As I filled the bags and repacked the old suitcases, I carried them all the way down to the front hall and stacked them ready to go to a local charity shop, so I was getting tired, hot and grubby by the time I reached the last couple of boxes. The first and largest one was full of bric-a-brac, teddy bears and various trashy holiday souvenirs, so I labelled that for the attic and moved it over with the furniture that was going to the new house.
Finally I was left with just a large shoebox of old letters. I hadn’t looked at them when I was packing her stuff up, but now I found myself sitting under the skylight on the Lloyd Loom chair with the contents spread across the top of the ottoman. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to read them; I didn’t really think they would suddenly illuminate some depths that my shallow and self-centred mother had kept hidden because I was sure she hadn’t got any. What you saw was what you got.
There wasn’t a huge collection, though some dated back to just before I was born. My mother had scrawled remarks on a couple of the envelopes like ‘Yes!!!’ and ‘Result!!!’ so I started with those – and hit pay dirt with the very first one. Then, with horrified illumination dawning, I went through all of the rest, finishing with a couple of notes in Mags’ distinctive handwriting.
After that, I just sat there unconscious of time passing, my lap full of secrets and lies, until I heard the unmistakable thumping of Jake’s big boots on the wooden attic stairs. Hastily bundling all the letters together, I thrust them back into the box and crammed on the lid, wishing what I had learned could be as neatly packed away and forgotten.
‘What on earth are you doing up here?’ Jake demanded, ducking his head to get through the low doorway. ‘The lights and radio are on in the flat, but Zillah hadn’t seen you for hours. I thought you’d vanished.’
‘Like Mum’ was the unspoken inference. I’m sure that’s why he had always got rid of my boyfriends – every time I’d gone out with one of them, he’d been afraid I wouldn’t come back.
‘Sorry, Jake. Grumps asked me to sort things out up here ready for the move, and I lost track of time.’
‘You look a bit pale.’
‘I’m tired, I’ve been up and down stairs with bags of stuff. But I’ve just about finished now and I found this lovely Lloyd Loom furniture for my bedroom. What do you think?’
‘It’s a bit girly,’ he commented, his attention clearly elsewhere. ‘But I like that huge trunk with all the travel stickers on it! Do you think Grumps would let me have it?’
‘It would take up an awful lot of floor space in your room, you know.’
‘Maybe, but I could store loads of stuff in it, so the rest of my room would actually be much tidier,’ he suggested cunningly.
‘I suppose it would fit at the foot of your bed, if you really wanted it, and Grumps won’t mind because he said I could have anything from the attic.’ I handed him the roll of labels. ‘Here, write “Cottage – front bedroom” on this and stick it on top.’
He did that and then I asked him to carry the last boxes and bags down to the hall.
‘OK,’ he said, grabbing two heavy bags in each hand as if they weighed practically nothing, ‘but I really came to find out what’s for dinner.’
I passed a weary hand across my forehead. ‘Oh, I don’t know…I haven’t thought about it yet.’
‘Zillah says she’s doing steak and kidney pudding, mushy peas and crinkly chips, but you have to say now if you want any, before she starts cooking.’
‘You have that, if you fancy it, Jake. I’m meeting Felix and Poppy this evening, and by the time I’ve showered all this filth off, there’ll only be time for a snack. What are you doing tonight?’
‘I promised Grumps I’d help him with something,’ he said mysteriously, and then laughed at my expression. ‘No, I’m not about to become part of the coven, cavorting about with a lot of wrinklies, or do anything else daft! He just wanted me to research someone called Digby Mann-Drake on the internet for him.’
‘Digby Mandrake? That sounds even more bogus than Gregory Warlock!’
‘Mann with a double “n” and it’s hyphenated. I expect he made the Mann bit up, since he seems a bit Aleister Crowley – all fancy robes and “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”,’ said Gregory Warlock’s grandson, casually knowledgeable. ‘In fact, he sounds a nasty piece of work altogether and he’s been sending veiled threats to Grumps, because he wanted to buy the Old Smithy, only he fell ill at the crucial moment.’
‘Opportune,’ I commented, thinking that this sounded awfully like the plot of Satan’s Child. Could this Mann-Drake possibly be the Secret Adversary, both of the novel and in real life? The man who had tried to prevent Grumps realising the significance of the Old Smithy’s magical position? The plot thickened. ‘Do they know each other, Jake?’
‘They were at Oxford at the same time, but I don’t think their paths have crossed since, until now. Grumps wants to probe Mann-Drake’s weak spots so he can protect us if he tries any mumbo jumbo,’ he said with cheerful irreverence. ‘That’s why he wanted the information. I’ll see you later.’
I carried the shoebox of letters down to my room, then dashed back up to the attic one last time in order to blast the inside of the cabin trunk with Jake’s very overpowering Lynx aftershave, which entirely vanquished the scent of Je Reviens. There was no need for both of us to wallow in miserable memories.
I showered quickly, so I had time to do an internet search for one of Mum’s correspondents, who turned out to be an actor, printing out his photo and some information to take with me to the Falling Star, where I was meeting Poppy and Felix.
Zillah must have come into the living room just after I’d finished that and gone back into the bathroom to apply a bit of slap, because there was a plate of dinner on the table covered by a hot, inverted soup bowl. I hadn’t thought I was hungry at all until I lifted the bowl off and the aroma of steak and kidney pudding and chips hit me, but I ate it in five minutes flat, standing up, before dashing out.
Indigestion was on the cards – if I could tell heartburn from heartache these days.
Chapter Six
Stupid Cupid
We were all sitting round the table in the snug at the Falling Star, Mum’s collection of letters and the computer printouts spread over the table between our glasses.
‘So, let’s get this straight, Chloe,’ Felix said, making a valiant attempt to untangle my incoherent narrative. ‘When Lou got pregnant with you, she didn’t just tell Chas Wilde that he was your father, she told another man he was too?’
‘Yes, as a moneymaking scam. Since they were both married, once she threatened to tell their wives they agreed to pay her to keep quiet about it. She had quite a little racket going.’
I hadn’t thought I could feel any more disillusioned about my mother, but this sank my perception of her to whole new depths and I’m not sure anything could survive down there, certainly not love.
‘Gosh!’ said Poppy, wide-eyed. ‘So your father could be either of them?’
‘Yes – or neither, because there’s no guarantee it wasn’t someone else entirely, is there?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Felix said thoughtfully. ‘Since she seems to have got pregnant as a means to an end, it probably is one of them. It’s still quite likely it was Chas Wilde, like she always told you, you know.’
‘Yes, he’s always taken an interest in you and sent Christmas and birthday presents, which he didn’t do for either of us,’ Poppy agreed, ‘and called in to see you when he’s in the North.’
When I was a child those had been short, awkward visits, with me desperate to know why, if he was my daddy, I wasn’t allowed to call him that, or ask him anything else that puzzled me, like why he didn’t live with me and Mum. But later, when I was old enough to understand, we had grown closer and easier with each other. I hadn’t seen a lot of him since Mum vanished, but we kept in touch by phone and email.
‘But all that doesn’t prove he’s my father, just
that Mum convinced him he was,’ I pointed out, and then looked down despairingly at the letters. ‘I wish now I hadn’t read these so I would still believe Chas is my father, because at least he’s kind and nice, despite being stupid enough to let my mother use him!’
‘But, Chloe, he may very well turn out still to be your father,’ Poppy said.
‘I know, and I want it to be Chas,’ I said, picking up one of the envelopes from the table, ‘because when you read this letter he sent to Mum when I was ten, after he’d finally confessed everything to his wife, he made it clear he was still going to carry on supporting me – that he cared about me.’
‘He is a nice man,’ agreed Poppy, ‘and he certainly paid for one weak moment, didn’t he?’
‘Through the nose – and maybe for someone who wasn’t his child after all. Have a look at these two sets of photos I got off the internet and tell me if you think I look like any of them. The ones of Chas are from when he was younger, so he looks different.’
Felix and Poppy put their heads together over the photographs and Felix asked, ‘Who is this other man?’
‘Carr Blackstock, an actor, mostly theatre work, especially Shakespeare, but he has appeared in one or two things on TV. When I Googled the name, he was the only one who came up, so it must be him.’
‘He looks slightly familiar,’ Poppy said, then added hesitantly, ‘though actually that might be because you look a bit alike. Slightly elfin, if you know what I mean – like Kate Bush.’
‘Elfin? I don’t look at all elfin,’ I said with disgust, ‘or like Kate Bush. I wish people wouldn’t keep saying that!’
‘Well, it certainly wasn’t me who got called “Pixie Ears” at school!’ she retorted.
‘No, you were “Pudding” because you ate everyone else’s jam roly-poly and custard on Wednesdays!’
‘Only because I needed the energy. I burned up loads of calories mucking out my ponies before school every morning,’ Poppy said with dignity.
‘Now, girls!’ Felix said mildly. ‘I think we’re straying from the subject in hand – and I have to agree with Poppy that if I had to pick one of these two as being related to you, then Carr Blackstock would be the man. It’s hard to tell from printouts, but he even seems to have the same unusually light grey eyes.’
‘I think my printer cartridge is fading. But anyway, Grumps has grey eyes.’
‘Yes, but ordinary grey ones,’ he said.
‘There’s nothing at all ordinary about Grumps!’
‘That’s true, they are a bit piercing.’
‘What do you know about this actor?’ asked Poppy, and I fished out the information sheet from the bottom of the heap. One of us must have slopped his or her drink, because it was a bit damp and wrinkly.
‘He’s been married to the same woman for ever and they have four children. Mum must have got him in a weak moment, like Chas. It doesn’t say a lot about men’s faithfulness, does it?’
‘We’re not all alike,’ Felix said, which was quite true in his case. He is the faithful-unto-death sort and divorced his wife several years before, only when she had a very blatant affair. ‘But your mother must have been stunning at the time, if that’s a mitigating factor? And we all make mistakes in life, of one kind or another.’
‘He must have been furious about making that one, because apart from his really terse answer to her news about the pregnancy, there aren’t any letters until my eighteenth birthday, when he sent the note saying he wasn’t going to pay any more and he’d never been entirely convinced I was his child anyway.’
‘I suppose that was fair enough, because they didn’t really have DNA testing then like they do now, so he wouldn’t have been able to prove it one way or the other, would he?’ Felix said.
‘But if he’d actually seen you he’d have spotted the likeness,’ Poppy said.
‘I don’t think there is a likeness.’ I scrutinised the photos again. ‘You’re imagining it.’
‘He’s just the most like you out of the two of them, that’s all,’ Felix conceded.
‘Or the least unlike. And whether he believed it or not, he paid up, just like poor old Chas, so Mum must have thought she was on to a good thing until the money stopped coming in altogether when I was eighteen.’ I tossed the picture back on the heap. ‘And then the truly awful thing is that she thought she’d try the same trick all over again – by getting pregnant with Jake!’
Poppy’s pale denim-blue eyes widened. ‘Oh, no, not Jake too!’
‘Yes, only this time it didn’t work out.’
‘No, well, I suppose it wouldn’t, these days,’ Felix said. ‘Things have changed and a lot of men wouldn’t care, except for being made to pay Child Support. And they could find out for sure if the child was theirs first, through a DNA test.’
‘Lou was never the brightest bunny in the box, so that didn’t seem to have occurred to her until too late,’ I said, then gave a wry smile. ‘And the man she tried to trick into believing he was the father was very fair, so it wasn’t going to wash if he ever set eyes on the baby! I think for once she was telling the truth when she told me that Jake’s father was an Italian waiter she met on holiday. He had to get those lovely dark brown eyes from somewhere.’
‘When she knew she wasn’t going to get any money out of it, I suppose there was no point in lying about who the father was,’ Poppy agreed. ‘So at least you don’t have to worry about Jake’s paternity, only your own.’
‘Mags and Janey both seem to have been in on Lou’s original scam and it’s clear that Mags at least thought it was all highly amusing,’ Felix said, looking up from reading one of the brief notes in his mother’s scrawled handwriting. ‘Especially about Chas, since he’d never shown any sign of being anything other than a happily married man until he let Lou seduce him.’
‘Well, he could have said no,’ Poppy said fair-mindedly. ‘And so could the other man.’
‘They could have, but they didn’t,’ Felix said. ‘Lou knew what she was doing and she put it about a bit. In fact, all three of our mothers seem to have, though at least yours settled down after a few wild years and got married, Poppy.’
‘That was just a timely combination of desperately missing horses and falling for Dad. Once he’d gone, she started trying to work her way through the male members of the Middlemoss Drag Hunt.’
‘Quite literally,’ I said and Poppy giggled.
‘I suppose so! Still, at least she hasn’t brought any of them home since that time I caught her in a loose box with one of the whippers-in when I was thirteen. And on the whole, she’s not really been bad as a mum.’
‘She certainly turned out the best of the bunch from that point of view,’ Felix agreed, ‘though that isn’t saying much. Chloe’s is a bolter with a blackmailing habit, while my unre-spected parent dumped me on my grandparents the minute I was born and is still playing the field in her fifties, while nominally living with a smarmy git half her age.’
‘At least she’s around, Felix,’ I pointed out, because Mags got lucky with a legacy from an elderly lover and opened the Hot Rocks nightclub in Southport a few years ago. The said smarmy git is the manager. ‘If she hadn’t had a business to run, she might have decided to vanish with Mum.’
I’d never believed Mags’ version of events about the night Mum disappeared. Lou and Mags had always been thick as thieves, whereas Janey had tended to go off and do her own thing after the Wilde’s Women years were over, though they all remained friends and sometimes hung out together at Hot Rocks.
‘God knows what Lou is up to all this time, or where she is, though I suspect Mags could give me a hint if she wanted to, Felix,’ I said.
When she’d switched from taking all those holidays to Jamaica on her own and started visiting Goa instead, I’d wondered if that was a clue to Mum having skipped the Caribbean.
He looked uncomfortable. ‘I have asked her and she swears she has no idea.’
‘Yes, that’s what she told me, but I don�
�t believe her.’
‘And I asked Mum if Mags had told her anything and she said she hadn’t,’ Poppy said, ‘though that means nothing when they’ve always lied and covered up for each other.’
She indicated the stuff on the table, which Felix was now neatly repacking into the box. ‘What are you going to do about this, if anything?’
‘I don’t know, I’ll have to think about it. It’s been a shock finding out my father might not be Chas. But there’s no point in telling any of it to Jake, because it would only upset him and anyway, it looks like she was telling the truth about who his father was, at least. She even gave him a holiday snap of them both together, though it isn’t terribly clear.’
‘He must have been nice, because Jake is,’ Poppy said loyally. She’d always adored Jake, who had never played tricks on her (apart from mild ones, like whoopee cushions and plastic flies in her coffee) and called her Auntie Pops.
‘I’m certainly not going to do anything hasty. Even if I wanted to, I have too much on at the moment, trying to keep my business running while sorting and packing and getting ready for the move. I’m dismantling my greenhouse tomorrow.’
‘I could come and help,’ offered Felix.
‘No, that’s OK, Felix,’ I said quickly, since he is pretty useless as a handyman, besides being the kiss of death to anything breakable, being all elbows and feet. ‘It won’t take me long. It was dead easy to put up and I still have the instructions.’
‘Really, Chloe, we make a good team,’ he insisted. ‘We’d get it done twice as fast.’
‘Really, Felix, we don’t – especially where panes of glass are concerned.’
He looked slightly hurt, so I added, ‘But I’ll definitely need your help on moving day.’
I felt in need of another drink, so went to the bar to get a round in.
When I got back, Poppy suddenly announced, ‘I’ve got a date for tomorrow night!’
Chocolate Wishes Page 6
