Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
OLIVER
“Less than twenty-four hours and already she’s embarrassed the family.” My mother pulls off her glasses in despair as she paces in front of the living room windows.
“No wonder you like her.” Dad doesn’t even raise his eyes from the Financial Times. “Peas in a pod.”
“Criticize me all you like.” My fingers dig into the top of the high-backed armchair I’m standing behind like it’s a shield that might protect me from their barbs. “But do not criticize Lexi. None of this is her fault. It was you who sent her there. She didn’t ask for any of it.”
“She did not have to get into the damn bog,” Mum says, pausing to face me, hand on hip for emphasis.
“What exactly is wrong with her joining in and looking like a good sport? You should want her to be popular. All the comments on those photos were good. One of them said she was ‘a breath of fresh air’ because she got involved and got mucky with everyone else.”
“To hell with the comments, do you think the headlines were good?” Mum resumes her aggressive pacing. “Giles showed me one that said Prince Oliver’s dirty girlfriend, and the caption said she walked across the grass in her socks. In her socks!”
“And if she’d waded into the bog wearing Sofia’s wellies and ruined them, you’d have been pissed off about that too. She can’t win.” I straighten and rub the back of my tense neck with my tense fingers. “Also, fuck Giles.”
“Steady on.” So it takes the word fuck to make my father put down his paper, does it? “It’s disrespectful to speak of a loyal member of the staff like that.”
My head might be about to combust. “When has Giles ever had one ounce of respect for me?”
My parents’ right-hand man has done nothing but encourage their disapproval since I got drunk at a friend’s house when I was sixteen and a photographer snapped me throwing up in a bush in someone’s front garden.
Giles can smash his etiquette and decorum bullshit into a ball and shove it up his prickish arse, along with that fucking listening device. Since nothing goes on in this place that he doesn’t know about, I have to assume that, at the very least, he chose to ignore the bugging of my room.
“Respect needs to be earned,” Mum mutters in the direction of the heather bed outside the window.
The fury simmering inside me reaches boiling point and sends my hands flying into the air. “And you see no irony in that sentence at all? No irony in expecting an entire nation to respect you, our whole family in fact, purely by dint of our births?”
She turns around slowly. “Parts of this nation have never respected me, Oliver. You know that.”
And here we go, a guilt trip that rips me in half.
At least this one might be justified. That was a clumsy, clumsy thing for me to say after everything my mother went through when she was a teenager.
But why it hardened her, rather than gave her compassion for anyone going through something similar—me, for example, her goddamn son—I will never know.
If only someone had thought to use therapists back then. In fact, is anyone in the family even allowed to have therapy now? Or would it be seen as “complaining”? Christ, everything but slapping a smile on your face and soldiering on is seen as complaining—particularly by Giles.
“I’m sorry, Mum.” I walk around the chair and drop into it. “It’s just… Could you find it in you to have even the tiniest grain of compassion for my girlfriend?”
Every time I refer to Lexi as my girlfriend, it sends a strange shiver through me. Partly because it’s such a long time since I’ve described anyone as that, but also because maybe a part of me wonders what it would be like if that’s what she really was.
The word slips off my tongue smoother and more naturally in relation to Lexi than it ever did with some actual girlfriends.
But that’s ridiculous. Not only have we known each other less than a week, she’s part of the enemy—the media, the press—and is only temporarily on my side because she has to be, because if she doesn’t write my book, she doesn’t get the job she wants.
There’s just this nagging certain something about her.
Something I can’t put my finger on. Something that happens when she looks at me that makes me forget everything else in the world for that split second.
And the way she laughed when I said “melons” during our fake bathroom sex—man, her natural abandon was beautiful.
“None of it is anything to smile about, Oliver.” Dad folds up his newspaper and hangs it over the arm of his chair.
I was smiling? And was it because the melons thing amused me or because it also reminded me of the sounds of Lexi’s moans and groans and made me wonder if that’s how she sounds when she’s on the edge of the orgasm of her life.
“Oh, I promise you, any signs of happiness around here are only ever an accident,” I say. “But God forbid we should learn from the mistakes of what happened to Mum. Best we make sure to hand them down to the next genera—”
My mother’s eyes dart to something she’s seen over my shoulder.
I turn to find Lexi standing clean and wet-haired in the doorway.
Dane had brought her around the back so she could come in via the kitchen and not drip mud all through the entranceway.
Then Flora had provided her with a bowl of warm water to wash her feet before she made her way upstairs to our room and the shower.
Our room.
That phrase does the same thing to me as my girlfriend.
“Sorry,” Lexi says. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“You’re not interrupting anything.” I dash to her side and give her a peck on the cheek like it’s the most normal thing in the world. In return, her lips brush my face.
She smells all clean and fresh, and I can’t help remembering my joke about soaping her up. What would it be like to get to do that?
“You must feel better now you have all that mud off you,” Dad says.
“Yes, we saw the pictures.” Mum approaches and stands behind Dad’s chair. Now it’s her turn to use the furniture as a shield, to protect herself from the horrors of the woman I’ve brought into her home. “You must feel rather embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed?” Lexi looks up at me, her brow furrowed with confusion, then returns her gaze to them. “Why would I be embarrassed? I thought I was doing a good thing. Showing that someone associated with the royal family can—I think the bogmeister used the phrase—‘get stuck in’ with the locals.”
“One of the points of us is that we do the opposite of that.” My mother sniffs. “Clearly we should have given you a full briefing before allowing you out into the world.”
“Allowing me out into the wor—”
“Or sent Giles with you,” Mum says, steamrolling over Lexi’s outrage.
“I’m a journalist who gets sent out into the world all the time to deal with difficult and sometimes dangerous situations. I think I can cope perfectly fine with a local village bog tradition thing.” After a second, she adds, “Ma’am.”
Mum winces. “The American pronunciation of ma’am. Oh, how I love it.”
“What did I do wrong this time?” Lexi asks me.
“Spoke with your own accent, I think.” Talk about gratuitous unpleasantness from my mother.
“Tea?” Flora is right behind us with a clinking tray.
“Good God, yes,” my father says, getting enthusiastic about something for the first time today.
Lexi and I step aside to let Flora through.
I move to follow her, but Lexi catches my sleeve.
“Could I show you the pictures of potential dresses for the wedding that Sofia’s sent me?” Her eyes are doing that pleading thing again that says she needs to speak with me in private and it’s nothing to do with dresses.
It’s a tiny difference that no one else in the room would notice, even if they weren’t one hundred percent focused on a tray of tea and digestive biscuits.
“Of course,” I say.
“I left my phone in our room,” she adds. “We’ll have to go upstairs.”
“Of course.” I turn to follow her.
“I assume we’ll see you at dinner,” my mother calls after us. “Unless you’re planning to run riot in the village fish and chip shop as part of this getting stuck in with the locals thing.”
Thankfully, Lexi’s back is already some distance along the hallway and she might not have heard.
“Yes, we’ll see you at dinner,” I tell my mother.
Then I turn to follow my pretend girlfriend, who’s now almost as much of a disgrace in my parents’ eyes as I am, to our room.