Chapter Twenty-Five 16 November 2023
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Colin sat down beside me on the sofa and handed me a whisky.
“I’m glad you called. It’s been a while.”
I took the heavy crystal glass and sipped. It was so expensive, it didn’t even burn as it went down.
“Yes, sorry about that.”
“Being the heir is a full-time job,” he said and pulled my bare feet into his lap.
Everything about his apartment was beige.
It looked like one of the first-class lounges at Doha Airport.
Colin was the type of man who had a single drumstick framed on the wall, no doubt a collector’s item from some rocker I didn’t know.
In his closet was a special velvet drawer for his watch collection.
There was a leather squash bag in the entrance that never seemed to move from its position leaned against a limestone console.
That morning, I had climbed into the Range Rover next to Mary and we rode silently to Aberdeen International Airport for our flight home.
As she dozed beside me in the blue light, I studied her face and tried to conjure memories of her, but none came.
At first I thought it was unfathomable that Amira would know someone I didn’t at Astley, but by our last year I had lost Mum and thought of nothing else.
I had always sensed that Mary and I shared a past she preferred not to discuss.
I thought perhaps she’d had a hand in the leaks that came from Wolseley House when it belonged to Papa, but maybe I was wrong.
Maybe our past stretched further back than I ever realised.
Once we’d landed in Heathrow, I texted Colin and asked if I could come over.
He was still at work, so I had my driver drop me off at his flat, where his concierge let me in.
Colin worked at his father’s company that managed the family’s real estate holdings and investments.
I had a bath in his enormous clawfoot tub, and he had come home a few hours later, dressed in his flawless suit, with a bottle of whisky tucked under one arm.
“Can I ask you a slightly illegal question?” I said now as the peat turned to vapour on my tongue.
Colin laughed and dug his knuckle into the arch of my foot. “Well, that’s the most interesting thing anyone’s asked me in a while.”
“This is all extremely hypothetical,” I said, my head swimming. “But imagine that you have to give money to someone. And you couldn’t personally do it because they live in another country. And you would need to get them the money without ever being found out.”
He looked at me seriously, but he didn’t stop kneading my feet.
“Finding an intermediary would be simple—there’s three people I could call now whom I’d trust to do it.
I’d ask them to make the deal and then I’d do the exchange with Bitcoin.
Or you’d put all the cash on a private jet and have it flown over—that’s not a bad option either. ”
I stared into the glow of his minimalist fireplace and wondered about myself.
“Hypothetically speaking,” he said, lowering my foot into his lap, “if you were ever to need something like that, I could help.”
I said nothing. When he crawled towards me on the sofa, I let him kiss me.
He pushed me into the cushions, and I wondered if I could succumb to this life.
Tomorrow, I could ask Vikki to write a cheque, and Colin would funnel the money into a Bitcoin wallet for Davide Rossi.
Next summer Colin could stand in the esplanade of Edinburgh Castle and watch while Granny placed the coronet on my head.
His presence would be enough to divert the press’s attention from the inevitable Scottish independence protests I had no hope of snuffing out.
But when he wove his fingers into my hair, it was Jack’s face that surfaced in my mind. I thought of the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled at me, the way the early sunlight had caught in his hair on New Year’s Day. A great panic rushed through me, and I squirmed out of Colin’s arms.
“Sorry,” I said, covering my lips.
“You alright?”
“Yes,” I breathed, though I wanted out of the prison of his heavy limbs. I sat up and let my chest heave. “I’ve been having these dizzy spells. Sorry, I’m not sure I’m up for anything tonight.”
He tentatively rubbed my back. “That’s okay. Want to just order a takeaway and go to sleep?”
We slid into his gargantuan bed, and I listened to his rhythmic breaths while I soothed myself by naming in my mind all the bones in the human hand.
When I was done, I moved on to the foot, then all the signs of pneumonia, then every step to insert a central line without causing an infection.
I lay there, steering my mind through black waters until finally, just before dawn, I sank into sleep.
In the morning, I woke to the smell of coffee. I came into the kitchen and found Colin sipping an espresso, already dressed for work and reading his iPad.
“You’re up.” He smiled. “Would you like a coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
I sat on one of the stools lined against his marble island and watched as he ground coffee beans, measured them on a scale and then brushed off the excess with a tiny brush. He submerged a cup in hot water before pouring in the espresso.
“Can you make designs in the froth?” I asked.
“I actually can.” He laughed.
I drank, and the coffee was as perfect as everything else in his apartment.
“So,” he said. “Tonight. Why don’t we go out? I know it’s tricky, but we can go to Oswald’s. It’s private there. Members only. No one will bother us or take pictures.”
“I’ve got a reception at the palace tonight,” I said. “I organised it myself. It’s for a clinic in Nairobi that treats obstetric fistula.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a serious childbirth injury. It mostly happens to girls who are too young to be pregnant. Prolonged labour can seriously damage the wall of the birth canal and—”
He grimaced and laughed, waving a hand in front of his face. “I get the picture.”
While I had become something of a derelict princess in recent months, I still cared deeply about my patronages, so I’d thrown myself headlong into planning the reception.
The clinic’s board members were already in London ahead of the event, and the city’s wealthiest and most powerful residents had RSVPed yes.
There was one person who would not be there, though.
Six weeks earlier, Mary had asked me to go over the guest list one more time before we sent out the invitations.
I drew my finger down her leather binder, slowing to a stop when I reached Jack’s name.
I tried to imagine what would happen if I let it slip through so that the stiff cream invite made its way around the world, landing in the pile of mail on the kitchen bench back home.
Would he see it as an entreaty? A cruel tease?
I picked up a pencil and crossed him out.
“Mr. Jennings is no longer able to attend,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Afterwards, I locked myself in a stall in the ladies’ room and silently wept into my hands. Just for a moment. It was all I would allow myself.
Colin was polishing the steel of his coffee machine until it glowed. “Come here after the reception if you like.”
I smiled thinly. “I would, I just haven’t seen my dog in a few days, and I think I should.”
“Lou’s pointer? Bring him round.”
“That dog in this apartment? I’m sweating just imagining him on all these neutral furnishings.”
He laughed, but it was a hollow sound. “Well, I won’t presume to invite myself to Cumberland. I’m not sure Amira would want me hanging around her house anyway.”
I felt a familiar twinge of something I had not been able to name for months. I was beginning to see that for the duration of my time in London, everyone around me had been cloaking themselves in falsehoods, giving me only a fraction of the truth, so that I was no longer sure who to believe.
“What’s the problem between you two?”
There was a strange expression on his face. “I don’t have a problem with her. I’m not sure she really liked any of Louis’s friends, to be honest.”
“She told me she invited you to a dinner party at their house and you showed up with a new girlfriend, but you hadn’t broken up with the old one yet, and she was there too, and it was very awkward.”
“What?” He looked startled, and then rolled his eyes. “That’s not… I didn’t do that. That’s not how it went down.”
I shrugged. “I’m not judging. But maybe that’s why she’s… I don’t know, ambivalent.”
He studied my face. “Has she warned you off me?”
“No,” I said. I wasn’t quite sure what Amira wanted for me anymore. She was frighteningly unsentimental when it came to marriage and repeatedly insisted there was no better match for me than Colin. But the possibility that I might go through with it seemed to leave her bereft.
“Look, she’s your friend, but… I don’t know,” he said, throwing up his hands. “There’s people like us and there’s people like her.”
“Sorry?”
He rolled his eyes again, clearly frustrated with me.
“I’m not talking about skin colour. It’s just…
you’ve met her parents. Her mother engineered that whole thing with Lou.
She dug her claws into him, and she pushed them together.
I don’t know if Amira even wanted him. I mean, she wasn’t faithful to him, that’s for sure. ”
I sat very still on my stool while Colin pinched the bridge of his nose. I thought of her simmering resentment, the way she seemed to know everything about him, how quiet she had been on the drive home from our weekend at Lutton Hall.
“That’s just what I heard,” he muttered. “Anyway, let’s drop it.”
“It was Amira,” I said slowly. “The girl at the dinner party who had to sit across the table from you and your new girlfriend. You and Amira were together.”
The howl of an ambulance filled the apartment as it careened past. Once it faded, we sat in the yawning silence. His arms were folded over his chest as he stared at the floor.
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
He looked at me sideways. “Do you really want to know?”
I shrugged again. When he said nothing, I pushed back my stool and stood up to leave.
“Look,” he said firmly. “It was a mistake, obviously. I shouldn’t have done it.
We got a little caught up in things for a while, but I certainly wasn’t trying to break up their marriage.
But then she started talking about leaving him, and the thing is, Lou was like a brother to me.
I would never do that to him, ever, and I wouldn’t want to put your family through that.
I knew I had to end it. And the way I did it…
yeah, that wasn’t great. But I had to shock her out of this fantasy she had. I did it for Louis.”
I nodded. I was dressed only in a t-shirt and suddenly felt exposed. “I should let you get to work.”
In the bedroom, I started searching for my clothes on the floor. She had kept secrets from me, and she’d been involved in some sort of scheme I didn’t quite understand, and yet all I wanted to do was get home to her. Colin appeared at the door and watched me stuff things in my suitcase.
“I know you’re upset,” he said.
I didn’t look up as I pulled my dress back on. “It’s really fine. I just need to go be with my friend.”
“She’s not your friend,” he said. “That family—those people—have never been your friends. I invited her to Lutton Hall over the summer because I knew you wouldn’t come up without her, but it was only you I wanted to see. I’m done with her. It was nothing.”
I pulled my coat off the hook and slung it over my shoulders. “You’re wrong about the Shankars. I can’t get into it, but you’re wrong. Amira was a good wife to Louis. They both tried their best.”
He shook his head, looking confused. “Okay.”
“Thank you for letting me stay here last night.”
I made it to the entrance with my suitcase before he caught up to me and grabbed my wrist.
“Lexi,” he said. “Cards on the table here: I like you. I’ve liked you since we were kids.
And sure, it makes a certain sense for us to be together—I’m not saying I’ve never thought about that side of things.
If everything worked out, our first son would be the heir to the throne.
And then we could arrange things so his younger brother becomes the Duke of Hereford and manages the land holdings.
That’s a powerful pair of siblings. It would solve every problem your family has ever had with the second-born child. ”
He saw my face go dark and looked briefly up at the ceiling.
“Sorry, but you know what I mean. All I’m saying is, if you stopped rushing off every time we got closer, you might find that you like me too. I know there’s some other guy, some… Australian. Demelza told me about it. But I just think this”—he gestured between us—“this makes sense.”
He took my hand in his, and I thought suddenly of the last time I’d been standing in a man’s apartment this way.
You’d be incapable of living a real life, Ben had said to me.
I could never explain to myself why this had hurt so much, but I understood now what he meant.
It was not the world’s rabid interest in my private life that I feared.
It was being truly known by the person standing in front of me.
Colin and I could merge power bases and call that a family.
We could also have our own private dalliances and never ask each other probing questions.
And during the decades we spent together, waving from balconies, posing for pictures and keeping our secrets, we would never really get to know each other at all.
Gently, I withdrew my fingers from his grasp and grabbed the handle of my suitcase.
“I really am sorry,” I said.
I took the lift down, and when I hit street level I walked out into the cold November air where I could finally breathe.