by Unknown
Spurs was snacking on a thumbnail, his neck crisscrossed with anxious veins as he glanced at Ellen again, tortured with unknown demons.
Why is he bothered about Felicity Gates seeing us together? she wondered. Then again, from the excitable, adoring look on Felicity’s plump face, she might almost be as much in love with him as Ellen was. The thought made her snort with laughter.
Spurs almost shot through the roof, so finely tuned into Ellen’s every move that he could probably hear her heart beating. But Felicity even didn’t look round. ‘. . . better get a move on,’ she was saying. ‘The lilies are wilting in the back of the car. I’ll drop you on the way. I can’t believe you forgot the lunch. You are a one! Your mother has been telling me all week that you’ll be there. Come on, then.’ She trotted off, trug swinging, nodding gratefully as the liveried valet who was emerging through the doors held them open for her with a touch of his cap.
As soon as the doors closed, Spurs dashed to Ellen, eyes wild, sending the valet flying as he tried to present her with her car keys. He grabbed both her hands. ‘I’m sorry – I’m so sorry. I have to go. I’ll explain later.’
‘Go where?’
‘I’ll explain later.’ He pressed her knuckles into his teeth, staring at her over them, the silver gaze tarnished with guilt. ‘I’ll come to the cottage. I’ll explain everything, I promise.’
‘You can’t just—’
‘I love you.’ He kissed the signet ring on her finger. ‘You’re my life, and you’re the one secret I just can’t keep.’ With that he sprinted away, sending a Japanese family flying.
By the time Ellen had grabbed her keys from the dishevelled valet and picked her way over ten matching Louis Vuitton suitcases, Felicity’s Volvo was half-way along the Eastlode driveway, passing the lake where two swans were stretching their wings together.
Swans mated for life, Ellen recalled, as her mind jerked uncertainly between extremes of confusion, happiness and fear. Last night, I was the signet that became a swan. Just my luck to pick a black one.
She looked at the ring on her finger, wondering what possible reason Spurs could have for abandoning her in favour of the church stalwart and local do-gooder, plump, boring Felicity.
You are the one secret I can’t keep.
Did that mean he wanted to tell everyone that they were in love, or did that mean he couldn’t keep her?
‘I love him, I love him, I love him.’ She stared at the swans, who were now gliding serenely on the lake, waltzing in their own watery ballroom. And Ellen laughed as it hit her what love really meant. What had Spurs said? Like fear, only nice.
When Ellen drove up the potholed drive to the yard, Dilly was leaning over the gate to the sand school, yawning widely as she watched Rory riding a youngster. Dressed in Ellen’s hot pants and one of Rory’s shirts, her hair piled under a baseball cap, she turned to wave at the jeep and mimed cutting her throat.
‘Oh heck.’ Ellen chewed her lip as she parked beside a huge pile of plastic-wrapped haylage bales. She glanced anxiously out of the window, watching Dilly brush noses with the ginger stable cat that had teetered along the gate to join her.
Deep breaths, Ellen told herself. You can always lie.
Dilly bounded over as soon as she got out of the car. ‘What happened to you? Did you break down? We tried the mobile but you didn’t answer. Where’s Spurs? God, what are you wearing?’
Ellen looked down at her discreetly logoed gold Eastlode polo shirt, but thankfully Dilly was too preoccupied with chattering to pursue the subject.
‘Mum is so mad at you. She called ages ago, when she discovered nobody was at your place. She said something about ordering a taxi, but I think she must have got distracted because nobody’s turned up – a bit like last night.’
‘I’m so, so sorry, Dilly.’ Ellen felt clammy with embarrassment. ‘Were you okay? Rory looked after you, didn’t he?’
She nodded, looking across at Rory, who was cantering around the sand school. ‘I’ve had the best night of my life ever. We stayed up talking most of it, and Rory made me banana sandwiches at four in the morning, and we watched the dawn and saw fallow deer and I helped him muck out and . . .’ She looped her arm through Ellen’s, babbling like a happy toddler. ‘We kissed for ages. He says I’m really special.’
Ellen gave her a hug. ‘You are.’
‘We didn’t do It,’ Dilly whispered in her ear. ‘We did lots of other things, but Rory thinks I shouldn’t lose the big V ASAP. He thinks we should take our time.’ She pulled away, glancing at him with unconcealed rapture, then took Ellen’s hands. ‘You were so right when you said that if it’s truly magical you could be anywhere in the world.’
Ellen bit her lip.
Dilly was watching her face closely. ‘Where did you get to last night?’
‘I went round the world.’
Pheely was beyond livid. Furious with herself for blithely letting Dilly stay away all night because she wanted privacy with her lover, she turned the force of her wrath on Ellen, whom she decided had abused her trust for the last time. Touchy Pheely was about to show how she had earned her name.
Bow-legged, exhausted, and wantonly bonked half to death, Ellen was an easy target when she brought Dilly back. They had walked together to the Lodge cottage, with Snorkel in tow, so that she could apologise in person.
‘Mum!’ Dilly charged out of the wilderness on to the terrace, almost knocking Godspell’s bust from its plinth as she gave her mother a huge hug and spun her round. ‘I have had the best night! Rory had done the table in the Plough’s garden like a magical grotto, and he played the fiddle and Twitch sang and then—’
‘That’s enough, Dilly darling.’ Pheely prised away her arms and caught Ellen’s eye over her daughter’s shoulder. ‘I’d like a word with Ellen. Go and have a bath.’
‘But—’ On seeing her mother’s expression, Dilly knew it wasn’t wise to argue and sloped inside, followed by the tussling Hamlet and Snorkel.
The green lantern eyes almost seared the skin from Ellen’s face. ‘How dare you abandon my daughter overnight with Rory Midwinter?’
Ellen hung her head. ‘It was completely thoughtless and selfish and I can’t excuse it. I’m sorry, Pheely, but at least she was okay.’
‘Okay? Okay?’ She mocked Ellen’s Somerset accent, drawling out the slang word with a snobbish sneer. ‘She’s a little girl!’
‘Pheely, she’s seventeen,’ Ellen reminded her kindly, not picking up on the severity of Pheely’s anger. ‘I was living out of a rucksack in Europe with my boyfriend at seventeen. My parents were lucky if they got a postcard a month.’
‘That’s because you’re a tart,’ she snarled.
Ellen reeled.
‘At seventeen,’ Pheely seethed, ‘I had an eighteen-month-old child because I’d been so naïve and desperate to fall in love that I willingly gave myself to the first man who treated me like a grown-up.’ She paced over to a crowded table to extract her cigarette packet from among sculpting tools and empty wine bottles. ‘I can’t believe I trusted you and you let me down not once but twice, in the worst possible way. You have encouraged my sweet, open-minded daughter to open her legs and her heart to any man that comes along. You might live like that, but I can assure you not everyone wants to be known as the girl who fucks like a stoat.’
‘Steady on.’ Ellen caught her breath.
But Pheely was on the rampage, assuaging her own guilt by attacking. ‘First you put all sorts of ideas about Spurs – Spurs! – into the child’s head, and then you turn her special night out into a grotty sleepover. You are completely unreliable. Worse than that, you’re manipulative and selfish and really quite evil. It’s no wonder you and Spurs are so close.’ Satisfied with her outburst for now, she kicked a pot of chives and crossed her arms, waiting for the backlash as she took a cigarette break to regroup.
But Ellen felt no anger, just desperate shame that the friendship was crumbling when she needed it most. Pheely deserved
her honesty, at least.
‘I was with Spurs last night,’ she confessed hoarsely. ‘We love each other, Pheely.’
‘Ha!’ Pheely lit her cigarette. ‘Ha!’
‘I love him.’
‘You bloody reckless idiot, how can you possibly love someone you’ve known barely five minutes?’
‘I’ve known him all my life.’
‘Oh, no.’ She tutted patronisingly. ‘I have known him most of my life, and I think you’ll find you’ve barely scratched the surface. You’ve just scratched an itch. You wanted to shag him, you told me yourself. And last night you did just that, I take it?’
Ellen’s skin still burned from every kiss. She looked up at a streak of white where a plane had just crossed the blue sky and tried hard not to give into the urge to shriek happily and dance around Pheely’s terrace. ‘I know it was totally irresponsible, but we couldn’t stop, and it was . . . Oh God, it was the most breathtaking thing that has ever happened to me, Pheely. It felt like nothing on earth.’ She hugged herself tightly. ‘I love him totally.’
Pheely laughed bitterly. ‘Hooray, hooray, Spurs is a great lay. Well, bully for you, Ellen. But please don’t mistake what’s just happened to you for love.’
Ellen closed her eyes and felt Spurs beside her and within her, a magical force that she had lived a lifetime in possession of, never knowing how to harness it until now. And she knew for certain that this wasn’t a case of mistaken identity. This was love. She’d never experienced anything like it before in her life.
‘He’ll break you up into pieces.’ Pheely sighed, with deliberate dispassion. ‘Which is probably the least you deserve after what you’ve done to Dilly. He can smash you to bits.’
‘I was already in pieces when we met,’ Ellen kept her eyes closed, longing for Pheely to understand, ‘but I didn’t see it – nobody did except him. He’s made me see that my pieces fit with his.’ She pictured two fractured vases that combined to make a stained-glass window depicting a fairy tale.
But Pheely interpreted the perfectly fitting pieces differently: ‘Please don’t go into the sordid details of your smutty night spent shagging in some ditch,’ she huffed.
Opening her eyes, Ellen looked at Pheely’s generous face, twisted with anger. ‘I know I’ve let you down, and I know that you’ll never trust Spurs as I do. But he and I understand one another. From the moment we met, it’s been like trying to deny my own identity. I feel like I’ve been under water for thirteen years and have only just come to the surface.’
Her cigarette break over, Pheely ground out the butt into the terrace and dusted her dress down, a nasty smile curling on to her plump lips. It was time to launch the cannonball.
‘It’s rather a shame that Spurs is marrying somebody else, then, isn’t it?’
Ellen froze. Was this some sort of absurd joke?
Pheely widened her eyes and spoke very slowly and clearly, as though addressing a halfwit. ‘That’s why Spurs came home in the first place, Ellen. He’s getting married.’
Unable to speak, Ellen shook her head stupidly.
‘I do love good old-fashioned arranged marriages.’ Pheely was relishing her revelation, her anger at last sated by a satisfactory revenge. ‘There’s something rather sexy about a Machiavellian union arranged by ambitious parents. One imagines the innocent victims torn from true lovers and forced to endure their lives of wealth and privilege together far from love.
‘Then again,’ she cocked her head, happy to be swept away, ‘it could be rather Kiss Me Kate – two strangers sharing a wedding bed on the first day they meet, only falling in love after months or years of marriage.’
Ellen wasn’t taking any of this in. She was unable to believe that Spurs was getting married.
‘I’m not surprised Spurs is devoting himself so avidly to screwing around right now,’ Pheely mused. ‘That’s where you came in – he must have been thrilled to find a wannabe Pamela Anderson on his doorstep, fresh from the beach-bum, rebounding like a bouncing beach-ball, and swooning over his pathetic circus tricks. He won’t be able to have casual sex much longer, after all – one can hardly be unfaithful with Gladys as a housekeeper. God knows, the Surgeon’s tried hard enough. Spurs will have to be a faithful husband. With any luck, that means he’ll drink himself to death fairly soon.’ She peered at Ellen. ‘Have you got a fly in your ear or something?’
Ellen stopped shaking her head and just stared at her.
‘I’m sure he told you he loved you.’ Pheely feigned understanding as she fluttered back to the table to search through the bottles for one with some wine left in it. ‘Most men say that when they want to take a girl to bed, don’t they? But this wedding has been planned for a very long time.’ Finding her search fruitless, she turned back to Ellen.
Slumping down on to an earthenware gargoyle, she battled not to be sick. ‘Wh-wh-who . . . is . . . he . . .’ She stopped in horror as Pheely stepped towards her latest work of art.
Very slowly, she turned Godspell’s bust to face Ellen. ‘Dracula’s bride. I think it’s rather fitting, don’t you?’
‘Godspell Gates?’ Ellen gasped.
‘The engagement – which, I gather, will be extremely short – is going to be announced at Ely’s garden party. This little creation,’ she tapped the top of the horribly lifelike head, ‘is to form the centrepiece of one of Felicity’s floral displays, a huge tribute to Ely’s little girl who has so dutifully agreed to unite Oddlode’s two great families by marrying Jasper Belling. So romantically feudal, don’t you think?’
‘This is a joke.’ Ellen stood up, clutching her head. ‘A bad joke.’
‘Ely wanted to buy Goose Cottage as a wedding present for the young couple,’ Pheely went on. ‘He is very disappointed that you’ve scuppered his plans, and he’ll be even more irate if he finds out that you’ve been playing with the bridegroom. You really should watch your back.’
‘I don’t believe you. Spurs would never agree to do something like this.’
‘No?’ Pheely dusted ash from Godspell’s nose. ‘Why don’t you ask him yourself?’
Ellen stared at her.
A stricken look crossed Pheely’s face, but she held it in check. ‘Where exactly is Spurs, Ellen?’ she asked lightly. ‘I thought you were so madly in love that you couldn’t leave one another’s sight.’
It was as though her own shadow had disappeared. Ellen turned and stumbled into the wild garden.
Ellen ran along the old footpath, deaf to Hunter’s bellows, the rush of blood in her ears like an approaching tidal wave. Still dressed in her disgusting gold Eastlode Park sports separates, she stumbled over the gate and through the archway to the kennel yard.
Spurs had shown her the answer to the riddle all along, she realised. It was in the story of the Little Mermaid; the prince had married somebody else. Not all fairy tales had a happy ending, he had explained. He’d agreed to marry Godspell Gates.
‘Oh God, no.’ Ellen raced past the yews, her windpipe so atrophied with panic that she thought she would suffocate.
There was no answer when she hammered on the big black door. Looking around frantically, she spotted that the french windows leading from the terrace into the manor house were open, and she darted inside, searching each room in turn for Spurs.
The dining-table was laid for six at one end. At the other a large open folder spilled details of marquee-hire companies, caterers’ sample menus, toastmaster’s CVs and mobile-disco playlists.
Yelping, Ellen pinched herself hard. ‘Wake up,’ she gasped as she ran on. ‘Wake up, wake up.’
But she was already awake, and however hard she pinched herself, it was nothing to the thousands of mousetraps that were snapping shut on her heart.
Spurs wasn’t in the big games room with the billiard table, or the huge hallway. The Victorian drawing room, which looked completely different without the rows of mismatched chairs that had been laid out for the auction, was deserted, its heavy curtains drawn against the p
icture-fading sun.
She ran back along the winding inner lobby, looking into each room in turn. And ground to a halt as she heard raised voices at the far end of the house.
‘I won’t stand for this!’ Came Hell’s Bells’ familiar baritone, snarling with anger. ‘I’m going to get your father in here!’
‘You can get the household cavalry for all I bloody care,’ Spurs’ voice yelled back.
Ellen followed the racket and found Spurs and his mother squaring up to each other across a huge kitchen table covered with Cellophaned quiches, pies and salads. They were arguing so furiously that, at first, they didn’t notice Ellen standing in the doorway.
‘We have the Gateses coming to lunch in ten minutes’ time. What am I supposed to tell them?’
‘That it’s off.’ Spurs laughed at the simplicity of the solution. ‘Tell them it’s off. I won’t do it.’
Ellen let out a strange squeak as her hands flew to her mouth in relief.
‘What’s she doing here?’ demanded Hell’s Bells in a boom that would have stripped a horse-chestnut of conkers.
The black Labradors who had been making waggy-tailed progress across the flagstones to greet the newcomer sloped hurriedly back to their baskets.
Spurs ran his hand shakily through his curls and looked at Ellen, his face pale.
‘I’ve just heard,’ she croaked. ‘The whole village knows you’re marrying Godspell Gates.’
He sprinted across the room and drew her into his arms. But before he could say a word, Hell’s Bells squawked, ‘The village can’t possibly know! We’ve gone to great lengths to keep it from Gladys. She even has this afternoon off so she can’t listen in to our lunch. All we’ve told her is that Ely is going to announce Godspell’s engagement at his party, no more.’
‘It’s true, then?’ Ellen looked up at Spurs.
He pulled away and rubbed his forehead with white-knuckled fingers, unable to look at her. ‘I tried to tell you, but I couldn’t. God help me, I just couldn’t.’
‘What business is it of hers, anyway?’ snapped Hell’s Bells.
