The house will never sell. The bank will take it off our hands to repay our overdraft and we’ll both be left homeless. It’s not even as though we have alternative accommodation to return to. We don’t. You bailed university to get married and moved into the family pile with Roger. I may have stayed on to get my diploma, but by the time I got back here everything had changed and we were both in it together. Both here, both trying to make the company work...’ His voice had acquired the bitter, plaintive edge Sophie had come to recognise.
She knew how this would go. He would drink away his sorrows and wake up the following morning in a blurry, sedated haze where all the problems were dulled just enough for him to get through the day.
He was, she had been forced to accept, a weak man not made for facing the sort of situation they were now facing.
And she hated that she couldn’t do more for him.
He was drinking too much and she could see the train coming off the tracks if things didn’t change.
Did she want that? Wasn’t there too much already on her conscience?
She shut down that train of thought, shut down the deluge of unhappy memories and tried hard to focus on the few bright things in her life.
She had her health.
They might be struggling like mad trying not to drown but at least Mum was okay, nicely sorted in a cottage in Cornwall, far from the woes now afflicting herself and her brother.
It might have been a rash expenditure given the dire financial circumstances, but when Gordon Griffin-Watt had tragically died, after a brief but intense period of absolute misery and suffering, it had seemed imperative to try to help Evelyn, their mother, who was herself frail and barely able to cope. Sophie had taken every spare penny she could from the scant profits of the company and sunk it all into a cottage in Cornwall, where Evelyn’s sister lived.
It had been worth it. Her mother’s contentment was the brightest thing on the horizon, and if she was ignorant about the extent of the troubles afflicting her twins, then that was for her own good. Her health would never be able to stand the stress of knowing the truth: that they stood to lose everything. One of the sweetest things Gordon Griffin-Watt had done had been to allay her fears about their financial situation while dealing with his own disastrous health problems, which he had refused to tell his wife about. She had had two strokes already and he wasn’t going to send her to her grave with a third one.
‘Vasquez is willing to listen to what we have to say.’
‘Javier won’t do a thing to help us. Trust me, Ollie.’ But he would have a merry time gloating at how the mighty had fallen, that was for sure.
‘How do you know?’ her brother fired back, pouring himself another drink and glaring, challenging her to give him her little lecture about staying off the booze.
‘Because I just do.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong, sis.’
‘What do you mean? What are you talking about? And should you...be having a second drink when it’s not yet four in the afternoon?’
‘I’ll stop drinking when I’m not worrying 24/7 about whether I’ll have a roof over my head next week or whether I’ll be begging in the streets for loose change.’ He drank, refilled his glass defiantly, and Sophie stifled a sigh of despair.
‘So just tell me what Javier had to say,’ she said flatly. ‘Because I need to go and prepare information to take with me to the bank tomorrow.’
‘He wants to see you.’
‘He...what?’
‘He says he will consider helping us but he wants to discuss it with you. I thought it was pretty decent of him, actually...’
A wave of nausea rushed through her. For the first time ever, she felt that at the unseemly hour of four in the afternoon she could do with a stiff drink.
‘That won’t be happening.’
‘You’d rather see us both living under a bridge in London with newspapers as blankets,’ Oliver said sharply, ‘rather than have a twenty-minute conversation with some old flame?’
‘Don’t be stupid. We won’t end up living under a bridge with newspapers as blankets...’
‘It’s a bloody short drop from the top to the bottom, Soph. Can take about ten minutes. We’re more than halfway there.’
‘I’m seeing the bank tomorrow about a loan to broaden our computer systems...’
‘Good luck with that! They’ll say no and we both know that. And what do you think is going to happen to that allowance we give Mum every month? Who do you think is going to support her in her old age if we go under?’
‘Stop!’ Never one to dodge reality, Sophie just wanted to blank it all out now. But she couldn’t. The weight of their future rested on her shoulders, but Oliver...
How could he?
Because he didn’t know, she thought with numb defeat. What he saw was an ex who now had money and might be willing to lend them some at a reasonable rate for old times’ sake. To give them a loan because they had nowhere else to turn.
She could hardly blame him, could she?
‘I told him that you’d be at his office tomorrow at six.’ He extracted a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and pushed it across the table to her.
When Sophie flattened it out, she saw that on it was a scribbled address and a mobile number. Just looking at those two links with the past she had fought to leave behind made her heart hammer inside her.
‘I can’t make you go and see the man, Sophie.’ Oliver stood up, the bottle of whisky in one hand and his empty glass in the other. There was defeat in his eyes and it pierced her heart because he wasn’t strong enough to take any of this. He needed looking after as much as their mother did. ‘But if you decide to go with the bank, when they’ve already knocked us back in the past and when they’re making noises about taking the house from us, then on your head be it. If you decide to go, he’ll be waiting for you at his office.’
Alone in the kitchen, Sophie sighed and rested back in the chair, eyes closed, mind in turmoil.
She had been left without a choice. Her brother would never forgive her if she walked away from Javier and the bank ended up chucking her out. And her brother was right; the small profits the company was making were all being eaten up and it wouldn’t be long before the house was devouring far more than the company could provide. It was falling down. Who in their right mind wanted to buy a country mansion that was falling down, in the middle of nowhere, when the property market was so desperate? And they couldn’t afford to sell it for a song because it had been remortgaged...
Maybe he’d forgotten how things had ended, she thought uneasily.
Maybe he’d changed, mellowed. Maybe, just maybe, he really would offer them a loan at a competitive rate because of the brief past they’d shared.
Maybe he’d overlook how disastrous that brief past had ended...
At
