The first group of tourists stopped and stared.
‘Oh my God, it’s you,’ a woman in her fifties carrying a camera and a guide book, said. ‘Gosh. I’m sorry!’ She laughed, near-hysterical. ‘So good to see you!’
‘Hello,’ said Nick. ‘Er, you too!’ He shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘Everything OK? I hope you’re enjoying yourselves.’
‘We’re having a wonderful time,’ said her friend, who had severely bobbed grey hair. ‘Absolutely marvellous. Everyone says it, but you don’t believe it ’til you’re here. This really is the most beautiful house we have, isn’t it?’
‘Well,’ Nick said, putting his hand on the small of Laura’s back, ‘I think so.’
The two of them glanced in surprise at Laura by his side. ‘Well, lovely,’ said the first, uncertainly.
‘My girlfriend’s opening a children’s bookshop in the village this afternoon,’ Nick said. ‘We’re on our way there now. You should drop by, it’s wonderful. Excuse me.’
They smiled, but their expression was curious. ‘Right. Thank you,’ the first one said. She looked Laura over, rather disappointed. ‘How nice for you, dear,’ she said vaguely. ‘Marjorie, let’s be moving on.’
‘I think she was hoping for a character from Downton Abbey instead of me,’ said Laura as she and Nick emerged into the Great Hall and walked across the black and white marble flooring, taken from a Roman palace.
‘You’re exaggerating,’ Nick said. ‘She just wished you weren’t there. Or dead.’ He held the door open and she passed through, down the golden stone steps, and the visitors who were just arriving stopped and stared.
‘Welcome to Chartley Hall,’ Nick said, holding the door open for them and smiling in a friendly way. ‘Thanks so much for coming to our home. Have a fantastic time.’
‘That lady he’s with, she’s the girlfriend from nowhere,’ she heard one of them say as they walked away. ‘I read about her in the paper last week.’
‘She’s from Middlesex or something isn’t she?’ another one put in. She could feel their eyes on her back. ‘Her dad’s a handyman or something. Do you know they couldn’t even afford to go abroad when she was a kid? They had a caravan. I read that somewhere.’
‘Well, she’s got her claws into this one, hasn’t she? Good for her.’
Rule Three:
Get a good answer ready for those questions about wedding bells.
‘It’s not easy, being the girlfriend of the most eligible bachelor in the whole country. After Prince William, that is, and he’s out of the running now!’ The crowd gave an excited laugh. You could sense them thinking: At last. Someone’s mentioned it! Rose, in her absolute element at the microphone, gave a wicked chuckle. ‘They’re pretending not to hear me. Well, big sisters are supposed to embarrass their little brothers, aren’t they?’
Laura shot a glance at Nick out of the corner of her eye, but his gaze was fixed firmly to the floor. In front of them was the shop, its new sign bold green and white:
Laura’s Place
A bookshop for children and their grown-ups
Once again, Laura wished her parents were here. But she’d been too – shy? Worried? – to invite them, and they’d come down the previous weekend instead to see the shop. It was stupid, because they’d have loved it. They were so proud of her, getting this whole thing off the ground. If the rest of her life baffled them, this, at least, was something they could entirely get their heads round and tell their neighbours about.
‘It’s hard, dear, knowing what to say to people. I don’t like to brag about it. After all,’ her mother had said, without meaning to sound unkind. ‘What is there to brag about? You’re not married to him. He just happens to be …’ And she’d trailed off.
He just happened to be Dominic Edward Danvers Needham, twelfth Marquis of Ranelagh, Earl of Albany Cross, Lord of the Handfast, owner of Chartley Hall and 10,000 acres of land. Title created over 600 years ago after the Wars of the Roses. House designed by Inigo Jones. The finest collection of Renaissance drawings in the country. A muster of peacocks (yes, after three years, she knew what the name for a group of peacocks was). And a diamond tiara worn by Queen Victoria during her first tour of India. To say nothing of the castle in Scotland, the properties in London, the diamonds and other jewels residing in the vault, the foundation that gave away millions of pounds in grants every year.
And she just happened to be a normal girl – nothing more, nothing less – from a London suburb, a house with a rusty climbing frame in the garden, a caravan, enough money for new shoes, but not enough money for holidays abroad. A safe life, a boring life, a happy life.
When she’d told her parents what she was planning, her mother had clapped her hands together. ‘Well, Laura, that’s great! Good for you. We were worried …’ She’d glanced at her husband, who’d stared into his newspaper as though it held the secret to the location of the lost city of Atlantis. ‘We were worried you might not have anything up there that’s your own.’
‘Oh,’ Laura had said, a little puzzled.
Then Angela Foster had said, ‘It’s such a big place. And to me you still seem … so small.’ She had laughed, tears in her eyes, and Laura had suddenly found herself struggling not to cry as well. ‘I just … well, I’m very glad you’re doing that. We’re very proud of you.’
Laura had spent nearly ten years working on volunteer reading programmes for a local London council, and Laura’s Place was her long-term dream come true. A place for children to flick through all the books they wanted. A playground, with cabins at the back of the garden. There was room to sleep up to twenty children at a time. Eventually the old school house, which had been turned into a shop, would also become a centre where kids from all over the country, especially deprived areas or families where English wasn’t their first language, could come for a weekend. To learn about the joy of books, camping, bonfires and games on the estate. Each child would be given a bag of books and a mentor to stay in touch with afterwards.
She hoped to replicate Laura’s Place elsewhere in a couple of years, but that was the next stage. She was waiting for the final funding to come through from a few sources, including the Needham Trust, the charitable foundation run by Nick’s family which, like many charities, could only give away so much each year.
The following weekend, she and Nick had agreed to an interview with Laura’s greatest enemy, the Daily News, who were obsessed with her and her relationship with Nick. One of the advisors who’d helped set up the shop had arranged it. ‘You have to do it. It’s a talking point, to promote the shop and secure that last piece of funding. You have to sound credible. Happy. Together. Committed.’
She loved that. Committed!
The old red brick gleamed, the green front door and white windows sparkled with fresh (dry) paint. Inside the shop was stacked with shelves and brightly coloured furniture, bean bags, cushions and mats, so anyone could sit on the floor and read.
Casey, the manager, was a local single mother of two. Brian, the vicar’s husband who was an ex-teacher, was now part-time bookshop assistant. Both stood proudly beside Laura. They were all exhausted. Nick took the microphone from his sister Rose.
‘Thank you, Rose. I won’t keep you, ladies, gentlemen and children.’ He grinned. ‘This is a wonderful day for Chartley. For us, and for a generation of children who are going to enjoy this shop. It’s all because of Laura, and I want to raise a glass to her and tell her …’
She lifted her eyes to his, but her smile froze when she saw his expression. She followed his gaze as a slim blonde girl in a white kaftan, jeans and thong sandals, standing slightly apart from the group, waved shyly at him and let her hand slide quickly back to her side.
Laura recognised her but couldn’t place her. Nick looked ruffled, dumbstruck, even. Whoever she was, he didn’t want her here, that was for sure.
Laura nudged him, and he shook his head and continued.
‘I … I’ve forgotten what I was going
to say. To Laura’s Place! Oh! Hog roast starting in a few minutes, and please go into the shop and have a look round, buy something, enjoy yourselves. Thank you.’
The local and national journalists in the front row shuffled in annoyance. ‘Nick, smile for the camera please,’ said the largest one, a beefy, red-faced guy. ‘Laura, get close to him, please.’
‘Me, too?’ said Rose, edging towards them.
‘No thanks. Just one of the happy couple. You know what I mean,’ said the photographer as a couple of people sniggered. Laura and Nick stood still, like waxworks in a museum, and when she glanced up again, the girl in white had disappeared. It was then that Laura remembered who she was. Nick’s ex-girlfriend, Lara Montagu.
They’d never really discussed Lara. It was in the past, but it was also too recent. It was one of the things she and Nick didn’t talk about.
Rule Four:
Don’t Google yourself, and don’t read newspapers.
She struggled sometimes to remember what the old Laura had been like. The one who’d met Nick nearly four years ago, in a field behind the woods at the back of Chartley Hall. She had reasonably assumed that this tall, muscular man driving a mower was someone who worked on the estate. That girl had probably been pretty normal, Laura thought now, but back then her life seemed to be a total mess. At twenty-six, she fell in love all the time, and she could never seem to see the flaws everyone else did. The guys were gay, they were crazy, they were engaged, or they kept promising to leave their girlfriend, who then turned out to be pregnant.
It was after this, her most recent (and most catastrophic) romantic disaster, that Laura had found herself up in Norfolk staying with her parents at her grandmother’s house by the sea. It was almost a working holiday. Time for her to work out what she was doing wrong, that is: why she kept looking for romantic heroes and ending up with losers. Years of Jane Austen TV dramas and slushy novels about tall, dark, handsome men with curt manners and amazing kissing techniques had twisted her perspective. She’d decided she had to reject everything to do with romance.
Then she met Nick. Who, it turned out later, wasn’t a farmhand, but one of those bloody romantic heroes, a character from a novel come to life.
But the thing was, it was wonderful – all the time, either when they were alone in her crummy flat or hanging out in London with her friends. She was completely, totally happy when she was with Nick, and he was with her. So many men before had wanted only the best bits of her, or to change her. Nick wanted her to be as much like herself as possible.
He wanted to watch TV with her and join in hilariously with her attempts to bake (everyone was baking, so Laura thought she ought to try it). He wanted to sit up with Paddy, Laura’s hapless flatmate, listening to the traumatic stories of his relationship breakdown. He wanted to lie in bed with her, tracing the edge of her hand with his finger, or read her stories from the papers on Saturday mornings or sing her Johnny Cash songs in his special growly voice.
But that was in London. Up at Chartley Hall things weren’t the same, and that’s when it started to go wrong.
Eighteen months into their relationship, Laura was offered the job of a lifetime, working in San Francisco for a tech company developing children’s reading programmes. At first she’d told them she wasn’t interested. But the more she protested that she didn’t want to leave, the more she realised she had to. She had to give Nick a fresh start, a chance to meet someone new who’d be exactly what he needed. Not the person she’d become when she was at Chartley: stilted, nervous, not herself.
She still remembered Nick’s face when she’d told him she was leaving.
‘You know this place, it isn’t me, Laura,’ he’d said, his dark eyes liquid, his jaw set. ‘None of this matters. We matter. You and me. You can’t go.’
‘You said that before,’ she’d replied, holding his hand – his dear, sweet, warm hand that was strong and gentle – and her heart felt as though it would actually break, it hurt so much. ‘You said that when we got together, and it wasn’t true. It does matter.’
‘You’re wrong. What can I do to change your mind?’
But Laura couldn’t say, Give up Chartley Hall, let’s live somewhere else. Tell your sister Rose to leave me alone. It was her own fault she couldn’t make this work, her fault she constantly forgot the names of important people, or broke plates, or opened the door the wrong way on Tony the butler, giving him a black eye, or annoyed the staff by going down to the kitchen and making a cup of tea at night. It was her fault she still didn’t understand the strange rules and traditions.
Laura had really snapped the week before at the county show and told the reporter from the Norfolk Gazette that of course she was a feminist and didn’t understand why, if they were going to pass a law so that eldest daughters could become queen, they couldn’t do the same for peers of the realm. Laura thought this was a perfectly normal thing to think: after all, wasn’t it 2010?
But the headline in the newspaper (next to ‘Lowestoft: 200 Tonnes of Horse Manure Catches Alight’) was ‘Lord’s New Ladyfriend: Man-hating Revolutionary?’ Which, as Nick pointed out, was a bit of a contradiction: how could you be a Lord’s ladyfriend and a man-hater at the same time?
Rose also made it quite clear that Laura didn’t cut the mustard. Rose was there on the terrible night that Laura dropped the Wedgwood plate worth thousands of pounds. As Laura stood in the ballroom in despair, while Tony donned gloves and swept the pieces carefully up into a special polystyrene box ready to be mended, she actually said, ‘Laura, dear, where you come from it’s normal to pick up objects and touch them. Here, we don’t do that. Please be more careful with my family’s things in future.’
My family’s things.
There would be dinners with other posh people, and Laura would sit and watch, not knowing what to say, while girls like Lara Montagu, one of Nick’s oldest childhood friends, with her perfect white teeth, thick blonde hair, clear skin and total, one hundred per cent confidence would laugh and joke with each other. Lara even had a degree in Marketing and Estate Management; she might as well have had ‘Ideal Wife’ stamped on her forehead.
And Laura would think, You should be sitting next to him, not me. You should be having his babies. You should run this place and organise teas and visit vicars and understand horses and know how to automatically give commands. You can make him happy, and I want him to be happy more than I want anything else.
Laura’s greatest friend at Chartley was Charles, the estate manager, and an old friend of Nick’s. He’d been there at the beginning of their relationship and she could actually talk to him about things. After she left for America, Charles told her afterwards, Nick didn’t sleep for weeks. They could hear him pacing up and down in his room at night. Nick’s personal quarters on the top floor of the house hadn’t been touched since the time of his grandfather. Now, they remained mostly unused again as Nick was either outside or in meetings. He spent as little time as possible there and only came back to sleep in his room, a tiny grey attic with sloping windows, as far away from the rest of the house as it was possible to be.
Charles was by now married to Nick’s younger sister Lavinia, and, at the time, their bedroom was directly below Nick’s. After a week, Lavinia had gone upstairs and banged on her brother’s door.
‘Shut up with your clomping around in the middle of the night when the rest of us are trying to sleep,’ she’d yelled, unaware of the noise she was making, or indeed the fact that she’d been convicted of noise pollution twice during her hippy-boho-stallholder-with-a-Portobello-Road-flat years. ‘You’ve woken the baby up! I’m going to murder you!’
When did Laura realise she’d made a mistake, leaving Nick? Was it her third night in San Francisco, when she was in a bar with her new colleagues? ‘You’re The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me’ by Gladys Knight came on the jukebox and she had to pretend she had something in her contact lens so they wouldn’t see her crying. Or was it every morning when she walke
d past the ice-cream parlour and thought how much Nick would love it? Or every time she went into her local bookstore and saw some quirky non-fiction book about the history of maths or something that she knew he’d enjoy? Or was it the clothes store that had a polo shirt he’d look so cute in, or the hippy tourist shop selling dreamcatchers that she always wanted to tell him about, because they both hated wind chimes and dreamcatchers almost as much as they loathed fat chips?
Maybe Laura realised she’d been wrong to leave him after allowing herself to Google him and discovering that he was now going out with Lara Montagu, and that she’d been right all along. Lara, she learned, was also an Olympic-standard showjumper. She’d actually quite liked Lara, and that only made it worse, this feeling that it was the right thing for him. Already she missed Nick so much it physically hurt. Her chest would ache as she lay in bed at night trying not to think about him, listening to police sirens and the sound of the Chinese family in the flat above her arguing. After that, she didn’t Google Nick again.
But this rage Laura felt at knowing he was with someone else, this passion she had for that dark-eyed, quiet, shy man whose hands were always warm and whose heart she had used to hear beating as she fell asleep on his chest wouldn’t go away.
She started to feel quite mad. She’d sit in cafés working on her laptop, drinking coffee and listening to the rain on the pavements and the cosy, relaxed West Coast chatter. She’d see how at home everyone else felt while she didn’t seem to fit in at all. She loved the people, the freedom, the pride everyone took in the city. She felt she could live there and be happy, but one thing was stopping her. As the months passed she realised that was never going to change.
Laura asked herself, Would she have left Nick if the job in the States hadn’t come up? Maybe not. She only knew she had to see Nick again.
Picking up her old life again in England was easy enough. Her boss, Rachel, was on maternity leave, they needed someone to cover for her. Sadly, Paddy had finally split from his girlfriend and wanted to rent a flat again. And so one spring evening back in London, Laura gritted her teeth, had a large gulp of wine and dialled Nick’s mobile. He answered immediately.
Rules for Dating a Romantic Hero Page 2
