Epilogue
A few months later:
Call it the nesting instinct on my part, but Operation Modernise Belvedere is in full swing… and there isn’t a thing Xav can do about it—especially given how fully his wife and sister have thrown themselves into helping me.
Happily for me, he’s being kept busy. Even now, as the rest of us are enjoying a civilised lunch, he’s pacing up and down the length of the dining room, rubbing the back of baby Alice, who is out cold and sprawled over his shoulder, along with a muslin.
Alice is adorable beyond all measure, and we are all obsessed with her.
There’s something special about having a baby in the family to cut your teeth on (not literally) as you grow your very own version.
The de Vere men, it appears, are breeders, and the de Vere women are basically hoes for all that aristocratic sperm.
That’s what Ivy and I have concluded, in any case.
And it’s not like I’m modernising Belvedere too much.
I haven’t pulled out the Georgian French doors and replaced them with Crittall, after all.
I’ve just updated the aesthetic from all that gilded furniture and candelabra to something a little more muted and contemporary.
Obscenely high-end, but tasteful. Think six-star resort rather than the National Trust.
If I’m honest, it wasn’t until Athena insisted I break my Marie-Antoinette-style house arrest and accompany her to a wonderful soirée at the Kensington home of Natalie and Adam Wright, who own the luxury brand Gossamer, that the aesthetic I was chasing fell into place.
Their home is a full-on London mansion, even more sprawling than the de Vere pad in Little Venice, and the interiors were to die for: timeless and elegant, with intense gravitas and a colour palette that married the subdued with the right pops of colour and let the quality speak for itself.
I took the name of the interior designer Adam had originally used, fired our own useless one, and made a call.
Thus, the dining room is no longer clad in shiny bottle green damask but in the most perfect smoky-grey silk faille that provides a kind of moodily austere backdrop for the huge oils rather than competing with them.
Next to the Dürer hare hangs a stunning oil of Belvedere’s exterior that Ben and I commissioned Ivy to do last summer.
And next door, in the breakfast room, the damask has been stripped and replaced with highly polished Venetian plaster, whose lustrous shell tones make the room brighter and more contemporary.
Charlotte finds all of it a travesty, and that fills me with glee.
One by one, we’re working through the rooms. My and Ben’s bedroom was the first priority.
He’s a big fan of our new wet room, and I have my suspicions that my womb is highly susceptible to it, too.
I’ll never be able to prove it, but I like to think that the little boy growing safely inside my body was conceived during one particularly athletic shower session.
Next up: the nursery. I cannot tell you how out of control my Pinterest boards have got over this one little room.
But, as summer beckons, my mind is turning to the gardens.
‘I’m still very interested in commissioning a new bronze for the west lawn,’ I tell the table at large.
I turn to Flora, who is home from uni for the weekend and in whose honour we’re throwing this little lunch party.
‘Flora, any chance you know James Locke? I looked him up and it sounds like he’s involved with you guys somehow? ’
James Locke is a preeminent British sculptor and really the only person I would consider for this commission. According to Google, he’s a visiting professor of the Royal College of Arts, where Flora is studying. Maybe I’m being simplistic, but it seems fair to assume their paths may have crossed.
Flora freezes with a forkful of cold salmon halfway to her mouth. The expression on her face makes me laugh. She looks beyond horrified at my question.
‘Is that like your mum asking your least favourite teacher to dinner?’ I ask her jokingly.
‘Yeah.’ She stuffs the salmon into her mouth and nods frantically.
‘Not a fan?’ Ben asks her.
‘He’s very grumpy,’ she admits when she’s swallowed. ‘Hostile is probably fairer.’
‘He’s a genius, darling,’ Charlotte protests from the other end of the table.
‘He’s allowed to be temperamental.’ She holds out her arms and makes grabby hands in Xav’s direction.
His and Ivy’s wedding and the arrival of Alice have glossed over all manner of perceived ills from Charlotte’s perspective.
She’s obsessed. Xav hands his unconscious daughter over, looking deeply reluctant.
‘Umm-hmm,’ Flora says noncommittally, lowering her face over her plate. I catch Ivy’s eye and raise a confused eyebrow, only for her to give me a knowing smirk and nod. The subtext: there’s a story there.
Right after lunch, the two of us corner Flora and drag her off to the conservatory. It’s a lovely, light-filled corner of the house, even if I can’t get as excited about its contents—ferns dating back to when the house was built—as Ivy does.
‘Spill,’ Ivy orders her. ‘What’s the score with James Locke?’
‘Only if you let me hold the baby,’ Flora says mutinously.
‘Fine.’ Ivy, who has been cuddling Alice since she regained possession towards the end of lunch, passes her carefully to Flora. ‘Now talk.’
Flora slumps defeatedly down onto one of the broad limestone edges of the fern beds, laying the baby in her arm. ‘We’ve had some beef.’
I raise a you were right eyebrow at Ivy, who barks, ‘Sexy beef?’
‘Jesus, Ivy,’ I say with a little laugh. ‘Not everything is about sex.’
At exactly the same time, Flora sighs out a defeated ‘Yes.’
‘Oh my God,’ I say, squatting down to get to eye level with Flora. ‘Seriously?’
‘Called it,’ Ivy says.
‘Is he your professor?’ I ask. I’m trying desperately not to openly clutch my metaphorical pearls, as Ivy has had words with me before about encouraging Flora’s sexual expression and not being a ‘total cockblocker’ like her brothers were for so long.
But we’ve had slim pickings in terms of gossip from Flora over the past few months, and this is one hell of a surprise.
‘Kind of,’ Flora says. ‘He’s been overseeing one of my modules this term.’
‘And?’ Ivy demands. ‘Come on, spill the tea. And bear in mind that I still feel as if my insides are going to prolapse every time I have sex, so I could do with some sexy times by proxy.’
I, on the other hand, am flooded with sex hormones and gagging for it more than I ever have in my life, so have an entirely different agenda for wanting sexy times by proxy.
Only this morning, I came by rubbing myself against my husband’s very muscular thigh while he pretended to read the newspaper in bed.
I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me.
Flora sighs. ‘He’s tutoring one of my practical classes, and things got kind of out of hand a couple of weeks ago.’
‘Go on,’ I snap.
‘I’m going to die of happiness,’ Ivy announces.
‘You’re ridiculous.’ Flora dips her head so her hair is hanging over the baby, concealing her face. ‘Ugh, I’m so embarrassed.’
‘No you’re not,’ Ivy says. ‘You are a strong, sexual creature. You take what you need from men and you don’t overthink it. Now, for fuck’s sake.’
Flora raises her head slowly. ‘Obviously, my medium is marble, and we’re working on a piece of coursework around the theme elusiveness.’
‘Okay,’ I say, unsure where the hell this is going.
‘So’—she bounces the sleeping baby a little—‘I chose to depict the female orgasm.’
‘Oh my God,’ I say again. Ivy’s jaw is hanging open.
‘And I stayed late to work on it one evening,’ Flora says, ‘and he stopped by the art room.’
‘Of course he did, the dirty bastard,’ Ivy says gleefully. I let out a little squeal of horny-pregnant-person delight.
Flora’s neck and jaw are stained an angry shade of red. ‘And he kind of demanded I talk him through my inspiration, and, in my defence, I’d fancied him for weeks. Like, he’s really old—’
‘Define really old,’ I snap, my maternal genes kicking in on Flora’s behalf.
‘Thirties, maybe? But he’s so hot. He’s the hottest guy I’ve ever seen.
And I’d been thinking of him every night and, you know…
So anyway, I just wanted to provoke a reaction.
I wanted to see if I was having any effect on him.
So I told him that men were useless and that not a single one had ever got me off successfully, even though I was perfectly capable of doing it on my own—very efficiently, I might add.
And, well, it’s a longer story, but he ended up sitting me up on the work surface and making me pull up my dress and show him my’—she shrugs—‘and he fingered me.’
Utter, shell-shocked silence from me and Ivy—and the baby.
A moment later, we both start cackling, huge, raucous laughs that even make Alice stir and shoot out a panicked hand in some kind of simian startle reflex. It seems the sexually unshockable Ivy is actually as stupefied as I am.
‘He fingered you?’ Ivy asks finally.
‘Yeah.’
‘And? Well? Did he disprove the elusive thing?’ I ask, which is admirably articulate of me given the circumstances.
‘He disproved it all over the table,’ Flora admits, and Ivy and I fall apart again. I stagger to my feet and clutch Ivy’s arm.
‘I’m dead. This is the best story I’ve ever heard.’
Ivy shakes her head in delighted disbelief. ‘My little girl is a woman. I’m so fucking proud of you.’
‘But what now?’ I ask. ‘Has anything happened since? He’s not married, is he?’
‘No and no,’ she says in a small voice. ‘We’ve studiously ignored each other since then, and I’ve thought about him literally nonstop.’
Ivy is whipping out her phone. ‘That’s fair—sounds like excellent spank bank material. Let’s see—James Lock, sculptor. Oh, it has an E. Holy fuck, he’s hot.’
She turns the screen to me.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I say, taken aback. He’s standing in front of an aggressively abstract bronze in what looks like Regent’s Park, arms crossed over his chest. I definitely missed this photo during my browsing of his website. He’s dark-haired and smouldering and absolutely fucking gorgeous.
‘He’s divorced,’ Flora says, ‘and he appears to have some kind of personality deficit.’ I screw my face up in sympathy at this regrettable situation.
‘Hmm,’ Ivy says. ‘But he knows his way around a clit, so we can forgive him a lot. Do you want something to happen again?’
‘Yeah,’ Flora says. ‘I really do.’
Ivy and I turn to each other. ‘He doesn’t sound like the most suitable boyfriend material,’ I say to Ivy, as if Flora isn’t in the room.
‘He doesn’t have to be a boyfriend,’ Ivy protests. ‘He’s the first guy who knows his way around her knickers, for fuck’s sake. Stop being so Victorian.’ She turns to Flora. ‘If you think you can handle it, I say go for it. You may as well take him for a full ride if you can.’
‘Would you get kicked out of uni if anyone found out?’ I fret.
Flora makes a face. ‘It’s not ideal. Particularly for him. But I can’t get him out of my head. Look, she’s smiling.’
Alice is indeed grinning in her sleep as if highly amused, and we all pause to marvel at her.
‘It’s a sign,’ Ivy says. ‘You’ve got the Alice de Vere seal of approval. I say you go and seduce that man so thoroughly he doesn’t know which way is up.’
THE END