The Vintage Girl

“Champagne can make up for a lot of dancing,” I said, already suffering a twinge of envy. Alice’s social life was significantly more upmarket than mine. “Especially when served in a castle.”

  “Yes, well, I thought it would be like the balls you get in London—you know, lots of standing around the Dorchester, drinking kir royales and slagging off everyone’s bolero jackets.”

  “And it’s not?”

  “No,” she said flatly. “It’s not. It’s full-on dancing, ten till three in the morning. Six different reels to learn. Like one aerobics class after another. Tickets are like gold dust—you have to know someone on the committee. Soon as Fraser got ours, he made me go to this reeling society he belongs to, in Chelsea. With experts.”

  “Oh, my God,” I breathed, intrigued and horrified. “Experts.”

  “This is my sixth session, and I still have no idea what’s going on.” Alice’s voice was rising dangerously. “I feel like someone’s taken my feet off and put them back on again the wrong way round. Everyone keeps shouting one and two and set and turn, and I’m just like …” She mimed someone coming round after a major operation.

  “But what is reeling?” I asked. “It must be the only class Mum didn’t send us to. Is it like Morris dancing?”

  Alice struggled for the right words. “It’s like rugby, but without a ball,” she managed. “You have to move into the right space at exactly the right time, then the man spins you, then someone else catches you, then you swerve around the next person. And if you’re not in the right place at the right time, it all goes tits-up, and everyone yells. Just to put you off, the whole thing’s accompanied by accordion music. Oh, God. I can’t explain. You have to be there. Worse than Riverdance.”

  “No,” I mouthed. Nothing had been worse than the one Riverdance workshop we’d ruined.

  “And it’s on Valentine’s weekend !” Clearly this was the final straw. “I mean, honestly! I wanted to have some romantic minibreak in Venice or somewhere! Or Paris! I thought—”

  “Calm down, Alice,” I said sternly. “You’re getting mad eyes.”

  She pressed her lips into a line, and vulnerable, panicked Alice vanished beneath the streamlined house-stylist once more. It was like watching one of those séances where the host body reasserts itself over the gabbling spirit.

  “I’ve said I’ll go,” she said. “And I will. It’s not like Fraser doesn’t know to bring padding. I’ve already given him a wrist sprain and a gimpy leg.”

  “But I bet he’s said you’re doing a marvelous job,” I said reassuringly.

  Alice’s expression softened, and she nodded. “Even when I pulled him over last time, he still said I had an admirable grip.”

  That pretty much summed up Fraser Graham: polite, even in the face of personal injury. He was one of those courteous men who automatically offered women (“ladies”) his seat on trains, and was bewildered when they accused him of thinking they were pregnant. He always had a hankie, wouldn’t let you buy a coffee. That sort of man.

  I had been nursing a clandestine crush on Fraser for ages. I could totally picture him at a ball, offering his arm to ladies while fetching them ice water and sweeping them around a dance floor.

  “Well, if Fraser’s there, you’ll have a nice time,” I sighed. “Bet he looks divine in white tie.”

  Alice was shrugging her red coat back on and leaving money for the tea. “No white tie for him. He’ll be wearing a kilt this time,” she said. “It’s that sort of do. Full-on Scottish.”

  “A kilt?” I croaked as Fraser’s sturdy calves in thick white socks flashed before my eyes. My cup and saucer gave a telltale wobble.

  Alice stopped adjusting her beret and fixed me with a gimlet eye. “You know what? He’s going back up there on Sunday for his week in the Edinburgh office—why don’t you drive him up? He can show you where to go, and fill you in properly at the same time. Yes, that’s a good idea …” She got out her phone.

  Just to explain, Fraser worked for a very top-drawer wine merchant with a branch in London and one in Edinburgh, so he and Alice spent half the month together, which was why he probably still thought Alice was a sunny, non-control-freak sort of gal.

  “Is there any point in disagreeing?” I asked.

  Alice shook her head, and her bob swung emphatically.

  I hadn’t really thought there was. Luckily, I now had the image of Fraser in a kilt to soothe the pain.

  Three

  I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to drive with your knees clamped together and your stomach pulled in while trying not to worry about getting so much as a fly on the windscreen of your boss’s precious car, but I can tell you it’s exhausting. By the time Fraser and I crawled onto the M1, my inner thighs were on fire, and not in a good way.

  Fraser, of course, had no idea of my silent agonies. He was too busy making lovely conversation. The checkered history of the Scottish Borders, why chardonnay is the chameleon of grapes, my work (which I’d upgraded as much as I dared), etc., etc. Fraser could talk the hind leg off a donkey, unlike many men of my acquaintance, but—and this is a crucial difference—he always remembered to ask the donkey’s opinion.

  “… really very kind of you to drive me up,” he was saying, as I tried to change gear while somehow clenching my triceps. “Alice does seem to get everyone organized.”

  “It’s genetic,” I said. “Mum’s so organized we have to give her our Christmas lists in July so she can buy our presents on sale. Dad has reminders on his phone for mowing the lawn and pruning.”

  Fraser laughed as if this were some kind of joke. It wasn’t.

  “Did she tell you much about Kettlesheer?” he inquired. “Or the McAndrews?”

  “Just that it was cold.” I sighed. “I love stately homes. They’re my secret passion. I like to walk round and imagine what everything smelled like.”

  I would have been more scintillating, but there was a taxi driver right on my tail, and the stag’s head in the back was obscuring my rear view. Max had heaved it into the car personally and wrapped the antlers with Fraser’s clean socks for protection; Fraser, as I’d guessed, adored it, and had already christened it Banquo.

  “Well, you’ll love Kettlesheer, then. I wonder if they’ll give you the bed Sir Walter Scott’s meant to have had pneumonia in. Mind if I have a travel sweet?”

  “The bed that … ?” I momentarily took my eyes off the road, saw the cluttered glove box open and Fraser holding out a tin of hard candies. My heart gave an illicit bump.

  Even in jeans and a cable-knit sweater, Fraser Graham looked like a Regency gentleman. The thick blond hair, the wide mouth, the accent that sounded like expensive dark chocolate—and what really swung it for me, the charming, totally unaffected manners.

  He grinned affably, and I melted a little further. Fraser had actually opened my car door for me when I’d picked him up at his flat in Notting Hill. It was a constant struggle not to imagine him galloping around on a horse, tipping his hat to the ladies. He was absolutely wasted on Alice, who kept trying to make him wear long-sleeved T-shirts and get a trendier haircut.

  “Yes, help yourself,” I said, before remembering that we were in Max’s car. “Oh, actually, be careful that—”

  Too late. He was opening the tin and frowning at the contents.

  “Ah,” said Fraser, quickly slamming it back into the glove box before I could see what was in there. “Perhaps not. Where was I? The McAndrews—lovely people, Duncan and Ingrid. They used to stay at Kettlesheer in the summer when Duncan’s uncle Carlisle had the place. Now, he was a one. His wife, his horse, and his dog all had the same name—to save effort, apparently.”

  “He sounds mad.” I loved bonkers posh people. No one wore a jaunty hat and matching cape for breakfast like a minor British aristocrat.

  “Oh yes, dangerously so. I don’t think Duncan was expecting to inherit, but then, you don’t expect a ninety-year-old man to disinherit his two perfectly good sons and take up mountain biking, do
you?”

  “Not in my family,” I said. “There are rules about mud. So come on, give me the gossip. Alice went all discreet on me.”

  Fraser settled back into his seat and crossed one long leg over the other, revealing a flash of red sock. “Well. Up until two years ago, Duncan was a deputy head teacher at some prep school in Kent, and Ingrid was the school secretary. Nice house in Wimbledon, his and hers Jaguars. Suddenly Carlisle falls off his bike, and bang! Duncan’s got his own tartan and grouse moor, and poor Ingrid’s having to learn fifty ways with cocktail haggis. Mum says she went round in a trance for the first month, virtually begging someone to tell her it was a huge practical joke.”

  The traffic had slowed down, so I sneaked another sideways glance. “But … surely you have an inkling that you’re going to be left a castle? It’s not like being left a train set.”

  I didn’t add that if there’d been any chance of me inheriting a castle, however remote, I’d have been fantasizing about complicated lawnmower accidents at family gatherings involving anyone standing between me and the keys to the drawbridge.

  “Ah, well. Family tradition. Duncan inherited because there’s this ye olde McAndrew superstition that the castle can’t be left to an unmarried heir, and both of Carlisle’s sons were divorced. Well, one was divorced, the other misplaced his wife in Thailand.”

  “I don’t understand. Why can’t they inherit?”

  “Because bad things happen.” He made a Whooo-oooh gesture, wiggling his fingers and jiggling his eyebrows up and down in Scooby-Doo ghost fashion.

  “Like … what?” My imagination filled up instantly with walled-up nuns and hauntings.

  “Oh, just the usual bad things that happen when a man doesn’t have a wife to run his castle,” said Fraser. “Grill-pan fires. Unflattering trousers. Tax inspections.” He gave me a wink. “Not such a bad policy, if you ask me.”

  I felt my cheeks go hot, but then had to snap my attention back before I hit the car in front, which had slowed to join the back of the traffic jam ahead.

  Banquo bounced reproachfully in my rearview mirror.

  “So is your mum showing them the ropes?” I said, trying to regain my composure. “Does she know the castle well?”

  “Like the back of her hand. She grew up running around the kitchens. Her family’s always farmed on the estate, and my granny was a lady’s maid at Kettlesheer, when they had a full staff to run the place.” Fraser discreetly turned off my turn signal to stop the man behind beeping at me. “It’s a lot for Duncan and Ingrid to do on their own,” he went on, little knowing how my stately home fantasy was now bubbling into full color with each word, “keeping a house that size watertight and clean, as well as fulfilling the social obligations, of course.”

  Social obligations!

  I realized I’d said it out loud.

  “Absolutely. Duncan and Ingrid have got to host the local ball once a year, throw sherry parties for the local hunt, sit on endless committees. And of course, it all costs money.” He paused, and his voice turned serious. “Which is where, as I’m sure Alice explained, you come in. If you could find one or two things they could sell, to the right people, it would solve a few problems.”

  The traffic had stopped again, and I allowed myself to look properly across the car, my best take-me-seriously face at the ready. I liked Fraser’s solemn expression. It spoke to me of illicit conversations in drawing rooms and carriages.

  “I’m sure there’s plenty up there that they could sell,” I said. “Max seems to think it’s a real treasure trove.”

  That was a direct quote, incidentally. When I told Max why I needed a week off work and the loan of the Duchess, his prized Mercedes, since my own battered Polo wouldn’t have made it past Luton, he’d come to life in the most spectacular fashion.

  “Kettlesheer?” he’d breathed, spreading out his bony fingers as if playing an invisible piano of longing. “That is number four on my top ten stately homes to get into. It’s crammed with stuff, and practically no one knows it’s there. How the hell did you manage that?”

  “Oh, contacts,” I’d said.

  “Well, it can’t have been through your social diary,” he went on with a waspish pout. “The McAndrews don’t socialize.” Max spent many hours indulging in and recovering from other people’s hospitality in the name of stalking antiques. He claimed his hangovers as a tax deduction and had a file of drunken notes scribbled on loo paper.

  “So, what should I look out for?” I’d asked.

  “Everything. Scottish silver, oils, Italian marbles dragged back from the Grand Tour … Every four generations there’s a McAndrew who makes a bloody fortune. Then the next three spend it.” From the distant look in his eyes, Max was gamboling around Kettlesheer with a pricing gun. “If they can’t buy it, they marry it and reel it in that way—they bagged an American heiress at the turn of the last century, must have brought some quality gear with her. For years, Derek Yardley’s been saying there’s a table up there worth a mint. But no one’s ever seen it, so I don’t know …”

  I was still on the American heiress: I loved Edwardiana. And Victoriana. Any -ana, really.

  “What sort of heiress?” I’d said. “Like Edith Wharton’s Buccaneers?”

  “Bucktoothed, probably. But very rich. Try to keep that tiny mind of yours on the antiques, not the photo albums, Evie.” Max had smiled with all his teeth and both eyes. I preferred him when he was shouting. “Don’t forget, if you need any help, just give me a call and I’ll come straight up. In fact, wouldn’t it be better if—”

  “No!” I hadn’t meant it to sound so emphatic, but the thought of having to deal with Alice and my mum checking up on me to see how my comfort-zone breakout was going while Max fingered the valuables and engaged in industrial-strength sycophancy was just too much.

  Fraser coughed, and I realized my knuckles were white on the steering wheel and the cars were moving again around me.

  “So, will you be holding valuation audiences? Like on television?” He mimed the Antiques Roadshow Mask of Fake Middle-Class Surprise. “ ‘This dusty old vase? Worth eight million pounds?’ ”

  “I definitely will not.” I cringed. “I can’t work with an audience, it … spoils the vibrations. Speaking of which,” I went on, keen to get off the topic, “how’s the Scottish dancing going? Has Alice injured anyone yet?”

  “No, no! She’s very good!” Now Fraser’s good-humored expression faltered, then reengaged manfully. “Takes a while for the penny to drop with reeling, but I’m sure she’ll get there.”

  “By this weekend?” I couldn’t help it.

  “Well …” His mouth twitched, and I felt as if we were sharing a secret. A warm, slightly guilty flower of excitement bloomed in my chest. “I’ve got a couple of practices lined up for the end of the week,” he confessed. “Just to put her at ease. But she’s really tried hard, and I appreciate her making the effort for me. She keeps saying she won’t let it beat her.”

  “No,” I said. That was Alice all over. I would have learned to reel backward over hot coals for a proper man like Fraser; Alice would learn so no one could accuse her of not being able to count up to eight.

  “I’ve stocked up on arnica,” he added, spoiling the effect a bit. “My brother, Dougie, swears by it for bruising, and he’s always falling off horses.”

  “I’m sorry, it’s a family failing, clumsiness.” I sighed. “I once gave someone a black eye just shaking hands.”

  “If that’s the worst family failing you’ve got, then I’m a lucky man!” Fraser replied gallantly, and I temporarily forgot how adolescent it was to nurse a crush on your sister’s boyfriend.

  Luckily, a big lorry slammed on its brakes next to Max’s precious bumper and gave me something real to worry about.

  *

  We made reasonable time on the motorway, especially after I relaxed my core muscles and Fraser spelled me at the wheel for a bit. By five-thirty, dusk had fallen and we’d wound through Berwi
ckshire’s beautiful rolling countryside, dotted with gray sheep and neat stone villages, and were nearing Rennick.

  I slowed down to take in the local detail as we passed the Welcome to Rennick, Home of Rolled Oats sign. It was a pretty town with a terraced main street, a post office, an off-license, and a gun shop. Fraser directed me past the sturdy Victorian town hall and down a hedged side road to the Grahams’ farm, Gorse Bank.

  The car’s wheels crunched into a circular drive, and when the security light came on, I could make out a modest sandstone Georgian house, double-fronted, with lovely symmetrical sash windows. The sort of place the quiet but respectable gentleman usually lives in in Jane Austen novels. There was a mud-spattered Mitsubishi 4x4 outside, which wasn’t so Jane Austen, and when Fraser opened his door, I got a brief blast of pure North Sea air and a distant snatch of spaniels going nuts inside the house.

  “Do you want to come in for a coffee?” he asked, heaving the stag’s head out of the boot. One antler had shifted in transit and the eye had rolled to one side. “You can advise me where best to hang Banquo.”

  I shivered; the temperature gauge on the dashboard read nearly freezing. It might have been spring in London, but it felt more like midwinter up here. “That’s very tempting, but I’m supposed to be arriving at Kettlesheer for tea. I’m already ten minutes late.”

  “Well, tell them it was my fault for not navigating properly. I hope you’ll let me take you out for lunch this week?” Fraser was leaning into the car now, close enough for me to smell his cologne. Acqua di Parma. I knew that, because Alice bought it for him. “Least I can do to say thanks for the lift.”

  “That’d be lovely,” I said, mentally punching the air. Lunch with Fraser! In a cozy country pub! With a log fire and dogs and haggis and oatcakes or whatever the Berwickshire specialty was.

  “Marvelous. I’m around this week—we’re supplying all the wine for the ball, so I’ll be copping a day or two off keeping the client happy, right? Now, listen, to get to Kettlesheer, you need to go back to the main road, take the next left through the village, then there’s a sign to the right, and you go up a long drive. You could walk there from here, across the field, in ten minutes if you want to leave the car. Evie? Did you get all that?” he added.