by Fiona Walker
Charlie returned to London bad-tempered, complaining that it was too early in the season to have his eye in, disappointed that his fellow guns had been eager locals, not legal eagles, his outing bringing no advantage to press home professionally. Now they were a day away from the Well-hung Party, and he was still sulking so much about his small bag that he hadn’t even asked her to look out his suit for cleaning or send his thank-you to the Austens. She’d done both anyway, as well as giving Father Willy the mother of all erotic epiphanies to round off her first rough draft.
‘And did anybody mention what’s happening with the stud?’ Gill asked casually, as they single-filed out of the woods to cross the Broadbourne road into Austen land on the opposite side of Lord’s Brook to the village.
‘Nothing new. The Austens are still waiting on the land deal from what I could tell.’
It had been a month since the night of the hurricane, the Percy family tree still blighted on the Sixty Acres, just visible from their high vantage-point. There had been no more sightings of Ronnie. Predictably tight-lipped, Lester carried on as usual, and Pip still blustered back and forth twice a day in her little blue car, driving too fast through the village.
‘If I was struck by lightning, I’d think twice about coming back.’ Bridge’s eyes rolled above her scarf. ‘Even insurance companies call that an act of God.’
‘Lightning never strikes twice in the same spot,’ Mo pointed out cheerfully, leaning back as the cob shuffled down the sharp incline.
‘Balderdash,’ scoffed Gill. ‘It does so all the time. That’s an old wives’ tale, like cows lying down when rain is on its way.’
‘But they really do, don’t they?’ asked Petra, doubting years of basing her mackintosh selection on the behaviour of Friesians in neighbouring fields.
‘Are you taking your kids trick-or-treating later?’ asked Mo. ‘There’s a disco in the Bugger All afterwards for the little ones. Grace is hoping Bella will be there. They’ve set an age limit this year.’
At the previous year’s Hallowe’en, the older Turner kids had terrorised small children and parents alike, one Edward Scissorhands in particular leaving his mark on most of the parked cars while a brace of ghoulish clowns ran rampage. A skeleton and a mummy were spotted having sex in full view of the CCTV by the bins. Brian Hicks had played the footage twice at the next parish-council meeting to try to identify the culprits, which Petra thought was excessive, even with the strategic pixilation.
She shook her head, grateful for an excuse to miss a frosty evening tramping round the village extorting Wilko sweets from cynical householders. ‘Gunny thinks it’s a consumer con and insists they all stay in so she can share quality time with her grandchildren. They’re staging a spooky movie night instead. I’m not sure she’s quite ready for Prudie method-acting Wednesday Addams or Ed’s Ghostface sofa trick, but I’ll make sure she has a strong gin on the side. Wooooah!’ The mare took exception to a flock of nearby sheep.
‘Good job we’ve only got those two back for a week,’ sighed Gill, watching the pair flying down the hill in giant cat leaps, soon twenty lengths ahead. ‘Must be hard to write in a neck brace.’
A buzzing noise made them glance up and they saw a familiar drone heave into view, zipping after the Redhead, who flattened her ears and accelerated away.
‘Or, indeed, a full-body plaster-cast.’
*
The taxi driver eyed her fare in the rear-view mirror, her fingers drumming on the wheel to ‘Thriller’, the Hallowe’en tracks non-stop on the radio today. Her passenger looked like he’d already seen a ghost. Apart from a muttered ‘hello’ and a nod to confirm the destination address, he hadn’t said a word, haunted eyes gazing out of the window.
His phone, by contrast, was sounding alerts for messages every few seconds. He ignored them all.
She was sure she’d seen him somewhere before. She picked up a lot of celebrity fares from Broadbourne station, and this one could be a name-drop share with the girls, who were getting a bit bored by the number of times she’d ferried Alex James around. This one was an oldie with the brooding, good-looking confidence that hinted at film sets or recording studios. The newsboy hat and checked scarf were a touch of ironic spiv chic, and the wire-rimmed glasses were definitely ironic. The luggage was compact and well-travelled; the bouquet of peonies and winter roses he was holding must have cost a ton, and her car smelt of expensive cologne. But it was the red coat that screamed stardom. It was an Oscar carpet, reupholstered with plump down filling and designer kick-pleats.
She turned down the spooky anthems. ‘Train journey good?’
‘Uh-huh.’
Her mum would know who he was. Anybody with a touch of the George Clooney about them was on her silver-fox radar. Who was that Spanish actor she liked?
‘Staying long?’
‘I haven’t decided.’
His phone let out another flurry of alert tones.
‘You’re popular.’
‘O’er-prized all popular rate.’ Kit tipped the brow of his hat lower as the Fosse Vale dropped away beneath them and they climbed the steep escarpment.
*
‘Breakfast in bed, Gunny!’ Prudie bustled into the guest annex with a bowl of chocolate cereal swimming in milk, topped with a small bunch of grapes and two physalis onto which she’d sprinkled icing sugar to look professional. ‘I got Fitz to carry the tea. We weren’t sure how many sugars you take so we went safe with three.’
‘Oh, how charming!’
Following his sister, Fitz watched from the doorway as his grandmother hastily slid yesterday’s Telegraph over the round of toast and marmalade she’d made for herself in the annex kitchen, muting This Morning.
‘So, Prudence, what are you calling this creation?’ She picked up her iPad to share a photograph with Instagram followers, guaranteeing almost as many aws as Victoria Beckham showing off Harper’s suspiciously professional cupcake-baking. Prudie was by far the most photogenic of her grandchildren, bending her knees to twist sideways and strike a pouty pose.
‘It’s called Coco Pops dans le Lit avec Fruit. You have to get back into bed to fully appreciate it.’
‘I’ll have it here at the breakfast bar, thank you.’
‘I’m practising my French because I’m invited to take part in the opportunity of a lifetime.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Dancing in Paris, Grandmère!’
Fitz sighed, wishing his sister had the guile to be a little less transparent. ‘Prudie’s dance troupe are taking part in some Euro Disney thing, Gunny.’
‘You get a free pass to the theme park!’
‘Do you now?’ Gunny’s painted eyes glittered knowingly.
‘All expenses paid!’
‘Apart from travel, accommodation and food,’ Fitz murmured. ‘Mum worked out it would be two grand a pop and said no.’
‘And you’d like me to pay?’
‘Oh, will you, Gunny? Will you really? You can come too. They have themed bedrooms. Please say yes!’
‘No,’ Gunny said emphatically.
‘Or “non”,’ Fitz told his sister, smirking because he’d just won a bet.
Unlike her ultra-competitive siblings, Machiavellian Prudie never bore grudges, knowing there was more than one way to skin a cat.
‘Tant pis. C’est pas grave. Enjoy your breakfast. I promised Bella I’d help her collect twigs for her Hallowe’en costume. She’s dressing as a swamp monster. Her movie choice is a Shrek Hallowe’en special. Seriously lame, but she likes green. Mummy says we can’t go out trick-or-treating because the Turner family always take over and try to kill everyone. Like, literally. See you later!’ She danced off.
Gunny pushed the offering aside, picking up her newspaper and toast as Fitz carried her over-sweet tea to her. As well as incredibly smooth skin, which she made up with full war-paint before anybody was allowed to see her each morning, her short blonde hair had less grey in it than his mother’s. Fitz, who dreaded g
oing bald like his dad, hoped he’d inherited her genes.
He perched on a high stool opposite. ‘How’s it going?’
‘How’s what going, William?’
‘Things.’
‘Things are very well. Do you still have eyes behind that fringe?”
He pushed it higher, tucking the ends behind his ear. ‘Sorry it’s a bit of a lame Hallowe’en. Dad’s been busy in town. Seeing a friend.’ He eyed the rejected Coco Pops.
She indicated for him to help himself. ‘We had words about that in the summer, your father and I. It was made very clear that he must be more antisocial.’ She ate a corner of toast. ‘He promised to put an end to it, this...’ The slice fanned expressively.
‘Friendship.’ Fitz removed the fruit to the bin, as if he were handling a dead mouse, then started spooning up the cereal.
‘Yes.’
‘He’s still being friendly.’
Gunny let out a sigh. ‘I feared as much, which was why I wanted to come here to check.’
In fairness to his father, Fitz suspected he’d been trying to put an end to it throughout the autumn. But it wasn’t proving easy, as the app bore witness. ‘His friend wants to talk to Mum. There are lots of photos apparently. And a video.’
‘Are we...’ the toast went down the wrong way and he had to slap Gunny on the back ‘...talking revenge...’ the slice waved around again ‘...porn?’
‘No, not that.’ He returned to his Coco Pops, quietly certain that revenge porn didn’t happen to anyone over thirty. At least, he hoped not. His mother would never notice if it did, anyway: she struggled with Tesco.com. ‘A confrontation. Phone ringing, strange voice on the line, “You don’t know me, but I know your husband” type thing.’
‘Or the doorbell rings.’ Gunny shuddered, her eyes clouding. ‘You answer it, babe in arms. Young woman. Striped Biba coat and knee boots. Blonde flick-ups. She’s crying, mascara on her cheeks. “Let him go,” she pleads. “He’s only staying for the sake of the child.”’
‘Yes, um, that too.’
‘That must never happen, Fitz.’
*
Kit closed his eyes as vertigo made him light-headed, his brain fooled into thinking that he was flying for the second time that day. Travelling up Broadbourne Hill towards the Comptons always felt like taking off in a small plane, the horizon pulling further and further away, a hazy green panorama of crosshatched fields opening out beneath him. It was the ultimate widescreen view.
His phone beeped again. He should switch it off, but while it still beeped he knew she wasn’t doing anything stupider than sending him abusive messages.
It wasn’t as if Ferdie hadn’t warned him: ‘My dear boy, please don’t seduce your leading lady again. It’s getting very smold-smold, and I’m frankly bored of opening the Standard to see you papped by stage doors looking sleazy. What is it with you and last-chance saloon-girls?’
Not listening to Ferdie’s advice was something Kit had turned into a speciality.
To do her credit, Orla had been the soul of discretion through their affair: ‘This show’s all about me,’ she’d told him matter-of-factly on that first vodka-fuelled night. He’d laughed, happy to stay under the radar until the five-star reviews came in.
Kit had known it was curtains the moment the pleated blue cubicle divider had been snatched open in the Royal Infirmary, but it wasn’t until they were back in New York that Orla had provided the costume change to play out their final scene.
The heating in the car was suffocating. He shouldered his way out of the huge duvet coat, the unwanted metaphor for the end of the short romance, a red rag to his bull.
Orla had marched him into a store on Third Avenue to buy it when the freak blizzard blew into the eastern seaboard the week before opening, blanketing Manhattan in thick snow. The unseasonal storm had caught everyone on the hop, killing five people in the state and drawing comparisons with the deadly fall of October 2011. Shrugging on the coat, he’d laughed at how much of a berk he looked in it, then laughed more when he saw the price label, but he’d been too cold to care, freezing hail boulders bouncing off the sidewalks. ‘He’s British. Everything’s smaller there, even the weather,’ Orla had told the sales assistant.
It was a young man’s coat. Beautiful, talented Orla was a young man’s lover, too self-absorbed and capricious for the deeply entrenched ego of middle age. He understood her brittle shell, how it had thickened throughout her career, bulletproofing the vulnerability she’d first drawn upon to act before she’d sold her soul as a series vampire, now reinvented brilliantly in comedy. She needed every unbreakable inch of it for the role he’d cast her in.
She’d hated the apartment he’d rented, the jazz clubs he hung out in, the street food he ate. She grew bored with him sitting reading; she couldn’t understand why he walked everywhere. If he’d drunk a bourbon – and Kit drank a lot of bourbon – she wanted him to clean his teeth before they kissed. The sex – both greedily biting the forbidden fruit before it was ripe enough – had been too showy for lasting tenderness, her desire to pleasure him that of someone seeking applause, his own performance drawn unflatteringly onto her brightly lit stage when he preferred the dark, quiet intimacy of the back row of the stalls.
‘Doesn’t he look divine?’ Orla had asked the cast later that day.
Kit didn’t look divine. He looked like a cliché in a berk coat; he looked like an older director dating a young actress. Ronnie’s deep, ringing upper-class voice had mocked him: And who made you my judge, dressed like Bon Jovi, shagging someone who wasn’t even born when your illustrious career was taking off? He’d shrugged it off furiously in his stalls seat and made them run through the show twice, filling a new leather notebook with his most pedantic directions to date, a cool-headed detachment clicking in, the count-down to opening night a beep test of demands on the cast’s comic timing and physical humour, requiring ever-sharper focus and rigorous attention to detail. On the back page, he’d written the one note he saved until the show was safely into its run to give Orla personally: I think it’s best we leave what we had together here. A month’s sleepless nights condensed into eleven words.
All lovers sensed the end coming, like dogs picking up on approaching thunder.
‘Is it over?’ she’d asked tearfully, the night before opening.
He’d kept his notebook closed. ‘This is your beginning.’
When Kit’s Broadway debut opened, beautiful, self-destructive, smoke-eyed Orla had stepped up to the plate, put her live audience before her social-media one, and wowed them all, as he’d always known she would. Her performance – spell-binding if unpredictable through the final rehearsals, bettered and balanced in the previews – had brought the house down through the first fortnight of the run. Her reviews blew everyone out of the water, her well-publicised diva behaviour forgiven. The rumour that she’d only made it through because she’d been sharing a bed with the uncompromising sod of a director remained tightly under wraps.
Now the uncompromising sod had upped and left, and the diva was kicking off big-time. They had been together barely fifteen weeks; they had never gone public. Kit, who had never lost faith that he’d cast the right actress, could have predicted Orla would turn a three-month love affair into a five-act play. Her ability to reach emotional top notes from nowhere was what made her so mesmerising on stage.
‘I need you! I can’t perform without you!’
Kit hoped the understudy was grateful: this was almost certainly going to be her moment.
She would soon play herself out. In two days, maybe less, she’d be back onstage stunning the crowds; it was her new drug. He’d just been the pusher. ‘You don’t need me any more,’ he’d told her. ‘We have nothing in common. My downtime is your doldrums, my uptime is your Mogadon. You want me to be a flamboyant British eccentric in a red coat and I’m a boffin in corduroy.’
‘This is about the coat?’
‘No! It’s more than that. It’s—’
‘I didn’t. I just—’
‘Then the cast all laughed at you in it.’
‘They did?’
‘You look fucking great in that coat.’
‘I look like a berk in it, but that’s not—’
‘You’re dumping me over a fucking coat?’
It wasn’t the coat. It was about the fact they had nothing in common apart from the play, the aphrodisiac that had thrown them together, which she had made magical. He’d helped her professionally, but they were at entirely different life stages. It was about the fact that however deep they were capable of being as individuals, it was a shallow grave of a relationship. It was about the fact he bored her. He’d been happy to be Henry Higgins, finicky in his demand for technical detail and repetitive precision, but that was what he was like offstage as well as on it, directing. He was intense, precise and he read books. A lot of books. It was about the fact that she put on a show twenty-four seven, while he didn’t want the inconvenience of camera lenses and media scrutiny in his life. It was about the fact he liked drinking whisky – he liked doing it until he could barely walk sometimes. It was about the fact that, judge him as you wish, he’d wanted to have sex with her more than he’d wanted to grow old with her – he’d had a head start there and had a lot less time to lose. It was about the fact he was still deep in mourning. It was about the fact that every three months since his wife had died he’d come back to visit her grave and cursed the very soil that surrounded her.
‘Yes, it’s over because of the coat.’
He tipped his hat brim back up, ears popping as he opened his eyes. They’d reached the top of the climb and turned away from the brow to drive between the straight Cotswold-stone walls skirting the edge of the huge black Drover’s Woods – viewed from the vale they were like the dark side of the moon. Then the car brightened as they burst out into open country, bouncing over the familiar humpback bridge, and were into the outskirts of Compton Bagot, passing the ugly ‘pensioner bunkers’, his son called them, bungalows with the best views in Warwickshire that developers now bought up a bereavement at a time. More had been replaced by the oak-framed faces of new money since he’d last taken the road. With their defensive electric gates and in-and-out drives for a quick getaway, these new fortresses now formed a guard of honour along to the ribbon development that garlanded the village Kit liked best in the Cotswolds.