The Love Letter (24 page)

Bloody Byrne hadn’t misjudged her at all, she writhed guiltily.
He had seen into her shabby soul, so fickle it transferred affection faster than a stray dog passing on fleas, desperate to be loved but ultimately destined to be cast aside for a super-loyal pedigree bred for the job.

Overhead the horseshoe bats flapped about mumsily, feeding their young broods and guarding the best pitches in the vast roof void.

She let out a low groan as a sharp sword of pain was drawn from the soft scabbard of her belly. Her period which was due on Monday had decided to stage an early appearance. No wonder she’d been behaving like a demented, angry, tearful sex maniac all night.

Remembering that her tampons were in her weekend bag with Nico at Inkpot Farm, Legs wearily trailed down to the bar and found Nonny waving off the last customers, still looking as immaculate as she had at the start of her six hour shift.

She took Legs’ black-screened phone, ‘I’ll charge this for you, but you’ll have to plunder the Ladies for tampons. I haven’t had a period since my last coil was fitted. Guy says I’ve been switched to digital. Tell me,’ she collared Legs before she could escape, ‘are you and Fran really staging a comeback?’

‘Oh, we’re just – hmm – making friends again,’ she bluffed badly, wishing that she knew Nonny well enough for a heart to heart, but she was far too jumpy and tired right now, her head already thundering with an approaching hangover of industrial proportions.

‘Good for you.’ Nonny creased her pretty eyes, still perfectly made up. ‘Mind you, I think I can speak for everybody in saying we’ll be over the moon if you two
do
get back together. Kizzy’s a very odd fish. Hector calls her the Maenad Machiavelli; he thinks she’s quite mad; you should have heard him ranting down here when they were first together. Half the village thinks she’s Poppy’s love child, you know.’

Legs took a moment to register this. ‘Love child! With whom?’

‘Neptune? You know what Farcombe’s like for rumours. The other half think she’s a mermaid washed up to avenge Farcombe Hall of sinful Protheroes. Do you think our Michelin man enjoyed his meal, by the way?’ She suddenly changed topic, making Legs’ tired head spin again, filled with images of Francis and Kizzy as two amoebas cast in stone.

‘He loved the food,’ she said eventually, appalled to find her eyes filling with tears as she thought about what Byrne had told her about losing his life, after all her ogling, confiding and bad dancing. She should have ‘Trollop 28’ written across her back instead of ‘Walcott 14’. No wonder he’d even offered to pay for her cab back to London, poor man. Her hormones were in utter havoc tonight. She’d probably put him off women for life – whatever life he had left.

Nonny, who only cared about Guy’s Michelin star, patted her arm gratefully. ‘Thank you for this evening, Legs. We’ve missed you. Now get some sleep. And I know you’ll hate me for this right now, but,’ – she stood on tiptoes to breathe in Legs’ ear – ‘rethink the shiny tight T-shirt look, honey.’

Having plundered the machine in the Ladies, using all her pound coins, Legs trailed stiffly up to bed, stomach cramping, all the time alternating between spasms of shame about her dinner with Byrne, and obsessing about Francis and the fishy, flame-haired poet.

In the early hours, she suddenly sat up, remembering something Byrne had said: ‘Shotgun wedding. Poppy’s first marriage was a shotgun wedding. Bloody hell. Kizzy
must
be Poppy’s daughter!’

Still mildy squiffy and riddled with stomach cramps, she got up and paced around her room beneath the restless bats, trying to ease her discomfort and make sense of the situation.

This had to be the secret Francis wasn’t telling her; he was being held to ransom by Poppy and Kizzy in some way. Byrne was wrong; this wasn’t about Francis wanting revenge, this was about him needing to be rescued. She had to get to the truth and then try to help him.

Legs woke up far too hungover to face the Book Inn’s award-winning cooked breakfast in the restaurant, which at least spared her any risk of bumping into Byrne. He had haunted her dreams all night, telling her his dying wishes as they swayed together in a smoky dance hall while Francis sang Bing Crosby numbers into an old fifties RCA microphone on stage, dressed in a tuxedo. She now couldn’t remember what those wishes had been, but she had a feeling they had involved her mending her immoral ways.

Signing the Pledge would be a good start, she decided as she crawled to the bathroom and crouched over the sink with the cold tap directed at her face and mouth until the pounding in her head abated from hydraulic kanga to hand-held sledgehammer. Then she took a run to punish herself for her excess, wearing her dark glasses and her nephew’s
Clone Wars
baseball cap pulled low over her nose. To her relief, she didn’t bump into Byrne on the cliff paths. She hoped he had already checked out.

But when she panted into the Book Inn’s back lobby, feeling as though she was sweating Rioja from every pore, she was greeted by Guy looking far brighter than he had the night before, his big hammer jaw widened by a smile that made his eyes disappear in delighted creases.

‘How the tables turn,’ he laughed. ‘You look like you need a Bloody Mary Shelley. It’s my secret recipe – lots of beetroot juice and horseradish vodka.’

‘Oh, please no.’ She waved her arms on front of her, catching her breath.

‘Your performance last night is already the talk of the village.’

She pulled off her cap and raked back her sweaty hair, unable to resist a little puffed-out probing: ‘Surely they’re far more interested in Poppy Protheroe’s sea-nymph love child?’

‘Who?’

‘Kizzy de la Mere.’

‘You’ve obviously been talking to Nonny,’ he tutted. ‘She loves those mermaid rumours. Everyone round here figures Kizzy’s not the Hawkeses’ real daughter, but nobody knows the truth.’ He leaned forwards and whispered. ‘I’ve heard that her real mother was The Black Widow of Bideford, a gold-digging siren who married very old men for their money.’

‘Well, that’s reassuring.’ She crammed her hat back on, glancing up nervously as she heard feet bounding downstairs, but it was just a young couple heading for breakfast with cheery ‘good mornings’.

‘Is Mr Byrne still here?’ she asked Guy after they’d gone through.

His big, battered face lit up. ‘Very dark horse, our Michelin judge. Ordered Frosties in bed for breakfast, and grilled kidneys for his dog, then booked for three more nights. And this is for you.’ He handed her a Book Inn postcard with a message scrawled on the back:
Heavenly Pony, You were inspiring company last night. I was wrong; you can change hearts and minds, certainly about Paella Valenciana. With thanks. J

‘You – we – were a hit, baby.’ Guy grinned, having read the card. ‘He
loved
the paella!’

She reread it, wondering what J stood for. Please don’t let it be Jeremy.

‘And the band loved
you
too,’ Guy was saying. ‘You can have a meal on the house tonight.’

‘I’m eating at the hall tonight,’ she said vaguely, turning to go back upstairs, unaware that she had just unleashed another piece of Farcombe village gossip to be served out at the bar all day along with cocktails and tapas.

Inspiring company … change heart
? Legs reread the note as she carried it up to Skit. And why was he staying longer? Could she have haunted his dreams too?

She already deeply regretted telling him so much about her current situation and her muddled feelings for Francis, which
seemed to change with the tides. Last night she’d felt herself shipwrecked with a case of Rioja and a passing stranger to confide in. Now she couldn’t shake Byrne and his fierce eyes from her consciousness. His insight and sex appeal alarmed her. He’d seemed to look straight into her heart and find it false, blasting all her claims of divided loyalty against the rocks as she’d shamelessly moved on from protesting love for both lover and ex to making eyes at the sexy stranger himself.

Then she sat down in her doorway and felt icy cold as she remembered him saying, ‘I am about to lose my life.’

Spywood Cottage was deserted and locked when Legs arrived, her teeth chattering despite the fact she was wearing two jumpers. They were Nico’s, and were so tight they rose up her midriff and arms like Peter Rabbit’s clothes crammed on Hartley Hare. Although the sun was climbing the sky without a cloud crossing its path, she still felt bitterly cold.

Her mother’s car was parked on the track so she couldn’t be far away. Sitting on the wood-wormed bench by the porch, she wondered vaguely whether Francis had tried to make contact since last night’s public kiss. Her mobile phone was still plugged into Nonny’s charger at the Book Inn.

Experiencing another shudder of cold embarrassment, she headed down to the cove.

Sure enough, Lucy was close to the rocks directly beneath the steep path, where she had set up her easel overlooking the harbour. Although Eascombe cove was private, she was at least wearing clothes as a concession to passing dog walkers. Dressed in an old sleeveless denim dress, her soft shoulders tanned to the colour of speckled hen’s eggs, she looked up from beneath her floppy straw hat as Legs clambered down.

‘Be careful, it’s crumbling more than ever,’ she called up, stepping back as a shower of scree from Legs’ slipping feet landed close by. ‘Someone will fall to their death here one day.’

‘You’ve been saying that for twenty years,’ Legs reminded her, perching on the rocks behind her to admire the watercolour.

‘I’ve been saying I’ll capture this to my satisfaction for twenty years, too,’ Lucy sighed, pointing at the distant harbour which was glittering with light and jostling with boat masts that poked up from behind its high walls like an army’s pikes, ‘and I haven’t managed it yet. One or the other of them will finish me off, that’s for sure.’

‘It’s looking good.’ Legs admired the preparatory sketches.

‘All it needs is an attractive girl sunbathing in the foreground,’ Lucy hinted.

‘Far too cold to sunbathe.’ She shuddered, unscrewing the top of her mother’s Thermos to sniff its contents, her skipped breakfast having left her with serious caffeine deprivation.

‘Bovril.’ Lucy laughed at her expression.

‘Since when did you start drinking Bovril?’ Legs hurriedly screwed the top back on.

‘Hector likes it.’

‘He’s not here is he?’ She looked around anxiously.

‘He was going to come down and play his bassoon for the seagulls, but he’s been summoned to an emergency meeting of the festival committee this morning.’

‘That figures.’

‘He looked terribly stern when he set out.’

‘Poppy wants to call off the whole event.’

‘She threatens the same thing every year.’

‘This year is rather different.’ Legs selected a paintbrush from the roll lying on her mother’s little folding table and flicked its dry bristles across the tip of her nose.

‘I know this must feel like hell to you.’ Lucy stepped away from the easel and perched alongside her, covering her hand with a warm grip. She was still wearing her wedding ring, Legs noticed with relief.

She nodded mutely, paintbrush up one nostril, shamefully
aware that her hangover was eclipsing the most hellish of her feelings quite satisfactorily, both her fury at her mother’s behaviour and her shame at her own. But her bad mood still niggled beneath the sense-dulling headache.

Her mother’s face, once so pretty with its full lips and upturned nose, had been gently sinking south for many years now with ever-darkening bags beneath her kind blue eyes and a puffy little double chin that she hated. This summer’s deep tan and the highlighted hair gave an impression of youthfulness, but today, make-up free, she looked terribly tired.

Too much sex, Legs thought sourly. ‘I’m sure Poppy’s throwing every threat at Hector right now to try to talk him back into her bed.’ She narrowed her eyes, watching for a reaction.

The hand on hers was carefully removed. ‘Throwing things rarely leads to romantic reconciliation in my experience.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

‘You’ve seen Francis again, I take it?’

Legs tried not to think about last night’s kiss in the bar. ‘We’re just throwing curveballs.’

‘But you two are talking again?’

‘Three guesses what the main topic of conversation has been.’

Lucy looked out to sea, her voice controlled and calm. ‘You said you came to Farcombe on festival business.’

‘Yes, we’re in discussion about a new guest speaker,’ she said self-importantly. ‘If the committee manages to persuade Poppy to let the festival go ahead, they’ll be voting on it today. Then the printers will be notified of a change to the programme: “scratch ‘Stevie Smith for the Ecstasy Generation’, pencil in Gordon Lapis”.’

‘Gordon Lapis?’ Lucy almost fell off the rock. ‘Here at Farcombe Festival?’

She nodded. ‘So his agent hopes.’

‘Surely Poppy will never agree to it?’

‘It seems she’s not averse, but then again she’s hardly been herself lately.’ She shot Lucy a meaningful look.

‘Francis must be over the moon. Gordon Lapis. What a coup!’

‘Why throw things when you can drop names?’ Legs shifted awkwardly. ‘Although I doubt the committee will share his enthusiasm, even with Poppy on side. Ptolemy Finch stands for everything they detest. And I can’t see the Titian poet surrendering top billing very graciously.’