Silver spurs and a twelv.., p.1
Silver Spurs and a Twelve Pound Heart, page 1
First published in Great Britain in 2023 by
The Book Guild Ltd
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Copyright © 2023 Helen Newman Wood
The right of Helen Newman Wood to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This work is entirely fictitious and bears no resemblance to any persons living or dead.
ISBN 978 1915853 363
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
For Mum, Dad, Marcus and Tabitha.
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Acknowledgements
One
Twenty-four-year-old Katie Holland stirred her vegetable soup with a rather bent spoon that had been stolen from the café down the road.
‘Homemade soup again, Katie? You are eating healthily. Did we overindulge during the festive period?’ Mrs Hicken gave a tinkly laugh as she arranged the blue pashmina over her shoulders and then wafted out of the office on a cloud of Chanel.
Smiling sweetly until her boss turned away, Katie then narrowed her brown eyes and stuck two fingers up at the Versace that was stretched to its limit over Mrs Hicken’s enormous backside.
From the desk opposite came a splutter of stifled laughter. ‘I know who’s been overindulging over the festive period, and it’s not Skinny Minnie over there.’ Trish nodded at Katie and the rest of the office murmured in agreement.
Katie knew that Mrs Hicken wouldn’t be having vegetable soup for lunch, and if she did, she would probably report that the Asian-inspired aromatic vegetable broth, with coconut milk, pak choi and shiitake mushrooms, was celestial. Last week, she had floated back into the office raving about the baked celeriac, smoked trout and caper salsa at the new pop-up bistro in Kensington. The week before, it was how divine the beef carpaccio with Gorgonzola Piccante and Tardivo di Treviso had tasted in the posh restaurant in Mayfair.
Mrs Hicken always lunched out with her clients and returned to the office with her podgy cheeks flushed with lunchtime Chardonnay. Friday lunches were always an extended affair and, knowing that they would not see their boss until after three o’clock, Trish threw her empty yoghurt pot in the bin and took a bottle of red nail polish from her handbag.
‘Coming, Katie?’ Lauren was pulling on her coat. ‘We’re going to McConnell’s. According to Old Hicken, the pan-fried salmon and watercress sauce is supposed to be heavenly.’
‘No thanks.’ Katie shook her head with a rueful smile, her long, brown hair sweeping around her shoulders. ‘I’ve got my soup today, thanks. Maybe another day?’
‘Definitely,’ Lauren squeezed Katie’s arm and joined Becky making for the door.
Katie looked down again at her cooling bowl. Having had no breakfast, she was absolutely starving, but vegetable soup was the last thing she felt like eating. Taking a spoonful, she watched Trish painting the nails on her left hand with caring precision.
Her co-workers all assumed she was eating this wonderous, fat-busting soup for the benefit of her health, and she had done nothing to suggest otherwise. There was something embarrassing about being so short of money, and for the first time in her life, Katie was discovering that looking well-heeled on a non-existent budget was an artform.
She made excuses when her colleagues were going for a drink after work, saying she was meeting friends elsewhere in London. And despite the monotony of the soup diet, it was something of a blessing as it gave her a ready-made excuse if she was invited out for lunch. She dreaded the day one of her fellow employees discovered that the soup regimen was not a choice and that all she could afford to buy in the grocery department was a bag of vegetables and a loaf of bread.
The first time she had braved the Saturday market, the nice man who ran the vegetable stall had given her a wink and the bag of stewing vegetables at a discounted price as she was thirty pence short.
‘Best come here after four, princess. I’ll keep a bag for you, if you want one every week?’
When she nodded, he muttered that Gloria with the artisan bread, five stands further down the row, was selling off her London Bloomer Bread “Meryl Streep” and added two Granny Smiths and a pomegranate to Katie’s bag.
The potatoes, carrots, cabbage, onions and turnip made a pan of soup on a Sunday afternoon which lasted until the following Saturday, as long as Katie limited herself to only a small portion at lunchtimes. By Thursday evening, when the bloomer was a bit too stale to swallow in public, she scraped off the mouldy blue spots, cut what was left of the loaf into chunks and grilled them until they turned golden-brown.
Wincing as the spoon scratched the bottom of the bowl, Katie recalled the moment yesterday when her bank card had been declined in the discount shop. She had only wanted to buy toothpaste and shampoo, but as her emergency credit card was hidden between the pages of a paperback in her room, she had been forced to leave the shop as quickly as she could while the lady behind the till gave her a pitying look. After going back to her digs and realising that it was two weeks until payday, she had upturned her car in total desperation and unearthed two pounds and seventeen pence in sticky, discoloured coins.
Feeling as though she had won the lottery, Katie was planning to stop at the discount shop again this evening and had decided that if she used the bar of soap in the communal bathroom to wash her hair, she could splurge on some conditioner as well as toothpaste.
The credit card hidden in-between the pages of Jilly Cooper’s Riders had been taken out strictly for emergencies. The emergencies so far had consisted of a packet of cheap and not very sharp razors which left her legs covered in shaving burn, a tub of horribly greasy moisturiser to try and combat the razor burn, seven cocktails after work on the last Friday before Christmas and a new suit from the charity shop.
The new suit was unquestionably classed as an emergency purchase because staggering to the bus stop after the seven cocktails, she had tripped and landed face down in someone’s regurgitated Tikka Masala and Pea Pilau. Despite scrubbing the jacket and skirt with her flatmate’s shower gel in a fairly drunken state that evening, the stain had refused to budge, and she had been forced to plunder fifteen whole pounds on someone’s shiny-elbowed cast off.
Having finished painting her toenails, Trish took a small mirror and a pair of tweezers from her top drawer and began to pluck her eyebrows. Trish was also a junior in the company, and Katie assumed by the packed lunches and DIY beauty treatments at her desk on a Friday, she also didn’t have much spare money. Eating their pre-made lunches together at their desks was a stark contrast to Lauren and Becky, who lunched out every day and got their nails and waxing done by the illegal workers at Ellie’s further down the Caledonian Road.
‘What have you got to do this afternoon?’ Trish was leaning over the little mirror on her desk pulling her right eyebrow taught.
‘Reference checks, on the couple moving into that place on Derby Road.’
Trish looked across in amazement. ‘I can’t believe you found someone to rent that – it’s tiny.’
‘I know,’ Katie furrowed her brow. ‘But it was the only property we had in their price range.’
‘I don’t know how anyone can afford to rent in London, that’s why I still live at home.’ Trish was pulling at her left brow and plucking wildly.
‘Tell me about it. I pay a fortune, and it’s not exactly the Ritz.’
‘Why don’t you look for somewhere else? There’s always rooms to rent on the Cally Road, and it would save your tube fare if you could walk to work.’
‘But the rent would be twice as much as I’m paying now.’ Katie was about to add that as she had no money on her Oyster card, she had been walking the three miles to work for the past two weeks anyway but stopped herself. She knew from past experience that if she admitted to
The tall, brown house in Stamford Hill where Katie rented a room was freezing cold, but as the offices of Hicken Lettings were tropically warm, she was always at her desk at eight and didn’t leave until after six, making Mrs Hicken think she had the most marvellous work ethic. Keeping warm in this way also meant Katie could avoid having to talk to her housemates, who were seriously strange.
There was Sam, who worked in a pizza restaurant and ate microwaved margherita for every meal; Matt, the builder who left cement dust in huge, hand-shaped marks all over the kitchen and skid marks down the back of the toilet. Orchid was an exotic dancer who dripped bright pink hair dye all over the bathroom, and sixty-seven-year-old Olive washed her knickers in the kitchen sink in-between stints at the nearby library.
The house was filthy as none of them ever cleaned up. Orchid slept all day, worked all night and made her presence felt by the smell of cannabis wafting from her room, her crotchless knickers left drying on the towel rail in the bathroom and several tubes of lubricant in the fridge that no one else would admit to owning. Matt ate fish and chips out of their paper in the lounge every night; Olive hung out her weary, grey underwear on a makeshift line across the hall; and there was always pubic hair in the shower.
Last week when Katie had complained she was cold, Matt had sniggered that she was welcome to warm up in his bed, as he wouldn’t kick her out for farting. Sam had then suggested that they could toss a coin to see who got first dibs, which made Katie feel slightly sick and remain in her bedroom every evening since.
‘Are you coming for a drink after work tonight?’ Trish was holding the mirror above her upturned face so she could examine her finished brows.
‘I can’t,’ Katie lied. ‘I’m meeting up with some friends.’
Moving from Dorset at the beginning of November, Katie had initially tried hard to adapt to London life but, used to the slower pace of the countryside, she hated the crowds, the noise and the faceless bustle of London. Having no money and no friends to do the things her parents had told her she was missing out on in Dorset, Katie resented her father daily for setting her up in this crap and boring job.
Edward Holland ran a land agency in Dorset and wanted Katie to start at the bottom and work her way up. After all, he had said, just look at him – he had started as the tea boy and now had his own company with five offices in Dorset and Hampshire.
When her dad had proudly told her that he had got her a job in London, Katie had gone ballistic.
‘You have to control everything, don’t you? You couldn’t have let me find a job on my own!’
‘You can’t go swanning off to New Zealand to play polo every bloody winter!’ Eddie bawled back. ‘You’ve got to get a proper job and join the real world; after a year in London, you can come and work for me.’
‘I don’t want to work for you,’ replied Katie fiercely. ‘I’d rather spend the rest of my life stuck in a lift with a naked Piers Morgan.’
Being five foot six, slim and pretty with her high cheekbones and slanted brown eyes, Katie had never been short of work. Unfortunately, the kind of work Katie wanted to do, her father saw as a complete and utter waste of time and far removed from what he considered to be a career. Six years ago, after finishing her A levels, Eddie had begrudgingly paid for her to attend the Royal Agricultural College, where Katie had sailed through a degree course in International Equine Studies and Land Management. Eddie’s hopes that she would then find a “real job” were thoroughly thwarted when Katie promptly signed up for a twelve-week course at the Southern Riding Centre in Gloucestershire, to gain her coaching qualifications so she could teach people to ride. The winter after passing her teaching exams, she had groomed for a polo team under the New Zealand sun and, after picking up further connections in the southern hemisphere, had flown out the following winter to work in an event yard. Both jobs had provided free air fares, board and lodgings, meaning Katie not only got to play polo and event but was also able to put money aside to compete her own horse from her Dorset base during the English summer. She was already planning her next jaunt back to the eventing yard in New Zealand, leaving England as usual in the autumn when her father found out and subsequently hit the roof.
Katie was an intelligent girl. She knew that if she went back to New Zealand, her dad would rant on and on to her mother about the wasted university fees, so she had found a room to rent and moved to North London to start the job that he had created for her. The overwhelming homesickness during those early days in the capital had made her remain in the city every weekend. She knew that going back to Dorset’s high hedgerows and thatched cottages would make coming back to London even harder. Filling her Instagram feed with images of the famous London sights for her friends in New Zealand, she added art galleries and museums for the benefit of her mum, who assumed her reluctance to leave London was because she was having a fabulous time. Katie was aware that anyone who knew London well would have rumbled her straight away, because every attraction on her Insta feed was free to visit.
‘Trish, Katie!’ She jumped as Rob roared into the office in his usual whirlwind fashion, bringing a blast of cold January air with him. ‘My son’s playing in a sponsored football match this weekend, raising money for the school. I don’t suppose I could press you to sponsor him, could I?’ He rattled a metal biscuit tin that was half full of notes and coins.
Trish was plugging her hair straighteners into the extension lead under her desk and said in a muffled voice that she had left her purse at home.
‘Oh, Rob,’ Katie put down her crooked spoon on a piece of scrap paper. ‘I don’t think I have any cash on me either.’ She searched in her handbag for her purse with a slightly sinking heart. ‘I’ve only got two pounds and some shrapnel.’ She dropped the two tacky pound coins into his box and gave him her best attempt at a smile.
‘That’s really kind,’ he said warmly. ‘Every little helps, thanks.’
Fuck, thought Katie.
True to form, a grinning and shiny-eyed Mrs Hicken swept back into the office at twenty-past three, bursting with lamb flatbread, pickled cucumber, elderflower yoghurt and lemon posset. Disappearing into her office for what she thought was a tiny secret snooze, she accidentally slammed the door so hard that Lauren’s framed Letting Agent Certificate fell off the wall.
At quarter to five, having slept off the three large glasses of wine on her squashy leather sofa, Mrs Hicken was putting on her coat when Katie knocked on her door. Two minutes later, she was frantically fanning herself with a copy of House Letting Monthly.
‘Leave? But you have only been here for five minutes, and Eddie was adamant I was to train you up properly. That’s why he offered so much for… oh, forget it.’ She dropped the magazine on top of a brochure for a block of new apartments in the East End. ‘Leave?’ she repeated in amazement.
Katie looked down at her neatly typed resignation on the desk. ‘I’ve got some holiday to use, so would it be okay to finish now?’
Mrs Hicken sighed heavily. ‘No, it would not. Take your holiday and come and see me when you get back; we can talk then. January is such a gloomy month; you’re just suffering from post-Christmas blues.’ Mrs Hicken was back to waving her hands around like an air traffic controller. ‘Go abroad; get some sun for a few days. Come and see me next Friday.’
