‘No, you can’t,’ agreed Max. ‘Although it sounds like she was awfully rude to you.’
‘Someone should send her to the new vicar to confess her sins,’ said Gabe.
Dragging his boys up to the counter he began unloading his basket: another TV dinner for tonight, four cans of lager and a packet of chicken nuggets for the kids. Laura was many things: loving mother, sex goddess and, recently, since going back to work in television, breadwinner. But Nigella Lawson she wasn’t.
‘Call-me-Bill’s door is always open,’ he added with a grin.
The new vicar of St Hilda’s, the Reverend Clempson, had already become the butt of numerous jokes down at The Fox, even before the Great Ramblers’ Showdown. In his mid-twenties, with a boyish face and an unfortunately earnest manner, Reverend Clempson had been transferred to the Swell Valley from a trendy North London parish. His invitation to the largely elderly, dyed-in-the-wool-conservative population of Fittlescombe to ‘Call me Bill’ had gone down like the proverbial turd in a swimming pool. Used to the equally elderly, equally conservative Reverend Slaughter, many in the congregation were still getting over the shock of a new vicar who voted Labour, openly supported gay marriage, and wore T-shirts around the vicarage emblazoned with slogans, reportedly including the unforgivable: ‘I roll with God’ next to a picture of a suspicious-looking leaf. Call-me-Bill’s arrival, and subsequent set-to at Wraggsbottom Farm, had been the talk of the valley, until the Wellesleys came along and trumped him.
‘Why don’t you come back to Furlings for tea?’ Angela offered Penny. ‘No offence but you do look a bit of a fright. Something hot and sweet would do you good.’
‘Thanks,’ said Penny. ‘I’d love to.’ She turned to say goodbye to Gabe but he was already wrestling his children out of the door, his shopping jutting out precariously from underneath Luca’s stroller.
Max, Angela and Penny followed him towards the exit. Mrs Preedy called after them: ‘Mrs de la Cruz? That’ll be one pound sixty for the apple juice. I expect you forgot to pay in all the excitement.’
‘I’m so sorry!’ Penny blushed again, scrambling in her purse for the change.
‘All the excitement, indeed,’ muttered Max Bingley. ‘A libidinous old tax dodger just moves in down the road. Does anybody really care?’
Sadly, he already knew the answer to that.
‘This is a bloody joke. D’you think he’s done a bunk and ’opped on a plane to the Seychelles with one of his mistresses?’
Harry Trent rubbed his hands together to keep out the cold. A veteran from the Sun, Harry had been shivering at the bottom of Riverside Hall drive since eight o’clock this morning. His back ached, he was starving, and if Fast Eddie didn’t put in an appearance soon, he was going to miss the start of the Arsenal game.
‘I doubt it.’ Sasha McNally from Sky News was equally fed up with the long wait. ‘He wants to get back into politics, apparently, so I’m sure he’ll be on his best behaviour. They probably got a flat tyre or something. Shit!’ She grabbed her microphone. ‘Here he comes!’
A black BMW with darkened windows approached the gates at a stately pace.
‘Wasn’t he picked up in a Bentley?’ Harry asked.
‘Told you. Flat tyre,’ said Sasha. ‘If he had to change motors, that explains the delay.’
The gates swung inwards. As the car drove forward, the press pack surged behind it, like a swarm of bees around its queen, shouting questions before the door had even opened.
‘Sir Edward!’
‘Eddie!’
‘How does it feel to be back?’
Then the door opened. A boy of about seventeen stepped out, smiling broadly.
‘All this fuss for me?’ he asked, pulling a suitcase out of the boot. ‘I’m honoured, but it’s really not necessary.’
With his mop of blond hair and piercing blue eyes, Milo Wellesley looked a lot more like his mother than his father. But the cheeky smile and easy confident manner were Eddie to a T.
Milo zeroed in on Sasha. She was old, thirty at least, but she had a pretty face and amazing knockers. ‘You look freezing,’ he said gallantly. ‘Would you like to come inside and warm up? I’m sure Mummy would be happy to offer you a cup of tea.’
‘Milo!’ Annabel’s voice rang out through the cold air like a bell. ‘What are you doing here?’
It was the first time the front door had opened all day. Immediately the reporters surged forwards, their cameras click-click-clicking as they ran.
‘Get inside! Now!’
Reluctantly, Milo turned away from Sasha.
‘You don’t happen to have a hundred quid on you, do you?’ he asked his mother sheepishly. ‘For the taxi? I seem to be a bit short.’
A ripple of laughter ran through the assembled press.
‘Like father like son, eh?’
Mortified, Annabel darted back inside for her handbag, then came out to pay the driver. Click, click, click. In all the commotion, few people noticed Fast Eddie’s Bentley pulling up behind them. By the time they’d turned their various cameras and boom mikes back round, their long-awaited quarry was already halfway up the steps to the front door.
‘Hello, Milo.’ Eddie clapped his son warmly on the back. ‘I wasn’t expecting you here. Shouldn’t you be at school?’
‘Oh, that. Sort of. I’ll explain later.’
Milo slipped inside, leaving Annabel frozen on the doorstep like an ice sculpture.
‘Hello, darling. Sorry I’m late.’
Eddie leaned forward to kiss her. She hugged him stiffly, her arms opening and closing like a puppet’s as the cameras clicked away. This was exactly what she hadn’t wanted: a public reunion. She could cheerfully have strangled Milo.
Eddie turned to face the media while the chauffeur brought in his case.
‘It’s good to see you all and great to be home,’ he announced. ‘I’m looking forward to the next chapter in my life and to getting back to work.’
The questions came like bullets.
‘What sort of work?’
‘Are you planning a return to politics?’
‘Has the prime minister been in touch?’
Eddie smiled graciously. ‘I’m sure you’ll understand this is a private family moment. All I want right now is a cup of tea with my wife. Thank you.’
Ushering Annabel inside, he closed the door behind them.
‘I’ve missed you.’ He pulled her to him.
Annabel said nothing.
‘The house looks beautiful.’
‘Thank you. Where have you been? I expected you hours ago.’
‘Oh, we stopped off for lunch in Winchester,’ Eddie said nonchalantly. ‘You’ll never guess who I ran into afterwards?’
Annabel wasn’t in the mood for guessing games. She was still trying to get over the ‘stopped for lunch’ part.
‘Charles French!’ Eddie beamed, apparently oblivious to his wife’s displeasure. ‘You remember Charles, my literary agent? Anyway, I invited him and his wife for dinner.’
What little colour Annabel had left drained from her face. ‘You invited him for dinner?’
‘Yes.’
‘Here? Tonight?’
‘Yes.’
‘Eddie, you’ve just got out of prison.’
‘Exactly. So I thought it might be quite jolly to have some friends round. And we can talk about the book. You know, the prison memoirs.’
Annabel forced herself to count to five before speaking.
‘You should have asked me, Eddie. I don’t have a cook. I’ve nothing prepared.’
‘Charles won’t mind. As long as there’s wine. Milo can go and pick us up something in Chichester.’
Annabel could barely speak.
‘Milo!’ Eddie yelled up the stairs. ‘Make yourself useful and go and do the shopping for your mother. We’re having guests for dinner tonight.’
Milo appeared on the landing. ‘Great. Am I invited?’
‘No. It’s business. You c
an walk down to the pub for supper. Oh, and FYI, if you’ve been chucked out of Harrow it’s the end of the line. I mean it. No more school fees. You can get a bloody job.’
‘Oh, Dad.’
‘Don’t “Oh, Dad” me. I mean it. Have you been expelled?’
‘Let’s talk about it later.’ Grabbing his mother’s car keys and purse, Milo wisely slipped out of the door.
‘We need food for four,’ Eddie shouted after him. ‘And when you get to the supermarket, ask them if they’re hiring.’
‘This is delicious.’ Sarah French, Charles’s journalist wife, took another bite of fish pie. ‘And the house is spectacular. Truly, Lady Wellesley, you’ve done an amazing job.’
‘Thank you,’ Annabel said stiffly. Sarah was still waiting for a smile, or at least a ‘Please, call me Annabel’. So far she’d received neither, but she wasn’t giving up.
‘It’s terribly kind of you to have us over. Especially on Eddie’s first night back. If it were me I wouldn’t dream of entertaining.’
‘Yes, well. It was Eddie’s idea.’
Clearly Annabel only bothered to turn on the charm for people whom she believed could help her and Eddie politically. And I don’t fit into that category, thought Sarah. She was so rude, it was hard to feel sorry for her. And yet Sarah found that she did. How typically thoughtless and male of Eddie to invite people over, tonight of all nights, without running it past his wife first. No wonder Annabel was irritated. Was he was trying to avoid being left alone with her? Delaying the inevitable? Or was he simply such an innately social animal, he couldn’t help himself?
‘Let’s talk book,’ said Charles, helping himself to a third glass of Eddie’s excellent claret and attempting to lighten the mood. ‘Do you know what you’re going for in terms of tone?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you could pitch it various ways. You could go more Jeffrey Archer. Or more Jonathan Aitken. Or there’s always the Alan Clark approach.’
‘Not Clark,’ Eddie said firmly. ‘The man was a fraud and a bastard.’
‘Damned funny, though. His diaries sold like hot cakes.’
‘I know. But he claimed to love his wife and regret his affairs, then wrote a book boasting about them. That’s not my style.’
Sarah French watched Annabel’s face for any flicker of emotion, but found none.
‘On the other hand I couldn’t do an Aitken.’
‘Too pious?’
‘Exactly. All very well if one finds God in prison. But I’m afraid I didn’t.’
‘What did you find?’
Eddie thought about it for a moment. ‘Compassion, I suppose. Camaraderie. And ambition. Renewed ambition. I enjoyed Jeffrey Archer’s prison diaries, but I want this to be my own voice. I want it to be the book that gets me back in government. Or at least back in the party fold.’
‘Blimey,’ Charles French spluttered. ‘That might be a tall order.’
‘It might be,’ Eddie agreed. ‘I made a lot of enemies in Westminster.’
‘And Fleet Street,’ Charles reminded him.
‘One enemy in particular, as we all know,’ Eddie said darkly. ‘But I’m also foolish enough to believe that I still have a number of friends, in both those worlds. Voters aren’t looking for perfection. They’re looking for someone who can learn from their mistakes. I’ve learned from mine.’
Have you? thought Charles French. But he kept it to himself.
‘Besides, returning to politics is what I want,’ said Eddie. ‘And one should always go after what one wants in life.’
‘What about you, Lady Wellesley?’ Sarah turned to Annabel, infuriated by Eddie’s self-centredness. ‘Do you want to go back to Westminster life? After everything that’s happened?’
To Annabel’s own surprise, her answer was unequivocal. ‘Yes. I do.’
Sarah was amazed.
‘Why?’ she couldn’t help asking. ‘After people were so poisonous to you.’
‘I think it’s because people were so poisonous,’ Annabel said truthfully. ‘David Carlyle and his cronies destroyed our lives. Not just Eddie’s life, but mine too. He robbed us of something that was ours. I want it back. We both do.’
Eddie saw the glint of fire in his wife’s eyes and felt a powerful rush of desire. All of a sudden he wished his guests would bugger off and leave them alone.
‘So why the move out here?’ Sarah asked.
‘We needed a change,’ said Annabel, her earlier coolness back. ‘If Eddie does go back into politics, we’ll need somewhere private to retreat to. Somewhere that’s just for us. Besides, I wouldn’t want to live in London full time. And in any case, it may not happen. It’s still early days.’
‘There you are, you see,’ Eddie smiled at Sarah French. ‘You heard it from the horse’s mouth. That little pleb Carlyle may have won the battle. But the war isn’t over yet. Not by a long chalk.’
That night, in bed, Eddie pressed himself against his wife, slipping his hand up underneath her starched cotton nightdress.
‘Can’t you take this off?’ he whispered in her ear.
Annabel didn’t quite know why, but suddenly she felt like crying.
‘No, Eddie. I can’t.’
‘Are you angry?’
‘No,’ she lied. ‘I’m tired.’
‘I’m sorry, Annabel.’
The words hung in the air above the bed like a cloud of ash, the last, lingering remnant of the catastrophe that had befallen their marriage. A volcano had erupted two years ago, wiping out Eddie’s career and the life he and Annabel had built together. The cloud was all that was left of that life.
We’ll build a new life, thought Eddie. We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again.
‘I love you.’ His hand caressed her breast through the fabric of her nightgown.
Annabel closed her eyes and bit down on her lower lip. Part of her wanted him, wanted to turn round and kiss him and make love and make everything all right. But that would require forgiveness and she hadn’t got there yet. Not completely anyway. Annabel had married Eddie when she was very young, barely out of her teens. She’d built her entire life around him. But in one, disastrous year she’d seen that whole life wiped out. It was like planting a forest, watching it grow, and then waking up one morning to find that the chainsaws had been in and it was all gone. People accused her of being a snob, and perhaps she was. It didn’t occur to anybody that she was defensive and standoffish for a reason. That she’d begun wearing armour because she needed it. Because Eddie had dragged her into a war zone and left her to fend for herself.
‘Things have to change, Eddie,’ she said, removing his hand from her breast and clasping it in hers.
‘I know, and they will. You heard Charles tonight. It’s going to be a slow road back to politics, whatever happens with this book. And in the meantime we can focus on our new life here. This house, the Swell Valley. It’s a new chapter for all of us.’
I hope so, thought Annabel. I really hope so. But if this was day one of their new life: deranged neighbours wandering into the kitchen, Eddie inviting agents for supper, Milo getting rusticated again and reporters slavering outside the door like a pack of wolves, she had her doubts. They hadn’t even bumped into David Carlyle yet, but that was bound to happen. On a clear day you could see Hinton golf course from Riverside Hall’s attic windows.
‘Goodnight, Eddie.’ She let go of his hand and rolled over.
Eddie kissed the back of her head tenderly.
‘Goodnight, my darling. It’s good to be home.’
CHAPTER THREE
Laura Baxter watched the raindrops shudder their way down the grimy train window as the 5.02 p.m. from Victoria hurtled through the Sussex countryside. For once she didn’t feel tired. Ever since she’d gone back to work, she’d been operating in a permanent fog of exhaustion, what with Luca still waking in the night and the long commute, not to mention the poisonous politics of the TV world. But today, none of that mattered.
She’d had an idea for a show. A bloody brilliant idea, if she did say so herself. She could hardly wait to talk to Gabe about it.
Ironically, it was the argument with Bill Clempson and his merry band of ramblers that had inspired her, although the idea itself had come to her in the midst of a disastrous meeting at Television Centre this morning. Sisters, a dark comedy drama that Laura had been working on with an old friend from the Beeb, and which looked certain to be green-lit a few weeks ago, had suddenly been binned by the powers-that-be at ITV drama.
‘But you loved the pilot,’ Laura protested. ‘Jim Rose said it was the most original thing he’d seen since Sherlock.’
‘It’s a great show,’ the commissioning editor agreed. ‘It’s just not quite the tone we’re looking for at the moment. You mustn’t take these things so personally.’
The problem was, Laura strongly suspected it was personal. John Bingham, Laura’s long-term lover before she met and married Gabe, was out to get her. John had been head of Drama at the BBC when Laura first met him – charismatic, powerful, charming and married; unhappily so, according to him. Laura was young, impressionable and madly in love. It wasn’t until she got pregnant and John callously cut her off, crawling back to his wife and torching Laura’s career for good measure, that the scales had fallen from her eyes.
It all felt like a lifetime ago now. After she lost John’s baby, Laura had moved back to Fittlescombe and met Gabe; the rest was history. She hadn’t given John Bingham a moment’s thought in years. Until family finances had forced her to go back to work and she’d discovered that, in the interim, Bingham had risen to become one of the most powerful men in the whole of British television. Now at ITV, where he’d sent the drama ratings through the roof and was considered little short of a god, John Bingham could make or break the careers of writers and producers with a nod or shake of his balding head.
He’d actually got in touch with Laura when she first went back to work, inviting her to a swanky, intimate lunch at the Oxo Tower ‘for old times’ sake’. Laura had been shocked by how old he looked – how old he was. The fit, rugged fifty-year-old she remembered was now over sixty, with a pronounced paunch and saggy, bulldog jowls that quivered when he laughed. How was I ever attracted to him? she thought, as he boasted about his success, bemoaned his marriage and assured her how bad he felt about ‘that business with the baby’ and how glad he was that it was all ‘water under the bridge’.
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