‘I think Chef’s doing mushroom soufflé, followed by roast partridge and then rhubarb syllabub, Your Grace. And there’s some cheese, if you’d like?’
‘Yes, we simply must have cheese,’ the Duke said gravely.
‘Well, if you’ll forgive me,’ said the Duchess, ‘I’m going to go and get changed and then go out. So, I’m afraid I won’t be joining you for dinner, Polly, but my husband and children will look after you.’ She glared at the Duke and stalked out, slamming the door behind her.
‘Drink, Polly?’ asked the Duke. ‘I’m going to have another one. A strong one, I think. Bugger the doctors.’
After its warlike beginning, dinner was almost disappointingly peaceful. Jasper, the Duke, Violet and I sat at one end of a vast mahogany table in the dining room, the light from several silver candlesticks flickering off the dark green walls and an eight-foot stuffed polar bear casting a long shadow along the room at the other end of the table. It was his grandfather’s, the Duke told me, one of forty-six polar bears brought back as a trophy from one of his hunting expeditions in the Arctic in 1906.
There was no shouting. No Duchess. Violet (in jeans and a t-shirt) talked about her horses, the Duke generally talked about the animals he’d killed, Jasper (in jeans and a collared blue shirt) quietly fed Bovril scraps of partridge. I felt excruciatingly out of place given that I was dressed as if I was off to a pre-war nightclub, but I kicked my shoes off under the table. I rubbed my feet together as the Duke asked me questions about London.
‘Far too many people in London,’ he said, wiping his mouth with his napkin at the end of dinner and standing up. He then announced he needed to walk Inca and Violet said she wanted to have a bath. Which left Jasper and me sitting at one end of the table, candles still burning and Ian humming while removing bowls and dirty napkins.
‘Another bottle?’ Ian asked.
‘I think so, don’t you?’ replied Jasper, pushing his chair back from the table and stretching his legs out in front of him. ‘OK, Polly, let’s get this over with.’
‘Get what over with?’
‘The interview, our little chat. What do you want to know about me and this madhouse?’
‘Oh, I see. OK. You call it a madhouse?’
‘What else would you call it? My father is a Victorian whose dearest wish is that he’d fought in the Boer War. My mother is happiest pottering about in the hen house with her friend, the gamekeeper.’
‘Ah. So, that’s…’
Jasper raised an eyebrow at me.
‘… common knowledge?’
‘Desperately common. The whole village knows about it. It’s been on and off for years. As long as I can remember. I don’t mind so much but I think Violet probably does. So, instead, she thinks of horses from morning till night.’
‘Hang on, hang on, can I record this?’ I pulled my phone out of my pocket and waved it at him.
He smiled at me. ‘Ah my inquisitor. I didn’t realize I was doing an interview for Newsnight.’
‘You’re not. But I quite need to record it. Can I?’ I held my phone up again.
‘’Course. I will say lots of immensely intelligent things.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ I said, fiddling with my phone to make sure it was recording. ‘And what about you?’
‘What do you mean “What about me?”’
‘Are you as mad as everyone else?’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’m the sanest of the lot.’ He smiled again and swept his hair out of his eyes.
‘What about your break-up? What about those photos?’
‘What photos?’
‘The ones in the paper.’
He looked straight into my eyes. It was unnerving, as if he could see directly into my brain. A sort of posh Paul McKenna. ‘I don’t want to talk about Caz,’ he replied. ‘She’s a sweet girl. It just wasn’t right. Or I’m not right…’ He trailed off. ‘And those photos… All right, so occasionally I behave badly and let off a bit of steam. I go out and I behave like an idiot. But I don’t think being photographed stumbling out of a club is the worst thing in the world.’
He leant closer, shifting in his chair, still looking into my eyes. ‘Forgive me, Polly, for I have sinned.’
I burst out laughing. ‘Nice try. But you can’t charm your way out that easily.’
‘Fine.’ He sat back again, reached across the table for the wine and filled our glasses up. ‘OK, go on, ask me anything.’
I raised an eyebrow at him. ‘I’m trying to work you out.’
‘That’s not a question.’
‘I’m just trying to work out whether the joking is a front.’
‘A front?’
‘Like a mask. Covering up something more serious. You joke a lot.’
‘What did you expect?’
I frowned. ‘I’m not sure. You to be more cagey, more defensive.’
‘You expected me,’ he began, ‘to be a cretin in red trousers who couldn’t spell his own name?’
‘Well, maybe a bit. I mean, er, some of your friends at lunch, for example.’ I was thinking about Barny.
‘Yes. Most of them are bad, aren’t they? But…’ He shrugged. ‘They’re my friends, I’ve known them since school. And they don’t mean to be such thundering morons. They were just born like that.’
‘And you weren’t?’
‘No. I’m different.’ He grinned.
‘How?’
‘OK. I know there’s all this…’ He threw his arm out in front of him and across the room. ‘But sometimes I just want something normal. A normal family which doesn’t want to kill each other the whole time. A normal job in London. A normal girlfriend, frankly, who doesn’t look like a horse and talk about horses and want to marry me so she can live in a castle and have more horses.’
‘Oh, so you do want a girlfriend?’ I sensed this was the moment to push him a bit harder, to try to unpick him. ‘You want a proper relationship?’
He looked at me again, straight-faced. ‘Who’s asking?’
‘I am,’ I persevered. It was tricky, this bit, quizzing someone about their most personal feelings. But Peregrine wanted quotes on Jasper’s love life, so I needed him to talk about it. I needed a bit of sensitivity from the most eligible man in the country, a chink in his manly armour.
‘So, OK, you’re single again,’ I pressed on, ‘and I know you don’t want to talk about Lady Caroline… Caz… but what’s the deal with all the women?’
His wine glass froze in mid-air, before he placed it back down on the table. ‘Polly, I can’t believe it. “All the women” indeed. Who’s told you that?’
‘OK, so I know you dated Lala, briefly, and I know about a few others. The rumours about you and that Danish princess, last year, for example?’
Jasper grimaced in his seat. ‘Clara. I had dinner with her once and that was it. Terrible sense of humour. She didn’t laugh at any of my jokes.’
‘All right, the photos of you and Lady Gwendolyn Sponge?’
‘Nothing to it. Our parents are old friends.’
‘Who was that one you went skiing with last year then?’
He frowned at me.
‘You were photographed laughing on a chairlift together.’
His face cleared. ‘Oh, Ophelia. Yes. She’s a darling. But about as bright as my friend Bovril.’
Under the table, Bovril thumped his tail at the sound of his name.
‘Fine. But I imagine there have been… many more.’
He sighed. ‘Many more. I mean honestly, who makes up this nonsense?’
‘So it’s rubbish? All those tales about the legendary Jasper Milton are nonsense?’
‘You, Little Miss Inquisitor, are teasing me. And anyway, what does my personal life really matter to you?’ He looked at me with a straight face. ‘Why are you blushing?’
I put my hand up to my cheek. ‘I’m not. It’s all this wine.’
‘Oh. I thought it might be because I’m flirting with you.’
He laughed. ‘Touché.’ And then he brushed his hair to the side, out of his eyes, again. And just for a second, literally for a second, I promise, I wondered what it would be like to be in bed with him, my own fingers in his hair. But then I thought about Lala and told myself to have a sip of water. I couldn’t go around the place fantasizing about my interview subjects. Kate Adie would never do that. I tried to get back to the point.
‘Do you think you’ll settle down though? Find someone? Get married? Have children? Do all that?’
He sighed again and sat back in his seat. ‘Maybe. I don’t know. How does one know? Do you know?’
‘This isn’t about me.’
He laughed. ‘See? You don’t know either. It’s not that easy, is it?’
‘What isn’t?’
He shrugged. ‘Relationships, life, getting older and realizing things can be more complicated than you thought.’
‘You feel hard done by?’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘That’s not what I’m saying at all. In the great lottery of life, as my father is fond of saying, I know I’ve done pretty well. But do you know what? Maybe, sometimes, I don’t want to take over this whole place. I don’t want to be told how lucky I am because I get to devote my whole life to a leaky castle and an estate that needs constant attention and I don’t want to be in the papers falling out of a club. But that doesn’t mean that I know what I do want.’
I stayed quiet and glanced up at a portrait of the sixth Duchess of Montgomery, a fat, pale lady in a green dress looking impassively at us from the wall. I looked from the painting to Jasper, who suddenly smiled at me.
‘What’s funny?’ I said.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Me, sitting here, talking to you about how terribly hard my life is. Come on, let’s have more wine and you keep asking me all your clever questions.’ He reached for the bottle and filled up our glasses again.
‘Does it bother you, what other people say? What newspapers say?’
‘It would be a lie if I said that it didn’t. Sometimes it does. But then you just have to remind yourself that they don’t know the real story.’
‘Which is?’
He sighed. ‘Oh, I suppose that we’re a bunch of dysfunctional misfits trying to muddle through like everyone else. Just… in a bigger house. But you can’t say that,’ he said, inclining his head towards my phone, still recording on the table. ‘I’ll get in trouble. More trouble. “Poor little rich boy”, they’ll all say.’
‘It’s quite a defence plea though.’ I said this smiling at him. I couldn’t take his sob story that seriously but I still felt a twinge of sympathy. A very tiny one.
‘Nope,’ he said, ‘Sorry. Can’t use it. That was just for you to know. Not everyone else. And what about you, anyway?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What’s your story? Why are you here interviewing me?’
I felt awkward. ‘Erm, it’s not very exciting. I grew up in Surrey, then my dad died, so Mum and I moved to Battersea where she’s lived ever since. I was all right at English at school so my teacher said I should think about becoming a journalist. I think he meant more politics and news than castles and Labradors, though, no offence.’
‘None taken.’
‘But this is good for now.’
He nodded in silence. ‘Have you got a boyfriend?’
I laughed. ‘I’m supposed to be asking the questions.’
‘You are. I’m just being nosy.’
‘No, as it happens. I don’t. A bit like you, I guess, relationships aren’t my thing.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t imagine you with an Ed or a James, living in some terribly poky flat in Wandsworth.’
‘Oh, I see. You’re not a man of the people at all. You’re a snob?’
‘I’m teasing. Some of my closest friends are called Ed and James. But come on, Polly, you really must lighten up or we’ll never get anywhere. If we’re going to get married one day, you’ll need to stop being so stern.’
‘You’re ridiculous,’ I said. But I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. He was clearly the boy your mother warned you about but he was also charming. More charming than I’d thought earlier that day. More charming than the papers made out. Or maybe it was the wine?
‘Why shouldn’t we get married? I think you’re terribly sweet. And funny. And you clearly know nothing about horses which is also a bonus.’
And then he leaned forward and kissed me. Briefly. His lips brushed mine for two or three seconds, tops, before I pulled my head back. Slow reflexes, admittedly. But, in my defence, I was very drunk.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ I said in my most matronly voice, pulling away.
‘No?’
‘No. This is work. For me anyway. And just when I was starting to like you.’
‘Have I ruined it?’ he said, still leaning forward, still smiling at me.
I ignored the question. ‘Your seduction techniques might have worked on Lala, but not me.’
He sighed and sat back in his seat. ‘Good old Lala. How is she, anyway?’
‘She’s very well. Well… kind of. You know Lala.’
‘I did like her,’ he said, staring at the table as if in a trance. ‘It just wasn’t the right timing again.’ He paused. ‘Or it was something else. I don’t know.’ He looked up at me. ‘You won’t write about me and her though, will you?’
‘You and Lala? No. Don’t worry.’
‘Good. I don’t mind being written about that much but I don’t want to cause trouble for anyone else. I mean, I ask for it, I know. Others don’t.’
He threw back his wine glass and I tried to think of something to say, but I couldn’t. So, we sat for a few moments in silence while ancestors in wigs frowned down from the walls. The mood had changed but I wasn’t sure why.
‘Bedtime, I think,’ he said after a few moments. ‘Let me show you the way to your room.’
I followed him in silence back down the long corridor and up the stairs. I felt awkward about things. About the whole day. The entire family should be in an asylum. I knew Peregrine would expect my piece on the family to be glowing, to talk about how upstanding they all were. To put a gloss on life in the castle and be as flattering as I could about the Duke and Duchess. But the truth was they all seemed a bit lost. Trapped. Although, having met Jasper, I could at least write about how much more self-aware he was in real life, as opposed to how he was portrayed in the papers. I could definitely bring myself to do that, I thought, as I reached for the zip on the back of my dress. For God’s sake, it was going to take me about five hours to get out of this thing.
4
‘GOOD TIME THEN?’ ASKED the taxi driver as I got back into his car early the next morning, having fished out his card and decided I would sneak out early before breakfast, before any more awkwardness over bacon and eggs. I didn’t want to talk to anyone because I had the kind of hangover that I thought I might die from.
‘Mmmm, kind of,’ I replied, shutting my eyes.
‘See much of the Duke?’
‘A bit.’ Eyes still closed.
‘And the Duchess?’
‘I saw a bit more of her actually.’ I had to silence this. How could I silence him?
‘So you’re back to London then?’
‘Yup.’
‘Back to the Big Smoke. I don’t know how you do it. I like the quiet life myself.’
‘Mmmm.’ Could have fooled me.
‘Can’t be doing with all the stress of London, do y’know what I mean? People rushin’ about all the time. And all that noise. How d’you sleep at night with all that noise? All them buses and cars. And people.’
‘I can sort of sleep anywhere,’ I muttered. Like right now, I thought to myself, literally right this very second.
‘Nope, not for me. I’m happier up here. Just me and my Marjorie. I drive my car, she works in the loca
l library. Loves it there, she does. Says she likes the peace.’
‘Mmm. I can imagine.’
‘Not much of a reader myself. But she loves it. Always got her head in a book, has my Marjorie.’
‘Mmm. Listen, I don’t mean to be rude but do you mind if I have a quick doze? I’m just a bit tired.’
‘No, no, right you are. You have a doze. I read an article the other day about sleep. What was it called?’ He paused. ‘“The Power of the Nap”, I think, something like that. I have trouble sleeping myself, do you ever find that? Not every night, just sometimes. My head hits the pillow and the brain’s still going, d’you know what I mean?’
I didn’t reply. My brain felt like it was about to dribble out through my nose. I was worrying about whether I was going to say anything to Lala about the kiss. Not that you could even call it a kiss really. But, still, did I have to mention it?
Half an hour later, I’d reached the station, paid off the most talkative taxi driver in Yorkshire and installed myself in the Quiet Carriage with provisions for the journey: one large latte, a Diet Coke, a large bottle of still water, two plain croissants and a packet of salt and vinegar McCoy’s crisps.
‘Ladies and gentleman, welcome to York. This train is for London King’s Cross, calling at all stations to Peterborough, where there is a bus replacement service to…’
Fuck’s sake. I scrolled through my phone. Three emails from Peregrine asking how the weekend was going, a text from Mum saying that Jeremy Paxman was very poor on Celebrity Bake Off last night and she thought he might get the boot, a message from Bill with the link to a review for a new French restaurant in Shepherd’s Bush and a message from Lex saying could I ring her ‘immediately’. Some sort of sordid sex story, probably. Strangled with courgetti. Spanked with a spatula. That sort of thing. It could wait. I was in no way strong enough for that discussion, and anyway I was in the Quiet Carriage. I fell asleep before I’d even had a sip of coffee.
The flat smelt when I opened the door. It was the sort of smell you know if you’ve ever ventured into the bedroom of a teenage boy. A musty, stale odour. In the sitting room, Joe lay on the sofa in his boxer shorts and a t-shirt watching Antiques Roadshow, empty packets of crisps scattered around him. A large bottle of Lucozade stood propped on his belly like a cairn on top of a hill.
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