Adored (45 page)
Mercifully, once they got into bed, he had fallen straight to sleep. She really couldn’t have faced sex now. She just wanted to be alone with her thoughts.
Unfortunately, those thoughts were not remotely comforting.
For all her bravado, tonight’s events had shown her one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt.
She still loved Max.
She wasn’t sure if she could ever bring herself to forgive him for betraying her the way he had. But love him she did.
And yet now, even more than before, she knew that there could be no way back, love or no love. She had told him she never wanted to see him again. He had reached out to her, and she had rejected him, brutally and publicly.
One thing Max had never been lacking in was pride. Siena knew him well enough to know that he wouldn’t be back for more.
Her tears started to flow faster as she thought back over what felt like a lifetime of lost love: first Grandpa, then Hunter, then her parents. For a brief while there, after she’d found Hunter again, and then Max, she had almost felt as if all the wrongs of her childhood had been made right. And for a little while, life had been absolutely perfect.
But now Max and Hunter were both gone. Even Ines had been discarded, in the same way that Siena had discarded Marsha, Patrick and Janey Cash, basically anyone who had ever truly cared about her.
It was as if she couldn’t help herself. She had to hit back first, make sure she abandoned people before they abandoned her.
Hunter was right.
She was like Grandpa Duke.
And tonight, in the vast, opulent emptiness of Randall’s bed, that realization made her want to sob her heart out.
Max ran down the hill laughing, trying to keep his footing and avoid slipping on the cowpats as he hurtled down toward the stream. Behind him, three screaming children, led by a very determined-looking Charlie, were hot on his trail, brandishing their new pump-action water pistols.
“You’ll never catch me alive!” Max yelled over his shoulder, promptly tripping over an unexpected mound of thistle and landing ignominiously, not to mention painfully, on his rear end.
The Arkell posse was on top of him in seconds, spraying him mercilessly with water from point-blank range until his T-shirt was soaked through.
“Take
that,
Uncle Max,” said Madeleine triumphantly, emptying the last drops from her weapon down the back of his neck.
He flung his arms open wide and lay back on the grass in exhaustion and defeat. “You win, Maddie.” He smiled at his little niece and handed over a third pound coin.
The two boys were already racing back up the hill with their own victory spoils, and Maddie scampered off to join them.
Max lay back and enjoyed the warmth of the sun on his face.
It was late June, six months almost to the day since he had stormed into Randall Stein’s Malibu mansion and seen Siena for the last time. Within a week after that fiasco, he had packed up his paltry possessions, sold his beloved Honda for scrap, said his goodbyes to Hunter, and moved back to Batcombe. He had finished shooting the two shorts for the famous Hollywood actor/would-be producer, so there was no business reason for him to stay on in L.A. And living in the same town, even the same country as Siena was killing him inside.
Hunter had tried to persuade him to stay, of course. But in the end, Max felt his old friend understood his reasons for going.
“Life has changed for all of us,” he’d said to Hunter on the particularly depressing journey out to the airport. “I need to get over her, get away from all the bad memories and try and make something of myself. And you and Tiffany need some time together as well, without me getting under your feet the whole time.”
Hunter had protested that he never got under their feet, that they were both happy to have him, forever if he wanted. But deep down he knew Max was right. It was time for a change, for all of them.
As soon as he landed at Heathrow, Max had found his spirits lifting slightly. He felt even better when he saw not just Henry but the whole family hopping up and down with excitement in arrivals waiting to meet him.
Bertie and Maddie were holding up a homemade cardboard banner with
WELCUM HOME UNKEL MAX
written in multicolored marker. Charlie, who considered himself too old for such childish activities, merely waved in what he hoped his favorite uncle would recognize as a rather grown-up manner.
Max felt quite choked when Henry stepped forward to help him with his luggage.
“Hello, little brother.” He smiled, patting him warmly on the back. “Bloody good to see you.”
Henry was shocked by how thin Max looked. He had read the press coverage of his brother’s heroic but doomed attempt to rescue Siena. The gossip rags, force-fed by Randall’s PR machine, had all crucified him for it, made him out to be some sort of jealous, possessed monster. Even Muffy refused to read the
Enquirer
anymore, after seeing the stuff they’d written about poor Max. It wasn’t like he was even famous or courted the publicity.
At first Max’s plan had been to stay for Christmas and the New Year celebrations with Henry, then look around for a place of his own.
He hadn’t, in fact, come home solely to escape his demons, or to take solace at Batcombe. There were career reasons as well. He had belatedly decided to take up the offer from his friend, the young Oxford playwright, to direct his latest work in Stratford. The play was to open in April and run throughout the summer, but rehearsals would start in January.
The money was terrible, but Max loved the dark weirdness of the script, and he was in no urgent need for cash, having just been paid top dollar for his last two short films. The original plan had been for him to rent a little cottage close to the theater for six months, popping back to Batcombe for weekends to see Henry and the family. But it hadn’t worked out like that.
He’d been so caught up in the horrors of his own life back in L.A. that he hadn’t grasped the full extent of Henry’s debt problems till he got back home. Having turned down a huge offer from Gary Ellis, his brother had started selling off assets left, right, and center—everything from artwork to furniture to his cherished vintage MG, a twenty-first-birthday present from their mother—just to keep up on the interest payments to the bank. The children had been pulled out of their prep schools and sent to the local primary school, and Muffy had even started taking in commissions as a portrait photographer.
“The fact is,” Henry had told Max despairingly over a whiskey one night, soon after he arrived, “I was a fool not to take up Ellis’s offer when I had the chance. He’s developing across the valley now, in Swanbrook.”
“You don’t mean that, surely,” said Max. “You couldn’t just sell up. Let the place be turned into some Mickey Mouse golf course?”
“We’re going to lose the farm anyway, Max.” Henry sounded almost resigned to his fate. He looked older and terribly tired. Over the past six months, he and Muffy had racked their brains day and night, trying to come up with something, anything, that would enable them to keep the place going, but it was hopeless. None of their efforts had amounted to more than a drop in the ocean of Henry’s debts. The irony was that the farm itself was doing well, with their diversification out of dairy finally starting to pay dividends. But that brought a steady trickle of income, when what they needed was a tidal wave of cash.
“Barring all my numbers coming up in Saturday’s lottery,” said Henry, sighing, “I truly don’t see a way around it. The only question now is when. How long can we keep the wolf from the door?”
The moment he understood the seriousness of Henry and Muffy’s problems, Max had decided to stay. He might not be able to contribute much financially—his director’s wages at the theater barely amounted to a weekly Chinese takeout—but at least he could help out with the children and do his best to keep the family’s spirits up. Besides, he thought, family life might be just the thing to distract him from his heartbreak.
Taking off his sodden T-shirt and wiping the worst of the cow dung off his tennis shoes with a handful of long grass, he made his way back across the fields toward the house.
It was Sunday, the first full day he’d had off from the theater in over three weeks.
His play,
Dark Hearts,
had been running for almost three months and had won Max some of the best reviews of his career. They were playing nightly to packed houses, which was fantastic, but it did mean he had precious little time to himself to enjoy what was shaping up to be a record-breakingly hot summer.
Walking up the hill, he was struck once again by the magical view before him. The golden, rose-covered stone of Manor Farm seemed to glow in the late-afternoon light, beautiful, like some vision of a lost England.
He couldn’t imagine how Henry was going to cope if they did lose it. Despite everything his brother had told him, Max was only able to think of the loss of the farm in terms of an “if.” He still hoped against hope that it wouldn’t come to that, and that some solution would present itself before it was too late.
Kicking off his dirty shoes outside the kitchen door, he stepped into the pantry wearing only his grass-stained shorts. He had just started to remove them, to throw them into the washing machine along with his sodden T-shirt, when he was startled by a young female voice behind him.
“Please, monsieur,” said the girl, who couldn’t have been much over twenty, in a heavy French accent. “Don’t go any further. I am ’ere.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Max, spinning around and pulling up his shorts faster than a priest caught pants down with a choirboy. “Where the hell did you come from?”
“Toulouse,” said the girl.
They could be damn literal, the French, thought Max. It was hard to tell which of them was blushing more fiercely.
“Yes, okay, I know Toulouse,” he said, flustered. “I mean I don’t actually
know
Toulouse. That is, I didn’t know you
came
from Toulouse. My point is—” He cleared his throat and tried again: “What I meant was—”
“‘Who on earth are you?’” Muffy succinctly finished his question for him. She had just walked into the kitchen carrying a huge pile of children’s laundry and looked confused to find a strange woman hovering by the door of her pantry. “And Max, what on earth are you doing with nearly no clothes on?”
“Washing?” Max gestured lamely toward the open machine.
“Oh. Well, never mind that,” she said, dropping her mountainous load on the kitchen table and turning to smile at the French girl, a pretty, freckled creature with a sleek auburn bob, who seemed to be carrying a suitcase. “I’m sorry, I must have sounded terribly rude just now. I was just a little surprised to find you standing in my kitchen. Have we met? I’m Muffy Arkell.” She extended a clean, slightly calloused hand.
“Delighted to meet you, Meesees Arkell,” said the girl in her stilted, formal English, dropping the suitcase and pumping Muffy’s hand enthusiastically. “I am Frederique.”
A few long seconds of awkward silence followed this pronouncement. The girl was evidently not about to offer up any further information. She apparently thought that her first name was enough to clear up the mystery of her identity, and presence in the kitchen, entirely.
“I’m sorry, Frederique who?” said Max eventually.
But before the girl had a chance to answer, Muffy had let out a wail, clapping her hands over her mouth in horror. “Oh my goodness. Frederique,” she whispered. “I thought I canceled with the agency months ago. It must have slipped my mind. Henry’s going to be mad as hell.”
“Have I missed something?” said Max. “Do you two know each other?”
“Not exactly,” said Muffy. “Frederique was going to be our summer au pair.” She looked at the poor girl apologetically. “But I’m afraid we can’t possibly afford you now.”
Once Max had swapped his shorts for a crumpled old pair of Henry’s trousers from on top of the dryer and made both the women a cup of tea, things were fairly swiftly sorted out, to everyone’s mutual relief.
Having just come all the way from France, not to mention planned her whole summer, Frederique was to stay. Max would pay her wages, which were next to nothing anyway, and the extra help with the children would allow Muffy more time to work on her photography commissions.
By the time Henry got home from yet another depressing meeting with his farm manager, Frederique had already had a bath and unpacked and was happily playing a game of Monopoly with the children around the kitchen table, while Muffy peeled the potatoes for supper.
“Hello, darling,” Muffy said, without looking up. “How did it go? This is Frederique, by the way, our new au pair.”
“Hello, Frederique,” said Henry, waving at her absently and apparently completely unfazed by her arrival. “Or should I say, bonjour.”
“Daddy, your French accent’s terrible,” said Charlie. “Frederique speaks English anyway, don’t you, Freddie?”
“We’re allowed to call her Freddie,” Bertie explained to his father. “She likes it.”
Frederique, it seemed, was already a hit.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Arkell,” she said shyly, standing up to shake Henry’s hand. “I am very ’appy to be working weeth you and all the family. I ’ope we will ’ave a lot of fun togethair.”
“I hope so too, Freddie,” said Henry, slipping his hands around his wife’s waist from behind and nuzzling her neck affectionately. “We’ve been running a bit low on fun around here lately, I’m afraid. Eh, Muff?”
“Can she stay with us for longer than the summer, Dad?” asked Bertie, who seemed to be particularly smitten with his new playmate.
“Can you stay forever?” Maddie added her voice to the chorus.
Frederique laughed. “Not forever, no. Anyway, you wait and see. You might be fed up weeth me by tomorrow.”
“We won’t,” said Maddie earnestly. “Do you have a husband? Or a boyfriend?”
“Maddie!” chided her mother, throwing a mountain of peeled potatoes into an industrial-sized saucepan and dropping it with a clatter onto the stove. “Leave poor Frederique alone. That’s none of your business.”
“It’s okay,” said Freddie. “No, Madeleine, I don’t ’ave a boyfriend. I deed ’ave one, but we broke up.”
“Good.” Maddie grinned. “Then you can marry my uncle Max.
He
used to have a girlfriend. But then
they
broke up as well. Grown-ups are always doing that,” she added philosophically.
“Doing what?” said Max, who had wandered in from the kitchen garden to refill his empty Pimm’s glass. “Oh, hello, Henry. How’d it go?”
“Shit,” said Henry grimly. “Things could be looking up for you, though. Your niece here has just been trying to fix you up with our delightful new au pair.”
“See,” said Maddie triumphantly. “He’s very handsome.”
Freddie blushed furiously.
“Apparently, the two of you are already altar-bound,” Henry went on.
“Oh, Henry, stop teasing them,” said Muffy, who could sense that Max was also feeling awkward, despite his forced smile. “Give Max another drink, and then why don’t you both bugger off out of my kitchen. I’m trying to make supper, and it’s like Piccadilly bloody Circus in here.”
Out in the kitchen garden, the two brothers sat on the ancient lichened bench sipping their drinks and watching the heavy, blood-red sun beginning to set.
“Did it really go badly today? With Richard?” Max asked.
Richard was Henry’s farm manager, really just the chief farmhand, but with responsibility for the other four lads Henry employed.
Henry nodded. “Very. I’m going to have to lay off at least two of them before the end of the summer. If it weren’t for the subsidies, I doubt we’d be breaking even at all. I tell you, it’s bloody impossible to make a living off dairy these days. Unless you’re French, of course. Like your beautiful bride-to-be.”
