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Dream Vacation, Surprise Baby
by Ally Blake
PROLOGUE
MY DESK BUZZED.
Or, to be precise, the fancy intercom my gung-ho interior designers had embedded into my new desk.
So embroiled had I been in the utterly delightful photographs my private detective had sent me, I might have flinched. Which, as I am nearly seventy-six years of age, could be a health hazard.
My assistant’s voice followed, carrying the slightest hint of defeat, as if it wasn’t the first time she’d tried to rouse me. “Vivian? Ms Ascot? Your ten o’clock is here.”
I swiped crooked fingers over the hidden touchscreen, in search of the appropriate button with which to answer.
“All these new-fangled technologies,” I muttered, rolling my eyes at my little dog, Max, who peered up at me from his personal, antique chaise longue beside my office chair. “In the olden days a simple knock at the door sufficed. Yet another sign the world is overtaking me.” Then, to my assistant, “And whom might my ten o’clock be?”
A whisper through the speaker, tinged with a hint of hauteur, replied, “The ghost writer.”
“Oh! Excellent. Let him up.”
I had been approached more than once over the years to write my autobiography. “Your life!” those in charge of such things had expressed. “Your charitable work! Your support of the arts! A woman—” gasp! “—in charge of such a stupendously successful company!”
But this was the first time I’d entertained the idea. The first time I’d felt as if I had something of worth to share. I was quite looking forward to their shock when they realised it had little to do with my net worth.
Knowing it would take a minute or two for the writer to make it up the lift to my office high atop the Ascot Building in central London, I went back to enjoying the photographs of my lovely young friend, and most recent recipient of the Vivian Ascot Scholarship to Life—a delightful Australian girl named Aubrey Trusedale—arriving safely and stepping off the plane in Rome. First stop on the international adventure my scholarship was funding.
“You remember Aubrey, right, Max?” I said. “And Jessica and Daisy? They are the ones who rescued you when you leapt from my arms at the annual Ascot Music Festival when it was held in Copenhagen. Stopped you from being trampled to death.”
Max’s delightful little ears pricked. Perhaps at the thought of being trampled to death, but I chose to believe he was remembering the good part. The way those three girls had fawned over him. The way they didn’t make me feel silly for being so upset when I thought he’d disappeared for good.
I paused the slide show on one photograph. Sat forward. Squinted. Not sure how much worse my eyes could get before my glass lenses became so heavy they’d make me hunch.
Back when we first met, Aubrey had been a little on the wild side. With a mass of head-turning auburn waves and the trust the world would catch her if she fell. The result—I felt—of having three burly older brothers who adored her to pieces.
As I look at her now, beneath a hat too big for her head, the auburn hair poking out beneath was more a shaggy bob. She seemed a little lankier, too. Chin up, grin plastered across her elfin face as she traipsed through the airport, hands gripped tight to the straps of her battered backpack. All joy, gumption and grit. But changed.
No wonder, after all she’d been through.
I could only hope the infusion of funds from the Vivian Ascot Opportunity Legacy—better? Or too much of a mouthful?—would give her the chance to find her feet again.
“Max,” I said, a strange kind of melancholy coming over me, “is it wrong of me to envy her? Not for her youth, or her loveliness, or her excellent eyesight. But for the fact she is about to experience Italy for the first time. The impossibly green hills of Tuscany, the ancient architecture of Rome.”
And the men, I said, only this time to myself. For Max was a sensitive soul. Nowhere else in the world makes men quite like those of Roman blood.
Max’s greying muzzle twitched as he looked up at me, limpid brown dachshund eyes a little rheumy, pitying even. I could all but hear him saying, Vivian, dear, it’s not like you to be so schmaltzy.
Well, he’d feel schmaltzy too, if he was finding himself looking back more than he was looking forward. Such as now, as I found myself drowning in the bittersweet memories of a single summer spent under the Chianti sun.
It was why the Vivian Ascot Endowment Fund for Most Excellent Young Women had been born. Yes, I quite like that one!
The reason I’d endowed those young women with the means to achieve their dream? Instinct.
I couldn’t see the future, or sense the lotto numbers, or lead police to dead bodies like that lady on the television. But I could sense what people needed, if they needed it enough. Not need as in a little extra deodorant wouldn’t go astray. But deeper. Transformative. That one thing that would make a person feel whole.
Whole, I thought, my hand going to my chest. To the strange bittersweet sensation that had taken up residence therein the moment I had seen the first picture of Aubrey in Rome.
I’d been twenty or twenty-one when, in a trattoria in Florence, I’d found myself face to face with the most beautiful man I’d ever met. Tall, dark, Italian. He’d smiled at me, as if he’d known exactly how he’d affected me—
I shook it off.
It was a long time ago. I had no regrets.
I might never have married, or had children of my own, but I’d travelled and laughed and imbibed and inhaled and delighted and felt great wonder. My life was, and had been, wonderful. People wouldn’t be throwing so much money my way to hear about it otherwise.
Not that I needed the funds. I had amassed a fortune the likes of which no one person could ever hope to spend. None of which I could leave to Max as I fully planned on outliving my darling boy.
And so the endowments to the lovely Jessica, Daisy and now Aubrey. I had been biding my time, waiting for the right moment to pounce. I mean help. Nudge—gently, generously, benignly—towards that which might allow them to shake off the fears holding them back, so that they might truly thrive.
“Ms Ascot,” my assistant called through the speaker in my desk. “Your ten o’clock is here.”
“Let him in.”
The door opened with a soft click and an electronic whir. All this technology really was a bit ridiculous. Just another sign that perhaps my time in the corporate world was coming to its natural end.
“Hi?” the writer called, his head poking around the door. Hand-picked from one of the few glossy magazines still in print, he was young enough the whiskers on his muzzle were golden and sparse. “I mean hello there, Ms Ascot. I mean... Sorry.”
I pushed back my chair, moved around the desk, and held out a hand. “Call me Viv.”
“Viv,” he said. “All right. Though I’m not sure I’ve ever been quite this star struck.”
“Star struck?” I repeated, quite liking that. I gave Max a look, to find he was pretending to be asleep.
“You are the Vivian Ascot,” the writer intoned, arms spread wide. “Head of Ascot Industries. Benefactor of the Ascot Music Festival. Ascot Music Awards. More galleries and performing arts scholarships and publishing endowments than we likely even know. You, ma’am, are a true patron of the arts.”
“You have done your research, young man.”
The young man smiled, and I saw a flicker of determination behind the soft face. “Why?” he asked.
“Why do I spend such a large portion of my hard-earned money on pursuits in the arts? Because without art, without beauty and invention and elegance and verve, what is there to live
for?”
“No, I mean why do you want to write a book?”
Because I had a story to tell. A story of kindness, and hope, and love.
“Well,” I said, “the idea came to me the weekend I met three lovely young women at my music festival in Copenhagen...”
Copyright © 2020 by Ally Blake
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ISBN-13: 9781488065286
A Will, a Wish, a Wedding
Copyright © 2020 by Pamela Brooks
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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