Rosa Temple - Playing by the Rules - The feel-good heart-warming and uplifting romance perfect for Valentine’s Day

‘Magenta, get off the floor,’ my mother said as I lay prostrate on the Persian rug in Mr Bartholomew’s office, which smelled of Shake ’N’ Vac.

‘Ignore her,’ Mother said to the solicitor. ‘Just carry on.’

My sisters sniggered.

Mr Bartholomew cleared his throat. ‘Any monies owed will be authorised for payment and all contracts to transfer properties to the beneficiaries will be drawn up. You’ll have to allow several months for completion of the transfers, especially the foreign ones, but it will all be in hand.’

My family made a combined sound as they prepared to leave the office, shuffling in their seats and gathering their jackets and handbags.

Just to give you a little background about my family. My mother and father were divorced. My two older sisters, Amber and Indigo, were both married and worked for one of the family businesses: the lingerie company, now owned by Mother. My younger sister, Ebony, was single like me but unlike me, she had a career outside the realms of the family empire and was doing very well indeed.

The four of us girls looked pretty much alike, but in varying dress sizes. We had all acquired the same sandy brown complexion – a combination of my Jamaican father and Irish mother’s genes – black-brown hair of varying wave texture and very posh accents after having attended the same private boarding school as Mother and Nana Clementine. The school was supposed to have made us well-balanced, well-educated, ambitious young ladies. For my sisters that had worked well – for me, not so much.

Nana Clementine had wanted my mother – her only child, Scarlett – to marry well. Mother had been worth a considerable amount of money since before she was conceived so, of course, nothing but an appropriate suitor would do. Fortunately for Nana Clementine, Mother met Father, the son of a rich and influential businessman, at Oxford University.

As a young man, my father, Carl Bright, was destined to inherit a large amount of land and two thriving guest houses in his native Jamaica, which he later developed into a chain of hotels in various islands in the Caribbean – the second of our family businesses. Father was as posh as Mother because of his upbringing: prep school, Eton, Oxford – the whole shebang. Father sounded a bit like Trevor McDonald reading News At Ten but he broke into his Jamaican vernacular when he was upset or angry. We heard a lot of Jamaican patois in the lead-up to their acrimonious divorce, five years ago.

‘Mavis will see you out,’ said Mr Bartholomew as they all left, most of them having to step over me to get to the door. Completely ignoring my dire situation, none of them cared that I might choke down there with all the Shake ’N’ Vac I’d inhaled.

‘You’ll have to get up now, Magenta. I have a meeting in ten minutes.’

I heard Mr Bartholomew tapping documents into a neat pile on his desk.

‘How can I get up?’ I asked from the floor. ‘You just signed my death warrant. I have to work for a full year before I get to spend a penny of my inheritance.’ I proceeded to rise from the dead; that is, I sat up and tried to arrange my big hair into the smooth, presentable style I’d arrived with. I blinked large, hazel eyes at Mr Bartholomew but he was sorting out files and papers and missed my ‘with-these-eyes-I-can-get-anything’ look, which worked like magic on Father when I was a little girl.

‘Mr Bartholomew, isn’t there anything you can do?’ I was on my knees and peering at him from the other side of his desk. ‘Do you understand what it means to hold down a job for a whole year?’

‘I’ve been a solicitor for thirty years.’ He got up and dropped a file into one of the wire trays on his desk, walked to the mirror on the far wall and began straightening his tie. I followed him, put my arms around him from behind and fixed his tie.

‘I mean a year for a normal person,’ I said. His hairline was receding and his suit was terrible but he was still handsome. ‘You don’t understand,’ I went on. ‘Nana loved me the most. There’s no way she’d give Amber, Indigo and Ebony all that money for nothing and make me work for mine.’

He unwound himself from my vice-like grip on his shoulders.

‘I don’t have the power to alter your grandmother’s will, Magenta. You know that.’ He put papers into a thin case, fastened it and held his hand towards the door where Mavis had just come in to hurry her boss along.

My shoulders slumped down like they used to when I was thirteen and someone in my family had ruined my life. I picked up my Hermès Vintage Tote and left the office just ahead of Mr Bartholomew. We walked out onto Lancaster Gate together and he waved his hand in the air to hail a taxi.

I stopped to watch him get into the back seat and wondered for a moment if he had any jobs going back at Bartholomew and Tooke. Realising very quickly I hadn’t exactly led with my best foot forward and there was no way he’d ever employ me, I waved at him. He waved back and I gave him the thumbs up sign. He gave me a puzzled look as the taxi shot off.

I was left holding the tote bag in front of my legs with both hands, rocking backwards and forwards on my Manolo Blahniks and wishing I’d asked if I could use his toilet before we’d left.

Chapter 2

Back at my Holland Park flat I stood on the balcony outside the bedroom window. It was probably the hottest day of August and the heat made my head ache. The traffic trundled past at street level, three floors below, each of the drivers oblivious to my recent run of bad luck and the horrendous fate that awaited me if I gave in to Nana Clementine’s crazy condition and actually worked … for a whole year.

All of a sudden my head began to spin. My life was falling to pieces around me. Mother had already lived up to her threat and had stopped giving me money for rent and clothes whenever I was out of work.

‘It’s the only way you’ll learn to stand on your own two feet, Magenta,’ she’d told me over breakfast one morning when I’d come to borrow £2000 for the rent arrears. ‘If you don’t learn to look after your finances you’ll have to come back home and live with me and get a job alongside your older sisters.’

She’d seen the look of terror in my eyes. Mother had retired as CEO to the lingerie business and my older sisters both held high positions within it. Amber was head of marketing and Indigo was the business lawyer for the firm. Ebony had gone straight from university into a job as an assistant buyer for Harrods and hadn’t looked back.

‘But, Mother,’ I’d pleaded. ‘I’m not business-minded; I’m an artist. I’d never last in the dizzying heights of high finance and corporate management.’

‘Magenta,’ Mother had sighed. ‘You haven’t produced a single piece of art since you left art school. Why don’t you at least try to finish your degree? You were very good, you know?’

Mother was right. I was good at art but I was hardly the best. I realised a long time ago that in order to succeed one had to be competitive. And I wasn’t. There didn’t seem to be a competitive bone in my body. My sisters had been direct products of my parents’ ambitious natures. Their power-mad gene was missing from my DNA.

I leaned on the rail of the balcony and sighed. I was an artist who no longer owned a sketch pad and who didn’t have an HB pencil to her name. My talents lay elsewhere as I kept trying to tell everyone. I was an expert in where to get the best cosmopolitan in town, how to dress well and how to get invited to all the good parties in London, Paris, New York and at least four other cities in the world. With those credentials how was I ever going to get a job that lasted a year and what on earth did working for a year actually feel like?