Deception (4 page)

“So, what brings you here?” I asked, meeting her eyes at last.

“Now there’s a warm welcome, to be sure,” she said by way of reproof, and picked up her cup, taking a sip of coffee and dabbing at her lips delicately with a cloth napkin as she replaced the cup neatly in the saucer. The imprint of her lipstick left a faint smudge on the edge of the napkin. “Hello to you, too, dear.”

I flushed at the implied rebuke. “Nobody told me you were coming.”

She tinkled a laugh. “Goodness. I hope I don’t stand on ceremony. Do I need an invitation to come and visit my children and pregnant daughter-in-law?” she replied, giving an indulgent smile in Miranda’s direction.

I glanced across the table at
Jonti’s unhappy face. He was trying to avoid my gaze.

“She rang earlier,” he ventured, by way of explanation. “You were still in bed.”

I glowered at him. “And you told her I was staying here, of course.”

He shrugged. “She wheedled it out of me. And I couldn’t very well tell her not to come round, now could I?”

My mother’s brightly painted lips pursed, and her still lovely green eyes flickered between my brother and me in cool amusement.

“Bailey,
Jonti. Darlings.
Please
don’t talk around me as if I wasn’t here or was so aged and decrepit that I am unable to understand a word of what you’re saying, although occasionally, I admit, conversation between you two can be difficult to comprehend to any outsider who may be listening. And if the mountain, as they say, won’t come to Mohammed...”

She was gazing at me now in some fascination, glossy brown head tilted to one side as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was
seeing.We hadn’t seen each other for ages, not since our falling out six months ago, when she remarried and wouldn’t invite Freddie to her wedding.

But then she’d never liked Freddie, not even when I’d first started dating him, and she’d certainly made no secret of the fact that she didn’t approve of my choice of companion. She had her reasons, she’d said. He was too old for me, being in his late forties. He’d been divorced twice, both marriages to models, neither of which had lasted more than a year. He’d used drugs and was too fond of alcohol. He was a dilettante artist living off an inheritance from an uncle. He was this, he was that. Basically, he just wasn’t good enough for
me.I guess I could agree with her about that now, but I would never admit it to her.

Back when Freddie and I had first met, it was just me and my mother living in the house of my childhood. I’d dated but nothing serious.
Jonti had already left home after graduating from University, and by then he was secure in his relationship with the lovely Miranda.

Our parents had divorced years ago, when I was about eight, and
Jonti four. Mother had gone out to work afterwards, and we’d had a succession of nannies until we were old enough to be without adult supervision. Maybe that’s why Jonti and I had been so close as kids. We’d sort of relied on one another because our parents were so distant, if not in miles then in attitude. Growing up, we didn’t see much of our father at all once he’d left the family home. We received the occasional birthday and Christmas cards, the odd phone call. A few times he came to visit, but after a while the visits tapered off, and we hardly heard from him after that. If we hadn’t written our little letters to him, I do believe all contact would have been cut.

Lara, our mother, never discussed the divorce with either of us. She had always been very tight-lipped. I was always a little bit in awe of her, she was so lovely, and yet not quite real. My father had always been more solid to me, even when I was a very young child. I’d felt loved by him right up to the time he went.

I never blamed him as such, but somehow I got the impression that it was my dad’s fault that they’d split up, that he’d had affairs. I guess she’d been a neglected wife, as his job as an executive for a major oil company had taken him travelling away from home so often, but I never thought to ask her the reason at the time he left, I was too miserable that he’d gone. And later on, well, I didn’t really care or want to know. What’s done was done, and the reason why the marriage had broken up didn’t seem as important as the fact that it had happened and he
had
left us.

When I met Freddie Gillette I was twenty-seven, a secretary with a fairly good job in a bank, and in most other ways was fairly independent. It made me furious that I couldn’t invite my new boyfriend back to the house because of my mum’s dislike of him. It was ridiculous;
it made me feel like I was still an adolescent. Trouble was, no matter what your age, if you’re still living under a parent’s roof, well, you’re bound by the rules of the house and taught to abide by them and respect them, aren’t you?

Of course it didn’t matter too much to Freddie what my mother thought of him. He’d simply shrug and roll his eyes and try to charm her even more. His charms didn’t work on her. We used to escape back to his flat and he’d laugh about Mrs Cathcart’s old fashioned ideas and outlook on life.

After a year or so, when we’d been seeing each other fairly regularly, he invited me to go and live with him.

Of course I gladly accepted; I couldn’t wait to escape from my mother’s clutches, and it absolutely goaded her beyond belief because there was nothing at all she could do about it.

However, being a still fairly dutiful daughter, and loving my mother despite her infuriating ways, I continued to visit her every now and again, and made sure I rang her occasionally, as adult children do to please their parents, and because, despite everything, I cared for her. When we met up for tea or lunch out somewhere, we spoke about everything as long as it was trivial, general or work-related, but Freddie’s name was never mentioned. It used to upset me very much that she was so disappointed in me and my choice of partner. But all I wanted was to just be allowed to live my own life as I saw fit. As she did. As she had always done, ever since my father left her alone with two young children.

It wasn’t long after I’d left home to live with Freddie that she met Oliver Miller, another passenger on board a cruise ship when she went on holiday. He was a widower who’d lost his wife to a long illness more than six months earlier. My mother and this man continued to see one another afterwards, and it seemed to be serious in the months that followed. A year or so after they returned from the cruise he proposed marriage and my mother accepted.

I met Oliver a few times. He took the family out for dinner on our mother’s birthday. A very tall, elegant man, it turned out he’d been a surgeon, a consultant gynaecologist, before he retired from private medicine. There was something very likeable about the guy and we all got on extremely well. Oliver didn’t have a family of his own. He and his first wife, who’d been an invalid for practically all of their married life, had never had children. So I could well understand how happy he must have been to have suddenly had step-children thrust upon him, even though we were rather too old to dandle on his lap or play with toys. And it was evident he adored our mother. She in turn obviously adored him back, but despite deferring to him in most situations, when it came to Freddie, she was adamant.

He wasn’t going to be invited to their wedding. It was that cold, cruel obstinacy which brought things to a head between my mother and me. It left me feeling distraught. Even
Jonti and Miranda had accepted him as my partner, apparently without any qualms.

The trouble with my mum was that she was wilful and stubborn. She’d always been strong willed, a woman used to getting her own way, and most people had given in because she was charming and quite unfairly beautiful.

But I could be as obstinate as her, so I didn’t go to her wedding to Oliver Miller, and thereafter cut off all contact with my mother and refused to take her calls and messages. I actually only kept up to date with what was happening through my stepfather, who regularly kept Jonti in the know.

And now here she sat, Lara Miller, as she was now, and she must be revelling in the situation, I thought sourly. Because she’d warned me time and again Freddie would do the dirty on me, and so he had.

And I was pretty sure my brother, the darling of my mother’s eye, would have brought her up to scratch on what had happened. He wouldn’t have been able to deny her anything.

The mountain spoke again, directing the comment to my appearance.

“Bailey, darling, what
have
you done to yourself?” my mother murmured, as playful as a girl.

Not expecting such a direct thrust, I blinked at her in confusion. Helpfully she pointed at my
hair.I’d forgotten, and reached up to my head self-consciously.On Thursday night, after work and a few drinks, I’d made an impromptu appointment at my hairdresser and had had all my beautiful russet brown curls and ringlets lopped off and the remaining hair bleached a platinum blonde. I now sported a completely new look. A headful of short, spiky, silvery tufts.Before I had a chance to reply, my mother glanced across the table at my brother.

“Couldn’t you stop her?” she said.

Jonti grimaced. “You must be kidding, Mum, she’s a black belt in karate.”

I grinned in appreciation, but our mama wasn’t so amused.

“Don’t be so ridiculous, Jonti,” she snapped. “What on earth possessed her to chop off all those beautiful curls, do you think?”

He sighed, and raised his hands to stop the flow. “What did you expect me to do, forbid her from every going to a hairdresser? Follow her around everywhere? Bind her hands and tape up her mouth? She’s a grown woman, mother. She did it of her own free will and being of partially sound mind.”

Our mother looked uncomprehendingly at me, then back again to Jonti.

“But what was she trying to prove?” she asked him in bewilderment.

Now
who was talking as if
I
didn’t exist?

“Oh for goodness sake, I’m not trying to
prove
anything,” I snapped. “I was simply trying to change, to improve my looks.”

“But darling girl, you looked gorgeous as you were. If you had wanted a change...”

“Please. It’s not like I went and got a dragon tattooed across my back,” I said irritably.

Miranda came over just then and placed a steaming tall glass of coffee in front of me, then stepped back and looked thoughtful before putting in her two pence worth.

“You know, Mother Lara, I wasn’t sure at first, when I first saw it, but now I really quite like it,” she said, surprising me. “It makes Baily look... sort of... I don’t know...
edgy
.”

Mother Lara’s eyes crinkled. “Edgy?” she breathed.

I gazed at Miranda, almost hardly daring to breath, waiting in suspense to hear how she’d reply and wondering how it was she wasn’t intimidated at all by my mother’s narrowing lids and glacial expression. Or maybe she was simply ignorant

“Yes,” replied Miranda cheerfully. “She reminds me a bit of that character
Geena Davis played, you know, in that film with Samuel L Jackson, the American black actor. The one when the girl’s got amnesia, and then remembers she’s a secret agent, or spy, or whatever it is she was, and she reverts to her original look, which was really sexy and, well,
edgy
. She also went from being brown to platinum blonde. Same colour as Bailey’s now.”

She smiled at me, and I smiled back, but my mother grimaced.

“What rubbish, Miranda. Just because some actress once played a gangster in a film, doesn’t mean my daughter had to copy her.”

I rolled my eyes. But she wasn’t finished with me.

“What about your colleagues at the office?” she asked, turning back to me and knitting her brows, always perfect arcs above her carefully made-up Cleopatra eyes. “I take it your bosses have seen your new hairstyle? They must have been somewhat confused in the bank by this
edgy
looking creature turning up the next morning looking as if she’s the sort of person who could easily knife someone in the back.”

I was secretly rather pleased at that description, but I kept my voice even, so as not to rouse my mother’s ire any more than it had been already aroused.

“Actually,” I said, “most of the people at work said I looked cool. In fact one guy I’d never spoken to before noticed me and said he had a room to rent in his house if I needed it.”

My mother gave the same sort of harrumphing noise in the back of her throat, which
Jonti seemed to have inherited and which I’d missed out on.

“Toast,” said Miranda, rather unexpectedly.

I raised an eyebrow. “This is hardly the occasion,” I demurred.

“No, your toast’s ready,” replied my sister in law, placing a stack of it on the table before me. She placed a hand on my mother’s shoulder. “Another espresso, Mother Lara?” she asked sweetly. “Another croissant, perhaps?”

As my mother raised her cup to be re-filled and gave her daughter-in-law a thin smile, it occurred to me that Mrs Miranda Cathcart might be rather pleased that my mother had arrived so fortuitously. Perhaps she’d even secretly arranged it with my mother, hoping I’d be hauled out of there, leaving her and Jonti in peace once more.

But if she thinks I’m going back to live with my mother and step father, at my time of life, I thought, as I viciously attacked the toast with the only knife to hand, which happened to be the butter knife, she’s got another thing coming!