Do Not Disturb

by Bagshawe, Tilly

  Honor closed the blinds. She felt sick.

  She didn’t want to believe what Sam had just told her. That Devon would cynically and deliberately sell her down the river, saving his own reputation without a shred of concern for hers. But she did believe it. Most bizarrely of all, it didn’t even surprise her, not really. On some deeper level, it all rang horribly true.

  “He said he was going to deny it,” she said, turning back around.

  Sam shrugged. “He lied.”

  They both jumped when Honor’s cell phone started jumping up and down on the desk, buzzing like a demented insect. Picking it up, her eyes widened.

  “Oh my God. It’s him.” She held the flashing screen aloft. “Should I answer it?”

  “No!” said Sam. But she couldn’t help herself.

  “You’ve got a nerve, you lying son of a bitch,” she began furiously. “How dare you call me? How dare you? You’re not talking your way out of this one, asshole.”

  But when she heard the faltering female voice on the other end of the line, her bravado deserted her.

  “I didn’t have your number. But I figured my dad would,” said Lola, “so I’m using his phone.”

  “Listen, Lola…” Honor began. She had no idea what to say, but felt that she had to say something. “I…your dad and I…”

  “Save it,” said Lola, cutting her dead. “I’m not interested in anything you have to say. I’m only calling because I thought you ought to know what you’ve done. We’re in the hospital.”

  “What? What hospital? Why?” She hated herself for caring, but she couldn’t help it. “Is Devon…your dad…is he OK?”

  “Dad?” said Lola witheringly. “Oh, he’s fine. He’s just peachy. It’s my mom who’s fucked up. You remember my mom? The woman whose life you just ran over with a bulldozer?”

  Honor winced.

  “After that sick charade Dad put her through for the TV cameras, she totally flipped out. She locked herself in the bathroom and took an overdose.”

  “No!” It was more of a gasp than a word, and it was out of Honor’s mouth before she had time to think.

  “Yeah,” said Lola. Even through her anger, Honor could hear she was fighting back the tears. “She emptied a fucking bottle of painkillers down her throat, and Dad had to break the door down. So if anything happens to her, it’s on your conscience, you heartless bitch. I hope you’re happy.”

  And she hung up, leaving Honor shaking, phone in hand, and looking about as far from happy as it was humanly possible to be.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  LOLA CARTER PULLED her trench coat more tightly around her and struggled vainly with her crappy drugstore umbrella as the rain started to pour in earnest.

  She loved London, even though it had rained pretty much ceaselessly since she’d moved here in January. The same week that her father’s affair had hit the press and her home life had come crumbling down around her ears, she’d discovered she’d been offered a place at the prestigious St. Martin’s School of Fashion. At the time she’d been too distraught to give the idea much thought. It felt like years since she’d filled in the application, along with a slew of others, behind her father’s disapproving back, and her long-cherished dreams of becoming a designer seemed frivolous and stupid when she thought about what her poor mom was going through. But as the weeks rolled by and the tension at home went from bad to utterly unbearable, escaping Boston began to look like a more and more attractive possibility.

  It was now March and officially spring, but the monsoon season seemed far from over. If anything it was getting colder. Lola could feel the wet tips of her toes growing numb through her loafers as she splashed along King’s Road, jumping in and out of puddles like a naughty five-year-old.

  So much had happened in the last six months, good and bad, that in a way it felt appropriate to be in this strange, sodden city, starting again. Already the events of last summer felt so distant they might as well have been someone else’s life.

  Devon’s affair with Honor had changed everything. Initially, one of the worst things was knowing it was Lucas who’d exposed it. Despite the way he’d blown hot and cold with her over the summer, Lola had left East Hampton still nursing a serious soft spot for him. She knew he didn’t love her. But she had thought he at least liked and respected her. The idea that a man she’d willingly shared her dreams and fears and body with could throw a nail bomb of pain into her family like that…it shook her. For one thing, it meant she must be a pretty terrible judge of character. She’d honestly thought Lucas was a good guy at heart, but he’d turned out to be a snake of the lowest order. As for Honor, whom she’d come to look up to almost as an elder sister, she was even worse: a lying, calculating bitch. And her father? Even now Lola couldn’t really get her head around it. Sure, she and her dad had never gotten along, even before this bombshell. But deep down she’d always believed that he, too, was a decent, honorable, upstanding man. That he practiced the strict morality he preached, not just to her and her brother, but to the world at large. Underneath all the teenage tantrums, she’d respected him. But now that respect was shredded.

  It was harrowing, having to stand by uselessly while her mom crumbled like a stale piece of wedding cake. Her parents might never have been the Waltons, but they’d depended on and trusted each other for the better part of thirty years. The affair blew her mother’s world apart.

  Lola could still remember feeling sick to her stomach in the hospital, watching her dad hold her mom’s hand as they waited for her to come around after the overdose, playing the concerned husband when he was the one who put her there in the first place. It was gross. All he seemed to care about was how things looked.

  Even so, both he and Nick, who wasn’t normally known for dramatic displays of emotion, burst into tears of relief when Karis finally came to. But not Lola. She couldn’t. She just felt numb inside.

  On the drive home, she wouldn’t even look at her father. For the next month, while Karis recuperated in the hospital, the only time Lola agreed to be anywhere near him was during visiting hours, and that was purely for her mother’s sake. At home the two of them rattled around like strangers, Lola having refused point-blank to contemplate retaking her SATs at St. Mary’s.

  “The doctor says Mom can come home next weekend,” said Devon one gloomy Sunday night, forcing the cheeriness into his voice. “I thought maybe you and I could throw her a welcome-home party, now that Nick’s gone back to LA.”

  He was sitting on a red damask couch at one end of their enormous Boston living room while his daughter, coiled like a snake into a rattan armchair at the other end, refused to look up from Harper’s Bazaar.

  “Do what you want,” she snapped, still not looking up. “I won’t be here.”

  “Oh?” said Devon, trying hard to mask his annoyance. “And why’s that?”

  “I’ve been offered a place at fashion school. In London,” said Lola nonchalantly. “I’ve decided to take it.”

  “I see,” said Devon.

  “My course doesn’t start until the new year, but I’ve booked a flight out on Friday to start looking at apartments and get the lay of the land.”

  He looked across at her determined, defiant face. A month ago he’d have slapped her down for talking back to him like that and sent her back to St. Mary’s with a flea in her ear. But everything was different now. The contempt in her eyes burned so brightly it frightened him. If he tried to lay the law down now, she’d bolt. Then he’d have lost her for good.

  “What’s the name of the college?” he asked, playing for time.

  “St. Martin’s,” said Lola truculently, flipping the page of her magazine with unnecessary violence and keeping her eyes down. “Like you care.”

  “Well,” said Devon, projecting a calm that he was far from feeling, “you’re not moving to England on your own. I’m sorry, but you’re far too young for that.”

  “I’m eighteen,” Lola shot back at him, loo
king him in the eye at last. “Plenty of kids younger than me leave home. Besides, I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. I’m going, whether you like it or not.”

  Wisely, Devon had decided to let the conversation lie at this point. For all her fighting talk, she would of course need him to fund her studies, not to mention her accommodation, if she wanted to go. But keeping her in Boston as an economic prisoner would be the surest way to drive a permanent wedge between them. Morally, she had him over a barrel, and they both knew it. The affair had robbed him utterly of his authority as a father. As much as he disliked it, he realized that if he was to have a chance at winning Lola’s forgiveness and earning back her love, he’d have to let her go.

  In the end, he’d agreed to rent her an apartment in Chelsea, on the condition that she room with a friend. Both he and Karis had hoped she’d pick one of the daughters of the many respectable old Boston families that they knew socially. But Lola had other ideas.

  “But darling,” Devon had tried to reason with her, watching her bent over the sewing machine in the kitchen one November evening, lost in concentration as she restitched one of Karis’s skirts. Despite Devon’s best efforts to encourage her to eat, Karis had been losing weight at an alarming rate since she came home, and most of her clothes hung off her now like rags on a skeleton. “A girl like Sian would be so far out of her depth in a cosmopolitan city like London. How do you think she’d afford the rent?”

  Lola shrugged, biting off a stray thread with her front teeth. “We can subsidize her. Until she finds a job.”

  We? thought Devon. Who the hell was “we”? He was on the point of demurring but thought better of it. The daughter of some blue-collar New Jersey bum might not be ideal company for Lola, but at least the two girls would be safe together. And if agreeing to fund Sian meant Lola moved even an inch toward a reconciliation with him, he figured it was a price worth paying.

  Ever since Karis had come back home, he’d begun to feel like a stranger in his own house. His wife drifted aimlessly from room to room like a zombie; his son had hightailed it back to LA as fast as his legs could carry him; and his daughter looked at him like something that had crawled out from under a rock every time he walked through a door.

  He did regret the affair. Part of him still missed Honor and the thrill of youthfulness and excitement that being with her had given him. But for the first time the enormity of what he’d done to Karis really hit home. Underneath all the bickering and social climbing, he now realized, she still loved him. The damage to his reputation, much as it pained him, wasn’t half as bad as the crushing guilt he felt watching her struggling to rebuild her life and carry on as normal while inside she was clearly still in a million shattered pieces. The other day he’d watched her from their bedroom window, chatting happily to one of the gardeners as she planted out bulbs for the spring. But as soon as the man left, she’d dropped her head into her hands, and he’d watched helplessly as her frail shoulders began to shake with sobs. Tears had come to his own eyes then. He wanted desperately to make things right. But the affair and all the ensuing publicity had left him so far adrift, he had no idea where to start.

  Part of him hoped that with Lola abroad and Nick back in LA, things might get easier at home. But whether they did or didn’t, he knew he had little choice but to let his headstrong daughter go.

  Turning onto Tite Street now, Lola closed down her umbrella—the stupid thing was practically useless against such a pounding torrent anyway—and fumbled in her purse for the front door keys. The flat Devon had rented was comprised of the ground and first floors of a white stucco-fronted Victorian house, overlooking pretty, communal square gardens. Through the bay window at the front, Lola could see Sian slumped over her PC at the kitchen table, and banged on the glass to get her attention.

  “Can’t find my keys!” she yelled, lifting up her purse and rattling it to illustrate the point. “Can you let me in?”

  A few seconds later Sian was at the door. Barefoot and in sweatpants, she had a long, chunky-knit cardigan pulled tightly around her and her hair scraped back in an elastic band. She looked tired.

  “Have you been to sleep yet?” asked Lola.

  After months of interviews Sian had finally landed herself a job at the News of the World, but it was mostly night shifts copyediting, which didn’t pay her enough to cover the rent. Lola was always telling her not to worry—“my guilty asshole father can pay”—but Sian had no intention of freeloading and was still trying to write and pitch freelance articles during the day to supplement her meager salary. Unfortunately, this didn’t leave her a lot of time for sleep. In the last week she’d started sporting full-on panda eyes, which didn’t do much for her already pasty, sun-deprived complexion.

  “Not yet.” She shook her head. “Nice swim?”

  “It’s unbelievable!” Lola laughed, shaking out her wet hair and peeling off her coat and shoes. Her socks were so wet she had to wring them out on the porch like used washcloths before she could come in.

  “Well, maybe the rain agrees with you,” said Sian. “You certainly look a lot more cheerful.” Padding back into the kitchen, she flipped on the kettle to make them some tea. Both the girls had taken to drinking Earl Grey and eating chocolate digestive biscuits when they got home from work, a ritual that made them feel marvelously English and Mary Poppins–ish, especially when the storms set in. “Did Ego call?”

  “Ego” was the nickname Sian had given Lola’s latest boyfriend, Igor, a revoltingly chiseled Russian in the year above her at school. A part-time model, he was also a full-time jerk, although it had taken Lola until yesterday, when he dumped her by text message, to see it.

  “No.” Lola shoved the last biscuit from the open packet into her mouth before greedily ripping open a new one. It never ceased to amaze Sian how a girl who ate like a sumo wrestler and whose idea of exercise was stretching for the TV remote kept such a sickeningly perfect body. Not to mention her flawless, alabaster complexion. “He didn’t call, and I don’t give a shit,” she said, spraying biscuit crumbs across the table with happy abandon. “Asshole. His designs were all lame Vivienne Westwood rip-offs anyway. He can fuck-right-off-ski.”

  Sian bustled around making the tea, opening and closing cupboards and hunting for the quaint flowery teapot they’d picked up at Portobello Market. Man, she was exhausted. Even getting out the china and tea bags felt like a monumental effort today.

  She was pleased Lola was over Ego and tried not to envy her friend’s uncanny ability to bounce back from heartbreak like a human Tigger. Since they’d come to London Lola had gone through boyfriends like other people went through toilet paper. She never mentioned Lucas, not once, and seemed to have succeeded in blocking out the painful events of last summer completely by diving headfirst into her new life at fashion school.

  How Sian wished she could do the same. She was fed up with being the Eeyore in their partnership, moping and brooding and worn out all the time. But she wasn’t like Lola. She didn’t have the supreme confidence, born of lifelong wealth and serious, supermodel beauty, that protected Lola like a magic cloak from whatever stones life might throw at her.

  Not that life was treating Sian too shabbily at the moment. Being offered the chance to come to London was a miracle for a girl like her. She still remembered getting Lola’s phone call, back home in Lymington. Looking back, it was like the opening scene from a movie: her mom in the kitchen, making dinner; her dad and brother sprawled on the couch in the living room, Budweisers in hand, engrossed in the final minutes of the game; and Sian herself, running down the stairs screaming with excitement, holding the phone in front of her like a talisman, begging her parents to let her go.

  “I can pay my own way,” she pleaded. “I’ve got almost three thousand dollars saved up now. And I’ll find work as soon as I get there, I swear.”

  “I thought that money was for college?” said her mom. “How long have you been telling us about wanting to get more education?”

>   “This is London, Mom,” Sian explained patiently. “It is an education. Anyway, you and Dad always wanted me to start work right after high school. So now I will.”

  “We meant work here,” said her father. “In Lymington. Not halfway across the world with some heiress kid we’ve never even met.”

  They’d taken some persuading. To her parents, moving to London was equivalent to saying you wanted to spend a year on the international space station or join the submarine corps. It was something they couldn’t picture and consequently feared.

  “Soon as you get homesick, you get right on the next plane,” her mom said tearfully at the departure gate. “There won’t be no ‘I told you so’s.’ You just come on home, all right, honey?”

  “Sure, Mom,” said Sian. “Of course I will.”

  But inside she was rolling her eyes. Like she was gonna be homesick! For what? Burgers at Dino’s on a Friday night? Hanging out at the mall?

  Yet to her surprise, she found she did miss home, almost from the moment she landed in England. Two solid months of waitressing at a greasy spoon café in Earl’s Court probably hadn’t helped. But even now that she’d finally landed a job on a Sunday tabloid, her dream for as long as she could remember, there was still a feeling of restless unhappiness she couldn’t seem to shake.

  She hesitated to attribute this to Ben, who she soon discovered was some kind of microcelebrity in England, a sort of Donald Trump mini-me. Like most eighteen-year-old girls, she found the financial pages deathly boring, useful only as cat litter, or possibly to start a fire. But Ben’s name cropped up in the FT with such regularity it was impossible not to take a morbid interest. Seeing his name in print was like picking at an emotional scab—disgusting, painful, and yet weirdly addictive. It wasn’t long before she found herself actively scanning the hedge fund articles, looking for a mention or a picture.