Mistress And Mother

After work she drove over to Nigel and Lena’s house. Pillars worthy of a Texan mansion embellished the entire frontage and a big extension had been added to the rear. Not a trace of the old farmhouse’s former damp, dry rot and dilapidation remained. Her eldest niece, Sally, was sitting forlornly on the back step of the conservatory, her little face tear-stained and pale.

Molly crouched down beside the eight-year-old with anxious eyes. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Mum says I’ll have to go to a new school…and I won’t have any friends there,’ Sally said tremulously. ‘I don’t want to have to go to a new school. I like the one I’m at.’

Molly walked into the messy kitchen which had until recently been her sister-in-law’s pride and joy. These days Lena was letting the house go in much the same way that she was letting herself go. A small, slight woman with untidy fair hair, she gave Molly a dull look from swollen blue eyes, her depression palpable.

‘Sally’s talking about changing schools.’

‘We can’t find anywhere we can afford to rent around here,’ Lena muttered tightly. ‘And the waiting list for council housing is a mile long. She’ll have to go to another school. We did ask your stepfather if he could put us up for a while but he started laying into Nigel and there was a huge row and that was the end of that.’

They must’ve been desperate to even consider approaching her stepfather for help, Molly thought grimly. George Gilpin had remarried two years after her mother’s death and was. now enjoying his retirement in his present wife’s comfortable bungalow some miles outside the village—but he had never invited his stepchildren to visit him there.

‘Where’s Nigel?’ Molly asked.

‘I don’t know. He went over to the garden centre as usual first thing this morning and this man was waiting for him. The man asked for the keys and said he was in charge now and that Nigel could go home again,’ Lena recited, her voice thickening with sudden tears. ‘So it’s finally started.

They’ve put a manager in to run the business until they can sell if…and next month it will be the house. Nigel was in an awful state…he just took off in my car and he hasn’t come back and I don’t know where to turn because I n-never really thought it would come to this!’

Molly curved an arm round the smaller woman’s quivering shoulders and pressed her down into a chair.

Sally’s sister, Fiona, wandered in, trailing a torn carrier bag stuffed with soft toys in her wake. ‘I’m packing,’ she announced with all the importance of a four-year-old seeking praise for being helpful.

Lena took one look at her younger daughter’s innocent face and went off into gasping, shuddering sobs of misery, burying her face in her arms over the table. In response, Fiona burst into frightened tears and the toddler in the play-pen behind the door set up a piercing howl in sympathy.

Molly concentrated on the children, lifting her nephew, Robin, out of the play-pen and wafting him and Fiona through to the lounge where their toys were. But in all her life she could never recall feeling so utterly useless. She lived in a tiny rented flat with one bedroom and could offer no assistance on the accommodation front.

Nigel and Lena had got married in their teens. Molly’s grandfather had allowed them to live with him and until his death he had employed Nigel at a poverty-line wage in his market gardening business.

Sholto had never seen how Nigel and Lena had lived then. Lena had shrunk from the prospect of entertaining Sholto in their damp, run-down home. So they had caught the train to London and met Sholto in his breathtaking Georgian town house instead. Molly still remembered the two of them sitting in that vast drawing room in their very best clothes, hugely intimidated both by Sholto and their surroundings and then shellshocked when Sholto had carelessly offered them the finance to make Nigel’s dreams come true.

Having been desperately short of money all their married life, they had then been as wildly extravagant and foolish as a pair of reckless children, and now they were paying the price.

Molly stayed until her brother came home at eight. By then she had persuaded Lena to go for a nap and had fed and put the children to bed. Nigel had a blank look in his bloodshot eyes when he came into the lounge and found her there. He looked exhausted, face drawn, shoulders slumped in defeat.

‘I suppose Lena told you about the new manager over at the garden centre?’ he mumbled heavily. ‘Well, as our old stepdad put it, once a loser always a loser. Academic failure and now failed businessman.’

Driving back to her flat a few minutes later, Molly was still recoiling from her stepfather’s cruelty. Nothing like kicking Nigel when he was already down. The phone was ringing as she came through the front door. Wearily thrusting the door shut behind her, she reached for the receiver.

‘It’s Sholto, Molly.’

The silence crackled on the line. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

‘I have a business proposition to put to you and, yes, it does concern your brother,’ Sholto outlined softly. ‘I’ll see you in my office to discuss it at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon.’

Molly gulped. She was in a daze, unable to think straight. ‘But I’m working… No, it’ll be OK…I’ll be there!’ she stressed, terrified the offer might be withdrawn.

‘Shall I send a car to pick you up?’ Sholto enquired pleasantly. ‘You never did like driving in city traffic.’

‘No…thank you, I’ll catch the train.’

Breathless and stunned, Molly replaced the receiver and then almost reached for it again to call Nigel. But she snatched her hand back from temptation. No, she’d better not say anything until she had seen Sholto. Had something she said this afternoon struck a compassionate chord with him? She shook her head numbly, still reeling with shock.

Funnily enough, she would have thought that her having shouted at Sholto would have put him in an absolute freezing rage because he was considerably less accustomed to censure than other, more ordinary mortals. But if she hadn’t shouted he would never have listened…

Cristaldi Investments occupied a strikingly contemporary building in the City. As Molly took her seat in the breathtakingly elegant waiting area on the executive floor, she found the soaring stainless-steel pillars and preponderance of tinted glass coldly intimidating. But it hadn’t always been like that. She could remember once charging out of the lift. cheerfully brushing aside the receptionist’s objections to announce her intention of surprising Sholto, bouncily secure in the knowledge that he had asked her to marry him the night before.

Then Pandora had been in his office, draped elegantly across a designer couch and looking maddeningly at home there.