by Karen Swan
This book is dedicated to my mum (even though she isn’t allowed to read it because of the rude bits), whose tireless devotion to her grandchildren and steadfast faith in me enabled the book to be written.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Chapter Fifty-three
Chapter Fifty-four
Chapter Fifty-five
Chapter Fifty-six
Chapter Fifty-seven
Chapter Fifty-eight
Prima Donna
Christmas at Tiffany’s
The Perfect Present
Christmas at Claridge’s
Chapter One
Hugh Summershill knew better than to try to discern or understand the subtle rivalries that women engage in, but he did know that Julia McIntyre was the type of woman his wife, Tor, sniffed at. She’d think Julia had ‘let herself go’ (even though she was only a size fourteen – he’d checked in her labels one languorous afternoon, wanting to go back to La Perla and get that lacy all-in-one thing he’d seen in the window). Her hair wasn’t poker straight, but bouncy with a soft curl which she just left to dry naturally, and she had milky skin with rosebud-pink nipples that had clearly never seen the sun. She wasn’t polished, sophisticated, thin or fashionable. In fact, she wasn’t any of the things that Tor prized – she wouldn’t even have seen her as a competitor – and he’d often wondered whether, subconsciously, this was why he’d gone with her: a random act of spite to his wife, whose perfectionism was alienating and aloof.
He lay back, enjoying the feeling of her breath on his stomach, the spring breeze whispering over him and making him shiver as they lay naked and entwined on the daybed on her veranda. The background rumble of buses and steady drone of rush hour traffic kept his senses rudely aware that this was Battersea, not Bermuda.
‘Hmmm, you like that?’ she smiled, blowing air rings on his hips. She shifted position, placing herself between his legs, inching downwards, her hair fanning silkily across him as she traced wide meandering S-shapes over his torso with her breath.
She felt him stir and looked up at him, pulling herself forwards, grazing her curves against him, giving him some of what he wanted, but not enough. Nowhere near enough. He grabbed her, ready again, and she giggled at his lusty appetite. Poor Hugh, he’d clearly been starved for years.
‘You know,’ she said provocatively as she straddled him, not remotely done with him yet, ‘this could be how we spend every afternoon. Can’t you just imagine it, darling? You and me and this?’
Her hands fluttered behind her, cupping his balls, and she began grinding with intent.
‘What . . . do you . . . mean?’ he groaned.
The late afternoon sunlight caught her hair, drenching her in apricot light. He didn’t know whether to fuck her or eat her.
‘I mean I don’t want to share you any more, lover,’ she purred, leaning over him and biting his lip. ‘Let’s make this real, once and for all. I want you to move in.’
At the exact moment her husband was ravishing his mistress, Tor Summershill was also reclining in splendour. The sun was low in the sky, ready to drop like a fat peach from the tree, and Tor was stretched out on a teak steamer, eyeing the honeyed glow on the children’s naked bodies that made them appear even more luscious than usual. Their busy baby chatter as they tucked into their lawn picnic was nothing more than a tranquil buzz, and Tor made a mental note to get some more of those diddy organic cocktail sausages – so much easier for little fingers and milk teeth.
Mmmm, bliss, she sighed. Still, having a garden bigger than a bikini helped. There weren’t many places in southwest London where you could stick the kids out of earshot in an orchard. One hundred and thirty feet of London lawn came with too many zeros for most people.
God, Cress was lucky. She sighed deeply, breathing in the first delicate scent of the night-flowering honeysuckle, and stretched out further. Where the hell was she anyway? She’d been gone ages.
A distant crash and flurry of expletives answered her question and she shaded her eyes to search for her friend, just as the french windows burst open and Cress’s slight, angry silhouette stomped down the lawn to the summerhouse. Oh God, what? What? WHAT? Tor frantically scanned over the list of possible disaster scenarios that might explain Cress’s crossness – a leaky nappy on the Aubusson? Some broken antique blue and white porcelain? Felt tips on the Frette bedspreads?
Cress set down the tray of freshly-made lemonade with a clatter, and abruptly presented Tor with a glossy red sword.
‘Uh, thank you,’ Tor faltered. ‘What’s it for – besides battle, I mean?’
‘Can you believe it?’ Cress muttered. ‘Rumbled already. And it’s only bloody May. Bloody kids.’
‘What’s rumbled?’
‘Christmas!’ sighed Cress. ‘That sword was part of my Santa stash. One of the kids has found it. God knows which one. It was lying on the stairs.’ She stood there, hands on hips. ‘If I put it in their stockings now, the game is up. They’ll know Father Christmas is a myth, I’ll be exposed as a liar – because it will of course be my fault that he doesn’t exist – and that’ll be it, end of their childhood; next stop, smoking and snogging behind the scooters . . .’
‘Jago’s at a boys’ school,’ Tor interrupted.
‘Precisely!’ Cress exclaimed triumphantly.
Tor grinned and took a sip of lemonade. ‘Did you make this?’
‘Yes. Why, is it disgusting?’
Tor laughed. Cress was many things – mother of four, business dynamo, social butterfly and intoxicating to her husband – but domestic goddess? Not a chance. Every dinner party was spooned from a caterer’s Le Creuset, and when she stopped breastfeeding after three weeks, she joked it was because her milk was off.
‘No, it’s great,’ she lied. She took another slug of lemonade to prove her point, and tried not to shiver.
‘Well, that’s it. Big Yellow Storage for me,’ Cress continued, settling herself noisily on her steamer. ‘The kids get into everything now and there just isn’t the storage space in these houses.’
Tor looked up at the detached seven-bedroom pile and weighed i
n sarcastically. ‘Yes, you’re right. Five thousand square feet and not a cupboard in sight. It’s pitiful. I don’t know how you’ve put up with it for so long.’
Cress idled a hand in the grass, brushing it casually. ‘Hey, why don’t you get one too? Our spaces could be neighbours.’
‘Thanks, Cress, but I really don’t need to pay for any more square footage. Our mortgage payments are crippling enough. And anyway you know I’ll just want to decorate it. Think about it – no natural light, low ceilings, no original features. My basic nightmare.’
Cress laughed, and they both tried not to drink the lemonade.
Tor squinted over at the toddlers now running amok around the crab-apple and plum trees. Marney and Millie were four and three respectively, but they still shared the padded thighs, bare pudgy bottoms and high, rounded tummies of their eighteen-month-old brother, and she felt brimful of love as they staggered shrieking through the sprinklers. She felt tempted to jump up and join them.
But only momentarily. Lying back doing nothing, for once, felt so good too. And anyway, Cress’s stunning Swedish nanny, Greta, had emerged from an hour-long phone call to her boyfriend back home and was herding the children into fluffy towels.
Tor noticed that Cress kept squinting at her mobile on the table and checking the signal.
‘So, what’s happening at work?’ she asked. ‘You’ve been travelling a lot recently.’
‘Tchyuh, don’t I know it. The air hostesses miss me more between flights than the kids.’
‘Mmmm.’ Tor squinted at her in the sunlight. Cress’s emotional isolation from her children – which she buffered with a stream of nannies – was scarcely acknowledged and certainly never discussed. Cress was all about achievement, control and perfection, and Tor understood her friend well enough to know she needed to keep this ‘blemish’ below radar until she figured out how to nix it.
To look at her, nothing – apart from the red sword – was out of place in Cress’s world. Not her career, not her house, not her marriage, not even her hair. Cress’s bob – tinted a shade too blonde – was so sharply styled it looked like it had been cut with lasers. The style was perfect for framing her small heart-shaped face and offset her steely blue eyes, but Tor was always on at her to let it grow out a bit more, get it to look ‘a little more relaxed, more natural’.
But then nothing about Cress was relaxed or natural – why should her hair be any different? She was a mini dynamo, a five-foot-two vortex of energy – running between deadlines and flight schedules and spinning classes and bedtime stories. That hair had to toe the line.
Cress raised her face to the sky and shielded her eyes. ‘But yuh. I guess you could say work’s going . . . well.’
Something in her voice caught Tor’s attention. Tor looked back at her friend. Wearing giant shades and a tiny green towelling beach dress that showed off a figure few thirty-three-year-old mothers of four could boast without drastic plastic surgery, Cress was brushing the grass casually in a bucolic manner. She looked uncharacteristically relaxed.
Tor was instantly suspicious. ‘Cress, what is it?’
‘Hmm?’
‘You’re trying to tell me something.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Yes, you are.’ Tor looked at her, suspiciously.
There was a long pause. ‘You want me to beat it out of you.’
Cress giggled. ‘I do not.’ She began humming lightly. Tor’s flecked hazel eyes narrowed further. The women’s friendship spanned fifteen years – formed over a mutual ex who had two-timed them at Bristol University – and there was precious little they didn’t know about each other. She sank back into her chair, then suddenly gasped and clapped her hand over her mouth.
‘Oh my God – you’re having an affair!’
‘Sssssht! Tell the neighbours, why don’t you!’ Cress looked annoyed. ‘Actually, no. I’m not having an affair – and I’m shocked that you think I would.’
‘Then good God, woman – what is it?’
‘I’m considering having an affair.’
‘No!’
‘Yes.’
‘No! Who with?’
‘With whom,’ Cress corrected. ‘With Harry Hunter.’
‘Nooo!’
‘Yes.’
‘Nooo!’
‘No, you’re right. I’m not really.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ Tor, deflated, sank back into the chair and absent-mindedly took another sip of the rancid lemonade. Dammit.
‘But he is completely delicious, isn’t he?’ Cress asked rhetorically. ‘And who could blame me, now that I’ll be working so closely with him. I mean, I do think Mark would actually understa—’
‘What?’ Tor shrieked. ‘What do you mean, working so closely?’
‘Well, he’s signing with me on Monday – that’s what all the travelling’s been about.’ She smiled impishly and threw her arms around herself in a hug. ‘Oh yes. That man is mine, all mine. I’m pinning him down to a five-book deal. Plus backlist.’
Tor couldn’t take it in. Harry Hunter? She couldn’t believe she was only one degree removed from him. Oh please, please, let her meet him. Harry Hunter’s face was more familiar to her these days than her own husband’s. But then, Hugh was never anywhere to be seen and Harry Hunter was everywhere you looked – bearing down from bus billboards, beaming out from the society pages, falling out of nightclubs in the gossip columns, and flirting up a storm on the telly chat-show circuit.
You’d have had to be living in Neverland not to know who Harry Hunter was. He was the publishing world’s latest sensation, his books selling by the millions, topping best-seller lists simultaneously all round the world. He’d been translated into thirty-eight different languages and now Hollywood was adapting the books into blockbusters.
His breakthrough book, Scion, had been a sleeper hit which had swept the nation, and then the rest of the world, only five years ago. He’d quickly followed it up with The Snow Leopard and The Ruby Route, which were critically mauled but still sold in their millions because of his name. But it wasn’t so much his sales as his torrid, tempestuous nine-month marriage to Lila Briggs – the chart-topping, multi-platinum-selling, stadium-filling singer – which was played out through the tabloids, that ensured that the former housemaster’s name had stayed in the headlines ever since. Six foot three, with a curly mop of buttery blond hair, flashing green eyes and rugby-muscled shoulders, he was now a rampant lady-killer, rarely seen without his signature cashmere tweed jacket on his back and some society darling on his arm.
‘God, I’d leave Hugh in an instant if Harry Hunter even so much as looked my way.’ She stretched dreamily at the thought and Cress enviously noted her muscle tone. Tor had danced her way through her teens and twenties, and although at fifteen and five foot eight she had recognized that she was too tall and not quite good enough to make the corps in a professional dance company, her recompense was an easily toned, low-maintenance figure that made Cress – who fasted for one day every week – want to weep.
In fact, much about Tor’s effortless elegance made Cress well up with envy. Her unbleached, rich caramel hair – blonde around her face – that fell in sheets to her shoulder blades; her distinctive almond-shaped hazel eyes that didn’t need mascara; and those faint freckles – which opened up in the sun like daisies – covering her cheeks and nose, which kept her forever looking no older than twelve.
‘Well, I’m glad you feel that way because, to celebrate, I’m throwing a welcome party for him next week, and you’re invited – naturally.’
Tor’s jaw dropped.
‘No!’ She was struck by panic and took all her wishes back. ‘There’s no way I can party with Harry Hunter. I mean, you know I’ll get drunk after half a glass and start to stutter and suffer stress incontinence . . .’ Her voice trailed off as she clocked Cress’s bemusement. ‘Well, what’s the dress code? You know I’ve got nothing to wear.’
‘Cocktail,’ Cress said, crunching h
ard on a clutch of ice. ‘And I know precisely the opposite.’ Pre-babies, Tor had slowly but surely scaled the heights of fashion retail. It hadn’t been a meteoric rise, owing to a sensational lack of ambition, but the design houses’ sales teams admired her easy chic and instinctive eye. She could put together a rail that even they hadn’t considered, and more often than not she left them with more tips for the forthcoming season than the other way round. She was always invited to the first round of buying appointments, sat in the front row at the shows, and by the time she fell pregnant with Marney she was chief buyer at Browns in South Molton Street. It was a nomadic life, though, regularly flying to Milan, Paris, New York and Los Angeles, and not one she’d wanted to continue once the children were born. She wanted to be a hands-on, stay-at-home mother, and although she increasingly found herself drawn to interior design these days, she still had a wardrobe of eveningwear that Cress lusted after like a little sister.
‘Well, I’ll still need something new. This is no time for hand-me-downs,’ Tor muttered, trying to work out how much weight she could shed in a week and whether she’d be able to get Fabien for a blow-dry at such short notice. Did Hugh have anything in his diary?
Talking of which, how had they left it for Kate and Monty’s tonight? Was he going straight from the office? She tried his mobile but it was switched off.
Tor checked her watch and started gathering the children’s beakers, swim nappies and discarded clothes.
‘Millie, Marney, Oscar,’ she called to her waddling, toddling brood. ‘Over here, please. Let’s get you dressed.’
The sun had plopped from the sky now and her legs goose-bumped in the dusk. She shivered and shrugged on her pale grey cashmere jumper (M&S, machine washable, but with the label cut out, who knew?). There were only two hours till dinner at Kate’s, and with three kids under five and still bath and bedtime to get through, it was a tight schedule. Time to get a shift on.
Cress waved and smiled cheerily as Tor reversed out of the drive. She closed the front door slowly and leant against it, deliberating whether to make the phone call, or go and bath the children. She could hear their shrieks and splashes three floors away – God only knew the amount of water there must be on the floor.