One Small Act of Kindness

by Lucy Dillon

  He bit his lip and she knew she’d hit the truth; Jason always was bad at hiding his emotions. Libby covered her mouth as a wave of nausea swept through her. The earrings. Of course. That must have been a smaller trade that came off: Jason always liked to treat her when he was flush. She should have known there wasn’t a grand down the side of the sofa. You stupid cow, she thought.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Jason’s voice had turned scornful. ‘How else did you expect us to fund the sort of refurbishment you had in mind? It wasn’t that much. You knew how much those baths cost.’

  No. This wasn’t the first secret deal he’d done. ‘You said we could afford it!’

  ‘Yeah, and you didn’t ask how.’

  ‘Why would I? I trusted you when you said it would be all right!’

  ‘And I am! It will be! Come on, I do this for a living! I’m good at it!’

  ‘So good your bank decided to let you go for the safety of their investors?’

  It was a low blow. Jason flinched. Libby was ashamed, but panic was making her reckless. This wasn’t just about the hotel anymore. This was about a betrayal they’d been too tired and shocked to discuss until now, burying it under arrangements and house-move lists. Now, though, every fear she’d suppressed was fighting its way out and there was no way of stopping it. All she could do was try to steer her way through this horrible conversation, on the back of a bucking, destructive anger.

  With a momentous effort, she made her face calm. ‘OK. Fine. Can you get the stake back?’

  Jason stared sullenly at the desk. ‘No.’

  ‘Surely you can ask Darren to buy you out, if it’s such a good deal?’ Jason’s stockbroker mates threw their bonuses into these private deals all the time; Jason’s stake would be peanuts compared with what they’d put in.

  It came down to pride, Libby knew that. But she’d swallowed her pride, going to her dad for money, hadn’t she?

  Another, longer pause. ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s not that easy. There’s no point pulling out of it now – they could be on the verge of turning over a massive profit. Massive. Like buying this hotel a hundred times over . . .’

  As Libby looked up, she caught the glint in Jason’s eye and she knew, from now on, there was no discussion to be had. Jason was seeing the figures rolling up on the screen, his instant approval, his reward for being right, and daring to gamble. He couldn’t see her. He couldn’t see the hotel, the people, the bricks. Just the numbers.

  The first time Libby had noticed that glint in Jason’s country-boy eyes, she’d assumed it was excitement. He was on his laptop in their home office, with some currency screens open – it was fun to watch him doing his job, sexy even, the way his long fingers fluttered confidently over the keyboard. It wasn’t gambling, he assured her, showing her what he’d just made while she’d been watching Mad Men; it was way more skilled than that. Forward planning, insight, the right moment – his research coupled with a lucky knack had made him a rising star on his team, so why shouldn’t he use some of that on his private account? They went on holiday to Necker Island with that glint.

  And it was fine, when it had worked. But then – though Jason didn’t tell her for a long, long time – it didn’t.

  Libby’s head felt too heavy on her shoulders. One last chance, she told herself, hollowly. ‘Jason,’ she said, staring at the veins in the scuffed leather of the old desk top. ‘Please. For the sake of our marriage, call Darren and get that money back. We have to pay the builders. Unless the hotel gets finished, we’re screwed.’

  It felt as if the pause was going to go on for the rest of their lives.

  ‘No,’ he said, finally, and when he lifted his gaze, he looked furious. ‘I won’t do that. And by the way, I’m shocked by your lack of faith in me.’

  Libby stared at this handsome thirty-something man who’d won her over with his decency and self-deprecation when they were both too young to know how much those things mattered and thought, What’s the point? She couldn’t trust him. She’d put their marriage above everything else to come here and start again; he hadn’t. If he couldn’t see what this was doing to her, undermining all the happiness they had, then what chance was there? How much worse would it have to get before he realised?

  ‘I’m trying to trust you, Jason, but then you do things like this,’ she said.

  ‘Seriously? If you don’t trust me, then we’re wasting our time.’ He looked outraged. ‘I’ve worked fucking hard – for us – and you’ve got the nerve to tell me it’s not the right kind of hard work? Do you think you’re the only one who’s been through hell this year? There’s a difference between giving up your Pilates and your handbags, and losing your livelihood and your self-respect!’

  ‘That’s not fair. I always worked until—’ she started, but Jason was on a roll, still raging from his encounter with the builders.

  ‘I’m not going to stand here and be lectured by someone who hasn’t the first idea what I do or how good I am at it,’ he snapped. ‘You want me to go? Fine, I will. I’m more than happy to.’

  He’s not going to go, Libby told herself. It’s just a stance.

  ‘All right, then,’ she said. ‘Go. Walk out on me, and your mother, and your responsibilities. I suppose that’ll be my fault then, will it? For kicking you out?’

  Jason said nothing. Then he turned and walked out of the hotel.

  Chapter Twenty

  Libby could only watch as the builders continued to dismantle and remove their gear, and by two o’clock, they drove away and silence descended on the hotel.

  Alice had managed to get Marek on the phone, and Libby had begged and pleaded with him, but he’d only confirmed what she dreaded: Jason hadn’t even paid the whole first stage payment.

  ‘I’m sorry, Libby, but I can’t make my guys work for nothing,’ he’d said. ‘We already made so many allowances because you’ve been good clients, but Jason . . . Look, keep in touch, yeah? Maybe we can do something.’

  She couldn’t blame him. Marek was a nice guy, but he was a businessman. She and Jason had been good clients once, but now they were probably on some builder blacklist.

  That’s the last kitchen I’ll ever get fitted in London, she thought.

  Libby walked slowly upstairs and stood in the sea of abandoned dust sheets, trying to make her numb brain assess the building work, as far as she knew how. She couldn’t even start thinking about Jason, and what they’d said to each other. Whether he was coming back.

  This had happened because she hadn’t wanted to look at the details, so now she forced herself to look inside each room. Not one of the upstairs bedrooms was finished, and room four, their own special room, was stacked high with boxes and random junk. Four rooms had bathroom suites fitted, but no tiling or floors laid. The others had had their baths and toilets ripped out, leaving ugly broken holes in the en suites. The ground-floor rooms were just the same; Libby couldn’t bring herself to look round those.

  She bent down to pick up a discarded ball of masking tape, then realised there was no point trying to tidy up. The enormity of what they had to deal with squeezed the breath out of her body. The comfortable, shabby old hotel was wrecked, gone forever. She understood why Margaret refused to go upstairs; the chaos had looked exciting when the end was in sight, but now it felt as if the raw bricks and bare wires were mocking her. You thought you could manage this? With no experience? How are you going to fix this now? With no money?

  The thought of that lump sum had been a huge comfort, the one thing that had made the move bearable. When Jason had told her they needed to borrow from her dad, she’d assumed it was because that money wasn’t easily accessible, in cash. Not that it wasn’t there at all. For it to have gone, just like that . . .

  Libby stared at the bunch of wires sticking out of the wall above the missing skirting board – were they dang
erous? What was supposed to go on there? – and her mind started to form the words ‘Jason, what does . . . ?’

  But he’d gone too. An involuntary noise came from somewhere inside her. Libby had never felt small or alone before – she’d looked on the bright side all her life, believing that things would work out fine in the end – but she couldn’t see the bright side to this. She’d had nightmares less surreal than the scene in front of her. And she felt so sorry for the hotel she’d ruined. For the first time, she saw the bones of the house – not the slick boutique hotel she’d wanted to impose on it, but the old family home, welcoming and comfortable. What have I done? thought Libby, mortified.

  The sun moved in the trees outside, highlighting the patchwork of grey-lilac stripes in the double bedroom, and she saw herself, painting tester patches like Marie Antoinette while Jason played for time, knowing they hadn’t a penny left to pay for any of it, gambling with her future.

  Oh Libby, said a voice in her head. It sounded a lot like her dad. How could you have been so oblivious?

  She turned on her heel and ran downstairs.

  Jason didn’t reappear that afternoon with a bunch of flowers and a shame-faced apology, as he had on the handful of times he and Libby had rowed before, and neither did he call or text.

  Libby wasn’t going to text him. She didn’t know what she wanted to say. Anger and misery were taking turns to have the upper hand. Fear was there all the time, though – lurking in the background, popping up every time she caught sight of a bill. It was almost too big to feel angry about.

  She needed Jason to come back and help her sort out the mess he’d made, but at the same time, Libby had meant the things she’d said about trust and honesty, and now those hard words were out there, she wasn’t going to unsay them. They had to be said. Libby just wished, bitterly, that Jason hadn’t chosen the worst possible moment to force the conversation.

  She sat alone in the office, unable to move or think or speak, not wanting to see anyone. She didn’t know how long she’d been in there when Alice knocked and put her head round the door.

  ‘Hey. Are you all right? I thought you needed some time to calm down,’ she said. She was doing a brave, if unconvincing, job of covering her concern. ‘But then I thought you might need to talk.’

  Libby sank her head into her hands. ‘I don’t know if I want to talk. I just want to walk out of here and never come back.’

  But where would she go? Not home. Her dad had been a firm believer in his daughters making their own mistakes from the age of eleven; her mum wasn’t a ‘there, there’ sort of mother. She had her own problems. And her sister was in Hong Kong, getting over an unpleasant divorce to a man much worse than Jason.

  The hard fact was, there wasn’t anywhere to go. She was trapped. Any money she had was tied up in this hotel, and right now, it was worse than lost – the place was wrecked. Misery paralysed her, and she couldn’t even summon the words to ask Alice for help.

  Alice waited a beat, then said, gently, ‘Fair enough,’ and withdrew.

  Libby would have sat alone in the office all night, rooted to the spot while her brain whirred in circles, but by six, she was forced upstairs by the dual need for the loo and a large glass of wine.

  Margaret was in the kitchen, preparing some lavish supper for Bob, and called out as Libby slunk past.

  ‘Elizabeth? I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Is Jason out tonight? I was hoping he might give me a lift down to Pat Hasting’s for gardening club. I see his car’s gone. Will he be back soon?’

  Libby bit her lip. Obviously Margaret wouldn’t have bothered looking in the one place any actual work was done. She might have found some unpaid business-rate final demands. ‘I’ve been in the office all afternoon. Did you knock?’

  ‘Oh, I thought you were upstairs playing around with your paints!’ She decanted the contents of the pan into Bob’s bowl and put it on the floor for him. ‘I saw the office door shut and assumed Jason was doing something complicated with the accounts. Didn’t want to disturb him!’ The self-deprecating laugh that accompanied this was like nails on a blackboard to Libby’s mood.

  ‘Jason’s left,’ she said flatly. ‘As have the builders.’

  Margaret straightened up. ‘Sorry, dear, I missed that. What’s Jason doing with the builders?’

  ‘Nothing, as it turns out.’

  Playing with paints? Jason had taken her for an idiot, and his mother’s opinion of her obviously wasn’t much better.

  ‘He hasn’t paid them, so they’ve downed tools. Walked off the job.’

  That wiped the smile off Margaret’s face. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s quite simple. We had a certain amount of money set aside to renovate the hotel. A small amount went to the builders. Jason used a sizeable chunk of it to pay your overdue business rates. We’ve also been paying food, electricity, general running costs for us all since we moved in, given that the hotel barely breaks even. And the rest of it – well, what we had left after we’d paid off the debts Jason ran up gambling all our savings on the currency markets . . .’ Libby drew a breath and went on, giddy with the elation of saying things she’d wanted to say for months. ‘He’s invested every penny we had left in some deal. I can’t give you precise details, because I was too angry to ask, but the important thing is that that money is no longer ours. It may well be lost altogether, and we have no more. So we’re screwed.’

  Margaret’s face was slack with shock as she tried to take it all in. ‘But why has Jason left?’

  ‘Because I can’t trust him, apparently. No, not apparently,’ she corrected herself. ‘I can’t trust him. Apart from the small matter of him losing our money, he made one promise to me to save our marriage, and he’s just broken it. He flounced out, and I’m afraid I didn’t try to stop him.’

  Margaret sank onto a kitchen chair. ‘Are you sure you’ve got the whole story?’ Amazed, Libby could see her struggling to put Jason back in the right, despite everything she’d just said. ‘It’s only money. He’ll have to ask his firm if he can have his job back for a few months.’ Margaret’s expression brightened: problem solved. ‘I know he’d rather be here, overseeing all his plans for the hotel, but I bet his firm would be delighted to have Jason back on board for a little while.’

  ‘He can’t go back to his old job.’

  ‘Now, don’t be selfish.’ Margaret looked reproachful. ‘It’s lucky that Jason has the earning potential to get you out of this hole. In fact, given the costs that you’ve both incurred with your plans, maybe it would have been better if you both hadn’t been so quick to rush to leave your jobs . . .’

  This is madness. She thinks this is my fault, thought Libby, reading Margaret’s face. She thinks it was me who talked Jason into packing in his job, so I could come here to play at being an interior designer. This from the woman who hid bills in drawers rather than deal with them.

  The injustice loosened her tongue. Libby had promised Jason she’d never tell his mother the real story, but Margaret’s wilful refusal to see any fault whatsoever in her son, who’d dropped them all in it, swept away any resolve she’d had.

  ‘Margaret, Jason can’t go back. He was sacked. And he came this close’ – she held up her finger and thumb in a mean, pinching gesture – ‘this close to losing his broker’s licence when they found out just how much money he’d lost. Not his clients’ money. Our money.’

  ‘What he chooses to do outside work doesn’t affect his job . . .’

  ‘Oh, but it does. If you’re constantly worrying about how you’re going to make up thousands of pounds’ worth of personal losses, it tends to take your mind off your day job. Clients notice. And they move their portfolios to a broker who does have his eye on the ball. Eventually, your management team notices, and when, one day, you accidentally email a client with another client’s trading details because you’re spread-be
tting on your mobile phone at the same time, your managers don’t have a choice. You’re a liability. You’re a risk. You have to clear your desk and tell your wife not only that you’ve lost your job, but that you’ll need to sell the house because you’ve burned through every penny you’d saved in the bank!’

  As Libby spoke, the images spooled across her mind again, and this time she couldn’t push them away. Nice handbags or not, she’d never got completely blasé about the sums involved. The carelessness of it made her uneasy. The arrogance. The way it turned a part of her Jason into someone she didn’t know; he was bold with other people’s money, but it was still money, not just numbers on a screen. That was the glint. The glint that blinded the better side of him, and turned their life savings into numbers too. Not even coming back here could make him ignore that glint. Not his father’s hotel. Not her savings. Not her.

  ‘I’m sure Jason was only doing his best,’ said Margaret stubbornly. ‘Neither of us has worked in that field. We shouldn’t judge.’

  ‘I can’t judge when my husband gambles away everything we had? Everything I’d worked for too? No, Margaret – Jason was greedy,’ said Libby. ‘And it made him reckless, not just with money, but with our marriage, and your hotel.’

  There was a long silence. Even Bob had stopped eating; he’d slunk under the table, his ears pulled forward with trepidation.

  Finally, Libby thought, watching Margaret fidget with her rings, finally it’s sinking in that Jason is just as capable of making mistakes as the rest of us. And that this time he’s ruined it for everyone. Her shoulders relaxed: the relief of sharing the secret she’d had to carry alone was physical. Margaret had always been so kind to her. Surely she’d understand now why it meant so much to get the hotel up to scratch?

  ‘Well, I blame you,’ said Margaret quietly.

  ‘How?’ Libby’s head bounced up in surprise. ‘How on earth can you blame me?’

  ‘You’ve got expensive tastes. He hasn’t. He never had. Look at him now, perfectly happy with a pint and some rugby. I think Jason was only trying to make money to keep up with all the things you wanted. Just look at what you’ve done here.’ Margaret waved a contemptuous hand towards the door. ‘Redecorating wasn’t good enough for you. Oh no. You had to tear everything down and start again. Expensive baths. Expensive taps. What nonsense! Silly, self-indulgent nonsense. Jason was quite happy to get it back up and running the way we’d done it for years, but no, you had to do something better. I imagine it was ten times worse in London, keeping up with your friends. Jason must have been under enormous pressure trying to work out how to pay for it all . . .’