I’m about to answer him, but just then my phone rings again; my pal Monica wanting to arrange a girlie movie night this weekend.
‘Back to bride-ing for you, I guess,’ he says with a quick, tight smirk and the minute we were discharged for the day, he is gone.
KATE
December 2006
It was just coming up to Christmas when Kate discovered to her great joy that she was finally pregnant. She’d been feeling run-down and seemed to be tired all the time, so a trip to her GP and a quick test later confirmed the happy news. Damien, naturally, had been ecstatic.
‘Because I plan on having a big family, babes, so you may as well be warned!’ he’d joked, as they celebrated the news back at Castletown House. ‘Two boys and two girls, to start with anyway.’
Kate was lying stretched out on a sofa and looked fondly over at him as he made an embarrassingly ridiculous fuss over her, putting cushions at her back and massaging the soles of her feet, etc. The whole works.
‘Now don’t you worry about a thing, sweetheart, I’m going to take such care of you, you won’t believe it.’
She’d laughed and told him to stop treating her like an invalid, but just moments later, that wonderful, joyous mood between them shifted. She watched, unable to believe it as Damien picked up the phone and started to tell people the news. Her mum and his father, Ivan, she didn’t mind so much, after all, they were both family. But she drew the line when his next call was to a journalist he knew and trusted at The Goss.
‘Damien, you can’t be serious!’ she’d protested, sitting bolt upright and feeling an instant wave of nausea rising to her throat. ‘We’re not really supposed to tell anyone, let alone some gossip columnist. I’ve barely been pregnant for five minutes, suppose something goes wrong?’
‘It won’t,’ he said, ignoring her. ‘Because things don’t go wrong for me. Ever.’
‘This is crazy, you can’t do this!’
He just waved her silent though and went ahead with the call anyway, while she looked on, dumbfounded. She heard him charming this journalist, joking and flirting, not actually telling her out straight, but hinting that Christmas had come a little early for the Kings and they were planning to fill the bedrooms at Castletown sooner rather than later.
Jesus, Kate thought furiously, he’s almost writing out the copy for her. They’d rowed about it the minute he was off the phone, the first proper, humdinger of an argument they’d ever had.
‘How do you think it’ll feel for me,’ she said furiously, ‘to have to read about this in print? No one is supposed to know until I’m safely at the twelve-week mark. You’re asking for trouble, Damien, and you’re mortifying me while you’re at it!’
‘Sweetheart, that’s just your hormones making you narky,’
‘This is nothing to do with hormones, I’m genuinely angry, actually!’
‘Then I gotta tell you, you’re making a big deal over nothing,’ he said, coming over to massage her shoulders, apparently still blithely cool about the whole thing. ‘It’ll just be a few throwaway hints in a few papers, nothing more. The press are going to write about us anyway, so we may as well be the ones that dictate what they write. Frankly, Katherine,’ he added with a shrug, ‘I can’t see what you’re getting so upset about.’
Katherine. He only ever called her that when he was really annoyed. She pushed him away, but he just shrugged and left the room, leaving her quietly seething on the sofa.
But then that was another slightly less palatable thing Kate was fast learning about her brand-new husband. Like the ultimate media junkie, it wasn’t enough for the two of them to be out night after night, enjoying the highlife. Instead, Damien absolutely needed everyone to know about it too, to make sure he was talked about for his fabulous lifestyle as much as for his successes with Globtech.
Like a tree falling in the forest that makes no sound if there’s no one there to hear it, it was as if nothing ever really happened in his life unless it had appeared in cold, hard print. Preferably with a nice, glossy photo to go along with it.
Like it or not, Kate reasoned as she tried her best to calm down, this was the man she loved. And after all, considering that she and Damien were happy in every other respect, this side of him seemed a relatively minor annoyance to have to put up with.
Even if just at this moment it certainly didn’t bloody well feel like it.
*
As it turned out, Kate’s forebodings had been right all along. It was the day before Christmas Eve and she and Damien were on a flight to Verbier to celebrate the holidays along with Mo, her husband and kids, and another group of friends. They would all be off skiing, of course, but Kate just planned to hide out in the hotel’s luxury spa for a blissful week of rest and pampering.
She was just at the ten-week mark in her pregnancy by then and was feeling exhausted all the time. Even the smell of food made her nauseous and she looked, she knew, ghostly, no matter how much make-up she plastered on.
Then one hour into the flight, she felt a sharp stomach cramp so violent that she knew immediately that something was very wrong. A cold, panicky feeling swept over her and instinctively she glanced around for Damien, but he was right at the back of the business class cabin, of course, drinking champagne and chatting to Don and Michelle Mayhew, another couple in their group.
Suddenly Kate felt a dampness between her thighs and put her hand down to discover the seat was now soaked with blood. Heart palpitating, she rushed to the loo to find she was bleeding a frightening amount, so heavily, it was almost non-stop. Then weakness and more nausea. She locked herself into the tiny bathroom for so long, that a concerned flight attendant ended up tapping gently on the door and politely asking if she was OK. In what weak little voice she could muster, Kate just whispered to her through the door, ‘My husband. Get my husband for me. Please. Hurry.’
Damien was there a moment later, and Kate managed to haul herself up to unlock the door and let him in. She didn’t even need to tell him what had just happened though. The devastated look on her face said it all.
*
The following summer, Kate found herself pregnant again. This time though, she took absolutely no chances, swearing Damien to secrecy so she wouldn’t have to suffer a repeat of him leaking it to the media all over again. At least this way she’d be spared the mortifying humiliation of her miscarriage actually making it into the grubbier tabloid papers for all to see.
Mind you, it still didn’t stop Damien from dropping the heaviest of heavy hints ‘that my lovely wife and I might have some very interesting news for you soon’, to most of their social circle. Pretty soon and to her annoyance, Kate found herself fending off calls and concerned texts from girlfriends asking if there was anything they could do for her.
There wasn’t, as it happened. She knew their friends only meant to be kind, but still it left Kate cross and angry with Damien for doing exactly what she’d begged him not to. She cancelled every social do that she’d been due to attend and mostly stayed at home, resting and taking care of herself in the peace and tranquillity of Castletown, just as she should have done first time around.
As it happened, though, it was an incredibly busy time and she and Damien had a lot of engagements they were expected to go to during those first weeks; no less than three weddings, two of which were abroad, a charity auction and three black-tie balls.
‘Don’t you worry, sweetheart,’ Damien had said to her, yanking himself into a dress suit and black tie for a gala do at the American ambassador’s home later that evening. ‘You just stay here and rest up. Everyone will understand.’
‘But are you sure you’ll be OK on your own?’ she’d asked him worriedly, stretched out on their bed, sipping a herbal tea.
‘Course,’ he’d smiled, pulling on his dinner jacket and striding across the room to give her a quick kiss goodbye. ‘Mind you,’ he added from the door on his way out, ‘if some hot babe starts making moves on me, then you’ll only have yourself
to blame.’
He was joking, just teasing. Of course he was.
Still, though, all that night Kate worried and didn’t really sleep soundly till he eventually came home, which was hours and hours later; well past dawn.
*
Then, just as Kate was reaching the eleven-week mark and she was actually starting to feel the worst was behind her, disaster. Another miscarriage, this time so frightening that her housekeeper had to call an ambulance. Damien was away in Brussels on business and it was hours later before she even got to speak to him from her hospital room. He changed flights of course and immediately rushed home to be with her, but still, it was too late and by then, it was all over.
This time, the awful, aching emptiness inside Kate just wouldn’t go away. She felt like a failure in every single way imaginable. And she knew Damien well enough by now to know exactly what he was thinking, as he looked down on her in her hospital bed, with drips and cannulas and God knows what else coming out of her.
Why was it that every other woman in the world could do this so effortlessly and just not her? He wanted a family, and so did she, so, so badly. But there was no denying the disappointment in his eyes. This was a man who had everything else in life handed to him on a plate. So why was this working out to be so bloody hard? Damien didn’t do failure and the more this went on, the more Kate felt like she’d become exactly that.
Then followed more doctors, tests and still more bloody tests. When Kate suffered a third miscarriage after just a few weeks, her consultant decided to call in the big guns. IVF was mooted and both Kate and Damien agreed that maybe this was a route they should consider going down.
‘It says here that IVF increases our chances of a multiple birth,’ Damien read from one of the endless leaflets and booklets of information they’d been inundated with. ‘I’ve always wanted to be the proud father of twins. Can you imagine? Three King men under the one roof – we’ll have a dynasty!’
Kate had tried to smile, but kept her fears to herself. The chances, they’d been told, were frighteningly slim given her medical history. Even with this gruelling round of treatment, the success rate was still just below twenty per cent.
‘What’s hugely in your favour is that you’re still young,’ her consultant had told her; a buff, bearded sixty-something who spent more time chatting to Damien about rugby than he ever did about Kate’s condition. ‘But what’s causing us a problem is that tilt in your uterus, particularly when you couple it with your history of endometriosis. So both conception and carrying a foetus to full-term are major issues here. IVF will boost your chances of conception, but after that, I’m afraid—’
He’d trailed off there, leaving Kate to imagine the very worst. Still, though, she steeled herself and so began an incredibly painful round of ovulation induction, intrauterine insemination and something she never really fully grasped called pituitary gland suppression. All she knew is that the cocktail of drugs she was now on was enough to fill a pharmacy.
For someone like her that had barely taken as much as a paracetamol in her whole life, she now found herself pumping her body with all sorts of stimulants and hardcore medication. Every single day she had to inject herself with a follicle stimulating hormone, followed by a heavy dose of something called Clomid. The combination of drugs made her feel sluggish and depressed and bloated her out so she could barely recognise her once slim frame.
‘You may not be pregnant yet,’ Damien had said, taking in her bulging tummy with a distinctly unimpressed up-and-down glance, ‘but you sure as hell look it.’
More pregnancy tests – every single one negative. And to add to it, a frightening number of Kate’s contemporaries – women who’d married around the same time she had – were now falling pregnant like ducks in a row. Falling pregnant easily and effortlessly, like it was the simplest thing in the world.
It seemed that not a month passed without Kate being invited to some baby shower or else, worse, a Christening. Babies, babies, babies. There was no escaping them. Kate frequently went to visit Mo and when she’d see how healthy and happy her gorgeous twins were, she’d hug them so tightly to her that they’d pull away from her complaining, ‘Aunt Kate, you’re hurting!’
There was an awful, hollow throbbing inside of her that was inescapable now and nothing seemed to fill it. Not even the ridiculous amounts of money she was spending these days. Never having been much of a spendthrift before, Kate had taken to shopping in a way that she wouldn’t have dreamt of in the past.
She’d remembered the way Damien always glowed proudly at her when she was immaculately dressed and looking her best. And so she hit the designer stores; kitting herself out top-to-toe in straight-off–the-catwalk high fashion, that only someone as tall and thin as her could really pull off. It actually got to the stage where she and her girlfriends knew the staff at Harvey Nichols and Brown Thomas by name.
Kate would fill her walk-in wardrobe with hanger after hanger of exquisite dresses, most of which would never even be worn, but still, it was something to do to pass the long, lonely weeks when Damien was away on business. Plus it went a way towards sating that gnawing emptiness inside of her. These days she was buying stuff she barely needed. Shopping, spending, accumulating, collecting; anything just to take her mind off things.
Well I have to fill the time somehow, don’t I, she figured. Seeing as how the entire medicine cabinet of drugs she was taking wasn’t the slightest comfort to her at all.
In fact the only thing that eased that dull ache inside of her was the surreptitious glass of wine she’d taken to having late at night to soothe her sleep. When Damien and the house staff were already in bed and there was no one around to see.
TESS
The present
‘Good God, Tess, what have you done to yourself?’ says Bernard when he calls over to the house later on. ‘You look like Coco the Clown.’
‘Make-up malfunction.’ I shrug as he bends down to kiss me in our tiny hallway. Filling the hall, as he always seems to do, he’s just that big.
‘You’re not going to look like that on the big day, are you, sausage?’ he asks worriedly. ‘It’s just … well perhaps a little avant-garde, wouldn’t you say? Not that I wouldn’t marry you if you turned up in a black refuse sack,’ he adds hastily.
But then Bernard lives his whole life in permanent fear of being thought of as impolite. This is a man who’d eat a plate of regurgitated baby poo if you plonked it in front of him, rather than cause offence.
I steer him into the kitchen, away from Mum and Gracie and their telly marathon, stick the kettle on then fill him in on the day’s events.
‘You’re working on the King case?’ he asks, plonking down at the kitchen table, all ears. ‘How extraordinary.’
‘I know, it’s like the case of the decade! Can you believe it? I thought I’d end up on a TV licence fraud case or something equally boring.’
‘Because, you know, that family really do have the most astonishing collection,’ says Bernard, drifting off a bit. ‘A Vermeer, a Titian, a Goya, even a very rare Gainsborough portrait of the Duchess of Marlborough. But of course the jewel in the crown is the famous Rembrandt; the one that Kate King is insisting is hers.’
‘She’s in breach of three court orders, you know,’ I say, pouring out two cups of tea and bringing them over to the table, careful to serve Bernard his just how he likes it – English breakfast, loose leaf and always, always in a good china cup and saucer – only too glad that Gracie isn’t here so she can slag him off afterwards.
‘What can you possibly mean, sausage?’
‘Well I’m not really supposed to talk about it, but …’ Feck it anyway, my will to yack is just too overwhelmingly huge. ‘Oh Bernard, you should have heard Oliver Daniels in court today, he was just brimming over with confidence. They have a cast-iron case against Kate King, because they think the whole thing will be over in about eight days. And as for her defence lawyer, she was beyond useless! She barely even bo
thered to try. Just said “it’s not how it looks”, and that was it really.’
‘Well, innocent until proven guilty, and all that.’
‘It’s bizarre though,’ I say knowledgeably. ‘I’m telling you, Bernard, I sat this close to Kate King herself and you should have seen her. The woman was a nervous wreck. All trembling and twitchy. She couldn’t even look us in the eye.’
‘Now, sausage, you know you’re not really supposed to discuss the case outside of court.’
‘Fine, then, let’s talk about something else.’ I shrug, inwardly cursing Bernard and his ethics for not even letting me chat about this at my own kitchen table.
‘Jolly good idea,’ he says, taking a sip of the tea with his little finger pointing upwards, a gesture which makes me doubly glad Gracie isn’t around to see. I can just hear her and Dad now, slagging Bernard off for the tiniest little thing and referring to him as ‘his ladyship’ behind my back. In vain I’ve tried to plead that just because Bernard doesn’t drink Heineken from the tin and follow the FA Premier League that doesn’t make him either gay or a granny; but as my mother wisely says, when it comes to Dad and Gracie, you might as well be trying to reason with a pair of gorillas.
Silence. And I know I’ve piles of stuff to go through with Bernard about the wedding and everything, but all I can think about is the case.
‘Well, can I at least tell you about the other jurors?’ I ask hopefully.
‘Best not to,’ says Bernard, shaking his head.
‘Shit. I can’t even talk about that much?’
‘Afraid not, sausage. And there really is no need for the expletive.’
‘Sorry.’
An even lengthier pause before he pipes up again.
‘Although I did meet them once, you know. Both of them.’
‘The Kings?’
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