Strange Intimacy. Anne Mather

ambivalent, too.

      And it was the main reason why she and his mother had never got on. Or was that carrying understanding a little too far? Mrs Jacobson had never wanted her son to marry anyone. She had been quite happy caring for him, and making his life comfortable. An orphaned teenager, without a penny to her name, who had been trying to come to terms with her father’s death at the time, had never figured in her scheme of things.

      Looking back, as she had done many times in the months since Edward died, Isobel had had to admit that maybe Mrs Jacobson had had a point. Perhaps he had been too old for her. Perhaps she had been looking for a replacement for her father. Whatever, the years they had spent together had been mostly happy. At least as happy as most of their friends within their cloistered community.

      Edward’s sudden demise had been a blow to all of them—even Cory, who had spent the last two years of her father’s life doing everything she could to frustrate him. Ever since she’d left the private school, which Mrs Jacobson had insisted on her attending, and started at the local comprehensive, she’d become a problem. Of course, Edward’s mother had maintained it was because Isobel had deprived her of her identity, by putting her into the state-school system. Isobel—and Edward, when he wasn’t being brainwashed by his mother—had called it something else.

      Sheer bloody-mindedness, Isobel had opined, when for the umpteenth time Cory’s headmaster had reported on her daughter’s delinquency. Playing truant, using bad language, indulging in petty shop-lifting—Cory had been found guilty of them all. Far from trying to get good grades, and maybe even get to university, as Isobel had once hoped to do, Cory had done everything she could to upset her parents. And, what was more, she wasn’t ashamed of it. She actually enjoyed the notoriety it gave her.

      Occasionally, Edward had worried that perhaps they should have allowed his mother to go on supporting Cory in private education. But Isobel had persuaded him otherwise. Mrs Jacobson’s influence on their daughter’s life had already been untenable, with Cory quoting her grandmother’s words whenever she didn’t get her own way.

      Edward’s death, ten months ago, had given Isobel a brief breathing space. In the vacuum of their shared grief, she and Cory had been closer than they’d been for years. Isobel had even begun to hope that some good might come from Edward’s accident. That Cory had begun to realise how short life could be. And it might have happened, if Mrs Jacobson hadn’t chosen to interfere again.

      Until Edward’s death, Isobel had had a part-time job, in a local solicitor’s office. Because she had married so young, and become pregnant almost at once, she had been forced to wait until Cory started school to learn the most basic secretarial skills. Edward had never wanted her to work anyway, and only the fact that Cory’s clothes and shoes were so expensive had enabled Isobel to persuade him that she should get a job.

      And Isobel had enjoyed it. She didn’t enjoy spending her days attending her mother-in-law’s coffee mornings, or listening to her mother-in-law’s friends gossiping about anyone who didn’t conform to their strict code of conduct. Isobel had no doubt that she herself had suffered the same fate, once she started working for Gordon Isaacs. But her hours were flexible, and she was always there when Cory came home from school.

      Edward’s death had changed things, however. In the new, tougher financial circumstances in which she had found herself, Isobel knew a part-time job would not be enough. The insurance Edward had left would barely cover the mortgage on their apartment. And what with food and light and heating, all subject to inflation, she knew she needed full-time employment to cover all their expenses.

      That was when Mrs Jacobson had suggested they move in with her. Her house, a rambling Victorian mansion, in St John’s Wood, was far too big for one person, she said. There was no earthly need for Isobel to work, when everything she owned would come to Cory on her death anyway. She’d be glad of the company—and the help about the house—and she was sure it was what Edward would have wanted.

      Isobel had panicked then. There was no other word for it. The idea of moving in with her mother-in-law, and becoming an unpaid servant in her house, was something she couldn’t even countenance. Perhaps she was unkind; perhaps she was ungrateful; perhaps she was foolish! But Isobel knew there was no way she could accept such an arrangement. Cory was hard enough to control as it was. With her grandmother’s support, she would become downright impossible.

      And that was only part of it. Isobel knew she would never be allowed to live her own life in that house. Without a job, without friends, without independence, she would have no life at all. It just couldn’t happen. She was sure she’d go mad.

      And just when she was at the end of her tether—when Mrs Jacobson had started bribing Cory with expensive CDs and other presents, with promises of holidays in the United States, and the chance to decorate her own room when she came to live with her grandmother—Isobel had run into Clare Webster in Oxford Street.

      She and Clare had been at school together. By the time she was fourteen, her father had decided that the peripatetic type of education he could give her, as an antiquities professor, was not enough. In consequence, he had enrolled her at a good boarding-school for girls in Sussex, and although Isobel had protested her father’s word was law.

      Besides, after a few weeks, she had started to like it, and her father’s promise that if she worked hard and got the necessary qualifications he would allow her to work with him had been a very potent incentive. And she had found a good friend in Clare, the daughter of a London surgeon, at whose home she had always been made welcome.

      But time, and circumstance, had not decreed that their friendship should last beyond their schooldays. Clare’s father was a Scot, and when his own father, a country practitioner, had been taken ill Dr Webster had transferred to a hospital in Glasgow, so that he could be nearer his parents.

      That had happened just weeks after the two girls had left school, and less than a month after Isobel’s eighteenth birthday. But Isobel had been preparing to go to South America at the time, to join her father for a year’s sabbatical, before continuing her studies at Oxford, and she had been too excited about her own future to worry about missing Clare. It was only when news came that her father had been killed in a rock-fall that she realised how isolated she was. She had no close friends, no relations, and precious little money. In the depths of her grief, she had been forced to get a job in Sainsbury’s to support herself, and all her hopes for the future had been buried in Yucatan.

      That was why, when she met Clare in Oxford Street, it had seemed so prophetic. It had been almost fourteen years since they’d seen one another, and although, in the beginning, they had kept in touch by letter, the passage of time had eroded even that connection.

      But Clare had recognised Isobel at once, even if Isobel had not been quite so sure. But the expensively clad woman in fine tweeds and pearls bore little resemblance to the plump teenager Isobel remembered, and it was soon obvious from Clare’s attitude that she had married rather well.

      Her insistence that they go somewhere and have lunch, so that they could catch up on one another’s news, had initially aroused a polite but fairly uncompromising refusal. She was due back at the office in less than half an hour, Isobel had explained, not altogether regretfully, in no mood to listen to Clare going on about the difficulties of getting a taxi in London these days. Isobel couldn’t remember the last time she had ridden in a taxi, and with the prospect of another round with Mrs Jacobson that evening looming on the horizon she was desperate to think of some way to head off another confrontation.

      But Clare wouldn’t take no for an answer, and her sudden reversion to the girl Isobel remembered had her agreeing to ring Gordon and beg an extra hour. It was a rather special occasion, she’d consoled herself, and perhaps Clare might have an idea as to how she could extricate herself from Mrs Jacobson’s clutches.

      And she had. Amazingly, Clare had had the perfect answer to her problems. Her father, who had given up his hospital duties when his father died, and taken the senior Dr Webster’s place in Invercaldy, required a competent secretary. Until recently, he had made do with the rather elderly retainer, who had worked with his father for the past forty years. But now Miss McLeay had retired