Honeymoon Suite

by Wendy Holden

  Even if she didn’t have the right clothes. Nell now regretted not going into Chestlock to find something smarter to wear than a T-shirt and jeans. Ought she to have worn her wedding dress after all, dirty though it was, and odd though the plastic boots would have looked?

  But perhaps clothes didn’t matter too much now that Fate seemed to be driving the whole business. Every plan she had made for herself, after all, had been countermanded. She had wanted to leave Edenville but was, thanks to Rachel, staying the rest of the week. Now, thanks to Ben’s intervention, she had nowhere to live in London when that week was up.

  Everything seemed to be pointing towards what Rachel had urged all along: giving this whole Pemberton job idea a go. For the time being, at least. Was there a good reason not to?

  Well there was Adam Greenleaf. The fact that he lived in the area was not ideal. But she would just have to keep out of his way. She couldn’t spend her life running away from people. Especially when she had nowhere to run to.

  And she had, at least, had the satisfaction of telling Greenleaf what she thought of him. He would probably be as keen to avoid her in future as she was to avoid him.

  Gail appeared again and Nell followed her down the corridor. Gail knocked on Angela’s door. ‘Nell Simpson for you, Miss Highwater,’ she said, heart sinking in the knowledge this was another lamb to the slaughter.

  Nell’s experience of directors of human resources had been that they tended to be of conservative appearance. The woman behind the desk looked the opposite, with her crazy hair and tight clothes.

  Angela was, as Gail had anticipated, all friendly brightness. She always was, to start with. It was after she got them comfortable that she stuck the knife into her victims. ‘Hello, Nell! Come in, it’s great to see you. I’m Angela, Director of Human Resources for the Pemberton Estate. Tall, aren’t you? Love the jeans!’

  Nell reddened. ‘I’m sorry about my clothes. I didn’t expect to be coming for an interview when—’

  ‘Couldn’t matter less! It’s great you feel so comfortable with us already,’ Angela exclaimed, untruthfully, as Gail knew. Angela was obsessed with people looking smart at interviews and regarded anything less as a personal insult. Nell’s outfit would count against her, there was no doubt about that.

  Once Nell sat down, Angela wasted no time getting to the bottom of things. ‘So where are you from, Nell?’ she beamed. ‘There wasn’t an address on your CV.’

  ‘Er . . .’ Nell had been intending to give Gardiner Road as her home, but that was obviously not an option now. She might be back on the moral high ground, but it didn’t provide anywhere for her to live on.

  ‘I don’t really have a place at the moment,’ Nell confessed. ‘I’m staying at the Edenville Arms.’

  Homeless, Angela thought with satisfaction. A vagrant lesbian. Marvellous. ‘Of course, you’re the lady newlyweds! Congratulations.’

  Nell concealed her surprise with a smile. ‘We’re not actually together. Not in that way.’

  Angela stared. ‘Not . . . together? You’re not married, then?’ Bloody Jason. How could he have got this wrong?

  Nell smiled. ‘My friend Rachel is a widow. And I’m . . .’ She stopped. Angela Highwater was obviously a warm and sympathetic person, but that didn’t mean she needed to go into the whole Joey business.

  ‘A widow!’ Angela shook her head, tutting. ‘Poor lady. So you brought her up here for a treat, did you?’

  Nell hesitated. ‘Not exactly,’ she began, and again wanted to leave it at that. But the kindness and sympathy in the other woman’s face encouraged her onwards.

  ‘Not exactly?’ prompted Angela, with her warmest smile and most confidante-worthy tones.

  Nell’s resolve not to say anything splintered and collapsed. Angela listened with an expression of compassionate understanding. But her nails were positively gouging her palms with excitement. Forget the lesbianism; this was miles better. Jilted at the altar with nowhere to live! Homeless and emotionally unstable! Eminently unsuitable for estate employment!

  Nell came to the end of the tale. ‘So there it is. That’s what’s brought me up here.’ Well, some of what had brought her up there. The Adam Greenleaf business remained unbroached. Even Rachel didn’t know about that.

  ‘It’s a terrible story.’ Angela shook her head sorrowfully. ‘You poor thing. I can’t bear to think what you’ve been through.’

  She had not meant a word of it but was surprised to feel that, actually, she did. Somewhere deep within her serially romantically disappointed soul was a stirring of sympathy for everything this woman in front of her had experienced at the hands of a man. It reminded her of what she had suffered over Dan Parker, who in the end preferred that living corpse Juliet Turner. Men were so bloody destructive, so bloody heedless of the chaos they caused! But it was only a stirring, and Angela was swift to remove the heat beneath it and put the lid back on. She wasn’t here to sympathise with Nell Simpson. She was here to dispatch her back to where she had come from.

  Though grateful for the relief of unburdening herself, Nell sensed she had rather overshared. ‘I’m sorry,’ she began. ‘You’ll have to excuse me talking about myself so much. I hadn’t meant to but it’s all rather complicated. I know I can count on your discretion, though.’

  ‘Tell anyone!’ Angela’s red fingernails flew to her blancmange-like white breast. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it! Wild horses wouldn’t drag it from me! I’m Director of Human Resources, remember!’

  Nell felt instantly reassured. It was true that Angela’s position guaranteed confidentiality. She was hardly likely to go out and start gossiping about interview candidates, was she?

  She watched Angela stand up and smooth down her tight dress. Something was missing, Nell realised. ‘Aren’t we going to talk about the job?’

  Angela looked blank. ‘The job?’ There was no job for this woman. Not once the Earl heard she was an unreliable vagrant who’d just left her fiancé at the altar. ‘Oh, er, leave it with me.’

  ‘So you’ll get back to me?’ Nell rose to her feet now as well. She felt worried.

  ‘Course I will.’ Angela snuck a glance at her watch. Just coming up to five. If she could wind this up in the next few minutes and then call the Earl, she could head over to the Edenville Arms and see Jason. She had a bone to pick with him.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Nell searched Angela’s features, which somehow looked less friendly than before. She was reassured to some extent by the dazzling beam the other woman now trained on her. ‘Everything’s fine. Couldn’t be better!’

  Nell was hardly out of the door when Angela pressed the speed-dial link to the Earl. It took some time to get through, even so. Angela suspected that Margaret, the secretary, had put her on hold on purpose. They had crossed swords in the past; there had been a misunderstanding over Margaret’s husband. Eventually, however, His Lordship’s patrician tones floated down the line. ‘Good afternoon, Angela. What can I do for you? Interviewed that young lady, have you?’

  It was best, Angela knew, to come straight to the point; the Earl was famously unkeen on beating about the bush. ‘Yes, and I really don’t think Nell Simpson is a good choice.’ She tried her best to sound regretful.

  ‘Well, I disagree,’ the Earl returned robustly. ‘Her experience is spot on. She’s just what we need.’

  ‘She’s a destabilising influence,’ Angela countered vehemently.

  ‘A what?’

  Angela drew in a deep breath. ‘Nell Simpson,’ she said with all the pomp and circumstance she could summon, ‘turns out to be a vagrant with a history of emotional instability, deceit and untrustworthiness.’

  The Earl let a few beats pass. ‘What is the evidence for this?’ he asked.

  His very calmness exacerbated Angela’s hysteria. ‘She left her fiancé standing at the altar! H
ow can we possibly give a position of such enormous responsibility to someone like that?’

  ‘Leaving one’s betrothed at the altar might in some circumstances be a wise thing to do. People have second thoughts.’

  Angela was getting desperate now. ‘She was dressed appallingly! Turned up for the interview in jeans and a creased T-shirt.’

  ‘She was wearing that when I saw her,’ His Lordship mused. ‘She looked very nice, I thought.’ And certainly better than how Angela Highwater normally looked, with her strangely coloured clothes and bizarre hair.

  Angela flailed for another negative. ‘She’s much too good-looking,’ she said censoriously.

  ‘Is she really?’ the Earl said innocently. ‘I must say I hadn’t noticed. What has that got to do with it, anyway? You’ve just said she was badly dressed.’

  ‘Attractive women lower productivity,’ Angela ignored the last remark. ‘It’s a proven fact.’

  ‘Whatever can you mean?’ the Earl asked. Personally, he’d always preferred to be served by a pretty girl in a shop, or at least someone with a smile. This reflection led on to the realisation that there were very few smiles or pretty girls in his shops, if anywhere on his estate. Why was that?

  ‘They’re seen as social magnets. People go over and talk to them, men try to impress them, that sort of thing,’ said Angela, trotting out the one piece of theory she had agreed with at the recent human resources training day.

  ‘Absolute twaddle,’ said the Earl. ‘I absolutely want you to hire Nell Simpson. Indeed, I insist on it. We need someone good in that position, and we need them now. As a matter of urgency.’

  Angela was about to tartly observe that it was only urgent because His Lordship had seen fit to sack Ros, but she thought better of it. One of Angela’s few genuine personnel skills was recognising when her own job might be in danger.

  She tried one final tack. ‘But Your Lordship, she’s of no fixed abode. She’s living at the Edenville Arms.’

  ‘I don’t object to that. On the contrary, it shows excellent taste. The Edenville Arms is a very good pub.’

  ‘Well, she can’t stay there,’ Angela said ominously. ‘She’s only got the room for the rest of this week. Jason’s got it booked solid all summer.’

  ‘Has he now?’ mused the other end, approvingly. Angela could have kicked herself for inadvertently ushering the hotel manager into the limelight. ‘Perhaps she can rent somewhere,’ the Earl suggested.

  ‘There isn’t anywhere for rent,’ Angela stated quickly, and in the face of the plethora of ads to the contrary in all the local estate agents’ windows. ‘Summer’s coming. All the local places have gone.’

  The Earl, who tended not to look in estate agents’ windows, was silent, as Angela had expected. Then he said something she did not expect at all.

  ‘Well, she can always stay at Pemberton. Plenty of spare bedrooms here.’

  The possibility of Nell Simpson taking up residence in the Earl’s actual home was so far-fetched, so ghastly, it had never so much as crossed Angela’s mind. She imagined her now, the cool, tall blonde, beneath the pleated canopy of one of the state bedrooms, looking out over a view of the park. She imagined her in one of the bathrooms with their polished copper pipes and mahogany fittings. Furious, murderous jealousy filled Angela. It could not be tolerated, it would not be borne. It absolutely could not happen.

  ‘I’ve got another idea,’ she said desperately.

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘There’s Ros’s old cottage. Just outside the village. Beggar’s Roost.’

  ‘Didn’t they leave it in rather a mess?’ The Earl had heard from the estate maintenance men of drawings on walls and a garden like a bomb site. Ros Downer, it appeared, had had rather a free-range child.

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ Angela maintained, although she had privately been shocked by Rapunzal’s biologically explicit depictions of the human form. ‘Iggy and I believe that nakedness is beautiful,’ Ros had explained. ‘We don’t feel the need to cover up at home.’

  ‘Well, perhaps we can get it repainted for her,’ the Earl said. ‘Did all that business with the old chap next door get sorted out, by the way? It sounded very unpleasant.’

  ‘Dreadful!’ Angela agreed, seizing on an outlet for her pent-up ire. ‘It was very stressful.’

  ‘Yes, I understand old George had a very difficult time.’

  But Angela’s loyalties – so far as they went – were with the other side. ‘He was a very difficult neighbour,’ she countered.

  ‘Didn’t they want to cut his hedge down? Seemed rather unreasonable. Old George Farley has been there for as long as I can remember.’

  ‘On a peppercorn rent!’ Angela put in, even though rents were not her business. She had, at one stage, attempted to get close to the estate manager, whose business they were and who was Margaret’s husband.

  ‘Lovely man. So gentle,’ the Earl was saying thoughtfully. ‘War hero too. You know he flew a Lancaster bomber, don’t you?’

  Angela suppressed a yawn.

  ‘Yes, awfully brave. So few of them survived. But you’d never know it, he’s so modest. Never talks about it . . . Poor old chap, his wife died a few years ago. Rather retreated into himself after that.’

  ‘Must have been a welcome release for her,’ Angela muttered uncharitably.

  The Earl didn’t quite hear this, but the sound nudged him from his reverie. ‘I’m afraid I have to go,’ he said. ‘So can I take it that Nell Simpson will be offered the job as Director of PR and Marketing, with the option of Beggar’s Roost with the job?’

  Angela, through gritted teeth, agreed that he could.

  Afterwards, she slammed the phone down hard and yelled for Gail. As Angela thundered out the latest unwelcome human resources developments, Gail did her best to look as appalled as she was clearly expected to, and not, as she actually felt, that it would be a relief to have someone nice about the place.

  As her boss continued to rage behind the desk, Gail remembered she had a piece of meat to throw the ravening beast. She had just read it in the local newspaper. She hurried off to her desk to fetch it.

  Angela seized it from her minion’s trembling hands. The item concerned Caradoc Turner, actor husband of the corpse-like temptress who Dan Parker had preferred to her. He was returning home from his latest tour. The play was Murderous Death, an Agatha Christie-esque mystery.

  Angela skimmed the article before shoving the paper back at Gail, her eyes sparkling through her clogged mascara. The final night of Murderous Death was to be this weekend, at the local theatre in Chestlock. Well, Angela planned to be at the stage door afterwards. She had news for Caradoc Turner.

  CHAPTER 32

  Caradoc Turner sat in his dressing room at the Woking Hippodrome. He was manically pressing and re-pressing the redial on his mobile. His wife, however, was not picking up.

  What was she doing? When he had spoken to Juliet earlier that morning, she had not said she was going out. So far as he was aware, she rarely left their home, Birch Hall. What was there to go out for, in Chestlock?

  Caradoc breathed deeply in the manner he had been taught at theatre school to combat stage fright. But it had been months since he had feared walking out of the wings; he knew his part so well he could perform it in his sleep. On at least one occasion he had. It was not stage fright that was exercising Caradoc now.

  It was Juliet.

  For some reason, the gnawing anxiety Caradoc felt whenever he thought of his young, attractive wife had worsened as the tour’s end drew nearer. He had longed for her every day for the past six months, as the Backstabbers Theatre Company moved from Gaiety to Hippodrome to Palace to Civic Theatre in towns he had never even known existed and would have been happy to remain ignorant of. But now he was finally coming home, and the very last perform
ance loomed. It was on Saturday, a mere three days from today. A mere six performances left, three matinees and three evening.

  Caradoc felt a palpitating excitement. The moment he had been looking forward to for six months was almost upon him. Soon, hopefully, Juliet would be upon him too. Would his wife, after the long absence, finally agree to have sex with him?

  When his agent had first called to offer a six months’ stint in a touring provincial production of Murderous Death, Caradoc had laughed in his face. He, who had once played Hamlet at the National (admittedly, as understudy to the understudy; his actual part had been Guildenstern)! He, playing a character called Hercules Pierrot in an Agatha Christie-style mystery with a washed-up bunch of old soap-stars!

  True, his career was some way past its zenith. But it had not, or at least so Caradoc thought, yet reached the nadir that sent actors out into the wild to be shot, stabbed or poisoned in dusty provincial theatres in front of ancient audiences sucking Mintoes.

  His agent’s response had been frank and crushing. His view was that not only was Caradoc’s career at just such a nadir, but that he was lucky to have even this opportunity. As he absorbed this it had occurred to Caradoc that Murderous Death might be the break he and Juliet needed to reinvigorate their marriage. Or simply invigorate it, full stop.

  In fact, their marriage had started pretty well. Full-bloodedly, quite literally. Juliet had been a set designer when Caradoc met her. She was in charge of painting gore all over the stage in a production of Titus Andronicus which was sanguinous even by Globe standards.

  Her very black hair and very white face had beautifully set off the bright red she was professionally concerned with. She was also fabulously wraithlike, wafting about the stage in floaty garments that clung to her narrow hips and small, firm breasts. It seemed to Caradoc, who had always found Gothic women a turn-on, that Juliet, in her clinging, bloodstained clothes, pulsed with a repressed yet powerful sexuality. It was in the hope of liberating it that he began to pay serious court to her on the Andronicus press night.