Letters

She’d enjoyed her life with Harrison until his madness, which after all marred only the last 10 years or so of the 40 they’d had together. She’d enjoyed her children when they were small. If she didn’t feel close to her grandchildren, the distance seemed to her more a matter of political and social class distinctions, insisted on by Drew, than of racial bias on her part. But never mind: if family feeling was not her long suit, so be it. And she’d always liked having money, social position, and excellent health to enjoy them in: people who turned their backs on such pleasures — like Drew and to some extent Jeannine — were incomprehensible to her.

I agreed that it was better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick.

“That’s right!” Jane said, seriously. But more than her married life, family life, and social life, she went on, she enjoyed the business life she’d taken up since Harrison’s decline. It was a passion with her, she admitted, her truest and chiefest; she regarded herself as having been neither a very good wife and mother nor a bad one, but she knew she was a good businessperson, and she loved the whole entrepreneurial-managerial enterprise more than she’d ever loved any human being, think of her what I would.

I thought her lucky to both know and have what she loved, and said so. But what about “Lord Baltimore”? Those trysts in London and Tobago?

She poofed away the word trysts. She and André (aha, we have milord’s first name) didn’t much go for that sort of thing — not that they just played bridge and tennis, I was to understand! But the pleasure they found in each other’s society, and the basis for their (still confidential) affiancement, was the pleasure of shared tastes and objectives, together with compensatory desires, with which sex had little to do. Think what I would of Betsy Patterson, Wallis Warfield Simpson, Grace Kelly; like them she had always hankered after a bona fide title; would almost rather be Baroness So-and-so or “Lady Baltimore” than be rich! As for “Lord B.,” never much interested in business and virtually dispossessed by Canadian social welfare taxes — he would rather be rich than titled. Why then should they not both be both, since they so enjoyed each other otherwise?

She knew what I must be thinking, Jane said here, especially as her friend was some years younger than she. But suppose he were a fortune hunter in the vulgar sense, as she was confident he was not: she was a businesswoman, and had no intention of endowing him, unless in her will, with more than the million or so (minus inheritance taxes, gift taxes, and lawyers’ fees) she hoped to win from the will suit. A windfall, really, costing her no more in effect than her title would cost him. Now, she was no child: she’d had his credentials and private history looked into, and was satisfied that he was what he represented himself to be: a middle-aged widower of aristocratic descent and reduced means (like her friend Germaine Pitt), who truly enjoyed her society and candidly wished he had more money to implement his civilized tastes. But even if she turned out to be being foolish, it was a folly she could afford.

I agreed, my heart filling with an odd emotion. But she had mentioned sex?

Would I believe it? she wondered, blushing marvelously. She was being blackmailed! Or threatened with blackmail. About… a Sex Thing! A Sex Thing?

Out of her past, she added hastily. Mostly. Sex Things that she herself had completely forgotten about, as if they had never happened.

Ah. Uneasily, but with sharp interest, I wondered whether… But no: 20 years ago, it seems, she had been briefly swept quite off her feet by another titled gentleman, now deceased: friend of the family, delightful man, I’d know his name if she told me, but a perfect rakehell; she couldn’t imagine what on earth had attracted her so, or how she’d let him talk her into doing the mad things they did. Maybe it was change of life: she’d had a hysterectomy the year before, and was taking hormones, and feeling her age then much more than now. Maybe it was that Jeannine was turning into such a little tramp already at sixteen, or that she and Harrison weren’t as close as they’d been before…

Lady Amherst’s husband? I asked, and identified my old emotion: simple jealousy. Jane nodded, smiling and tisking her tongue. It seemed a hundred years ago; she and Germaine had never even mentioned it since the latter’s return to Maryland. She doubted Germaine even remembered; it hadn’t seemed to bother her at the time, though it had upset poor Harrison. She herself had just about forgotten it, it was at once so crazy and so inconsequential. And it was immediately afterwards that she became so absorbed in business that nothing could have tempted her That Way again, not even to a flirtation, much less — she closed her eyes, breathed deeply.