The Magnificent Mrs Mayhew Read online

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  The Queen of Wishful Thinking

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  The Mother of All Christmases

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  For my mam and dad. For bringing me up fed well, safe and warm and raising me with love and care.

  I never fully appreciated how much you did until I became a parent myself.

  Thank you xxx

  Behind every successful man there is a woman.

  Behind the fall of a successful man there is usually another woman.

  From: Len.Spinks @ jfmayhewoffice.co.uk

  To: Gina.Almonza @ SouthCountiesMagazine.com

  Subject: Sophie Mayhew Ar ticle – Editorial Control Suggestions.

  Dear Gina

  Thank you for the draft ar ticle on Mrs Mayhew entitled ‘Sophie At Home’.

  A few amendments, additions and deletions to consider then implement.

  1. Mrs Mayhew smiles as she greets me; warmth is perhaps not a word associated with her, but her handshake is firm and friendly.

  2. The reception room is wall-to-wall taste with its cool pastel walls and sumptuous carpet. The furniture is more reflective of style than comfort. It is all too perfect, suggesting some deliberate artistic composition. !!!!! The furniture stylish and beautiful, rather like Mrs Mayhew herself.

  3. End the ar ticle after ‘New York’, see below. After the tour of her fabulous house, I ask Mrs Mayhew over tea what her dream is and she gives me a measured reply: to be by her husband’s side as a suppor t because she has put her dreams with his, which reminds me somewhat sweetly of the lyrics of ‘Fairytale of New York’. I’m not convinced. There is more to Mrs Mayhew than as a mere appendage to her super-successful husband, much more I suspect but sadly I’m not going to get the true answer today.

  And I think we will go with an alternative title: The Magnificent Mrs Mayhew.

  Alliterative and entirely fitting to Sophie, the adjective ‘Magnificent’ has slightly old-fashioned yet fond and glamorous connotations see: Magnificent Obsession, Magnificent Seven, Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines. It is a word less used these days and for that reason stands out in the best way.

  We are good to go once these have been incorporated into your article. Please send amended copy for thwith for final read-through.

  Yours truly,

  Len Spinks

  Senior Communications Director and Press Officer to John F. Mayhew, Secretary of State for Family Matters.

  Mrs Mayhew

  Chapter 1

  Doorstepgate, 11 a.m.

  As Sophie stood in the middle of them all, the moment strangely crystallised for her, as if time had frozen solid and she was able to study everything at leisure, appreciate how odd it was to be surrounded by familiar people in the house she had lived in for eight years and yet still feel as if she had been dropped from a great height into a room full of strangers.

  She saw her mother seated, holding a cup of tea in one hand and the accompanying china saucer in the other, talking to her father, who was standing, one hand slotted stiffly in his jacket pocket; his default pose, as if he were a catalogue model. Mother was talking to him and Father had a polite smile of concentration on his face. Standing next to him, her parents-in-law, Clive and Celeste, looking serious and focused as if they were building up to jumping out of a plane. Sophie’s husband, John, deep in conversation with the top pick of his aides: Parliamentary Assistant (London) Rupert Bartley-Green; Senior Communications Director and Press Officer Len Spinks; Chief of Staff Edward Mayhew, who also happened to be John’s
eldest brother, and Executive Office Manager (Cherlgrove) Findlay Norris. Between his two governmental bases and the office that looked after his investment and property portfolio, John had more staff than the POTUS, although there was an opening for a Girl Friday (London) now, since his last one was currently enjoying her fifteen minutes of fame. The ‘people’ of breakfast and daytime TV, and every programme which attracted those the media chose to concentrate its temporary but brightest lights on, were no doubt already negotiating appearance fees with her ‘people’. Why was it always someone in that junior assistant/intern/researcher role who toppled the boss? thought Sophie. Weren’t there enough cautionary tales of littered corpses to warn any man in a high-profile position – who really should know better – what dark and treacherous waters he elected to dip into when he chose a pretty, young, ambitious swimming companion. A pond with a hundred signs around it, all lit up with massive red neon lettering and strings of exclamation marks: Warning. Danger. Come any closer and you’re a bloody IDIOT!!!!!

  It would have been easy for the other woman to fall in love with her husband, though; if that were what it was. John could sell ice to the Eskimos, coal to Newcastle, toys to Santa and all the other clichés. Charm personified, absurdly handsome, moneyed, intelligent, refined – oh yes, John F. Mayhew was the full package. Sophie could guess how quickly Rebecca Robinson would have become ensnared in his net, even thrown herself into it willingly, because she had done the same thing fourteen years ago when she was eighteen.

  She’d met him at the Christmas Ball when she was in her first year at Cambridge University, studying French, and he was in his last year studying Business and Politics. He’d been absolutely wrecked on champagne and told her he was going to marry her, before his friends dragged him off for yet more alcohol. She didn’t think much about it until Valentine’s Day, when their paths collided again at a private party. She spotted him long before he noticed her, which gave her the luxury of studying him unseen. He wasn’t her dream type at all but he was extremely magnetic and from the way he held himself, it was more than obvious he knew what his best qualities were. Long-limbed and lean, she imagined him as a human equivalent of a well-bred racehorse, something pampered and valued. Greek-statue profile, mid-brown hair that flopped into his eyes – and what eyes they were: puppy-brown, intense, seductive. Eventually, as if detecting the heat in her gaze, his eyes swept around to hers, locked and she felt powerless, as if she were a hen and he a fox. He sliced through the banks of students that stood between them, mouth stretching into a killer smile, and when he reached her, said:

  ‘Well if it isn’t you again. Where have you been hiding yourself ?’

  And from that moment they were a couple. Sophie forgot all about swooning over the prop forward who was on her course, which was a shame because he would end up captaining England and was a thoroughly nice chap, but John F. Mayhew engulfed her brain and was all she could think about.

  John F. was going to be richer than Croesus and prime minister, one day, he said and she didn’t doubt that he would be. She could easily forecast his future: top of the tree in his chosen profession, women would adore him, men would want to be him, magazine reporters would queue up outside his door to take photos of the beautiful home he lived in. His children would be perfect and well-behaved. Maybe they’d be her children too. Maybe this was the man that her old headmistress Miss Palmer-Price told her would be the one to carry her along in the grip of his forcefield.

  The F stood for Fitzroy, he told her post-coitus in bed on the night he took her virginity. His great-great-great-grandfather – Donal F. Mayhew – and his best friend, Patrick, had decided to escape the great Irish famine by emigrating to America in the late 1840s; but an Irish heiress fell hook, line and sinker for the strong and handsome – if impoverished – gypsy Donal and he changed his mind about going. Donal and his wife eventually moved to London where his determination both to shake off the label of male ‘gold-digger’ and to better himself drove him to build up a fortune in his own right selling property, metal, alcohol, ship parts; anything legal or illegal to trade in order to make a profit. Across the pond, Patrick’s family’s fortunes improved with every generation too. His great-grandson John F. Kennedy became president of the United States of America. The Kennedys, John said, had stolen the idea of using the F from the Mayhews, and in doing so had cursed themselves. As if he couldn’t get any more fascinating, traveller magic was thrown into the mix.

  By April Sophie could not imagine living without John F. Mayhew; then in May she found that she’d have to, because he dumped her for the fabulously rich wild-child, Lady Cresta Thorpe. Sophie was heartbroken. John graduated with a first and spent a year touring the world with Cresta, who had dropped out of uni, far preferring to indulge her habits of clubbing, cocktails and cocaine. His life, so she gleaned from gossip, was shining and golden as hers slipped further into the dark and depressing. Her coursework suffered and she started self-medicating with alcohol to blot out the pain. She also realised that the girls she’d thought of as friends weren’t that hot in a crisis. She had never been good at gathering friends. The beautiful, insubstantial people were attracted to her, but the really nice people found her own good looks intimidating.

  It took Sophie a long time to get over losing John F. Mayhew, partly because she didn’t have a group of hard-core pals to help chase him out of her heart. She buried her true feelings deep as she had been taught to at school, threw herself into her studies, never let anyone see how wounded she was. Her heart had just about healed by the time she graduated, give or take the scar he had left.

  Months later, Sophie had been working as a temp at the London headquarters of the glossy magazine Mint when she heard that they were to run a feature on a young successful investment banker, a high risk-taker and up-and-coming politician, at home in his recently acquired, stupidly expensive bachelor penthouse. His name was John F. Mayhew. Sophie’s heart started to race. She wangled it so that she accompanied the reporter and the photographer, desperate to show herself off at her best to him: content, happy, preened and perfect – unattainable and indifferent. Or so she thought.

  He was overjoyed to see her, ridiculously so, and she was gracious enough not to dampen his delight with a long-overdue rebuke for dumping her so callously. He asked her out to dinner and she accepted, merely for old times’ sake. Sure that if he asked to see her again, she would politely refuse, walk away, having shut the door firmly in his face this time.

  He had never forgiven himself for the caddish way he had behaved, he said in Le Gavroche. He’d been glamoured by Cresta’s glitzy veneer, but it was mere infatuation. He hadn’t realised how much he felt for Sophie until he lost her. Sophie was in love with him all over again before the dessert menus had been delivered to them.

  Six months after the photos of his bachelor pad had been published, John F. Mayhew had moved out and into Park Court, a beautiful, if run-down, country residence – a wedding present from his parents for himself and his new bride-to-be, the sublime Miss Sophie Calladine. She ignored that little voice inside her that warned her about the speed of all this, the worm burying into her happiness. Is this the real deal, Sophie, or are you just grateful to be loved?

  To a woman starved of affection, the full spotlight of his attention was blinding, disorientating – of course she knew this. She had gulped it like air seeping through a hole in a vacuum. For that reason, it would be too easy to let that worm convince her that genuine love was not her primary reason for accepting John’s marriage proposal: but it was, it really was. It had to be said, though, that her heart was whooping considerably that she had also earned parental approval for her choice of husband and she could even hear the echoes of applause from her old headmistress, nodding consent from the afterlife: I knew you’d be a credit to St Bathsheba’s in the end, Sophie, like your sisters and your mother before you. But she did love him very much. Enough to have sacrificed her own wants and needs on his altar for the past eight and
a half years. Enough to be standing here with her heart ripped open in this room full of people who were looking at her to mend her marriage. Because by doing that, Sophie Mayhew would mend everything.

  Chapter 2

  Eighteen years before

  ‘So can you tell me why you were engaged in such a vicious display of pugnacity that it took four members of my staff to separate you?’ asked Miss Palmer-Price of the two girls standing in front of her desk. ‘Sophie? Irina? Quiet now, aren’t you? I did glean you weren’t so silent on the playing field, unleashing all those invectives. Which one of you is going to speak first?’

  Miss Palmer-Price knew it would be Irina. She was likely to have been the cause of this altercation and therefore would jump in first to give her account of the event, shifting pieces of evidence around to make them appear much more favourable to herself.

  ‘I hit her in self-defence, madam,’ said Irina, stroking her clawed and bleeding cheek for effect.

  ‘And what do you have to say, Miss Calladine?’

  Sophie coughed before answering. ‘She’s right it was self-defence, madam, because I did strike first.’

  ‘And why was that?’

  ‘Because she was attacking another pupil,’ replied Sophie. ‘One younger and more vulnerable . . .’

  ‘You lying cow, you . . .’

  ‘Miss Morozova, I will not have that sort of language in my office. You will lose thirty house-points for that outburst. Please see to that, Miss Egerton.’

  Miss Egerton, standing behind the girls, nodded to indicate that she had committed the instruction to memory. The cane in her hand twitched hopefully. She was an ex-nun who had left the cloistered life because it didn’t present enough sadistic opportunities. In a previous incarnation she had been sacked as a Spanish Grand Inquisitor for proving too hard-line.

  ‘Miss Egerton, can you add anything based on what other girls have said?’