Ivoria, Tanith Lee [popular ebook readers .TXT] 📗

sometimes still thought. Claudia undoubtedly would have helped him as she had her daughter. And like all of Claudia’s children, he had looks and physique, was reasonably well-educated, (if, in Nick’s case, in a very laid-back way) and might have shown talent. Certainly, he could have tried. Yet he never really did. Joss’s verdict on his younger son, as was Laurence’s, encapsulated the idea that Nick had no incentive, no staying power. If not lazy he was too ‘relaxed’. “He should have disowned you when you were fifteen,” Laurence had told Nick when Nick was twenty, and obviously unemployed at anything except the odd sketch, or sketchy story, with few of these even printed - there might have been more if Nick had ever seriously tried to find an agent or a publisher. “Shoved you out to fend for yourself. Then you’d have had to wake up. But oh no. First Dad keeps you, and then Claudia leaves you a bloody fortune. Of course. She knew you had no spine, Nicky. The rest of us could make something for ourselves, but you… As a kid, you couldn’t even tie up the laces on your trainers.”

There had always been something sour, spiky, between Laurence and Nick. Initially was it only that obvious thing, the jealousy of an older sibling for the baby, abruptly arriving and taking up every inch of maternal space?

Joss meanwhile was fairly uninclined to either of his sons, though he tolerated Laurence, the bright one – who proceeded through public school and Oxbridge to a prestigious career - with a sort of bovine bonhomie. Serena was Joss’s pet. Despite being a brunette, she was reckoned to look very like Claudia. Although of all of them Nick resembled his mother the most. He had a quieter version of her colouring, fair, pale, and dark-blue eyed. That, and his inheritance of her fine features, masculinised, had made a lot of people forgive him his noncommittal and unstriking life. A lot of people, if not his family. Even his sister had coined for Nick the Nickname of the Sloth.

He had been her favourite too, Claudia’s.

No doubt that rankled. And subsequent events had only clarified Laurence and Serena’s acidity.

Perhaps characteristically, Nick considered retaliation for their digs and swipes, not to mention for some of the childhood attacks on him, too demanding, too time-consuming. Why go around brooding and plotting. Do good to those that hate you - it was easier. You had to keep propping up grudges, feeding them with all those regurgitated ancient gripes and blows.

Only once long ago had Nick altered course in his attitude. That was in the days and months after Claudia’s death. He had felt then - what was it he wrote in his notebook? - broken in half by her going. So unexpected, so entirely unlooked for, unplanned for. He too young to think such a death possible, she too comparatively young for him to have to think of it. She would always have been there. Changing only a very little. Sometimes saying, with a soft laugh, that she should veil all her mirrors not to see the lines - one day she would be brave and have a face-lift, better safe than sad. But when she said this, he would never see any lines on her face, he never had, and not a mark on her lovely hands, not an extra inch on her waist, or rumple in the straight elasticity of her back, or her two perfect, slender ankles rising from the high-heeled shoes.

He could recall death’s aftermath, Laurence white and strained, and Serena, who in her private life was always called Reenie, sobbing and then hugging Joss. And Joss wandering around like a zombie, a robot with a blanked-out screen. And the inescapable pain inside Nick; rigid, a steel spike. He had thought it would never lessen. It was there always, even when he slept and dreamed of different things. Always there like a low thin sound, a type of tinnitus of the emotional ear.

But really, what he remembered most of all was not crying, not even when he was alone, not being able to cry, wondering if he should be able to. It was too horrible and impossible to cry over. It was a sort of death of him. Broken in half, and half of him gone, because that half had been Claudia. And all those flowers, flowers everywhere, sent for the funeral, from theatre people and movie people and fans, always more and more from fans. And how the flowers were so beautiful, and then you had to watch them die there on the lawn, by the gates, in the cemetery. Bit by bit, until they were rotten, and vanished, just the paper left and the paper ribbon and brown wisps blowing about.

He had hated Laurence then, Nick believed. Yet the hatred would not last, just as the steel spike miraculously, over the year, dissolved, leaving only a bitter afterglow just visible on the mind’s horizon.

So that was the only time for hating. Although Laurence, indubitably, came to hate even more enduringly Nick, when the terms of the will were revealed. Claudia had been wealthy in her own right. And though she left her estate, any subsequent royalties or bonanzas, jointly among Joss, Laurence and Serena, to Nick she had left almost a million pounds, all secured and suitably invested, yielding an income that even if, as Reenie put it, he never shifted his Sloth’s backside, should keep him in great comfort for an indefinite number of long, trouble-free lifetimes.

3

He sees Debby almost always on a Monday or Tuesday afternoon, twice a month. She works from home then, so can take a couple of hours off.

She wears her hair in a long highlighted bob, and opens the door wearing a black silk dressing-gown, with an embroidered dragon on the pocket over her left breast.

“Hi, Nick. Lovely to see you.”

She is always friendly in a business-like way.

They go through