Just a Family Affair Read Free

happy birthday, but decided against it. It was still far too early - she’d take advantage of the peace and quiet. She had a lot to do.
    For the fifth time she added up how many she had coming for lunch. For months, it had been just the two of them for Sunday lunch at Honeycote House, which had been horribly strange. In the end, Lucy had stopped bothering doing a roast, because it was hardly worth it. But today, everyone was coming round for Mickey’s birthday, and she couldn’t wait.
    Her stepson, Patrick, and his girlfriend Mandy would probably arrive first. They usually rushed off somewhere glamorous on a Sunday. To the races, or shopping in Bath, or for lunch with friends at a rowdy restaurant in Cheltenham. But then they were young and in love and with no real responsibility, although Lucy knew that Patrick had taken a lot on board at Honeycote Ales. He’d stepped into Mickey’s shoes straight after the ghastly accident that Lucy didn’t like to think about any more, now it was becoming a distant memory. Even now Mickey was back on form Patrick seemed to manage more than his share of the workload. God knows where the boy had inherited his sense of duty from. Certainly not his father - Mickey was notoriously irresponsible, only marginally less so now he was undeniably middle-aged. And not his mother either. She had been by all accounts a hippydippy flake, which was why Mickey had managed to get custody in the end. Lucy had brought Patrick up as her own, and she thought the world of him.
    He was so like Mickey in some ways. They both had the devil-may-care insouciance that only the truly handsome can carry off, combined with boyish charm, immaculate manners and a fondness for the good things in life. But Lucy knew Patrick had hidden depths. He was not as transparent as his father; he took things to heart, though he was always desperate not to show it. Mickey, on the other hand, was a bona fide ostrich. If he could pretend something bad wasn’t happening, then he would. Patrick did the worrying for both of them.
    Which made Lucy wonder if Mandy was quite the right girl for him. She was very sweet, but perhaps a little . . . well, superficial seemed an unkind description. But Lucy couldn’t help feeling that Patrick needed someone who could unlock whatever it was that lay underneath his beguiling exterior, someone who understood his complexity. On the other hand, perhaps someone like Mandy was good for him. She was a simple soul, straightforward and relatively undemanding, not like a lot of girls these days, who seemed to expect everything their own way with gold-plated, diamond-encrusted knobs on.
    Next to appear would be Mandy’s father, Keith. Lovely, cuddly Keith, with his ready smile and the broad Brummie accent he would never lose. He’d come for one of their infamous Sunday lunches a few years ago, just after his ghastly wife had left him. Disillusioned with the empty life he was leading in soulless, suburban Solihull, he’d fallen under the Liddiard spell immediately, plunging all his money into the ailing brewery, which had been on the verge of bankruptcy at the time. He was virtually one of the family now. He would be bringing Ginny, his . . . what would you call her? Girlfriend? Lover? Mistress? Other half? Lucy wasn’t sure of the official term. She’d introduced the two of them to each other three years ago, when they had both been abandoned souls licking their respective wounds, and they had been living together ever since.
    Lucy’s younger daughter, Georgina, was also coming back from university in Gloucester for the day, bombing over in her clapped-out Fiesta. Madcap Georgie - the phrase ‘jolly hockeysticks’ could have been coined just for her. She was halfway through her degree; Lucy had never quite got to the bottom of what it was all about, but it seemed to involve hospitality and sport and tourism - perfect for the sporty, bossy Georgie. Lucy was eternally grateful that she’d chosen a