The Secret Hours

by Santa Montefiore

  ‘This evening?’ Gracie repeated. She’d rather been hoping to stay in and warm herself with the thought of that hot Italian sun in the blissful silence of her pottery room.

  ‘This evening, at seven-thirty to be precise. I’m having a small, informal get-together and it’s imperative that you’re here.’ There was a determined tone to Flappy’s voice which Gracie immediately recognised. A tone that suggested she would not accept any excuse Gracie might give in order to avoid going out on this damp and foggy evening. Besides, Flappy knew very well that Gracie had no reason to decline; it wasn’t as if she had anything else to do.

  ‘How lovely,’ Gracie replied weakly, feeling decidedly unlovely about it. Italy beckoned. She was already there. But tonight she would be firmly embedded in Devon – her pottery and her planning would have to wait until the morrow.

  ‘Good,’ said Flappy, then she added cheerfully, ‘Ciao.’

  Gracie frowned. She had never heard Flappy say ‘Ciao’ before.

  Flappy’s husband Kenneth had made his money in a chain of fast food restaurants that became popular in the 1970s. He sold it for millions in 1983 and promptly retired, buying the big house in Badley Compton and building a golf course for which the people of Badley Compton were enormously grateful. It had been Flappy’s idea to join their names together when they married, but no one in Badley Compton knew that. For all they were aware the Scott-Booths were an old English family with a house in the Algarve and plenty of money to spend on holidays in the Caribbean where they invited their four children and ten grandchildren for Christmas every year.

  Darnley was a pretty white house with a grey slate roof that boasted fourteen bedrooms, an indoor swimming pool and an outdoor tennis court. The gardens were open to the public for three weeks in June (when Flappy could be spotted floating around the borders in a big straw hat and summer dress wielding a pair of secateurs with which she lopped off the occasional dead rose). Tonight Karen, the girl who came to cook, managed to disappear in time for Flappy to put on an apron and start stirring the Napoli sauce before any of her guests arrived for dinner. The first to appear was Mabel Hitchens, who made it her business to arrive before anyone else. She had brought Sally Hancock with her in her small green Golf and the two of them were more excited than ever, ringing the doorbell three times with impatience.

  Flappy let them in, wooden spoon in one hand, glass of prosecco in the other, looking elegant and serene in an ivory silk blouse, floaty black trousers and pearls, her shoulder-length blonde hair immaculately coloured and blow-dried. At sixty-six she was still strikingly beautiful and aware of it. ‘Buona sera,’ she said, closing the door behind them. ‘What a bella evening this is going to be. Come, you must have some prosecco. I’ve been slaving in the kitchen all afternoon so I took the liberty of helping myself to a teeny tiny glass before you arrived.’

  The two women followed Flappy’s willowy figure across the black-and-white chequerboard floor to the spacious kitchen, which was warmed by a large Aga and scented with the savoury smells of fried onions and garlic. Both Mabel and Sally had dressed up for the occasion because Flappy’s interpretation of the word ‘informal’ was notoriously understated. Always chic with a Continental air and a permanent suntan, Flappy wore silk and cashmere and lots of gold jewellery even when she had no plans to see anyone. She detested denim and never wore boots. She abhorred trainers even on the young, and her shoes were dainty with a low, discreet heel. She professed that it was vulgar to show off one’s wealth (and came down very heavily on the modern celebrity who flaunted theirs) but managed to let the other women know by allowing the odd detail to slip out in conversation that her clothes were expensive designer items bought on Net-a-Porter and delivered to her door, then waving her manicured fingers in the air and adding breezily, ‘I don’t care for that sort of thing but Kenneth expects it, you know.’

  As the two women stepped into the kitchen Flappy caught sight of Sally’s sparkly gold stilettos and gave a little sniff. Anything sparkly besides diamonds was enormously vulgar to Flappy. But this small act of rebellion was as far as Sally would dare go. Being on the wrong side of Flappy Scott-Booth was an experience none of the women wanted to risk. Eileen Bagshott had been foolish enough to call a meeting at her house and worse, to chair it, an act of outright rebellion which had resulted in the end of her membership of the Badley Compton Ladies’ Book Club as well as invitations to Darnley. Eileen was now a sorry figure sitting in the shadows in the back row at church on Sundays, and had to practically beg for tickets to concerts in the town hall. So, besides her stilettos, Sally, who had written unashamedly trashy romantic novels for thirty years under the pseudonym Charity Chance, wore burgundy trousers (a touch on the tight side), a pink blouse and her red hair swept into what she believed to be a modern take on the 1960s beehive. Her leather trousers and glittery tops were reserved for dinners at home with her family.

  Unlike Sally, Mabel would have rather died than induce Flappy to think ill of her. She was a nervous, conventional creature and eager to please. Mabel wore a busy floral blouse fixed at the throat with a pastiche diamond brooch, navy-blue slacks and gold buckled pumps on her small feet – a high street version of Flappy, worn with less flair. Her hair was shoulder-length, grey-brown and too thin to copy Flappy’s billowing bob. If it hadn’t been for the glasses that exaggerated the size of Mabel’s watery grey eyes, which had an unsettling habit of staring, she would have looked decidedly unremarkable. Now they stared at Flappy who had gone to such trouble to lay the table beautifully. Really, Mabel thought it remarkable how Flappy had thrown together a soirée at the very last minute, and for a moment she forgot about Gracie going to Italy and gazed in wonder at the clusters of candles, flower displays and starched blue-and-white Provençal tablecloth with matching napkins. ‘I don’t know how you do it,’ she murmured, propelling Flappy, already on a pedestal, to even greater heights.

  ‘Fa niente,’ said Flappy, taking credit for Karen’s good taste and hard work and feeling very pleased with her Italian, which sounded flawless to her ignorant ear. She handed them crystal flutes of prosecco and then swept into the hall to answer the door. A few moments later Esther Hancock and Madge Armitage, who had spent the previous couple of hours reading the book club choice in case Flappy asked them about it, hurried into the kitchen, bursting in their enthusiasm to talk about Gracie.

  Flappy had taken care to invite Gracie half an hour later than the other women so that they’d have time to discuss her decision to go to Italy before she arrived. Once Flappy was satisfied that the women had witnessed her cooking apron and the few professional-looking sweeps of the wooden spoon around the tomato sauce, she hung the apron on the back of the door and led her guests into the drawing room where Karen had lit the fire and scented candles. The four women had spent many evenings in Flappy’s cream-and-taupe-coloured drawing room and yet they hovered about the chairs until she invited them to sit down.

  ‘We need to talk about Gracie,’ said Flappy in her slow, well-articulated voice, and the other women listened respectfully. ‘I’ve been thinking about her ever since I heard the news. I believe I was the first. I’ve decided that the worry is not about Gracie going to a foreign country on her own, even though she hasn’t gone anywhere on her own for as long as I’ve known her, and really, as her friends, we must discourage her, it’s about her running away. What is she running from? What has happened to induce her to take such drastic measures?’ Flappy looked at each lady individually, fixing them with her topaz-blue eyes and silently asking them to think carefully and not all reply at once.

  ‘How clever you are, Flappy. Running away had never crossed my mind,’ gushed Mabel, enjoying the taste of prosecco but trying not to gulp it. ‘I just assumed she wanted a holiday.’

  ‘No, she’s never wanted a holiday. She’s running from something,’ Flappy persisted. ‘And we must find out what it is.’

  ‘She must want to run away very much to venture so far from home,’ said Est
her, who had the deep, gravelly voice of a man and the ruddy, weathered skin of someone who has spent most of her life on horseback. ‘She could run to Land’s End, but to run to Italy . . . That’s very far.’

  ‘Boredom?’ Sally suggested with a grin that might have won support had the others not been so nervous of Flappy.

  Flappy put her head on one side and gave Sally a look as if she were a teacher ticking off a student who had said something unkind. ‘Just because you might think her routine a little dull does not mean to say that it is dull, Sally,’ she said. ‘Gracie is comfortable in that routine and she’s very happy to be given things to do for the book club. There’s nothing boring about being busy, I know that better than anyone! Gracie is not a woman who wants to be adventurous and social like us.’ Sally took a swig of prosecco and noticed that none of the others were willing to catch her eye.

  ‘I wonder what her daughter thinks,’ said Mabel, knowing that the mention of Gracie’s daughter would please Flappy, who enjoyed criticising the girl for not taking trouble with her mother when Flappy’s four children and ten grandchildren made such a fuss of her.

  True to form Flappy inhaled through dilated nostrils and shook her head gravely. ‘That girl should be ashamed of herself. She hasn’t been down to see her mother for over six months. If my memory serves me right, which it usually does, I believe her last visit was in August. However busy her life is in London, she should spare a thought for her poor mama who is alone in that house with only her dogs for company. I know what comfort children can be. I can’t imagine being ignored like poor Gracie is ignored. Without us she’d have no one.’

  ‘Perhaps she just wants to see Italy,’ said Madge with a shrug. ‘After all, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to go to Italy, is there?’

  Once again Flappy put her head on one side and smiled patiently at Madge, whose bohemian clothes and unkempt grey hair more typically drew her sympathy. ‘My dear, if it were anyone else we wouldn’t be having this conversation, now would we? Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to go to Italy, or with simply going to Italy, I’ve been many times and it’s a paese incantevole, but this is Gracie we’re talking about. Gracie can’t possibly go on her own. She can’t possibly go. She’s not up to it. It’ll be a disaster. Gracie—’ And at that point the doorbell went.

  ‘Gracie!’ Madge gasped, and as Flappy got up to open the front door four pairs of eyes followed her eagerly.

  Also by Santa Montefiore

  Meet Me Under the Ombu Tree

  The Butterfly Box

  The Forget-Me-Not Sonata

  The Swallow and the Hummingbird

  The Last Voyage of the Valentina

  The Gypsy Madonna

  Sea of Lost Love

  The French Gardener

  The Italian Matchmaker

  The Affair

  The House by the Sea

  The Summer House

  Secrets of the Lighthouse

  A Mother’s Love

  The Beekeeper’s Daughter

  The Temptation of Gracie

  The Deverill Chronicles

  Songs of Love and War

  Daughters of Castle Deverill

  The Last Secret of the Deverills

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2019

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Santa Montefiore, 2019

  The right of Santa Montefiore to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4711-6962-5

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4711-6963-2

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-6964-9

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset in Bembo by M Rules

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY