Guilty Feet (7 page)

‘Well, I am. I don’t like people reading my private mail and if you ever do it again I’ll ban you from my flat. OK?’

She didn’t look remotely chastened.

‘I just love it when you’re all manly and masterful, Dan,’ she said, cupping her face in her hands and fluttering her eyelids.

‘I’m serious, Aisling. It wouldn’t even have been so bad if you’d left it at being nosy. I just don’t see why you had to tell everyone about it.’

‘I didn’t tell everyone,’ she said, defensive now. ‘Just Libby. She’s always asking about you and I get tired of having nothing to say.’

Dan sighed. It was hard to be mad with Aisling for long, and besides, if what she said was true, what harm had she really done? Then something else occurred to him.

‘What do you mean, she’s always asking about me?’

‘You know,’ she said with a sigh. ‘ “How’s Dan? What’s Dan up to? Have you seen Dan today?” It’s the only thing we ever talk about. I think she’s trying to find out if you’ve succumbed to my charms yet, and it’s humiliating to have to admit that you haven’t.’

And
he
had to admit, if only to himself, that there were times when he might well have succumbed. If she’d been around last night for instance, when he’d heard about Jo being with somebody else—but that was the problem. It would never be for the right reason.

‘Like I said before, Ash—you’re gorgeous, but you’re just not my type.’

‘Well, you’re not mine either,’ she said, uncupping her pretty heart-shaped face. ‘But what does that matter?’ She shrugged. ‘We’re both free agents at the moment, so what harm would it do to give it a try?’

‘Because then it would be hard to be friends when we found that it didn’t work out.’

He was thinking again of Jo now, of course, but at least he didn’t have to risk bumping into her every day. He had no idea where she was living now. He’d thought about phoning Cass many times, or trying Jo’s office. And now it was all too late. Now she had someone new in her life.

‘You might have a point,’ he was surprised to hear Aisling say through his thoughts. ‘But that doesn’t mean I’ve given up yet,’ she added with a grin. She stretched and got up from her seat. ‘Better go and unpack, I suppose.’

‘What about your coffee?’ Dan said as he picked up his own mug and followed her into the hallway.

‘You know how I hate that nasty instant stuff you serve up, Dan. My body’s a temple, remember?’

He looked at her body as it glided gracefully down the stairs and he had to admit that it was a very fine temple indeed. Smiling still, he went back to his computer and decided to check his e-mails before getting down to work. There were only three waiting for him, but the one that stood out was from dalysarah.

It was becoming a
daily
thing, come to think of it, and he wondered if it was time to discourage her by not replying. Still, might as well read what she had to say, though, he thought.

***

As well as a quick introduction to Thompson family history, lunch included a lecture on food fat content and a chicken salad without any dressing that cost what would have kept me in burgers for up to a week. Oh, yes, and some deft subject-dodging whenever I asked about my father.

We drove to the records office in my mother’s Corsa, and because we had difficulty parking we managed to arrive ten minutes late for the appointment, which seemed to annoy the woman in charge of the office greatly. Clearly a charm school drop-out, she had a glacial, superior air, and warned us in no uncertain terms that the smooth running of the office was dependent on the courtesy of all its users.

I was sure that this would infuriate my mother, but instead she apologised profusely, ignored the unforgiving tut-tuts, and generally did a very good impersonation of a polite and mild-mannered follower of rules and regulations. There was clearly something about records offices that had a transforming effect on her, and I wished I could bottle whatever it was and feed it to her twice daily.

There were three other people inside the wood-panelled room, all of them so deeply involved in what they were doing that they didn’t even glance up at us, the interesting new arrivals. It was the sort of place where you didn’t need to be told that whispering was obligatory, and I’m not sure why, but it was at that particular moment that the whole strangeness of the situation struck me.

My mother didn’t normally include me in her interests, and if I hadn’t been trying so hard to make up for our last falling-out I would already have made further enquiries about her motives. But it seemed a bit late for that now, so I put my suspicions aside for the time being and followed her whispered instructions on handling the equipment. She showed me how to use the cunning little microfiches that looked like photograph negatives and contained enormous amounts of information when magnified on a screen. Once I felt confident with what I was doing, she instructed me to examine the marriage records of a certain parish of Tillingham.

I’d learnt by now that my mother had got back as far as 1841 through the Thompson family tree, to the birth of one Henry Thompson. She had a copy of his baptismal record and it showed that his parents had been Ann and Henry Thompson Senior. It was Ann that she was particularly interested in. Because although our forebears to this point had been generally disappointing as far as she was concerned—a long list of law-abiding artisans—she’d somehow got it into her head that Ann might have been a member of the aristocrat Fothershaw family of Tillingham. I’d never heard of Tillingham but according to my mother it is a former grand estate on the outskirts of Leeds, now covered in box-like starter homes that were erected in the late Eighties. It didn’t matter that the family no longer owned the land, although that would have been a bonus, of course. What seemed to matter most to my mother was proving that she had aristocratic blood in her veins.

She’d as good as admitted to me over lunch that it would be one in the eye for Barbara Dick, who’d apparently been researching her own family history for years and years. The best she’d come up with so far was a bastard child whose father might possibly have been a philandering archbishop.

She was being very guarded about where the idea had come from, and I had my doubts about it all from the start. Certain things just didn’t add up to me. Like why a member of the aristocracy would marry a Thompson, for starters. But my mother dismissed such unhelpful scepticism out of hand.

While I was doing the groundwork my mother was finding out what she could about the Fothershaws. Being a prominent family in the area, there was a fair bit about them in the archives, and as if the links were already proven beyond any reasonable doubt she was making copious notes about them. In order, no doubt, to rub Barbara Dick’s nose in it later.

It took a long time, but eventually I came upon something. That is, I found the record of a marriage between an Ann Fothershaw and a Henry Thompson, which at first glance seemed promising, though I quickly realised that it couldn’t be anything to do with us. Somewhat perplexed by the coincidence, I signalled to my mother and she calmly slipped into the seat beside me and examined the screen. I don’t know why, but somehow that calmness bothered me.

She nodded, evidently pleased but just not excited enough. ‘Well done,’ she said. ‘I knew I could rely on you to find it.’

‘I’ve found
something
, all right,’ I whispered cautiously, ‘but I’m afraid it doesn’t prove that we’ve got Fothershaw blood in our veins.’

‘What more proof do you need?’ she said, unperturbed.

‘Henry Thompson is not an uncommon name,’ I said. ‘And we know that our Henry—the one that we are absolutely
certain
about—was born in 1841.’

‘Yes,’ she replied guardedly, ‘but so what?’

‘This marriage took place in 1797,’ I said, prodding my finger at the date on the screen. ‘And, assuming Ann was twenty or so when she married, that would put her in her sixties when she gave birth.’

She looked uncomfortable for a moment, but quickly rallied.

‘Well, a woman in Italy gave birth at that age recently.’

I glanced at her sideways and it all suddenly felt a bit fishy to me.

‘Not without the aid of modern medical science, she didn’t.’

She got a bit narky then. ‘Typical!’ she hissed. ‘Most people would be thrilled to know they belonged to an important Yorkshire family, but oh, no, not you.’

And the penny suddenly dropped. I looked at her again and her shifty expression clinched matters.

‘You’ve been surfing the net, haven’t you?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said slyly.

‘You looked for links with the name Henry Thompson and any old Ann who happened to belong to an aristocratic family in the area—and this is the best you could come up with.’

When she didn’t reply I shook my head and sighed. ‘You can’t go adding people to the family tree just because it
looks
good.’

‘I don’t see why not,’ she said childishly. ‘Nobody needs to know.’

‘You mean Barbara Dick doesn’t need to know?’

I realised then that what their relationship was all about was outdoing each other. They were rivals in everything—from the juiciest parts in local Gilbert and Sullivan productions to how well their daughters were faring in life. And things definitely weren’t going well for my mother in that particular aspect of their rivalry.

‘Precisely,’ she said. ‘She’s always boasting about her wayward cleric, and I thought—’

‘Why did you bring me in on the act?’ I interrupted her. It was then that she finally squirmed, and I knew the answer to my question.

‘I don’t believe you!’ I said, and I said it in a raised voice.

One thing you can say about my mother is that she knows when the game is up, and the game was definitely up for her now.

‘Well, you know what Barbara is like,’ she said with a shrug. ‘She’d be so green with envy that she might be tempted to check the facts for herself.’

‘And find the same discrepancies that I found.’

‘But I didn’t expect you to notice,’ she said matter-of-factly.

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘I’m just the idiot daughter you could blame it all on if things backfired.’

‘Something like that,’ she agreed lamely.

Just then the woman in charge of the office came over and glared at me for daring to speak above a whisper. And because I was so furious with my mother, I looked at her defiantly.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said in such a loud voice that everyone else in the office finally looked up. ‘We’re leaving.’

Chapter Six

It was a day of people turning up unexpectedly at my flat. Sid was waiting outside for me when I got back from my long walk from the library, where I’d gone after my mother dropped me off. And he looked even colder than I was and a lot more fed up.

‘How long have you been here?’ I asked, then frowned at him nervously. ‘And how do you know where I live?’

‘I brought you back here two nights ago,’ he said glumly. ‘That’s when we arranged for me to pick you up at six o’clock.’

It was all coming back to me now. For some reason I’d agreed to go to his home for dinner. I glanced at my watch and was embarrassed to see it was almost six-thirty

‘Sorry,’ I said, wishing that I could get out of it but knowing it was too late for that now. ‘Have I got time to change?’

‘I’m afraid not. My mother insists on punctuality and dinner will be served at seven sharp.’

At least I had my good suit on, and he was right about me not having time to change. He’d borrowed his mother’s car to pick me up, and even though we were going against the tail-end of the rush hour traffic we still didn’t arrive at his home till two minutes to seven.

I was surprised by the size of the house, which was subtly lit by discreet outdoor floodlighting. It was one of those Victorian piles that in less leafy areas often get turned into a dozen or so student bedsits. This was clearly a ghetto for the rich, however, and as we turned into the drive I glanced over at Sid with new interest. Maybe he wasn’t mad after all. Maybe he did have the wherewithal to purchase companies from receivers. It was one of those passing thoughts that I dismissed almost immediately.

The moment I was introduced to his very unusual family, in fact.

Mr Perrez—Dawood, as he insisted I call him, was a bit like his son—quiet and rather morose—but I began to understand why when I got to know the women of the family over dinner. They were already seated at the dining table when we got there and they were completely exhausting right from the off.

Sid’s mother, Jennifer, who surprised me turning out to be Irish, quickly informed me that she was a Feng Shui consultant with a lot of rich clients. She was very flamboyant and a bit eccentric and she was wearing a magnificent red sari that had a few western touches, including a Dolce and Gabbana leather bum-bag strapped around her enormous waist.

The daughters, Darinda, Belle and Marinda (I kept getting Marinda and Darinda mixed up), competed for my attention for much of the evening. It was as if they had been locked up and I was the only outsider they’d seen in years.

For the first half an hour or so they pumped me mercilessly for details of club life, which I felt obliged to exaggerate when my original, honest responses—that I didn’t go to clubs very often, that I’d never been offered drugs—seemed such a huge disappointment to them. At fourteen, fifteen and sixteen, they weren’t yet allowed to go to clubs, and by the way they were talking I hoped that they never would be.

‘Yes, but you
must
have friends who’ve taken Ecstasy,’ persisted Marinda, or possibly Darinda.

It was the names I mixed up, not the faces, which were very different. One was plump, pale and cherubic, while the other, more like her father, was tall and quite dark-skinned. Belle, the youngest, was pale and thin and lived up to her name by being extremely pretty.

‘I suppose so,’ I said, looking nervously at their father, who didn’t appear to be listening.

Jennifer clearly took my lack of experience as reticence.

‘Don’t be afraid to talk about such matters in front of us,’ she said in what remained quite a strong accent as she served up tuna steaks with slices of lime. ‘We’re a very open family, and if you know of anyone who has come to grief taking drugs so much the better. The girls need to know the downside of experimenting with mind-altering substances.’

The girls turned their wide-eyed attention back on me and I felt honour-bound to come up with something educational.

‘Well...’ I began.

I told them of a newspaper report I’d read about some tablets that had been laced with rat poison and applied it to an imaginary friend of mine. I called her Nicola, which seemed to enliven my enthusiasm for the tale. I found myself quite good at it, fibbing like that for their own good, but I think a lot of the credit must go to the encouragement I got from my completely captivated young audience.

‘There now,’ Jennifer said when the story came to an unhappy close, with Nicola slowly recovering on a life support machine though she was never likely to be the same again. ‘Let Joanna’s story be a lesson to you all.’

I felt as if I’d done a pretty good job, but when I glanced sideways at Sid for some recognition he ignored me. Like his father, he appeared to be giving his entire concentration to his food.

‘And what about you, er...Dawood?’ I ventured, while the girls started an argument over which of them was the most likely to take drugs when they got the chance. ‘What do you do for a living?’

As soon as I said it I could have kicked myself. It was the question my mother asked first, and because of that I’d always made a point in the past of letting people tell me what they did only if they chose to.

‘He’s a raging capitalist.’ Jennifer answered for him—very fondly, though, I thought, as if she had said ‘he grows beautiful orchids in his greenhouse.’ ‘He owns a string of turf accountants, as he still quaintly calls them—betting shops to the rest of the world.’

I was tempted to ask how many, but I didn’t want to sound any more like my mother than I already had so I just said, ‘That’s interesting,’ lamely, and, because the girls were still squabbling, I took the opportunity to look around me.

The dining room was very beautiful. It had the typical grand high ceiling of a fine Victorian house, with a huge crystal chandelier that hung from a rose cornice directly above us, but there the period theme ended. The rest of the furnishings were otherwise a shrine to modernism, smooth-lined and clutter-free.

Jennifer had obviously been watching me.

‘It all works surprisingly well, doesn’t it, Jo?’ she mused. ‘The old and new cleverly fused in accordance with Feng Shui principles. I had everything made by Jeffry Saville—you know, the furniture designer and Feng Shui master.’

I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter because a nod of interest was all that she needed to trigger a lengthy lecture on positive energies and how they can be harnessed in order to create health, happiness and prosperity. She gave a few examples of lives she had changed through her work: a woman who’d met the perfect man; another who landed the job of her dreams; a businessman who sold his company for twice as much as expected. It all sounded just a bit trite to me, but I think I made the right noises. She finished off by suggesting that I seriously consider consulting her myself (special prices for friends of the family) and by giving me half a dozen cards to distribute amongst my contacts.

And throughout the three girls chattered and threw in the odd sarcastic comment that was completely ignored by Jennifer, as were her son and her husband.

The food had been delicious: the tuna followed up by a salad of exotic fresh fruits, some of which I’d never even seen before, let alone tasted. And afterwards we took coffee or herbal tea in the gigantic sitting room. It was two rooms knocked into one, Jennifer explained, and was just about to demonstrate some of the changes she’d made in Feng Shui terms when Sid announced that I had to get home by ten to receive an important phone call.

His father looked relieved and the women of the house deeply disappointed. Marinda (or Darinda) had been pressing me to look at her bedroom, though I think she had an ulterior motive. I suspected she had more questions for me on the outside world, and I was very relieved that I wouldn’t now be expected to further exhaust my limited imagination.

I bid cheerful farewells and offered my heartfelt thanks for a lovely evening to a sombre Mr Perrez and the still alarmingly lively women in his life, and had hardly ever felt quite so relieved to take my leave from anywhere. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the family. I did. A lot. It was just that I was afraid of not living up to their expectations of me, and with a few minutes longer I would probably have given myself away as the dull and ordinary person I felt compared to them.

‘That’s quite a family you have,’ I said as we started down the drive, with the females still waving us off from the doorway.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It was unfair to thrust them on you without warning you first. But I was afraid you wouldn’t come if I did.’

‘But they’re terrific—’ I began.

‘But only in small doses, aye? I don’t usually subject people to more than an hour at a time and you managed nearly two.’ He turned to me admiringly. ‘Who’s Nicola, by the way?’

‘Ah... So you didn’t swallow my story, I take it?’

‘I read the same article, but I still felt sorry for Nicola. I take it by the relish you used that she isn’t your favourite person?’

‘You take it correctly,’ I said. Then something suddenly occurred to me. ‘Was that some sort of test you were putting me through?’

‘As a matter of fact, yes.’ He kept his eyes firmly on the road ahead now.

‘What sort of test?’ I asked carefully. Then a worrying thought. ‘You’re not thinking of asking me to marry you, are you?’

We were at a traffic light now, and I heard Sid laugh aloud for the very first time.

‘Sorry,’ he said when he recovered, ‘that was very rude of me.’

Though I was relieved on the whole, it did indeed seem a bit rude, but I chose not to take offence. ‘Well, what was it all about, then?’

We started up again and he returned to normal dour Sid mode.

‘I thought if you could cope with them that you could cope with working for me.’

I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I took a stab when I remembered the paper serviette that he had written on. ‘Are you talking about Pisus UK?’

He nodded. ‘I’ve been on to the receivers and I’ve got an appointment with them early next week.’

‘And I thought it was the wine talking,’ I said, which was better than telling him I’d thought he was mad.

He glanced over at me and looked a bit hurt.

‘I never allow alcohol to do the talking for me,’ he said sternly. ‘All I need to know now is if you meant what you said about working for me or whether in your case it really was the wine?’

I didn’t need to think about it. Sid might be morose, and childlike, but he could also be an enormously impressive young man. I had every faith in him talking those Suits round to his way of thinking. And with the backing of a father who owned a string of turf accountants, the sky was the limit as far as I could see.

‘Well, I’ve only had one glass tonight, and if you’ll allow me that then the answer is a definite yes.’

***

At ten past ten Dan opened the door to Steve and found that he wasn’t alone. He was so stunned to see Libby standing comfortably next to him—as if they were old friends or something—that for a moment he didn’t know what to say.

‘Well, are you going to leave us out here on this cold landing all night?’ Steve finally asked.

‘Come on in,’ Dan said, standing aside, taking the bag that Steve shoved in his direction. ‘I just didn’t know that you two were acquainted.’

‘We weren’t,’ said Steve cheerfully, ‘until about five minutes ago.’

They all three moved on to the sitting room, where Dan dumped Steve’s bag on the leatherette armchair.

‘We met outside,’ Libby explained. ‘I went down to empty some stuff in the bins and bumped into Steve as he was getting out of his taxi.’

‘And when I realised she lived above you,’ Steve put in, winking slyly at Dan so Libby couldn’t see, ‘I asked her in for a coffee. Didn’t think you’d mind, since you’re neighbours.’

‘Of course I don’t mind,’ Dan managed to lie. ‘Coffee all round, then?’ Cursing Steve under his breath, he started towards the kitchen but Libby headed him off.

‘I’ll make it,’ she said, ‘while you two do some catching up.’ She was acting like someone who knew her way round his flat only too well, which annoyed Dan slightly.

‘You and she—you know...?’ Steve said quietly as soon as Libby closed the door behind her.

‘Definitely not.’ Dan shook his head firmly.

Steve looked surprised, then pleased. ‘Good. You won’t mind if I nudge in, then, will you?’

‘You fancy
Libby
?
’

Steve moved his bag off the chair, noticed the sag in the middle of the seat and flopped on the sofa instead.

‘Still into junk shop chic, I see,’ he said with a grin. ‘And don’t sound so shocked,’ he said, quietly now. ‘She’s a good-looking woman. In fact when I saw her outside I thought it was Jo at first. Similar build and hair.’

Dan frowned at this, then realised he’d thought the same thing when she turned up at his door with the food. She even wore the same sort of clothes that Jo wore.

‘Fair enough,’ he said, sitting on the mock leather arm of the chair rejected by Steve. The springs had collapsed in the seat and it was long overdue a visit to the local tip.

‘She’s been telling me a bit about Jo. How she just walked out without a word.’