by Fiona Walker
‘One moment,’ she told the caller now, covering the receiver and mouthing, ‘Are you available?’
‘Who is it?’
‘Bay Austen.’ The pink cheeks said it all.
She held out her hand reluctantly for the phone. It was better to get it over with. She was as disappointed in wily little Pip as dreamy Petra Gunn, but not surprised. Bay had been making women blush since he hit puberty.
‘Bay.’ There were very few people Ronnie spoke to without a ripple of laughter or a furnace of warmth in her voice, but Bay got a flat monotone so sharp that both her dogs sat down and looked up at her.
‘Ronnie. I hear you’re moving in. Welcome back!’
‘Thank you. I take it you’re calling about the land?’
‘Can one neighbour not welcome another home?’
‘Of course, and thank you.’ She watched Pip start to wade through the piles of formal-looking envelopes to find the one she’d asked about, fast as a card shark separating a deck.
‘It’s been a long time, when was it – twenty years ago?’
‘You know when it was, Bay.’ She ran her tongue along her teeth, the bad taste back.
She’d known him as a boy before that, a little charm assassin hunting at the front of the field with the thrusters, always hanging about her at point, the merry blue eyes watching her flirt with Angus. He was just a couple of years older than Tim, their Boy’s Own social worlds crossing, his family a strong reminder of absent Hermia, always at the same events, the old feud between the Austens and the Percys enjoying a new era of friendship. She’d ruffled his hair, listened to his Danger Mouse impersonations and crashed into him a lot playing Marco Polo in the Austens’ crowded swimming-pool. It had never occurred to Ronnie then that a boy under ten could have a crush, least of all on a mother of three in her twenties hiding a car-crash private life. After her marriage ended, she hadn’t seen Bay for more than a decade. When they’d met again, the circumstances laughably awful, she hadn’t recognised him. He, by contrast, had known precisely who she was.
‘Now, the land,’ he was saying, in the silken tones of a man accustomed to giving the orders and charming the opposition. ‘My solicitor says you’re the last trust signatory needed on the contract of sale. Then it comes across here for mine and we’re away. If we’re quick, we’ll get it under the wire for completion before the Eyngate Park meet.’ He started chatting easily about the plan to make an old-fashioned three-mile hunt chase from the grand old house on the Fosse Way across the farm’s land to the legendary Compton Thorns. ‘My band of supporters are on stand-by to fix up all the old hunt jumps. Nothing like galloping home to supper across one’s own hedges, is there?’
She could hear the twenty-year-old in there still. Bombastic, flirtatious, easy to like, despite the bravura. She could imagine he was a hugely popular master. Confidence was such an aphrodisiac, especially in young men as beautiful and straightforward as Bay. Pax had been utterly infatuated by it.
‘Bay,’ she interrupted, another sharp command that made her dogs sit down obediently once more. ‘I’m sure it will be a wonderful occasion and I appreciate you’re spinning a delicious yarn to make me feel all this is meant to be but, frankly, I just have to find the bloody paperwork.’ She looked at Pip again, now on her third pile. ‘It was sent here in error. I’ll sign it as soon as—’
With a loud ‘whoo-hooo!’ Pip held up a thick A4 envelope.
‘—I can find a pen.’
‘That’s excellent news! Why not bring it round tonight? Parents are having their usual do. Come and celebrate with us. We’ll toast your return.’
Another flashback. Stiff taffeta and sherry at Manor Farm, which, contrary to its humble name, was a citadel of oak-panelled snobbery, high sheriffs and MFHs being horribly self-congratulatory. What had lovely Petra called it, the Well-hung Party? Hosted by Sandy Austen, Hermia’s oh-so-strait-laced elder brother and his sprightly wife Viv. In the old days, Bay had crept downstairs in pyjamas with a stuffed giraffe under one arm.
‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea.’
‘It’ll be a double welcome home. Hermia’s theatre chap’s back in the village too. Hoping he might come along. Hugely clever.’
‘I have to unpack.’
‘Come on, Ronnie.’ Bay’s upbeat, growling voice was wagging its tail furiously. ‘Isn’t it time to let bygones be bygones?’
‘Bay, when so much of your life has gone by in the blink of an eye, as mine has, you’ll learn that letting things go is a very bad state of affairs. I’ll sign the papers now.’ She rang off.
Pip was hovering, holding out the solicitor’s envelope, generous and willing to help.
‘Would you like a cup of coffee? I’ve got lungo, intenso and decaffeinato. And cake.’
‘A cup of tea would be heaven.’
‘You know Bay well?’ Pip hovered, raspberry stain creeping back into her cheeks.
‘Well enough.’ Ronnie ripped open the envelope and pulled out a thick sheaf of papers, then leafed through them.
‘They’re having their party tonight. My friend Petra’s going. She’s a super-successful novelist.’ She dropped her voice. ‘Big crush on Bay. Bought special underwear for tonight.’
Pretending not to hear, Ronnie held the covering letter at arm’s length, struggling to read it without her glasses. It was instructing her to review the trust assets for the probate application and sign the sales contract for the land. ‘Where would I find a pen?’
The contract was pages long. She felt her chest tighten at the sight of her children’s signatures, lines striped one below the other, dated and witnessed.
Pip had disappeared on a quest for tea and a pen.
The light was fading fast as evening stole in. Ronnie turned on the lights and stood directly below one between two oil-paintings of big-boned hunters.
Running her eye down the page, she spotted the probate valuation beside the sixty acres of land. She looked at the stud’s other land holdings, then back to that parcel. The figures couldn’t be right. She started leafing furiously back through the sales contract.
By the time Pip returned with a tray of two different teas, milk, lemon slices, tiny fluffy cakes with slightly sunken middles and a selection of pens, Ronnie had gone.
Pip edged a few columns of post out of the way and set her tray down dispiritedly. It was heaven to have someone back at the stud and to know her job was safe, but she missed the Captain who, you could fairly confidently guarantee, would stay in one place, especially when his gout got bad. Then she heard dog claws skittering along the back corridors and Ronnie burst through the door carrying a suitcase.
‘Tea. Heaven! You’re an angel, Pip. Bring it upstairs and you can help me get ready. Are you any good at make-up? I’m hopeless.’
Pip’s smile was so wide her earrings wobbled. The Captain had never needed a makeover.
42
This evening Carly wanted to prove herself to the Austens as a good worker. The farm shop would extend its hours for Christmas shopping, and there was talk of opening a café in the new year. With her waitressing experience at Le Mill, she saw tonight as an opportunity to impress. If she worked every job she could, setting some money aside, she’d calculated that she could afford the first term’s college fees for the farriery course by September. Ash would have qualified as a personal trainer by then, so things would surely get easier. The more she thought about it, the more she wanted to do it.
Reluctant to be seen getting a lift with Ash’s cousin, Mex, who drove a prehistoric van with rusted wheel arches and two Staffies snarling in the back, Carly asked to be dropped at the end of the drive she normally used for work, not realising that Mr and Mrs Austen’s home had its own private entrance. The closest she’d ever got to the big farmhouse was the old sheep yard at the back of the shop where she and the other girls shared cigarettes in breaks from where they could just make out its tennis court behind a tall topiary hedge. Baronial in proportion, the ho
use was well shielded from the converted buildings that formed commercial units and holiday cottages. Climbing over locked gates and scrabbling around old glass houses and compost piles, Carly quickly discovered that it was no longer the back-door-always-open hub of the working farm.
Arriving ten minutes late, covered with leaves and mud, she made her way past a huge conservatory, glowing like a Moroccan lamp, to a side extension, where a harassed blonde beanpole in leather trousers was unloading big foil-covered trays from a van with This Most Excellent Canapé written in curly script on its side. It was all hands on deck. A handsome olive-skinned youth in a suit minced back and forth in her wake. Mr Austen senior, dressed like he’d just come out of his potting shed in threadbare cords and tattered waxed jacket, was unloading boxes of hired wine glasses from his Land Rover.
‘Reinforcements!’ he greeted her affably, handing her a box and picking up another. ‘Our pretty shop girl has arrived at last.’
Reminding herself he was old, posh and paying her, Carly apologised for being late and followed him inside.
She’d always imagined farmhouse kitchens as homely and welcoming places, with orphan lambs and dogs lying in front of an Aga and lots of waxed coats on the back of chairs, but this was on a whole different scale. The kitchen was footballer’s wife state-of-the-art. Even though Mr and Mrs Austen were knocking into their late sixties, they had some seriously high-gadget wizardry going on.
‘My son and his wife had all this put in when they had theirs done this year,’ Mr Austen explained, as he showed her the drinks fridges – they had two, one as big as a wardrobe with wine racks in it and another filled with soft drinks and mixers. There were also two dishwashers just for glasses – the sort that pulled out like drawers – as well as an ice machine and a sparkling-water tap. ‘It’s all rather fun, isn’t it? No idea how any of it works.’
The harassed caterer, who had handled parties for the Austens in their old kitchen for years, had no idea how any of it worked either, and was having a meltdown by a huge gumboot-green range cooker, as stone cold as a marble altar.
‘It’s log-burning,’ Mr Austen told her proudly. ‘Frightfully environmentally friendly – we have woodland here so we never have to buy fuel. Rather wasted on us. Viv prefers that.’ He nodded at a small combination oven just large enough to cook a meal for two.
‘How long does this thing take to heat up?’ the caterer asked, through gritted teeth, hands splayed on its cold cooking plates, like a faith healer trying to summon life into it.
‘A couple of hours, I think. Is that a problem, Leonie? Oh dear.’
While a panicked discussion went on, the handsome waiter rolled his espresso-dark eyes at Carly and introduced himself in a softly camp Scottish accent as the Austens’ groom. ‘We’re all being roped in tonight. The agency she normally uses for waiting staff has everyone on their books at this giga-wedding at Eyngate Hall.’ An ageing pop princess was marrying her young old-Etonian actor – it was all over social media.
Carly liked the sound of the agency. She made a mental note to sign on.
They were eventually dispatched with trays of hot finger food to commandeer the range cooker in Bay’s recently converted barn, its kitchen even more jaw-dropping than his parents’. The range was a hideous shade of easyJet tangerine.
‘Bay had it custom sprayed Dutch orange for Monique,’ the groom explained, trying to slide a tray into the warming oven and finding it didn’t fit. ‘He said he thought it might encourage her to cook. Not very funny.’ He went in search of something to transfer the canapés into.
Carly had met Monique Austen just a handful of times, kicking off with an unfortunate encounter when she’d accused Monique of shop-lifting designer water and a packet of Cotswold crumbles, not knowing she was the owner’s wife. Compared to friendly Bay she was sub-zero, and Carly thought she plucked her eyebrows too thin to be called classy.
They could hear an argument raging overhead, a high, hysterical voice talking over a low, reassuring one.
‘Do they do that a lot?’ she asked in a whisper.
‘A lot.’
They distinctly heard a shriek of ‘Fuck you!’
A moment later Monique swept downstairs, a high-cheekboned, pale-lashed ice queen in a silk robe, her short blonde hair shower-wet, helping herself to a glass of wine from the fridge. Remarkably composed for a woman fresh from a screaming match, she watched, one thin eyebrow lifted, as her groom angled the big catering tray to tip the rows of neatly arranged choux pastry and filo wraps into a Le Creuset casserole. ‘Nee, nee, nee!’ She jabbed one slim hip to open a double-width drawer, taking out a baking tray and handing it across with a tut. ‘The groots forgot to light the bloody oven again, didn’t they?’ Seeing their blank faces, she explained the Dutch nickname with the frustration of a teacher recapping the two times table to Year Threes. ‘The grootouders – grandparents? Okay, I can see I’ll have to keep a close eye. They’re not coping. Has anyone turned the heating up? They are so mean with it.’ She caught sight of Carly’s Christmas-pudding nails. ‘Ugh! Okay, those will have to go. Wait there!’ She stalked back upstairs. There was another brief burst of argument overhead before Monique reappeared with a pair of immaculately white cotton gloves with grippy pimpled palms. ‘Wear these. I don’t have time to sort out anything else.’
Walking back to the main house, Carly felt ridiculous, like a historian on a television programme about to leaf through old births and deaths records.
‘Dressage gloves,’ her companion told her, snorting derisively. ‘You might want to carry a whip too. There’ll be a lot of dirty old leches at this thing.’
Looking down at her hands again, imagining them holding the double reins of one of the dancing horses Monique competed, Carly decided they looked quite stylish after all.
They were passing within a tempting breath of the Austens’ stable-yard. ‘Maybe you could show me the horses later if we get a break.’
‘I don’t get paid to give tours,’ he said waspishly.
In the kitchen Leonie, the tall, thin caterer, was lining up champagne flutes on circular trays. ‘Mr Austen has asked that we pour the supermarket cava to give to guests when they arrive and save the Moët for refilling glasses.’
*
‘Are you sure you want to go to this thing?’ Petra asked Fitz’s locked bedroom door, when there was no sign of him ten minutes after she’d told him they should set out. At the other end of the corridor, she could hear Gunny overseeing the girls’ bath-time and felt another pang of regret that Charlie, who had planned this so tactically, wasn’t going.
He’d just sent her a Have fun tonight text with a wide-eyed emoji and an unprecedented three kisses. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but something felt very wrong, and it wasn’t just her ridiculously tight miracle pants, which were bizarrely high-waisted, pulling up right underneath her boobs, like Wallace and Gromit’s wrong trousers.
She could see her reflection in the tall sash window at the end of the corridor, chopped into twelve segments. Bridge was right. It was a great dress, a long-sleeved, low-backed curve-clinger, which was made from an absurdly flattering, sumptuously heavy fabric the colour of ripe Victoria plums. She was a bit hot in it, standing by the landing radiator, but winter drinks parties in country houses were often chilly, and Sandy Austen was notoriously thrifty.
The door opened a crack. ‘Thank God it’s you, Mum. Can we sneak out the back way? Gunny wants to photograph me for her blog on teenage public-school drop-outs. When I stayed in my room, she kind of just stood outside refusing to take no for an answer.’
‘We’ll go the back way,’ Petra assured him, equally reluctant to star in the mummy-muffin-top Instagram feed.
When Fitz stepped out of the room, Petra whistled, trying not to tear up with pride and ruin her make-up. True to his word, he had scrubbed up beautifully. Dressed in impossibly tight skinny black jeans and his best cashmere jumper, fringe artfully arranged over his face so that his ey
es showed for once, and smelling deliciously of the Jo Malone aftershave she’d bought Charlie, which he never wore, her handsome son took her arm. ‘You’ll do.’
‘So will you.’
They tiptoed down the back stairs and out through the boot room, Petra pulling on her big riding coat over her evening jacket so she could throw bedtime slices of hay in with the Redhead and the ponies on the way past.
‘Best behaviour this evening, Mummy,’ Fitz teased her in the car in a Perfect Peter voice, ‘and please don’t introduce me to anyone as William, “my gorgeous boy” or “little Willy”.’ It had been his baby nickname, for which he’d never quite forgiven his parents.
‘Absolutely not.’ Having recently created Father Willy with his gifted tongue and magnificent rampant appetite, Petra knew the name was safe.
‘Do you want me to carry your phone?’ he offered, as she parked the family’s muddy Freelander among more prestige saloons and off-roaders two minutes later. ‘You don’t have any pockets.’
‘Neither do you,’ she pointed out. ‘I have a clutch bag.’
‘I’ll carry that for you too.’
‘Don’t be silly.’ She thought it was rather sweet that he was being so over-courteous. She just wished she felt more enthusiastic about the party. Her glum mood wouldn’t budge, a leaden sense of being ill-at-ease and out of place without Charlie.
In the end, Fitz took both her bag and her hand because her heels kept getting stuck in the matting path the Austens had laid out across the grass from the car-park paddock to the house.
‘Hello, hello – so glad you could make it after all!’ They were welcomed by Sandy and Viv, he as damson-faced and white-haired as she was alabaster and Titian, both gregariously accomplished hosts who swiftly saw guests’ coats into the arms of a helper, beckoned for drinks and introduced them into a friendly group in a grand double-height entrance hall, already milling ten-deep with the braying of the well-heeled country set.
