The Vintage Summer Wedding (11 page)

Anna glossed over the fact that she’d then been bitten by a horsefly and they’d had to go home and Seb had driven to the pharmacy for some cream but it was shut, while she’d tried to have a bath and the water had run brown so, in the end, she’d sulked on the back porch with an ice pack on her massive bite, refusing to speak.

Her overriding thought was that she had to get back. That the image of Seb and the stile and the view was getting further away, receding like the mouth of a tunnel. Fading as the dusk settled.

‘I have to go,’ she said suddenly, cutting off some story Luke was telling mid-flow.

‘You can’t go,’ he smirked. ‘We’re catching up. I thought we could go for a drink, maybe get some dinner. I’m not in town for long, Anna Banana.’ He pushed his sunglasses up into his wild hair and his grinning eyes creased at the corners.

‘No, really, I have to go. I’m sorry to leave you here, but I have to go home.’

‘Running back to Sebastian?’ He shook his head. ‘He’s got you under lock and key, hasn’t he, Anna?’

‘No, not at all, it’s just…’ She shook her head, trying to think of something to say. Seeing suddenly that the sum of the parts of his face didn’t always add up to better. That sometimes, like right now, they added up to looking a bit cruel. ‘I’m not feeling that well. I think it’s the sun. Look, it was really nice to catch up. I mean it. Enjoy your evening. Sorry. Bye.’ She picked her bag up and thrust it under her arm, taking a couple of steps backwards as he watched her through narrowed eyes, then raised a hand in a salute goodbye.

‘Bye,’ she said again, and turned to make a tottering dash for the tube. Barely pausing to look at Eros again, or the buses, or Regent Street, or to smell the air and absorb the heady bustle. But her eye caught one looming building, its gothic spire thrust up into the sky, the mullioned windows dark and lifeless, the big metal doors locked tight. The Waldegrave, in all its magnificent, bankrupt glory, now just a ghost of a former life.

As she got to the stairs of the Underground, she started to jog, holding onto the banister to steady herself in her heels. The tourists were suddenly an annoyance, blocking the path, not getting out of her way, messing up their Oyster card transactions so she had to wait in line, tapping her foot.

All she could think was, I have to get home. Whatever happens with the job, I have to go home. Seb cannot find out about Luke. It was a mistake to see him. Sitting across the table from him, as he talked about Tinder and her relationship, felt suddenly like the worst betrayal, one she wished she could suck back in.

Sitting on the Tube, she counted the stops, it wasn’t moving quick enough. By the time she swapped to a train, she was tapping her fingers on her bag in her lap. She flicked through the free newspaper, but couldn’t concentrate so stared out the window willing it to move faster. Until finally, finally, they rattled into Nettleton Station. The familiar wooden-slatted station building with its intricate white cornicing, the closed ticket office with its blind pulled down, the little coffee stand ‒ an off-shoot of Rachel’s bakery ‒ locked up for the night, baskets of petunias, geraniums and pansies, carefully tended, hanging along the platform.

Just get home, her mind was chanting. Her feet were raw now from the Jimmy Choos and crying out for her to stand still, but something was making her feel like she was running out of time.

There was no taxi in the rank, just a phone on the wall that would connect her directly to the cab company.

‘Bruce is five minutes away, Anna. He’ll be right with you,’ said Pam from Pam’s Taxis. How she knew who Anna was, Anna had no clue.

She took her shoes off and stood on the patch of grass in front of the station, waiting for Bruce who, when he pulled up, got out of the car to open the door for her.

‘Lovely evening, isn’t it?’ Bald Bruce mused from the driver’s seat as he snaked his way to her house at a fifteen mile per hour crawl. ‘Been anywhere nice?’

‘Just London.’

‘I don’t get to the city much. The wife does, loves the theatre. Sees everything. How’s your dad?’

‘Fine, I think,’ she said, drumming her fingers on the leather seats, then throwing five pounds fifty at him as he was still pulling up outside her indecently drooping roses and legged it barefoot up the path.

‘Hi, honey. Seb?’ She called to what seemed like a strangely empty house. ‘I’m home. Sorry I was late. I—’

Seb was sitting on the sofa in the living room, tie off, collar undone, glass of something clear on the table. From what she knew they owned, it was either water or vodka and it was lacking the off-white colour of their tap water. His hands were clasped in front of him.

When he looked up, his eyes were flat and hard and she felt like one of his pupils hauled into his office, not sure what their crime was but running through a list of excuses in their head, ready for any eventuality.

‘Luke rang.’ Seb said, his voice bland.

‘Who?’ As soon as she said, it she rolled her eyes at herself.

‘Seemingly your date for this evening.’

Anna licked her lips.

‘You left your phone. In your hurry to get home, you left your phone at wherever it was you’d arranged to meet.’

‘We didn’t—’

‘He wanted to check that you were OK, not too ill.’

‘I erm—’ She ran a hand over her now-feverish forehead.

Seb rubbed his hand over his face, then picked up the glass and slumped back, his legs spread wide. ‘He had a great time, Anna. Great time telling me all about Tinder, your date, how he admired that I let you stay free to casually date. How he always knew I’d work out a way to keep a woman. He fucking loved it.’

‘It wasn’t like that.’ She stayed where she was. Felt every muscle in her body tighten, her shoulders go back, her chin rise, her spine instinctively arch.

‘No?’ He glanced up. ‘Doesn’t really matter how it was, does it? He got what he wanted out of it. I imagine you did too. You look very glam. Did you get your fix? Did you have a good laugh about boring Pleb dragging you back to the country? Because I’m assuming it was all my fault? No Anna blew every penny we had and then lost her job? No both of us having too good a time that we couldn’t afford it any more? Couldn’t afford the lifestyle and the holidays? He said you were really sick, Anna, he said you were having such a good time reminiscing that you must have been really sick to have to run off.’

‘He was winding you up, Seb. ’

‘Yeah, and fucking good at it he is too. Did you say Yes to him on Tinder?’

He was talking with a really flat voice, like the recorded voice at the station. Like,
‘You have arrived at Nettleton. Bad things will happen here. You have been warned. You will ruin your relationship. Are you sure you want to get off?’

‘Kind of.’

‘Yes or no.’

‘Yes. But you know what it’s like. I was bored, Seb. It’s boring here. We don’t do anything because there’s nothing to do. I was chatting to Hermione, and it was just another experiment. It was something to do.’ She squared her shoulders. ‘I don’t have anything I want to do here.’

‘Oh fuck that, Anna.’ He took a gulp of what she’d now decided was definitely vodka from the gloopy shine in the glass. ‘Hermione, of course. She’d have loved this.’

‘It was an experiment. You encouraged it before. With Jackie and Doug.’

‘Give me a break. This was behind my back, and with—’ He closed his eyes. ‘Luke Lloyd, of all people, Luke Lloyd. Why would you do that to me?’

Anna picked at the stitching on her bag.

‘You just blatantly lied. I mean, who else have you been dating that I don’t know about?’

‘No one.’ She scoffed. ‘And I didn’t lie. I just…’ She searched for a word. ‘Omitted.’

He paused. She could feel the blisters on her heel burning. She wiped away the dampness that was appearing on her face, the heat that had been building in the room all day engulfing her like a huge, flumpy duvet.

‘Like you omitted your swanky new job in New York?’ he said, looking up at her under half-closed lids.

She was too surprised to reply.

Seb stood up, knocked back what was left of the glass and scooped his jacket up off the back of the armchair. ‘Good luck with that by the way, sounds right up your street. I assume, from the sounds of it, that you’ll be taking it? Can’t be hard for you to compare New York City to cornfields. Pretty hard for me to compete.’

She opened her mouth to speak, but was silenced by the look on his face.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, bemused, looking at her as if who he saw he wished was invisible, before walking past her, swiping his money and keys off the table by the door and walking out, but still carefully closing the door behind him so as not to rattle the stained-glass panel that was loose.

Chapter Nine

When Seb hadn’t come home by ten o’clock and Anna had exhausted every range of excuses about why this wasn’t her fault, practised speeches that she would make in apology and imagined herself just throwing herself at him in an out-of-character, movie-inspired leap that would have them whirling through the house knocking vases off sideboards with gay abandon, she went to look for him.

He wasn’t in any of the places she thought he might be sulking in isolation ‒ the stile in the corner of the field opposite, the allotment shed that his grandfather owned, the bench in the village square ‒ nor was he sitting stubbornly in the car, so finally she went to look for him in the pub.

In London, Anna made a point of going into pubs alone because she was determined not to inherit her mother’s hang-up about walking in and believing the whole place took a collective in breath of horror at the idea of a woman alone in a public house. But in Nettleton, that was exactly how it felt. The almost familiar faces at the bar did seem to pause, the sound did seem to drop as she stood alone on the threshold, she thought she saw a woman in the corner nudge her partner on the arm.

When she spotted Seb’s brother, Jeremy, at the bar, it was almost a relief.

‘Look what the cat dragged in,’ he smirked, propping himself up in a casual lean, ‘Isn’t this a bit beneath the great Anna Whitehall?’ he asked, sweeping a hand around the place and his mate smiled into his pint.

‘Hi, Jeremy.’ She sighed, wishing that perhaps she wasn’t wearing the cashmere lounge pants that Seb said made her arse look like a ninety year old’s. ‘Have you seen Seb?’

‘Why, have you lost him?’ Jeremy’s eyes twinkled.

‘No, he’s just not answering his phone.’

‘Had a row?’

‘No.’

‘Why isn’t he answering his phone, then?’ Jeremy raised a brow as he sipped his bitter.

‘I don’t know.’ She sighed again, hand on her hip, tongue pressing against the back of her teeth.

Jeremy shook his head and drained the rest of his pint. ‘These are not good wifely answers.’

A couple walked up to the bar and as the man nudged her out of the way so he could have a look at the beers on tap, she took a stumbled step forward and said, exasperated, ‘Can you just tell me if you’ve seen him.’

‘Have I seen Seb?’ Jeremy mused as if it was a great philosophical question. ‘Now you come to mention it, I may have seen him earlier with Jamie.’

Anna pounced on the news. ‘You did?’

‘Maybe.’ He cocked his head and she felt him toying with her.

‘Where were they going, Jeremy?’

‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ he smirked, tapping his nose.

She sighed and he grinned. ‘D’you know what?’ she said after a second, ‘No, actually I wouldn’t. I just wanted to know if he was alive or not.’ She pulled her hair back from her face into an elastic band and started to turn and leave.

But then Jeremy said, ‘Oh, he’s alive all right. Very, very alive. Most alive I’ve seen him in years.’

She waved a hand in dismissal. ‘I don’t want to know.’

‘No? You sure? I’d want to know if it was me.’

She took a step away, ‘I’m not playing this game, Jeremy.’

‘Suit yourself.’ He chuckled and turned back to the bar, pouring a handful of peanuts into his mouth and laughing with his friend as she started to walk away.

Just as she got to the door though, she paused when she saw someone familiar sitting in the booth on the far side of the bar, white hair swept back from a dirty-tanned face, thick black horn-rimmed glasses, his paper held low so he could see her. She looked at the door and then back at the booth. After a second’s hesitation she started to walk towards him, down the opposite side of the bar where she had been chatting to Jeremy, past the woman who had nudged her partner and was now pretending not to look up as if some Z-list celebrity was in the vicinity. Anna decided they must have been to school together, she looked about the right age.

But then the woman stopped her as she saw Anna coming closer and said, ‘You’re Anna Whitehall, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. Yes, it’s me, I’m back.’ Anna held her arms wide. ‘Gawp all you like. Yes, it’s me. I’m Anna Whitehall. Yes, I was forced to come back. No, I never made it big. Yes, I’m here.’ She sighed, almost about to give a twirl, ready to say more and involve the whole pub, but the woman cut her off.

‘Well, I hope you’re proud of yourself. My kids are in Razzmatazz or, I should say, were in Razzmatazz.’ She looked at the man sitting next to her. ‘She’s the reason they’re not doing it any more. Just went in and told them they were all crap and then quit.’

Anna, shocked by the revelation that this woman didn’t know her from Adam and inwardly cringing at her spiel, opened her mouth to reply but the woman wouldn’t let her.

‘I was told you were a top dancer. We trusted you to teach those kids and now—’ She held her arms out wide as if there was nothing. ‘Shocking. Shocking behaviour,’ she said and turned her back on Anna who mumbled an apology and scuttled to the corner where the man was still watching over his paper.

‘Hi, Dad,’ she muttered, sliding into the seat opposite him.

‘Still causing trouble wherever you go, I see.’ He folded the paper and smiled. ‘About time you said hello to your old dad.’ Then he did a surreptitious check over towards the door.

‘Are you waiting for someone?’

‘No, not at all. What are you doing here on your own?’