by Isabella May
“Guess who?”
River was back in the present, blindfolding Heather’s eyes moments later with a napkin, and Terry was almost spitting out his goulash.
“Woop woop,” said Cassandra. “Oh heavens above, what a wondrous thing to do. Well, I always said magic follows this man wherever he goes, but now it seems that very magic is here at our table.”
All this before Heather had even stabbed a guess at the person who was letting her veggie dumplings get cold. Much as he’d warmed to Cassandra in recent weeks, why couldn’t she just keep a lid on it, show some decorum?
“Ha,” added Hayley, “I’ve had to keep schtum all afternoon after bumping into Riv and Al down in Wenceslas Square, now the secret’s out at last and I can breathe a sigh of relief, the number of times I’ve almost let the cat out the—”
“Well, cheers for that, Hayley. I might as well uncover this now then, hadn’t I?”
River released his grip on the napkin, thoroughly pissed off at the lack of discretion. Then again, going by the growing collection of empty wine bottles, clearly this lot had been knocking back the glasses for a couple of hours already.
“River? No… I don’t believe it!”
Heather was practically shaking, somehow only catching up with the revelations of the others once she’d laid eyes on the boy for herself. “Oh, the pair of you,” she looked around for Alice now as well, and pulled them both in for a hug, “this is just amazing… oh, what a day we’ve had.” She turned to her right to squeeze Terry’s hand, happy tears in her eyes. “And we’ve only just arrived as well… this is all just so exciting. It had been too long since I’d visited another land, Stonehenge and Avebury aside… way too long.”
“Hey, you’re not wrong there… and this is just the beginning,” said Terry, raising his glass to prompt another toast from everybody at the table. “The ‘ole globe sure is our oyster now.”
“Am I missing something? What is this significant other thing that’s happened today?” River said with an expectant smile. He could already tell what was coming.
Banjo Boy began to pat his instrument, sat as usual, protectively in his lap, to signal some kind of a build-up to a public announcement. The pat became the hard beat of a drum and soon he couldn’t resist leaving the table to try his luck with the Czech musicians at the restaurant’s entrance, who had little choice but to accept him – just for one song, which admittedly, he did a pretty decent job of providing a strangely haunting melody to.
“What a day it’s been, as I was saying,” cried Heather again as the musicians finally called it a day and began to pack up their instruments. “Terry’s only asked me to move in with him… permanently, on the Charles Bridge.”
“The… did you just say on the Charles Bridge?”
His question was met with a round of hearty giggles.
“She doesn’t mean I’m gonna knock up bricks and mortar on the bridge, River. No, course not. Plus the fact, I’m a man in demand these days, soon to brighten up all of your television sets… Nicholas Knowles eat your heart out.”
Terry’s index finger scanned the guests at the table then, as if it might find the traitor, the one who had always secretly had the DIY SOS front man geek crush but was too embarrassed to admit it.
“She means when we get back to Glastonbury, we’re going to shack up together permanently, your mother and I. Well, I can hardly kick out Blake and George – mind you, I’d probably be doing them the biggest favour if I did, so we’re going to pool our resources together, love, aren’t we?”
He paused briefly to look lovingly into Heather’s eyes, and despite the genuine sentiment, River almost had to clutch at his stomach, as would have Georgina, had she not been serving up trays of heady mixers right now. “Because actually, there is a little bit more to tell you about this TV show I’m appearing in right now where we’re filming the stately home improvements at the Rigby-Chandlers—”
“Sounds fascinating,” said River, pulling up a spare seat for himself and Alice, figuring that any story emanating from Terry after wine, and now the slivovic which the waiter threatened to uncork, was going to be akin to a reading straight out of War and Peace – but also, that they couldn’t hover behind Heather for ever and a day, making her strain her neck this way and that.
“I’m only flippin’ well earning more than I’ve done,” Terry broke off momentarily to switch to a whisper now, suspicion washing over his face at the sight of the waiter and his huddle of shot glasses, “in a bloomin’ decade,” he added, eyebrows tall as skyscrapers, head nodding affirmatively.
“Well that’s brilliant, Terry,” said Alice encouragingly.
“And there’s more,” Terry rubbed his hands together. “Please don’t think me greedy… and only God above knows how this has come about, ‘cos stuff like this never happens to a run of the mill kind of Joe Bloggs like me… but they really are tipping me to be a bit of a future Somerset celeb, like.”
River couldn’t help but smirk inwardly at this little nugget. How Terry would scoff at his own hand in all of this; at his unknown link to Mexico, and the gratitude a little woman with wonky teeth living in a shack in an agave field so deserved for the way she had personally seen to it that lives would be changed.
“Gosh, never mind River and me giving people autographs.” Alice quite unnecessarily forced River to imagine Piet snooping around their room now, a vision he was keen to entrench in drink before he arrived at the sniffing at her underwear part. “It sounds like you’ll be doing that soon enough. But if I may say so myself, hasn’t your luck changed since you’ve started visiting the cocktail bar?”
“He’s worked hard all his life and when opportunity knocks at our age, you really do have to grab it,” said Heather.
“Here, here,” echoed Hayley.
“Our sentiments exactly.” Cassandra raised her slivovic in a toast to Terry, for the drink had now made its merry way around the table. “I must echo Alice’s words though, there’s something about the tall, handsome, bearded, pony-tailed hunk of a mixologist sat beside her… well surely you’ve all noticed it?”
River swallowed down his fear at having been sussed out as Cassandra got to her feet now, her little thimble of potency undulating left and right.
“Sorry we’re late!”
River had to do a double take, a double take of sheer relief but a double take nonetheless. Lady Rigby-Chandler was only rushing over to join them all in an outfit straight out of Dynasty; shoulders wide as plane wings, pearls layered heavily around her neck as if she’d been scooped off a seabed. She turned to click for her tortoise-like husband and as if by magic, Lord Rigby-Chandler began to scuttle a little faster in their direction too.
The group became silent.
“Now,” said Terry, “be friendly one and all… that was the part I was rather trying to get to… but as usual, my tangents stopped me in my tracks. Lord and Lady R-C, Rigby-Chandler, I mean, Rigby-Chandler…” He bowed down low to the aristocrats who stood wide-eyed and expectant at the head of the table, so low it was a wonder he didn’t set fire to his few remaining sprigs of hair on the Gothic candelabra. “M’lady and his lordship… well, they wanted to come over to Prague as well. They’ve sort of taken to the idea of the travel group in recent weeks, you see, as per my relaying of the trip’s details whilst they’ve been overseeing my plastering above their drawing room fire place.”
Lord Rigby-Chandler removed his bowler hat to signal his agreement.
“Um, well, let’s all make them feel welcome then.”
Alice jumped to her feet, helped herself to a couple of chairs from another table, prompting everybody to bunch up together to make room for their unexpected guests. Cassandra panned the restaurant for the dregs of her now forgotten conversation and resigned herself to her own chair.
***
“You’re off the hook, River, and I can only apologise, I’ve been a snob of the first order,” said Lady Rigby-Chandler halfway into her first glass
of wine.
River pinched himself behind the screen of the lace tablecloth; sure he’d wake up from this kaleidoscopic dream any minute. Even Mercedes couldn’t have made this shit up.
“So,” he mustered up a smile, “this means you’re going to stop threatening to grass me up to the local papers… for things I haven’t even done?”
“Yes, yes… as well as to start paying for our drinks. We’ve behaved quite monstrously, with myself taking the lead… it’s just… it’s just…” She shook her head then and drew in her top lip, presumably to prevent the bottom one from wobbling. “Just between you and me,” she turned to look at River with glassy eyes, “our castle was starting to resemble more of an Abbey Ruins than a stately home. The place was dilapidated, ceilings caving in, more damp and mould and rot than an episode of that frightful excuse for light television entertainment, Coronation Street. That’s when we applied to feature in one of those programmes, out of desperation, we’d become charity. Terry has been a godsend. Yes, he’s awfully common, but it’s that delicious contrast between us and him, him and us, which is going to save our house, transforming it into its former glory—”
“Breathing new life into the saddest and darkest of corners,” Mercedes’ voice seemed to cut in then with her reminder.
“Opening it back up to the public, fuelling their aspirations and filling our coffers, just like the good old days. I couldn’t be more grateful if I tried.” Lady Rigby-Chandler retained control.
River knocked back his second slivovic, letting the fermented plum burn his throat, and preferably his voice box too while it was at it. Because what could he say to that? He might still semi-loathe the very blue blood of these silver-spooned idiots, but essentially, Lady Rigby-Chandler was showering him with the very evidence that he craved, the proof that his task had been worth it, that he wasn’t simply enriching the lives of three random customers in his cocktail bar… but a whole world beyond it.
Never underestimate the power of three. It’s a magic number. The ripples of joy this chosen trio will generate is going to envelope your town – and beyond – in something never seen before.
Isn’t that what Mercedes had predicted?
Chapter Thirty-Five
ALICE
“I still think Georgina’s pregnant… you know… that the baby is yours. What would you do if it was? Wouldn’t you be tempted to go back to her? After your own childhood being brought up by just one parent… doesn’t… doesn’t,” Alice faltered and then drew a deep breath, it was now or never, despite the copious amounts of alcohol she had imbibed, despite the fact she wasn’t even sure if she could string together a half logical sentence, “doesn’t the presence of a child, regardless of who its mother is, change everything between us?”
“What on Earth has brought this on?” River flopped back onto the bed, nursing his head. “We had… such an awesome time… tonight, why ruin it?” He too was hardly coherent, and now she wasn’t even sure if he was truly taking in any of what she thought she had said.
“I just can’t do this. I’m head over heels in love with you,” she cried, “but it’s the thought that she is carrying your child… it’s doing my head in, River… and in all honesty, that scattering of twigs and leaves all over the bed when we walked in tonight, well, it’s hardly helped to keep me in my previously passionate mood. I mean, who does that?”
“And I… I… told you,” River sat up now briefly, reaching for the water bottle standing on his bedside table and gulping at it greedily, “I will be having… more than a word with this hotel’s… management about it… I asked for… for rose petals,” his words slurred and swirled, “red rose petals… at that… not flaming weeds.”
He put his head in his hands, sloshing the remains of his bottle all over the bed, and she wondered for a moment whether he’d laugh or cry.
“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stop thinking about it,” Alice steered the conversation back on her track. “And surely, River, surely you’ve noticed her titillating bust which is only getting larger by the minute, her ever-growing paunch which definitely can’t just be passed off as eating one too many of Zara’s pies; the way she declines alcohol at every given opportunity, no longer partaking in a new cocktail when you whip one up for us to sample, the pale face, the permanent parking of her hand on her back, the emerging from the bathroom with a beaded brow, the collection of her pills from our caravan – pills she’d evidently been neglecting to take. Want me to go on?”
Alice was shouting now but she found she couldn’t stop, such was her anger at Georgina’s hell bent plans to ruin their relationship. And anyway, the dialogue flowed a lot better this way.
“Let’s move away… for a fresh start.”
River’s face was serious now, as if implying it was something he had already been looking into, whether drunk or not. But to Alice this felt like nothing more than diversion.
“It’s not the answer… besides, the caravan is so homely now… and I’ve only just put up the tinsel.”
“But it’s only November, we can put it up somewhere else.”
“But… but… but… why are we even having a discussion about tinsel? You’re evading me, avoiding my question, which leads me to believe that if this baby is yours… because make no mistake about it, there is a bun in that oven… in truth, you’ve absolutely no idea whether you’d run to her side or stay by mine.”
“Alice! There’s no bun and there’s no baby, okay. This is just your imagination… and even if there was, in which case I am positive it isn’t mine… but even if there was a miniscule chance I was this phantom child’s father, then no, I assure you, I would not go running back to her.”
“You’re just saying this now, I know it. You have to remember, River, your own dad didn’t stick around, men change when they become fathers and they’ve lived through that absence as children. They know the pain, the suffering, the loss, the void. The love for a child outweighs everything, even going above and beyond the way we feel about a partner, the way you profess to feel about me. Grown men stay with women they detest simply to give a child the bond they deserve, some stability so they don’t let history repeat itself when they themselves have been deserted in their childhood.”
His tired eyes appeared to follow the words she had expelled. She watched him, quite voyeuristically, trying to capture them as they circled the air, invisible to all but the two of them and this moment; a moment which would quite possibly redefine everything they thought they were working towards.
A moment which also meant that Georgina had, once again, won the tug of war that Alice vowed she would never partake in.
***
Whilst the threads of that inebriated conversation could only be clutched at, Alice was sure enough by the next morning that she had heard as much as she’d needed to hear. Sometimes drink will out the truth like that.
No, River undoubtedly didn’t have a smidgen of a feeling for Georgina, she could see it in his eyes; the hatred, the bitterness for the way this Man Eater had taken advantage of his kinder side, propelled as she would have been by her ego and greed. Not that River’s malice was to be encouraged in any shape or form, but under the circumstances, it was useful to know. And yet as she had always feared, the word ‘baby’ had become not so much an elephant in a room, but an elephant in a caravan, tipping his world, and their small world, upside down with it.
But Alice was tired of running away.
Sometimes you just had to stay put and accept things. What use had it been last time anyway? He’d only come to find her once more. And so, as she would insist upon sleeping on the couch – for the Czech penthouse was furnished with a burnt orange one, draped in those distastefully embroidered arm covers – equally she would insist upon exploring Prague alone, by day and by night. This causing quite the height of speculation within the travel group no doubt, but she had three days to get her head together, to resign herself to a life of Just Good Friends all over again in the caravan, until th
e New Year when she would hatch out a new plan and a new start.
On the final morning they waited for their taxi to the airport, to fly back to Bristol in quite the anti-climax of the mood they’d taken off with, and the others were preparing for their epic drive back across Europe, with Hayley taking the helm at the wheel this time.
“No offence, Tel,” Hayley said, as she helped Terry board his luggage and Christmas market purchases into the trailer which was hitched onto the rear end of the mini bus.
“None taken, Hayley. To be honest, you’ve done me a favour. How am I ever going to fill in Cassandra’s Eye Spy scrapbook with photos and snippets from the journey if I’m constantly staring at cats eyes and road signs? There’s a prize for the best recorded memories of the trip when we reconvene next week in the bar: drinks on the house courtesy of Cassie herself… for a whole year!”
“Now you tell me,” said Hayley with her very best disgruntled look. “There’s no way I’d have volunteered to drive you all home if I’d known that.”
Banjo Boy appeared then from the boat, instrument tucked under his wing. Somehow he’d transformed during this trip from chick to fully grown sparrow. Cassandra left the group for a moment and went over to hug him, their words inaudible as they bid their adieus. She turned back to wave at him one more time, only to be lunged at by River as she climbed on board the minibus.
“But I thought you two were—”