She sat in the bath after putting the children to bed and cried herself silly, her eyes so puffy afterwards that she had to wear her spectacles at dinner.
‘When one cries oneself blind,’ Alexandra told her daughter over sautéed lambs’ kidneys with tarragon and wine, ‘one learns to see with one’s heart so much more.’
Tash took this in thoughtfully.
‘Pascal must go away for a few days,’ she went on in a falsely cheery tone as she set the ball rolling. ‘Can you stay and keep me company? Having you here is so divine.’
Tash wasn’t sure that was true. So far, all she had done was run around manically after the children and blub whenever she was alone.
The following morning Pascal set out, somewhat huffily, for Tours airport, his suitcase crammed with a waxed coat, gaiters, thick jumpers and rain hats.
It was soon almost ninety degrees on the sun-soaked terraces. Tash let her mother entertain the children in the shade of the pergola while she took a long swim in the pool, closing her eyes and diving low into the cool water, trying to see with her heart. But she just got chlorine up her nose and even puffier eyes. She was forced back into her spectacles, this time with unflattering clip-on shades that Alexandra had lent her, which dated from the seventies and made her look like she was trying out for a
Cagney and Lacey
remake.
The moment the children had settled down for an afternoon nap, Alexandra fetched a fresh bottle of
eau de vie
and took aim with her biggest cannon. ‘Tash, sweetheart, I think it’s time to talk.’
Of course she knew that this was guaranteed to make her daughter clam up faster than a slammed freezer door.
‘I don’t really want to talk,’ Tash replied, looking trapped.
‘No, not you, darling – me.
I
want to talk.’ Alexandra smiled at Tash’s baffled expression. She knew her daughter’s weak spot of old: Tash was impossibly polite, having been brought up to be totally fair-handed, a point that had probably been over-laboured by her bullish father. Combined with her natural generosity, it made her charitable to a fault. If invited to dinner, however ghastly the company, Tash would feel obliged to play hostess in return. She replied to every fan letter she, Hugo and the horses received, however vacuous or even malicious. If paid a compliment, she gave one back. If someone opened their heart to her, she opened hers.
Settling down for the first stage of what she knew would be a long and delicate operation, Alexandra opened the bottle and poured out two glasses.
At close to midnight, Alexandra phoned her husband from bed, speaking in French. ‘
Chéri
, how is my lovely England?’
‘Wet,’ Pascal grumbled. He hated England in August, or indeed at any time of the year, with its terrible food and transport system, full of angry bald idiots driving on the wrong side of the road.
‘Tash has told me what’s happening. Prepare yourself,
chéri
, it is rather worse than we feared.’
When he heard the details, Pascal was astonished. ‘Hugo tried to force himself upon the girl?’
‘So it seems. I need you to go straight to Haydown and find out Hugo’s version of events, like Hercule Poirot.’
‘He was Belgian,’ Pascal reminded her, bristling.
‘I’m sure there has to be another explanation for this,’ Alexandra rushed on, ignoring his protests. ‘It just sounds so unlike Hugo. You must find out the truth, Maigret.’
Pascal cleared his throat. ‘He is not a man who opens his heart easily, I think – and my English is so rusty.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ she assured him. ‘And please stop off at a supermarket while you are there and – have you got a pen,
chéri
? Yes? Buy
Marmite, Birds Eye custard, Angel Delight (any flavour except raspberry), Spam, apple chutney, Colman’s mint sauce and Typhoo tea bags.’
‘How did you get Tash to talk?’ Pascal asked just before they said goodnight, hoping to get some tips for getting Hugo to spill the beans.
‘I told her about my marriage to her father and what went wrong.’
‘I can hardly do that with Hugo,’ he sighed.
‘Of course you can,’ she said brightly. ‘You have four marriages to choose from. Now get some sleep.
Je t’adore
.’
In Fox Oddfield Abbey, Pete gave an exclusive interview to the
Sunday Times
about the end of his stormy six-year marriage to Indigo, overseen by the ever-professional Clive Maxwell, who was orchestrating the careful release of the story to the media.
‘Indigo says I have a madonna–whore complex,’ he told celebrity profiler Christy d’Isle. ‘But,’ he continued, laughing at his pun, ‘I told her there was never anything in the rumours – I like the woman, don’t get me wrong, and she’s played a blinder with the Sticky and Sweet tour, but she’s not my type. Plus she’s a mate of my daughter, so I wouldn’t go there.’
‘Strike that,’ Clive said smoothly, giving Pete a sharp look to remind him that he was currently ‘going there’ with his son’s fiancée.
‘So there’s nobody else involved?’ Christy checked.
He flashed the Rafferty smile with such force her chair almost flew back against the wall. ‘There’s always somebody else involved, darling. The question is, are they sweet enough to stick?’
Clive closed his eyes in despair.
‘Are you going to be a sugar daddy again then?’
Pete winked at her. They went back a long way and he liked her style. ‘I’m the Rockfather, baby,’ he laughed. ‘And a stick of rock is very hard candy, remember.’
*
‘How did it go?’ Sylva asked him later when they met in the hermitage on the Abbey’s estate, their temporary love nest hidden deep within woodland. To be extra sure of privacy, Sylva had sent out three of her fleet of cars that evening, hiding in one in the hope that the paparazzi would follow one of the dummies while hers crept through one of the many back gateways to the Abbey. In fact, the paparazzi hadn’t followed any of them, believing Sylva to be hiding at home, weeping tears of despair that her pop star fiancé had gone to the Caribbean without her.
They seldom bothered following her when it was raining this heavily. For the past three days of intermittent downpours, Sylva’s loyal gatekeepers had got drenched every time they clambered from their cars to snap their quarry doing something truly newsworthy like collecting her post. Now they preferred to stay parked up until the weather front passed.
The rain was still pounding down on the hermitage roof as she and Pete stripped in their little hidden pleasure palace, at such a peak of mutual attraction that they thought about making love together night and day. In the short snatches of time they did have together, they had to have sex before they could talk, while they talked, before they said goodbye and then again afterwards. Pete was knocking back his little blue pills like Smints, along with an increasing numbers of painkillers as his knees gave him more and more trouble, but he was far too besotted to complain about it.
As Sylva propped herself up on the table, lifted one slim ankle to his shoulder and swung out her other leg to reveal a pussy as sweetly pink and glistening as an orchid after a rainstorm, Pete growled with happy laughter and slid in, telling her about his interview. ‘I just wanted to shout “I’m in love with Trouble!” I want to tell the world how beautiful you are inside and out, how glad I am to have found you, my little Sylva loving cup.’
Those wise, naughty blue eyes that had seen the inside of more hotel rooms and groupies than they’d seen sunsets watched her lovely face colour and her pupils dilate as her eyes lost focus and she came with a series of delicious grunts and squeals, like a comely Eastern European tennis pro serving a clutch of aces in quick succession.
Then, letting him slip out for a moment, she turned around and bent over the table, two perfect buttocks rising up to him with a pretty little oyster pink starfish joining the orchid as options.
‘You are such a naughty girl.’ He slapped one of her buttocks playfully. ‘God, I love you.’
Laying her cheek on the scrubbed pine, she looked back at him over her shoulder and smiled.
During his difficult marriage with Indigo, Pete had suffered long bouts of depression and low self-esteem. Despite being an unreformed serial shagger, he relied upon a steady family life, something that his beloved first wife had understood, turning a blind eye to his infidelities so long as home was sacred and Dillon and Kat loved and protected. But ambitious Indigo, who had provided a crèche, prison and therapy centre, had no such blind spot when it came to his tour pussy and just tried to control him with increasingly rigid demands and threats. He was relieved to be finally free, although he needed the reassurance of a back-up plan. Like his son to whom he had bequeathed the same tendencies, Pete was reluctant to leave the warm, safe establishment of a long-term relationship unless he had a car waiting with its engine revving.
Sylva’s engine was revving very loudly indeed, but he needed to check it was a truly personal limousine service, not just a card held up at the arrivals gate with the name Rafferty hand-written on it.
‘My son’s a fool to let you slip through his fingers,’ he said as he spread that silken juice from orchid to starfish, dipping in finger and thumb to hold her like a bowling ball.
‘I’m the one slippery in your fingers,’ she gasped.
‘He’ll never forgive us for this,’ he said, with surprising satisfaction. Having not had a top-ten hit in almost five years, Pete secretly couldn’t help wanting to show the little upstart he was still boss, his good intentions forgotten in the wake of scoring the most satisfying paternal victory of his life. ‘He knows I’ll break your heart.’
‘I’d rather have my heart broken by you than frozen by him.’
He smiled, reaching down to steer his eager cock into position. ‘I’m never faithful.’
‘I know!’ she gasped deliciously as his electric eel slipped into the starfish.
‘I like young blondes, threesomes and high-class hookers.’
‘So do I,’ she groaned deliriously as his fingers slithered in and out of the orchid’s mouth.
‘Tell me I’m a better lover than Dillon.’
‘You’re a better lover,’ she said without hesitation. ‘You’re the real deal, Pete. He did nothing for me.’
‘Nothing?’ He drove faster.
‘Nothing!’
He laughed, thrusting ever more eagerly, although he privately thought his son was much more of a chip off the old block than she realised. After all, he was currently entertaining a very young strawberry blonde on his father’s private island, and Sylva clearly had no idea …
With paparazzi buzzing around his St Croix villa like mosquitoes, Dillon had been left with no choice but to phone his father and ask if he could use his private Caribbean retreat, the jewel-like Golden Hinde Island, one of the smallest and prettiest of the British Virgin Islands (a fact that always amused Pete who called the island Goldie and liked to boast that he had taken many British virgins there, but never brought one back). Dillon felt rather like a goofy teenager asking his dad if he could borrow the car to go on a date, but Pete had been surprisingly easygoing about it: ‘No worries, son – it’ll keep the staff on their toes. Just take care of her.’
‘I’m alone,’ he said, not very convincingly.
‘I was talking about Goldie. Don’t forget to put the cat out, yeah?’
‘I really appreciate this. I’ll return the favour some time.’
‘You already have, son,’ Pete cackled. ‘You already have!’
Dillon had no idea what his father meant, but was wholly relieved when they set off by helicopter later that day for the half-hour hop from St Croix to Golden Hind Island. He had increasingly cold feet about the press getting their hands on this story, or at least on Faith’s identity, fearing that exposure of that magnitude could make her life hell for a very long time. She was his friend and she might talk tough and punch low, but she was still very young and innocent.
Faith was restless. She had read all her books, and the additional two that Dillon had bought her on the day he went out shopping and brought her back a complete wardrobe of parrot-bright sarongs,
bikinis, flip-flops and pretty bangles (‘You’re in the Caribbean, what more do you need?’ he’d pointed out, to which she’d replied ‘An umbrella?’ when a tropical storm broke overhead).
It was the hurricane season, but none were forecast for their stay, just the occasional refreshing cloudburst which she needed to cool her excess energy and hot head from time to time.
Accustomed to working twelve-hour days, with six of those spent in the saddle, to the thrills of competing and the spills of being shouted at by Gus Moncrieff, Faith found the pace of the tropics as stifling as the temperatures. Dillon hadn’t even allowed her out of the gated villa on St Croix. At least here she was allowed to explore an entire island, although he told her not to go near the beaches, cliffs or coastline because the paps were still bobbing around at a distance, the canniest old hands knowing full well that he was trying to close their apertures to one of the biggest picture stories since a Texan sucked the Duchess of York’s toes.
But when Faith went for a run inland, fighting her way along an overgrown path that ran up the spine of the old volcano at the island’s centre, she found the mosquitoes and heat too oppressive, started feeling unpleasantly like a character in
Lost
running from the black smoke, and so returned to pace around the opulent main house, a ridiculous surfeit of luxury that obviously embarrassed Dillon, who kept apologising for it, from the twelve bedroom suites as big as penthouse flats to the full recording studio, cinema complex, gym and no less than four swimming pools.
‘Dad likes to take a dip in to cool water between dipping in to hot women,’ he had explained, scuffing around awkwardly, hands deep in his pockets and thoughts deep in his head.
Faith knew most girls would die to be in a place like this. Carly would probably never speak to her again if she knew where her friend was, but that was no great change because they hadn’t spoken properly for months as it was, the friendship waning yet again in the light of a new boyfriend called Ryan who she claimed was as good as signed to the Premier League.