Nana had come to England from Ireland as a six-year-old with wild flaxen hair and rosy cheeks. She came from strong, Northern Irish stock and a family who knew how to work hard and get ahead. Her father, Damon Burns, also knew that if his beautiful Clementine was ever going to do well in England and be able to rub shoulders with English gentry, she’d have to get rid of the thick accent and smooth out that hair.
Damon Burns signed Clementine up for elocution lessons and had the Queen’s English drummed into her until she could pass for a member of the royal family. Damon worked as a handyman in a women’s underwear factory and his wife was a seamstress in said factory. Damon worked an additional two jobs so that their only daughter could go to private school.
He didn’t stop working until he and his wife eventually bought out the underwear factory and, in years to come, thanks to some astute business sense from the Irish couple, the small factory became one of the largest women’s lingerie designers and wholesalers in Europe. When Nana Clementine took over the company at age twenty-one, she made it a global success.
Unlike Nana Clementine and her Irish family, I hated to work. A fact she was fully aware of. But yet here she was, and from beyond the grave I might add, trying to drum some of those hard-nosed, working-class family values into me.
In her will she had left her estate to Mother, her only child, and to each of her granddaughters she’d left a tidy sum of £250,000. My sisters – Amber, Indigo and Ebony – all got away scot-free with their stash but there was a proviso attached to my payout. As Mr Bartholomew put it:
‘Magenta Clementine Bright will take possession of her inheritance at age forty-five; but at any age prior to her forty-fifth birthday, she may take possession of the inheritance if she has been in continuous employment for the same employer for exactly 365 days.’
The mention of waiting to get hold of the money until age forty-five had caused the failure of my bodily functions; that is, I felt faint and I needed to wee. I was twenty-eight for crying out loud. The words ‘continuous employment’ had caused my eyes to roll back in my head. The loss of breath occurred straight after he’d said, ‘same employer’, and I’d crashed to the floor as if dead when I heard him say, ‘365 days’.
By 365 days Mr Bartholomew meant a year. A whole year of work. Since I was twenty-three and had left university, the longest I’d held down a job was two months. In between jobs there’d been months of unemployment – not a good look for any curriculum vitae. Five years of living precariously doesn’t look good for anyone but I’d been consistent in the type of job I’d had. I’d always been a PA of some description. I can’t organise myself for shit but I’m brilliant at organising other people. Well for two months at a time, it would appear.
‘Magenta, get off the floor,’ my mother said as I lay prostrate on the Persian rug in Mr Bartholomew’s office, which smelled of Shake ’N’ Vac.
‘Ignore her,’ Mother said to the solicitor. ‘Just carry on.’
My sisters sniggered.
Mr Bartholomew cleared his throat. ‘Any monies owed will be authorised for payment and all contracts to transfer properties to the beneficiaries will be drawn up. You’ll have to allow several months for completion of the transfers, especially the foreign ones, but it will all be in hand.’
My family made a combined sound as they prepared to leave the office, shuffling in their seats and gathering their jackets and handbags.
Just to give you a little background about my family. My mother and father were divorced. My two older sisters, Amber and Indigo, were both married and worked for one of the family businesses: the lingerie company, now owned by Mother. My younger sister, Ebony, was single like me but unlike me, she had a career outside the realms of the family empire and was doing very well indeed.
The four of us girls looked pretty much alike, but in varying dress sizes. We had all acquired the same sandy brown complexion – a combination of my Jamaican father and Irish mother’s genes – black-brown hair of varying wave texture and very posh accents after having attended the same private boarding school as Mother and Nana Clementine. The school was supposed to have made us well-balanced, well-educated, ambitious young ladies. For my sisters that had worked well – for me, not so much.
Nana Clementine had wanted my mother – her only child, Scarlett – to marry well. Mother had been worth a considerable amount of money since before she was conceived so, of course, nothing but an appropriate suitor would do. Fortunately for Nana Clementine, Mother met Father, the son of a rich and influential businessman, at Oxford University.
As a young man, my father, Carl Bright, was destined to inherit a large amount of land and two thriving guest houses in his native Jamaica, which he later developed into a chain of hotels in various islands in the Caribbean – the second of our family businesses. Father was as posh as Mother because of his upbringing: prep school, Eton, Oxford – the whole shebang. Father sounded a bit like Trevor McDonald reading News At Ten but he broke into his Jamaican vernacular when he was upset or angry. We heard a lot of Jamaican patois in the lead-up to their acrimonious divorce, five years ago.
‘Mavis will see you out,’ said Mr Bartholomew as they all left, most of them having to step over me to get to the door. Completely ignoring my dire situation, none of them cared that I might choke down there with all the Shake ’N’ Vac I’d inhaled.
‘You’ll have to get up now, Magenta. I have a meeting in ten minutes.’
I heard Mr Bartholomew tapping documents into a neat pile on his desk.
‘How can I get up?’ I asked from the floor. ‘You just signed my death warrant. I have to work for a full year before I get to spend a penny of my inheritance.’ I proceeded to rise from the dead; that is, I sat up and tried to arrange my big hair into the smooth, presentable style I’d arrived with. I blinked large, hazel eyes at Mr Bartholomew but he was sorting out files and papers and missed my ‘with-these-eyes-I-can-get-anything’ look, which worked like magic on Father when I was a little girl.
‘Mr Bartholomew, isn’t there anything you can do?’ I was on my knees and peering at him from the other side of his desk. ‘Do you understand what it means to hold down a job for a whole year?’
‘I’ve been a solicitor for thirty years.’ He got up and dropped a file into one of the wire trays on his desk, walked to the mirror on the far wall and began straightening his tie. I followed him, put my arms around him from behind and fixed his tie.
‘I mean a year for a normal person,’ I said. His hairline was receding and his suit was terrible but he was still handsome. ‘You don’t understand,’ I went on. ‘Nana loved me the most. There’s no way she’d give Amber, Indigo and Ebony all that money for nothing and make me work for mine.’
He unwound himself from my vice-like grip on his shoulders.
‘I don’t have the power to alter your grandmother’s will, Magenta. You know that.’ He put papers into a thin case, fastened it and held his hand towards the door where Mavis had just come in to hurry her boss along.
My shoulders slumped down like they used to when I was thirteen and someone in my family had ruined my life. I picked up my Hermès Vintage Tote and left the office just ahead of Mr Bartholomew. We walked out onto Lancaster Gate together and he waved his hand in the air to hail a taxi.
I stopped to watch him get into the back seat and wondered for a moment if he had any jobs going back at Bartholomew and Tooke. Realising very quickly I hadn’t exactly led with my best foot forward and there was no way he’d ever employ me, I waved at him. He waved back and I gave him the thumbs up sign. He gave me a puzzled look as the taxi shot off.
I