‘That marquee’s a bloody eyesore,’ Jonty mutters. Yasmin couldn’t agree more.
‘It frames the lake,’ Blythe says.
Jonty stomps through the bifolds with a box of lights. ‘It blocks the bloody lake!’
The local girl is on canapés. They arrived in a Fortnum & Mason van half an hour ago, and Mia’s transferring them from their boxes on to platters. Blythe has issued strict instructions to all the lodge-owners to clear their fridges to allow for storage – it truly is a military operation.
‘Imagine if nobody comes!’ Yasmin says. She laughs to show it’s just a joke, but it’s too late for the flash of panic that crosses Blythe’s face at the prospect of such social embarrassment.
‘Course they’ll come.’ Bobby is moving drinks around with a marked lack of haste. He’s probably avoiding Ashleigh, who has been conspicuously absent during the party preparations. ‘They’ll all want a nosy at the poshos.’
‘No one will be troubling you, then,’ Jonty murmurs. He’s fired up the log-burner, but every five minutes Mia takes more food out, or Jonty comes in for more lights, and an icy blast blows through the lodge. Above the lake, thick clouds hold the promise of snow.
Where is Rhys? Yasmin is torn between not wanting to be anywhere near her husband, and resenting the fact that she’s blowing up bloody balloons while he skives off for pretend phone calls. He’ll have skulked back to his study, no doubt, messing it up so she’ll have to tidy up again before people arrive. After the divorce, she’ll repurpose his office at home. Perhaps she’ll take up art: it would make a stunning studio, and Yasmin could source one of those antique easels as a centrepiece.
Rhys will try to take the house, of course, but Yasmin will be ready for him. He won’t want his shameful behaviour splashed across the papers. As soon as the holidays are over, Yasmin will lawyer up. If Rhys thinks he’s coming out of this better than Yasmin, he’s got another think coming.
Clemmie is at the drinks table, taking the bottles Bobby and Caleb dump on the kitchen counter and arranging them into neat rows. Yasmin swoops up Rhys’s brandy just as Clemmie spots it. ‘Sorry, this one’s personal use only.’ Yasmin smiles, then turns to Blythe. ‘Darling, can I stash this somewhere?’
‘Here, I’ll hide it behind the cans.’ Blythe puts the brandy in a cupboard. ‘I can’t imagine anyone will be rootling through the chickpeas at a party.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ Jonty says. ‘Some of them probably aren’t even housetrained.’ He laughs raucously and Yasmin notices Mia’s eyes on him from the other side of the room. She notices something else too. She waits for Jonty to look in her direction, then discreetly gestures to her own neck, nodding towards Jonty’s collar. Jonty frowns, then looks down and clamps a hand over the smear of lipstick on his shirt, before slinking gratefully out of the room. Such a cliché. Yasmin wonders if Blythe has noticed. Maybe she doesn’t care – you never know what people’s marriages are like beneath the surface.
It takes Yasmin three hours to inflate all the balloons and arrange them to Blythe’s satisfaction, her progress hindered by demands to carry this and move that, and would you mind popping to get some more cheese? She smiles tightly at this last – surely the cleaner could do that? – but slips on her shoes and finds her coat.
As she reaches the hall, she hears a car engine, revving angrily. By the time she’s opened the Charltons’ front door the car’s disappearing around the corner, a black cloud of exhaust smoke in its wake. As if that wasn’t extraordinary enough – this is The Shore, not some sink estate – her husband is on his knees in the middle of the drive.
For a second she forgets what he’s done, and that she hates him for it. She forgets that she’s restless, that she’s frustrated by his lack of success. She forgets that she wants a divorce. She runs to him, panic making her stumble. ‘What’s happened?’ He looks at her wordlessly. Is he having a heart attack? ‘Who was in that car?’
The question seems to galvanise Rhys. He gets shakily to his feet, but he still doesn’t answer, and now Yasmin is annoyed. He clearly isn’t having a heart attack; she almost twisted her ankle for no good reason.
‘No one. It’s nothing.’
It’s the final straw. No one doesn’t drive away in a cloud of exhaust smoke, and nothing doesn’t push a grown man to his knees. Yasmin didn’t want to upset the girls on New Year’s Eve, but she simply cannot maintain this charade a moment longer.