boy should stay, but within a month Nick was walking like his dad and talking like him, and Josh, when he thought Rose wasn’t looking, had been bursting with pride in his son.
‘Well,’ Rose said now, ‘you’re welcome to come to Macclesfield for Christmas with us, you know that, Nick’
‘What, and have Saint Robert sympathising with me, whilst secretly they’re all thinking that they don’t blame Sarah. Because, let’s face it, Ma, I don’t fit in with them and I never have. Posh people with posh kids, that’s what they are. No offence meant. As it happens I’ve got a mate who’s going to be spending Christmas in the Bahamas and he’s invited me to join him. Sun, sea and pretty girls – what else could a man want, eh, Ma?’
Rose wished she could do more to help him but she knew how independent he was. Nick had inherited Josh’s sharp instinct for a good business deal. After university he’d studied for an MA and then gone to work on the trading floor of the London arm of an American bank. The Gordon Gekko world of money and Nick had almost been made to go together, Rosie recognised, and neither she nor Josh was surprised that he’d become so successful.
She also understood perfectly well why he had fallen for Sarah, then a newly qualified young accountant, whom he’d met through work, and why Sarah had fallen for him, but she had worried that they were rushing into marriage with expectations that couldn’t be met.
Rose knew there had been differences between them for a while – arguments that had caused problems between them, which neither of them had seemed willing to resolve. Sarah’s father was a wealthy titled Scottish landowner, who, Rose privately thought, was inclined to bully his wife and daughter and who didn’t like Nick. But Rose suspected that Nick sometimes went out of his way to provoke his father-in-law into hostility towards him. Rose actually felt sorry for Sarah, guessing that there were times when the young woman felt torn between her father and her husband.
‘Of course, Sarah’s father is going to be crowing, but if either of them think that I’m going to allow my sons to be packed off to his old public school then they can have another think.’
Rose sighed. She knew that the subject of the education of Nick and Sarah’s two young sons, Alex and Neil, had led to the most bitter of their quarrels. Sarah’s father felt the two boys should be educated at his old public school, as boarders ‘to make men of them’, whereas Nick wanted the boys to attend his own old school.
Nick might like to come across as a bit of a cockney wide boy when it suited him, and in order to infuriate his father-in-law, but the reality was far more complex than that.
‘Cup of tea?’ Rose went to fill the kettle when he nodded. ‘Remember when you first arrived here, Nick?’ she asked him as they waited for it to boil.
‘Do I?’ he laughed. ‘I was nearly crapping meself as I stood on the step, not knowing what to expect. Christ, I hadn’t even known Bert wasn’t my father until my mother told me when she was dying. When you opened the door and saw me there I bet you felt like sending me packing, a snotty-nosed scruffy kid, claiming that your husband was his dad.’
‘What I saw, Nick, was a young boy with more courage than a man three times his age. Not that it wasn’t a shock.’
‘You’re the one with courage,’ Nick told her, going to the fridge to get the milk. ‘We both know that Dad would have had me out on my ear and handed over to Social Services, if he’d had his way. But you wouldn’t let him do that. You told us both that my place was here.’
‘Josh was just shocked. He’d never really have turned his back on you. He simply had no idea that you existed.’
‘It was you, though, who swung things in my favour, Ma. You who loved me before Dad did.’
Rose put her hand on his arm. ‘I was so grateful to your mother, Nick. I still am. When she sent you to us she gave me the best gift I could ever have had, aside from your father’s love.’
‘But…’ Nick challenged ruefully. He knew his stepmother. He knew how much she loved him, how protective she had always been of him, knowing from her own experience how hard it could be to find acceptance when you were ‘different’. He had gone from living on welfare, to having a father who could afford to give him the very best of everything. It had been Rose, though, who had understood that he needed 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
