Wild Oats (3 page)

‘Your father will be pleased to see you,’ remarked Olivier easily. ‘He’s missed you.’

He made it a statement, not a reproach, but nevertheless Jamie felt on the defensive. Had they talked about her? What had been said? Paranoia crept up and tickled the back of her neck.

‘Where is he?’

‘At the races.’

That figured. Some things didn’t change. Olivier handed her a cup of steaming tea.

‘So. How was South America?’

‘Amazing.’

He raised an amused eyebrow.

‘That’s it? Just… amazing?’

Jamie managed a smile despite herself.

‘I could go on for hours. Trust me, once I’ve started, you’ll wish you’d never asked. If you’re really unlucky, I’ll show you my slides.’ She took a slurp of tea. It was heaven. ‘This is divine. It’s the first proper cup of tea I’ve had for nearly a year.’

‘Is that what made you come home? Tea deprivation?’

The fact that his query was masked with a joke made her feel uncomfortable. Those piercing eyes were very perspicacious. And she didn’t know whether she could trust him, or quite what his game was. There were too many pieces of the puzzle missing for her to confide in him just yet. Instead, she made a rueful face.

‘Ran out of money. Thought I’d better come back and do some work.’

‘Bloody money. Always gets in the way. Stops you from doing what you really want to do.’

‘Spoken from the heart?’

Olivier spooned three sugars into his tea and stirred.

‘Dad wants me to take over his car dealership in the New Year. This is my last-ditch attempt at having some fun. I’ve spent the last five years being a ski instructor in the winter and a tennis coach in the summer. He says it’s about time I had some responsibility.’

Responsibility? Jamie couldn’t imagine that Eric Templeton knew the meaning of the word. When had he ever been responsible? She raised a dubious eyebrow.

‘That doesn’t sound like your dad.’

‘I know. Bit of a cheek, considering what he used to be like. But he’s changed a lot. Keeps going on at me to settle down. Keeps asking me if I’ve got a pension plan.’ Olivier rolled his eyes. ‘As if.’

There was an awkward silence, as the conversation seemed to run out of steam. Olivier cleared his throat.

‘I’m… I’m really sorry about your mother, by the way.’

He obviously felt uncomfortable talking about it, as he couldn’t meet Jamie’s eye. But Jamie didn’t want to dwell on it either.

‘Thanks,’ she said, then changed the subject quickly
as she put her tea cup back in the sink. ‘I think I’ll go and have a bath.’

For some reason, she suddenly felt horribly self-conscious about her appearance. She was keenly aware that her legs hadn’t been shaved for weeks, and though the hairs on them were fine and fair, they were still evident. The shower she’d had at the hotel before catching the plane had been nearly twenty-four hours ago. She knew the combat shorts she was wearing looked butch and unflattering, and the plaits that were most practical for travelling made her look about twelve.

‘There should be enough hot water. If not I’ll flick on the immersion for you.’

Jamie frowned. Yet again Olivier was making her feel as if he were the host and she the intruder. He must have his feet well under the table, if he knew where the immersion was. She wondered exactly how long he’d been here.

‘I know where it is. Thank you.’ She couldn’t quite keep the coolness out of her tone as she left the room.

The final indignity was when Parsnip and Gumdrop made no move to follow her, but stayed resolutely under Olivier’s feet.

Feeling slightly disgruntled, Jamie lugged her rucksack into the utility room, emptied almost all of its unsavoury contents into the washing machine, then went up the two flights of winding stairs to her bedroom. It was just as she had left it. She’d stripped it of most
of her childhood detritus several years ago: pony-club rosettes, pop-star collages, postcards, dead pot plants – and tried to make it more sophisticated, with photos in proper frames and candles. But it was still definitely the bedroom of a single girl, with its high brass bed and rose-covered eiderdown, and the patchwork nightdress case she’d made in needlework at school and hadn’t been able to bring herself to throw away.

She wondered where Olivier was sleeping. There was another bedroom on her floor, cosy and crooked but with barely any headroom – surely he would be too tall? Or there were three large, well-appointed rooms in the later wing of the house, each with an en-suite bathroom. No doubt he was in one of those.

She sat on the bed, suddenly exhausted, and debated whether food or a bath was the more important. Neither of them had featured prominently on the shoestring budget she’d set for herself on her South American tour. Finally she decided that, for the sake of public interest, she’d make herself presentable first. There was nothing but an ancient box of Radox in the bathroom on her floor, but somehow she felt inhibited about prowling round the house in search of something more exotic, in case Olivier appeared miraculously with an assortment of luxury toiletries. She wanted time alone to gather her thoughts – if there was one thing Jamie hated it was being wrongfooted – so she made do, emptying the remnants of the box under the taps.

She dropped her dusty, sweaty clothes on to the bathroom floor and climbed into the blissfully hot water. She’d been lucky to get a tepid shower in most of the places she had dossed, and the water had often been suspiciously murky in colour. She slid down until she was submerged up to her neck, closed her eyes and began to try and make sense of the strange turn of events. Of all the scenarios she had envisaged on her homeward journey, finding Olivier Templeton in her kitchen had not been one of them.

Jack Wilding and Eric Templeton had met as boys, while incarcerated together at a minor public school. There they’d run scams and wheezes for the benefit of their pockets rather than their fellow pupils, and had narrowly avoided expulsion on several occasions. From then on they’d been partners in crime, terrorizing the streets of Chelsea in the Swinging Sixties with their contrasting good looks and charm: Eric dark and swarthy and dangerous, Jack golden-haired and smooth and suave, both dressed to kill and ready to pounce. They were bad boys together, heads filled with dreams and schemes that, because of their boldness and daring, often came to profitable fruition. Their flat off the King’s Road was a notorious sin bin, where a stream of glamorous girls came to lose their virginity and their hearts.

Eventually, they grew up. Jack had fallen in love with the bohemian and almost-aristocratic Louisa, a student at Chelsea Art School. He’d found her sketching passers-by in a coffee bar on the King’s Road.

He’d demanded she do his portrait, and she’d willingly agreed. The sitting had blossomed into a full-blown love affair, and before he knew it he was married. Five years later they’d taken up residence at Bucklebury Farm in Shropshire, handed over to Louisa by her parents, who insisted they were far too old to manage the place any longer.

To his surprise, Jack found he didn’t miss London and took to country life like a duck to water, rather enjoying being something of a squire in the village, with his own silver tankard in the pub. Big fish, small pond, Eric had teased, with his cosmopolitan lifestyle dealing in second-hand sports cars. Then he’d settled down too: on one of his trips abroad he’d come back with Isabelle, allegedly the daughter of a French count. They’d married, and lived in a luxury penthouse in St John’s Wood, all mirrored ceilings and leather and glass and chrome, a million miles from Bucklebury Farm.

Louisa and Jack stayed with Eric and Isabelle whenever they went to London, which was often. Isabelle neither understood nor liked the countryside, so the visits were rarely reciprocated, but the four of them went on an annual holiday to the south of France for a fortnight of sybaritic sunbathing and drinking. This ritual had a hiatus when children arrived: first the Templetons had Emile, Delphine and Olivier in quick succession, then Jamie had come along – and they all agreed the French Riviera lost some of its charm when one had screaming infants in tow. But one
summer, when Olivier was seventeen and Jamie fifteen, Eric was given the use of a huge luxury villa near Cap Ferrat, and reinstated the tradition.

Jamie remembered the holiday being a frightening mixture of heaven and hell. The setting was divine, the food out of this world, the weather perfect. But she found she couldn’t relax with the Templetons. Isabelle was so frighteningly chic, with her Parisian clothes, her twelve swimsuits, her high heels on the beach, her menthol cigarettes. Eric was gregarious and boisterous, and brought out the worst in her father: they were bad boys together again, with their constant calls for champagne. Her mother seemed amused by it all, but kept her cool reserve, as beautiful as Isabelle in her own way, but without the need for constant reapplication of Dior lipstick. But Jamie couldn’t help feeling as if an air of forced jollity kept the momentum of the holiday going; a desperation to have fun before time ran out. How true that turned out to be…

Whilst the grown-ups dozed and read by the pool, and Emile and Delphine disappeared off each day on mopeds, Jamie and Olivier found themselves thrown together and expected to get on. They’d played happily enough together when they were little, when their parents had got together for weekends. But no one seemed to have taken into account the excruciating torture of adolescence. At first, Jamie was tongue-tied and embarrassed in Olivier’s company. As a self-conscious fifteen-year-old from the sticks, she was a
little in awe of his extrovert London sophistication, and longed to crawl away and read books in her bedroom. But Olivier wasn’t having any of it: he was friendly, with an enormous sense of fun, and it wasn’t long before he managed to bring her out of herself. Soon she was hanging out with the other young people he’d met on the beach, drinking beer in the bars and sneaking off to the boîtes de nuit when they’d managed to ditch the parents after dinner. Occasionally they’d bump into Emile and Delphine, who studiously ignored them. Olivier, meanwhile, treated her with a certain chivalry that made her feel safe, but teased her mercilessly, almost as if she was a younger sister. But not quite. Once or twice she’d caught him looking at her in a way that made her cheeks go pink – though if he caught her looking he’d turn away, make a joke, start playing the fool.

One afternoon, she’d been asleep on the pontoon on her front. She was half aware that her fair skin was in danger of burning, but the holiday had turned her a golden brown for the first time in her life and she wanted to prolong her tan. It made her look so different; when she tied up her hair in the evenings and applied mascara and lip gloss, she felt incredible. She became aware of admiring glances, and aware of Delphine’s hostility at having competition. Despite herself, Jamie found she rather liked the sense of power it gave her.

Suddenly from the shore there came an urgent whistle. It was their signal to go back, to start getting
ready to go out for dinner, but surely it wasn’t that time yet? Jamie sat up sharply, then realized with horror that her bikini top had stayed on the pontoon. She was topless. Olivier fell about laughing as she tried to cover herself.

‘You pig. You undid it…’ As she put her arms up in a desperate attempt to retie the strings behind her neck, her breasts betrayed her again, revealing themselves from behind the triangles of gingham. Tears of humiliation stung her eyes. ‘Help me, for God’s sake…’

Olivier stopped laughing when he saw how distressed she was. Gently he came over to help her.

‘I’m sorry. It was only supposed to be a joke. I didn’t mean to upset you.’

Jamie brushed away her tears with the back of her hand, too angry to reply or even acknowledge his apology. She stood as tense as a racehorse in the starting gate as he did up the ties on her back. When he’d finished, his hands slid down to her waist.

‘I really am sorry,’ he said softly, and Jamie felt the brush of his lips on the back of her neck. Then he turned away and dived into the water.

Jamie stood stock-still. One moment she had been rigid with fury and humiliation, then the next… His kiss should have filled her with further indignation, but it hadn’t. Her anger had melted, to be replaced by a feeling of swirling bliss.

Her father’s second whistle from the shore brought her back to reality. She plunged into the cool water.
Within seconds the moment was lost, and the feeling washed away.

When they got back to shore, it seemed the holiday had come to an impromptu close. The Wildings’ car had been packed up hastily, ready for the journey home. Someone had shoved Jamie’s things back into her suitcase hurriedly; nothing had been folded. Jack ushered her into the car, muttering about a misunderstanding between ‘the girls’, as he always called Isabelle and Louisa. Louisa was waiting in the front seat, inscrutable behind her sunglasses.

As Jack jumped in and started up the engine, driving away without so much as a backwards glance, Jamie was baffled. It was obvious she wasn’t going to get a proper explanation for their hasty departure, but she suspected it might have something to do with Olivier’s mother. She’d seen Isabelle giving Jack the come-on over the past week, her manicured hands on his knee, her demands for him to top up her champagne and rub in her suntan lotion. And the way Jack kept chirruping into cheerful conversation on the way home, only to be met with if not a stony, then a resigned, silence from Louisa, merely confirmed Jamie’s suspicions that her father had overstepped the mark. Not that she was bothered about finding out the truth. She was too busy reliving the agonizing memory of Olivier and that kiss. What might have happened between them if the holiday had been allowed to continue? She tortured herself as only a fifteen-year-old can, imagining all sorts of scenarios.

Her fantasies sustained her on the interminable ferry-crossing all the way back to Bucklebury Farm.

Now, as her bathwater went from scalding to lukewarm to cold, Jamie recalled the last moment she’d seen Olivier. They’d exchanged bewildered glances through the car window as Jack accelerated out of the drive, and he’d given her a helpless shrug as if to say he hadn’t a clue what was going on either. No one had actually said as much, but it was pretty clear that, whatever had gone on between the grown-ups, they were now sworn enemies and she was unlikely to see Olivier ever again…