The Love Letter (40 page)

Legs started to explain that her head and heart were at ever more confusing odds, but Daisy was so overrun gathering her brood, making a big champagne brunch, packing Nico’s things and chasing away the flock of angry bantams that had invaded the kitchen complaining that they’d had no breakfast, she hardly seemed to be listening and kept laughing or sympathising in all the wrong places. In the end, Legs gave only edited highlights.

Sometimes the two women’s long friendship was a comfort and therapy to both, but the confessional side worked better via email and long-planned phone calls these days. In person, Daisy was such a chaotic, cheerful, overextended multi-tasker that it was impossible to get her to concentrate.

‘I have three episodes of
Slap Dash
to script by the end of this week,’ she lamented. ‘Mum was supposed to be coming here to help with childcare, but bloody Gerald’s just sprung a surprise trip to France. I’m sure it’s deliberate. He’s furious that we’re
planning to move back to Spycove. I bet he wants Mum to flog it, eradicating a few more memories of a happy family life with Dad.’

Again, Legs kept quiet about what her own mother had said just that morning about the Adulteryhood years and Nigel’s affair with Yolande. But she did tell Daisy about Kizzy de la Mere’s mysterious parentage, her clifftop Kate Bush shanties and her sudden disappearance halfway through supper. ‘I keep imagining her swimming out to sea and dissolving into the waves, like the Little Mermaid, you know?’

Cramming cherry tomatoes and fat field mushrooms in between split-skinned sausages frying in a big skillet, Daisy sucked her hot fingers; ‘How fantastically fishy, although frankly Poppy is hardly about to croak so I shouldn’t think the matter of inheritance is particularly important right now, unless they bump her off.’

‘Don’t joke. It feels like walking into
Evil Under the Sun
down there, everybody has so many grudges and secrets.’

‘It always feels like that,’ Daisy sighed happily. ‘God, I can’t wait to get back!’

Today, with an offer accepted, she was busy turning all life’s punches into punchlines and seeing only the positives in life.

‘This Gordon Lapis connection is such a career coup for you, Legs, you must use it to your advantage,’ she insisted as she plated up brunch from the old brown Aga. ‘He obviously feels an affinity with you.’

‘He’s madder than the tea party Hatter,’ Legs sighed, reluctant to admit how many times she’d reread his heartfelt message about the Emperor’s New Clothes, certain she had let him down somehow.

‘And you’re his Alice.’

Seeing it from that perspective, Legs felt strangely buoyed up, her resentful affection for Gordon bubbling gaily once more. She had yet to email Kelly to make tactful enquiries about his sanity, she remembered guiltily. She’d do it as soon as she got back to London.

‘Maybe Gordon Lapis is the raven at the writing desk?’ Will joined them. ‘Oh boy, this is looking good. I can smell my cholesterol count rising already.’

He was in just as ebullient mood as Daisy, making the family brunch infectiously jolly. As the only one drinking the champagne they’d brought out to celebrate their news, he got increasingly raucous and indiscreet over lunch. Keeping the children in stitches, he pulled faces, tickled, told stories and play-fought with all of them, baby Eva on his knee, as flirty and happy as Legs could remember him.

‘Why are you driving a hire car?’ he asked her as they all wolfed back scrambled egg, bacon, hash browns and a mountain of fried toast.

‘It’s not hired.’ She felt her heart drum-roll. ‘It’s called Tolly; Francis gave it to me.’

‘Bloody hell!’ Daisy spat out a mushroom in shock. ‘You didn’t tell me that.’

‘Bloody hell!’ Grace parroted delightedly from her high chair, cramming scrambled egg up her nose with a plastic spoon.

‘Francis
has
changed,’ Daisy was too amazed by the car news to notice. ‘He was always such a tightwad.’

‘He was
not,’
Legs defended.

Her confused heart rolled over a few more times in her chest, full of nervous butterflies, like tickets in a tombola with dwindling prizes on offer. She wished they could have talked more. They hadn’t spoken about the break-up at all, nor had he mentioned the letter she’d sent him pouring out her heart so soon afterwards. And the Kizzy situation still mystified her.

‘My mother always maintains that Francis’s meanness is a reaction to Hector’s gambling,’ Daisy was saying. ‘Children of addicts either replicate the addiction or have an almost unnatural aversion to it, as in Francis’s case. He’s the same with infidelity.’ She gave Legs a penetrating look.

Legs side-stepped the deliberate dig. ‘Hector will probably start
gambling again now Poppy’s not there to stop him.’ She had a sudden and alarming image of her mother pawning the Spywood furniture to settle his Ladbrokes account.

‘Why so?’ asked Daisy. ‘Poppy had nothing to do with him giving it up.’

‘He always says she did.’

She shook her head. ‘He stopped at least a year before they met. I remember because Dad used to talk about it; he said Hector’s betting habit got seriously out of hand after he sold Smile and came back to live in England full-time. Then there was that massive clampdown on race fixing, with trainers being banned and jockeys suspended all over the place. The media loved it; rumours were rife about the big gamblers involved from the business world. It was all fantastically Dick Francis stuff. Hector’s name came up more than once. Nothing ever stuck, but Hector never went to a racecourse again.’

Clearing up together after the massive fried feast that Legs would be running off all week, Daisy looked across at her friend slyly. ‘Looking forward to seeing Conrad?’

‘Of course.’ Legs tried and failed to hold a self-assured smile.

‘You know,’ Daisy pondered idly as she rinsed plates, ‘perhaps it would be good if you and Francis got back together.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Legs could hardly believe she was hearing this after Daisy had been so against it two days earlier.
Et tu, Brute,
she thought weakly.

‘He can hardly care much for the redheaded poet if he lets her swan off halfway through a dinner party without a by your leave.’

They watched through the windows as Will and Nico built a bonfire outside; the girls were having a nap upstairs, the baby monitor propped on the sill between two aloes in need of repotting.

‘Mind you, have you read her stuff?’ Daisy went on. ‘I Googled her, and it’s like those dreadful poems you used to write as a
teenager, Legs – “our love is a wound razed from the shards of our hearts that splinter with the impact of every quaking orgasm” …’

‘Did I show you that?’ She was mortified.

‘Duh!’ Daisy stretched her eyes. ‘It was on the wall above your bed. Francis never struck me as the quaking sort.’

‘We quaked in our day.’

‘And now?’

‘He’s changed a lot,’ Legs admitted, relieved to be able to talk about it. ‘He seems so much colder, tougher too.’

‘He’s always been pretty impenetrable,’ Daisy sighed as she thought back. ‘It was one of the things we all found wildly attractive about him.’

‘I can’t remember him ever being this calculating. He even suggested putting on an act to break up our parents’ affair at first, and he made it pretty clear that he was happy to act out the bed-scenes as well as the ensemble pieces.’

‘You can hardly expect him to behave like a saint after what you did to him a year ago,’ she muttered, irritation mounting. ‘He’s bound to try to protect himself.’

‘But now he says he still loves me.’

‘Well that’s progress.’ Daisy was deep in the dishwasher, cramming plates in any old how amid a lot of angry clanks. ‘Did he mention the letter you sent?’

‘Not once. My mother has a theory that his broken heart has been put back together in all the wrong order. Somebody else suggested he might be after revenge?’ Legs thought back to her dinner with Byrne, when she’d banged on drunkenly about her feelings for Francis. It seemed like a lifetime ago now.

But Daisy clearly couldn’t imagine honourable, conservative Francis to be capable of such a thing. She straightened up with a plate still in one hand. ‘C’mon, Legs. Francis says he wants you back even if it’s just make-believe for a little bit, he can’t keep his hands off you and he kicks his new girlfriend out. Anybody can see he’s still mad about you. Just don’t break his heart a second time,
because it could be fatal. You’re playing with fire here, remember? Ex-lovers can be very flammable; that’s why they’re called old flames, especially one that was kept alight as long as Francis. I don’t want you to get burned.’

‘Oh, I’ve already got burned, trust me.’ Legs felt weak, thinking about her flirtation with a near-stranger, the devastating free-fall lust of that brief kiss with Byrne compared to the bittersweet nostalgia of reuniting with Francis.

‘But you two
are
getting back together, yes?’ Daisy asked. To Legs’ alarm, she looked as eager as she would asking Agnetha whether Abba really were going to stage that final arena tour.

‘I’ve promised him I’ll think about it.’ She swallowed a lump of panic.

Daisy still wasn’t tuned into her wavelength at all: ‘If you two get together again that will mean you’re in Farcombe lots so we’ll get to see each other. It could be like the old days; we children raising our broods by the cove where our parents left off.’

Again, Legs thought uncomfortably about the Adulteryhood years.

‘I have Conrad to think about too,’ she said firmly, although saying it felt like secretly proving her own point. The Adulteryhood years were already upon her generation, and as usual she had been a rebellious pioneer, along with Daisy herself.

‘Nico says Conrad’s impossibly pompous and that he’ll never marry you.’

‘Since when did you listen to the opinion of a ten-year-old over your oldest friend?’ she said hotly.

‘I happen to think Nico has a very good take on life. And he loves you to bits. He’s worried about you. We all are.’

‘Well I am perfectly capable of making my own romantic decisions, thank you.’ She shelved any intentions to confess all her darkest secrets to Daisy; that kiss with Byrne, which had felt like a last farewell, still haunted her lips.

But Daisy already knew one dark secret. ‘Is that why you’ve
bought your sister’s wedding dress on eBay? You always said it was hideous.’

Legs almost dropped the glass she was washing.

Daisy smiled wickedly, ‘Nothing gets past a ten-year-old conspiracy theorist.’

‘I should have taken him to Farcombe as my detective sidekick,’ she sighed. ‘He might have helped unravel the riddles there.’

Driving Nico back to London was just the distraction Legs needed; he didn’t pause for breath long enough for her to dwell upon the maelstrom she was leaving behind or the challenges that lay ahead.

After just forty-eight hours at Inkpot Farm, Nico was a totally different boy, his yells louder, body looser, attitude cockier and laughter endless. And he was very opinionated. Whereas Ros encouraged educational talk about subjects like history and wildlife, all carefully modulated and slotted in between church and after school activities, conversations at Inkpot revolved around people they knew, gossip, emotions and intrigue.

‘Daisy says we’ll all be able to have holidays together at Farcombe soon,’ he told his aunt excitedly. ‘Dad wants the Spycove tower room overlooking the sea as his writing study, but Daisy reckons he’ll kill himself on the spiral stairs if he’s drunk, which he often is, so I might get it as my bedroom, which would be so cool. Daisy says she wants a desk near a loo because she has a weak bladder and writes “loo-ney and loo-ed comedy”. She’s so funny. I think Daddy is a bit jealous that her stuff gets put on telly and he only ever gets things published in boring newspapers that nobody reads, but I told him his novel might make him as famous as Gordon Lapis one day, and that would mean movies and everything.’

He didn’t stop chattering the entire way to Ealing, almost all sentences starting with ‘Dad says’ this and ‘Daisy says’ the other, along with many an opinionated ‘I think’ the complete opposite. In Ealing, he was encouraged to learn, in Somerset to debate. He benefitted from both, although the transition could be tricky at times, especially given Ros’s protectiveness.

The hug between mother and son on the doorstep was all tears and delight, as cuddly as two bears reunited after a treacherous winter. But it all went rapidly downhill.

Furious that they had got back an hour later than promised, Ros was in a picky mood, her lovingly prepared supper burned beyond repair. At first she blamed her sister, ‘you never look at your watch, Legs’; and then Will, ‘I can’t believe he let you stay in bed until lunchtime, Nicholas; it will completely ruin your sleep pattern’; and finally Daisy, although her name wasn’t mentioned, as usual, ‘I suppose
somebody
gave you all the wrong things to eat and encouraged you to stay up too late.
Why
aren’t you eating?’ She hovered over him as he picked his way through hastily defrosted and undercooked wholemeal crust pizza, as chewy and crumbly as brown polystyrene.

It was a tricky course for Nico to steer. Increasingly subdued, he agreed that he did have a bit of a funny tummy now he came to think about it.