Next of Kin (13 page)

‘Bad luck again,' said Jasper, frowning. ‘But never mind. Third time's the charm.'

Gareth looked at him and shrugged off the arm that his friend still had around his shoulders. Twelve pounds down already. His mother, Jane Bentley, had given him the thirty pounds as a birthday present earlier in the day and he had hoped it would last him for a few weeks yet. Although he was from a wealthy family, his father had shrivelled his allowance down to a pittance in recent times with the promise that it would increase again when he found suitable employment, preferably alongside him in chambers. Throughout this evening his friends had paid for the dinner and the drinks—well, Alexander had for the most part—as it was his birthday but now he was starting to haemorrhage money that he could ill afford to lose.

‘It'll never go red three times in a row,' said Jasper. ‘Try again. Seriously, Gareth, there's nothing to be afraid of.'

He felt a strong desire to cut his losses and head for home with the remaining eighteen pounds intact but something about the way that Jasper was speaking to him had started to irritate him. It was the patronizing air of the man who had nothing to lose but his friend's money. In a show of defiance he reached down and picked up all his remaining chips and placed them on the red square.

‘No, black,' insisted Jasper quickly.

‘Red,' said Gareth.

‘No more bets,' called the croupier as the ball started to slow down in its trajectory.

‘You'll get it this time for sure,' said Alexander as all three friends pinned their eyes to the wheel. Gareth's hands bunched into fists and his head started to bob back and forth, urging it into the red pocket.

‘Well that's rotten luck,' said Jasper a few moments later. ‘But I did say put it on the black.'

They walked back into the bar, Gareth feeling a little shell-shocked that he had thrown away so much money in the space of a few minutes. The loss of this final piece of financial security made it feel like the weight of the horsehair wig was being placed firmly on his head while the gown was being secured around his shoulders.

‘You will keep your ears open for any suitable job, won't you?' he asked in a pleading voice of Alexander as they returned to their booth, but on this occasion his friend was barely listening because he could see the familiar shock of white hair emerging from an office on the opposite side of the room and making its own way towards the bar area.

‘I
thought
it was him,' Alexander muttered to himself as he walked over to greet his closest friend, Owen Montignac.

7

STELLA MONTIGNAC EMERGED FROM
the bathroom wearing a white cotton towelling robe and went straight to the side table to pour herself another drink. Her dark hair hung lank and wet around her shoulders as she sat down and ran a brush through it in front of the dressing-table mirror.

‘Feeling any better?' asked Raymond, who had taken off his jacket, tie and shoes and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt; the more relaxed he appeared, he believed, the less chance there was of Stella changing her mind and sending him on his way.

‘A little,' said Stella. ‘I just need some sleep really. Especially if I have to deal with him again at lunchtime tomorrow.'

‘Then let's go to bed,' he said, standing up and stretching his arms wide. He walked across to his fiancée and took the drink from her hand and placed it on the counter, leaning forwards then and kissing her lightly on the back of the neck. She turned and responded in kind for a moment but then edged back and smiled at him, shaking her head.

‘I'm going to finish my drink first,' she said. ‘And dry my hair a bit. You go to bed. I'll be there in a minute.'

He smiled and nodded, moving away from her as he started to undress. ‘You know what the real problem was,' he said as he took his trousers off and folded them neatly on a chair for the morning, smoothing out the creases with his hand as he did so. ‘He was so disgusted that I was there at all that he was determined to make things as awkward as possible. I told you that was a mistake. I shouldn't have come.'

‘Of course you should,' said Stella. ‘You're my … well you're with me, aren't you?' she asked. Stella never liked to use words such as ‘boyfriend' or ‘fiancé'; she found such terms a little ridiculous, phrases directly from the romance novels she despised.

‘He doesn't like me,' insisted Raymond.

‘Oh how could anyone not like you?' she asked, watching him in the mirror as he changed. For someone who spent so much of his time propagating new species of Hybrid Teas in a glasshouse, she never failed to be impressed by the muscular definition of his body. At moments like this he was a joy to watch; it was one of the things she liked the most about him. ‘You're perfectly adorable.'

‘Thank you,' said Raymond with a small self-conscious laugh. ‘But I don't think your cousin thinks so.'

‘Oh he's just a little jealous, that's all,' she said.

‘Of me? But why?'

She bit her lip. She hadn't meant to say that and was keen to change the emphasis. ‘He sees the two of us together, happy in each other's company, and I suppose he wishes that he too could find a girl to be happy with. I'd be jealous in his shoes.'

Raymond nodded. ‘Well I suppose that makes sense,' he said. ‘But why doesn't he then? There must be plenty of girls out there who'd fall for him. He's a handsome chap, after all. The waitresses at Claridge's couldn't keep their eyes off him.'

‘Yes, he does rather attract attention in that way,' admitted Stella quietly.

‘He's a little intense, of course,' he continued. ‘And not exactly a barrel of laughs, but I'm sure there must be some girl out there who could break through his defences if she had a mind to. Has there been anyone?'

Stella shrugged and looked away. ‘There was someone once,' she told him, ‘but it was a long time ago. He was quite a bit younger. I think they were very much in love, actually.'

‘And what happened to her?'

‘It's hard to say. It was around the time that my brother was killed. I think the affair, or whatever it was, was at its peak then. But then Andrew died and the whole family was thrown into turmoil. By the time I was thinking clearly enough again to wonder what had become of their relationship, it already seemed to be over.'

Raymond climbed into bed and settled some pillows behind his head, sitting up straight and watching her. ‘He was only eighteen when he died, wasn't he?' he asked.

‘Yes,' said Stella after a moment's hesitation, not to remember the age but to remember the boy.

‘So Owen was—?'

‘Fifteen. It was a shooting accident. The two boys, well they loved to shoot rabbits on the opposite side of the estate, near where the gamekeeper's hut is.'

‘You've never really told me what happened,' said Raymond. ‘If you don't want to discuss it, of course, that's perfectly fine.'

‘No, it's all right,' said Stella. ‘I suppose I should have told you long before now anyway. Andrew had just had a birthday, in fact, and Father and Mother had given him a new gun. He came down to breakfast one morning and asked Owen would he like to go shooting with him later in the day and they arranged it for the afternoon. When Owen went looking for him before lunchtime it turned out that he'd already gone, without a word to anyone, which was most unusual because Andrew would always go searching the house or screaming for one of us at the top of his voice if we had plans.'

‘Perhaps he couldn't wait,' suggested Raymond. ‘I know that when I first got a gun—'

‘Yes, perhaps,' interrupted Stella, who was telling her brother's story and didn't necessarily want it complemented by Raymond's. ‘Well I remember that I was up in my bedroom and Owen was there too and then he asked me what time it was and when I told him he became terribly anxious and jumped up and ran off. The whole thing seemed a little unsettling at the time actually, he went in such a dreadful rush. The funny thing was that he left in such a hurry that he forgot his own gun and when I saw him making his way down the driveway without it, I shouted at him from the window but he couldn't hear me. I thought of following too but I wasn't dressed, as I recall, so I stayed where I was. I'm glad now that I didn't go too.'

Raymond sank down a little in the bed. He could feel a distinct chill around his body and wished that Stella would climb in beside him so that he could hold her while she told this tale. But she wasn't even looking at him now; in fact she had an expression on her face that suggested she was barely aware of his presence in the room at all.

‘Well I didn't really think much more about it after that,' she continued. ‘I remember I went to take a bath, and then got dressed, and was on my way downstairs when I ran into Margaret, our old nanny, who started complaining to me that I spent far too much time in bed and that when she was a girl of my age she wouldn't have been allowed to sleep past eight. The usual things that people say, I suppose. Anyway I wasn't in the mood for it at the time and we started an argument, although I didn't think that either of our hearts was fully in it. She's always felt she has to be a mother figure to me, but at the same time she knew that I was hardly going off the rails. And I loved her too much really to be angry with her. But anyway, we were going at it hammer and tongs when suddenly the front door burst open and Owen came running in, his face pale, his hair standing on end and…' She hesitated before going on, her voice catching in her throat as she remembered the worst part. ‘And there was blood on his jacket. A lot of blood. I mean, really ridiculous amounts, Raymond, as if he'd just spilled a bucket of red paint all over himself. Needless to say, Margaret and I stopped whatever it was we were arguing about and turned to look at him, open-mouthed.

‘“What on earth's happened to you?” Margaret asked and I remember I could feel the blood draining from my face as I looked at him. At first I thought
he'd
had an accident, I thought the blood was his own but there was so much of it and it wasn't as if he was collapsing at our feet in agony so I couldn't understand it.

‘“It's Andrew,” he said then. “He's hurt himself.”

‘A lot of things were probably said then but I don't remember them all. What I do remember is sitting down on the staircase and clinging on to the railing while Margaret ran for the telephone to call a doctor and then her running out of the house on her way to find Andrew herself.'

Stella burst out into a bitter laugh and shook her head, surprising Raymond who could feel a sting of tears behind his eyes at the thought of the tragedy.

‘And you'll never believe what she did before she went,' she said.

‘What?' asked Raymond.

‘She collected a first-aid box from the kitchen. You know the type, a few plasters and a bottle of iodine, and went racing off to the woods to find my brother as if this was going to be of any use to him. He'd lost all that blood and she thought a few plasters would make him better.'

‘People don't know what to do when things like that happen. I remember my cousin Charlie's appendix exploded one afternoon and—'

‘It was the gun, you see,' said Stella quietly, ignoring the story about Cousin Charlie. ‘It was the first time he'd used it and he hadn't taken the time to get to know it properly. Of course that was Andrew all over. Impetuous to the end. Never stopped and thought. Burst into rooms without knocking, spoke without thinking, and rather than sitting down for an hour and examining the gun and getting comfortable with it he just loaded it up and took a shot at the first rabbit he saw. And it exploded back on him, the pellet going right through his face.'

Raymond winced.

‘He was almost unrecognizable,' said Stella quietly. ‘Not that I saw him of course. But that's what Owen told me. It was horrible.' She hesitated and thought about it before offering the valediction. ‘It was the beginning of the most horrible time in my life and afterwards I thought that if I could get through that, then I could get through anything. And I have.'

She put her glass down then and turned off the main light, leaving only the bedside lamp beside Raymond switched on. Without a trace of self-consciousness she slipped her robe off her shoulders and left it on the chair and stepped naked towards the bed, pulling back the sheets and climbing in beside him, lying down immediately and wrapping herself around him for comfort.

Raymond decided not to offer any sympathies for her dead brother. He knew how fake it would sound. She had told him the story and that was all he needed to know.

‘And Owen's romance ended at the same time?' he asked.

‘Almost immediately. It wasn't mentioned for a long time afterwards anyway. I know that much for sure. I mean obviously he was very young too. She was his first love. But she seems to have damaged him somehow.'

‘He must have loved her very much if he's closed down all his emotional faculties since then,' said Raymond. ‘I mean he was only fifteen.'

‘Don't let's talk about it,' said Stella, closing her eyes. ‘It's all so long ago. I don't like to remember those days.'

‘I imagine that Owen's been very protective of you since then,' he said.

‘Yes.'

‘Perhaps I should make more of an effort to get to know him,' he suggested. ‘Show him I'm not such a bad chap after all.'

‘I'm not sure,' she said. ‘He's not easily swayed by words. Let me speak to him tomorrow. I'll see if I can't get some things straightened out on my own.'

She rotated in the bed then, turning her back to him as he moved closer and started to kiss her neck, his hands reaching further down under the sheets to appreciate her warmth and suppleness. She allowed him to continue and began to respond but she was pleased that he had switched off the light because it meant that he was unable to see the sorrow and regret in her eyes and the pain that always threatened to overwhelm her at any moment if she permitted it.