Making Your Mind Up by Jill Mansell

Author:Jill Mansell [Unknown]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi

Chapter 35

Fundraising for charity was always laudable, of

course it was. Being lectured to about the desperate

need for further research into such a distressing

medical condition was boring but understandably

necessary. Everyone in the room had their serious caring

faces on and was dutifully paying attention. Lottie,

clutching her glass of fizzy water, wondered if they

were all battling to control their Oh-God-this-is gross

faces as desperately as she was.

Seriously, much more of this and she might actually

be sick.

It was the opening night of Jumee, a glamorous

new restaurant in the upmarket Montpellier district of

Cheltenham. Deeply impressed by the invitation, a

silver 3-D hologram printed on Mediterranean- blue

perspex, Lottie had been delighted to come along and

check out the glamour first-hand on behalf of future

visitors to Hestacombe. And the food of course. She

had even celebrated by going out and treating herself to

a slinky new black and gold dress.

So far so good.

The bad news was, she hadn’t counted on

having to listen to an earnest grey-haired woman

doctor in a fawn, buttoned-to-the-neck cardigan and

bristly-looking tweed skirt droning on and on and on

in stomach-churning Technicolor detail about the horrors of ..

.

Eczema.

Half an hour ago Lottie’s stomach had been

rumbling away in joyful anticipation of the evening

ahead. The cooking smells wafting through from the

kitchen had been sublime. She deliberately hadn’teaten

anything since a KitKat at lunchtime. But now her

stomach had undergone an abrupt change of heart;

instead of rumbling happily away it had squashed itself

into a tight, hard little knot, sullenly daring her — in true

teenage fashion — to try and make it accept any food at

all.

It clearly wasn’t an ideal scenario. Lottie felt

sorry for the young couple who had plunged their life

savings into this new venture. Having spoken to

Robbie and Michelle earlier, she’d learned that it had

always been their dream to run their own restaurant.

Duly selling their house and emptying their savings

accounts, they had been dismayed to discover that

they still didn’t have enough money to make the

business viable. Step forward Michelle’s Uncle Bill, a hugely

wealthy man, who had generously offered to back

them to the tune of eighty thousand pounds. Thus,

relieved and grateful, they had accepted the offer and

work had duly been completed on Jumee.

When Uncle Bill had suggested using the

opportunity of the opening night to raise money for

his favourite charity, it would have been churlish to

refuse. Even though they already knew his favourite

charity was Clearaway UK. Uncle Bill’s beloved son Marcus

suffered dreadfully from chronic eczema to the

extent that he still spent months on end in hospital,

his life blighted by the painful disfiguring disease.

Uncle Bill had long made it his mission to do as much

as humanly possible to eradicate it.

Which was noble and admirable and just went

to show what a wonderful compassionate human being

he was. But it also had to be said that inviting Dr

Edwina Murray of the Clearaway Research Institute

to speak at Jumee’s opening night possibly wasn’t the

smartest idea Uncle Bill had ever had.

‘... when the skin is cracked and red, when a

person’s entire body is one mass of swollen weeping

wounds, when members of the public turn away in

revulsion from the sight of a face so hideously

disfigured it is barely recognisable, life becomes

intolerable for the sufferer,’ Dr Murray pronounced.

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