to flick through for amusing variations on face, torso and legs.
‘I said I’d show LS the chapel,’ Ben said. ‘You girls will be able to make your own fun for a bit, won’t you?’
I glanced at Lucy, who was standing in the corner next to an enormous Smeg fridge, holding her pashmina tightly, her mouth set in a mutinous line.
‘Of course, sweetie,’ Serena said. ‘But at least get them a drink first!’ She laughed – a tinkling sound like teaspoon against saucer – and poured us all a glass of Veuve Clicquot that was already chilling in an ice bucket by the industrial-sized sink.
Ben took our glasses and led me back the way we’d come.
‘We’re still waiting for some of the furniture,’ he said as we came to a halt in front of a stone fireplace. The mantelpiece was the same height as our heads. The central recess had been filled by dozens of altar candles, waxen wicks pulled straight and ready to be lit. ‘Stuff Serena picked up in France. Some bigger pieces from a friend she has in Bali.’
‘Not tempted to light a real fire?’ I asked.
‘Ha! No. Serena wanted it all to be candlelit tonight. Adds to the—’ He broke off, lowered his voice and assumed a cod French accent, ‘ambience. So I’m told.’
He put his arm round my shoulders and drew me to him. He was still grinning. Still determined to show what a jolly time he was having and how relaxed this all was and wasn’t it all just good clean fun between friends. Perhaps he forgot how well I knew him. I had, after all, made a lifetime’s study of the planes of his face. Tonight, there was a twitching light to his eyes, a kind of fevered alacrity that meant his gaze kept shifting over surfaces and people, never once steadying to meet my own.
He dropped his arm, took a gulp of his champagne and waved me into a narrow corridor, darker than the others, which led off from the main aspect of the house.
‘I think you’ll like this,’ Ben said. He pushed open a door, the hinges blackened and creaking. There was a lingering smell of incense. In the half-gloom, I could make out the hulking form of an altar and a font.
‘Sorry guys, don’t mind us,’ Ben said, stepping across a cable. Two men in black T-shirts bearing the words ‘Sono-Vision Inc.’ above a logo of three interlinked circles were applying miniature screwdrivers to a series of speakers.
‘Quite a production,’ I said.
‘Ha!’
The chapel looked almost entirely as it must have been when the monks had left. There were open hymn books on the shelves, the pages fluttering in the draught of a closing door. It was as if the former residents had been forced to leave halfway through a service, abandoning all their possessions in their rush to escape.
It reminded me of Victor Hugo’s house in the Place des Vosges in Paris: untouched since his death, everything still in its rightful place. But then you saw Hugo’s death-mask, placed casually in a box on top of the desk, and you realised how macabre it all was, how strange the human impulse to keep everything stagnant, frozen in aspic. When my mother died, I couldn’t wait to be rid of her. I arranged for a swift cremation and when the notice came from the funeral directors that her ashes were ready for collection, I ignored it. What do they do with uncollected ashes? I never found out.
‘Spooky,’ I said.
‘You have no idea, LS. No idea. There’s a ghost, you know.’
He went on to say that the ghost was said to hang about the medieval graveyard, just by the ornamental maze they had planted to entertain their four children – Cosima, Cressida, Hector and Wilf (known to the family as Bear). The ghost was referred to locally as ‘The Brown Monk’. He was believed to walk through the walls of the house making a soft, low, moaning sound.
‘You don’t believe in all that though, do you?’ I asked.
Ben shook his head. ‘No, but … Serena. You know how she is …’
Yes. Yes, I did.
The first time I met her, at a restaurant situated at the top of one of London’s newest skyscrapers, Serena had leaned across the table and clasped my forearm. She did it so quickly, I had no chance to remove my cuff from her grasp and so we sat there, uncomfortably, while she looked at me earnestly with those chlorine-blue eyes and said ‘Ben’s told me so much about you. I already know we’re going to be kindred spirits.’
I gave a non-committal smile. The non-committal smile is one of my specialities.
‘I can see the child in you,’ she said and as she spoke, a strand of blonde hair stuck to her lip gloss and stayed there, bisecting the lower half of her distant, beautiful face. Behind her, I could see the dark sweep of the city: the carcass of recently erected scaffolding illuminated by a foggy moon and the red twinkling lights of Canary Wharf, sequenced like the LED display of an unreadable digital watch.
‘It’s so important, isn’t it?’ she said as the first course arrived. ‘To keep that childlike wonder about the world.’
She removed her hand, pleased with herself. There was a single wrinkle on her smooth forehead and it seemed to have been placed there expressly to denote concern and empathy.
Serena was the latest in a long line of girlfriends. But even I had to acknowledge she was different. Prior to this, Ben had had a type. He was handsome and came from money. His life had been almost too easy – public school, Cambridge, hedge fund manager – and as a consequence, he sought out difficulty in his personal attachments. He liked neurotic girls with ripped jeans who smoked too much and cut their own hair. They never lasted for more than a few months and Ben had always been the one to end the liaison.
Often, I would have to mop them up afterwards. They would come to me, these girls, a muddied mess of tears and eyeliner, and I would always tell them the same thing: that Ben just wasn’t ready to settle down and who knew if he ever would be and it wasn’t them, it was him, and he adored them in his own way but he couldn’t help it, he just wasn’t ready. And they would nod and bite their lips and then, after a cup of sugary tea and a few crumbs of cake (they would never eat the whole slice), they left my flat, never to be seen again.
I liked these girls, probably because I never felt threatened by them. They had no designs on my friendship with Ben. They respected our unbreakable bond. We knew each other better than anyone else in the world, you see. No woman could compete with that. Like I told them: not their fault.
Until Serena.
Serena, with her casual confidence, bowled him over. They met on a skiing holiday. Of course they did. That’s where people like that meet. It’s either Verbier or St Tropez.
She was blonde and tall and striking. Lean muscles. A sugary scent. Hair that swung from side to side as if advertising itself. She worked in an art gallery, although as soon as they got engaged, she gave up the job. She was the kind of person I had always assumed Ben would find boring. We used to laugh about the dull Sloanes with their made-up careers and their reliance on Daddy’s trust fund and their weekends in the country in Hunter wellingtons and padded body-warmers.
But I underestimated Serena. Because although she looked boring (beautiful, yes, but undeniably boring) she possessed this unspoilt quality. She was deeply naive. It wasn’t stupidity, not exactly, but rather a sense of other-worldliness, as if she had never quite found her
