‘He’s vain. I’m not surprised he and Tatiana are getting friendly. They’re like two peas in a pod.’
The thought of Tatiana’s perfect, youthful, curvaceous, sinfully sensual body being plundered by a vain village schoolteacher was not a pleasant one. But it was hardly worse than the idea of her going to bed alone every night, less than a mile from the spot where Brett himself was trying and failing to go to sleep, twitching with anger and frustration. It wasn’t simply that he couldn’t have her, although that certainly rankled. It was the idea of all that youth and beauty going to waste. In far too many ways, Tatiana Flint-Hamilton felt like a thorn in Brett Cranley’s side. He longed for September, for the court case to be over and done with, and for the girl to go crawling back to her old, dissolute lifestyle somewhere far, far away from Furlings and from him.
And yet …
Michelle knocked on his office door.
‘Is the coast clear?’ she asked conspiratorially. She held a mug of hot tea in each hand, one for her and one for Brett. Pushing the door closed behind her with her bottom, she handed Brett his tea, kissing him fleetingly on the lips as she did so. Brett put the mug down on his desk and slipped a hand under her sweater, more out of habit than desire.
‘We’re going to have to cool it,’ he said, caressing her wonderfully full, heavy right breast. ‘Jason’s suspicious.’
‘I see. And this is you cooling it, is it?’ Michelle smiled, closing her eyes and enjoying the sensation of Brett’s warm hands on her bare skin. She knew Brett Cranley was a shit. That their affair – if you could even call it that – was going nowhere. But he was so funny and charming and exciting and so interested in her. When Brett looked at her, she didn’t feel like Michelle Slattery, secretary from Colchester. She felt like somebody important, somebody who mattered. Like a muse. Josephine to Brett’s Napoleon, Cleopatra to Brett’s Caesar. It was that ego boost, more than anything, that she couldn’t quite bring herself to give up.
Reluctantly, Brett removed his hands. ‘I’m serious. Just for a while, while Jase is here. I wouldn’t want to upset the apple cart, if you know what I mean.’
Michelle knew exactly what he meant. If it upset her, she hid it well, changing the subject with her usual good-humoured briskness.
‘He’s a sweetheart, your son, but he did make a bit of a pig’s ear of that document.’
Brett rolled his eyes. ‘Can you fix it?’
‘Oh yes.’ Michelle said confidently. Brett loved her competence almost as much as he loved her warm, welcoming, womanly body. ‘I’ll whip it into shape. Drink your tea now. I’ll be cross if you let that get cold.’
By late June a heat wave had descended over the whole south of England. In London this meant office workers in rolled-up sleeves eating their lunches in the park, and restaurants shoving tables out onto pavements, doing their best to look as if they were in Rome. Fittlescombe, like the rest of the Swell Valley, opened its back doors and spent an inordinate amount of time lounging about in its collective gardens in deckchairs. Whittles, the off-licence in the village, sold out of Pimm’s. Red-faced children sucked greedily on Wall’s ice lollies. And everywhere a holiday mood prevailed.
At Furlings, Angela Cranley finally felt as if she were getting into her stride. She’d hired Karen, a girl from the village, as a cleaner to help out Mrs Worsley, as well as a boy to assist Jennings in the garden. The Flint-Hamiltons’ old gardener was highly resistant to the idea.
‘I know me way about,’ Jennings muttered stubbornly when Angela first suggested it. ‘I don’t need some bloody little Herbert getting under me feet.’ But in fact, he did need it. His arthritis was so bad at times that he could hardly hold a pair of secateurs, still less get on his hands and knees to weed the rose and lavender beds at the front of the house. Angela didn’t know exactly how old Mr Jennings was. (Nobody did, it seemed, not even the man himself.) But he was certainly over seventy. His face was as gnarled and weather-beaten as a pickled walnut and his chest made a terrible wheezing, rattling sound as he shuffled about, like a concertina punctured by a sword.