Kirsty gazed at Grace in that mulish, ‘I’m a toddler and I’m going to stare at you for as long as I want’ way. Grace stared right back and waited for their shared DNA or irrevocable flesh and blood bond to kick in. It didn’t. Also, someone needed to wipe Kirsty’s nose.
‘I’m Gary,’ said a voice behind her. There were introductions to the second husband, and her grandmother wanted to know why she hadn’t called from the station and it was still awkward half an hour later when they were balancing cups of tea and plates of mince pies on their laps. Her grandmother wouldn’t stop harping on at Grace for her Christmas Day no-show while her grandfather grilled Gary and Caroline about the current state of the Australian economy. When that topic had been exhausted, Caroline kept asking Grace questions: how had her journey been? Had she been going to lots of Christmas parties? What part of London was she living in? Under her grandmother’s most steely glare, Grace was forced to answer politely. Monosyllabically, but politely, as Kirsty lay on the floor and kicked her legs in the air - Grace knew just how she felt. Then she remembered that she’d bought a bagful of pink, glittery tat from Claire’s Accessories, because her grandmother would have killed her if she’d turned up empty-handed and besides, none of this was Kirsty’s fault.
Three year olds were very easy to please. Kirsty put on everything in the bag from fairy wings to bangles, beads and bracelets, so she looked like a pre-school drag queen. After that, she climbed into Grace’s lap, though Grace tried to dissuade her, and launched into her entire repertoire of party tricks, which consisted of tuneless renditions of ‘Row, Row, Row the Boat’, and some knock-knock jokes, which were mostly gibberish. Actually it was a godsend because it meant that no one could really talk about anything significant, and when Kirsty moved on to ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’, her grandmother went for a lie-down.
Grace could finally excuse herself ‘for a bit of fresh air’, and scurried outside to sneak a crafty fag behind the shed in the back garden. She’d barely taken the first drag when she heard the kitchen door open and saw Caroline coming down the path. She steeled herself for a confrontation, or worse, platitudes, but Caroline merely smiled and gestured at Grace’s hand.
‘Can I nick one?’
Grace proffered the packet, making sure that their hands didn’t touch.
‘This used to be my secret smoking place too,’ Caroline continued at a breathless pace so Grace guessed that she was nervous as well. ‘One year they dismantled the shed to put a new one up, and found piles of fag butts by the fence and a couple of empty Bacardi bottles. I blamed it on next door, but they didn’t believe me.’
She really didn’t want to, but Grace could feel her face stretching into a grin as she answered: ‘It never mattered how much perfume I sprayed on myself or gum I chewed on the way home - and one time I even used mouthwash - the minute I got through the door, Gran would be all, “You’ve been smoking. I can smell it all over you”.’
‘So, Mum says your best friend’s getting married tomorrow?’ Caroline leaned against the fence and blew a few experimental smoke rings, as if she wasn’t sure that she still had the knack.
‘Yeah.’ Grace had decided that Lily’s wedding was the best option for a Get Out of Worthing Free card, followed by a winter skiing holiday, which was a surprise gift from her newly acquired, doting boyfriend. The fact that she wasn’t actually attending the wedding was a mere technicality.
‘And you and this guy - is it serious?’ Caroline asked, like it was any of her business.
Grace stared at her feet. ‘Still early days.’ She glanced up to see Caroline watching her, and not even Vaughn looked at her so hungrily, like he was committing every gesture and grimace to memory. It wasn’t much and it didn’t make Grace hate her any the less, but it was something. ‘Don’t say anything to Gran, but he’s older than me. A lot older than me.’
Caroline pursed her lips as she processed that information. ‘I meant to ask, do you ever see Mark . . . your dad?’
Jesus! She’d only volunteered the information about Vaughn to be charitable. Not because she had a daddy complex. ‘No,’ Grace said shortly. ‘Never. Guess there’s a lot of that going round. Or there used to be.’ She threw her cigarette end away and viciously ground it into the path with her foot. ‘Why did you have to come back?’
From the calm look on her face, Caroline had been waiting for Grace to get down to business. ‘Because I haven’t seen my parents for fifteen years and they’ve never even met Gary and Kirsty.’
‘So?’
‘It was time. They’re not going to be here for ever. When I talk to Mum, she spends ages going on about their various hospital appointments.’
Grace shoved her cold hands into her coat pockets. ‘What? You talk to her regularly?’
Caroline sighed and pushed herself away from the fence so she could stand up straight because Grace was obviously in attack mode. ‘Every week.’
‘She never told me that,’ Grace said sullenly, though having secrets was a family trait, like not being able to whistle or feeling the cold. ‘Have you been asking Gran to butter me up? Because, you might as well know, I don’t want you in my life. I don’t want you calling me and emailing me with photos that totally clog up my inbox. You made your choice - just stick with it, will you?’ It wasn’t The Speech. It wasn’t even The Speech Lite. It was like a badly recorded version of The Speech, but Grace could still feel herself trembling as hard as the tea towels her grandmother had pegged to the washing line.
‘Grace, you’ve managed fine without me. Mum and Dad are so proud that you went to college and have a job on a magazine. They’re always going on about you.’ She pulled a face. ‘Though I think they’re just relieved that you got through your teen years without a pregnancy.’
It was the God’s honest truth. In fact, Grace was convinced that on the day before her twentieth birthday, her grandparents had let out such a huge collective sigh of relief that it had caused a tidal wave somewhere off the coast of South-East Asia.
‘You might be right there,’ she conceded with a mere hint of a smile.
Grace had thought that seeing Caroline again would whip up fifteen years of hurt and resentment into white-hot fury, but now that her mother was standing in front of her, it was proving impossible to even maintain an icy dignity. Maybe her best revenge was simply that she was making more of a success of her life at twenty-three than Caroline ever had. Then Grace remembered that actually she didn’t have a degree, her grandparents thought she earned £10,000 more than she really did and also thought that the reason it still said fashion assistant on the Skirt masthead was because the subs hadn’t got round to changing it to senior fashion stylist. If they really knew, they wouldn’t be even a little bit proud of her.
‘For what it’s worth, I’m glad you came down today,’ Caroline said, because she’d mistaken that glimmer of a smile as proof that Grace was softening. ‘I picture you as a little girl and now you’re standing here all grown up. God, there’s so much I want to say to you and I don’t even know where to start.’
Grace opened her mouth so she could issue a furious disclaimer but her grandfather called from the back door: ‘Gracie, the taxi’s here to take you to the station!’
There was no time for anything other than a hurried goodbye while she prised Kirsty’s arms from around her leg and insisted that no, she didn’t need a lift to the station, that’s why she’d called a cab.
They all stood on the doorstep waving, as if Grace was going off to war. As if they were one big happy family.
Grace buckled her seat belt before her grandmother could come hurrying down the path to tell her to do just that, and waved back. ‘Please, can we go now?’ she begged the driver.
She’d had this idea that as soon as the car had turned the corner of Linden Way, she’d start to bawl and never stop. But Grace’s eyes were dry and itchy, as if she’d stayed up three nights straight in a really smoky room. It had to be her hangover coming back for an e
ncore that was making her stomach lurch and her temples throb as if she was in for a world of pain once the headache kicked in.
chapter twenty-two
‘You look very pale,’ Vaughn announced when Grace finally arrived at Gatwick, dragging her suitcases behind her and inwardly berating herself for never being able to pack light. ‘I didn’t think you’d had that much to drink last night.’
‘Enough,’ Grace said weakly, checking herself before she could grab her suitcase. In Vaughn World you paid a uniformed airport employee to do all the shlepping for you. Luckily her feet could find the British Airway Business Travel check-in all by themselves, until Vaughn hauled her back.
‘We’re travelling first class,’ he said shortly, and strode off before she could even thank him. Grace couldn’t believe that he was still angry with her for trying to amend his Christmas schedule. Or maybe her wide-eyed ingénue routine was getting a bit boring and he hoped that she’d have acquired a more blasé attitude by now. Bearing this in mind, she kept her delight about the first-class lounge, complete with dining room and waiter service, to herself and hoped that she hadn’t lowered the tone by detouring via the Duty Free shops to get fags, gossip mags and some lozenges because the dry, itchy feeling had migrated to her throat.
Grace wondered if she could risk a little doze as they waited for their flight to be called, but Vaughn was already opening his briefcase and presenting her with a stapled sheaf of papers. The itinerary, prepared by the ever-loving hand of Madeleine Jones, ran to several pages and involved far too much ski instruction from some chump called Chip for Grace’s liking. But mostly, Vaughn was fixated on tomorrow’s lunch-party and finally, Grace got what the big deal was.
‘Oh my God!’ she hissed, when she saw the first name on the guest-list. ‘Even my grandmother knows who he is!’
‘If you act like some starstruck groupie, I’ll tell Chip to take you down the black run,’ Vaughn snapped, one finger tapping impatiently against another name. ‘This is who you need to be concerned about.’
‘Lucy Newton. Never heard of her.’
‘Well, she used to be a model, though I think the highlight of her career was probably draping herself across the bonnet of sports cars at motor shows,’ Vaughn said waspishly. ‘What’s important about her is that she’s been with Martin Halpert for two years.’
Grace read the dry facts supplied. Martin Halpert. Venture capitalist. She was never sure what that meant, other than being richer than God. Philanthropist. Art collector. ‘OK.’
‘Poor Lucy’s been given her marching orders; Martin has rather a short attention span, but he likes to make sure his companions will be financially solvent until the next billionaire comes along.’
When Grace got dumped, it was usually with a text message asking for the return of borrowed CDs, articles of clothing and duplicate keys. ‘What do you mean by financially solvent?’
‘Lucy’s been with him for nearly two years so I imagine about two million dollars’ worth of generous. Hopefully, in art, though I hear she’s been seen in several Beverly Hills car dealerships, which is not something that makes me happy.’
‘Why doesn’t he just give her the money?’
Apparently the tax implications of giving your ex-girlfriend two mill in cash were very complicated. The pounding headache finally arrived as Vaughn explained the finer points. ‘I’m relying on you to get her on side,’ he concluded, as their flight was called. ‘You can be very disarming when you put your mind to it.’
Grace doubted that very much. Vaughn seemed pretty immune to it anyway. ‘Well, I’ll do my best,’ she offered feebly.
‘We’ll talk more about it on the plane,’ Vaughn promised, as Grace started hunting through her bag for passport and boarding card. ‘You asked me to look after them. For God’s sake, Grace, focus!’
Spending Christmas in Worthing was starting to look like the better option, Grace thought to herself until she turned right when they boarded the plane and had to revise all her previous notions of air travel.
There was an actual lounge with comfy bucket chairs and a stewardess who couldn’t wait to brandish a glass of champagne at Grace, before she’d even found her seat. Some hair of the dog that had savaged her the night before couldn’t hurt, Grace reasoned, and as Vaughn was offloading his coat and briefcase, she downed it in one, but classily.
Then they were shown to their seats, although there wasn’t anything as prosaic as seats but pod-like demi-cabins with wallpaper and loungers that folded out into full-sized beds. There was no climbing over other passengers to sit down or entering into tense negotiations on discovering that someone had nicked her blanket either. Grace lovingly stroked the Anya Hindmarch wash bag and velvet slippers that had been provided and decided that there was something to be said for the sugar that made the medicine go down that little bit easier.
Vaughn was being carefully cajoled into turning off his BlackBerry and going to his own pod for take-off. ‘We’ll talk more once we’re in the air,’ he told Grace as she snuggled gratefully under her blanket. From the speculative gleam in his eye, Grace suspected that he planned more than just a little light conversation.
‘Grace! Wake up!’ A hand was stroking her face. Grace opened one eye to see Vaughn squatting down in front of her; a stewardess hovering anxiously behind him.
She opened the other eye and wished that she hadn’t as the dim lights of the cabin made her head throb. ‘Why haven’t we taken off?’
Vaughn rolled his eyes. ‘We’ve taken off, flown across the Atlantic and landed again.’
Grace stretched cautiously and realised that her seat belt was still fastened. She must have slept the whole seven hours with her mouth open as it felt like something had crawled into it during the flight and died. She’d never even got to experience the turndown service. ‘You should have woken me,’ she groused, trying to undo her seat belt with clumsy fingers.
‘I did try but you were dead to the world,’ Vaughn said, freeing Grace from her restraints and offering her his hand so she could stand up.
Being vertical made Grace feel dizzy and disorientated. It was only as they stepped out of the airport, after being whisked through Customs, that she regained full consciousness.
‘God, it’s freezing,’ she whimpered, as an icy blast of air rushed to meet her, the cold scouring her face and hands as she scrabbled for her gloves. ‘Did the plane drop us off in the Arctic Circle by accident?’
Vaughn was already hustling them towards a car and Grace decided that she’d never think another uncharitable thought about the sleek, black cars he had on standby, as she was cocooned in blissful warmth within seconds.
‘You have brought proper cold weather gear with, haven’t you?’ Vaughn asked, giving Grace’s Burberry coat a disapproving look.
She had. For London cold weather, which now seemed like a tropical heatwave compared to the icy hinterlands of British Columbia. As they cleared the airport, all Grace could see out of the window was pitch-black night and white snow heaped as far as the horizon. ‘I have lots of stuff I can layer,’ she improvised. ‘And I can hire a ski suit.’
Grace was saved from the inevitable lecture by Vaughn’s BlackBerry. He spent the rest of the two-hour drive to Whistler on the phone, getting increasingly ratty as he tried to track down a painting that had last been seen in a packing crate in Berlin airport.
By the time they got to the hotel - yet another modernist, upscale boutique - his face was set in a painful-looking grimace. Even the unctuous reception they got from the hotel manager only managed to downgrade it to a scowl.
‘This will do,’ he remarked tersely, when the door shut behind a kow-towing porter and they were alone in a two-bedroom loft suite. He was already unzipping his laptop bag and checking the wi-fi access.
Absolutely no idea of priorities, Grace thought as she found the tea bags she’d stashed in a Ziploc and put the kettle on in the fully fitted kitchen. She walked back into the lounge and shuddered. Th
e fire was roaring away but simply looking at the glittering white view from the big picture windows set her shivering.
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ she asked Vaughn and got a nod in reply.
There was milk in the fridge but not much in the way of food. Grace tore open a carton of raisins, gave Vaughn his tea and began to unpack.
She was just hanging up the last dress, when she felt Vaughn’s hands around her waist. ‘Dinner in or shall we go out?’ he asked, kissing her ear.
Grace could feel the beginnings of a really promising hard-on against her buttocks and Vaughn’s hands were already creeping up to cup her breasts. For once, she wasn’t turning into a puddle of formerly Grace-shaped gloop because the mere thought of getting naked and exposing her body to the elements made her shiver again.