by Fiona Walker
‘Ché?’
‘Russ’s dog. He’s vegetarian.’
‘That’s cruel.’
‘Depends how you look at it. Russ says pet food doesn’t have the same labelling requirements as human stuff and that “meat and animal derivatives” is basically anything scraped up off the slaughterhouse floor, and that “EC permitted additives” covers four thousand chemicals banned for human consumption.’
‘Remind me to pass on the Chappie next time.’
‘Apparently greenhouse gases coming from meat stock now outweigh the emissions of the entire global transport system.’
‘And what about the bullshit vegan arboriculturalist cricketers give out?’
Despite trying to look offended on Russ’s behalf, Kat cracked and confessed, ‘I give Ché tripe sticks when Russ isn’t looking.’
Dawn was unimpressed by the scale of the rebellion, eyeing her old friend worriedly. She’d not forgotten how Kat had changed during her relationship with Nick, the gradual decline from extrovert to introvert, the Stepford Wife transformation during which her bright, opinionated friend had become subjugated by fear and misery, regurgitating Nick’s opinions as though she had none of her own. When she’d finally plucked up the courage to leave him, Dawn had prayed that the old Kat would come bouncing back, but she was worried that the damage was still much too deep for her to surface, her need for attachment still too great. When she had been the old lady’s carer, Kat had become a mouthpiece for antediluvian opinions dating back to the Indian Raj – her emails and Facebook messages had been peppered with ‘frightfully’, ‘jolly’ and even ‘bang on’. Now she sounded like a member of the Animal Liberation Front.
Like most of Kat’s friends, Dawn had been utterly bowled over by Nick at first, not to mention wildly jealous: he was incredibly good-looking, confident and poised, an old-fashioned hero whose character came through action as much as talk, from his gallant firefighting career to adventurous free running and arduous marathons. He raised money for charities, had loyal friends of bromance proportions, loved his mum and dad and worshipped Kat. He could even cook and actually liked hanging around outside changing rooms taking his girlfriend shopping. Kat grumbled about his penchant for impractical tailored dresses and high heels, but when a man so sexy was flashing the plastic why complain? her friends had countered. Besides, they’d thought she looked fantastic.
Always the laughing daredevil of her crowd, Kat had never been a very girly girl, but with Nick she became ultra-feminine, never losing the kindness or that reckless streak, yet blossoming into an irresistibly sexy, sassy woman. She’d radiated good living and loving. The couple ran together, worked out together and clearly pleasured together non-stop. Her friends, including Dawn, were green with envy.
Kat and Nick, Dawn and Dave would often go out in a group – the boys became great golf friends – and Dawn realized that the effect loved-up Kat had on people was mesmerizing. Men had started to notice her in a way they never had before she was with Nick, hitting on her all the time. In turn, Nick noticed them, and occasionally hit them back, which horrified Kat, who was happy to shrug off the advances good-naturedly and get on with life. Dawn now suspected that was where the relationship had started to show its first signs of stress fractures, although she hadn’t noticed back then. Nick had a jealous streak, and was very controlling. Kat’s easy-going, happy-go-lucky kindness made her vulnerable. She grew quieter, more withdrawn, letting Nick take over, both physically and emotionally. She was increasingly obsessive about exercise and lost a lot of weight, and while she still looked fantastic, she was on the borderline between ripped and skinny. Nick said she’d never looked more beautiful, but men stopped chatting her up in bars. When Dawn suggested she might be overdoing the workouts, Kat admitted Nick wanted to get her up the aisle to start making babies. ‘He says he can’t wait to see me eating for two.’
Dawn’s own biological clock had been ringing so loudly by then that she hadn’t questioned why this revelation had made Kat look so miserable.
Kat had always been very protective about her private life, then as now; her friendship with Dawn was incredibly close, and Dawn had cried on her shoulders too many times to count, but she’d kept her own unhappiness with Nick hidden behind the big Mason smile. Everybody liked Nick. Everybody liked Kat: the hospital patients and staff adored her; they put her increasing lethargy and quietness down to working too hard. Dawn upped the fake tan and recommended cucumber patches, then wept endlessly about how unhappy she was with Dave and how she wished she had the guts to walk out. Now she was ashamed that her own self-absorption had been so total that she’d not realized how desperately bad things had got between Kat and Nick. She still had no idea what had really gone wrong inside the relationship. She remembered Kat leaving him once, giving him some sort of ultimatum, but they were a volatile couple and it had seemed to be one of those rows over nothing. Dave had gone round to calm Nick down and later reported that the row had been about Nick watching too many late-night movies.
Three months later, when Kat had been admitted to hospital having almost drowned, Dawn and the couple’s other friends had believed the story about her dropping her engagement ring in the river and diving in after it. Nick had swallowed a lot of water too. There could have been a terrible tragedy.
A month later, Kat had gone home on her afternoon off, packed a suitcase and left Watford and Nick with just the briefest note telling him it was over.
Nick was heartbroken. Friends rallied round. Nobody could understand why kind, joyful Kat had forsaken her hero and how she could be so cruel. Many still refused to forgive her, including Kat’s own mother. One of the few friends Kat had written to after she’d left, reassuring them that she was okay, was Dawn. The message hadn’t said much, just that she was sorry to do this to her but that she had been incredibly unhappy for a very long time and this was her liberation. At the end, there had been a line Dawn would never forget: Follow my lead.
And here she was, in rain-sodden Herefordshire, listening to a monologue about veganism and sustainability. She wanted to party like a single woman, not listen to a field guide on hedge foraging or the listed contents of a can of budget dog food.
Dawn knew she’d been fooling herself to hope for the sixteen-year-old Kat back, the burst of smiling energy that made anything seem possible. But she had hoped for more positive signs of recovery. The Kat she loved was sassy, plucky and crazy enough to take on a farm in the middle of nowhere, and the big smile was as knock-out as ever, but she had dark rings under her eyes and the fingernails on her weather-worn hands were bitten right down as she reached across the table and tapped the jewelled iPhone between them.
‘Now, show me all these lovely cruise-ship pictures.’
Chapter 3
Dollar flicked through the movies stored on her tablet to watch during the flight from Mumbai to Jaipur and settled on a swash-buckling medieval fantasy starring a little-known British actor called Dougie Everett.
‘Again?’ Seth asked, amused, from the adjacent seat, his own tablet screen striped with emails.
‘I like this movie,’ she dead-panned.
‘That is abundantly clear.’ He grinned across at her, eagle brows aloft, mimicking her monotone enunciation with its perfect diction. His assistant had faultless Received Pronunciation while his own Bradford accent remained defiantly strong, peppered with ‘man’ and the Mumbai equivalent ‘yaar’.
She kept her face expressionless, turning slowly to look at him. ‘Is that a problem for you, sir?’
The more Seth teased Dollar, the more impassive and obsequious she could be in return. It was a trick she’d developed as a form of anger management, but which was just as effective in handling the man who liked to make fun of her and himself in equal measure. Over their years of working together, Dollar’s reaction to Seth’s many attempts to wind her up had become increasingly poker-faced. It entertained and infuriated him. Seth took very little in life seriously, apart from his u
nassailable Russian business associates and his elderly mother. He loved playing games – it was what his IT corporation had grown from. Riddle-solving and gambling were specialities.
‘No, I don’t have a problem with it,’ he said smoothly, watching the opening credits come up. ‘Perhaps you would like me to arrange for you to meet Mr Everett.’
‘That won’t be necessary.’ She slotted in her earphones.
‘The offer’s there, yaar.’ He returned to his screen, swiping the emails aside and studying a spreadsheet as the plane thundered along the tarmac.
As they climbed through the night sky out of Mumbai, Dollar watched the start of the movie, aware that she was sitting too close to Seth to risk skipping through dull dialogue as she usually liked to do to get to the fight sequences. Travelling in the smallest of his planes was always uncomfortably intimate and she preferred it when he was at the controls, but today he had work to catch up on, so Deepak, the pilot, was up front, a man with a moustache so thick and bristling that Seth was convinced it spent Deepak’s nights running around a wheel in a cage.
Studying his spreadsheet, Seth let out a loud, martyred sigh designed to penetrate earphones. Dollar ignored it, but the movie wasn’t holding her attention as it usually did. The love interest’s unfeasibly bee-stung lips always annoyed her, along with her habit of flicking her chin up during the more emotional scenes as though she were swallowing paracetamol tablets. At least she died quite soon.
While the chin-flicking scene was playing through, she glanced at the spreadsheet on Seth’s tablet and looked quickly away when she saw what it contained, but not quickly enough to stop him catching her glance and pouncing on it.
‘Brides.’ He sighed with mock horror.
She pretended not to hear. Then she pulled out one earphone as a thought struck her. ‘Your mother put them on a spreadsheet?’
‘No, I did. I still can’t work out a short list. I wish you’d look at them for me.’
With effort, Dollar forced her face to remain rigid, her voice level. ‘It’s my day off,’ she reminded him, plugging her earphone back in.
He lifted a finger in acknowledgement, chuckling to himself. Dollar loathed time off and would work all week and all year round if she could – Seth had to force her to take holidays by booking them for her or bringing her along on his. Her compromise on a designated day off was to take on only those tasks she chose to do, or which were totally essential for the smooth running of his life. Helping choose his wife was not among them.
‘My mother is really putting the pressure on.’ He raised his voice over the plane engine and movie soundtrack. ‘She wants to arrange a match this year. She says she can’t wait for grandchildren any longer. “A man needs a wife, Arjan,” she keeps saying.’ He mimicked his mother’s strong Punjabi accent.
‘That much is true,’ Dollar shouted back. She was finding it even harder to concentrate on the swashbuckling action on screen despite Dougie Everett now seducing his pouting co-star in masterly fashion. His magnificent cobblestone abs would appear in close up on screen at any moment. She wanted Seth to shut up.
‘So help me out, yaar.’
‘You know my thoughts.’ She turned up the volume. The seduction scene was in full throttle now and she was almost deafened by lascivious pants and an orgasmic wail so loud that even Seth jumped. They both looked politely away.
For the past four years, Seth’s mother had been trying to match her successful, globe-trotting son with a bride. Many candidates had been lined up during that time – what family would not want their daughter married to such a handsome young man descended from noble warriors who just happened to be a dotcom billionaire? Seth’s eligibility had been hailed in print from The Times of India to Tatler, and from Forbes to the Bradford Telegraph and Argus.
The lists of suitable girls from good families came and went, but Seth had yet to commit to a wife. It wasn’t that he refused to take a bride of his parents’ choosing on principle. He’d always accepted an arranged marriage would happen, much to Dollar’s fury – he had, after all, asked her to be his wife once, in the very early days when they had been lovers. As far as she was aware it was the only proposal he’d ever made, but before she’d drawn breath to answer he’d listed clauses that ruled out both a ceremony and her legal status changing, effectively making her a mistress with a contract. She’d refused and removed him permanently from her bed at such speed it had almost cost her her job. She was far too good a PA to lose, though, so he’d sent her on the anger-management course and hidden his hurt and rejection behind an ever-changing bride list on which Dollar’s name would never feature. Not that she had ever been in the running for the gold and red sari: Mrs Singh was old-fashioned and intractable, insisting that her son’s bride must be well-born and a virgin. Dollar was neither. Seth was a good son who wanted to do the right thing by the family and to make his mother happy, but he would do it in his own time. Right now he was too wrapped up in his business interests to focus on the task.
He cancelled the spreadsheet and brought up a pdf. ‘What do you think of this? Good buy or goodbye money?’ It was a catchphrase he’d caught from an American transport magnate with whom he played a lot of golf. Seth loathed golf, but he saw the strategic benefits of a sport that could place a Russian oligarch, a Chinese manufacturing dragon and an Indian IT mogul in one small electric buggy through eighteen holes. The transport magnate signed a lot of deals on the fairway, and Seth had been assiduously practising his swing and muttering darkly that there had to be a better sport with which to seduce the world’s biggest business players.
Taking the tablet in her free hand, Dollar saw a picture of an English country house with the single word Eardisford. Deducing it was from an estate agent’s brochure, she studied it in surprise, although her face betrayed nothing. He hadn’t talked about expanding his property portfolio recently. She could guess why.
Both earphones came out this time. ‘This would be for your wife to live in?’
‘I doubt it. Who’d want to actually live there?’
‘It’s very beautiful.’
‘Glad you approve. I bought it this morning.’
Her grip tightened on the two tablets she was now holding, inadvertently sending their touch screens into action. In one hand, a picture of a magnificent ornamental lake zoomed in so a pair of swans became Loch Ness monsters; in the other Dougie Everett’s six-pack was paused mid-frame like an egg box in close-up. Dollar noticed neither as her monotone deepened tellingly. ‘Why didn’t you mention this?’
‘It’s a surprise.’
‘When did you go to see it?’ she asked suspiciously, knowing that his professional and personal diaries had been full for the past few weeks, every appointment committed to her memory.
‘I haven’t yet.’ He took back his tablet and adjusted the zoom to admire his new purchase, leafing through pages of high-definition pictures and florid descriptions of the magnificent historic house and its land, farms, cottages, subsidies and way leaves. ‘I’m getting a bit of refurb work done before I check it out. It’s one leaky old crib, man.’ He made it sound as though he was having a damp-proof course put into a Bradford two-up-two-down, not a major overhaul on a Grade I listed stately home.
Now Dollar’s voice started climb, her eyes stretched wide: ‘You bought this – this palace without even visiting it?’
‘It’s an investment, yaar. I had people view it for me.’
Jogged by Dollar’s tight grip on the tablet, Dougie Everett’s stomach muscles had moved on a few frames. She switched off the movie. ‘Why did you say nothing to me?’
‘It was a spur-of-the-moment thing.’
Dollar couldn’t believe that he would make such a monumental commitment without her knowledge. She knew everything that he did professionally: she co-ordinated his entire schedule; she organized his life for him; she even had access to the wife list.
‘I have a family connection with Eardisford,’ he said proudly, admiring
a picture of vast gateposts topped with stone pineapples. ‘My great-grandfather Ram served in the 16th Infantry under Lieutenant Colonel “Hock” Mytton. The Mytton family have lived in the same home since it was built. So have my parents, come to that, but the Sycamores was only built five years ago.’ He chuckled. He’d bought the big executive house on the outskirts of Bradford off plan for his elderly parents when he insisted they could no longer stay in their beloved suburban semi and that they needed more security. Mrs Singh now complained of being lonely and needing to take taxis everywhere, but her husband thought the enormous home cinema was marvellous and watched cricket on it round the clock. ‘I wish Ram could have lived to see his great-grandson buy Hock Mytton’s house,’ Seth mused.
‘That’s the reason you bought it?’ Dollar was even more astounded. Seth was not by nature vengeful. The only chips on his shoulder were the minuscule ones from his high-tech gadgetry.
