Figgy Pudding

‘We arranged to meet to have lunch and discuss every thing. And that was when I knew…’

‘When you knew what?’ Janet questioned her.

‘When I knew that she—Tiffany—must be engaged to Harold… She was wearing Louisa’s old engagement ring,’ Heaven told her simply. ‘I recognised it straight away. Louisa threw it back at him the day she walked out. Later she told me that she’d never liked it and had always considered it too vulgar. It was a huge brilliant-cut solitaire. Very flashy.’

‘Louisa’s engagement ring and now this Tiffany’s wearing it?’ Janet gasped.

‘Yes, but I doubt that she knows it was Louisa’s. She’s very young—I feel quite sorry for her. She’s obviously terrified of doing anything to annoy or upset Harold and it’s typical of him that he should have sprung this dinner thing on her—and typical as well that the fee he’s willing to pay the cook he’s told her to hire is nowhere near enough—not for the type of meal he’s ordered her to organise.

‘She’s panicking like mad that the guest bedrooms aren’t going to be finished on time. She confided to me that Harold’s refusing to pay the interim payments he promised the designers and suppliers unless they get everything ready ahead of schedule. I don’t know who these people are he’s so keen to impress but they must be pretty important to him…’

‘More important than his new fiancée,’ Janet suggested shrewdly.

‘Oh, much more important,’ Heaven agreed. ‘I could tell from the way she was talking about him that she hardly knows him at all. There’s some kind of distant business connection between Harold and her father, apparently, and that’s how they met.

‘Anyway, once she told me what was happening, I realised that if I took on the job of cooking this dinner for her it would give me the ideal opportunity to get my own back on Harold. He always did have a sweet tooth,’ she added inconsequentially, a wide, cat-like smile curling her mouth as her eyes danced.

‘Heaven…’ Janet said uncertainly. ‘You’re not thinking of doing anything too over the top, are you?’

She was suddenly remembering the scrapes her friend’s irrepressible sense of humour had got them into as schoolgirls and remembering too just how much reason Heaven had to want to punish Harold for the damage he had done to her.

‘That depends,’ Heaven answered soberly, but Janet could see that her eyes were still gleaming with amusement.

‘On what?’ she asked warily.

‘On what one considers to be too over the top,’ Heaven replied promptly, but unsatisfactorily—at least so far as Janet was concerned.

Janet tried again.

‘What I meant was, you’re not planning on doing something illegal…?’

‘Illegal?’ Heaven’s eyebrows rose. ‘Certainly not,’ she denied emphatically. ‘What I have in mind is designed quite simply to hurt Harold’s pride, to damage it just as he damaged mine. Poisoning him and ending up in prison for it—if that’s what that anxious mother-hen look in your eyes means you’re worrying about—is the last thing I’d want to do, although…’ A thoughtful far-away look in her eyes made Janet’s anxiety increase. ‘There are certain hallucinogenic mushrooms which I could—’

‘No, no, you mustn’t do anything like that,’ Janet intervened quickly.

‘No, I mustn’t,’ Heaven agreed, adding with mock primness, ‘It would be quite unethical.

‘No, what I’ve got in mind will teach Harold a much more salutary lesson than anything like that…’

‘If he doesn’t recognise you and throw you out,’ Janet warned her.

‘He won’t recognise me,’ Heaven assured her positively. ‘For a start Tiffany only knows me by my new professional name of Mrs Tiggywinkle and she obviously hadn’t a clue who I was when we met. She was at great pains and rather embarrassed to ask me if I would mind keeping a very low profile—apparently Harold wants his guests to think that she cooked their meal.

‘He would, of course, since he’s obviously being too mean to take them out to an expensive restaurant or pay the fees charged by the kind of frantically up-market caterers he’d enjoy boasting about hiring. He’s decided it will give him more kudos to have his victims—sorry, his guests—believe that poor Tiffany has cooked their dinner, so I’m to lie low in the kitchen whilst she serves the meal.

‘Knowing Harold as I do, I very much doubt he’ll come anywhere near the kitchen—for a start he’d think he was demeaning himself and no doubt he’ll try his best to get away with delaying paying me for as long as he can—I’ve asked to be paid cash on the night. No, Harold won’t see me to recognise me.

‘It won’t matter, not so long as they eat their dinner—and they will.

‘Revenge is sweet, so they say, and, as I’ve already told you, Harold has an extremely sweet tooth, so he shall have an extremely generous portion of revenge,’ Heaven told her, giving Janet a kind smile when she saw that she was still looking anxious.

‘I wish you weren’t doing this,’ Janet told her.

‘I don’t,’ Heaven responded cheerfully. ‘You can’t imagine how much better I’ve felt these last few days knowing that at last Harold is going to get his comeuppance, or rather his just deserts! Do you know, I think I’m going to enjoy Christmas this year after all?’ she added conversationally as the timer on her oven pinged and she went to attend to the puddings she had made earlier.

‘All alone here?’ Janet asked her doubtfully. ‘I wish you would change your mind and come with us to Lloyd’s parents’. I know they’d make you welcome.’

‘No… I want to be alone… Next year is going to be my year and I want to be ready for it.’

‘Those puddings smell marvellous,’ Janet told her.

‘Mmm… they do, don’t they?’ Heaven agreed with a small smile that made Janet’s maternal heart beat even more anxiously.

CHAPTER TWO

‘I HOPE you don’t intend to allow him to get away with this.’

Louisa gave her brother an unhappy look as he put down the letter he had just been reading. She had received it from her ex-husband’s solicitor only that morning and had telephoned Jon straight away to tell him what had happened.

‘I don’t want to. If he does insist on refusing to pay the girls’ school fees they’ll have to change school and Belle is already having a few problems following the divorce… but I don’t know what I can do to stop him.’

‘My God, when I think…’ Jon began, and then stopped when he saw the unhappiness on his sister’s face.

‘I know what you’re thinking, Jon,’ she told him. ‘I admit I have only myself to blame for the fact that Harold has made such a fool of me financially. If I hadn’t walked out on him and insisted on an immediate divorce and if I hadn’t been so desperate to let my pride rule my head I could have obtained a much better financial settlement from him.’

‘The fact that he’s depriving not just you but also his own children of the financial comfort you’ve all every reason to expect has nothing to do with your pride and everything to do with his greed,’ Jon told her gently. ‘I just wish I hadn’t been working abroad and away so much when the divorce was going through. I’d give a lot to know just how he managed to convince the divorce judge that he didn’t have the assets to give you what you were fully entitled to.’

‘He manipulated me,’ Louisa admitted grimly, ‘by pretending that he was having an affair with Heaven. He tricked me into walking out on him. I should have stayed where I was. After all, it wasn’t as though she was his first affair—not that they were having an affair, of course,’ Louisa corrected herself hastily. ‘She was just as much a victim of his machinations as I was myself—even more of one, really, when I think what that poor girl suffered…’

‘Have you seen her at all since?’ Jon asked her casually, turning slightly to one side as he did so so that Louisa couldn’t see his face.

‘Only once,’ she told him. ‘Not unnaturally I don’t think she really wanted anything to do with me but we literally bumped into one another in the street. At least I was able to apologise to her. Even now, you know, I’ve still got friends who quite plainly don’t believe that she wasn’t involved with Harold even though I’ve told them that it was all a mistake. Harold treated her almost as vindictively as he did me and I’ve wondered since if he did actually make a play for her and got turned down. That would explain the obvious pleasure he took in deliberately blackening her character…

‘Jon, what am I going to do about this?’ she asked her brother, returning to the original subject of her urgent phone call to him. ‘If I accept this reduced level of maintenance and Harold’s refusal to pay the girls’ school fees, I just don’t know what we’re going to do.’

‘I’m more than happy to cover the cost of the girls’ education. After all, they are my nieces,’ Jon told her firmly.

‘Your nieces, yes, but one day you could well have children of your own, a wife of your own who might not look too kindly on you having to virtually support my children as well as your own.’

‘Any woman who felt like that would never be my wife,’ Jon told her truthfully, and Louisa hugged him.

‘It says in this letter that the reason Harold is seeking to reduce his payments to you is the fact that he is planning to remarry and he and his new wife intend to have their own family…’

‘Has he said anything to you about wanting to cut my maintenance payments?’

‘No,’ Jon told her, shaking his head. ‘I have managed to convince him that I’m more interested in maintaining the friendship I’ve struck up with him than I am in whatever problems you might be facing, but as yet he still hasn’t opened up to me as much as I’d hoped about how and where he’s managed to conceal so much of his wealth. But I am still trying.

‘He’s invited me to a pre-Christmas dinner he’s giving at the end of the week. He faxed me from New York to tell me about it. He’s over there on business at the moment.’

‘A pre-Christmas dinner?’ Louisa questioned.

‘Mmm… his new fiancée is arranging everything, apparently, and it’s being held at the house he’s been having renovated in Knightsbridge.’

‘The house he bought with the profit he made on selling our house,’ Louisa said fiercely.

‘Yes,’ Jon agreed grimly.

‘That poor girl. I hope that, unlike me, she finds out what he’s really like before they get married,’ Louisa told her brother bitterly. ‘Oh, Jon, what am I going to do?’ she asked him plaintively. ‘The parents have offered to help but they’ve already done more than enough, and so has Rory…’

Jon noticed the way his sister’s skin changed colour slightly as she mentioned the old family friend who had done so much to support her both emotionally and practically since the break-up of her marriage. It was no secret to Jon that Rory Stevens loved his sister and Jon suspected that she was now beginning to return his feelings.

‘Do you think Harold believes that you want his friendship and that you approve of what he’s done?’

‘He seems to,’ Jon told her, ‘but I must admit I had hoped by now to at least have some proof for you that he deliberately concealed the major part of his assets in order to pay you far less money than he should.’

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