Scandals

‘It’s all right,’ he told her now. ‘I’m not going to do anything stupid, like going round there and kicking up a fuss. I’ve already tried that, after all.’ He rubbed his hand against his jaw, the contact making a faint rasping sound. He was the image of his father, Rose thought, as she put the sliced vegetables into a bowl, and covered it, her movements practised, calm and minimal, in harmony with the pared-down elegance of the kitchen. Rose liked things to be easy to understand and assess instead of complicated; she liked things to be out in the open instead of hidden away, and all that was reflected in her designs. Just as a cluttered, overfilled mind could conceal forgotten secrets and thoughts that ultimately could grow and fester, so, she felt, could cluttered ‘space’ lead to the same potential hazards.

Nick wasn’t like that, though. Nick was a child damaged by the misery of the early years of his life, and Rose’s heart ached for him.

Although he was trying to conceal them, she could see his bitterness and his anger over the draining, long-drawn-out misery that had been the ending of his marriage, even if those emotions were now banked down under a thin seal of acceptance.

‘What…what’s going to happen about the children?’ Rose had dreaded asking. She and Josh adored their grandchildren, and Rose considered herself fortunate to see as much of them as she did, thanks to the fact that she and Josh lived virtually within walking distance of Nick and Sarah’s house.

‘Sarah’s agreed that I’ll be able to have reasonable access. Reasonable access. Hell, they are my kids, I made them, I—’ He broke off and pushed his hand into his hair. ‘Sorry…but when I think of what this is doing to them, and all because of Sarah’s ruddy father. The poor little sods were crying their eyes out when I left. Bloody Sarah – you think she’d have spared them that, at least until after Christmas.’

Christmas.

Rose bent her head over the bowl, not wanting Nick to guess what she was thinking. For her Christmas meant going ‘home’ to Denham Place, near Macclesfield, and to Amber, her aunt. It meant being part of the large gathering of siblings, cousins and parents that now spanned three generations. But Nick had never truly been comfortable within that group, always holding himself deliberately outside it, and since the boys had been born he had opted out of going altogether, ‘because Sarah wants to go up to Scotland to be with her parents.’

‘Will you be seeing the boys over Christmas?’ Rose asked.

‘Not a hope in hell. Sarah’s taking them to her parents. They’ve never liked me, especially her father. No doubt they’ll have some kilt-wearing chinless wonder waiting in the wings to offer her the comfort of a male shoulder and the right kind of background. Jesus,’ Nick exploded, ‘when I think of the way I’ve bloody half-killed myself to give her the kind of lifestyle she kept on whining that she wanted, only to have her turn round and say that she wants us to separate because I’m always working.’

Rose didn’t say anything. How could she? She knew as well as Nick did himself that there was some justification in Sarah’s accusation, and that the reality was that he loved his work. It enabled him to express the aggression within him that came from his struggle to withstand the cruelty of his childhood, living with a stepfather who had beaten both him and his mother, until the man had fallen into the road after a heavy bout of drinking and had been hit by a bus, dying of his injuries in hospital. Nick’s work gave him not just financial independence, but also something he needed very badly, and that was the triumph that came from out doing others who, for one reason or another, considered themselves to be his betters.

Rose loved her stepson but she wasn’t blind to his faults or the inner demons that drove him.

There was one thing, though, about Nick that filled her heart with pride and gratitude and that was his abhorrence of physical violence. He could so easily have developed the same behaviour patterns as the man he had once believed to be his father. Even at twelve, with the deprivation he had suffered, he had been a tall, muscular boy. Rose knew she would never forget the evening the headmaster of the excellent local school they had got Nick into had come round to tell them about the taunting Nick had suffered from a group of boys in his class, and the way that Nick had endured that taunting and walked away from it without resorting to the violence they were obviously trying to goad him into.

When Rose had talked to him about it later, he had confided to her that his mother had made him promise before she died that he would never use his fists on anyone, ‘because him that beat us both up isn’t your proper dad, and I want to be proud of you when I think of you with your proper dad when I’m gone.’

Later that night, Rose had cried in Josh’s arms. ‘I can’t bear to think what Nick’s had to go through,’ she had told him. ‘He’s only twelve and he’s had to watch his mum dying, and then come and find you, not knowing how he’d be treated.’

‘Well, I could hardly deny him, could I?’ Josh had said bluntly. ‘Not when he’s the spitting image of me. But I’d still not have taken him in if you hadn’t been willing to have him, Rose.’

The thin, dark-haired boy had indeed been unmistakably Josh’s son when he’d knocked on their door and announced that Josh was his father from, as they’d discovered later, a brief fling he’d had with a young married woman, way back before Rose had even met Josh.

And, of course, Rose, childless by choice because of all that she’d suffered herself because of her mixed race, had taken Nick straight to her heart. Josh had taken a bit more convincing that the boy should stay, but within a month Nick was walking like his dad and talking like him, and Josh, when he thought Rose wasn’t looking, had been bursting with pride in his son.

‘Well,’ Rose said now, ‘you’re welcome to come to Macclesfield for Christmas with us, you know that, Nick’

‘What, and have Saint Robert sympathising with me, whilst secretly they’re all thinking that they don’t blame Sarah. Because, let’s face it, Ma, I don’t fit in with them and I never have. Posh people with posh kids, that’s what they are. No offence meant. As it happens I’ve got a mate who’s going to be spending Christmas in the Bahamas and he’s invited me to join him. Sun, sea and pretty girls – what else could a man want, eh, Ma?’

Rose wished she could do more to help him but she knew how independent he was. Nick had inherited Josh’s sharp instinct for a good business deal. After university he’d studied for an MA and then gone to work on the trading floor of the London arm of an American bank. The Gordon Gekko world of money and Nick had almost been made to go together, Rosie recognised, and neither she nor Josh was surprised that he’d become so successful.

She also understood perfectly well why he had fallen for Sarah, then a newly qualified young accountant, whom he’d met through work, and why Sarah had fallen for him, but she had worried that they were rushing into marriage with expectations that couldn’t be met.

Rose knew there had been differences between them for a while – arguments that had caused problems between them, which neither of them had seemed willing to resolve. Sarah’s father was a wealthy titled Scottish landowner, who, Rose privately thought, was inclined to bully his wife and daughter and who didn’t like Nick. But Rose suspected that Nick sometimes went out of his way to provoke his father-in-law into hostility towards him. Rose actually felt sorry for Sarah, guessing that there were times when the young woman felt torn between her father and her husband.

‘Of course, Sarah’s father is going to be crowing, but if either of them think that I’m going to allow my sons to be packed off to his old public school then they can have another think.’

Rose sighed. She knew that the subject of the education of Nick and Sarah’s two young sons, Alex and Neil, had led to the most bitter of their quarrels. Sarah’s father felt the two boys should be educated at his old public school, as boarders ‘to make men of them’, whereas Nick wanted the boys to attend his own old school.

Nick might like to come across as a bit of a cockney wide boy when it suited him, and in order to infuriate his father-in-law, but the reality was far more complex than that.

‘Cup of tea?’ Rose went to fill the kettle when he nodded. ‘Remember when you first arrived here, Nick?’ she asked him as they waited for it to boil.

‘Do I?’ he laughed. ‘I was nearly crapping meself as I stood on the step, not knowing what to expect. Christ, I hadn’t even known Bert wasn’t my father until my mother told me when she was dying. When you opened the door and saw me there I bet you felt like sending me packing, a snotty-nosed scruffy kid, claiming that your husband was his dad.’

‘What I saw, Nick, was a young boy with more courage than a man three times his age. Not that it wasn’t a shock.’

‘You’re the one with courage,’ Nick told her, going to the fridge to get the milk. ‘We both know that Dad would have had me out on my ear and handed over to Social Services, if he’d had his way. But you wouldn’t let him do that. You told us both that my place was here.’

‘Josh was just shocked. He’d never really have turned his back on you. He simply had no idea that you existed.’

‘It was you, though, who swung things in my favour, Ma. You who loved me before Dad did.’

Rose put her hand on his arm. ‘I was so grateful to your mother, Nick. I still am. When she sent you to us she gave me the best gift I could ever have had, aside from your father’s love.’

‘But…’ Nick challenged ruefully. He knew his stepmother. He knew how much she loved him, how protective she had always been of him, knowing from her own experience how hard it could be to find acceptance when you were ‘different’. He had gone from living on welfare, to having a father who could afford to give him the very best of everything. It had been Rose, though, who had understood that he needed to find his own level, and who had supported him.

‘No buts,’ Rose assured him. ‘Just don’t let your pride lead you into doing something you might regret, Nick. You’ve got two sons—’

‘You mean I’ve provided Sarah’s father with two grandsons,’ he interrupted her bitterly, ‘because that’s what she thinks is more important. It’s no use. I’ve tried…Sarah would probably say that she’s tried as well, if she were sitting here, but all the trying in the world can’t put right what’s gone wrong between us and, to tell the truth, I don’t even think that I want it put right any more.’

‘Oh, Nick…’ Rose hugged her stepson tightly.

In so many ways he was the image of his father, and she would have loved him for that alone. But there were other ways in which he was uniquely himself and she loved him for that as well. Josh had grown up as an only child of loving Jewish parents, who had themselves grown up in the East End of London. His childhood had given him self-confidence and an optimistic self-assurance. Nick had been brought up in an atmosphere of male violence and female fear. He had Josh’s self-confidence, but in Nick that confidence had a much harder edge to it, twinned with cynicism and sometimes even suspicion about the rest of the human race. Where Josh was exuberant and physically affectionate, Nick found it difficult to show his feelings. Whilst Josh had always been ambitious, Nick was far more driven. The so-called ‘big bang’ in 1986, when the financial system in London had become deregulated, had made Nick a very wealthy man, taking him from the trading floor to heading up his own department within one of the world’s most successful merchant banks, but it was rare to see Nick smiling and even more rare to hear him laughing.

‘When’s Dad due back?’ Nick asked, changing the subject.

‘He said he’d be home in time for dinner, but you know how these sessions with the advertising people run on.’

Out of the success of his original hairdressing salon Josh had built up his business, mainly by lending his name to hair-care products and merchandising, and these days he was more of an entrepreneur and businessman than a hands-on hairdresser, although he still insisted on cutting Rose’s hair himself.

‘Black gold, that hair of yours was,’ he often told her. ‘That style I cut for you and the photographs Ollie took of it were where it all began for me, Rosie. You’re my good luck.’

‘Why don’t you stay and have dinner with your dad and me?’ Rose suggested.

Nick shook his head. ‘I’ve got a client to see this evening, and I need to sort myself out with a decent flat before Christmas.’

‘I can’t give you your Christmas present yet because it hasn’t arrived,’ Rose told him.

Nick had come to them with no possessions, and when Rose and Josh had gone round to the house where he and his mother had been living, they’d found a handful of photographs of Nick as a baby with his mother. Recently Rose had sent the best of these photographs to Oliver in New York, and he had promised to produce some new photographs from them, to be framed and given to Nick as his Christmas present. They were Rose’s way of saying to him that neither she nor anyone else had the right to exclude his mother from his life, nor to ignore all that she had done for him, and Rose knew that when Nick saw them he would understand that, just as she knew that beneath his sharp-edged exterior he could be both vulnerable and sentimental.

Christmas presents…Nick looked away from his stepmother. He hadn’t had time to go with Sarah when she’d taken the boys to Hamleys and Harrods at the beginning of December. He’d stopped going Christmas shopping for the boys with her after he’d bought them both battery-driven child-size cars. He’d been thrilled with the cars. As a child he hadn’t even been able to dream of things like that. He’d raced home from work the day they were due to be delivered, only to find that Sarah had sent them back.

‘But, Nick, that kind of thing is so dreadfully vulgar,’ she had told him.

‘Like me, you mean?’ he had fired back, and she hadn’t denied it, simply turning away from him, saying quietly, ‘Daddy says that we really ought to be thinking about getting the boys used to riding. He’s sorting out a couple of ponies he thinks will suit them.’

‘Ponies? They are my sons, not some ruddy little Lord Fauntleroys,’ he’d told her before he’d stormed out of the house.

‘Hurry up, you two, otherwise Katie is going to miss her train.’