Brick by Brick

Part Nine

With a knowing smile she looked back ahead.

Fifteen minutes later they arrived at the five star Mayfair hotel that was home to this prestigious event. Joel was used to visiting the place, he'd been to a ton of conferences and meetings in most of the Mayfair and Park Lane high end hotels and he was no longer intimidated by them, but he had been once, many years ago. Glancing at Sammy he recognised the anxiety, the tension in her shoulders, the way she bit her bottom lip, she was suddenly petrified.

"Let's go in the bar, get a warm up drink first, yes?"

He barely gave her chance to agree and he'd led her past the liveried concierge and into the lobby bar. It was as glamorous as he remembered and filled with equally glamorous people sitting talking and drinking exotic looking cocktails. He steered her into the room and to two seats in the corner of the bar.

"Sit, I'll get us a drink."

Sammy thought this would be easy, walking into a hotel and playing the part of someone who belonged there. But she didn't. This was a million miles from her comfort zone; she'd sampled this life with Marcus, a little, occasional dinners out or luxurious weekends away. But in all honesty, she hadn't stayed in a hotel until she was sixteen, she hadn't had a holiday until that trip to Greece, and she hadn't known luxury until Marcus treated her.

She thought about her mother, Monica, as much as she was useless she was defensive over her, furiously so. They'd lived in more than fifteen homes by time she was sixteen, and that had included several school changes, that hadn't been good for her education. But for some reason she had scraped some decent qualifications. They'd had nothing, her mother dragged her from temporary job, to temporary job; useless man to useless man. Her mother had never had a sense of belonging, a sense of happiness and now, years later she felt pity for her.

It couldn't have been easy getting pregnant at sixteen, to an older man who disappeared at the first warning. She'd been let to believe that her grandparents had thrown Monica out and that she'd had to forge a way through life by herself, young, naive and pregnant. It wasn't until she was sixteen herself that Sammy found out that wasn't the truth. Her mother had apparently always been as self centred and stubborn as she was now, and after a disagreement over the baby, her, after her grandparents tried to discuss the best options with her, she'd literally thrown a childish tantrum and packed her bags. She'd not seen them for years, and Sammy did think that as the years passed she actually believed her own story; it had probably morphed in to one story over the years in her mind. When Eleanor, her grandmother had found her, Sammy refused to believe her; she was unable to fathom the fact that Monica had CHOSEN that life for them. But she had.

She had hated her for years, she'd never done anything to help Sammy, in fact Sammy had spent a lot of time actually caring for her own mother. Even now, Monica was useless, she was an emotional cripple and unable to organise anything. She'd inherited her family home when her parents died, and even that solidity wasn't enough for Monica. Late night phone calls, tears, histrionics...she had it all from her mother.

But she was the only mother she had, and she couldn't change that. She loved her as a person, but resented her as a mother. The only real positive, the only think she could thank her for, was her determination to be a better mother than Monica, to be everything for Eleanor.

A drink appeared in her visual field and she had to blink to focus on it, and the person at the end of the arm holding it. Joel smiled, "penny for your thoughts?"

Though they were probably worth a hell of a lot more than that, if her facial expression was anything to go by. Joel had ordered her a champagne cocktail in the hope that it would settle her nerves; placing it in front of her he sat his whisky rocks opposite.