The Antique Love by Helena Fairfax Page A

got the head of White River looking at my accounts. I’m doing perfectly well by myself. I don’t need David.”
    Daniel turned to the stove to stir a pan that didn’t need stirring, his hand thin and shaky on the wooden spoon.
    “I don’t doubt you can run that business perfectly well,” he said, more quietly now. He carried on stirring, his slumped back turned toward her. “It’s not that that bothers me. You’re a beautiful person, Penny,” he continued, holding up the spoon to halt her when she would have protested. “I know you don’t think so, and maybe your grandmother and I are to blame for that. You’re not beautiful in the same way your mother was. And your mother wasn’t a romantic like you. She looked like a romantic heroine in all those films, but she could be extremely hard-headed. She was determined to do what she wanted and blow the consequences.”
    He turned round to face her. Penny was staring at him, wide-eyed. Her grandmother had never spoken of her mother in this way. She always made her mother out to be some sort of beautiful, tragic paragon, someone who Penny could never possibly live up to.
    “You’re nothing like your mother but not in the way you think. You have a much warmer heart. And I worry that one day someone is going to break it.” Daniel’s voice broke a little at the end of his speech, and he would have turned away then, but Penny caught hold of his hand and pulled him into a fierce hug.
    “Oh, Granddad,” she said into his old sweater.
    “I know you grew up in your mum’s shadow, Penny,” he said over the top of her head. “But you’re a special person.” He pulled away and looked down into her troubled face. “So don’t let anyone ever make you feel second-best. Not David, not anyone. You’re worth far more than you think you are.”
    Penny stilled for a moment in his embrace, touched by his words. Her grandfather’s extraordinary kindness had helped keep her on an even keel after her parents’ death, but still, it was hard not to feel as though her mother’s legacy was permanently colouring her life. She thought about how she had concealed her identity from Kurt and felt a miserable chill run through her. She knew she should show more courage, but it was difficult living up to a woman who had been fêted as one of the iconic British beauties of the century. Once Kurt met that ideal woman of his, he would be moving out of her life, and in the meantime, as cowardly as she knew it was, it was easier not to say anything.
    “It’s okay, Granddad.” She turned back to the table, hiding the pain in her expression and keeping her tone light. “You don’t have to worry about anyone breaking this old heart. It’s too tough now for all that.”
    She began laying the table mechanically. If she’d turned round then, she would have seen that her words had failed to reassure her grandfather in the way she intended. If anything, he looked more distressed. He opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again, turning to the stove to begin serving out their meal.
     

 

Chapter Four
     
    The following weekend found Penny in the bathroom in Kurt’s house, staring at the bidet, hands covering her face. She peered in dismay over the tips of her fingers. For a couple of seconds, neither of them spoke. Kurt took a step nearer, gazing down into the hideously patterned bowl.
    “So, what period would you say?” His voice was deadpan, but when he raised his eyes, they were dancing at the sight of her pained expression.
    She lifted her head to scan the bathroom. The hideous pattern was repeated over and over again in the tiles, from floor to ceiling.
    “Late eighties,” she said at last, with a stunned shake of the head. “Late eighties gone horribly, horribly wrong.” The colour was salmon pink, the pattern was tiny and floral and everywhere. The result was suffocating. “I’m glad I came to see all this for myself,” she continued. “I didn’t get the full