Rumours Read online

  ‘I have a John Piper etching,’ he told her with an almost-smile.

  They had just pulled up outside the Victorian conversion, where the one-bedder was on the second floor.

  ‘A Piper?’

  But Geoff pressed the doorbell before Stella could coax a reply.

  Forty minutes later, Geoff really couldn’t fault her – they had a new vendor on their books, her valuation had been spot on. The client had liked her and Geoff had liked Stella’s manner – chatty, enthusiastic, supportive. He sensed if she took a potential purchaser around, they’d be lining up a second viewing just as soon as they’d seen the place. He had to concede that she’d probably sell a place like this faster than he could.

  ‘Nicely done,’ he said when they headed back to the car.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘We’d heard all sorts of things about you,’ he said, as if disbelieving that reality could be so very different. She looked aghast. ‘I doubt whether there was much truth in any of them,’ he told her. ‘Ignore them – Those Three, back in the office – they’re harmless.’ He paused. ‘Relatively.’

  The trouble with rumours, thought Stella, is that once the seed is planted, roots spread and the whole thing rampages like ground elder. As fast as you pull it up, renegade shoots are already off on tangents.

  But then she thought, it’s impossible for something to grow from nothing. However tiny, there’s always a seed of truth that starts it all off.

  A bit like Love really.

  Chapter Two

  Jesus, do I not feel like doing this.

  Xander reached over to whack down the alarm clock as if it was a bluebottle that had been bugging him for hours. Lying next to him, Siobhan mumbled in her reverie. He looked at her, naked and so very tempting. Outside, grey and raining. Inside, warm and cosy. Inside Siobhan, downright hot and snug. He lay back on his side of the bed, his hand lolling over his morning erection, trying to persuade himself that he had a true dilemma on his hands. But the truth was, Siobhan wasn’t really the distraction and he wasn’t really all that horny – he just craved any excuse not to go. He didn’t want to do ten miles. Not today. Not in the rain. But it wasn’t a choice; there really was no decision to make. He had to do it. And that was that. Half-marathon at the end of the month, all the won-derful people in his life effervescing on his justgiving.com page, pledging money for his chosen good cause. He dressed, steeled himself and headed out into the rain. More fool him for having believed in all that mad March sunshine yesterday. iPod on, he headed out of his house, past the other estate cottages in his terrace, and headed up Tramfield Lane at a sprint as if to prove wrong the Xander who’d woken thinking he didn’t want to run today.

  Within two miles he felt good. Really good. He headed his loop up Bridgeback Hill and through Dansworth Forest, pushing on hard until the gradient levelled out and he was looking down on the Georgian beauty of Longbridge Hall; the arable fields, noble woods, rolling parkland and manicured gardens of the Fortescue estate. The rain had stopped and sudden sunlight elicited caramel tones from the mansion’s brickwork, glints of silver from the expansive slate roof; the high floating hornbeam hedge sparkled like a soft chuckle and the gravel driveway, from this angle, was like a swooping butter-coloured smile. Xander thought, it’s been a while since I saw Lady Lydia. His instinct was still to refer to her thus if he hadn’t seen her recently – though he’d been invited to call her Lydia once he’d graduated from university almost two decades ago.

  I must drop her a line. It’s been over a month.

  He ran on and laughed out loud – remembering a conversation so clearly she could very well be running alongside him just then.

  ‘Have you heard of eel mails, Xander?’

  ‘Email?’

  ‘What a ghastly notion. Lady Ranchester told me she is now called dorothy at ranchester dot com. All lower case. How preposterous! Dot Common – that’s what she is now.’

  ‘Handwritten letters are now known as snail mail, Lydia.'

  ‘Nonsense. If one can write – it’s downright wrong not to.’

  Ten miles in sixty-eight minutes. Not bad. Not bad.

  ‘Xan?’

  He wished Siobhan wouldn’t call him that. Laura used to call him Xan. And that experience had shown him how familiarity bred contempt. Also, with his mind now alert and his body charged by endorphins, he just wanted to shower, have a quick, quiet coffee with his bowl of muesli and be gone. Siobhan didn’t need to be here – not in his bed, not on the scene. He had to do something about it, he really did. Just not now.

  ‘Xan?’ she called out.

  God!

  ‘I need a shower!’ he called back.

  ‘I need to go.’

  Thank God!

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Call me.’

  ‘OK.’

  Xander always marvelled at the transformation. All it took for his Lazy Git alter ego (the duvet-muffled bloke who’d had too much red wine the night before) to morph into Xander Fletcher with all traces of sleep, sex, stubble and sweat erased, bright and eager to greet the day, was a ten-mile run in under an hour and ten minutes. Dressed neatly in dark trousers and a pale shirt, driving sensibly through his beloved village of Long Dansbury to his office in Hertford twenty-five minutes away, he thought of the process as a sort of protracted Superman turnaround. Well, if not a super man, a good bloke at any rate. Heading for forty in a couple of years, Xander had no complaints at all. He lived in a lovely cottage, he had an OK bank balance and his own business keeping its head above water, a close family, great friends and a woman called Siobhan who didn’t mind things being casual. Doing those ten miles in sixty-three minutes would ice an already tasty cake. He thought about it as he headed out for his car. It was doable. Xander had been brought up to believe anything was doable. Apart from Love, which was beyond one’s control. Accordingly, he’d decided not to entertain it in his life, not since Laura.

  He drove through a landscape which rolled and tumbled like a soft green rucked-up quilt. Born and bred here, Xander had never fallen out of love with his environs and never stopped noticing its beauty or the changes, for better or worse. That’s why, after interludes in Nottingham and London, he’d returned home at thirty.

  His route took him through a handful of small villages, a few still with a shop clinging on for dear life to the local economy like a limpet to a storm-lashed rock. Most supported a pub and all of the villages heralded their approach with a profusion of daffodils along the verges in spring. Beyond each community, pastureland subtly cordoned off by barely visible electric fencing supported little gatherings of horses in weatherproof rugs, looking like the equine relatives of the Michelin Man. Woodland interrupted the swathes of fields like a patchy beard and the rivers Rib, Ash and Beane coursed through the landscape as if on a mission to deliver goodness straight to the Lea, the main artery of the area.

  ‘Good morning, Xander.’

  Pauline Gregg, his PA of eight years, still wished he’d let her call him Mr Fletcher or Alexander at the very least. To her, it seemed too casual, unseemly somehow. When she’d been at secretarial school all those decades ago, she’d been trained, along with other girls, in the correct way to address their future employers and their clients. Formality is fitting; that’s what they learned. She felt it somehow downgraded her qualification to call her boss ‘Xander’. Her daughter, who was Xander’s age, told her it was a generational thing. But there again, her daughter had sent her children to a school where the pupils called their teachers by their Christian names. Moreover, the school didn’t classify it thus, but as ‘given names’. There again, that school appeared to be teaching Pauline’s grandchildren more about something called Diwali than Christmas. So many things to button one’s lip against – it was part of Pauline’s day to declare to herself at least once, what’s the world coming to?

  ‘Morning, Mrs Gregg,’ Xander said. He respected her right to be addressed like this – even though eight years on and bei
ng privy to the end of her marriage, the birth of her grandchildren and that Unfortunate Incident at the Roundabout With That Silly Car Which Wasn’t Her Fault, Xander considered Mrs Gregg to be on the outer ring of his family.

  ‘Seventy-two minutes?’ she ventured. Xander cocked his head and smiled. ‘Seventy?’

  ‘Sixty-eight,’ he said.

  ‘Very good, that,’ said Mrs Gregg. ‘Tea?’

  ‘Please.’ They sipped in amicable silence, each leafing through the documents on their desks. Xander looked up. ‘You’ve had your hair done.’

  Mrs Gregg touched it self-consciously but smiled. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very nice,’ said Xander. He wished his own mother would wear her hair in a similar style – elegant and in place – instead of the unruly thatch half in, half out of a bun, invariably adorned with debris from the garden. ‘Mrs Gregg, can you take this to the post office? And can you pick up a nice greetings card – blank inside?’

  She glanced at him. When Xander had been steady with Laura for all those years, he’d never once asked her to help assist in the running of that relationship. He’d scoot off at lunch-time himself and return with flowers or something bulky in a bag which would sit quietly taunting her from the chair in the corner until he left in the evening. That was another part of her training going to waste – he had no need for her to alert him to Valentine’s Day, or Special Occasions. Yet today he was asking her to buy a card, blank, just like his expression.

  ‘Blank inside,’ she said, writing it down and, without looking up, she asked, ‘And what should be on the outside?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘something soft – floral perhaps. Or a landscape.’

  She wrote it down. Floral. Landscape. Unlikely to be a special card for a ‘significant other’ – or however his generation referred to girlfriends these days. She felt strangely relieved and yet somehow disappointed for him too. He’s such a nice young man, she often described to her friends at bridge. It’s a bit of a waste, she’d say. Perhaps he’s not a lady’s man, one of her chums might venture. Oh, he’s not like that, Pauline would say, almost defensively. The contradiction had never confronted her – how she wanted to mother him, be at the helm of his life, yet keep the Decorum of Division she’d been trained to maintain.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Treat yourself to a Danish pastry,’ said Xander.

  ‘Why, thank you!’

  With Mrs Gregg gone, Xander leafed through his diary and in-tray. Design, print and packaging wasn’t a sexy business, but it was a solid one and even in the dire economic climate, Xander found his long-term clients remained loyal. He’d cut overheads instead of staff and it had been serendipitous that Keith, the designer, had asked to go part-time just when the office rent had been hiked, so Xander and Mrs Gregg moved to these smaller premises in the same building. Everything remained the same. Apart from the chair that had been in the corner of the old office, on which the flowers or the bag with the bulky object for Laura had once sat.

  I don’t need that chair, Mrs Gregg, Xander had said. And that’s when Mrs Gregg realized Xander had broken it off with Laura – right at the point of engagement, she assumed. Though he said they could bring the chair with them, if she felt it might be useful, she’d declined. If he didn’t need it, who was she to suggest he might, at some point, in the future?

  ‘I bought this card – it has flowers and a landscape and is what I’d call gentle. I have paper napkins with this very design.’

  ‘Monet,’ said Xander.

  ‘No, no – it wasn’t pricey.’

  ‘Monet,’ Xander said again, as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘The Garden at Giverny.’

  ‘One of my favourites,’ Mrs Gregg said, as if there’d been no faux pas.

  ‘It’s most appropriate, thank you.’

  Xander made a couple of calls and then, with the card open on his desk and his pen thoughtfully pursed between his lips, he gazed out of the window before beginning to write.

  ‘I’ll take the post,’ Mrs Gregg said at the end of the day.

  ‘There’s not much,’ said Xander.

  ‘It’s not a problem.’

  ‘I can post it on my way home.’

  ‘Let me,’ said Mrs Gregg. ‘You know those country lanes – if you get stuck behind something, you’ll be trundling along for hours and miss the post altogether. I’ll pop it in the box outside Elmfield Estates – it’s at the end of my street. It’s never collected before six. Never.’

  ‘OK,’ said Xander. ‘Thanks.’

  She was barely out of the office door before she was leafing through the mail. Yes, yes, them, them, boring, boring. Ah! Aha!

  Lady Lydia Fortescue

  Longbridge Hall

  Long Dansbury

  Hertfordshire

  Xander’s handwriting: even, bold and steady, written with his trademark calligraphy fountain pen. Mrs Gregg tutted at the envelope. Convene with women your own age, Xander, not an upper-class old battleaxe. Cut your ties with minor aristocracy! Venture forth into the real world – the one beyond Long Dansbury.

  Chapter Three

  Stella didn’t often go out, nor had she had her friends over that much recently. Her social life had dwindled over the last three years but this was her call because the invitations to socialize were no less forthcoming. Her close friends, her oldest friends – those she could count on the fingers of one hand who brought her all the dependable warmth and comfort of a well-fitting thermal glove – were always at the end of the phone, consistently energetic respondees to text messages and Facebook updates. Indirect contact and communication had become so easy that it was hard to remember when time was last spent together actually in person. She didn’t mind; she was always busy and, with the new job, tired too. It wasn’t as if she had much spare time to wonder how to fill it. But two weeks into her new position at Elmfield Estates, Stella had now settled into the routine. It was as if she’d been swamped by paperwork, floor plans and surveyors’ reports and had suddenly looked up and thought, where is everyone? So tonight, butternut squash soup simmered on the stove and a baguette was ready on the breadboard awaiting the arrival of Jo, the closest Stella had to a sister. Tomorrow, she’d invited herself over to her older brother Robbie’s and the day after that, their eldest brother Alistair would be hosting Sunday lunch for her on the condition she brought their mother and dessert. It did cross her mind that in one weekend she could conceivably regain the stone she’d lost over the last two years.

  Jo arrived with a packet of tortilla chips, a jar of salsa, a great new haircut and, predictably, the suggestion of a date with some bloke who had a tenuous link to someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew Jo – and Stella had barely closed the front door.

  ‘Come on in, madwoman.’

  ‘You do realize I haven’t actually seen you since Pancake Day?’

  Stella laughed. ‘Ah yes, when Stevie burnt herself on the pan, Scarlet spilled the sugar all over the floor and you referred to Michael as Tosser all evening?’

  ‘He was Chief Tosser – in charge of flipping the flipping pancakes,’ Jo justified. ‘And I told my daughters to keep away from the stove and let me do the sugar sprinkling.’

  ‘How are they all?’

  ‘Fine. Gorgeous.’ Jo kissed her friend three times: ‘There – their kisses are delivered.’

  ‘Thank you thank you thank you.’ Stella paused and raised an eyebrow. ‘I do have a bowl, you know. A veritable selection, in fact.’ But Jo had already opened the tortilla chips en route to the kitchen and updated Stella on her various nightmares at work through a mouthful of crumbs.

  The salsa was pretty hot, the soup was delicious and butter oozed fragrantly into the warmed baguette but Jo and Stella barely tasted any of it, their hunger for conversation outweighing what was to eat. Stella regaled Jo with the details of Elmfield Estates and it provided ample opportunity for the merry chinking of glasses.

  ‘Any news from Charlie?’ said Jo. ‘Dare I
ask?’

  Stella chewed thoughtfully. ‘Not a word. Funny how, before it all happened, you always used to call him Chuck—’

  Jo interrupted. ‘And when it was all kicking off, I called him Twatface.’ She paused. ‘I did wonder – even after all this time – with what’s happening now, whether he’d be in touch.’

  Stella shrugged. ‘So did I. Yet the fact that he hasn’t, well –’

  Jo nodded. ‘The lawyers – it’ll be any day now, I expect.’

  ‘I know,’ said Stella.

  ‘You’ll call me – won’t you?’ Jo stretched over the crumbs, the globs of salsa and splashes of soup which now decorated the table like a minor work by Jackson Pollock. She squeezed Stella’s arm. ‘Call it the last piece of the jigsaw – the final nail in the coffin. It’s a good thing.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ Stella said, raising a glass and sipping so that she didn’t have to talk about it any more.

  ‘By the way,’ Jo said and, slowly, she let a lascivious smile spread, ‘your hair is looking a bit mumsy.’

  ‘Well, you look like a wee blonde elf,’ Stella said, in her defence.

  ‘That, my love, is intentional.’

  ‘But I wear it like – this – for work,’ Stella demonstrated, scooping it away from her face.

  ‘That’s highly appropriate for an estate agent,’ Jo said measuredly, ‘but a bit dull for a gorgeous, single, early-thirties gal.’

  ‘I’m mid-thirties, practically. So what is it you suggest I do?’

  ‘You phone Colin at Pop, that’s what you do. And tell him I sent you. And don’t tell him what you think you want – just put your head in his hands. Promise?’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘How is your ma?’

  ‘I’m seeing her on Sunday, actually. At Alistair’s.’

  ‘And how’s the Robster?’ Stella’s brothers were as close as Jo came to having any.