Chapter Seventeen 10 June 2023 #2
Ever since the state banquet, speculation that Colin and I were a couple had been feverish.
The images of us walking arm in arm towards the ballroom made us look like an inevitable bride and groom.
But it was the picture taken as he escorted me to my seat that had become a tabloid favourite.
He was beaming down at me while I gazed up at him with my mouth parted and pouty.
I looked positively feral in my low-cut gown, ready to pump out a bunch of his aristo babies.
The day after the banquet, I had woken to a dozen texts from Finn, most of them a cascade of fire emojis and question marks.
Who’s the hot ginge????????? he wrote above a link to a Daily Post story with the headline, “Sparks fly as Princess Lexi openly FLIRTS with UK’s most eligible bachelor, Colin Bellingham, who will one day be a Duke worth BILLIONS.”
There was also, I noted with alarm, no text from Jack that morning. It was the first day since I had returned to London that I didn’t wake up to a photo of Ragu, or an update from Jack’s day.
Omg lol, I had responded to Finn, mindful he would relay this message back to Jack. That’s just one of Louis’s friends. I don’t really know him. He was awful to me when we were kids. I bashed him over the head with a croquet mallet once.
EVEN HOTTER, he wrote back immediately. Enemies to lovers, my fave x.
I had been tempted to keep going with my denials, but I knew Finn loved nothing more than revelling in the drama of someone else’s life.
Exhausted, I’d stuck the phone back under my pillow, pulled the duvet over my head and languished there for the rest of the morning.
By nightfall, I was still hiding from Amira in my room.
I finally relented and texted Jack: What are you doing?
But I didn’t receive a response and went to sleep feeling friendless, repulsive and alone.
Jack was not a game-player. He had been raised in a house where people said what they meant and went to sleep with their disagreements sorted and their consciences clear.
The Jennings farm was a weird place for me and Finn.
We had grown up in homes where the only way to voice your displeasure was to go so quiet that your silence was like a scream.
The next day, I’d awoken to a notification from Jack: a photo sent without comment.
It was Ragu lying on the gravel road. It took a few days until the tenor of our conversation returned to normal.
By then, Colin was texting me too. It had started with a few photos of Louis from their junior school rugby days.
Found these the other day. Thought you might like them, he wrote.
I responded to thank him, and from there he began to text me every other day.
“Look at you, stringing along all the boys,” Amira had said a few weeks later when we were friends again and she watched my phone pulse with messages from Hobart and Belgravia.
“I’m not stringing anyone along,” I said, worried that I was, in fact, doing exactly that.
“String Colin along all you like, he’s a nightmare,” she said, sipping her wine. “But you might want to be more careful of the farmer’s feelings, don’t you think?”
“He’s not a farmer,” I muttered. I had talked Amira into letting me make spaghetti bolognese for dinner—with proper pasta instead of zucchini noodles—and the sauce was giving me trouble. “Also why do you hate Colin?”
Amira looked surprised. “I don’t hate him.”
“You just said he’s a nightmare.”
“Oh, well he is. I mean, he’s fine,” she’d said, her face twisting in contempt. “He’s just kind of a nightmare for women.”
She hesitated and then looked away.
“One time he was seeing a girl in our circle, but after a few months he met someone else. Rather than break up with her, he just brought the new girl to a dinner party at our house. So we had to sit through a whole meal with Colin and his new girlfriend on one side of the table and the poor woman he’d been sleeping with on the other side. ”
“Jesus,” I said, though I hadn’t been particularly surprised. It sounded like any other dinner party at a Norfolk estate—Elton Park included.
“Anyway, I wouldn’t worry about that if you like him. You’re the big prize—he’s not going to screw that up.”
Surrounded by my family in the gold leaf and brocade opulence of the Central Room, I glanced at my phone and saw that Colin had invited Amira and me to his family seat for a weekend over the summer.
Jack had texted as well, but I decided to save those messages for when I was alone.
I was wedging my phone in the waistband of my skirt when Stewart appeared in his charcoal suit, a sedate pocket square folded like origami at the breast.
“Make sure that phone doesn’t make an appearance on the balcony, ma’am,” he said gently. “When you’re out there, stand to Her Majesty’s left. And try to smile.”
“I won’t cry this time, Stewart, I promise.”
We smiled at each other. Louis and I had made our balcony debut at the age of three, but I was so overwhelmed by the carpet of people before me, followed by the scream of the planes overhead, that I had burst into tears, and Mum had to take me inside.
The next year, Stewart had arranged for the balcony to be opened up the night before the parade so he could lead me onto the narrow stone ledge and describe all the things I would see the next day.
Together, we watched the night traffic swirl around Queen Barbara’s memorial, the workmen setting up barricades for the people who were coming to see us in the morning, and Stewart explained that there was nothing to fear.
I’d never really got used to the feeling of all those eyes on me, but with his help, I always managed a smile and a wave.
Now it was time for my first balcony appearance in three years, and when a footman pushed the doors open, the wind tumbled through the sheer curtains, bringing with it the murmur of a thousand voices below.
Granny led us into the light. As my eyes adjusted, I saw them all before us, a huge mass of people just beyond the gates, climbing up onto Barbara’s marble lap for a better view, filling the parks and the roads, the horde accumulating so far down The Mall that I could hardly see where it ended.
Everyone was always happy to see Granny.
But the roar of this crowd rolled in like thunder, so loud I could feel their voices echo in my chest. Startled, I glanced at Richard who was standing on the other side of Granny.
I wondered if perhaps everyone had become far more vocal in the years I’d been gone, but I saw surprise on his face as well.
Demelza and Birdie beside him looked astonished.
There were Union Jacks fluttering in people’s hands and tears in their eyes, and I understood that they were enveloping us in their love, as they would any family who had lost all we had lost. Amira was standing to my left.
When she took my hand, our eyes met, and I saw that tears were tracing down her cheeks.
The summer solstice was approaching, the Earth’s relentless grind around the sun almost halfway done.
We’d made it to the tipping point of the year without Louis and Papa, fumbling through it, fighting and reconciling, trying every day to be better.
I squeezed her fingers hard and smiled through my own tears.
Later, the press said that while Granny was clearly moved by the outpouring of support from her subjects, unlike the rest of us, she refrained from crying.
But I was standing by her side that day, and I saw the tear caught in her lashes, the bobbing of her throat as her subjects shouted her name.
For the first time, perhaps in my entire life, I saw what she meant to these people, and what they meant to her.
I understood why she could never possibly be suffocated by their love.
When the parade was finally done, a light lunch was served in the drawing room, but I slipped outside for a moment alone and headed straight across the lawn for the sunken garden.
Hidden from view by hedges on all sides, I stepped within its whispering green walls and took off my heels, wandering along the terraces that descended to a stretch of chamomile lawn, satin soft under my bare feet.
It was midafternoon in London, which meant it was creeping past 1 a.m. in Hobart.
Jack had texted to say that he was out late with Finn, but I doubted he was still awake.
The yearly vintage had just been completed, which always left him exhausted.
He would now be spending all his time in the winery, crushing, pressing and fermenting grapes, somehow turning those enormous vats of fruit into something special.
I pulled my phone from my skirt and dialled his number.
“Hey,” he said in a sleep-roughened voice.
“I woke you up.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Sorry, I thought you might still be awake. Go back to sleep. I’ll talk to you later.”
I heard the rustling of blankets. “I was going to watch you do the balcony thing, but I must have fallen asleep. How did it go?”
I sat on the grass. “Usually I hate doing it, but it was nice, actually. Emotional.”
“Let’s switch to FaceTime, I want to see you.”
“No, I have hat hair.”
But he had already sent the video chat request, and I found that I wanted to see him too, so I tapped the accept button.
He was lying shirtless in bed, with sleepy eyes and his messy tumble of hair, and I tried to ignore the flush that started in my stomach and seemed to drift downwards. We smiled at each other like idiots.
“I haven’t seen you in so long,” I said.
“I see you everywhere. I go to buy groceries and your face is on every single magazine at the checkout. Go on, show me your dress.”
I stood up, leaned my phone against a pot of lavender and stepped back so he could see me in my white skirt suit, with my hair ironed so flat I barely recognised myself.
“I look silly.”