They were ushered into an imposing foyer. Two enormous vases as tall as Jane, possibly Chinese, flanked the front door – nothing as prosaic as a coat rack or a little table to dump keys and post on in this house. The maid led them up an impossibly grand, intricately carved staircase, the kind that women in ball gowns swept down as the assembled company below gazed up at them in awe.
This was not the domain of an old lady. No chintz, no stairlift, no knick knacks.
There was no time to adjust what Jane knew of this great-aunt, which wasn’t much other than the fact that she was gravely ill, before a set of double doors were opened onto a drawing room where a drinks party was taking place, even though it was barely half past four on a Sunday afternoon.
Though it was barely a drinks party, only six people but they were making a hell of a racket. All talking and laughing over each other and then, one by one, they sensed there were interlopers in their midst and turned to stare at Leo and Jane standing in the doorway. It was tempting to hide behind Leo until she’d got her bearings, but that wasn’t possible when Leo tugged her forward so he could hide behind her.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Hi, Rose. Hello, everyone. Sorry to turn up like this.’
There were four women and one man arranged on two huge sofas, but Leo was talking to the woman who sat in a white leather cube-shaped armchair framed by two large windows at the other end of the room. Even sitting down, Jane could tell she was tall; long legs neatly crossed at the ankle. Sat there poised and elegant like a queen on a throne.
‘Leo,’ she said in a clipped but amused voice. ‘Goodness, you could at least have phoned.’ She paused. ‘And shaved.’
This was dear Great-Aunt Rose? Supposedly at death’s door? She looked very much alive and present in an elegantly draped navy blue dress with a diamond brooch pinned to her collar. Her snowy white hair was cut in a sharp and precise angled bob, lips and fingernails painted scarlet. She didn’t even have varicose veins.
‘We only just flew in from the States a couple of hours ago,’ Leo said and he rested his hands on Jane’s shoulders in a show of togetherness, though she wanted to wriggle free, because they weren’t together. ‘This is Jane, my wife,’ Leo added. He sounded quite defiant.
All eyes were upon her now, but all Jane could see was Rose. She wasn’t doing much, just sitting there with a tiny smile on her face, eyebrows slightly raised, but she had presence. She also had the look of someone who could sniff out bullshit at fifty paces.
Jane straightened, drew herself up and smiled wider. ‘Hello. It’s lovely to meet you at last. Leo never stops talking about you,’ she said and she stepped forward, out from under Leo’s tense fingers, and walked further into the room.
It felt a lot like walking onstage, but she kept on going until she was sucked right into Rose’s gravitational pull. When she’d first met Jackie, Andrew’s mother, they’d embraced, kissed, but after only two minutes in her presence she knew not to try that with Rose. Anyway, Jane had never been much of a hugger.
Instead she held out her hand and Rose received it like a tribute. ‘Married? I didn’t think anyone bothered getting married these days.’
‘Well, we were in Vegas – it seemed like the thing to do,’ Jane said as she stood by Rose’s chair, uncertain of what to do next.
‘Yeah,’ Leo said from the doorway where he still cowered, because he was absolutely dickless. ‘Would have been rude not to.’
‘Oh, stop hovering, Leo,’ Rose said sharply. ‘Why don’t you get your lovely wife – Jane, was it? – a drink.’
A corner of one of the sofas was found for Jane, where she sat next to a striking redhead called Connie wearing an original Zandra Rhodes kaftan in greens and pinks, who ran her own landscaping business.
There was Elaine ‘from across the square’ and Gudrun, a Swedish textile designer; Sarah who taught yoga to ‘prisoners, bored housewives, dancers, all sorts really’ and George, who was a curator at the V&A. They all introduced themselves to Jane jovially but perfunctorily, as if they were waiting to return to their scheduled programming. Jane sat there clutching a lime and soda. Even the smell of their martinis made her eyes water, and because anything less than a clear head could prove fatal.
Leo perched on the arm of the sofa opposite with a lime and soda too. ‘I never drink this early. The sun’s hardly over the yardarm,’ he’d said, eyebrows waggling. ‘And on the day of rest too? God, what a bunch of reprobates you are.’
Rose merely smiled in a tight, composed sort of way then looked at Jane. It felt a lot like being under a microscope, but Jane had learned how to appear as if she was at ease in a room full of strangers.
She always imagined herself sitting on a beach, the sun warming her face, waves gently lapping, genuflecting waiters ready to bring her whatever her heart desired. When Jane thought about that, it was easy to sit there with a slight smile on her face too, her posture relaxed. Like she belonged in this beautiful room with these clever, chattering people.
The walls were a dark, smoky grey, but the space wasn’t dark because of the two huge sets of French windows behind Rose’s chair and because everything else in the room was white, from floor to sofas to rugs to mantelpiece. Over the fireplace, there was a Warhol silkscreen of Rose. A younger Rose, face a little softer; her hair dark apart from a streak of white springing from her widow’s peak, still the same arch smile.
Rose had style that Jane, for all her intensive grooming regimen, appointments with personal shoppers and outfits that were always either black, white or grey because she was scared of trying to match colours together and terrified of prints, could never hope to emulate.
‘Leo, how did you and Jane meet?’ Rose asked, cutting through a heated debate about the Turner Prize. ‘I do love hearing how people got together.’
Leo smiled but his eyes darted round the room because he was a terrible liar. Someone who lived the way he did, hand to mouth, winging it with very occasional lucky breaks, should have been much better at faking it. ‘You tell it, baby,’ he said. ‘You’re much better at telling it than I am.’
Then again, he was really good at passing the buck. All eyes were on Jane again. She smiled again as if she were reliving all sorts of happy memories. ‘Well, I was engaged to another man. Having dinner with him when we had one of those silly arguments about nothing that escalated into a full-blown row until he stood up, demanded his ring back and walked out.’
Really she was doing Leo a favour when she went on to explain that he’d been their waiter, because Rose with her gimlet gaze was never going to believe that Leo was a successful artist. She had an iPad next to her on a side table. This was a woman who knew how to set up a Google alert.
Anyway, she said, Leo had kept a discreet distance to give Jane time to compose herself then placed a slice of chocolate cake and a glass of champagne in front of her. ‘On the house, which was very sweet. I was close to tears anyway, and that pushed me over the edge.’ Jane then went on to describe how Leo had pursued her relentlessly, though she wasn’t interested in a rebound romance as her heart was ‘not broken, but bruised. Definitely bruised. Leo wouldn’t take no for an answer though and in the end he just wore me down.’
Rose seemed to buy it because she nodded. ‘That sounds like Leo. How long have you been married?’
There was no point in fudging that particular detail. ‘Just over a day,’ Jane said to shocked and delighted gasps. ‘We were in Vegas for work and I told Leo that I always planned to be married before I was twenty-seven, so we got married with a couple of hours to spare.’
‘And you decided to honeymoon in London? I can think of better places to honeymoon than London in October,’ Elaine said.
‘We didn’t really plan a honeymoon, what with…’
‘Lydia called,’ Leo said. He’d been silent up until then. Smiling bashfully in all the right places, but now he was still, his face set. ‘She said… Insisted I came home. Made it seem like… you know…’ He shrugged and stared down at his glass.
Jane waited for a hush to creep over the room, but the atmosphere remained relaxed and convivial.
‘Did she tell you I was on my deathbed?’ Rose asked. ‘Well, not quite.’
‘But you are… you’re not… I don’t know…’ He couldn’t get his words out. All his flash and swagger suddenly gone, as if someone had let his air out. Jane couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. He’d come here expecting the worst and now that the worst didn’t seem so bad, he was lost and floundering.
‘Yes, I am,’ Rose said gently. ‘No point in being all cloak and dagger about it. This way I can have a lovely time saying goodbye to all my dear friends and do all the things I wouldn’t normally do, like having two cocktails before dinner instead of just the one. There’s no need to be upset and I really can’t see why you felt the need to hotfoot it over the Atlantic.’
That seemed unnecessarily harsh. Whatever Leo had done to be banished couldn’t have been so terrible that he deserved to be humiliated in front of Rose’s friends.
Still, Rose was Leo’s problem, not hers. ‘I’m sorry that we turned up unannounced,’ Jane said. ‘We really should be going now anyway, but Leo was so worried that we wanted to pop over right away.’
Leo was already on his feet, a grateful look on his face. ‘Yeah, we’ll get out of your hair now. Need to sort out a hotel, anyway.’
‘Don’t be so ridiculous. I’m sure Lydia will have got your old rooms ready.’ Rose picked up the iPad. ‘Anna will show Jane where she can freshen up before dinner and Leo, you can make us some more drinks. You did always make a mean martini.’
Within a minute of Rose swiping at her touchscreen, the young woman who’d shown them in was back.
‘Go on, dear,’ Rose said kindly. ‘We’ll eat at seven. You and I can get properly acquainted later.’
It was a relief to be dismissed. To be taken up another flight of stairs and down a corridor to a set of rooms: dressing room, sitting room, bathroom and bedroom where her suitcase had already been set down at the foot of the bed. The bedroom was painted a soft, smudgy indigo: a blue room for a blue boy. There were a few framed pen and ink sketches on the walls, books about art on the shelves, but Jane was more interested in digging her own iPad out of her bag, switching it on and typing ‘Rose Beaumont Kensington’ into Google.
Rose pointedly ignored Leo after Jane left the room. She still gave excellent cold shoulder.
He’d expected that. Instead he talked to George about the latest gossip from the V&A and Connie about garden design.
Every now and again, he’d catch Rose’s eye and she’d shoot him a pained look, then turn to Elaine or Gudrun, who were seated nearest to her.
It reminded him of being a very small boy and Rose descending on Durham a couple of times a year. She’d roar up in her scarlet MG with pretty parcels tied with ribbons for Linda, his mother, whisky for his father, and big boxes of Lego, which she’d thrust at Leo then ignore him.
That suited Leo fine because he hated Great-Aunt Rose. His mother spent the week before one of Rose’s visits telling him to ‘mind your Ps and Qs and only speak when you’re spoken to’. He wasn’t allowed to eat with the grown-ups either but was stuck in the kitchen with his younger brother, Alistair, who was just a baby while Leo was a big boy of three, then four, then five. Still Rose greeted him with a look of mild distaste, as if she knew that he hadn’t washed his hands even though he’d promised his mother he had.
Then, Rose had come to visit, just after Leo’s fifth birthday. He’d stood in the hall, ready to be presented to her like she was the Queen, and with the film that he’d just seen fresh in his mind and Rose sweeping in with that streak of white in her brown hair, he’d blurted out, ‘Great-Aunt Rose, you look just like Cruella de Vil.’
There’d been a terrible silence. His mother had given him a Look, which promised no TV for at least a week, his father had started apologising profusely, ‘Sorry, Rose. Never thinks before he opens his mouth,’ and Rose had stared down at Leo, who’d stared back at her because she really did look like a cartoon villainess. Then Rose had laughed. Properly laughed, a belly-deep chuckle.
‘Do I really?’
Leo had nodded.
Then she’d tousled his hair and squatted down. ‘Do you want to know a secret?’
He’d nodded again.
‘I’d much rather you call me Cruella than Great-Aunt Rose. It makes me feel very, very old.’
‘You’re not that old.’ His mother had sucked in a breath but Rose had laughed again.
They became firm friends after that. Her next visit, she bought him a cuddly Dalmatian from Hamleys and he’d drawn her as Cruella. ‘You’d never think he was only five,’ Rose had said to Linda, who’d beamed proudly. Linda’s proud smiles were usually reserved for Alistair when he walked a few steps without falling over or managed to navigate a spoon to his mouth without spilling anything – all things that Leo could already do.
After that, parcels would arrive regularly from Rose full of felt-tips and pencils in more colours than Leo had names for. Even better than the parcels were the endless, magical summers at Rose’s house in Lullington Bay, Sussex. It was where he learned how to paint as he tried to capture the pink and orange glory of the evening skies and the way the sea would shimmer in the sun.
There wasn’t any discussion about whether he should train to be a doctor like his father and both his grandfathers before him. Rose had decided that he’d do his Art Foundation at the Chelsea School of Art and Design and his path was set. His future mapped out. Not many eighteen-year-old boys would have wanted to go and live with a great-aunt in her early seventies but Rose had never seemed like an old woman to him. She’d been his mentor, confidante, friend. But before that, she’d ignored him.
Now, as Leo sat at the other end of the room, frozen out, he wondered what it would take, what he had to do, before he and Rose could become friends again.