One Winter Weekend

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

“ T ell me again why we couldn’t fly First Class?”

Patricia Pembrey did not like flying steerage – and she certainly did not approve of the sort milling about in Luton Airport just then.

She made a horrified face as an elderly couple slowly walked past her, chewing gum loudly and clicking their canes against the tile floor.

“Because, mother,” her son Ben said flatly, “we’re going to travel like normal people for once.”

He had predicted his mother was going to be a pain, but he had no idea she would be this intolerable. The complaints had started months ago and it looked like they were not ending anytime soon.

“Oh, nonsense, Ben,” Patricia said coolly, adjusting the foxtail scarf over her shoulder. “We do travel like normal people, normal for our class.” She stuttered, lifting her arms in frustration, “Tell him, James.”

Lord James Pembrey, 15th Earl of Daventry, was nonplussed.

“I know, dear,” he said pompously. His travel usually included a private boarding area at Heathrow away from the public, waitresses with endless champagne flutes, and takeoffs scheduled around his agenda.

This was too much like roughing it for his liking.

Ben shook his head, completely frustrated with his parents’ inability to see past their own wants and needs.

“Look,” he said, his brown eyes darting towards the fast food lines. “I’ll pop over to Costa and pick us up some coffees. Will that do?”

He loved his parents, and they had given him a wonderful life filled with opportunities many only dreamed of – but they could be such woeful snobs that he sometimes wondered whether he’d been adopted.

He had been so completely different to them that when he’d gone off to university, he’d deliberately chosen not to go to Oxford or Cambridge but instead to University College Dublin – much to his parents’ chagrin.

And he was glad that he had; it’s where he’d met Molly.

He remembered clearly that first night he’d laid eyes on her at a social in a pub following a big rugby match.

Molly and her friend Caroline had come in, and Molly’s large doe eyes met Ben’s from across the crowded room.

He was normally confident, but something about her had told him that she wasn’t the type that would instantly fawn over him, as so many other girls did once they found out he was bona fide English gentry.

But, unlike in the UK, that kind of thing meant little in Ireland. Part of the reason Ben had shipped out of England in the first place.

He took a deep breath and marched over to talk to her – and promptly knocked a drink off a server’s tray and down the front of her top. Horrified, she’d stomped out of the pub with Caroline following at her heels. It was as awful a first encounter as any had ever been.

He counted himself lucky, then, that only two weeks later, they happened to meet again at a college party for Italian & Classical Degree students.

Ben had been invited by a mutual friend after he offered to make a pasta dish his old nanny cooked up for him and his brother every time his parents were off travelling.

Molly had made her way into the kitchen, the smell of the homemade sauce tempting her. When she saw the idiot from the bar, she’d immediately turned on her heel but Ben was faster. He grabbed her arm as she was leaving, apologising the entire way.

She’d looked at the man in the dirty apron, red sauce splattered on his cheeks, with his dark hair, deep brown eyes boring apologetically into hers, and couldn’t find a reason to be angry any longer.

They’d ended up talking the whole night through, eventually watching the sun rise over campus.

As he watched her in the glow of the early morning light, the warm sunshine reflecting in her wide blue eyes, Ben knew, even at that early moment, that this was the woman he was going to marry.

On Christmas Eve five years later, he had it all planned out as he took them on a journey of their old college haunts. They’d gotten fish and chips from the chipper they’d always gone to after a night on the town, went for a drink before closing at the pub where they’d had that first run in, and eventually wandered into St Stephen’s Green.

With light snowflakes swirling around them, and fairy lights shining amidst the trees above, Molly pushed her bundled-up body closer into his as they sat down on one of the benches.

As she talked about their Christmas plans for the next day, she turned to him expectantly, her eyes shining with excitement.

But Ben was not there, at least not where he had just been sitting. He was down on one knee, and pulled out a little black velvet box, his hands trembling as he searched for the words he had rehearsed for months – before promptly dropping the ring in the snow.

Ben was horrified as he squinted his eyes and searched the damp snow for the sparkling diamond once belonging to his grandmother.

But Molly only laughed and bent down, easily picking up the antique ring with its beautiful three off-centre diamonds, tears in her eyes.

She brought her red-gloved hand to his face. “Oh, you don’t even have to ask,” she told him, beaming. “Of course I’ll marry you.”

There hadn’t even been a question of where - or indeed when - to get married. Winter in Rome, at Christmastime.

While Ben had suggested that Molly’s family might be more comfortable with a traditional Irish ceremony at home, she wouldn’t hear of it.

She also knew Ben too well – particularly, that his family’s wealth and prominence embarrassed and irritated him.

Anything traditional would have been dwarfed by the excess and pomposity the Pembreys would no doubt insist on bringing to the table.

So in the end they’d both known that a small, intimate gathering at an historic church in Rome – just family and friends - was exactly what they wanted. The arrangements had taken nearly a year, though they’d had lost of help from a wedding planner in Italy to navigate the details.

And now days before Christmas, Ben found it hard to believe that here he was, ordering coffees at the airport, about to board a plane to Rome to meet his soon-to-be wife.

He grinned and thanked the barista as he picked up the coffees, leaving some change in a small jar next to the register. “Thanks - Merry Christmas.”

He returned to their boarding gate to find his mother, daintily dusting off the plastic airport seat with his father’s handkerchief.

“Oh, you have got to be joking, Mother,” he said, rolling his eyes and thrusting a cup her way.

“What?” she inquired innocently. “We’ll have to find a reputable dry cleaner once we have landed in Italy. I am not packing this handkerchief in our luggage.”

Ben handed his father his coffee and strode away. “Ben?” his father called from behind him, “where are you going now?”

“To find a bar,” he grumbled. “I need a stiff drink.”