Cents and Sensibility

‘OΚ,’ he said, when I’d related the whole story, as figured out by me and Ned. ‘Let me get this straight – you’re telling me it was one of your colleagues at the paper who called the magazine and tipped them off about us? And she’d been given the information by another colleague, who’d been told by one of the other journalists who was at the Jericho thing? Have I got that straight?’

‘Yep,’ I said. ‘That’s it.’

‘OΚ,’ said Jay. ‘So is this normal when you work on a newspaper? I mean, I know what the press do to people like me – but you’re telling me they do it to each other as well?’

He had me there.

‘Well,’ I started. ‘I think this was quite an unusual case, but yeah, it can be pretty bitchy. People get very ambitious – and jealous – and they do try to stitch each other up. It’s very competitive.’

Jay said nothing, he didn’t need to. He’d made his point – this was the marvellous job I loved so much, the job that was keeping us from being together at that very moment.

I sighed. I could see how it looked to him, but his resentment of my work was just about the only thing that irritated me about Jay. I mean, I was pleased that he wanted to be with me so much that my job pissed him off because it was keeping us apart, but I somehow felt he should show it a little more respect. Especially as he had never worked a day in his life, as far as I could tell.

But apart from that, things were as sweet as ever and even though our only contact for the time being was phone calls, texts and emails, it wasn’t showing any signs of wearing thin between us.

I just hoped it would last until he could come back to London again – because I couldn’t see myself taking time off to go to New York anytime soon.

He’d told me he was going straight on to LA from his mother’s place, to catch up with some old friends, and I couldn’t help imagining the kind of women he would meet there – and how pleased they would be to see him.

Although I tried not to fret about it – telling myself that Jay was a free man, just as I was a free woman – I was aware that the longer we were apart, the greater was the likelihood of him meeting someone else. Who perhaps wasn’t quite so irritatingly committed to her day job.

For the time being, though, with him five and a half thousand miles away, my job was still my main focus and despite all Jeanette’s efforts to undermine me, the presentation that Friday morning was a triumph.

Ned’s revelation about the source of the Hot Stuff! story had left me momentarily battle weary, but that soon turned to cold fury – the perfect state of mind to show I would not be beaten by Jeanette and her mean tricks. I’d win out through talent, application and hard work. And I think I was also a little driven by the need to prove something to Jay.

Ned and I did the presentation as a kind of double act, acting out the part of Journal readers, with me as the seasoned and sophisticated luxury shopper and him as the less-experienced but cashed-up younger consumer, both explaining how the various parts of the section we had created appealed to us and served our needs.

From the first slinky lounge beats of the opening soundtrack – Ned’s idea, he’d got a DJ friend to put it together – and the way I had styled the boardroom with ranks of designer carrier bags, our presentation had been smart, funny and clever, and it had worked brilliantly.

Between doing my bit of the yackety-yak and keeping on top of the technology – we had the mocked-up dummies of our proposed pages projected on to screens from two laptops, with light pointers and all that malarkey – I hadn’t really been able to take in their reaction while we were doing it. I was concentrating too hard.

But when we’d finished, I looked up to see Peter beaming at me like a proud uncle. That was all the confirmation I needed that it had gone well, but it didn’t hurt to see that Doughnut and the advertising execs looked equally happy – and that Jeanette looked like she had just been forced to eat a plate of cat food. Result.

I looked back at Ned and it was clear he had just clocked her too. He grinned and winked at me.

‘Bravo,’ Doughnut was saying, leading a little spattering of applause, which I could see it was nearly killing Jeanette to join in with. ‘That was superb. I’m feeling quite excited about this section now – I think it’s going to add some real energy to the paper at the end of the week.

‘So, well done, you two, excellent work. Now, take yourselves off for a good lunch on expenses somewhere and don’t come back this afternoon. You can start commissioning all this on Monday.’

Ned and I were so excited that we did a little victory dance around my office when we got back down there, whooping and hollering with glee.

He grabbed me for a spontaneous burst of polka and on one of the giddy turns, I thought I saw a face staring malevolently in at us through the glass wall of my office. It was Jeanette, I realized, but by the time I had broken free from Ned and turned around, it was gone. I shuddered involuntarily and before I could say anything to Ned, Peter appeared in the doorway, clapping.

‘Bravo, bravo,’ he was saying. ‘That was marvellous, quite brilliant. Donald is thrilled, as you may have gathered. And I think you can rest assured that your future here is secure, Ned.’

Ned punched the air in triumph, as Peter walked over to me and put his hands on my shoulders.

‘Oh, did you see the expression on her face?’ he almost sang into my ear. ‘Pure bile – such bliss.’

Then he disappeared off to Gino’s for his customary lunch.

‘So,’ said Ned, turning himself round and round on my chair, like an excited little boy. ‘Where shall we have lunch then? Can you get us into The Ivy? The Wolseley?’

‘Probably,’ I said, laughing. ‘You’ve developed a taste for the high life pretty quickly, matey, I must say, but I’ve got another idea – are you doing anything this weekend?’

‘Getting pissed and sleeping it off probably. Getting laid if I’m lucky.’

‘Have you got a girlfriend at the moment then?’ I asked tentatively. I didn’t want to make the offer I was about to, if he did.

‘No,’ he said, one of his cheeky smiles spreading across his chops. ‘But I’ve got a reputation to keep up.’

I balled up a press release and threw it at his head.

‘Well, I was just wondering if you would like to skip the lunch today and come straight down to my dad’s place with me for the weekend. There’s going to be loads of us down there, it’ll be a bit crazy, I warn you, it always is, but good fun. You could nip home for your kit now and I’ll meet you at Victoria in a couple of hours.’

Ned looked really surprised – but pleased.

‘I’d love to do that, Stella,’ he said. ‘It won’t matter that I’m an uncouth colonial?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I told him. ‘My dad might be a lord by name, but he’s a total savage by inclination and he’s going to love you. You two have a lot in common…’

It only occurred to me as I said it, but it was true. They’d either love each other on sight, or it would be a clash of the testosterone titans. Ned was very much an Alpha Male, in his own particular way.

After he left to get his things, and I gathered up my own bits and pieces to leave the office, I hoped I wouldn’t regret the invitation.

It had been a completely spontaneous impulse to ask him down – I’d almost been surprised to hear the words come out of my mouth as I’d said them – but I knew Ham and Chloe wouldn’t mind, they were always urging me to bring friends there.

In fact, Ham would be delighted – once he had got over his initial disappointment that Ned wasn’t a future son-in-law – to see that I had a friend of any kind.

He was always telling me I could have the whole place for the weekend anytime I wanted to ‘with a crowd of mates’. His face got so sweetly excited whenever he suggested it, because he loved the idea of me having a wild time down there with great gangs of ‘young people’, using the house to its full capacity, but I just didn’t have a crowd of friends in that way.

I had workmates, like Tim, Peter and Ned, who I rarely saw outside the office; I had the people I knew from the luxury circuit, like Amy and Becca; there were a few bods I kept in touch with from school and university; the odd person I had met on holidays over the years; my human handbags; and various ex-boyfriends I was on good terms with, but I saw them all as separate friends, not as a cohesive crowd.

I just didn’t particularly like introducing friends from different compartments in my life to each other. It made me feel uncomfortable and exposed, as though I would somehow be revealed if they could get together and compare notes on me, so I always saw them separately. It’s just the way I was.

Even introducing friends to my family was unusual for me, so this weekend with Ned would be quite a new experience. It had been a spur-of-the-moment idea, inspired by the triumph of our collaboration, but as I walked to the Tube, it did occur to me that having him there that particular weekend would also help to make sure there wouldn’t be any more overly intimate moments with Alex this time.

That last one had been so weird, I really didn’t want to risk it again – and it seemed my subconscious had taken care of that for me.

It really was a ‘house party’. Not in the snobby stately-home sense, but because there was such a festive atmosphere spread over the entire place that the house seemed very much a part of the event – just as it was designed to be.

All the windows and doors were permanently open and people were constantly coming and going, in ever-changing combinations. Hordes of kids would come racing in through one door and then disappear out of another, and whichever part of the house or gardens you went into you would come across little knots of people happily engaged in various activities. It was – to use a Henry Montecourt buzzword – completely ‘fluid’.

With all the children in situ – including Archie – I did end up in the guest wing again, but it was fine. Ned and Rose were sleeping there too, as well as me and Alex, and we ended up being quite a tight little unit of our own. Plus it helped that I had a bedroom on the ground floor next to Rose, with the two boys in rooms on the upper floor.

Apart from anything else, it was great to see Rose again. After Chloe, she was my favourite stepmother and she’d been in my life at such a formative stage – from eight to seventeen – that she’d been a huge formative influence on me. She was certainly the reason I couldn’t cook. She never cooked herself, she had very little interest in food and just couldn’t be bothered with it.

What I loved about Ross was that, despite such talent gaps, especially of one so crucial when raising a large family, she was completely unflappable. She was very creative – a brilliant garden designer and a good watercolourist too – but there was none of the neurosis that often goes with that temperament.

She wasn’t a very good housekeeper at all, completely chaotic actually, but it never mattered somehow. She had just always made sure she had a reliable and devoted team of domestic help to look after things for her.

She was always finding a ‘marvellous little chap in Lewes’ who would cook all the food for a Willow Barn weekend in advance and deliver it, ready to be heated up, and ‘such a sweet girl from the village’ who would clean and organize the house, making sure all the ironing was done and the beds immaculately made.

Really, the ability to find such people and make them slavishly loyal to her, was as much a talent as being able to do it yourself, I had decided.

Ned and I were having a quiet drink on the terrace of the guest wing on the Friday evening when she and Alex arrived.

‘Where’s that darling girl?’ I heard Rose saying as she came in – she was always already talking to the people in a room before she entered – and I sprang up to meet her.

It was a couple of years since I’d last seen her and she hadn’t changed at all. Still as skinny as a teenager, with the same kind of sporty spring to her limbs, and her hair – which now had a lot of grey mixed in with the natural blonde – in the same boyish Christopher Robin cut.

‘Let me look at you,’ she said, holding me at arm’s length. ‘Marvellous. I always knew you were a beauty, even though I was your stepmother during those terrible awkward years girls have. She was quite the ugly duckling, weren’t you, sweetheart?’

She roared with laughter and introduced herself to Ned.

‘Oh, brilliant,’ she said, eyeing his packet of Camels on the table. ‘Another smoker. We can be untouchables together.’

By the time Alex emerged on to the terrace we were having a great time, with Rose and Ned wreathed in smoke, a bottle of white wine well on the go.

‘Alex,’ I said, standing up to kiss him. ‘Great to see you. This is my colleague, Ned Morrissey. We work at the Journal together. We had a bit of a triumph today and so Ned’s come down here to celebrate with me.’

They shook hands and I continued to babble slightly.

‘Ned, this is my ex-stepbrother, Alex. He works in the City. Rose is his mum and she used to be married to my dad.’

I knew I was talking too much, and like a five-year-old, but I couldn’t help it. The first few swigs of wine had gone straight to my head, the way they do when you’re a bit excited and haven’t eaten anything, and it was really important to me that Ned and Alex both understood exactly where they both fitted into the picture.

I thought I’d done a pretty good job – and I had tried to prime Ned with the complications of my family tree on the way down on the train – but I could still sense they were eyeing each other up a bit, that way men do, trying to see who is the dominant wolf in the pack.

But by the time we’d got over to the main house for dinner, the ‘boys’ as Rose was calling them, seemed to have bonded and were having an involved conversation about the various codes of football, including something called ‘Aussie rules’ – yet more sport Alex was keen on, and the first I had ever heard Ned express an interest in.

I thought his only sporting activity was chatting up the more attractive media students who came into the paper to do work experience, and his scores in that regard were pretty high, as far as I could tell.

When we got over to the house Ham was frowning down at the huge round dining table – it had its biggest top on – and puzzling over his seating plan.

‘Aha, the out-of-the-nest wing,’ he said when he saw us, quoting the slogan Alex and I had put on our sweatshirts, the last time we had been here together.

I felt immediately uncomfortable, and the unexpected reference to that night made my eyes flick over to Alex before I could stop them – just as he looked at me. Our eyes locked for a millisecond that told me he was still as self-conscious about the events of that evening as I was. I looked away immediately.

‘Now, you lot,’ Ham was booming. ‘I need your help with this plan. Can you count heads for me, Alex, to check numbers? You’re the best with figures. You see, I think we’ve got thirteen tonight. Chloe suggested putting Daisy to bed early to make it twelve, but I don’t think that’s fair, she deserves her place at the table, so I suppose it will have to be a teddy, which I’ve always thought was horribly twee…’

I was about to go looking for a large Pooh Bear who lived in the kiddie corridor, when I noticed Rose and Alex were looking at each other and giggling. Rose was nodding excitedly at him.

‘Actually, Henry,’ said Alex, ‘I think we might be able to solve that problem for you. I’ll just nip out to the car.’

Ham looked bewildered, but shrugged and carried on shuffling the index cards he had with our names written on them.

After a couple of minutes Alex returned – with a small, plump fawn-coloured pug on an emerald-green lead.

‘Monkey can take the fourteenth place,’ said Alex. ‘He has very good table manners.’

Rose shrieked with laughter. Monkey was her most treasured dog and she’d brought him with her, even though canines had been strictly forbidden at Willow Barn, ever since she and Ham had split up. He’d told me once that it was having several dogs in bed with them every night which had caused that marriage to fall apart.

‘Oh, I know I wasn’t supposed to bring him, Henry,’ Rose was saying. ‘But I couldn’t leave him behind. He’s so devoted to me. The others don’t mind, they’re all staying with Mrs Plimmer, who does my house, and they all adore her. But Monkey is so devoted to me, he just would have pined terribly’

Ham looked cross for a moment, but Monkey looked up at him and put his wrinkled little head on one side in such an appealing manner, Ham couldn’t resist him.

‘Oh, all right, Rose,’ he said. ‘We can’t leave the poor little bugger in the car all weekend. Here – write his name on this card.’

The twins, who had come down to the house with Chloe, were thrilled to see their favourite dog and Daisy was simply beside herself. She wanted a dog more than anything, but Ham was intransigent on the subject.

‘They’re dirty,’ he always said. ‘And smelly and needy and farty and they shit all over the garden. I’ve done dogs and I’m not having another one.’

‘We’ll see about that,’ said Rose to me, out of the side of her mouth.

With Monkey in situ between Rose and Daisy, and sporting a black tie which Tabitha had put on him, it was a very funny dinner from the outset.

By the time we’d finished the first course, both Monkey and Daisy were asleep at the table, and Rose and I took them off to bed – we just didn’t tell Ham it was the same bed.

Children gradually peeled off – to sleep, or just to do their own thing – until it was just the six adults who were left. While Chloe made coffee, Ham switched the table top to a smaller one, to make it more intimate, and with just him, Chloe, Rose, Alex, Ned and me, it was a surprisingly successful combination.

There was certainly no awkwardness between Rose and Chloe, who had established a very good relationship from the outset with regard to the movements of the twins between the two households – greatly aided by Alex, who helped as much as he could with the ferrying.

The two women were having great fun ganging up against Ham and teasing him, which he clearly adored; Ned and Alex were getting along famously in a blokey kind of way; and Rose and Ned kept popping out of the glass doors for what she called intercourse ciggies. It was generally a very successful evening.

It was nearly midnight and we were getting into the eau de vie – always the sign of a really good dinner – when my phone started ringing. In all the excitement I had completely forgotten it was in my pocket, but I knew who it was the moment it started: it was Jay calling ‘to put me to bed’.

From the first trill of the ringtone, every face around that table was looking at me.

‘It’s a bit bloody late for phone calls,’ protested Ham. ‘Even from that office of yours that makes you work weekends and God knows what.’

Oh no, I thought, as I saw Ned look at me oddly. He knew I didn’t work weekends – and I knew that a casual remark like that, which might have gone over most people’s heads, would be instantly logged in the Woodward and Bernstein hard drive of his brain.

I pretended to look at the number – like I didn’t know what it would be – then I turned the phone off with a flourish, cutting it out in mid-ring.

‘Sorry about that,’ I said, way too brightly. ‘It was a New York number. They’re still at work over there and they must have forgotten the time difference. Probably some airhead from Ralph Lauren. They’ve always got loads of ditzy rich kids doing play work there.’

I could have swallowed my tongue as I said it. Why did I have to overegg my explanation? Now I noticed Alex was looking at me keenly and I was sure he was remembering the last time my phone had rung at that table – and was wondering when the black Ferrari would arrive at the front door.

From that moment on, sitting at the table was torture for me. I was so terrified of opening my mouth in case I made another gaffe, that after about ten minutes I hurriedly made my excuses, saying it had been a big day with our presentation that morning and I had to crash.

I went straight to my room and rang Jay. I shouldn’t have done it. I should have just texted him an explanation but I was pressing return call before I’d even thought about it, because the thing was, with the white wine before dinner, all the red during it and the hard stuff at the end, I was just too pissed to think sensibly.

‘Hi, honey,’ said Jay in his most affectionate tones, when he answered. ‘I called you to say g’night and I got cut off.’

‘Omigod,’ I blurted. ‘It was such a nightmare, I was at dinner at my dad’s house – I’m down at the Barn, remember, I told you? And I realized it was you and I could see everyone was looking at me and I knew Alex was thinking about you and then I said this really stupid thing and I could see Ned looking at me too and I was just, oh my God…’

There was a short silence before he responded.

‘So, there’s quite a gang of you down there then,’ he said. If there was a slight coolness in his voice at that point, I didn’t pick it up.

‘Oh yes,’ I was off again. ‘It’s been so much fun – until your call. Oh what a nightmare that was. Anyway, Ham really loves Ned, which is great, and Rose is here – she’s Alex’s mum – and I really love her and it’s really good to see Alex too, because my dad really wants me to be friends with him and I do love him really, and all the kids are here and really it’s the house being used exactly as Ham had always envisioned it. It’s a perfect Willow Barn weekend, really’

‘Well, I hope you all have a lovely time,’ said Jay, and now, even through my boozy funk, I could hear the chill in his voice. And now I’m going surfing. Goodbye, Stella.’

And he hung up.

I was so surprised I didn’t think I could have heard him right. Had he really hung up on me, or had I missed something? And as my fuddled brain tried to make sense of it, I fell into an ugly open-mouth sleep.

I sat bolt upright in bed, as the conversation replayed itself in jagged snatches in my brain. Then I groaned and threw myself face down on to the pillow and hammered my feet against the mattress.

Jay didn’t even really know who Ned was and I had been happily babbling on about how lovely it was that Ham liked him – oh – and how great the evening had been until Jay had rung. I groaned some more.

‘A perfect Willow Barn weekend,’ I could now remember saying. A perfect weekend at the place Jay would love to visit again and never could, because my dad hated him – unlike Ned and Alex, who he loved, and so did I.

How could I have been so tactless? I groaned a bit more, but it just made me feel more sick.

I was never going to drink again, that was clear, but my more pressing concern was how I was going to make it up to Jay – especially as he was on LA time. It was hours until I could ring him.

By the time we were having breakfast at the main house, I was almost glad of my hangover, as a cover for my tender emotional state. The combination of remorse and anxiety, with the tyranny of the time difference, and the need to keep it all under wraps, was making me feel quite hysterical.

I was so jumpy at the breakfast table I knocked over the milk jug and then literally fell off my chair, trying to avoid the resulting deluge. It was so embarrassing. I was just relieved Alex wasn’t there to see me – he’d gone off to a specialist shrub nursery with Ham and Rose – but Ned, Archie, Venezia et al. clearly found it hilarious and Daisy was bouncing up and down in her chair with delight.

‘Stella had an all fall down,’ she was squealing, before hopping off her own chair. All fall down!’

‘I think I must still be drunk,’ I said, hauling myself up from under the table.

‘Cool,’ said Archie, followed by a burst of his staccato Butt-head laughter, which was like a painful assault on my ears.

I put my head in my hands and sighed.

‘I have to go back to bed,’ I said. It was all too much, being surrounded by so many people when I was in that condition. But when I got back to the guest wing and was all alone, I felt even worse.

Particularly awful phrases from the conversation – ‘It’s been so much fun – until your call…’; ‘Ham really loves Ned, which is great…’; ‘It’s a perfect Willow Barn weekend, really…’ – went round and round in my head, until I felt like some kind of crazy Hitchcock heroine, going bonkers.

On top of that I couldn’t stop myself looking at my watch constantly, to see whether I could call him yet, even though I knew he wouldn’t be up until it was late afternoon in East Sussex.

I made myself a strong cup of tea in the guest-wing kitchen and went to sit outside on the terrace, hoping the fresh air might clear my head. Then I had a brainwave and rushed back up to my room to get my phone – to see if maybe he had sent me a reassuring text while I was asleep. He hadn’t.

I was sitting there staring down at the phone wondering whether I trusted myself to send him one, when Ned walked out on to the terrace.

‘How’s your head?’ he asked me.

‘Shocking,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t drink white wine. It really doesn’t agree with me.’

He laughed.

‘I shouldn’t drink the equivalent of the English Channel in alcohol,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t agree with me. I’m going to have a swim. Your dad’s back and he just told me the pool’s open. Maybe you should have one too, it might sort you out.’

‘What a brilliant idea,’ I said.

I went back into the main house to see if I could borrow a swimsuit from Chloe, and as I was walking back through the sitting room carrying two ridiculously small pieces of shocking-pink Lycra, dating from her pre-Daisy life, I bumped into Alex. He saw the bikini and his face lit up.

‘Is the pool open?’ he said.

‘So Ned tells me,’ I said. ‘You coming in?’

‘You bet,’ said Alex.

I went straight to the pool house to change and as I came out into the bright morning sunshine there was a big splash as someone dived into the pool.

I was standing on the edge at the shallow end, weedily dipping my big toe in to see if the water was bearable, when a large seal burst out of the water at my feet. It was Ned. His normally messy black hair was slicked back by the water, and his eyelashes were stuck together in thick clumps against his green eyes. He grinned at me and stood straight up in the water. I nearly fell into the pool.

He had the body of a god.

I couldn’t help staring. Seriously broad shoulders, a perfectly smooth muscular chest, a taut flat stomach with a tantalizing line of hair down it – and those hip lines, just like Jay’s, but deeper.

There was something about those lines that did me in. Gazing at Ned, I remembered the first time I’d seen Jay in the pool at the Cap Mimosa, but while that gave me a pang of guilt, something still fluttered inside me where it really shouldn’t have.

I couldn’t believe I’d been sitting inches from this body for weeks at work, putting together the new section, and I hadn’t realized. I mean, I knew he was well built, but this was something else again. Did all the other women in the office have X-ray vision? Because they had clearly seen something I hadn’t, beneath that shambolic suit he always wore.

Just as I caught myself, and tried to look away, I realized that he was brazenly checking me out too. He wasn’t even pretending not to. His eyes were on their way back up for another look, when he suddenly shifted his gaze to my eyes – and unfurled his slowest, most wicked smile.

‘Nice bikini, Stella,’ he said, and took off back down the pool at high speed.

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