The Love Letter

by Fiona Walker

  Having plundered the machine in the Ladies, using all her pound coins, Legs trailed stiffly up to bed, stomach cramping, all the time alternating between spasms of shame about her dinner with Byrne, and obsessing about Francis and the fishy, flame-haired poet.

  In the early hours, she suddenly sat up, remembering something Byrne had said: ‘Shotgun wedding. Poppy’s first marriage was a shotgun wedding. Bloody hell. Kizzy must be Poppy’s daughter!’

  Still mildy squiffy and riddled with stomach cramps, she got up and paced around her room beneath the restless bats, trying to ease her discomfort and make sense of the situation.

  This had to be the secret Francis wasn’t telling her; he was being held to ransom by Poppy and Kizzy in some way. Byrne was wrong; this wasn’t about Francis wanting revenge, this was about him needing to be rescued. She had to get to the truth and then try to help him.

  Chapter 12

  Legs woke up far too hungover to face the Book Inn’s award-winning cooked breakfast in the restaurant, which at least spared her any risk of bumping into Byrne. He had haunted her dreams all night, telling her his dying wishes as they swayed together in a smoky dance hall while Francis sang Bing Crosby numbers into an old fifties RCA microphone on stage, dressed in a tuxedo. She now couldn’t remember what those wishes had been, but she had a feeling they had involved her mending her immoral ways.

  Signing the Pledge would be a good start, she decided as she crawled to the bathroom and crouched over the sink with the cold tap directed at her face and mouth until the pounding in her head abated from hydraulic kanga to hand-held sledgehammer. Then she took a run to punish herself for her excess, wearing her dark glasses and her nephew’s Clone Wars baseball cap pulled low over her nose. To her relief, she didn’t bump into Byrne on the cliff paths. She hoped he had already checked out.

  But when she panted into the Book Inn’s back lobby, feeling as though she was sweating Rioja from every pore, she was greeted by Guy looking far brighter than he had the night before, his big hammer jaw widened by a smile that made his eyes disappear in delighted creases.

  ‘How the tables turn,’ he laughed. ‘You look like you need a Bloody Mary Shelley. It’s my secret recipe – lots of beetroot juice and horseradish vodka.’

  ‘Oh, please no.’ She waved her arms on front of her, catching her breath.

  ‘Your performance last night is already the talk of the village.’

  She pulled off her cap and raked back her sweaty hair, unable to resist a little puffed-out probing: ‘Surely they’re far more interested in Poppy Protheroe’s sea-nymph love child?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Kizzy de la Mere.’

  ‘You’ve obviously been talking to Nonny,’ he tutted. ‘She loves those mermaid rumours. Everyone round here figures Kizzy’s not the Hawkeses’ real daughter, but nobody knows the truth.’ He leaned forwards and whispered. ‘I’ve heard that her real mother was The Black Widow of Bideford, a gold-digging siren who married very old men for their money.’

  ‘Well, that’s reassuring.’ She crammed her hat back on, glancing up nervously as she heard feet bounding downstairs, but it was just a young couple heading for breakfast with cheery ‘good mornings’.

  ‘Is Mr Byrne still here?’ she asked Guy after they’d gone through.

  His big, battered face lit up. ‘Very dark horse, our Michelin judge. Ordered Frosties in bed for breakfast, and grilled kidneys for his dog, then booked for three more nights. And this is for you.’ He handed her a Book Inn postcard with a message scrawled on the back: Heavenly Pony, You were inspiring company last night. I was wrong; you can change hearts and minds, certainly about Paella Valenciana. With thanks. J

  ‘You – we – were a hit, baby.’ Guy grinned, having read the card. ‘He loved the paella!’

  She reread it, wondering what J stood for. Please don’t let it be Jeremy.

  ‘And the band loved you too,’ Guy was saying. ‘You can have a meal on the house tonight.’

  ‘I’m eating at the hall tonight,’ she said vaguely, turning to go back upstairs, unaware that she had just unleashed another piece of Farcombe village gossip to be served out at the bar all day along with cocktails and tapas.

  Inspiring company … change heart? Legs reread the note as she carried it up to Skit. And why was he staying longer? Could she have haunted his dreams too?

  She already deeply regretted telling him so much about her current situation and her muddled feelings for Francis, which seemed to change with the tides. Last night she’d felt herself shipwrecked with a case of Rioja and a passing stranger to confide in. Now she couldn’t shake Byrne and his fierce eyes from her consciousness. His insight and sex appeal alarmed her. He’d seemed to look straight into her heart and find it false, blasting all her claims of divided loyalty against the rocks as she’d shamelessly moved on from protesting love for both lover and ex to making eyes at the sexy stranger himself.

  Then she sat down in her doorway and felt icy cold as she remembered him saying, ‘I am about to lose my life.’

  Spywood Cottage was deserted and locked when Legs arrived, her teeth chattering despite the fact she was wearing two jumpers. They were Nico’s, and were so tight they rose up her midriff and arms like Peter Rabbit’s clothes crammed on Hartley Hare. Although the sun was climbing the sky without a cloud crossing its path, she still felt bitterly cold.

  Her mother’s car was parked on the track so she couldn’t be far away. Sitting on the wood-wormed bench by the porch, she wondered vaguely whether Francis had tried to make contact since last night’s public kiss. Her mobile phone was still plugged into Nonny’s charger at the Book Inn.

  Experiencing another shudder of cold embarrassment, she headed down to the cove.

  Sure enough, Lucy was close to the rocks directly beneath the steep path, where she had set up her easel overlooking the harbour. Although Eascombe cove was private, she was at least wearing clothes as a concession to passing dog walkers. Dressed in an old sleeveless denim dress, her soft shoulders tanned to the colour of speckled hen’s eggs, she looked up from beneath her floppy straw hat as Legs clambered down.

  ‘Be careful, it’s crumbling more than ever,’ she called up, stepping back as a shower of scree from Legs’ slipping feet landed close by. ‘Someone will fall to their death here one day.’

  ‘You’ve been saying that for twenty years,’ Legs reminded her, perching on the rocks behind her to admire the watercolour.

  ‘I’ve been saying I’ll capture this to my satisfaction for twenty years, too,’ Lucy sighed, pointing at the distant harbour which was glittering with light and jostling with boat masts that poked up from behind its high walls like an army’s pikes, ‘and I haven’t managed it yet. One or the other of them will finish me off, that’s for sure.’

  ‘It’s looking good.’ Legs admired the preparatory sketches.

  ‘All it needs is an attractive girl sunbathing in the foreground,’ Lucy hinted.

  ‘Far too cold to sunbathe.’ She shuddered, unscrewing the top of her mother’s Thermos to sniff its contents, her skipped breakfast having left her with serious caffeine deprivation.

  ‘Bovril.’ Lucy laughed at her expression.

  ‘Since when did you start drinking Bovril?’ Legs hurriedly screwed the top back on.

  ‘Hector likes it.’

  ‘He’s not here is he?’ She looked around anxiously.

  ‘He was going to come down and play his bassoon for the seagulls, but he’s been summoned to an emergency meeting of the festival committee this morning.’

  ‘That figures.’

  ‘He looked terribly stern when he set out.’

  ‘Poppy wants to call off the whole event.’

  ‘She threatens the same thing every year.’

  ‘This year is rather different.’ Legs selected a paintbrush from the roll lying on her mother’s little folding table and flicked its dry bristles across the tip of her nose.

  ‘I know this must feel
like hell to you.’ Lucy stepped away from the easel and perched alongside her, covering her hand with a warm grip. She was still wearing her wedding ring, Legs noticed with relief.

  She nodded mutely, paintbrush up one nostril, shamefully aware that her hangover was eclipsing the most hellish of her feelings quite satisfactorily, both her fury at her mother’s behaviour and her shame at her own. But her bad mood still niggled beneath the sense-dulling headache.

  Her mother’s face, once so pretty with its full lips and upturned nose, had been gently sinking south for many years now with ever-darkening bags beneath her kind blue eyes and a puffy little double chin that she hated. This summer’s deep tan and the highlighted hair gave an impression of youthfulness, but today, make-up free, she looked terribly tired.

  Too much sex, Legs thought sourly. ‘I’m sure Poppy’s throwing every threat at Hector right now to try to talk him back into her bed.’ She narrowed her eyes, watching for a reaction.

  The hand on hers was carefully removed. ‘Throwing things rarely leads to romantic reconciliation in my experience.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

  ‘You’ve seen Francis again, I take it?’

  Legs tried not to think about last night’s kiss in the bar. ‘We’re just throwing curveballs.’

  ‘But you two are talking again?’

  ‘Three guesses what the main topic of conversation has been.’

  Lucy looked out to sea, her voice controlled and calm. ‘You said you came to Farcombe on festival business.’

  ‘Yes, we’re in discussion about a new guest speaker,’ she said self-importantly. ‘If the committee manages to persuade Poppy to let the festival go ahead, they’ll be voting on it today. Then the printers will be notified of a change to the programme: “scratch ‘Stevie Smith for the Ecstasy Generation’, pencil in Gordon Lapis”.’

  ‘Gordon Lapis?’ Lucy almost fell off the rock. ‘Here at Farcombe Festival?’

  She nodded. ‘So his agent hopes.’

  ‘Surely Poppy will never agree to it?’

  ‘It seems she’s not averse, but then again she’s hardly been herself lately.’ She shot Lucy a meaningful look.

  ‘Francis must be over the moon. Gordon Lapis. What a coup!’

  ‘Why throw things when you can drop names?’ Legs shifted awkwardly. ‘Although I doubt the committee will share his enthusiasm, even with Poppy on side. Ptolemy Finch stands for everything they detest. And I can’t see the Titian poet surrendering top billing very graciously.’

  ‘Oh Kizzy will love the notoriety,’ Lucy said sharply.

  Legs turned to her mother in surprise. Her guilt about Francis was seeping through the sides as it always did, and she couldn’t resist asking, ‘What do you know about her?’

  ‘Not a lot. Just that she started working for the festival last year and then set her sights on Francis.’

  ‘History repeating itself then.’

  ‘She’s very clever, I gather, and very ambitious.’ Lucy watched her daughter’s reaction closely, noting the pinched tightness around her red eyes as they blinked repeatedly. ‘It’s natural to be jealous, darling.’

  ‘I am not jealous. Francis had every right to find a new lover, as will Dad now,’ she huffed, lowering the paintbrush and using the end of its handle to dig into the gritty depths of a sea-lashed groove running through the rock she was sitting on.

  Lucy refused to rise, looking out to the harbour again.

  ‘I heard that Kizzy might be Poppy’s daughter,’ Legs confided. ‘If so, rumour has it she’s only seducing Francis to get her hands on her birthright.’

  But her mother just laughed. ‘That’s ridiculous. Aren’t these things forbidden by law?’

  ‘They’re not related. Anyway, Francis might not know her true parentage.’

  ‘Now you really are getting absurd, Legs darling. I know you love all those exaggerated crime thrillers you read non-stop, but you must learn to temper your imagination. These things just don’t happen.’

  ‘And there was me thinking that you and Hector have been madly in love with each other for years without telling another soul, but of course that’s way too far fetched …’

  ‘Don’t be facetious,’ Lucy snapped. ‘Besides, I have always confided in one or two close friends. Babs Foulkes has known all along.’

  ‘Babs?’ Legs gasped, wondering how much Daisy knew. Mother and daughter shared every secret.

  But Lucy was eager to get off the subject, ‘I think you must be wrong about Kizzy, darling. For a start, I’m sure Poppy’s child was a boy …’

  ‘How old was he when she ran off?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know; he must be about the same age as you, so he’d have been about ten maybe?’

  ‘So he could have had a sex change in adulthood?’ She counted through the years. ‘Kizzy could be a twenty-seven-year-old transsexual, don’t you think?’

  Lucy chuckled, and patted her daughter’s knee. ‘As I said, it’s natural to be jealous.’

  But Legs refused to be entirely dissuaded: ‘With that boyish physique, gender reassignment is a real possibility. If Kizzy’s father was a jockey, then they’re all tiny and fine-boned, hence no give-away clues like being six foot with an Adam’s apple. It all makes perfect sense; now he/she’s returned to exact revenge for being abandoned by Poppy. Being abandoned by a mother is life-shattering,’ she muttered, adding darkly, ‘especially when she runs away with Hector Protheroe.’

  ‘Now you’re just winding me up.’ Lucy returned to her easel, comparing the lines on the paper with those of the harbour and letting out a dissatisfied sigh, no longer happy with her composition.

  ‘There’s definitely something Francis isn’t telling me,’ Legs persisted.

  ‘I should think there’s a lot he isn’t telling you, given what you did to him.’ She picked up her pencil and changed the outline of the headland. ‘You’re just transferring guilt, Legs.’

  ‘He’s frightened of her.’

  ‘He’s frightened of any woman that doesn’t mother him,’ Lucy sighed, getting into her Freudian swing now. She’d been a homespun counsellor ever since discovering A Road Less Travelled at a second-hand book fair.

  ‘I never mothered him!’

  ‘You mothered him from the age of eleven, darling. From what Hector says, Kizzy is a very different kettle of fish; more sea siren than earth mother. He dislikes her intensely.’ She rubbed out the line she’d just drawn and tried again, ‘But she is Poppy’s vassal of course.’

  ‘And possible long-lost transsexual son,’ Legs muttered.

  Lucy pretended not to hear. ‘Given you are now Conrad’s plaything, one can hardly blame Francis for going on the rebound so wholeheartedly. And Kizzy is very pretty.’

  ‘How dare you say that!’ She threw the paintbrush back on the table where it rolled onto the shingle below.

  Lucy stooped to pick it up. ‘Well, maybe not as pretty as you, although I’m not sure that tight jumper look suits you, frankly.’

  ‘Not that, the thing about being Conrad’s plaything.’

  She turned around and crossed her arms. ‘Who sent you here this weekend, Legs?’

  ‘He didn’t “send” me!’

  ‘It’s obvious he did. He treats you appallingly, refusing to let you share anything much of his life beyond work, not wanting to meet your family and friends, abandoning you at weekends, then expecting you to be available throughout the week to cross London at all hours. Now this! You don’t have to stay with him just to prove that you made the right decision, Legs, to validate what you did to Francis.’

  ‘I’ve had this lecture.’ She looked away sulkily.

  ‘Then you have been getting some wise advice. You should heed it. If you still love Francis, tell him.’

  ‘I love Conrad.’ Even as she said it, she felt uncertainty prickle her scalp.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! It’s just an infatuation. That ghastly man has taken advantage of your kindness long enoug
h.’

  ‘Pot kettle black!’ Legs fumed, then eyed her mother suspiciously. ‘What would you and Hector do if Francis and I got back together? Because a double wedding’s out of the question.’

  ‘If you two are still in love and determined to marry, we wouldn’t be able to carry on.’ She mixed a dash of French ultramarine into the wash to capture the growing intensity of the sky.

  Mind whirring, Legs pulled down her cuffs and shivered, hugging herself for warmth. ‘This is a double bluff, isn’t it?’

  ‘Darling, you’ve lost me. I never understand bluffs and double bluffs. You’re the one who loves reading crime thrillers.’

  ‘Promise me that you and Hector aren’t staging this affair to try and get Francis and me back together?’

  The sky in Lucy’s painting was getting ever more purple. ‘Hector and I understand one another very deeply.’

  ‘Oh shit.’ Legs closed her eyes. ‘You are.’

  ‘That’s your opinion.’ Lucy rinsed her brush in her water pot and started to mix up a wash of ultramarine, gunmetal and cedar green into a very unlikely-coloured sea, humming the tune to ‘She’.

  ‘Dad called you a martyr to the cause,’ Legs remembered with a gasp. ‘Is he in on it too?’

  The humming stopped abruptly. The rattle of brush against water pot grew faster.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about your father.’ From the tone of her voice, Legs knew that if pressed, Lucy would just clam up, an evasion tactic she’d passed on to Ros, who held the family record for not speaking a word: eight days.

  Instead she pulled a loose thread of rubber from her plimsolls and admitted: ‘Poppy’s invited me to supper at the hall this evening. There’ll be her usual cronies, with Francis and Kizzy in full mating plumage no doubt. It’s obvious she’s expecting me to make a big scene.’ She shuddered anxiously, imagining herself pointing at Kizzy across the drawing room and shouting ‘I know you’re a man!’