Page 72 of The Heir Apparent
Paula had approached me about the possibility of throwing a party in Louis’s honour, just for a few friends and the Jennings vineyard staffers. To my surprise, Louis agreed. There was no way to stop people taking his photo and sharing his location, but by the time anything hit the tabloids, he’d already be back on the plane to London. And, I had to admit, the revelation that he’d come to visit me a few weeks before the wedding would play extremely well with the public.
We threw the party in the main shed, with fairy lights wound around the rafters and sheepskins draped across the chairs for warmth. Deep inside that vast space was a chamber once used by Jack’s great-grandfather to store apples from his thriving orchard. Its thick walls were filled with coal, and it was always deliciously cool in there. Jack’s friends, who played seventies cover songs in the pub on weekends, set up their gear so they could croon to the swaying crowd on the dance floor. Almost every guest who arrived at the shed worked at a vineyard or a distillery, bringing with them promising new blends or daring experiments in unmarked glass bottles. Out on the grass, Finn filled a few disused steel wine vats with wood and set them alight for the smokers and the kissing couples to keep themselves warm on the cool summer night.
Friends arrived in their best shirts and summer dresses, carrying wheels of local cheese and fruity homemade craft beers, a ratherpolite and timid crowd. It was always this way in the beginning, and it was always up to me and Louis to break the ice.
I was wearing a black cotton sundress with delicate straps, my hair scrunched and manipulated into wild curls. I escorted Louis from cluster to cluster, making introductions. Then he would take over, flashing the audience his Isla smile—the slightest dip of his chin, the curl of his lips—before asking them sweet and insightful questions. Within the hour, the crowd had loosened up in the presence of a future king. When a winemaker from the Coal River Valley turned out to be a free climber who had just ascended Cape Pillar, I left them to their extremely technical and fervent chat.
I walked into the shed’s makeshift kitchen as Jack was pulling a tray of sausage rolls out of an ancient oven. He shook them into a big bamboo steamer on the bench, which was stacked with loaves of Turkish bread, tubs of hummus, chopped up vegetables and two boxes of frozen spring rolls.
“Ah, just in time,” he said. “Make yourself useful and take these around, would you?”
“Sure,” I said, dunking one into tomato sauce and eating it. “Louis’s doing alright, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, he’s a good guy,” he said, emptying a box of spinach and ricotta triangles onto the tray. I could see that he was working through something in his mind. “He seems a bit… I don’t know. Tortured? But then…”
He went quiet and I looked at him.
“What?” I asked. “So did I?”
He popped the tray in the oven and came back, resting his hands against the only available bench space, his rolled-up shirtsleeves showing off his shapely forearms. He was annoyingly handsome in the summer, when his skin went bronze and his dark mop of hair was kissed by the sun. A string of light bulbs draped between the support beams above us lit up the blond tips of his eyelashes. He smiled, but looked unsure how to proceed.
“All I needed was some good Jennings hospitality to fix me,” I said, smiling back at him. The Finnish brandy I had consumed made me feel loose-limbed and slightly irresponsible.
Since Georgia left a few weeks ago, a curious energy had hummed between us.
“You didn’t need fixing,” he said, leaning towards me across the bench. “You were perfect just the way you were.”
I smiled, knowing he was lying, but also that he wasn’t. I picked up the bamboo steamer, which was so ridiculously large I had to hoist it onto my hip. “Save me a dance, will you?”
I went back into the crowded main shed, wondering if he was watching me leave. By the time I’d distributed the sausage rolls, the evening had reached its raucous peak and everyone was ready to dance. Finn and Louis were singing along to the band’s rendition of “Free Fallin’.”
“I want to move here!” Louis shouted in my ear when I was nearby. “I’ll become a vintner and we can live here together!”
The band began playing “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and the shed, packed with sweaty dancers, immediately paired off into couples. Louis and Finn were swaying to the music, arm in arm. Jack appeared, and he pulled me into the centre of the dance floor, his big hands on my waist. It was one of those moments when it feels like the movie credits are rolling on your life, when all the thoughts in your head go quiet, and you can only feel gratitude for the people around you. I slung my arms around Jack’s neck, unbothered by the consequences of our proximity for once. The heat of his body was radiating through his shirt collar and the band’s plodding bass reverberated through me. We stayed intertwined through four songs, ignoring Paula’s curious eye and the smash of a dropped glass from somewhere in the shed. Unchecked, my fingers combed through his bristly nape.
When two sweaty hands landed on our shoulders, we broke apart, guilty and confused. It was Tom the wine wholesaler, who’d arrived at the party late, drunk and thrilled to see Jack. Jack’s arms left my waist, and he reached forward to shakeTom’s hand, looking dazed. I left them to catch up, relieved and disappointed in equal measure. It wasn’t until I went outside to cool off that I realised I didn’t know where Louis had gone. I looked for him in the crowds hovering around the bonfires and in the grape arbour before heading back into the shed to search for him among the slow-dancing couples.
“He said he was off to bed,” Paula said, collecting the abandoned glasses that had accumulated on every surface. “He’s got an early start tomorrow.”
It had been a good night. Everyone was sweat-slick and drunk and stinking of woodsmoke. As the crowd dwindled, I wheeled the recycling bin inside and began picking up empty glass bottles and napkins. The band packed up their gear and chatted in low, hoarse voices. I could see Jack through the shed doors cleaning up the kitchen and farewelling the guests as they wandered past him and into the dark. I was weary, but my heart was full. As I started to sweep up, Paula came over and took the broom from my hands.
“You’ve done enough—go to bed. We’ll finish everything off in the morning,” she said. She looked over my shoulder as Jack approached the shed doors. “You too, love. Thanks, but go to bed.”
We left the shed in silence, heading back to the cottage on the hill. It was a clear night, laden with stars. I wrapped my bare arms around myself to stay warm, and Jack draped his jacket over my shoulders. How many times had we done this? On so many nights, we’d walked out of noisy bars and movie theatres and fallen into a companionable silence as we approached our shared cottage and the wall that separated us.
“Want to come in for one more drink?” Jack asked.
“Sure,” I said lightly, trying to pretend it was nothing. “Did you have a good night?”
“Yeah. I think Louis had a good time—once he stopped worrying about everyone looking at him to make sure he was having a good time.” He glanced at me. “You used to do the same thing.”
I felt my face go warm. We were cutting through the narrow path between the vines, the grape leaves brushing our arms as we walked.
“I did?”
“Not so much anymore,” he said.
I imagined him watching me in those first few years, when we were new to each other and I was still coming out of the fog of my old life. When Finn and I first met Jack, we were practically children—immature and half-formed, spoilt and largely incompetent, learning how to save lives rather than tending to our own.
