I knew I was talking too much, and like a five-year-old, but I couldn’t help it. The first few swigs of wine had gone straight to my head, the way they do when you’re a bit excited and haven’t eaten anything, and it was really important to me that Ned and Alex both understood exactly where they both fitted into the picture.
I thought I’d done a pretty good job – and I had tried to prime Ned with the complications of my family tree on the way down on the train – but I could still sense they were eyeing each other up a bit, that way men do, trying to see who is the dominant wolf in the pack.
But by the time we’d got over to the main house for dinner, the ‘boys’ as Rose was calling them, seemed to have bonded and were having an involved conversation about the various codes of football, including something called ‘Aussie rules’ – yet more sport Alex was keen on, and the first I had ever heard Ned express an interest in.
I thought his only sporting activity was chatting up the more attractive media students who came into the paper to do work experience, and his scores in that regard were pretty high, as far as I could tell.
When we got over to the house Ham was frowning down at the huge round dining table – it had its biggest top on – and puzzling over his seating plan.
‘Aha, the out-of-the-nest wing,’ he said when he saw us, quoting the slogan Alex and I had put on our sweatshirts, the last time we had been here together.
I felt immediately uncomfortable, and the unexpected reference to that night made my eyes flick over to Alex before I could stop them – just as he looked at me. Our eyes locked for a millisecond that told me he was still as self-conscious about the events of that evening as I was. I looked away immediately.
‘Now, you lot,’ Ham was booming. ‘I need your help with this plan. Can you count heads for me, Alex, to check numbers? You’re the best with figures. You see, I think we’ve got thirteen tonight. Chloe suggested putting Daisy to bed early to make it twelve, but I don’t think that’s fair, she deserves her place at the table, so I suppose it will have to be a teddy, which I’ve always thought was horribly twee…’
I was about to go looking for a large Pooh Bear who lived in the kiddie corridor, when I noticed Rose and Alex were looking at each other and giggling. Rose was nodding excitedly at him.
‘Actually, Henry,’ said Alex, ‘I think we might be able to solve that problem for you. I’ll just nip out to the car.’
Ham looked bewildered, but shrugged and carried on shuffling the index cards he had with our names written on them.
After a couple of minutes Alex returned – with a small, plump fawn-coloured pug on an emerald-green lead.
‘Monkey can take the fourteenth place,’ said Alex. ‘He has very good table manners.’
Rose shrieked with laughter. Monkey was her most treasured dog and she’d brought him with her, even though canines had been strictly forbidden at Willow Barn, ever since she and Ham had split up. He’d told me once that it was having several dogs in bed with them every night which had caused that marriage to fall apart.
‘Oh, I know I wasn’t supposed to bring him, Henry,’ Rose was saying. ‘But I couldn’t leave him behind. He’s so devoted to me. The others don’t mind, they’re all staying with Mrs Plimmer, who does my house, and they all adore her. But Monkey is so devoted to me, he just would have pined terribly’
Ham looked cross for a moment, but Monkey looked up at him and put his wrinkled little head on one side in such an appealing manner, Ham couldn’t resist him.
‘Oh, all right, Rose,’ he said. ‘We can’t leave the poor little bugger in the car all weekend. Here – write his name on this card.’
The twins, who had come down to the house with Chloe, were thrilled to see their favourite dog and Daisy was simply beside herself. She wanted a dog more than anything, but Ham was intransigent on the subject.
‘They’re dirty,’ he always said. ‘And smelly and needy and farty and they shit all over the garden. I’ve done dogs and I’m not having another one.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ said Rose to me, out of the side of her mouth.
With Monkey in situ between Rose and Daisy, and sporting a black tie which Tabitha had put on him, it was a very funny dinner from the outset.
By the time we’d finished the first course, both Monkey and Daisy were asleep at the table, and Rose and I took them off to bed – we just didn’t tell Ham it was the same bed.
Children gradually peeled off – to sleep, or just to do their own thing – until it was just the six adults who were left. While Chloe made coffee, Ham switched the table top to a smaller one, to make it more intimate, and with just him, Chloe, Rose, Alex, Ned and me, it was a surprisingly successful combination.
There was certainly no awkwardness between Rose and Chloe, who had established a very good relationship from the outset with regard to the movements of the twins between the two households – greatly aided by Alex, who helped as much as he could with the ferrying.
The two women were having great fun ganging up against Ham and teasing him, which he clearly adored; Ned and Alex were getting along famously in a blokey kind of way; and Rose and Ned kept popping out of the glass doors for what she called intercourse ciggies. It was generally a very successful evening.
It was nearly midnight and we were getting into the eau de vie – always the sign of a really good dinner – when my phone started ringing. In all the excitement I had completely forgotten it was in my pocket, but I knew who it was the moment it started: it was Jay calling ‘to put me to bed’.
From the first trill of the ringtone, every face around that table was looking at me.
‘It’s a bit bloody late for phone calls,’ protested Ham. ‘Even from that office of yours that makes you work weekends and God knows what.’
Oh no, I thought, as I saw Ned look at me oddly. He knew I didn’t work weekends – and I knew that a casual remark like that, which might have gone over most people’s heads, would be instantly logged in the Woodward and Bernstein hard drive of his brain.
I pretended to look at the number – like I didn’t know what it would be – then I turned the phone off with a flourish, cutting it out in mid-ring.
‘Sorry about that,’ I said, way too brightly. ‘It was a New York number. They’re still at work over there and they must have forgotten the time difference. Probably some airhead from Ralph Lauren. They’ve always got loads of ditzy rich kids doing play work there.’
I could have swallowed my tongue as I said it. Why did I have to overegg my explanation? Now I noticed Alex was looking at me keenly and I was sure he was remembering the last time my phone had rung at that table – and was wondering when the black Ferrari would arrive at the front door.
From that moment on, sitting at the table was torture for me. I was so terrified of opening my mouth in case I made another gaffe, that after about ten minutes I hurriedly made my excuses, saying it had been a big day with our presentation that morning and I had to crash.
I went straight to my room and rang Jay. I shouldn’t have done it. I should have just texted him an explanation but I was pressing return call before I’d even thought about it, because the thing was, with the white wine before dinner, all the red during it and the hard stuff at the end, I was just too pissed to think sensibly.
‘Hi, honey,’ said Jay in his most affectionate tones, when he answered. ‘I called you to say g’night and I got cut off.’
‘Omigod,’ I blurted. ‘It was such a nightmare, I was at dinner at my dad’s house – I’m down at the Barn, remember, I told you? And I realized it was you and I could see everyone was looking at me and I knew Alex was thinking about you and then I said this really stupid thing and I could see Ned looking at me too and I was just, oh my God…’
There was a short silence before he responded.
‘So, there’s quite a gang of you down there then,’ he said. If there was a slight coolness in his voice at that point, I didn’t pick it up.
‘Oh yes,’ I was off again. ‘It’s been so much fun – until your call. Oh what a nightmare that was. Anyway, Ham really loves Ned, which is great, and Rose is here – she’s Alex’s mum – and I really love her and it’s really good to see Alex too, because my dad really wants me to be friends with him and I do love him really, and all the kids are here and really it’s the house being used exactly as Ham had always envisioned it. It’s a perfect Willow Barn weekend, really’
‘Well, I hope you all have a lovely time,’ said Jay, and now, even through my boozy funk, I could hear the chill in his voice. And now I’m going surfing. Goodbye, Stella.’
And he hung up.
I was so surprised I didn’t think I could have heard him right. Had he really hung up on me, or had I missed something? And as my fuddled brain tried to make sense of it, I fell into an ugly open-mouth sleep.
I normally loved the early birdsong from the woods at Willow Barn, but the next morning I could quite happily have nuked the lot of them. Not only did their insistent tweeting make my very tender head throb unbearably, they had woken me up into the realization that I had said some inconceivably stupid things to Jay the night before.
I sat bolt upright in bed, as the conversation replayed itself in jagged snatches in my brain. Then I groaned and threw myself face down on to the pillow and hammered my feet against the mattress.
Jay didn’t even really know who Ned was and I had been happily babbling on about how lovely it was that Ham liked him – oh – and how great the evening had been until Jay had rung. I groaned some more.
‘A perfect Willow Barn weekend,’ I could now remember saying. A perfect weekend at the place Jay would love to visit again and never could, because my dad hated him – unlike Ned and Alex, who he loved, and so did I.
How could I have been so tactless? I groaned a bit more, but it just made me feel more sick.
I was never going to drink again, that was clear, but my more pressing concern was how I was going to make it up to Jay – especially as he was on LA time. It was hours until I could ring him.
By the time we were having breakfast at the main house, I was almost glad of my hangover, as a cover for my tender emotional state. The combination of remorse and anxiety, with the tyranny of the time difference, and the need to keep it all under wraps, was making me feel quite hysterical.
I was so jumpy at the breakfast table I knocked over the milk jug and then literally fell off my chair, trying to avoid the resulting deluge. It was so embarrassing. I was just relieved Alex wasn’t there to see me – he’d gone off to a specialist shrub nursery with Ham and Rose – but Ned, Archie, Venezia et al. clearly found it hilarious and Daisy was bouncing up and down in her chair with delight.
‘Stella had an all fall down,’ she was squealing, before hopping off her own chair. All fall down!’
‘I think I must still be drunk,’ I said, hauling myself up from under the table.
‘Cool,’ said Archie, followed by a burst of his staccato Butt-head laughter, which was like a painful assault on my ears.
I put my head in my hands and sighed.
‘I have to go back to bed,’ I said. It was all too much, being surrounded by so many people when I was in that condition. But when I got back to the guest wing and was all alone, I felt even worse.
Particularly awful phrases from the conversation – ‘It’s been so much fun – until your call…’; ‘Ham really loves Ned, which is great…’; ‘It’s a perfect Willow Barn weekend, really…’ – went round and round in my head, until I felt like some kind of crazy Hitchcock heroine, going bonkers.
On top of that I couldn’t stop myself looking at my watch constantly, to see whether I could call him yet, even though I knew he wouldn’t be up until it was late afternoon in East Sussex.
I made myself a strong cup of tea in the guest-wing kitchen and went to sit outside on the terrace, hoping the fresh air might clear my head. Then I had a brainwave and rushed back up to my room to get my phone – to see if maybe he had sent me a reassuring text while I was asleep. He hadn’t.
I was sitting there staring down at the phone wondering whether I trusted myself to send him one, when Ned walked out on to the terrace.
‘How’s your head?’ he asked me.
‘Shocking,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t drink white wine. It really doesn’t agree with me.’
He laughed.
‘I shouldn’t drink the equivalent of the English Channel in alcohol,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t agree with me. I’m going to have a swim. Your dad’s back and he just told me the pool’s open. Maybe you should have one too, it might sort you out.’
‘What a brilliant idea,’ I said.
I went back into the main house to see if I could borrow a swimsuit from Chloe, and as I was walking back through the sitting room carrying two ridiculously small pieces of shocking-pink Lycra, dating from her pre-Daisy life, I bumped into Alex. He saw the bikini and his face lit up.
‘Is the pool open?’ he said.
‘So Ned tells me,’ I said. ‘You coming in?’
‘You bet,’ said Alex.
I went straight to the pool house to change and as I came out into the bright morning sunshine there was a big splash as someone dived into the pool.
I was standing on the edge at the shallow end, weedily dipping my big toe in to see if the water was bearable, when a large seal burst out of the water at my feet. It was Ned. His normally messy black hair was slicked back by the water, and his eyelashes were stuck together in thick clumps against his green eyes. He grinned at me and stood straight up in the water. I nearly fell into the pool.
He had the body of a god.
I couldn’t help staring. Seriously broad shoulders, a perfectly smooth muscular chest, a taut flat stomach with a tantalizing line of hair down it – and those hip lines, just like Jay’s, but deeper.
There was something about those lines that did me in. Gazing at Ned, I remembered the first time I’d seen Jay in the pool at the Cap Mimosa, but while that gave me a pang of guilt, something still fluttered inside me where it really shouldn’t have.
I couldn’t believe I’d been sitting inches from this body for weeks at work, putting together the new section, and I hadn’t realized. I mean, I knew he was well built, but this was something else again. Did all the other women in the office have X-ray vision? Because they had clearly seen something I hadn’t, beneath that shambolic suit he always wore.
Just as I caught myself, and tried to look away, I realized that he was brazenly checking me out too. He wasn’t even pretending not to. His eyes were on their way back up for another look, when he suddenly shifted his gaze to my eyes – and unfurled his slowest, most wicked smile.
‘Nice bikini, Stella,’ he said, and took off back down the pool at high speed.
17
On top of my already feeble state, a sudden surge of highly inappropriate sexual attraction was almost too much to deal with. I lowered myself quickly into the pool via the steps and got my head under the water. I needed to cool down.
What was it about that place? Every time I went down there I had some kind of close encounter of the seriously weird kind. Maybe Ham was pumping some kind of hormonal love potion into the water supply, as an experiment. I wouldn’t have put it past him.
I swam up and down a few times until I felt a bit calmer, and then got out and lay down on a sunlounger. For once in England, it was properly hot and I planned to spend the day as inert as a lizard.
Ned was still pounding up and down the pool like an Olympic swimmer – he even did proper racing turns at the deep end, I noticed – and I was glad that he was leaving me alone.
I was even more relieved when Alex appeared with a number of children in tow, although I couldn’t help noticing he looked pretty dandy himself in a pair of Speedo trunks he’d found in the pool house. Daisy was wearing her first real swimming costume – it had an adorable little frill round the bum – and was very proud of her Barbie rubber ring.
<
br /> Toby and the younger boys jumped straight into the water and immediately had Ned teaching them how to do tumble turns, while Alex bounced Daisy around in the shallow end.
‘Look at me, Stella,’ she was shouting. ‘I’m swimming! Come in, Stella, come in! Come in and swim with me!’
I couldn’t resist her and got up to join them in the pool. But as I walked over to the shallow end, I suddenly felt extremely self-conscious in Chloe’s tiny bikini.
She had been really skinny when she’d first got together with Ham, with much smaller breasts than me. Now I was all too aware that mine were spilling out of the flimsy halter-neck top – and that both Ned and Alex were steadily watching my progress along the side of the pool.
‘Was that right, Ned?’ shouted Toby, emerging from his latest spluttering attempt at a racing turn, but Ned wasn’t paying attention. He had his arms extended along the edge of the deep end of the pool, and was shamelessly watching me.
It was too much, I pulled a face and stuck my tongue out at him, and with one movement he turned and pulled himself up out of the water, so I had a quick rear view – nice – and then he was standing on the edge, his hands on his hips. Homo magnificent. He shook his head, so the water flew off his hair like a dog coming out of the sea and then he raked it back with his hands.
Our eyes locked for a moment and a knowing smile flickered across his lips, before he turned his attention back to the kids.
‘Right, you lot,’ he was saying to the boys. ‘Now I’m going to show you how to do a proper racing start. Watch…’
And with another splash, he was back in the pool.
Alex clearly hadn’t missed a beat of it.
‘Great bod, eh?’ he said, nodding his head towards Ned, who was now speeding back down the pool again away from us, but then just happening to stand up himself, revealing his rower’s chest and shoulders.
I splashed water at him.
‘You’re not exactly Mr Blobby yourself, Alex,’ I said and turned away from him. ‘Right, Miss Daisy, I want to see those frog legs kicking.’
Cents and Sensibility Page 25
