One Christmas Morning & One Summer's Afternoon (14 page)

‘I’m sorry you thought so.’

Santiago’s deep, mellifluous tones rang out through the tiny shop. Laura Tiverton blushed, Mrs Upton coughed nervously and Piers Renton-Chambers felt the blood drain from his face like pus from a boil.

‘I say. You really shouldn’t sneak up on people like that,’ said Piers crossly. ‘I’m sorry if I offended you. I thought I was having a private conversation.’

‘In a shop?’ Santiago looked down his hawklike nose at the MP, his black eyes alight with arrogance, like a glamorous racehorse noticing a mangy, stable-yard dog. In perfectly fitting jeans and a plain white T-shirt that showed off both his athlete’s physique and mahogany-brown tan to perfection, Santiago radiated enough glamour to light up Oxford Street. When he broke into his famous, wolfish grin, he was in serious danger of setting Upton’s Stores on fire. ‘Don’t worry.’ Santiago clapped Piers on the back, a little too heartily for comfort. ‘Luckily for you, I’m not so easily offended.’ Turning his attention to the mesmerized shopkeeper, he added, ‘I wonder, Mrs Upton, is it possible to buy some of your homemade damson jam? I’m told it’s very good.’

Poor Mrs Upton nodded mutely and scurried out to the storeroom. She couldn’t have looked more bedazzled if Elvis had just strolled into the building.

Ignoring Piers, who still stood hovering by the counter like a spare part, Santiago turned to Laura.

‘I’m so sorry. Did I jump the queue?’ he said smoothly. ‘You were still shopping.’

‘No, I er … no, no. I’m all done,’ Laura babbled nervously, gazing up at him like a schoolgirl. ‘Just a few onions. Ha ha ha! Anyway. Enjoy your damsons. Goodbye!’

‘Let me carry your bag to your car at least.’ Santiago put a hand on her arm just as she was making an embarrassed dash for the door. ‘I couldn’t bear to seem impolite to such a beautiful lady.’

He was so perfect, even his hands looked as if they’d been newly manicured. Laura tried hard not to think about where they might have been recently, and all the legions of beautiful female bodies they’d caressed.

‘Really, thank you, but I’m fine,’ she blurted. ‘They’re not heavy.’

If Gabe heard that Santiago de la Cruz had been seen in Brockhurst High Street carrying her shopping, he was liable to head straight round to Wheelers Cottage and do something less than sporting with a cricket bat.

‘I’ll see you later, Piers!’ Laura called over her shoulder as she scuttled out.

‘Here you are.’ Mrs Upton returned, triumphant, with a jar of jam. ‘That’s the very last of this season’s batch.’

Santiago reached into his pocket but the old woman shook her head vigorously. ‘No, no,’ she insisted. ‘That’s on the house. Consider it a “welcome to Brockhurst” gift.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Santiago, bestowing a second smile on her. ‘I must say,’ he added, turning back to poor Piers, ‘it is nice to be made so welcome by my fellow villagers.’

And with that he swept out, a lingering waft of Gucci Envy aftershave the only reminder that he’d been there at all.

‘Well!’ Mrs Upton felt quite unsteady on her feet. ‘What do you think of that, Mr Renton-Chambers? Quite the gentleman in the flesh, isn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ said Piers, through gritted teeth. ‘Quite.’

He tried to recapture his hopeful, happy feeling of earlier, but found that it was quite gone.

Will Nutley made his way along the woodland path with a spring in his step. He had much to be thankful for. It was a gorgeous day, with shafts of warm, pale sunlight piercing the canopy of oak and silver birch and a thick, heady scent of moss and jasmine and honeysuckle and wild garlic hanging in the air. He wasn’t in London, stuck at his desk making dreary phone calls to dreary bankers at his dreary,
dreary
recruitment firm, Martin & Rudd. And, best of all, he was just minutes away from seeing Emma again.

Will Nutley had been in love with Emma Harwich for so long that he could no longer remember a time when his heart hadn’t been full of her. He was fifteen when they first met, at Brockhurst Manor, the local co-ed boarding school. Emma was only eleven then, four years below him. But already she had the striking good looks that would go on to make her one of the country’s most sought-after models. More importantly, she was fun back in those days. Always laughing, always getting up to mischief, and always adoring of Will, whom she adopted first as a sort of cool older brother, and later as her first real boyfriend. As day pupils in a school where almost everybody boarded, Will and Emma often walked home together, along the very path where Will now strolled, carrying a posy of hand-picked flowers and a heart heavy with hope. Their relationship had been a friendship first. It was, Will told himself, still a friendship now. Surely what had blossomed into romantic love once, years ago, could do so again?

Of course, much had changed since those days. Back then, Will had been one of the stars of Brockhurst Manor – older, cooler, and captain of the cricket team. Although he was not the most handsome boy in the sixth form, scores of Brockhurst girls were in love with him, and wildly envious of Emma Harwich, a lowly fourth-year, for snagging him. And then of course there was the ‘package’ that he came with. Will’s family lived in a stunning Georgian pile on the edge of the village and were known to be vastly wealthy. His mother wore couture clothes and was regularly photographed in
Tatler
and even in the society pages of the national newspapers. His father collected vintage Bentleys and threw shooting parties to which the entire county flocked.

Yes, back then it had been Will who had been the catch.

But, after he went away to university, everything changed. Will tried hard to maintain a long-distance relationship with Emma. But she began spending more and more time up in London, clubbing and generally getting herself noticed as a beauty about town. Inevitably, they grew apart. It wasn’t long before modelling scouts started to approach Emma. Soon money, success and attention began rolling towards her like a character-destroying tsunami, just as all three of those things were flooding
out
of Will’s life like used bathwater. The Nutley family fortune, which had taken a century to build, was lost in a matter of weeks. Will had been forced to drop out of uni and take a job that he loathed in London. With his father on the brink of a nervous breakdown, his mother drinking and his own hopes and dreams in tatters, Will had had no time to focus on his girlfriend. And Emma, dazzled by her new life and career, and dealing with family dramas of her own (Paul Harwich’s coming out had shocked everyone, but few people more than his own daughter), drifted further and further away.

For Will, one of the hardest parts had been the fact that they had never officially ‘broken up’. There was no tearful meeting, no phone call, no long, Dear John letter, spelling out the inevitable. Will had simply opened a newspaper one day and seen a picture of Emma at a film premiere in Leicester Square on the arm of some smarmy Hollywood director. A string of boyfriends followed, all of them richer and handsomer and infinitely more glamorous than Will.

He had dated, too, of course. A girl from the office; the sister of one of his uni friends. But sex with other women only served to remind him of how much more it had meant with Emma. He’d told himself that his move back to the Swell Valley was prompted purely by longing for the countryside and a need to escape London. But in truth it was the pull both of Emma and of their shared past. If they ran into each other in London, they’d be little more than strangers. But here, in Fittlescombe, their roots were intertwined. Here, he felt sure, he could rediscover the old Emma Harwich and win her back.

The woods ended at a half-rotted wooden gate that led directly into Woodside Hall’s paddock. Since the divorce, Penny could no longer afford to keep horses, and the field was now a wild meadow of knee-high grasses, dotted with buttercups and dandelions. Will waded through it, brushing off his shirt and running a hand through his hair as he approached the front door. It swung open before he had a chance to knock.

‘Will!’

At least Emma’s mother seemed pleased to see him. Smiling broadly, her arms thrown open in welcome, she pulled him into the hallway and wrapped him in a heartfelt hug.

‘I saw you coming from the study. Since when do you use the front door, silly boy? You know the kitchen’s always open.’

‘Well, it’s been a while,’ he blushed. ‘I didn’t want to assume—’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! You’re as good as family,’ Penny insisted. She was looking great, Will thought, and far younger than her thirty-nine years, in a short denim skirt and an ancient tie-dyed T-shirt covered in paint splatters. Her hair was tied up in a bun, from which wisps continually escaped and blew into her eyes and mouth, which she kept pushing away with her hands. Will noticed that these were covered in scratches.

‘Skittles,’ Penny explained, catching him looking. ‘I tried to give the stupid animal a worm tablet this morning. She wasn’t having it.’

The Harwiches’ cat had been old and cantankerous for as long as Will had known the family.

‘Are those for Emma?’ Penny gestured to the flowers he was clutching. The walk from the village in such hot weather had left them looking distinctly wilted and sorry for themselves. ‘Shall I pop them in some water?’

Just then, Emma appeared at the top of the stairs. In tiny shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt with a faded American flag on it, she looked every inch the supermodel, her long limbs as smooth and brown as sticks of caramel. When she saw Will she smiled, then followed it up with a belligerent glare at her mother.

‘Why didn’t you tell me Will was here?’ she barked imperiously.

‘He just arrived,’ said Penny, choosing to ignore her daughter’s rude tone. ‘He brought you some flowers. Isn’t that lovely of him?’

‘Yes, I can see that. I have eyes,’ Emma snapped.

Will felt awkward, witnessing the obvious tension between mother and daughter. But his discomfiture was outweighed by the sheer rapture of seeing Emma again. When she came downstairs and hugged him tightly, whispering, ‘It’s
sooooo
good to see you!’ in his ear, he almost felt as if he might pass out with happiness.

Penny disappeared into the kitchen to find a jug for the flowers. ‘Let’s sit outside,’ said Emma, grabbing a half-empty packet of Marlboro Lights from the hall table and taking Will by the hand. ‘Mum can bring us something to drink and we can catch up in peace.’

He followed her out to two deckchairs, half shaded beneath the boughs of a cherry tree and watched, enchanted, while she lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

‘I didn’t expect to see you till Saturday.’ Gazing up at the sky, she blew the smoke out through her lips on perfect rings. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’

‘I took a few days off. For training,’ said Will.

‘
Training!
’ Emma’s tinkly laugh rang out around the garden. ‘You’re as bad as Sebby. Anyone would think it was the Olympics, not a sleepy old village cricket match.’

Will shrugged. ‘There’s no point playing if you don’t take it seriously. Especially now that Brockhurst have raised the stakes and brought in a pro.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Emma smiled. ‘So I heard. Santiago.’

Will did not like the way she referred to de la Cruz by his first name, or the way it rolled off her tongue.

‘But he’s no match for you, surely?’

Will couldn’t tell if she was flirting with him or mocking him. He wanted so much to believe the former, but it had been so long since they’d spent any time together, he found it hard to read her signals.

‘He’s a pretty handy fast bowler,’ Will admitted. ‘Not as good as he thinks he is, of course. No one could be as good as Santiago de la Cruz
thinks
he is. The man’s so vain he makes Donald Trump look shy.’

Emma laughed, sincerely this time.

‘I’ll be at the nets this afternoon with Gabe, working on my block shots,’ Will went on. ‘If you’ve nothing better to do, you could come down to the green and watch us.’

He’d tried so hard to sound nonchalant, but there was no mistaking the desperate hope in his voice.

From the comfort of her deckchair, Emma looked across at him coolly. She knew his face so well. Those merry amber eyes and the smattering of freckles that seemed to spread out and join together in the summer months, giving the illusion of being a tan until you got really, really close; both brought back memories of a simpler time. It had been a happier time in some ways. But could one ever go back, after so many bridges had been crossed?

Emma couldn’t have said whether she was attracted to Will Nutley any more or not. Whether what she felt was a memory – nostalgia – or something more. What she
did
know was that it felt nice to have him here, wanting her, courting her, obviously still as in love with her as the day they parted ways. Will made her feel safe in a way that no one else could.

‘I’m not sure what I’m doing later,’ she said.

Will’s face fell.

‘I should be able to make it, though,’ said Emma quickly. ‘I’ll try. Either way, I’ll be cheering you on at the match.’

Will smiled, lying back in his chair and stretching out his long legs as Woodside Hall’s garden buzzed with life around him. Emma’s reaction wasn’t everything he’d hoped for. She hadn’t swooned and fallen, damsel-like, into his arms. But it was a start.

*****

Less than an hour after Will had gone, Emma had run upstairs, put on some eye make-up, doused herself in her mother’s Chanel Cristalle and set off down the lane towards Brockhurst. By the time she reached Wheelers Cottage, a gorgeous, thatched long-house with roses around an ancient wooden front door and a thick, two-hundred-year-old yew hedge along one side of its idyllic garden, her cheeks were pleasantly flushed with exercise and anticipation. A lesser beauty might have been tempted to stop and check her reflection in a pocket mirror or a parked car’s window. But Emma Harwich knew she looked a million dollars as she skipped up to the porch and knocked on the door.

‘Who is it?’ The voice from inside was deep, heavily accented and quite obviously annoyed.