The Finishing Touches (34 page)

“Thanks,” I said, and bit into my chewy bagel. It was very good and distracted me nicely, as food always did. Kathleen hadn’t been daft with her breakfast rule.

We ate in silence, watching the sun move around the white stones of the church, and a comforting peace settled on the bench between us.

“We used to live round here when it was
really
scabby, not trendy scabby,” said Jamie, stretching out his long legs in a patch of light. “Before Ken’s empire really got going. He wasn’t always Mr. Chelsea Town House, you know. He used to be Mr. Grimy Shoreditch Terrace.”

“What? And look at him now.” Jamie was trying to make me feel better, I could tell, but it wasn’t working. “He’s on the run from the tax man in Spain.”

“No, don’t look at him now. Look at
me and Liv
now. I mean, I don’t think it matters what your parents do. It’s what you do with your own life that counts. I’ve had no help from Ken with Party Animals—he thinks it’s a total waste of my degree studies. As he’s fond of telling me, when he makes an appearance.”

I threw my coffee cup into a bin. “It’s not the same. All right, so you’re doing your own thing now, but you know you get your wheeler-dealing from Ken. You know you’ll be a silver fox like his dad when you’re seventy. It’s like insurance. I haven’t got that. I’ll never know if my parents were killed in some car crash, or died in a skiing accident, or whatever it is that they’re hinting at in that article. You can look at Ken, even if you don’t want to be him, and know that’s where you came from.”

“Not necessarily.” Jamie crossed his leg over his knee, making a defensive block.

“All right, so you can do things differently,” I conceded. “But you know what you’re playing with. I just feel…” I looked around the churchyard, trying to find a way to express the nauseating uncertainty I felt. “I feel like I’m just veneer, not solid inside. The
outside
sounds posh and looks right, but underneath…I don’t know who I am.”

Jamie drew in a long breath through his nose and let it out again.

“OK,” he said after a long pause. “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone, and that you can’t tell Liv. Under any circumstances.”

He turned on the bench and looked at me. His gray eyes were clear and serious. “I mean it. This has to stay between you and me.”

“Fine,” I said, and even though I was still aching with mis
ery, my skin prickled at the intensity of his gaze and the secret we were sharing. “I won’t tell.”

Jamie looked away and said in a quiet voice, “Ken probably isn’t my dad.”

My mouth dropped open. “How do you know?”

“I don’t know for sure. Neither does Mum. She found out she was pregnant a few weeks after she and Ken got together, couldn’t work out her dates very well…Not the sharpest stick in the pile, my mother. Typical model, lots of boyfriends, went to some pretty debauched parties, you know how it is.” Jamie’s voice was light and flippant, his usual anecdote voice, but I could tell it hid something sore.

“He
might
be my father,” he went on, “but he was definitely the one who stuck around and offered to marry her. Then when Liv was born, there was no doubt she was Ken’s little girl, and that’s why he basically treated her like a princess and left me to sort myself out.”

“But you’re so like him!” I protested.

Jamie’s mouth twitched. “In what way? I’m good with people? Good at making money? Partial to after-hours partying? That’s not genetic. That’s observation.” He raised his hands and dropped them, meeting my eyes with a frank look. “I know you reckon I’m a bit of a playboy, and I know to an extent I am, but most of it’s an act. I’m good at fitting in, like you are. Mum sent me and Liv to a therapist when they got divorced, to make sure we weren’t screwed up too badly, and he diagnosed me as an attention seeker, brought on by family trauma. But it wasn’t. I just wanted to be like Ken. So like him that he’d have to say, yes, you’re a chip off the old O’block.”

“You’ve done that,” I reminded him. “You’re a huge success! You’ve built up your own business from scratch, you’re constantly dating gorgeous women—”

“Again, like you,” said Jamie. “Not dating the gorgeous
women, obviously, but from what Liv says, the guys aren’t too shabby, and you’ve done well.
You
got your degree, not your parents.”

I looked down at my fingers, where I’d chewed my nails. “I work in a shoe shop, Jamie.”

“You manage a very fashionable shoe shop. And now you run a life-coaching college.”

“Yes, one that’s about to close down through publicity that I brought on myself because I allowed a journalist to nose around.” I was biting back tears of frustration. “Everyone’s going to cancel their deposits, and demand their money back, and we won’t be able to carry on! It’s all over. And it’s my fault because I didn’t put my foot down hard enough about Adele and her stupid idea that marriage is the only thing smart girls should be doing. I should have
talked
to Venetia! I should have seen that she was only doing this for the money.”

He grabbed my hand. “Betsy, people will forget. No one believes that sort of feature anyway; it’s just tacky gossip—”

“Get real, Jamie! It’s on the internet forever, anytime anyone googles Phillimore Academy! And I won’t forget,” I moaned. “It’s only cheap gossip to anyone reading it, but for me…” My stomach crawled. “For
me,
it’s…”

I couldn’t hold back the tears now. I felt so small and humiliated, and angry—not just for me and the chance I’d had to run my own business, but for Franny and her reputation and the dreams I’d had since I was a baby.

“The Academy is all I
am.
” I hiccupped. “My mother left me there to be part of it, and Franny was everything it stood for. If it’s cheap and tacky, then so am I.”

Jamie let go of my hand and grabbed my shoulders. “Look at me,” he said, and shook me when I couldn’t lift my eyes from the seat.

“
Look
at me, Betsy!” he insisted fiercely. “You are the most
independent, intelligent woman I have ever met in my whole life. Everything about you is stylish. You never tried to make a sob story out of being adopted, and you were never a snob about growing up with a rich family. You were always just you. No airs or graces, no pretending to be stupid when it was obvious you were clever, no stuffing your bra or dyeing your beautiful hair. You were your own person, and I’ve admired that since I was fifteen years old.”

“But…,” I began.

“You can go back and find out who your real mum is, if you want,” he said. “Or you can think of Franny as your mother, just like you always have done. But it doesn’t make a shred of difference to who
you
are, and what you’ve done with your life, because you’re absolutely amazing, as you are.” Jamie paused, and one corner of his mouth lifted in a self-deprecating twist.

“You’d probably be the first one to point out that I’ve met a lot of women over the years. Some of them very rich, some of them very beautiful, some of them bizarre, but none of them has stayed in the front of my mind the way you do. I go to a new bar, and I think, I wonder what Betsy would make of these highball glasses. Or I buy a new suit, and I think, I wonder if Betsy would say this was a bit car salesman.”

He took a loose ringlet that had escaped from my hat and gently tucked it behind my ear. “I think the things I love about you most are the things you seem to hate. Like these gorgeous curls that you’re always ironing flat. And those hilarious to-do lists that you never let yourself finish. Like you’re keeping everything in check by following your rules.”

His finger lingered behind my ear, sending electric sparks all the way down my bare neck, like a delicious chill. It traced a pattern in the soft skin, caressing the little hollow. “What you don’t seem to realize,” said Jamie slowly, holding my gaze, “is that the only person who has to make the rules for your life is
you. Stop worrying about where you come from. You’re you. And you’re lovely.”

I gazed at him, my lips opening in surprise. Had that softness in his face always been there? Hadn’t I noticed the vulnerability in his eyes, or was it just that I was so much closer to him now than I’d been before?

I could smell the laundry detergent on his sweatpants and the coffee on his breath, and I didn’t want the moment to break. But still I felt that hesitation, that the anticipation might be better than the real thing…

A voice in my head cut in, and it sounded a lot like Franny. What was the point in running away from relationships, in case they turned out to be as disastrous as my mother’s? I didn’t even know what had happened to her. I could only be myself, and right now all I wanted was to lean forward and feel Jamie’s lips against mine.

His finger traced a tender line from my ear, along my jaw, to my mouth, and round the soft outline of my lips. I raised my head, almost in a trance, and Jamie leaned closer so I could feel his breath.

“I stick around too,” he said. “Haven’t I been waiting all these years for you?”

And suddenly I was the one leaning forward, catching the side of his mouth with my lips, until the stubble of his chin prickled against my face. We both hesitated for a microsecond, just feeling the heat of our mouths against wind-chilled skin, and then his hand tangled in my hair while his arm pulled me nearer and I felt myself being swept into the most dizzying kiss, as Jamie’s lips met mine, gently parting them and sending tiny ripples of pleasure all over my skin, hot and cold at the same time.

All I could think of then was how absolutely right it was,
how perfectly we fitted into each other, and how the anticipation had absolutely nothing on the real thing.

I would have stayed on the bench, lost in what Nancy’s novels would call “the delicious passion of Jamie’s embrace” indefinitely, if the clock in the church tower behind us hadn’t struck twelve and spoiled the moment.

Three chimes you can ignore, but after five, it’s impossible not to count in your head. We pulled apart, suddenly self-conscious but not, I was pleased to feel, embarrassed.

“Would you like me to help you make a list?” offered Jamie.

“I don’t need to—” I began, eager to turn over a new leaf, but Jamie raised a forgiving hand.

“I’ll let you off this time,” he said. “I’d be making one, if I were you.”

“OK. Well, I should ring Lord Phillimore and check that he’s all right,” I said as my brain clicked into gear. “And Mark, to see if anyone’s called to demand a refund. And the girls, in case they’re mortified about—”

“Forget the bloody Academy!” Jamie looked aghast. “That doesn’t matter now. The only people you should be thinking of are yourself, Kathleen, and Nancy, and possibly Lord P. Although if he’d been a bit more open with you from the beginning…” He handed me my phone, which he’d helpfully charged in the car, with the ringer safely off. “Call him now.”

I took it tentatively. I had another ten missed calls.

Soonest tackled, soonest finished, I reminded myself, and dialed Lord P’s number.

“If I get Adele, I’m hanging up,” I told Jamie as it rang at the other end. If I got Adele, I wasn’t sure I could exercise politeness.

Fortunately, Lord P himself picked up on the second ring.
“Betsy! I’ve been trying to call you all morning!” He sounded relieved but very anxious. “I’m so sorry. So very sorry. Are you all right?”

I looked at Jamie. “Yes, I’m all right. Upset, but…all right.”

“I need to talk to you,” Lord P went on. “There are some matters I absolutely must clear up, and…” He paused. “There’s someone you need to meet. Where are you now? Can you come to Halfmoon Street?”

“Halfmoon Street?” I looked at Jamie, who nodded.

“I’ll take you anywhere you need to go,” he whispered.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll see you there in half an hour.”

Jamie dropped me off at the corner of Berkeley Square.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to come with you?” he said again as I got out of the car, knees first as always.

I shook my head. Already I was preparing myself—for what, I wasn’t sure. “I need to do this on my own. I’ll call you when I’m done.”

He leaned over the hand brake and beckoned. “Good luck,” he said, and kissed my cold nose with a tenderness that nearly made me get back inside.

I set off toward Halfmoon Street, making myself swing my arms and hold my head up high even though inside I was quivering. I even took a leaf out of the girls’ book and put on my shades, so no one would see the nerves written on my face.

As I rounded the corner, my whole body flinched: there was a man with a camera and a woman hanging around outside. When they saw me, I knew they knew who I was.

The woman came haring down the street toward me.
“Betsy? Betsy Phillimore? Is there anything you’d like to say for the record about the revelations in the papers?”

“No,” I said politely, and kept walking.

“Are you ashamed of the way the Phillimores covered up the scandal about your birth? Don’t you feel angry?”

“No,” I said again. I was nearly at the door now.

“Don’t you think it’s morally reprehensible to set young women up for some kind of sick marriage market?” she persisted. “Isn’t it like a legalized form of slavery? Don’t you think you deserve to be told the truth about who your real parents are?”

“I don’t want to talk about this.” My voice cracked. I didn’t want to talk about it. Not to her, anyway. It hadn’t
been
like that.

I glanced up at the familiar sash windows where girls had once waltzed and curtseyed, and I thought of Franny and her kindness and the way she had smiled at everything I did. She had loved me. She’d wanted the best for me, in every way. That hadn’t changed.

The journalist kept following me, though, running to keep up with me. “Are you going to find your
real
parents?”

I turned and pulled myself up to my full height. “I don’t need to find my real parents,” I said. “I know who they are.”

“You think your father was Hector Phillimore?” Her eyes lit up, and she gestured to the photographer. “What about your mother?”