Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [162]
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.”
“What about Mother? How could you— ”
“Your mother never knew, Manette.”
“But Mignon knows, doesn’t she?”
Fairclough looked away. A moment passed during which a V of ducks flew overhead, swooped down towards the lake, rose above them again. He finally said, “She does. I don