Flawless (58 page)

“Dearest, steady on,” mumbled Hugo. But Caroline was far from finished.

“You’ve ruined your brother’s life, not to mention mine. You’ve gone and got that poor man from the BBC murdered.”

“Caroline!” said Hugo. “Really.”

“It’s all right, Dad,” said Scarlett. “Let her finish.”

“I
am
finished,” seethed Caroline, flinging her napkin down on the table. “Finished with
you
. If Cameron doesn’t recover…if these filthy journalists print their lies about him…I will never forgive you, Scarlett. Never.”

Scarlett watched in silence as she left the table and stormed back upstairs to her and Hugo’s bedroom. Only once she’d gone did Scarlett allow the tears to flow.

“Poppet, you mustn’t cry,” said Hugo, pulling out the neatly folded linen handkerchief he always kept in his breast pocket and handing it to her. “This business with Cameron has been a lot for Mummy to take in. You know how she dotes on him. It’s hardly your fault the lad’s a momma’s boy, a whoopsie.”

Despite herself, Scarlett laughed. The alternative was collapsing into a heap, and she couldn’t afford to do that. One nervous breakdown in the family was more than enough to be getting on with.

“I don’t know what to do, Daddy,” she told him, honestly. “I don’t know where to begin putting any of this right.”

“Well,” said Hugo, wiping his mouth with his napkin and pushing his chair back thoughtfully. “First things first. I’ll go with Mummy to the Maudsley. You call this newspaper and see what you can find out. In the meantime I’ll put in a call to Kevin Fahey, my lawyer, and suss out the lie of the land.”

“All right,” said Scarlett. She’d never seen her father in decisive mode before, but she couldn’t have been more grateful to discover this side to his character now. It was a relief not to have everything falling on her own overloaded shoulders.

“At some stage,” Hugo went on, “we need to have a little chat about Drumfernly.”

“We do?” Scarlett looked perplexed.

“I’m afraid so,” said Hugo. “Of course it’s far too early to make any long-term judgments yet. But if your brother should remain…shall we say, mentally incapacitated? I’ll need you to take over the estate.”

“But it’s entailed,” said Scarlett, her heart thumping with panic. At some point, when all this was over, she wanted her life back. The thought of being manacled to Drumfernly was too awful to contemplate. “It would go to cousin Ronan, wouldn’t it, if Cameron couldn’t inherit?”

“Over my dead body,” said Hugo, deadly seriously. “That house is not going to the junior branch of the family, not after four hundred years. I won’t allow it.”

Scarlett’s heart sank, but she said nothing.

“I’m not sure how we’d work it,” said Hugo. “I need to talk to Kevin about that too. Perhaps Cameron would inherit, but you would act as his agent throughout his lifetime. Then it could pass to your sons. Anyway, as I say, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. One step at a time, eh?”

“Hmm,” Scarlett nodded, wishing she had Jake or Nancy or even Boxie here to talk to. “One step at a time.”

Two weeks later, Danny Meyer sat opposite his boss at Gemology, the trendy West Village jewelry store where he’d been working for the past two months, and tried to picture him naked, taking a dump.

It was a trick he and Jake had learned at school, whenever authority figures like teachers or prefects lectured them. Picture the guy naked, having a crap. It helped to mentally level the playing field. Over the years Danny had found it worked equally well in adult life, with anyone who tried to lord it over him. With a petty-minded megalomaniac like Todd, his current boss, it was proving particularly effective.

“What are you smirking at?” Todd looked positively furious, his pink baby face reddening exponentially as Danny smiled back at him across the desk. “This is not a joke, Daniel. You are
this close
to getting fired.”

“I’ve told you. It’s Danny,” said Danny. “No one calls me Daniel. And I can’t see what you’re getting so hot and bothered about. Customers appreciate honesty in a salesman.”

“Don’t be facile,” snapped Todd. “No one appreciates being told they’re too fat to wear a choker.”

“Her saggy neck folds were hanging over the pearls like fucking foreskin,” said Danny bluntly. “No one should shell out a hundred grand on a necklace they can’t even see for double chins. It’s grotesque.”

“Your job, Daniel, is to make sales. To make our clients feel good
so they buy something
. What part of that concept do you find so hard to grasp?”

Danny stared over Todd’s bald head out the window. What the fuck was he even doing here? He’d taken the Gemology job in desperation, after every half-decent outfit in town had turned him down, fearful of making an enemy of Brogan O’Donnell. He tried to remind himself that he was working to survive and to
provide for his child, that there was no shame in it. But recently that rationale had begun to look as hollow as everything else in his life. Brogan and Diana were back together, living, as far as he knew, as man and wife. What use would the baby have for his feeble paycheck? Brogan might be a card-carrying cunt, but he could provide a far better life for the kid than Danny could dream of doing, and he knew it.

He’d thought about fighting for joint custody once the kid was born. He no longer doubted but that it would be a fight if he chose to go that route, and his lawyer had stressed how important it would be for him to show he was in regular work and could provide a stable, loving environment. Jake and Minty, needless to say, were very gung ho about this idea. But Danny himself wasn’t so sure. “Loving” he could do, but “stable”? He still woke up crying most days, which, let’s face it, wasn’t exactly normal for a grown man. And though he hadn’t voiced the fear to anyone, even Jake, he worried that the child might remind him too much of Diana. That if he played an active part in its life, he was effectively giving up all hope of ever getting over her, of ever being happy again.

“Am I boring you?”

Todd’s mean, wide-set eyes glared at him from behind thick-lensed, horn-rimmed glasses. He reminded Danny a bit of Himmler, although he definitely had no balls at all, so perhaps Goebbels was a better analogy.

“Daniel!”

“It’s Danny,” said Danny, sighing heavily, “and quite frankly, Todd, yes, you are boring me. So I suggest you stick your stinking job where the monkey stuck his nuts, and we’ll call it quits, shall we? I can see myself out.”

Strolling through the leafy streets of the West Village half an hour later, he already felt lighter, as if someone had unstrapped a backpack full of rocks and lifted it gently from his shoulders. He knew he was being irresponsible. It had taken him forever
to land that job, and he still had a stack of bills to pay higher than the Eiffel Tower. This was no time to be skipping about feeling pleased with himself. And yet it was impossible not to savor the taste of freedom just a little bit. He’d felt like a rat in a cage almost since the day Diana had moved in with him, knowing that Brogan would coil himself around their lives like a cobra and not let go until he got her back. Then came the pregnancy, another closing door. Then the breakup, Diana going back to Brogan, the collapse of his business. One by one he’d watched the separate pillars of his life being flicked out from under him like matchsticks.

But today, as of right now, there was nothing left to fall. He had nothing, not one thing left for O’Donnell or anyone else to take. He could pick up and move to Malawi if he felt like it. Not a single tie bound him to anything, a thought that ought to have been depressing, but for some reason felt gloriously liberating instead.

“Hey, man. Your usual?”

Turning on a whim into Agostino’s, his favorite local coffee shop and usual Sunday-morning hangout, he returned the smile of Permanently Cheerful Toni, the world’s most upbeat barista, and ordered a hot chocolate with extra whipped cream and sprinkles. Simple childhood pleasures were the only ones he could readily afford these days. Sinking down into one of the capacious leather sofas, he took a long, luxuriant sip and wondered idly what his twin brother was up to right now.

Two and a half thousand miles away, Jake turned out to be in a considerably less Zen-like frame of mind than Danny.

“No, don’t, don’t buy it. Not until you’ve seen the ring I’ve got you, Lexi.” Pacing the shop floor at Flawless, phone in hand, the volume of his voice was rising in direct proportion to his stress
levels. “Please tell me you haven’t already done the deal?
Alexis
!” he shook his head in frustration. “Why?”

Alarmed by the shouting, a customer who’d been browsing idly through the higher-end necklace display case decided to try her luck elsewhere, scurrying out of the store with a silent wave at Perry.

“Jake!” Perry hissed crossly once she’d gone. “Do you have to do that here? You’re scaring away business.”

“Fuck, fuck,
FUCK
,” said Jake, hanging up and banging his fist down on the counter so hard that the credit card machine jumped. “Why are rich women so unutterably stupid?”

Perry rolled his eyes. He still adored Jake, but in the two weeks since Scarlett had been gone, he was starting to see what it was she’d found so impossible to live with. Everything had to revolve around him.

“What’s happened now?”

“Lexi Bennett, one of my so-called loyal clients, has gone and paid cash,
cash
, for an eternity ring from Tyler fucking Brett. I swear to God, that man must have clones. He’s everywhere.”

“All the more reason not to frighten away customers from here,” said Perry sanctimoniously. “There’s no point you being here, standing in for Scarlett, if you’re going to spend every waking moment working on Solomon Stones.”

It was fair criticism, and Jake knew it, but apparently his temper didn’t.

“And what exactly do you suggest, Liberace?” he snapped, casting a disdainful look at Perry’s appliquéd sequin jacket. “I’ve got Scarlett on my case day and night, begging me to be here. Although what the fuck it is she expects me to do, I’ve no idea.”

Run the business, maybe?
thought Perry, but he kept his thoughts to himself. He’d only just been given a whopping pay rise and didn’t want to rock the boat too much.

“Meanwhile, that cunt Brett is waltzing off with what’s left of my clients,” fumed Jake, “and I’ve got you giving me a flea in my
ear because you can’t keep customers in the bloody store for five minutes at a stretch. I mean, you’re the fucking manager, Perry. And Scarlett’s the designer. As you rightly say, I shouldn’t even fucking be here.”

Perry waited a few moments for the self-righteousness storm to pass before speaking again.

“Would you like me to answer the question now?” he said archly, pretending to polish the walnut countertop with a little felt cloth.

“What question?” said Jake.

“The ‘what exactly do I suggest’ question,” said Perry. “Because as it happens, I do have one or two ideas.”

“Be my guest,” said Jake, throwing himself grumpily down into one of the customer armchairs with all the surly gracelessness of a spoiled sixteen-year-old. “God knows I’m fresh out of ideas myself. Unless you were thinking of flying to Scotland, kidnapping Scarlett, and getting her bony ass back here pronto.”

Perry smiled. He missed Scarlett, perhaps not as much as Jake, but acutely nonetheless, from both a business and a personal perspective. If he could have beamed her back to LA, he certainly would have, but as it looked like she’d be stranded in Blighty for the foreseeable future, his mind was turning to more practical solutions.

“If your friend Mr. Brett has clones chatting up your clients,” he said, “perhaps it’s time you called on your own clone for assistance.”

“English please,” muttered Jake. “What are you on about?”

“Your brother?” said Perry slowly. Honestly. Getting through to Jake in one of his moods was like trying to teach calculus to a chimpanzee: slow going. “Super-twin? The one you always used to say could sell ice to Eskimos. Didn’t you tell me he was between jobs at the moment, and miserable as sin in New York?”

“He’s got a job,” said Jake. “But he is miserable.”