A Good Heart is Hard to Find
Page 1
About the Book
‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man of over forty is in possession of a major defect.’
Cassandra Leigh has woken as if from a bad dream: forty-four, childless and twenty-plus years into an affair with a married man. Max assures her that one day soon they will be able to marry, but Cass is desperate for a baby and running out of time. Maybe Max is not the only man for her?
There’s her friend Jason – though he’s perhaps a little too rugged, and there’s something strange about the way his wife disappeared. Or there’s Dante, the mysterious stranger she meets on a dark night in his haunted manor house …
Cass must throw caution to the wind and claim the life she’s always wanted. Suddenly, it’s a choice between Mr Right, Mr Wrong or Mr Right Now …
Hilarious, warm, quirky and feel-good, Trisha Ashley’s writing is perfect for fans of romantic comedies by Milly Johnson and Jill Mansell.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Prologue: Resurrection
1: Oh, Hell Again
2: Pregnant Pause
3: Twisted Sister
4: Lover, Come Back to Me
5: Mistress of All She Surveys
6: Tall, Dark and Cadaverous
7: Things Go Bump
8: Raising the Spirits
9: Somersaulting Backwards
10: Spawn
11: Gone, but Not Forgotten
12: Rover’s Return
13: Dead Again
14: Mad Max
15: Rescue Me
16: The Definitive Delilah
17: A Slave to Love
18: Don’t You Love Me, Baby?
19: A Plague on It
20: Single Cell
21: The Ghost of Her Former Self
22: Family Party
23: The Pendulum and the Pit
24: Buried Treasures
Epilogue: Famous Last Words
Read More
About the Author
Also by Trisha Ashley
Copyright
This one is for Laura Preston, with love.
Foreword
Originally published by Piatkus in 2003 under the title Singled Out, this is the fourth of my romantic comedies. It’s been long out of print and difficult to get hold of, so I’m delighted that Transworld have released this new edition.
It features Cass, whose tangled love life is about to receive a Gothic twist worthy of the horror novels she writes for a living …
I haven’t rewritten it, merely tweaked and polished a little here and there, so since it was created on the cusp of the new century it’s obviously very much of its time, especially with regard to mobile phones and computers. It’s amazing how things have changed in such a short space of time, but back then they were a luxury, rather than the norm.
Happy reading, everyone!
Trisha Ashley
Prologue
Resurrection
If Mary Shelley hadn’t been able to let her own dark demons out, we wouldn’t today have her classic novel Frankenstein. Now Cass Leigh’s demons are on the loose in her debut novel, Twisted Sister, and darker than most … Genuinely original, sincerely terrifying …
Charlie Rhymer: Skint Old Northern Woman Magazine
It was in spring, when living things were pushing green fingers up through the earth like a resurrection (and dead things were doing much the same in Chapter Sixteen of Lover, Come Back to Me), that three catastrophic things happened in quick succession: Max’s wife died, my sister, Jane, came to stay, and the vicar sold me as a slave.
You don’t think any of these night-moth harbingers of chaos sound that bad?
Maybe you’re right, and perhaps it really shouldn’t have surprised me that Max’s wife, Rosemary, came back to haunt the ghoul who’d waited to step into her shoes for over twenty years.
Then there was my sweet twin sister, the Three Horsewomen of the Apocalypse in one person. While dear Jane’s presence was always as welcome to me as a wart, she didn’t usually stay. This time she brought luggage.
Even the vicar’s annual charity slave auction took a turn for the worse, when Dante Chase, who was far scarier than anything I’ve ever written into a novel, paid so much for my services I feared (or should that be hoped?) that he expected somewhat more than a fortune-reading and a little light dusting.
But I suppose things really first started to unravel long, long before that, when Max left for a sabbatical year at a Californian university, taking Rosemary with him …
1
Oh, Hell Again
Twisted Sister, Cass Leigh’s debut novel, takes elements of both traditional Gothic horror and the fairy tale, and weaves them into something altogether darker and nastier. While the horror genre is not generally noted for restraint, Cass Leigh drives her narrative along with the brakes of good taste permanently in the ‘off’ position.
Fiction Today
By December, Max’s luxurious trappings littering my cottage had ceased to be poignant and tear-provoking mementoes of our love and more a reminder that I’d been discarded for the duration, too: an abandoned Abandoned Woman.
He’d left traces of his presence everywhere like he’d been marking out territory, yet when it came to packing his possessions up they made a pathetically small heap of boxes. (Or rather, Fortnum and Mason hampers, Max having profligate tastes in food and wine.)
When I came down from stashing them away in the attic the answering machine was frantically winking at me. Three messages. Three messages. Three messages.
‘Play it cool,’ I advised it, ‘you know you’re the best offer I’ve had all year.’
And no, loneliness had not reduced me to the depths of talking to inanimate objects because I’d always done it, particularly with my worn (but still handsome) black leather Italian handbag, Guido.
When I pressed Play Messages, Pa’s voice boomed with unchristian fervour: ‘You’ll burn in hell, girl!’ Then he added on a rising note: ‘Spawn of Satan! Seed of Beelzebub!’
‘And the Season’s Greetings to you, too,’ I said, deleting him right at the start of what was clearly destined to be one of his longer, brandy-sodden rants.
Pa had phoned me at least once a month with the same message since I became Max’s mistress, so Hell hath rather lost its sting over the years.
As you may have guessed, Pa (who converted to the Charismatic Church of God as a young man on a trip to the USA) has had quite a strong influence on my life, some of it good, some bad. Or maybe it was all bad, and I’ve turned it into good?
I mean, think about the way he frequently locked me in the cupboard under the stairs in order to force the devil out of me! (And had he never tried to take it out of me, I might never have known it was in there in the first place, although his habit of addressing me as ‘Seed of Satan’ and suchlike from my infancy onwards, should have given me a pointer.)
You know, I never realized he was crackers until I was sent away to boarding school and could compare him with other people’s fathers. Mind you, I don’t think he was quite so unhinged before the demon drink took hold of him, but even so, my childhood experiences seemed to be pretty unique among my peers.
Still, it was great training for a horror writer, because I now know I’m invulnerable to ghosts, spectres, ghouls or any other supernatural manifestation. I often felt their inimical presence in the darkness of the cupboard, and if any of them had been capable of physically harming me they would surely have done so then when I was at their mercy.
… she heard others breathing a different rhythm in th
e darkness, and hearts pounded to a different beat from her own until sometimes the cupboard walls seemed to wildly pulsate …
But sometimes now I wonder if such apparitions only exist because I let them escape from some Pandora’s box in my brain, so that they owe their existence to me, their creator, La Frankensteina?
Who knows? The denizens of my novels certainly owe their existence to me, though on paper my monstrous creations have a more tangible presence in order to better curdle the blood and chill the spines of my readers, who do not believe in ghosts and their like but are afraid of them anyway.
Of course with me it is quite the reverse: I believe but I am not afraid – or not afraid of physical harm, anyway, though I do admit to an unnatural fear of birds and have a terrifying recurrent nightmare about cupboards.
Still, I believe I am a walking example that good can come from bad, though if you read some of my book reviews or listened to Pa, you might think that bad was coming from bad.
Emerging from my reverie, I listened to the second message, which was from my sister, Jane, and just as predictable in content as Pa’s. After briefly gloating over her immaculately conceived verse, life, and marriage to her adoring spouse, Gerald, she proceeded to plant as many wasp-like stings as she could into my quivering flesh.
Max’s leaving me for a year’s sabbatical at a Californian university, taking his wife, Rosemary, with him, had given her fresh ammunition. She could sense vulnerability, and his absence had left me feeling strangely exposed, especially since his communications had slowly dwindled to sporadic and unsatisfactory phone calls.
Jane was erroneously considered by many, including Ma and Pa, to be the nearest thing to an angel in human form, so she needed to say these things to me, because her pedestal would probably corrode and crumble under her if she couldn’t drain the poison from her fangs occasionally.
I deleted her pretty swiftly, then listened to the third and last recording.
‘Hi, Cass, it’s Orla. Guess what, I’ve got a Perfect Partner tonight! I’m meeting him at a restaurant, but if he’s as useless as the last one I’m climbing out of the back window and coming home.
‘Oh well, hope springs eternal in the female breast.
‘By-ee!’
I wiped that, too, hoping against hope that Mr Perfect Partner would at least be approaching human this time, for poor Orla was getting desperate.
Could this be me all too soon? Old banger, high mileage, one careful owner from new, reliable and in good running order?
It was an unsettling thought: but then, when had I ever had any other kind?
I dialled the familiar vicarage number and impatiently waited, imagining Charles waking up from a light snooze, working out what the ringing noise was, and then plodding across to answer it.
‘Charles, there wouldn’t be a lot of virtue in giving Max up if he’d already discarded me first, would there? I mean, I’d still be damned even if I did the sackcloth and ashes for ever thing that Pa’s so keen on?’ I demanded without preamble.
‘Yes, Cass my dear, but God is love, don’t forget,’ he said, then yawned. ‘Good heavens, is that the time? I must have dozed off in my chair.’
‘Pa’s God isn’t love, it’s punishment and vengeance and retribution and stuff.’
‘Love takes strange forms, and possibly your poor father is not always in his right mind. But I sincerely believe his phone calls to you are a manifestation of his paternal love.’
‘You do? What about the locking me in the cupboard to drive the devil out episodes when I was a child, though? Was that a manifestation of his love?’
‘In his own misguided way, I believe it was. He perceived your physical resemblance to an ancestor he thought evil, and took the Bible’s message that sin was handed down the generations too literally. Didn’t you say that he punished your brothers and sister also?’
‘Not Jane – never Jane. She couldn’t do any wrong,’ I said bitterly. ‘But the boys were physically punished if they misbehaved.’
‘Well, dear Cass, he was misguided, and the law would intervene on your behalf should such a thing happen these days, for which we must be thankful.’
‘But, Charles, even my mother doesn’t like me!’
‘I have told you of the many examples I have come across of families where one child is less regarded than the rest, for no discernible reason: it is not your fault.’
‘But am I innately bad?’
‘Of course not: you have many good qualities. But you have sinned, as you yourself realize, in your relationship with a married man. Yet God will understand how needy of love you were, and at any time you can repent and start afresh, the one lamb that was lost and is found again.’
You know, I might not always follow what Charles is on about (or want to do what he suggested), but I always felt better after talking to him.
‘You should come into the church sometimes,’ he suggested.
‘I couldn’t come to a service – I haven’t been in a church since I left home.’
‘I didn’t mean a service, although you are always welcome. I meant just come in, in order to meditate in the house of God. The door is always open.’
‘Not at night, though, surely?’
‘Yes, even at night. Of course I lock the vestry, and there’s a CCTV camera in the gallery, but I would only look at the film if something was taken, which praise the Lord hasn’t happened yet,’ he said practically.
‘Well I might try that, Charles, if you really think a bolt of lightning won’t crisp me on the threshold, even if I am still a married man’s mistress.’
‘I am sure it won’t. Oh dear!’ he added, sounding alarmed.
‘What?’
‘Mrs Grace left a shepherd’s pie in the oven for my supper, and I’m afraid I fell asleep and forgot about it! It smells a little singed.’
‘Like me, really,’ I said, but he’d gone.
After this somehow soothing conversation, instead of going down to the village pub for dinner as I generally did, I heated up my second pizza of the day (garlic chicken), poured a glass of red wine, and settled down to consider the whole Max’s Mistress situation, which was not something I’d bothered to do for a considerable number of years.
But in his absence I was slowly starting to wake from Max’s thrall (and he had a lot of thrall) like a somewhat aged Sleeping Beauty, and question just where my life was heading. If anywhere.
Who hung the ‘Gone to Lunch, Back in Two Decades’ sign out?
Look how we’d all jogged comfortably along for so many years, Max and his two women in their separate, non-interlocking worlds, once long habit had dulled my initial feelings of guilt; a guilt that now seemed to be slowly seeping back in.
Max once assured me that Rosemary tacitly accepted our affair, since she was not interested much in the sexual side of marriage even before her dreadful accident, and at least I was sharing him – I mean, I hadn’t taken him entirely away from her, as I might have done.
But now that golf (once merely his face-saving excuse for frequent weekends away) had become more of a passion than I was, I was wondering if perhaps he could get by quite nicely with that and Rosemary.
Was I extraneous? Suddenly surplus to requirements?
Vague daydreams of the ‘poor Rosemary hasn’t got long to go, and then we can marry and have a family’ kind had sustained me over the years, but suddenly here we were, a good twenty years down the line, and every cheery sundial was saying: The Time Is Later Than You Think.
But strangely enough, all this sudden angst seemed to be doing wonders for my writing.
Was this another example of good coming out of bad?
Whenever Orla had a big problem she wrote down the reasons for and against doing whatever it was she was worrying about, so I settled down to compile a list of the pros and cons of being Max’s mistress:
For:
1) Lots of time to write in.
2) Independence.
3) Don’t
have to wash his dirty underwear.
4) Do not have to look wonderful all the time.
5) Max is tall, handsome, clever, charismatic, and distinguished. (And sexy.)
6) My brothers are all still in contact with me.
7) Have my friends for company when he isn’t there.
Against:
1) Guilt, because of his invalid wife, Rosemary.
2) Loneliness.
3) Max not interested in horror writing.
4) He’s never there in an emergency.
5) When he is there, he expects me to look great and be in the mood for lurve, like I’ve got an On and Off switch.
6) I now play second fiddle to his new love, golf.
7) Max resents my sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night to write and visit graveyards.
8) Max adamant about not having children until we can marry, which looks like being never.
9) Having committed to the relationship with Max, have to remain faithful due to inbuilt Puritan streak. (But haven’t been terribly tempted by anyone else for years, anyway.)
10) Max spooked by my mind-reading skills, even though I’ve promised never to do it to him … again. (And all I read was exasperated affection, lust and guilt, which figured.)
11) Ma hasn’t spoken to me since, and Pa only rings me up to curse me.
12) My sister, Jane, is always phoning me up or dropping in uninvited.
13) Max jealous of my longstanding strong friendships with Orla Murphy and Jason Shaw (and his wife, Tanya, until she took off a couple of years ago.)
Conclusion:
Clearly, the game is not worth the candle!
But then, no one else had tempted me seriously in all these years, so even were I to ditch Max I would still have most of the disadvantages. Besides, whenever I got fed up with things as they were I only had to see him again and I was putty in his hands.
This charisma, Svengali touch, or whatever you want to call it, was not something that worked well via occasional transatlantic phone calls.
In the grip of a depression like a dank fog I resorted to desperate measures.