“Your divorce … It always puzzled me. Nick and Mignon”— Fairclough fluttered his fingers in the general direction of the folly— “they had their demons, but you didn’t seem to. I was pleased when you and Freddie married. She’s chosen well, I thought. To see it end, to have it dissolve as it has… You’ve made very few mistakes in your life, Manette, but letting Freddie go was one of them.”
“These things happen,” Manette said shortly.
“If we allow them,” was her father’s reply.
Now those were truly infuriating words, Manette thought, all things considered. “Like you allowed Vivienne Tully to happen?” she asked.
Bernard’s gaze didn’t leave her face. Manette knew what was going on in his head. It was that rapid assessment of all the potential sources from which had sprung his daughter’s question. It was also a wondering of what, exactly, Manette did know.
He said, “Vivienne Tully is in the past. She’s been gone a very long time.”
He was casting his line most delicately. Two could fish in these waters, though, so Manette cast hers. “The past is never as gone as we would like it to be. It has a way of coming back to us. Rather like Vivienne’s coming back to you.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I mean Ian’s been paying her off for years. Monthly, it seems. Years and years of monthly. You’ll know that, of course.”
He frowned. “Actually, I know nothing of the sort.”
Manette tried to read him. His skin wore a glittering of sweat and she wanted that to mean something significant about who he was and what he might have done. She said at last, “I don’t believe you. There was always something about you and Vivienne Tully.”
He said, “Vivienne was part of a past that I allowed to happen.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That I failed myself in a human moment.”
“I see,” Manette said.
“Not everything,” her father countered. “I wanted Vivienne, and she agreed to my wanting. But neither of us ever intended— ”
“Oh, people never do, do they?” Manette heard the edge of bitterness in her words. Its presence surprised her. What, after all, was her father saying that in her heart she’d not suspected for years: a long-ago affair with a very young woman. What was this to her, his daughter? It was nothing at all, yet everything at once, and the hell in the moment was that Manette did not know why.
“People don’t intend,” Fairclough said. “They get caught up. They start to think rather stupidly that life owes them something beyond what they have, and when they go in that direction in their heads, the result is— ”
“You and Vivienne Tully. I have to be honest. I don’t mean to hurt you but I can’t see why Vivienne would have wanted to sleep with you.”
“She didn’t.”
“Sleep with you? Oh, please.”
“No. That’s not what I mean.” Fairclough looked towards the hall and then away. There was a path along Lake Windermere, rising towards a woodland that marked the far north edge of the property. He said, “Walk with me. I’ll try to explain.”
“I don’t want an explanation.”
“No. But you’re troubled. I’m part of what troubles you. Walk with me, Manette.” He took her arm and Manette felt the pressure of his fingers through the wool sweater she was wearing. She wanted to loosen his grip and walk away from him and make that departure a permanent one, but she was as trapped as was her sister by the fact that Bernard had wanted a son so badly. Unlike Mignon, who’d spent her life punishing him for this desire, Manette had tried to be that for him, adopting his ways, his postures, his habits, his manner of speaking and standing and gazing intently at someone with whom he was conversing and even working in his business from the time she was able, all to show him she was a worthy son. Which, of course, she could never be. Then the son he’d had was unworthy from the start, no matter how he’d redeemed himself recently, and even that had not been enough to turn her father’s eyes upon her so he could see her merit. Thus, she didn’t want to walk with the bastard and she didn’t want to hear his lies about Vivienne Tully, whatever they were going to be.
He said, “Children don’t like to hear about their parents’ sexuality. It’s unseemly.”
“If this is going to be about Mother… some rejection of you…”
“God no. Your mother never once… No matter. It’s about me. I wanted Vivienne for no reason other than I wanted Vivienne. Her youth, her freshness.”
“I don’t want— ”
“You brought her up, my dear. You must hear it through. There was no seduction involved. Had you thought there was?” He glanced at her. Manette saw his look but she kept her eyes fixed ahead, on the path, the way it followed the shore, the way it climbed a rise to the woods that seemed to keep receding no matter how she and her father pressed onward. He went on. “I’m not a base seducer, Manette. I approached her. She’d worked for me perhaps two months at that point. I was frank, as frank as I’d been with your mother the night I met her. Marriage between us wasn’t possible, it wasn’t even a thought. So I told Vivienne I wanted her for my lover, a discreet arrangement that no one would know of, something that would never stand in the way of her career, which I knew was important to her. She had a brilliant mind and an excellent future. I didn’t expect her to waste that mind for a lifetime in Barrow-in-Furness or to give up that future because I wanted to be in her bed for however long she remained in Cumbria.”
“I don’t want to know this,” Manette told her father. Her throat aching so badly that she found speaking difficult.
“But you brought her up, so now you’ll hear. She asked to have time to think about it, to consider all the ramifications of what I was proposing. For two weeks she thought. Then she came to me with her own proposal. She would try me as a lover, she said. She’d never thought of herself as anyone’s mistress and she’d certainly never thought of herself as a woman attached in some way to a man older than her own father. This, she said frankly, was rather distasteful because she was not the sort of woman who found a man’s money an aphrodisiac. She liked young men, men her own age, and she didn’t know if she could manage even once putting up with me in her bed. She couldn’t see me exciting her, she said. But if I pleased her as a lover, which she frankly did not expect, she’d agree to the arrangement. If I didn’t please her, there would be— as she put it— no bad feeling between us.”
“God. She could have taken you to court. It could have cost you hundreds of thousands. Sexual— ”
“I knew that. But it’s the madness of wanting that I was speaking of earlier. It can’t be explained if you haven’t felt it. It makes everything seem so reasonable, even propositioning one’s employee and accepting her proposition in return.” They walked on, their pace slow and the wind beginning to come off the lake. Manette shivered, and her father put his arm round her waist, pulling her closer, saying, “There’s likely to be rain soon.” And then he said, “So for a time, we played two different roles, Vivienne and I. At work we were the employer and his executive assistant with never the slightest indication that there was something more between us; at other times we were a man and his mistress with those daylight hours of fierce propriety providing the stimulus for what happened at night. Then, at last, she’d had enough. Her career called out to her, and I wasn’t so much a fool as to stop her. I had to let her go, and as I’d promised to do so from the first, there was nothing for it but to wish her well.”
“Where is she now?”
“I’ve no idea. The job she was offered was in London, but that was some time ago. I’d think she would have gone on from there.”