The summer wedding, p.26
The Summer Wedding, page 26
‘He’s right here, Iris.’ Mia placed both hands over her heart just as Scully lost patience and lunged forwards, taking off across the stable yard for twenty metres before Iris could pull him up. ‘He’s always been here.’ Mia thumped her folded hands against her chest.
But Iris didn’t see the gesture as Scully reared. She only heard her mother’s words. Staring tearfully at the darting white ears rising up in front of her, she whispered, ‘He’s here.’
Chapter 23
For ten minutes, as the balloon gradually descended, Griff had dismissed all potential landing sites they passed until the Wootton estate came into view. Only the roof of the huge Palladian house was visible among the trees, several hundred square feet of gleaming hipped and ridged lead, edged with intricate balustraded parapets.
‘Jesus wept,’ he exclaimed. ‘That is some spread.’
‘Too much woodland,’ Neville pointed out, eyeing the fuel gauges worriedly. ‘We’ll need to get clear of that. Let’s not lose any more height. My team will have to try to contact the landowners.’
While Neville got on the radio to discuss the options with his crew, Griff admired the scale and splendour of Wootton in its densely wooded parkland. This would be a trial run, he decided. Then, as soon as he was fully licensed, he could wait for the same weather conditions and return alone.
‘We can’t land here,’ Neville reported, coming off the radio and immediately firing up the burner, which Griff had neglected. ‘There’s a special request out from the landowner for privacy today. The local airfield should have notified you when you contacted them.’
‘Should they?’ Griff asked innocently, still gazing at the house, imagining the satisfaction of planting the recordings of Cloud Man in Mia Devonshire’s jewellery box before slipping away unnoticed.
‘We need to be over a thousand feet.’ Neville triggered the burner again, then cursed as the balloon failed to rise, forced down by a strong thermal column that was edging it back towards the river, even lower this time so that the basket was just metres above the treetops.
‘They can’t stop us making an emergency landing, surely?’ Griff studied the fuel gauge and realised it was perilously low. ‘What about that field?’ He pointed at a swathe of emerald pasture beyond the woodland, dotted with a few old trees but otherwise empty and inviting. ‘There’re no power cables and it looks as though there’s a public lane running along the far side.’
‘We have to try to put down safely,’ Neville agreed, looking out across the tree canopy. ‘We should just make it.’
Shielded in dusky evening shade beneath the trees, the wedding guests were oblivious to the hot-air balloon just beyond the wood, its roaring burners muffled by the leafy canopy as the string quartet and hubbub of conversation filled the glade.
Standing by the pergola at the riverside, which afforded them a clear view upstream, Dougie and his best man Mills watched with interest as it edged along just a few yards above the trees.
‘You don’t suppose it’s a late guest, do you?’ Dougie suggested idly.
‘Perhaps it’s Leo.’
‘At least that might hurry Iris along.’ He yawned and rolled his head on his neck to loosen stiff muscles. ‘Where the bloody hell is she? My father’s going to start picking off my stepmothers with a catapult in a minute.’
Disgraced political roué Vaughan Everett was not in the best of moods, having found himself sharing a row of seats with three of his four ex-wives, all of whom hated him. Dougie’s stepmothers had all accepted their wedding invitations, even though they had no contact with Vaughan or his eldest son. To Dougie, that proved their contemptibility: they had grasped the excuse to dress up and gawp at the Devonshires’ pile. His own mother was the only former Mrs Vaughan Everett not there, preferring to stay hidden in her villa in the south of France, from which she’d rarely strayed since a botched facelift three years earlier.
The guests were restless, sensing trouble. When there was a startled, throaty cry from the front row they strained forward excitedly, but Jacinta had nodded off in her wheelchair and woken with such a start that her hat had fallen off. It landed on Iris’s Maltese terriers, which were on her lap. They attacked it furiously, then, hearing a roar behind the trees, sprang to the ground and charged into the woods.
The bored guests perked up as Mia made her way to her seat, a blade of tear-streaked tension in beautifully tailored rust silk, her burnished hair pinned neatly beneath a pillbox hat.
‘Stop texting, Daddy,’ hissed Kitty. ‘It’s kicking off.’
Far behind them came a trumpeting whinny and Simon craned round once more as Escultor clattered out from beneath the Wootton stable yard’s arch, marching on to the grass, high knee action like a can-can dancer. Neck arched and nostrils flaring, he began to jog, performing the classical passage, a slow-motion trot, his dark eyes gleaming with touches of white.
‘Beautiful!’ Dougie breathed rapturously as Iris came into view.
‘Looks likely to bolt at any moment,’ muttered his best man.
‘My bride or the horse?’ drawled Dougie, thinking he’d never seen Iris look more ravishing.
Iris was almost as pale as the silver-coated stallion. She rode across the ornate lawns and into the arcade of chestnuts that led to the water’s edge. Guests leaned away warily as the stallion bounded past, snorting with every stride, the heat and tension seeming to shimmer off his body. Halfway along the aisle, Iris reined him back and looked around the guests, her green eyes moving from one face to another.
Watching her over his children’s heads, his squirming twin daughters on his knees, Simon was surprised to see her so unsmiling. Laney always maintained that the one positive thing from the unfortunate Devonshire crisis was that Iris was so loopily, giddily and happily in love. But today she was as stony-faced and tense as her mother.
Then he raised a quizzical eyebrow as those vivid green eyes counted their way down his row. Finding his face there, Iris stopped and stared. Smiling encouragingly, he gave a discreet thumbs-up, but Iris carried on staring at him.
‘Why’s she looking at you like that, Dad?’ whispered Teddy.
‘Have you nicked the ring or something?’ chuckled Louis.
‘She probably just wants you to put your phone away,’ muttered Kitty, hugely embarrassed that her father was holding up the wedding even more as Iris stared at him in that freaky way. Other guests were turning to peer at them now.
Simon’s smile was fixed as he tried for a double thumbs-up. On his lap, the twins waved excitedly. And suddenly, breaking into a ravishing smile at last, Iris gave a thumbs-up in return.
At this, Scully let out a deafeningly shrill call and bounded forwards into a crab-like canter. Iris barely shifted in the saddle as she regained control, but it meant that she arrived at the makeshift altar rather more speedily than she’d intended, like an eager Pony Clubber racing for the line at a gymkhana.
While the registrar and the best man jumped nervously backwards into the pergola, Dougie stood his ground as Iris pulled up in a perfect four-square halt in front of him, gazing down with total devotion.
Wootton’s head groom Vicente was on hand to take Scully, but just as the young Spaniard stepped forward to reach for the reins, a dark shadow fell across the clearing as the hot-air balloon loomed into view between the trees. It let out a long, roaring blast.
Scully was a brave horse, but he had just been forced to stand in front of the mares’ boxes for the best part of half an hour while tearful, fearful Mia – normally his calm champion – talked to the girl on his back, a wait that had revved up his heart and hormones to melting point. Now he’d been ridden to the waterside to face a mythical beast. His nerves couldn’t take it. Going swiftly into reverse, he began to turn on his haunches to flee, catching his leg on a flowered archway as he did so and bringing it down. As guests screamed and leapt away, he reared back and practically sat down, trapping the long skirt behind his hind legs so that Iris was dragged backwards from the saddle.
The balloon basket was almost trailing in the river now as its burner fired again and again to try to gain height. When it finally drew in line with the long clearing in the woods it caught an updraught that hoisted it clear of the water and propelled it towards the bank, on a collision course with the pergola. The best man and the registrar jumped out. Then, finding themselves inches from Scully’s flailing front legs, they dived in opposite directions.
Vicente and Mia were trying to separate horse and bride before one crushed the other, but the dress was tangled beneath flailing hoofs, yanking Iris with it. Scully was desperate to get away, bellowing with fear. Quick-thinking Iris was ripping at the skirt to escape from it, but just as she’d almost managed to free her legs, the balloon smashed into the pergola and brought it crashing down. Scully reared back, still dragging her with him and cannoning into Vicente, who fell between two rows of recently vacated chairs.
At last Dougie saw fit to make his heroic move as he calmly stepped forward and reached out for a rein. ‘Whoa. Stand still! Whoa, old chap.’
He’d handled horses all his life and, for a moment, Scully regarded him with something close to equine relief before his dark eyes bulged with white rims again as he gaped at the huge basket lurching towards the back of Dougie’s head.
Iris saw it too as she scrabbled out of her skirts and screamed, ‘Let go of the reins and duck!’
The last thing she remembered of her wedding day was Dougie’s incredulous expression as he said, ‘My darling Iris, don’t you know that they teach you out hunting never to let go of the—’
Chapter 24
‘Can you believe Daddy had his phone with him throughout and didn’t take a single picture?’ Kitty lamented at her stepmother. ‘I think he was tweeting non-stop.’
‘Deplorable behaviour,’ Laney agreed distractedly, opening the oven to check on the crackling and almost searing her eyebrows off as a blast of heat burst out. She had yet to master Red Gables’ vast industrial gas range, which had once catered for fifty little wannabe actors and was far too much for their own family needs, but which they couldn’t afford to replace. She thought enviously of Mia’s custom-sprayed remote-control Aga, which had barely heated a croissant in its life.
Laney was the one who always insisted that the family should gather around a table together for formal weekend lunches, particularly when Simon’s children stayed, yet every time she wondered afterwards where her demented grace-saying, shoulder-jogging Waltons aspirations had come from. She knew sibling rivalry, fussy eating, furtive texting and sniggering was all they would get. Simon always backed her up nobly with a beautiful table setting, patriarchal joint-carving and much witty if sarcastic repartee, but he and she would still end up sniping at each other, usually after too much wine. Laney was starting to suspect that it might be kinder to send the kids to McDonald’s and carry on bickering, eating and drinking without them. Not that she felt remotely hungry, even though the kitchen was filling with the mouth-watering smell of roast pork. The little Korean pills were having an amazing effect, although her concentration had dwindled in direct relation to her appetite.
Today she was doubly distracted. She knew she should be worrying about poor battered Iris, who was still in hospital being patched up, but Kitty’s reports of Simon’s furtive phone-fiddling at the disaster-struck wedding were getting under her skin, just as they were intended to, and she was also juggling dozens of quick-fire, needy calls from Mia, which ran along the lines of ‘She’s just gone into X-ray again. Can you call Lito and let her know? I’ll cry if I do – I can only talk to you,’ and ‘Have you seen the Sunday News? Bloody Dougie’s all over it and not because of what happened yesterday. We mustn’t tell Iris yet.’ She fretted about the animals too, all the dogs at Wootton that hadn’t been walked, and Scully, who was now lame and shaken: ‘Charlie Soames just called to say that he might not be sound for the quadrille at the charity gala, but I can’t bring myself to think about that when Iris has a crushed leg.’
The phone started ringing again as Laney was trying to make gravy, the chrome splashbacks all around her acting like an unflattering hall of mirrors to reflect her pink hair and matching pink, hot face. Holding the phone to her sweaty ear, she stirred the lumps in the roasting pan with her free hand and used her knees to keep the dogs away.
‘That bloody idiot man in the hot-air balloon who tried to kill my daughter’ – Mia was breathless with indignation – ‘Iris thinks I hired him! Can you believe it? And I’ve only just found out the police released him without charge last night saying it was an accidental landing and he wasn’t paparazzi after all. But I’m sure Simon said he recognised him. Is he there? Can you ask him?’
‘He’s outside with the boys. How’s Iris?’
‘It seems her leg’s not broken after all, thank goodness. She’s got a hairline fracture to one ankle and a grade-three MCL tear, whatever that is.’
‘One up from grade-two flute, one down from grade-four piano,’ Laney joked, gravy pan spinning as she tried to stir a bubbling black caramel. ‘Are they keeping her in much longer?’
‘Another night at least – they have to keep an eye on the concussion. I suppose I should go home but—’ She gasped as a thought struck her. ‘What if Dougie tries to get in here to see her? She’s desperate to talk to him. Should I show her the piece in the Sunday News?’
‘No!’ Laney had gleaned enough from their fractured calls to know that Mia’s revelation about Dougie had come at precisely the wrong time. Mother–daughter relations were hardly going to be helped by a sordid tabloid exposé.
‘I can’t believe she won’t even bloody talk to me. I don’t want to go home. Wootton is full of house-guests who don’t know what to do with themselves. Lito’s having a whale of a time telling everybody that she’s going to die and explaining exactly how she wants her funeral conducted.’
‘Come to lunch here,’ Laney found herself offering.
‘How can you possibly think I could eat at a time like this?’
‘Nobody apart from Simon will put fork to lips, so you’ll be in good company.’
‘Oh, God, she’s brought dogs,’ Simon groaned as he watched Mia park her car.
‘How many?’
‘I can count at least four but they’re not the big drooling buggers.’ He threw open the front doors. ‘Mia! Poor, poor baby. Welcome! How’s Iris?’
‘I hope you don’t mind me bringing a few of the little ones, but when I popped home to change just now, they were all cooped up.’ Mia’s voice wobbled, but her tears were rigidly contained for the sake of the Demons’ children.
As soon as she was through the door, she abandoned her pack of dogs and scooped up Hope in delight. ‘My little chunky monkey! I brought you sweets and presents!’ Then she spotted Simon’s twins, just six months older than Hope, and shrieked delightedly, stooping to gather them into her embrace.
Mia’s love of children had never diminished in all the years the friends had known one another; if animals were her comforters, small children were her dream catchers.
Holding up a brace of miniature terriers to stop them mauling the Labradors or each other, Simon sidled up to Laney and whispered, ‘Is this really wise? She looks terribly wound up. D’you want to take her somewhere quiet to talk instead?’
‘You know Mia. She’ll just keep putting on the show until she’s ready.’
‘I thought Leo was coming back,’ he muttered. ‘What in hell’s he up to?’
‘No idea.’ They exchanged a familiar look. ‘Shall we fish?’
He nodded. ‘Rods out, darling.’
There was a thundering of feet on the stairs as Simon’s older boys staged an appearance for the first time that day amid much blushing, hair-flicking and shrugging, pulling at the hems of their T-shirts and saying a shy hello. Mia was a knock-out to teens as well as tots.
