Cents and Sensibility

by Maggie Alderson

  ‘Isn’t it so cute, George?’ she said. ‘You’ll have to take our picture, with our shoe cousins on, eh, Stella?’

  ‘I can’t wait,’ I said gaily. ‘Shame we can’t breed ’em, eh?’

  Flo came round with some even fattier hors d’oeuvres, once more bypassing Ms Lemon Rind and heading straight for me. I declined, without a pang of embarrassment and asked her loudly if I could have a glass of mineral water – with a lime twist.

  ‘Don’t you like Cristal, Stella?’ said George, sounding sincerely concerned, and clearly willing to crack open the Krug, or the Dom, or whatever would make me happy.

  ‘Oh no, I love it,’ I said. ‘It’s just I’m a little thirsty and I don’t want to swig it down like lemonade. I want to savour it.’

  Zaria was looking at me with narrowed eyes. She knew I was giving her the finger. I didn’t care. I smiled brightly at her and waggled my foot. I really didn’t give a shit any more. It was one of the great advantages of not being fixated on marrying the man you were sleeping with, I thought. You didn’t care if his best friends hated you.

  Flo came in again and spoke to Zaria.

  ‘The dinner is ready, madame,’ she said. ‘Would you like me to serve it?’

  ‘Oh no, that’s fine, Flo,’ said Zaria. ‘You go home now. We’ll see you tomorrow. And thank you so much.’

  Well, I thought, at least she was nice to the help.

  Things were much easier over dinner, mainly because the two boys were there all the time and, unlike his poisonous wife, there clearly wasn’t a malicious or snobby bone in George’s chubby body. He really was a lovely chap – and I thought it reflected very well on Jay that they’d been friends for so long.

  ‘So, tell me again,’ he was saying, ‘why is it you two are hiding out like a couple of bank robbers?’

  I glanced at Jay. I didn’t know how much he would have told George. Did he know it was partly because my father had made it all into a ridiculous Montague and Capulet situation?

  Jay looked back at me and raised an eyebrow. I got the message. Leave it to me, he was saying.

  ‘Well,’ he said.’It was the usual gutter-press shit. Stella and I met in the South of France, when we were both at that Jericho jewellery thing and we went out dancing – we went to that club Wonderland. Have you two been there yet? It’s nuts.

  ‘Anyway, somehow the paparazzi creeps found out we were there and because I’d been seen having a drink – and believe me, nothing more than that, I value my balls – with Jericho in Aspen just a whiles before, they sold the pictures to an English rag and then, because of who Stella’s dad is, they blew it up into a big story and after it came out, poor Stella got seriously hassled by the paps back at home.

  ‘And, of course, her dad wasn’t too happy about that, which is understandable, so we have to play it cool for a while.’

  Nice work, I thought, making it sound like I was the one the paparazzi were after, and I was gratified to see Zaria’s head flip round towards me just at the moment Jay mentioned my dad. That was logged, I thought. Good.

  ‘So you don’t want to risk being seen together again in case you get more paparazzi hassle?’ said George. ‘We went through all that, didn’t we, Zee baby, when we first started dating?’

  She nodded.

  ‘But now we’re just boring old married farts, they leave us alone,’ he continued, laughing heartily. ‘Which is a great relief. Did they stake out your home and everything?’ he asked me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s really scary when you’re not used to it. Of course, I’m a journalist myself…’ I glanced at Zaria. ‘But the paper I work for doesn’t do that kind of thing. It was quite a shock.’

  ‘Oh, that’s right,’ said George, getting enthusiastic. ‘You work for the Journal, Jay told me. Now that is a seriously great newspaper…’

  He was clearly about to ask me more about the paper, when Zaria cut in.

  ‘Why don’t you just go to New York for a while?’ she said, like it was the most obvious thing. ‘You won’t get hassled there.’

  She glanced at me, with narrowed eyes the ‘boys’ couldn’t see – a nobody like you won’t get hassled there, was what she meant, of course.

  ‘You tell her, Stella,’ said Jay, smiling at me mischievously. ‘You tell Zaria why we can’t go away, like I want to.’

  I stuck my tongue out at him.

  ‘I work,’ I said loudly, to the whole table. ‘I have a job. A job I love and that I’m very committed to. I’ve just been promoted and I can’t take any time off right now.’

  ‘Well, good for you,’ said George. ‘That’s great.’ He looked a bit pensive for a moment. ‘You’re really lucky, you know, having a job you love, something you really want to do.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, deliberately misinterpreting him. ‘I tell myself that every day – I could be stacking shelves in a supermarket, or working on a chicken-plucking line, and instead I work on one of the world’s great newspapers. I feel very privileged.’

  Take that, Lamebrain, I thought, but she was already on to something else.

  ‘So who is your father?’ she asked me directly.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said George, beaming again. ‘Jay told me about him. Stella’s dad is the guy who did the museum for the Fishers, you know, Zee…’

  ‘The Fisher Institute in Boston?’ said Zaria, her eyebrows almost meeting her immaculately highlighted hairline. ‘Wasn’t that Lord Montecourt…?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, smiling cheerfully at her. ‘That’s Daddy’

  ‘Stella’s dad is so amazing,’ said Jay. ‘You should see their country place, it is a seriously radical take on the family home…’

  And he went into a long and loving description of Willow Barn, and then the London house, while Zaria appeared to thaw before me, like a time-release film of a glacier melting.

  By the end of the meal, she was practically sitting on my lap.

  ‘We would love to meet with your father,’ she was gushing. Her habit of talking in the royal ‘we’ was seriously starting to irritate me. ‘And we would love to see Willow Barn. We have a property on Long Island where we are going to build our beach house and your father is one of the architects we are thinking of commissioning for the project.’

  Take a ticket, join the queue, I thought, Ham’s time was booked up for years. And the likelihood of me ever introducing him to Jay’s best friends looked very slim indeed.

  ‘So how did you like them?’ Jay asked, beaming happily at me, in the car on the way back to his place. He had clearly had a great time.

  ‘George is lovely,’ I said.

  Jay’s head snapped round to look at me.

  ‘Was Zee a bitch to you?’ he said.

  ‘Somewhat,’ I said. ‘Until she found out I had a famous father. With a tide…’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said Jay. ‘I’m sorry about that. I really hoped she wouldn’t do that to you. The thing is, Stells, Zee is a little overprotective of me. She’s seen me in the clutches of too many miners…’

  ‘Minors?’ I said, horrified.

  ‘Diggers? Miners for precious metal…’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ I said. ‘Zaria thought I was a gold-digger, mining for the Fisher billions. How hilarious.’

  ‘Yeah, well, coming from money herself, she knows just how many users there are out there. Plus, she and I used to date, back in the day – don’t worry, way back – and I guess she feels she has some kind of extra proprietary role with regard to my romantic life. And then, I’m George’s best friend and so she’s just a little possessive. I did ask George to tell her to behave towards you, but I’m afraid he’s blind to his wife’s little personality defects.’

  ‘He seems like a really lovely guy,’ I said, sincerely, and glad to shift the focus off beastly Zaria.

  ‘You know what? He really is. And he hasn’t had the easiest time, with his mom dying when he was so young…’

  As he spoke, that sad story came back to me – his mother
had killed herself, when he was a young boy. It was one of those classic jet-set tragedies and there had been a huge piece about it in Vanity Fair not long ago. It was twenty-five years since it happened, or something.

  It was a perfect story for that magazine – the beautiful French showgirl from a humble background who had married the Greek billionaire and then couldn’t cope. Well, he clearly hadn’t inherited his mother’s height, I thought, but he must have got his charm from her, because his father was a famous tyrant.

  Jay was still talking. I tuned back in.

  ‘So, after his mom died, he spent most of his school holidays with me at my mom’s place – he doesn’t really get along with his dad, something we have in common – so we’re pretty close. He’s like another brother to me really. Anyway, I’m real glad you two hit it off and I’m sure you and Zaria will get along fine. She just needs to get to know you better. Give her another chance, would you? For me?’

  He squeezed my hand. I lifted it up to my mouth and kissed it tenderly. But I couldn’t help thinking, as we drove on, that Zaria was exactly the kind of product of inherited wealth my father had warned me about. And although I liked him enormously, so was poor motherless George.

  Despite the difficulties of our self-imposed purdah, Jay and I continued to spend every night together. Most evenings, I’d have some kind of event to go to for work, so I’d speed in and out of that and then get over to Sloane Avenue, as fast as I could, for yet another night in.

  Apart from George and Zaria, he still wasn’t in town as far as his friends were concerned, and I was seriously paranoid about word getting back to Ham via the paparazzi if we were seen, so we sneaked about, getting food sent up from local restaurants. And he always paid for it with cash.

  Now I understood why he always carried wads of banknotes and never paid for anything with credit cards, if he could avoid it – a black Amex card emblazoned with the name J Fisher was the equivalent of a neon sign over his head.

  For someone who had always dreaded the cosy sofa supper, I sure was having a lot of them.

  During the day, I would go to work and he would hang out with George, mainly playing tennis at obscure suburban courts where no one would know who they were.

  When the weekend came around George insisted we borrowed a really pretty cottage on the Xydis family estate in Berkshire. It was gorgeous.

  Total isolation – just the two of us – country walks, cooking, napping and just hanging out. We even risked a trip round the local Spring Flower and Produce Show together, which really took me to a new level of cosy coupledom. And no one recognized Jay among the displays of giant gladioli.

  And then, at last, after ten days of our oddly proscribed bliss, the moment I had been dreading arrived. We were lying in the bath together on the Monday night – one at each end, having races with wind-up bath toys – when he brought it up.

  ‘I’m sorry, Stella, but I can’t stay over here much longer,’ he said, abruptly.

  ‘Is the solitary confinement getting to you?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘It is a huge pain – although it’s worth it for you…’ He made a small turtle walk up my thigh. ‘But even apart from that, I have to go back to the States.’

  He sighed deeply and put his head right back, leaning it against the edge of the bath, running his hands through his wet hair. Something about his exposed throat made my heart turn over with lust and admiration and tenderness, that brand-new mixture of feelings I had whenever I looked at Jay.

  ‘It’s the anniversary of my brother’s death next week,’ he continued, lifting his head and looking back at me again, causing another minor earthquake in my abdomen. ‘And it’s always a really hard time for my mom, so I usually go and stay with her for a while and we go on hikes and cook and do all the stuff we do and I help her through it.’

  I smiled sadly at him.

  ‘You’re a good son,’ I said.

  Jay laughed, bitterly. ‘Oh, boy. I don’t hear that very often. From her, yes, but from the rest of them – I’m just a useless piece of shit.’

  He crashed the turtle down into the water so hard it made a huge splash. Then he shuddered, quite violently, as if trying to shake the association off.

  ‘I’m sorry, babe, but just thinking about my dad makes me angry’

  ‘What’s his problem?’ I asked gently, wary of going over the line.

  ‘Oh, I’m the problem – not serious, not interested in the trusts, not properly respectful of what the name Fisher stands for. “A playboy not a player”, that’s his latest one. God, sometimes I understand why my uncle Michael drinks. Do you know what having dinner with my dad is like?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘You can be in the most beautiful restaurant in the world – beautiful decor, beautiful people, beautiful food – and it is like having a twenty-ton weight on your head. He just crushes any energy out of you with the sheer pressure of his disapproval. No one is good enough for him – me least of all.’

  I didn’t know what to say. Jay was pretty perfect as far as I was concerned.

  ‘Why do you think he is so down on you?’

  Jay shrugged.

  ‘He always has been. My older brother was the golden boy – I mean, I loved my brother, but he did have a lot more in common with Dad than me. I don’t know if it was because he always knew he was the heir from the day he was born, whereas I knew I could just cruise it – or thought I could – but really, I think it was just genetics.

  ‘Bob was more like my dad and I’m more like my mom, and I don’t know why they ever got married, so Dad and I are just plain incompatible like they were.’

  He picked up a small plastic whale, threw it high up into the air and caught it.

  ‘I wish I could divorce him too.’

  The next day, Jay left London for New Mexico and I minded even more than I had expected to. Spending every night at his place had been a bit distracting when I was so busy at work – especially as he used to ring me there all the time and send me filthy emails – but now he was leaving, I felt quite desperate. And it seemed he did too.

  Calling from the departure lounge at Heathrow on Tuesday afternoon, he had almost begged me to come out to New York to be with him, as soon as he got back from seeing his mother in Santa Fe, and I had to tell him I just couldn’t.

  But I promised I would take a holiday the moment it was possible and he promised to come back to London as soon as he possibly could. Neither of which seemed nearly soon enough.

  When we hung up I realized I was crying.

  15

  While I missed Jay enormously once he was gone, there was another part of me that was quite glad to get back to my funny old singular life – and to spend some time with my family. It was very unusual for me to see so little of them.

  It had been a happy accident that Ham had been away for five of the days while I had been with Jay, but once he was back, I knew I would have to make myself a bit more visible at his place, or arouse suspicions. And apart from that – I really wanted to see him and the rest of them.

  So the day Jay left, I rang Chloe and asked if it was all right for me to come up for supper that night. She seemed surprised I’d even asked, and said they would love to see me.

  The sincere enthusiasm in her voice triggered multiple twinges of guilt that I hadn’t been looking after her, as Ham had specifically asked me to while he was away, so I just added that to the big pile of guilt that was already in my head and got back to work.

  That evening I made sure I got up to Ham’s place before seven thirty, so I could put Daisy to bed. It was one less thing for Chloe to do – but it was also one of the great pleasures of my life, and I’d missed it.

  Daisy was gratifyingly excited to see me.

  ‘Stella, Stella,’ she said, holding her little arms up to me to be picked up, in a gesture I adored and dreaded her growing out of. ‘Will you put me to bed? Will you tell me a story? Will you tell me the one about you and Alex an
d the tree house and the whispery leaves?’

  Daisy had loads of books, but the stories she really loved were the ones I told her about her older half- and step-siblings and the high jinks we had got up to when we were kids at Willow Barn.

  I gave her a bath and then once she was tucked up in her pink pyjamas in her boat-shaped bed, I squeezed in next to her, so close our faces were practically touching, and told her the story she’d asked for.

  ‘Once upon a time, a very long time ago, before you were even born,’ I began – it was the ritualistic start to all her bedtime stories. She snuggled up to me contentedly and put her little arm around my shoulder. ‘There was a little girl called Stella…’

  ‘That was you, wasn’t it?’ said Daisy, nodding. ‘You were a little girl then and Alex was a little boy’

  I nodded back and then went on to tell her the story, which was a fictionalized account of a true event.

  It was the end of our first summer holidays together. Alex had been fourteen and I was eight – and already starting to develop my crush on him, although I left that aspect of it out when I was telling it to Daisy – and one night he declared he was going to sleep in the tree house, which Ham had just built.

  Alex’s younger brother, Rowan – who was ten – had insisted on joining him, but came back to the house after about half an hour, because he had ‘heard something rustling’.

  Despite such dangers, in the middle of the moonless night, I went out on my own to join Alex. But with carrying my duvet and a teddy, I dropped my torch, and got completely, terrifyingly disorientated in the dark orchard, until he heard my desperate cries and came out to find me.

  It wasn’t funny at the time – I had been absolutely petrified – but it had passed into family legend. The gallant Alex had taken me to the tree house, where I had insisted I still wanted to sleep, and had given me the last of the cocoa from his Thermos. And his last Jaffa Cake.

  About half an hour later, by which time I was in a state of teeth-chattering terror at all the whispers and rustles of the country night, he had accompanied me back to the house.