One Summer Night At the Ritz Read Online Free PDF

‘When you have evidence of widespread altruism, Dolly, I’ll give this Jane character more than twenty minutes. Mum, hi,’ he said as he picked up the phone. ‘I’ve got ten minutes, max.’
    ‘Hello, darling. You work far too hard.’ Francis Blackwell’s voice always had the calming melody of someone who had nothing to do except read her book in the sunshine with a glass of rosé. ‘Right, so ten minutes. OK. Well, I was clearing out the attic yesterday and I remembered something about those diary pages. You’ve read them, haven’t you?’
    ‘Course I’ve read them.’
    ‘Yes, well you’re so busy—’
    ‘I’ve read them.’
    ‘Well, it was something your father said years ago. He knew her. This Enid character. Well he didn’t know her as such, but he knew of her. He went to that little island. Strawberry something?’
    ‘Cherry Pie.’
    ‘Cherry Pie Island, of course. He went. His mother took him. He said they stood on the bridge and they watched this woman at the cafe and her child playing outside. I remember him saying that they didn’t go over the bridge, just stood on it and his mum just stared and then they left. But he never knew why and they never went again. I suppose this is why, isn’t it? She knew, Granny knew. She was always a cold fish, they all bloody were; the Blackwells. I hear Violet’s asking you for more money? What happens if you say no?’
    Will peered down towards street level, down to the tiny people and tiny cars. He sighed. ‘She has to find an investor, or I do, to buy her out, or we have to split the assets which would be a nightmare. I can’t pay her any more. I’m only just getting us back on even, there’s no more to give her.’
    His mum sighed. ‘Yes, Dad did rather er… Well you were handed a bit of a millstone, darling. We all know it. Sell it all off, if you ask me.’
    ‘Can we not go into this?’
    ‘OK, sorry, Will. I’d better go, my ten minutes is up, isn’t it? I just thought that was quite interesting. That he’d seen them. Enid and her little girl. That he’d remembered that. Ties it all up quite nicely. Anyway, ciao, darling.’
    Will slipped his phone in his pocket and narrowed his eyes at the view. He thought for a moment about his dad. All ambition and crazy ideas and happy-go-lucky and ‘let’s just give it a go’. Thought about when they’d go and stay with his grandmother - Prudence Blackwell. The big, dark house, like there were never any lights on, yet he could see the big gold chandeliers blazing even now when he thought back. Could feel her cold hands and hear her clinking rings. Her lip raised in a sneer watching to see if Will would make a noise, kick his ball in the house, draw on the wall, anything that she could suck her breath in at and leave his dad tense and panicked and trying to please her but also wishing his son could just run about the garden without the possibility of damaging the roses.
    He thought of the summer he’d stayed with her when his mum had had Zeph. Struggling to cope with a rambunctious ten year old as well as a newborn, they’d reluctantly packed him off to granny. The worst summer of his life. Sitting round the huge table being forced to eat things like liver and tongue, lying in bed hearing the creak and crack of the house at night and her saying that it very well could be ghosts who took unkindly towards naughty little boys. This dreadful, brittle woman who had terrified him and ignored him but also kept him on the tightest rein. A summer where he had sat on the side of the bed and cried and when she had heard him had come in and slapped him on the cheek and told him to grow up and be a man. He’d cried into the pillow after that, terrified she’d come in again. A summer that had left him furiously resentful of his brother when he got home, bitter that no one had come to get him. Angry at this baby who seemed to have stripped him of his lovely life with his mum and dad. And then that September