her, or her previous unfortunate alliance to my son, I will indeed sue her. That witch Dorothea Kerr no longer enters into it. I assume, “The Princess' “—her voice was scathing—”is retired.”
“For the moment.”
“I suppose whores can always take their trade up again.” At that he hung up on her, and called Serena. It was early afternoon in London and she sounded better than she had the night before. She had spent the whole morning calming Vanessa, and she said that when she spoke to Vasili at the hospital, he sounded a little more himself.
“Then you're not coming home?” Teddy sounded agonized at his end.
“Not yet.”
“Keep me posted at least and if I don't hear from you, I'll call back in a few days.” After the call Serena went back to Vanessa's room, to hear another diatribe about Vasili. It had been an excruciating few days.
“I hate him. I wish you had married Teddy, or Andreas.” She remembered Vasili's brother in Athens.
“I'm sorry you feel that way, Vanessa.” Serena's eyes filled with tears again. She was always being pulled between them, and Vanessa was looking at her strangely now.
“Are you really having a baby?”
Serena nodded. “Yes, I am.” That was going to be a problem too. Nothing was easy anymore. It was hard even to remember when it had been. “Does that upset you very much?”
Vanessa thought about it for a minute and then looked at her mother. “Couldn't we just leave and take it back with us to the States?” It was what Serena had thought of doing, but then she would have had an abortion.
“It's Vasili's baby too,” she said gently.
“Does it have to be? Couldn't it just be ours?”
Slowly Serena shook her head. “No, it couldn't.”
43
A week later Vasili came out of the hospital, and he appeared to be almost angelic. They led a quiet life, stayed home much of the time, he was kind and thoughtful and loving with Vanessa. It was as though in his last rash act of self-indulgence he had finally seen the light. He explained to Serena that he first tried heroin ten years earlier, as a kind of lark, to see what it was, and within weeks he had got hooked. Andreas had ultimately arrived from Athens, seen the condition he was in, and put him immediately in a clinic to clean up. After that, he had stayed away from it for a year and then someone had offered it to him at a party, and he had fallen off the wagon again. For the next five years he had been on and off it, and then he had stayed totally clean until he met his last wife. Shortly after their marriage he had discovered that she used it—”chipped,” he called it—and she had wanted him to use heroin with her, so she “didn't feel so lonely,” she had told him pouting, and stupidly he had tried it again. Their relationship had apparently been a catastrophe of using dope together, and in the end she had died. That had sobered him again, until now he had tried it again. But this time he was certain that it was the last. Serena, however, found it discouraging to learn that he had been in and out of the hospital to clean up so many times.
“Why didn't you tell me?” She had looked at him sadly, feeling as though she had been cheated.
“How do you tell someone that? ‘I have been a heroin addict.’ Do you know how that sounds?”
“But how do you think I felt when I found out, Vasili?” Her eyes showed him how great was her pain. “How could you think I wouldn't know?” The tears began to flow again then.
“I didn't think I'd get hooked again.”
She closed her eyes and lay back among her pillows.
“Serena, don't … darling, don't worry.”
“How can I not?” She looked at him with anguish. “How do I know you won't start again?” She didn't trust him now. She didn't trust anything about his life.
He held up a hand solemnly. “I swear it.”
For the next five months he was as good as his word. He was absolutely exemplary and he spoiled Serena rotten, doing everything he could to make up to her the pain he had caused her and to assuage her fears about his using again. He was thrilled about the baby, told everyone he knew, talked endlessly to his friends, his clients, his models, everyone knew about the baby, and of course he called