Oh, God. Thanks for reminding me.
‘Still stands,’ I said. ‘What kind of car do you have? So I can keep an eye out.’
‘An old one,’ he replied, with a faint smile. ‘But it should get us there and back.’
As I was leaving, Miss Flaky called to me, ‘I meant it, you know. You tell him!’
I had absolutely no intention at all of doing so until I got to Big Man’s flat. And then I thought – why not?
There was a paper napkin wrapped around the cup to make it cooler for me to hold. I put down the cup and plastic bag full of sugar sachets, removed the napkin and retrieved a pen from my bag.
I wrote that I wouldn’t be at the café Saturday morning (no need to evoke a sneer by telling him I’d be at a flash garden party), so the next coffee delivery would be Monday. And then I wrote down Miss Flaky’s promise – or threat, I suppose – word for word.
I slid the napkin under the door, knocked once, loudly, and walked away as fast as I could without actually breaking into a run.
I was in a lather. It was a quarter past ten and there was no sign of Marcus or Claude. I’d been ready since nine, worried that I wouldn’t look as good in the dress as I’d hoped. That I would, in fact, look like a fat dufus. But the dress was still pretty, the shoes fitted and I’d found a very nice costume art deco hair-clip for fifty pence at Camden Passage. I wasn’t at all sure I would pass muster in Claude’s mother’s eyes, but it was too late to change anything now. The weather wasn’t helping. For the past fortnight, it had been grey, chilly and murky. But this morning, the sky was crisply blue and there was a shimmer in the air that portended real heat. My satin dress was already feeling clingy and heavy. I could only be grateful it didn’t have sleeves. Ambrose’s tennis dress, knees or not, suddenly seemed like a much better idea.
Thank God! There was the knock.
I opened the door, smiling and expectant, to find only Claude. He was wearing a navy blazer, worn over white wide-legged, square-cuffed trousers and a white shirt, collar open. He would have looked very handsome had his face not been tight with irritation.
‘I am so sorry we are late,’ he said. Then he blinked. ‘Goodness. What a lovely dress.’
I would have been flattered if I’d not been so distracted by the lack of Marcus. But then I caught a whiff of nicotine, and he stepped into view. He was wearing what appeared to be cricket gear – how had I known? – a striped red and white blazer over trousers and shirt not dissimilar to Claude’s. I was overwhelmed both by relief and by how astonishingly attractive he was. It was one thing to talk to him over the phone, quite another to have him here in the flesh. I had forgotten just what an impact he made on me. It was knee weakening.
He wasn’t paying the same attention to me, however, being busy sucking the last out of a cigarette, which he then dropped onto the footpath and ground under his heel.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ he smirked as he approached. ‘Can’t smoke in Claudie’s car–’ His eyes widened as he caught his first proper look of me. ‘Good Lord!’
‘Is that a good good Lord?’ I asked, nervous. ‘Looking at you two, I’m afraid I’m a bit over the top.’
Marcus stepped up to me. He surveyed me slowly, down and up, and met my still anxious gaze. The light in his brown eyes was somewhere between amused and triumphant. I felt a second surge of relief. He liked what he saw.
‘Glorious dress,’ he murmured.
He placed his hands on my waist, causing me to shiver. He bent his head and kissed me lightly on the mouth. Then he kissed my jaw, my cheek and, with his lips against my ear, whispered, ‘And I intend to have you out of it at the first available opportunity.’
Behind us, Claude coughed meaningfully. ‘Marcus, we are already running late. Let’s not compound the situation.’
Marcus rolled his eyes, as if we were teenagers being reprimanded by a parent.
‘Do you have everything you need? Purse? Lipstick? AA card?’
‘The car is in perfect order,’ said Claude, irritated. ‘And as long as you are prevented from driving it, it should remain so. Shut that door and come along.’
When Claude had said he had an old car, I’d immediately formed a picture of the banjaxed Austin Princess parked in my street. Claude’s car was as much like an Austin Princess as I was like Princess Diana.
‘Is that a Jaguar Mark IX?’ I asked, in surprise. ‘How lovely!’
‘God,’ Marcus grimaced. ‘Please tell me you’re not a car enthusiast?’
‘My father had a Mark II,’ I explained. ‘He thought it was the epitome of English taste, until someone pointed out that it had been the getaway car of choice for bank robbers in the nineteen sixties. He sold it straight away, to my everlasting regret.’
Claude had the passenger door open for me. ‘This car was our father’s also. It seemed a waste to let it go.’
Marcus had slid into the back seat. ‘You haemorrhage money on this damn thing, Claude. It’s more of a waste to hang on to it.’
Claude ignored him, started up and pulled away from the curb. I’d adored my father’s Mark II, hence my interest in the breed. Dad’s car had been winter white with a red leather and walnut interior. It looked and smelled, I always imagined, like an exclusive London’s gentleman’s club. Claude’s Jaguar was green, with moss green leather upholstery and acres of walnut.
‘Does it have the fold-down picnic tables in the back?’ I murmured to Claude.
He laughed. ‘Two. Twin veneered.’
‘God, how wonderful.’
Marcus muttered something I didn’t catch. I looked over my shoulder at him. He had his phone out, and was checking the screen.
‘I thought everyone had a flash car where you live?’ I said.
‘Almost everyone has a garden with a palm tree, too,’ he replied, without looking up. ‘I don’t think much of those, either.’
Something he was reading made him smile. ‘Gus says she’ll be late,’ he said to Claude. ‘But we’re to start being obnoxious and disreputable without her.’
‘I thought she had declined?’
‘Mother exerted eleventh-hour pressure on her, apparently,’ said Marcus. ‘Probably threatened to slash her wrists or something …’
‘I hardly think–’ Claude was irritated.
‘Don’t blow a valve. I’m kidding. But you have to admit, she does rather put the “ma” into “drama”.’
Their mother was definitely sounding more Peke than pony. I wasn’t sure if that were better or worse. Less risk of coming after me with a riding crop, I supposed.
My neck was starting to hurt. I’d been craning it around the whole time, watching Marcus. Which was proving not only painful but also somewhat embarrassingly pointless, as he seemed to have eyes only for his phone.
And now said phone rang, causing Claude to direct a dark look into the rear-view mirror and tut in disapproval.
‘Must he?’
‘Allo–’
Marcus began to speak rapidly and fluently in what I assumed was French. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but all the same, I was. It was a sharp and not exactly pleasant reminder of the distance between our lives.
I glanced at Claude. If Marcus was that fluent, I assumed he must be, too. He wasn’t reacting to anything Marcus said, so I guessed it was all pretty banal. Not that it had anything to do with me. Marcus would do whatever he pleased, and I could accept that or not. That was my choice.
Marcus ended the call, and blew out a breath. ‘Why do other people make everything more complicated than it needs to be?’ he said to neither of us in particular.
‘Would it be too much to ask for you to allow us to drive in peace?’ said Claude.
‘Fine,’ snapped Marcus. And he shoved the phone into his jacket pocket, slumped back in the seat and proceeded to stare out the window.
We drove if not in peace, exactly, then at least silence. Claude exited the motorway after about forty-five minutes, and I was on my first trip in
to the English countryside. On this clear blue day, it glowed like the real version of the Constable prints my parents insisted on hanging on their walls. They would never buy original art; it was far too threatening. Prints came preapproved as safe and tasteful, like the Concise Oxford English Dictionary and Axminster carpets.
The villages we passed through suggested we were among wealth. Not gaudy wealth – no high-gated mock-pillared mansions and flashy cars. The people here were comfortably, a little smugly, well off. Even in this rural area, everything was clean and neat. There didn’t appear to be a real farm in sight. I got quite excited when I saw an actual cow.
‘Welcome to our little slice of the Home Counties,’ said Claude, ‘about which the best thing you can say is that it’s not Cheshire.’
‘Is this where you grew up?’ I asked him.
‘Heaven forbid. The family seat was in Wiltshire.’
‘It still is, of course.’ Marcus had decided to rejoin us. ‘It’s just minus the family.’
I glanced back at him. ‘Do you miss it?’
Marcus stared at Claude’s profile. ‘What do you think, brother dear? Do we miss it?’
But all Claude said was, ‘Here we are.’
And as he slowed, and turned down a long gravel driveway, panic made me forget I’d ever asked the question.
By golly. If this was a trade-down from the family seat, I was even more out of my league than I had previously feared.
The house wasn’t that large compared to, say, the whole of Liechtenstein. My parents’ house was about the size of the garage. That is to say, the garage right at the end of the string of garages. Or were they stables? All my years of Nancy and Tatler had prepared me not a jot for the real thing. Claude and Marcus had no reaction at all, and I realised this was everyday for them. But I could not imagine a life for me in which this would ever be the norm.
The vast circular area that marked the end of the driveway was already chock-full of cars.
‘Christ,’ said Marcus. ‘How many thousands of people has she invited?’
Claude parked on the grass. ‘I’ll take the consequences,’ he sighed.
It was Claude who opened my door for me. Marcus had his phone out again, and was checking messages. I saw him frown briefly, but when he looked up and saw me, he smiled, and came to take my arm.
‘If there is another woman here today to rival you,’ he said, ‘I will eat Claude’s blazer.’
‘You will not,’ said Claude. ‘I borrowed it. And it’s a jacket. Blazer is common, as you well know.’
My heart gave a small clutch of dread. I didn’t know that one. What other class faux pas was I likely to unknowingly commit?
‘Why the hell,’ muttered Marcus, as we crunched our way across the gravel to the house, ‘did she insist upon this ridiculous dress-up nonsense, anyway? Why couldn’t she have a common or garden party like everyone else?’
‘She told me it was because the majority of the people she knows dress in clothes that have been rejected even by Oxfam. She hoped that, this way, they might turn up in something if not less old, then at least with fewer holes. That was her reason,’ Claude replied. ‘Personally, I think she’s done it purely because it amuses her.’ He gave Marcus a sideways glance. ‘In that regard, you and she are very similar.’
Marcus looked furious. ‘I’m not related to the woman. We have nothing in common whatsoever.’
The front door of the house was open. At least, I assumed it was the front door – hard to imagine there’d be a bigger door somewhere else. Inside, I had the impression of vast ceilings, primrose and cream and apricot walls, dark wood floorboards and a double staircase that swept upwards from two sides of the lobby and met at the floor above.
Claude led us along a hallway and through a series of airy rooms and into one last, spacious one. Two sets of French doors along the back wall were wide open and as we stepped through onto the paved area outside, I almost gasped. The view was breathtaking. Standing on what I wanted to call the patio but suspected I shouldn’t, we looked down a series of broad stone steps that emerged onto a vast sloping lawn that in its turn ended at the bank of a narrow, curving, willow-edged river. To either side of us were the gardens proper. The magnolias stood tall above box-bordered flowerbeds, and I could see why Marcus and Claude’s mother wanted to show them off. They were luminous, in shades of pink, purple and white. There was a pergola to our far left, smothered in clematis and wisteria. Through it, I glimpsed what looked like a swimming pool. The thought of cool water was extraordinarily enticing. I’d have to find an excuse to take a walk over there.
I’d been so struck by the view that I’d failed to really register how many people were standing around. And how well they were dressed. And how posh they sounded. They yocked and haw-hawed all around me. I began to shrink inside.
Marcus’ voice made me jump. ‘Brace yourself. Claude has foolishly attracted the attention of our mother.’
‘Well, it is her party,’ I said.
‘No excuse.’
‘My dears!’
The woman who walked towards us was neither horsey nor Pekey, and she looked, I swear, no older than Claude. She had dark red hair and beautiful pale skin, faintly specked with freckles like brown sugar dusted on cream. She was wearing a green dress with enormous puffed sleeves, not unlike the one Ambrose had discarded as an abomination. But on her, it looked sensational. She had a superb figure, all high breasts and great legs. She could have worn a sack and looked terrific.
She kissed Claude, who kissed her back, and Marcus, who did not, and fixed me with a gimlet eye.
‘That’s a very lovely dress,’ she pronounced.
I felt, somehow, her tone held a note of censure. Should I have worn something less lovely?
I heard Claude give a small, prompting cough. ‘Marcus–’
‘Yes, yes!’ Marcus said. ‘Mother, this is Darrell. Darrell, this is my mother.’
‘She can hardly call me that, can she?’ Marcus’ mother held out a hand. I took it and squeezed it gingerly. Her own grip was firm. ‘Anne,’ she said.
I just – just – managed to stop myself saying, ‘Pleased to meet you.’ Instead I said, ‘Your magnolias are magnificent.’ Inwardly, I cringed, but it was better than ‘Pleased to meet you.’
Her eyes flickered briefly in the direction of the trees. ‘Yes, I know. Felix and Elizabeth are in particularly good form at the moment.’
Had she given her trees names? Or were they actual varieties of magnolia? I didn’t dare ask.
‘There’s Gus!’ Marcus sounded pleased.
‘So I see.’ Marcus’ mother did not. ‘Dear God, what has she brought with her?’
Stepping through the French doors were two women. One was tall and willowy, with short, gamine-cut dark hair. She was extremely beautiful in a slightly mannish way, reminding me of the supermodel Erin O’Connor. She was wearing a boy’s school uniform, which only just fitted her: grey shorts, a grey and yellow striped blazer and a matching Billy Bunter cap. Under the blazer, she appeared to have nothing on at all.
The second woman reminded me of someone, too, but I couldn’t put my finger on who. She was shorter and more athletic-looking than her companion. On her lower half was a pair of plaid plus fours that managed to look sexy rather than ridiculous. On her upper half was a tight-fitting Argyle-patterned vest. She wore no bra. Her dark hair was so close-cropped as to be almost shaved, and she had a barbed wire bracelet tattooed on her upper arm. She had sultry kohl-rimmed eyes and bright red lipstick on full, pouty lips.
Both women were utterly gorgeous, effortlessly glamorous – and stratospherically more sophisticated than I was. As they approached, I was filled with a sort of crawling dread. It was as if I’d been flung right back to the third form, to one of those moments when I’d come around the corner and bumped smack into the mean girls. Like evil robots, their eyes would scan me up and down, registering every chubby inch, oozing fear and lack of cool. And that was all they n
eeded to do to inflict maximum damage. They might then decide also to dead-arm me for fun, but that didn’t matter – they had already stripped me bare of any delusion that I was anything but a tragic spaz.
Fairly obviously, I was no longer thirteen. But while I knew now that I was pretty enough, I also knew I wasn’t more than that. I lacked that refinement, that sheen of true class and beauty. Marcus had it, and so did his mother. Claude almost had it; what he lacked was the sexual spark that gave energy to physical beauty. His sister and her friend also had it. In spades.
Oh well. I could hardly run for the hills. I wondered which one was Gus. I rather assumed, from Marcus’ mother’s comment, that it was not the one with the tattoo.
Never assume. As Adam always said: It makes an ass out of you and umption.
The tattooed one spied Marcus, broke into the broadest grin and came running over to throw her arms around him. She kissed him soundly and a little too fully on the lips for my personal comfort. But then, they weren’t blood brother and sister. If that made it any better …
She broke away and beamed up at Claude. ‘Don’t panic,’ she said. ‘I know you hate it when I do that. Here–’ She pecked him lightly on the cheek, and then beamed at both of them. ‘How are you, my darlings?’
‘Top hole,’ replied Marcus. ‘Or is that an expression better reserved for your kind?’
‘Retard,’ said Gus, with affection. Then her smile vanished. ‘Hello, Mother,’ she said.
‘I was wondering when you’d notice,’ said her mother mildly, tilting her head to receive a desultory kiss on the cheek. ‘You look well. Unfettered as usual.’
The willowy blazer-wearer wandered up, a glass of champagne in her hand.
‘Where did you get that?’ demanded Gus.
The blazer-wearer blinked and then turned vaguely around, as if the source of champagne had been right behind her only a minute ago.
Marcus’ mother made a brisk exasperated noise and snapped her fingers. A waiter appeared like magic. The blazer-wearer picked up a second glass with her free hand.
The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid Page 21