‘Felix phoned me up and suggested it: we were a bit worried you might fall for him all over again,’ Poppy confessed, ‘so we thought we would come and see.’
‘Yes, and it looks as though we were right. He was holding your hand when we came in,’ Felix said pointedly.
‘He wasn’t, it was only a casual gesture. He’d just asked me to help him look for a country house, because he wants a woman’s viewpoint.’
‘You’re not really going to take up with him again, are you?’ Poppy asked anxiously. ‘Only we never thought he was right for you the first time round.’
‘No, and actually I was quite glad when you came in, because although it was lovely to see him again, we seemed to have even less in common than we had before, and I was getting bored. I expect he has some other candidate in mind for the country house and really does just want a bit of feminine viewpoint when he’s looking round them.’
‘I think you’re naïve, and it’s a ploy to get back together with you again,’ Felix insisted.
‘You’re daft. I’m sure neither of us is interested in starting the romance up again.’
‘Is that a coffee cup?’ asked Poppy, tactfully changing the subject. ‘Since when did the Star start serving hot drinks?’
‘Just today. They’ve got a machine behind the counter, but Mrs Snowball is the only one who knows how to use it so far. I’m not sure she’s entirely got the hang of it, though, because although mine was fine, David said his was horrible.’
When I got back home, Jake was in the garden practising with the firesticks that Grumps had paid for. The effect in the darkness was very pretty and he seemed quite expert, so I hoped he wouldn’t set himself, or anything else, alight.
David rang me while I was watching (we had exchanged mobile numbers) to say that he was sorry he’d had to rush off earlier, but he was feeling quite peculiar, and was positive it was the coffee he’d had at the pub.
‘I’m sure it can’t have been because I feel fine, and Poppy and Felix had some later too. What sort of peculiar?’ I asked curiously, but he wouldn’t say.
I’d noticed that Mrs Snowball didn’t sprinkle anything onto our coffees, so I suspected that whatever ingredient she’d added to David’s had been at Grumps’ instigation. But I’m sure it can’t have been harmful, just something discouraging.
Chapter Fifteen
Welcome Gifts
Poppy turned up the following Thursday just as I was pouring hot cream onto grated chocolate to make truffles – one part cream to two parts grated chocolate.
She was still wearing jodhpurs and a quilted gilet, but must have been to a Parish Council meeting, since she had changed her usual T-shirt for a fairly disastrous spotted blouse in mustard with a bow at the neck.
‘Oh good,’ I said, ‘I need an extra pair of hands. I’m dividing this mixture in half and I need you to keep stirring the other bowl until I tell you to stop.’
She took the spoon and obediently started to stir. ‘This smells lovely! What are you making?’
‘Truffles. I thought I might try combining two of my favourite flavours, vanilla and cinnamon, and see what happened. Yours will just have natural vanilla flavouring and I’ll roll them in powdered cinnamon, but I’ll add both ingredients to my batch and dust with powdered chocolate.’
When they were blended I transferred them to two labelled plastic boxes ready to be put in the fridge to firm up. ‘There we are, I can finish those off later. Now come on, we’ll have a cup of coffee and you can tell me all the latest Parish Council gossip. I can see you’re dying to!’
She followed me into the kitchen and said, ‘Well, it was Mr Merryman’s last meeting, because he hands over to the new vicar officially on Monday morning. Miss Winter thanked him and we gave him a present – a loving cup in that blue pottery they sell to the tourists up at Winter’s End. But we still don’t know who the new vicar is!’
‘What, still?’ I handed her a mug and we went into the sitting room.
‘No, apparently he’s been in America on business and he’s only flying back on Sunday and then coming straight down to Sticklepond. But the exciting thing is that he’s invited the whole Parish Council round for drinks that evening! Salford Minchin delivered the invitation to Miss Winter, but the signature was as unreadable as the bishop’s, and he just shoved it through the letterbox and cycled off before she could question him.’
‘Didn’t you tell me he communicated in grunts anyway?’
‘He does seem pretty monosyllabic, especially with women,’ she agreed. ‘Given his history, I suppose that isn’t surprising. Miss Winter has been calling up the bishop, trying to find out who the vicar is, but his secretary keeps telling her he is unavailable, so now she suspects that he’s appointed someone so disreputable he daren’t tell her the name!’
‘He can’t be that bad, or they wouldn’t have ordained him in the first place. And any vicar is better than none, surely?’
‘Yes, that’s what I said to the others. Anyway, we’ve decided to take buffet food to the vicarage on Sunday and make it a bit of a welcoming party. Effie Yatton said Maria Minchin’s idea of a canapé was cold cheese on toast cut into triangles, and since the new vicar is a bachelor, he probably wouldn’t have thought of food.’
‘Is he? At least you know that much about him.’
‘That’s about all we do know – except that he must be well off, of course, to afford all the renovations going on up at the vicarage. Filthy rich.’
Her denim-blue eyes were bright and her cheeks flushed. She seemed amazingly excited just because the Parish Council were going to throw a welcoming party for a jaded, ageing, ex-pop star and still-nameless vicar…though actually, I was starting to feel a bit left out of things and would have liked to have gone too!
‘What are you taking as your contribution?’
‘A cake – and I can’t imagine why on earth I offered to make one, when it’s the thing I’m truly hopeless at!’
‘You could hardly turn up at a party with a Yorkshire pudding,’ I pointed out, since those are her speciality.
‘No, that’s true, though there’s going to be a pretty weird mix of food anyway. Hebe Winter said she was going to get her cook to make a tray of sushi, because she thought that was the sort of thing the vicar would be used to eating. Her great-niece, Sophy Winter’s daughter, spent several months in Japan and she’s shown her how to make them. Otherwise it will be sausage rolls, crisps, nuts and olives – and my disastrous cake.’
‘It’s not going to be a disaster. I have a whole, fresh, uncut fruitcake in the tin right at this moment that you can take. You know Jake loves them, so I’m forever baking them, two at a time.’
‘Oh, thank you, Chloe!’ she said, her face lighting up. ‘Though isn’t it a bit like cheating?’
‘Not any more than Miss Winter telling her cook to make sushi! But if we ice it now, you will have had a hand in it, won’t you?’
‘I suppose I will,’ she agreed, brightening.
So we covered it with marzipan and roll-out fondant, then added a snow-covered church from my biscuit tin of cake-decorating odds and ends. Poppy was all for adding the stagecoach and horses that originally made up the rest of the Victorian Christmas scene, but I thought that would be over-egging the pudding. Instead she used my set of small metal letter cutters to write ‘Welcome Vicar’ around the edge in left-over icing, tinted a froggy green, which was the only shade of natural food colour I had in the cupboard.
When we’d finished she helped me to clean up the kitchen, over which icing sugar had drifted like snow, then said, ‘I’d like to buy some Chocolate Wishes to take too. Twelve should do it, even including the Minchins.’
‘Is that a good idea? Hebe Winter might not be pleased if she finds out where they came from.’
‘I don’t see why not. She said she didn’t mind a chocolate shop, it was only the museum she objected to. Besides, I wanted the angel-shaped Wishes and I can’t see why she should objec
t to those. I mean, angels are good things, right? That one we saw looked quite stern, but I wasn’t frightened of her.’
Poppy used to say that about the maths teacher at school, who petrified her. But I hadn’t thought our angel was scary, she just looked as if her mind was on other, deeper, things.
‘The Lucifer-type fallen angel element aren’t so good, Poppy. Don’t you remember when we did Paradise Lost?’
‘Oh, I always rather liked Lucifer. He was just a bit too ambitious.’
I gazed at her, speechless. After a lifetime of being friends, she can sometimes still surprise me.
‘But yours are all good angels and the messages inside say only helpful or comforting things, Chloe. So I thought they would be appropriate and different. Fun. I bet the new vicar won’t have seen anything like them before.’
‘No, probably not,’ I agreed, and would have given them to her except she insisted on paying. They were a new batch, one I had said the latest version of the chocolate charm over – Mayan specials. I can’t really see where the Mayans and guardian angels meet, but I expect they had something similar, even if they did seem to be a violent lot (the Mayans, not the angels).
‘Hebe Winter is hoping the new vicar is a much stronger character than poor Mr Merryman, because Laurence Yatton has been surfing the internet and found out all kinds of unsavoury things about the Mr Mann-Drake who is buying Badger’s Bolt!’
‘Well, we already knew that from the stuff Jake printed out for Grumps, didn’t we?’ I pointed out. ‘Did you see the photograph of him wearing a sort of druid robe, all hollow-cheeked and cadaverous? But perhaps he’s just a very peculiar old man with more money than sense, who likes dressing up and holding rather off parties.’
‘Perhaps,’ she agreed doubtfully, then looked at the cuckoo clock and got up. ‘Look at the time! I must go – and thanks for the cake, Chloe!’
‘I’ll save you a couple of the new truffles to try too,’ I promised.
When she’d gone, clutching a cake tin, I removed the chilled truffle mixtures from the fridge and rolled teaspoonfuls into little balls between my palms, coating one batch in cocoa powder and the other in the cinnamon. I tasted one of each before putting them back in the fridge and they were equally delicious!
Unfortunately, Jake thought so too, and I had to forcibly remove the last couple from him later so I could save them for Poppy – though, of course, I could always make some more…
As a thank you for helping with the cake, Poppy rang early next day and invited me out for a hack, which she does sometimes anyway, when not fully booked up. I originally learned to ride on Poppy’s first pony and I enjoyed it, even if I never got bitten by pony-mania as badly as she did.
This time it was just the two of us, with Poppy riding her beloved Honeybun and me on an elderly grey called Frosty. It was a brisk, cold, sunny March day, so it certainly blew the cobwebs away, and we were just coming back along the bridle path through part of the Winter’s End estate when we came across Hebe Winter, standing in silent contemplation among a patch of wild garlic.
She looked as if she’d been there for some time – perhaps a decade or two. And I’m not saying she was having an out-of-body experience, but there were no lights on and nobody was home for several long minutes when Poppy stopped to introduce me. Then life slid into her wide, blank eyes as though someone had pushed a slide into a projector: spooky.
‘Miss Winter, this is my best friend, Chloe Lyon. You remember I told you about her? She makes chocolates.’
Restored to herself, Miss Winter’s searchlight-bright blue gaze rested on me in a way that would probably have totally disconcerted me, had I not had a grandfather like Grumps.
‘Gregory Lyon’s granddaughter? We have already met, I think – briefly.’
‘Hello, Miss Winter,’ I said cheerfully. ‘Isn’t it a lovely day for March?’
‘I expected nothing less,’ she stated, then turned on her heel and strode off, the greenish tweed of her cape blending with the shrubbery. I’d have liked to have known what she had in the cloth-covered basket over her arm, because it was moving.
Back at the stables, while Poppy was still fussing over Honeybun, her mum, Janey, cornered me in the tack-room.
Though you wouldn’t think it, she was a lot closer to sixty than fifty, like Mags and my missing mother, Lou, and slim and attractive in a haggard sort of way. She was wearing buff-coloured, skin-tight breeches and a checked shirt unbuttoned to just south of decent. Her hair is golden, rather than sandy like Poppy’s, and although her eyebrows and lashes might once have been pale, she kept them tinted dark brown. I wished Poppy would, because it would take away that permanently startled look.
And it was Poppy she wanted to talk about, which made me feel a bit uncomfortable because since she’s my best friend I felt I couldn’t really discuss her, even with her mother. So mostly I just listened while Janey chain-smoked in an edgy sort of way, and told me how she wished Poppy could find a decent man.
‘She’s the marrying-and-settling-down-with-a-family kind, but she’s never going to find someone if she doesn’t bother more about clothes and makeup, or listen to any of my advice, is she?’
‘She’s been going on quite a few dates lately, through the dating column in The Times,’ I said defensively, though two hardly counts as a lot.
Janey shrugged. ‘If she has, I bet she’s never been out twice with the same man. They don’t ask her again, do they?’
‘One of them did, but it turned out he was interested in the wrong sort of outdoor pursuits. Still, you have to get out there and look, if you want a partner, don’t you?’
‘I’m not convinced that the sort of man she needs puts adverts in newspapers,’ Janey said, flicking ash about in a way you really shouldn’t do in riding stables. I only hoped their insurance was fully up to date and entirely comprehensive.
‘Perhaps not, but it’s going to work out OK: I’ve read the Angel cards and Zillah read both the Tarot and the leaves for her the other day, and they all say that she’ll find love closer, and sooner, than she thinks.’
Janey looked at me through a haze of smoke. ‘Then I only hope it isn’t one of my ex-boyfriends, because I don’t think any of them are her type.’
‘I’m sure it won’t be. Poppy couldn’t possibly go out with a man that you had gone out with. She would find it really weird.’ And since most of the eligible men in the neighbourhood were Janey’s cast-offs, it materially had to lessen her chances of ever finding someone.
‘Would she?’ She gazed at me rather blankly. ‘I don’t know why it is, Chloe, but I feel sort of guilty that she hasn’t found anyone. I mean, I’ve always been nice when she’s brought a boyfriend home in the past, haven’t I?’
Too nice, that had been the problem! Twice when she was younger Poppy had found some pleasant and innocuous boy who seemed to be on the same wavelength, but they always completely lost interest once they came within Janey’s orbit.
‘I don’t think I’ve been a terribly good mother, on the whole,’ Janey confessed, viciously grinding the cigarette stub out under one booted heel.
I was surprised by this rare moment of introspection. None of the former Wilde’s Women were prone to look at their innermost deep feelings, even supposing they had any. I’m pretty sure my mother didn’t.
‘Oh, I don’t know, Janey – at least you were always around when Poppy needed you, which was more than Mags or Lou managed. And she had ponies and birthday parties, and you let us camp in the paddock and have midnight feasts and things like that, a bit like the children in an Enid Blyton novel.’
She smiled. ‘Thanks, Chloe, I hadn’t thought of it like that.’
‘I suppose you don’t want to tell me where Mum has got to, do you?’ I asked hopefully, thinking I would try my luck while she seemed to be in an unusually forthcoming mood.
But a shutter seemed to come down. ‘Me? Why should you think I would know?’
‘Because I’m sure Mag
s does and when one of you knows something, you all know it. Only she won’t say either, although I suspect it’s Goa.’
She neither confirmed nor denied this, simply changed the subject back. ‘Do you know what the cards meant about Poppy?’
‘I’m starting to have an inkling, but we’ll have to wait and see if I’m right.’
Now I could see that Poppy and Felix were made for each other, I only wondered why I hadn’t spotted it before. The only problem was making the two of them look at each other with fresh eyes…
I’d have to work on it.
That evening Chas Wilde phoned up again, this time to say he would be in the north soon and would like to pop in for a quick visit.
‘It’s ages since I’ve seen you, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘How are you settling into your new home?’
‘Oh, I love it,’ I said abstractedly, then on a sudden impulse took the plunge and added, ‘and I’m glad you rang, because there’s something I want to talk to you about.’
‘That sounds ominous!’ he replied cautiously.
‘No, not really, though it is difficult. You see, when I was packing up to move, I found some of Mum’s old letters.’
He sighed. ‘I think I can guess what you want to talk about, then, and it’s long overdue, after all. You want to know how your mother and I…came together?’
‘Not exactly. Knowing Mum, I can imagine. I also know she got pregnant with me on purpose, as a sort of insurance policy after Wilde’s Women disbanded, because she told me so.’
‘She would. But I did a wrong thing in a weak moment and I had to pay for it, though I never grudged one penny I gave her to support you, Chloe,’ he said sincerely.
‘I know that,’ I answered, because Chas is a kind, decent man, weak moment or not. ‘But the thing is, I’ve discovered that she also told another man that he was my father too, so you might have spent eighteen years paying out for a child that wasn’t your own!’
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