though the salaries had seemed, she had soon realised that with the very high cost of living she would barely be able to manage, and so instead she had taken a junior typist’s job locally, and, taking her solicitor’s advice, she had used her small inheritance to buy a tiny one-bedroom flat in a conversion development being built on the outskirts of the town in what had once been a large Victorian house.
That, she now acknowledged, had been one of the best pieces of advice anyone could have given her.
There was certainly no way now she could ever have afforded to buy even such a modest property of her own at present-day costs. Don paid her well, she lived comfortably, ran a small compact car, took her annual holidays abroad, entertained her friends, and even occasionally splurged on good clothes, but there was no way she could find the many thousands of pounds required to repair Cousin Emily’s run-down cottage.
Her only savings were the small insurance pension she had started on her twenty-first birthday, and the few hundred pounds she had in her building-society account.
Lucy did not consider herself poor nor hard done by; after all, she had a good and very pleasant job, working for a man she liked and who made it plain that he valued her professional skills. She had good friends, enough money to get by on, and she had her health. She also had her pride, something she had discovered in those awful months after her parents’ death, when she had abruptly come to hear herself being described as ‘that poor child’, and had realised sensitively that people felt sorry for her; that in some way they blamed her parents for not making better provision for her. There had even been whispered conversations about how dreadful it was that a family which had been so prominent locally and been so wealthy should have fallen so far, almost as though her poor parents had been responsible for the disappearance of that wealth, which Lucy knew was not the case at all.
She had longed to defend her parents, to tell their friends that neither her father nor her mother had considered money to be of prime importance, but at seventeen they were still treating her like a child.
She had resolved then to find a way of standing on her own two feet, and now her independence, as well as being something she privately cherished, was so much a part of her that occasionally the braver of her friends would tease her a little about it.
Perhaps she was a little over-independent, overdetermined to prove she could manage, but her friends had never been in her situation, had never discovered almost overnight that they were no longer a loved and protected only child with caring parents, but completely alone in the world with only themselves to rely on.
If anyone had asked her Lucy would have answered quickly, and she believed honestly, that at twenty-six she was completely over the trauma of losing her parents, and of the consequent discovery of her vulnerability emotionally and financially, but the shock of discovering all the problems attached to her unexpected and unwanted inheritance had shaken that belief. She felt vulnerable and afraid again, so much so that she had broken one of her unwritten rules and had confided her dilemma to Don.
As an accountant, he had warned her of the problems she was likely to face in view of the property’s run-down state and its sitting tenant; as a friend, he had consoled her as best he could, and unfortunately, as a husband, he had discussed the situation with Verity.
Not that Lucy had expected him not to. Verity, after all, was a good friend, but she was a terrible gossip, and Lucy suspected that there could be very few people who did not know about her problems with the cottage now, thanks to Verity.
The trouble with Verity was that she did not have enough to occupy her time or her mind. Their two sons were away at public school, and Verity spent most of her time either shopping or gossiping. She also had a tendency to embroider the facts, and Lucy tensed now as she heard Verity exclaiming sympathetically and indignantly, ‘It’s all Eric Barnes’s fault…trying to make all this trouble for you…he’s been living in that cottage for years. He should have complained to your cousin.’
‘He did,’ Lucy told her patiently. ‘But Emily was virtually senile. I doubt she even read his letters, never mind understood them. I used to go and visit her, you know. The people in the home were very kind, but she barely recognised them, let alone me.’
‘But there must be something you can do,’ Verity consoled.
‘Yes. There is. Sell my flat,’ Lucy repeated grimly. She got up, putting her fragile china teacup down.
Don was away on business, and she had called round with some papers she had been translating for him. Don had several clients who were investing in properties in France, and it fell to Lucy to translate the correspondence received from France concerning these properties.
‘Oh, you don’t have to go yet, do you?’ Verity complained. ‘I haven’t finished telling you about Niall Cameron. You’d never guess he was Scotch.’
‘A Scot,’ Lucy corrected her automatically. ‘Scotch is a drink.’
‘Scotch…Scottish…what does it matter?’ Verity demanded slightly petulantly, adding quickly, ‘Anyway, as I was telling you, he’s incredibly wealthy. Apparently he’s built up this huge business to do with computers, and he’s opening a factory not far away on that new industrial park just outside Tetfield. He’s bought Hawkins Farm as well—’
‘Yes, Verity, I do know,’ Lucy interrupted her, adding wryly, ‘I work for Don, remember.’
‘Yes, but you were away when it happened. You haven’t even met him yet.’
‘No,’ Lucy agreed.
She didn’t particularly want to meet Niall Cameron either, she decided with distaste. He sounded the type of man she most disliked. Arrogant…full of his own importance, forever boasting about his achievements.
She was glad she had been away when he had moved to the area, although it seemed that she wasn’t going to be allowed to put off meeting him much longer, not if Verity had her way and organised this dinner party.
‘I wish Don would buy us a property in France,’ Verity was saying poutingly now. ‘All our friends are doing it. I mean, you pick up the most marvellous things over there for next to nothing. The Martindales have bought the most fabulous château…with fifteen bedrooms.’
‘And no bathrooms nor any running water,’ Lucy told her wryly.
She knew. She had been over in France for the last month, working for Don, acting as both his representative and a translator for those of his clients who were involved in buying French properties.
It had been a hectic six weeks, demanding and challenging; she had enjoyed the work, although sometimes she had found the attitude of Don’s clients hard to understand. Many of them seemed to have no conception at all of what the purchase of their French properties was going to involve.
In many cases the properties themselves were virtually derelict, and yet the new owners were talking happily of summers spent lavishly entertaining the friends they expected to come hurrying over from England to admire and envy their newest acquisitions.
It was true that there were some who genuinely seemed to know what they were getting themselves into and who seemed to be prepared to make all the adjustments they would need to make to be able to live in such rural communities. For the most part, though…She sighed a little to herself, remembering the look on the face of one woman when she had discovered that her fourteenth-century farmhouse had neither any sanitation nor any electricity, and that when it rained the lane to it became a marshy bog through which their immaculate Daimler saloon could not possibly travel.
‘I must go,’ she told Verity.
‘Oh-ho…got a date tonight?’ Verity asked archly.
Lucy forced herself to smile.
‘Tom’s taking me to the theatre,’ she told her.
‘Tom Peters. He’s divorced now, isn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ Lucy agreed quietly.
She and Tom