Saturday, 11 April, 2020

"What do you want for lunch—thought I'd make today the day I tried that tempura recipe?" Tom inquired, his hand on the door handle. "That question in the food round put me in mind of it."

I winced. Last night's pub quiz hadn't shown me at my finest. And Tom's understanding of 'rubbish at general knowledge' diverged from mine. He managed all the sports questions, most of the history ones and the best part of every other round too.

My sole contribution was correctly identifying the year Kim Kardashian broke the internet with 'that' photo of her arse. Luckily for me, no-one had insisted on the downing a shot for every wrong answer clause. When we eventually left the Zoom chat, Tom tipped his head to one side. "Did you actually go to university, Sophie? What do they teach in those places?!"

My university years, particularly the last one and what took place not long afterwards, did not bring back fond memories. I laughed anyway. "Don't blame me. Didn't I warn you I was useless?"

Tom's friends were fun. Liam who joked about my age, challenging me to come up with all the answers in the history round seeing as "you must have lived through all this, isn't that right, Sophie?!" Another couple joined us, the woman insisting I take her on a guided tour of the house via webcam. (I only showed her half of the rooms, which left her wide-eyed in wonder anyway.) And an older guy Tom knew from the Post Office who asked me my name twice and who also showed an interest in the virtual tour.

I headed upstairs for a shower. As Tom's mission to feed me energy-dense food continued, I'd upped the number of Joe Wicks workouts I was doing. Thanks to a twenty-something metabolism and a job where he spent most of the day walking, calories didn't bother Tom in the least.

Shower finished and hair washed, my phone beeped. I gawped at the message, my skin crawling. How... I thought I'd blocked his email address, but here it was again—the day after Simon had dropped his name into a conversation too.

"Sophie, it must be that these strange times we're living in have made me take a long, hard look at myself and want to make amends. Would it be possible to—

No. I deleted the message. And just as I had regretted the move as soon as I'd done it last time, the same complicated emotions swirled around once again. I rang Arlene, a spur-of-the-moment bit of madness. As if she could counsel me through this whole complicated part of my past in ten minutes.

Sure enough, her phone went straight to voice mail. "This is Arlene. The office is closed but if you feel this is an emergency, please ring the on call mental health services on 0800—

I hung up. The idea of describing everything to a stranger appalled me.

Phone him... wouldn't it give me far greater peace of mind to find out the truth for once and for all instead of...

Beeeeeeeppppp!

The smoke alarm cut through my thoughts. Opening the bedroom door to the stink of burnt food, I hurried downstairs.

*****

Heart thudding and mind thoroughly rattled, I pushed open the kitchen door and took in the scene.

Carnage. Most of the time, I'd trained myself to stifle all objections to the mess Tom made when cooking. "It's good for you not to be so uptight about it," I told myself. Arlene's dreaded why questions frequently touched on why tidiness bothered me so much.

"I like the order of it. I find it soothing. Therapeutic, even."

Nowhere near enough of an answer for her. Why did I like the order? What was soothing about it? Why was it therapeutic...

My hands curled into fists, the nails digging into my palm. Flour on the floor in the kitchen. Spice jars, their tops off and contents spilled out on the counters. A puddle of oil on the floor, seeping through the floorboards. The fridge door open and a pile of dirty dishes and pans in the sink. The air stank of frying oil because the extractor fan above the hob hadn't been switched on.

A heat haze hung over the hob; the smokiness having triggered the alarm.

Tom stood under the spot where the alarm was fixed to the ceiling, ineffectually flapping a tea towel under it. The alarm continued to scream. He dragged a stool underneath, got up and removed the batteries—killing off the sound instantly—and stepped off the stool cautiously.

He glanced at me; expression inscrutable.

"The mess in here!" I shrieked. Disappointment met frustrated libido and weeks of curbing my instincts to tut at his untidiness. "Look at the state of the place!"

I grabbed a cloth and swiped at the flour coating the countertop. In my haste, I'd forgotten to put on an apron and a cloud of white dust flew up into the air, landing on the dark blue sweater I wore.

"Oh!" I flung the cloth at Tom, who caught it and moved to the sink, turning on the hot water and soaking the cloth.

"Here," he pressed it onto the sweater, the action turning the flour into a white paste which would be even harder to remove. Especially since the specialist cleaning service I used for its expertise in such matters was closed for the foreseeable future.

"No," I thrust his hand and the cloth back. "Don't do that! You'll ruin it! This sweater cost me almost a thousand pounds!"

At that, his own mouth twisted into a snarl, eyes darkening and scornful. "So what, Sophie. Can't you buy another one? What with the £24 million you inherited from your grandfather. Why the fuck are you working—taking a job from someone who really needs it?"

Ah.

He swiped his phone from the messy counter and handed it to me. "A message came in from Liam and distracted me while I was cooking."

Liam Murphy: "Arthur thought he recognised Sophie from somewhere. Landed on your feet there, son! Lucky old you."

Arthur the older postie guy from the pub quiz. The one terribly interested in my name.

Underneath Liam's message, a link to an old article on the Daily Mail site. That oh so familiar picture, Josie and I, dressed in dark suits our heads bowed as we ducked flashing cameras. My father leaving the Supreme Court, lips pressed in a thin, hard line.

The headline—Father fails in bid for a share of daughter's £24 million inheritance.

All the newspapers ran with the story at the time. The Herald, the Scotsman and the Metro along with the Mail. Why wouldn't they? It was too juicy to resist. A grandfather who invested in property in London at the right time building himself up a considerable fortune. A daughter who married a man he couldn't stand, the grandfather marking him as a fly-by-night right from the start.

The old man changed his will not long after she married him. His only daughter would inherit when he died, but his estate would be held in trust to prevent her husband from getting his hands on any of the money. When the daughter died, everything in the estate, bar a few charitable donations here and there done as a tax dodge, was to go to me.

When he died only two years before my mother—choking out of existence over breakfast one morning at the age of 78. I felt nothing. All I recalled was a remote, bad-tempered figure from my childhood who I'd only visited out of duty over the years. But if his death had been a rehearsal for what I suffered when my mum died, it was a shoddy one.

I hadn't been prepared at all.

My mother hadn't realised how wealthy her father was. When the conditions of his will were made clear to her after he died, she consulted a lawyer about the legality of the trust seeing as she and my father were no longer together and did try to contest it but then Wester Ross happened.

One hideous, horrible night and she was dead.

"Well, you've read about all about it, haven't you?" I said to Tom, putting the cloth down. He leant against the counter, eyes unreadable. "The newspapers' version of the story. Sophie Malcolm painted as the spoilt, vindictive and ungrateful daughter. The law is on her side because if nothing else, my grandfather employed a top-class lawyer skilled at drawing up watertight legal documents.

"Just that ethically, is it right?"

Tom said nothing. I'd summed up the tone of the articles published at the time. Ever read the comments on stories about contested wills? The outraged and disgusted banded together to brand me as vile.

"Greedy little cow. What's she done to earn that money? NOTHING."

"Straight out of King Lear! How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child..."

And they were the milder ones. Plenty of people called me far worse. Wished me a painful death. Promised me all that money would make me lonely and unhappy.

They weren't far wrong.

I read them all, not out of some weird form of sado-masochism, but terror. What if one of the readers looked at the photo, thought to themselves, "Hey, she looks familiar. Didn't I once..." They picked up their phones and called the papers. "The ungrateful heiress? I've a juicy story for you. How much are you willing to pay me?" And everything from my early 20s came to light.

If I'd thought the headlines about my inheritance lurid, the knowledge of that once upon a time life, would have made them hundreds of times worse.

"My father's argument for his share of the wealth related to the time he was married to my mother. They'd split fifteen years previously but never divorced, so in legal terms he was still her closest next of kin," I said, my voice toneless. A recitation of facts, even if every one of them prickled against my mouth as I spoke them.

"When he found out about the trust after my grandfather's death—he'd read his obituary in the Times and contacted my mother under pretence offering his condolences—he immediately started legal proceedings.

"My mother kept that from me. She made a point of not slagging him off in front of me. But you know how long the law takes to work. The case didn't make it to court before she died herself.

"And my father's argument for his entitlement didn't wash with the judge because the codicil in my grandfather's will was so specific. And he was of sound mind and body when it was drawn up."

"What about his girlfriend?"

Ah. J'accuse... The girlfriend argument. The lawyer acting on my father's behalf had argued his-then girlfriend had a rare form of cancer. In the States, the man said, honey-toned, as he appealed to where he imagined the law's soft underbelly might be, my father's girlfriend would be able to access a novel form of treatment.

One that cost substantial amounts of money.

The newspaper articles made much of that angle. A journalist even interviewed the girlfriend afterwards. Pale-faced and eyes dark-shadowed in the picture, she told the Daily Mail she didn't blame me at all but found it difficult to understand why I needed all that money.

I shrugged. "The woman disappeared not long after that. Was she ill? I don't know. Was she even his girlfriend and not someone he persuaded to pretend to be? Cal, my brother, suggested I hire a private detective to find out. Josie recommended the QC I used. They both took my side. Said my father didn't deserve a penny."

I flapped a hand at the space behind me. "Six months after my 30th, I inherited this house—my grandfather's city home. His second home in the country. He also had properties in London. You're right that I don't need to work, but otherwise..."

I wouldn't feel normal at all. I'd fritter the money on absurdities such as more cosmetic work done on my face, jet-setting to European cities at the drop of a hat or ridiculously expensive furniture and artwork I neither liked nor needed. Every month, I disciplined myself to buy only food and drink, clothes and trivialities such as hairdressers, beauty salon appointments and a personal trainer that were merely expensive rather than obscenely so.

Tom's jaw had dropped open. Impossible to hazard a guess at what confounded him the most—the money, my family, the court case, the life I lived. I hadn't mentioned the paranoia.

"I have no friends! If I invited my work colleagues here, they would hate me. Every time I walked into the office, I'd know I was interrupting whispered conversations, 'My God! Have you been to that house?'

And as for relationships, forget it. As a teenager, pre-university, I dated a guy my own age. We held hands, kissed, sneaked out of parties and discos and groped each other. Swore we'd be together 4 EVER. Distance split us up when the London-Glasgow gap proved impossible to overcome. That was the last time I'd ever had any lasting relationship with a man that ticked the 'normal' box.

The oil on the floorboards had dispersed, drops trickling through the joins in the woodwork. Perhaps if I soaked the sweater in cold water and then handwashed it gently, it wouldn't be ruined. I plucked at the neckline, desperate to remove it.

"But I am reconsidering whether I should work or not. Particularly now when so many people are going to lose their jobs because of the pandemic and its economic consequences."

He held his hands up. A dismissal of his earlier remark or an apology for it?

"This will sound trite, but I do donate heavily to charities," I added. "And I offered money to my brother and sister. They refused, but I get around that by contributing to trust funds I set up for their kids. My sister's well off anyway because she and her husband are both lawyers. And she and my brother have always sworn they don't envy me the money."

Silence. No clocks ticked, but they should have. Marking out seconds as one person took in the enormity of a confession and the other sagged back against the kitchen counter, exhausted by the confessional.

Josie had met me after the court case finished, insistent I stay at her house afterwards and recover. I'd felt the same then. Wiped out and if my insides had been hauled out through my nose, Egyptian-mummification style, for all to see.

"You could have told me before," Tom said. He edged towards me. Conciliatory? "Swear to God, I'm not after your money, Sophie."

The inheritance was the primary reason I no longer used the second name that appeared on my birth certificate. Any half-arsed Google search for Sophie Malcolm would turn those articles up. I hadn't wanted potential dates reading the coverage and, to quote Josie, rubbing their hands together in glee.

Any man who set his hat at me should love me for me, right?

Men who found out my real name early on might decide my newly acquired wealth made me much more attractive than if I was just a simple 30-something who held down a regular job. Remember Simon? The one who turned up not long after the news of the inheritance hit the headlines. Sophie, are you all right? I read about terrible accident your mother had."

And the rest, Simon.

Tom pushed his hand through his hair. "That's some story. I worked out you were well off when I turned up here. Just nowhere near this rich. When you said it was an inheritance, I thought your grandfather must have been awful fond of you and left you his house as a thank-you."

A kind way of putting it. But the old man's hatred of my father—justified, perhaps—far outdid fondness for his granddaughter. Men of his generation put a lot of stock in bloodlines. I was his, much as he would have preferred a choice. A son who in his turn produced sons, say.

There was one thing I could do in the meantime. "Please don't give me anything for the bills. I don't need the money."

"No fucking way."

The words burst out staccato style, a tiny droplet of spit hitting me in the face. I dashed my hand up to wipe it away.

"Sorry. I shouldn't have sworn," he said, fierce words belying the sentiment. "But I'm not living here for free. Give the money to one of your charities if you don't need it. God knows, this pandemic will hit poorer people worst. People who don't have enormous houses and gardens, or piles of money to shore them up when they lose their jobs."

He rubbed his eyes. His face had taken on that pinky flush again. I suspected mine had lost all colour. Reliving that time always made nauseated me—my mum's death, my guilt over that, the news of the inheritance that seemed undeserved and then the whole mucky court case.

"I need to do a bit o' tinking. I'm going out for a walk." He bent to kiss my cheek. "I'll be back in a bit."

His footsteps grew quieter, and the door opened and closed behind him. I tipped my head to the ceiling and blew out a huge sigh.

What now?

AUTHOR'S NOTE - sorry folks. I published one chapter twice the last time I updated. This is the correct one now and thanks to @minniemair for pointing out...