Free A Perfect Heritage by Penny Vincenzi Page A

I. The package should be pretty attractive but we can discuss that when you’ve made up your mind. I get the feeling we’d work OK together and Jonjo thinks so too. Want another of those?’
    ‘No, no, thank you,’ said Patrick.
    ‘OK. Well I’ve got to go – dining with a client, God help me.’
    And he was gone. Jonjo sat back in his seat and said, ‘I think he liked you. Up to you now, I’d say.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Yeah. Whether you think it’s your bag, whether you can work with him.’
    ‘Bit hard to say,’ said Patrick, ‘after . . .’ he looked at his watch . . . ‘twenty-five minutes.’
    ‘That’s a long time in his day, believe me. I think you’d enjoy it, you know. Only thing is, it would be pretty stressful. You’ll be working longer hours and you won’t get home to see the children nearly so much. Better spell that out to Bianca. She might get a bit of a shock.’
    Patrick was so used to his orderly existence, it was hard to imagine getting home late from time to time, and not being able to play his role of semi house-husband quite so devotedly. He could see he might even be unable to attend some crucial parents’ meeting while Bianca sat in all-night financial sessions or jetted off to New York at little more than a moment’s notice. For some reason – and he was shocked at himself as he realised it – it was a rather intriguing notion.
    Lucy Farrell was leaving university. She was leaving, however, not in a cloud of glory, with a First, but in the middle of her course. With no degree of any size whatsoever.
    She was hating the course. English literature – or certainly the way it was being presented to her – was a load of crap. Like the last essay, ‘the Marxist view of Jane Austen’, indeed. What could be less relevant to Jane’s work than that, for God’s sake? There’d been loads of others, just as hideously stupid, and almost two more years stretched ahead of her. She just couldn’t face it, wanted out. And she’d taken a deep breath and said so to her tutor. And he’d said she should take time to think about it and she said she didn’t want time, she was quite sure. And he’d been really very nice about it and said well, if that was how she really felt, then perhaps it would be better, and asked her politely, clearly not really wanting to know the answer, if she had any other ideas about her future.
    She’d said no, and it wasn’t true, but she knew that if she’d told him, he wouldn’t even begin to understand. He would have certainly thought it wasn’t a proper job, think she was only doing it because, given that her family was in the cosmetic business, she could just walk into a job, no problem at all.
    She wanted to be a make-up artist. She had read lots of articles about it, had watched a programme on the fashion shows, showing the make-up artists working in the chaos of the Paris collections. It looked like hard work, but huge fun. And she would be good at it, she knew that. She loved doing her own face, painting it all kinds of wonderful ways for parties, and had a bit of a reputation for doing her mates’ as well. And, while she didn’t think she’d ever want to work at Farrell’s, and had always resisted any idea of going into the business on a managerial level, there were lots of people there who’d be able to advise her how to go about this plan at least. She’d read in the article that you had to do a course somewhere, but that’d be fun, and if her father wouldn’t pay for her, she could fund it working at bars and stuff like that.
    She was a bit worried about her father; he might not like her new plans. But he could hardly argue about them, when the cosmetic business was his whole life. Not that he particularly liked it being his whole life; in fact, he never seemed to enjoy it very much.
    Hopefully Grandy would be pleased. Lucy was very fond of her grandmother. She found her more fun – and in many ways she seemed years younger –