Lord and Master (17 page)

Just over three hours later, she was standing outside the West End theatre where the preview was taking place. Nancy and Jem were inside getting drinks, and a steady crowd of punters were streaming past her through the glass doors of the theatre foyer. She looked at her watch: 6.50. Then looked at her mobile: no messages, no missed calls from Stefan. She debated ringing him, but if, as she was beginning to fear, he'd been delayed at his meeting, there wasn't really a point. She waited a few more minutes, saw a couple of moderately famous celebrities enter, then heard the bell ringing inside the theatre. The performance was about to start.

The orchestra was just finishing tuning up as Luna sat down next to Jem. She briefly shrugged to her and said softly, ‘No sign of him. I think he must have gotten stuck at his meeting.' And then the orchestra started playing the overture, and all at once Luna was reminded of how much she loathed Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals.

Unfortunately, the next hour did precious little to change her feelings. When all the cats entered the stage to sing the opening number it was certainly a spectacle, and Luna was completely wowed by the sleekly reimagined costumes Patrice had created for the show. But Kayla was right; something wasn't coming together in this production. At one point, Nancy, who was sitting on the other side of Jem, angled her head over and caught Luna's eye, shaking her head, and Luna's heart sank. To make matters worse, her throat, which had been scratchy all afternoon, was now aching. She was coming down with a cold, trapped in Lloyd Webber hell.

Kayla herself didn't appear until the end of the first act. Hers was arguably the best role in the entire musical, Grizabella the Glamour Cat, the old cat past her prime who sang the musical's famous, showstopping number,
Memory
. Luna knew that casting Kayla had been a risky move – at only twenty-seven, she was really too young to play the role. Judging from what they'd seen so far, it was entirely possible that this was yet another mistake by the director.

When Kayla finally took the stage, Jem grabbed both Luna and Nancy's hands, gripping them tightly. Patrice had made Kayla's ‘onesie' a threadbare, tattered affair, with bits of bare flesh peeking out exactly like a stray cat that had been in one too many fights. Her gorgeous hair had bits of matted dreadlocks woven into it, again, exactly like a cat with no one to groom her. And Kayla herself was a complete revelation, playing Grizabella as some kind of deranged consumptive. ‘Like Mimi in
La Bohème
,' Luna whispered to Jem, ‘but crazy!' She began to sing, and Jem increased the pressure on Luna's hand till it hurt.

‘Midnight. Not a sound from the pavement…' Kayla sang, her voice shaky, broken, but then building and soaring, filling the theatre. Luna squeezed Jem's hand. Kayla was amazing.

When they went down to the foyer at intermission, Luna half expected to find Stefan waiting for them, smiling that smile of his and full of apologies, but he wasn't there and still there were no messages on her phone. And then she shivered, beginning to feel well and truly ill.

She managed, just about, to sit through the second half without curling up in a ball on her seat and going to sleep. And she was glad she'd stuck it out till the end, when Kayla reprised
Memory
and gave it so much wellie that Jem started sobbing uncontrollably. The applause that came after the curtain went down, however, was tepid at best, though of course when Kayla took her bow all three of her friends immediately got to their feet and screamed their lungs out.

They waited for her at the stage door, Luna wiping the mascara streaks from under Jem's eyes with a tissue and Nancy furiously tweeting praise for Kayla's performance, vowing, ‘If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to make sure she doesn't get dragged down by the rest of this crappy production.' When Kayla finally emerged, still in costume, Luna could see from her face that the underwhelming response from the audience had her distraught. All three of them immediately launched into a litany of praise for her, Jem insisting, ‘People are going to come to this just to see you.'

Kayla looked at Luna and then looked around, and Luna said, ‘Stefan got stuck at work.'

‘Thank fuck for that,' Kayla exclaimed. ‘I wouldn't have wanted him to see that train wreck.'

Luna shook her head and said gravely, ‘You were incredible, Kay. I was' – she looked at Jem and Nancy – ‘we were all
amazed
by you, and we can't believe we have such a talented friend.'

At this, Kayla burst into tears and they all had a group hug.

Luna cried off post-theatre drinks and got straight on the Tube and then the train to Newbury, her entire body now aching. Sitting alone in the train carriage, she saw that she had a voicemail message from Stefan. He'd left it sometime during the second act of the play.

‘Luna, I'm sorry,' came his voice, sounding…constricted. ‘Something has come up,' there was a noise on the line, like a PA system or something, ‘and I'm sorry I couldn't make it tonight. I'll ring you later.'

Luna stared at her phone. He didn't sound like himself. She honestly couldn't imagine what had happened to transform the triumphant man she'd seen earlier that afternoon. She resolved to ring him later, but by the time she got back to Arborage, it was all she could do to drag herself up to the attic and into bed.

It was flu, not a cold, she realised when she woke at eight the next morning, swallowed more painkillers and went immediately back to sleep. She slept fitfully until mid-afternoon, waking to find no missed calls from Stefan.

She debated, then rang his number. The call took a long time to go through and when it did the ringtone sounded strange, like he was abroad. Had he been called back to Berlin, was that it? The phone rang four times, and she briefly considered just hanging up. It went to voicemail, and still she considered just hanging up. The tone beeped for her to leave a message. And still, still Luna hesitated.

Finally, she said, ‘Hi,' and cleared her throat because her voice sounded froggy. ‘Hi,' she repeated. ‘I'm just ringing to see if you're okay. You sounded…I don't know, strange in your message. Maybe I'm just hearing things, but, um, I hope you're alright. And I'll, well, ah – anyway, ring me when you get a chance.'

She lay back down in bed. Well,
that
went well. Very articulate, Luna, she chided herself. And went back to sleep again.

The next morning she got dressed in leggings and a long-sleeved t-shirt, going down to the staff kitchen to get some porridge, which she very slowly carried back up the four flights of stairs to the attic. She ate it in bed, and was rather bleakly unsurprised to find nothing from Stefan on her mobile.

She texted him:
Hey, you okay?
Then regretted it. Then felt annoyed at herself for regretting it. She picked up her laptop and logged in to her personal account, exchanging a few emails with Jem and Nancy, who by now had started a one-woman PR campaign to rescue Kayla's reputation. She logged in to her work email. There were a few inconsequential messages from the Marchioness, all of which could wait, and a few press alerts: a piece on the Christmas market in the local press, and one about
Remainers
in a gaming magazine. The final, most recent link was about Stefan, who she'd added to her alert list only last week.

It was an article in the
Times
online edition about a restaurant opening in Stockholm, one of the ‘new wave of Scandinavian cuisine', according to the writer. There was a photo from the opening night featuring a striking blond woman, the head chef, and…Stefan. Luna had to look at it twice to be sure of what she was seeing, but it was him, smiling at the camera, dressed in a black jumper and jeans, standing with the other two in front of a mural in the restaurant. She looked at the date on the article, saw it was today's date. She read the first paragraph:

Luna sat and stared at the laptop, not quite believing what she was seeing. He had been in Stockholm last night. Not Berlin. He'd gone home to Stockholm, and he hadn't told her. She continued to scan the article. There was one quote from Stefan, something about the building the restaurant was in and how difficult and costly it had been to refit.

Luna switched off her laptop and went to the bathroom, stripping off her clothes and climbing into the bath, turning on the ancient shower taps and pulling the curtain around.

Why wouldn't he have told her about this? Was this the commitment he said he'd gotten out of, and if so, had he somehow been drawn back into it?

Her phone was flashing when she returned to the bedroom. A text from Stefan:
Luna, I will be back at Arborage on Wednesday and will speak with you then.

It was like a slap in the face, the brevity of it and the complete lack of warmth. Something
was
wrong, she knew it now, but after receiving a blunt dismissal like that she couldn't, nay wouldn't, ring him. He'd be back on Wednesday, he'd said, and from the tone of his text, she guessed he thought she could just lump it until then.

There was no more sleeping after that. She brushed, then braided her hair, decided she needed something fizzy to drink and made the four-flight journey back down to the vending machines outside the staff kitchen, buying a Sprite and downing it in six quick gulps. She bought another one to take back with her, then went and filched a copy of the
Sunday Telegraph
from the office.

When she got back up to the safety of her room, she briefly opened a couple of windows to let some fresh air in, shutting them again when it got too cold. She went to the sitting room and lit a fire in the fireplace; another of the incredible perks of her position, fires laid for her all winter long.

As the afternoon shadows lengthened and the room grew dark, she paged through the
Telegraph
, purposefully keeping her brain numb, empty. But somehow, as the sun set on the horizon and day transitioned into night, she found her eyes drawn to the laptop still sitting on her bed. She walked into the bedroom and picked it up, carrying it back to the sitting room. Throwing another log on the fire from the basket next to the grate, she sat back down on the settee. She switched the laptop back on.

And then Luna Gregory did what she'd sworn she would never do, a promise she'd made to herself in this very room the morning after she and Stefan first had sex in her bed: she googled Stefan Lundgren.

Most of what came up was professional stuff: the S.L. Associates website, of course, plus the websites of some companies he'd consulted with and, of course,
The Triad
website. She clicked over to images and there were a number of posed shots with his teams in Stockholm and London. None of which interested her.

Then she searched him on News and there, at the bottom of page two of her search, was what she was looking for: the tell-all ‘Swedish love rat' piece from his
Triad
days. It included a jaw-dropping image of the Titian-haired owner of a party supply business based in Luton, Stefan's second ‘assignment' on the programme. Luna studied her full, pouting lips and impressive breasts and saw absolutely no common physical denominator between herself and the buxom redhead. The breasts, she noticed, looked real – a D cup at least, putting her own humble B cup assets to shame.

And the story Miss Party Supply told wasn't much of a surprise: about how the young Swedish stud had swept into her office, filming crew in tow, and saved her from the brink of bankruptcy, telling her how to sort out her suppliers, how to stand up to her staff, and most importantly, how to keep her focus on what she really wanted from the business. ‘That's the only thing that will keep you going,' she quoted Stefan as saying. ‘Absolute dedication to what you're trying to achieve.'

Inevitably, she went on to detail the ‘sparks' that began to fly between her and Stefan shortly after filming wrapped up, culminating in what sounded like an epic night of sex at the Ritz in London. ‘He was incredible,' Miss Party Supply reported, ‘far and away the most passionate, gifted lover I have ever slept with.' Luna read on, experiencing something like pain to discover that she and Stefan had also had several liaisons at his Bankside apartment. Not that Luna had expected he'd lived like a monk there, but…to see it on her laptop screen, intimate details of what they'd gotten up to. Yes, it hurt.

And then the inevitable denouement:

‘I found myself thinking about him literally ALL THE TIME. But it soon became clear that he was just too busy for me. He'd fly into town, we'd have crazy, animal sex' –
Luna rolled her eyes at this description –
‘and then he was gone again, off to another business meeting or to rescue another company. He just wasn't emotionally THERE for me. Maybe it's a Swedish thing: great in bed, but useless at personal relationships…'

The whole affair came to its final, bitter conclusion after Miss Party Supply left a series of increasingly desperate messages for Stefan, including one with a colleague of his in the London office – James? Luna wondered. After that, Stefan visited her in her Luton headquarters
‘and said the four words no girl wants to hear: ‘We need to talk.' And just like that, it was over.'

To be fair to her predecessor, Luna could see that the ‘love rat' headline for the piece wasn't really reflected in her account of the affair. To Luna, she sounded like a woman who had fallen in love and was bitterly disappointed to discover that her feelings weren't reciprocated. She was at pains to say that Stefan was always a gentleman, and that this made it even harder for her. That the respectful way he'd treated her, combined with the ardency of his lovemaking, had made her believe there was more to the relationship than there really was.