“Oh, very good, Dad.” Roxie smiled encouragingly. “All you need now’s a two.”
She placed the two of clubs gently on top of Teddy’s nine.
Teddy frowned. “Hmm. Well, I haven’t got a two, have I?”
“Then you have to pick up two, Daddy.”
“Blast it.”
“Last card.”
“Now hold on just a minute . . .”
Roxie played the jack of clubs and sat back, triumphant. “I’m out.”
Teddy’s face was such a picture of outrage, she couldn’t help but laugh.
“Oh, darling Dad, never mind. Maybe you’ll win the next one.”
Father and daughter were sitting in the library at Kingsmere, the De Veres’ ancestral pile in North Oxfordshire. Since Roxie’s “accident,” her bedroom had been moved to the ground floor, with Teddy’s old study converted into an en suite bathroom. As a result, the formal drawing room was now upstairs overlooking the deer park. But the library, a cozy, red-walled room with dark leather Chesterfield sofas, hunting paintings on the walls, and dog baskets nestled by the permanently crackling fire, remained exactly as it had always been. Roxie loved the room for that, for not changing. She loved it most of all when her father was in it.
“How about a nice, dry sherry before dinner.” Teddy leaned back in his chair and stretched out his legs. He wore the same deep purple corduroy pants every evening, winter or summer, rain or shine. He had about a hundred pairs of them upstairs in his dressing room. To Roxie, everything about her father suggested familiarity and ritual, a comforting sameness in a bleakly changing world. “Your mother’ll be home in a minute.”
Roxie didn’t need reminding. Turning her wheelchair around, she pushed herself over to the bar to fix Teddy’s drink. Roxie rarely drank before dinner but tonight she made an exception, splashing the pale amber Manzanilla into two tumblers instead of the usual one. Mummy was bound to be unbearable tonight, gloating and full of herself after her big victory. Home secretary. The words stuck in Roxie’s throat. How had her mother managed it? Why could others not see through Alexia the way that she, Roxie, could? Her mother would be the triumphant star of her own show at dinner, smug and unbearable. But then wasn’t she always?
There had been a time, long, long ago, when Roxanne De Vere had loved her mother. Yes, Alexia had always been ambitious, self-contained, and distant in a way that other little girls’ mothers were not. But even so, Roxie remembered happy times. Long summers spent on the beach together in Martha’s Vineyard, eating picnic lunches and playing fairies-and-elves. Christmases at Kingsmere, with Alexia lifting Roxie up high to hang hideous, garish homemade decorations on the tree. She remembered wheelbarrow races in the garden, and—incongruously, for Alexia was a notoriously awful cook—making blackberry jam.
But then came Roxie’s teenage years, and everything changed. From the first, mother and daughter battled. They battled about everything from politics to music, from fashion to religion, from which books they liked to the color of Roxie’s hair. On the surface it was normal coming-of-age stuff. But over time, Roxie began to sense a deeper rift, something more disturbing.
Alexia, always considered a great beauty in her youth, seemed to become envious of her daughter’s burgeoning good looks. Roxie couldn’t pinpoint it exactly. It was hard to remember specific incidents, as Michael was forever asking her to when he leaped to their mother’s defense. Nevertheless, Roxie developed a strong sense of her mother’s resentment. She felt Alexia’s eyes on her when she came out to the pool in a bikini, a gaze that blazed with a heat that was not admiration but rather a caustic, acid burn of envy on Roxie’s skin. When Roxie started bringing boys home, things went from bad to worse. Alexia seemed to go out of her way to humiliate her, putting her down during family meals, or worse, taking over the conversation and ensuring that she, the great Alexia De Vere, was the center of attention at all times. She would grill Roxie’s boyfriends about everything from their family backgrounds to their career ambitions—God, she was such a snob! No one was ever good enough.
Roxie’s father, on the other hand, took a very laissez-faire attitude toward his daughter’s dating. Naturally this drove Alexia to distraction.
“Can’t you say something, Teddy?” she used to roar. “I know you don’t approve. Why do I always have to be bad cop?”
But Teddy steadfastly refused to get involved, doing the best he could to keep the peace.
Until the day Roxanne De Vere met Andrew Beesley and everything changed.
Andrew Beesley had been hired as Roxie’s tennis coach.
He became the love of her life.
Roxie had loved Andrew deeply and passionately, but her mother was determined to destroy her happiness. Deeming Andrew unworthy and a gold digger, Alexia ruthlessly drove him away. Teddy, loving but weak in the face of his wife’s determination, had failed to stand up to her. When Andrew returned to Australia, Roxie’s heart shattered. In despair, she jumped from her bedroom window at Kingsmere, a sixty-foot drop that ought to have killed her. Instead, with bitter irony, Roxie survived the fall, only to be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life, doomed to remain her parents’ dependent. She would never escape her mother, but would live out the remainder of her days a cripple under Alexia’s roof.
There was nothing left for her mother to envy now. Alexia De Vere was once again the fairest of them all.
Roxie’s accident was never referred to openly at Kingsmere, mostly because Teddy couldn’t bear it. Of a different, older generation, Teddy De Vere buried his grief deep, preferring denial to the harsh light of truth.
Roxie could live with that. She loved her father. What she couldn’t live with was the fact that her mother had never been punished for what happened. Never suffered, as she should have. Alexia De Vere was still happily married, still professionally successful, still famed for her beauty as well as her brains and, since Roxie’s fall, for her resilience in the face of adversity. Actions should have consequences. But instead of suffering, Alexia De Vere sat back while yet more laurels were heaped upon her head. Her surprise appointment as home secretary was just the latest in a long line of unearned glories. It made Roxie sick.
“Cheers.” She clinked her glass grimly against Teddy’s.
“And to you, my darling. I know you’re not looking forward to this evening. But try to keep things civil, for my sake, if not for your mother’s. Being asked to be home secretary is a big deal, you know.”
“Of course it is, Daddy.”
Mummy’s triumphs always are.
Gilbert Drake fell to his knees in the front pew of the tiny country church and made the sign of the cross.
He was frightened, despite the righteousness of his cause. How could he, one man, a lowly, insignificant taxi driver, deliver just retribution to the most powerful woman in England?
He prayed for courage, and a verse from Deuteronomy came to him, a gift from the Lord.
“Be strong and courageous, do not be afraid or tremble, for the LORD your God is the one who goes with you. He will not fail you or forsake you.”
Sanjay Patel had been failed and forsaken. By his friends, by the courts, but most of all by that evil she-devil Alexia De Vere.
Gilbert Drake stayed in the church, praying, until darkness fell. Then he zipped up his hooded jacket and walked into the night.
“For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen.”
Alexia De Vere listened silently as her husband said grace.
When they had first married, Teddy’s insistence on this arcane ritual used to irritate Alexia intensely. Neither of them was particularly religious, so why the pompous, public show of piety? But over time Alexia, like Roxie, had come to take comfort in Teddy’s unchanging eccentricities. When the storms of her own life had raged, Alexia De Vere’s husband had proved to be the rock she needed, the one, true, solid thing she could cling to. Very few politicians were so lucky.
“Well.” Alexia smiled magnanimously around the table. “This all looks lovely. Anna has surpassed herself as usual.”
“As have you, my darling.” Leaning across the mouthwatering spread of roast beef, fresh tomato-and-basil salad, and home-baked bread, Teddy De Vere kissed his wife proudly on the cheek. “Home secretary! My goodness. I expect this means we’ll see even less of you.”
“Hopefully,” Roxie muttered under her breath.
“You know, brown’s really not your shade, darling,” Alexia shot back, looking at Roxie’s drab Next dress. No one was going to ruin this triumph for her, especially not her spoiled, self-centered daughter. “It makes you look like even more of a wet weekend than you usually do. Try a spot of color, next time. It might brighten you up. God knows you could use it.”