beneath the skimpiest of PETA shirts. “Mother would adore you.” You’d be right up there with anthrax and Che Guevara. “I simply don’t think tonight’s the right moment to introduce you, that’s all.”
TEN MINUTES LATER, WAVING LENKA OFF from the platform, Michael De Vere breathed a sigh of relief and cheerfully deleted her contacts from his cell phone.
Sexy, but way too high maintenance.
Michael had enough stress to contend with, what with his mother being appointed home secretary the very same week that he had decided to quit Oxford. Not just decided. Actually done it. This morning Michael had gone to his tutor, signed the relevant forms, and packed up his gorgeous rooms in Chapel Quad, never to return. He planned to break the happy news to his parents over dinner tonight.
Naturally they would both have a fit, not least because his mother’s new job meant that this was now a story. HOME SECRETARY’S SON FLEES BALLIOL TO BECOME PROFESSIONAL PARTY ANIMAL. The Daily Mail always used words like “flee.” They were such arses. Michael felt bad about the inevitable negative coverage, but it couldn’t be helped. He’d set up an events company last year with his best friend, Tommy Lyon, and the pair of them were printing money. The future was bright, and Michael De Vere could smell success from here. This was no time to be messing around analyzing T. S. Eliot.
Ironically, his mother’s wrath would probably be as nothing compared to his father’s. Teddy De Vere was a Balliol man himself, just as his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had been before him. Short of desecrating his grandmother’s grave, or announcing he was gay, or (unimaginable) that he’d joined the Labour Party, in his father’s eyes there was no worse crime that Michael De Vere could have committed than dropping out of Oxford.
Yes, tonight’s dinner would be tricky enough, even without Lenka’s histrionics. The only silver lining in the whole ghastly business was that Michael’s sister, Roxie, would be there to support him.
“LAST CARD.”
Teddy De Vere slammed the nine of clubs down onto the green baize card table with a theatrical flourish. It was a family joke that Teddy never won at cards, or indeed at anything: Monopoly, Pictionary, charades. You name it, Teddy lost at it, repeatedly and often quite spectacularly. As chief financial officer for a successful City hedge fund, not to mention a respected Oxford-educated historian, Teddy De Vere was no fool. But he played the fool to perfection at home, delighting in his role as the butt of family jokes, a sort of willingly tamed circus bear.
As usual, his daughter, Roxie, had gone out of her way this evening to give him an advantage in their predinner game of Oh Hell. For once, Teddy seemed genuinely to be winning.
“Oh, very good, Dad.” Roxie smiled encouragingly. “All you need now’s a two.”
She placed the two of clubs gently on top of Teddy’s nine.
Teddy frowned. “Hmm. Well, I haven’t got a two, have I?”
“Then you have to pick up two, Daddy.”
“Blast it.”
“Last card.”
“Now hold on just a minute …”
Roxie played the jack of clubs and sat back, triumphant. “I’m out.”
Teddy’s face was such a picture of outrage, she couldn’t help but laugh.
“Oh, darling Dad, never mind. Maybe you’ll win the next one.”
Father and daughter were sitting in the library at Kingsmere, the De Veres’ ancestral pile in North Oxfordshire. Since Roxie’s “accident,” her bedroom had been moved to the ground floor, with Teddy’s old study converted into an en suite bathroom. As a result, the formal drawing room was now upstairs overlooking the deer park. But the library, a cozy, red-walled room with dark leather Chesterfield sofas, hunting paintings on the walls, and dog baskets nestled by the permanently crackling fire, remained exactly as it had always been. Roxie loved the room for that, for not changing. She loved it most of all when her father was in it.
“How about a nice, dry sherry before dinner.” Teddy leaned back in his chair and stretched out his legs. He wore the same deep purple corduroy pants every evening, winter or summer, rain or shine. He had about a hundred pairs of them upstairs in his dressing room. To Roxie, everything about her father suggested familiarity and ritual, a comforting sameness in a bleakly changing world. “Your mother’ll be home in a minute.”
Roxie didn’t need reminding. Turning her wheelchair around, she pushed herself over to the bar to fix Teddy’s drink. Roxie rarely drank before dinner but tonight she made an exception, splashing the pale amber Manzanilla into two tumblers instead of the usual one. Mummy was bound to be unbearable tonight, gloating and full of herself after her big victory. Home secretary. The words stuck in Roxie’s throat. How had her mother managed it? Why could others not see through Alexia the way that she, Roxie, could? Her mother would be the triumphant star of her own show at dinner, smug and unbearable. But then wasn’t she always?
There had been a time, long, long ago, when Roxanne De Vere had loved her mother. Yes, Alexia had always been ambitious, self-contained, and distant in a way that other little girls’ mothers were not. But even so, Roxie remembered happy times. Long summers spent on the beach together in Martha’s Vineyard, eating picnic lunches and playing fairies-and-elves. Christmases at Kingsmere, with Alexia lifting Roxie up high to hang hideous, garish homemade decorations on the tree. She remembered wheelbarrow races in the garden, and—incongruously, for Alexia was a notoriously awful cook—making blackberry jam.
But then came Roxie’s teenage years, and everything changed. From the first, mother and daughter battled. They battled about everything from politics to music, from fashion to religion, from which books they liked to the color of Roxie’s hair. On the surface it was normal coming-of-age stuff. But over time, Roxie began to sense a deeper rift, something more disturbing.
Alexia, always considered a great beauty in her youth, seemed to become envious of her daughter’s burgeoning good looks. Roxie couldn’t pinpoint it exactly. It was hard to remember specific incidents, as Michael was forever asking her to when he leaped to their mother’s defense. Nevertheless, Roxie developed a strong sense of her mother’s resentment. She felt Alexia’s eyes on her when she came out to the pool in a bikini, a gaze that blazed with a heat that was not admiration but rather a caustic, acid burn of envy on Roxie’s skin. When Roxie started bringing boys home, things went from bad to worse. Alexia seemed to go out of her way to humiliate her, putting her down during family meals, or worse, taking over the conversation and ensuring that she, the great Alexia De Vere, was the center of attention at all times. She would grill Roxie’s boyfriends about everything from their family backgrounds to their career ambitions—God, she was such a snob! No one was ever good enough.
Roxie’s father, on the other hand, took a very laissez-faire attitude toward his daughter’s dating. Naturally this drove Alexia to distraction.
“Can’t you say something, Teddy?” she used to roar. “I know you don’t approve. Why do I always have to be bad cop?”
But Teddy steadfastly refused to get involved, doing the best he could to keep the peace.
Until the day Roxanne De Vere met Andrew Beesley and everything changed.
ANDREW BEESLEY HAD BEEN HIRED AS Roxie’s tennis coach.
He
