I drove to my parents’ house in a state of consternation, not helped by the stream of messages arriving on both phones.
Even if Nelson hadn’t been such a homemade policeman, lecturing me incessantly about hands-free car kits, I wouldn’t have wanted to check the messages anyway, in case they’d contained even more pleas to fit appointments into my bursting schedule and/or updates about whatever this emergency was at home. When it came to my father, ignorance was usually bliss. Which was just as well, because as far as he was concerned, “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” were three entirely separate levels of information.
The other members of my family weren’t much better. They rarely bothered to explain their crises in advance, on the grounds, I think, that if I’d had any inkling of what I’d have been letting myself in for, I’d simply have driven in the opposite direction.
I pulled a reflective face in the mirror. That said, things had been quite peaceful in the eight months since Christmas, when my younger sister Emery married William, a sports-mad, ultracompetitive, thrice-married solicitor. Peaceful by Romney-Jones standards, at least, since they’d spent most of those eight months moving to Chicago and therefore removing themselves from immediate contact; although Emery was so vague that she could easily be on the verge of childbirth by now and not thought to mention it.
There had been nothing in the paper about my father for months—although Parliament was out of session at the moment.
My mother was, the last time I called home, resident in the marital manor house and not shacked up in some seaweed spa in the west of Ireland, or, worse, in some discreet ranch called Serendipity in Arizona having her liver holistically massaged. Though that, again, might have been connected in some way with Parliament being out of session.
My other sister, Allegra, was in Sweden, where she lived with her husband Lars, an art and antiquities dealer specializing in prehistoric arrowheads and other more arcane stuff that I didn’t like to ask about.
And Granny…I turned up my Julie London CD, which reminded me of her. Granny was the one redeeming feature of my family: She was glamorous, amusing, and the only person I knew with sufficient self-confidence to rattle my father. She had friends in higher places than him, coupled with a mysterious private income, which meant that he couldn’t crack the financial whip at her either.
I loved Granny more than anyone, but if there was some crisis afoot at home, she was almost certainly on a camel tour of Egypt or similar, charming all and sundry from beneath a diaphanous veil.
I made it back to the family pile in a very decent two hours, and when I pulled up in the drive there was a full complement of cars outside. That never boded well. Family crises seemed to escalate exponentially the more Romney-Joneses joined in. And from the chewed-up state of the gravel, all the cars had been parked with some rage. Mummy’s mud-splattered Mercedes station wagon still had a dog in the back that she’d obviously forgotten to let out in her haste to get in. Daddy’s Jag was blocking in Emery’s old lime-green Beetle, left there since her wedding, and an enormous black BMW X5 was halfway across the ornamental flowerbed in the center, looking not so much parked as stalled and abandoned.
I peered at it. It was brand new. God knew who that belonged to.
I parked my own Subaru well out of the way, next to an ancient hydrangea, and checked my face in the rearview mirror, taking three slow, deep breaths to prepare myself for the onslaught. When that failed, I had a couple of squirts of Rescue Remedy. Then another, for good measure.
The gardens were deceptively calm in the warm August evening, and I could smell the tall box hedges, which ran around the perimeter of the house, mingling with the musky roses climbing up the front wall. I wondered, hopefully, whether I’d be able to deal with whatever it was in time to be back for the date I had with Jonathan on Saturday night. He was taking me to a dinner dance, but he wouldn’t say where: he wanted it to be a surprise. I sighed happily. Jonathan’s surprises were always pleasant ones. Which was more than I could say for my family.
I drew back my shoulders. The sooner I got it over with, the sooner I’d be drifting round the dance floor in my best Ginger Rogers frock.
Jenkins, Mummy’s oldest basset hound, leaped up at the window of her car as I approached, barking his head off with excitement, and I helped him out. He was getting on a bit and sometimes needed a hand over the dog shelf, as his back legs were somewhat arthritic and his undercarriage tended to ground him like a barge.
“Hello, old man!” I said, wobbling his big ears and trying not to get my face within reach of his toxic breath.
He snuffled gratefully at my bag as I made my way inside. Already the echoes of a family row were bouncing off the parquet tiles like so much distant cannon fire. I adjudged, from the level of shrieking and bellowing, that the row was taking place not in the kitchen, as usual, but in the drawing room, which indicated that it was quite a high-level argument. In the intimidatingly formal drawing room, my father could take full advantage of the uncomfortable antique sofas, which he liked to stalk around then lean over, aggressively, without warning, to bellow in the ear of the occupant. My mother much preferred to argue in the kitchen, where she had improved access to plates and knives, not to mention “cooking sherry.”
“Have you taken leave of your senses entirely?” Daddy was yelling at some unfortunate—my mother, I guessed, since he asked her this question more often than anything else. “Do you think the world revolves entirely around you?”
I paused at the door, temporarily paralyzed by the sheer hypocrisy of this comment, coming from a man who refused to read the morning paper if someone else had gotten there first and “spoiled the pages.”
“No,” said a low but equally piercing voice. “I imagine the world revolves around Art. Which is better than imagining it revolves around money, like you do.”
Oh, God. Allegra. What was she doing here?
Jenkins whimpered, turned tail with surprising agility, and skittered across the parquet and down to the kitchen, out of harm’s way. I was tempted to join him, especially since it was village fete time and I knew Mummy would have cleaned out the cake stalls with her usual inability to stop at four fruit scones.
“Don’t be so bloody precious!” roared my father, who had no time for Allegra’s artistic nature, or, indeed, Lars’s art gallery, oddly profitable though it was. “Even Melissa doesn’t come out with claptrap like that, and she doesn’t know the difference between shorthand and streetwalking!”
Charming. The “real” nature of my agency, as understood by Daddy, was something of a running joke. Or it would be, if it had been funny.
“Martin!” screeched my mother. “Do not use my Meissien dish as an ashtray!”
I gave Mummy or Allegra ten seconds to leap to my defense, then, when no one did, I barged in before they actively joined in with slurs of their own.
“Oh, Christ, what now?” Daddy bellowed by way of paternal greeting. He had apparently forgotten that it was in fact he who had summoned me there in the first place.
“Hello, Melissa,” said my mother, through tight lips. I mean they were tight lips, literally. Her whole face seemed unnaturally taut, and she was wearing her shimmery blond hair much more forward than usual. “I’m so glad you’re here. I know you can talk some sense into everyone, darling. You always do.”
“Hello, Mummy. Hello, Daddy,” I said, shrinking, like Alice in Wonderland, back to my nine-year-old self. “Hello, Allegra, how lovely to see you at home! I thought you were in Stockholm at the moment.”
Allegra was quite something to behold in the chintz of the drawing room. She seemed taller than ever, in a long black kaftan-type thing that would have made me look like a funeral parlor sofa but draped over her willowy frame like couture. It might well have been couture, come to that. Her long dark hair—about the only thing we had in common—rippled down her back, and her face was unmade-up, apart from her lips, which were a bright matte scarlet. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.
“I’ve left Lars,” she announced, red lips moving in a hypnotic fashion amidst all the black and white. “I have Come Home.”
“God alone knows why you have to come back to this one,” interrupted my father. “You’ve got a perfectly good home of your own on Ham Common.”
She shot him a poisonous glare in reply and turned back to me with a pained expression. “It’s over. All over, Melissa.”
“Oh, no!” I said, feeling terrible for her. “You poor thing!” Allegra and Lars were notoriously tempestuous, as befitted artists, but she’d never actually left him before. That was, she’d explained, the whole point of having two houses in separate countries. It cut down nicely on the togetherness. “What’s happened?”
A dark look crossed Allegra’s pale face. “I can’t talk about it.”
“Is it too painful? Give it time,” I urged. “When Gabi split up with Aaron, she couldn’t—”
“No,” said Allegra. “I mean I really can’t talk about it. I have to speak to my solicitor first.”
“A solicitor?” My hand flew to my mouth. Was it that bad? “Oh, Allegra! I’m so sorry!”
She nodded. “I know. He’s on his way over now.”
Now? I frowned. “But surely it can wait until you’ve had a chance to sleep on things a little, you know, calm down?…”
Allegra made a zipping gesture over her lips.
My mother let out an impatient sigh, but Daddy shushed her with his raised hand. “That’s my girl,” he said with a ghastly smile of pride. “Always make sure you’re on firm legal ground before you get the kicking brogues laced up. Aren’t you glad now that I made the prenup in England and not in Stockholm? Hmm?”
Allegra tossed her head scornfully.
“I always think there’s a touch of art in a really clever contract,” he concluded.
“But, darling, why can’t you go back to Ham?” asked my mother. Her hands twitched automatically for her cigarettes, but she was obviously on one of her annual giving-up kicks, because I didn’t see her familiar gold cigarette case around. Instead, she reached underneath the sofa and pulled out an embroidered bag with a kitten on the front. To my astonishment, she withdrew a shapeless hank of knitting and started clicking away, lips pressed firmly together where her cigarette would normally have gone.
Daddy tapped the ash from his cigar ostentatiously into the fireplace.
“I wonder what will kill you first, Martin?” she said, shutting her eyes. “Tobacco or me?”
“You, I’d hope, my darling,” replied my father easily. “I’m on the board of at least two tobacco importers—shame to cast a shadow on business.”
He whipped back round to Allegra. “Answer your mother’s question, Allegra—why can’t you go back to Ham? Perfectly good house you’ve got there. What’s happened? Lars changed the locks?”
“Lars has not changed the locks,” snorted Allegra, flapping her long black sleeves huffily. She and Daddy were practically nose-to-nose on the carpet now. “That’s my house!”
“So why can’t you go and boil with rage there, instead of cluttering up my home?” he demanded. “Your mother and I went through this when you were a teenager. We don’t need to have another round of midnight phone calls and dead cats in the garden.”
Dead cats? No one told me anything, even then.
“Not that we don’t love to see you at home, darling,” added my mother, clicking furiously. “It’s lovely to see you.”
My father wheeled round on his heel. “Are you off your head, Belinda? Of course we mind her turning up here! Not only am I a busy MP, I am now serving on no fewer than two Olympic subcommittees!”
“Are you?” I asked, temporarily distracted. “I didn’t know that.”
“Yes, well, I’ve been invited to join a couple of select committees for the London 2012 business. Taking up a lot of my time, involves a tiresome amount of meeting and greeting and so on….” He sighed as if he didn’t spend half his life trying to find junkets to skive off on.
“Really?” I said, impressed all the same. My father, involved with the Olympic spirit! “Congratulations!”
He brushed it away, but he was unable to hide his preening. “Well, lots of opportunities floating around right now. For the right people…if you know what I mean.”
Unfortunately, I did.
“So what sort of committee are you on?” I asked, intrigued.
“Oh, this and that…I can’t really talk about it,” he said. “Very hush hush just at the minute, but it’s very high level. Very high level.” This seemed to bring him back to reality, because he swung back to glare at Allegra, who had arranged herself along a sofa like a militant end-of-the-pier crystal-ball reader.
“So you’ll appreciate that I don’t need all these amateur theatricals going on when I have work to do. If I want to see Phantom of the Opera I’ll have a night out in the West End. You’re welcome to stay here tonight, Allegra, but you can’t just land here and treat this place like a hotel. You have no idea what plans your mother and I have for entertaining this week, for one thing.”
A look of dread passed across Mummy’s face, and she knitted faster. She spent most of her time organizing dinners and cocktail parties for Daddy’s constituents and contacts and, with what time was left, writing notes of apology and explanation to cover any untoward consequences.
“I can’t go back to Ham because it’s covered in POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape!” Allegra roared.
“What?” I gasped, but no one was listening to me.
“Oh, don’t be so hysterical!” snapped Daddy dismissively.
I stared at her, my skin crawling with panic. Mummy looked less concerned by this news than she had about Daddy’s weekend plans, and as for Daddy and Allegra, they seemed to be positively reveling in the drama.
“There are forensic policemen from three different countries swarming all over my beautiful home, and I am not allowed to go back, all right?” Allegra spat, with no small relish. “You don’t think I’d put a foot over your Godforsaken threshold unless I absolutely had to? I’ve left my husband, not had some kind of mental collapse, for Christ’s sake!”
Mummy made a choking sound and scrabbled around in her knitting bag. I wondered if she had a whole other set of knitting patterns for serious stress, but instead she pulled out a medicine bottle, wrenched off the cap, shook out a handful of pills, and swallowed them.
“Valerian,” she lied unconvincingly, seeing my shocked face.
“Valerian, Vicodin, Valium…,” mused Daddy, puffing on his cigar. “What’s a couple of letters between friends when you’re working your way through the narcotic alphabet?”
“Right up to Viagra,” spiked Allegra.
“Enough!” roared Daddy. “I will be in my study. Working. At the job that twenty-three thousand sentient voters have elected me to do.” And with that, he hurled his cigar butt in the fireplace and stalked out.
Allegra, who had risen momentarily to argue, threw herself back on the sofa and glowered at the open door. “I thought age was meant to mellow bastards like him.”
“It doesn’t,” said Mummy, who was suddenly much more serene now that Daddy was out of the room. Her knitting, however, remained jerky. “It just intensifies them. Like those really stinky cheeses.”
Since no one was going to offer me any, I helped myself to a cup of stewed tea from the tray on the mahogany side table. There were many questions I was burning to ask Allegra, but I fished around for an easy, nonconfrontational opener. Which wasn’t as easy as it sounded, believe me.
“So…how long are you planning on staying, Allegra?” I asked. “In England, I mean.”
“God knows.” She let out a theatrical sigh and kicked off her shoes so she could tuck her bare feet underneath her. She had enviably ruby-red toenails. “Until I’m deported, I guess.”
“Oh, darling, it won’t come to that, will it?” murmured my mother. She paused, then asked more seriously, “I mean, will it?”
I looked on, aghast.
“That depends what that little shit Lars has been up to,” Allegra hissed. “And believe me, when I find out, it won’t just be Scotland Yard he’ll be scuttling away from.”
I sipped my tea and thanked God that I, at least, had a morally upstanding and thoroughly responsible boyfriend in Jonathan. The dodgiest thing he was liable to do was send his secretary out to feed his parking meter.
“Allegra,” I began, carefully. “Why have the police taped up your house? No one’s been…hurt, have they?”
She cast an imperious look toward the door to check that Daddy wasn’t lurking. Clearly she was hoping to keep him out of the picture for as long as possible—why, I didn’t know. Power games, presumably. “Lars has been implicated in some international smuggling ring. I don’t know what. Cocaine, I assume,” she added airily, “and there was some mention of rhino horn. And antiquities.” She paused and twisted the large gold rings on her right hand. “Such an idiot.”
“Gosh,” I said, shocked. “I never thought Lars—”
“And arms,” she went on, with a flick of her long white fingers. “Some other type of drug too, but I can’t remember what…”
“Allegra!”
“…and possibly money laundering, but for God’s sake! Is there any need to be searching my house for evidence?”
As there was no polite sisterly response to this, we sat in silence for a moment while Mummy’s needles clicked hysterically. I couldn’t work out what she was meant to be making: It looked like it could be anything from a matinee jacket for Jenkins to some kind of ceremonial hat.
“Mummy, why are you knitting?” I asked, because I had to know, imminent Interpol raid or not. “Emery isn’t pregnant, is she?”
“Not as far as I know, darling,” she said. “I just enjoy it. It gives me something to do with my hands. Some lady at one of the Women’s Institute fairs recommended it for giving up smoking. She was smoking forty a day, she said, and now she knits entire king-size blankets in under a week. Plus,” she added, “I can fantasize about shoving these needles up your father’s ghastly nose at times of stress.”
“No plans for your wedding anniversary yet then?” asked Allegra. “Thirty-five years in September, isn’t it?”
Mummy knitted faster. “That’s weeks away. Don’t buy a card just yet.”
“So what are you going to do?” I asked Allegra, to change the subject. “Have you, er…” It was delicate, talking about money. I hated it. “The police haven’t done anything awful, like freeze your bank accounts, have they?”
Allegra’s head swiveled over to me, sending her curtain of jet-black hair swinging. “How the hell did you know that?”
“Oh…just a guess.” I wasn’t stupid. It had happened to Daddy twice.
She sighed. “Well, yes. That has happened. And I refuse to ask that bastard for a loan.”
“Which one? Lars or Daddy?”
“Daddy. Though Lars owes me.”
“Just as well, darling,” murmured Mummy, “because I don’t think he’d give you one.”
“No,” I agreed. “And there are always conditions.”
I knew that from personal experience. Daddy’s loans made Mafia money-lending look like some form of charity handout. What you didn’t pay in interest, you paid in favors owed.
“I can give you enough to tide you over,” offered Mummy, “but…”
“No, no,” said Allegra, placing her hands firmly on her knees. “I’ll just have to get a job. That’s what you did, wasn’t it, Melissa? When you couldn’t find a rich husband?”
I stared at her in shock. On so many levels.
“Just joking,” Allegra said. “I mean, how hard can it be? I don’t need that much to live on in London. I reckon about fifty thousand would be enough. Where’s the Times? Don’t they have an Employment section?”
I narrowed my eyes slightly. I sincerely hoped this wasn’t what Daddy had wanted me to come and sort out. I was a problem-solver, not a white witch. “Allegra,” I began, “have you thought about, er, what skills you’d be able to offer? Because there really aren’t that many jobs that pay that sort of money for so little experience…”
The phone rang on the side table. Mummy stared at it for a second, as if trying to place the sound, then picked it up. “Hello?”
“Your lipstick is smudged,” Allegra informed me. “You should either wear lipstick with panache or not at all.” She paused to let this information sink in while I fiddled self-consciously with my compact, then added, “Have you thought about plain lip gloss?”
Mummy put the receiver to her chest and looked at me sympathetically. “It’s your father, calling from his study. He says can you pop in to see him, please? He’d like a word.”
“And that word will doubtless be cash,” snorted Allegra.
“Allegra,” said my mother weakly.
I got up, startled by the novelty of actually wanting to escape to my father’s Study of Doom.
I only had to get within thirty feet—yelling distance—of my father’s study to feel my stomach begin to knot and my palms begin to dampen: Virtually every difficult conversation of my childhood had taken place within its book-lined walls. Most of those difficult conversations had been about the cost-effectiveness of educating me at a series of very expensive schools—I’m afraid my grades made Princess Diana look like Stephen Hawking—but there had been some other delights thrown in for variation, like the time he’d explained we’d all have to go and live in France to avoid a tax scandal, and then there was the one about our au pair’s horrendous court case in which my Snoopy pajama case had played an embarrassingly central role, and…
However, when in situ in his oak-paneled study, Daddy still had the ability to reduce me to jelly, even after a year of asserting myself through Honey’s no-nonsense persona. These days I could just about tell Emery to buy her own curtains rather than have me “run some up” for her on my sewing machine, but Daddy was a whole other kettle of fish.
The decanter was already on his desk, and he’d poured himself a large Scotch by the time I walked down the corridors that led to his bit of the house. When he heard me knock, he swung round in his chair like a Bond villain and steepled his fingers. I hated it when he did that. It usually meant he knew something I didn’t and wasn’t going to tell me straight away.
“Ah, Melissa,” he said, gesturing toward the chair as if I’d turned up for an interview. “Do sit down. Take the weight off your feet.”
I tried not to take that personally.
“It’s a while since we’ve had a little chat, isn’t it?” he mused, sipping his Scotch. “I think the last time, if I remember rightly, was at your sister’s wedding. When you told me all about your escort agency.”
The wedding I’d organized, I might add. All by myself.
“It’s not an escort agency,” I replied hotly, rising to the bait despite myself. “It’s—”
“Yes, yes…” He flapped a hand at me. “So you say. Anyway, how is business? Booming? Hmm?”
“It’s going well,” I said cautiously.
“Making lots of contacts?”
I eyed him, not sure where this was going, but certain it was going somewhere. Somewhere I would almost certainly not want to end up. “Ye-e-e-es.”
He frowned in what I think he imagined was an understanding manner. “Or is that awfully dull boyfriend of yours laying down the law about what you can and can’t do? Hmm? I imagine he’s got some pretty strong views about, ah, a few of your sidelines, eh?”
How did he do that? Did he have some kind of telepathic hot wire into my deepest secrets? I went hot and cold.
“No,” I insisted, for what felt like the millionth time. “Jonathan’s very happy for me to carry on the agency. I mean, I’m mainly sorting out people’s wardrobes and arranging their parties these days, but I’m sure if I wanted to take on a client who needed me to…” I slowed down, realizing the untruth of what I was saying. But I was committed now. “…deal with more lifestyle issues, he’d understand.”
“Ding!” went Nelson’s lie detector in my head.
Damn.
Daddy tipped his head to one side and smiled at me, as if I were a very stupid little girl. “Well, that’s nice. It would be a shame to let such a clever business idea go to waste.”
I was thrown by this unexpected turn of events. Last time we’d discussed the Little Lady Agency, he’d accused me of working as a hooker and dragging the family name into disrepute.
“Anyway, Melissa, since you’re doing so well, you must be run off those great big feet of yours, no?”
“Well…”
“Come, come, either you’re doing well, or you’re not?”
“I’m doing well.”
“So you can give Allegra something to do.” He pushed himself away from the desk with the air of a job well done and started flicking through his Rolodex of cronies by the phone. “Keep her busy. Out of our hair.”
I stared at him. “You are joking now, aren’t you?”
Daddy looked up from his address book. “Does Allegra’s divorce strike you as anything to joke about?”
“Well, no, but…”
“You do seem to be remarkably uncaring about your sisters,” he observed reproachfully. “I practically had to twist your arm to help out with Emery’s wedding. Is it because you’re feeling the call of the old maid’s apron, eh? There’s always volunteer work, you know. Spinsterhood isn’t the end of the world any more, my dear girl.”
“But I can’t give Allegra a job!” I wailed. “There isn’t enough for her to do, even if I wanted to help out. Which I do. Of course I do. But wouldn’t she be better working in an art gallery, or something like that? She’s got lots of experience of…um, art.”
I didn’t want to say that Allegra could wipe out my client list in about seven phone calls. She had the interpersonal skills of a grave robber, and most of my clients were ridiculously sensitive.
Daddy peered at me patiently. “I realize that, Melissa. Allegra would be an asset to any gallery.”
My eyes boggled at this outrageous fib, and he had the grace to drop his gaze momentarily.
“But, thinking as a protective father,” he went on smoothly, “it would be quite stressful for Allegra to reenter the job market at—”
“Enter the job market,” I corrected him. “She’s never actually had a real job.”
“Quite so,” agreed Daddy. “Even more reason why this isn’t the time to open herself up to the strain of interviews and possible rejection.”
“And she’s also under investigation by the police,” I added.
“I know,” said Daddy. “And, well…” His voice trailed off discreetly. “The press are ghastly, prying creatures. And I know you girls have always suffered the pressures of being the children of a prominent politician.”
He looked at me beadily over his fingers, and the penny dropped. With a clang, right in my eye.
“You want me to give Allegra a job at my office because you don’t want her showing you up in someone else’s!” I said.
“Right the first time,” said Daddy, shuffling some papers on his desk, as if the interview was nearing a close. “We don’t want some nosy HR woman poking around in our business, and I don’t want Allegra getting on the front page of the Sun for downloading porn or taking drugs in the loo or whatever else she’s liable to do.”
“But I can’t afford to pay her anywhere near what she wants,” I protested, thinking of Allegra’s exorbitant ideas about salary. “I don’t even pay myself that sort of money!”
“Oh, I don’t expect her to scratch around on nothing,” said Daddy. “I’m happy to, how can I put it, supplement her income?”
I stared at him, trying to see where the scam was. There had to be one. Daddy was not a “free money” sort of businessman.
“And I can put a little something your way too,” he said generously. “I’m going to need some guidance on international etiquette, with so many meetings with dignitaries in my Olympic diary, and who better to guide me than London’s premier etiquette expert?”
If I was reeling before, I was knocked off-balance by this, and Daddy seized on my uncertainty like a hawk spotting a field mouse with a gammy leg.
“Wouldn’t that be wonderful, Melissa?” he demanded. “Not only working on an internationally significant project, but helping your father at the same time! And promoting your business! And getting paid! And,” he added as an afterthought, “maybe meeting some nice young man!”
“I have a nice young man, thank you.”
Daddy sniffed. “Well, an American one, yes. So, can we agree on this? Between us? Hmm?”
I knew there was something I was missing here, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it could be. “And what if I say no?” I hazarded bravely.
Daddy drained his Scotch. “Don’t make me answer that, Melissa. Bottom line is she can’t hang around here like some kind of very high maintenance vampire bat, and that’s the long and short of it. I have things to be getting on with. I’d be most upset if I had to add Allegra—and you—to that list.”
“Er, I’ll think about it,” I said. What option did I have? “I’ll do my best.”
“Good, good…”
He picked up the phone and gave me a ghastly smile, showing all his teeth, old and new.
I excused myself and went down to the kitchen for something to calm my nerves.