A Royal Match (18 page)

Time, the seasons, everything seemed suspended in the hush of the starlit night. Well, at least it did before we heard a fox doing something horrendously cruel to some small animal.

‘What do you think will happen with Freddie and you now?’ Arabella asked as we began to open up our tuck.

I watched a shooting star flash across the sky and suddenly I felt tears spring to my eyes. I didn’t know what I could wish for. I didn’t even know what I wanted to happen with Freddie any more.

I was saved from replying by Star. ‘What a jerk,’ she went. ‘I mean, what was that formal crappy letter begging forgiveness all about?’

Georgina sat bolt upright. ‘He sent you a letter?’

‘The palace did,’ I replied bleakly.

‘Cool. But don’t you find it weird he hasn’t called and left a message, though?’ she added.

I did find it quite strange. I mean, before the social he was a text and voice-mail message demon.

‘You know what?’ she went on. ‘I reckon he’s still paranoid that what Honey said was true.’

Arabella added, ‘Portia said that her brother, who’s in his year, said that Freddie’s totally gone on you. It’s just that he has to lie low while the gossip dies down. Apparently the palace has given him a talking-to.’

I wondered why Portia hadn’t told
me
this. After all, she was the only other girl on the sabre team, and I fenced with her three times a week. But then I supposed Portia hardly ever spoke to me. I’d always thought she was just quiet, the sort of girl who kept herself to herself, but clearly she had been chatting away to Arabella.

Star snorted in disbelief.

Clemmie snorted in agreement, which caused her vodka to go down the wrong way and she started choking. When she recovered, she said, ‘I heard pretty much the same from Antoinette. Her brother says Freddie never stops talking about you, darling.’

‘Remember Kevin, Freddie’s mate?’ Georgina said.

‘Yaah. He was so fit,’ Clemmie gushed, having long since turned her affections from the Razzle guy she’d met at the social to Kevin.

‘Well, his brother is only Poppy’s boyfriend.’

‘You mean Poppy would deign to date someone from
the East End? I doubt it,’ I said.

I watched another star shoot across the sky as Arabella offered me a crisp – well, actually, she tickled my nose with it until I opened my mouth and she shoved it in.

‘Got any matches, Georgie?’ Star asked.

Georgina took the cigarette from Star’s mouth and stuck it in her own, where three other cigarettes were already arranged. ‘We only brought three matches down with us,’ she explained, speaking out the side of her mouth as she lit all four with the one match and distributed them.

‘So Freddie’s best friend’s brother is Poppy’s boyfriend,’ I repeated, trying to get my head around what that might mean – if anything.

‘Yup,’ Georgina replied.

‘So he must know if it’s true or not?’ I went on.

‘Or he might have been convinced by Poppy that it
is
true.’

‘As if anyone in their right mind would believe Honey or Poppy? According to Mummy, Lady O’Hare – and by the way, she’s not married to a Lord anymore, so she shouldn’t even have a title – will appear at the opening of an envelope! Do you know she was even on some sordid Sky television channel last week showing off their house in Knightsbridge? I mean, how tragic do you have to be to do that?’

‘What was it like?’ Clemmie asked, her blue saucer eyes popping with curiosity.

‘Darling, what do you think it was like? A five-star
luxury hotel – absolutely so ghastly. No personal touches. Nothing eclectic, and all their furniture was bought new – well, it was riddled with antiques, of course, but all of it was bought this generation, if you know what I mean. Mummy was like, “
Hello
, do you not have any ancestors?”’

This is where not being part of the English class system really gets to me. ‘Well, erm, actually, Georgina, all my parents’ stuff is new too.’ I didn’t add that our house doesn’t even look like a five-star hotel, although I suppose it is madly eclectic.

‘Yes, but that’s different, darling. You’re not trying to be all pretentious and pretending that your great-great-great-grandfather was best mates with the King. It’s just fake and false and, well, tacky. I love modernism. When I get to buy my first house it’s going to be madly Space Odyssey. I hate old stuff. It’s all dusty. I bet your parents’ place in LA is like supercool. Is it in Malibu, darling?’

‘No.’

‘I think it’s really cool that we might be coming over to see you,’ she added.

I watched another star shooting across the sky and wished like mad that Georgina would forget about Bob’s offer.

‘Honey’s always been pretentious,’ Arabella sneered a little later.

I didn’t really give a toss about how tacky or pretentious Honey was. All I could think of was that if Freddie’s best friend’s brother was going out with Honey’s sister, he’d be getting a whole different angle on everything.

Star took a deep drag on her fag and said, ‘I mean, the mere fact that his best friend’s brother would go out with a girl like Poppy means he’s tragic. And if he’s tragic, his brother’s probably equally tragic and
ipso facto
, so is Freddie. You can tell a lot about a person by their friends.’

Georgina took a slug of her vodka. ‘Oh, don’t
ipso
bloody
facto
me. I’m only going to fail Latin, darling, and Daddy says if I fail Latin he’s going to choose all my subjects in Lower Sixth.’

‘Oh, look, there’s a shooting star!’ Arabella pointed up at the sky. ‘Let’s all make a wish.’

‘To
Nun of Your Business
being a huge success,’ Star declared.

‘For raising thousands and thousands of pounds for Children of the World,’ Clemmie added.

The girls all held their cigarettes against one another in the air in a toast. Georgina, realising I was left out, handed me one of the last of the two precious matches and I held it against their embers, where it exploded in a whoosh.

‘I told you this was going to be a great term,’ Georgina reminded me, taking my hand in hers. I reached out and took Star’s hand and all five of us held hands and looked up the sky, silent in our own thoughts.

‘And anyway,’ Georgina remarked later as we took another swig of vodka, ‘you’ve still got Jay back in LA,’ which made us all howl with laughter for some reason.

‘Actually, I haven’t,’ I told her when the laughter stopped and we were all just lying there silently again.

‘Darling, you didn’t drop him when you pulled Freddie, did you?’

‘I didn’t have to,’ I told her as a shiver went through me at what I was about to do. ‘He was never really my boyfriend, see. I made him up.’

I felt Star’s hand squeeze mine and that gave me the courage to say what I knew I had to say if I was going to be honest.

‘But the photographs?’ Clemmie asked.

‘He’s my mom’s PA. You know Sarah … Jay is her gay PA.’

Georgina spat out her vodka. ‘Your mum’s gay PA?’

‘Uh-huh. Look, I’m not particularly proud of it,’ I told them, praying that Georgina wouldn’t pull her hand away from mine. I could take it if Clemmie and Arabella did, but not Georgina.

Georgina laughed. ‘Darling, you are the end.’

‘Delusional, you mean?’

‘Delusional women and the boys they fall for. Let’s do a piece on it for the next edition of
Nun of Your Business
,’ Clemmie suggested.

‘Or not,’ I told them.

That was when I realised that I’d just fessed up to my greatest shame and here we still were, still holding hands, and the moon was still full and the stars were still shooting in the sky, and even though I’d pulled my prince and even though he’d dumped me, I was going to be OK. And suddenly all the things Star had been saying to me,
about friendship not being based on being an insider or an outsider, or pulling princes, but on moments like these, rang true.

People aren’t always what they seem. All my time at Saint Augustine’s I’d been so wrapped up in my preconceptions about Georgina and their kind. What was it Star had said, that I’d have to accept who I was before I could expect other people to accept me?

Arabella interrupted my epiphany. ‘Anyhow, you’ll see him tomorrow.’

‘Who? Gay Jay?’ Star giggled.

‘No, darling – Freddie. You’ve got fencing at Eades, remember? You might even be up against him again!’

Star nudged me. ‘Possibly even a bit of tongue-fencing, if you can lose the security guys.’

God, how could I have forgot about fencing? Especially when it meant I’d be face-to-face with Freddie again.

‘Tongue-fencing? You are totally gross sometimes, Star,’ Georgina declared happily as she lit another bundle of cigarettes.

I was unusually quiet on the minibus ride to Eades. It was almost like I was having one of those out-of-body experiences. My head was whizzing about and my heart was doing funny fluttery things, and it wasn’t funny in a nice way.

Georgina said it was despair poisoned by hope (she’d been getting very literary in her language since we started up the writing salon). She had a point in a way, I suppose – only I think it was more a case of love poisoned by pissed-offness.

Our moonwalk discussion about Freddie actually believing that I was trading on his royalty was now ringing true to me. I felt very confused about it all, because:

a) I was really pissed off with that wretched letter he’d sent me.
and

b) I really, really wanted to kiss him again.

I still remembered the kiss vividly. It was on some kind of loop in my brain. On and on it played, always accompanied by the tingly feeling I’d had as he’d handed me his jacket to hold while he held open the window in the library.

Followed by the warm feeling as he placed his jacket over my shoulders and guided me through the bushes as if I, me, Calypso Kelly, were the princess.

Followed by the way his mouth felt pressed on mine. Followed by the crescendo as my heart went
whoosh
as he ran his hand up my safety-pinned back and supported my neck as he kissed me.

It had all been so lovely and then within minutes it had all gone so sordidly wrong with the ‘trading on my royalty thing’ and the Rough-and-Tumble photographs. And if anything, it was made even worse after his stupid formal letter begging for forgiveness.

None of it felt sorted.

Of course he was the first and only guy I saw when we entered the fencing salle at Eades. He was looking even more fit than I remembered. He was doing warm-ups on one of the pistes. His hair was all tussled … oh, no – I wanted to rough-and-tumble him again.

When he saw me he smiled, but I couldn’t tell if it was an it’s-all-OK smile or merely one of those false
how-charming-am-I? smiles, which he’d no doubt been trained to do since birth.

Star, sensing my pain, whispered wickedly in my ear, ‘Excuse
me
, but do you know who I think I am?’ which did actually make me laugh.

Star, Portia and I were on the first team – which didn’t mean much, as there was only one sabre team at Saint Augustine’s. The thing was, Portia also did
épée
, so she was called to a bout almost as soon as she’d finished her stretches.

Star and I were sitting around on the benches watching the other three bouts going on around us when Star nudged me. ‘I think that’s Kevin’s brother, Billy, over there, fencing Portia.’

‘God, he’s really going for her, isn’t he?’ I marvelled.

He was good. Some boys have a very different approach to their game when they fence girls – actually, make that
most
boys. They didn’t like to hit you anywhere above or below the stomach. There was nothing worse than a guy letting you win – it was like being lied to, or being made to feel you weren’t worth the trouble.

Star agreed with me, but Clemmie thought we were mean. She thought they just let us win because they were being nice. But then Clemmie thought it was mean to eat Jelly Babies because they looked like her little brother Sebastian.

But Billy was ruthless. He was throwing everything he had at Portia.

I liked that.

When my first bout was called, I guess I had imagined it would be against Freddie, but instead it was his captain Billy, who was not only one of the best sabreurs in the country, but was probably going to be on the Olympic team.

As I waited to be hooked up to the electrical point recorder, I looked him up and down. Suddenly I wasn’t thinking about Freddie at all. I was thinking of winning … and of Billy.

He looked like Kevin in a sort of older, better-looking way – short, blond hair and eyes that seemed to be laughing at you even when he wasn’t smiling. I figured he’d probably be tired, having just been fencing Portia.

The president, in this instance the Eades fencing master, called, ‘On guard, ready, fence!’ He wasn’t as mad keen on French as Professor Sullivan.

Billy lunged at me first, which sort of shocked me, so I parried and riposted with a hit to the back of his neck. This didn’t actually register as a point and wasn’t really the done thing, but it really, really hurt. (I knew this from firsthand experience!)