Victoria Fox - Glittering Fortunes

‘Right now it’s a salvage operation,’ said Charlie, indicating to the sommelier to pour. ‘Once the ground’s recovered we should start seeing results. At this rate, we’ll be able to open to the public quicker than I thought.’

‘The public?’ Susanna cringed, as if he had suggested unveiling a sewage tank in the rose garden. Cato placated her with an imperceptible shake of the head: no, that wouldn’t be happening, not on his watch.

‘Well,’ Susanna shredded a seeded plait with her fingertips and declined the offer of butter, ‘it wouldn’t be for me. I can only stand an hour in the heat before my skin comes out in the most outrageous rash. Isn’t that right, Cato, darling?’

‘You’re a delicate flower, my dear.’

‘I can’t imagine it,’ said Olivia, tucking into a bread roll. ‘Me, I couldn’t be cooped up for any length of time. When I was in London it did my head in being trapped indoors all day … I surf, so I’m used to the fresh air.’

‘You surf?’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Well, nothing, I suppose.’ Susanna considered it. ‘Only it’s not very ladylike.’

Cato’s eyes were flashing. ‘I think it’s rather sexy. I say, perhaps we should get you out on a surfboard, Mole.’

‘Over my dead body!’

‘You should try sometime,’ offered Olivia. ‘I’ll teach you, if you like.’

Susanna went to pour scorn on the suggestion before Cato supplied wolfishly:

‘You can teach me.’

‘I think she offered to teach me ,’ Susanna huffed, snapping a grissini in two.

The oysters arrived, a majestic array of rocky shells, bolstered by wedges of sunshine lemon, their flesh pearlescent in the candlelight and doused in sweet shallot.

Cato seized a mollusc and threw it back. ‘Go on, girl,’ he encouraged Susanna, who took a suspicious sniff. ‘Down the hatch!’

‘These look awfully slimy,’ she observed. ‘Are they alive?’

Olivia lifted hers and it vanished down her throat. ‘Not any more.’

Susanna was horrified. Olivia laughed, and put her elbows on the table.

Charlie stole a glance at her. She was unembellished in a plain dress, her auburn hair loose, and she wore no make-up. In the shimmering light her cheeks were soft as apricots, and her eyes were the colour of the sea. Around her neck was a delicate gold locket.

He had kept the picture. He didn’t know where it was now—gathering dust in a box with all his old school stuff, probably. Remembering it felt strange, deceitful somehow, as she sat beside him.

The summer before he left for Harrow, Adrian and his gang had been in the common room, scrapping over a piece of paper, pointing at it and laughing. There had been some disagreement over its contents, a round of jostling and teasing, before the pretty boy capitulated and tossed it in the bin. Charlie had retrieved it after they’d gone, flattening it and smoothing down the creases. Straight away he had recognised the OL initials in the bottom right-hand corner.

It had been the most wonderful drawing. A map of Lustell Cove done in sharp, determined pencil, incorporating the beach and the Steep, the moors and the cliffs, with three big fat Xs scratched in red crayon at the foot of the bluff, where a sailboat was coming in to land, armed with treasure-seeking pirates. What had struck him wasn’t just how good it was, how talented the artist, but with what care it had been done. She had done it for Adrian, and he had thrown it away.

Susanna was attempting to sip her oyster from its shell. She looked like a mother bird returning to the nest, a regurgitated worm dangling from her mouth.

‘Suck it up, Mole, come on now!’

In a slurp it vanished. Susanna shuddered.

‘She’s trying to like them,’ explained Cato. ‘There’s the most terrific pressure to serve them at dinner parties.’

Susanna smacked the table with her hand. ‘That’s it!’ she cried.

‘What in heaven’s—?’

‘We’ll have a party,’ she announced. ‘At Usherwood! We’ll invite everybody! Get the gang down from London, I’ll do the place up, get designers in—caterers too; it’ll be the society event of the decade! Oh, can we, Cato, can we?’

Cato stroked his chin. ‘I don’t know about that, Mole …’

‘The town could come,’ she said recklessly, turned to Charlie for support, whose face was distraught. ‘Lustell Cove. Let’s see what your precious public makes of that! Oh, it’ll be wonderful. You know how easily bored I get when I’m not working. It would be a treat for me to plan something like this, a pet project—’

‘Let’s not get carried away …’

‘It’s not happening.’

The force of Charlie’s interjection plunged the table into silence. It was definite as a slammed door. Cato and Susanna might have opened every aspect of their lives to the masses but that didn’t mean he had to. The gathering wouldn’t be for the cove, or even the couple’s friends. It would inevitably drag an army of paparazzi and press attention with it: presumably that was the point.

Cato assumed everyone wanted the limelight. Charlie didn’t.

But predictably, his brother’s veto spurned Cato to a decision.

‘Let’s consider it, Charles—this might just be a fine idea.’ Next to him, Susanna clapped her hands together and released a squeal. ‘Since when has the old place hosted anything on that scale, hmm? It’d be good for the image.’

‘I don’t care about the image. It’s not reality TV, it’s a family home.’

‘Precisely. So this must be a family decision.’

The men stared each other down.

‘And as the eldest,’ continued Cato, ‘I think you’ll find it falls to me.’

‘You’re never here,’ lashed Charlie, ‘so how can it?’

Susanna went to dispel the fracas. ‘Ooh, look!’ she exclaimed, as a dish of razor clams and langoustines arrived at the table. ‘Aren’t they pretty? I do love pink.’ A light bulb went on above her head. ‘We could have a pink theme—not Barbie pink; prawn pink! Crab pink! Lobster pink! All seafoods pink, inspired by—’

‘Olivia, what do you think?’ Cato turned to their guest.

‘About the pink?’

‘About the party.’

‘It’s not for me to say.’

‘Of course it is,’ said Cato impatiently, ‘if I’ve just asked you. Keep up.’

‘Well, I—’

‘It’s not my job to keep your girlfriend entertained,’ interrupted Charlie.

Cato drew a sharp intake of breath. ‘Neither was it mine to entertain yours,’ he returned. ‘Strange how she didn’t seem to object.’

The table fell into a long and excruciating quiet.

Eventually, Charlie spoke. ‘You forget yourself.’

He pushed his chair back. Without another word he threw a stash of bank notes into the middle of the table, pulled on his jacket and walked away.

His brother’s voice chased him from behind, ripe with evil glee.

‘Not to worry, darling,’ Cato said. ‘We’ll send out invitations later this week. Never mind the decade, it’ll be the party of the century—just you wait and see.’

SUSANNA WOKE AT one a.m. with the most formidable stomach cramps, her belly growling and gurgling as if it were about to explode. Cato’s side of the bed was empty, the blankets pushed back and the imprint of his body fresh on the sheets.

As she staggered to the bathroom, all she could see were those horrid slithery oysters grinning back at her. She retched over the porcelain bowl. Why oh why did she insist on trying them? After a weak bout of spitting and weeping, she crawled on all fours back into the bedroom, a pitiful shadow, and slid beneath the covers.

It was utterly freezing. Had Cato left a window open? Susanna forced herself to investigate, her nightdress shining white as she staggered to the panes, imagining how she might look from miles away: a lonely ghost belonging to some bygone era, Victorian perhaps. The drapes were musty and thick, and when she drew them the grounds of the estate gleamed before her, impossibly still and as quiet as a painting. A river of star-glow spilled across the lawns, snaking between giant trees whose hulking frames were black as crows. The cherub in his pond, youth everlasting, sang a silent song to the sky. An owl hooted in the distance, a low, melancholy call.