The Christmas Party (5 page)

‘Besides, you know me, honey. What would I do if I retired?’

That was the burning question. How
would
Lance fill his days? He knew nothing but work, had no friends, no real interest in anything other than the oil business. He lived and breathed Fossil Oil. But surely there must come a time when he simply couldn’t carry on?

‘If you do, would you like to stay in England?’

‘I haven’t thought about it,’ her husband admitted.

‘It would be nice to have a home that I could truly call our own. Perhaps we could get a little cottage somewhere and settle down?’

Due to Lance’s work, Melissa rarely went out of London. He didn’t like to have her too far away from him as he often used her as a sounding-board for some new proposal or initiative that had been mooted and which he, increasingly, struggled to understand.

‘There are some very beautiful parts of the country – Hampshire, Devon, Cornwall. It would be nice to take some trips.’

Lance laughed. ‘Can you see me whiling away my days in a twee little cottage with a thatched roof?’

Melissa too laughed at the very thought. ‘No, honey. I can’t.’

‘There are a few good years left in me yet.’

‘I know that, sweetheart.’ She smoothed the collar of his dinner jacket. ‘We should think about it though. You know how time rushes by. It pays to start making plans. We could retire to Florida, spend our twilight years soaking up the sun. You could even take up golf again if you had the time.’

Lance used to play once, but only because work had required it. Now, like everything else, it was difficult to find the spare hours.

‘Do you think we’d see the boys more if we were retired?’ he asked.

It was always a difficult subject between them. She was much closer to their sons than Lance was and she felt that, not too far below the surface, he resented that. ‘Oh, yes. I’m sure we would. Or we could visit them.’

What she meant was that she could visit them alone. Lance would never bother, even if he was retired. And that was why he wasn’t closer to the boys.

His ‘Harrumph’ was the only answer she needed.

The children were grown-up now, men not boys, both nearing thirty, and they had lives of their own. Rich and interesting lives. It was a great sadness in her life that they rarely saw them.

‘Are they coming for Christmas this year?’ he asked.

‘No, no,’ Melissa said. ‘But I’m sure they’ll Skype us.’ It might be Christmas, but the only time she’d have with her children would be a rushed five-minute phone or video call from some distant part of the world.

Drew and Kyle had spent most of their young lives in boarding school. A good one in England, all funded by Fossil Oil. At least it had given them some stability at the time, but she regretted that now. She had tried to keep them at home with her as they followed Lance to his different postings around the globe. It gave Melissa a home life too, a life outside Fossil Oil. She loved doing the school run, waiting for the boys to come home so that she could read with them, play games. It gave an otherwise shallow existence some meaning. But it wasn’t ideal for the boys. They had to change schools so often that their education suffered. They’d just start to settle in, make friends with their classmates, there’d be tentative and awkward play-dates or they might start to get invites to birthday parties at burger bars, and then Lance would announce that they were off again. They were always the outsiders and that was never a good feeling. She knew that only too well. It had been a terribly painful decision to leave them behind as she trailed after Lance. And she wondered now how she could have packed them off so young. Boys needed their mother’s love. They needed a father who was there for them and Lance had never been. Yet, despite their parents’ failings, thankfully they’d turned out to be decent, caring young men.

‘They should have come into the oil business with me,’ Lance said. ‘That’s a proper career. They’re both layabouts.’

‘They’re so not,’ Melissa chided. ‘They just want different things to you. There’s nothing wrong with that. They want to be their own people. Money doesn’t matter to them.’

‘They don’t mind taking ours,’ Lance grumbled.

Melissa had done her very best to steer them away from the corporate game and it seemed to have worked. She’d never wanted them to grow up to be their father’s sons. She and Lance might have all the trappings of wealth, but the truth was they had no life.

The opposite was true of their sons.

‘Drew does great work,’ she said. ‘You know that. You should be proud of what he’s achieved.’

‘Huh,’ Lance said.

Their eldest was in Nepal, working as the manager of a small orphanage. They had thirty children in the home and he sometimes sent her photographs of them, all beautiful smiles and shiny faces. It was a hand-to-mouth existence and, largely without Lance’s knowledge, Melissa regularly wired him money. One day she hoped to visit him, even though he assured her that she’d be horrified by the conditions in which he lived.

Lance snorted. ‘At least he’s doing better than Kyle.’

It was true that their youngest boy had never really grown up and had a very hippy lifestyle that Lance totally disapproved of. He had piercings everywhere – nose, ears, lips, you name it. He had those big black earrings that made holes in your ears. Lance couldn’t even look at them. In the summer he’d work teaching surfing or, last year, with a company that offered bungee jumps off a bridge in South Africa. In the winter he headed to ski resorts in California or Europe and taught snowboarding and worked in bars. One year he’d been a chalet ‘girl’, and it felt strange to know that her son could bake a great cake whereas, due to usually having staff, she could barely boil an egg.

‘He’s doing fine,’ Melissa insisted. ‘He’s young yet and he’s having fun. How can we begrudge him that?’

She could see Lance’s frown deepening and, in an effort to steer him from his favourite subject to complain about, she said, ‘How do you like the house decorations this year? Haven’t they done a great job?’

Lance looked around him and nodded.

The vast hall in their latest house was decorated beautifully for the festive season. She’d used the same company she’d employed last year and they hadn’t disappointed her. She was so pleased that she’d recommended them to Kirsten Benson too.

The tree was over ten feet tall and dressed with traditional baubles in red and gold. The banister of the sweeping stairs had a holly garland weaving through it that went right up to the first floor. All the mirrors were decked with holly arrangements topped with red velvet bows. There was another tree in the living room that was just as sparkling, just as lavish.

‘They look great, honey. Good enough to eat.’

‘Speaking of which,’ Melissa said, ‘I’ve decided to cook myself this year.’ It was some time since she’d made the effort and now, at the last minute, she was wondering if she should have arranged for a chef to come in.

‘You don’t have to do that.’

‘Most of it’s being sent pre-prepared from Fortnum’s, so there’s no need to worry. Whatever we have, it will be edible.’

Cooking was definitely not her forte. Even with a little help from her favourite store, there was still the potential for disaster and a sandwich for Christmas lunch.

‘The dining-room table has already been set. That looks pretty too.’ It glittered with crystal and golden charger plates – both sourced by the Christmas planners. ‘I hired all the crockery and glasses. Our china and crystal is somewhere in a storage facility, it was too much effort to retrieve it.’

If only the boys had come home they might have had a lovely time with the family all together. As it stood, amid all this festive loveliness, she and Lance would be here alone. Lance’s career had provided for all this opulence, but it had certainly come at a high price.

‘We could have gone to a hotel again,’ he said. ‘Then you don’t have to do anything.’

Frankly, she’d seen enough of hotel rooms in her lifetime. ‘That’s a lovely idea, but I would just like for us to be in our own place.’

‘You’re such a home bird,’ he said and hugged her tightly. ‘Now we’d better get to this Christmas party as we’re the star turn. Ready when you are, honey.’

He held up her fur coat for her and she slipped her arms into it. Picking up her diamanté clutch bag, she sighed inside. Yet another Christmas party. She was a veteran of them now. Thirty years a corporate wife had seen to that.

‘You look lovely tonight, Mrs Harvey,’ Lance said. ‘As always.’

‘Thank you, sweetheart.’ The truth was that it was all smoke and mirrors. Beneath the emerald-green sheath dress she wore, there was shapewear that was nearly cutting her in two. Eating would be a trial too far. Staying a size eight – in British sizes – didn’t come easily these days.

The glaring brightness in here was condemningly harsh. If it had been her own home she would have changed it to something more subtle, more flattering. The light showed the fine etching of laughter lines much too clearly. Laughter lines. That was the biggest laugh of all: it wasn’t an overdose of jollity that had caused these babies, it was the years slipping by with alarming regularity that had left these blots on her facial landscape. She was like a tree, a gnarled old oak. You could count the summers she had sweltered through and the winters she had weathered by the number of lines on her face. Since she’d turned fifty, she’d embraced the miracle of Botox as you would a lover, in the hope that it would keep her looking younger. But you could only fight it for so long. Once your body hit a certain number, everything drooped, sagged and dried up. It didn’t stop her from trying to hold back the sands of time though.

In the ten years since they’d been rudely plucked by Fossil Oil from the cosmopolitan delights of New York, they’d wandered like executive vagabonds through various offices in Europe. Then Lance had been promoted to chairman of Fossil Oil UK and they were posted to London, where the dampness of the summers had merged inextricably with the slightly fuller dampness of the winters. Mind you, at least her skin had enjoyed a brief respite from the penalties of ultraviolet overindulgence.

They’d now been based here for longer than usual, almost two years. Finally, she was starting to enjoy it. She liked this house well enough and it certainly looked beautiful dressed for Christmas.

‘I want to get there early to do the rounds and press some flesh.’ Lance glanced out of the window by the door and clapped his hands together. ‘Martin’s waiting outside with the car.’

‘I’m all yours,’ she said and he took her arm. Lance closed the front door behind them and, his step still sprightly, they crossed the gravel as he escorted her to the car.

By the fountain in their sweep-round driveway, Martin held open the door of the Bentley for her while she slid into the luxurious warmth of the car. Martin had been with them since they’d been in England, which could be considered long-term. He was a nice man. Loyal. Reliable.

She nodded to him. ‘Good evening, Martin.’

‘Evening, Mrs Harvey.’

It was a bitterly cold night and snow threatened. A white Christmas was looking likely. That would be nice. All the previous times she’d spent Christmas in England it was, so very often, grey and raining.

Lance got in beside her and the car purred away, heading towards Wadestone Manor. She didn’t think she’d been to this venue before, so that was something to look forward to. There was something else to look forward to as well, but that was her secret.

‘Will tonight be insufferably boring, honey?’ she asked. It was always more taxing when the party was for the whole of Fossil Oil. When it was just the executives you knew where you stood. Introduce even the most junior of staff and, so often, it descended into mayhem. People didn’t know how to behave these days.

‘Probably, my sweet.’ Lancelot Harvey smoothed his fingers through his wavy silver hair. He noticed Melissa scrutinising him and smiled back at her.

‘You look very handsome, Lance.’ And he did.

She knew that it was a constant marvel and source of pride to Lance that, despite having seen the wrong side of sixty, his hair was no thinner than when he was still a fine young buck, wowing the girls as the rising star on the college football team. Now it was silver-white and it made him look very distinguished. Though he hated it and complained constantly that there was no goddamn colour left in it.

But then both she and Lance knew full well that you could never have everything you wanted in life. Over thirty years of marriage and virtually the same length of service with Fossil Oil had proved that, on more than one occasion. He was so different now from the swaggering young man who’d swept her off her feet with his enthusiasm and ambition. She was still green, just out of college herself, when they met, and they’d married after a whirlwind romance, much to her parents’ displeasure. Though they were mightily relieved that she had tied the knot when her first son was born just six months after the wedding. That hadn’t stopped her own quest for a fulfilling career though and even with two toddlers she’d been working her way up to be a tax specialist in a respected company. She’d enjoyed it too – the power, the adrenalin buzz of meetings. They’d managed quite well when Lance was a relatively junior sales manager at Fossil and had only travelled inside the USA. He could manage to be at home most weekends and a full-time nanny had taken up the slack in the week for her.

When her husband had been promoted and burst on to the global scene, it had been impossible for her to continue her own career. Another regret. If she wanted to climb the ladder, it would have meant more time away from home, longer hours, later nights, earlier mornings. The boys were already spending too much time with hired help and it was unfair on them.

When he was offered his first overseas posting, a big step up, together they agreed that they’d put everything into Lance’s career. She’d give up her job, take the boys out of school, and they’d travel with him. They were so in love, the world was in the palm of their hands and they wanted to embrace it wholeheartedly. It was to be a big adventure. And it was. For a while.