Last of the Great Romantics (2 page)

At thirty-seven, he was just a few months older than her, although he'd never quite lost that boyish, Robert-Redford-circa-1975-before-he-started-to-turn-into-a-dried-sultana look he always had about him. Tall and fair-haired, he was dressed in a navy suit which brought out his twinkly deep blue eyes and a sexy, crumpled white linen shirt. In short, he looked like a movie star. Not for the first time, she silently marvelled that someone like her could have had the sheer good fortune to land a man like Andrew de Courcey. And what he'd given up for her!

When they'd first met, Portia was struggling to maintain her family's ancestral home, Davenport Hall, a vast, crumbling, eighteenth-century manor house set in over two thousand acres of prime Kildare farmland. Struggling being the operative word. In fact, so rundown, rotting and neglected was the Hall back then, it had become a sort of joke amongst the locals in the neighbouring town of Ballyroan. Alcatraz, they used to call it. Dachau-sur-mer. Or Wuthering Depths, if they were feeling particularly vicious. Portia's long-cherished dream had been to restore the Hall to its former glory and then run it as a luxury five-star hotel. However, she was continually hampered by the family's total lack of funds, exacerbated by the fact that her father, the ninth Lord Davenport, had pretty much gambled away anything they possessed which was of any value. So, in true Cinderella-style, she had fully resigned herself to a life of genteel destitution – poverty behind lace curtains – along with her mother, Lucasta, and younger sister Daisy. Until Andrew came along.

They'd fallen in love and married a disgracefully short length of time after they'd first met, as her mother-in-law never ceased to remind them. He'd spent years working as a successful corporate lawyer in New York and, like most lawyers at the top of their game, had made a fortune there. However, instead of setting up his own practice and scaling the corporate heights to amass even greater wealth, he suddenly decided to jack in the whole rat race. In a career U-turn of which Ronald Reagan or even Arnold Schwarzenegger would have been proud, he came to a decision he'd yet to regret. If Portia wanted to restore Davenport Hall to what it once was, then he was determined to help her realize that dream. He'd slowly come to love the Hall almost as much as she did and the idea of transforming it into one of the most salubrious, classically elegant country house hotels in Ireland was a challenge he couldn't resist.

'Just don't ask me to get involved in the day-to-day running of it, honey,' he'd said to her at the time. 'That is, unless you actually want Basil Fawlty in charge of the place.'

It was an overwhelming gesture. Never having had money of her own, Portia found it difficult to spend someone else's and Andrew certainly wasn't one to cut corners. His mantra was: 'Penny wise, pound foolish. If this is worth doing, then it's worth doing it properly.' His one and only condition, it turned out, was that he and Portia first renovate the nearby gate lodge and live there while the building work on the Hall proper was under way. It was an arrangement which suited everybody; they were only two miles from the Hall, although still on the Davenport land, and Portia got to decorate the tiny lodge in the simple, fresh style which she loved: all wooden floors and pristine white walls, so utterly different to the high ceilings and opulent Georgian splendour of the Hall. Andrew, moreover, got to begin life as a married man without the added pressure of living under the same roof as his mother-in-law, Lucasta. Not that he didn't adore her; he was one of the few people who got a great kick out of her oddities and eccentricities. One of the very few. Even Portia had to admit that her mother would try the patience of a pontiff.

They were barely three months into the restoration project when the foreman on the job handed in his notice. 'I'm responsible for two dozen men on this site,' he'd explained to Portia, 'and your ma keeps plying them with drink from lunchtime on. Happy hour, she calls it, and that's one thing, but by three o'clock my lads are too plastered to plaster. I can handle her doing their bleedin' star charts for them, I can even handle her telling us that we all worked on the pyramids in a past life – says she remembers cos she used to be Cleopatra – but this, I cannot take. I'm a professional, you know. Suppose one of them fell down off the scaffolding? They'd be rightly tequila slammed then.'

The final straw came when he discovered one of Lucasta's army of cats had done its business right inside his hard hat. He was gone in a matter of moments.

'Just as well,' Andrew had said as his white van drove away. 'If I had to listen to him say: "Now I can't even touch that till Tuesday," once more, I'd have screamed.'

'And have you noticed the way a lot of the coving on the ceiling in the Ballroom is completely offline?' Lucasta had asked him innocently as they walked back inside the Hall. 'Wouldn't surprise me in the least if that gobshite had a glass eye. I won't say what I really think of him, though, because you know how I like to be nice about people. So let's just say it rhymes with trucking tanker.'

There were no two ways about it, Andrew had been the driving force behind the whole project, entrusting only the best and most expensive restoration team with the mammoth job of gutting, reroofing and completely renovating the Hall from top to bottom. Only Christopher Johnson, the country's top architect, was deemed experienced enough by Andrew to handle the enormity of the task. And so, together, he and Portia ploughed every penny of his hard-earned cash back into the Hall – but the substantial savings he'd made from his annual six-figure salary were not even enough to cover the initial estimate. As with all building jobs, they'd gone way over budget within a matter of months and were left with no choice but to remortgage the Hall, on the assumption that once it was up and running as a successful country house hotel, their ship would well and truly have come in.

It didn't stop Portia from worrying though. From worrying herself sick. If there was a tiny blight on the happiness she'd known since her marriage, it was her awareness of the full extent of the debt she'd plunged her husband into. If it weren't for her, he could be enjoying his money and living the high life, she used to think, instead of fretting about how in God's name they were ever going to ask their interior designer for further credit. She was only too well aware of the fact that her esteemed mother-in-law never lost an opportunity to raise this subject.

'So, Portia Davenport has finally got what she wanted. She's frittered away every last penny of Andrew's on that God-awful monstrosity, and now he's as destitute as she ever was. All the Davenports are the very same, you know, never happy till they're bankrupt. Well, she's certainly dragged him into the mire with her and I just hope she's happy, that's all I can say.'

Susan de Courcey was nothing if not a lady, though. She only ever said this behind Portia's back.

As ever, Andrew seemed to be reading her thoughts. Reaching across the table, he lifted the unopened menu from her and gently cupped his hand over hers, his wedding ring glinting under the candlelight. 'Don't spoil tomorrow by worrying, darling. The Davenport Hotel is going to be the biggest success story of the decade, I can feel it. Best investment I ever made. In two years' time, we'll have trebled our money. There'll be a six-month waiting list to get into the restaurant and every A-list celebrity in the world is going to want to have their wedding there. Trust me.'

She looked him square in the eye and smiled, blushing prettily as she always did when it was just the two of them, alone. Andrew was brimming over with confidence and was so full of enthusiasm that it was virtually impossible not to get swept up in the maelstrom of all that positive energy.

'What's so funny, my lady?'

'Nothing. You make me feel like a young girl of thirty-six all over again.'

Portia sat up in the bed, straining to hear sounds of life downstairs. Nothing. Not a peep. She'd half expected Andrew to walk through the bedroom door, breakfast tray in hand and hop back into bed beside her, as he normally would, but there was no sign of him. Hauling herself up on to one elbow she stretched over to the alarm clock on his side of the bed. Jesus Christ, she thought, suddenly wide awake, eleven a.m.! No wonder the lodge is so quiet; he must have let me sleep on and gone up to the Hall by himself. In one movement, she'd leapt out of bed, shivering, and thrown on the first thing that came to hand: a pair of grey tracksuit bottoms and an oversized fleece jumper to match. She paused briefly to glance at herself in the gilt mirror on her dressing table and then wished she hadn't. She'd had way too much to drink in the Lemon Tree last night and boy, did it show. Her eyes were bloodshot and puffy and her normally pale, white skin now looked grey and saggy.

That was the trouble with being thirty-six, she thought, one night on the tear and I look like I need a blood transfusion. She scraped her light-brown shoulder-length hair back into a ponytail to conceal how greasy it was and hastily pulled on a pair of runners. Plenty of time for glamour later, she thought, seeing the stunning new evening dress Andrew had bought her to wear at the grand opening tonight peeping out from behind the open wardrobe door. It was a snug-fitting cocktail dress, pillar-box red and deeply unforgiving, considering the extra few pounds she'd gained since she'd got married.

Portia had always been one of those lucky, naturally slim people who measured their weight gain in ounces rather than pounds, but ever since she'd met Andrew, her whole metabolism seemed to have drastically slowed down to a snail's pace. She wasn't exactly overweight but certainly had ballooned from a small size ten to a large size fourteen. They ate out a lot, she reasoned, which she'd never done before she got married, and anyhow Andrew always said he liked her the size she was now. 'Happiness fat' he used to tease her. So when it came to the tight red dress, he'd categorically refused to take no for an answer. 'It looks stunning on you,' he'd said as she shyly emerged from the fitting room of Khan, one of Kildare's swankiest and most expensive boutiques. 'And I don't care what it costs. Half the county's going to be at the opening and I want my wife looking the part.'

Personally, the only part she thought it made her look was that of an overweight dancer at the Moulin Rouge, and it seemed like such an unnecessary extravagance when she'd plenty of other more suitable outfits at home, but as long as Andrew was happy . . .

Racing downstairs, she grabbed her car keys and was about to dash out of the front door when a flickering red light on the answering machine by the hall table suddenly halted her in her tracks. She hurriedly pressed the replay button, silently praying that it wasn't some catastrophe which would delay her even more. Between florists arriving and last-minute changes to the guest list, never mind somehow trying to squeeze in a hair appointment for herself, she'd quite enough on her plate without any other hassles. The first message was from her younger sister Daisy, politely enquiring whether she could borrow a particular evening dress for the nights festivities, one she'd had her eye on for ages.

'Hi fat arse, it's me.' Daisy was nothing if not direct. 'Let's face it, unless you have surgery the black Donna Karan ain't never getting over your thunder thighs ever again, so
pleeease,
pretty
pleeease
with knobs on, can I have a borrow? I swear I won't sweat into it or puke on it or hand it back to you in a Tesco's bag like the last time . . .'

Portia rolled her eyes to heaven, obediently hoofing back upstairs to get the dress for her. Daisy was one of those people it was just impossible to say no to. Not that her sister needed expensive, designer clothes to make her look well. At just twenty-two, Daisy was unquestionably the beauty of the family, tall like all the Davenports, but rake-thin, with ice-blue eyes and a mane of cascading blonde curls. She was often told that she could make a fortune as a model but Daisy had absolutely no interest in either clothes or fashion, preferring instead to muck around in jodhpurs and woolly jumpers and simply borrow from her big sister when the need arose.

She was to be the Davenport Hotel's new equestrian manager, with sole responsibility for over a dozen stabled horses, a job which didn't exactly call for ball gowns and tiaras. Her voice was still resonating all over the tiny hall-way as Portia rushed back downstairs again. Daisy didn't believe in leaving a message on the answering machine when a three-act radio play would do instead.

'And, by the way, don't bother with brekkie, you wouldn't believe the
yummy-licious
fry-up Tim's made, totally organic you know, and there's a pile left over so . . .'

Portia pressed the fast forward button on the machine, knowing full well that she'd have driven to the Hall in the time it would take for Daisy to shut up rabbiting.

The second message was from Andrew, sounding crackly and miles away, as though he was calling from a mobile in his car.

'Hey, sleeping beauty, hope you're not feeling too hung over after last night. Perfect way to spend Valentine's night, if you ask me, getting drunk and doing it twice.'

Portia smiled, glad there was no one else around to overhear.

'Look, darling, I've had to come to Dublin for a meeting. It was urgent; I couldn't get out of it. All very last minute, but don't worry, I'll be back at the Hall by three at the latest and I'll explain then.'

She did an involuntary double-take; who on earth could he be meeting in Dublin? And what could be so important that he'd drop everything to drive almost forty miles for it? And today of all days too, when she was up to her eyes and totally reliant on his being there . . . Her train of thought was interrupted, however, by Daisy's voice leaving yet another message. 'Oh, for God's sake, I'm bringing the bloody dress,' Portia shouted in exasperation at the machine, grabbing her house keys and opening the door.