The Summer Wedding

by Fiona Walker

Genres: Women's Fiction

Synopsis

The hotly anticipated wedding of Iris Devonshire, ravishing teenage daughter of celebrity couple Mia and Leo, is to be held in the gardens of their grand Palladian pile alongside the Thames. But Mia and Leo worry that she's rushing into the marriage. Just ask their best friends since college, Simon and Laney de Montmorency, whose relationship is on the rocks again - and they've already married each other twice.

On the big day, Iris's hellraiser fiancé Dougie Everett is not the only one flying high. As Iris rides up the aisle on a white stallion, a hot air balloon appears over the woods, heading straight for the ceremony. Its arrival is about to transform the lives and loves of some of the wedding guests for ever.

The Summer Wedding is a sizzling summer comedy set against the beautiful backdrops of the Chilterns, Spain, Africa and LA.

Release date: June 6, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 704

Sample

 

It was the first day of the autumn term at Old Gate College, the furthest scholarly outpost of the University of London, its walled campus a leafpit of learning that nestled between the pristine golf courses and boutique villages of commuter Surrey.

A new intake of undergraduates was congregating in the great hall of the historic Founders Hall to pay residence fees, some still clinging to the parents who had driven them there, others queuing alone and casting around for friendly faces.

Melanie Holden – known to her friends as ‘Laney’, from Kent, reading English Literature and Drama, likes Ionesco and Curly-Wurlys, has a cuddly dinosaur called Eric – was trying to radiate confidence, but was way out of her comfort zone, her intimidation compounded when she spotted that term’s man bait in a parallel queue. The girl was exquisitely pretty, flicking her burnished curls as she laughed alongside a handsome olive-skinned hunk who looked like a polo player; they could have stepped out of a Ralph Lauren aftershave ad. They made a great deal of noise, giggling and flirting, radiating glamour and talking horses. The girl had a curious accent which Laney couldn’t immediately place, possibly South African.

Then a smooth, clipped voice said in her ear, ‘She has more eyes following her across the room than a porter in an ocular prosthetics warehouse.’

The oblique joke, delivered with deadpan cool, made her laugh, and she turned to find a handsome stranger, like a highwayman in long leather boots, a floor-length coat and red spotted neckerchief, beside her. The startling light grey eyes were framed with lashes so tangled and dark he just had to be wearing mascara.

They now took a leisurely tour of her body. ‘Great dungarees.’

‘Actually, it’s a playsuit, but thank you.’

‘Does that mean you play dirty?’

‘It’s dry-clean-only, but I’m not.’ She grinned. Tall, buxom and fresh-faced, Laney had always preferred icons to fashion trends and, after several seasons of channelling Toyah, she’d recently begun styling herself on The New Avengers’ Purdey. In truth, the pudding-basin haircut was more Victoria Wood than Joanna Lumley, polo-necks emphasised her wide shoulders and big chest, and cat-suits made her look like Super Mario, but she certainly stood out as individual, and the highwayman’s attention was all hers: he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

‘I must warn you that I’m desperately in love with you already,’ he confessed as the queue shuffled forward. ‘Your embonpoint is breathtaking. Simon de Montmorency.’ He held out a long, thin hand tipped with silver-painted nails.

‘Laney Holden.’ She shook it, admiring the silk cuffs and the signet ring featuring an S with a crown above it. She had no idea what an ‘embonpoint’ was, but it sounded wonderfully sophisticated.

‘Do you think you could love me too, Laney?’ he wondered.

‘Oh yes, absolutely.’

‘Marvellous. We can be one another’s first campus futuito.’ The glitter in his eye made it clear that futuito wasn’t an ice-cream flavour. ‘What’s your room like?’

‘I share with a chain-smoking historian called Birgitta.’

‘Then we’ll go to mine. I have a charming westerly aspect on the fourth floor with Grace Jones posters and a cafetière. If you show me a good time, I’ll rustle you up some Arabica afterwards.’

She’d never met anyone like Simon de Montmorency; he had to be the son of mad aristocrats, she decided, and almost certainly gay. As the queue shortened, he kept her in stitches, those pewter eyes focused on her. He was funny, irreverent and fearless, part Withnail, part Noël Coward. Excited to have her first gay friend – an all-girls boarding school in Sussex had limited her opportunities to be a fag hag, which she felt was a thespian rite of passage – she was honoured to be singled out, and disappointed when they had to stop play-flirting to tackle paperwork.

She got appalling giggles when she noticed that the name on his halls of residence bill was Sean Pegg.

‘It was printed before I put in my Deed Poll application.’ He flicked his curtains of hair out of his eyes.

‘Why change your name?’

‘Sean was a boring little squirt from Croydon,’ he whispered. ‘You mustn’t tell a soul he ever lived. I was a square Pegg, but now I intend to fill a round Holden.’ He reached a warm hand to her cheek and steered her into a short, sweet, smiling kiss. ‘Come for a drink. I’m so hopelessly bewitched by you, I’m afraid I’ll fluff my seduction without a few tequila chasers for panache.’

‘I love your coat!’ gurgled a voice behind them. It was the man bait, gazing up at Simon with eyes as green as lime cordial. ‘You look like a highwayman.’

I thought that. Laney glowered inwardly.

Amid shrieks of delight that they were all studying Drama, the babe was introducing herself as Mia Wilde. Her polo player was now gazing at Laney, his eyes like two Galaxy Minstrels. If Simon was quirkily handsome, this boy was beautiful.

‘I’m Leo Devonshire.’ He kissed Laney’s cheeks. He smelled lovely, of lemony aftershave and expensive shampoo. She guessed being a millionaire’s son meant having carte blanche with one’s black AmEx at Penhaligon’s.

‘We’re off to get trolleyed,’ Mia was saying to Simon, in an accent Laney now realised was more Preston than Pretoria. ‘Would you two like to come?’

‘We’d be delighted!’

Laney felt a stab of disappointment, but then Simon breathed in her ear, ‘Forgive me… I have no cash and they look minted. We’ll lose them after they’ve bankrolled a few Jose Cuervos.’

Nevertheless, she noticed his eyes were drawn to Mia’s bottom as it disappeared across the room. She could hardly blame him. It was as pert as two scoops on a double cornet, watched by at least half the eyes in the room, the other half fixing on the polo player’s high-goal haunches. They were the ultimate rich playthings, Laney decided.

Within minutes her preconceptions about the snaky-haired spoiled brat and her olive-skinned partner were blown sky high as they all stretched out on the sunny grass of the Founders quad drinking pints from the Fall Inn.

Mia Wilde was from Lancashire tenant-farmer stock and had battled to pursue her acting dream instead of taking the veterinary route her parents had preferred for the first family member to make it to university.

‘The only theatre they want me to perform in has padded walls with a winch to hold horses upside-down – “Four legs good, five acts bad” is the Wilde motto.’

Huge rows over her choice of course had even led her to leave home a year before. ‘I lost my full grant because Dad wouldn’t sign the forms, so I deferred my place here and went to live with my boyfriend in London, waitressing to earn the money to study. It took almost a year, but they relented in the end.’ She grinned, swigging her Guinness. ‘Never work with children and animals, isn’t that what they say? I love them both to bits – Dom and me will have loads of pony-mad kids after we’ve collected a few Olivier Awards for the mantelpiece.’

Laney was shocked: her own daydreams of becoming the next great comedy actress, marrying Alan Rickman and bearing his babies were kept firmly hidden beneath wisecracking cool.

‘You have a boyfriend in London?’ Leo watched her with eyes as dark as the Guinness, clearly more than a little in love already.

‘He’s in Yorkshire at the moment.’ She stared into her pint, a shadow crossing her exquisite face. ‘Dom says I keep men on tight leads, which is his excuse for getting pissed in Leeds when I’m not around.’ She looked up at him with that wicked smile. ‘He’ll be wildly jealous I’m hanging out with such a stud muffin.’ She clinked her glass with Leo’s. ‘I’m made up we’re all on the same course – me and Leo only just met in the queue too. He recognised my pendant as an eggbutt and I knew we’d be mates.’

‘What’s an eggbutt?’ Simon’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Sounds like a sex toy for chickens.’

‘It’s a horse bit,’ explained Laney, who had gone through a pony-mad phase.

‘You’re in the gang.’ Mia grinned. ‘Leo’s parents were trick riders in a circus. Isn’t that amazing?’

‘You made that up.’ Simon snorted.

Although he looked like a polo player, Leo Devonshire turned out to be a soft-spoken, self-effacing eighteen-year-old from Reading with a passion for musical theatre. His parents had indeed toured together in a circus, although his Russian father now sold pension plans and the family home was a thirties semi in Caversham where his Spanish mother ran a dog-grooming parlour. ‘They came to Britain in the sixties with a clapped-out Barreiros lorry and six stallions, and now they have a Vauxhall Cavalier and two Shih Tzus. Mamá wanted me to go to La Complu, the university in Madrid, but when I explained that getting a place here is harder than breeding a perlino horse, they understood.’

‘Devonshire’s not a very Russian name,’ Simon pointed out.

‘Dad changed it for their double-act. He’s Dmitri Kazak by birth.’

‘You must make the most of that Dr Zhivago heritage. It’s great for chat shows – look at Peter Ustinov. I adore that man. We’re distantly related on my mother’s side, I believe.’

‘So you have Russian blood too?’ Mia asked excitedly.

‘De Montmorency blood has been mixed by the centrifuge of war and passion through seven continents over many centuries,’ Simon said grandly.

Laney tried not to giggle. Wildly jealous that modest Leo could lay claim to being the son of liberty horsemen, Simon kept very quiet about Sean Pegg’s upbringing in Croydon, hinting instead at an orphaned childhood, forfeited nobility, penury, scholarships and a de Montmorency curse: ‘I too had to fight to get here,’ he said. ‘The Sorbonne were furious I turned them down, but I hate Paris. It’s full of emaciated women carrying dogs around in handbags.’

Laney felt breathless as he rattled out anecdotes and witty one-liners with the speed of his beloved Ustinov. ‘The de Montmorency family motto is “Merda taurorum animas conturbit”. We all die young and impoverished but, my goodness, we spring-load our short mortal coils to the full. Corripe cervisiam!’ He raised his pint.

‘What does that mean?’ asked Mia.

‘Seize the beer!’ He downed it in one, giving Laney a long, hungry look that both confused and excited her. She couldn’t fathom him at all, especially when he leaned forward to whisper in Latin, ‘Frequentasne hunc locum?’

She raised an eyebrow and his eyes didn’t leave hers, the pupils so large and dark that the pale irises were just silver linings. She could suddenly hear her heartbeat thudding in her ears and felt a twinge deep in her groin, the same unfamiliar, exquisite pull she’d experienced necking a rugby hunk at her cousin’s eighteenth.

‘It means “Do you come here often?”’ Leo translated kindly. ‘I did A-level Latin. And I think your family motto is bullshit, Simon.’

Simon laughed delightedly. ‘Et tu, Kazak?’ He turned back to Laney, silver linings glinting. ‘Don’t tell me you’re the unacknowledged daughter of a Calcutta slum nun who walled you up in a cave like Antigone and begged you not to come here?’

Laney was almost too embarrassed to admit that she’d divided her cosseted childhood years between a picture-postcard Kentish oast-house and a Blytonesque boarding school, and that her parents, both GPs who indulged in am-dram in their spare time, had encouraged her to study theatre arts. Her biggest struggle in life thus far had been shutting her suitcase to go on holiday.

Her new friends were clearly astonished that somebody as boringly middle-class had been accepted on to the famously edgy Old Gate Drama course.

‘You’re too posh for us, Holden!’ they joked, then insisted on pronouncing ‘Laney’ in cut-glass tones for the rest of the afternoon.

Eventually they moved on to the Students’ Union, where a freshers’ disco was revving up, the girls diving straight into the loos to salvage laughter-washed mascara.

‘Are you and Si an item?’ Mia asked, borrowing Laney’s ultra-fashionable matte-brown lipstick.

‘Steady on! We only met five minutes before I met you.’

‘He seriously fancies you.’

‘But isn’t he gay?’

‘About as gay as you are, I’d say.’ She turned with a swish of long hair, purring seductively in Madonna tones, ‘Wanna get it on, Laaaaney?’

Laney giggled and returned to her mascara, but her belly was now squirming deliciously at the thought of her wild highwayman wanting to take her to his bed for futuito… whatever that was. ‘What about you and Leo? Do you fancy him?’

‘He’s sweet, but I’m totally mad about Dom.’

‘Your boyfriend in Yorkshire?’

‘He’s called Dominic Masters. He’s a professional actor,’ she boasted, pretty face lighting up. ‘We met at the National Youth Theatre and I played Cressida to his Troilus. He’s Yorkshire born and bred – we’re the Wars of the Roses, us.’ She fished around in her crocheted bag, drawing out a photograph of a craggy youth with intense blue eyes. His face was powerful, with high cheekbones and white-blond hair. He probably played drug pushers and murderers in The Bill, Laney decided.

‘How long have you been together?’

‘Four years – I was fifteen when we met and he was about to turn five.’

Laney was horrified.

‘Dom’s birthday’s February the twenty-ninth.’ Mia chortled. ‘He’ll be six next year, but he’s twenty-three really. He graduated from RADA this year,’ she explained proudly. ‘He had three job offers straight off – one a movie role – but he took the season at Agitprop Theatre in Leeds to stay close to his roots. He’s fierce on politics. When he won the Bancroft Gold Medal for best actor in his year, he reckoned they’d only awarded it to him because he’s a miner’s son, so he gave it to another actor he thought deserved it more. Dom won it on merit, but that’s the way he is. He’s a bloody-minded sod.’ She smiled fondly, but the shadow crossed her face again. ‘I’m going to miss him something rotten.’

‘I bet he misses you just as much.’ Laney patted her arm reassuringly.

She smiled wryly. ‘He’s a method actor. Right now he’s too busy being a druid in a Howard Brenton play to notice I’m gone.’

‘Then we’ll build a stone circle round your room in halls to lure him here.’

‘You’re so lovely. I hope we’ll be mates, you and me.’

‘Me and Mia.’ Laney hoped so too.

‘That’s sound. You and Mia, Laney, are going to be best mates.’

‘Of course we will,’ Laney agreed happily, wondering if it would test the new friendship to ask her to say the thing about Simon fancying her again.

But Mia was already rattling on, wired from first-day nerves and too much Guinness. ‘I can’t tell you how terrified I’ve been about coming here. I wanted to flunk it and stay with Dom, but he’s so proud of me getting this place. He told me to act the part when I arrived. I’m all right when I’m acting, it’s being myself I’m lousy at – the oldest dressing-room cliché,’ she said. ‘And I promised myself I wouldn’t drink too much, flirt with anybody or talk about him, and that’s all I’ve done. I’m normally not this daft… Well, not always… I know I can be a soppy cow – my friends back home say all I do is bang on about him – but they’re still just into horses and they don’t get how a lad can change your life. He’s my world, you know?’

Something about the way she said it told Laney that this ravishing chatterbox stud magnet really was madly in love, the sort of love she’d yet to experience. She studied the photograph of the fierce-eyed, belligerent militant and hoped he wouldn’t call Leo out.

He certainly wouldn’t have wanted to see the suggestive way that Mia and Leo were soon grinding their hips together to Happy Mondays and the Shaman, their exclusivity clear for all to see, heedless of other hopeful male undergraduates showing off their dance moves as they tried to attract Mia’s attention.

By contrast, Laney and Simon bopped about like a pair of lady pensioners in nylon frocks trying a jitterbug at a tea dance and wary of electric shocks if they touched. They’d both stopped drinking anything more than water, and Laney couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten, but she wasn’t remotely hungry. Simon still couldn’t take his eyes off her. That ticklish feeling in her groin was back, the gorgeous pull of lust, teasing like a finger on a drink can, eager to release the fizz.

She guessed Simon was biding his time, waiting for the perfect song, and she was determined to match his poise despite an urge to shimmy seductively closer with comedy aplomb. He had the smooth patter and Byronic mini-series looks, whereas she was more Joan Sims than Joan Collins, but the mirth in those pale grey eyes was giving her knock-out doses of confidence as her excitement mounted. At last she’d met somebody who got off on laughter too; they could share the joke of their overwhelming mutual attraction.

When Right Said Fred announced that they were too sexy for their shirts, Simon’s pale eyes rolled in frustration. Beside them, Leo and Mia were miming a strange, shirt-removing theatrical interpretation. Laney and Simon edged away, their eyes entangled. Just as she was about to gesture that she was going to get another drink, a dancer knocked her against him. His arms closed around her and, before she knew what was happening, she felt his lips against hers. At that moment, Laney wouldn’t have been surprised if they had started to crackle with blue strobes of electric charge, like two sci-fi characters in a space transporter. Simon was a Don Juan of kissing, confident, unhurried, unstoppable, oblivious to everything around him. She kissed him back, blown away by the head-rush. She’d never imagined her body could respond like this, a great coil of lust rising from her solar plexus, circling around Simon, pulling his torso against hers, catching her breath in his mouth and guiding her tongue towards his.

Oh God, I’m snogging to Right Said Fred, she thought vaguely, but it no longer mattered. She couldn’t hear the music over her racing blood. The finger was tug-tug-tugging at her ring-pull.

Simon tore himself away, his eyes almost all pupils, the silver linings a glittering eclipse, the whites bright in the ultraviolet disco lights, glowing along with his smiling teeth.

‘I think we should go back to my room, don’t you?’ he mouthed.

 

Simon’s room was a romantic little garret up in the eaves of the fourth floor of Founders, with bare-board floors and peephole casement windows, making Laney think of La Bohème. He didn’t turn on the main light, just lit the gas fire so the room glowed orange. Despite the heat and her reddening cheeks, Laney couldn’t stop her teeth chattering.

‘There’s something I should tell you,’ she blustered before they started kissing again and she lost the power of speech. ‘I’m a bit inexperienced.’

He cupped her burning face in his hands. ‘Me too.’

Yet when his lips moved against hers, she knew he had to have diplomas and degrees in love-making compared to her. He seemed to know exactly what to do to turn her on, every finger he laid on her making nerve endings leap with unfamiliar, greedy ecstasy.

‘I’m a virgin,’ she gulped, pulling away.

‘We’re none of us far off that.’ He started to unbutton her playsuit, breath catching as he discovered her pink satin bra.

‘Big puppies,’ she said before she could stop herself, then wanted to die of embarrassment. What had happened to her brain? She sounded like an eager dog breeder welcoming a litter of Newfoundlands.

‘You. Are. Beautiful,’ Simon breathed, his eyes reaching up for hers again, mouth following to her lips.

Her face still flamed, ring-pull twanging below, but her gargantuan bra was a monster of underwiring and heavy elastic scaffolding. She’d always longed to be a small-breasted totty, like Mia, who could get away with thin-strap lace teddies, but her boobs were huge. Her mother had marched her into M&S for regular fittings since she was thirteen, refusing to give in to tearful pleading for anything fashionable.

Yet Simon seemed delighted with her mammoth satiny orbs and their sturdy truss, which he was exploring for hooks.

Eager to get in on the act, she reached for his shirt buttons.

‘There’s something I must tell you too,’ he breathed. ‘I’m a total fake, but I never fake orgasms and neither must you. Do you promise?’

Laney suddenly had the unbuttoning skills of a toddler. His breath on her neck and his fingers against her back were making the ring-pull tighten in her groin; she was certain an all-consuming climax was only moments away.

‘We’ll work out how to do this.’ He kissed his way from one side of her throat to the other, still searching for the bra fastening while edging her towards his cassette deck. ‘We are going to be so good, you and me. We’ll have a double first in Foreplay soon. But tonight I am a selfish bastard and I want to get this bloody lovely bra off and get naked and naughty. I hope you feel the same way.’

‘I do,’ she breathed – and then, realising this sounded embarrassingly like a marriage vow, added enthusiastically, ‘Let’s shag!’ which sounded far worse, but thankfully he’d just pressed Play on his stereo and Bowie growled, ‘Let’s dance!’, which covered her shame.

Together, they hauled her bra hurriedly over her head.

‘Oh, Laney.’ His eyes glowed as her breasts spilled free, buoyant and pink-nippled, resting on a creamy curve of midriff. ‘Laaaaaney. I am so in love with you.’

As Bowie put on his red shoes and danced the blues, the conversation stopped and all sorts of gasping, panting, laughing and groaning sound effects started up, from which Laney could barely identify her own voice, just as the sticky, slippery confusion of kisses, tongue, buttons, arms, zips and legs became a glorious muddle of excitement and disrobing. Opening a condom was a new-found land, as was the amazing upstanding member protruding from Simon that he rolled it on to. The fizz that was now foaming around the ring-pull in her belly was rapidly reaching maximum pressure. She’d never seen an erection close to, and knowing that this one, so beautifully long, smooth and sheathed, was all for her was overwhelming: it looked far too big to fit into her, yet the infinite possibilities it bestowed brought a total thrill.

I’m a sensible middle-class girl from Kent about to lose my cherry on my first night at university, she reminded herself as Simon kissed his way joyfully up her body and angled for entry. I should be so ashamed.

But looking up at him, her hands on his chest, she had no doubt whatsoever that she wanted this to happen as much as he did. Another wave of excitement shuddered through her. Across the room, the gas fire puttered furiously and Bowie was replaced by Grace Jones singing ‘Slave to the Rhythm’.

Simon’s face was more compelling than ever as it hovered above hers, the grey eyes glittering, his laughing cavalier mouth suddenly serious as he tipped his head to touch her lips with his and breathe a warning: ‘This might hurt, my beautiful girl.’

At first, as he began to part the curtains on the Holden stage debut, Laney panicked that he would never get past Security, that she was a freak of nature who was too uptight to perform despite the slippery wetness that was trying to lap Simon in like a moon tide. But when he pushed through the door, she almost burst into laughter, blinded by sensation, biting her lip to stop herself talking nonsense because she had no idea what her lines were and didn’t trust herself to improvise. It felt strange and amazing being so full of Simon in body as well as mind.

As they bucked and plunged, Laney wasn’t sure how much of her ‘Oh, oh, oh’ was actually ‘Ow, ow, ow’ because pain, pleasure and newness were mixed so tightly that it was impossible to separate them, a crescendo of such closeness and intensity that she thought they’d never be able to peel their bodies apart.

Yet no sooner had she begun to get her head around the fact that he was inside her than he murmured, ‘I can’t hold on… you are just too gorgeous… forgive me, gorgeous Laney! I love you!’

 

Which were the first words Laney heard when waking up in Simon’s bed on her first full day at university. ‘I love you, gorgeous Laney. You are a splendiferous shag. Can we do it again all day?’

‘Are you bisexual, Demon?’

He closed one eye, and she felt her breath catch. Questioning a guy’s sexuality the morning after the night before was right up there in the Melanie Holden Anthology of Shame, alongside sitting on the family hamster, cheating to get Brownies badges and tearfully demanding to be taken home at 2 a.m. on her first sleepover.

But then she heard a soft laugh. ‘Demon?’

‘De Montmorency… De Mon… Demon,’ she explained, blushing deeply.

‘I like that.’ He stretched across the pillow to kiss her long and hard, breaking away just as she was becoming cross-eyed with lust. ‘And I love you. I first fell in love with you at the group interview with that awful crimped, crazy-colour hair and a kilt that showed off your great legs. You were so funny and sexy I thought I’d collapse a lung laughing and never sleep again.’

‘You were there?’ She gazed at him in wonder. She was certain she would have remembered someone as theatrical and beddable as her highwayman at the first nerve-racking Old Gate workshop – held to select the best candidates to go forward for interview.

‘Sean Pegg was there.’ He didn’t blink. ‘You won’t remember him. But you’ll never forget me.’ Smiling, he started to kiss her again and, to her wriggling consternation, he kissed ever lower.

‘I’m not clean,’ she complained.

‘We’re together now. We can be as dirty as we like,’ he insisted, burying his lips and tongue between her legs.

‘They say the worst thing about oral sex is the view, don’t they?’ she groaned, writhing with shame and pleasure.

‘It’s breathtaking, trust me’ – he raised his head briefly, grey eyes amused – ‘but I was always taught not to speak with my mouth full, so stop cracking jokes and tell me what feels good.’

‘That does,’ she assured him, as he resumed licking and kissing his way around her erogenous zones, although she couldn’t resist wisecracking between compliments: ‘Cunnilingus and fellatio sound like characters from commedia dell’arte, don’t you think? Ooooh, yes… up a bit… We had a beagle once that gave tongue when it found a scent, but my mother got muddled up and said to a neighbour, “He’s always giving head on walks—”’

He reached up to cover her mouth just as the lapping waves of pleasure reached a point where she was hanging from her upturned boat, ready to let go.

‘Is this coming?’ she asked, lips moving against his fingers, one of which inadvertently slid up her left nostril.

‘I think it’s the giggles,’ he said, eyes bright, ‘but it’s damned close. God, you are beautiful.’ He licked the swollen clitoris again, his tongue a soft, caressing beat.

Years of fiddling at home had led Laney to many an orgasm, but this was no longer a private shame: it was a shared delight, a landmark moment that made happiness reverberate around her body like a loose firework as she came laughing, a burst of weightless pleasure.

‘Never leave me.’ He kissed his way up to her mouth, his tongue salted with her own body.

‘Why me?’ she had to ask.

‘If it takes me until the day I die, I’ll make you realise how perfect you are,’ he breathed against her breastbone. ‘Besides, you have by far the best tits of any girl on campus.’ She smiled down as he cupped one and kissed its pink nipple. ‘You unleashed the demon in me, Laney. I am reincarnated.’

His cock was already hard against her thigh once more. Laney reached down to stroke it with her fingers, amazed at its satiny smoothness. ‘Third-leg Pegg left at least one lovely legacy.’ She started humming ‘Jake the Peg’.

The warm lips were removed from her breast and her fingers were left clutching thin air as he rolled away, muttering, ‘Sean Pegg is dead, OK? He pegged out.’

Aware that she’d upset him, Laney edged after him to press kisses to his bare shoulder, but on finding a tiny tattoo there bearing the same crested S monogram as his ring, she couldn’t let the subject drop. ‘How do your parents feel about that?’

‘We’ll need a clairvoyant to find that out,’ he said, after a pause. ‘They’re dead too.’

Appalled, she wrapped her arms around him. ‘How long?’

‘Four years. Mum had cancer – she died within three months of diagnosis. Not long afterwards my father had a heart attack. He was dead by the time the ambulance arrived… We’d been watching Casualty, which I always thought ironic.’ For once there was no glib joke. ‘I’d rather not talk about it. They’re all dead now, including Sean. The Peggs have pegged it. You are my brave new world,’ he started to kiss the little moles on her chest, ‘and we’ve just landed here together.’

Laney was overwhelmed by such compassion and desire that she couldn’t immediately speak. Then, without warning, those silver-lined eyes snapped up and watched her face as his hand slipped between her legs. ‘Stick with me, baby, and we’ll achieve brave new world domination.’

She gasped, her slippery, eager welcome taking even her by surprise as it drew his fingers straight in. Then she laughed, reaching for another condom. ‘Let’s be brazen Huxleys.’

 

Soon known to all as ‘Demon’, Simon cut a flamboyant dash even in a Drama Department already full of talented eccentrics. At his side, Laney blossomed, making friends easily with her warmth and humour, her obvious love for Simon silencing all the cynics who claimed that a relationship started on the first day of university could never last, although they still muttered behind their hands that the formidable duo wouldn’t make it into a second term, particularly when it became obvious that they both had serious commitment problems. This was nothing to do with their relationship, which was strong, honest and close, but they over-committed to absolutely everything else. They auditioned or volunteered backstage for every Drama Department studio production, became active members of campus arts clubs and debating societies, went clubbing with friends at least once a week, caught the best of London’s stand-up and theatre, and were soon nominated unofficial social secretaries because they were so good at organising get-togethers.

Simon was one of those frustrating individuals who could party and screw all night, spill into an exam half cut and still achieve the highest mark of his year. And he charmed absolutely everybody, from tutors to fellow undergraduates; doors opened and adoring audiences formed everywhere as he breezed through tutorials and workshops. He never seemed to need much sleep, and his ability to knock back vast amounts of alcohol, dope and sugary black coffee to keep going far outweighed Laney’s wimpy limits. Her addiction to the things he could do to her body, however, was so great that she couldn’t keep away even when she desperately needed rest. Laney was studying English as well as Drama, which meant more lectures, tutorials and essays. Having a boyfriend meant lots of delicious overnight love-making. As a result, she hardly slept; the weight dropped off and her physical self-confidence soared. Mia and Leo worried she was going to burn out.

‘You’ve got to calm down, chuck,’ Mia advised, with the serenity of one whose long-distance relationship meant she was totally up to date with her work and could give her all to a spell-binding performance as Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire each evening, a role that had already marked her out as a huge talent.

‘It’ll look good on my CV,’ Laney defended her Pro Plus- and caffeine-fuelled lifestyle.

‘Staying up all night smoking dope with Demon?’ tutted Leo, who made it no secret that he disapproved of Simon’s debauched lifestyle.

‘Well, I am taking joint honours… ⁠’

Making love with Simon was the learning curve to which she dedicated every night. They were both improving fast, and while she still giggled a great deal, she also climaxed with regularity, intensity and delight as Simon hung on longer, relaxing into the warm welcome of her body. He had no inhibitions and an amazing imagination – she teasingly nicknamed him Budgie because he especially loved mirrors and toys – and was happy to play for hours upon end, which made for an exciting voyage of discovery as they tried every position, exploring different angles and depths, penetration sensations that left Laney reeling and weak-legged, her body coursing with aftershocks from being brimful of Simon, orgasm and love. She grew ever more bold and daring, overwhelmed by the emotion she’d always believed frightened men off, but which Simon lapped up. He was incredibly tender, for all his foppish wit, and told her constantly that she was the epitome of perfection. Yet he refused to be drawn any more on the subject of losing his parents so young, insisting that Sean’s years of counselling had been enough.

‘This is the best therapy I could hope for,’ he insisted each time he took her to his bed, and Laney’s heart and body unfolded amid the creased sheets.

Unlike Simon, Laney had always had to study very hard to achieve good academic marks. As a result of spreading her time thin and her legs wide, her first-term grades were mediocre at best, even though Mia lent her her notes and provided helpful crammers over tea in her room. ‘I know your relationship is now officially on the Old Gate Chemistry curriculum under “exothermic reactions”, Laney chuck, but you’re here to read Drama,’ she warned. ‘We could all tell Simon had his hand up your skirt in this morning’s Jacobean Tragedy lecture, and that sneezing fit you had was definitely phoney.’

Laney blushed crimson. ‘People knew?’

‘Of course they did. You know how many girls on our course envy you Simon’s five-finger exercises? There’s a waiting list.’

In fact, the only queue longer than the one waiting for Demon to be single again was the queue waiting for Mia Wilde to dump her macho northern boyfriend.

With her exquisite face and petite figure, amazing bronze hair and deep green eyes, Mia Wilde had quickly become the source of a huge number of undergraduate crushes. She soon had more gentleman callers than an 0898 number, more dinner dates than a restaurant critic, and never had to buy her own Guinness.

‘I don’t know why you always say yes,’ grumbled Leo, who resented the interruption to their cosy alliance of evenings spent reading and swotting together.

‘I like studying people,’ Mia explained simply. She’d always found human behaviour fascinating, constantly alert to habits and idiosyncrasies she could use in her acting, and loved nothing more than to talk theatre, politics, literature and even farming, her knowledge and interest making her beguiling company. Vivacious, attentive and flirtatious when drunk, Mia was accused of giving out mixed messages to her band of male admirers, but she genuinely saw them all as ‘mates’. Her love was for her soulmate, Dominic Masters. Mia’s wannabe campus beaux sulked like mad whenever his battered Triumph motorbike was parked in a bay outside Founders Hall, which was rare because he lived two hundred miles away. His acting commitments afforded little time off, not even allowing him to watch Mia captivating her audience in the Tennessee Williams.

‘It’s like he’s deliberately avoiding her world here,’ Leo confided to Laney. ‘The only time he’s been around I was at home for the weekend, and you and Demon were off at some rave.’

Laney’s first encounter with the legendary boyfriend was not good. She’d trotted to Mia’s room late one night with HobNobs, mildly pissed and in need of advice over a petty row with Simon, but Dominic Masters had opened the door wearing nothing but Mia’s pink bathrobe. He’d looked every bit as frightening as he had in the photograph, and a great deal sexier. Testosterone rose off him like fumes from a smelting plant, and it was pretty clear what he’d just been doing. Simon would have laughed, but he looked furious.

‘You must be Dom!’ she said brightly. ‘I’m Laney. Is Mia around?’

‘It’s almost midnight.’ Dom’s voice was both furious and fabulous, a deep Yorkshire purr that came from the very base of his throat. No dialect coach could have created that: it was innate.

‘Is something wrong, chuck?’ Mia called from the bed, in which she was wearing nothing but a Paisley quilt and an orgasmic flush.

‘No! Just thought you might be free for a chat, but—’

‘We’re trying to get some sleep.’ He closed the door with a bang.

‘I didn’t know he was going to be here!’ she grumbled to Mia the following day after Dom had set off for Leeds.

‘Neither did I.’ Mia shuddered with delight, having barely got out of bed in twelve hours.

Laney secretly thought Dominic Masters had been born to play Heathcliff, as antisocially fierce and instinctive as Mia was loyal, wilful and joyful. After that, she made one or two attempts to draw friends and lover together when he visited, but it was never an easy fit. A committed method actor, Dom lived so deep within his roles he was impossible to read. The others found him intimidating: dedicated to his profession, he seemed so much more grown-up than them.

Dominic might have had few birthdays, but he was no longer the truant who had been expelled from two schools before his talent proved a ticket to freedom from the bleak prospects offered in a Yorkshire colliery town. Now he was being tipped as the next Sean Bean, and smouldered with aloof self-confidence and misanthropy. He seemed to resent Mia’s new friends’ camp, high-jinks camaraderie and showed no desire to join in raucous pub crawls or cosy tea-and-toast parties.

The close-knit gang resigned themselves to the fact that their bubbly, sensitive friend preferred to keep them all at arm’s length when Dom was around. The couple rarely left her room, which she insisted was her choice: ‘I want to keep him all to myself. If I could wear his cock inside me all day, I would.’

Laney tried to hide how shocked she was at Mia’s earthy confession. She and Simon might behave like randy stoats in private – and occasionally get carried away in lectures – but she never discussed the intimate details, even with Mia. It felt too sacred. Yet Mia, who worshipped Dom, was open and unapologetic about her desire for him. ‘When we were first together, he insisted we wait until I was sixteen before we slept together… By then, I just had to close my eyes, think of him, touch myself and come. I still do. He’s hung like a Holstein bull.’ She winked naughtily.

Theirs was an extraordinary bond that went far beyond sex: they shared hours of calls each week and exchanged long letters, and Mia pined after each all-too-brief visit, crying on Laney’s shoulder as she struggled to stick with the course that separated them.

‘You have to,’ Laney urged. ‘You’re so bright and work so hard, and everyone’s saying you’re the best actress the department’s ever seen. Dom’s obviously really proud of you.’

‘He says I’m too clever for him,’ she sniffed, ‘but he knows more about theatre than anyone here. He’s obsessed with it. And his acting is out of this world.’ To prove her point, she insisted all her friends trek to Leeds by train to watch him preview in Agitprop’s new adaptation of Emile Zola’s Germinal, in which he scorched the stage as the idealist miner and activist Etienne. Only Leo remained unimpressed: ‘Give me Les Mis any day – at least it has a few good tunes.’

None of Mia’s university friends was more disparaging about the brooding Dominic than Leo, who saw him as wholly unworthy of Mia’s open-hearted joie de vivre. Leo was an inseparable part of the Old Gate Campus foursome, he and Mia the Tom and Barbara to Laney and Simon’s Margot and Jerry, a pair of joyful self-dramatists with a pragmatic edge and plenty of get-up-and-go. Leo doted on Mia, his beautiful, kind-hearted muse for whom he cooked, made clothes and even famously procured a horse – hiring it from a local stables with money earned from his weekend job so that she could enjoy a few hours in the saddle. She stood up for him against the sneering rugger buggers who plagued his corridor with late-night revelling, cheered him through bouts of homesickness, spent hours wandering London galleries companionably at his side and sang hits from his favourite musicals with him. A sincere, hard-working perfectionist, Leo had an enviably level head and rarely got angry, but Dom’s unannounced visits tested his patience: Mia would cancel their planned nights out at the drop of a motorcycle helmet.

‘He is incredibly selfish,’ he grumbled to Laney after yet another aborted theatre trip. ‘He has almost no time off over Christmas and is expecting Mia to spend her holiday chasing him around the country on tour.’

‘Long-distance relationships rarely last through university,’ she reassured him, without conviction. ‘They’ll probably split up over Christmas… as indeed might Simon and I.’ He’d accepted an invitation to spend Christmas with her family, but was already kicking up a stink about the separate bedrooms and smoking ban.

 

When the Old Gate students returned from the festive break, Mia was more loved-up than ever, wafting around a snow-caked campus with fresh-faced happiness.

‘Don’t tell me Santa gave you a pony?’ Leo asked miserably.

‘Dom took me to see Ned’s Atomic Dustbin at Brixton Academy – I love that band.’ Her boyfriend’s musical taste was a long way from the old Broadway shows Leo adored, and while Mia insisted she loved both, she clearly found hard-core rock far sexier, along with pretty rocks. ‘He gave me this.’ She flashed a silver ring with a huge green stone on the middle finger of her right hand. ‘Green opal – it’s for energy.’

‘We should club together to get Laney one,’ he sighed.

Laney had returned from her Christmas holiday exhausted from frantically copulating with Simon in the garden shed behind the family veggie patch at every opportunity, and the furious arguments in the oast-house kitchen because the Holdens had refused to let her go to an illegal rave in Wiltshire with him for New Year.

The term kicked off with auditions for the big spring departmental production, The House of Bernarda Alba, and Mia read for the part of Adela with such spell-binding conviction that nobody was in doubt she would be cast in the central role, the youngest of five sisters oppressed by their power-crazed mother. The play was being directed by Professor Andrew Crutchley (or Prof. Crotch as most students called him), who had adapted his own translation of Lorca’s work, eager to explore the themes of sexual repression, lust and female beauty with his all-female cast.

The title role went to Laney, whose initial euphoria at being given such a meaty part was soon overshadowed by the realisation that Prof. Crotch was angling his interpretation entirely around Adela, with Bernarda featuring as little more than a comedy grotesque. His translation pared her part to almost nothing, and when rehearsals began she wasn’t even called for the first fortnight.

By week four, Laney’s lines had halved again and Mia’s rehearsal calls had doubled, although she seemed grateful to throw herself into the role, increasingly on edge because Dom kept cancelling visits: any free time he had during the final run in Leeds was spent visiting directors and auditioning for new roles.

‘His agent’s got lots lined up for after the Agitprop season,’ she explained – before skipping a Lorca rehearsal to sneak up to London and meet him after a group casting.

She returned late that night even more troubled, rushing to Laney’s room for a heart-to-heart only to find she and Simon were out partying. Instead she trailed across the building to visit Leo, who made toast on his gas fire and spread it thickly with his mother’s home-made marmalade, which contained oranges from her family’s farm in Spain.

‘Dom wanted to see Death and the Maiden while he was in town,’ she told him shakily. ‘It was amazing, but I needed to talk about the future, not sit in return seats three rows apart at the Royal Court. Then we…⁠’ She blushed.

‘What?’

She shook her head, knowing that the sort of information she could have shared with Laney tonight was not for Leo’s ears. He wouldn’t want to know that she and Dom had been so desperate for one another that she’d insisted they enact a naughty loo-cubicle fantasy during the interval, only to find it a disinfectant-scented anti-climax. The rush, tension and a split condom had kept her usual ecstatic response infuriatingly on the brim, and it still bubbled hungrily now, along with a churning anxiety like indigestion.

She licked jammy toast crumbs from her lips and studied Leo’s beauty, wishing he was Dom, but they were oil and water: Leo was all softness, so calm, tactile and kind – most girls’ dream boyfriend, although she had never had any predatory signals from him as she did from other guys; either Leo was biding his time or he wasn’t interested in taking her to bed. Most importantly, Mia sensed he understood that she loved Dom in a way that entertained no rivals, and for all his disapproval, he’d never do anything to threaten her happiness. Right now, she needed to talk too badly to care that she was trying to keep her burning oil alight in icy water.

‘I’m frightened he’s going to outgrow me,’ she blurted.

‘Like a pony?’

‘If you like.’ She chewed a nail. Leo moved her hand away gently, having battled all the past term to stop her biting her nails. It was a sign that a big worrier hid behind the joking, flirty performer. ‘I’m so scared of losing him,’ she went on. ‘I hate us being so far apart. He’s such a workaholic, he gets lost in it.’

‘And you deserve a Mia-holic.’ Leo sighed, fetching a bottle of Christmas brandy from his book cupboard and pouring slugs into espresso cups. ‘I’m merely a humble trainee in holism and tortured genius, but I can offer you some advice: dump him now and you’ll spare yourself the heartache of growing out of him when you get a Hollywood break and he’s still looking back in anger in the provinces.’ He was gratified that she got the joke, laughing in mock outrage.

‘Nobody else could get away with saying that, you bastard!’

It wasn’t the warm, supportive confessional with Laney that she’d craved, but in many ways the pep talk served Mia better. Afterwards, she vowed to stay positive and give her all to rehearsing the Lorca play, pouring her passion into the role and her love into long, heartfelt letters, which Dominic rewarded with postcards from every destination he visited in search of work, each one saying, ‘I love you’ and ‘Wish you were here’ in his distinctive, spiky hand.

‘Hardly Catullus,’ Leo said bitchily, but he made no more pleas for her to end the relationship. Mia lined the postcards up on her mantelpiece in order of preference, the London landmarks leading the way.

Even when Dom bailed out of a promised visit on Valentine’s Day to attend a recall in the Midlands, she remained optimistic. ‘It’s something big, he says. He’s not allowed to talk about it.’

‘Don’t tell me they’re bringing Crossroads back?’ Laney suggested. She thought Dominic’s small, apologetic Valentine’s card, featuring a Picasso sketch of a horse, very shabby compared to Simon’s vast hand-made one to her, or indeed to the tens of cards Mia’s admirers had crammed in her pigeonhole, many of which she had yet to open. ‘He’d better be here to support you in the Lorca with the biggest bunch of roses this side of Covent Garden.’

‘It’s the last week of Arturo Ui. He’s got performances every evening,’ Mia admitted.

‘Can’t he throw a sickie? He has an understudy, doesn’t he?’

‘That would be totally unprofessional,’ Mia said, but it was obvious she was desperate for him to see her in the role everyone thought was likely to win her a professional career. ‘I’ll talk to him when I go up to his birthday party. That’s on his day off,’ she added, before Laney could mutter about hypocrisy. ‘I’ll be staying over.’

‘Poor you.’ Laney shuddered, recalling mention of the unheated flat Dom shared with his fellow cast. ‘Lots of intense actors and politicos banging on about the recession.’

‘Actually, the party’s at his dad’s house.’ Mia had a very soft spot for Dom’s racing-mad father, a retired miner who suffered from emphysema. Increasingly house-bound by his illness, he doted on her and the regular cheery postcards she sent from college featuring horses and little bits of news.

‘Surely Dom could come down for a rehearsal?’ Laney had already block-booked tickets for friends and family. ‘Does he even know you have this part?’

‘Of course,’ Mia scoffed. ‘I talk to him about it all the time on the phone, and he’s really helped me get into the role. He’s hugely proud, but this Arturo Ui run is exhausting.’

‘No more exhausting than you running from Prof. Crotch’s wandering hands. Is it true he’s asked you to go naked in the final act?’

‘He thinks the part demands it.’

‘What does he know? My part demands lines, but he’s cut most of those.’

‘I said no.’

‘That’s about all I say in the entire play.’

 

Unusually for an Old Gate Drama academic, Professor Andrew Crutchley liked things of tradition and beauty. Despite its heavy sexual symbolism, his House of Bernarda Alba was set to be among the tamest of recent departmental productions. At the next rehearsal, Prof. Crotch compromised on Adela’s nudity, suggesting Mia wear a transparent negligé. He also told Laney that she would be wearing a fat-suit ‘to demonstrate Bernarda’s character is a physical as well as a psychological grotesque’.

‘It’s Mia I feel sorry for,’ she complained to Simon. ‘Prof. Crotch is such a lech and he’s taking total advantage of her to stage his own fantasy.’

‘You are my eternal fantasy and I will lech after you in a fat-suit like mad,’ Simon growled. ‘You’ve lost too much weight. I love every inch of you and hate to see such magnificence scaled down.’

Simon was designing the set, but when Laney asked if he was inviting anyone to see the show, he gave her his charming smile. ‘You know the answer to that.’ He fobbed off those fellow undergraduates who were agog to see the de Montmorency clan in the flesh with a dismissive drawl: ‘I’ve banned them.’ Only Laney knew the truth about his parents, and he remained tight-lipped on the subject even with her.

In the six months since he’d arrived at Old Gate College, Simon might have done a brilliant job at convincing his fellow Drama students of the de Montmorency birthright, a mysterious past, unfashionably right-wing opinions and erudite wit, but they remained unconvinced about his sexuality and many assumed he would come out sooner or later, despite his almost symbiotic attachment to Laney, whom some unkindly dismissed as a mother figure. His flamboyance confused people.

The Lorca set was being constructed in the cavernous workshops alongside the theatre, and Simon had long since replaced his highwayman’s leather with a Russian officer’s woollen greatcoat and wolf-fur trapper hat stolen from the costume store. They were the only things capable of keeping out the cold in the old metal hangar where he worked to bring his amazing creation to life. His designs marked him out as a rare talent, being brilliantly engineered as well as beautiful. The design for the Lorca set was dominated by a ten-foot-tall, intricately carved crucifix which, with Dalíesque ingenuity, came apart throughout the play into chairs, table, pews and bed. To cheer himself on through the late nights, Simon had painted I LOVE LANEY on the back of every backcloth and stage flat, to which some wag soon added a B and an R to make BLARNEY.

‘They can think what they like,’ he muttered, but the rumour that his relationship was less than genuine had intensified since his inclusion on Prof. Crotch’s Lorca crew. The professor was well known within the department for liking things played straight, with the notable exception of his male cast and crew. Notoriously eager to claim droit de seigneur with his female leads, he always went to great lengths to ensure that very few heterosexual men were ever involved in his plays, believing that his own sex appeal would take a boost if he cleared the field of potential rivals. To be branded one of Prof. Crotch’s gay hussars didn’t bother Simon in the slightest.

Leo was also on the design team, costumier angel to the demonic set designer, but far from bringing the two of them closer, it created discord between them. Simon liked to test Leo’s limits when he called on him in the costume room. Having noticed a startling similarity between Leo and the young Lorca in a photograph, he nicknamed him Federico and teased him mercilessly.

‘Apparently Salvador Dalí did some of Lorca’s set designs, and the poet was rumoured to be madly in love with him, but Dalí would have none of Federico’s backstage passes. He was a front-entrance man. I bloody love Dalí.’

‘Actually, he had a huge phobia of female genitalia,’ Leo pointed out drily. ‘He also preferred to watch his wife screwing other men than partaking; it’s called Candaulism.’

‘Surely that’s watching one’s wife screw candles,’ Simon joked feebly, irritated that Leo, who spoke fluent Spanish, was always far better read than he was on any given subject.

‘Prof. Crotch will have Mia screwing a candle live on stage if she’s not careful,’ Leo said darkly. ‘He’s such a creep around her. He wants Adela in a transparent nightdress for most of the last act so I’ve promised Mia I’ll cover as much as I can with embroidery. She’s worried Dom-ineering will kick off if he sees her flashing her nips onstage.’ His quiet scorn for pervy Prof. Crotch was only exceeded by his distrust of Dominic Masters. ‘I can’t believe she’s bunking off for two days to go to his birthday party in the last week of rehearsal.’

‘Well, he does only get to host one every four years.’

‘Like the Olympics and general elections,’ sighed Leo, who found politics and sport equally tiresome. ‘As long as he doesn’t keep her up all night listening to Dusty Bin.’

‘Ned’s Atomic Dustbin.’ Simon smiled.

‘Have you heard it? Horrible racket.’

‘“I know I’m a sucker, but live your life again with me!”’

Leo glared at him. ‘I appreciate the overture, Simon. But now’s really not the—’

‘It’s what Domineering wrote in Mia’s Valentine’s card – or words to that effect,’ Simon told him. ‘Laney told me. I forget the exact quote, but it’s from a Dusty Bin song. Mia keeps it in her bag and reads it twenty times a day.’

‘How romantic,’ Leo sneered, and they both flicked up the 3-2-1 finger gesture.

When Laney bustled in to find them collapsing with laughter in a rare moment of connection, she narrowed her eyes suspiciously, not immune to the gay-romance rumours currently circulating around the department. While Simon played to the gallery and Leo ignored them, she couldn’t help but take them personally.

‘You’re here to try on your fat-suit, I take it?’ Leo wiped his eyes and reached for the hideous, bulging Babygro he’d covered with glued-on shoulder pads and American-tan tights.

‘Jesus.’ Simon shuddered. ‘I thought that was the dead body for the first funeral scene.’

‘I’ll try it on another time, thanks.’ Laney smiled stiffly.

Mia spent the first part of the c. . .