Chapter 19
19
N ow that she’d had a proper look at it, Cassie no longer felt that warmly about her little bunk-bed room.
She’d seen Gosford Park several times and it wasn’t hard to imagine the lowly scullery maids who’d slept in the room in the olden days. Nursing their reddened, split hands from all that caustic soap, and weeping because the master of the house kept trying to take advantage of them.
It was clean at least and although the bunk beds were clearly meant for children (poor children banished to the attics), Cassie usually slept curled into a ball so she would fit.
However, there wasn’t a full-length mirror and the very utilitarian bathroom down the corridor only had an antiquated toilet and sink, so she had no choice but to go back downstairs to the shower room-cum-boot room and pray that there was a lock on the door.
There was, and the shower had much better water pressure than Cassie’s shower back home. Also, eighteen hours with her hair wound around a bendy curling rod had produced the kind of ringleted waves that were ordinarily impossible to achieve.
Her face was sallow in the unforgiving strip lighting. But for once, she had enough time to do her make-up properly, even using her brushes instead of the tips of her fingers like she usually did.
Then she slipped on one of her favourite dresses. A midnight blue maxi dress with shirred bodice, little puff sleeves and a voluminous skirt because Cassie intended to eat her bodyweight in fried haddock and chips and a tight waistband would spoil her fun.
Cassie didn’t have the sort of room where she could just hang out, so once she’d ferried her stuff back up two flights of stairs, she headed for the garden.
It was still sunny and warm, so she slipped off her Birkenstocks to feel the velvety grass beneath her feet. At the edge of the lawn just before it became cliff, there was a wooden bench that looked out to sea.
There was something rare and precious about being able to grab some time when Cassie didn’t have to do anything, organise anything, remember anything. She could just be .
She was lucky to live in a very green part of London, bookended by Alexandra Park in one direction and Highgate Wood in the other, but even a city kid like herself could appreciate the fresh air of the open countryside. Especially when it came with a faint sea breeze. Cassie knew that if she licked her hand, she’d taste the salt tang on her tongue.
The tide was quite far out but she could see the white-tipped waves as they softly rippled at the shoreline. Tomorrow, she might swim. Or at the very least get her feet wet but now, even with the weekend stretched before her, with a house full of friends, she was gripped with a familiar panic.
She was always going to feel at her most alone among a group of people who had found their person. Whatever life threw at them, they didn’t have to deal with it on their own.
Cassie knew that there were no guarantees of a happy ever after. Also, every time she had been an ‘us’ instead of a solitary ‘I’, she’d chafed at the ties that bound her to another person. Had felt regret when it ended but also, if she was honest, quite a lot of relief.
Still, it shouldn’t be so hard to find your most favourite person and be their favourite person in return. Not when she wanted it so desperately.
Maybe if the other areas of her life were polished to perfection, being a lonely only wouldn’t feel so bad. But last time she checked she still had a failed business and an arseload of related debt. Her domestic bliss was dependent on the whims of her landlords and their late father’s cat. It wasn’t much to show for thirty-seven years of being alive.
‘I don’t always want to feel like this,’ Cassie said out loud and let the breeze carry her words away. ‘Get a grip. Think happy thoughts. You are going to have a good weekend.’
At five to seven, the sun was hanging low and though the sky was still blue, it was streaked with delicate trails of sherbet pink and tangerine, which promised a spectacular sunset.
Cassie walked back to the house where everyone, except Lucy and Russell, had reassembled in the lounge to organise dinner.
‘Shall we just get a few bags of chips to share?’ Anita asked, which was wasn’t in the spirit of getting fish and chips.
‘I don’t really eat chips,’ Heather demurred. ‘I’ll probably just pinch a handful off someone’s plate.’
‘Not my fucking plate, she won’t,’ whispered Kwame to Cassie as he came to stand next to her and put an arm round her waist.
Cassie shook her head and hoped that she was banishing the last traces of her bad, sad mood. ‘I’m so hangry. If anyone tries to nick my chips, I’ll bite their arm off.’
It was left to Iris to be the voice of reason, her Glaswegian accent getting thicker because this was a topic she felt strongly about. ‘This is heading into lamb bhuna Gavin and Stacey territory. If you want chips, then order your own bloody chips and if there’s any left over, I’ll turn them into a hash when I make lunch tomorrow. End of discussion.’
Sadly, it wasn’t the end of the discussion. The discussion dragged on for several more very long minutes until Lucy and Russell came strolling in. The tense look had gone from Lucy’s face as if she’d taken an eraser and a lot of Touche éclat to it, and Russell seemed to be back to his usual smiley, affable self.
‘Shall we order saveloys for the table?’ he suggested enthusiastically. ‘Who doesn’t love a saveloy? Marc?’
‘The ghosts of my French ancestors are turning in their graves,’ said an amused voice behind Cassie. ‘I’ll pass on the saveloys. Bad enough I’m eating fish fried in batter.’
‘Oh, come on! Mushy peas are exactly the same as pea purée without the delusions of grandeur,’ Cassie said over her shoulder and Marc shuddered in a way that suggested he wasn’t doing it purely for the drama. Although that could have been because Davy had just made a very off-colour joke about battered sausages.
By the time Anita and Azad returned with four huge bags of tightly wrapped paper parcels that wafted the delicious Friday-night scent of fish and chips in Cassie’s direction, the outside table was set with little tealights. The men had taken great delight in making fire in the fire pit and Digby and Kwame had mixed some very strong negronis.
Cassie tried not to inhale her large haddock and chips and instead take polite bites, using a knife and fork instead of fingers like she would have at home, but soon she was horsing it down. As so often happened when she was organising an event, she’d forgotten all about lunch and it had been light years since her seafront breakfast.
Heather was on her left and maybe all she’d really needed was some carbs because as she slowly ate a fishcake and a handful of chips, she said, ‘OK, I admit this is hitting the spot in a way that a nigiri roll can’t.’
‘It will be our little secret,’ Cassie said. ‘Also, I love your jumpsuit. Please tell me it’s high street and not completely out of my price range.’
Heather looked down at her slinky emerald-green jumpsuit. Like Lucy, she was tall and slim, which meant that they could wear clothes in an elegant, put-together way that Cassie could never hope to achieve.
‘It’s Whistles,’ Heather said. ‘And I know it will be in the sale because whenever I buy anything full price in there it always ends up in the sale.’
It was that easy to change the mood. To make a concerted effort to enjoy Heather’s company and not treat her like the devil.
Cassie demolished the tail end of her haddock and nodded as Heather described a coat that she’d seen in Liberty, which was going to be the ‘fulcrum of my winter wardrobe’.
On her other side, Digby was talking to Russell about some BAFTA-nominated, gritty TV drama that Cassie hadn’t seen because she didn’t subscribe to Apple TV.
‘It’s amazing how he can play a total psychopath but also, I totally would,’ said Anita of the lead actor.
‘Yup. Don’t mind if I do,’ Digby added with a wolfish grin. ‘When’s the new series, does anyone know?’
‘January, I think,’ Anita said. ‘Roll on January, right, Russell?’
For someone who’d been so enthusiastic about saveloys for the table, Russell hadn’t eaten very much. This was a man who always polished off whatever Cassie couldn’t finish when they had lunch at Manzi’s. Now he gently pushed away his plate, which was still quite full. ‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly. ‘A lot can happen between now and January.’
The chips turned to a claggy paste in Cassie’s mouth and for one awful moment, she thought that she was going to be sick. Then came an even awfuller moment as she felt the first tear suddenly descend without warning and land with a splodge on the rim of her plate. Another splodge and another and another …
Cassie stood up, scraping back her chair, so everyone turned to her.
‘Tartare sauce!’ she yelped, tugging at the hem of her dress, which was caught under one of her chair legs.
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter, Cass,’ someone said.
But it did matter.
Cassie ran for the sanctuary of the house but there was no safe haven with an entire wall made of glass.
She pushed open the door of the walk-in pantry and slammed it shut behind her. It was dark inside. She couldn’t remember where the light switch was and she didn’t care because Russell was dying.
It was only now that Cassie allowed herself to finally confront this horrifying truth. She hadn’t even been able to say the word ‘cancer’ out loud. Had danced around it, even as it cast its long shadow over her.
She rested her arms against a shelf and let the tears come full force, sobbing so hard that she was bent in half.
Russell is dying.
Russell will be dead.
He wouldn’t be alive for Lucy’s next birthday and he wouldn’t be there to see Joni and Fleur graduate and have ridiculous boyfriends and leave home and then return home because they couldn’t afford to rent.
He wouldn’t be there to cheer on their brilliant careers. Or walk them down the aisle if they got married, or pretend that he didn’t mind if they didn’t want him to walk them down the aisle because of the patriarchy.
He was never going to see the amazing women that they’d become.
Russell wouldn’t even be alive to watch the next season of some stupid TV programme because death was so cruel, so random but also so fucking mundane.
Cassie wasn’t just crying but making an unearthly keening noise. She shoved a hand into her mouth to muffle the sound.
Every time she thought that she’d got the sobbing under control, in the seconds it took to take a couple of hiccupy breaths, she was crying all over again.
Time ceased to have any real meaning so she didn’t know how long she’d been hiding in the pantry when the door suddenly opened.
Even though it was dark without the light on, Cassie turned around so her back was to the interloper. ‘I’m fine,’ she tried to say in between the snot and the tears and the hiccups.
‘You need to calm down,’ said Marc sternly, then turned the light on.
Being annoyed meant that Cassie was able to stop crying long enough to splutter, ‘Telling someone to calm down is a fucking stupid way to try and calm someone down.’
She was crying again, as if she’d never stop. Marc sighed and shut the door. He gently but firmly turned Cassie to face him and pulled her, unyielding and unwilling, into his arms.
‘Five minutes,’ he said in the same stern voice. ‘Then I’m cutting you off.’
Cassie tried to hold herself stiff but it was much easier to give in to the impulse to bury her wet, snotty face in the crook of Marc’s neck and cry while he stroked her hair and murmured words in French that she could hardly hear and didn’t understand.
Eventually her sobs became softer and the gaps in between grew longer and all the while Marc kept stroking the hair back from her hot, swollen face.
Then there were no more tears left, just deep shuddering breaths. Cassie drew back from Marc a little but one of his arms was still around her waist and she was still clinging to him.
The hand that had been in her hair moved to her chin so he could tip her face up and run his eyes over her features as if he were seeing her for the first time.
‘I look terrible,’ Cassie whispered, trying to hide her face, but Marc wouldn’t let her.
‘You don’t,’ he whispered back. ‘You never look terrible, not even when you spend the whole day with some odd torture device on your head.’
Cassie managed a weak little laugh. ‘My heatless curling rod.’
Marc was still looking down at her. Cassie risked raising her eyes to see that hatefully handsome face that she knew so well, but there was nothing hateful about him tonight. His gaze was concerned, but when Cassie ran her tongue over her dry lips because the crying had leeched all the moisture from her body, he didn’t look concerned any more.
He looked as if comfort was the very last thing he wanted to give her. Cassie couldn’t even explain why the atmosphere in the small, enclosed space, home to packets of pasta and rice and tins of kidney beans and chopped tomatoes, was now so charged.
Cassie’s giddy, gulping breaths sounded deafening. Marc’s hand slid, slowly and deliberately, from her waist to her hip and, his eyes never once leaving hers, he pulled Cassie closer.
Then he lowered his head and lightly brushed his lips against hers in a question which was answered by Cassie clutching his arms tight and kissing him back.
It went from nought to oh my God in seconds. From a hesitant kiss to test the temperature to a raging heat as they came together in a messy clash of teeth and tongues. Cassie grabbed handfuls of Marc’s shirt to yank him closer still until their bodies were so cleaved to each other that not even a sheet of tissue paper could have come between them.
It wasn’t even kissing. It was snogging. Proper, old-fashioned snogging. Cassie hated Marc for what he’d done to her but there had been so many times over the years that she’d thought about how good it had been, before it had all got very bad.
Now here they were, Cassie on tiptoe, her hands in his hair, sharing desperate, needy kisses and Marc’s hands were on her arse, almost lifting her off her feet, so he could grind against her. She could feel how hard he was, how much he wanted her.
Eventually Cassie pulled her mouth away to catch her breath. Speaking would have broken the spell so neither of them said a word. Instead they stood there, both panting, eyes fixed on each other’s faces.
Cassie didn’t know how long they stayed like that. One of them needed to say something. Some bitter little barb to get them back on track. To pretend that the kissing hadn’t happened, that it didn’t mean anything. She should just leave but she didn’t move and instead it was Marc who … suddenly dropped to his knees.
He stared up at her with glittering green eyes, his bottom lip caught between his teeth as his hands crept under the skirt of her dress. He traced a path up her thighs, the edge of his nails lightly scoring her skin so that Cassie’s knees trembled.
Then his fingers hooked in the waistband of her pants. ‘Take them off.’
Marc might have been on his knees in front of her (and that certainly hadn’t happened the other time, it had been the other way round) but it still felt like he was very much in control.
Whereas Cassie felt as if she’d lost control the moment that his mouth had landed on hers. Her hands were shaking as she hitched up the voluminous skirt of her dress and tugged down her knickers, then kicked them away. Marc was still staring up at her face even though she was standing there bared to him. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from him either and it felt too … intimate.
She let go of the scrunched-up navy cotton of her dress with nerveless fingers so her skirt covered him and that was much better. Now she could concentrate on the warm gusts of his breath on her skin, the touch of his hands on her inner thighs.
She gasped when he lifted her up enough that she had to hook her legs over his shoulders so she didn’t fall and then his mouth was right there . No teasing, no waiting, he simply began to feast on her.
Cassie was instantly soaked and twisting to get even closer to him, her arms braced against the shelf behind her, jars rattling …
Then Marc suddenly plunged two fingers in her, his mouth still working, sucking on her clit like it was the ripest and juiciest of fruit and she just needed—
The door was abruptly flung open. ‘Cassie! There you are!’
It was Heather. Of all the people, in all the pantries in the world, it had to be Heather.
For one agonising split second, their eyes met, Cassie pinned, propped up and panting. Then Heather looked down.
‘Is that … Marc?’ Her tone was positively gleeful.
‘No!’ Cassie yelped but she didn’t know if that was because it was best to deny all plausibility or because Marc was now delicately circling her clit with the tip of his tongue and she couldn’t quite believe that this was happening.
‘Oh my God, it is!’
Heather was gone as quickly as she’d arrived, pantry door left wide open. Panicked, Cassie tore herself away from Marc, kneeing him in the head so he had no choice but to let go of her and she toppled over, taking several cans of cannellini beans with her.
Marc emerged from under her dress, hair rumpled, eyes glinting. He licked his lips ruminatively, appreciatively, as if he could still taste her.
Cassie couldn’t even look at him. It was a much better idea anyway to look for her knickers. Her eyes darted into the corners of the pantry but she couldn’t see a small scrap of M&S’s finest black cotton anywhere.
‘Are you all right, Cass?’ Marc was still on his knees, still wanting to look Cassie right in the eye, while she was beyond words. ‘I’m sure she won’t tell anyone.’
Cassie threw her head back and groaned in a similar way to only a couple of minutes before. ‘It’s Heather ! Of course she’s going to tell everyone.’
Barefoot, because her Birkenstocks had fallen off as soon as Marc had hoisted her legs over his shoulders, and with her clit feeling like it was about to detonate, Cassie pushed past Marc to run back to the table.
Obviously, she wasn’t in her right mind because rather than running towards trouble, it would be a much better idea to flee into the night.
Maybe Marc was right, for once. Maybe Heather wouldn’t mention anything …