2
They pulled through gateposts that owls perched upon and followed a gently twisting drive to park up in front of a sprawling stone country house hotel. Warm yellow light flowed from leaded pane windows onto an immaculate lawn dotted with white canopied picnic tables, in the crisp early dusk.
Jon’s mother emerged from the main door and walked out to meet them, Harriet’s heart sinking at the inevitability of their having arrived first. Jon’s dad was someone who would leave at dawn for any journey.
Jacqueline was in a candy-pink striped shirt with upturned collar, pearls and white jeans, pushing her bouncy salon blow-dry out of her face with her fresh manicure, fingertips like shiny coral beetles. She was always groomed to within an inch of her life, the snowy Mallen streak in her blonded silver hair giving her a pleasingly appropriate look of Disney villainess, to Harriet’s eyes. In turn, her dismay at Harriet’s ‘curiously tomboy style’ (© Jacqueline) was barely concealed.
After Harriet had met them for the first time, she was sitting next to Jonathan when he got a text from his mum. It was very Jon to have neither the deviousness nor the common sense to not open it in Harriet’s eyeline.
We thought Harriet was a lovely girl, JJ. Terribly pretty face, like the sidekick girl from the detective show where he’s lame with a cleft palate. But why on earth does she wear those awful glasses?! Last seen on Eric Morecambe! Such a shame. Given contact lenses are widely available, you presume she’s making some sort of cross feminist statement.
‘What the …!’ Harriet had exclaimed, cupping her hand to stop herself spitting BBQ flavour Walkers Bugles. ‘What’s wrong with my glasses, and why say something like that?’
‘She thinks you’re beautiful!’ Jon said, blushing, with what Harriet at first took as embarrassment and later realised was in fact a swoon at what he’d taken as straight praise from his mother.
‘She’s only saying that so she can go in hard on the “four-eyed feminazi frump” angle, Jon. That’s a “paying twenty pence so you can use the toilet” move.’
‘You really can’t cope with compliments, can you?’ Jon had said, absurdly fondly. Harriet gave up trying to translate it for him. Like trying to wake a sleepwalker.
‘At last!’ Jacqueline said, as they climbed out of the seats, straightening stiffened limbs and grinning awkwardly. ‘We were about to send out the search parties!’
Jon and Harriet weren’t late.
‘Hit a sticky bit of traffic on the B6160,’ Jon said, ‘Hi Mum, how are the digs? Acceptable?’
‘Fine, though your brother asked them to change the pillows on his bed, they’re like rocks.’
Of course he did. Martin Junior, a chest-puffed humourless little pigeon of a man, always led with a complaint, to make it clear he was superior to his surroundings. Harriet suspected he liked Jon picking up the bill but was also hugely insecure about it.
‘Harriet, how ARE you?’ Jackie cooed, with that oddly sarcastic intonation that passed for good manners among affected people.
‘Very well, thanks. And you?’
‘Oh, you know. Can’t complain.’
Bet you do though.
Harriet had really tried to bond with Jackie, at the start. She once told her over too much wine in girl talk that she had irregular periods. The following week, Jackie rang Jon and told him that he should send Harriet for a fertility test.
‘We’re going to check in, head up to change and meet you in the bar at six?’ Jon said.
‘I should hope you are going to change!’ Jacqueline said, in fake-merriment, giving Harriet’s standard t-shirt and jeans and Doc Martens an up-and-down pained look. ‘Tell me you’ve packed something smart!’
‘I’m always smart-casual, mum!’ Jon said, imagining this was maternal fussing, rather than a blatant jibe at Harriet that Jacqueline was very thinly disguising by pretending she was referring to the pair of them.
Somehow, no matter how much she remembered that Jon’s family were a trial, their manifold horrors always dazzled her afresh in person. A thunderous measure of Bombay Sapphire could not come fast enough.
Their ‘Estate Room’ was more Dalston than Harriet had anticipated for the Dales, a collision of countryside and town – William Morris Strawberry Thief print quilt on the bed, Edison bulbs hanging on a cluster of cables as a modern chandelier. There was a vast copper freestanding tub with matching jug near a marble fireplace, as a whimsical cosplay of the privations of a previous century. The walls were a dramatic shade of Farrow & Ball smoky grey against toothpaste-white cornicing.
Harriet was a veteran of fancy hotels thanks to her job, and this one still stood out as exceptionally luxe. The kind of scene you were near obliged to put on Instagram with a moody filter, captioned #dontmindifIdo or #todaysoffice. (Harriet was an Instagram refusenik. ‘Busman’s holiday!’ she told her best friends Lorna and Roxy, when they exhorted her to join in.)
‘Bloody hell, Jon, this must have cost a fortune,’ Harriet blurted as she twirled her trolley case to a halt, then regretted her words as a bit crass and grasping, rather than grateful. It must have, though.
‘It’s not Travelodge prices, but, then again, it’s not every day you’re forty years married!’
Harriet tensed as she watched him do that thing – where he saw tissues on the bedside table and immediately had to seize one, and start blowing his nose astonishingly loudly, like he was trying to bring brain matter out through his nostrils. Her stomach churned, like it was mixing a Slush Puppy of freezing cement.
‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ Jon said, folding Harriet into a hug, and she squeezed back, mumbling, ‘Thank you for inviting me.’
‘Dur, of course I invited you! You make it sound like you’re an optional extra. You’re one of the family. You’re more my family than they are.’
‘Hah, I hope not,’ Harriet said, disentangling from an octopus grasp. ‘That would make this incest. I’m going to have a shower, if that’s alright?’
‘Have at it!’ Jon said, accepting her subtle non-compliance with the moment he wanted.
He began prodding at the remote control for the television. What was the unspoken rule that all men in hotel rooms had to immediately put CNN on at a slightly-too-loud volume and lie on their bed watching it, in their socks? Harriet had so often found herself brushing her teeth in a gorgeous suite, listening to a newsreader booming the violence and looting continued through the night as community leaders appealed for calm through the door.
She unzipped her case and rifled through it for her eveningwear and her clean bra and knickers, silently cursing the way Jackie made her want to mulishly reappear in the same t-shirt. Actually no, reappear in a t-shirt with the slogan BEAST MODE: ACTIVATED and a pair of Union Jack Crocs.
In the floor-to-ceiling white metro-tiled bathroom, like a sexy sanatorium, Harriet stood under a showerhead the size of a dinner plate, in a pleasingly scalding gush of water. Her hair was gathered off her face into a drooping bun. Harriet had an incredibly thick, strawberry-blonde mane which some might think a blessing, but it meant it was unmanageable worn any other way than up in her trademark long, high, bell pull of a plait. She’d tried cutting it short in her teens, but it stuck out from her head like a box hedge. In a science class at school, they’d examined strands plucked from their own scalps under the microscope, and hers looked like an ear of wheat.
Once dry and in her underwear, she picked up her dress from the armchair upholstered in chinoiserie fabric in the corner. Bathrooms with armchairs: mad fancy.
Harriet didn’t buy many dresses, but this one had called to her from the window of a boutique in a picturesque village, a few months back. She’d had an hour and a half to kill before Andy and Annette said, ‘I do,’ and had gone in to touch the fabric. Naturally, she was swooped upon by a bored assistant who was adamant Harriet would look absolutely stunning in it, and that was that.
It was a deep emerald-green cheongsam that buttoned high at the neck and clung so tightly to her calves it meant she had to take baby steps. She’d not necessarily wanted to wear something so showy to tonight’s dinner, but she also had few options in her wardrobe, and it had cost her almost £200.
She also had to concede her beloved black-rimmed spectacles didn’t really go with it. Harriet would have to infuriatingly oblige Jacqueline, and wear contacts. She gingerly applied mascara to her exposed eyes and wound colossal handfuls of hair into a bun, securing it with Kirby grips. She turned her head from side to side to check her handiwork. It looked like she had a huge cinnamon pastry on her head, but it would have to do. She dropped the necklace she always wore, with the small key, down her neckline.
As she exited the bathroom, she saw Jon standing naked in the tub, dousing his head with the jug, spluttering as he swallowed water. She hadn’t expected to come face to face with a penis this early in the evening and let out a small yelp, covering her eyes.
‘And good evening to you too!’ she said.
‘You have seen it before!’ Jon said, in jolly fashion, and set about aggressively towel-drying his hair, so his face was obscured while his member flapped gently at her, like a windsock in a weak breeze.
Jon was the image of a solid catch – solvent, dependable. He had a catalogue-model handsomeness, tall, with neatly clippered dark brown hair, unthreatening and well-ironed, and a slim build softening around the edges. And that was a perfectly adequate size of penis. As Lorna always said, the extra-large ones were only a recipe for constant cystitis.
What kind of monster wouldn’t be satisfied with a man like Jonathan Barraclough?
‘Wow!’ Jonathan cried, mercifully having wrapped the towel round his waist by the time he’d blinked away sufficient water that Harriet swam into view. ‘My girlfriend, the supermodel!’
‘Hah. Thanks,’ Harriet said, tugging black velvet heels on, which were otherwise only used for funerals. She’d never worked out why comfy flats were disrespectful to the departed. ‘Not too much?’
‘Not at all, seriously, you look stunning,’ Jon said, staring as he stepped out of the tub, with some effort given it was the size of Gibraltar. ‘Really. Wow. I don’t know why you don’t dress up more often, given you’re such a knockout.’
‘It’s not really me.’
‘It is you; you just can’t see yourself the way others do. Stand up, I want a proper look at you.’
Harriet embarrassedly got to her feet, while Jon whistled and waggled an imaginary Groucho Marx cigar.
‘I’m the luckiest guy in the world!’