Angela looked doubtful.
‘Oh, come on Mum, pleeeease.’ Logan twirled around, stroking the fabric of the dress lovingly as it clung to her skinny, almost-twelve-year-old figure. ‘You have to admit it looks good.’
It did look good. That was the problem. That and the fact that Angela knew for a fact its intended audience was Gabriel Baxter. A year on, Logan’s crush on their handsome, married, thirty-something neighbour showed no signs of abating. All the boys at St Hilda’s fancied Logan, as did a number of their elder brothers from the village. Still not yet twelve, her height and confidence made her seem older than her years. Brett seemed oblivious to the dangers. In his eyes Logan was still completely a little girl. He couldn’t imagine anyone seeing her differently. But Angela fretted constantly, every time an adult male so much as said hello to her daughter.
Despite this she’d given in on the Topshop dress, worn down by days of constant pleading. She hadn’t said anything to Brett, and prayed that Logan was right and that he’d be too distracted to notice.
Climbing down the ladder, she took both Logan’s hands, pulling her up to her feet.
‘Just please make sure you wear the low heels, not those ridiculous spiky things. And if I see you spending the whole evening following Gabe and Laura around like a shadow, I’m going to put you to work in the kitchen.’
‘I won’t,’ said Logan breezily. ‘I never do.’
Just then, Angela’s phone rang. It was Brett, calling with the details of his flight.
For the first time in a long time, Angela realized that it wasn’t only Logan who missed Brett. She missed him too. This weekend would be all about family. Logan was thriving, Jason was happier than ever. Perhaps the pain and drama of the past few years could now finally be put behind them?
Tatiana stood up and shook hands with the three suited men across the table.
‘Thank you all for your time,’ she smiled warmly. ‘I’ll see myself out.’
In the grand eighteenth-floor lobby at Angel Court, in the heart of the City, it was all she could do not to hug herself and jump for joy as she waited for the lift. She was glad she’d restrained herself, however, when one of the suited men followed her out and tapped her on the shoulder.
‘Marcus.’ She jumped. ‘You surprised me.’
Marcus King was only thirty-nine, but he was the most senior of Tatiana’s trustees. A handsome Oxford graduate and former rowing star, Marcus was a practical and serious man, as steady in his private life as he was in his job. Happily married with three children, he was one of the rare heterosexual males able to look on Tatiana Flint-Hamilton solely as a client.
‘I want to be completely clear with you, Tatiana,’ he said, in his usual sober tone. ‘While we support this investment, there are risks involved. Significant risks.’
‘I understand that.’ Tati nodded gravely.
‘Forty per cent loan to value is our absolute limit,’ Marcus went on. ‘That means you need to find considerable seed capital on your own. We won’t release funds without it.’
‘I understand that too,’ said Tatiana. ‘And I appreciate the trust’s support.’
‘If you don’t mind my asking,’ Marcus pressed her. ‘How do you intend to find the money? Six million dollars is a very considerable sum.’
‘Marcus.’ Tatiana smiled sweetly, stepping into the elevator. ‘I never mind you asking.’
The doors wheeshed closed behind her.
Marcus King shook his head. She’s grown up immeasurably in the last year, he thought. The proposal she’d presented to him and his colleagues today had been impressive. Well researched, balanced, compelling. But for all her confidence and newfound maturity, Marcus wondered whether she fully understood the risks.
If she pulled it off, she could potentially make a fortune.
If she didn’t, she could lose a fortune, one that her father had spent a lifetime struggling to preserve.
Yet there was something in Tatiana’s eyes that seemed to suggest that to her, this was all a game.
With a lingering feeling of unease, Marcus King returned to his desk.
Brett Cranley sat bolt upright in his first-class seat as the British Airways flight roared upwards, dwarfing the New York skyline before disappearing above a blanket of cloud.
Brett could have afforded a private plane. Most of his peers in the real-estate business had one, once their net worth got above a certain level, but it had always seemed like a waste of money to Brett. At least his yacht, the Lady A, paid for itself through expensive charters when he wasn’t using it. Besides, yachts were built for pleasure. Jets, in Brett’s view anyway, were for business, for getting quickly from A to B, and as a business proposition, they sucked, burning through money faster than a Russian hooker in Cartier. There was also a faint whiff of insecurity about the owning of a private plane – the very rich man’s version of the shiny red Ferrari. Jets were for short men who wanted to be noticed by beautiful women. Brett Cranley was a big man who beautiful women noticed anyway.
Not that they always gave him what he wanted. As they reached cruising altitude, Brett sipped on his champagne, but it tasted sour. He ought to be happy, but he was not. Eight months after their fiery, passionate encounter at his London flat, Tatiana Flint-Hamilton still had the power to dampen his mood. She took the sweetness out of his successes and sharpened the sting of his failures, simply by existing. Brett resented her for exerting such an irrational power over him. For remaining important in his psyche when she ought to be supremely unimportant, just another girl he’d been to bed with. Deep down, however, he knew it wasn’t Tati who was the problem, but himself. Why couldn’t he let go?
It was hard to put his finger on it exactly, but ever since last summer in France, when Ange had walked in on him and Tricia in bed on the yacht, Brett’s personal life had slid off kilter. Angie had changed afterwards. She’d forgiven him, and stayed with him, like she always did. But something was different between them. It made Brett feel profoundly uneasy.
He loved Angela as much as he always had, maybe more. He’d felt genuinely guilty about the Tricia thing – a stupid, opportunistic fuck if ever there was one. And yet that day at the High Court, when he saw Tatiana again, there had been a desperation about his need for his young ‘cousin’ that he wouldn’t have felt six months earlier. Back then, Angela’s blanket acceptance of his infidelities, of all his frailties and weaknesses, had given him the confidence to go forth and conquer, be it in business or in bed. Back then, he was pretty sure, he could have slept with Tati, enjoyed it and moved on, as he had with countless other beautiful young women before her. But now, unsure of Angela for the first time in his life, he’d come to Tatiana in a position of weakness, of need. Brett Cranley hated himself for that. He was sure it was the reason that Tatiana had spurned him afterwards. Ever since, a part of him had been feeling like Samson after his hair was cut. Preposterously, he found himself angry at Angela about it, as if she were somehow responsible for what had happened. He’d barked at Ange and bickered with her more in the last eight months than at any time during their marriage. Brett hated himself for that, too.
And now it was Jason’s birthday party, and the two women would be under the same roof, his roof, a prospect that made him feel guilty, anxious and enraged all at the same time, not least because he was powerless to stop it. Worse still, Tati was rumoured to be debuting her boyfriend at the party, a sure sign that things were becoming more serious between the two of them.
Feeling like a schoolboy guiltily thumbing through Playboy beneath his bedcovers, Brett turned on his iPad and opened the file on Marco Gianotti. There was Tatiana’s boyfriend, smiling professionally in his official Goldman headshot. Other pictures from Facebook showed him playing beach volleyball in Miami, or laughing with friends around the lunch table in Forte dei Marmi. No doubt about it, Marco was a great-looking kid. Twenty years younger than Brett (and less than half his net worth, but Brett sensed correctly that Tatiana Flint-Hamilto
n couldn’t give a shit about that), he was also both well born and well connected. Although raised and educated in America, Marco’s mother’s family had been Italian aristocrats. Brett felt his chest tighten with envy and dislike. He closed the file. Everything he had, he’d worked for. Marco Gianotti, on the other hand, had been gifted his advantages on a solid gold platter. Just like Tatiana.
Spoiled brats, the pair of them.
‘Do you know what you’d like for supper this evening, sir?’ A pretty stewardess wearing far too much make-up appeared at Brett’s side. Leaning over him, menu card in hand, she afforded him an excellent view of her ample cleavage, her large, milky-white breasts, pressed together beneath her blouse like two, perfectly round scoops of vanilla ice cream. In his younger days, Brett would have got the girl’s number and bedded her as soon as they landed, or maybe even before. Air stewardesses had some wonderfully uninhibited habits, in Brett’s experience – yet another good reason not to fly private. But tonight he had zero appetite, either for the girl or the food.
‘I’m not eating,’ he said curtly. ‘I’ll go straight to sleep. Please don’t disturb me.’
‘Of course, sir. Would you like to be woken for breakfast?’
An image of the breakfast awaiting him at Furlings popped into Brett’s mind. Angela, pretty and smiling in her apron with the cherries on it, pouring fresh orange juice; Logan wolfing down some ghastly sugary cereal, regaling him about what had happened at school since he left; Jason, happier than he had been in years, evidently, reading the papers contentedly by the Aga.
I have so much to be grateful for, thought Brett. Life doesn’t get any better than this.
Why can’t I enjoy it?
He looked at the stewardess. ‘No, thank you. I’ll sleep till we land.’
In fact, he barely slept at all. The flight was bumpy, a fitting backdrop for Brett’s turbulent emotions and the torrent of thoughts and fears racing through his head. Angela had called in him in high excitement earlier that day, overflowing with happiness about Jason.
‘He was playing the piano for about an hour after work, and then again after dinner. I happened to catch a glimpse when he got off the stool to go up to bed, and the look on his face, Brett! I wish you’d been here. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so happy.’
‘That’s great,’ said Brett, trying to sound as if he meant it. He was pleased that the depression that had dogged their son throughout his teens seemed to be lifting. But it was almost as if the dark cloud had transferred itself from son to father. Now it was Brett who seemed incapable of any positive emotion.
‘His eyes were sort of half closed,’ Angela went on. ‘I can’t describe it exactly, but he looked dreamy and peaceful and … content. I think he might be in love.’
‘I doubt it,’ said Brett. ‘Love doesn’t make you content. It makes you anxious and miserable.’
‘Thanks a lot!’ Angela laughed, trying to make light of this comment, but Brett could hear the sadness in her voice. It wasn’t just his own happiness he was ruining with his black moods. It was Angie’s too.
I’m bringing her down.
As ridiculous as it sounded, he almost felt as if Tatiana Flint-Hamilton had put some sort of curse on him, in revenge for him ‘stealing’ her inheritance. As if he were under a spell that meant he would never find happiness under Furlings’ roof.
Finally succumbing to sleep as they prepared for landing, Brett had wild, vivid dreams of witches and moorland. Angela was old and wizened, leaning over a cauldron next to him, while Tatiana danced naked around them, a cold wind blowing through her long, streaming hair. In the background, Jason was playing the piano. Beautifully. But it was a melody that made Brett cry, a song he hadn’t heard since childhood, since before his mother died.
‘Welcome to Heathrow.’
The steward’s voice woke him with a start. Looking down, he saw the front of his shirt was wet with tears.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The night of Jason Cranley’s twenty-first birthday party finally arrived, and everyone agreed that Furlings had never looked more beautiful. In its last few years under Rory Flint-Hamilton’s care, the old man’s ill-health had meant that the house had been allowed to fray a little at the edges. Nothing dire or drastic. Peeling paint around a window here, crumbling brickwork there, the wisteria that snaked over half the façade allowed to explode unchecked, so that its roots worked their way into the stone, causing deep cracks, like lines in the mud of a dried-out river bed, or wrinkles in the face of a very grand, very old woman who had once been a great beauty.
Over the last year, however, Angela Cranley had begun to change all that, painstakingly starting to restore Furlings to its former glory with a combination of love, patience and good taste, all washed down with limitless money. She’d stuck to her guns and made sure that the theme for this evening was very much ‘Birthday Party’. As well as the contested balloons, found everywhere in cheerful clusters of yellow, red, blue and green, and emblazoned with kitsch gold sparkly number 21s, she’d ordered Jason an enormous chocolate cake in the shape of a grand piano, and had tablecloths made up out of photographs from Jason’s babyhood and childhood years, printed against a background of the Australian flag. But despite these relaxed, youthful touches, the house itself radiated understated elegance and good taste, as every grand old English estate ought to. A wonderful smell of roses and gardenias, combined with beeswax wood polish, filled the grand state rooms. Bathrooms were lit by Jo Malone candles in mandarin or lime. Priceless antique rugs and solid, Jacobean English furniture shared space with modern sculptures and artwork, but it was a testament to Angela’s skill with interiors that the juxtaposition never felt forced or awkward. Similarly, none of the guests seemed put off by the fact that, having approached the house through a formal lavender walk, accompanied by a violin quartet playing Handel, they walked into a brightly lit hallway throbbing to the beat of pop music.
The guest list was huge and eclectic, but somehow on the night it worked, with Jason’s village friends and local schoolteachers rubbing shoulders happily with Brett’s property-tycoon cronies and a decent smattering of celebrities, many with second homes in the idyllic Swell Valley. The age range was equally broad, with at least two ladies from the Fittlescombe Conservative Association topping the hundred mark, and Logan’s posse of St Hilda’s Primary School mates starting at just seven.
Max Bingley was one of the first to arrive, arm in arm with his new love, Stella Goye. In her late forties, with a sleek bob of dark hair that Max always thought made her look rather French, and a face that was attractive and intelligent rather than pretty (long nose, high cheekbones, small, expressive mouth and merry green eyes, deeply wrinkled from years of smiling), Stella had gone for a floaty, vintage look tonight. Privately, Max wasn’t a fan of the gypsy look. (His daughters informed him it was known as ‘boho’ these days, but to Max Stella’s tasselled patchwork dress and jangly gold bangles made her look as if she lived in a caravan and/or read tarot cards for a living.) Her graciousness and warmth more than made up for any fashion-related shortcomings, however, and Max felt proud introducing her to Angela Cranley.
‘I’ve heard such a lot about you,’ Angela said kindly as they shook hands. ‘We’re so glad you could make it.’
In a floor-length Calvin Klein shift dress in slate grey, low cut at the back, and no jewellery other than a plain diamond cross necklace, Angela looked stunning, as pared down and chic as Stella was colourful and eccentric. Max saw Angela regularly at school and in the village, once a week at least, but rarely remembered her looking quite as radiant as she did tonight. Indeed, the last time she’d seemed so completely happy was in the garden of The George Inn at Alfriston. They had never spoken about that day since, or about Angela’s mystery Frenchman. True to his word, Max had told nobody, not even Stella, about running into her. In some unspoken way, he felt that his chance encounter with Angela Cranley that afternoon had deepened their friendship. It was a moment h
e wanted to keep for himself – rare and, in its own way, quite perfect.
Angela certainly appeared genuinely pleased to see him here tonight. As for Max, he was always happy to see Angela. She was one of those women, like Stella, who could light up a room simply by walking into it.
‘Your house is breathtaking,’ Stella was saying.
‘Thanks. It might be more breathtaking if Gringo hadn’t chewed up half the upholstery,’ Angela joked. ‘You don’t want to buy a very poorly trained basset hound, do you?’
‘Not really,’ laughed Stella. ‘Max said your son still lives at home. I must say, now that I’ve seen the place, I don’t blame him. He’s a lucky young man.’
‘In some ways he is,’ Angela agreed. ‘He hasn’t always felt lucky. But I think – I hope – he does tonight.’
‘When I was twenty-one, my dad took me to the pictures and bought me a gin and tonic in the pub and my mum baked rock cakes with little silver keys on top made from sugar,’ said Stella. ‘I thought that was the height of sophistication.’
Angela smiled. She’s nice, she thought. Funny and genuine. No wonder Max looks so happy. She felt a tiny, unworthy stab of envy, but stifled it. After all, she was happy too, wasn’t she?
Brett had got home yesterday morning from New York and was clearly making a real effort to shake off his bad mood and get back into her good books. Business had gone well out there evidently. He’d arrived home from the airport with an enormous duty-free gift bag for Angela, as well as a hand-tied bouquet of flowers that he’d actually stopped off to buy from the flower shop on Brockhurst High Street. Logan had launched herself into his arms the moment he got through the door, claiming her father for herself as she always did. But Brett had made a point of putting her down and coming over to kiss his wife.
‘I missed you, Ange,’ he whispered in her ear, reaching down and grabbing her hand tightly for emphasis.
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