It had always been her light.
‘This is it, Mum. This is what I wanted to show you.’
Trinity stared up at the small building in front of them, taking in the oval stained-glass windows, ornate crosses and miniature turrets.
‘It looks like a church,’ she said, and Pepper smiled.
‘It is. Well, it’s a chapel – the Little Chapel, to be exact.’
Her mother still looked mystified.
‘I have never heard of it,’ she said.
‘Neither had I, until I started looking up Guernsey earlier this week,’ she confessed. ‘But isn’t it amazing?’
‘It’s certainly . . .’ Samuel paused, raising a hand to shield his eyes from the sun. ‘Something.’
‘The whole thing is decorated in shells, glass, pebbles and broken china,’ Pepper told them, unable to keep the excitement from her voice. ‘It’s essentially a giant mosaic.’
As they moved forwards to take a closer look, Pepper realised that it wasn’t simply the chapel that had been adorned with broken fragments, but the walls, archways and steps around it, too. She was aware of the familiar tickle of inspiration as she took in all the colours, shapes and patterns, a new delight revealing itself with every step she took. There were diamond-shaped panels of white and green, stars of yellow shards and crowns of amber, sapphire and terracotta. There were daisies and willow trees, roses and birds, geometric patterns and painted faces split in two. It was chaos, but there was harmony, just as Pepper had known there would be.
‘What do you think?’ she asked Samuel, as the two of them emerged from the far exit of the chapel and made their way back around to admire it from the front.
‘I think it looks like a place that elves would live in,’ he replied. ‘But I like it.’
‘Park Güell in Barcelona is a lot like this,’ Pepper told him. ‘But on a much larger scale.’
Her mother had been examining the little grotto-cum-garden to the left of the chapel, but now she joined them, a real smile on her face for the first time that day. The walk had clearly done her some good. The hangover she’d had when Pepper knocked for her that morning seemed to have gone, and her quiet poise was well on the way to returning.
‘You know,’ Pepper said. ‘I have always loved mosaics, because I saw them as a sort of jigsaw puzzle – only one where I got to decide what picture to make. Putting everything back together, as I saw it, made me happy. I wanted things to be as perfect as possible – and anything I found lacking, I simply tossed away.’
Samuel was smiling at her as well now, the sun behind him making the tips of his ears glow.
‘But all that time, and actually until very recently, I was missing the whole point,’ she went on. ‘It wasn’t until Josephine said something to me a few weeks ago that I realised I’d been looking at things all wrong.’
‘What do you mean?’ her mother asked, tucking her hair behind her ears as a light breeze scurried past them.
‘Well, what do you see when you look at this chapel?’ Pepper asked.
Trinity shook her head in confusion.
‘Go on,’ Pepper urged. ‘Just look at it right now and tell me what you see.’
‘I see lots of colours,’ she said. ‘And patterns.’
‘And?’ encouraged Pepper. ‘Do you like it?’
‘Yes. I mean, it’s certainly very striking – very beautiful.’
Samuel coughed. ‘It’s a masterpiece if you ask me – must have taken ages.’
Pepper laughingly agreed.
‘What do you think makes it so beautiful, Mum?’ Pepper pressed, watching her closely.
‘All the pieces,’ she said. ‘All the broken pieces.’
‘Yes!’ Pepper exclaimed. ‘When we look at this chapel, or at any mosaic we ever see, we look at the pieces, not at the cracks around them.’
‘I would argue that we do,’ Samuel put in. ‘I guess, we just don’t see them – we don’t take them in.’
‘Exactly!’ Pepper took a few steps forwards and placed her hand on the chapel wall.
‘The thing is,’ she said, her eyes now solely on her mother, ‘I think you and I have been guilty of looking at the wrong thing for years.’
Her mother frowned, still not quite understanding.
‘The cracks,’ Pepper went on, tracing a finger along one as she spoke. ‘We have focused so intently on the fault lines of our lives that we forgot to appreciate all the beauty – the good things we still had left after Bethan died.’
‘I couldn’t see any of them,’ her mum said then, her voice choked with pain. ‘Everything was tarnished by what happened, by the accident.’
Pepper froze. It was the first time she had ever heard her mother refer to it as such.
‘First Bethan died, then your father left. I had you, but it felt as if I didn’t. I was so scared of the pain that I pushed you as far away from me as I could. I was scared to even love you – my own daughter.’
She crumpled over then, her hands finding her knees, and Samuel hurried towards her, his arms open.
‘It’s OK,’ he said, as she fell into them and began weeping against his chest. ‘I’ve got you. Let it all out. That’s right.’
His eyes found Pepper’s and she stepped forwards, letting him envelop her in the same embrace. For a moment her mother stiffened, and then she threw her own arms around her daughter, pulling Pepper tightly against her and saying over and over again that she was sorry, and that she loved her. Samuel didn’t say a word, he stood stock still and strong as they leant against him, both overwrought but for once not despairing, just holding tight and close and feeling like they never wanted to let go. Pepper knew that if they tried, they could make something beautiful from all the broken pieces. It might not be perfect, but it would be theirs.
Samuel lowered his arms, and Pepper stepped back and looked past him for a moment, to where the Little Chapel sang with a thousand colours, each lit up by a brilliant sun. The pieces of a rainbow splintered not into a pot of gold, but into a promise: of a future untethered by hope.
And by love.
Chapter 49
This time when Pepper walked through the arrivals lounge of Hamburg Airport, there was no Finn waiting to lift her up in his arms.
It felt like only days ago that she had last been here, at the start of something so fresh and so thrilling, to see a man she had fallen for on the beat of that first hello. Her heart then had been fit to burst with possibility, but now it felt leaden. Nothing that had happened was predictable – or even fathomable. Pepper had jumped into the slipstream and clung on for the ride, and now here she was, arrived at what could well be her final destination.
She had messaged Finn to tell him what time she landed, but gently refused his offer to come and collect her himself and wondered now if he would be fed up with her as a result. That was silly, though – the Finn she knew was not capable of such pettiness. His enormous heart and unflinching determination to remain upbeat were two of the reasons she loved him so much.
After checking into her Airbnb apartment and changing from her jeans into a plum-coloured crushed velvet dress, Pepper began refamiliarising herself with Finn’s enigmatic neighbourhood. She avoided the neon lights and stumbling drunks along the Reeperbahn and made sure not to stroll past Freunde either. With only a few hours to go until the launch party began, Finn was bound to be there, and Pepper did not want to catch him unawares. She was also gut-churningly nervous, her stomach tied in more knots than she’d seen on ropes along the marina in Guernsey.
The valiant sun that had become such a loyal companion throughout her stay in the Channel Islands hadn’t made it as far as Hamburg, but it was no real loss. Pepper thought the charcoal-smeared sky made the city’s Gothic architecture seem all the grander, providing the perfect backdrop to all the tall red-brick buildings and moody dark trees.
As she ventured further, passing the metal palm trees in Park Fiction and the mirrored waves atop the roof of the Elbphilha
rmonie, Pepper was reminded yet again of her lost tiles, and how much she had been looking forward to showing them to Finn. It would have been nice to give him a token that proved how much her first visit to this city had meant to her, and how much the time she spent with him meant, too.
Taking out her phone to check the time, Pepper found a message waiting.
‘Good luck tonight, darling. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do (or would!).’
Josephine had signed off with a flurry of kisses and a winking face made from a semi-colon, dash and closed bracket, which for some reason made Pepper want to weep. She wished her wonderful mischievous friend were here with her, but despite receiving an invite directly from Finn, Josephine had chosen not to make the trip.
‘Three’s a crowd,’ she had said, adamant even when Pepper had begged her to reconsider. ‘You will want some time alone with him – trust me, darling.’
Pepper had no idea how she would feel when she saw Finn, but it was about time she found out.
She had only just rounded the corner of the street when she felt an arm slide around her shoulders from behind. Startled, she yelped, leaping about a foot in the air as she did so.
‘Sorry, love!’
Otto was addressing her in a very strange cockney accent.
‘That’s all right, guv,’ she threw back, and his mouth cracked open in a smile.
‘How are you, Cool Peppers?’
‘Oh, you know,’ she said, patting his back as he pulled her into an extremely tight hug. Her neck was so constricted against his bicep that she could barely get the words out.
‘Ah, scheisse,’ he cried, swinging backwards like an orangutan. ‘The baby, yeah? Can you believe it, man? Those fuckers.’
‘Literally,’ Pepper drawled, and Otto slapped both his hands against his knees in amusement.
‘You will be a very good stepmother,’ he said cheerfully, and Pepper dropped her eyes. She could smell alcohol on Otto’s breath, and see a faint trail of capillaries across his nose and cheeks.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked, consumed suddenly by the idea that he might not be. Of course, Finn and Clara having a baby together would affect him, too – they were his best friends.
Otto made a show of shrugging.
‘Shit happens,’ he said, although with perhaps less gusto than he had intended. Pepper did not know him well enough to delve any deeper, so instead she told him the one thing that she knew would be true, whatever happened.
‘The baby will be amazing – and you will love it. We all will.’
‘Ja.’ He nodded. ‘Ja.’
‘Come on, then,’ she chivvied, linking an arm through his. ‘You can escort me to the party.’
Both the restaurant and the bar sides of Freunde had been done up for Finn’s launch, with plinths replacing tables so that works of art and sculptures could be displayed. Waiting staff circulated with trays of wine and champagne, others with iPads and tablets, and there was a vast TV screen arranged at the far end of the room, a digital clock underneath it counting down. The website was scheduled to go live at exactly midnight, and it was then, Otto explained, that Finn would reveal the identity of his mystery artist – the person who had brought his concept to life. The room hummed with anticipation, and Pepper soaked it all in as Otto dragged her around to meet various groups of people, introducing her every time as ‘Cool Pepper’, punctuated by a bellow of mirth.
She had been feeling pretty good about her clinging plum dress until she saw Clara. Despite being in the early stages of pregnancy, which Pepper understood to be sickly, bloated and uncomfortable, she was wearing impossibly tight cigarette pants and a very expensive-looking periwinkle silk shirt. With her endless legs and her thick chestnut hair pulled back into a high ponytail, she looked like a racehorse being paraded around a winner’s enclosure. Everyone at the party seemed to gravitate towards her, and there was an awful lot of air-kissing going on. When Clara spotted Pepper, however, she appeared to falter.
To put her at ease, and because Pepper never had been able to bear any sort of uncomfortable atmosphere, she lifted a hand and waved, smiling across with as much warmth as she could muster.
Visibly relieved, Clara mouthed ‘danke’, lifted her champagne flute of orange juice in Pepper’s direction, and the two women offered each other a silent toast. Pepper took a sip of her drink and found that her only thought was of the baby, and how lucky he or she was to have parents as glamorous and capable as Clara and Finn.
There was no sign of the man himself, although Pepper was surprised to discover the sketch she had done of him in Lisbon hanging on one of the walls. Finn must have moved it here from his flat.
Bending over to peer at the label underneath, she saw a circular red sticker next to some German words that she could not decipher.
‘It says, “not for sale”.’
Pepper wheeled around, her heart a tight fist.
It was Finn.
Chapter 50
For a moment, neither of them said anything.
They simply stood and stared at each other, a smile playing around Finn’s lips but an intensity in his eyes. Pepper had forgotten how it felt to be held within his gaze, to feel as though she was stuck fast to a web of mutual desire.
‘Hey, you,’ she managed at last. ‘It’s really good to see you.’
Finn beamed at her.
‘Ja, very good,’ he agreed. ‘Thank you for coming, I know it is a very long way, a very big deal. But can you believe it? I did it.’
‘You most certainly did.’ Pepper looked around in admiration. ‘It’s incredible,’ she told him. ‘You are incredible.’
Finn nodded in agreement, and Pepper had to fight an absurd desire to laugh. He looked as good as she had ever seen him look this evening, in a sharp navy suit and emerald-green tie embroidered with – Pepper squinted – pelicans.
‘Love the tie!’ she said. ‘Very apt.’
‘It was you who gave me the idea. I am sad not to see the pelicans on you tonight, although this dress is very nice,’ he said, raising a hand as if to touch her, then lowering it again.
‘They were toucans,’ she reminded him, and Finn laughed.
‘Toucan, pelican – potato, kartoffel.’
Pepper could feel herself being drawn into his bubble, could sense the room around them being smudged away as she focused on him, and only him. Now that she was so close to Finn again, her body ached for him, her cheeks flushed with tell-tale longing. All she wanted to do was lie back and let the pleasure wash over her – over both of them.
‘Come.’ Finn put a warm hand in the small of her back. ‘There are some people that I want you to meet.’
Pepper let herself be led across the room to where a rather stern-looking man with the heavy brows of an owl was helping himself to a glass of red wine. Beside him, a slight woman with deep-set celestial-blue eyes and piles of ash-blonde hair was contemplating a mini bruschetta.
‘Mein Junge,’ she cried, pulling Finn against her. ‘Das ist wunderbar!’
‘Danke, Mama,’ Finn said, ushering Pepper in closer.
‘This is Philippa,’ he explained.
‘Aha!’ The woman found a napkin for her bruschetta and put it down on the table, before clasping both Pepper’s hands in her own.
‘Der Künstler – sehr gut.’
Pepper fumbled out a hello and a thank you, glancing from the woman – who must surely be Finn’s mother – to the flinty man at her side, who she deduced could only be his father.
‘Malcolm,’ he barked, extending a ramrod straight arm. ‘Pleasure.’
As they exchanged small talk, Pepper marvelled at how different Finn was from his dad. He may well have inherited Malcolm’s height, broad shoulders and direct stare, but his features and softness all came from his mother, who she had just learnt was called Hanna.
As Finn stepped away to greet some more new arrivals, she leant towards Pepper.
‘You must be excited, ja?’
‘Y
es. Very excited for Finn – he’s worked so hard, and I know how much this website means to him.’
Hanna looked slightly puzzled by this but made no further comment except to smile at her with warmth. Pepper noticed her exchanging a look with her husband.
‘I should’ – she began, motioning towards the bar area – ‘go and get a top-up. It was nice to meet you both – enjoy your evening.’
‘Pleasure.’ Malcolm nodded. He was so stiff – like an uptight colonel from an old war film. No wonder Finn found it difficult to connect with him properly – he was intimidating.
She met Finn again on the way back from the bar, and, emboldened by a second glass of champagne, put a hand on his arm. He looked down at her, but only for a second, distracted as he was by the chattering groups of people on every side.
‘I am sorry,’ he said, grimacing with frustration. ‘Now that you are here, I just want to steal you away, back to my home, but I have to be the host for a while. We will have time together later – is that OK?’
Pepper made herself let go of him, her hand dropping to her side only for Finn to gather it up again and press her fingers against his lips.
‘I love you,’ he said, and then he was gone again.
She spent the next few hours orbiting the party, watching Finn from a distance while his friends, colleagues and family flocked around him. Otto made several heroic attempts to pull her into conversation, but each time she made polite excuses and slipped away back into the corners.
As midnight grew steadily closer, the level of anticipation in the room swelled. Pepper stared around at all the faces she did not recognise, wondering which of them was the mystery artist. Whoever it was had made a tidy sum this evening, as every single piece from their collection had apparently been sold to a private buyer, someone who – according to Otto – had been given an early preview ahead of the website’s official launch.
‘Five thousand euros,’ he had whispered in Pepper’s ear. ‘Five fucking thousand.’
Now it was only ten minutes to go until the big reveal, and Pepper made sure that she was positioned close to where the artwork – whatever it was – had been hung on the back wall of the restaurant, a black sheet concealing it from view.
Hello, Again Page 27
