Tasmina Perry - Guilty Pleasures

She looked over at Cassandra, wearing what she called her ‘après yoga’ look of cashmere jogging pants and a skinny white vest. Cassandra was leaving for Milan that afternoon and so she was taking armfuls of clothes from her cedar-lined wardrobes and folding them between tissue paper before putting them into two Louis Vuitton trunks. Julia had kept a fascinated inventory as she watched Cassandra pack: ten pairs of red-soled shoes, most of which looked unworn. Twelve skirts, twice as many dresses, cashmere sweaters in a rainbow of complementary colours and finally, almost a dozen coats, one each from the main designers showing at the Milan collections, which she would wear to the corresponding show. There must have been hundreds of thousands of pounds of clothes in those trunks which, according to Cassandra, would be completely redundant by the time the shows were over. Julia considered it an abject waste of money; think of what all that money could really buy! A Picasso sketch, perhaps, or a Corot landscape. Now that would be something worth having.

‘So. Tell me again what Roger told you?’ asked Cassandra, finally fastening the latches on the trunks and taking a seat at the dining table. Julia tried not to smile; Cassandra had a habit of making every conversation feel like a business meeting.

‘He said that Emma has come back from Boston in time for the shareholders, meeting tomorrow.’

‘And do you think it’s significant?’

Julia shrugged.

‘She’s already told Roger she doesn’t want to be CEO. I suspect she’s just there to show willing and formalize Roger’s appointment so we can all move forward.’

Cassandra frowned slightly.

‘So everyone is happy with Emma’s share in the company?’ she asked.

‘I never said that,’ replied Julia diplomatically, knowing that her daughter had not been pleased with Saul’s bequests. ‘But what can we do? Roger has already engaged a lawyer; apparently we can’t contest the will simply because we don’t like what it says.’

Cassandra was silent for a moment and Julia reached across the table to take one of her hands.

‘I was desperately disappointed at the reading of the will. It should have been you, darling. We know that. But there seems to be very little we can do.’

‘Is this the sort of fight you put up when Dad left you?’ snapped Cassandra, pulling her hand away. Cassandra was angry. She was already well aware of the legal situation with Saul’s will; her own lawyers had taken the full force of her fury when they had explained it was watertight. So Cassandra had contacted her financial advisers to explore the possibility of buying Emma’s shareholding should she decide to sell, but even with a conservative valuation on Milford, they were talking very big numbers indeed. Cassandra might be the highest-paid editor in London, but it was still way out of her financial grasp.

Julia looked at her daughter wondering how she could be so fearsome. She blamed Cassandra’s emotional detachment on herself of course, for allowing her husband Desmond to leave. She had tried to put that day in a box at the back of her mind. The day Desmond had left her for another woman, leaving her to bring up Cassandra and Tom by herself. In the years that followed Desmond had given very little financial support to Julia; maintenance payments dwindled to nothing once he’d moved to South Africa twelve months after their divorce. But it wasn’t money Cassandra wanted from her father; it was love, support, approval. So Julia had spent the last two decades trying to make up for it. That was why she had volunteered to bring up Ruby when Cassandra had made the move to New York and it hadn’t been easy. Suddenly burdened with a three-year-old grandchild, Julia had been forced to cut her time back at the Oxford gallery she owned with the result that it had almost gone under. It had taken the business a decade to recover but Julia had taken the sacrifice on the chin: everything she did was for her children.

Julia held her hand to her breast as if she had been stung.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Cassandra with an unusual tone of softness. ‘I didn’t mean it to sound like that. I’m just incredibly frustrated by the whole thing.’

‘I could sell my shareholding to you, if that’s what you want, darling?’ replied Julia. ‘A gallery space I’d love is coming up soon on Cork Street. The money would certainly come in handy.’

‘Mother, you have 5 per cent stock,’ sighed Cassandra, ‘and 5 per cent is neither use nor ornament.’

They fell into silence as Lucia entered to serve the poached salmon with a spoonful of hollandaise sauce on the side. Julia used the interruption to change the subject – the situation at Milford was all anyone in the village could talk about and for Julia it was getting a little trying – and besides, she was keen to move on to matters even closer to home. ‘Darling, the reason I wanted to see you today is that I’m very concerned about your brother,’ she said.

‘What’s the matter this time?’ asked Cassandra. She was aware that Tom had moved back into her mother’s house and expected a tirade about cigarettes, loud music and mountains of washing.

‘He wants to go to Goa. Next week. And he wants me to pay for it,’ said Julia, a tone of exasperation in her voice.

‘I should think it will do him good to get out of the country for a while,’ said Cassandra.

‘But I’ve read about these places in the Daily Mail,’ Julia insisted. ‘It’s rife with disease and drug trafficking and heaven knows your brother doesn’t need any encouragement in that department. Cassandra, can’t you speak to him? Sort him out with a job or something to keep him in the country?’

Cassandra took a deep breath. It sometimes pained her to think how the role of parent and child had reversed so quickly. Increasingly Cassandra now felt like the head of the family and for once, it was not a position of authority she relished.

‘You make me feel like a babysitter,’ she snapped. ‘I’m not here to entertain Tom just to keep him out of trouble.’

‘I appreciate that, darling,’ said Julia.

Cassandra snorted.

‘I mean, remember the time I got him work in Xavier’s studio.’

‘He really wasn’t cut out for photography,’ said Julia.

‘It was nothing to do with his talent behind the lens,’ said Cassandra, dipping her fork into the fish. ‘He was caught having sex with a model in the darkroom.’

‘He’s a boy, he’s got hormones.’

‘He’s 26, not some randy teenager.’

Julia met her daughter’s eyes. ‘Darling, please.’

Cassandra was tempted to say no. She was sick of Tom’s feckless ways, drifting from one half-baked ‘career’ to another and she was annoyed that her mother expected her to pick up the pieces. It wasn’t as if she didn’t help out the family as it was. She introduced Julia to wealthy art patrons on London’s society circuit and constantly promoted artists exhibiting in Julia’s gallery, billing them as the next big thing in the pages of Rive. But there was always something else.

‘OK, Mother, I’ll see what I can do,’ she said finally. ‘But this is absolutely the last time: I mean it.’

Julia patted Cassandra’s hand. ‘Thank you, darling. He won’t let you down.’

‘Oh, I am absolutely sure he will,’ said Cassandra. ‘Now let’s eat. I don’t want to be late for my flight.’

Roger Milford never liked Monday mornings, but today he had woken up in a particularly anxious mood. From the bedroom window of the Old Rectory he could just see the iron entrance gates to Winterfold and it made his stomach ache. Roger was by nature a decisive, ‘to hell with the consequences’ kind of man, but for once, he was at a loss for what to do. On the one hand he had no intention of going into Milford this morning; the last thing he wanted to see was that smug bluestocking niece of his sitting behind Saul’s old desk. My desk, he corrected himself. On the other hand, much as it pained him to do so, he had to put on a good show for Emma, to impress her, to convince her that with himself installed as CEO her majority shareholding was in good hands.