Yet if she’d stopped to think about it for more than a second, she would have realised that none of this had ever really made sense. As if Martin would own a huge apartment like this and then rent it out to her for such a ridiculously low rent. But she had let him, hadn’t she? She’d closed her mind as to why he’d chosen to be so ‘generous’ and, instead, she had buried her head in the sand and just got on with it, because it had seemed like a lifeline thrown to her in an increasingly turbulent world.
It had been the first decent place she’d lived in since the fortune she’d acquired during her girl-band days had been lost in such spectacular style by her father. She’d gone from a six-bedroomed house in Surrey on glitzy St George’s Hill—with its obligatory swimming pool and the cachet of knowing that John Lennon had once lived two streets away—to a series of ever-more shabby apartments. She’d downsized and downsized until all her worldly goods had been reduced to little more than the contents of a single suitcase. And hadn’t her battered spirit found a blissful kind of refuge here in this glorious tree-lined street? Somewhere where she could just close the door on the rest of the world and lose herself in dreams of a brighter future.
Her last place had been a horrible bedsit above a dry-cleaning shop and she’d been paranoid that the fumes would affect her voice. But she hadn’t had a lot of choice. She needed to be in London because that was where the work was—but living in London was prohibitively expensive. And lonely. Though maybe her other job contributed to the loneliness. Cleaning people’s houses didn’t provide colleagues and it didn’t pay particularly well—but at least it gave her the flexibility to be able to carry on with her singing. And singing was her life. It was all she had left. The only real thing she had to hang onto.
She closed the door behind her and went into the bathroom to start running a bath, telling herself that she had come through things much worse than this. She had to keep positive and keep going—and by morning she would have discovered a solution to this particular problem.
But after a sleepless night the morning presented her with more than the worry of whether Titus Alexander would be as ruthless as he had implied. Her throat was tickly and sore—and felt as if someone had coated it with sandpaper. It was the professional singer’s nightmare and when she tried a practice note, she heard the terrifying sound of her voice cracking. Roxy shivered. There were things she could put up with and things she could not—and losing her voice came in the latter category. In a panic she prepared a concoction of lemon and honey and hot water, which she cradled as she sat by the big window and dialled Martin Murray’s number.
She never called him these days—although sometimes he rang her with that whiny note in his voice as he tried to get her to have dinner with him. But there was no whininess in his voice now—just an oddly furtive tone as he picked it up on the second ring.
Gone was the teasing flirtation which usually edged his words. ‘Roxy,’ he said warily. ‘This is a surprise.’
‘I?
??ve had a visitor,’ she said flatly.
There was a pause. ‘Go on.’
‘Titus Alexander came to my dressing room.’
An odd, ugly note entered his voice. ‘And?’
Roxy swallowed. ‘And not only did he inform me that I was illegally subletting his apartment—he also told me that I had to be out by the end of the week.’
She waited. And waited. But what had she expected? That Martin Murray would tell her that the Duke was lying through his teeth? That she was safe and nothing was going to change? No, she hadn’t thought that for a minute, though maybe she had hoped—a foolish hope which withered the moment she heard the accountant’s answer.
‘Not my problem, I’m afraid, Roxy. I’m having to deal with my own stuff—like finding myself unemployed for the first time in fifteen years. Made “redundant” by that arrogant young upstart Torchester.’
Roxy didn’t waste words by asking why he had lied to her. She knew exactly why he had lied to her—and exactly why she had turned a blind eye to it. There was only one question she needed to ask and deep down she had known the answer all along.
‘Do you think he means it?’
At this he gave a laugh she’d never heard before. It was the sound of bitter cynicism cloaked with a kind of hollow resignation. ‘You bet your sweet ass he means it. The man is ruthless. I’d start looking round for a new place if I were you.’
Her hand was trembling as she put the phone down, knowing that she had no right to apportion blame. That the only person she could blame was herself. It was nothing to do with Martin Murray that she had no money for a deposit. That was her stuff. Her stuff and her stubbornness in refusing to give up on her dream of making it back to the big time. A dark spectre of fear hovered over her but she batted it away. She could work it out. She’d just have to see if she could find a small room in a house somewhere—maybe with a few light cleaning duties or child-care thrown in, which would guarantee a rock-bottom rent. Surely places like that existed?
But her sore throat became a hacking cough and she felt too weak to look around for somewhere new. She barely had the strength to drag herself off to one of her regular cleaning jobs in one of the big houses on Holland Park. Unfortunately, the Italian footballer’s wife who was normally so sweet took one horrified look at her and said that she couldn’t risk Roxy giving her cold to the children and that she needed to go straight back home.
In truth, Roxy couldn’t blame her because this was beginning to feel like more than a cold—and it was getting worse by the minute. She felt too ill to get out of bed the next morning, and as panic began to mount that people would think her unreliable the week began to slip away.
She got the news that she’d lost her regular singing spot at the Kit-Kat Club on an icy morning when she was at her lowest ebb. They told her that they were sorry, but she wasn’t pulling in the punters in as they’d hoped she would. She’d known that they’d wanted her to dress up as she used to when she was in The Lollipops. To wear those same outrageous clothes and sing all those old, familiar songs. But she couldn’t do it. To try to recreate the past felt like a backward step and a betrayal—because she wasn’t that person. Not any more.
Getting the sack felt like the final blow, yet somehow she managed to keep the tears at bay. It was that old self-preservation thing again, because she suspected that once she started crying she might never stop—and what good would that do her?
Forcing herself to be practical, she managed to make it round to the chemist to buy some paracetamol, but her legs felt so cotton-woolly that it seemed to take forever to get back home again. And all the time she kept wondering how she was going to manage. Whether the disapproving Duke of Torchester had meant what he’d said.
She leaned against the iron railings, so busy trying to catch her breath that for a moment she didn’t notice the huge suitcase sitting outside the front door and when she did, she blinked.
That was …
She blinked again.
That was her suitcase!
Walking slowly up the steps towards it, her gloved fingers trembling as she clicked the bulging case open, she swallowed down the salty taste of tears as she saw what was inside. Her jeans. Her sparkly stage tops. Her toiletries stuffed into that ancient soap-bag she’d had since her days with The Lollipops. And there, peeping out from among the other more functional clothes, were glimpses of her undies—bras and knickers, stuffed haphazardly into wherever there was a space.
Roxy snapped the case closed as dizzy yellow spots began to dance beneath her eyelids. And even though she knew it was completely pointless, she still attempted to wriggle her key into the front-door lock, which was mocking her with its brand-new shininess. It wouldn’t fit, she thought frustratedly. It wouldn’t fit and she knew exactly why.