by Fiona Walker
‘Needs a damned haircut.’ James looked at Tash critically. She was excitedly waggling a card featuring Wills and Harry and whispering to Niall that Sophia must have forged it. ‘So does her chap, come to that. Both look like a pair of gypsies.’
‘I was talking about Mummy,’ Alexandra said kindly, and then looked up to see James’s wife hovering nervously in the doorway, the lipstick-stained glass of her third Glühwein already half-empty.
‘Here, Henrietta darling!’ she called out, patting the seat beside her. ‘Come and sit down – you must be exhausted after all that cooking yesterday. How many did you have?’
‘Oh, just James and the girls,’ Henrietta swallowed nervously and perched as far away from Alexandra as possible, avoiding that warm, friendly gaze as she cast her blue eyes down to her knees, uneasily pleating her flowered Laura Ashley skirt with her fingers. ‘Emily wanted to bring her boyfriend, but James felt we should just have family this year.’
‘Chap’s a dratted yob.’ James cleared his throat, desperate to prod Henrietta into a more animated state. She was usually far more effervescent than this, but whenever she encountered Alexandra, his cool-headed, blonde second wife – to whom Alexandra could give almost twenty years – became ridiculously gauche, like a lower-third schoolgirl with a crush on a sixth-form lacrosse captain.
‘Em adores Six Pack,’ she said gently. ‘And, after all, he’s her third boyfriend since she went to university last October, so I don’t think we need panic. You know what they’re like at that age.’
‘Gosh, yes – Sophia had loads of simply ghastly boyfriends before she met Ben,’ Alexandra sympathised. ‘Tell me, why is he called Six Pack? Is he a bit of a party animal or something?’
Henrietta shook her head. ‘Something to do with his tummy, I gather. Em tried to explain, but I found it all rather baffling.’
‘Is she here today?’
Alexandra looked around the gathered throng, a mixture of her own children and grandchildren, Sophia’s in-laws and various honking Worcestershire locals that her elder daughter had deemed socially vital for Boxing Day lunch. The only noticeable absentees were various of the Merediths who were still out hunting, Ben’s great chum Hugo who – usually a regular at Sophia’s Boxing Day gathering – had Christmased in Australia this year, and, now Alexandra came to look, Henrietta’s fractious but likeable elder daughter Emily was also not in evidence.
‘She’s spending the day with some friends.’ Henrietta gave James a sideways look, but he showed no sign of guilt. There had been a huge row that morning as he’d tried to bully Emily into coming, culminating in his telling her that he wouldn’t pay off her overdraft unless she came to lunch. She’d refused, and stormed away from the house in Henrietta’s car.
‘I see Beccy’s here, though.’ Alexandra grinned at Henrietta’s younger, pudgier blonde daughter, who grinned back and then, blushing furiously, scuttled over to attack a tray of hors d’oeuvres. She reminded Alexandra of Tash at that age – shy, easily intimidated and desperate not to be noticed.
‘Is she doing “A” levels this year?’
‘Next.’ Henrietta watched as her daughter crammed back three smoked salmon parcels on the trot.
‘You and I must get our heads together soon.’ Alexandra dropped her voice and touched Henrietta’s arm. ‘About the most exciting event of next year.’
‘Oh yes?’ Henrietta hoped it wasn’t anything that might annoy James.
‘Tash and Niall’s wedding,’ Alexandra whispered. ‘I hope you’ll chum up with me to organise it – I think we can give them quite a splash, don’t you? Particularly if we keep the details a surprise. Pascal’s agreed to pay for most of it, so I’m planning to spend a lot of time in England this spring. Gosh, we can be lavish!’
That, Henrietta realised, was truly going to annoy James.
‘Lunch!’ Sophia chimed at the same time as her synchronised antique clocks all pealed the first hour of the afternoon throughout Home Farm.
‘Christ, it’s like the Feast of Lanterns,’ Sally muttered under her breath as they filed through to the long dining room to be faced with a table positively groaning under the weight of its piled goodies – most of them priceless crockery and silver rather than food.
Beside her, Matty, who was rebelliously donning his crocheted hat, was looking hugely sulky. They had spent a ludicrously uncomfortable night on the floor of the forge whilst the kids shared the sofa like Dickensian waifs. As a result they were both walking like rheumatic OAPs and Matty was convinced he had developed a chill. He was absolutely furious that his mother had called the forge from her plush hotel first thing that morning to pass on the news that Sophia was now expecting them for lunch and was delighted that they could make it after all. Knowing that Tash and Niall were likely to announce their Big News that day, Sally had insisted that they cancel their London lunch and go to Worcestershire.
‘She told me there was nothing veggie here apart from bloody veggies,’ Matty hissed under his breath.
‘Great – can I have ham then?’ Tom looked up at his father hopefully.
‘No, you can’t.’ Matty grumpily sat down next to Niall, completely ignoring Sophia’s placings.
Sighing, Sally winked at a downcast Tom and headed for the opposite end of the table where she realised happily that Sophia had placed her between her affable, easy-going husband Ben and a very dishy local who’d already filled her glass several times, told her some lovely gossip about the Parker-Bowleses and peered into her cleavage with surreptitious admiration, much to Matty’s disgust – more because she had her cleavage on display than because he had looked, Sally suspected.
‘Tom, you’re eating in the kitchen with the other children.’ Sophia smiled coolly at her nephew.
‘But I’m nine!’ he protested, looking deeply affronted.
‘Quite,’ Sophia waved him away impatiently. ‘Beccy can eat with us this year, though.’
‘Gee, thanks.’ Beccy pushed back her alice band and noticed to her delight and terror that Sophia was booting Matty out of his chair and indicating for her to sit in it. This meant she would be sitting next to Niall. Next to her all-time hero, idol and crush. Next to the man she most wanted to take her breath away, take her virginity, and just basically take her away.
‘I think I’d really rather eat with the children, actually,’ she said in a terrified bleat.
‘Nonsense!’ Sophia looked aghast. ‘You’ll muck up my numbers.’
‘Oh, do sit next to Niall,’ encouraged a soft voice behind Beccy as Tash wandered back from washing her hands upstairs. ‘He thinks your’re great – and he’s dying to give you all his opinionated clap-trap about horses and courses.’
Beccy blushed even more deeply. Try as she might to hate Tash for having Niall, she admired her riding too much to truly detest her. Beccy was on the lower rungs of eventing – just out of juniors and into young riders – and Tash was something of an idol.
‘Besides, he’s got Granny opposite him, and he’s terrified of her.’ Tash winked at Beccy and nodded towards Etty, still sporting her bearskin hat and fur coat to ward off the cold of Sophia’s house. ‘You can hold his hand and keep him distracted.’
Beccy gulped with gratitude and fear.
Tash was rather alarmed throughout the meal to find herself being peered at with avid interest by a number of her relatives. Her every move, from using the wrong spoon for her starter to dribbling red wine down the front of her cream jumper, was noted and contemplated by several sets of amber or green eyes.
She tried to catch Niall’s eye for support, but he was wrapped up in flirting with Beccy on his far side, making Henrietta’s daughter turn pink with delight as he flattered her like mad to cheer her up. Tash helped herself to more devilled turkey and dropped most of it in her wine glass.
By the time the dessert was circulating the table on a second lap, Sally had winked at her three times, her father had asked her if she had anything she wanted to tell him, and Et
ty loudly enquired why she wasn’t wearing her lovely glass ring today.
‘My what?’
‘Your ring, chérie.’ Etty waved her wine glass around in an expansive gesture which caused the men either side of her to duck. ‘That lovely bijou that you were wearing hier soir.’
‘Oh, that thing!’ Tash laughed. ‘I think I’ve lost it.’
There was a shocked silence at her end of the table.
Niall, who’d had rather too much wine, let out an enraged faux-theatrical wail as he turned to face her again. ‘But that was your engagement ring, dammit!’
‘And I told you yesterday that my answer was no.’ Tash grinned at him.
‘Ah, no, my darling.’ Reaching out a hand, he lifted her chin and stared her out with relish. ‘What you actually said was that you’d think about it.’
‘I might change my mind then.’ Tash pouted cheerfully, giving him a slight wink.
The rest of the table was hushed now. From the gloomy far end, Tash caught sight of her gossip-mad Aunt Cassandra frantically shushing various waffly locals.
‘I might even say yes, just for the hell of it,’ she halfheartedly pursued the role-play, increasingly aware that it was eliciting rather too much attention, particularly from her mother, who was almost in the flower arrangement in her attempt to listen in.
‘Might you now?’ Niall was growing aware of the attention too and relishing the prospect of playing to a crowd, although several glasses of Ben’s best port was blurring the plot somewhat. He seemed to recall that Tash was entertaining a proposal from Wally the collie at Lime Tree Farm.
‘Oh, yes, you must!’ Alexandra joined in eagerly. ‘You absolutely must!’
‘Must what?’ Tash and Niall both turned to her in confusion.
‘Say yes.’ Alexandra sounded slightly less sure of herself now. ‘I actually thought you already had. I’ve told your father and he’s terribly excited about it.’
‘Is he?’ Bewildered, Tash looked at her father.
James cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘Very pleased. Yes,’ he muttered grimly.
‘What on earth are you all on about?’ Sophia piped up from the end of the table, furious that this loud family dispute had just interrupted a wonderful, gossipy story she was being told about a local landowner’s marijuana plants.
‘Tash and Niall are going to get married!’ Alexandra announced dreamily.
‘We’re what?’ Tash gaped at her.
Niall started to laugh uproariously. Beside him, Beccy’s face was fading with disappointment through the various shades of high blush like a dying sunset.
It was at this moment that Etty Buckingham realised that she might have started something of a faux-rumour. She dabbed her nervously puckered mouth daintily with her napkin as she let the gravity of her misapprehension sink in. Never one to take being proven wrong on the chin, she realised that hasty and drastic action was called for.
‘Eeeeegh!’ She let out a delighted, creaky wail which silenced the table from its increasingly excited, congratulatory babbling.
‘You are going to make a dying woman so very, very ’appy, ma jolie petite!’ She rose shakily from her seat, mustering a few tears as she stretched across the table to embrace Tash, hugging a lot of the flower arrangement at the same time. ‘I sink zere is not a lovelier sing I could want to ’appen before I leave zis world.’
‘But I – I mean we . . .’ Tash fought to control the situation, but her grandmother was too forceful and too desperate.
‘I weel pay for eet all,’ Etty announced grandly, reaching for a handkerchief to dab her eyes. ‘I weel spare no expense. I weel make thees the best—’
‘We’re paying, Mummy!’ Alexandra chipped in. ‘Pascal is quite delighted to help two such lovely young people start married life with every possible treat.’
Pascal cleared his throat unhappily.
‘I say, congratulations, chaps—’ Ben Meredith was trying to raise his glass at the head of the table, but his wife cut him off.
‘By rights, Daddy should actually pay for Tash’s wedding, Mummy,’ she argued. ‘He paid for ours.’ She carefully didn’t add what a fight he had put up to keep it cheap.
James’s jowls were lifting like a bulldog cornered by honking geese. ‘I’m not bloody paying.’
‘But we’re—’ Tash stared hopelessly at Niall.
He was still speechless with giggles, lifting his palms upwards and shaking his head.
‘You paid for my wedding!’ Sophia pointed out.
‘And damned nearly bankrupted myself in the process.’
‘I weel pay!’
‘You’re absolutely penniless, Mother. Of course you can’t pay.’ Alexandra was beaming at Tash, tears edging her mascara into her crows’ feet. ‘I’m just so happy for you both, darling.’
‘Mummy, I think there’s been a terrible mis—’
‘Shut up, everyone!’ howled a loud bass from the head of the table, accompanied by the chiming of a coffee spoon against a port glass.
They all shut up and turned to look at Sophia’s husband, Ben – a tall, rangy blond with soup stains on his shirt and his thinning mop of hay-like hair on end. He rose from his seat to his full six feet four inches, stooping to avoid the Christmas holly which was escaping from a picture frame behind his head, and grinned awkwardly.
‘I think we should actually be congratulating Tash and Niall here,’ he said, rather embarrassed now by his outburst, his weathered cheeks starting to pinken. ‘Champagne all round, I say.’
‘Have we got enough?’ Sophia took a sharp breath. ‘It won’t be chilled.’
‘It weel in this house, chérie.’ Pascal shivered.
‘Oh, Christ alive!’ Tash whispered, kicking Niall, who was now bent double with delighted mirth. ‘What are we going to do?’
Etty, who was pretending to be so carried away with emotion that she had her face buried in her handkerchief, held her breath and eyed them closely through the lacework.
‘Well.’ Niall straightened up with difficulty and buried his mouth in Tash’s hair so that only she could hear, ‘We could get married, I guess.’ He was still fighting giggles.
‘I guess,’ Tash said hesitantly, worried that she was going to faint because her heart was beating so quickly that her blood was whooshing around her body like a white-water canoe run. ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit drastic, though?’
‘Not nearly so terrifying a prospect as telling your family that it’s been a mistake.’
Niall kissed her ear through its curtain of hair and tried not to notice that Pascal had whipped out his camera and was snapping their embrace for the album. At least Polly, who was confined to the kitchen with the other children, couldn’t video it.
He was still buoyed up by several glasses of scotch and a bottle of Burgundy, Tash realised. In this state he’d agree to sky-dive naked from the Holdham Hall ramparts if he thought it would make him popular with her family.
‘This is ridiculous.’ She bit her lip and then shook her head firmly. ‘We must tell them, Niall.’
Pulling away, she turned to face the pairs of eager eyes trained on her. Even Sophia’s helpers, staggering in with bottles of their employer’s non-vintage champagne, were watching the couple with avid absorption. Niall’s star status made this something of a coup – they’d undoubtedly be on to the tabloid press as soon as the corks had popped.
‘Listen, everyone.’ Tash took a deep breath. ‘I have something to explain before this goes too far—’
The next moment a broad, warm hand had enveloped hers and she was swept out of the room, almost flooring herself as she fell over Sophia’s pack of dogs, now lined up like the von Trapp children outside the dining-room doors.
Niall pulled her into the kitchen lobby and glanced around to check they wouldn’t be overheard before clutching her shoulders and pressing her back against a hunting print. ‘Don’t tell them,’ he urged.
‘I must!’ Tash stared into his chocolate eyes,
wishing for a brief, honeyed moment that she didn’t have to. ‘This is all wrong. We can’t get hitched just because my potty grandmother gets the wrong end of the stick. It’s mad.’
‘No more mad than me getting down on one knee and embarrassing myself by fluffing my lines, now.’
Tash pushed her hair out of her eyes and stared at him, her heart suddenly in her throat and using her epiglottis as a punch-bag.
‘You weren’t going to though, were you?’ She swallowed her heart down so that she could croak out the words, but it continued beating madly in her windpipe like a ping-pong ball in a vacuum hose.
‘Well, not today, no.’ He shrugged, glancing away. ‘Perhaps not at all. Not like that, no.’
Tash closed her eyes. She and Niall spent such long stretches of time apart, and were hopelessly impractical when together. Although lovely, their relationship had barely progressed in the two years they had been together. Each brief, snatched weekend still possessed the heady, heart-lifting feeling of a holiday romance. They weren’t really capable of buying a toaster jointly, let alone starting married life.
‘I went down on my knees to ask Lisette to marry me,’ Niall was saying, his voice suddenly very quiet and serious.
‘Was that before or after you tied the knot in the Las Vegas Elvis Chapel?’ Tash bit her lip and fought a smile.
‘Shhh!’ Niall rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t remind me. We hardly saw that as a marriage – it was the family occasion in England that counted. I did everything the right way – father’s permission, talking and planning through the night, not telling her where the honeymoon would be. Look where that got us.’
‘I know.’ Tash touched his cheek, trying to blot out the excited chatter coming from the nearby dining room.
‘And you once agreed to marry someone you didn’t love simply because you didn’t want to hurt his feelings by saying no,’ he reminded her with a crooked smile.
Tash guiltily bit her lip at the memory. She had agreed to get engaged to an ex-boyfriend once because she couldn’t bring herself to tell him that the relationship was over. It had been one of the worst times of her life.
