Last Child Read online

  But Keira was just young and misguided, I thought, and Luke’s lovely. I chose not to remind her of my own background, or indeed the fact that it was Luke who’d brought me to the Lanchesters in the first place.

  Oh dear, oh dear, I had my own business to run, but I was never far away from the daily dramas of the Lanchesters’ lives. I was lucky that my secretary, Gina, was an absolute treasure who was happy to be left in charge when necessary; I had the feeling I’d be needed during the months to come, and would place myself at Isabella, Jaz and Erin’s disposal again, as I always did, partly because I felt honoured they wanted me around at all, as if some of their glamour might rub off on plain little old me.

  ***

  I made the short journey from my house on the town’s outskirts to Lanchester Hall in the village of Woodville once or twice a week. Never did I travel up the long, gravelled driveway without remembering the day I arrived for my interview a soggy mass of nerves, and heard Harry Lanchester say that he couldn’t employ me, because I was too fat. I wonder what would have become of me if he hadn’t been persuaded to give me a chance.

  Ten years on, I arrived one Sunday in late April in the middle of a family celebration. I’d been invited for lunch; as I walked into the living room that I always forgot to call the ‘drawing room’, I saw that Ned Seymour and his wife, Angie, were already there, clinking glasses with Aiden and Erin. They were drinking champagne; even Jaz held a glass, empty though it now was.

  “Any excuse for champagne!” Kate smiled at me, magazine-fashion-page perfect in the sort of pale blue crêpe de Chine dress that would look like a creased rag after five minutes on the frame of yours truly.

  Aiden poured out and handed me a glass of fizz. “We’re drinking to Ned and Angie’s new house,” he said.

  “Oh—cheers!” I raised my glass. “I didn’t know you were moving.”

  “Kept it under wraps until exchange of contracts—we’ve bought Hertford House.” Ned looked very pleased with himself. “You must have seen it; old Georgian sandstone place out past Woodville Manor, set back from the road.”

  “Wow!” Indeed I had seen it; I’d often driven past and wondered who was lucky enough to live there. “How lovely for the girls to grow up in a house like that.” Ned and Angie have two superbly well-behaved daughters called Cordelia and Imogen. Not quite the sort of names that parents give their children where I grew up. I live in a different world, now. I gazed at Erin, just back from two weeks in Manhattan and looking like a supermodel, at Kate who looked like the mother of a supermodel, and at Angie Seymour, who lived in the pages of the Jaeger catalogue, and was glad I’d swathed my bulges in my best Anna Scholz.

  “Well, now that Ned’s running Lanchester Estates, we thought we ought to be the Joneses rather than just keep up with them,” Angie said, with a titter; I suspected a true word or two spoken in jest, and wondered if Ned resented little brother Aiden living at Lanchester Hall simply because he was lucky enough to be loved by Kate. Big brother had won; Hertford House was far more grand.

  Lunch was a lively affair, with awkward undercurrents. Afterwards, Kate insisted she and I did the washing up together.

  I realised she just wanted a chance to talk.

  “Aiden says that Ned’s getting unbearable at work,” she told me, as she rinsed off plates prior to loading the dishwasher. “He’s wildly overcompensating for the fact that Jim Dudley’s a shareholder, and of course he and Jim are constantly at loggerheads.”

  “What about?”

  “Jim wants to expand, move the company into the hotel trade as a side industry, but Ned thinks they should stick with the ‘company’s roots’, as he calls it, which means tendering for social housing contracts and buying land for housing, with the odd shopping centre thrown in. I think.” She laughed.

  “So whose side are you on?”

  “Me? I don’t care one way or the other. What I do care about is that it’s brought out a side of Aiden that I didn’t know existed; now they’re vying with each other over who will be Jasper’s favourite uncle.” She rolled her eyes. “Sorry, I mean Jaz. He won’t even answer to ‘Jasper’ at the moment, the rude little blighter.”

  “How is he, do you think?”

  “Jaz? A pain in the arse,” Kate said, and we laughed. I did like Kate. She looked like the archetypal snooty ice queen, tall and poised, still without a crease in that gorgeous wisp of a dress, but her appearance belied her warmth. I’d always been able to see why Harry was so attracted to her; when they first met, this had needled at the last remnants of desire I had for him. At the time I told myself I just felt usurped of my place in the children’s lives, but I was jealous that Harry fell in love with her, too. How wise I was to give myself a good ticking off; now, she was one of the few I considered a real friend.

  I looked out of the window. The afternoon was warm, sunny; Jaz and his uncles had the cricket bats out. “Is he that bad?” I asked.

  “No. Worse!” Kate sat down at the table and uncorked a bottle of red. “Come on, let’s have some more, and a proper talk. No, no, don’t worry about driving; get a cab, and I’ll get Dave the handyman to deliver yours back.”

  I sat down, kicked off my too-high heels and mentally loosened my stays. “Go on, then. Fill me in about the stepson from hell.”

  “Oh, he’s not that bad.” Kate leant her chin in her hand. “No, sorry, rewind—I’m lying. He is that bad. You know what a sweetie he can be, but I’m afraid it’s been Kevin the Teenager all the way since Ned did his ‘the king is dead, long live the king’ speech in the boardroom at Christmas. He’s dismissive about his schoolwork because he knows that when he’s sixteen he’ll leave it all behind. It’s not just that, though; he raises two fingers at discipline, sometimes literally, so much so that it makes me wonder how he’ll cope with this ‘starting in the post room like his father afore him’ bit. I’ve talked to Will about it, a lot; when Harry was in that position he knuckled down and took it seriously, but children are different these days, aren’t they? They’re encouraged by what they see on television and the internet to ‘express themselves’—” (here she made inverted commas in the air with her fingers) “—and talk back, with no respect for authority. Oh yes, and there’s his fascination with alcohol. I try to be relaxed about it so it doesn’t become a big thing, but I don’t know, he’s so sneaky—or are all children like that? He’s got some awful friends, little horrors with rich parents who just shove money at them—you’ve heard of Ollie, the current partner in crime?”

  “Yes.” I smiled. “It’s all ‘me and Ollie this, me and Ollie that’, lately.”

  “Exactly. Well, his mother, Trisha Dawkins—honestly, Hannah, I don’t mean to sound like a snob—oh, what the hell, yes I do—she’s all fake nails, fake suntan and leather trousers. Open-toed gold sandals in winter, you know the type? She thinks it’s funny if they get ‘a bit tiddly’, at family parties, says Ollie ‘loves to speak his mind’ when I’d just say he was being downright rude. So I ‘ground’ Jaz, as it’s called these days, I take away his pocket money, but then he just runs to Aiden. It’s ridiculous, he actually has some secondary signatory power on Lanchester Estates documents; only certain purchase orders, it’s something that was expressed in Harry’s will with the aim of giving him a sense of responsibility, but he hasn’t got a clue what he’s signing, and cares even less. Honestly, he wouldn’t know a sense of responsibility if it—oh, I don’t know—if it–”

  “Farted in his face?” I offered.

  Kate laughed. “Yes. That’ll do. Oh, bloody hell, I wish his mother was alive!”

  I whistled. “That’s a big one. Both our lives would be so different, wouldn’t they?”

  “Yes,” she said, and looked out of the window. Her face fell. “I’d have married Aiden sooner; I wonder how that would have worked out.”

  I followed her eyes over to the window, and saw immediately why her expression had changed. Angie and Erin had joined the boys outside in the sunshine. Erin had
changed out of her amazing Chloé dress into faded denim shorts so small she might as well have walked out into the garden in her knickers, worn with a Motorhead t-shirt and calf-high lace-up boots. She looked like something out of a rock video; Aiden’s eyes were popping out of his head.

  I remembered the Christmas before last, when the two of them had been caught mid-snog at the Lanchester Estates office party. That was when Kate was still married to Harry, of course, and Aiden was a free agent, but it caused an uproar nevertheless. Erin was only sixteen, and Aiden thirty-two. Now, as I watched her prance around the garden, swinging her neat little hips and flicking her hair over her shoulder as she shot sexy sidelong looks at Kate’s husband, I saw that the flirtation was far from over.

  “Don’t say anything—just don’t,” Kate whispered. Her eyes were filled with tears and I leaned towards her, but she put up a hand to ward me off. “No, please,” she said. “I have to ignore it, or I’ll go out there and behave like a jealous old bat.”

  “Come on,” I said, pouring out more wine. “She’s only exercising her power over men. I’m sure that’s all it is, and Aiden adores you; you know how long he waited to marry you.”

  She dragged her eyes back to me. “I know, I know. But honestly, Hannah, sometimes I want to just—just—oh, what’s that thing Jaz says? Bitch slap her!” At least that made us both laugh again. “Thing is, she’s not an innocent little girl, not at all. She knows exactly what she’s doing. She comes down to the kitchen to get a Coke out of the fridge in her underwear, even though I’ve told her not to, she makes deliberate double entendres at the dinner table; I tell you, the way she eats asparagus spears ought to be X-rated! I mean, what the hell’s going on here? She’s not my daughter but she happens to live in my house, except it’s her house, really, isn’t it? Hers, Isabella’s and Jasper’s. Harry’s will stipulates that I can live here as long as I want, but it will never belong to me, and why should it? My twelve-year-old stepson is my landlord! Then I think, why can’t I just enjoy being with my husband without the constant presence of this sexy young woman who keeps flirting with him? We can’t leave, because of Jaz.”

  She was extremely overwrought; I could see it was more than just a slight annoyance. “Presumably she goes out a fair bit? Has her own life?”

  “Oh yes, it was great when she was away in New York, and she’s always zooming off in cars with her various other admirers; if it’s not Rob Dudley it’s a chap called Eddie Courtenay from the office, or Tim Wyatt, who’s the nephew of some old lover of Annette’s. She certainly knows how to play the opposite sex—the apple has not fallen far from the tree, and I’m not talking about her mother.” That amused us both. “So, yes, I do get to spend evenings at home with my husband, just us, alone—until we get called out to deal with another scrape that Jaz has got himself into. Only last week I had a phone call from his friend Guy’s mother, asking me to pick him up from their party—he and Ollie had smuggled in two bottles of that paint stripper type cider that down-and-outs drink, and were so drunk they’d been sick in one of the bedrooms.”

  “Bloody hell!”

  “Oh, it’s happened before, believe me. In the morning I got Ned over to read him the riot act and forbid him from hanging out with Ollie for three weekends—but even though he accepted the punishment, it’s just a big joke to him; he doesn’t actually care, and it doesn’t make him modify his behaviour. Later that day I listened outside his bedroom door, and heard him giggling with Ollie about how ‘wasted’ they’d been. And then—then—”

  She stopped and covered her mouth with her hand. My instinct was to jump up and put my arm around her shoulders, but I knew I mustn’t. She didn’t do hugs, either.

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, bloody Aiden, that’s what! He only went and bought him some new games for his PlayStation. Can you believe it? When I had a go at him, he said, ‘well, the poor lad’s stuck in his room for three weeks’.” She pushed back her chair, threw her hands up in the air, wiped the escaping tears from her eyes and laughed. “I said, yes, Aiden, that’s the whole point, he’s supposed to be learning that actions have consequences, not be given treats! He could do something useful with the time, help around the house or learn something about the business he will inherit one day. But Aiden just spouted some rubbish about when-he-was-his-age, and treated the whole thing like a big joke.” She looked out of the window again. Aiden Seymour’s arm rested on Erin’s shoulder as they fooled around together. “And now he’s encouraging my stepdaughter to behave like a bitch on heat, too.”

  I watched her brush him off and execute a perfect cartwheel in front of him, while he clapped and whistled. “I don’t think she needs any encouragement, to be honest,” I said.

  “No, nor do I.” She shoved her chin into her hand. “God strike me down, because they’re orphans, after all, but I keep thinking this: I live with two kids who are having an adverse effect on my marriage, and they’re not even mine. Is that really awful of me?”

  Ned might have been in competition with Aiden for the position of Best Uncle, but he didn’t seem keen on what I saw as the perfect solution, i.e. for Jaz to live with him. I thought this would give the boy a more stable background, an insight into the business, and get him used to sharing with other children, but when I made the suggestion, later on, Ned and Angie exchanged awkward glances and made lame excuses. I imagine the truth was that they didn’t want him disrupting their family life any more than Kate wanted him disrupting hers. I felt so sorry for the poor kid, then.

  The tensions concerning both Jaz and Lanchester Estates continued to smoulder under the surface, but the Erin situation exploded fairly soon afterwards, to such a shocking extent that I wondered if my love for her was so unconditional after all.

  The phone call came late one Saturday night near the end of August.

  I’d had a lovely evening sitting in the garden on my swing seat with a jug of weak Pimm’s and the new Douglas Kennedy. Dorothy and Parker had finished tearing round the lawn, and now sat at my feet as I read. Peace. At about eight-fifteen I’d gone indoors, curled up on the sofa and carried on enjoying my book, which I knew would keep me up until the early hours; yet again, I relished the luxury of living alone. When the phone rang, my heart sank. A hangover from living with my sister—a phone call at eleven o’clock on a Saturday night could only mean bad news.

  Kate was in her car, down by Woodville village green. She’d had to flee from Lanchester Hall to stop herself committing murder, she said.

  I told her to leave the car and get a cab over to my house. I didn’t think she ought to drive further; she sounded in shock.

  It had happened. Erin and Aiden.

  She admitted she’d left them alone together on purpose, going down to London for the weekend to stay with Mollie, her step-daughter from her second marriage. Jaz was away, at a sleepover.

  Erin and Aiden were to be left alone in the house, overnight.

  Now, wrapped in one of my oversized, snuggly cardigans and armed with a huge glass of Courvoisier, she huddled into the corner of my sofa, dazed and still shaking.

  “I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, but it was getting worse. Building up, you know?” She rolled the brandy around in its glass; she looked exhausted. “I’ve been noticing their little secret glances for weeks. I knew it had already started. I knew it.” Round and round that brandy glass rolled in her hands. “For weeks. It’s been building up for weeks.” Little gulps kept escaping between words, as if she had hiccups.

  “And you’ve left them there together, now?” I didn’t like the sound of that.

  “No, no, no. God, no. I phoned Isabella, made her come and get her sister, but it was worse after she left, because there was just Aiden and me, facing each other—and the knowledge that he’s just wrecked everything we’ve ever had between us.”

  I wondered, was it really that final, or if this was just a knee-jerk reaction. “Kate—can you tell me what happened? Sorry, sorry; can you be
ar to go through it again?”

  She closed her eyes for a moment. I don’t think she’d even heard me. “Hannah, all day I knew what I was doing. I planned it. I pushed them into it. Mollie understood; I thought she’d say I was mad but she didn’t, she said, ‘good for you, you might as well know for sure whether something really is going on, or if it’s just your imagination’. So I drove home, got there about nine. And there they were, just as I’d imagined. No, much worse than I’d imagined.” She began to cry. “I caught them in bed. Oh God. Oh, God, Hannah, I think I’m going to be sick.” She clutched her stomach, then held out her hand to stop me reaching out to her. “No, no, I’m not, it’s okay, panic over. But—oh no, oh no. How could they do this to me? No, please, don’t touch me. I can’t bear it. I can’t bear the thought of anyone touching me, it makes me think of him and her—”

  She cried a lot, then. “He was in her bed,” she told me, between sobs. “In her room. The one I helped her choose the décor for, when she was just bloody fourteen. They were in her bed, in the throes of it. Actually doing it. Her long brown legs that she's always flaunting at him, wrapped round his back. Oh, my God. I was violent, Hannah. I didn’t know it was in me, there was this rage—I pulled him off her, I dug my nails into his shoulders, I made him bleed, and I socked him in the face. She sat there clutching the quilt up to cover herself, and crying, the stupid bitch, and actually saying ‘I’m sorry’—can you believe it? She looked as though she’d realised what she’d done—as if saying sorry was going to make any difference. I went for her then, I think I would have smashed her wicked little face in, but all I got to do was grab a handful of her hair before Aiden pulled me off. At least she hollered the place down, I really yanked it.”

  I sat in appalled silence; there wasn’t anything to say that might have helped.