Chapter 16
William
Iendured an evening meal at the Dower House with Mum and watched the England v France match on her couch with Bramley, then he and I dragged the only surplus mattress not riddled with carpet beetles up to the belvedere at the top of the folly.
He fussed about for a while—making beds, muttering about biscuit crumbs and falling standards.
“Bramley, I hope you realise you’ve ruined my carefully curated Wallowing Bachelor Aesthetic,” I scolded him on his way out the door.
“Read,” I said to myself, and plucked my well-thumbed copy of The Broken Crown off the coffee table. My buttocks had barely grazed the fabric of Dad’s old armchair when I heard the click of the door downstairs.
“Petey Boy?” I called down casually, as if I hadn’t been on tenterhooks for an hour.
“Is it all right?” His voice sounded unsure.
I stood at the top of the stairs. “Of course, come on in! This is your home now. Welcome to the pyjama party!”
My fake fiancé pulled the door closed and kicked off his shoes. He looked tired but as beautiful as ever.
“Cup of tea?” I offered.
Petey turned to look up at me, his eyes suddenly on stalks. “Uhhh, you should probably…” He waggled his finger at me, and I realised he could see straight up my boxer shorts.
“Oh! Right. Sorry.” I bounced down the stairs. Petey didn’t take his eyes off me the whole way down. “Left my dressing gown upstairs in the belvedere, I’m afraid. I’ll try to remember for next time. Was that a yes to tea? Have you eaten? I could boil you an egg.”
“I ate at the catering truck.”
As I bent over the gas ring, Petey started unbuttoning his pink boiler suit. He had a white vest on underneath, and I kept sneaking glances as his fingers worked lower and lower. When he got to his waist, he tied his sleeves together in front of his groin. Then he flopped onto the bed.
“You look exhausted,” I said.
“Tough day. Armando’s affair with Ellie came out. He’s a lord and she’s a servant, so according to the rules, she had to be dismissed.”
“Sounds a bit brutal. What does that mean, in practice?” I reached for a couple of mugs from the kitchenette.
“She’s currently in the Travelodge with the aftercare team, and she’ll be on a train back to Essex in the morning. The cast is a mess about it. It’s our first dismissal.”
“Golly, I didn’t realise that was a thing. What happens to Armando?”
“Nothing. He’s a lord.”
A laugh barked out of me, my mind flickering to the envelope upstairs.
“Oh, for a world where a title meant no consequences.”
Petey Boy was leaning back on the bed—the slender length of him, the porcelain skin, the pink of his nipples showing through his vest. He was breathtakingly handsome. I pointed at the kettle.
“This thing takes ages. Why don’t you have a shower to wash away the day, and I’ll take these up to the study?”
Petey Boy shook his head. “I think I’ll hit the hay. I’m sapped.”
“Oh,” I said, failing to hide my disappointment. “I was hoping we could, you know, get to know each other.” And I winked, for good measure. I don’t know why. The mood came over me. Seemed the friendly thing to do.
Petey Boy blinked, his eyebrows bouncing. Then his eyes sparkled through the tiredness, a glorious grin widening across his face.
“OK, sure, why not. We’re engaged, aren’t we?”
A warm tingle flushed through my body.
Twenty minutes later, he was sitting in the chair opposite me in my father’s study, hair damp, wearing a fluffy white robe. I was in one exactly like it, but with tea stains down the front.
“Were you actually christened Petey Boy?” I asked.
He smiled. “It’s Peter, obviously. But my gran calls me Petey Boy, so it’s what I like to be called. You can just call me Petey, if you like.”
“Are you close with your gran?”
“Spent every afternoon after school with her, either at her place in Tower Hamlets or at their market stall in Petticoat Lane.”
“Oh, so your grandparents are proper East Enders, then?”
Petey Boy’s whole face lit up. “Gran’s brothers used to knock around with the Krays. You don’t get more East End than that!”
He seemed inordinately proud of this link to London’s most notorious gangsters.
In the fifties and sixties, the Krays were responsible for armed robberies, money laundering, arson, violent assaults, and even murder.
Still, Buckford Hall’s Long Gallery was lined with portraits of men whose crime sheets wouldn’t have looked so very different.
I remembered Jonty saying Petey Boy’s family were hugely successful, and suddenly I wondered in what field.
“If you’re planning to nick the silver, you should know none of it is real,” I said. “The real stuff is in storage. Indira insisted. Come to think of it, you might be the reason why.”
Petey laughed, and I enjoyed knowing it was because of something I’d said. It was a shot of endorphins, and I wanted more of it. His eyes locked onto mine, and he kicked out his foot across the coffee table to playfully nudge my knee.
“Why does Jonty call you Dub-Dub? That’s what I want to know.”
I sighed. “Oh, it’s a stupid nickname. From school. I hate it. It’s because of the two Ws in my name.”
“In William Buckford? I thought you went to one of the best schools in the country. Didn’t they teach you how to count?”
I laughed. “Buckford is only the title. The W is for Winters.”
“So, you’re William Winters?” Petey Boy sipped at his tea.
“Actually, I’m William Stanley Leaf Richard George Winters-de Valois-Winters. If we’re getting technical about it.”
Petey Boy frowned. “Leaf?”
“It’s my godfather’s name.”
“And two Winters?”
“Across five hundred years, you pick up a lot of valuable surnames. You don’t simply let the good ones go. Generations of scheming mamas worked so terribly hard to acquire them.”
“Should we be worried you seem to have picked up the same one twice?”
“I’ll have you know the Winterses are where we get our prominent chins. We have to circle one back into the gene pool every two hundred years or so to top up the old jawline.”
Petey Boy laughed, and it was beautiful. He wriggled in his armchair, and the movement loosened his robe a little, letting me glimpse the milky skin of his chest. It took me a moment to remember where I was.
“So, have you always been a reality TV show producer?”
Petey shook his head. “First gig.”
I listened while he told me about his years working on Wake Up Britain, fascinated by a world about which I knew nothing.
“Five years was enough,” he said. “I was sick of the segue sandwich. It was a joy to hand in my notice.”
“Is the catering no good at Channel Three?”
“No, I mean writing the presenters’ links. Give me any two subjects, totally unrelated—make them as stupid as you like—and I’ll write the segue for you.”
“Oh, this is fun.” I sat upright and loosened my robe to get the blood flowing and the old noodle noodling. “Got it. I bet you can’t link former Welsh rugby full back Leigh Halfpenny and Britain’s most endangered mammal, the hazel dormouse.”
Petey Boy seemed to roll the idea around in his head for barely a second.
“And if the sight of gorgeous golden-haired Leigh Halfpenny wasn’t enough to get your ovaries quivering over your cornflakes this morning, it’s time to meet another adorable golden furball you wouldn’t mind taking up residence in your basement, the hazel dormouse.
” He clapped his hands and flopped back into the chair. “Too easy.”
I bellowed with laughter. “You can’t say that on TV!”
“No, but it was worth it to make you laugh.” Petey Boy winked and flopped a leg onto the coffee table, his foot mere inches from my bare knee.
Extraordinary manners, really. My stomach burst with nervous energy, and my leg started to bounce up and down involuntarily.
I wanted to ask him more, but he beat me to the next question.
“You know the hazel dormouse is Jonty’s pet project?”
“Where do you think I plucked the idea from? Buckford is where Jonty learned about the hazel dormouse in the first place.” I pointed towards the porthole window and Buckford Hill beyond. “The wood is absolutely teeming with the little blighters.”
“You’re kidding.”
“My parents were committed naturalists. And naturists, as it happens. I can never remember which one is which. But during his nineteen years as baron, my father rewilded a third of the estate, created two new forests, and restored the ancient oak woodland. All bare-arsed, of course. Murder in the bramble season, but you get used to it. We were a very naked household. Upon reflection, that’s probably why the staff all left. ”
Petey snorted a laugh. Emboldened by the sight of him enjoying himself, I kept riffing on the theme.
“Long and the short of it, Buckford is practically a nature reserve. A few years ago—before my father and my brother, David, died—Jonty was staying for the weekend when the Hazel Dormouse Protection Trust released twenty dormice into our oak woodland. Now you can’t move up there for the furry little bastards.
They’re taking over. I went for a ride the other day, I kid you not, half a dozen of them—pistols in their paws, bandanas covering their darling little faces—blocked the path and shouted, ‘Stand and deliver!’”
Petey Boy was in fits, and my heart was absolutely bursting out of my chest.
His foot brushed my knee, jolting me out of my momentary reverie.
Our eyes met. Then, before I realised he’d even moved, Petey Boy was straddling me in my armchair, his soft lips pressing passionately into mine.
He smelt like tea and toothpaste and geranium body wash.
There he was, this beautiful lithe man, wrapped in a bathrobe, his body hot with expectation, and there was me, underneath him, frozen in horror—my body an explosion of pins and needles.
He pulled away. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
He scrambled off me, tightening his robe around his waist. “Did you not… oh my God. I’m so sorry.”
I jumped up because sitting down suddenly seemed incredibly awkward. “No, I’m sorry, I wasn’t expecting—”
“I thought you said you wanted to get to know each other?”
“I do. We were. I mean, I thought we were. The conversation was going well, wasn’t it?”
Petey Boy shook his head, his eyes wide in disbelief or panic or something like it. “When you said you wanted to get to know each other, I thought you meant… you know… you wanted to get to know each other.”
How had we got here? Why was I so bad at reading signals—at giving signals?
“I think there’s been a misunderstanding—”
“No kidding.” Petey Boy’s hand was in his short-cropped hair. “I thought you’d been giving me green lights all the way.”
“To be fair, I did make you tea.”
“I’m, like, really good at consent.”
“We’ve hardly met,” I said.
Petey Boy was pacing now. “You answered the door with your cock out.”
“It was the angle. I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I told you, we’re a really naked household.”
“You told me to go for a shower.”
“You seemed like you needed one.”
Petey Boy stopped still, staring at me incredulously. “I douched!”
As sentences that can silence a room go, it had to be one of the shortest in the English language.
I stood there, staring at Petey Boy, unsure if he was angry or embarrassed or both, and completely unsure how I was meant to respond.
Apparently, the squirrel part of my brain, the part that gets distracted easily, thought this was a good time to take over.
“Did… the plumbing hold up OK? There’s a plunger in th—”
“I should go to bed,” Petey Boy said. His face was unreadable. He spun around and started down the stairs. “I’m sorry. I didn’t… I thought… I’m sorry.”
“Goodnight!” I called after him. I stood there, staring at the top of the stairs for a minute, as if he might reappear, until the light from downstairs was doused and I heard Petey Boy climbing into my creaky old bed.
Disappointed, confused, I grabbed my copy of The Broken Crown off the coffee table, turned the light out, and schlepped my way up to my new bedroom in the belvedere, wondering where it all went so wrong.