Sour Grapes Read online

  As Emma looked round the door, Lucinda filled the mug with water and flung the whole lot over the side of the bath, shrieking with giggles. The mug caught Willow’s shoulder and emptied its contents all over her loose yellow cashmere jersey.

  ‘See if you can keep the water in the bath, Lucinda,’ said Willow calmly before reaching for a large towel from the heated rail and mopping first her clothes and then the floor. She looked up at the sound of Emma’s laughter and smiled.

  ‘What a moment for you to arrive! How are you? You look wonderful with the black hair.’

  ‘Do you think so? You are kind. I’m not at all bad, in spite of that shocking letter I wrote. Not now I’m here, anyway. It’s lovely to see you both. Hello, Lucinda.’

  The child greeted her with a doubtful look and then a series of vigorous kicks, which sent yet more water surging over the edge of the bath and did not seem to worry Willow at all. Emma had always known that her friend would be an efficient mother, and a well-informed one, but she had never expected to see such ease or tolerance in her.

  Emma had been eighteen when they had first met, and she had found Willow frightening as well as dazzlingly impressive. In those days Willow had been a part-time civil servant, writing her pseudonymous—and extraordinarily profitable—romantic novels between Thursday and Monday every week. The two parts of her life had been kept quite separate and at first Emma had known nothing of the civil service half.

  The woman to whom she had been introduced was ‘Cressida Woodruffe’, the author of a series of novels Emma had enjoyed for years. It had amazed her to discover that anyone as sophisticated and successful as ‘Cressida’should have had time and affection to spare for someone as young and inexperienced as she had been, and she had revelled in their friendship.

  Even then, before she had known anything of the real woman or lost her residual fear, Emma had seen in Willow something she had always longed to achieve for herself. It had not been the success or riches, the beautiful flat, or any of the luxuries she enjoyed: it had been Willow’s freedom to live exactly as she chose without having to take crap from anyone. In those days Emma would never have thought of using such a word, but later on she had decided that it summed up Willow’s determined independence better than any other.

  Since then Willow had admitted to her secret double identity, left the civil service, changed her writing style, married Tom Worth and, at the age of forty-four, given birth to Lucinda. As Emma had begun to grow up and Willow to learn to trust other people, they had found they still liked each other and shared a surprising number of tastes and ideas. Willow had even told Emma a little of what her life had been like before she had started writing and what had driven her to attempt such a dramatic change.

  Understanding how much imagination and courage it must have taken, Emma had often thought that the almost perfect relationship Willow seemed to have achieved with Tom was a suitable reward. Altogether her example had convinced Emma that with enough vision, grit and honesty every human being could build a life in which he or she could be happy. She still hoped that she was going to manage it for herself, but she was not always convinced that her grittiness would be enough to see her through.

  ‘Lucinda’s looking good,’ she said as Willow leaned forward to scoop the child out of the bath.

  She immediately started wailing. Willow ignored the sound, wrapped her tightly in another warm towel and sat down with her facing Emma.

  ‘She is, although she can’t resist getting as much of the bath on the floor as she possibly can. I think she must take after her father in that respect. He’s a shocker when it comes to sloshing water on to the floor.’

  ‘He can’t be that bad,’ said Emma, laughing as she stepped carefully around a large puddle. Poised to sit down on the only dry part of the edge of the bath, she added, ‘Shall I clear up?’

  ‘No, don’t worry. Mrs Rusham takes it as an insult if I do any of the things she considers part of her job, and she took on post-bath blotting from day one.’

  ‘She is amazing.’

  ‘Isn’t she? And it’s such a boon that she and Lucinda love each other, which means I can leave them to it in the day and work with a clear conscience.’

  ‘How is the work?’

  ‘A little like your thesis,’ said Willow, screwing up her pale, bony face and pushing some of her hair out of her eyes. ‘I’ve got stuck and I can’t see my way at all. Hence my sympathy for your state.’

  ‘Isn’t it awful?’ said Emma, immediately feeling less of a failure. If even Willow had similar problems, perhaps they were perfectly normal after all.

  ‘Yes. But it always passes, so long as one keeps on working. That’s the only secret. By the way, Jane is coming to dinner tonight and she thinks she has details of just the case you need in her files. Look, could you take Lucinda for a second while I fetch her pyjamas? I always keep them in her room out of the wet for as long as possible.’

  Emma received the damp and wriggling bundle and sat down in Willow’s chair. She was pleased that Lucinda did not protest and she dropped a kiss on the child’s sopping head, noticing how envious she felt of yet another aspect of Willow’s life.

  ‘D’you mind that she isn’t red-headed like you?’ she asked as Willow returned with an astonishingly vibrant red-and-green tartan bundle in her hand.

  ‘No. I’m thankful. I think she looks a bit like Tom, don’t you?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ Emma turned Lucinda and stood her up. ‘With his broken nose and that big square chin it’s hard to say. I suppose her eyes are a little like his. Why?’

  ‘I keep trying to work it out. She certainly doesn’t look anything like any of my relations.’

  ‘Perhaps the next one will.’

  ‘Emma,’ said Willow. ‘Come on. I’m forty-six.’

  ‘So? You can’t have an only child, can you?’

  ‘I was one.’

  ‘I know. That’s what I mean. You weren’t happy, were you?’

  ‘No. But…’ Willow hesitated and then deliberately lightened her voice: ‘Nor were you; and you’re one of three. At least there’ll be no one for Lucinda to bully—or be bullied by.’

  ‘Touché. I’m sorry. That was a silly thing to say and tactless. I suppose I’m a bit distracted. Look, shall I go away and offer to help Mrs R lay the table for dinner as penance?’

  ‘She’ll have done that already and you don’t need to do penance anyway. Come and listen to Lucinda’s story—unless that would bore you?’

  Emma merely shook her head, glad to have been forgiven, and struck by how much Willow had changed. When they had first started to see something of each other, Willow had resisted anything that smacked of criticism from anyone. Emma could not remember having received a direct rebuke herself, but she had witnessed several, and there had been moments of cold withdrawal during which she had become aware that she, too, had transgressed.

  Led by Lucinda, who kept deviating from the direct route to investigate something interesting on the way, they progressed slowly to her bedroom to explore the further adventures of Ant and Bee. When the book was finished and Lucinda’s foot-high illuminated penguin had been switched on and all her necessary toys arranged at the foot of her cot, Willow turned off the overhead light and followed Emma out of the room.

  ‘I must get out of this wet sweater,’ she said quietly. ‘Jane won’t be here for half an hour or more; would you like a bath?’

  Emma almost laughed. Willow had always taken enormous pleasure in baths herself, and she assumed that everyone else shared her trust in hot water as a cure for all life’s ills. Her bathrooms had always been havens of warmth and comfort, colourful with pictures and books and well stocked with fruit or Mrs Rusham’s luxurious home-made biscuits in case she felt hungry while she washed.

  ‘I’d love to sluice off the journey’s grubbiness,’ said Emma, still smiling, ‘if you’re sure there’s enough hot water and you don’t mind.’

  ‘I’m quite sure,’ said
Willow, not having noticed Emma’s amusement. She opened another white-panelled door. ‘Here’s your room. I’ll see you downstairs when you’re ready. There’s no hurry. Jane always likes her drink on Friday evenings and so even if she gets here before you’re ready it won’t matter. Take your time and relax. Oh, good. Mrs Rusham has brought up your bag.’

  ‘She shouldn’t have bothered. I could have done it. Are you dressing up for Jane?’

  ‘No. I told her to come as she was. Be comfortable.’

  ‘OK.’

  Willow went away and Emma took out the few clothes she had brought with her and hung up most of them. She ran herself a deep hot bath in the adjoining bathroom and added some scented foam from one of the expensive-looking bottles Willow kept for her guests. Lying in the water, amused by the series of witty feminist cartoons that had been hung above the bottles since her last visit, Emma tried to do as Willow had advised, and relax.

  The small but infinitely comfortable house felt wonderful after the bleakness of St Albans. Even in her gloom Emma could appreciate the irony of that since she had spent so much time and energy trying to escape from the almost equally luxurious surroundings of her family’s house. But there was freedom in Willow’s mews, which there had never been in Gloucestershire.

  The sensation of imprisonment Emma had felt there had not come only from the rigid mealtimes and the unwritten rules that made everyone lie about the things that really mattered, smile when they felt like howling, eat everything that was put in front of them, however disgusting it might be, and pretend to like people they loathed simply because they came from the right sort of background. There had been her half-brother’s bullying, too.

  His own mother had abandoned him when he was just three, and, although Emma’s mother had been careful to make no difference between him and her two daughters, it was hardly surprising that he should have resented them. If he had been equally cruel to her elder sister, Emma might have been able to forgive him and accept the excuses her mother always made for him. But he had behaved as though he adored Sarah, reserving all his spite for Emma, the baby of the family.

  Looking back and thinking of some of the things he had said and done to her, she wondered why they had not taught her to stand up to the much less violent bullying she endured at St Albans. After a moment it occurred to her that Anthony’s efforts might have sensitised rather than toughened her, so that each new attack added to the effects left by the last and made her even less able to resist.

  Emma sank lower under the water and closed her eyes, ignoring the sounds of Mrs Rusham coming upstairs to clear up the other bathroom, various telephone calls and even the ringing of the front doorbell. It was wonderful to know that she was not responsible for anything at all and could just let go for a while.

  Later, dressed in faded jeans and, as a sop to Jane’s well-known flamboyant taste, a long scarlet shirt and shorter blue-and-green brocaded waistcoat, Emma went downstairs to find Willow saying goodnight to Mrs Rusham. When she had left the house, Willow whisked Emma into the drawing room, where a plate of crab tartlets and a bottle of white wine in a cooler stood as testimony to the housekeeper’s familiar efficiency.

  ‘Jane rang to say she’ll be a bit late,’ said Willow, pouring wine into two of the three waiting glasses. ‘There was some crisis with somebody’s lawyers, but she should be here in about half an hour.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Emma, accepting the wine and a tartlet. ‘Wow! That tastes amazing. What’s she put in with the crab?’

  ‘Nutmeg and cream, I think. Now, tell me.’

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘Everything. Anything. Your supervisor, the polygraphs, the prisons, this mysterious Jag who’s been appearing in your letters. Whatever you feel like.’

  ‘He’s not that mysterious,’ said Emma, settling back into one of the feather-stuffed chairs and stretching out her feet to lay them on a square pouffe and smiling as she thought of him. ‘He’s a New Zealander, a postgraduate psycholinguist working on “private language as threat”, six foot five, very straightforward, very nice. We’re becoming friends and I like him. Quite a lot actually. I think. That’s about it.’

  ‘How did you meet?’ asked Willow, refraining from asking any of the questions to which she really wanted answers in the interests of allowing Emma the sort of privacy she herself would have demanded as a right.

  ‘At an undergraduate lecture on ambiguity. We both thought it looked interesting, went along, saw that we were years older than everyone else there and got talking. Oh, and his real name’s Jack, but he’s been Jag since babyhood.’

  ‘But he’s not a criminologist?’

  ‘No, unfortunately. It would be nice to have someone as easy as him to share my work with instead of the high-achieving, sneering bunch I have got.’

  ‘What about the work itself?’ asked Willow hopefully. ‘Isn’t that interesting enough to make up for the people and the sneers?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Emma at once, adding more honestly a moment later, ‘Well, I suppose so, in a way.’

  As Emma began to talk about some of the ideas she had been discussing with her supervisor, Willow felt reassured. Behind the depression that had been so clear in Emma’s letters was obviously a keen interest in the work she was doing, and it did not sound as though she had manufactured it to copy—or please—Willow. Encouraged, she decided that Emma would probably get over her gloom quite soon; and if she did not worry so much about what the other graduates thought of her she might find that she minded their teasing less. If she stopped giving them the reaction they wanted, they would presumably get bored and lay off her.

  The two of them were deep into a discussion about offender profiling, and whether it could make investigators miss important facts that did not happen to fit in with the profile, when the doorbell rang. Willow was so interested in what Emma was saying that she began to wish she had not invited anyone else to join them. But it was much too late for that and she told Emma to help herself to more wine while she went to let Jane Cleverholme in to the house.

  Chapter Three

  ‘I nearly didn’t recognise you, Emma,’ said Jane the moment Willow brought her into the drawing room. ‘Love the hair. It’s a huge improvement.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ said Emma, standing up to greet her properly. There were some habits she did not know she had and was not even trying to change.

  The two of them were different from each other in almost every possible way except their liking for Willow, but they managed to get on reasonably well when they met. Jane, who was a year or two older than Willow, had worked on tabloid newspapers ever since leaving her East London grammar school in the mid-1960s.

  When Willow had first encountered her, Jane had been a gossip columnist on the Daily Mercury, successful in work though not in love, tough-talking, colourfully dressed and funny. Since then she had progressed through various parts of the paper until she had been appointed editor of the whole thing just over two years earlier. She had no idea how long the owners were planning to keep her, and the mixture of power and insecurity had given a new harshness to some of her opinions—and, so Willow had heard, to some of her dealings with her staff.

  It had definitely not helped in her search for love, which was as dramatic as ever and quite as fruitless. Willow had come to the conclusion that Jane sabotaged every relationship that threatened to become at all serious, but she was not sure why or even whether Jane was aware of what she was doing.

  ‘Yes, I definitely like it,’ she was saying to Emma in apparently sincere admiration. ‘You look a lot less sweet, which must be a good thing.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I thought,’ said Emma, laughing in real pleasure. ‘I’m getting used to it, although at the beginning I wasn’t sure I’d be able to live up to it.’

  ‘I think it suits you a lot,’ said Willow, pouring Jane a glass of wine and offering her the half-finished plate of tartlets. ‘Have one of these before Em and I scoff the lot.’
r />   Jane took one, shaking her head. ‘You do yourself well, don’t you, Willow? Living in the lap of luxury like this, while we hard-working, impoverished peasants—’

  ‘You may work hard,’ said Willow with some of her old asperity, ‘but as for impoverished! Quite apart from your enormous salary, you haven’t paid for a meal of your own or a holiday or a theatre ticket for years.’

  ‘It’s not the same somehow,’ said Jane, acknowledging Willow’s dig with a wild grimace, ‘as having Mrs Rusham attend to your every whim. It’s not fair.’

  ‘Come on, Jane,’ said Emma at her most coaxing. ‘You must admit that Willow’s earned it all with some phenomenally hard work.’

  ‘I’d have to be tortured before I’d admit it’s anything more than wholly undeserved good luck. But, since she shares most of it with the rest of us, I suppose I can put up with it.’

  ‘You’re all charm and generosity tonight, Jane,’ said Willow. ‘Were the lawyers particularly tiresome?’

  ‘Aren’t they always? But don’t get me started on them now. My temper’s short enough as it is. Let’s talk about Emma’s thesis. At least that won’t make me angry. What exactly are you after, Emma? A miscarriage of justice or a false confession?’

  ‘Both would be best,’ she said, ashamed of dumping her problems on someone as busy as Jane. ‘In a way Willow’s right when she says it’ll have to be a case no one else has written up. But that’s not actually the most crucial thing.’

  ‘So what is?’ Jane was beginning to look more interested.

  ‘Whether I can work out the reasons why whoever it is did confess. You know, whether it was his psychology, what the police did to him… whatever, and then use that to come to some kind of conclusion for the whole thesis. D’you see what I mean?’

  ‘Yes. And once you’ve decided on the case,’ said Jane, thinking how young Emma’s apologetic earnestness made her seem, ‘how are you going to set about finding the reasons?’