Hidden Cottage (3 page)
Just as there was between Eliza and Greg. Funny that their lives should have taken the same turning at exactly the same time. She couldn’t speak for her brother, but for her own part – and she wasn’t proud of this – she had wanted to bring Greg with her this evening to prove to their father that despite not being as pretty as Daisy, she could still attract someone as amazing as Greg.
Of course, given their father’s track record, it was no surprise that she and Jensen should be so secretive about their relationships. The only surprise for Eliza was that her brother hadn’t already confided in Mum. On several occasions in the last month Eliza had come close to telling Mum about Greg, but each time she’d held back, irrationally anxious that by uttering the words out loud she would be tempting fate and she would lose Greg. Maybe Jensen had had the same irrational fear. Until now.
At Milton Keynes, her head down in the scrum of commuters, she hurried along the platform wheeling her overnight case behind her, her heavy workbag slung over her shoulder and banging against her hip. Mum had offered to come and meet her, but she had said she’d be fine with a taxi.
Outside she found one, gave the driver the address for Medlar House and took a deep breath as she felt the familiar knot of apprehension in her stomach tighten. Twenty-six years old and she still felt like she was thirteen and returning home after a term away at school.
She had been the only one of the family to go to boarding school; it had been entirely her choice. When she was twelve years old, without her parents’ knowledge she had sent off for a selection of brochures and when she had read them all and made her choice she had presented the school’s prospectus to Mum and Dad and asked if it would be possible for her to go. Mum had been shocked and upset, but Dad, once he’d checked out the fees, had been all for it. ‘Let’s face it,’ he’d said to Mum, ‘she’s running rings round those ruddy useless teachers of hers. Has been for some time. Do you remember that new teacher who accused her of cheating in a maths test because she did it in double-quick time and got every answer correct? Smaller class sizes, more attention – that’s exactly what our very own little Einstein needs.’
Einstein had been Dad’s nickname for her. It had started when she was three and a half years old after Mum had found her in bed one morning reading Roald Dahl’s
James and the Giant Peach
to herself. And not just reading from memory, mimicking her mother’s telling of the story, but actually reading the words. By the time she had started school, she already knew her times tables, could name all the planets and play chess with Jensen and beat him. Her favourite book was an encyclopaedia that was so big and heavy she could hardly carry it.
It was Mum who took Eliza to visit the school, to see whether it was as good as the prospectus portrayed, and it was Mum who drove her there two months later for her to begin her first term. ‘If it’s not what you thought it would be,’ Mum had said, trying to hide the tears that were filling her eyes, ‘you can come straight back home.’
But they both knew that wasn’t going to happen. Even at that young age, Eliza was resolutely independent. She had no concept of relying upon anyone else for help. Any problems she encountered, she resolved them herself. She put this down to being the middle child of the family, the in-between child who had to fend for herself.
School life away from home was exactly as she’d imagined it would be. She loved the structure, the order and the discipline. Never having really felt the need of friends before – other than friendship with Jensen – she discovered the joy of a best friend, a girl who was also new to the school. With her sleek black hair that fell to her waist and her unfeasibly slight body that didn’t look strong enough to withstand the worst of the British weather, let alone survive the rigours of cross-country running, netball or lacrosse, Serene Tay, who barely spoke a word of English, was the prettiest girl Eliza had ever laid eyes on. They were in the same class and shared the same dormitory with two other girls, and within no time they were firm friends, and had been ever since.
After graduating from Cambridge, Serene, whose razor-sharp intellect made Eliza look like a half-wit, returned to Singapore to help run the family printing business. The expectation was that when her father retired as chairman, she would step into his considerable shoes.
Fathers, thought Eliza as she stared out of the taxi window at the familiar passing scenery, they want and expect so much of us. Her father’s words to her when she’d gone away to school had been: ‘Make me proud of you.’ And hadn’t she always tried to do exactly that? Because at the end of the day, it was the only way she could really gain his attention.
Jensen had been furious with her when Eliza had told him that she was going to boarding school. He didn’t speak to her for three days and when finally he did, he came into her bedroom and threw himself on her bed. ‘I suppose now it’ll be down to me to babysit the Special One,’ he’d said sullenly. That had been his nickname for Daisy.
The morning Eliza was due to leave, when Dad was away on a business trip and Jensen was helping to load her things into the boot of Mum’s car, with Daisy getting in the way as usual, he’d hugged her fiercely, then abruptly, without saying anything, let go of her and walked back inside the house. When it was time to leave, she had looked up at his bedroom window and spotted him there. She had waved goodbye to him, but he hadn’t waved back. Even now that memory saddened her, knowing that she’d hurt him so much. She had written to him every week while she was at school and she still had the few letters he’d written to her.
The taxi driver slowed the car and then stopped. ‘This it, then?’
She looked up at Medlar House. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This is it.’
While her father filled the car with petrol, Daisy went inside the shop for a copy of this week’s
Grazia
. Minutes later she was back out on the forecourt and Dad was replacing the petrol cap on the car. ‘Found what you wanted?’ he asked as he passed her to go and pay.
‘Got the last copy,’ she said, waving the magazine at him.
She’d just got herself settled in the car when her mobile rang. It was Scott. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘what’s up?’
‘Have you missed anything yet?’
‘You mean, other than you?’
He laughed. ‘No, not me. You’ve left your brother’s present on the kitchen table.’
‘Oh hell! I didn’t leave my head there as well, did I?’
‘Give it time and you will one day. How’s it going?’
‘OK. We’ve just stopped for petrol. Should be home in about ten minutes.’
‘Have you told him?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I thought the idea was to tell him in the car when it was just the two of you.’
‘It was. Now I’ve decided to wait until the evening’s under way. Then when the bickering starts, I’ll slip it in while no one’s looking.’
‘Are you sure that’s such a smart move?’
‘Probably not, but—’ She saw her father approaching the car. ‘He’s coming back,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I’ll speak to you later.’
‘Just remember, Daisy, you’re all grown up.’
‘Yeah, try telling my father that. Bye.’
She stuffed her mobile back into her bag and guiltily opened her magazine. No reason to feel guilty, she told herself as her father got in beside her. He leant over, peered at the open pages on her lap and pointed at a photograph of Janice Dickenson in a dress that couldn’t have suited her less. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said, ‘she’s got a tan on her like an Oompa Loompa! What is she, our latest deterrent against global warfare? Because I’ll tell you for nothing, she’s scaring the hell out of me. One look at her and I’d run in the opposite direction.’
‘She’s an American model from a squillion years ago.’
‘Oh, well, that explains everything.’
He switched on the engine and pulled out of the forecourt onto the road. They’d been driving for a few minutes when he said, ‘You OK? You seem a bit quiet.’
‘Busy week, that’s all.’
‘Been overdoing it?’
She shrugged and turned the page of her magazine.
‘So how’s the job going?’
Oh God, she thought. Where to start? How to answer his question without blurting the whole thing out? How to avoid telling him that the job he’d wangled for her through a friend of a friend was doing her head in? That every morning she woke up, she felt like calling in sick and hiding under the duvet for the rest of the day. And yes, she knew all too well that, as Dad would be quick to remind her, in these difficult times, she was lucky to have a job.
Graduating last year while the recession was still in full swing meant she hadn’t had a hope of landing her dream job, but then Dad had stepped in and pulled some strings and before she knew it she was a bored-out-of-her-mind graduate trainee designer for a manufacturer based in Luton that supplied hotels with the dullest furniture imaginable.
When she’d been studying for her degree in furniture design her work placement had been with a small, award-winning design team in London that had produced gorgeously one-off funky and cutting-edge pieces of furniture. All her hopes had been pinned on working there when she graduated. But the recession put paid to that. Every job she applied for, she got the same response – if she was lucky to hear back at all – that they were not taking on anyone new currently. It was then, when she had so badly wanted to prove to her father that she could stand on her own two feet, that there was no need for him to keep holding her hand, that he waded in with a wave of his magic wand and found her a job. It was what he did, stepped in and put things right for her.
Or so he believed. The truth was, he didn’t make anything right for her. Repeatedly he said all he wanted to do was protect her and keep her safe, just as any parent did. But what he didn’t understand was that his protective care totally suffocated her.
It hadn’t always been that way, not when she was a small child, when she had idolized him, had thought there wasn’t anything he couldn’t or wouldn’t do for her. In those days she had revelled in knowing that she was his favourite child, that she could do no wrong. She had happily gone along with it because who doesn’t want to be more loved than anyone else?
She would be the first to admit now that she must have been a difficult child, a bloody nightmare more like it. But once she was old enough to understand what was really going on, she realized that she could only ever disappoint her father by ultimately wanting to wriggle out from his protective hold, to have the same freedom and control over her life that her brother and sister had.
She had tried to take control some years ago and had got herself into a hell of a mess. She hated to think of that time and what she’d put Mum through. As for Dad, he’d been at a complete loss how to treat her.
This time, though, it would be different. This time she was older and wiser and stronger. And she had Scott. Wonderful Scott.
‘In your own time, Daisy.’
She turned to look at her father and realized that he was waiting for her to say something. ‘What?’ she said.
He smiled. ‘I asked how the job was going.’
‘Oh, that. Yeah. It’s fine.’
How the lie tripped off her tongue.
Since Jensen had yet to make an appearance, Jeff did what he always did when he arrived home from Brussels: he took an ice-cold bottle of beer from the fridge and went upstairs for a shower.
Now dressed, he got himself comfortable on the bed, placed the bottle of Budweiser to his lips and filled his mouth with the welcome cool beer. He swallowed it appreciatively, enjoying its light freshness. In Brussels they were always banging on about the beer there, the enormous choice, the superior quality, the complex this, the aromatic that, but for him there was nothing like the straightforward, crisp, dry taste of a Bud. He drank some more, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and sighed the sigh of a tired but relatively contented man.
With the low evening sun shining through the window on him, he reminded himself of the promise he’d made Mia, that he’d be on his best behaviour tonight for Jensen’s birthday. As if he wasn’t always on his best behaviour! Any chance she’d asked Jensen to do likewise? He doubted it.
He put the beer to his mouth again and drank some more and wondered as he so often did why he and Jensen couldn’t get on better. Life would be so much easier if they did. One of the things that really irked him was Jensen’s inclination to drift through life without a clear idea of where he was going. A website designer – was that really a job? Wasn’t that just another name for lolling around at home watching daytime telly?
Jeff, on the other hand, had known from an early age where he was going in life and that you had to take life by the scruff of the neck and wring out of it exactly what you wanted. And that took guts. You see an opportunity, you take it; that was his motto. You didn’t dick around on the sidelines waiting for an opportunity; you got stuck in and made it happen. Which was why he had taken the position in Brussels. He was looking at another three years in the job and then he’d call it a day and cash in on the package he’d negotiated for himself. And who knew what he’d do then? Retirement was an option. But then so was consultancy work. Or sitting on the board of a company or two.
For now, though, he was enjoying the continuing challenges in his role of divisional MD of the Rieke Hirzel Group. Since his appointment last year, his sector of the business was bucking the trend and exceeding all expectations. The first thing he’d done was to increase the budget on technical research and instil a far more aggressive approach when it came to targeting new customers; for obvious reasons it was the latter that was showing immediate results. The research investment was the slow-burner part of his strategy. But let no one be under any misapprehension: there’d be no resting on any laurels on his watch.
Whenever he was foolish enough to question Jensen’s lack of ambition, Mia always rushed to his defence, claiming that his work as a website designer was going well. She would also point out that Jensen’s early years had not been the same as those of Eliza and Daisy and therefore Jeff had to accept there would be differences and inevitable consequences.