The Old House on the Corner Page 10

  When she looked back on her childhood, Sarah couldn’t remember a single unpleasant thing happening. The Fitzgeralds lived in a big old house that had once been a vicarage and was situated in the countryside halfway between Knowsley and St Helens. Daddy would take them shopping for new clothes in Liverpool or Southport. Anything they wanted, they could have, no expense spared. ‘We’ll be a long time dead,’ Daddy would say when he wrote the cheques, signing them with an arrogant squiggle, though she knew he was short of money sometimes when investments failed or stocks and shares fell when he thought they would go up. Or something like that.

  But it didn’t get Daddy down. Nothing did. He just laughed his way through life, adoring his girls, loving his quiet little wife, enjoying himself to the full. In summer, the Fitzgeralds went on holiday to the South of France, always staying in the best hotels. Every so often, they threw a party and, when the girls were small, they went around with trays of drinks and refreshments and everyone said how very sweet they were. Dinner parties were held regularly and, as Sarah and Julia grew older, they sat with the guests and Daddy started inviting scores of eligible young men. Although quite a few asked the girls out, they always refused a second date.

  There was an insurmountable problem with all the young men: they weren’t Daddy. They were nothing like Daddy. They giggled, told silly jokes, were unsure of themselves, didn’t know how to treat waiters – Daddy was always firm, but charming, because that way you got the best service. It was the same in banks and shops. Daddy, with his wicked smile and engaging manner, always got his way. People rushed to serve him, whereas the young men had no idea how to behave and were either rude or servile.

  Sarah and Julia decided it could only be because they were young, though they felt sure Daddy hadn’t been so callow in his youth and, as they couldn’t marry him, they couldn’t imagine marrying anyone.

  At sixteen, Julia left school with three GCEs and went to work in an antique shop owned by a friend of Daddy’s. When Sarah left two years later with a GCE in Art and nearly one in History, he found her an equally nice job in a big hotel owned by another friend. She was never quite sure what she was supposed to do there. She had her own office and people came to her with problems that she was never able to solve, often guests who wanted to complain about something. Sarah just gave them a big smile and said she was terribly sorry and they went away, apparently satisfied.

  One day, quite out of the blue, when Julia was twenty-one, she fell in love. Gary Moss was small, very pale, with mousy brown hair and, although he had an interesting face and a lovely smile, he wasn’t remotely like their big, sunburned, outgoing Daddy.

  ‘How on earth did you manage it?’ Sarah asked her sister.

  ‘Manage what?’

  ‘Manage to fall in love with Gary?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Julia replied, shrugging helplessly. ‘It just happened.’

  Gary wasn’t remotely eligible. He and Julia had met at a party – someone else’s party where Daddy wasn’t able to choose the guests. A social worker, he earned scarcely enough to live on, let alone buy a decent house.

  ‘We’ll just have to buy an indecent one,’ Gary said with a grin when Daddy felt bound to point this out. He wasn’t the least bit over-awed by his future father-in-law.

  ‘I’m not in a position, at the moment, to help you out with a few grand,’ Daddy said stiffly.

  ‘I don’t wish to be rude, Mr Fitzgerald, but I wouldn’t have taken it if you were. I’d sooner provide for me wife meself, thanks all the same.’ Gary came from Liverpool and had a truly horrid accent.

  ‘Call me Robin.’

  ‘I know my wages don’t sound much to someone in your position, Robin, but they’re pretty average. Lots of people have to manage on much less.’

  Daddy looked as if he didn’t believe it.

  Julia’s wedding wasn’t as grand as her father would have liked. He was in one of his downward spirals, he explained. But things would soon buck up, he added, as cheerful as ever. By the time Sarah married he would be flush again, but for now they couldn’t afford to invite more than a hundred guests and would Julia mind if they had a buffet meal instead of a sit down one?

  Twenty-five of the guests were from Gary’s family. Daddy was fearful they’d be frightfully badly dressed, drink too much, swear, and throw food at each other, but Gary’s relatives turned out to be eminently respectable. His father was a toolmaker, whatever that meant, and his mother a social worker, just like her son. Mrs Moss wore a lovely blue boucle´ coat and a feathered hat that Sarah admired very much, until Mrs Moss took them off at the reception and she noticed they’d come from C&A and went right off them. She’d never been inside C&A, but understood it was frightfully common.

  Julia and Gary went to live in a titchy little terraced house in an area of Liverpool called Fazakerley – such an awful name. ‘It’s like a dolls’ house,’ Sarah commented when she first went in. It was in terrible condition. The people they’d bought it from had been very old and it looked as if it hadn’t seen a lick of paint since the year dot.

  ‘You’ll have to get people in to decorate,’ Sarah said.

  Julia just laughed. ‘No way, we couldn’t possibly afford it. We’re going to decorate the place ourselves.’

  Sarah looked at her, shocked to the core. ‘You can’t paint things!’ Daddy always got a man in, or sometimes a whole gang of men, whenever anything needed doing on the house.

  ‘Oh, sis. You can do anything if you try.’

  Sarah had no intention of trying. She vowed she would only marry someone who earned more than a hundred grand a year and that she would never so much look at a paintbrush.

  Daddy’s fortunes didn’t improve as he’d predicted. Sometimes, unusually for him, he got quite tetchy, and Sarah guessed his fortunes were getting worse. He had to sell the Bentley and bought a silly little Mini that looked more like a toy than a real car. When she came home from work at the hotel, she always went into his office to say hello, and would find him buried in papers or totting up figures on the calculator, too busy to speak. He might be on the telephone, his voice strange, wheedling almost, as if he wanted something badly off the person at the other end.

  One day when she went in and he was on the phone, he sounded terribly cross. ‘For Chrissake, Alex,’ he shouted. ‘It was you who told me that the damn place was a surefire investment, a goldmine, I think you said. I put everything I had into it. I notice you got out quickly enough,’ he added bitterly. ‘You might have told me what was going on. I thought we were supposed to be friends, partners.’ He slammed down the receiver, noticed Sarah, and said, ‘Hello, Poppet,’ a trifle halfheartedly. ‘Daddy’s busy at the moment. I’ll talk to you later at tea.’

  It must have been Alex Rees-James he’d been speaking to. Sarah had always assumed he was Daddy’s best friend and partner. They spent hours in the office upstairs studying the Financial Times and talking business. Until a few months ago, Alex and his incredibly skinny wife, Midge, had dined with her parents at least once a week. One year, they’d all gone on holiday together to the South of France. The Rees-Jameses had no children and seemed terribly fond of one another. It had come as quite a shock when, after Christmas, Alex announced he and Midge were getting divorced. Nobody could understand why and Alex and Midge weren’t prepared to tell them.

  Alex was a few years older than Sarah’s father. He wasn’t quite so tall, so brown, or so handsome, but he was an attractive man all the same. Powerfully built, the nose on his flat, tough face was slightly crooked, which Daddy said was because he’d been a boxer in his youth and it had been broken. ‘Alex was born in the East End of London and his name then was Alex James,’ he said a trifle spitefully, adding, ‘It’s marvellous the way he’s hauled himself out of the gutter.’ Alex always wore beautifully cut Italian suits – he must have had a whole wardrobe of them – and Sarah had always admired his forceful personality and abundant energy.

  He lived in a big house called Th
e Grange only a mile from their own. Alex had designed it himself. It had acres and acres of garden. Mummy, who rarely passed an opinion on anything, had called it a monstrosity of a place, but Sarah liked the big, arched porch, the floor-length windows, the little turrets on each corner, the stone eagles perched at each side of the massive, iron gates.

  Most of all, she liked the horses that Alex bred in the brand-new stables – he was hoping to produce a Derby winner one day. Daddy used to take her and Julia to see them and feed them carrots. Sarah loved the feel of the soft, velvety noses nuzzling her hand, although horse riding was one sport that didn’t interest her because she was scared of heights.

  She was still standing outside Daddy’s office when the phone rang. ‘I’m sorry I lost my rag, Alex,’ she heard him say, so humbly that she squirmed. ‘It’s just that Spanish thing virtually cleaned me out. I’m desperate.’ Another pause, then, ‘Of course you can come tomorrow. What time? After breakfast? That’s fine. Look forward to seeing you, Alex, old friend.’

  ‘Alex rang earlier,’ he remarked over tea. ‘There was something in his voice. I think he might have decided to bale me out.’

  ‘So he should, darling,’ Mummy said in her little-girl voice. ‘You wouldn’t be in this mess if it weren’t for him.’

  Three days after this conversation, Alex Rees-James invited Sarah to dinner. A month later, he presented her with a diamond ring as big as a walnut and proposed. Sarah didn’t say yes straight away. She wanted to ask her father’s opinion first. If he thought it a bad idea, she would turn Alex down.

  But Daddy seemed hugely pleased. ‘He’s a fine chap, Alex,’ he said, but there was something in his expression, a funny look, almost as if he was embarrassed as well as pleased. ‘He’ll make a fine husband. You have my blessing, Poppet.’ He fondly patted her head. ‘You may as well go ahead with the wedding as soon as possible. There’s no point in hanging around. Why not ring Alex now, tell him you’ve accepted his proposal? He’s probably on tenterhooks, waiting to hear.’

  For some reason, her parents weren’t speaking to each other, something that Sarah had never known happen before. Mummy had been as mad as hell when she was told that Sarah was going to marry Alex Rees-James. Mummy being mad about anything was another thing that had never happened before.

  ‘He’s too old,’ she snapped, ‘and he’s not a very nice man. He swears like a trooper and those suits he wears are atrocious.’

  ‘I don’t mind him being old,’ Sarah said defensively. ‘In fact, I prefer it. Anyway, I like him. And I like his suits.’

  ‘Yes, but do you love him? That’s what matters.’

  ‘I’ll grow to love him.’ It would be like marrying a slightly inferior Daddy. She couldn’t marry the real one and the young men she met were quite beyond the pale. Alex would be almost perfect. It also helped that he was immensely rich. Sarah had no intention of ending up, like Julia, in a miniature house having to do her own cleaning and go into hospital to have a baby in a ward with hundreds of other women, as Julia would do in three months’ time when she gave birth to her first. The fact that Julia seemed blissfully happy meant nothing. Perhaps falling in love rotted the brain. It certainly hadn’t done Julia any good.

  Sarah’s wedding dress was a strapless, skin-tight silver affair that clung to her shapely figure like a second skin, making her look like Venus di Milo according to Daddy, or a mermaid, Julia said. For something borrowed, she wore Mummy’s diamond necklace and for something new, Alex bought her a tiara. For the blue thing, she wore a garter that rather spoilt the line of the dress, so she took it off before leaving for church, and for something old, she put on a pair of bikini panties that she’d bought a whole year ago, but hadn’t worn much. She left her hair loose and wild and wore the minimum amount of makeup because she didn’t really need it.

  Alex’s eyes popped when she came down the aisle of the crowded church to where he was waiting. ‘It’s like marrying Miss World,’ he whispered. He’d had to slip the vicar a hefty donation so the wedding could be held there. Not only did he never go near a church, he’d only recently been divorced.

  ‘Cor, blimey,’ he muttered that night when they made love for the first time in a sumptuous hotel in Monaco. ‘I never dreamed you were still a virgin.’ Normally he spoke terribly well, but occasionally his cockney roots showed if he was surprised by something.

  ‘I was saving myself,’ Sarah said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  He kissed her. ‘You’re a sweet girl, Sarah. I’ll try to be a good husband. Just don’t take any notice if I lose my temper. I don’t mean it.’

  She hoped the kiss wasn’t a signal that he was going to make love again because the first time had hurt rather, though had got quite nice towards the end. She felt sure she would eventually come to like it.

  Sarah’s first child, a girl, was born in a Southport nursing home. There were frilly curtains on the window of her private room, a thick cream carpet on the floor, and the walls were painted a slightly lighter cream. She’d been so heavily drugged during labour that she’d hardly felt a thing.

  The baby was born exactly nine months after she’d married Alex and he was incredibly pleased with both Sarah and his daughter. The room was full of flowers that had arrived that morning, only moments before Alex himself.

  ‘She’s a stunner,’ he said in an awed voice when he looked down at the baby in the cot beside her mother’s bed. ‘God, she’s beautiful.’

  ‘You can pick her up if you like,’ Sarah said generously.

  ‘Can I?’ He looked different, much softer, almost gentle, as held his daughter for the first time. ‘I wish I’d been here when she was born.’

  ‘I tried to track you down, but no one knew where you were.’

  ‘I was having dinner with someone in a hotel. There was a meeting afterwards that went on until the early hours and I thought I might as well stay the night. I forgot to tell Charlie where I was going.’ Charlie was his assistant. He did virtually everything for Alex except dress him.

  ‘Why didn’t you and Midge have children?’ Sarah asked curiously.

  ‘She couldn’t have ’em,’ Alex said abruptly.

  ‘You could have adopted some.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been the same.’ His eyes hardened, the way they always did when she brought up a subject he didn’t like. ‘What are we going to call our little girl?’ His face changed again and he rubbed his cheek against the baby’s smooth white one.

  ‘Tiffany’s my favourite girl’s name,’ she said. ‘It’s what I wanted to be called when I was little. Sarah seems so dull and plain.’

  ‘Sarah’s all right, but Tiffany’s better.’

  The following night he came in armed with a video camera and filmed Tiffany awake, Tiffany asleep, Tiffany having her nappy changed and being breastfed by her beautiful mother.

  ‘I’ll do this every year on her birthday,’ he vowed, ‘and give it to her when she gets married.’

  Just then, Julia arrived. Her little boy, Kevin, had been born the day after Sarah’s wedding. Now she was expecting again and looked terribly tired and bedraggled.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she cried when Sarah remarked on the fact. ‘I just didn’t get much sleep last night. Kevin’s teething. I’ve left him with Gary. I wasn’t sure if the nursing home would allow a National Health baby on the premises. I suppose,’ Julia went on, ‘you’ve got a whole team of nannies at home to look after Tiffany.’

  ‘Only two,’ Sarah said stiffly. ‘A permanent one and a maternity nanny who’s only staying for three months.’

  ‘Is that all?’ Julia hooted.

  *

  Daddy was up with the stars again. The Spanish thing had been sorted out somehow and he’d made some good investments since. Property was the thing, he claimed, but he was sticking to his own country from now on. He managed to buy a piece of land that Liverpool Corporation wanted for a school and had made a 1,000 per cent profit when he sol
d it. Sarah wasn’t quite sure what this meant, but it sounded awfully clever.

  Although his situation had improved out of all proportion for the better, Sarah could tell her father wasn’t very happy. He badly missed his girls. His favourite day was Sunday when they came to tea: Julia with Gary, Kevin and Dorothy, the new baby, who cried all the time, and Sarah with Tiffany, who was a little angel. Sarah had never known her cry, but then, as Julia said tartly, she didn’t see her all that much, so wouldn’t really know. Daddy’s eyes would mist over when he looked at his growing family and remark he wished they could come every day.

  Perhaps he would be happier if he’d been getting on better with Mummy. There’d been a distinct coldness between them ever since Sarah had announced her engagement to Alex. And he wasn’t even all that friendly with Alex, who refused to come to tea, saying he had more important things to do with his time.

  She was deeply shocked when, one Sunday, she overheard Gary say to Julia that he felt sorry for the old chap.

  Old! Daddy! Sarah looked at her father and could have cried when she noticed, for the first time, the deep lines under his eyes, the sharp crevices running from mouth to jaw, his thinning hair. Then she blinked, and when she looked, he was his old self again, her youthful, virile Daddy, who would never change, not in her eyes, until the day he died.

  Three years later, Daddy did die. Mummy found him in his office, his head buried in the Financial Times. He’d had a heart attack and had been dead for two hours.

  Sarah was inconsolable. It didn’t help that she was pregnant for the third time and was having dreadful morning sickness. What made it worse was that no one seemed as upset as she was. Julia cried a lot at first, but her life was so busy, what with three small children to look after, Gary working all hours, she didn’t have time to mourn. She got over losing Daddy in no time.