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Authors: Jenny Colgan

Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend (6 page)

BOOK: Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend
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I gave him a second glance. ‘What about Leonard?’
 
‘Leonard only worked for your dad. Mr Fortescue has been helping me out with a few things.’
 
I didn’t like the sound of that very much. Leonard half-smiled at me, a little sadly.
 
‘We just wanted to have a little talk with you. About arrangements and so on.’
 
Gail’s eyes were fixed on a point about twenty centimetres above my head. She looked really uncomfortable. I didn’t realise why I hadn’t figured this out before - it hadn’t really crossed my mind. But it was about Daddy’s will. Of course. I briefly felt a cold hand clutch at my insides. Then ignored it; it wasn’t as if I had to worry. ‘I’ll always look after you,’ Daddy had said.
 
‘Sophie,’ she began, ‘look. Now, your dad obviously wanted you to be well looked after . . .’
 
I nodded.
 
‘Look, Sophie . . . I’m so sorry . . . this is going to come as a bit of a shock.’
 
‘What?’ The room suddenly swayed a little out of focus.
 
‘There is an inheritance for you, of course there is. But here’s the thing. Your dad . . . he put it in trust.’
 
‘What does that mean?’
 
‘Sophie, you know your dad was worried about you. He worried that you didn’t really have a job.’
 
‘I have a job!’
 
‘Sorry, I know that. Well, maybe more of a proper career. He worried about your party lifestyle.’
 
I heaved a sigh. ‘Was this him thinking this? Or you?’
 
Gail looked pained. ‘I promise, Sophie, it has nothing to do with me. He was just doing what he thought was best. Nobody thought he would . . .’ She suddenly bit her lip and turned her face away. ‘We honestly didn’t think that this . . . that we’d use this will. We thought we had years . . . for you to find a career path, for us to be together . . . for me to have a . . . anyway. Never mind about that.’
 
I could hardly take in what she was saying. Mr Fortescue patted her on the arm.
 
‘And I know with everything . . . but did you even see the papers?’
 
I had. There had been a story, ‘Cat Fight Spat with Party Brats’ in one of the papers, with a very glamorous picture of Carena getting a shoe thrown at her. It made me out to be an unstable idiot.
 
‘Well, let’s not talk about that now. But it has convinced me that your father’s will should stand.’
 
Then she stared very hard at the desk, like she didn’t want to look at me any more.
 
‘Sophie,’ she said. ‘It’s in the will. You have to go and make your own living. For six months. Then we can review the situation. He loved you to bits, Sophie. But it didn’t always do you much good, and he knew that.’
 
I staggered backwards, as if someone had thrown a punch. ‘What?’ I said. This didn’t make any sense.
 
‘Your dad . . . he was trying to make things better. You have to move out. Find your own way. It’s only for six months!’ she added, pleadingly.
 
‘But you can’t make me go,’ I said. ‘You can’t throw me out of my own home. Daddy can’t have meant that!’
 
The lawyers were shuffling their feet and looking embarrassed. Gail handed me the will and I read it there in black and white. ‘For a period of not less than six months, the beneficiary will earn every aspect of her own living . . .’
 
Gail still looked embarrassed. ‘You know what he was like with his ideas and schemes,’ she said. ‘He just felt you were wasting your life.’
 
‘But I was just having a good time,’ I said, truly shocked. OK, we went to parties and lunches and shopped a lot, but I thought he liked me doing those things. I thought every time he suggested I work harder on my career it was Gail being nasty to me.
 
‘Can’t I stay here?’ I asked, feeling the tears spring up.
 
Gail shook her head. ‘Apparently I could make you pay rent,’ she said. ‘Rent on your room in this area is eighteen hundred pounds a month. Before bills and food.’
 
I looked at her. ‘But you don’t have to do it, though, Gail? You’re not going to throw me out of my own home after I’ve just been orphaned?’
 
There was a long pause, and I tried not to think of all the times I’d been horrid to her. She glanced at her lawyer again. ‘Sophie, I’m sorry. I am. Really. But . . . I agree with your dad.
 
You’re twenty-five years old and still reliant on other people for everything. You won’t grow up. You can’t even use the washing machine or make yourself a cup of coffee. I think . . . I think it’s what you need.’
 
I looked to Leonard for help, but he just smiled sadly at me and shook his head.
 
‘Of course, you can take time to find yourself a place to stay, and go back to your old job . . .’
 
I didn’t have much confidence that my old job was still there - I hadn’t been to the studio for weeks. And seeing as it didn’t pay any money how was that going to help me now?
 
I stumbled back upstairs in disbelief, then called down to Esperanza.
 
‘Esperanza, could you please get me a non-fat soya latte?’
 
There was a long pause on the phone.
 
‘Please?’ I added again.
 
There was another pause. Then, ‘I’m sorry, Miss Sophie. I was told not to do anything for you now.’
 
‘What do you mean?’
 
‘Your mother . . . she says no more coffee, no food, no cleaning in your rooms.’
 
‘You
are
joking.’
 
Suddenly, I realised I couldn’t talk my way out of this. It had started. It was really happening. And I had no one to blame but myself.
 
Chapter Six
 
Hunger drove me downstairs eventually. There was nothing in the huge pristine kitchen except for a newspaper folded up on top of the central island.
 
I took a look. It was a copy of
Loot
. Very deliberately folded open to the flat-hunting page. God. I picked it up gingerly. I thought ruefully about Carena’s parents’ house. They had a guest floor. Of course she didn’t live there any more - she had a lovely apartment in South Ken - and the whole place was empty half the time. They wouldn’t have minded . . . of course I couldn’t. My friend had stabbed me right through. I couldn’t forgive for real estate. I didn’t even know if she would want me to. I tried not to think of her tearing around town. In my head I had horrible images of them, shrieking with laughter and kissing in exotic locations. Whilst I had . . .
Loot
.
 
Rooms to rent. All looking for ‘friendly non-smokers’. I didn’t see any ads desiring someone ‘quite grumpy in the mornings, very occasional social smoker’.
 
All the ads asked for six hundred quid a month, and for me to be ‘tidy’. But I didn’t know if I had six hundred quid. Oh God. My blood ran cold. My allowance. I’d never known life without an allowance. There was an envelope next to the paper. I picked it up. Inside was a cheque for a thousand pounds, signed by Gail. ‘To get you started,’ it said.
 
What would Daddy want me to do?
 
I knew, of course. Find a flat, do a good job, make a good show, then in six months’ time I could come back and claim my inheritance. He’d have been delighted. I could do it. Of course I could do it, I wasn’t stupid, and Gail and Leonard and everyone would be really impressed with me, and I’d be on my way to becoming the new Annie Leibovitz, and it’d be great. Wouldn’t it, Dad? Maybe I could show them all, stop living my life as some expensive victim.
 
With hope jumping in my heart for the first time in weeks, I picked up the phone.
 
 
 
Oh God, but flat hunting is hell on a stick. Who thought it was a good idea to go and audition for a group of weird horrible strangers who keep a collection of their bogies on the bathroom mirror but somehow want you to prove to them that you’re good enough to sleep in their airing cupboard, and by the way, would you mind doing all the cleaning in the nuddie?
 
That September Tuesday, filled with optimistic zeal, I’d started to call the numbers in the paper. I started with nice places I already knew - Notting Hill, Chelsea, Primrose Hill. Everything had gone.
 
The next day I tried again, but no luck. And the day after.
 
‘How are you doing?’ Gail asked when she saw me. She looked nervous, in case, I suppose, I bawled her out for ruining my life. She didn’t realise that I was trying to be the new Sophie; stoic and upbeat and calm. Even though I had just been asked by a chap on the phone if I minded cats. I’d said no, until he explained he had
fourteen
cats.
 
‘
Fine!
’ I said, stoically.
 
‘Good,’ she said. ‘I know it’s difficult. When I first left home I lived with a fishmonger . . .’
 
I knew she was trying to be kind, but I couldn’t listen to her story. At least she’d found a place to stay - she hadn’t been thrown out by the person who was meant to be looking after her. She realised I wasn’t really listening, because she changed track.
 
‘Um,’ she said, ‘don’t be alarmed, but there’ll be men around the place over the next few days . . . just doing valuations. ’
 
‘You’re selling up?’ I said in a panic.
 
‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘I just need to get everything organised for the insurance. There’s a lot of paperwork, Sophie. I’ve tried to spare you most of it. Look, there’s no good way of saying this, but . . . you can’t take anything off the premises.’
 
At first I didn’t know what she was talking about. Then I realised, and blushed hotly. She thought I was going to steal things in the house and sell them to make money. Then I quickly realised this was a good idea and wished I’d thought about it before. Not that I’d have sold my jewellery. My necklaces and bracelets had come straight from my father. We’d chosen them together. They were special things, special moments. They were us, all I had left of him.
 
‘What about things that are mine?’ I said.
 
‘Anything that comes under the house insurance policy can’t be moved right now,’ she said. That meant, I guessed, all my jewellery and bags. Then she looked up. ‘But they’ll be right here waiting for you, Sophie.’
 
I heaved a sigh. ‘Can I take, you know, a change of underpants? ’
 
‘Of course, of course, it’s just the insurance . . .’
 
‘That’s fine,’ I said, cheerily, holding up the paper. ‘Not everywhere I’m looking at has a dressing room and a walk-in wardrobe anyway.’
 
So I scoured websites, and called estate agents, and finally, just as I was considering joining that convent with really nice premises in Chelsea - it certainly wouldn’t have made my love life any worse - I got a male voice on the phone. It sounded distracted.
 
‘It’s about the room,’ I said, trying to sound cheery, but not annoyingly so, friendly but not nosy, and very, very tidy, with a reasonable, but not ridiculous, cat tolerance (just in case this was required), all in the space of four words.
 
‘Oh yeah?’
 
He didn’t immediately say, ‘It’s gone,’ so this was an up.
 
‘I don’t smoke or anything . . . uh, and I’m quite easy to live with.’ As long as, I thought to myself, you don’t do a straw poll of Gail and Esperanza, the two other people in my current house.
 
‘So, can I come and see it?’
 
There was a pause, as I waited, all my nerves straining to see if I’d passed the telephone test or not.
 
‘Yeah, all right.’
 
He gave me an address in Southwark. I’d never been down there.
 
‘Can I come straight over?’ I was trying not to betray my desperation, although I suppose a phrase like ‘can I come straight over’ doesn’t exactly sound like someone who has millions of offers of great places to live and is weighing them up.
 
‘Yeah, all right.’
 
 
 
OK, I was not such a puffed-up spoiled little madam that I’d never taken public transport, but I still felt an idiot at Sloane Square station, when I’d queued for about nine hours for my tube ticket, until someone told me there wasn’t actually a tube station on the Old Kent Road, where I was headed, and that I had to go to Elephant and figure it out from there. Yeah! And
how much
did they want for a ticket? Surely a car service couldn’t be more expensive than this.
BOOK: Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend
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