Chapter Nineteen 2020 #3
“Not into its mouth. The slopes are covered in ash and gravel after they erupt, and you coast down that.”
“Sounds wild,” Finn said.
“Sounds suicidal,” I muttered, embarrassed for him.
Finn and Jack made meaningful eye contact across the fire.
“Nature is there to be conquered,” Louis said.
It was the kind of boneheaded thing his friends might say, but never him.
“I don’t know,” Jack said lightly. “I feel like anyone who tries to conquer nature pays the price. The natural world has its own rules, and if we break them, we die.”
Louis shook his head, grinning in a way that made him look like a stranger to me. “There are no rules out there, that’s the thing.”
We were all quiet for a while. I glowered at Louis over the campfire while he pretended not to notice.
“Well, I’m knackered. I might turn in,” Jack said, getting up from his chair.
“Me too,” Finn said.
Pots were washed, teeth were brushed, and Jack and Finn were swiftly zipped up in their tents. Louis’s security team, who had set themselves up at a respectful distance along the beach, hid among the melaleuca trees, though we knew they were keeping watch with their night-vision goggles.
When I came back from peeing in the bushes, I found Louis alone.
He was staring into the fire and hardly seemed to notice when I sat down beside him.
Without the others, the sizzling tension between us eased.
We sat quietly by the fire for a while, listening to its hiss and sputter as it split a log in two.
“Can I tell you something?” he asked softly. His bravado was gone.
“Yeah.”
“Last Guy Fawkes Day, we went to a friend’s place in Scotland for a bonfire. Some guy brought peyote, and I took it,” he said. “And the next day I woke up locked in a room. They’d bound my wrists with a scarf. Kris and Amira said they’d had to sit with me all night to calm me down.”
“What happened?”
“They said I’d kept running towards the fire. I was fighting them off and screaming that I needed to get into the fire. It took four guys to get me locked up inside. I told everyone that I didn’t remember what happened. But I remember.”
He was staring into the fire now, the flames lighting up his storm-coloured eyes.
“What do you remember?” I asked.
He looked at me. “I could hear Mum screaming from inside the bonfire. She was begging me to come get her. She was calling both our names, screaming for our help. And no one would let me get to her. It was so real.”
We said nothing for a long time, but we both had tears in our eyes. We looked into the fire, and I tried not to imagine Mum trapped inside it. We had never talked about what had happened. After she was gone, we rarely spoke of her again.
“Do you think she was calling for us at the end? Out there on her own?” he asked.
I covered my face to hide my tears, because that was all I ever thought about.
Louis put his arms around me, and I buried my face in his shoulder.
We held each other for a long time as the fire began to dwindle.
In the days after her death, there had been too much to do, too much to hide, and we’d never sought much comfort from each other.
“You’re the only one I can talk to about it—the only one who understands,” I said. I felt him nod as his head rested against mine. “I don’t want this distance between us.”
We were motherless children who’d been stupid enough to lose each other as well as her. Finally we broke apart and looked at each other with shining eyes.
“I know you don’t support what I’m doing,” he said. “But I can’t do the other thing, I can’t. Amira and I are friends—we’ll take care of each other. Granny’s giving us Sherbourne House after the wedding. Amira’s happy for me and Kris. And she wants this life—she wants to be queen.”
I wiped my face and nodded, trying to understand. “Does Papa know?”
“He knows and he doesn’t know,” Louis said, looking towards the pearly moon on the horizon. “We’ve never really spoken about it, but, yeah, he knows.”
We hadn’t been this honest with each other since the night in the Highlands when we were still children.
“I want you to be happy,” I said. “I want Amira to be happy. I want Kris to be happy. I just worry someone’s going to get hurt in all this. I worry someone will use this against you. I’m just… worried, I guess.”
“So am I,” he admitted. “But no one’s figured it out yet. And the thing is, I think we can all be happy this way. No one ever gets everything they want. But this way, we get pretty close.”
We knew that life was a ledger and that happiness would always be offset by pain and sacrifice. Kris and Louis could be together under the guise of close brothers-in-law. Amira could have the life of Vikki’s dreams and a marriage of convenience.
“This feels like an insane conversation to be having in this day and age,” I said.
“It is, but you know our family’s about a hundred years behind everyone else,” Louis said. “You don’t have to support what we’re doing. But I do need you.”
I grabbed his hand and squeezed, the way Mum used to. We would be at a dreary Easter service or a garden show or yet another polo game, and she would absently take our little fists in her hand and knead them.
“It’s a good life you have here,” Louis said. “I’m really happy to see you so healthy. I was worried about you at the end.”
“Yeah, same.” I sniffed. “I’m sorry I left you like that. I just… it felt necessary.”
He nodded. “Are you really going to be a doctor?”
“My hospital internship starts next week.”
“Jesus Christ.” He laughed. “I think Papa’s secretly impressed. He’d never, ever admit it, though.”
We drove back to Hobart two days later, salt-crusted, tanned and triumphant.
Louis and I had waded out until, finally, the sand flats gave way to deep water.
We swam in the frigid bay, watching a glossy seal pirouette past us.
We drank red wine by the campfire and walked the great length of the sand when the tide receded.
I dozed in my tent in the afternoon sun and listened to Jack tell Louis about his dreams for the vineyard.
When we got back to the property, Ragu galloped towards us and leapt into Louis’s arms. By his last night, I was almost looking forward to the wedding, when we would be together again.
Paula had approached me about the possibility of throwing a party in Louis’s honour, just for a few friends and the Jennings vineyard staffers.
To my surprise, Louis agreed. There was no way to stop people taking his photo and sharing his location, but by the time anything hit the tabloids, he’d already be back on the plane to London.
And, I had to admit, the revelation that he’d come to visit me a few weeks before the wedding would play extremely well with the public.
We threw the party in the main shed, with fairy lights wound around the rafters and sheepskins draped across the chairs for warmth.
Deep inside that vast space was a chamber once used by Jack’s great-grandfather to store apples from his thriving orchard.
Its thick walls were filled with coal, and it was always deliciously cool in there.
Jack’s friends, who played seventies cover songs in the pub on weekends, set up their gear so they could croon to the swaying crowd on the dance floor.
Almost every guest who arrived at the shed worked at a vineyard or a distillery, bringing with them promising new blends or daring experiments in unmarked glass bottles.
Out on the grass, Finn filled a few disused steel wine vats with wood and set them alight for the smokers and the kissing couples to keep themselves warm on the cool summer night.
Friends arrived in their best shirts and summer dresses, carrying wheels of local cheese and fruity homemade craft beers, a rather polite and timid crowd. It was always this way in the beginning, and it was always up to me and Louis to break the ice.
I was wearing a black cotton sundress with delicate straps, my hair scrunched and manipulated into wild curls.
I escorted Louis from cluster to cluster, making introductions.
Then he would take over, flashing the audience his Isla smile—the slightest dip of his chin, the curl of his lips—before asking them sweet and insightful questions.
Within the hour, the crowd had loosened up in the presence of a future king.
When a winemaker from the Coal River Valley turned out to be a free climber who had just ascended Cape Pillar, I left them to their extremely technical and fervent chat.
I walked into the shed’s makeshift kitchen as Jack was pulling a tray of sausage rolls out of an ancient oven. He shook them into a big bamboo steamer on the bench, which was stacked with loaves of Turkish bread, tubs of hummus, chopped up vegetables and two boxes of frozen spring rolls.
“Ah, just in time,” he said. “Make yourself useful and take these around, would you?”
“Sure,” I said, dunking one into tomato sauce and eating it. “Louis’s doing alright, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, he’s a good guy,” he said, emptying a box of spinach and ricotta triangles onto the tray. I could see that he was working through something in his mind. “He seems a bit… I don’t know. Tortured? But then…”
He went quiet and I looked at him.
“What?” I asked. “So did I?”
He popped the tray in the oven and came back, resting his hands against the only available bench space, his rolled-up shirtsleeves showing off his shapely forearms. He was annoyingly handsome in the summer, when his skin went bronze and his dark mop of hair was kissed by the sun.
A string of light bulbs draped between the support beams above us lit up the blond tips of his eyelashes.
He smiled, but looked unsure how to proceed.
“All I needed was some good Jennings hospitality to fix me,” I said, smiling back at him. The Finnish brandy I had consumed made me feel loose-limbed and slightly irresponsible.