*
Richard’s home was one of those sparkling white mansion flats with black-and-white tiled steps leading up to the front door. She often passed similar houses on the various millionaires’ rows, but never seemed to see anyone going in or out. They were like the residential versions of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. She stood in a very plush lounge and tried not to think about the size of Richard’s income. She failed, and blanched. Her own conception of financial independence had been shopping at Topshop more often than she did at Primark.
Richard handed her a cup of strong coffee. After that one betraying moment of stillness in the car, he had been behaving quite normally. She didn’t know what she had expected—that he would flip a dimmer switch and activate mood music? Clearly she’d spent too much time with Will.
Sipping her coffee, she strolled awkwardly around the room. They were in Richard’s study, and she was afraid to touch anything. It was like going into shops full of breakable knickknacks and feeling as if any wrong movement would bring a priceless ornament crashing to the floor. Not just when she was small and tagging along with her mother: she still tended to feel that way now.
She stopped in front of a large oil portrait set into the wall above the fireplace. Her eyes went from the intense painted features to the flesh-and-blood man sitting sprawled in a Regency chair. “You don’t look much like your father,” she ventured.
Richard swallowed a mouthful of coffee. “Not at all.” He sounded completely unperturbed as he added, “Knowing my mother, it’s possible there was no blood link. We can but hope.” He frowned as he looked at the portrait. “It’s inset into the wall and it appears that removing it would damage two-hundred-year-old fixtures around the mantel. Otherwise I’d have taken it down.”
Lainie didn’t know how to respond to that. She said, rather uncertainly, “Your father was...fairly conservative, I take it.”
Richard snorted. “My father was about as far right as it was possible to move without falling completely off the grid. I’m not sure what policies his party actually supported. They were too busy opposing everything under the sun. Equitable rights, be they racial, sexual, or gender-oriented. Immigration. Public healthcare. Accessible education. The arts.”
“The arts?”
“Hmm. A waste of time and public funds that ought to be directed into an aggressive overhaul of the military. The practise of licentious and unpatriotic tomfoolery by a bunch of Bohemian layabouts. Loose women and homosexual men.” Richard swirled his coffee. “Franklin and his cohorts would have had ninety percent of the population exiled to Australia—still a jumped-up penal colony, by the way—if they could. Or just lined up against a wall and shot.”
“Nice.” Lainie sat down on the edge of the Queen Anne chaise. “I imagine he wasn’t exactly thrilled to have a son who wanted to go to drama school.”
“He died when I was still at school, and I hadn’t made up my mind what I wanted to do at that stage.” Richard grinned suddenly. “I think I was going through a very late-blooming astronaut phase, which would never have done. Rubbish at physics.”
Lainie could suddenly imagine him as a teenager, and the image was more endearing than she would have expected.
“I did my first school play a couple of months before he died.”
“Did he go?”
“No. He tried to have the drama teacher fired.”
He wasn’t joking. Lainie winced.
“At the time of his death, he was campaigning to eliminate almost all public arts funding. Government cultural grants were to be limited to a select few projects approved by the appropriate ministers, and art education was to be beaten out of the school curriculum with a barbed stick.” Richard’s voice was weary and disgusted. “Cultural resources were even more scarce then than they are now. The system needs a sharp boost, not to be dwindled into bleak totalitarianism.”
Lainie was becoming clear on a number of things. “So first step, the RSPA,” she said slowly. “To pick up the reins that your father dropped and turn the battle in the opposite direction.”
“He would have approved the military allusion.” Richard shrugged. “Perhaps not quite that dramatic, but yes. If he could have, my father would have done this country a monumental injustice in a number of areas. I intend to help correct at least one of them.”
“It still must have been hard. When he had the heart attack.”
There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of their breathing.