Country Plot (2 page)

Jenna gave her what was meant to be a controlled, social smile – but which on reflection probably came out as a terrifying grimace – and said, ‘I think you're in the wrong flat,' and stalked out again.

Patrick was struggling into his underpants. ‘Jenna, wait,' he said as she passed him. ‘We must talk.'

She looked at him scornfully, hoping her trembling didn't show. ‘What on earth for?' she said. She grabbed her overnight case from the top of the wardrobe and quickly packed a few things, without the slightest awareness of what things they were, since appearing to be calm and unconcerned was taking all her mental effort.

‘What are you doing?' Patrick cried.

‘That doesn't even deserve an answer,' Jenna said, slamming the lid down and zipping it so fast she zipped the side of one of her nails into it. ‘I'll come back for the rest of my things later.'

And she left without another word, hearing Patrick behind her calling, ‘Jenna, wait! Where are you going? Let's talk. Let me explain,' and other similarly useless things. She felt immensely proud of herself for the way she had handled the situation. She floated head-high down the stairs, almost elated, imagining how small and ashamed they must be feeling now. It wasn't until she got out into the street that the brief euphoria wore off and she started to feel sick.

Jenna had met Patrick at a book launch at Holland House four years ago. The book was a ‘celebrity title' by one of the Young Royals about various palaces and stately homes in England, so there was a motley array of interests at the party, quaffing the champagne and scarfing the canapés. There was plenty of press there, plus PR bods, minor-royal hangers-on, and all the usual liggers from the world of publishing. Elements from the National Trust and the private families who owned the houses mentioned in the book could be identified by the high polish on their shoes and the uncomfortably warm tweeds they were wearing – it was the end of April, and obviously it was much colder in the country than in town. There was a Simon Schama element of TV gurus and celebrity experts, and the glamour brigade of famous female historians, poshed up to the nines and trailing clouds of Guerlain and Elizabeth Arden strong enough to fell a miner's canary.

Jenna mingled with the crowds, enjoying herself by identifying the famous and placing the non-famous in their categories. She noticed Patrick because she could not quite be sure which slot to drop him into. He was beautifully dressed and had an expensive haircut, was elegant and superior enough to be one of the Young Royals set; but he was standing alone, ostentatiously not mixing, which was emphatically
not
YR behaviour. He was regarding the scene with a sort of lofty amusement that both interested and annoyed her. She drifted past him to the buffet table for a look, and then drifted back again for another, and on her second pass he noticed her and smiled. Thousand-watt teeth, she thought. He
must
be a YR. Or a movie star.

‘Hi,' she said. ‘Good bash, don't you think?' She remembered he hadn't been joining in, and added, ‘As these things go.'

‘What on earth is that on your plate?' he responded, looking with arch horror at a round, yellowish thing she had picked up.

She scrutinized it. ‘I think it's a chicken tikka vol-au-vent.'

‘Please tell me you're joking. Who would eat such a thing? Who would even think anyone
else
would eat such a thing?'

‘A lot of the canapés are Indian,' Jenna said. ‘They've got miniature pakoras and bite-sized samosas as well.'

‘Good Lord! What's going on? A Glories of the Empire theme, to go with the book?'

‘You don't go to a lot of these things, do you?' she said kindly. ‘Caterers like Indian snacks because they taste of something definite, and go on tasting the same for a long time.' She looked at her plate. ‘I wouldn't have put chicken tikka in a vol-au-vent, though. It doesn't quite work, visually.'

He peered too. ‘It looks as though someone very, very tiny has been sick in there,' he said solemnly. ‘It's a leprechaun's vomitorium.'

She laughed. ‘Thank you for that thought. Now I definitely won't eat it. What are you doing here, anyway? I've been trying to work you out. If you don't know about Indian canapés, you're not one of the usual launchistas.'

‘Who do you think I am?' he asked, amused.

He seemed to want her to be outrageous, so she obliged. ‘Your suit is expensive enough for you to be an agent, but you're not networking, so it can't be that. Hmm. Posh, but not sociable. Estate manager for one of the statelys?' she hazarded.

‘Thank you for the “posh”,' he said. ‘I'm an architect. Since the author doesn't actually know the first thing about architecture, the book had to be checked for gaffes, and have the correct vocabulary inserted. You know, replacing “those twiddly bits on the bridgy things” to “the pinnacles on the flying buttresses”, and so on. My firm was chosen because the senior partner is on the Sandringham guest list, and I got the job because I'm the most junior associate. It's a perfectly dreadful, meretricious book. But slightly less meretricious since I did my part in it.'

‘Wow,' Jenna said. ‘When you answer a question, it stays answered.'

‘And,' he added, ‘I'm perfectly sociable, in the right circumstances.'

She grinned. ‘Well, you're talking to me. How bad can that be?'

‘So what are you doing here?' he asked. ‘I can't place you, either. Something in the publishing world, I imagine.'

‘I'm a researcher in the features department on
TopMet
,' Jenna said, and seeing him throw another blank she added: ‘It's a magazine. We're doing a feature on lesser-known statelys next month, so we were on the guest list in the hope that we'll give the book a mention. I got to come because the goody bags will be book-related, and no one else was keen. It's the cosmetics and fashion launches they all want. I'm here with the features director.' She looked around. ‘She loves these do's, whatever the subject. Where the crowd is thickest, there you'll find her.'

‘I'm quite happy where I am, thank you,' he said, and Jenna felt a warm blush coming up through her neck because he looked at her as he said it, and it was just enough to suggest he was interested.

Oddly enough, she hadn't fancied him that first time she met him. He was good-looking all right, and his presentation was perfect, but she preferred fair types, and his very dark, almost swarthy looks didn't appeal to her. But when later, as the party was breaking up, he had asked her on a date, she had said yes without hesitation because, my God, a man who actually asked you out was rare enough these days, and she hadn't been on a proper date since breaking up with Jamie five – no, six! – months ago. There'd been dinner parties with married friends where you're supposed to get on with the one unattached man invited ‘for' you, and group outings with other singles to pubs and clubs where you're supposed to pick up strangers. A couple of disastrous experiments, leading from those episodes, which she tried not to think about, convinced her that if a man was unattached there was usually a reason. So to be asked – straight out, like that – by a more than presentable man if she would have dinner with him, just the two of them, in a proper restaurant, was not something to be turned down.

She didn't sleep with him on the first date, but that was because he was being a gentleman: by the end of the evening she was fancying him like mad. He was different. She liked his seriousness, and his certainty about himself and where his career was going. All the other men she knew were racked with self-doubt: it was nice not to spend the evening listening to self-pitying moans. They slept together after the next date and were practically living together after six weeks. Six months – almost to the day: had he timed it? – he asked her to move in with him.

Everyone told her how lucky she was, and she knew it was true. It was hard enough to get a boyfriend at all these days, let alone one who would commit himself to living together, and had nothing obvious wrong with him – indeed was intelligent and ambitious and successful. It was not long before he had been made a partner; at about the same time, she'd got promoted to features editor, and they moved to the better flat. Nice flat, nice job, nice man. And the next stage was that Patrick would ask her to marry him, and with a bit of luck (and if necessary a bit of hinting) it would happen before she was thirty, everyone's goal in life. Lucky, lucky Jenna! Her friends told her she had it all.

Until Lousy Monday struck.

Like many a broken-hearted person she headed for the river – in her case, not to throw herself in, but because there was always something comforting about moving water. She walked from Albert Bridge along the embankment for hours – all the way to Lambeth Bridge, in fact, where she discovered that her feet were sore and she was tired and starving hungry. She left the river and found a sandwich bar in Horseferry Road where she sat on a high stool at the window bar and wolfed a chicken salad sandwich and a cup of coffee. Then, since her car – her beloved purple Mini Cooper called Florence – was still parked outside the flat (she really hadn't been thinking straight, had she?) she got a taxi back there.

In the blankness of her misery, during her embankment walk, she had heard her mobile ringing in her handbag several times, but hadn't answered it. In the cab she took it out and looked at missed calls. Yes, Patrick had been calling her. There were three messages in her voicemail box and two texts. She deleted them without listening to or reading them, and turned the phone off.

At the flat she paid the taxi off, and then felt a sickness of misery and loathing come over her. She did not want ever to come here again. She wished she could get all her stuff out now, and have it over with. She looked up and saw there was no light on in the living room. Of course, he might be in his office – you couldn't see that window from here. She hesitated a moment, and then rang the bell on the street door. There was no reply, even to a second and third ring, so she decided to chance it, let herself in and went upstairs.

Everything was quiet. He was out. The bed was made – it looked so innocent – and lying on it was a note in his strong, dark, tidy hand:

In a panic now, afraid he would come back any moment, she packed her clothes and belongings into whatever suitcases and bags came to hand. It was fortunate that she didn't have a lot; and some things she was perfectly willing to abandon in her haste to get away. It struck her as she darted round how much of what was in the flat was his, or chosen by him. His taste. His place. Now she examined her belongings, it was as if she had been camping out here.

The phone rang once, making her jump, but he had put the answering machine on. She thought she heard his voice, and kept away from it, terrified that he was leaving a message for her. She left his note where it was on the bed. Even in her shocked and panicky state, she observed that he did not speak of love. No ‘I love you'. Not even ‘Jenna darling' and ‘Love, P'. Just an order not to leave until she had his permission.
Not what you think?
Well, let's see – naked blonde hiding in bathroom, having left her watch beside the bed, bloke pretending to be asleep: hard to figure that one out, wasn't it?

Oh Patrick! Was it all a sham, the whole four years? Her heart was sore and the last thing she wanted was to let him talk, to hear him try to explain the obvious away. She was afraid she might believe him – and afraid she would not.

With Florence stuffed with her belongings, Jenna fled home, which in her case was the one she had grown up in, a large, shabby three-storey house in Muswell Hill. Her father, a palaeontologist, was dead, and her mother, who was trying to grow old disgracefully, now lived permanently abroad with a lover, an ex-Guards major turned watercolour painter. They moved nomadically from Spain to Portugal to Italy to Greece in search of landscapes and a particular quality of light. There was no real reason Ma and the Major shouldn't get married, but they seemed to enjoy a sort of frisson from living in sin, and since they weren't doing anyone any harm, the family didn't mention the ‘m' word. They were all quite proud of her, really, for her enterprise, and were glad she was happy. Her lover, whom they all called simply ‘The Major', seemed a nice man, Jenna thought. She just wished he'd dump the moustache.

The family home was occupied by her brother Oliver, his wife Sybil, and their three children, Allegra, Inez and Tertius. Jenna could never be quite sure whether the children's names were a joke – perfectly possible given Oliver's puckish nature – or a serious attempt to set them aside from the norm. The children bore them with dignity. Actually, as they went to private schools, they probably didn't know anyone with normal names anyway, and would have stood out far more by being called Mary, Elizabeth and John.

The numbness of shock, reinforced by the weariness from her long walk, was wearing off by the time she got to Muswell Hill, and she was only just able to park the car safely and stagger to the front door before collapsing into tears and abject misery. Sybil was a good person to collapse towards: she was brisk and efficient and quite unflappable, but very kind. Oliver was away – he was a civil engineer and worked on enormous international projects. At present, Sybil said, he was working on a dam in northern India, and would be back at the weekend. ‘So you just take your time, poor thing, and cry all you want,' Sybil concluded. Jenna loved her brother but was glad not to have to face him yet. Discovering your man in bed with another woman was like an embarrassing illness, and she wasn't prepared to expose its anatomy to another member of the male sex yet.