Rumours

by Freya North

  She laughed. ‘It would take a lot more than that,’ she said and then did a theatrical shiver and nestled in close. ‘I have to go,’ she moaned, picking up his wrist to look at his watch, kissing his chest. ‘I really have to go.’

  ‘I really want you to stay,’ he said. His bed smelled of sex and the notion of sleeping alone that night seemed to cruelly contradict the togetherness they created.

  ‘I can’t. Not tonight.’

  ‘Next weekend?’

  ‘Maybe. Hopefully. I’ll try and arrange babysitting.’

  ‘If you can’t – you could bring Will, you know. I understand. I don’t mind – I have the futon.’

  ‘I think I’ll be craving grown-up time,’ said Stella.

  ‘Well – I wanted to offer.’

  ‘And I’m grateful you asked.’

  ‘Remember, the village fete is next weekend. Lydia lets the lower pastures be used for car parking – either side of the driveway, when you first turn in. She lords it up on the day – but has kittens leading up to it and a nervous breakdown afterwards. It’ll be strange this year. But stranger still, next year.’

  ‘So much change in the air – it’ll be poignant. I don’t even know which “lot” the consortium have plonked on that part of the estate. Whether there’ll be parking on offer next year –’

  ‘– and if there is, whether the proceeds will be given to the community – which is what Lydia does. Tell me about Charlie.’

  It came from nowhere.

  Stella wasn’t expecting it and Xander was unaware he was to say it. Instantly, he felt Stella deflate a little.

  ‘Some other time,’ he added quickly. ‘I know you have to go now.’

  ‘There’s not much to say,’ Stella said, pulling carefully cultivated brightness around her along with Xander’s duvet. ‘It went wrong a long time ago. We divorced. It’s history.’

  ‘But Will – does he see his father?’

  Stella had left the bed and was now walking around the room, dressing. ‘No,’ she said conversationally. ‘Not in ages.’

  ‘Define ages.’

  ‘Years,’ said Stella, bluntly.

  Xander watched her. She’s faffing, he thought to himself. She’s having trouble with her buttons. She’s put her knickers on inside out. She’s humming tunelessly, blithely. Her awkwardness was palpable, not least because she was so desperate to hide it. OK, thought Xander, that’s OK. It is history – but it’s her story and I guess it’s her prerogative as to when she tells it.

  She came back over to him, sat on the edge of the bed, her eyes skittering here and there, before she smiled at him and kissed him on the lips, eyes closed.

  ‘Speak soon, you,’ she said and though Xander couldn’t fault the tenderness with which she said it, when she left he lay in bed a while longer, pondering her reticence to share.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  What Bert Fletcher liked immediately about Stella was that she didn’t alter the pace of his life in any way. Xander brought her in, Audrey offered her tea and Bert said, sit yourself down, love. She brought no fuss with her. Bert knew how, after Xander and Stella left, Audrey would assess the girl’s ‘energy’. No doubt she’d say something about her bringing fresh air without a breeze. In comparison, Laura had always been something of a whirlwind – very jolly, very chatty but just a bit overpowering for Bert. After Laura’s visits, Bert always felt exhausted and Audrey was visibly ruffled; picking things up to put them down again – ornaments, photo frames, a vase of flowers, a pile of letters – as if Laura’s energy had blown everything in their home slightly off kilter. This Stella – she had a quiet softness about her. Yet she wasn’t shy. Shy people unnerved Bert; putting him on his guard, making him feel as awkward as they were. This Stella wasn’t shy, she was just – calm. Smiley. Refreshing. He could see what his son saw in her; Bert liked the way she simply sat, waiting for the cup of tea, listening to Xander chat, taking in the room and the details of their lives, all the while stroking the arm of the sofa.

  ‘Xander’ll say scones are an afternoon institution,’ Audrey said, offering one already loaded with cream and jam to Stella. ‘But I think that’s a nonsense.’ It was elevenses. ‘It’s a Lydia-ism,’ she said and Stella grinned, knowing just what Audrey meant.

  Stella took a bite. Delicious. ‘This is Longbridge jam,’ she said.

  Audrey glanced at her, surprised.

  ‘I did the jam tarts with Mrs Biggins last week,’ Stella explained. ‘Impossible not to lick the spoon accidentally-on-purpose.’

  ‘Xander tells us that you’ve sold Longbridge,’ said Bert. Stella noted a tone of admiration in Bert’s voice, as if it was an achievement of which she should be proud. She was touched, though she did wonder, just then, what inflection Xander had used when he told his parents what she’d done.

  She munched pensively, picking crumbs from the sofa before she answered. ‘Well, Lydia has sold Longbridge really,’ she said, ‘but yes, I brought the client to her.’

  ‘Well done!’ said Audrey.

  ‘Thank you,’ Stella said, somewhat lacklustre. She could see that Xander’s facial expression echoed her tone of voice.

  ‘An estate agent!’ said Bert, as if his son had brought home a brain surgeon.

  It made Stella wince. That this reputation should precede her was at odds with whom she felt herself to be. ‘Not really,’ she said.

  They all looked at her, expectant. ‘My heart – is in art.’ She giggled almost immediately, having neither intended it to sound so pompous – nor to rhyme. Audrey and Bert glanced at Xander with fleeting confusion.

  ‘My background is art,’ Stella elaborated. ‘This is a relatively new thing for me – property.’ She didn’t want to call it a career. It sounded too permanent.

  ‘A sideline?’ Bert asked.

  ‘A sidestep,’ Stella clarified. ‘Needs must – and all that. I’d like to return to art one day, though.’

  ‘An artist!’ Audrey was delighted.

  ‘Well – not really,’ Stella all but apologized. ‘Just an art historian and erstwhile gallery owner – but, in a recession, there’s not much call for either. Which is a shame, because I believe art gladdens the heart – and in a recession, we all need a bit of that.’

  Bert thought, Audrey is going to love this one – all principled and appreciative. Bert thought, this one will help Audrey to stop worrying about Xander. Bert thought, Xander looks made up with this one. He looked at his son, sitting at ease in a chair next to him, opposite the sofa on which his mother and his new lady were busy forming their mutual appreciation society. He looked at his son, all relaxed and bright about the eyes, clean-shaven, already staying longer than he had in ages. Bert had a little nod to himself. This one’ll do nicely.

  ‘And Xander says you have a super little boy?’ said Audrey.

  ‘Called Will,’ Bert felt he should add, so that Stella could infer that Xander spoke of the child as more than a passing comment connected to her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s almost eight.’ She beamed. ‘He’s with my mum, at the mo’.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he like to go to the Dansbury fete today?’

  ‘Oh yes – he’s coming. They both are.’

  Xander felt his parents glance at him. He hoped the look he returned said, no offence, folks – I’ll introduce you one at a time.

  ‘He wants to help Lydia park the cars – I think he envisages her turfing out the drivers so she can ride the cars roughshod over her lawn.’ Stella laughed. ‘Can you imagine!’

  ‘She’s a dreadful driver,’ Audrey said. ‘Art won’t even let her near the ride-on mower.’

  Stella helped Audrey take the plates through to the kitchen as Xander was letting his father show him what was doing well in the vegetable patch. The women watched the men standing at the back of the garden with their hands on their hips, while Bert nodded in the direction of this vegetable or that herb. Audrey stole a glance at Stella who was now dabbing at scone cru
mbs and licking them off her fingertip. ‘You can have another, love, if you’re still hungry.’

  ‘I imagine the cake stall will be loaded with them,’ Stella said. ‘Xander said the week before the fete, you’re in a baking frenzy.’ She paused. ‘That’s nice – even though you don’t live in the village any more.’

  ‘Once you’ve been part of Longbridge, your connection with the village is permanent.’

  Audrey observed Stella looking suddenly crestfallen. ‘I think I’ve fallen a bit in love with that place,’ Stella said quietly, ‘and I feel guilty that it’s going. I wish I could have either prevented it – or else found people better suited to it.’

  ‘You were following orders,’ Audrey said kindly. ‘And no doubt, they were given with a bark and a bite and not much in the way of a please or a thank-you.’ She paused. ‘Dear Lydia,’ she chuckled.

  ‘I’ll miss her too,’ said Stella. ‘Even though she’s frequently pretty vile to me. It’s crazy – I’m not ready to let any of it go.’

  ‘Well,’ said Audrey at length, ‘you’ve picked yourself a very fine souvenir, haven’t you.’

  For a split second, Stella thought that somehow Audrey knew about the spoon she’d pocketed. But then she realized Audrey was referring to Xander. And Audrey saw the blush creep up Stella’s neck and over her cheeks. And then Audrey saw Bert put his hand on Xander’s shoulder and let it lie there for longer than his usual prosaic pat. And Audrey thought to herself, all is well with my world. At long last.

  Lydia didn’t take much notice of the drivers – in the main, she simply pointed them to one TA cadet or other whom she roped in on the day of the fete to guide the vehicles along the appropriate parking lines. Lydia just liked being there, at the helm, in control. Privately, she was acutely aware this would be her last fete and she was adamant that she wouldn’t let the sudden wash of emotion show in any way. So she barracked drivers for veering off the tarmac too early, and she whacked her bamboo cane over the windscreens of others she deemed to be travelling too fast and she absolutely refused to converse with anyone who wound down their window and called to her from afar. Everyone had to slow down to a reverential crawl, if not a complete standstill, right beside her before she would deign to direct them left or right. She also charged them £5 per car which she’d later make much of donating to the community – but for now, the money went into a leather hunting pouch that had belonged to her grandfather. Thus, when Lydia heard distant squawking of ‘My Lady! My Lady!’ she steadfastly ignored it.

  ‘She’s elderly – like me. She probably can’t hear you. Why don’t you pop out here, and run along and say hullo,’ Sandie told Will, having little idea of Longbridge protocol or Lady Lydia’s obsession with etiquette. All Will knew was that his grandma often had top ideas, so he happily scrambled from the car and careened the few yards up the driveway to where Lydia was standing. It did cross Sandie’s mind that the woman looked as if she was holding some kind of retributional cane, rather than a stick – but then Sandie thought, who on earth could object to Will?

  ‘My Lady! My Lady!’

  Oh dear God, thought Lydia. But the nearer Will came, and the more gold the sunlight spun into his hair, and the clearer the absolute delight on his face at seeing her, the softer she felt.

  Dear darling Edward. Is it you?

  ‘My Lady!’ Will was effervescent and absolutely out of breath. First he saluted. And then he bowed. And Lydia tapped him on the shoulder with the cane as if she was knighting him.

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s quite enough.’

  ‘I’ve come to help!’

  ‘Help?’

  ‘My mum said if I saw you I was to be helpful about not letting things get in the way.’ He paused. For a horrible moment, it struck him that maybe his mum had said he was to be helpful and not get in the way. But he thought better of it; his teacher was always telling him how helpful he was, it was obviously a skill and today he intended to employ it to the best of his ability to assist Her Ladyship Lydia of Fortescue. He beamed up at Lydia, the sunlight causing him to squint with one eye, then the other.

  ‘Your nose,’ she said distastefully, ‘it’s running.’

  He wiped it on his arm and stood again to attention. ‘What do I do! Where do I point!’

  Lydia stared at him. She had an overwhelming desire to touch him; just to hover her hand so it caught the tips of his hair, to feel how his small bony shoulder might nestle into her palm, how his chin might feel like a plump little plum between her thumb and finger.

  A car tooted. Some one called out, ‘Come on, love!’ Will gasped. You must never, ever, refer to this lady as anything other than Lady!

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Will was aghast. ‘Shall we banish that car from your kingdom? It’s the red one.’

  ‘Peasant,’ Lydia said. ‘We’ll send him over that way – hopefully he’ll step in cow shit.’

  Will almost fell over. Not just an adult – but royalty – using the S word! This was the best day in his entire life. Standing to attention next to Lydia, who said disparaging things under her breath to him about all the approaching motorists, Will copied her arm gestures, pointing the cars this way and that.

  ‘We’ll send this old bird over that way,’ Lydia chortled.

  ‘That old bird is actually my grandma,’ said Will casually, ‘and I think she’d probably prefer it if you called her Sandie – if that’s OK with you.’

  Stella and Xander were waiting at the cake stall for Will and Sandie but, half an hour after they’d arranged to meet, there was still no sign of them and Sandie’s phone was off. Just as Xander and Stella were discussing what on earth to do, and whether Will would be mortified by a message over the tannoy, they saw them. A veritable procession. Lydia walking demurely, nodding to all and sundry, her hand on Will’s shoulder as if he were part pageboy, part walking stick. Will walking in a peculiar gait to fall in line with Lydia; behind them, Sandie like a lady in waiting, desperate to look around her but compelled to keep her eyes fixed low and ahead, as if in service to Lady Lydia. They stopped a few yards short of Stella, who felt a bizarre impulse to curtsey which, if Will hadn’t then scampered over to her, she might well have done.

  Lydia looked slowly from Stella to Xander and then back again, as if all that Stella had said might have been little more than joshing rumours and that only her own eyes could calculate the truth of it. As if sensing this, Xander slipped his hand around Stella’s waist for a moment – long enough for Lydia to see, but for Will not to notice.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Lydia said. ‘A wonderful turnout, don’t you think?’

  The three of them shared a silent moment reflecting that this was Lydia’s last time promenading as lady of the manor. Walking with Will from her fields to the fete, it had crossed her mind whether she’d be able to insert some sort of covenant into the contract – that all future owners of Longbridge had a duty to the village at such times as the fete or Christmas. Wondering about this, in a businesslike way, overruled any sentimentalism creeping in on such fine and jolly proceedings.

  ‘I hope Will didn’t make a nuisance of himself,’ Stella was saying.

  ‘On the contrary,’ Lydia said in a voice new to Stella and which Xander hadn’t heard for many years, ‘he was most helpful.’ The timbre was soft – as though her vocal chords were bouncing on a feather bed. She looked at the boy. ‘And a lot of fun.’ And she reached for Stella’s wrist and, as she squeezed it, she made a sound the closest to a giggle that she was capable of. ‘I taught him to swear,’ Lydia said. ‘I do hope you won’t object.’

  ‘It’s for best only,’ Will told his mother, as if Lydia’s ripe language was a suit of the finest worsted wool to be worn on only the most special of occasions.

  Stella didn’t know what to say and by the time she was about ready to reply, Lydia was already telling Will to come along – that they had rounds to make. This was not what Stella had envisaged – she’d thought she’d be strolling around the fete with
her mum, her lad and her boyf. Her mum was now deep in conversation with the man on the honey stall, her little lad had been commandeered by aspirant monarchy and her boyf was suddenly nowhere to be seen. Stella picked at the free samples on the cake stall and, recognizing Audrey’s scones, bought one.

  ‘Greedy pig.’

  Xander’s back, thought Stella and before she turned to face him, she wondered if it was peculiar that the disparaging pet names he already had for her should swell her heart so. Stroppy mare. Moody cow. Greedy pig. He’d called her a Dirty Bitch too last week, after she’d bustled him into her downstairs loo and surprised him with a particularly artful blowjob.

  ‘Do you speak to Stella’s mother with that mouth?’ It was Caroline, standing alongside Xander and jabbing him in the ribs.

  ‘Where is your mum?’ Xander asked.

  ‘Talking to the honey man,’ said Stella.

  Caroline and Xander groaned. ‘She’ll never get away,’ Caroline said. ‘Go and rescue her,’ she told Xander. They watched him saunter off.

  ‘Hullo,’ Caroline said to Stella, ‘again.’

  ‘Hullo,’ said Stella.

  ‘Have you been stared at an awful lot?’

  Stella looked confused.

  ‘You’re the toast of the fete,’ Caroline laughed. ‘You’ve rained on Lady Lydia Fortescue’s parade. You would’ve thought everyone would be whispering about her – about this being her last as lady of the manor. If she comes next year, she’ll have to pay entry. But no – as soon as we got here, all the talk has been “Ooh er! Xander’s here with a woman.” Although Bob referred to you as “a bit of skirt” and Mrs Patek, from the shop, called you a “Young lady”.’ Caroline paused. ‘Obviously, she hasn’t seen you after a night out in Hertford.’

  Stella laughed. ‘Oi!’ she said. ‘You told me I could forget all that!’

  Caroline held her hands up in surrender. ‘You’re right. I apologize.’

  They paused, glancing over to observe Xander trying to extricate Sandie from the non-stop conversation of the bee man so as to introduce her to Audrey who’d just arrived for her stint on the cake stall.