Losing You (2 page)

‘Both houses,’ Emma reminded her, and immediately wished she hadn’t, since it was Lauren’s precious father and his crooked – yes,
crooked
– accounting and dubious investments and demanding new wife who’d virtually turned them out on the streets.

Looking dismal, Lauren said, ‘It’s a real pity Dad couldn’t let you hang on to the cottage. He really wanted to, well you know that, but with all the debts that had mounted up ...’

‘We don’t need to go over it all again,’ Emma interrupted, trying not to sound clipped or bitter and failing on both counts. Her feelings towards Will and Jemima Scott-Robbins (yes, he really had gone double-barrelled since marrying the wretched woman, pretentious, ludicrous, sad bastard that he was) were for her to deal with and not to be laid on Lauren. Not that Emma wasted any time harbouring the bitterness that most said she was totally entitled to after her ex had virtually destroyed the small, and until he got his hands on it, successful catering business she had started
alone
some fifteen years before. She’d never felt right about his insistence that he should resign from his job as an insurance assessor to help expand her company, and she could only wish now that she’d cleaved to her instincts.
The debts they’d managed to accrue until he’d abandoned ship – and marriage – to take up with Jemmy, as he called his mistress-now-wife, had turned out to be so staggering that, with a recession upon her and banks fleeing from the rescue, there had been nothing Emma could do to save her dear little empire from crashing. Nor had she been able to hold on to their smart house in Chiswick, unless she’d wanted to declare bankruptcy and turn her back on the debts she owed people she’d known, and who’d trusted her, for years. And the tiny, two-bed cottage his father had left to
both of them
just after they were married, had also been liquidised in order for them to reach a settlement that would help Will to provide a decent home for his new, young family. (The fact that
Jemmy
was absolutely rolling in it hadn’t seem to count for anything at all.)

In the end Emma had come out of the ordeal with the grand sum of two hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds, which might sound massive, but almost all of it had gone towards the small, three-bed estate house she and Lauren had recently moved into; the rest – around fifteen thousand – she was counting on to get her through until she was earning again.

The really good part of it all was that she was mortgage-free – at least for now, and if she found a job soon there would be no reason for that to change.

The worst part was that she’d worked so hard to build her business, only to end up back where she’d started.

Nevertheless, she wasn’t going to age and enrage herself by focusing on the injustices she had suffered at Will Scott’s grabbing little hands; indeed, she did her level best never to think about the TBs (Thieving Bastards as her brother Harry liked to call them) at all. What was the point when they were no longer a part of her life? Nor, mercifully, were they enjoying their marital bliss in either of the homes Emma had created and loved with a passion. Instead, they were luxuriously shacked up in Jemmy-baby’s towering town house in Islington along with Ms Scott-Robbins’s twelve-year-old twins from a previous marriage and two- and three-year-old Chloe and Dirk (
Dirk
!) the adorable (according to Lauren) fruits of Jemima’s union with Will.
So with the TBs fully ensconced in London where Jemima practised her sharkery – another of Harry’s little witticisms, Jemima being founder and head of some whizzo IT firm – and Emma now settled in only just affordable North Somerset, there was next to no chance of running into them.

Thank God.

In fact, the only contact Emma ever had with Will these days was the occasional text concerning Lauren, usually to ask what she might want for her birthday or Christmas, when he always went preposterously over the top with his gifts. He didn’t have to buy his daughter’s love, or try to absolve his guilt with five-hundred-pound cheques, or a brand-new car as he had for her eighteenth, because Lauren adored him anyway. Nor did he have to keep making pathetic excuses (another source of his irritating texts) about why it wouldn’t be convenient for him and Jemima to have Lauren living with them in London during the week while she finished her last year of school. Lauren was more than happy to stay with Donna and her family, who’d readily thrown open the double front doors of their massive house in Hammersmith, or with Emma’s mother, Phyllis, with whom Lauren had a far closer relationship than Emma had managed in her entire life. There was also Emma’s wonderfully eccentric and still outrageously flirtatious Granny Berry – her father’s mother – who lived some of the time in an airy riverside apartment in Chelsea, and the rest with Alfonso, a dashingly romantic Italian poet, in his rambling Tuscan retreat just outside Siena.

‘It’s a pity you didn’t know your mother before your darling father was so tragically taken from us,’ Berry often sighed tipsily to Emma. ‘She was a real beauty in her day, you know, and actually not a bad singer in spite of what the critics used to say. They were really quite cruel about her at times, claiming that it was only because of your daddy that she was in the band. That was probably true, I suppose, but none of the other members had a problem with it, and it was always Daddy who did the real vocals, she was only ever part of the backup.’ At this point Berry would usually smile mistily and take another sip of Chianti, before going on to say, ‘Everyone loved him. I don’t mean
just his fans, I mean his friends and the people he met on tour, or in the recording studios. You should have seen the turnout for his funeral. Well, you and Harry were there of course, but you don’t remember it, do you?’

Emma always felt terrible that she didn’t, but since she’d only been three at the time it was hardly surprising. In fact, she had very few memories of her father, and since her mother would never talk about him, she had to rely on Harry’s hazy recollections, and the wonderful stories Berry often told about him. And of course there were the two Top Ten hits he’d had with his band, back in the sixties, the royalties from which still provided her mother with a modest income today.

‘Your daddy absolutely adored Phyllis,’ Berry would insist. ‘It was after he died that she changed. Such a terrible tragedy. It broke all our hearts, and I don’t think she’s ever got over it. It’s hard to know though, isn’t it, when she won’t ever discuss it.’

A part of Emma actually detested her mother for the way she’d so stubbornly and selfishly refused to talk about her father; it made the dozens of silver-framed photographs around her mother’s house of a man clearly besotted with his children seem more of a punishment than a kind and loving way of remembering him. She wouldn’t even allow Emma to play his records, which was unbelievably mean, Emma always thought, when she never used to tell Harry off if he put them on. Since Harry had been almost eight when the terrible accident had occurred, he had his own memories of their father, which he readily shared with Emma when she was small, though never when their mother was around. What he didn’t remember very clearly, however, was their father going out into the garden after an almighty storm to start tidying up, according to Berry. He hadn’t realised until it was too late that the broken cables he’d grabbed hold of were live power lines brought down by the wind. Apparently her mother had seen it happen, the frenzied jolting of his body as thousands of volts pumped their lethal energy through him, burning him to death from the inside out.

It was when she considered how horrendous that day
must have been for her mother, aged only twenty-eight at the time, that Emma found herself able to feel some sympathy and even tenderness towards her. Not that she ever showed it, she’d learned long ago that her mother wouldn’t welcome it if she did – in fact there had even been occasions when her mother had managed to make her feel as though she was in some way to blame for what had happened.

‘Ah no,’ Berry had assured her, ‘it’s not just you. In her way she blames everyone, especially God, which makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what’s going on in her prayers when she rocks up to His place on a Sunday.’

Emma was sure she’d never made Harry feel to blame, in fact she knew that her mother loved Harry much more than she’d ever loved her, mainly because she’d never tried to hide it. Emma would go as far as to say that her mother seemed to like everyone much more than she liked her own daughter, including Will when he’d come into the family. She’d even stayed in touch with Will during and after the divorce, and had gone with Lauren several times to visit the new family in Islington.

How disloyal could a mother get? She’d even seemed to take some pleasure in remarking to Emma, after one of her visits, how well Will seemed to be doing for himself now, as if up to then she, Emma, had been responsible for holding the lying, swindling, double-crossing swine back. Life was looking blindingly rosy for Will since he’d made a meteoric rise through the ranks of Jemima’s company to the position of vice president, whatever that overblown catch-all of a title was supposed to mean. What it meant to Emma was a) he could afford to provide very generously for Lauren, which indeed he did; and b) the sly-witted, money-grubbing Jemima was stupid enough to be setting herself up for the exact same fall that had left her, Emma, face down in the muck after she’d promoted her husband beyond his capabilities.

What a fool she had been! And what a salutary, and expensive, lesson in love and how never to trust yourself when in it!

‘So what are you doing on the computer?’ Lauren wanted
to know, turning the laptop round so she could see the screen. She read aloud, ‘“The Rainbow Centre for Children affected by cancer, life-threatening illness and bereavement.”’ Her eyes were both questioning and knowing as she turned them to her mother.

‘It’s a local charity,’ Emma explained as she set two mugs of coffee on the table and squeezed back into her chair. She was actually becoming quite fond of this new build they’d recently moved into, with its mock Georgian windows and shiny front door, but she had to admit that its bijou interior, after the space they’d had in Chiswick, was taking some getting used to. The kitchen table, not much bigger than a dartboard, was set up against the wall beneath a row of fake-ash cupboards, and had just about enough space in front and to one side of it to accommodate two chairs. The back door, which was at the end of a small hall outside the kitchen, opened out on to a brave little patio (brave for claiming such a lofty status when it consisted of no more than a three-by-three layout of paving stones) and a boxed-in cabinet for the bins was around the corner, next to the side gate. Beyond the patio was a largish dirt patch that constituted the back garden, which Emma intended to turn into a lawn and vegetable patch when the weather improved. At the front of the house were two gravelled areas, four-by-six, fenced in by some fancy black wrought-iron work, and home to a pair of ornate stone pots (currently empty). A jaunty crazy-paved path connected the pavement outside to the front door – no gate yet, but it was due to be fitted by the end of the week.

From the kitchen window, which was above the gleaming new stainless steel sink with single drainer, they could, if so inclined, chart the progress of cars coming and going from their loosely laid-out cul de sac that looped around a central green with Victorian-style lamp posts and a couple of carved wooden benches; or wave hello to a friendly neighbour who might be ambling past with a pushchair, or a dog, or an ageing relative with a Zimmer. (Not much activity going on out there today given the weather, but Emma imagined that would change come spring.)

Since the cottage Will’s father had left them was less than a mile away this was an area Emma and Lauren already knew quite well, having spent most summers and school holidays over the past eighteen years enjoying their picture-book country abode and the village nearby. This shining new estate had only been completed in the last year, making many of their neighbours either first-time buyers, or older couples downsizing because their children had left home – or because the recession had done for their larger incomes or businesses. Already Emma had found herself commiserating with a hairdresser who’d been forced to close down the salon he’d opened with a five-hundred-pound loan from his dad almost twenty years ago; a PR executive who’d lost so many clients he’d had to wind up the company that he too had built from scratch; and even a lawyer whose firm had laid off more than half its staff. (She wasn’t sure why, but she’d never imagined lawyers being subjected to the devastatingly brutal blow of redundancy.) Finding new positions wasn’t proving anywhere near as easy for any of them as this new coalition government had promised when it had started making all the cuts, and as the unemployment lines lengthened it was becoming clear that hope was turning into as rare a commodity as cash.

‘So do they have any jobs going at this charity?’ Lauren wondered as she sipped her coffee.

‘None that pay,’ Emma replied, turning the computer back to carry on reading the website, ‘but once I’ve found a job I think I’d like to be involved in some capacity anyway.’

Taking out her mobile as it bleeped with a text, Lauren appeared faintly flustered as she checked to see who it was from.

Amused, Emma said nothing, while guessing it was a new boyfriend, or at least someone she had her eye on.

Seeming to sink with disappointment, Lauren gave a groan of frustration. ‘It’s Parker Jenkins again. Mum, what am I going to do? How do I get him to accept that it’s over between us? It’s been nearly three months now and he’s still asking if we can get together to talk things through,
but there’s nothing to talk about. I just don’t want to go out with him any more.’

Remembering a time, barely eight months ago, when all Lauren had been able to think about was how to get Parker Jenkins to notice her, Emma said, ‘Why don’t you tell him you’ve met someone else? That should get the message across.’

Two vivid spots of colour flew to Lauren’s cheeks. ‘Because I haven’t,’ she protested. ‘What makes you say that?’