Humbugs and Heartstrings: A gorgeous festive read full of the joys of Christmas!

Humbugs and Heartstrings

Catherine Ferguson

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright

Published by Avon an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2014

Copyright © Catherine Ferguson 2014

Cover photographs © Lisa Horton

Cover design ©Lisa Horton

Catherine Ferguson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © October 2014 ISBN: 9780008117269

Version: 2017-11-14

For Matthew

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Back Ads

Acknowledgements

About the Book

About the Publisher

Prologue

It has to be here somewhere.

I bend closer and yet another van hurtles past in the semi-dark, flinging spray all over me.

I’m not normally to be found scrabbling about in gutters on wet, murky late afternoons in October, risking a drenching from the vehicles swishing by.

But today, The Boss gave us a lecture on biros.

She said we’d probably have to start paying for our pens because she couldn’t be sure we weren’t using them for our own personal stuff. So then, of course, I was digging in my bag on the way out of work, and what should come flying out and roll away into the road, but my precious biro.

Suddenly I spot it, floating in an oily puddle, and as I’m bending to fish it out, something else catches my eye.

A crumpled ten pound note is skating along the pavement beside me.

Fascinated, I give the pen a shake, pop it in my bag and follow the progress of the queen’s head as it zigzags towards the hedge and snags on a lamppost. I glance around, expecting someone to rush up behind me and breathlessly claim it, but there is no one in sight. If it was a purse with money in it, I could take it to the police station. But what do I do with a ten pound note?

Ten pounds.

There’s no question how I’d use it.

Already I am imagining slipping my pass book under the glass and watching the cashier’s efficient, manicured hands processing the note. And afterwards, the pleasure of checking the growing balance in the Tim Fund and knowing I am inching slowly towards our goal.

A gust of wind frees the note from the lamppost and shuttles it on its merry way. And right at that moment, I am diverted by a flash of colour. A well-rounded woman in a bright orange tracksuit and lime green trainers puffs past on a bike, corkscrews of blonde hair escaping from her hood. Her mode of transport looks creaky, to say the least, and something about her red cheeks and slightly awkward posture tells me she’s brand new to this cycling lark. With a quick glance behind her to check for traffic (none), she suddenly starts pedalling furiously then freewheels with her legs out to the sides, shouting, ‘Whee-ee!’

A drop of rain plops onto my forehead and I glance skywards. I got wet walking into work this morning, resulting in a day of mad hair (think Kate Bush and ‘Wuthering Heights’) and the clouds are heavy with the threat of more rain.

Now I’ve lost the note. Oh, there it is, loitering at the car park entrance, as if it’s waiting for me to catch up.

Suddenly a vehicle roars out of the car park right in front of me and the driver brakes hard into a puddle. A bucket of cold rain-water rises up and slaps onto my thighs.

Out jumps The Boss.

Trousers clinging wetly, I bend down to rescue the money. But The Boss gets there first, trapping it neatly beneath a vintage Karl Lagerfeld heel.

‘Mine, I think.’ Snatching it up, she flashes me a dazzling – but entirely fake – smile.

I shrug as if I don’t care – and actually, I don’t think I do any more. It’s taken a great deal of practise but I’ve become fairly good at allowing her unpleasantness to roll over me. Does anyone like her, apart from her bank manager?

At the same time, I can’t help feeling a sneaky admiration for the woman’s stingy single-mindedness; her never-ending drive to acquire something for nothing. I mean, hello! Only The Boss could spot a freebie at ten paces from behind a car windscreen and get there in time to nab it.

It’s rumoured she goes to weddings with confetti on elastic.

But as I need to hold on to this job, naturally I couldn’t possibly comment …

Chapter One

‘You haven’t a ghost of a chance.’ Shona returns from the kitchen with our first caffeine hit of the day. ‘Here, get down, Bobbie, and let me do it.’

The desk beneath my feet sways scarily as I clamber off. It’s the flimsiest bit of flat-pack rubbish ever designed. We cobbled it together one lunch hour. (There were some screws left over, but we chucked them in the bin.)

Shona hands me the tray of mugs, pushes her oversized specs up her nose, hoicks up her long cord skirt and shoves it between her knees. Then she clambers up and, with a skill born of regular practise, surfs until she is steady, as the desk sways on an illusory ocean.

I watch, arms up ready to catch her, marvelling at what ‘Health & Safety’ would make of our ‘quirky’ work environment. It’s just as well a dodgy paint job from the last century has cemented the windows of our offices tight shut. One whisper of a breeze and I swear that desk would lift off on its spindly legs and float around the office like a dandelion clock.

The Boss never tires of pointing out that the desk actually cost her less than a box of the cheap print cartridges she buys (the kind that, if more than fifty per cent of them actually work, you feel chuffed out of all proportion).

The Boss thinks my desk is hilarious.

She doesn’t have to stand on it.

Looking back, she’s always found other people’s misfortune mildly amusing.

‘That’s it.’ Shona climbs down, having temporarily ‘fixed’ the terminally knackered blind.

The headquarters of Spit and Polish cleaners are two cramped, interconnecting offices and a shared kitchen in a converted Victorian villa that looks fairly impressive until you get inside. I once heard The Boss describe it as ‘shabby chic’. She is only half correct.

‘She’s coming.’ Shona rushes to switch on her computer.

We hear heels on the stairs and The Boss makes her entrance, elegant in a new honey-coloured cashmere coat that is almost the exact same shade as her chic, cropped hairstyle.

She holds the coat out to one side and barks, ‘Twenty-five quid at a car boot sale!’ Then she marches into her office and kicks the door shut with a beautifully-clad foot.

‘And good morning to you, too,’ mutters Shona.

She shoots me an anxious glance. ‘Do you think she’s noticed?’

I shake my head. ‘The radiators are clay cold now. She won’t suspect a thing.’

‘Really? Because I’d already started job hunting.’

Shona had phoned me late last night in an uncharacteristic panic and, being an office key-holder, I’d dived out into the frosty night to put things right. I reasoned The Boss never had to know that Shona, working late to catch up on some filing and finding herself alone in a chilly office, had not only committed the punishable-by-death crime of turning on the heating but also, in an unusual lapse of concentration, had forgotten to switch it off before she left.

The Boss’s rules on temperature control are non-negotiable. The heating cannot creep above ‘minimum’ between the months of October and April except in extreme conditions, such as when our fingers turn black and drop off. The rest of the year, we rely on chunky cardigans draped over the backs of our chairs to combat the shivers.

People laugh when I tell them of her meanness, but Shona and I haven’t found The Boss amusing for quite some time. Not since the day she announced she was dispensing with pay rises because in such an uncertain financial climate, we should consider ourselves bloody lucky to be in work in the first place.

Behind The Boss’s door, there’s the sound of something crashing to the floor followed by a loud expletive.

Ella, our new junior, purses her perfectly glossed lips. ‘Stress.’ She shakes her head regretfully. ‘I’ll bring her some chamomile teabags. I’ve got a mountain of them at home.’

Shona and I exchange a grin. The only way The Boss would ever go near a herbal teabag mountain would be if she had to climb over it to get to the hard stuff (Death Wish Coffee, treble strength).

Ella, who was watching our antics with the faulty blind in mild disbelief, points a square, French-polished fingernail under my desk and says, ‘Isn’t that arrangement a little dangerous?’

Since Ella arrived two weeks ago, we are even more pushed for space. I am crammed into a corner with no electrical sockets, so I get by with a complicated series of extension cables that stretch out across the floor like sleeping snakes.

Our junior casts a censorious glance at The Boss’s door. ‘I mean, doesn’t she care about Health & Safety?’

Shona and I exchange a look.

Ella is right, of course. But Shona is probably thinking exactly the same as me: since when did teenage girls become so confident? And so obnoxiously superior. It almost makes me want to defend The Boss!

Ella stands up. ‘I’ll volunteer to sort it out.’ She straightens the skirt of her cute pink dress.

‘No, no,’ chorus Shona and I in alarm, all but leaping out of our chairs to restrain her.

Ella gives us the kind of bewildered and slightly pitying look my twelve-year-old brother gives my mum when she gets flushed and animated recalling her brush with Beatles mania. (She saw them perform live, back in the day, and loves to tell how she had to revive her friend Marjorie who overheated in her vinyl mini dress and fell down in a swoon.)

I smile cheerily at Ella. ‘Best leave it up to The Boss, eh?’

‘If you want to keep your job,’ I murmur, sitting down at my computer and clicking on the following week’s cleaning rota.

Thankfully, Ella – who comes direct from the New York catwalk each morning – sits back down again. Today she is wearing a tangerine fake fur over the pink dress and skyscraper ‘nude’ shoes which, she informed us helpfully yesterday, can make women with fat legs look an awful lot slimmer. She was looking at Shona’s rear end, snugly encased in brown cord trousers, when she said this. Luckily, Shona had her head in the filing cabinet and didn’t notice.

To be fair, Ella does look amazing. I mean, I am twenty-nine, but standing next to her, I resemble a middle-aged nun. Actually, no, make that a middle-aged nun’s mother. (And let’s be honest here, I might just as well take Holy Orders. At least then Mum might stop fretting about me not having a ‘chap’ in my life.)

As far as fashion goes, I have always been drawn to black, ever since my fat teenage days. Black is so generous and forgiving, skimming over lumps and bumps and giving the satisfying illusion of a sleek outline. Of course, I don’t just wear black. I also like white and all colours in between – namely, many shades of grey. Icy grey, pastel grey, blue-grey, charcoal grey. My colour palette of choice means I can dive into my wardrobe in the morning, pull out any combination of garments and know, without doubt, that I will co-ordinate nicely.

I had a brief flirtation with eye-catching, peacock colours in my mid-twenties when I was at my slimmest, working in London and partying practically every night. I had the world at my feet; a dazzling future ahead of me. I was going to take the art world by storm with my quirky glass sculptures.

It was an optimism that lasted for about five minutes. The evidence of my youthful naïvety is now folded up and packed away in a trunk in Mum’s garage.

I don’t bother with make-up now, except for a touch of mascara and blusher, which I only wear because otherwise, with my pale complexion and dark hair, I look like I might have died during the night. I no longer waste money on hairdressers so my locks just keep getting longer and I twist them in a ‘messy up-do’ as it’s now called. Actually, I had this ‘style’ before it became fashionable. It takes me about twenty seconds to wind my hair up and skewer it with a big wooden pin, although admittedly by three o’clock it is usually falling down enough to genuinely warrant the term ‘messy’.

I glance at Ella, who’s been tasked with reorganising the office, a job Shona never has time to tackle. Sorting out paper clips and tidying filing cabinets is not exactly glamorous work. Ella is seventeen and earns pennies but she behaves and talks as if Alan Sugar is in the room and might, at any moment, spot her potential, point that knobbly finger of his and say, ‘Ella. You’re hired.’

Actually, I have a sneaky respect for her. In any other organisation, her youthful enthusiasm and fluent use of corporate jargon might combine to take her places.

But her prospects here are, regrettably, zilch.

A good boss educates and encourages her employees, finds each person’s unique talent and makes sure her staff feel valued and respected.

The Boss subscribes to none of the above.

Making money is all she cares about these days – and the thing is, she’s very, very good at it. As she keeps on telling us. Of course, she has her exhaustingly successful family to thank for setting her up in business in the first place.

The McGinleys are all high-achievers. Mr McGinley’s electronics company floated on the Stock Exchange last year and his wife is an extremely successful barrister. Brother Max has followed in his mother’s footsteps and Carol’s sister, a dentist, lives in Los Angeles and crafts perfect smiles for B-list celebrities. Carol, the youngest of the three, is following in their workaholic footsteps with her cleaning gold mine.

She started up the company three years ago and we are now the premier domestic cleaning company in the area. Everyone I talk to has heard of Spit and Polish. And to be fair, The Boss has worked her butt off to make it happen, grafting late into the night and most weekends, and making shameless use of her parents’ business contacts to bring in work.

She employs an odious little man called Gerry Flack to do her accounting. He’s overly moist, believes he’s everyone’s intellectual superior and is a master at slithering his way through tax loopholes while staying just this side of prosecution. The Boss regards Gerry as second only to God and she guards the financial records jealously, locking them away in a desk drawer. Even Shona has never clapped eyes on the lucrative results of our hard work. We joke that The Boss thinks she’d have a staff rebellion on her hands if we found out the true scale of her wealth.

My dad died when I was sixteen, leaving Mum with me and my unborn baby brother. Cash was always tight – most of our clothes came from charity shops – and I was aware from a very young age that life wasn’t always fair and that it was the people with money who wielded the power.

We have living proof of that here every day, sitting in the adjoining office.

Poor Ella has no idea what she’s let herself in for.

The Boss has grown even narkier of late. She has developed a way of ‘putting wood in t’hole’ (as they used to say in this part of the North) that borders on legendary. Her door slams shake the building, reverberate through your abdomen and encourage flakes of peeling paint to hurl themselves off the walls in surrender. Most days, Shona and I tiptoe around on eggshells with our shoulders up to our ears.

My friend, Fez, says I should just tell her to stuff her job. He keeps banging on about how pointless it is being creative if I’m not planning to actually create. But glass-blowing or painting watercolours isn’t exactly going to pay the rent, now, is it? It would take years to get established and how would I exist until then?

No, far better to concentrate on keeping The Boss sweet so that I can hang onto my job, however mundane it might be, and eventually get Tim his operation. And as I keep saying to Fez, The Boss isn’t all bad. She’s consistent, which is a good thing. There are never any nasty surprises because she’s consistently horrible. So you know exactly where you stand with her (and also where you’d prefer to stand, which is in the solicitor’s office next door because at least it’s warm in there).

‘I owe you, Bobbie.’ Shona whisks the tie from her brown bushy ponytail, gathers the rebellious bits that have gone AWOL and, with a snap of elastic, gets the troops under control. ‘Your midnight dash probably saved my life.’

I grin. ‘Honestly, it’s fine. And anyway, she seems to have other things on her mind this morning.’

Shona spins round. ‘What other things?’

‘I’ve no idea. But I notice she’s wearing the Chanel blouse, and yesterday she told me to hunt out the coffee machine.’

‘Oh, Lord. I knew something was up.’

I laugh. ‘She’s probably just drumming up new business.’

‘Yes, but the coffee machine?’

‘Hmm, you’ve got a point.’ I bite my lip thoughtfully. Important client or not, the only coffee on offer here is the instant brown powder that comes in an industrial-size tin from the Cash and Carry. (The first sip makes you shudder but it’s any port in a storm when you need your morning caffeine fix.)

‘Plus,’ says Shona darkly, ‘she’s been really secretive lately.’

‘How?’

She shrugs. ‘Phoning people directly instead of shouting through to me to do it. Surviving on fags. And snippy. Really snippy.’

‘So what’s new?’

A roar from next door makes us both jump.

‘Shona-a-a-a-a? Is this crap meant to be coffee? If I’d wanted dishwater, I’d have asked for fucking dishwater!’

As bosses go, Carol McGinley is a complete and utter nightmare.

It’s hard to believe that, until a few years ago, she and I were as close as best friends could possibly be.

Chapter Two

‘Bobbie? In here!’

The Boss bellows like a drill sergeant in a corny movie and I rise to attention.

I know better than to hang around when I’m summoned.

I go into her office and sit down, studying her curiously as she checks something in an ancient ring binder file. Her green eyes are bruised with shadows. Not that this is anything new; these days she always looks like she’s a week behind on sleep.

At last she looks up. ‘I need you to book me a hotel.’

‘A hotel?’ I can’t help sounding surprised. The Boss never stays in hotels. She never goes anywhere, just works all the time.

She grabs her fags and lights up.

‘Yes, a hotel.’ Her tone is rich with sarcasm. ‘You know, one of those things that looks like a house but bigger.’ She draws on the ciggy as if it’s a life-saver and blows smoke all over me. ‘I’m in London overnight. I’ll need a room.’

She shoves her desk calendar at me. A Saturday several weeks ahead has been circled furiously in red.

‘It’s a party. I’ve got to be there,’ she says, her tone suggesting that, given the choice, she’d rather be pretty much anywhere else in the known universe.

‘What’s the do in aid of?’ I’m taking my life in my hands, asking such a personal question.

‘Seventieth birthday.’ She scowls. ‘My father’s.’

I nod. ‘That’ll be nice?’ It’s a probing question more than a statement of fact.

‘No, it won’t. Actually, ‘party’ is the wrong word for it. It’ll be a gathering of his business cronies under one roof with the potential for making more money.’

‘Right. But at least you’ll see your family.’

She ignores this, draws hard on her fag and blows the smoke out, sideways this time. ‘They’re all booked into the hotel where the function is. I’d rather be somewhere else.’

She slaps a sheet of paper on the desk in front of me. ‘I’ve written down my requirements. I do not want an economy hell hole that looks like a block of council flats and where you’re expected to bring your own soap. And where the walls are so thin you can hear the guests in the room next door shagging all night.’

I bristle slightly. ‘There’s nothing wrong with budget hotels.’

‘Maybe not – if you’ve never stayed anywhere else,’ she says pointedly, knowing I never have. ‘I’ll have had a really stressful day. I will want to crash in a chic, comfortable room, go for a swim and a sauna, and eat in a decent restaurant.’

She points her ciggy at me. ‘I do not want to choose from a menu that’s the size of a protester’s placard and is laminated for ease of wiping, okay?’

‘Well, there are plenty of small, boutique hotels in London.’ I shrug. ‘You’ll be spoilt for choice.’

‘Er, hang on a sec. Before you start splurging my cash, I am not paying’ – she grabs the list of requirements and scribbles something at the bottom – ‘any more than that.’ She stabs the figure and I glance at it and nod, assuming she’s mistakenly missed off a nought.