Summer at Tiffany's (2 page)

‘Damn, that's great,' Brett beamed, looking genuinely pleased. As a trader for Cantor's, he earned four times what Henry could make in a year and yet he inhaled every anecdote and dastardly tale of Henry's daredevil job like it was pure oxygen.

Kelly put a hand on her husband's arm as though holding him back. ‘I'm half expecting Brett to quit his job and volunteer to explore the Arctic depths with you. If he makes any noises about that, you tell me pronto, right?' she grinned. ‘We. Have. A. Mortgage,' she said to her husband, sounding out each word as though communicating with him through bulletproof glass.

‘Hey! I know where my limitations lie. Henry might be able to make a career out of this Indiana Jones stuff, but frankly, I lack the charisma. If I told anyone I wanted to go to the deepest point in the ocean, they'd put a ball and chain round my leg and give me a big push, not over a hundred grand!'

They all laughed.

‘It's not everything it's cracked up to be, mate,' Henry replied with usual modesty. ‘Frankly, a bit of job security would go a long way. It was great when I was younger – I could afford to live on toast and bunk at Suze and Arch's flat between jobs. But now . . .'

‘Now that you've got a beautiful fiancée who's accustomed to only the best . . .' Kelly said, looking at Cassie with a wink. ‘Talking of which, any news yet on a date, or are you still keeping us all hangin'?'

Cassie groaned. ‘Oh God! Not you too!'

‘What?' Kelly laughed. ‘I need a new dress, OK?'

‘Well, trust me, when we know, you'll know.'

Kelly looked at Henry with arched eyebrows. ‘Unbelievable. She's engaged to you and yet
still
playing hard to get.'

‘Tell me about it,' Henry said with a wry look.

Cassie turned to him. ‘So, is there anyone else you need to talk to?'

‘You're not changing the subject there, are you, missy?' Kelly asked devilishly.

‘No! I was just finding out whether we can go. After all, you're the one dead on your feet!'

Kelly gave a melodramatic wince, as though Cassie had dropped her in it.

‘I knew it! You
are
having a terrible time,' Henry said, deadpan and shaking his head.

A chorus of ‘No's came back at him.

‘I'll bet it was Cornell banging on about the biomes near lakes Geneva and Baikal that did you in, wasn't it? No, be honest.'

Yet more ‘No's.

‘We are crazy proud of you,' Kelly said, leaning over and patting his shoulder. ‘I intend to dine out on this evening for months.'

He sighed, looking bashful. ‘Well, you'll be happy to learn my work here is done, anyway. I have a fancy new tie' – he slid out the Explorers Club tie from his jacket pocket – ‘dinner in my stomach and a fat grant poised to drop into my bank account. What say you all to going on somewhere for a nightcap? I know a great little place in the Village that keeps fifty-year-old single malts behind the bar.'

‘Great,' Kelly said with an easy shrug, her earlier tiredness gone.

Cassie looked down at her and Kelly's sumptuous floor-length dresses, wondering how their uptown dress code would be received in a downtown bar and already knowing there was no point in worrying about it – Henry had once talked down a man who had pointed an Uzi automatic at him in Yemen.

‘Super,' Cassie smiled, squeezing his arm and leaning into him tiredly.

Brett went ahead in the hope of hailing a passing cab, as Henry retrieved their coats. Kelly had lent Cassie a tiny black faux-fur bolero, which did practically nothing to combat the temperature, but they would only be outside for a few moments as they moved from kerb to car, and at least it covered her arms.

‘OK, guys!' they heard Brett call, as they stood just inside the doors of the Jacobean townhouse, looking out into the white-speckled night.

Henry pushed open the door, a gust of wind skirmishing around them as Kelly led the way down the steps towards the waiting cab. The slick pavements shimmered in the street lights, yellow taxis speeding past with their roof lights off and droplets spinning from the wheels. It was more shockingly cold in the bitter night air than she had braced herself for and Cassie wrapped her arms tightly around herself, shivering, as she waited for Kelly to slide across the back seat in her narrow dress. A gusty wind had picked up while they'd been at the dinner and she half laughed, half gasped as the skirt of her dress was blown back against her legs, billowing behind like a scarlet sail.

‘Oh my God! This weather!' she squealed.

In the next moment, as though heaven sent, sudden warmth settled upon her shoulders and her fingertips found the soft splay of velvet as Henry tucked his jacket around her. She angled her head happily as he stood behind her and kissed her neck, a small sigh escaping her as she reflexively closed her eyes.

‘There's no such thing as bad weather . . .' he murmured, his breath hot on her exposed neck.

‘Just the wrong clothes,' she finished for him, easily recognizing the quote from his lifelong idol, Sir Ranulph Fiennes. She was a
very
good fiancée.

He laughed, impressed, and she carelessly arched an eyebrow – pleased with herself too. She turned to get into the car just as a cab slowly sluiced past, a pale face behind the rain-mottled window fixed upon them – her.

Cassie stiffened in shock as the cab glided past into the night.
No.
There were more than nineteen million people in this city.
Not possible
. There was no way that could have been the one person she didn't want to see.
No way.
The rain was too hard, the night too dark to see properly; she hadn't even caught a glimpse, just garnered an impression really.

And yet . . . she had been known to recognize friends in her peripheral vision just by their walk.

‘Cass? You OK?'

She looked back at Henry, who was watching her with quiet calm, his hand by her elbow. She realized she had paused, mid-step into the car.

‘Of course,' she said weakly, trying to laugh off his concern and sliding in beside Kelly.

The door closed behind Henry with a
thunk
, his thighs warm as they pressed against hers, but the cold had already seeped into her bones and she gave a big shiver.

‘Ooh, someone just walk over your grave?' Kelly winked.

She couldn't know how right she was.

Morning had broken – the tuneful din of two hundred coal tits chirruping in the crab apple tree outside the open window told her so. She stirred fractionally, heavy-limbed and rested, as the breeze rippled over her bare skin like a breath, Henry's hand in the nook of her waist; she felt his fingers spread as she stretched, her body firming beneath his inert fingertips before relaxing back into the softness he adored.

Her eyelids fluttered open and closed several times like a basking butterfly's wings, blinking the busy blossomed tree into focus. They never drew the curtains, and she didn't need to be standing at the sash window to know that somewhere Breezy, Mrs Jenkins's cat from the flat below, would be sitting watching and waiting for just one of the tiny spirited birds to linger a moment too long on the shaded grass.

She could see the sky was already a promising blue, narrow drifts of clouds spinning into airy thinness as the sun began to get into its stride, and the dull roar of traffic on Embankment was already beginning to build. She sighed sleepily, used to it now.

Another zephyr blew in, unsettling a sheaf of papers stacked loosely on a tower of books on the floor, several pages blowing free and settling on the coir matting like stepping stones. Her eyes wandered the room with bleary indolence. Heaps of clothes were piled along the footboard of the iron bedstead so that nothing could be seen of it; a picture they'd bought at the Affordable Art Fair in Battersea Park was still propped against the far wall, ready to be hung whenever Henry remembered to buy nails; the whisper-pink roses he'd bought for her the week before were still luscious and dewy on the chest of drawers; the powder-blue walls colour-matched the sky, at this early hour at least. Her eyes stopped at the photo on her bedside table, taken of her and Henry at Kelly and Brett's wedding almost two years ago, the very hour they'd finally got together; it was their favourite photograph – her arms wrapped tightly round his neck, both of them laughing, eyes bright as tigers' so that to the casual observer, it would have seemed it had been
their
wedding.

She closed her eyes again, a smile on her lips. Home.

That wasn't to say it was perfect. The flat was far too small – even she would admit that now – but after a decade of being the chatelaine in a grand Scottish country house, she had fallen hard for the intimate charm of somewhere ‘cosy' – her buzzword for everything good: log fires, Henry's jumpers, a bubbling pot of chilli con carne – and when they'd first viewed it, she'd sworn to be the queen of edits. They would live minimally, she had declared; she didn't want ‘things' anyway; her divorce from Gil had shown her just how little comfort they provided when your world was dismantled bit by bit –
my
chair,
my
lamp,
your
mirror,
my
silver . . . And Henry proudly considered himself someone who prioritized experiences over possessions in any event (although that wasn't to say he wasn't dearly fond of his PS4 and the plasma that took up almost one wall in the sitting room and made her feel on Saturday afternoons that their flat was actually a box at his beloved Twickers).

Their intentions had been sincere and well meant at the time, but it's hard for two people to build a life together in only 800 square feet of prime London property, not to mention their mutual careers which came with unwieldy accoutrements. Henry's, as a professional explorer, meant ice axes and crampons were stored beneath the sofa, and metres of fluorescent climbing ropes were loosely looped on nails tapped in along the picture rails round the tops of the walls. Cassie's career, meanwhile, as co-owner of Eat 'n' Mess, a vintage picnic company that put together old-school hampers for high-end society events, meant – in a reversal of Kelly's Manhattan bachelorette apartment, where cashmere jumpers had been kept in the unused oven – there were baking trays in the shelving unit where her jeans should be, cake boxes instead of hatboxes; her make-up was kept in the cutlery drawer, and the kitchen had no table as such but a carefully stacked arrangement of wicker baskets that held Eat 'n' Mess's vast collection of mismatched porcelain tea sets and Welsh rugs, resulting in their ‘dinner parties' – which actually meant plates on laps, sitting on upturned terracotta flowerpots (or, most prized of all, an upside-down large yellow bucket) on the fire escape – becoming as famous with the neighbours as with their friends.

So yes, it was a tiny flat, but she still maintained it was a gorgeous tiny flat. The clotted-cream sitting room caught the evening sun, and on every one of their four windowsills there was a herb garden: Henry liked to have the basil outside their bedroom, as he said it reminded him of Italy and the time they'd almost, but not quite, got it on; he said he never wanted to forget how excruciating it had been to have her in his life but still just out of reach; The lavender, which reminded him of his mother's garden, where they
had
got it on, was outside the bathroom; the camomile, which she used for tea and was one of their earliest love tokens, was outside the sitting room; and the thyme and rosemary were outside the kitchen.

She loved it here. She loved him. Their messy, spilling-out-at-the-edges life was everything she wanted. Henry shifted beside her, his arm easily drawing her in tighter so that the small gap between their bodies closed and they touched from tip to toe again so that nothing – not even the breeze – could slip between them.

Her eyes were just closing again when she caught sight of the time on her alarm clock beside the bed.

‘Oh
crap
!' she shouted, sitting bolt upright. ‘Henry, we've overslept!'

‘Wha—' he groaned sleepily as she threw back the duvet and ran starkers across the room towards the hall console, where her knickers were kept.

How could this have happened again? It was the third time in five days. They
had
to start going to bed earlier. They were in their early thirties now, not twenties. They weren't bright young things anymore. If either one of them had office jobs, they'd have been sacked ten times over by now.

‘Get up! You're late!' she yelled over her shoulder, wishing she had a chest of drawers like most normal people. It'd be easier to access in emergencies.

Henry sat up, the white duvet falling back to reveal his beautifully cut shoulders and smooth stomach, although his face was hazy with sleep. Then he saw the time on the clock and wide-awake horror crossed his face too.

‘Oh shit!' he hollered, leaping out of bed and almost immediately going flying on a stray sheet of paper that had drifted to his side of the bed. He grabbed the door for support, but that only swung under his weight, leaving him in an undignified half-crab pose above the bedside table. ‘Bloody buggery hell!' he shouted crossly, righting himself and wondering if he'd pulled a muscle in his hip.

‘Here!' Cassie said, throwing him a clean pair of boxers from across the room. Luckily, he'd already hung out his suit and shirt the night before and he was in those and straightening his tie before Cassie had found her clean shirt – the red lumberjack one – to go with her jeans.

‘Cass, come
on
,' he said impatiently, snapping on the clasp of his watch. ‘I'll have to go without you. You know I can't wait.'

‘It's OK. I'm done. I'm coming,' she panted, tightening the double knots on her Converses and standing up. They both jogged across the room then to the front door.