Puffing out rapidly warming cheeks, she heaved herself to her feet. ‘Ouch, I think my leg muscles are turning to rock,’ she said, pulling a face.
‘You should get in the hot tub,’ Clara said. ‘The hot water will ease them in no time.’
Madeleine managed little more than a glance in Rose’s direction before she dissolved into giggles.
‘What’s so funny?’ Clara said, shuffling herself up and swinging her legs onto the floor.
Rose shook her head. ‘Oh, my God, Maddy. Stop it.’
‘I can’t help it,’ Madeleine said, doing her best to snuffle back her giggles. It must be the exhaustion which made the reminder of the earlier hot tub revelation so hilarious, but whatever the reason, she couldn’t seem to stop laughing. Rose’s face quirked into a smile, probably more at her hysterics than anything else. Then she, too, began to laugh.
Clara looked from one to the other, a crease appearing on her forehead. ‘What did I say? What’s wrong with the hot tub?’
Madeleine fought to contain her giggles, and managed to say, ‘You need to ask Tania,’ before she completely lost control.
Clara looked from Rose to Madeleine. She hadn’t realised they were so close. She knew Rose and Tania were tight. They went way back– having been at the same exclusive boarding school since they were eleven. A place that Rose’s family had still struggled to finance, even though her father was the CEO of his company. In comparison, Tania’s father had seemingly paid the fees from the loose change in his back pocket. He’d financed the addition of the ‘Anthony Harrington’ wing onto the drama block at Kittering College when Tania’s younger half-brother, Lysander, had finished the sixth form. Apparently as nothing more than a gesture of goodwill.
But the realisation that Rose had grown so close to Madeleine, someone Clara had only just met, was a surprise to her. Not that she’d been paying any of her friends much attention lately, Clara supposed. She’d been conspicuous by her absence, absorbed totally by her life with Mike and Poppy, and subsequently with the void which had once been her life with Mike and Poppy. Latterly, she’d spiralled into the black hole that had taken over the space her life had once inhabited. A black hole which, at some point, seemed to have decided to inhabit her, rather than the other way around.
Watching Rose and Madeleine continue to laugh over teabags and the size of slices of cake Madeleine was cutting only served to accentuate how lonely Clara felt. The calm of earlier in the afternoon evaporated, replaced by a sense of desolation, which washed over her with the suddenness of a tsunami that no one had forecast, but which was so large it seemed impossible that no one had seen it coming.
She waited for the worst of the wave to subside, shoved her book onto the coffee table and stood. ‘Never mind tea,’ she said, forcing a brightness into her words. ‘I’m going to have a glass of wine, I think. Anyone want to join me?’
By the time they sat down to dinner, Tania had counted Clara refilling her glass with Merlot at least three times. And according to Rose, she’d started early. Really early. As Clara reached for the bottle again, Tania put a hand on her arm.
‘Why don’t you have something to eat before you have another top-up?’ she said, lifting the breadbasket and placing it in front of Clara.
Clara frowned at her and flopped back in her chair. ‘I’m not very hungry.’
‘It must be being outside in the mountain air, then,’ Madeleine said, reaching a hand into the basket for another piece of baguette. ‘Or maybe it’s all the falling over I’ve done today. Either way, I’m starving.’
‘After all the cake you ate at teatime?’ Rose said.
‘I know.’ Madeleine shrugged. ‘I can always diet in the new year, I suppose.’ She spread some butter on a knob of bread and popped it into her mouth.
Tania had decided she quite liked Madeleine, with her unfiltered approach to life. It was a welcome change to most of the people she knew, with their guards permanently up, utterly consumed with inflating or airbrushing their lives, presenting things in the right light for mass-consumption. Not that Tania could throw stones. She’d done her fair share of airbrushing and soft-focusing things, over the years.
With the main course– a tasty chicken dish, with a centre of soaked fruits– in front of them and the tales of their varying experiences from the day relayed around the table, she was pleased to notice that Clara seemed to have slowed down on the vin rouge and was looking more relaxed, joking with the chef about something Tania didn’t catch.
‘That reminds me,’ Clara said, focusing her attention on Tania. ‘What’s all this about there being a problem with the hot tub? They said I should ask you about it.’
Tania rolled her eyes, trying to ignore Madeleine’s barely suppressed snort of laughter from across the table. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the hot tub. Can we please draw a line under the whole thing?’ She shot a furious look in their direction. ‘I wish I’d never said anything.’
‘I suppose he might have meanthishot tub,’ Madeleine said. ‘You know, wherever he’s staying might have one. Mightn’t it?’ She put her fork down. ‘I just couldn’t get the questions out of my head, once they were there. They just kept rattling around. But if he’s got his own hot tub, then we don’t need to worry, do we? We can feel free to use this one as and when, I suppose.’
‘Jesus wept,’ Tania said, with more volume than she intended. ‘It doesn’t matter whose sodding hot tub he was talking about; I’m still not going to fuck him in it. End of conversation. Please.’ The table fell silent, and she couldn’t fail to notice how the chef made himself busy, hulling some strawberries. She clocked the raise of his eyebrows, too. She should control herself better than this. Last thing she wanted was some crappy nonsense story appearing in the press, about her sleeping with a mystery man on her ski retreat. Especially so hot on the heels of her last brush with the media.
Tania suspected someone in her father’s entourage would have ensured Tom had signed a privacy agreement prior to starting the job; her father would not be the only famous face to grace the rooms of Snow Pine Lodge during the season, and discretion from staff was of the utmost importance. What happened on tour always stayed on tour. At least, that was the theory. There was never a cast-iron guarantee of privacy, though, however intimidating the document might be that he’d been made to sign.
She took a sip of wine, then said, ‘Just for the record, Clara, some guy propositioned me in Le Bar last night. I said no. End of story. OK?’ She fixed the other two with a stare. ‘OK?’
‘You said you never actually told him no,’ Madeleine said.
The chef’s eyebrows arched again.
Tania reviewed her feelings about Madeleine’s lack of filter. Perhaps the girl needed to install one, if they were going to be friends. People like Madeleine had no idea the lengths the paparazzi would go to for a sniff at gossip. How it was that anyone inside the velvet ropes was considered fair game. And how the well-publicised scandals involving phone tapping and email hacking were only the tip of a sordid iceberg.
For now, she said, ‘Suffice to say, it’s never going to happen. Never.’ She drew the final word out, syllable by syllable, to make her point crystal clear. There was no way she was going to mention her subsequent meeting with him on the chairlift, or the fact that he chased her halfway down the mountain to apologise. Again.
