Gold Digger by Frances Fyfield Read Free Book Online

refuge for now, but she’s still a thief. Maybe she’s worming her way into your affections,’ he emphasised the word
worming
, ‘with a view to isolating you?’
    Thomas lit another cigar. These little cigars were an unadulterated pleasure that Di had come to share.
You could buy a lot with one of these in prison
, she said.
    ‘On the contrary,’ Thomas said. ‘She finds the idea of split families abhorrent. She’s sorry for them having a mother who died. The idea is to have a party for the grandchildren. The sort of party that used to be given here. She’s planning it.’
    Saul whistled through his perfect white teeth and adjusted the crease in his trousers, meticulously.
    ‘Oh, Thomas love, is that really a good idea?’
    ‘I hope so, because I would so like it to happen. We have rather frozen luncheon meetings in London where the boys are terribly well behaved. Even the duty visits here stopped after Christina … disappeared.’
    ‘After Christina drowned,’ Saul said. ‘After she drownedon her way to France, on a detour that might have ended up with her coming to visit you, scrounging again. I keep in touch, as you asked. At one remove. And I don’t think getting them to come here is a good idea.’
They will simply come to put a value on everything, make them greedier than ever
.
    ‘It’s the children,’ Thomas said, sadly. ‘Their children. I would like them to see me for what I am. A silly old man who wears silly hats and does magic tricks, that’s how I’d like to be remembered. I want them to have fun. They don’t seem to have much of that. Patrick loved it here. Patrick needs nurture.’
    Saul did not say, your two daughters wish you were ten years older than you are so that you would die sooner. You criticised a man’s children only at your own peril. They are desperate, and Edward, the husband of one of them, is more odious and dominant than the two together. And the existence of a housekeeper/protégée, unless such a person was an ancient crone, would not improve things at all, but Thomas would do what Thomas would do. He had a terrible naïveté about his daughters, forgetting that most of their genetic identity had come from their mother who had been, in Saul’s eyes, insanely possessive and envious. She was the one who took her daughters away to a richer man when they were both under ten, when Thomas was not rich at all: she was the one who denied him access and spread the self-justifying legend of his sinister propensities as well the legend of being abandoned herself. The one who reinvented her own persona again and again, self-deluding, jealous bitch and a lousy artist to boot.
    Saul’s opinion of the fairer sex carried a distinct prejudice: his affections were confined to men, apart from his sister, but even taking all that into account, Christina hadbeen dangerously manipulative and prone to violence. And there was Thomas, the innocent, who still hoped his daughters would change into people who shared his values. It was not going to happen. Their minds were addled and worst of all, they had no taste.
    ‘If anything happens to me whilst Di is still here, you won’t let her get locked up again, will you? It would kill her.’
    Thomas said it suddenly, as if it was something he had only just understood. It came out of the blue and in a moment of petulant suspicion, Saul wished that something would simply eradicate Di, like rubbing out a line of a pencil drawing. Then he reprimanded himself, because after all, he did not want Thomas to return to his life of quiet desperation. He wanted him happy.
    ‘A Paragon, she is, this Diana,’ he said. ‘So tell me, what are her real virtues?’
    He was thinking that perhaps Thomas wanted the same from the girl as he did from the paintings he collected. He wanted them raw, untouched, unrestored, authentic and with a protective layer of sheer dirt.
    ‘Di? She sees things. She never stops looking. She’s intelligent, she’s obsessive and