by Liz Fielding
‘Well, no. Obviously. You’d have to be there.’
‘I was,’ he reminded her. ‘Out of interest, what did you have for breakfast?’
‘Gran made us both porridge. I sliced an apple over mine and added a drizzle of maple syrup.’
‘Organic, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, good for you.’ Annie, he noticed, lips pressed together to keep a smile in check, was being very careful to avoid eye contact, this time for all the right reasons. ‘Actually,’ he continued, ‘you seem to have overlooked the fact that there’s fruit in the mincemeat.’
Xandra snorted, unimpressed, but she turned away quickly. He was hoping it was so that he wouldn’t see that, like Annie, she was trying not to laugh.
He was probably fooling himself, he thought, reaching for the paper lying on the counter to distract himself with the sports headlines on the back page so he wouldn’t dwell on how much that hurt.
‘Here you are.’ Xandra put his coffee and pastries in front of him, then, sipping from the bottle she was holding, wandered over to the window to watch for the arrival of the trees. Or possibly the young man who’d be bringing them.
‘It’ll take him a while to dig up two big trees,’ he warned her.
‘Well, I’m sorry to take up so much of your time.’ She took the paper from him, pulled out a chair and turned it over and, having glanced at the front page, opened it up. She was using it as a barrier rather than because she was interested in world news, he thought, but after a moment she looked up, stared at Annie, then looked at the paper again.
‘Has anyone ever told you how much you look like Lady Rose, Annie?’ she asked.
‘Who?’ she asked, reaching for the paper, but he beat her to it.
‘You know.’ She made a pair of those irritating quote marks with her fingers. ‘The “people’s virgin”.’
‘Who?’ he asked.
Xandra leaned over and pointed to a picture of a man and a woman. ‘Lady Rose Napier. The nation’s sweetheart. She came to Dower House a couple of years ago for prize-giving day. Chauffeur, bodyguards, the Warthog genuflecting all over the place.’
Since George paid the school fees, he received invitations to all school events as a matter of courtesy. Did his best to make all of them.
‘I must have missed that one,’ he said, realising that Lady Rose was the pampered ‘princess’ whose wedding plans were the talk of the tabloids.
He looked up from the paper to check the likeness for himself. ‘Xandra’s right,’ he said. ‘You do look like her.’ Which perhaps explained why she’d seemed vaguely familiar.
‘I wish,’ Annie said with a slightly shaky laugh. ‘I was just reading about her. She’s holed up in luxurious seclusion in a palace owned by the Ramal Hamrahn royal family. I could do with some of that.’
‘According to this, she’s with that old bloke she’s going to marry.’ Xandra pulled a face. ‘I’d rather stay a virgin.’
‘I’d rather you did too,’ George said.
She glanced at him. ‘You’re a fine one to talk.’
‘Your mother was eighteen,’ he protested, then stopped. This was not a conversation he wanted to have with his sixteen-year-old daughter. ‘Did you meet her? Lady Rose?’
‘In other words, did I win a prize? Sorry, they don’t give one for car maintenance.’ Then, since that didn’t get the intended laugh, ‘Lady Rose is nearly as old as Annie. I suppose she must be getting desperate.’
He looked at the picture of the man beside her. ‘He’s not that old,’ he protested.
‘He’s thirty-nine. It says so right there.’
With his own thirty-sixth birthday in sight, that didn’t seem old to him, but when he’d been sixteen it would probably have seemed ancient.
‘It also says he’s rich. Owns a castle in Scotland, estates in Norfolk and Somerset and is heir to an earldom.’
‘I think that cancels out “old”,’ he countered, looking up from the photograph of the two of them leaving some function together to compare her with Annie.
If you ignored the clothes, the woolly hat pulled down to hide not just her hair but most of her forehead, the likeness was striking.
And Annie had admitted to cutting her hair, borrowing the clothes she was wearing. She’d even talked about security men watching her night and day.
If the evidence that she’d flown to some place called Bab el Sama hadn’t been right in front of him, it might have crossed his mind that Annie was Lady Rose Napier.
Assuming, of course, that she really had gone there. But why wouldn’t she? It was the ultimate getaway destination. Luxury, privacy.
Why would she swap that for this?
‘Rich, smitch,’ Xandra said dismissively. ‘Lady Rose doesn’t need the money. Her father was the Marquess of St Ives and he left her a fortune. And her grandfather is a duke.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Everything she does is news. She’s the virgin princess with a heart of gold. An example to us all.’
She clutched at her throat to mime throwing up.
‘I’d have thought a woman like that would be fighting off suitors.’
‘Yes, well, she’s been surrounded by bodyguards all her life, has a posse of photographers in her face wherever she goes and she has a whiter than white image to maintain. She can never let her hair down, kick off and have fun like everyone else, can she?’ She thought about it for a moment. ‘Actually, you’ve got to feel just a bit sorry for her.’
‘Have you?’ he asked, thinking about the way Annie had reached out to him last night. Her whispered ‘I don’t want to be safe’. ‘What about you, Annie?’
‘Do I feel sorry for her?’ she asked, looking at the picture.
That was what he’d meant, but there was something about the way she was avoiding his eyes that bothered him.
‘Would you marry the old guy in the picture?’ he pressed.
She looked up then. Straight, direct. ‘Not unless I was in love with him.’
‘Oh, puh-lease,’ Xandra said. Then, taking back the paper, she compared the two pictures and shrugged. ‘Maybe she is in love. There was a rumour going around that she was anorexic, but she looks a lot better here. It’s a pity, really.’
‘What is?’ he asked, never taking his eyes off Annie.
It all fitted, he thought.
The timing was right. The poise. He’d even thought that she was acting as if she were royalty when she’d left him to close the tow-truck door behind her. He doubted that Lady Rose Napier, with a chauffeur and bodyguards in attendance, had ever had to do that in her life.
But it had to be coincidence. There was a likeness, it was true, but wasn’t everyone supposed to have a double somewhere? And why on earth would a woman with a fortune at her command take off in a rattle bucket car when she could be going first-class all the way to paradise with Mr Big?
‘What’s a pity?’ he repeated sharply.
Xandra gave an awkward little shrug, shook her head, clearly embarrassed, which had to be a first.
‘Nothing. It’s just that in the earlier picture the likeness is more pronounced.’
When she was thinner? A little less attractive? Was that what his tactless daughter had stopped herself from saying?
‘But if Annie worked at it a bit, grew her hair, had the right clothes, make-up, I bet one of those lookalike agencies would snap her up.’
Annie opened her mouth, presumably to protest, but Xandra wasn’t finished.
‘You’d have to wear high heels,’ she went on, getting carried away in her enthusiasm. ‘She’s really tall. But I bet that if you put on a pound or two you could do it.’
‘What about the eyes?’ George said, trying to see her not in baggy jeans, a chain store fleece jacket with a woolly hat pulled down to cover her hair, but a designer gown cut low to reveal creamy shoulders, long hair swept up. Her face transformed with make-up. Jewels at her throat. He seemed to get s
tuck on the shoulders…‘Aren’t they the big giveaway?’
‘What?’ she said, her attention shifting to the sound of a tractor pulling into the car park. She dropped the paper, more interested in what was happening outside. ‘Oh, that’s not a problem. She could use contacts.’
‘Of course she could,’ he said, his own attention focused firmly on the woman sitting on the far side of the table. ‘So does that appeal as a career move?’
The corner of Annie’s mouth lifted in a wry smile. ‘You mean if I were a little younger, a little taller, wore a wig, contacts and plenty of make-up?’
‘And if you put on a few pounds,’ he reminded her. A little weight to fill out the hollows beneath her collarbone. Hollows that matched those of Lady Rose Napier in her evening gown.
‘Much more of your mother’s meat pie and buttered toast and that won’t be a problem,’ she replied, the smile a little deeper, but still wry.
‘As good a reason to stay as any other,’ he suggested. ‘As long as you remember to add garlic to the mash.’
‘Are you suggesting that I’m scrawny?’
‘The trees are here, George.’ His daughter impatiently demanded his attention and he pushed back his chair, got to his feet, never taking his eyes off Annie.
‘Not if I have any sense,’ he replied. ‘And you can save the expense of contact lenses. Your eye colour is more than a match for the people’s virgin.’
He took her glasses from his pocket and, taking her hand, placed them in her palm, closing her fingers over them, holding them in place as he was held by Annie’s vivid gaze.
‘They look an awful lot bigger on the trailer than they did growing,’ Xandra said, breaking the spell. ‘Will they be safe on the roof?’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said, telling himself that he was glad of the distraction. ‘If it’s going to be a problem I’m sure your lovelorn swain will be happy to offer a personal delivery service.’
‘My what? Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ she said, rolling her eyes at him before stomping down the steps and striding across the car park.
‘I’d better go and find some rope,’ he said, still not moving.
‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ Annie asked, the glasses still clutched in her hand.
‘I think you’ve done more than enough for one day, Annie. If you don’t fancy lookalike work, you could always take up acting.’
‘Acting?’
He noted the nervous swallow, the heightened colour that flushed across her cheekbones with relief. Despite his earlier suspicion that she might be a practised con woman, it was clear that, whatever she was hiding, she wasn’t a practised liar.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with your ankle,’ he said bluntly.
‘Oh.’ The colour deepened. ‘How did you guess?’
‘I’ve rarely encountered one in less perfect condition,’ he said, reliving the feel of it beneath his palm. ‘In fact, I’m seriously hoping that you’ll take Xandra’s advice to heart about wearing high heels.’
‘I didn’t pack any.’
‘No? Well, you can’t run in high heels, can you?’
‘If you hadn’t gone all macho over the car-’
‘Oh, right. Blame the sucker.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ she protested. ‘I just thought-’
‘I know what you thought,’ he said curtly, before she could say the words out loud. Determined to crush any foolish notion that throwing him into close proximity with Xandra would produce a cosy father-daughter bond. ‘I have no doubt you imagined you were helping, but some relationships can’t be fixed.’
No matter how much you might regret that.
‘Not without putting a little effort into it,’ she came right back at him, her eyes flashing with more than a touch of anger as if he’d lit some personal touchpaper. The air seemed to fizzle with it and he wondered what would have happened if, instead of listening to his head last night and walking away, he’d listened to her.
‘I don’t want to be safe…’
He took a step back, needing to put some space between them, but she wasn’t done.
‘Don’t give up on her, George,’ she said, leaning towards him, appealing to him. ‘Don’t give up on yourself.’
‘I’m sure you mean well, Annie, but don’t waste your time playing Santa Claus. It’s not going to happen.’ He pushed the paper towards her. ‘You’d be better occupied thinking about your own future than worrying about mine. What you’re going to do next week. The money you’ve got stashed in your underwear isn’t going to last very long when you’re out there on your own.’
Reminding her that she might have found a temporary sanctuary, but that was all it was.
Reminding himself.
Annie let out a long silent breath as he walked away, but it had more to do with the anger, the pain that had come off him like a blast of ice than fear that he’d seen through her disguise.
Although maybe, she thought, looking down at the glasses in her hand, maybe she should be worrying about that.
She’d assumed that he’d pushed the paper at her so that she could check out her ‘double’. Think about the career opportunities it offered. But he hadn’t actually said that.
Even with the evidence that she wasn’t the ‘people’s virgin’-and could it be any more lowering than to have her lack of sexual experience pitied by a sixteen-year-old?-on the table in front of her.
She was in Bab el Sama. It said so right there for the whole world to see, yet still he’d handed her back her disguise as if he thought she needed it.
Too late for that, she thought, dropping the glasses into her bag and switching on her cellphone to thumb in a quick text to Lydia.
Tomorrow there would have to be pictures to prove she was there.
‘Are you all right, dear?’ The woman who’d served them came to clear the table and wipe it down and glanced after George meaningfully.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, switching off the phone. ‘Honestly.’
‘Christmas…’ she said, sighing as Rudolph started up yet again. ‘It’s all stress. You wouldn’t believe the things I hear. Did you know that there are more marriage break-ups over Christmas than at any other time of year?’
‘Really? I’ll bear that in mind. Should I ever get married.’
‘Oh…You and he aren’t…?’
‘We only met yesterday, but thank you for caring,’ Annie said, stowing her phone and standing up. ‘Being ready to listen. That’s the true spirit of the season.’
‘The Christmas fairy, that’s me,’ she said with an embarrassed laugh before whisking away the tray.
And nothing wrong with that, Annie thought, before crossing to the window to see how far things had progressed.
One of the trees had already been hoisted onto the roof of the car, but as George and a good-looking boy bent to lift the second, larger tree, Xandra, who had climbed up to lash the first into place, stopped what she was doing and looked down, not at the boy, but at her father.
Full of longing, need, it was a look that she recognised, understood and she forgot her own concerns as her heart went out to the girl.
They’d both lost their parents, but in Xandra’s case the situation wasn’t irretrievable. Her mother might not be perfect but she’d be home in a few weeks. And George was here right now, bringing the scent of fresh spruce with him as he returned to the chalet to pay for the trees.
For once it didn’t bring a lump to her throat, the ache of unbearable memories. This wasn’t her Christmas, but Xandra’s. A real celebration to share with the grandparents she adored. And with George, if he took his chance and seized the opportunity to change things.
‘All done?’ she asked.
He gave her a look that suggested she had to be joking. ‘This is just the beginning. When we get back I’m going to have to find suitable containers and erect them safely so that they don’t topple over if the cat decides to go
climbing.’
‘Back’, not home, she noticed. He never called the house he’d grown up in ‘home’.
‘Then I’ll have to sort out lights and check them to make sure they won’t blow all the fuses.’
‘Why don’t you ask that boy to give you a hand?’ she suggested. ‘Earn yourself some Brownie points with your daughter.’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said, handing a grubby handwritten docket to the woman behind the till along with some banknotes.
Protective. A good start, she thought.
‘You can’t keep her wrapped in cotton wool.’ At least not without the kind of money that would make Dower House fees look like chicken feed. ‘And, even if you could, she wouldn’t thank you for it.’
‘Nothing new there, then,’ he said, slotting the pound coins the woman gave him as change into a charity box on the counter.
They piled back into the car and this time Xandra gave her more room so she wasn’t squashed up against George. Just close enough to be tinglingly aware of every movement. For his hand to brush her thigh each time he changed gear.
‘We’ll need to stop at the garden centre in Longbourne to pick up some bags of compost,’ Xandra said carelessly as he paused at the farm gate. ‘If the trees are to have a chance of surviving.’
‘I don’t think-’
‘Granddad always plants out the Christmas trees,’ she said stubbornly.
‘I remember,’ he muttered under his breath so that only she heard. Then, raising his voice above the sound of the engine, ‘He won’t be fit enough to do it this year, Xandra.’
Her eyes widened a little as the reality of her grandfather’s heart attack truly hit home, but then she shrugged. ‘It’s not a problem. I can do it.’
‘Damn you!’ George banged the steering wheel with the flat of his hand. ‘You are just like him, do you know that? Stubborn, pig-headed, deaf to reason…’
Xandra’s only response was to switch on the personal stereo in her jacket pocket and stick in her earplugs.
George didn’t say a word and Annie kept her own mouth firmly shut as they pulled into the garden centre car park.
It was one of those out of town places and it had a huge range of house plants that had been forced for the holiday, as well as every kind of seasonal decoration imaginable.