Hello, Again

by Isabelle Broom

  Isabelle Broom was born in Cambridge nine days before the

  1980s began and studied Media Arts in London before a

  12-year stint at Heat magazine. Always happiest when she is off

  on an adventure, Isabelle now travels all over the world seeking

  out settings for her escapist novels, as well as making the annual

  pilgrimage to her second home – the Greek island of Zakynthos.

  Currently based in Suffolk, where she shares a cottage with her

  two dogs and approximately 467 spiders, Isabelle fits her writing

  around a busy freelance career and tries her best not to be crushed

  to oblivion under her ever-growing pile of to-be-read books.

  Hello, again

  Isabelle Broom

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in Enter YEAR by Choose IMPRINT

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Isabelle Broom 2020

  The right of Isabelle Broom to be identified as the Author of the

  Work has been asserted by her in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Cover image: shutterstock.com

  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 without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

  in which it is published and without a similar condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781529325041

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Tamsin, whose wish for a hot German

  is where this whole thing began . . .

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Pepper Taylor visited her mother at the same time every Tuesday.

  It was part of her routine, something she had done for a long time, without question.

  Today, however, everything felt different. Because this particular Tuesday should have been her sister’s thirtieth birthday.

  Bethan had been dead for almost twenty-three years now, and while the anniversary of her accident was always a difficult day, in some ways Pepper found birthdays the hardest of all.

  She was not the only one.

  ‘Hello, Mum.’

  Her mother always opened the door with the chain still fastened, and now she squinted at Pepper through the gap, apparently surprised to see her.

  ‘Oh,’ she said wearily. ‘Is it that time already?’

  ‘I brought cheese straws.’ Pepper held up a Tupperware box. ‘Baked them this morning.’

  There was a pause as the door was closed and the chain removed. Pepper heard the soft patting sound of her mother’s slippers against the plastic hallway runner and wondered, not for the first time, why she didn’t just get rid of it. Once upon a time, it had served as a barrier between the muddy soles of her children’s shoes and the carpet, but now all it did was serve as a reminder that one of those children was gone, while the other was old enough to wipe their feet on the mat outside. Pepper had asked the question a few years previously, only to have her words waved vaguely away.

  ‘You know I prefer things spick and span,’ her mother had said airily, running an eye over the paint-stained shirt and leggings that Pepper had been wearing at the time.

  While Pepper was by no means fastidious when it came to her home or her appearance, she was very particular about her work, and so she had let the matter slide. She had learnt over the years that it was easier to accept her mother’s foibles than attempt to change them, and now, to keep her happy, Pepper abandoned her tatty pumps by the door and ventured barefoot towards the kitchen.

  She knew her mother must know what day it was, and how significant a year, but neither of them raised the subject of Bethan. Pepper watched on in silence as her mother made tea, humming faintly as she opened first the fridge, then the cutlery drawer. Her hair, once ash blonde like Pepper’s, was fine and silvery now, and she kept it cut short and neat around her face. Everything about her mother was unobtrusive; she dressed in mostly creams, whites and the palest blues, her nails clean, her make-up immaculate yet understated. Pepper, who favoured bold prints and colourful patterns, and never left the house without a slick of bright-red lipstick, often felt almost garish by comparison.

  ‘Shall we sit in the conservatory?’ her mother asked, and Pepper nodded. The small, glass-walled room was a relatively new addition to the house, and as such it always felt less oppressive somehow. There were no memories lingering in there, no traps liable to snap.

  Pepper waited for her mother to sit first, then settled herself into the squashy wicker-framed chair opposite and brought her knees up under her chin. The weather had been unable to make up its mind all day, and the sky beyond the windows was the same sullen grey as a pigeon’s wing. It felt to Pepper as if spring was taking an awfully long time to arrive, and she said as much to her mother, who muttered something back about her daffodils having bloomed later than expected.

  ‘How’s work?’ they asked in unison, and Pepper braved a tentative smile.

  ‘You go first,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ her mother said with a sigh. ‘Busy. Mr Patel retired last week, so we organised a small send-off. Just some party food and fruit punch, nothing too extravagant.’

  ‘Party food, eh?’ Pepper sipped her tea. ‘I thought dentists frowned upon anything sugary.’

  The corners of her mother’s mouth did not so much as flicker.

  ‘Business is good,’ Pepper went on, when her mother said nothing further. ‘I’m getting regular bookings in London now, plus a slew of children’s parties. Oh, and did I tell you I’d branched out into candle-making?’

  The clock in the kitchen chimed the hour.

  ‘Well,’ P
epper continued, ‘people kept asking about it, so I thought I’d best supply their demand. I’m hosting the first session at my studio in a fortnight, if you fancied joining in?’

  Nothing. Her mother was staring hard at a point on the wooden floor, not listening.

  ‘Or instead, we could dye our hair purple, put tutus on over our normal clothes and dance along Aldeburgh high street reciting Wee Willie Winkie? What do you think?’

  ‘I see.’ Her mother did not look up. ‘Lovely. Well done you.’

  Pepper fought hard not to sigh. She knew her mother didn’t mean to ignore her; it was more a symptom of her perpetual misery. She could not work up enough energy to engage, and it had been years now since she had pretended to try. To distract herself, Pepper dived into the cheese straws, cupping her spare hand under her chin so as not to drop flaky pastry crumbs.

  ‘Have you spoken to Dad lately?’ she asked between mouthfuls. This, at last, caught her mother’s attention and she looked up sharply.

  ‘Martin? No. Why? Should I have?’

  Pepper had spoken to her father that morning. He had remembered the day, of course, had called to check that she was OK, to chat about Bethan for a time, share some stories.

  ‘I just thought that he––’ Pepper stopped abruptly when she saw the heat beginning to rise in her mother’s cheeks.

  ‘Never mind. Forget I mentioned him. Are you done with that tea? I can make us another cup, if you like. Or a pot? Why don’t we have a pot?’

  Anything to escape the suffocating tension that had descended.

  Pepper hurried back into the house, her heart battering against her chest, only letting go of the breath she had been holding in when the kettle began to boil, soothing her with its familiar sound. She was thirty-six years old, but still scared of her mother, too timid to pull at the threads of the past or stray into a conversation that she knew would cause upset. She had thought that today of all days the two of them might have found a way to talk about her sister, but it was clear now that the topic of Bethan was not only off the table but swept neatly under the rug beneath it.

  When she returned to the conservatory a few minutes later, she found her mother distractedly picking dead leaves off a potted fern, the remains of one of Pepper’s homemade cheese straws on a plate beside her.

  ‘Are you busy on Saturday?’ Pepper asked, putting down the teapot.

  Her mother glanced up, arched a questioning brow.

  ‘There’s a big fête happening over at The Maltings – that care home on the outskirts of town, where I go and volunteer sometimes.’

  ‘I thought you volunteered at the RSPCA shop?’ her mother countered.

  ‘I do,’ Pepper said. ‘But that’s only every other Monday. And The Maltings is far more fun – I do art and crafting sessions with some of the residents, help out with lunch, that sort of thing. Some of them are only young, and it’s––’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t do Saturday.’ Her mother went back to pruning. ‘Perhaps another time.’

  ‘Please come.’ Pepper curled her bare toes. ‘I’m hosting a bric-a-brac stall and you know how terrible I am at maths. I’ll end up giving people the wrong change.’

  For a moment, she thought her bait had actually worked. Her mother had stood, a look of agency on her face, and promptly wandered off in the direction of the hallway. Pepper heard the creak of the banister, then another of the floorboards upstairs. It was always so quiet in this house, so different from Pepper’s home, where the radio was barely off and the television chatted late into the night. She was overcome suddenly by an urge to scream and had to stuff her fist into her mouth to stop herself, removing it just as her mother came back into the room.

  ‘Here,’ she said, handing Pepper a large cardboard box. ‘This was all in the attic. I only just got around to having the ladder fixed. You know it’s been broken since your father–– Well, it’s probably no good to anyone, but perhaps you could take a look through, sell anything you don’t want at the fête?’

  ‘Thanks.’ Pepper shook the box gently and heard a clunk. When she went to prise open the lid, however, her mother raised a hand.

  ‘No. Open it later,’ she said quickly, gesturing around. ‘The dust will go everywhere, and I only just polished in here.’

  ‘OK.’ Pepper frowned. ‘But what’s in there? Surely you can tell me that?’

  She studied her mother’s expression, watched as her pale eyes flickered with discomfort.

  ‘Some clothes,’ she said snippily, sitting down and turning her attention back to her plant. ‘Toys, books – that sort of thing.’

  ‘Oh.’ Intrigue inflated like a bubble inside Pepper’s chest. ‘My old stuff?’

  ‘Some,’ her mother replied, through what sounded suspiciously like clenched teeth.

  Pepper moved the box from side to side, thinking.

  ‘Mum?’ she began, her voice small. ‘Is this? Are they? Beth––’

  ‘Please, Philippa.’ Her mother shot her a warning look.

  ‘Just take the box and go.’

  Chapter 2

  Taking the beach route was neither the quickest nor easiest way for Pepper to get home, but she turned off the high street regardless, blinking as the blustery wind picked up strands of her hair and flattened them across her cheeks. Agitated gulls were picking their way over the pebbles, as restless as the sea that was swirling and frothing below them, and in the far distance, she could just make out the shape of a man walking his dog.

  Pepper put down the cardboard box and contemplated the murky water. It was not quite brown, not quite blue, not quite grey – as if all the painters of the world had used it to rinse off their brushes. She had always seen the world in this way, always strived to find the familiar in the new, or the magic in the mundane. There had been occasions in Pepper’s past where she saw her artistic nature as a curse, but not even that had stopped her from pursuing a career where she was able to indulge in all things creative. Although it was not the dream she had set out to achieve, Pepper was still proud of her little teaching business, Arts For All, and for the most part, she found it both satisfying and rewarding.

  She enjoyed meeting people, inviting them into the studio at the end of her garden to learn a new skill, make a new friend or two, then go home with something beautiful they had created, something they could display or give away as a gift. Solitude was the enemy of creativity, and Pepper did anything she could to avoid it, to shield herself from loneliness.

  Aldeburgh was one of Suffolk’s more beautiful towns, but it was also one that people left behind. Pepper had watched each of her school friends move away in turn, be it for a job or a relationship, and as time had ticked by, the bonds between them had started to fray. For Pepper, the whispers of the past had always been more insistent than the beckoning hand of the future, and so she stayed where she was, bound by a mixture of duty and fear.

  The next gust of wind felt as if it had passed right through her, and she shivered, cursing the lacklustre April weather as she retrieved the box from the ground. Pepper didn’t stop again until she reached the wooden bench in the sheltered courtyard not far from the fishmongers’ huts. It was too early in the season for any of the vendors to bother opening, but there was still enough ripeness in the air to wrinkle her nose. The fresh catch of the day carried a scent that settled into cracks, submerged underneath layers of damp wood and burrowed into plaster and stone – yet she found it oddly comforting. It was the smell of home, of growing up, of long summer days chasing Bethan across the stones, of chips wrapped in newspaper that stained your fingers, of a time when their family was still together, still intact, not broken by tragedy, the pieces scattered and muddled, the picture of happiness destroyed.

  It felt right to be here today, even if the memories were making Pepper feel increasingly melancholy. In a bid to distract her mind, she decided to have a look through the box now, rather than waiting until she was home, and slid a hand under the cardboard flap to open it. Insi
de, she found a plastic Care Bear with a single tuft of pink hair, a metal Slinky twisted into a thousand knots, and a crude drawing of four people with arms dangling out from where their ears should be, oversized feet and huge, wide-apart eyes. There was an ancient bottle of bubbles, its lid stuck fast, a light-up yo-yo that needed new batteries, a deformed-looking teddy that had been washed one time too many, a battered piggybank, a whistle on a string and a My Little Pony purse. It was all rubbish, yet precious – each item a memory of a made-up game, a shared giggle, an imagination permitted to flourish without constraint. Some of the things had been Pepper’s, but many had been Bethan’s – the sketch, the bubbles, the bear.

  As she took out each object in turn, Pepper was reminded of how much her younger sibling had begged to play with her toys, had wanted to be grown up enough to have her own Barbie doll, or her own set of smart pastels instead of crayons, and wished she had given in.

  Right at the bottom, tucked underneath a Get Along Gang Montgomery Moose doll and a toy barn that mooed when you opened the doors, Pepper discovered her and Bethan’s Book of the World and exclaimed in delight.

  This had been their favourite, the one they had pored over together in their tent of many sofa cushions. Pepper felt her eyes fill with tears as she began flicking through, remembering how her sister had asked her to read it to her again and again, to tell her the story of Tutankhamun and the Egyptian Pyramids, of Mount Everest and the South Pole. They had folded down the corners of all the pages bearing countries they wanted to visit, then turned to the world map at the back and charted their course with a finger, soaring across from England to France to Spain to Greece to Africa to China to New Zealand. She couldn’t believe she had forgotten about this book, about their plans, about that intrepid need the two of them had shared for adventure.

  All this time, all these years later, and Pepper had not gone on a single trip.

  Shame coloured her cheeks, the compulsion to cry suddenly so strong that she felt compelled to stand up again and move, get herself back to her cottage before her emotions had the chance to overtake her. When she emerged from the courtyard, however, Pepper saw someone she recognised on the beach. The older woman was set up in front of an easel that was wobbling precariously on spindly legs, her body mostly concealed beneath an acid-green coat that would make even a colour-blind person baulk.