‘Does she do the same sort of thing as you do? Is she in the same company?’ Whatever that’s called.
‘Oh no, no, she was a client. We set up a financing package for the agency she works for,’ he continued, confusing his mother even more. She understood the individual words; they just didn’t seem to link together into anything that made sense.
‘Ah.’ Carole tried desperately to think what potential mothers-in-law were supposed to say in these circumstances. ‘So have you thought yet about when you’re going to get married?’
‘September the fourteenth,’ her son replied, surprisingly specific.
‘Well, that sounds fine.’
‘It fits in with Gaby’s parents. They always spend August in the South of France.’
Oh yes, of course. The fiancée would have parents. Presumably at some point Carole would have to meet them. She shrank instinctively from the thought of contact with these unknown people. If their daughter was called Gaby, and they spent their summers in the South of France, then perhaps they weren’t even British?
‘Also,’ Stephen went on, ‘that date suits Dad fine.’
Carole was shocked by how much that hurt. Not just Stephen continuing to call David ‘Dad’ while she had been relegated to ‘Mother’, but the implication of her ex-husband’s complicity in her son’s life. David had been told about the wedding before she had. He’d probably met Gaby. They all lived in London, after all. (At least, presumably Gaby lived in London.) Perhaps David was regularly included in social excursions with the young couple.
Her marriage, the event Carole thought she had locked away for ever, was evidently still capable of breaking out and reviving her pain.
‘I’d like you to meet Gaby,’ Stephen pressed on doggedly.
Carole felt new guilt. She should have said that before he did. ‘I’d love to meet Gaby soon’ – that’s what she should have said. And yet, in the shock and smarting from the hurt, she was forgetting even her most basic good manners.
‘Oh yes, I’d love that!’ Trying to make up the lost ground, she only managed to sound over-effusive.
‘We want to come down the weekend after next.’ As her son spoke, Carole realized he was following an agenda. His and Gaby’s lives between now and the wedding were rigorously planned. Telling his mother the news and introducing her to his bride-to-be were duties that had to be performed and fitted into their schedule. ‘We’ve got to be in the area.’
‘Oh, why?’
No answer could have surprised her more than the one Stephen came up with. ‘We’re looking at some houses down your way.’
‘Really?’
‘Gaby’s very keen to get out of London. We’re looking for a big family house in the country for the next stage of our lives.’
So formally did her son speak these words that Carole knew, had Jude been there to hear them, they would both have giggled. But, on her own, Carole was too winded by the implication of Stephen’s words to offer any response.
‘So I was wondering, Mother, whether you’d be free for Sunday lunch that weekend.’
‘Lunch? Sunday week. Yes, that sounds fine.’ Uncharacteristically gushing, she added, ‘I’m simply thrilled at the idea of meeting Gaby!’
‘She’s longing to meet you,’ Stephen asserted, with all the enthusiasm of a weatherman announcing a cold snap. But he hadn’t finished. ‘There is one thing, Mother.’
‘Yes?’
‘I am very keen that you and Dad should both be at the wedding. Will that be all right?’
‘Yes,’ said Carole Seddon. ‘Yes, of course it will be.’
That was only one of her worries after she had put the phone down. A lot of moribund emotions had been stirred up, reminding her they were still far from dead. And she knew they wouldn’t go away. September the fourteenth would be a climax, a day of maximum stress, but that would not end the process. She was reliving the myth of Pandora’s box. Now it had been opened, Carole was made aware of its fragility, and felt foolish for the misguided reliance she had placed on its security.
Another troubling thought occurred to her. It was rare for Stephen to come down to Fethering, and even rarer for him to stay overnight. On the few occasions when he wasn’t just down for a quick pub or restaurant lunch and away, she had put him up in her spare bedroom. But if he was coming with a fiancée . . . The spare room only had a single bed. Oh dear, would she have to arrange for a double to be brought in? Worse than that . . . would she actually have to ask Stephen what sleeping arrangements he and Gaby favoured? The potential embarrassment loomed large enough to cloud Carole’s entire horizon.
Seriously shaken, she wanted to talk to Jude. But even though the April evenings were drawing out, it still went against Carole’s nature to knock on the front door of Woodside Cottage.
She telephoned instead. Jude was out.
Chapter Three
The outside door of the kitchen clattered open and, as Max Townley entered, Suzy slipped the sheet of paper and envelope back into her apron. The chef was dressed in black leathers; he’d parked his worshipped motor bike outside. He had once tried to impress Jude with the fact that this was a Ducati, but her patent lack of interest hadn’t allowed him to get far. As he came into the kitchen, he removed a crash helmet, revealing short bluish-black hair. He was as lithe and jumpy as a Grecian cat, his eyes piercingly pale blue, and his thin mouth permanently tight with discontent.
He nodded acknowledgement to the two women, and focused sneeringly on Suzy’s Piaget watch. ‘It’s all right. They’ll get their precious dinner in time. Fat lot they’ll notice, though.’ He moved angrily across to a butcher’s block, on which stood a box of vegetables and flicked through it. ‘Still no celeriac.’
‘They hadn’t got any celeriac,’ said Suzy evenly.
‘I know they hadn’t this morning. You said you’d ring them.’
‘I did ring them, and they still didn’t have any celeriac.’
‘Well then, get a bloody different supplier! How am I supposed to produce a celeriac remoulade without bloody celeriac?’
‘You’ll have to do something else.’
‘I thought you’d agreed a menu with the guests.’
‘They won’t notice.’
The chef’s head snapped back and he faced his employer, but the retort on his lips died in her stare. He returned to the vegetables, mumbling, ‘No, hardly matters what I give them, does it? Might as well nip down and get them takeaways from Macdonald’s. Bloody peasants’d probably prefer that.’
Morosely, unzipping his leathers, he went through into the pantry to change into his freshly laundered white jacket, black-checked trousers and clogs.
Jude knew she had just witnessed a battle of wills, and also knew Suzy had won it beyond doubt. The triumph might simply be a credit to strength of personality, or maybe there was some other source of power. There had been rumours of an affair between the chatelaine of Hopwicke House and her chef, but Jude doubted their veracity. Such rumours clung around Suzy and every attractive man she met, but she was too shrewd an operator to put her business at risk by an unprofessional liaison.
Kitted out in his chef’s gear, Max slipped a couple of heavy-bladed knives out of their slots, like a cowboy drawing his six-shooters, and started to chop fresh carrots on the butcher’s block. His movements were slick from experience, and flamboyant by choice. He was a chef who,