Gifted and Talented Read online

  Copyright © 2013 Wendy Holden

  The right of Wendy Holden to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2013

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  Epub conversion by Avon DataSet Ltd, Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire

  eISBN: 978 0 7553 8528 7

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also By

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  About the Book

  It’s the new university term among the dreaming spires. The start of a whole new life.

  Meet Isabel, beautiful, clever, shy – and leaving home for the first time.

  Meet Olly, recently graduated, idealistic and a little hopeless, a man whose heart leads his brain and for whom opportunity just hasn’t come knocking – yet.

  Meet Amber, the It girl who is soon partying with the fast set – and no-one is faster than Jasper de Borchy, glamorous leader of the notorious Bullinger club.

  Meet the grown-ups: Diana, recently divorced mother-of-one, newly arrived in town to take up a post as college gardener – and Richard, the new college head, a widower, a scientist, and as lonely as some of the specimens he captures in his science lab.

  The rich, the poor, the shy, the extrovert, the givers, the takers. Meet the Gifted and Talented.

  About the Author

  Number One bestselling author Wendy Holden has written ten consecutive Sunday Times Top Ten Bestsellers. A former journalist on The Sunday Times, Tatler and Mail on Sunday, she contributes features and short stories to a range of publications and is a regular TV and radio contributor. She ws a judge for the Costa 2013 Novel and Book of the Year Awards and is a Daily Mail book reviewer. She lives with her husband and two children in Derbyshire.

  For further information about Wendy Holden visit her website www.wendyholden.net or follow her on Twitter @Wendy_Holden.

  Praise

  ‘Pin-sharp social-climbing comedy’ Grazia

  ‘One of the country’s greatest comic authors’ Mirror

  ‘Rom-com with serious attitude’ Daily Mail

  By Wendy Holden

  Simply Divine

  Bad Heir Day

  Pastures Nouveaux

  Fame Fatale

  Azur Like It

  The Wives of Bath

  The School for Husbands

  Filthy Rich

  Beautiful People

  Gallery Girl

  Marrying Up

  Gifted and Talented

  To Andrew and Isabella

  Isabel stared out of the train window. The English fields flashed by, sometimes with cows in, sometimes sheep, sometimes nothing but a couple of troughs or an oak tree with russet-leaved branches. It was autumn and the light was low and rich. Beneath the surface of the fields the ancient plough and furrow pattern rippled like a sea.

  Isabel glanced at the man and woman opposite. Neither seemed to have noticed the view. The woman had boarded at Edinburgh, hours ago now. The scarf she was knitting, originally a woolly beige stub a few inches long, was now heading for two feet.

  Isabel pulled the Branston College prospectus out of her bag and looked at the photograph on the front. It was of the college from behind a red brick wall and the central dome appeared like a rising sun of grey concrete.

  ‘Every room’s got central heating and there’s a laundry and kitchen at the end of every corridor,’ she had reminded her mother on the way to the station that morning.

  ‘Laundry and kitchen, eh?’ Mum had shot back, teasing. ‘Didn’t realise you knew what they were for.’ It was a joke between them that Isabel’s genuine intentions to help with chores always got sidetracked. Her mother would find her, ostensibly putting ironed clothes away upstairs, but actually crouching on a step, absorbed in poetry or a novel pulled from the upstairs bookcase.

  Now, Isabel thought sadly, rather fewer clothes would be put away, and in record time. Books would stay in the bookcase and Mum would go back down afterwards to an empty house. No wonder, as they turned into the station, she had been staring through the windscreen, blinking hard. As had Isabel, come to that.

  The train was drawing into a station. There were people on the platform, milling about, holding coffees, reading newspapers, picking up their bags, squinting at the carriage numbers.

  A young woman on the platform was holding a baby. She was smiling at the child, talking to it. Isabel felt a sudden hot rush of tears.

  She blinked hard, willing her normal composure to return. What had happened had been irrelevant for years. Although, of course, it had always been there, like a dark, mysterious cupboard at the back of a room. Ever since, that day at primary school, Moira MacDougall had said something about Isabel’s mummy giving her away.

  ‘Why did my real mummy give me away?’ Isabel had asked her adoptive mother that night. Mum had hugged her tightly and explained that her real mummy hadn’t wanted to but she wasn’t able to look after her. But she had another mummy now who loved her very much. ‘What about my daddy?’ Isabel had asked, but alas no one seemed to know anything about him.

  And then, after her adoptive father had died when Isabel was nine, being an only child with a single parent had become the normal way of life. A happy, settled way of life too. No parent could have been more loving than Mum, no place more idyllic and safe than Lochalan, that string of white cottages along the silver lochside with the green and purple mountains rising protectively behind.

  But now life was changing, stirring, bringing all this buried business to the surface. It was on Isabel’s mind as never before.

  The train slid down the platform. The mot
her waggled the baby’s fat little pink hand as it passed. Isabel, still blinking, lifted her long pale thin one in response and, then, as mother and baby disappeared, felt an almost overwhelming loneliness.

  She wished with all her heart that she had allowed Mum to come with her today. She had wanted to save her a long, lonely return journey but perhaps, in retrospect, the trip back might have been a good thing. It would have given Mum time to adjust so, when she got back, finally, to the little white cottage by the still expanse of loch, she would have been prepared.

  But now Mum would get back almost immediately and Isabel herself would have to face everything alone. The thought of all those new people made her heart thump.

  ‘Just be your usual self,’ Mum had urged her, but her usual self was shy, self-conscious and prone to blushing to the roots of her already-red hair. Only in books could she lose herself; only when working could she feel really confident and shine.

  Would she know anyone? There had been, at interview, a girl called Kate. She had seemed very down to earth. But no one had been terrifyingly posh. In fact, apart from the beautiful buildings, the town had borne little resemblance to its popular image.

  The train was slowing. The ticket inspector was yelling over the Tannoy: This is Derby. This is Derby. Change here for Chestlock, Buxton . . .

  The train was about to depart before his very eyes. It was the last straw; well, the latest last straw. The hindmost straw up to this point had been when, this afternoon, the job at the Chestlock Advertiser had failed to materialise.

  Olly had been delighted and hugely relieved when, after a whole summer’s fruitless search for employment, he had landed an interview. The position was investigative journalist with the local paper of the small market town of Chestlock. Which was fine; Olly had never expected to kick-start his career on one of the national newspapers, as many of his well-connected fellow former students were doing. He would do it under his own steam. He would work his way up to London in the time-honoured journalistic tradition.

  He had travelled to Chestlock, a journey of some three hours on the train from the university town. The file on his knee had been bulging with examples of his college journalism and his head positively swarming with ideas for features on the town he had researched exhaustively on the internet. For example, he had – admittedly after some searching – discovered Chestlock to be the birthplace of a minor poet called Ivor Tickle. Why not have a literary festival – a Tickle Festival, no less – sponsored by the paper?

  He had only been off the train five minutes, five seconds probably, when he realised Chestlock was not a festival sort of place – of Tickles, tickles or anything else. The Victorian town hall that had been the main image on the council website turned out to be flanked by branches of Poundstretcher and Blockbuster. The town’s northern border was a sprawling multiplex while massive rival supermarkets hemmed in the east and west. They were, Olly concluded, the reason for the tumbleweed blowing through the town centre.

  It turned out, when he reached the Advertiser offices, that Chestlock was no longer a newspaper sort of place either. A porcine blonde receptionist called Hayley showed him into the battered office of the editor, a harassed-looking man called Don. He had wonky glasses, thinning grey hair and an air of defeat. He gave Olly the grim news, received that morning. The Chestlock Advertiser’s parent company was rationalising its platforms and diversifying its offer.

  ‘What?’ Olly had asked, uncomprehending.

  ‘Or, to put it another way,’ Don added heavily, ‘closing down local papers left, right and centre.’ The Advertiser, he explained, was one of many that would be going weekly and, with five days to gather the news, Don was expected to do it by himself with the assistance of Hayley.

  Olly felt sorry for the editor, obviously a good man who had equally obviously not expected his own career in newspapers to peter out quite this way. Don had, he told Olly, his face lighting up for a moment, once worked on the Manchester Guardian. But, even more than sorry for Don, Olly felt angry. He knew Caspar De Borchy, whose father owned the Echo’s parent company. De Borchy had been at the same university college, although they had not moved in the same circles. Drunken, wobbly circles in Caspar’s case. He had been one of the rich set; black tie permanently at his neck and bottle of champagne welded to his signet-ringed fingers, loudly guffawing in one of the quads. Whatever Caspar was doing now, Olly guessed, which was probably not much, his particular platforms would remain flagrantly unrationalised.

  Skirting the puddles on the broken pavements as he hurried back to the station, Olly silently lamented wasting the last of his money on a suit. A horrid, slightly-too-tight, definitely-too-shiny suit, as well. And, actually, it would have made no difference if he’d turned up in a pink bikini.

  Now he was broke. Very broke. His pace quickened. He could not afford to miss the train; after this one, the prices changed and he would have to upgrade his ticket at vast expense. Olly broke into a run.

  As he hurled himself across the footbridge, the deafening yet indistinct announcements mingled with the desperate pounding in his heart.

  ‘You can’t go through there.’ A man in a train company overcoat reared up forcibly before him.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Olly pleaded at the flint face and the gloved hand sliding the barrier between him and the thrumming locomotive.

  ‘Barriers go up one minute before the train leaves,’ his opponent smirked. ‘Says so on all the posters.’

  As there was clearly no point in arguing, Olly simply twisted his body sideways and shot through the section the guard had not yet managed to close. He shouted after him, but Olly had reached the train and hurled himself on. He felt rather daring, like something from a film.

  Ribcage heaving with the recent effort, he looked for a seat. There was one right next to him in the aisle, next to a youth plugged into an iPod and occupied by his guitar case. As an enormous navy-blue bottom was now reversing towards him down the aisle, dragging the buffet cart after it, Olly had no choice but to squeeze himself in between the guitar case and the back of the seat in front.

  The youth removed his earplugs. ‘Hey, man. Respect the Rickenbacker, yeah?’

  ‘Bought that seat for it, have you?’ Olly said dryly.

  The youth scowled and shoved his earphones back in.

  Olly ploughed on down the aisle. The mobile in his pocket buzzed. It was his mother.

  ‘Just wondering how the interview went,’ she said.

  Olly regretted mentioning the Advertiser to his parents at all, but he had had to tell them something. If a whole summer without as much as a bite at a job had been a worry for him, it had been downright shocking for his mother and father.

  Olly himself, on the spot, at least knew the way the economic wind was blowing – not too propitiously, even for students of his own prestigious alma mater. There were others besides himself looking for work, although not Caspar De Borchy, admittedly. But his parents retained the idea that a degree from the ancient university was a guaranteed passport to future greatness.

  He sought now to downplay events.

  ‘It was always going to be more of a chat than a formal interview,’ he heard himself saying breezily. ‘And it was very useful to go there. I mean, um . . . that particular paper’s closing.’

  ‘Closing!’

  ‘But,’ Olly added hastily, ‘I’ve got other irons in the fire . . .’

  ‘I suppose you mean your novel,’ his mother sighed.

  ‘Well, yes, actually,’ Olly said defensively. ‘It’s going very well, actually,’ he added, although in actual fact it wasn’t. It was a rite-of-passage memoir, heavily influenced by Brideshead Revisited. Or at least this particular manifestation of it was. The work as a whole never seemed to get beyond the first chapter. He was wondering whether an experimental novel composed entirely of beginnings might have a f
uture.

  ‘I think,’ his mother said, obviously trying to mask her impatience, ‘that you need to get a proper job first. Get an income. Then write the novel.’

  ‘I’ve got a few other possibilities,’ Olly assured her. He hoped she would not force him to admit this was the cleaning agency he had, in desperation, registered with earlier that week. The owner, a no-nonsense Zambian, had told him she preferred to employ Eastern Europeans. ‘Better than college students,’ she told him. ‘They want to work, not write novels.’

  He had not mentioned his novel, but the Zambian lady had sharp eyes which could obviously see inside his head.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ he said brightly before he rang off. ‘Something will turn up.’

  The train, he noticed, was drawing into another station. Hopefully someone would get off, make some room.

  Isabel longed for a cup of tea but the buffet trolley had not passed for at least an hour. Probably ground to a halt in one of the crowded carriages. She wanted to go in search of it but was hemmed in by a large woman in the next seat. Isabel gathered her courage to tackle her.

  The woman was reading a tabloid. As she occupied a considerable amount of space to start with, and required even more to read an open newspaper, Isabel could hardly help reading it too.

  It was open at the diary page, full of gossipy items about prominent people and dominated by a large photograph of a very beautiful blonde girl in a very short leopardskin print dress. She was laughing with very white teeth at the camera. She was in the back of a limousine, surrounded by cream leather. Her long, slim brown legs spilled out and, alongside the diamonds at her ears and fingers, her confidence blazed from the page. Who was it? Isabel started to read the story that ran alongside:

  After a long hot summer on Mustique, heiress and socialite Amber Piggott is swapping Basil’s Bar for books as the new university term begins. Pulchritudinous Amber, daughter of retail billionaire Lord Piggott, starts an English degree at—

  The paper jerked suddenly and Isabel became aware that its owner was staring at her coldly. She smiled awkwardly, gathered up her bag and, muttering apologies, stumbled into the aisle.