Alison Fraser - The Mother And The Millionaire

The City was the heart of London’s money markets from where her stepfather did his wheeling and dealing.

‘But surely you wouldn’t sell to Jack Doyle even if he was interested?’ Esme appealed.

‘Why not?’

‘Well…all the things you said about him once.’

To her mother, Jack had been a jumped-up working-class boy who had dared to imagine himself suitable for one of her daughters just because he’d managed a first from Oxford.

‘Things,’ her mother muttered vaguely. ‘Oh, you mean the time he fancied his chances with Arabella? Yes, that was quite absurd. Still, in hindsight, who knows? She might have been better off with him than that character she did marry.’

Esme was speechless for a moment. How the world had changed! Her mother had been absolutely delighted when Arabella had married Franklin Homer, supposed heir to an American banking fortune. Only the fortune seemed to have dissolved along with the marriage.

‘Anyway,’ her mother resumed, ‘if Jack Doyle wants to buy Highfield, then good luck to him.’

Esme’s heart sank. ‘You can’t mean that, Mother.’

‘Whyever not?’ An impatient edge crept into her mother’s voice. ‘I really am surprised at you, Esme. I would have thought you’d be delighted at the whole idea. You’re the one who has always championed the underdog, maintained there is no fundamental difference between the working class and us, apart from money.’

Esme didn’t know about ‘championing’ the underdog. She was usually too busy looking out for herself and Harry. But she had always deplored her mother’s blatant snobbery.

‘Anyway, I need the money,’ her mother continued. ‘You know that, darling. I’ve explained.’

Esme could have said, No, you don’t. You have a husband as rich as sin. But her mother saw Highfield as her insurance policy in case anything happened to her second marriage.

‘You’re bound to sell it eventually,’ Esme pointed out. ‘You don’t have to sell it to Jack Doyle.’

‘No, but it would be simply perverse to turn down an offer from him,’ Rosalind argued back. ‘And I don’t really see the problem. It’s not as if you and Jack were ever involved.’

A silence followed. Esme could have broken it with the knowledge she’d always withheld from her mother, but she doubted it would change anything.

She changed tack instead. ‘Well, at least make sure the estate agent clarifies what’s included in the sale.’

‘What do you mean, darling?’

Was it her imagination or did her mother sound cagey?

‘He thinks the cottage is up for grabs. I told him it wasn’t but he didn’t believe me. Perhaps Connell, Richards & Baines could draw his attention to the fact?’

‘Yes, well…’ There was a pause while her mother decided on her phrasing.

‘Mother?’ Esme prompted with growing suspicion. ‘You haven’t changed your mind? You said I could have a life interest in the cottage.’

‘I know, darling, and I meant it,’ her mother claimed, ‘but James Connell says it just isn’t feasible, parcelling up the estate that way. But don’t worry, you should be all right. You’re a sitting tenant.’

Esme did not believe this. ‘And if we’re not all right, what do Harry and I do then?’

‘Well, obviously you’d have to find somewhere else,’ Rosalind sighed in reply, ‘but would that be so awful? I mean, the cottage is very basic. Little better than staff quarters.’

‘We like it,’ Esme claimed, temper finally rising, ‘and, compared to bed and breakfast accommodation for the homeless, it’s palatial!’

‘Don’t be absurd, darling!’ Rosalind snapped back. ‘You have other alternatives.’

‘Like?’ Esme was confident that her mother wasn’t about to invite Harry and her to live in her Kensington four-storey in London.

‘I don’t know,’ Rosalind replied just as crossly. ‘I’m sure there are lots of places you could go, if you would stop playing the martyr… I’ve heard Charles Bell Fox would have you at the drop of a hat, and you could do a lot worse.’

Esme agreed. She could. But it was hardly any business of her mother’s.

‘Charles and I are just friends,’ Esme could claim in perfect conscience.

‘Only because you won’t let the poor boy be anything else,’ her mother countered, ‘and goodness knows why. He’s rich, he’s eligible, he’s even quite good-looking. What are you waiting for?’

‘Nothing,’ Esme replied tartly. ‘I’ll call him up now, shall I? Ask if he’d like us to shack up together?’

Her mother gave a weary sigh. ‘Is that meant to be funny?’

‘Not especially.’

‘Because it isn’t—and you know perfectly well I was talking about marriage, not cohabitation. I think you’ve already done enough of that, don’t you?’

‘What?’ Esme was genuinely puzzled for a moment. She’d never lived with anyone other than her family. ‘Oh, right, my fall from grace? I don’t think casual sex counts as cohabitation, Mother.’

A loud tut came down the phone. At times her mother liked to pretend she was a prude.

‘Really, Esme,’ her mother reproved, ‘it’s nothing to be proud of—having a baby with someone you barely knew. What have you said to Charles about Harry?’

‘Nothing.’ Charles had scrupulously avoided the subject.

‘Well, I trust when you do,’ Rosalind continued, ‘you’ll dress it up a bit. Falling into bed with some Italian boy you met in a café sounds very loose.’

Esme controlled an errant desire to laugh. Such a lame story, it was a source of perennial wonder that her mother still believed it.

‘OK, Mother, I’ll bear it in mind,’ Esme replied, tongue-in-cheek, ‘when and if Charles ever asks me to marry him.’

‘Good.’ Her mother seemed oblivious of any irony. ‘Because he really is your best bet. You certainly can’t expect me to keep bailing you out… Now I really must go. I’m having people for dinner.’

Boiled or fried? Esme was tempted to ask, but was already holding a dead line. She replaced the receiver and pushed a worried hand through her hair before hearing a sound behind her.

She turned to find Harry standing on the open staircase from his bedroom. He looked vaguely troubled. How much had he overheard?

He stared at her briefly before saying, ‘I’m hungry. What’s for tea?’

A normal, ordinary-boy question. Esme allowed it to dispel her fears and led the way through to the kitchen as she declared, ‘We have a choice: pizza, pizza or pizza.’

Harry rolled his eyes at this familiar joke but joined in by saying, ‘OK, pizza. The second one.’

‘That’s pizza with pepperoni and olives,’ she announced.

It elicited a boyish, ‘Yuk. I’ve changed my mind. I’ll have pizza, the first one.’

‘Anchovies.’

‘Double yuk.’

‘Ham and mushroom?’

‘Yeah, suppose that’ll do.’

‘But no picking off the mushroom,’ she warned as she got the ready-made meal out of the freezer, ‘and you’ll have it with orange juice so at least something healthy passes your lips today.’

He pulled a face. ‘I had chips for lunch. That’s a vegetable.’

‘Potatoes are a vegetable,’ she corrected. ‘Fry them and we’re talking a whole new ballgame.’

‘Like the difference between football and pinball,’ he suggested wryly.

‘Quite,’ she agreed, wrestling with an oven shelf that refused to pull out.

The cooker was ancient. It had been here in the time of the Doyles and must have been antiquated then. A poor tool for a woman like Mary Doyle, who had been a wonderful cook.

A lovely person, too. Kind and thoughtful and endlessly patient. That was how Esme remembered her, anyway.

She’d died that same year, before Harry had been conceived, so she’d never seen her little grandson.

It was sad, really. Though her own mother wouldn’t even let Harry call her grandmother, she imagined Mary Doyle would have been different.

Would she have told her? Esme suspected there would have been no need. She would have seen. The smile was Jack’s, as was the temperament. Maybe it was elemental, a recognition of genes shared.

Thank God it hadn’t been put to the test that afternoon. But what if Jack actually bought Highfield? Wouldn’t a meeting of man and boy be inevitable?

She shook her head. Yes, it would, but it wasn’t going to happen. It couldn’t.

Esme had no logical reason for this certainty, just blind faith and the fact she couldn’t allow herself to believe otherwise.

ESME dismissed the Doyles from her thoughts and concentrated on making tea, which they ate at the kitchen table.

Later, with Harry in bed and the cottage gravely silent, she tried to focus on her latest project. She’d been commissioned to design a master bedroom for a mock-Tudor house owned by a City dealer friend of her stepfather and his advertising-executive wife, but it was proving difficult as the two had quite conflicting ideas on what they wanted. Esme, who had fallen into interior design more by chance than planning, had come to accept the work required enormous tact and patience as well as flair and a good eye.

She pored over colour charts now, hoping for inspiration, but her mind kept wandering. Back to that summer almost ten years ago.

She’d come home for the holidays to find Jack there. He’d returned from Ireland to wait for the results of his finals and dispose of his mother’s things. Her mother had allowed him to remain in the cottage, paying him subsistence money for gardening duties and general repairs.

It showed how little her mother had really known Jack. To her, he’d been the cook’s son, and therefore suited to manual work. Esme, of course, had known him a lot better. He’d tutored her, ridden with her and babysat on more than one occasion. Undoubtedly strong and fit, he, nevertheless, had not been handyman material. Give him the intricacies of a computer to fathom, and he’d be your man. Give him a stable door off its hinges and he’d be resolutely uninterested.

He’d put in the hours—mowing the lawns on the ride-on tractor, feeding the two horses left in the stables, washing down cars and the yard—but no more.

Esme had watched from a distance, wishing she could keep him company as she had so many times before. But something had changed. Him or her or the situation.

It wasn’t that she’d had nothing to say to him. On the contrary, she had longed to go up and ask him how he was and tell him how much she, too, missed his mother. It had just seemed that the gap between them—social, age, intelligence—had grown into a chasm since the Christmas when they’d last talked.

Or maybe it had been Arabella. She’d been home, too, from the Swiss finishing-school that had been meant to teach her to be a lady but had, to Esme’s mind, failed miserably. Bored and kicking her heels while a socially acceptable job was being found for her in London, she had looked for a way to kill time and settled on Jack.

At first Esme hadn’t worried. Jack had always been offhand to Arabella and at times obliquely rude.

Esme wondered sometimes if that was why she’d become infatuated. All her life she’d played second fiddle to Arabella, with Jack the only one seeming to prefer her.

Until that summer, of course, when August brought a heat-wave and with it a kind of madness.

Or maybe it had just been sex.

She’d felt it, too. Weak at the knees every time Jack had come near. Tongue-tied and pathetic whenever he’d smiled her way. Morose with her awkwardness. Shot through with jealousy as his thing with Arabella had developed.