The Garden Party, page 2
Harris nods. ‘Everything.’
Rhys says nothing for a moment, chewing his lip. Then says, ‘You don’t have to do it, you know.’
Harris doesn’t acknowledge this. They remain in silence for a while, then eventually Harris says ‘You ought to get ready. We should leave soon if we’re going to get to Bath in good time.’
‘Yeah,’ Rhys says. He steps back from the window, and Harris gets the feeling he is dragging himself away from thoughts deeper and more complicated than he is letting on. They both have a lot on their minds, that’s unavoidable. Today will send ripples through their lives. Perhaps not ripples, tidal waves, smashing through their sense of the day-to-day. Rhys has a sense of this, Harris can tell, but at least he doesn’t know the full plan. If he did, Harris would be on his own.
‘I’m going to have a quick shower,’ Rhys says. ‘I’ll bring my uniform and will change when we arrive. I don’t want to drive in it.’
Harris nods, offering a smile. Rhys sort-of returns it, but it’s more like a jerk of his mouth than anything else. He goes to grab a cereal bar from the kitchen and Harris hopes to himself that it’s just nerves that are making Rhys distant. He’d better not back out now. Not when they’ve come so far.
The drive to Bowen Hall in Bath goes smoothly, with the M4 surprisingly light and the weather remaining bright and dry. But on the last stretch of their journey, barely five miles from their destination, the police stop them. Rhys had realised he was in the wrong lane at a roundabout, changed lanes without indicating, then went round twice while he and Harris argued about which exit they needed to take. Harris grappled with a nonsensical sat-nav app on his phone trying to get it to show or repeat the necessary turn-off instruction, but in the end Rhys gave up and picked one at random, unable to glean the necessary information from the road signs surrounding them. All this is noticed by a police car, which follows them onto the quiet road Rhys’s KA has turned into and signals them to pull over.
‘Fuck. Oh fuck,’ says Rhys, running his hand over his forehead.
‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ Harris says, trying to convince himself this is true, watching in the rear-view mirror as the police officer gets out of his car and starts to walk over to them. ‘You weren’t speeding. Just tell him we’re lost. Tell him the truth.’
‘Shit,’ Rhys says, gripping the steering wheel tightly.
The police officer, when he arrives at the window and gestures for it to be lowered, is surprisingly polite, friendly even, apparently ‘just checking everything was okay’ as he’d noticed the boys had ‘gone round the roundabout a few times more than one would expect’. He had also noticed the lane drifting. In spite of his kind manner, however, Harris is worried how stressed he and Rhys must look, with Rhys’s hands trembling as he is breathalysed (and tests negative for any alcohol). Afterwards, once they are on their way again, Rhys still seems upset, his hands continuing to shake.
‘Are you okay?’ Harris asks. ‘Did you really think that cop was going to arrest you?’
Rhys doesn’t answer for a moment. Then he says, ‘Don’t you feel it was a bad omen?’
‘Omen? No. I don’t believe in omens or superstitions or any of that shit.’
‘My mum did,’ Rhys says quietly.
Harris doesn’t know what to say to this, so closes his mouth and thinks for a bit. Then says, ‘We’re doing this for your mum. And for mine. And for everything else that family has done.’
‘I know,’ Rhys says, nodding.
‘So just … keep calm.’
‘I will,’ says Rhys, still nodding, pulling down the sun visor to block out the bright, late-morning sunshine, ‘and anyway, we’re not doing anything illegal, of course. I just ... I don’t know… I find the whole social shaming thing a bit stressful.’
Rhys is driving smoothly again, but his knuckles are still white on the wheel. Nothing illegal, Harris thinks to himself as they lapse into silence. If only that were true.
Chapter Three
RAPHAEL
The day of the party
Raphael Moncrieff wakes up on the day of his engagement party with a sense of dread hanging heavy around him. He turns over to feel the cold side of the pillow next to him, enjoying having the space to stretch out. Whenever he shared a bed with his fiancé, he couldn’t help but feel cramped and uncomfortable, especially in the queen-size bed in her Oxford flat. There wasn’t enough room for his long legs and, more than once, he’d accidentally kicked or knocked Lauren in the night, waking her up with a start, then had to apologise and try to go back to sleep. Instead of suggesting they sleep in a bigger bed, though, she often seemed to find this more amusing than annoying, joking about it the next morning and saying how she loved how close and ‘intertwined’ they were. He particularly dislikes that word, intertwined. It makes him feel like his relationship is a creeper plant, like the Devil’s Snare in Harry Potter, locking him into place, restricting his freedoms, shutting down his options.
And his options were shut down. He was to marry Lauren Rizzini because that is what his parents desired. When they discovered their son had gotten Lauren pregnant during his final year at university, his mother had gone completely white and looked as if she would faint, and his father had smashed a bone china plate against a wall. ‘How could you have been so stupid?’ Isabella had asked, putting her head in her hands, before turning to her husband and saying ‘And that better be the last plate you fling at the wall. We’re not that sort of family.’
Patrick had let out a laugh at that. ‘Apparently we are. Full-blown EastEnders here, with Raphael unable to figure out how condoms work.’ The comparison had been an apt one, and for a moment during that confrontation, Raphael had felt as though he’d slipped into a play, or even a TV soap of the kind his mother pretended not to watch (he’d once seen the ‘iPlayer downloads’ section of her iPad, so he knew the full truth). The explosive reaction from his parents only got worse when they picked over all the ‘issues’ with the situation. Although they had met Lauren and seemed to like her, they took the opportunity to find new faults with her – the fact she was less ‘girl’ and more ‘older woman’, since she was twenty-eight, a full seven years older than him (a PhD student, in the midst of her doctorate on Georgian Literature). To further aggravate the matter, he’d revealed to his parents, who at that point were convinced the situation couldn’t get any worse, that the woman had, as part of her PhD, been doing some seminar tutoring and he was one of the students in her class. This was a detail he hadn’t originally revealed to his mother or father, but upon the revelation of the pregnancy, he wished he’d been up-front from the start.
‘So you’ve been fucking your tutor?’ his dad had said, spitting out his words, his face uncharacteristically red, eyes so intense Raphael wondered if they might melt.
‘She’s not really my tutor…’ Raphael had said, trying to fight off the urge to both cry and start smashing crockery himself.
‘As good as,’ his mother had replied, getting up from the table and stepping over the fragments of broken plate on the floor on her way through to the kitchen.
It had been a thoroughly miserable affair and Raphael had gone to bed that night without saying anything to either of his parents. Lauren had phoned later that evening to ask ‘how it had all gone’. Raphael hadn’t sugarcoated things. ‘Imagine an absolute fucking awful shitshow, then times it by three thousand.’
‘Oh, Raphy, try not to worry,’ Lauren said, using a nickname he hated. Its use was exclusive to her and the fact that nobody ever called him that had either not occurred to her or she perhaps found it endearing she had her own pet name for him. It was the kind of thing she’d found sweet.
‘Of course I’m bloody worried,’ he said, ‘If they cut me off I––’
‘I’m no gold digger, Raphy. You could be as poor as one of those unfortunates you see in documentaries and I would still love you.’
‘Well … that’s all very lovely, but … I kind of care. A lot, actually. It wouldn’t be fair. It’s the unfairness of it all.’
‘Of course it is, I know the money’s nothing to you, too, and it isn’t important––’
‘The money is important, that’s what I’m bloody saying.’
‘Don’t get snappy, it’s all going to be fine,’ she said, clearly trying to sound soothing.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said, ‘I need to sleep.’
‘Goodnight my dearest, I hope you get some rest and…’
He’d cut the call.
The next day, it was all change. His parents had convened for an emergency summit while he’d been asleep. And they had a plan.
‘You’ll marry her,’ Patrick had told his son firmly. ‘We’ll have some details to iron out. But yes, the plan is that you’ll have to marry her.’
‘You are aware of the year, aren’t you?’ Raphael had said. ‘You do know this is the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth?’
‘The wedding will need to be soon,’ Isabelle added, ignoring him, ‘May or June, I think, before it’s obvious she’s pregnant. Providing she’s told you the truth about dates and such.’
‘Of course she’s told me the truth,’ Raphael said. ‘Don’t imply that again, it’s not nice. But … what if I don’t want to get married? I’m twenty-one.’
‘What you want,’ Patrick said, slowly, his harsh, dark eyes burning into him, ‘is irrelevant.’ He then raised an eyebrow. ‘Unless, of course, you want to go your own way with all this.’
The meaning was clear. Play the game, do as you’re told, or you’re on your own.
So he played the game. He proposed to Lauren a week later in her Oxford apartment when she arrived home with one arm full of dusty hardback books and the other holding a bag of supermarket shopping. She immediately said yes, proclaimed that day the best of her life so far, and they celebrated by eating a Waitrose Very Best Dine In for two Truffle Chicken Kiev. Afterwards, they sat on her uncomfortable grey sofa watching a DVD of the 2007 adaptation of Persuasion, with Lauren giving an unbroken running commentary on how it compared with the original text, and Raphael sitting completely still wondering how his life had gone so spectacularly wrong.
He didn’t dislike Lauren. He actually quite liked her in some respects. And in many ways, she fitted. She was beautiful, intelligent, upper-middle-class, if not exactly rich. But the pregnancy had accelerated things, made things move quicker than he would have wanted and he’d felt manoeuvred and manipulated – not by her, exactly, but by those around him. His parents, and to some extent hers, too. And he couldn’t help sometimes taking out his frustration and resentment on her.
As the weeks passed, his fiancé bought things in large quantities in preparation for both wedding and baby and liaised with Isabelle and the event planner for the engagement party. Raphael was curious to note how the two women managed to get on perfectly well, with his mother remaining blunt and borderline unfriendly, and Lauren being her usual jolly self, apparently unphased by Isabelle’s demeanour and tone. Raphael met Lauren’s parents (her father was a producer at the BBC, her mother was a Harley Street doctor’s receptionist) and did his best to appear jovial and excited for the wedding, all the while trying to hide his sweating palms and juddering legs – a nervous habit of his when he was under stress or anxious. The wedding would be a very small, discreet affair, it was decided, with an engagement party held a little while before it in place of a grand reception. The story would be that they wanted the day itself to be ‘fuss-free’ to make it possible to enjoy their love for each other without distractions.
Now the day of the engagement party is upon him and Raphael is shocked to find the whole thing is actually happening. He’s become used to telling himself it’s all some elaborate hoax or a dream that he will soon wake up from, or that someone would shout ‘fooled you!’ and then reveal Lauren as a trained actor, the whole thing part of an edgy reality TV show. But of course, no such thing has occurred. Now he must face the party after a night of broken sleep. He is in the process of heaving himself out of bed when the door opens and both his parents walk in.
‘Good, you’re awake, we got tired of waiting,’ his mother says in a business-like tone, walking over to the curtains and flinging them open.
‘Hurry up and get dressed,’ his father says, ‘we need you to help with the chair fiasco.’
‘It’s not a fucking fiasco,’ Isabelle snaps at him.
‘That’s your word. You said it was a fiasco not half an hour ago.’
‘Fine,’ she concedes to her husband, ‘it is a fiasco. I just knew something would go wrong today.’
‘Christ, can you both leave?’ Raphael says, frozen to the spot. Drama like this from his parents is the last thing he needs today. ‘I could do without this now.’
‘I’m sorry it’s not convenient, but these things matter,’ his mother says, icily. ‘I gave birth to you. They literally quarried you out of me, it hasn’t been the same down there since, so forgive me if I want to oversee every detail of my precious son’s important day.’
‘Engineered important day,’ Raphael mutters.
‘We wanted to reiterate what we said yesterday about Great Aunt Elizabeth,’ Patrick says.
‘I know, I know,’ groaned Raphael. ‘You literally said it twelve hours ago – don’t let on Lauren’s pregnant, don’t let on you’re cohabiting. I thought all that was supposed to be secret, anyway? At least the first part. I’m hardly about to start advertising it to the most intolerant and Catholic member of the family.’
‘We wanted to remind you. You’ve slept since then, and you have a history of insensitivity and lack of tact when it comes to Elizabeth. And she has an unfortunate habit of keeling over with heart attacks. I would prefer to avoid any such drama today.’
‘Can you please just leave,’ he says, firmly.
‘We need you showered, dressed and downstairs in five minutes,’ Patrick says, turning to go.
‘Make that two,’ Isabelle adds as they walk back out of the door, neither of them bothering to close it.
Instead of doing as he was told, Raphael collapsed back onto his bed with a half-sigh, half-moan, his hands over his eyes, as if by blocking out the light he could bring back the darkness of the night, rewind time, return to another day, another month, another year. There he lies, until a minute later his phone rings. With effort, he reaches over and answers.
‘Hey Raphy,’ Lauren says, her cheery voice as painful as knives on bare flesh. ‘Are you getting ready? The weather is perfect. Do you know, if I believed in omens – well, I sort of do, of course – I would say this is a good one. My parents and I are leaving Oxford at ten, so should arrive at yours at noon.’
‘I know,’ Raphael murmurs.
‘Gosh, I’m excited,’ she says breathlessly. ‘This will be a day we’ll never forget, my love.’
Chapter Four
HARRIS
The day of the party
Harris and Rhys part ways shortly before they get to the driveway of Bowen Hall. They stop on a deserted country road about five minutes away so Rhys can change into his caterer’s uniform of tight, black, skinny suit trousers, white shirt and black tie. Harris stays in the car while he gets out to slip his clothes on. Rhys had flatly refused to get changed in the gents of a service station, saying he’d probably catch something or ruin his shirt. Harris told him he had more chance getting mud on his shirt changing at the side of the road in the countryside, but it didn’t seem to make a difference. Once dressed, they drive down the last few roads until they got near the entrance to the estate.
‘You should get out here,’ Harris says. ‘Then make your way up the drive on foot. That way it can be like you’ve been dropped off by someone. I’ll park the car outside the front of the house.’
Rhys nods and gets out. Harris notices his eyes look red and strained and darting about him. ‘You sure you’re okay?’ he asks.
‘Fine,’ Rhys says, ‘I’ll … well, I guess I’ll see you in there. I’ll let you know how it’s … how it’s all going. If I can.’
‘I’ll keep my phone on, so you can always message if you can’t talk to me,’ Harris says.
‘And if I can’t … if there’s no way to do it without someone––’
‘I’ll press ahead regardless,’ says Harris. ‘The … um … visuals will be an added extra. But the real impact will be in what I’m going to say. And once I’ve said it, there’ll be no taking it back.’
Rhys nods and leaves. Harris drives through the already open gates up the driveway he knows so well. The frontage, featuring a two-storey colonnade of Corinthian columns styled in white, like the rest of the building, comes instantly into view.
He parks outside the front of the house, finding the clutch on Rhys’s KA difficult and unpredictable, and almost grazes the side on the neat stone wall that separates the driveway from the front lawn.
The front door is opened by Isabelle Moncrieff herself – a surprise to Harris, as this is a job normally left to the housekeeper, Emmeline.
‘Oh, you’re here,’ Isabelle says, which was about as friendly as she’s ever been to him. ‘Good. You can go and hurry up Raphael.’
‘Where’s Emmeline,’ Harris asks, stepping inside.
‘Sorting out the chair fiasco,’ Isabelle says. ‘There’s been a terrible mix-up – they’ve sent the wrong sort of––’
She stops suddenly in the middle of closing the door, then peers out of it before turning to Harris with a look of horror and disgust on her face. ‘What on earth is that?’
‘What?’
‘That car!’ she says, pointing to Rhys’s battered and dirt-flecked KA.
‘It’s what I came in. I borrowed it. Off a friend.’
‘Well it can’t stay there,’ she says, looking at Harris as though he was insane, ‘it looks hideous.’
