Sunshine and Sweet Peas in Nightingale Square

by Heidi Swain

  ‘To impress you,’ Jemma asked, ‘or undermine you?’

  ‘From what I could gather the underlying motivation was to try and win me back,’ I told her.

  ‘He’s determined not to give up, isn’t he?’

  ‘Well, he was,’ I said, my eyes roving over the impostor portrait again, ‘but I think we can safely say we’ve seen the last of him now.’

  ‘Well, I hope so,’ she said, giving my arm a squeeze, ‘and I’m sorry I didn’t stop your mum from asking him to visit at Christmas.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said, squeezing her back, ‘I know it was all done with the best of intentions.’

  ‘So, what did you say or do to finally be shot of him?’

  ‘I threatened to set my new best friend on him,’ I said, with laughter on my lips.

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Yep, and she’s the sort who enjoys frying the balls of meandering men.’

  ‘Is she now?’ Jemma laughed. ‘I think I’d get on well with this new friend of yours. I think I’d get on with her very well indeed.’

  I was dead on my feet by the time we’d finished tidying away after dinner and excused myself early on the pretence of needing a good night’s sleep before I faced Mum the following day.

  ‘She can’t wait to see you,’ Tom had told me after he had bumped into Dad, who was also propping up the bar in The Mermaid pub. ‘In fact, she was all set on calling round, but Dad went home and told her not to.’

  I bet she had loved that, but nonetheless, she hadn’t turned up and I was grateful for a few more hours on my own in which to get used to the idea that I was going to have a baby. I didn’t know how I was going to manage looking after a baby, how I was going to afford a baby or even how I was going to explain the arrival of a baby, but I hoped with all my heart that I wasn’t going to have to leave Nightingale Square. Lisa and Heather were the only friends I had who would be capable of supplying exactly the sort of no-fuss support network I was going to need to help me through it all.

  ‘How did you sleep, Auntie Kate?’ asked Noah, my nephew, at breakfast the following morning.

  ‘I’ve had better nights,’ I told him as I stifled the first yawn of the day and thanked my lucky stars that I wasn’t stuck in the bathroom with my head down the toilet bowl. ‘What about you, Noah?’

  ‘I didn’t catch a wink,’ he told me.

  On closer inspection he did look rather tired.

  ‘Did you not?’

  ‘Nope,’ he said, slipping off his chair and leaving his bowl of cereal practically untouched.

  ‘Come back and finish your breakfast,’ Tom called after him, but Noah carried on up the stairs.

  ‘Where’s Jemma?’

  ‘At the café.’

  ‘And what’s up with Noah?’

  ‘Swimming,’ said Ella, who had finally looked up from her phone. ‘It’s his class’s turn to go swimming again and he hates it.’

  ‘No phones at the table,’ rumbled Tom.

  Ella rolled her eyes behind his back and slipped the contraband device into the waistband of her jersey shorts.

  ‘And why aren’t you dressed yet?’

  Moodily she followed her brother back up the stairs, banging her bedroom door for good measure.

  ‘What’s all this about swimming?’ I asked, turning my attention back to Noah’s problem.

  I hated the thought of him dreading it so much. I had felt exactly the same when it came to cross-country and remembered all too well how that one hour of games used to mar the entire school day, along with the night’s sleep before it.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ grumbled Tom. ‘He’s just acting up.’

  ‘Well, from the look on his face it didn’t look like nothing to me,’ I shot back.

  ‘Well, you talk to him then,’ my brother snapped. ‘He can swim fine so I don’t see what the problem is.’

  ‘Maybe it’s not the actual swimming that’s the problem,’ I snapped back.

  I was determined that he was going to deal with the situation, even if he did have to get off to work.

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘Which lesson did you hate above all others when you were at school, Tom?’

  ‘French.’

  He said it straightaway with no hesitation.

  ‘And why did you hate it?’

  ‘It wasn’t the language,’ he said, leaning against the worktop and abandoning the packed lunches as he thought back to his high-school days. ‘It was the two-foot-tall Gestapo teacher who had it in for me.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said, hoping he would make the connection and get the point.

  ‘That bastard made my life hell,’ he reminisced. ‘It didn’t matter what I did, or how hard I tried, he always put me down in front of the rest of the class.’

  I raised my eyebrows and nodded in encouragement to try and make him think faster.

  ‘So, what’s your point?’ he asked.

  ‘My point is,’ I said gently, ‘that I wanted to remind you of the power something like that can have. Just because it doesn’t seem like a big deal to anyone else it can have a massive impact on the person involved.’

  ‘In this case my boy, Noah,’ he nodded.

  ‘Exactly,’ I sighed, relieved that he’d finally got there. ‘It’s probably a clash with the teacher, or some low-level bullying in the changing rooms, but it’s clearly ruining his opportunity to swim at school.’

  ‘I’ll deal with it,’ Tom promised, wrapping his arms around me and kissing the top of my head. ‘I’ll make it my number one priority for today.’

  ‘Good,’ I said into his chest.

  I was pleased I had been able to help.

  ‘One day,’ he said, holding me further away and looking right at me, ‘you’re going to make someone a great mum, do you know that, sis?’

  The words felt like a bolt out of the blue. I shook my head and swallowed hard to stave off the inevitable tears I could feel building.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ I croaked, ‘but I do like to think I’m a pretty cool aunt.’

  I had agreed to meet Mum at the Cherry Tree Café for mid-morning coffee (assuming I could stomach it), and a long overdue catch-up. She had wanted me to call at the house, but I had told her there was plenty of time for that as I was staying for a few days and that my priority for now was making sure I was around to help Jemma and Tom. The real thinking behind the public rendezvous of course was that it was neutral territory and would ensure my annoyance over what she had done at Christmas wouldn’t get the better of me.

  ‘Kate,’ she cried, rushing across the café when I arrived and enveloping me in a long hug, ‘you’re here!’

  She had already secured a table and ordered us a drink. Jemma cannily switched my latte for lemonade and disconcertingly winked as she decanted the crockery on to the table.

  ‘No coffee?’ Mum asked, noticing the change.

  ‘You know Kate’s had the bug from hell,’ Jemma said breezily, ‘her taste buds are totally up the spout.’

  That glossed over the unsettling moment nicely as far as Mum was concerned, but I wasn’t so sure about my sister-in-law.

  ‘Have you seen the papers?’ asked Lizzie, as she appeared from the kitchen with a tray of toasted teacakes.

  ‘Yes,’ I groaned. I was well and truly bored with the subject now and hoped my tone would put her off pursuing it. ‘Jemma showed me yesterday and yes, I do live within spitting distance of the lovely Luke Lonsdale.’

  ‘There’s no need to be so base,’ Mum tutted as she took two of the plates from Lizzie’s tray.

  ‘I’m not talking about the local paper,’ said Lizzie, her red curls bouncing behind her vintage headscarf. ‘According to Angela, he’s all over the red-tops today.’

  Chapter 29

  Luke was indeed ‘all over the red-tops’ as Lizzie had so succinctly put it and he continued to be for the next few days. Lisa and Heather were keeping me abreast of what they could fa
thom was really going on via multiple texts from ‘the eye of the storm’ as they called it, and to be honest, I was pleased to be out of the way, even if I was missing the sanctuary and peace of my own four walls.

  From what I could decipher from my combined sources of information, David had denied all knowledge of the portrait of Edward being a fake and was insisting that he had been as duped as everyone else by the seller in the US. So far everyone seemed to be buying his unlikely story, but had they known what Charlie had discovered, along with what Luke and I had learned from the letters I had found in the secret cupboard in my bedroom, I was sure they would soon change their minds.

  I was surprised I hadn’t heard directly from David. I thought he would be keen to ensure my silence. Perhaps he had assumed, given our history, that I would keep schtum out of loyalty. If that was the case then he couldn’t have been more wrong. I was keeping quiet because I didn’t want my name, face or reputation anywhere near the column inches that were suddenly devoted to the life and loves of a model turned ‘property mogul’. My silence was nothing to do with protecting my sneaky ex at all.

  However, the provenance of the portrait paled into insignificance in light of what happened next. When interest finally seemed to be waning, Candice set about cunningly using every trick in the book to keep the journalists attracted to her and Luke’s story. Given the explicit details of the numerous outrageous tales she had ‘let slip’ about Luke, and the kind of life he used to lead, it sounded far from likely that she was really planning her own happy ever after with him. Had it been me at the centre of the frenzy I would have gone out of my way to keep it all under wraps, but she seemed to be revelling in the revelations and the extra column inches they afforded her.

  I knew better now than to judge Luke on the basis of the life he had led; none of us had blameless pasts after all, but even if just one tenth of what had been written about him turned out to be true then I hoped the little life I was carrying inside me never decided to follow in his or her father’s footsteps.

  ‘So, is he the father then?’

  I practically jumped out of my skin as Jemma threw yet more newspapers down on the kitchen table.

  ‘What?’ I croaked. ‘What are you talking about?’

  There had been other signs that Jemma knew there was more to my aversion to hot caffeinated drinks than the knowing wink in the Cherry Tree. Or at least my paranoia was making me think there had. The longer I stayed in Wynbridge the harder I was finding it to keep the lid on my secret. My nausea had made a comeback and I was going to have to buy new bras soon as my breasts weren’t at all comfortable in the confines of such a restrictive cup. It felt inevitable that Jemma would suss me out soon. Having a daughter of Ella’s age had made her adept at sniffing out secrets.

  ‘This little girl, Jasmine,’ she continued. ‘You’ve seen her and Luke together, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, my lungs re-inflating when I realised I hadn’t been rumbled.

  ‘So, what do you reckon?’ she quizzed. ‘Is he the daddy?’

  I didn’t give two hoots about Candice or why, in this latest twist to their tale, she had decided to now imply that Luke might not be Jasmine’s dad after all. I was more concerned about how the vulnerable little girl at the heart of all this mess was coping. I was certain Luke would be trying to shield her from the brunt of it all, but with a mother like Candice it must have been an uphill struggle.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said crossly, ‘and to tell you the truth—’

  I was going to say that I didn’t care; but I did actually. Whether or not Luke was Jasmine’s dad, and what he and Candice decided they were going to do after the media decamped, would almost certainly have some bearing on my future. I didn’t expect or want anything from Luke, but I would have to tell him my own news soon. That thought alone was enough to crank my nausea up another notch.

  ‘What?’ Jemma urged when I didn’t add anything else.

  ‘I just hope it’s all sorted soon, that’s all.’

  ‘Me too,’ she said, flopping into a chair and kicking off her shoes. ‘Can you imagine the damage all this is doing to that dear little girl?’

  I felt my temperature rise as I realised I had made the mistake of lumping Jemma’s interest in the story in with that of the gossiping masses. I should have known better than that.

  ‘She looks about school age to me,’ she added, peering at the page again and shaking her head. ‘And the sooner her mother gets her act together and settles down, the better. Not that it’s anything to do with me, of course.’

  ‘Or me,’ I said.

  But it was quite a lot to do with me now, wasn’t it? There was every chance, in spite of what Candice was trying to suggest, that Jasmine was the half-sister of the baby I was carrying. I hadn’t thought about that before.

  Things seemed to be coming to a head over the next couple of days and the media was full of rumours that Candice was going to be breaking into television soon.

  ‘So much for you coming here to get away from it all for a couple of weeks,’ Tom tutted, as he tossed aside another well-thumbed weekly magazine.

  ‘What makes you think I have anything to get away from?’ I asked him.

  As far as I was concerned my trip back to Wynbridge was focused on building bridges with Mum and spending some quality time with my family.

  ‘I just get the feeling that there might be more to you being here than a desire to sort out Noah’s changing-room dilemma and curbing Ella’s obsession with her phone.’

  ‘Well, there isn’t,’ I shrugged, looking over at Ella, who was still glued to her screen.

  Tom tutted and shook his head.

  ‘I just wanted to spend some time with you guys,’ I insisted, ‘without the pressure of having to play nice because it’s Christmas hanging over our heads.’

  Tom laughed and I realised it was a sound I hadn’t heard often enough recently.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he yawned, ‘but at least, thanks to you, Noah can now enjoy his time in the pool safe in the knowledge that his bag and shoes won’t have been dumped in the showers by the time he gets back to the changing room.’

  I was pleased to have played a part in having sorted that out and Noah was over the moon and happily back to his mischievous self.

  ‘That’s true,’ I smiled.

  ‘Anyway,’ Tom continued, ‘the point I was really getting at is that it seems a bit odd that the unobtrusive little place you moved to, in the hope of enjoying a few quiet months, has turned out to be the hotbed of all this celebrity goss that the world has become obsessed with.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘ironic, isn’t it? I’m just grateful that I’m not there to have to witness it for myself.’

  ‘And none of it is really anything to do with you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I laughed. ‘What a ridiculous thing to even think, let alone say!’

  I shuddered to think what the world’s press would make of the stor y I could sell them. I certainly wouldn’t be worr ying about how I was going to afford to buy a car with the money I could have banked from that particular headline.

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Tom, eyeing me astutely. ‘And it’s probably just as well you’re not there.’

  ‘Now that,’ I told him, ‘you are right about.’

  The latest texts from Lisa and Heather were decidedly downbeat and I could tell they were getting sick of having to fight their way in and out of the gates just to water the tomatoes; Lisa had told me John was ready to thump the next person who blocked their drive and stopped him getting his van out for work at a decent hour. She had also hinted that David seemed to be spending quite a lot of time holed up in the house with Candice, but I wasn’t much interested in that.

  ‘Well,’ said Tom, ‘the media madness can’t last for much longer. Tomorrow’s D Day after all.’

  ‘Don’t you mean DNA day,’ Ella muttered in the background, referring to the fact that Luke had insisted very publicly on taking a t
est to shut the speculators up.

  ‘See,’ said Tom as he pointed an accusing finger at the newspaper. ‘Even my daughter is talking about it.’

  ‘The sooner it’s all over the better,’ I agreed.

  And I wasn’t just thinking for Jasmine’s sake either.

  I was up early the next morning, keen to distance myself from both the newspapers and my phone which, even when switched off, was proving hard to ignore. I planned to leave it in my room until the evening, avoid the papers at all costs, work like a trooper for Jemma and catch up with things after dinner. By then the DNA result would be common knowledge and hopefully the first flush of interest in it would have died down. I had no doubt that Luke was Jasmine’s dad, but it was tricky not getting caught up in the drama that had been created. Carole must have been wetting herself in excitement.

  My stint in the kitchen had barely begun before I was catching snippets of conversations from folk who were engrossed in the saga.

  ‘I’m shocked,’ I heard a girl telling her friend as she waited in line for her first skinny latte of the day. ‘It’s not what I was expecting at all.’

  ‘Well, I’m not surprised,’ her friend forthrightly announced with a purposeful sniff, ‘I had a feeling that this was going to happen all along.’

  ‘How could you possibly have known that?’

  ‘Why else would she have made such a fuss?’ her friend went on in a sing-song voice which carried wide and far. ‘Why would she go and say all those things about him if she was really planning to spend the rest of her life with him?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  By the time I had dried my hands and poked my head out of the kitchen door they were headed for the market square, taking their opinions with them.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right to be here, Kate?’ Jemma asked when the early morning pre-work queue had died down.

  The tables were already beginning to fill up with the elderly early risers who still shopped daily and made a stop at the café during a trip into town a priority. Looking around I knew I wouldn’t have time for an attack of the vapours before the second wave of orders were lined up on the counter top. It was hardly surprising Jemma and her team were tired all the time.