The Love Letter (17 page)

There was an awkward pause. Poppy carefully picked off the passion fruit seeds that had landed on her smock. Across the table, Francis’s blue eyes were as wide as two Delft changers. Byron helpfully filled the silence by snuffling up the grapes that had just fallen from his mistress’s spoon, then spitting them out and making doggy ‘bleuch’ noises at ankle height.

Poppy was first to regain her composure, readjusting her turban smoothly. ‘You must do what is required to save Farcombe.’

‘I can’t “showmance”,’ Legs said in a panic, stealing another glance at Francis and instantly regretting it. He looked as though he was about to cry. She tore her eyes away and levelled her gaze
at Poppy, who had always frightened her like the Ice Queen in Narnia, and did so now more than ever.

She was looking irritated. ‘Why ever not?’

‘I can’t “pretend” to love Francis again,’ she said firmly. Her eyes involuntarily sought his across the table, then raced away. ‘I can’t possibly fake something that has never st—’

‘Stop!’ Poppy screeched, covering her ears. ‘This is no time for sentiment. I’ve spent all morning planning this. It’s all arranged. You and Francis will get back together tomorrow evening. I’ve invited the Keiller-Myleses to kitchen sups, along with Kizzy’s parents. Darling Édith and Jax will be here, of course. There’s even a charming beard lined up for you, Allegra. We must have an objective outsider after all.’

‘As witness to the crime?’ Legs stuttered, watching her with mounting alarm.

‘If you like.’ The dowager queen beamed back, her stage set. ‘I prefer to think of Jay Goburn as Everyman.’ She looked rather skittish. ‘Superb prose style; reminiscent of Fitzgerald at his best. He’s researching a book set in the peninsula, and we’ve been exchanging emails for some months now. Turns out he’s in the area this weekend and would like to visit the house and gardens, so I invited him to tea and on to supper.’

Lined him up for yourself more like, thought Legs, observing Poppy on a mission. She had a penchant for last minute entertaining, which Hector rather cruelly called her ‘asks’; or ‘agoraphobic spontaneity kicks’. Poppy, who had always found long-term commitments like the festival terrifying, loved nothing more than rustling together dinner for twelve or a cocktail party for fifty with just a few days’ notice. Few who were invited ever dared to refuse an invitation, even if it meant cancelling other commitments and hastily arranging babysitters. There was something about Poppy that defied conformity, and her parties were famously lavish, generous and entertaining. She was always utterly in control, and held court throughout, with great force and compelling charm.
Despite their eleventh hour conception, they were never casual; ‘Kitchen Sups’ was a well worn euphemism for ‘Formal Dining’.

The minstrels’ gallery players found themselves demoted from courtly dance to farce as Poppy now gave notes like an amateur theatre director at the first cast read-through: ‘The American will be your blind date, Legs, but of course you are still in love with Francis,’ she ordered so forcefully that Legs and Francis locked eyes again, and again got stuck there, grey clouds and blue sky converging. ‘Tomorrow evening, you two will be unable to resist your mutual attraction,’ she breathed in her deep alto, ‘you will be publicly reconciled, and Hector will be told. After that, he and that fat—’ She flashed her guilty-sweet smile as she corrected herself. ‘Hector and your mother will see the error of their ways. You
must
cooperate, Legs.’

She looked at them all in wonder, certain this was a conspiracy to humiliate her. Francis was studying his fingernails fixedly, as though hoping they’d sprout Edward Scissorhands blades to claw himself out of this situation. Beside him, the reddest head in the room was tilted to heaven as though in prayer.

‘And you’re OK with all this?’ Legs appealed directly to Kizzy.

Two glittering green eyes fixed upon her, as bright as a rainbow trout’s scales. ‘I’m cool if Poppy is,’ she purred in her best Kirsty Young tones.

Poppy was staring straight at Legs, Ice Queen to subject.

‘I won’t do it.’ She tried one last protest.

Francis swallowed with a loud gulp.

‘In that case,’ Poppy said flatly, ‘the festival must be cancelled.’

Kizzy and Francis briefly united with a cry of ‘no!’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Legs laughed in surprise.

But Poppy’s dark eyes glittered, knowing that she had played a trump card. ‘Without Hector, there is no festival.’

Legs stared at the passion fruit seeds scattered around her plate, already staining the white tablecloth with little blood-red pinpricks. ‘You can’t do that.’

‘I certainly can. I’m the Chair and majority shareholder.’

Legs looked at Francis for confirmation and he nodded almost imperceptibly.

‘Gordon Lapis won’t get his moment in the sun,’ Poppy said breezily, enjoying the obvious panic in Legs’ face. ‘His desire to appear here is rather extraordinary, but this whole summer has been far from ordinary. I was rather warming to the idea of an enigma in our midst but now I have quite gone off the prospect of the festival entirely. We cannot possibly host a public event amid such family anarchy. It will be a great relief to cancel it this year.’

Looking at Francis again, Legs could see his blue gaze eating into hers, begging her not to let him down. She quickly closed her eyes, only to find Conrad in her head, along with Gordon Lapis whom she had never even met, yet his presence burned brightest of all in her mind, like young Ptolemy Finch with his white hair and wings. How she longed for the little hero’s nerve right now.

‘Can I have some time to think about this, please?’ She gulped.

‘You have until tomorrow evening,’ Poppy said darkly.

As Francis walked Legs through the walled gardens, along the high yew avenue and into the churchyard beyond the family’s private gate, he explained the financial situation.

‘Dad looks like he’s still worth a fortune on paper, but the truth is he’s pretty cash poor these days – has been for years. He borrowed heavily against all his properties when he was building Smile Media and then didn’t repay all the loans when he sold up. The recession wiped out his investments, and he was still gambling heavily then. He’d think nothing of betting fifty thousand in a race or spending the value of a small house in a casino. He only stopped
all that when he married Poppy, but by then the damage was done. It was Poppy who paid off the money outstanding on this place when she inherited from Goblin Granny, hence she’s majority shareholder of the estate and its interests, including the festival. The running costs of this house, its farms and all the tenanted property are beyond belief; half the villagers pay peppercorn rents, and nothing has been properly renovated since the eighties.

‘The festival is one of the few profitable income streams. The family has precious little involvement in the practical running of it these days, as you know. It’s all handled by the team on site, but Poppy has ultimate autonomy. The financial side doesn’t interest her; she loves such clever people coming into her orbit for a few days annually, although she gets into a panic about the event itself, worse and worse each year. With Dad staging his ridiculous rebellion this year, I think he might have truly pushed her over the edge.’

‘But she loves the festival. She wouldn’t want to cancel it.’

‘It was always Dad’s baby, remember? Sure, she took it over just like she took over the house, cramming it full of sculpture, performance poetry and installations. It used to be just music and literature at one time, Dad’s real loves, but Poppy saw an opportunity to showcase her own work and naturally got her way, putting all her cronies onto the board.’ There was great bitterness in his voice. ‘Now that she has been proven the worst sculptress in the stratosphere, she keeps looking for an excuse to ditch the Arts in favour of an international celebration of food.’

‘But she hates food!’

‘Don’t assume that just because she doesn’t eat it, she doesn’t crave it. Rather like surrounding herself by art she admires even though she can’t create it.’

They had reached the first of the gravestones in the outer reaches of the churchyard, tucked behind yet more yews that shielded the plot traditionally allocated to the estate from that of the rest of the dearly departed congregation. To the left of the yews in a prettily railed enclosure stood the grandest stones and a small
mausoleum belonging to the Waite family who had owned Farcombe Hall for several hundred years until they were forced out when death duties practically bankrupted them in the seventies. The estate had then passed through several developers who made unsuccessful attempts to fashion it into a luxury hotel and golf resort, before being bought by Hector at the height of his success as a private holiday home for his family.

Francis rested his hip against a tombstone’s lichen crust, blond hair flopping as he bowed his head, still the self-conscious epic hero he’d fashioned himself into as a student. ‘We can’t let her do this, Legs; not if Gordon Lapis wants to come here. There’s too much riding on it, and Poppy certainly won’t get Dad back by cancelling the one thing that could save Farcombe.’ He steepled his fingers to his nose for a long time before admitting, ‘We have a rather large financial shortfall on our hands this year. Dad’s been trying to play it down, of course, and now he’s run away and buried his head in the sand completely. Poppy has no idea how serious it is, nor the limited number of options we face if the festival doesn’t go ahead.’

‘What are the options?’

‘We’ll have no option but to asset-strip – land, art, possibly even the house itself.’ He eyed her face closely for a reaction. ‘There’s already one offer on the table.’

‘You can’t sell Farcombe!’

He stared down at the tombstone. ‘Vin Keiller-Myles has been trying to get his hands on this place for years.’

‘Isn’t he the dodgy impresario? Always arguing with your father about which performers to invite?’

Back in the Fitzroy Club days, Vin Keiller-Myles had always been one of last men standing – and musicians playing – who would join club owner Hector in sinking bottles of bourbon late into the night, alternately jamming, imbibing, brokering deals and above all gambling. Both men had been high-stakes players when it came to laying bets and doing business. Hector had been one of the earliest investors in Vin’s mail-order music company, VKM, at
a time when few believed it would work. Not many years later, Vin repaid his due and fulfilled a lifetime’s ambition by buying the Fitzroy Club for himself. Since Farcombe Festival’s inception, Vin had been one of its foremost patrons.

Vin liked to collect modern sculpture to fill his echoing and bright mock-Deco holiday house perched on the cliffs just across the Cornish border, rivalling nearby GCHQ Bude for its vast, weird whiteness. He was to date the largest – and only genuine – collector of Poppy’s work. In return, Poppy booked many of his avant-garde musical friends to perform during festival week, his taste these days being no less eclectic than in his rock and roll youth, often involving ageing white-haired men in black suits and dark glasses playing one note repeatedly on vast stacks of electronic instruments connected to computers. He and Hector maintained a joshing public friendship and private rivalry that verged on extreme enmity.

‘Vin wants to buy out the festival as well as the estate,’ Francis looked up at her through his lashes, ‘but Dad’s always told him he’ll only get it an artwork at a time, starting with Poppy’s blobs. He’d rather torch the place than see Vin playing lord of the manor here.’

‘I thought they were old business allies?’

He shook his head. ‘Old gamblers are never friends, not when they’ve lost so much to each other over the years. There’s a well-known rumour that Vin won the Fitzroy Club in a bet. The same rumour says that Dad seduced his girlfriend by way of revenge, then fell in love and married her.’

‘Your
mother
?
’

He nodded. ‘She was Vin’s childhood sweetheart, and Dad stole her off him. It’s all supposedly forgiven and forgotten now, but you never get over something like that, do you?’ His blue eyes seared into hers, making her look away.

She’d never heard him mention the fact before, although he could have buried it in a quote.

They walked past the yews to the mausoleum.

‘I often wish my mother had been buried here.’ Francis stopped
by the rails and gazed at the pretty building, a neoclassical mini-temple cast in local stone, inset with carved marble plaques featuring doves and angels. ‘Then I’d be able to visit her grave whenever I like.’

Legs’ heart gave a lurch of pity as it always did when she thought about beautiful Ella Protheroe losing her life so young and leaving her son without a mother, her heartbroken husband with an empty castle and no queen.

According to Francis, whose concept of beauty had changed over the years, Ella had looked variously like Raquel Welch, Elizabeth Siddal, Nicole Kidman and an Egon Schiele’s model Valerie Neuzil. Almost all photographs of his mother had been destroyed by Hector’s jealous second wife, Inés. But Ella had undoubtedly been a great beauty, and she had loved Farcombe, although illness had made her a rare visitor and she had spent the final years of her short life in New York. The Big Apple had also been the setting for Hector’s ill-fated rebound marriage, an unhappy union which Francis sometimes ruefully pointed out lasted half as long as his mother’s illness, but brought no less pain or respite. It was only when Hector had returned to Farcombe that he’d found reprieve and eventually love … or so Legs had always believed, however much Francis had tried to cast Poppy as the evil stepmother when he was a boy.