And now I have to drop it.

So all right. I bloody will.

BOOK THREE

119

1986

‘Not that one, honey – this one. How many times?’ Lenny’s voice was gently scolding. ‘You don’t have to go for crap stuff. Get the best. We can afford it. Sky’s the limit, OK? You don’t stick cheap and cheerful in a gaff like this, you’ll devalue the fucking place.’

Lenny and Angel were standing in the kitchen of their grand Chigwell house, flicking through kitchen magazines and showroom samples and debating floor coverings. Angel had selected a budget-priced vinyl. Now Lenny was overruling that, and insisting on slate tiles, top of the range.

Christ, will I ever get used to it? wondered Angel. Ten years into married life, and still she struggled to adjust to all this money.

She’d grown up poor, and the habits acquired back then had stuck. You bought cheap, always. But now she had money and somehow or other she had to adapt, even though adapting to any sort of change wasn’t her strong suit. But Lenny had money to burn. And he was generous with it, gifting her with all sorts of luxurious goods and with cash too, which – much to his amusement – she rarely spent. Mostly, she carefully deposited it in the bank, put it into her own personal savings account. She hadn’t a clue where he was getting it all from.

Their house was massive. Seven bedrooms, seven bathrooms. Set in four acres of ground. Lenny didn’t do gardening, so they had a gardener who was always moaning on about how difficult his job was, and a ride-on mower. And Mrs Axelford did not do house cleaning, Lenny insisted, so they had a cleaner every week too, who also moaned – about the cost of living and how sick her mother was. When she came in, Angel guiltily slipped out, got her hair done, or her nails, or anything, because she couldn’t bear to sit there in the lounge with her feet up while some other poor cow did all the work for her. There was a pool outside in the garden with a heater running non-stop all through the year, because her big flamboyant rock-god of a husband liked to swim every day and he wouldn’t take anything less than a nice warm toasty thirty degrees.

‘Thinking of doing away with that pool,’ Lenny often said in irritation. ‘Freezing my arse off getting out of the thing every day. I’m going to put an extension on the house, get the damned thing inside there, much cosier.’

Time and again when Angel was in these lush surroundings she thought of the flat where she had lived with Dora. What a shit-hole. This was so far removed from it. Too far, maybe, for her to cope with, but she never told Lenny that. She was happy with him. Looked after and protected. It wasn’t a passionate love affair – not for her, anyway. He was coming up to forty and she was twenty-eight, but she didn’t care about the age difference. She liked being married to an older man, was quite happy to let him take the lead most of the time. They hadn’t had kids, but then the idea of that made her feel sick, and Lenny wasn’t fussed either way.