Party Girl at Heart

by Karen Elaine Campbell

  ‘Crystal, pick up your bloody phone, will you?’ the message read. Ah, Jazz then. She groaned, remembering why she was here at the pub at all. She’d booked herself in here in a fit of pique yesterday evening, when Imogen had insisted on ‘helping’ with the wedding arrangements for the umpteenth time.

  “Either she goes, or I do,” she’d told Jazz. Not her wisest move. ‘The pub is that way, down the road.’ He’d replied, humour in his voice.

  Only in her current condition, she’d not seen the funny side of his joke, and she’d moved out. Only temporarily, but she’d actually done it, she’d moved into the pub, and left that hideous woman in her house. God only knows what havoc the hateful woman would wreak while she was gone. Not your brightest move, Crystal, she thought now, in the cold light of day.

  Reg had been pretty surprised too, when she’d rolled up at almost 9pm and told him that she was moving into one of the master suites that she’d booked for the wedding guests to ‘try them out’ before the first visitors arrived. He’d given her a very straight look, but he’d obliged readily enough, after all, the more elderly guests from the USA, the ones who didn’t have a job to worry about, were scheduled to arrive the day after tomorrow.

  She rolled over on the bed and pressed re-dial. She may as well have this conversation now, she supposed. Could she really tell him he was going to be a dad on the phone? She thought not. Best not mention that one for the moment.

  “You’re late,” Jazz told her without preamble, when she did get hold of him.

  “So,” she retaliated, reverting back to petulant child within a heartbeat.

  The tone of Jazz’s voice changed, she could almost hear him take a deep breath and adopt the tone that he always used with his most irritating customers. “So Crystal, love of my life, while you are down at the pub, sulking and ‘checking out the facilities’, several of your American guests have been on the telephone. Lucky for you, my sister doesn’t bear a grudge and has been thoughtful enough to check through your diary for you, in your absence, of course.”

  “What?” Crystal shrieked, catapulting upright on the bed. “I told you to keep her out of my stuff.”

  “Hmm, I know. Sorry. Anyway, I couldn’t get hold of you and the phone has been ringing off the hook this morning. The first bus-load of guests have already landed at Heathrow and are on their way here by taxi. The limousine that you booked didn’t show up to meet their flight and so they hired a car and rang for directions. Apparently there are more guest airborne as we speak. I thought you said they were arriving later in the week?”

  “They are, I checked the details with them myself.”

  “Well, there’s been a change of plan, or something, they’re on their way here now, and I don’t want them up at the factory causing trouble either, so you have a bit of a ‘situation’ I think. You might like to get your act in gear and sort them out, unless you want them all sleeping at our house too?” he taunted, and then, without pausing for breath, “And about the conversation that we had last night, before you stomped off to the pub. I’ve spoken to Imogen, and she’s absolutely mortified to have caused problems between us, she’s promised to behave herself and stop trying to rearrange things, so you can come back home now.” He lowered his voice. “The bed is cold without you. And I missed you this morning, Crystal.” He waited a couple of seconds and then used a different tack, his voice automatically dropped a couple of octaves. “I don’t like it when you’re not here. I want you at home, here with me Tatty.”

  Crystal smiled, despite all her best attentions. He never used her nickname, unless he knew that he was in real trouble. She just couldn’t help it, a huge smile broke out all over her face. “Okay, okay, I give in, I’ll be back home in an hour or so,” she confirmed, her voice all mellow and warm. She knew he’d been teasing her last night, she’d worked it out, finally, as she lay exhausted on the bed, fully dressed, and feeling just a little bit lonely. Unfortunately she’d been so tired that she’d dropped off to sleep long before she’d even got around to changing into her night things, she’d have gone back home last night if she’d had the energy, but she hadn’t made it that far. It was just a good job that no lasting harm had been done, she thought, as she counted the cobwebs strung out across the ceiling, she loved Jazz, she decided, she really did.

  “See you later, Tatts, and don’t forget to sort out those Yanks,” Jazz replied, satisfied, as he blew her a kiss down the phone line and promptly hung up.

  Crystal lay back on the bed again and spent the next ten minutes day dreaming about golden haired children with cross scowling faces and angry blue-grey eyes, before she remembered the purpose of the phone call and picked up her night bag ready to check out of the pub.

  In his office, Jazz made a steeple out of his fingers and rested his chin in his hands thoughtfully. He’d followed Crystal down to the pub last night, and after a few choice words with Reg he’d persuaded him to give him the spare key to Crystal’s room.

  He’d reckoned that she needed about fifteen or twenty minutes to calm down, so he’d had a glass of whisky with Reg in the bar, chatted about women in general, and then slipped off up the back stairs to Crystal’s room. By the time he’d put the key into the lock, she’d already fallen asleep outside of the covers, on the top of the bed.

  He’d brought a single long stem rose with him, one of the beautiful ‘cottage garden’ roses from their own bush, just outside the front door, and he’d gone into the small bathroom looking for something suitable to put the flower in. He’d not wanted it to die and he’d thought that if it was the first thing that Crystal saw when she woke up she’d know that he’d brought it for her, a kind of mental telepathy.

  He’d not found quite what he was looking for in the bathroom though. Instead, he’d found her hastily packed overnight bag, thrown down onto the floor with the contents spilling out in a haphazard fashion. The wash-bag was wide open, and the pregnancy testing kit was immediately visible, right on the top, clear as day. The implication had hit him square in the face, blinding him to anything else. Following hot on the heels of Verity and her sordid misdemeanours, he’d panicked and wondered why Crystal was being so secretive about the whole thing. Was she pregnant? Was the baby his? In that one brief second his head had almost exploded with possibilities.

  He’d stumbled out of the bathroom and back down the stairway like a man possessed, taking the precious rose with him as one stark fact reverberated around his brain. His girl-friend suspected that she might be pregnant, and she’d not told him? What did it mean? Now she’d run off to stay at the pub, on her own. She’d left him. She’d run off again.

  It had taken a few more whiskies in front of the fireside in his own study at home, before some semblance of sanity had returned, and with it some common sense. Okay, so she’d been behaving a bit erratically recently, though with Crystal it was often quite difficult to tell, and she’d certainly over-reacted to a bit of mild teasing last night, but it didn’t mean that there were dark and sinister forces at work, it may not mean anything at all. He still held the rose in his hand and the delicate petals began to wilt in the heat from the last of the embers in the grate.

  He walked to the kitchen to place the flower in water, and made a few snap decisions along the way. Imogen may be his sister, but he couldn’t let her interfere in his life with Crystal any more. He’d hoped that the two women would work things out for themselves, but quite patently they hadn’t, so he’d have to talk to his sister, much as it pained him to do it. He wasn’t having Crystal upset again.

  Also, he couldn’t let the problems with Verity cloud his life and his better judgement, Crystal and Verity were poles apart in character and attitude, just because Verity had chosen to keep the father of her baby in the dark, it didn’t mean that Crystal would do the same to him. He’d need to give her a bit of time to come to terms with things, if indeed she was expecting his baby, and he’d let her tell him herself when she was ready.

  Decisions made,
he’d strolled off up the stairs to his own bed, removed the cat from Crystal’s side of the duvet, much to Lindsay’s disgust, and slept the whole night through just like a baby.

  Now though, in the clear light of day, he realised that he was feeling very impatient. If Crystal had good news, why hadn’t she shared it with him? He wanted to shout their news from the rooftops, tell everyone he knew, he felt euphoric with delight. And then he felt saddened, just in case it wasn’t true.

  His computer bleeped as an e-mail came through,

  Verity.Brown.sexgoddess@girlmail.com pinged up on the screen, he cursed and clicked on it to open the message up.

  Hi Jazz,

  Have decided you’re right, the father of the baby should be told. Seeing him on Friday and will do it then. Keep your fingers crossed for me, and whatever happens, thanks for being an ace big bro.

  Jazz smiled despite himself. Verity was so like his father, although she didn’t know it, of course. In his profession as High Court Judge, his father had made the most serious decisions, life changing, calculated judgements regarding right and wrong and the sordid situations that people created, he ruled other people’s lives at work, and then when he came home to them, his family, he played havoc with his wife’s neatly arranged plans. He’d been very much an impulsive man in his private life and especially where his wife and children were concerned, maybe because so much of his work life was prescribed, orderly and perhaps, even a little dull.

  It was no excuse for allowing his child to grow up without a father, of course, but he could see why his father had taken that path. Life in his father’s generation had been different, and the scandal, if he’d revealed it, would have ended not only his career, but the sedate and genteel life that his pampered and cosseted wife coveted.

  Verity was a sad product of a past generation, their lives, morals and beliefs. As he sat there, in contemplative mood another thought occurred, Verity’s timing was bang on target. If his guess was right, he had an idea where this was going and it would cause havoc this weekend. He wondered if he should persuade her to keep the new to herself, just a little while longer.

  Chapter

  14

  A DAY OF RECKONING

  Crystal sat at the kitchen table and willed her stomach to stop pitching around. She didn’t have time for this, she really didn’t. All of the American guests were already installed in the Pub, the flowers were up in the church, the marquee was set out in the field, right next to the dirty old barn, exactly as the bride had dictated and she’d had an army of trusted catering staff working on the wedding banquet since daybreak yesterday.

  She’d already been over to the farm at first light, to make sure that her aunt had everything under control there and had been pleasantly surprised. Not that there was actually that much to do, since Saskia had refused to allow Uncle Vernon to change even one inch of the ancient, grubby old barn. He’d initially offered to spruce the place up a bit with a few litres of whitewash and some shiny new buckets of begonias, but Saskia had insisted that she wanted the setting to look as authentic as possible and so the rust spattered structure had remained as it was, cow dung and all.

  In the interests of hygiene, and in deference to the bride’s wishes, some extra bales of hay had been dragged in from a neighbouring farm and they’d suspended a couple of old WWII parachutes from the ceiling inside the barn to cover the worst of the dust and decay. Surprisingly, it now looked fit for the romantic shabby-chic country style wedding that Saskia had set her heart on.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t the accommodation, the food, the church or any of the other arrangements that had Crystal grinding her teeth at the eleventh hour. That was all in order. No, the problem now, on the morning of the wedding, three hours before the ceremony was due to take place, was indirectly down to her brother.

  Saskia had caused the bru-ha, by deciding, late last night, that she wanted a ‘pre-nup’ agreement after all. So now Jeremy was sulking, Jazz was on the phone to an old friend and she was sitting here trying to work out how to accommodate the bride’s latest demand: in between rushed trips to the loo, to be sick down the toilet.

  She felt as wrung out as an old dishcloth, and she probably looked like one too. She had no idea what to say to her twin, who didn’t look much better than she did, he too was ashen and shaking and had turned mulish as well. “The wedding is ‘off’,” he muttered through gritted teeth, without raising his eyes from the legal document, printed on high quality cream vellum and spread out over the kitchen table like confetti, where he’d scattered it not ten minutes earlier.

  Both Crystal and Giles ignored him, each pretending that they’d not heard his muttered decision.

  Giles sat opposite; he too was a sickly shade of green, though for very different reasons than the groom. He pulled at the top button of the starched cream shirt which had accompanied the hired morning suit and automatically loosened the dark purple lace cravat. He’d been part way through getting dressed when Jazz had phoned earlier and fired questions and a string of demands at him, and then belatedly remembered his manners and ‘asked’ him to sort the problem out.

  He’d done the majority of the work from the small home office at the house on the green, once he knew what Saskia wanted, but witnessing the document was proving impossible. It was bad luck for the bride to see the groom on the day of the wedding and Saskia had insisted that the whole occasion must conform to tradition, which was tiresome enough, but now that he’d arrived with barely minutes to spare, Jeremy had flatly refused to even look at the papers that had been painstakingly drafted.

  Giles was only partly listening to the ceaseless monologue which was taking place between brother and sister over the kitchen table, his mind was occupied elsewhere. His own life had tilted and then slid headfirst into the mire yesterday too. He was an idiot, plain and simple. He’d been taken in by a lush set of ruby red lips and an accommodating disposition. Okay it was all wrapped up in a package that was both prim and tempting in equal measure, but he’d made every mistake in the book.

  ‘Don’t dip your nib in the office ink’ had been one of his late father’s favourite catch-phrases, and Giles had agreed with him wholeheartedly, pitying the poor fellow who fell for the obvious charms of the latest office strumpet. But now, here he was, not only ‘dipping’ so as to speak, but also impregnating, if his girl-friend’s ashen, tear-streaked face and delicately quivering, full bottom lip was to be believed.

  He’d arrived at the restaurant for their date in optimistic mood last night, with Imogen neatly ensconced in Jazz and Crystal’s spare bedroom, and the house on the green remaining empty unless he chose to travel back from ‘town’, it had made his sneaking around so much easier. There was no one keeping tabs on his activities these days. He’d optimistically assumed that he could take all of the time in the world to sort out his priorities and work out where his life was headed.

  But now, as he sat at the scrubbed pine table in the small country kitchen, waiting for the penny to drop for Jeremy, knowing that although he was kicking against the inevitable, he would sign the papers eventually, the knowledge brought his own life into sharp relief. He blinked hard, twice, and rolled the revelation around in his mind.

  It was clear now, it was over. His respectable, five-year marriage to Imogen had reached full-term, just like that, in one instant he knew with absolute certainty what he must do next. He felt very calm, as he sat there while Crystal and Jeremy droned on about the wedding. He knew that he needed to harness the powerful emotion that impending fatherhood had thrust upon him and rise up to the occasion. His heart skipped a beat as he delved deep into his psyche to grasp the courage of his conviction and make the next move.

  Of course, he’d not handled the situation well last night, in the restaurant. He seriously doubted that they’d ever take another reservation in his name, ever again. When he’d realised the full implication of the news that had been imparted, the whole fatherhood thing, he’d freaked. There was no other
word for it.

  As his dinner partner had tried to drop the bombshell lightly, mentioning her illness and the trip to the doctor’s surgery, he’d been impervious to her hints. The sickness he’d rationalised as some dodgy oysters from the seafood bar that they frequented and the hints to tiredness he’d taken as a complaint that he was working her too hard in the office. She’d had to spell it out in words of one syllable, before the penny had finally dropped into place.

  A mild sweat had broken out on his upper lip and he’d had heart palpitations at the mere thought. He’d struggled to undo the restrictive top button on his designer shirt as the full impact of her news hit home. While his heart slammed into his ribs and his mouth went dry, his vocal chords had been in full working order, ten paces behind his brain. “No, No, it can’t be true,” he’d yelled at the top of his voice.

  When she’d assured him, that ‘yes’ she’d been to the very best consultant that there was and had the news verified, double and triple checked in fact, just to make sure, he’d resorted to whimpering softly, like an animal in pain.

  Realising that he was on the verge of causing a scene, his brain had finally caught up with his mouth, and he’d suggested that they leave the restaurant, forthwith. It wouldn’t have been quite so embarrassing if he’d remembered to pay the bill before flagging down a taxi in full view of the other diners, bored with their current company and eager to gawp at any cheap-rate diversion. And so, while he ushered his guest into the taxi, and in his haste, missed the step as he attempted to climb in beside her, the waiter had tugged at his sleeve, babbling away and waving the unpaid bill frantically.