by Freya North
‘Will I have to fill in a questionnaire?’ he asked her.
‘No – but after the lie-detector test, she’ll have you jump through a fair few hoops,’ Stella told him. ‘Oh – and she’ll probably threaten you, too.’
‘Protecting her pal?’
Stella nodded and, just for a moment, she stopped chewing and stared at something way beyond the melee of peas remaining on her plate.
Not yet, thought Xander. Not here. Not the time.
She glanced up at him and their eyes locked.
‘Jo will ask you outright if you have any addictions,’ Stella said, quietly.
He nodded at her. ‘And I’ll be able to tell her – no. Apart from running, I suppose.’ Stella nodded and Xander tipped his head to one side and nodded back. He thought to himself, Christ – poor girl. And then he reminded himself, not here – not now.
It was practically dark outside now, the candle on the table casting caramel hues over his face – clean-shaven, the dip between cheekbones and jawline just perfect for her to run the backs of her fingers over. Her lips parted at the thought of how his skin would feel, a sudden recall of the taste of him, the sensation sending a bolt of desire so strong she looked away, as if lust was written all over her face.
‘Are you a pudding type of girl?’ he asked her, half hoping she’d say no so he could just get her home to his.
‘I am,’ she said, wondering for a moment whether it was a deal-breaker or a trick question.
‘That’s refreshing,’ he said. Even more so, he thought, when she scoffed the lot without offering him a mouthful and then helped herself to a spoonful of his baked Alaska.
When the bill came, Stella offered to go Dutch. ‘Don’t be daft,’ Xander said, ‘it’s a date. It’s my treat.’
‘Thank you,’ said Stella, feeling full and flush and pampered and just plain happy. A date. Nice to hear it out loud.
Xander chatted briefly to the landlord and to one of the diners, exchanging pleasantries with a couple of others on their way out; introducing Stella to them all. Please don’t let it be late, Stella said to herself as they left. She didn’t wear a watch, she never had. She’d always been most adept at estimating the time – before the advent of mobile phones. Nowadays she was useless, but she really didn’t want to check her phone, she didn’t want to see all the larky missives from Jo, she didn’t want to have to minimize her evening into abbreviated sentences. Fundamentally, though, she simply didn’t want to see what the real time was. But it was dark. Cool, now. Very quiet, out in the village. She and Xander didn’t speak, as if the air between them was loaded with messages so soft and scrambled that silence was essential to decipher them. When they turned into Tramfield Lane, it was as if a notch on the night sky had been turned and the lane was velvety black and appeared to have a soft soundproofing of its own. And then Xander took her hand. And a surge of adrenalin stormed through her as she knitted her fingers against his and that’s how they walked back to his cottage.
Inside, door shut on the outside world, they stood for just a moment before grabbing at each other, ravenous. As soundless as their first kisses had been at the weekend, now the room reverberated with them. Little gasps from Stella, a throatiness from Xander, their breathing audible and hastened, furniture knocked against, items clattering to the floor.
‘Jesus Christ you taste good,’ Xander whispered against Stella’s lips before sucking them gently and slipping his tongue into her mouth. They stumbled, still locked in embrace, over his uneven flagstones to fall upon his sofa where their kisses came more slowly as they broke away now and then just to look at each other; smile, close eyes and open them again, stroke hair and arms and faces. Their legs were entwined and as they kissed, Stella instinctively rocked her hips against his thigh, sensing the bulge in his trousers, delighting in the charge it sent down to her groin. His hands, simultaneously gentle yet eager, burrowing up under her top, over her bra and at last to her bare skin.
When had anyone last felt her breasts? It would have been Charlie, of course, but his style was to maul them perfunctorily in a crude preamble to sex. Xander, it seemed, just wanted to touch and discover. And see her for his own eyes. He pulled her top over her head and slipped her bra straps down. And then he broke into a big open grin, smiling at her breasts as if they were the best sight in the world which far exceeded his imaginings.
‘Aren’t you gorgeous,’ he said and she wasn’t sure whether it was to her, or to them. With her fingers enmeshed in his hair she guided his face to them. God she was on fire, she was floating, sinking. With his tongue at her nipple, the graze of his teeth; with his hand travelling along her legs and adeptly in between them, Stella felt herself melt into orgasm and her head emptied as her body filled with feeling.
Xander kissed and kissed her face. Loving it that her eyes were closed yet willing them to open. And when they did, he saw how she was woozy with it all.
‘Sorry – I –’ she began.
‘Sorry?’ He looked at her as if she was mad. Actually, he looked triumphant. ‘For what?’ He was propped up on his arm, brushing her hair from her face. And then she winked and she said, what about you, boyo! And he said, you dirty cow and they laughed but they shifted around so that he was on his back, his erection visibly mapped out behind his trousers. She traced it coyly with her fingers, fiddled with his belt and his flies, suddenly desperate to see him. As his trousers were pushed down and his boxers were pulled away, Stella thought to herself, that’s a really nice-looking cock. She floated her fingertips along the length, feathered her touch over his balls, judged by his shallow breathing, his eyes half closed but still boring into hers, that he liked what she was doing.
‘I’m fit to burst,’ he whispered, his hand at her breast again. Eyes locked onto his, gently and deftly she pulled his orgasm in just a few minutes. Then, with her hand still around him, feeling the pulse and leap of his cock ebb away, she snuggled down next to him. Both of them sated, squished onto the sofa, tangled against each other, back in the present marvelling at what had just happened.
‘Fuck!’ he said quietly. Then he laughed. ‘Fuck?’ he said.
‘Yes, please,’ said Stella, as if he’d just suggested a cup of tea. ‘Soon?’
She was in his arms. He kissed the top of her head. ‘When can you arrange it?’
And Stella thought, oh god.
In Xander’s cottage, time had done something strange, enabling her to be purely on her own with Xander. Not mum to Will, not daughter to Sandie who was currently sitting in Stella’s front room. Not best friend to Jo, who’d gone to bed happily reading much into the fact that Stella hadn’t replied to a single text. Stella had just been herself, thinking only of her own needs, not worrying about anyone else – it was a strange and liberating new world to explore. But the bastard bloody clock on Xander’s DVD player goaded her: it’s after half eleven! It’s after half eleven! You won’t be home till gone midnight! It’s a school night! Your mum’s babysitting! Get up! Get a move on! You have to go – now!
‘Oh God, I have to go,’ she moaned, burying her face in his neck. ‘It’s late – my mum!’ She was soothed by his laughter, because over and above the sound of it was once again the feel of it, emanating from his chest just as she had felt it through her drunken haziness that night not so long ago. His hand was in her hair, teasing out tangles, weaving locks between his fingers.
‘Go,’ he said. ‘You need to go.’ They unfurled from each other and stood. Xander pulled his shirt over his head to wipe at his stomach, Stella twanged her bra back into place and rushed into her top. Bare chested, Xander showed her to the door. She ran her fingers over his collar bone, sweeping her hands lightly over his chest.
‘When?’ she said.
‘Soon as you can,’ he said.
‘Perhaps at the weekend?’
‘Drive safe.’
‘Did you have a lovely time, darling?’ asked her mum as if it were only half past nine, not gone midnight; as if
Stella had popped over to Jo’s and hadn’t taken her ballerina cardigan anyway and had gone out with her mascara a little smudged in the first place.
‘It was brilliant,’ Stella beamed. ‘Sorry I’m late. Sorry sorry sorry.’
Her mother brushed her apology away as if she was fussing over nothing. ‘Any time,’ she said to her daughter. ‘I mean it – any time.’
Goody! Stella sang to herself as she waved her mum off, closed the front door and took the stairs three at a time.
Will! she whispered. It was brill!
Chapter Twenty-Five
‘Saturday?’
Stella stole a private moment behind the gazebo at Longbridge to phone Xander, which was slightly daft on account of it being open latticework with the clematis yet to break fully into bloom.
‘Saturday,’ Xander mused.
‘Will’s going for a sleepover at Jo’s.’
‘I see.’
‘So I can come.’
‘Phnar phnar,’ said Xander and at the other end of the line, Stella giggled.
‘Or you could come to me, perhaps?’ said Stella.
‘For a sleepover?’
‘Yes,’ she said, tingling. ‘Yes – you can.’
Stella didn’t much like the people she was showing Longbridge to that afternoon. They were men in suits – a consortium – and they didn’t really care for her guided tour. They’d dispensed with her quite quickly, having brought maps and aerial photographs with them. It seemed, for them, the devil wasn’t in the details at all but in the potential for carving up the estate like a side of beef. They didn’t care for secret bookcases or soft-water taps, they weren’t bothered by fade-free wallpaper or a frayed piece of pipe that once carried messages from maid to chauffeur. They were, she decided, the type who’d stick two fingers up at the Prince Regent should he thrust his horse’s arse at them – but they didn’t take any notice of the painting anyway. It was when she heard them say the apple store could come down to extend the lawn for something they called Lot 3a, that she excused herself and took refuge behind the gazebo to phone Xander. Now she didn’t know whether she should go after them or wait for them to reappear – and she couldn’t work out if she was pleased Lydia wasn’t here or whether it would have been better had she been. Perhaps she’d have shooed them off the land. Or she might have sniffed out the ready cash which seeped from the fibres of their business suits like insidious air conditioning. Stella had already left a message for the Tompkins yesterday afternoon – why hadn’t they replied? The Hakshimis were sticking at eleven which had made Lydia and Douglas Hutton tetchy with Stella.
What was that?
Over there – just flitting out of sight behind the summer house at the edge of the pond? Was someone there? Stella thought she heard a peel of laughter – but it could well have been skylarks or something rusty moving in the stables courtyard.
No! There!
Stella stared. Who is that? It was a woman skipping across the lawn like a child. Stella frowned, peered hard after her. Was she seeing things? Who gambols around in full-length peasanty kaftans anywhere – let alone Longbridge? The person had darted out of sight again, off in the direction of the tennis court. Stella looked around her – no sight or sound of the consortium honchos. No Mrs Biggins bashing mats on the lower steps. No Lydia peering haughtily from upper windows like an eagle in an eyrie. No sound of the creak and wince of Art’s old wheelbarrow. No one around at all. Stella looked over her shoulder at Lord Freddie who was gazing intently in the very direction that the stranger had just headed.
‘Do you know something I don’t know?’ Stella asked him.
‘I know everything about this place,’ he seemed to reply.
Stella came out from behind the gazebo, leaving her clipboard and mobile phone on the seat within it. She crossed the lawns, calling out a friendly but insistent hullo? every few strides. Something broke the surface of the pond as she walked past and she glanced at the concentric circles but saw only a fat frog sitting on a lily pad; so still, so glossy, so perfect, he looked as if he was made of the same plastic as a garden gnome.
That was laughter.
But there was nobody on the tennis courts.
‘Hullo?’ Stella called. She could hear something from beyond the yew hedge, over in the little orchard with the short, wizened old apple trees rising up from the ground like gnarled claws. It was laughter, unmistakably. She went through the arch, hewn from the hedge, and then she simply stood and gawped. There, with gay abandon, a woman not much older than Stella was swinging on the old tyre swing. Her hair was long, hitting against her back like a thick bead curtain as she swung to and from. Her long dress was tie-dyed in every imaginable shade of blue – bursts of purple and explosions of indigo, blooms of lilac, spatters of sapphire, a sprinkling of aqua. She looked as though she’d been dipped in the clearest sea and the brightest sky. Barefoot. She was barefoot. And she was calling to Stella.
‘Heidi! Heidi Girl!’
Stella automatically raised a hand in a bewildered wave.
‘Come here, Heidi Girl!’
You look more like Heidi than me, thought Stella as, tentatively, she walked over. You with your twinkle toes and your peasanty frock.
‘Heidi Girl – hullo.’
‘Hullo,’ said Stella who could see, close up, that the woman’s hair was a mat of long golden dreadlocks varying in girth from snake skinny to great cords like those scooping away the curtains in Lydia’s bedroom. ‘I’m not Heidi,’ said Stella. ‘I’m Stella.’
Still the woman swung, quite vigorously, laughing – her head tipped back, legs extended, toes pointed, arms outstretched, body practically horizontal. Oh God – I know you’re in a tyre, but don’t let go. The woman soared back and forth like a benevolent angel. She let the tyre slow itself down and then, with a slither and a leap, she was standing on the grass next to Stella.
‘Heidi Girl!’ Her eyes danced. She was breathless.
‘No,’ said Stella. ‘Stella.’
‘I saw you!’ her voice was sing-song. ‘Behind the gazebo. Hiding. Hidey hidey girl!’
Stella thought, this woman is quite mad. But then she thought, who the Dickens is she?
‘Love this swing! Haven’t done that in so long.’ She looked Stella up and down, then came in close and whispered. ‘Used to hide, myself. Badly as you!’ Why wasn’t she speaking in full sentences? ‘Sneaked away to the greenhouse to smoke.’ She giggled and ducked down behind Stella’s shoulder as if someone had seen her. ‘Very silly place to hide! Thought no one knew where I was or what I was doing. Till one day my mother offered me a cigarette.’ She peered at Stella. She was standing very close, right up in Stella’s personal space but oddly, it didn’t feel as though she was encroaching. It felt to Stella as though she was in the presence of some life-size Longbridge sprite. Up close, she was older than Stella first thought – perhaps ten years older than Stella. Her skin was softly tanned, lines around her eyes from laughter and outdoors. Her eyebrows and the tips of her eyelashes were the colour of flax. In her nostril, a thin gold loop. ‘Stella!’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Stella. ‘But who are you?’
The woman tipped her head, as if surprised that Stella shouldn’t know, as if this place was hers and it was peculiar that Stella hadn’t come across her until now.
‘Verity,’ she said.
Not one single penny had dropped for Stella until then, because she would never have imagined that Lydia Fortescue’s daughter would look or sound or act anything like the woman beside her.
‘You’re Verity?’
‘Yes!’
‘Of Longbridge,’ Stella gesticulated in the air as if the estate might have disappeared.
‘Yes! Verity Fortescue!’ Her eyes were still glinting and flitting but her breathing was more even. ‘But I haven’t been Verity of Longbridge for a long, long time.’
‘You’re Lydia’s daughter?’
‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘Lydia’s daughter!’<
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‘The one who lives with the Welsh,’ said Stella. Suddenly, the woman backed a step away and appeared timid, as though Stella’s word had knocked her a little. After a moment, she nodded shyly before her beatific smile returned.
‘It’s so lovely to meet you,’ Stella said, with genuine warmth and not a little curiosity.
‘You too,’ said Verity. ‘Mother told me to look out for you. Told me not to scare you. Told me you are helping her to sell Longbridge.’
Stella nodded, wondering how Verity felt about it. Wondering too, when she’d arrived, how long she’d be here, what she was even doing here, and whether any of this would have any effect on anything else. Verity looked, to Stella, nothing like a Fortescue should – or was expected – to look. Instead, it was as if she’d walked barefoot all the way from the meadows of the first Woodstock festival, or had stepped off a Jimi Hendrix album cover, or had climbed through the bars of an Arlo Guthrie song and was totally unaware of the current year. Stella had an overriding urge to protect her from the navy suits and sharp talk of the consortium swaggering around Longbridge as though they owned it already.
‘There are people looking around today,’ Stella told Verity. ‘That’s why I’m here. They didn’t want me, though.’
‘Suity Sods!’ said Verity. Then she thought about it. ‘Not suited.’ She shook her head vigorously.
‘I know,’ Stella said. ‘But I had to show them around. They have money.’
Verity shrugged and nodded.
‘Do you mind?’ Stella asked tentatively. Verity tilted her head like a bird trying to locate a single seed. ‘About your home being sold?’
Verity thought about it, tipping her head one way then the other and when she smiled at Stella she changed from artless and childlike, to sage and worldly. She shook her head whilst regarding Stella benevolently. ‘Not a bit,’ she smiled. ‘Mother’s decision and the right one for her. Haven’t lived here for many many years – not my home. Lived With The Welsh – as Mother puts it – for longer than ever I lived here. That’s my true home. I’ll never leave.’
