‘No,’ Serena said. ‘No, no, I’m …’
She couldn’t finish the sentence.
‘You don’t have to worry about Oblivion Oil,’ Cosima continued. ‘They’ll never have me back after what I did. And they know who I am now, so …’
‘Right. Well. I’m relieved to hear it.’ Then Serena added, a beat too late: ‘I’m sorry, Cozzie, I really am.’
Serena had tried to persuade her daughter to come back to Tipworth, but Cosima refused. They had fallen into their old patterns, shouting at each other from entrenched positions, until Martin suggested Cosima stayed with him until she was ‘back on her feet’. Serena had agreed, caving to spare them yet another fight.
In the past, when she had been presented with an intractable issue, Serena had iced it out and pretended it didn’t exist until someone else stepped in or the solution magically presented itself. At least this time she had tried. But really, where had it got her? Here, in an Austrian health clinic, slipping ever further away from the life she was meant to have lived. Or, as Cosima might have put it, trapped.
‘Serena?’
She turns away from the canoe on the lake at the sound of her name. It is Vanessa from reception, a slight, pretty young woman wearing the traditional dirndl the clinic insists on as a uniform.
‘It’s time for your IV.’
Serena looks at her watch, then remembers she isn’t wearing one.She has left her Patek Philippe on the bedside table. She should have put it in the safe, she thinks, and the worry lodges itself in her mind. No, no, she tells herself, it will be alright. Breathe. But she can’t relax, even as Vanessa guides her through the carpeted corridors and upstairs to the medical rooms, gently asking Serena about her day and how she’s feeling. She keeps thinking of the watch, of someone coming into her room – a cleaner, maybe, or a workman – and stealing it. Her neck becomes sweaty and then her forehead and her cheeks and then her entire chest is engulfed in the fire of intense heat. She dabs at her face with the sleeves of her robe. Perhaps it won’t be a bad hot flush, she thinks; I just need to surrender to it and it will pass. But Vanessa is walking more quickly now and Serena has to lengthen her stride to keep up with her and the sweat keeps coming and she wants nothing more than to rip her thick robe off and dive head first into the lake.
‘Here we are,’ Vanessa says, opening a glass door and ushering her into a room lined with four bulky faux-leather chairs. A woman with sunken cheekbones and a yellowish tinge to her skin is sitting in one of them with an oxygen mask strapped to her face and a blanket tucked around her spindly legs. The first thing Serena thinks when she looks at the woman is how thin she is. It still elicits a pang of envy, even though the woman’s thinness has clearly tipped into illness.
‘Are you alright?’ a nurse asks Serena. ‘Do you need me to open a window?’
‘No, no, I’m fine. Some water, maybe?’
The nurse returns with a glass and Serena drinks it down. She sits in her allotted chair, the faux-leather sticking clammily to her thighs. She shuts her eyes as the nurse fiddles with the needle, trying to find Serena’s vein to insert the cannula.
‘You have very tricky veins,’ the nurse says.
Serena, who has been told this many times before, scrunches her hand up tightly into a fist, then releases. After several false starts, the nurse manages to slide in the needle. Serena shivers, suddenly cold and in need of a blanket.
‘This will take about forty-five minutes,’ the nurse says, squeezingthe plastic bag at the top of the intravenous pole. Dr Hans told Serena yesterday that she had a very low iron count and that this was the cause of much of her exhaustion. He’s booked her in for four IVs over the next two days. She feels calmer now, knowing that her energy levels are being restocked. She forgets about the watch and drifts into a light sleep.
Before she had flown to Austria, there had been the necessary confrontation with Jarvis. It couldn’t carry on, she knew that. Not with all the focus currently on Ben. And if he became prime minister … well, that was a whole other set of difficulties, wasn’t it? He had already been talking to her about the need to live in Downing Street. Serena had refused, point-blank. There was no way she was leaving Tipworth, not after all the redecoration she’d done. Besides, she had no desire to be in the public eye. Her parents had raised her to believe that fame and drawing attention to oneself was the worst kind of shameful behaviour. Privacy was one of their most cherished values.
Serena did not want to live in the fishbowl of media attention and she’d heard from Edward Buller’s wife that the Downing Street flat was surprisingly poky. Besides, the Bullers had no aesthetic flair. When she’d seen the two of them photographed at home for a spread in a Sunday newspaper magazine, Serena had been appalled by the drab greys of the sterile kitchen and the patterned burgundy cushions on the sofa that she recognised from the John Lewis sale. There would have to be a full-scale renovation for her even to consider it. She had told Ben this and he had pleaded with her to at least consider spending a couple of nights there a week and that’s when the realisation had dawned on her that this thing with Jarvis – because what was it, really? Less than an affair, more than a casual dalliance, frustratingly indefinable – would have to be brought to a swift conclusion. They’d only slept together twice but it had been enough for her to find him off-putting. She didn’t like the unwarranted power that sex gave him over her, and the dislike was tinged with something else she didn’t want to think about – something approaching fear.
They met on a weekday afternoon in one of Jarvis’s privatemembers’ clubs. It was a new establishment, in a Georgian building with a black-painted facade off Bond Street. Despite the time of day, the interiors were dark and sombrous and smelled cloyingly of roses. A young man with a moustache and narrow hips led her up two flights of stairs and showed Serena into what looked like a Victorian parlour where Jarvis was sitting on one side of a high-backed sofa, with an ice bucket on the table in front of him containing an opened bottle of Ruinart.
He got up to kiss her on the cheek.
‘Serena,’ he said with his usual lopsided smile. He held her hands in his and stepped back to examine her. He leaned in and whispered, ‘You look sexy.’
She was wearing high-waisted flares, an olive-green silk shirt and Roger Vivier heels. She knew she looked good. Even though she was breaking up with Jarvis, she wanted to leave a lasting impression. She wanted, in truth, to be the woman to whom all other future lovers would be unfavourably compared.
‘Jarvis,’ she said. She had never called him Andrew, even though he had asked her to. ‘Nice to see you.’
She pulled away and tried to sit on the chair opposite him, but he patted the sofa and so she took her place next to him and immediately, he pushed his leg against hers. He poured her a glass of champagne. They clinked a cheers.
She was grateful that there was no one else in the room. Serena could not abide a scene.
‘Jarvis,’ she started. She had rehearsed what to say in the taxi on the way here. ‘This has been a lot of fun.’
‘It sure has.’
He nuzzled her neck. Quickly – so quickly she had no chance to resist – Jarvis undid the top two buttons of her shirt and slipped his fingers under her bra to squeeze her right breast. He groaned. She froze.
‘What are you doing?’
