Do Not Disturb (40 page)

“The doctor says Mom can come home next weekend,” said Devon one gloomy Sunday night, forcing the cheeriness into his voice. “I thought maybe you and I could throw her a welcome-home party, now that Nick’s gone back to LA.”

He was sitting on a red damask couch at one end of their enormous Boston living room while his daughter, coiled like a snake into a rattan armchair at the other end, refused to look up from
Harper’s Bazaar
.

“Do what you want,” she snapped, still not looking up. “I won’t be here.”

“Oh?” said Devon, trying hard to mask his annoyance. “And why’s that?”

“I’ve been offered a place at fashion school. In London,” said Lola nonchalantly. “I’ve decided to take it.”

“I see,” said Devon.

“My course doesn’t start until the new year, but I’ve booked a flight out on Friday to start looking at apartments and get the lay of the land.”

He looked across at her determined, defiant face. A month ago he’d have slapped her down for talking back to him like that and sent her back to St. Mary’s with a flea in her ear. But everything was different now. The contempt in her eyes burned so brightly it frightened him. If he tried to lay the law down now, she’d bolt. Then he’d have lost her for good.

“What’s the name of the college?” he asked, playing for time.

“St. Martin’s,” said Lola truculently, flipping the page of her magazine with unnecessary violence and keeping her eyes down. “Like you care.”

“Well,” said Devon, projecting a calm that he was far from feeling, “you’re not moving to England on your own. I’m sorry, but you’re far too young for that.”

“I’m eighteen,” Lola shot back at him, looking him in the eye at last. “Plenty of kids younger than me leave home. Besides, I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. I’m going, whether you like it or not.”

Wisely, Devon had decided to let the conversation lie at this point. For all her fighting talk, she would of course need him to fund her studies, not to mention her accommodation, if she wanted to go. But keeping her in Boston as an economic prisoner would be the surest way to drive a permanent wedge between them. Morally, she had him over a barrel, and they both knew it. The affair had robbed him utterly of his authority as a father. As much as he disliked it, he realized that if he was to have a chance at winning Lola’s forgiveness and earning back her love, he’d have to let her go.

In the end, he’d agreed to rent her an apartment in Chelsea, on the condition that she room with a friend. Both he and Karis had hoped she’d pick one of the daughters of the many respectable old Boston families that they knew socially. But Lola had other ideas.

“But darling,” Devon had tried to reason with her, watching her bent over the sewing machine in the kitchen one November evening, lost in concentration as she restitched one of Karis’s skirts. Despite Devon’s best efforts to encourage her to eat, Karis had been losing weight at an alarming rate since she came home, and most of her clothes hung off her now like rags on a skeleton. “A girl like Sian would be so far out of her depth in a cosmopolitan city like London. How do you think she’d afford the rent?”

Lola shrugged, biting off a stray thread with her front teeth. “We can subsidize her. Until she finds a job.”

We?
thought Devon.
Who the hell was “
we
”?
He was on the point of demurring but thought better of it. The daughter of some blue-collar New Jersey bum might not be ideal company for Lola, but at least the two girls would be safe together. And if agreeing to fund Sian meant Lola moved even an inch toward a reconciliation with him, he figured it was a price worth paying.

Ever since Karis had come back home, he’d begun to feel like a stranger in his own house. His wife drifted aimlessly from room to room like a zombie; his son had hightailed it back to LA as fast as his legs could carry him; and his daughter looked at him like something that had crawled out from under a rock every time he walked through a door.

He did regret the affair. Part of him still missed Honor and the thrill of youthfulness and excitement that being with her had given him. But for the first time the enormity of what he’d done to Karis really hit home. Underneath all the bickering and social climbing, he now realized, she still loved him. The damage to his reputation, much as it pained him, wasn’t half as bad as the crushing guilt he felt watching her struggling to rebuild her life and carry on as normal while inside she was clearly still in a million shattered pieces. The other day he’d watched her from their bedroom window, chatting happily to one of the gardeners as she planted out bulbs for the spring. But as soon as the man left, she’d dropped her head into her hands, and he’d watched helplessly as her frail shoulders began to shake with sobs. Tears had come to his own eyes then. He wanted desperately to make things right. But the affair and all the ensuing publicity had left him so far adrift, he had no idea where to start.

Part of him hoped that with Lola abroad and Nick back in LA, things might get easier at home. But whether they did or didn’t, he knew he had little choice but to let his headstrong daughter go.

Turning onto Tite Street now, Lola closed down her umbrella—the stupid thing was practically useless against such a pounding torrent anyway—and fumbled in her purse for the front door keys. The flat Devon had rented was comprised of the ground and first floors of a white stucco-fronted Victorian house, overlooking pretty, communal square gardens. Through the bay window at the front, Lola could see Sian slumped over her PC at the kitchen table, and banged on the glass to get her attention.

“Can’t find my keys!” she yelled, lifting up her purse and rattling it to illustrate the point. “Can you let me in?”

A few seconds later Sian was at the door. Barefoot and in sweatpants, she had a long, chunky-knit cardigan pulled tightly around her and her hair scraped back in an elastic band. She looked tired.

“Have you been to sleep yet?” asked Lola.

After months of interviews Sian had finally landed herself a job at the
News of the World
, but it was mostly night shifts copyediting, which didn’t pay her enough to cover the rent. Lola was always telling her not to worry—“my guilty asshole father can pay”—but Sian had no intention of freeloading and was still trying to write and pitch freelance articles during the day to supplement her meager salary. Unfortunately, this didn’t leave her a lot of time for sleep. In the last week she’d started sporting full-on panda eyes, which didn’t do much for her already pasty, sun-deprived complexion.

“Not yet.” She shook her head. “Nice swim?”

“It’s unbelievable!” Lola laughed, shaking out her wet hair and peeling off her coat and shoes. Her socks were so wet she had to wring them out on the porch like used washcloths before she could come in.

“Well, maybe the rain agrees with you,” said Sian. “You certainly look a lot more cheerful.” Padding back into the kitchen,
she flipped on the kettle to make them some tea. Both the girls had taken to drinking Earl Grey and eating chocolate digestive biscuits when they got home from work, a ritual that made them feel marvelously English and Mary Poppins–ish, especially when the storms set in. “Did Ego call?”

“Ego” was the nickname Sian had given Lola’s latest boyfriend, Igor, a revoltingly chiseled Russian in the year above her at school. A part-time model, he was also a full-time jerk, although it had taken Lola until yesterday, when he dumped her by text message, to see it.

“No.” Lola shoved the last biscuit from the open packet into her mouth before greedily ripping open a new one. It never ceased to amaze Sian how a girl who ate like a sumo wrestler and whose idea of exercise was stretching for the TV remote kept such a sickeningly perfect body. Not to mention her flawless, alabaster complexion. “He didn’t call, and I don’t give a shit,” she said, spraying biscuit crumbs across the table with happy abandon. “Asshole. His designs were all lame Vivienne Westwood rip-offs anyway. He can fuck-right-off-ski.”

Sian bustled around making the tea, opening and closing cupboards and hunting for the quaint flowery teapot they’d picked up at Portobello Market. Man, she was exhausted. Even getting out the china and tea bags felt like a monumental effort today.

She was pleased Lola was over Ego and tried not to envy her friend’s uncanny ability to bounce back from heartbreak like a human Tigger. Since they’d come to London Lola had gone through boyfriends like other people went through toilet paper. She never mentioned Lucas, not once, and seemed to have succeeded in blocking out the painful events of last summer completely by diving headfirst into her new life at fashion school.

How Sian wished she could do the same. She was fed up with being the Eeyore in their partnership, moping and brooding and worn out all the time. But she wasn’t like Lola. She didn’t have the
supreme confidence, born of lifelong wealth and serious, supermodel beauty, that protected Lola like a magic cloak from whatever stones life might throw at her.

Not that life was treating Sian too shabbily at the moment. Being offered the chance to come to London was a miracle for a girl like her. She still remembered getting Lola’s phone call, back home in Lymington. Looking back, it was like the opening scene from a movie: her mom in the kitchen, making dinner; her dad and brother sprawled on the couch in the living room, Budweisers in hand, engrossed in the final minutes of the game; and Sian herself, running down the stairs screaming with excitement, holding the phone in front of her like a talisman, begging her parents to let her go.

“I can pay my own way,” she pleaded. “I’ve got almost three thousand dollars saved up now. And I’ll find work as soon as I get there, I swear.”

“I thought that money was for college?” said her mom. “How long have you been telling us about wanting to get more education?”

“This is
London
, Mom,” Sian explained patiently. “It is an education. Anyway, you and Dad always wanted me to start work right after high school. So now I will.”

“We meant work here,” said her father. “In Lymington. Not halfway across the world with some heiress kid we’ve never even met.”

They’d taken some persuading. To her parents, moving to London was equivalent to saying you wanted to spend a year on the international space station or join the submarine corps. It was something they couldn’t picture and consequently feared.

“Soon as you get homesick, you get right on the next plane,” her mom said tearfully at the departure gate. “There won’t be no ‘I told you so’s.’ You just come on home, all right, honey?”

“Sure, Mom,” said Sian. “Of course I will.”

But inside she was rolling her eyes. Like she was gonna be homesick! For what? Burgers at Dino’s on a Friday night? Hanging out at the mall?

Yet to her surprise, she found she did miss home, almost from the moment she landed in England. Two solid months of waitressing at a greasy spoon café in Earl’s Court probably hadn’t helped. But even now that she’d finally landed a job on a Sunday tabloid, her dream for as long as she could remember, there was still a feeling of restless unhappiness she couldn’t seem to shake.

She hesitated to attribute this to Ben, who she soon discovered was some kind of microcelebrity in England, a sort of Donald Trump mini-me. Like most eighteen-year-old girls, she found the financial pages deathly boring, useful only as cat litter, or possibly to start a fire. But Ben’s name cropped up in the
FT
with such regularity it was impossible not to take a morbid interest. Seeing his name in print was like picking at an emotional scab—disgusting, painful, and yet weirdly addictive. It wasn’t long before she found herself actively scanning the hedge fund articles, looking for a mention or a picture.

He’d told her when they met that he worked in finance, so she’d assumed he was reasonably well off. To stay at the Herrick he’d have had to be. But despite Lucas’s assumptions to the contrary, she’d actually had no idea Ben was a fully paid up member of the superrich. In some ways she supposed it explained his sensitivity over the whole bet thing. Explained it, but didn’t excuse it. Even after six months the pain of their parting was still raw, and the wound to her pride still stung like acid every time she thought of him. Which, these days, was pathetically often.

“You know,” said Lola, pouring herself a second cup of tea, into which she heaped three towering teaspoons of sugar. “Breaking up with Igor does leave me with one problem.”

“It does?” Sian looked disbelieving.

“Kind of. It means I’m gonna be dateless for the Burnstein wedding.”

Araminta “Minty” Burnstein was the daughter of family friends from Boston. Her wedding to some random shipping heir or other promised to be one of the grandest seen in New York since Liza Minnelli’s. Lola had had mixed feelings about going. She hadn’t been back to the States or seen her parents since Christmas, but she knew from Nick, who’d spent the holiday at home, that things at home were still walking-on-eggshells tense. Minty’s wedding would be the first big social event her mom had attended since her dad’s affair with Honor became public. Lola wasn’t sure she could bear to watch the forced, brittle smiles of people trying to pretend nothing had happened. And what if her mom broke down?