‘Who’s Kashi Soames again?’ Flora asked as Mason led her back inside. Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ was playing, mingling with the laughter and chatter of well over a hundred excited guests. Pine and balsam candles had been lit everywhere, filling even the grandest, high-ceilinged room with a glorious festive scent, and another huge Nordic spruce dazzled in the entryway.
‘My godmother,’ Mason whispered in Flora’s ear. ‘Very rich, very eccentric.’ Looking at his watch, he added, ‘And by now probably very drunk.’
‘Maaaason! Daaarling!’ Right on cue, a bejewelled crone wearing what looked like green silk ceremonial robes and a matching turban, made her way over to Mason and Flora. ‘You’ve been hiding from me!’
‘Not at all, Kashi. I—’
‘So is this her?’ The crone pointed a bony, ruby-encrusted finger at Flora, talking about her as if she weren’t there. ‘She’s very pretty. Shorter than I expected, though. I always thought you admired tall girls.’
‘Oh, Mason admired a lot of things until he met Flora,’ a familiar voice trilled.
Flora’s heart sank. Just when she thought the evening couldn’t get any worse, Henrietta Branston appeared behind the dreadful Kashi. Henrietta had pulled out all the stops tonight in a stunning red backless gown that accentuated her tall, athletic figure, and a ruby drop necklace that drew attention instantly to her impressive cleavage. Her blonde hair was piled and pinned extravagantly on top of her head, making her look even taller. Standing next to her, Flora felt like a hobbit. Bilbo Baggins in the presence of the Ice Queen.
‘But true love changes everything, doesn’t it, darling?’
She kissed Mason on both cheeks, before pointedly stooping to do the same to Flora. ‘My goodness, you are a long way down, aren’t you?’ She laughed. ‘I haven’t seen you for ages. Chuck and I were starting to think you’d abandoned poor Mason for good.’
Think or hope? thought Flora, forcing a smile.
‘How’s Merry Olde England?’
‘Fine. Busy.’
‘I’ll bet.’ Henrietta poured the remnants of her flute of vintage champagne down her swan-like neck. ‘I heard you’ve had all sorts of problems at Hanborough. Aren’t the renovations, like, a year behind schedule?’
‘Renovations?’ Mason’s godmother piped up disapprovingly. Glaring at Flora, she asked, ‘Are you some sort of builder?’
‘Flora’s a designer, Kashi,’ said Mason. ‘She works with one of the top guys in the city.’
‘Who told you the castle was a year behind?’ Flora asked Henrietta, all pretence at an entente cordiale abandoned. ‘That’s complete bullshit, by the way.’
She couldn’t understand how Henrietta Branston knew anything about Hanborough, other than what Mason might have told her, and he would never have said they were a year off schedule.
‘Well.’ Henrietta smiled, ignoring Flora’s hostile tone and addressing herself to Kashi and Mason as much as to Flora. ‘Such a small world. But it turns out one of my best girlfriends is the business partner of the guy who owns the castle! Can you believe that?’
‘Georgina Savile?’ Flora went white. She felt as if she were in the midst of some awful lucid dream. All she needed now was to look down and find she was standing there naked. ‘You know each other?’
‘Oh, we go way back.’ Henrietta beamed. ‘We met in the Hamptons years ago, at a summer party up at Brett Cranley’s place. I just adore George, don’t you? She told me you guys were at school together.’
‘That’s amazing,’ said Mason, smiling at Flora. ‘What a crazy coincidence. So this is Henry’s partner?’
Flora nodded awkwardly. She hadn’t mentioned anything about George to Mason. Those terrible days at Sherwood Hall were a part of her life she wanted to forget, to leave behind for ever. Only now they seemed to be stalking her, in the loathsome form of Henrietta-butter-wouldn’t-melt Branston.
‘I know. Crazy, right?’ Henrietta gushed. ‘It takes six degrees of separation to a whole new level. Anyway George has been at the castle a lot, right, Flora? So she’s been filling me in on all these setbacks you’ve been having.’
‘How thoughtful of her,’ said Flora through gritted teeth.
‘I feel so bad for you.’ Henrietta’s attempt at a sympathetic expression was not a roaring success. ‘George says Henry Saxton Brae’s been spitting teeth about all the delays and the extra costs.’
‘Really?’ Mason looked at Flora. ‘You never told me that.’
Because it isn’t true, thought Flora, but she didn’t want to get into any of this in front of Henrietta.
‘Isn’t there some, like, super-modern barn you built that Henry can’t stand?’ Henrietta went on. Putting a comforting arm on Flora’s shoulder, she said, ‘You know, you shouldn’t feel too bad. George also tells me Henry can be real difficult to please.’
‘On the contrary,’ said Flora, downing her own champagne in one gulp, so fast that bubbles threatened to pour out of her nose. ‘He’s actually very easy to please. All you have to do is open your legs. Your good friend George Savile should know all about that. Merry Christmas, Henrietta.’
Turning on her heel, Flora stalked off.
‘Did she just say … what I think she said?’ Kashi Soames asked Mason, open-mouthed. ‘How utterly appalling. And you’re sure this is the girl you want to marry?’
‘I hope I didn’t speak out of turn,’ said Henrietta, biting her lower lip in a bravura performance of hurt innocence. ‘Should I go after her?’
‘No,’ Mason said grimly. ‘It’s all right. I’ll go.’
Later that night in bed, Flora lay in Mason’s arms, relieved that the evening was over. They’d had a stand-up row out on the lawn after the Henrietta incident. Mason could see that Henrietta was being provoking and manipulative, but he still felt deeply embarrassed by Flora’s outburst. Flora, on the other hand, felt completely unsupported.
‘What was I supposed to do? Sit there and take it while she told a bunch of lies about my work, and made me out to be an asshole in front of your godmother? Who, by the way, is just horrible.’
‘I agree Kashi can be a challenge,’ Mason said pompously. ‘And I’m sorry Henrietta upset you.’
‘Are you?’ Flora demanded angrily. ‘Because it doesn’t look that way to me.’
‘Yes,’ said Mason, ‘I am. But in answer to your original question, what you’re supposed to do is be a lady, Flora. Rise above it. Show some dignity, for God’s sake. I’m introducing you to these people as my future wife.’
Flora had been reduced to tears of frustration, unable to get Mason to see things her way. In the end they’d both given up the fight, retired to bed and had two much-needed rounds of make-up sex, which turned out to be by far the best they’d had since Flora arrived. Mason had fallen asleep immediately afterwards, satisfied and no doubt also physically exhausted by all the tension.
Flora was very tired too, but sleep eluded her. She’d texted her mother earlier, to wish her a happy Christmas. Checking her phone now, she saw there’d been no response. Camila was supposed to be coming to dinner out here tomorrow night – Mason had insisted they invite her – but neither he nor Flora had heard from her in days, which was worrying. Flora prayed she hadn’t fallen off the wagon again.
She did have one new picture message.
Clicking it open, she saw it was from Barney, a beautiful shot of the lake where he was staying, with the fells behind it covered in what looked like knee-deep snow. It was an image from another world, almost another planet. It made Flora smile.
First white Christmas in 12 years, he wrote. Sister’s kids all very excited. I miss you. B xoxo
Flora thought about how much more fun tonight would have been if Barney had been there. He would have backed me to the hilt against that bitch Henrietta.
She was about to turn her phone off when another MMS came through. She assumed it would be another of Barney’s beautiful landscape photographs. Instead, to her surprise, it
was from Henry. Underneath a picture of himself sitting under a plastic Christmas tree and holding up a tin of roll-mop herrings, he had written: Beam me up, Scotty!
Flora laughed so loudly that Mason stirred and woke for a moment, sitting upright before sinking back into a deep sleep.
Poor Henry! Three weeks with Eva’s sweet but deathly dull parents in their Swedish bungalow made Flora’s Christmas look like heaven on earth.
I miss him, she was worried to find herself thinking. I miss them all.
Tomorrow was going to be another long day. Turning off her phone, she forced herself to go to sleep.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Christmas Day dawned cold and wet across the Swell Valley. As excited children reached for their stockings and tore open the first of the day’s presents, the storm that had begun as blustery winds and a few scattered showers morphed into a full-blown downpour. By the time Fittlescombe parishioners began arriving for the Christmas morning service at St Hilda’s Church, half the roads in the village were flooded and the village green was a quagmire.
‘The Swell’s burst its banks upstream, about a mile north of Brockhurst,’ Seb Saxton Brae announced gravely, holding an official hunt umbrella over his wife’s perfectly hairsprayed head as they made their way into the church. ‘We might all be sandbagging the village later.’
‘Sod that,’ Gabe Baxter said cheerfully, shaking the rain out of his hair like a dog and liberally spraying anyone within a twelve-foot radius. ‘Bloody Brockhurst could do with a bit of biblical retribution after last year’s cricket match.’
Feelings among Fittlescombe’s cricket fans still ran high after last summer’s Swell Valley face-off, when a very controversial run-out had been given against Fittlescombe’s star batsman, a young man who revelled in the name of Dave Grunt, leading to Brockhurst being awarded the match.
‘They should be swept away like … who got swept away in the Bible, Vicar?’ Gabe asked Bill, who looked more stressed out than usual, decked in his Christmas finery.
‘I’m sorry?’ Bill asked distractedly. Jen had been having contractions half the night but was still refusing to go to the hospital until lunchtime at the earliest.
‘Who got swept away in a flood?’ Gabe asked again.
‘Noah, you arse,’ Gabe’s wife Laura answered for him, dragging Gabe into a pew and away from the poor, harassed vicar, adding to Seb and Kate, ‘And if Brockhurst floods, of course we’ll come and help. I don’t think it will, though.’
‘Not Noah,’ protested Gabe. ‘He was rescued, wasn’t he? I want to know who actually drowned. Vicar? Vicar!’
Santiago de la Cruz leaned forwards from the pew behind. ‘I think it was some dickhead who wouldn’t stop talking. Merry Christmas.’ He kissed Laura on the cheek. ‘How long are you down for?’
‘A week,’ Laura mouthed, as the first strains of ‘Good King Wenceslas’ rang out from the new and very loud church pipe organ.
At the back of the church, Lucy Smart shook out her umbrella while Richard ushered the children into one of the few remaining open pews. It always took Richard an age to get anywhere, as he kept stopping to smile and wave and ‘Merry Christmas’ everybody he laid eyes on, from actual friends, to the village baker, to the man he once bumped into coming out of the loos in The Fox. Watching him meet-and-greet his way along the pew, the human embodiment of bonhomie, Lucy felt a combined surge of love and guilt.
He’s the loveliest man in the world. The best husband. The best father.
She hated herself for missing Henry as much as she did. Of course it wasn’t really Henry she missed. It was the agony and the exhilaration. Lucy wasn’t sure whether that made it better or worse.
Sex with Richard was lovely and loving and easy and fun. Sex with Henry was painful and complicated and addictive and incredible, like having an adrenaline needle plunged directly into your heart. The terrible thing was that Lucy was beginning to need both.
Unlike Henry, however, she knew right from wrong. She’d stuck to her guns since ending their affair and had done everything she could to keep away from Henry. Learning about his quickie with Kate Saxton Brae had definitely helped to harden her resolve, and before Christmas she’d almost reached a point where she felt she was over him completely, where she’d finally moved on. But, weirdly, Henry’s disappearing to Sweden with Eva for the holidays had been incredibly hard for Lucy. Harder, perhaps, because she hadn’t expected it. Driving past Hanborough Castle every day, knowing that Henry wasn’t there, she’d felt an awful emptiness inside. Before he left, Lucy had begged him to stop texting her, especially when he was drunk, which he’d taken to doing a lot. But now that the texts finally had stopped completely, she was appalled by how much she missed them.
The second carol had already started. Richard was singing along loudly and tunelessly. ‘The angel Gab-ri-el from heaven caaaaaame!’
Harry, the older of their two boys, grinned up at Lucy as the chorus came around, delightedly changing the words from ‘Most highly favoured lady’ to ‘Most highly flavoured gravy’.
Lucy grinned back at him.
I have to get a grip, she thought. But as the organ fell silent and the congregation sat down, she couldn’t stop herself from wondering what Henry was doing right now.
‘Aha, yes. Bra. Very good. And where would the children’s rooms be in this plan?’
Eva’s mother, Kaisa, was sitting in the Gunnarsons’ pine-clad ‘family room’, poring over Flora’s latest designs for Hanborough. Henry had already sat for almost an hour, bored rigid, while Eva scrolled through images of the party barn, which both her parents seemed to love as much as she did.
‘I like the clean lines,’ her father Erik had intoned, obviously pleased with his command of relevant architectural English expressions. ‘This is actually rather Swedish,’ he told Henry, smiling broadly.
Eva’s parents did a lot of smiling. They were such good people, so eager to please and be pleased. Henry felt like a heel for finding them so crushingly, despair-inducingly boring. But after a week of Gunnarson family small talk, he was seriously considering slipping out while Eva took a nap and swimming back to England.
And now Kaisa was talking about children’s rooms and where Eva wanted the nursery. Every well-intentioned word sounded like the clanging of another prison door.
‘We haven’t really thought about that yet, have we, darling?’ Eva squeezed Henry’s hand.
‘No, not yet.’
He squeezed back. Eva was so happy here, and so happy to have him here, it was touching. She hadn’t brought up the Kate incident once, which Henry knew had been hard for her. After hurting her so badly, spending Christmas here was the very least he could do for her and he knew it. He tried to return the favour by smiling till his jaw ached, helping out around the house and doing his best to show some enthusiasm for Eva’s homeland.
But, by God, it was hard. The Gunnarsons didn’t even live in Stockholm proper, which at least had the advantage of being a beautiful city, but in a dreary suburb that seemed to be stuck in some nightmarish 1960s socialist time warp.
Waking up on Christmas morning in a fiendishly uncomfortable futon bed in the Gunnarsons’ hideously ugly guest room was not Henry’s idea of fun. Nor was being dragged to a revolting breakfast of kaviar (actually some sort of god-awful fish paste) and crispbread at some ungodly hour, followed by another boring session looking at Hanborough plans around the fire. Next on the yuletide hit list would be a spännande trip out to the Swedish church in six-degrees-below weather. And after that, Kaisa was threatening to make ‘Lutefisk’ for Christmas lunch, a slimy, gelatinous fish dish which was considered a great holiday delicacy in Scandinavia, but which looked and tasted, to Henry, like a quivering plate of frozen snot.
‘What did you expect, mate?’ Richard Smart had replied unsympathetically to Henry’s moaning emails. ‘It’s Sweden. These are people whose national sport is paying income tax, for God’s sake. You were never gonna fit in there.’
> ‘Didn’t they invent porn?’ Henry asked plaintively.
‘Ah, no. That’s a myth,’ Richard shot back confidently. ‘They actually invented meatballs.’
Henry had resisted the urge to ask after Lucy. He hadn’t texted her, but that didn’t stop him missing her, and the wild, abandoned way she’d given herself to him. All the sweeter, of course, because they both knew it had to end. But he’d come here to recommit to Eva, to prove to her and to himself that he was capable of being faithful, of being the loyal, loving husband she deserved. And that was what he was going to do, even if it killed him.
Giving up other women is like giving up smoking, he told himself firmly. It’s a question of willpower.
There was no magic bullet. The only way to stop was just to stop.
He had texted Flora, mostly because he suspected she might be having a difficult Christmas too, and because she would have understood the things he found absurd about Sweden, and laughed about them with him. Eva truly was the perfect woman. But sometimes it was nice to have a less than perfect woman around: someone who could catch your eye and giggle when your mother-in-law handed you a plate of ectoplasm for lunch.
He’d checked his phone first thing this morning, hoping Flora might have replied, but there’d been radio silence from New York as well.
‘You do want children, though?’ Erik Gunnarson looked at Henry expectantly as he offered him a bowl of sugared almonds.
‘Of course.’ Henry tried to relax his jaw.
‘Eva will make a wonderful mother. Don’t you think?’ Kaisa chimed in. ‘Always she was very maternal. Even as a little girl. With her dolls.’
‘Mor!’ Eva looked embarrassed.
‘I can imagine,’ Henry said kindly.
‘Tell us about your mother?’ Kaisa ploughed on. ‘What was she like? Eva was telling us she died when you were very young?’
‘That’s right.’ Henry stood up. He was still smiling but his jaw was in danger of going into spasm. ‘I’m actually feeling a little warm. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll go out and get some air.’
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