‘Ham,’ I said. ‘Do you know a woman I work with – well, used to work with…’
He started to speak, but I stopped him.
‘I’ll tell you all about what happened at the Journal in a minute, but I need to ask you something first. I used to work with someone there called Jeanette Foster. Do you know her?’
‘It’s ringing a vague bell,’ he said. ‘What does she look like?’
‘Harsh burgundy hair, weird teeth, terrible jewellery…’
‘Oh, GOD,’ said Ham. ‘Not the one that ended up marrying that Lib Dem chap, what’s his name…?’
‘Yes, that’s her,’ I said.
‘Oh, she’s the pits,’ he was saying.
I said nothing, I wanted to see if he had anything to add. He did.
‘Do you know, I had a terrible experience with her once. She used to be a Labour girl, and we were at the party conference in Bournemouth – years ago – and she wouldn’t leave me alone. She kept trying to crack on to me, it got really embarrassing. She’s got a terrible reputation, you know. She’s what they call a Westminster Bicycle – she’ll sleep with anyone with a seat.’
‘Did you sleep with her?’ I asked. I had to know.
Ham pulled a face.
‘Are you mad? Have you seen what she looks like? Give me some credit, Stella, I may have been a shocking old tart in my time, but only with beautiful women.’
I couldn’t help smiling. He was so appalling.
‘But do you know what she did?’ he was continuing. ‘She just wouldn’t give up, and in the middle of the night, after we’d all been at this big piss-up – I was out for the count – she came and knocked on my hotel-room door. I got up to answer it and she was standing there in this ridiculous trench coat, which she pulled open to reveal she was naked beneath, except for some ghastly cheap lingerie – stockings and suspenders, all that caper. I think I was supposed to be maddened with desire, but I’m afraid I just burst out laughing and went back to bed.’
I started to giggle, but he hadn’t finished.
‘And, you see, the thing is, I may have told a few people about it at breakfast the next morning and it rather got round the conference, the way these things do. She wasn’t very pleased. In fact, I think that’s when she went over to the Lib Dems…’
That was it. The laughter burst out of me like a dam breaking. I was howling with it and he joined in, until the two of us were rolling around in that tiny space. I could hardly breathe.
‘Oh, my God, Ham,’ I was spluttering. ‘If you only knew…’
And then I was off again. We laughed until we had tears running down our cheeks and my stomach was aching from it. In the end we had to get out of the tree house, it was getting really claustrophobic in there with our limbs flailing around.
But Ham found it rather difficult to manoeuvre his large bulk in that tiny space, and from my vantage point behind him, with his head out of the door, his massive backside still inside, he reminded me so much of Winnie the Pooh getting stuck in Rabbit’s burrow, I got even more hysterical.
In the end, we pretty much fell out and stumbled back to the house, stopping intermittently to crack up all over again, and by the time we sat down together at the round table, a bottle of champagne in front of us, I felt happier than I had for weeks.
Ham and I talked long into the night. We made dinner together – him cooking, me as a rather useless sous-chef, although Jay had taught me to chop an onion like a pro – ate it, cleared it away, and never stopped talking.
I had a lot to tell him and I realized I was soaking up his wise, inspired, measured responses to all that I had to say, like a downpour on a parched garden.
But, as we talked, I was aware that we were both skirting around what was, for me, the really big topic. In the end, it was Ham who broached it.
‘So,’ he said, finally. ‘How are things between you and Jay Fisher?’
‘They’re not,’ I said bluntly. ‘Didn’t Chloe tell you? It’s all over.’
Ham looked surprised.
‘No, she didn’t tell me. I thought, after I’d seen that picture in the Mail, that you were practically living with him.’
‘I suppose I was,’ I said, the idea sinking in for the first time. Jay and I had been living together to all intents and purposes. I’d never done that before with anyone and I realized how much I’d loved it. That just made it all seem even worse, but I tried to make light of it.
‘What can I say?’ I said, shrugging casually. ‘We broke up. I don’t even know where he is now…’
It was the look on Ham’s face that did it. He didn’t look pleased, as I had expected him to – he looked really sad and sorry. And that’s when the tears came again and, for the second time that day, I wept on my father’s shoulder.
‘Oh, my poor love,’ Ham was saying. ‘The first cut is the deepest and all that, and you’ve fallen in love for the first time so late in your life, it must be even harder for you.’
I just wept a bit more and let him talk. I wasn’t about to remind him that I’d experienced my first love many years before and it had been Alex.
‘I’m sorry about that terrible promise I forced you to make,’ he was saying. ‘I must have been deranged, but I’m afraid that is the effect his hideous family have on me and I just wanted to protect my most precious duckling from being hurt, when in fact, I just made it worse. If I hadn’t interfered, you could have enjoyed your first love and events would have taken their natural course. And I feel terrible, because it’s all my fault that you’ve found it so hard to surrender to those feelings in the first place. I do understand that.’
I blew my nose on his shirt again.
‘Oh, don’t go on about all that any more,’ I said. ‘What’s done is done and at least I know what proper requited love is like now, even if it didn’t last. And it wasn’t your fault Jay and I split up, it was my fault – well, it was a bit his fault too – but if I could only turn back the clock, I’d still be with him. I brought it on myself. I was too attached to my bloody job.’
Ham looked at me, thoughtfully, for a moment.
‘Tell me about him,’ he said, eventually. ‘I do admit that I liked him very much that day he came down here – even apart from that marvellous car, he seemed to be an engaging fellow. Good-looking too. I want to know about him. So tell me about it, right from the start.’
So I did, from the very first moment I had seen him in the garden at the Cap Mimosa. And my father being the man he was, I even told him about Jay’s prodigious sexual appetites, which made him chuckle heartily.
‘I knew he was a proper Alpha Male,’ he said. ‘I can always spot them. Takes one to know one, you know.’
He winked at me and I kicked him, lovingly, on the shin.
‘Shut up, you old perve,’ I said, realizing in that moment just how much I loved him.
I told him the whole story, right up to the very bitter end – rather enjoying Ham’s amazed reaction when he heard what Jay had been studying at UCLA, before his father insisted he dropped out, after his brother’s death.
That was a revelation to him.
‘Well, blow me. I designed that whole bloody course. No wonder he was making such intelligent comments about this house,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘I was very impressed by that.’
‘He’d presented a class paper on it,’ I told him, with slightly spiteful relish. ‘He knows more about it than I do.’
Ham shook his head and sighed.
‘Sorry, duckling,’ he said.
But he wasn’t remotely surprised to hear about Jay’s trials at the hands of his stepmother.
‘Oh, my word, that woman is a hell monster,’ he said, when I got to that part of the tale. ‘She’s even worse than his Uncle Edward, because she’s not just nasty and neurotic, like him, she’s stupid too. Stupid, but cunning, the most dangerous combination of all – and oh, that terrible son of hers. He’s like a suet pudding on legs.’
He snorted with l
aughter, when I told him Jay called Todd the Hippo.
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘she was trying to get that hippo involved in the design of the institute at one point. I had to get Edward to see her off, which he rather enjoyed doing, I must say. I learned how to play them in the end, but they are a rum lot, Stella. How do you think your fellow has come out of it so relatively normal?’
‘His mother, by the sound of it. She sounds really cool.’
Ham squinted at me thoughtfully.
‘Hang on a minute – his mother… Now, something did occur to me about her. Obviously she didn’t have anything to do with the building, and I thought I hadn’t met her, but then after it all blew up I got to thinking that I might have known her once. Does she live in LA?’
‘Used to. Topanga Canyon – like you.’
Ham snapped his fingers.
‘Yes! I can place her now. Celia, that’s her. We knew her back then. We were all part of the same gang up there.’
He glanced at me. He had a funny look on his face.
‘Me and your mother – we knew her. Back in the seventies. Before you were born, of course, and before she met that terrible Robert Fisher. She was a great girl. Stunning-looking too…’
I couldn’t stand it. I slumped down, my head in my hands. It was just too much.
It was a huge relief to be reunited with Ham, but I was still a mess. Job offers had continued to come in – all of them similar to my old gig, except not as good – but I just couldn’t get excited about any of them. The thought of being on another luxury-brand press trip with Laura Birch-wood and her ilk, just held no appeal. But I had finally been forced to be truthful to myself about the Woodward and Bernstein thing too.
The whole notion of being a serious investigative reporter had never been more than a fantasy, I now accepted. An idea of the person I thought I’d wanted to be, but wasn’t really. Not any more than Tim was truly a flighty fashion head.
I was really lucky, I kept telling myself like a mantra – I had my own place, so I didn’t really need a job to survive – but the way I felt, I don’t think I could have gone back into an office at that point, even had my life depended on it. I was still very vulnerable, as I discovered the morning the letter I had sent Jay came back unopened and with ‘return to sender’ on it. In his writing.
I was so wounded it put me in bed for a couple of days, until Daisy came and got me up, insisting I came and played with her myriad Sylvanian Families and their houses.
I found it strangely comforting, sitting on the floor with her, moving the small bits of furry plastic around. We made them change houses frequently, and various squirrel children would have to go and stay with the rabbits for the weekend, while mice and hedgehogs were despatched elsewhere.
‘No, Stella,’ Daisy said firmly, wrenching a baby badger from my hand. ‘You know that baby badger doesn’t like the daddy squirrel. He’s going to stay with the rabbits this weekend. They’re nice.’
It made total sense to both of us.
I don’t know how long I might have drifted on like that, but eventually it was Ham who came up with the perfect solution to get me motivated again.
We’d just had dinner at the London house and he asked me to come through to his study, where he showed me the proposal he’d written for a new book his agent was in the process of selling around the world.
It was called Willow Barn – the Story of a Family and a House, and he asked me to co-write it with him.
‘You know what it’s like to live at Willow Barn better than anyone, Stella,’ he said. ‘It has formed your family life, and ergo who you are, so who better? Plus, you are a marvellous writer. I’d love it if you would do it with me. I’d be honoured. And I think it would add another level of interest to the project if we worked on it together. Should get us loads of publicity.’
My answer was to throw my arms around him and give him my version of a double cheeseburger hug.
23
So, as it turned out, I would be going to the Willow Barn apple harvest picnic and barn dance that year, after all – in fact, I volunteered to organize it. I’d already swept out the old hay barn where the dancing took place, so I thought I might as well just do the whole thing.
Chloe normally did it all, but with only two months or so until the baby was due, it was a lot for her to take on, and as I was pretty much living down at Willow Barn full-time, working on the book, it seemed natural for me to take over.
I was quite excited about it. I’d spent the last five years going to lavish parties arranged by other people, as part of my job, so it was rather a lark to be organizing one myself.
I’d even had a look at some of Chloe’s back issues of Martha Stewart Living to get some entertaining tips and I’d spent an evening discovering the joy of cookbooks for the first time, boning up on interesting ideas for barbecues. It was a whole new world for me, playing happy homemaker, and it was rather fun.
I’d just come off the phone from Chloe one evening, getting the low-down on the preferred butcher, the quantities of sausages to order, the numbers of glasses to hire, the phone number to book the ceilidh band and the rest of it, and was settling down for an orgy of list making, when the phone rang again. It was Ham.
‘Darling,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been talking to Chloe and I know you’re being an angel helping her organize the apple harvest fest, but actually I’m going to make it rather different this year and I’m going to get caterers in.’
I felt so deflated, I couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘Don’t be disappointed, Stella,’ Ham said, reading my silence correctly. ‘Because the thing is, we’ve got rather a lot of interest in our book. The American publisher wants to bring a major photographer he intends to use for the book over to see it, and there’s a rather interesting film-maker who is talking about doing a feature-length documentary based on it, and he wants to visit too. So I thought they could all come to the apple harvest and experience a real Willow Barn family event. See the house as it’s meant to be used.’
It was encouraging that there was a buzz starting up about the book, but I still wasn’t very thrilled. I loved the hokey family and friends event the way it had always been and I’d been really rather stoked up about organizing it. I didn’t want a load of Ham’s architecture groupies there as well.
But he was clearly off on one, so I just let him drone on. When he was excited about something, he was an unstoppable force. My sausages on witty hazel-switch sticks would have to wait until next year.
‘I’ve got a lot of people from the universities I teach at, who I need to entertain as well,’ he was saying. ‘And then there are all my students who are agitating to visit the house, so I thought we might as well have one big black-tie bash in a marquee and have them all at once.
‘We’ll have friends and family too, of course – the more of those, the better, for context – and we’ll do the apple picking as normal and the lunchtime picnic and the barn-dance part. I just want the dinner to be more formal, but with an apple theme to the food. It will be a living example of my beliefs about the importance of formalized rituals in family life and creating fluid spaces for them to take place in…’
The marquee for this particular fluid yet formalized ritual was enormous, I soon discovered. It started going up several days before the event, while I was still the only one down there, and it wasn’t just your bog-standard party marquee, it was a huge, circular, red and white stripy thing, like a circus tent.
‘Ham,’ I said, calling him on his mobile. ‘Did you mean to order a big top for this dinner? It looks like Billy Smart’s setting up on the lawn.’
He chuckled down the phone at me.
‘Oh, excellent,’ he said. ‘That’s just what I wanted. Has it got a large pennant flying from the central pole?’
I looked out of the window.
‘Yes, with a picture of two apples on it…’
Ham chuckled some more and hung up on me.
Things got even weirder on the day of the big event. Chloe and the kids were all in residence and the VIPs who were staying in the Willow Barn guest wing were starting to arrive, but Ham hadn’t even got down there yet.
I could hear some banging outside and when I went out to see what was going on, there were two men with lavish beards erecting a tall thin object in front of the big top.
‘What on earth is that?’ I asked the one with the longer beard.
He looked at me as though I were simple.
‘It’s a maypole,’ he said.
‘Did my father order that?’ I asked him.
‘If your father’s called Henry Montecourt – yes,’ said the beardy weirdy, and he went back to weaving long green, red and yellow ribbons around the pole.
‘Funny time of year for one of those, isn’t it?’ I persisted, but he wasn’t interested.
‘Ask your father…’ was all he said, and I didn’t give it much more thought after that, because when Ham got going with one of his special events, anything was possible.
So, I just put it out of my mind – along with the large quantity of empty barrels which were just being delivered, out of which, I gathered, we were going to bob for apples; and the Druid priest and his attendants, who, Chloe had told me over breakfast, were coming to bless the trees and the harvest.
He loved a theme, did Ham.
Once it all kicked off and we actually got going with the apple harvest, I pretty much forgot about his more over-the-top details, it was so much fun.
The whole family was there, plus the much-loved addons. Archie was a permanent fixture with us now, and Alex came too, bringing Rose – and Monkey, of course.
I didn’t know whether it was the looming presence of Ham’s ridiculous stripy tent, the prospect of a proper black-tie rave-up, or just general high spirits, but they did all seem particularly excited.
We all loved a party down there, but Archie and Tabitha, in particular, seemed to be in a permanent state of near hysteria and Venezia kept changing her outfit into briefer and briefer ensembles, until so much of her midriff was on show, Ham sent her inside to put a shirt on.
Cents and Sensibility Page 35