The Love Letter

by Fiona Walker

  The close friendship between the families had endured for almost thirty years now, although Nigel’s death four years earlier had changed the way they all thought of ‘the Spies’ as he’d always called them.

  Daisy still clammed up on the subject of losing her father, more so than ever since her mother had remarried, settling down with quiet gallery owner Gerald, whom Daisy thought of as a very poor replacement for larger-than-life Nigel. It was a sore point, and Daisy had a lot of sore points these days, her touchiness having increased tenfold since having her own children. Unlike Legs, who wore her heart on her sleeve as she fought her way through life via the scenic route, cutting to the chase even if it meant drawing her own blood, Daisy had always been more circumspect. Her ability to see everybody’s point of view had made her a terrific diplomat in her youth, and was the secret to her ability to write raucous scripts for comedy ensembles, but nowadays she saw as much bad as good in people. This newfound cynicism could be refreshingly honest, but that didn’t always make her easy company.

  Today was no different. Of all Daisy’s sore points, the topic of Francis was always destined to hurt most.

  ‘Why does he want to see you?’ she asked ungraciously.

  Legs tried to stop her heart racing madly. ‘Perhaps it’s time to forgive?’

  ‘Hmph,’ came the cynical raspberry. ‘You know he’s got a new girlfriend?’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish.’

  Daisy eyed her through her fringe. ‘You mean you haven’t heard about Kizzy?’

  ‘Kizzy de la Mere the poet?’ She remembered the self-publicising redhead on the festival website.

  ‘I hear they’re practically engaged.’

  ‘We’ve only been apart a year!’

  ‘And you and Conrad have been together how long?’

  Legs brooded silently, casting aside her half-eaten apple. ‘We’re hardly “practically engaged”.’

  ‘Well he would have to get divorced first,’ Daisy mused. ‘But, assuming one is unattached like Fran, it doesn’t take long to go from thinking one can never live without a lover to finding a future spouse. Look at my mother. Dad’s hardly been dead long.’

  Legs winced. Four years seemed a respectable amount of time to her, but she had no first-hand knowledge to compare. If her father died and her mother remarried afterwards, perhaps she would be just as angry? The thought of Francis getting measured up for a morning suit was certainly making her blood boil.

  ‘He can’t possibly marry somebody called Kizzy,’ she groaned. ‘It’ll play havoc with his lisp.’

  Daisy was spared answering by the loud, rattling arrival of Will in the rickety MPV, returning from the farm park with two sleeping daughters and a panting pair of lurchers.

  ‘Gorgeous, gorgeous Legs – you look fabulous!’ He immediately scooped her up into a huge hug, earning a jealous scowl from Daisy.

  Neither tall nor handsome, Will nevertheless possessed a fawn-eyed kindness and ebullient energy that made him instantly disarming, the boyish looks now acquiring wise crow’s feet and wolfish grey streaks to the hair as he aged. He was an incorrigible flirt, which more than made up for his moderate looks. When married to Ros, he’d become a background character, as comfortable as a reassuring armchair, easy to like and talk to, but rather flat and drab and in need of his cushions plumping. With Daisy at his side, he had been reupholstered with confidence and everybody wanted to perch on his arm.

  But there was only one true love rival in Daisy’s relationship with Will, and he burst in through the back door now, grass stains on his knees and twigs in his hair. ‘Dad!’

  Nico hurled himself at Will, as hazel-eyed and bouncy as his father. Daisy turned to Legs. ‘Let’s get the girls in from the car. They’ll be thrilled to see you.’

  Waking grumpily and hungrily to find an unfamiliar face lowered over her grappling with the car seat straps, Eva was not at her cheeriest to greet ‘Aunt Legs’. Beside her, Grace was equally wary, clutching a fluffy dog fearfully to her face. Both started to mewl.

  ‘How are you getting on with Conrad’s kids?’ Daisy asked pointedly as Legs hastily handed over wailing Eva.

  ‘We’re taking it slowly.’ She pulled comedy faces at Grace who looked horrified and hid behind her mother’s legs.

  ‘You never take anything slowly,’ Daisy laughed.

  The tension between them bubbled again. Legs guessed this wasn’t about Conrad at all. ‘If this has to do with Francis, say so,’ she rounded, preferring to get it out in the open.

  ‘Just be careful,’ Daisy warned. ‘Try to read the situation before you rewrite any rules. Things have changed a lot down there.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she sighed.

  ‘Well you did rather cut yourself adrift, chucking him out without so much as a kiss goodbye.’

  ‘I wrote to him to apologise.’ She turned to Daisy indignantly.

  ‘What good manners.’ Daisy watched Grace chasing a chicken around the driveway.

  Legs gazed down at her feet, her Nike Lunars looking stupidly urban alongside Daisy’s dusty clogs. It was the first time she had confided about her letter to anyone: ‘Actually, I told him it had all been a huge mistake.’

  Daisy turned to her sharply. ‘When was this?’

  She dug holes in the gravel drive with her toes, ‘About a month after we split up.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He never replied.’

  Eyebrows shooting up behind the collie fringe again, Daisy blew out a puff of surprise.

  ‘He must have hated my guts back then.’ Legs carried on staring at her feet. The truth of it still hurt like glass shards through her nerve endings. She’d wept such bitter tears over that letter, writing and rewriting it, pouring her heart out. Looking back, she knew she should have been brave enough to talk face to face instead of hiding behind purple prose and clinging to Conrad for security. ‘And now you say he’s engaged.’

  ‘Practically engaged.’

  ‘It hardly smacks of a broken heart, does it?’ She suddenly felt feverishly angry. Nor did it smack of one of Britain’s Most Eligible Bachelors as recent press had branded him. Increasingly neglected by Conrad out of work hours, Legs didn’t like to admit to the amount of time and effort she’d spent tracking down and reading the many articles that had featured Francis in recent months, but she’d been on the Daily Mail website so often that it now ranked high on her Explorer drop down list, and the corner newsagent had suggested she might like to take out a subscription to Tatler because she bought it so often. Its glossy pages regularly featured photographs of him ranked highly in Most Invited, Most Wanted and Sexiest charts, praising this good-looking heir to Farcombe, with his literary bent, healthy outdoor lifestyle, boyish sex appeal and an untarnished reputation, all of which made for a great catch. His long relationship and engagement to Legs was clearly deemed too trivial to mention, making her feel that their thirteen years together had been struck off his romantic CV entirely.

  She had friends who were ex-obsessed, Googling previous boyfriends on a regular basis, and she hated the thought that she was similarly afflicted. (Surely with just the one ex to her name, an active interest was not unjustified?) But, talking to Daisy today and confessing to sending the letter that could have changed the way the past year had panned out entirely, she already suspected that her personal motivation for returning to Farcombe was less about work and more about finally making peace.

  Daisy was still looking up at her through her fringe, lips pressed to the top of Eva’s downy head. ‘Men react to rejection in different ways. Some go straight on the rebound. Look at Conrad.’ Then, before Legs had a chance to snap back that the two situations could not be compared, she added, ‘What does he think about your long weekend in Farcombe?’

  ‘It was his idea.’

  Daisy almost dropped Eva in shock. ‘Please don’t tell me he’s joining you at the cottage?’

  ‘What d’you take me for?’ As they headed back insid
e to prepare lunch, Legs explained that she was going to Farcombe on festival business.

  Looking ever more disapproving, Daisy buckled Eva into a high chair before fetching salad ingredients from the fridge. ‘So that’s what this is all about? Nothing to do with trying to get back together with Francis?’

  ‘Well, fate is playing a bit of a card, don’t you think?’

  ‘No! I don’t think that.’ A cucumber was being waved about like a conductor’s baton now. Grace and Eva were entranced. ‘I think that you have a horribly guilty conscience, and want to do anything in your power to lance the penitent boil.’

  ‘Nicely put.’

  Daisy glanced out of the garden window to check that Nico and Will were suitably distracted and out of earshot, kicking a ball about. Then she turned back to Legs, voice hushed, cucumber lowered. ‘I think you believe you’ll never forgive yourself for what you did to Francis unless you create some sort of emotional Tardis, where you try to go back in time and recreate the moment you left him, Groundhog Day-style, and take the other path to see where it leads.’

  ‘You have no idea how I feel!’ Legs protested hotly.

  ‘I so do!’ The cucumber struck a worksurface with a splat. ‘I know, Legs, because I feel exactly the same way a lot of the time.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About stealing your sister’s husband.’

  Legs gasped in surprise. ‘You mean you want to go back in time and hand him back?’

  ‘Of course not!’ Daisy glanced at Grace and Eva in their high-chairs, lowering her voice. ‘Will’s the best thing that ever happened to me. But it doesn’t make the guilt go away, the need to repent and the wish that it could have happened differently, with more dignity and less pain. I think you’d like to take it one stage further, and that a part of you wishes you and Francis were still together.’

  ‘That’s not what this trip is about! I’m with Conrad now. And you said it yourself, Francis is “practically” engaged.’ She winced as the words physically hurt to say out loud each time. ‘This is just business and, hopefully, friendship.’

  Daisy gave her that age-old wise look before turning to chop up the cucumber. ‘Friendship is important, Legs. Friendship and family; you mustn’t abuse them.’

  ‘They’re everything to me.’

  ‘Good.’ She looked over her shoulder, and they shared an appeasing smile, although both knew that there was a lot being left unsaid.

  Their deep bond of friendship had lasted well into adulthood despite the severest of tests. It sat comfortably beneath them, a cushion on which they both relied, which still worked better out of London, particularly away from Ros and the reminders of Legs’ divided loyalty. It also worked better away from Francis. It always had. For the first few years of their friendship, the girls had known nothing about the only son of the man they thought of as their king. They hadn’t even known his name.

  Then the king had returned to his castle, and his heir made himself apparent. The princesses’ friendship had been tested ever since.

  Throughout lunch, the knot of anxiety in Legs’ stomach at the prospect of seeing Francis again tightened, seeming to pull all her entrails around it like a tight ball of wool. Speaking with Daisy had just opened up a Pandora’s box of emotions that she’d been blissfully unaware of, and which now writhed like snakes around that knotted ball. Soon indigestion was raging.

  ‘Not another faddy diet?’ Will observed her picking her bread roll into small chunks without eating them. He gave her a gappy-toothed smile across the table as Nico speared up the ham on his aunt’s plate.

  She shook her head, suddenly fighting an urge to head back to London instead of continuing her journey west. She must have put on half a stone since she last saw Francis, and now it felt as though every ounce was in that churning lump in her belly.

  ‘Aunt Legs is buff,’ Nico offered sportingly, matching his father’s smile.

  Daisy almost choked on her mouthful. ‘Since when did you start using phrases like “buff”?’

  ‘Since Legs taught me to say it.’

  ‘Nico!’ She threw a little dough ball at him. ‘I did no such thing!’

  ‘So have you got a girlfriend at the moment, Nico?’ Daisy asked, making him blush to his roots and stutter about not liking girls.

  Still distracted, Legs held in her stomach and looked down to see how pot-bellied it was. While nothing on Daisy’s pregnant bulge, it was definitely not very flat. She made a mental note to change into Magic Pants as soon as she got to Spywood Cottage.

  Her iPhone was buzzing in her pocket. She pulled it out and peered at it discreetly beneath the table rim.

  Gordon says he is not prepared to compromise on a bath or pet friendly accommodation, and definitely not on red car.

  She looked up, wondering whether to share the joke, but suspected the confidentiality agreement she’d signed precluded it. Will had a journalist’s nose after all and, for all his assertions that he’d turned his back on the newsroom for literary pursuits, he needed the cash.

  All around her, the chattering, giggling, joyful family tableau felt at total odds with the life she now had, careering through London, living alone in her basement beneath Ros’s super-organised life, which revolved around Nico and church, just as her own revolved around Conrad and work.

  She could see how relaxed Nico was here. He loved the easygoing routine at Inkpot, the laughter, lack of pressure and the free-range existence. She felt the same.

  It made her think about Farcombe again, the memories so acute that she could almost smell and taste them. Family holidays there had been such fun. It was where she had first learned about love. She craved it again.

  Fingers moving beneath the table, she typed: Cannot guarantee anything, regrettably. Will try my best, but this could be very tricky to steer.

  Again, the reply was almost immediate. Gordon says that is because you drive a red car. Suggests you trade in for safer colour.

  She jumped as Will waved a hand in front of her face. ‘Hello? Legs?’ I said what’s hot off the shelves right now? Still Grit Lit and Cruci Fiction?’ He’d loved drilling her about the publishing market ever since he began toiling on the great debut novel that he would let nobody read until it was finished, and which he’d only thus far described as being ‘vaguely brilliant’.

  ‘Parent Thrillers.’

  ‘Kitchen-sink violence, you mean?’

  She shook her head. ‘Think Sophie’s Choice set amid Cath Kidston accessories, Ocado deliveries and the school run. Picture a lovely but stressed professional family: by the end of chapter one, one child (preferably under the age of five) will be held hostage in a nursery-school siege, or abducted by someone planning to keep them in a cellar for twenty years, or be found to be the only matching donor that can save the life of their estranged, imprisoned rapist father, or be brutally disfigured and blinded in a house fire while holding the secret to the arsonist. Mother and father then face great personal sacrifice, a race against time, an impossible decision or all of the above.’

  ‘Oh, I love books like that,’ Daisy sighed. ‘I cry as soon as I read the blurb.’

  ‘The “blub” then.’ Will looked sceptical. ‘And they’re hot in literary London?’

  ‘Conrad sold one by a complete unknown just last month; six figures for two books; film rights have already gone, it’s been chosen as Book at Bedtime and is tipped for a certain famous couple’s book club.’

  ‘In that case I’ll kill a child,’ he said firmly, earning a nervous look from Nico.

  ‘Just make sure the family have at least one spare sibling as compensation,’ she warned him.

  ‘You two are so cynical,’ Daisy scoffed. ‘We all know you prefer a huge body count somewhere scenic, Legs. She had a five-a-week Agatha Christie habit at your age,’ she told Nico.

  ‘You can’t beat a classic formula,’ she sighed.

  ‘Perhaps you should persuade Gordon Lapis to feature an idyllic village with a mass
murderer on the loose in the next Ptolemy Finch?’ Will teased. ‘A career in criminal profiling awaits our young, winged soothsayer,’ he predicted in a movie trailer voice.

  ‘Already on the case,’ she beamed. ‘I’m doing some research for him in Farcombe for Ptolemy Finch and the Seagull Strangler.’

  ‘As long as you’re not researching Ptolemy Finch and the Sentimental Shag,’ Daisy muttered darkly.

  ‘A shag is a type of bird,’ Will told Nico, who nodded, having followed the conversation with bright-eyed interest. ‘Very like a cormorant.’

  ‘Legs has promised to get me a personally signed copy of Ptolemy Finch and the Raven’s Curse when it comes out,’ he told them. ‘She and Gordon are like that now.’ He pinched his fingers together closely. ‘I think he probably wants to give her a shag.’ He smiled sweetly. ‘Or perhaps a cormorant?’

  On cue, Legs’ phone flashed with a message from Gordon: Julie Ocean investigating a crime that took place more than twenty years ago; she uncovers corruption at the heart of a highly respected institution. They will close ranks on her. How does she feel? What does she do?

  At least he seemed to be talking to her again, she realised with relief, replying: Alone. Calls Jimmy for back-up.

  Too deep undercover; fears he’s corrupt too.

  Tempted to type ‘take annual leave?’, she wrote, Goes direct to Chief Super.

  Trust nobody. He signed off without further explanation.

  Chapter 5

  Every familiar twist and turn on the journey to Farcombe made Legs’ heart race faster and her spirits lift. She was going through the back of the holiday wardrobe of memories. Clouds scudded over the sun, flashing intermittent blinding light onto her bug-flecked windscreen as she weaved the curling miles towards the Hartland Peninsula. When the Farcombe turn came into view, her car indicator ticked in time with her thudding heart as she turned between the two wind-bent white-beam trees that stood sentinel on its high Devonshire banks.