Authors: Tilly Bagshawe
‘You’re sleeping with her, aren’t you?’
Jason was almost as astonished to hear the words come out of his mouth as Brett was.
‘I beg your pardon?’
Brett sounded dangerously angry, but it was too late to back down now.
‘M-M-Michelle,’ Jason stammered. ‘She’s your new mistress, isn’t she? I saw the chemistry between you just now. How could you? How could you do it to Mum?’
‘Now you listen here.’ Brett grasped his son by the shoulders. Although Jason didn’t think so, Brett loved him. He hated Jason’s depression because it was a problem he couldn’t fix, and he resented the boy’s sensitive, open nature because he was congenitally incapable of such emotions himself. But he did love him, and he valued his family more than anything. ‘I don’t know what you think you saw. But you’re wrong. I’m not “doing” anything to your mother. I don’t have a mistress, and if I did, it wouldn’t be one of my employees. Understand?’
Jason nodded, willing it to be true.
‘Go out and get yourself some lunch,’ Brett added gruffly. ‘Clear your head. I’ll see you after the meeting.’
‘OK.’
Brett watched his son leave, shoulders slumped, feet dragging, as defeated as any retreating infantryman. He sat back down at the desk, punching the polished teak in frustration. What the fuck was wrong with the boy? He just didn’t understand it. It was as if he didn’t want to be happy, didn’t want to succeed.
Whatever Jason’s weaknesses, he certainly wasn’t stupid. At least not emotionally. He’d picked up on the vibe between him and Michelle in an instant, like a bloodhound stumbling upon a scent.
I’ll have to be a lot more careful if I’m going to continue to have him work here.
Although it pained Brett to admit it, perhaps he’d been rash in forcing Jason to join the family business. At the time it had seemed an obvious solution to his listlessness. Ever since they arrived in England Jason had been moping around like a wet weekend, hanging around the house and the village, getting under Angie’s feet. It seemed clear to Brett that he needed something to do, some structure to his life. An eight-to-six job interning at Cranley Estates fitted the bill perfectly. Add in the commuting time – Brett spent at least three nights a week at his London flat, but Jason took the train back and forth from Fittlescombe daily – and he wouldn’t have time to dwell on whatever it was that was bothering him.
The theory still sounded solid. But the reality was that Jason loathed the rhythms of office life and found no excitement, no thrill in business, in the daily battle to beat one’s competitors and make money. All Brett had done was to inadvertently parachute a spy into his London life, a spy with the potential to cause serious damage to his family idyll down in Sussex.
Because it
was
an idyll. Angela was happy to a degree that Brett hadn’t seen in years. Logan seemed to have settled in at school. And Brett felt his own heart soar and spirits lift on a warm Friday evening, leaving grimy, gridlocked London behind, driving through lanes lined with cherry and apple blossoms as he weaved his way through the ancient Downs. Turning into the driveway at Furlings, walking into his beautiful home, to be greeted by his beautiful, smiling, loving wife … It all gave Brett a sense of security and deep contentment that he hadn’t felt since before his mother died.
London, the office, Michelle – not to mention all the other girls he brought back to the flat during the week: that was all part of a different life, a life that Brett had gone to great lengths to compartmentalize, both practically and emotionally.
The thought of Jason jeopardizing this perfect balance sent iced water through Brett’s veins. As did the prospect, remote though it was, of losing Furlings to Tatiana Flint-Hamilton.
Brett Cranley had grown used to scaring off would-be competitors or threats to his interests through a combination of bullying and flexing his economic muscle. If a rival real-estate developer showed an interest in a property Brett wanted, for example, he either simply outbid that developer, or intimidated him into backing down by making multiple threats to his business. And Brett Cranley’s threats were not idle. Renowned as one of the most maliciously, aggressively litigious players in the market, Brett had a legal war chest bigger than the GDP of many small African countries. By dragging out lawsuits, he was able effectively to filibuster smaller players out of the game.
Unfortunately, this strategy did not seem to be working with the tenacious Tatiana Flint-Hamilton. Despite her lack of funds, or even any serious legal case, she’d managed to rally significant support in the village. A County Court judge had already ruled there was enough there for the challenge to be heard in the High Court, and a date had been set for September.
Brett had already spent a fortune employing a team of legal experts to look into every possible loophole that Tatiana might conceivably exploit in court. Although he hadn’t paid her another visit in person since their first, ill-fated but memorable encounter, he’d had lawyers send an array of bullying letters in an attempt to get her to drop the case. Tatiana had responded to none of them, and had even had the nerve to hand the last, most aggressive missive to Logan at school. Sealed in a fresh envelope, with ‘Return to Sender’ written boldly on the front, she’d instructed the little girl to deliver it to her father.
‘What is it?’ Logan asked.
‘It’s a birthday card.’
‘But Daddy’s birthday’s not till August.’
‘It’ll be his first then, won’t it?’ Tati smiled sweetly. She was very fond of Logan, who was in her remedial reading group at school, and did her best to forget that the child was a Cranley.
Brett opened the envelope that evening at dinner. Inside was his latest lawyer’s letter and a two-word note from Tati.
‘
Bugger Off
.’
That was the night he’d decided to take Gabriel Baxter up on his offer and sell off two hundred acres of Furlings’ farmland. Once the deal was done, Brett had played Tati at her own game and sent copies of the new deeds with Gabe’s name on them to school, via Logan. His envelope also contained a two-word note.
‘
Give Up.
’
But of course Tati hadn’t.
Even more infuriating than his inability to bully her out of court were the erotic dreams Brett found himself having about her almost nightly. The whole of England knew about Tatiana Flint-Hamilton’s wild sexual exploits in the years leading up to her father’s death. But as far as Brett could see, since she’d returned to Fittlescombe and hunkered down on his doorstep, like a fungus asserting its unwanted presence at the roots of a giant oak, Tatiana had lived the life of a nun. Once or twice Angela had reported seeing her looking chummy with the married art teacher at St Hilda’s, Dylan Pritchard Jones, a jumped-up popinjay of a man if ever Brett saw one.
Curious, Brett had asked Gabe Baxter in conversation what he thought of Dylan.
‘He’s all right,’ Gabe had shrugged, but he said it in a tone that made it plain he wasn’t a fan. ‘We used to be mates. We play cricket together.’
‘But …?’
‘He’s vain. I’m not surprised he and Tatiana are getting friendly. They’re like two peas in a pod.’
The thought of Tatiana’s perfect, youthful, curvaceous, sinfully sensual body being plundered by a vain village schoolteacher was not a pleasant one. But it was hardly worse than the idea of her going to bed alone every night, less than a mile from the spot where Brett himself was trying and failing to go to sleep, twitching with anger and frustration. It wasn’t simply that
he
couldn’t have her, although that certainly rankled. It was the idea of all that youth and beauty going to waste. In far too many ways, Tatiana Flint-Hamilton felt like a thorn in Brett Cranley’s side. He longed for September, for the court case to be over and done with, and for the girl to go crawling back to her old, dissolute lifestyle somewhere far, far away from Furlings and from him.
And yet …
Michelle knocked on his office door.
‘Is the coast clear?’ she asked conspiratorially. She held a mug of hot tea in each hand, one for her and one for Brett. Pushing the door closed behind her with her bottom, she handed Brett his tea, kissing him fleetingly on the lips as she did so. Brett put the mug down on his desk and slipped a hand under her sweater, more out of habit than desire.
‘We’re going to have to cool it,’ he said, caressing her wonderfully full, heavy right breast. ‘Jason’s suspicious.’
‘I see. And this is you cooling it, is it?’ Michelle smiled, closing her eyes and enjoying the sensation of Brett’s warm hands on her bare skin. She knew Brett Cranley was a shit. That their affair – if you could even call it that – was going nowhere. But he was so funny and charming and exciting and so interested in her. When Brett looked at her, she didn’t feel like Michelle Slattery, secretary from Colchester. She felt like somebody important, somebody who mattered. Like a
muse.
Josephine to Brett’s Napoleon, Cleopatra to Brett’s Caesar. It was that ego boost, more than anything, that she couldn’t quite bring herself to give up.
Reluctantly, Brett removed his hands. ‘I’m serious. Just for a while, while Jase is here. I wouldn’t want to upset the apple cart, if you know what I mean.’
Michelle knew exactly what he meant. If it upset her, she hid it well, changing the subject with her usual good-humoured briskness.
‘He’s a sweetheart, your son, but he did make a bit of a pig’s ear of that document.’
Brett rolled his eyes. ‘Can you fix it?’
‘Oh yes.’ Michelle said confidently. Brett loved her competence almost as much as he loved her warm, welcoming, womanly body. ‘I’ll whip it into shape. Drink your tea now. I’ll be cross if you let that get cold.’
By late June a heat wave had descended over the whole south of England. In London this meant office workers in rolled-up sleeves eating their lunches in the park, and restaurants shoving tables out onto pavements, doing their best to look as if they were in Rome. Fittlescombe, like the rest of the Swell Valley, opened its back doors and spent an inordinate amount of time lounging about in its collective gardens in deckchairs. Whittles, the off-licence in the village, sold out of Pimm’s. Red-faced children sucked greedily on Wall’s ice lollies. And everywhere a holiday mood prevailed.
At Furlings, Angela Cranley finally felt as if she were getting into her stride. She’d hired Karen, a girl from the village, as a cleaner to help out Mrs Worsley, as well as a boy to assist Jennings in the garden. The Flint-Hamiltons’ old gardener was highly resistant to the idea.
‘I know me way about,’ Jennings muttered stubbornly when Angela first suggested it. ‘I don’t need some bloody little Herbert getting under me feet.’ But in fact, he
did
need it. His arthritis was so bad at times that he could hardly hold a pair of secateurs, still less get on his hands and knees to weed the rose and lavender beds at the front of the house. Angela didn’t know exactly how old Mr Jennings was. (Nobody did, it seemed, not even the man himself.) But he was certainly over seventy. His face was as gnarled and weather-beaten as a pickled walnut and his chest made a terrible wheezing, rattling sound as he shuffled about, like a concertina punctured by a sword.
Happily, however, once eighteen-year-old Alfie finally arrived and began tidying potting sheds, mending tools and making Jennings cups of tea like a whirling dervish, the old man relented. Sitting out on the terrace at the back of the house, overlooking the lawn and rolling acres of parkland beyond, Angela watched happily as man and boy tended the flowerbeds, Alfie pruning and Jennings given directions, waving his spindly old arms about like a general on a battlefield.
Noticing that her own arms were turning pink and freckly, despite the lashings of factor fifty sun block she’d applied only an hour ago, Angela retreated indoors. It was half past two on a Friday afternoon, almost time to collect Logan from school. Logan, thank God, seemed to have settled in brilliantly both at school and in the village. Sweetly, she’d developed a thumpingly enormous crush on Gabe Baxter, the local farmer to whom Brett had just sold some fields. Angela suspected Brett had only done the deal to get back at Tatiana Flint-Hamilton, but that was by the bye. A few nights ago she’d been tidying Logan’s room when she’d found four sheets of A4 paper stuffed under the bed, covered in practice signatures, all of them either Logan Baxter, Mrs Logan Baxter or Mrs Gabriel Baxter.
‘Should we be worried?’ Angela asked Brett. ‘She’s only ten, for God’s sake. Surely we should have a few more years before this starts?’
But Brett had been enchanted, insisting that they keep the papers and frame them. ‘It’s adorable. We should give them to her as a birthday present on her twenty-first.’
Brett would be coming home tonight, along with Jason, whose low moods were starting to worry Angela again. She’d hoped that the job up in London might have opened up some new friendships for him. The village was lovely, and Jason seemed to appreciate it, but there weren’t many opportunities for him to socialize with people his own age. Other than the pub, but Jase had never been the sort of confident man’s man who can strike up easy conversation in a room full of strangers. Unlike his sister, Jason seemed lonelier than ever since their move.
Grabbing a sun hat and a wicker shopping basket (she needed to stop at the greengrocer’s for some white cherries on the way home), Angela set off for the village, pushing her worries about Jason out of her mind for the time being. It was such a glorious day, with the dappled sunlight pouring through the trees and the heady scents of honeysuckle and mown grass hanging thick in the warm air. Turning right out of Furlings’ drive towards the green, she heard the church bells of St Hilda’s toll three times, and watched the front doors of the cottages open one by one as the other village mothers began their various school-runs. They reminded her of the little wooden people that used to come out of her father’s weathervane back home in Australia. There was a woman with an umbrella who popped out if it was raining and a male peasant in breeches and shirtsleeves if it was fine.