Pearls Page 3

  ‘You’re sure – you didn’t feel it was a disfigurement?’ her voice faltered on the word.

  ‘No, honestly, Monty, I was hardly aware of it. It’s something I never give a thought to.’

  Later, however, Cathy lay awake in the night thinking about the pale brown stain on her skin. She had dreamed vividly of watching herself from behind, diving into a swimming pool, with the birthmark showing darker because she was suntanned. Accompanying the dream were feelings of violent emotional disturbance – anger, anxiety and acute insecurity. Monty said that everyone dreamed a lot in Arizona; she had a theory that the elemental landscape, all air, fire and earth, put people in closer touch with their hidden emotions.

  Perhaps she was right, Cathy thought, sitting up in bed and pulling the white quilt up to shoulder level. She switched on the concealed lighting in the white wall behind the bed and reached for the folder at her bedside. It contained the draft of the prospectus for her new venture, a private bank. In the years during which Cathy had dealt successfully with some of the wealthiest but most wayward people in the world, she had become convinced that the bank would be a logical development of the service she already provided for her clients. Now other firms were getting to the same place, and it was time to act before her market began to be eroded. Cathy knew she would never be in quite such a strong position again.

  She was a wealthy woman, certainly, the richest self-made woman in Britain. But money did not buy friends, it just got you smarter enemies. Human nature didn’t change – especially male human nature.

  Even the prospectus could not engage her tormented mind and Cathy’s thoughts strayed. A name floated out of her unfocused memories of her father – William Treadwell. He was the man to whom her father had been closest out in the East; maybe she could trace him.

  Because Treadwell had changed his name and adopted the native religion, Daddy had talked about him as if he had contracted some chronic illness. They must have been close, or her father would never have felt so strongly about Treadwell’s change of faith. She tried to remember more. Treadwell had taught her father to play chess. Cathy smiled with affection for her dead father. She also remembered her husband accusing her: ‘You don’t love me,’ he had raged, ‘you can’t love me, or any other man. There’s only one man you’ll ever love, Cathy, and he’s dead. That’s your little tragedy, darling.’ The harsh words, spoken in anger so long ago, no longer wounded her. What her husband had said was untrue; she could love. She loved her son more than his father would ever be able to comprehend, but there would never be anyone in her life quite as dazzling as Daddy, of course. She had accepted that.

  Chapter One

  ‘I seem to be in trouble.’ The forelock of James Bourton’s greying dark hair fell into his line of vision as he leaned over the chessboard. He picked up his one remaining bishop, moved it halfway across the board, saw danger and retreated.

  A few pink petals from the rose which climbed the grey-stone façade of their house fell on to their table on the terrace, and James picked them off, playing for time. Cathy wondered if her father was putting on a show of floundering in defeat for her benefit. She hoped not. She was sixteen, and no longer wanted concessions of that kind. She watched him with patience, folding her arms across the bib of her navy school tunic to keep warm. The heat of the September day was fading.

  When she had been a little girl, it had been different. She could not bear to lose at any game, and had cried and screamed, ‘It’s not fair!’ if she was checkmated. Her father had indulged her, surrendering with a show of despair at the end but putting up just enough of a fight for her to feel her triumph was genuine.

  ‘Dash it, you’ve done it again,’ he would murmur in a pained voice. ‘Run off the board by my own daughter!’ he would protest, pretending an agony of disgrace.

  ‘But Daddy,’ Cathy would say with childish forthrightness which persisted long after she should have learned tact, ‘I only won because you were absolutely stupid.’

  ‘In victory, magnanimity,’ he advised her, making room for her on his lap so she could give him a kiss. He smelt of the cologne from his Curzon Street barber, of cigars, and, after lunch, of brandy.

  His cheeks were cool and smooth, never scratchy with stubble like Uncle Hugo’s.

  Cathy began to beat her father for real shortly after she went to boarding school, but he would still lounge back in his chair, blow smoke-rings from his afternoon cigar, and give her advice from a position of superiority.

  ‘Always think two moves ahead,’ he counselled in lordly tones. ‘Put yourself in your enemy’s shoes. Think about what I’m up to as well as what you’re going to do about it,’ he told her, narrowing his bright brown eyes. Then his attention would wander and she would be able to take his queen in two moves.

  ‘That’s the spirit, princess. Do as your father says, not as he does.’ And he would beam with pleasure, tickled pink that his daughter had such ability. His concentration span was short, and, unlike Cathy, he saw no point in winning a game, only in passing his time enjoyably.

  The last chess game of the school holidays had become a ritual, as much a part of the process of saying goodbye to home as taking her pony down to the livery stable and kissing his silky nose. Their mother would leave for her afternoon at the bridge club, and Monty would vanish upstairs to her piano. This was the last precious time which Cathy would spend alone with her father for some months.

  ‘All right, you’ve got me. I surrender. Hang out the white flag.’ James tossed the hair out of his eyes and they smiled at each other with satisfaction. ‘I never mind losing to the most beautiful girl in the world. Come and give your poor father a kiss.’

  From the uppermost window, under the graceful gothic curve of the gable, cascades of notes sounded from the piano. Monty was attacking an elaborate Chopin fantasy much too fast, slurring across the passages she could not remember and guessing the chords until at last the piece collapsed in hopeless dissonance. Monty said, ‘Hell,’ loudly enough to be heard outside, slammed down the piano lid, then slammed it up again and started picking out a different tune. James hummed it.

  ‘Isn’t that something by those dreadful insects – what are they called?’ Cathy knew he was teasing her.

  ‘The Beatles, Daddy. Yes, she can play all their songs.’

  ‘They’re still the latest thing, are they?’

  ‘They’ve been number one for weeks.’

  ‘Ridiculous name. I suppose you teenagers like that sort of noise.’ He tossed the last two inches of Havana into the herbaceous border.

  ‘We’re not teenagers, Daddy.’

  ‘Of course you are, you’re sixteen and fifteen, that makes you teenagers.’

  Cathy wriggled on the Georgian garden bench. She had a knack of seeing life very clearly which adults often found embarrassing. ‘You know what I mean, we aren’t really teenagers.’ What she meant was that teenagers were virtually a new social class. The granddaughters of a Duke, educated at the boarding school which was shortly to be attended by the Queen’s own daughter, had their position in society predetermined.

  Whatever their social background or education, teenagers shared the same interests and rejected everything their parents held dear. Teenagers, by definition, had rows with their parents and wore outrageous outfits. They had jobs which paid them as much as £20 per week – leaving plenty of money to spend on clothes and records – but their attitude to work was irresponsible. They skipped from one job to another, contributing as little as possible and always looking for excitement rather than secure employment with a pension afterwards.

  Girl teenagers wore corpse-pale make-up, near-white-lipstick and thick black eyeliner; the boys wore hair so long it almost brushed their shirt collars, and cuban-heeled boots with chisel toes. At weekends, teenagers hung around coffee bars in gangs. Above all, teenagers liked pop music. They bought singles by the million for 6s 3d each, and played them on automatic record players. Teenagers despised BBC light music
programmes hosted by middle-aged men with patronizing, upper-class voices. Instead, they tuned their transistor radios to Radio Luxembourg, a station which transmitted pop music all night from the tiny principality on the Continent, beyond the censorship of British broadcasting laws.

  James half-approved of what he called the teenage thing. He bought Monty a transistor radio for her fourteenth birthday, and silenced his wife with a glare when she objected to the noise. Without ever analysing his knowledge, James recognized that teenagers were essentially non-conformist, and his two daughters, high-spirited as they might be, were nice, upper-class girls, conformist to the tips of their unvarnished fingernails.

  ‘Why shouldn’t they enjoy themselves?’ he argued with his wife. ‘There’s no harm in listening to music. They’ll grow up soon enough.’

  Bettina pinched her lips, making the coral lipstick run further into the deep wrinkles around her once pretty mouth. ‘Nice young men nowadays …’ she began, but James cut off her sentence.

  ‘Nice young men nowadays aren’t going to want to marry a pair of stick-in-the-muds,’ he told her, suddenly vicious.

  Bettina wanted her daughters married as well and as quickly as possible, so that she could consider her duty as a mother discharged. The sisters had sensed their mother’s hostility in their earliest childhood, and drawn closely together to protect themselves against her. In those days their father had been a virtual stranger, whose weekend visits were like interludes of dazzling sunlight in a life overcast with their mother’s dislike.

  As they matured from perplexing bundles of childish passion to pleasing pre-adolescents, James discovered that his daughters were delightful companions. Just as his own lust for living was waning, their enthusiasm refreshed it. Even their faults entranced him; if Cathy was outspoken to the point of rudeness and Monty increasingly rebellious, they were only expressing his own frustrated feelings. He began to realize that the two girls were the best achievement of his life. They were also the only women whom he could love with all his heart; he was never anxious to be left alone with his wife, whom he did not love at all.

  To everyone but his wife, Bettina, James Bourton was the most charming man imaginable. In middle age he was wiry and energetic, with spontaneous good manners and flattering attention for everyone from the new traffic wardens who put tickets on his Bentley all over the City to the Chairmen of his boards.

  One enthusiasm after another caught James’s fancy, and in consequence he passed on to his elder daughter a broad-based education in gentlemanly pursuits; at sixteen she could hold a competent discussion with anyone about the right trout fly to use, the best claret to drink or the most likely horse to back. She was slow to acquire the ladylike cunning to hide this knowledge, but most of her father’s friends found her girlish frankness charming and would only laugh when she earnestly explained exactly where they had gone wrong.

  Cathy also learned something else from mixing in her father’s world. She learned that he was a failure. He was well-liked, and valued for his name and connections, which were worth a great deal in the City of London in 1963. But his colleagues thought James a lightweight, lacking in judgement and insufficiently aggressive in business. Every now and then she would catch a patronizing note as someone spoke to him, and she would burn inwardly with anger. Didn’t they realize that her father was the most marvellous man in the world?

  ‘Well – all good things must come to an end.’ James stood up and took her arm as they strolled indoors. ‘Go and see if your sister’s ready. I’ve got to speak to your headmistress about her and we’d better not be late if I’m going to tackle the dragon in her lair.’

  Nominally, James was a director of a large merchant bank, two new Unit Trust companies and an old-established insurance brokerage house. Lord James Bourton was a name which looked well on the letterheads, and James himself looked well at board meetings, excavating neat holes in the ends of his cigars with a gold penknife to mask his boredom. He looked best of all in the bank’s box at Ascot, or watching polo on Smith’s Lawn at Windsor, or running a fluent, amusing conversation around the long, mahogany dining table of his club. Any habitat of the British aristocracy was natural to him, and the traditional plumage also became him more than it became most men; Cathy thought he looked finest in full evening dress, with diamond studs twinkling below his crisp white tie and discreet medal ribbons reminding everyone that this dandy had also served his country.

  As soon as the girls were old enough, James took them with him to lighten some of the ceaseless round of entertaining which was his primary business function. Bettina never spent more time with her husband than necessary; Monty was easily bored, and then became sulky, announcing that she didn’t want to dress up and go out with her father any more; but Cathy was always delighted with any excuse to enjoy his company. The road that led to Benenden School was like the road to Manderley, a mysterious, private highway overhung with beech trees and rhododendron bushes. Monty always had a sense of foreboding as they drove down the dark-green tunnel, leaving the fertile Kent countryside behind in the mellow autumn sunshine. The wall of vegetation enclosed the school completely, cutting it off from life in the real world outside.

  She shrank down into the corner of the Bentley as it emerged into the avenue of lime trees that connected the group of red-brick school buildings; the main building was a castellated edifice with Jacobean pretensions. Monty thought it a hypocritical sham, and held the same opinion of most of the activities promoted within its walls. Most of all, she dreaded the swamp of boredom which waited behind the diamond-paned windows. The endless afternoons spent acquiring useless facts or redundant skills would, she knew, plunge her into a lethargy which was as painful and exhausting as an illness.

  Cathy got out first. Her house, Etchyngham, was a building at the far end of the lime avenue. Etchyngham’s colour was pink, and Cathy looked almost pretty with a pink belt and tie on her navy uniform. Monty’s house, Guldeford, had orange accessories. She hated orange. It made her look sallow. Monty knew the teachers kept her in Guldeford House because it was part of the main school building and she would be under their noses. The school’s biggest troublemaker, Serena Lamotte, who called herself Swallow, was in Guldeford House for the same reason. Monty and Swallow were becoming good friends.

  Once the girls had kissed him goodbye and vanished inside their respective houses, James strolled towards the headmistress’s study, trying to put himself in the right frame of mind to win Monty the approval of those in authority over her. The reason he found this difficult was that he felt his younger daughter’s spirit was her most valuable quality. He envied her courage to rebel; he could not help reflecting that his own life would have been very different, and probably far more satisfying, if his character had contained a similar measure of fire. He saw no reason at all why she should obey the school rules. If his bond with his elder daughter was founded on complementary personalities and interests, James’s attraction to Monty was the yearning of a reluctantly domesticated personality for one which was fighting to remain untamed. Cathy shared this feeling. They both knew that Monty was in some way special, and protected her accordingly.

  In the headmistress’s study James began to play the part of the concerned parent.

  ‘Quite frankly, Lord James, I am not at all sure that we will be able to do much more for Miranda,’ Miss Sharpe began with an expression of discomfort.

  Miranda was Monty’s real Christian name. Monty, the nickname of Britain’s great World War II general, had been the name her father had called her after a holiday at Deauville, where he had listened to his seven-year-old daughter ordering her older sister and her cousins to scramble up and down sand dunes in a game they called Desert Rats. The name seemed more appropriate as Miranda grew older, more independent, more awkward, and more uncontrollable.

  ‘It isn’t just a question of position badges and detentions, or even of the smoking. It’s her general attitude. We stress personal integrity here and we ha
ve to consider the other girls. Does she smoke at home, do you know?’

  ‘Certainly not.’ James knew perfectly well that Monty’s recent passion for long walks was entirely inspired, by the fact that she could smoke undetected out of doors. ‘We’ve had some long talks during the holidays, and Monty has promised to turn over a completely new leaf.’ He beamed with confidence, baring fine white teeth, one of which was chipped. ‘I’m sure you’ll find the smoking was just a youthful experiment.’ The smile widened and the lines which crisscrossed his otherwise boyish face deepened. Miss Sharpe smiled back. ‘Monty really lives for her music, and my wife and I are tremendously appreciative of everything you’ve done for her here. I’m quite sure you will have every reason to be proud of her. She’s quite determined to make a new start.’ Like all successful seducers, James’s blandishing sincerity was due to the fact that he believed every word he said at the time he said it, and Miss Sharpe’s shrewd schoolmistress’s sense about difficult girls was overwhelmed.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to congratulate you on your Oxford and Cambridge results,’ he went on. ‘You must be very pleased. I think Cathy’s rather looking forward to the Sixth Form.’

  ‘Will she be considering university?’ The annual tragedy of Miss Sharpe’s life was that the parents of so many of her competent girls took them away from the school at fifteen or sixteen and sent them to finishing schools or tossed them into the debutante season, considering any proof of intellect as at best irrelevant and at worst something more damaging to the girl’s marriage prospects than congenital insanity. Many of the school staff would have been married if their fiancés had not died in the war. Their careers were a forced choice, and they felt in no position to argue with the girls’ parents.

  ‘We’ll leave university up to her – I think that’s wisest, don’t you? I see you’ve started work on the new house – how is the appeal going?’ James was subtly reminding Miss Sharpe that his contribution to the fundraising had been handsome and early, allowing her to approach other parents with a high benchmark to indicate the size of donation required. Such generosity was to be expected of a man of his means and social position, but with Monty under threat of expulsion, this seemed to her father an expedient moment to bring up the subject of the school’s gratitude.