Free Gold Digger by Frances Fyfield Page A

carry the Flame.
    You are the best thing that ever happened to me.
    And you to me,
she wrote
.
    T he greatest mystery in the entire world, someone said, is the true state of a marriage. She only knew that the brief years of hers, which had passed with such reckless, joyful speed, would never be enough, and now there was no one alive who knew her. But Thomas had; Thomas did.
    Recognition of a true colour.
No one knew the colour of her, except him.
    It was a dangerous way to be.
    Nobody knew her, and the last that anyone would think was how much she loved him. She was ashamed of that last afternoon. Perhaps she should have let him speak.
    Jones thought she had killed him.
    She went down to the basement, to the point where she had first come in, almost ten years ago. Curled herself into a ball in the warm dark.
    Come back, Thomas: please come back.
    Thought of what might be happening elsewhere. Raymond Forrest giving the daughters the news. Surely there would be room for grief. Regret that they had not come, even when she begged them to. Surely there would be regret that they had not seen him, known him. Surely they would soften and see the point of their father.
    She could not cry.
    L ater, Raymond Forrest wrote notes on the occasion when he had witnessed the response of Thomas’s children to the news of his death and his legacies. Like Thomas, he enjoyed writing notes.
    T here were a few small drawings on the wall of this little pied-à-terre. Childish scribbles: Thomas loved drawings by children. A selection of porcelain objects on shelves, a roomfull of light and knick-knacks, darkened by the presence of three adults standing crouched around a laptop on a bare table, with the child, Patrick, sitting to one side on the floor, scribbling in his sketch book.
    Don’t shoot the messenger.
Raymond was sick of being the messenger, and yet he knew it was his role. He had heard one of them, Edward, remarking that Forrest looked like a large mole, which he did and he knew it, but he did not like him for that observation. To his eyes, they looked like hungry rats, Gayle the elder, Edward her husband, Beatrice with her snake-like eyes, dressed in smelly wool, all of them ready for the reading of the will from a screen.
    We met in the London abode of my late client,
Raymond noted.
Same place as before, cosy little studio place, where Thomas came on shopping trips and Di rearranged. No oil paintings, a few drawings and these ceramics, which look a little fragile, especially in this company. These are fragile people. Gayle, elegant, Edward, stocky, Beatrice, the loose cannon. They have planned for this occasion … oh dear.
    There was a sharp intake of breath,
he wrote.
Then they all hissed, like wasps humming in a nest, until Gayle raised a hand in a command to be quiet.
    Edward looked as if he might have shouted, but refrained in response to his wife’s gesture. As the mere messenger, Raymond would not have minded them shouting; anything would be better than this ominous silence. He noticed how the boy – how old was he now? Eleven? Twelve? – put his hands over his ears.
    ‘So, no mention of us,’ Gayle murmured. ‘Absolutely no mention at all. Some mistake, surely? Our father, the children’s grandfather, and he doesn’t mention any of us at all.’
    ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Raymond said, and for a moment he was. He admired Gayle, and to disenfranchise your own children completely was a terrible thing to do.
    ‘However,’ he added. ‘It really was his last will and testament. And he was in sound mind when he wrote it.’
    ‘Was he really?’ Gayle murmured, moving towards him, maintaining her mesmerising eye contact throughout before moving away. ‘Of course, you had no choice. You drafted what he wanted. You had no choice.’
    ‘He drafted everything, I merely received,’ Raymond corrected, appreciative of her understanding, while Beatrice hissed in the background. He always managed to encourage the perception that