Slightly Foxed

by Jane Lovering

Leo returned the smile. It softened the contours of his whole face, and I realised how stressed he’d been. “Maybe I’d better go. You’ll think clearer if I’m not here, and you’ve got enough to worry about, with your friend being ill and everything.” A momentary pause. “You’re not going to go out with—what’s his name, Peter?—are you?”

  “Piers. No! He’s—Piers is a friend, that’s all. He’s been very good.” Another tiny shiver at the memory of Piers standing so close. God, I needed to get a grip. “To Florence,” I finished.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I lay in the darkness trying to sleep. It wasn’t quite the romantic postproposal night of passion I had envisaged, but that hadn’t been Leo’s fault. He’d sweetly and uncomplainingly gone back to Devon, leaving me with my worries and uncertainties and a sapphire the size of a small dog.

  In the living room, the telephone rang. Who’d ring at four a.m.? Maybe the hospital? Or—no, he wouldn’t, would he?

  “Hey, Alys.”

  “Why don’t you just fuck off?”

  A sharp intake of breath. “Oooh. Hissy fit!” But Piers sounded as though he was laughing. “So, when shall I pick you up?”

  “Look, I told you, I’m going to the hospital on my own. On the bus. No picking up. No lifts.”

  “So, I’ll come by about nine, then?”

  “Read my lips. No.” There was a pause. “Piers?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry. But everything’s got very complicated. Leo thought you and I—and so he’s a bit sensitive about me talking to you. Do you see?”

  “How complicated?”

  “He thought we were—oh it’s stupid. I’m not even going to bother to explain. Look, thanks for offering and everything, but I’m fine.”

  “Okay. If you say so.”

  My breath caught and a tiny soblike gasp escaped. “Yes. Yes, I’m fine.”

  “Ally.” The sympathy in Piers’s voice was almost touchable. The receiver was suddenly slippery between my fingers.

  “I’ll—I can’t do this right now. I’ll talk to you later.” I hung up very carefully and wiped my eyes and nose on my dressing gown. What the hell was wrong with me? Losing it over the phone to Piers? I mean—Piers—what the hell was I thinking? Was I thinking at all?

  Next morning I set out for the hospital bright and early with my ring stuffed in a pocket. It looked too valuable to be left kicking around an empty flat, and I couldn’t bring myself to put it on, so I’d wrapped it in my handkerchief and shoved it in the recesses of my jeans. Diamonds and sapphires. Leo thought I was worth diamonds and sapphires.

  I walked down Monkbar and turned up Gillygate, against the flow of tourists. It was another bright morning, and despite my errand, I felt my heart rise. I was worth diamonds and sapphires. I nearly stopped to put the ring on, wanting everyone to see. Hey, everyone. Diamonds! Sapphires!

  The throaty roar of a restrained sports engine began trickling along beside me. At a break in the queue, the car speeded up, then bumped up onto the pavement at an angle which blocked my path.

  I recognised the car after a second of panic. Particularly when the driver sprang the passenger door open. “C’mon. I’ll get a fucking ticket.”

  It was the inevitability which did for me. I should have kept walking, of course I should. Ignored him and marched off, leaving the Porsche skewed across the pavement, impotently kerb crawling. But somehow the fact that he’d second-guessed me was some kind of admission. I slid into the seat and closed the door, sitting bolt upright and not looking at him. “I’m doing this under protest. I thought I made it clear,” I said between clenched teeth, “I was going on my own.”

  Piers was wearing glasses tinted so dark I hadn’t a hope of reading his true expression. “This morning, on the phone. I heard you crying, Alys. You need someone to talk to.”

  “Where the hell do you get off, using these bully-boy tactics on me? You just can’t—” To my shame my voice cracked. I was tired and my nerves were stretched so tight that you could have played the opening bars of “Layla” on them. I squeezed my eyes shut to prevent the betrayal of tears.

  “Actually, I kinda think I can.”

  I squinted out between my eyelashes. Piers was staring out of his window, tapping his rings against the wheel, his hair scragged back from his unshaven face. It was like being abducted by a hitman from Models 1.

  “At least you’re not wearing any of your truly scary wardrobe,” I muttered. “That would be too much to cope with.”

  “Be glad that you can’t see my underwear.”

  “Oh, I am, Piers. Trust me, I am.”

  He smiled. I felt my heart give a catch in my chest and bit the inside of my cheek to stop it. Shit. I must be feeling more vulnerable than I thought, to start getting all knee-trembly over Piers. Although it had to be admitted that he did look alarmingly sexy. Oh God, please, make me stop this, now. It’s Piers. He can’t help being eye-poppingly gorgeous, can he? I’m just having an attack of unhealthy lust, that’s all. But—Jesus Christ—

  “So, Ally. Anything you want to tell me?”

  “I think I’ve told you quite enough already.”

  “Yeah, and have I used it against you? Have I repeated even so much as one fucking word to anyone else? What is it going to take to make you trust me, Alys?”

  I opened my mouth to ask him why it was so important that I trust him, but what actually came out was “Do you think I’ve wasted my life, Piers?”

  “What brought that on? Did that…did Leo say something?” He powered down the Porsche, pulled it to a standstill at the side of the road. A couple of passing cars tooted but he flicked a finger at them without even looking. “Ally?”

  I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “Sorry, Piers. Sorry. I didn’t mean to. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Why? Cos I’m young? Maybe, but maybe things are clearer to me, not cluttered up with all that life crap. Maybe I see what’s really there cos I’m not looking through some cloud of duty.” He whipped the trendily dark glasses away from his face and glanced at me, sharp brown eyes seeming to steal some of my doubt. “Don’t be scared.”

  I took a deep breath. Ready to be reasonable, to ask him to leave my private affairs to me.

  “Look.” But it was no good. It was as though the magnetism which undoubtedly surrounded Piers was pulling everything to the surface. “Leo’s asked me to marry him. But he seems to think that I’m going to be this little woman, working a few hours a week in a bookshop and looking after the house and him and—”

  “Holy fucking shit.” Piers wrapped his long fingers around my hands clenched in my lap. His hands were trembling. “Tell me.”

  “I searched Alasdair out.” My voice shook. “I knew he fancied me. I’d seen him watching. When Flick said he wanted nothing to do with me and the baby I—oh, I made it look like an accident, but I already knew who Alasdair was, his family, everything. I knew he’d be able to support us. The baby and me. I wasn’t going to be able to finish my degree and my parents were dead and his father owns an island, you know that?” I sniffed. “Not a very nice one, admittedly. It’s full of midgies and people shooting deer and stuff.”

  Piers moved one hand to my shoulder blades and rubbed my back gently. He smelled of coffee, of something lemony and rich, like scents in the night air. “Hey, Ally. It’s okay.” His voice sounded a bit shaky too. “You didn’t go looking for Leo though, did you? Or did you?”

  “No, but I knew who he was and pretended I didn’t. It’s all repeating itself.”

  “And he’s asked you to marry him.” Piers’s voice dropped. “Are you going to?”

  I gave a cracked laugh. “I have absolutely no idea. And how stupid is that? He’s got everything I ever thought I wanted. All these years of struggling and not enough money and second-hand clothes and stuff and—I don’t know.”

  “Oh, Ally. You’re so fucked up about this, aren’t you?”

  “Look, I’d better get to the
hospital.” I opened the car door. “Thanks for the lift and everything, but I—”

  “Uh-uh, you’re not running out on me now.” Piers leaped out of the driver’s seat and grabbed me as I tried to head off up the pavement. “You need someone. I’m here. Talk to me, Alys, for Chrissake.”

  “There’s nothing more to say. I’m going to see Mrs. Treadgold now. You’d better move the car, you’ll get a ticket.”

  “Fuck that. I’m coming with.”

  He swore a trail of Spanish as we entered the hospital along a corridor where the smell of bandages and the ghosts of long-dead cabbages filtered into my lungs. The buckles on the boots he wore jingled and the hems of his overlong combats trailed on the floor. He was still all legs and hair, but at least that weird longing feeling had gone, and I could look at him properly again.

  I found Mrs. Treadgold propped on pillows in the geriatric ward. She looked pale and old and pleased to see me. “Alys. You came! And brought your young man.” She lowered her voice. “You saucepot.”

  I decided not even to attempt to explain. “They said you were asking for me?”

  “Yes. Tom and Vivienne will be on their way. They’ve been expecting this for a while. I’m ill, Alys, I expect you knew that?” I gave a kind of half-nod. “And I’ve come to think of you as a surrogate daughter, I suppose.”

  A sudden outburst of coughing doubled her forward across the blankets and I looked on helplessly, ineffectually patting her blue-veined hands. Piers piled pillows behind the old woman’s head and winked at her when she finally got her breath back. To my slightly appalled surprise, she winked back at him.

  “I’ll go get you a drink of water.” He loped off with her empty drinking jug. No doubt he’d spotted a good-looking young nurse somewhere and wanted an excuse to chat.

  “An American,” Mrs. Treadgold croaked at last. “Ah—I had an American sweetheart after the war. He was a good-looking boy too. Had an enormous willy, as I recall.”

  “Mrs. Treadgold!”

  “Not much point in being coy when you’re dying, is there? It’s all right. I’ve come to terms with the whole thing. Arrangements have been made and suchlike. Which brings me to why I asked for you.” Mrs. Treadgold scrabbled about in the confines of the bed. “Before Vivienne gets here. I’ve got a present for you.” A cold, bony hand pushed something into my palm. “It was mine from before Mr. Treadgold. Vivienne and Tom don’t know about it, but I’d like you to have it. To remember me by. You and your young man. Please wear it when you agree to marry him. For me.”

  I opened my mouth to prevaricate. This had all gone far enough. I really couldn’t accept something like this under false pretences, but Mrs. T went on. “That little chat we had the other day? Don’t worry, Alys, it’s obvious that you’re in love.”

  The coughing came again. Harder and harder she choked until a couple of nurses came over and elbowed me aside, pushing the bed to who knew where, the fragile hand being snatched from mine.

  I collapsed into a chair. Piers had returned, thrust his hands into his pockets and was staring at the floor, occasionally shaking his head, muttering to himself under his breath. Finally he looked up. “Mortality. What a fuck.”

  I opened my hand a crack, looked at the object Mrs. Treadgold had been so desperate for me to have and had to bite my lip to prevent a hysterical giggle escaping. She’d given me an engagement ring. Oh, not diamonds and sapphires. A much more understated little item in white gold with a ruby cut into a heart shape set in the centre. A giggle escaped over my tongue clamped between my teeth. The ring was beautiful.

  “Let’s get outta here.”

  I was hardly aware of the tears rolling down my chin until we got outside. The ring was clenched so tightly in my fist that the ruby was making little heart shapes on my palm, but I didn’t kid myself it was just for Mrs. Treadgold that I was crying.

  Piers didn’t ask. Instead he stood, back braced against the Porsche, smoking what I hoped was an ordinary cigarette. Then he looked at me, said, “Oh, Ally,” in a heartfelt way, and closed his arms around me.

  I could really do with more friends like him.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Jace took another Jaffa cake. “So, you are telling me that you are having Mr. Small Horses Man asking you to be marrying with him?” She looked at me over the top of the spongy morsel which she ate in her usual fashion, by folding it in half and popping it into her mouth in one go. Her expression was absolutely deadpan. I couldn’t get any kind of impression as to what she thought about this, other than that the emotion it generated was making her get through confectionary products as if there was about to be a prohibition order on Kit Kats. “You must be very exciting.”

  “Excited. Yes, I suppose I am. It’s a lovely ring, you’ve got to admit. Leo’s got taste.” We looked at it jointly for a few moments and if the weight of our gazes had been physical, the ring would have been atomised in milliseconds.

  “Forgive me, Alys.” Jace grabbed me by the wrists suddenly and pulled me towards her until my face nearly rested on the shelf of her bosom. “But as your friend I must be speaking. This man is not the man for you, I am thinking.”

  I disengaged myself gently from her grasp. “What on earth makes you say that? He’s good looking, he’s got money, he’s very nice.” And Mrs. Treadgold had spotted that I was in love. Even if I didn’t know it myself.

  “Well, I would not be asking you to marry me in a letter.” She sounded contemptuous. I hadn’t known Jace was quite so opposed to Leo, but now she seemed quite vituperative. It was strange how this attitude of hers made me even more determined to see his side of things.

  “Florrie likes him.”

  “Florence is liking Eminem. You are not wanting to be marrying him, are you?”

  I reached for a biscuit and lackadaisically bit the chocolate off around the sides. “Oh, Jace. Why does it have to be like this? It should be all lovely and happy. We should be drinking champagne with you telling me how lucky I am to have a man who loves me and wants to give me a better life. Instead, here we are, ingesting a lifetime’s worth of calories in one sitting. He’s hardly going to want to marry me if I turn up with a bottom the size of a principality, is he?”

  Jace snorted like a bullock and declaimed in Spanish, but when I asked for a translation, she just shook her head. “So, what else is news? I was hoping you would be coming to the shop yesterday, after you are visiting your sick person.”

  “I was feeling a bit shaken up.”

  After the hospital Piers had taken me to some bar he knew and bought me sneaky, vicious little cocktails all day and well into the night, which tasted like a potent treacle and weedkiller mix with umbrellas in. They all had improbable names like Scrubbing the Puke off the Carpet on Sunday Morning. I’d become incoherently drunk and probably cried a good deal too, but my memory of that was hazy. Piers had taken me to visit Grainger, I remembered that. I had the teeth marks to prove it. And Piers’s arm around me reassuring me that I needn’t feel guilty, that Grainger was fine where he was for another day or so.

  Then he’d listened to my list of things I did need to feel guilty about, held my head while I was sick in the toilet and given me a huge hug when I tried to apologise. This morning I’d had an economy-pack headache and a horrible itchy feeling in the back of my mind when I tried to remember getting home.

  “You were gone on a day with Piers, and you are having nothing new to be saying? I am finding myself hard to believe.” Jace waggled a finger at me. “And Piers is lovely, lovely young man, veerrrry pretty. I am not blaming you if you are sweeping him backwards.”

  I loved Jace dearly, she was my best friend and everything, but sometimes she just plain got on my nerves. “No. No sweeping backwards.” Our eyes swivelled back to the ring. I ate another biscuit and was sure I felt my hips expand. At this rate they were going to need planning permission.

  “So. You are going to be saying yes to the man who is always being with his horses.”


  “Florence was mad keen. She’ll love it in Devon. Horses on tap.”

  “But you will not be marrying to please Florence, will you? Is this what you want?”

  I made some noncommittal remark and we left the subject, but that night I woke in a feverish sweat.

  “Charlton Hawsell Stud, Leo Forrester speaking.”

  It was three a.m. and Leo was answering the phone like it was midday. “It’s me.”

  “Alys? Good Lord.” Then his voice softened. “Can’t you sleep?”

  “No. Sounds like you can’t either.” I tried to think how to say what I needed to say. Before we get married there are things I need to tell you, things you should know about me. “Leo, I need to talk to you.”

  “Yes, and I’d love to talk to you too, but, actually I’ve got a mare foaling.”

  “Not that kind of talking.”

  A sudden silence. “Ah. I see. You mean serious stuff.” Another quiet space. “Well, look. We can’t really do this now, can we? Is there any chance you could come down here? We could have some proper time together, get some proper talking done—how does that sound?”

  There was a silence across which metaphorical tumbleweeds blew and timber wolves called. “Yes. I’d like to do that. I’ll talk to Simon, see if I can get some time off.”

  There was a huge relief in his voice. “So, this isn’t the Final Speech you want to give me? You haven’t. Decided. Yet, that is.”

  “No. I was just ringing. Oh, I don’t know why.” The howling empty sound of the phone line was doing nothing to bridge the miles. “To say that I wanted to talk.”

  There was a sudden shuffling sound, an echoing voice said, “Oh, she’s down,” and a straining, groaning noise like a hot-water system in distress. “Things are getting moving here, I’d better go.” Leo was already distant. “Let me know when you can come. Sleep well.” The phone clicked off to a hum in my ear.

  While I was waiting for the kettle to boil, I flopped onto a stool and considered Leo’s ring. Slid it onto my left hand, third finger, held out my hand at arms length and twisted it around. Made tea with the unfamiliar weight on my finger, clinking the gold band against the side of the cup for the sheer novelty of it.