The House in the Clouds

By Alex J. Milan

For years, Stella has kept a secret, but the truth she has concealed for so long is in danger of becoming public knowledge and destroying everyone and everything she cares about. The only person she trusts to help her is her daughter, but she has secrets of her own. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex J. Milan
• Release date: Jul 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9788409512720

Book preview

Prologue

April 2011

The Summer House, Tuscany, Italy

If not now, then when? Perhaps never. If never, why keep them at all? Stella looked at the papers in her hands and wondered again what she should do. She had thought of little else lately. Some people would no doubt have said it was necessary for her to do the right thing and report her findings, but when that would destroy so many people, could it really be considered right? Destroying the documents was the logical, if not strictly moral, option. Then she thought perhaps she should keep them after all, although she was not altogether sure why. Being indecisive was a new and unwelcome experience for her.

As the mother of two teenage children; the director of Isherwood, Gregory & Abate, a major name in the construction industry, and the wife of an increasingly high-profile politician, Martin Isherwood, she had learned to deal with anything that was thrown at her. Or so she had believed until the information contained within those papers had come into her possession and confirmed her deepest fears.

She had thought getting away from England, coming to the summer house, would be the best moment to tackle the subject. If there could be said to be a best moment. Then the phone call had come, offering Martin the opportunity he had longed for: promotion to the Cabinet. A whirlwind of phone calls and arrangements had followed and in two days Martin would be back in London while she remained in Italy with their children. There was, after all, no point in disrupting their Easter holiday. The moment which had never really come had now certainly passed.

Stella heard footsteps approaching and pushed the documents under some other folders on her desk. She composed herself as Martin appeared. He looked around the room as though he had caught the scent of suspicious activity in the air. She felt her guilty conscience nudging her, but then she wondered which of them was most to blame. He had acted without her knowledge, but she might be the one to ensure nobody would ever know.

‘Are you ready?’ Martin asked.

‘Of course,’ Stella replied, moving across the room to keep him well away from the desk. As she put her hands on his shoulders, she playfully turned him around before embracing him. She peered over his shoulder at the desk to reassure herself that the papers were fully concealed, no tell-tale piece of paper protruding from the makeshift hiding place. It seemed she was safe for now, and she allowed herself to relax into his arms, feeling the soft cotton of his shirt against her cheek.

She considered her next move as she held him close. After they had all returned from dinner, she would wait a while and then persuade him to go upstairs to check that their fifteen-year-old son Nick wasn’t glued to his games console. Martin would protest and say it would be better for her to do it, but she would remind him how much Nick respected him and that he was much more likely to listen to his father.

Giorgia, at nearly seventeen, would not reappear before morning; she would be tucked up in her room as soon as they returned. As of late, she had seemed preoccupied and uncharacteristically distant. Stella was worried about her and more than aware she hadn’t given her enough attention lately. All because of those papers. The thought of them made her realise she was becoming sidetracked when she needed to focus on the dilemma at hand.

Keeping Martin occupied would give her some breathing space; a chance to find a temporary hiding place more secure than any she had found since they had arrived at the house. And once he was back in England, she would have the luxury of more time to think, although neither time nor thinking had helped her yet. But now it really had to be time; time to decide whether to destroy the secrets she had uncovered before they could destroy her family or bury them so deeply they would only resurface if she chose to excavate them.

She found it impossible to imagine what circumstances might drive her to take the latter course. Perhaps it was just the thought of destroying months of painstaking research that deterred her from lighting a fire and seeing them disappear for what would, with a little luck, be forever.

One thing was clear to her, though. She could not continue wavering between the two options, consumed by indecision. Whatever she did, she would have to make sure that what Martin had done would not have an impact on their children’s future. They were blameless, and their lives should not be clouded by his actions.

Stella stepped back and looked at him with the smile she had learned to produce at will. ‘Congratulations on your new job, Secretary of State. Let’s go and celebrate.’

Chapter 1

Giorgia

From Monday to Friday, my alarm still went off at six thirty, and I dutifully got up, went through the motions of getting ready to go to work and left the house at seven forty-five, just as I always had. So far, so usual. Except I no longer had a job. Now I was travelling around London in a frantic search for a new one.

Two weeks before, I had been made redundant and put on gardening leave. Gardening leave; it sounded so inoffensive, almost alluring, but that was far from the reality of the situation. I had still been made redundant; I was superfluous. Soon I would receive my last salary payment and that, even combined with my redundancy pay, wouldn’t go far.

I hadn’t told Rob yet. I had thought, I had hoped, if I could get a new job, I could gloss over it, and he would barely register the change. As long as the money was coming in. He earned more than enough for both of us to live on, but that would not help me to plead my case for a little breathing space. Money was a big issue for Rob. I had always contributed equally despite the yawning pay gap between us, but I would have hoped for a partner on whom I could rely as I tried to restore equilibrium. Perhaps I should have told him, but I wasn’t trying to spare him the worry. I was trying to spare myself the additional aggravation I didn’t need when I was already paddling like mad to stay afloat.

* * *

‘Thank you for coming in, Ms Isherwood. No relation to our illustrious Home Secretary, are you?’ The interviewer’s tone was ambiguous, suggesting that could equally be a point in my favour or one against me. The forced laugh which followed didn’t help.

I stifled a sigh. Martin Isherwood was that rare politician who had somehow captured the public’s attention and become a household name. You might love him or hate him, but you would certainly know who he was. Everyone had heard of Martin Isherwood.

Playing along, I smiled. ‘No, none at all,’ I lied. My relationship with my father was strained, but the main reason for my lie was my desire to be seen as a person in my own right. I might succeed or fail, but I would do it because of who I was, not because of who my father was.

The interview proceeded down the usual, tortuous paths to which I had become accustomed as I was asked to outline my strengths and weaknesses. I could feel it wasn’t going particularly well, and I just wanted it to be over and done with.

‘Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?’

‘I’d like to think I’ll still be working here and perhaps, having proved my ability, even progressed a little,’ I said, trotting out the stock line I used without variation at every interview. I never meant a word of it, and the more frequently I heard myself saying it, the less plausible it sounded.

‘And what do you feel you can bring to this job?’

Any number of flippant answers came to mind: the ability to answer the phone, to write emails, to use a computer. ‘I have excellent time management skills,’ I offered.

‘But what sets you apart from the other candidates?’

I could feel my patience beginning to slip. ‘It’s hard to say when I don’t know them.’ I saw his earnest expression cloud over. I needed to rescue the situation. ‘But I do know I have the skills and experience you’re looking for.’

I watched as he jotted down a note. From that angle, his scrawl was indecipherable. ‘We’ll get back to you as soon as possible.’ He rose to shake my hand.

As I reached over to respond, I heard myself asking when I might hear from him. My voice sounded a little shaky, tinged with desperation, and I hated myself for it.

‘Well, we do have quite a long list of candidates to interview.’ He frowned and fiddled with his monogrammed cuffs. ‘As I said, we’ll let you know.’

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ I said, scooping up my bag. I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could and save either of us from any further embarrassment.

Taking refuge from the rain in the nearest café, I crossed another one off the list. Lists had always been my way of trying to convince myself I had some semblance of control over my life. They also helped me to make sense of things. Sometimes.

I started to doodle around the edges of the list. Some days, there were no interviews directly with prospective employers, only with recruitment agencies. On other days, there was nothing at all. I wasn’t sure which type of day was worse. That had been my second interview of the day, and now I had to kill time until I could head home.

Rob worked from home most of the time, leaving me needing to avoid the house until six o’clock, the time I would have got home if I had still been working. Since I had received my redundancy notice, I had consumed more coffee than was good for me as, every day, I waited for my watch to tick off the hours until I could go home.

The reality, I reflected, as I stirred another coffee and thought about my situation, was that a fine arts graduate with nothing but a string of administration jobs on her CV in the seven years since leaving university and no clear career path was probably not going to be anyone’s first choice.

I caught the conversation between the two people working in the café and listened in for want of any better distraction.

‘Turn the TV up.’

‘What do you want to listen to him for?’ the other woman asked but reached for the remote control and increased the volume anyway.

I glanced up to see my father’s face filling the screen, following the interviewer’s question with an attentive expression. He was nodding just enough to show how interested he was. I called it his listening face, although I thought that half the time he wasn’t actually listening at all but instead formulating the response he wanted to give, regardless of whether it was an answer to the question which had been posed. His effortless yet utterly irrelevant response was swiftly interrupted but not by the interviewer.

‘Look at him, blathering on,’ the woman said, waving the remote in the direction of the screen.

‘Shh.’

‘I don’t know why you want to listen. It’s all hot air and lies. Same as all of them.’

‘Hold on.’

We continued to listen as the Home Secretary swept aside the interviewer’s next question and proclaimed his enthusiasm for his latest policy. He was completely unruffled and dressed as immaculately as ever.

The presenter changed tack. ‘Moving on from the policies you’ve just been outlining, the Prime Minister is facing a number of questions about his conduct. Could you comment on that?’

If my father was rattled by the question, it didn’t show. He sighed; it was a theatrical one, designed to convey his weariness at the pointlessness of such enquiries. ‘There are always going to be people who say they dislike the leader of the party, but we are talking about a minority. I, along with the overwhelming majority of my colleagues, have the utmost confidence in the Prime Minister’s policies. As these are rolled out and the public start to see the very real and tangible benefits in their lives, those voices of dissent will, I am sure, die down.’

I noticed how he had said he had confidence in the Prime Minister’s policies, not the Prime Minister. It was typical of him. As the camera panned back to the presenter for him to wrap up, the woman turned the volume down. ‘So did you learn anything?’

‘No, he only reminded me that he’s a smarmy so-and-so. You were right. What a waste of space.’

They laughed at that and went back to work, and I thought about what they had said. My father; the liar; the smarmy so-and-so; the waste of space. In private he was tetchy and often distant, at least with me. In public, however, he presented himself as a paragon of reason and calm. The oil on troubled water; a safe pair of hands.

I remembered how our relationship had fallen apart; how I had been a huge disappointment to him. My determination to pursue a career in art had not gone down well, but when I had returned to the fold and gone to work at the family business, there had been a thawing. When I had resigned, the rift between us had reopened and left relations chillier than the Arctic.

That rift had done nothing but grow since then despite my mum’s valiant efforts to try to build bridges between us. Unable to find any common ground, I had given up, and he had seemed unconcerned. Now we were both entrenched in our positions. Yet, before all that, there had been a time when we had been close; one of my earliest memories was of us paddling in Cornish rock pools on a family holiday and then me squealing with delight as I got a ride back to the hotel on his shoulders. Somehow all that had been lost along the way, and I had learned to accept it would never be that way again.

My thoughts drifted back to work or the lack of it. I could have asked to go back to my parents’ company, now run by my mum since my father had entered politics. I was fairly sure she would try to find me something, but I wasn’t sure how my father would react. There was a reason I addressed my mum as ‘mum’ and my dad as ‘father’. It perfectly encapsulated the awkward formality and gulf of understanding which existed between us.

My brother Nick was his father’s son and idolised him. My relationship with Nick was as difficult as the one with my father. The saving grace for me was the fact that whilst I was not my mother’s daughter, there was a warmth and level of understanding between us which enabled us to accept how different we were yet remain close.

I wondered if I really could bear to go to my mum for a job. It would be the last resort; the very last resort. My previous stint at Isherwood, Gregory & Abate had been far from a resounding success but, more than that, the thought of being in close proximity to Nick every day was something I didn’t relish. He would crow about how I had come crawling back and use his seniority relative to mine to make every day as uncomfortable as possible.

I sent Rob a message to tell him I would be working late. Since I had received notification of my redundancy, I had been finding it harder and harder to face him. The brief message which appeared on my screen made him seem as uninterested as usual, but perhaps that was for the best. What would I have said if he had asked what I was working on? I sipped the cooling coffee and watched as the rain came down harder.

Chapter 2

Giorgia

Another week had passed, and I was staring the last week of gardening leave in the face with nothing in sight. I had managed to maintain the pretence of going to work while my search for a new job became ever more frantic, and the net I was willing to cast to find something, anything, grew wider. It was more wearing than actually working. The prospect of approaching my mum for a job was becoming inevitable and, although I knew I should be grateful for a safety net most people didn’t have, it gave me scant comfort.

Sunday was at least a day when I didn’t have to pretend to go to work, and I thought I should try to relax, not that I did that very successfully. My money was starting to run as low as my morale, and Rob would be expecting a transfer to his account for half of the rent and bills before long.

I saw Rob open his eyes and rolled across the bed to be nearer to him. Once, he would have automatically pulled me close. That time had long gone, and I ended up with my head resting awkwardly on the bony ridge of his shoulder. Not quite shut out but not let in either. I wondered what to say to him, but every idea which I ran through seemed to come up short. I stayed there in a sort of limbo, hoping he might initiate a conversation instead. He didn’t.

‘What would you like to do today?’ I aimed for a casual, cheerful tone.

Rob looked out of the window, and I followed his gaze. ‘Why do you always need a plan? There’s nothing much we can do anyway unless this rain lets up.’

‘I suppose not.’ I moved away from him because his shoulder had simply become too uncomfortable. I settled back into my pillow, soft and welcoming in comparison.

We lay there for about ten minutes. I had no idea what he was thinking about, but I was scrolling through a list of suitable things to say which might break the ice. The trouble was I had no idea why the ice was there in the first place.

The sound of the landline ringing echoed up the stairs. It had been Rob’s idea to have one. He was a software engineer, but he was also addicted to riding the waves of nostalgia for more traditional technology. We finally looked at each other. ‘I’ll go,’ Rob said. He was out of bed before I could respond.

I stared at the ceiling, mulling things over. On the other side of the bed, I heard Rob’s phone buzz. I never looked at his phone, but something made me reach out to pick it up before I could stop myself, and I read the message which had appeared on the screen.

Hey. I know I shouldn’t message you but I couldn’t stop myself. The other day was sooo good. Can’t wait til we can do it again.

I sat and looked at the screen, my hands shaking. I had not read it correctly. I tapped the screen and read it again. And again. I felt something inside me drain away, leaving nothing but a frozen void in its wake. The message left no room for ambiguity; not even Rob could talk his way out of that one, although he would no doubt try to twist it around if he felt so inclined. It did at least explain his coldness and irritability towards me lately.

Hearing footsteps on the stairs, I swiftly returned the phone to his bedside table. Keep it together, I told myself and took a few deep breaths before Rob walked in to find me where he had left me, on my side of the bed, gazing at nothing in particular.

Propping myself up, I noticed he looked wary. He appeared to have been knocked off-balance by something he could not have foreseen.

‘What is it?’ I already realised it was bad news, but how bad and what it might be, I couldn’t even imagine.

He ran a hand through his tousled, sandy hair, making it messier. ‘It’s someone from St Thomas’ Hospital, G.’

He knew how much I hated being called G, but what he had said overrode my desire to get into that conversation with him again.

‘What … Why?’ I seemed to be unable to move.

‘G, did you hear me? You need to get up.’ Rob’s voice sounded as though it was coming from far away.

Pushing the covers back, I asked why again, but he had already gone.

I raced down the stairs and saw Rob lingering near the phone. I picked up the receiver.

‘Hello?’

‘Good morning. Is that Giorgia Isherwood?’

‘Yes. Who is this?’

‘I’m calling from St Thomas’ Hospital. Could you confirm your mother’s name, please?’

‘Stella Abate Isherwood. What’s happened?’

‘I’m sorry to inform you that your mother has been involved in a road traffic accident.’

‘I see,’ I said, although I didn’t see anything at all.

‘Your mother asked us to call you.’

A number of questions clamoured to be asked first, but I found I could not manage to formulate any of them. I tried to focus on the fact my mum had been able to ask them to call me. That had to be a positive sign.

‘Are you still there, Ms Isherwood?’

‘Yes, yes, I am. How serious is it?’

‘She’s been conscious since she came in, which is good news. She has a broken leg and various other minor injuries, but she has escaped remarkably lightly all things considered. She was very insistent that you come in as soon as possible, though.’

‘Of course. I’ll leave now.’

Putting the phone down, I turned to Rob. ‘I’m going to the hospital.’

‘Do you want me to come with you?’

I looked at him and thought about the message waiting for him on his phone. ‘No, I’d prefer to go alone.’

‘Do you want to take the car?’ Rob asked, holding up the keys.

‘No. I’ll take the tube.’

I ran upstairs, pulled on the first clothes which came to hand and picked up my phone. There was a missed call which had come in fifteen minutes beforehand. I had put the phone on silent overnight and hadn’t got round to switching it back on. I called the number and got the hospital. ‘Sorry, wrong number,’ I said and hung up.

It occurred to me that if I had had my phone switched on, Rob wouldn’t have left the room, and I would never have had the opportunity to read