Chapter 28
Selena
Iwas pretty quiet for the rest of the dinner—or as quiet as my upbringing and good manners would allow me to be, anyway.
I made polite, careful conversation, praising Ivy’s cooking (genuinely delicious) and enquiring as to how her sisters were finding their first few weeks at Hartwell House (‘posh but okay’, apparently).
Retreating into my carefully crafted shell without coming across as a total bitch was my only game plan.
That, and casually (read: opportunistically) bringing up my intention to put in place a long-term overhaul of Belvedere’s interiors. Ben was disinterestedly supportive, Ivy was enthusiastic, and Xavier looked horrified but didn’t follow it through with actual censure.
Here’s the lovely thing about quid pro quo.
Every little piece of dignity at which he and his brother had chipped away afforded me some currency with them: currency that sat, burning a hole in my metaphorical pocket at that table.
And when I decided to spend it—to redress the balance somewhat with a power move of my own—there was nothing he could do about it.
Nothing at all.
You made your bed, Xav.
You can fucking well lie in it.
Now we’re at a party about fifteen miles away in a seriously nice Georgian stately home. The owners are Jack and Lydia Balfour, Lydia being my bridesmaid Minty’s older sister. She was a year above us at school, and Jack was a year above Xavier at Eton.
Yeah.
It’s all super incestuous in this neck of the woods.
I’d be on edge tonight even if I hadn’t sat through bombshell after bombshell at supper, because it’s Xavier’s first formal outing with Ivy among our social circle.
We may be in April, but the timing is still a little tight for my liking, and the narrative a little fuzzy.
They’re planning to tell people that they met a couple of months ago, at a club in London, that it was love at first sight: this to explain the compressed timeline.
Because even if they fudged it and said that Ivy was just staying with Xavier (rather than fully moved in and playing Happy Families), there are the indisputable facts that these two are now married and that Ivy’s sisters have been ensconced in Hartwell House since late February.
All of this is hard to explain away.
All of this undermines the public narrative Ben and I have crafted so carefully.
I remind myself that there’s nothing I can do, that it is what it is.
Xavier can’t keep Ivy stowed away forever.
We just have to brazen it out. Let people think she’s a rebound, if that helps them to square the Great Groom Swap with the fact that Xavier is now clearly smitten with a killer blonde who is just as clearly not part of our social set.
Let them wonder.
Never complain; never explain.
‘Benedict is on good form tonight,’ Minty remarks.
It’s meant caustically, of course; it’s said caustically.
She looks striking tonight in floor-length pillar-box red.
Minty is of the Erin O’Connor school of beauty: tall, jet-black hair, features strong enough that one wouldn’t initially use the word pretty to describe her, but undeniably magnetic.
Unfortunately, the world-weariness she cultivated so devotedly at school has warped into a low-level yet relentless sort of bitter bitchiness that constantly seeks out and locks onto external targets to replenish itself.
‘He is,’ I say airily, because nothing infuriates Minty more than being denied oxygen.
But the truth is that she’s correct in her observation.
That’s why it stings so much. Because if to Benedict was a verb, my husband would be Benedicting the ever-loving fuck out of this party.
He’s on fire: moving and shaking and double-kissing and flirting.
He’s every inch the guy I used to watch from the safety of the sidelines at every event we attended together, and you’d think the yearning would dissipate now that we’re married, now that I landed him, but it doesn’t.
It’s morphed, but, like all energy, it hasn’t vanished. How can it, when the target of all my attention is still the same guy, when that gold band on his ring finger hasn’t changed him a jot?
I stand with Minty and Annabel at the chic bar towards one end of the large drawing room and survey my new husband.
He’s as popular with the women as ever. As affectionate with the women as ever.
And for every woman who flirts less with him now that he’s taken, there’s one who flirts more.
I bet there’s the odd one who thinks they’re in with a chance, that he can be tempted, who chooses to disregard the public declaration of love he made to the world’s press.
I bet there’s one who reads into his easy and, let’s be honest, probably innocent flirtation.
Who believes, like I did on the dance floor at Xavier’s thirtieth, that maybe, just maybe, there’s something more to it.
Who craves having Benedict’s eyes on her like I always have, because there’s something addictive about his attention.
He has this way of making people—women, especially—feel as though they’re the centre of the universe when he’s with them.
A Benedict-ion.
God, I’m lame.
Back in the day, the yearning felt hopeless and delicious in equal measure: a forbidden crush, the brother I could never have.
But now, after all the machinations he, Xavier, and I have undertaken to save face, to steer the de Vere juggernaut clear of any unsolicited scrutiny, it feels exactly as I feared it would that midwinter day when he knelt before me and re-offered me the de Vere diamond:
Horribly, stupidly lonely.
Not all the time, obviously. Not when we’re alone, or we’re in bed, and he’s shining the warm, beautiful sunshine of his affection on me. Not when my body is wringing pleasure from his, when he makes me feel like the most desirable woman in the world.
Not then.
But at times like this, yes.
I thought that sunshine would continue in public, that the warm glow of ownership—entitlement, to make it sound less ugly, or smugness, to make it sound more so—would envelop me in situations like these, but it’s like watching my husband from behind a veil.
Notice me notice me notice me.
Come to me.
Don’t make me go to you, because I’m still paranoid that you won’t give me the warm welcome I need everyone to witness you giving me.
Jesus Christ. Needy much, Selena?
He’s talking to a girl called Imogen. She was, like, four years below me at school. She’s all over him like a rash, stupid little bitch.
Then he looks over at me.
Smiles.
Blows me a kiss.
And the clouds part.
I’m actually standing next to Benedict an hour or two later when Ivy shows up.
My husband’s arm is draped lazily over my shoulder, even though we’re both carrying on entirely separate conversations with our hosts, Jack and Lydia.
He draws absent-minded doodles on my upper arm, and I tell myself that’s a good sign.
It’s not disinterest; it’s a sign of intimacy. Affectionate familiarity.
‘Can you show me where the toilets are, please?’ she asks me.
I flinch inwardly—there’s no quicker route to social Siberia than using words the upper classes simply don’t tolerate, like toilet instead of loo—but keep my thoughts to myself.
If it were me, I’d be trying to assimilate, swapping out my toilets and serviettes and dinners for loos and napkins and suppers, but it strikes me, the pitch-perfect Versace aside, that Ivy gives far fewer shits about this stuff than I do.
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Excuse us a moment,’ I add to Lydia.
I lead Ivy out of the main drawing room and across the hall. There’s a powder room near the front door, but two women are already standing outside it. I’ve been here a few times before with Minty, so I know there’s another loo out the back of the kitchen, off the ample utility.
The kitchen is filled with catering and waiting staff.
On the large island stand trays upon trays of bowl food, ready to be carried out and handed around in the hope of lining stomachs.
I trill a smooth ‘Excuse us!’ as we weave through the mayhem and through the utility room.
One person has beaten us to it—the loo door is locked—but it feels good to have a breather from the party.
It seems Ivy feels the same, because she slumps against the wall and lets out a huge breath, her entire frame deflating. ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘These people are exhausting.’
I turn to her, considering. If I think people are observing me and Ben, then I can’t imagine how scrutinised Ivy must be feeling.
And they aren’t even her people. I may not love the MO of most of the women in this room, but by God, I know the script well enough that this party could be my opening night in a West End play.
‘If you feel like you’re in a goldfish bowl,’ I say, ‘then you’re not the only one. But yes, exhausting is a fair descriptor.’
It’s not that the people are exhausting, per se—it’s that being around them is exhausting.
Staying polished. Socially adroit. Balancing warmth with being reserved.
Making an effort but not being too, you know, extra.
Constantly pulling rank, but in a classy way; reminding people of your social status without namedropping too openly—or eagerly.
And if you think that’s just me, you’d be wrong, because the jungle has nothing on the social hierarchy at parties like this one.
‘They’re so nosy,’ she says, pushing her fringe out of her eyes. ‘But they ask questions in this really, like, strident way? Like, it’s so in your face that you forget that answering them is optional.’
‘It’s called blinkered entitlement, darling, and it’s been bred into them so hard that they’d never dream that someone would actually call them out on it. What did you do?’