Chocolate Wishes

by Trisha Ashley

  David shuddered.

  ‘What? You like him, you said so!’

  ‘Yes, of course I do, but that doesn’t mean I want to live with him. And there’s no reason why you should have to sacrifice your entire life to bringing up your half-brother, is there? Fostering might be the making of him.’

  ‘Fostering? I can’t believe you would even suggest that!’ I stared at him with new eyes. ‘Anyway, it’s going to be only for a few weeks at most, until Mum comes back. The longest she’s ever been away is three months.’

  David’s expression softened and he came and put his arms around me. ‘Darling, you have to accept that she isn’t coming back this time – she’s dead. I know it’s hard, but look at the facts.’

  The facts, as Mum’s friend Mags had reported them, were that Mum had simply vanished into thin air one night from the cruise ship taking them between Caribbean islands (a holiday won by Mags, who was ace at making up advertising slogans).

  ‘Mags was lying and she isn’t dead,’ I explained. ‘She’s probably somewhere in Jamaica with a man, and when she gets tired of that, she’ll come back again. She has a very low boredom threshold.’

  ‘Look, darling, she was seen on the ship the evening after it left Jamaica, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Someone wearing one of her more flamboyant dresses and with dark hair was seen, but I suspect it was Mags.’

  ‘But your mother’s friend is blonde – and why on earth should she go to so much trouble anyway?’

  ‘A wig? My mother often wore one when her hair looked ratty. And they were in the habit of covering up for each other.’

  ‘Come on, Chloe! Look, it’s been several weeks now, and I think, however hard it is, you’ll have to accept that she had too much to drink – which you know was one of her failings – and went over the side in the small hours without anyone noticing. This time she isn’t going to reappear as if nothing has happened. Which brings us back to what to do about Jake.’

  ‘Nothing, because you’re wrong. I expect she’ll be back in time for our wedding, but if she isn’t, then Jake can come and live with us, can’t he? I mean, you always realised he would have to do that whenever Mum was away, didn’t you?’

  David was slow to answer, probably imagining the chaos one very lively boy could cause to his immaculately ordered life and minimalist white flat. I had already unintentionally caused enough of that while cooking chicken with a dark cacao mole sauce in his kitchen: chocolate does seem to get everywhere…And evidently he hadn’t understood the strength of the bond between Jake and me.

  ‘I’d like it to be just the two of us, for a while at least, darling,’ he said eventually. ‘You have to accept she’s not coming back and that other, permanent arrangements need to be made. I mean, your grandfather’s got a private income, hasn’t he? He could send Jake to boarding school.’

  ‘I don’t think his private income would stretch that far and anyway, Jake would hate it. He’s always seen me as more of a mother figure than Mum. I’m the security in his life, and so it would simply be another betrayal. And his friends are all here in Merchester.’

  ‘Then he’d hate being transposed to a city flat, wouldn’t he?’ David said quickly.

  ‘Yes, but we did say we’d find a house in the country, one you could commute from. That could be somewhere round here, couldn’t it?’

  ‘I meant much later, when we want a family. I’d like to have you to myself for a bit. Anyway,’ he added with a wry smile on his handsome face, ‘I’m starting to think I’m allergic to the country because I come out in this damned rash every time I visit Merchester.’

  ‘You can’t really call Merchester country,’ I objected, but it was true about the mysterious rash, because even now an angry redness was creeping up from the collar of his shirt.

  I reminded myself to speak to Grumps about that…He and David had not really taken to each other, mainly because David spoke to him like an adult humouring a child: big mistake. He tended to take that tone with Jake too, and according to most of the locals, he’d never been any kind of child at all, but an imp of Satan.

  ‘Look, Chloe, I really can’t live with your brother. It isn’t fair to ask me.’ He ran his fingers through his ordered dark chestnut locks in a distracted way that showed me just how perturbed he was. He even loosened his silk tie – good grief!

  ‘You’ll have to find some other solution,’ he announced with finality.

  ‘I keep telling you Mum isn’t dead!’ I snapped, losing patience. ‘She bolts all the time, but she’ll be back eventually: I’ve read the cards and I know I’m right. What’s more, so has Zillah.’

  But although they had told us that Mum was alive, they couldn’t, of course, show us where she was or how long she would be gone.

  ‘It’s Jake or me,’ he said quietly.

  ‘But, David—’

  ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, which I did, even if not with the searing passion of my first love. ‘But—’

  ‘Me, or Jake,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t want to be hard-hearted, but it simply won’t work having him to live with us – and I’m certainly not moving here, which I’m sure you were about to suggest next.’

  ‘Well, yes, but it would be only until Mum comes back.’

  He sighed long-sufferingly. ‘Which she isn’t going to do.’

  He put on his jacket, which had been hanging neatly over the back of a chair in the chaotic kitchen area of the flat, where the paraphernalia of my budding Chocolate Wishes business covered every surface. In fact, there was a glossy smear of tempered couverture down one immaculate sleeve, which I decided not to point out.

  ‘The wedding’s in less than a fortnight, so you had better make your mind up fast, Chloe, hadn’t you?’

  ‘You can’t really mean you’d end it all over this, David?’

  ‘Yes, I do. Make other arrangements for Jake or you can call off the wedding.’

  I still didn’t really think he meant it and I might have tried to soften him up a little, but I was distracted at that moment by catching sight of the imp of Satan himself through the window. He seemed to be closing the bonnet of David’s car…But no, David was always careful to lock it, so how could Jake…?

  The door slammed behind David and he strode across the gravel and got into his sports car without, so far as I could see, a word or look at Jake, who was standing innocently by with his hands behind his back.

  The engine roared into life and then coughed a bit, before the car sputtered off down the lane. It sounded pretty ropey; I’d be surprised if it got him home without breaking down.

  It hadn’t, either. He’d phoned me when he finally got back, incandescent with rage. ‘That child did it – and that’s the last straw, Chloe, I mean it. Make other arrangements for him, or this is the last you’ll ever hear from me.’

  So that was it, and though I was heartbroken, I was also relieved that I had discovered how jealous he was of my love for Jake before we got married. I’d already known he resented my closeness to my old friends Felix and Poppy, but thought he would get over that. Funny how you can be so blind, isn’t it?

  I called off the wedding, which was both expensive and difficult at that late stage, and, resigning myself to perpetual spinsterhood, settled back into my life as before.

  Except that this time, Mum didn’t come back. And the awful thing was, none of us missed her.

  Chapter Three

  Chocolate Wishes

  I was jarred back to the present by the realisation that Radio Four was now traitorously playing ‘Darker Past Mid night’, yet another damn song of Raffy’s! Is there no escape from him?

  You hear it everywhere since it was used as the theme song for a film. And it’s still running as the soundtrack to that hugely popular car advert – the one in which a man is driving through the night alone, when suddenly a girl appears, sitting next to him, and you’re never quite sure if he’s imagining her or if she’s a ghost…


  This time it was the introductory music to a supernatural story, so clearly no radio channel is safe any more. But still, at least the hated sound of it brought me back to the present, because sitting about in a murky swamp of unwanted memories, feeling like one of love’s rejects, was not going to get me anywhere.

  My first impulse (apart from switching off the radio) was to phone up my best friend, Poppy, who together with her mother runs a riding stables called Stirrups just outside Sticklepond, and tell her the news about the move. But she was probably taking a lesson, or was out with a hack, and, even if she wasn’t, half the time she forgets to take her mobile phone with her, or it isn’t working because she’s dropped it in a bucket of water.

  Felix, my other best friend, was going to an auction that day to buy more books he didn’t have room for: Marked Pages was bursting at the seams.

  So in the end I just did what I always did at that time: typed up Grumps’ letters on the computer and put them into envelopes ready to post, then started on the latest instalment of Satan’s Child.

  The new episode was surprisingly gripping, with a very scary bit when the tall, dark and compelling warlock hero (who from the detailed description looked amazingly like photographs of Grumps when younger) was inside the pentagram, while a really nasty demonic beast was testing the boundaries and trying to get in.

  In fact, the scene was so realistic that I started to wonder if Grumps…But no, surely not? He just has a fertile imagination, that’s all, as evidenced by his constant hints that some mysterious rival was loosing the slings and arrows of outrageous magic at him, which was probably, as Zillah said, ‘all my eye and Betty Martin’ (though don’t ask me who Betty Martin is, I have no idea).

  But I made a mental note that once we had moved to the Old Smithy I would take care to avoid entering the museum area when the coven was meeting. Maybe I could make a little sign for Grumps to hang on the connecting door between the cottage and the barn:

  DO NOT DISTURB: IN FOR A SPELL

  I’m a fast touch-typist so it didn’t take long to input everything. Then I printed the manuscript out ready to take it across in the morning when I collected the next lot.

  I sort of fell into being Grumps’ PA when I returned after that disastrous first term at university. It gave me something to occupy my mind with, while looking after Jake and waiting for Mum to come back from her latest fling, other than worrying about my future and what would happen when Raffy finally got my letter telling him everything…

  I wrenched my mind back from the brink of yet another pointless trip down Memory Lane and reflected that I seemed to have managed pretty well without a Significant Other for the last few years. Among my blessings I had good friends (OK, only two, Felix and Poppy, but it’s quality not quantity of friendship that counts) and a social life, though that mainly involved meeting up with them at the Falling Star in Sticklepond.

  I didn’t think I’d made a bad job of bringing Jake up either, considering his lively disposition: the police never pressed charges, even when he painted the Arbuthnot statue in front of the Town Hall blue. (Luckily there was a downpour soon afterwards and the emulsion was not quite dry, so most of it washed off.)

  And the saying ‘Who needs men when you’ve got chocolate?’ was literally true in my case, since discovering a passion for it and then building up my successful Chocolate Wishes business had certainly put the icing back on the slightly jaded cupcake of life.

  Little did the purchasers of my expensive chocolates know that they were whipped up practically on the kitchen table in the kitchen end of our living room. I made the chocolate shells in big batches and often spent the evenings sitting putting in the Wishes and sealing the two halves together with melted tempered chocolate (because if you don’t use tempered chocolate, you get a white line round the join). I had the TV for company if Jake was out with his friends, or shut into his room, doing whatever teenage boys do – and whatever that is, it’s probably much better that their big sisters don’t know anything about it.

  The flat – and probably me, too – always smelled deliciously of chocolate. Maybe that’s why Felix, who has a sweet tooth, had started to look at me in a new, slightly appraising light…unless I was imagining it? I didn’t think I was, though, unfortunately. I first noticed it about the time Grumps gave me that allegedly Mayan chocolate charm to say over the melting pot and the business took off like a rocket, though as I said, I’m sure the two events had nothing to do with each other: it was simply all my hard work paying off.

  I had only part of the charm anyway. Grumps was trying to decipher the rest, which was written in some form of ancient Spanish, having specialised in dead and buried languages at Oxford. One of the letters I’d just typed up was to the archivist in Spain who had found the original document among some collection of papers he was cataloguing, though like Grumps his principal interest was in ley lines.

  Since I’d just created a whole new batch of Wishes I had enough to keep me going for a while, so I packed and labelled that day’s orders ready to post later with Grumps’ mail.

  All the time I was working I was thinking about the Old Smithy and the little cottage that I would have to myself once Jake had gone off to college, and especially what I could grow in the walled garden. Certainly a greater variety of herbs and, if there was room for a bigger greenhouse for over-wintering them, I’d have lots more varieties of scented geraniums. Pelargoniums were my newest passion. There were so many kinds I hadn’t got yet…even one that was supposed to smell like chocolate!

  And I would have tubs of hyacinths and those small, frilly Tête-à-tête daffodils in early spring, lavender and roses, nasturtiums, snapdragons and hollyhocks…My mind ran riot with horticultural possibilities.

  But I still couldn’t imagine Grumps running a museum, even a witchcraft one! He wasn’t in any way gregarious, besides being over eighty and very set in his habits, so I expected Zillah would end up collecting the entrance money and issuing tickets. But since she used to operate the Tarot-reading booth on a Lancashire seaside pier with Granny, I imagined she’d take to it like a duck to water, especially since, unlike Grumps, she was hugely inquisitive about people.

  Maybe she’d do Tarot readings on the side, and make herself a little nest egg?

  Jake came home briefly to eat and change, before going out to an eighteenth birthday party. Zillah had given me some goulash, having made gallons, so that’s what we had, together with crusty bread. I didn’t mention Tabitha’s tail to Jake, because I hoped perhaps it hadn’t quite gone into the stew pot. The goulash tasted OK, anyway.

  We followed it up with blackberry crumble, out of the freezer, with ice cream and then, while Jake filled any remaining interior spaces with about half a pound of crumbly Lancashire cheese (he is a bottomless pit as far as food is concerned), I broke the news of our imminent move to Sticklepond.

  He stopped shovelling food in and stared at me through a lot of thick, blue-black hair. When it isn’t dyed, it’s the same dark brown as mine and our colouring is quite similar, apart from his brown eyes. Mine are the typical Lyon grey.

  Jake’s father was an Italian waiter Mum met on holiday, while mine was Chas Wilde, the former manager of the Pan’s People-type dance troupe she performed in during the late sixties and early seventies, along with her friends Mags (Felix’s mother) and Janey (Poppy’s). Mum told me herself she only had me as an insurance policy after Wilde’s Women disbanded, since Chas was married and so paid up without a murmur to keep her from letting the cat – or the baby – out of the bag.

  But none of the three of them was much good in the motherhood stakes, which is probably why Felix, Poppy and I have such close bonds of friendship: we’ve always looked out for each other.

  Jake resumed chewing, swallowed, then said, ‘Grumps showed me the house agent’s leaflet and asked me what I thought of the Old Smithy ages ago. I didn’t think he was going to buy it, though. I just thought he was interested because it’s at the
junction of two important ley lines.’

  ‘Yes, that does seem to have been his driving motivation,’ I admitted, ‘but also he’s had a very good offer for this house, much more than it’s worth. Did you know that he intends reopening the Old Smithy as a museum, too?’ And I told him about Grumps’ plans.

  ‘So, you and me are to move into the little cottage, then? How do I get to college from Sticklepond – can I borrow your car?’

  ‘No way! But Grumps says you can use the Saab.’

  ‘Even better. I look stupid in your baby Fiat.’

  ‘I’m going to try and get the Old Smithy key tomorrow and have a look, but it has two bedrooms and there’s a bathroom, though I don’t think any of it is terribly modern. One room downstairs was extended into a shop front for Aimee Frinton’s doll’s hospital.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘One of the Frinton sisters mended dolls and teddy bears. There used to be a lot of doll’s hospitals, before mass-produced cheap toys took over. Grumps thinks it would be perfect for making Chocolate Wishes and I could even sell them directly to the public, if I wanted to.’

  ‘You’ll be practically round the corner from Felix’s shop, too,’ Jake pointed out in a casual manner that didn’t fool me in the least, ‘so you can see a lot more of him.’

  ‘I see quite a lot of him already,’ I said mildly. Having done his best to get rid of potential suitors for years, Jake had recently started to try to push me and Felix together – maybe that’s what gave Felix the idea in the first place? I suspected it was because Jake was about to fly the nest and felt guilty at leaving me alone, but little did he know how much I was looking forward to some me-time!

  Anyway, it was pointless, because I simply couldn’t feel that way about Felix – he was more like family. Wilde’s Women finally folded in the early seventies, when Janey suddenly married and had Poppy and then, as I’ve said, Mum had me for her own dubious reasons. Felix was a few years older, having been Mags’ teenage mistake, so he was always a protective older brother figure to us.