Tati used the time to check her schedule for the rest of the day, then wished she hadn’t. Fuck. She’d totally forgotten, but she’d agreed months ago to go to tea with her elderly godmother this afternoon.
Beatrice Radley-Cave – Bee, or Queen Bee, as she had always been known to Tatiana – was ninety years old, sharp as a tack and lived in a mansion flat in Westminster that had been frozen in time at some point in the early 1950s. This was probably also the last decade in which it had been properly cleaned. Despite her somewhat shoddy surroundings, Queen Bee herself remained as regal as ever. She was not a woman one disappointed – or rescheduled – lightly.
Tati adored her godmother, and in other circumstances would have looked forward to a visit. But things were so preposterously hectic at work, between the firings and the ongoing boardroom battles over a New York school, she had neither the time nor the energy for Bee today.
Not that work was going badly, per se. Tati’s last trip to New York had been wholly positive, from a business point of view. Not only had she found a great potential site for Hamilton Hall NYC, but she’d met with two potential new investors who might be willing to step in and provide funding, should Tati’s chairman and CFO really stick to their guns and try to block her. She ought to have returned to London in high spirits. But for some reason her unexpected run-in with Brett Cranley the evening she arrived had both heightened her stress levels and depressed her.
How had Brett known about the infighting amongst the Hamilton Hall board? There was no way he’d have heard anything through Jason. Relations between father and son were as bad as they’d ever been, nonexistent at this point, in fact. Was it just coincidence that Brett had been staying at Tati’s hotel? Somehow Tati doubted it. She didn’t trust him an inch.
The thought that Brett Cranley might be up to something, and that she didn’t know what it was, accounted for part of her anxiety. The other part was harder to explain. She hated Brett with a passion, felt repulsed by the very thought of him. And yet she couldn’t seem to stop thinking about him. In some dark, sinister way, Brett seemed to be all around her, a shadowy ghost hanging over her marriage, her career, her future. Worse, since bumping into him in New York, Tati had started to have dreams about him, some of them embarrassingly sexually explicit. She awoke from these dreams panicked and drenched in sweat, gripped by a sensation that was part arousal, part disgust and part fear. And then Jason would lean across the bed and ask her what was wrong, and a new torrent of emotions – guilt, shame, resentment – would wash over her. She hadn’t even told Jason or Logan that she’d run into their father in New York. Which was ridiculous! Why not tell them? It wasn’t as if she’d done anything wrong. But somehow, every time it might have come up naturally in conversation, Tati couldn’t bring herself to do it.
‘Mrs Cranley?’ The secretary’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker. ‘Janice Watkins is here to see you.’
Tatiana sighed. Running a successful business was good for the ego, but both the self-esteem and the financial rewards came at a cost. Brett Cranley had been paying it his whole life and it showed. Was Tati really becoming just like him, as Jason had said? She hoped not.
‘OK Caroline,’ she said grimly. ‘Show her in.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Beatrice Radley-Cave scowled as her goddaughter walked in.
‘You’re late.’
‘Only five minutes, Bee.’
‘Only? There’s no “only” about it. Late is late, Tatiana. Who in their right mind sits down to tea at five past four?’
Tatiana grinned. She was glad she’d come after all. Her godmother’s flat in Ashley Gardens was as familiar to her as her own body, and one of the few reminders of her childhood that made her wholly happy. She loved everything about it, from the sweet, musty smell that lingered in every room (part Garibaldi biscuit, part Gauloise tobacco smoke, part Chanel Number 5 and, Tati assumed, part mould) to the dust-covered ornaments along the mantelpiece, to the frayed Knole sofa still covered with its original William Morris fabric, now more hole than cloth. She loved Queen Bee’s face, a crumpled mishmash of folded, wrinkled skin, like crepe paper, but brought alive by the two twinkly, bright blue eyes, blazing with intelligence and wit and warmth amid the wreckage. She loved the fact that Bee had known her father, Rory, all of his life, and that she still dropped his name into conversation with Tatiana freely and easily. As if he were still alive. Or as if father and daughter had never grown apart, never hurt and disappointed each other and left it too late to put things right.