The Accidental Family (19 page)

That part of her, the part that had loved clothes and worn high heels religiously, had faded since she’d come to St. Ives. She still had all her glamorous clothes in her B & B closet (barring the red patent-leather Jimmy Choos she had loaned Bella with uncharacteristic largesse when Bella was playing
Wizard of Oz
, and had never seen again, except during the girl’s renditions of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”), but she’d only had one occasion to wear any of them, and that was the night Louis had proposed.

First she blamed her newly sensible look on the fact that she was living literally at the very end of the British Isles now, where fashion was irrelevant, except that alongside its history of fishing, artists, and tiny working-class cottages, St. Ives was an utterly stylish place, chockful of designer shops and as many well-dressed and
well-heeled people as you could hope to see anywhere on the streets of London. Sophie could easily have worn heeled boots and a pencil skirt to do the school run and not looked out of place, but she didn’t. She’d frequently told Cal that there was no point in wearing anything nice when you had two girls hell-bent on literally painting the town red, and she had evidence of many a ruined item and irretrievably stained garment to back that up from their time living in Sophie’s one-bedroom flat, but that wasn’t it either. Since the incident when Izzy had rather helpfully tried to jazz up Sophie’s best little black Chanel dress by gluing sequins and pom-poms onto it as a surprise, and Sophie had actually cried over the loss of one of her best and oldest friends, the girls had desisted from raiding Sophie’s closets.

Sophie had always believed, although she hadn’t told Cal because he’d laugh in her face, that when she came to Cornwall to be with Louis, she had shed everything about her life that was inconsequential and unimportant. That she had pared herself down to her bare minimum, unless you counted the extra cream-tea pounds, and shown Louis the essence of herself, because that was the kind of courage that truly loving someone required. The fact that he still loved and desired her when she wasn’t tottering about in beautiful heels or trussed up in a tight top only affirmed how right and how liberating her decision to come here had been. But as she watched Cal walking down the platform toward her, Sophie considered, for the first time, another reason she had let her devotion to glamour and shoes slip so easily away. Had she lost herself here? Had she lost herself in Louis and the girls and let her identity slip and bleed into theirs? All at once Sophie missed the hours of preparation it had taken simply to leave the flat every morning in London, she lamented her former dedication to shaping her brows on a daily basis and shaving her legs. She missed the fact that her nails used to be long and were never chipped and that the balls of her feet always
burned with the gratifying pain that said “these shoes are gorgeous.”

As soon as Sophie saw Cal striding toward her she felt better, a little more like her old self again. She felt as if he’d brought more than just himself and a cerise Yves Saint Laurent suitcase on wheels. He’d brought a little bit of her back with him too. The little bit of her that wanted the world to sit up and take notice.

“Good god, where am I, and why?” Cal asked as she hugged him. “Because I know we are friends and everything, but I can’t possibly like you
this
much.”

“Gucci?” Carmen asked Cal with a raised eyebrow, nodding at his shoes.

The first place Sophie had taken him was for after-hours cakes at Ye Old Tea Shoppe to meet her best St. Ives friend.

It had been a mutual-appreciation society between Sophie’s two friends from the start. Carmen had handed him a slice of baked custard and nutmeg tart and admired the tailoring in his suit and he’d told her he’d never expected anyone so classically styled to be anywhere so far from civilization, particularly not behind the refrigerated display counter in a cake-shop–cum-café.

“Now she,” he said, nodding in Sophie’s direction with a cursory glance, “was always going to throw everything away for a slim chance at happiness, that’s desperation for you, and as I’ve always said, desperation is Sophie’s middle name. But you, Miss Carmen Velasquez? You’ve got class written all over you.”

“That’s because I’m from Chelmsford,” Carmen agreed with a nod. “Say what you like about Essex girls, but class runs through us Chelmsford girls like letters through a stick of rock.”

“Well, that’s obvious,” Cal agreed. “So tell me, what brought you to the back of beyond?”

“It was love that brought me here,” Carmen said. “Love for a much younger and very-well-muscled man.”

“Seems reasonable.” Cal nodded, savoring the last forkful of his tart, which he had been delicately demolishing in the same way Artemis would polish off a bowl of tuna, slowly and carelessly, as if she were doing you a favor by taking it off your hands.

Cal always maintained that he didn’t really like food, which was why he largely survived on anything that could be impaled on a cocktail stick or ordered in a restaurant where he would never consider either an appetizer or a dessert. All food meant to him, he would often say, was fuel.

But once, after Cal had had a particularly wonderful weekend with a man who then turned out to be married, he’d invited Sophie over to dinner to commiserate, telling her that her love life, which was even more sorrowful and emptier than his own, would cheer him up no end. Happy to oblige, because at that point in her life the nearest she had to a relationship was an occasional round-robin email from her ex-boyfriend Alex, Sophie had assumed that dinner would mean prepacked sandwiches, perhaps some minipizzas if she was lucky. When she arrived, however, not only had Cal cooked enough courses and quantities to feed twenty, he had baked as well: cakes, muffins, cookies, tarts, and more. It was like walking into a fine French patisserie. They had spent the weekend drinking wine and eating as much of the food as was humanly possible without actually rupturing their intestines and Sophie had let him hold forth on how terrible her life was because she knew that he didn’t want to talk about his own.

“If you don’t like food,” Sophie had challenged him, forcing down one final slice of chocolate cheesecake, “then how come you’re a better cook than Gordon Ramsay?”

“I do like food, and of course I can cook. I am very accomplished,” Cal had replied. “What I don’t like is that I only ever eat when I’m miserable. And I don’t want to be miserable, so I don’t eat.”

Sophie had had to think about that for quite some time, during
which she sampled a tiny slice of Cal’s tarte tatin just to be polite and also because she thought the apples could feasibly represent one of her five fruits and vegetables a day.

“Wouldn’t it be better to practice eating when you are happy so that you can have a healthy and happy relationship with food?” she’d asked him.

Cal had leaned back in his chair and narrowed his cornflower blue eyes as he looked down his impeccably chiseled nose at her.

“Well, obviously it would, but we all need a hang-up, Sophie, and this is mine. You, on the other hand, eat like a horse whatever the weather. I might be screwed up, but at least I’m thin and fashion loves me.”

Sophie had never pressed him again on how he felt about food, because most of the time he did seem to be happy and thin, and as far as she knew, that ticked off at least two out of three boxes on his list for a perfect life. But she knew that much as he might be pretending to be eating Carmen’s tart out of politeness only, he was finding it just as delicious as Sophie always did and she wondered if here, in the bosom of the coast, with the sea air in his lungs, he might stop thinking that eating food was equated with misery and just allow himself a little bit of happiness with a tart. Which under other circumstances was practically his personal mission statement.

“So tell me,” Cal asked Sophie. “What am I going to do after Eve’s fired me for being better at her job than she is? What will become of me?”

“You could always work for me,” Sophie said, smiling as she remembered her wedding-planning idea.

“What, as a nanny? I thought you said that nannies who swore and drank weren’t to be trusted.”

“No, idiot. I know you think I gave up everything when I came
down here, but the truth is, I’ve realized I don’t have to. I’m starting my own wedding-services company, but different, you know. I’m going to offer exclusive quirky wedding venues, really special catering, and dress designers and everything else I can think of. It’s going to be brilliant, and I am going to be brilliant at it.”

“You will as well,” Cal said, impressed. “It is the perfect job for you, starting your own business from scratch, Sophie—you’ll love that. And if things go horribly wrong with you and Louis, at least you’ll know you’ll have
someone’s
wedding to go to.”

“Scrap that job offer,” Sophie said mildly.

“You know I’m only joking, I want you and Louis to get married—how else am I going to be chief bridesmaid?”

“Hang on, sonny, I think you’ll find that job’s taken,” Carmen protested.

“So far that position hasn’t been filled,” Sophie told them both. “I might compare and contrast how I feel about you tonight.”

“So where are we going?” Cal asked Sophie as he sipped the double espresso that Carmen had made him with some aplomb, once he’d lusted after the outrageously expensive and rather beautiful Italian coffee machine she had invested in for the café, even though it was neither Olde nor had anything to do with Tea. “Where’s the hot be-seen-there-or-die venue in this town? And where, more to the point, are the hens?”

“Um.” Sophie looked at Carmen. “Well, to be honest, what with me not having lived here very long and spending most of my time with Louis and the girls, I was rather limited on hens. Carmen is it. Unless you count Mrs. Alexander, but she’s babysitting, and I would have asked Grace if it wasn’t for the fact that she’s eighty-nine and quite likely to die if she gets too excited …”

Cal blinked at Sophie. “This is it? I’ve come eight hundred miles on a train without a buffet, and with a load of country people, for this, for
this
. Well, fine, I suppose I should have expected it,
you’ve never exactly been popular. As long as the gin is flowing and the music’s pumping, then I’m happy. So where are we going?”

“Well.” Sophie tried to muster some enthusiasm for the night out she didn’t really want. “There’s a lovely art gallery on the harbor, with a bar that opens late sometimes …”

“Or a very nice fish place,” Carmen said. “Very chic, and the chef once worked in the Dorchester Hotel.”

“Chic?” Cal rolled his eyes. “I haven’t come down here for chic, I’ve come down here for dancing, drinking, and wild sex in the surf.”

“You’ve come down here for that?” Carmen asked him. “In September, you’ll freeze your bits off.”

“Also, don’t forget, you’ve come down here to support me through Louis’s love child debacle,” Sophie told him, glancing at her watch again. It was just after six. Seth, if he was anything like his father, would be at least twenty minutes late. Wendy and Louis would be there right now in her front room. (Which for some reason Sophie pictured as garishly decorated, much like that of a low-rent hooker, although she accepted that the mental image could have a lot more to do with her personal feelings toward Wendy than Wendy’s interior design tendencies.)

Wendy and Louis would be there waiting for the sound of the key in the lock, waiting for the moment Seth walked in through the living room door and found his father there. She felt her heart constrict with panic, not only on Louis’s behalf but on his son’s. She knew what it was like to live without a father and she also knew how shocking it was to discover that your whole life, everything you’ve believed to be unalterable and true, could be turned on its head in a second. Wendy had had twenty years to deal with what she knew, Louis only a few days, but Seth would have had no time at all, and she worried for him, because as confident and self-assured as he seemed, he really was still very young.

“It will all be happening any minute now,” Sophie said, staring at her watch. “It feels wrong that I am here, thirty miles away, while Louis is meeting his son.”

“Feels like an episode of
EastEnders
to me,” Cal said. “But anyway, I am here now and I have come down to help you deal with the love child and in my considered opinion the best way for you to do that is to get me very, very drunk and find me a podium to dance on. So where are we going?”

“A podium you say …well, there’s Isobar,” Carmen suggested halfheartedly. “Although it’s a very young crowd in there, and from what I remember they do tend to wear a lot of sombreros …but it is open until two tonight.”

“And drinks are only a pound before ten,” Sophie added.

“And?” Cal asked, seeming to be waiting for other options.

“That’s pretty much it for late-night nightlife round here,” Sophie admitted. “But there are many lovely pubs with local flavor. No podiums, mind you, but quite a few solid oak tables.”

Cal thumped his head down onto Carmen’s checked tablecloth.

“You’re regretting coming to see me, aren’t you?” Sophie asked him. “It seemed like a good idea to come down here and take my mind off my fiancé’s illegitimate love child. You thought there’d be more excitement, didn’t you? But now you’ve got here and all you’ve found is an off-season holiday town with one nightclub, you’re wondering why you left your wonderful, vibrant, amazing city of London that loves you no matter what you do, aren’t you?”

Cal looked up at her. “Frankly, yes,” he said. “No …look, of course I’m not. I’m here for you, Sophie. I am just tired and I really need a nice, long, cool, and very alcoholic drink.”

“We could always get in a cab and go somewhere bigger,” Carmen suggested tentatively. “Penzance is only a fifteen-minute drive away, but I’m not sure it will be that much fun this time of year—
how about we go crazy and go to Newquay? There are loads of clubs in Newquay and, after all, this is your hen night, Soph. We need to find you some action.”

“Newquay?” Sophie repeated. “That’s where Louis is though. If I go to Newquay for my henless hen night, he’ll think I’m following him around and that I don’t trust him anywhere near his manipulative, scheming ex.”