‘I wouldn’t call him a child,’ said Maddie, catching Brett’s eye and the wild hunger beneath his brooding exterior. ‘He’s very good looking.’
‘If you say so, my dear,’ Professor Jensen muttered absently.
Maddie did say so. Not just to her husband, but to Brett himself when she approached him after lectures a few days later. ‘Are you a virgin?’ she asked him bluntly.
Brett replied in the affirmative. Since his mother’s death he’d undergone a self-imposed ban on all interaction with the opposite sex. Not that he had no libido. Quite the opposite. But the strength of the physical longing welling up inside him was at war with the terrible fear of loss and abandonment that had become as much a part of him as his own flesh and bones. Brett adored women – both sexually and for the warmth and intimacy they offered, warmth and intimacy that he desperately longed for – but he was afraid of them.
‘Do you want to be?’
Whether it was Madeleine’s directness, her utter lack of guile, or the fact that she was almost old enough to be his mother; or whether it was her beauty, or her own deep sexual need speaking to his, Brett didn’t know. What he did know was that he wanted to go to bed with her. Very, very badly.
‘No.’
‘Good.’ Maddie smiled. ‘Follow me.’
Sex opened up a new and glorious world for Brett Cranley. Before long it rivalled ambition as the key driver in his personality. His relationships with women were wildly conflicted: needy, passionate and adoring on the one hand; angry, frightened and controlling on the other; each one a reflection of his feelings for his mother, frozen in suspended animation at fourteen. He and Maddie Jensen remained lovers for over a year, but there were many, many others, too many to count, let alone remember, a sea of faces and bodies and, before long, a trail of broken hearts left in his wake. Brett needed sex like a plant craving sunlight. Both the physical rush and the emotional validation fuelled his confidence and ambition like a shot of adrenaline in the arm.
He’d been sure of himself before ANU, before Maddie Jensen.
Now he felt invincible.
It was in his last year, his last few months at ANU, that Brett Cranley met the second woman who was to change his life forever.
Angela Flynn was not a student at the university. A shy, sweet, quietly funny eighteen-year-old girl, with no life experience and no particular ambition, she worked in the Belwood Bakery close to the mathematics faculty building. Brett used to see her when he bought his lunchtime sandwich and was immediately drawn to something about her. It was a combination of innocence, kindness and fragility. Angela was so pale she looked almost like a ghost, with her white-blonde hair and amber eyes, oddly translucent beneath her spun gold lashes. She was the sort of girl who looked as if she might faint if exposed to too much sun, or cold. And yet her disposition belied her appearance. As Brett got to know her, he discovered she was a relentless optimist, as hopeful and trusting of the world as he was cynical and dismissive. He also discovered that she was a virgin. For some reason that he couldn’t define, even to himself, this was important.
His attraction to Angela was different to that with all the other women he had gone to bed with, something that would remain the case throughout their long marriage. He wanted to own her, to protect her, to carry her around with him in a glass case, like a guardian angel. His angel. His Angela. He was sure that his mother would have loved her.
As it turned out, marrying Angela Flynn was not the easy feat he’d assumed it would be. She had a father, and three older brothers, all of them Irish Catholic, deeply protective and not remotely inclined to let their teenage sister ‘throw herself away’ on a kid not much older than she was and well known to be a player on campus. Nevertheless, Brett persisted, proposing to Angela before he went away to business school and agreeing to a chaste, three-year engagement at the Flynn family’s insistence. Even after he founded Cranley Estates at only twenty years old, backed by MacQuarie Bank, then dropped out of business school and became a multimillionaire almost overnight, Angela’s family held firm. They finally married on Angela’s twenty-first birthday, not a day before, in a tiny local church in Canberra.
The bride wore white.
It was the happiest day of Brett Cranley’s life.
‘You’d better get dressed,’ Michelle said, matter-of-factly.
She was back in PA mode now, as if the sex had never happened, scrolling through the rest of the day’s agenda on her Samsung phone while Brett lay sprawled out naked on the carpet with his arms and legs outstretched, like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man.
‘The guy from Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s gonna be here in ten minutes.’
‘Oh, God. Really?’
‘Really. And I don’t think those are the assets he’s interested in, do you?’ She looked down at her boss’s wilting dick and grinned broadly.
‘I certainly hope not.’ Brett grinned back, feeling happier by the minute that he’d hired this girl. If they didn’t give him an ‘Investor in People’ award next year, there’d be no justice in the world. ‘Be an angel and hand me my clothes, would you? And call down and order a pot of tea for … what’s his name, the GSAM bloke?’
‘Kingham. Anthony Kingham. Will do.’
Brett had forgotten completely about the Goldman meeting. He must be tireder than he thought. He’d have liked to cancel, but it was too late now.
Never mind. The call to Angela and the kids would have to wait.
Max Bingley walked down Fittlescombe High Street with a spring in his step.
‘Good morning, Mrs Preedy!’
The village shopkeeper’s wife smiled and waved. She was wearing an old-fashioned apron with deep front pockets and had a wicker basket, filled incongruously with leeks, under one arm. She reminded Max of Mrs Honeyman, the village gossip from Camberwick Green, a 1960s children’s programme made with puppets that he and his younger brothers used to watch as kids. There was something wonderfully innocent and timeless about Fittlescombe that regularly took Max back to earlier, happier times. The Preedys’ shop was at the heart of it all, along with the excellent village pub, The Fox.
‘Enjoying the break, Mr Bingley?’
Mrs Preedy had unloaded her leeks into a crate of fresh vegetables outside the front door of the shop and was now polishing apples with the front of her apron.
‘I am indeed. Hard not to with such lovely weather.’
It was indeed a perfect day, blue-skied and warm for May, with the faintest hint of breeze carrying the scent of honeysuckle and early flowering jasmine on the air. Half-term had run late this year, and school wasn’t due to start again for another week, so the unexpected sunshine was an added boon. Max Bingley was thoroughly enjoying his new job as headmaster of St Hilda’s Primary School, and didn’t mind the idea of going back. But nothing could quite beat a week’s walking and fishing in the glorious Downs countryside. Not for the first time, Max said a silent prayer of thanks that he’d had the good sense to take the St Hilda’s job when it was offered to him.
When Harry Hotham, St Hilda’s headmaster of over twenty-five years, unexpectedly announced his retirement last year, and the governors approached Max about the position, he found himself on the receiving end of a relentless campaign by his daughters to accept the job. Max had been depressed since his wife, their mother, had died two years earlier.
‘You need a fresh start, Dad,’ said Rosie, now in her fourth year of medical school at Cambridge. ‘The Swell Valley is supposed to be ridiculously beautiful.’
‘You