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Susannah had greater intelligence and imagination than George and therefore a larger capacity for pain, she had felt his disappointment on top of suffering her own, larger share.
    Katherine, Victoria and Annie had, in their early teenage years, been the darlings of the glossies. All three radiated a beauty that comes naturally from handsome parents and a wealthy upbringing. Susannah and George had high hopes for their future, financial and otherwise.
    George’s middle daughter, Victoria, now nearing twenty-eight, had married Charles Norman at the perfectly acceptable age of 22.
    Charles Norman came from old stock, like George, andwould, one day when his father died, inherit his father’s considerable estate. Victoria had done well and they all celebrated her nuptials with so much relief that it hovered dangerously near smugness.
    It was only after her marriage though, that Victoria discovered the ghastly truth about her husband. Until said death of his father, Charles got nothing. Nada. Not a penny. And his father, a youthful fifty four, had the constitution of an ox. His father had lived past a hundred.
    The news, naturally, hit them all hard.
    Susannah had had to console both George and Victoria, while feeling no consolation in her heart at all. And she was truly concerned for her poor Victoria.
    In those early, shocking months of marriage it had only been the fact that Victoria liked the face of her husband that kept her sane. She was, deep down, a woman of simple tastes. Some might say, on looking at her husband’s face, that she was, in fact, a woman of odd tastes. Charles’s face proved that if indeed, God did lovingly mould us all, occasionally His thumb slipped.
    Victoria stayed sane, but she didn’t stay the same determined young heroine of her own life, with everything before her. A sense of grievance, of being wronged by the world – and especially by Charles – gradually became so much a part of her identity that few could remember her before it. She honed the identity of guiltless victim/passive heroine, which had been thrust upon her when her mother died, to new heights. Susannah watched her middle god-daughter grow more and more resolutely bitter. In time, she became Victim Victoria, Giver of Guilt to all those who cared enough to deserve it.
    Meanwhile, Susannah was reduced to plotting with Georgedifferent ways of funding Victoria and Charles’s lifestyle. Hardly what they had hoped for her.
    Charles was given a nominal role in George’s company – a role which, while creating the impression that he was important, gave him little, or nothing, to do. It was a thoughtful, clever gesture from George, which gave his son-in-law self-respect and his daughter an income. It had been Susannah’s idea. The young couple settled into domestic life, had their ‘heir and a spare’ and resolutely stopped partying.
    Then there was Katherine.
    George’s eldest daughter, Katherine, at thirty, had done enough high-publicity fundraising in her lifetime to get a one-way ticket on Concorde straight to heaven the very moment she shuffled off her mortal coil. Yet still she had not brought a steady investment into the family via a wealthy husband. She had had to endure the slow shame of growing world-weary in the full glare of the spotlight without her moment of shimmering, white-dressed glory. There were younger, hipper ‘It’ girls now, who did vulgar things like write newspaper columns and reduce their high-class addictions, phobias and ailments into prurient headlines.
    The fact could no longer be denied that Katherine Markham had extended even her credit on the platinum card of acceptable single life. It was growing harder and harder to maintain the angular figure and self-loathing nature that was expected of women nowadays. Her bulimia and acidic tongue were so twentieth century. The plain fact was that she was a has-been and her assets were crumbling before their eyes.
    And as for Annie, ah Annie, where had they