Copyright © 2014 Margaret James
Published 2014 by Choc Lit Limited
Penrose House, Crawley Drive, Camberley, Surrey GU15 2AB, UK
www.choc-lit.com
The right of Margaret James 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
ISBN 978-1-78189-177-3 (epub)
ISBN 978-1-78189-178-0 (mobi)
ISBN 978-1-78189-176-6 (epdf)
My love and thanks to C and M and A,
who helped in all sorts of ways.
You light up my life.
Contents
Title page
Copyright information
Dedication
Acknowledgements
August
September
October
November
December
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
August - one year later
About the Author
More Choc Lit
Introducing Choc Lit
More from Choc Lit
Acknowledgements
Once again, it’s been a huge pleasure
to work with Choc Lit on this novel.
I’m delighted to be a member of such a brilliant team.
Special thanks to Tasting Panel readers: Kirsten, Jamie, Elke, Linda, Heather, Caroline, Liz, Jane, Julie & Marsha.
August
ROSIE
Once the dead are buried, they stay dead and buried.
They can’t come back to life.
They’ve gone for good.
But as I followed Mum and Dad and Granny Cassie out of the Dorset churchyard, I was still insisting none of this could have happened, that it must be a bad dream.
Any minute now, I told myself, Charlie would come strolling down the road from Melbury, wearing grubby trainers which had walked a thousand miles already and carrying a battered, filthy rucksack fit only for the bin.
We’d have a great big hug. We’d walk back to the house. We’d go into my mother’s lovely garden where the Jacques Cartier roses which bloomed for Mum all summer filled the air with scent.
We’d all be talking, laughing – that’s except for Dad, who would be shouting: Charlie, what the hell have you been doing? Where’ve you been? Your mother has been frantic! Why didn’t you send a postcard or an email or at least a text?
The dogs would all be going mad with joy, the stupid things, and Granny Cassie would tell us to calm down, to stop acting so daft, to behave like normal human beings. But she’d be laughing, too.
Maybe I’d wake up one morning and I would be able to accept it?
But today I couldn’t accept it or the part I’d played in it.
So the nightmares would continue, wouldn’t they?
I still had the video on my phone. Why did I keep watching it, again, again, again? I couldn’t seem to help myself, that’s why. Maybe I should share it with my parents? Or would seeing it hurt them even more than they’d been hurt already?
Why hadn’t I found the pen?
September
PATRICK
‘It’s partly the cute accent,’ Lexie told me, checking she had emptied that particular closet in our apartment.
The apartment we cannot afford, but Lexie had to have because the views of Minneapolis, of Minnehaha Park and of the Mississippi River are so awesome she fell in love with it, even though she hates to ride the elevators, so she always has to take the stairs.
She says the stair work keeps her in good shape. She’s right, it does. She’s curvy, sexy, blonde and gorgeous. All in all, she’s pretty hot, my wife.
But I digress.
‘Let me get this straight,’ I said. ‘You met this British guy, his accent’s cute, and that’s the reason you’re leaving Polly, Joe and me – your home, your work, your life – to go with him?’
‘I’m not leaving the kids.’ She threw more stuff into a case. ‘I’m taking them with me. We’ll stay with Stephen in Saint Paul.’
‘He has an apartment in Saint Paul?’
‘He has a house, it has a yard,’ said Lexie, who has always wanted to live in a real house with a real yard – that’s when she’s not wanting apartments in expensive blocks in downtown Minneapolis. ‘It’s on Grand Avenue.’
‘When are you moving out?’
‘A week, ten days. I’ll need to pack all Joe’s and Polly’s stuff, fix up their rooms at Stephen’s place. He said to call a stylist, but that won’t be necessary. We won’t be there long. Come October we’ll be going to Europe.’
‘You can’t go to Europe. Joe will be in school.’
‘There are schools in Europe, Pat. Stephen says they’re excellent in Surrey.’
‘Where and what is Surrey?’
‘It’s someplace near London where Stephen’s parents live. Stephen has a house there, too. He says there’ll be no problem getting Joe enrolled in a good elementary school.’
‘Polly isn’t old enough to go to school. So what’s she going to do?’
‘She can go to preschool, playgroup, nursery or whatever they call it over there.’
‘You and Mr Wonderful, you have it all worked out.’
‘Yeah, we discussed my options, which were—’
‘Leave your husband, take his children, but who gives a shit about your husband anyway?’
‘I knew you wouldn’t understand.’ Lex stopped emptying drawers into her case and turned to look at me. ‘Joe and Polly, they’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘They get along with Stephen. When we all went to the park last week they had a blast.’
‘You took our kids to meet this man?’ I thought I must be dreaming. ‘You decided you and they are emigrating to some cold, wet island off the coast of mainland Europe to go live with some guy you’ve known ten minutes? What about your job?’
‘Stephen’s on a salary which means I’ll never have to work again, and there’s no need to emigrate. The kids and I will get to go to Europe, in fact we’ll have a chance to see the world, to visit places like Dubai and Singapore. But we’ll still spend time in Minneapolis. We’ll still be Americans, still be citizens of the USA.’
‘You don’t have passports, Lex. Did you think of that when you were making all these plans with Mr Wonderful?’
‘We’ll have passports soon. I have an appointment with the Passport Agency downtown on Wednesday afternoon. We’ll go for expedited service and should have our passports inside of a fortnight, Stephen says.’
‘Lex, let me remind you there are laws to stop a parent taking children who are US citizens out of the US unless the other parent says okay. There was a case on CBS last week. If you think Joe and Polly will even leave the state without my full agreement, you must be off your head. You try it, and I’ll call the FBI.’
‘But you don’t even like the kids!’
‘I love those children! I’d do anything�
��’
‘You love them, maybe. But you don’t like their company. They bore you half to death. You know they do.’ Lexie pulled the zipper on her case. ‘I’ll drop this off at Stephen’s and sort my other stuff out later, if you don’t object?’
‘Whatever, be my guest, there isn’t any hurry. I don’t care if our bedroom stays looking like a member of al-Qaeda came to call.’
‘Patrick, please don’t be like this? It’s not been right between us for so long!’
‘What’s not been right?’
‘We’re not a couple any more. You’re so wrapped up in your work and students that you don’t seem to notice I exist.’
‘Lex, don’t be ridiculous! Of course I notice you exist.’
‘But we never talk. We don’t communicate—’
‘We’re communicating now, and we—’
‘I mean we don’t talk properly. We don’t have conversations, like married people should. We never touch except when we have sex, and that’s all we do in bed, have sex. It’s been years and years since we made love. Last week, I was speaking with a friend who told me I should get some healing, have some therapy, and now I’m thinking she was right.’
‘You mean you want some fifty-dollar shrink to tell you it’s okay to walk out on your marriage? Give you permission to treat me like a piece of gum, chewed for a while, spit out?’
‘I need to see more clearly, and maybe you do, too.’
‘Okay, we’ll go get some marriage guidance or whatever. We’ll have couples counselling, is that what you’re suggesting?’
‘It’s way too late for counselling,’ said Lexie. ‘Pat, these past few years I’ve been so lonely I felt like I had died. But when I met Stephen, he brought me back to life. While I’m with him, he makes me fly.’
Lexie looked at me with big round eyes like the orange cat in that cartoon, the one about the fat green ogre Joe and Polly love. ‘You can’t deny me the chance to have a life?’
‘You can have what the hell you like, Alexis. But I’ll never let some opportunist British bastard take Joe and Poll from me. Where are they now?’
‘At Angie’s place.’
‘Why are they at Angie’s?’
‘I didn’t want them to be here while you yelled at me. I’ll go pick them up in half an hour.’
‘I’ll pick them up myself.’ I grabbed my keys. ‘Does Angie know your plans? Did she agree to have the kids so you and Mr Wonderful could come to life together and go flying in the middle of a Thursday afternoon?’
I didn’t wait for Lex to answer me. I was too mad to trust myself to listen.
So I walked out the door.
ROSIE
I’d hoped nobody else would have this dress.
But that’s the trouble when you shop online. There’s some sort of cyber-voodoo that makes everyone end up on the same site and choosing the same thing. I wished I’d asked one of the new designers who have accounts with Fanny to let me have a sample for a day.
Why was I there at all? I didn’t know. I knew I’d been invited to this wedding, obviously. Jane and I had been at school together and we had been best friends. But last month I had said goodbye to Charlie. So I wasn’t in the mood for weddings, as I’m sure you’ll understand.
Why do people bother to get married anyway? Why not just have affairs? Out of half a dozen friends who’d sashayed up some aisle or stood under some palm tree or whatever over the past five years, only one seemed happy.
As for all the others – one was having counselling and had fallen for her shrink. One was separated, one divorced. One already had two toddlers and was very pregnant with the third, so she had to be certifiable. She needed to be taken somewhere Gothic and Victorian in a padded van. One poor girl was downright suicidal …
I wouldn’t have put any serious money on this latest marriage lasting long. Why do I say that? The groom and the chief bridesmaid were snogging in the shrubbery half an hour after the service ended. Or rather more than snogging. She had left her knickers lying underneath a bush, the best man had found them and he was threatening to auction them.
The whole thing was a farce.
The father of the bride had pinched my arse at least three times. I don’t think a plastic surgeon with a very exclusive private practice, the owner of a turreted and buttressed pile in Sunningdale, should have behaved like that, at least on his own daughter’s wedding day.
The mother of the bride looked really grim and also out of place. Most of the other women there were wearing flowery pastels. But she was dressed in navy polyester. She looked like a stewardess on Geriatric Airlines or maybe a receptionist in one of those old-fashioned Eastern European hotels.
I’m sorry, that was mean of me. Please excuse me while I go and scratch a sofa or destroy a cushion. I haven’t always been so sharp and spiteful. But since Charlie, everything is different …
As I was thinking about leaving, the best man came over carrying two glasses of champagne and wearing the chief bridesmaid’s scarlet knickers on his head. ‘Hello, gorgeous,’ he began and winked suggestively. ‘Where have you been all my life?’
I left.
I’d thought going to Paris for a year – I had come home in early August, several weeks ago – might mean I’d meet a man and fall in love.
Of course I’d been to France before. I’d spent a year at the Sorbonne. But there I’d met just students and students are a different species. Most are quasi-human, only marginally evolved.
I didn’t want to vamp my tutor. He was nearly seventy and stank of stale Gitanes. Yes, there were other teachers and some were even borderline attractive, but I didn’t want an academic. They didn’t earn enough.
Those thirty, forty or even fifty-something businessmen, I’d told myself, the ones who wear expensive clothes, drive Porsches or Mercedes, they’re the ones who’ll know exactly how to make a girl feel really special.
Ha ha ha.
I’d met a lot of rich, attractive Frenchmen, but half of them were married and wanted me to be their petite amie, an occasional girlfriend who would show their mates they could still pull. Most of the unmarried ones lived with their mamans out in the suburbs beyond the Périphérique and merely wanted sex.
I’d wondered what would happen if I sat upon my suitcase on the concourse at the Gare du Nord, sobbing like Linda Radlett did in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, my favourite novel.
A handsome, sexy Frenchman might notice me, perhaps? He’d offer me his handkerchief and take me to have lunch somewhere discreet and very expensive and tell me I was beautiful and fall in love with me?
I thought it was more likely that crowds of British backpackers on bargain weekend breaks would surge and mill around me, bashing me with their enormous rucksacks, while some illegal immigrant tried to snatch my bag.
I wanted so, so much to fall in love. But it never happened, and I finally decided there must be something very wrong with me. I remembered reading somewhere that love is almost always found in the last place you look. But in how many places did I have to look before I found the last one?
So now I was at home in Dorset, moping round the place.
My mother must have got fed up with me because she said why didn’t I take a little holiday? Why didn’t I go and spend some time in Italy or Spain or California, where it would be sunny?
I didn’t fancy Spain or Italy – too many tourists at this time of year – and trying to come to terms with what had happened in a place like California would have been a cliché, don’t you think? California’s swarming with counsellors and gurus and healers and what-have-you. I’d have found myself in therapy ten minutes after I got off the plane.
I was thinking I should go to London and see Fanny. There was no way I could return to Paris. It would be impossible. But I had a half-formed plan for something I might do in London …
Then I got a text from my friend Tess.
I hadn’t heard from Tess for months and months. The last time we had spoken,
she’d told me she was thinking about leaving the job she had in London, working as a buyer and negotiator in a reclamation yard. I’d thought she would find something similar, maybe in a bigger, more upmarket company.
But what she’d done was far more interesting than merely change her job. She was in Minnesota with her brand new husband – another happy couple, I couldn’t get away from them – a guy she’d met on holiday while she was in Las Vegas back in June, having an American adventure.
I knew she’d gone to Vegas by herself. She always liked to travel on her own. She said it was more challenging and also meant she didn’t have to do what other people wanted. She wasn’t always saying yeah, you use the bathroom first or yeah, you have the comfortable bed, I love to sleep on nails.
On her own, she could do as she liked, and always did.
She had often come to see me while I lived in Paris, staying for several long weekends and entertaining all my French friends with her East End Franglais. Garson, could you bringez-moi duh cwasons, seevooplay, et n’oubliez pas mon pot de jam.
So first I had the text.
Got married to a Yank met him in Vegas bet u shocked! At home in Saint Paul Minnesota now. Where u these days? TXXX
Then the emails started: ping, ping, ping.
She’d married the American because he was hot. She thought it would be cool to be American herself. Or, at any rate, to be allowed to stay more than three months and spend her husband’s money on some stuff. She got lucky there because her rich and famous husband could afford a lot of stuff.
‘Come and stay,’ she wheedled when later on that afternoon she phoned and we’d caught up. ‘We have this ace apartment in the smartest part of town. It’s in a block that’s got a man in uniform sitting at a desk and opening the door for you. There are two elevators, one for odds and one for evens. It’s not some rubbish walk-up.’
‘Do you have the space?’
‘We have loads of space! You can have your own en-suite. Rosie, you must come. We’ll do some serious shopping. Stuff’s so cheap out here.’
Some serious shopping. How could I resist?
‘I’ll be on the next plane out,’ I said.
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