by Jagger, Kait
The old, bad Luna would find myriad vulnerabilities in this American roommate that made her ripe for evisceration, not least the fact that her veneer of confidence was whisper thin, dangerously undermined by her desire to be liked. But the new Luna, the one who didn’t play with her food, saw qualities to admire, too. The American – Nancy, that was her name – was generous to a fault, always offering to pay for her less affluent roommate when they went out for drinks in Manchester’s Northern Quarter.
And she was fearless. Whether it be foul-mouthed yobs leering at them on the Met, or hardened, argument-prone Bury lasses out on the lash on Canal Street, or some drunk bloke talking over the band at The Ritz (talking during gigs was a particular pet peeve of hers), Nancy never hesitated to call out bad behaviour.
‘Hey, roommate!’ came a croak from across the room. Nancy reached for her horn-rimmed glasses on the bedside table, and suddenly she was up, running a brush through her shoulder-length blonde hair, talking about breakfast. Rather annoyingly, Nancy was a morning person, capable of partying late into the night and still waking up bright and breezy, full of good cheer. And now she wanted coffee.
By the time Luna had showered, dressed in her new uniform of skinny jeans and her brand-new University of Manchester hoody, and French braided her long brown hair, which she’d been growing out ever since the shaving incident five years earlier, there were also signs of life from across the hall.
The girl from the East End, Kayla, was singing along with Amy Winehouse, trumpeting her steadfast refusal to enter into addiction therapy, giving it some welly. Nancy bitched about all the noise their flatmate made, but Luna privately thought that was jealousy talking. Because the East End girl could sing. And dance. And act. And do backflips, and basically wipe the floor with anyone else in the room who thought they were talented.
She was also proper, in-your-face bolshie. And she and Nancy did not get along. Just last night they’d fallen out over some inappropriate boy they both took a fancy to at a party in Withington, and it had nearly come to blows. Luna’s money would have been on Kayla if it had.
But she also knew the East End girl’s dark secret: that underneath her brash exterior, Kayla was suffering from crippling homesickness. Luna had heard her on her mobile late at night with someone named Patrice, quietly crying, saying she missed London and wasn’t sure uni was for her.
She seemed to be getting better lately, though. At the party the night before, before she and Nancy fell out over the inappropriate boy, she’d stood with Luna watching their other flatmate talking to some professorial-looking student named Rod. She seemed smitten, though Luna and Kayla had exchanged a sceptical glance when she breathlessly characterised him as ‘exotic and risky’ during a communal trip to the loo.
‘He’s about as risky as my nan,’ Kayla observed to Luna whilst adding vodka to her Red Bull. ‘Mark my words, she’s going to marry that boy.’
Luna hadn’t recognised Jemima Evangeline, or Jem as she preferred to be called now, when she arrived to move in on their first day, her mother and three sisters in tow. With her hair bleached and teased into a Gwen Stefani bouffant and ponytail, Jem looked different… cooler.
She, on the other hand, had known Luna straight away. ‘Look at all your hair!’ she’d exclaimed joyfully, beaming at Luna, questioning her about her life for the past two years. Unlike Luna, Jem had left St Catherine’s at age fifteen to attend the local technical college, where she’d studied web design. ‘And now look at us, all grown up and back together!’ she said, like it was kismet, like the two of them were long-lost friends.
Luna wasn’t entirely surprised when Jem later confided to her that it had been Isabelle who’d sealed her decision to leave St Catherine’s. After a brief cessation of hostilities following the fateful spring break at Arborage, Bella had wisely elected to give Luna a wide berth, turning her attentions to Jem instead. Indeed, Luna suspected it was precisely because Jem was Isabelle’s second choice that the months-long campaign of public shunning that ensued was so unrelentingly brutal.
If Luna had, as Jem believed, been her friend, it would have pained her to watch the formerly happy, bubbly girl be transformed into an anxious wreck who lived in constant fear of another confrontation with Isabelle and her bitch pack. If Luna had been her friend, she would have helped her – all it would have taken was a few cutting words in the right ears.
But Luna was not Jem’s friend. And she’d had her own worries, engaged as she was in the Sisyphean task of trying to be good. For she had quickly discovered after her conversation with Lady Wellstone that, having chosen to be unkind for so long, she had absolutely no idea how to be kind. Or even just neutral. At first, she kept her head down, circumventing the seemingly never-ending guessing and second guessing she had to do every time she opened her mouth by not opening it at all, except when absolutely necessary.
Eventually, though, she decided she couldn’t go through the rest of her life without speaking. No, what she needed to do was find a template, a model of kindness that she could imitate. She tried the obvious choice first, St Catherine’s Catholic youth group, but stopped after two meetings when the overwhelming goodness of its membership had the paradoxical effect of making her want to kill them all. Subsequently, she tried volunteering with a local homeless shelter, before realising that neither the founders nor patrons of the shelter were particularly kind.
She settled for the Latin club, in the end. She liked Latin, and it seemed to attract reasonably nice people. So she conjugated verbs with them, and competed in certamens, and dressed in togas… and watched her fellow Latin students closely, mimicking their gentle, patient, scholarly ways.
And she held on, by the skin of her teeth, to her hard-won kindness. Seen in this light, her subsequent admission into the University of Manchester had seemed to be not only a reward for her efforts, but an opportunity to completely shed the skin of bad Luna. To be clean and new and good again.
It was a stand-off, Luna thought to herself as she, Jem, Kayla and Nancy sat in a coffee shop on Oxford Road, eating breakfast. Nancy was giving Kayla the proverbial stink eye, and Kayla was being extra specially nice to Luna and Jem, enquiring sweetly about where they were going (‘Lecture hall,’ said Luna), what they’d be doing (‘Um, sitting in a lecture,’ said Jem).
Choosing the better part of valour, Jem and Luna decided to decamp shortly thereafter, leaving the other two to their staring match. As they stood to go, however, Kayla happened to unzip her bomber jacket, revealing a black t-shirt with the words ‘Backstreet’s Back Alright’ emblazoned on it in big blue block letters.
‘You like the Backstreet Boys?’ Nancy asked incredulously.
‘I love them,’ Kayla said with reverence. ‘Especially—’
The two women spoke as one: ‘Brian Littrell.’ And blinked at each other.
‘I think we just witnessed a moment there, don’t you?’ Jem chortled to Luna a few minutes later as they walked past Indian restaurants and sari shops along the Curry Mile, making their way to the main campus.
‘They certainly do seem to like Brian Littrell,’ Luna agreed.
Jem did a little skip. ‘Oh, it’s going to be a great weekend!’ she predicted joyfully. ‘First we’re off on our jolly to Sheffield to see… what was the name of that band Nancy likes?’
‘The Arctic Monkeys.’
‘Right. And then I’m going to the cinema with Rod.’ Luna could almost see little hearts and butterflies floating around Jem’s head as she spoke his name. ‘Actually, I was wondering if you wanted to come with me, just to give me some moral support.’
‘Oh, I don’t think—’
‘Only, I hardly know him, really, and he seems like such a bad boy…’
‘You know, I think you may have the wrong end of the stick about that.’
‘Oh please, Luna!’ Jem stepped in front her, clasping her hands in a begging pose.
‘Pretty please?’
‘Okay,’ Luna relented, pursing her lips to stop the smile that was coming.
‘Yay!’ Jem came back to her side and slid a hand up into the crook of Luna’s arm, then reached her other one over to join it. The hair stood up on Luna’s neck. It had been so, so long since anyone had touched her in anything other than a purely transactional way. It felt… nice.
Unbidden, she remembered her favourite passage in a story her mother used to read her, The Snow Queen, where the character of Gerda hugged her friend Kai till she melted the shard of enchanted glass that had frozen his heart. It must have felt something like this, she thought. Painfully good.
Luna pressed her arm slightly into her side, to give Jem’s hand a little squeeze. And the two of them carried on walking down Oxford Road.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The wedding planner was sobbing, actually sobbing in Luna’s office, her heavy black mascara running into the mineral veil on her cheeks.
No one had been more surprised than Luna when she ended up offering a permanent role to her nemesis, the martinet with the black bob. But she’d come to Luna after her and Stefan’s nuptials with a business plan too good to refuse, whereby she would become a rainmaker for Arborage’s steady but not precisely thriving wedding business.
So far, Luna had to admit, the woman had delivered. She’d already sealed deals with several high-profile, high-spending couples for the coming year, she was endlessly enthusiastic, and she kept her eye firmly on the bottom line. But Isabelle Wellstone’s wedding, planned for the following spring, was proving a bridge too far.
‘She’s rejected every single proposal I’ve put to her, and every time she phones me some major detail changes. First it was going to be one hundred and fifty guests, then two hundred. Now it’s two hundred and fifty.’ The wedding planner broke off, sniffling loudly. ‘And she’s just… so… mean.’
Luna’s PA came into the office bearing a tray of tea and the two of them exchanged a look. Luna mimed dabbing her eyes and the PA reached for the box of tissues on her desk, placing them on the conference table.
Luna let the wedding planner talk. And cry. ‘…and she phones me all hours of the day and night…’ Right on cue the woman’s ringtone sounded. ‘Chapel of Love’ – null points for originality, Luna thought with an internal eye roll. ‘Oh God, it’s her,’ the wedding planner hiccupped.
‘Right,’ Luna said, scrawling her landline number on a pad and sliding it across the table. ‘Here’s what I want you to say.’
‘Isabelle, what seems to be the trouble?’ she opened moments later, adopting her most practical, rational, Stefan-like voice. ‘Is there some way I can assist?’
‘You can tell that… woman to do her job,’ came Isabelle’s inimitable, overwrought voice over the conference phone. ‘I’m the daughter of the sixteenth Marquess of Lionsbridge. Arborage was my home for my entire childhood, and I’d like to think I can still call it home now.’
‘That goes without saying,’ Luna replied, smiling at the wedding planner as she left the office, giving her a little thumbs up.
‘You know better than anyone,’ Isabelle went on, injecting a note of pathos into her tone, ‘having walked down the aisle without your father at your side, what an emotional time this is for me. I need to feel Daddy’s spirit with me on my special day.’
‘But, Bella, my understanding is that our wedding planner has done her absolute utmost to meet your needs. You want your ceremony to take place in the Orangery, and even though we don’t normally make it available for wedding functions, we will accommodate this. You’ve said you want to use the state dining room and ballroom for your reception, and we’ll find a way to make that work as well.’
‘But the point is,’ Isabelle came back, ‘I simply cannot have an evening wedding! It will ruin my bridal photos. And my entire colour scheme, it simply won’t work at night.’
‘Perhaps the three of us should sit down together and talk through your options,’ Luna offered, privately thinking that there wasn’t a single thing on earth that she would less rather do.
‘No. The night wedding stipulation has to go. Surely you can stretch the rules a little, for a family wedding,’ Isabelle wheedled.
‘These are rules your father and mother put in place as part of Project Mercury, Bella. They were very clear on it: we do not close Arborage for private occasions, ever. That means any wedding inside the house has to take place after tours finish for the day.’
‘They can’t have meant for that to apply to their own daughter,’ Isabelle protested. Then said in a harder tone, ‘I’m warning you, Luna, if you won’t be reasonable about this, much as it breaks my heart, Tarquin and I will be forced to look for another wedding venue.’
And there it was. An ultimatum. Luna lifted her cup of tea, took a sip. And said, ‘Well, Isabelle, we’ll be sorry to lose your business.’
By the time Luna finished the call two minutes later, Isabelle had seen sense. Yes, she supposed that, if she must, she could see her way clear to having an evening wedding. Perhaps Stefan could arrange fireworks again? ‘And Chinese lanterns,’ Isabelle added helpfully. ‘Those would be lovely.’ The conversation ended on a cordial note, with Luna promising to speak to the wedding planner on Isabelle’s behalf.
‘Give Tarquin my regards,’ she said, pressing the disconnect button on the conference phone.
Her mobile buzzed: a text from Stefan saying he’d be on the 1:30pm flight back from Manchester. Luna texted back a kiss.
‘Knock knock?’ Roland, standing in her doorway. ‘You wanted to see me?’
‘Ah yes,’ Luna said genially, gesturing to the settee. ‘Come, sit with me.’
They talked about special events planned for the remainder of the summer, and about the forthcoming Rebuilding the Dower House television series, which was already in pre-production. Luna asked how the book was coming, nodding sympathetically when Roland said he was experiencing writer’s block. He confessed he sometimes felt he didn’t have the headspace, after a long day at Arborage, to write in the evenings.
‘I completely understand. That’s what I brought you here to discuss,’ said Luna. ‘I want you to finish this book, so I’m going to put my foot down and insist you take a six-month paid sabbatical from September.’
‘But…’
‘And then, when you return, I have a new opportunity I want you to consider. I’ve decided we need an in-house historian and archivist, not just for the Robert and Margery collection, but for all our valuable historical documents. Ultimately I want us to have a library here, and I need someone passionate and knowledgeable enough about Arborage to make that a reality. You’re the only person I’d consider for the role.’
Roland shifted in his seat, visibly preening at her praise. ‘Well, I’ve long believed that we need a library…’
‘Yes, and it’s the perfect solution for your writing career.’ Luna smiled. ‘Not as full on as Tours, and with complete, unfettered access to our collections.’
‘But what will happen to Tours?’ Roland asked plaintively.
‘Well, I’ll have to find a new manager, obviously,’ she said reassuringly. ‘I have my eye on a few candidates, and clearly I’d want you sitting in on the interviews.’
‘A month isn’t long for me to do a handover,’ he ruminated, beginning to come around to the idea. ‘But I’m sure Alex can manage the department on an interim basis.’ He paused, colouring slightly. ‘Perhaps you’d even consider him as my permanent replacement.’
‘No,’ Luna said, standing and walking to the window. ‘No I would not. And Alex was the other reason I wanted to talk to you. I need you to sack him, Roland.’
‘Wh – at?!’
‘I have signed statements from a member of the catering staff and one of your own tour guides saying that he stole two bottles of champagne from the Robert and
Margery opening party. Theft of estate property is cause for summary dismissal. So I’d like you to dismiss him. Today.’
‘B-but, surely,’ Roland stuttered, rubbing his hands on his tweed waistcoat. ‘Yes, of course, he should be reprimanded, made to reimburse the estate for the cost of the champagne.’ The pitch of his voice rose precipitously. ‘But sacking?’
Luna turned, leaning back against the window casing. ‘Roland,’ she said gently. ‘The champagne is purely a pretext. The real reason I want you to sack him is because he’s bad at his job. I blame myself, in part, for this situation. After the attack in Stockholm this spring, I was distracted. I didn’t notice that you’d effectively made Alex your deputy. And when I came back, I failed to address your error in judgement as quickly as I should have.’
Before he could reply, she went on, ‘You’ve promoted him beyond his abilities, and it’s clear that he’s out of his depth. It’s affecting morale in the department, the fact that someone so clearly unqualified has risen so quickly.’
‘Alright then,’ Roland backtracked. ‘I can demote him. Put him back in his old position.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose miserably. ‘Though I’m not sure he’ll accept a lesser role now.’
‘Oh, he’d accept it,’ Luna said, curling her lip. ‘He’d accept it, and then proceed to scheme, and bitch, and poison the atmosphere in your team even more than he already has. And this time next year he’d have us in a tribunal for constructive dismissal. You’ve allowed your personal feelings for him to blind you.’
‘Oh, really,’ Roland interrupted, sounding hurt and defiant. ‘I’d have thought you’d be the last person to take exception to favouritism in the workplace.’
The words landed like an anvil in the middle of the room. Roland choked, looking as if he wished he could suck them straight back into himself. But Luna’s expression remained calm, cool. Entirely unmoved.