Brief Encounter at the Picture House by the Sea

by Holly Hepburn

  Praise for the Star and Sixpence series:

  ‘A fresh new voice, brings wit and warmth to this charming tale of two sisters’ Rowan Coleman

  ‘You’ll fall in love with this fantastic new series from a new star of women’s fiction, Holly Hepburn. Filled to the brim with captivating characters and fantastic storylines in a gorgeous setting, Snowdrops at the Star and Sixpence is simply wonderful. I want to read more!’ Miranda Dickinson

  ‘The Star and Sixpence sparkles with fun, romance, mystery, and a hunky blacksmith. It’s a real delight’ Julie Cohen

  ‘Like the dream pub landlady who always knows exactly what you want, Holly Hepburn has created the most delightful welcome to what promises to be a brilliant series, in the first Star and Sixpence. The sisters who inherit a tired local and must bring it back to life are warm and intriguing, the neighbours are (mostly!) friendly and the gossip is utterly addictive. I was very sad when it was time for last orders, and am already looking forward to the next round. Especially if a certain blacksmith happens to be at the bar . . .’ Kate Harrison

  ‘Warm, witty and utterly charming, Snowdrops at the Star and Sixpence is the perfect book to curl up with on a cold winter’s day. It left me with the most wonderful happy glow’ Cally Taylor

  ‘Warm, witty and laced with intriguing secrets! I want to pull up a bar stool, order a large G&T and soak up all the gossip at the Star and Sixpence!’ Cathy Bramley

  ‘A super sparkling star of a story and I can’t wait for part two’ Alexandra Brown

  For my grandmother, Agnes,

  who introduced me to so many classic films

  Chapter One

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this train will shortly be arriving at Bodmin Parkway. If you are leaving the train at the station, please ensure you take all your personal belongings with you.’

  Gina Callaway stretched, then reached for her coat. The journey from London had gone faster than she’d expected; a harassed-looking young mother had slid into the seat opposite just before they’d pulled out of Paddington, with a red-faced screaming baby clutched to her shoulder, and Gina had resigned herself to a noisy few hours. But the baby had settled down quickly, lulled by the motion of the train, and his mother started to look less harassed, especially after Gina surprised her with a tea from the buffet car just after Exeter St Davids. She’d murmured her thanks but hadn’t felt obliged to talk; in fact, they’d travelled in companionable silence, both gazing out of the window as the tracks came so close to the sea that it seemed as though they were travelling by boat instead of a train. And now, as Gina stood up to leave, they exchanged a fleeting smile, two almost-strangers whose paths would never cross again.

  The train stopped at the platform. Gina swung her case out of the door and onto the concrete below. A cloud of billowing steam drifted on the air, causing her to stop in confusion: admittedly it had been an age since she’d been to Bodmin station, but she was sure the Penzance-bound train usually stopped at Platform One. Yet here she was on Platform Two, right next to a crowd of day-trippers snapping pictures of the steam train that ran along the Bodmin and Wenford heritage line from Platform Three. It wasn’t a major problem, just an inconvenience to have to carry her case up the stairs and down again on the other side before she could get into a cab to her grandparents’ house in Polwhipple. If she made it through the throng of tourists clogging up the platform, that was.

  She dodged out of one photograph and swerved around another cluster of cameras and smartphones just as the old-fashioned train let out a shrill whistle. A thick cloud of steam burst from its chimney and billowed across the adjoining platform, driven by a gust of wind. Gina blinked into the breeze and gasped at a sudden sharp pain in one eye.

  She stopped mid-stride and let go of her suitcase, causing the man behind to mutter a curse as he was forced to change course. ‘Ow,’ Gina mumbled, as tears began to stream down one cheek. ‘Ow. Bloody hell, that stings.’

  What she needed was a mirror, she decided, trying in vain not to blink as her eye burned. She rummaged in her bag with one hand, searching for a compact, but her eye was streaming so much that by the time she found it, she could barely focus and the other eye was swimming too.

  ‘Excuse me, can I help?’

  The voice was deep and male, with an unmistakably Cornish lilt. Gina swung towards the speaker. She got a jumbled impression of fair hair and height through her blurred vision. ‘Oh no, I’m fine. It’s just a piece of grit, I expect.’

  ‘Here, take this.’ A cool fold of cotton was pressed into her hand. ‘Don’t worry, it’s clean.’

  Gina’s eyelid twitched, causing another needle of pain. ‘Thank you,’ she said, raising her tiny mirror once again and squinting as she dabbed at her watery eye with the thick white handkerchief. ‘You’re very kind.’

  ‘It’s no trouble,’ he replied.

  Gina twisted the corner of the handkerchief into a point and eased the black speck from the edge of her lower lashes. She blinked, causing another stream of tears, and the stinging lessened. ‘I think I’ve got it.’

  Now that her eyeball didn’t feel as though it was under attack, she could see the owner of the handkerchief better. He was tall – perhaps a little over six feet – and tanned, with short, sun-streaked hair that suggested plenty of time spent outdoors. His eyes were blue, like the Cornish seas on a sunny day. He was very easy to look at, Gina decided; if her sight hadn’t been compromised, she might even have kept on looking.

  ‘Agony, isn’t it? Even a grain of sand feels like a razor blade,’ he said, sounding sympathetic. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to take a look?’

  In London, Gina would have taken his persistence as a chat-up attempt, but there was nothing more than friendly concern on his face. His accent was disarming too, Gina thought, all softness and warmth and long vowels. It had been a while since she’d been to Cornwall, and hearing that unmistakable burr again now summoned up memories of sun-drenched summers spent on Polwhipple beach and endless ice-cream cornets from her grandfather’s ice-cream stall on the seafront. It was almost like being fifteen again.

  Gina gave herself a mental shake. She might be back in Cornwall but she was very different from her teenage self. ‘I’ll be okay,’ she said, pushing the handkerchief towards him. ‘Thanks, though.’

  The man shrugged. ‘Why don’t you hang on to it? There are toilets a bit further along the platform in case you want to splash some water into your eye but the tissue they use disintegrates as soon as you look at it.’ He offered her a lopsided smile, that faded into a thoughtful frown, as though there was something he wanted to say but wasn’t sure how. Then he seemed to realise he was staring and gave her a brisk nod instead. ‘All the best then.’

  With a final flash of summer blue, he turned and vanished into another burst of steam. ‘Bye,’ Gina called after him. ‘Thanks again.’

  She stared into the wispy white clouds for a second or two, half expecting him to rematerialise, then tucked the hankie into her handbag and started along the platform once more. It was like something out of an old film, she mused, as her case bumped along behind her: a handsome stranger helps a woman to remove some grit from her eye amid clouds of steam from a nearby train. Except that if this had been a movie, they’d have gone for coffee and begun a torrid love affair that could only end in disaster. Gina shook her head wryly as she walked; all those Saturday mornings she’d spent at the Palace, the old picture house in Polwhipple, while visiting her grandparents each summer had given her a love of the dramatic that had never quite let her go. Even now, she liked nothing more than settling back in front of a giant screen with
a tub of popcorn and letting a film roll over her. Unfortunately, it was a pleasure her boyfriend, Max, did not share, meaning that the cinema was somewhere she went with her friends, not him. And girls’ nights out were becoming more and more infrequent as her friends settled down and started families. I’ll end up going on my own soon, Gina thought wryly. It’ll be just like old times . . .

  The station toilets smelled faintly of citrus-scented air-freshener and coal smoke. Gina gave her eye a careful rinse, flushing the last few specks of dust from her lash-line. Satisfied that it was all gone, she restored the cat flick eyeliner and black mascara her tears had displaced, and smoothed her long black hair before heading to the ticket hall. Beyond it, there would be a line of taxis; one of them would be more than happy to transport her to Polwhipple. Unless—

  She glanced across at Platform Three, just as the piercing whistle of the steam train split the air. Gina hesitated. She could take the heritage line to Boscarne Junction, the way she had when she was younger, and ask her grandmother to pick her up from the much-nearer station. It was only a short drive from Polwhipple and the whole journey might even be quicker, given how snarled up the roads between Bodmin and the coast could become, even in March; all it took was a tractor trundling along a narrow country road to slow traffic to a crawl. And there was another, less practical reason to take the steam train; what if her chivalrous stranger was on board? It had been good of him to stop, unlike the commuters she travelled with every day in London, who were so intent on getting to and from work that they barely took the time to look around. She could thank him properly for his kindness.

  She peered into the ticket office, wondering how much a one-way ticket to Boscarne might cost nowadays. But then a burst of steam wafted across the train tracks and the whistle screeched again, followed by the chug-chug-chug of a bygone time as the train at Platform Three began to move along the tracks.

  The guard behind the glass window of the ticket office leaned forwards. ‘There’s another one at 16:20, if that helps.’

  Gina shook her head. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, forcing away her memories of the rich velvet-covered seats and walnut-panelled doors inside each compartment of the old train. ‘I’ll take a taxi.’

  ‘Where to?’ the driver asked, once he’d hoisted her case into the boot and settled back behind the wheel.

  ‘Polwhipple, please,’ Gina told him, picturing her grandparents’ immaculate grey-stoned farmhouse with its sturdy outbuildings tucked away behind. ‘The Old Dairy on Tregarran Street. No, wait—’

  If she checked into her hotel first there was less chance Nonna would insist that she stayed with them. As much as Gina loved her grandparents and treasured her memories of the summers she’d spent with them, they could be a little bit overpowering and she was thirty-one, not fifteen; she needed her own space.

  ‘Could you take me to the Scarlet Hotel, in Mawgan Porth, please?’

  Nodding, the driver pulled away and Gina settled back into the seat, wondering what she’d find when she eventually did get to her grandparents’ house. Neither of them were frail – until recently they’d both been in perfect health – but Gina knew she’d begun to take their vigour for granted. Had it really been more than a year since she’d been down to see them? Even that had only been a fleeting weekend visit; she’d meant to go again but work had kept her busy – there always seemed to be one more client to accept, one more event to manage. Being freelance meant it was harder to justify time off and Cornwall seemed so far away, even though it didn’t take that long by train. But as soon as she’d heard her grandfather had broken his leg she’d known she would go. Ferdie Ferrelli himself would never have asked for help – he was from proud Italian stock – but his wife, Gina’s Nonna, was nothing if not practical. She knew that she couldn’t run the dairy and produce enough ice-cream to satisfy customer demand, so she’d put out an SOS. And given that Gina was the only member of her family still living in the UK, she’d known there was only one answer, even though it meant taking a three-month break from her own work. She’d forgotten more than she ever knew about ice-cream, other than which flavours she liked to eat, and she had even less experience of running a food concession in a seaside cinema. But still she hadn’t had the heart to say no. Not to her much-loved Nonna and Nonno, who’d given her so many perfect Polwhipple memories years ago.

  All of which meant there was a small niggling knot of worry in Gina’s stomach about how the coming hours, days and weeks were going to pan out. Ferdie would be overjoyed to see her, until he found out why she was there; he was famous for refusing to accept help, even from his own flesh and blood. He’d built his business up from scratch after arriving from Italy in the 1950s, and he’d run it single-handedly ever since, although Gina suspected her grandmother did far more behind the scenes than Ferdie was prepared to admit. If Gina was going to win her grandfather round, she’d have to convince him she could do the job. Ferdie Ferrelli had never been easy to convince about anything, but he was especially set in his ways where his beloved gelato was concerned. Gina was going to need all her charm and determination to persuade him to let her help.

  Chapter Two

  ‘Gina! Bella mia!’

  Elena Ferrelli wrapped Gina in a generous hug on the doorstep of the pretty grey house they’d lived in for more than fifty years. ‘It is so good to see you. Have you grown?’

  Gina smiled into her grandmother’s jet-black hair, enjoying the sensation of being in her arms again. No one said her name in quite the same way as Nonna – the accent she’d never lost turned it into something elegant and exotic. ‘It’s good to see you too, Nonna. And I think I’ve finished growing, unless you mean my waistline.’

  Elena stepped back to survey Gina from head to toe and plucked at her coat. ‘Of course not, there is nothing of you. Do you even take the time to eat in that city of yours?’ She sniffed and shook her head. ‘But it doesn’t matter – you are here now and I can take proper care of you. We’ll soon have some meat on those bones.’

  Gina laughed; for all Nonna’s proclamations, she herself was a trim seventy-something who thought nothing of donning her Lycra to join the surfers for beach yoga in the summer months. But she also loved to cook and expected the ultimate mark of respect from those she fed – an empty plate. ‘Don’t get any ideas, Nonna,’ Gina said, patting her arm affectionately. ‘I’m here to work, remember?’

  ‘But you still have to eat,’ Elena said, unperturbed. ‘Now, come in and see Nonno. He is rude and bad-tempered but you will put a smile on his sour old face.’

  A flutter of nerves flapped in Gina’s stomach. How was her grandfather going to take the news that she was here essentially to take over his business?

  Elena was frowning. ‘Where are your cases? Surely you can’t have everything you need for three months in that tiny handbag?’

  Gina took a deep breath. Before she faced Ferdie, she had another minefield to negotiate. ‘I’ve checked into a hotel,’ she said, bracing herself. ‘I know the plan was to stay here, but you’ve got enough to do taking care of Nonno and it seemed like the sensible thing to do. This way, we all get a bit of space and won’t get under each other’s feet.’

  And I have somewhere to escape to when your well-meaning interference is driving me crazy, she thought but didn’t say. It didn’t matter, though; Elena was still looking at her as though she’d just been insulted. ‘A hotel? How could you do such a thing? My own granddaughter staying in a hotel when there is a perfectly good bed here – people will think there is bad blood between us when they find out.’

  Gina smothered a groan; she might have known Nonna would be predominantly concerned by what her friends and neighbours would think. ‘Of course they won’t.’

  ‘And how can I look after you when you are not here?’ Elena went on indignantly. ‘You might as well have stayed in London.’

  ‘It’s just for a few days,’ Gina said, doing her best to soothe her grandmother’s ruffled feathers. ‘Besid
es, it’s a treat for me – a little present to myself. There’s a spa and a pool and hot tubs on the clifftop overlooking the sea.’

  Elena let out a ladylike snort. ‘Sounds dangerous to me.’ She threw Gina a hard look and then sighed. ‘But I suppose it won’t hurt, as long as you come home to us in time.’

  Gina hesitated; once she’d found her feet, she planned to start looking for a reasonable holiday home to rent. But there was no need to mention that now. ‘Thank you, Nonna.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ Elena said, leading her inside. ‘Goodness knows what your grandfather will say.’

  Ferdie Ferrelli was sitting in his favourite armchair, one leg encased in plaster and raised on a footstool as he studied La Gazzetta dello Sport. He looked up as she entered and his lined, olive-skinned face became wreathed in smiles. ‘Gina! This is a surprise.’

  He reached for his crutches. Gina hurried forwards. ‘No need to get up, Nonno,’ she said, bending down to hug him. ‘I hear you’ve been in the wars.’

  ‘Nothing so heroic,’ Ferdie growled, looking disgusted. ‘I slipped off a ladder while painting the windowsills. My fault.’

  Gina shook her head. There was no point in suggesting he shouldn’t have been climbing a ladder in the first place; Ferdie was seventy-eight on the outside but twenty-eight in his head and he liked to take care of things himself. Paying someone else to paint the house would never have entered into his thoughts. ‘It was an accident,’ she said, smiling. ‘Even you have those sometimes.’

  He grunted, as though unconvinced. ‘It was stupid. But enough about me – what brings you here? Your nonna and I thought you had forgotten where we lived.’

  Elena stepped forwards. ‘Why don’t I make us some coffee? Gina has come straight here from the train and you know what dishwater they serve aboard those.’

  Gina smiled. Her grandmother’s cappuccino was the stuff of dreams; strong and creamy with the perfect amount of froth, and her espresso could power the national grid. ‘That would be lovely, thank you.’