by JL Merrow
There was another sniff, this one slightly puzzled. “Boxing Day is today.”
It took me a moment to work out what she was getting at. “Ah. I know, but it’s still called the Boxing Day Brunch. Apparently a slight temporal displacement is immaterial to the spirit of the thing. Like May Balls in June. You know.”
“No, I sodding don’t. We didn’t all go to uni among the glittering spires of Oxbridge.”
“I was at Durham! But anyway, you’ve got other friends…”
“They’re all away at their families’. Or being all loved up with their husbands.” The way she said husbands, one might have thought it a euphemism for serial killers. “Can’t you miss it?”
“I…” I thought about it. It was tempting to make an early return to Shamwell, avoiding any awkward questions re career choices, no doubt about it. But Mother would be upset, Fordy would be hurt, and Peter would be disappointed. Laetitia would probably be delighted, but I felt that wasn’t really a consideration that should factor into my decision.
An idea formed in my mind. “Why don’t you come down here? Peter and Mother have got plenty of spare rooms, and I’m sure they’d love to have you. You can save me from my evil stepsister,” I added deviously but also hopefully.
“Won’t the roads be really busy? Christmas, and all that?”
Hah! She was wavering. “Shouldn’t think so. They were fine on Christmas Eve—it only took me two hours fourteen minutes door to door. And if you’re worried, take the train. Portia and I can pick you up from the station. It’s not far.”
“You do realise your car isn’t actually a person, right? Sod it, all right. I’ll come. Always wanted to find out how the other half lives. Do I need to, like, dress for dinner and stuff?”
“This isn’t Downton Abbey. Just wear your normal clothes.”
“And you’re sure it’ll be okay with your mum?”
“Mother will love you,” I said confidently. After all, Rose was at least three dress sizes larger than Mother, which pretty much guaranteed a warm reception. “Now, you go and pack, and I’ll tell Mother you’ll be here for dinner.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Rose arrived, in fact, in plenty of time for dinner, and despite my protestations, insisted on changing. Laetitia greeted her appearance downstairs with a friendly, “Oh my God, he’s brought a bloody tranny.”
To be fair, Rose was looking a little overdressed for a family dinner, and the leopard print really wasn’t doing her any favours, but I couldn’t see anything remotely masculine about her. And in any case, there was no call for that kind of language.
I bristled on her behalf, and Peter made warning noises, but Rose just stepped up to Laetitia with a smile. “Lovely to meet you too. Robert did tell me your name, but I’ve got a brain like a sieve, me. Is it Anastasia, or Drusilla?”
“Laetitia,” I corrected, stifling a laugh. “But you can call her Titty.”
Rose snorted. Laetitia, for once, was speechless.
“Drinks, anyone?” Peter said loudly and poured himself a large one.
Mother didn’t appear to be watching her figure this evening, either. But then, it was an awfully nice chablis.
It was fun, having a friend to stay. Rather like being at school again. Particularly when Rose knocked on my door at midnight with a bottle of sherry and some mince pies she’d liberated from the larder.
“Always fancied having a midnight feast,” she said with a shrug.
“Rose, you live alone,” I reminded her. “You can eat any time you want to.”
“Not the same, though, is it?” She grinned. “If we make too much noise, will your stepdad come and tell us off?”
“Probably. But he’d be very polite about it. And probably join us.” Surrendering to the inevitable, I downed the water from the glass by my bed and let her refill it with sherry. “So what do you think of the old place?”
“Seriously?” Rose frowned, her expression curiously at odds with the gambolling sheep on her pastel-pink pyjamas. “It’s a lot less grand than I was expecting. I mean, I could actually see me living in a place like this. When I win the lottery, obviously. And your mum cooks, and everything.”
“It’s Mrs. Patmore’s week off,” I said drily.
“You ought to watch that, giving the servants time off. They’ll only start to expect it every year.”
“Shocking, isn’t it? They’ll be wanting to be paid next. The audacity of the lower orders is astounding.”
Rose laughed. “Speaking of which, you heard any more from Sean?”
My levity evaporated like expensive brandy. “No. Not since the carol service. I’ve still got his jacket at home.”
“Holding it hostage, are you?”
“Not exactly. I might have been sort of hoping he’d pop in to retrieve it on his way through the village sometime.”
“You could actually take it back yourself.”
I gave a short, mirthless laugh. “With my luck, I’d just run into Debs.”
“Oh, come on. You can’t be scared of Debs. Not after facing down Mrs. Ormley like that. She has resigned, you know. Lucy Kemp told me. She’s thinking of organising a collection for a thank-you present for you.”
“I’m sure the twins deserve far more credit than I do. Then again, thanking them for setting someone on fire would send out entirely the wrong message. But anyway, Debs is very protective of her brother. And, well, if I have to hand the jacket over to her, it’s gone, isn’t it?”
“Oh my God. You’ve been sleeping with it, haven’t you?” She cackled. “Better make sure you sponge it off before you return it.”
“I have not been sleeping with it. Either literally or euphemistically.” That one time I’d dozed off on the sofa while wearing it definitely didn’t count. “I just meant, once I’ve handed back the jacket, the excuse for talking to Sean is gone. That’s all.”
“You could always go and talk to him without an excuse, you know.”
“No, I couldn’t.” He’d think I was needy and clingy and one step up from a demented stalker. And I’d been so careful to try to play things a little bit, well, cool, to use the common parlance. Clingy was desperately unattractive. Crispin had made that abundantly clear. “I, um. I don’t suppose you’ve seen anything of Sean, the last week or so?”
“Nope. Sorry. Haven’t been around, have I?” She patted my knee. “But you must be in his good books at least a little bit, after the carol service.”
I nodded. “We… Well, we did speak, a little, after the service. And it seemed… He seemed… Oh, I don’t know.” I drank some sherry. It didn’t mix well with the minty flavour my toothpaste had left in my mouth. “You probably don’t want to talk about this, anyway.”
“Course I do. Go on, tell me everything.”
“That’s just it. There’s nothing to tell, really. Just that he seemed…regretful.”
“Yeah? Regretful regretful, or maybe still interested regretful?”
I traced the lines on the candlewick bedspread with one finger. “The latter. I think. Possibly.”
“See? That’s the way it goes with you two. You screw up, he storms off, then he regrets it and comes back. It’s your thing.” She gave a satisfied smile and slurped some more sherry.
Oh God. My heart thudded into the pit of my stomach. She was right. Every time we’d had a misunderstanding, I’d just left it up to Sean to make the first move towards a reconciliation. I’d been an idiot. Sooner or later, he was going to just stop bothering.
Looking back, I was amazed it hadn’t been sooner. “I need to do something,” I blurted out. “Oh God. What should I do?”
“Well, it’s not rocket science. Have you tried, I don’t know, phoning him?”
“What, phone him from here?” Laetitia might be listening.
“No, I thought you could go roun
d his house and then phone him. Duh.” Rose refilled her glass of sherry. “On the other hand, you’re probably better doing it face-to-face.” She sniggered. “Pun not intended.”
“What—oh.” I took a too-hasty gulp of sherry and suffered a minor choking fit that left tears in my eyes.
Rose thumped me painfully on the back. “Yeah, see, he obviously fancies the pants off you, so you want to focus his mind on what he’s missing. So face-to-face.” She nodded. “Wear something sexy.”
I sipped my sherry more cautiously this time. “I’m not sure I own anything sexy.”
“Yeah, I was just thinking that.” She grinned. “You could turn up on his doorstep in a bow tie and nothing else.”
“Because that wouldn’t get me arrested. Not to mention, frostbitten in unfortunate places, this time of year.”
“All right, then—you ask him round to yours, and you open the door in your bow tie and the altogether. Or, you know, you could even put your bow tie on your—”
“And if it turns out to be the postman at the door?” I cut her off hurriedly. “Or Hanne? Or you, even.” I narrowed my eyes.
“Yeah, time to confess. I’m just that desperate for a glance at what you keep in your paisley pyjamas. Speaking of which, you don’t actually wear those at home, do you? ’Cause I gotta say, they’re not going to do a lot for the get-him-back-and-keep-him cause.”
I may have coloured faintly. “These were a Christmas present from Mother.”
“That figures.”
“What do you mean?” I bristled on Mother’s behalf.
“Well, you’re her little boy, aren’t you? Even if it’s all subconscious, she’s going to want to keep you all sweet and innocent in bed, isn’t she?” She cackled. “And trust me, those pyjamas are going to do the trick.”
“And sheep are just so seductive,” I retorted.
Rose held up a hand. “I’m a city girl, all right? I don’t want to hear about what you get up to in the countryside.”
“Actually, there are very few sheep around here. More dairy cattle. Some of them have very fine eyes…” I sniggered at Rose’s shudder and had some more sherry. It was starting to taste a lot better, which was probably a bad sign. “What’s it like, growing up in a city?”
“I dunno. Normal. What’s it like growing up here?”
“Dunn—I mean, I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t actually move here until I was fifteen. And even then, I spent half the year at school.”
“So what was it like in the holidays?”
I shrugged. “Rural?”
“Wasn’t it dead boring?”
“I suppose there weren’t a lot of things to do, but Fordy was near enough to visit quite a bit, so no, I don’t remember ever being bored, really.” Lost, perhaps—or at least misplaced—and alienated by my stepsister’s hostility, but never exactly bored. There had always seemed to be plenty of things to do. “Peter used to give me driving lessons on the common,” I remembered with a fond smile. “And teach me golf.”
“You get on all right with him, don’t you?”
“Shouldn’t I?”
“Well, no. He took your mum from you, din’t he?”
“Perhaps being gay preserved me from any Oedipal leanings.” I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes. “He made her happy, anyway. You don’t know what it was like, when Father died and the whole ghastly mess got revealed. She had to go through a hell of a lot, and it showed. Then she met Peter, and, well, she was happy again. Still is.” I opened my eyes. “I’d have loved him for that even if it hadn’t turned out that we get on all right.”
Rose looked at me mistily and gave a loud sniff. Then she downed her sherry in one and refilled her glass. “More?” she asked, holding the bottle out to me.
“Thank you.” I suddenly realised how much the conversation had revolved about my family. “Do you want to talk about, um, Shitface?”
“No.” She took a hefty swig of sherry. “Not now, not ever.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, Christ, how much of a bastard could he be? Turning up at my mum and dad’s on Christmas sodding Day, just to tell me how fucking happy he is without me? I mean, seriously, is he a wanker or is he a wanker?”
“Wanker,” I agreed solemnly and wondered if I might perhaps have had a tad too much sherry. I took another sip while I thought about it.
“And then he gives me a present. A sodding present. Bastard.”
“Bastard.” I nodded. “Was it a good one?”
“What?”
“The present. Was it good?”
She shrugged, and spilled some sherry on the bedspread. “Oops. Sorry. Nah, it was all right. ’Spensive stuff from the duty-free shop.”
I frowned. “So, not even from Dubai?”
“No. Bastard.”
“Bastard,” I agreed. “Is there any more sherry left?”
“Bit. Here you go. Oops. No, so no, he didn’t think of me at all while he was out there. Only on his way home. Like, mixed in with the guilt about not calling his mum every week, he gets the guilt about totally fucking over his fiancée, and buys a couple of scarves and some perfume. As if that’s going to make it all better.”
“As if.” I frowned again. Or possibly I hadn’t stopped since the last time. “He could have got you a handbag. Some Louis Vuitton luggage. A…a watch. Not just a cheap scarf.”
“It was a Lanvin scarf. One of ’em was. And an Alexander McQueen.”
I snorted dismissively. “As if the cost had anything to do with it.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.” We clinked glasses, causing yet another spillage to the bedspread. I considered laundering the bedclothes tomorrow, but Mother would most likely misinterpret my motives, which might be embarrassing all round.
Rose downed her sherry and stood, wavering a little in the dim light. “I’m gonna bed. Nigh’.”
“Night.” I toasted her with my sherry, put the glass carefully back on the bedside table, then flopped back on my sherry-sodden bedspread and went to sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Fordhams’ house in the New Forest was only twenty-two minutes away by car. We could all have piled into Mother’s Range Rover, but as that would have put Laetitia and Rose a little too close together for comfort, I ended up taking her in Portia.
This meant, of course, that I wouldn’t be able to drink at the Brunch, but as I seemed to be suffering something of a sherry hangover this morning, I wasn’t particularly bothered.
Rose, annoyingly, seemed unaffected by the previous night’s libations. Once arrived at the Fordhams’, she got out of Portia and whistled. “Did I say your parents’ place was posh? I take it all back. Your mum and dad are just one step up from a council flat. This? This is posh. I mean, look at it! It’s got wings.”
“Well, yes, but they haven’t used the west wing in years. Decades, even. It’s all closed up—dust sheets on furniture, that sort of thing. Fordy and I used to frighten the life out of each other by creeping in there at midnight looking for ghosts.”
“Ever see any?”
“No, but according to family tradition, some nights you’re supposed to be able to hear a baby crying. Apparently it’s a young Fordham of generations ago who died in infancy. And Fordy swears blind he’s stayed here sometimes, and either he or Linette have got up in the night because they heard little Georgie cry, only to find him fast asleep.”
Rose shivered. “Okay, if I had a baby, I would not want to stay here with it. We’re not going to be staying here after dark, are we?”
“Hardly. It’s brunch, not supper.”
“You say that, but the invitation was for twelve. To my mind, that’s lunch. No br about it.”
“No, lunch would be an entirely different affair. The menu would be completely different, for a start.�
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“Whatevs. Come on, I’m starving.”
I rolled my eyes and offered Rose my arm. She accepted with a strange expression which I think was supposed to be a simper (after all, she hadn’t eaten yet, so it couldn’t really be indigestion) and we crunched across the gravel to the stone steps of Copse House (or Corpse House, as Fordy and I had liked to dub it in our more ghoulish days).
Having Rose with me, I soon realised, was a godsend. Instead of asking awkward questions about my career choices, all the old acquaintances and not-quite-relatives occupied themselves with getting introduced to her and wondering what on earth our relationship was, and if there was a possible polite way to ask if I’d moved on from Greek love (if there was, nobody managed to find it). It left me free to actually enjoy my quails’ eggs mini muffins and prosciutto crostini for once, with attention to spare for avoiding the infamous squid fritters. (They appeared without fail every year despite the fact everyone loathed them; I was convinced they were Mrs. Fordham’s idea of a joke.)
I caught sight of Fordy and Linette over on the far side of the room with some university friends I’d met once or twice before. I waved and Fordy detached himself, beaming, to come and welcome us. Mother and the others had arrived only moments after we’d gone in, and still lingered at the entrance. Fordy greeted her with an affectionate kiss, Peter with a hearty handshake, and Laetitia with polite forbearance.
I was enveloped in one of Fordy’s trademark bear hugs. “Finally! It’s about time you got here. I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.”
“We’re only six minutes late. Sorry.”
“Yes, but six minutes late for you is the equivalent of about a decade and a half for everyone else. Trouble on the roads?”
“No,” I said with an involuntary glance at Rose. “We just left a little late.”
She rolled her eyes, unabashed. “Yeah, right, blame it all on me. Just ’cos I couldn’t decide what to wear.”
“Well, you look absolutely delightful in that dress, I must say,” Fordy said with one of his most charming smiles, and in fact it wasn’t empty flattery. I’d finally persuaded Rose into an understated wrap dress that showed off her curves, and even Peter had cast her an admiring glance that had lingered until Mother raised a single eyebrow that sent him scurrying, shamefaced, back to her side.