Chapter Seventeen The Hen Do
The problem with planning a hen do for Anastasia was that Anastasia didn’t have any friends.
This sounds harsher than I mean it. She had James, obviously. She had colleagues, business contacts, people she knew through the startup world who might reasonably be called acquaintances. She had, after the country house party, been provisionally adopted by the women in James’s circle.
So when the question of her hen do arose, the organising fell, somewhat inevitably, to Camilla.
‘What’s wrong with Slough?’ Freddie asked.
‘Everything Freddie. Everything is wrong with Slough.’ Camilla fixed him with a look that could have withered crops. ‘This is going to be done properly, with style and class. Which means Bath.’
Bath, it turned out, was the perfect compromise.
Close enough to London for easy travel, far enough to feel like an escape.
Old enough to be romantic, civilised enough to be comfortable.
Camilla had secured a Georgian townhouse towards the top of the centre for the weekend, a place with high ceilings, tall windows and the kind of understated elegance that made you feel like you’d wandered into a Jane Austen novel.
The guest list was carefully curated. Camilla herself, naturally.
Mei, Rupert’s girlfriend, who had bonded with Anastasia over architectural history and a shared appreciation for load-bearing walls.
Sophie, who had turned out to be far more interesting than Archie deserved and who had, improbably, become surprisingly close to Anastasia, two clever women recognising each other in a sea of amiable idiots.
And Marcus.
‘You can’t have Marcus at a hen do,’ James said, when he heard. ‘He’s a man.’
‘Marcus transcends gender,’ Camilla replied. ‘Also, he does the best facials. You wouldn’t understand.’
‘I understand facials.’
‘You absolutely do not understand facials. You once washed your face with hand soap because you’d run out of, and I quote, ‘the blue stuff.’’
‘The blue stuff works.’
‘The blue stuff is washing-up liquid.’
Marcus, for his part, seemed entirely comfortable being the only man at what was otherwise a traditional hen party. He arrived with a case of champagne, a professional-grade espresso machine and enough skincare products to stock a small pharmacy.
‘Tariq sends his love,’ he said, embracing Anastasia with the ease of someone who had decided she was family and saw no reason to be shy about it. ‘He wanted to come, but someone had to stay with the sheep. They get anxious when we’re both away.’
‘The sheep get anxious?’
‘Very. They’re sensitive animals. People don’t appreciate that.’
*
The first evening was gentle, by design.
They ate at a restaurant Camilla had chosen for its excellent tasting menu and its willingness to accommodate a party of five for four hours without complaint.
The conversation flowed easily: work, relationships, the eternal question of whether anyone actually enjoyed yoga or just pretended to.
Anastasia was relaxed and the armour she usually wore had softened, if not quite disappeared. She laughed more freely. She talked more openly. At one point, she even told a story about her grandmother that was simply a memory she wanted to share.
‘She sounds formidable,’ Mei said. ‘Your grandmother.’
‘She was. She survived things that would have broken most people. And she never once complained. She just… adapted. Kept going. Made the best of whatever she had.’
‘That sounds like someone else I know,’ Sophie observed, with a look that suggested she saw more than Anastasia might have liked.
Anastasia didn’t respond to that. But something passed across her face, recognition, maybe, or the discomfort of being seen too clearly.
???
The next day was the Roman Baths, which Marcus approached with the enthusiasm of a pilgrim reaching Mecca.
‘Ancient engineering,’ he said, guiding them through the museum with the confidence of someone who had probably read every book ever written on the subject. ‘The Romans understood water management in ways we’re only now beginning to appreciate. These baths were heated by a hypocaust system that…’
‘Marcus,’ Camilla interrupted gently. ‘We’re here to relax, not to learn.’
‘Learning is relaxing. For some of us.’
They spent the morning soaking in the modern spa complex, which had the virtue of being attached to the original Roman site without the inconvenience of being two thousand years old. There were thermal pools, steam rooms and various treatments that Camilla had pre-booked with military precision.
‘You’re getting the full package,’ she told Anastasia, consulting a schedule that had clearly started life on a spreadsheet. ‘Massage at eleven, facial at two, something called a ‘chakra alignment’ at four, which I don’t entirely believe in, but the reviews were good.’
‘You don’t have to…’
‘Ah, but I do. You’re marrying my boyfriend’s best friend, which makes you practically family. And family gets the full package.’
Anastasia submitted. It was, I gathered, easier than arguing with Camilla about anything.
???
The afternoon brought an unexpected complication: Robbie Williams.
‘He’s playing tonight,’ Sophie announced, having discovered this while researching restaurants. ‘In the Royal Crescent. It’s some kind of charity concert.’
‘Robbie Williams?’ Marcus’s face lit up with an enthusiasm that seemed improbable for a six-foot-four sheep farmer with hands like dinner plates. ‘I love Robbie Williams.’
‘You love Robbie Williams?’
‘‘Angels’ was playing when Tariq and I had our first kiss. It’s our song.’ He was already reaching for his phone. ‘I need tickets and I need them immediately.’
‘Marcus, this is a hen do. We have plans.’
‘Plans can change, plans are fleeting. Robbie Williams is eternal.’
The concert, as it turned out, was excellent. Marcus knew every word to every song and was not shy about demonstrating this fact. At one point, during an emotional rendition of ‘Feel,’ Camilla turned to Anastasia and said, with the tone of someone making a definitive judgement:
‘You’re proper.’
Anastasia blinked. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Proper. It’s a compliment. I don’t give them often.
’ Camilla took a long drink of her wine.
‘I wasn’t sure about you, at first. James has terrible taste in women, no offence, but his history is appalling.
I thought you might be another disaster.
But you’re not. You’re proper. Solid. Someone I’d want in a crisis. ’
‘I don’t know what to say to that.’
‘You don’t have to say anything. I’m just telling you. For the record.
It was, in its way, a kind of acceptance. The gruff, backhanded, thoroughly English kind of acceptance that came from people who had been raised to distrust emotion but couldn’t quite help feeling it anyway.
???
Later that night, much later, after the concert and the champagne and Marcus’s impromptu one-man show of Robbie’s greatest hits in the townhouse drawing room, the others drifted to bed.
Camilla first, by announcing that she was retiring at a sensible hour and expected the rest of them to do the same, in the full knowledge that nobody would.
Sophie and Mei, both rather tipsy, followed an hour or so later.
Which left Marcus and Anastasia.
They were in the kitchen of the townhouse, sitting at the long table with the remains of a second bottle of champagne between them.
Marcus was making what he called a ‘recovery omelette’, his cure for late nights and Anastasia was watching him cook with the focused attention she gave to anything she hadn’t seen before.
‘You’re very good at that,’ she said.
‘Years of practice. Tariq can’t cook. He’s a brilliant man, genuinely brilliant, he could have done anything, but he approaches a kitchen the way most people approach a hostage situation. Lots of fear and very poor negotiation.’
She laughed, picturing this in her head.
‘Can I ask you something?’ Marcus said, sliding an omelette onto a plate and pushing it across to her. ‘Feel free to tell me to mind my own business.’
‘That’s usually a warning.’
‘It is a warning. But I’m asking anyway.’ He sat down opposite her. ‘What does England feel like?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, you came here alone. No family, no friends, nothing. You built a company and learned the language and figured out which fork to use at Camilla’s dinner parties. But what does it actually feel like? Being here, being the person you’ve become.’
Anastasia was quiet for a long time, she ate some of the omelette. She looked at the champagne.
Then she said: ‘Do you know what I miss most? Not a place, not a person. I miss knowing the rules.’
‘The rules?’
‘In my old life, there were rules. I knew exactly what was expected of me. I knew what to say, how to behave, what the consequences were if I got it wrong. The rules were terrible, they were controlling and suffocating and I hated them, but I understood them. Here…’ She paused.
‘Here, everyone is kind. James is kind. You’re kind.
Camilla just told me I was proper, which I think is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.
And none of it makes sense, I don’t know the rules like you all seem to’
‘In what way?’
‘Because I keep waiting for the cost. In my experience, kindness always has a cost. Someone is kind to you because they want something. Someone is generous because they’re building leverage.
Someone tells you you’re proper because…
’ She stopped. Shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. This is not a hen do conversation.’
‘It’s the best hen do conversation I’ve ever had,’ Marcus said. ‘And I’ve been to a lot of hen dos.’
She smiled.
‘The cost of kindness here,’ Marcus said, ‘is that you have to accept it. That’s all.
You don’t have to earn it. You don’t have to repay it.
You just have to let it in.’ He refilled her glass.
‘I know that while that sounds simple, it isn’t.
Tariq took ages to believe I wasn’t going to leave.
Months of me turning up every single day, being exactly who I said I was, before he could trust it.
Some people need more proof than others. There’s no shame in that.’
Anastasia looked at him for a long moment, her eyes were very bright and she looked, for the first time since he’d met her, like someone who had put something down that she’d been carrying for a very long time.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘You’re welcome.’
They finished their champagne. Marcus washed up, because Marcus always washed up.
Anastasia dried, because apparently she had never left dishes to drain in her life and wasn’t about to start now.
And then they went to bed, in their separate rooms, in a Georgian townhouse in Bath.
Marcus lay awake for a while thinking about her and what it must cost to build a life from nothing and about how some armour was so well made that you forgot, after a while, that the person inside it was still soft.
???
The hen do ended, as all good hen dos should, with promises to keep in touch and share photographs that must never be shown to anyone else and a vague sense that friendships had been formed that might actually last.
When Anastasia got home, she told James that Camilla had called her proper.
‘Proper?’ James said, delighted. ‘From Camilla? That’s practically a knighthood.’
‘Is it good?’
‘It’s the best thing she’s ever said about anyone. She once described the Queen as ‘adequate.’ You’ve outranked the monarchy. I’m incredibly proud.’
James told me this with the particular glow of a man whose two worlds had finally merged. Anastasia had friends. Anastasia had been accepted. Everything was going to be fine.
I smiled and said nothing and filed away the word ‘proper’ alongside everything else I was collecting about the woman my best friend was going to marry, the good, the puzzling and the things I couldn’t yet name.
*
The same week as the hen do, Granny rang Elizabeth.
I know this because Elizabeth told James and James, as he does with everything, told me, though I suspect the conversation was rather more colourful than either of them reported.
‘I’ve completed my enquiries,’ Granny said.
‘And? Is she a fortune hunter? A gold-digger? Some sort of Eastern European honeytrap?’
‘She’s something rather more complicated than that.’ A pause, choosing words carefully. ‘And I approve of her.’
‘You what?’
‘I approve. She’s not entirely what she appears, but then, neither was I at her age. Neither were you, if we’re being honest, though your secrets were rather less dramatic than hers.’
‘Mother, you’re not making any sense.’
‘I’m making perfect sense. You’re just not listening.
’ Granny’s voice carried the unbreakable authority of someone who had spent a lifetime being right about people.
‘Anastasia Kovalenko has a past. A complicated one. A potentially dangerous one. But she also loves your son, genuinely and completely, and she will do whatever is necessary to protect him. In my experience, that’s worth more than a clean background check. ’
‘But—’
‘Stop fighting this, Elizabeth. You won’t win. And more importantly, you shouldn’t want to win. James has found someone who sees him for who he is and loves him anyway. That’s rare. That’s precious. Don’t ruin it because she wasn’t born in the right postcode.’
Elizabeth was silent for a long moment. Then, grudgingly: ‘You’ve never approved of any of his girlfriends before.’
‘No. I haven’t. And I’ve been right about every single one of them. Which should tell you something about what it means that I approve of this one.’
She rang off before Elizabeth could argue further.