by Jessica Hart
“Hey, I’ve got you,” she said to Sweetie, smiling wryly to herself as Sweetie ignored her completely. “You’re my family now.”
Max paused at the manor gates and whistled for the dogs. They were ecstatic at getting another walk after being shut in all day while he’d been at Stella’s and were snuffling happily in the undergrowth. As always, Christmas lunch had stretched long into the afternoon, and it had been nearly seven before he’d been able to get away. He’d walked Bella and Ted as soon as he got in, but he couldn’t settle.
The truth was that he’d been restless ever since kissing Flora that day. Now he couldn’t open the damned fridge for the butter without thinking about how warm she had been, how sweet she had tasted. It had been a stupid thing to do.
The cold made his teeth ache and his breath hung in frozen clouds in the air. Holly and Ben had been disappointed that once again it hadn’t been a white Christmas, but Max preferred it like this. A hard frost had lent a sheen to the road, and the countryside was rigid in a starlight so bright he had no need of a torch. It was very quiet as he crossed the green, Bella and Ted quartering the grass, noses to the ground. Everyone was at home, tucked up in the warm behind closed curtains. Even the Three Bells was locked and dark. He wondered how Flora had got on.
When he had asked what she was doing for Christmas, she’d told him that she would be helping out at the pub.
“Bit of a busman’s holiday, isn’t it?”
“It’ll be fun,” she’d said. “The atmosphere’s always great when you’re cooking Christmas lunch. Even Jennifer Harmon cracks a smile.”
But now it was half past nine and everyone had gone home, even Flora who had only a sneaky cat to go home to.
Without meaning to, his feet had taken him past the church, past the old market cross, past what had once been the village shop run by Norman and Margaret Deare and up the street that curved round towards the lane where they had lived. It was a pretty stone cottage with steps up to the front door. In the summer, Margaret Deare had decorated the steps with a colourful display of geraniums and busy lizzies but the pots were empty now.
The curtains were drawn but a sliver of welcoming yellow light showed through a crack. Flora was still up.
Bella and Ted waited, puzzled, by his side. Max hesitated, then knocked at the door.
There was a pause, long enough for Max to wonder what the hell he was doing. He was on the verge of turning to go, unsure whether he was relieved or disappointed, when Flora opened the door. She was wearing faded pyjama bottoms covered in pale blue bunnies and a baggy jumper that Max strongly suspected might have belonged to her grandfather. Her hair was tousled and her face a bit puffy and creased, as if she had fallen asleep on the sofa.
She looked wonderful.
Max felt his heart swell even as his tongue tangled over an explanation for what he was doing on her doorstep. “I, er, I was passing and thought I’d wish you a happy Christmas.”
Flora looked at him for a long moment, and then she stood back to hold open the door. “Come in.” She looked down at Bella and Ted who were pushing forward. “I suppose you’d better come in too, but I don’t know what Sweetie is going to say.”
Sweetie had plenty to say. He made it clear that he wasn’t having any dogs in his house. He puffed up in a ferocious ball of black fluff and hissed so terrifyingly from the back of a chair that Bella and Ted whimpered and ran behind Max.
“Do you think they’d mind going in the kitchen?”
Max thought they’d be only too glad to get away from the cat. But by the time they’d separated the animals, and Flora had poured a glass of wine, and the cat had returned to its normal size to stalk menacingly back and forwards in front of the kitchen door, they were left with an awkward silence.
“I’m sorry, did I wake you up?”
“I think I did drop off.” She rubbed her hair. “That’s why I look such a mess. I wasn’t expecting any visitors.”
“Sorry,” he said again. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have come. It was an impulse.”
And how long was it since he had given in to one of those?
“I’m glad you did,” said Flora, settling herself cross-legged on the end of the little sofa. “It’s nice to have some company. Sweetie is even less chatty than you are.”
“How was lunch in the Three Bells?” he asked stiffly.
“Great. Hectic, but worth it. We had a laugh. I love Tom,” she added with a reminiscent smile.
Max hated the way he prickled instantly at the idea. “Tom?”
“You must know Tom!” Flora looked at Max in surprise. “The chef at the Three Bells? He’s the one who really turned it into a gastropub.”
She forgot that he didn’t know Combe St Philip the way she did, Max thought. Hasebury Hall was on the outskirts of the village, set at the end of its long avenue, its boundary marked by the great stone gates his great-great-grandfather had erected. Flora might not have been born in the village, or come from a family that had dominated it for some five hundred years, but she was part of Combe St Philip in a way that he could never be, especially since his father’s greed and stupidity had irretrievably ruined the reputation of the Kennards.
Flora was telling him how Pete Harmon had given her her first job at sixteen, helping in the kitchen. “I loved it so much, I became assistant chef as soon as I left school. Tom was the one who said I should go to London a couple of years later. He said he’d taught me all he could and I needed to move on. I owe him everything. Even if I hadn’t enjoyed it, I would have helped Tom out so the other staff could have a break over Christmas.”
She swirled her glass and bent her head over it to sniff the wine appreciatively. “So, how was your Christmas?”
“Oh, fine ... the usual: overexcited children, too much to eat, polite conversation with Marcus.”
“Is it hard, seeing Stella with Marcus?”
“No.” Max was definite about that. “I’m just glad she’s happy now. I feel guilty about the divorce.”
Flora paused with the glass halfway to her lips. “But I thought Stella left you?”
“She did, but I didn’t make things easy for her.” Max stared down into his own glass as if he could see the past shimmering there. “We’d only been married a year when she found herself in the middle of a national scandal when my father was arrested. It was a humiliating time, to say the least of it, and Stella was dragged down with the rest of us.”
Shame still burned in the pit of Max’s stomach whenever he thought about how greedy and stupid and dishonourable his father had been. Gerald Kennard’s family had had no idea of what he’d been doing, but they were tainted by association.
“Stella thought she was marrying a landscape designer in line to inherit a prosperous estate and a historic manor house. She ended up embroiled in scandal and shame and with a husband presiding over the sell-off of the family inheritance. To be honest, I’m surprised she stuck with me as long as she did.”
Chapter Seven
Flora didn’t look convinced. “Whatever happened to ‘for better or worse’?”
“These things are never one-sided,” said Max. “There was so much going on then. I had to cope with my mother, who shrugged off my father’s betrayal, but refused to accept that she couldn’t afford to live in the same way they had done. I was worried about Hope. She adored our father, and was only fifteen when her whole world turned upside down.
“In the middle of it all, Stella was pregnant,” he remembered. “I didn’t give her enough attention, and by the time Holly was born, I was in the middle of trying to rescue something from the whole mess. I was determined to save Hasebury Hall, if nothing else, but that meant I had to sell all the farms and all the land except for the gardens. The paintings and antique furniture and silver had to go, too. Cars, horses, jewellery, the lot.”
The corners of Flora’s mouth pulled down. “It must have been tough.”
“People deal with worse things. We still had a roof over our
heads – just.”
Max shrugged, but it had been tough, disposing of everything his ancestors had worked so hard to acquire. He’d imagined them spinning furiously in their tombs in St Philip and All Angels. He’d had no choice, Max knew, but still the guilt weighed heavily on him.
“With brilliant timing, I’d set up as a freelance landscape designer two months before my father was arrested,” he told Flora. “That was a struggle too. I realized that if I was to pay off the mountain of debts, I had to find a new source of income.”
“Is that why you set up your pot plant business?”
He nodded. “It’s not something that makes my gardener’s soul thrill, I have to admit, but it’s turned into a much more profitable sideline than I could have imagined, and it meant that I could hold on to Hasebury Hall and feed my family.
“But that was another thing occupying my attention, and Stella resented it. She hadn’t signed up for a frugal existence, for constantly being told to save money, to put on a jumper instead of the heating. She was used to skiing holidays and summers in Tuscany and, I don’t know, new clothes and whatever women spend their money on. I was preoccupied and short-tempered, which didn’t help. We argued constantly about money, how she couldn’t spend a hundred quid on having her hair done or to invite friends round to dinner.”
“You don’t have to spend a fortune on dinner with friends,” Flora pointed out.
“You do when you insist on having it catered because you can’t cook.”
“Stella can’t cook?” Flora looked astounded.
“Not everyone loves food the way you do,” said Max. “Stella would happily get by on a lettuce leaf or two, and I’m in no position to criticize her on the cooking front, I know. I can put together a spaghetti bolognaise from a jar, but that’s about it.”
“What about Holly and Ben?”
“Stella’s got an au pair who cooks pretty well – she did a good job of Christmas lunch, anyway. And there are always prepared meals from the supermarket.” He almost smiled at Flora’s expression.
“Ending a marriage is never good, but by the end, I was just glad to stop the fighting. Marcus had been waiting in the wings a long time, I think, and Stella married him very quickly after we were divorced. He gives her all the financial security she craves, and he’s good with the kids, too. Holly and Ben love him. It’s much better for them than growing up with Stella and I rowing the whole time.”
“Hmm,” said Flora doubtfully. “So Stella leaves you and ends up with the kids, an adoring husband and lots of money, while you get the debts and a house that’s falling down around your ears?”
“It’s not that bad,” Max couldn’t help protesting. “It just needs a little paint.”
“It doesn’t seem fair.”
“It is fair,” he insisted. “The truth is, I put saving Hasebury Hall above my marriage. That’s on me. There have been Kennards at the manor for hundreds of years. I just couldn’t stand the thought of being the one who let it go.”
“That would have been your father’s responsibility, not yours,” Flora pointed out.
“Yes, but he didn’t care about Hasebury Hall the way I did. The way I do. For my father, the estate was just there to fund his lifestyle, while for me, it’s part of who I am.”
Max sipped reflectively at his wine. “I learnt that from my grandfather. He was the opposite of my father: very upright, very stern and a bit forbidding to a lot of people, but he had complete integrity and he loved Hasebury Hall with a passion. Even when I was very small, he would take me round the house and we’d stop at every portrait so that he could tell me about each ancestor and what they had done for the estate.”
“I think I remember my grandparents talking about him,” said Flora. “I’ve got a feeling my grandfather fought alongside him in the Second World War, though Pops was just a soldier and your grandfather an officer, of course, so he didn’t really know him. But Pops admired him, I know that.”
“He wasn’t an easy man to get to know. He preferred dogs to people. When they died, he buried them in a corner of the orchard and gave them a proper headstone. I knew as much about the dogs as I did about the portraits of my ancestors.”
Max half-smiled at the memory. “He died when I was seven, but I’ve never forgotten him telling me that Hasebury Hall would be mine one day and that I would have to look after it. That’s what kept me going when I was sent away to school later that year.
“I hated it,” he remembered bleakly. “I used to lie in my dorm with my head under my pillow so no one would hear me crying. All I wanted to do was to come home. I wasn’t homesick for my parents, but I missed the house and the dogs. My father had a golden retriever called Bess – a love of dogs was the only thing we ever had in common – and she was a great dog. I missed her more than my parents.”
Poor little boy, thought Flora. Her throat ached for the seven-year-old Max, sent away from all that was familiar. No wonder he had seemed aloof in the village. No wonder he had fallen so heavily for Stella and the idea of someone to love him.
“Seven’s very young to go away to boarding school,” she said.
“It was supposed to toughen me up,” Max said flatly. “Besides, what else were my parents supposed to do with their child while they were off having a good time?” She could hear his struggle to erase the underlying bitterness in his voice, but his mouth twisted. “So I’d long to come home, but when I did, I didn’t really feel I belonged here either any more. My parents usually had friends staying, and I was a nuisance. I thought it would be better when Hope was born, but she was so much our father’s favourite ...” He shrugged. “Well, there wasn’t a place for me.”
The thought of the careless cruelty to the little boy he had been made Flora tighten her fingers around the stem of her glass. “What about your mother? Didn’t she love you?”
“Oh, my mother ...” Max lifted his shoulders and then dropped them as if defeated by the idea of explaining his mother to anyone. “I don’t think, really, that my mother loved anyone but herself. She was beautiful and spoiled, and she could be great fun. I remember how she used to laugh, and how she’d light up a room when she walked into it, but she had the attention span of a gnat. She was made to flit around parties, not deal with messy stuff like children or money.
“She wasn’t horrified by what my father had done, but she couldn’t forgive him for ruining her comfortable lifestyle. She divorced him straight away and remarried a wealthy banker who could keep her in the manner to which she felt entitled.”
“She died not long after your father, didn’t she?”
“Yes, swimming off some billionaire’s yacht after too much champagne for lunch.” Max’s smile was more painful than he realized. “Typical of her. I can just hear her saying, ‘oh, but darling, what a way to go!’”
Flora uncrossed her legs to lean over and refill his glass. “It’s not much fun having a mother who doesn’t love you, is it?”
“No.” He looked at her. “Do you still see yours?”
“Occasionally. She drifts in and out of my life.” Having refilled her own glass, Flora wriggled around to find a more comfortable position against the cushions and crossed her legs once more. “Sky isn’t a bad person. She can be quite charming, in fact, but I’ve never been enough for her. She’s always searching for something more, something spiritual.
“A lot of what I’ve done is in reaction to Sky. She eats lentils and mung beans; I cook incredibly elaborate and expensive dishes. She lives in ashrams or communes; I had a loft in east London. She’s slight and ethereal; I’m ... not. I blame my grandmother for that,” Flora added with a smile. “She was so appalled at my diet when I first came to live here that she cooked me treats the whole time. Steamed puddings were my favourite, so I had lots of those. I was skinny then, if you can believe it, but by the time I’d been here three months I was a little pudding myself!”
“Did you ever know your father?” Max asked curiously.
&nbs
p; “I’ve no idea who he was,” said Flora. “I tried asking Sky, but she just says I was born in a ‘place of great love’, so I suspect she doesn’t know either.” She sighed a little. “I used to long for a father. Before I got to know Hope, I envied her so much having a father who adored her. But I was lucky,” she added quickly. “Pops was the perfect father figure for me.”
It was almost as if she wouldn’t let herself acknowledge the sadness in her story. Max thought about his own father, who had humiliated and betrayed them. At least he had known who his father was and where he came from. Flora didn’t even have that.
Flora ran a finger around the rim of her glass, thinking about her mother. “For a long time, I resented her. It wasn’t so much the way she ignored me, as the way she never thought about my grandparents. It used to make me furious, but I realized when Pops was ill that actually, it was my mother’s loss. I got to spend time with him, and she didn’t. So I managed to let all that go in the end – although I still can’t forgive her for my name,” she added, thinking that it was time to lighten the atmosphere.
“What’s wrong with Flora?” Max asked, surprised.
“It’s not the name on my birth certificate.”
He sat up. “What is?”
Flora pressed her lips together and shook her head. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
“Tell me.”
“You’ll laugh.”
Max pointed at his face. “Does this look like the face of a man who would laugh at you?”
She let her eyes rest on the austere angles of his cheek and jaw, the heart-shakingly cool line of his mouth, and the memory of the kiss they had shared flared bright inside her. She looked away.
