8. Xavier
Xavier
Those ten words that girl whispered to me are still haunting me five days later.
As are her breasts.
Her face.
The look on her face when I sent her packing.
Did I mention her breasts?
My parents are back from the Swiss Alps, a return accompanied by intricate medical choreography as Pa was reinstated in his makeshift hospital room and made comfortable.
And my brother is back, too, having, apparently, hooked up with one of the van Praags’ sexy little hangers-on the night of the party and then promptly absconded with the lot of them to crash another thirtieth at Soho Farmhouse the following night, after which, I believe, he headed up to London.
‘You look tired, Ma,’ Benedict observes over scrambled eggs and toast. I inwardly roll my eyes. While our mother isn’t vain—far from it—she prides herself on her stoic superpowers, her ability to be a ‘trooper’, never to buckle under the pressure of her not-inconsiderable responsibility.
She’s essentially a less fashion-obsessed version of my fiancée, twenty years on, a fact that often causes me to marvel at the extraordinary foresight she and Pa showed in selecting baby Selena Wentworth to eventually pluck the baton from her capable hands.
Of course, I may have it the wrong way around. It may simply be that Selena has been moulded to this version of herself since birth. That any other potential paths for her character development never stood a chance.
My mother, predictably, presses her lips together in displeasure before picking up her china teacup (Royal Doulton, naturally, because only my brother is cavalier enough to actually drink from the Sèvres).
‘I’m fine. Your father was uncomfortable during the night, that’s all. It’s nothing a good canter around the park won’t sort out. Now, have you heard from your sister, either of you?’
Ben and I exchange a glance. It seems we’ve got away with our little shindig after all. To his credit, he did arrange a special cleaning crew to swoop in and restore harmony obnoxiously early the next morning, removing the weight of the epic clean-up from our staff.
‘I called her yesterday.’ I heap some eggs onto an excellent homemade potato farl and lift it to my mouth, poised for entry. ‘I thought she sounded a little subdued, but she was alright, otherwise.’
‘I had a text from her while she was away,’ Ma says. ‘She intimated that she was lonely.’
‘Not surprised, knocking around all alone in that bloody great house,’ Benedict says. ‘She should be renting some shithole with a bunch of other students and living it up.’
‘Like you did,’ I observe drily. My brother did four years at Edinburgh, all spent in splendour in one of the family’s fine properties on Dundas Street.
‘Exactly.’ He grins at me. ‘Shithole part aside.’
‘Flora’s not exactly streetwise,’ I remind both of them. ‘Not sure she’d last two minutes living in Tooting and shopping in Aldi.’
Benedict snorts at the mere thought of it, while Ma frowns.
‘That’s the whole point. Perhaps we’ve done her a disservice. We can’t coddle her forever. After all, she’ll have to find her own husband at some point.’
If Ben is the spare, then Flora is—I don’t know—the afterthought, I suppose: a pretty little thing whose sunny nature has given her entire family endless delight over the past nineteen years, but who, from a succession perspective, is entirely redundant.
‘I think it’s more important for her to find a decent career than a decent husband, Ma.’ This from my brother.
‘Hear, hear,’ I say heartily through my eggs, earning myself a stern look.
‘There’s no reason she can’t have both. But has she no friends?’
‘Like Benedict said,’ I point out, ‘it’s hard to make a good gang of friends if you’re living alone. Uni is all about getting stuck in. Maybe she should move into halls.’
‘It’s not just her friendship group I’m worried about,’ Ma says. ‘I can’t help but suspect she’s at a bit of a loose end. Shelly is around to cook for her, of course, but she’s hardly experiencing quintessential student life.’
I refrain with difficulty from reminding her that it was she and Pa who insisted upon Flora shacking up at the family’s enormous Little Venice pad when she started at the Royal College of Art. Instead, I shovel up more of my excellent eggs.
Ma pushes her chair away from the table.
Breakfast with her sons clearly can’t compete with the allure of getting on her horse and clearing the cobwebs out in our fine deer park.
‘I’m sure, between you, you can find someone to take her under their wing.
Show her the ropes, as it were. She’s been babied long enough.
It’s time for her to stand on her own two feet. ’
She’s not expecting a response, and we don’t give her one. As soon as she’s cleared the room, my brother slumps back in his chair and groans. ‘Fucking hell. I’m so fucking fucked.’
‘Such command of the English language.’
‘I don’t have enough brain cells left to form a sentence, alright? Not sure which I’ve pickled more—my brain or my liver. And I think I’ve broken my dick. That French chick was insatiable.’
I grimace. ‘Jesus, I don’t want to know. But honestly, mate, great job on the party. Very well done, and I think everyone had fun.’
He smirks at me as he pours himself more coffee from the pot. ‘Except you, from what I hear.’
Instantly, I stiffen.
He must be talking about her.
‘What do you mean?’
‘That girl. What was her name, again? The one I sent upstairs especially for you to fuck. I served her up on a silver platter, and you bloody well kicked her out.’ He tuts. ‘Poor form. Very poor form. Not like you to walk away from a pretty girl and a nice wet cunt.’
At his spectacularly crass and not entirely inaccurate observation, my fork stops halfway to my mouth. I stay very still. He’s spoken to her since I ‘kicked her out’, as he put it, and for some reason, that feels gravely important.
I ignore his scolding. ‘What was her name, do you know?’
If he or anyone else asked, I wouldn’t be able to articulate why I care, why I want to know her name so badly.
But I do. I made the only feasible call I could the other night, but that’s not to say I don’t have regrets.
I regret that I clearly hurt her feelings.
I deeply regret that I had to shoot my load in a Victorian chamber pot and not inside her body or all over her breasts.
And, most of all, I regret the four subsequent nights I’ve spent thinking about how lovely she was, how unexpected.
How intriguing—the most alluring combination of bravado and vulnerability.
Thinking may be a decidedly euphemistic verb for how I’ve spent the past four nights.
My dick may not be much better off than my brother’s, given the workouts I’ve put it through.
Her face was so expressive as she looked up at me from her knees.
Her mouth, so close to my throbbing dick, was exquisite.
Fuck.
It was so close to my dick. What the actual fuck was I thinking?
‘Hmm. Do I know it? I swear it was something to do with plants. Or trees. Willow, maybe? Nope. Holly. No—wait. Ivy! That’s it. Ivy.’
He toasts his own extraordinary mental agility with his coffee cup and takes a noisy slurp while I sit, body still frozen and mind looping and spiralling.
Ivy.
The fantasy woman has a name.
She’s real.
She’s not some strange, porno Cinderella whom my imagination conjured up, who existed only in that room for those few moments. She’s a real, live person, with a sweet, quirky name that suits her, from the handful of minutes I presumed to know her.
Ivy.
The frustration and restlessness that continue to dog me flare into something hotter. Angrier.
‘You had no business “serving her up” to me on a platter. What the fuck were you thinking? She’s not a side of smoked salmon, mate.
You know I would never, ever condone exploiting a sex worker, and you know I wholeheartedly disapprove of your membership of that place.
Besides.’ I ram my point home with a strong finish.
‘God knows where she’s been. She could have been crawling. ’
I did, in fact, spend precisely zero seconds considering where she’d been when she had her tits out for me the other night and her little hand wrapped around my dick.
His face twists with disgust. ‘Listen to yourself! Christ alive. You’re a fucking snob. How dare you judge people for what they do to make ends meet? And don’t go all moralistic on me. She told me you were gagging for it.’
I drop my fork and sit up straighter. The surge of blood to the surface of my face is instant, the idea that she and my man-whore brother had some kind of snide postmortem after I dismissed her almost unbearable. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Put it this way. She came looking for me afterwards, to tell me you weren’t having any of it, and I asked her if you weren’t up for it. And she said, and I quote, “He was a hundred percent up for it. That was very clear. He just had a crisis of conscience.”’
‘Of course I was… turned on,’ I bluster. ‘She’s a very attractive young woman. But, like I said, I would never take advantage of someone like that. It’s not right. I wasn’t about to fuck her when she was there under duress.’
Even if the sensation of her soft breasts under my hands has dogged my every waking—and sleeping—hour since then. Even if I still remember how delicious it felt to suck that full upper lip into my mouth.
‘Let me tell you, mate, only one of you had a problem with the fact that she was being paid. She bloody well didn’t—she was fucking furious.
I’d promised her a nice bonus if she looked after you, and she didn’t get it, did she, because Lord Can’t Fuck Won’t Fuck wouldn’t man up and do the decent thing. Poor girl went off fuming.’
I stare at him in horror. ‘Wait—she was supposed to get a bonus? And you didn’t give it to her?’
He shrugs and reaches for the jam. ‘I most certainly did not. No fucks, no bucks.’
I flinch. ‘Jesus. Seriously, Benedict?’
‘What? Don’t have a go at me. You’re the one who bailed and left the poor girl high and dry.
She looked like she was really counting on that money, and I bet she would have earned every penny if you were as uptight then as you are this morning.
’ He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know what the hell your problem is.
You’re a lost fucking cause. It’s almost like you’re already in your loveless, miserable marriage.
The clock is ticking, my friend, and Ivy’s a knockout.
You won’t get any bonus points for being a martyr, you know. ’
I zone that last part out because of the thing he said before that.
She looked like she was really counting on that money.
Jesus Christ. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t in this life.
I tried to do the right thing the other night; I tried to respect a young woman in a precarious situation where the power imbalance was absolutely insupportable, and I set her free against every primal instinct my body has ever had, and it seems I’ve wronged her, even so.
It seems she still left my party feeling hard done by.
I recall the dangerous, seductive way she tried to egg me on to take, take, take. I recall the hurt in her pretty, tear-filled blue eyes when I told her to get out. And I recall the ten broken words she whispered as she brushed past me:
It must be nice to be able to afford morals.
I did the decent thing, and now she’s out of pocket and blaming me despite everything, and I know what I have to do.
I tell myself it’s about the money, about doing right by her. But the truth clawing at my chest has nothing to do with morals and everything to do with the fact that I can’t stop thinking about that lovely little mouth.
I have to track her down.