‘Jane, this is Lydia, Rose’s housekeeper, cook and general saint. See, Liddy? I said she was a looker.’
‘And I said, in that case, you were obviously punching above your weight,’ Lydia said in a flat, deadpan voice, which made Jane instinctively know she didn’t suffer fools or Leo gladly. ‘Hello. I won’t shake hands, I’m in the middle of dinner, but it’s very nice to meet you.’
‘It’s lovely to meet you too,’ Jane said. She looked at Leo, then back at Lydia who wasn’t wearing a neat staff uniform but a floral apron over a jumper and grey trousers.
‘Liddy’s the love of my life,’ Leo said. He was still leaning against the sideboard as if it were the only thing keeping him upright. He looked grey and tired. Playing the prodigal son had to be quite a stretch.
Lydia must have thought so too, because she shot him an exasperated look, then turned to Jane. ‘I forgot to ask, you’re not a vegetarian, are you?’
‘No, I eat most things. Except octopus. Too many legs,’ Jane said and Lydia smiled again.
‘No octopus, I promise. Did you want a drink?’
Jane, ever the perfect houseguest, shook her head. ‘Water’s fine. Still, preferably, but I’ll wait for everyone else.’
‘I really must get back to the kitchen. I did placecards, though. Jane, you’re on Rose’s right,’ Lydia said and she hurried out.
‘I’d love a drink,’ Leo said plaintively. ‘Seemed politic to say that I was on the wagon, you know.’
‘I don’t, darling, because you’ve thrown me in at the deep end without checking if I can swim. Your Rose, she’s quite something, isn’t she…?’
Leo had his back to her and was staring at the decanters on the sideboard. ‘You only got Rose at half-throttle. Can you imagine how intimidating she is when she’s firing on all cylinders?’
Of all the bars in the world, she’d had to walk into that one. ‘That was half-throttle, was it?’
‘I really need a drink. Maybe a snifter of brandy.’ Leo held one of the decanters aloft so the amber contents glowed in the candlelight. ‘I’ve always wondered exactly what a snifter is.’
‘It’s one of those pear-shaped glasses to the left of you.’ Jane winced as Leo pulled the stopper out of the decanter and took a sip. She sat down in front of her place card. ‘So, are we still going to play this like we did in Vegas? You were a lot more help then than you were earlier.’
Leo smiled sheepishly. ‘Sorry about that. Look, it will all be fine, I promise.’
‘What will be fine?’ Rose was standing in the doorway, heading up her procession of dinner guests. She was taller and more imposing standing up. Jane rose to her feet. ‘No, you might as well stay seated, dear, and stop slouching, Leo. You’ll end up with a hunch if you’re not careful.’
Jane hadn’t had time to change for dinner and was still wearing the jeans and Breton top she’d flown in because they were comfortable and she was aching all over. Now she was sure she was included in the disapproving look that Rose gave Leo as she sat down at the head of the table. George, Gudrun and the others dispersed themselves as directed while Rose adjusted one of the spoons, unfolded her napkin and placed it on her lap, then glanced up. ‘Goodness, how serious you two look. Am I that frightening?’
‘Of course you’re not,’ Leo said, as he sat down at Rose’s left, opposite Jane. ‘We’re both jetlagged, that’s all. Jane can’t sleep on planes and I slept too much.’
‘Do you think you’ll be able to sleep tonight?’ Rose asked Jane, as George started talking to Leo about the time he’d gone to Vegas in the eighties.
‘I hope so, but I don’t think my body knows what time zone it’s meant to be in.’
‘It’s a horrible feeling, isn’t it? Not to worry, I promise I won’t grill you too hard,’ Rose said.
Rose didn’t even wait to break bread but immediately launched into Jane’s interrogation. There was no need for Leo to feel guilty, because Jane was quite capable of looking after herself. She answered Rose’s questions politely but in a flat, disinterested voice as if she’d answered the same questions again and again.
‘My father was much, much older than my mother,’ she said. ‘He died when I was quite young but before that we moved around a lot for his work.’
‘Army brat? Or was he in the diplomatic corps?’ Rose asked.
Jane shook her head. ‘He worked in aviation.’ She smiled faintly. ‘One year he flew me to Greenland to see Father Christmas. He died when I’d just turned five. Plane crash. Then it was just my mother and me.’
‘Where did you settle?’
‘Well, it was my mother and me and a variety of stepfathers.’ Jane sniffed. ‘We weren’t really close. She had family in Australia, an aunt, so I was shipped off to boarding school in New South Wales. A religious boarding school.’
‘That sounds quite grim,’ said Elaine, as they were served sea bass in some kind of citrus reduction. ‘I hated being sent away to school. Did you like yours?’
‘A bit too much emphasis on praying and they made us go on these camping trips into the Bush, which were pretty horrific. Then my mother died just as I was doing my final exams and my aunt passed away a year later so I don’t really have much in the way of family.’ Jane wrinkled her nose as if not having much in the way of family had stopped bothering her a long time ago.
‘Not even on your father’s side?’ Elaine appeared to be gripped by Jane’s tragic biography. Leo was pretty gripped himself.
‘Not as far as I know. From what my aunt told me, his family didn’t exactly approve of the marriage. I think they were quite well-to-do and my mother wasn’t. Always sounded a little Victorian to me.’
Rose neatly placed her knife and fork on her plate. In a room lit only by lamps and candles with shadows hovering, she looked older than she had done earlier. Leo thought that there was something already cadaverous about the way her face was arranged. He blinked to clear the image and it was gone. She was the same old Rose who was smiling at Jane.
‘I must say, I was quite taken with the idea of being an orphan when I was a child. I’d have been quite happy to have been sisterless too, no disrespect to your late grandmother, Leo.’
‘None taken,’ Leo said; his maternal grandmother had died before he was born. ‘I’d have been quite happy to have been brotherless too. At least you never had any annoying siblings constantly getting you into trouble,’ he added to Jane.
‘Oh, I’m sure you’ve never had any difficulty getting into trouble all by yourself,’ she said sweetly, and everyone but Leo smiled.
‘You seem to have Leo’s measure,’ George said as Rose murmured her agreement. ‘That will come in handy.’
Leo didn’t really mind a little light teasing – it was the Reckoning that he was really dreading, but Rose wouldn’t do that in front of company. ‘Anyway, you do have family,’ he reminded Jane. ‘I’m your family now.’
It sounded ridiculous. Like he was hankering for evenings spent in a farmhouse-style kitchen, a couple of tow-headed brats in attendance, Jane cooking homely fare on an Aga while he spent the days painting in a converted barn. Not a life he’d ever wanted.
‘I’ve never missed having a family,’ Jane said as if his husbandly comment wasn’t even worth acknowledging. ‘I’ve got lots of friends and work keeps me busy. I’m in hospitality.’
‘Are you? I always wondered exactly what that was,’ Rose said. ‘Leo, will you go and tell Liddy we’re ready for pudding and coffee?’
When he got back to the dining room after finally teasing a reluctant smile from an unforgiving Lydia, Jane was silent and seemed grateful to no longer be centre stage as the grown-ups talked politics.
Leo was pleased to be quiet too. He sat down and tried to catch Jane’s eye so he could signal that everything was A-OK, but she was looking everywhere but at him.
‘Where do the two of you live, then?’ Rose asked, as Lydia came in with the coffee. ‘You mentioned San Francisco, Jane, but, Liddy, didn’t
you say that Leo had been living in LA?’
It was a horrible feeling when your heart suddenly hurled itself against your chest wall.
‘They’re not that far apart – it’s just over an hour’s flight and I travel so much for work that it’s never really been an issue,’ Jane said smoothly. ‘Once Christmas is out of the way, we’ll make a decision about where we’re going to live.’
‘I can live pretty much anywhere,’ Leo said. ‘It’s not like I have a commute to get to my job.’
‘So, you do have a job, then, because —’
‘Actually, talking of travelling, I know we’ve hardly had a chance to get to know each other, but I’m fading fast,’ Jane said. ‘I always seems to end up with a terrific headache after a long-haul flight. Would it be terribly rude if I excused myself?’
‘Of course not,’ Rose demurred. ‘You poor girl, and there was I doing a good impersonation of the Spanish Inquisition.’
‘You should have said,’ Leo choked out. ‘Shall I come up with you?’
Jane gifted him with another of those sweet, sweet smiles that Leo was learning not to trust. ‘No need for that, darling. You stay. I know you and Rose have so much to catch up on.’
12
Dinner had gone well, Jane thought, as she got undressed. She’d faced down worse foes than Rose, even if Rose did have a grande-dame hauteur that made Jane think of a dowager duchess refusing to secede the family manse to her young upstart of a daughter-in-law.
Jane didn’t know if Rose had believed her, but there was no reason why she shouldn’t. She’d told that story so many times, to so many people, and familiarity and repetition had given it a degree of authenticity. Jane could easily imagine the glamorous, distinguished father who could pilot his own planes; the flighty and discontented mother still chasing the last vestiges of her own youth who didn’t want to be saddled with a kid. She could even imagine the dormitory in that Australian boarding school: the giggling and whispers after lights-out, someone in the bed by the window crying because they were homesick.
It shouldn’t really have mattered whether Rose believed her or not and Jane shouldn’t have really cared. Jane was just meant to be passing through, that had been the plan, except it hadn’t been a plan but a series of catastrophic events that had placed Jane in Rose’s orbit.
But now she was here, there was no harm in trying to make the best of it. The Google search she’d done earlier had been very interesting. Enough to make a girl quite giddy.
On first meeting her, Jane had imagined that Rose was a wealthy widow with all her equity tied up in the house and her art collection.
Not even close. Rose reigned over a property empire. She owned whole streets of houses, charging rent on mansion blocks, shops and offices from Kensington to Chelsea, Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove to Westbourne Park. Not to mention three estate agents, a building maintenance company and an interior design business all run from her company offices in a converted stable block in a little road behind Kensington High Street.
And although her other business interests included a partnership with a Housing Association that provided affordable accommodation for essential workers and a right-to-buy scheme for her employees that had earned Rose a Queen’s Award for Industry, it was obvious that Rose was no soft touch.
Jane had married into money after all. One thing was clear, though: she’d need to tread very carefully. Not just with Rose, but with Leo too. No point in killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
For the first time since she’d sat in that bridal suite in Las Vegas and wondered if she might faint, Jane felt hopeful. At least now that she had a husband, she had options.
She was expecting Leo to turn up imminently, so Jane rushed through her skincare routine then rummaged in the chest of drawers for a T-shirt she could sleep in. And in case Leo got the wrong idea, Jane shoved two pillows down the centre of the bed. She wasn’t handing out freebies any more, not with so much at stake.
By the time Leo did come up, half an hour later, Jane was asleep. Or she was pretending to be asleep. She heard him approach the bed. ‘Are you awake?’ he whispered loud enough that she might well have woken up if she really had been asleep. ‘Are we cool? Do we need to talk?’
Jane would be quite happy if she didn’t have to say another word to anyone for at least a week.
‘So, that story about your parents and the Australian boarding school, was any of that true?’
She could feel him coming nearer and she held her breath, until she remembered that she was meant to be asleep. She made her breathing slow and measured, threw in a snuffle for good measure and Leo took the hint.
Jane heard him move away, go into the bathroom, then come out of the bathroom. Heard him unscrew something, the clatter of pills, everything amplified in the dark. He took one, no, two tablets. Then toed off his sneakers, clothes falling on the floor, and she tried not to freeze again when he pulled back the covers and the mattress dipped as he got into bed.
‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,’ he muttered when he discovered their pillow chaperone, then he made a sound in the back of his throat like it was funny.
Five times Jane watched the second hand of the clock on her nightstand do a full sweep and that was all the time it took Leo to fall asleep.
Jane was still asleep when Leo woke up with a furry feeling in his mouth and rocks in his head. He lay there and was happy to watch her for a while, even though that was probably a little creepy. She even slept perfectly. Limbs curled up into a tight ball, her face a beautiful blank because Jane would never do anything as ungainly as sleep with her mouth wide open or dribble and snore.
Leo still felt guilty about throwing her to the lions the night before. Talking of which, it was time to head for the Coliseum. It was eight o’clock. The house had come to life. He could hear the distant sound of someone vacuuming, a door being opened, voices.
Leo pulled on the same clothes as yesterday. And the day before that. He doubted there was anything in the house that still fitted him, but he didn’t want to wake Jane by yanking out drawers and rattling hangers.
He walked down the stairs, smiling at Anna, who averted her eyes as she dragged the vacuum cleaner behind her, and hurried along the corridor to the heart of the house.
‘Ah, Leo, we were just talking about that wife of yours,’ Rose said jovially before he’d even made it in to the kitchen.
She and Lydia were having breakfast together. Pride of place on the scrubbed pine table was the big blue and white Cornishware teapot that Leo remembered so well from other breakfasts in this kitchen. The chunky china mugs, the silver rack full of toast and Lydia’s homemade jams spooned into little mismatched bowls were old and familiar.
The cosy scene reminded Leo of sneaking home ‘with the milk’ as Rose called it, coming in through the back door, only to find Lydia and Rose already in the kitchen.
‘Do come in, Leo. We won’t bite,’ Lydia said, and now he was remembering how they’d always used to tease him then, too. Calling him a dirty stop-out and telling him he needed to settle down with a nice girl. ‘Do you even know any nice girls?’ Rose would ask and she and Lydia would both giggle. It was a nice memory.
‘You smell less than fresh,’ Rose said now, as Leo sat down next to her. ‘Weren’t you wearing that rather grubby T-shirt yesterday?’
‘Yeah. I didn’t bring any luggage with me. Long story.’
It wasn’t that long a story really. The last time he’d seen his luggage it was in Melissa and Norm’s pool house.
Rose looked at him wearily as if everything was always a long story with him. ‘Anyway, about your Jane…’ she said. ‘We were just discussing how extraordinary-looking she is.’
‘I’ve never seen anyone so beautiful in real life,’ Lydia added. ‘Did you want me to make you some eggs, Leo?’
He shook his head and grabbed a piece of toast.
‘One wants to sit down opposite her and spend hours simply staring a
t her face,’ Rose said with a wry smile. ‘Do you ever get tired of looking at her?’
Leo took a bite of toast and jam and munched contemplatively. ‘She’s all right, I suppose,’ he said at last. ‘To tell you the truth, she looks a bit rough first thing in the morning.’
‘I’m sure she doesn’t, you rude boy.’ Rose tapped him smartly on the arm and in the pitiless morning light, with no make-up on, her hair covered by a scarf, he could see the deeply ingrained purple circles around the blue eyes that had grown filmy and red-rimmed. Even her hand where it rested on the table had changed. Rose had had beautiful, long-fingered, elegant hands. Pianist’s hands, Leo had always thought, but now he could see raised veins like fat blue worms and her fingers were crabbed and crooked.