The Love Letter (90 page)

‘Everybody in my family always assumed I was too thick to function or too mad to care,’ she gushed in her lovely Joanna Lumley voice, ‘but I was simply never understood. I’ve spent most of my life in therapy and institutions.
The Girl Who Checked Out
is my bridge to the mainstream world.’

‘It’s a great title,’ Wendy nodded earnestly.

‘Your life-story will sell it,’ Conrad nodded. ‘And if we can get a quote from Gordon Lapis for the front cover, we’re made.’

Byrne was already waiting outside Shh with Fink sitting on the cobbles at his master’s feet, leaning against him. The Catwalk Collection had been removed from the window display, which now featured Autumn Separates draped over the pebbles, chains and photographs of Cici as a glamorous young bride.

‘How was it?’ He leaped forwards, making Fink tip sideways.

‘We can ditch the recipe for nail file sponge cake,’ she told him. ‘You’re no longer looking at a fugitive from the law.’

He seemed delighted, but she had a feeling he knew it already.

‘You spoke to Vin, didn’t you?’

‘I figured if you and I were going to set sail to Latin America, I should tie up a few loose ends first. Now he’s the one crossing continents and we’re still on dry land.’

‘I’m sorry. It wasn’t the justice you wanted for what happened to your father.’

‘It felt good enough. Dad doesn’t want to be dragged through all that again right now. He has a baby on its way, or “her” way as he insists on saying.’

She swallowed anxiously.

As sensitive as a horse, he picked up on her tension straight away. ‘Is it Francis? Was he difficult?’

She shook her head. ‘Francis was a gentleman as always.’ She took his hands in hers. ‘Kizzy’s in Farcombe, Byrne.’

‘Ah.’

‘You must talk to her. She deserves to know the truth.’

‘Can’t it wait?’

She shook her head. ‘We both know all hell will break loose tomorrow. Tonight’s the calm before the storm.’

‘Which is why I want to spend every minute of it with you.’

‘Liz is here too. Don’t you see it’s a perfect opportunity to get it all in the open?’

‘Then let’s get her to tell her daughter the truth!’ he snapped. ‘From what I’ve seen of Kizzy so far, I’m not wild on a family reunion, frankly.’

‘She’s really very sweet when you get to know her.’

He looked at her angrily, a childhood of fury burning from his eyes. ‘Her mother used to serve me undercooked fishfingers after school and shut me in the kitchen with Radio One turned up really loudly so I couldn’t hear her and Dad talking in the next room.’

‘That must be where Kizzy got her taste for raw fish and Kate Bush.’ Reluctant to let it go, Legs looked away irritably, and found her eyes inadvertently drawn to the solicitor’s office across the lane. Suddenly she realised something didn’t add up: ‘I saw you go in there the day after you arrived.’

‘That’s right. I had to collect some papers.’

‘Kizzy was there too.’

He shook his head. ‘Not with me. Perhaps she went next door?’

Suspicions mounting, Legs towed him across the road to study the building alongside Marshall and Callow. Its door was painted purple and bore a sign over it that she’d never noticed before.

‘Merle Peters, Medium and Clairvoyant,’ she read out loud then reeled back in surprise. ‘She was consulting a soothsayer!’

‘Well that’s me off the hook,’ Byrne turned away with relief. ‘Merle will have told her everything already.’

‘Do you think they saw a tall dark handsome stranger coming?’

‘They almost certainly heard me. Fink got very overexcited barking at a woman he saw peering in through this window as I recall.’ He looked across at her thoughtfully. ‘She had feathers in her hair and looked rather like you.’

She blushed, wondering if it would be far too nosey to ask what the documents he was collecting had been.

But he had already read her mind faster than Madame Merle: ‘The Deeds to Nevermore.’

‘You own Nevermore Farm?’ she gasped.

He propped himself on the sill of the solicitor’s window. ‘It came up for auction a few months ago; I bought it on a whim.’

‘But you were so unhappy there.’

‘I loved the land; it was my sanctuary. I want to knock down the old house and build something new. A holiday home for us, maybe. It deserves to be a happy place. Now let’s go shopping.’ He stood up. ‘If I can buy a house on a whim, I can buy you a new frock.’

‘Just something simple,’ Legs insisted as she followed him back across the lane to Shh. ‘You really don’t have to splash out.’

‘I insist. We are about to make a very big splash after all.’

Cici’s spider’s leg lashes performed a series of high kicks when she saw her young client returning to her emporium with a man in possession of a black Amex.

‘I am all yours!’ she announced orgasmically, turning the sign to closed and flicking the lock.

Byrne swallowed in terror and glanced at Legs who gave him an ‘I told you so’ look and resigned herself to being heavily accessorised. She was, however, determined to forfeit the fascinator and take the lingerie option this time.

Over an hour later, Legs and Byrne were finally released from Shh with more bulging carrier bags and boxes under their arms than the Beckhams coming out of Corso Como.

‘You really, really didn’t have to buy me so much.’ Legs was embarrassed that the idle
Pretty Woman
fantasy she’d harboured in Dublin had become hardcore WAG shopping in Farcombe. As the door pinged closed behind them, she was sure she could hear Cici already on the phone booking a holiday.

‘I really, really didn’t have any choice,’ Byrne laughed. ‘That woman is terrifying.’

Legs reached up to remove the fascinator from her head. ‘Tomorrow’s crowds will be a breeze compared to her.’

‘Let’s not think about it.’ He swallowed uncomfortably. ‘We have a party to enjoy. Your friend Daisy seems to have invited half the village. She’s even asked Poppy, I gather.’

‘Poppy refuses to go to any parties except her own.’

Byrne gave her a shrewd smile. ‘You might be surprised. She was looking through her turban collection when I popped in on the way here.’

‘Oh God, how can we possibly make tomorrow work?’ She was gripped by sudden nerves.

‘It has to.’ He let the bags and boxes fall from his arms as he wrapped her in a tight hug and kissed her thoroughly. ‘It just has to.’

As the barbecue sizzled and a bonfire roared in Spycove’s clifftop garden, the sun set over the sea with such a splendid blaze of reds and oranges that the coastline seemed to be in flames, the rocks red as hot lava, the woods glowing like a forest fire and the sea itself a shimmering sheet of molten tin.

Legs sat beside Nico toasting fat marshmallows on the bonfire, watching Byrne talk to Will with great animation as they shared an
adjacent log swigging wine from plastic cups, both men laughing uproariously as they flew through subjects like two running partners passing fast-moving landscapes at the same speed, able to keep perfect pace. Suddenly, she was reminded of her father and Nigel Foulkes.

‘We used to do this as kids,’ she told Nico, lifting her sizzling marshmallow to blow on it, ‘me, your mum and Daisy.’

‘You were all really close, weren’t you?’

She nodded, glancing past the flames to where she could see her sister looking out to sea, talking quietly to another guest whose blond hair was cast brightest copper red in the setting sun. ‘And Francis.’

He and Hector had rolled in about half an hour ago blootered from the pub, like a pair of naughty schoolboys on the rampage. Taking a detour on the way home, they’d clearly decided to gatecrash the Spycove barbecue, reeling around in an unruly fashion demanding to meet Gordon Lapis, and driving Daisy demented as she tried to stop them stumbling into the bonfire or off the cliff. It was no-nonsense Ros who’d taken charge of them both, helping Daisy to furnish them with piles of food and soft drinks to soak up and dilute the alcohol from a day in the pub, then posting Hector and his bassoon on a log with two chaperones to keep him busy while she took Francis to one side to listen to him reeling off reams of poetic quotes and ranting about his heartbreak.

Now, standing on the sunset-soaked decking alongside Francis, Ros had nothing but sympathy for her sister’s spurned first love. ‘My heart has been so badly broken, too.’

She shot her ex-husband’s fireside log a martyred look over her shoulder and edged closer to Francis, who was woozily pronouncing that Will was a louse for abandoning her, an intellectual sell-out and a buffoon for becoming a house husband. Ros couldn’t agree more. He launched into Milton again, staring out to sea, as noble as the Cristo Redentor overlooking Rio de Janeiro’s harbour. Admiring his profile and remembering how much she’d
secretly adored him as a girl, Ros was soon finishing the quotes that Francis was too drunk to recall.

Meanwhile, Hector played a lot of bum notes and showed no signs of sobering up, his loud voice still slurred as he tilted between his two companions like a wild-blown dinghy between sturdy boardwalks. ‘The young have no sense of dignity,’ he was saying now. ‘Look at us. All friends. All forgiven. All forgotten.’

Dorian North gave him the benefit of his charming, diffident smile and topped up Hector’s drink with his own home-made Dandelion and Burdock which nobody in the North family would ever drink because it led to vile wind and turned your pee green. On Hector’s far side, Lucy smiled dreamily, sketch pad on her knee as she captured moments from the evening in soft pencil and charcoal.

‘The young have no sense of what it means to be a part of our generation.’ Hector was trending youth as a theme. ‘We found free love in the seventies, got rich in the eighties, paid the price for both in the nineties, got naughty again in the noughties and now we’re like teenagers once more, swapping truths round a campfire and occasionally kissing each other after lights out.’

‘You certainly haven’t lost your boyish outlook,’ Dorian said with measured cool, handing Hector an undercooked chicken drumstick then watching with satisfaction as he ripped into it between drafts of burdock.

‘We’ve known each other how many years now?’ Hector threw his chicken bone into the fire and accepted another, along with a top-up of green pee juice. ‘Twenty? Thirty? All water under the bridge for us, isn’t it?’

‘Indeed,’ agreed Dorian and reached for a bowl of red eyed chillies he’d picked up from Will and Daisy’s prep table which he now offered to Hector. ‘Sun dried tomato?’

‘Marvellous.’ He scooped up a handful and shovelled them in his mouth, chilli seeds flying out as he talked. ‘You’re a good man, Dorian. Only wish old Poppy were so forgiving,’ he sighed. ‘She’s
been behaving mighty oddly this week. Mighty oddly. Think she might be having a fling herself. Gosh, those tomatoes are punchy.’ Blowing out through his lips, he drained his glass.

‘It might help if you paid her a few compliments,’ Lucy murmured, looking lovingly across at her husband. On her lap was a magnificent depiction of his profile, drawn in the style of a Greek god.

‘You must make her realise how much you love her,’ Dorian agreed, gazing adoringly back as he topped up the now-gasping Hector’s glass with more wind-inducing Dandelion and Burdock.

‘Appreciate your differences.’ Lucy patted his back as he started to splutter.

Now Dorian handed him a handkerchief to mop the tears running down his face. ‘Embrace what you share.’

‘Forgive.’ Lucy looked gratefully at her husband who winked back and offered her a chilli.

‘Forgive what?’ Hector lamented, eyes streaming. ‘Poppy is a bloody saint for putting up with my escapades. I could hardly blame her for wanting a fling. But I will kill the cussed cad if she is!’

On cue there was loud, whining putter as Poppy appeared at the wheel of Édith’s bright green Beetle, her stepdaughter white-faced in the passenger’s seat. Travelling at high speed, they slid to a halt just beyond Spycove’s gates with the aid of a forsythia bush. Poppy cut the engine, patted the steering wheel and laughed delightedly. She was dressed in bright purple harem pants and a scarlet bat-winged top, her neat bob accessorised with a small sequinned pink disk from which colourful plumage sprouted. Legs recognised it straight away; she owned an identical one herself.

When Édith opened the bonnet of the car, it was crammed full of her stepmother’s turbans.

‘I am going to burn these tonight!’ Poppy announced rapturously to the crowd around her. ‘From now on, I am embracing the fascinator!’

Hector had leaped up and reeled to her side, bassoon aloft, mouth aflame with chilli after-blast. ‘My darling you look as beautiful as I have ever known you. I love you!’

Poppy looked thrilled. ‘I know that, you silly oaf. Now play me a tune. I have been reborn; tonight is my baptism of fire!’

Hector lifted his bassoon to his foaming lips and then lowered it again, eyes tortured. ‘Are you having a bloody fling?’ he thundered, mopping his weeping eyes on his broad shoulders.

‘No!’ She selected a red velvet toque that was pure Lillie Langtry and hurled it towards the flames.