Wonder Women

by Fiore, Rosie

  ‘That’s crazy!’ said Holly. ‘There’s plenty of money in the account. Could the card have got damaged?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said the assistant, but she didn’t look convinced. ‘Maybe you just had a big payment go out and you forgot about it.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Holly, and paid with her personal card. ‘I’ll sort it when I get back to work.’

  On the way back to her car, she glanced at her mobile and saw that she had four missed calls from Jonathan. She rang him straight away. ‘Hi, Jon,’ she said cheerily. ‘Such a weird thing just happened. My card got declined at the button shop. Any idea what’s going on?’

  ‘You need to get back here. Now,’ he said, and his voice sounded raw and strangled.

  ‘What do you mean? What’s going on? Jon, you’re scaring me.’

  ‘Look, Holly, they won’t let me explain. Just come back, okay?’

  ‘Who? Who’s “they”? Jon, are you being held up? Do I need to ring the cops?’

  ‘No. Just come. Okay? Please.’

  Holly drove well above the speed limit all the way back to the house. It took her about ten minutes and she felt sick with fear all the way. There were four or five cars in the driveway, and somehow she knew that it was the police. She leapt out of her car and ran up to the open front door. There were people all over the house, walking around with clipboards. A tall, burly man walked up to her. ‘You are …?’

  ‘Holly … Holly Evans. I live here. And you are …?’

  ‘Detective Tshabalala. Are you the owner or part-owner of this property?’

  ‘No … It belongs to my fiancé.’

  ‘Damon Vermaak.’

  ‘Yes,’ Holly said faintly. ‘Is he okay? Has something happened to him?’

  ‘To the best of our knowledge, he is all right. But you might be able to tell us more. Where is Mr Vermaak?’

  ‘He went to the office early this morning. I can give you the number …’ She reached for her phone.

  ‘Mr Vermaak is not in his office. His staff have all been dismissed, and the lease on the office was terminated some time ago.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I am sure you’ll be able to tell us more, Miss Evans,’ he said insistently. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know! He left this morning, as normal, and I was expecting him back tonight.’

  ‘Did he take a bag with him?’

  ‘No … well, I don’t think so. I was asleep when he left.’

  ‘Could you check his personal effects for me and tell me if anything is missing?’

  They went up the stairs to the bedroom. There were more police officers in there, cataloguing everything. Damon’s wardrobe door stood open, and at a glance, Holly could see most of his clothes were gone. She started to cry, big tearing sobs, and she turned on Detective Tshabalala. ‘What’s happened? What is going on? Who are you? And where’s Damon?’

  ‘We’re from the fraud squad, and if anyone is going to tell us where he is, it’s you.’ There was no gentleness in Tshabalala’s voice. He clearly thought that Holly’s fear and heartbreak was an act.

  ‘You won’t be able to stay here tonight,’ he said briskly. ‘Do you have somewhere you can go?’

  ‘Yes, I … I can stay with friends. Can I take some of my stuff?’

  ‘An officer will write down what you take.’

  Holly suffered the humiliation of a junior officer painstakingly listing her bras, pants and toiletries as she packed them. Then she went to pick up her watch and engagement ring from the bedside table where she had left them the night before. She glanced up and saw Detective Tshabalala watching her with dark, suspicious eyes, and she left them where they were.

  The shocks were far from over. She went downstairs to her work area, and found the officers had taken the details of her seamstresses and sent them home. They were busy pawing through her stock and materials and listing everything, making a dreadful mess. She went through into the office. An officer was pulling files and books off the shelves in a disorderly and destructive way, and Jonathan was sitting at his desk like a statue, his eyes red and swollen. She wanted to hug him.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Jon,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what’s going on. But when this is all over, we’ll put everything back and things can get back to normal.’

  ‘It’s all gone,’ he said in a whisper.

  ‘What do you mean? Nothing is gone. They’re just making lists. It’s a mess, but everything is still here.’

  ‘No, the money. It’s gone. The business accounts have been stripped. There isn’t a cent left.’

  ‘Our business accounts?’ Holly said, her voice surprisingly calm, even to her own ears. ‘But no one has access to them except you and me.’

  ‘He …’ Jonathan couldn’t bring himself to say Damon’s name. ‘He watched me doing the online banking. He must have remembered all the passwords. It’s all gone.’

  There followed several weeks of intensive and painful questioning by the police. They gave her very little information, but bit by bit she pieced together the story. The multimillion-rand deal Damon had been working on had turned sour. He’d tried to shore it up by borrowing even more money, and then he’d mortgaged the house and taken out further loans against his car and other assets. It seemed that when he had run out of options, he had decided to take all the cash out of Doradolla, the only liquid and profitable business he had access to. The police knew he had left the country, crossing the border by road into Botswana, but from there he had disappeared. Detective Tshabalala was relentless. He was convinced Holly knew where Damon was and was in on it, but she kept telling the same story and what she said was always consistent. Once the detective understood the arrangement she had made with Damon over Doradolla and had grasped that she too had been robbed, he began to be a little gentler with her. Finally, reluctantly, when it was clear that Damon was not going to be found and could not be put on trial, he gave her leave to go.

  She didn’t want to stay in Johannesburg. The house now belonged to the bank. She had moved back in with Pierre, and she could have stayed there and started again, but she just didn’t have the strength. She had no capital to get the company back on its feet, so she spent almost the last money she had paying off Jonathan and the seamstresses as fairly as she could. Then she packed up her few personal belongings, booked a flight to London and went home to her mother.

  6

  HOLLY NOW

  A mother-and-child relationship is a funny thing, Holly thought. Although she wasn’t one herself, she knew a lot of mothers and had observed them. Mothers grow their children inside their bodies, make every cell of them, nurture them, give birth to them and feed them. Many mothers will always feel that bond, no matter how old the child becomes. The phrase ‘You’ll always be my baby’ has an element of truth to it. But for the child, the bond is not the same. They don’t remember the gestation, the birth, the unceasing and intimate care. Once children are conscious beings, they believe they invented themselves, and they don’t feel that constant physical bond with the mother. In fact, they might look at their mother and wish they could deny being of her body at all. She is so strange, so other, so foreign to them, they cannot possibly be related.

  Or maybe it’s only me who feels that way, thought Holly, as she sat at the kitchen table and watched her mother iron dish towels. Judith Evans was a small woman, slight of build, and she had been a petite size eight all her adult life. Holly had grown taller than her mother when she was twelve. If Holly was to choose three words to define her relationship with her mother, they would have to be, ‘Oh, Holly, don’t …’ Sometimes it seemed that everything she had ever done, her mother had found too bold, too colourful, too adventurous. Whatever the situation, Judith would always counsel caution. She was forever saying, ‘Well, maybe we should wait and see,’ whether Holly was talking about travelling through Africa or buying a new kettle. She made these pronouncements in a wavering, tentative and almost girlish voice, and every t
ime, it set Holly’s teeth on edge.

  Judith had grown up in west London, and the house she lived in now was less than a mile from the house where she had been born, and round the corner from the school she had attended. She had held the same job as the secretary for a small local medical practice for thirty-five years, until her retirement two years before. She had a small circle of friends, people she had met at school or church and had known for forty years or more. Now she was retired, her life revolved around the church: she did the flowers, helped to clean it once a fortnight, sang in the choir and attended coffee mornings and the bridge club.

  She was only sixty-two, no age at all, Holly thought, but she had embraced life as a pensioner, and seemed happy to sink into old-lady activities without a fight. It was ridiculous. Her health was sound and she had a reasonable income. She could do anything she chose, but instead she inhabited a tiny world bounded by the North Circular and the Uxbridge Road, and it was very difficult to get her to go beyond those boundaries. When Holly had first returned home, she had tried to get Judith out and about. She’d suggested a trip into town to see an art exhibition or to watch a show. She’d even proposed they go away for a weekend to the Cotswolds or the Lake District. She’d been away so long that the prospect of being a tourist in her own country had seemed quite appealing, and she thought Judith would welcome the chance to do something new. ‘Oh no, dear,’ Judith responded to each offer of an outing. She always had an excuse: either there was a church event on the same date, or she didn’t like to drive at night (or be driven), or the Tube into town got so crowded. After a while, Holly gave up. At a push, Judith could be convinced to get into her little Nissan Micra and creep around the North Circular to visit Miranda and her family, but that would only be on a Sunday, after church. David lived in Oxfordshire, and he knew perfectly well his mother would never come to visit him, so he and his wife and children made a duty visit once a month.

  Holly tried hard not to get annoyed at her mother. It seemed unfair to be angry with someone so determinedly inoffensive, like being infuriated by mashed potato. In the end, she decided to accept that they were just completely different people, who could coexist peacefully, like different species in the same enclosure at the zoo. She stood up from the kitchen table, and her mum looked up from her ironing.

  ‘Cup of tea, dear?’

  What Holly really fancied was a gin and tonic. She was sick to her back teeth of tea.

  ‘No, thanks, Mum. I thought I might …’ Might what? Go for a walk? It was raining. Go out for a drink? With whom? She was low, but not low enough to go and nurse a drink alone in a bar. ‘… go to my room,’ she finished, aware she sounded like a sulky teenager.

  ‘All right, dear,’ said her mum, sounding disappointed and, as usual, faintly martyred. ‘Can I do any ironing for you, dear?’

  Holly tried not to bristle. From anyone else, that might sound like an innocent offer, even a generous one, but from her mum, there was an implied criticism, as if Holly, who did take great care over her appearance, was somehow rumpled. ‘I can do my own ironing, Mother,’ she said, aware that she sounded petulant.

  ‘I know you can, dear … and I suppose you wouldn’t want me ironing some of your … special things.’

  ‘What do you mean, “special”?’ said Holly, unable to keep the tension out of her voice.

  ‘Those outfits you’ve made – the fancy ones,’ said Judith, aligning the edges of a dish towel perfectly and ironing the folded square. ‘I’ve never ironed things like that.’ She sighed, and with a touch of wistfulness said, ‘So glamorous … like a bird of paradise.’

  Holly raised her eyebrows. The idea of pale, wispy Judith coveting one of Holly’s jewel-coloured silk-and-taffeta creations was too bizarre for words. She had to squeeze past her mum to get out of the kitchen, and as she went, touched her briefly on the shoulder. Judith quickly put her own small, soft hand over Holly’s, just for an instant, and then let her go. Funny old fish, thought Holly, as she bounded up the stairs.

  Her mother was the least of her problems, however. She had almost run out of money, and she had to find some work. She had never looked for a job in the UK, and except for her short tenure at the dress shop in Johannesburg, had never really been employed. She’d considered starting up a dressmaking business in London, but it would have meant looking for clients, advertising, maybe getting a market stall, and to be honest, she just didn’t have the energy to start that all over again. Besides, taking the cover off her sewing machine and pulling out the well-used Doradolla patterns just reminded her of what she had lost. It was all too painful, and she quite simply couldn’t do it. Eventually she walked down to Ealing Broadway and went from clothes shop to clothes shop, asking if they were looking for staff. Her CV was far from average, but she had little conventional retail experience, and many of the shops were reluctant, but eventually she struck lucky, and a small branch of one of the chain women’s stores took her on.

  Her life seemed better almost instantly. Just the day-to-day routine of getting up, going to work, getting a coffee on the way and chatting to customers lifted her black mood. She was naturally sociable and she enjoyed the work, even though she thought the clothes were uniformly dull and often badly made. She was at least six or seven years older than the other sales assistants, but they didn’t seem to mind and dragged her on nights out to clubs in London, and to karaoke evenings at a local pub. She wasn’t earning a lot, but then she didn’t need a lot. Her mother would only accept a token rent, and she didn’t have commuting to pay for. She felt like a thirty-year-old school-leaver, earning a starting salary, living at home, spending her money on drinks and partying. It was far from the life she had had, and light years from any life she might want in the long term, but it was a good transition and quite healing, after the appalling conclusion of her time in South Africa.

  But what did she want to do? There was a question she couldn’t answer. As far as men were concerned, she couldn’t have been less interested. She got plenty of offers on her nights out, but Damon had broken something in her, and she knew it would take her a long time to heal. Damon himself had, quite simply, disappeared. Holly knew that through his business he had connections across Africa, as well as in the Middle East and China. His mother rang her about once a fortnight and wept over the phone, begging Holly to tell her if she knew anything at all about his whereabouts. It was awful and heartbreaking, and she dreaded the calls because she never had anything new to tell Mrs Vermaak. It gave her another reason to hate him, and made her more determined to avoid any romantic entanglements for a very, very long time.

  Besides, she didn’t feel she was much of a prospect at the moment. In terms of her career, she’d lost all the progress she’d made in her twenties and she was starting again. She thought about it every day as she walked to and from work, and resolved that she would plan a career path that involved all the things she’d loved about running Doradolla and exclude the parts of the business she hadn’t enjoyed. She decided to write things down as they occurred to her. She had loved the designing, and enjoyed the sewing, to a certain extent, but she didn’t want to be responsible for all of it. While she didn’t mind her retail job now, she had no real enthusiasm for the selling part of the job, both pimping her clothes to stores and boutiques and the physical grind of standing at a market and interacting with customers. As for the business side: hiring people, managing the money, carrying the burden of debt, well, she could do it, but she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to again. Damon had broken that part of her too.

  One sunny autumn Sunday, she and her mum made the interminable trek from Ealing to Finchley to have lunch with Miranda and Paul and the kids. It should have been a twenty-five-minute journey, even in heavy Sunday traffic, but Judith, who insisted on driving, crawled along at exactly twenty-eight miles an hour for the entire journey, even when Holly, sweating with stress and jittery from the honking drivers behind them, pointed out that the speed limit on that stretch of the dual ca
rriageway was fifty. ‘I can’t be remembering every time the speed limit changes, dear,’ said Judith mildly, oblivious to the man in the four-by-four screaming obscenities and flipping her the finger as he roared past. ‘I like to drive at this speed, because then I know I’ll never be caught speeding.’

  A pensioner on a mobility scooter would be more likely to be caught speeding, thought Holly, as she slid down in her seat and resigned herself to a long journey.

  Judith spent an age carefully parallel parking in Miranda’s pretty cul de sac, edging back and forth seven or eight times until she was satisfied she was a perfect six inches from the kerb. Then she spent another few minutes gathering her things, pulling in her wing mirror, painstakingly folding her coat over her arm and checking several times that all the windows were closed and the car was locked and that Holly had not left any valuables in sight in the vehicle. Even after all the faff, they still weren’t late: wary of possible disasters, Judith had insisted they leave Ealing a full hour before they were expected for lunch, so they walked up the path to the front door bang on time. Holly wondered if the sun was over the yardarm and she could demand a drink as soon as she walked through the door.

  Thankfully, Miranda had decided they were barbecuing, to make the most of the last of the sunshine, and there was already a jug of Pimm’s on the table on the patio.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Judith. ‘Are you sure it’s warm enough to be outdoors, Miranda? Won’t the children catch a chill?’

  Miranda looked instantly horrified, as if she might have failed her children in some way. But Oscar, sitting in his pushchair on the patio, was wrapped in a padded suit so bulky it made his little arms stick out at right angles to his body, and his little cheeks were red with heat. Martha, also in a bulky coat, was riding her tricycle on the lawn in precise circles. ‘I think they’ll be fine, Mum,’ said Holly. ‘Let them get some fresh air while they can. Why don’t you go inside and help Miranda in the kitchen? I’ll watch the kids.’