Free A Perfect Obsession by Caro Fraser Page A

painful silence for a moment. Each of them was thinking the same thing. Every conversation seemed to descend to this level.
    Leo was the first to give way. ‘This is pointless. I’ll see you on Saturday morning.’ He put the phone down before there could be any further acrimony.
    At her end, Rachel replaced the receiver slowly. Why, why, did things always end like that? It was pitiful, childish, to bicker the way they did. Always over Oliver. Well, if Leo wanted to be with Oliver so badly, he could have behaved like a decent husband and father in the first place. If he had, they might all still be together. But Leo was selfish, too busy satisfying his various appetites to care about his family. Rachel found tears welling in her eyes. She pulled a tissue from her pocket and dabbed them away. Maybe it had been a mistake to let Fred instruct Leo, if she and Leo were incapable of conducting things on a civilized level for longer than five minutes. Still, it was done now, and they would all just have to live with it.

    Lady Henrietta Ethel Margaret Norbury possessed a temperament admirably suited to membership of the Lloyd’s Names Committee. The experiences of a long and colourful life had shaped a disposition which made her a natural champion of the dispossessed. A privileged upbringing as the youngest daughter of the 11th Earl of Halstead had equipped her with a marvellous arrogance, so pure as to be well above snobbery, and an assumptionof the pre-eminence of her family and class. In her youth, she had enjoyed a reputation as a considerable beauty, which had enhanced her sense of self-worth and attracted the first of three husbands, Charles ‘Bozzy’ Bostick, a dashing American who drove racing cars and had made his fortune in the Chicago meat industry. The marriage, which lasted ten years, left her with an enduring passion for extravagant spending. It was no surprise, therefore, that her subsequent marriage to Monty Smallwood, a handsome good-for-nothing who played second piano in the Ritz Orpheans, ended shortly after Monty had squandered much of his wife’s divorce settlement in a variety of unsuccessful business ventures and failed cocktail bars. Monty, a man of immense charm but very weak character, died subsequently of alcohol poisoning. Lady Henrietta’s legacy from this union was a son, Gideon, a detestation of impecuniosity and a determination never to allow any subsequent fortune to be frittered away by the improvidence of others. At the age of thirty-nine, with the remnants of her dark-eyed beauty fading, she married Sir Henry Percival Norbury, a Shropshire baronet twenty years her senior, who never gave her a moment’s trouble, was fond of Gideon and dutifully attended to his education, who happily indulged his wife’s taste for lavish spending, and whose death ten years later left her in possession of a modest fortune, a manor house near Chesterton and an apartment in Belgravia.
    That was in 1985. Sir Percy had taken it for granted that membership of Lloyd’s befitted a man of his wealth and standing. It was, perhaps, a happy thing for him that he died before he could witness the disaster that was to overtakesyndicates 727/418 and 317/661 and see the inherited wealth of three centuries disappear in a matter of years. It was Lady Henrietta who had to watch as, along with thousands of others, she was driven to near ruin by the follies of Messrs Meacock, Outhwaite and Merrett, and nameless others privy to the mismanagement of affairs at Lloyd’s of London. The Norbury fortune was all but swallowed up, the manor house and the apartment in Belgravia sold, along with furniture, paintings and jewellery. Small wonder that Lady Henrietta should be driven, if not to the brink of madness, at least to a state of obsessive bitterness. She regarded all men as her enemies now. Stripped of her wealth, she lived in a three-bedroomed flat in Pimlico, surrounded by remnants of the opulent furniture which had graced her