Wild Oats

by Veronica Henry

  She phoned the agency to say she would be indefinitely unavailable. They were sympathetic, but keen to get her working again as soon as possible. She was one of the best maternity nurses on their books. With her youth and energy, new mothers found her sympathetic rather than intimidating, and looked upon her as a friend rather than someone to be in awe of. But Jamie couldn’t give them an idea of when she would be back.

  Over the ensuing months, Jamie toured her way round Mexico, Peru, Ecuador and Nicaragua in search of peace. Once every few weeks, she steeled herself to phone home and check up on Jack. They would have a stilted, awkward conversation, not helped by the time delay on the line. Jamie would hang up hastily, her conscience salved for another couple of weeks.

  But over the past month, as the shards of grief in her heart had gradually started to melt and the pain began to fade, Jamie had a sudden feeling that the time was right to come home. She’d climbed to the top of Machu Picchu and there, on top of the world, standing amongst the clouds, she could almost believe she was in heaven itself. She’d never been a very spiritual or fanciful person, but somehow she’d felt as if her mother was there beside her; as if Louisa was telling her that it was all right, that she was all right, and that it was time for Jamie to go and make her peace with Jack. And Jamie had climbed back down feeling stronger, convinced that ten months was long enough to stay away from someone you knew you had to forgive in the end…

  And now here she was. The back door was slightly ajar, suggesting that her father was in, though they had never been tight on security. Locks and keys weren’t part of the Wilding lifestyle. Jamie breathed in as she pushed open the door and stepped over the threshold, almost expecting the smell of freshly baked soda bread or one of Louisa’s casseroles to rise up and greet her. Instead, there was the odour of cigarette smoke and bacon fat. She frowned – her father only ever smoked cigars. Then she stopped short.

  The kitchen was undoubtedly Bucklebury Farm’s greatest selling point. Nearly thirty-foot long and fifteen wide, it had a high vaulted ceiling, crisscrossed with beams, and a limestone floor. The walls were painted a dusky pink, and were smothered in ancient farming implements. An antediluvian range lurked in an inglenook fireplace at one end, and a huge moose head reigned over the scene in regal bemusement – he was a relic from someone’s past, though no one knew quite whose. In the centre was a hefty oak table, usually bearing a pile of unanswered post, car keys and a battalion of jars containing jam, honey, Marmite, pickles, mustards and chutneys. For as long as Jamie could remember there had always been people sitting at this table, enjoying a morning coffee, a midday beer or an early evening glass of wine, sharing wit, wisdom and salacious gossip.

  Today was no exception. Bent over the newspaper, deep in concentration, a cup of tea at his elbow, was a bare-torsoed man. His hair was somewhere between long and short, whether by design or because he couldn’t be bothered to get it cut, Jamie couldn’t be sure, but he’d tied it back with a bandanna. He was stripped to the waist, his body tanned and sinewy, not an ounce of spare flesh upon him. As he looked up, a pair of brilliant aquamarine eyes met hers.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ She knew she sounded incredibly rude, but she’d been taken unawares. She’d been steeling herself for a confrontation with Jack. She hadn’t been prepared for a half-naked stranger in the kitchen. For some reason – his exotic bone structure, the colour of his skin – she expected him to reply in a foreign accent. Who was he? Some asylum-seeking Eastern European her father was employing at slave wages to maintain the place? Because if so, he wasn’t doing a very good job of it.

  But the voice that answered her was unmistakably English. A laconic, lazy drawl with the insouciance that only public school could provide.

  ‘I could ask you the same question.’ He tipped back in his chair, revealing cut-off jeans and long, bare legs. He’d clearly been doing some sort of menial task: Jamie noticed his hands were filthy, and as he pushed his fringe back from his forehead with the back of his hand he left a streak of dirt across his skin. Then he took a drag from a Disque Bleu smouldering in the ashtray, surveying her through laughing eyes. Jamie scowled.

  ‘For your information –’ she began, but he cut her off with a wave of his hand.

  ‘I know. It’s obvious. You’re Jamie.’ He grinned. ‘My, how you’ve grown.’

  Jamie stared at him, a memory battling its way into her consciousness, like a poor swimmer struggling to the surface of the sea. In her mind’s eye was a boy – well, a youth, perhaps sixteen or seventeen – with the same laughing eyes as the man before her now, but with shorter hair and a lighter physique, sitting on a floating pontoon in red bathing trunks, confident in the knowledge that every female over fifteen and under fifty was gazing at him with longing. Everyone except her, of course.

  ‘Olivier?’

  She was rewarded with a smile of acknowledgement as Olivier stubbed out his cigarette and got to his feet. He was going to hug her, Jamie realized, and she dropped her rucksack just in time to reciprocate. His embrace was easy, familiar, and despite herself Jamie relaxed; it could have been yesterday that they last met, instead of fifteen years ago.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he was saying. ‘I shouldn’t have teased you like that, but I couldn’t resist.’

  ‘You never could,’ countered Jamie, wondering if perhaps lack of sleep and food was making her hallucinate. Olivier Templeton, here, in their kitchen?

  Their fathers had been best friends – inseparable soulmates, until they’d fallen out all those years ago. Yet here was Olivier, holding court as if he owned the place. Even Parsnip and Gumdrop had settled themselves under his chair, clearly quite comfortable with his presence.

  Jamie composed herself as best she could, wriggled out of Olivier’s grasp and smiled.

  ‘So… what are you doing here?’

  ‘I came to give your father my condolences. He… wasn’t in very good shape. I stayed around for a while to make sure he was all right.’ He grinned ruefully. ‘I keep forgetting to leave.’

  Jamie blinked. This was certainly a turn-up for the books. How on earth had the hatchet come to be buried between the Wildings and the Templetons? She didn’t want to ask, as she wasn’t sure she was ready for the answers. And she had a feeling, judging by the lightness of his tone, that Olivier didn’t really want her to probe. They both shared a history that was forbidden territory, for the time being at least.

  ‘Let me make you a cup of tea. You must be shattered.’ Olivier moved over to the sink, grabbing the kettle en route. Jamie felt totally bemused – he was offering her tea in her own house, as if she was a visitor and he the host. She accepted, despite herself, and watched in amazement as he filled the kettle, produced two clean cups from the cupboard and emptied the pot of its last brew in preparation for the next.

  ‘Your father will be pleased to see you,’ remarked Olivier easily. ‘He’s missed you.’

  He made it a statement, not a reproach, but nevertheless Jamie felt on the defensive. Had they talked about her? What had been said? Paranoia crept up and tickled the back of her neck.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘At the races.’

  That figured. Some things didn’t change. Olivier handed her a cup of steaming tea.

  ‘So. How was South America?’

  ‘Amazing.’

  He raised an amused eyebrow.

  ‘That’s it? Just… amazing?’

  Jamie managed a smile despite herself.

  ‘I could go on for hours. Trust me, once I’ve started, you’ll wish you’d never asked. If you’re really unlucky, I’ll show you my slides.’ She took a slurp of tea. It was heaven. ‘This is divine. It’s the first proper cup of tea I’ve had for nearly a year.’

  ‘Is that what made you come home? Tea deprivation?’

  The fact that his query was masked with a joke made her feel uncomfortable. Those piercing eyes were very perspicacious. And she didn’t know whether she could trust him, or quite what h
is game was. There were too many pieces of the puzzle missing for her to confide in him just yet. Instead, she made a rueful face.

  ‘Ran out of money. Thought I’d better come back and do some work.’

  ‘Bloody money. Always gets in the way. Stops you from doing what you really want to do.’

  ‘Spoken from the heart?’

  Olivier spooned three sugars into his tea and stirred.

  ‘Dad wants me to take over his car dealership in the New Year. This is my last-ditch attempt at having some fun. I’ve spent the last five years being a ski instructor in the winter and a tennis coach in the summer. He says it’s about time I had some responsibility.’

  Responsibility? Jamie couldn’t imagine that Eric Templeton knew the meaning of the word. When had he ever been responsible? She raised a dubious eyebrow.

  ‘That doesn’t sound like your dad.’

  ‘I know. Bit of a cheek, considering what he used to be like. But he’s changed a lot. Keeps going on at me to settle down. Keeps asking me if I’ve got a pension plan.’ Olivier rolled his eyes. ‘As if.’

  There was an awkward silence, as the conversation seemed to run out of steam. Olivier cleared his throat.

  ‘I’m… I’m really sorry about your mother, by the way.’

  He obviously felt uncomfortable talking about it, as he couldn’t meet Jamie’s eye. But Jamie didn’t want to dwell on it either.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, then changed the subject quickly as she put her tea cup back in the sink. ‘I think I’ll go and have a bath.’

  For some reason, she suddenly felt horribly self-conscious about her appearance. She was keenly aware that her legs hadn’t been shaved for weeks, and though the hairs on them were fine and fair, they were still evident. The shower she’d had at the hotel before catching the plane had been nearly twenty-four hours ago. She knew the combat shorts she was wearing looked butch and unflattering, and the plaits that were most practical for travelling made her look about twelve.

  ‘There should be enough hot water. If not I’ll flick on the immersion for you.’

  Jamie frowned. Yet again Olivier was making her feel as if he were the host and she the intruder. He must have his feet well under the table, if he knew where the immersion was. She wondered exactly how long he’d been here.

  ‘I know where it is. Thank you.’ She couldn’t quite keep the coolness out of her tone as she left the room.

  The final indignity was when Parsnip and Gumdrop made no move to follow her, but stayed resolutely under Olivier’s feet.

  Feeling slightly disgruntled, Jamie lugged her rucksack into the utility room, emptied almost all of its unsavoury contents into the washing machine, then went up the two flights of winding stairs to her bedroom. It was just as she had left it. She’d stripped it of most of her childhood detritus several years ago: pony-club rosettes, pop-star collages, postcards, dead pot plants – and tried to make it more sophisticated, with photos in proper frames and candles. But it was still definitely the bedroom of a single girl, with its high brass bed and rose-covered eiderdown, and the patchwork nightdress case she’d made in needlework at school and hadn’t been able to bring herself to throw away.

  She wondered where Olivier was sleeping. There was another bedroom on her floor, cosy and crooked but with barely any headroom – surely he would be too tall? Or there were three large, well-appointed rooms in the later wing of the house, each with an en-suite bathroom. No doubt he was in one of those.

  She sat on the bed, suddenly exhausted, and debated whether food or a bath was the more important. Neither of them had featured prominently on the shoestring budget she’d set for herself on her South American tour. Finally she decided that, for the sake of public interest, she’d make herself presentable first. There was nothing but an ancient box of Radox in the bathroom on her floor, but somehow she felt inhibited about prowling round the house in search of something more exotic, in case Olivier appeared miraculously with an assortment of luxury toiletries. She wanted time alone to gather her thoughts – if there was one thing Jamie hated it was being wrongfooted – so she made do, emptying the remnants of the box under the taps.

  She dropped her dusty, sweaty clothes on to the bathroom floor and climbed into the blissfully hot water. She’d been lucky to get a tepid shower in most of the places she had dossed, and the water had often been suspiciously murky in colour. She slid down until she was submerged up to her neck, closed her eyes and began to try and make sense of the strange turn of events. Of all the scenarios she had envisaged on her homeward journey, finding Olivier Templeton in her kitchen had not been one of them.

  Jack Wilding and Eric Templeton had met as boys, while incarcerated together at a minor public school. There they’d run scams and wheezes for the benefit of their pockets rather than their fellow pupils, and had narrowly avoided expulsion on several occasions. From then on they’d been partners in crime, terrorizing the streets of Chelsea in the Swinging Sixties with their contrasting good looks and charm: Eric dark and swarthy and dangerous, Jack golden-haired and smooth and suave, both dressed to kill and ready to pounce. They were bad boys together, heads filled with dreams and schemes that, because of their boldness and daring, often came to profitable fruition. Their flat off the King’s Road was a notorious sin bin, where a stream of glamorous girls came to lose their virginity and their hearts.

  Eventually, they grew up. Jack had fallen in love with the bohemian and almost-aristocratic Louisa, a student at Chelsea Art School. He’d found her sketching passers-by in a coffee bar on the King’s Road.

  He’d demanded she do his portrait, and she’d willingly agreed. The sitting had blossomed into a full-blown love affair, and before he knew it he was married. Five years later they’d taken up residence at Bucklebury Farm in Shropshire, handed over to Louisa by her parents, who insisted they were far too old to manage the place any longer.

  To his surprise, Jack found he didn’t miss London and took to country life like a duck to water, rather enjoying being something of a squire in the village, with his own silver tankard in the pub. Big fish, small pond, Eric had teased, with his cosmopolitan lifestyle dealing in second-hand sports cars. Then he’d settled down too: on one of his trips abroad he’d come back with Isabelle, allegedly the daughter of a French count. They’d married, and lived in a luxury penthouse in St John’s Wood, all mirrored ceilings and leather and glass and chrome, a million miles from Bucklebury Farm.

  Louisa and Jack stayed with Eric and Isabelle whenever they went to London, which was often. Isabelle neither understood nor liked the countryside, so the visits were rarely reciprocated, but the four of them went on an annual holiday to the south of France for a fortnight of sybaritic sunbathing and drinking. This ritual had a hiatus when children arrived: first the Templetons had Emile, Delphine and Olivier in quick succession, then Jamie had come along – and they all agreed the French Riviera lost some of its charm when one had screaming infants in tow. But one summer, when Olivier was seventeen and Jamie fifteen, Eric was given the use of a huge luxury villa near Cap Ferrat, and reinstated the tradition.

  Jamie remembered the holiday being a frightening mixture of heaven and hell. The setting was divine, the food out of this world, the weather perfect. But she found she couldn’t relax with the Templetons. Isabelle was so frighteningly chic, with her Parisian clothes, her twelve swimsuits, her high heels on the beach, her menthol cigarettes. Eric was gregarious and boisterous, and brought out the worst in her father: they were bad boys together again, with their constant calls for champagne. Her mother seemed amused by it all, but kept her cool reserve, as beautiful as Isabelle in her own way, but without the need for constant reapplication of Dior lipstick. But Jamie couldn’t help feeling as if an air of forced jollity kept the momentum of the holiday going; a desperation to have fun before time ran out. How true that turned out to be…

  Whilst the grown-ups dozed and read by the pool, and Emile and Delphine disappeared off each day on mopeds, Jamie
and Olivier found themselves thrown together and expected to get on. They’d played happily enough together when they were little, when their parents had got together for weekends. But no one seemed to have taken into account the excruciating torture of adolescence. At first, Jamie was tongue-tied and embarrassed in Olivier’s company. As a self-conscious fifteen-year-old from the sticks, she was a little in awe of his extrovert London sophistication, and longed to crawl away and read books in her bedroom. But Olivier wasn’t having any of it: he was friendly, with an enormous sense of fun, and it wasn’t long before he managed to bring her out of herself. Soon she was hanging out with the other young people he’d met on the beach, drinking beer in the bars and sneaking off to the boîtes de nuit when they’d managed to ditch the parents after dinner. Occasionally they’d bump into Emile and Delphine, who studiously ignored them. Olivier, meanwhile, treated her with a certain chivalry that made her feel safe, but teased her mercilessly, almost as if she was a younger sister. But not quite. Once or twice she’d caught him looking at her in a way that made her cheeks go pink – though if he caught her looking he’d turn away, make a joke, start playing the fool.

  One afternoon, she’d been asleep on the pontoon on her front. She was half aware that her fair skin was in danger of burning, but the holiday had turned her a golden brown for the first time in her life and she wanted to prolong her tan. It made her look so different; when she tied up her hair in the evenings and applied mascara and lip gloss, she felt incredible. She became aware of admiring glances, and aware of Delphine’s hostility at having competition. Despite herself, Jamie found she rather liked the sense of power it gave her.

  Suddenly from the shore there came an urgent whistle. It was their signal to go back, to start getting ready to go out for dinner, but surely it wasn’t that time yet? Jamie sat up sharply, then realized with horror that her bikini top had stayed on the pontoon. She was topless. Olivier fell about laughing as she tried to cover herself.