‘Good: I’ll get you your drink, introduce Lucia, and come back and make my special dressing for the starter.’ Beckoning Lucia to accompany her, Rosemary headed for the door leading to the rear of the hall.
As she had put on a dress to go to church, Lucia had worried that her jeans might be too informal for today’s lunch. To her relief, her benefactor’s daughter was also wearing jeans, though her top was recognisably one of a famous designer’s expensively beautiful knits and Lucia’s was a schoolboy-sized shirt she had found on the men’s rail in a charity shop.
Before Rosemary could introduce them, her daughter jumped up, put out her hand and said, ‘Hi, I’m Jenny…and you’re Mum’s unlikely-looking jailbird. Nice to meet you. This is my husband Tom.’
A thickset man with a receding hairline and kind blue eyes offered his hand. ‘Hello, Lucia. I’m an architect…married to a woman who prides herself on her outspokenness which is why some people cross the road when they see us coming. The first time we met she told me I stank of garlic.’
‘But I liked him so much that, despite the garlic, I kissed him goodnight…and he came back for more and here we are twenty years later,’ said Jenny, laughing. ‘What are you going to drink, Lucia? White wine?’—with a flourish of her own glass.
‘Yes, please.’
Grey was in the act of handing a Campari and soda to his mother. He glanced at Lucia. ‘Jenny likes her wine sweet. Would you rather have something dryer?’
At first she had been taken aback by Jenny’s immediate reference to her imprisonment. Now she was grateful to her for bringing it into the open so quickly, and to Tom for picking up what some would regard as his wife’s indiscretion and capping it in an amusing way. It was immediately obvious that they were very happy together.
‘What Jenny is drinking will be fine.’ Smiling at his sister, she said, ‘Drinking anything alcoholic is a major treat for me. There was some illicit alcohol available in prison—at a price—but I wasn’t desperate enough to risk it.’
‘Was there anyone like yourself in there? Anyone you could be friendly with?’
‘In prison, you’re grateful if anyone will be friendly with you,’ Lucia said quietly. But she knew it was next to impossible to make people who had never been there understand how it was ‘inside’.
Jenny started to ask something else but was stopped by her brother saying, ‘Don’t start grilling her, Jen.’ Putting a glass of wine into Lucia’s hand, he said, ‘My sister was once a journalist…more precisely a junior reporter on a small town weekly. It was going to lead to a glittering career in London, but she met Tom and changed her mind.’
‘And have never regretted it,’ said Jenny. ‘I enjoyed my three years on the Gazette, but I like being my own boss better. Now that the children are launched, I may try a spot of freelancing.’
‘Did you read the article in yesterday’s paper…?’ Tom took charge of the conversation and steered it in a more general direction.
CHAPTER FOUR
HALF an hour later, starting to eat his lunch, Grey wondered why, when he had engineered his sister’s presence here in order for her to exercise her canny judgment of character on the interloper in their midst, he had chosen to intervene when she started questioning Lucia.
Something in Lucia’s face as she answered Jenny’s first question had stirred a curious sense of compunction in him. Logically it was she who should be feeling that reaction.
He looked up from the grilled courgettes dressed with a special apple and caper mixture of his mother’s and glanced across the table. Today his mother was at the head of it, with Tom and himself on either side of her and Lucia on the left of his brother-in-law. They seemed to be getting on well while Jenny talked across him to their mother.
He watched Lucia laughing at something Tom had said to her. With him, she seemed wholly relaxed. With himself she was tense and guarded. As she bloody well should be, he thought, remembering that she had cost him a very large sum of money, not to mention considerable loss of face. He could live with that aspect of the affair rather better than the fine art auctioneers from whom he had bought the fake painting they had authenticated as a genuine pencil and watercolour drawing by Joseph Edward Southall.
Their reputation was in shreds, his own only dented. That the prime mover of the scam was the guy who was still in prison, and who would remain there for several years, was beside the point. Without Lucia’s skill he could not have carried out the operation.
Grey wondered if their relationship had gone beyond business dealings. Later on he would ask her. Or perhaps ask Jenny to find out. With his sister’s gift for winning people’s confidence, she was more likely to elicit the truth than he was.
Lucia did not give the impression of being a woman of considerable sexual experience. There was nothing bold or even confident about her. Her reaction to his invasion of the bathroom the other day had been almost virginal. But she could be and probably was putting on an act. Like a cat, she had fallen on her feet and was far too astute to muff this unexpected opportunity to enjoy the good life at someone else’s expense.
On the other side of the table, Lucia was aware of being under surveillance. It made it difficult for her to give Tom her full attention. He was telling her about a Scottish architect who had set up his practice in 1848 and, designing houses for newly-rich Glasgow merchants and factory owners, had evolved a style that was now regarded as the finest neo-classical urban design anywhere.
‘The tragedy is that until quite recently Thomson’s buildings were being demolished,’ Tom told her. ‘One of his best buildings, with black marble fireplaces and fine ceiling decorations, was sledge-hammered into rubble.’
‘What a shame.’ Lucia was sincere in deploring the destruction, but try as she might she could not switch off her awareness of the cold gaze she knew was focussed on her.
If Grey hadn’t been present she could have enjoyed herself. The courgettes and their sauce were delicious. Tom and his wife seemed willing to take it on trust that she had paid for her misdemeanours and would not repeat them.
Only Grey seemed determined to distrust her. Was that only because he was the only person here who had been directly affected by the fraud in which she had conspired, if not knowingly and directly then at least by refusing to listen to the questions asked by her conscience?
Or did Grey have other reasons for being wary, not just of her but of the whole female sex? The remark he had made before his sister’s arrival—about the direction the world was taking being a consequence of women’s initiatives—hinted at some kind of hang-up connected with feminist issues.
Lucia belonged to the post-feminist generation. She knew Grey was thirty-six, twelve years older than herself, because his mother, now seventy, had told her he was born when she was thirty-four. Probably, when he was twenty, more vulnerable than he was now, he would have encountered some feminist extremists and attitudes far more hostile than those that were prevalent now.
After lunch they all went for a walk, setting out in a group but gradually separating into a threesome and a twosome, the latter being herself and Jenny bringing up the rear while the two men walked on either side of Rosemary.
‘Now I can grill you about the prison,’ said Jenny, with a sideways grin. ‘I must admit I’m madly curious…who wouldn’t be? Do you mind if I ask you questions? If you really don’t want to talk about it, I’ll shut up.’
‘I don’t mind—but first I’d like to ask you something,’ said Lucia.
‘Fair enough…go ahead.’
‘How do you feel about my being your mother’s painting companion on these trips that she’s planning? I know Grey isn’t happy with the arrangement. Do