Secrets from the Past. Barbara Taylor Bradford

as I usually did at lunch time, a bad habit picked up from my father and Harry.

      Later, I went to Jessica’s room and looked around, wanting to make sure everything was in good order. It was, thanks to Mrs Watledge, who came in twice a week to clean and do odd jobs for me. She always dusted every room in the apartment, whether it had been used or not. Much to my pleasure, she was fastidious.

      Jessica had left in a rush the last time she’d been here. I had hung up the clothes she had strewn around on pieces of furniture and put away all the scattered shoes once she was gone, and Mrs Watledge had vacuumed, polished the furniture and changed the bed linen.

      I saw there was not a thing out of place, and that would please Jessica, who was normally the neatest of the three of us. A crisis in the auction house she owned in Nice had necessitated her unexpected and swift return to France last November, hence the messy room she had so blithely abandoned without a backward glance, as usual focused on the problems in Nice.

      I was thrilled my sister was coming for the weekend. Although she and Cara had once teased me unmercifully, as the much younger child of the family, things had eventually levelled off as I grew older.

      We became the best of friends, the three of us, very bonded, and we were still extremely close. We shared this apartment and the house in Nice, which our mother left to us equally. The two places were our parents’ main homes for many years. Their special favourites and ours; the ownership only passed to us after our father’s death last year, which was the stipulation in her will.

      Closing the door of Jessica’s room, I went to the kitchen and checked the refrigerator. Mrs Watledge filled it up with basic items and bought a fresh roasting chicken from the butcher every Friday.

      There was plenty of food, and if my sister felt like eating out we could go to Jimmy Neary’s pub on Fifty-Seventh, or the French restaurant, Le Périgord, at Fifty-Second and First. Two old favourites of ours, where we’d been going for years, starting when we were teenagers.

      I wandered down to the office, sat at the desk and opened the top drawer, staring at the two cell phones and the BlackBerry.

      I knew there would be no messages. I never used the BlackBerry these days; only ever took a cell phone with me if I intended to be gone for several hours.

      Grimacing at them, I reached for my Moleskine notebook and closed the drawer firmly. Those devices reminded me too much of the front line.

      I had given up covering wars eleven months ago, and had no intention of ever walking onto a battleground again. The mere thought of this sent an ice-cold chill running through me, and I shivered involuntarily.

      For eight years I had been lucky. But I had come to believe my luck wouldn’t last much longer. And I’d grown afraid … afraid to put on my flak jacket and helmet and head out to some no-man’s-land on a far-flung distant shore, my camera poised to get the most dramatic shot ever. Fear had taken hold of me bit by bit by bit.

      When you’re afraid you don’t function with the same precision and skill, and that’s when you’re truly putting yourself at risk. I understood all this. The game was over for me.

      Flipping through the pages of the Moleskine, I came across some jottings I had made during the week, regarding the year 1999. I needed to talk to my sisters about that particular year, and what we’d all been doing then. I had a photographic memory, but several months of that year were somehow missing in my head. Jessica would no doubt remember.

      I pulled the manuscript towards me and glanced at the one section that continued to trouble me. As I pored over the pages I realized that only my father appeared in this long chapter. Obviously it was the reason I was worried.

      His family and friends needed to occupy those pages as well, didn’t they? Yes, I answered myself.

      A thought struck me. I jumped up, went to one of the cupboards built in below the bookshelves, and looked inside. Stored there in stacks were many photograph albums which had been carefully put together by my mother.

      I pulled out a few and glanced at the dates. Albums for the years 1998 and 2001 were there, but not 1999 and 2000. So those must be in Nice. The albums ran up to 2004, and some were much earlier, dated in the early Nineties. All would come in useful at some point, but these were not the ones I needed at this particular moment.

       FOUR

      I took the two albums I wanted to review and carried them over to the sofa. Balancing the one marked 1998 on my knee, I opened it, and a smile immediately flashed across my face.

      In the middle of the first page my mother had written: MY THREE DAUGHTERS GROWN UP.

      When I turned the page my smile widened. There were a number of snapshots of Jessica, which had been taken by my father. She had been twenty-five years old at that moment in time, tall and arresting.

      I gazed at the images of her, thinking how beautiful she was, with her glossy black hair framing her heart-shaped face. Her large dark eyes were full of sparkle and she was smiling broadly, showing perfect white teeth. Our grandmother had called it ‘the smile that lights up a room’.

      What a knockout she had been. The snaps were taken in the summer of that year; Jessica had a golden tan, was wearing a white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up and white jeans. She looked even taller because she was in a pair of high, wedged espadrilles.

      On the following pages were shots of her taken outside Laurent’s, the well-known auction house in Nice, which the ancient owners had, somewhat ridiculously, allowed to become rundown and decrepit. Jessica had bought it with my parents’ help. I saw how cleverly my father had told the story of Jessica’s first business venture. He had documented almost every step, showed her supervising the restoration and remodelling of the Belle Epoque building, working on the outside and in the interiors. His picture story showed me how diligent she had been in bringing it back to its former architectural glory.

      Stone’s, as she had named it, became, under her direction, one of the most technically modern and digitally up-to-date auction houses in Europe. And a most glamorous venue. And it had happened because of her vision, talent, hard work and determination.

      The pièce de résistance of my father’s brilliant picture story was the next section devoted to Jessica’s opening night. My sister had inaugurated Stone’s with a grand auction – the contents of our mother’s Bel Air house, which our mother had recently put on the market, plus selections from her haute-couture clothes by famous designers. Also in the auction were pieces from our mother’s collection of jewels, from the world’s greatest jewellers.

      The auction had been a sensation, had broken all records, and the publicity for Stone’s had continued to roll ever since. It was now considered to be one of the most important auction houses in the world.

      Now there we were, me and Cara, our images captured on the next few pages of the album. I stared at them eagerly, had forgotten how special we looked on that gala evening. We were in attendance to boost Jessica’s confidence, and cheer her on, wanting to make her opening night a big smash. Naturally, it was a family affair.

      I peered at the pictures; we were glamorous, beautiful – or perhaps we only looked that way because of Dad’s superb photography, plus the skilful professional help from our mother’s makeup artist and hairdresser. I wondered who we were trying to impress? Or which men to attract?

      Cara, as dramatic in appearance as her twin, was wearing a clinging, royal blue silk gown, with a plunging neckline. The dress showed off her hourglass figure to perfection, and she had never looked so sexy before.

      Jessica had chosen her favourite colour, daffodil yellow. She appeared sleek and elegant in the chiffon dress, which fell in narrow pleats to the floor and was somewhat Grecian in style. Her black hair was swept up on top of her head, and she was wearing diamond chandelier earrings, which our mother had loaned her for the event.

      I