Summer at Tiffany's (46 page)

‘If I do go –
if! –
I'm not leaving Henry
for
Luke. But there's unfinished business there. I can't pretend there isn't.'

‘This would all be a helluva lot more simple if he'd just stayed on his side of the Atlantic,' Kelly said crossly. ‘I mean, I cannot believe he's staying in the exact same place as you.'

‘I know. It is weird,' Cassie sighed. ‘His girlfriend knows Gem.'

‘Or maybe it is fate, uh?' Anouk asked.

Kelly shot her a look that suggested Anouk was being unhelpful. ‘I just don't understand why you stayed on once you realized he was there too. Surely you knew what might happen if you and Luke were together again?'

‘Honestly? No! I hated him so much after Paris.'

‘Too much, in retrospect, uh?' Anouk asked.

Cassie shrugged again. ‘Yes, maybe.'

There was a pause.

‘Look, it's a sex thing with you and Luke,' Kelly said, changing tack. ‘The chemistry was always incredible between you. God knows, it was in
my
face long enough. Man, I will never forget the time I found the two of you in the bath—'

‘Thanks!' Cassie shrieked, preferring not to go into specifics, even though the exact same memory had played through her mind several times in the past twenty-four hours.

‘The point I'm trying to make is that you two didn't get to let things take their natural course. You upped and left for Paris after New Year because that was the date we'd arbitrarily agreed on at the outset, but you and he weren't done. You hadn't played yourselves out. The relationship didn't get a chance to die; it just ended,
like that
.' She clicked her fingers. ‘So it's maybe not that surprising that this has happened.'

Cassie sensed there was more to come. ‘But you think that we would have ended if we'd had more time?' she prompted.

‘Oh yeah. Absolutely,' Kelly said resolutely.

‘You have no way of knowing that,' Anouk argued. ‘You're making assumptions because you see her with Henry and want that to be the answer – but what if it isn't? They've got problems. Cassie and Luke don't.'

‘If Henry could hear you—' Kelly started.

‘Hey! I love him as much as you, but this is about what's right for Cassie. This is the rest of her life we're talking about. There are no second chances with this. Whatever direction she chooses – whichever man – she can't go back.'

Cassie slumped further down the pillow, feeling her anxiety and confusion begin to marble again. Both Kelly and Anouk fell silent, feeling guilty. As much as they shared a style DNA, they had always disagreed about what was best for Cassie. Kelly had rendered her a Park Avenue blonde during her New York stint, Anouk a bobbed brunette. Kelly had had her running Central Park and eating sushi; Anouk had introduced her to the joys of the hammam and a full-bodied Merlot. They weren't likely to make it a first and agree, now, on this.

‘And Suzy has no idea?' Kelly asked after a moment.

Oh God, Suzy. Cassie dropped her head into her mueslicoated hands again. ‘She had her suspicions. We had a big fight about it. She was right and I was . . . I was putting my head in the sand. I didn't see it clearly like she did. I believed Luke when he told me he'd moved on. I mean, he's dating Amber Taylor, for heaven's sake! Hello! Why would I think he was pining over me? It's laughable.' She swallowed as they remained silent. There was nothing funny about it. ‘She doesn't know about last night.' Her face crumpled, the muscles falling slack with despair. ‘How can I tell her? If I go back to Luke, I'm betraying her as much as I am Henry. She'll never forgive me. She won't. I'll lose her too.'

Kelly and Anouk glanced at each other. Confirmation. There were no platitudes to offer here.

‘Did you tell Luke you were leaving?' Kelly asked quietly.

She nodded.

‘So then he's waiting for you.'

‘Yes.' Cassie met their eyes. ‘Oh Christ, what do you think I should do? Someone please just tell me what to do.'

It was a moment before either woman spoke.

‘Well, I know there's one thing you can't do,' Anouk said slowly.

Cassie blinked. ‘What's that?'

‘You can't go back there alone.'

‘Jeez, it would've been quicker coming by mail,' Kelly grumbled from the seat in the back, a hamper on her knee as they passed a sign for Bodmin.

‘This is nothing – you should see Henry's car,' Anouk drawled. ‘We almost had to cut the roof off to get Bas out.'

Cassie laughed, winking at Kelly in the rear-view mirror. OK, so it had taken seven hours instead of five, but she was really rather pleased (not to mention relieved) that her Morris Minor had made the motorway journey without incident – no black smoke belching from the exhaust (as it had done on the road to Bath once), no burst tyres (en route to Norfolk) or the clutch going (a wedding in Warwickshire). The poor little car was so full its back bumper was practically kissing the tarmac, as Cassie had expertly wedged baskets, rugs, glasses, cutlery, ice buckets, food trays and best friends inside.

‘Right. Bas says he can get the first train down in the morning,' Kelly said, reading from her texts.

‘Did you tell him where the spare key is?' Cassie called back. ‘It's under the—'

‘Yeah, yeah. He says he's in. Reckons he'll be with us by eleven tomorrow.'

‘I can't believe we missed him. It must have been by minutes,' Cassie said sadly, shaking her head. ‘Such crummy luck.'

‘Well, maybe next time he will think to text beforehand to check you're there,' Anouk said. ‘It is rude to turn up unannounced,
non
?'

But Cassie already had a feeling as to why he may have turned up at her flat without notice. The couture shows were starting in Paris next week, but if he'd turned up a few days early to see Luis and things hadn't quite panned out in the way he'd hoped . . .

She bit her lip, hoping it wasn't that. Let one of them be lucky in love, at least.

She swung along the back roads via Delabole as the sky reddened into black, her grip tightening on the steering wheel as the miles to Rock were counted down on every road sign. They were too late for dinner now, in spite of their best plans, and she had texted Archie from the Tiverton services to appraise them of their new ETA. ‘If you're tired, don't wait up. Big day tomorrow!' she'd signed off, in the vain hope – she now realized – that Archie would spread the word and scatter their guests back to their rooms. If she could just
not
see Luke for one more night . . . If she could just have another twelve hours to herself while she reached for clarity, achieved perspective, settled on the answer that her heart told her was right.

Her hands tightened at the wheel again.

‘You OK?' Anouk asked, her eyes on Cassie's blanched knuckles.

‘Me? Yeah. Just tired.' She had barely slept again, her nervous system scarcely touched by the holistic, relaxing treatments her friends had prepared last night, and she had been working in the kitchen for several hours before Anouk and Kelly had woken up, their rubber gloves still on and bits of porridge oats stuck in their eyebrows.

‘I'm not surprised. You worked like a fever today.'

Cassie shrugged. ‘It was good to get ahead with the prepping. I reckon it's going to be fairly stressy in the house tomorrow, no matter what Gem says about it being low-key. At least all I've got to do now is roast the lamb and stack the macaroons.' A sixth sense told her that tomorrow was going to be difficult in lots of ways – not only with Luke wanting an answer, but also being faced with Suzy's stonewalling again. Her eyes flickered towards Anouk in the passenger seat beside her. ‘I couldn't have done it without your help, you know. You guys were amazing, pitching in like that.'

Kelly and Anouk had stood in the kitchen doorway, their eyes on the bowls already filled with washed, chopped and colour-coded ingredients, and had immediately put aprons on over their pyjamas, recognizing work as catharsis when they saw it. They had stayed like that all day – no one, not even Anouk, taking a shower or getting dressed till they'd been ready to start packing the car, Kelly and Anouk obediently following Cassie's instructions with an understanding that sometimes, just sometimes, it was better to do than to talk. They had made great sous-chefs. (Notwithstanding the moment Anouk accidentally sliced off a nail and made such a fuss that for several moments Cassie had thought it had been a finger.)

‘I've got to say, I never realized how intense your job is,' Kelly piped up from the back. ‘It seems to me you've got to have ten arms, plus eyes in the back of your head.'

Cassie chuckled. ‘It certainly feels like that sometimes.' It had been revelatory for her to be the ‘expert' among her friends for once. Her tutelage under her late friend and mentor Claude Sautans in Paris had been a first-class education and she rarely got a chance to indulge, to show what she was really capable of doing; her job usually meant working to very tight budgets and briefs, but Gem's ideas had been so obscure and unrealistic – not to mention last-minute, having maintained all the way through that she didn't want to be ‘hung up' on the superfluous details of the day – that Cassie had felt vindicated to take carte blanche and produce a menu to her vision.

Hence she'd planned individual hampers, starting with terrines of jellied ham, parsley and quail's eggs, then moving on to a salad of pea tops with edible pansies, and rare lamb and butternut squash roasted with hazelnuts. For pudding, she'd whipped up some deliciously tart gooseberry fool and elderflower jelly, and in lieu of a formal wedding cake – which would have needed to have been started six weeks ago – she had baked several trays of rose petal-infused macaroons, ready to stack into a croquembouche (her and Claude's signature dish) in the morning.

‘I can't believe the scale of things down here,' Kelly murmured as ten-foot-high, pink-tufted hedgerows whistled past the car with only inches to spare either side, the scent of wild garlic a pinch of sweetness in the night air. ‘It's like Lilliput, everything's so tiny. They must operate a one-way system like New York, right?'

‘Nope.'

‘You're kidding? They get two-way traffic down these roads?'

‘I know. It's crazy. And most of it's tractors too.'

The lanes were quiet as they slipped through the hilltop village, the snake of traffic down to the sailing club mercifully dispersed for the night and the drunken babble from the Mariner's pub too distant to discern from here. A fox skipped across the lane a short distance in front of them, its casual cock of the head telling them it had no fear, took no heed of the rounded car from another era bumbling towards it.

‘Well, this is it,' Cassie said a few minutes later, turning into the long drive and past the cream pebble-dashed pillars. ‘That's Snapdragons on the right.'

‘Oh.' Anouk's voice betrayed disappointment as they passed the 1950s house, the Renault Clio and the Jeep parked outside at jaunty angles, a light shining through the downstairs window.

‘I know. It's not a beautiful house, but wait till tomorrow when you see the setting and the views. It's sensational.'

She slowed as they approached Butterbox. Every light was blazing so that from a distance the house appeared almost aflame and there were various cars in the drive – Suzy's Volvo, of course, and an old orange Beetle that she recognized as Hattie's, but there was another, glossier one too, with a rental sticker on the back bumper. Had Laird's brother caught a standby flight after all, then? Archie's bike was propped up against the hydrangea bush, the day's issue of
The Times
still rolled up and now damp with dew in the basket.

They disembarked with care. Cassie was the only one who hadn't had a hamper on her lap and they each had to stretch out, after hours of sitting hunched. They piled the hampers in a tower in the porch by the front door – some of them had been filled with the wine glasses and cutlery, others the jellies and pansies – ready to bring in shortly with a little help from the others.

‘Well, here goes,' Cassie said quietly, her key in the lock and taking a deep breath as Anouk and Kelly both squeezed her shoulders. ‘Remember, say nothing yet to Suzy, OK? You're just here to . . .' She faltered, not having thought through an alibi.

‘Here to see her,' Anouk said. ‘She's been trying to get me down here for years.'

‘And I'm so desperate to get away from Bebe I'll even spend seven hours in your tinpot car,' Kelly quipped, taking the sleeve of Cassie's light jumper and maternally tugging it down, over the bangle.

‘OK, yes. Good. Great,' Cassie nodded uncertainly. She had a sense of standing on the precipice again, not sure if she was going to jump or be pushed.

They stepped into the hallway, dropping their bags onto the sagging blue damask wing chair opposite the stairs. The house's distinctive musty, salty tang had sweet and fresh top notes, thanks to an armful of long-stemmed pale pink roses lying out on the hall console.

‘Beautiful,' Anouk whispered, rushing over.

‘Well, Hats must have come round to the idea of the marriage, then,' Kelly murmured, lifting one and smelling it with her eyes closed. ‘I carried these at my wedding, do you remember?'

As if she could ever forget. ‘Maiden's Blush,' Cassie nodded. It was the perfect wedding flower, albeit a rare, old-fashioned variety these days, which Hattie grew in her noteworthy dedicated rose garden at West Meadows. They had been the catalyst that had brought her and Henry together at last, and the sight and smell of them were almost painful to her now.

The sound of voices in the sitting room carried down the hall – earnest conversation, some talking over each other, the tone harried and humourless. The women all looked at each other. Perhaps Hattie hadn't come round after all? Were she and Suzy launching a joint last-minute offensive on Gem?