Hitched!, page 14
‘It’s good to see you, Letitia.’
‘It’s been too long,’ she said astringently, but her frail hand touched his hair in a gesture so full of love that my throat tightened.
‘I know,’ said George. ‘I’m sorry.’
Straightening, he looked at the watching group. ‘Hello, Mother,’ he said, unsmiling. She had a hand to her throat and was staring at him in shock. ‘Dad.’
The beefy-faced man on Letitia’s other side was obviously his uncle. ‘Andrew,’ George acknowledged him. ‘And Penny.’ He smiled at Andrew’s wife, whose gaze darted anxiously between him and her husband, obviously dreading the explosion that was to come.
‘You’ve got a damned cheek coming here!’ Andrew burst out. ‘Who asked you to come?’
‘I did,’ said Letitia clearly. ‘George is my grandson, and I wanted him here with me.’
Michael Challoner was a good-looking man like his son, but his eyes were hard. ‘You should have told us he was coming.’
‘And have you make a fuss? I’m tired of this nonsense about George letting you all down. He’s family and I want you all to treat him that way this weekend. This is my house, and my party, and you’re all to behave.’
Letitia Challoner might be old, but she still had the whip hand. Her sons exchanged a glance, but they weren’t prepared to argue with her.
George’s gaze had moved on to his brother. ‘Hello, Harry,’ he said quietly.
Harry had the same dark gold hair, the same features, the same lean build, but he wasn’t the same at all. Next to George, he was somehow muted. There was no laughter dancing in his eyes, no smile tugging at his mouth. When I looked at him, my pulse didn’t kick, and my bones didn’t dissolve with longing.
I thought I saw yearning in Harry’s eyes in place of laughter. George had told me how close the two brothers had been as boys. Harry must have remembered that too as he watched his own sons throw themselves at their uncle. For a moment it seemed as if he would step forward and hug his brother, but he caught his father’s eye and in the end he just nodded back.
‘George.’
There was an uncomfortable silence.
‘And who’s this?’ Letitia swung her gaze to me waiting awkwardly at the bottom of the steps. George had inherited his blue eyes from his grandmother. Hers might be faded with age, but they were still sharp.
‘This is Frith.’ George held out a hand, and I climbed the steps, burningly aware of everyone’s eyes on me. They were all smartly dressed, ready for the celebratory lunch, and I felt scruffy in the jeans and white T-shirt I’d worn for driving.
‘You told me to find myself a sensible girl, and I have,’ George told his grandmother and she looked me up and down, clearly reserving judgement.
‘Humph. I’ll decide if she’s sensible or not.’
Letitia might be ninety, but this was no dotty old lady. She was sharp as tacks, and she would pick up any false note. I couldn’t bear the thought of her calling George on the pretence. It would be just an added humiliation for him in front of his family. If Letitia realised that we weren’t really in love, it wouldn’t be my fault, I decided.
‘Happy birthday, Mrs Challoner,’ I said, letting go of George’s hand to shake hers.
‘What sort of gal takes up with my grandson?’
‘One who loves him very much,’ I said with a smile at George, who smiled back, an arrested expression in the blue, blue eyes.
‘Well, that’s not very sensible for a start.’ Andrew Challoner snorted in the background, but we ignored him.
‘Frith’s a civil engineer,’ George told his grandmother.
‘Unusual.’ Letitia inspected my face more carefully. ‘Do you ride, Frith?’
‘Only a bicycle, I’m afraid.’
NINE
‘I thought my lack of horse-riding experience was going to count against me,’ I whispered to George when the housekeeper showed us to our room to change before lunch. By the time Letitia had finished cross-examining me, it was getting late, and the meal had already been set back an hour. The cook would be cursing me, I thought.
‘She liked you, I could tell.’ Careless of the fact that they were waiting for us downstairs, George kicked off his shoes and threw himself down on the bed. In chinos and a pale yellow polo shirt, he looked wonderful, and I wished that we were in a hotel, that there were no family to be faced, no formal lunch to be eaten.
In a hotel, I could go over to the bed and sit next to him. I could push my hair out of the way and lean down to press my lips to his throat. I could kiss my way up to the pulse that beat below his ear, to the jaw that made me weak with desire whenever I looked at it. I could tug the shirt from his trousers and slide my hand beneath it. I could explore the broad solid chest, let my mouth drift over the sleek warmth of his skin.
But we weren’t in a hotel. We were late for lunch.
I turned away, swallowing, and opened my case.
‘It’s better to be honest, anyway,’ George was saying, unaware—I hoped!—of the lustful turn of my thoughts. ‘She can pick up a fib a mile off.’
I made a big thing of shaking out my dress. ‘I told her I loved you,’ I objected.
‘So you did.’ The dent in his cheek deepened with his lopsided smile as he got up from the bed. Grabbing his shirt below the collar, he hauled it over his head, the way men did. ‘Maybe you do love me,’ he said, muffled.
My mouth dried at the sight of his lean, hard body, already so achingly familiar. If only we could forget the lunch and his icily polite family, and spend the afternoon in that wide, inviting bed with the afternoon sunshine spilling through the open window.
‘Maybe she can’t spot a pretence quite as well as you think she can,’ I said, unsettled by how badly I wanted to touch him. This wasn’t like me. There was a time and a place for lazy afternoons in bed, and the middle of a fraught family reunion wasn’t one of them.
Anyone would think I couldn’t keep my hands off George. I was going to have to get used to not being able to touch him sooner or later, and I’d better start now.
‘Maybe I’m a better actor than you think I am,’ I added, hoping that it was true. Because if it wasn’t true, I was in trouble.
Big trouble.
No, it wasn’t love I felt, I reassured myself. Lust, maybe, but I had been so careful not to think beyond these few weeks. I had my emotions well under control as always. My relationship with George was firmly time-limited, like all the best plans, and I hadn’t forgotten that. Hadn’t we just been discussing that in the car? I would be leaving soon. There was no point in doing anything silly like falling in love with him.
Of course I wasn’t going to do that.
George had been vague when I asked him how formal the lunch was likely to be, so I had played safe and brought my favourite summer dress. With its soft chintzy print, it was faintly old-fashioned, but I’d always liked it. It had a chiffon overskirt that floated when I walked, and it made me feel pretty.
It wasn’t the most exciting dress in the world, but I felt comfortable in it, and, with some heels and my mother’s pearls around my throat, I was ready to go.
George stared at me as he shrugged on his jacket. In spite of the heat, the men were all wearing suits. ‘You look gorgeous,’ he said. ‘You should wear a dress more often.’
‘I don’t think this would be very practical on site,’ I said briskly to hide my pleasure.
‘Who cares about the site? You could wear it for me.’
I touched the pearls at my throat. They reminded me of my mother. She had done everything my father asked of her. If he’d wanted her to wear a bin bag, she’d have done it to please him, and look where it had got her. I didn’t need to please George, I reminded myself.
‘I’ll wear what I feel like,’ I said.
* * *
In deference to Letitia’s age, the lunch was the main celebration of the day. We had champagne, and then a whole salmon with hollandaise sauce and tiny new potatoes boiled and tossed in parsley.
I would have enjoyed it if it hadn’t been for the undercurrent of tension running around the table. Everyone was on their best behaviour, but there was still an edge to the conversation, a stiltedness to the way the family talked to each other. Margaret and Michael Challoner didn’t address George directly once, but I saw them looking at him with a kind of baffled frustration, as if they couldn’t understand what had gone wrong.
It was hard to believe George was their son. I wondered if he had always been regarded as the cuckoo in the nest. It would certainly explain why he had kicked out against the stultifying formality of the family.
At least he had forged a strong bond with his grandmother. I watched them together, and it was obvious that George was Letitia’s favourite. He teased her and made her laugh and if he was aware of his parents’ coldness, he gave no sign of it. It was left to me to make laboured conversation with them and with George’s uncle and aunt. They were too well bred to be overtly rude to me, but I could tell that they weren’t impressed.
I didn’t care. The feeling was mutual. Charlotte made little effort. She was one of those pale, wilting women with wills of iron.
The only decent conversation I had was with the two boys, Jack and Jeremy. They were a little subdued by the atmosphere but happy to talk about some computer game they liked to play. I didn’t really follow the details, but I gathered it was set on some alien planet populated by hideous monsters and we had an interesting discussion about space travel and the likelihood of life on Mars.
They were nice boys. I’d never had much to do with children before, and I was surprised at how easy they were to talk to. Long ago I had decided against having children of my own. Children needed too much, and how could you ever guarantee that they would be happy? That you would always be there for them? That a blood clot wouldn’t strike you down just when they needed you most? I couldn’t bear the thought of letting a child down, the way my father had let me down, or of leaving him or her alone.
Still, chatting to Jeremy and Jack made me think that having a family might be fun too. I wondered what it would be like to be a normal family—like the ones you saw in the TV adverts anyway—and sit happily around a table, talking together. I even indulged myself in a little dream where I was at one end of the table, a couple of blue-eyed kids in the middle, and their father at the other end, gazing fondly at me and our children...
Only then I realised that the man across the table from me was George, and I yanked the fantasy firmly to a halt before it could go any further. George wasn’t for me. Children weren’t for me. There was no point in a dream like that.
At least it got me through the lunch.
It was a relief when Letitia announced that she was tired and going to rest. ‘Come on, Frith,’ said George the moment the door closed behind her. ‘Let’s go for a walk. I’ll show you where Harry and I used to get into mischief.’
The boys leapt up, obviously as eager to escape from the frigid atmosphere as George and I were. ‘Can we come?’
‘Of course.’ George looked at his brother. ‘Harry?’
Harry’s gaze flicked between his wife and his parents, who looked stonily back at him. He hesitated, then pushed back his chair with a kind of defiance. ‘Why not?’
I’d had hopes that George and I might get to spend the afternoon in the sunny bedroom after all, but I was glad later that we’d gone out. I changed back into my jeans, and then George led the way out into the summer afternoon, Jack and Jeremy leaping on either side of him like puppies.
I followed more slowly with Harry. ‘I didn’t realise George would be so good with kids,’ I said.
Harry smiled. He was more relaxed out here away from the rest of the family. I was afraid Charlotte would have wanted to come too, but she had gone to rest too. Apparently it was exhausting driving an hour from London and having to look after your own children for a whole morning.
‘The boys always loved George. He’s more fun than anyone else and he never talked down to them.’ Harry glanced at me. ‘He’d be a great father.’
He would. I could imagine him playing with his sons, blue-eyed, tousle-haired boys just like him, or swinging a daughter up so that she could ride on his shoulders. He would love them and make them laugh and keep them safe.
Something twisted inside me at the thought of George with children of his own. At the thought that they wouldn’t be my children. It made my chest ache and to my horror I felt tears clog my throat. I never cried. Crying meant letting go and losing control and I wasn’t about to start now, but I was very glad of the sunglasses that shaded my eyes.
‘Yes, he would,’ I said after a moment with a non-committal smile.
‘Are you and George thinking...?’
‘Oh, no.’ I even managed a laugh. Not a very good one, but a definite laugh. ‘We’re not nearly there yet.’
‘It’s just you seem really good together,’ said Harry. ‘George needs someone like you.’
How little he knew his own brother! I was the last kind of girl George needed. Having met his mother, so coldly focused on the success of the bank, I could understand even more why George longed for the warmth and comfort of a true homemaker. I was never going to be one of those.
We poked around in the barns, stuck our heads up into the old apple loft and explored the stables, sadly empty now, and then we crossed the fields into the dappled shade of the little wood at the far side where a stream ran sluggishly. Clearly they hadn’t had all the rain that had plagued my site in the early days.
The smell of wild garlic was intense in the heat of the afternoon. I pulled at the burrs that clung to my jeans. ‘I can see what a great place this must have been for boys,’ I said. ‘George told me about all the holidays you used to spend here together.’
‘Yes, we had some good times.’ Harry looked sad.
‘He misses you, I think.’
Harry didn’t answer at first. We were walking side by side along the edge of the stream. ‘I should have supported him,’ he said suddenly. ‘But I had school fees to think about and Charlotte felt...’ He trailed off. ‘Well, anyway, I should have stuck by him. I knew he was doing the right thing.’
‘George doesn’t blame you, Harry.’
‘I blame myself.’ Harry’s mouth set in a straight line, and suddenly he looked much more like George.
‘It’s hard for him, cut off from everyone,’ I said tentatively. ‘Maybe you could see each other every now and then?’
He nodded. ‘I’ll talk to Charlotte about it. Letitia’s right. This rift has gone on long enough.’
I hoped that Harry would make the effort. It wasn’t my business to interfere between George and his brother, but I hated the thought that George was going to be alone when I left.
Which was ridiculous, of course. George had masses of friends. He didn’t need me. Still, I liked the idea that he could reconnect with his family. At least I had Saffron.
Ahead, George and the boys had stopped and were peering up into the branches of an old oak.
‘I was just wondering if it’s still there...yes, see that?’ George pointed up to a straggle of frayed rope. ‘Your father and I used to swing across this stream on that.’
‘Until it broke,’ said Harry. ‘George fell in the water and broke his ankle the day we were due back at school.’
‘Remember how we rigged up our own version of paintball in the wood?’
Harry laughed. ‘And the trouble we got into when the entire paint pot fell on that busybody neighbour of Letitia’s when she was walking her yappy little dog?’
After that, they vied with each other for the memory of the times they had been at their naughtiest, and of course the two boys drank it in. It turned into a nice afternoon in the end. We found a bridge further upstream and played pooh sticks, and then we sat in the long grass and dangled our feet in the water.
On the way back, we stopped to talk to the ponies in the neighbouring paddocks. At least, George and the boys did. I hung back. I didn’t care what George told me about holding my palm flat, I couldn’t forget just what big teeth those horses had.
‘Do you ride?’ I asked Harry, who was watching his brother and his sons with a smile.
He shook his head. ‘Not any more. George was always the one with the horses. He’s absolutely brilliant with them. I’m glad he’s got the chance to ride up in Yorkshire. George is never going to be happy without a horse.’
George needed more than a horse, I thought. After seeing him with his nephews, I thought he needed a family of his own too
A family he could never have with me.
* * *
That evening we gathered for drinks on the terrace. The heat of the afternoon had faded, and the shadows were just starting to stretch across the lawn in the golden light.
Letitia looked fabulous in a burgundy dress and jacket, a magnificent sapphire necklace around her neck and diamond rings winking on her gnarled fingers. The other women were similarly glamorous and bejewelled. I felt distinctly underdressed in my plain red wrap dress, in spite of recycling the pearls and heels I’d worn earlier.
Dinner was not a comfortable occasion. Letitia retired after the toast, and the boys were also in bed, which left George’s uncle, Andrew, to rule the roost.
I didn’t care for Andrew. He was a bully, I decided, and Michael Challoner was spineless for not standing up to him in support of his son. We women did our best to keep a stilted conversation going, but Andrew was determined to make George pay for the family’s wounded pride, and the moment there was a pause, he would start hectoring.
Every mistake George had ever made was flung out. Every exam he’d ever failed, every opportunity he’d ever squandered.
‘All the money that was spent on your education,’ Andrew ranted. ‘Everything you ever had you owed to your family, and what did you do? Fling it back in our faces!’
George refused to rise to the bait, but he was holding himself under tight control, I could tell. When I put a hand on his back in wordless support, it was rigid beneath my palm. I tried to rub it comfortingly, but it was like trying to loosen up an iron bar.
