Love, Lies and Lemon Cake

by Sue Watson

  LOVE, LIES AND LEMON CAKE

  SUE WATSON

  BOOKOUTURE

  CONTENTS

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  1. Film Star Fingers and Fake Bake

  2. Bulging Muscles and Historical Hams

  3. Ryan Gosling and a Dirty Martini

  4. Metamorphosis for a Marriage

  5. Cakes, Coke and a Cute Australian

  6. Slow-Pulled Pork and Ice Road Truckers

  7. Looking for Mr Waitrose

  8. Porn Star Martinis and Broken-Hearted Cake

  9. Strappy Dresses and Malevolent Blondes

  10. German Sausage and Australian Sunshine

  11. Sangas on the Beach and Sex Under the Stars

  12. A Weekend Lost and Found

  13. A Glittery Groin and a Sparkly Future

  14. Anything Could Happen!

  15. Kick-Ass Cougars on Very Thin Ice

  16. You Hear The Music and You Just Gotta Dance!

  17. The Non-Lithuanian Baywatch Blonde

  18. Taxi for Fate

  19. Film Stars and Rooftops and Santorini’s Heart

  20. Castles in the Sky

  21. A Red Dress, A Sunset and No Goodbyes

  Epilogue

  A note from Sue

  Published by Bookouture, an imprint of StoryFire Ltd.

  23 Sussex Road, Ickenham, UB10 8PN

  United Kingdom

  www.bookouture.com

  Copyright © Sue Watson 2014

  Sue Watson has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-909490-43-7

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This story is about a woman’s journey and, as with all my heroines, I have travelled with her. Along the way, some very special people joined us, bringing their own brand of help, humour, love and lemon cake...

  A huge thank you to Oliver Rhodes at Bookouture for his wisdom, guidance and belief in this book from the very beginning when all I had was a handful of thoughts and cake crumbs. Thank you to Emily Ruston, my fantastic editor who put zest in the lemon cake, cream in the frosting and transformed my ingredients into a delicious read.

  A very big thank you to my friend Louise Bagley for her hilarious and fascinating insights into hair and beauty salon life, to Emma Richardson for the dating dramas, and Lesley Mc Loughlin, Sarah Robinson and Liz Cox for advice, inspiration and everything in between.

  Lots of love and very large glasses of wine to Jan Holman, Jackie Swift, Sheila Webb, Diane Tilley and Sarah Douglas, who have all contributed thoughts, malapropisms and brilliant anecdotes. Love and hugs to friend and ‘Book Whisperer’ Kim Nash and my girls and cheerleaders Alison Birch, Sharon Beswick, Sue Johnson and the legendary ‘Literary Ladies Wot Lunch’.

  Thanks as always to my mum Patricia Engert, who started me on my own journey by always telling me anything is possible. And last, but never least, my love to Nick Watson—what would I do without you?

  For Eve Watson, wherever you go and whatever you do, know I’ll always be there... with cake.

  1

  FILM STAR FINGERS AND FAKE BAKE

  ‘I want you,’ he breathed, sliding his warm hand under my gown, then slowly, sensuously along my thigh. I lay back on the white sunlounger, the infinity pool lapping at my toes, him lapping at my neck, all hot breath and sensual friction. Dressed only in diamonds and Fake Bake, I smiled provocatively, playing hard to get and stirring on the lounger so he could enjoy me in the best possible light. In his free hand he held a dirty martini to my lips and I swallowed gratefully, framed perfectly by the Hollywood sign nestling in those star-studded hills.

  ‘Ryan... I shouldn’t be here,’ I said, admiring the way he held his glass and moved his hand around my body at the same time. It can’t have been easy, like rubbing your head and patting your stomach in sync.

  ‘I have washing to do,’ I panted. ‘Then I have to.... ah... clean the windows, and then I’m... oh... making the tea.’

  He didn’t care; he was too wrapped up in lust, his twinkly eyes and film star fingers caressing my whole body, and aching for the moment I would be his. I wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last he made passionate love to by an aqua infinity pool in LA. With total disregard for my washing pile and in complete denial of my filthy windows and uncooked tea, he gently pushed his knee between mine, panting in my ear about just what we would be doing next. The stars were out and I lay back in his arms, waiting for the passion to explode, when the sound of Craig’s voice bore through the air like a bloody bullet.

  ‘Are you going to spend all day in that bath?’

  I looked up. Ryan Gosling’s twinkly eyes faded through the mists of steam and foamy bubbles, along with the dirty martinis, white leather sunloungers... and hope.

  Unlike Ryan, the last time Craig had touched my thigh was about two years before when his hand had slipped as he turned over in bed... asleep. We’d been married for about a hundred years so romance was a distant memory and sex something I only saw fleetingly on TV. After the usual passion and wanting of the early days, we’d settled down to married life. The chaste goodnight kiss, the ‘did you have a good day?’ for a while, which then petered out into nothing and, like siblings sharing a house, we carried out our rituals and roles independently, while pretending to ourselves everything was fine.

  While my daughter was growing up and I was juggling work and childcare, I was happy to live like this, with no distractions, but recently I’d begun to question where my life was going. Was this it? A life lived on film star fantasies and vague memories of a marriage that once was? Craig lived for his work and had long ago given up on romantic evenings fuelled with wine and sweet nothings; he was always too busy. For my part, I’d given up competing with his plumbing business and the sheer excitement that leaking stopcocks and faulty faucets brought him. Faced with the glittering prospect of a flange crisis at seven a.m. the next morning, Craig found it hard to contain his excitement and had little left for a night of marital sex with his middle-aged wife. Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt and the boys, however, had plenty of time for me, even if it was only in the Hollywood of my head.

  I climbed out of the bath and dried myself, trying to remember how it felt to have someone else’s hands on my back, round my undressed waist. I craved the warmth, the body of another human—a real man as opposed to the film stars I could only dream about.

  It wasn’t just the lack of sex; I missed the physical affection and closeness we’d once had, and with each day merging into another, before I knew it another loveless year had gone by. It wasn’t like I hadn’t tried; a few months before, I’d taken the bull by the horns and suggested we have ‘an early night’. He'd looked at me like I was mad.

  ‘But... Top Gear’s on...’ he’d gasped, incredulous, and as always missing the point.

  ‘We could go to bed and you could record Top Gear,’ I answered trying to keep my voice seductive while wanting to smack him in the face.

  ‘That would be stupid,’ he answered incredulously. He didn’t look at me, just continued staring at the TV screen while slowly turning the pages of Plumbing Monthly. Crai
g had all he needed right in front of him. Who needed sex with a human when you had a pressure-reducing valve glistening and just begging to be fitted? Tightly.

  ‘Yes, going to bed together would be very stupid,’ I’d snapped back, trying to push all thoughts of poison and paying a hitman from my mind. It had been a while and, being generous, I wondered if Craig may be a little shy and needed more encouragement. I put both arms around him awkwardly and, closing my eyes and pretending he was Brad Pitt, I kissed his face. I’d read in a magazine at work that if you behaved in a loving way with your partner, even if you didn’t feel the love, it would come... So imagine you’re feeling deep resentment, disappointment and nothing towards your partner during the dying embers of what was once something like love (just an example, you understand). If you then force yourself to hug and kiss them like you are back in love, all those pesky feelings of deep, dark hatred and unadulterated loathing will be replaced by love and affection. I was ready to give anything a go. My negative feelings towards Craig were causing my skin to flake. It had to be worth a try. My worry was that the very act of hugging him may turn into an act of violence on my part. It was no coincidence that Craig was planning a new patio in the summer, and I was thinking less about decking and more about where to hide the body.

  Kissing Craig was like sucking lemons and, as I pulled away, he looked at me, surprised. Going against my gut feeling, I thought of the shared mortgage, gave him another smouldering look and left the room. I went upstairs and carefully took out the faded nightie I saved for holidays and sprayed ‘Angel’ all over it. Wafting it around the room, I tried to set the scene so when he came upstairs the ‘intoxicating and alluring’ fragrance would render him helpless to resist. I’d read this ‘love tip’ on GetYourManHotNow.com. and, also taking the website’s advice, dotted a few lit tea lights around the room so it would be just like a love scene from a film where they fall into a room, dazed by lust and glowing by candlelight. But Craig saw tea lights as a fire hazard, so rather than upset him, I blew them all out. I’d save them for Johnny Depp, who never complained about a little fire in the bedroom.

  After about ten minutes he still hadn’t appeared, so before I lost all interest and went to bed with Good Housekeeping and a slice of cake, I padded back downstairs. I stood in the doorway of the living room, waiting for Craig to look up from his magazine. He didn’t.

  ‘Craig. Would you like to go to bed... with me?’ I tried. It was my last-ditch attempt to see if there was anything at all left in our marriage. His silence hit me like a slap as he turned from the screen and looked me up and down.

  ‘Not tonight, love. Clarkson’s testing the new Audi.’

  Even if he genuinely preferred to watch Jeremy Clarkson drive a fucking car than have sex with me, the least he could do was fake it. After all, I was willing to lie back and think of Johnny Depp... surely he could do the same with Jeremy Clarkson? When your own husband rejects you in the bedroom (the living room doorway, to be precise) for a loud, opinionated, middle-aged man driving a fast car, it’s a sign that:

  a) You need to shave your legs.

  Or b) Your marriage is in deep shit.

  I gazed sadly at myself in the steamy mirror, recalling this last rejection only months before. When did we stop loving each other? Did it happen in a minute, in an hour? Or had our feelings slowly decayed over the twenty-odd years we’d been married? Like a lifeboat at sea, disillusion and regret had slowly seeped in and we were all but capsized. I was torn between accepting my fate and fighting for something better—and recently I’d been dreaming of the latter. I didn’t want to live the rest of my life and never feel another hand on my thigh, the frisson of passion, that first kiss with strange lips... the kiss with someone I loved.

  When we were first together, Craig would look into my eyes and tell me he loved me every single day. I was always the crazy one who booked weekends away at the last minute, ran into the sea fully clothed, sang the loudest karaoke and always had a funny story to tell. Once he came home from work and I’d set up the tent in the back garden, with a bottle of cava and a takeaway because we couldn’t afford to go on holiday. He’d said one of the things he loved most was my optimism and the way I never let anything get me down; ‘You are such a dreamer,’ he’d say, his eyes bright with love. Funny how later in our marriage he used the same words to criticise me for forgetting to pay a bill or trying to see something from a positive perspective; ‘Oh, you’re such a dreamer, Faye. Why don’t you see what’s in front of you and stop always looking for the happy ending?’ he’d yelled in my face. ‘Because there isn’t one!’

  I knew one thing for sure: Craig wasn’t my happy ending. My heart would sink at the scrape of his key in the door each evening and it was impossible to imagine how once upon a time I’d been excited about seeing him after work. I’d recently read an article in a glossy mag during my coffee break at work, ‘How to Get Your Marriage Groove back,’ which suggested it was common for married couples to suffer a dip and, like an infected wound, as long as you got it in time, it wouldn’t kill your relationship. But the time had passed for saving the life of our marriage. I was now forty-two and couldn’t bear the thought of staying with Craig for another twenty-odd years until it was too late. But what could I do? And where could I go? I had plenty of time to plan my escape as I sat in my chair near the window, silently waiting for bedtime as the TV droned on.

  Still in my towel I wandered into Emma’s room to breathe in the remnants of her perfume and pretend she was still living at home. Emma’s was the only room with a full-length mirror—I didn’t want one in ours; after the age of thirty, a full-length mirror is not something one wants to be confronted with on a daily basis. I held my breath, stood to face it and dropped my towel. I tried not to make an agonised noise as the towel fell, but staring at the horrible truth, I couldn’t help it. The body that had once skipped along beaches in bikinis, wiggled past boys in tight jeans and carried my beautiful daughter to full term was gone. What replaced it had lumps and lines and, though I optimistically spotted a bottle of Emma’s left-behind scented body lotion and began slapping it on, I knew this was a far bigger job than mere lotion could cope with. Scaffolding would be more appropriate for this task I thought, suddenly spotting wrinkles on my knees. I didn’t even know it was physically possible to have furrowed knees.

  That face cream I’d bought from Debenhams hadn’t worked either, I noticed, trying not to think of the new knee crisis and going in for a facial close-up I knew I’d regret. Apparently there was a scientific formula inside that extremely expensive little pink pot that imitated babies’ skin cells. Mandy the Beauty Therapist I worked with had insisted I would be transformed from being an ‘old and wrinkly forty-two-year-old’ (her words) to looking like a perky eighteen-year-old again in just two weeks! However, it was now exactly two weeks since I’d started this new regime and I still looked like a forty-something me and not the glowing, well-preserved supermodel pictured on the label.

  ‘It’s not moisturiser; it’s like something from a science-fiction film,’ Emma was keen to point out when I’d called to tell her about my new face cream.

  ‘Mum, think about it—if it worked as they say and your own skin absorbed these cells and reversed the ageing process, you’d literally be a time traveller... or a baby!’

  We laughed at that. She had a point and she'd always been more sensible and down to earth than me, more like her dad in that respect.

  I looked back at myself in the mirror. Faye Dobson forty-something faced with the physical manifestation of gravity, empty nest and married life with an indifferent plumber stared back at me. My head, heart and body were in limbo—we had no place in the world; my leaky lifeboat was cast adrift and I wasn’t now needed on anyone’s voyage.

  I opened my wardrobe and waded through a few old skirts and dresses. I hadn’t been anywhere in the past few years to justify a nice dress or a pair of heels. It occurred to me I hadn’t worn high heels and an evening dress
since before Emma was born, and she was now twenty-one!

  Then I spotted the bright pink rucksack on top of the wardrobe. I pulled it down, blowing off the dust, and smiled to myself, recalling how I’d bought this bag as an eighteen-year-old with global travel in mind. I clicked apart the plastic locks on the bag. It was probably old-fashioned now in its garish pink with blue piping, but I’d loved that rucksack, spending all my birthday money on it and convincing myself it was ‘an investment’ because I would use it all the time travelling to all those places I'd dreamed of. I was going to see the world with that bag. It was small but I’d be able to squeeze in everything I’d need.

  I didn’t use it once.

  I held it to me, imagining the airports, the ferry terminals and mountain treks the bag had never seen. Reaching in, I was reminded of all the other things I’d dreamed about but never done. I tipped the bag up onto the bed, scattering the photos, friendship bracelets, hair toggles, postcards and maps, and like a magpie my eyes went to a scarlet silk dress. I unfurled it gently from the aged tissue paper it had lived in all these years. It was still heavenly soft and strikingly red. I was nineteen again and at the seaside with Alex, the only boy I’d ever kissed apart from Craig. I was deliriously happy as we wandered arm in arm, the seagulls yelling above us—a stolen weekend by the sea. The dress had been in a shop window on a mannequin and when I’d tried it on, Alex had said I had to have it because I looked beautiful, just like Julia Roberts. It cost a fortune but I decided to spend it on the dress instead of eating that month. Like the rucksack, I saw it as another investment in my fabulous future—a future of world travel, scarlet dresses and good-looking college boys like Alex.

  I slowly put the red dress back into the now crispy tissue paper. It had never been worn. Too late now. Perhaps Emma would like it? I picked up a purple Filofax, all the rage in the eighties before the Internet and online diaries. My whole life had been in this purple faux-leather book. I opened it, landing on a page with three scrawled words: My Living List. ‘Oh, God, I’d almost forgotten about this...’ I sighed under my breath. It had been my plan for my life, a list of all the hopes and dreams I’d once believed I could achieve. How naive I was.