Adored (25 page)
That was it, then. It was over.
BATCOMBE, ENGLAND, THREE YEARS LATER . . .
“Right, shut up please, everyone shut up, I’ve got a joke.”
Henry Arkell was sitting at the head of the table, trying to make himself heard over the excited rabble of his assorted children and dogs. “Two horses, sitting in the field,” he began, reading from the white slip that had fallen out of his cracker.
“Horses don’t sit, Daddy,” piped up a voice to his right, belonging to a child whose entire face appeared to be covered in a combination of chocolate sauce and icing sugar.
“Be quiet, Madeleine,” Henry continued, wiping ineffectually at the goo with his napkin, “you’re putting me off. Right, two horses, sitting in a field, and one of them turns to the other and says—”
“Horses don’t speak either, Dad,” interrupted another voice from the far end of the table, this time his elder son, Charlie.
“They do if they’re Mr. Ed,” said Bertie, the six-year-old.
“Can I have some more Coke?”
“Mr. Ed isn’t real, you doofus,” pronounced Charlie scornfully.
“Well, nor are the horses in Dad’s joke, doofazoid.” Bertie hurled a plastic whistle in his brother’s direction. “Are they, Dad? Your horses aren’t real, are they?”
Henry opened his mouth to speak, but Madeleine had already begun to wail. “Horses
are
real! Blackie’s definitely real. She’s the best pony in the world, and in the universe and in space. You can’t say she isn’t real, can he, Mummy?”
“I don’t think he meant that Blackie wasn’t real, darling.” Muffy, nominated family peacekeeper, tried in vain to placate her daughter.
“Space
is
the universe,” said Bertie authoritatively.
“Blackie
is
real!” maintained Madeleine.
“Jesus Christ,” said Henry, who was by now looking rather defeated, with his yellow paper crown askew above his springy light brown hair. “I’m trying to tell a fucking joke here. Is anyone going to let me finish my bloody joke?”
“I don’t think so, darling,” Muffy smiled at him lovingly. “Why don’t you have another glass of claret?”
She handed the decanter to Max, who passed it along to his brother. He loved Christmas lunches at Batcombe.
“Daddy said ‘fucking,’” Charlie pointed out with a grin. “He has to put a pound in the swearing tin.”
“Two pounds,” said Bertie, watching with delight as his Coke foamed up over the rim of his glass and began to form a pool on the mahogany table. “He said ‘bloody’ as well. He said no one would let him finish his ‘bloody’ joke. Didn’t you, Dad?”
Henry poured himself a claret and, with his best attempt at dignity, got up from the table, taking his drink with him. “I’m going to go and sit in the drawing room,” he announced to the table at large. “If anybody wants me, I will be sitting in front of the fire with the jumbo
Times
crossword.”
“But what about presents?” protested all three children in unison.
“Anyone who is hoping for presents,” said Henry, holding up his forefinger for silence, “would be very well advised to leave their father alone for twenty minutes—”
“Twenty
minutes
!” they wailed in horror.
“Twenty minutes,” repeated Henry, “while I finish my glass of wine in peace. Then, and only then, there
may
”—he paused for dramatic effect—“be some present opening.”
“But what can we do for twenty minutes?” asked a grief-stricken Bertie. “That’s ever.”
“You can help Mummy clear the table,” said Max, waving down the howls of protest. “Come on, Charlie, you can scrape off those plates for Titus and Boris. The sooner we get started, the sooner we can get to those presents.”
Batcombe was Max’s sanctuary.
Henry, his much older half brother and only real family, had inherited Manor Farm from his father, Max’s mother’s first husband, ten years ago. It had been in a terribly dilapidated state back then, a picturesque but decaying mess of ancient barns and outbuildings, clustered around a much neglected but nevertheless magnificent sixteenth-century manor house. Henry and his young wife had moved in, full of energy and ambition, determined to revitalize both the house and the business. And revitalize it they had.
From the dining room window, Max now looked out across a spotless yard to the gleaming rows of snow-covered milking sheds, and beyond them to his brother’s three hundred acres of rolling Cotswold countryside. Every hedgerow, wooden fence, and drystone wall had been painstakingly restored by Henry over the last decade, and the farm was now picture-perfect. Max had traveled all over the globe, but he had yet to see anywhere that topped Batcombe for the sheer heart-lifting beauty of the landscape.
Thanks to years of hard work by Muffy, the house itself had become as much of a triumph as the farm. Henry’s father, who had lived there for most of his life, rarely used any of the larger formal rooms, some of which had mildewed wallpaper hanging from the ceilings when they first moved in. Now, with the wood paneling in the drawing room lovingly restored, and every corner of the house crammed with books, brightly colored Persian rugs and cushions, and an eclectic mix of objets d’art, ranging from obscure family heirlooms to interesting junk-shop finds, the manor was once again a home.
As a teenager, Max had spent a lot of time with Henry and Muffy and his nieces and nephews, helping out on the farm. If it weren’t for the fact that he loved his brother so much, he would certainly have envied him. His home, his rock-solid marriage, his kids, his little kingdom at Batcombe—he really did have it all. But one of the nicest things about Henry was that he knew how lucky he was. Always laughing and joking around, never with a bad word to say about anyone—not even their mother, who had effectively abandoned him when she met Max’s father and flitted off to California—Henry was a true hero in his brother’s eyes.
Having given up on getting any constructive help from the children, Max and Muffy had cleared the table themselves, and Muffy was now extracting fragments of vanilla pods from the sugar bowl so she could sweeten her own tea before taking a cup in to Henry.
“D’you think it’s been twenty minutes?” she asked, pouring a dash of milk into both Max’s and Henry’s mugs. “You did want milk, didn’t you?”
Max nodded. “Even if it hasn’t,” he said, “Bertie’s going to explode if you make him wait one more minute for his presents. Anyway, I don’t know why you pander to Henry like that. If anyone needs a twenty-minute break today, it’s you, not him.”
Muffy sighed and wiped her hands on her apron. “Tell me about it. Honestly, I know Christmas is always a lot of work but it’s been such a struggle this year, especially with money being so tight. I’ve done all my own baking, and Charlie and I made all those new decorations together, which took an absolute age.”
“Is money tight?” asked Max, taking a tentative sip of his too hot tea. “I thought the business was going great guns. Haven’t you just diversified the farm?”
“We have,” said Muffy, emptying a packet of bourbon biscuits onto a plate for the children. “But it took a lot of investment, and we’d already borrowed quite a bit to revamp the milking sheds and restore the big barn last year. And now we have Bertie’s school fees as well as Charlie’s to think about. We’re definitely a bit pushed.”
“I thought Bertie got a scholarship?” Max asked, risking a second gulp of tea.
Muffy shook her head. “Flunked it. Look, I wouldn’t worry, it isn’t like we’re stone broke or anything,” she said, catching his concerned expression. “Just a bit of a cash-flow problem. Maddie will just have to wait till next year for the Malibu Barbie mansion, and the boys can jolly well put up with homemade mince pies. Do you know they’re over three pounds for a box of six at M&S?”
“Scandalous,” said Max, helping himself to one of Muffy’s efforts from the open cake tin. “Anyway,” he said through a mouthful of crumbs, “yours are ten times better.”
After the last present had been opened and the drawing room floor had become a sea of shredded wrapping paper and empty boxes, Henry and Max decided to clear their heads and take the dogs out for a walk.
The winter sky was already darkening, and the cold, crisp bite of the smoky air jolted both brothers out of their drunken Christmas stupor as they strode across the fields, with the two King Charles spaniels, Titus and Boris, running along excitedly at their heels.
“So when are you off back to sunny California?” asked Henry, picking up a stray stick and throwing it for Titus.
“The twenty-eighth,” said Max. “I’m not looking forward to it actually.”
“Oh?” said Henry. “Why not? I thought you had rather a sweet deal, living with Hunter McMahon? Did I tell you his mother’s married to Christopher Wellesley these days, living over at Thatchers?”
“Yes,” said Max frostily, “you told me.”
He had not laid eyes on Caroline since he was a teenager, but he remembered her only as Hunter’s selfish and neglectful mother. It irked him a little that Henry and Muffy seemed to think she was terrific fun, although to be fair, Henry’s father had been friendly with the Wellesleys for the whole of his life, and Caroline was, apparently, greatly improved as a result of her late marriage to Christopher.
“Never introduce Hunter to my wife, will you?” said Henry, swiftly changing the subject, having remembered that Max had a bee in his bonnet about Caroline. “She loves that bloody
Counselor
rubbish. I’m sure she’d swan off into the sunset with him, given half a chance.”
Max laughed. “Don’t worry, you’re safe there. Hunter’s in love. With a very nice girl, actually. Tiffany. He met her at an audition for his new show,
UCLA.
It’s huge in the States already, but I don’t think they’re showing it here yet.”
“Tiffany?” Henry raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t sound like a very ‘nice girl’ name to me.”
“I know,” said Max, “but she really is. Most of the girls in L.A. are such gold diggers, especially the ones around Hunter, but she’s different.”
“So, why don’t you want to go back?” Henry pressed him, as Titus came bounding back with the stick clamped between his jaws.
“I don’t know,” Max sighed. “Living at Hunter’s is great, I know I’m very lucky. But sometimes it just gets to me, you know? He’s so fucking successful. And rich. Drop, Titus!”
He picked up the stick and faked a throw for Titus before hurling the stick fifty yards in the opposite direction for Boris, who was fatter and slower and needed the odds stacked in his favor when it came to playing fetch. “Everywhere we go, he’s mobbed by these incredible women.”
“I thought you said they were all gold diggers?” said Henry.
“They are,” said Max. “Which is why none of them are interested in me. I don’t
have
any gold. That’s the problem. Hunter’s been so generous, he’s an incredible friend, but he makes me feel like such a fucking failure. I mean, I’m twenty-six years old, and I still live in my buddy’s spare room. How tragic is that?”
Henry put a paternal arm around his brother’s shoulder. “Look, Max, twenty-six is young. Take it from me. You still have plenty of time to make money. And you always knew that this directing lark was going to be a bit of a gamble. You can’t expect to hit the big time right away.”
That was a bit of an understatement, thought Max bitterly. He’d been out in L.A. now for three full years and still hadn’t earned enough to pay Hunter back a quarter of what he owed him. If it weren’t for a couple of theater gigs he’d been offered in England last year, he wouldn’t have been able to afford to stay in America at all, even allowing for his subsidized living arrangements.
“Hunter had the McMahon name behind him,” Henry insisted. “You’ve got to do it all yourself, and that takes time and effort and patience. Cut yourself some slack.”
They came to the bottom of the hill and scrambled over a rotting old stile into some woodland. Henry frowned at the state of his fence; he’d have to get that sorted before spring.
“What about you?” Max asked. “Muff mentioned something about money being tight. Is everything okay?”
“Oh yes, yes,” said Henry, waving away the question with a frown and increasing his pace. Max took the hint—whatever was wrong, his brother didn’t want to talk about it. “Don’t worry about me. You just concentrate on keeping your own spirits up. The worst thing you could do now would be to lose your confidence.”
Max shrugged gloomily. “I think I’ve probably done that already.”
“Nonsense. You’re just in a funk, Maxie. Things will look brighter when you get back out there, I’m sure. And if they don’t, well, you know you’ve always got a home with us. The kids would die of happiness if you ever decided to give the old farming a try.”
Max felt quite choked with gratitude. Without Henry’s unwavering love and support in his life, God only knew where he’d be.
“Maybe I need a girlfriend,” he said, embarrassed by his emotion and wanting to change the subject.
“Dear God, boy, I hope you aren’t going to start complaining about lack of sex. Because if you are, I’m afraid I may have to hit you,” said Henry. “Try having three kids and a farm to run. Then you’ll discover the meaning of sex-starved.”
“I’m not sex-starved,” said Max, with devastating understatement. “That’s not what I meant.” For all his moping about L.A. girls’ materialism, he still managed to screw more than his fair share of them and certainly more than the faithfully loved-up Hunter. Still, there was a part of him that envied what Hunter and Tiffany had, or Henry and Muffy for that matter. Recently, his litany of casual sexual conquest had begun to seem hollow by comparison.
He quickened his pace as they started up a second hill, determined to work off at least some of Muffy’s delicious Christmas cooking.
“I tell you what,” said Henry, warming to the theme of sexual frustration. “You know who’s absolutely bloody gorgeous, but don’t tell Muff I said so?”
“No, who?” said Max.
“Hunter’s little sister. Siena. Or is it his niece? Did you see those pictures of her in
GQ
last month? Fucking hell, she’s sexy. Why don’t you get Hunter to set you up?”
“With Siena?” Max laughed. “Now that would be a match made in hell. Besides, Hunter hasn’t spoken to her in years, not since we were kids.”