PRAISE FOR AMANDA PROWSE
‘Amanda Prowse is the queen of family drama’
Daily Mail
‘A deeply emotional, unputdownable read’
Red
‘Heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal measure’
The Lady
‘Amanda Prowse is the queen of heartbreak fiction’
The Mail Online
‘Captivating, heartbreaking and superbly written’
Closer
‘Uplifting and positive but you may still need a box of tissues’
Cosmopolitan
‘You’ll fall in love with this’
Cosmopolitan
‘Powerful and emotional drama that packs a real punch’
Heat
‘Warmly accessible but subtle . . . moving and inspiring’
Daily Mail
‘Magical’
Now
ALSO BY AMANDA PROWSE
Novels
Poppy Day
What Have I Done?
Clover’s Child
A Little Love
Will You Remember Me?
Christmas for One
A Mother’s Story
Perfect Daughter
The Second Chance Café
Three and a Half Heartbeats
Another Love
My Husband’s Wife
I Won’t be Home for Christmas
The Food of Love
The Idea of You
The Art of Hiding
Anna
Theo
How to Fall in Love Again
The Coordinates of Loss
The Girl in the Corner
The Things I Know
The Light in the Hallway
Novellas
The Game
Something Quite Beautiful
A Christmas Wish
Ten Pound Ticket
Imogen’s Baby
Miss Potterton’s Birthday Tea
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Lionhead Media Ltd
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542014496
ISBN-10: 1542014492
Cover design by Ghost Design
This book is for everyone and everything I love in Norway – a country I adore. It is for all the incredible cities I have visited: Trondheim, Stavanger, Kristiansand, Tromsø, Bergen, and my beloved Oslo. It’s for all my friends, my readers and my colleagues. Each time I visit I leave a little bit of my heart with you. With love, Mandy Xx
CONTENTS
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
EPILOGUE
BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ONE
It was late August, and had been one of those long, lazy hazy days of summer when the sun rose slowly and lingered late into the evening. Victoria had moaned about the fierce heat, knowing full well that on chilly winter days she would give anything for a glimpse of the sun. It took all of her strength to lift a hand and swat the darned fly away from the front of her face. In this balmy clime, Rosebank, their large square red-bricked Edwardian home on the outskirts of Epsom, with its rolling Downs and only a short train ride from the hubbub of the capital, felt closer to an African savannah than the suburbs. Especially if that savannah had a Pizza Express, a Waitrose and a roaring social scene based around the horse-racing calendar. Not that Victoria’s social life was roaring. The truth was it didn’t even mewl.
She and her gran, Prim, had mostly spent the day lying on the wide wooden veranda that ran along the back of the house, with buttons undone, shorts rolled or skirts lifted, and with wide-brimmed hats askew on their heads in the hope of shielding their pale, freckled skin from the harsh sun. Victoria, in a familiar pose, held a book close to her face, squinting behind her sunglasses. Her long curly chestnut hair, shot through with gold, was tied loosely at the nape of her narrow neck. While Prim prayed aloud to the ‘Good lord above’ for a breeze.
‘Does he ever actually answer your prayers, Prim?’ Victoria asked, lifting her eyes briefly from the pages of her novel.
The older woman looked wistfully out over the wide bowl of the lake, which her grandparents had, by all accounts, dug out by hand, wielding shovels and two rickety wheelbarrows for a whole summer, long before the days of regulated planning permission.
‘Yes, sometimes. But not always.’ Prim took a slow intake of breath and pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve, as she was wont to do from time to time when her grief bubbled to the surface and caused ripples of sadness, even on a glorious day like this. ‘I do miss him.’
‘I know.’ Victoria reached out and laid her palm over the crêpey back of Prim’s hand. The old lady nodded and sniffed. Victoria now abandoned her book entirely. ‘I always think how unfair it is that you lost my mum and then Grandpa.’
‘Well, life isn’t fair, is it? And besides, I got you, so it wasn’t all bad. And now, my darling, you have finished school and are, I believe, almost fully formed, no longer precocious, but mature; an industrious coper, the very best kind of person!’ Prim smiled and returned the slightly moistened handkerchief to the depths of her sleeve. ‘But yes, you are right. It is monstrously unfair.’ She removed her hand and flattened the double string of pearls at her neck, before adjusting the brim of her hat so it covered more of her face.
It made Victoria smile, how her gran, despite her advancing years, still wore pearls on an ordinary day and shielded her skin from the sun’s glare. With her hair coiffed, her teeth sparkling and her lipstick always within reach, Prim was glamorous and beautiful – age had nothing to do with it.
Discussions about her mother were rare, and this, too, Victoria understood. If her own measurable pain was for a woman she had never known and a life she could only imagine, then how bad must it be for Prim, who had had Sarah in her life for so long? Her daughter. Her only child. It was beyond sad that Sarah had had so little time on Earth, when her potential had been so huge. She had died during her second year at Durham, where she was studying law, shortly after meeting Marcus Jackson, who had, according to the story Victoria had been told, introduced her to the drug that would prove to be her downfall. If Sarah was rarely mentioned, then Marcus was never so, and Victoria’s questioning about the pair had waned over the years, mainly because the one source of information she had was the reluctant, tight-lipped Prim. Victoria was certain that had Marcus not taken his own life before she even came into the world, Prim, after the loss of Sarah, and no doubt aided by Grandpa, would have hunted him down.
Sarah: a name, which was of course familiar to Victoria and yet was without substance, no more than an idea, a dream. Her pretty mum, whose photographs sat inside a variety of silver frames dotted around the house. There she was each night as Victoria climbed the stairs to bed, sitting on the windowsill of the half landing, smiling, capture
d for eternity in her glorious youth. It was one of Victoria’s favourite places to sit, with the summer sun streaming in through the square bay window set high in the wall, the stained-glass panels of which cast purple, blue and yellow squares on to the honey-coloured carpet. She liked to sit there in the corner and chat to the Sarah in the photographs, hoping her mother might understand. They were of a similar age, after all.
‘So there’s this boy I’m quite keen on, not that he likes me, probably doesn’t even know my name. He’s in my chemistry set . . . in fact, I more than quite like him, I really, really like him . . .’
‘It must be time for a cup of tea, darling, surely?’ Prim drew her from her thoughts. Victoria stood and shook the creases from the cream linen shirt that had been doubling up as a pillow on the sun lounger, before slipping her narrow arms into it.
‘Daks is on her way. I think we’re going out, but I’ll make you one before we go.’ Victoria bent down and kissed her gran’s forehead. ‘And where you are concerned, I think we both know it’s “always the right time for a cup of tea!”’ She repeated her gran’s favourite saying.
‘Earl Grey.’ Prim raised her finger.
‘Gran, I have made you a million cups of tea – you think I don’t know it’s Earl Grey by now? I know everything about you.’
‘Well, you say that and yet still you have not learned, apparently, how much I detest the word “Gran” – makes me sound ancient.’
‘You only don’t like it when I call you Gran in front of Gerald!’ she teased. Gerald was her gran’s dapper toy boy, who at seventy-four was ten years younger than her and who accompanied Prim on regular trips to the theatre and out to dinner and was a dab hand with a hoe when the need arose.
Prim wrinkled her eyes in amusement. ‘Well, that might be true . . .’
‘There’s no “might” about it. And by the way, I hate to break it to you, but you are ancient.’
‘Only compared to you. Good lord, eighteen! What wouldn’t I give to be eighteen again!’
Victoria liked the small spread of a smile on Prim’s face, as if a memory had hooked itself to the outer extremities of her eyes and mouth and lifted them up. She loved spending time like this; she’d miss her gran when she and Daksha went travelling, which was the plan for six months’ time, give or take.
‘What was so great about being eighteen?’ Victoria asked dismissively. Based on her own rather mundane existence, eighteen was nothing special. Once, when she had complained about her rather bland, mannish face as she looked in the mirror, her gran had informed her reliably and without sentiment that all Cutter women looked like potatoes until they blossomed, and suddenly one day they would look in the mirror and realise they had evolved into a chip.
In fairness, it offered little solace.
Victoria, aware of her low ranking in the Instagram-worthy world of her peers, did very little other than study and spend time with her one good friend, Daksha. In truth, life scared her – or rather, making the same mistakes as her mum scared her. Not that she voiced this, and certainly not to Prim. But it bothered her nonetheless. What was the thing that turned Sarah from a bookish scholar into an out-of-control junkie? And if it was something in her mother’s DNA, what was to say Victoria didn’t possess it too? It was a frightening thought, and as a result she had up until this point lived a rather solitary, buttoned-up existence in the shadow of the popular set. The ones who cluttered up the corridors of school, seemingly more concerned with perfecting the swing of their hair extensions and capturing the best selfie than actually getting an education. All that, however, was about to change, as she and Daksha were off to see the world! The plan was to take twelve months, but the reality was they would be away until their funds ran out, which could happen a lot sooner.
‘So come on.’ Victoria refashioned her hair into a bun, capturing the long tendrils that had in their usual manner worked their way loose from her hairband. ‘What did you do that made eighteen so great?’
‘What did I do?’ Prim fixed her eyes on the middle distance. ‘What didn’t I do? I flirted with inappropriate boys, swam braless in my underslip – very daring at the time – and then danced in front of a bonfire until I dried off with a very large mimosa in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I was quite magnificent.’
It was Victoria’s turn to smile. She loved the woman’s lack of modesty, in every sense. Staring at her gran’s profile, she took in the sharp edges of her cheekbones, which always seemed dotted with the apple-red hue of health; the thick wave of grey hair that still, despite her age, sat alluringly over one eye, giving her an almost starlet quality; the large, baguette-cut emerald that was never from her finger; and her good teeth. Yes, Victoria could imagine that Mrs Primrose Cutter-Rotherstone had indeed been magnificent.
Once she had gone full chip.
‘How inappropriate, exactly?’ Victoria was curious. Boys had to her always been an enigma. An alluring enigma, but an enigma nonetheless. Shaking her head, she erased the face of Flynn, the boy in her chemistry set who filled her daydreams and on occasion her night-time musings too. The chances of anything actually happening with him were slim. They had been in the same class for the best part of five years and had exchanged only six sentences, which were indelibly etched in her mind.
Flynn: ‘What did he say?’
‘I think he said three parts water.’
Flynn: ‘Can I borrow your ruler?’
‘Yes, it’s in my pencil case – help yourself, I’ve got another one.’
Flynn: ‘I forgot to time it, how much longer?’
‘Fourteen minutes.’
‘Well,’ Prim began, but was quickly interrupted by the front doorbell.
‘Daksha!’ they chimed.
‘You put the kettle on, I’ll get the door,’ Prim instructed as she lumbered from her chair. This was how they did most things, as a team.
You wash the dishes . . . I’ll dry.
You strip the bed . . . I’ll pop the sheets in the machine.
You make the toast . . . I’ll fetch the tea.
It was a nice way to live.
Victoria filled the kettle and popped it on to boil before rushing into the hallway; the cool interior of the old house was a wonderful relief for her sweat-covered skin and her eyes were glad of a break from the sun’s glare.
‘Come in, Daksha dear, how are you?’ Her gran opened the solid oak front door wide and stood back in the square hallway, where anaglypta paper bearing an ornate fleur-de-lys pattern inside raised squares had covered the ceiling for as long as Victoria could remember. When needed, Bernard-the-handyman, as Prim referred to him, climbed up on the stepladder and pasted any edges or corners that had lifted. It was currently painted the palest shade of Indian gold.
‘Good, thanks, Prim. How’s Gerald?’
She knew her friend was fascinated by the blossoming love between these two very elderly people, finding it a little hard to fathom. Victoria had explained to her that they might be old, but probably felt the same on the inside as they had when they were young.
‘Oh, Gerald is an absolute poppet; we are planning a trip to Wales to go on the fastest zip wire in the world – should be fun! The only thing I am dreading is having to wear a standard issue jumpsuit, so very unflattering, but I’m thinking if I go double on the pearls and put on an extra coat of red lipstick, I can counteract the horror somewhat.’
‘Can you stop talking about it, please, Prim!’ Victoria held up her palm, feeling a little queasy at the thought of the height and speed; conquering her fear was something she thought she might try during her trip away, maybe.
Victoria watched her friend as she stepped over the threshold and, as she always did, cast her eye over the walls crowded with paintings, samplers, decorated plates and various artworks that Prim favoured, some of which she knew had been around since Victoria’s great-grandparents first bought Rosebank in 1907. She and Daksha had joked that the house and its particular fussy décor had been in a
nd out of fashion at least ten times, proving the old adage that everything came back around eventually.
With the abundance of space and the special lake in which she often took a dip when the mood took her and the air temperature allowed, she had loved growing up here. However, the older she got, the more concerned she was about what might lurk beneath the murky surface, and she lamented the complete abandonment with which she used to jump in and swim to the middle while Prim and Grandpa clapped her on, encouraging her adventure.
She also heard the way Daksha enunciated her greeting, as if keen to revel in the privilege of being allowed to call this elderly lady by her first name, like they were mates. It made her laugh, but then Daksha did that, made her laugh, a lot; just the sight of her was enough to brighten the dullest of days.
‘Are you excited about your travels? I know Victoria is, but a little worried about the money side of it, I’d say.’
‘I’m not, actually,’ she called from the middle of the stairs, where she now perched and buckled up the straps of her rather bulky brown leather sandals. ‘I’ve planned really well. I even have a spreadsheet!’
‘Now why doesn’t that surprise me?’ Daksha offered the aside to Prim, who laughed.
Victoria ignored them. ‘And as long as I don’t lose my job, I will be fine to leave for the great adventure in March, as planned.’
‘You are disgustingly disciplined.’ Daksha fired her a look from behind her heavy-framed glasses, part hidden by her blunt-cut fringe. ‘I’m doing my best to save, but then shoes and shiny things seem to call to me and I can’t resist. I have the willpower of a gnat.’ She patted her podgy tum, as if proof were needed.
‘Don’t worry, dear, there’s still plenty of time to save, plus I am sure that Dr Joshi wouldn’t let you travel without adequate funds. He really is a wonder.’
Both girls suppressed a giggle. The high regard in which Prim held Daksha’s father, who also happened to be her GP, was no secret.
‘Hope so.’ Daksha pulled a face at her mate. ‘Although my parents aren’t nearly as cool as you, Prim. There’s no way they would have let me reject going to university.’
The Day She Came Back Page 1