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‘I’m afraid Charlie doesn’t approve of you at all,’ Vanessa was saying bitchily. ‘She seems to think that just because you’re successful you must be guilty of sharp business practice.’
The blue eyes studied Charlotte rather too shrewdly for her comfort for a moment, and then he said smoothly, ‘Well, naturally I’d deny such an allegation, although speaking of sharp practice—’
He was going to mention this afternoon, to amuse himself at her expense by recounting what she had done. Suddenly preternaturally sensitive, she felt the stinging colour in her face deepen. He was laughing at her, she knew. More amused than angered by her supposed antipathy towards him, enjoying her embarrassment.
Quite what would have happened if Adam had not suddenly come up to tell Vanessa that the hired staff were ready to serve dinner, Charlotte didn’t know.
As Vanessa, ignoring both Charlotte and Adam, turned away, taking Oliver Tennant with her, Charlotte discovered that she was trembling inwardly with a mixture of anger and impotence. Her anger was caused as much by Oliver Tennant’s patronising amusement at her expense as by Vanessa’s malice, and her frustrated impotence was the result of her own inability to escape from the role Vanessa had deliberately cast her into.
Vanessa had taken good care to paint her in colours to Oliver Tennant which, while having a basis in truth, were greatly exaggerated. Charlotte made no apology for her own belief that Oliver Tennant was cashing in on the property boom without any thought of how it would eventually affect their small community, but, given free choice, she would not have voiced those opinions so volubly or tactlessly in his presence. It was also true that there were certain aspects of the male sex which she personally found unappealing, but she was by no means the almost vigilante-like anti-men campaigner Vanessa had portrayed.
Unwittingly worrying at her bottom lip, as Adam escorted her through to the dining-room, Charlotte fumed over Vanessa’s deliberately derogatory description of her as a feminist. Vanessa had used the word as a malicious insult. Charlotte resented being classified as a specific ‘type’ under any name; she was an individual, and, if her upbringing and physical attributes made it impossible for her to mimic Vanessa’s cloying, clinging, supposedly ‘feminine’ manner with men, she preferred to think that it was because she had too much pride…too much self-awareness…too much self-respect to sink to Vanessa’s level.
If the male sex couldn’t see that beneath that sugary sweetness Vanessa was as corrosive as any acid, then they deserved everything they got.
Adam was saying something to her, clumsily trying to apologise, she recognised, her mood softening. Poor Adam. He most definitely did not deserve his atrocious wife. Sensing that he was genuinely concerned that she might be upset, she started to reassure him, and admitted, ‘I did rather over-react. I didn’t realise that the new estate agent was one of your guests.’
‘Vanessa invited him. She met him when she approached him to ask him to value this place.’ His face went dark red and he muttered uncomfortably, ‘I don’t know why she wants to move. I like this house…’
‘It’s all right, Adam,’ Charlotte told him, wanting to comfort him. ‘I’ve already recognised that most of the larger properties locally will probably go to the new agency. There’s enough business here for both of us,’ she added lightly, ‘and by opening up I suspect that Oliver Tennant has saved me the necessity of taking on a partner.’
‘He’s got a very good reputation,’ Adam told her earnestly, seizing her olive-branch. ‘He started up originally in London and then expanded—’
‘To take advantage of the current fashion for living in the country—’ Charlotte finished for him a little grimly.
‘Adam, where are you? I want you to sit here next to Felicity.’ Vanessa’s sharp voice broke into their conversation, as she gave Charlotte a false sweet smile and said nastily, ‘Heavens, Charlie, you’re not still boring on about poor Oliver, are you?’
Holding on to her temper, Charlotte forced herself to smile. She was bitterly regretting having ever accepted Vanessa’s invitation.
Most of the other guests were people she knew, but not very well. They were incomers to the area in the main, like Vanessa and Adam, most of them pleasant professional couples in their mid-to-late thirties. All of them had bought their properties via her, and, although she believed that she had given them as professional and skilled service as they would get anywhere, she had no illusions. Were they to put their properties on the market tomorrow, it would be Oliver Tennant they instructed and not her.
Dinner was a long drawn-out affair of several minute courses. Toying with hers, Charlotte suddenly thought longingly of a bowl of home-made soup, the kind that Mrs Noakes from Little Dean Farm made, along with some of her home-made rolls, eaten across the well-scrubbed farm kitchen table, while a couple of early lambs bleated noisily in front of the Aga, and Holly, the Noakeses’ now retired sheepdog, lay across her feet.
She was not cut out for the sophisticated pleasures of life, Charlotte recognised broodingly. She had nothing in common with any of these people here, who all seemed to live frantically busy lives. The women’s conversations were interspersed with references to the hopelessness of au pairs and the traumas of the pony club, the men’s with mysterious references to ‘insider dealing’ and the horrors of London’s traffic.
Moodily, Charlotte sipped spartanly at her wine. It was very rich and no doubt very expensive, but she wasn’t enjoying it.
Smiling automatically at the man on her right at the circular table Vanessa favoured, as he described his battle with the local council to get planning permission for a conservatory large enough to house his new swimming-pool complex, for no reason she could analyse Charlotte was suddenly impelled to turn her head and look across the table.
To discover Oliver Tennant looking right back at her was so unnervingly disconcerting that she took a deep gulp of her wine and promptly choked on it, causing Vanessa to frown at her and her embarrassment to increase.
Why had he been looking at her like that? she wondered, when her embarrassment had eased. As though he had been studying her for quite some time; as though he knew every thought passing through her head; as though he almost felt sorry for her…sorry… Anger lashed at her, making her stiffen her spine and bare her teeth in a smile that made the man sitting next to her watch her nervously and wonder what on earth he had said. He was forty years old, and found modern women very confusing—this one more than most.
The meal seemed to drag on forever. Charlotte ached to be able to leave, but good manners forced her to stay, listening politely to the conversations going on around her, as they left the dining-room to finish the evening with coffee in the drawing-room.
Vanessa was discussing the summer fête, an annual late summer event of the village.
Deep in her own thoughts, Charlotte was stunned when Oliver Tennant got up and walked over to sit down beside her. The amused smile that briefly lightened his expression as he sat down puzzled her. She had no idea that it was the look of shock-cum-apprehensio
n on her own face that had caused it. Stiffly she made room for him beside her on the small pastel sofa.
‘Vanessa tells me that you’ve only recently taken over your late father’s agency,’ he began questioningly.
Grimly aware of how Vanessa had probably run her down to him, Charlotte corrected coldly, ‘Officially, yes, I took over on my father’s death, but in fact I have been running the agency for nearly six years.’ She turned her head so that she could look at him and added, ‘But I should have thought you would have known this. Surely, when you plan to open up in a new area, you check up on the opposition first?’
‘Yes, we do, but it was my partner who was responsible for this particular expansion. I’ve historically dealt with the London side of things, but earlier on this year we decided to split the partnership. He retained the country offices, while I retained the central London one…and this one.’
There was a look in his eyes that suggested to Charlotte that his split from his partner had not been overly amicable, and she wondered what had caused it.
