The Sunday Lunch Club

by Juliet Ashton

  ‘I’m in love with this novel that feels like pure comfort food. It’s warm, hug-able and delicious. This book will leave you with a spring in your step’ @laraamandamarsh

  ‘A touching and heart-warming story of a family’s most special moments as they share their problems, comfort food and love around the dining table’ @AnnetteHannah

  ‘An extraordinary novel about ordinary people. It has the perfect balance between tough moments and joyful ones. A touching and uplifting story that will warm many hearts, this is a real treat that will surprise you, with both laughs and tears guaranteed!’ @albainbookland

  ‘A warm, welcoming story with a dash of mystery and emotion, comfort reading at its very best!’ @katesbookspot

  ‘The literary equivalent of a glorious roast you haven’t had to cook yourself. With dessert. And lashings of lovely warm custard. If only every Sunday lunch was this good’ @Vikbat

  ‘A great story of family – those you’re born with and the family you choose to include in that special place in your heart. The love that these characters felt for each other, through thick and thin, was like a lovely warm hug. An absolutely great read with lots of laughter and even more heart’ @Raarchel

  ‘A phenomenal portrayal of family drama, lost identities, and the power of forgiveness. Absolutely outstanding’ @kaishajayneh

  ‘I laughed, I cried, I sat on the edge of my seat, I went through so many emotions just reading about lunch’ @Zoe__Diane

  ‘A brilliant story . . . you are taken on a journey that feels special’ @B00kShelf

  ‘This was a truly wonderful read. The story is gripping, the characters endearing and I am sure that you, too, won’t want it to end!’ @fabbookfiend

  ‘I loved each and every one of the characters. I loved seeing their stories unfold and the joy of a new chapter and therefore new lunch where I could catch up with the family and really feel like I was sat amongst them at the table catching up on the recent gossip. I also loved that it went that bit deeper, dealing with issues which really tugged at the heart strings’ @overflowingklc

  ‘There’s bound to be at least one character which you think, “I know someone a bit like that!” Light-hearted, happy and wholesome – the perfect Sunday-in-your-pyjamas-with-a-cuppa read!’ @LauraNazmdeh

  ‘It has everything. This made me cry, laugh and swoon . . .a beautiful tale of love, loss, family, friendships and second chances. Full of wit, warmth and love, I really recommend this’ @hellosweety26

  ‘Full of warmth and belonging, this is one story you won’t want to miss’ @shazgoodwin

  ‘Oh this book! It got me right in the feels! I haven’t felt so strongly about a group of characters in ages! I loved the way it was written, each chapter being set at a Sunday Lunch Club, with just enough time passed for the drama to mount up and the emotions to swell. The dialogue is flawless, the dynamics are perfect. I really can’t fault this book at all!!’ @tishylou

  ‘Just wow! Full of laughs and tears . . . a wonderful new book’ @BookLoverx

  ‘I was hooked from the start and couldn’t put the book down. There were several twists in the plot and that just made it more exciting. I felt like being there with the characters and was actually sad when it ended’ @skydreamersimi

  ‘Heartwarming, uplifting and poignant. Highly, highly recommended’ @Agi_mybookshelf

  Praise for Juliet Ashton:

  ‘Funny, original and wise’ Katie Fforde

  ‘Gloriously and irresistibly romantic . . . It’s like One Day with all the additional trials and tribulations of female friendship’ Hannah Beckerman

  ‘Warm, witty and surprising’ Louise Candlish

  ‘This brilliantly written and captivating story instantly drew us in and refused to let go. Fresh, funny and utterly fabulous, it’s the perfect holiday read’ Heat

  ‘Cecelia Ahern fans will love this poignant yet witty romance’ Sunday Mirror

  ‘You’ll laugh and cry your way through this original and touching love story’ Closer

  This book is for Sonia Lopez-Freire

  with love and thanks

  No hay mejor hermano que

  un buen vecino al lado

  Prologue

  Lunch at Thea’s

  VOL-AU-VENTS

  COD BAKED IN FOIL

  STICKY TOFFEE PUDDING

  Everything – but everything – had changed.

  The cutlery Thea laid out was old and well handled. Mellowed by years of lunches and dinners, it enhanced the flat’s eccentric blend of old-fashioned cosiness and hipster style. She picked up a dessert spoon, felt its weight as it balanced on her finger, then set it down again, just so.

  The table looked perfect, even if she did say so herself. Not showy, not styled, yet welcoming and beautiful and thought about. She thought deeply about things, this slender woman with the carefully done nails and the well-cut dress in cornflower blue. She bent down to tweak the clean blanket she’d laid over the cat bed, amused at herself for such Mad Housewife attention to detail. This was not her usual style.

  The doorbell rang.

  Thea froze. Had she bitten off more than she could chew? Inside these walls she was safe. When that door opened, the world would flood in, dabbing its fingerprints all over her safe place.

  An old fear was exhumed; she could lose everything.

  Thea looked at the door to the garden. She could open it, race out, hurdle the low fence, leave the bell ringing and the cod in the fridge and the wine unopened. Each guest was a friend, but what would they make of her? Would they find her odd, exotic, alien? Or would they recognise her for what she was?

  A quote from a wise old woman popped into her head. ‘Your soul never changes,’ murmured Thea, taking one last appraising look around as the doorbell repeated itself, churlish this time.

  If she’d forgotten anything, it was too late to do a damn thing about it. Thea pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, cleared her throat, gave herself a last searching look in the hall mirror and opened the door.

  It was time.

  Chapter One

  Lunch at Anna’s

  NIBBLY BITS

  ROAST BEEF WITH ALL THE TRIMMINGS/NUT ROAST

  STRAWBERRIES AND CREAM

  The Sunday Lunch Club wasn’t a proper club.

  There were no membership fees, or laminated passes, or rules. It was an ad hoc get-together for the Piper family plus any stray friends or lovers or pets who happened to be kicking around. Sometimes the club sat down together twice a month, sometimes every week; at other times, they forgot about it for weeks on end.

  It had started when Anna’s parents moved to Florida. There’d been a big send-off, when her mother had served one of ‘her’ roasts in the conservatory of the family home out in the suburbs. It had been emotional, saying goodbye to the bricks and mortar the four brothers and sisters grew up in. A mass of memories, some good, others bad and one decidedly ugly, had crowded the table alongside the beef and vertiginous yorkies and gravy thick enough to walk across.

  They’d realised, as they chewed and drank and argued and laughed, that there’d be no more roasts after Mum left. That was a solemn moment; everybody put down their forks, and in that moment the Sunday Lunch Club was born.

  Not that they ate a roast every time. Only Anna could be bothered to undertake the multiple tasks and meticulous time management involved. Anna’s roomy conscience put her forward to be keeper of the flame. Sunday lunch had to be perfect, it had to be complete; if there was no horseradish sauce on the table she went to bed in a funk.

  Furthermore, there had to be both freshly grated horseradish and the supermarket version. Her older brother, who jumped on every passing foodie bandwagon, insisted on the real thing, but her ex-husb
and said the shop-bought sauce reminded him of his childhood.

  There is so much more to roast beef than mere lunch.

  Each roast carries echoes of all the roasts that went before. No two gravy recipes are the same. Some families insist on peas; others stage a mutiny if a carrot is involved. A Sunday roast is a comfort blanket made of meat, a link to the past, a reassurance that not everything changes.

  Anna understood this, and took everybody’s preferences into account. That’s why she had to conjure up not only a perfectly cooked joint – rare in the middle, crusty at the edges – but also roast potatoes, mashed potatoes, peas, carrots, Yorkshire puddings both large and small, red wine gravy, gravy from granules, roast parsnips, plus a nut roast.

  The kitchen was smallish and imperfectly formed, but there was room for a sofa, and it was improved by the view of Anna’s small garden. Mostly paved, the pots loitering around its edge were beginning to wake up. April toyed with them, blowing hot and cold. The sleek lines of the modern garden studio were incongruous among the trellises and benches; it was newly built, a testament to her confidence in Artem Accessories, the business she’d started with Sam. They spent more time in there together than they ever had done during their marriage.

  She consulted her spreadsheet. Time to make the batter.

  Flour. Eggs. Milk. The comforting, timeless sound of a fork beating plain ingredients in a bowl. Anna decanted the pale sludge into a jug and put it in the fridge. Why, she didn’t know; she did it because that was how Dinkie, her grandmother, had always done it.

  She turned to the table. Extended, it took up almost the whole of the kitchen floor space. Anna liked to pretend she was indifferent to the style of the table setting, saying loudly that it was the food and the company that mattered. However, the previous lunch, a sumptuous catered affair at her brother’s house, was a hard act to follow. Anna felt the pressure, and had splurged on napkin rings.

  Then she’d had to buy napkins; her paper ones looked foolish in their new wooden coats. Anna tweaked the flowers, regretting her decision to put them in a glass vase. She hustled them into a jug. Then, no, that didn’t look right either, and she shoved them back into the vase. By which time they looked as droopy as she felt.

  However often Anna ‘entertained’, there was always this moment before the first arrival when everything looked wrong. When the battered chairs morphed from shabby chic to plain shabby, and the tablecloth showed its age. It was too late to start again. Too late to re-set the table in her usual slapdash way. Too late to scale back her ambitious menu. Too late to dismantle the updo that now looked overdone and fussy when she checked herself out in the chrome of the built-in oven.

  She looked so young in the fuzzy reflection. Her hair looked naturally blonde instead of L’Oréal Sweet Honey, and her eyes glinted greenishly in a pale oval face with not a line to commemorate the hurly-burly of forty years on earth. She’d inherited her mother’s tendency to puffy under-eyes; the more truthful hall mirror told a different story. Still, Anna had long ago made peace with her looks – so-so on a bad day, ramping up to yummy if an effort was made.

  Life was a compromise between aspirations and reality. She let go of all her misgivings about the table setting, about the size of the joint, about whether or not the place cards that had seemed so cute when she’d written them were actually pretentious.

  Anna took in a deep breath (through the nose? Or the mouth? She could never remember her Pilates teacher’s instructions) and let go of all, or almost all, her anxieties. She still cared that her guests had a good time and left feeling nourished; she no longer cared whether or not she impressed them.

  Which, she thought, looking at the misspelling on the nearest place card, is just as well.

  The room filled up. Coats were handed to Anna or dumped on the sagging sofa. Bottles were pressed on her, her cheek was kissed, a gift of champagne truffles was oohed over.

  Somebody – probably Neil, the oldest of the four siblings and the one who liked to impress himself on a room – had opened the glass doors to the garden, and the straggly spring sun exposed the neglected pots and an Ikea bookcase she’d dismembered weeks before.

  ‘God, olives, I love olives,’ whooped her sister. Maeve scooped up a handful and stuffed them all in her mouth, unaware they were artisan olives and their price had made Anna’s hair stand on end. ‘Did you do me a veggie option?’

  ‘Don’t I always?’ Even though Maeve’s vegetarianism was the shaky sort, easily derailed by the whiff of a bacon sandwich, Anna always made sure to dip into her cookbooks and come up with something that rivalled the mighty roast.

  ‘Somebody,’ said Santiago, sidling up to Anna who was pouring Prosecco and worrying whether she’d bought enough, ‘has done a poo-poo.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Anna and they both laughed. She was grateful to the God of In-Laws for sending her Santiago. Decorative, playful, very very Spanish, his light touch brought out her own inner child. ‘I bet,’ she said, leaning down to the baby in his arms, ‘it was you, wasn’t it?’

  At three and a half months old, Paloma was all pink and white innocence, blue eyes huge in her chubby face. She was everybody’s pet, everybody’s favourite, the Piper family’s new toy. ‘Take her up to my room, Santi,’ said Anna. ‘There’s more space to lay out the changing mat.’

  She watched him go.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking.’ Neil appeared, nudging her. ‘You’re thinking what a great bum. A ten out of ten, A1, classic of its kind. Santi’s bum is more or less why I married him.’

  Anna nudged him back. ‘Actually, I was thinking what an incredible dad he is. Even though he’s so young.’

  ‘Is that a dig at me?’ Neil took offence as easily as he took in air. ‘I was young once, you know. It’s not a skill. Anybody can do it. And Santi’s not that young. He’s twenty-four.’

  ‘Or, to put it another way, two decades younger than you.’

  ‘Don’t remind me. In some ways it’s lovely having an Adonis beside you in bed every night. But in others . . .’ Neil pulled in his tummy and put a hand to his hairline. He whispered, ‘It reminds you of what a fat old has-been you are.’

  ‘You’re only forty-four!’ A mere four years behind her brother, Anna hated it when he lamented his age. She preferred to strenuously believe the magazine articles that told her forty was the new thirty. She’d always felt older than her years; when Anna looked back over her teens they weren’t the sunlit beach scenes of other people’s youth. With their parents out of the country so much, she’d been a mini-mummy to the younger siblings. Anna and Neil had been born close together. Seven years later, Maeve had come along, then Josh. There’d always been a ‘them and us’ feel; Anna and Neil still felt vaguely responsible for Maeve and Josh.

  ‘I’m forty-four in human years,’ said Neil. ‘In gay years I’m a thousand and one.’ He tutted at the breadstick in his hand. ‘Why are your nibbles always so samey?’

  ‘Samey?’ Anna was insulted. ‘It’s tradition, you oaf.’

  ‘Nothing traditional about rocking up to the same old hummus and olives and tzat-bloody-ziki for years on end.’ Neil was extra-arch today. ‘And when are we eating? I’m starving.’

  ‘When it’s ready.’ Anna took off with the tray of Prosecco.

  The L-shaped kitchen and family room had been one of the reasons she’d bought the small Victorian semi in a terrace of similarly neat homes near the park, but the open-plan layout was a disadvantage when she hosted the lunch club. There was no escaping the lunchers’ endless neediness; they regressed to toddlers as they walked through the door, unable to pour liquid for themselves, all drooling with hunger. No, she thought, not toddlers. They were baby birds, their beaks open, their squawks filling the air. She imagined herself chucking worms into their open gobs, and Sam heard her giggle.

  He was in his chair. Or rather, what used to be his chair when they were married. Six years after the divorce, Sam still colonised the frayed blue velvet cushi
ons whenever he visited, long legs stuck out in a potential trip hazard.

  Sitting back, he parroted her giggle. Sam was tall, sturdy, an oak, with low-key colouring stolen from nature – eyes a soft hazel, hair a difficult to describe medley of blond and brown. Like the oak, Sam was calm. Another metaphor Anna favoured was the iceberg; not because Sam was cold – far from it – but because he kept so much of himself hidden. To the world at large, Sam was tranquil, but ten years of marriage had taught Anna how to recognise the giveaways that hinted at inner turmoil. Today he was serene, already a touch tipsy; Sam had no capacity for booze.

  A fixture in Anna’s life, these days her ex-husband was a cheerleader for her love affairs, such as they were. The latest one had crashed in flames some time ago. Sam had listened to each twist and turn, given advice, consoled her and boosted her confidence. As Anna had said, he’d been almost as good as a woman at all those things.

  He seemed to have sworn off relationships. Perhaps our marriage vaccinated him against romance, thought Anna, as he took a glass from her tray and said, ‘You look nice.’

  He said it as if it was unusual. ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Maeve, snaffling a glass and leaning into Anna’s face. ‘Your skin’s all glowy and your eyes are sparkly. Ooh! You naughty girl! You’ve been having ess ee ex!’

  The boy at Maeve’s side, thirteen years old with skin the colour of toffee, winced. ‘Mum, for God’s sake!’

  ‘That’s how Dinkie used to say it. So we wouldn’t understand. Ess ee ex!’ repeated Maeve, with relish. Their Irish grandmother, often quoted, was an occasional member of the lunch club. ‘Who’s the lucky guy?’

  Anna hurried back to the oven, ignoring their laughter, hoping none of them noticed the blush that crept up her neck. Pretending to check on the beef, she had a vivid flashback.

  A utility room. White goods. A Kenwood stand mixer. Herself up against a fridge-freezer, frenzied, forgetting her own name as a man pounded his body against hers. She’d held out a hand to steady herself and pushed over a litre bottle of fabric conditioner. Neither of them noticed.