by Jagger, Kait
As Luna and Stefan entered, a rail-thin woman standing behind a restored Edwardian glass and mahogany counter smiled. At Stefan. Abandoning her task of artfully folding silk scarves, she came around the counter and extended her hand to him.
‘You must be Stefan Lundgren. Isabelle told us to expect you.’
Alerted by the sounds outside, Isabelle herself sailed out of a back storeroom on a cloud of Guerlain.
‘Cousin Stefan,’ she squealed, leaping toward him and throwing her arms around his neck. Luna was briefly gratified to see Stefan stagger back slightly before returning the embrace. ‘Mummy tells me you’ve been here for weeks and you haven’t bothered to call me.’ Isabelle’s slightly feline features arranged themselves into a pout.
Isabelle bore a passing resemblance to her elder sister, in the way a thoroughbred horse looked like a Dartmoor pony. She was a very beautiful girl. To Luna, she took after her father more than Helen, with his large hazel eyes and appearance of a permanent tan. Isabelle’s natural hair colour was light brown, like her sister’s, but hers was tinted and sliced to a warm honey that she wore loose, in artfully artless waves that fell to her shoulders.
Her clothes, too, were all designer. Luna had often thought that Patrice and Kayla would have a field day in Isabelle’s closet. The only thing that let her down was her taste for bling. She was wearing a large gold necklace with matching earrings and cuff that served to detract from her beauty and were at odds with her exquisitely cut Roland Mouret dress.
‘It’s only been two weeks, cousin,’ Stefan was saying. ‘I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of each other from now on.’
‘But you can’t stay for lunch?’ Isabelle asked piteously, widening her eyes like Regina the spaniel.
‘I’m afraid not,’ he smiled apologetically. ‘Luna and I have another appointment in Shoreditch after this.’ Luna glanced at him sharply; it wasn’t strictly true that they had to rush off to Jem and Rod’s office, and far be it from her to stand in the way of the Marchioness’s carefully laid plans for Stefan and Isabelle. But before Luna could correct him, Isabelle clapped her hands together and cried, ‘Wait! I’m coming out to the house for the weekend with a few friends to do a bit of shooting, a bit of drinking. You must join us! You’re staying at the Dower House, aren’t you? You must come up to the house tonight and have a few drinks with us.’
‘That sounds—’ Stefan began.
‘I won’t take no for an answer,’ Isabelle interrupted. ‘I’ll see you tonight at eight. Don’t make me come down to the Dower House to fetch you.’
Meanwhile, Luna stood in silence, ignored by Isabelle as she knew she would be. That they had known each other for years, had once even nominally been friends, counted for nothing now. In Isabelle’s eyes, Luna was her mother’s secretary and nothing more. Oh, occasionally, when the two of them were alone in Luna’s office while Isabelle was waiting for her mother, and if Isabelle was feeling chatty, she might mention their long-distant schooldays. ‘Remember Hester? Prim old Hester? I saw her in Mayfair last week. Pregnant with her third child, if you can believe it…’ To be honest, Luna preferred being blanked. She knew where she stood when Isabelle ignored her.
She wondered if Isabelle remembered the time she, Luna and Stefan had briefly crossed paths twelve years earlier. Luna rather imagined that she did, but she had few qualms that Isabelle would reveal as much to Stefan. Isabelle had almost as much vested in keeping the past in the past as Luna did…
*
A strange thing happened after Luna’s father died just before her thirteenth birthday. Whereas her mother’s death the previous year had turned her into a bit of an outcast at the private girls school she attended in Chieveley – what teenage girl, after all, knows how to deal with the recently bereaved? – the subsequent demise of her father in even more tragic circumstances transformed her into something of a cult figure. An emotional grotesque, as it were, who attracted the attentions of morbid goths and earnest do-gooders in equal measure. Isabelle had fallen into the latter category, only she was the alpha do-gooder of St Catherine’s Preparatory School for Girls, daughter to the local landed gentry and top dog in the well-controlled pack at the apex of the St Catherine’s food chain.
Luna couldn’t remember Isabelle taking much notice of her before her father died. And perhaps if things had been different she might have spurned Isabelle’s persistent advances when she returned to St Catherine’s after the funeral, now a full-board student on a bursary hastily arranged by the school’s headmistress.
But Isabelle herself had recently suffered a family loss in the death of her brother James. Judged according to Luna’s brutal internal calculus – her barometer of pain – the death of a sibling didn’t really measure up to the death of both parents, but the connection with Isabelle held a secret attraction for her.
Isabelle’s mother, Lady Wellstone, Marchioness of Lionsbridge, was a member of the St Catherine’s board of governors. Luna had seen her at school sports day, standing at the sidelines watching Isabelle play rounders. She had been dressed in black, in mourning, Luna marvelled. Who wore mourning clothes anymore? Not even Luna, whose life was silently and utterly devoted to mourning. She saw something she recognised that day, a kindred spirit in suffering. Measured by Luna’s exacting barometer of pain, the death of a beloved child was commensurate with her own loss.
She also knew, had been quietly told as much by her headmistress, that it had been Lady Wellstone who had paid for her to stay at the school. And saved her from expulsion when she subsequently hacked her hair off, her beautiful coccyx-skimming hair that her father had always said looked just like her mother’s, and donated the proceeds to Cancer Relief. ‘The girl’s heart is in the right place,’ the Marchioness had said, or so Luna had been told.
So she had accepted Isabelle’s advances, becoming a temporary junior member of her pack. And she had been as close to happy as she was then capable of being when Isabelle invited her to join a select few for a mid-term visit to Arborage.
Luna’s memories of the months after her father’s death were cloudy, but she remembered her first approach to Arborage House with complete clarity. The way the yellow sandstone of the building stood out against the dark April clouds. The meticulously trimmed topiary hedges that surrounded the portico. And the copious scaffolding, for despite being in mourning the Marchioness was proceeding with a planned renovation of the east wing of the house, Isabelle informed them in somewhat bored tones.
Luna couldn’t believe how blasé Isabelle was about her home, how much she took it for granted. And, she realised soon after their arrival, she had been foolish to think that she could fit in with Isabelle and her real friends, sitting on Isabelle’s frilly canopied bed giggling and confiding in each other about secret crushes and hidden enmities. The harder she tried, the worse she felt, and the more she hated each and every one of them for not seeing how trivial their concerns were.
Worst of all was Isabelle, who at the time was claiming undying love for her visiting cousin, Stefan, from Sweden. It was all ‘Stefan says this’ and ‘Stefan thinks that’ and, really, Luna couldn’t see the point of it. He was two years older than Isabelle – a lifetime when you are a teenage girl – and anyway, he was nothing special: a painfully thin, sallow-looking youth with floppy hair and a collection of truly awful woolly jumpers. Not that they saw much of him, because he went out of his way to avoid them.
One afternoon, however, after Isabelle had pestered her mother one too many times, the Marchioness ordered them all to take a hike in the forest.
‘And bring your cousin with you,’ she added. ‘He could do with the fresh air.’
Which Isabelle had been only too happy to do. So they had all trekked out under darkening skies that soon gave way to an afternoon of constant drizzle. Luna hadn’t brought a coat or, crucially, a hat for her recently shorn head with its half-centimetre of hair, and she was soon wet and miserable, trailing along with the others in Isabelle and the Swedish
boy’s wake.
The boy seemed positively angry about being forced to spend time in England. From what Luna could gather from his monosyllabic responses to Isabelle’s best efforts to engage him, his mother had pretty much forced him to come over for college studies in the wake of her divorce from his father. And everything he saw here appeared to disappoint him.
‘Your roads here, they are crazy. You English see a tree in the way and you build the road around it. In Sweden we cut it down, build the road straight…English houses are so cold because they are badly built. In Sweden we know how to build efficiently…You English, you always expect everyone else to speak in English…’ and on, and on. Meanwhile, Isabelle gamely continued flirting with him (Luna half expected him to comment on the fact that English girls just didn’t flirt with the same gusto as Swedish girls). And the rest of them walked along behind, watching this tragedy unfold like a sodden Greek chorus.
They stopped under a stand of yew trees at one point to shelter from the rain, and Isabelle leaned closer to her skinny cousin, laughing at a joke he hadn’t really made, while Luna stood against the trunk of a yew tree wishing she had a hat.
Then the boy said something about how the rain didn’t feel as wet in Sweden and something inside Luna snapped. She turned to the other girls and said, ‘Why doesn’t he fuck off back to Sweden then?’
She hadn’t bothered to keep her voice down, and from the red blotches that immediately appeared in the boy’s cheeks and the furious expression on Isabelle’s face when she turned to look at Luna, she could see that she’d hit the mark. At this point in her life, Luna was not one to shy away from confrontation, so she brazened it out, giving them both a caustic, contemptuous look. And for a moment, it could have gone either way. One of the girls, the extravagantly named Jemima Evangeline Mitford, actually started to laugh. Had the others followed suit, it would have turned into a mini-triumph, with the whiny Swedish boy put in his place and Isabelle receiving a salutary, patriotic wake-up call.
Alas, it was not to be. On seeing Isabelle’s stricken expression, the other girls cast hard looks at Luna, and Jemima Evangeline stifled her laugh. The Swedish boy said nothing for the rest of the long walk back to the house, by which point Luna was back where she started, an outcast.
*
Luna had plenty of time to reminisce during Stefan’s meeting with Isabelle. Isabelle was as slippery as an eel when it came to questions about her business, and Stefan, for whatever reason, seemed slightly cautious with her.
The shop had a tea room, or salon de thé, as Isabelle preferred to call it, in the back, where Isabelle had taken them for her ‘little chat’ with Stefan. Sitting on slightly uncomfortable white painted wrought iron chairs, with a complete set of fine bone china laid out before them, Isabelle poured tea for them all, the perfect hostess. She even smiled and wrinkled her nose at Luna as she passed her her cup; it didn’t escape Luna that this was all for Stefan’s benefit. Look, look, Stefan, how lovely I am to the help.
Luna gave herself a little mental shake. It was very easy to slip into the rut of criticising Isabelle; something about their shared history brought out the worst in her. She made a conscious decision to think about something else as Stefan pulled out a sheaf of spreadsheets Luna hadn’t seen before and attempted to get Isabelle to focus on them.
‘But, cousin, really, I leave all this stuff to Mummy,’ Isabelle protested. ‘I’m just a simple shopkeeper, doing my best to promote the Arborage brand.’
Watching as Stefan repeatedly but patiently brought her back to the task at hand, Luna reflected on how much he had changed since she first met him. He really was practically unrecognisable, a complete metamorphosis from the petulant teenager he had been then. Or perhaps, Luna acknowledged to herself, she had been unfair in her assessment of him at the time. All her experiences in the immediate wake of her parents’ deaths passed through the distorted lens of her grief and other, darker emotions. Maybe if twenty-six-year-old Luna had met sixteen-year-old Stefan, she would have seen a boy on the cusp of manhood, uprooted from his home country, separated from his family…and felt sorry for him.
As it was, all she could do was wonder at how well he’d turned out, how in the space of twelve years he’d put on at least two stone, a substantial amount of muscle, clearly gotten over his hatred of all things English, and built a small business empire for himself. All by the age of twenty-eight. She actually admired Stefan Lundgren. She respected his opinion and his business acumen, she appreciated his patient approach to his work and to people in general, and she…well, Luna had always been attracted to competent men, men who were good at what they did and knew it, and Stefan was the single most competent man she’d ever met.
‘It’s impossible to put a value on the contribution this establishment makes to general brand awareness around Arborage. We have literally thousands of people walking past this shop every day on their way to Harrods, Selfridges…’ Isabelle was saying.
‘I do appreciate that, Isabelle,’ Stefan said. ‘But I’m not talking to you about marketing. This is a much more basic conversation about the revenue and profits generated by Lionsbridge. Or not, as the case may be.’
Isabelle waved her hand dismissively – she really could be like her mother sometimes, Luna thought to herself wryly. ‘You’re right, we clearly aren’t talking the same language.’
At this point a friend of hers glided into the tea room, the third to have appeared during their meeting. Isabelle rose to exchange kisses and exclamations of mutual admiration, and Stefan looked over to Luna, who kept her gaze innocently fixed on the brim of her teacup.
‘I think our work is finished here,’ he said quietly.
Luna met his eyes and he purposefully adopted a hapless expression. She choked back a laugh, and they both stood, Stefan retrieving her satchel and arranging the strap for her, his hand briefly resting on her shoulder. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Isabelle watching them. There were no more sweet smiles for Luna as she walked them to the door.
‘So, I will definitely see you tonight,’ she instructed Stefan as he kissed her cheeks.
‘I look forward to it,’ Stefan replied.
They took the Tube to Jem and Rod’s studio in the East End, both opting to stand holding the same rail as the train clattered through the tunnel. Luna’s posterior still bore the imprint of the wrought iron chair at Isabelle’s shop, and besides, there was something airless about that place that made standing on the Tube feel good, jaunty.
‘So,’ she said eventually. ‘What did you think?’
‘I think I will be telling Augusta that Lionsbridge should be wound down as quickly as possible,’ Stefan replied immediately. Luna raised her eyebrows, genuinely surprised by the bluntness of his response. In all their other meetings with managers he’d been very careful not to give too much away to her, to seem to be open without actually telling her his full views. Even now she could only guess which areas he might give a negative report about to the Marchioness. The account books for Lionsbridge must be even worse than she thought.
‘She doesn’t seem to like you very much, my cousin,’ he added, and again Luna was surprised. That he had noticed and that, to his eyes, Isabelle’s attitude towards her was something more tangible than a mere lack of interest.
‘She…we don’t really know each other,’ Luna said, somewhat lamely.
‘Hunh,’ Stefan grunted, and looked out the darkened windows of the train. And Luna imagined that he stood a little closer to her. That his hand moved a shade down the pole, and his shoulder inclined ever so slightly towards her. She felt his usual heat radiating into her and noticed for the first time how perfect his height was for her. How, if she had rested her head on his shoulder, her nose would have met the pulse beating in his neck.
Chapter Seven
Jem and Rod’s company, the eponymously named Rod Studios, was located in a former printworks in Shoreditch, one of the few historic buildings in the immediate vicinity that had s
urvived the Blitz, now transformed into an uber cool office space. Their offices were on the second floor and Rod’s domain started immediately outside the old industrial lift, where the walls and ceilings were covered with old style graffiti, most of it featuring characters and settings from video games Rod and his team had designed.
‘Wow,’ Stefan said, surveying the industrial, almost brutalist light fittings and Rod’s slogan, ‘Welcome to your new world,’ emblazoned in blood-red spray paint on a black background opposite the lift. ‘What is it exactly that your friend’s company designs?’
‘It’s video games mostly, although they also do some instructional apps.’
‘Would I have heard of any of the games they’ve designed?’
Luna pointed down the hallway towards a florid painting of a British WWII destroyer sailing through icy seas, a Nazi fighter plane diving overhead and merchant marine vessel sinking in the background. ‘Well…’ she began.
‘Archangel!’ Stefan exclaimed. ‘Your friend designed Archangel? I love that game.’
Archangel was a game based on the true story of arctic convoys run by the British navy from Iceland to the Soviet ports of Archangel and Murmansk during the war, to provide vital supplies to the Soviets. Eighty-five merchant ships and sixteen British warships were lost to German attacks from air and sea from 1941 to 1945. Rod’s video game, to date his most successful creation, charted the journey of a convoy led by the HMS Duke of York in 1943. From what Luna could tell, the goal of the game was to protect as many English merchant marine ships as possible whilst sinking as many U-boats as possible.
She was not, admittedly, completely sure of this, not being a fan of video games herself. However, she’d spent enough time around Jem, Rod and their friends to recognise the boyish excitement in Stefan’s face as they approached the doorway to Rod’s offices, where Jem stood waiting for them.
