The Bachelor

by Tilly Bagshawe

  ‘I’ll come with you.’ Eva stood up too. She could have strangled her mother, asking Henry about his mum like that, as if she were enquiring about the weather.

  ‘It’s OK.’ Henry kissed her on the cheek, sensing her embarrassment. ‘I just need a few minutes on my own.’

  ‘Don’t forget church!’ Erik called after him cheerfully. ‘We leave at ten.’

  ‘Absolut,’ said Henry, to approving glances all round. He’d learned that the occasional word of Swedish went a long way.

  Outside, the snow had stopped falling and the wind dropped to almost nothing. The still, cold air echoed the silence of the suburban street. All the Gunnarsons’ neighbours were safe and snug indoors, and a week’s steady snowfall had left a thick, heavy blanket on the ground, muffling every sound except for the quiet crunch of Henry’s feet as he walked.

  He thought about his mother, something he generally tried not to do. Even after all these years, it was still too painful. What would she have made of Sweden, of Eva and her parents? Would she be proud of Henry’s life and achievements? Or would she disapprove of his choices?

  She’d have loved Hanborough, that much Henry knew. And everybody loved Eva. Although perhaps Gina Saxton Brae would have pictured a different kind of wife for her younger son? Someone English, maybe? Or someone who shared his sense of humour, like Flora?

  Henry’s phone buzzed in his pocket.

  Pulling it out with frozen fingers, his heart skipped when he saw it was a text from Lucy.

  Merry Christmas. I miss u. L.

  It wasn’t exactly a Shakespearean love sonnet. But it was enough.

  Lucy wasn’t ready to walk away either.

  Despite himself, Henry felt a warm glow of happiness rush through him.

  She still wants me.

  Turning off his phone, he headed back inside.

  ‘Why was Santa’s Little Helper feeling depressed?’ Barney’s sister Claire challenged him from across the table. They were halfway through a big, boozy family Christmas lunch, and Claire’s husband Michael had declared it cracker joke time.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Barney said dutifully.

  He was feeling a bit depressed himself. After Flora had failed to reply to any of his texts, he’d drunkenly looked at her Facebook page earlier, and been bombarded by picture after picture of her at glamorous New York parties with her ghastly stiff of a fiancé.

  Terrible word that. Fiancé. It sounded like the sort of cheap drink you’d make with Martini Bianco or Malibu and fizzy wine from Tesco. Make mine a Fiancé, please. With one of them little umbrellas in it.

  ‘Because he had low Elf-Esteem!’ Claire laughed loudly. ‘Geddit? Low “elf” esteem? Oh, for fuck’s sake, Barn, cheer up.’

  ‘You said “fuck”!’ Barney’s nephew Peter announced, with a triumphant look at his mother.

  ‘Your mother’s a fucking grown-up,’ said Michael, refilling Barney’s wineglass, which was the last thing he needed. ‘She can say what she likes. Now eat your Christmas pudding or you won’t get any presents.’

  Lunch dragged on. Then it was presents round the tree, with Barney’s nephews tearing at their gifts like overexcited puppies in a display of naked greed that would normally have amused Barney immensely, but this year went right over his head. Slumped on the sofa by the fire, he stared into space, there but not there, getting progressively drunker as the afternoon wore on.

  At five o’clock, he slipped outside into the freezing Cumbrian weather and drunk-dialled Flora’s American number.

  She didn’t sound ecstatic to hear from him.

  ‘Barney? Is that you?’

  He could hear loud voices all around her. Another party.

  ‘This isn’t really a great time.’

  ‘I jush called … I … Merry Chrishmash,’ Barney slurred.

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ Flora replied dutifully. ‘Are you having fun at your sister’s?’

  ‘No. You can’t marry him,’ Barney blurted.

  The voices in the background were getting louder. ‘What?’ said Flora. ‘It’s really hard to hear you …’

  ‘I said: You can’t marry … you know. The guy. Peter-fucking-Parker,’ Barney shouted. ‘You can’t marry him!’

  There was a pause. ‘Are you drunk?’ Flora asked.

  ‘Only on love,’ Barney sighed dramatically.

  ‘You are drunk.’

  ‘I love you, Flora. I mean it. I want to marry you!’

  ‘I have to go,’ Flora said tersely. ‘Merry Christmas, Barney.’

  She hung up. Barney stood in the cold, staring at the phone in his hand for a long, long time.

  Shit, he groaned. Shit, shit, shit.

  ‘Everything OK?’ Mason asked Flora, reappearing at Flora’s side just as she cut Barney Griffith off.

  ‘Yes!’ She smiled, again – the same manic Jack Nicholson smile she’d been wearing as a mask for the past three days. ‘Everything’s fine! How are you?’

  ‘I’m good,’ said Mason, giving her a confused look. ‘Are you sure you’re OK, Flora? You sound … weird. And you look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘I’m OK,’ she said. ‘Just tired I guess. And worried.’

  She looked over Mason’s shoulder to where her mother, Camila, was deep in conversation with Mason’s father, also called Mason but known to everyone as MJ. From her mother’s body language – the animated Puerto Rican hand gestures, the face thrust forwards and just a little too close to MJ’s, the defiant jut of the jaw – Flora could tell Camila had been drinking, probably since early this morning. In her bright print dress and cheap high heels, she looked painfully out of place amid this Waspy, conservative, republican crowd.

  ‘I wish you hadn’t asked her here,’ Flora whispered in Mason’s ear.

  ‘She’s your mother, Flora,’ Mason said reprovingly. ‘It’s Christmas.’

  Flora rounded on him angrily, the pressure of the last week suddenly overwhelming her, shattering her fixed-smile façade like water crashing through a dam.

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ she shouted.

  A number of the Parkers pre-lunch guests turned to stare at them.

  ‘There’s no need to raise your voice,’ said Mason, mortified. ‘Let’s go outside.’

  It was a command, not a request. Grabbing Flora firmly by the elbow, he dragged her into the kitchen, past the surprised-looking staff, and out into the rear courtyard.

  ‘What was all that about?’ he asked.

  He looked hurt, and Flora felt bad, but she needed to get this out.

  ‘You never listen to me!’ she shouted, tears stinging her eyes. ‘She’s my mother, Mason. Mine! I told you I didn’t want her here. I told you it would be embarrassing. But you insisted.’

  ‘The only thing that’s embarrassing right now is you yelling,’ said Mason.

  ‘You see? There you go again. Not listening! Has it ever occurred to you that maybe that’s why I yell? So you can hear me for once. I didn’t want this.’

  ‘Didn’t want what?’ Mason looked confused.

  ‘This!’ Flora threw her arms wide. ‘All these parties. All this fuss. Wedding this, wedding that, change for lunch, change for dinner, “you must be so excited!” My God. It’s deafening, Mason. It’s stifling. I can’t breathe.’

  Mason’s face hardened, his lips drawing into a tight, hurt line.

  ‘I guess people made the mistake of thinking that maybe you were excited about our wedding.’

  Flora ran a hand through her hair in frustration. She tried to explain.

  ‘I’m excited about our marriage. I’m excited about you.’

  ‘Well, you have a funny way of showing it.’

  ‘Don’t you ever wish we were spending Christmas on our own? Somewhere beautiful and peaceful, with mountains and lakes? Or just … lying in bed?’

  An image of Barney at his sister’s farmhouse floated into Flora’s mind, followed by one of Penny and Santiago de la Cruz, wrapped blissfully in one anot
her’s arms.

  ‘No,’ Mason said coldly, ‘I don’t. You’ve been gone for seven months, Flora. Seven months! No one’s seen you. No one’s had a chance to celebrate. None of our friends or family. I want to mark our engagement, to share our joy. Only you could turn that around to sound like a bad thing.’

  Flora turned away, stung.

  Was he trying to misunderstand her?

  ‘You’ve changed since you went to England,’ Mason went on. ‘It’s like your whole head is somewhere else, all the time. The sooner you finish this damn Hanborough project the better. Maybe then we can all get on with our lives.’

  He walked back inside, slamming the kitchen door behind him.

  Flora stood alone, staring up at the sky, a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. Snow began to fall, the heavy flakes landing on her upturned cheeks like iced tears. For some inexplicable reason, she found herself thinking about Henry, and his funny text from last night.

  Beam me up, Scotty.

  Despite everything, she smiled.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The annual West Swell Valley Hunt Ball was the highlight of the valley’s midwinter social calendar. Held in January, usually about a week after New Year, to give people a chance fully to recover from their hangovers, it always used to be hosted at Furlings, back when old Rory Flint-Hamilton was still alive. But these days the idyllic Fittlescombe estate was owned by Angela Cranley and her defacto husband, Max, neither of whom were hunt supporters. As a result, in recent years the ball had moved to a variety of different venues, from private homes to grand hotels and even one year (shamefully) to Hinton Golf Club.

  It was this last disastrous fall from grace that had prompted Sebastian Saxton Brae to take over as master. This year, for the first time, Seb was able to host the ball himself at Hatchings, having inherited both the house and the title from his and Henry’s father.

  Across the Swell Valley, and at a number of smart London addresses, the arrival of the stiff, formal invitation, embossed with the words ‘Lord and Lady Saxton Brae request the pleasure of your company …’ had been a source of much excitement during the boring lull between Christmas and New Year. And now, at long last, the evening of the forty-third annual WSV Hunt Ball had arrived.

  Lady Saxton Brae, unsurprisingly, had pulled out all the stops to ensure that Hatchings looked its best for the big event. This was not as easy as it sounded. The estate was grand – a huge, sprawling early Victorian pile, approached by a long, oak-lined drive and through impressive ten-foot-high stone gates – but it could not truthfully be described as beautiful. Despite the huge proportions of every room, the high ceilings and oversized windows and doors, there was something inexorably solid and dour and dark about the house. With its mahogany staircase and thick panelled walls, it felt institutional, like a boarding school or a particularly impressively maintained old people’s home. Unlike Furlings, a house that positively begged to be used for parties with its pretty, flower-filled terraces and delicately framed rooms flooded with light, Hatchings had to be cranked into life laboriously by hand, like an old-fashioned motor car.

  Despite this, Kate had done her best, hanging bright white fairy lights over the front door and lining the entire terrace and front lawn with outdoor candles in pretty glass and silver hurricane lanterns. Inside, positively enormous displays of flowers filled every room, in light, feminine shades of pink and violet and pale green. Tables had been covered with simple white linen cloths and dressed with the Saxton Brae silver, a dazzling collection dating from the early eighteenth century. Two priceless medieval tapestries by Bruges masters, depicting hunting scenes, had been moved from their usual position on the stairway and rehung in the ballroom, the hub of the night’s festivities. The sound of 1930s jazz music echoed through the downstairs rooms, courtesy of a local live band, and fully liveried maids and footmen relieved arriving guests of their overcoats and furs.

  ‘Blimey,’ Lucy Smart whispered to Richard, slipping out of her grandmother’s old fox fur that had seen better days and helping herself to a passing flute of champagne. ‘How much do you think all this cost? Isn’t Seb always saying he’s “cash poor”?’

  ‘I suppose it’s all relative,’ said Richard, grabbing a glass for himself along with some sort of fancy-looking beef and truffle hors d’oeuvre. ‘Damn good spread though.’

  ‘Lucy! Richard! How lovely to see you both.’

  Kate glided forward, very much in ladyship mode, and kissed both of them on the cheek. In a full-length blue taffeta gown that looked like something Maggie Smith’s dowager countess might have worn, and with an absolutely vast sapphire sparkling at her neck, she could have passed for a woman twice her age. She wore her hair swept up, accentuating her long nose and the horsiness of her features. Overall the impression was regal, which was clearly exactly what she was aiming at.

  ‘She sounds like the bloody Queen!’ Lucy giggled, once Kate glided away. ‘High lovely to seeiyew,’ she mimicked, dropping into a deep curtsey.

  ‘Never mind sounds. She looks like the Queen.’ Richard shuddered. ‘Can you imagine what possessed Henry?’ he added, dropping his voice to a whisper.

  ‘No,’ said Lucy. She didn’t want to talk about Henry and Kate. Especially not with Richard. Although at least comments like this one meant that Richard hadn’t guessed about her own affair with Henry, which was a huge relief.

  Henry was coming tonight, with Eva. They’d flown in from Stockholm yesterday, apparently, although nobody had seen them yet. It would be the first time Lucy had seen him in almost six weeks, and the combination of nerves, guilt and excitement at the prospect had released a whole swarm of butterflies in her stomach. As soon as she’d sent him her Christmas Day text she’d regretted it, cursing herself for her weakness. Yet at the same time, just seeing a response from Henry in her message folder later that day had calmed her growing panic far more effectively than any tranquillizer. In a bizarre way, that small contact had enabled her to put him out of her mind, to refocus her energies on the children and Richard.

  And meanwhile, of course, Richard had been perfectly lovely and Lucy loved him more than ever. Which just made the butterflies in her stomach flap all the harder. Increasingly she felt as if she lived simultaneously in two parallel universes. It was an effort to remind herself that her children lived only in one of them.

  ‘Hello. Happy New Year!’

  A human beachball in a bright pink dress that would have made a very serviceable big-top tent for a small circus rolled up and accosted Lucy. It took Lucy a moment to recognize it as Jen Clempson, the vicar’s wife. Her eyes widened.

  ‘You’re not still pregnant?’

  ‘Two weeks overdue.’ Jen patted her swollen belly ruefully with her fat, sausage-like fingers. ‘I’m hoping to dance it out tonight.’

  ‘Is Bill here?’

  ‘Are you joking?’ Jen spluttered, through a mouthful of mini-hot dog. ‘Bill doesn’t fraternize with the enemy. He’s furious I came. Then again, he’s furious if I so much as pop to the village shop these days. If he had his way, I’d have been chained to a hospital bed since before Christmas.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s just nervous,’ said Lucy. ‘First baby and all that.’

  ‘So am I,’ said Jen, not looking that nervous as she shovelled in two more hot dogs and washed them down with a large glass of champagne. ‘If it doesn’t come out soon I’m going to pop open like an overcooked baked potato. It’ll be like Lord Grantham’s ulcer bursting open on Downton Abbey.’

  In the ballroom proper, the party was already in full swing. The invitations said 7.30 p.m., but guests had been arriving as early as six and many were already clearly three sheets to the wind as they ricocheted around the room, swapping Christmas holiday horror stories and bemoaning the awful weather they’d had for this year’s New Year’s Day meet.

  ‘You know it’s bad when the sodding antis don’t even bother to turn up,’ old Graham Hewson grumbled loudly
to Laura Baxter.

  Laura was exhausted, having just wrapped her latest reality show for Endemol, and was only here tonight on sufferance because Gabe had his eye on a future mastership.

  ‘Old Seb Saxton Brae can’t go on for ever,’ Gabe had informed Laura confidently after the New Year’s Day meet. ‘Wouldn’t you like to be married to the master of the West Swell Valley?’

  Laura had pointed out that ‘old’ Seb was only in his forties, so actually younger than Gabriel, that he could perfectly well go on for ever, and that being married to a master of hounds was low on her list of fantasies, as it was for most women.

  As so often, Gabe had ignored her and dragged them both up to Hatchings for tonight’s hunt ball, insisting Laura looked ‘gorgeous’ in her tatty old red evening dress from Monsoon, and claiming not to be able to see her undyed grey roots or the almighty bags under both her eyes.

  ‘I suppose the vicar had other things on his mind,’ Laura said to Graham Hewson, ‘what with Jenny about to pop.’

  But the old man had stopped listening. Like everyone else, he’d turned to gawp at Henry Saxton Brae and Eva Gunnarson, who’d just walked in with their arms around each other, looking like a couple of movie stars.

  Henry was his usual, dapper self, in an immaculately cut dinner jacket and evening trousers. His black hair positively gleamed in the candlelight, and his blue eyes danced whenever he looked at his stunning girlfriend, which was frequently. Eva, who would have looked heavenly in a sack, had positively outdone herself tonight in a cream and gold, floor-length Grecian gown, which seemed to shimmer when she moved, as if it were woven from pure light. Other than a demure scoop at the back, the fabric of the dress covered her entire body. But despite this, or perhaps because of it, the overall effect was phenomenally sexy, accentuating Eva’s every curve, her long legs and high, round breasts to perfection.

  ‘By God, that’s a beautiful woman,’ sighed Graham Hewson, with as much longing as a retired gardener in his eighties could muster.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Laura, feeling older and frumpier than ever. ‘She’s divine, isn’t she?’