Falling for You Page 3

  “And letters from satisfied customers,” exclaimed the girl, moving on.

  “Well, maybe not the customers themselves. But after the funeral, the relatives quite often write to tell me what a difference it made.”

  “I like this one.” The girl touched the edge of a photo displaying a casket simply decorated with white clouds in a cerulean-blue sky, with a silver bird soaring above them.

  “One of my bestsellers. Fancy a cup of tea?”

  “I’d love one. But I’m not about to die, so I won’t be needing a coffin, if that’s what you’re hoping.”

  “Don’t speak too soon,” said Jake. “You don’t know what I could be putting into your cup.”

  They sat outside together, companionably drinking their tea and chatting about the famous bits of Bath Trude had spent the morning exploring.

  “Very nice,” she said, nodding seriously, “but so terribly crowded. It would be far better if there weren’t so many tourists.”

  Jake managed to keep a straight face. “Sometimes it can get a bit much.”

  “You know, my grandmother is very old. I’m thinking she might enjoy one of your coffins. Do you have a leaflet, perhaps, so I could show her your work?”

  “I do. Better still,” said Jake, loping into the workshop and returning with a brochure and a bag of cookies, “it has my website address on it. That’s how I get most of my business.”

  Trude tucked the brochure carefully away in one of the pockets on her backpack.

  “I like your business, very much. But how did you start? What gave you the idea to do this thing? Oh, thanks.” Blushing slightly, she took a cookie from the bag, showering crumbs down the front of her khaki shorts.

  “Well, my sister died when I was fourteen,” said Jake, and Trude shot him a look of anguish, unable to speak through her mouthful of cookie.

  “It’s OK,” said Jake. “I get asked this question all the time. Anyway, April was sixteen, and my dad thought she wouldn’t want to be buried in a plain coffin. He made one himself, a proper wooden one, and painted it pale pink, because that was April’s favorite color. Then the rest of us put our handprints on it, and Dad painted wildflowers and butterflies over the rest. April would have loved it.” He smiled briefly. “So there you go. That’s how it all started. I knew at once it was what I wanted to do. I left school at sixteen and set up the business. And here I am, almost ten years later, still here.”

  “In a tiny place like this,” Trude marveled.

  “Ah, but it’s my tiny place.” Spotting Marcella and Sophie heading toward them along Gypsy Lane, Jake waved and broke into a grin. “I’ve lived in Ashcombe all my life.”

  Moments later Sophie hurtled the rest of the way down Gypsy Lane and flung herself into his arms. It was like catching an exuberant, wriggling puppy. Swinging her around, Jake kissed the top of her neatly braided head and said, “I’m getting too old for this. What have you two been up to then?”

  “Making daisy chains.” Proudly, Sophie showed him the bedraggled chain in her left hand before placing it around his neck. “This one’s for you, Daddy.”

  “Now everyone will think I’m a girl,” said Jake.

  “They won’t, because you’ve got stubble on your chin.” Lovingly, she ran a grubby finger over his jawline. “Anyway, there’s a surprise for later. At six o’clock in the backyard, and you have to put a shirt on.”

  “What kind of a surprise?”

  “Me and Tiff are getting married.”

  “Really?” Jake raised his eyebrows at Marcella, who was leaning against the wall lighting a cigarette. “Mum, did you know about this?”

  Marcella gave a what-can-you-do shrug. “Darling, I tried to talk them out of it, tried to persuade them to wait a couple of years, but would they listen? You know how it is with young people today.”

  “Fine.” Jake lowered his daughter to the ground. “Just so long as you aren’t expecting a wedding present, because I haven’t had time to get to the shops.”

  Beaming, Sophie said, “That’s OK. You can give me a check.”

  Behind Sophie, Trude was looking puzzled, clearly struggling to work out the dynamics of the family before her. Jake smiled to himself, because confusion was a fairly common occurrence and always a source of entertainment. He knew exactly what was going through Trude’s mind.

  “Come along, pet. We’d better start getting you ready.” Marcella held out a hand. “Every bride has to have a bath before her wedding.”

  “Oh, Gran, why?” Sophie pulled a disgusted face. “I just had a bath on Saturday.”

  “No one wants to marry a girl with muddy knees.”

  “Tiff wouldn’t mind. He hates baths too.” Rolling her dark eyes, Sophie gave up and made her way over to Marcella. “OK. And, Daddy, don’t forget. Six o’clock.”

  Jake shook his head in mock despair as Marcella and Sophie headed back up the road to Snow Cottage.

  “How old is she?” asked Trude.

  “Seven.”

  “You were very young when you became a father.”

  “Seventeen.”

  “She’s beautiful. You must be very proud.” Trude hesitated, as he had known she would. “And the lady with her? You called her Mum. But she is your mother-in-law, right?”

  “No, she’s my mum,” Jake said easily.

  Trude, confused all over again, said, “Please, forgive me if this is impertinent, but your daughter is…um, black.”

  “Well spotted,” said Jake with a grin.

  “And your mother, she is the same.”

  Jake said helpfully, “Black.”

  Poor Trude was now frowning like Inspector Morse, doubtfully eyeing Jake’s streaky blond hair, green eyes, and golden-stubbled chin.

  “So, I’m sorry, but you’re not…um…”

  “It’s OK.” Jake nodded encouragingly. “You can say it. I’m not black.”

  “Exactly,” Trude exclaimed with relief. “But I don’t understand. How is it that you are white?”

  Chapter 4

  When Robert Harvey had lost his young wife, Annabel, to acute lymphoblastic leukemia, he was devastated. Left alone to grieve and bring up their three small children, he couldn’t imagine ever finding love again. Two years later, meeting Marcella Darby in a café in Keynsham where she was working as a waitress, he wondered what he’d done to deserve a second chance at happiness. Marcella, then twenty-two, was funny and irreverent, feisty and passionate. Robert, convinced there had to be a catch somewhere, tried—with spectacular lack of success—to conceal his true feelings. But it soon became apparent that there was no catch. Within weeks, he knew he’d found his soul mate.

  Unable to believe his luck, he brought Marcella back to Ashcombe and introduced her to his children. April was by this time six years old, Maddy five, and Jake four. It was risky, but it had to be done. Marcella hadn’t been scared off when he’d told her of their existence; indeed, she had declared that she loved kids, but saying it and actually meaning it were two different things. There was no guarantee that it wouldn’t all go horribly wrong.

  It hadn’t. The bond between Marcella and Robert’s children had been instantaneous, irrevocable, and touching to behold. Marcella had adored all three and made her feelings so plain that they, in turn, had adored her. A fortnight after that first meeting, Maddy and Jake had asked their father why Marcella couldn’t live with them. The following weekend, she’d moved in, and by the end of the month, all three children were calling her “Mummy.” Three months after that, they were married.

  Marcella’s arrival in Ashcombe caused a bit of a stir. Some of the older residents got quite upset about it, never having seen a black person in the flesh before. But most of the villagers, sympathetic to the family’s tragic past and delighted to see Robert smiling again, welcomed Marcella with genuine warmth. Marcella herself, with her n
atural enthusiasm, exuberance, and dazzling smile, soon won over the rest, the ancient old farmers who seemed to expect her to start smoking joints in the pub and turn Ashcombe into a den of vice, and those doubters who whispered that she had only married Robert Harvey for his money.

  Not that he had any, but that was the first rule of small-town tittle-tattle: when stuck for a spurious excuse, make one up.

  But who could doubt Marcella’s genuine love for her new family when, at that year’s summer fete, April was crowned carnival queen? Nobody could have been prouder than Marcella, who had spent weeks sewing sequins onto the Barbie-pink dress she had painstakingly made by hand. The little girl, who suffered from cerebral palsy and had never won anything before in her life, had insisted on making her own faltering speech at the crowning ceremony, and Marcella had applauded with tears of joy in her eyes.

  Eight years later, the unthinkable happened. Tragedy struck again one sunny Saturday afternoon in May. April left the cottage and made her way up Gypsy Lane to visit a friend. A car, losing control as it rounded a bend at speed, mounted the pavement and catapulted April fifty feet into the air. According to the coroner at the inquest, she was probably dead before she hit the ground.

  Robert and Marcella were inconsolable. Their grief was compounded at the trial, when it was suggested that April’s handicap had contributed to the accident, that she had been wandering in the road when the car had rounded the bend.

  “April never wandered in the road,” Marcella stormed. “She always kept to the pavement. How dare they say that, just to try to get that sniveling little fucker off the hook?”

  In the end it didn’t, and the seventeen-year-old sniveling little fucker—Kerr McKinnon’s younger brother—was found guilty of dangerous driving. Den McKinnon was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, which didn’t pacify Robert and Marcella one bit.

  “Two years.” Marcella wept on the steps of the court, so incandescent with rage she could barely get the words out. “Two years… How can that make up for killing our beautiful girl? If I ever see that murdering bastard again, I’ll kill him with my bare hands. I swear I will.”

  Marcella had done a lot of swearing during those dark days, not least when a rumor spread through Ashcombe that the mother of the teenage driver had been heard outside the courtroom pointing out that it wasn’t as if the Harveys had lost a normal child, that everyone knew the girl wasn’t all there. When Marcella heard this, she had to be physically restrained. “Jesus Christ, are these people human? What are they saying, that April had cerebral palsy, so they’ve actually done us some kind of favor? That killing her was on a par with running over an animal? Is that it? Am I hearing this right?” Wild-eyed with grief, she was almost literally tearing her hair out. “So what do they think we should do to cheer ourselves up, buy a cute little rabbit?”

  But as the months passed, the family gained strength from each other. Love pulled them through. Somehow they survived and learned how to be happy again. Marcella and Robert devoted themselves to making the remainder of Maddy’s and Jake’s childhoods idyllic, and when Maddy wrote in a school essay that she had the very best mum and dad in the world, she knew that—unlike all the other kids in her class, who only thought they had—she was writing the absolute truth.

  * * *

  Estelle had reached Heathrow in plenty of time to meet her daughter off the flight from New York. Now, waiting at the arrivals gate for Kate to appear, she found herself being jostled by an excited family unfurling a huge homemade welcome-home banner. Touched by the sight of them, Estelle wondered how Kate would react if she emerged through the doors to find her mother waving a welcome-home banner. Well, maybe not. It wasn’t the kind of gesture Kate would appreciate. Somehow, they just weren’t that kind of family.

  The toddler in the stroller next to her spat his pacifier out on Estelle’s shoe. Retrieving it and handing it back to him, she was rewarded with a face like thunder, as if it was all her fault. Strongly reminded of Kate at that age—the haughty attitude, the indifference—Estelle straightened up and quelled the butterflies in her stomach. She loved her daughter, of course she did, but she was also slightly afraid of her.

  Oh Lord, that was an awful thing to even think. Not afraid, intimidated. Kate had inherited her father’s somewhat aloof manner, and the emotional distance had been furthered by the school she had attended. Estelle hadn’t been convinced that sending her to superexpensive Ridgelow Hall was necessary, but Oliver had insisted. “Can you imagine how she might turn out if we dumped her in the nearest public school?” he’d demanded. “Good heavens, woman, are you out of your mind?” So Estelle had capitulated, thinking that maybe she was wrong after all, but the long-suppressed doubts had come back to haunt her. And as for the local public school, well, it hadn’t seemed to do Maddy and Jake Harvey any harm. They may not have PhDs and stratospheric careers, but they were thoroughly nice people and had grown into the kind of young adults of which any parent would be proud. Plus, of course, they adored their mother. Despite all the truly terrible things that had happened to Marcella over the years, Estelle secretly envied her.

  “There he is! Dad, Dad, over here!” The family at her side began screaming and Estelle was forced to dodge out of the way to avoid getting entangled with their frantically flapping banner. Dad, letting out a roar of delight, raced over and hauled several small children into his arms. As they showered him with kisses and he told them how much he’d missed them, Estelle saw him catch his wife’s eye and mouth: Love you. The wife, who was forty if she was a day, beamed like a teenage bride and blew him a kiss, happy to wait her turn.

  Estelle’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. Now she was reduced to envying total strangers—total strangers waving the kind of banner her own daughter would sneer at and pronounce tacky.

  She wouldn’t mind betting this couple would be having fabulous sex tonight.

  Then she straightened, because Kate was coming through, pushing a trolley piled high with cases and looking like a celebrity traveling incognito in a sleek charcoal trouser suit, dark glasses, and trilby-style hat.

  “Darling! Yoo-hoo,” Estelle called out (slightly tacky), waving an arm to attract her attention. Catching sight of her, Kate altered course and came over, proffering the undamaged side of her face for a kiss. Hugging her rather too enthusiastically in a feeble attempt to keep up with the neighbors, Estelle dislodged the trilby, which managed to land in the lap of the toddler in the stroller.

  The small boy stared at it as if it were a bomb. Kate snatched it up and thrust it back onto her head. Estelle flinched as one of the small children said, “Mum, what’s happened to that lady’s face?”

  “Shhh,” his mother chided. “It’s not nice to say things like that. Poor girl…” She pulled a sympathetic face at Kate. “I’m so sorry. You know what children are like.”

  Shooting the woman a look that could have pickled walnuts, Kate said brusquely, “Mum, can we get out of here? Now?”

  Kate waited until they were racing down the M4 in the Lancia before speaking again. “Will Dad be there when we get home?”

  Estelle shot her an apologetic look. “Sorry, darling. He had to work.”

  “Par for the course.” Kate watched her mother light a cigarette. Estelle, a furtive smoker when her husband was around, had needed the boost of a Marlboro to brave the terrors of the motorway.

  “But he’ll be home soon,” Estelle went on brightly, as she had done for the last twenty-odd years, “and he can’t wait to see you.” She paused. “I thought we’d have dinner tonight at the Angel, just you and me.”

  Kate shuddered. The Fallen Angel was the only pub in Ashcombe. “Just you and me” could be roughly translated as “the two of us sitting at a table while everyone else in the pub ogles us from the bar and snickers at the posh bird’s comeuppance.”

  She hadn’t asked to be the posh bird; they’d just saddled her with th
at label God knows how many years ago, and ever since then, she’d been stuck with it.

  “Darling. I know. But you have to face them at some stage.” Estelle was only too aware of what gossipy small-town life was like.

  Kate sighed and gazed out of the window as Berkshire sped past them in a blur of motorway-constructed emerald-green turf and geometrically planted trees. She knew her mother was right.

  Aloud she said, “We’ll see.”

  * * *

  “You’ll have to tell Mum,” said Jake.

  “I can’t tell Mum.” Maddy covered her face with her hands. “She’ll go ballistic.”

  “You still should. She at least has a right to know he’s back.” Jake kept his voice low. They were outside in the backyard of Snow Cottage, Maddy sitting cross-legged on the grass and Jake lounging in the hammock, his eyes shielded by dark glasses, a can of lager in his hands. Upstairs, Sophie was having her hair rebraided by Marcella in preparation for the ceremony.

  “He’s been back for months and she hasn’t known about it. He’s living in Bath,” said Maddy. “What are the chances of her bumping into him?”

  “About the same as the chance of you bumping into him,” Jake pointed out. “And you managed it. Jesus, I can’t believe he didn’t recognize you. You must have been even uglier than I remember.”

  “I was.” Memories had nothing to do with it. Maddy had the unfortunate photos to prove it, but she reached over and gave the hammock a shove anyway, causing Jake to spill ice-cold Fosters over his bare chest.

  He flicked lager back at her with his fingers. “Thanks. So what happens now? I take it you won’t be delivering to his company.”

  Maddy paused. She’d already told Juliet, who could be trusted to be discreet, and Juliet had reacted with typical pragmatism: “Look, I’m not just saying this because it means more business for us, but we are only talking sandwiches here. And you did say his staff was keen on our stuff. I mean, why should they miss out?” She’d shrugged, then gone on in her gentle way. “Of course, it’s entirely your decision. Whether you want to or not. You said he was a nice man. What did he have to say about it?”