A Perfect Proposal (2 page)

Amanda looked Sophie in the eye. ‘Why you? Why not anyone else in your family? Your mother, for example?’

‘Oh, Amanda! You know why! No one else would do it and, to be fair, I am currently between jobs.’ Sophie was aware that her friend was much more outraged by her going to look after an aged relative than she was. Maybe she did let herself get pushed around by her family. ‘I am going to make him pay me.’

‘And do you think he will? Surely if he wanted to, he could just get someone from an agency to look after him. He wouldn’t be insisting on getting a family member to do it. He must be mean. That’s why they call him “evil”.’

Sophie considered. ‘Well, as I said, I’ve never met him personally, but the family do all say he’s terribly tight-fisted. Apparently they tried to borrow some money during some financial crisis or other and he sent them out of the house uttering Shakespearean texts about borrowers and lenders and not being one.’ She laughed. She was imagining the irritation her parents must have felt. ‘It was years and years ago though.’

‘Well, he must be penny-pinching to ask you to care for him if he can afford a professional.’

Sophie bit her lip. She didn’t want to tell Amanda that her mother had offered Sophie’s services, possibly to sweeten Uncle Eric now he was so much nearer to death than he had been years before. If he wouldn’t lend them the money, he might still leave them some, given that he didn’t have many other relations. And Sophie’s family had always been desperately short of money.

But Amanda had known Sophie since primary school and was well aware of how Sophie’s family regarded its youngest member. ‘Don’t tell me, your mother said you’d do it.’

‘Well, I won’t then!’ Sophie twinkled at her friend over her coffee cup. ‘It’s OK! I know you think they all bully me dreadfully, but I do have my way more often than they think I do. Being thought stupid by people – even your family – does give you a bit of power, you know.’ She felt she had to explain her lack of indignation. ‘I know I always seem to take it on the chin, but I never do anything I really don’t want to.’

Amanda sighed. ‘Well, if you say so, but what I’ve never really got is why your family think you’re thick?’

Sophie shrugged. ‘I suppose because I’m not academic like they all are, and being the youngest and all. It’s partly habit and partly because they don’t see my strengths as useful.’ She sighed. ‘Although they do get the benefit of them. In my family if it doesn’t involve letters after your name, it doesn’t count.’

Amanda humphed. ‘Well, I’d like to hear what Milly has to say on the subject.’

Milly, the third of the trio known at school as ‘Milly-Molly-Mandy’ – unfairly, according to Sophie, who didn’t awfully like being called Molly – lived in New York. A couple of years older than the other two, she was the head of the gang and spoke her mind even more than Amanda did.

‘I haven’t bothered Mills with this, although I am due to ring her. But now I must fly. I’ve got to find some half-decent plastic glasses for the children. People are turning up at about one.’ She made a face. ‘My mother is insisting we make a children’s room upstairs in the old playroom. She says it’s because it’ll be more fun for them, but really she doesn’t want kids cluttering up her party.’

‘You see! There you are again, doing loads to help your mother have a party and they still treat you as a second-class citizen.’

Sophie giggled. ‘It’s not about class, darling, it’s about brains! I do have the former, but my exam results indicated I didn’t have many of the latter.’

‘You sound just like your mother!’

‘Do I? That’s not good!’

‘It’s inevitable. And to be fair to your mother, I think she has a point about the children’s room. Parents’ parties can be frightfully dull when you’re little. And your father is prone to demanding if people are learning Latin – if you’re a child, anyway.’

Sophie raised an eyebrow. ‘They’re quite dull when you’re five foot six, which is why you’re not coming. Unlike last year. And he doesn’t ask you about Latin any more. He knows you went to the same school as I did, and didn’t.’

Amanda obviously now felt guilty. ‘Do you really want me to come? I will. We did used to have fun at your parents’ annual bash.’

‘When we three used to cover each other in face paint and play with the hose in the garden.’ They both sighed reminiscently and then Sophie went on: ‘No, you’re fine. I’ll do this one on my own. After all, I’m used to my ghastly family. I can cope with them.’ She frowned slightly. She hadn’t been entirely truthful with Amanda. Although she always appeared to accept her lot in the family pecking order it had irked her more lately. Especially during these hard times, when her skill with turning shabby into chic was particularly useful, she could have done with the occasional pat on the back.

Sophie found the shop selling party favours tucked down a side street in the old part of the town. As it had a sale on, she added some extras to her list: sparklers, face paint and some tinsel wigs, and then walked up the hill to the big old Victorian house where she lived.

She often thought that if her parents really minded about being short of money, they would have either moved into something smaller or converted part of it into a flat. For the cost of putting a bathroom and a galley kitchen into the attics they could have had some regular extra income for years. As it was, the family who still lived there – Sophie, her older brother Michael and her parents – all bumbled about, arguing over the only bathroom and filling the spare rooms with clutter.

Sophie’s mother, who’d given up her life as a teacher to become an artist, had taken up a lot of the space to have a studio and to store her paintings. Her father, an academic, was a compulsive book buyer. He needed a study and a library. Michael, who was also an academic, needed the same. Sophie had once enquired tentatively about them sharing a library so that maybe she could have a room to do her sewing in but was patronised into submission. ‘Art’ was ‘arty’, whereas sewing was either ‘mending’ or entirely frivolous. When her sister Joanna left home when Sophie was fifteen, Sophie took over her room for her sewing machine and all the bits and pieces she needed for her creations.

Now, the downstairs rooms had been cleared for her parents’ party, which took a lot of Sophie’s talent. The house had grace and charm but the carpets were threadbare, there were patches of damp that required huge floral arrangements to conceal them and Sophie had had to fling tablecloths over the tables to disguise the rings caused by careless academic people, who put their hot mugs down just anywhere.

The kitchen had been taken over by the caterers, Linda and Bob, for whom Sophie often did waitressing. This was a large room, which had the sort of free-standing furniture that was so fashionable these days, simply because it had missed out when fitted kitchens were all the rage. Sophie sometimes contemplated selling off the utensils as ‘kitchenalia’,
replacing them with newer items and making a nice little amount of money. But new things wouldn’t fit into their gently decaying family home.

She dumped her bag on to the counter. ‘OK, lemons, limes, crisps and bits and pieces for the children. Was there anything else?’

‘Don’t think so,’ said Linda, taking the lemons and limes. ‘The salads are all assembled and I’ve garnished the salmon and the cold meats. Everything hot is in the oven, so we’re pretty well on track, really.’

‘So, what would you like me to do?’ Sophie was good at reading body language and could tell that her friend needed something, if not very much, and she’d always helped out when her family entertained. She’d always helped out, full stop. She found a lot of satisfaction in being useful, unlike the male members of the family, who always seemed affronted if anyone asked them to do anything remotely domestic. Her mother obviously didn’t feel she had to offer: she was currently soaking in the bath, having exhausted herself remodelling part of the garden. (Her artistic sensibilities had taken against a particular colour combination.)

‘Could you set out the glasses in the dining room? And maybe give them a polish? Your brother picked them up from the wine merchant’s but I had a look and they don’t seem all that clean to me.’

‘OK.’ Sophie found a clean tea towel and put it over her shoulder, then she carried the boxes of glasses into the dining room. Here French doors looked on to the garden; with the finest October on record, they hoped to be able to open them and let people spill out on to the paving and on into the wilderness.

The garden, like the house, was lovely if you didn’t look too closely at the details. There were lots of huge shrubs – unpruned for years – and massive clumps of shocking pink
phlox, flowering late, against the orange crocosmia. (It was these that had caused her mother’s last-minute attack with a fork.)

Now, still a little red and shiny from the bath, her mother found Sophie in the dining room holding the glasses over a bowl of hot water and polishing them.

‘Oh, darling, don’t do that! They’re perfectly clean. I need you to do some flowers for the hall. I hadn’t noticed that frightful damp patch just opposite the front door. A big vase of flowers would hide it. Another one of your mad creations – just what we need.’

‘Hm, I’ll need to find a table or something to put them on. Oh I know! There’s a good solid cardboard box upstairs. I’ll find a bit of fabric. Leave it to me, Mum.’

‘Thank you, darling,’ said her mother, catching up escaping locks of hair, and wandering back upstairs, presumably to finish getting ready.

Sophie went to find the secateurs.

Sophie, after setting up the largest attic room as a space for children – which could mean anyone under twenty-five – had found herself running from one minor crisis (no clean hand towels) to another (no loo paper), and so had little time to get ready for the party herself. She just pulled on a white blouse because it was clean and a little black skirt because her mother would prefer that to jeans. Then she ran downstairs to help her parents and brother serve drinks. Not that her brother did serve them. The moment someone arrived whom he wanted to talk to he did just that; having made sure he and his victim had full glasses, he led them to his study where they could chat in peace.

Things were soon well under way; food was being served, people were standing on the terrace, and Sophie was beginning to wish she was upstairs with the younger crowd.
She was tired of explaining that yes, she was very much younger than her clever older siblings and no, she wasn’t at uni and had no plans to go; she was perfectly happy doing what she did, thank you. (She was very polite.)

Sometimes she yearned to tell her interlocutor that she really wanted to learn tailoring, but her parents dismissed this as not being a proper subject and something she would ‘grow out of’ so she didn’t. She was beginning to seethe inside though, something Milly and Amanda would have thoroughly approved of.

She was just wondering if she should steal a whole bowl of chocolate mousse to take upstairs when some connection of her mother’s she’d met several times – she was a member of the same art class – tapped her on the shoulder.

‘Could you get me a clean glass. This one’s filthy.’

The woman didn’t add a smile to her request, let alone a please or a thank you, and Sophie, who’d personally polished all the glasses and couldn’t imagine which dark cupboard that one had been lurking in, took offence. The woman didn’t realise she had, of course, because Sophie just gave her a tight smile and took the offending glass. She went to the kitchen, washed the glass, dried it and then took it back to the woman.

‘Oh, and white wine, please. Not Chardonnay,’ said the woman. ‘Something decent.’

Only when the woman had the wine she wanted, and had deigned to acknowledge Sophie’s helpfulness with an incline of her head, did Sophie decide she’d had enough of being an unpaid waitress for one day and would escape.

She stole the chocolate mousse and a handful of spoons, knowing there were paper plates upstairs in the children’s room. She would share it out among everyone who was up there, sort them out with a game and then she would phone Milly in New York.

*

‘And then,’ Sophie went on, her mobile captured between her ear and her shoulder as she sorted playing cards, ‘some evil old biddy thought I was a waitress! At my parents’ party! I’ve met her loads of times! It got too much for me so I’ve taken refuge up here. Far more fun.’

‘That’s so horrid.’ From the other side of the Atlantic, her friend’s voice sounded croaky.

‘Oh, sorry, Milly! Have I woken you up? I’ve been meaning to ring you for ages and I forgot the time difference.’

‘’S all right, I’m awake now. I was having a lie-in, but never mind.’ There was a short, expensive pause during which Sophie could almost hear her friend rubbing her eyes and settling in for a gossip. ‘So no one nice at the party?’

‘Not if you mean men, no. It’s my parents’ annual summer bash – a bit delayed. You remember, you and Amanda always used to come – it’s full of family and their old friends. I’ve come upstairs to the nursery where the kids are. I’m fed up with being treated as staff. My family are bad enough, but when the guests start doing it …’

‘To be fair, Soph, you do do waitressing.’

‘I know! And I’m proud to be a waitress, but this woman was so rude, I’d’ve objected even if I
was
working. So I’ve organised this lot into finding enough packs of cards to play Racing Demon and we’re going to have brilliant fun.’