Christmas at Claridge's

by Karen Swan

  Chiara’s eyes narrowed as she hastily took a bite. Luca was watching from over the rim of his glass.

  Seconds later, Chiara’s fork clattered to her plate.

  ‘Luca!’ she shrieked, reaching for the water jug and splashily pouring herself a glass.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Clem asked, her cutlery poised above the plate in nervous trepidation.

  ‘He has put hot chilli powder in instead of nutmeg!’ Chiara gasped, gulping down the water and pouring some more, all the while hissing at Luca in a rapid, colloquial Italian that Clem had no chance of keeping up with.

  Her eyes met his over the rim of his glass – devilment indeed – and she began to laugh. Really laugh. So hard she had to push her chair back and put her hand against her stomach. It was just the kind of thing she’d done as a child, making her mother tut and Tom shout.

  Luca joined in, delighted that their guest’s response meant he was more likely to get away with it – even Chiara had to smile.

  ‘Salad, anyone?’ she asked finally, her dignified stoicism making Clem and Luca laugh so hard that they didn’t notice the visitor standing by the door, watching them all.

  Chiara saw him first, addressing him in Italian as she explained what had gone on. Clem’s laughter died as Chiara took Rafa by the elbow and led him over.

  ‘Clem, I would like you to meet Rafa.’

  Clem tried to smile. Chiara didn’t know they knew each other already. She had never known. It had been the one thing, the only thing, Clem had never told her: the final secret. ‘We . . . we already met. At the house.’

  Chiara’s hand dropped. ‘Oh yes, of course.’ She shook her head vaguely and an awkward silence followed as Rafa felt no need, as usual, to make small talk.

  ‘You have eaten?’ Chiara asked him, speaking in English again as a courtesy to Clem, and holding up a plate.

  Rafa nodded. ‘Yes.’ His eyes fell to Clem’s bare, scraped knees and she hurriedly swung her legs beneath the table.

  Clem tossed the salad and put extra heaps onto Luca’s plate. ‘Garlic bread?’ she asked in a low voice, just the two of them again.

  The boy nodded, quieter now that Rafa was here, but sharing a secret, conspiratorial look with her.

  ‘Well, thank you for coming over,’ Chiara said, walking away with a sigh and reaching over the windowsill. ‘It is the bathroom in room fourteen. There’s a cracked tile letting in water to the back.’ She handed him a single white square tile.

  He took it from her, his features softening slightly. ‘Everything is up there?’

  ‘Yes. I moved the guests to room nine instead.’

  ‘Sea view.’

  She shrugged. ‘There was no other room free.’

  Rafa looked back at the others – Clem was watching Luca watching them, a heartbreaking expression on his face – and ruffled the boy’s hair roughly as he passed.

  Chiara sank back against the worktop as his footsteps disappeared up the stairs.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Clem asked, getting up with her plate and joining her as Luca tore huge chunks off the bread and topped it with tomato from the salad.

  ‘Sure,’ Chiara shrugged again, but the sadness emanated from her like a radioactive glow. ‘I just . . .’ She looked at Luca. ‘I just miss him being around. It feels so big here, just us two surrounded by all these strangers every day.’

  Clem rubbed her arm. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Every day it becomes more normal,’ she said, and Clem could see she was trying to be brave. ‘It gets easier.’

  ‘It can’t be serious with this new girl, can it?’ From the looks of her earlier, she was barely twenty.

  Chiara’s eyes flickered towards Luca again, her voice lower still. ‘I don’t know. I don’t care, not like that. I don’t want him back. I just . . .’

  ‘Don’t like him being gone?’ Clem offered. ‘That’s loneliness, its normal. You were together a long time.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We just have to find you a new man.’ Clem smiled, winking at her, trying to josh her along. ‘Best cure I know for a broken heart. Honestly, works for me every time.’

  Chiara rolled her eyes and shook her head, a sad smile on her lips. ‘But does it work really?’ she asked, doubt firing every word. And patting Clem’s arm, she walked over to the sink to start on the washing up.

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  ‘OK, so these are the prelim sketches for the salons we discussed last week,’ Chad said, sliding an artist’s A3 pad over the seats to her. They were en route to the boatyard for another meeting with the naval architects and stuck in traffic that was tailing back from an accident in one of the tunnels further on.

  Clem looked them over – one for the master en suite, the master bedroom, dressing room and principal lounge – loving the way Chad’s illustrations gave her thoughts shape. She wasn’t short of ideas, but it wasn’t always easy for her to visualize how everything could hang together. She’d spent that last meeting trying to articulate her ideas for a roughed-up luxury for the yacht, wanting to get away from the sleek lines that everyone always did for boats, and falteringly coming up instead with underlit marble in the bathrooms with the edges left stubbly, rather than polished smooth, and the use of coloured semi-precious stones like amethyst and pink topaz for the bar, dining tables and cabinets. It had a strong mineral feeling that she thought would complement the boat’s aquatic environment, but she’d worried it might come across as a white witch’s wet dream or a teenage girl’s stab at fairyland.

  She needn’t have worried. In Chad’s hands, it had a refined opulence that befitted the grandeur and financial investment such a boat involved: he’d in-filled the walls with his own suggestion of oyster linen, and a huge clipped rabbit-fur rug was shown on the floor, set into a tulip-wood surround. ‘Actually a totally practical idea because everyone gets cold feet on a boat, it doesn’t matter how grand it is,’ he said factually. ‘And, of course, they’re barefoot all the time, so it won’t be worn bald from shoes in ten minutes.’

  The car started rolling forwards again, inching into another mile-long tunnel and blocking out the sun.

  ‘I love it,’ Clem murmured, automatically switching on an overhead light. ‘Especially how the palette’s so muted and all the colour just comes from natural, organic things like the stone, you know?’

  Chad watched her. ‘You know, you’re really good at this, Clem. I can’t believe you haven’t had any formal training.’

  She swatted his arm without looking up at him, scrutinizing the colour key he’d painted at the corner.

  ‘I mean it. I’m pretty damn pleased you’re not staying on in Italy, I can tell you. I don’t fancy the competition.’ He checked his list. ‘Oh, and we still need to decide on the walls for the green suite in the house by the way. I hope you’ve been thinking about that? We need to place an order soon or it’ll delay the finish date.’

  ‘I keep forgetting. I’ll put it on my list to do next.’

  She fished her notepad out of her bag and scribbled, ‘Green suite – walls’, across the top. The list filled seven pages, and most of the time it gave her a headache just looking at it. She could fill every single minute of the day with work if she chose to: coming up with ideas, research and sourcing materials, making decisions for even the tiniest details in the house – which directions would the beds face? Where should the sockets go? What wattage should the lights be? – as well as collaborating on the boat (there was a crazy amount of rules and regulations to comply with, in addition to making it look pretty). And as for the hotel, well, bringing that on board had been a mistake, she thought now, with Chiara resisting everything she suggested. Lack of funds clearly wasn’t the real reason the hotel was languishing. Not to mention the fact that she never, ever got a full night’s sleep with Gabriel next to her, and the fatigue was beginning to tell. In fact, she’d been so busy, she hadn’t even spoken to Stella in almost a week, which was an absolute first in the history of their frie
ndship.

  ‘Did you decide on the woven leather for the headboard in the left attic room?’ Chad asked her, drawing a line through his own notes.

  ‘Um, yeah . . . the burnt orange with the black accent in the classic tight weave. Anything bigger and it’ll just get caught on fingers and begin to stretch.’

  ‘OK, I’ll send off that order to Simon later then, I’ve got the dimensions somewhere. And I’m going to need to get Gabriel to sign off on these invoices,’ Chad said, rifling through another file of papers.

  ‘That’s fine. Give them to me. He’ll be back from Paris in two days.’

  Her phone rang and she picked it up. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Bunny? Is that you?’

  ‘Dad?’

  Chad sat back in the seat at the change in her voice, sliding further away to give her a little privacy.

  ‘How . . . how are you?’ she asked, turning to look out the window and facing only her reflection in the dark walls instead.

  ‘Well,’ She heard him take in a deep breath. ‘I have to be honest, darling, it’s been a rotten few weeks. We’ve been rather low.’

  Clem squeezed her eyes shut. She had done that to them. She had. ‘I’m so sorry, Daddy.’ How many times could she say it? ‘Did you get the bag?’

  ‘Yes, we did. Your mother is very grateful.’

  ‘I didn’t know if you were away. I tried calling a couple of times but . . . Hello? Dad? Are you still there?’

  She pulled the phone and checked the signal strength. No bars.

  ‘Dammit!’ she cursed, putting the phone back on the seat where she could see it. She craned her neck to see whether she could see any light at the end of the tunnel, but everything ahead was resolutely dark. ‘Bloody tunnels.’

  ‘You can call back when we come out the other end,’ Chad said helpfully.

  ‘Oh, can I? Gee thanks, Mr Technology, I didn’t realize!’ she quipped sarcastically, slumping slightly in her seat and wondering what it was her father had been ringing to say. Come home, all’s forgiven? Was Tom going to ring, too? Had there been a family council and she’d been voted back in now that the Birkin was safely back in her mother’s possession and she’d proved her regret over and over? Or was she still out in the cold, with just a silk-clad secret to keep her warm?

  It was late when Stefano dropped her back at the house. Luigi had taken Chad on to Rome for a dinner date with Fiammetta, and Stefano had picked her up from the boatyard with the Riva, speeding her across the bay under the dark sky. There was no moon tonight.

  Signora Benuto had left dinner prepared for her, but Clem felt too tired to eat it. She wandered through the house like a spectre, her hands brushing over the freshly primed windowsills, her feet treading lightly over the dusty, sanded floors, cotton shrouds hanging limply over chairs, the plastic window rustling noisily in the breeze; power tools left silent under workbenches and ladders propped against the walls. The house had been steadily and completely colonized by the building works and Gabriel had formally moved into the folly with her. Almost all the preparations had been completed now and the basic team of workmen was getting ready to assimilate the various specialists who would be coming in over the next few months to take the project into its next phase.

  She wandered into her office and sat down at her desk, switching on the table lamp and pulling the swatch books closer. She thumbed through the pages of each book slowly, growing steadily more tired, resigned and uninspired, worn down by the bombardment of taste and beauty that had filled her days for five long weeks. One by one she discarded the books, finding nothing in them that moved her.

  After more than an hour, she gave up, turning off the light and walking back through the shadowy house. The workmen would be back here in seven hours, their careless cacophony dragging her from sleep. She wandered upstairs to the so-called green suite and stood by the door, staring in at the walls that had been taken back to bare plaster, hoping for inspiration.

  There was no bed in here, no furniture at all, and it was easy to appreciate the grand dimensions of the room with its triple-aspect status. One of the windows was still open, the bloomy magnolia tree poking one fragrant tendril through, and she walked across to close it, leaning down to smell the blossom.

  Her eye caught on something on the wall beside the window and she stepped closer to examine it. It was a pencil line, drawn lightly and faintly in a falling swirl. She tried following it with her eyes, squinting as it ran into the dark, but the moon gave only as much light as a crack beneath a door and the lines escaped from view, undeciphered. She looked around and saw a workman’s site lamp on the floor. She ran over to it and turned it on, drenching the room in a falling white light so bright that she had to blink several times. When she could finally focus, what she saw made her catch her breath.

  Feather-light pencilmarks were sketched all over the plaster walls, depicting blossom trees and a rose garden rendered with a gossamer touch. It was masterly and refined, romantic, poetic and haunting, utterly exquisite even just in HB. She turned a full circle in slow wonderment. How long had it been here? It seemed too even and complete to be of any age.

  Her eye caught sight of something darker, just below the windowsill and she bent down. It was out of place, a separate motif – naïve, almost cartoonish – drawn with a thicker, heavier pencil. It was a picture of a crest.

  ‘Real Madrid.’

  She laughed softly, her fingers tracing over Luca’s crude pencil marks and running over the indentations where he’d even signed his name.

  And where Luca went . . .

  She stood back again and took in the mural with new knowledge, fresh perspective. Never in a million years would she have guessed.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The phone buzzed insistently under her pillow – there was no bedside table – and she grappled for it without opening her eyes.

  ‘Yeah?’ she mumbled, already expecting Stella’s shrieks in her ear.

  ‘It’s Chiara.’

  Clem’s eyes opened. What time was it? She fumbled under the pillow for her watch.

  ‘Hi, Chiara,’ she said, surprise cutting through the sleep in her voice. She found the watch and peered at it. 8.04. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I am in panic. I need your help.’

  Clem pushed herself to sitting, her hair falling in a tangle over her face as she rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. ‘Anything, you know that.’

  ‘You must have Luca today.’

  ‘Huh? What?’ Alarm cut through the sleep in her voice instead.

  ‘Please, Clem. I must go to Bologna, my aunt is very sick. I cannot take Luca with me.’

  ‘But . . . but what about Rafa? He usually has Luca at the house with him anyway.’

  ‘He is in Firenze today.’

  ‘What? All day?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is there no one else? A friend from school?’

  ‘It is high season, Clem. Everyone is busy and school is finished.’

  ‘Oh God, I don’t know, Chiara. I’m . . . I’m really not good with kids. Anyone will tell you that.’

  ‘Clem!’ Chiara shouted. ‘Seriously? You tell this to me?’

  Clem bit her lip. ‘Sorry sorry. Of course I’ll have him.’

  Chiara breathed a big sigh. ‘Good. Thank you. I shall send him over in an hour.’

  ‘All right then. But what should I, you know . . . do with him?’

  There was silence.

  ‘Chiara? Are you there?’

  The dial tone beeped in her ear and she let the phone drop onto the pillow.

  ‘Oh God.’

  Much to the workmen’s amusement and Chad’s hilarity, she was frantic in the garden when Luca arrived, forty-five minutes later.

  ‘Ciao,’ he called out as he trotted down the main path, his football under his arm, as she stepped back to admire her work.

  ‘Hey, Luca,’ she smiled, breathless from her exertions. ‘I thought we could play.’


  He stopped and took in the efforts she’d made: white electrical tape on the grass marking out a football pitch and box; lengths of bleached eucalyptus from the log store delineating goals. She had set it up in the rose garden, the first level below the house and the only area with a lawn flat enough to play.

  ‘OK.’ He shrugged, jumping down from the terrace to join her, letting the ball drop to his feet. ‘Shall we throw the money?’

  Clem frowned, puzzled for a moment before realizing what he meant, then she rooted around in her jeans shorts’ pocket for a coin. ‘Heads or tails?’ she asked, patting her head and bottom by way of interpretation.

  Naturally, he chose the bottom. Clem flipped the coin – it was tails.

  ‘You go first,’ he said with a small bow, rolling the ball towards her.

  ‘Thanks,’ she preened, finding his Latin courtesy charming.

  ‘You need all help you can have.’ He grinned.

  ‘Oh do I?’ she laughed, amused by his cheekiness. ‘We’ll see about that,’ she said, rolling her foot over the top of the ball in an attempt at a dummy before kicking it. But before she could even swing her leg back, he had nipped forward, his skinny leg moving like a switchblade – in, out, back, forth – the ball seemingly magnetically attached to his foot as he sped towards the opposite goal and booted it in with a slice.

  The workmen on the scaffolding cheered. Clem glared up at them, then back at him, her foot planted on the floor with a stomp. ‘It’s like that, is it?’ she asked, pulling a fierce face.

  Luca wandered back, tapping the ball aimlessly from foot to foot, his eyes meeting hers and finding devilment there.

  He thrashed her, of course. 32–4. Even when the plasterers and carpenters joined in, no one could get the ball off him. He was like a mini tornado, a whirling dervish, too small, too agile and too skilled to catch.

  ‘Urgh,’ Clem groaned an hour later, collapsing on the grass, her arms and legs stretched out. ‘I give up. You win, do you hear me? You win!’