‘Well I don’t know about that,’ said her friend. ‘But Oliver saw him in The American Bar at the Savoy on Tuesday night with a girl half his age on his lap, acting like he didn’t have a care in the world.’
‘Yes, well, he doesn’t does he?’ a third woman piped up. ‘He’s got his lovely house, his lovely wife, his lovely life in London. Cat that got the cream, I should say.’
‘Is Oliver sure it was him?’ the first mother asked.
They all laughed at that. ‘You can hardly mistake him. He’s so bloody good looking.’
‘Do you think so?’ The first mother wrinkled her nose. ‘I’ve only met him once but he gives me the creeps. Anyway, what was your husband doing at The Savoy on a Tuesday evening, that’s what I’d like to know? Oliver might have made the whole thing up to cover his own tracks!’
‘Yeah, right. Somehow I don’t think my Ollie has quite the pulling power of Brett Cranley.’
The mothers’ conversation moved on. Behind them, Angela Cranley stood rooted to the spot. She felt dizzy all of a sudden. The sounds of birdsong and chattering voices and the school bell ringing all merged into one muffled dirge that grew louder and louder until she found herself clutching her head. Spots swam before her eyes.
‘Are you all right?’
Someone was touching her arm. Angela turned to look at them but could see nothing but blackness. She felt herself falling, sinking. Then nothing.
‘Mrs Cranley. Mrs Cranley, can you hear me?’
Angela opened her eyes. Max Bingley, Logan’s headmaster, was standing over her. He had one hand on her forehead and the other on her wrist, apparently taking her pulse. When he saw her look up at him he smiled reassuringly.
‘Thank goodness. You had us all worried there for a moment. Mrs Graham, would you fetch Mrs Cranley a large glass of water?’
While the school secretary scuttled off, Angela took in her surroundings. She was in the headmaster’s study, stretched out on the sofa. Copies of the latest OFSTED report lay neatly stacked on the coffee table, and the walls were covered from floor to ceiling with bookshelves. Bingley had an eclectic collection, everything from teaching manuals and curriculum guidelines to Victorian novels and books on travel and adventure.
‘You’re a reader,’ Angela croaked.
‘I should hope so, in my job,’ Max Bingley said amiably. ‘I think you must have had a touch of sunstroke out in the playground. How do you feel?’
‘Embarrassed,’ said Angela. ‘I can’t believe I fainted.’
Painfully, the mothers’ conversation came back to her. It doesn’t mean anything, she told herself angrily. It’s just gossip. A man in Brett’s position gets that sort of crap all the time.
The secretary returned with the water and Max handed it to Angela, propping her up with cushions.
‘Nothing to be embarrassed about,’ he said kindly. ‘Its ridiculously hot out there. I suspect you got a bit dehydrated, that’s all.’
In fact, Max knew what had happened. After Angela passed out, one of the mothers admitted they’d been talking about Brett.
‘We had no idea she was there. None of us would have said a word otherwise.’
‘And you’re sure she overheard you?’ Max asked.
‘I’m not sure, no. But she keeled over right afterwards, so I’d say it’s a fairly safe bet. We all feel dreadful.’
Max loathed gossip, but unfortunately it was the very lifeblood of almost all schools, and St Hilda’s was no exception. In any case, the whispers about Brett Cranley could be heard well beyond the school gates. Everybody in the village knew that Furlings’ new owner was an inveterate womanizer, and that the Cranleys had moved here at least in part to escape an impending sexual scandal back in Oz.
Max Bingley for one couldn’t understand it. Angela Cranley was a beautiful woman, and not just on the outside. There was something luminous about her, a glow that could only come from a truly kind spirit within. If Max were married to a woman like Angela, he wouldn’t dream of playing the field. Then again, he suspected that he and Brett Cranley had very little indeed in common, in this area or any other. There was a reason that Max was headmaster of a tiny village primary school and Brett was an international real-estate mogul, a reason that went far deeper than their respective sexual mores.
‘Where’s Logan?’ Angela asked. She didn’t know why but she suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to get out of this room, away from Max Bingley’s kindness and sympathy.
‘Bertie Shaw’s mother Harriet took her home. She’s fine.’
Bertie Shaw, aka Naughty Bertie, was a great friend of Logan’s.
‘She’s going to have tea with Bertie and Harriet will drop her off at Furlings later. Or she can stay the night there, whatever you prefer. Have you got her number?’
Angela nodded weakly. Logan was bound to want to stay the night, which was fine with her. It was about time her daughter had a night off from perching at her bedroom window clutching binoculars, hoping to catch a glimpse of Gabe Baxter. Plus it would also be easier to talk to Brett with Logie out of the house … if she wanted to talk to Brett. Right now she wasn’t sure. It was so much easier, so much safer and less troubling to believe that what she’d overheard this afternoon was idle gossip. To dismiss it, refuse to allow it into their lives.
‘I gave Dr Grylls a call.’ Max Bingley’s voice brought her back to reality. ‘Once he’s taken a look at you I can run you home, if you like.’
‘Oh, no. God no, please. I don’t need a doctor.’ Finishing her water, Angela sat up straight, then gingerly got to her feet. ‘I’m completely fine.’
Max Bingley frowned. ‘I think you should see someone, Mrs Cranley.’
‘Angela, please. And I assure you there’s no need. Please,’ she turned to Max’s secretary, ‘ask Dr Grylls not to come.’
Mrs Graham looked to Max for approval. He nodded, although his expression made it plain he was still concerned.
‘I don’t need a lift home either,’ said Angela hurriedly. ‘I appreciate the offer, but I’m perfectly capable of walking. Despite appearances, I assure you I’m not some pathetic, feeble damsel in distress.’
She laughed, but Max Bingley answered seriously.
‘I never for a moment thought of you as either feeble or pathetic,’ he said. ‘Far from it.’
There was something terribly intense about him. When he focused his attention on you, it was like sunlight burning through a magnifying glass. Angela felt as if she might burst into flames at any moment.
‘However, I’m afraid I do absolutely insist on driving you home.’
Max Bingley said this in a tone that made it clear he would brook no argument. Tired suddenly, Angela acquiesced.
Max drove a very old Land Rover, the back seat of which was piled high with books, papers and classical music CD cases. The CDs themselves were strewn liberally on the front passenger seat. Scooping them up, apparently unashamed of the mess, he chucked them into the glove compartment so that Angela could sit down.
‘They’ll get scratched, you know,’ she warned him.
‘I know,’ said Max, pulling out of the school and heading along the green in the direction of Furlings. ‘I’m awful about putting them back in their cases. But I like having them to hand. CDs are my one extravagance. I love music.’
‘So do I,’ said Angela. She found herself telling him about Jason’s talent as a pianist. How she’d always encouraged him, but Brett disapproved.
‘That’s a shame,’ said Max. He’d yet to meet Brett Cranley in the flesh, but he was finding it harder and harder not to dislike the man. ‘What about Logan? Is she musical too?’
Angela laughed. ‘Unfortunately not. She’s tone-deaf like her father.’
‘She’s a sweet little thing,’ said Max. ‘Seems to have settled in really well.’ Angela could hear in his voice that he had a genuine love of children. It made her like him even more.
‘She’s a handful. She’s growing up so fast,’ Angela
sighed, thinking about the sheet of signatures in Brett’s drawer.
‘Oh, they’re all a handful,’ Max grinned. ‘Some of them just wait a little longer than others to let it show, that’s all.’
‘Do you have children?’
They’d arrived at Furlings just as she asked the question. Angela hadn’t even noticed them turning into the driveway before the car juddered to a halt.
‘Two daughters,’ he said. ‘They’re both grown now, of course.’
Angela longed to ask about their mother. She knew that Max lived alone, but she wasn’t sure if he were divorced or widowed. For some reason she was curious, but she didn’t want to be rude or to overstep the boundaries.
‘Well. Thank you. For the lift and … everything.’ She opened the passenger door. ‘Sorry again for all the drama.’
‘Not at all.’ Max smiled, but it was a brisk, distant smile, the smile that a headmaster would usually employ when addressing a parent of one of his pupils. The fleeting intimacy Angela had felt hovering between them on the short drive was gone now. Although perhaps intimacy wasn’t the right word? It was more a sort of paternal affection. Angela realized with a pang that she missed her own father. She would call him tonight. Hearing his voice, even from thousands of miles away, always made her feel safe.
Standing outside the front door of Furlings, she watched Max Bingley drive away.
Then she turned and went inside, smothering her doubts and fears like someone throwing a wet blanket over a fire.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘Through Him, With Him, In Him. In the Unity of the Holy Spirit, One God, for ever and ever.’
Reverend Slaughter enjoyed the sound of his own voice as it resonated throughout the packed church. Few things pleased him so much as seeing St Hilda’s full to the rafters. Clearly his Fittlescombe flock had been as eager to hear his sermon on Our Lord’s passion and its relevance today as he was to deliver it. No one ever gave sermons on the passion outside of Easter week. Reverend Slaughter was convinced it was the way that he ‘changed things up’ and kept his parishioners guessing that was tempting them back to Sunday services in ever-increasing numbers.
It hadn’t occurred to him that it might be the soap opera being played out in the front three pews that had actually dragged seo many of the reluctant faithful from their beds. The war over Furlings was the most interesting thing to have happened in Fittlescombe in many a long moon, not least because both factions were so glamorous and attractive. Up till now, the key battlefields had been the school, the pub and the village shop, where Tatiana Flint-Hamilton had been relentlessly campaigning. But, perhaps sensing he was losing ground, Brett Cranley had decided belatedly to make his presence felt in the village. Last week Brett had attended church for the first time and had ostentatiously led his wife and children to the front left-hand pew, a bench that for three hundred years had been the exclusive preserve of the Flint-Hamilton family.
Naturally this had instigated a frenzied round of gossip in the village. Once news reached Tati, suitably embellished (by the time Tati heard the story, Brett had been ‘strutting like a rooster, as if he owned the place’) it was only a matter of time before she would show up in person to defend her birthright.
It was all wildly diverting. From the moment the first bells had begun pealing for the ten o’clock service, at nine forty-five that morning, it had been standing room only in St Hilda’s Parish Church.
Max Bingley, who had somehow managed to rise above the drama and was out of the ‘Pew-gate’ loop, sat in his usual spot in a pew about halfway down the nave. He’d arrived early to light a candle for his wife, as he always did on Sunday mornings, and exchanged a few kind words with Angela Cranley, until her husband appeared and hurried her away. Max couldn’t be sure, but he got the sense that Mr Cranley didn’t like his wife talking to other men, even if those men were years older and the headmaster of her child’s school. It was clearly one rule for the goose and another for the gander in the Cranley marriage.
He wondered why Angela Cranley put up with it. Like one of those kidnap victims who fall in love with their captor. Then again, Max was old enough to understand that one could never really know anything about another person’s marriage. There were those who’d thought that he and Susie weren’t right for each other. How very, very wrong those people had been. Max still missed his wife every day, even if the sharp agony of eighteen months ago had dulled now to a slow and steady ache.
‘The Lord be with you.’
‘And also with you.’
Five rows back from where Max Bingley was sitting, Dylan Pritchard Jones said a silent prayer that the Lord might do something about his hangover. Dylan’s wife Maisie was away visiting her parents, which had left him free to spend a leisurely Saturday evening at The Fox last night. He didn’t remember having drunk so very much. Then again, he didn’t remember anything at all after about ten o’clock, when Chris Edwards, the local bobby, had suggested a round of ‘I have never’. The next thing Dylan knew he was waking up fully dressed in his marital bed at five o’clock this morning with a sandpaper-dry mouth, a stomach that churned and curdled like a vat of cottage cheese and a headache that felt as if it might at any moment burst through his skull and run around the room shrieking like some mad leprechaun. Four Alka-Seltzers, a hot shower and a fried breakfast later, he’d felt well enough to put on a clean shirt and stagger to church. He’d only come to support Tatiana, but so far she’d failed to show up, to the entire congregation’s immense disappointment.
Almost the entire congregation. Logan Cranley, wedged between her father and brother in the disputed front pew, couldn’t have cared less about Tatiana, so delirious was she with happiness that Gabe Baxter had decided to come to church this week. Logan had to turn around and crane her neck to get a good look at him, which was annoying. And of course there was his wife, looking pretty but (in Logan’s opinion) far too old for him, selfishly imposing herself on Logan’s fantasy by sitting next to him and occasionally whispering things in his ear that made Gabe smile. Still, if she pretended that Laura Baxter wasn’t there, Logan found it was easy enough to lose herself in Gabe’s mesmerizing blue eyes and to imagine his strong arms beneath his Thomas Pink shirt wrapped tightly around her. Thank God she’d vetoed that hideous, babyish dress Mummy had picked out for her and gone for jeans and her new blue top with sequins from Zara. That looked far more teenager-ish. Obviously she was too young for Gabe today. But if she wanted him to notice her in a few years, she needed to plant the seeds of romance now. She was hardly likely to do that in a smocked number with pink bows that made her look about six.
Four rows back, on the other side of the aisle, Laura whispered in Gabe’s ear. ‘I think you’ve got a fan in the Cranley pew. And I don’t mean your buddy Brett.’
It had been a tough few weeks in the Baxter household. Gabe had ignored Laura’s wishes and bought the land from Brett Cranley, raising the money through a combination of a second mortgage on their house plus a hefty bank loan. Laura, whose parents had lost their own home back in the early Nineties and had almost lost their marriage as a result, was horrified by the scale of their debts, and even more horrified by Gabriel’s devil-may-care attitude to their finances. They’d had some bitter, horrible rows. But last night they’d made love again for the first time since the sale went through. Laura was trying hard to put both her fear and resentment behind her.
Looking up, Gabe saw Logan staring and winked, prompting a blush that could have earned a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.
‘She’s a sweet kid,’ he whispered back to Laura, squeezing her possessively around the waist. Gabe had also felt miserable and unglued after all the fighting and was deeply relieved to be back in Laura’s good books.
‘She is,’ said Laura. ‘You shouldn’t encourage her though.’
Gabe grinned. ‘I can’t help it if all females find me irresistible.’
The congregation stood up, preparing to shuffle up to the fr
ont for communion. Dylan Pritchard Jones was just thinking that this might be as good a moment as any to slip away unnoticed – Tatiana had clearly thought better of a confrontation with Brett Cranley at the Sunday service, which was no bad thing – when the rear doors of the church swung open.
‘Bloody hell,’ Will Nutley whispered to Santiago de la Cruz, who’d been dragged to church by his fiancée Penny. ‘Talk about an entrance!’
Dylan almost didn’t recognize Tatiana. With her long hair swept up elegantly beneath a veiled, pillbox hat, and her to-die-for figure modestly encased in a 1930s-style skirt suit, exquisitely cut in ultra-fine lightweight wool, Tatiana looked like a vision from another time. Serene, mature, effortlessly classy, radiating that unique confidence and entitlement that only the true upper classes seemed to possess. Every head swivelled to gawp as she glided up the central aisle towards the altar, meekly bowing her head in front of Reverend Slaughter as she took the first host.
‘The body of Christ,’ the vicar intoned pompously, handing the wafer to Tatiana.
‘Amen.’
A line of parishioners had formed behind Tati as she made her stately way to the front of the church. Turning around she paused, giving all of them a chance to get a good look at her chilly composure, before turning sharp right into the first pew and sitting down right next to Logan Cranley.
Oh my God, Dylan Pritchard Jones winced. She’s sitting right next to them! The entire congregation held its collective breath.
‘Miss F-H!’ said Logan in an awestruck voice, loud enough for the entire church to hear. She knew Tatiana from school and the two of them had always got along well. ‘I didn’t know you came to church. You look so pretty!’
‘Thank you, Logan,’ Tati smiled. ‘You look very pretty too. I love your top.’
Logan grinned like the Cheshire cat. At the other end of the pew, Brett Cranley looked as if someone had just pissed in his champagne. Nostrils flared, lips drawn into a tight line of loathing, he seemed unprepared and had clearly been caught off guard by Tatiana’s bold assertion of her ancestral rights.
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