Daisy’s Vintage Cornish Camper Van

by Ali McNamara

  Praise for From Notting Hill With Love… Actually:

  ‘Perfectly plotted, gorgeously romantic, has some great gags and leaves you with that lovely gooey feeling you get at the end of a good Hollywood rom com’

  Lucy-Anne Holmes, author of The (Im)Perfect Girlfriend

  Ali McNamara attributes her overactive imagination to one thing – being an only child. Time spent dreaming up adventures when she was young has left her with a head constantly bursting with stories waiting to be told. When stories she wrote for fun on Ronan Keating’s website became so popular they were sold as a fundraising project for his cancer awareness charity, Ali realised that writing was not only something she enjoyed doing, but something others enjoyed reading too. Ali lives in Cambridgeshire with her family and two Labradors. When she isn’t writing, she likes to travel, read and people-watch, more often than not accompanied by a good cup of coffee. Her dogs and a love of exercise keep her sane!

  To find out more about Ali visit her website at:

  www.alimcnamara.co.uk

  or follow her on Twitter: @AliMcNamara

  Also by Ali McNamara

  From Notting Hill with Love… Actually

  Breakfast at Darcy’s

  From Notting Hill to New York… Actually

  Step Back in Time

  From Notting Hill with Four Weddings… Actually

  The Little Flower Shop by the Sea

  Letters from Lighthouse Cottage

  The Summer of Serendipity

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Sphere

  978-0-7515-6622-2

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © Ali McNamara 2018

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  SPHERE

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DZ

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Daisy’s Vintage Cornish Camper Van

  Table of Contents

  Praise for From Notting Hill With Love… Actually

  About the Author

  Also by Ali McNamara

  COPYRIGHT

  Dedication

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  St John’s Academy, Sixth Form Leavers’ Ball, 2004

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Brighton University campus, 2006

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital, March 2011

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  For those who believe in the unbelievable…

  Prologue

  September 2001

  ‘What ya listening to?’ the new girl asks, sitting down next to me on one of the benches that surround the schoolyard.

  I look at her suspiciously, wondering if I should say. I usually got teased mercilessly when I admitted what was playing in my earphones, but something in the expression on this girl’s face tells me she might understand.

  ‘Wham!’ I say hesitantly, still not trusting her or my judgement completely. ‘Actually it’s a compilation of eighties music.’

  ‘Ooh, I love eighties music!’ she exclaims happily. ‘No one at my old school got it. They were all into the Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, and’ – she pulls a face – ‘Westlife.’

  I feel her pain.

  ‘I’m Daisy,’ she says, introducing herself. ‘I’m new here.’

  ‘I know,’ I tell her. ‘I’m Ana.’ I shyly offer her one of the earphones. Daisy takes it and in that moment we begin a friendship that will last for the next seventeen years.

  Until the day it ended.

  One

  ‘And that concludes the will reading for the Estate of Rosalind Mary Williams.’ The elderly, sombre man we’d been listening to for the past fifteen minutes shuffles the papers in front of him on the desk like a newsreader at the end of a bulletin and looks up at us.

  There’s silence in the small office we’re all crowded into, not because there had been anything particularly shocking about Daisy’s will, but what other way are we supposed to react? Our loved one has still been cruelly taken from us, and no words read by a solicitor with white hair and a questionable taste in ties were going to make us feel any better.

  I turn to Peter, Daisy’s grieving husband. He gives me a half smile which, just as quickly as it has appeared, disappears immediately from his face. I glance around the room at the other few people who have joined us today: Daisy’s parents, Katherine and Tim, and her brother Elliot, all looking equally as upset and distraught as Peter and I felt.

  ‘Thank you, Jonathan,’ I hear Peter telling the solicitor. ‘We appreciate everything you’ve done.’

  Jonathan gives a dismissive shake of his head as he takes Peter’s outstretched hand. ‘Not at all,’ he says, placing his other hand over the top of Peter’s. ‘Daisy was a fine young woman who sadly left us far too soon.’

  Peter simply nods, and his head drops.

  I stand up and go over to him. ‘Pete,’ I say, placing my hand on his shoulder. Peter turns to face me, allowing the solicitor to release his hand and move discreetly away to Daisy’s mother, who is dabbing at her eyes with a tissue.

  ‘Ana,’ Peter says, and he kisses my cheek. ‘That was fun, eh?’ He pulls a wretched face, and the lines under his eyes that I swear have increased threefold since Daisy’s death are pulled taut for a second.

  I nod. ‘She certainly knew what she wanted.’

  ‘Daisy always knew just what she wanted from the first moment I met her.’

  I smile in agreement. ‘I know exactly what you mean. For someone who was so free-spirited, a rod of iron definitely ran right through her.’

  ‘To my detriment a lot of the time,’ Peter says wryly, and he smiles now too as we remember her.

  ‘Try being her friend – Daisy was always the one who made the decisions on what we should do and where we should go on nights out. I never got a look-in!’

  ‘Best friend,’ Peter corrects me.

  I shake my head. ‘Only until you came along, Pete.’

  ‘Will you do what she asks?’ Peter enquires eagerly. ‘She was adamant she wanted you to have it.’

 
‘I – I don’t know,’ I say, looking away. ‘I’m not sure it’s really my thing, and the will said it’s currently down in Cornwall.’ I say the word ‘Cornwall’ like it was Mars.

  ‘I know, in St Felix. Daisy loved it down there. She was never happier than when we took a holiday there with the boys. She called it her magical place.’ Pete’s eyes get a little misty as he talks, and I regret coming over to chat to him. Seeing Pete getting emotional only made things worse. ‘This meant a lot to Daisy – you know it did. It was the only thing she talked about towards the end… the one thing that kept her going… gave her hope.’

  I reach for his hand.

  ‘Please, Ana,’ he asks imploringly, looking into my eyes. ‘Please do this one thing for Daisy, and do it for me too. It would mean so much… to both of us.’

  I should have driven, I think for about the hundredth time since I left London this morning. What possessed me to take the train, all these trains down to Cornwall? It was taking for ever to get there.

  But when you live in London, or on the outskirts like I do, public transport becomes your norm and I’d thought this would be the easiest option. I’d use the travelling time productively to get on with some work – it would be ideal. But as so often happens in life, what I’d planned and what actually transpired were two very different journeys.

  It had started like most of my days did, with a train into Liverpool Street Station. I’d then hopped (well, I say hopped, I’d actually been dragging a small suitcase and carrying a rucksack) on to a Circle Line tube across to Paddington Station. This would have been fine – I’d allowed plenty of time to make my changes – until I discovered there had been a security alert and Paddington Station had been evacuated.

  Again, this wasn’t anything new as it happened a lot these days. The security breach could be anything from a hoax phone call to a stray bag left on the platform, and even overcrowding was reason to evacuate a station nowadays. I roll my eyes – another delay – but I try to keep myself calm. Better to be safe than sorry. Anyway, at least by travelling later in the day than I usually did, I’d saved myself money on my ticket – something I always liked to do. Daisy, rather than being impressed, would have laughed at my thriftiness; she always found my penny-pinching hilarious. I just called it good sense.

  I drag my case across the road to a nearby coffee shop. As I wait in line with some of my fellow delayed passengers, I think about Daisy. She was the reason I was here today about to embark on this journey down to Cornwall. I shouldn’t complain – Daisy had been such a good friend to me over the years that this was the least I could do for her in return.

  Travelling later in the day had not only saved me money but it had allowed me to avoid too many commuters as well. An excuse not to have to push on to a busy tube platform followed by standing in an even more crowded train was always welcome. Daisy had always been so good about my ‘little problem’ as we often called my anxiety. There had been many a time when we hadn’t been able to go somewhere because of it: school discos in our teens, busy nightclubs in our twenties, mosh-pit-style pop concerts when we were just about old enough to know better. Only a few years ago, I’d had a bit of a wobbly when in a mad moment we’d decided to hit our local shopping centre on one of the first Black Friday sale days in the UK and it had been absolutely rammed.

  But every time my little problem had occurred, Daisy had understood and never complained. She’d simply found another way for us to deal with the situation, and it had always worked out fine, if not better, as a result.

  God, I missed her so much.

  Eventually the station is opened again without a reason being given for its closure, and by the skin of my teeth I just manage to board my train before it leaves for Exeter.

  I find my seat, grateful I’d booked one in advance, and flop down into it with my untouched coffee, drinking it fast before it gets cold.

  But just as I’ve emptied my cup and I’m thinking about getting my laptop out of my bag, we stop at a station and a grandmother and her two grandchildren board and sit in the three reserved seats opposite and next to me.

  I smile politely at them and hurriedly retrieve my laptop from my bag before they cover the table between us in their comics, crisps and electrical gadgets. This was the longest stage of my journey – I would be on this train for over two hours and I’d planned on doing a fair amount of work in that time so I didn’t waste it.

  ‘What’s that?’ one of the kids asks, as I arrange my equipment on the table.

  ‘It’s a drawing tablet,’ I reply, quickly plugging it into my computer.

  ‘Cool, can I see?’

  I look at the grandmother in the hope that she might intervene, but she’s already absorbed in the pages of her Woman & Home magazine.

  So the rest of my train journey is spent fending off questions from the children about what I’m doing. They take a bit of a break when they’re allowed their crisps, but once the munching has stopped they then turn their attention immediately back to me again.

  I could ask them to leave me alone or even ignore them in the hope they’ll go back to their own gadgets, but I haven’t the heart to do that because they remind me so much of Daisy’s two children. They were always inquisitive too and fascinated by my life, so different to their mother’s, and they would never seem to tire of asking me questions about it.

  I’m relieved when we reach Exeter, but also a little sad to say goodbye.

  ‘Thank you,’ the grandmother says, as we all get up to leave the train. ‘You’ve been very good with them. I do hope they haven’t bothered you too much?’

  ‘Oh no, don’t worry,’ I lie. ‘They’ve been fine. Are you stopping in Exeter?’ I ask, desperately hoping they aren’t going to be on my next train.

  The woman nods. ‘Yes, I’m returning them to my daughter. They’ve been on holiday with me for a week.’

  I smile, relieved to hear I won’t have to answer any more questions on the next part of my journey. Perhaps I’d get some peace at last? I wave goodbye to the family then attempt to find the platform my next train is leaving from.

  My change this time is smoother, and as I board my fourth train of the day for St Erth, I’m glad to see my seat is one of two and not four. There is no one in the seat next to me so I settle down again and get out my laptop, but I barely get my latest project open on the screen when I feel my eyelids begin to droop. I reach for the can of Red Bull I’d bought at the station and sip it, but even that fails to give me the energy or the inclination to stay awake.

  I sigh. I’ll have to close my eyes for a few minutes. I won’t fall asleep, I’m sure of it. I barely slept at night these days, let alone nodded off in a public place, but just the simple act of calming my mind for a few minutes was usually enough to freshen me up.

  It was a technique Daisy had taught me. She, unlike me, was completely into alternative healing. Usually I’d listened politely to her ideas then immediately dismissed them, but she had persuaded me to try this particular technique and I had to admit this one actually did work. However, whereas usually I would simply close my eyes, do some deep breathing and then open them again a few minutes later feeling revived, today I actually fall asleep and I don’t awaken again until I feel someone tapping me on the shoulder.

  ‘Wake up, dear. The train has stopped – you need to get off,’ an elderly lady says in a strong Cornish accent. ‘This is the end of the line.’

  I glance bleary-eyed through the window and to my surprise see a small station with a few people making their way from the train to the exit, where a guard is checking their tickets.