Standing up to go to the loo, Laura had to clutch the back of Lord Lomond’s chair to steady herself. The whole room swayed gently, like a boat at anchor. Perhaps she should have eaten some of her pudding. So much wine on an empty stomach had clearly gone to her head.
Focusing intently, both on where she was walking and on not glancing towards Daniel, she made her way out of the Great Hall and into the corridor. It was cooler out here, and quiet, and the change of atmosphere soothed her. With no signs indicating where a loo might be, Laura headed upstairs. A sash window on the landing had been partially opened to let in some crisp night air. Through it, Laura could see thick, heavy snowflakes falling and felt a childish delight. However inconvenient it might be to her adult self, with the play scheduled for tomorrow, there was a magic about snow, and particularly Christmas snow, that could not be denied. It meant purity and hopefulness and the promise of a bright, white future, a fresh start. It was what she had come here for, she and Peggy, back to Fittlescombe, to the place she’d been happiest. Not Daniel Smart, nor Gabe Baxter, nor John Bastard Bingham could take that away from her.
Upstairs, with nothing looking obviously like a bathroom, Laura started opening doors. Most of the rooms were bedrooms and had clearly not been redecorated for decades. Chintzy Laura Ashley wallpaper suggested a woman’s touch at some point back in the 1980s. Laura found herself wondering when, exactly, Tatiana’s mother had died. She must have been very beautiful to produce a daughter like that.
The style of the rooms was old-fashioned and simple, with nothing to suggest the family’s vast wealth. Most of the furniture was solid Victorian mahogany, and the odd watercolour painting hanging on the walls was the only attempt at adornment. Rugs were Persian and tatty, and the beds were made up with sheets and blankets rather than duvets, giving them a look of a boarding school dormitory.
Bedroom, bedroom, bedroom. Laura was starting to wonder whether there were any bathrooms at all, or if Furlings’s guests simply peed out of their windows, when the fourth door opened and a distinctly dishevelled Lisa James fell out into the corridor, giggling.
‘Oh! Hello.’ She blushed when she saw Laura. ‘I was just … we were, erm …’
Gabe Baxter sauntered out behind her. His shirt was untucked and he was wiping away very obvious lipstick marks with a handkerchief.
‘Hi,’ he said to Laura, unsmiling.
‘I was just looking for the loo,’ she found herself explaining. For some reason she was blushing furiously, as if it were she who’d been caught in flagrante.
‘Well, you found it,’ said Gabe tersely. Taking Lisa’s hand he led her towards the stairs.
Shutting the bathroom door behind her and locking it securely, Laura undid the hook and eye on her dress and sank down gratefully onto the loo. It felt wonderful to be able to breathe and enjoy the cool sensation of porcelain against her skin. Less wonderful were the livid red welts around her ribs from where her bodice had dug into her skin, not to mention the familiar feeling of tension that seemed to follow every encounter she had with Gabe Baxter. Laura didn’t know what it was about Gabe. How he always managed to throw her off stride. All she knew was that she felt foolish around him, as though she had a giant piece of spinach permanently stuck to her teeth. And her stomach was full of something. Not butterflies – that was far too pretty an image. Something like butterflies, but unpleasant. Moths. Or bats.
With an effort she pulled herself together, refixing her hair in the mirror and wiping away an unfortunate mascara smear with a piece of tissue. For one awful moment she feared she was going to be physically unable to winch herself back into her dress. But, after much frantic tugging of fabric and sucking in of the stomach, she succeeded in refastening the hook and eye and yanking up the zip. Feeling a bit more sober, tossing back her mane of dark curls with a confidence she didn’t feel but was determined to project, she walked back along the corridor towards the stairs. But after a couple of paces she froze.
She heard them before she saw them. Daniel’s voice, low and enticing, the voice that only a few hours ago had been whispering in her ear at Briar Cottage, telling her how gorgeous she looked. And a female voice, higher but completely confident, the cut-glass accent ricocheting off the stairwell walls like shards from a broken chandelier.
‘Are you sure no one’s up here?’ Daniel asked.
‘If they are, they shouldn’t be. Why? Are you ashamed to be seen with me, darling?’
‘Ashamed? Are you kidding? Every man in that room wanted you. I’m the lucky bastard who won the prize.’
It was too late to run to back into the bathroom. Panicked, Laura flattened herself against the wall, like a toddler playing hide and seek who believes that, if they close their eyes, no one will see them.
Miraculously, Daniel didn’t see her. He was so mesmerized by Tatiana Flint-Hamilton’s cleavage, and so focused on bundling her into the bedroom, he probably wouldn’t have noticed if a T. rex were running down the hall. Looking over his shoulder, however, Tati saw Laura, back to the wall like a sentry on duty, and winked. It wasn’t a mean wink. Quite the opposite. It was matey and conspiratorial, a ‘we’re all girls in it together’ wink. She has no idea who I am, thought Laura. Daniel never told her he came with me. She stood, rooted to the spot as Daniel rattled the doorknob behind Tati’s bare back and finally got it to open. With loud shrieks of delight, the pair of them shot into the bedroom and out of view.
Laura didn’t know how long she stood in that corridor. She didn’t remember how she got downstairs, who she passed on the way, or how she retrieved her coat from the cloakroom. But at some point she found herself standing outside in the snow, about halfway down Furlings’s drive, staring at the village lights below her like a sleepwalker emerging from a terrible dream.
It must have been snowing for at least three hours, as the ground was already blanketed with white. Behind her, sounds of music and voices and revelry hung faintly in the air, like a distant echo. But around her, and in front of her, all was peace and white and silence. The world had been muffled, softened, muted. Laura wished she could do the same to the voices inside her head. You’re a fool, they mocked her. A complete fool.
‘Hey.’
Gabe Baxter’s feet crunched heavily through the snow. He had no coat on, but had run down the drive in just his dinner jacket. White flakes stuck to his hair and glittered on the lapels of his jacket like sequins. He looked handsome and freezing and as totally out of place as a snowman in a sauna.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Please go away.’
‘I saw what happened. Everyone saw the two of them sneak off together.’
‘For fuck’s sake!’ Laura spun around, her sadness and embarrassment and disappointment suddenly condensed into anger. Anger at Daniel for being a snake, anger at herself for being a fool, but most of all anger at Gabe Baxter for just being. ‘What is your problem? You followed me out here, like some kind of weird stalker, just so you can gloat?’
Gabe shivered, wrapping his arms around his chest against the cold. ‘Is that what you think? That I came out here to gloat?’
‘Well, didn’t you?’
‘Unbelievable.’ Gabe shook his head, kicking at the snow with irritation. ‘I tried to warn you, you know. I knew he was a user.’
‘You knew nothing!’ Laura shouted. ‘You were jealous, that’s all. So don’t bother trying to dress it up as concern for my welfare.’
‘Jealous?’ Gabe’s eyes widened with outrage. ‘Of that tosspot? I don’t think so.’
They stood in awkward silence for a moment. The snow began to fall faster and thicker, till Gabe’s shoes were completely submerged in white.
‘Look, it’s fucking freezing,’ he said, breaking the silence because one of them had to. ‘I’ll drive you home.’
‘No!’ Laura sounded angrier than she meant to. But she couldn’t be around anyone at the moment, certainly not a man, and certainly not Gabe Baxter. There was only so much humiliation a
girl could bear in one night. ‘Go back to Lisa. I’m sure she’s back in the warm right now, waiting eagerly for round two.’
‘You know what? Fine,’ said Gabe, matching Laura’s anger with her own. ‘Maybe I will go back to Lisa.’
‘Good.’
‘Great. At least we agree on something.’ Gabe began walking back towards the house. But after a few paces he stopped.
‘You know,’ he said to Laura, ‘for someone who went to Oxford, you can be painfully fucking stupid sometimes.’
‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ said Laura, turning her face away so that he wouldn’t see her tears. Gabe might have seen Daniel Smart make a fool of her – the entire village might have seen it – but that was one satisfaction Laura wasn’t about to give him.
Holding her head high, she walked on through the snow towards the village without looking back.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Laura walked into St Hilda’s church hall with a fixed smile plastered on her face.
‘My dear. Merry Christmas Eve!’ Harry Hotham greeted her warmly, making no reference to the large pair of sunglasses she was wearing to cover eyes puffy from crying, nor to the supersized flask of coffee she clutched to her chest like a security blanket. ‘There’s no need to worry about anything. The entire cast are present and correct, a minor miracle if I do say so myself. Now that you’re here, the only thing we still need is an audience.’
‘Merry Christmas, Harry. Everyone.’
It wasn’t a Merry Christmas, of course. It was the worst, most shaming, crushing, awful Christmas Laura could possibly have imagined. By now the entire village, school and probably half the county knew what had happened last night. That Laura’s date for the Furlings Hunt Ball, her big-shot London playwright boyfriend, had publicly dumped her in favour of the stunning Tatiana Flint-Hamilton. The two of them were probably still shacked up at Furlings right now. Either that or they’d already jetted off to some exotic location to begin their glamorous lives together. Meanwhile, Laura was here, in a church hall full of excited schoolchildren, nursing the sort of hangover that merited a call to the paramedics at the very least, if not immediate admission to rehab.
She’d considered not showing up tonight. Burrowing deep under her duvet and staying there until the snow melted, or her heart mended, or at least until she could stand up without wanting to throw up. But, after a morning spent staring at the ceiling and weakly sipping Alka-Seltzer, she realized that the show must go on. Not just tonight’s show. But the show, the tragicomedy that was Laura Tiverton’s life. That had to go on, whether she wanted it to or not.
‘What happened to the set?’ she asked, as the musicians began a warm-up rendition of ‘Good King Wenceslas’. Someone had brought mince pies and a huge vat of mulled wine backstage for the adult performers, and the smell of sugar and alcohol wafting over made Laura feel violently ill. ‘That crib was in pieces last night.’
‘Gabe Baxter came in at crack of dawn this morning and repaired everything.’ Harry Hotham smiled. ‘We’ve rechristened him the Angel Gabriel.’
I wouldn’t go that far, thought Laura, watching Gabe flirting with the make-up girl as she daubed foundation on his cheeks at the side of the stage. But it was a very kind and thoughtful gesture, especially given what time he must have got to bed last night. She remembered their conversation in the snow last night word for word, and wondered now whether maybe she’d been too hard on him. It was at least possible that he’d followed her down Furlings’s drive out of concern.
Downing the dregs of her coffee, she walked over to him.
‘You fixed the set.’
‘Yup. You showed up.’
‘Yup.’
They looked at one another awkwardly. It felt as if there should be more to say, but Laura at least couldn’t think of what it might be. In the end Lisa James broke the tension. Resplendent as Mary in a full-length blue robe with a white nun’s wimple and headdress and a frighteningly convincing baby-bump sewn into her midsection, she came over to ask Laura about her lines in the kings-and-shepherds scene. Laura noticed the way Lisa turned her back to Gabe, making a point of ignoring him.
‘Have you two had a row?’ she asked Gabe afterwards.
‘Not really. We broke up last night.’
‘Oh! I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. It wasn’t going anywhere. She knows it really, she’s just annoyed I beat her to the punch. Listen, do you have a minute?’
Laura glanced around at the throngs of children and teachers and set hands all needing direction. ‘Not really.’
‘Yes, you do. It won’t take long.’ Grabbing her hand, Gabe led her through one of the rear stage doors into a corridor at the back of the building. A couple of shepherds were going over their lines at the far end, but otherwise the two of them were alone. ‘I want to talk about Daniel.’
Laura stiffened. ‘That makes one of us. Truly, Gabe, I don’t have time for this right now. People will start arriving soon, curtain goes up within the hour and—’
‘He’s bankrupt.’
Laura paused for a moment. ‘He … what?’
‘This is all about money. He’s bankrupt, in debt up to his eyeballs on his latest play. He’s been trying to screw cash out of every rich heiress he can get his hands on in London for almost a year now, but it wasn’t enough. That’s why he came to Fittlescombe.’
Laura tried to take this in, not easy through her thick hangover fog. ‘But that makes no sense,’ she said eventually. ‘He came here to see me. I’m not a rich heiress. I can barely afford to pay my water bill.’
‘Yes, but Tati Flint-Hamilton is. Remember when he first contacted you? It was the day after you were invited to the Furlings Hunt Ball, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeeeees,’ Laura said cautiously. ‘But I don’t see what—’
‘You posted about it on Facebook,’ said Gabe, ‘didn’t you? And the very next day, good old Daniel Smart decides to look you up. After ten years. It wasn’t you he came here for, Laura. It was never you. It was always Tati. He wanted a chance to get close to her and you gave it to him.’
Laura’s eyes narrowed. For a moment all her old distrust of Gabe came rushing back. ‘How do you know all this? What do you know about Daniel’s finances and his motives?’
‘I know a lot. I didn’t trust him from the day I met him and I decided to check him out. Just because I’m a farmer doesn’t mean I’m a moron, you know. You don’t have to go to bloody Oxford to recognize a liar when you see one. It only took a couple of calls to discover his play was up shit creek. He hadn’t told you that, which got me thinking, “What else hasn’t he told her?” Turns out it was a fuck of a lot. He’d been after Tati for months, but she kept sodding off abroad with her rich lovers, giving him the slip. Last night he finally pinned her down.’
Literally, thought Laura.
Was it really true? Had Daniel really been using her from day one? She scanned Gabe’s face, searching for traces of insincerity, but found nothing.
‘Why?’ she asked him at last. ‘Why did you bother finding all this out? I mean, why did you even care?’
The question obviously angered him. ‘Because, you stupid bloody woman,’ he shouted, ‘I—’
‘Sorry to interrupt, guys.’ Eileen Carter, one of the St Hilda’s teachers, ran in, flapping her hands like a distressed bird. ‘But I need Laura. The first load of parents just arrived, Michael O’Brien’s got stage fright and is refusing to put on his wings, and I’m afraid to say our cellist, Mrs Kennedy, has had one too many glasses of mulled wine and has just been extremely rude to the bishop.’
‘You’d better go.’ Gabe’s face shut down like a mask. Laura didn’t know why, but she felt a surge of disappointment mingling with the nausea and nerves.
‘Yes.’
She followed Mrs Carter back into the hall. Everything else would have to wait for now. It was show time.
* * *
By the time the curtain went up and the Fittlescombe o
rchestra (minus one cellist) launched into the first, rousing strains of ‘Deck the Halls’, St Hilda’s church hall was packed to the rafters. Parents, parishioners and villagers of all ages sat eagerly in the front rows, many of their faces known to Laura since childhood. Suddenly, last night and Daniel and all the bad things that had happened melted away. It had been a terrible year. But Laura was happy to be here, in this village, in this hall, surrounded by these kind, familiar faces. She belonged in Fittlescombe in a way that she had never belonged anywhere else. She was proud that it was her play, her work that the village had turned out to see on this cold, snowy Christmas Eve.
After yesterday’s disastrous dress rehearsal, Laura held her breath throughout most of the first act, but it went off without a hitch. The carols sounded magical, with George Monroe’s solo performance raising the hairs on everyone’s forearms with its purity and beauty. Even the reception infants did a terrific job, getting through ‘Away in a Manger’ without forgetting the words or having their wings fall off or needing to be taken to the loo. Act Two was where most of the drama came in. Laura had put her own stamp on the classic Nativity story by trying to give Mary and Joseph a more real, believable marriage. There was lots of dialogue between the two of them, and some banter that had worked well in rehearsals. But she was scared that, after last night’s break-up, the onstage spark between Gabe and Lisa might fall flat.
Again, for once, the gods were with her. With the lights and attention on her, and the whole village watching, Lisa James suddenly emerged from her cocoon like a gloriously unexpected butterfly. Before, it was Gabe who had got all the laughs. But tonight Lisa displayed a comic timing and pathos that Laura had never imagined her capable of.