Scandals. PENNY JORDAN

to find his own level, and who had supported him.

      ‘No buts,’ Rose assured him. ‘Just don’t let your pride lead you into doing something you might regret, Nick. You’ve got two sons—’

      ‘You mean I’ve provided Sarah’s father with two grandsons,’ he interrupted her bitterly, ‘because that’s what she thinks is more important. It’s no use. I’ve tried…Sarah would probably say that she’s tried as well, if she were sitting here, but all the trying in the world can’t put right what’s gone wrong between us and, to tell the truth, I don’t even think that I want it put right any more.’

      ‘Oh, Nick…’ Rose hugged her stepson tightly.

      In so many ways he was the image of his father, and she would have loved him for that alone. But there were other ways in which he was uniquely himself and she loved him for that as well. Josh had grown up as an only child of loving Jewish parents, who had themselves grown up in the East End of London. His childhood had given him self-confidence and an optimistic self-assurance. Nick had been brought up in an atmosphere of male violence and female fear. He had Josh’s self-confidence, but in Nick that confidence had a much harder edge to it, twinned with cynicism and sometimes even suspicion about the rest of the human race. Where Josh was exuberant and physically affectionate, Nick found it difficult to show his feelings. Whilst Josh had always been ambitious, Nick was far more driven. The so-called ‘big bang’ in 1986, when the financial system in London had become deregulated, had made Nick a very wealthy man, taking him from the trading floor to heading up his own department within one of the world’s most successful merchant banks, but it was rare to see Nick smiling and even more rare to hear him laughing.

      ‘When’s Dad due back?’ Nick asked, changing the subject.

      ‘He said he’d be home in time for dinner, but you know how these sessions with the advertising people run on.’

      Out of the success of his original hairdressing salon Josh had built up his business, mainly by lending his name to hair-care products and merchandising, and these days he was more of an entrepreneur and businessman than a hands-on hairdresser, although he still insisted on cutting Rose’s hair himself.

      ‘Black gold, that hair of yours was,’ he often told her. ‘That style I cut for you and the photographs Ollie took of it were where it all began for me, Rosie. You’re my good luck.’

      ‘Why don’t you stay and have dinner with your dad and me?’ Rose suggested.

      Nick shook his head. ‘I’ve got a client to see this evening, and I need to sort myself out with a decent flat before Christmas.’

      ‘I can’t give you your Christmas present yet because it hasn’t arrived,’ Rose told him.

      Nick had come to them with no possessions, and when Rose and Josh had gone round to the house where he and his mother had been living, they’d found a handful of photographs of Nick as a baby with his mother. Recently Rose had sent the best of these photographs to Oliver in New York, and he had promised to produce some new photographs from them, to be framed and given to Nick as his Christmas present. They were Rose’s way of saying to him that neither she nor anyone else had the right to exclude his mother from his life, nor to ignore all that she had done for him, and Rose knew that when Nick saw them he would understand that, just as she knew that beneath his sharp-edged exterior he could be both vulnerable and sentimental.

      Christmas presents…Nick looked away from his stepmother. He hadn’t had time to go with Sarah when she’d taken the boys to Hamleys and Harrods at the beginning of December. He’d stopped going Christmas shopping for the boys with her after he’d bought them both battery-driven child-size cars. He’d been thrilled with the cars. As a child he hadn’t even been able to dream of things like that. He’d raced home from work the day they were due to be delivered, only to find that Sarah had sent them back.

      ‘But, Nick, that kind of thing is so dreadfully vulgar,’ she had told him.

      ‘Like me, you mean?’ he had fired back, and she hadn’t denied it, simply turning away from him, saying quietly, ‘Daddy says that we really ought to be thinking about getting the boys used to riding. He’s sorting out a couple of ponies he thinks will suit them.’

      ‘Ponies? They are my sons, not some ruddy little Lord Fauntleroys,’ he’d told her before he’d stormed out of the house.

      

      ‘Hurry up, you two, otherwise Katie is going to miss her train.’

      The sound of her best friend’s brother’s voice from the bottom of the stairs had Katie making a grab for her case whilst Zoë put her finger to her lips and mouthed, ‘Let’s pretend we aren’t here. He’ll have a heart attack. You know what he’s like about being on time for things.’

      Katie could have said that since, on this occasion, what he wanted to be on time for was the train she needed to catch for London, teasing him didn’t seem very fair. But long experience of Zoë had her shaking her head instead, whilst downstairs Tom swore audibly. Zoë burst out laughing and called out, ‘Ooooh, Tom, fancy you using such naughty words.’

      Well pleased with her joke, Zoë turned back to Katie, tossing a parcel towards her. ‘Catch! Happy Christmas, and don’t you dare open it until Christmas morning.’

      ‘Yours is in your suitcase,’ Katie responded. ‘I sneaked it in last night.’

      ‘What is it? Tell me. Is it a naked poster of that gorgeous boy who serves in the uni bar? The one who looks like he could be a modern-day Earl of Rochester?’ Zoë was mad about the seventeenth-century notorious rake and poet, and Katie wasn’t surprised when she struck a pose, grasping two handfuls of her top as though it were a lecturer’s gown, and quoted,’“…with an avowed contempt of all decency and order, a total disregard to every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious observation, he lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness”. He must have been the most deliciously wickedly dangerous man, far more so than Lord Byron,’ she sighed. ‘I would love to meet a man like that, a reincarnation of him, wouldn’t you, Katie?’

      ‘Who, Dr Johnson?’ Katie teased, referring to the author Zoë had just quoted.

      ‘No, silly, John Wilmot, of course. Just imagine how exciting it must have been to be with him.’

      ‘He was a womaniser and a rake,’ Katie reminded her.

      Zoë gave a small ecstatic sigh. ‘Exactly,’ and then demanded, ‘Tell me what my present is.’

      Katie shook her head.

      ‘Please…’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Katie, do you want to catch this train or not?’ Tom bellowed.

      Zoë ran to lean over the banister. ‘Katie does, but I don’t want her to. Why do you have to go home for Christmas when you could have come with us to Klosters? I thought you were my best friend.’ Zoë adopted a tragic pose. ‘You don’t love me any more, do you?’

      ‘Zoë, stop fooling around for once, will you? Of course Katie wants to spend Christmas with her family.’

      Katie blew Zoë a kiss and dragged her case down the stairs, giving Tom a look that was both grateful and apologetic.

      It was funny how things could jog along in the same way for so long and then suddenly change overnight or in her case, over a lager in an Oxford pub when she and Zoë had met up with Tom, newly returned to the UK, having completed his Master’s in America. She’d known him virtually all her life, but sitting there in the pub, listening to him talk about America, watching the way he smiled and pushed his dark hair out of his eyes, Katie had realised that the excitement she suddenly felt had nothing to do with the fact that he was Zoë’s brother. And then he’d smiled at her as though he guessed what she was thinking and she’d smiled back. Now it wasn’t just because of Zoë that she was looking forward to going skiing after Christmas.

      Katie