One Christmas Morning & One Summer's Afternoon (12 page)

They all laughed, except for poor Will.

Santiago de la Cruz’s good looks worried him at least as much as his famous rival’s bowling arm.

Will had been banking on using this summer’s cricket match to win back the heart of his first love, Emma Harwich.

If I could score a century, and take home the Swell Valley cup for Fittlescombe, maybe she’d start to fancy me again
,
he’d argued to himself, night after night for almost a year. But now, with cricket’s answer to David Beckham swooping in to seize the limelight at the last moment, what possible chance did he have?

It was unlike Will Nutley to hate anybody. But at that moment, listening to the reassuring platitudes of his teammates, Will came close to hating Santiago de la Cruz.

*****

Santiago de la Cruz flipped open his vintage Hermès suitcase and lifted out a stack of perfectly pressed, sky-blue linen shirts. Karen, his PA, had done a stellar job packing up his penthouse flat on the front in Brighton and installing him here, at Wheelers Cottage. He’d arrived yesterday to find his bed made, his fridge stocked and his Sky Sports fully operational. Other than hanging up his shirts, there wasn’t a thing for him to do.

Santiago had never understood what possessed otherwise intelligent men to hire useless, leggy blondes as personal assistants. He was as much a fan of leggy blondes as the next man. But all PAs worth their salt were over fifty and a solid 80 per cent battleaxe. Karen was two stone overweight, wore surgical stockings come rain or shine and had blisters on her hands as tough as barnacles after a lifetime’s heavy lifting. She’d made Santiago’s move to Brockhurst a dream. A good thing, as he’d been having nightmares about it since the day his agent had persuaded him to sign on the dotted line.

‘You’ll love it,’ the agent had assured him, over a wildly expensive lunch at the Dorchester that he would no doubt bill Santiago for later. ‘That part of the country’s alive with hot chicks.’

‘It’s the middle of fucking nowhere,’ Santiago had grumbled.

‘Who cares?’ The agent grinned. ‘You won’t want to leave.’

‘I loathe the countryside.’

‘No you don’t. You love it. Which is why you’re gonna make the perfect face of the Best of Britain Hotel Group.’

And there was the rub. Santiago’s year-long prison sentence in some godforsaken Sussex village was going to earn him a cool two million pounds in sponsorship from a leisure consortium that specialized in five-star country-house hotels. They’d originally wanted him to tour the country as an ‘ambassador’ for their various different properties, but as a county player Santiago had to stay in Sussex. Brilliantly, his agent had brokered a deal whereby his client would spend a year in a chocolate-box thatched house in Brockhurst, home of English cricket. He would play in the famous Swell Valley One-Day Match, which in recent years had become almost as popular a society fixture as the Boat Race or the Cartier Polo. In return, the leisure group would have use of the house, and the coveted de la Cruz image, for various promotional shoots and events, all endorsing their ‘Best of Britain’ brand. And Santiago would plug their hotels relentlessly at every possible opportunity.

It had seemed like a no-brainer at the time – money for nothing. He could still play for the county, still commute to London for weekends in the off season. But, now that he was actually here, his heart sank. The house was picture perfect, but it was the sort of house a wealthy grandmother might retire to, all low ceilings and beams and leaded-light windows. Santiago had already cracked his head twice. The whole place made him feel horribly claustrophobic. As for the wall-to-wall stunning women Santiago’s agent had promised him, so far he’d seen nothing but a couple of middle-aged village shopkeepers and a gaggle of overweight teenagers, who had pointed and stared at him as they loitered around Brockhurst’s only bus stop yesterday, as if he were an animal in a zoo.

After putting the last of his shirts into the heavy Victorian chest of drawers by the window, he opened the latch and stuck his head outside. The views, at least, were fabulous. From his bedroom window, Santiago looked over his pretty cottage garden to the glorious Swell Valley beyond. Startlingly green fields sloped down to the River Swell, a wide, glinting swathe of silver, snaking its way along the valley floor. On the far side of the river, the South Downs rose up dramatically like great, benevolent giants. The grass on the hills was a paler green than in the valley – almost grey, in fact – and crisscrossed with bright white paths that had been etched into the chalk over thousands of years. Only one building was visible, at the foot of the Downs close to where Fittlescombe village lay hidden from view, folded between two hills. It was a medieval hall house, probably a large farm originally, and it stood surrounded by its own orchards. Curious, Santiago picked up his ‘Best of Britain’ binoculars from the dressing table (his sponsors had provided him with a number of twee, country-themed gifts, including walking sticks with carved pheasants’ heads on the top, a fly-fishing rod and an engraved hip flask, presumably for use on fictional shooting weekends) and zoomed in on the house.

The first thing he noticed was that the binoculars were superb. He had a perfect view of the house and garden, and was even able to zoom in on the roses climbing up the brickwork. The second thing he noticed was the front door opening and an incredibly pretty blonde in a tiny floral bikini emerging into the garden. She was carrying a bath towel and a magazine and, despite being barefoot and (presumably) alone in her own garden, she carried herself as if she had an audience, with the haughty, self-satisfied bearing of the very young and very beautiful.

Spreading out the towel, she proceeded immediately to remove her bikini top, revealing a pair of small but perfectly formed breasts, like two apples dipped in caramel.

Santiago let out a long, low whistle. Now that really
was
the best of Britain, or at a minimum the best of Brockhurst. Would she be at the match on Saturday? he wondered. Surely she was bound to be. It wasn’t as if there was anything else to do around here.

He closed the window and went downstairs in search of a cold gin and tonic, feeling mildly cheered.

Perhaps his agent would turn out to have been right after all.

The Swell Valley was starting to look up.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’

Penelope Harwich stared down at the blackened chicken casserole, so badly burned it probably couldn’t even be identified from its dental records, and ran her hands through her hair in despair.

‘Why didn’t the bloody bipper go off?’

This last question was addressed to Sebastian, Penny’s fourteen-year-old son, who was hunched over the kitchen table at Woodside Hall, deep in his Nintendo 3DS.

‘It did,’ he said without looking up. ‘I turned it off.’

‘Why?’ wailed Penny.

‘Because it was annoying,’ said Seb, reasonably.

‘Yes, but why didn’t you come and get me? I set it so I’d remember to take the lunch out of the oven!’

‘Well I didn’t know that, did I?’ said Seb, reluctantly turning off his game and pushing open the kitchen door, to allow the smoke to escape. ‘You set that thing all the time – to remember to call granny, to remember to do the ironing, to remember some other thing you’re supposed to remember.’

Penny groaned. She wished this weren’t true. That she didn’t muddle through her life like a victim of early-onset Alzheimer’s, barely able to brush her own hair or make a cup of tea without some sort of outside assistance. But, ever since her divorce last year (since her husband, Paul, had left her on their twentieth wedding anniversary, for a man, admitting to a gay double life that Penny had had literally no suspicion of whatsoever), she’d lost so much confidence she barely trusted herself to remember her own name.

‘I think we’d better leave this in the garden for a bit. Till it stops, you know, smoking,’ said Seb.

Watching her lovely, kind, capable fourteen-year-old son slip on her oven gloves and carry the charred mess outside, Penny Harwich felt poleaxed with guilt. Paul’s abandonment and spectacular coming-out had been hard on all of them, a terrible shock. But, while she had unravelled like a dropped spool of yarn and Emma, Seb’s older sister, had taken refuge in anger and acting out, Seb had held things together with a maturity and stoicism far beyond his years.

‘If someone’s gay, they’re gay,’ her son had told her calmly while she sobbed on his shoulders. ‘It’s not Dad’s fault and it’s certainly not yours. You just have to, you know, get on with it.’

And Seb had ‘got on with it’, going back to boarding school with no apparent problems, even spending occasional weekends with his father and his new partner, Mike. When Penny had steeled herself to ask Seb what the boyfriend was like, he’d shrugged and said simply, ‘All right. He can fix toasters. And he likes cricket.’

For Seb Harwich, the world was divided not into gay and straight, old and young, rich and poor, but into those who did and did not like cricket. How Penny wished her own world-view could be so simple, so accepting.

As it was, she felt guilty about everything. Guilty for not reading the signs, for not knowing about Paul, for not changing him. Guilty for not being a better mother, a better wife, a better artist, a better person. And, while Penny was busy blaming herself, her daughter Emma vociferously seconded the motion, blaming her mother for everything from her father’s sexuality, to the dilapidated state of the house, to the weather.

The chicken casserole, Emma’s favourite, had been Penny’s latest doomed attempt at appeasement. Emma was home for a week, ostensibly to watch Sebby in the big cricket match, but actually to have her photograph taken, bask in male attention and make her poor mother’s life as hellish as humanly possible. It was hard to know what, exactly, had pushed Emma Harwich from being a normal, slightly moody teenager, to a full-on-entitled, spoiled bitch. Whether it was the bombshell dropped by her father or the explosion of her modelling career, which had happened at about the same time, Penny didn’t know. Either way, it was safe to say that money, fame and attention had not had a beneficial effect on Emma’s character.

This was really Seb’s big moment, and Penny knew that she should be focusing on her son this week and not her daughter. Not only was it the first time he’d made the team, but Seb would be the youngest player in Swell Valley cricketing history to bat for Fittlescombe against their age-old rivals. As ever, however, Emma was the squeaky wheel that ended up getting the grease.

Seb came back in to find his mother pulling leftovers out of the fridge with the frenzied energy of a bag lady trawling for food in a dustbin. ‘What on earth am I going to give her now?’ she wailed. ‘She only eats chicken and fish.’

‘Mum, it’s Emma, not the bloody Queen,’ said Seb, calmly putting the food back. ‘You’ve got cheese. Let’s have pasta and cheese sauce.’

‘She’ll never eat that. Far too many calories,’ fretted Penny.

‘Well she’ll have to go hungry, then, won’t she?’ said Seb. ‘We’ll do a salad on the side. She can stick to that if she’s fussy. But you’ve got to have the pasta, Mum. You’re too thin.’

This was also true. At thirty-nine, Penelope Harwich was still extremely pretty in a wild-haired, hippyish, Pre-Raphaelite-beauty sort of a way. But the stress of divorce had stripped the pounds off her already small frame, to the point where the jut of her hip bones and ribs was clearly visible through the long cotton sundress she was wearing.

Twenty minutes later, with the cheese sauce bubbling on the Aga, the pasta almost done and a hearty-looking salad sitting in a big bowl on the table, Penny had started to relax. Seb pulled a bottle of Chablis out of the fridge and had just opened it, ignoring his mother’s protests, when the front door opened and a familiar man’s voice rang out through the hall.

‘Yoo-hoo! Only me.’

‘What does
he
want?’ Seb’s shoulders stiffened. Penny’s son was not a fan of Piers Renton-Chambers, the local Tory MP and self-styled ‘family friend’. Seb had no memory of Piers constantly dropping round when they
were
a family. But, since his parents’ divorce, he’d become an almost constant visitor, offering Penny help around the house, financial advice and, as he put it, a ‘shoulder to cry on’. Seb hoped fervently that Piers’s shoulder was the only thing his mother might be crying on. He didn’t trust the man an inch.

‘Be nice,’ hissed Penny, just as Piers walked in. Considered good looking for a politician, at forty Piers Renton-Chambers was probably at the height of his charms. He was reasonably tall and regular-featured, and he still had a full head of hair, although the beginnings of a widow’s peak were starting to form, a fact that bothered him quite inordinately. His other attributes were a deep, resonant, orator’s voice – no matter what he said, he always sounded slightly as if he were making a speech – and his immaculate grooming. Unlike Penny, who rarely got through a day without wearing at least one stained item of clothing, often forgot to brush her hair and was no stranger to odd socks, Piers never looked anything less than dapper, clean-shaven and altogether beautifully turned out. But, if he was a little vain and pompous, he was also incredibly kind. For all Sebby’s misgivings, Penny didn’t know how she would have got through the last year without Piers’s support. And, despite his obvious affection and attraction for her, he had never made a move or overstepped the line – or at least, not yet.

‘Oh, you brought flowers. How lovely,’ she beamed, relieving him of a hand-tied bunch of pale-pink peonies. ‘And peonies, too, my absolute favourite.’

‘Are they?’ said Piers.

‘You know they are, you twat,’ Seb murmured under his breath. Happily, neither of the adults heard him.

‘Something smells good.’

‘It’s cheese,’ said Seb in a distinctly churlish tone, earning himself a reproachful look from his mother.

‘We’re having pasta and cheese sauce,’ said Penny, pouring Piers a glass of wine. ‘You’re very welcome to join us.’

‘I’d love to,’ he enthused.