by Fiona Walker
Dillon smiled, watching her animated face, and realising that she was so fantastically focused in life, she had none of his angst and vacillation. He longed to have some of that drive. She had a really handsome and unusual face, he decided, like a young Meryl Streep.
‘Everything to your satisfaction, Mr Raggety?’ Angelo shimmied up with a tray of coffee.
‘Rafferty. Yes, thanks.’
Beaming, Angelo clicked his heels, re-laid his napkin over his arm, executed a half pirouette and shimmied away.
‘Why can’t he see me as a woman not a child?’ Faith was moaning, helping herself to sugar lumps.
‘Well you could try sitting up straight, putting your napkin on your lap rather than tucked in your collar, and not eating the sugar lumps.’
‘Huh?’
Dillon raised his eyebrows at her in return.
‘Rory. I’m talking about Rory,’ she clarified.
‘Ah, of course you are.’ He dropped a slice of lemon peel in his espresso. ‘That might take rather more work.’
‘Like what? Cosmetic surgery?’
‘No! God, no. Perhaps if you played the field a bit more, got a bit more experience …’
Faith huffed. ‘There’s no way I can ever try to compete with sex vixens like MC or Sylva—’ She covered her mouth as she realised what she’d just let slip.
‘Sylva?’ he beetled his brows at her. ‘And Rory?’
‘It was all in your ex girlfriend’s kiss and tell,’ she pointed out.
‘I never read that, funnily enough.’
‘She bigged it up far too much. It was nothing. Just a fling. Before Sylva’s gay fling. And her you fling – not that it’s a fling, what with getting married and all that.’
He rubbed his face in his hands. ‘God what a mess.’
A flash suddenly went off at the window and he looked up sharply. ‘Fuck.’
‘What is it?’
‘Paparazzi. Somebody must have tipped them off that I’m here.’ He glared at Angelo as he sidled past at a leisurely pace to draw the curtains beside their table, hoping they’d get some nice shots of the exterior while they were here.
Faith giggled at the novelty of it all. ‘I can see the headlines: Sylva Love Rival – heartthrob pop star spotted with scruffy-looking teen in pub clinch. Pucker up and we’ll draw back those curtains again and give them a show.’ She closed her eyes and pursed her lips theatrically.
He was about to throw a sugar lump at her, but he suddenly leaned forward and stared at her intently. ‘You know, you might have a point.’
She laughed. ‘It’s okay, I think we’re safe. Nobody is seriously going to believe I’m a rival to Sylva Frost.’
‘If they did, it would make Rory sit up and take notice of you, wouldn’t it?’
‘True.’ She was still laughing, not taking him seriously.
‘You say you wouldn’t be missed if you didn’t work for a week?’
She shrugged. ‘I have Whitey to look after.’
‘And if I paid for him to be looked after?’
She stopped laughing. ‘Why would you do that?’
‘Come on holiday to the Caribbean.’
She gaped at him. ‘This is a joke, right?’
‘You need a holiday. I definitely need a holiday.’ He nodded towards the curtained window, behind which the shadow of the photographer was still loitering. ‘Let’s give them something to talk about.’
‘No funny business?’
‘I’ll phone your mother personally and assure her of my strong moral fibre.’ He smiled the killer Rafferty smile which, despite his beard and double chin, rocked Faith back on her chair.
‘There’s no need for that. I am almost nineteen and I do know you’re practically married. Will Sylva be there?’ She didn’t relish any close comparisons with Sylva’s petite perfection while sunbathing.
‘She’s not invited.’ He shook his head. ‘Are you okay with that?’
‘Absolutely!’ She grinned. ‘Won’t that upset Sylva, though?’
‘So I’m hoping.’ He regarded her cautiously, suddenly realising how young she was and worrying what he was letting her in for. But she was tough, fun company and madly in love with someone else. That made her a perfect holiday guest. ‘Have you got your passport with you?’
‘It’s in my room.’
‘Good. Because that’s all you’re going to need.’
Within four hours of paying the bill and leaving the Olive Branch by the back door to avoid any more pictures, Dillon and Faith were on a private jet heading west. He refused to let her pack more than a toothbrush: ‘Your clothes are awful. We’ll buy it all there. My treat.’
It wasn’t until they were airborne, her ears popping, that Faith finally took Dillon seriously and realised she was on her way to the Caribbean.
Chapter 78
Spending time at Le Manoir was good for Tash, who could feel the tension draining out of her even after just twenty-four hours, like a beach drying out after a monsoon, as she baked in the Loire sun and listened to Alexandra and Pascal talking of their adventures.
The globetrotting pensioners were clearly thrilled to be home, however much they’d adored their grand tour. Champegny was their haven. They were amazingly close and loving, more so than Tash had seen them for years. Barely more than a few metres apart throughout the day, they were never short of conversation, debate and shared humour. Often they would render one another speechless with laughter, bent double and tears falling from their eyes. Their pace of life had changed since Tash’s last visit. They sat for longer over breakfast, then moved on to a terrace in the sun to read the papers, parasols angled strategically while Alexandra sported a floppy sunhat and Pascal donned huge Roy Orbison dark glasses, later walking steadily in the garden arm in arm, dead-heading, weeding and lopping as they passed.
They were living at retirement pace, Tash realised. They had slowed right down and suddenly looked old. It came as a total shock to her as she studied them with a fresh perspective. They were both grey now; her mother’s once nut brown bob had been infused with palest silver for many years before turning white but Pascal’s thick, Byronic black tresses had only recently become pewter, highlighting his darkly tanned skin and dramatic beetling brows, still raven black and now far thicker than before, with hairs that seemed to grow upward to sweeping peaks like a forest blackened by fire. He was ten years Alexandra’s junior, yet early retirement and travelling had killed off his competitive streak and he was happy to focus on the woman he loved, his country retreat, his vineyard and his food.
Food was the centre of life, an axis around which the day solely revolved. The couple slowly prepared and then lingered with leisurely delight over lunch before taking a long siesta and rising just in time to start cooking and drinking and eating again. Meals at Le Manoir had always been lengthy affairs, but they now took for ever – far too long for Cora and Amery, who fidgeted and wailed after just half an hour. Trying to keep them entertained, aware that her mother and Pascal were nose to nose whispering sweet nothings, Tash was reminded all to vividly of the closeness that she and Hugo had shared before children, of the symbiotic life they had led working and competing together, talking all the time, supporting and sharing and becoming mutually exclusive.
She sat in the bath after putting the children to bed and cried herself silly, her eyes so puffy afterwards that she had to wear her spectacles at dinner.
‘When one cries oneself blind,’ Alexandra told her daughter over sautéed lambs’ kidneys with tarragon and wine, ‘one learns to see with one’s heart so much more.’
Tash took this in thoughtfully.
‘Pascal must go away for a few days,’ she went on in a falsely cheery tone as she set the ball rolling. ‘Can you stay and keep me company? Having you here is so divine.’
Tash wasn’t sure that was true. So far, all she had done was run around manically after the children and blub whenever she was alone.
The following morn
ing Pascal set out, somewhat huffily, for Tours airport, his suitcase crammed with a waxed coat, gaiters, thick jumpers and rain hats.
It was soon almost ninety degrees on the sun-soaked terraces. Tash let her mother entertain the children in the shade of the pergola while she took a long swim in the pool, closing her eyes and diving low into the cool water, trying to see with her heart. But she just got chlorine up her nose and even puffier eyes. She was forced back into her spectacles, this time with unflattering clip-on shades that Alexandra had lent her, which dated from the seventies and made her look like she was trying out for a Cagney and Lacey remake.
The moment the children had settled down for an afternoon nap, Alexandra fetched a fresh bottle of eau de vie and took aim with her biggest cannon. ‘Tash, sweetheart, I think it’s time to talk.’
Of course she knew that this was guaranteed to make her daughter clam up faster than a slammed freezer door.
‘I don’t really want to talk,’ Tash replied, looking trapped.
‘No, not you, darling – me. I want to talk.’ Alexandra smiled at Tash’s baffled expression. She knew her daughter’s weak spot of old: Tash was impossibly polite, having been brought up to be totally fair-handed, a point that had probably been over-laboured by her bullish father. Combined with her natural generosity, it made her charitable to a fault. If invited to dinner, however ghastly the company, Tash would feel obliged to play hostess in return. She replied to every fan letter she, Hugo and the horses received, however vacuous or even malicious. If paid a compliment, she gave one back. If someone opened their heart to her, she opened hers.
Settling down for the first stage of what she knew would be a long and delicate operation, Alexandra opened the bottle and poured out two glasses.
At close to midnight, Alexandra phoned her husband from bed, speaking in French. ‘Chéri, how is my lovely England?’
‘Wet,’ Pascal grumbled. He hated England in August, or indeed at any time of the year, with its terrible food and transport system, full of angry bald idiots driving on the wrong side of the road.
‘Tash has told me what’s happening. Prepare yourself, chéri, it is rather worse than we feared.’
When he heard the details, Pascal was astonished. ‘Hugo tried to force himself upon the girl?’
‘So it seems. I need you to go straight to Haydown and find out Hugo’s version of events, like Hercule Poirot.’
‘He was Belgian,’ Pascal reminded her, bristling.
‘I’m sure there has to be another explanation for this,’ Alexandra rushed on, ignoring his protests. ‘It just sounds so unlike Hugo. You must find out the truth, Maigret.’
Pascal cleared his throat. ‘He is not a man who opens his heart easily, I think – and my English is so rusty.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ she assured him. ‘And please stop off at a supermarket while you are there and – have you got a pen, chéri? Yes? Buy Marmite, Birds Eye custard, Angel Delight (any flavour except raspberry), Spam, apple chutney, Colman’s mint sauce and Typhoo tea bags.’
‘How did you get Tash to talk?’ Pascal asked just before they said goodnight, hoping to get some tips for getting Hugo to spill the beans.
‘I told her about my marriage to her father and what went wrong.’
‘I can hardly do that with Hugo,’ he sighed.
‘Of course you can,’ she said brightly. ‘You have four marriages to choose from. Now get some sleep. Je t’adore.’
Chapter 79
In Fox Oddfield Abbey, Pete gave an exclusive interview to the Sunday Times about the end of his stormy six-year marriage to Indigo, overseen by the ever-professional Clive Maxwell, who was orchestrating the careful release of the story to the media.
‘Indigo says I have a madonna–whore complex,’ he told celebrity profiler Christy d’Isle. ‘But,’ he continued, laughing at his pun, ‘I told her there was never anything in the rumours – I like the woman, don’t get me wrong, and she’s played a blinder with the Sticky and Sweet tour, but she’s not my type. Plus she’s a mate of my daughter, so I wouldn’t go there.’
‘Strike that,’ Clive said smoothly, giving Pete a sharp look to remind him that he was currently ‘going there’ with his son’s fiancée.
‘So there’s nobody else involved?’ Christy checked.
He flashed the Rafferty smile with such force her chair almost flew back against the wall. ‘There’s always somebody else involved, darling. The question is, are they sweet enough to stick?’
Clive closed his eyes in despair.
‘Are you going to be a sugar daddy again then?’
Pete winked at her. They went back a long way and he liked her style. ‘I’m the Rockfather, baby,’ he laughed. ‘And a stick of rock is very hard candy, remember.’
*
‘How did it go?’ Sylva asked him later when they met in the hermitage on the Abbey’s estate, their temporary love nest hidden deep within woodland. To be extra sure of privacy, Sylva had sent out three of her fleet of cars that evening, hiding in one in the hope that the paparazzi would follow one of the dummies while hers crept through one of the many back gateways to the Abbey. In fact, the paparazzi hadn’t followed any of them, believing Sylva to be hiding at home, weeping tears of despair that her pop star fiancé had gone to the Caribbean without her.
They seldom bothered following her when it was raining this heavily. For the past three days of intermittent downpours, Sylva’s loyal gatekeepers had got drenched every time they clambered from their cars to snap their quarry doing something truly newsworthy like collecting her post. Now they preferred to stay parked up until the weather front passed.
The rain was still pounding down on the hermitage roof as she and Pete stripped in their little hidden pleasure palace, at such a peak of mutual attraction that they thought about making love together night and day. In the short snatches of time they did have together, they had to have sex before they could talk, while they talked, before they said goodbye and then again afterwards. Pete was knocking back his little blue pills like Smints, along with an increasing numbers of painkillers as his knees gave him more and more trouble, but he was far too besotted to complain about it.
As Sylva propped herself up on the table, lifted one slim ankle to his shoulder and swung out her other leg to reveal a pussy as sweetly pink and glistening as an orchid after a rainstorm, Pete growled with happy laughter and slid in, telling her about his interview. ‘I just wanted to shout “I’m in love with Trouble!” I want to tell the world how beautiful you are inside and out, how glad I am to have found you, my little Sylva loving cup.’
Those wise, naughty blue eyes that had seen the inside of more hotel rooms and groupies than they’d seen sunsets watched her lovely face colour and her pupils dilate as her eyes lost focus and she came with a series of delicious grunts and squeals, like a comely Eastern European tennis pro serving a clutch of aces in quick succession.
Then, letting him slip out for a moment, she turned around and bent over the table, two perfect buttocks rising up to him with a pretty little oyster pink starfish joining the orchid as options.
‘You are such a naughty girl.’ He slapped one of her buttocks playfully. ‘God, I love you.’
Laying her cheek on the scrubbed pine, she looked back at him over her shoulder and smiled.
During his difficult marriage with Indigo, Pete had suffered long bouts of depression and low self-esteem. Despite being an unreformed serial shagger, he relied upon a steady family life, something that his beloved first wife had understood, turning a blind eye to his infidelities so long as home was sacred and Dillon and Kat loved and protected. But ambitious Indigo, who had provided a crèche, prison and therapy centre, had no such blind spot when it came to his tour pussy and just tried to control him with increasingly rigid demands and threats. He was relieved to be finally free, although he needed the reassurance of a back-up plan. Like his son to whom he had bequeathed the same tendencies, Pete was reluctant to leave the warm,
safe establishment of a long-term relationship unless he had a car waiting with its engine revving.
Sylva’s engine was revving very loudly indeed, but he needed to check it was a truly personal limousine service, not just a card held up at the arrivals gate with the name Rafferty hand-written on it.
‘My son’s a fool to let you slip through his fingers,’ he said as he spread that silken juice from orchid to starfish, dipping in finger and thumb to hold her like a bowling ball.
‘I’m the one slippery in your fingers,’ she gasped.
‘He’ll never forgive us for this,’ he said, with surprising satisfaction. Having not had a top-ten hit in almost five years, Pete secretly couldn’t help wanting to show the little upstart he was still boss, his good intentions forgotten in the wake of scoring the most satisfying paternal victory of his life. ‘He knows I’ll break your heart.’
‘I’d rather have my heart broken by you than frozen by him.’
He smiled, reaching down to steer his eager cock into position. ‘I’m never faithful.’
‘I know!’ she gasped deliciously as his electric eel slipped into the starfish.
‘I like young blondes, threesomes and high-class hookers.’
‘So do I,’ she groaned deliriously as his fingers slithered in and out of the orchid’s mouth.
‘Tell me I’m a better lover than Dillon.’
‘You’re a better lover,’ she said without hesitation. ‘You’re the real deal, Pete. He did nothing for me.’
‘Nothing?’ He drove faster.
‘Nothing!’
He laughed, thrusting ever more eagerly, although he privately thought his son was much more of a chip off the old block than she realised. After all, he was currently entertaining a very young strawberry blonde on his father’s private island, and Sylva clearly had no idea …
