Page 89 of The Spare

Oh, Jesus. The tears come out of nowhere, and I press my lips together for a moment, trying to steady myself. ‘Yeah. Same,’ I say eventually, because it’s true. ‘Eight weeks, wow! How are you feeling? Hang on—haven’t you been on the rosé all afternoon?’

‘Nope. Elderflower cordial. I’m sick of it already.’

I stare at her completely flat stomach in awe. ‘My God. There’s a baby in there. That’s crazy. Is Xav delirious?’

‘He’s beside himself,’ she says softly, and my tear ducts pour forth again. Jesus. Thank fuck it all worked out. Thank fuck Xav found Ivy and I found Ben.

‘I’ll bet. I thought your boobs were looking particularly good.’

She reaches up and cups them. ‘They’re growing even faster than the baby. They’re fucking sore, though. But weirdly erogenous? I don’t know. The whole thing is super strange.’

‘Well, they look great. So the line of succession is secured. Does Charlotte know?’

‘No, and we’re going to hold off a few more weeks, so keep it under your hat. I can’t bear to have her stressing about it all. Can you imagine what she’ll be like?’

I giggle. ‘Maybe the baby will mellow her. You are carrying Xav’s ancient seed, after all.’

‘Ew. That’s so upsetting. And you’ll have to get Ben to knock you up soon—you don’t want my and Xav’s grubby little bloodline getting the title, do you?’

‘Tell me about it,’ I groan. ‘I just want a few more months of being married and actually being happy, now that the media circus is finally dying down. Is that too much to ask?’

She pulls up her sunglasses, and I see that her eyes are wet, too. ‘No,’ she says. ‘None of us would ever begrudge you that. You take your time. And in the meantime, Xav and I will give the tabloids their next headline.’ She pats her stomach, and I muse that the papers will surely have a great deal to say about the fallen heir knocking up his not-remotely-blue-blooded wife before the actual duke knocks me up.

‘Whatever headlines you can generate,’ I say, lying back down, ‘I’ll be exceedingly grateful.’

My therapist says (yes, I have become one of those dreadful people who start too many of my sentences this way) that it’s harmful to compare ourselves to others with different personality types. She says it’s like comparing apples with oranges. But in my search for that elusive holy grail of authenticity, whatever that is, I find myself holding my sister-in-law up time and time again. Ivy doesn’t wear a mask. She doesn’t understand the concept of performing. She’s only ever been herself. And perhaps that’s all there is to it, really.

As I rebuild my confidence, shard by shard, from the debris at my feet, I gradually widen the circle of people I feel safe showing my true self to: the self whose nervous system can’t tell a nasty social media comment from an actual lion, whose brain never, ever turns off, who overthinks absolutely everything.

And, the more I understand my special, exhausting brain, the more I grow to appreciate it. A different type of brain may not have been able to build a business empire, to juggle a million projects, to make connections between seemingly random aesthetic references in her work, to dream up great, escapist creative visions in the name of relentless dissociation. These days, I spend less time cursing my brain and more time trying to extend it some grace.

It’s striking how often said brain comes back to that old housemistress of mine, the one who marvelled at how good I was at going after what I think I want and how staggeringly poor I was at knowing what it actually was that I wanted.

These days, I know exactly what I want:

The unconditional love of the green-eyed man I could never look away from for all those years. Not across a tennis court. Not across a crowded ballroom.

He wasn’t the brother I was told to want.

He wasn’t the brother I was told to marry.

But he was, and always will be, the brother for me.

Epilogue

A few months later:

Call it the nesting instinct on my part, but Operation Modernise Belvedere is in full swing… and there isn’t a thing Xav can do about it—especially given how fully his wife and sister have thrown themselves into helping me.

Happily for me, he’s being kept busy. Even now, as the rest of us are enjoying a civilised lunch, he’s pacing up and down the length of the dining room, rubbing the back of baby Alice, who is out cold and sprawled over his shoulder, along with a muslin.

Alice is adorable beyond all measure, and we are all obsessed with her. There’s something special about having a baby in the family to cut your teeth on (not literally) as you grow your very own version. The de Vere men, it appears, are breeders, and the de Vere women are basically hoes for all that aristocratic sperm.

That’s what Ivy and I have concluded, in any case.

And it’s not like I’m modernising Belvedere too much. I haven’t pulled out the Georgian French doors and replaced them with Crittall, after all. I’ve just updated the aesthetic from all that gilded furniture and candelabra to something a little more muted and contemporary. Obscenely high-end, but tasteful. Think six-star resort rather than the National Trust.

If I’m honest, it wasn’t until Athena insisted I break my Marie-Antoinette-style house arrest and accompany her to a wonderful soirée at the Kensington home of Natalie and Adam Wright, who own the luxury brand Gossamer, that the aesthetic I was chasing fell into place. Their home is a full-on London mansion, even more sprawling than the de Vere pad in Little Venice, and the interiors were to die for: timeless and elegant, with intense gravitas and a colour palette that married the subdued with the right pops of colour and let the quality speak for itself.