The Heir Affair, стр. 93
“Happy New Year, Annie,” Nick said, kissing both her cheeks politely.
“And it’s so brilliant to see you, Bex,” Annabelle said, turning to me. “We missed you last year. I had to work overtime to keep a smile on this one’s face.” She nudged Nick affectionately.
“Your house is…beyond,” I said, staring up at the Gothic arches in the hall ceiling, some forty feet above my head. It was rare that Nick and I found ourselves in a house that was more awe inspiring than his grandmother’s. “It must have been hard to leave it for Dubai.”
“Honestly, the upkeep is a grind,” she said conspiratorially, as if she dusted the gargoyle carvings herself. “And terribly expensive. But I’ve had so much fun curating it since we’ve returned. We’ve added costumed Tudor docents, and calligraphy workshops, and the National Portrait Gallery is sponsoring an Elizabeth of Bohemia exhibit in our Long Gallery right now that is splendid, if you want to peek. And having the film, of course, was tremendous. I’ve also remanicured the lawns so we can charge admission to the public.” She put her hand to her heart. “We’re so fortunate,” she added. “It’s imperative to give back. Anyway, please go have fun! There’s croquet on the back lawn, and an actual game of whist in the parlor. Isn’t it marvelous?”
With a peck on Nick’s cheek and a squeeze of my hand, she floated off to see her other guests, as a gloved waiter deposited some kind of signature cocktail in my hand. It smelled like warm spiced cider, but had been generously augmented with rum. If I had to be unhappy, at least I could be unhappy with a drink in my hand.
Nick turned to me and raised his brows. “I don’t know if I’ve fully prepared you for this lot,” he said. “You’re going to want to drink that fairly quickly.”
We pushed through a crush of formally dressed partygoers into a wood-paneled library, complete with a roaring fire and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Almost immediately, a nearby cluster of pasty men in suits stopped arguing and parted to receive Nick as if they’d been waiting for him to complete the picture all night.
“And, right on cue,” Nick said under his breath, before extending a hand to one of them. “Baxter, hello.”
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this, eh, old boy?” said Baxter, clubbing Nick’s back with a meaty hand. He seemed like he’d started his New Year’s drinking early and was too blotto to pretend to care about me. “We were talking about Doris Tuesday’s latest,” he said. “Mixing up Manchester United and Manchester City? Ghastly. Seems like Tuesday’s got a case of the Mondays.”
The three other men guffawed as if they’d never heard anything funnier, and I watched as Aggressive Pleasantness settled over Nick’s features like a fog rolling in over the ocean.
“When it’s your turn, do us a favor and tell the PM to get stuffed from time to time, okay, old bean?” Baxter said. “And if you could put in a good word and get us all antique country piles of our own…” As he waved his arm drunkenly toward what looked like a priceless tapestry hung near the massive carved fireplace, his glass knocked into Nick’s and splashed rum cocktail all over Nick’s white shirt.
“Bloody hell,” Baxter said.
“Accidents happen,” Nick said. “I’ll go mop up and get a replacement at the bar.”
He reached for my hand, but Baxter surged past and took him by the elbow. “Allow me, chappie. I’m empty anyway,” he said, shoving both of them through the crowds. Nick shot an apologetic look back at me before he and Baxter got swallowed up in a fresh surge of partyers.
Awkwardly, I turned back to the group, and found that the other three men had vanished while my back was turned, off to search for other mediocre white men at whom to make self-congratulatory noises. I saw no one I knew or even recognized. There was a cluster of women by the door, so I drifted in that direction, but one of them spied me coming and tensed up and said something in a low voice to her cohorts, so I walked right past and back into the entryway as if that was where I was heading all along.
But I felt foolish standing flat-footed and alone as new arrivals greeted old friends, flowing around me as if I were a rock in a riverbed, to be skirted at all costs. I pulled my phone out of my bag and punched in a message to Cilla.
Is it too late to come to Yorkshire?
She sent back a photo of Gaz huddled underneath three blankets, wearing a thick turtleneck sweater. Bloody heat’s gone out. Think we can all get to Lisbon by midnight?
I resolved to press on; Nick would surely find me, if I didn’t stumble upon him first. But Merysfield Park’s rooms flowed into each other higgledy-piggledy, and were dimly lit, and I swiftly regretted my decision. Even children know that the emergency protocol when you get separated is to stay exactly where you last saw each other, and it was becoming apparent that I was in a social emergency that had me feeling every bit as small as when I was six and lost in Kmart. I strode through room after room with faux purpose, as if I were on my way to see friends in the very next one, rather than trying to outrun the judgments floating past me.
“…of course Nick’s ditched her already. No surprise there…”
“Maybe he just wanted her off the sofa…”
“…so dumpy. Is she pregnant?”
That one stung. People talking about me as if I weren’t in the room wasn’t unusual in and of itself, but I