Chapter 14 #2
‘I expect so,’ said Elizabeth. ‘We were going to formalise plans after the big, fat engagement party up in Durham.’
‘That where he comes from?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘I love that accent.’
‘He doesn’t have one, I’m sorry to disappoint you.’
‘Ah, I bet he’s got one of those really posh, neutral accents hasn’t he?’ Roo drew the conclusion.
‘Yes, he has.’ Gregory actually had the accent of someone with a mouth full of hard plums. No flat vowels would be allowed to pass his lips. He made Jacob Rees-Mogg sound like a barrow boy.
‘Mind you, so have you. But your voice is really lovely.’ It was too, thought Roo, she wasn’t giving false praise. ‘If I could scoop it up and put it in a jar, it would look like best honey.’
Elizabeth laughed at that.
‘Old money? Or nouveau riche?’
Elizabeth had never been asked as many questions about Gregory and the wider circle of the whole Pennington clan.
‘Well, his father came from the impoverished branch of the family but in his thirties he inherited the estate – and fortune – from a childless relative.’
And apparently overnight he slipped into the role as if ‘to the manor born’. But without the class of old money, and all the pretensions of the worst of the nouveau riche.
Roo whistled. ‘Lucky bugger. I thought that only happened in films. And one day will it all be yours then when you get spliced?’
‘Yes, one day.’ And it looked as if that would be sooner rather than later too because Gregory’s mother was ‘delicate’ and his father was a frail wisp of a man now, albeit one with a waspish tongue.
In all the time she’d known him Elizabeth had never heard him say a kind word.
He had too much in common with her own father which was probably why they got on so well.
Elizabeth just hoped that Gaylord Pennington wasn’t a future version of Gregory.
She’d do everything in her power to prevent that.
It shouldn’t follow that children became their parents; she most certainly hadn’t.
‘Wowee.’
‘To be honest, Roo, I can’t think of anything worse,’ said Elizabeth. That had slipped out; Roo was too easy to talk to, or maybe she was just too ready to talk.
‘Really? Why? I’d kill to own a mansion.’
‘Trust me, it’s not what it’s cracked up to be. Every time they have all the windows cleaned, you can wave goodbye to over two thousand pounds.’
‘Gulp.’
‘The rooms are enormous to heat, so they don’t.
It’s freezing.’ Although Gregory’s mother, Elspeth-Ann, would have made sure they were heated for the engagement party so no guest would be talking behind their backs.
She’d had the decorators in too to spruce up the reception rooms. A lick of fresh paint over the flaky old.
‘Bit stingy are they, his mum and dad?’ Roo levered herself up to listen to more. This was a glimpse into an alien world and she was rapt.
Elizabeth opened up her mouth to say no, of course not.
She shouldn’t be indiscreet, disloyal to her future family, especially not to someone she’d met only hours ago, but she was hardly giving away any of the unsavoury family secrets they’d managed to keep hidden, such as Gaylord getting the housekeeper’s granddaughter pregnant when he was seventy and she nineteen.
And them holding a celebratory soirée when they found out she had a ‘blighted ovum’ pregnancy.
‘It’s odd, Roo, because they blow money like it’s going out of fashion on some things and yet on others they skimp to a ridiculous degree.
Top-of-the-range cars: Gaylord’s got four Ferraris and he shouldn’t be allowed to drive any of them.
Extravagant curtains and linen, but the cheapest of furniture from antique auctions; wildly expensive jewellery, wardrobes full of high-end clothes that they’ve bought but never worn, horrendous wigs… ’
Oops, that also slipped out. Roo obviously loved that detail though.
‘What? Wigs!’
‘They both have hair, they haven’t lost it or anything. But they just… for some reason, favour… wearing… awful, cheap wigs.’
They had a whole section of their respective dressing rooms reserved for the display of them.
Gaylord’s favourite was block-brown and completely at odds with his natural fair colouring.
It was parted in the middle and he wore it so low it went into battle with his shaggy grey eyebrows.
Elspeth-Ann favoured a variety of midnight-black coiffeured towers that made her look like the illegitimate child of Joan Collins’s character in Dynasty and a busted sofa.
Picturing it, Roo burst into laughter in the dark, apologising at the same time, which set Elizabeth off giggling.
‘I’ve offered to take them somewhere decent and be fitted for proper ones, but they just won’t.
’ Elizabeth’s voice dissolved and she thought of the last time she had laughed talking to someone like this and it had been her uni friend Drusilla, ten years ago when she’d been nineteen and they’d been in a tent at Creamfields, off their faces on the home-fermented parsnip wine they’d brought with them, bought at the farm up the road from their student house.
‘Do your mum and dad like Gregory?’ asked Roo when their laughter eventually subsided, though it took a while.
‘My mother hasn’t met him. She lives in Madeira with her new husband. She’s not really interested in my life. My father adores him. More than me, I think.’
Roo wondered if Elizabeth meant that her father loved Gregory more than she did, or that her father loved Gregory more than he loved her. If she’d asked, Elizabeth might have answered that both were true.
‘Sweep you off your feet, did he? Am I asking too many questions? Tell me to shut up, I won’t mind. My life is so boring and yours is so interesting, I’m just fascinated.’
Elizabeth smiled again, but had the light been on, Roo would have seen it was a sad sort of smile.
She wasn’t tired and it was nice to talk.
She hadn’t got any close friends these days that she could natter away to, not with any honesty, not without feeling that they might store anything that was off-piste as future gossip currency.
If only Roo knew how boring her life really was, how grey and dull and unfulfilling.
‘I was very attracted to him from the off. He oozed style and confidence and he seemed to be very taken with me when we met.’ Sometimes, when thoughts tormented her, she pulled their first meeting out of the store cupboard in her head.
He couldn’t have faked his reaction when he first saw her, a look of instant intoxication.
She had wondered about it since, when she was in a contemplative self-doubting zone, but didn’t want to believe it.
It was two years ago and her mother had just announced she’d married her long-term lover, the man she’d left them for ten years previously.
‘I didn’t ask you to the wedding, darling, because it was just a small affair and I thought it might put you in a spot with him.
’ Him was Roderick Walter Dudley, her ex-husband and father of her only child, but she never referred to him by name after abandoning them, without any warning, for the Portuguese owner of the tennis club she attended.
Elizabeth had never visited their house in the Madeiran hills nor met Luis Lemos, because she had never been invited.
‘It would make it awkward for everyone, darling.’ Penelope Dudley (Lemos now) flung the word ‘darling’ around so liberally that it had long since lost its value.
But then Elizabeth saw photos of the wedding, which looked a hell of a lot bigger than her mother had said, complete with smiling bridesmaids: Luis’s three daughters.
Elizabeth had been beyond hurt, her heart had been punctured actually to the point where she didn’t think it could get any more battered.
Enter stage left, a dashing knight, proficient in the courtly code, primed to flatter, someone whose attentions were salve for her wounds.
Oh, he wined and dined her, he bought her jewellery, he introduced her around as his lady.
He met every need she didn’t know she had.
She had never been quite able to work out when the change occurred, when his patience with her began to wane, when her ‘little endearing odd ways’ became her ‘infuriating annoying ways’, when she felt the blow of a cold wind in their relationship.
But they were creatures trapped in the same aspic and it was beneficial for everyone they made a success of it.
‘But does he make you laugh, Elizabeth?’
Roo had no idea of the impact such a question could have on her temporary room-mate.
Silence. She couldn’t lie and say he did.
He’d never made her laugh, not really laugh until her sides ached and she could barely breathe.
He wasn’t the sort. But did people in her position really still laugh like that anyway?
The questioning was making her think too much and she aimed for deflection.
‘Never mind about me,’ said Elizabeth. ‘What about you? What do you do?’
‘Not much,’ said Roo. ‘I’m just wading through life trying to find a coat that fits. I work in an office at the moment, sorting post, making tea. Doing a job at twenty-four that I probably should have done at sixteen. Told you I was boring.’
‘Silly. Anyone special in your life?’
‘Absolutely no one.’ Roo yawned. ‘Blimey, all this chit-chatting has knackered me out, I might have to shut my eyes in a minute. Incidentally, what’s Santa’s problem with women?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Tim. Haven’t you noticed how he talks to women differently to men?’
Elizabeth hadn’t. He’d been fine with her. He was the least talkative out of all of them, admittedly, but she hadn’t picked up on what Roo had.
‘I can’t say I have, to be honest.’
‘Well, it’s probably just me he has a problem with. Sorry, I’m talking too much and keeping you awake. Goodnight. See you in the morning.’
Thinking about it, he hadn’t used that clipped tone when he’d spoken to Elizabeth, maybe because she was beautiful, with her long golden hair and perfect face.
Some people put a lot of stock on looks.
He wouldn’t have been rude to Jane because she was old, or Grace because she was with Frank and he might have lamped him.
Just her then, thought Roo in the dark. But Santa always had been a tosser, she’d had no need to try and get on his right side like the lied-to kids who one day grew up to find out all their efforts to be good for him had been nothing but a total waste of time.