Chapter 2
2
It had been years since she’d thought about their wedding, but now with her ex-husband’s wedding invitation scrunched up in her handbag, Lucie found she couldn’t help herself.
Their wedding had been low-key – a trip to the registry office and afterwards, a sit-down hotel dinner for about thirty guests. It had been a struggle to winnow down the family and friends on both sides to get to the limit imposed by her dad’s wedding budget. Her dad was very well-off now, of course, but back then, he’d still been building up his business and there hadn’t been much money to spare for lavish wedding events. Especially when they were unplanned.
At the age of twenty-five, Lucie had married Miles, six months after she’d first met him and two months after she’d discovered she was pregnant. A hurry, a rush, a whirlwind even. But that was handsome, ever-energetic Miles, always pushing on to the next thing, determined to get on with life, make his fortune, build his empire. And she’d been caught up in it all; plus, it had seemed like the right thing to do – marry him, have their baby, grow up and start creating their family and their future together.
Until she’d met Miles, she’d been quite a different person. She’d thought of herself as arty, creative, and just a little bit cool. She had an architecture degree under her belt and a slightly ‘wild child’ past. She’d studied in London and had sought out the cool crowd, snagging invites to the most fashionable gigs, clubs and parties. She had plenty of colourful stories to tell about sneaking celebrities and singers in and out of clubs and gigs to avoid fans, photographers, or even people they owed money to. She had been a regular at the kind of house parties where the models and the bands of the moment dropped in. Somewhere, someone had a photo of her lighting Kate Moss’s cigarette. Yes, back in the 1990s, Lucie had counted several pretty famous stars as casual friends.
But when she’d met Miles, she had been impressed with his ‘let’s work hard and get on’ philosophy. Until she’d met him, she’d been working, yes, but she’d been coasting along, hovering, waiting on the sidelines for her life to begin. But once Miles arrived, she was quickly married, living in a house with a garden in commuter-belt Bromley, waiting for her first baby to arrive. ‘Where is being cool and arty going to get you?’ she remembered him asking. ‘It’s time to toughen up and knuckle down.’
Together, they had worked relentlessly, deciding early on that one child was enough because they were full of plans and ambition and wanted to give their daughter, Zoe, a wonderful life. So Miles had carried on his day job as an estate agent for several years, but they’d started building Miles’s property business and Lucie’s interior design service on the side until those companies were big enough to work in full-time.
And so much success had come their way, pushing them on to dream bigger, aim higher, earn… and borrow… more and more. Looking back, of course she knew she should have concerned herself more not just with her own business, but also with Miles’s. She should have asked far more questions and she should have regularly poked about in his profit and loss spreadsheets herself.
But he’d always assured her that everything was fine: ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ve got it all under control with the accountants. Clever people – they’re keeping me right. You concentrate on what you’re good at – picking paint colours, choosing fabrics, making your customers’ houses and my offices look fantastic. There is tonnes of money rolling in, Lucie-Lu .’
And that was how it had felt, for years. Current accounts stuffed with tens of thousands of pounds, beautiful cars, beautiful clothes, wonderful holidays, lavish nights out, the very best schools for Zoe. A relentless whirl of more properties, more projects, more clients and more success.
Until, about five years ago now, when she’d first felt just the hint of an uneasy undertow… That was the way she thought of it. As if something unsuspected and dangerous was lurking beneath the calm waters. Letters from the tax office arrived on the doormat too often. Miles developed a late-night whisky-drinking habit, seemed to lose his relentless optimism, and then came phone calls that he would leave the room to answer.
‘Nothing to worry about. Honestly, darling, trust me.’
‘Oh, some cashflow issues, it will all be sorted next month when that big payment comes in.’
When she thought back now, she realised she had let the undertow exist in the background, on the edge of her thoughts, for far too long. So when it had all finally come to the surface, it was far too late for her to be able to do anything about the situation.
In the end, it wasn’t the debts, it was the deception that had strained their marriage to breaking point. She’d still thought she’d been in love with him until the sheer scale of how much he’d hidden from her and how much he’d risked, without ever consulting her, had finally become clear. Desperate, but sure everything would come round soon, he’d borrowed from far too many lenders, including high-interest, short-term loans. He’d left huge tax bills unpaid, until their remaining assets, even bank accounts, had all been frozen, and he hadn’t told her anything about any of it. Worst of all, he’d bet their home by forging her signature … and he’d left her to imagine that everything was just carrying on as usual when, in fact, it was all crashing to the ground.
The uneasy undertow, the feeling that things weren’t as they should be; that’s what she should have paid attention to, not just about the finances, but even all those years ago when she’d first been introduced to Miles and made her choice.
At their wedding, she’d worn a lovely cream dress, not expensive, an off-the-peg bridesmaid dress from a high-street shop. Her dark hair, long then, had been piled onto her head then adorned with a gold band and a scattering of small, cream roses. She’d carried a bouquet of cream, white and green and she’d worn her mother’s drop pearl earrings.
Just starting her third month of pregnancy, she’d thrown up before the ceremony, but apart from a fuller cleavage, she’d still looked girlish and slim. Looking back now, twenty-five seemed young to get married, but back then, she’d felt grown up and determined. She’d made her decision. She’d been completely convinced she was in love with Miles, wanted to marry him, have their baby, and start building their fabulous lives together.
But right at the back of her mind, she’d known even then that there was an undertow. She hadn’t admitted it to herself at the time, but she could take it out from her memory and examine it a little more closely now. The truth was – she’d never been certain that Miles was the man she should be spending her life with. She’d just tried hard to convince herself, to make it work.
The year before she met Miles, there had been a work colleague she’d been so powerfully attracted to, convinced that something was going to develop between them, certain that this man was The One for her. But somehow, despite all the talking, laughing, confiding, longing looks and growing sense that a fire was building between them, the relationship never got started. Either he was seeing someone, or she was with someone, or one of them was sent off on a work project. The timing had never worked for them. Convinced she was in love, Lucie had pined for him, but never told him.
What could you do when you were twenty-four and desperate to have love, and for your grown-up future to begin? You couldn’t just sit around and pine and hope that your unavailable love would suddenly become available. No, you had to get out there and meet a man like Miles, full of charm, enthusiasm and energy, be dazzled and believe that you wanted to get caught up in his whirlwind and be carried along. ‘ Toughen up and knuckle down .’
All the time she’d been married, she’d tried not to dwell on the decision she’d made back then to give up on the other man and actively choose Miles. But now, she found herself wondering how different things could have been.
From the window of the bus, Lucie could now see her stop coming into view on this beautiful, leafy street with its generous, comfortable houses, so she reached over and pressed the bell to alert the bus driver. This street had never been her home. Her parents had moved here long after she and her older brother, Richard, had grown up and moved away. The charming, spacious house with its luxurious garden had been chosen just a few years before her father’s planned retirement, with her parents brushing off all suggestions that it was too big, as they insisted they would need the spare bedrooms for family visits and the generous flower beds, lawns and vegetable patch to ‘keep us from disappearing into the couch’.
Alighting from the bus, Lucie walked to the front gate of the house and paused, not able to resist a smile. The front garden was full of cheerful, colourful flowers – hollyhocks, delphiniums, tulips and stocks – as well as three busy bird tables and a stone bird bath where a cluster of sparrows was lined up to take a dip. The bright flowers and the bird playground had been her dad’s idea. All part of his ‘this place needs cheering up’ philosophy after the sudden death of her mother eight years ago.
So, with Lucie’s help, the awful period of grieving had been followed by busy weeks of decorating when they had both been so relieved to have a project and all the distraction of making the house over with bright flowers and colourful garden furniture outside and, inside, yellow walls, dazzling white and blue walls, vibrant modern paintings, bright curtains and sofas and, on her dad’s insistence, surround sound, so he could play jazz, Elvis, Classic FM and The Beatles in his sitting room, kitchen, bedroom and sunroom.
‘Life is so precious and short,’ he’d said to her so often after her mother’s death. ‘You’ve got to remember to live every single day.’ So, even now, when he was facing a terminal illness himself, he was relentlessly cheerful and optimistic, and Lucie was so grateful for his positive energy because the thought of losing him too was never far away. Over the years since her mother’s death and in the wake of Lucie’s divorce, they’d become very close. Her dad had become her mentor, her sounding board, her constant, and she wasn’t ready to think about life without him. He was ‘seriously’ ill. That was all she could admit to. She wasn’t ready to deal with the word ‘terminally’ yet.
Moments after she’d rung the bell, her father’s carer, Domenica, opened the door with a wide smile.
‘Hello, Lucie, good to see you. How are you today?’ she asked.
‘Good, good,’ she insisted, ‘and how is the reluctant patient?’
‘Good grief! Never call me that!’ she heard her dad shout out from the sitting room. ‘Patient? Never! I’m the im patient !’
Lucie and Domenica exchanged a smile.
‘He’s doing just fine,’ Domenica said. ‘Go on in. I will be in the kitchen fixing you a sandwich.’
‘No, really, I’m…’ Lucie began, but she already knew it was hopeless. Domenica would make her the sandwich and insist she ate it, and that sandwich would be so beautifully assembled and delicious looking that Lucie would not be able to resist. So, she said, ‘Thank you very much.’
‘Here comes Lucie,’ her dad greeted her, arms out wide for a hug from his spot on the sofa, blanket over his knees, his trusty copy of The Telegraph open on the crossword page. Yes, he was terribly skinny, but he was already nut brown because he spent every available moment chasing rays in the garden, and his lean and craggy face only made his smile all the wider and his bright eyes more vibrant.
‘Hello, darling girl,’ he said as she leaned in for a hug, trying not to notice how thin his back and shoulders were now, how light the arms were around her, because then she would have to think about how little precious time was left with him.
‘Hello, Dad.’
‘Pull up a pew’ – he gestured to the space on the sofa beside his feet – ‘and give me another word for pessimistic, begins with “g”, six letters.’
She considered.
‘Pessimism… should be right up your street.’ He gave her a cheeky wink.
‘Ha ha,’ But she thought about her current mood and the matching weather, and came out with, ‘Gloomy?’
‘That’s the one!’ he exclaimed, writing it into the squares. ‘You’re the expert. So, what are you gloomy about today, my darling?’
‘Are you asking because I look gloomy, or because there’s always something?’
‘Both, I suppose,’ he said.
She sighed and leaned back into the comfortable cushions behind her.
‘Guess what arrived in the post today?’ she began.
‘Your invitation to Miles’s wedding in the south of France,’ her dad replied, to her astonishment.
‘How do you know? Don’t tell me the bloody man has sent you one as well?’
‘Ha! That would be a bit much even for Miles. No. No invitation for the ex-wife’s father, who is possibly going to have pegged it by July. No, Zoe messaged, even sent me a photo of the thing. Perpignan, eh? That’s a very nice part of the world. You should go.’
‘Dad!’ Lucie snorted. ‘Of course I’m not going to go. I’m not going to sit at his wedding like some sad spare part, clapping while he does the first dance with his nubile new wife. Bloody hell, no, never!’
‘Lovely part of the world though… and July. It’ll be hot. Plus, you can get your money’s worth, eat a huge dinner and drink all the drinks at his expense,’ he smiled and waggled his eyebrows at her.
Despite her outrage, Lucie did have to think about that for a moment. It was three whole years since she’d last been abroad and too long to mention since someone had last bought her dinner.
With a glance at her dad, Lucie had to ask, ‘So, how has he got the money to pay for a lovely French wedding, two years after very narrowly avoiding bankruptcy not just for himself but for me too?’
Her dad shook his head and looked back down at the crossword. ‘Damned if I know. Maybe something has turned around for him again. He always had the luck of the devil. Or maybe she’s paying. He has very good taste in wives, or he did have when he married you.’
‘Thank you.’ She smiled at her dad but suddenly felt that small shudder of fear. How could it be true that he wasn’t going to be here for much longer? And how on earth was she going to cope with that?
Domenica came back into the room just then to deliver the kind of luscious sandwich Lucie had come to be very grateful for, along with a glass of water, and a small milky drink for her dad.
‘What flavour are we going with today, Domenica?’ her dad asked.
‘Vanilla and strawberry,’ she replied.
‘Absolutely delicious,’ he said, picking the glass up and taking a sip. ‘No one tells you that the best part about being ill is that you get to have milkshakes instead of meals,’ he added. ‘Another childhood dream fulfilled!’
‘OK, I’ll leave you two to gossip and finish the crossword,’ Domenica said as she began to head out of the room again.
‘Perfect, and thank you. Now, Lucie,’ her father began, ‘an inconvenient tax, begins with an “I”, eleven letters.’
‘Dad, that isn’t in the crossword,’ she said, telling him off.
‘No, but I know you don’t want to talk about these things, but we have to, well ahead of HQ and D-Day.’
‘D-Day’ was what her dad, with his dark and irrepressible humour, had nicknamed his impending death, while ‘HQ’ was the hospice that he would be going into when carers, Domenica and Jacqui, could no longer manage looking after him at home. Lucie suspected this inconvenient eleven-lettered tax was ‘inheritance’. And even though thinking about him dead filled her with dread, her dad, ever the businessman, was going to want to talk through some financials.
‘I’ve had Eric, my lawyer, over, and we are all tidied up and good to go, which is a great relief, I can tell you.’
‘Dad…’ Lucie warned; she really didn’t want to talk about it. Talking about what would happen to the house, how his savings would be shared out, who would get his beloved paintings, or record collection… it was horrible, morbid, awful. It felt as if it was bringing his death closer. And the idea of gaining from his death, which she knew she would, was terrible. It made her feel incredibly guilty.
‘Now, just listen and I’ll go over the basics,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll get Eric to send you and Ritchie a copy of the latest will. Does that sound OK?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘OK, here we go.’
Then, quite cheerfully, as if he was running through a new project, or a planting scheme for the garden, he gave her the outline. The house would not be sold until after his death, because that was more ‘tax-efficient’, and the money was to be split between her and Ritchie, with a generous sum also going to Zoe, and Ritchie’s two children. There were pension plans and investment accounts that she and Ritchie would inherit between them and there was also a healthy savings account, which would pay for Domenica and Jacqui for as long as needed and give them a severance lump sum.
‘You and Ritchie used to squabble to the death when you were little, but you’re civilised grown-ups now, so I trust you to sort out what you want to take from the house between you. See if the grandchildren want anything too – especially Zoe, as she’ll be setting up home – then flog the rest, and do it cheerfully, my darling. There will be a healthy old sum in the bank for you when it’s all done and dusted. And you don’t have to share any of it with the ex-Mr Marshal, so that’s good news.’
For a long moment, as she imagined her beloved, endlessly optimistic dad no longer being here and the horrible task of emptying, packing up and selling this lovely house, she swallowed the hard lump in her throat and didn’t have any words for him.
But finally, she managed, ‘Thank you, Dad, for giving it all so much thought. For looking after us and thinking of us all. And now, please can we talk about something else?’
She quickly wiped a stray tear from her cheek as her dad sat up straight, patted her on the knee and replied, ‘Of course, let’s get back to Miles’s wedding and why you should definitely go!’