Little Lady, Big Apple, Page 3

  I stared at her disbelievingly. Since when had Jane Austen run to small, cynical north London shopaholics?

  ‘Well, he certainly makes a change from Aaron,’ I said tactfully.

  Gabi tossed her head dismissively. ‘I am so over Aaron,’ she said. ‘Him and his ridiculous quarter-life crisis. Nelson’s much more focused. He wouldn’t chuck everything in to go back to college at his age.’

  ‘You know, I don’t think giving up a stressful job to study pathology is necessarily a bad thing,’ I tried. ‘I mean, OK, he should have discussed it with you first, but maybe he wanted to follow a dream.’

  ‘Honestly, Mel, you and your benefit of the doubt! Jesus!’ She gave me her best ‘dur!’ look. ‘If he’s so interested in dead bodies, why couldn’t he have just bought himself a CSI box-set?’

  ‘Maybe it’s just a phase?’ I suggested. I wasn’t so sure she wasn’t going through a phase.

  ‘Yeah,’ she snorted. ‘A phase of singleness.’

  I was saved from having to continue this now-familiar discussion by my phone ringing in my bag. I have two: a normal one for myself, and a swanky black one for work.

  But this was my own line, and the number displayed made my heart sink, right into the pit of my corseted stomach.

  ‘Hello?’ I said, as brightly as I could nonetheless.

  ‘Melissa!’ barked Daddy. ‘Get yourself home at once. There’s a family crisis. Your mother needs you.’

  Then he hung up.

  Well, I thought, trying to look on the bright side, that sorted out one of my immediate problems, at least. There was little or no chance of having to avoid public displays of affection at my parents’ house.

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said to Gabi. ‘You and Nelson have got the place to yourselves this evening!’

  ‘Thanks, Mel,’ she said with a wink, and I felt pleased, guilty and slightly sick, all at the same time.

  2

  I drove to my parents’ house in a state of some consternation, not helped by the stream of messages arriving on both phones.

  Even if Nelson wasn’t such a home-made policeman, lecturing me incessantly about hands-free car kits, I wasn’t sure I wanted to check the messages anyway, in case they contained even more pleas to fit appointments into my bursting schedule and/or updates about whatever this emergency was at home. When it came to my father, ignorance was usually bliss. Which was just as well, because as far as he was concerned, ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ were three entirely separate levels of information.

  The others weren’t much better. My family rarely bothered to explain their crises in advance, on the basis, I think, that if I had any inkling of what I’d be letting myself in for, I’d simply drive in the opposite direction.

  I pulled a reflective face in the mirror. That said, things had been quite peaceful in the eight months since my younger sister Emery’s wedding at Christmas to William, a sports-mad, ultra-competitive, thrice-married solicitor. Peaceful by Romney-Jones standards, at least, since they’d spent most of those eight months moving to Chicago and therefore removing themselves from immediate contact. Although Emery was so vague she could easily be on the verge of childbirth by now and not thought to mention it.

  There had been nothing in the paper about my father for months – although Parliament was out of session at the moment.

  My mother was, the last time I called home, resident in the marital manor house and not shacked up in some seaweed spa in the west of Ireland, or, worse, in some discreet ranch called Serendipity in Arizona having her liver holistically massaged. Though that, again, may have been connected in some way with Parliament being out of session.

  My other sister Allegra was in Sweden, where she lived with her husband Lars, an art and antiquities dealer specialising in prehistoric arrowheads and other more arcane stuff that I didn’t like to ask about.

  And Granny . . . I turned up my Julie London CD, which reminded me of her. Granny was the one redeeming feature of my family: she was glamorous, amusing, and the only person I knew with sufficient self-confidence to rattle my father. She had friends in higher places than him, coupled with a mysterious private income which meant that he couldn’t crack the financial whip at her either.

  I loved Granny more than anyone, but if there was some crisis afoot at home she was almost certainly on a camel tour of Egypt or similar, charming all and sundry from beneath a diaphanous veil.

  I made it back to the family pile in a very decent two hours, and when I pulled up in the drive there was a full complement of cars outside. That never boded well. Family crises seemed to escalate exponentially the more Romney-Joneses joined in. And from the chewed-up state of the gravel, all the cars had been parked with some rage. Mummy’s mud-splattered Merc estate still had a dog in the back that she’d obviously forgotten to let out in her haste to get in. Daddy’s Jag was blocking in Emery’s old lime-green Beetle, left there since her wedding, and an enormous black BMW X5 was halfway across the ornamental flowerbed in the centre, looking not so much parked as stalled and abandoned.

  I peered at it. It was brand-new. God knew who that belonged to.

  I parked my own Subaru well out of the way, next to an ancient hydrangea, and checked my face in the rear-view mirror, taking three slow deep breaths to prepare myself for the onslaught. When that failed, I had a couple of squirts of Rescue Remedy. Even so, my hand joggled rather as I was freshening up my lipstick.

  The gardens were looking deceptively calm in the warm August evening, and I could smell the tall box hedges that ran around the perimeter of the house mingling with the musky roses climbing up the front wall. Jenkins, Mummy’s oldest basset hound, leaped up at the window of her car as I approached, barking his head off with excitement, and I helped him out. He was getting on a bit and sometimes needed a hand over the dog shelf, as his back legs were somewhat arthritic and his undercarriage tended to ground him on obstacles like a barge.

  ‘Hello, old man!’ I said, wobbling his big ears, and trying not to get my face within reach of his toxic breath.

  He snuffled gratefully at my bag as I made my way inside. Already the echoes of a family row were bouncing off the parquet tiles like so much distant cannon fire. I adjudged, from the level of shrieking and bellowing, that the row was taking place not in the kitchen, as usual, but in the drawing room, which indicated that it was quite a high-level argument. In the intimidatingly formal drawing room, my father could take full advantage of the uncomfortable antique sofas, which he liked to stalk around then lean over, aggressively, without warning, to bellow in the ear of the occupant. My mother much preferred to argue in the kitchen, where she had improved access to plates and knives, not to mention ‘cooking sherry’.

  ‘Have you taken leave of your senses entirely?’ Daddy was yelling at some unfortunate – my mother, I guessed, since he asked her this question more often than anything else. ‘Do you think the world revolves entirely around you?’

  I paused at the door, temporarily paralysed by the sheer hypocrisy of this comment, coming from a man who refused to read the morning paper if someone else had got there first and ‘spoiled the pages’.

  ‘No,’ said a low, but equally piercing voice. ‘I imagine the world revolves around art. Which is better than imagining it revolves around money, like you do.’

  Oh, God. Allegra. What was she doing here?

  Jenkins whimpered, turned tail with the grace of an oil tanker, and skittered across the parquet and down to the kitchen, out of harm’s way. I was tempted to join him, especially since it was village fete time, and I knew Mummy would have cleaned out the cake stalls with her usual inability to stop at four fruit scones.

  ‘Don’t be so bloody precious!’ roared my father, who had no time for Allegra’s artistic nature, or, indeed, Lars’s art gallery, oddly profitable though it was. ‘Even Melissa doesn’t come out with claptrap like that and she doesn’t know the difference between shorthand and street-walking!’

&nb
sp; Charming. The ‘real’ nature of my agency, as understood by Daddy, was something of a running joke. Or it would be, if it had been funny.

  ‘Martin!’ screeched my mother. ‘Do not use my Meissen dish as an ashtray!’

  I gave Mummy or Allegra ten seconds to leap to my defence, then, when no one did, I barged in before they actively joined in with slurs of their own.

  ‘Oh, Christ, what now?’ Daddy bellowed, by way of paternal greeting. He had apparently forgotten that it was in fact him who had summoned me there in the first place.

  ‘Hello, Melissa,’ said my mother, through tight lips. I mean they were tight lips, literally. She seemed oddly lifted and was wearing her shimmery blonde hair much more forward than usual. ‘I’m so glad you’re here. I know you can talk some sense into everyone, darling. You always do.’

  ‘Hello, Mummy. Hello, Daddy,’ I said, reverting, like Alice in Wonderland, to my nine-year-old self. ‘Hello, Allegra, how lovely to see you at home! I thought you were in Stockholm at the moment.’

  Allegra was quite something to behold in the chintz of the drawing room. She seemed taller than ever, in a long black kaftan-type thing that would have made me look like a funeral parlour sofa but it draped over her willowy frame like couture. It may well have been couture, come to that. Her long dark hair – about the only thing we had in common – rippled down her back, and her face was unmade-up, apart from her lips, which were a bright matte scarlet. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

  ‘I’ve left Lars,’ she announced, red lips moving in a hypnotic fashion amidst all the black and white. ‘I have Come Home.’

  ‘God alone knows why you have to come back to this one,’ interrupted my father. ‘You’ve got a perfectly good home of your own on Ham Common.’

  She shot him a poisonous glare in reply and turned back to me with a pained expression. ‘It’s over. All over, Melissa.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ I said, feeling terrible for her. ‘You poor thing!’ Allegra and Lars were notoriously tempestuous, as befitted artists, but she’d never actually left him before. That was, she explained, the whole point of having two houses in separate countries. It cut down nicely on the togetherness. ‘What’s happened?’

  A dark look crossed Allegra’s pale face. ‘I can’t talk about it.’

  ‘Is it too painful? Give it time,’ I urged. ‘When Gabi split up with Aaron, she couldn’t—’

  ‘No,’ said Allegra. ‘I mean I really can’t talk about it. I have to speak to my solicitor first.’

  ‘A solicitor?’ My hand flew to my mouth. Was it that bad? ‘Oh, Allegra! I’m so sorry!’

  She nodded. ‘I know. He’s on his way over now.’

  Now? I frowned. ‘But surely it can wait until you’ve had a chance to sleep on things a little, you know, calm down?’

  Allegra made a zipping gesture over her lips.

  My mother let out an impatient sigh, but Daddy shushed her with his raised hand. ‘That’s my girl,’ he said, with a ghastly smile of pride. ‘Always make sure you’re on firm legal ground before you get the kicking brogues laced up. Aren’t you glad now that I made the pre-nup in England and not in Stockholm? Hmm?’

  Allegra tossed her head scornfully.

  ‘I always think there’s a touch of art in a really clever contract,’ he concluded.

  ‘But, darling, why can’t you go back to Ham?’ asked my mother. Her hands twitched automatically for her cigarettes, but she was obviously on one of her annual giving-up kicks, because I couldn’t see her familiar gold cigarette case around. Instead, she reached underneath the sofa and pulled out an embroidered bag with a kitten on the front. To my astonishment, she withdrew a shapeless hank of knitting and started clicking away, lips pressed firmly together where her cigarette would normally have gone.

  Daddy tapped the ash from his cigar ostentatiously into the fireplace.

  ‘I wonder what will kill you first, Martin?’ she said, shutting her eyes. ‘Tobacco or me?’

  ‘You, I’d hope, my darling,’ replied my father easily. ‘I’m on the board of at least two tobacco importers – shame to cast a shadow on business.’

  He whipped back round to Allegra. ‘Answer your mother’s question, Allegra: why can’t you go back to Ham? Perfectly good house you’ve got there. What’s happened? Lars changed the locks?’

  ‘Lars has not changed the locks,’ snorted Allegra, flapping her long black sleeves huffily. She and Daddy were practically nose-to-nose on the carpet now. ‘That’s my house!’

  ‘So why can’t you go and boil with rage there, instead of cluttering up my home?’ he demanded. ‘Your mother and I have been through this when you were a teenager. We don’t need to have another round of midnight phone calls and dead cats in the garden.’

  Dead cats? No one told me anything, even then.

  ‘Not that we don’t love to see you at home, darling,’ added my mother, clicking furiously. ‘It’s lovely to see you.’

  My father wheeled round on his heel. ‘Are you off your head, Belinda? Of course we mind her turning up here! Not only am I a busy MP, I am now serving on no fewer than two Olympic sub-committees!’

  ‘Are you?’ I asked, temporarily distracted. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Yes, well, I’ve been invited to join a couple of select committees for the London 2012 business. Taking up a lot of my time, involves a tiresome amount of meeting and greeting and so on . . .’ He sighed as if he didn’t spend half his life trying to find junkets to skive off on.

  ‘Really?’ I said, impressed all the same. My father, involved with the Olympic spirit! ‘Congratulations!’

  He brushed it away, but was unable to hide his preening. ‘Well, lots of opportunities floating around right now. For the right people . . . If you know what I mean.’

  Unfortunately, I did.

  ‘So what sort of committee are you on?’ I asked, intrigued.

  ‘Oh, this and that. I can’t really talk about it,’ he said. ‘Very hush-hush just at the minute, but it’s very high-level. Very high-level.’ This seemed to bring him back to reality, because he swung back to glare at Allegra, who had arranged herself along a sofa like a militant end-of-the-pier crystal-ball reader.

  ‘So you’ll appreciate that I don’t need all these amateur theatricals going on when I have work to do. If I want to see Phantom of the Opera I’ll have a night out in the West End. You’re welcome to stay here tonight, Allegra, but you can’t just land up here and treat this place like a hotel. You have no idea what plans your mother and I have for entertaining this week, for one thing.’

  A look of dread passed across Mummy’s face, and she knitted faster. She spent most of her time organising dinners and cocktail parties for Daddy’s constituents and contacts, and what time was left writing notes of apology and explanation to cover any untoward consequences.

  ‘I can’t go back to Ham because it’s covered in “Police Line Do Not Cross” tape!’ Allegra roared.

  ‘What?’ I gasped, but no one was listening to me.

  Daddy tutted. ‘All the more reason to get back there, I’d have thought.’

  I stared at her, my skin crawling with panic. Mummy looked less concerned by this news than she had done about Daddy’s weekend plans, and as for Daddy and Allegra, they seemed to be positively revelling in the drama.

  ‘There are forensic policemen from three different countries swarming all over my beautiful home, and I am not allowed to go back, all right?’ Allegra spat, with no small relish. ‘You don’t think I’d put a foot over your godforsaken threshold unless I absolutely had to? I’ve left my husband, not had some kind of mental collapse, for Christ’s sake!’

  Mummy made a choking sound and scrabbled around in her knitting bag. I wondered if she had a whole other set of knitting patterns for serious stress, but instead she pulled out a medicine bottle, wrenched off the cap, shook out a handful of pills and swallowed them.

  ‘Valerian,’ she lied unconvincingly, seeing my shocked face.


  ‘Valerian, Vicodin, Valium,’ mused Daddy, puffing on his cigar. ‘What’s a couple of letters between friends when you’re working your way through the narcotic alphabet?’

  ‘Right up to Viagra,’ spiked Allegra.

  ‘Enough!’ roared Daddy. ‘I will be in my study. Working. At the job that twenty-three thousand sentient voters have elected me to do.’ And with that, he hurled his cigar butt in the fireplace and stalked out.

  Allegra, who had momentarily risen to her feet, threw herself back on the sofa, and glowered at the open door. ‘I thought age was meant to mellow bastards like him.’

  ‘It doesn’t,’ said Mummy, who was suddenly much more serene now Daddy was out of the room. Her knitting, however, remained jerky. ‘It just intensifies them. Like those really stinky cheeses.’

  Since no one was going to offer me any, I helped myself to a cup of stewed tea from the tray on the mahogany side table. There were many questions I was burning to ask Allegra, but I fished around for an easy, non-confrontational opener. Which wasn’t as easy as it sounded, believe me.

  ‘So, how long are you planning on staying, Allegra?’ I asked. ‘In England, I mean.’

  ‘God knows.’ She let out a theatrical sigh and kicked off her shoes so she could tuck her bare feet underneath her on the chaise-longue. She had enviably red toenails. ‘Until I’m deported, I guess.’

  ‘Oh, darling, it won’t come to that, will it?’ murmured my mother. She paused, then asked more seriously, ‘I mean, will it?’

  I looked on, aghast.

  ‘That depends what that little shit Lars has been up to,’ Allegra hissed. ‘And believe me, when I find out, it won’t just be Scotland Yard he’ll be scuttling away from.’

  I sipped my tea and thanked God that I, at least, had a morally upstanding and thoroughly responsible boyfriend in Jonathan. The dodgiest thing he was liable to do was send his secretary out to feed his parking meter.