My name’s Linda, and this is the story about how I captured the sweetest man in the world, while fending off a complete twerp, and the most repulsive little tick God ever saw fit to curse the world with. Andy tells me a story begins at the beginning, and I’ve never worked out if that’s deeply profound, or just trite and meaningless, but, I’ll follow his advice and start from the beginning.
My parents, The Right Honourable Nigel Grosvenor-Edgeworth and Chloe Cavendish-Haldane, were the products of two of Britain’s oldest and wealthiest families; theirs was a dynastic marriage in every sense of the word; the problem was, they didn’t see themselves as the next generation of captains of industry; rather, they saw themselves as the beneficiaries of their ancestors’ industry, business acumen, and huge wealth; they were a playboy and an ‘It Girl’ respectively, happy to live off the bottomless trust funds settled on them by their doting parents and grandparents. Their more responsible brothers took up the reins of the various industrial combines both sides of the families owned, and my parents lazed and played.
My father pretended to be an antiques dealer, although to be perfectly honest, he was only a dilettante at best, with a taste for antique furniture and objets d’art that he somehow never got around to selling; dancing with minor Royals at Annabel’s, shooting at Sandrinham, partying in Mustique, and being photographed in Cannes, Nice, and Saint Tropez with his hands all over big-breasted American starlets in teeny-tiny bikinis seemed to be his main preoccupations.
Mother didn’t even pretend to work; her racehorse stable, her sports cars, her various artist ‘friends’, guaranteed entrance to the Royal Box at Ascot, Polo at Hurlingham, a private box for The Bolshoi, and weekend breaks in Barbuda, these were my mother’s life and her pastimes.
Quite how my older brother, Andrew, or Andy for short, and my twin brother Freddy and I came about has always been a mystery to me; my parents hardly ever seemed to be on the same planet as the rest of us, or each other, let alone the same bedroom or time-zone, but things must have got interesting a few times, hence the three of us. I put it down to divine providence and boredom, as there’s really no other explanation. They never brought their dalliances home, but I only needed to see a picture of my mother in one scandal-rag or another, with her mouth glued to some pop star’s and his hands up her dress a limited number of times to realise what she was up to.
That my parents stayed together at all was always a source of wonder to me, seeing as they never did the things married couples are supposed to do together, obviously preferring instead to do them with other people, but they did love each other, in an aimless, entirely non-exclusive sort of way. I suppose it helped that they were both almost ridiculously good-looking, a set of genes none of us seem to have inherited; ‘not bad’ is probably the kindest description you could give of me, and as for Freddy…
A description or two is called for at this point. Freddy and I, as twins, share the same blue eyes and brown hair, like our mother (well, that’s her real colour; at the moment she’s channelling Gwen Stefani, so her hair is currently a brittle platinum), but we both look like daddy; we both have that same ‘aristocratic’ chin (whatever that is), and the same smooth, high forehead, straight nose, and wide full mouth that makes daddy so attractive; however, Daddy is tall and well-built, and effortlessly charming while Freddy is short and slightly built, with the muscle tone of a rubber band, and the personality and social skills of a paperclip.
I tower over him at 5’6″, and weigh in at a comfortable 9 stone, or 126 lbs for our transatlantic chums (and don’t ask me what that is in kilos; if I knew, or cared, I’d be French, a terrible fate…) with a slim build and a 22″ waist, long hair that falls to the middle of my back, nice but not extravagant 32B boobs, and I’ve been told I have a nice shapely bum, due mostly to sport and gymnastics all the way through school.
Freddy is 3 inches shorter than me, and considerably skinnier; if he stood sideways-on and stuck out his tongue, he’d look like a zipper. Andy once tried to get him to exercise with him, claiming he looked like a gate-post with a toast-rack stuck on half-way up, but Freddy revels in looking like a half-starved, skeletal, famine victim; I think he thinks it makes him look lean and interesting, but really, he just looks famished. I also think he’s hoping for a growth spurt. Otherwise he’s doomed to spend his life as an Oompa-loompa, but without the charm; personally speaking, I just wish he’d wash more often; please don’t let me be the only girl in the world whose brother selects which socks to wear by picking the ones that don’t make a sucking noise when you pull them off the floor…
Andy is two years older than us, and he’s the big, eye-catching one in our family, see below.
Growing up with a twin brother and an older brother was interesting; Andy was always the one I turned to when I needed something, wanted something, or needed a shoulder to cry on; I soon worked out that, twin or no, I had absolutely nothing in common with Freddy, and his coterie of creepy little goblin friends were equally unappealing; at least Andy didn’t spend his time teasing or annoying me, but when I came home for my coach-weekends, there would be Freddy, usually with one or more of his sweaty, weedy little cohorts, gearing-up to try and make my life miserable once again.
That, of course, didn’t trouble me in the slightest; Freddy’s friends were all as puny as he was, and a good open-handed smack in the right place, the way Andy had showed me, would have had any of them curled-up on the ground and crying for their mummy.
I think you’ve probably got the message by now that Andy and I are more connected than my twin and I ever were; over the years, Andy came to be the one I needed and depended on, and eventually I came to see him as more, much more, than just my big, gentle, patient, sweet older brother. The trouble was, I didn’t really know what was happening to me; all I did know for sure was that Andy made me feel safe, secure, wanted, and loved, and I adored him. More of that later.
It was Freddy that concerned me; he’d started acting possessive and over-attentive towards me, which unnerved me a little; I didn’t get it, as he was usually such a creepy little pizzle. So I kept my distance, and ordered him to do likewise, or I was going to barge into his room late one night and kick him so hard he’d be singing soprano the rest of his life.
After a while it started to become more than tiring, and became a little bit frightening. It got to the point eventually that one year we were both home from school on coach weekends, and Freddy developed the habit of suddenly bursting into my room, on the pretext of asking me something, or to tell me something, or because he was looking for something. I complained to Daddy, but I’m not sure to this day he even got what I was saying; he just gave me vague assurances, slipped me a twenty-pound note, and basically patted me on the head, so, no joy there.
I couldn’t turn to Andy for help; he was off at boarding school too, all the way over in Shrewsbury, and, because he was playing in the Inter-School Rugby Tournament that year, held over several Coach Weekends leading up to the summer holiday and Prize Day, he was staying at school, and I wouldn’t even see him until the week the summer break began, after Prize Day.
So I gritted my teeth and avoided sweaty Freddy and his oik friends on the last couple of Coach Weekends before school gave out and Andy would be home all summer to keep him away from me. My last coach weekend, Andy invited me up to his school for Prize Day; of course I said yes; the only down-side was that sweaty little goblin Freddy would be there too, as he also went to Shrewsbury.
Boy was I glad I went! All of Andy’s friends were gorgeous, but two stuck out for me; Harry Waterfield, who was just the most gorgeous boy I’d ever seen, and Jack Cameron, who easily matched Andy for height and heft. I’d seen both Harry and Jack play rugby on TV, when the two of them, together with Andy, were selected for an England Schoolboys XV to play a Rest Of The World team at Twickenham, but to see them in the flesh; my heart was all a flutter! I did see Freddy occasionally, sulking and glowering in the background, but paid him no mind; what was he compared to these gorgeous, sporting heroes?
After that, I started spending my coach weekends with friends; I’d get cajoling, wheedling, finally angry, then hostile, phone calls from Freddy, demanding I come home, but even the stupidest guy will eventually come to understand that constantly being told to ‘Piss Off!’ means just that.
Appeals to my parents (when they were visiting our planet) to get him off my back made no difference; their response was that he was growing up, he’d calm down soon, just ignore him. I was just waiting for my mother to tell me to tap him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper, they were that disconnected from reality by now…
Finally, the great day came, and I was finished with that grim prison of a school forever; my 18th had come and gone, and summer stretched before me. I took a Gap Year, and travelled around a bit, mostly the Med, to try out the sun-spots my mother seemed so fond of, occasionally even crossing paths with her and her herd of acolytes and hangers-on. Some of the young (and not so young…) men assumed I was a chip off my mother’s old block, but I soon put them straight, occasionally with a strategically placed knee, the way Andy had showed me; orange tans and over-whitened teeth do nothing for me…
When I came back to England, I hung-out with friends who’d also taken Gap Years, and clubbed and partied a little, and eventually ended-up working for a while in London as a library assistant at The Houses of Parliament, so, with the Gap year I’d taken, I was 19, and a little more worldly than when I’d left school when I was ready to start at university.