Christmas at Tiffany's (47 page)

‘There’s no wedding. We called it off,’ he said quietly.

The news jolted her. It echoed through her like a slap, stinging and hot, but she willed her body not to flinch or start, not to betray her to him. Because if she turned around now . . .

‘Cass? Did you hear what I said?’

He waited for a response – anything at all – but she kept up her pretence, playing dead, and after a minute or two he gave a weary sigh and turned away from her. She listened for the sound of his breathing to change, and within moments he succumbed to a deep, inebriated sleep.

She lay next to him like a piece of driftwood – far from home, wooden and washed out – with just one thing running over and over through her mind. If there was no wedding or honeymoon, then what were they doing here?

When he awoke, she was already dressed and sitting at a table downstairs, drinking a cappuccino and nibbling on a cornetto whilst her mobile phone charged up at reception. She had resolved to continue as though nothing had happened between them on the balcony, and, more importantly, as though she hadn’t heard a thing he’d said – after all, she’d pretended to be asleep and she couldn’t very well bring it up now.

Not that she needed to worry about keeping up a pretence. One look at his face in the doorway – puffy and pale – told her his hangover was fairly monumental. He probably didn’t even
remember
telling her the wedding was off. There again, it occurred to her, maybe . . . maybe it had all been a joke, a drunken lie? Maybe his resolve to stay faithful to Lacey had weakened with the drink, and the prospect of coming back to a sure thing was too much for him to resist. One last hurrah. After all, he was about to spend the next two months in the Arctic, and hadn’t he said himself that he was no angel?

She stared at him as his bleary eyes sought her out in the empty room. She had no idea what the truth was. Everything he did and said was a riddle.

She smiled politely as he sat down, determined to recover the dignity she’d lost last night. ‘Good night?’

Henry arched one eyebrow at her to see whether she was being sarcastic, but she gave nothing away.

‘Not really,’ he mumbled, wincing from the effort. ‘Bad idea.’

Cassie said nothing, just looked out into the garden. A gardener was out there, pruning some bougainvilleas.

‘How about you?’

‘Me?’ She picked up her coffee cup, trying to look nonchalant. ‘Oh, I just had an early night.’

He gave a small painful nod. ‘Did you get anything to eat?’

She shook her head, almost offended by the question. As if she could have eaten. ‘I wasn’t that hungry.’

‘Ah.’

A pretty young waitress came up, her dark hair tied back in a long ponytail, her pink dress straining slightly over the hips, and handed Henry a menu, her eyes sweeping over his lightly as she did so.

Cassie felt herself prickle. This was obviously one example of the many opportunities that Henry had been talking about.

‘Is my phone ready?’ she asked the girl, her voice tight with irritation.

The girl looked at her, a languid arrogance in her eyes. ‘I shall check.’ She smiled, giving Henry another glance before walking back to the reception desk, deliberately swinging her hips.

‘Ugh, I can’t believe I’ve done this,’ Henry said, pushing his knuckles to his temples. ‘Cass, I’m so sorry.’

He looked up at her but it was impossible to tell what he was apologizing for. Last night? Or the hangover? He clearly wasn’t in any fit state to go sightseeing.

‘Maybe you should go back to bed,’ Cassie said, watching him. ‘I can go out and do some sightseeing on my own. I’m sure I’ll be able to find some good things for your honeymoon list.’ She watched Henry’s reaction as she said this, but from the grimacing and gurning he was doing, it was hard to tell anything other than that his head was about to fall off.

The girl came back with her phone. ‘Full charge,’ she said, putting it down on the table.

‘Thanks,’ Cassie said, not looking at her as she picked it up.

‘Could I possibly have bacon and sausages and eggs?’ Henry asked. ‘I know it’s not on the menu, but . . .’ He managed a smile.

‘Of course,’ the girl smiled back. ‘Anything.’

Cassie furiously jabbed at the buttons on her phone. She already hated today and they hadn’t even had breakfast. The previous evening’s humiliation, mingled with the confusion from his middle-of-the-night confession and now his debilitating hangover, meant he wasn’t fit to spell his own name, much less explain to her what the hell was going on.

She turned the phone on and the message icon started bleeping at her. She dialled the voicemail and listened in.

‘
You have eighteen new messages . . .
’

Eighteen? Who the hell could need to get hold of her so urgently? she wondered. She’d only been gone a day and a half. ‘. . .
voicemail is full. Please delete any unwanted messages . . .
’

She suddenly felt a wave of horror flush over her. Suzy!

‘First message . . . Message received . . .’
She listened to it, her body tense.

‘
Cassie. C’est moi
.’ She relaxed as she heard Claude’s distinctive voice – probably ringing up to moan about the price of the fish, or the tablecloths coming in the wrong colour. She just hoped he wasn’t going to reschedule their lesson tomorrow. It felt like a long time since she’d seen him, even though it had only been Thursday evening. She pressed the next message.

‘
Cassie? Where are you? I need to see you. Ring me
.’

She blew out through her cheeks, pressed delete and held the phone up to her ear for the next message.

‘Cassie, it is me again. You must ring. I do not understand. Where are you? Why do you not call me back? Call me. Please.’

Cassie deleted again, somewhat annoyed by the instructions. She didn’t have to answer to him if she wanted to go away with a friend – their mutual friend – for a weekend jolly. She put the phone back to her ear for the next message.

‘Why are you are doing this to me? Is this funny to you? I thought we had an understanding? I thought you understood me?’

Cassie looked at the phone, a knot of nausea beginning to tighten inside her. This wasn’t right. His voice was different – higher, faster. She pressed delete and listened to the next, aware that her hand was beginning to shake.

‘Cass? What’s going on?’ Henry asked, holding his head between his hands, staring at her curiously. She didn’t answer, just kept putting the phone to her ear, listening and then pressing delete, and repeating the manoeuvre again and again and again. Henry grabbed the phone from her and listened himself, his eyes meeting hers as he heard the desperation building in Claude’s voice. By message fourteen, Claude was manic, rambling and swearing at her – Cassie could hear his voice down the phone from across the table. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, and she held her hand across her mouth as she shook her head.

By message number seventeen, his voice had changed again – slow, dull, inert, rambling. Henry was holding her hand across the table, his eyes red-rimmed, as he pressed play for the eighteenth message. Except for a faraway bang, it was long and silent.

‘You can’t blame yourself,’ Anouk said, watching as Cassie paced the room. She hadn’t sat down for days, a nervous energy keeping her moving at all times like a spinning top. She’d barely slept either, and she’d lost a ton of weight, seemingly overnight.

‘I don’t!’ Cassie refuted, whirling around to stare down at her – stare her down. Her face was pinched white with anger and blanched whiter still by her harsh black mourning clothes. ‘Why would I? I did nothing wrong. I went to Venice to help a friend. What, in that set-up, could possibly have prompted Claude to kill himself?’

Anouk swallowed in the face of her fury. Cassie’s shock had gradually settled in the past few days since arriving back from Venice, but today, the day of the funeral, it seemed to have been replaced by a molten anger that was stoked by grief. She didn’t want platitudes. She wanted answers.

‘It wasn’t jealousy, I know that much,’ she muttered as she lapped the room. ‘I’ll scream if one more person looks at me as if my loss is more than the loss of a friend. He’d be so furious at them, you know he would.’ Her hands balled into little fists as she stared over at Anouk. ‘I know you believe me . . . that it wasn’t like that between us.’

Anouk nodded. She didn’t dare not to, even though she knew people had been asking why he’d left the messages on Cassie’s phone; why he’d been so unbalanced by her trip with another man.

‘What we shared was a passion, a calling. There was no expectation, no drama. Just conversation and cooking and making up recipes and plans for working toge— Oh God!’ Her voice broke and she collapsed suddenly into a heap on the floor, her face burrowing into her hands. Anouk dropped her cigarette into her coffee and ran over to her.

‘Why?’ Cassie cried. ‘We had all these plans, Nooks! Everything had just come right for him. At last! He’d been unhappy for so long, and then all of a sudden there was this huge change in him. He just suddenly
got happy,
overnight.’

‘Maybe that was the warning sign,’ Anouk said.

Cassie went stock-still. What had she missed? She peered up at Anouk, and Anouk noticed her hands were trembling. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Maybe it was his final, last-ditch attempt at normality, a desperate lunge towards happiness. You know – fake it till you make it?’

‘No. No.’ Cassie shook her head. ‘He
was
happy. The restaurant . . . he was so fired up . . . it was real.’

‘Maybe he was never going to be able to find lasting happiness,’ Anouk said quietly, rubbing her back. ‘After what had happened to him, I don’t know how anyone could bear it.’

Cassie looked at her. ‘So you know too then? About his wife and child?’

‘Henry told me,’ she nodded. ‘In the church.’

‘Last week was the anniversary of the crash.’ Cassie’s voice was flat now. Henry had told her too, but only afterwards, at the airport. Why hadn’t he told her before? If she’d only known . . .

‘I know,’ Anouk whispered. ‘Three years. That’s what I mean, Cass, when I say you mustn’t blame yourself. This wasn’t about you being in Venice with Henry. He wasn’t sensitive – he was broken. I think he was always trying to run away from this.’

‘But why all the phone calls? Why to me?’ There was a tremor in Cassie’s voice. For all her defiance, she was plagued by the fear that she had unwittingly driven her unstable friend over the edge.

Anouk chose her words carefully. ‘Because you were the one who let him dare to hope that, maybe, things could be different for him. You brought him hope, Cassie, not despair.’

Cassie stared at her, her eyes filling with tears. ‘But I let him down. I wasn’t there when he needed me, when he needed some hope.’

‘There was no way you could have known. He lied to you – he wasn’t even supposed to be in the city. He was supposed to be in Rouen.’

‘But . . . but if I had picked up . . . if I had been there instead of in Venice on some
masquerade
.’ She spat the last word out.

‘Masquerade? What do you mean?’

‘Henry told me that he needed me to help him research a list for Venice – for his honeymoon.’

‘So?’

‘
So there’s not going to be a honeymoon – because there’s not going to be a wedding.’

Anouk stared at her, stunned. ‘
Non
.’

‘Oh yes. They called it off, supposedly.’

‘Supposedly?’

‘He was drunk when he said it. I don’t know if it’s on or not . . . I don’t know anything about anything,’ she said vehemently, balling her hands into fists again and feeling the nails dig deep into her palms.

Anouk thought back to the funeral service that morning. Henry and Cassie had barely spoken, Cassie choosing to sit apart from them in the pews, tears sliding silently down her cheeks. Anouk had thought it strange, given that they’d been together when it had happened, and she had caught Henry glancing at her worriedly several times during the service. He had delayed the departure of his expedition by three days in order to attend the funeral, but he’d had to leave immediately afterwards to catch a flight late that afternoon.

‘You sound angry with him,’ she said quietly.

‘With Claude?’

Anouk shrugged. ‘Yes, with him too. But I meant Henry.’

There was a short pause. ‘Well, I am,’ Cassie muttered. ‘I’ve had enough of all his games. I don’t know which way is up with him. I feel like he’s got me on some kind of treasure hunt, some quest he’s devised for his amusement.’ She smacked her chest with her open hand. ‘But it’s my life he’s manipulating, Nooks.’

‘He’s just trying to help you, Cass. From what I’ve seen, he seems to be trying to give you goals and focus and direction. It’s sweet. I mean – wasn’t he the one who introduced you to Claude in the first place?’

‘And the one who kept me from him in the last,’ Cassie said bitterly.