I stare at someone’s flashing voicemail light. Jeremy Rothschild doesn’t deserve your loyalty, I want to say. But she’s known Jeremy far longer than she has me.
Sheila continues: ‘I knew you’d find something when you started writing Emma’s stock. I saw you googling her university, Leo. Her TV series. I knew how upset and confused you’d be. I’ve found myself very conflicted.’
Someone in news turns on the giant TVs and the floor fills with noise. I get up and go to sit at my own desk.
‘I want to kill Jeremy Rothschild,’ I say, even though I’ve never been even half capable of violence.
Sheila sighs. ‘God knows, you must dislike him at present, but he’s not a bad man. He’s actually been very good to Emma.’
‘I bet he has!’
‘He’s not a bad man,’ she repeats.
‘Fine, Sheila. I get it. You’ve known him for years, you don’t want to take sides.’
She smiles, apologetically.
‘But, Ruby,’ I say, and my voice shatters. ‘What do I tell Ruby, Sheila? How can I be her father now?’
Sheila looks stern. ‘You’ll be her father in the same way you’ve always been,’ she says. ‘Of course. Look, this is not where you should be. Come to my place. I’ll give you some food, and then I think you need a good sleep. You look frightful.’
I’ve never been able to imagine where Sheila lives. She’s so private I don’t even know what part of London she travels in from every day – she just says ‘north of the river’。 I imagine a flat somewhere sensible, maybe Queen’s Park or Barnsbury.
But Sheila is unlike anyone else I have met, and for this reason it is not a huge surprise when she tells me we can walk to hers in twenty minutes. And when she stops outside a townhouse on Cheyne Walk, north of the river by approximately five metres, I start to smile. Of course she lives in a grand house right on the river. Of course.
It is stylishly decorated inside; that sort of bookish, old-fashioned good taste Emma and I have striven for but never quite attained. Persian rugs and bookshelves; antiques from an ancestor’s Grand Tour. A pleasant smell of leather, flowers, ancient velvet.
‘Wow,’ I say, miserably. What a coup it would have been, in another life, to get an invitation to Sheila’s house. To be able to tell Jonty that Sheila is probably a multi-millionaire in property, that she has a neo-classical statue with a huge penis on her mantelpiece.
‘My father’s house,’ she says offhandedly. ‘Too many rooms for a single woman. Sometimes I – it gets too much.’ She gestures towards her bag, which contains the book she had come into work to read.
I’ve never imagined Sheila to be lonely. Whenever I think about her, out of work hours, I imagine her entertaining large crowds and hosting visitors from all over the world. Being here with her, on a Saturday, feels like reading her diary.
She shows me a room upstairs, in which there is a large white bed and a wall hung with charcoal studies. ‘I’ll bring you something to eat in a minute,’ she says, and disappears. I try to find something to lay on the sheets so I don’t get them grubby, but I have nothing else with me. Eventually I sit down on a thick rug next to the bed, unable to make a decision about anything.
When Sheila comes up with chocolate Hobnobs a few minutes later, I am fast asleep. I get up briefly, at her request, and allow myself to be shepherded into bed. She puts a calm hand on my head for a few moments, and then I’m gone again.
When I wake the light is beginning to slope and particles of dust wait in the air. It’s 5 p.m. I can hear Sheila moving around downstairs, and for a few moments I can’t quite remember why I am here.
It doesn’t last long. I check my phone and my stomach rolls; there are nine messages and five missed calls from Emma.