Nefarious Doings Read Free Page A

dragging my gaze towards the mirror. I looked pale, so pale that my dark, stupidly curly hair seemed even darker and my eyes looked huge. A little Botticelli, or a middle-aged Rembrandt. Certainly my figure was more Renaissance than contemporary anyway, so it matched the whole theme. Who knew shock could be so flattering? This last thought reminded me that my mother was in hospital, and a man was dead. ‘Thank you, but I don’t
do
guests,’ she had said. Which was just as well, given the circumstances.

Chapter Two
    Your ‘Bite Me’ column last week on the sandwich generation resonated so much that I stuck it on the fridge for inspiration. But then one of the kids tore off the heading to use on a ransom note and my father used the rest to jot down a phone message. Which I suppose says it all …
     
    My mother was a woman thwarted by life. Coming into the world just as her parents were hit hard by the Depression, she had been raised with all the responsibilities of money but with little of the benefits. Ironically, being home-schooled by her father gave her a superior education to what was offered to her peers, but it counted for little when she eloped with the son of the local butcher. It was probably the only time that Lillian Antoinette Forrest nee Milner let her heart rule her head and was regretted soon after. The marriage, always a bad fit, lasted for six long years and resulted in two daughters and a lifelong aversion to red meat.
    She christened me Eleanor Aquitaine, after a woman dead for nearly nine hundred years. It was a little intimidating to have a namesake who was one of the most beautiful, learned celebrities of her day, as well as queen of France
and
England, one after the other, and who birthed ten children, of whom three became kings, two queens, two dukes, two countesses and one duchess. So far I hadn't even managed to get one through university. And by all accounts she had lovely
smooth
hair. An overachiever, my father declared, choosing instead to call me Nell. The name stuck even though he didn’t, eventually leaving not just his family but also the country, and putting optimum miles between us by moving to the other side of the world. He was very much alive when last heard from, married to a Cornish lass named Edie and the father of numerous offspring with sensible, single-syllable names such as Bob, Dave and Jane.
    My mother, left to raise two children, rose to the task by sinking all her spare energy and capital into a bookshop in town. Nowadays, having expanded into the shop next door, Renaissance was not just a new and second-hand purveyor of books but a cafe and a place to buy local produce. It also hosted various book and reading groups as well as committee meetings for my mother’s two personal favourites, the local chapter of the Richard III Society and the Majic Women’s Guild. Despite nearing seventy, she was showing no signs of slowing, still spending every day at the shop alongside her staff, as well as having her finger in so many local pies that she seemed an essential ingredient.
    Which was why I was taken aback to find her looking so small, so diminished, in the hospital bed. It is one thing to know somebody is incapacitated, but quite another to see them that way. She was asleep when we arrived, snoring through a transparent oxygen mask, her short white hair splayed across the starchy pillow. Her skin was pale, powdery, with deep folds around her neck. I sat beside her, washed by an unexpected wave of emotion, and smoothed the hair from her forehead. Her skin felt like tissue paper.
    ‘Yen?’ I whispered, using the derivative that had arisen from her initial insistence that my sister and I not call her ‘Mum’. She hadn’t counted on the difficulties a baby would have with the three syllables of Lillian, and the instinctive incision that would occur. By the time she realised that she had traded a comfortable, cosy moniker for a unit of Japanese currency, it was too