‘Painting, embroidery, ceramics, archaeology, cultural tours . . .’ Hester is flicking through the brochure, face wrinkled with distaste as though it were some trashy flyer shoved through the front door. ‘Unbelievable! You’ve brought me to a holiday camp.’
There are occasions in life when people so wilfully misconstrue one’s good intentions that it is impossible to respond rationally. This is such a one. Harriet finds herself breathless, almost speechless with outrage. All the planning, the delay at the airport, the journey itself, that unexpected reminder of her early married life, all these now culminate in feelings so strong it might be best to remove herself from the source of her fury. Hester. At this very moment, she could cheerfully see her sister plunge over a thousand-foot cliff; indeed, were one to hand, she might—in her view quite justifiably—shove her over herself.
Harriet wrenches her handbag open, extracts a thick envelope and slams it down on the table in front of Hester.
‘And a very happy birthday to you.’
CHAPTER 4
‘Be a laugh.’ Jez ambushes his friend outside the local sweet shop, where Ben has just replenished his revision provisions: a Twix, a Crunchie, two Flakes and a bag of wine gums.
‘Piss off.’
‘C’mon, Benji-baby, it will. Who’s gonna know?’
‘Fuck’s sake, Jez, it’s my aunts’ house.’
‘So?’
‘I can’t just use the place ’cos they’re out the country.’
‘Why not?’
Ben throws up his hands in disbelief and stomps off towards home. Jez follows, walking backwards in front of him.
‘Listen. We put everything out in those sheds in the garden, roll up the carpets, clean it all after. Be like it never happened.’
‘Oh yeah? Can just see you with a hoover and a duster.’ There’s a lamppost looming. Should he warn Jez? ‘Look what happened when your lot went on holiday that time.’
Some sixth sense alerts Jez to the imminent collision and he swerves around the obstruction just in time. ‘That was Hedge, not me. I wasn’t even there, worse luck.’
Henry, Jez’s older and even more wayward brother, for some unaccountable reason known to all and sundry as Hedge, is a legend locally among anyone under twenty. A prolific shoplifter, he had fathered a child at fifteen with a neighbour twice his age, written off his father’s car the day he passed his test and at one time or another been barred from every pub within a ten-mile radius of his home. Famously, a party he had hosted when his parents unwisely went to Florida for some winter sun a few years previously had culminated in the fire brigade being summoned at three am when one guest decided to deep-fry some Creme Eggs and then passed out. Hedge is now mercifully many hundreds of miles away at university studying, rather alarmingly in many people’s opinion, automotive design technology. Jez hero-worships him.
‘Awesome, that was.’
‘You said you weren’t there.’
‘No, but I seen the pictures on Instagram.’
So has Ben. ‘That’s what I’m saying. No way.’ He runs up the path and slams his front door before Jez can follow him in.
This conversation has been repeated several times, with minor variations, all afternoon via various social media before this latest encounter, but Ben remains adamant. Not only does he not trust Jez to make a cup of tea, let alone organise a trouble-free party, he does not even want to contemplate his aunts’ reactions to the presence of any of his peers in their home. Besides, his parents have woken kraken-like from their torpor—he guesses it’s partially due to the aunts’ absence and the lack of their stalwart support for his ambitions—and they are once again raising objections to his choice of career, with ever-increasing force. The last thing he needs right now is Jez badgering him with his half-arsed ideas when he needs to keep focused on outwitting his parents.
He’s just reached the sanctuary of his bedroom when his phone rings.
‘Ben!’
‘Yeah?’ A girl’s voice. A girl’s voice?
‘How’s it going?’
‘Yeah. Good?’ He can’t suppress a slight upward intonation that indicates uncertainty, even apprehension.
A little giggle.
‘Oh, God, like, you have no idea who this is!’
Ben is racking his brains, trying to identify the caller. The voice sounds familiar, but not that familiar. He decides laughter is the best response. It comes out extremely lamely.
‘God, I am such an idiot!’ the voice says. Another giggle. ‘It’s Louisa, yeah?’
‘Louisa?’ Of course! What a numpty. The name emerges as no more than a croak. Louisa? Louisa Jellinek? Is it possible? What is she, the hottest babe in Year 12, doing phoning him? Deigning to speak to someone whom she customarily swans past, unseeing, wreathed in clouds of Miss Dior.
‘Hello? You still there? Ben?’
She said his name. She actually said his name. Again.
‘Yeah. Yeah?’ Wow! Wait till he tells Jez!
‘So, like, I was wondering? How’s it going?’
How’s what going? Has he missed a page? He opts for nonchalance. ‘Good, yeah.’
‘Wanna a hand?’
‘Sorry?’
‘With this party you’re having?’
‘Sorry?’ His throat suddenly feels very thick. ‘Party?’
‘Yeah, like everyone’s talking about it.’
Who? Who?
‘And I was wondering if, like, anyone could come?’
‘Well, actually . . .’
‘I mean, like, could I come?’
‘You?!’ The word only just makes it out; Ben fears his airways are about to close permanently.
‘I was only asking!’ There’s a change of tone, a steely note in her voice now. ‘’Course, if you don’t want me to . . .’
‘No! No, I do!’
There is an agonising silence. Ben’s heart thumps.
When Louisa finally speaks, she sounds distant, hurt. ‘I’m really, like, disappointed. I thought you were different, Ben.’
‘Me? How? Why?’ He’s gabbling; he must stop gabbling . . .
‘Oh . . . you know . . .’ Her voice is so faint, she is almost whispering.
‘No, please. I’m sorry.’ He’s not sure what he’s apologising for. ‘Tell me.’ His stomach is in knots, the phone slippery in his clammy hand.
The pause is so long he fears she has rung off, until she murmurs, ‘See, the thing is, I always had you down as . . . well, not like the others. I mean, sensitive, caring . . .’
‘Oh, I am! Yeah, dead sensitive.’ Is that a good thing?
‘Like, the way you are with that girl’s baby and all that.’ Everyone in the area knows about Milo after all the coverage in the papers. ‘Like, most guys wouldn’t be seen dead with a kid. But you, well, you just don’t care. I like that in a guy. That’s pretty rad.’
‘Oh yeah . . . right. Thanks.’
‘And I just thought it might be nice to hang out together . . .’
‘It would! Oh, God, yeah. It would be—’ The words don’t exist that would do justice to the wonder of such a prospect.
Louisa’s voice recovers, swooping down to its habitual seductive purr. ‘Oh, babes, that is awesome!’ Babes! ‘Can I, like, bring a few friends as well? You know, Kat and Els?’
Oh my God. Ben can hardly process this information. Not just the unbelievably cool Louisa but also her two best friends, almost as goddess-like as she is . . .
‘Kat and Els?’
‘Yeah, like, they really like a good time. They are soooo up for it.’
‘They are? Well, great!’ Ben feels he’s floating in a dream. Is this for real?
‘We are gonna have a seriously good night, I’m telling you. Can’t wait!’
‘Nor me.’
‘Okay. Laters!’
She’s gone. And only as he stares, gobsmacked, at his now-silent phone, that magical piece of technology that has somehow enabled him to have a conversation—an actual
conversation!—with Louisa Jellinek, does reality rear its extremely ugly head. What was he thinking?
‘You total and utter twat! You can’t start organising a party at my aunts’ without asking me!’
‘I did ask you.’ Jez sounds smug.
‘Yeah and I said no! Like, a million times!’
‘Chill, will you? Only gonna be small. I just sent out a closed invite on Facebook—from me and you.’
‘You did what?’
‘Yeah, just the usual suspects: Luke and Liam and Dom and—’
‘Luke? You invited Luke?’ Ben hates Luke: the feeling’s mutual. ‘How many altogether?’
‘Eighteen. Well, plus girlfriends.’
‘Right. Listen. That’s it, okay?’
Ben reckons twenty, twenty-five is manageable. Just.
‘You tell Louisa?’ he asks. ‘About numbers?’
‘No.’
‘Fuck’s sake! She’s already talking about bringing friends. Do it—like, now!’
‘You do it. It wasn’t me that invited Louisa Jellinek to my party.’ Jez sniggers.
‘You gave her my number!’ Amid the panic, reason prevails. ‘No. No! This is mad. Forget it, we’re cancelling. There’s not gonna be a party!’
‘That’s not what Louisa and her mates think. They think they’re invited to yours on Friday. We’re talking Louisa Jellinek here, dickhead. At your crib. Imagine!’
‘It’s not my crib!’
‘Well, it is sort of is, temporarily. Your aunties need never know. What the eye doesn’t, et cetera.’
Ben’s blood runs cold. A vision of the two aunts swims into his mind. Aunt Harriet might, if she understood the stakes here and was the right side of several large glasses of wine, have a smidgeon of compassion for his dilemma, but Aunt Hester . . . Sweat trickles from his armpits.
‘Who else have you . . . ? No, I can’t. Jez, I mean it. They’ll kill me.’
‘I promise you, mate, nothing they can do will come close to what lovely Lou-Lou and her gang will do to you if you let them down. Remember Nathan Nyland?’
‘Oh, Jesus . . .’ Ben shudders. What happened to Nathan Nyland is the stuff of nightmares.
‘Yeah. ’Nuff said. Wanna come round to mine tonight and start planning?’
CHAPTER 5
‘It was meant to be a surprise.’
Hester is still staring thunderstruck at the card in her hand. Mount Rushmore has nothing on her face.
‘A nice surprise. For your birthday.’
Why, thinks Harriet, am I sounding so apologetic? If anyone should be apologising, it’s the ingrate opposite, sitting there as though I had given her a season ticket to the pantomime.
A silence does not so much fall as totally flatten them.
‘Forgive me for disturbing you, but might I try to persuade you ladies to take a glass of wine?’ Where has he materialised from? And how did he know an intervention was needed at this precise moment? Alfonso, dapper, solicitous, charming of smile, proffering the wine list as the sisters exclaim simultaneously, ‘Thank you!’ He is a true hotelier: nothing escapes his watchful eye. Oil is urgently required for these clearly troubled waters.
‘May I perhaps suggest the Barolo?’ Before Hester can ask, he adds with some satisfaction, ‘It’s a 2008 Mirafiore Lazzarito.’
Hester’s face softens, almost manages a smile. ‘That would be most acceptable.’
Harriet, still smarting, says, ‘I don’t suppose you have a Barbaresco?’ She knows Hester will have shot her a withering, if not accusatory, glance that says, Don’t overreach yourself, but she refuses to catch her sister’s eye. Nor does she wither.
Alfonso positively beams. ‘My favourite also!’ He leans towards her confidentially. ‘An acquired taste, no? A little more—shall we say—subtle than the Barolo?’
‘Precisely,’ says Harriet. ‘Subtle, that’s the word.’ She exchanges a complicit smile with him.
‘And some olives?’
‘Thank you. My sister is particularly fond of olives,’ says Harriet, turning her sweetest smile on her sibling.
Alfonso sketches the subtlest of bows and disappears.
Birds flit gaily in and out of the bushes. The slightest of breezes takes the edge off the sun and rustles the leaves in a riot of greens and russets. The air is scented with rosemary. Faint voices drift up from the lower terrace, where couples engrossed in paperbacks look up from time to time to pass comment. Someone snaps the pages of a broadsheet; the report is like a pistol shot in the peace of the late afternoon. Harriet tips back her head, drinking in the warmth, lets her eyelids droop, and waits. She can hear Hester unfolding the papers she had enclosed with the card. There is a sniff from across the table. Behind her, a chair scrapes on the gravel; a male voice murmurs, ‘Good afternoon.’ Hester returns the greeting, as does Harriet without opening her eyes. The clink of a wineglass on the marble table behind her; the crack of a hardback spine.
‘A cookery course,’ says Hester finally, through, her sister imagines, clenched teeth.
Harriet does not reply.
Hester’s hissing increases fractionally in volume. ‘You have spent God alone knows how much sending me on a cookery course!’
Harriet’s eyes remain resolutely closed. ‘An Italian cookery course,’ she murmurs, brushing a fly from her cheek.
‘Well, given the location I hardly thought it would be French!’
The crunch of feet on the gravel signals Alfonso’s return. ‘Signor,’ he murmurs as he passes their neighbour, fetching up at their table with a tray bearing two large glasses and a rustic earthenware bowl of fat green olives. He spies the papers in Hester’s lap.
‘Ah! Signora Greene, I see the secret is out!’ He places a glass in front of each of them. ‘So, the surprise was wonderful, no? You are excited about tomorrow?’
Hester’s hand, halfway towards her glass, hesitates. ‘Excited?’
Harriet takes a tentative sip of her wine, scrutinising with great interest a bee on a nearby flower.
‘Of course! Signora Pearson has been so anxious that you will like it. I assure her, who would not like to learn at the feet of the great Franco? The best of teachers! Everybody loves him!’
Harriet takes another, longer, sip. The bee really is most fascinating.
‘Franco?’ repeats Hester.
Alfonso laughs, gesturing at the course literature. ‘You did not see? Franco Riccardi is your tutor. You know the magnificent Franco, surely?’
Harriet permits herself a brief squint across the table. Were she not in such a bate with her sister, she might have laughed at the look of incredulity on Hester’s face. ‘Franco Riccardi?’ Hester stammers.
‘Sì, sì . . . the same. The master. He is here this week. A great honour for us. For all the students.’
Hester gulps a great slug of her wine. ‘Good Lord.’
‘Ladies . . . excuse me, please.’ He runs swiftly down the steps to attend to a guest. Harriet transfers her gaze from her bee to his departing back.
‘Harriet . . .’ begins Hester, her fingers fretting the edge of the papers. ‘I had no idea . . . for heaven’s sake, it’s not a special birthday, is it?’ Then, with a frisson of alarm, ‘It isn’t, is it?’
‘No, no, not really. Sixty-six, that’s all.’
Hester gives a huge sigh of relief. ‘I thought for one minute . . .’
Harriet regards her benignly. ‘It’s all right, you’re not losing your marbles. I simply thought you could do with a treat. And when I saw it was—’
‘Franco Riccardi, yes.’ Hester breathes his name with all the reverence an acolyte might afford the Pope. She avidly watches any cookery programmes featuring the great man, rare as they are, since he is generally immured in his Tuscan restaurant concocting undreamt-of delights from local ingredients. A thought strikes. ‘Yes, but, Harry, how much—’
Harriet waves away the question with a decisive, ‘Money and fair words.’ Harry. Not Harriet. The thaw has started.
It pleases her inordinately that she has managed to discombobulate Hester so comprehensively. She takes a mouthful of her delicious wine.
‘I don’t know what to say.’ Hester gulps her wine unthinkingly. Then, as it hits her tastebuds, ‘Golly, this is superb!’
‘Thank you would be sufficient.’
Hester wriggles uncomfortably on her chair and rearranges her face.
‘Thank you, Harry—really,’ she says gruffly. ‘It’s the most marvellous birthday present.’ And to Harriet’s considerable surprise, she gets up to give her sister a peck on the cheek. ‘I am sorry I’ve been so . . .’ She leaves the unspoken word hanging. Impossible? Infuriating? Diabolical?
Harriet grasps the olive branch with both hands. ‘It’s okay,’ she says, erasing in an instant the irritations and anxieties of the past few months. She grins happily. ‘I think we’re in for a treat.’ But she can’t fail to notice that as Hester resumes her seat and picks up her glass, her face still bears a faint look of strain.
‘You know what an old grump I am,’ says Hester by way of apology, or as close to an apology as Harriet is likely to get. ‘I don’t like it when you keep things from me.’
Harriet smiles. ‘I like that! You’re the one who plays things close to your chest. Getting anything out of you requires the patience of a saint, not to mention a crowbar.’ But if she’s expecting a light-hearted reaction from Hester, she’s disappointed. All she gets is a perfunctory tightening of the lips, before Hester turns away to look out over the valley. One day at a time, thinks Harriet, as the little flame of worry reignites in her stomach.
Across the table, hand grasping the stem of her glass just a little too tightly, Hester’s thoughts are in turmoil. Their brief rapprochement feels such a relief after the days, the weeks, of apprehension. Harriet’s wonderfully generous birthday present has deeply unsettled her. If only she could simply enjoy it. If only she could unknow what she knows! If only, if only . . . the possibilities whirl around her brain with sickening familiarity. She is aware of Harriet’s scrutiny, aware also that they know each other too well to keep secrets concealed. Or she had thought they did . . .
Love, Lies and Linguine Page 3