LITMIR.BIZ

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Mum,’ Tom said, his attention riveted on the screen again. ‘Do you really want some coffee?’

      ‘Not if we’re going out at once. Are you ready, Vicky?’ Vicky stirred, blew on her fingers. ‘I’m ready, but I can’t go yet—it would ruin my nails and I only just painted them.’ She looked round, waving a plum-tipped hand at a small table on which lay a red-foil-wrapped box. ‘Oh, that’s your present there, Mum. Happy Birthday.’

      Bianca unwrapped a box of Chanel make-up, her eyes widening. ‘Why, thank you, Vicky, that’s wonderful.’ She hoped Vicky hadn’t spent too much on the expensive cosmetics; it had been very generous of her.

      ‘I know you don’t usually wear those colours, but I think you should—you need an image change!’ Vicky said. ‘My friend Gaynor is on the Chanel counter; she picked out the colour scheme for you; she said they’d suit you.’

      Bianca fingered them all in their matching packaging: a glossy dark red lipstick, eyeshadow boxes in a trio of shades, from light blue to brown, a cream foundation, and loose powder in a compact.

      ‘I can’t wait to try them.’ Somebody else trying to do an image change on her! she thought crossly. First Judy, now her own daughter…What was so wrong with the way she looked?

      She opened her shopping bag and took out a holiday brochure, her blue eyes brightening. ‘How do you two feel about a winter holiday? Two weeks in Spain. sunshine, beach life, flamenco dancing?’

      ‘Great—when?’ asked Tom without looking round.

      ‘As soon as we can fix it!’

      ‘What…now?’ He looked round then, aghast. ‘You’re joking, Mum. I’ve got matches fixed every Saturday for weeks. I can’t go away. We’d lose if I wasn’t there.’

      ‘Big head,’ Vicky told him.

      ‘It’s true,’ he insisted indignantly. ‘I’m their best striker! Ask anyone. I get all the goals. I can’t go away during the season—they’d kill me.’

      Vicky said casually, ‘I can’t go either, Mum. Actually, Drew and I were thinking of going to Majorca some time in the spring—’

      ‘Drew can come with us!’ Bianca interrupted.

      Vicky’s look revealed first blank incredulity, then scornful amusement. ‘Drew and me.go away with you? Come off it, Mum! You don’t think I want my mother around, do you? Anyway, we were thinking of going on one of these under-thirty holidays. No old people can go on them.’

      ‘Old people?’ repeated Bianca, outraged.

      Vicky gave her a quick, half-laughing look. ‘Well, you’re not old, of course; I didn’t mean you, I meant. Well, you know what I meant.’

      Oh, yes, she knew what Vicky had meant. Her daughter did not want her around when she went on holiday; she was the wrong age group. Her son was too absorbed in his own life to want to go away at all. Her spirits sank. She had been looking forward to getting away to the sun, but she couldn’t go alone; she hadn’t had a holiday alone for. She stopped, frowning, realising with a shock of surprise that she had never had a holiday alone. Before she met Rob she had gone away with her parents, and then she had always gone with Rob and the children. She had never once gone anywhere alone.

      Well, it’s time I did, she thought. Judy was rightshe had to start adjusting to the idea that Tom and Vicky were growing up, would one day leave home. She had to build a life which did not revolve around them.

      ‘I’ll go away alone, then,’ she said, and they both turned to stare at her, mouths wide open in disbelief.

      ‘Alone?’ Vicky repeated.

      ‘You mean you’re going to leave us on our own here?’ Tom’s eyes sparkled. ‘For two whole weeks?’

      She could read his mind; he was looking forward to two weeks without supervision, without anyone nagging him to do his homework, do his daily chores. Tom hated doing housework, but Bianca insisted that he helped out, did as much as his sister. She had been determined not to bring up a useless boy who expected women to do everything for him. She had a brother like that. Jon had never had to lift a hand at home; their mother had waited on him hand and foot, and after Jon had married he’d expected his wife to do the same. Sara had resented it; the marriage had broken up after a few years, with Jon complaining that Sara was unreasonable, and Sara bitterly accusing him of being selfish. Jon had married again, but his second marriage was far from contented; it seemed to be drifting on to the rocks exactly the way the first one had.

      Bianca didn’t want her son turning out like Jon. She had shared out work equally between her two children. In the kitchen was a computer-printed rota pinned up on the wall; Vicky and Tom each had jobs to do every day.

      Bianca expected them to keep their own bedrooms tidy, and inspected them once a month to make sure they were actually doing the work, but they also had to help her keep the rest of the house tidy, do the shopping, help prepare meals for them all. Bianca, too, had a rota, which was pinned up next to theirs, so that they should know that she did twice as much as the two of them put together. Which was more or less what they expected, of course, but it put a stop to claims that she was asking them to do too much.

      ‘And while I’m away there are to be no wild parties, or hordes of your friends wrecking the house!’ she told Tom, who looked at her innocently, blue eyes wide as a child’s.

      ‘No, Mum.’

      ‘I’ll keep an eye on him,’ Vicky said with suspicious sweetness.

      ‘It applies to you too, Vicky. I’ll hold you both responsible for anything that happens, remember.’

      She had been encouraging them both to be responsible ever since their father died. Before she made any decision she had carefully asked their opinions, and listened to them seriously.

      After Rob’s death she had had the choice of living, with difficulty, on a small fixed income for the rest of her life—or taking the risk of investing some of the money from Rob’s insurance in a business which might give them all a comfortable income.

      After talking it over with Vicky and Tom, she had decided on the latter course. Judy, who was a close friend and long-time neighbour, had enthusiastically offered to put up fifty per cent of the money and share the work in running the business. She had recently inherited money from her father, and wanted to put it to work in a more interesting way than simply investing it in stocks and shares. Her husband, Roy, was a travelling salesman who was away a good deal, her children were grown-up, and Judy was tired of working in other people’s shops; she’d wanted to run her own.

      Bianca had explained to Tom and Vicky that she could only manage to work six days a week if they were prepared to help in the house, and they had both agreed. They had more or less kept their bargain, too, even if reluctantly at times.

      ‘Are we going to the Chinese or not?’ she asked them both crossly now. ‘Or shall I make some beans on toast?’

      They gave each other a silent but eloquent look, then smiled soothingly at her, getting up.

      ‘We’re ready, Mum!’

      Now they were going to be indulgent, as if she were a half-wit. A pathetic old half-wit. Resentment churned inside Bianca as she drove them to the restaurant. Some birthday she had had! It had begun with depression in bed that morning and it was ending in much the same mood. And now I’m forty, she thought. Forty! She had a terrible feeling that from now on life was going downhill all the way.

      * * *

      

      A week later she landed at Málaga airport in very different weather. She came out of the airport building into a world of blue skies, sunlight and palm trees, and stood there for a moment feeling her winter-chilled skin quiver in disbelief. Then she hurried off to collect the hire car she had booked in advance before setting out on the motorway to Marbella. The drive took longer than she had

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