London and New York, 1965–7
ROZ COULD REMEMBER exactly when she had discovered her father didn’t love her. She had been six years old at the time and it was fixed in her memory as indelibly and certainly as her own name, and the fact that she was too tall for her age, and the least pretty girl in Miss Ballantine’s dancing class, and therefore the one chosen to be the prince in the charity concert and not one of the pink and white princesses. And it had been no use her father telling her over and over again that he did love her, and trying to prove it to her with expensive presents and treats and holidays, just as it had been no use Miss Ballantine telling her she had been cast as the prince because she was better at dancing than all the others; she believed neither of them, and indeed she despised them both for trying to convince her of something that she and they knew perfectly well was so patently untrue.
She knew he didn’t love her because she had heard him say so. Well, perhaps not in so many words, but he had certainly admitted it. He had been having a row with her mother, shortly after she had married Peter Thetford; they had been shouting at one another in the drawing room of the house in Holland Park which Roz and Nanny and Eliza and Thetford all lived in, and which was so small you couldn’t help overhearing everything, and she certainly hadn’t intended not to overhear the row anyway. Rows were a good way of learning things. It was during a row between her mother and Thetford that she had learnt that he regarded her as a stuck-up bitch, and during another that he thought she had robbed him of any possibility of becoming a major force in politics (whatever that might mean). This particular row started when her father returned her to the house in Holland Park after she had spent the weekend with him. She never knew if it was worth the happiness of those weekends for the misery of their endings; they had such fun, the two of them. Sometimes in London, when he took her out shopping and bought her clothes that her mother strongly disapproved of, and to meals in smart restaurants like the Ritz, and let her stay up late, but more often they went to the country, to Marriotts where he was teaching her to ride, and had bought her her own pony called Miss Madam, because that was what Nanny Henry was always calling her. Nearly as excitingly, he took her for rides in some of his very special cars, the old ones with lamps sticking out of their fronts and roofs that opened like the hood of a pram, the Lanchester, and the Ford Model T and the Mercedes 60; he told her that as soon as she was big enough, probably about twelve years old, he would let her drive one of them round the grounds of Marriotts, and that she would find out what driving a real car felt like.
They had the most wonderful time, those weekends; to have her father to herself seemed to Roz the most perfect happiness. She was very fond of her mother, indeed she supposed she loved her, although she hated Peter Thetford so much she found it very hard to forgive her mother for wanting to go and live with him, and forcing her to go and live with him too. But her father had always seemed to Roz the most perfect person; he was so good-looking, so much more good-looking than most of her friends’ fathers, and he wore such lovely clothes, and he was so good at telling her stories, and making her laugh and just knowing what she would most like to do. But more important than all those things, he seemed to value her company and her opinions; he never sent her off up to the nursery if she didn’t want to go, he would explain things to her about his company and the sort of things he was doing and wanting to do when she was a little tiny girl, and he told her it was never too early to learn and that one day it would be hers, because he was never ever going to have any other children, and that Roz was his heir.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Julian,’ her mother had said the first time he had ever said this, when she had only been four years old, ‘how can you expect her to understand such a thing, and anyway, she’s an heiress, not an heir.’
And her father had looked at her, not her mother, and smiled, and said, ‘No, she is my heir. Roz will inherit the company, because she is my child and extremely clever and her sex is quite immaterial.’
She hadn’t understood all the words, but she certainly understood the meaning; that whatever happened, one day her father’s company would be hers, because he thought she was the right person to have it, and no one, no one at all, was going to be able to take it away from her. It was something that made everything else worth while, the awfulness of her parents not being married any more, and seeing so much less of her father, and having to live with Peter Thetford and sometimes even his horrible little boys, with their very short hair and loud rough voices, the kind of boys Nanny Henry called her away from in the park, and also of not being able to live all the time with her father: the certain knowledge that he loved her so much and considered her so special.
And then it was taken away from her.
They had got back from Sussex quite late one Sunday evening; her father had returned her to the doorstep, said she was very tired, and her mother had sent her up to Nanny Henry to get ready for bed.
‘Do you want a drink, Julian?’ she heard her mother say, and her father said yes, that would be very welcome, and where was the master of the house.
‘He’s driving the boys back home.’
‘Long way.’
‘Yes, but Margaret won’t have them put on the train, and she’s not prepared to come down and get them, so he doesn’t have much choice.’
‘I see. And how is the most promising young man in politics since Lloyd George? Or would Aneurin Bevan be more appropriate?’
‘Don’t be unpleasant, Julian, please. Peter is a very clever politician. And he’s doing well. Very well.’
‘Really? I had heard rather the reverse.’
‘Had you? Well your informant was clearly in the wrong.’
‘And how are you, Eliza?’
‘I’m extremely well. Very happy.’
‘Good. You don’t look it.’
‘Julian, you have no idea how I look when I’m happy. It was not a state I enjoyed very often during our marriage.’
‘Well, we won’t discuss that now. Roz doesn’t seem to like Thetford very much.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘What I say.’
‘How do you know?’
‘She told me.’
‘How dare you encourage her to talk about such things? To be so disloyal?’
‘I didn’t have to encourage her. And I think we should not get on to the topic of disloyalty. Otherwise I might find a few stones to sling at you of that nature.’
‘Oh, go to hell.’
‘Eliza, I do assure you there was no question of my prompting Roz in any way. She says spontaneously, and quite frequently, that she hates her stepfather and she’d like to come and live with me.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘What do you say back?’
‘What can I say? I can’t encourage her in that fantasy, can I? I’ve tried to make her feel more warmly towards him. Without success.’
Roz, listening on the first-floor landing, praying Nanny Henry wouldn’t stop watching Sunday Night at the London Palladium on her television and realize she was home, couldn’t actually remember her father ever trying to do anything of the sort; he sneered at Thetford a lot, and said how dreary he was, and how he wouldn’t know one end of a horse from the other and that sort of thing, but otherwise he was never mentioned between them, it was too depressing on her weekends away.
‘Julian,’ she heard her mother say, just casually, ‘Julian how would you feel about having Roz to live with you?’
Roz’s heart lifted, leapt; she had to bite her fists to keep quiet. She knew how her father would feel; he would love the idea as much as she did. She had always thought her mother would never consider such a thing. If she was willing to let her go back home, as she still thought of Hanover Terrace, then obviously her father would take her. She waited to hear him say it. To say, ‘Well of course I’d love it,’ or something like that. But there was a long, an endless silence. Then:
‘Eliza, exactly what do you mean?’
‘I mean what I say. I just think it might be better.’
‘For her?’
‘Well, yes. Of course for her. I mean she isn’t happy here, you’re quite right. And she doesn’t get on with Peter. She’s very awkward. She causes a lot of friction. There’s no doubt about it. She’s rude about the boys, won’t have anything to do with them –’
‘Good. Vile little tykes.’
‘Julian –’
‘Sorry.’
‘Well anyway, it’s all very difficult.’
‘Well, yes. And for Peter. And I thought – well, of course I’d miss her, but, Julian, things aren’t going terribly well. If she was with you more, here less, just for a bit, then it would give us more of a chance. Nanny could come of course –’
‘Of course.’
‘I mean, I could have her when Peter wasn’t here. It would be better for her.’
‘Really? And for you. And most of all for him. Jesus, Eliza, what a hypocrite you are.’
‘Oh, I knew you wouldn’t understand.’
‘Oh, I understand, Eliza. Very well. Roz is making your idyllic new life difficult, and so the best thing is to get rid of her.’
‘I’m not trying to get rid of her.’
‘You could have fooled me.’
‘No, Julian, I’m not. But she does so much prefer you. She adores you. You know she does. And I just can’t do anything right for her. She’s –’ and Roz could hear the suppressed laughter in her voice, slightly shaky, but nonetheless there, ‘she’s just like you.’
‘Really? In what way?’
‘Oh, every possible way. Hard to please. Impossible to reason with. Shutting people – me out.’
‘Poor child. You make her sound very unattractive.’
‘Well, she isn’t very attractive, is she? At the moment? Be honest. She’s so morose and awkward.’
‘She seems fine to me. I would agree she isn’t very physically attractive at the moment. She’s going through a very plain phase, and she’s so big for her age. It’s a shame, poor child. She has enough problems.’
‘Yes, well, that will pass, I’m sure. So what do you think, Julian? Would you – could you have her for a while?’
Time had stopped for Roz, sitting on the landing in a frozen stillness, her legs cramped underneath her, her fists still crammed into her mouth to stop her making a sound. Surely this was it, the long boring conversation would finish, and her father would say yes of course he would have her, and probably tell her to pack up her things immediately, come back with him now. That was all that mattered, really; it had been very unpleasant hearing him say she was plain (she didn’t mind her mother saying she was unattractive), but she had known really anyway, and if she could only go and live with her father, she would become more beautiful straight away. All the people surrounding him were, it was a kind of magic he seemed to work, and she would be happier and she would smile more so she would look prettier anyway. So all he had to say was yes: so why wasn’t he saying it?
‘No, Eliza, it’s absolutely out of the question.’ (What? What? Roz thought she must be hearing wrongly, that she was imagining his words.) ‘I couldn’t have her even if I wanted to, and frankly I don’t. I –’
But Roz heard no more. She got up, very quickly, and crept up to her bedroom and lay down on her bed fully clothed, with the eiderdown pulled over her, waiting for the tears to come. But they didn’t. She just lay there, silent, and as she lay, her numb legs, which she had been sitting on for so long, came back in a stabbing agony to life. The pain was so bad, she found it hard not to yell out. But it was nothing, nothing at all, compared to the awful, deathly cold hurt throbbing in her head and her heart.
She had learnt to live with it, of course. You could learn to live with anything. Obviously there was a reason for him not loving her, and she spent a lot of time trying to find it. Was it that she was not pretty? It could be. Her mother was so beautiful, and so was her grandmother, Granny Letitia, and her father was extremely good-looking; it must be horribly disappointing for them to have someone in the family who was so plain. Of course her father wouldn’t want a plain, an ugly person living with him; he couldn’t be expected to. Then maybe it was because she wasn’t clever enough. He was so extremely clever himself, and if he was going to leave her his company (only maybe he wasn’t now, maybe he had changed his mind) she needed to be extremely clever too. Of course he hadn’t said yet that he wasn’t going to give her the company, but if he didn’t think she was good enough to live with him, then he probably wouldn’t think she was good enough to have the company either.
Or maybe it was because she wasn’t a boy. He had never said he minded, but Nanny Henry (and quite a few other people, mostly Nanny’s friends, but also the Thetford boys, and some of her mother’s luncheon companions, the ladies who arrived at half past twelve and stayed often till about four, drinking wine and eating almost nothing and laughing and talking endlessly) had said it would have been much better if she had been a boy and could take over the company. Or – and this was the most frightening thing of all – maybe he was planning marrying someone else, and having another baby with her. And maybe that baby would be a boy, or a pretty girl, or really really clever and then the company would go to him or her instead.
Nothing that had happened to Roz could compare with this in awfulness; not even the day that her father had taken her on his knee and held her very tight and said he was terribly sorry, but he and her mother were going to be living in separate houses from then on, because they didn’t get on very well any more, or when her mother had told her that she and Peter Thetford were going to get married and be together always. And the worst thing about it of all, she knew, was not finding out that her father didn’t love her; it was finding out that she couldn’t love him in the same way either.
She couldn’t talk to him about that of course; she couldn’t talk to him about any of it. She simply shut him out, and tried not to let him see how badly she felt. She didn’t want him to know what power he had to hurt her; she wanted him to think she didn’t care what he did. He could buy her as many dresses as he liked, and take her on trips to New York and Paris, and throw extravagant parties for her on her birthdays (one year he took her and her six very best friends to Le Touquet for the day in his own plane which he piloted himself, and bought them all lunch in a very smart restaurant there; another he hired the ballroom at the Ritz, and everyone wore long dresses, even though they were only ten, and instead of a conjuror which most of the girls had, they had a pop group who played all the top hits, and instead of it being in the afternoon it was from six o’clock till ten o’clock at night). He never stopped trying to please her; he got tickets for shows like Camelot and Beyond the Fringe and arranged for her to meet the cast afterwards, and to premieres of films like Lawrence of Arabia and West Side Story and even occasionally to the parties afterwards where the stars went; he took her out to expensive restaurants (by the time she was ten Roz had eaten in practically every restaurant recommended by Egon Ronay – and complained in most of them); he took her to Disneyland; he did (as promised) let her drive some of the cars round the grounds of Marriotts on her twelfth birthday; he bought her not one but two ponies to replace Miss Madam when she was eight, one grey and one chestnut, because she said she couldn’t make up her mind between them, he had her to stay with him in New York most school holidays; and she had only to mention most casually that she wanted a puppy, a kitten, a new bicycle, a new stereo, and it arrived. And Roz would say thank you politely, formally, but never warmly, never showing her pleasure; and she got great satisfaction from seeing the disappointment, the hurt in his eyes. She knew he was desperate to please her, that he was frightened of making her unhappy, and she enjoyed the knowledge. It was the only thing that made her feel safe.
When Roz was nine years old Peter Thetford moved out of the house in Holland Park. She had stood at the window of her bedroom and watched him piling his things into the taxi that morning, and quite literally danced with pleasure. Her joy came quite as much from the fact that he was gone from the house as that her mother would be on her own, and it seemed to her just possible that she and her father might start living together again. The disappointment when they did not was almost as bad as the hurt when they first separated. ‘But why?’ she asked Eliza over and over again, crying in bed the night she finally asked if this might be possible, and beating the pillow with rage and despair when she was told it was not. ‘Why not? You’ve had a turn at being married to someone else, and you didn’t like it. Why not go back to Daddy?’ And Eliza had tried to comfort her, holding her, wiping her tears. ‘Just because I wasn’t very happy with Peter, darling, doesn’t mean I can just go back and be happy with Daddy. Life isn’t like that. But we shall have more time together, and you must keep me company now I’m on my own again.’
And Roz, remembering all the evenings she had begged her mother to stay in with her and not go out with her friends or with Peter, and Eliza had gone just the same, said, ‘Oh you’ll find someone else to keep you company, I expect,’ and turned her face into her pillow and cried endlessly and refused to be comforted.
Her father had said much the same thing: that he and her mother just couldn’t get along any more and it was better they lived in different houses even though Peter had gone; and he said perhaps Roz would like to stay with him a bit more often now that she was a bigger girl and that he got lonely sometimes too.
‘No,’ Roz said, seeing a chance to hurt him, to show that she was in command of the situation, not him, ‘no, I want to be with Mummy, she needs me. Besides,’ she added, looking at him out of her green eyes with a blank expression so like his own, ‘you have Camilla to keep you company, don’t you? Poor Mummy hasn’t got anyone.’
Roz hated Camilla. She had hated her from the very first time she met her, when she had gone to stay with her father in New York when she was just seven years old. At first she had thought she was just a friend of her father’s, one of the many ladies he took out to dinner or the theatre and then didn’t see again – or not very often. But Camilla didn’t go away. She went on being around, first in America and then in London until Roz couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been there. One of the things she had most hated about her was how beautiful she was, with her goldy red hair and her bright red lips, and her long red nails; she could see that was why her father must like her, and it seemed so unfair that someone could be liked so much straight away just because they were beautiful.
Camilla came out to lunch with them twice in New York that first time, and although she worked very hard being nice to her, asking her endless questions about her friends and her school and her pony, Roz could see perfectly well she was bored, she had that look on her face that grown-ups always had when they weren’t listening to what you said, a sort of fixed smile with her eyes wandering round the room a bit. She didn’t like the way that her father looked at Camilla either, or the way Camilla put her hand over his and kissed his cheek, or talked for a very long time very seriously about something that had happened in a meeting that morning. Another night she went out to dinner with them; she was looking particularly beautiful, Roz thought – although she didn’t like to have even to think it – wearing a great big shaggy sweater in lovely blues and greens, with a V-neck, and rows and rows of beads, in a pair of very thin black velvet trousers, and sort of slipper-like shoes. Her father had laughed and told her she looked like a beatnik, and Camilla had got very serious and told him he was out of date, beatniks had been around five years earlier, and he had told her not to be so tedious, which had pleased Roz very much. They went to a restaurant called Sardi’s, which Roz liked much better than all the expensive places they had been to; she had a hamburger and a knickerbocker glory and felt quite happy until Camilla started talking to her again, and said she had a present for her and gave her a little box with a silver dollar in it made into a brooch.
‘That’s lovely, Camilla,’ her father said, ‘isn’t that kind of Camilla, Roz, what do you say? Put it on, darling, and let’s see how pretty it looks.’
‘Thank you, Camilla,’ said Roz carefully, aware that once again someone was trying to buy her and trying to make her like them, ‘but I won’t wear it now, it doesn’t go with this dress.’
‘Roz, you don’t know what does and doesn’t go with dresses. Put it on,’ said Julian. He tried to sound light and amused, but she could see the anger in his eyes and she felt just slightly frightened.
‘No,’ she said, bravely. ‘No, I don’t want to.’
‘Roz,’ said Julian, and he had stopped even pretending to be amused. ‘Put it on.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I won’t.’
‘Oh, Julian,’ said Camilla quickly, ‘don’t make a thing of it. If Roz doesn’t want to wear it I don’t mind. And she’s quite right, aren’t you, Roz, it doesn’t go with that dress. What a clever little girl you are.’
Something snapped in Roz; she could feel a hot rage sweeping over her, could feel Camilla thinking she was getting round her.
‘I’m not clever,’ she said. ‘I just don’t like the brooch. And I don’t want to wear it. I feel sick and I want to go home.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Roz,’ said Julian. ‘Apologize to Camilla and eat your food. We are not going home.’
‘No you won’t. Now eat it.’
Roz ate in total silence; when she had finished the last mouthful she took a deep breath, and by sheer effort of will vomited the entire meal on to her plate again. It was a trick she was to learn to perfect over the years.
Looking at her father across the table, she was rewarded by an expression on his face she had never seen there before. It was defeat.
But she did not get rid of Camilla.
Later, Camilla often came to London, and stayed at the house in Regent’s Park, or even came down to Marriotts. Roz minded her being at Marriotts even more than in London, because she always thought of it as her father’s and her house, and Camilla absolutely ruined it. She was so boring about things and went on and on about whatever Roz said, even if it was a joke, or if they were playing a game like draughts, spending hours studying her moves, and if they went riding together, the three of them, Camilla was forever telling her little things she was doing wrong, like not sitting into the canter enough, or letting her pony trail his legs over a jump. She was meant to sleep in one of the guest rooms, but Roz had seen her coming out of her father’s bedroom more than once. She knew what happened when a man and a woman were in bed together, intercourse it was called, her friend Rosie Howard Johnson had told her, and she had also told her it could lead to the woman having a baby; Roz didn’t mind too much about the intercourse but the thought of Camilla having a baby made her feel very sick indeed. Apart from the fact it might be a boy, and that he might get the company, her father might love the baby more than he loved her. If he loved her at all. Sometimes for days at a time Roz managed to make herself forget that she had heard him refusing to have her to live with him, but when she thought about him sort of living with Camilla and possibly even having a baby with her, the pain came back so badly it made her breath go away and she felt as if she had fallen and winded herself.
Right from the very beginning of her relationship with Julian, Camilla’s main problem had been Roz. She could handle the highly charged matter of having both to work with Julian and sleep with him, and the inevitable speculation and tensions it caused; she could handle the fact that she knew she was not the only woman in his life; she could handle her slightly ambivalent attitude to her sex life. And she had no problem at all handling the question of Eliza. Through the divorce, which did not surprise her in the very least (except perhaps in that someone as frivolous and non-intellectual as Eliza should have captured the attentions of a politician), Camilla supported Julian admirably; she allowed him to talk as much as he wished: to question his behaviour, to examine his feelings, to express regret, anxiety, remorse (which he did occasionally and rather dutifully, as if he knew it was expected of him); she was careful not to criticize Eliza, and was even more careful to avoid any hint of an idea that now he was free he might wish to enter into a more serious relationship with her. And she took great care to allow him to spend more time with her than usual between the linen sheets, and to consciously express more affection and tenderness there than perhaps she had done in the past. In brief, she was the perfect mistress. But she was not the perfect stepmother.
Roz quite clearly resented her, feared the impact she might make on her life, and in fact (Camilla had to admit to herself) thoroughly disliked her. She was polite to her – just – but no more, she rejected her overtures of friendship, she cut any conversation with her down to a minimum and she made it perfectly plain that whenever Camilla was with her and her father she would much prefer it if she was not. Julian had taken an indulgent attitude to this at first, saying easily that Roz would soon get to know Camilla better and feel less threatened by her; later on, weary of the constant hostility between the two of them, unable to ease it in any way, he refused to discuss it or even acknowledge its existence.
The fact that she was not a pretty child didn’t help; she was not appealing, she did not enlist sympathy, she was big for her age, not fat, but sturdily built, dark-haired and slightly sallow-skinned, with a rather large nose and a solemn expression. The only thing that gave her face any charm at all was her eyes, which were green like her mother’s, large and expressive. But the expression in them was very frequently not in the least charming; she had a capacity to fill them with a kind of brooding intensity which she would fix on Camilla, or make them, like her father’s, an inscrutable blank.
She was obviously a clever child, and she seemed very self-confident. Camilla, studying her carefully, could see few signs of insecurity. She knew quite a lot about disturbed children, as she had done a psychology project about them at high school and had worked at a day centre in one of the poorer areas of Philadelphia; her thesis had won the psychology prize and left her with an abiding interest in the subject. Julian’s lecture on being tactful and patient with Roz had left her irritated. He had gone to some lengths to explain that at no time during Roz’s visits was she to stay over at the apartment or to appear anything more than ordinarily friendly towards him. Camilla had told him shortly that he would be fortunate if she appeared friendly towards him at all, ordinarily or otherwise, if he persisted in treating her like some kind of insensitive moron. In fact she avoided him altogether until Roz had been in New York for several days.
Later, as Roz got older and she herself became more involved with Julian, the problem increased. Roz was increasingly difficult to handle; both her parents spoilt her and were afraid of upsetting her, and Camilla could perfectly well see that she was fast reaching a point where nobody would be able to handle her at all – she was like a badly trained overexcited thoroughbred, she told Julian, and she needed a good long session on the lunge rein at regular intervals. She had been rather pleased with this analogy, but Julian clearly hadn’t liked it at all and told her shortly that handling children was extremely easy for people who hadn’t got any.
Camilla observed with a mixture of irritation and admiration Roz’s manipulative skills; she heard her on the phone one evening, telling her mother that she had been having the most wonderful time with Daddy and Camilla and didn’t really want to come home until the next day when in fact they had all spent a rather depressing afternoon skating at Queen’s and then having supper at a dreadful place called the Carvery where you could take as much of everything as you liked and which was supposed to be Roz’s favourite place. Roz had sat out most of the skating saying her ankles hurt, and had refused to eat anything at the Carvery except ice cream and roast potatoes.
Roz was just about nine at the time; Camilla rather bravely volunteered to take her home in the morning by taxi as Julian had several meetings, and on the way she asked Roz to show her Harrods and offered to buy her something. Roz had said she hated Harrods, it was a boring shop and anyway her mother had bought her so much lately she really couldn’t think of anything else she wanted; but then, as Camilla delivered her to a rather cool Eliza, Roz had said thank you very very much and could she please please go out with her another day and buy her a present for always being so kind to her in New York.
What Camilla felt within her most secret self – the self she crushed ruthlessly into submission most of the time and which only surfaced during the middle of the night – (like most obsessive over-achievers Camilla was a poor sleeper) was that her own rather irregular situation with Julian made her relationship with Roz worse. Had she been married to him, or even his permanent, long-term mistress, sharing his homes as well as his bed, then she felt that Roz would come to accept her, and she could have established a relationship with the child which had some stability. But Julian did not want that; he made it perfectly clear, they had a great many long conversations about it (usually at Camilla’s instigation) and agreed over and over again that the success of their relationship was based on their total freedom, and the lack of anything in it that smacked of obligation. Camilla was always at even greater pains to assure him and herself that this was precisely what she wanted; she liked him, she told him earnestly, and more than that, she was very fond of him, they had a superb working relationship and an equally superb sex life, they shared many other pleasures and interests, riding, design, fashion, and it would have been very foolish, very foolish indeed to have introduced any form of long-term commitment into what was a totally pleasurable and undemanding arrangement. But the fact remained that in the middle of the night, when the secret self was asserting itself and having its rather obstreperous say, Camilla knew much of this was quite untrue. She was indeed very fond of Julian, very very fond, and if she had been caught unawares and asked directly if she loved him she would have said yes. More importantly than that, there was a lot about him that she didn’t actually like very much, and particularly in the work situation. She found his ruthlessness with people, the way he used them and discarded them, very hard to accept: he would take an idea from someone and claim the credit for himself if it succeeded and make sure that everyone knew whence it came if it failed; and she found his deviousness almost intolerable. He had what amounted to a near compulsion to confuse people, to inform the creative team of some part of his plans and the sales team another, so that only he could bring the whole together. It caused uncertainty, ill feeling and mistrust among his staff; but what it did do was ensure his continuing indispensability, it kept him totally in control. Camilla saw through this, and despised it; she even challenged him on it. But he had a great talent for turning away criticism and disapproval; he would smile at her and tell her she was far too astute for her own good, that if there was one person in the entire company apart from himself who he could trust to know everything it was her, and although she knew this to be untrue she was quite unable to prove it.
Then there was their sex life; Camilla continued to try very hard to enjoy sex, and to improve her performance constantly for Julian; she never refused him if he wanted to go to bed with her, and she always told him afterwards that it had been absolutely wonderful. She hardly ever had an orgasm, or even came near it (although she became adept at faking); her sex therapist told her it was because she would not release her emotions, that she was afraid of her body taking her over, and gave her all sorts of exercises to do, both physical and mental, but it didn’t do any good. Fearing that it might be Julian’s fault and that they were incompatible, she took another lover from time to time, but it was no better, worse if anything; so then she was left fearing she must be frigid, which was worse still.
She knew what an orgasm felt like because her therapist had taught her to achieve it herself, but even that seemed to her a purely mechanical pleasure, rather like having a drink of water when she was very thirsty, or scratching an itch, it never approached the glorious abandon and heights that she read of and indeed which Julian seemed to experience when they were in bed together.
She had moved in 1963 from her apartment in the Village and had bought a studio in the upper Seventies; near enough Sutton Place and Julian for convenience, not too near for either of them to feel stifled. She loved the area, the quieter, sunnier streets, the expensive shops, the wealth of museums and galleries, the smart restaurants, the pastry shops, the sidewalk cafes, the entire atmosphere so much more cosmopolitan and civilized than the roaring, grabbing street life of mid-town Manhattan.
Her position in the company was unchallenged, and the most envious, the most malicious person could not but have acknowledged it had been earned, that her success was not dependent on her relationship with the chairman. After Circe’s launch, Julian made her design director of the company (stores division); when he opened another Circe in Paris in 1961 he put her on the main board. Two years after that he made her advertising director as well, and creative director of the company worldwide; this meant she had to spend several months of the year in London as well. She bought a tiny flat in The Boltons, and shared her life with Julian exactly as she did in New York; undemandingly, charmingly and affectionately. But she was very clearly, as even Letitia (who loathed her) acknowledged, in London to work and not as his mistress.
She was brilliant, innovative and (most unusually) had a shrewd commercial sense as well; she never put forward a proposal for a new line, a relaunch, an advertising campaign without costing it out very carefully, without examining it in all its aspects, and she was equally clever at recognizing the virtue of an idea, a scheme, a suggestion from someone else; she knew how to delegate and she knew how to lead and inspire. She was an invaluable asset. And Julian needed her, very badly.
Circe had been a huge, a breathtaking success; it stood, a glittering jewel, in the very top echelons of the world’s stores; it did not so much rank with Bonwit’s, Bergdorfs and Saks in New York, Fortnum and Liberty in London, it had a glamour and style above and beyond all of them, for it had exclusivity, a sense of intimacy that set it closer to the smaller, more specialist establishments, to Gucci, Hermes, the Dior boutiques.
The Paris Circe, opened two years after New York, stood on the Faubourg St Honoré, very similar in feel, a building that had, in living memory, been a house.
But it was the cosmetic company itself which was still at the heart of the Morell empire; and it needed ever more intense attention. Competition in the industry was getting increasingly ferocious in the sixties: Charles Revson was probably at the height of his creative and innovative skills, launching new colours with the brilliance and panache of an impresario: the show was a non-stop extravaganza with one brilliant promotion staged after another: six, eight brilliant launches a year, all with dazzling, emotive, pulsey names. The man who gave the world Fire and Ice, Stormy Pink, Cherries in the Snow was setting a formidable standard; he was also innovative with his products, there was powder blusher, frosted nail enamel, ‘wet-look’ lipsticks and above all a mood of constant excitement and innovation. Then there was Mrs Lauder, rocking the cosmetic world with her high-priced and exclusive range: Re-Nutriv Crême and Extract with its twenty secret ingredients, selling for the awe-inspiring sum of one hundred and fifteen dollars a jar.
The cosmetic industry was discovering science in a big way: Helena Rubinstein had launched a ‘deep pore’ bio facial treatment; Elizabeth Arden had Creme Extraordinaire ‘protecting and redirecting’; Biotherm had incorporated plankton ‘tiny primal organisms’ for the skin in their creams.
It was a challenging time in the industry and nobody could afford to rest on their laurels, however exquisitely coloured and beautifully perfumed the leaves. Julian responded with a range from Juliana called Epidermelle which offered a new complex cream containing placental extract for its ‘cell revival programme’ and fought back on the colour front with a series of promotions based on the concept of the new frenetic fashion of the sixties – his range of first mini and then micro-mini colours, pale, pale, transparent lipsticks, and ultra pearlized eye shadows sold out in days and his eye wardrobe, the collection of false eyelashes, thick and thin, upper and lower, launched to adorn the little-girl wide-eyed faces of the sixties dolly birds, with their waist-length hair and their waist-high legs, was the sensation of the cosmetic year in 1965.
Nevertheless, Letitia’s prophecy that Julian would need to find more and more brilliant chemists had indeed come to pass. He had actually hired not one but three; each overseeing their own branch of a large development team: two American, one French, and the rivalry between them was intense (each having deliberately been given the impression that the others were just slightly more brilliant, talented and experienced) and a great spur to creative activity. He had opened a large new laboratory in New Jersey, and greatly expanded the one in England, having moved to new premises in Slough with Sarsted in charge.
However, most of the major cosmetic concepts for Juliana came from none of the chemists but from Julian himself. They were the result of several things: his extraordinarily astute understanding of women and what they wanted; his endlessly fertile mind; and a capacity above all to think laterally about what were apparently small and unimportant incidents.
He was sitting with Camilla in the New York office over a working lunch one day, discussing the decor of the salons in the Paris store, when Camilla said she would go and get some mineral water to drink. She stood up, looking in the mirror on Julian’s wall as she did so.
‘Oh, I look awful,’ she said. ‘This colour has changed on me so badly, the formula just doesn’t suit me, the lipstick has gone really dark. I look ten years older.’
‘I hope it’s not one of ours,’ said Julian absently; then he suddenly froze, staring at Camilla with an expression of intense excitement. ‘Good God,’ he said. ‘Dear Christ. God in heaven. Shelley!’ he shouted at his secretary down the intercom, ‘get me Tom Duchinsky in the lab right away.’
‘Good God,’ said Camilla, half amused, half startled. ‘Do I really look so awful?’
‘No, Camilla, you look wonderful. Wonderful. As always. Listen, listen – oh, Tom, is that you? Tom, listen to me. You know how lipsticks and eye colours – lipsticks particularly – change on the woman? Due to the acid content of her skin? Do you think you could formulate some quite basic colours that could make a virtue of that fact? That were sufficiently neutral and formulated so that they responded to the woman’s chemistry. Developed on her? Do you see what I’m getting at? You do? Good. I’d have fired you if you hadn’t. What’s that? Of course it hasn’t been done. Well, it happens all the time, but it’s a vice, not a virtue. I want to turn it into a product benefit. And for eye shadows as well. Listen, give it some thought. Camilla and I will be over there in an hour.’
‘No we won’t,’ said Camilla crossly. ‘Julian, I have work to do on the new advertising, I can’t afford to spend the afternoon in New Jersey.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Julian. ‘If it wasn’t for all the new products, you wouldn’t have anything to advertise. Come on, I’ll drive us. In the Cord. You know you can’t resist that.’
‘Of course I can,’ said Camilla, crosser still. She found Julian’s endless preoccupation with cars intensely irritating, and was constantly telling him he would have been far better off with a perfectly ordinary limo and a chauffeur rather than insisting on driving himself round the streets of New York and London in the various exotic vehicles he fell in love with. The white thirties supercharged Cord was his latest piece of folly, as she saw it, with its monster curving mudguards and very long bonnet, set in front of a modestly shaped body; Julian told her as they pulled out from the garage built beneath Circe that he loved it more than anything in the world, with the possible exception of his new brood mare. Camilla was never quite sure whether this kind of remark was made as a joke or not; but there were times, and today was one of them, when she found it very hard indeed to smile.
Later that year they took a trip to Florida, and stayed in Key West; it was the first time he had suggested they vacationed together and Camilla saw it as important to their relationship. Lying in bed on the third humid night, she was dutifully struggling to arouse the energy to respond to Julian and his protestations of desire when he drew back and looked at her.
‘What’s the matter,’ he said, half amused, ‘don’t I excite you any more?’
‘Of course you do,’ she said, ‘it’s just so very very hot. Let me go and take a shower, and revive myself.’
She went and stood in the tepid water for a long time, doing some of the mental relaxation exercises her therapist had taught her, breathing deeply and emptying her mind, and some of the physical ones too, earnestly clenching and unclenching her vaginal muscles, hoping to find in herself some semblance of desire. She had her eyes closed; she suddenly heard the shower curtains part, and saw Julian looking at her with an expression of great amusement.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ he said. ‘If I didn’t know you better, I would say you were up to all kinds of solitary vices in here.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Camilla, nearly in tears at being caught in such foolishness, ‘I’m just trying to relax, that’s all.’
‘Well, you had an expression of great concentration on your face. Not relaxed at all. Come on, darling, let me dry you down, and make you feel really good.’
He wrapped her in a huge towel and led her to the bed, and massaged her gently through it; then he removed it and took up her body oil and began to massage it into her breasts, her stomach, her thighs.
‘Nice?’
‘Lovely,’ said Camilla firmly, closing her eyes, forcing her mind back on to her relaxation therapy, saying, pleasure pleasure pleasure over and over again silently, like a mantra.
‘You feel better. Softer . . . This oil doesn’t smell very good,’ he said suddenly, ‘funny, how perfumes seem to change in bed, in this kind –’ he bent and kissed her breasts – ‘this kind of situation. I wonder – Good God, yes, I wonder . . .’
‘What, Julian? What do you wonder?’
‘Oh, nothing. Nothing worth talking about now.’
‘Tell me,’ said Camilla, who would have thought anything at all worth talking about then.
‘No, really nothing. All I want to do now is just take you over and love you until it’s light again.’
Camilla yawned and then hastily stifled the sound, hoping he would think it was a sigh of passion. It just all sounded terribly exhausting.
Signature Colours, the dazzling new range of lipsticks and eye shadows that were designed personally to suit every woman, to adjust to her own individual chemistry, and the new Juliana fragrance Affair, spearhead of an important new element in the Juliana range, were both great successes financially and creatively, launched simultaneously in the spring of 1966 in New York and London. Affair was one of the new all-over fragrance concepts, designed to flatter and adorn the entire body. There was a bath oil, a shower gel, a body lotion, the usual battery of perfume concentrates, and eau de toilettes; and a new product altogether, a body fragrance for the night. ‘Night-Time Affair’, it said on the packaging, ‘to be stroked and massaged into the skin, last thing at night, to surround a woman and her body with the lingering sensuous echoes of Affair until morning.’ The implications were very clear.
Mick diMaggio produced an advertisement that was so near to being an explicit piece of soft porn – a woman’s body, a man’s hand, and a bottle of Night-Time Affair fallen on to the rumpled sheet beside them – that two publications (although assuredly not Vogue and Harpers Bazaar who both adored it) refused to run it; in its first week Night-Time Affair sold out in every store in New York.
Sometimes Camilla North wondered if there was any aspect of her life with Julian Morell that would not become a product.
When Roz was ten years old her parents decided to send her to boarding school. This was partly because they both felt she needed the discipline and stability it could provide and partly because neither of them was prepared to try and provide it at home. Julian was riding on the crest of wave after wave; dizzy, exalted with his own success, jetting from London to New York and back again almost weekly; he was investigating the possibility of launching Circe in Madrid and Nice, he was exploring hotels, he was investigating a chain of health farms, and he had no time at all to spare for an awkward little girl who was more demanding than all his business interests put together. Had she been more attractive, more appealing, he might have taken her with him sometimes, but she was still a large child, solemn, heavy featured; Eliza worked hard on her wardrobe and her hair, but she never looked pretty as so many of her friends did, and her manner was not appealing either, she was truculent and argumentative and she made no attempt to talk to people if she did not like them.
Eliza was also extremely busy, having a great many well-documented affairs both with members of the British aristocracy and the cosmopolitan set: with the twin aims of having a good time and finding a husband. She was achieving the first, although not the second; the English aristocrats, while delighted to enjoy her favours in their beds, did not really wish to marry the twice divorced Mrs Thetford, and the cosmopolitan set, while appreciating her beauty and her style, found her in the last resort too English, she lacked their sybaritic indolence, the absolute devotion to the pursuit of pleasure that they required of her. Nevertheless, her days and her energies were extremely occupied; like Julian, there was no place in them for a daughter who did her very little credit. Boarding school, it was agreed, was the best place for Roz. It fell to Julian to tell her.
‘Mummy and I think,’ he said to her, over lunch one day at the Ritz (it had become a ritual at the start of each school holidays that he took her there), ‘that you should go to boarding school.’
Roz dropped her knife on the floor, panic rising in her throat. ‘I don’t want to go to boarding school,’ she said firmly, anxious not to allow him to see how frightened she was. ‘I like being at home.’
‘Well, darling, you might like it, but we think it would be better for you to go away. You’ll like that even better.’
‘I won’t. Why ever should I?’
‘Well, because you’re all on your own, it isn’t as if you have any brothers and sisters and Nanny really is getting very old and she can’t stay looking after you for ever, and Mummy and I worry about you being lonely.’
‘And since when,’ said Roz rudely, ‘did you and Mummy decide things together for me? I’d have thought you’d want to do the opposite of what Mummy thought.’
‘Rosamund, don’t be rude,’ said Julian briskly. He only ever called her Rosamund when he was very cross with her.
‘I don’t see,’ said Roz, determined not to be frightened away from her position, ‘why I shouldn’t be rude. You seem to want to get rid of me. Why should I be polite about it?’
‘Darling, we don’t want to get rid of you. We think you’d like it.’
‘No you don’t. You don’t know what I’d like. You don’t spend enough time with me to find out. And you do want to get rid of me, so you can go to New York whenever you want, and out to dinner all the time, and Mummy can go rushing off to France and things with her boyfriends, and have them to stay without having to worry about me being rude to them. You both want to get rid of me. I know you do.’
‘Darling,’ said Julian patiently, choosing to ignore her attack rather than defend himself against it, ‘you’re wrong. We love you very much. But going to boarding school is what an awful lot of girls your age do. Isn’t Rosie going?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. She wants to go to St Paul’s. And so do I.’
‘You don’t know anything about it.’
She could see he was beginning to lose his temper. She enjoyed that, urging him nearer and nearer the edge. When he pushed his hair back, she knew she was nearly there. She gave a final shove. ‘Anyway, I’m not going just to please you.’
She watched his lips go rather tight and white round the edges. She had done it. But he still didn’t say anything really angry. ‘Well, what you’re going to do, Roz, is take your Common Entrance next January and we’ll go and look at a few schools.’
‘I’m not going.’
‘Rosamund,’ said Julian, ‘you will do what you’re told.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I won’t.’
She sat in the Common Entrance examination and didn’t write a word. The headmistress sent for both her parents: her father came and took her home with him. She had never seen him so angry.
‘I hope you don’t imagine,’ he said, ‘that you are going to get your own way in this. All this sort of behaviour does is convince me you are grossly spoilt and you need the discipline of boarding school.’
Roz shrugged. ‘You’ve spoilt me. It’s not my fault.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, you’re right, it isn’t. None of it is. But I am not going to allow you to ruin your life because we have been stupid enough to do it for you so far. You are going to boarding school, Roz, and that is the end of it. Had you behaved more reasonably I might have considered day school. Now it’s out of the question.’
‘No one will take me. Not now I haven’t done the exam.’
‘Oh, but they will. Your headmistress says you are an extremely clever child, and she is personally writing to the heads of the schools we have chosen for you, with some examples of your work, and you will sit the individual entrance exams.’
‘I won’t do them either.’
‘Yes, Rosamund, you will. Otherwise you will go to a school that doesn’t require any kind of exam. The sort that exists to help difficult children like you.’
‘I’ll run away.’
‘Do. You’ll be taken back.’
Suddenly she stopped being brave, allowed the tears to flow, and once the tears started, the screams followed, the ones she had been silencing for years and years; her father looked at her in horror for a moment then stepped forward and slapped her hard across the face. It hurt horribly; she hit him back.
‘I hate you. I hate you all. You and Mummy and Thetford and Camilla. You all hate me. You want to be rid of me. Send me away so I don’t interfere in your own precious lives. So you can all do what you like and Mummy and her boyfriends and you and Camilla can – can have – have –’ ‘intercourse’ she had been going to say, but her courage failed her, and she stood silent, white, her eyes huge, tears streaming down her face, sobs shaking her body.
Her father stepped forward and took her in his arms, and held her close for a long time, soothing her, stroking her, kissing her hair, telling her it was all right, that he loved her, that they all loved her, that they didn’t want to send her away, that it was for her own good, they thought she was lonely and unhappy and getting more so.
She didn’t believe him, she couldn’t remember when she had last believed anyone, when they told her such things; and she didn’t argue any more or say the reason she was lonely and unhappy was because they had no time for her; but she could see she was beaten. Slowly, very slowly she stopped crying.
He held her away from him, looked down at her, wiped her eyes on his hanky.
‘Better?’
She nodded.
‘Good girl. I’m sorry, I’m so terribly terribly sorry, Roz, that we’ve hurt you so much. We didn’t mean to.’
‘Didn’t you?’ she said.
‘No. You have to believe me.’
She had learnt that when her father said that he was invariably lying; she pulled herself out of his arms and went over to the window. She couldn’t ever remember feeling so bad. She wondered how they could possibly go on and on being so cruel to her. It was interesting that her father at least realized it.
She suddenly remembered a request she had been storing up for several weeks. This was clearly a good time.
‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘can I have a new horse? A hunter?’
‘Of course you can,’ he said. ‘We’ll go to some sales this holiday.’
Once again she had been bought off.
They decided on Cheltenham Ladies’ College for her; Roz loathed it. She loathed everything about it from the very first day; the awful dreary green uniform, the way they were all scattered round the town in houses, and marched through it in crocodiles, the endless games, the misery of communal bathing and dressing, the aching horror of homesickness, the hearty jolly staff, the way everyone acted as if they were terribly lucky to be there, the awful food and most of all the feeling of dreadful isolation from the real world. She wasn’t popular because she didn’t conform; she wasn’t friendly and jolly and eager to get on with, she was aloof and patently miserable and refused to join any clubs or societies or even do any extra lessons. She did what she was required to do; she went there and she stayed there and she worked very hard, because it was the only thing that seemed to make it bearable, and she was always top or nearly top of everything, but beyond that she wouldn’t cooperate. She would go, but she was not going to be happy. That was asking too much.
Camilla had interceded on Roz’s behalf over the matter of boarding school; she told Julian that if there was one thing a rejected child didn’t need it was to be sent away from the rejecting parents and that she should be allowed to stay at home and go to day school; Julian told her that he wished she would keep her damn fool psychology to herself. Camilla had an uneasy feeling she had probably made poor Roz more and not less likely to be sent away.
After Roz had actually started at Cheltenham her hostility to Camilla became greater. She was illogically afraid that in her absence they might suddenly decide they were able to get married and have a baby.
Camilla, sensing at least some of this, decided she should talk to Roz, bring some of her fears into the open (knowing that honesty and openness were crucial in these matters). She felt that if Roz realized there was no likelihood of her ever marrying her father, she would be more friendly, and open up a little, come out of her hostile little shell. During the Christmas holidays, when Camilla was in London, working over and anglicizing the advertising campaign, she invited Roz to tea with her and told her she would like to hear about her new school. She made little progress; Roz sat in a sullen silence, pushing her teacake round her plate in a manner very reminiscent of her father. Camilla suddenly took a deep breath and said, ‘Roz dear, there’s something I would like to discuss with you.’
‘What?’ said Roz rudely.
‘Well, I have always imagined that you felt rather as if I was trying to come between you and your father.’
‘No,’ said Roz, ‘not at all. Nobody could do that.’
‘Well perhaps not come between you. But that you thought that if I was going to marry your father, then I might be – well – a threat.’
Roz was silent.
‘Well, the thing is, dear, that I have no intention of marrying him. Not because I am not very fond of him, but because neither of us really wants that kind of commitment.’
‘Why not? Isn’t he good enough for you?’
‘Of course he is. Too good in lots of ways. But you see, some women, and I am one, feel that there is much more to our lives than marriage. We are people in our own right, we may want to have relationships with people, but we don’t want those relationships to take our lives over. We want other things. My career has always been terribly important to me, and I would never combine it with marriage, I would feel I had to neglect either the career or the husband. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we can’t feel very lovingly towards people and enjoy their company. So you see, Roz, there is absolutely no danger of my ever becoming your stepmother, and moving into your home on a permanent basis. I thought that might make you feel more friendly towards me.’
Roz’s sullen, pinched face told Camilla that friendship was not forthcoming.
The other large thorn in Camilla’s side at this time was Letitia. Camilla loathed Letitia. Whenever she allowed herself to consider, however briefly, whether she might, after all, like to be the second Mrs Julian Morell, she reflected upon the reality of becoming Letitia’s daughter-in-law and quite literally shuddered.
She loathed Letitia on two counts: personal and professional. She found it quite extraordinary that this old lady (Letitia was now sixty-nine) should still hold a position of considerable power in the company, and she could not help but feel that Julian was being less than professionally fastidious to allow it. Although Letitia was no longer involved on a day-to-day basis, having retired with a stupendously extravagant party at the age of sixty-five, at which she had danced the Charleston into the small hours at the Savoy, she was still a director of the company, with a most formidable grasp of its workings, a sure steady instinct for financial complexities, and an equally strong feeling for the cosmetic industry in general. The new financial director, Freddy Branksome, said that the day he was no longer able to consult her on company matters, he would take an early pension and go; to an extent he was being diplomatic, but the fact remained that he did give considerable credence to her views, and liked to have her at all major financial review meetings. Camilla found this incomprehensible, and was perfectly certain that both Julian and Freddy must simply be flattering a vain and difficult old lady. It simply did not make sense so far as she could see, that a woman with no formal education, no training in business affairs or company management, could possibly be of any value to a multi-million-pound company. She had tried to say as much to Julian, but he had become extremely angry, told her to keep her business-school nonsense to herself, and that Letitia had more nous and flair in her little finger than the entire staff of the Harvard Business School.
‘When I need your opinion on company structure, Camilla, I will ask for it. Otherwise I would be intensely grateful if you would keep your elegant nose out of things which have nothing whatever to do with you.’
Camilla had said nothing more. She never minded when Julian attacked her views on management and policy. She knew perfectly well his touchiness on the subject and his suspicion of any formal scientific approach sprang from insecurity, but she did think it was a pity he refused to study modern business theory with a sightly more open mind. She supposed it all came from the well-known English passion for the amateur; in time, no doubt, Julian would come to see his methods were simply not professional enough for the hugely competitive business environment of the sixties.
But if she found Letitia’s professional relationship with Julian difficult to cope with, his personal one was almost impossible. He seemed to regard her more as a mistress than a mother; whenever he got back to London he seemed more eager to see Letitia even than his daughter (‘I am,’ he said cheerfully, when she taxed him with this quite early on in their relationship, ‘she’s better tempered.’) And would take her out to dinner, to lunch, and quite often away for the weekend, down to Marriotts, leaving Camilla (should she have accompanied him on a trip) fuming alone in London, rather than face the disagreeable prospect of spending forty-eight hours alone with them, listening to their silly jokes, their convoluted conversations, their detailed accounts of how each of them had spent the intervening few weeks. She knew Letitia found her tiresome; what enraged her was that she made so little effort to disguise the fact.
Camilla had tried terribly hard at first, she had been courteous, patient and polite; she had talked about Julian at great length (knowing this to be the key to a mother’s heart), she had been very careful not to imply any suggestion that she might be trying to encroach on their relationship in any way; and she had made it as clear as she could, without being actually rude or crass, that she had no intention of marrying Julian, that she saw herself purely as a professional colleague.
On her trip to London in the summer of 1967 she decided once again to try to form an adult, working relationship with Letitia; she phoned her and invited her to lunch at the Savoy, which she knew was her favourite place. But Letitia said no, she was on a strict diet and why didn’t they meet in the Juliana salon, for a fruit juice and a salad; Camilla, always grateful to be able to avoid gastronomic temptation and for an opportunity to indulge her body in some therapy or another, agreed and booked herself into the salon for a massage and a sauna for the hour before lunch.
She was now thirty, and against the atmosphere of frenetic pursuit of youth that was taking place in that year, she felt old. London was full of girls who looked just past their seventeenth birthdays, with silky straight hair tumbling down their backs, bambi-wide eyes, and skirts that just skimmed their bottoms. Jean Shrimpton’s face, photographed by David Bailey, gazed with a sexy tenderness from every magazine cover, every hoarding; Marianne Faithfull, Sandie Shaw, Cathy McGowan lookalikes stalked the streets, rangy, self-confident; and through the open window of every car in the capital the Beatles and the Stones sang ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Ruby Tuesday’ and ‘Penny Lane’. It was no time to be over twenty-five.
Camilla sank gratefully on to the massage couch, accepted the sycophantic exclamations over her slenderness from the beauty therapist, and then feeling just pleasantly traumatized from the massage and the attentions of the G 5 machine to her buttocks, walked into the sauna, removed her towel and lay flat on her back with her eyes closed.
She was feeling just slightly sleepy when the door opened; Letitia’s voice greeting her made her sit up startled, looking frantically round for her towel, and in its absence, wrap her arms round her breasts. Quite why she didn’t want Letitia to see her naked she wasn’t sure; but it seemed in some way an intrusion into her relationship with Julian; she felt Letitia was not looking merely at her body, but at what it might offer her son, and that she would find the sight immensely interesting; and she didn’t like the feeling at all. Letitia was dressed in a towelling robe, with a turban wrapped round her head; she did not remove either, merely sat down on the wooden seat opposite Camilla and smiled at her graciously, her eyes skimming amusedly and slightly contemptuously over her body. Camilla, with a great effort of will, removed her arms and met Letitia’s eyes.
‘Good morning, Letitia,’ she said. ‘How nice to see you. I am so looking forward to our lunch.’
‘I too,’ said Letitia. ‘And now we shall have even longer together. How well you look, Camilla.’ And her gaze rested again, lingering, interestedly on Camilla’s breasts and travelled down towards her stomach and her pubic hair.
Camilla swallowed hard, closed her eyes, did a relaxation exercise briefly, and said, ‘Maybe I should go and get dressed, Letitia, I’ve been here ages already.’
‘Really?’ said Letitia. ‘They must have been mistaken, they told me you had only just arrived. Don’t mind me, dear, I have plenty to think about, just relax.’
‘Well,’ said Camilla, ‘perhaps I will stay a little longer. Have you been shopping, Letitia?’ she added in a desperate attempt to get the conversation on to a comfortingly mundane level.
‘No, dear. I don’t often shop these days. The shops come to me. No, I’ve been to see Julian. To discuss next year’s budgets and so on. So nice the company is doing so extremely well, don’t you think?’
‘Marvellous,’ said Camilla.
‘Such a clever man, my son, isn’t he?’
‘Very clever.’
‘And you, Camilla, you have done a great deal for the company. I hope he gives you sufficient credit for it.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Camilla, startled by this sudden rush of friendliness and the unexpected tribute, ‘yes, he does.’
‘Good. You are unusually fortunate in that case. And in other cases as well, of course.’
‘Er – yes.’
‘You seem to enjoy a very special relationship with Julian.’ Her gaze again travelled down to Camilla’s breasts. Camilla made a superhuman effort not to cover them up again.
‘Well, yes. Well, that is to say – I thought . . .’
‘Yes, my dear?’ Letitia’s voice was treacly sweet.
‘Well, that was one of the things I wanted to talk to you about.’
‘Really? What exactly do you mean?’ A wasp was buzzing languidly now near the treacly tones.
‘Well, you know, Mrs Morell, I have always hoped we could be friends. But I imagined you thought that I might be in some way becoming very involved with Julian personally, and that you might find that difficult to handle.’
‘What a strange expression,’ said Letitia sweetly. ‘No, I don’t think so, Camilla dear, I very rarely find things difficult to handle, as you put it. It is one of the advantages of growing older, I suppose. Now what exactly do you mean? That I would be jealous of you?’ And her gaze flicked down again.
‘Oh, no, of course not,’ said Camilla earnestly, ‘and that is exactly what I want you to understand. There is nothing to be jealous of, in that my relationship with Julian is really very much more professional than personal. I see him primarily as a colleague, an employer, rather than a man.’
Letitia leant forward, an expression of acute puzzlement on her face. ‘Camilla, are you trying to tell me that you do not find my son sexually attractive?’
Camilla was so shocked that she did something she had not done for years, and blushed; furious with herself, desperate to escape from the claustrophobia of the sauna and Letitia’s amused, insolent eyes, she stood up and reached for the towel which had fallen on the floor, bracing herself for the full frontal confrontation.
‘How thin you are, dear. Perhaps you should eat a little more. Now I can assure you,’ the silvery, flute-like voice went on, ‘you are very much alone, if that is the case. Most women can’t wait to get into bed with him.’
Camilla rallied. ‘I do find him attractive,’ she said, wrapping herself thankfully in her towel, ‘but I happen to think that some relationships can transcend the physical.’
‘Balls,’ said Letitia. She smiled at Camilla sweetly.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said “balls”, dear. An old Anglo-Saxon expression. It means rubbish. Balderdash. Poppycock. Oh dear, you won’t know what those words mean either. Your country’s vernacular is, if I may say so, extremely limited.’
‘I do understand you, Mrs Morell. But I really can’t agree with you.’
‘Really? Then what do you do when you are over here, staying at my son’s house? Talk to him all night long? Hold animated discussions about sales psychology and corporate identity, and the design ethic, and all those other things you take so seriously over there? I find that very hard to believe.’
Camilla struggled not to lose her temper.
‘No. Of course we have a – a physical relationship.’
‘I see. But you don’t enjoy it. Is that what you are trying to say?’
Camilla flushed again; she pulled her towel more closely round her.
‘No. It’s not what I am trying to say.’
‘Then try harder, my dear. I am only a very simple old woman. I can’t quite follow your articulate Americanisms.’
‘What I am trying to say,’ said Camilla, ‘is that although I do, since you force me to express it, enjoy my personal – physical – relationship with Julian, what is really important to me is our professional one. I can’t imagine my life without that. However much I might admire and enjoy him as a person.’
‘I see,’ said Letitia, ‘how very interesting.’
‘Why is it so particularly interesting?’ asked Camilla boldly.
‘Well, dear, forgive me, but it seems to smack of using him to me. Of using your considerable feminine charms to inveigle him into employing you in his company.’
‘Not at all. I worked for Julian for quite a long time before we – I – he –’
‘Had sexual intercourse with you? How charming,’ said Letitia.
Camilla had had enough. ‘Mrs Morell, forgive me, but I am finding this a little embarrassing. Perhaps you would excuse me, I have a lot of work to do.’
‘Oh, my dear, I am so sorry!’ cried Letitia, an expression of great distress on her face. ‘How thoughtless of me. Of course I have no right to talk to you like this. It is absolutely no business of mine. It’s just that Eliza and I were so very close, still are, and I find it hard to be formal when I talk about my son. Now, why don’t we both get dressed and move out to the juice bar and you can tell me exactly which aspect of the company you are currently engaged in, to keep you so busy, and over here so much.’
‘Well,’ said Camilla carefully, determined not to lose her temper. ‘As you may not know, Julian has put me in overall charge of the advertising, both here and in New York. Not the creative concept, of course, although he likes me to be heavily involved in that, but I have a major responsibility, reporting only to him, on campaign planning, budgets, media schedules, and of course, overseeing the advertising, in all its aspects here. The campaigns don’t alter very much, but they need to be carefully anglicized, and we are always ready to consider creative concepts this end. So I have a lot to do this week. I – we – have also to get to know the people at the new agency, and see how we are going to work with them.’
‘I see,’ said Letitia thoughtfully. ‘Tell me, is Julian no longer able to afford to employ an advertising manager in New York?’
Camilla looked at her, her eyes wary.
‘Of course there is an advertising manager. But he reports to me. He is not on the main board. I’m surprised you didn’t realize that, Mrs Morell. But I suppose Julian finds it difficult to keep you informed on every detail of the company these days. It must be so different from the old days when he ran it virtually single handed, and you helped him.’
Letitia stood up and smiled at Camilla graciously. ‘He did not run it single handed, my dear, and I did not help him. We did it together. It could not have survived any other way.’ She looked at Camilla and then suddenly raised a limp hand to her head. ‘I am so sorry, but I very much fear I may have to cancel our luncheon after all. I have a very severe migraine coming on. The only thing is simply to get home and lie down in a darkened room. Do forgive me.’
‘Of course,’ said Camilla, relief and rage struggling with each other, ‘can I get my driver to take you home?’
‘Oh, no, dear, mine is waiting. He’s been with me for years, you know. Ever since the company began. So loyal, all my staff. Goodbye, Camilla, I think I’ll just get dressed again and hurry off. I do hope you will find someone else to join you. I don’t suppose you have managed to find many friends in London, as you are so dreadfully overworked.’
Talking to Eliza that evening over dinner, regaling her most wickedly with every lurid detail of the encounter, Letitia said, ‘I do hope for all our sakes, Eliza, he never does marry that dreadful creature. Our lives will become a great deal less agreeable if he does.’