Well Groomed (7 page)

‘But I – I mean we . . .’ Tash fought to control the situation, but her grandmother was too forceful and too desperate.

‘I weel pay for eet all,’ Etty announced grandly, reaching for a handkerchief to dab her eyes. ‘I weel spare no expense. I weel make thees the best—’

‘We’re paying, Mummy!’ Alexandra chipped in. ‘Pascal is quite delighted to help two such lovely young people start married life with every possible treat.’

Pascal cleared his throat unhappily.

‘I say, congratulations, chaps—’ Ben Meredith was trying to raise his glass at the head of the table, but his wife cut him off.

‘By rights, Daddy should actually pay for Tash’s wedding, Mummy,’ she argued. ‘He paid for ours.’ She carefully didn’t add what a fight he had put up to keep it cheap.

James’s jowls were lifting like a bulldog cornered by honking geese. ‘I’m not bloody paying.’

‘But we’re—’ Tash stared hopelessly at Niall.

He was still speechless with giggles, lifting his palms upwards and shaking his head.

‘You paid for my wedding!’ Sophia pointed out.

‘And damned nearly bankrupted myself in the process.’

‘I weel pay!’

‘You’re absolutely penniless, Mother. Of course you can’t pay.’ Alexandra was beaming at Tash, tears edging her mascara into her crows’ feet. ‘I’m just so happy for you both, darling.’

‘Mummy, I think there’s been a terrible mis—’

‘Shut up, everyone!’ howled a loud bass from the head of the table, accompanied by the chiming of a coffee spoon against a port glass.

They all shut up and turned to look at Sophia’s husband, Ben – a tall, rangy blond with soup stains on his shirt and his thinning mop of hay-like hair on end. He rose from his seat to his full six feet four inches, stooping to avoid the Christmas holly which was escaping from a picture frame behind his head, and grinned awkwardly.

‘I think we should actually be congratulating Tash and Niall here,’ he said, rather embarrassed now by his outburst, his weathered cheeks starting to pinken. ‘Champagne all round, I say.’

‘Have we got enough?’ Sophia took a sharp breath. ‘It won’t be chilled.’

‘It weel in this house,
chérie
.’ Pascal shivered.

‘Oh, Christ alive!’ Tash whispered, kicking Niall, who was now bent double with delighted mirth. ‘What are we going to do?’

Etty, who was pretending to be so carried away with emotion that she had her face buried in her handkerchief, held her breath and eyed them closely through the lacework.

‘Well.’ Niall straightened up with difficulty and buried his mouth in Tash’s hair so that only she could hear, ‘We could get married, I guess.’ He was still fighting giggles.

‘I guess,’ Tash said hesitantly, worried that she was going to faint because her heart was beating so quickly that her blood was whooshing around her body like a white-water canoe run. ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit drastic, though?’

‘Not nearly so terrifying a prospect as telling your family that it’s been a mistake.’

Niall kissed her ear through its curtain of hair and tried not to notice that Pascal had whipped out his camera and was snapping their embrace for the album. At least Polly, who was confined to the kitchen with the other children, couldn’t video it.

He was still buoyed up by several glasses of scotch and a bottle of Burgundy, Tash realised. In this state he’d agree to sky-dive naked from the Holdham Hall ramparts if he thought it would make him popular with her family.

‘This is ridiculous.’ She bit her lip and then shook her head firmly. ‘We must tell them, Niall.’

Pulling away, she turned to face the pairs of eager eyes trained on her. Even Sophia’s helpers, staggering in with bottles of their employer’s non-vintage champagne, were watching the couple with avid absorption. Niall’s star status made this something of a coup – they’d undoubtedly be on to the tabloid press as soon as the corks had popped.

‘Listen, everyone.’ Tash took a deep breath. ‘I have something to explain before this goes too far—’

The next moment a broad, warm hand had enveloped hers and she was swept out of the room, almost flooring herself as she fell over Sophia’s pack of dogs, now lined up like the von Trapp children outside the dining-room doors.

Niall pulled her into the kitchen lobby and glanced around to check they wouldn’t be overheard before clutching her shoulders and pressing her back against a hunting print. ‘Don’t tell them,’ he urged.

‘I must!’ Tash stared into his chocolate eyes, wishing for a brief, honeyed moment that she didn’t have to. ‘This is all wrong. We can’t get hitched just because my potty grandmother gets the wrong end of the stick. It’s mad.’

‘No more mad than me getting down on one knee and embarrassing myself by fluffing my lines, now.’

Tash pushed her hair out of her eyes and stared at him, her heart suddenly in her throat and using her epiglottis as a punch-bag.

‘You weren’t going to though, were you?’ She swallowed her heart down so that she could croak out the words, but it continued beating madly in her windpipe like a ping-pong ball in a vacuum hose.

‘Well, not today, no.’ He shrugged, glancing away. ‘Perhaps not at all. Not like that, no.’

Tash closed her eyes. She and Niall spent such long stretches of time apart, and were hopelessly impractical when together. Although lovely, their relationship had barely progressed in the two years they had been together. Each brief, snatched weekend still possessed the heady, heart-lifting feeling of a holiday romance. They weren’t really capable of buying a toaster jointly, let alone starting married life.

‘I went down on my knees to ask Lisette to marry me,’ Niall was saying, his voice suddenly very quiet and serious.

‘Was that before or after you tied the knot in the Las Vegas Elvis Chapel?’ Tash bit her lip and fought a smile.

‘Shhh!’ Niall rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t remind me. We hardly saw that as a marriage – it was the family occasion in England that counted. I did everything the right way – father’s permission, talking and planning through the night, not telling her where the honeymoon would be. Look where that got us.’

‘I know.’ Tash touched his cheek, trying to blot out the excited chatter coming from the nearby dining room.

‘And you once agreed to marry someone you didn’t love simply because you didn’t want to hurt his feelings by saying no,’ he reminded her with a crooked smile.

Tash guiltily bit her lip at the memory. She had agreed to get engaged to an ex-boyfriend once because she couldn’t bring herself to tell him that the relationship was over. It had been one of the worst times of her life.

He pressed his forehead to hers. ‘So I guess asking isn’t always the best route.’

She gazed into his dark, honest eyes for a long time.

‘What exactly are you saying here?’

Niall smiled. It was that big, loopy smile which creased his cheeks, crinkled his brown eyes and could stop her heart at fifty paces.

‘That perhaps your mad bloody family have done us a favour. That perhaps this is fate. Neither of us is putting pressure on the other; the pressure is from outside. We could tackle this together. Think about this together. Enjoy this together. That’s what marriages are about, Tash – committing to something together.’

‘You’re not saying that you’re really willing to go through with it?’ She gulped.

‘Why not?’ he laughed. ‘We love each other, live together as much as we can. We now have dual custody of a dog and a turkey. And,’ he rolled his eyes, ‘I seriously think your grandmother would breathe her last if we tell them it’s all been a misunderstanding now.’

‘You really want to marry me?’ Tash was aware that she was sounding rather thick, but she wanted to make sure she was reading this absolutely right.

‘Depends if you want to marry me?’ He raised a black eyebrow hopefully.

‘It’s certainly a thought.’

‘Nothing need change.’ He shrugged. ‘Sure, you don’t even need to change your name. And it’d make your family and mine extremely happy.’

‘And us?’

Niall smiled. ‘I don’t know about you, but the only thing in the world that would make me happier would be a bit more time with you.’

‘Same here.’

‘So, shall we do it?’

Tash hugged him tightly, tucking the doubts and worries tightly away in her excited, leaping heart. ‘Like you say, why not?’

NIALL’S FAMILY WERE NOT as delighted as he’d anticipated. In their Catholic eyes, he was still, strictly speaking, married to Lisette, so could not be married again in their church. And, although they adored Tash, they felt she was too young and too daffy to make their son a decent wife.

‘Sure, the girl’s a mere slip of a ting, Niall,’ his mother worried when he called them from the forge to break the news. ‘And she’s a hopeless cook, so she is. I’ll never forget those sloppy pancake tings she served up on your birthday last year.’

‘Fajitas.’

‘Well, it certainly gave your father gas, now.’ There was a deep sigh at the other end of the line followed by the sound of a hand-rolled cigarette being lit. ‘Are you sure you’re doing the right ting here, son?’

‘Sure,’ Niall said firmly, knowing just how to win her over. ‘Tash can’t wait to start a family.’

‘Ah, sweet girl.’ There was an ecstatic exhalation of breath followed by a hacking cough. ‘I’m so pleased for you, my darling. Sure, it’s about time you gave Nuala’s nippers some young cousins to play with now.’ She started coughing again.

‘You should give up smoking, Mother,’ Niall scolded. ‘I feel so much better since I packed it in.’

As soon as he was off the phone, he lit up one of Tash’s Camel Lights and wondered if feeding his mother the babies line had been a wise move. She was bound to be searching for her knitting needles already in anticipation of tiny socks and babygrows.

Through Lime Tree Farm’s illuminated kitchen window, Tash caught sight of a neat, pudding-basin mop of blonde hair flopping over the table to scan a newspaper, and breathed a sigh of relief as she realised Zoe was there to offer coffee and advice. As she crunched up the drive, Zoe looked up and waved, smiling widely. She had a classically poised, northern European appearance that seemed icy-cool and imperturbable on the surface but cracked every time she smiled to reveal a bubbling geyser of warmth beneath. Tash thought her the epitome of sex appeal and longed to possess that effortless glamour.

Zoe Goldsmith was older than her sister, Penny, by a few years – she never specified how many – and had been something of a career and society glamourpuss in her time. For many years, she had been married to one of London’s most successful designers. In the eighties, she’d had a showpiece house in Greenwich, a regular ‘career mother’ column in a Sunday broadsheet, feature pieces commissioned weekly, a designer wardrobe and two great kids who were so well behaved and good-looking that her friends had smarted with envy as they wiped snot and jam from the howling faces of their own plump brats.

Quite what had gone wrong was something Zoe kept a closely guarded secret. All Tash knew was that the dream marriage had ended very abruptly and acrimoniously, leaving her financially stymied as she lost both her house and the job practically in the same week. She and the kids had then decamped to stay with Penny and Gus temporarily until Zoe could find more work and get herself a small flat in London.

That had been seven years ago. So far as Tash could gather, Zoe had gone through some sort of breakdown shortly afterwards, and had stayed on to recuperate, paying her way by cooking and filing for her overstressed sister who in those days competed abroad for a great part of the year. Finding it impossible to get back into the closed shop of high-powered journalism, Zoe had tried instead to write fiction, failing to attract any interest in her work for several years before she accidentally bumped into an old friend who was setting up a new publishing venture.

That venture was now one of the most successful erotic fiction imprints in the industry, churning out hot, steamy tomes with short shelf-lives and high profits. Zoe – under the name Su Denim – was its flagship author, with over twenty books to her credit. She could now easily afford those things that had eluded her after her divorce: a London house, smart social life and public-school education for her kids. But instead, she deliberately shunned such superficial trophies, preferring the settled, bucolic life with her sister and brother-in-law. The warmth of her friends within the eventing circuit and the good education that the local schools were providing for her kids could not easily be replaced by the slavishly fashionable and academically snobbish world she had left behind in the chattering dining rooms of her London circle. In truth, Tash also suspected that she stayed at Lime Tree Farm because she also knew how invaluable she had become to Penny and Gus. Without her calm, easy-going efficiency, unflappable common sense and occasional baling out when the bills turned red, the Moncrieffs would be bankrupt within weeks. Tash adored her, although she sensed a deep, enduring sadness that Zoe kept deeply hidden from her chaotic, dependent family.

‘Can I borrow a fag? I left mine in the forge.’

Tash settled down at the Moncrieffs’ cluttered table and reached for the nearest packet.

‘Please do.’ Zoe looked up from a pile of late Christmas cards and grinned. ‘They’re Rufus’s. Since I confronted him about the cigarette butts in the guttering outside his window, the little brat now feels he can smoke openly in front of me. I have absolutely no authority.’

Rufus was the elder of her two children; at seventeen he was a big, blond charmer who loudly justified smoking, drinking and having four girlfriends as ‘vital teenage experimentation’.

‘Matty treated my mother the same way the moment he grew taller than her.’ Tash was searching around for a lighter. ‘It’s just a height thing. Did you have a good Christmas?’