The Spanish Promise

by Karen Swan

  ‘Oh, don’t buy into it.’ Her mother’s voice: bored, manicured. ‘This is just her latest rebellion. She’s trying to get a reaction from me, falling in love with a boy from the wrong side of the tracks. It’ll never last.’ Her heart began to race.

  ‘I don’t know, Petra, they certainly seem smitten.’

  ‘Precisely. They’ll burn brightly and then the novelty will wear off and she’ll see what’s blindingly obvious to the rest of us – that he doesn’t fit. I mean, he’s sweet enough, but he’s clearly out of his depth. Did you see him at dinner? He had no idea about the fish knife; he was using it upside down, poor chap.’

  Cecilia Fairfax tittered. ‘Oh, put him out of his misery now.’

  They were quiet for a few moments, no doubt rearranging their hair, refreshing their make-up.

  ‘Do you remember when they were little,’ Cecilia said in a strange voice and Charlotte knew she was pulling down her lips as she reapplied her mascara. ‘We always used to think Lotts would end up with Jules? They just seemed to go so well together.’

  ‘They still do.’

  ‘Mmm. Such a shame they broke up. Jules has really gone off the rails again. I think she was rather a calming influence on him.’

  ‘And vice versa, darling.’

  ‘Jules? Calming?’ Cecilia sounded confused.

  ‘Oh, I know he’s a little wild but he’ll calm down soon enough. It’s a phase. And the thing is, he understands her – that’s what she needs, although God knows she’d never admit to knowing it.’ There was a small pause. ‘I’ll tell you something I’ve never said to anyone before,’ her mother said, dropping her voice a little. ‘But I’ve always been so worried Charlotte will take after her father. They’re so alike it frightens me.’

  ‘You mean—?’

  ‘Their passions, excesses, yes. Life’s too easy for them. Everything’s a party.’

  ‘So then, couldn’t this boy be good for her? He seems very stable.’

  ‘No! On the contrary, he’s the very worst thing for her. Don’t you see? He’s just another of her obsessions, an infatuation, a novelty act. What she needs is someone who comes from her world, who’s not impressed by it all. I mean, I really thought at one point that boy was going to invade the stage and piggyback Paul—’

  He didn’t wait for her answer, lighting it easily, one-handed, as he drove. Practised, deft, angry, she saw he was no longer, in any lingering way, the man-child she’d once known, struggling to find his new place in the world. His beautiful enquiring mind had dislocated him from his roots into her star-dusted orbit, before spinning him out again into another world – this one, in the Spanish heat and dust, with a sexy woman on a balcony and a baby on her hip.

  ‘What’s her name?’

  She hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but it was uncontainable, the question lurching from her like seeds spilling from a pod, as inevitable and natural as a cloud bursting with rain. ‘Your wife, I mean.’ She looked down at his hand – no ring, but that meant nothing; plenty of men didn’t wear wedding rings. Her father hadn’t. ‘Or girlfriend. The one at the apartment.’

  He looked dumbfounded by the question, as though it was somehow scandalous she had dared to ask it. ‘That’s none of your business.’

  ‘I’m only asking her name, not her life story.’

  He glanced across at her angrily. ‘You don’t need to know anything about her. She’s nothing to do with you.’

  Charlotte watched his profile as he drove, faster again. ‘So – what? I’m not allowed to know anything about your life? Nothing?’

  He looked dead ahead. ‘That’s right. Nothing at all.’

  ‘Why not? What is it you think I’m going to do? Tell her about us?’

  ‘I already told you, there is no “us”,’ he snapped, his fingertips curling round the top of the steering wheel, tightening. ‘I fell in love with you once. It’s not a mistake I intend to repeat.’

  She stared at him, pummelled by the words. She’d been a mistake to him? ‘Did you plan it all? All this?’

  ‘Did I what?’

  ‘You must have known it was me you were coming to see. Rosie would have given you my details. I was sitting there waiting for Dr Ferrante. But you – you knew it was me you were coming to meet.’ She watched him, seeing how his grip tightened on the wheel. ‘How long have you been waiting to hurt me back? All that time?’

  ‘I haven’t been waiting.’ He looked across at her, their eyes connecting even as the car bumped along on the rough track. He shrugged. ‘I did it because I could.’

  The coldness of his words took her breath away. She had been that easy to play? She had meant nothing at all . . . ? The tears slid treacherously from the corners of her eyes but she couldn’t stop them.

  He looked away again, his expression setting harder still.

  ‘Has what I did really tormented you that much, that you’re prepared to sacrifice your own family, everything that’s good in your life, just for the chance to get back at me?’ she cried. ‘Was it worth potentially losing them . . . ?’ The words fell from her, torn from her lips, as she suddenly lurched forwards, her head almost hitting the dash as the car came to a sudden stop. The smell of burning rubber came to her nose and she saw the car had stopped at a skewed angle.

  ‘I’m not losing anything. Not for you. Not again.’

  She looked at him in bafflement. The bumper was inches from an old dry stone wall. Had he almost crashed the car to win a fight?

  ‘I didn’t ask for any of this, okay?’ he snapped. ‘I didn’t want you back in my life and I didn’t go looking for it. I don’t want to be here now and I don’t want you to be here. I don’t even know why you are here! Why are you here?’ He threw out his hands in utter exasperation. ‘You’re not a researcher! You can’t help! Why the fuck are you here?’

  His anger shook her to the core; she had never seen him angry before, not even that day, the last day . . . ‘Because the client asked me to be,’ she said quietly.

  He said nothing for a moment, his eyes roaming her face with a dark expression that left her frozen in its wake; even her tears had stopped mid-track. How had she not seen any of this, lying in his arms? How could she have blinded herself to the truth of what they were now, strangers determined to hurt and wound one another, to inflict death by a thousand cuts.

  He turned away, ball pulsing in his jaw as he steadied his breathing and she watched as he stretched his fingers straight, visibly forcing them out of a fist. He took a deep breath and leant down to the ignition, starting up the engine again. ‘Just stay away from me, Lotts, and let me do my job.’

  Did he know he’d said it? The sound of her pet name in his voice . . . she went cold, goosebumps rippling on her skin, the past keeping pace with them again. She saw the slip register on his features, surprise and then anger flitting over them.

  ‘I’ll finish up as soon as I can and then we will never have to see each other again. Until then, we will have to tolerate the situation, which I am doing my level best to do; as far as I’m concerned, you’re not even in this car right now.’

  It was another moment before she could speak. ‘. . . Right. Got it,’ she said in a half-whisper.

  He straightened the car up and drove her the rest of the way in silence, dropping her off at the gleaming plane that was refuelled and waiting for her on the airstrip. She got out without a word and he drove off without looking back. Within five minutes, she was up in the sky, tears she couldn’t stop streaming down her cheeks, as she looked out of the window in fragile stillness, her gaze casting down over a field of grazing donkeys, over striped parcels of olive groves, over a red dot that was moving silently and ever further away through the Andalusian landscape.

  Chapter Eighteen

  London

  ‘Oh my God, I have literally been having kittens,’ Mouse cried as she ran through the door into the suite three hours later. ‘What happened? You said you’d be here at seven?’

  ‘And I
was,’ Charlotte panted, throwing down her bag and giving her sister a quick hug. She looked sensational in her acid-yellow pleated dress with pale-pink lace inserts, her long brown hair worn back in some sort of intricate but edgy braid. ‘There was a security alert at Whitechapel and half of Embankment’s got roadworks. I’ve just spent ninety minutes sitting in a cab, stuck in bloody traffic. Where’s Ma?’

  ‘Downstairs with your dearly beloved and the outlaws, trying to pretend everything’s tickety-boo.’ She poured a glass of Dom Perignon and handed it to her. ‘Here, bolt that.’

  Charlotte did as she was told, feeling the worst of her agitation begin to dim. Mouse, for all her histrionics and dramas, was the one person who could read her, reach her.

  ‘So how’s this?’ Mouse held up a dress on a hanger – black silk chiffon with a pink rosebud print, it had a crossover bust, translucent skinny sleeves and long flowing skirt.

  Charlotte smiled, feeling her shoulders drop another inch. It was good to be back. ‘Nailed it! Sis, you are a star.’

  ‘Yes, well, someone had to take charge. Clearly you’d have just . . . worn that,’ she replied, taking in Charlotte’s creased khaki linen shorts and white shirt. ‘Matty thought it’d suit you. She said she’d been holding it back for you anyway.’

  ‘Yes, I must go in and see her,’ Charlotte sighed, sipping from her glass as she began to unbutton her shirt. ‘I need some new pieces for next season.’ She padded through to the bathroom and showered quickly, emerging minutes later with pink cheeks and brighter eyes – the puffiness had all but gone now, thanks to the protracted taxi ride too. No one would ever guess she’d spent the entire flight in tears.

  Mouse had refilled her glass and sat beside her on the chaise, swinging one long tanned leg idly as Charlotte quickly did her make-up.

  ‘Is everyone here?’ she asked, carefully applying a nude eyeshadow.

  ‘Everyone who’s anyone,’ Mouse shrugged. ‘All awaiting your grand entrance.’

  ‘Ha, I hope they’re not going to be disappointed then,’ she muttered.

  ‘As if. You’re the peacock in every room, whether you like it or not.’ Charlotte glanced over at her. Mouse’s own wild partying stage had come late, after their father’s death. She had been an awkward teen before that and Charlotte had the sense she had unwittingly cast a long shadow over her little sister, something she’d been trying to make up for ever since. ‘Even your ex has made it.’

  Charlotte’s hand dropped down like a stone. ‘What?’ Her voice sounded cleaved.

  ‘Jules?’ Mouse arched an eyebrow.

  ‘ . . . Oh.’ She looked down at the dressing table, her eye picking up the microscopic grains of Chanel pressed powder on the glass. She tried to bring her heart rate straight back down again.

  ‘Who’d you think I meant?’

  Charlotte shook her head and swallowed. ‘No one.’

  Mouse frowned, quiet for a moment as she watched her. ‘. . . I take it you’ve heard the latest?’

  Charlotte didn’t stop moving to listen, blending the shadow up onto her brow bone; there was always news of some sort about Jules. ‘Nope. What’s he done now?’ she asked, bored, far more interested in her make-up.

  Mouse laughed loudly. ‘I can’t believe you haven’t heard! Honestly, don’t you two ever talk?’

  ‘We didn’t talk while we were married, why would we talk now?’ Charlotte muttered, looking for her brown kohl.

  ‘He’s going to be a father.’

  She found it, pulling it out and checking the point was sharp enough. ‘Really?’ she murmured. The news only vaguely surprised, rather than shocked, her. He had been engaged to Jemima Astoria for a few months now, after surprising himself, as well as his intended, by proposing at a party in Ibiza. ‘Well, that’s great.’

  ‘Yeah. But that’s not the thing,’ Mouse said, revelling in the gossip, her slim leg swinging faster.

  ‘No? What’s the thing?’ Charlotte murmured, applying her mascara, eyes pulled wide.

  ‘It’s not Jemima that’s preggers. It’s Violet.’

  Charlotte’s hand dropped again. ‘Her sister?’ she gasped, sitting back in the chair in shock.

  ‘I know. Been at it for months apparently, the dirty dog,’ Mouse tutted, eyes bright with the scandal of it all.

  Charlotte rubbed her hands over her face, feeling somehow tainted by the news. ‘Poor Jem, she must be devastated. She’s hardly the most resilient girl.’

  ‘Whole family’s gone batshit appaz,’ Mouse said, holding her hands up in the air and sloshing champagne onto the carpet.

  ‘I’m not surprised. Is Violet keeping the baby?’

  ‘Must be. Otherwise this could have all blown over quietly, couldn’t it? She could easily have got rid of it without anyone ever knowing and things could have carried on between them as they were.’

  ‘Unless she wanted more from him than a fling.’

  Mouse wagged her finger. ‘Which would be typical of her – she always did want everything Jemima had.’

  Charlotte inhaled deeply, feeling the tendrils from her old life reaching out to her and inching ever closer.

  ‘Honestly, what you ever saw in him,’ Mouse tutted.

  ‘Yes, well, I think we both know the answer to that one.’ She tried to draw a line under the conversation, to move on and away. She got up and slipped off the bathrobe, stepping into the dress. ‘Can you do me up?’

  Mouse stood, looking six feet tall in her heels, and zipped the dress, stepping back to admire Charlotte’s reflection in the mirror. ‘Yeah. Nailed it,’ she nodded, congratulating herself. ‘Stephen Rathbone is going to be the most envied man in London tonight.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘He will,’ Mouse said simply, reaching down to pick up her clutch. ‘Ready then?’

  Charlotte slid her feet into the new strappy black heels left out for her too and straightened up, taking a deep breath as she caught her own gaze in the mirror. She looked transformed: revitalized; beautiful; free. With almost one and a half thousand miles between her and her past, she felt like she could breathe again, see clearly. Being with Nathan at La Ventilla had been like having her face pressed against a pane of glass – it had been hard to breathe, to focus. But in this beautiful hotel suite, with her sister beside her and the man she was going to marry patiently waiting for her downstairs, she could see the bigger picture again. This was how things were always supposed to have been.

  She smiled back at her sister. ‘I’m ready.’

  It was a fairytale princess moment – not the kind of thing she had ever dreamed about because she had never wanted to be a princess – but special nonetheless, heads turning, everyone smiling and an audible gasp of delight as she entered the room.

  ‘My God, you are worth waiting for,’ Stephen said proudly, catching sight of her and coming over. She smiled hard but felt a deep and sudden bolt of shame as he approached. It was the first time she had seen him since being with Nathan and the most striking thing, out there anyway, had been how very unguilty she had felt about her betrayal. But standing before him now – could he tell? Sense it?

  He came over with his trademark deportment, looking dashing in a navy lounge suit, pale-blue shirt and primrose-yellow Windsor-knotted Hermes tie.

  ‘Traffic, I’m sorry,’ she said in a low voice, beneath her smile, as he kissed her on each cheek, as he always did when they were in public.

  ‘We’ll discuss it later,’ he murmured in her ear and she knew he was still angry with her from their disagreement earlier.

  ‘Darling! You look radiant!’ her mother trilled, looking newly trim from her 48- hour flash visit to the Mayr clinic in Austria, where she had had to chew every mouthful of food one hundred times before swallowing. She always popped over there before any ‘big event’ and Mouse had made her laugh in the lifts on the way down, impersonating their mother’s deeply ingrained need to always keep the small talk going at dinner while everyone was busy counting.

>   ‘Hello, Mama, you look beautiful.’

  ‘I’m glowing from the inside, Lotty darling. To see my eldest daughter marrying the man of her dreams has always been my greatest wish.’ She reached over and squeezed her future son-in- law’s hand. ‘You make such a beautiful couple and I just know you’re going to be so happy together.’ Charlotte stretched her smile wider as everyone nodded. ‘Now all I need to worry about is finding someone equally suitable for Mouse.’

  ‘Ha, don’t hold your breath,’ Mouse muttered with a roll of her eyes and another swig of fizz, before seeing her mother’s expression. ‘By which I mean, Lotts has snagged the last of the good ones. I swear old Stevie here was the best man left in London.’

  ‘You’ll have to travel then,’ Charlotte winked, immediately banishing from her mind the pop-up image of Nathan, in Spain, in bed.

  She determinedly sipped more of her champagne, allowing her gaze to travel the room. Most of the guests were from the groom’s side: friends from school, Sandhurst, the corporate finance world, some High Court contacts of his father . . . She had perhaps thirty people there, most of them friends from school and Cambridge. She hadn’t invited anyone from work; unlike her fiancé, she preferred to keep her private and professional lives separate.

  It was interesting – amusing, in fact – watching the two sides mix. She could see her friend Bee caught in conversation with Stephen’s father, Toby. There was a lot of earnest nodding going on, heads tilted empathetically; Bee looked and sounded the part – her father was a viscount – but Charlotte wondered whether Toby, a High Court judge, would be quite so enamoured by her if he knew that Bee had been their main weed dealer in sixth form.

  Stephen’s mother on the other hand was excitably holding court with Jules and clearly oblivious to the fact that he was her future daughter-in- law’s ex-husband. She watched Harriet’s extravagant hand gestures, the feather bouncing wildly in her fascinator – Jules tended to have that effect on women, regardless of age or marital status. He was leaning against a pillar, one hand stuck in his trouser pocket, and letting her talk, regarding her with that insouciant gaze that made most of them capitulate. He was irritatingly beautiful – straight, dark hair, ever-smiling mouth, dancing eyes. It was little wonder he had seduced and impregnated his future sister-in- law too.