Into Temptation

She went; later she tiptoed up, heard the unmistakable sound of weeping. Male weeping. An awful, literally heartbreaking sound. But – she had agreed. That he should go away. Geordie had persuaded her.

God, Lucas hated Geordie. Hated him for his smarmy charm, the way he could wrap his mother round his little finger, the way he tried to order Lucas about, to play the heavy father, tell him what to do: when he had no right to, no right at all.

But most of all he hated him for something quite different. Something that was nothing to do with Lucas.

He longed to tell his mother but he couldn’t. It would hurt her too much and, besides, he had absolutely no proof. He had tried telling Noni, but she refused to listen, left the room, told him he was disgusting, just making it up to excuse his own behaviour. She thought Geordie was wonderful too, she adored him. It was pathetic.

The first time, he hadn’t wanted to believe it himself. It had been at Christmas, the Christmas after his grandmother had married again; they’d spent it with the Warwicks. It had been pretty grim; Lucas hated most of his cousins, they were so noisy and uncivilised. They didn’t show any interest in the arts or literature or anything like that, Henry only cared about making money, and Elspeth and Amy were very pretty, but their only interests seemed to be boys and hunting; he had nothing to say to any of them. He’d spent most of the day reading, had even tried to get on with his book over lunch until Boy had removed it forcibly from him.

Anyway, that evening they were all playing charades because his grandmother insisted on it and he’d gone to the lavatory; he’d stayed as long as he could, just in the hope that someone would take his turn. And as he came out of the lavatory, with his book stuffed up his jersey, he’d seen Geordie slipping into Boy’s dressing room. Which was odd: odd enough to make Lucas want to know why. He’d walked very quietly along the landing, and stood outside the door which wasn’t quite shut, and he’d heard Geordie saying, ‘Oh, darling, I’m missing you too.’ Then a silence and then, ‘Well, only two more days. And then we’ll have one of our wonderful long lunch hours.’ Followed by his awful, creepy laugh.

Lucas had felt sick; so sick he had had to go back into the lavatory and sit there a bit longer. He tried to tell himself that Geordie had been talking to his sister, or someone he worked with, but he knew he wasn’t. Lucas was quite a precocious fourteen; he read adult fiction and spent a lot of time at the cinema. A clear instinct told him that it had not been a business liaison. He rejoined the party finally and sat staring at Geordie in disgust as he acted From Here to Eternity, with embarrassing enthusiasm.

The second time was worse, because Geordie had realised he knew. Adele was out and he heard Geordie come in whistling; Lucas was in the kitchen making some coffee. He’d looked at Geordie, and at first he couldn’t believe it, had to look again to make sure, but there it was, definitely, a great smudge of lipstick on his collar; and he just couldn’t help it, he said, ‘Better change that shirt, Geordie, before my mother comes home.’

Geordie had glanced in the hall mirror, and then blushed dark, deep red, before grabbing Lucas’s wrist and saying, ‘You can just keep your nasty thoughts to yourself, you little creep.’ And then he had run upstairs and slammed the door to the bedroom. From then on, it was outright war.

And because Lucas simply could not be polite to him, because he couldn’t even bear to think his mother was so stupid as to love and trust this dreadful man, things had gone from bad to worse, until finally Geordie had said that either Lucas went away to school, to learn some manners, or he would leave home himself.

He meant it; Adele knew him well enough for that. He was sufficiently angry at Lucas’s treatment of her – and sufficiently hurt himself, he said – to finally insist. Geordie was very sweet-natured, terribly easygoing; but there was a point beyond which he could not be pushed. And that point had come. Adele loved Geordie too much to risk losing him. Of course he would not actually have gone, she was sure; would not have actually left her and the small, beloved Clio. But he would have read her refusal as a rejection of him, and she was terribly afraid he would have retreated from her, spent more time in New York – which he loved – moved away from her emotionally. Adele had been lonely before in her life; she couldn’t face it again. And so, finally and very reluctantly, she agreed; and Lucas was going to Fletton, in Bedfordshire, currently fashionable for its exquisite buildings and its reputation for the arts and its avant-garde approach to education.

‘We think you’ll enjoy it,’ Adele had said brightly. ‘It’s the most beautiful place, and—’

But Lucas had turned dark and angry eyes on her and said he was quite sure he would hate it.

‘But Lucas! It’s a marvellous school.’

‘So is Westminster. And I’m happy there.’

‘Then you might have tried to behave as if you were happy,’ said Adele briskly, ‘and treated us all with some degree of respect. I’m afraid you have only yourself to blame.’

She seldom came even close to rebuking Lucas; he was clearly startled. But he said nothing.

And now it was the night before his departure. And Adele, racked with remorse, longing to make her peace with him, had tried three times to be allowed into his room. And failed.

Even Noni was doubtful of the wisdom of what they were doing.

‘I’m afraid he may do something drastic.’

‘Noni, like what?’ said Adele, trying to sound light-hearted, firmly pushing down that self-same fear.

‘Run away. Refuse to cooperate. Stay in his room—’

‘Of course he won’t. Noni, he’s only a boy. He’ll do what he’s told.’

‘He hasn’t done that here.’

‘Yes, well, he’s not afraid of us, we have no proper authority over him.’ She hesitated. ‘He clings to the memory of your father, that’s why he won’t accept Geordie.’

‘I know, Maman. And I think he’s awful, honestly. Poor Geordie has been so patient. So have you. So have I, come to that. But Lucas is in a mess. He feels – oh, I don’t know, rejected, I suppose.’

‘Rejected! But Noni, who’s rejected him? No one. Your father is dead, he died ten years ago, we left France in 1940.’

‘I suppose that was it,’ said Noni quietly, ‘you did leave. You didn’t stay.’

‘No. But—’ And then she stopped. Adele could never properly explain why she had left; it was too cruel to the children, too defamatory to their father’s memory. She had always simply told them that he had insisted they went, that because he had been Jewish and they had been English, because the Germans were about to occupy Paris, the danger was too great. When really . . .

‘I know. But don’t you think, from Lucas’s point of view, you should have stayed? Maman, don’t look like that, that’s not what I think. I know how brave you were, I can still remember that journey, bits of it, you know I can, and I remember how you always told us how wonderful Papa was, how much you loved him. But – well, I think Lucas sees it differently.’

That, and a strong genetic inheritance, Adele thought. Every year, every month, even, Lucas became more like his father. The same selfishness, the same self-obsession, the same built-in sense of grievance. And the same conviction that he was owed whatever he wanted.

Noni had endured the same hardships, the same sorrows, the same disruption as Lucas, but she had survived, was level, loving, merry-hearted. ‘She is a Lytton,’ Geordie had said once, when Adele had remarked on it, ‘a Lytton like you, my darling. Which is why I love her so very much.’

‘And she loves you,’ said Adele, and it was true, Noni adored Geordie, they were the best of friends. He had never tried to be her father; indeed he had told her at the outset that he would like to be her friend.

‘That is how I regard you,’ he said, smiling at her, ‘as a very dear and special friend. I know I am a little older than you, but I have friends who are many years older than me and the friendship is none the worse for that. Better, indeed, in some ways.’

But his attempts to charm Lucas in the same way had failed absolutely. Lucas had been wary from the very beginning, when Geordie was no more than a visitor. He greeted the news that his mother was to marry him with an intense, dark hostility that was chilling in a child and fought to be allowed to stay away from the wedding. It was only when his great grandmother, one of the very few people Lucas respected, told him he was making himself look ridiculous and that his father would have been ashamed of him, that he agreed to go. Indeed she had done much in the early days to ease the relationship along. But when she died Lucas descended into a dreadful grief and anger. And bitterness that yet another of the few people he had properly loved was gone from him.

He had only been ten at the time; Adele could scarcely remember him so much as smiling at her since. With an almost adult intensity, he had set about making himself awkward, uncooperative, casting a shadow over her new happiness with Geordie.

‘Give him time,’ she kept saying, as Geordie’s amusement at Lucas’s behaviour turned to impatience and finally to a deep, slow anger. Geordie had not encountered much hostility in his life; his charm, his capacity to be interested by, and to like everybody, had made his own life easy, amusing and agreeable.

But time had only made things worse.

Adele drove Lucas down to Fletton alone; Geordie would have made things infinitely worse and while she would have appreciated Noni’s company, she felt there was more chance of communication with Lucas without her. She was wrong; he sat in an icy silence the entire journey, and refused her offer of stopping for lunch.

‘I’d rather just get there,’ he said when she asked him if he was hungry, ‘there’s no point trying to make this journey pleasant.’

Those were the last words he spoke directly to her until a sullen goodbye as she left him with his housemaster on the steps of the famous West Front of Fletton.

She drove away in tears and had to stop several times on the way home because she was crying so hard that she could not properly see, not just from sadness at the parting, for she loved Lucas dearly in spite of his awkwardness, but from guilt and remorse as well. In failing Lucas, as she so obviously had done, she felt she had failed his father. She could imagine only too clearly what Luc would have said about her abandoning his son, as he would undoubtedly have seen it. Never mind that Luc himself had failed her all those years ago.

‘Are you all right, my darling?’

Geordie came in, sat down on the bed, tried to take her hand. Adele snatched it away. He looked hurt, and surprised.

‘Darling. What is it?’

‘Geordie what do you think it is, for God’s sake? I’ve just had to take Lucas to a place he is clearly going to hate, somewhere that I feel pretty unhappy about too. He refused even to kiss me goodbye. I’ve never seen him look so wretched and frightened. Do you think that’s going to make me feel good?’

‘Darling, we did agree—’

‘Did we?’ Adele looked at him, and felt angrier still. ‘I don’t think we did, actually, Geordie. You delivered an ultimatum which left me very little choice in the matter. Now you may prove to be right, but at the moment it doesn’t look like it, and I have just had a day of sheer hell. I think I’d be better on my own for a bit, if you don’t mind.’

Kit was now published by Wesley. He liked the set-up, the size of the house, the fact that it was new, hungry, and much talked about as being imaginative and exciting. He also very much liked his editor there, a woman called Faith Jacobson, who had an extraordinarily sensitive editorial approach; his agent had secured him a very good contract for his next three books.

‘I feel much happier altogether,’ he had told Sebastian, ‘and they have a high visibility in America, which is very good. You should come and join me.’

‘I couldn’t,’ said Sebastian with a sigh. ‘You know what they said about Mary Tudor having Calais written on her heart, I’ve got Lyttons. In a way I’d like to get away of course, but – well, I just don’t feel I can. Lyttons is much more than your mother, it’s a lot of people I’m fond of, Jay and Venetia and poor old Giles—’

‘Everyone calls him poor old Giles,’ said Kit, slightly irritably. ‘I can’t quite see it. He’s got a job – and a company, for that matter – that he almost certainly wouldn’t have if he wasn’t a Lytton.’

‘Hey, steady on! Harsh words.’

‘They’re true. I’m sorry. It’s the one thing I do agree wholeheartedly with my mother about. Giles is not up to that job. He’s also not a very good figurehead for Lyttons.’

‘You should tell her,’ said Sebastian lightly.

But he knew it wouldn’t happen; Kit had not even written to Celia to tell her about Wesley. He had quite simply cut her out of his life.

He was doing it again: staring at her across the silence of the Bodleian. In that blatant, almost insolent way. Elspeth frowned, looked away and started making furious notes from the book on Paradise Lost she was studying. Five minutes later, she looked cautiously up again; he was still staring. And worse, she saw a half-smile twitching at his mouth. Damn. He had noticed. Noticed that she had noticed him. Been waiting for her to respond. She should have resisted the temptation. It was just that he was rather – attractive. She couldn’t deny it. He had very large brown eyes, and very dark curly hair that looked as if it didn’t get brushed very often. He tended to wear big shaggy sweaters, and baggy cords, rather than the sports-jacketand-tie look favoured by his contemporaries. He was moderately tall, just shy of six foot, Elspeth imagined, and he had rather long arms and very large hands which gave him an ungainly look. His name was Keir Brown; he was known to his detractors as the Glasgow Gorilla.

Elspeth didn’t like him much: what she knew of him, anyway. He made no attempt to be polite, to get to know her in the usual way, by asking her if she wanted to come for a cup of coffee, or even striking up a conversation after a lecture. He just nodded at her, quite tersely, said ‘hallo’ occasionally and then proceeded to ignore her, as if it was up to her to make the effort. And it annoyed her, this meeting of her eyes in that I-know-you-fancy-me-and-I-fancy-you way. Of course boys had done that to Elspeth ever since she had been old enough to notice; she was very pretty, she had a wonderful figure, and she was quick-witted and sharp and great fun. She wasn’t quite as much of a sexual honeypot as her younger sister Amy – their father said Amy still shouldn’t be allowed out unchaperoned – but men did fancy her, and what was more they admired her, for her clear, bright mind.

She had had a wonderful first two years at Oxford; she was reading English, was expected to get a First and had already expressed, to the great delight of her grandmother, a desire to join Lyttons. She was very much one of Celia’s favourites; she resembled her physically, with her dark, rather dramatic beauty, she was hugely ambitious – and she was also a fine and fearless horsewoman.

Women were still in a minority at Oxford; anyone half attractive rode through their time there on a wave of heady popularity. Had Elspeth been less committed, less serious about her future, she could have been seriously distracted by the social life; as it was she had worked extremely hard, and, what was more, enjoyed doing so. She also had the inestimable gift of an almost photographic memory; exams were consequently not the nightmare for her that they were for so many of her peers.

So far her social life had been predictable; several romances, a few of them serious, with the kind of boys she was familiar with, bright, well-mannered public-school boys. She was still a virgin and had not yet felt the desire to cease being one strongly enough to undergo the risks. Not just of pregnancy, but of being known as cheap, ‘easy’, a tart. You had to be very much in love, very, very sure that the feeling was reciprocated, to take more than the most faltering step down that road.

There were of course a few very bohemian girls at Oxford who bedhopped seriously and tended to sneer at their more conventional sisters; but Elspeth had decided at the outset of her time there that she was not going to be one of them. Apart from anything else, you risked being sent down and what moment of sexual rapture could be worth that?

Keir Brown was one of the new breed of student; he was from a grammar school, he had no money and he spoke with quite a strong Scottish accent. He had made no attempt to modify the accent and for that Elspeth admired him; most of the grammar-school boys tried to adopt an Oxford accent, but it never quite came off, and everyone recognised it for what it was. There was a fairly brutish element among the establishment which made a point of mocking such boys; it required courage to face them down.

She had not been very much aware of Keir Brown during her first two years. Initially, he had kept a fairly low profile and had then become very involved with a girl a year below him who had suddenly left the university. It was rumoured she had been pregnant, but the official reason was that she had simply never settled to university life.

Keir was two years older than most of his peers, having done his National Service before going to Oxford; it had given him a selfconfidence that many of the grammar-school boys lacked, and enabled him to cope better with the Oxford snobbery.

And this term he had clearly set his sights on Elspeth. And she was quite determined to resist him.

As she walked out of the room, she managed to drop one of her files; papers went everywhere.

‘Damn,’ she hissed through the silence; several people looked up, frowned, a friend moved to help her pick them up.

Flushed and flustered she finally moved out of the building and into the street.

‘Here,’ said a voice, holding out a small clutch of papers, ‘you left these.’ It was Keir; he was still not smiling, still those dark-brown eyes were looking at her in that slightly contemptuous way. Just the same, there seemed no harm in saying thank you.

‘That’s all right,’ he said and turned away. She was just thinking how extremely oddly mannered he was when he looked back.

‘Would you like to go for a coffee?’ he said.

Slightly to her own irritation, Elspeth heard herself saying she would.

Lucas had expected to be miserable at school; he had expected to feel homesick – though getting away from Geordie MacColl would certainly be some kind of recompense for that – he had even expected the kind of bullying and sexual unpleasantness he had heard about but never experienced at day school. What he had not expected was to feel totally disorientated.

From the first moment when he was shown to his dormitory – a bleak, cold room with six beds in it, which clearly afforded absolutely no privacy to anyone – he had felt he had no real idea where he was or what he was supposed to be doing.

It got worse: supper that night, in the huge dining room, with its long tables and horrible food, assumed the proportions of a nightmare. And then at bedtime, lying in the hard, lumpy bed, with its thin bedclothes, being told to be quiet, that lights were going out, as if he was a small child, rather than fifteen years old (at a time when at home he would have settled down to hours of reading); being woken in the morning – woken by a bell rung loudly somewhere in the corridor, dressing in the freezing cold and following the other boys (none of whom seemed remotely agreeable or interesting) down to a breakfast, which was as disgusting as it was inadequate; and then into Assembly in the Great Hall with its high, high ceiling and glass rotunda, where he felt the great mass of boys almost like a physical pressure against him, and so into lessons, where he had expected to shine, but found himself bewildered by new teachers, different approaches – through all this he felt absolutely confused. Confused and cold and angry.

How had this happened to him, to Lucas Lieberman, so clever that he had won a scholarship to Westminster, so confident that on his first day there he had felt not a shred of nervousness, so musically accomplished that he was given a trial for the string section of the school orchestra in his first term, so arrogantly mature that he had become, after his two years there, the member of a small but intensely intellectual little clique that people fought to be allowed to join? How had he become a helpless, incompetent creature, his brain as numbed by the cold as the rest of him, shunned by his peers, mocked by his seniors, already beaten twice by the prefect he fagged for, for forgetting to light his fire and acquire bread for his toast? What was he doing out here on this freezing October morning, wearing nothing but shorts and singlet, doing some form of PE, a punishment inflicted by the senior boys on the juniors, his throbbing arms above his head as he jumped up and down? Where was the music his mother had promised him, the art, the culture? Lost somewhere in this nightmare; this nightmare of hearty games, absurd rivalry, vicious hostility.

Of course the place itself was ravishing, and its beauty was the one single source of comfort to him, impossible to ignore. And he could have done better, he knew, could have made friends, but he was not prepared to, not prepared to lower his standards by taking part in conversations about things he cared nothing about, not prepared to try, even to pretend to try, to be good at games, not prepared to tell smutty jokes, to sing filthy songs, to admire the school heroes – mostly great oafs playing rugby – not prepared to suck up to the masters. It was a tradition that you sat next to them in turn at supper and made polite conversation: if his housemaster thought he was going to try to be agreeable to him when only four hours earlier he had been beating him, then he was very much mistaken.

His first experience of being beaten had shocked Lucas more than he would have believed possible; the humiliation, the attack on his body by someone he despised, the pain of the first blow even through his trousers, the continuing assault of five more – the desperate struggle not to cry out or to cry, and then walking out of the room, head held high, past the queue of boys waiting for similar punishment – it was all such an assault on his psyche that the physical pain, the bruises which developed, were as nothing.

He was beaten constantly; his personal disorganisation grew with his misery and he was constantly late for lessons, for games, for meals, for assembly, garnering so many defaulters that they added up with horrifying speed to beatings. He was insolent to the masters too; there was only one man he admired intellectually, the history master, and he only taught the senior boys.

Lucas slept badly, worrying over the events of the day and then was tired the next day, increasing his inefficiency. Terrified of his own tendency to sleepwalk – he had often in Montpelier Street woken to find himself in a different room – and of getting lost in the cold darkness of the great house, he at first tied his foot to the post of his bed with his tie, but one of the boys discovered it and told the others. They mocked him so ruthlessly for being a baby that he gave it up and lay awake for hours, worrying instead.

He was unlucky in that he had been placed in a dormitory of rather hearty boys, whose parents lived in the country and who boasted endlessly about how much shooting land their fathers had got, and how they were going to roger the girls at the next hunt ball; there were other, more civilised boys, interested in the things he was, even in his year, but he so quickly gained a reputation for arrogance and unfriendliness that nobody bothered with him.

What he longed for was time on his own: time to think, to read, to cry even, cry for his mother, for the house in London that from here looked so warm and so happy, for the school he had loved, for the friends he had lost. But there was none; the only place was the lavatory and even there time was short, people banging on the door telling you to buck up and asking if you were having a wank.

The older boys, the house captains and prefects who could have made his life better, all disliked him for his insolence, for his refusal to buckle down to the school traditions, and tormented him further, putting him on extra duties, giving him almost unearned defaulters; by the end of the first half term, life seemed to have become a long weary cold procession from one wretched day and place to the next.

And for it all, Lucas thought, he had Geordie MacColl to blame; his hatred of him grew and grew like some vicious brooding creature. One day, one day he would get his revenge; that thought was one of the few things which kept him going in his misery.

‘So are you going to ask me to this party, then?’

Keir’s eyes on Elspeth were probing, half contemptuous, half amused as usual; she met them coolly.

‘If you want me to, I will. I just don’t think it’s a good idea, that’s all.’

‘And why not? Do you not think I’ll fit in with your grand family and friends? Are you ashamed of me?’

‘I am absolutely not ashamed of you. You know that. And I think you could fit in if you wanted to. If you’d make the – the effort. I’m just not sure that you would.’

‘Well, thank you for that.’

‘Oh Keir, don’t be so awkward. You know perfectly well being social is not exactly your thing. And while I wouldn’t specially mind if you stood in a corner sulking all evening, because someone had said something to upset you, my parents would. It would be – unfair to all of you. Perhaps.’

‘Perhaps. Any other reasons?’

‘Yes. There will be the full roll call of Lyttons there. My grandmother, the absolute head of the family, I know you’d like her and she would like you, but she is an appalling snob and as for her new husband, Lord Arden – well, I don’t see that one, Keir. My mother and her twin sister are pretty strong medicine, talk in riddles all the time, never stop fooling around and talking and flirting with everyone. My brothers – the older ones – are what you’d call public-school poofs. I mean I love them, but I don’t think they’d become your best friends. The person I’d like best in the world for you to meet, Sebastian Brooke, the writer you know, won’t be there.’

‘Why not?’

‘He and my grandmother have had the most fearful falling out. I can’t tell you why, let’s just say family politics. And then there’s Giles Lytton, my mother’s brother, dreadfully dreary, he’d get you into a corner and bore on about the war all evening, and his wife Helena is worse. She behaves like she’s the Queen Mother. Honestly, they’re a desperate lot. Some of them are nice, my cousin Noni is heavenly—’

‘Heavenly, Elspeth? In what way? Does she have wings?’

‘Keir,’ said Elspeth tartly, ‘I don’t comment on your accent and correct your turns of phrase. I don’t see what right you have to comment on mine.’

She had discovered quite early on that, like all bullies – and he was a fearsome intellectual bully – he responded to being stood up to.

They had moved quite swiftly from the coffee bar to a drink in the Turl, to a meal at the Vicky Arms; from walks along the river to cosy smoky evenings in pubs; from slightly awkward chat to long, deep conversations, taking in a lot of personal history and philosophy; from standing rather self-consciously clear of each other to holding hands and kissing, and from kissing to a journey far further along the road towards full sexual experience than Elspeth would ever have imagined.

‘It’s no use, Keir,’ she said, pushing his hand away as it embarked on its tirelessly hopeful journey into the country between her stocking tops and her thighs, ‘I’m not going to do it, and that’s all there is to it.’

‘Oh God,’ he said rolling on to his back, staring up at the ceiling, lighting a cigarette (they were in his room at Wadham, risky even at lunch time but less so than hers). ‘This bloody virginal rubbish. Just exactly what are you saving yourself for, Elspeth?’

‘Love,’ she said very seriously. ‘Love and the man I probably want to spend the rest of my life with.’

‘I thought you rich girls were more unconventional than that.’

‘Some of us are. I’m not. Sorry.’

‘Mummy told you it was wrong, did she?’

‘Not wrong, stupid. Dangerous. And I agree with her. OK?’

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Look, if it’s getting pregnant you’re scared of, I can make sure you don’t.’

‘Oh yes? An awful lot of girls have heard that one. Girls who’ve then had to get married or have back-street abortions or—’

‘Girls who sleep with ignorant wankers who don’t know what they’re doing.’

‘Don’t Keir. I’m not going to.’

‘Oh have it your own way,’ he said and stood up, glaring down at her, then slammed out of the room; she lay there for a while on his bed, then finished the paper cup of appalling cold red wine he had poured her and left. She didn’t care if that was the last time she saw him; she really didn’t.

But she knew deep down that she would. Keir Brown had a strange and strong effect on her; he invaded her consciousness, he took her over. She found it hard to explain; she realised that she was experiencing sexual desire for the first time, that the shoots of sensation that soared through her when he was kissing her, even sometimes when he was just looking at her across the room, were a new and very powerful thing, but it was more than that; when he was around, everyone else was wiped from her consciousness. She could be talking to, even flirting with, men far more good-looking, much more charming, and certainly more suitable than Keir Brown, but he would appear, walk into the room or the bar or the party, and it was as if she were there quite alone with him, incapable of concentrating on anything else. Quite a lot of the time she felt she didn’t even like him very much. He made no effort to amuse her or to flatter her, he wasn’t particularly witty, not in the least charming, often truculent, and absolutely not the sort of man she had ever imagined herself being involved with. But she was: completely involved, and almost against her will. She fought it sometimes, told herself she didn’t want to go on with it, didn’t want to see him any more even; and then he would come over to her after a lecture or at a party and give her that look of his and half smile at her and the resolve would just wash away.

She wondered if this was love and decided it couldn’t be. It was too uncomfortable.

He certainly hadn’t told her he loved her. He told her she was gorgeous, that she was clever, that she was interesting, and of course that she was extremely sexy, that he wanted her very badly, challenging what he called her ridiculous chastity.

‘It’s so pathetic,’ he said, sighing, turning on to his back and lighting a cigarette after one particularly determined assault on her. ‘What do you think is so wrong about it?’

‘I don’t think it’s wrong,’ said Elspeth, considerably disturbed and upset herself, ‘I just think it’s – stupid. To do it like – like this.’

‘But why? It’s a natural instinct. You want it, I know you do, I can feel it, I certainly want it, what’s going to happen to you? I’ve told you, you won’t get pregnant, so what’s the big deal? You’re flying in the face of nature, Elspeth.’ He added, half smiling now, ‘And it won’t do. You’ll give in one day, why waste time? And deny yourself – and me – a lot of pleasure. It’s absolutely ridiculous.’

‘Not to me,’ she said firmly.

‘I know what it is, you want it all dressed up in white lace and roses. With Mummy and Daddy smirking in the background. Pathetic, that’s what it is, Elspeth. It’s not worthy of you.’

So far she had managed to resist him; him and his arguments. But it was getting more difficult.

He was, of course, a ferocious inverted snob. Mocking her background, never missing an opportunity to take a shot at her accent, her education, her terms of reference. It was so stupid. It didn’t matter to her, in the very least, that his parents ran a corner shop in Glasgow – she teased him sometimes that he wasn’t proper romantic working class with a father who went down the pit or a grandmother who had been in service. Why should it matter to him that she lived in a big house and her brothers had gone to Eton, and she rode to hounds occasionally on her own horse? (This last had provoked a particularly strong attack.) Why couldn’t they put such rubbish out of the way? But he couldn’t, he was obsessed by it. When he found out that she had been presented at Court, he ridiculed her for about five minutes, without pausing for breath; finally she turned on him.

‘I wonder how you’d feel, Keir Brown,’ she said, ‘if I launched this kind of attack on you. On your accent, your background, your home and family, and everything that mattered to you. But that would be cruel, wouldn’t it, not funny, not fair game. You have a very odd sense of values, it seems to me.’ And she walked away from him, quickly, before he could see that she was crying; he ran after her, but she shook him off and refused to see him for at least a week. It was a measure of his remorse that he actually apologised to her; and after that, he was more restrained on the subject. Most of the time.

It was the only thing they did clash seriously about; such a stupid, unimportant thing. Of course they argued about quite a lot – politics, (although she was beginning to go along with some of his arguments there, and to admit that socialism did perhaps have some right on its side), religion (although he did at least now listen to her arguments in favour of the Church), their respective groups of friends, he found hers arrogant and two-faced, she found his graceless and aggressive – but they agreed about a lot of other things which really mattered, like work and ambition and family. Rather to Elspeth’s surprise, Keir was as keen to have a family as she was, but he thought two children would be quite enough. She passionately agreed with him. They had both grown up in a family of six; and while she had clearly not had to share a room with two brothers and quite often a baby as well, she knew how much parental time and attention was rationed amidst such a mob.

His ambition, he told her rather reluctantly, was to go into publishing, to be an editor; he seemed to have a feeling for the book trade, he worked in bookshops in Glasgow in the vacations and had had several articles published in Isis. He also wrote book reviews for the literary section: Elspeth found them rather florid and over-written, but was impressed nonetheless by his uncompromising judgement on what he had read. He either liked or loathed a book, there was never a shred of indecision; her grandmother had often told her that was the sign of a true publisher.

‘Well I think you should invite me,’ he said finally, as she finished outlining the full horrors of her family, ‘and I promise not to eat peas with a knife or spit or take up a seat when an old lady’s standing up. It’ll be better than not being there, thinking about you, wondering what’s going on, what stupid poofter you’re dancing with. But there’s to be no mention of my interest in publishing.’

‘Why on earth not? They might be able to help you and—’

‘I want none of that kind of help,’ he said, scowling at her, his dark eyes defensive and wary. ‘I’ll make my own way, and if I can’t do that, I won’t do it at all.’

‘Fine,’ said Elspeth, thinking that if she did not find Keir talking publishing to Celia by the end of the evening she would be very surprised indeed. ‘I promise. And I’m very pleased you’re going to come. Only don’t blame me if you hate every minute of it. You’ll have to stay to the end, though. And you’ll have to wear a dinner jacket.’

‘Well I’ve got used to that over the past two years. Now as my reward, will you take that horrible girdle thing off?’

‘You haven’t done anything worth rewarding yet,’ said Elspeth firmly, ‘and no, I won’t.’

‘Darling, it’s so lovely to see you, we’ve missed you terribly, haven’t we Noni? We have such wonderful plans for half term, starting with Elspeth’s party tomorrow of course, that’s going to be such fun and everyone is just longing to see you there. How is it all? I wish you’d write more, but I suppose you’re too busy. Come and sit in the front with me and tell me everything.’

‘I’d rather sit in the back,’ said Lucas, ‘thank you.’

Adele fielded his hostility like a physical blow; she had half expected it, of course, but she had hoped, hoped so much that he might have come to appreciate her and home more, would have come to terms with the decision to move him, even seen why it had happened and resolve to put things right.

‘Well all right, darling. Tell us about it anyway. What’s it really like, do you—’

‘I loathe it,’ said Lucas, ‘it’s vile, and I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Darling, in what way is it vile? It can’t be that bad, surely, the other boys all seem very nice and—’

‘They’re not nice, they’re unfriendly oafs.’

‘But you must have some friends—’

‘I don’t. I don’t want any friends. They’re not worth even talking to.’

‘But darling, why? They can’t all be bad.’

He shrugged. ‘Mother, for a few days I’m not going to be there. I don’t want to spoil the time here with talking about life there and why I haven’t got any friends.’

A silence. Then, ‘All right,’ said Adele. ‘What would you like to do for half term? Noni and I thought we might do some theatres and take you out to lunch tomorrow. Jay said he was longing to hear about it all, he can still remember his first term at Winchester, he says, and he’d love to swop notes with you, he’ll be at the party of course—’

‘I don’t want to swop notes with anyone. All right? And I certainly don’t want to go to any parties.’

‘But Lucas, it’s Elspeth’s twenty-first.’

‘I really don’t care, I’m afraid. I’m not going. I don’t see why I should. She hasn’t written to me, none of them have. All I want to do is stay at home and read and possibly see some of my old friends. Now if you don’t mind, I might have a sleep, I’m awfully tired.’

‘Adele, of course he must come to the party. It would be the height of rudeness not to.’

‘Well Geordie, I’m afraid he won’t. I can’t drag him there physically.’

‘You must tell him he has to go. He’s only a boy and you are his mother.’

‘You know perfectly well that doesn’t mean a thing. And any influence I might have had over him once is gone. Largely because—’

‘Yes? Because of what?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I suppose you blame me for this rift between you and your son, Adele.’

‘Yes,’ she cried, tears rising to the surface, after a long day of rejection and hostility from Lucas, ‘yes, Geordie, I do. You insisted he went away to school, he’s desperately unhappy there. If he was still here, I could be maintaining some kind of relationship with him, the lines would have been open at least, he would have come through this difficult patch—’

‘It’s been a long patch, Adele. Very long. He’s been rude and hostile to me for years. And to you. Even Noni agrees.’

‘Yes and even Noni agrees that he’s desperately unhappy, and is worried about him. It’s been a disaster, Geordie, and—’

‘It is far too early to say. He’s been there half a term.’

‘I don’t think it’s too early at all. He looks dreadful, so white and thin, and haunted looking. He seems to be living in another world half the time. And—’

‘Adele, this is an absurd conversation. We are talking about a boy who has not yet settled at his excellent new school, not someone locked up in some kind of prison.’

‘I think that is exactly how he sees it, a prison.’

‘Then it’s time he grew up,’ said Geordie.

‘How can he be expected to grow up, in an environment so unsuited to him?’

‘Adele, I would like to know what environment would suit him. A loving home where he is treated with courtesy and understanding certainly doesn’t. Perhaps you could come up with a better suggestion. And he is to come to the party tonight, if I have to drag him there myself by the roots of his hair.’

‘You are not to try to force him, Geordie. It’s not fair, when he’s so clearly upset and only just home.’

‘And it’s not fair of you to allow him to hurt and insult your sister and her family. I will not have it. Now shall I go up there and talk to him or will you?’

She was silent.

‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ said Geordie. ‘I’m going out. But if he’s not ready and in a dinner jacket at seven-thirty this evening, I can tell you his sulky little French backside will become extremely sore.’

‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ she shouted. ‘It’s jealousy, all this, jealousy that he’s Luc’s, that you think I still love Luc, that’s what it’s all about.’

‘Oh for Christ’s sake!’ said Geordie again. ‘I’m amazed you could be capable of such stupidity. Both now and, I might add, in the past. I’ll see you later.’

The front door slammed. Upstairs, Lucas quickly moved into his bedroom from the landing where he had been listening to his mother and Geordie quarrelling. He hadn’t felt so happy for a long time.

‘Happy Birthday, Elspeth, my darling. You look absolutely beautiful, doesn’t she, Boy? You must be so proud of her.’

She always did that, thought Venetia, it was always Boy, not she, who was congratulated, as if she had played some subservient role.

‘Thank you, Granny,’ said Elspeth, leaning forward, kissing Celia. They were almost exactly the same height, and at that moment, looked quite extraordinarily alike.

‘Now I have a present for you here,’ said Celia, producing a small package. ‘Are you opening them now? No, I’m glad to hear it. Such a vulgar thing to do, I always think. I hope you like it. It’s from Bunny and me. He is so sorry not to be here, but he hosts this shoot every year at this time and it was set in stone, or rather peat, long before he knew about your birthday.’

‘Darling Granny, that’s all right,’ Elspeth kissed her grandmother. ‘It’s so wonderful of you to come. All the way from Scotland.’

‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,’ said Celia. ‘It’s just too exciting for words to think you’re twenty-one. I’m only sorry that – well, that everybody in the family couldn’t be here.’ She smiled brilliantly at Elspeth, but her dark eyes were shadowed. She had been hoping against hope that Kit would come, but he had simply said he couldn’t contemplate it and that was all there was to it. It had been a very heavy blow for her.

‘No sorrier than me,’ said Elspeth. ‘But—’

‘I know, I know. Now, how is Florian?’

‘Marvellous. I went down there last weekend again, with Mummy and Noni, we stayed at Home Farm and I was out with him on both Saturday and Sunday. It’s so nice of Billy to let me stable him down there, and he looks after him so well.’

‘Of course. How is Billy?’ said Celia.

‘Fine. Really fine. As he keeps saying, not bad for fifty and with just the one leg. Dear Billy. He and Joan are making such a success of the farm, and the two boys are really helpful. Apparently Jenna caused an absolute riot down there and—’

‘I had heard,’ said Celia tartly. ‘That child needs some firm discipline.’

‘She’s awfully interesting, though,’ said Elspeth, ‘and very sweet.’

‘Not a word I’d choose. Now off you go,’ said Celia, ‘you’ve done your duty, talked to your grandmother for at least three minutes. I hear there is some rather special young man here from Oxford. I would like to meet him before the evening is over.’

‘Well Granny, you can meet him. But you’ve got to be nice to him.’

‘My darling Elspeth, why shouldn’t I be nice to him, for heaven’s sake? I’m not in the habit of being unpleasant to people, surely?’

‘Of course not, but – well – he’s – well – ’

‘He’s what, Elspeth? Hunchbacked? Stupid? Ugly?’

‘No,’ said Elspeth, thinking that any of those defects might be preferable. ‘No, he’s – well he’s – ’ there was a long pause ‘ – not very posh,’ she said quickly. ‘He – well, he’s at Oxford on a state scholarship. From a grammar school. His parents keep a – a shop.’

There was a pause; then ‘How absolutely fascinating,’ said Celia. ‘Where is he? I can’t wait to meet him. Oh, not that desperately attractive young man over there, standing and scowling by the fireplace? He looks very uncomfortable. Take me over, Elspeth, and introduce him to me. I’ll have him at his ease in no time.’

‘And the extraordinary thing was that she did,’ said Elspeth, sitting bleary-eyed on her bed next morning, talking to Amy. ‘I thought she’d be wildly patronising, I was terrified, but an hour later they were still talking. He told me she was a fine and interesting woman, and very attractive for her age, and she told me he was a very interesting and attractive young man and extremely well mannered – and in spite of him swearing he wouldn’t even mention it, she had him telling her all about his ambitions to be a publisher.’

‘Why didn’t he want it mentioned?’

‘I think he felt we’d laugh at him.’

‘How horrible. Of course we wouldn’t.’

‘No, I can see it. Here we are, great literary clan at the top of the mountain; and there’s him, at the bottom, staring up. Bit intimidating. Anyway, apparently she suggested he read some manuscripts for her. You know that’s how she checks people out. I must say no one would think she’d retired, hearing her talk last night.’

‘No, Mummy says she’s slithering back, as she puts it, keeps appearing with manuscripts and books from the competition.’

‘Well, they all said she would. Anyway, Keir told me he didn’t know if he wanted to do it for her, but of course he will. It was amazing. Honestly, I think they’d have spent the whole evening together, if Daddy hadn’t broken them up.’

‘Well, good for both of them,’ said Amy. ‘I think he’s absolutely wizard, Elspeth. Very, very sexy. Have you – I mean – ’

‘No, I haven’t,’ said Elspeth firmly, ‘and not with anyone else either, nor am I going to, until I get married.’

‘Oh, you’re so old-fashioned. I’m just waiting for the first really good offer I get. All right, all right, only joking. I say, Adele and Geordie looked pretty glum, didn’t they? Apparently they keep having the most frightful rows over the terrible infant. Noni says it’s absolutely horrid and she keeps getting caught in the middle, because she can see all sides. Poor Noni.’

‘Poor Noni. Let’s ask her over for lunch today. Your new beau can cheer her up.’

‘Oh he’s not staying for lunch,’ said Elspeth quickly, ‘we thought the party would be quite enough for him. He’s off back to Oxford quite early.’

‘Honestly Elspeth, you’re mad. Anyone would think he had four legs. Or rather we all did. I bet you ten bob he wants to stay. He had a lovely time.’

‘Done,’ said Elspeth.

Ten minutes later there was a knock at her bedroom door; it was Amy. ‘You owe me ten bob,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I just met young Master Brown on the stairs and he most definitely wants to stay for lunch. And Mummy says yes of course we must ask Noni. So – cash or cheque?’

‘Cash,’ said Elspeth, slightly vaguely. The one thing she hadn’t expected was that Keir would fall in love with her family. It made her feel rather odd.