Conditional Love Read online

‘It’s all right for you, Daddy’s Girl. He took you out for lessons. I had to pay for my own.’ Emma was hopping around the living room, fizzing with indignation.

  ‘He did take you out in his car. You called him a cretin and told him he drove like Mr Bean.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have been able to afford a car anyway. Whereas you got a lump sum towards that Beetle.’

  ‘The same amount you had to set up your studio, if I remember correctly.’

  I stared at them both, envy making my heart thump and my breathing quicken. They had no idea how lucky they were. Despite their petty squabbles, both of them knew that their dad loved them, that he had taken care of them since the day they were born. Whenever they needed him, he dashed over from Mansfield like a middle-aged knight in his trusty Volvo. My dad hadn’t even hung around to see me arrive into the world.

  It wasn’t fair. Part of me wanted to shout at them, tell them to be grateful for their close family bond. But it wasn’t their fault that my own family was such a mess. They were probably doing what all sisters do. I wouldn’t know.

  My father had deprived me of growing up as part of a family. I might even have had a sister of my own.

  I’m doing it. I’m going to meet my dad.

  A light bulb switched on in my brain. Not one of those energy-saving bulbs, which take thirty seconds to light up, by which time you’ve left the room. This was a bright halogen spot light, illuminating my thoughts with a piercing beam.

  My decision was made. I was going to accept Great Aunt Jane’s challenge. Not simply so that I could prevent my father from inheriting her estate, but to show him what he had been missing all these years. And to tell him exactly what I thought of his negligence.

  A shiver of apprehension surged up from the base of my spine.

  ‘What’s up, Sophie?’ asked Emma, taking a breather from the verbal sparring. ‘You look very serious.’

  I made us all a mug of tea, brought the tray into the living room and sat down next to Jess before blurting out my news. Both of them were speechless when I told them how much the old lady had in savings.

  ‘Good for you, Sophie,’ said Emma, cradling her mug in her hands. ‘I’m proud of you; I know you hate stepping outside your comfort zone.’

  ‘I’m terrified,’ I admitted. Even thinking about it gave me goose pimples. ‘But I can’t get away from the fact that this is what the old lady wanted me to do.’ Of course she could have been a sandwich short of a picnic, for all I knew.

  ‘It’s like a fairy tale,’ said Jess dreamily. She blew on her tea. ‘You’ll be rich, babes.’

  I shook my head. ‘I’ll probably leave it in the bank for the future. It’s the bungalow I’m not sure about.’

  ‘You wouldn’t want to live there, would you?’ scoffed Emma.

  Oh, so she clearly didn’t. A wave of disappointment splashed over me.

  ‘Not as it is, no, but the architect I met had some good ideas.’

  Emma choked on her tea. ‘How can you even think about moving to that place? Your idea of DIY is painting your own nails, for heaven’s sake!’

  ‘You wouldn’t catch me moving out to the sticks,’ added Jess, shaking her head. ‘It’s too far from school, for one thing.’

  ‘And it’s full of sheep and mud,’ Emma added. Jess nodded sagely.

  At least I’d managed to get them back on the same side. Sadly, at my expense.

  ‘This is going to come as a big shock to your mum. Remember where your loyalties lie, babes.’ Jess gave me one of her stern teacher looks and my insides quivered with guilt. ‘Have you considered her in your plans?’

  ‘I’m still working on that one,’ I muttered, hiding my face behind my mug. ‘Anyway, better get on.’ I picked up the tray and scampered back to the kitchen.

  Well, that had gone down well. So much for the three of us transplanting our communal life to the country.

  I stood at the sink and poured the rest of my tea away. I opened the fridge and took out a bottle of Pinot Grigio. There were times in life when tea just wouldn’t cut it and this was one of them.

  My light bulb moment had included a ruse for dealing with my mother which I wasn’t prepared to share with Jess and Emma. It was a risky strategy, but the alternative was too scary to contemplate. Mr Whelan’s granddad sprang to mind. I would imagine that amongst his old adages was a saying that, ‘If you can’t say anything nice, say nothing.’ So that was precisely what I planned to do.

  It was seven o’clock. Time to tell my mother.

  Mum answered the Skype call on my second attempt. As usual I was struck by her bright blue eyes and delicate features. Her blonde hair was wrapped up in a towel, turban-style, and her petite frame was enveloped in an exotic kimono. I had overtaken her in height and weight when I was a teenager and always felt like a moose beside her. Tonight she was sitting on her little balcony, brimming with energy, and even though it was only April, she was already tanned and looked far healthier than me.

  ‘Buggering hell, I can’t see your lovely face, my darling!’ She frowned and leaned in close to her laptop. ‘Is your webcam on?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, lying through my teeth. I would only manage to pull this off if she couldn’t see me. ‘Never mind. The internet must be playing up.’

  ‘Smack it one!’ she suggested. ‘That sometimes works.’

  I should have made some notes. My mind had gone blank and I couldn’t think how to introduce the subject of the will.

  ‘Are you working tonight?’ I asked.

  ‘Exciting news!’ Mum wriggled in her seat and beamed at me. ‘Paulo has asked me to do some Madonna numbers tonight. Solo! Been practising all week. What do you think, your old mum doing Madonna?’

  What I thought was: Why couldn’t she be a school secretary like other people’s mums? What I said was: ‘Well done you!’

  ‘Thanks, love,’ she continued. ‘People are fed up with Abba these days. To be honest, if I never have to sing ‘Mamma Mia’ again, it’ll be too bloody soon. Meryl Streep’s got a lot to bleedin’ answer for.’

  I squeezed my eyes shut tight and tried to blank out the image of my mother prancing round the stage in a pink corset with cone-shaped boobs. I was suddenly struck by a brainwave.

  ‘I’d love to see you perform as Madonna. Maybe I’ll come over to visit you soon.’

  Mum clapped her hands together. ‘Would you? Ooh, I’d love you to come. But I thought you were saving?’

  I flushed. She did have a point. I had a habit of pleading poverty and rarely visited and wild horses wouldn’t drag her away from Spain. Forty-eight hours at Christmas was her limit. She claimed England gave her Seasonal Affective Disorder, twelve months of the year. All of which meant that we didn’t see each other often enough.

  ‘Funny thing, actually.’ Was it me or had my voice gone up an octave? I cleared my throat nervously. ‘Do you remember a Mrs Jane Kennedy?’

  Mum’s face changed from china doll to suspicious ferret. ‘What’s she been saying?’ Her eyes narrowed and she clamped her jaw together.

  ‘Nothing!’ I squeaked. ‘At least, not for a few months. She died in February.’

  ‘How do you know? What’s it got to do with you? What’s been going on?’

  Poor Mum, her face had gone an angry shade of red and huge blotches were appearing on her neck and spreading down to her cleavage.

  ‘Her solicitor contacted me. Apparently I’m the sole heir to her estate!’ I kept my tone bright and breezy, but Mum was having none of it.

  ‘You’re taking the piss!’

  Here we go.

  I shrank away from the screen. Mum’s language has always been colourful. I blamed her for my inability to swear properly. The more potty-mouthed she was, the more ridiculous my cursing became.

  I would never recover from the time she referred to my secondary school as a shithole. Fairly innocent as bad language goes, you might think. But uttered to Petra, my fifteen-year-old German exchange partner as Mum tucked
a packet of HubbaBubba into our pockets for break time snack, it was lethal. Fast-forward nine hours to when the coach carrying us back from our day trip to Skegness pulled through the school gates accompanied by the sound of forty adolescent Germans chanting, ‘Shithole, shithole, shithole’, and only then can you appreciate the depths of my teenage pain.

  Mum wagged a finger at the screen. ‘Sophie, don’t you have anything to do with it. Don’t even answer their letters.’

  Awkward. Too late for that. I cringed, watching Mum work herself up into a right old lather.

  ‘Don’t get yourself upset, Mum. Remember your solo later.’

  ‘I mean it. She was a meddling old bat.’

  Hmm. Great Aunt Jane had mentioned something of that ilk.

  ‘Nosey bitch. Wouldn’t leave us alone. Wanted pictures of you and all sorts.’

  I flinched. Much as I wanted to side with my mum, I couldn’t reconcile the Jane she was describing with the happy young bride in that wedding photograph.

  ‘It was good of her to remember me in her will.’

  ‘You can’t do this to me, Sophie. It would break my heart,’ she pleaded. ‘You and me, we’ve got each other, you don’t want to get involved with that lot. Next thing you know, Terry will be back on the scene.’

  I held my breath. She only ever called him Terry. Not ‘your father’. She said that he hadn’t earned the right to be called that. I exhaled slowly, letting the air out between my lips as if I was blowing out a candle.

  Stay calm.

  If only she knew how close to the mark she was. Thank goodness I had come up with the broken webcam idea; my sneaky omissions were about as easy to spot as a white bra under nightclub lights.

  Mum twisted her laptop round and I shared the view from her balcony. I could just make out the deep blue of the swimming pool mirroring the glimmer of ocean in the distance, the dusky sky tinged with orange from the setting sun. The laptop turned and Mum’s face filled the screen again.

  ‘Forget all about it, Sophie, and come out here for a few days, I’ll even pay for your flight. It’s so beautiful in spring. I wish you could smell the evening air – orange blossom and jasmine – my little piece of heaven. What do you say?’

  Right, I was going to tell her.

  ‘Mum, I’ve decided to accept the inheritance.’

  Her face fell, her shoulders sagged and she shut her eyes for one, two, three seconds. Then they sprang back open and she pulled herself up tall as she launched into phase two of the guilt offensive.

  ‘Well, thank you very much for ruining my night!’ She paused and turned her face from the screen. ‘I’m very disappointed in you. I brought you up to be independent. Pay your own way.’

  That was unfair; she’d bobbed off to Spain as soon as I was legally an adult, I hadn’t had much choice to be anything other than independent!

  ‘What happened to that glittering future you used to harp on about? Where’s your sense of adventure? I expected you to make a career for yourself. But no, you’ve been festering at that bloody newspaper for years. Sometimes I wonder how the hell I managed to give birth to such a wimp, I really do.’

  My mum’s face suddenly loomed large, filling the screen. Then it went black; she’d cut me off.

  Blimey! I reeled back from her attack. I’d touched a nerve there. It had been years since the subject of my father had come up between us and I’d forgotten how strongly she could react.

  I waited for her to call back in case it had been an accident. After five minutes I gave up, logged on to Facebook and updated my status to miserable. Within seconds two of my so-called friends liked my comment. What was that supposed to mean? They weren’t supposed to like it, they were supposed to try and cheer me up. I logged off my laptop with shaking hands.

  The sound of Jess and Emma laughing in the kitchen made its way through my closed door. Now I felt worse. I’d naively assumed that it would be a relief to come to a decision.

  So why was it I felt so wretched?

  twelve

  The morning bus into the city was packed. It was impossible to hold a private conversation while standing nose to nose with strangers. As usual, there was standing room only by the time Emma and I got on. I was sure the man behind me with the lumpy briefcase on his knee was nudging the corner of it into my bottom on purpose and there was a studenty scruffbag opposite shoving huge sweat patches my way as he held onto the overhead rail.

  ‘When I inherit that money, the first thing I’m going to do is buy a car, even if it’s an old banger,’ I grumbled, raising my voice to reach Emma, who was standing three passengers away. ‘Anything has got to be an improvement on this bus journey every day.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Emma called back, grabbing onto a pole as the bus veered round a corner. ‘Rock climbing in Derbyshire with sixty kids maybe?’

  Emma was wedged between two teenaged girls who were shouting to each other to avoid having to remove their earphones. She was trying to talk without opening her mouth. Emma was convinced that public transport was a hotbed of germs. One wrong in-breath and she would be infected with God knows what. One of the girls had a cold sore; she definitely wouldn’t want to catch that.

  ‘True,’ I replied, ‘but strangely Jess seemed really excited about that.’

  ‘Weirdo,’ said Emma, rolling her eyes. ‘Mind you, knowing her, she’ll be copping off with the climbing instructor by now. “Ooh, I’ve got a wedgie from this harness. Please can you sort me out?”’

  Jess was a sucker for a hero; her ideal man was a cross between Daniel Craig and Mr Darcy. Add a uniform into the mix and she lost all use of her legs. Emma was far less fussy. She was flattered by any male attention, mainly due to the fact that she treated her red hair as if it was a form of disability. I’ve even heard her declare breathily, ‘He liked me even though I’ve got ginger hair!’ The daft bat. She had gorgeous hair.

  I knew Emma like the back of my hand. Deep down she was just as romantic as her sister and was secretly searching for someone to sweep her off her feet. Unfortunately, it was usually Jess who inspired such devotion; Emma’s abrupt manner had a habit of making men run for the hills. On paper, Emma had the better figure, tall and willowy, whereas Jess was short and plump. But Jess was naturally so much better with people. If only Emma could work on being a bit more empathetic.

  ‘Sorry Jess isn’t being very supportive about the will thing,’ said Emma.

  There you go; I must have sent her some telepathic empathy.

  ‘Thanks. She’s entitled to her opinion I suppose.’ I shrugged. I had been hurt by her attitude, but didn’t really want to get into it now at volume, across the bus.

  Emma continued. ‘You know how she is about family. Family comes first, and all that. Unless it’s me, then I come second, of course.’

  I grinned and looked out of the window. Only two more stops until Emma got off. The skies were grey and menacing clouds looked ready to explode.

  ‘How did your mum take the news about the will?’

  ‘Worse than expected, she cut me off in the end.’

  Emma pulled a face. ‘Oh dear. Well done, for facing up to her. That’s the hard part over. What did she say about your dad?’

  I felt my face flush. I shifted from foot to foot and swallowed. Why was I so nervous? Emma was my best friend; she had stuck by me through all manner of disasters.

  ‘I didn’t tell her. I figured she doesn’t need to know. I’ll just make sure she never finds out, it’ll be less painful that way.’

  Emma gasped so dramatically that everyone on the bus turned to stare.

  ‘You lied! Sophie, you lied to your mum?’

  The teenagers pulled their earphones out to tune into the oldies having a row.

  ‘More of an omission, I’d say,’ I muttered, casting my eyes down.

  ‘You wimped out and lied? That’s despicable!’

  It was a toss-up whose face was redder: mine from mortification or hers from being cross.

>   ‘I was so proud of you for taking action for once.’

  I cowered as she narrowed her eyes. ‘You’re making a whole heap of trouble for yourself. What if she finds out?’

  Curious faces peered at me, waiting for an answer.

  ‘I…I…’ I was speechless. I’d let everyone down, including the other passengers who were desperate for more gossip.

  The brakes hissed and the bus came to a standstill. Emma stared at me and hoisted her bag onto her shoulder.

  ‘Jess isn’t going to be impressed with this,’ she warned, sweeping past me.

  The bus decanted her and several other commuters out into the morning rain and I shuffled further up the bus into an empty seat and buried my face into my coat.

  The morning dragged by at work. Misery shrouded me like a hooded cloak. I couldn’t even be bothered to call Mr Whelan and let him know that I’d made my decision. I sighed and forced my eyes to focus on the computer screen. In theory, I was supposed to be creating promotional ideas for a travel agent’s May bank holiday advertising campaign. But all I could think of was Mayday, Mayday. Help. Abort mission.

  Somehow I had managed to alienate all my chief supporters. Until Valentine’s Day, my life had been tripping along quite nicely. Since then I’d been dumped for being boring, accused of being a selfish wimp and my mother wasn’t talking to me.

  My mum’s words had really stung. I hadn’t realised she had such a low opinion of me. There was an element of truth in what she’d said; I was ‘festering’ in the same old job. But it wasn’t as simple as that.

  I concentrated on my breathing for a few moments. I needed a friend. Someone to be unequivocally on my side. The only person who was being nice to me at the moment was Mr Whelan, the man paid by my great aunt to settle her affairs. How sad was that!

  The architect’s face materialised in my mind’s eye. Hmm, strange choice. To get him onside, I’d need a wet nose and a waggy tail. Besides which, he was another man paid by the hour for his services.

  Blimey! I fanned my cheeks. I didn’t mean it like that. Thank goodness I hadn’t said those words out loud! I peered over the top of my screen and checked that my colleagues weren’t watching. No. I was safe. Jason was watching YouTube and Maureen was on the phone to a client.