At Last Read Free Page B

platters steadily.
    When the Crash came, lawyers flew in from America to ask the Craigs to rack their brains for something they could do without. They thought and thought. They obviously couldn’t sell Sunninghill Park. They had to go on entertaining their friends. It would be too cruel and too inconvenient to sack any of the servants. They couldn’t do without the house in Bruton Street for overnight stays in London. They needed two Rolls-Royces and two chauffeurs because Daddy was incorrigibly punctual and Mummy was incorrigibly late. In the end they sacrificed one of the six newspapers that each guest received with their breakfast. The lawyers relented. The pools of Jonson money were too deep to pretend there was a crisis; they were not stock-market speculators, they were industrialists and owners of great blocks of urban America. People would always need hardened fats and dry-cleaning fluids and somewhere to live.
    Even if Daddy had been too extravagant, Mummy’s marriage to Jean was a folly that could be explained only by the resulting title – she was definitely jealous of Aunt Gerty being married to a grand duke. Jean’s role in the Jonson story was to disgrace himself, as a liar and a thief, a lecherous stepfather and a tyrannical husband. While Mummy lay dying of cancer, Jean threw one of his tantrums, screaming that doubt was being cast on his honour by her will. She was leaving him her houses and paintings and furniture only for his lifetime and then on to her children, as if he couldn’t be trusted to leave them to the children himself. He knew perfectly well that they were Jonson possessions…and on and on; the morphine, the pain, the screaming, the indignant promises. She changed her will and Jean went back on his word and left everything to his nephew.
    God, how Nancy loathed Jean! He had died almost forty years ago, but she wanted to kill him every day. He had stolen everything and ruined her life. Sunninghill, the Pavillon, the Palazzo Arichele, all lost. She even regretted the loss of some of the Jonson houses she would never have inherited, not unless lots of people had died, that is, which would have been a tragedy, except that at least she would have known how to live in them properly, which was more than could be said of some people she could name.
    ‘All the lovely things, all the lovely houses,’ said Nancy, ‘where have they all gone?’
    ‘Presumably the houses are where they’ve always been,’ said Nicholas, ‘but they’re being lived in by people who can afford them.’
    ‘But that’s just it, I should be able to afford them!’
    ‘Never use a conditional tense when it comes to money.’
    Really, Nicholas was being impossible. She certainly wasn’t going to tell him about her book. Ernest Hemingway had told Daddy that he really ought to write a book, because he told such funny stories. When Daddy protested that he couldn’t write, Hemingway sent a tape-recorder. Daddy forgot to plug the thing in, and when the spools didn’t go round, he lost his temper and threw it out of the window. Luckily, the woman it landed on didn’t take any legal action and Daddy had another marvellous story, but the whole incident had made Nancy superstitious about tape-recorders. Maybe she should hire a ghost writer. Exorcized by a ghost! That would be original. Still, she had to give the poor ghost an idea of how she wanted it done. It could be theme by theme, or decade by decade, but that seemed to her a stuffy egghead bookworm kind of approach. She wanted it done sister by sister; after all, the rivalry between them was quite the dynamic force.
    Gerty, the youngest and most beautiful of the three Jonson Sisters, was definitely the one Mummy was most competitive with. She married the Grand Duke Vladimir, nephew of the last Tsar of Russia. ‘Uncle Vlad’, as Nancy called him, had helped to assassinate Rasputin, lending his Imperial revolver to Prince Yussopov for what was supposed to be the final