To Be the Best (Emma Harte) Read online

  Turning away from the balustrade, she stepped up to the table where she had laid out her papers a few minutes earlier, and sat down. As far as work was concerned, her immediate priority was her impending trip to Hong Kong to buy merchandise for Genret, the import-export trading company she ran for Harte Enterprises. She opened her diary and glanced at the dates in September she had tentatively selected some weeks ago. She flipped the pages backward and forward several times, carefully studied her schedule, pencilled in the changes she now wished to make, and began to scribble a note for Janice, her secretary in London, outlining her new itinerary.

  A few minutes later, Emily almost jumped out of her skin as a strong cool hand came to rest firmly on her shoulders, and she started up in her chair and swung her head swiftly, her eyes wide with astonishment. ‘My God, Winston! You mustn’t creep up on me like that! So silently. You scared me!’ she cried.

  ‘Oh, sorry, darling,’ he apologized and bent over and kissed her cheek. ‘Good morning,’ he added as he walked across the terrace and leaned against the balustrade, where he stood regarding her lovingly for a moment before proffering her a warm smile.

  Emily smiled back. ‘And tell me, what are you doing up so early? You’re usually dead to the world until ten o’clock at the earliest.’

  Winston shrugged his bare shoulders, put the towel he was holding on the balustrade. ‘I couldn’t sleep this morning. But it’s always the same with me, isn’t it, Em? I mean, on our last few days here I seem to want to cram everything in, enjoy every single second, just like the kids.’

  ‘And as I do, too.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true…you do love this place so. But then it loves you, Emily…why you’re positively blooming.’ ‘Thank you, kind sir,’ she said.

  He eyed the glass in front of her. ‘I suppose that’s water you’re drinking…aren’t you going to make coffee?’

  Emily shook her head. ‘No, Winston, I’m not,’ she said very adamantly. ‘Because if I do, I’ll also make some toast and I’ll butter the toast and put jam on it and then I’ll eat it, and when Odile arrives at seven, with all that scrumptious stuff from the bakery, I’ll have another breakfast, a second breakfast, and you know perfectly well that I’ve got to watch my weight.’

  ‘You look pretty terrific to me, Mrs Harte,’ he said with a chuckle and leered at her. ‘I don’t half fancy you.’

  ‘Honestly, Winston, at this hour!’

  ‘What’s wrong with this hour? It’s still very early…come on darling, let’s go back to bed.’

  ‘Oh don’t be so silly, I’ve a thousand things to do this morning.’

  ‘So do I,’ he remarked lightly, giving her a pointed look. Then his face changed suddenly, and he levelled a swift appraising glance at her, liking what he saw. Emily was now thirty-four and one of the prettiest women alive, in his opinion. She was blonder than ever and brown from the sun and her brilliant green eyes, so identical in colour to his own, sparkled with a vivid intelligence and a joie de vivre that were uniquely hers. She was wearing a lime-green-and-pink cotton shift over her bikini and looked impossibly young, fresh and delectable this morning.

  ‘Winston, you’re staring. And very rudely. What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. Just admiring you, that’s all. And thinking that you look like a delicious ice cream…and good enough to eat.’

  ‘Oh pooh!’ Emily laughed, but her neck turned bright pink and she dropped her head, stared at her engagement book intently.

  There was a tiny silence.

  Winston swallowed a smile, both amused and pleased that he could still make her blush after eleven years of marriage, but then that was his Emily and he adored her for her girlishness and her femininity and her softness. Odd, he thought, that she can be so tough in business and yet she has such a soft edge to her in her personal life. Like Paula, of course, and Aunt Emma, when she was alive; it was just this dichotomy in their natures that made the Harte women so original. He had known that for a long time.

  Emily raised her head. At once, she saw the contemplative expression on her husband’s face and asked, ‘And what are you thinking about now?’

  ‘I was just wondering what all this is in aid of this morning?’ Winston murmured, strolling over to join her at the table. He flopped down in the chair opposite and held her eyes as she looked across at him.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, puzzled.

  ‘Why are you going at the work hammer and tongs today, when you’ll be back in London at the end of the week? It hardly seems worth it, love.’

  ‘I’m not working, actually, I’m trying to figure out the dates for my buying trip to Hong Kong and Mainland China,’ Emily explained. ‘If I leave on the tenth of September, instead of the sixth as I’d planned, I’d still be there when Paula breaks her return journey back to the States from Sydney. We were talking about it yesterday afternoon, and decided it would be nice to have a couple of days in Hong Kong. Relaxing…doing our Christmas shopping…and then we could fly on to New York together, spend a day or two there before taking the Concorde home to England. What do you think?’

  ‘It sounds good to me, if that’s what you feel like doing. I’ve certainly no objections, I don’t have to be in Canada until the first week of October. Presumably you’d be back in England before I left?’

  ‘Yes, of course I would. I’ve taken your Canadian trip into consideration and planned around it.’

  ‘Then it’s fine, darling,’ Winston answered with a smile and stood up, went to get his towel. ‘Well, if you’re not going to take pity on your poor husband and make him a cup of coffee, I think I’ll go for a swim before that tribe of fiendish little monsters invades the area and ploughs down everything in sight.’

  Emily couldn’t help laughing at the expression on his face. ‘Oh I don’t know, darling, they’re not so bad,’ she protested, feeling the sudden need to defend the younger generation.

  ‘Oh yes they are!’ he retorted. ‘They’re bloody awful most of the time!’ A lopsided grin glanced across his face. ‘But I must admit, I do love ‘em…especially the three that are mine.’ He kissed her quickly and loped off in the direction of the swimming pool without another word, nonchalantly swinging the towel and whistling merrily.

  Emily watched him go, thinking how fit and healthy he looked with his tanned body and face and his reddish hair turned to gold by the Riviera sun. The summer here had done him good. He worked extremely hard running the Yorkshire Consolidated Newspaper Company and its Canadian subsidiaries, and she was always after him to slow down a bit. But he paid not the slightest attention to her, merely commented that they all worked like demons, which was true, of course. It was the way her Gran had brought them up. Emma had only disdained slackers, so naturally they had all become over-achievers.

  How lucky I am to have Winston, Emily mused, settling back in the chair, idly drifting with her thoughts, putting off preparing the menus for that day’s meals for a few moments longer.

  Sometimes, when she turned her gaze back into the past, she realized she had managed to catch him by the skin of her teeth, understood how easily she might have lost him to another woman.

  Emily had been in love with Winston since she was sixteen. They were third cousins. His grandfather and namesake, Winston Harte, had been her grandmother’s brother. Although Winston was five years older than she, they had been bosom pals as children, but once he had grown up he had hardly noticed her again, at least not as an attractive young woman with whom he might become romantically involved.

  He had gone off to Oxford with his best friend, Shane, and the two of them had rapidly acquired reputations as terrible womanizers. Almost everyone had been scandalized by their disreputable antics. She had ached with a mixture of jealousy and longing, wishing she were one of the girls Winston chased and bedded. Only her Gran had been sanguine. Emma had simply laughed, had said they were merely young bucks sowing their wild oats. But then neither Winston or Shane could do much wrong in Emma Harte�
�s eyes and she had had a special fondness for them both.

  And so Emily had worshipped Winston from afar, hoping that one day his glance would fall on her again. But it hadn’t, and much to her profound dismay he suddenly became seriously involved with a local girl, Alison Ridley. At the beginning of 1969 the gossip going around the three clans was that he was about to get engaged to Alison. Emily had thought her heart was going to break.

  Then everything had changed. Quite miraculously, Winston had noticed her at the christening of Paula and Jim Fairley’s twins in March of that same year. And all because of an incident with Shane which had upset her grandmother. She and Winston had been called into the library at Pennistone Royal and had been grilled by Emma about Shane’s feelings for Paula. When they had finally escaped, they had gone for a walk in the gardens to recover from their gruelling ordeal, and for some reason Winston had been prompted to kiss her. This action on his part had been as sudden as it was unexpected, and Emily, loving him though she did, had been as stunned as he by their intense physical reaction to each other as they had sat on the bench by the lily pond, entwined in each other’s arms. The world had turned dizzily and wonderfully upside down for them both.

  Winston, in typical Harte fashion, had wasted little time. The moment their affair had begun he had broken off with Alison, and shortly thereafter he had asked Emily’s grandmother if they could become engaged. Emma had given her consent, thoroughly approving of the match between her granddaughter and her great nephew. And one year later, when her Gran had returned from Australia, they had been married in the quaint old church in Pennistone village, and Gran had given the most beautiful wedding reception for them in the gardens of Pennistone Royal; her life as Winston’s wife had begun…and it was the best life any woman could ever want…

  Emily sighed with contentment, brought her thoughts back to the present, picked up her pen and began to write out the menu for lunch. When she finished, she started on the one for dinner, but stopped abruptly as an idea occurred to her. Tonight, she and Winston, Paula and Shane, would drive over to Beaulieu and have dinner at La Reserve. Just the four of them. Without the tribe. That would be much more peaceful. Not to mention romantic. Winston will approve, she thought, and smiled a small secret smile.

  Chapter 6

  ‘You clot! You unbelievably stupid clot! Look what you’ve done! You’ve splashed my beautiful painting and ruined it!’ Tessa Fairley yelled at the top of her lungs, glaring at Lorne, adopting an angry stance, waving the paintbrush in the air.

  ‘The side of the swimming pool is hardly the proper place to set up an easel and start painting,’ Lorne rejoined loftily, returning her glare. ‘Especially when everyone’s leaping in and out of the pool. It’s your own fault the watercolour’s been splashed, not mine. And one more thing – I’m not a stupid clot.’

  ‘No, you’re a stupid CRETIN,’ his twelve-year-old twin shot back, then sucked in her breath with a horrified gasp. ‘Don’t do that, Lorne Fairley! Don’t shake yourself like that! Oh! Oh! you rotten thing. You’ve spoiled my other pictures. Oh, God, you’ve made them all trickly.’ She had the sudden murderous urge to bash her brother in the head, to do him some kind of bodily harm, but instantly suppressed it because of her mother’s presence this morning. ‘Mummy…Mummy…tell Lorne to stay away from my paintings drying on the grass,’ she wailed.

  ‘I want this hat,’ Linnet announced matter-of-factly and snatched Tessa’s large yellow sun hat from the chaise near the easel, placed it on top of her bright red curls and happily marched off, dragging a rubber duck on a string behind her and pushing the hat up as it kept sliding down over her eyes.

  ‘Bring my hat back at once, you naughty girl!’

  When her five-year-old sister paid not a blind bit of notice, Tessa exclaimed to no one in particular, ‘Did you see that? She took my hat without my permission. Well! Her behaviour certainly leaves a lot to be desired. Mummy…Mummy…that child’s spoiled rotten. You and Daddy have ruined her. There’s no hope – ’

  ‘Pompous, pompous, Tessa’s being pompous, just like Lornie, she’s parroting Forlornie,’ Gideon Harte taunted in a sing-song tone from the relative safety of the pool.

  ‘I won’t dignify that ridiculous remark,’ Lorne sniffed with hauteur and lowered himself onto a mattress, picked up his copy of Homer’s Iliad and buried his face in the book.

  ‘Bring my hat back!’ Tessa screamed, stamping her foot.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, leave her alone,’ a faintly disembodied voice admonished from the pool, and Toby Harte’s reddish-gold head bobbed up over the side. The ten-year-old grinned at Tessa, who was his favourite girl cousin, and then hauled himself out of the water, being careful not to splash her or her paintings, having no wish to incur her wrath. Reaching for a towel, he added, ‘After all, she’s only a little itty bitty baby, and how could she – ’

  ‘Not a baby,’ a muffled voice informed them from underneath the large sun hat.

  ‘ – possibly damage it,’ continued Toby, towelling himself dry. ‘And why do you care so much, Tess? It’s only a stupid old hat you bought in Nice market…a cheap bit of rag.’

  ‘It’s not a bit of rag! It’s beautiful. And it cost me a whole week’s pocket money, Toby Harte!’

  ‘More fool you,’ called out Gideon, and with this inflammatory comment the eight-year-old paddled swiftly to the centre of the pool, flipped over, floated on his back, and began to make faces at her.

  ‘What do you know about anything, Gideon Harte! You’re a CRETIN like my brother.’

  ‘Is that the only stupid word you know, Stupid?’ Gideon shouted back and stuck his tongue out at her.

  ‘Brat! Brat!’ Tessa yelled at him. ‘You’re a spoiled brat, too!’

  ‘Oh shut up both of you,’ Toby admonished in a bored voice. ‘Listen, Tess, can I borrow one of your old Beatles’ albums?’

  ‘Which one?’ Tessa asked, suddenly wary, squinting up at him in the bright sunlight, moving a strand of fair hair away from her face.

  ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.’

  ‘Oh no, I can’t possibly lend you that one! It’s er…er…it’s become a…classic. When Auntie Amanda gave it to me, she told me it’d be very, very valuable one day, ‘cos it’s an early one…she’d had it since before we were even born. But…Well…all right, because it’s you I’ll make an exception, so – ’

  ‘Gosh, thanks, Tess,’ Toby cut in, his freckled face lighting up.

  ‘ – you can rent it if you want, it’s ten pence an hour,’ Tessa finished, sounding as magnanimous as she now looked.

  ‘Ten pence an hour! That’s highway robbery!’ Toby spluttered, his expression indignant. ‘No thanks, Tessa, I’m not going to help you become a capitalist.’

  ‘In this family, everybody’s a capitalist,’ Tessa declared smugly, with a small smirk.

  ‘Forget it, I’ll play my new Bee-Gees.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  ‘Aunt Paula. Aunt Paula…your daughter’s turned into a really nasty little sharpie this summer,’ Toby exclaimed scathingly and threw a disgusted look in Tessa’s direction.

  ‘Mummy…I’m taking my knickers off, they’re all wet,’ Linnet cried from the depths of the sun hat.

  ‘You see what I mean about her behaviour, Mummy,’ Tessa sniggered. ‘She’s the only five-year-old I know who still wee-wees in her pants.’

  ‘I don’t! I didn’t, Mummy!’ a clear voice shrilled as the hat was pushed back and Linnet’s round flushed face appeared.

  ‘Auntie Paula, may I have one of these ginger snaps, please?’ three-year-old Natalie Harte asked and promptly took one and crunched on it before she was forbidden to do so.

  ‘Mummy! Look at her now! She’s dragging my gorgeous sun hat in the puddles. Stop it, you little monster. Stop it! Mummy, make her stop. Mother…you’re not listening. If you throw that hat into the pool, I’ll kill you, Linnet O’Neill! Gideon! Get my hat! Quick, before it sinks!’

 
; ‘Okay, I will, but it’ll cost you plenty.’

  Tessa ignored this threat. ‘Wait until I catch you, Linnet,’ she screamed after the small, plump figure retreating swiftly in the direction of the pool house.

  ‘Mother…Mother… will you please tell Tessa to stop screeching like a banshee? I’m getting a frightful headache,’ Lorne murmured languidly from the mattress where he lay reading.

  ‘Auntie Paula, Natalie’s eaten all of the ginger snaps,’ India Standish gasped and, turning to her cousin, she added in the most dire tone a seven-year-old could summon, ‘You’re going to be sick. Horribly, horribly sick, and it serves you right, you greedy little girl.’

  ‘Have this, India,’ Natalie said with a winning smile, pulling a half-eaten chocolate out of the pocket of her sundress, dusting it off and offering it to the older girl, whom she adored.

  ‘Ugh! No thanks. It looks icky!’ India pulled a face. ‘It’s covered in sand. And fluff. Ugh!’

  ‘Auntie Paula, there’s a dead something at the bottom of the pool,’ Gideon shouted, coming up for air with a splash, triumphantly holding the sodden sun hat aloft.

  ‘Oh my God, my beautiful gorgeous new sun hat has been ruined! Mummy, she’s ruined my expensive hat. Who’s going to buy me a new one? Mummy, did you hear what I just said?’

  ‘Where’s the dead something?’ Patrick asked, throwing himself flat on the ground, dangling his dark head over the pool, craning his neck so that he could peer down into the depths. ‘Can’t see it, Gid.’

  ‘I’ve got to dive for it,’ Gideon explained, running his hands through his wet blond hair, taking a deep breath and instantly plunging underwater again like an agile little dolphin.

  ‘Patrick, don’t lean over the edge,’ Linnet warned from the door of the pool house. ‘You’ll fall in.’ ‘Won’t fall.’

  ‘Will you take five pence an hour for Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band?’ Toby negotiated hopefully. ‘Eight pence…perhaps.’

  ‘No thanks, Miss Sharpie. You can go and shove it up your…jumper.’