She couldn’t have cared less, at that point, if his mother had been a gargoyle.
In fact, Lady Evelyn Buckley was no gargoyle. In her youth, she’d been beautiful, her long neck, thick eyelashes, and haughty mouth giving her the elegance of a scornful giraffe. All the men of her circle had clamored for her, or so Lizzie gathered as she paged through old photograph albums and scrapbooks in the library at the manor. Fading pictures of tennis tournaments, charity balls, hunt meetings, and “coming out” parties showed Lady Evelyn with a succession of young men, all good-looking, all apparently gratified to be squiring the slim blonde beauty with the pinched-in nostrils and skeptical brow.
Roger Buckley, elegant in sepia tones, didn’t appear any more frequently in the photo archive of Lady Evelyn’s glorious social career than his rivals. But somehow or other, he’d won through. Perhaps his grace and ease had allowed him to pip everybody to the post. Perhaps his possession of Laingtree Manor had given him the extra cachet he needed to win the hand of the ice princess.
The lunch at the manor that day, all those years ago, had been an excruciating affair, with James trying to protect Lizzie from his mother’s version of the Spanish Inquisition and Lizzie trying to figure out which was the fish knife, which was the butter knife, and which was the knife most suitable to be aimed at her hostess’s jugular.
Apparently, Lizzie’s violent fantasies went undetected beneath her demeanor of docility and politeness. As Lizzie left the dining room for a quick trip to the loo to apply powder to a face she was sure must be gleaming with the effort of remaining civil, she heard Lady Evelyn say in her carrying voice, “She doesn’t seem
too
bad, does she, Roger? Not abrasive, at any rate, like that brassy Californian. Of course, I can’t understand a word she says — she will mumble. And she’s very middle class. What did you say her father does? Some sort of agricultural salesman?”
“Oh, shut up, Mum,” Lizzie heard James say without rancor. But her heart swelled with pride. He’d stood up for her!
After lunch Lizzie and James escaped into the private grounds, rowdy with relief. As they sat chortling in the wild meadow near the orchard, James took a key from his pocket. “Come on,” he said, pulling her to her feet. “I’ve got something to show you.”
He took her to the cottage she’d already noticed, set in a picture-book garden next to a fast-running stream where an eighteenth- century water mill still turned. As he unlocked the door, he said with simple pride, “Welcome to my house.”
She was deeply impressed, of course. First, there was the bare fact that he had a house at all. Second, there was the perfection of the house itself.
Mill House looked rather small from the front, but some cunning architect (she didn’t know then that it was James) had knocked down interior walls and added on rooms at the back, so that once inside you had an airy impression of space and a sense of almost limitless possibilities — a bit like the feeling of being in a rambling country hotel and glimpsing archways and doors going off into uncharted territory.
And the furniture! Actually, the furniture nearly scared her away. This was furniture with frets and cartouches and finials, pediments and curlicues and floriated scrolls. Lizzie felt very middle class indeed, gazing at the lovely faded silks and damasks, the velvets and brocatelles, the gleaming tortoiseshell and metal inlays — and thinking of her mum’s blue 1970s sofa and wobbly bamboo drinks cabinet.
James led her from room to room, showing her his favorite pieces and telling her things she couldn’t take in about chairs that had to be addressed by name (Louis Quatorze, Princess Charlotte) and ugly knickknacks with impeccable pedigrees.
How could he be the owner of such magnificence? It was almost a turnoff. She’d always thought of him as a slightly scruffy frequenter of obscure London pubs. One of the lads. Now he was turning out to be a country property owner and connoisseur of rolltop desks, the sort of person who might easily take over a slot from one of the Sotheby’s types on
Antiques Roadshow
. Not really
her
type at all.
“This is the room I really want you to see,” he said, throwing open the door into the master bedroom.
Lizzie had never seen such a bed, not in real life.
It was a massive, tea-brown, Jacobean four-poster draped in dull gold fabric adorned with scarlet lions. The drapes pooled extravagantly on the floor at each corner and were tied back against the posts with heavy, tasseled ropes.
“Oh. My. God,” she said.
He gave a sheepish laugh. “It’s a reproduction, of course. The real ones are too narrow for a king-sized mattress. Would you care to . . . ?” He quirked his eyebrows at the bed.
“To . . . what?”
“You know — try the bed?”
In the golden gloom, behind the heavy drapes, Lizzie and James made love with such passion that James managed to rip one of the sheets with his toe.
Of course, Lizzie hadn’t known then that the bed, with its carved roses and exquisite linen, was for hire. The house happened to be free of paying guests that weekend. James explained the holiday rental thing to her afterwards as he bundled the linen into the washing machine and scrambled around in closets trying to find a replacement for the ripped sheet.
As they sat waiting for the tumble dryer to finish its work, James told Lizzie all about the house — how his father had allowed him to draw up plans to expand and redesign it while he was still an undergraduate; how James had used a small inheritance from his paternal grandmother to fund some of the construction; how his parents had paid a top interior decorator to handle the refurbishment, incorporating many pieces that were already in the family’s possession; and how they’d eventually transformed Mill House into a highly lucrative holiday cottage.
When James graduated from university, his parents’ gift to him had been the opportunity to buy the house. His mother had wanted to give it to him outright, but his father insisted that James should come up with some money. “He was trying to give me an education as much as a house,” James explained. The asking price had been ridiculously low, but it was still substantial. James had been stretched to organize a loan at all, young and inexperienced as he was.
“Dad deliberately gave me no help at all with that end of things,” he remarked cheerfully. “He was even obstructive, telling his own bank manager not to deal with me. He wouldn’t stand guarantor, and he set a time limit on how long I had to raise the money. Two months.”
“But you did it,” Lizzie said with pride, looking around the luxurious kitchen with its lustrous paneling concealing the humdrum white gleam of household appliances.
Many women might have sat at that enviable scrubbed oak kitchen table in a frenzy of covetousness. Not Lizzie. Even though he’d introduced her to his parents, Lizzie knew in her heart that she had slightly less than a snowball’s chance in Saudi Arabia of ever hanging onto James Buckley for the long haul. She was just glad to be there, in that moment, still flushed from their romp on the four-poster, cradling a cup of James’s trademark strong, sweet bricklayer’s tea.
“Yeah, I did it,” said James.
Later, as they made the bed, flicking the freshly laundered sheets up into the air between them, Lizzie suddenly asked, “Who’s the brassy Californian?”
She hadn’t meant to ask at all. Had planned
not
to ask. But the question simply popped out of her mouth of its own volition.
James stopped shaking out the sheet for a moment. “The brassy . . . ?” His brow crinkled.
“Your mum reckons I’m
slightly
better than some ‘brassy Californian’ you used to bring round,” Lizzie said patiently.
“Oh . . . I went out with an American girl for a while. Mum never took to her.”
“Goodness, you astonish me. And your mother so easy to please. So — where did you meet her?”
“London. She was from Santa Barbara, doing some kind of study year abroad.”
“Oh? So she was only here a year?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, she stayed on a bit longer.”
“How much longer?”
“I don’t know — a year or so?”
“Was she pretty?”
“Boot-faced and bandy-legged. Now, is the interrogation over?” He grabbed a feather pillow and gave her a playful clubbing.
Naturally, she seized her own pillow and began clubbing him back. Feathers flew, and in the excitement of the tussle a corner of James’s pillow, which for some reason had a coin sewn into it, caught Lizzie hard in the eye, instantly giving her a shiner. This was rather difficult to explain away when they dutifully trooped back to the manor for a cup of tea before James’s dad drove them both to the railway station.
How fondly Lizzie always remembered that eye injury. James had been absolutely stricken at hurting her. He’d held ice to her face with such tenderness — a big man hunched down over a kitchen chair, face quite stiff with remorse — that Lizzie had known then and there she’d never be able to stop loving him.
The eye had remained swollen for a couple of days. She’d booked off sick, not too devastated to be missing out on another day in front of the computer screen with G.H. Brightman and Associates, the public relations company she worked for.
Of course, she’d told G. H. Brightman she had pinkeye. Better a childhood disease than a black eye from the boyfriend, no matter how playfully inflicted.
In those days James was the mere employee of a busy firm of architects based in Ealing Broadway. He took a long lunch that Monday, turning up at the flat with, among other things, an eye patch, a box of maximum strength painkillers, a bunch of the kind of pale ivory lilies that sprinkle brown pollen stains everywhere, a bottle of wine, a loaf of French bread, and several different cheeses.
She and Tessa lived off cheese for days afterwards, Lizzie remembered.
But the memories were slowing her down. How long had she been sitting on the bed with the drapes drawn, cradling a pillow?
And how long had the doorbell been ringing?
The visitor was her father-in-law. He sauntered into the house, swinging his ridiculous monocle and looking about him with that faintly amused air she’d always found a bit daunting.
“Making progress?” he asked, running his eyes over the jumble of boxes.
Lizzie shrugged. “Sort of,” she mumbled.
“Evelyn’s after some Tupperware container she once lent you. Leftovers from a meal up at the manor, apparently.” He raised his eyebrows ruefully, and for the millionth time Lizzie thought how much he looked like James. An older, more worldly, vastly disillusioned James.
“Oh. Tupperware? I don’t remember. Let’s have a look.” No need to ask why Lady Evelyn hadn’t come herself. From the moment James had turned up at the manor with his suitcase, Evelyn had excommunicated Lizzie from the church of Buckley.
Lizzie went into the kitchen and pulled out a drawer. Although she’d already cleared away most of the plastic, several containers and a jumble of lids still remained.
“It could be any of these,” Lizzie said. They both contemplated the drawer in silence. Roger Buckley even raised his monocle to get a better look, then let it fall and gave a fastidious shudder.
“Oh, just give me one or two of the better looking ones,” he said. “God knows, whatever I take back is bound to be the wrong thing.”
Lizzie found a plastic bag and dumped a handful of containers and lids into it. “Here, give her a wide selection. Rich Americans don’t want to be storing leftovers, I’m sure.”
He gave a brief chuckle. “I’m going to miss you, Lizzie,” he said regretfully. “Miss you like the devil. Do you really have to go? Was my boy such a dead loss?”
Lizzie wished fervently that he’d shut up. She could feel her eyes going hot and prickly. If the tears couldn’t be suppressed, she’d have to bolt to the loo with a fake sneezing fit or something. “He wasn’t a dead loss at all,” she said. “He was — well, he was great, if you want to know.”
“Really?” Roger was carefully looking for lint on the lapels of his tweed jacket; a very absorbing task, apparently. “He swears he wasn’t messing about with other women, by the way. I asked him point-blank.”
“What?” The question came out as a squeak.
He put down the bag of Tupperware, pulled out a kitchen chair, and sat down with a weary sigh. “Yes, I asked him. Wanted to get to the bottom of it all. The whole thing makes no sense to me, and I can’t abide mysteries. Why would he leave you? Why would you want him to? You two have always been so . . . so
happy
. Sickeningly happy, if you must know. So I thought to myself, if that boy of mine has gone and flushed away his marriage for the sake of a quick . . . Well, you get my drift. I was going to give him what for.”
Lizzie gazed at her father-in-law in amazement. “What were you planning to do? Cane him?”
He gave a lopsided grin. “You flatter me, Lizzie. He’s a decade or two too old for a caning — but I’d have sorted him out.” He looked down at his well-manicured hands and slowly clenched them into fists. “Rest assured, I’d have sorted him out. He’d have come back to you on hands and knees.”
Lizzie just shook her head, completely at a loss for words.
Roger leaned forward and patted Lizzie’s lifeless hand where it lay on the kitchen table. “So anyway, I wanted to let you know he hasn’t been cheating on you,” he said. “In case you had your suspicions. In case that was the problem.”
“It wasn’t the problem.”
“So I gather. Well, is the shoe on the other foot, then? Have you been messing about with some chap? Evelyn seems to think so.”
Lizzie snorted. She could just imagine Lady Evelyn’s comments on the subject. “Of course I haven’t been ‘messing about’! Bloody hell! I’m a married woman with a pair of children to keep track of. I don’t have time to go to the
toilet
by myself, let alone go sneaking off for any extramarital quickies!”
Roger laughed gently. “Don’t get all worked up, my girl. That’s exactly what I told Evelyn. Plus I happen to think you’re rather fond of our boy. So, if that’s not it, what the devil is it?”
Lizzie rubbed her face and tucked some stray hair behind her ear. “I-I really can’t tell you, Roger. It’s complicated. And it’s . . . well, it’s between the two of us.”