Copyright © 2015 Linda Mitchelmore
Published 2015 by Choc Lit Limited
Penrose House, Crawley Drive, Camberley, Surrey GU15 2AB, UK
www.choc-lit.com
The right of Linda Mitchelmore to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the UK such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 9HE
EPUB ISBN 978-1-78189-230-5
Rog, this one’s for you.
And in memory of my mother – the best little dressmaker in town
Contents
Title page
Copyright information
Dedication
Acknowledgements
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
Epilogue
About the Author
More Choc Lit from Linda
Introducing Choc Lit
Acknowledgements
Jan Wright and Jennie Bohnet have been with ‘Emma’ and me every step of the way. No journey is long with good company, so thanks for being there for me, girls.
Huge thanks to the Choc Lit Team, my fellow Chocliteers, and the Choc Lit Tasting panel (Olivia, Catherine, Robyn, Lynda M, Jo, Lisa, Betty, Liz and Caroline). Your support and encouragement knows no bounds.
I know I’ve given Ian Tomlinson, computer genius, more than a few headaches, so thanks, Ian, for never making me feel anything was my fault – even though it probably was!
And last, but by no means least, a massive thank you to my family – James, Elisabeth, Sarah, Alex, Emily, Eric and Sheila here in the UK, and David, Susan and Sharon in Canada. I love you all.
Chapter One
APRIL 1927
‘A year, Fleur,’ Emma said. ‘We’ll give it a year. A lot can happen in a year.’
‘Yes, Ma. I could curl up and die in a place like this well within a year.’
‘You don’t have to be so dramatic,’ Emma told her. Yes, she – and she alone – had made the decision to uproot Fleur from the only home she’d ever known and all her friends, so she was prepared to put up with a bit of petulance until the girl settled. But that thought did nothing to quell the ripple of unease under Emma’s breastbone that she might have made a mistake leaving Canada and coming back to England. Might.
Fleur sighed heavily. ‘I didn’t want to come here.’
But I did. I never really liked the vastness of Canada. The perishing winter cold that meant the harbour froze and Seth’s seine netters couldn’t put to sea for weeks. I never really settled, or made friends. We were a unit of three, Seth and Fleur and me, but …
‘Well, we’re here now. Our furniture and paintings and all the things we chose to bring have arrived. They’re in storage at Pickfords until we need them. It will be exciting to see it all in a new situation, don’t you think?’
‘But, Ma, please, please tell me you’re not going to live in this?’ Fifteen-year-old Fleur’s voice was thick with horror, as though it had been ladled on with a plasterer’s trowel.
‘We can’t stay at the Grand Hotel forever,’ Emma told her.
‘Why not? Pa left you a mint. Didn’t he?’
Emma couldn’t argue with that. The Vancouver fishing fleet Seth’s uncle signed over to him had been far bigger than the one Seth had owned in Brixham. Far, far bigger. Huge boats with crews to match. Lots of money had been made and invested. But Emma would swap it all in a heartbeat to hear Seth’s voice again, feel his lips on hers.
‘Your pa left me well-provided for, yes. For the moment. But it won’t last forever. I’ll have to find some way of earning money and I won’t be able to do it at the Grand Hotel.’
‘I suppose. But this!’ Fleur said, wrinkling her nose.
The this in question was Nase Head House, a grand building that used to be a thriving hotel, that overlooked Brixham harbour. Emma had worked – and lived – in Nase Head House between 1909 and 1911 and had been mostly happy there. At least she’d had a roof over her head and good food in her belly, even though she’d been a servant. She’d grown up there. She’d seen her sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth birthdays in this house, turning from a girl – an orphaned waif – into a woman. What if Mr Smythe, the owner, had been grooming her to become his second wife after he’d been widowed? Emma had seen through his plan in time. And, with Seth’s help, she’d escaped. Grown to love Seth as a woman and not with the calf love she’d had for him when she’d been younger. And she’d married him. And now she was his widow.
The estate agent from Haarer and Mott, standing discreetly behind Emma and Fleur, coughed. Rent it for goodness sake, it’s cheap enough, that cough said, and ignore your daughter’s horror at the thought.
‘Could you leave us for half an hour?’ Emma asked him.
So many memories were swirling around her just standing in the foyer that she felt faint with them. The last thing she wanted was to make a fool of herself if she did faint.
‘I could make it forty-five minutes,’ he replied.
‘Perfect,’ Emma said, and the man walked off across the foyer and out through the double doors, leaving them slightly ajar.
Emma waited until she heard his footsteps go down the curved steps. She peered from a window and watched as he walked to the gate and leaned against one of the stone pillars, lighting a cigarette.
She took a deep breath, holding it in for a few seconds to steady herself, then let it out slowly.
‘It could be lovely again, Fleur. Really lovely. The rent is extremely reasonable and I’d have carte blanche to redecorate.’
‘But, Ma, it’s filthy! And it’s enormous. It’s far too big for the two of us.’
‘I’ll concede the last bit,’ Emma said. ‘It is big, but we could run a business. Open a small school, perhaps?’
‘You have to be jesting with me, Ma, yes?’ Fleur said. ‘Lots of little brats peeing their pants all the time.’ Fleur screwed up her nose at the thought, and Emma couldn’t help but laugh.
‘Perhaps not that,’ she said. ‘But something. It will be good to have a job of work to do again. I miss the time I worked alongside your pa.’
Within days of their arrival in Vancouver it became obvious that Seth wouldn’t be able to do all the office work required for such a big business on his own. As well as the fishing fleet itself, his uncle also had shares in the fish market. A fast learner, Emma had soon picked up the rudiments of bookkeeping. Her original plan to start a dressmak
ing business had been put on hold – until now, perhaps. And so had begun the pattern of their days, until those days were cut short.
‘I know. I wish you could still be working together. You and Pa.’
‘Me, too,’ Emma said. She put an arm around Fleur’s shoulder but Fleur was still spikier than a Scottish thistle and shrugged it off.
‘Well, don’t expect me to live here,’ Fleur said.
‘Don’t be silly. Where I go, you go.’
‘I could go back to Vancouver. Delia Gethin said her ma would take me in any time. We’d be like sisters. Actually, Ma, Mrs Gethin was planning to speak to you about just that very thing before we left—’
‘She would have been wasting her breath if she had done so,’ Emma cut in. ‘You’re a minor and will remain in my care until you reach your majority.’
‘I could run away.’
‘Stop being so melodramatic, Fleur. There’s nowhere you could go without money.’
‘I could if you weren’t so mean about giving me an allowance. You could at least let me have some of what Pa left me.’
‘You know I can’t. It’s in trust until your twenty-fifth birthday.’
‘I’ll be on the shelf by then. An old maid. No one will want me.’
‘And your fortune will still be intact, not squandered away by some feckless fellow who might have wanted to marry you for your money and not for you when you were twenty-one. But enough, we’re wasting time talking about all this when we should be talking about this house.’
‘Which you’re not going to rent, Ma. I ought to at least have some say in where I’ll live – Pa would have wanted that.’ Fleur stormed across the foyer, hit her hand against the wall. Then she marched back again and did the same to the other side. Dust swirled around her feet as she went, the sound of her stomping footfalls echoing in the large space. She put a hand to her brow. ‘I’ll just die if I have to live here.’
‘You should be on the stage,’ Emma said, the words out of her mouth before she realised what she was saying, vocalising a secret from the past that Fleur didn’t yet know. That Emma wasn’t Fleur’s birth mother – Caroline Prentiss was. Caroline Prentiss who was on the stage – or was it films? – albeit it under another name. Or she had been when last Emma had heard her name come up in conversation. Emma wasn’t sure and cared even less. Both secrets she and Seth had kept from Fleur because they’d thought it the right thing to do. In many ways Emma did still think that, but she knew the day would come when Fleur would have to be told. But not yet, please not just yet.
‘The stage,’ Fleur said, twirling around on one foot. ‘I might just do that. When I’ve shingled my hair.’ She lifted her long, straight, ebony hair at the sides, visually shortening it to a fashionable bob.
Ever since Fleur had seen Louise Brooks in Love ’Em and Leave ’Em, she’d been going on and on about getting her hair cut. And every time she mentioned it Emma said that no, it would make her look too old. What Emma didn’t add was that Fleur’s looks might attract the wrong sort of attention from men, and that she was too young to cope with that. She was too inexperienced.
‘No,’ Emma said. ‘Your hair is beautiful as it is.’
As if of its own volition, Emma’s hand reached up to touch the hair on the top of her head. And it was as though she could feel lips there. Matthew Caunter’s lips, the day he’d danced her around this room when she’d been just a girl still a few months short of her sixteenth birthday.
‘Ma?’ Fleur said, sounding alarmed. ‘You’ve gone very pale. Are you—’
‘I’m fine,’ Emma said. ‘It’s just a shock being in here again.’
‘Again?’
‘I used to work here. Live here.’
Emma reached for Fleur’s arm and pulled her towards the circular carousel seat in the middle of the foyer. The leather – no longer scarlet, but now a faded cherry almost – had seen better days. There were one or two cigarette burns, and it was ripped in places. A vision of Seth sitting on that carousel with a present and flowers for her on her sixteenth birthday swam before Emma’s eyes as though he was still in the room with her. Again she saw the shock and the sadness in his eyes as he’d seen her reach up and kiss Matthew Caunter on the cheek to thank him for a lovely day out in Torquay. A day when Matthew’s wife, Annie, had been with them – except there had been no chance to tell Seth that as he’d stormed out.
‘You never said,’ Fleur muttered.
No. And there are a lot more things, Fleur, I’ve never said. And I have a feeling you are going to hate me when I do tell you. But that won’t be just yet. I need time.
‘Then I’ll tell you. About the time I lived here. Let’s sit down.’ Emma patted the seat and a cloud of dust rose into the room.
‘I’d rather stand,’ Fleur said. She screwed up her nose and pointed to the carousel seat. ‘That’s filthy!’
As briefly as she could – because time was ticking away and the estate agent would be back, wanting her decision soon – Emma gave Fleur a resumé of her time at Nase Head House. She kept to what she had done there – the tutoring in French of Mr Smythe’s motherless children; how she’d made crab tarts and tarte Tatin to be served in the restaurant; how she’d made friends with a girl called Ruby – the girl in the photograph that had been on their mantelpiece back in Vancouver. Emma was going to call on Ruby soon – very soon. She was impatient to see her old friend now, to surprise her with her return to England.
‘Well, Ma,’ Fleur said, when Emma finished her tale, ‘all I can say is you must have been made of strong stuff because it’s like an icebox in here.’
‘Isn’t it just,’ Emma agreed.
‘And it’s seen better days.’
‘Most of this country has,’ Emma told her. ‘France is just across the water there.’ She waved an arm vaguely in the direction of France. ‘And the Germans were getting closer. You heard the estate agent say that Nase Head House was used as a convalescent hospital for American officers.’
‘And a bit of shooting practice.’
No one could have failed to notice the missing bits of masonry outside – like pockmarks on the face. That would be first on her list of jobs to do, Emma thought. Her mind became a swirl of colours for fabrics and wall coverings, furniture and fittings. Nase Head House had, in the estate agent’s words, potential.
‘They could have taken their beds with them when they left.’ Fleur pointed to two old iron beds tipped on their sides in the corner of the foyer. She wrapped her arms across her stomach and shivered theatrically.
And put in some form of central heating that was better than the old boiler that had been down in the cellar in the days when she’d lived there, Emma decided. It was cold in here, very cold.
‘This floor needs a good clean,’ Fleur said.
Emma made a little circle in the dirt and the dust on the tiles with the toe of her shoe.
‘But I don’t know how to dance.’
‘Then I’ll show you.’
And then Emma was in Matthew’s arms again as he taught her how to waltz. She heard again the words he’d sung so well, so softly, so close to her ear. Could words and experiences – emotions – stay in a room for all time?
She put her arms up in a dance hold and moved backwards around the room. Round and round she went. She leaned her head forward the way she’d done when she’d danced with Matthew a second time, two years later, and it was as though he was there with her, kissing her hair. She could smell the soap he’d always used, and the delicate aroma of champagne on his breath.
Would she ever dance in Matthew Caunter’s arms again? Would she?
Three more times Emma waltzed around the carousel – not wanting to let go of her memories – before flopping down onto it, the dust swirling up around her, making her eyes itch, and tickling her throat. But none of that mattered. She had been right to come back to England – this experience alone was enough to tell her that.
‘Ma?’ Fleur said, her voice a tremb
le of fear and disbelief all rolled up together. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘No, Fleur, not a ghost.’
Seth was dead. He would always have a place in her heart, a very special place. But Matthew, where was he? Did he still have the amethyst necklace that had been her mama’s and which she’d given him for safe keeping before she and Seth had left for Canada? She hoped so.
‘Memories then?’ Fleur said, surprising Emma with her insightful remark.
‘Yes, Fleur, memories.’ There were more memories here for Emma than there were in Canada; the happy life she’d lived with her parents and her brother, Johnnie, before their deaths. Her time here with Seth, and dear old Beattie Drew – who’d been like a mother to them both – Ruby. And Matthew. ‘Memories which mean I won’t be renting Nase Head House after all.’
And Emma knew with that one, short sentence that she’d been right to come back to be amongst those memories again.
Two days later Emma stood, a little anxiously if the butterflies fluttering in the pit of her stomach were anything to go by, on the doorstep of Shingle Cottage. She rapped the knocker, and stepped back a little. Ah, at last – footsteps. The butterflies in Emma’s stomach were a frenzy of activity now. The door creaked open.
‘Bleedin’ ’ell, Em, what are you doin’ ’ere?’
The tone of Ruby’s voice and the look of horror in her eyes as she peered through the slimmest of cracks in the barely-open door, told Emma that her friend wished her anywhere but standing on the doorstep of Shingle Cottage.
‘I’ve come to see you,’ Emma said.
What else could she say? It was the truth. She’d been waiting years for just this moment. But now …
Emma and Her Daughter Page 1
