‘The twins are beautiful, precious; we have two beautiful girls. You hear so many horrible stories. Birth defects. What if something awful happened …’
She felt sick just thinking about it. She knew she fretted more than she should about her girls and that her concerns were bordering on neuroses. How many times when they were small did she creep into the nursery to check they were breathing, putting her fingers underneath their nostril to feel their reassuring warm breath? She did not want to go through it all again. She couldn’t.
‘Honey, I know you are just being a good mother, but you are being a little dramatic.’
Her husband put his hand in his jacket pocket and pulled out an envelope, throwing it onto the table between them.
‘What’s that?’ asked Paula.
‘A weekend at The Point. This weekend.’
She gave a weak smile. The beautiful Adirondacks resort, one of the most exclusive hotels in America, was where he had taken Paula for their first weekend together. She thought back to how she had reeled him in: she had played it perfectly, using all the tricks in a woman’s arsenal. Not answering his phone calls, being elusive when it came to pinning down dates, not having sex for the first three months. William was an uncomplicated man, but he was a man, and she knew that he had loved the chase.
‘I’ve arranged for the girls to stay with my mother,’ said William with a soft smile. ‘Louise will go too of course.’
Drawing close to her husband, she kissed him lightly on the cheek.
‘Thank you, darling, it will be wonderful,’ she whispered, thinking – no, swearing – that there was not a chance in hell that she would become pregnant again, however many romantic mini-breaks William arranged. If she had to keep taking the contraceptive injections beyond the recommended limit, then so be it. Whatever it took, she was never going back there. Never.