Chapter 35
Benedict
My wife is disappearing before my eyes, and it’s freaking me the hell out. I don’t mean physically—although she’s eating nowhere near enough—but spiritually, if you like. The woman I’ve fallen for is imploding on herself, and the woman sharing my bed is a hollowed-out shell of herself.
I remember being struck, the morning I went over to propose to her, by her composure. I remember marvelling at how she could be fully made up and functioning after the blow my brother had dealt her, and I’ve been marvelling at her ever since.
Slinks is an over-functioner by anyone’s standards, and while I don’t think it’s necessarily a healthy characteristic, I’ve found it more comforting than I realised.
Slinky is the grown-up in the room, and seeing her like this feels as scary and wrong as being a little boy and having your mum take to her bed for days on end in a darkened room.
It’s like the bottom falling out of your world.
My wife is always on—doing, working, socialising—and I suppose I’ve taken that for granted.
This past week, she has been off. As in, turned off.
The lights are on but nobody’s home. She’s refusing to go into work and she’s not answering work emails.
She won’t take any of the calls from her mum or dad.
Not that I blame her, but she’s someone who will usually go to any lengths not to fall short of others’ expectations.
Like I mentioned, she’s been eating very little.
Not wearing makeup. Not styling her hair.
Obviously, I don’t give a shit whether my wife wears makeup or has a blow-dry, but every ounce of experience I have with her tells me that she does.
She gives a lot of shits about that stuff, usually.
As far as I can tell, I have two kinds of weapons in my arsenal here, both of which are proving equally useless: distraction (which also takes the form of entertainment, staying positive, goofing around, and trying my damnedest to raise a smile from her) and throwing my weight around.
You’d better believe the De Vere Estate’s PR and legal teams are on the case, though their hands are tied.
Legal can’t get anywhere with either the press or the Reddit article, and our PR strategy of never complain, never explain is proving disastrous beyond all imagining.
A dignified silence only works when the press cycle moves on, and with new ‘evidence’ and commentary coming out of the woodwork every fucking day, it seems that won’t happen anytime soon.
The relevant experts have slapped down several of my suggestions: suing the care home (sorely tempting but an exercise in shutting the door after the horse has bolted and not great for optics); a carefully worded statement asking for privacy (an outright admission of guilt, apparently); briefing a friendly journalist (useless unless I can get Slinks on board, which is proving impossible); throwing Xav and Ivy under the bus and persuading them to do a warm and fuzzy interview (Slinks and Xav have both put their feet down on that one).
From where I’m surveying the chessboard, that only leaves one move left to make.
It’s beautiful early May weather, and I’ve dragged Slinky outside for a drink.
We’re sitting on the terrace outside the drawing room, on one of the long rattan sofas.
It’s chilly now, so I’ve tucked her against my side and covered her with a rug.
Xav and Ivy are on their way over for the lowest of low-key suppers—asparagus omelettes and sourdough.
While Slinks claims not to feel up to socialising, I’ve gently suggested it’ll do her good for us to have a bit of company.
It’s only partly true—in fact, I feel totally out of my depth with this pale little shadow pretending to be my wife and could do with some moral support.
I’d like to see what Xav and Ivy make of it all.
‘I want to put out a statement,’ I tell Slinks as we drink our aperitifs. Her Chablis is going down quickly, but she won’t touch the insanely good truffled nuts I brought out.
She turns her head so she’s nuzzling her face into the crook of my neck. It’s a sensation I like a lot. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean like the one I put out during the wedding. I want to reiterate to all those dickheads that I married you because I love you. Whatever happened between Xav and Ivy, people should know how happy we are. I want them to know it’s real.’
She shifts abruptly away and sets her wineglass on the table before standing up. The throw pools at her feet. ‘Let’s not rewrite history, shall we? That press release stank of bullshit, and nothing you attempt to say now will get rid of that stink. It’ll only make it worse.’
‘Then let’s be seen out in public together,’ I plead, pushing myself up to standing, too. ‘Let’s just be us. No one who sees us together will doubt that it’s real.’
‘You’re wrong if you think celebrities haven’t faked emotions for as long as there’s been tabloid press,’ she says, staring out at the lake. ‘That proves nothing.’
‘It’s worth a try. Please, sweetheart.’ I know I sound desperate, but I don’t care.
I’m positive I can show the world how crazy I am about my wife.
We may have fudged the truth in that press release, but I’ve fallen hard for Slinky over the intervening four months—very hard—and there’s no way our chemistry doesn’t radiate out of us when we’re together.
Besides, I have to do something. I’m scared out of my wits here.
‘There’s no point.’ Her voice is flat; her entire being is flat. There’s no spark there, no energy, none of that charge I love about her.
‘There is a point. My fucking family got you into this—not that I’m exonerating your parents; not for a second—and I’m damned if I’m not going to get you out of it.
’ They’re dragging her through the mud, for God’s sake.
They’ve metaphorically put her in stocks in the town fucking square and are pelting her with rotten vegetables, and I won’t stand for it.
Slinks is the victim here. She didn’t ask for this; on the contrary, she did every last thing our families asked of her, and she’s been hung out to dry.
‘I mean there’s no use. There’s nothing you can do.
There’s nothing anybody can do. They’ve decided.
Ivy’s a saint, you and Xav are the dashing knights, and I’m the evil mastermind, the dangerous social climber, basically, who whored herself out to whichever brother would have her.
They never liked me, and now they have the perfect reason to hate me. ’
The Selena de Vere I know is fire and brimstone beneath that cool facade. She abhors a justice vacuum. She rails against wrongs. If this was happening to anyone else, she’d be filled with moral outrage, but from where I’m standing, she’s given up.
I’ve had numerous opportunities over the past few days to be reminded of that weirdly intimate conversation we had over lunch in Courchevel, where she talked about her inability to shake negative shit off.
About the fact that it swelled up inside her brain and drowned out everything else.
If I didn’t understand it then, I have a front-row seat to it now, at a scale neither of us could have conceived of when she was sharing those vulnerabilities with me.
It’s as if this avalanche of articles and comments and posts has hijacked her brain and taken up residence, and I have no earthly clue how to exorcise these fucking demons.
We go inside for supper. Slinks picks out bits of perfectly charred asparagus to nibble on but doesn’t engage with the rest of her omelette.
She shreds her slice of sourdough but doesn’t eat it, and she sits slumped in her chair at the dining table.
While Ivy and Xav are family, and definitely no one to impress, I can’t help but suspect that Old Selena would be horrified by behaviour that in her eyes was so un-performative.
Usually, she’s the consummate hostess at any cost, and it’s impossible to miss the concern in their eyes as they observe her over supper.
‘I’ve said it before,’ my brother says, setting his knife and fork together, ‘but I feel the need to say it again in light of the week we’ve all had, but especially you, Selena.
I am unutterably sorry for the pain I’ve caused you.
Absolutely all of this is my fault, and I’m horrified that you’ve borne the brunt of it with the press.
It’s just… it’s unforgivable how I treated you.
I wish I’d done things differently, I really do.
I’ll always regret it.’ I’ll give him this much; he genuinely does look cut up about it all.
‘I feel awful too,’ Ivy says, squinting at her. ‘We were the ones who messed up, and you’re getting all the shit. It’s not fair.’
‘No one would argue that you two shouldn’t have ended up together,’ Slinks says, staring blankly down at her plate. ‘We all know Xav and I would have been miserable together.’
Silence. None of us can deny that.
She makes a face and pushes her plate away as if the sight of the uneaten food is turning her stomach.
‘I just wish—I don’t know what I wish. I suppose I wish I’d had the backbone to break it off years ago instead of hanging around like a stupid twat, or at least that I’d had the balls to have a frank conversation with you.
’ She looks over at Xav, then turns to me.
‘And I definitely wish I’d had the balls to turn you down and cancel the wedding, because at least the whole thing would have died down by now.
And at least everyone would just have laughed at me instead of hating me. ’
I stare at her in horror. I get that she’s hurting, that she’s lashing out—and frankly, I wish she’d lashed out more over the past week—but wishing she hadn’t married me?
It’s devastating to hear.
Devastating.
‘You don’t mean that, sweetheart,’ I tell her, reaching out so I can touch her shoulder.
‘I do.’ She jerks her shoulder away, and I drop my hand. Message received. ‘It was such a stupid move, and so shortsighted. I can’t believe we didn’t think it would blow up in our faces.’
Ivy and Xav are staring at her in horror.
‘M-maybe we should have told the truth at the time,’ I stammer.
‘We should have said, hey, Xavier and Selena have decided their futures don’t lie together, blah, blah, and they’ve decided to go their separate ways.
But I stand by us getting married.’ I dip my head, twisting it towards her, trying to get her to look at me.
‘I’ve never regretted it. Not for a single minute. ’
‘I have regretted it every single minute for the past week,’ she whispers to the tablecloth.
‘But not before that. Look, I know it was a rash decision, but we’re good together, sweetheart. Really good. And we’ll get through this. Together.’
‘Have you seen what they’re saying about me?’ she asks. ‘It’s all true. It took you, what, five minutes to persuade me to marry you that day? I mean, what the fuck does that say about me? I knew you weren’t in love with me any more than Xav was, and I still said yes. How fucking desperate is that?’
‘Maybe I wasn’t in love with you then,’ I say hesitantly, because there are words I want very much to say to my wife, but now is not the time.
I want them to be a declaration and a promise, not a platitude.
I want my I love you to mean more than the empty, off-the-cuff wedding vows we made to each other in that cathedral.
My intonation has her glancing up at me briefly with what looks like the tiniest spark of hope in her eyes before she drops her head again.
I press on. ‘But I was very, very happy to marry you. I was fucking thrilled with myself, sweetheart. You and I have always had something, and you damn well know it.’ I’m not even embarrassed at saying this shit in front of Xav and Ivy.
Slinks needs to hear it, and that’s all there is to it.
Besides, the four of us have made too much history in the past few months for us to start making it awkward now.
‘For what it’s worth, I believe he’s right,’ Xav tells her.
‘I always thought there was something between you two. I could never work out what, exactly, but it was clear to anyone with a pair of eyes. Pieter asked me about it a few times, actually. “Are you sure Ben doesn’t want to marry Selena himself?” he said, more than once.
’ I shoot him a grateful smile. Slinks thinks I’m fobbing her off, but perhaps she’ll be able to hear it when it comes from Xav.
‘Honestly,’ he continues, ‘I had my suspicions when he told me he was going to ask you to marry him. I could have sworn he had an ulterior motive. I knew it wasn’t just about the lake. ’
Oh, shit.
My wife’s head jerks up. ‘What about the lake?’