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‘Ah, I see. I’ve made a peach trifle for dessert,’ Cilla smiled at her. ‘If you’re not dieting.’
‘Why would I be dieting? My BMI is perfect,’ returned Flick, bristling. Her mother was a human needle designed to get under skin. As for peaches, she wasn’t keen on them, though she’d eat the trifle to be polite. She would never eat peaches as a child because even the thought of their furry surfaces made her skin crawl; she would have thought her own mum might have remembered that.
‘How’s Hugo?’ asked Flick, spearing a roast potato. Dialogue with her mother had always been strained. They never spoke to each other like adults, or had proper conversations like she did with Auntie Marielle and recently, Sabrina at work. She really liked Sabrina and felt inspired by her. She was keener than ever to go to university now and maybe take her career down the same sort of path that Sabrina had. She hoped that they’d stay in touch when Sabrina went back to wherever she’d come from and, while she knew she was being selfish, she wished that wasn’t until she herself had left for uni.
‘Hugo is wonderful, Felicity. He’s very good company. You should come around one night and talk with him and then I think you’d warm to him. He knows how to address counts and barons and any dignitary you can name.’
‘I’m sure that comes in handy in Shoresend,’ said Flick, sounding more sarcastic than she meant to, so she generated a compliment to balance it out.
‘The beef’s lovely. Really tender.’
‘Thank you. When you get some spare money, which will be a long time off I should imagine with all the student debt you’ll incur, you should think about having a private pension,’ said Cilla. ‘The earlier you start, the better, Hugo says. He’s very on the ball with financial matters and has investments and stocks and shares spread everywhere. I always wondered if people really had Swiss bank accounts and now I know they do. Anyway, he told me to pass on his advice about your pension so that you won’t be sorry in later life.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ replied Flick. If Hugo had a Swiss bank account, she was Taylor Swift.
‘Have you got an ISA?’ asked Cilla after a few forkfuls of buttered cabbage.
‘No point in me locking my money away, is there, when I’ll need it for university.’
Cilla nodded. ‘Of course, of course,’ she said. Her speaking voice had got even more plummy since she’d been hooked up with Hugo and it was bad enough before, thanks to all those elocution lessons she’d had as a child.
‘Worth mentioning, though, that the longer you do lock your money away for, the higher the interest rate you get. Hugo’s money is all in long-term investments, because he didn’t imagine he’d need to access it sooner. He said he never expected he’d meet someone that he wanted to share his life with, isn’t that sweet?’ Cilla tittered. ‘Now I’ve put him in a whirl and totally upended his plans. He’s had to give a year’s notice to get to his own money, can you believe, or he’ll be stung with the most ridiculously heavy penalty fees.’
Flick could feel the cold wind edge into the room. She didn’t comment, leaving the silence clear for her mother to fill it.
‘More gravy, dear?’
‘Thanks, I’m fine, Mum.’
‘There’s plenty of meat, so do tuck in.’
Flick hadn’t been invited here because her mother was missing her; there was something else afoot, she could tell. She didn’t have long to wait for the big reveal.
‘Felicity, darling, the money I deposited in your name for tax purposes, I wonder if you could transfer it back to me.’
It was lightly said, as if of no more importance than the surfeit of roast beef available for consumption.
Flick didn’t miss a beat. She cut up a slice of meat and put it into her mouth, chewed, swallowed.
‘Did you hear me, Felicity?’ Cilla’s voice, honeyed and sweet.
‘I heard. You told me that was your emergency fund,’ said Flick. ‘Under no circumstances was it to be accessed unless you were either very ill or a disaster had occurred.’ She cut more meat, chewed, swallowed.
‘Things change though, don’t they? I gave it to you for safekeeping until I needed it, and now I do.’
Flick registered the note of steel that had crept into Cilla’s voice but still she answered, ‘No, Mum.’
‘What do you mean,no? It’s my money. Mine.’
‘Not legally it isn’t. It’s in my name.’
Cilla gave an open-mouthed gasp of astonishment. ‘You’ve spent it, haven’t you?’
Flick gasped in turn at the accusation. ‘I haven’t touched a single penny of it.’
‘And that’s because you know it’s mine.’ Cilla’s volume was rising: the honey replaced by acid.
‘Yes, but you told me to keep it safe for a dire emergency.’
