Well Groomed (59 page)

Pascal was privately furious that, of his guests at dinner, only his wife and Ben ate a respectable amount of the ambrosial food on offer. Sophia, competitively watching her weight because Tash had grown so slim recently, picked at her poached chicken mousseline and undressed green salad as though her jaws were wired. And Tash and Niall – who had both ordered the most delicious
Rognons d’agneau grillés chivry
– watched it congeal on their plates with barely a prod of their forks. They had been equally disrespectful to their stuffed artichoke hearts in sorrel sauce, and had skipped the fish course entirely, smoking cigarettes throughout. To a gourmand like Pascal this was the equivalent of someone taking one-hundred-pound seats at the opera and sleeping throughout the performance, or driving a Ferrari at a constant thirty miles an hour on an unrestricted autoroute. Such abuse of good food appalled him. He returned to the
manoir
spitting for a fight, but they both sloped off to bed early.

Still fretful, he produced his favourite cognac and pronounced it a night to get drunk.

Looking eager, Ben settled down on the tattered red silk sofa and loosened his tie in anticipation.

‘Bed, I think.’ Sophia hauled him back up.

‘But it’s still early, darling,’ Alexandra protested. ‘Stay for one drink at least.’

‘No – Ben and I promised ourselves an early night, Ma.’ Sophia tugged his arm, eager to get up the stairs. ‘Sorry.’

Suddenly realising what his wife’s fervour might indicate, Ben’s face lit up and he himself took up the dragging as they dashed out.

‘Lord.’ Alexandra sagged on to the sofa as Pascal poured their drinks. ‘One knows one’s getting dreadfully old when one’s children start to go to bed before one –’

‘Get off me, Ben, I’m trying to listen.’

‘But I thought . . .’

‘Oh, that – maybe later. This is far more important.’ Sophia craned her neck to pick up on the argument that was raging next door.

When Ben persisted in his nuzzling, he was ordered to have a bath.

‘We’re making one another unhappy, Niall!’ Tash was crying. ‘However hard we try to make it work, our lives are incompatible.’

‘Which means your career is more important than I am to you, doesn’t it?’

‘No!’ she wailed. ‘But if I gave up my job, it would make me explosively unhappy – and I know the same would be true for you, so I would never ask you to do it.’

‘I should bloody well hope not, so I should,’ he raged. ‘I was acting a long time before you started riding horses around rich bastards’ estates. All this only started when your mother gave you that horse. You weren’t like this when I met you. You were sweeter, less hard. You’ve changed.’

They were facing one another across the bed like adversaries in a billiards match, stalking around it as they assessed the best angle of approach.

‘I started working for Penny and Gus just weeks after we met!’ she argued. ‘You can hardly say I changed as a result – you barely knew me before.’

‘When I met you,’ he said quietly, ‘you lived in London, scratched out a living as an illustrator and took each day at face value, so you did. Now you socialise with landed gentry, get fat sponsorship deals and plan our dates three months in advance. I call that change.’

‘I call that our relationship, Niall. If I didn’t plan ahead, we would never see one another. And I got that deal less than a fortnight ago, as you well know. I could barely afford to stand a round before that, let alone race round the world trying to meet up with you.’ She stalked around to the foot of the bed.

Niall relocated to the bedside table. ‘I’ll pay for you to do that! Christ, I’ve always offered to pay for you to do that.’

‘That’s not the point. I can’t afford to be away right now, paid for or not. If I miss an event, my edge goes and my horses suffer. I don’t qualify, I don’t get asked to endorse products, owners don’t see me as a potential jockey.’

He looked down at the table which was covered with the Four Poster Bed script.

‘You love those horses far more than you love me.’

‘I love you more than anything, Niall,’ she breathed. ‘I probably always will. But I don’t want to marry you.’

‘I don’t want to marry you either,’ he echoed, staring at her. He seemed almost surprised.

The pause was like a power-cut, suspending everything except their angry, shallow breathing.

Colour was licking its way into Tash’s cheeks and she could see Niall blinking nervously over and over again as though suddenly blinded.

‘There – we’ve said it,’ he breathed hoarsely.

‘Thank God.’ Tash bit her lip, eyes still glued to his.

Suddenly letting out a furious, big-cat bellow, he spun around in a discus-thrower coil, arm outstretched so that he swiped every book, lamp, photograph frame and the entire Four Poster Bed script from the bedside table. Then he slumped on the page-strewn bed, head in hands, utterly defeated.

Climbing on to the bed behind him, pages of script crunching beneath her knees, Tash edged forwards until she could reach out a hand to his shoulder. A second later his arm had shot behind his head and he was gripping it tightly, fingers lacing through hers. She pressed her forehead to his warm back and clenched her eyes shut. The release of tension was so great that she felt weak, her limbs chewed to string, her lungs shallow and perforated, hardly able to hold air.

Niall shifted as he glanced around at the pages of script littering the room. It looked as though it had just snowed inside, everything was so white.

‘I always said that script was all over the place,’ he sighed.

Despite the awfulness of their predicament, Tash felt a giggle rip through her chest. Then, goaded by the highly charged emotions that had been battling away inside her, it started to catch. Soon she was shaking with laughter and crying at the same time. Twisting around, Niall enveloped her in a vast, warm hug.

‘Just how on earth,’ he wiped her eyes gently, ‘are we going to tell your mother?’

Sophia was absolutely furious. Just as she had been listening to the vital moments of the argument next door, Ben had emerged from the bathroom and pounced on her, his libido at a rare high.

Rather swept away by his enthusiasm, she had humoured him for a while before wriggling away to remove her make-up, hoping to catch some more of the fascinating denouement next door. But all had fallen silent, and she retired to bed unsatisfied. She rather wished that Ben would remain the same way, but somehow she didn’t have the heart.

‘Will you put on your stockings?’ he pleaded, tickling her neck with his fingertips.

‘No, Ben – not after last time.’

‘I didn’t mean to rip them, Sophs. Bloody wrist watch got in the way.’

‘They were La Perla.’

Taking in his desperately disappointed, hang-dog face, she was shot through with guilt, realising what a negligent snoop she had just been, caring more about family gossip than her sensitive giant of a husband. Freshly scrubbed and baby pink from his bath, he actually looked quite presentable for once, his wet, blond hair combed slickly back from his noble, aristocratic face, teeth squeaky clean, skin smelling of soap and talc. Feeling beastly and suddenly rather horny, she decided really to cheer him up by doing something frightfully risqué and talking dirty.

‘Come here, you beast, and roger me senseless,’ she growled, turning red.

‘Who’s Roger?’ Ben looked horrified.

NEITHER TASH NOR NIALL was able to confess their monumental decision to Alexandra the next morning. Humming old Supremes hits, she was in such an ebullient mood as she fried eggs English-style and supervised Polly squeezing oranges, that they simply didn’t have the heart.

‘You do it – she’s your mother,’ Niall hissed after breakfast as Alexandra headed off to make more coffee, still humming.

‘No, that would make it far harder – you’re more impartial if she gets hysterical,’ Tash whispered back. ‘And she’s less likely to try and argue with you.’

Despite their nervous asides and rising panic, they said nothing over coffee and avoided Alexandra throughout the morning, behaving ludicrously like children unwilling to confess to breaking a favourite mirror or chair.

Tash suddenly found that she and Niall were talking as though given an intravenous truth serum. Bathed in relief and mutual gratitude, they could afford to be absolutely frank. They were friendlier to one another, more honest and less touchy. Escaping from the
manoir
for a long mid-morning ramble, they chatted easily about the pressure they had both been under, the ghastliness of the last few weeks, and the problems they were going to have to face in the future. Talking with him, Tash experienced the strangest sensation of meeting up with an old ex-boyfriend that one hasn’t seen for years, yet finds oneself opening up to with amazed, heart-skipping delight and nostalgia. There was the awful, aching ‘what could have been’ mixed with astonishingly easy ‘what did I ever see in him to make me so unhappy?’ She felt almost revitalised.

Their new-found affection was quickly picked up on by Alexandra, who was now under the impression that her weekend break had truly smoothed out the pre-wedding nerves and provided a much needed tonic for them both. Throughout a glorious al fresco lunch of pea salad gleaming with vinaigrette, wine-rich pâtés and dry toast, she watched them both indulgently, clapped her hands together with delight whenever Niall cracked a joke, and even managed to lay off the subject of weddings for their benefit. She just poured the Kir and smiled indulgently.

Keeping a close eye on the couple, Sophia was far more sceptical than her mother, but Alexandra wouldn’t be dissuaded as to the efficacy of her little plan.

‘They look so wonderful together!’ she sighed as Sophia helped her make coffee in the cool of the kitchen whilst the others basked outside. ‘I think they’re madly in love. You know, I’ve had my doubts about them in the past, but I truly think they’re kindred spirits.’

‘They had a blazing row last night.’ Sophia wrinkled her nose. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing it. They said some dreadful things to one another.’

‘Well, they’re both very emotional, highly strung people.’ She waved the information away with her hand as though it was a bothersome wasp. ‘And rowing can lead to glorious frissons in bed, darling – Pascal and I often have a bicker when we’re cleaning our teeth to spice things up.’

Packing to go back to England that afternoon, Tash knew that she had to say something within the next hour, or it would be too late.

After lunch, Pascal had taken Ben and Niall to the village bar for a final drink, leaving the women to ‘talk weddings’. As they were setting off, Tash had darted up to Niall.

‘You tell Pascal and Ben that the wedding’s off while you’re there, and I’ll break it to my mother and Sophia.’

‘Are you sure, angel?’

‘We have to, Niall.’

This way, she figured that the onus was on both of them to do it, and they would be spurred on by the knowledge that when both parties came together again, life would be very complicated if only half of them knew the news.

Yet she had been working herself up to it for almost an hour now, and still she couldn’t bring herself to join her mother on the covered terrace and broach the subject.

She sat on the floral bedspread in the turret room she had been sharing with Niall and gazed mindlessly at the wall, wondering what to do. If she told them now it would put an end to their immediate panic, cauterise that leaping nerve of fear that they were running out of time. Yet to do so would trigger off the far greater trauma of cancelling every part of her mother’s and Henrietta’s meticulously organised event. Her head was pounding again. She blinked several times to try and clear it.

Suddenly she noticed that she was staring at one of her own paintings – not a very good one at that. It was of Rooter, the shaggy old canine lothario that Alexandra and Pascal had adopted for a couple of years, and who had gone on to father most of the local dogs, including little Beetroot. Tash’s picture made him look like a large, shaggy hearth-rug with mad eyes and paws like joke slippers, rather detracting from his noble looks. Her eyes misted over as she looked at it, remembering his big personality, over-exuberant affection and total lack of morals.

‘If Niall was a dog, he’d be a bit like Rooter,’ she muttered aloud.

She was just wondering what sort of a dog Hugo would be – something sleek and proud and disobedient, she mused – when Sophia wandered in under the pretext of getting back her sarong.

‘I put it on your bed.’ Tash dragged her eyes away from the painting.

‘Oh – right.’ Sophia hovered in the doorway for a couple of seconds before walking purposefully over to the bed and perching beside Tash.

‘Are you okay, Fanny?’ she asked gently. ‘With Niall? You both seem a bit tense.’

Tash started slightly, caught off-guard by the use of her childhood nick-name and the gentleness in Sophia’s usually brisk voice.

‘Why do you ask?’ She looked at her, noticing the kind expression on her sister’s beautiful face. As children they had often been known as ‘china doll’ and ‘rag doll’, for Sophia’s face had been cool, set and exquisitely pretty, whilst Tash’s had been soft, padded and smiling. Yet on the few occasions that Sophia dropped her guard, her face was transformed and one wanted to pour out every woe to those huge, sympathetic eyes.

But Tash had poured out enough woes in the past to know that Sophia was also appallingly indiscreet – often barely listening to the end of a tearful confession before she sprinted off to spread the word. Tash was acutely aware that in this case, that was precisely what she needed, but she was still wary, still balancing on the precipice of the awfulness that lay ahead.

‘I ask because I care about you,’ Sophia was saying. ‘And I think you’re very unhappy with the way things are going. And I also know that there is one person in particular who is simply longing for you to have a change of heart.’