Please Don't Stop The Music

by Jane Lovering

  Please Don’t Stop the Music

  Jane Lovering

  How much can you hide?

  Jemima Hutton is determined to build a successful new life and keep her past a dark secret. Trouble is, her jewellery business looks set to fail - until enigmatic Ben Davies offers to stock her handmade belt buckles in his guitar shop and things start looking up, on all fronts.

  But Ben has secrets too. When Jemima finds out he used to be the front man of hugely successful Indie rock band Willow Down, she wants to know more. Why did he desert the band on their US tour? Why is he now a semi-recluse?

  And the curiosity is mutual - which means that her own secret is no longer safe ...

  ... Darker than most chick-lit offerings, Please Don’t Stop the Music proves a compelling story featuring two complex but likeable characters.

  Emotionally charged but also full of humour, this is an accomplished debut from a promising new author.

  Emma, Reviewer, News of the World. Jan 2011

  ...This is a good book but I suspect that there will be better to come from this author as she develops her craft and allows full rein to her glorious sense of humour. She's got a very good plot here and some characters you really warm to. It's a couple of days since I finished the book and I've been wondering about them, as though they're people that I know. There's a sensitive hand with disabilities and problems; you can understand why people hate them, but they don't diminish the characters in your eyes. More please!

  Sue, The Bookbag

  Copyright © 2011 Jane Lovering

  Published 2011 by Choc Lit Limited

  Penrose House, Crawley Drive, Camberley, Surrey GU15 2AB. UK

  Smashwords Edition

  www.choclitpublishing.co.uk

  The right of Jane Lovering to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the UK such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 9HE

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library

  PRINT ISBN 978-1-906931-27-8

  EPUB ISBN 978-1-906931-52-0

  MOBI ISBN 978-1-906931-46-9

  PDF ISBN 978-1-906931-07-0

  In memory of Peggy Thomson, 1922–2010

  Acknowledgements

  To everyone who has so patiently encouraged me, laid trails of chocolate to encourage me to my laptop and listened to me whinge about how haaaard writing is; everyone at LLS, especially Fran and Heather for spending hours plotholing. For Lyn and Linsey for being so long term, the rest of my kids, Vienna, Fern, William and Riyadh for … umm … give me a minute, I’ll think of something … My husband, Kit, for putting up with me, as always. Not that he always puts up with me, sometimes he just leaves the room with a tense smile.

  To Sarah Williams, wonderfully talented owner and creator of www.butterflybuckles.com, for all the information on jewellery making and for letting me rummage around among her crystals for inspiration. For all guitar-related stuff, for the Metal Hammer tip-off, and also for an incredible amount of posing, my eldest son, Tom.

  And, because I’ve been told that people mentioned feel obliged to buy the book, I dedicate this novel to everyone whose name appears in the York District Telephone Directory.

  Chapter One

  You know you’re in for a bad day when the Devil eats your last HobNob.

  All right, it was Saskia, not Old Nick, and any hoofed tendencies were well-disguised in sling-back Manolos, but from there on the resemblance was remarkable, down to the slightly reddish-tinged eyes and the air of immoral superiority.

  ‘Bad news I’m afraid, Jemima. Well, bad for you, obviously, not for me!’ She tinkled a laugh that I wanted to hit with a brick. ‘I’ve decided to start sourcing elsewhere.’

  Her tight little lips mouthed another few crumbs, nibbling slowly around the biscuit’s edge until I wanted to scream, ‘Just eat it!’ but I didn’t dare. ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘Your jewellery is very – well, it’s quite lovely of course, very intricate, but it is rather expensive you know.’ It takes weeks to build each piece. That’s why Saskia started stocking them in her shop – because they were exclusive. ‘I’ve been talking to one or two people in the States who make very similar pieces, and they can supply me at roughly half what you charge.’

  Half? What are they using, I wanted to ask, plastic and polyfilla? I’d already got my overheads down as low as I could by renting a room in Rosie’s little house and sharing workshop space in Jason’s barn. ‘I could, maybe, give you discount … use less expensive materials …’ I tried, but Saskia was already standing up.

  ‘Anyway, I’ve decided to give the shop a more cosmopolitan look, buy things in from all over the world. That’s what this darling little rural corner could do with, right? A touch of World Culture? All right, better trot now, busy, busy!’ She dropped the remains of the biscuit casually onto the edge of the table, paused for a moment as if waiting for the butler to sweep it off, and then with a quick shrug, was gone through the door in a waft of Arpège tinged with brimstone.

  ‘Coast clear?’ Rosie snuck half a shoulder round the bottom of the narrow stairway. ‘Thought I’d stay out of the way until she’d gone, she doesn’t need any more ammunition in the great Unpleasantness War. Sssh, lovey, Cruella’s gone now.’

  This was addressed to her baby son, Harry, who lay in her arms like a damp rucksack, grouching slightly.

  ‘She … she’s just dropped me.’

  ‘Dropped you?’ I tried not to look as Rosie pulled down the front of her pyjama top and fastened Harry to a boob as though buttoning him on. ‘From how high? Ow! Yes, go on, Jem, I’m listening, breast-feeding doesn’t leach away your brain you know.’

  ‘Yes, I know, it’s just … distracting, you sitting there with your chest hanging out and Harry grabbing you, farting and squelching.’

  ‘Sounds like a really good party,’ Rosie said wistfully. ‘Remind me again, Jem, what parties are?’

  ‘Excuse me, I’m just about to become penniless thanks to the Diamante Demon and you’re smiling indulgently at me whilst having a head full of fluffy mummy-moments! You might want to throw me out into the snow when I can’t pay my bills. And – and this is the clincher – she ate the last HobNob.’

  Rosie sighed. ‘She really is evil, isn’t she?’

  Rosie supplied the shop with her handmade greetings cards so she was well up on the Awfulness of Saskia. She, however, had long since branched out and now also supplied most of the card shops in this part of North Yorkshire. We’d first met at Saskia’s one afternoon when I was delivering a series of belt buckles, each a bejewelled representation of the Seven Deadly Sins, and discovered that we both loathed Saskia with a passion bordering on unhealthy fixation. Which came in handy six months ago when Rosie’s pregnancy meant that she’d had to ease up on the work front and the short-term lease on my flat in York had begun to seem restrictive. It was a near-perfect situation, except that the result of the pregnancy now had to sleep in a carry-cot jammed in beside Rosie’s wardrobe; when he needed to move into a proper bed we were probably going to have to fence-in the bath.

  ‘You’ll find a
nother outlet.’ Rosie tucked herself away and hoiked Harry up to her shoulder where he belched like a lager-lout. ‘You’re twenty-eight. Blonde and gorgeous. You make the most exquisite jewellery I’ve ever seen, and you’re thin, you bitch. Honestly, people will be eating their own knees to have a chance to buy your stuff. Anyway, Saskia never marketed you properly, you should have worldwide recognition for your designs, not a cramped corner of a jumped-up knick-knack shop!’ She pondered for a moment, flicking her chicane of black curls out of her eyes. ‘And I can’t throw you out into the snow. It’s not winter.’

  ‘I was being figurative. Honestly, Rosie, what am I going to do for money? What am I saying, it can’t get much worse, I already share workspace with a guy who reads Shunters’ Weekly, and not in an ironic way.’ Jason is an artiste (his ‘e’) who lives in a beautiful flat in the roof-space of the barn, like a materially successful pigeon, and he builds things out of scrap locomotives. Thicker than a bed sandwich, his chief saving grace is looking like a mixture of Johnny Depp and Jack Davenport. ‘And we both know she only stocked my things in Le Petit Lapin because I’d got friendly with Jason and he put in a word for me. Saskia fancies him so much she’d buy Liverpool FC if he asked her to. I mean, yeah, everyone loved my stuff but they didn’t like the prices.’

  ‘Le Petit Lapin.’ Rosie sniggered, ignoring my tirade. ‘Honest to God, Jem, I can’t hear that name without thinking that it sounds like a strip club. I’m surprised the York Board of Trade didn’t make her change it.’

  ‘With a husband as rich as Alex is she could call it “Rub Me With Your Willy” if she wanted to.’ I stared at the walls. ‘I really thought I was making a go of it,’ I said quietly.

  Rosie touched my arm. ‘You are making a go of it,’ she said gently. ‘People love your pieces, you only need to read your e-mails to know that. Don’t let Saskia get you down, other shops will take you on, don’t worry. Anyway, what’s she so uptight about money for?’

  Saskia’s husband Alex ‘did something’ in property. They lived in the same village as us in a much, much larger house. Saskia regarded living twelve miles outside York as the class equivalent to just-off-Knightsbridge, while Rosie and I privately agreed that she put the ‘colic’ into bucolic and couldn’t wait until she was driven back to town by the pitchfork-wielding locals. Sadly improbable, with the money that she and Alex threw at village institutions, but we still found ourselves backing away slowly whenever she complained about the 5 a.m. cockerel chorus, or the smell of cows.

  ‘Maybe her marriage is on the rocks?’

  Rosie snorted. ‘Yeah, right! She’d take Alex to the cleaners! Anyway, what did she pay you for the last lot? Two grand? Two thousand pounds is the kind of loose change she’d give to a beggar in the street, if she ever gave anything to beggars apart from a sneer and a kick in the ankle.’

  ‘She doesn’t actually kick them does she?’

  ‘Well, no,’ Rosie looked down at Harry’s sleeping head and dropped a soft kiss on it. ‘But she looks as though she would if no-one was watching. Anyway, my point is … oh sod it, Jem, what is my point? I thought my memory would improve after Harry was born. D’you know I’m beginning to think it wasn’t the placenta that came out after him, it was my brain?’

  ‘Well thanks for that image. Your point, I think, was that Saskia isn’t exactly short of a few quid.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, that was it. And she ate our last HobNob? Hang on a minute, nursing mother here, aren’t I entitled to any privileges? Look, I’m going to put Harry in his cot for a sleep and get on and do some cards. I’ve got a few orders to fill before next week so I’d better make a start now while it’s quiet.’

  ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go to bed for a bit?’ Harry, bless his little babygros, wasn’t exactly the calm, relaxed baby Rosie had somehow been led to believe she’d have, despite all the whale-song CDs and the hours of pregnancy-yoga, during which she’d looked more and more like an egg on a stick. Since his arrival she’d acquired shadows under her eyes and a pale, stretched look as though she was co-existing in several universes at once.

  ‘Nah, I’d better get on. I’ll catch a snooze later.’

  ‘Have you thought any more about … maybe …’ It sounded incoherent but Rosie knew what I meant.

  ‘I can bring Harry up on my own perfectly well, just as long as Saskia doesn’t decide she wants to turn him into a baby-skin coat or sausages or something.’

  Harry’s father was something Rosie never talked about. She’d not had a boyfriend for at least a year, or, obviously she had, for the duration of copulation if nothing else, but she refused to say anything about him. My money was on Jason, but then my money was on Jason for everything from funding terrorism to dropping litter. Despite this, I harboured a kind of hope that he was the father. He was well-off, good-looking and wouldn’t necessarily mean Harry was doomed to being several nails short of a shelf unit; Rosie was quite bright enough to make up that particular deficiency.

  ‘Well, if you’re sure … I’d better get back to the marketing drawing board. Again. “Cosmopolitan” huh! I dread to think what she’s going to turn that lovely little shop into! Should have seen it coming, I guess, she’s always wanted to be El Supremo of York City Centre.’

  ‘Wouldn’t she have to be black?’

  I stared at Rosie for a moment then my synapses managed to switch to new-mother mode of thinking. ‘That’s the Supremes, dear. Look, I’m going into York, trolling round the jewellery shops for another outlet. Do you need anything?’

  ‘New body? One where all the bits that are meant to go in, go in and don’t flap around in the breeze?’

  ‘I’ll buy you some big pants.’

  Rosie looked down at herself. ‘Can you get them neck-to-ankle?’

  ‘You’re not that bad. Anyway, you had a ten-pound baby less than two months ago, it’ll take time for it all to go back to where it was.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Rosie sounded tired and I suddenly had a brilliant idea.

  ‘How about if I take Harry with me?’

  She came over all protective, wrapping her body over Harry’s slumbering form. ‘Why?’

  ‘Distraction. I mean, last time I went round with my stuff, everyone was so dismissive. If I’ve got a pram and a baby, people might at least feel sorry for me.’

  ‘So you want my baby just so you can have a crack at the pity vote? Jemima, that is very immoral.’

  ‘You could get on with your cards. And probably fit in a snooze.’

  I watched her eyelids droop as though even the promise of sleep was enough. ‘All right. There’s a couple of bottles of expressed milk in the fridge, in case he wakes up.’

  ‘But you just stuffed him.’

  Rosie gave me a Look, which expressed the gulf between mothers and non-mothers. ‘Just in Case. That’s my motto.’

  ‘I thought your motto was Biscuits, Bustiers and Orlando Bloom?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She sighed. ‘Then I had a baby.’

  Chapter Two

  York has numerous streets and alleyways which fold in upon themselves to fill a small area with an almost limitless number of retail opportunities, like a kind of fractal purchasing reality. However, I soon discovered (a) that most of the shops, despite looking exclusive and designer from the outside, actually stocked depressing shades of the same eco-friendly woodwork and mass-produced earrings and (b) that you can’t push a pram over cobbles. Cobblestones might be picturesque but they take a toll on childhood constitutions, and Harry looked a bit wan as his head rolled around on the mattress for the third or fourth time. He was beginning to grouse tetchily. I peered down at his matinée-jacketed form. He was wearing a pale crocheted effort over a green babygro that Rosie liked because she thought it made him look cute; I actually thought it made him look like a string bag of sprouts but, hey, he’s not my baby.

  ‘One more, Harry. Promise. Then we can go home.’

  I lied, of course, because he was eight weeks old and couldn’t hold
it against me. Much good it did me. I might just as well have quit after the ‘one more’, no-one was keen and most of the shops were so narrow that I had to push in and back out, risking taking most of the stock with me. Leaning over the pram, spreading my portfolio over Harry’s head, didn’t really give the opportunities for selling either. The answer was always, ‘Sorry, they’re beautiful, but a bit expensive,’ until eventually I had tried every jewellery stockist in the central York area.

  Harry had begun to complain seriously now. I shushed him by pushing the pram energetically to and fro, making his rabbit mobile oscillate dangerously, while I perched on the edge of the fountains outside the art gallery and wondered what to do. I mean this was York! City of horse-drawn carriage rides and medieval stone work. If I couldn’t sell hand-crafted belt buckles here then I might as well go back to France. Where I hadn’t exactly taken the Continent by storm either, but at least my failures had had an edge of Gallic glamour. Or Italy; I could go to Italy again, where I’d discovered the population possessed a whole range of elegantly dismissive shrugs when faced with a belt buckle in the shape of the Venetian Bridge of Sighs. If the jewellery didn’t start selling I could write a book, ‘How to tell you’re being given the brush-off in ten European languages’ – hang on a minute. Wasn’t that another little alleyway there, between those two sandwich shops?

  Sure enough, the sun was shining down a passage I hadn’t noticed previously where the walls of the two shops didn’t quite touch. Dragging the grumpy Harry, although there was barely room for the pram to pass without scoring a line in the brickwork, I emerged into a small cobbled yard behind the shopping street. It contained two kiosk-sized constructions, one of which was closed and boarded but the other had a window display of technicolour music posters and T shirts with various tour dates emblazoned across. It also contained, coiled in one corner like a sleeping snake, a big leather belt. Belts need buckles, don’t they?