by Karen Swan
For Vic and Lynne,
who also understand the joy
of a good cup of tea
Contents
Prologue
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
Acknowledgements
Prima DONNA
Christmas at TIFFANY’S
The Perfect PRESENT
Christmas at CLARIDGE’S
The SUMMER WITHOUT YOU
Christmas THE SNOW
Summer at TIFFANY’S
Prologue
November, three years earlier
The note lay on the table in a sunspot, dust motes spinning in the air above like dancing sprites. All around it was silence. A coffee cup to the side was half full, but a skin had formed across the top and it sat, now, below the tideline inside. The chair stood at an odd angle, the newspaper smooth and unread, fruit quietly over-ripening in the fruit bowl.
She had stood in the doorway, staring at it like a set piece in a Dutch painting – that was what she would always remember of that moment as her instincts absorbed the narrative laid out before her.
It had taken several moments to move from the spot and intrude into the scene, to become a player on the stage. But her feet had done their job, and her eyes, on the note, did theirs.
And that was how it had begun.
Chapter One
December, present day
‘I am a giant blue bunny. A blue freaking bunny. Of course I am. Of course I am,’ Nettie muttered, her voice muffled beneath the outsized plush-furred rabbit’s head, one long ear dangling down and obscuring her already compromised vision.
‘On the plus side, your bum looks cute,’ Jules grinned, flicking at her white pom-pom tail.
‘Yeah?’ Nettie twisted, trying to catch a glimpse of her large moulded rear end in the mirror, but her ear kept getting in the way.
‘Yeah.’ Jules grinned devilishly. ‘All the better for Alex to grab next time you get back to—’
‘There won’t be a next time,’ Nettie said furiously, turning on the spot and stamping her foot – well, paw – on the ground. ‘Not this time. We are over. Completely over . . . What?’
Jules had collapsed against the wall like she’d been thrown against it. ‘Do that again.’
‘Do what?’
‘Stamp your foot.’
‘You mean like this?’ Nettie stomped her foot on the ground again.
Jules cackled with laughter. ‘My childhood just flashed before my eyes! You know you’re just like Thumper when you do that?’
‘Oh, well, as long as you’re amused by all this . . .’ She tried swatting the ear back with her paw. ‘You get to look gorgeous, while I have to endure the ritual humiliation of wearing this thing.’
‘Aw, it doesn’t matter – no one will know it’s you in there,’ Jules said, trying to stifle her giggles as she too tried to manipulate the ear into staying back. ‘Besides, it’s all for a good cause.’
‘But I still don’t get why I have to be a giant blue bunny! It’s not like it’s a toddlers’ tea party out there. Who’s going to want to give money to me? Look at you. You look cool dressed like that. They’ll all wait for you to go round with the bucket.’ Nettie looked on enviously at Jules’s sexified, micro Swiss traditional dress costume, her breasts in the scooped blouse offered up like peaches on a plate. She’d look good in it too, she knew, given half the chance. OK, maybe not as good as her glamorous colleagues – she didn’t have legs up to the ceiling or a washboard tummy, for starters – but her gentle curves and almond eyes (both in shape and colour), and crowning glory, a sleek hazelnut mane that was both swishy and shiny, deserved better than to be mummified in this monstrous get-up.
‘Yeah, maybe, but it was a closing-down sale and there were only three of these costumes left.’ Jules nodded in agreement, tugging her top down a little lower. ‘The only other thing they had was a giant banana, apparently. I think Mike figured he’d done you a favour.’
‘He’d be doing me a favour if he could point out to me where exactly in my job description it says anything about dressing up in costumes? We are professionals, for heaven’s sake.’
Jules shrugged helplessly. ‘Well, look on the bright side – at least you get to be warm in that thing. It’s flipping freezing out here.’
‘I’ll happily swap,’ Nettie said quickly.
‘Nah, you’re all right.’ Jules winked, her light brown eyes dancing with mischief. ‘I rather like the look of that Canadian racer – what’s his name?’
‘Cameron Stanley?’
‘Yeah, him. I reckon this might help my cause.’ She fiddled some more with her neckline and tucked stray wisps of her hair back into her short, stubby plaits; her dark, curly hair fell to just below her jawline and they had had a devil of a job weaving it back. ‘Do you reckon he’s got a girlfriend?’
‘No idea,’ Nettie muttered, glowering that she’d have no chance of pulling in this outfit. Not that she’d want to go out with any of the guys here. They were mad, the lot of them. Certifiable, in fact. Why else would anyone willingly throw themselves down a steep and winding ice track on skates?
On the other side of the screens where they were standing, the lights strobed red, pink, blue and green, the roars of the crowd getting louder as the DJ whipped them into a frenzy. It was more like a rock concert than a sporting event, although the sponsors (and her marketing agency’s star clients), White Tiger, had carved a niche for themselves supporting the hard-core, extreme sports that were practically uninsurable, attracting a radical, die-hard crowd, and this annual event had become the fans’ favourite fixture.
And here she was, in the thick of it, dressed as a giant blue bunny. Nettie picked up her collection bucket. The first heats were completed and they would be ready at any moment for the second round to begin; then they could go round collecting money for Tested, the testicular cancer charity currently benefiting from White Tiger’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) beneficence.
‘Honestly, why are they taking so long?’ Jules tutted, peering round the White Tiger sponsor’s board to the racetrack, warming her bare arms with her hands. ‘I’ll die of exposure if they carry on like this.’
Nettie came up behind her and wrapped her furry arms around her friend – at five foot three, she was usually three inches shorter than Jules, but was currently two feet taller thanks to her giant head. ‘Don’t say I never do anything for you.’
‘Ah, that’s so nice,’ Jules sighed as she watched a couple of the engineers talking in a huddle at the top of the ramp. They were wearing pensive expressions and talking intermittently into their headsets, occasionally rattling at the starting gates beside them. ‘Hmm, that doesn’t look good.’
But Nettie’s attention was elsewhere. She wasn’t great with heights, and the ice-skinned course, built upo
n specially adapted scaffold towers, rose sixty metres above ground level. Narrow spectator aisles flanked the run on either side, and Nettie could see the long-haired, goateed supporters beginning to get restless, their gloved hands starting to pound the boards. Most of them looked just like the gnarly guys all padded up behind the gates, helmets and skates on and ready to go, punching their hands into their fists as they kept their adrenalin and aggression levels up. Ice cross downhill racing wasn’t a sport for the faint-hearted – in fact, it made ice hockey, famous for its punch-ups, look positively limp by comparison – and the title given to this event was apt: Ice Crush. So far there had already been one broken wrist and a dislocated shoulder, and there were still six rounds to go.
One of the engineers walked in their direction; from the expression on his face, he was being bollocked in his earpiece.
‘Hey,’ Jules said to him as he walked past. ‘What’s going on?’
The guy, clocking Jules in her provocative costume, seemed happy to stop, pushing the microphone of his headset away from his mouth. ‘Technical difficulties. The gate mechanism’s jammed.’
Jules pulled a cross-eyes face. ‘Urgh, but I’m frozen. The sooner I can get out there with this bucket, the sooner I can get back into some proper clothes.’
The engineer didn’t look particularly incentivized to make that happen.
Nettie looked across at the competitors trying to keep warm and psyched behind the gates. ‘How long till you fix it? They look more like they’re going to pick a fight than have a race.’
‘Could be hours. We need to get to the circuit board underneath, but some daft idiot’s built the ramps over the access hatch. If we can’t find another access point, we’ll have to cancel.’
‘Oh great,’ Nettie groaned. ‘We came all the way to Lausanne for nothing.’
‘Not nothing. Wait till we hit the bars later.’ Jules grinned, burrowing back into the rabbit fur to keep warm.
‘Mike’s going to be on the warpath if we go back with just this for the pot.’ Nettie shook the yellow bucket despondently and a few coins rattled.
‘Well, it was a rubbish idea anyway,’ Jules said. ‘I keep telling him nobody collects donations by shaking a bucket anymore – well, except the Foreign Legion and the Salvation Army. If he wanted us to do this, we might just as well have gone and stood outside Tesco.’
Nettie looked back at the engineer. ‘Is there really nothing you can do? Because if not, I’m taking this stupid costume off. It stinks and it weighs a ton.’
The guy shrugged. ‘Well, there’s no race if the riders can’t even get out of the gates.’
‘Why can’t they just stand in front of the gates?’ Jules asked.
‘The gates are too low when they’re behind them, meaning they’d be on the back foot. The riders need to start with their weight low but forward, on the front foot, to get the explosive power they need to blitz the course.’
‘Oh.’
Nettie would have thought a seventy-degree slope and blade-encased feet were more than enough to get blitzing. ‘So then why don’t you get people to stand in front of each gate and the riders can hold on to them? That way, they’ll be able to put their weight forward.’
‘It’s a bit . . . crap.’ He frowned.
Nettie shrugged. ‘Well, they did it for the snowboarders at the Winter Olympics.’
‘Yeah, I guess . . . I guess that’s a thought.’ The engineer frowned, holding up a finger to listen to his boss on the one hand, while considering Nettie’s proposal on the other. He spoke quickly into his headset.
‘We should go out there and do it,’ Jules hissed.
‘What?’
‘Yeah. It’d be great exposure. Everyone would see us up there before we go into the crowds.’
‘It’d be great exposure all right – everyone would be looking straight up your skirt!’ Nettie laughed.
The engineer overheard and looked back at Jules again. ‘How many others are there like you?’ he asked her, a quick – appreciative – flick of his eyes indicating her costume.
‘Two more dressed like me,’ Jules said. ‘And then our big bunny here.’
‘Yeah, four . . .’ the engineer said into the headset again. ‘It’s about the only option we’ve got . . . I know,’ he murmured. He looked back at the girls and a few moments later gave them a thumbs-up. ‘OK, then. Get the others over here.’
‘Yo! Daisy! Caro! We’re up!’ Jules yelled.
Daisy – six feet tall with legs that came up to Nettie’s armpits and blonde hair as soft as swansdown – sauntered round the corner looking like Heidi Klum playing Heidi. Caro, a skinny strawberry blonde with freckles and a serious gum addiction, followed after her.
‘Time to head into the fray, is it?’ Daisy asked wearily, pocketing her phone inside her dress. ‘About time. I’ve got plans after this. My second ever boyfriend’s best friend lives here now and we’re meant to be meeting up after.’
‘Yeah, well, there’s been a technical hitch, so we’re helping out,’ Jules said as the engineer told them all to follow him.
‘Uh, sorry, what’s going on?’ Caro asked as they lined up at the side, along the top of the track.
‘Pick your rider, girls. We’re gonna get to hold their hands,’ Jules winked. ‘But I’m taking number three. Cam Stan is gonna be my man,’ she laughed, trotting off friskily towards the snowy ledge.
‘What’s she talking about?’ Daisy demanded, squinting to see past the bunny’s eyes and decipher who was inside. ‘Nettie?’
‘Yeah, it’s me,’ Nettie sighed. ‘And we’ve got to stand in front of the gates so the riders can hold on to us. The gates are jammed.’
‘Oh great!’ Caro tutted, chewing exaggeratedly on her gum so that her jaw looked like it was on springs.
The crowd erupted as the girls filed out – their tanned legs, plattered bosoms and kinky plaits highlighted in the spotlights, buckets still over their arms as they waved to the crowds below them. Gingerly, being the most cumbersome of them all with an eighty-inch waist, Nettie followed slowly along the ledge that topped the ice ramp and a ripple of laughter accompanied her entrance, as though she was deliberately intended as a joke. The riders – having been told of the solution – were already clambering over the gates, seemingly unencumbered by their bulky padding and very obviously anxious to get going.
‘Hi,’ Nettie smiled at her rider in lane four, an Austrian called Juls Frinkenberg, who had once been in the world top three.
‘Oh really? I get the bunny?’ he said irritably, stepping out of the way while she wedged herself past him to squeeze into the space in front of the gate.
‘That’s exactly what I said,’ she replied, grabbing hold of the gate with one paw and holding out her other arm for him. She swallowed at the sight of the near-vertical ice drop, just a metre in front of them. How could this guy be so desperate to go down it? Every instinct in her body was telling her to get the hell back.
‘Link arms!’ the engineer shouted across to them all. Nettie saw Jules giggling as she proffered her arm to Cameron Stanley like it was the prelude to a seduction. Cameron seemed more than happy to link up with her, and nowhere near as keen as Juls to hurl himself down the slope, not when he had his very own milkmaid standing at the top.
Juls linked his arm round hers just as Nettie noticed that the bucket was still swinging from it.
‘Oh—’ she said, going to remove her arm, but the first of the three race bells sounded suddenly and everyone went still, the riders crouched low in their starting positions like wolves ready to hunt. Nettie bit her lip – sod the bucket – and tried to tighten her hold on the gate, but it was hard to get a good grip with her padded paws and she could feel Juls straining away from her, pulling her outwards too.
The second bell blared and she felt herself begin to tremble from the strain of trying to counterbalance against Juls’s weight as her paws failed to grip.
‘Oh . . . oh . . .’ she wailed, panickin
g as the seconds dragged like weeks. She couldn’t hold on; she was going to drop him . . . Oh God, she was going to drop this rider down the ramp . . .
The third bell sounded and like a rope snapping he was gone. Just like that, to a whip-crack of cheers, the tension was released and she staggered backwards into the gate, her ear falling in front of her eyes again so that she couldn’t see, only hear the riders race away, the crowd’s accompanying roar following them like a Mexican wave, down and away from her.
Relief arrowed through her – she had felt fear, real fear, in those few moments when she’d thought he might pull her over with him. ‘Close one!’ she muttered as she straightened herself up, the long, wide, padded paws of her feet slippy on the ice. Wasn’t there a scene in Bambi in which Thumper went flying along a frozen pond? she wondered as she turned to get the hell off this ledge and back to the safety of the race meet area.
But the bucket . . . she’d forgotten about it as she scrabbled against Juls’s weight, and only as it slid off her thick, furred arm and rolled onto the ice with a thud did she remember it again.
‘Oh! Shit!’ she said, scrambling down to pick it up before it too headed down the ramp. If that hit a corner and went flying into the crowd, there could be an injuries lawsuit before she got this costume off. She didn’t think, though, to calculate for the greater weight of the rabbit’s head, and as she leaned forward, her paw just grasping the bucket’s handle, she felt herself begin to tip. The ice drop stretched out in front of her, vertigo-style, and she over-corrected, lurching up to standing again, but her paws slipped, and as she moved her front foot wider, trying to plant herself solid, she stepped over the lip of the ledge and immediately began to slide down the ice sheet.
‘Nets?’
Jules’s voice was immediately far away and becoming smaller, the crowd speeding towards her as she rushed down the first drop, too shocked, too terrified even to breathe, much less to scream. The crowd were doing it for her anyway – screaming and laughing and cheering as she sped past them, arms outstretched, ears flying behind, her wide, flat paws steady but speedy on the ice. What . . . ? No . . . No . . . No . . . She’d never experienced speed like this before, never anticipated what it does to your body when fear activates the survival instinct. She couldn’t breathe; she couldn’t draw in a breath to let out a scream. Instead, her body froze as she sped down the ice – immobile and yet more mobile than she’d ever been.