Sophie Weston - The Millionaire Affair

‘Oh, find her yourself,’ snarled Lisa.

She whipped back into her flat and banged the door.

NIKOLAI cornered his aunt under a silver birch and came swiftly to the point.

‘Who is she?’

Tatiana looked at her great-nephew in surprise. Nikolai could be very irritating. But he was usually much too laid-back to lose his temper in her experience. Now he was looking positively grim.

‘You sound just like your Uncle Dmitri. In fact in that ridiculous suit you even look like him.’

They both knew it was not a compliment. Dmitri Ivanov was a merchant banker in New York. Tatiana thought Dmitri was a pompous ass and frequently said so at family reunions.

Nikolai waved the irrelevance aside impatiently.

‘Who is she?’

Tatiana sighed and put down her trowel. She had been enjoying her gardening. ‘Who is who?’

‘The fierce person in the basement.’

In the middle of stripping off her gloves, Tatiana stopped, arrested. ‘Lisa? My tenant Lisa? She’s not fierce.’

Nikolai grimaced. ‘She is if you get her out of bed before she’s ready,’ he said with feeling. ‘She nearly bit my head off.’

‘Oh?’

Tatiana stared into the middle distance, suddenly thoughtful.

‘So where did she come from?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Lisa Whatever-her-name-is,’ Nikolai said impatiently. ‘Where did you find her?’

Tatiana remained distracted. ‘Oh, around,’ she said vaguely.

Nikolai curbed his irritation. Tatiana, he reminded himself, was old and eccentric, and probably worried about money.

So he said carefully, ‘Why this sudden urge to become a landlady again?’

She shrugged. ‘I’ve always let out rooms when I needed to.’

‘But the point is,’ said Nikolai patiently, ‘you don’t need to. I went through the figures last year and I saw your accountant again a couple of days ago. You don’t need to do this. You can pay your way easily.’

Tatiana sniffed. Since she had given Pauli carte blanche to manage her affairs more than forty years ago, she could hardly claim that this was high-handed. But she could and did say that her decision was nothing to do with Nikolai.

‘I like Lisa. I wanted her to have the flat.’

Nikolai looked at her narrowly. ‘Is running the house getting too much for you?’

‘No, of course not,’ said Tatiana impatiently. ‘I have a cleaner twice a week. What more do I need?’

‘You are lonely, then?’

‘I do too much to be lonely.’

‘Then why—?’

Tatiana folded her lips together stubbornly. ‘I told you. I like her. She needed somewhere to live and I—’

He pounced on it. ‘Needed. Aha. She is a vagrant. From what I saw this morning, I can well believe it.’

‘Oh, Nicki, don’t be pompous. Of course she’s not a vagrant.’

‘What do you know about her? Have you taken any references?’

‘No, but—’

‘I knew it. She is exploiting you.’

‘Nikolai, will you listen to me? She has a perfectly good job.’

‘Doing what?’

Tatiana had to admit she didn’t know. She had simply not taken in what Lisa did for a living and had only the vaguest idea of where she worked.

Aware of this, she said defensively, ‘I have known her for over a year. We go to the same dance studio.’

Nikolai was not stupid enough to look triumphant. But the faint hint of scepticism about his mouth infuriated Tatiana.

‘And she is not exploiting me. In fact she’s the one who has been insisting that we have a legal agreement.’

If anything, Nikolai’s scepticism increased.

‘Protecting her position,’ he diagnosed. ‘Very shrewd.’

‘You know, it’s very unhealthy, always thinking the worst of people. It gives you ulcers,’ Tatiana informed him.

‘So do great-aunts,’ said Nikolai ruefully. He sobered. ‘Now, are you going to ask her for references? Because if you don’t I will.’

Tatiana looked infuriatingly ethereal. ‘You must learn to trust more.’

‘Right. I’ll deal with it.’

He marched off without waiting for a reply. Tatiana did not permit herself to smile until there was no chance of his turning round and seeing it. But as soon as he was out of sight she threw her gloves up in the air and gave a whoop of triumph.

‘Yes!’

Lisa heard the shout. By that time she had just about stopped dancing with rage. She had got to the point where she didn’t know if she was angrier with herself for being so stupid, or Tatiana’s visitor for being so arrogant.

Considering it, she realised that neither was the main course of her fury. It was the way he’d looked at her! Nobody looked at her like that. Nobody dared.

Angrily she stripped off her clothes and stamped into the bathroom. The floor-to-ceiling mirror showed her a slim figure, pale and shaking with temper—and a clown’s mask of smudged paint.

Lisa was taken aback. She leaned towards the mirror, fingering the mascara experimentally. It spread.

If that was what he’d seen, maybe there was some excuse for the way he’d looked at her. It couldn’t be often that the door was opened to a man like that by the Thing from the Black Lagoon. A brief laugh shook Lisa at the thought.

But then she took a firm grip of her anger again. Somehow she needed that anger; she didn’t know why. Nobody had a right to look another person up and down as if they were a thing, she assured herself. Even if they were looking a little strange at the time. If she ever saw him again—which of course she did not want to—she would tell him so.

She stepped into the steaming shower and prepared to put him out of her mind.

Ten minutes later she was still polishing the scathing things she would never now have the opportunity of saying to him and surveying her fridge blankly. One packet of carrots, going mouldy. One carton of milk, rancid. Two bottles of mineral water. She needed coffee and she hated it black. So—

A glance out of the French windows she had locked in the hateful man’s face told Lisa that it was raining. It looked cold, too. She really did not want to go out. But her stomach rumbled threateningly.

Quiet, she told it. Black coffee won’t hurt you for once. I’ll give the man time to go and then I’ll borrow some milk from Tatiana.

She sat down to wait. But the morning stretched into lunchtime, and there was no sound of the front door closing behind him. Lisa looked at the rain, now falling in a sheet.

‘Damn,’ she said.

She fetched an umbrella.

Nikolai was angry. He was sitting in his hired car, watching his aunt’s house like a private eye. It felt seedy and faintly ludicrous. He didn’t like either sensation.

Something else that was the fault of the downstairs tenant, he thought. On top of defying him, and then making him feel as if he was holding onto his control by the thinnest of threads! It was intolerable. It had to be put right. He had told Tatiana that he would deal with it. So he would.

He didn’t have to wait long. The front door opened and a figure huddled under an umbrella scurried out. She could not have looked more furtive if she was running away from the police, thought Nikolai. It filled him with an obscure triumph.

Lisa didn’t notice the man sitting in the Lexus across the road. She hurried along, head bent. The wind blew the rain in little swirls against which the umbrella was almost no use at all. In the end she put it in front of her like a battering ram, and, looking neither to right nor left, she pelted for the shop.

Nikolai put the car in gear and slid it smoothly out of its tight parking place. Lisa didn’t notice that either, deep in her absorption.

If only the horrible man hadn’t woken her up, she thought, she could still be fast asleep, without this need for milky coffee and a bun. And she wouldn’t be feeling the sting of having made a complete idiot of herself. And the weather made everything ten times worse.