Whatever Love Is Read Free

and this one.’
    Frankie craned her neck as the car weaved its way down a narrow, twisting lane, dark and shady from the beech and oak trees that formed a canopy over the road. Nerys grabbed her phone from the
glove compartment, and with one hand on the steering wheel, punched a button.
    ‘Three minutes away!’ she shouted into the phone. ‘What, dear? Yes, of course she’s all right – we’ve been chatting.’
    Frankie felt that was a slight distortion of the facts but tried a wan smile as Nerys hurled the handset into the pocket at the side of her seat and beamed at her. ‘The family are all
ready for you,’ she said. ‘Much better for you to be at Park House with the girls. You haven’t met Jemma and Mia yet, of course – well, not since you were all in nappies! Of
course your lifestyles have been so different. I looked up that school you went to on the internet; ghastly looking place, you poor child. Jemma’s at Cheltenham, of course, and darling Mia
– such a clever girl – has just left and is going to Switzerland to finish.’
    Frankie was about to ask what she was going to finish when Nerys stamped on the brakes to allow a pheasant to cross the lane in front of her before hurtling off again. ‘Well, here’s
another surprise: Thomas has managed to get you a place at Thornton College.’
    She had turned to look at Frankie, clearly waiting for a cry of delight, and narrowly missed hitting a small boy on a mountain bike.
    ‘Thornton College, dear? One of the top rated schools in the East Midlands? State, of course, but I said to Thomas, private will be too much of a challenge for Francesca, coming from . . .
Well, anyway, I’m sure you’ll love it.’
    When Frankie, swallowing back tears, said nothing, Nerys sniffed and glared at her. ‘I hope you’ll be grateful,’ she said. ‘Thornton College is totally oversubscribed but
then with Thomas being who he is, it’s amazing the doors that open! And of course, they are pledged to take in disadvantaged girls, what with the new government guidelines and everything.
Well now, here we are!’
    And with that she had pressed a button on the car dashboard, and a pair of wrought-iron gates had slowly opened.
    ‘That’s my little pad,’ Nerys remarked, as they drove past a small, wisteria-covered cottage. ‘It was part of the original estate – it belonged to the gamekeeper in
the days when there was shooting in these parts, and, when my husband died, Thomas suggested I took it over. It’s much smaller than anything I’ve been used to but needs must. I struggle
financially, but I never complain.’
    Frankie didn’t know it at the time but Nerys, who had quite enough money to live very comfortably, enjoyed pleading poverty in the same way that her sister Tina enjoyed imagined ill
health.
    As Nerys had driven the car round the bend in the tree-lined gravel driveway, Frankie caught her first glimpse of Park House. It was grand, far grander than she had expected. Overlooking a huge
lawn that led down to a gazebo and tennis court were three storeys of mellow, honey-coloured Northamptonshire marlstone with a huge conservatory to one side and great swathes of Virginia creeper
covering the walls. It’s beautiful , she thought to herself, but it isn’t home .
    Yet now, three years on, it was home and she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. For all the teasing from her cousins, she had never once been left out of family events and had
been taken to places she had only dreamt of as a child – holidays in Tuscany and Corfu, race meetings and theatre trips to the West End at least three times a year.
    At first, whenever she had returned to Brighton to visit her mother, she would deliberately walk past her old home, freshly painted and spruced up by the new owners, and recall the good times
before her father had gone and she had been left to cope with her mother’s strange moods. And once, after she had been at Park House for eighteen months