Paradise End

by Elizabeth Laird

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve done this for me, Carly. Giving up the dress rehearsal and everything. You’ve got no idea what it means to me.’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact . . .’

  I was about to tell her about Mrs Litvinov’s mum, and how Mr Litvinov had called me, but the shining look in her eyes stopped me. I didn’t want her to think I’d only come because the dress rehearsal had been cancelled. It would have spoilt it for her.

  The band in the marquee had been playing all this time, ordinary background stuff, but now it revved up to a real dance number. And then I felt it. A blaze of excitement and a fierce joy surged through me. After Frost and Dixie, Tia was the most important person at this party. And I was Tia’s best friend. I was at the centre of it all. I had a right to be here.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘What are we doing, hiding in here? Let’s go to the party!’

  I take Tia’s hand and we come out from the bushes and walk across the grass. People are arriving in a steady stream, parking their cars down the hill to the left of the house, moving round to the far side on to the terrace and drifting down the wide stone steps from the terrace towards the marquee. There are all ages here, some quite old, lots of people like Frost and Dixie, but younger ones too, around twenty or twenty-five, and quite a few our age as well. There’s a group of them standing around on the terrace, laughing nervously.

  I walk right up to them, with Tia coming along shyly behind me. The excitement’s pounding through my veins, propelling me along, but it’s tinged with nerves now. If this crowd give me hassle, my confidence will fizzle out and I’ll come to a dead stop like a car that’s run out of petrol.

  ‘Hi,’ I say. ‘I’m Carly.’

  Two of the girls look at me as if I was something wriggling out of a muddy pond, then they giggle. They turn to Tia.

  ‘Wow, Tia,’ one gushes in a super-grand accent, ‘what a fabulous dress.’

  ‘Thanks, Camilla. So’s yours. Fantastic,’ Tia says, sounding posher than I’d ever heard her sound before.

  I take a good look at Camilla. I feel I know her already. And I don’t much like what I see. Her nose is wrinkled and her top lip’s curled up as if she can smell something nasty. I guess she usually looks like this, but I can’t help thinking she’s searching for a way to put me down.

  My bubbles start to run out, like Coke that’s going flat. I don’t belong here. I’m a fly that’s landed on a big cream cake and any minute now someone’s going to swat me off it.

  Then I look up and catch the eye of one of the boys. He’s grinning at me. He’s got a really nice face, with a squashy nose, and his hair sticks up like mine does.

  ‘Want a drink, Carly?’ he says. His voice is a bit posh too, but not sneering like Camilla’s, and he looks cute as he pulls at his black bow tie to let a bit of air get to his neck. ‘Don’t tell me you’re not dying of thirst. It’s practically tropical tonight. What do you want? Champagne?’

  ‘Brilliant,’ I say.

  He waves at a waiter, who’s passing along the terrace with a tray in his hands, and my heart misses a beat. What if it’s Sam?

  It isn’t, thank God.

  The boy picks up two glasses of the pale, bubbly wine and hands one to me. The boy next to him, who’s shorter and looks shy, hands one to Tia. The others help themselves.

  ‘Cheers,’ everyone says, and the boy with the squashy nose raises his glass towards Tia and me.

  ‘Rory,’ Camilla says to him, flashing me a sideways look, ‘are you going to the point-to-point on Sunday?’

  ‘Not sure.’ Rory’s still looking from Tia to me and back to Tia again.

  ‘What about you, Tia?’ says Camilla. ‘Oh, sorry. I forgot. You don’t like horses, do you?’

  I feel Tia stiffen up beside me, but she doesn’t say anything, and the others all start talking about horses. Tia and I are standing there like a couple of losers, out of it. I take a sip of champagne. I’ve never had it before, and I can’t say I like it much. It’s sour. But it starts to fizzle through my veins straight away.

  Then I sense someone coming up behind me, and I turn round. Frost is here. He’s wearing a white dinner jacket and unlike everyone else he doesn’t look too hot. He’s taller than ever and grand and lordly.

  Uh-oh, I think. Here we go. Now for some cutting down to size, and I have to stop myself hiding my champagne glass behind my back.

  But he gives me a friendly smile and, what’s better, he ignores all the others.

  He says, ‘Hello, Carly.’

  I say, ‘Hiya, Frost.’

  It’s taken a surge of courage to call him by his nickname, and I’m scared for a moment, but he just says, ‘How nice to see you. Delighted you could make it. I gather you had to cut a rather vital rehearsal to get here.’

  I shrug and say, ‘Not a problem.’

  ‘I hope you approve of the band,’ he says, looking around at all of us. ‘I’m not sure what you young people like dancing to these days. It’s all just noise to me, I’m afraid.’

  ‘It’s great, Mr Braithwaite,’ says Camilla in a smarmy, breathy voice.

  ‘Well, enjoy yourselves,’ he says vaguely and walks off.

  The atmosphere’s changed. Camilla’s dropped her sneer and everyone looks at me with respect.

  ‘Are you a frightfully famous actress or something?’ says the short boy who’d given Tia her champagne. He sounds impressed.

  ‘No, she’s a frightfully famous dancer,’ says Tia, and I’m scared in case she goes off into one of her flights of fancy and sets me up for a fall, but luckily, before she gets going, Camilla gives a shriek.

  ‘Oh!’ she squeals. ‘There’s Petra! I haven’t seen her for ages.’ And she runs off down the lawn, and the other girls follow her.

  Dixie appears out of nowhere. She smiles at me, but the smile doesn’t reach her eyes. They move past me and fix on Tia.

  ‘There you are, darling. I was afraid you’d run off and hidden somewhere. Such a little shrinking violet.’ She gives Rory and the other boy a blinding smile. ‘Now why aren’t you all dancing?’

  And she drifts off, her pale-green silk dress rippling round her body as she goes.

  ‘Shrinking violet?’ I say, shooting sideways looks at the boys to make sure they’re listening. ‘Tia? That’s all she knows.’

  The boys laugh, and look at Tia with more interest. I can see they think she’s gorgeous. She clocks it too. She’s blushing a bit, and tossing back her hair.

  ‘Rory! James!’ yells Camilla. ‘Come and talk to Petra. She says you always ignore her.’

  Rory rolls his eyes.

  ‘Don’t go away, you two,’ he says. ‘We’ll be right back.’

  He leaps off down the terrace steps towards the group of girls, and James, with a last admiring look at Tia, goes after him.

  ‘They both fancy you like mad,’ I say to Tia.

  She giggles.

  ‘No they don’t. It’s you.’

  ‘They like us both then,’ I say, ‘because we’re cool and fascinating and totally irresistible.’

  I don’t know whether it’s that sip of champagne or the look in the boys’ eyes, but something’s gone whizzing to my head.

  ‘Come on,’ I say, grabbing Tia’s arm. ‘Let’s go and see what’s happening. Let’s check this whole party out.’

  She hangs back.

  ‘But those two. Rory and James . . .’

  I stare at her.

  ‘You’re not going to wait around for them, are you? Let them come and find us. Make them sweat a bit. It never fails.’

  Oh, it was fairyland at Paradise End that night, and we were like two winged spirits, Tia and me, flitting about everywhere, filled with laughter, slipping from room to room, she in her pale dress and me in my dark one.

  The light was going now. Mr Hollins had lit the drive all the way from the gates to the front canopy with flaring torches, and the flames sent unearthly shadows dancing into the house.

  We started
in the drawing room, sliding into it through the long French windows from the terrace. The huge room gleamed soft and gold, a treasure house of beauty. I thought no one was there, and I wanted to throw out my arms and shout out loud, but then we heard a sound and we turned round and saw a man in a white jacket and a woman in a scarlet dress kissing each other on one of the sofas at the far end. Mad laughter burst from us both. The couple looked round, but by that time we were out of the far door, tiptoeing across the hall.

  No one was in the dining room. I looked up and caught the stern eye of crazy old Joshua Braithwaite, staring down at me out of his portrait, with his factories behind him. The walls glowed a deeper red than usual, and I had the oddest feeling that they were really made of rose petals and would be soft if I touched them.

  ‘Tia, look, the colours are all different tonight,’ I began, but she had gone out again, and I ran after her, back across the hall and into the library, where two solemn men were standing with their backs to the empty grate, holding their champagne glasses against their bright-white shirt fronts.

  ‘Do you think the press have got hold of it yet?’ we heard one of them say, and for some reason it made us laugh even more, and we sidled past them, out of the library, into the conservatory beyond, holding ourselves in till we could collapse into a pair of cane chairs beneath the fronds of a huge fern.

  But the conservatory was airless and stiflingly hot, and we were filled with wildness and happiness and strength. We couldn’t stay still, so we were up again a moment later, bursting out through the glass doors, right beside the swimming pool. The water was so beautiful with the lights of the great house sparkling on it, and it looked so cool and welcoming that I could have thrown myself into it then and there. I stood poised on the edge, almost ready to dive, then I turned and looked at Tia, standing there too, and we read each others’ minds and shook our heads and laughed a bit more.

  Something had changed between us. I’d been ahead before, with Tia behind me, but now she had taken the lead, and I was following her. And we went on through the rose garden, round the sundial, through the trellis and out past the cherry trees, and then we came to the far end of the terrace where the buffet was laid out.

  I stopped and stared, my mouth open, because never in my life had I seen such food: turkeys and ducks, lobsters and hams, yellow rice and bowls of salad, tomatoes carved like flowers and pineapples carved like trees. There were swans made of ice holding butter in hollows in their backs, and sauces, and different kinds of rolls, and another table groaning with sweets – strawberries, cakes, meringues, tarts and mousses – and everything was so beautiful, so tempting, that my mouth watered hard and I had to swallow.

  ‘Look at this, Tia,’ I said. ‘Look at all that.’

  But her eyes had swept over it indifferently as if it was nothing special to her. She was looking down to the other end of the terrace, and I saw that Rory and James had seen us, and they were pushing past people on their way towards us. Someone else, an older person, came up and started talking to Tia, and she turned away to answer.

  Then I had a heart-stopping shock, because standing right in front of me, a tray of glasses in his hands, was my brother, Sam.

  ‘Carly!’ he gasped. ‘What on earth are you doing here? What about your dress rehearsal?’

  I pushed one shoulder out towards him, getting myself geared up into fighting mode.

  ‘It was cancelled. And before you ask, Mum and Dad don’t know. They don’t know I’m here either.’

  I could see he didn’t know what to think. He couldn’t decide whether to play the disapproving big brother or admit to himself that he admired my guts.

  ‘You’ll catch it,’ he said at last.

  ‘Don’t think I haven’t worked that out.’

  I grinned at him, and to my relief, he grinned back.

  ‘It’ll be worth it anyway,’ I said. ‘Isn’t this the most amazing thing you’ve ever been to in your whole life? I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.’

  He pulled a face.

  ‘All right for some. Lousy rotten hard work for us. I’m dripping with sweat and my feet are killing me. They’re going mad in the kitchen. They took a risk, putting the buffet outside. It’ll all be wrecked if the storm breaks. I think it will soon. Can’t you feel it in the air?’

  We looked up at the sky. I hadn’t noticed before, but even in the near darkness we could see that black clouds were rolling up over the horizon towards us, blotting out the last glow from the summer night sky.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ Sam said. ‘Look, Carly, watch out for yourself. This isn’t a kids’ party. Don’t go mad or anything.’

  ‘Yes, and you bog off with your tray and stop cheeking the guests,’ I said, but he hadn’t stopped to listen.

  I looked round. Rory and James seemed to have got stuck halfway along the terrace. Tia was still talking politely to the same person. At last she turned back to me.

  ‘Were you asking that waiter for a drink?’ she said. ‘Is he going to bring something? I’m terribly thirsty.’

  ‘No.’ I hesitated. I hadn’t told Tia about Sam being there. I suppose I’d felt ashamed, of my brother being here only as a waiter, and I’d half hoped we wouldn’t run into him. But there was no help for it now. ‘It wasn’t a waiter. Well, it was too. It was Sam. My brother. He’s got a job with the firm that’s doing the catering. I’d have told you, only – I didn’t get round to it.’

  ‘What? Sam?’ Her head whipped round and she stood on tiptoe to look over the crowd at his disappearing back. ‘Why didn’t you say anything? Is he coming back this way? That’s so amazing, I . . .’

  She didn’t finish, because Rory and James came back, and they said did we want to go down to the marquee, where the dancing was, and we said yes, and we all went down together. The band was great, a bit old-fashioned and not loud enough for me, but OK, and we danced for ages.

  It was strange dancing with older people. They were doing really weird things, like out of the eighties, but we got into it after a bit, and got going with the rhythm and just ignored them all.

  A couple of times I saw Camilla looking into the marquee, scowling when she saw us, and once I saw Dixie flinging herself across the dance floor with Otto, but mostly I was only aware of the four of us, Rory and James laughing and sweating and trying to keep up with me, and Tia, who’d jumped right out of her cool, sleek self for once, and was shimmering around in her gleaming dress, her hair flying, a smile of pure happiness on her face.

  Then the band stopped playing, and people started appearing with plates of food in their hands, so we pushed our way up to the buffet and helped ourselves. We sat on the terrace steps and ate the most delicious things I’d ever tasted in my life, and I felt for the first time that I was beautiful and clever and sophisticated and cool, and I wanted to stay there forever, to be there forever, in the heat of that magical night, sitting on the sun-warmed stones with my best friend, while the boys teased us and admired us and made us feel good.

  The first drop of rain fell as I put the last frosted strawberry into my mouth. It splattered down on to my plate, the size of a fifty-pence piece. Another one fell on my knee, and another on the top of my head. We all jumped up. Some people were running down the terrace steps, back into the marquee. Others were moving quickly into the drawing room through the French windows.

  ‘Come on,’ said Rory, pulling me to my feet. ‘Let’s go inside.’

  There was such a crowd trying to push across the terrace that I had to let go of Rory’s hand. I found myself up against a pair of broad male backs, right in front of me. One of the men was Otto. The other was an older person with a mass of thick, white hair. They were moving forwards slowly, as if they hadn’t noticed that at any moment the rain would start pelting down.

  I was just about to push between them, when the older man put his arm up and patted Otto on the back, completely blocking my way. I heard him say, in a strong American accent, ‘You know what, Otto? You sure
as hell got lucky tonight. You’re looking at it straight in the face. Your break. The big one. A part to die for. Fall in love with fame, baby. It’s coming your way.’

  Otto turned, and I caught a glimpse of his face. He was biting his lip, holding back the huge grin that was trying to split it in half.

  A space opened up beside them, so I could have stepped round them and gone inside, but I was too interested. I wanted to hear more.

  Otto mumbled something.

  ‘Oh, Dixie!’ laughed the older man. ‘We love dear Dixie, of course.’ He made a bunch with his fingers, kissed the tips, then spread his hand out to blow the kiss away. ‘But my dear, so yesterday. And that legendary temper! The alcoholic breath! Take my tip. Cut loose. She’s served her turn. You can do better than Dixie.’

  Otto laughed, and I could hear relief in his voice.

  ‘Oh, I will. I will. It’ll be no sacrifice, believe me.’ He gave an exaggerated shudder. ‘Have you ever seen her in a full screaming tantrum? Or even worse, when she’s trying to be cute?’

  The older man laughed too.

  ‘Frankly, I don’t know how you have put up with her for so long.’

  ‘Frankly,’ said Otto, ‘neither do I.’

  I suddenly realized that Tia was standing just behind me, listening to every word. I saw her face, but I couldn’t bear to go on looking, and screwed my eyes shut.

  ‘Otto!’ came Dixie’s voice from the far end of the terrace.

  ‘Time to quit, I think,’ said Otto. He turned back, and ran quickly off down the terrace steps.

  Dixie ran up to us.

  ‘Wasn’t Otto here? Where did he go?’

  She sounded strained, almost desperate. Her hair had lost its perfection. It was straggling round her face, which suddenly looked old and haggard.

  ‘Who cares where he went, Mimi,’ said Tia, and I’d never heard her speak so like an ordinary daughter to Dixie before. ‘He’s a pain. Let him go. Please.’

  ‘Not now, sweetie,’ Dixie said, as if Tia was a child who’d begged for an unsuitable treat. ‘Otto!’

  She looked wildly round, saw Otto disappear from the bottom of the terrace, then plunged down the steps and stumbled after him across the lawn.