The Mini Break by Jane Costello Read Free Book Online Page A

me, particularly as if Florence had found out, she’d have held it against me for the rest of her life. Plus, to Mary’s infinite credit, she also left us the funds for a dog-walker each
day I’m at work for the next five years. Which goes to show what an optimist she was, given that Spud is already knocking on fourteen.
    Despite this chaos we do, just about, cope. I can’t claim to be mother of the year – there have been one or two low points, the most recent being Florence’s nursery’s
Harvest Festival when, last-minute, the only items I could find in the kitchen cupboards as an offering were a tub of bicarbonate of soda, some cocktail sticks and three bottles of WKD.
    That doesn’t, of course, stop my mother from telling me every time we speak that things would be much easier if I’d just move back to Liverpool. Which I’ll never do – and
not only because she lives there.
    The fact is, I love Liverpool and I’m proud to call it home – it’s the city that made me. But it’s London that will forever be the mad, glorious place I can’t ever
imagine leaving, not when so many memories live here with me.
    I push open the door to Florence’s room with trepidation.
    It is in every way an offence to feminist sensibilities. A haven of pink, it has a glittery dressing table (a present from Grandma), a fairytale bed (also Grandma’s work) and more
Disney Princesses
paraphernalia than you’d find in all the store cupboards of the Magic Kingdom.
    But she adores it. And, given that I’ve brought my daughter up to know her own mind, I can hardly complain when she asserts it – even if I wish she’d find something to replace
the subject of her current obsession: a pink vacuum cleaner. I refuse to buy it, despite her tearing out a picture of it from an Argos catalogue and sticking it on her wall, like some sort of
shrine to domestic servitude.
    It’s her big eyes I see first. You can’t miss them, even when part-hidden behind her wild, dark ringlets. Then I’m diverted.
    ‘I’ve done my nails. But I smudged a bit,’ she declares, holding out her hands.
    Courtesy of a bottle of cherry-red polish (again, my mother’s work), her fingers look like she’s fed them into an office shredder. And, yes, she
has
smudged them. All over her
duvet.
    ‘Florence!’ I gasp, diving across the room.
    It’s only when I’m halfway there that I realise my movement has prompted Spud to stir from one of his lengthy snoozes. He bounds towards me to give me a kiss, knocks over the nail
polish and proceeds to leap around until there are bright red doggy footprints all over the carpet.
    Barely pausing for breath, I grab the bottle and race to my room to locate some nail polish remover, which I proceed to sprinkle about the place in a futile bid to clean up.
    ‘If only I had that pink Hoover to help,’ Florence sighs.
    Then my phone rings. I press ‘Answer’ and wedge it under my ear. It’s my boss, David.
    ‘Imogen, you asked me to call. Don’t you know it’s Saturday?’
    David is a dream boss on many levels, and I owe him for reasons that go beyond my recent, scarily stratospheric, promotion. He’s the chief executive of one of the UK’s foremost
food-manufacturing companies, Peebles Ltd. You might not recognise the name, but we are an omnipresent force, producing some of the world’s best-known brands of biscuits, crackers, breakfast
cereals and confectionary. Basically, if there’s wheat and sugar in whatever you’re eating, it’s very likely that we’ve made it, something we do in no less than twenty-one
other countries.
    Unfeasible as it might seem for a 29-year-old single mother, I am its UK marketing director. Or, at least,
acting
UK marketing director, which effectively means I’ve got the job but
not the salary, for the moment at least. It’s a position for which David plucked me from relative obscurity after my two predecessors went off with stress.
    The position is everything I’ve ever