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‘Did he? Well, he had a funny way of showing it, didn’t he? Getting a kid off another man’s wife and—’
‘That’s enough of that. I’m not having you speaking ill of your dad, especially not now he’s dead. Wanted to marry me, he did, but I was already married, see, and like it says in the Bible, let no man put asunder them as God has joined together. Good to me he was, though, always, and he made sure that you never wanted for anything. Remember that bike you had when you was ten?’
Oliver did. He had been the only boy in the street to have a brand-new Raleigh bike, and he’d been as proud as punch of it.
‘He got that for you, your dad. I wasn’t for you having it, on account of it causing gossip, but he wouldn’t be argued out of it. Wanted me to take some photographs of you on it–always wanting me to take photographs of you for him, he was. He wanted to send you to a posh school as well but I wasn’t having that.
‘Remember that fancy camera you wanted when you first got started? It was him that got that for you.’
‘I bought it second hand.’
‘Brand-new it was, and it was your dad that got it and me that told you that I’d heard that old man was selling cameras.’ His mother’s voice was scornful and yet proud at the same time.
‘He’s left you everything. He told me that. Said that it was only right. Loved you, he did, and no mistake.’ Her voice cracked. ‘Loved you like the sun and moon shone out of you. Always talking about you. Drove me mad sometimes, asking me questions about you.’
‘I never saw him, never spoke to him.’
‘It was for the best. I couldn’t have told you when you was a kiddy in case you said summat you shouldn’t have.’
Oliver stared at the kitchen wall. It was distempered a sickly green and the distemper was flaking in places. A man he had never known but who had been his father had lived here, thinking about him, loving him, wanting him. He thought about the distance that had always existed between him and the man he had always thought of as his father, the sense of confusion and pain he had felt so often as a child, knowing that that father was irritated by him and resented him. A huge wave of loss swamped him. He looked at his mother. She had done what she had thought was right, he knew.
As her plane lifted into the steel-grey late February sky, Ella finally released her breath. There was no turning back or changing her mind now. She was on her way to New York and her new life there.
Part Two
Chapter Thirty-Five
England, June 1965
‘Well, well, if it isn’t Vogue’s much-admired Sixties Model Mother.’
Emerald, who had been trying her best to look interested as she watched her seven-year-old son running in his school’s end-of-term egg and spoon race, didn’t even bother to turn her head as she responded, ‘Don’t be tiresome, Drogo.’
Dougie had reverted to his real name on his thirtieth birthday, three years earlier, for no specific reason other than that he had wanted to reclaim a part of himself he felt that he’d somehow abandoned, and it had both amused and amazed him to be told by so many people whose opinions he valued, how comfortable they felt
with the change.
Amber perhaps had said it best when she had told him affectionately, ‘Drogo–it fits you so comfortably, rather like a favourite jacket that’s been hanging in the wardrobe for ever because it felt a little too big, that you’ve suddenly rediscovered now fits you perfectly.’
Tiresome was definitely the right word for Drogo, as the family now called Dougie, Emerald decided, and it applied equally well to the way she was currently having to behave since Vogue published an article on the young ‘with it’ mother, using her as one of its examples of what modern sixties motherhood meant.
Of course, both she and Robbie were exceptionally photogenic. She felt so sorry for those women who produced ugly children; now she did look at Drogo. His children were going to be incredibly ugly if he did as everyone, including her own mother, thought he was going to do and proposed to Gwendolyn.
Who would have thought it, especially after the absolutely stunning models Drogo had dated over the years?
After she herself had turned down Drogo’s proposal of marriage, she had assumed that he would continue to beg her to marry him. Only he hadn’t. Instead he had virtually buried himself in his ducal and estate responsibilities, both in London and at Osterby, to such an extent that Emerald was glad that she had not accepted him. Who wanted to live such a dull worthy life? Certainly not her.
Naturally it had irritated her when, after Drogo had finally decided that he needed some sort of social life, he immediately became fêted and sought after by virtually every single society hostess, including those she thought of as her own particular friends. Equally naturally, that had led to them attending the same events and being in one another’s company, but whilst Emerald had expected to have Drogo following her around begging to be allowed to pay court to her, instead he had made it very plain that he was grateful to her for turning him down, and had no regrets. Not that she did herself, of course. Now Drogo was very much a part of her mother’s family circle, always welcome at Denham, where he was a frequent guest and, to Emerald’s irritation, much loved by her own son, who practically worshipped him.
Emerald had no intentions of remarrying–ever. She liked her freedom and the right to order her own life. Having a man as an ardent lover was far, far better than having a man as a husband, and there had been plenty of men over the years who had been very ardent in their pursuit of her on their way to her bed.
Janey reckoned that if Drogo did propose to Gwen it would be out of pity because no one else wanted her. ‘She’s probably still a virgin,’ she had added. ‘Imagine!’
Emerald didn’t want to, but she could imagine the shame of still being virginal at the age of twenty-five when the whole of swinging London had fallen on pre-marital, post-marital and outside-marital sex like the starving on a banquet. Although she hadn’t said so to Janey, Emerald suspected that Gwendolyn wasn’t alone in her shameful virginity, and that it was a state that Rose also shared.
Emerald thought of herself as a woman who, because she had been married, was entitled to live a very different lifestyle from someone like her cousin Rose, who, quite obviously to Emerald, knew nothing about men because she didn’t have what it took to attract them.
Emerald enjoyed despising Rose almost as much as she enjoyed taunting her on the rare occasion when they met, by flaunting her own social superiority in front of her.
