Let It Snow

by Sue Moorcroft

  LET IT SNOW

  Sue Moorcroft

  Copyright

  Published by AVON

  A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

  Copyright © Sue Moorcroft 2019

  Cover design by www.headdesign.co.uk © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

  Cover illustration © Carrie May

  Sue Moorcroft asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008321796

  Ebook Edition © September 2019 ISBN: 9780008321802

  Version: 2019-08-27

  Dedication

  For

  Paul Matthews

  and

  Hollie Clark Matthews

  in this special year.

  Your happiness brings me joy.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Keep Reading …

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  ‘Mum, what’s the matter? Why are you crying?’ Lily Cortez hurried across the lawn to crouch in front of the slender figure huddled over an iPad in a garden chair. The raw October day had almost ended and the light was steely grey.

  ‘Oh! Lily, we didn’t expect you until tomorrow.’ Roma swiped at her wet cheeks turning the iPad face down in her lap. Roma Martindale was an all-weather gardener and though the October day was blustery, planters, compost and pots of violets surrounded her.

  ‘I decided to make the journey from Spain over two days rather than three to surprise you.’ Lily frowned. The redness of her mum’s eyes spoke of a prolonged weep and Roma was no crybaby. Lily felt in the pocket of her fleece for tissues to press into Roma’s chilly hands. It was probably ten degrees cooler in Peterborough than it had been in Barcelona when she’d left at the crack of dawn yesterday, driving away from a Spanish husband who was as relieved as her to call it quits. She gave her mum a minute to blow her nose. ‘Are you ill? Or is Patsie?’ Patricia Jones was Roma’s life partner, a tall and confident lawyer whose dark hair fell smoothly to the shoulders of her dark blue suits.

  ‘We’re both fine.’ Roma blew her nose again. ‘She’s doing pro bono work at a women’s refuge. And I thought you weren’t arriving until tomorrow so …’ Fresh tears leaked down her cheeks.

  ‘Has someone said something crap about you and Patsie?’ Not everyone accepted same-sex couples. Sergio, Lily’s soon-to-be-ex-husband, never coped well with Lily having two mothers, for example.

  Roma shook her head, searching for a dry area of her tissue. ‘No.’ She blotted more tears.

  Lily had to swallow before she could speak again. ‘Please, Mum. I’m imagining all kinds of awful things here.’ Then her gaze fell on the iPad. ‘Have you received bad news?’

  Roma pressed her hands over the iPad and squeezed her eyes shut. ‘You’ve caught me at a weak moment. It’s something in the past, really.’

  Lily had to blink tears away. ‘You’re frightening me,’ she said in a small voice. What on earth could cause her usually sunny, funny, quirky mum to sob so broken-heartedly?

  Still clutching the iPad and levering herself to her feet, Roma took Lily’s hand. ‘Come indoors.’

  The kitchen was warm and welcoming. After hanging her khaki gardening coat by the back door and kicking off her wellies Roma sat down at the table. Lily took the next chair and watched as the iPad’s screen sprang to life. Slowly, Roma turned it so Lily could read it: the Peterborough Telegraph obituaries.

  Lily’s eyes scanned the notice on the screen. ‘This guy Marvin’s died? He was eighty-seven, so quite a bit older than you, Mum.’ Marvin had been a beloved husband of the late Teresa, a loving dad and granddad, a much-missed brother to Bonnie. ‘I’ve never known you cry over a man.’ As a gay woman, out and proud all her adult life, Roma’s friends were mainly female.

  Roma was silent, her face blotched red.

  Then realisation caught Lily’s breath. ‘I can think of one man you had a relationship with. But he was some one-night stand whose name you didn’t even know … you said.’ She gazed into her mother’s eyes, at the apprehensive, apologetic agony she read there. ‘Wasn’t he a one-night stand? My father?’

  With a noisy swallow Roma shook her head. ‘It was a mess. You know most of the story.’

  Lily’s stomach dropped down a shaft. ‘But not all, evidently! Tell me. I want to try to understand.’

  Roma covered her eyes. ‘Patsie and I wanted a family. She had a settled career with maternity benefits. She became pregnant with your sister Zinnia via the sensible route: anonymous donor. But I got jealous. I wanted a baby too.’ She clasped her hand over Lily’s as her voice broke. ‘Patsie wouldn’t agree, particularly before the first baby was even here. I was a freelance photographer scraping a living and there was childcare to be considered. If there was to be a second pregnancy then she wanted to have artificial insemination again using the same anonymous donor – possible to arrange even in 1983 – so the babies would be full siblings. I thought she was unbearably pragmatic.’ She gave a bitter laugh. ‘It wasn’t a one-night stand I had, it was an affair. Marvin was an older man, who, in my reckless, heedless naivety I thought wouldn’t be hurt by me using him. He never knew I was only in the relationship to get pregnant.’

  The kitchen clock ticked from above the range cooker, loud in the silence. ‘Why did you lie when I asked about my father?’ Lily demanded, rocked by an unexpectedly keen sense of loss.

  Lurching to her feet Roma took down a glass and filled it from the chilled water dispenser in the door of the fridge. Footsteps dragging, she returned to her seat. ‘I met Marvin through a photography job – headshots of managerial staff for a company magazine. He developed a thing for me and let it show. He was shocked when I, a woman in her mi
d-twenties, responded.’ Colour flooded her cheeks. ‘He was fit and good-looking for early fifties. I thought he’d be kind to me and most of my experience was with women.’ She cleared her throat and raised her gaze to Lily’s. ‘Are you sure you want to hear this?’

  Lily’s heartbeat seemed to have taken over her whole body, pumping in her stomach, her head, her throat. She nodded.

  Roma hooked her hair behind her ears. The wind had tumbled her corn-coloured waves. ‘It lasted for five months, the length of time it took me to get pregnant. I was sorrier than I thought I’d be to end things. Poor Marvin was devastated. Said he’d fallen in love with me. Had risked his marriage, the happiness of his kids. He was so hurt. It was awful. I’d been so immature and self-centred that I truly had barely given his marriage a thought. Looking back, I can’t believe my own selfish behaviour. And Patsie—’ Roma’s hands were shaking now. ‘I almost destroyed us. She’d been so happy in her planned pregnancy and all the time I’d been betraying her.’

  ‘With a man,’ Lily whispered, shocked.

  A bitter smile twisted Roma’s lips. ‘Yes. Well. That it was a man didn’t help. But I’d betrayed her trust, her plans for our future. It was rocky for a long while.’

  Through the enormity of everything she was hearing, Lily craved information on one person. ‘Tell me about my father,’ she demanded hoarsely.

  The semblance of a smile flitted across Roma’s face. ‘He was a company director. Fair-haired, clean-shaven, looked good in a suit. He liked old-school rock ’n’ roll, rugby, tennis, cinema, detective shows on TV, holidays in America.’

  Lily felt her insides had been hollowed out with a giant spoon. ‘And you didn’t think his concern for “his kids” should extend to me?’

  Roma rose and quietly poured coffee from the filter jug. Her voice was low and filled with shame. ‘I couldn’t find a way to make things right. Be fair to everyone. There were two babies on the way; I was desperate for Patsie and I to stay together and be parents to both. The only way to bring that about was for her to know the full story … but nobody else. I couldn’t risk Marvin knowing about you or you knowing about him because Patsie would have been faced with him in your life.’

  Lily gazed at the cup of coffee her mother put before her and felt faintly revolted by it.

  Roma sat down and wrapped her arms around her, smelling of fresh air and compost. ‘If you only knew the hours we talked about it! Everything, anything I thought of doing just felt as if it would make my wrong wronger, risk my family and risk his family. If we’d told you the truth and you wanted to find him it would change the entire dynamic of our family – you and Zinnia, Patsie and me. Lily, don’t hate me! You had two mothers and a sister. I wanted it to be enough.’

  ‘So, on my behalf, you chose to exclude me from his family. One half of my family.’ Lily propped her head on her fist. She could actually see how her mother had made the choice she had, though it left her feeling as if she had a black hole where her insides should be. ‘I don’t hate you, Mum. It’s all so … you. Chaotic and impetuous. It’s just tough to find my father and lose him in the same instant.’ Tears prickled her eyes.

  Then, slowly, Lily sat straighter, pulling the iPad towards her, rereading the obituary. And in it she saw her consolation prize. In silence, she highlighted the first of two names and tapped it into a search engine. A list of hits filled the screen and it took her seconds to access one. Then it felt as if the words she read reached into her chest and gripped her heart. ‘Look. The eldest of my two half-brothers, Harrison Tubb, is the landlord of The Three Fishes pub in a village called Middledip.’ She looked up at her mum with a surge of excitement. ‘It’s here in Cambridgeshire. I could find him.’

  Roma sat back with a horrified gasp. ‘Oh, Lily … no!’

  Chapter One

  November, two years later

  Lily passed a string of coloured Christmas lights through her hands and wondered whether, if she looped it several times, she could use it to gag her sister.

  Zinnia, supposedly helping Lily decorate The Three Fishes, had so far done no more than fidget with a fistful of silver tinsel and give Lily earache. ‘We’re your family!’ Zinnia declared, shoving her fingers through her chestnut hair. ‘What you’re doing could hurt Patsie and Roma.’

  Lily climbed on a stool and began to feed the string of lights through hooks above the bar. ‘They understand it’s my decision. You know this, Zin. Let’s not press “repeat” on the conversation.’

  Zinnia bulldozed on. ‘Aren’t we enough for you? You and I grew up sharing a bedroom! We’re sisters—’

  ‘And you’re the loveliest sister in the world.’ Lily hoped popping in a positive note would distract Zinnia. She jumped down, scraped her stool towards the next few hooks, gave Zinnia a hug then clambered up again. ‘How about twisting that tinsel around the ivy swags along the mantelpiece?’

  ‘Lily!’ Zinnia tossed the tinsel onto the polished wooden bar. ‘I know you! I’m where you come from. I understand how it feels when people think we’re weird because we come from a single-sex family.’

  ‘I know,’ Lily agreed gently. ‘But there’s more to my life than that. It’s the part you don’t share that’s the problem, isn’t it?’ Plus the fact that a couple of years ago Lily had visited the village to find her half-brother and had ended up applying for a job in his pub, finding somewhere to live in Middledip – and here she still was. Zinnia was particularly upset by that.

  Zinnia didn’t offer a direct reply to the question but her voice softened. ‘You’ve completed your mission and met him. You should either tell him the truth or leave the poor guy in peace.’

  By ‘he’ Zinnia meant Harrison Tubb of course, almost universally known as Tubb from the pub, and her stomach clenched at the idea of him discovering the truth before Lily was ready. If she ever was. She left the Christmas lights dangling and slid off the stool to stroke Zinnia’s arm. ‘I’ve completed half my mission and I’ll complete the other half next month,’ she pointed out, with a little leap of excitement that there was a half-brother yet to meet. ‘I understand that you’re concerned I’m somehow trying to leave our family – which I’m not – but my relationship with our mums isn’t affected by where I’m living or who I mix with. If my relationship with you is suffering then it’s because you’re letting it.’

  Zinnia tried another tack. ‘You’re worth so much more than working in a crappy village pub.’

  ‘It’s not crappy.’ Lily moved her stool along again.

  ‘In the two years since you came back from Spain you’ve been wasting your time in this village. You don’t seem to want to be near your family—’ Zinnia halted, as if realising she might be painting herself into a corner. ‘We’re your real family, Lily,’ she clarified.

  ‘Families have more than one branch.’ Lily hooked up the end of the string and got down to judge whether it was hanging evenly.

  Zinnia’s dark eyes saddened. ‘Just get telling him over with so it’s not hanging over us all. I feel like telling him myself—’

  ‘That would affect our relationship. It’s up to me when, and if, I think the time’s right for me to spill the beans.’ Lily had to fight to keep anxiety from her voice, newly aware that Zinnia, through calling at the pub to see Lily, knew Tubb and could actually have blabbed Lily’s secret at any time. ‘You don’t agree with the way I’m doing things, but this is my business.’ Not yours hung unspoken in the air.

  Before Zinnia could argue further, a calm voice came from behind the bar. ‘Sorry to interrupt.’

  Both Lily and Zinnia swung around. Lily forced a laugh. ‘You made me jump, Isaac. This is my sister, Zinnia. She’s helping me with the Christmas decorations. Zin, this is Isaac O’Brien the relief manager Tubb appointed while he was away.’

  Isaac, his eyes as brown as apple seeds, hair several shades darker, a single small gold ring in his ear, reached across the wooden countertop to shake Zinnia’s hand. His eyes returned to Lily. ‘
I didn’t realise you were coming in this afternoon to do this.’

  Lily flushed. She’d learned enough about Isaac in the past fortnight to know he was politely asking why she hadn’t cleared it with him. He’d come from a trendy venue where he’d managed dozens of staff and probably brought in an outside company to put up Christmas decorations. ‘Janice asked me if I’d do it as she’s in Switzerland. They’re normally up at the beginning of November and it’s the seventh already … I assumed she or Tubb had communicated with you.’ Janice had a pretty free hand at the village pub and becoming an item with Tubb last Christmas had only elevated her status.

  ‘We open in less than an hour,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Right.’ Lily covered up a flash of alarm that so much of the interval between closing after lunch and reopening in the evening had been eaten up. ‘We only have little trees on the bar rather than a great big thing so the rest won’t take long.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He gave them a smile then turned and headed in the direction of what was usually referred to as ‘the back’, the area of the ground floor that encompassed a place to hang coats, the cleaning supplies cupboard and the mixers store, along with doors into the beer cellar, kitchen, car park, upstairs accommodation and staff loos. There was also a desk in an alcove where Isaac’s laptop often rested.

  ‘Wow,’ Zinnia breathed, eyebrows waggling as the sound of his footsteps died away. ‘He’s easy on the eye. Tubb will never look quite the same.’

  Lily pictured Tubb’s wiggle of hair at the front and his smile that turned down instead of up. ‘Yes, Isaac’s hot,’ she agreed in a low voice as she dragged one of the small Christmas trees out of its box. She now had less than sixty minutes to get the bar to a presentable state and if Isaac’s appearance had diverted Zinnia from her crusade to reshape Lily’s life it might be a good thing. ‘His last job was in a hipster lounge in Peterborough. He’s reserved, but he has a way of getting people to do things.’

  Zinnia gave an exaggerated wink. ‘He could get me to do all kinds of things—’