Milly sat on the bed up in her room, listening to the roar of conversation from the guests downstairs and glad to be up here, away from it. Away from the necessity to be polite, to play hostess. Because she guessed she was the hostess now.
Now that Mum was gone.
Milly gulped and blinked back tears. She felt scoured out, empty, finished. She sat there, slumped, and looked at the black bin bags stacked up high against the far wall of her bedroom.
Nula’s things.
Her designer dresses. Her furs. Her jewellery. Her make-up. Harlan had sent that dead-eyed creep Ludo upstairs yesterday and the bastard had bagged all her mother’s gear up and stuffed it in here.
‘You’ll want to go through all this, won’t you,’ Harlan had said to Milly. ‘See if there’s anything you want to keep? I might hold on to some of Dad’s pieces, there’s a few designer bits I like, but most of the stuff’s too loud for my taste,’ he said. ‘I’m taking over the master suite, anyway. The boys’ll move my stuff in there.’
Rotten bastard, she thought, but didn’t dare say it.
Now she wearily got to her feet and went over to the pile of bags. Her mother’s stuff. Crying, she opened the first. Such beautiful gowns. Sequinned and hand-stitched and worth a small fortune. And – oh God – here was the pastel blue shift Nula had been wearing the day before she’d left for the Med with Dad for their pre-anniversary cruise. The last time Milly had seen her alive.
Milly clutched at the silky fabric, brought it to her nose, inhaled Je Reviens, Nula’s signature scent. Sobbing, she dropped it back into the bag. Oh Christ. Oh Mum.
With shaking hands she moved on to the next bag, tearing it open. These were more personal, intimate things. Nula’s Chinese tortoiseshell jewellery case. Her tablets. Dad had called them ‘Nula’s crazy pills’. That had been unkind. But she supposed the stress of living with someone as flaky as Mum must have told on him. Must have frustrated him, she guessed, because Charlie wasn’t the kind that would ever succumb to a mental illness, and he had never understood Nula’s pain.
Milly delved deeper. There was a big Louis Vuitton holdall in here, with notebooks inside. Nula had never been a reader. You either were or you weren’t, and she knew that Nula had never picked up a book in her life.
‘I’ll read when I’m ninety,’ she had always said.
But Nula hadn’t lived that long. And these weren’t books to read. Milly thumbed through a few pages and saw Nula’s scrawled, shambolic handwriting. Ah! Nula’s journals. These were the notebooks the psychiatrists and psychotherapists had encouraged Nula to write in when she was receiving treatment and in her day-to-day life; they had wanted her to pour out her troubles onto the page, to find some release maybe. Milly reached into the bag again. There was a whole stack of them, testament to Nula’s long struggle with her mental health. There were more of them in the pouffe in the sitting room, the ones she’d shown Belle when she’d been asking questions about the business; she’d get those later, keep them all together in this bag. She couldn’t just bin them. And she didn’t want anybody else pawing through them. Maybe later, she would be able to look at them in more detail. Right now, she couldn’t. It was too raw, all of it.
She thought of what Belle had told her about the Clacton place, the one they’d found reference to.
A crack factory, running alongside a legitimate furnishings business? Her father, a drugs baron? Her mother, going along with that? Belle’s parents, in the know?
No. It couldn’t be true. Could it? She wished she smoked or drank or something, because she was in a bad, bad place right now and she felt that it could only get worse.