It’s really not that deep, Verity told herself. And you’re not on a boat; you’re on a really high-up motor vehicle. But still her guts heaved as the sea tractor carried her to an uncertain fate or at least a weekend-long party hosted by a woman that Verity disliked more than any other person that she’d ever met since secondary school, when her games mistress, Miss Harriss, had taken violently and instantly against her. The feeling had been entirely mutual.
Still, the injustice of all those push-ups Miss Harriss had made Verity do at the slightest provocation took her mind off the nausea and the feeling that she might die at any moment. Not that Johnny noticed her discomfort. He was listening, rapt, as Jeremy waxed lyrical about his four different sun terraces.
They reached the island, not a moment too soon. The sea tractor left the water and came to a juddering halt that had the inevitable effect on Verity’s shuddering stomach. She leaned over the side of the vehicle so she could throw up the ploughman’s she’d had for lunch.
‘Oh God,’ she moaned. God had featured quite heavily over the last hour and yet he seemed to have forsaken Verity in her hour of need.
‘Poor Very.’ She felt a hand on her shoulder and then Johnny was rubbing soothing circles on her back though it was very much a case of shutting the stable door after the horse had well and truly bolted.
He helped her down the steps and even when her feet were firmly on solid ground, her legs were as unsteady as blancmange and she felt shaky and emotional the way she always did after she’d been sick. For once Verity didn’t mind when Johnny put his arm around her as they walked up the path to the house. Like any couple would.
‘We’ll go straight to the lower terrace,’ Jeremy decided, unlatching a side gate to a gravel path, bordered by lush succulent plants, which wound round the building. Even before they turned the corner, Verity could hear from the chink of glasses and ice, the chatter and laughter of a drinks party in full flow.
Or it was in full flow until the three of them came into view and then everyone stopped talking and turned to look at them. Perhaps it was because the people clutching martini glasses were dressed all in white and Johnny and Verity weren’t. Also, Verity was pretty sure, from sense of smell alone and without even daring to put a hand up to check, that she had vomit in her hair.
‘Darling! I’m so glad you’re here, Johnny.’ Marissa detached herself from a throng of people at the end of the terrace. She was wearing a simple draped dress that made her look like a Greek goddess just popped down from Mount Olympus. She glided towards them so she could detach Johnny from Verity’s limp grip, slink her hand up his chest and kiss him on the cheek. ‘Now the party can really get started.’
‘Looks like the party’s already well under way,’ Johnny said and he gently but firmly pushed Marissa away; a gesture that warmed the cockles of Verity’s tired little heart. ‘Happy Anniversary to you and Harry. Where is he?’
‘Around somewhere,’ Marissa said, eyeing Johnny up and down as if she were planning to have him served up medium rare. ‘Why don’t you go and get changed. I’ll make sure there’s a cocktail waiting for you when you get back. Martini, isn’t it?’
Johnny shook his head, smiled regretfully. ‘We both know martinis were always more your thing. I’d love a G&T if there’s one going.’
Verity had rarely been more proud of anyone. Then Marissa turned to her with a cold-eyed gaze. ‘Valerie. You made it,’ she said flatly as if she’d been hoping that Jeremy would have pushed Verity off the infernal sea tractor halfway through the crossing. ‘Goodness, you’re looking rather … forlorn.’ Marissa sniffed the air delicately, then took a hasty step back, not that Verity could blame her for that. ‘Luckily you’ve got time to freshen up and change into your LWD before dinner. It’s at seven thirty, sharp. Chef is very particular about these things.’
Half an hour to shower, wash her hair like it had never been washed before and change into a … ‘LWD? What’s that?’ Verity asked nervously because Marissa seemed to think she should already know what a LWD was.
‘Oh, Valentine! Everyone knows what a LWD is,’ Marissa said loudly, then finished up with a tinkling laugh.
Johnny wasn’t laughing though. Despite the possible vomit-hair, he put his arm round Verity again, pulling her in close so she could lean against something solid and steady. ‘You know perfectly well that her name is Verity,’ he said quietly so only Marissa could hear because it wasn’t Johnny’s style to publicly humiliate someone. ‘And I don’t know what a LWD is either so maybe you can enlighten us both.’
Marissa didn’t flush or turn away or apologise, because that wasn’t her style. She stood her ground and tilted her head upwards so the sun caught the beautiful planes of her face like the heavens were backlighting her. ‘It stands for little white dress,’ she explained slowly as if she was talking to a pair of idiots. ‘It’s an all-white themed weekend. Traditionally, the tenth wedding anniversary is tin but what would I want with anything made of tin? This was all in the email I sent you, Verity.’
‘I didn’t get an email about little white dresses or little white anything,’ Verity said, because she absolutely hadn’t. Just one very brusque email acknowledging that she and Johnny had now RSVP-ed and details of who to text once they’d reached Lower Meryton. ‘I don’t have any white dresses with me. I’m really sorry. I hope that won’t ruin your weekend too much.’
Verity was sincere enough but she did half hope that Marissa would send them packing, even if it meant a return trip on the infernal sea tractor.
‘I know for a fact that I sent you an email about the dress code,’ Marissa insisted so vociferously that even though Verity knew for a fact that she hadn’t, maybe, just maybe, Marissa had sent her another email and for some strange reason it had ended up in Verity’s spam folder. ‘Oh well, it can’t be helped. At least tell me that you brought eveningwear? We’re dressing up for dinner tomorrow night. White tie and formal gowns.’
‘No evening wear,’ Johnny said calmly as Verity was contemplating flinging herself off the sun terrace. Yes, she might get dashed to death on the rocks below but at least no one would expect her to wear a formal gown for dinner tomorrow. ‘We don’t mind eating in our rooms though if …’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Marissa said quickly with a tight smile. She looked around the assembled guests who had gone back to talking and laughing and clinking their glasses. ‘We could probably rustle up a spare dinner jacket and perhaps someone could lend you a gown, Verity …’ Marissa tailed off, her eyes locked on Verity’s body like she’d never been confronted by a size-ten woman in the flesh before.
‘It’s just as well Very is one of those women who could wear a bin bag and still look beautiful,’ Johnny said smoothly, which was such an outrageous lie that Verity was amazed he wasn’t struck by a lightning bolt where he stood. Still, she was glad of the outrageous lie and his unfailing, good-humoured support.
She said as much to him after Marissa relinquished them to the care of the housekeeper who would take them to their rooms. ‘Thank you for having my back,’ she whispered as they climbed up a gracefully curved staircase and marvelled at the sleek white interior of the house. ‘But, honestly, I’m ninety-nine per cent certain I never got an email about a dress code.’
‘Oh, I’d put money on it,’ Johnny said cheerfully. He shot Verity a sideways glance. ‘Don’t look so glum, Very. If nothing else, Marissa being so vile is great aversion therapy. Funny how you only remember a person’s better qualities when you haven’t seen them for a while.’
If Marissa had any better qualities she kept them hidden well, Verity decided as they were shown to their room. One room. Singular. A beautiful room with huge picture windows that looked out onto an impossibly blue sea and an impossibly blue sky now tinged pink and orange as the day gave way to evening. And in this beautiful room was a bed. One bed. Because Verity hadn’t thought to inform Marissa that she and Johnny would be sleeping in separate beds, preferably in separate roo
ms. She could imagine, all too clearly, the look of malicious glee on the other woman’s face if she had.
‘Look, this is fine,’ Johnny said before Verity could say that it wasn’t. ‘We’ve shared a room before. We might not have shared a bed but we’re both adults. I’m sure we can rise above any lustful urges we might have.’ He laughed, awkwardly.
‘And if we can’t, we could always sleep with a pillow between us,’ Verity joked, even though there was nothing funny about this. Then she thought about the events of the last hour and how she’d make her sisters, not to mention Posy, Nina and Tom, hoot with laughter when she told them about rocking up to the welcome cocktail party with bits of regurgitated cheese and pickle in her hair. It was one of those situations where if you didn’t laugh about it, the only other course of action was to collapse on the huge super-kingsize bed and weep until your tear ducts ran dry. ‘If nothing else, I’ll keep my family entertained for years telling them stories about this weekend.’
‘And it could be worse. For instance, we could be doing hard labour in a salt mine in Siberia,’ Johnny pointed out.
‘I once spent a summer holiday working on the fish jerky line of a pet food factory in Grimsby,’ Verity said, entering into the spirit of things. ‘This is definitely not as bad as that. I don’t even smell as bad as that. Talking of which, I’ll let you freshen up first as long as you’re really quick in the bathroom because I need to shower as a matter of some urgency.’
24
‘I should infinitely prefer a book …’
It very quickly became apparent that they were not among friends. The guest list was exclusively made up of men that Harry knew from the City and their wives, who were all groomed and glamorous and worked as fashion or media consultants and got up at six every morning to do yoga in a very hot room, then have a blow-out before their first breakfast meeting.
They were civil but utterly disinterested. Their collective gaze faintly pitying, their smiles condescending every time Verity appeared in their midst in another non-white ensemble.
At dinner that first night, while Johnny was far down the other end of the table and deep in conversation with Jeremy, Marissa had been quick to inform her other guests that Verity was a vicar’s daughter who worked in a shop. ‘And she has to wear a uniform,’ Marissa helpfully pointed out. ‘And the shop only sells romance novels. I had to check that I was still in the twenty-first century.’ She’d then gone on to explain that Verity was a product of a state school education and hadn’t been to either Oxford or Cambridge.
‘I’ve never met anyone quite like you before,’ Trudie, a holistic interior design consultant, told Verity at breakfast the next morning when Verity timidly asked how bircher muesli differed from ordinary muesli.
Johnny was faring no better. He’d been all but ostracised because he hadn’t made obscene amounts of money betting against the pound or shorting on the dollar or whatever it was the other men had done to make their fortunes. Also he didn’t live in West London, play squash or pay alimony to his first wife and complain bitterly about it.
The only way to get through the weekend was for the pair of them to bond over not being good enough and attempt to keep each other’s spirits up.
‘At least we’re not breaking rocks in a chain gang in the American Deep South,’ Johnny had said to Verity before dinner on the Friday night when everyone else was dressed in white and had a three-drink lead on them.
‘At least we’re not trapped in a malfunctioning space pod endlessly orbiting the earth with dwindling rations and fuel supply,’ Verity said to Johnny as they lay in bed that night, window open to let in the breeze and the sound of the sea, a pillow down the middle of the bed only because Johnny had admitted to being a fidgety sleeper and Verity quite liked to sleep without a stray elbow or knee banging into her.
‘At least we’re not crossing the Appalachian mountain trail on foot, carrying all our worldly goods on our backs, because our mule has gone lame,’ Johnny said the next morning after breakfast when they were meant to play mixed doubles but were banished to the net to serve as ball boys because they hadn’t brought any tennis gear with them.
‘At least we haven’t gone back in time to London in 1666 and if the bubonic plague hasn’t got us, then the Great Fire of London probably will,’ Verity said later that afternoon. Everyone else was lounging round the swimming pool on the Upper Terrace – only Johnny and Verity were brave enough to take to the water. Even wearing a sensible one-piece swimsuit and not a tiny white bikini, Verity felt a lot more comfortable with her body submerged. They lazily swam lengths, until Harry said that it was time to get dressed for dinner and they’d be serving cocktails on the Crescent Terrace (so many terraces) at seven.
The only vaguely white clothing Verity had packed was one of Lavinia’s old dresses; another fifties frock adorned with jaunty yellow, pink and blue sailboats on white lawn cotton. She’d even attempted a jaunty ponytail to match the sailboats but as she arrived at the Crescent Terrace and saw Jocasta, Rainbow and Solange draped elegantly on the art-deco-inspired lounge chairs in their white art-deco-inspired bias-cut dresses, Verity felt as out of place as a dominatrix at a vicarage tea party.
Though if a dominatrix in a latex catsuit had turned up at one of her mother’s tea parties, then Our Vicar’s Wife would never have made them feel out of place. Unlike Jocasta, Rainbow and Solange who gave Verity a cursory once-over, raised their eyebrows at each other, and then went back to discussing Jocasta’s Spanish au pair and how she’d better buck her ideas up.
Their husbands were clustered around the bar and had already made it clear that as Verity wasn’t a friend of their wives or attractive enough to flirt with, they had no use for her.
Verity stood in a corner with a glass of champagne (no Prosecco here, no sir). It was a lot like the school discos Merry and Con had always dragged her to. They’d immediately disappear with their friends and Verity would be left to her own devices, which usually meant holing up in the girls’ cloakroom with the book she’d brought with her expressly for that purpose.
Now, she thought longingly of the new Santa Montefiore novel she had upstairs: would anyone notice if she slipped away? But before she could put her plan into action, Johnny was at her side.
‘You look lovely,’ he said, tugging the end of her ponytail. ‘You also look like you’re about to bolt. Please don’t leave me on my own with them.’
Verity looked up at him. The closest he could come to full dinner dress was a white shirt that he’d begged the housekeeper to iron for him and a pair of cream-coloured chinos that really could have done with a press too. But Johnny was so comfortable in his own, tanned skin that he looked perfectly at ease and not like he wanted to melt into the walls as Verity did. ‘I’m pretty sure I have a protein bar and a packet of Strepsils in my handbag. I’m happy to split them with you if we sneak back to our room.’
‘It’s a tempting offer,’ Johnny agreed. ‘Perhaps one of us could fake a headache and—’
‘Darlings! Sorry to keep you waiting,’ Marissa cooed at the assembled company from somewhere behind them. ‘Harry distracted me, the naughty man.’
He hid it very well, but Verity just caught the flicker of something that looked a lot like anguish on Johnny’s face before he masked it with a bland smile as he turned to face Marissa and Harry.
‘Well, you deserved it,’ Harry said to Marissa with a wolfish grin and Verity was thinking it was a bit much to talk about their pre-dinner quickie in front of their guests when she caught the flash of something sparkly on the third finger of Marissa’s left hand.
It was hard not to miss it as Marissa was waggling her fingers at her friends who were moving in closer to admire and fuss over the ring.
‘An eternity band,’ Marissa explained. ‘Because Harry says that’s how long our love will last.’
‘Platinum band with a cobblestone setting of ten rose-cut and round diamonds,’ Harry announced. ‘One diamond for every year we’ve
been married and none of them less than a carat.’
‘You are too good for me,’ Marissa said and for once she didn’t coo or trill or say the words with an edge but as if she really meant them. Next to Verity, Johnny’s whole body was rigid and she instinctively reached out to comfort him, to place her hand on his arm. He hesitated then wrapped his arm around her waist, which was unexpected. As was the way he pulled her flush against him, her back to his chest, so she could feel the heat coming off him, which made Verity shiver though she wasn’t cold, far from it.
‘Dear, sweet Very,’ Johnny said in a throaty voice and when Verity looked up at him, he lowered his head and brushed his lips against her cheek because they were friends, very good friends, and everyone thought they were a couple and what better way to show that he was moving on with his life. Anyway, it was no big deal, just an innocent kiss on the cheek.
She looked up to see that while everyone was looking at Marissa and Harry, Marissa and Harry were staring at Verity and Johnny like they’d never seen two people, dear friends, exchange an affectionate gesture.
Then Johnny raised his glass. ‘To Marissa and Harry!’ he said and the other guests joined in with the toast as Johnny let Verity go, so she felt suddenly chilled from the loss of him. Not as chilled as she was when she caught sight of the expression on his face, which was positively frozen.
He still had the same deathly look on his face as they went into dinner and though Verity had thought this weekend would be a good idea – that Johnny would see, once and for all, that there really wasn’t room for three people in Harry and Marissa’s marriage – she ached for him. Wished that she could shoulder some of his pain herself, but at least Johnny knew that she was there for him. Always.
True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop Page 27