The Bachelor

by Tilly Bagshawe

  ‘I see,’ said Seb, in the tone of someone who quite clearly didn’t.

  ‘Anyway, you and I might not like the new designs, but apparently a lot of people do. According to Graydon James, Hanborough’s got a chance of being nominated for some prestigious design award.’

  Seb raised an eyebrow. ‘Does that matter?’

  Since when did Henry care about design awards? The castle was his home, not some GCSE art project.

  ‘It matters to Flora,’ said Henry. ‘Anyway, we’re still using some of her original ideas, like the Sissinghurst library in the tower and the oak-panelled master suite. And the wine cellar, with all the reclaimed flagstones.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, that’s something, I suppose,’ muttered Seb.

  ‘The finished castle will be a marriage of old and new,’ said Henry. ‘A compromise between Eva’s tastes and mine.’

  Seb smiled. ‘A compromise, eh? My dear Henry! You’re starting to sound like quite the married man.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ said Henry, downing the last of his wine.

  The conversation soon turned to hunting, as it always did with Seb, and before long Henry tuned out. He found himself thinking about Flora, and how much jollier tonight’s supper would have been if he had been dining with her instead of his brother. Henry wasn’t sure why she’d been avoiding him like the proverbial plague since she’d got back from New York. When he challenged her she’d pleaded pressure of work, but Henry could tell it went deeper than that. Something had changed between them. He missed Flora’s witty, bitchy asides and the sparring matches he used to enjoy with her back in the autumn. She’d always disapproved of him, of course. But for Henry, that was part of Flora’s charm. The fact that she couldn’t be charmed. That she saw through him, and stood up for Eva, and called him on his shit, both great and small.

  Ever since the day of the hunt, when Eva had caught Henry in flagrante with Kate and gone running to Flora as a shoulder to cry on, something had shifted between Henry and Flora. Disapproval had become dislike. At least, that was what it felt like from Henry’s perspective. He was surprised by how much the thought depressed him. Flora was the first female friend Henry had ever had. Now it seemed he’d managed to lose her already.

  His mobile phone started buzzing in his pocket.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said to Seb, pulling out the offending object. He had a new picture message. Clicking it open, he saw it was a naked selfie of George, her legs spread to reveal a perfectly groomed, pale pink pussy. She was looking right at the camera, right at Henry, her pupils dilated with desire. Can’t wait to see you, read the message.

  Henry closed the image, but not before his cock had stiffened to concrete under the table. George was coming to the valley next week as a guest at some grand shooting party over at Hinton. In a weak moment, Henry had allowed himself to be bamboozled into giving her lunch at Hanborough. It was pretty clear what George expected the main course to be.

  Henry hadn’t slept with her in months. It felt good, like giving up smoking. But now, with Eva and Lucy both away and Flora consistently looking at him as if he were something unpleasant she’d found stuck to the bottom of her shoe, the idea of taking out his frustrations on George’s lithe, available body was more appealing than ever.

  ‘Anything important?’ asked Seb.

  ‘No,’ said Henry, deleting the image. ‘Nothing.’

  Flora drew her parka more tightly around her, burying her face in the soft, downy fur around the hood in an attempt to keep out the worst of the freezing drizzle.

  Stupidly, she’d decided to walk into Fittlescombe to buy an emergency bar of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut, her new addiction, at the Preedys’ shop. Within twenty minutes of setting out from Peony Cottage, the weather had closed in. Now she was exactly halfway between Hanborough and Fittlescombe, and faced with an impossible choice that at this particular moment felt worthy of Solomon’s judgement – should she abort her mission and return to Peony Cottage chocolate-less but pneumonia-free? Or press on and risk being lost like Scott of the Antarctic on her return journey?

  ‘Flora!’

  Oh Christ. That was all she needed.

  Barney Griffith, dressed like a North Sea fisherman in head-to-toe yellow oilskins with a matching rain hat, darted out of his cottage garden and up the hill towards her, a bedraggled-looking Jeeves trotting reluctantly at his heels.

  ‘I thought it was you,’ he panted, rain coursing down his ruddy cheeks as he drew closer. ‘Bloody awful weather. I had to take the dog out for a pee. What’s your excuse?’

  ‘Oh, well, I … er … chocolate,’ blurted Flora. She hadn’t seen Barney since before she left for Christmas, and had been slightly dreading running into him, particularly after his drunken declaration of love on the telephone.

  ‘You haven’t returned any of my calls,’ he said, cutting to the chase.

  ‘I’ve been busy,’ Flora said awkwardly. ‘With work.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ Barney replied robustly. ‘You’re avoiding me. It’s because I rang you up at Christmas and made a tit of myself, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ insisted Flora. ‘Of course not.’

  In reality, Barney’s drunk-dial insistence that he loved her, and that Flora couldn’t, under any circumstances, marry ‘Peter Parker’, was a part of why she’d failed to return a single phone call or email from him since she got back to England. But only a part of it.

  It was Mason who’d really changed things. Changed the way Flora was with Barney, and Henry; changed the way she saw England and the valley and Hanborough and this entire chapter in her life. She could still hear his reproachful words ringing in her ears.

  ‘You’ve changed since you went to England. It’s like your whole head is somewhere else, all the time.’

  It hurt because he was right. Somehow, since taking on the Hanborough project, and especially since Graydon had dangled the possibility of winning International Designer of the Year in front of her, Flora had changed. She’d lost sight of what really mattered in life – her and Mason. More than that, she’d begun to lose touch with the person she was before she came to the Swell Valley. Henry, Eva, Barney Griffith, Penny de la Cruz – these people had become her reality, her world, her tribe. Peony Cottage already felt like home, to a frightening degree. Even the bad things in England, like her enmity with Georgina Savile or having to keep Henry’s secrets or Graydon breathing down her neck, demanding the impossible, now seemed more real to Flora than the bad things in her New York life, like her mother’s problems or the flirty society girls flocking around Mason, wanting nothing more than to usurp Flora’s position.

  In short, she’d become disconnected. But it had taken Mason calling her on it to make Flora wake up and smell the coffee. To make her sense the danger, remember what it was that she stood to lose. Security. Happiness. Her entire future. The morning after her fight with Mason, she’d extended her visit home by two and a half weeks, braving a bone-rattling meltdown from Graydon.

  ‘Absolutely not!’ he seethed. ‘You cannot possibly step away from the project at such a crucial stage. I won’t allow it!’

  ‘Then you’d better fire me and find someone else,’ Flora said defiantly, knowing that he couldn’t. At least, not if he wanted to stand a chance of getting nominated for the work on the castle. ‘I’m not asking you, I’m telling you, Graydon. I need this time with Mason.’

  Those extra two and a half weeks had been hugely healing, and gone a long way to bridging the rift that Flora had unwittingly allowed to form between the two of them. Now that she was finally back in England, she was determined not to make the same mistake twice and be sucked back into the vortex of Swell Valley life.

  I work here. I don’t live here.

  I’m here to do a job. That’s all.

  Barney Griffith was just one of a series of connections that Flora was trying to break, or at least weaken to a point where it was no longer a threat to her engagement. Not that she fancied Barney. Although,
of course, thanks to his drunken Christmas phone call, she had now had it confirmed that he fancied her.

  ‘Good,’ Barney said, as the rain began to fall harder, ice-cold drops bouncing off the tarmac of the lane like tiny, frozen silver balls. ‘In that case you’ll come in and have a cup of tea with me.’

  ‘Oh, thanks, but I honestly can’t,’ protested Flora. ‘I’m on an emergency Fruit and Nut run and then I really have to get home.’

  ‘I’ve got Fruit and Nut,’ said Barney. ‘And I’ll drive you home. Stay out in this and you’ll catch the sort of chest cold that girls in Jane Austen novels get and drop down dead. Come on.’

  He turned and marched back towards his cottage, dragging Jeeves behind him. Too wet and cold to resist, Flora found herself following. A few minutes later she was sitting by a crackling log fire, sipping a delicious mug of Lapsang Souchong tea and warming her bare feet while her wet socks dried on the rail of Barney’s Aga.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, smiling as he handed her a plate of Mr Kipling’s Country Slices. All around her, spread out across the coffee table and then spilling onto the floor, where they covered most of the living-room carpet, were Barney’s photographs. They were landscapes mostly: brooding, darkly conceived shots of the valley. In one of them a dead oak tree, long since struck by lightning, clawed at the sky, its arm-like branches wreathed in thin strands of cloud, like a skeleton dressing itself for the first time in its ghostly white raiments. There were two versions of the picture side by side: one in colour and the other in black and white. In the latter version the cloud looked like a shadowy swarm of bees from which the poor tree was trying to escape.

  ‘Those are terrific,’ said Flora, forgetting for a moment to feel embarrassed about being there.

  ‘Do you think so?’ Barney brightened. Having peeled off his oilskins he was wearing a pair of dark Levi’s with a thick black roll-neck sweater. The look rather suited him. He reminded Flora of a young Ted Hughes.

  ‘That tree’s at the top of the field behind my garden here,’ Barney told her. ‘I liked the way the cloud was sort of smothering it.’

  ‘It’s an incredible photograph. Why do you have all these pictures laid out?’ Flora asked, looking around at the blanket of images.

  Barney turned away, looking awkwardly into the fire.

  ‘You’ll think it’s silly.’

  Flora frowned. ‘I’m sure I won’t.’

  ‘Penny’s asked to showcase some of my work at her gallery. They’re officially opening soon. She’s asked me to pull together eight to twelve images of the valley as part of their first exhibition.’

  ‘That’s incredible!’ Flora beamed. ‘Barney, that’s huge. You must be so excited.’

  Forgetting her new detachment resolution, she jumped up and hugged him. Barney closed his eyes, feeling Flora’s small, soft body pressed against his. She’d regained a little weight over Christmas, which was no bad thing in Barney’s book, and cut her hair a bit shorter. It felt silky under Barney’s chin and smelled of something floral – lavender water, perhaps, mixed with rose. Releasing him, she sat back down. Barney just stood there swaying, his senses still reeling.

  ‘You see?’ said Flora, apparently oblivious to the effect she was having on him. ‘I told you you were super-talented as a photographer.’

  ‘I’m just an amateur.’ Barney shrugged.

  ‘Only until someone at Penny’s gallery buys one of your pieces,’ said Flora. ‘Then you’re a professional.’

  ‘I highly doubt that’s going to happen,’ said Barney, pouring a cup of tea for himself from the pot on the table. ‘I’d be a lot more excited if someone had agreed to publish my bloody book.’

  ‘Is it finished then?’ Flora asked, innocently.

  A look of dejection swept over Barney like a storm front. ‘No.’

  Silence descended. Flora took a bite of Country Slice and chewed it contemplatively. She was starting to feel a bit guilty about how nice it was to be here, in front of Barney’s fire, eating cake and talking about art as if she’d never been away.

  ‘How are things coming along up at the castle?’ asked Barney. He didn’t dare ask Flora about her New York trip, in case she waxed lyrical about how wonderful it was to be back with Perry Mason, or whatever the arsehole’s name was.

  ‘Slowly,’ she said. ‘Too slowly.’

  Barney smiled despite himself. ‘That’s a shame. You’ll have to stay longer, then?’

  ‘I can’t.’ Flora shook her head. ‘My wedding’s this spring and I still have so much to do. I’m hoping Graydon will let me go back once the International Designer of the Year award is over. Whatever isn’t done by then can be managed by someone else.’

  Barney asked her, ‘When are the awards?’

  ‘June. Nominations are in April,’ said Flora, matter-of-factly. ‘I pretty much have to work twenty-four/seven until then. So don’t take it personally if we don’t see that much of each other.’

  Barney sat down. He could feel all the happiness he’d felt when Flora hugged him seeping out of his body like air from a slow-punctured tyre.

  ‘Graydon’s flying into London at the end of this week to start lobbying for a nomination. Schmoozing the sponsors and the judging panel, lunching with design mag editors, trying to whip up interest in Hanborough. He’ll be here for a site meeting next Saturday.’

  ‘Is that bad?’ asked Barney.

  Flora made a face. ‘It could be. Mason wants me to fly home every three weeks now for a visit, with the wedding so close and all. I’ll have to ask Graydon for the time off.’

  ‘And you think he’ll say no?’ asked Barney, who was starting to think he might have misjudged Graydon James. Anyone who wanted to keep Flora in England was good news in Barney’s book.

  ‘He went gonzo when I told him I was staying on in New York past New Year,’ said Flora. ‘I seriously thought his head was going to fly off his body.’

  ‘Maybe now’s not the best time to be abandoning ship, then?’ suggested Barney, as casually as he was able to. ‘With the award looming, and all that? I’m sure your fiancé will understand. He supports your career, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Sure,’ answered Flora, a little too quickly. ‘Totally.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Barney. ‘I’d play it by ear, if I were you, when Graydon gets here. No point taunting the tiger if you don’t really need to.’

  Flora got up to go, padding into the kitchen for her almost dry socks. Suddenly she felt annoyed with herself. She hadn’t wanted to talk about Mason, or Graydon, with Barney, but had ended up doing both.

  ‘I’ll drive you back,’ said Barney, getting up too.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Flora, looking past him out of the window as she pulled on her boots and parka. ‘The rain’s stopped. I’d prefer to walk.’

  Barney opened the door, and watched as Flora began to slosh her way down his garden path. ‘Will you come?’ He blurted out the question. ‘To the opening of Penny’s gallery? To see my stuff?’ When Flora didn’t answer instantly, he added, ‘The whole place has been done to your designs, you know. You really should see it.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Flora. ‘I’d love to come. See someone pay fifty thousand dollars for your ghost tree.’

  ‘Ha!’ Barney laughed. ‘I wish.’

  George Savile arched her back and pulled Henry deeper inside her.

  ‘Harder!’ she commanded. ‘I want it harder.’

  I don’t give a shit what you want, thought Henry. But he obliged anyway, flipping George over onto her stomach and driving into her from behind with all the force of a runaway freight train. George shot forward, the top of her head bumping up against the padded headboard.

  ‘Ah!’ she gasped. Three powerful thrusts later and they both came, George’s orgasm spasming through her like an electrical current, her muscles gripping Henry’s dick like a hungry mollusc devouring its prey.

  Dripping with sweat, his heart pounding, Henry pulled out of her and flopped back onto
the bed. Staring up at the ceiling, complete with a glittering French antique chandelier, he let his mind go blank.

  They were at The Dorchester, in a quiet but luxurious bedroom suite at the rear of the hotel. In the past, they’d tended to make love at Henry’s flat in Belgravia or in the office. Once they’d done it in George’s marital bed, but Henry found the framed wedding pictures of George and Robert off-putting, not to mention the godawful taupe interiors and gold ‘accents’. It was like shagging in a Kardashian’s bedroom. The way Henry saw it, if one were going to play away, one might as well do it in style. He liked The Dorchester because it was luxurious and the staff were discreet. He also preferred the impersonal atmosphere of a hotel. In his mind, it kept his ‘relationship’ with George, whatever that was, at a safe distance from his real life, in a ‘what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’ sort of a way.

  ‘I must say, I was touched you went to so much trouble,’ said George, lighting a post-coital cigarette and doing her best, nonchalant, Lauren Bacall impression. ‘A suite at The Dorchester? For me? If I didn’t know you better, I’d be tempted to say you were turning romantic in your old age.’

  ‘You do know me better,’ Henry said coldly. As always after sex with George, especially like the great session they’d just had, he felt dirty and ashamed of himself the moment it was over.

  ‘All right then, Mr Grumpy,’ said George, rolling onto her side and resting a hand on Henry’s chest, smiling as if he hadn’t just insulted her. ‘Let’s forget romance and talk business. I’ve got an idea for a new project for us. A fabulous idea, if I do say so myself.’

  Henry frowned. They’d talked about diversifying before, and he’d reluctantly agreed to consider things that had obvious synergies with Gigtix.com. Competition had become increasingly fierce in the e-ticket space, and if they were going to keep thriving as a business, they needed to adapt. The problem was that, up till now, George’s suggestions had all revolved around making large cash bids for existing companies. Buying and restoring Hanborough had seriously depleted Henry’s cash reserves, and though George had offered to put in more money and cover any shortfall from Henry’s side, Henry didn’t like the idea of owing her, or of being viewed as the junior partner.