Rich Again

by Anna Maxted

  ‘Coming, Mum!’ He was so obliging. He had his quiet moods, but he was, for someone approaching puberty, a very cool customer! She wouldn’t say he was cold, or detached – she didn’t like those words at all – he was his own person. Yes. But he was also her treat, her pleasure, her only delight.

  ’There we go, darling. I’ve put the ketchup and the English mustard on the side, I know you like to add it yourself. And the pickled cucumber, thinly sliced, yes? And one slice of tomato. And here’s your Coke. Ice, no lemon.’

  She did like to show him how closely she’d studied his likes and dislikes. She needed him to know that she was a Nathan scholar, an expert in Nathan studies. She knew she was maybe a little needy, but she lived for his love. She wanted to engulf him in her love, but she wanted him to love her back.

  He did, he did.

  ‘Thanks, Mum. It smells great.’

  ‘My pleasure, darling.’

  She leaned in for her kiss. They kissed on the lips, a tradition she’d established and jealously maintained. Once or twice, when she’d puckered up, he’d turned his cheek, but she preferred to kiss him on the lips. It was more intimate, more special, it was what she wanted, and even though the child always comes first, the mother has the right to have a few of her needs met!

  She sighed, and as she watched him eat, couldn’t resist stroking his hair. He flinched and she pulled away her hand, hurt, her eyes fast oozing tears.

  He laughed. ‘No, I had a mouthful of mustard!’

  ‘Oh, poor baby!’ she crooned, giddy with relief. She was so silly where Nathan was concerned, so sensitive. But she worried over nothing. Their adoration was mutual. She picked a chip off his plate and fed it to him, then licked her own fingers. It was as if they were one person. She couldn’t believe that she’d lived for so long without him. She cursed her stupidity for not understanding this incredible gift: the love between a mother and child. It was an everlasting honeymoon, and she would gladly die for him.

  LONDON, 1986

  Innocence

  ‘Don’t think I care if you catch anything, but if you give anything to Emily, I’ll kill you for it.’

  That girl had no idea, stroking dogs in the street. They could have any number of diseases, and Emily was only four. ‘Hurry up, stop dawdling, you’re so slow.’ Innocence grabbed Claudia’s wrist, digging her nails in, and dragged her across the road to where the driver waited in the Bentley.

  She was a plain child – now. Misery and pre-pubescence had been harsh – the girl was at least two stone overweight.

  Innocence slid carefully into the front seat, while Day Nanny strapped Emily into her car seat.

  ‘Mummy, I want a new tutu, a Sugar Plum Fairy tutu, because I’ve only got the White Swan tutu, and Sylvia has got the Sugar Plum tutu, and she’s taunting me, because it’s pink and mine is only white, so can I get the Sugar Plum Fairy tutu, please, Mummy? I’ll be good for the rest of my life!’

  ‘Darling, of course you can get the Sugar Plum Fairy tutu. Why didn’t you say when we were inside Harrods?’

  ‘I was eating my chocolate cake, remember.’ ,

  ‘Of course you were, sweetie. Don’t worry. Day Nanny, will you ring when we get home and order it? Order three. The dressmaker has her measurements.’

  ‘Harris, can you drive at high speed, because Mummy bought me a new rabbit, and I want to get home to feed him. His name is Petronella. He’s a boy rabbit but he doesn’t have a willy. Do you have a willy, Claudia?’

  ‘No, Emily. I’m a girl. Girls don’t have willies.’

  ‘I think you got one. I think you got one under your fur.’

  ‘Emily, sweetheart! Oh, Day Nanny, isn’t she precious! I must remember to tell everyone at Harry’s tonight! The things she comes out with! Of course, the fat ones do start puberty earlier. Under your fur! Do remind me, Day Nanny, to tell everyone! Harris, you too!’

  ‘Mummy, can Claudia have a tutu? Then we can be twins.’

  ‘No, darling. Claudia’s too fat for a tutu. A tutu is only for pretty girls, like you. Claudia, for fuck’s sake’ – God, the child was a moron. Innocence turned in her seat and jabbed Claudia hard in the fleshy thigh – ‘your big fat elephant knees are digging into the back of my chair.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Innocence.’

  ‘Shut up. Emily? Emily, darling! Why are you crying?’

  ‘Stop being mean to Claudia! Claudia is my friend!’

  Oh! Innocence felt her cheeks burn. For a second she was lost for words. That devious, spiteful little brat had bewitched Emily. Innocence could barely believe it. She’d turned darling Emily against her own mother. She felt sick. How had it happened? Those bloody nannies – Day Nanny, Night Nanny, Weekend Nanny – were all the same. Slack. They let Claudia entertain Emily, while they chewed gum and called their boyfriends. She knew that Claudia played dolls with Emily, and told her stories – Claudia was not allowed leisure time of her own – but she had no idea that the situation was so critical.

  Innocence clenched her teeth and lit a cigarette. So, Claudia was Emily’s friend. Well. She’d put paid to that.

  SCOTLAND, 1986

  Emily

  Emily loved having a sleepover at Timmy’s house. Timmy lived in a castle with turrets and battlements, like a prince. He wasn’t a prince though, but his mummy and daddy were an earl and a countess. But Emily was allowed to call them Pat and Fred, because they were Daddy’s friends. Before she was born, it had been Daddy’s job to look after their money. He’d put it in vests.

  Timmy had a baby brother and sister, but he was the biggest boy, and Mummy said he was the most important. He was the most fun. He had a stinky dog, who was a greyhound, and carpets with holes in them. And it was very cold in the castle, but there were blankets. Timmy’s garden went on for ever. Mummy said it was a hundred thousand acres, which is the biggest number you can get. There was a wood full of bluebells and Timmy and she rode ponies through it. She got Pippin, who ate carrots off her hand, although you had to make your hand flat or he thought your fingers were carrots. There was a pond, with ducks, and a moat that went all around. Timmy said his daddy sometimes swam in the moat, but Timmy didn’t because it was too cold, and he thought it might have duck wee in it. Emily liked playing on the drawbridge, and the tower that used to be a dungeon. She was the princess, and Timmy was the prince, and he rescued her. And then the prince got in trouble, and the princess rescued him, to make it fair, because it wasn’t so nice, sitting in the dungeon. It was dark and smelled mouldy.

  Emily was scared of Timmy’s daddy – he shouted and wore a skirt. But sometimes Timmy wore a skirt too, when it was a special occasion. It was OK for children, because it was dressing up, but not for grown-ups. She liked Timmy’s mummy. She wore green Wellington boots, even at the dinner table. She let Emily pick strawberries from her vegetable garden. When Emily stayed, if Timmy’s daddy was in a good mood, they ate dinner together in the big hall, which had lots of big old sewings on the wall. They had candles, and a massive fire in the fireplace instead of electricity, so it was like camping. If Timmy’s daddy was in a bad mood, Timmy and Emily ate fish fingers in the nursery by themselves. Timmy’s daddy was almost always in a bad mood when Emily stayed. Emily liked eating in the nursery so she didn’t mind. Afterwards, if they went to the kitchen, Cook would give them each a glass of Coca-Cola with a slice of melon in it. Emily stayed in the guest bedroom, in a four-poster bed. You needed a stool to climb into it because it was so high. A black cat called Bertie slept at the bottom of the bed, and there was a special stone to clean your hands with in the bathroom.

  ‘Let’s get our Coca-Cola now, Timmy. I’ve had enough fish fingers, I’m full up.’

  ‘OK. But it’s not a race.’

  Emily led the way to the kitchen. She liked to be first. First the worst, second the best – but not really! ‘I’m going to have melon in mine, Timmy.’

  ‘Lemon, Emily. Lemon, not melon.’

  ‘Hello, Cook. If you smoke you�
��ll die. We’ve eaten up all our fish fingers and mash. We’d like our Coca-Cola now—AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!’

  ‘Gracious, love, what’s the matter? Oh Lord! The cat’s got a rabbit. Well, that’s nature for you.’

  It was disgusting and sick-making. The poor rabbit’s grey fur was all torn up and ripped and inside it was all red and blood everywhere and it was properly dead, and the pretty black cat that she sometimes kissed on the nose was eating it with its face right inside all the red stuff. Emily felt sick, and then she was sick, and it tasted of fish which made her sick again, all down the front of her velvet dress with the white lace ruffles.

  ‘We’ve a townie here, my Lord, and no mistake!’

  Cook was trying to take off her dress but Emily couldn’t be near anyone because she couldn’t breathe properly because she was crying so much. ‘I want to go home now, Cook, please can I go home.’

  ‘Come along, come along. What a fuss! She’s just a cat doing cat things. You can’t go home now, love, it’s ever so late and it’s such a long journey—’

  ‘I want to go HOME, I want to go HOME, I want to go HOME, I want to go HOME, I want to go HOME, HOME, HOME! HOME! HOME! HOME! HOME! HOME! HOME, I want to go HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOME! I want to go home, I want to go h-h-h-h-h-h-o-o-o-o-m-m-m-me!’

  ‘I understand, Miss Emily. You want to go home. Calm down or you’ll choke on your tongue. I’ll call her ladyship. If she’s agreed of it, Vincent’ll warm up the Land-Rover.’

  ‘Don’t cry, Emily. You can come and play another time. But the cat is always hunting rabbits.’

  ‘Timmy, I need to get home. It’s an emergency. I’ve got my own pet rabbit, called Petronella, and my big sister Claudia is looking after him while I am here. He is a special rabbit with soft peach-coloured fur and ears that go back like aeroplane wings. He isn’t a field rabbit, he is a Harrods rabbit. He sits in my lap and lets me stroke him. He is very tame, and he likes apple, and I love him and I want to make sure that he’s OK. I am very worried about him, he is my favourite thing, even more favourite than my Sugar Plum Fairy tutu. I don’t want to see that broken rabbit that is died again, it makes me feel sick. Cook, I don’t feel very well. I think I’m going to—’

  Cook was a liar, liar, pants on fire. It wasn’t a long journey from Scotland to London at all; it was a very short journey. Pat helped her wash and put on a new dress, and then she waved goodbye to Timmy, Vincent took her suitcase and helped her get into the car, and after five minutes it was morning and she was home!

  ‘Hello, Mummy, I’m back!’

  ‘Hello, my precious. Pat told me you had a fright. I’m so sorry you were upset by the dead rabbit. Shall we go and stroke Petronella to cheer you up? Claudia says she’s been looking after him for you, so I’m sure he’s fine. Shall we take some carrots for him to eat?’

  ‘Yes. Where is Claudia? I missed her.’

  ‘Claudia’s busy now. She said she’ll see you later.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’

  Emily skipped into the kitchen garden where Petronella had his hutch. ‘Petronella!’ She looked but she couldn’t see him. Usually he made a scratchy noise when she called his name.

  ‘Open the door, darling.’

  ‘It smells! Claudia promised she would clean his hutch every day, because Petronella does so many poohs.’

  ‘Perhaps she forgot, darling.’

  ‘But she promised!’

  Emily got on her knees and pulled back the lock, and opened the wooden door. At first, she wasn’t sure what she was seeing, and then a fly flew right in her face and she started to scream, and gag. And she looked harder, and screamed and screamed, and gagged and gagged, until Mummy pulled her away.

  ‘What’s wrong? What’s happened! Emily!’

  Emily looked at her sister’s stupid worried face as she hurried towards them on her big fat legs and felt so angry it was as if the whole world might explode. She shook off Mummy and ran at her sister, screeching, clawing and punching.

  ‘I hate you, I hate you, stupid old Claudia! You promised me you’d look after Petronella and now she’s dead and bloody and worms are crawling on her and there are flies eating her and one flew in my face and nearly in my mouth, I hate you, I hate you, and I’ll always hate you, you killed her because I had a rabbit and you don’t and if you get a rabbit I’ll kill it and I’ll kill you!’

  ‘Emily! Please, stop it! It … it can’t be … oh my God … Innocence … tell her. I don’t understand. Petronella was fine! I cleaned out her hutch last night, you saw me. This – ugh, it stinks – it can’t be … This rabbit has been dead for days. Are you sure that some—’

  ‘Shut it, Claudia. Don’t lie. You didn’t feed Petronella because you were jealous and spiteful and you hoped she’d die, because you don’t want Emily to have anything nice. You’re a nasty piece of work and you should be ashamed of yourself. Apologize to Emily.’

  Emily felt too sad to stand up so she fell on the ground and cried and cried. She was the saddest ever about Petronella, even more sad than about the field rabbit. But she was the most saddest about her sister Claudia, because she thought Claudia was her friend when Claudia was only pretending. Claudia had hurt her feelings – the worst thing.

  ‘I’m sorry, Emily,’ said stupid old Claudia.

  ‘Sorry doesn’t count!’ screamed Emily. ‘Shut up, you idiot! Make her go away, Mummy, I hate her and I hate her!’

  ‘Please leave us, Claudia,’ said Mummy, and Emily saw that she didn’t have a cross face any more. ‘Emily is no longer your friend.’

  THE LLOYD’S BUILDING, LONDON, 1989

  Jack

  Jack noted the eighteenth-century nautical paintings that adorned the walls of the grand boardroom, and smiled grimly. Time was when he would have replaced them with an Andy Warhol fighter jet. He’d come a long way. Then, he was a wannabe. Now, he was one of them, and he recognized the beauty and value of these sombre paintings. They still weren’t his thing, but he understood.

  He was sentimental about this room because he’d had his interview here. Interview! There had been a jovial, school-boyish atmosphere, and Sir Peter, the chairman, had said, ‘Give me a blank cheque with your signature. That’s the risk you are undertaking as a Name at Lloyd’s.’

  It had shaken him, to hear it put like that, but he’d popped a few diazepam in the grand marble hall and the anxiety churning up his stomach had dissolved along with those little yellow pills. Of course there were risks – this was insurance, after all – but he would be on the right side, because when did insurance ever pay out when you really needed it? That’s what the small print was for.

  Fact was, he felt safe with business. It was so much easier to do business than to do … family. He didn’t enjoy family life and that was the cold truth of it. Claudia, once the light of his life, had turned into a dumpy, sullen child. He had nothing to say to her. If ever they were in the same room, he struggled to find a topic of conversation that would interest them both, and ended up silent.

  It was plain that she and Innocence disliked each other, which annoyed him. It was so inconvenient. The rare mealtimes they suffered as a ‘family’ were torture. If Claudia was present, Innocence would have a face like an Easter Island stone statue. A few months ago, her face rigid with fear, looking about for Innocence as she spoke, Claudia had asked Jack to let her attend a local day school so that she could visit Ruth more often. He’d told her, ‘We’ll see.’

  But the atmosphere was so much lighter when she was out of the house. So when Innocence suggested packing Claudia off to a new boarding school, Jack had agreed. He’d tried to write letters to her, after she’d talked about another girl whose pigeon-hole had an envelope every morning from either Mummy or Daddy – a rota, apparently. Other parents: how they loved to make everyone else feel like shit with their smug little arrangements. Eventually he’d sent her a postcard of a London bus with a punk on it: ‘Hope you are well and behaving! Love Dad’. Ms Green had chosen the postcard.

&nbs
p; Claudia had come home in the spring. They were all off to New York, a working holiday, as the Apple Core Hotel was being tarted up and he wanted to finesse some details. He had been shocked to see her. In two months she’d gone from blimp to shrimp. She was bone thin – she had the ragged ill look of a scarecrow. He’d never liked thin. Even in the Twiggy days he’d loathed the fact that tits were out of fashion. He’d always felt that women looked best when they weren’t half starved.

  He, Innocence, Claudia and Emily had eaten breakfast along with two or three assorted nannies in the hotel restaurant. What a fiasco. The room was gorgeous: sleek, white, modern, but not too severe. He’d paid top whack for an interior designer who understood mood lighting, and there were crammed bookshelves to add a bit of colour and large canvases by a young English artist called Tom Hammick, whose Norfolk – Sea and Sky drew you in and calmed you, as surely as if you were being rocked to sleep on the waves. Jack liked to think that Hammick created the twentieth-century equivalent of those ancient nautical scenes, minus the ships; just the dark blue of the sea and the light fresh sky – you felt free, looking at those paintings.

  The breakfast menu was sumptuous. The Apple Core served a proper fried English breakfast, beautifully done. He couldn’t believe the current disrespect for food. Ms Green had taken her son (he hadn’t known she had a son) to a café in Marylebone for lunch and his cheese on toast had been microwaved! But here the orange juice was freshly squeezed, not from a carton. The croissants were warm and baked that morning, so the butter melted as it spread, and the coffee was superior-quality knock-your-head-off stuff. The pièce de résistance: it served PG Tips, a proper cup of tea in the USA. Fuck that Liptons shit!