Love Nest (11 page)

11

Lucinda was sitting at the breakfast bar of the mansion flat in the block Daddy owned in South Kensington, eating muesli and gazing out at the communal gardens bathed in weak, but promising, early spring sunlight. It was Tuesday – Valentine’s Day, not that the date meant anything to her – and her day off.

The night before, she and Benjie had stayed up late watching a bad movie about a dog from space, so she’d slept late, until nine. It wasn’t what Benjie would call a lie-in – he thought noon was an early start. Lucinda, on the other hand, considered a morning in bed a morning gone for ever and was now berating herself for her laziness.

She ran through her plans for the day: check her investments online and perhaps trade some shares. Go to the gym. Catch up on her reading that afternoon – thanks to Cass’s woes she still hadn’t had a chance to get through the Sunday papers – and then tonight was the Vertical Blinds gig, which could be fun. Her phone rang. She looked at the Caller ID, hardly daring to believe it.

‘Daddy! Hello. How are you?’

‘Mummy and I are in town,’ barked her father, as ever ignoring her attempts at social niceties. ‘We’d like to take you to lunch.’

Typical. Anyone else’s parents would have acknowledged that their daughter had a job, that she might not be available at a moment’s notice. But not Michael Gresham. Such a big cheese it never occurred to him that any of the mice might not be eager for a nibble. And anyway, of course Lucinda was thrilled at a chance to see him. So often she’d discovered from a newspaper article, or an offhand remark, that he’d been in London a whole week on business and not bothered to look her up. She tried not to let it bother her, she knew how busy he was, but it still hurt, just as it had hurt when he’d never appeared at school concerts, or plays, or at her graduation ceremony.

‘You’re lucky, Daddy, it’s my day off,’ she said, determined to play it cool. ‘Normally it wouldn’t have been possible at such short notice.’

She’d been angling for a ‘Why?’ but all she got was: ‘What about Benjie? Is he about?’

‘Um. He’s not here. I think he’s in the library.’ Hearing his only son was dead to the world after a heavy night on Hampstead Heath might not go down too well with Michael Gresham.

‘Well, please get in touch with him. Unless I hear otherwise I’ll see you both at Claridge’s. One.’

‘’Bye, Daddy,’ Lucinda said softly into the silent handset. ‘See you later. I’m really looking forward to it.’

She banged on Benjie’s door.

‘Fuck off!’

‘Fuck off yourself. Daddy’s in town. He wants us all to have lunch today.’

‘Oh, shite.’

She opened the door to be greeted by that smuggy boy smell of old socks and semen, which even a raving queen like her brother, who probably spent at least two-thirds of his trust fund on aftershaves and moisturizers, couldn’t banish from his bedroom. Benjie pulled himself up on his elbow revealing his buff torso, achieved by a daily hour in the gym when he should have been in a zoology lecture.

‘It may be shite, but if you want your allowance next month I suggest you come along.’

‘But I’ve got college! What does he want to see us for?’

‘Um… possibly the fact that we’re his children.’

‘Like that’s ever motivated him. Must be his annual attempt at playing the paterfamilias. Will Mummy be there too?’

‘Yeah,’ Lucinda said without enthusiasm.

‘Great. That’ll make it slightly more endurable.’

Lucinda shrugged. The battle lines had always been drawn very precisely in the Gresham family. Benjie and Ginevra were Mummy’s little boy and girl, Lucinda was Daddy’s. She found herself both scornful and sorry for Gail Gresham. She had come from a fairly humble background, had dazzled Daddy with her youthful beauty and had spent the rest of her life trying desperately to hang on to her looks and to him, turning a blind eye to his philandering. For the past nineteen years she’d not eaten more than five hundred calories a day, ever since Daddy had remarked that she was looking a bit chubby after the birth of Benjie and ought to watch it. Her diary was crammed with appointments for facials, hairdos, manicures, fillers, an annual spot of surgery.

But Daddy was still bored with her, and no wonder when Gail never read anything but
Hello!
Lucinda always did her best to make sure she’d read
The Economist
before she saw her father and had opinions on the issues of the day, so they had plenty to talk about. Why couldn’t Mummy see that, she wondered, as she clicked on to the
FT
website for a hasty mug-up.

But as she skimmed an article about developing finance initiatives in Islamic banking, her thoughts kept returning to her father. Lucinda was incredibly proud of him. All right, he wasn’t one of these ‘I were born in a barn, we had it reet poor, walked ta school barefoot, had ta eat me brothers and sisters for tea one winter’ types. His father had been a stockbroker, he’d been to public school and Oxford.

But he’d still taken the family money on to the next level, buying up rows of condemned houses in Cornwall, demolishing them and turning them into chi-chi retirement villages. After that his tentacles began to spread everywhere. He owned huge chunks of London, a massive slice of the north-east, had empires all over Europe, Australia and the States. By the time Lucinda, the middle child, was born, he was a tax exile. She’d grown up in Geneva, world capital of milky chocolate and cow bells, and attended an international school where her fellow pupils were sheiks’ sons and oligarchs’ daughters.

Even though Daddy was rarely around, he’d always been her favourite parent. As a little girl she remembered dancing around when he came into the room, hoping he’d notice her. Which he did vaguely – patting her on the head, saying she looked pretty. Lucinda wanted more than that. Very early on she clocked that the only thing Daddy really paid attention to was money, and the only way she was going to make an impression on him was to make some herself.

Of course there was absolutely no need to ever go out and earn a bean – the three Gresham children all had trust funds, and even though their access was limited until they were twenty-five, they could still basically have whatever they wanted. But Lucinda still wanted to work. Gail wouldn’t allow them to have any kind of holiday job; she was worried they’d be kidnapped or something, and anyway Geneva wasn’t the kind of place where you could find a job delivering papers from château to château, so Lucinda had to wait until she left school.

‘What would you like to do with the rest of your life?’ Daddy asked when he took her out to celebrate her Baccalauréat and her place to study economics at Brown University in the US. Blissfully, it was just the two of them – the rest of the family had chosen to go to their villa in St Tropez for the weekend, as one of the neighbours was having a party.

Lucinda glowed. ‘Well, Daddy, if it doesn’t sound too cheeky, I’d like to do a Master’s in business and then come and work for you.’

The ‘if it doesn’t sound too cheeky’ was a sop. Of course Daddy would want Lucinda to work for him, she thought. But to her surprise, he didn’t give her his usual indulgent if distracted smile. Instead he put down his cutlery and looked at her severely.

‘You would, would you?’

‘Well, yes, of course,’ she stammered, wrong-footed. ‘I mean – who else would I want to work for? You’re the best. And I’d really try my hardest for you.’

Michael laughed. ‘But why would I want you to work for me? You’ve got no experience.’

Now Lucinda was flustered. ‘But nor does anyone who’s doing their first job. I’d learn quickly, Daddy.’

He eyed her over his glass of Châteauneuf. ‘I’m flattered you want to work for me, though also slightly concerned about your sanity. But it’s not going to happen just like that. You need to go off, get some experience of your own and then – if you really can impress me – I’ll take you on. But it’s not going to happen automatically. I didn’t get to be Michael Gresham by hiring my children.’

‘You’re not going to hire Benjie or Ginevra. Just me!’ Infuriatingly Lucinda’s eyes were full of tears.

‘Maybe you,’ Daddy said gently, picking up her hand and kissing it in the candlelight. Lucinda saw an old lady at the table next to them stare in fascination. Clearly she thought she was his mistress. Oh, yuk. Loudly, to make the situation clear, she said, ‘
Je t’aime, Papa
.’

‘What? Oh. I love you too, sweetheart.’ He smiled. ‘But you know better than to think you can get round me that way. I’m telling you. Go off. Get your degree – you’d bloody better after the amount I’ve spent on your education. Find a job. I might help you with that bit but it won’t be at HQ. Amass experience.’

So that was what Lucinda was doing now, amassing experience. She’d got her degree, she’d got her Master’s and then she’d gone back to Daddy, hoping he’d have changed his mind. But if anything he was more resolute than before.

‘I want to see you out in the real world for a bit. I think a spell in an estate agent’s would be a good start. Maybe in the UK, you’ve never spent any time there. You should know a bit about where your old dad comes from. And it’ll give you a feeling for how the market moves, what people are looking for in a property. I’ll pull some strings.’

Lucinda was infuriated that she couldn’t find her own job. She felt stuck in a no man’s land – unable to join the family firm and take the nepotism taunts square on the chin. But also unable to go out and find a job like a normal person – even though she was more than qualified to do so.

It was the same with the South Kensington flat, she thought, pulling a Ralph Lauren slip dress over her head. Daddy went on and on about not spoiling his children, but then insisted they lived in one of his properties ‘because otherwise your mother’s frightened you’ll end up in some arse end of nowhere being burgled and stabbed’. Lucinda would have relished the prospect of finding her own place, of – burgling and stabbing aside – living like most people. She’d already been surprised at the satisfaction she derived from doing her own laundry and cooking, though not cleaning – because that would mean tidying up after Benjie – so she paid Honoria nine pounds an hour for that.

Still, resentment was pointless. Daddy was what he was, and if Lucinda wanted to be his number two she would just have to work her hardest at Dunraven Mackie and do brilliantly. And once she’d served her apprenticeship, she’d win her rightful place at company HQ in Geneva working as his right-hand woman. And – although she wished Daddy a long life – one day the company would belong to her alone.

It wasn’t as if she’d have to fight the others for the job. Ginevra was happy being a corporate wife in Mum’s image, and all Benjie cared about was ketamine-fuelled nights in Old Compton Street. Neither of them needed the cash, neither of them possessed the ambition that burned inside Lucinda. Sometimes she thought it might be fun to compete with her siblings as if they were in the cast of
Dallas
. But looking at Benjie now, checking his MSN for messages from his various paramours, Lucinda knew that the chance of him fighting for a stake in the family business was about as likely as snowfall on their house in Tobago.

Not that Benjie wanted to totally piss off his father – he needed his allowance. Which was why today he’d eschewed his normal combo of pink T-shirt under a studded leather jacket in favour of a blue button-down Thomas Pink shirt and chinos. Benjie’s homosexuality was taboo in the Gresham family. You’d have thought it would be impossible to ignore the sexuality of a man who’d always preferred his sisters’ Barbies to his toy soldiers, but if Michael Gresham had his suspicions, he had never voiced them, continuing to use terms like ‘poofter’ and ‘bender’ to describe any man he didn’t think much of. For his part Benjie did his best to act manly, even if he couldn’t prevent himself from squealing in admiration if Mummy had a piece of new jewellery.

She was just having a before-going-out pee when Benjie yelled.

‘Your phone’s ringing!’

Lucinda jumped up, Princesse TamTam knickers round her ankles. ‘Quick, hand it to me!’ she yelled round the loo door. She hated missing calls – you never knew when someone might ring with a cash, asking-price offer on a property. But by the time Benjie tracked down her phone on the kitchen table, it had stopped. She listened to the message.

‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Our gig tonight is cancelled.’

‘What gig?’ Then Benjie remembered. ‘Oh, the Vertical Blinds? Fuck, I was looking forward to that. Their lead singer is so sexy.’

‘Never mind.’ Lucinda was pleased. Now she wouldn’t have to tell her brother she’d actually offered his ticket to Cassandra. Who’d be disappointed, but what could she do? She turned her head as the post thwocked on the doormat.

‘Wicked!’ Benjie screeched, gathering it up. ‘Please God, please, let there be something from Sergei.’

‘Uh?’ It took her a moment to work out what he was talking about. Then she remembered. Of course. Valentine’s Day.

‘Yes!’ Benjie was kissing a card emblazoned with a romantic image of an erect penis. ‘He loves me, he lervs me. He loooves me!!’ He opened Lucinda’s Valentine and laughed. ‘Thanks, sis.’

‘How did you know it was from me?’

‘Er, the message. And the handwriting…’ Lucinda laughed. In school they’d all learned to write the French way, in big loopy curved letters, very different from English people’s anarchic scrawl. Not that you saw people’s handwriting very much these days when everyone emailed and texted. Uneasily, she thought of the Valentine she’d sent Anton South-Efrikan. Would he be able to recognize her from her handwriting? Oh, but sod it. Lucinda had already been through this. His secretary would bin it, and that would be the end of that.

‘Shall we go?’

‘Wait, there’s one for you!’

‘For me?’

‘I don’t see any other Lucinda Gresham in the room. And you are a gorgeous young woman of twenty-four. Why shouldn’t you get a Valentine?’

True. Intrigued, she opened the hot pink envelope. Perhaps it was from Daddy, she couldn’t help thinking, but he’d never observed Valentine’s Day before – even with Mummy – so why should he now?