Free Sleeping Cruelty by Lynda La Plante

winner’s enclosure, and showing them to her friends when they appeared in the society columns. But the effervescent, giggling young socialite of courtship had vanished immediately after the wedding. She began to reprimand him as if he were a child for the way he held his knife and fork, the way he dressed. She made little jibes that exploded into huge rows. Eventually she had hired Miss Drumgoole to teach him etiquette. The truth was, William had needed to learn from Katherine so that he could feel at ease in the social circles to which she introduced him, but her scornful carping made him uncomfortable and afraid to open his mouth.
    And here was Sabrina, his offspring, as like the whingeing Katherine as if she had been spat out of her mouth. She was pale, with straight blonde hair, heavy-lidded eyes with fair lashes and braces on her teeth. She might have been attractive but her long, thin nose and full lips made her face lack animation and she seemed loath even to attempt a smile. William had no one to blame but himself: it had been his choice to divorce one vacuous titled blonde and marry another. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
    ‘I can’t stay long,’ lisped Sabrina. ‘Besides, Mummy said I really shouldn’t have agreed to see you at all. We’ve had these press people everywhere.’
    ‘I am sorry,’ he said flatly. ‘Perhaps if your mother hadn’t been so eager to spill her vitriolic lies about me, this would all have blown over.’
    ‘I have been teased unmercifully because of you. The other girls do nothing but giggle about you, and mince around like willy woofters, pointing at me. It’s embarrassing having someone like you for a father. They call me “Rough Trade”, because of you and your boyfriend.’
    ‘I’ll take you back to school.’ William folded his napkin. He was too tired and too hurt to argue.
    Had he brought all this vituperation upon himself? Surelythere had to be someone he could call a friend. He went through lists of names, people who had stayed on one or other of his estates, all those he entertained regularly. But then it dawned on him that no one except his employees had made contact in the past few weeks. He kicked at the sofa in a drunken fury, as his father had when the bailiffs arrived to remove the family’s few possessions. Unlike his father, he had no woman on whom to take out his frustrations. At least his mother had always been there, even if it was only as a punch-bag.
    His mother had scrimped and saved for him to stay at school for extra tuition, and it was she who had told him there was a way out. She always said, ‘Get your maths, Billy. You got to have maths.’ Why she had this fixation with maths he never discovered, but his high grade in that subject netted him a scholarship to Liverpool University. Sadly, she had not lived to see this and his father’s advice was that he should go out and work, rather than ‘loll around at university with a load of ponces’. Billy had rolled up his sleeves and punched his father – so hard that he sent him sprawling into the fireplace – and walked out. He never saw his father alive again.
    Fortified now by anti-depressants and sleeping-tablets, William remained closeted in his bedroom where his past became his focus. There had been around forty mourners at his father’s funeral from the bars and clubs at which he had virtually lived. They all told funny anecdotes about him, what a character he had been, what bad luck he’d always had in his business ventures, how near he had been to doing well, and how many times he had tried to earn a decent living. Hidden among various drawers at home, William had found the remnants of his father’s so-called ‘business ventures’. Most were unpaid bills, but astonishingly he found a life assurance policy worth four thousand pounds. William sold the family house and made a further three thousand. Throughout his university life he hardly touched the money; his grant was