Birthday Party, page 21
It didn’t bother him at first, but once they were married Benedict wanted to murder every last one of them. It was the source of much tension between the couple. Jeanne was incensed that he suspected her of leading men on, and refused not to speak to them. She enjoyed men’s company. It didn’t mean she was going to be unfaithful. Benedict could never conquer that fear.
It grew and grew. Hot, white and destructive, uncontrollable. If she spoke to a waiter, his hands gripped the side of the table until the conversation was finished. If she chatted to another man at a party, it was all he could do not to drag him outside by the tie. He phoned her six, ten, twelve times a day to check what she was doing. He knew it was going to destroy them. He tried to be rational. When they were together, alone, they were so happy. There were no threats. But there were rafts of time when they weren’t together, when she was left to her own devices. He worked long hours, and during those long hours the jealousy gnawed away at him.
He was constantly looking for clues. He never found any proof, but then he knew she would be clever. He tortured himself, thinking of all the people she could have come into contact with during the day. All the opportunities she might have had for a liaison. Or liaisons – why should she stop at one? His questions, his traps, grew more feverish, and she grew more resentful.
‘Why is it so hard for you to believe I’m faithful? Do you really think so little of me? Or think I think so little of you?’
Eventually, his mistrust wore her down so much that she began to drink more and more. By the time he got home at night, she had already started on the wine, to inure herself to his line of questioning. He saw only one possible reason for that: she was guilty. She was having an affair. She protested her innocence, then gave him an ultimatum. Back off, or she would leave. He was appalled. He begged forgiveness. In the end, she had to give in to him.
She was pregnant.
The year Justine was born was their happiest. Benedict could relax, because while Jeanne was pregnant she was out of bounds to other men. And the first six months after the baby was born were bliss. Jeanne was so involved in being a mother she scarcely left the house. Eventually, however, she emerged from the post natal fuddle and ventured out into the world. His paranoia re-emerged. He was aware that motherhood had made her even more attractive – riper, more rounded, womanly. She drove him crazy with desire, so she must have the same effect on every other red-blooded male she came into contact with.
She wanted to have a thirtieth birthday party. Benedict was reluctant. It was his worst scenario, her being the hostess, skipping from guest to guest. How could he reasonably prevent her from circulating? He tried everything to dissuade her from the idea, but she was adamant, even refusing the offer of a week in Bora Bora as an alternative.
‘We haven’t had a party since Justine was born,’ she insisted. ‘I’ve got my figure back. I want to be me again. I want to let my hair down.’
In the run-up to the party things were tense between them. He couldn’t help it. He kept reading signs into what she was doing. When she showed him the emerald silk dress she had chosen, he couldn’t help feeling she had picked it with someone else in mind. Repeatedly he told himself he was being irrational, that he would lose her if he didn’t get a grip on his emotions. He promised himself he wouldn’t let it spoil the party. She was right – she deserved to have fun. She was doing such a wonderful job of bringing up their daughter. He was immensely proud of them. If he didn’t get a grip, he would lose them both. This was a sobering thought indeed, and Benedict resolved to relax. If she spoke to another man, so what? It was his bed she would climb into at the end of the night.
He knew the moment he set eyes on them talking. The man was leaning casually up against the wall, looking at her sleepily, his hand curled around his glass. There was a familiarity between them that didn’t just come from having had a few cocktails. And as Jeanne walked away, he watched the man watching her, proprietorial lust in his eyes.
He could scarcely wait until the last guest was gone before he hurled accusations at her. She hurled back denials.
‘Do you know what? I wish I was fucking him. Because I’m being punished enough for it. I might as well.’
She left the room. Benedict lay back on the bed, exhausted. It was too late to call her back and apologise. He knew he should. He had behaved disgracefully, but it was only because he loved her so much. Maybe he should see a shrink. Other husbands didn’t seem to have this overwhelming possessive-ness. He pulled the covers over his head and sought refuge in sleep, hating himself for his temper. He would make it up to her tomorrow, he thought drowsily. They would go somewhere lovely for lunch with the baby. He thought of his little family with a warm glow as he drifted off into unconsciousness.
At this point in the story, Benedict halted. It was as vivid as if it had happened yesterday. He wasn’t leaving any detail out. Justine had the right to know everything. He wanted her to know exactly how guilty he had been for everything that had followed. He could have given her the sanitised version, but what was the point?
She was staring at him, sitting upright, her arms clasped around her knees. She knew it wasn’t going to be a happy ending.
‘Go on,’ she whispered.
He took a final slug of brandy. He wasn’t going to whitewash himself, but he wasn’t going to whitewash Jeanne either. The truth had been festering inside him for years, and he was ready to be judged. He had been judging himself for long enough, after all.
Someone came to wake him at half past five that morning. He couldn’t remember who. A member of staff, a policeman, a paramedic – he had no idea. No recall. Jeanne had been found floating face down in the swimming pool, still in her green dress. There was a glass by a chair on the side of the pool smeared with her lipstick, next to her discarded shoes.
The post mortem showed that she had died with an excessive level of alcohol in her body. And that she had had sex several hours before she drowned.
Benedict looked at his daughter as he revealed the last piece of the puzzle. The piece that he could have held back, if he had wanted to, but it was the piece of information that redeemed him.
Jeanne and Benedict had not made love for three weeks.
It had been a double-edged sword, that piece of information. It made him realise that his fears hadn’t been irrational, but the fact that his suspicions weren’t unfounded, that she had been unfaithful, were hardly a consolation. And now he would never know if her drowning had simply been a terrible accident, or if she had tried to take her life because she was embroiled in a passionate but unrequited love affair, or if indeed he had driven her to seek solace in someone else’s arms because of his paranoia. He never found out who the man at the party had been.
His way of dealing with it was to wipe Jeanne out of his life. He excised all trace of her. He changed all of his staff. He no longer mixed with the same friends. He paid someone very well to keep as much of the detail out of the press as possible. Even now, he paid someone a retainer to comb the Internet on a regular basis, erasing any mention of her, so that even if Justine chose to do some digging, she would never find anything.
Benedict finished his story, and waited for his daughter’s judgement. If his confession meant losing her, then so be it. It was all he deserved.
For several moments, Justine didn’t speak. She looked around her, bewildered, as if someone was going to come forward and tell her what to think. Then she turned to face Benedict, and he saw the tears glittering in her eyes.
‘Oh Dad,’ she said softly. ‘That’s so sad …’
And she reached out and held his face in her hands, and stroked his cheeks with her thumbs, and he realised she was wiping away his tears, tears that had remained unshed for all this time.
‘It was an accident,’ she told him. ‘A terrible, tragic accident. There was no one to blame.’
There was everyone to blame. Him. Jeanne. They were all culpable. He’d been over it often enough in his head.
And then she pulled him into her arms as he wept, all the grief and regret and sorrow pouring out of him at long last. And along with those emotions was an overwhelming sense of relief, that at last he had confessed, and that she wasn’t going to punish him, his beautiful daughter. She understood.
Of course she understood.
She understood completely. The only thing he was guilty of was loving too much, with a passion that had engulfed him and driven him to near madness.
By asking Benedict about her mother, she had hoped to find a clue about the new person she had become. She had assumed that what she was going through was courtesy of characteristics she had inherited from Jeanne. Now she realised that she was replicating her father – the man she had thought so strong, so self-sufficient.
Her father’s story was a lesson to her. She was going to have to tread carefully on her journey with Violet. Already she had felt the emotions he described – the sense of wanting to possess someone entirely, the sickening dread when they spoke to someone else, the desperation when they were out of sight and all the time questions: how did they feel, what were they doing, would they come back … ?
Benedict had stopped weeping now. He sat back on the sofa, drained.
‘Sorry …’ he muttered, then gave an embarrassed laugh as he wiped away the last of his tears with his sleeve. It was a moving gesture, almost childlike, and Justine felt tears catch again at the back of her throat.
He put his hand over hers and gave it a tight squeeze, gathering strength as much as giving it.
‘Why today?’ he asked curiously. ‘What made you ask me today?’
She opened her mouth to tell him, then decided against it. Something told her now was not the time to deliver such a shock, when she had no real idea where she stood or where she was going.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied eventually. ‘Maybe it was … seeing Delilah with all her daughters. It just made me wonder …’
They sat for a while in silence, Justine curled under the crook of his arm.
Benedict sensed she was lying. Something had happened to change his daughter. He could tell. He hoped she hadn’t been hurt, or wasn’t going to be. He felt a flash of protectiveness – that familiar searing pain in his gut, different from the one he had felt for his wife, but all-consuming nevertheless.
He wasn’t going to let any harm come to Justine. He wasn’t going to let any bastard harm a single hair on her head. She might not be forthcoming, but Benedict had ways of finding things out. If there was someone out there with the power to hurt his daughter, he would know soon enough.
Twenty
It was the day Raf was due to decamp to Bath to start work on Something for the Weekend, and for the first time in her life, Delilah thought that perhaps today she just wouldn’t get up. Her limbs felt heavy, and every thought that made its way into her head was unwelcome. She didn’t feel ill. Just overwhelmed. She genuinely didn’t see the point in throwing back the duvet. She wanted to snuggle back under the protective cloak of white linen and goose-down and float away to oblivion.
There had been a hideous, horrible piece in one of the papers after Coco’s screening. An immensely unflattering photo of Delilah coming out of The Melksham looking puffy and bloated. She wasn’t puffy and bloated, not at all, but the camera angle, and the fact that she had had her head down, made her look as jowly as Doug the Pug. The long grey silk cardigan over wide-legged trousers that looked chicly sleek in the mirror transformed her into a ship in full sail when seen through a lens.
The strap-line had read: Who Ate All the Pies?
She knew she should brush it off. She knew she didn’t look old and fat but had been caught unawares by a photographer determined to make her look her worst, and that no effort had been made to improve her appearance. And she knew what this meant.
The tide was turning. They were out to get her. This was the start. Whereas once she had been revered as a national treasure, now she was going to be an easy target, overshadowed by her ravishing daughters. The spiteful copy would increase tenfold. There would be competition as to who could photograph her at her worst. There would be speculation about her state of mind, her marriage, her health. They wouldn’t be happy until they had destroyed her. She’d seen it so many times before. While you were a success, you thought you were immune. But nobody was immune. She didn’t know who decided it was your turn for a downfall. It happened almost as if by osmosis. But it was her turn. She could feel it in her bones.
And once they – whoever they were, those nameless, faceless arbiters of destiny – had decided your card was marked, you began to fulfil their prophecy. Loss of confidence, paranoia, ill-chosen decisions all combined to hasten your fall from grace.
She tried to breathe deeply to suppress her rising panic. There was no one she could turn to for reassurance. Everyone around her was paid to be nice. Polly, Tony, Miriam – they all had a huge vested interest in her continued success. If she voiced her fears, their response would be biased.
And Raf. She couldn’t turn to him either, even though she had steered him through the most spectacular downfall. The difference was that he had engineered that downfall – it had been entirely of his own making. The press at the time hadn’t decided to de-throne him; he had done it for himself. They had recorded it all, of course, but they hadn’t actually brought it about. And now they were preparing themselves for his resurrection.
Maybe there wasn’t room for two on the throne? Maybe she had to sacrifice herself to make way for him? There was already a sea-change in Raf that she found difficult to cope with. He had a new energy to him. Where once her phone had rung all day, now it was his. Production assistants, wardrobe girls, people asking about dates, accommodation, costumes, his dietary preferences. The production company had sent him a welcome hamper from Daylesford Organic, stuffed with all sorts of culinary delights to take with him on location. Couriers with updated scripts arrived at all hours. A photographer came to do a portrait shot for the publicity. And he seemed to be out for lunch or dinner every day of the week. Not that Delilah wasn’t able to go if she wanted, but she knew how dull it was sitting in on someone else’s gig. The old adage don’t mix business with pleasure always hit home.
Her phone, in the meantime, was suspiciously quiet. She had finished shooting her latest series, and was battling to finish the next book. So she was in a fallow period. People should still be ringing her, though. She was on everyone’s wish list. Wasn’t she?
There was no doubt that the focus at The Bower had shifted.
Delilah hated herself for minding. She wasn’t so shallow and self-centred that she had to be the star of the show all the time. Or was she? Maybe all those years of being top bitch, the one that ruled the roost, had affected her. Made her think that she was the one the world revolved around.
And the resonance of Violet’s words were still stinging. Her daughter hadn’t phoned to apologise, or even defend her slur. In fact, none of them had phoned for days. They were wrapped up in their own worlds. She was no longer needed.
Until they needed a handout, or a favour, she told herself bitterly. One or other of them would be on the phone sooner or later.
She stared up at the Abigail Ahern chandelier that swung over her bed. On her feet lay Doug the Pug, a dead weight, wheezing gently.
Come on, she told herself. Get up and go into the gym. Do a workout, eat some fruit, drink some water, have a shower, get dressed. You’ll feel better.
She still didn’t move. She could hear Polly and Tony talking to Raf downstairs in the kitchen. She didn’t want to know about what. She was pretty sure it wouldn’t be her. Laughter floated up the stairwell. There’s nothing worse than other people’s laughter when you are feeling below par. She felt a nasty twitch in her gut; a slightly burning sensation. Was she ill? Had she eaten something, or caught a bug? Maybe that would explain her lassitude. As she ran over what she had had for dinner last night, a slow realisation hit her. The boiling acid in her stomach wasn’t food-related.
It was jealousy.
Once more she felt the overwhelming urge to throw the duvet over her head. But she couldn’t. This was Raf’s big day. She didn’t want to look like a sour-faced old bag, even if that was what she felt like. With a Herculean effort, she extricated her feet from underneath Doug and got out of bed.
Delilah waited until Raf was lining his cases up in the hall ready to put into the boot of the Maserati before presenting him with her farewell gift. She dangled it in front of him with a grin.
He took it from her, puzzled.
‘What this?’
‘The key to the most gorgeous bachelor pad in the Royal Crescent. You will absolutely love it.’
‘But Dickie’s sorted the accommodation. He’s rented a house on the outskirts of Bath.’
‘It looks horrible. Didn’t you see the details he emailed?’ Delilah was disparaging. ‘Half the rooms haven’t even got their own bathroom, for heaven’s sake.’
‘I don’t mind—’
‘What if I want to come and stay?’
‘It’s perfectly good enough.’
‘And you’re going to have to share the kitchen with everyone else.’
‘So? It’s me that’s got to stay there. If I’m happy with it, what’s the problem?’
‘If you’re going to be away from home for three months then you need decent accommodation. And your own space. This is perfect. It’s got all the mod cons; there’s even a mini-gym in the spare room.’
‘No.’ Raf shook his head, his lips tight. ‘We’re on a strict budget. Of course Dickie would love to put us all up in some Regency shag palace, but he can’t afford to—’
‘I’m not expecting him to pay. I’ve dealt with it.’
Raf knew this tone in Delilah’s voice. It meant she had made up her mind. Well, this time he was going to dig his heels in. He had become used to her making all the decisions over the past few years. He’d been happy to go along with it – she had such firm opinions about things, and he usually wasn’t bothered about details. This, however, was a point of principle.
