Page 27 of Happily Ever After
‘Oh, all right.’ Hugo swung around now and perched himself on the desk beside me. ‘Look, Jazz is gay. He’s always known that he wasn’t going to marry a nice girl and do the decent thing by the estate, produce the next generation and all that, so he had to come out and tell Mother that he didn’t want to inherit. I think’ – he bent forwards a little so that he could see my face – ‘you can appreciate the amount of silent reprobation that went on in this house afterthatlittle explosion was detonated.’
‘She clearly got over it.’
‘She’s had a while. Jazz dropped the bombshell when he was twenty-two. I’m nine years younger, so I was thirteen when it happened. Suddenly, all Mother’s focus switched to me. There I am, adolescent, just starting to discover that actually I look damned good in velvet, and I’m being groomed to take over the estate while my brother buggers off to live a life of splendid isolation and take up a course in design.’ A deep breath. ‘So, yes, I fully understand you resenting your sister for being able to live a life that you feel you’ve been denied.’
The uncomfortable feeling was intensifying. It had become a niggle that I couldn’t fully explore, like having an itch in that part of your back that you can’t reach, and you can’t wait for everyone to leave you alone so that you can press yourself up against a doorframe and have a good scratch.
‘But you’re going to sell the estate anyway.’ I tried to ignore my thoughts and focus on Hugo’s distress. ‘So you get what you want, in the end.’
He jumped up. ‘It could beyearsthough. Jazz has had his own way since 2003! Twenty-two years of being able to live the life he wants, while I’m here with Mother! And if I so much asmentionselling the estate, then she’ll dash off to the solicitor and get everything changed to an entailment or some kind of trust that means I physicallycan’tsell, and I’ll be doomed to living here until I die.’
‘At least you’ll have a roof over your head,’ I said, somewhat sarcastically. ‘And it will be all yours. I can either share a bus with my parents – who can’t or won’t get something more comfortable, because the bus has become the star of the show, or move into my sister’s guest suite and have the care of her hyperactive children thrust at me, to help cover my keep. I suppose there’s a very slim chance that I might, somehow, be able to find a job that will take someone with no qualifications or experience and yet, miraculously, pays enough to rent somewhere to live and pay my bills, but that’s pretty unlikely. You can swan around in your lovely house, wearing all the velvet you want, and I’ll still be the dependent unmarried daughter with no life!’
Hugo blinked at me. ‘We’d both be unhappy, then.’
‘Well, yes.’
‘Or, we could go along with my mother’s intentions. Marry, do up the house, sell, travel.’ He looked half-hopeful.
‘Are you proposing to me, Hugo?’
I’d injected just the right amount of jocularity into my tone, I saw it in his eyes. They stopped looking worried and gained a little more twinkle. ‘No. You don’t need to say anything, Andi, it’s fine. I know the whole’ – he made ‘flary dress’ motions with his hands along his body – ‘isn’t for everyone, and that’s OK. Being my friend is enough. Although, if you really need me to marry you and save you from whatever, we could do that too.’
I shook my head. ‘No. That only works in stories, Hugo. It’s a lovely thought, but we’d resent one another and it would stop you from finding someone who might absolutely adore having a man who looks better than they do in a frock.’
‘Do they exist?’
‘I’m sure they do. A little bit outside my area of expertise, but they must.’
‘And you really won’t say anything to Mother?’ Hugo looked happier again now. He began to drift towards the door.
‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’ I grinned at him.
‘And you won’t let on that you know about Jazz? Mother has just about come round to him after some truly dreadful years, but she’s not happy about it.’
I sighed. ‘Hugo, I don’t want to incur your mother’s wrath in any way that I may not currently be incurring it. I’m going to keep my head down, find…’ Oops, nearly. So many people were keeping so much from one another that I’d almost forgotten that I was one of them. ‘Finish cataloguing these books, and then go. To whatever life might offer me.’
Hugo flittered his fingers at me in farewell and closed the door behind him. I collapsed across the desk and keyboard in a slump that brought the cat out from under my legs, with a chirrup of complaint.
Books had made life and love soundsimple. Evenfun. Some of my more up-to-date reading had been cute romantic comedies, where, despite misunderstandings and grim secrets, everything worked out happily and the end was telegraphed right from the beginning.
According to books, Ihadto marry Hugo. But absolutely none of my reading, classic or modern, had mentioned what to do when narrative causality meets the hero who just isn’t attractive to the heroine, and vice versa. Or did my life story switch tracks – become a marriage of convenience? Hugo and I marrying to save him from discovery and me from the life I was currently contemplating? I somehow doubted that I was going to undergo an epiphany and discover that I reallycouldfind him sexually desirable in a dress and heels, and I really didn’t think that it would be fair to ask him to renounce the silk and velvet, that entire collection he had hanging upstairs in the locked room. It was part of who he was and my lack of attraction to it was my problem, not his.
The Master chirruped again and came around to jump up onto my lap, four tiny paws supporting his bulky body so that all his weight was concentrated on my leg in those four points of contact. He stared into my face, his blue eyes very bright in the burnished brown of his face and his pale coat shedding noticeable hairs all down my front.
Without thinking I began to stroke him, incurring a deep, rumbling purr and a stomp that felt as though it was bruising every inch of my thighs. ‘This is too complicated for me, puss,’ I muttered. ‘What I suppose would be the dark moment in the story of my life. I’m not getting anywhere with the diary-finding, I’m not going to marry Hugo. I guess I should just admit that I’m wasting my time here. Less of a denouement and more of an intercession.’
A tiny brown nose raised and shoved itself into my eye. The purr intensified as I blinked my way clear and reared my head away from the contact, and a spaghetti-slim tail, seemingly with a life independent of its wearer, coiled around my wrist.
‘You can stop that,’ I said. ‘If it hadn’t been for you in the first place, Lady Tanith would have sent me back home straight away.’
Purr purr. Stomp stomp. Then, as though annoyed by my lack of any follow-up actions, The Master sprang down off my lap and strolled off to sit underneath Oswald’s portrait, where he bent himself into a shape any acrobat would be proud of and began licking his back end.
I shook my head at him and went back to stare at my spreadsheet, but that little itch in the back of my brain flared into life again when it had nothing to distract it.
Hugo’s brother. Who lived on the estate. Jasper.
They call me Jay.
