A Paper Marriage. Jessica Steele

is doing all right, is it?’ Lydie enquired—and received another of her mother’s sour looks for her trouble.

      ‘As a matter of fact, he’s decided to—um—cease trading.’

      ‘You’re saying that he’s gone bust too?’

      ‘Must you be so vulgar? Was all that expensive education lavished on you completely for nothing?’ her mother grumbled. Though she did concede, ‘All companies work on an overdraft basis—Oliver found it just too much of a struggle. When he and Madeline come back from their honeymoon, Oliver will go and work in the Ward-Watson business.’ She allowed herself the first smile Lydie had so far seen as she added, half to herself, ‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised if Oliver isn’t made a director of the Ward-Watson conglomerate before he’s much older.’

      All of which was very pleasing, but this wasn’t getting them anywhere. ‘There won’t be any money coming back to Dad from Oliver, I take it?’

      ‘He’ll need all the money he can lay his hands on to support his wife. Madeline is used to the finer things in life, you know.’

      ‘Where’s Dad now?’ Lydie asked, her heart aching for the proud man who had always worked so hard. ‘Is he down at the works?’

      ‘Little point. Your father has already sold the works to pay off some debts—he’s out of a job, and at his age nobody’s going to employ him. Not that he would deign to work for anyone but himself.’

      Oh, heavens, Lydie mused helplessly, it sounded as though things were even worse than she had started to imagine. ‘Is he out in the grounds somewhere?’

      ‘What grounds? Any spare ground has been sold. Not that, since it’s arable land only, it made a lot.’ And, starting to build up a fine head of steam, ‘Apart from the house—which the bank wants a slice of, which means we have to leave—your father has sold everything else that he can. I’ve told him I’m not moving!’ Her mother went vitriolically on in the same vein for another five minutes. Going on from talk of how they were on their beam-ends to state that if they had only a half of the amount the Ward-Watsons were forking out for their only daughter’s fairy-tale wedding, the bank would be satisfied.

      ‘Dad doesn’t owe the bank very much, then?’ Lydie asked, but before she could start to feel in any small way relieved, her mother was giving her a snappy reply.

      ‘They’re his one remaining creditor—he’s managed to scrape enough together to pay off everybody else, plus most of his overdraft. But—today’s Tuesday, and the bank say they have given him long enough. If they aren’t in receipt of fifty thousand pounds by the end of banking on Friday—they move. And so do we! Can you imagine it? The disgrace? A fine thing it’s going to look in Oliver’s wedding announcement. Not “Oliver Pearson of Beamhurst Court”, but “Oliver Pearson of No Fixed Abode”. How shall we ever—?’

      Her mother would have gone on, but Lydie interrupted. ‘Fifty thousand doesn’t sound such a fearfully large amount.’

      ‘It does when you haven’t got it. Nor any way of finding it either. Apart from the house, we’re out of collateral. How can we borrow money with no way of repaying it? Nobody’s going to loan us anything. Not that your father would ask in the circumstances. No, your father overextended himself, the bank won’t wait any longer—and now I have to pay!’

      Lydie thought hard. ‘The pictures!’ she exclaimed after a moment. ‘We could sell some of the family—’

      ‘Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said? Haven’t I just finished telling you that everything, everything that isn’t in trust for Oliver, has been sold? There’s nothing left to sell. Nothing, absolutely nothing!’

      Her mother looked closer to tears than Lydie had ever seen her, and suddenly her heart went out to her. For all her mother had never been the warmest mother in the world to her, Oliver being her pride and joy, Lydie loved her.

      Lydie went impulsively over to her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said gently, taking a seat next to her on the sofa. ‘I’m so very sorry.’ And, remembering her mother saying only a short while ago that it was time she paid something back for the expensive education she had received, ‘What can I do?’ she asked. While the amount of her inheritance was small, and nowhere near enough, Lydie was thinking in terms of asking to have that money released now and not two years hence, when she would attain the age of twenty-five, but her mother’s reply shook her into speechlessness.

      ‘You can go and see Jonah Marriott,’ she said clearly. ‘That’s what you can do.’

      Lydie stared at her, her green eyes huge. ‘Jonah Marriott?’ she managed faintly. She had only ever seen him once, and that was some seven years ago, but she had never forgotten the tall, good looking man.

      ‘You remember him?’

      ‘He came here one time. Didn’t Dad lend him some money?’

      ‘He did,’ Hilary Pearson replied sharply. ‘And now it’s his turn to pay that money back.’

      ‘He never repaid that money?’ Lydie asked, feeling just a touch disappointed. He had seemed to her sixteen-year-old eyes such an honourable man—and she knew he had prospered greatly in the seven years that had elapsed.

      ‘Coincidentally, the money he borrowed from your father is the same amount we need to stay on in this house.’

      ‘Fifty thousand pounds?’

      ‘Exactly the same. I can’t impress on you enough that if the bank don’t have their money by Friday, come Monday they’ll be making representation to have us evicted. I’d go and see him myself, but when I mentioned it to your father he hit the roof and forbade me to do anything of the sort.’

      Lydie could not imagine her mild-mannered father hitting the roof, especially to the wife he adored. But he must be under a tremendous amount of strain at the moment. No doubt he himself had previously asked Jonah Marriott to make some kind of payment off that loan. There was no way her father’s pride would allow him to ask more than once. But to…

      Her thoughts faded when just then the drawing room door opened and her father walked into the room. At least the man was tall, like her father, white-haired, like her father, but Lydie was shocked by the haggard look of him.

      ‘Daddy!’ she whispered involuntarily, and went hurriedly over to him. There was a dejected kind of slump to his shoulders which she found heartbreaking, and as she looked into his worn, tired face, she could not bear it. She put her arms round him and hugged him.

      ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, putting her aside and sending her mother a suspicious look.

      ‘I—thought I’d give Donna a chance to see how she’ll cope without me,’ Lydie invented, quickly hiding her shocked feelings. ‘I’ll give her a ring later. If she’s okay I’ll stay on, if that’s all right with you?’

      ‘Of course it’s all right,’ he replied with assumed joviality. ‘This is your h…’ He turned away and Lydie’s heart ached afresh. She just knew he had been thinking that this was her home, but would not be for very much longer. ‘Your mother been bringing you up to date with everything?’ he enquired, his tone casual, but pride there, ready to be up in arms if his wife had breathed a word of his troubles.

      ‘This wedding of Oliver’s sounds a bit top-drawer. Are they going to have a marquee—you didn’t finish telling me, Mother?’

      Over the next half-hour Lydie observed at first hand the proud façade her father was putting up in front of her, and her heart went out to him. Looking at him, seeing the strain, the worry that seemed to be weighing him down, to go and see Jonah Marriott and ask him to repay the money he had borrowed from her father seven years ago did not seem such a hard task. Particularly as, if memory served, that money had only been loaned for a period of five years anyway.

      ‘Your room’s all ready for you.’ Her mother took the conversation away from