скачать книгу бесплатно
Henry nearly went after her, but Dorothy laid a hand on his arm. ‘Let her go. I’ll be glad of the peace.’
*
Back in the car, Pru glowered and sulked without her Walkman. Connie smugly and irritatingly listened to hers, flicking her sister the occasional two-fingered salute.
After a while, Pru waved her hand in front of her sister’s face in order to attract her attention.
‘Hello,’ she said exaggeratedly. ‘Earth to Constance! Let me have a listen to yours, Con.’
Connie was indignant. ‘Why should I? It’s your own fault Dad took them off you, not mine!’
‘Oh, come on, Connie,’ Pru wheedled, going for the sympathy vote – a tactic Connie was always a sucker for. ‘You know I’ve been desperate to listen to that new Madonna tape for weeks, and you did promise to swap when we left London. I was going to let you have the Kylie one, remember?’
‘But Dad’s confiscated it.’
‘Exactly – not fair! Come on, you know I’d do the same for you.’
‘You would not!’
And so it went on, with Pru eventually breaking her gentler sister down.
Connie managed to tune out the tinny strains of Madonna’s ‘Express Yourself’, and stared out of the window, drinking in the Cornish scenery as it sped by. She hoped that Pru wouldn’t be a complete cow over the whole bedroom business, but she had a horrible suspicion that her sister would outwit her again, same as she always did. She sighed loudly, attracting a quizzical look from her father through the rear-view mirror.
At last the Range Rover crunched slowly down the lane and into the driveway of Atlantic House. Pru got out quickly and, with suspicious brightness, told her father: ‘I’ll help you take the luggage upstairs.’
He raised an eyebrow in surprise and disbelief, but handed her a suitcase and a couple of pillows and opened the front door for her.
A couple of minutes later, Connie climbed the stairs, lugging her bags behind her, and threw open the door of her bedroom, the big and beautiful blue room.
‘Surprise!’ sang Pru from the depths of the pretty four-poster bed. ‘Your room is down the hall, little sister.’
‘Very funny, Pru,’ laughed Connie, before turning to her mother. ‘Mummy, thank you. This is the best room ever.’
‘Which is why I am having it,’ said Pru. ‘The yellow room is so pretty and just right for you, Connie. Much more suitable for a fourteen-year-old.’
Connie’s face darkened. ‘And why should this room be suitable for a horrible sixteen-year-old?’
‘Because,’ Pru said reasonably, ‘I am studying for my O-levels and I need this room to study in. It’ll be quieter for me.’
‘Mummy!’ Connie turned to her mother for justice. ‘You said this was my room.’
Dorothy, staggering up the stairs with her own luggage, heaved a sigh. She was tired of constantly having to adjudicate in her daughters’ petty squabbles. Opting for the path of least resistance, she turned to Connie. ‘Darling, be a sweetheart. Pru needs to do lots of studying to get good grades, or else she won’t get a place at university. As soon as she’s through with all that you can swap rooms – OK? Hmm? For my sake?’
Connie knew she was defeated before she’d even started. It was typical of Pru to resort to these guerrilla tactics. Mum always said she loved them both equally, but somehow she always ended up twisted around Pru’s little finger. She was so manipulative!
Nonetheless, Connie acquiesced. She had no appetite for a fight she was bound to lose.
‘OK, Mum – but I’m only doing this for you, not her.’ Connie cast a filthy look in her smirking sister’s direction.
‘Good girl. Right, girls – let’s give Daddy a hand with the rest of the luggage.’
Pru got off the bed and put her arm round Connie. ‘Your room is lovely. It’s perfect for you. I’ll help you settle in.’
Connie looked at her sister and silently swore that she would get her sister back for this. Never mind how long it took.
3 (#ulink_3218cb93-a288-5d2c-97b9-22a9545fef7e)
Some decades later
‘What on earth is your father doing now?’ Connie Wilson could feel her temper starting to rise. ‘Greg?’ she shouted up the stairs. ‘Come on – we’ve got to go.’
Calm down, she told herself, you’ve got the whole summer ahead of you. Don’t let the holiday get off to a bad start, don’t let it get to you!
Abigail, sitting quietly on the sofa, bags packed and at her feet, looked up from her book. Though only sixteen, she had endured enough family holidays to realise how stressful her mother found the whole business. With an expressive shrug of the shoulders, she returned to her place on the page.
Connie tossed her expensively highlighted hair back and put a hand over her eyes.
‘God, we’re going to be late again. Why does everybody leave it all to me?’
Abigail sat unmoving, peering over the top of her book as her mother pulled the specs from her blonde head and checked for the umpteenth time the long list of notes she’d made in her Smythson diary.
‘Well?’ She looked at Abi pointedly.
Abi indicated the bags at her feet. ‘Mum, I’m all packed and ready to go.’
‘Sorry, darling. I don’t mean to be a grouch, it’s just that I hate the thought of Pru getting there before us.’ Connie glanced towards the stairs. ‘What on earth is your father doing? Why is he taking so long?’ Rolling up the sleeves of her stripy sweatshirt, she marched to the foot of the stairs and bellowed, ‘Greg! Please can you turn your computer off. Surely work can wait for a few hours? We need to get a move on.’
Upstairs, Greg had his feet propped up on the wide and empty expanse of his ultra-cool desk, or ‘work space’ as he preferred to call it. This was his oasis. A place of sanctuary from the bedlam of his wife’s domain. A place of privacy. He slowly rocked himself on the ergonomically designed kid leather chair, sighing as he ran his hand through his wavy dark hair, now speckled with grey – much to his annoyance.
Raising his voice he shouted back, ‘Darling, won’t be a minute. Just got some loose ends to tie up at the office. Your father will want to have a full report as soon as we get there.’ He listened for a response from below, but none came. ‘Sorry about that, Janie,’ he murmured into the receiver of his agonisingly trendy and sleek steel handset.
‘That’s all right, Greggy,’ returned the voice of a well-educated young woman. ‘I’m so going to miss you.’
‘And I shall miss you. But I shall be thinking of you every moment of every day and every night, Janie darling.’
‘You will call me when you get there won’t you, Greggy?’
Irritation flared in him. Janie was getting too clingy.
‘Greg!’ Connie was shouting again. ‘Please hurry up!’
Greg, beginning to lose interest, was eager to end the call. ‘Yes, Con, I’m coming,’ he shouted. Then, speaking softly into the phone: ‘I’ll try. I’ve got to go. If only for Abigail’s sake.’ He started to tidy his desk, closing the lid of his laptop and looking round for its leather case. Lately he’d found himself wondering whether the time had come to kick Janie into touch. Lovely girl and all that, but it was asking for trouble, having an affair with your secretary. Especially when your father-in-law owned the company. Maybe he could pay her off, get her another job in a friend’s company. He’d write her an excellent letter of recommendation. After all, she was very good at her job. And very, very sexy.
Greg Wilson considered himself a reasonable man. A man who was satisfactorily married while indulging in a slice of illicit cake. Surely it was expected that a man in his position would have a mistress? Then again, mixing business with pleasure … that was where he’d made a mistake. He’d have to give some thought to the Janie problem over the summer hols.
‘Janie, I really have to go. I’m only off to Cornwall. Not to the other side of the world. I’ll call when I can.’
‘Promise, Greggy?’ she purred.
‘Promise.’ Greg was now standing up with the phone sandwiched between shoulder and ear, shovelling things into his briefcase.
‘Bye bye, baby cakes.’
‘Bye, sexy.’ And he hung up. He’d added the ‘sexy’ to keep her sweet. She did the ‘sexy secretary’ look very well. Business suits with tight pencil skirts and high heels. And beautiful underwear that encased her twenty-six-year-old derrière to perfection.
He could hear the sound of a heavy suitcase being dragged across the hallway below.
Taking one last look around the room to see if he’d forgotten anything, he gathered up his laptop and went downstairs to inspect the damage.
His wife frowned up at him, ‘Greg, you know I want to leave as early as possible. We must get there before Pru.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Connie. Why you and that sister of yours insist on this ridiculous battle of wits each year is beyond me. And watch what you’re doing to the floor. It costs a fortune to polish those marks out.’
Connie was at the front door with the largest of three suitcases. She turned very slowly, took a deep breath, was on the verge of saying something unkind but thought better of it. Instead she continued towards the front door.
‘Here, let me help you. Before you scuff the paintwork as well.’
‘It would have been nice if you’d spared the time to do your own packing as well,’ Connie muttered, then, more loudly: ‘I think I can manage, thank you.’
Greg moved towards her just as she got the front door open. There ensued an unseemly scuffle as he tried to wrench the case from her hand and she held fast. It was Abigail who stepped in.
‘Mum! Dad! Why do we have to start every summer holiday with all this aggro? It will be brilliant once we get there and we’re going to have a LOVELY time! Let’s get on the freakin’ road.’
*
Fifty miles away, in an expensive corner of South-East London, Connie’s sister Pru was waiting for her pedicure to dry. She’d been up since four, tying up a few overnight loose ends that her overseas office had thrown up. These commercial surveyors could be such a bore. Now, she was lying on the bed in her extremely white and bright but sparsely furnished bedroom – a room so desperately tasteful it wouldn’t have looked out of place between the covers of Elle Decoration. She watched as her beauty therapist packed away the many pots of nail polish and lotions she had used on her client.
‘Thank you so much, Esther. I love this colour. What’s it called again?’
‘Pantie Glimmer,’ said Esther, a tall slender girl with a violent fake tan.
‘Pantie Glimmer? Where do they get these names from? I should think taupe was a perfectly adequate description.’
‘Yeah,’ deadpanned Esther. ‘But not very sexy, is it?’
Pru was about to argue the merits of taupe, one of her favourite shades in décor and clothing, but was stopped by a gentle knock on the door.
‘Enter,’ Pru called.
The door opened quietly and the slightly anxious face of her husband, Francis, appeared.
‘Hello, darling. You look marvellous.’ He took an appreciative sniff of the room. ‘Lovely smell. What is it, Esther?’
‘Ylang-ylang, geranium and sandalwood. It’s very good on ageing skin.’
Beneath her perfectly styled, short and sleek brown hair, Pru’s face stiffened, and her blue eyes took on a look that could only be described as icy. Francis hurriedly said, ‘Well, that’ll be lovely when my wife needs it.’ He turned to Pru: ‘Jeremy and I are ready when you are. I’ve packed the car and I’ve got some sushi for the journey.’
‘In the cool box?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is there fuel in the tank?’
‘Yes.’
‘Give me ten minutes. Oh, and remind Jeremy that once we start there’s no stopping. I want to be there in under four hours.’
‘Righto.’
Francis went downstairs, confident that he hadn’t forgotten anything.
Exactly ten minutes later, having sent the Aveda beautician packing, Pru swept out of the house to find her sixteen-year-old son already in the back seat, iPod headphones stuffed in his ears, and her husband waiting to shut the front door.
‘Is the alarm primed?’
‘Yes.’ Francis nodded.
‘Are the window locks checked?’
‘Yes, Pru. All sorted.’
‘Good. Let’s go.’
Pru walked to the driver’s side and got in. The keys were not in the ignition. Francis heard her tut of annoyance and, realising his mistake, hurriedly pulled the keys from his pocket and handed them over. ‘Sorry, darling.’
Pru checked her face in the wing mirror and started the engine.
‘My skin isn’t getting old, is it, Francis?’
‘Good lord, no.’ Francis smiled at her.
‘I didn’t think so.’
She slammed the gear stick into drive and pulled away in a spray of gravel before either son or husband had done their seat belts up.
*
Connie was aware that she was clenching her jaw. Her shoulders were up round her neck and her hands were in tight fists on her lap.
‘Can’t you drive any faster? This is a motorway. You can do eighty without getting stopped. The police accept that.’
‘No, Connie. The limit is seventy and that’s what I shall stick to. I’ve got nine points already. If I get stopped again, they’ll throw the book at me. Can you imagine what your father would say? The expenses I put in for chauffeured cars last time I got banned were horrendous.’
Connie bit her lip and looked out of the window to distract herself. They were passing the exit for Bristol Parkway station. The junction for the M5 wasn’t far. Another half an hour and they’d be at Taunton Deane Services. She could have done with a loo stop and a Costa coffee, but she was determined to arrive at Atlantic House ahead of Pru. This year the best bedroom was going to be hers.
She knew that she was behaving stupidly. This happened every year, and every year she got angry with herself for getting sucked into yet another silly, juvenile spat with Pru. Most of the time, Connie was a normal person: loving mum, good wife, someone who knew how to enjoy herself with friends and who appreciated her luck in life. But at the prospect of getting within ten feet of Pru, Connie started acting like a whiney, jealous teenager. It was in-furiating that after all these years she was still letting Pru get to her, but her sister’s competitive streak, combined with her superior attitude, was too much to bear. God only knew how Francis and dear Jeremy managed to put up with the woman. Connie was convinced that it was only thanks to Francis that Jem had turned out to be such a well-adjusted kid. Mind you, neither he nor Abi were kids any more; Abi’s seventeenth birthday was fast approaching, and she would be taking her A-levels next year and choosing a university. For a moment Connie allowed herself to wonder what Archie would have been doing now. Even after all these years it was hard to think about the little boy she had miscarried four months before she fell pregnant with Abi. Pru hadn’t attended his funeral; she’d been in New York on business. And she’d changed the subject whenever Connie mentioned him, closing the door on that heartbreaking grief.
Connie looked at her watch and was horrified to see the time.
