Love Lives

by Emlyn Rees

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Authors

  Also by Josie Lloyd & Emlyn Rees

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Two men. Two women. And every emotion you’ve ever felt…

  In 1871 Appleforth House was burned to the ground. Now, over a hundred years later, the house is being rebuilt – and so the lives of four very different people converge.

  Ned, a successful architect, is obsessed with restoring the house to its former glory. Focussed and determined – and bruised by a past relationship – he’s not looking for distractions. But then Ellen, a documentary-maker, arrives to make a film about one of the local landmarks, leaving her boyfriend and some tough decisions temporarily behind her.

  But as pieces of the past start to fall into place, the restoration also brings together Jimmy and Verity, two local teenagers: one falling in love for the first time, the other an incurable romantic, determined to find her fairy-tale hero.

  And as their hopes and fears come together they all learn some surprising lessons about finding love in the most unlikely places…

  About the Authors

  Josie Lloyd and Emlyn Rees each had novels of their own published before teaming up to write bestsellers together. Their work has been translated into twenty-six languages. They are married and live in London with their three daughters.

  Also by Josie Lloyd & Emlyn Rees

  The Boy Next Door

  Come Again

  Come Together

  The Seven Year Itch

  The Three Day Rule

  We Are Family

  For Tallulah – may you always love life

  Acknowledgements

  With special thanks to special agents Vivienne Schuster and Jonny Geller, as well as to Euan, Doug, Carol ‘The Engaged’ Jackson, Kate, Emma, Diana, Sarah, Gill and all at Curtis Brown. Thanks to everyone at Random House, especially Andy McKillop, Kirsty Fowkes, Kate Parkin, Georgina, Justine, Mark, Ron, Karen and Glenn. Many thanks to our friends and family for their incredible support, particularly Bob and Barbara Wines for so much, Richard and Anne Rees for lending us their home and for coming back safe and sound, Catherine, Moose, Liz, Ralph and Kirsti for keeping an eye on us in the Wild West, and Philip, Jenny and all at the Packhorse Inn for making Southstoke a great place to write, and to Anne Lloyd for the feedback when it mattered most.

  Chapter I

  JIMMY OPENED RACHEL’S bedroom door as quietly as he could and peered inside. There his dad’s girlfriend was, half hidden under the double duvet, alone on the double bed. In the half-light of the new day her thick black hair lay tousled across the pale-yellow pillowcases, reminding Jimmy of the clumps of seaweed that got tossed up on to the beaches during the winter storms.

  Rachel had redecorated in here six months ago. Gran’s old rose-patterned wallpaper had been too sickly sweet for her taste. It had been like sleeping in a box of chocolates, she’d complained. So now the walls were a neutral cream and Gran’s crinoline dolls had been relocated from the dressing table to a cardboard box at the back of the white laminated wardrobe.

  It made Jimmy sad, the way his gran’s past had been so easily wiped out, but at the same time he was glad that Rachel had fixed things up the way she liked. This was her home as much as his now, and he knew his gran was never coming back.

  Calm, Jimmy thought, that’s what this room felt like now. It had a clean, sweet smell to it, a combination of fresh laundry and aromatherapy candles, which the rest of the flat lacked. Plastered with posters, Jimmy’s room smelt of deodorant and cigarettes. A jumble of toys and clothes, his stepbrother Kieran’s room smelt of nappy sacks, Calpol and milk. Both had a busyness to them, which made relaxation outside of sleep almost impossible. But this room, neutral as doctor’s waiting room, exuded nothing but calm.

  And calm was what Jimmy needed right now, which is why he lingered in the doorway, vainly hoping that the room’s essence might somehow filter through him and unravel the octopus of nerves that had writhed inside him from the very instant he’d woken up.

  The source of these nerves was simple: Jimmy was in love. Jimmy was in love with Verity Driver. Jimmy was in love with Verity Driver, even though Verity Driver barely knew who Jimmy was. Jimmy was in love with Verity Driver, even though Verity Driver barely knew who Jimmy was, but Jimmy didn’t care. Jimmy was in love with Verity Driver, even though Verity Driver barely knew who Jimmy was, but Jimmy didn’t care, because Jimmy was going to make his move.

  And what’s more, he was going to do it today. He really was.

  Only, in the same breath, he worried that he wouldn’t. Because sometimes Jimmy only thought he was in love with Verity Driver. Sometimes Jimmy only thought he was in love with Verity Driver because he wanted someone to fall in love with. Sometimes Jimmy thought that if he only thought he was in love with Verity Driver, then he shouldn’t say anything to her until he knew for sure.

  It was a complicated situation, he was aware.

  Only sometimes it got more complicated still. Sometimes Jimmy wondered whether he actually knew what love was. He didn’t mean the kind of love he felt for Kieran, or the kind of love he felt for Rachel, or even the kind of love he sometimes – rarely – felt for his dad. He knew all about that. That kind of love was just there, background, like bricks in a wall. It wasn’t something Jimmy ever gave much thought to. It wasn’t something that could soar like a bird or plummet like a stone. It wasn’t an emotion that could be stretched one way or the other and yet remain the same. It wasn’t, in other words, the kind of emotion that overwhelmed Jimmy whenever he thought about Verity Driver – the kind of emotion he’d never experienced before, the kind that left him confused and ecstatic and terrified all at once.

  Was that love? Jimmy hadn’t a clue, but that’s what he was going to find out. Was it real? He’d soon discover that, too. And if it was, would Verity care? Well, that’s what today was all about for Jimmy: certainty. By tonight, all would be revealed.

  But not just yet. For now, he’d stick to his routine. He’d act like nothing out of the ordinary was going on. He’d put Verity Driver and all thoughts of love to the back of his mind. He’d keep it fresh for when it really mattered.

  Jimmy crossed the room and set down the steaming mug he’d been holding on Rachel’s bedside table. Weak white instant coffee slopped over the mug’s edge and down its side. He watched it spread outwards across the table’s embroidered cotton cover, like a mud splash on snow. And although the thought did enter his head that this might be a bad omen, he dismissed it immediately.

  Over on the windowsill the arc of red lights on the baby monitor flared, picking up the sound of baby Kieran coughing in his sleep in the room next door.

  Rachel responded with a deep sigh and her brow pinched into a frown that she’d wear for the rest of the day. Her ‘Mummy’ frown, she called it, whenever she saw it captured in photos, swearing blind that it hadn’t existed before she’d discovered she was pregnant with Kie
ran. ‘All right, love?’ she asked Jimmy, noticing him there and rolling over on to her side so that the duvet bunched up around her. Her accent had an easygoing Welsh lilt to it, even though she hadn’t been back to her home town of Fishguard for more than a decade. Jimmy had always thought that little Kieran was a lucky kid, having a woman like this to lullaby him to sleep at night. Jimmy’s own mum hadn’t been around to do the same for him. That had been down to his gran, who’d brought Jimmy up – what with his dad being out and about, neither here nor there, for most of Jimmy’s life.

  ‘I brought you some coffee,’ Jimmy said, nodding at the mug, noticing that the glowing turquoise display of the prehistoric Sony Digicube next to it read 8.05 a.m.

  Rachel rubbed the sleep from her tortoiseshell-brown eyes and looked him up and down. She tugged the sleeves of her white cotton pyjama top down over her exposed upper arms. ‘What’s the big occasion?’ she asked. ‘The T-shirt,’ she prompted, as he stared blankly back at her.

  Jimmy looked down at the old Iggy Pop tour T-shirt he’d borrowed off his dad. (‘Neat family heirloom,’ his friend Tara had grumbled at the time. ‘All my parents have in the way of rock and pop memorabilia is a photo of Michael Jackson with some chimp.’) ‘What about it?’ Jimmy asked.

  Rachel smiled. ‘Just that you’ve ironed it so hard that poor old Iggy looks like he’s had a facelift.’ Her eyes flicked down a notch, taking in Jimmy’s shop-fresh, blue-black combats. ‘New trousers, too, aren’t they?’ she observed.

  Her question was a loaded one. Jimmy hardly ever bought himself new clothes. What little money he allowed himself went on social necessities like hanging out with Tara and co. down at the Sapphire, or paying off the talk and text time on his phone. The rest of the cash that came his way he stuck straight into his deposit account, safe for the future. That’s how his gran had brought him up, to take responsibility for himself, and Rachel knew it.

  ‘New-ish,’ Jimmy responded noncommittally, deciding against getting into the whole story about how Tara had given them to him cheap after she’d shoplifted the wrong size from Denny Shapland’s shop over on Tudor Square the day before.

  ‘What’s her name, then?’ Rachel asked, reaching for her coffee.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘The girl you’re out to impress.’

  The accuracy of Rachel’s guess took Jimmy by surprise and, before he could prevent it, a blush had crept up on him and prickled across his cheeks. ‘I’d best get going,’ he excused himself, ducking forward and kissing her on the forehead, catching a hint of the sweet perfume he’d bought down the market last Tuesday for her thirty-sixth birthday.

  Outside in the hallway, a memory surfaced in Jimmy’s mind of his dad pitching up on the doorstep the year before, deep-tanned, crew-cut and beaming. He’d had a half-empty bottle of tequila cradled in one arm and an eight-months-pregnant Rachel in the other. ‘Meet the new love of my life, kiddo,’ he’d announced, blue eyes shining. ‘And get yourself used to her, because she’s going to be staying for a while.’

  Jimmy wished his dad would treat her better. The old man had split a couple of months after Kieran had been born, off to Portugal on the promise of regular bar and building work. He’d been full of promises of his own to move Rachel and Kieran over just as soon as he could, but – a weekend trip to Lisbon aside – he hadn’t come good on any of them yet.

  Out in the corridor Jimmy paused and checked out his reflection in the full-length mirror. The stolen combats hung baggy on his slim waist and, too long for his legs as they were, swamped his ankles, so that only half a white Nike tick showed on each trainer beneath.

  He toyed momentarily with the idea of beefing himself up with the grey woollen crew-neck he wore whenever he went out fishing on Arnie’s boat, but decided against it. If he wore the jumper, then the retro black leather jacket that Ryan’s sister had given him after the funeral would have to go.

  He shuffled his shoulders inside the heavy black garment, which he wore most days like a second skin. Anachronistic, Tara called it. Made him stick out like an operatic aria on a hip hop compilation, she reckoned, next to all the other kids’ Hilfiger, Reebok and Nike gear.

  But Jimmy liked it that way, looking different, letting everyone else know that he wasn’t the same as them. That’s what had always drawn him to Ryan: the fact that he’d dressed different and thought different.

  Lifting the veil of his dark shaggy fringe, Jimmy tried out a smile on himself, but then he wiped it off again. It had made him look apprehensive, like one of those Jehovah’s Witnesses who turned up on the doorstep from time to time. And, today of all days, he could do without that kind of negativity.

  He ran his hand across his jaw. Not bad, he thought, for a week’s growth. The stubble – adolescent and fluffy as he knew it was – still managed to make him look older and wiser, like he’d lived a little more than he really had. Maybe he should keep it going for a few more weeks, he considered, grow himself a mini-goatee, or maybe even go for the full Che Guevara.

  Sadness crossed Jimmy’s face as he remembered Ryan sticking up that massive red-and-black poster of Cuba’s finest on the Wreck’s wall early last year. Ryan had been stoned and it had taken him six or seven attempts to get it straight, but eventually he’d managed it. ‘There,’ he’d said, flopping back down on to the old mattress and staring up at his handiwork. ‘The Unholy Trinity.’

  At seventeen, Ryan had been a little old for posters, but posters there’d been, plastered all over the Wreck – the name they’d given to the disused and boarded-up cliff-side chapel they’d been hanging out in for years. ‘A practical necessity,’ Ryan had called them, ‘an invaluable aid in covering up the continents of damp which have made it their business to colonise our den of iniquity.’

  Next to Che Guevara had been one of Ryan’s hero, Howard Marks, the renowned Welsh dope smuggler. And beneath him there’d been a butter-wouldn’t-melt grinning head shot of Britney, culled from some teen magazine, upon whose forehead Ryan had painstakingly drawn a series of crude, rude cartoons.

  ‘No one’s really worth following, Jimmo,’ Ryan had pronounced with a sigh, staring up at Che, ‘because nothing’s really worth fighting for – not in the long run, anyway.’ He’d turned to Jimmy, who’d been sprawled on the torn maroon leather armchair they’d liberated from a skip down in the town. ‘The most charismatic revolutionary of his era and look where he’s ended up,’ Ryan had concluded, ‘stuck between a convicted Welsh felon and an American pop princess.’

  Ryan had then winked at Jimmy, the same way he’d always been winking at people. Ryan had never acted anything other than smarter than the people he’d mixed with. His near-black eyes – almost impossible to outstare – had always let others know he saw right through them. He’d been able to silence people twice his age – teachers, shopkeepers, you name it – without having to speak.

  Jimmy had respected Ryan so much that he’d got into the habit of never questioning his pronouncements. His friend’s confidence had been like a fire against which Jimmy had warmed himself over the years and the last thing Jimmy had wanted had been to douse it with doubt. So instead, this time as every time before, Jimmy’s response had been to nod his head and to smile.

  Which had been good enough for Ryan, who’d started to skin up a joint. He’d been coming out of his Jim Morrison stage at the time. His hair, naturally dark like Jimmy’s, but thin and needle straight, had hung low across the same jacket that Jimmy was wearing now. Jimmy smiled, remembering how, two weeks later, Ryan would have lopped off his locks, buzzing his hair down to grade two all over and ditching his gypsy earring in favour of a stud through the centre of his lower lip.

  Reinvention, that’s what life had always been about for Ryan, living as many lives as possible in the little time you had. Jimmy had loved him for this back then, for teaching him that you didn’t have to be a passenger all your life, and for showing him that you could take the wheel whenever you wanted and choose your own road. Even t
hough Ryan had only been a year older than him, he’d been a mentor to him, bigger than anyone else in his life, and certainly bigger than his dad.

  Turning his back on his reflection, Jimmy continued down the hallway into the kitchen. He swigged down the rest of his tea and swilled the mug out under the hot tap, leaving it to dry on the stainless-steel draining board next to last night’s plates and cutlery, and the ever-present row of plastic bottles and bibs and other baby paraphernalia.

  Something hooked his attention, and he glanced out of the window and saw a gull hovering there in the wind, barely five feet away. But then, no sooner had he seen it than it was gone, sheering upwards, leaving nothing but swirling clouds in its wake. Jimmy was seriously into his photography and he wished he’d had a camera to capture the sight, but now it was too late.

  The living room’s threadbare brown carpet was patterned with the stubborn stains of twelve months’ worth of tipped bottles and thrown bowls, all courtesy of baby Kieran and his growing appetite for destruction. Jimmy navigated his way through the minefield of second-hand Fisher Price and Tomy toys and other baby clutter, and on into his bedroom.

  On the upturned tea chest next to Jimmy’s box bed was a lava lamp in the shape of a space rocket, a cracked Jack Daniels promotional mirror and a framed photo of Tara, Ryan and Jimmy, the day Ryan had jacked an Alfa Romeo from the Royal Inn’s car park and had Schumachered it all the way along the coast as far as Lyme Regis.

  A nihilist. A bright kid, but a waster nonetheless. A dirtbag, a loser and a bloody shame. A kid who’d lost himself through taking too many drugs. That’s how everyone in the town thought of Ryan now. A young man whose life had ended in tragedy, driven to suicide by the lifestyle that had taken him over. That’s what the coroner had concluded. But Jimmy knew different. Ryan had been his best friend and Jimmy knew the truth about him better than any of them.

  T-shirts and socks overflowed from the wicker basket by Jimmy’s bed. Pringles tubes, chocolate wrappers and crushed Tango and Coke cans were scattered across the floor, next to copies of NME, Uncut, The Face and a variety of school textbooks and second-hand, mostly American, mostly modern paperbacks. Jimmy liked to read and liked to learn, the same as he liked to listen at school. But these were things that he wouldn’t admit to anyone except his closest friends, in case people thought him soft.