Читать книгу Sidney Sheldon’s The Tides of Memory - Сидни Шелдон, Sidney Sheldon - Страница 16

OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND. PRESENT.

“OH, MICHAEL! OH, MICHAEL, I LUF you, I luf you so much! Please don’t stop!”

From his uncomfortable position in the backseat of his vintage MG convertible, Michael De Vere wondered, Why do women say that? “Don’t stop.” Surely no one would stop at this particular juncture? Although presumably some men must; otherwise girls wouldn’t bother to say it, would they? As Michael’s mind wandered, so his erection began to wilt. But once started, he couldn’t seem to stop. What did Lenka, his latest conquest, think he was about to do? Whip out the Racing Post and start looking through the runners and riders for the four-fifteen at Wincanton? And if he was going to do that, what made her think that shouting “Don’t stop” was likely to change his mind?

“You stopped.” Lenka’s voice trembled with reproach.

“Paused, darling. I paused.”

It was four-fifteen on a glorious May afternoon and Michael De Vere was late. He was supposed to have dropped Lenka at Didcot railway station an hour ago. But what with the sunshine and the blossoms bursting out of the hedgerows, and Lenka’s impossibly short Marc Jacobs miniskirt riding up her smooth, brown thighs, one thing had led to another. Or rather, one thing had led almost to another.

Lenka pouted. “You don’t find me attractive?”

“Darling, of course I do.”

“You don’t luf me.”

Michael De Vere sighed. Clearly he was not going to be able to resume play. Pulling up his jeans, he started the engine.

“Lenka, you’re an angel, you know you are. But if I’m late for Mother’s dinner tonight, she’ll be serving my balls deep-fried for pudding. I’m afraid that’s what’s putting me off.”

The girl glared at him. “You lie! You are ashamed of me, this is the problem. You are embarrassed to introduce me to your mother.”

“Nonsense, darling,” lied Michael, glancing appreciatively at Lenka’s underwear-exposing skirt and enormous silicone breasts bouncing happily beneath the skimpiest of PETA shirts. “Mother would adore you.” You’d be right up there with anthrax and Che Guevara. “I simply don’t think tonight’s the right moment to introduce you, that’s all.”

TEN MINUTES LATER, WAVING LENKA OFF from the platform, Michael De Vere breathed a sigh of relief and cheerfully deleted her contacts from his cell phone.

Sexy, but way too high maintenance.

Michael had enough stress to contend with, what with his mother being appointed home secretary the very same week that he had decided to quit Oxford. Not just decided. Actually done it. This morning Michael had gone to his tutor, signed the relevant forms, and packed up his gorgeous rooms in Chapel Quad, never to return. He planned to break the happy news to his parents over dinner tonight.

Naturally they would both have a fit, not least because his mother’s new job meant that this was now a story. HOME SECRETARY’S SON FLEES BALLIOL TO BECOME PROFESSIONAL PARTY ANIMAL. The Daily Mail always used words like “flee.” They were such arses. Michael felt bad about the inevitable negative coverage, but it couldn’t be helped. He’d set up an events company last year with his best friend, Tommy Lyon, and the pair of them were printing money. The future was bright, and Michael De Vere could smell success from here. This was no time to be messing around analyzing T. S. Eliot.

Ironically, his mother’s wrath would probably be as nothing compared to his father’s. Teddy De Vere was a Balliol man himself, just as his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had been before him. Short of desecrating his grandmother’s grave, or announcing he was gay, or (unimaginable) that he’d joined the Labour Party, in his father’s eyes there was no worse crime that Michael De Vere could have committed than dropping out of Oxford.

Yes, tonight’s dinner would be tricky enough, even without Lenka’s histrionics. The only silver lining in the whole ghastly business was that Michael’s sister, Roxie, would be there to support him.

“LAST CARD.”

Teddy De Vere slammed the nine of clubs down onto the green baize card table with a theatrical flourish. It was a family joke that Teddy never won at cards, or indeed at anything: Monopoly, Pictionary, charades. You name it, Teddy lost at it, repeatedly and often quite spectacularly. As chief financial officer for a successful City hedge fund, not to mention a respected Oxford-educated historian, Teddy De Vere was no fool. But he played the fool to perfection at home, delighting in his role as the butt of family jokes, a sort of willingly tamed circus bear.

As usual, his daughter, Roxie, had gone out of her way this evening to give him an advantage in their predinner game of Oh Hell. For once, Teddy seemed genuinely to be winning.

“Oh, very good, Dad.” Roxie smiled encouragingly. “All you need now’s a two.”

She placed the two of clubs gently on top of Teddy’s nine.

Teddy frowned. “Hmm. Well, I haven’t got a two, have I?”

“Then you have to pick up two, Daddy.”

“Blast it.”

“Last card.”

“Now hold on just a minute …”

Roxie played the jack of clubs and sat back, triumphant. “I’m out.”

Teddy’s face was such a picture of outrage, she couldn’t help but laugh.

“Oh, darling Dad, never mind. Maybe you’ll win the next one.”

Father and daughter were sitting in the library at Kingsmere, the De Veres’ ancestral pile in North Oxfordshire. Since Roxie’s “accident,” her bedroom had been moved to the ground floor, with Teddy’s old study converted into an en suite bathroom. As a result, the formal drawing room was now upstairs overlooking the deer park. But the library, a cozy, red-walled room with dark leather Chesterfield sofas, hunting paintings on the walls, and dog baskets nestled by the permanently crackling fire, remained exactly as it had always been. Roxie loved the room for that, for not changing. She loved it most of all when her father was in it.

“How about a nice, dry sherry before dinner.” Teddy leaned back in his chair and stretched out his legs. He wore the same deep purple corduroy pants every evening, winter or summer, rain or shine. He had about a hundred pairs of them upstairs in his dressing room. To Roxie, everything about her father suggested familiarity and ritual, a comforting sameness in a bleakly changing world. “Your mother’ll be home in a minute.”

Roxie didn’t need reminding. Turning her wheelchair around, she pushed herself over to the bar to fix Teddy’s drink. Roxie rarely drank before dinner but tonight she made an exception, splashing the pale amber Manzanilla into two tumblers instead of the usual one. Mummy was bound to be unbearable tonight, gloating and full of herself after her big victory. Home secretary. The words stuck in Roxie’s throat. How had her mother managed it? Why could others not see through Alexia the way that she, Roxie, could? Her mother would be the triumphant star of her own show at dinner, smug and unbearable. But then wasn’t she always?

There had been a time, long, long ago, when Roxanne De Vere had loved her mother. Yes, Alexia had always been ambitious, self-contained, and distant in a way that other little girls’ mothers were not. But even so, Roxie remembered happy times. Long summers spent on the beach together in Martha’s Vineyard, eating picnic lunches and playing fairies-and-elves. Christmases at Kingsmere, with Alexia lifting Roxie up high to hang hideous, garish homemade decorations on the tree. She remembered wheelbarrow races in the garden, and—incongruously, for Alexia was a notoriously awful cook—making blackberry jam.

But then came Roxie’s teenage years, and everything changed. From the first, mother and daughter battled. They battled about everything from politics to music, from fashion to religion, from which books they liked to the color of Roxie’s hair. On the surface it was normal coming-of-age stuff. But over time, Roxie began to sense a deeper rift, something more disturbing.

Alexia, always considered a great beauty in her youth, seemed to become envious of her daughter’s burgeoning good looks. Roxie couldn’t pinpoint it exactly. It was hard to remember specific incidents, as Michael was forever asking her to when he leaped to their mother’s defense. Nevertheless, Roxie developed a strong sense of her mother’s resentment. She felt Alexia’s eyes on her when she came out to the pool in a bikini, a gaze that blazed with a heat that was not admiration but rather a caustic, acid burn of envy on Roxie’s skin. When Roxie started bringing boys home, things went from bad to worse. Alexia seemed to go out of her way to humiliate her, putting her down during family meals, or worse, taking over the conversation and ensuring that she, the great Alexia De Vere, was the center of attention at all times. She would grill Roxie’s boyfriends about everything from their family backgrounds to their career ambitions—God, she was such a snob! No one was ever good enough.

Roxie’s father, on the other hand, took a very laissez-faire attitude toward his daughter’s dating. Naturally this drove Alexia to distraction.

“Can’t you say something, Teddy?” she used to roar. “I know you don’t approve. Why do I always have to be bad cop?”

But Teddy steadfastly refused to get involved, doing the best he could to keep the peace.

Until the day Roxanne De Vere met Andrew Beesley and everything changed.

ANDREW BEESLEY HAD BEEN HIRED AS Roxie’s tennis coach.

He became the love of her life.

Roxie had loved Andrew deeply and passionately, but her mother was determined to destroy her happiness. Deeming Andrew unworthy and a gold digger, Alexia ruthlessly drove him away. Teddy, loving but weak in the face of his wife’s determination, had failed to stand up to her. When Andrew returned to Australia, Roxie’s heart shattered. In despair, she jumped from her bedroom window at Kingsmere, a sixty-foot drop that ought to have killed her. Instead, with bitter irony, Roxie survived the fall, only to be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life, doomed to remain her parents’ dependent. She would never escape her mother, but would live out the remainder of her days a cripple under Alexia’s roof.

There was nothing left for her mother to envy now. Alexia De Vere was once again the fairest of them all.

Roxie’s accident was never referred to openly at Kingsmere, mostly because Teddy couldn’t bear it. Of a different, older generation, Teddy De Vere buried his grief deep, preferring denial to the harsh light of truth.

Roxie could live with that. She loved her father. What she couldn’t live with was the fact that her mother had never been punished for what happened. Never suffered, as she should have. Alexia De Vere was still happily married, still professionally successful, still famed for her beauty as well as her brains and, since Roxie’s fall, for her resilience in the face of adversity. Actions should have consequences. But instead of suffering, Alexia De Vere sat back while yet more laurels were heaped upon her head. Her surprise appointment as home secretary was just the latest in a long line of unearned glories. It made Roxie sick.

“Cheers.” She clinked her glass grimly against Teddy’s.

“And to you, my darling. I know you’re not looking forward to this evening. But try to keep things civil, for my sake, if not for your mother’s. Being asked to be home secretary is a big deal, you know.”

“Of course it is, Daddy.”

Mummy’s triumphs always are.

GILBERT DRAKE FELL TO HIS KNEES in the front pew of the tiny country church and made the sign of the cross.

He was frightened, despite the righteousness of his cause. How could he, one man, a lowly, insignificant taxi driver, deliver just retribution to the most powerful woman in England?

He prayed for courage, and a verse from Deuteronomy came to him, a gift from the Lord.

“Be strong and courageous, do not be afraid or tremble, for the LORD your God is the one who goes with you. He will not fail you or forsake you.”

Sanjay Patel had been failed and forsaken. By his friends, by the courts, but most of all by that evil she-devil Alexia De Vere.

Gilbert Drake stayed in the church, praying, until darkness fell. Then he zipped up his hooded jacket and walked into the night.

“FOR WHAT WE ARE ABOUT TO receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen.”

Alexia De Vere listened silently as her husband said grace.

When they had first married, Teddy’s insistence on this arcane ritual used to irritate Alexia intensely. Neither of them was particularly religious, so why the pompous, public show of piety? But over time Alexia, like Roxie, had come to take comfort in Teddy’s unchanging eccentricities. When the storms of her own life had raged, Alexia De Vere’s husband had proved to be the rock she needed, the one, true, solid thing she could cling to. Very few politicians were so lucky.

“Well.” Alexia smiled magnanimously around the table. “This all looks lovely. Anna has surpassed herself as usual.”

“As have you, my darling.” Leaning across the mouthwatering spread of roast beef, fresh tomato-and-basil salad, and home-baked bread, Teddy De Vere kissed his wife proudly on the cheek. “Home secretary! My goodness. I expect this means we’ll see even less of you.”

“Hopefully,” Roxie muttered under her breath.

“You know, brown’s really not your shade, darling,” Alexia shot back, looking at Roxie’s drab Next dress. No one was going to ruin this triumph for her, especially not her spoiled, self-centered daughter. “It makes you look like even more of a wet weekend than you usually do. Try a spot of color, next time. It might brighten you up. God knows you could use it.”

Roxie flushed with anger and embarrassment but said nothing.

Eager to avoid further confrontation, Michael De Vere raised his glass.

“Congratulations, Home Secretary!”

Leaning forward, Michael helped himself to a mountain of beef. Bad news should never be broken on an empty stomach.

“Thank you, darling.” Alexia beamed at her son. “You are sweet.”

“Were you surprised they appointed you? I mean, it did come rather out of the blue.”

“Nonsense,” Teddy said loyally. “Your mother was the obvious choice for the job. After all her sterling work with the prison reforms.”

“You’re sweet, darling, but Michael’s quite right. It was a complete shock. I mean, the PM and I do get along well on a personal level …”

“Yes, yes. As you’ve told us a thousand times,” sniped Roxie, earning herself twin pleading looks from Teddy and Michael.

“But I never expected a promotion on this scale,” Alexia went on regardless. “I don’t think anybody else did either. It’s ruffled quite a few feathers in the party, I can tell you. But then why be boring and play things by the book? You’ve got to take life’s opportunities where you find them. Grab the bull by the horns and all that. And of course, if I can be of service to the country, then so much the better.”

This was too much for Roxie. She knew she’d promised her father, but really. Service?

“Oh, please, Mother. At least have the decency to admit that this isn’t about service. It’s ambition that got you the job. Personal ambition. We’re not journalists, we’re your family. You don’t have to lie to us, just because you lie to everybody else.”

Teddy said reprovingly, “Roxie, love, steady on.”

Alexia’s chest tightened into a familiar ball of anger. Steady on? Was that all Teddy had to say? Why did he never stick up for her properly? Why did he kowtow to Roxie’s victim complex by treading on eggshells all the damn time? The girl used that damn wheelchair like a weapon, and Alexia for one was sick of it.

“Speaking of taking opportunities and grabbing bulls and … things,” Michael began uncertainly. “I, er … I have some news.”

“Don’t tell us you’ve finally found a nice girl and are going to get married?” Teddy teased. “I thought we’d agreed. No weddings until you’ve finished Oxford.”

“Don’t worry,” said Michael. “No weddings. At least none where I’m the groom. But I, er … well, that’s the news. Part of it, anyway. I have finished Oxford.”

Complete silence. You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife.

Alexia spoke first.

“What do you mean you’ve finished, Michael? You’ve only just started.”

Michael looked at his mother plaintively. “Uni’s not for me, Mum. Really.”

“Not for you? Why on earth not?”

“Honestly? I’m bored.”

“Bored?” Teddy erupted. “At Balliol? Don’t be ridiculous.”

Michael plowed on. “You remember Kingsmere Events, the company I started last year with Tommy?”

Tommy Lyon was Michael’s oldest friend. The two boys had met at prep school and always remained close.

“Not really.”

“Yes, you do. We threw a thirtieth birthday party for that Russian chap on a yacht in Saint-Tropez last summer?”

“Vaguely.” Alexia looked at Teddy, whose usually jovial features were set like thunder.

“Well, anyway, we made twenty grand profit from that, just the two of us,” Michael said proudly. “And we’ve had loads of inquiries since then, for corporate events, Bar mitzvahs.”

“Bar mitzvahs!” Teddy De Vere could take no more. “You’re a De Vere, for God’s sake, and you’re halfway through a law degree at Oxford. You can’t seriously expect your mother and I to agree to you throwing all that away to book clowns and balloons for thirteen-year-old Jewish boys from Golders bloody Green!”

“Their parents are the clients,” said Michael reasonably. “And don’t knock Golders Green. Some of these Jewish mothers are dropping half a million on little Samuel’s big day.”

“Half a million? Pounds?” Even Teddy was brought up short by this number.

“Think of the opportunity, Dad.” Michael’s merry gray eyes lit up. “Tommy and I can net eighty, a hundred grand in a night.”

“Yes, and with a first from Balliol and my and your mother’s contacts, you could be making tens of millions a year in the City a few years from now. I’m sorry, Michael, but it’s just not on.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Dad, but it’s not up to you. I formally left college this morning. Gave in my keys and everything.”

“You WHAAAAAAT?” Teddy’s screams could be heard all the way to the Kingsmere gatehouse. Roxie tried to intervene and soon the three of them were shouting over one another like rowdy MPs at Prime Minister’s Question Time.

Alexia De Vere closed her eyes. First bloody Roxie, getting out her violin again and scratching out the same, bitter old tune. And then Michael, dropping this bombshell. So much for my celebration dinner.

It was a relief when Bailey, the butler, tapped her on the shoulder.

“Sorry to interrupt your meal, ma’am. But there’s someone at the gates wanting to see you.”

Alexia looked at her Cartier watch, an anniversary present from Teddy last year. It was past nine o’clock. “It’s rather late for house calls. Who is it?”

“That’s the thing. They wouldn’t give a name and they were acting, you know, erratically. Jennings wasn’t sure what to do.”

Alexia put down her napkin. “All right. I’ll come.”

ALFRED JENNINGS HAD BEEN THE GATEKEEPER at Kingsmere for almost forty years. At seventy years old, partially deaf, and with a weak heart, he was not much of a security guard. Michael had once described Jennings as being “as fierce as a newborn kitten,” a phrase that Alexia had always thought summed up old Alfred perfectly. Unfortunately, because she was now home secretary, her security was no longer a laughing matter. Her controversial work as prisons minister had earned her a number of enemies, some of them potentially dangerous, others frankly deranged. Sanjay Patel, an Indian man who had taken his own life in Wormwood Scrubs when his sentence was extended, had a particularly vociferous and unpleasant group of supporters. Alexia De Vere didn’t scare easily, but neither could she afford to be cavalier about unexpected “visitors.”

The Kingsmere gatehouse consisted of an office-cum-sitting-room downstairs and a single bedroom and bathroom above. Jennings had made it cozy, his plug-in fake coal fire constantly burning.

“I’m so sorry to have bothered you, ma’am,” he warbled feebly as Alexia came in. “Especially in the middle of dinner. Fella’s gone now.”

“That’s quite all right, Alfred, better safe than sorry. Were the cameras on, by chance?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am.” The old man wheezed, pleased to have gotten something right. “They’s always on nowadays. Mr. De Vere, he’s quite insistent about it. ‘You switch them cameras on now, Mr. Jennings,’ ’e says. They was on all right.”

“Marvelous. Perhaps I could have a look at the tape?”

DINNER WAS OVER. TEDDY HAD STORMED off in a huff and Michael and Roxie were alone in the kitchen, making tea.

“Well,” Michael quipped, “that went well, I thought. Dad was his usual calm, rational self.”

“What did you expect?” Roxie said reprovingly. She loved her brother dearly. Everybody loved Michael, with his naughty-little-boy charm, his warmth, his humor. It was impossible not to. But it pained her to see their father so upset. “You know how much Balliol means to Daddy.”

“Yes, but it’s not ‘Daddy’ who has to be there, is it? It’s me.”

“It’s only two more years.”

“I know, Rox, but I’m bored out of my mind. I’m not really a lectures-and-libraries sort of bloke.” Michael slumped down on the table with his head in his hands.

“Really? You don’t say.” Roxie raised a sarcastic eyebrow

“Ha ha. I’m serious. This business with Tommy, I honestly think I can make a go of it. Dad’s an entrepreneur.”

“Hardly.”

“All right, well, he’s a businessman at least. Surely there must be part of him that understands?”

“It’s not that he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t want you to make a mistake, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not. Mum gets it. Even though the press are bound to give her stick about it, she knows I have to find my own way.”

“Alexia thinks the sun shines out of your arse and always has,” Roxie said coldly. “She’d support you if you said you were off to join a Muslim Brotherhood training camp in the Kashmir mountains.”

Michael frowned. He hated it when his sister called their mother by her first name. The rift between mother and daughter was obvious enough, but somehow that little verbal tic seemed to underscore it.

“She loves us both, Rox.”

Roxie rolled her eyes.

“She does.”

“Well, she has a funny way of showing it.”

TEDDY FOUND ALEXIA IN HER STUDY. Sitting at the desk, an empty water glass in front of her, she was staring into space, twisting her wedding ring around and around on her finger.

“Are you all right?”

“Hmm? Oh, yes. Fine.”

She forced a smile. Beneath the perfectly coiffed, politician exterior, Teddy could see how tired she looked. Alexia had been in her midtwenties when they met and her late twenties when they married, in a small Catholic chapel off Cadogan Street. Back in those days she was a raving beauty in the classic seventies mold. Very slender, with long, coltish legs and a mane of straggly blond hair that streamed behind her like the tail of a comet when she moved. But she was ambitious even then, and she’d changed very quickly, cutting her hair and adopting a more sober, suit-and-heels dress sense when she ran for her first London constituency seat. Mrs. Thatcher had been elected leader a few years before Alexia De Vere became an MP, but the British Conservative Party remained a hostile place for a woman, especially one from a lower-middle-class background. Marriage to a British aristocrat had certainly helped Alexia’s chances. Teddy had relinquished his peerage so that his young wife could have a shot at the Commons, but Alexia remained a De Vere, and De Veres had been part of the Tory establishment since time immemorial.

Teddy wasn’t stupid. He was well aware that his name and his money and his family connections were a big part of the attraction for his brilliant, beautiful, pushy young bride. But he admired Alexia, and he loved her, and he was more than willing to offer up all that he had on the altar of her career. Before they met, Teddy De Vere’s life had been grand, privileged, and deathly dull. Marriage to Alexia Parker had made it an adventure.

SITTING AT HER DESK TONIGHT, ALEXIA looked every inch the powerful, competent, wildly successful woman that she had become. From her subtle Daniel Galvin highlights, to her immaculately cut couture suit, to the diamonds glinting discreetly at her fingers, ears, and neck, Teddy De Vere’s wife was a woman to be reckoned with. Watching her, Teddy could have burst with pride.

Home secretary. That was quite something.

We did it, my darling. We proved them all wrong.

Of course, the De Veres had had their fair share of trial and of tragedy, both as a couple and as a family. Teddy was intelligent enough to realize that the relationship between Alexia and Roxie would probably never recover, any more than his darling daughter’s shattered legs. It had started so long ago, almost as soon as Roxie entered her teens, but of course that awful business with the Beesley boy had made it a thousand times worse. And Alexia had never been the touchy-feely type, the sort of mother who could give her daughter a hug and say “there, there.” Teddy also knew that Alexia spoiled Michael rotten, partly in compensation for all that she’d lost with Roxanne. It drove him mad sometimes, but he understood. Teddy De Vere prided himself on the fact that he had always understood his wife. They were two sides of the same coin, he and Alexia. He loved her deeply.

“We missed you at dinner.”

“Did you? I couldn’t tell for all the yelling.”

Walking up behind her, Teddy rubbed her shoulders. “I’m sorry things got so heated. Where did you disappear to?”

“Someone was at the gate, asking to see me. Jennings didn’t like the look of them, but by the time I got there, they’d gone.”

Teddy scowled. “I don’t like the way these loonies keep following you around.”

“We don’t know it was a loony. It could have been anyone … a constituent, a reporter.”

“Did you get him on tape?”

Alexia didn’t blink. “No. The CCTV was acting up.”

“Again?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“For God’s sake. What is wrong with that damn system? Can’t you get MI5 to keep an eye on things, now that you’re running the bloody country?”

Alexia stood up and kissed him. “Relax, darling. It was nothing. I’m sure I’ll be given all the security I need, but we don’t want to live like prisoners, do we?”

“Well, no.”

“Good, then. Now, about Michael leaving Balliol.”

Teddy held up his hands for silence. Few people could stop Alexia De Vere midsentence, but her husband was one of them. “Absolutely not,” he said firmly. “We are not talking about either of the children anymore tonight. This was supposed to be your night. Let’s go to bed and you can tell me everything about your first day in delicious, minute detail. Home Secretary.” He gave her bottom a playful squeeze.

Alexia laughed. “All right. Bed it is.”

Not for the first time, she thanked her lucky stars that she had such a wonderful, supportive husband.

If only I didn’t have to lie to him.

The CCTV footage was poor quality. But it wasn’t blank.

Tomorrow she would show the tape to Edward Manning.

Edward would know what to do.