Fame and Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte

of your own kids, so we could all go home?

      Home.

      The word had been turning over and over in Tish’s mind all day. She would have to make a decision soon, tomorrow probably, and start making some concrete plans. She’d wanted Michel’s advice today, but deep down she already knew what he would have told her. Go. Go home and do what you need to do. There was no other way.

      Home for Tish was Loxley Hall, an idyllic Elizabethan pile in the heart of Derbyshire’s glorious Hope Valley. Much smaller than neighbouring Chatsworth, but widely considered more beautiful, Loxley had been the ancestral seat of the Crewe family for over eight generations. Growing up there as a little girl, Tish had never noticed the house’s grandeur, not least because behind the intricately carved, exterior with its stone mullioned windows and fairytale turrets, the family actually lived in a distinctly down-at-heel ‘apartment’ of seven, shabby rooms, and not in the immaculately preserved ballrooms and dining halls that the public saw. What Tish was aware of, however, was Loxley’s magic. The beauty of her grounds, with their ancient clipped yew hedges, endless expanses of lawn and deer-covered parkland beyond, punctuated by vast, four-hundred-year-old oaks. At the front of the house, beneath a crumbling medieval stone bridge, the river Derwent burbled sleepily, little more than a stream in the narrow part of the valley. As a child, Tish would sit on the bridge for hours, legs dangling, playing Poohsticks with herself or watching hopefully for an otter to make a thrilling, sleek-headed appearance. Her older brother Jago had never shared her fascination with the river, nor her romantic belief in Loxley Hall as some sort of magical kingdom. Mostly, Tish remembered him as rather distant and aloof (‘sensitive’, their mother called him), always playing inside with his computer games or his older, sophisticated friends from Thaxton House, the local boys’ prep school. Tish’s childhood playmates were her Jack Russell, Harrison, the family housekeeper Mrs Drummond, and on occasions her elderly but much beloved father, Henry.

      Henry Crewe had died two years ago and Tish still missed him terribly. It was Henry’s death that had set off the chain of events leading to the current crisis. Amid much familial wailing and gnashing of teeth, Henry Crewe had broken Loxley’s four-hundred-year entailment and left the house lock, stock and barrel to his estranged wife Vivianna, Tish and Jago’s mother. This was partly a romantic gesture. Although Vivi had left him and their children the better part of two decades ago to start a new life in Italy, visiting England only rarely, she had never actually divorced Henry. To the bafflement of all his friends, not to mention his daughter, who felt Vivianna’s abandonment deeply, Henry maintained a nostalgic attachment to his wife that only seemed to intensify as the years passed. The Crewes remained on friendly terms, and Henry never gave up hope that one day Vivianna would see the light, tire of her stream of younger lovers, and return to the bosom of her family.

      Needless to say, she never did. But changing the will had not solely been about Vivi. It had also been an attempt to mitigate Jago’s influence over Loxley’s future. The withdrawn, distant brother Tish remembered had grown up into a feckless, selfish and completely irresponsible young man. Blessed with good looks and a big enough trust fund never to have to earn a living, Jago Crewe partied away the years between eighteen and twenty-two in a narcotic-induced haze, eventually winding up depressed and seriously ill in a North London Hospital. It was after he had emerged from this self-styled breakdown that Jago had decided the time had come to change his life. He had shown no interest in ‘knuckling down’ at Loxley Hall, however. Pronouncing himself teetotal, Buddhist and a committed vegan, he had proceeded to disappear on a spiritual journey that had taken him around the world from Hawaii to Tahiti to Thailand (first class, naturally), spending family money like water as he tried out one spurious, navel-gazing cult after another.

      Meanwhile, Henry’s health had been failing. Clearly, something had had to be done. And so it was that Henry had willed the house to Vivianna, intending that she would let it out for the remainder of her lifetime, perhaps to the National Trust, and leave it on her death to whichever of the children, or grandchildren, looked like the safest bet at the time.

      Things had not worked out that way. Having failed to come home for his father’s funeral, or even send flowers, Jago showed up at Loxley two months later, announcing that he’d had a change of heart filial-duty-wise and had returned to claim his inheritance. Vivianna immediately made the house over to him (she never could say no to her darling boy) and retreated to her villa outside Rome, considering her duties to her former husband fully discharged and all well that had ended well.

      Meanwhile, stuck out in Romania, Tish was concerned about the situation, but as a single mother with a full-time children’s home to run, had problems enough of her own. Besides, as the months passed and nothing disastrous happened at Loxley, she began to relax. Perhaps Jago really had grown out of his immature, selfish stage this time and was going to make a go of things on the estate? He was still only twenty-eight, after all. Plenty of time to turn over a new leaf.

      Then she got the letter.

      The letter was from Mrs Drummond, the Crewe family’s housekeeper of the last thirty-odd years and a surrogate mother to Tish and Jago. According to Mrs D, Jago had walked out of the house three weeks ago, announcing that he would not be returning as he intended to live out the remainder of his days as a contemplative hermit in the hills of Tibet. Mrs D, who’d heard it all countless times before, took this latest change of plans with her usual pinch of salt. But she’d been forced to view matters more seriously when Jago’s wastrel hippy friends, many of them drug addicts, had refused to leave Loxley after Jago’s departure. Worse, they had begun to cause serious damage.

      ‘I called the police,’ Mrs Drummond wrote to Tish, ‘but they say that as Jago invited them in, and has only been gone a matter of weeks, they have no power to evict them unless they hear from Jago directly. They won’t listen to me. But Letitia, they’ve been stealing. At least two of your father’s paintings are missing and I’m certain some of the silverware is gone. I’ve tried to reason with them, but they can actually be quite intimidating.’

      That was the part that had really made up Tish’s mind. The thought of these drugged-out thugs scaring Mrs Drummond, the sweetest, most defenceless old woman in the world, brought out every protective instinct within her. She had to go back and sort out her brother’s mess. How could he have left Mrs D to cope with all of this alone? Whenever he deigned to return from his latest self-indulgent, soul-searching exercise, Tish was going to strangle him with her bare hands.

      Parking her exhausted Fiat in front of the graffiti-covered tower block she called home, Tish bolted up the staircase two steps at a time. Her flat was on the sixth floor, but the lift had long since broken, so she and Abel got regular workouts dragging their groceries and schoolbags up and down the stairs. Tish was still fumbling in her bag for her keys, trying to catch her breath, when the front door opened. Lydia, Abel’s heavy-set Romanian nanny, glowered disapprovingly in the doorway.

      ‘You’re late.’

      With her fat, butcher’s arms, old-fashioned striped apron, and steel-grey hair cut in a blunt, unforgiving fringe, Lydia had the body of an ex-shot-putter and the face of a Gestapo wardress. She had never liked her English boss, whom she considered flighty and appallingly laissez-faire as a mother. However, she was devoted to little Abel, who in turn was very fond of her, which was why Tish had never fired her. That and the fact that Lydia was prepared to work long, often erratic hours for laughably low pay.

      ‘I know, I’m sorry. There was a bit of a crisis at Curcubeu.’ Tish forced her way past the nanny’s giant frame into the hallway, dropping her bag on the floor. ‘Abel! Where are you, darling? Mummy’s home!’

      ‘He sleeping,’ said Lydia frostily. ‘He waited long time for you. Very upset in his bath time, but now is OK. Sleeping.’

      Tish looked suitably guilty. She couldn’t have cared less what old iron-pants thought of her, but she hated letting Abel down. Had he really been unhappy at bath time, or was Lydia just twisting the knife?

      The old woman pulled on her coat, a thick, frankly filthy sheepskin, and a pair of brightly coloured knitted gloves. ‘He need his sleep,’ she told Tish sternly. ‘Don’t waking him.’ And with this commandment she shuffled