Hugging Eva and installing her on the sofa in front of the fire, Flora sat and listened, still wrapped in a towel, while Eva told her the whole sorry, sordid story.
‘I mean, Kate. Kate!’ she repeated, over and over, between sobs. ‘I don’t suppose it would have mattered who it was, but Kate? Henry can’t stand her. They can’t stand each other. Why would he …? I don’t understand it.’
Flora listened and nodded and poured Eva the first of many large brandies, as well as one for herself. They sat and talked for a long time, hours, with the conversation mostly going round in circles. Flora didn’t understand Henry’s latest choice of lover either. Lady Saxton Brae had a face like a horse and considerably less brainpower, not to mention the fact that she was stupefyingly boring. Flora remembered hearing Henry refer to his sister-in-law as an ‘antisocial climber, like poison ivy’ and repeatedly expressing pity for ‘poor Seb’ for being married to her. What on earth had possessed him to risk it all with Eva for an afternoon of chilly outdoor copulation with Kate, of all people?
She wanted to say something comforting to Eva as a friend, but try as she might she couldn’t come up with a single mitigating circumstance to explain Henry’s behaviour. Clearly the man was some sort of sex addict. Or lunatic. Or both.
‘It isn’t the first time. Or even the second, or third,’ Eva sniffed miserably. ‘I’ve heard the rumours, about him and George. And I know there have been others. I’m not stupid.’
‘So why do you stay?’ asked Flora, not unkindly.
‘I don’t know. I love him I suppose,’ Eva sighed.
‘There must be more to it than that,’ Flora pressed her.
‘Well, there’s his childhood,’ said Eva. ‘Losing his mother so young. That’s a classic reason for men to fear intimacy.’
‘And that makes it OK?’
‘No, of course not. Nothing makes it OK.’ Eva ran a hand through her long golden hair in exasperation. ‘I don’t know, perhaps I am stupid. Because, honestly, I thought he’d changed. Since we moved to Hanborough things have been better. Different. Henry seemed so much happier here. At least he did until a few weeks ago.’
Flora wondered how much of Henry’s happiness had been down to his affair with Lucy Smart. Now that it was over, or at least on the wane, had he turned to his sister-in-law in anger, as the nearest available conquest? The whole thing was all seriously fucked up. Not for the first time, Flora wished she wasn’t privy to so much inside information on Henry’s extracurricular activities.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked Eva.
Picking up a red damask throw cushion, Eva played idly with the silk threads on one of the tassels. ‘Cancel the wedding, I suppose,’ she sighed. ‘I do love him. And I’ve tried to understand him. I really have tried so hard. But we can’t go on like this.’
It was the first sign of strength Flora had ever seen from Eva. She was amazed by it, and encouraged. ‘I agree,’ she said, refilling Eva’s glass and noticing that the bottle was almost empty. ‘For what it’s worth, I don’t think this has anything to do with you. Some people are just not capable of being married. I used to be like that.’
‘You?’ Eva looked at her disbelievingly. ‘I can’t imagine you ever sleeping with your sister’s husband!’
‘No, well, I don’t have a sister.’ Flora smiled, trying to lighten the mood. ‘I don’t mean I slept around. Just that I was scared of commitment, for a long time. Like Henry. If I hadn’t met Mason, I honestly don’t know if I would ever have gotten married.’
‘Of course you would,’ said Eva. ‘You’re totally the marrying kind.’
Flora shook her head. ‘I’m not. You only think that because you are, so you imagine everybody else is.’
‘Even Henry, you mean?’
Flora gave her a ‘you said it’ look. ‘You can’t fix him, Eva. My mother spent half her life trying to fix my father, and the other half blaming herself for failing. You can do so much better.’
‘Mason fixed you, though, didn’t he?’ said Eva.
Flora was just thinking about this and how to respond – she didn’t like the idea that Mason had ‘fixed’ her, although perhaps in some ways this was true – when the front door burst open. Unlike Eva, Henry didn’t bother to knock. Swaying in the cottage doorway, looking like a vast, drunken giant in Flora’s tiny but immaculate front room, he marched over to Eva and grabbed her hand.
‘I need to talk to you.’
Eva snatched her arm back. ‘Go away, Henry.’
‘No. I won’t. I can’t. Please, Eva.’
He was shaking. Looking as handsome as ever in a simple black jacket and open-necked shirt over dark jeans, with his black curls pushed back from his forehead, he gazed at Eva with a desolate, half-crazed look in his eyes. Even Flora felt sorry for him for a moment. But only for a moment.
‘She doesn’t want to talk to you,’ Flora said, standing up and physically inserting herself between them.
‘You don’t know what she wants,’ Henry turned on her angrily.
‘I know what I want,’ said Flora, ‘which is for you to get out of my house right now. You can’t just come barging in here and demand—’
Putting one hand on each of Flora’s upper arms, Henry simply lifted her up and moved her out of his way, setting her down again a few feet to the left, as if she were an inconveniently placed piece of furniture. Flora would have liked to hit him, but she was in imminent danger of losing her towel, and infuriatingly needed both hands to hold it up and protect her modesty.
‘Please,’ Henry addressed himself to Eva again. ‘Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking for. Please, just hear me out.’
It took Flora a few seconds to regain the power of speech after being so unceremoniously manhandled in her own living room. By the time she’d resecured her bath towel and opened her mouth, it was too late. One look at Eva’s face told her she’d already caved in.
‘Five minutes. Outside,’ she said, drawing Flora’s throw blanket around her shoulders as if she’d just been rescued from a shipwreck. Which, emotionally, she sort of had.
Flora watched, speechless, as Henry led Eva into the garden. They left the door ajar, and Flora could hear snatches of the conversation from her position on the sofa. Raised voices. Tears. A pleading tone from Henry that she’d never heard before. At one point she thought she heard Eva fighting back, and telling him where to go. But eventually the shouting subsided. Their voices grew lower and calmer. Flora distinctly heard the words ‘Christmas’ and ‘Sweden’ and Henry, conciliatory now, saying, ‘Of course. Of course we’ll go home. As long as you want.’
Moments later, Flora heard a car door open and shut.
I can’t believe it! she thought, waiting for the engine to start. She can’t have let him off that easy. She’s going to go back to Hanborough with him, just like that?
A rap on the door made her jump. She jumped again when she saw that it wasn’t Eva, regaining control of her senses and asking to stay the night, but Henry, looking less tragic than before but still surprisingly hangdog.
‘You must hate me,’ he said to Flora.
‘I don’t hate you,’ she heard herself reply.
‘But you think Eva should leave me?’
Flora looked at him, wide-eyed. ‘Of course I do. Don’t you?’
A half-smile formed on his lips, then disappeared. ‘Probably. I wouldn’t marry me.’
‘Exactly,’ said Flora.
Henry had started walking towards her, and stood now only inches away, towering over her like a poplar tree, smelling of whisky and aftershave and night air and sweat.
‘Thank you.’ He touched Flora’s arm.
Her heart seemed to have leapt into her throat, making speech almost impossible, and was beating so violently Flora felt sick. He was too close. Far too close.
‘For what?’ she managed to squeak.
‘Taking care of her,’ said Henry. ‘And for not saying anything. About Lucy, I mean.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Flora, who was starting to feel even sicker.
Henry turned to go.
‘If you really loved her, you’d let her go. Let her find someone else,’ Flora called after him. She hadn’t meant to. The words just sort of rushed out.
‘If I were a better person, you mean?’ Henry gave Flora a look she would never forget, his eyes boring into hers with an intensity that made her knees buckle. ‘Like Eva? Or your fiancé?’
Don’t bring Mason into this, Flora wanted to say. You don’t even know him. But her earlier eloquence seemed to have withered on the vine.
Henry filled the silence for her.
‘I’m not a better person though, am I? I’m just me. I can’t change, Flora. Neither can you. Our better halves will just have to take us as they find us.’
And with that, he left, closing the door quietly behind him.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Georgina Savile leaned back in her Herman Miller office chair and flipped, bored, through the pages of December Vogue. George already had all the winter collection pieces she wanted on order – Alison Loehnis at Net-a-Porter had sorted her out for years on the wardrobe front, which was marvellous, of course, but it did mean that one was reduced to actually reading the articles in Vogue, which this month were a dreary litany of ‘holiday-themed’ stories about as stimulating as watching paint dry. Or as listening to George’s husband bang on about Gimlet, the racehorse he’d just bought for an astronomical sum of money and dropped into every conversation with the sort of enthusiasm another man might reserve for the name of a new and exotic lover.
Even in his bachelor days, George thought sadly, Robert’s idea of a wild night out would have involved one too many glasses of claret at White’s or the novelty of a rickshaw-ride home after an evening of La Bohème at Covent Garden.
Then again, George hadn’t married her husband for the thrill factor. She’d married Robert because he was rich, successful, well connected and pliant. Since the day they’d met, George had chosen everything, from their wedding date and venue to which home they bought, how they decorated it, whom they invited over and whether or not they would have children. (They wouldn’t.) Finally, and perhaps most importantly, she’d married Robert to send a message to Henry. That she wouldn’t wait for ever. That if he didn’t commit to her, someone else would. That she didn’t need him.
The problem was that she did. George was used to men falling at her feet, lining up for the privilege of being the next to grace her bed. Not since her schooldays at Sherwood Hall had she experienced romantic rejection of the kind she got from Henry.
Back then George had been madly in love with Alexander Neville, a shy sixth-former with big doe eyes and a mop of unruly auburn hair, destined for great things at Oxford. When Alexander turned her down, thanks to his unrequited obsession with that tacky American sex-doll Flora Fitzwilliam, George had oscillated between fury and deep, penetrating shame. It wasn’t simply that Alexander didn’t want her. It was that he wanted Flora more. Even after she had been forced to leave the school in disgrace, the idiotic boy continued to write to her, mooning from afar like a lovesick puppy.
Of course, George got over it. She left school, became even more beautiful, and delighted in seducing a string of high-profile men, many of them married, all of them powerful, successful or just plain gorgeous. Henry Saxton Brae fell into all three categories. When they met, the chemistry had been instant, both carnally and intellectually. Founding Gigtix together had felt to George like the first step in their lives as a long-term couple. They were already lovers. Soon they became not just business partners but a business phenomenon, feted and interviewed all over the world as the next big thing in e-commerce, the glamorous twin ambassadors of Young British Entrepreneurship.
Although they’d never been exclusive, or announced themselves as boyfriend and girlfriend, George assumed that this would simply be a matter of time. Henry would grow up a little, realize that no one could ever match what they had in bed, marry her, and the two of them would live happily ever after. But it never happened. In fact, as the months passed, and then the years, he became increasingly bored and restless, ultimately coming to view George with something bordering on disdain. They still slept together regularly. But when he met Ikea, even that started to change. His encounters with George became less and less frequent and more and more laden with guilt on Henry’s part. Panicked, George had married Robert to make Henry jealous. It hadn’t worked. Two weeks later, Henry had proposed to Eva, bought Hanborough Castle, and decamped to the country.
As if all that weren’t bad enough, in a cruelly ironic twist, Henry had hired Graydon James to renovate Hanborough and wound up with none other than Flora Fitzwilliam, George’s old nemesis from school, as his practically live-in designer! Not only did Henry clearly like and respect Flora, but – far worse – Flora and Ikea had apparently become best friends. And, to top it all, while George was stuck sleeping next to a snoring Robert night after night, Flora was all set to marry some über-eligible New York bachelor, almost as rich and handsome as Henry but, by all accounts, considerably nicer.
George’s direct line buzzed.
‘Henry’s here,’ Charlotte, George’s secretary, saidnervously. Charlotte said everything nervously. Working for George she’d found it necessary to adopt the emotional ‘brace position’ at all times. ‘Do you have time for a quick meeting?’
George slipped Vogue back into her desk drawer. She had nothing but time. Gigtix pretty much ran itself these days, and she only came into the office in the hope of catching Henry alone.
In the old days he would simply have knocked on her office door, or more likely just walked in. Now that they were a hundred-million-pound company, with twenty permanent staff based in the London office, things were a lot more formal.
‘I have ten minutes if he wants to come up now. But that’s my only window,’ George lied.
‘OK, I’ll let him know.’
Two minutes later, Henry walked in. Dressed casually in jeans and a chocolate brown cashmere sweater, he looked tired and distracted.
‘What’s the latest with R-Ventures?’ he asked brusquely, getting straight down to business.
George yawned, leaned back and recrossed her legs, affording him a brief but crystal-clear view of her new red La Perla knickers. ‘I signed yesterday,’ she said nonchalantly.
Henry turned puce. ‘What? What do you mean you signed?’
George cocked her pretty head to one side in mock innocence. ‘Isn’t that self-explanatory?’
‘How can you have signed?’ Henry exploded. ‘We haven’t agreed terms yet.’
‘Yes, we have. I agreed them.’
‘Without my consent?’
George shrugged. ‘I tried to reach you. Repeatedly. You don’t return my calls, or emails. You’re never in the office—’
‘You had no right to do that deal without me!’
‘On the contrary,’ George shouted back. ‘I have every right. One of us has to live up to our responsibilities. Ever since you bought that damned castle, you’ve been totally distracted. All you think about is weddings and interior design. It’s like you have no balls left at all.’
‘But your balls are big enough for both of us. Right?’ Henry shot back.
‘You said it,’ said George.
Henry smiled. For the briefest of moments, the old spark flickered in the air between them. But then it was gone.
‘What are your plans for Christmas?’ Henry asked, changing gear and trying to return the conversation to a more civil footing. He was livid that George had done a big private equity deal without him, but part of him also knew that her criticisms were fair. He had been absent from the business recently, both physically and mentally.
‘The usual.’ George shrugged. ‘Mustique. Robert’s shooting in Scotland over New Year, though, so I might get some time to myself.’
She looked at Henry knowingly, but he didn’t take the bait.
‘I suppose you’ll be at Hanborough?’
‘Actually, no.’ He frowned. ‘We’re going to Stockholm. Staying with Eva’s parents.’
George laughed loudly. ‘What fun,’ she teased him. ‘Meatballs and roll-mop herrings in the Gunnarsons’ charming bungalow. I’ll bet you can’t wait.’
‘It means a lot to Eva,’ Henry muttered, grudgingly.
‘Well, that’s all right then,’ George said archly. ‘Are your trips to buy cheap, flat-packed furniture already planned? Or will you play that by ear, add an extra layer of excitement?’
‘Stop,’ said Henry wearily. He didn’t want another argument. George was still his business partner. Somehow he had to improve things between them, to find a way other than sex to neutralize George’s anger. ‘We couldn’t have stayed at Hanborough anyway. They found dry rot in the great hall and the entire roof of the West Wing. We’re back to camping in the master suite and kitchen, which is a pain in the arse.’
George raised an eyebrow. ‘I hate to say “I told you so”.’
‘Do you?’ quipped Henry.
‘But Flora Fitzwilliam’s clearly not up to the job. Six months in, and they’re only finding major structural problems now?’
‘That was the surveyor’s fault. Before Flora’s time,’ said Henry, already regretting bringing this up, or meeting with George at all. Somehow she never failed to make his day just that little bit worse.
‘I knew her at school, you remember, and it was the same story then,’ George went on. ‘She never had much talent, but she was always given good grades because the male teachers fawned on her. Not that she was ever particularly pretty. She just had that same slutty, available look she has now.’
‘Stop,’ Henry said quietly.
‘Oh, come on, you know what I’m talking about,’ said George. ‘Those great big uddery tits, like a porn star’s.’ She shuddered with distaste. ‘It’s obvious what Flora brings to Graydon James’s table.’
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