Contents
Cover
Title Page
Letter
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
The Perfect Long Weekend
Reading List
Seaside Playlist for The Perfect Long Weekend
Summer Recipes
Scallops And Black Pudding With Celeriac Purée
Crab Linguine
Fish Stew
Corned Beef Hash With Fried Eggs
Sea Urchin Cocktail
Cornish Clotted Cream Fudge
By Veronica Henry
Copyright
The Mill House
Mimsbury
New Year’s Eve 1999
My darling, beautiful boys,
I know by the time you read this letter, you will be angry with me. But please, think beyond what you are feeling just now and try and understand why I chose to do this. I know you will think that I was the only one who had a choice in the matter, that I didn’t give you any, and maybe this is true. Maybe I was selfish. Maybe I did it for me. But then I didn’t want to have to make the choice in the first place. That’s the cruel thing.
So. I hope you will forgive me, and remember me as I want to be remembered. Just as my last memory of each of you was as you should be – happy, laughing, carefree. Stay like that for ever, for me.
With all my love, every day and always,
Mummy xx
Prologue
Even now, after seven years, the smell of him after a night’s sleep, the faint, sharp scent of his sweat mingled with Issey Miyake, makes her shimmer inside.
He has a full mouth and a broken nose – the story of how it was broken changes depending on how much he has drunk and who he is with – and his dark-brown curls are still pinned down by the bandanna he wears to tame them while he works. His lids flutter slightly in his sleep, hiding greeny-yellow eyes that sometimes burn orange. He turns, and the aftermath of half a bottle of grappa hits her, so raw it makes her eyes water. He needs to wind down, he tells her, after a night in the kitchen.
She doesn’t buy that for a minute. He can do it with his eyes shut, cooking for a dining room full of people. It’s like breathing to him. Second nature.
Excess, too, is in his nature. Which is partly what she loves about him. But partly the problem. He will sleep now till gone eleven. Whereas she’ll get up in ten minutes’ time. She always wakes before the alarm for fear that it might never go off. One of them has to be up. A hotel, after all, does not run itself, and the staff are only as good as the person pulling their strings.
And Claire Marlowe is great at string-pulling. She is the mistress of delegation, of discretion, of diplomacy, of multitasking.
Luca is good at cooking. And talking. And partying. And drinking. Which is why people want to eat in his restaurant and stay in his hotel.
Luca is a legend.
Living with a legend is exhausting, and Claire is tired. The very marrow of her bones yearns for rest. But this is going to be the busiest weekend of the year so far. The forecast is wonderful: guaranteed sunshine and warmth. It’s a chance for the population to kick back and relax. Unless they work in a pub or a bar or a garden centre.
Or a five-star townhouse hotel by the sea.
She flicks the alarm to ‘off’ before it squawks. She doesn’t need it to tell her it’s time to get up. She throws back the duvet. Beside her, Luca stirs. He reaches out an arm and curls it round her before she can roll out of bed. She feels his hand slide up and down her flank. Immediately her weary bones turn to liquid; she shuts her eyes for a moment.
You can’t base a relationship on sex, she thinks. You can’t live with someone and excuse the fact that they take you totally for granted, just because their very touch makes you want to die.
Can you?
Outside she can hear the sound of the dustcarts collecting the recycling. Crash after crash as a week’s worth of empty bottles consumed by the residents of Fore Street disappears into the gaping yellow cavern. Bottles of milk, Merlot and mineral water shatter into shards with a satisfying smash. She feels sure the men make as much noise as they possibly can, although it is barely six. Wouldn’t you, if it was your job to collect other people’s rubbish?
She rolls out of Luca’s grasp. She’s not going to give him what he wants: her unconditional yielding warmth. She’s not here for his convenience. If he wants sex, he can at least do her the honour of gaining full consciousness first. Not that she’s not tempted. She can’t think of a nicer way to begin the day, to kick-start her body into action.
It’s sad, she thinks, that sex has become a bargaining tool, that she is punishing him by withholding it, even though he is probably unaware of his punishment because he is out for the count. She longs to go back to when they first met, when she gave herself freely and willingly without thinking twice.
But things have changed since then. Now they have responsibilities. Or rather, she has. Luca floats through on talent and charm alone, leaving Claire to balance the books.
That was the deal right from the start, of course. They were organic and synthetic. Yin and yang. His skill in the kitchen and her business brain combined to make the perfect team. But somewhere along the line the balance has been lost and has tipped in his favour. Claire is feeling resentful.
And there is nothing like resentment for destroying a relationship.
She goes over to the skylight in the corner of the room and stands on a chair to look out at the rooftops. They are there, the trio of seagull chicks, ugly and expectant. She has monitored their progress since the day they hatched. She feels a tug deep inside her whenever she looks at them, and she knows damn well what that is. But there’s nothing she can do about it. She couldn’t possibly fit a baby into her life right now.
Satisfied that the chicks are alive and well and haven’t fallen off the roof in their attempt to fly the nest, which they should be doing any day now, she breathes in the salty early-morning air. She can almost smell the sun, although she can’t see it yet from her vantage point. She imagines it bobbing up over the estuary with coy enthusiasm, ready to greet the visitors who will be flocking to Pennfleet in their hundreds over the weekend. They will fill the narrow winding streets and spill out on to the quay, as perpetually greedy for sustenance as the gull chicks. They will feast on fish and chips and ice cream and proper Cornish pasties and white paper bags full of crumbly fudge, and the townspeople will be grateful for the merry ringing of tills, if not the litter they will leave behind.
Claire pads over to the shower. Their room is right up in the eaves, because the ceiling here is too low to be suitable for paying guests – even though Luca is six foot one and continually bashes his head on the beams. The plan was for them to buy a little place somewhere else in the town to escape to, but it has never materialised. They don’t have time to look. They don’t have any spare cash either. When they first moved to Pennfleet, Claire used to leaf longingly through the property pages during her coffee break, looking for a dear little whitewashed fisherman’s cottage to call their own, but all their money has been ploughed back into the hotel. So here they are, up in the roof. It’s a nice enough room, with wooden walls painted white and one of the big sleigh beds they have in the rest of the hotel, but there’s not much room for ‘stuff’ and barely any wardrobe space. She can only just squeeze in the selection of navy blue and black and gre
y wrap dresses she wears for work. She can’t remember the last time she wore any of her ‘Claire’ clothes, which are stored away in a vacuum-pack bag. She can’t remember her last day off. Even if she’s not front of house, she is squirrelled away in her office doing marketing plans, budgets, press releases . . .
Her shower takes five minutes. Getting dressed takes another five. By quarter past six she is at the front desk, double-checking the staff rota, praying that no one will be tempted by the sun to throw a sickie.
They are almost fully booked this weekend. Seven rooms and the restaurant. She will, if she is lucky, get twelve hours’ sleep over the next three days. She knows this is because she is a perfectionist, but that’s why they have been so successful. Because she doesn’t let anything slip.
That, and Luca’s formidable reputation as a chef, which has been the subject of endless articles in the weekend supplements and magazines and foodie blogs. People are happy to make the three-hour train journey from London to Pennfleet for the weekend, just to taste the clever things he does with baby squid and borlotti beans and courgette flowers; his gelati are close to orgasmic – or so says an infamous food critic, who ordered five gallons of his honey, coffee and ricotta ice cream to keep in his own freezer. He’s quite the cover boy, Luca, which makes him a minor celebrity on this stretch of coast, infamous and instantly recognisable, but no one ever recognises Claire. Sometimes she feels totally invisible.
Everyone comes to The Townhouse by the Sea for the Luca experience. But nobody realises that without Claire, he would be nothing. Nothing at all.
One
Bloody seagulls. And bloody Jeff. Why couldn’t he put the rubbish in the bin properly? They’d told him time and again that the gulls would rip the bag to shreds if he just dumped it on the top of the bin, but he never listened. And sure enough, the bag had been eviscerated and its contents strewn over the five square foot of grass that passed as a front garden. The grass that no one ever mowed, so it had grown as high as it could then drooped with the effort. Angelica banged on the bathroom window, but the five gulls took no notice, lighting with glee on the remains of a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket that someone must have brought back from a night out, though heaven knows where – Angelica was pretty sure there wasn’t a KFC for fifty miles. That was the price you paid for living in Pennfleet. Pretty views, yes, but none of the things that were the lifeblood of your average twenty-one year old, like Topshop or Maccie D’s or even a bloody cinema.
Mention Pennfleet to most people and they thought of a picturesque harbour filled with merrily bobbing boats and quaint narrow streets lined with even quainter cottages painted in ice-cream pastels. It was the subject of a thousand clichéd paintings, many of which hung for sale in its bars and cafés, hefty price tags swinging from their distressed wooden frames. The shops sold self-consciously stylish leisure wear – ditsy dresses, sloppy sweatshirts in dusty pinks and blues and patterned Wellingtons – bijou mugs with clever-clever slogans and hand-made jewellery, all at overinflated prices. Families thundered through the streets in an orgy of excitement, revelling in the playground that was theirs for the summer, with little regard for the custodians, the locals who held it together over the long winter months and served them their cream teas and gin and tonics. Boden-on-Sea, they called it, and in the summer you couldn’t move for men in khaki shorts and deck shoes, and fragrant yummy mummies in capri pants and Chanel sunglasses.
What most visitors to Pennfleet didn’t know was that if they followed the road up past the museum and forked left, past the tiny fire station and then over the hill and right into Acland Avenue, they would find a grimy grid of uncared-for terraced houses totally out of keeping with the maritime idyll it overlooked. Here was the underbelly, the residents of Pennfleet who weren’t blessed with a view of the verdant mouth of the river and the sea beyond and whose only hope of gainful employment was a season of backbreaking sheet-changing or toilet-cleaning, unless they were lucky enough to have a job at the pie factory on the nearby industrial estate on the way to St Austell.
And even the chance to change sheets and clean toilets was diminishing. The hotel and café and restaurant owners were doing a lot of their own dirty work to keep costs down, and many of the B&Bs had been converted into self-catering apartments. Times were hard, and although the word on the street was that people would be holidaying at home this summer thanks to the recession, bookings so far were down. Except at the high end, it seemed, which remained buoyant, with bookings ahead for the whole summer. And for that Angelica was grateful. She had started out as a chambermaid at The Townhouse by the Sea five years ago, at weekends and during the holidays. When she left school they offered her a full-time job as receptionist, and she’d grabbed the opportunity with both hands. Then, three weeks ago, they’d promoted her to assistant manager.
She picked up her suit from where she’d left it on the floor the evening before. The black linen skirt was crumpled; the jacket not so bad. She tried to smooth out the fabric but the creases were deeply engrained. She’d have to iron it. Claire would go ballistic if she was less than bandbox-fresh. The Townhouse by the Sea was all about style over practicality. Everything was high-maintenance, from the Egyptian cotton sheets to the glittering glass and chrome surfaces in the bathrooms that needed polishing with a soft cloth. No corners were cut.
At least as assistant manager she wouldn’t have to do the backbreaking donkey work any more, unless they were really short-staffed. Angelica had been thrilled with her promotion, although the gloss had been taken off that thrill by the fact that her pay packet wasn’t going to show much increase.
‘Our margins are so tight at the moment,’ Claire had explained, her eyes wide. ‘But if the summer is a success, we can give you a bonus.’
And if it wasn’t? Angelica knew only too well, having lived in Pennfleet all her life, that a dull, rainy summer could be the kiss of death to any seaside business. And she wasn’t convinced that the Townhouse was going to get away for much longer with the rates they were charging. Luxury was all very well, but over two hundred quid a night? Unless it was a real scorcher, they’d be lucky if they weren’t bankrupt by the end of the summer.
Which would be devastating. Not least for her. For Angelica realised that she had landed on her feet. She loved every minute she spent in the hotel, and she was hungry to learn everything she could. Every job she’d had before had just been a means to an end, a way to get cash into her hand, but this was different. If she was going to be stuck round here for the rest of her life – and at the moment it looked that way – then the Townhouse was the place to be stuck.
It was certainly a marked contrast to her home surroundings. She looked around the bathroom with distaste. The pink suite was ancient and cracked, dirt settling into every nook and cranny. Jeff had fitted a rubber hose-style attachment to the taps so they could attempt to have a shower, but it wasn’t long enough to be any use. Angelica hardly used the bathroom at home any more. She sneaked into the en suites at work instead, during her break, checking on the rota which ones were waiting to be cleaned. She loved the powerful stream of water from the showers, the blistering heat, the herbaceous rosemary scent of the complimentary shower gel, the thick white towels . . .
How wonderful it would be to live that life all the time. Because there were people who did, she knew that. Not everyone was trapped. Although at least the trap she was in wasn’t of her own making. She thought of her friends, her naïve, foolish friends, who’d painted themselves into a corner by using the baby meal ticket. She scoffed at their supposed wiliness. How could saddling yourself with a kid work to your advantage? She’d seen the scuzzy flats they’d been given; knew the meagre amounts they were handed to live on. That was no future.
Of course, technically speaking, she was free to walk away any time she liked. But how could she? It simply wasn’t in her to be that selfish. A trait she hadn’t inherited from her mother.
She looked at herself in the medicine cabine
t that hung over the sink. Milk-white skin, eyes that made up for their smallness by being a brilliant blue, fine, silky black hair that hung to her shoulders with a blunt fringe, a wide mouth with a full bottom lip. She looked nothing special without make-up, which was useful for the day job, because she could blend into the background. But come the night, with black eyeliner and false eyelashes and red, red lipstick, Angelica could paint on a face that would never be forgotten. It was just a shame there was no one to appreciate it.
Well, except one person, and he was definitely out of bounds. So she didn’t let herself dwell on him any longer than was necessary.
She grabbed her clothes and skittered down the stairs into the kitchen on long legs. She pulled the ironing board out from its resting place between the fridge and the wall, erecting it with a clatter and total disregard for the fact that Jeff was listening intently to the traffic report on the radio. He was a courier, so it was important for him to find out if the bank holiday jams had already begun.
‘Pour us a cup of tea, Jeff,’ she wheedled, plugging in the iron and twirling the dial up high. She wasn’t going to tell him about the rubbish. If she admitted to noticing it, she would feel obliged to pick it all up, and then she would be late for work. Her mother would find out soon enough, when she deigned to drag herself out of bed. She could have the argument. Trudy didn’t have anything else to do, after all.
Jeff reached out an arm without blinking and poured the dark-brown dregs from a stainless-steel teapot into a mug, sloshed in milk from the carton, then held it out to her obligingly.
‘Ta.’ Angelica held the mug to her mouth, then grimaced as she realised the tea was lukewarm. ‘Yuck – it’s disgusting.’
‘You know where the kettle is,’ riposted Jeff.
She plonked the mug down on the side as the steam came out of the iron in an angry hiss.
‘Go on. Make me a fresh one. You know you want to.’
He rolled his eyes and got up, lumbering over to the kettle. It turned her stomach just to look at him, his belly bulging under the Jack Daniel’s T-shirt optimistically tucked into jeans and cinched with a belt displaying a hefty gilt eagle. Add to this his wispy grey ponytail and the goatee beard . . . Angelica shuddered, wondering just what it was that had attracted her mother to him.
The Long Weekend Page 1
