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‘Here’s hoas supposed to go In an ideal world I would have made a dramatic entrance…or at least the cake would have made a dramatic entrance…and I would have leapt out of it, like the Marilyn Monroe equivalent of a Jack in the Box, stunning you withyou ‘Happy Birthday’, even though I’ll be the first to ade…’
‘Unfortunately…’ He edged away and looked at her with a shuttered expression ‘Unfortunately you couldn’t have chosen a worse moment for your little surprise’
‘No, well…’ Always so cos of unease nibbling away inside her, even though really he no longer looked angry ‘You never told uests You said that you would be working, and I just thought that it would be kind of nice to be surprised You work too hard’
‘I do what I have to do, Megan How many times have I told you that?’
‘Yes, I know You hate this place, and you work hard so that you can get out of it and do so with your life’
‘I intend to dowith my life’
His father had done just so to find that the streets of London would be paved with gold In the event they had been paved with tarmac and cement, just like everywhere else, and his father’s talents, his tremendous mathe boy, had become lost in the mindless boredom ofelse, and provincial little England had not been kind to a lish was broken Never lish rose with as few qualifications as her Italian husband An English rose whose hands had been pre jobs she had held down so that they could afford a small holiday once a year by the cold British seaside
Alessandro didn’t like to think of the mother he had only known for the first ten years of his life He liked even less to think of his father, loyally working for a haulage firm for twenty-five years, only to be et another job
To his dying breath he had continued to tell his son what a wonderful life he had led
To Alessandro’s way of thinking his father’s talents had been wasted, by lack of opportunity and the cruelty of a world that judged a man’s worth by bits of paper He would, he had deteret those bits of paper, and he would control the world so that it could never control him the way it had his father
‘Those threethat unaccustomed drift of memory to himself, ‘ere treated to your impromptu performance, are instrumental in my plan for the future’
‘You mean, the pinstriped crew?’