There were some similarities, he supposed. He liked being in both of them, that was true.
‘I think they’re both perfect.’
He snorted. ‘You don’t have to live with him.’
‘Sometimes I think you think that you’re actually fooling everyone.’ She tapped his arm. ‘Coming? You can practise being nice.’
‘You don’t want to be seen, do you?’
‘Oh, come on. Why do you think Ben really invited me? Not for my charming personality and pretty face, was it? I think one-upmanship might be more to the point. Flights to the South of France ring a bell with you?’
‘Ah. So he produces the future Queen of England.’
‘As if an old bag in a waxed jacket would impress anyone. Come on; let’s go confuse the yummy mummies.’
They stayed on as the darkness grew. The monsters, shed their costumes, were more than happy to appear and scoff the food and swill the free wine. Then they found the discarded bubble machines and started having fun with those.
What the parents made of any of it was beyond Aleksey’s powers to guess. They all knew Ben, obviously; they recognised Sarah, and possibly the bodyguards, as one of them always accompanied Sarah if she drove the school run on her own. Aleksey suspected they recognised Phillipa only too well, but were entirely too flummoxed by this very recognition to actually speak to her.
He also caused a bit of a stir.
Presumably other parents at the school gossiped about Ben. Ben certainly felt that they did. Now, for the first time, they met the other half of the equation, so to speak. In the gloom of the moorland night, lit only by the glow from the coals, he suspected some of the magic of the day was affecting him. But he felt intensely powerful. Regal. The king of his little domain. It was all hubris, of course. He would offer oblation to the gods of chaos and chance for such arrogance, but for that moment, surrounded by his family, his people, but, more importantly, standing alongside the focus of his world and their child, he felt as if the entire trajectory of his life had aligned to give him this one moment of utter perfection.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Seven
One by one, their guests departed, most of them so deeply asleep that they didn’t know they were being lifted and carried, still in their sleeping bags, still clutching their tiny swords and shields, to waiting cars.
Molly was more unconscious than asleep. Aleksey picked her up and her head lolled. He hefted her over his shoulder and she didn’t stir. The guys were packing everything up, so there was nothing to do but walk the short distance back to their home, which was at the end of the valley. If they’d had a boat, they could have floated down and ended up in Lake Aleksey, which was an amusing realisation.
Before he left with his little slumbering weight, Aleksey wandered back to the pond and watched Miles wading in and dismantling the fairy village he’d set up and illuminated. Neither Ben nor Squeezy had helped him, apparently. He’d designed and built it all by himself. Aleksey wondered whether if his great masterpieces in sand had not stopped when he’d been sent to Russia (and other things had then occupied his mind), he’d ever have achieved anything as impressive as this twelve year old had, and suspected not.
Ben had downed quite a few glasses of wine, Phillipa more, and so they made a slightly unsteady couple as they wavered up the tor to find her protection officers, who were apparently waiting in a Range Rover on the road. Ben gave her his arm; she flung hers around his waist, and they were lost to sight in the dark.
He and the dogs began to walk along the riverside, until the stream turned to go into their grounds. Molly was still dead to the world as he laid her in her bed fully clothed and still in her sleeping bag. As he put one of her stuffed toys next to her, and watched her translucent, blue-veined eyelids flicker, he wondered if in her dreams she was running and hiding from monsters, or living in a tiny illuminated fairy village under the water.
Radulf and PB were collapsed in their baskets when he came out into the kitchen. He put the kettle on, then with a better thought found a bottle of wine, cracked it open and lit a cigarette.
Ben arrived half a bottle and two cigarettes later.
He came in, sat down, put his head down on his folded arms and muttered, ‘Next year it’s your turn.’
Aleksey laughed. ‘Round-the-world tickets it is then.’ He took a long drag and added, ‘But nothing would match what you did today. It was the best birthday party ever in the entire world.’
Ben lifted his head and gave a weak, but genuine smile of pleasure. He looked completely shattered. He accepted a glass of wine, but then got up and made tea as well. As he was waiting for the kettle to re-boil, he came and wrapped his arms around Aleksey’s neck, propping his chin on his blond hair. ‘I wish Kate could have been here.’
‘Yes.’ He had not told Ben of Molly’s distraught and confused conversation with him about her mother. Ben, clearly, had very different memories of Kate, not ones he wished to ever remind him of, and so rarely mentioned her if he could help it. He took one of Ben’s hands, and played with the calloused fingers for a moment. ‘You know, whatever happens with Sarah, if she decides to leave us, you will do the right thing. Whatever you decide to do, Ben.’ He moved his fingers up to the bracelet and twisted it around the strong, bony wrist, and although unspoken, his message was entirely clear between them.
Ben kissed into his hair. ‘I wantmypresent now.’
‘Molly’s here…’ It was one of Ben’s new rules, along with the no-smoking in bed—no sex on his daughter’s sleepover nights. It wasn’t a hard stricture to keep, much easier than the smoking one, because there was nothing worse either of them could imagine than Molly walking in on them during some of the things they did in bed together.
‘Well…we have to shower...’
Aleksey agreed. They absolutely did. And their bathroom had a door—which locked.
They stood kissing under the streaming, steaming water, their bodies perfectly matched, tall, hard, lean, muscled, scarred, smooth, tanned, blond, dark—it no longer mattered which attribute belonged to which man. Like this, they were as one, just sinewy bodies under flowing water. They washed each other’s hair, flicking and twisting their longish locks until they were slick and shiny and clean, and then Ben took him spread-eagled against the wall. Ben needed it. Aleksey understood and allowed the mastery, the almost painful thrusting and lack of concern for his pleasure. Ben was the best father in the world, but first and foremost he was the most loved man in the world, and for a short, snatched time in the shower, Ben wanted to remind himself of this fact by being the only one ever allowed now to take and possesshisbody.
