Last of the Summer Moët Read online

  Wow. Laura could hardly wait to get inside. Let alone get her hands on some langoustines, not to mention a glass of champagne.

  The phone in her pocket now rang and Laura reached for it. ‘Lorna Drake?’

  Laura had no difficulty recognising the cutting tones of Kiki Cavendish. She sounded very angry as she explained in no uncertain terms that the room at the Golden Goose was cancelled.

  Laura was aghast. ‘But why?’

  Kiki evidently had no intention of explaining her reasons. ‘The room is no longer available,’ she said crisply and cut off.

  Laura, in the back of Lulu’s Bentley, bit back her frustration and forced herself to think. There were two obvious possibilities. Either Kiki had checked with the senior Threadneedles and discovered Laura had never met them, or Kiki had checked with Wyatt and found Laura was a magazine journalist. Come to think of it, perhaps she had done both.

  Lulu’s arms were folded crossly in her neon tweeds. One polished boot swung in annoyance... ‘So where we go now for glass of Moët, hmm?’

  Laura looked out of the window. A signpost pointed the way to Little Hording, and her natural optimism kicked in. Perhaps it was a smaller, cuter version of its Great neighbour. They probably wouldn’t have grande marque champagne, but there might be a glass of prosecco. They could do worse than try there.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Is like ’orror movie.’ From behind her sunglasses Lulu regarded the Fishing Boat Inn, Little Hording, in disgust. She had not even got out of the Bentley.

  Laura, who had, could only agree. Before the entrance – or maybe the exit – a scabby patch of grass held a collection of faded plastic buoys, rotting rope and rusting, unnameable metalware. Within the blocky, uninspiring building itself, the once-white paint was peeling from the windowframes.

  In the rear of the car, Lulu pouted. ‘Is not nice in this willage.’

  Nor was it. While Great Hording was all heritage buildings and lovely shops, Little Hording comprised a row of dreary cottages huddled gloomily above a brown and bouldersome beach. In the far distance was a sullen sea and a bent figure throwing a stick for a dog. The dog did not take up the invitation. The sun similarly eschewed any suggestion that it should shine and there was a dispiriting cold wind.

  ‘We go back to Big Horing, hmm?’

  ‘There’s no point,’ Laura said. ‘I’ve told you. They made a mistake with the booking. There’s no room at the inn.’

  ‘Mistake, rubbish,’ said Lulu.

  Laura agreed with this assessment, but it didn’t make any difference.

  ‘We go back there.’

  Laura shook her head. She had no intention of facing Kiki Cavendish in the flesh. If, as was almost certainly the case, the pub manager suspected her motives, it would not help if she knew what Laura looked like. Better to stay below the radar and conduct operations from a distance.

  ‘I’m staying here,’ she concluded. ‘And so are you.’

  Consulted en route, the Fishing Boat Inn’s weary-sounding landlady had confirmed that two rooms were free. ‘They’re all free, to be honest.’

  ‘Lulu will not stay here!’ said Lulu now, vehemently.

  From the driver’s seat, Vlad cleared her throat in solidarity.

  ‘In which case, you’ll have to find somewhere else. Or,’ Laura added, hopefully, ‘go back to London.’

  A rickety-looking pair of youths in tracksuit bottoms grey as the distant sea, the peaks of baseball caps protruding from beneath their hoodies, now approached. One was vaping copiously. They stared at the car and, catching sight of Lulu, did a double take. ‘It’s Miss Piggy,’ exclaimed the vaper.

  Laura glared at them, whilst privately acknowledging they had a point. Lulu’s round face could look porcine in certain lights, and her neon-tinged aristocrat-at-the-races look was undeniably cartoonish.

  ‘I see you later, hmm?’ Magnificently ignoring her detractors, Lulu waved at Laura.

  ‘Where are you going?’ But the window had shot up and the car engine burst into life. Laura could only watch as the Bentley glided away.

  Turning back towards the pub, she was relieved to see that the vaping youths had gone. She picked her way carefully over the broken ground to the back – or possibly the front – door.

  While empty and not especially warm, the pub’s interior looked slightly better than the outside. It was simply furnished, with pine tables and chairs, but seemed clean. There was a fruit machine, but only one. The muzak was on low.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  Someone had appeared behind the bar. Unexpectedly, it was one of the youths, although without his hoody, baseball cap or vaping friend. His close-cropped brown hair was revealed, and two sharp eyes either side of a long nose. He wore a red T-shirt with Lenin on it.

  Laura decided that she couldn’t face anything further without a drink. ‘Glass of wine, please.’

  ‘Red or white?’

  The three most depressing words in the English language, someone had said. Laura had never understood why. ‘No wine left’ would have been far more depressing.

  ‘Red, please. Have you got a wine list?’

  ‘Only got one sort. Chateau Lave Ecran.’

  Laura repeated the name to herself. She knew the phrase. Lave écran. Screenwash. ‘Chateau Screenwash?’

  ‘Well, that’s what I call it. It’s not very good, but no one round here seems to mind. They’re mostly lager drinkers anyway.’

  Laura decided to chance it, and regretted it instantly as the bartender produced a screw-top bottle of red and blew the dust off it.

  Very possibly this was the most depressing wine in the English language. Sipping, and trying not to wince, she explained that she had reserved a room on her drive here.

  The boy reached for a book. He looked up, frowning. ‘Mr Lack, it says here.’

  Laura reddened. Admittedly it had been a pathetic effort at a nom de plume. ‘It’s du Lac, actually.’ The French for Lake. ‘Miss du Lac, I guess.’

  ‘My mum must have written it down wrong.’ The boy closed the book. ‘But you’re Laura Lake the journalist really. Aren’t you?’

  Laura was gobsmacked. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Wyatt Threadneedle is my girlfriend.’ His tone was matter-of-fact.

  Laura just stopped her mouth dropping open in time. She turned it into a smile. ‘Wow. That’s quite a coincidence.’

  He shrugged. ‘She said you might be coming here, and to look out for you.’

  Laura tried to maintain a calm expression. How had Wyatt known? Had she guessed why? And had Wyatt, Laura wondered, foreseen what would happen at the Golden Goose? Another thought struck her. ‘Is Wyatt here – I mean, in Great Hording – this weekend?’ If she was, perhaps she could stay at her family seat. Investigating the village of the rich was going to be tricky from this distance, especially without a car.

  The boy shook his close-cropped head. ‘Her parents have sent her on a course to make her own perfume.’

  ‘How strange.’ Wyatt had never seemed the perfume type to Laura.

  The boy smiled. It was a smile of such warmth and width that it not only put his sizeable nose in perspective, but gave sparkle to his eyes and lit up his whole face. Laura, previously struggling to see what Wyatt saw in him, wondered no longer.

  ‘Last weekend it was a cookery course in Cornwall. And why do you think she’s doing the internship in London? Her parents are trying just about everything to split us up. I’m not their type, you see.’

  Laura felt a kindling of sympathy for – given their location – the starfish-crossed lovers. This boy was intelligent and pleasant. And say what you like about Wyatt – plenty of people at Society did – she was definitely different. She saw below the surface. Just so long as she didn’t see what had brought Laura to the area.

  ‘Wyatt reckons you’re planning some kind of exposé of Great Hording,’ her host offered next, which made the horrified Laura fumble for the nearest bar stool and plonk her
self down in shock. ‘Are you?’

  Laura hesitated. To admit her mission might well be to end it on the spot.

  ‘She hoped you were,’ the boy went on. ‘That’s why she risked breaking the rules and telling you about the village. We both think Great Hording’s got it coming.’

  A relieved Laura now remembered what Wyatt had said about internships and the unfair distribution of wealth. And that speech about the Ocado van. Her gaze rested on the Lenin T-shirt again. Had love persuaded the privileged daughter of ultra-capitalists to see a different point of view?

  The boy gestured down at his T-shirt. ‘Wyatt bought me this. She says most kids in Great Hording think Lenin was in the Beatles.’ He smiled at her again, this time a tad apologetically. ‘Look, I’m sorry Daz was rude to your friend. He was well out of order.’

  Laura was grateful the subject had moved off her investigation. ‘Well, he was rude. But it’s true that Lulu is never knowingly underdressed.’ She glanced out of the plain, uncurtained but nonetheless clean windows, half-expecting the Bentley to slide back into view. But it was probably on its way back to London.

  ‘I’m Kearn, by the way.’ A thin hand with biro scribbles on the back was extended across the bar to her. ‘My mum and dad run this pub.’

  ‘And you work here too?’ Laura liked Kearn, but he seemed to have pretty dead-end prospects.

  ‘When I’m not studying thermochemical algorithms.’

  As she looked mystified, he added, ‘It’s a branch of computer science. Shall I show you your room? Or rooms. There’s no one else staying, so pick whichever you like.’

  Upstairs, Laura selected the middle of three identical possibilities. All were plain and clean with MDF furniture, functional bathrooms and views of the distant brown sea. If you had a very small cat, there might have just been room to swing it.

  Kearn paused by the door. ‘Let me know if you need any help.’

  Laura, unzipping her overnight bag, looked up. ‘Help?’

  ‘With your piece. About Great Hording.’

  Laura decided to continue with her policy of neither confirming nor denying. She pulled out her pyjamas.

  ‘I can tell you all about the place if you are. Everyone who lives there, and what’s happening tonight at the Golden Goose.’

  Laura, while desperate to press him, was still not entirely sure he could be trusted. This whole left-wing act could merely be a front, to get her to show her hand.

  Kearn went on. ‘The pub is a complete closed-shop, socially speaking. A local pub for local people. Local rich and famous people. So the pub quiz they’re having tonight’s going to be quite something.’

  ‘Pub quiz?’ Laura was unpacking her sponge bag. But her heart was hammering. ‘Tonight?’

  Kearn turned away from the doorframe. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it. If you’re not writing a piece, you don’t want to know.’

  ‘I might want to know,’ Laura said quickly. ‘Just out of... interest. Pub quiz, you say?’

  ‘Yeah, the locals have all formed teams – lawyers, artists, writers, politicians – Jolyon Jackson’s heading up that one.’

  ‘He lives in Great Hording?’ The larger-than-life, even notorious Minister of Defence? It was getting more and more difficult to seem interested in her toothpaste.

  ‘Yeah. But anyway, catch you later.’ Kearn strode off down the corridor.

  ‘Kearn!’ Laura shouted. ‘Come back here! Tell me everything you know!’ As his grinning face reappeared in the doorway she added, ‘Okay, I admit it. I’m writing a piece.’

  *

  An hour later, Kearn had finished his briefing and gone off to his delayed computer studies. Laura flopped back on the bed, hand aching from taking notes, head spinning with all the information she had been given.

  At the very centre of her whirl of thoughts was the knowledge that her suspicions had been wrong. The Great Hording story was not a good one. It was a brilliant one.

  The place was the weekend home of the rich and famous, yes – the Zeb Spaws, the Tim Laceys, the Jolyon Jacksons, the Alastair Cheases. But it was also the retreat of some genuinely powerful people, not just Wyatt and Edgar’s fathers and a cabinet minister but several distinguished judges, two permanent secretaries heading up big government departments and some senior armed forces personnel.

  That all these celebrities, oligarchs and Establishment figures were about to compete against each other in the world’s ultimate, if completely unknown, pub quiz was too good to be true. But it was true and she could turn it to her advantage. Kearn had offered to lend her his bicycle, and had provided her with a map. And while Laura hated exercise, there were times when it could not be avoided. Just now, her career hung in the balance. She must go to the Golden Goose and bluff her way past Kiki Cavendish. An exposé of Great Hording in general and an account of the pub quiz in particular would knock Christopher Stone’s salmon-pink socks off and make it impossible for Clemency to compete. Then the job share idea would be dropped and Clemency thrust back into the outer darkness where she belonged.

  Chapter Eleven

  As Laura pedalled up the bright high street of Great Hording in her tight dark jeans, the owner of the bookshop was just locking his azure-blue door. His smartphone was wedged between his shoulder and his chin and as Laura heaved herself past, a few words of his conversation floated towards her. The language was not English, but over her straining, heaving breath, it was difficult to make out what it was. Not French anyway, Laura’s attuned bilingual ear told her. Rather, something rolling and Slavic-sounding. Perhaps he was taking an order from the oligarch.

  But as her concern was less the polyglot denizens of Britain’s poshest village than getting to the pub before the quiz began, Laura pedalled faster. Past Taking the Biscuit, where a staff member was dismantling the Bond display, past Chocolateers, whose window boasted a selection of nettle nougat and curry ganaches, and past Di’s Deli, ‘Home of the UK’s First £100 Sourdough Loaf!’

  At the Golden Goose, at the end of the street, all was peace and quiet. It was just past four o’clock; lunch was long since over, even for the most determined lingerers. And the evening’s events were yet to begin. The only clue as to what would later be taking place was the casually scribbled notice on the blackboard outside. ‘Pub Quiz Tonight. All Welcome.’

  Of course, all were not welcome; anything but. So how would she get in? Laura dismounted and stood beside Kearn’s bike, relieved to be off the uncomfortably narrow plastic seat and the grimy drop handlebars from which unravelled tape dangled.

  Behind the pub was a big and well-kept garden. Pieces of contemporary sculpture were displayed in gravelled areas connected by twisting paths. Not all the pieces were entirely beautiful, Laura thought, regarding what looked like an enormous marble bum. At the bottom was a gate and beyond that, the sea. She would walk along the shore until inspiration struck.

  Laura leant Kearn’s bike against a Jeff Koons-style giant silver dog and walked down through the lush lawn dotted with lemon trees. They had actual lemons on them. There was clearly a balmy microclimate; the weather here was as perfect and favourable as everything else in Great Hording.

  The gate at the bottom was set in a fence of unvarnished silvery wood. A Perspex anchor lounged against it. Laura pressed the latch to reveal, spreading before her, a pristine beach as yellow as vanilla ice cream. At each end, embracing it like arms stretched towards the sea was an outcrop of rock topped with grass and tumbling with flowers. What looked like the ruins of an ancient chapel stood on one of them, its old stones catching the afternoon sun.

  The beauty of the place struck her forcibly. She noticed how the beach glittered with shells and iridescent clumps of foam. ‘It’s where the mermaids had their bath!’ a woman in a striped Breton top was smiling to an impossibly cute boy with a blond basin cut. Then she lifted him up and hugged him.

  This image of maternal perfection sent pure longing shooting through Laura. She turned away, a lump in her throat,
and walked quickly to the ocean’s edge. The water was blue and glassy and turning constantly with white ruffs of foam. The way it rippled up and down reminded her of fingers playing the piano.

  A memory came shooting back. A beautiful, dark-haired soloist in a glittering green dress. Her long white fingers had danced over the keys in precisely this way.

  Harry had not told her where they were going, insisting it was a surprise. As he had led her through Kensington Gardens, the air had been warm and heady with flowers. The grass had glowed intensely green beneath a sky of hot blue. The still-strong evening sun had blazed back off the golden figure of Prince Albert enthroned under his Gothic canopy. Everything had seemed more vivid than usual, especially the Albert Hall.

  Despite passing the venerable red building on the bus countless times back and forth to Lulu’s, Laura had never gone to a concert here before. The great neo-classical auditorium thrilled her. She loved the red velvet seats, the mighty organ pipes, the eccentric Promenaders with their collecting buckets and coloured shirts. Laura couldn’t play a note herself but knew from Mimi the importance of live performance. Her grandmother believed it fed the soul, which showed in the face. ‘Go to the theatre, to museums and concerts as often as possible. It gives you a healthy glow.’

  That Harry was taking her to a Prom was more than unexpected. She had never imagined he was a classical music fan. His subsequent revelation that his parents had taken him here every summer when he was a child made her feel, suddenly, that she was being shown something very intimate and important. And more was to come.

  ‘Were your parents musicians?’ she had probed during the interval, to which he had nodded yes, adding that he had been a music prodigy himself but had had to give it up after both his parents died.