Last of the Great Romantics Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Epilogue

  REMIND ME AGAIN WHY I NEED A MAN?

  HE LOVES ME NOT . . . HE LOVES ME

  THE WWW CLUB

  Claudia Carroll is a young Irish actress. She currently stars in Fair City, as Nicola Prendergast, one of the most popular characters. The Last of the Great Romantics, is her second novel, her first, He loves me not . . . he loves me is also published by Bantam Books. Her new novel, Remind Me Again Why I Need a Man, will be published later this year.

  www.booksattransworld.co.uk

  Also by Claudia Carroll

  HE LOVES ME NOT . . . HE LOVES ME

  and published by Bantam Books

  The Last of the

  Great Romantics

  Claudia Carroll

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 9781409046059

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  THE LAST OF THE GREAT ROMANTICS

  A BANTAM BOOK:

  ISBN: 9781409046059

  Version 1.0

  Originally published in Great Britain by Bantam Press,

  a division of Transworld Publishers

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Bantam Press edition published 2005

  Bantam edition published 2006

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

  Copyright © Claudia Carroll 2005

  The right of Claudia Carroll to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Condition of Sale

  This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

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  Bantam Books are published by Transworld Publishers,

  61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA,

  a division of The Random House Group Ltd,

  in Australia by Random House Australia (Pty) Ltd,

  20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney, NSW 2061, Australia,

  in New Zealand by Random House New Zealand Ltd,

  18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  and in South Africa by Random House (Pty) Ltd, Isle of Houghton,

  Corner of Boundary Road & Carse O'Gowrie, Houghton 2198, South Africa.

  For all the hopeless romantics out there.

  You are not alone.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to Marianne Gunn O'Connor, for her calm wisdom and for everything she's done for me in the last year. I really couldn't be happier, luckier or more grateful.

  Thanks to Pat Lynch, for his patience and encouragement (not to mention all the great nights out on the town).

  Thanks to everyone at Transworld, especially Francesca Liversidge for her brilliant editing (and shopping tips!), Nicky Jeanes and Laura Sherlock. Roll on your next trip to Dublin!

  Thanks to Declan Heeney for organizing such an amazing launch party for He loves me not . . . he loves me. (I swear, this man could run the country, with one hand tied behind his back. Easy.)

  Thanks to Gill and Simon Hess for all their hard work.

  Thanks to Vicki Satlow for everything she's done.

  Thanks to Anne and Claude, my wonderful parents, and all the family, especially my aunt Mai in Scotland, a great mentor and a great friend.

  Thanks to Patricia Scanlan, Kate Thompson, Maureen McGlynn and Eleanor Minihan for all their support.

  On a personal note, thanks to all my amazing friends for all the encouragement you gave me in the last year. Special thanks to Clelia Murphy (for coming with me on the book signings and generally putting up with me), Anita Notaro, wonderful neighbour and friend (or the Champagne Sheilas, as we're in danger of becoming known!), Susan McHugh, Sean Murphy, Karen Nolan, Larry Finnegan, Madge MacLaverty, Lise-Ann McLaughlin, Marion O'Dwyer, Pat Kinevane, Alison McKenna, Frank Mackey, Sharon Hogan, Karen Hastings, Kevin Reynolds, the Gunn family, Kevin Murnane, Ailsa Doyle, Hilary Reynolds and Fiona Lalor.

  Special thanks to Maeve McGrath for all her help when I was researching this (otherwise I'd never have known what it's like inside the players' box at a soccer match!).

  Thanks to everyone at RTE, especially all in Fair City.

  Finally, thanks to everyone who gave me such support and said such kind words about He loves me not . . . he loves me. It really meant the world to me.

  Prologue

  Portlaoise Prison, Maximum Security Wing

  ' "A HANDBAG?"'

  ' "Yes, Lady Bracknell, I was in a handbag – a somewhat large, black leather handbag, with handles to it – an ordinary handbag in fact."'

  ' "In what locality did this Mr James, or Thomas, Cardew come across this ordinary handbag?" '

  ' "In the cloakroom at Victoria station. It was given to him in mistake for his own."'

  ' "The cloakroom at Victoria station?"'

  ' "Yes. The Brighton line."'

  'CUT!' snarled a voice from the bowels of the pitch-black auditorium.

  'Oh bugger,' Lady Bracknell whispered. 'We're for it.'

  'Just out of curiosity,' came the voice from the shadows, dripping with dry sarcasm, 'have either of you talentless travesties bothered doing even the slightest bit of work on your English accents? Bonecrusher Barnes, with a performance like that, if you're not careful you'll end up in a soap opera. Jordan or, God help us, even Jade Goody could do a more upper-class accent than you any day. And you're a thundering disgrace in that corset; you're walking like a drag queen. Lady Bracknell is one of the greatest parts ever written for a woman and you should be honoured to be playing it. Even if you're a man.'

  Lady Bracknell hung his shaved head in shame and muttered an apology under his breath.

  'He's very tough, isn't he?' whisp
ered one prison warder to another from the back of the auditorium.

  'Shhh!' urged his colleague, panicking like a schoolboy afraid of the headmaster's wrath. 'No talking during rehearsals. Mad Jasper nearly killed a warder last year for chatting in the middle of the West Side Story dress rehearsal. Said he was putting the cast off. He'll separate us in a minute if we're not careful.'

  They were interrupted by the door to the rear of the auditorium opening and another officer joined them, panting and out of breath.

  'Howaya, Mick,' the second warder mouthed silently at him, indicating for him to sit down and shut up.

  'Lads, I've awful news. You won't believe what the Governor just told me. What's the mood like this morning?'

  'Quiet at the back of the hall!' roared Mad Jasper. 'Or I will personally rip your philistine heads off. You're a waste of organs, the lot of you.'

  'Judge for yourself,' whispered the first prison officer. 'And stop talking or you'll get us all into trouble.'

  Mad Jasper then turned the full force of his venom back to his trembling cast.

  'Now, I have directed three prison drama shows and I have had three nervous breakdowns. That's the level of commitment I'm bringing to this play so excuse the hell out of me for expecting no less from you lazy shower of artistically challenged gobshites. Back to Lady Bracknell and Gwendolen's first entrance and this time I want to see a bit of respect for Oscar Wilde and the majesty of the text, if that's not asking too much.'

  Unseen by Mad Jasper, there was a flurried, whispered conversation going on at the back, all three prison officers taking advantage of his attention being momentarily elsewhere.

  'You're joking, Mick,' said one, his face suddenly ashen with shock.

  'Not a word of a lie. The Governor is in bits. God love the poor man, he's the one who's going to have to break it to him.'

  'I don't bloody believe it,' said the other, stunned. 'Mad Jasper finally makes parole in the middle of production week, with three days to the opening night? Jesus Christ, we'll be lucky if he doesn't kill us.'

  Chapter One

  Portia yawned, stretched and wondered why the bed beside her felt so cold. In her half-asleep state, she'd instinctively reached out to snuggle up against her husband and was startled not to feel his warm, naked body beside her. Odd. She strained to listen for a moment, just in case he was moving around their tiny kitchen downstairs, making steaming mugs of tea for them both and slathering wedges of butter on to fresh toast, just the way she liked it. Serving his wife breakfast in bed was a ritual which Andrew religiously observed, no matter how late they'd been out the previous night. And boy had last night been a late one, Portia thought, pulling the duvet over her head in a futile attempt to try and keep warm.

  Yesterday had been Valentine's Day and even though they could ill afford it, Andrew had insisted on whisking her off to dinner in the Lemon Tree, Kildare's newest, trendiest and most expensive restaurant. 'I know tomorrow's a big day,' he'd said, not brooking no for an answer, 'but we've both worked like Trojans and we bloody well deserve a night off. Besides, the world and its sick dog are going to be at the grand opening tomorrow night, how will I even get a chance to talk to my sexy, gorgeous wife?'

  So, smiling, Portia had shoehorned herself into the only weight-minimizing little black dress she possessed and happily allowed her husband to escort her to dinner.

  The Lemon Tree was clearly the hippest place to be that night, she thought as the maître d' led them to their table, weaving his way through the roomful of well-dressed diners who thronged the restaurant, filling it to capacity. Although it was mainly lovey-dovey couples eating out that night, Portia was still aware of every female eye in the room silently clocking her husband as they were escorted to their window table which overlooked the minimalist, Japanese-style gardens beneath. A tiny, familiar, momentary pang of insecurity struck her, which she immediately brushed aside. For God's sake, look at him, she thought as the maître d' held out her chair for her; how could you blame any normal heterosexual woman in her right mind for staring at him? And with a flood of love which brought a flush to her cheeks she looked across the table to her husband of almost eighteen months.

  At thirty-seven, he was just a few months older than her, although he'd never quite lost that boyish, Robert-Redford-circa-1975-before-he-started-to-turn-into-a-dried-sultana look he always had about him. Tall and fair-haired, he was dressed in a navy suit which brought out his twinkly deep blue eyes and a sexy, crumpled white linen shirt. In short, he looked like a movie star. Not for the first time, she silently marvelled that someone like her could have had the sheer good fortune to land a man like Andrew de Courcey. And what he'd given up for her!

  When they'd first met, Portia was struggling to maintain her family's ancestral home, Davenport Hall, a vast, crumbling, eighteenth-century manor house set in over two thousand acres of prime Kildare farmland. Struggling being the operative word. In fact, so rundown, rotting and neglected was the Hall back then, it had become a sort of joke amongst the locals in the neighbouring town of Ballyroan. Alcatraz, they used to call it. Dachau-sur-mer. Or Wuthering Depths, if they were feeling particularly vicious. Portia's long-cherished dream had been to restore the Hall to its former glory and then run it as a luxury five-star hotel. However, she was continually hampered by the family's total lack of funds, exacerbated by the fact that her father, the ninth Lord Davenport, had pretty much gambled away anything they possessed which was of any value. So, in true Cinderella-style, she had fully resigned herself to a life of genteel destitution – poverty behind lace curtains – along with her mother, Lucasta, and younger sister Daisy. Until Andrew came along.

  They'd fallen in love and married a disgracefully short length of time after they'd first met, as her mother-in-law never ceased to remind them. He'd spent years working as a successful corporate lawyer in New York and, like most lawyers at the top of their game, had made a fortune there. However, instead of setting up his own practice and scaling the corporate heights to amass even greater wealth, he suddenly decided to jack in the whole rat race. In a career U-turn of which Ronald Reagan or even Arnold Schwarzenegger would have been proud, he came to a decision he'd yet to regret. If Portia wanted to restore Davenport Hall to what it once was, then he was determined to help her realize that dream. He'd slowly come to love the Hall almost as much as she did and the idea of transforming it into one of the most salubrious, classically elegant country house hotels in Ireland was a challenge he couldn't resist.

  'Just don't ask me to get involved in the day-to-day running of it, honey,' he'd said to her at the time. 'That is, unless you actually want Basil Fawlty in charge of the place.'

  It was an overwhelming gesture. Never having had money of her own, Portia found it difficult to spend someone else's and Andrew certainly wasn't one to cut corners. His mantra was: 'Penny wise, pound foolish. If this is worth doing, then it's worth doing it properly.' His one and only condition, it turned out, was that he and Portia first renovate the nearby gate lodge and live there while the building work on the Hall proper was under way. It was an arrangement which suited everybody; they were only two miles from the Hall, although still on the Davenport land, and Portia got to decorate the tiny lodge in the simple, fresh style which she loved: all wooden floors and pristine white walls, so utterly different to the high ceilings and opulent Georgian splendour of the Hall. Andrew, moreover, got to begin life as a married man without the added pressure of living under the same roof as his mother-in-law, Lucasta. Not that he didn't adore her; he was one of the few people who got a great kick out of her oddities and eccentricities. One of the very few. Even Portia had to admit that her mother would try the patience of a pontiff.

  They were barely three months into the restoration project when the foreman on the job handed in his notice. 'I'm responsible for two dozen men on this site,' he'd explained to Portia, 'and your ma keeps plying them with drink from lunchtime on. Happy hour, she calls it, and that's one thing, but by thre
e o'clock my lads are too plastered to plaster. I can handle her doing their bleedin' star charts for them, I can even handle her telling us that we all worked on the pyramids in a past life – says she remembers cos she used to be Cleopatra – but this, I cannot take. I'm a professional, you know. Suppose one of them fell down off the scaffolding? They'd be rightly tequila slammed then.'

  The final straw came when he discovered one of Lucasta's army of cats had done its business right inside his hard hat. He was gone in a matter of moments.

  'Just as well,' Andrew had said as his white van drove away. 'If I had to listen to him say: "Now I can't even touch that till Tuesday," once more, I'd have screamed.'

  'And have you noticed the way a lot of the coving on the ceiling in the Ballroom is completely offline?' Lucasta had asked him innocently as they walked back inside the Hall. 'Wouldn't surprise me in the least if that gobshite had a glass eye. I won't say what I really think of him, though, because you know how I like to be nice about people. So let's just say it rhymes with trucking tanker.'

  There were no two ways about it, Andrew had been the driving force behind the whole project, entrusting only the best and most expensive restoration team with the mammoth job of gutting, reroofing and completely renovating the Hall from top to bottom. Only Christopher Johnson, the country's top architect, was deemed experienced enough by Andrew to handle the enormity of the task. And so, together, he and Portia ploughed every penny of his hard-earned cash back into the Hall – but the substantial savings he'd made from his annual six-figure salary were not even enough to cover the initial estimate. As with all building jobs, they'd gone way over budget within a matter of months and were left with no choice but to remortgage the Hall, on the assumption that once it was up and running as a successful country house hotel, their ship would well and truly have come in.

  It didn't stop Portia from worrying though. From worrying herself sick. If there was a tiny blight on the happiness she'd known since her marriage, it was her awareness of the full extent of the debt she'd plunged her husband into. If it weren't for her, he could be enjoying his money and living the high life, she used to think, instead of fretting about how in God's name they were ever going to ask their interior designer for further credit. She was only too well aware of the fact that her esteemed mother-in-law never lost an opportunity to raise this subject.