Chapter Nine The Country House Party
The invitation arrived in early June, handwritten on card stock thick enough to stop a bullet.
‘Tariq’s having a thing,’ James announced, waving the card at me across the table at our usual lunch spot. ‘Weekend at the farm. Croquet, drinking, the usual. He wants you to come too.’
‘Tariq has a farm?’
‘Tariq has a boyfriend and he has a farm. Marcus. Have you not met Marcus? Enormous chap, breeds something. Cattle, I think. Or possibly sheep. Something with wool. Or possibly without wool. Anyway, they’ve been together about a year now and Marcus has finally agreed to meet the rest of us, so Tariq’s throwing a house party to celebrate. ’
‘And Anastasia?’
James’s face did something complicated. ‘I thought I might bring her. If that’s not too soon. Is it too soon? It’s probably too soon. Freddie says it’s too soon. But Freddie also says that ketchup is a breakfast food, so his judgment is suspect.’
‘It’s not too soon,’ I said. ‘It’s a house party, not a tribunal. She’ll either fit in or she won’t.’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’
But he needn’t have worried.
???
The farm, and it was indeed a farm, complete with actual livestock and the kind of mud that gets into everything regardless of precaution, sat in a valley in the Cotswolds.
It was about two hours from London if you drove like a normal person and ninety minutes if you drove like Freddie.
The house itself was a study in contradictions: ancient stone on the outside, all honey-coloured walls and sagging rooflines, but cutting-edge modern within.
Marcus, it turned out, farmed the way he lived: with technology and passion in equal measure.
There were sensors in the fields monitoring soil conditions, drones checking on the flock and a computer system in the barn that probably had more processing power than most small countries.
‘He’s very into efficiency,’ Tariq explained, when we arrived.
Tariq was immaculate as always, in a crisp white shirt with edges like a razor that would have looked ridiculous on anyone else in the countryside for a quiet weekend yet somehow looked inevitable on him.
‘The sheep have better healthcare than most of the NHS.’
‘The sheep deserve it,’ Marcus said, appearing in the doorway.
He was, as James had suggested, enormous, six foot four at least, with shoulders that suggested a previous career throwing heavy objects professionally.
His handshake could have crushed walnuts.
‘They work harder than most people I know.’
The guest list was small but select. Freddie had brought Camilla, his girlfriend of approximately eight months, though it felt longer because Camilla had the rare gift of making time slow down around her, not through boredom, but through sheer force of personality.
She was horsey, straightforward and utterly terrifying.
Freddie was clearly besotted and equally petrified of her.
‘She’s got him on a training programme,’ Tariq murmured to me, watching Camilla instruct Freddie on the correct amount of wine to pour in a glass (a lot less than he normally did).
‘Like a horse that needs schooling. It’s honestly the best thing that’s ever happened to him.
I have great hopes she will turn him into an acceptable human being’
Rupert had brought his girlfriend, Mei, who was so petite that standing next to Rupert, a generally oversized rugby player with a character to match, it created the impression of a giant with a fairy in some folk tale.
They were both architects, which explained nothing about how they’d met and everything about why they kept getting distracted by the structural features of the farmhouse.
And then there was Archie.
Archie had, as usual, brought someone whose name he couldn’t quite remember.
‘This is...’ He gestured vaguely at the woman beside him. ‘Sorry, darling, remind me?’
‘Sophie,’ she said, with the patience of someone who had already accepted this would be a recurring theme.
‘Sophie! Yes. Sophie and I met at a thing. Last week, I think. Or possibly the week before. Time is rather fluid at the moment.’
Sophie, as it turned out, was not at all what she appeared.
From a distance, she looked like the standard-issue arm candy that Archie tended to acquire: blonde, polished, the kind of woman who photographed well at charity galas.
But within twenty minutes of arrival, she had cornered Marcus in the kitchen and was asking detailed questions about regenerative agriculture and soil carbon sequestration.
She had a first in Environmental Science from Cambridge and was currently working on sustainable farming initiatives for a major investment fund.
‘She’s rather brilliant, isn’t she?’ Archie said, watching Sophie and Marcus discuss crop rotation with the intensity of generals planning a campaign. ‘I hadn’t actually noticed until now. We mostly just talked about restaurants.’
???
Anastasia, fitted in surprisingly well.
She was quiet at first, watching, assessing, the way she always did in new situations. But Camilla, who had the social instincts of a determined sheepdog, was having none of it.
‘You’re the Ukrainian one,’ Camilla said, cornering Anastasia by the drinks table within the first hour. ‘The tech person. James won’t shut up about you.’
‘I hope that’s a good thing.’
‘James doesn’t usually shut up about anything, so it’s hard to tell.’ Camilla studied her with the frank appraisal of someone who had spent her life judging horseflesh and saw no reason to apply different standards to humans. ‘You’re not what I expected.’
‘What did you expect?’
‘Someone shinier. More polished, putting on a performance.’ Camilla took a long drink of her wine. ‘You’re not performing. You’re just... here. That’s refreshing.’
‘I’m not sure how to take that.’
‘As a compliment. I don’t give many.’
By dinner, Anastasia had been absorbed into the group with the ease of someone who had always belonged there.
She helped Mei identify the period of a disputed beam in the dining room ceiling (late seventeenth century, they concluded, though Marcus insisted it was earlier).
She listened to Freddie’s increasingly implausible stories about insurance claims he had made with the appropriate mixture of scepticism and amusement.
She even managed to have a conversation with Marcus about sheep without once betraying that she had probably never thought about sheep before in her life.
I watched her across the table, this woman who had arrived in England with nothing and was now sitting in a Cotswolds farmhouse discussing livestock with strangers as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
She caught my eye and smiled, a small, private smile that acknowledged the absurdity of the situation without undermining it.
???
The next day brought croquet.
This was not, I should explain, normal croquet.
But then it never is. Marcus laid out the house rules that his family had developed over generations.
These incorporated various rules that seemed designed primarily to cause arguments and secondarily to ensure that no game ever ended in under three hours.
He said it was to allow for the natural undulations of the garden, but as normal, it was purely to give the host family the competitive edge in what has always been one of the hardest-fought and often dangerous non-contact sports around.
There were bonus shots for hitting other players’ balls into the ha-ha.
There was a rule involving the sundial that no one could quite explain but everyone insisted was essential.
At some point, someone had introduced flamingos; not real ones, thankfully, but bright pink plastic ones on spikes that served an elevated ceremonial purpose.
‘The flamingo goes to whoever’s winning at the halfway point,’ James explained, hefting a mallet with the confidence of a man who had lost many, many games of croquet.
‘Then it becomes a target. If you hit the flamingo holder’s ball, you steal the flamingo.
And the flamingo is worth fifty points at the end. ’
‘That seems unnecessarily complicated,’ Anastasia said.
‘It’s tradition.’
‘Tradition isn’t the same as sense.’
‘When it comes to croquet in England, it’s rarely even in the same postcode.’
The game devolved, as it always did, into cheerful chaos.
Freddie wanted to play fire croquet, a variant involving paraffin-soaked flaming balls that Camilla vetoed with a single look that could have frozen magma.
Rupert accidentally sent his ball into the fishpond and had to be restrained from diving in after it.
Archie spent most of the game trying to remember the rules and the rest of it trying to remember Sophie’s name, though to his credit he was clearly making an effort for once.
Anastasia, who had never played croquet before and approached the game with the analytical precision of someone used to solving complex problems, was unexpectedly good.
By the third round, she had figured out the angles, mastered the peculiarities of the ground and was systematically eliminating the competition with a style which would have had Machiavelli looking over his shoulder.
‘She’s destroying us,’ Freddie said, watching Anastasia execute a shot that sent three balls into unrecoverable positions simultaneously. ‘This is embarrassing.’
‘She’s applying logic,’ I said. ‘You’re not used to that.’
‘Logic has no place in croquet. That’s the whole point.’
Anastasia won. She accepted the victory with grace, the flamingo with bemusement and the congratulations of the group with something that looked like genuine pleasure.
‘You have held up the flamingo, so you’re one of us now,’ Camilla announced, presenting Anastasia with a glass of champagne. ‘For better or worse.’
‘Mostly worse,’ Freddie added. ‘We’re terrible people. Truly awful. You should run while you still can.’
‘I’ll take my chances,’ Anastasia said.
???
Later that evening, as the group scattered across the house.
Some went to the hot tub Marcus had installed in a converted barn that was a fully functioning spa, others to the games room to try out the new axe throwing setup Tariq had bought Marcus for his birthday.
And I found myself alone with Anastasia on the terrace.
‘You’re watching me,’ she said, without turning around. ‘You’ve been watching me all weekend.’
‘I watch everyone. James is my best friend. I want to make sure he’s making good choices.’
‘And am I a good choice?’
It was a direct question and it deserved a direct answer.
‘I don’t know yet,’ I said. ‘You’re clever, you’re competent and you make him happy. Those are good things. But there are gaps. Things you don’t talk about. Questions you deflect.’
‘Everyone has things they don’t talk about.’
‘True. But not everyone is dating my best friend.’
She turned to face me then and there was something in her expression, not hostility, exactly, but a kind of assessment. She was taking my measure, I realised, just as I had been taking hers.
‘I care about him,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s real. Whatever else you’re wondering about, that’s real.’
‘I believe you.’
‘But you’re still watching.’
‘I’m still watching.’
She nodded, as if this were the answer she’d expected. ‘Good. He needs someone watching. He’s not very good at it himself.’
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘He’s not, that is why I have always had to do it.’