Hitched!

As soon as I said it, I regretted it. I couldn’t think what had possessed me to tell George Challoner of all people about that bitter memory. I tensed, waiting for the sympathetic noises, but he surprised me.

‘I haven’t seen my parents for four years,’ he said, and I slewed round in my seat to look at him in surprise. He was so golden, so effortlessly charming. I couldn’t imagine him falling out with anyone.

‘Why not?’

‘We had an...er...disagreement,’ he said, lifting one hand from the steering wheel and spreading it in an eloquent gesture of resignation. ‘It culminated in one of those never-darken-our-doorstep-again conversations, and so I haven’t.’

‘I know what those are like,’ I said, unprepared to find myself sharing some fellow feeling with George.

‘Fun, aren’t they?’

‘Fabulous,’ I agreed. ‘Can’t get enough of them.’

‘Still, at least you’ve got your sister,’ said George. ‘I did family estrangement as a job lot. I haven’t seen my brother since then either.’ He spoke lightly, but I sensed the pain lurking, and I looked away.

‘Perhaps I should be grateful for Saffron, then,’ I said, keeping my tone light to match his. ‘Although if she upsets Lord Whellerby and anything goes wrong with Hugh’s contract, I will personally strangle her and then I’ll end up without any family either.’

‘Don’t worry about Roly,’ said George reassuringly. ‘He’s really not the grudge-bearing type.’

‘I hope you’re right.’ I gnawed fretfully at my thumbnail.

‘Is your sister really going to marry Jax Jackson?’ George asked to distract me after a moment.

‘Half-sister,’ I said automatically. ‘And so she says. I’m not really sure what it’s all about,’ I confessed, shifting back with a sigh to look out of my window where the hedgerows were a blur of spring green.

‘As far as I can tell Jax was a mediocre pop star until he started dating Saffron and became a celebrity. Now he’s on the cover of all those glossy magazines you get at the checkout in the supermarket. He seems to spend most of his time on tour, but Saffron’s so thrilled by the idea of getting married that he appears to be incidental to the whole process.

‘It’s going to be the wedding of the century, I gather,’ I added with a sigh. Ever since Saffron had announced her engagement, she had been in a frenzy of wedding plans, and if I never heard the word wedding again right then, I’d have been more than happy.

George glanced at me. ‘So are you going to be bridesmaid?’

‘No, thank God. Saffron did ask me, but obviously only because she thought she should, and when I said I didn’t think I’d fit with her other bridesmaids and would rather just be happy for her on the sidelines, she was so relieved it was funny. I really don’t blend with Saffron’s décor,’ I said to George. ‘She’s a socialite and I’m an engineer...you can probably imagine how much we have in common!’

‘I’d certainly never have guessed you were sisters,’ he agreed. ‘You don’t look at all alike.’

‘No, Saffron’s gorgeous,’ I said without rancour. ‘Her mother was a model, and Saffron gets her looks from her, not my father. Saffron’s blonde and bubbly and beautiful, and I’m...not.’

I wasn’t looking at George, but I could feel the blue eyes on my profile. Instinctively, I lifted my chin a little higher to show him that I didn’t care.

‘No one could argue that you were blonde,’ he said. ‘And I’d put you down as prickly rather than bubbly, but otherwise I think you underestimate yourself.’

‘You don’t need to be polite,’ I said, in what he probably thought was a very prickly way. ‘I know I’m not beautiful. I’m not ugly either. I’m just...ordinary. As my father never tired of telling people when I was younger, Saffron got the beauty, and I got the brains.’

‘Ouch.’

‘It’s true.’ I shrugged. ‘Saffron and I are so different it’s almost comical when we’re together, which isn’t very often.’

‘And yet it’s you she rings when she’s upset.’

‘That’s because she doesn’t have a mother. Tiffany ran off with her personal trainer when Saffron was a baby, and she died a couple of years after that. I always felt sorry for Saffron. She was the prettiest little girl, and she’s always been the apple of my father’s eye, but nobody really had any time for her.’

‘So you’re the big sister?’

‘That’s right. I was seven when my father decided a model suited his image better than my mother. Mum didn’t want a divorce, but when Tiffany got pregnant, Dad insisted. His company wasn’t as successful as it is now, so the settlement was fairly modest, and Mum and I had a very ordinary life. We lived in the suburbs and I went to the local school.

‘It was fine,’ I said, pushing away the memory of my mother weeping at night when she thought I couldn’t hear her. It hadn’t been fine for her. ‘But I had to spend two weeks every summer with my father, who was super rich by then and kept getting richer. It was like being dropped into a whole different world. I hated it,’ I said.

I sighed. ‘And then Mum died when I was fifteen.’

‘I’m sorry,’ George said, all traces of his usual lurking smile gone. ‘That must have been hard for you.’

‘It was awful.’ I pressed my lips together in a straight line. Just thinking about that time could still send a wave of desolation crashing over me.

Mum was only thirty-nine when she dropped dead at the sink one day. ‘The doctors said it was an embolism, and that she wouldn’t have felt a thing. I wasn’t there,’ I told George. ‘I was at school, and a neighbour found her. By the time I got home, they had taken Mum away.’

I swallowed hard, remembering how I had stood in the kitchen in dazed disbelief. One minute my mother had been there, the next she wasn’t. Gone, just like that.

There was nothing I could have done, even if I had been there. Everybody said so. But deep down, I always felt as if I should have known. I should have said goodbye and told her I loved her instead of cramming a piece of toast in my mouth and running for the bus. I wish I could remember the last thing I said to her, but I can’t. It was just an ordinary day.

And then it wasn’t.

‘My whole world fell apart.’ I’d almost forgotten that I was talking to George by then.

My nice safe life had vanished the moment that clot blocked my mother’s brain and I was pitched into an existence where nothing seemed certain any more. For months I flailed around in a hopeless search for something to hold onto, until I realised one day that the only thing I could be sure of was myself.

Slowly, carefully, I built a new life, and I made it as secure as I could. Friends sighed and called me a control freak, and maybe I was, but routines and plans at least gave me a structure, one that nobody else could take away from me without warning. Without them, I would have been lost.

‘Presumably you went to live with your father then?’ said George after a moment.

‘If you can call being packed off to boarding school “living” with him,’ I said. ‘At least I had Saffron in the holidays. She’s over seven years younger than me, but neither of us had a mother and she was so desperate for attention that we used to spend a lot of time together then.

‘It was Saffron who painted the eyelashes over Audrey’s headlights,’ I told George.

‘I wondered about that.’

‘She was so pleased with them, I didn’t have the heart to paint them out, and now they’re part of her.’ My smile was probably a little twisted. ‘Saffron’s spoilt, but she’s got a sweet nature and all she wants is a little attention. Unfortunately, this wedding has made her hysterical.’ I sighed, remembering the situation. ‘I just hope Lord Whellerby’s not too angry.’

‘You haven’t met Roly yet, have you? If you had, you’d know you’ve got nothing to worry about,’ said George when I shook my head.

‘Easy for you to say,’ I said tensely. ‘It’s not your sister having hysterics over your most important client!’

* * *

We were bowling up an avenue lined with stately trees. To either side stretched lush parklands, with placid cows grazing under the horse chestnuts. The Land Rover rattled over a cattle grid, the avenue curved round over a hill, and I caught my first sight of Whellerby Hall. I’d been too busy to visit before, and my jaw dropped.

It was an extravaganza of a house, a vast Baroque structure with a domed roof in the centre, and two wings stretching out on either side, set atop a slope on the far side of a serene lake.

George drove right up to the imposing entrance and parked with a crunch of gravel. The door was opened by a cadaverous-looking individual who looked offended by George’s cheerfully casual greeting but unbent enough to explain that Lord Whellerby was in his private sitting room.