Chapter Fifteen 2 May 2023 #3
Demelza, now half in the lap of a man on the couch, tried to hide her laughter. “Sorry, darling, it was utter chaos, and I thought you’d want to go home with Daddy.”
As people came to say hello to me, I realised I had met most of them at one time or another. Whether it was from Pony Club or parties at Elton Park, nearly every name and face resurrected a long-forgotten memory.
Soon Colin came over with two glasses of champagne. “How are you doing?” he asked. “You’re looking a little overwhelmed.”
“No, I’m fine. It’s just I can’t believe how many of these people I know.”
Amira was crouched by an open window with a cigarette between her lips, chatting to two women I recognised from Astley.
“Ours is a tight circle,” he said and sipped his drink. “All our parents know each other. We all went to school together, and we’ve all shagged each other—or assaulted each other during an innocent game of croquet.”
“I’m still waiting for my apology. The kids called me Frilly Knickers for about a year after that.”
He laughed. “No, look, I am sorry. I think I was just trying to get your attention. If it’s any consolation, Lou stole my clothes during swimming practice a few days after that, and I had to wander around school in my Speedos trying to find them.”
A wave of loss rushed up around me. In spite of myself, my eyes became wet. Colin looked into my face and placed a gentle hand on my shoulder.
“Sorry, it must still be raw.”
“I actually love hearing things like that—stories about him I’ve never heard before. We weren’t really in touch for the last couple of years. I don’t even really know if he was happy at the end.”
He nodded. “He seemed good. Though it was difficult to tell with him, you know? He always made me think of a mosquito flying over water, just kind of brushing the surface.”
I thought of my brother’s unfathomable depths, the secrets he had been drowning in.
“Growing up as the heir… I think that was hard for him,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “And now it’s you.”
I shook my head and looked at the crowd, feeling like I was sinking into something I couldn’t name. “It was meant to be him.”
I drained my champagne flute, immediately regretting my words.
I was confiding in a man I hardly knew, who was close to the one person who wanted nothing more than for me to board the first Qantas flight out of here: Demelza.
The Daily Post had an entire team of reporters dedicated to covering my every move, and here I was, at a party where people were spending a suspiciously long time in the bathroom.
“Sorry. Don’t tell anyone I said that.”
He smiled. “Don’t worry about that. You know we used to call Lou ‘Brian’ so if anyone overheard us, they’d think we were just talking about someone else? You’re safe here.”
I glanced at Demelza, who was watching us from her seat on the couch. Somehow she’d been able to get her tiara off her head, even though it had been stitched in like mine. Now she had it looped over her shoulder. Colin followed my gaze and then turned back to me with another smile.
“You don’t have anything to worry about there,” he said.
“Didn’t you say you read the Daily Post? Where do you think those leaks are coming from?”
He paused, as if gathering his thoughts, or perhaps choosing how much to share. “Sometimes it’s the courtiers behind all the drama, not so much the people they serve. They’re the ones climbing the greasy pole.”
I thought of Mum, who had spoken endlessly of the “grey men in grey suits” with paranoid fervour. At the end, she had insisted they were tapping her phone and using location trackers on her car, though I was never sure whether to believe her.
Amira appeared by my side. “I’ve got to get this bloody tiara off. I’m going home.”
“I’ll come with you,” I said.
Colin put his champagne flute down on Demelza’s dining table, between shoeboxes, shopping bags and a half-eaten pear.
“I can walk you home if you like,” he offered.
“Colin, we’re a hundred steps up the path,” Amira said, massaging her fingers into the crown of her head. “Ask for the girl’s number and say goodnight.”
He and I smiled at each other as Amira went to say goodbye to Demelza and the rest of the crowd in the living room. He pulled his phone from his pocket, and I put my number into it.
“You can talk to me, if you like,” he said. “I know that was hard for Louis—trusting people.”
“Thank you.”
I was quiet as Amira and I teetered home on our aching feet in the crisp spring air.
Even though I had grown up beneath the London stars, they were now foreign to me.
At night, I looked up expecting to see the flickers of Carina, Crux and Centaurus, and every night I found the sky scrambled and unfamiliar.
“Do you think you’ll go out with Colin?” Amira asked suddenly.
“What? I don’t know.”
“Because you talk to that farmer twice a day?”
“He’s not a farmer, he’s a winemaker.”
“I think Colin’s a good match for you, really,” she said, ignoring me.
“It makes a lot of sense: a future queen and a future Duke of Hereford. He’s got his own inheritance—perhaps even more than you’re in for.
He understands this life, he’s comfortable in it.
I see why she got him to escort you tonight.
That’s the kind of match she’ll support. She’ll never let you marry a farmer.”
My cheeks were growing hot. “You sound like one of the insane old women in a Jane Austen novel.”
Amira shrugged as we walked past Cumberland 3; the remodelling had been completed two weeks prior. Neither of us had yet discussed the possibility that I would move in.
“Those women weren’t wrong, especially for people like us—well, you. Not me anymore. But you’ve got to get married and stay married and produce an heir. That’s your job.”
We were a few steps from the door and I was desperate to go inside and crawl beneath my duvet.
“What about…” I faltered and said nothing more.
“What about what? What about love?” Amira said, stopping to look at me.
There had come a point many years earlier when she had stopped being honest with me. We didn’t talk like this anymore. There was something frightening about the look on her face, triumphant and ready to fight.
“Have you ever been in love?” she asked.
I thought suddenly of Jack, his big hands and his relentless cheer.
When we first met, he’d confided in me that he had once spurned the vineyard.
He looked at his father’s vines and felt the cordon of his own life creeping forward, every tendril that might take it in a surprising direction pruned back.
And so he left. He went overseas for a year and then he wound up on James’s sheep station.
But the longer he had been away from the grapes, the more he yearned for them.
He loved that stretch of earth like it was a part of him.
“I don’t know,” I huffed. “Have you?”
“No,” she said immediately. “Do you think love is what makes marriage work?”
“My parents—”
“Love wasn’t the problem for your parents—it was compatibility.”
I looked up at the strange sky to stop the tears from rolling down my face.
It was an accusation I had heard many times—that it had all been Mum’s fault, that she’d been naive and wanted too much and should have known better.
If she had tolerated Papa’s obsession with Annabelle, if she had dimmed her own light so it glowed just enough to shine on him, if she hadn’t been so sensitive, she would be alive today and she would be the future queen.
I had heard it all. I’d just never thought Amira and Louis agreed.
I was really crying then—for the first time since I had returned to London. I walked past Amira and left her standing in the quadrangle. All the windows around us were dark, but we knew better than to assume no one was watching and listening.
“Lexi,” she whispered. “I’m not trying to be cruel, I promise. I just want you to open your eyes.”