‘Great, I’ll be back in a second. I think there’s an old golfing umbrella in the vestry too …’
‘Take your time,’ Tamsyn called after him, a little weakly. So, OK yes, she had made a fool of herself with the vicar, that was true. But on the bright side, her mother couldn’t be cross with her lateness when it was the vicar’s fault, because the vicar’s lateness couldn’t be misconstrued as sullen sulkiness, like Tamsyn’s declining the offer to stay with Alex or Alex’s mother had been. After she’d refused, Tamsyn’s mother had asked her flat out if she was going to have a problem with Ruan getting married and she’d said no, of course she didn’t disapprove of the wedding. She just didn’t completely approve. Far away from Poldore, far away from this life of sexy vicars up ladders and torrential rain in June, sometimes Tamsyn forgot how everything had changed back here, and sometimes it slipped her mind that Merryn wasn’t still here, living her life with her brother. So much so that it still felt as if the wedding she was about to attend would be featuring the wrong bride, although that didn’t make any sense and she knew it.
It was odd, standing at the back of the church, so quiet and empty as it was now, only half of the lights switched on, filling the building with shadows that seemed to be watching her. The sound of the rain outside provided a sort of background static, but otherwise it was completely silent and still.
There had been a time, back in the days of the old vicar, the one they had so shamelessly baited, the one who was bald and fat and looked like a vicar should do, when she and Merryn had been in the choir. It had been her dad’s idea. He thought if she’d joined something, she might have a sense of purpose, something that might then tip over into her school life, which she had avoided as much as possible. Every Sunday they’d giggled through the family service, singing like angels and telling each other silly jokes behind their hands through the sermon, until one reached Reverend East and he sent them out, the two of them sniggering all the way up the aisle like a pair of fallen angels.
Laura Thorne had despaired of her rebellious daughter back then, and Merryn’s mum had even come round claiming that it was Tamsyn who was leading the other girl astray. Tamsyn remembered feeling especially proud of that claim, although it was not true. She and Merryn had just found everything so completely funny. There was no aspect of life they felt had to be taken that seriously, and that included school and church.
‘Right, it’s time to brave the elements!’ Tamsyn spun round to see Jed pulling on a bright orange Superdry coat, just able to catch a glimpse of an actual dog collar, now tucked under the collar of his shirt, and what looked like dark blond hair as he pulled up his hood. ‘If you promise not to attempt to have me arrested for harassment, I’ll even let you come under my umbrella.’
He brandished the object at her, like a small boy playing at swords, and Tamsyn wondered if he really was the vicar, or if she’d accidentally befriended a very attractively built delusional person, because that was normally the sort of thing that happened to her. Mad people on the Metro, angry people on aeroplanes, pretend hot vicars in rainstorms, egotistical but irresistible French fashion designers – that pretty much summed up her life.
‘I don’t think there’s much point,’ Tamsyn said, as he opened the door and they observed the sheets of water from the relative comfort of the porch. ‘After all, it’s only water.’
‘That’s what Noah said,’ Jed said. ‘And he had an ark.’
There wasn’t much small talk on the way down to the Silent Man. For one thing, the rain was coming down so hard and heavily that it was impossible to speak without having your words snatched away by the wind. Tamsyn had never known such a volume of water to come from the sky at such speed. Also, she knew that if she opened her mouth she would manage to say something unfortunate. Putting her foot in it was practically her hobby, and had been from the moment she could talk, according her mother. Like the time her Uncle Howard had come for Christmas and she had told him that he was too short to be a grown-up. She was eleven at the time.
Somehow in Paris it didn’t matter; in actual fact it was almost a positive in her profession to say exactly the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time. Within the design community she had developed quite the reputation for her cutting wit, ruthless efficiency and determination not to mince words. What no one, not even Bernard, had guessed about the Englishwoman who had somehow infiltrated the heart of the French fashion scene, was that none of it was by design. Tamsyn just had a habit of saying the first thing that came into her head and, as yet, at the age of twenty-nine, it wasn’t a trait she had managed to grow out of. So, although she was always honest, often insightful, it was only Tamsyn who knew that her reputation as the ‘
Reine de Glace anglaise’
, who must never be crossed, was entirely accidental.
As the rain ran down the back of her neck, she tucked her chin into the collar of her coat and allowed herself the briefest of moments to ponder on Bernard and what he would be up to now, right now, before deciding that it was probably best not to dwell on it. They had been ‘together’ for eleven months, since the night he had told her all her designs were ‘
épouvantable
’ – dreadful – swept them off the pattern-cutting table and her into a passionate embrace. Tamsyn, who had been raised never to let any man assume such rights over her person, had punched him very hard on the nose and broken it. To his credit, in between howling in agony, Bernard had found it all very funny. He had apologised to Tamsyn as she’d taken him to a private hospital, to have his nose reset, without any fuss. He told her he wasn’t in the habit of pouncing on women the way he had on her, and that he deserved her reaction. The flashing fury in her eyes had just been impossible to resist. Tamsyn had accepted his apology, because in that particular city it was impossible to keep a secret, and if Bernard had been a serial philanderer who preyed on the many much younger and more beautiful women he worked with on a daily basis, she would have known it. It seemed that his philandering was more sporadic and always consenting.
As Tamsyn had dropped him off at his apartment in the early hours of the morning, he’d asked her very sweetly if he might kiss her, and she had allowed it. And it turned out that Bernard, as challenging as he was as a boss, was an exceptionally good lover. So Tamsyn, whose love life up until that point could largely be summarised under the heading ‘nothing special’, had considered telling him where to go for about five seconds only. Another five seconds after that and she knew she was smitten.
Their affair could have been construed as inappropriate in the work place, of course, but Bernard had a talent for being beguiling at exactly the same moment that he was being infuriating. So despite the lack of any sort of courtship, Tamsyn had found herself very happy to be engaged in a romantic liaison with Bernard du Mont Père. The fact that Bernard insisted on keeping it a secret meant it had that extra frisson of excitement.
In the last eleven months, Tamsyn had learnt that the secret to sustaining her relationship with Bernard was never to let him see that she cared one bit about it, a trick she was rather good at as she had spent much of her life pretending not to care about anything. And as for her success coming from her association with him, well, if anything the opposite was true. So far not one of her designs had made it to the catwalk, as it was mainly the business and PR side of things Bernard let her handle, although he did sometimes let her have a belt buckle, or a pocket, in one of his designs if he was feeling very generous. And Tamsyn didn’t have a problem accepting that; it took a long time to get to the top in the fashion industry, and she’d rather pay her dues than think for even one second that her fondness for kissing Bernard had advanced her career before she had earned it.
‘We made it,’ Jed said eventually over the thunderous rain, pushing open the door of the pub for her, and for precisely one moment Tamsyn was glad to be out of the wet and in the steamy fug of beery warmth provided by the pub. And then she heard the cheers, and then she saw the banner ‘W
ELCOME
H
OME
T
AMSYN!
’
And then she wanted to throw herself into the swollen river and try and hitch a lift back to France on the next passing boat.
‘Oh God,’ she said to a room full of smiling, familiar faces, ‘please tell me this isn’t a party.’
‘Tamsyn!’ It was her mother who came and dragged her from the door, nodding politely to Reverend Jed as she hugged her rather wet daughter and unbuttoned her coat while she was at it.
‘You’re soaked through, you poor thing.’ Tamsyn submitted as her mum dragged the sodden coat off her shoulders. ‘You look like a drowned rat, and you’re thinner. You are too thin, you know. I do hope that fashion isn’t giving you body disorders.’
‘What’s a body disorder, if it isn’t your mother always telling you that the body you were born with isn’t too thin?’ Tamsyn asked Laura, hugging her anyway.
‘Mother, let the poor woman get in the door!’ Her sister Keira grabbed her hand and pulled her over to a long table that had been made up from several separate ones, and was lined with people, most of whom Tamsyn recognised, such as professional busybody and local aristocrat Sue Montaigne and her husband, Rory, with their children. There was Vicky Carmichael, whom she’d known since childhood and who – she knew from her mother, who despite not living in Poldore for decades still had a hotline on whatever anyone was up to – was now a vet, and even old Jago and Mr Figg the chemist, still hanging in there, neither one of them looking older than the last time she’d seen them, almost as if they had been a hundred years old for all of her life. Of course, her sister Cordelia was there, knocking back shorts at the bar; and Eddie Godolphin, the town’s mayor and landlord of the Silent Man, and his wife Rosie behind the bar. Despite the horrible weather outside the pub, inside it was warm, festive and friendly, almost as if they’d decided to hold the wedding breakfast a few days early, only with a great many packets of salt and vinegar crisps in place of canapés. Smiling and waving at everyone, Tamsyn took a seat, while at exactly the same time wondering if she’d be able to wriggle out of the window of the ladies’ loo and sneak back up to the hotel in time to order room service.
‘Boys! Look who’s here!’ Keira called to her sons.
Tamsyn braced herself for the onslaught of her nephews, twin four-year-olds, bundles of pure energy and noise, whom Tamsyn always secretly thought were a bit like cats, in that they seemed to seek out the people least fond of children and stick to them like glue. She had been there, at her sister’s side, well, actually in the cafeteria a couple of floors down, when they had been born, and usually saw them just at Christmas and sometimes in the summer, if she popped over to Suffolk. The pair of them laboured cheerfully under the misapprehension that she liked them.
‘Aunty Tam!’ Jamie was the first to hit, closely followed by Joe, the force of the pair of them propelling her back into a chair.
‘What?’ Tamsyn asked as Jamie hung off her neck and Joe climbed onto her lap. ‘What do you want from me? I’ve got no sweets, no toys, no money, nothing. I’m no good to you.’
‘Say something in those funny gobbledygook words,’ Joe asked.
‘What, you mean French?’ Tamsyn asked him, amused despite herself. When Keira had brought them to visit her in Paris, she had taken them to the Louvre to see the art, and they had giggled a lot about the Venus de Milo’s bottom. They had also found the French, speaking their native tongue, in their capital city, utterly hilarious and mimicked anyone they met with the bravado that only four-year-old boys can muster. Thank God they hadn’t met Bernard, who was so French he was almost like a parody of himself, as they would have had a field day with him, and Bernard, for all his famous ego, was also rather sensitive.
‘Are you coming to sleep with us tonight in the lighthouse?’ Jamie asked her, his eyes big and round. ‘The waves are so big they are coming almost to the top of the cliff! But Uncle Ruan says the lighthouse probably won’t fall in the sea.’
‘I said, if it falls in the sea we could say it was a submarine,’ Joe said. ‘Uncle Ruan says we have to keep a watch out for pirates!’
‘You can share my sleeping bag if you like,’ Jamie assured her, as if he were offering her the rarest of treats.
‘To be honest,’ Tamsyn told him, ‘I’d rather wear something nylon and with an elasticated waist than go anywhere near your sleeping bag. You have the personal hygiene habits of, well, a four-year-old boy, to be fair.’
‘Aunty Tam, we love you,’ Jamie told her sweetly.
‘And I can tolerate you in small bursts if I’ve had wine,’ Tamsyn told him back, patting him on the head.
‘Go and play with that dog,’ Keira told them. ‘Let Aunty Tam have a rest and get warm. I’m sure she’ll play with you in a bit.’
‘I won’t,’ Tamsyn assured the boys, but as ever they refused to believe that she didn’t totally adore them. ‘Definitely don’t come back and expect me to play with you. I won’t!’
‘It’s good to see you, sis.’ Keira hugged her as their mother bustled about at the bar ordering Tamsyn food that she no doubt hoped would make her the proper weight for her height.
‘You too,’ Tamsyn whispered into her ear as they hugged. ‘I wasn’t exactly expecting this to be such a big deal, you know.’
‘I think Mum thought that the more people there were here, the less we would actually have to talk to each other,’ Keira whispered back. ‘Ruan and Alex went out the back half an hour ago, and we haven’t seen them since. Maybe they’ve done a runner.’
‘I wouldn’t blame them. Where’s Pete?’ Tamsyn looked around for her brother-in-law.
‘Couldn’t make it,’ Keira said, the corners of her smile drooping just a little. ‘Work. Again. Japan, this time. Couldn’t get out of it. You know what it’s like with futures.’
‘I really don’t,’ Tamsyn said. Her brother-in-law’s job had always been a mystery to her; she only knew it had something to do with making quite a lot of money. ‘He couldn’t rearrange, or find someone else to step in for a family wedding?’ Tamsyn asked.