Hitched! (14 page)

‘The Challoners hushed it up as much as they could, but the
Serious Fraud Office were there for months. It was catastrophic for their
reputation as a bank and as a family,’ said Jon. ‘It’s them I feel sorry for.
One black sheep, and the whole family gets tarred with the same brush. My people
know the Challoners and they’ve really suffered because of what George did.’

My eyes found George at the other end of the table. He was
laughing with the girl next to him, and he looked so at ease, so at home, that
my heart clenched. I wanted him to be in my office—yes, even tipped back on the
chair!—with his thick socks and his old jacket, not here, looking like the star
of some costume drama.

He had never told me what had really caused the estrangement
with his family. Oh, he’d admitted to being sacked, but I’d assumed that was
because of his party lifestyle more than anything else. Embezzlement sounded
more serious but George...corrupt? I didn’t believe it.

Once he realised I wasn’t going to thank him for revealing
George’s sordid history, Jon lost interest in me, and spent the rest of the
evening with his shoulder turned to me while he talked to the group on his
right, roaring with laughter every now and then to show me what I was
missing.

Once I caught George’s eye and he mouthed
All right?
Immediately I put on a brilliant smile and nodded and
pretended to be immersed in conversation with the man on my left, who was so
dull I really can’t remember his name.

We’d agreed that people would help themselves to wine, but I
noticed it was George who got up every now and then and opened new bottles or
went round topping up glasses. Most of the men treated him as a servant, either
ignoring him completely, or covering their glasses impatiently with their hands
rather than go to the trouble of saying, ‘No, thank you.’

George gave no indication that he noticed their rudeness, but I
burned with humiliation on his behalf. I’d thought he looked at home, but it
hadn’t occurred to me that he’d been estranged from this life as well as his
family. It had to be difficult for him to face it again, especially now he had
been recognised. Clive had clearly been busy and word had got round. I saw
several of the men look at him askance.

The dinner dragged on, course after course. Saffron had wanted
a ‘real’ Edwardian dinner, so we had the lobster bisque, and then sole
Véronique. Mushroom vol-au-vents, Yorkshire beef, guinea fowl, rose-petal water
ice, strawberry galette, savouries...I thought it would never end. Mrs Simms had
excelled herself, but I would happily have stopped with the fish dish. The sheer
amount of food felt grotesque.

Everyone else seemed to be having a great time, though, and the
table was cluttered with empty wine bottles. Saffron had taken advice from some
friend of hers who claimed to be a wine expert, and had spent an astronomical
sum on wines to go with the meal, but I didn’t see one person look at the labels
or exclaim at how delicious it was. I had a couple of glasses—I needed it to get
through the evening—and it was very good, but I didn’t think it was that much
better than the wine we had at the cottage, which was on special offer at the
supermarket.

I could hardly move by the time the last savouries had been
eaten, the port passed, and the party moved away from the table at last and
spilled out onto the terrace outside the long gallery. I took the opportunity to
slip away to the kitchens and help Mrs Simms and the niece she’d roped in from
the village to give her a hand. I didn’t think anyone would notice that I’d
gone, and, to be honest, I had a much better time gossiping with them than I had
done being cold-shouldered by Jon.

I planned to walk home. I’d had a bit to drink and it was a
beautiful evening. When I’d thanked Mrs Simms, I wandered outside from the
kitchens at the side of the house. I’d have to say goodbye to Saffron, but I
couldn’t face the noise of the party again just yet. The last time I’d seen
George, he’d had two blondes draped over him. Ostracised by the men or not, he’d
obviously been coping with the dinner and the company better than I had.

My shoes were pinching horribly and my back ached from
unfamiliar heels. I actually groaned when I reached the grass and could take the
shoes off. Holding them in one hand, I wandered away around the back of the
house. The lawn was cool and comforting beneath my bare feet, and above the sky
was a deep, dark blue. From the terrace at the front I could hear the party
continuing, but there at the back it was quiet and still.

Two vast stone urns marked the bottom of a flight of wide steps
that led down from the back terrace, and as I rounded one, absently trailing my
fingers over the mossy stone, a voice spoke from the dimness of the steps above
me, and I just about leapt out of my skin.

‘Had enough too?’

‘George!’ I patted my throat to push my heart back into place.
‘I thought you were having a good time with the others.’

His face was too shadowy for me to read his expression. ‘No. I
looked for you when everyone left the table, but you’d gone.’

‘I just went down to the kitchen to thank Mrs Simms.’ I felt
stupidly shy. ‘What are you doing out here?’

‘Oh...thinking,’ he said. ‘What about you?’

‘Trying to persuade my feet that they will go into shoes again
one day.’

‘Come and sit down.’ George patted the step beside him.

I didn’t want him to think I was avoiding him because of
anything Clive had said, so I climbed up, still barefoot, and sat beside him.
Dropping my shoes onto the step below, I copied George, and rested my folded
arms on my knees.

The night smelt of summer, of lush grass and soft air. I drew a
lungful and let it out slowly. ‘It’s nice out here. Peaceful.’

George nodded. ‘I don’t know how anyone would prefer to live in
London,’ he said. ‘Why would you want a big city when you could have this?’

‘I was watching you this evening,’ I said. ‘In spite of Clive,
you looked so at home with those people.’ I hesitated. ‘I wondered if tonight
had been hard for you. I wondered if you were thinking about the life you had
before you came here, if you missed it at all.’

George gave a short laugh. ‘Do I miss it? Hardly! I was just
sitting here wondering how I stood that life for so long. I hate the idea that I
was that idle and mindless and self-absorbed, but I was.’

There was a bleakness to his voice I hadn’t heard before, and I
didn’t like it. Without thinking, I laid my hand on his arm.

‘You’re not like that now,’ I said. ‘I wonder if you ever
were.’

‘I was pretty unpleasant,’ said George. ‘You wouldn’t have
liked me at all.’ But he covered my hand with his own, turning it over so that
our fingers laced together.

‘I suppose Jon has told you all my dirty secrets over
dinner?’

‘He told me that you were sacked for embezzling hedge
funds.’

‘Aren’t you going to ask me if I did it or not?’

‘No,’ I said calmly. ‘You can be deeply irritating at times,
and the way you mess with my ringtone is probably downright illegal, but I don’t
see you as an embezzler somehow.’

George’s fingers tightened around mine. ‘I’ve got a braying
donkey for you next,’ he said with a half-smile.

‘I can’t wait.’

There was a pause. The party round the front were growing
raucous but here in the back the quiet summer night wrapped us in a warm
cocoon.

‘I didn’t go to prison,’ George said abruptly, letting go of my
hand. ‘I don’t know what that is—a rumour? wishful thinking?—but it isn’t
true.’

‘I didn’t think it was,’ I said. ‘What did happen, George? If
you didn’t do anything illegal, why are you estranged from your family?’

‘I broke ranks,’ he said, ‘I didn’t play the game the way I was
supposed to.’

He was silent so long I thought he wasn’t going to say any
more. I was very conscious of him beside me, the starlight skimming the lines of
his face and throat. He’d unbuttoned his collar and his tie hung around his
neck, and the whiteness of his shirt gleamed in the darkness. I wanted to touch
him, to tell him that I didn’t care what he’d done, but I made myself stay
silent and let him tell the story in his own time.

‘It’s ironic that I only ran into trouble the one time I tried
to do my job,’ he said at last, hunching forward as if the memory was
uncomfortable.

‘I thought you hated your job?’ I said.

‘I did, and I hardly spent any time in the office. I relied
completely on the staff in my department who did all the work, but every now and
then I’d put in a token appearance.

‘Then one day one of the junior account managers came to me.
He’d stumbled across some discrepancies in the figures, and when his managers
had blown him off, he decided to approach me instead. I didn’t know what I was
looking at, but when he explained that one of my many cousins was dipping his
fingers into the hedge funds I thought I’d better do something about it.’ George
laughed shortly. ‘Big mistake, as it turned out.’

I frowned. ‘But wasn’t it your job to do something?’

‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘The truth was that I didn’t have a
clue what I was doing, so I went to see my father and my uncle and explained the
situation to them. They told me not to worry about it. They’d deal with it, they
said. And they dealt with it by sacking the junior account manager who’d brought
it to my attention in the first place.’

I was so shocked that I could only gape at him. ‘They did
what
?’

‘They fired him.’ George’s voice was quiet, implacable, and I
realised that he was still very angry.

‘What did you do?’

‘I went back to them and told them that was unacceptable.
They’d chosen to protect family at the expense of a member of staff with real
integrity. We had a huge row, during which it was pointed out—correctly—that I’d
spent my whole life sponging off the company and that I only had the job because
I was a member of the family and they didn’t know what else to do with me. Also
that I was too stupid to understand the fine details.’

I realised that my hands were clenched into fists, and I made
myself relax them. There was nothing stupid about George, as his family would
have known if they’d ever bothered to talk to him instead of dismissing him. I
wasn’t surprised that he had opted for a dissolute lifestyle. When his own
family thought of him as a waste of space, what incentive had there been for him
to apply himself?

‘I got the message,’ George said. ‘I didn’t know what I was
talking about, and I was to shut up and stop making trouble.’

‘You could have done that,’ I said. ‘You could have believed
them, but you didn’t.’

‘No,’ he said, remembering. ‘I was so angry, I went straight
out and called the Serious Fraud Office, and then it all hit the proverbial
fan.’

‘It must have been awful.’ No matter how fraught my
relationship with my father, I knew I would have found it difficult to denounce
him to the authorities.

‘You know, if they’d taken my cousin and dealt with him
quietly, I wouldn’t have minded,’ George said, sounding weary, ‘but the fact
that they sacked Peter for being a troublemaker when he was just trying to do
his job...I saw red.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ I said. I did have a vague memory of a
whistle-blowing scandal a few years earlier, but I had just graduated and was
getting used to my first job and thinking about getting chartered. I hadn’t had
much interest in business news.

‘I didn’t set out to single-handedly ruin the name of the
family firm,’ George said. ‘It’s not as if I had anything to be proud about, but
I couldn’t stand by and let Peter take the blame.’

‘How did the rest of your family react?’ I asked curiously.
Surely
someone
had recognised that he was doing the
decent thing?

‘They closed ranks. Challoners are like that.’ George smiled
without humour. ‘It’s a family tradition. I came under a lot of pressure to
withdraw the allegations. It all got very nasty.’

‘So they fired you for doing the right thing?’

He shrugged. ‘For my family, dragging the family name into
disrepute is the worst thing you could possibly do.’

‘But didn’t anyone take your side? Your mother?’

‘My mother?’ George gave a mirthless laugh. ‘My mother’s even
more obsessed with the family name than my father is—and that’s saying
something! She was never what you’d call a maternal type. I think she thought
about her children as her contribution to the dynasty, and once she’d had Harry
and me as the heir and spare she felt she’d done her duty.’

‘That’s awful,’ I said, appalled.

‘Oh, she wasn’t cruel, neither of them were,’ he said. ‘They
just weren’t very interested in us. We had nannies and then we were sent away to
school until we could join Challoners. And it’s not as if we were deprived. We
had everything we could ever want.’

‘I’m not surprised you’re so close to your grandmother,’ I
said. ‘It sounds as if she was the only one who ever gave you any
attention.’

His voice softened. ‘Yes, Harry and I used to live for the
holidays we spent with Letitia. We had some good times there.’

‘Couldn’t Harry have stood by you? He’s your brother, after
all!’

George didn’t answer immediately. ‘Harry was married with two
children,’ he said, and I had the impression he was picking his words with care.
‘He couldn’t afford to give up a house and a job and everything that goes along
with toeing the line at Challoners.’

‘
You
gave it all up.’

‘I didn’t have anyone depending on me. I don’t blame Harry,’
said George. ‘He had to think of the kids.’

He didn’t blame Harry, he didn’t blame his mother, he didn’t
blame his fiancée. I sat on the stone step beside George, and felt chastened
when I remembered how often I had blamed my father for everything that had gone
wrong.