He watched as Carol visibly buffered, like a YouTube video failing to load, and he took a large swig of his water, before throwing Lizzy a wry smile which he was pleased to note she returned.
“You know, Matthew, I find your attitude a bit presumptuous,” Lizzy said, the words bitter like lemon. “I’m fairly certain that Benn would made it with or without you, to be fair.”
“There is always some truth in everything,” Benn tried to placate everyone on all sides.
“Although it’s not like Matthew found you cleaning out the whippet cage, is it?” Lizzy smirked, looking pointedly at the man himself, who was glaring at her.
“Well no, but…”
“I mean, you did go to Cambridge, after all. You were in the Footlights with Tom O’Mara, for crying out loud.”
Benn sensed the tension between Lizzy and Matthew, wasn’t sure what was happening or even if he wanted to get involved. She was sparking with anger, he could see it written across her body as she postured herself in hard angles.
“Cambridge? An old boy like myself,” Hugh, desperately wanting the night to end, poured himself another glass of wine, tried to prevent an awkward silence. “Oh yes, I remember Lizzy telling me earlier.”
Benn’s attention turned towards Lizzy and she swallowed hard. After their last encounter she had pulled up his page on Wikipedia, read how he had graduated from Trinity, played Rugby, been an active member of the Footlights, and dated a society It Girl for three years before there was an awkward break-up just after graduation. He had moved to London and won a post-grad place at RADA, where he met Madeleine Tennant. And the rest? Well, that was tabloid gold.
“Lady Elizabeth seems to have done her research,” he smiled at her genially, and she found that she smiled back despite herself.
The dinner passed in a haze of laughter and information, Matthew was charming and delightful as usual, and Benn did his best to charm Carol, who was decidedly less snobby now that he had discovered her secret. Hugh asked questions and was polite in the way that he had been brought up to be, being generally affable and polite as he waited for his turn to speak. She noticed a touch of iciness between Hugh and Carol – they were always weirdly distant, her stepmother having all the warmth of an ice pack, but this was more pointed than usual, and she wanted to get her dad alone. It was probably the stress of her sister, whose name alone caused eyes to roll and feathers to ruffle whenever it was mentioned.
Carol and Hugh were the first to leave. She tottered out on heels that were too high, he held her arm like the gentleman he was, and she grasped it tightly, denoting ownership and using him to balance. Benn followed them down in the lift as Carol’s glacial fake laughter shattered against the granite walls. Matthew left next, his attention half drawn for most of the night by a vibrating phone and excuses, followed by whispers on the outskirts of the conversation.
“Are you not taking me home tonight?” She questioned, as he stood to leave.
“No,” there was a dismissive tone in his voice. “I’m not going back that way.”
Lizzy was left at the bar, sipping on a Pellegrino and pondering whether to order an Uber or get the train home, and equal parts fuming and confused at the events of the evening. Pulling her phone out of her bag, she sent Matthew an angry, but passive-aggressive message. It single ticked.
“Pellegrino,” came the voice. “Cleansing. Glad you decided to follow my advice.”
She shoved her keys and her phone into her bag, a vintage looking embroidered clutch that Harriet had made her use – even though it held nothing, designed for the days when women only carried cigarettes and lipstick - and jumped off the stool; the bag fell to the floor and the contents spilled out. He kneeled quickly, placing her belongings back into the bag.
“Do you make a habit of insulting people, or is this specially reserved for me?”
“Just you, I’m afraid,” he handed the bag back to her and she accepted it with a small smile as Benn Williams kneeled at her feet.
“Well, thank you,” she said with more than a dash of sarcasm and a roll of the eyes.
“I wanted to ask you something,” he ordered a water. “Did you get the flowers?”
“Yes,” she said begrudgingly. “I did, thank you, they are very beautiful. But flowers don’t work with me, generally. Matthew sends far too many when he has done something dubious, so I’m fairly immune.”
The massive handtied arrangement of roses, lilies, and hydrangeas had arrived at the office the previous afternoon, causing Deb to raise her eyebrow and Harris to begin sneezing and complaining about his hayfever. He stood next to her, and she shuffled uncomfortably as their arms touched at the busy bar.
“So, what would work with you,” he enquired. “Just out of curiosity.”
Elizabeth was suspicious, this felt as if he was flirting with her, but he wouldn’t be. Maybe she was just terribly out of practice.
“Macarons maybe, or a bottle of fancy gin if you have done something terribly bad…and I mean an expensive batch one in a nice bottle, not Bombay Sapphire.”
“Noted. So, have I done something terribly bad?”
“Aside from being rather rude, not really. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and attribute it to method acting.”
He was silent. She wondered why inside she was daring him to say something, wanting him to challenge her, but he didn’t.
“I wondered when you would say thanks, I thought manners were rectally inserted into posh types like you at Cheltenham Ladies.”
“I’ve been avoiding you because you’re an arsehole,” she said, “even if you do have an assistant with very expensive taste in flowers.” She smiled slightly, “and I didn’t go to Cheltenham Ladies.”
“I can tell – you’re not walking funny.”
She viewed him curiously, took another mouthful of her water and wished she was somewhere else. She wasn’t mentally prepared to verbally spar with Benn Williams and his Double First from Trinity.
“Didn’t your ex go to Cheltenham Ladies?”
“Sarah?” He remembered that she had been cyberstalking him all week. “Yeah, she did.”
“I’ve met her once or twice, she’s fairly unpleasant.”
“You’re telling me.”
There was a roar of screams and laughter from the doorway as a hen party entered from the lift, a perfect storm of snapping heels, Michael Kors perfume and hair extensions. Lizzy was jostled at the bar as the bride to be aimed straight for the barman and ordered tequila for the whole party.
“Would you like a lift home?”
She nodded yes frantically from the midst of the throng.
He drove her back to Pemberley in a dark blue 4x4 with cream leather seats and a Rocket Lolly air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror. It was very tidy, if you ignored the backseat where jackets had been thrown, and the footwell where two pairs of pink trainers and a Minecraft slingbag had been discarded. The world swished by with a gentle hum and the soft melodies of Smooth FM.
“Strange choice for a movie star,” she said, voicing her dismay. “I expected a Range or some kind of Jaguar, I was looking forward to be driven home in something fast and stupid. I might not have accepted if I’d have known you drove a Volvo.”
“It has all the bells and whistles,” he said defensively. “Look!” He jabbed at the dashboard, the display flickering to life, the radio blaring offensively, “I can connect it to my phone. Watch this – it’s voice activated – Route to Pemberley House.”
The panel flashed to life and the journey back home was plotted out in vibrant HD.
“Okay, it’s a very fancy Volvo.”
“I’m going to be honest with you, I do have something fast and stupid too, but it’s not really suitable for country roads and doing the school run.”
“You do the school run? Who knew Henry Jones was such a modern man! Let’s hope Piers Morgan doesn’t find out.”
“Are you going to tell him?” He glanced over at he
r and grinned. “I’ve been off most of this week, and it was great to pick them up, hear about their day. Esther is eleven and she thinks she is far too old to be picked up, so complains constantly.”
“What about your youngest?”
“Anya?” He looked over quickly, “she speaks French now, it’s amazing, but I’m pretty sure she’s always swearing at me and I have no idea.”
“I bet you miss them.”
“I do.”
“Do they live in France full time now?”
“Mainly at weekends, but they’re in London during the week… and the holidays. I see them on the holidays.”
That small wave of sadness passed over him again, and she caught it this time, but didn’t know what to say and they continued in silence for a while. He broke the quiet, unsure of what he was asking.
“What was going on with you and Matthew? Forgive me if I am being too nosey.”
“Nothing is going on with Matthew and me. Why do you ask?”
He viewed her with a growing curiosity, could see the doubt running across her face.
“I’m nosey.”
“Well, in that case it’s a very long, dull story that will bore you.”
Benn knew that wasn’t the case, he had witnessed the on-location visits, the phonecalls, the hidden messages pinging up on Matthew’s phone between scenes. He always viewed any kind of infidelity as bad, but now after the breakdown of his own marriage his opinions had changed somewhat.
“What happened with you two?”
“Life happened,” the tone was sad. “It’s like you have a time slot, and you missed it, and whatever you do you can’t go back. However much you want to, but there’s no real reason for it, it’s just …gone.”
“Sometimes there are no reasons and we have to just accept it.”
“Did you ever love someone so much that you would be happy if they were happy… even if they were happy without you.”
“Yes, I have. I mean, I do. I do love someone like that.”
“Your wife.”
“Yes,” he replied wistfully. “Madeleine is a truly extraordinary person. We have a connection that I can’t explain; it was instant…unexplainable. She was married to someone else when we first met, you know.”
“I remember the stories in the paper. That must have been difficult.”
“You can’t help who you fall in love with, even if the timing is terribly inconvenient.”
She studied his face under the yellow motorway lights, it was hard to think of someone who was so very famous having real feelings like this. She had expected him to already have moved onto the next woman, to already be comfortably attached to a random starlet. But he was a real man with real feelings, and she appreciated his honesty in sharing them with her.
“Will it always be her, do you think?”
“Always, until I convince myself that it’s a bad idea. I don’t think I will ever love anyone the way I love her. I don’t think anyone would compare.” he pulled a hard boiled sweet out of the cup holder and handed her one. “But we’re not talking about me. This is about you. You are in love with him, aren’t you? Because surely that’s the most important part.”
“I have always been in love with the idea of him, but the reality isn’t quite enough…and I don’t know if that’s because I can’t have all of him, or if all of him isn’t worth having,” she paused. “I don’t even know why I am telling you this… I’m sorry!”
“Stop apologising; it makes it easier I think if you get it out of your head.”
“I don’t even know you.”
“Maybe that’s why it’s easier.”
He turned and smiled at her, finding that she returned the gesture. The lights of the M60 flashed against her face until they turned off the motorway and onto the winding country lanes that led to Pemberley.
“Benn, can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“If you love Madeleine so much, then what on earth possessed you to cheat on her?”
His jaw immediately clenched, his eyes fixed on the road, a frostiness on his warm geniality, and she immediately wished to grab the question from the air and shove it back into her stupid mouth. Lizzy recalled the horrible headlines, the death throes of the marriage plastered all over the newspapers, the paparazzi shots of Benn emerging red-eyed and bedraggled from a hotel in Paris, the photos of the elfin blonde actress wearing large over-sized glasses holding a smoothie and walking from her house on Venice Beach, images of Madeleine and the girls marching stoically through the airport.
There was silence again.
“I’m sorry, I’ve spoken out of turn,” she said.
“No,” he tapped the indicator, “you haven’t at all, but I don’t have an answer to your question.”
There was no way that she could even begin to imagine what the last year had been like for him, with the eyes of the world focused on the disintegration of his marriage. It was true that the Darcy family received press attention, but not at the same level as Benn Williams, whose every move it seemed was documented and reported and published. There had even been a story popping up on her phone this morning, an anonymous source commenting on how he was now so fat that he was having to be strapped in his breeches, alongside a picture of him shovelling red velvet cake into his mouth; the next story was about how fit he was now. No wonder people never knew what to believe.
“‘Maybe the most important thing you should know about me is that I don’t believe things I read in the paper, or on the sidebar of shame,” her voice a comforting hit of summer air melting his wintry coolness.
“Me neither.”
The car turned into the north gate and she tapped in the code before they curved down the driveway, juddering over the cattle grid, she noticed he strictly observed the 20mph speed limit, even though she would usually race up the winding road. The silhouette of the Cage dominated the view on the left-hand side, the moonlight catching the stately angles of the structure and making it appear not of this earth, as if in the morning it would be gone.
They pulled up in front of the north front gate and he got out of the car, opening the door and being generally quite gentlemanly as he walked her to large, studded door that closed off Pemberley from the rest of the world.
“I am sorry that I was a dick at the party,” he said. “I know you were trying to be friendly.”
“I think we might just have got off on the wrong foot,” she said. “I’m willing to start again if you are.”
“I can do that.”
The clock chimed midnight out across the courtyard, and she gestured for him to sit next to her on the stone seat in the porch. Reaching into the paper bag that she had brought from the restaurant, she pulled out a large tub of carrot cake with a dollop of cream and two plastic spoons.
“Now, I was saving this, and Harriet will never forgive me, but seeing as you have been so kind as to drop me off.”
She passed him one of the spoons and offered up the bowl. Benn was ravenous for cake and dug into the moist sponge, savouring each mouthful of the frosted walnut and carrot confection. They sat in silence. The only noise in the great park, usually so alive with voices, was the sound of the occasional owl hooting out its lonely cry to the darkness.
“So,” he licked the frosting from the spoon, “are we friends now?”
“We’re either friends or I’ve secretly poisoned you with vanilla frosting.”
She watched in part admiration and part disgust at the vehement way he was attacking the spoon.
“Are you happy being friends with an ‘arsehole’”
“I think we agreed that you are a complete arsehole,” she laughed, “and as long as you are happy to proceed on that basis…”
He smiled with his whole face and she noticed that his eyes lit up and actually sparkled, but maybe she was imagining it. It was strange seeing them up close and not displayed in giant size on the side of a bus. They were much nicer in real life. He was much nicer in
real life. He was normal, and she liked hearing the northern inflections appearing in his voice when he dropped his guard and forgot who he was meant to be.
She shoved the last spoonful of cake into her mouth, and munched away happily, swinging her legs against the stone porch. Benn had presumed all ladies of the aristocracy were like his girlfriend from Cambridge – a privileged coolness tinged with a haughty arrogance all wrapped up in a beautifully manicured and coiffured package, smelling like Penhaligon’s fragrances and the luxury of not having to work, but Lizzy didn’t seem to be a typical Lady at all. Her nails were roughly painted, her hair loose and wild, and she smelled like a packet of ginger biscuits.
He had spent the whole night trying to work out what it was, the indistinct whiffs of it teasing his nostrils throughout the night. But now he realised it was the same smell from his childhood and he imagined Lizzy was very much like one of those little biscuits from the kitchen of his Nan’s house in Salford, hard and unmoving until softened by the warmth of a cup of tea; because here she was, holding out the hand of friendship to him – a man who was in desperate need of a friend.
“Lady Elizabeth, I do not believe we have had the pleasure of being formerly introduced” he proclaimed in his best Mr Darcy voice, gallantly holding out his hand, which she took gracefully and shook firmly. “I am Mr Williams of Thurleigh Road, Clapham, currently residing in Derbyshire at the home of Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy.”
Laughing, she played along.
“Pleasure to meet you, Mr Williams!” She did a small curtsey. “I am Lady Elizabeth Georgiana Darcy,” there was a pause as she thought about something, “but my friends call me Lizzy.”
He wanted to eke out the last drops of the evening, enjoying feeling like a regular person rather than being dismissed back to his lonely hotel for room service and Netflix.
“Do you fancy going out for tea sometime, somewhere not poncey? I would like to say sorry properly, I am usually much better behaved… and I mean tea as in dinner,” he laughed. “I think I have some coupons for the Toby Carvery.”
Becoming Lady Darcy Page 13