The Love Letter

by Fiona Walker

  Lucy splatted more wash onto her drawing before it was fully blended so the pigment in the brush clotted on the paper. ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. I have to sort out the Gordon Lapis situation. It’s too important; I can’t let it cross over to what’s happening with Francis. It’s not just my career, it’s Conrad’s, the agency’s reputation and our biggest star’s welfare at stake. If I let my personal life intrude, I risk all that.’

  ‘Life is muddled up, darling, especially if you sleep with your boss.’ A great splash of Paynes Grey hit the paper now, carving out watery rocks. ‘You can’t separate it out.’

  ‘I’ve already had that career lecture this week too, thanks.’ Legs rested her chin on her knees, squinting up at the sun. Remembering the previous evening made a blush of heat creep up her neck to her face.

  Suddenly very hot, she tried to pull off her jumper, but it was too tight to wriggle out of without a serious amount of contortion, so she pulled it back down and shuffled into the shade. ‘I was also told in no uncertain terms that you can’t force people in and out of love.’

  ‘Wise words.’ Lucy had mixed a wash of sepia and umber for the foreshore which she applied with angry brushstrokes. ‘But remember you broke Francis’s heart in the first place. That was immensely cruel, deliberate or not.’

  Legs looked at the painting that was forming on the paper. Already it was wrong, all the potential of the delicate pencil drawing undermined by such clumsy splashes of paint. However carefully she sketched out her life, one impetuous brushstroke could ruin it, she realised. In London, her rash decisions coloured every day, but life was too fast paced to stop and examine the detail. Here in Farcombe, surrounded by the dreams she and Francis had laid down over so many summers, she was acutely aware of her path of destruction, like vivid red ink spilled across their clean white canvas.

  Stepping back to assess the work in progress, Lucy tutted under her breath, seeing its failings too.

  Legs hugged her knees even more tightly and turned her face away to hide the tears. ‘Did I really break his heart so badly?’

  ‘You shattered it, darling.’ Lucy laid down her brush and looked at her over one shoulder, her face incredibly sad. ‘That pretty redhead might have picked up all the pieces but she’s making a big mess gluing them back in the wrong order. He’s changed so much, and not for the better.’

  ‘Oh, poor Francis.’ Turning her head, Legs watched her mother pick up her paintbrush again and begin speckling ochre and umber shingle onto her painting.

  ‘I believe Kizzy’s no more right for him than Conrad is for you, but you both have to learn that the hard way, it seems.’ Lucy splattered and splodged the paper. ‘Just tread very carefully.’

  ‘I’m always cautious around vengeful transsexuals.’ Legs shuddered, wondering if she should take Byrne’s advice and head straight back to London. But if Francis was under threat, she owed it to him to stay put and go through with this. She had to make amends. ‘Have you ever heard of the Black Widow of Bideford?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been there,’ Lucy said vaguely. ‘Is it in the Good Pub Guide?’

  ‘Very popular for wakes, I’m told.’ Legs propped her chin on her knees.

  Her mother was watching her closely again. ‘Do you want Francis back?’

  Legs gazed at the painting, now a sludgy mess of browns and greys all bleeding into one another. It had looked so crisp and full of potential when she first saw it. ‘I miss what we once had more than anything,’ she said with feeling.

  ‘The two of you shared something very rare and so special,’ Lucy agreed. ‘It’s such a waste not to try to recapture it. You owe Francis that much.’ Her words echoed Legs’ thoughts.

  For a moment mother and daughter exchanged a look of understanding as the wind lifted their hair with invisible fingers and the waves sighed contentedly on the shingle. Then Legs ruined the moment completely by asking, ‘And you’ll go back to Dad soon?’

  Lucy looked hugely irritated, turning back to her work.

  ‘That’s my business,’ she snapped, ripping her wet watercolour from the easel and casting it aside before starting to mask up another sheet. ‘I might take new lovers; I might wear purple and a hat that doesn’t suit me; I might even have a sex change and enact terrible revenge on all who have wronged me. It’s my life, Legs, and right now I am enjoying living it.’

  Legs had a sudden vision of herself after thirty years’ marriage to Francis, looking much as her mother did now and behaving much as her mother was now, although of course she’d already done that. ‘Live for the moment, live with the consequences,’ she breathed.

  ‘Yes!’ Lucy agreed triumphantly. After many decades of leading the younger generation by example, which quite plainly does not work, I’m finally taking a leaf out of your book and trying not to think beyond tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m so not like that!’

  Lucy said nothing. It was clearly the beginning of one of her long silent stand-offs, Legs realised. There was absolutely no point staying to shout at the waves when she had a mystery to solve. She had a duty to find out what was going on at Farcombe Hall; she owed it to Francis, as well as to Gordon. Her detective’s nose scented intrigue and danger as surely as laying her Starbucks coffee beside a pile of new crime manuscripts. This was a task for Julie Ocean, despite being unarmed and unconvincing dressed in her undercover disguise as a young Arsenal fan.

  She tried to think what Julie would do if faced with a dinner invitation like Poppy’s, hosted by a highly manipulative agoraphobic whose guests included Julie’s embittered ex-lover, now shacked up with a vengeful transsexual, whose super-ambitious parents would also be in attendance, along with a mysterious American academic and Vin Keiller-Myles, a man intent on acquiring Farcombe at any cost. Not to mention sharp-tongued Édith, Francis’s half-sister, who had once been expelled from a top boarding school for planting a bomb beneath the headmaster’s car.

  What would Julie’s first instinct be?

  ‘I’m going shopping.’ She scrambled back up the perilous path.

  ‘I rest my case,’ Lucy muttered, just loudly enough to be heard. As Legs turned she saw her mother start to draw the harbour afresh.

  Chapter 13

  Headache now screaming in her ears and stabbing her temples, Legs hurried back to Farcombe, quite forgetting the need to buy another parking ticket for the Honda in her haste to get to the fishing village’s one and only overpriced boutique before it closed for lunch.

  She Sells Seashells – known to all as ‘Shh’ – was run by ageing temptress Cici, who had bought the little shop with her divorce settlement five years earlier. Shh contained an eccentric mix of beachwear, old ladies’ twinsets and just occasionally a hidden fashion gem. The front window was its owner’s post-divorce tour de force, a dramatic installation of driftwood, chains, organza, ribbon, chicken wire and crystals. Scattered throughout were photographs of Cici as a young glamourpuss, many of them accompanied by a man whose face she had carefully cut out. Several were wedding photographs. Into this packed mix she occasionally squeezed an item of stock, so that the overall effect was of a beach where a suicidal woman had examined her life in photographs before stripping off all her clothes and swimming out to sea.

  Today, a few twisted looking rags were draped over the rocks, weighed down with beads and pebbles. A handmade card beside them read ‘New Catwalk Collection’.

  As soon as she heard the bell ping, Cici appeared with a dramatic sweep through the velvet curtain that divided her storeroom from the shop. With silvery blonde hairpieces piled up on her head like a nest of sleeping chinchillas, she was dressed in a T-shirt covered in leaping gold leopards, very shiny leggings and beaded flip-flops from which her gnarled toes poked like the knuckles of tree roots, the nail of each painted a different colour. Her eyelashes were so thick with mascara that she looked as though she had two spiders glued to her face.

  Realising that she had a
client who was under fifty and not plus-size, she fell ecstatically on Legs. ‘Beautiful girl! You want a pretty dress for a party, no?’ The Italian accent was as heavily embellished as her T-shirt. Cici in fact hailed from Plymouth.

  ‘Nothing too fancy,’ she insisted as Cici began to flick through the rails, hauling out sequin and taffeta horrors. ‘It’s just kitchen supper.’ With optional thumbscrews by the Smeg and stocks by the Aga, she thought worriedly.

  ‘We dressa uppa for supper!’ The red talons raked some more hangers and burrowed for chiffon and silk. ‘You leave it all to Cici. I weel style you from head to toe.’

  Having forgotten the pushiness of the village’s only fashionista shopkeeper, Legs was tempted to abandon retail therapy and raid her ten-year-old-boy capsule weekend wardrobe again instead. But she knew it had nothing to offer her fragile ego. She couldn’t hope to borrow anything from diminutive Nonny, who was at least a dress size smaller, so she was at Cici’s mercy.

  She gazed longingly out of the window at the tourists milling past, a few of them looking in at the headless photographs, driftwood and chain window display trying to work out what the shop actually sold. Her eye was caught by an attractive man standing on the opposite side of the road, looking lost. He was gazing up at the building numbers and then down at a piece of paper. At his ankles was a very noble-looking basset hound.

  Then he turned towards the shop window and she realised it was Byrne.

  ‘Wow, he ees ’andsome, no?’ Cici followed her gaze briefly before holding up something fuchsia pink and ruffled under Legs’ chin.

  ‘I’m not keen on pink.’ She rejected it politely, still watching curiously as Byrne located a door further along the lane and rang a bell before disappearing from sight.

  ‘Peacock blue!’ Cici thrust out a shiny miniskirt and matching bustier trimmed with ostrich feathers that made Legs sneeze.

  She shook her head apologetically. ‘I was thinking more along the maxidress line?’

  ‘Ah ha!’ Cici raided another rail.

  Glancing out of the window once more, a flash of Titian-red caught her eye and she spotted Kizzy wafting past in an absurdly pretty lime green tea-dress, matched with strappy espadrilles and a meshy copper shrug. She stopped by the ‘New Catwalk Collection’ window.

  Oh God, she’s coming in, Legs realised, diving behind a shelf of cashmere twinsets.

  But Kizzy merely inclined her pretty head at the twisted rags and then set off again, crossing the cobbled lane to the same door which had admitted Byrne.

  Before Legs could follow her progress, a huge curtain of bold print purple and orange fabric blocked her line of vision as Cici held up a maxi dress made of such cheap nylon that it was letting off static like a plasma globe.

  Having realised the tea-dress was just daywear to Kizzy, Legs was now doubly determined to find something ravishing to wow them all that evening. She had nothing smarter than easy-wash football shorts and a range of branded baseball caps. Shh had to have something better that wouldn’t make her look like a Moulin Rouge chorus girl.

  She turned to the rails behind her and started searching while Cici tried to persuade her to try on a custard-yellow catsuit with a cut-out back that looked like a banana with a bite taken out of it.

  At last Legs let out an excited gasp as she winkled out the perfect dress hidden deep within the rock-pools of glittering voile and satin. Hand crocheted in duck egg blue lace lined with nude silk, it fell to her ankles on the bias, guaranteed to hug her waist, emphasising her toned shoulders and golden skin, while hiding the pale embarrassment of her chunky legs. As soon as she tried it on she knew it was perfect.

  ‘I think that colour is a little drab,’ Cici sniffed, noticing that the price tag boasted fifty per cent off, which meant it was old stock that she was selling at little more than trade price.

  ‘It’s the perfect dress-up, dress-down day to evening wear,’ Legs insisted, making Cici sniff even more as her client suddenly sounded like Mary Portas on a mission. Legs circled in front of the mirror, seeing a girl from more carefree days. It reminded her of a dress she’d worn to Francis’s college’s May Ball, a long, clingy swathe of silver net that had rendered him speechless with lust. The fall of the fabric and the cut were identical. The only drawback was that this one was far too long.

  Sensing some profit, Cici insisted she had just the right footwear, scattering boxes everywhere in her search for a pair of sky-high strappy cream mules that were at least a size too small and cost three times more than the dress. She also decided that the outfit needed accessorising with bright colours, and was soon winding beaded necklaces around Legs’ throat and wrists and draping silk and cashmere shawls over her shoulders until she resembled a Masai wife about to perform a ceremonial dance.

  To Legs’ horror, Cici then appeared with something which looked like an electrocuted macaw held aloft like a sacrificial offering before plonking it down on her head.

  ‘A fascinator!’ she announced, cramming in kirby grips that almost took Legs’ scalp off.

  Cici’s black spider eyelashes did several high kicks as she stood back and admired her creation, still an early work in progress as far as she was concerned. She wiggled to the door to turn the sign to ‘closed’.

  ‘First we try lingerie, then I advice on hair and make-up, yes?’ She rubbed her hands together. ‘Cici haff exclusive time for pretty young client.’

  ‘Actually I have to be somewhere in ten minutes.’ Feet already throbbing to match her head, Legs bought everything she was wearing and escaped, furtively shooting across the cobbles from Shh to examine the door that she’d seen Byrne and his basset enter earlier. There was a discreet brass plaque outside engraved Marshall and Callow, Family Solicitors. The vertical blinds in the street level window were closed, a dusty fake orchid on the sill the only thing visible in the building.

  Byrne would have to be a very important client to get a solicitors’ appointment on a Saturday, Legs realised, pressing her nose to the window.

  Suddenly the vertical blind swished open and a hand reached over the sill to hawk up the sash a few inches. Legs pulled back just in time to stop her nose flying up with it. For a brief moment, she could see a desk through the slats, with a basset hound lying on the floor beside it who now raised his head and started barking at her. Then the blinds swished closed again.

  Everyone in the room, meanwhile, had been afforded full sight of her gazing in. The basset hound was still barking his head off.

  Quite forgetting that the Honda was still languishing in the main car park with an expired ticket, she headed hurriedly back to the Book Inn to spend the afternoon pampering. It wasn’t until she passed a wall mirror on her way upstairs to Skit that she realised she still had the mad macaw fascinator pegged on her head.

  Chapter 14

  Trying the crocheted dress on again in the privacy of her room, Legs realised that it had another major drawback apart from its great length. Her white underwear showed horribly. No matter how many Masai scarves she draped strategically over hips and shoulders, the bra and knickers glowed through like snowy mountain peaks. She guessed she should have stayed for Cici’s exclusive lingerie after all. Knowing that Poppy kept Farcombe Hall’s lighting as bright as a floodlit stadium day or night to enhance her weak eyesight, she would have to risk going without. She felt increasingly nervous.

  The longer she spent tarting up, the more her confidence slipped, and she had allocated far too much time. By four o’clock her body was exfoliated, depilated and buffed, her hair was washed and finger-dried to bed head loveliness, and her make-up laid out ready to apply. If she slapped it on now, it would be sliding away by seven-thirty.

  Julie Ocean had left the building; she was a glamorous go-getting action woman, not a vain literary agency assistant torn between real life and show-mance.

  There was another storm brewing, the muggy air making her skin felt sticky and her throat dry.

  Remembering her phone was still with N
onny, she realised gratefully that she could slip downstairs to fetch it and grab a cup of tea and a sugar fix. But Nonny, delighted at the excuse to take a break from deskwork, was eager to loosen up over a cocktail.

  ‘You must join me,’ she insisted, ‘Guy tells me off if I drink during the day, but I’m allowed to join favourite guests.’

  ‘My hangover’s only just lifted,’ protested Legs, who longed for a chocolate hit.

  ‘Nonsense.’ Nonny ordered two refreshing Once Upon a Times from Pierced Tongue as they propped themselves up on bar stools. ‘Guy says you’re eating at the hall tonight, so they’ll all be out to take a piece out of you. You need inoculating.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Legs said nervously.

  ‘Hair of the dogs that bit you,’ Nonny laughed, ordering chips and aioli which made Legs realise how hungry she was from skipping meals again. ‘What are you going to wear? Please don’t say the Arsenal strip.’

  Legs told her about the great find in Shh, and confessed to her underwear crisis.

  Remembering the request the previous night for tampons, Nonny nodded sympathetically and then held up her hand. ‘I’ve got just the thing. Don’t go away!’ Two minutes later she returned with what looked like a ravel of sausage skin.

  ‘Different type of arse strip,’ she giggled. ‘Transparent g-string. It’s never been worn, I promise. They were all the rage in my heyday. Feels like wearing a clingfilm catapult, but you get used to it and men have no idea it’s there unless you let them get a very close look.’

  The bar was quiet. There was just one family having a cream tea and a dog-walker behind a newspaper in one corner.

  Nonny was dying for the latest gossip, hanging on to the modesty pouch and Legs’ iPhone like a bribe while she quizzed her. ‘Is it true you and Francis are back together?’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘It’s all over the village. Kizzy must be livid. She’s only just got her foot through the hall’s door.’