She handed the laptop over and Sybella obligingly took it as her sister-in-law bent with her hands on her knees and huffed and puffed to get her breath back.
‘You. Will. Thank. Me.’ She sucked in a few more breaths and then made a gesture at the laptop. ‘Fire it up. I’ve got something to show you.’
‘You know the Internet connection is bad enough in the village. I don’t know if we’ll get it up here.’
‘I broke speed laws to get here. Just open the blinking laptop!’
Sybella settled herself down in the grass and did as she was bid.
Meg had taken off her fancy shoes and was gingerly examining the soles, now sadly scuffed and damp.
‘They’re on the desktop,’ Meg said.
Sybella clicked and the screen filled with two faces, one of them so familiar her throat closed over.
Nik and Marla.
‘Why are you showing me these?’
‘That was taken at last night’s opening of Mendez’s fashion label in Milan.’
‘It went ahead?’
‘That’s not the question I expected. Why wouldn’t it?’
Sybella noted the space between Nik and Marla was filled by a young boy with a shock of dark hair and soulful brown eyes, perhaps around eight or nine. It must be her son.
She could feel her sister-in-law watching her face with barely constrained glee, and then she forgot all about Meg and her entire attention was welded to Nik, and although she couldn’t understand the Italian voice-over, she got a lot out of just watching the camera glide over him as he sat up front with Marla, her son, and all the other VIPs while bored-looking coat hangers strutted down the runway. Only…not all those girls were coat hangers. Several distinctly rounded, curvy girls swept the stage in just enough lace and satin to keep them decent. They looked amazing.
Marla Mendez’s perfect face filled the frame and she said in English, ‘I wanted the girls to fill out my sexier designs. I remember the day I had this exciting idea. I met up with Nik Voronov’s fiancée, Sybella Parminter, and I, Marla, looked at her and saw all the shape I wanted for my line. She is gorgeous. She is an oil painting. She has the boobs and the hips and the thighs. The definition of womanhood.’
Fiancée? Sybella felt Meg nudge her.
‘So I have the nymphs, the dryads and the Venuses to embrace all body shapes. We women are many things and I want my line to reflect that.’
‘How about off-the-rack pricing?’ commented Meg.
Then Nik was answering questions.
He was definitely out of his comfort zone with women’s lingerie, but then, given his brother was apparently the main driver of the market, he thought he might as well invest.
This brought laughter and more questions.
Then with a faint smile he said, ‘No, I have no interest in living in Milan. I am taking up residency in the UK to be with the woman I love. If she’ll have me.’
Sybella was vaguely aware Meg’s phone was ringing but she couldn’t take her eyes off the screen.
‘It’s Mum,’ said Meg. ‘She wants to talk to you.’
Sybella continued to gaze at the screen.
There was a volley of high-pitched squawking from the phone. Meg jumped. ‘He’s rung! Nik rang your phone. Mum says you have to ring him. She says it’s no time to play coy. He’s shown his hand.’
‘I’m not ringing him.’
‘She’s not ringing him, Mum. Why aren’t you ringing him? That’s from both of us, by the way.’
Sybella had put down the lid of the laptop and was looking up into the sky. There it was, the definite thwack, thwack, thwack. ‘Because he’s already here.’
* * *
Nik saw the forest first and then the church steeple and finally the village spread out on the cleft of the wold.
His attention wasn’t on Edbury Hall itself, but the grounds where tents and bunting had been erected. One of the lawns was covered in cars. Several weeks ago it would have been unimaginable. He’d have closed the lot down.
As the chopper flew over the village he could see the maypole on the green, no longer the solitary needle without a thread he’d seen it as when he’d driven into Edbury for the first time, but festooned with ribbons and encircled by dozens of little girls in white dresses, running happily, and not so happily as one or two took tumbles, and their parents and families and neighbours and school friends cheered them on.