Just In Case Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  About this Edition

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  About The Author

  A Proper Family Holiday

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Copyright

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 Chrissie Manby

  Cover Illustration copyright © Michelle Gorman ©Kongsak and © Simon Bratt

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  About This Edition

  Just In Case has been written and edited in British English rather than American English, including spelling, grammar and punctuation.

  JUST IN CASE

  By Chrissie Manby

  Chapter One

  Never were there two less similar identical twins than Clare and Rosie Marwood.

  Though they had shared a womb for nine months and were born within two minutes of each other on the third of June, most people being introduced to the Marwood sisters for the first time were astonished to hear they were even related.

  At first sight, they looked so different. Clare Marwood was a tidy brunette, with a sharp-edged bob, given to dressing for success. She held down a very, very responsible job at a company called Cyber Intel Solutions, which built enormous IT systems for businesses and governments all over the world. She lived in her own smart London flat, which was as pristine as the day she took ownership: all wooden floors, stainless steel and clean cream-coloured furniture.

  Clare’s twin, Rosie Marwood, on the other hand was a vivacious redhead whose arrival was announced by her laugh. She was not a natural redhead, mind you. Heaven knows the colour she dyed her hair was never actually seen in nature at all. And while Clare always looked as though she was on her way to the office, Rosie typically dressed as though she was on her way to Las Vegas, where she would be swinging from a trapeze as part of the Cirque de Soleil. In fact, that would have been Rosie’s ideal occupation. As it was, she alternated between temping and the odd acting job. She often played the ‘kooky’ girl next door in TV adverts.

  There was nothing ‘kooky’ about Clare, just as there was nothing ‘corporate’ about Rosie. They were as different as a glass of chilled white wine and a rum punch cocktail with three cherries and an umbrella on top. They were as unlikely to be found in the same habitat as an owl and a parrot or a polar bear and an orangutan. Clare was a minimalist. Everything about Rosie’s style was spectacular to the max. Clare drove a nice safe Volkswagen. Rosie actually knew how to ride a unicycle. Clare started every day with organic green juice and muesli. Rosie began most days at eleven with a sneaky cigarette.

  On closer inspection however, similarities did begin to show. The sisters were the exact same height, of course, and though Clare was always careful with her diet and spent hours in the gym while Rosie lived on chocolate and fries, they weighed the same to the very last ounce. They had the same fine arms and shoulders. They had matching high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes. Their feet were elegant and narrow (left foot slightly bigger than the right). If you watched them walk across a room, the resemblance became even clearer. They had the same energetic stride. If they were barefoot, that is. Rosie was fond of a three-inch heel and thought anything else made her look dumpy. Clare was rarely seen in anything but flats. Endlessly practical, Clare liked to be able to run for a bus if she had to. Rosie was forever waiting for her knight in a shining white limo.

  The twins’ mother, Jane, sometimes wondered if her girls had grown up to be so different because she had dressed them identically for much of their childhood. She hadn’t meant to. When they first learned she was carrying twins Jane and her husband Stu told themselves that they would always allow the girls to express their individual personalities to the fullest. They certainly wouldn’t treat them as a single entity. But the fact was that all the baby gifts Jane and Stu received came in perfect matching pairs. The young couple didn’t have a lot of money. If people gave the baby girls identical dresses then that was what they would have to wear. They continued to be given identical outfits by their aunts and godmothers every birthday and Christmas until they were ten years old.

  The changes began as soon as the girls started to get pocket money. Clare saved up and was the first to buy an item of clothing on her own: a navy blue jumper from River Island. After a decade dressed in pink and yellow and far too many flounces, Clare could not wait to embrace its simplistic chic. Rosie, who found it impossible to save up enough money to buy a sweater when there was always a new set of ‘scratch and sniff’ stickers to be bought first, continued to allow herself to be dressed by their mother and their aunts. Yet more flounces. Yet more pink.

  ‘I quite like pink,’ said Rosie. Indeed, in her thirteenth year, she wore no other colour, when she wasn’t dressed for school.

  Now that her daughters were adults, living very different lives in different towns, Jane Marwood tried, every year, to buy the twins two very different birthday presents. Twelve months ago, Clare had asked for a juicer, so she could make her own kale smoothies when she got home from the gym. Rosie had asked for an armful of colourful bracelets that looked as though they had been made from boiled sweets. However that year, for their twenty-eighth birthday, the sisters had been reluctant to tell Jane what they wanted. Clare said there was nothing she needed, which was probably true. Clare always could look after herself. Rosie told Jane she should save her money for her retirement, which wasn’t far off now. But both the sisters were going to be at their mother’s house on the actual day of their birthday, which fell on a Sunday that year. Jane couldn’t let them go home empty-handed. And then she saw the suitcases, in the window of the shop in town.

  Like so many of the shops in the once bustling market town where the Marwood twins had grown up, the luggage store was closing under the weight of competition from the Internet. ‘Everything must go’ said the huge red banner in the window. Jane found herself drawn inside.

  The metallic blue wheelie cases were an incredible bargain. Irresistible. They were light but surprisingly voluminous. The shop assistant assured Jane that the fiberglass structure of the cases made them astonishingly strong. Indeed an advertising poster on the wall of the shop showed the very same suitcases being used as stepping-stones by an elephant. And if Jane bought two, she could have them both for just fifty pounds a piece rather than seventy-five. Fifty pounds each? Reduced from two hundred and fifty at their most expensive? It would have been rude not to. Jane’s birthday shopping was finished in a trice.

  Jane wondered briefly, when she took the cases out of the boot of her car upon getting home, whether the twins would be offended to get identical presents for the first time in almost fifteen years. But she shrugged the thought off. The cases were extremely practical. Both girls loved to travel. And it wasn’t as though they ever travelled anywhere together. As that particular thought cro
ssed Jane’s mind she couldn’t help but feel a little twinge of sadness. How had the twins, who had been so close as children, come to spend so little time together as adults unless she, their mother, was their reason for doing so?

  Chapter Two

  The weekend of the twins’ birthday arrived. Clare and Rosie coordinated their train arrival times so that their mother could pick them both up at once. When she got to the station on Sunday morning, Jane was dismayed to see that while she had spotted both her daughters instantly, they did not seem to have noticed each other. Surely it wasn’t that neither had recognized her own twin? The girls stood about twenty-five metres apart. Clare was tapping away on her Blackberry, doubtless attending to some work-related emergency. Rosie was staring into space, blocking out the real world with the music on her iPod. Though it was a very warm day, Clare was dressed in head-to-toe black: a severe linen shift and sensible ballet flats. She had a sober black silk-knit cardi draped over her shoulders. Rosie wore a floor-sweeping maxi-dress in all the colours of the rainbow. She had dyed the tips of her red hair to match.

  When Jane beeped her car horn, both Clare and Rosie looked up and beamed at the sight of her. Jane was relieved to see they had equally warm smiles for each other too. But as they met at their mother’s car, Rosie went for a full body hug and Clare caught Rosie by the tops of her arms before she could get too close. Clare went for an air kiss instead, as though a hug might crease her pristine shift dress. Hug versus air kiss. Exuberant versus reserved. Even in the way they greeted each other, the Marwood girls were chalk and cheese.

  ‘Happy birthday, little sister,’ said Rosie, with a twinkle of mischief in her eye.

  It drove Clare nuts to be called the ‘little sister’, though, technically it was true. She was the second born by those all important two minutes.

  ‘Are you staying for a month?’ Clare asked, observing her sister’s luggage. Rosie was travelling with her enormous old Samsonite. Clare had a neat if ancient Tumi. She took great care of it, even oiling the wheels between trips. Rosie’s Samsonite had definitely been around the block a few times. It looked just about ready to burst.

  Luggage loaded, Clare got into the front of the car. Rosie was happy to sprawl across the back seat. They shared their news with their mother in a torrent of gossip and back-chat.

  ‘Still working for that boring IT company?’ Rosie asked Clare. ‘How many years has it been now? You must be about ready for your gold watch.’

  ‘Still signing on?’ Clare responded.

  ‘I had an audition last week as it happens.’

  ‘Nicole Kidman must be shaking in her Louboutins.’

  ‘Girls,’ said their mother in a warning tone and peace was, momentarily, restored.

  After a celebratory birthday lunch at the local gastro-pub, the Marwoods at last returned to the house they had grown up in. It was a house that contained many happy memories, but also some heart-achingly sad ones. The twins’ father had died in a traffic accident when they were just eleven years old. He was driving home from work. It was a cold night. Freezing fog. The car in front skidded on a patch of black ice. Stu died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. More than a decade and a half later, they still felt his absence when they walked through the door. Especially on a birthday.

  But the house was soon filled with laughter that afternoon. Jane opened a bottle of champagne she’d saved from Christmas and over bubbles and birthday cake the twins swapped their own little gifts. Rosie had bought Clare a book about ‘healing with colour’. For spiritual well-being. Clare had bought Rosie a book about ‘easy financial organization’. For dummies.

  ‘Thanks,’ the sisters told each other brightly. ‘Just what I’ve always wanted.’

  Both would leave their new books behind on Jane’s bookshelves when they left the following day.

  But Clare and Rosie were very pleased with their birthday gifts from their mother. As it happened, the twins were both visiting Jane en route to the airport. The next morning, Clare would be flying to the States for a three-day company conference, attended by the worldwide senior management of her firm. Meanwhile Rosie was flying to Italy, to a picturesque hill town near Florence, where she would be attending the wedding of Keira, an old friend from university.

  ‘This is brilliant,’ said Rosie, as she took her new suitcase for a spin around the kitchen floor. ‘And just in time. The wheels on my old case are about to fall off.’

  ‘It’s the perfect size,’ said Clare. ‘And hard-sided, which is wonderful, because everything you pack stays exactly in place and you don’t have to worry about it being thrown about by the baggage handlers. Thank you, Mum. I couldn’t have asked for a more useful gift.’

  The sisters wrapped their mother in a warm embrace that turned into a sort of group hug.

  ‘And you really don’t mind that they match?’ Jane asked them.

  ‘Of course we don’t!’ the twins told her, though secretly both would have preferred the same case in a different shade.

  Chapter Three

  That night, both Clare and Rosie decanted the contents of their old bags into the shiny new wheelie-cases in readiness for the travels ahead.

  Naturally, Clare’s approach to packing was nothing if not meticulous. She had a system. She had shoe bags for all her shoes, including her flip-flops. Underwear was kept in a neat cotton pouch. She had little waterproof envelopes for her swimming costume and toiletries and reams of tissue paper to fold between her blouses and dresses and trousers so that they arrived looking as perfectly pressed as when she brought them home from the dry-cleaner.

  Clare was very proud of her packing style, honed over years of last-minute business travel, inspired and influenced by those ‘how to’ articles that appear in every women’s magazine just before the summer holidays. She loved to see those tidy photo spreads. Everything flat and clean and matching. It made her feel calm. Since she bought that first navy sweater in River Island, Clare’s style had only become more pared down. Practically everything she owned now was navy, black or grey. The only difference between her summer and winter wardrobes came in the fabric. Cashmere and wool for winter. Cotton and linen for summer. But no matter what the season, she always travelled light. That was easy when every top you had went with every skirt and every pair of trousers. You could create dozens of outfits from just a handful of co-ordinated pieces. Oh, she added the odd dash of individuality with scarves, but mostly she kept her accessories minimal too. Just a pair of diamond ear-studs and her plain stainless-steel watch. Clare didn’t want her clothes to do the talking, but if they had been able to describe themselves, they would have said they were discreet, elegant and very grown-up. And so neat that Clare could happily leave her wardrobe doors open as though the clothes hanging inside were a carefully chosen modern artwork created especially for her stark white flat.

  Rosie’s approach to packing and dressing was altogether different. While Clare’s aesthetic was minimal to the point of blandness, there wasn’t a frill or a flounce that Rosie didn’t covet. As far as Rosie was concerned, more is more is more... Opening the doors to the over-stuffed wardrobe in Rosie’s bedroom in her shared flat was like pulling the string on an oversized party popper. Out everything tumbled, in a riot of texture and colour. You could almost hear trumpets blare ‘ta-daa!’ Every morning pastels and neons and primaries all fought for Rosie’s attention. Ski-jackets battled with swimsuits. On the floor was a landslide of battered and mismatched shoes. Rosie had never knowingly passed up the chance to own a pink suede stiletto. Or an electric blue patent pump. Or a bead embellished gold sandal with a five-inch heel. She had shoes for every possible occasion. Except perhaps going for a walk.

  With such a riotous, disorganized wardrobe back home, it was no wonder that Rosie’s old case was also groaning at the seams. Travelling light was never going to be part of Rosie’s repertoire. She’d left her packing for that wedding party in Italy until the very last minute and then she had a crisis. What di
d one wear to a wedding in Tuscany? The service was going to be in a church. That meant she should probably choose something that covered her shoulders and knees. But the party was going to be outdoors, and the weather forecasts were predicting thirty-degree weather. A maxi dress with spaghetti straps would be far more comfortable for that. But which one? Rosie could think of at least eleven candidates in that year’s shopping haul alone. Ah yes. Rosie was a somewhat indiscriminate shopper, as her bank account would attest. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a balance figure that wasn’t appended with the letter ‘D’.

  In the end, Rosie packed four maxi dresses. She also packed three knee-length dresses and six tops and five skirts including a tutu (Yes, an actual tutu in bubblegum pink). She would choose the dress which ‘called to her’ on the day. The problem then, of course, was that each of the dresses required a certain type of shoe. Different skirt lengths and volumes require different heel types. Every stylish woman knows that. The striped maxi could be worn with the gold mules but the pink one, which was longer, definitely required the high wedge espadrilles in soft cream suede. The plain blue dress would look better with silver accessories such as her silver strappy sandals. The rainbow dress with the glittering sequin highlights required the red platforms. Rosie stuffed all four pairs in.

  Then Rosie threw in necklaces and clutch bags and scarves. As far as she was concerned, it just wasn’t possible to over-accessorize. And then she threw in some cardigans in case it got cold in the evenings. And what if it rained? It wasn’t impossible at that time of year. She needed at least one rain-coat. She threw in her bright yellow trench. With all that inside, she could only close her old case by sitting on it and when she drew the zip around she heard the ominous sounds of strain from the fabric into which the zip was stitched.