was no warmth in her. As soon as she was pregnant with her first child she sent Emilie off to boarding-school. Her visits to her father’s new home were always brief; after a week or so she would be sent off on some activity holiday—skiing in winter, horseriding in summer. After leaving school she was despatched to a residential college in England, to take business studies. When she completed her two-year course Emilie began working for her grandfather at the paper-mill in Kent. She knew she would never live with her father again.
She had accepted it, yet there was always a sadness at the back of her mind. She tried to bury it by concentrating on her new life, on her grandfather and her job.
Emilie was learning the business by moving around the departments; she had spent some months on the most important process—production—moved on to a brief spell in packing and despatch, and was now working in sales.
She was at a very low level, of course. All she did was sit at a desk doing paperwork. Her grandfather didn’t employ any women on the actual sales team; he didn’t think it was a woman’s job, travelling the roads across the country alone by car, staying at cheap hotels. He certainly wasn’t prepared to let Emilie do it. She had to learn all about sales from processing orders as they came in from the salesmen and answering the phone, coping with enquiries.
She enjoyed dealing with people, she liked the other girls she worked with, and she was beginning to be very interested in their product, in the history of the paper-mill, in her mother’s family. After a rather lonely period of her life she felt she had come home, she belonged here, and Sophie Grant and her mother were family too, as well as being the first people she had got to know here, except her grandfather. She would never want to hurt either of them, especially Sophie.
She frowned. Why was Grandpa so cynical about Aunt Rosa and Sophie? They seemed so fond of him.
Emilie hadn’t seen Sophie since Saturday, since that party, in fact. When she did, she could hardly ask her if she was in love with Ambrose!
I’d better not mention him, in fact, she thought, getting dressed. It would be tactless to say much to Sophie about him. She might have been badly hurt when they broke up.
Why had they broken up, anyway? Had Ambrose ever been in love with Sophie?
She stopped brushing her hair, bit her lip, then glared at herself in the mirror. What’s it got to do with you what happened? Stop thinking about him—he’s twice your age, he probably has another woman now, a man like him isn’t going to be alone for long—I bet he’s forgotten he ever met you!
She ran downstairs to breakfast at a quarter to eight, and found her grandfather already at the table, in his faintly old-fashioned dark suit, with a stiff red-striped white shirt and maroon silk tie, eating toast and marmalade and drinking coffee, his normal weekday breakfast.
He looked up and smiled, his eyes approving of her crisp cream cotton blouse and dark grey pleated skirt, of the way her sleek brown hair swirled around her face, the brightness of her eyes and smile.
George Rendell had lived alone for years; loneliness had been engrained in his mind, had got under his skin. He had almost forgotten how it felt to live with someone else, to have someone running up and down the stairs, talking on the phone, watching television. He had forgotten what it was like to look across the breakfast-table each morning and see another face, meet a warm smile.
Emilie had changed his life. He had wondered at first if it would work for her to live with him, if he would be irritated and bored having a young girl around all day, but within a week it was as if she had always been there.
More than that, he felt a strange new happiness welling up inside him. He wasn’t the type to show his feelings, but the sun came out whenever he saw her come into a room. She called out all his protective instincts—she was young and small and helpless, and George would have killed anyone who hurt her.
Emilie kissed him on the top of his head. ‘Isn’t it a nice day?’
He looked at the window, saw the leafless trees in his garden, the chilly sky. Almost Christmas—he hated winter more each year. ‘At least it isn’t raining.’ He watched her slide bread into the toaster, pour herself orange juice and coffee and sit down to eat opposite him.
‘Everything OK for tonight?’ he asked, and she nodded, spreading thick, chunky marmalade on her toast.
‘We’re having broccoli soup—at this time of year a hot soup is a good starter—then poached salmon in hollandaise sauce, which is light and simple, followed by a sweet omelette…I thought I’d fill it with hot purée of fruit, probably redcurrants or raspberries.’
She had learnt to cook from her mother, first, and one of the activity holidays forced upon her by her stepmother had been a summer at a cordon bleu cooking school on the Loire. Her grandfather had been astonished and delighted by this unexpected skill; he was used to eating dull food plainly cooked by his housekeepers, and he had eagerly begun giving dinner parties to show off Emilie’s talent.
‘Sounds delicious, mouth-watering,’ he said fondly. ‘Is Mary coming in to help you?’
‘Oh, that’s all arranged—there’s no problem, Grandpa, don’t worry. I’ll make the soup in advance. The salmon is easy, it will only take me a quarter of an hour to cook it and make the sauce. The omelettes will take longer, but they aren’t difficult. I shall cook them at the table on a spirit-stove—people always enjoy watching!’
‘Watching other people work is always fun,’ George grunted, smiling. He loved to watch her do anything; she endlessly fascinated him. ‘I’ve never heard of omelettes filled with fruit.’
‘It’s really easy. I’ll have prepared the fruit beforehand, it will be reheated in the microwave and brought to the table in a jug, so that I can pour it into the omelette just before I fold and serve it.’
‘You’re a marvel!’ George Rendell said, and Emilie gave him a glowing look. Knowing he loved her made her feel she could do anything.
They drove to work at the paper-mill in Kent together, and that evening they drove home again, leaving on the dot of five o’clock. Her grandfather no longer worked the long hours he once had, she gathered. He had been a workaholic; now he preferred to be home with her.
It took them an hour to reach the house in Chelsea, and Emilie went straight into the kitchen. Their guests were not due for an hour and a half, which gave her just enough time to prepare most of the food before she went upstairs to dress for dinner.
The woman who came in every day to clean the house always helped with dinner parties. Emilie had left her instructions and Mary had already done some of the work—the vegetables were all prepared, the table laid, the ingredients ready.
Emilie rapidly made the broccoli soup and then puréed, separately, the raspberries and oranges she had decided on for the omelette-filling, then she went upstairs to shower and change. She couldn’t make up her mind what to wear and wasted time putting on first one dress then another, hating herself in all of them. She wanted to look different. Older, more sophisticated. In the end she despairingly settled on a simple black dress her stepmother had bought her. Marie-Claude’s taste was always perfect.
She did her hair and make-up and looked at herself in the mirror, and was startled by her reflection. The black dress certainly made her look different.
She dithered—should she wear it? Would it make Ambrose notice her, realise she wasn’t the little girl he had
