One Summer Night At the Ritz by Jenny Oliver Read Free Book Online Page B

midst of a promotional event. The make-up section had a DJ blasting hip-hop tunes out at full volume and girls dressed in wigs every colour of the rainbow were dancing between customers. Will groaned.
    ‘Really?’ he asked.
    Jane had to hold in a smile. In-house dancing and deafening beats weren’t necessarily her thing, but just to see the look on Will’s face was enough to make her push through the crowds and pretend to browse the cosmetics.
    The music made the floor shake.
    Strangely it reminded her of nights lying on the top of Enid’s boat while classical musical filtered into the night sky, threading its way around her and through Enid’s cigarette smoke to wend its way up to the stars. She would lie and listen as Enid would talk. Sometimes she’d read poems, which if she told someone about it would sound naff, but in reality it was so beautiful and calming that she wouldn’t want to leave even though she knew that she should. That she should go back to her own boat. Because the two of them, Jane and her mother, were a burden. There was no way to get around that fact. And the problem with being a burden was that however polite people were there was always the fear that one had outstayed one’s welcome.
    As she picked up a lipstick from the counter, her eyes widened at the price. It reminded her of the money she’d found in the account. It had crossed her mind when she discovered it that it was an inheritance of some sort left to her by her father. But that had immediately seemed too fanciful. Like a wish rather than reality that tied in with her naive hope that he had come to find her, had thought about her enough to leave her money.
    ‘Don’t you know her?’ she heard Will shout over her shoulder.
    ‘Who?’ Jane asked confused.
    ‘Emily Hunter-Brown, isn’t this her stuff?’
    Jane looked down at the red lipstick she was holding and saw EHB Cosmetics embossed in gold on the side of the packaging. ‘Oh yeah, I wasn’t really concentrating.’ She put it down and started to walk away. Then she paused amid the crowd. ‘How do you know that I know her?’ she said, turning back to Will who was being shoved this way and that by all the people.
    ‘Erm.’ He frowned. Then opened his mouth to speak, but Jane narrowed her eyes at him and spoke instead.
    ‘You’ve spied on me?’ she said loudly over the music.
    ‘No.’oWill shook his head.
    Jane pushed her way through all the people and finally popped out into the relative quiet of the designer handbag section.
    ‘You have,’ she said. ‘You’ve looked me up. What else do you know?’
    Will shrugged, realising he’d been caught out and it was pointless to deny it. ‘Not a lot actually. There’s not much about you,’ he said with a laugh.
    But Jane wasn’t finding it funny. ‘But you know something.’ She swallowed. ‘What do you know?’
    ‘Really nothing,’ he said. ‘There was just a bit about your family and some flower competition.’
    She bit the inside of her cheek.
    Will raised his brows and shrugged again.
    ‘I don’t want to walk around with you any more,’ she said. ‘I’m going to go. It was nice to meet you,’ she added, then turned around and walked away though all the lovely handbags till she stepped out onto Oxford Street.
    She walked as fast as she could, occasionally catching the shoulder or arm of someone walking past her but she didn’t care.
    The idea of William Blackwell sitting in his office perusing her life like he might his day’s to-do list and finding it tiny and insignificant made her feel furious. She walked a couple more paces, knowing that it wasn’t fury she was feeling but embarrassment. Shame. She felt ashamed of what he would have found. Her great achievements culminating in a Cherry Pie Island Show rosette. She didn’t know what else was available about her but she knew there wasn’t a lot because there hadn’t been a lot. Search Emily and you’d see her shining film career, her almost