‘You can never do anything right, can you?’
A gentle knock on the bedroom door woke Cate up from her sleep.
‘Can I come in?’
Cate rubbed her eyes as Venetia came into her room, a tiny space in the castle turret that was still decked out in chintz and lilac from when she called Huntsford home. Her sister perched on the eiderdown and Cate had a rush of déjàvu. It was a familiar scene with the Balcon girls – one sister creeping in to comfort another in the night, or sneaking away to the rickety old boathouse down by the lake to escape the shouting, the mocking, the disapproval. The boathouse had been the only port in their storm; Venetia, as the eldest sister, would take it upon herself to bring out rations of sweets and fizzy drinks and comfort to whoever was bearing the brunt of their father’s anger. Although Oswald deliberately sent them to different boarding schools to quash the bond, their closeness had survived into adulthood, and the Balcon girls still turned to each other in times of trouble – they were the only ones who really understood.
‘You’re crying.’
‘In my sleep, I think,’ said Cate, wiping the dampness from her cheek.
She felt a wave of guilt and sat bolt upright against her pillow.
‘Anyway, forget me. How’s Serena?’ she said quickly. Cate had run to the top of the stairs when she’d heard the commotion, but had left Venetia to deal with putting her drunk, emotional youngest sister to bed. ‘I’m so sorry I left you to it.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ smiled Venetia, handing her sister a mug of cocoa. ‘She was flat out as soon as you left her. Glamorously slumped out, of course.’
‘Slumped?’ said Cate raising an eyebrow. ‘Sloshed, more like it. She must have had a skinful. I’ve never seen her drunk before, let alone like that.’
‘Well, I’m not surprised. Apparently she drank half the bar on the flight over from Egypt.’
‘It’s so sad, isn’t it? Her and Tom. I just never saw it coming. They’ll get back together, don’t you think?’
Venetia shrugged. ‘You have to leave people to it.’
She noticed Cate’s red-rimmed eyes and put her hand on her shoulder. She knew that, for Cate, losing her job was equal to losing a lover.
‘You’ve got to learn how to ignore Daddy, you know. He was being an idiot tonight.’
Cate shrugged. ‘I’ve spent over thirty years trying to do precisely that, but he does seem to have a gift for making people feel as shitty as possible.’
‘Good job Collins put four shots of whisky in your cocoa, then. You’ll feel better after that.’ She walked over to the windowsill and lit a candle perched on top of it. ‘You’ll get another fabulous job, no problem.’
Cate shook her head. ‘No. All the big jobs at Elle, Vogue and Harper’s have all been filled recently. And anyway – I really want an editorship. At this stage in my career I don’t think it’s time to start going down the job ladder.’
She tailed off and leaned back to sink into the plump pillows, feeling small and childlike. She looked up, and for a second in the dim, amber candlelight, Venetia looked like someone else.
‘You look like Mum,’ Cate said quietly.
‘Don’t be silly. You can’t remember.’
‘I can. Sometimes I think I can.’
Cate had been seven when their mother had died of a brain haemorrhage, just months after the birth of Serena. One minute she had been sunbathing in the garden of their Cadogan Gardens home, with Cate running around barefoot and happy, the next minute she had a headache and, before they knew it, she was gone. It was the beginning of the end of their carefree childhoods as the four girls came under Oswald’s unbending control. Brought up by their nanny, Mrs Williams, and the shadow of a tyrant.
Venetia was right, though, thought Cate; she had only the foggiest memories of Margaret Balcon, just the vague smell of perfume, the feel of a soft sweater, and the odd detail of her face, the fullness of her lips as she tucked Cate in at night and kissed her. They were memories that came back at the most random of times, and tonight as Venetia leaned over her to put the coffee cup on the floor, their mother reached out across the years. Not for the first time, Cate wondered what life would have been like if their mother had still been around.
Feeling suddenly very tired, she pulled the eiderdown up to her chin. ‘Can we talk about this tomorrow?’
Venetia nodded and left the room.
Although the castle walls were three feet thick, Cate could hear the howling of a winter wind outside quite clearly. She lay back in the half light, trying to clear her head, but here in her teenage bedroom that was too hard. Despite wanting to forget about the job and her embarrassment at dinner, her thoughts kept drifting back to another time, another misery, another dinner when her father had humiliated her in front of his society crowd. On that occasion fourteen years ago, Cate had been home from Wycombe Abbey school for the weekend, to break the news that she had missed out on a place at Oxford.
‘See? I’ve produced a tribe of thickies,’ Oswald had mocked her in front of one of his selected audiences, this time down for a weekend of shooting. ‘And to think, I actually thought Catherine might have a brain. Well, at least my other three girls are lookers.’
Talk about the last straw. Over the years since her mother’s death, Cate had somehow slipped between the cracks and become an insignificance in her father’s eyes. Not the eldest like Venetia, not the cleverest like Camilla, not the most beautiful like Serena. At that moment, Cate knew she had to strike out on her own. That weekend was the last time she returned to Huntsford for six and a half years. Daddy could no longer hurt her if she didn’t see him, she reasoned.
From then on, Cate spent her weekends at school or with friends. Easters were spent studying art in Florence, summers backpacking around Morocco, Egypt, Spain. She didn’t go to Oxford, or her second-choice university, Bristol. Instead she enrolled to study literature at Brown University in Rhode Island, the liberal, Ivy-League institution that encouraged creativity and self-expression. The east coast elite, who thought royalty had graced the campus, loved her – Cate had dated an Astor, a Vanderbilt and a Rockefeller, spending holidays in the Hamptons, in Aspen and Palm Beach. She spent every penny of the small trust fund her mother had left her on tuition fees and a Madison Avenue wardrobe, but had gained bags of confidence, connections and self-belief in return. She took internships at Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and emerged back in Britain six years later stronger, leaner, more accomplished, and with a set of John Barrett russet-blonde highlights that meant, from that moment on, Cate Balcon would always be described as a looker too.
She wiped her eyes and blew her nose on a clump of Kleenex she had stuffed under the pillow. OK, she told herself sternly, enough self-pity for one evening. She picked up a tatty copy of Madame Bovary from the little bookshelf by the bed, but still she couldn’t concentrate.
It was bad enough she’d been sacked, but from what she’d learnt from her PA Sadie that afternoon, she’d also been outmanoeuvred. Sadie had been asked to book Nicole Valentine a Eurostar ticket to Paris – for the shows – two weeks earlier. Someone knew that Cate wasn’t going to be around to take her front-row seat