London, 1953–7
JULIAN MORELL HAD just banked his first million (having floated his company on the stock exchange a year earlier), when he met Eliza Grahame Black.
He was then thirty-three years old, and besides being extremely rich and hugely successful, was acknowledged one of the most charming and desirable men in London. Eliza was seventeen, and acknowledged the most beautiful and witty debutante of her year. Julian needed a wife, and Eliza needed a fortune. It was a case of natural selection.
Julian needed a wife for many reasons. He was beginning to find that having mistresses, whether short or long-term, married or single, was time-consuming and demeaning; he wanted to establish himself in a home and a household of his own; he wanted a decorative and agreeable companion; he wanted a hostess; he wanted an heir. What he was not too concerned about was love.
Eliza needed a fortune because everything in life she craved for was expensive and she had no money of her own. Being a conventionally raised upper-class girl of the fifties, she was anticipating earning it in the only way she knew how: by marrying a rich (and preferably personable) man. She was not too concerned about love either.
Eliza’s father, Sir Nigel Grahame Black, was a farmer; he had five hundred acres in Wiltshire and a modest private income, one of his sons was training to be a doctor and the other a lawyer. Eliza came a long way down on the list of demands on his purse, and indeed financing her London season had been largely made possible by her godmother, Lady Ethne Powers, an erstwhile girlfriend of Sir Nigel, who had looked at the potential for investment in her charge (sixteen years old, slender, silvery haired and fine featured, with pretty manners and huge sense of fun) and handed him a cheque for a thousand pounds along with a cup of tea and a cucumber sandwich in her garden the previous September. ‘Give that child a really good Season and she’ll be off your hands by this time next year,’ she said.
She was right. Dressed charmingly, in clothes made for her by Ethne’s dressmaker, Eliza danced, chattered and charmed her way through the Season, and found her way into every society column, every important party and dance. She adored it all; she felt she had gone straight to Heaven. She was a huge success with the young men she met; but then that had been something of a foregone conclusion. What surprised everybody, not least Eliza herself, was that she also got on extremely well with the other girls, and even succeeded in charming their mothers, something of an achievement given the fact that she was considerably prettier and more amusing than a great many of their daughters.
This had a lot to do with the fact that she was simply not in the least spoilt. She might have been the youngest in her family, the only girl, and enchantingly pretty, but her mother put a high value on practical accomplishment and a low one on personal appearance; consequently Eliza found herself more sighed than exclaimed over, as her total lack of ability to cook, sew, pluck pheasants, grade eggs, hand rear lambs and indeed perform any of the basic countrywomen’s skills became increasingly apparent. She did not even ride particularly well; nobody looked more wonderful hunting, but it was noticeable that she was invariably near the back of the field. Such virtues as she possessed – her beauty, her wit, and a stylishness which was apparent when at the age of twelve she took to wearing her school hat tipped slightly forward on her head, and lengthening all her dirndl skirts in deference to M. Dior and his New Look – her family put no value on whatsoever.
Consequently, Eliza grew up with an interestingly low opinion of herself; she did not lack confidence exactly, she knew she looked nice, and that she had a talent to amuse, but she did not expect other people to admire or appreciate her; and when she suddenly found herself that year so much sought after, regarded as an ornament at a party, an asset at a dinner table, it seemed to her entirely surprising and unexpected, a kind of delightful mistake on everybody’s part, and it did not go to her head.
Everything to do with the Season enchanted her in that Coronation year, when the whole country was in party mood; day after dizzy day whirled past, she was drunk with it, she could not have enough.
Strangely, her presentation at Court was the least clear of her memories; it was a blur. She could remember the long long queue in the taxi in the Mall, being ushered into the palace, into the anteroom even, but she could never even recall what she wore, nor what Lady Powers wore; who sat next to her on the long wait, whether she talked, whether she giggled, whether she was nervous. She remembered the Queen, looking so very much smaller than she had expected in the throne room, and the Duke of Edinburgh trying not to look bored beside her; and she did always remember making her curtsy because she slightly overdid it, and sank just a little too low, and then it was hard to get up gracefully and she wobbled and was terrified she was going to fall over; but apart from that she could recall very little, apart from an achingly full bladder throughout the entire procedure. ‘Such a waste,’ she would often say to her friends, years later, ‘being in the presence of the Queen of England, and just longing for it to be over so I could go and have a pee.’
But other things she did remember with extraordinary clarity: Queen Charlotte’s Ball (The Harlot’s Ball as it was christened by the Debs’ Delights with what they considered huge wit). Henley, where she was photographed a dozen times for a dozen newspapers (‘Beautiful Eliza Grahame Black, one of the brightest stars of this year’s Season, arrived at Henley looking particularly appropriate in a white dress with an outsize sailor’s collar and a straw boater that rivalled those of her three escorts’, rambled the gushing diarist of the Daily Sketch). Ladies’ Day at Ascot, perhaps most exciting of all, where she picked three winners and found herself standing next to Princess Margaret and the dashing Billy Wallace in the Royal Enclosure, both of whom smiled most graciously at her. It was an enchanted time; she could do no wrong, it seemed, fortune smiled on her along with everybody else, and finally, in a last, magnificent gesture, tossed a seriously rich man into the guest list at her own dance.
Eliza’s dance was held in Wiltshire on the second Saturday in July; she wore what she and Ethne termed a proper frock – a shimmering, embroidered cream organza crinoline from Worth. She wore fresh cream and pink roses in her silvery hair, a pearl necklace given to her for her presentation by her grandmother, drop pearl earrings a gift from her godmother on the night of the dance. It was a lyrically perfect evening; the huge marquee was decorated with banks of white roses; there were two bands, one jazz, one swing; there was as much champagne as anyone could wish for, a superb supper served at midnight, breakfast at dawn; three papers sent photographers, there were several minor royals, and every one of the three hundred people invited arrived. ‘I do hope you realize this has cost me a fortune which I certainly don’t have,’ moaned Sir Nigel to Ethne, watching the interminable line of cars driving up and parking in the paddock beyond the house.
‘Oh, don’t be so dreary,’ said Ethne, ‘this is an investment, Nigel, and probably a much better one than that new strain of cattle you’ve just put yourself really in debt for. This evening is going to pay dividends. I don’t know how you can look at that daughter of yours and begrudge her a penny. She’s an enchantment, and you ought to be very proud of her instead of regarding her as some kind of useless millstone round your neck. Just look at her, did you ever see anything so lovely? Honestly, Nigel, she’ll make a brilliant marriage. Mark my words.’
At this moment, most remarkably and punctually on cue, Julian Morell arrived.
He was not in the habit of attending debutante dances, but his brother James and his wife, as near neighbours of the Grahame Blacks, had been asked to make up a party, and had hauled him out of London for the occasion.
He came reluctantly, not expecting for a moment that the evening would have any more to offer him at absolute best than some second-rate champagne and some modestly agreeable dancing partners; but he was fond of his brother, he had nothing else to do and besides he was running in a new car, a Mercedes convertible, and the long drive to Wiltshire would serve the purpose well.
Nevertheless, as he arrived he looked with some foreboding at the house and the marquee, wondering if it could actually offer him anything at all that he might actually want.
It could and it did; it offered him Eliza.
She stood out, at her party, like a star, a jewel; Julian took one look at her, laughing, dancing in the arms of a pale, aristocratic boy; and felt his heart, most unaccustomedly but unmistakably, in the way of the best clichés, lurch within him.
‘Who is that girl?’ he said to his brother who was settling the rest of the party at a table, ‘the one in cream, with the fair hair?’
‘That’s Eliza, you fool,’ said James, ‘this is her party. I thought you’d met her at our place. You’ve certainly met her parents, her father’s the local MFH, nice chap.’
‘No,’ said Julian, ‘no, I haven’t met her, I would remember her if I had.’
He sat down and watched Eliza for quite a long time, sipping what he noticed despite his misgivings was excellent champagne, studying her, savouring her, before he made his way over to Lady Powers who was engaged in much the same activity, standing on the edge of the dance floor, briefly unoccupied.
He had met her once or twice in London; he smiled at her now and took her hand, bowing over it just slightly.
‘Lady Powers. Good evening. Julian Morell. You played an excellent game of bridge against my mother once: too good, she never forgave you. How are you?’
Ethne Powers looked at Julian and recognized instantly the return on her investment.
‘She’s pretty, isn’t she, my goddaughter?’ she said after they had exchanged gossip, news of Letitia, of Julian’s company, of the recent flotation which Julian was charmed to discover she had read much about. ‘Would you like to meet her?’
‘Oh, I would,’ said Julian, his eyes dancing, knowing precisely what was going through Lady Powers’ mind, enjoying the game, ‘I would very much. And yes, she is extremely pretty. What a lovely dress. Is it Worth?’
‘Yes, it is,’ said Lady Powers. ‘What a very unusual man you are. How do you know about women’s dresses?’
‘Oh, I make it my business to,’ said Julian, and then (lest the remark should sound in some way coarse, unsuitable, too much of an alien world to this one), went smoothly on, ‘it suits her very well. Shall we catch her now, in between dances?’
Eliza was flushed and excited now. Two of the roses had fallen from her hair and been thrust into her bosom by some over-enthusiastic partner. She looked quite extraordinarily desirable, a curious mixture of hoyden and high-class virgin.
Lady Powers moved over towards her and raised her not inconsiderable voice. ‘Darling. Come over here, I want to introduce you to someone.’
Eliza looked up at Julian and knew she had, quite literally, met her match. He stood out, much as she herself did on that evening, as someone of outstanding physical attractiveness and style. He wore his white tie and tails, as he did everything, with a kind of careless grace; his face was tanned, his dark eyes, skimming over her unashamedly, brilliant and alive with pleasure. As he took her small hand in his she felt his energy, his unmistakable capacity for pleasure, somehow entering her; she met his gaze with frank, undisguised interest.
To her enchantment, after he had bowed briefly over her hand, said ‘Miss Grahame Black’ and smiled at her, he raised her hand to his lips and gave it the lightest, slightest kiss; something inside Eliza quivered, she felt awed and excited.
‘How strange, how sad,’ he said, ‘that we have never met before. Could you spare me a dance? Or would that be too much to hope for?’
‘Not quite too much, although not quite straight away,’ she said –bravely, for all she wanted was to fall into his arms and stay there for the rest of the night, and was fearful that he might not wait for her if she did not. ‘I’ve promised the next one and the one after that, but then it would be lovely.’
‘I shall wait,’ he said solemnly, ‘and perhaps your godmother will keep me company until then. If not, then I shall simply have to be lonely.’
‘Oh, fiddlesticks,’ said Lady Powers, ‘there’s not a woman in this room who wouldn’t like to dance with you. Who did you come with anyway?’
‘My brother, James, and his wife, Caroline. Oh, and the Hetheringtons and the Branksome Joneses. Caroline’s parents, the Reever Smiths.’
‘Good God,’ said Lady Powers. ‘How perfectly appalling for you. Perhaps you’d better stay with me. Come along, let’s find you a drink, and then you can give me a dance.’
‘That would be delightful.’
But for the rest of the night he danced with Eliza; she was a beautiful dancer, graceful and musical, with a taut suppressed energy that he felt augured well for her sexuality. She was tiny, he realized as he took her in his arms for the waltz; she stood well below his shoulder, it added to her child-likeness. But then she was only seventeen. It was a long long time since he had had anything to do with any woman as young; scarcely a woman either, certainly a virgin, he would have to tread with care.
Eliza was very much a virgin: she had been repeatedly kissed and occasionally fondled rather as if she was a puppy by the over-enthusiastic under-skilled boys she had met and danced with during her magical summer but that was as far as her sexual experience extended. She had spent her entire life in the company of women; her two brothers had never had any time for her, and although their friends had occasionally remarked on Eliza’s prettiness and her charm, had been very much discouraged from pursuing matters in any way.
The fondling boys had seemed to her mere accessories, to be worn rather like a hat or a necklace, to set her off to her best advantage, they had touched no chord of feeling of any kind. She had never met a man who had inspired the kind of all-consuming, hungry yearning that most girls – and particularly very innocent girls – fall prey to. She did not spend long hours imagining herself in the arms of anybody in particular, did not dream of any declaration of passionate and lifelong devotion, had not come across anybody at all who made her blush, stumble over her words, whose name made her start, whose image haunted her dreams. The only men she did daydream about were totally beyond reach (most notably Mr Frank Sinatra and Mr Gregory Peck), but she was emotionally, as well as physically, totally untouched and her fantasies were more to do with being discovered and starring in films with them than being crushed to their manly breasts and swept off to nights of passion.
She found, as did so many very young girls of her background, the thought of nights of passion intriguing but a trifle incomprehensible. Having grown up on a farm, she had no illusions about precisely what took place between the male and female animal, but she found it very difficult to equate that with pleasure and what might take place between her and one of the fumbling boys. The nearest she had ever come to a truly pleasant physical sensation was climbing the ropes at school; then, several times, she had experienced an explosion of pleasure so great she had found it hard to walk normally and casually when she got to the ground. She had asked her best friend if she knew what she was talking about and the best friend said no, so she had assumed there must be something odd about her, and (while continuing the climb the ropes rather too vigorously from time to time in pursuit of the pleasure), had kept quiet about it; it was only at a giggly girls’ lunch during her Season that someone had referred to a ‘real climbing up the ropes feeling’ and she had realized with a surge of relief that she was not a misfit and indeed possibly had much to look forward to at the hands of the fondlers. But it had not come. Yet.
Dancing with Julian that night, during the extraordinary series of emotions that shot through her, she thought briefly, and to her own surprise, of that conversation and realized that along with happiness, emotional confusion and excitement, and a strange sense that she was no longer in command of herself, certain unexpected and unfamiliar physical sensations were invading her as well. She smiled to herself at the thought, and Julian noticed.
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Oh,’ said Eliza lightly and with perfect truth, ‘school actually.’
‘How very unflattering. Here I am, dancing to the very best of my ability and trying to engage you in interesting conversation, and all you can think about is school. Did you like school, Miss Grahame Black?’
‘I loathed it.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Wycombe Abbey.’
‘Oh, well you would have done. I disapprove of boarding school for girls myself.’
‘So do I.’
‘Then,’ he said lightly, ‘our daughters will all go to day schools or stay at home with governesses. All right?’
‘Absolutely all right.’
It was a conversation she was often to remember in the years ahead.
Julian was completely unlike anyone Eliza had ever met. It was not just that he was so much older than she was; it was his clothes, his cars, his lifestyle, the things he talked about, the people he knew; and, perhaps most alien to her background and upbringing, the acute importance of money and the making of it in his life. He was obviously immeasurably richer than anyone she had ever met but that was less significant than the fact that he had made his money himself. Eliza had grown up in a society that did not talk about money; and that regarded the making of it in large quantities as something rather undesirable; it betrayed an adherence to a code of values and a set of necessities that found no place in upper-class rural life. Nevertheless he was not what her mother described (in a hushed voice) as a nouveau (had he not after all lived five miles away from her most of his life, been to Marlborough like so many of the fumblers, and ride to hounds and dress with impeccable taste?) So it was hard to define exactly what made him so exciting, gave him just the faintest aura of unsuitability. She only knew that getting to know him was like discovering some totally new, hitherto unimagined country. And she got to know him (as she thought) extremely well and very quickly. He simply never left her alone. At the end of her dance he had said goodbye, very correctly, with the most chaste of kisses on her forehead (much to her disappointment) and driven off to London; she watched the tail lights of the Mercedes disappearing into the darkness and fell into a desperate anxiety that she would never see him again. But he phoned her next morning, thanking her for a wonderful evening, and asking her to dinner on the Monday night.
‘I’d love to,’ she said, her heart soaring and singing above her hangover, ‘I – I shall probably be back in London with my godmother. At the Albany. Shall I give you the number?’
‘I have it,’ he said. ‘I made sure of it before I left.’
‘Oh,’ she said, smiling foolishly into the phone at this small, important piece of information, ‘well, then, perhaps you could ring me in the afternoon and arrange when to pick me up.’
‘I will,’ he said. ‘How are you this morning?’
‘I feel terrible,’ she said. ‘How about you?’
‘I feel wonderful,’ he said. ‘It was the best evening I can remember for a very long time.’
‘Oh, good.’ She could hear herself sounding gauche and uninteresting. ‘I enjoyed it too. Well, thank you for ringing. I’ll look forward to tomorrow.’
Julian took her out to dinner that first evening at the Connaught. Her godmother had taken her once, as she had to most of the best hotels and restaurants in London; she said it was important for any girl not to be unfamiliar with places she might be taken with men, particularly the more expensive ones, it put them at a disadvantage. But being at the Connaught with Julian was not too like being there with her godmother.
The Connaught, Julian had often thought, and indeed put the thought to the test, had been designed with seduction in mind. It was not just its quite ridiculous extravagance, the way it pampered and spoilt its customers even before they pushed through the swing doors; nor the peculiar blend of deference and friendliness shown by the staff to its more favourite customers; nor its spectacular elegance, nor that of its guests; not even the wonder of its menu, its restrained adventurousness, the treasures of its cellar, the precisely perfect timing of its service; it was the strange quality it had of being something, just a little, like a private house, it had an intimacy, a humanity. He had often tried to pinpoint the exact nature of that quality; as he got ready for dinner with Eliza, contemplating the undoubted pleasure to come, he realized suddenly what it was.
‘Carnal knowledge,’ he said to his reflection in the mirror, ‘that’s what the old place has.’ And he smiled at the thought of placing Eliza within it.
They talked, that night, for hours and hours. Or rather Eliza did. She forgot to eat (her sole went back to the kitchen virtually untouched, to the great distress of the chef, despite Julian’s repeated reassurances) and she hardly drank anything either. She had no need to; she was excited, relaxed, exhilarated all at once simply by being where she was, and the enchantment of being with someone who not only seemed to want to hear what she had to say but gave it serious consideration. Eliza was used to being dismissed, to having her views disregarded; Julian’s gift for listening, for easing the truth from women about themselves, was never more rapturously received – or so well rewarded.
He sat across the table from her, watching her, enjoying her, and enjoying the fact that he was disturbing her just a little, and he learnt all he needed to know about her and more.
He learnt that she was intelligent, but ill-read and worse informed; that she loved clothes, dancing and the cinema; that she hated the theatre and loathed concerts; that she liked women as much as men; that her parents had been strangely unsupportive and detached; that she had been curiously lonely for much of her childhood; that her beauty was a source of pleasure to her, but had not made her arrogant; that she was indeed utterly sexually inexperienced and at engaging pains to conceal the matter; and that she was a most intriguing blend of self-confident and self-deprecating, much given to claiming her incompetence and stupidity on a great many counts. It all added up to a most interesting and desirable commodity.
Eliza learnt little of him, by contrast; trained by her godmother to talk to men, to draw them out, she tried hard to make Julian tell her about his childhood, his experiences in the war, his early days with the company. She failed totally; he smiled at her, his most engaging, charming smile, and told her that his childhood had no doubt been much like her own, as they had been such near neighbours, that she would be dreadfully bored by the rather mundane details of how his company had been born, and that to someone as young as she was, the war must seem like history and he had no intention of turning himself into a historic figure.
Eliza found this perfectly acceptable; she was still child enough to be told what she should think, and be interested in, and if he was more interested in talking about her than about himself then that seemed to her to be a charming compliment. It did not occur to her that this aspect of her youth was, for Julian, one of her greatest assets. And she was a great deal older and wiser before she recognized it for the ruthless, deliberate isolation of her from his most personal self that it was.
What he did make her feel that night, and for many nights, was more interesting, more amusing and more worldly than she had ever imagined she could be; and more aware of herself, in an oddly potent way. She had always known she was pretty, that people liked to be with her; but that night she felt desirable and desired, for the very first time, and it was an exciting and delicious discovery. It wasn’t anything especially that Julian said, or even that he did; simply the way he looked at her, smiled at her, studied her, responded to her. And for the first time also, since she had been a very young child, she found herself thinking of, yearning for even, physical contact: to be touched, held, stroked, caressed.
Julian kissed her that night; not chastely on the forehead, but on the mouth; he had had great hopes of that mouth, so full, so soft, so sensual-seeming, and he was not disappointed. ‘You are,’ he told her gently as he drew back, more disturbed than he had expected to be, wondering precisely how long he would be able to defer her seduction, ‘most beautiful. Most lovely. I want to see you again and again.’
He did see her, again and again. Every morning he phoned her, wherever she was, either at home in Wiltshire or at Ethne’s flat in the Albany. If she was in London he insisted on her having lunch with him; he would spend hours over lunch, there was never any hurry, it seemed (or hardly ever); he would meet her at half past twelve, and there was always a bottle of Bollinger or Moët waiting by the table when she arrived, and he would sit listening to her, laughing with her, talking to her until well after three. In the evening he met her for drinks at seven, and then took her out to dinner and then to dance at nightclubs; she liked the Blue Angel best in Berkeley Square where Hutch sat at the piano and played whatever he was asked in his quiet, amused and amusing way, the classics of Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart, and the great songs of that year, ‘Cry Me a River’ and ‘Secret Love’; but Eliza often asked him to play her own favourite, ‘All the Things You Are’, and sat and gazed, drowned, in Julian’s brilliant dark eyes, and discovered for the first time the great truth of Mr Coward’s pronouncement about the potency of cheap music. They drank endless champagne and talked and talked, and laughed and danced until far far into the night on the small, crowded floor, in the peculiarly public privacy created by warmth and darkness and sexy music.
And every night Julian delivered Eliza home to her godmother and her bed, and drove back to Chelsea and his, after doing no more than kissing her and driving her to a torment of frustration and anxiety. He must, she knew, have great sexual experience; he could not possibly, she felt, be satisfied with mere kissing for very long, and yet the weeks went by and he demanded nothing more of her. Was she too young to be of sexual interest to him, she wondered; was she simply not attractive? Was he (most dreadful thought of all) merely spending so much time with her in the absence of anyone more interesting and exciting? She did not realize that these were precisely the things he intended her to think, to wonder, to fear; so that when the time had finally come for him to seduce her, she would be relieved, grateful, overwhelmed and his task would be easier, more rewarding, and emotionally heightened.
Meanwhile, almost without her realizing it, he aroused her appetite; he did not frighten her, or hurry her, he simply brought her to a fever of impatience and hunger, awakening in her feelings and sensations she had never dreamt herself capable of, and then, tenderly, gently, lovingly, left her be. And he had decided to marry her before he finally took her to bed.
There was much speculation about Julian’s engagement to the almost absurdly young Eliza Grahame Black. Why (London society wondered to itself, and particularly female London society) should a man of such urbanity, worldly knowledge, sexual sophistication, decide to marry a girl sixteen years younger than he was, almost young enough (as London society kept remarking) to be his daughter, with no more experience of life than the rather limited variety to be gained in the school dormitory and the debutante dance. She might be, indeed she was, extremely beautiful and very sweet, but the marriage of such a person to Julian Morell could only be compared to setting a novice rider astride a thoroughbred and sending it off down a three-mile straight: the horse would do precisely as it wished, and would not pause to give its rider the merest consideration. And perhaps (remarked London society, nodding wisely over a great many cocktails and luncheons and dinners), that was precisely the charm of the match.
The Grahame Blacks received Julian’s request for their daughter’s hand with extremely mixed feelings. Clearly it was a brilliant marriage, he could offer her the world and a little more; moreover he gave every sign of caring very much for her. Nevertheless, Mary had severe misgivings. She felt Eliza was to be led into a life for which she was not prepared and was ill suited; and although her perspective of Julian’s life was a little hazy, she was surprisingly correct.
Julian’s friends were all much older than Eliza, most of them had been married for years, and were embarking on the bored merry-go-round of adultery that occupies the moneyed classes through their middle years. They tended to regard her, therefore, as something of a nuisance, an interloper, who had deprived them of one of the more amusing members of their circle, and in whose presence their behaviour had to be somewhat modified.
They were not the sort of people Eliza had grown up with, friends of her parents, or even the more sophisticated friends of her godmother; they were, many of them, pleasure seekers, pursuing their quarry wherever they might find it: killing time, and boredom, skiing for weeks at a time in Klosters or Aspen Colorado, following the sun to the Caribbean and the Bahamas, racing at Longchamps, shopping in Paris, Milan and New York, educating their children in the international schools, and spending money with a steady, addictive compulsion. All this Eliza would have to learn: how to speak their language, share their concerns, master their accomplishments, and it would not be easy.
Also, once the first rapture of the relationship was over, Eliza would plainly have to learn to live with Julian’s other great love, his company; he was an acutely busy man, he travelled a great deal, and his head and to a degree his heart as well as his physical presence were frequently elsewhere. Eliza was very young and she did not have a great many of her own resources; her parents could see much boredom and loneliness in store for her.
There was also that other great hazard of the so-called brilliant marriage, the disagreeable spectre of inequality. It is all very well, as Mary Grahame Black pointed out to Lady Powers, catching a man vastly richer than yourself; but for the rest of your life, or at least until you are extremely well settled into it, you are forced to regard yourself (and certainly others will regard you thus) as fortunate, and worse than fortunate, inferior. Lady Powers pooh-poohed this (mainly because there was nothing else she could do) but she had to concede that it was an element in the affair, and that Eliza might find it difficult.
‘But then, every marriage has its problems. Many of them worse things than that. Suppose she was going to marry somebody very poor. Or dishonest. Or . . .’ she dredged her mind for the worst horrors she could find there, ‘common. The child is managing to hold her own brilliantly at the moment. She will cope. And she does look perfectly wonderful.’
This was true. Eliza did look perfectly wonderful. There was no other way to describe it. She didn’t just look beautiful and happy, she had developed a kind of gloss, a sleekness, a careless confidence. The reason was sex.
Eliza took to sex with an enthusiasm and a hunger that surprised even Julian.
‘I have something for you,’ he had said to her early one evening when he came to pick her up from the Albany. ‘Look. I hope you like it.’
He gave her a small box; inside it was a sapphire and diamond art deco ring that he had bought at Sotheby’s.
‘I thought it would suit you.’
‘Oh, Julian, it’s beautiful. I love it. I don’t deserve it.’
‘Yes, you do. But you can only have it on one condition.’
‘What?’
‘That you marry me.’
Eliza looked at him, very seriously. She had thought, even expected that he would ask her, even while she had been afraid that he would not, and the moment was too important, too serious to play silly games.
‘Of course I will marry you,’ she said, placing her hand in his in a gesture he found oddly touching. ‘I would adore to marry you. Thank you for asking me,’ she added, with the echo of the well-brought-up child she had so recently been, and then, even as he laughed at her, she said, with all the assurance of the sensual woman she had become, ‘but I want you to make love to me. Please. Soon. I don’t think I can wait very much longer.’
‘Not until we are married?’
‘Certainly not until we are married.’
‘I hope you realize this is what I should be saying to you, rather than you to me.’
‘Yes, of course I do. But I thought you probably wouldn’t.’
‘I have been trying not to.’
‘I know.’
‘But I wanted to. Desperately. As I hope you knew.’
‘Well, you can. I wish you would.’
‘Eliza.’
‘Yes?’
‘Will you come to bed with me? Very very soon?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, yes I will.’
She was ardent, tender, eager to learn, to please, to give, and most important to take. Where he had expected to find diffidence, he found impatience; instead of shyness, there was confidence, instead of reticence a glorious, greedy abandon.
‘Are you quite sure you haven’t ever done this before?’ said Julian, smiling, stroking her tiny breasts, kissing her nipples, smoothing back her silvery hair after she had most triumphantly come not once but three times. ‘Nicely reared young ladies aren’t supposed to be quite so successful straight away, you know, they need a little coaxing.’
‘It isn’t straight away,’ said Eliza, stretching herself with pleasure, ‘it’s the – let me see – the fourth time we’ve been to bed. And you’ve been coaxing me, haven’t you, for weeks and weeks.’
‘You noticed.’
‘Of course. Most of the time,’ she added truthfully, ‘I couldn’t notice anything else.’
He laughed. ‘You’re wonderful. Really, really wonderful. I’m a very lucky man. I mean it. And I adore you.’
‘Do you really?’
‘I really really do.’
They were to be married at Holy Trinity Brompton at Eliza’s own insistence; it nearly broke her mother’s heart not to have the wedding in the country, deeply grieved her father, and even Lady Powers was hard pressed to defend her, but Eliza was adamant; she had fallen in love with London and its society and nothing on earth, she said, was going to persuade her to drag her smart new friends down to the wilds of Wiltshire for a hick country wedding.
What was more she wanted a dress from Hartnell for her wedding and that was that; she wasn’t going to be married in a dress made by anybody less. Lady Powers told her first gently, then sharply that her father could hardly be expected to pay for such a dress, and Eliza had answered that she had no intention of her father paying for it, and that Julian was perfectly happy to do so.
‘I imagine your father will be very hurt,’ said Lady Powers. ‘I think you should talk to him about it.’
‘Oh, you do all fuss,’ cried Eliza irritably. ‘All right, I’ll tell him next weekend. I must go and get dressed now. Julian’s taking me to South Pacific tonight, we were just so lucky to get tickets.’
Sir Nigel was very hurt about the dress; and the location for the wedding; Eliza stormed upstairs after dinner, leaving Julian to salvage the situation as best he could.
‘I know you don’t like the idea of this London wedding, and I quite understand,’ he said, smiling at them gently over his brandy. ‘To be quite honest I’d rather be married in the country myself. But I’m afraid all this London business has gone to Eliza’s head, and I suppose we should humour her a little. After all it is her wedding day, and I very much hope she won’t be having another, so maybe we should put our own wishes aside. As for the dress, well I really would like to help in some way. I know how devilishly expensive everything is now, and the wedding itself is going to cost such a lot and you’ve been so good to me all this year; let me buy her her dress. It would be a way of saying thank you for everything; most of all for Eliza.’
The Grahame Blacks were more than a little mollified by this, and accepted reluctantly but gracefully; but Mary, lying awake that night thinking about Julian’s words, tried to analyse precisely what it was about them that had made her feel uneasy. It was nearly dawn before she succeeded, and then she did not feel she could share the knowledge: Julian had been talking about Eliza exactly as if he were her father and not in the least as if he was a man in love.
There was another person deeply affected by the prospective marriage, and that was Letitia.
Letitia was losing more than a son (and gaining a daughter was little compensation); she was losing her best friend, her life’s companion, her housemate, her escort. The only thing she was not losing was her business partner, and the thought of that, as she contemplated Eliza’s invasion of her life, was curiously comforting. She did not exactly feel sorry for herself, that was not her style, but she did have a sense of loss, and what she could only describe to herself as nostalgia. The playhouse would be hers now, to live her own life in, and that would have its advantages, to be sure; but the fun, the excitement, the closeness she and Julian had shared for five dizzy years was clearly about to be very much over.
She viewed the marriage with some foreboding; she found it hard to believe that Julian was in love with Eliza, she had never known him to be in love with anyone, and that he should suddenly discover the emotion within the arms of a seventeen-year child, however appealing, seemed highly unlikely. When she taxed him with it, he had looked at her with dark, blank eyes and said, ‘Mother, you said yourself it was time I got married. Don’t you remember? And you were absolutely right. I’m simply doing what you tell me, as usual.’
‘But not, I hope,’ said Letitia, refusing to rise to this irritating piece of bait, ‘to the first person who accepts you? She is very very young, Julian, and not greatly experienced.’
‘She is the first person who has accepted me,’ he said lightly, ‘but she is also the first person I have asked. I like her youth and I like her lack of experience. I find them refreshing and charming.’
‘Well, if that’s all you find them, all well and good,’ said Letitia.
‘What else would I find them?’
‘Oh, untroublesome. Malleable. Grateful perhaps.’
‘What an extraordinary remark,’ he said.
Letitia let the subject drop.
She did not exactly dislike Eliza, indeed she grew, in the end, quite fond of her; she admired her beauty, appreciated her style, and found the way she was quite clearly setting out to be A Good Wife oddly touching.
Eliza, rather unexpectedly, admired Letitia greatly, indeed had something approaching a schoolgirl crush on her. She thought she was wonderful in every possible way, and told Julian that when she was old (Julian was careful not to relay this particular bit of the conversation to Letitia) she hoped she would be exactly like her. Nevertheless, she was greatly in awe of her, and in her more realistic moments recognized that as mothers-in-law went, hers was more of a challenge than most.
Letitia was sympathetic to this; she could see precisely how daunting she would have been to any bride, but particularly someone as young and unworldly as Eliza, but the more she tried not to daunt, the more she was aware of seeming patronizing and irritating. She was also concerned that Eliza seemed not to have the slightest idea how important Julian’s company was to him, and what a vast and consuming element it was in his life; he had been neglecting it rather over the past three months, but she knew that would simply mean that when the honeymoon was over – literally – he would be more absorbed and occupied with it than ever. He was clearly not going to spell that out to a tender and ardent bride, but somebody had to, in the bride’s interest; Letitia decided to take the bull, or rather the heifer, by the horns, and confront Eliza with the various unpalatable truths, as she saw them.
She invited Eliza to lunch at First Street, a few weeks after the engagement was announced, ostensibly to discuss wedding plans; dresses, bridesmaids, music and flowers occupied them through the first course, but halfway through the compote she put down her spoon, picked up her glass and said, ‘Eliza, I wonder if you realize quite what you are marrying?’
Eliza, startled, put down her own spoon, looked nervously at Letitia and blushed. ‘I think I do,’ she said firmly. ‘I hope I do.’
‘Well, you see,’ said Letitia, equally firmly, ‘I’m afraid you don’t. You think you are about to become the wife of a rich man who will be giving some of his time and attention to his company, but most of it to you. I’m afraid it will be rather the other way round.’
Eliza’s chin went up; she was not easily frightened.
‘I don’t know quite what you mean,’ she said, ‘but of course I realize that Julian is a very busy man. That he has to work very hard.’
‘No,’ said Letitia, ‘he is not just a very busy man. He is an obsessed man. That company is everything – well, almost everything – to him. How much do you know about it, Eliza? About Morell’s? Tell me.’
She sounded and felt cross; anyone who could approach marriage to Julian without a very full grasp of his business seemed to her to be without a very full grasp of him; realizing that Julian had talked to Eliza even less about it than she had thought, she felt cross with him as well.
‘Quite a lot,’ said Eliza. ‘I know he’s built it up from nothing all by himself and that the cosmetic range is very successful and that he’s hoping to start selling it in New York soon.’
‘I see,’ said Letitia, not sure whether she was more irritated at hearing that Julian had built up the company all by himself, or that he was planning to go to New York, a piece of information he had not shared with her.
‘And do you know about any of the people who work for us?’
‘Well, I know there’s a wonderful chemist called Adam – Sarsted – is it?’
‘Yes,’ said Letitia. ‘Some of us are less impressed by his wonderfulness than others. Go on.’
‘And I met a clever woman called Mrs Johns. She frightened me a bit,’ she added, forgetting for a moment she was supposed to be presenting a cool grown-up front.
‘She frightens us all,’ said Letitia cheerfully, ‘not least your fiancé. Now then, Eliza, there’s a bit more about the company that you should understand. First that it is just about the most important thing in the world to Julian. It is mistress, wife and children, and you must never forget it.’
‘What about mother?’ said Eliza bravely.
‘No, not mother. Mother is part of it’ (Good shot, Eliza, she thought).
‘Which part?’
‘A very important part. The part that pays the bills.’
‘So what exactly do you do there?’
‘I’m the financial director, Eliza. I run the financial side of it. I decide how much we should invest, how much we should pay people, what we can afford to buy, what we can afford to spend. In the very beginning, there was only Julian and me. We’ve built it up together.’
‘So it’s not Julian’s company? It’s yours as well.’
‘Well, it is largely his. I have a share in it of course, and I know how important my role is. But the ideas, the input, the – what shall we say – inspiration, oh dear, that sounds very pretentious, doesn’t it? – are his. The company certainly wouldn’t have happened without him. But it wouldn’t have kept going without me either.’ She spoke with a certain pride, looked at Eliza a trifle challengingly. ‘We started it,’ she said, ‘on what capital we could rake together, and an overdraft. We worked very hard, terribly long hours. It was all great fun, but it was very very demanding and at times extremely worrying. Did Julian tell you none of this?’
Eliza shook her head.
‘I’m surprised. He usually can’t stop talking about it. There was just the three of us, then; Julian, who sold all the products, just the patent medicines, no cosmetics in those days, to the chemists, driving all over the country in his car; Jim Macdougall working on formulation; and me managing the money and keeping us from bankruptcy. Just. Susan joined us after the first year or so. She is a remarkable young woman, and Julian is deeply dependent on her.’
‘What – what do you mean?’ said Eliza in a small alien voice.
‘Oh, nothing that need trouble you,’ said Letitia briskly. ‘I don’t mean he’s in love with her.’ She was silent for a moment, remembering the point at which she had feared that very thing. ‘But she is part of the company, a crucial part, and therefore a crucial part of his life.’
‘What does she do?’ asked Eliza.
‘Oh, she runs the company. From an administrative point of view. Keeps us all in order. Everything under control. Julian made her a director last year. You didn’t know that either?’
Eliza shook her head miserably.
‘Well,’ said Letitia comfortingly, ‘he’s obviously been much too busy discussing your future to talk about his past. But anyway, Susan and I work together a great deal, as you can imagine. The financial side of the company and the administration are very intertwined. Obviously. So you see, the company is a huge part of my life, as well as Julian’s. I just wanted you to understand that, before you became part of the family.’ There, she thought, I wonder what she will make of all that.
‘Do you think,’ said Eliza, a trifle tremulously, ‘that I could get involved with the company too? Work there, I mean?’
‘Oh, my darling child,’ said Letitia, unsure whether she was more appalled at the notion, or at what Julian’s reaction would be, ‘I shouldn’t think so. Julian obviously doesn’t want you to have anything to do with it. Otherwise he’d have suggested it by now.’
‘I suppose then,’ said Eliza, in a rather flat sad voice, ‘that’s why he hasn’t told me anything about it all. To keep me well out of it. He probably thinks I’m too stupid.’
‘Eliza, I can assure you that Julian doesn’t consider you in the least stupid,’ said Letitia firmly. ‘Quite the reverse. I don’t quite know why he hasn’t told you more about the company, and I think you should ask him. But you can see how important it was that I should explain. Because when things are back on an even keel, and you are settled into a normal life together, you will find that Julian devotes a great deal of his time and attention to the company – a great deal – and I don’t want you to think it’s because he doesn’t love you, or doesn’t want to be with you.’
‘No,’ said Eliza, sounding very subdued. ‘No, but of course I might have done. So thank you for telling me. I’ll talk to Julian about it all anyway. I think I should. That was a delicious lunch, Mrs Morell, thank you very much.’
‘It was a pleasure. You can call me Letitia,’ said Letitia graciously. ‘Come again. I enjoy your company.’
She watched Eliza walking rather slowly up the street, wondering just what size of hornet’s nest she had stirred up.
It was quite a big one. Eliza had a row with Julian about what she saw as a conspiracy to keep her from a proper involvement with his company; Julian had a row with Letitia about what he saw as a piece of unwarranted interference; Lady Powers telephoned Letitia and gave her a piece of her mind for sending Eliza away seriously upset; Eliza had a fight with Lady Powers for interfering in her affairs. Out of it all, only Eliza emerged in a thoroughly creditable light. Julian appeared arrogant and dismissive; Letitia scheming and self-important; and Lady Powers overbearing and rude.
The worst thing about it all, as Eliza said in the middle of her heated exchange with her godmother, was that they all appeared to regard her as a child, somebody unable to think, act and worst of all, stand up for herself.
‘I am not a child, I am a woman, about to be married,’ she said. ‘I would be grateful if you would treat me as such.’
But it was one thing to say it, and another to confront, in the privacy of herself, the fact that she so patently appeared to everyone, most importantly the man who was about to be her husband, in such an insignificant light. It hurt her almost beyond endurance; in time she forgave them all, even Julian, but it changed her perception of him, however slightly, and she never quite trusted him again.
Susan Johns was not quite sure what she felt about Julian’s marriage; a range of emotions infiltrated her consciousness, none of them entirely pleasing. What she would most have liked to feel, what she knew would be most appropriate, would have been nothing at all, save a mild rather distant interest; the savage jealousy, the desire to impinge herself on Eliza’s consciousness, the scorn and disappointment at Julian’s choice of a wife, these were all undignified, unseemly and uncomfortable. He had told her over lunch one day; he had taken her to Simpson’s in the Strand, where he assured her she could eat a whole cow if she liked; over her second helping of trifle, finally unable to postpone the moment any longer, he had told her.
Susan pushed her bowl to one side, fixed him with her large, clear blue eyes and said, ‘What on earth do you want to do that for?’
Thrown, as always, by a direct question, he struggled visibly to find a route around it. ‘My dear Susan,’ he said, ‘what an inappropriate response to such romantic news. Are you going to tell me what it’s all about?’ He smiled at her carefully; she met his gaze coldly.
‘Don’t switch on your famous charm, please. It makes me uncomfortable. And I’m not hostile. Just – well, surprised I suppose.’
‘What by? I need a wife.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and there was a cold wall of scorn in her eyes. ‘Of course you do.’
‘Well?’
‘I just don’t happen to think that’s a very good reason for marrying someone.’
‘Susan, I’m not just marrying someone. I’m marrying someone who is very important to me. Someone I want to share my life with. Someone –’
‘Someone who’ll be good at the job?’
He looked at her, and for a moment she thought he was going to lose his temper. He suddenly smiled instead. It was the kind of unpredictability that made her go on, against all the evidence, setting a value on him.
‘Yes. If you like.’
‘Well, I hope you’ll be very happy,’ she said, scooping up what was left of her trifle.
‘You don’t sound very convinced.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because,’ she said, looking at him very directly, searching out what little she could read in his dark eyes, ‘you haven’t said anything at all about love.’
The house Julian bought for them was undoubtedly one of the most beautiful in London, one of the Nash terraces on the west side of the Regent’s Park, huge and spacious, with a great vaulted hall and staircase and a glorious drawing room filled with light that ran the entire width of the first floor and overlooked the park. Eliza discovered in herself a certain flair for interior design, albeit a trifle fussy for Julian’s taste, and instead of calling David Hicks into her house to style it, like most of their smart friends, she set to work herself, poring over magazines and books, roaming Harvey Nichols and Liberty and antique salerooms herself, choosing wallpapers and curtain fabrics, innovatory colour schemes and clever little quirks of decor (setting a tiny conservatory into the end of the dining room, placing a spiral staircase from the top landing up to the roof) that made the house original and charming without in any way damaging its style. The main bedroom above the drawing room was her special love; she shared with Julian a passion for the deco period and there was nothing in their room that wasn’t a very fine example of that style – a marvellous suite of bed, dressing table and wardrobe by Ruhlmann, in light rosewood, a pair of Tiffany lamps by the bed, a priceless collection of Chiparus figures on the fireplace; a set of original Erte drawings given to her by Letitia who had once met and charmed the great man; and a mass of enchanting details, cigarette boxes, ashtrays, jugs, vases, mirrors. The room was entirely white: walls, carpet, curtains, bedspread (‘Very virginal, my darling,’ said Julian, ‘how inappropriate’). It was a stage set, a background for an extraordinarily confident display of style and taste.
On the spacious half landings she created small areas furnished with sofas, small tables, books, pictures, sometimes a desk, all in different periods: thirties for the nursery floor, twenties for the bedroom floor, pure Regency for the one above the drawing room. And on the ground floor, to the left of the huge hall, she created her very own private sitting room that was a shrine to Victoriana; she made it dark, and almost claustrophobic, with William Morris wallpaper, a brass grate, small button-back chairs, embroidered footstools, sentimental paintings; she put jardinieres in it, filled with ferns and palms, a scrap screen, a brass-inlaid piano; she covered the fireplace with bric-a-brac, collected samplers, draped small tables with lace cloths, and in the window she hung a small bird cage in which two lovebirds sang. It was a flash of humour, of eccentricity, and a total contrast to the light and space and clarity of the rest of the house. Julian loathed it and refused to set foot inside it.
‘That’s all right, my darling,’ said Eliza lightly, ‘that room is for me anyway, it’s my parlour. Leave me be in it.’
‘For what?’
‘To entertain my lovers, of course; what else?’
Then she was very busy buying clothes for herself; she did not only go to the English designers and shops, but took herself to Paris twice a year to buy from the great names, from Dior, Patou, Fath, Balmain, Balenciaga. She was clever with clothes; she had a very definite almost stark taste, and a passion for white and beige. She could look just as wonderful in things from the ready to wear boutiques in Paris as well; her beauty was becoming less childlike, but she was slender, delicate, a joy to dress, a favourite customer.
Then there was the social life; she and Julian began to give parties that became legendary, and she discovered she had a talent as a hostess, mixing and matching likely and unlikely people brilliantly. Her dinner parties were famous, a heady blend of names, fine wine and food and scandalous talk; Eliza Morell, like her mother-in-law, had an ear and an eye for gossip and a wit to match it.
She developed an admittedly rather gossip-column-style interest in politics and a liking for politicians, and the gossip of Westminster as well as of London society. She preferred socialists to Tories, she found them more interesting and charismatic; and she was amused by their intellectual approach to socialism which seemed to her to have so extremely little to do with reality. She met Michael Foot and his wife Jill Craigie at a party and liked them very much; they were in turn rather charmed by her, and accepted her invitation to dinner. Through them she met some of the other leading socialists of the day: Crossman and Gaitskell and the dashing Anthony Wedgwood Benn. Julian found her interest in such men and matters intriguing, amusing even, but he couldn’t share it. He told her that all politicians were self-seeking and manipulative (‘I would have thought you would have much in common with them, my darling,’ Eliza had replied lightly); the company he sought and valued, apart from amusing and pretty women, were businessmen whose time and energies were directed fiercely, determinedly and tirelessly to the process of making money, building companies, creating empires. They seemed to him to be the real people concerned with reality; they did not theorize, they had no time to, they acted, they fought, and they won.
What he did not understand about Eliza’s interest in politics was that it was an area that, in their marriage, she could stake a claim in, something she could know about and enjoy that he did not. Letitia had been quite right, she did feel excluded, ostracized even, from the company, and she was often, before she made friends of her own, lonely, and worse than that, diminished. She tried to become involved, to make Julian discuss matters with her, take her on trips, but he discouraged her, first gently, then more vigorously: ‘The business is mine, Eliza my darling, my problem, my concern; yours is our home, and our life together, and in due course I hope, our family. I need a refuge from my work, and I want you to provide it; I really would not want you to be distracted from anything so important.’
‘But I feel shut out,’ said Eliza fretfully. ‘Your work is so important to you, I want to share it.’
Julian looked at her almost coldly. ‘Eliza, you couldn’t. It’s too complex, and it is not what I want from you. Now please, let us not have any more of this.’
And so she gave up.
She learnt very quickly too that she was not going to find very much true friendship from within Julian’s circle. The women were all ten years at least older than her, and although charming and outwardly friendly found very little to say to her; they were worlds of experience away from her, they found her lightweight, boring even, and although the Morells were very generously entertained as a couple and people flocked to their house and their parties, Eliza found herself excluded from the gossipy women’s lunches, the time-killing activities they all went in for – riding in the park, playing tennis, running various charity committees. She had two or three friends from her debutante days, and she saw them, and talked to them, but they had all married much younger men, who Julian had no time for and did not enjoy seeing at his dinner table, and so she kept the two elements in her life separate, and tried not to notice how lonely she often felt. But her political friends were a great comfort to her, she felt they proved to herself as well as to Julian that she was not simply an empty-headed foolish child, incapable of coherent thought; and she also found their company a great deal more amusing and stimulating than that of the businessmen and their wives, and the partying, globetrotting socialites that Julian chose to surround himself with.
By the time they had been married a year, Eliza was learning disillusionment. In many ways her life was still a fairy tale; she was rich, indulged, admired. But her loneliness, her sense of not belonging, went beyond their social life and even Julian’s addiction to his work. She felt excluded from him, from his most intimate self; looking back over their courtship, she could see that while he had listened to her endlessly, encouraged her to talk, showed a huge interest in everything to do with her, he rarely talked about himself. In the self-obsession of youth and love she had not noticed it at the time; six months into her marriage, she thought of little else. She would try to talk to him, to persuade him to communicate with her, to share his thoughts, his hopes, his anxieties; but she failed. He would chat to her, gossip even, talk about their friends, the house, the antique cars that were his new hobby, a trip they were planning; but from anything more personal, meaningful, he kept determinedly, almost forbiddingly silent. It first saddened, then enraged her; in time she learnt to live with it, but never to accept it. She felt he saw her as empty-headed, frivolous, stupid even, quite incapable of sharing his more serious concerns, and it was a hard thing to bear. In theory he was an ideal husband: he gave her everything she wanted, he was affectionate, he frequently told her she was playing her new role wonderfully well, commenting admiringly on her clothes, her decor, her talent for entertaining, her skill at running the household; and he continued to be a superb lover; if only, Eliza thought sadly, the rest of their life was as happy, as close, as complete, as the part that took place in their bedroom. Even that seemed to her to have its imperfections, its shortcomings; the long, charming, amusing conversations they had once had, when they had finished making love, were becoming shorter, less frequent; Julian would say he needed to sleep, that he had an early meeting, a demanding day’s hunting, that he was tired from a trip, and gently discourage her from talking.
She had nothing to complain about, she knew; many, most women would envy her; but she was not properly happy. She did not think Julian was having an affair with anybody else, although she sometimes thought that even if he did she could feel little more excluded, more shut out than she did already. But she did not feel loved, as she had expected, hoped to feel; petted, pampered, spoilt, but not loved, not cared for, and most importantly of all, not considered. It was not a very comfortable or comforting state of affairs.
She was surprisingly busy; as well as running the London house, she and Julian had also bought a house in West Sussex, Lower Marriotts Manor, a perfect, medium-sized Queen Anne house; it had fifteen bedrooms, a glorious drawing room, and a perfect dining room, exquisitely carved ceilings and cornices that featured prominently in several books on English architecture, forty acres, a garden designed by Capability Brown, and very shortly after they bought it, a stable block designed by Michael McCarthy, an Irish architect who had made a fortune out of the simple notion of designing stables for the rich that looked just a little more than a set of stables. The stables and yard at Marriotts were a facsimile of Queen Anne stables, lofty, vaulted and quite lovely. The horses which Julian placed in them were quite lovely too, five hunters and five thoroughbreds, for he had developed a passion for racing, and was planning to breed as well. Eliza had a horse of her own, an exquisite Arab mare called Clementine (after the Prime Minister’s wife) who she flatly refused to take on to the hunting field.
‘I want riding to be a pleasure,’ she said to Julian firmly, ‘for both me and Clementine, and we are both much happier out on the downs on our own.’
‘My darling, you can ride her round and round the front lawn, if that will make you happy,’ he said, ‘as long as you don’t begrudge me my hunting. So many wives get jealous.’
‘Oh, Julian, I have quite enough to keep me jealous without adding hunting to the list,’ said Eliza lightly; Julian looked at her sharply, but her face was amusedly blank, her eyes unreadable.
Hunting weekends at Marriotts were legendary; right through the winter the Morells entertained, large house-parties to which came not only the hunting community but Julian’s business associates, many of whom had not been any closer to a horse than donkey riding in their childhood, and their socially climbing wives, all thrilled to be included in what they felt was a very aristocratic occasion, but totally unequipped to participate. Because she did not hunt herself, Eliza found herself forced to entertain these people, and on many a magically beautiful winter afternoon, the red sun burning determinedly through the white misty cold, the trees carving their stark black shapes out of the grey-blue sky, when she longed to be out alone with Clementine she found herself walking along the lanes with two or three women, listening to their accounts of purchasing their winter wardrobes or their cruise wear, or playing backgammon indoors with their loud-voiced, red-faced husbands.
She loved Marriotts, rather to her own surprise; she had thought to have become a completely urban person, but she found herself missing the rolling downs of Wiltshire, the huge skies, the soft, clear air, and she looked forward to the weekends more than she would have imagined – especially the rare occasions when she and Julian were alone, and could ride together on Sundays, chatting, laughing, absolutely at peace, in a way that was becoming more and more rare.
In the summer of 1955, though, she had to stop riding altogether; she was pregnant.
Eliza had very mixed feelings about her pregnancy. She didn’t like babies at all, or small children; she had no desire whatsoever to feel sick or grow fat, and she resented the curtailment of her freedom for nine months. Nevertheless she had not been brought up the daughter of even a minor strand of the British aristocracy without knowing perfectly well that it was the function of a wife to bear sons, and especially the wife of a rich man; she had a strong sense of the continuity of names and lines and she was still country girl enough to be totally relaxed and indeed cheerful at the actual concept of giving birth and mothering.
As it happened, relaxed and cheerful though she might have been, she was so tiny, so sliver-thin, that Rosamund Morell was born by Caesarean section after almost two days of quite excruciating labour, and Julian was told firmly and bluntly by the obstetrician that he was lucky his wife had not died, and that another child would undoubtedly kill her. Rosamund was therefore an important baby; the heiress apparent to a fortune, and an empire, with no fear of being usurped by a brother at any future date, and the unrivalled focus of her parents’ love and attention.