Nana smiled delightedly.
“I’m so glad you know your own mind, darling! Andrew is a lucky boy! It’s just a good thing they don’t have all that ‘Debutante, presentation at Court’ nonsense anymore, I’m not sure how your darling mother would have handled it!”
I had to smile; Nana was one of the last of the real Debutantes; she’d ‘come-out’ and been presented at Court in 1957 before the Queen abolished all that stuff in 1958, and louche as she was, I suspect my mother would have jumped at the chance to shoe-horn me into one of those ridiculous dresses and trot me out in front of the Queen if that archaic nonsense still survived; at the very least, it would have got her photographed yet again for the Society pages of ‘Tatler’; now, with me (hopefully) somewhere a long way away, playing bang-bang with Andy, even the remote chance of that ever happening was fading, and as for prancing around in front of ‘The Germans’ in a stupid frou-frou dress…
While she was off the subject of my nakedness with my brother, I had a question of my own.
“Why are you here, anyway, Nana?”
She looked blankly at me for a second, then grinned again.
“I’m having some old friends to dinner tonight, and they’re bringing some of their eligible offspring, so I was planning on doing a little match-making.”
I looked pained at that, but she touched my arm reassuringly.
“Don’t worry dear, I’m not about to foist some minor county society lout off on you, I actually popped-in to see if I could intercept you before you went off and did whatever it is you do, as I can’t seem to pin you children down for five minutes these days, and what do I find instead? A scene straight out of ‘Caligula’! Poor Barty Reeves-Wood is going to be devastated!” she grinned mischievously.
I wasn’t devastated; the Reeves-Wood simpleton had halitosis that could blow a hole through a steel dinner-tray, and left a trail of tarnished silverware and asphyxiated houseplants and wildlife wherever he went. Last Christmas at Nana’s house he’d tried to haul me under the mistletoe and I’d had to accidentally stand on his instep with a stiletto heel until his eyes crossed and he forgot all about me…
“If you’re sure…” I said, uncertain if I was ready to go that public this soon in our relationship, but Nana was a subversive who always threw fun dinner-parties; it would just be a real strain having to pretend Andy was nothing but my older brother, but what the hey…
Nana grinned disarmingly.
“I just thought you and Andrew might enjoy being dangled as bait; maybe it’ll liven things up a little! Of course, now that you’re both taken it might be a bit difficult…” she trailed off suggestively.
“Excuse me just a second…” I said, and opened the door to the family room, where Andy was still fast asleep on the sofa, looking so adorable I wanted to run over there and bite him.
“Andy, Andy!” I called. His eyes snapped open and he sat up.
“What is it, what’s wrong? Lindy…?”
I beckoned him closer.
“Come in here, baby, and put your robe on; Nana and Grandfather are here!”
His eyes widened and his mouth dropped open in shock.
“Oh Jeez, you mean they… both of us… on the sofa…?” and I nodded.
“They know, baby, and don’t worry, it’s all OK, Nana’s alright, ditto Grandfather; he’s been banished to the garden, you might have to go and find him in a minute, but Nana wants to talk to you now.”
His eyes narrowed, and I had to grin.
“Really, Andy, it’s all OK, just make yourself decent and come in here!”
Somewhat hesitantly, he followed me into the parlour, where Nana smiled brightly at him as she pecked him on the cheek.
“My goodness, Andrew, you really are the spit and image of George when he was your age; we shall all have to watch out for you, you handsome devil you!”
Andy, normally so quick on the draw with a witty riposte looked more than a little sandbagged by Nana’s charm offensive, given the state she’d found us in.
“Erm, yes… lovely to see you, Gran… er…” he floundered, while Nana’s eyes gleamed happily, until finally she took pity on him.
“Calm yourself dear, you and Lindy are of age, and quite frankly, I can see why both of you embarked on this… whatever you want to call it. Do calm down, darling!”
Andy stopped alternately flashing beet red and deathly pale as Nana’s words sank in.
“You mean you… I mean, you’re not …?”
Nana chuckled musically, that sweet, indulgent laugh she seemed to keep especially for us.
“No dear, I’m not ‘pregnant pause’, or indeed anything. Just be a bit more discreet in future! Now, the reason I stopped by was to nab the pair of you for dinner tonight. Do come, darlings, it will be fun, and you look so dashing in a dinner jacket, dear! You’ll both have to keep your hands off each other, but, as you’re now a couple as they say, you can at least torture my friends’ eligible sprouts from a distance!”
Andy grinned at that.
“You’re a mean, hard woman, Gran, that’s a terrible thing to do!”
Nana grinned innocently.
“Yes, it is, isn’t it? And so much fun, too! Eight o’clock sharp, dears, and Lindy, darling, wear something alluring; I want the devastation factor off the scale tonight! Andrew, please go and put something on, and go and find your Grandfather before he falls in the Koi pond again…”
When he’d left, something she’d said earlier rose up and demanded my attention.
“Nana, earlier, you almost said Andy… Andrew was my … half-brother; is that true?”
Nana looked sideways at me, then shook her head.
“I suppose I had better tell you, otherwise you’ll never let it go. Yes, Andrew is your half-brother; his father is… your Grandfather.”
OK, I never saw that one coming; Grandfather George was… Andy’s father? This was Level 9 on the scale of bizarre shit my family had gotten up to.
“Go on, please,” I heard myself say as I tried to bring myself back into focus. Nana pulled me closer, once again rearranging my robe as she told the tale.
“When your parents got married, Chloe was already pregnant; she’d been up to her usual tricks, and she and George had been having a little fun, only she got caught by surprise and ended up preggers. Her dear mother had been my best friend, and I couldn’t let her be alone and just have a child like that, so your father, who’d always been her good friend, agreed to marry her; I think he thought it was all a bit of a lark. So he did, just to give the baby a name.”
Ah-ha, so that was why my parents seemed so unconcerned about each other’s dalliances; they really weren’t interested, they’d only gotten married to give Andy a name. Poor Andy, but now that uncanny resemblance to Grandfather made sense. I was still a little shaken, though.
“But Nana, doesn’t that mean Andy’s my uncle too, if he’s daddy’s half-brother…?
Nana smiled secretively, then winked, possibly the dirtiest wink I’d ever seen.
“Lindy, Lindy, that isn’t so, and for a very good reason; Andrew isn’t your uncle, because George isn’t your father’s father; your father comes by his decadent nature honestly, darling girl!”
Now I was shocked.
“Nana!” I gasped, “you mean…?” and she smiled wickedly.
“Yes dear, I know, shocking isn’t it! Your Grandfather and I have always had a … relaxed attitude to what the other does; our marriage was pretty much arranged to tie up the family businesses, and we were hardly consulted; I wasn’t exactly straining at the leash to get married, not with all those lovely Oxford and Cambridge undergrads to road-test, and George was having far too much fun bouncing French-Moroccan film actresses off the walls of his Mayfair penthouse; our parents had to literally frogmarch us down the aisle!”
She paused to catch her breath, her eyes alight with memory.
“We just saw no need to… limit ourselves, just because our parents saw fit to shackle us together; he was absolutely gorgeous then, I have to admit, and I did love him, I still do, more than anything in the world, but I wasn’t IN love with him, and he was pretty much the same about me; as long as we kept it off the lawn so as not to frighten the dogs, or off the ballroom floor to avoid stains, we did as we pleased. Your father’s real father was such a sweet boy, if a little feckless, but he was so pretty; Nigel looks just like him, and so do you, and poor, confused little Freddy.”
My head was spinning with all this information. Nana took my hand and squeezed it gently as she once more brushed the hair away from my face.
“Bit of a shock, eh, finding out your sweet old granny’s actually a banged-out old society tart?”
I snapped around to stare at her, to see her wicked grin again.
“Relax Lindy, I told you all this so you’d know who and what we are, and probably explain a bit about your parents, too.”
But there was one thing that felt so bad right now, and I could feel it in my chest, wanting to burst out.
“Nana, what you said… about… daddy, Grandfather, but he’s not my Grandfather…?”
Nana took me by the shoulders and pulled me around to look into my eyes.