The Accidental Family (26 page)

“I think legally that would be tenant harassment. Sophie, accept it, you don’t really live anywhere and the one time I come miles and miles to visit you on a mission of highly uncharacteristic mercy, you end up kissing your dead best friend’s ex-husband’s secret love child by mistake and I have to go home again the very next day. Some holiday.”

“Why do you have to do that?” Sophie complained as she pulled up at yet another set of red lights. “Why do you have to sum up my entire life like it’s a tabloid headline? This is really hard for me, you know, to leave him and the girls behind like that—I didn’t want to leave, but what else could I do? I couldn’t just stay there feeling like an impostor in my own relationship, could I?”

“No, you couldn’t,” Cal said. “You did the right thing getting away for a bit. Louis loves you, he’s just not used to loving you yet, if you know what I mean.”

“I have no idea what you mean,” Sophie said anxiously as she cut off an SUV to change lanes. “What
do
you mean?”

“I mean that for the last three years he has been his own man, he’s had no one to answer to except himself. Then he comes back to the UK and before he knows it he’s got two daughters and a fiancée to think about.”

“Yes, but he’s got us because he wanted us, because he fought for us,” Sophie protested. “I didn’t force him to propose to me.”

“I know,” Cal replied. “And that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that when you’re in a relationship, you have to adjust. You have to find different ways to live your life. After he left Carrie, before he found the girls and you, he dealt with everything alone. And he hasn’t yet had a chance to get used to the fact that you are part of his life. That his problems are your problems and vice versa. He’s still flying solo because that’s what he’s used to,” Cal said.

“Do you really think that’s what it is?” Sophie asked him. “That it is all just a bit too much too soon?”

“I think that’s part of it, and I think with you out of the picture for a while he’ll have a chance to miss you and think about things and I reckon you’ll be back on for the wedding before you know it.”

“But should we be?” Sophie asked him. “I wanted it all so badly, so quickly. I wanted to rush it …why? Why was it so urgent?”

“Because you didn’t want to waste another second of your life without the love of your life by your side?” Cal ventured.

“Or because deep down I knew that none of this was real. What if I knew that it was nothing more than a glorified holiday romance?”

“Sophie, that’s not how you feel. You love that man. That man loves you; you just need to work it out, okay?”

Sophie took her eyes off the road for a second to glance at Cal.

“Hang on a minute, where have all the witty one-liners and put-downs gone? Why are you so sincere all of a sudden?”

“I’m not, I just want you two to work out. There’s got to be at least one couple on the planet destined for happiness, and if it’s not me then I want it to be you.”

“Cal, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Unless it’s me, then I don’t care about you,” Cal added with a smile.

When Sophie arrived at her mother’s house, Iris welcomed her warmly. “If it helps, I think you’ve done the right thing, giving yourself some space,” Iris said. “If you aren’t sure about marrying Louis and you need to think about it, then why shouldn’t you come home to your mother?” She paused and put her hand on Sophie’s shoulder. “In fact, I’m glad it’s me you’ve come home to.”

Sophie felt glad too as she followed her mother up to her old room.

“Now, you’ll need to find some clean sheets and shove Inky and Tipex off the mattress. They’ve been snuggling up in there for a while now, so it might need a brush down with a clothes brush and a squirt of Febreze.”

“What’s for dinner?” Sophie asked her, hearing the question echo from twenty years ago.

“Oh, darling, I’m sorry.” Iris opened her bedroom door. “You’ll
have to fend for yourself, I’ve got to go out in a minute. I would cancel …it’s just I’ve—well, I’ve got a date.”

“A date?” Sophie said, testing the word on her tongue. It was unfamiliar in relation to her mother.

“Yes, dear, it’s this man I met through the dog shelter. His name’s Trevor. It’s early days, you know, but he makes me smile. Is it awful for me to go out and leave you? It’s just that this is only our second date and I thought if I canceled on him now he might think I’ve got cold feet and I haven’t. My feet are decidedly warm.”

“No, god no—you go, Mum,” Sophie said. “Don’t change your plans just because of me. I’ll order in takeaway.”

“We’ll talk when I get back,” Iris told her, kissing her on the forehead just like she had when Sophie was a very small girl.

Sophie’s old room was not the comforting haven she had hoped for. Perhaps it would have been odd if it had still boasted the Manic Street Preachers poster and the black lace shawls that she had taken to hanging over the lamp shade in order to look a bit more Gothic, but still, she had hoped for the sense of sanctuary that the room had afforded her when she was a girl and needed a place to hide. After her father died her bedroom had suddenly become her whole world, a cocoon where she could plunge herself into the music she loved, curl up on her bed, and forget everything that hurt or confused her, which had seemed to be everything back then. She and Carrie had spent so many hours in this room talking about sex or what they thought they knew about sex in hushed voices, laughing over the problem pages in
Just Seventeen
magazine, and discussing every single boy they knew in exhaustive detail. It was here they had made promises to each other, here they had formed the bond that would one day lead Sophie into the path of Louis Gregory. It was in this twelve-by-eight-foot room with a window that Sophie’s life had really begun.

Somehow it seemed an inauspicious place for a beginning, particularly
as the room was cold—the radiator had obviously not been switched on in years—and smelled faintly of mildew and strongly of dog. With a heavy heart Sophie pulled on the same faded quilt decorated with pink and white hearts that she had used as a girl and wondered why she had insisted on coming back to London when she could just have gone back to the B & B where Mrs. Alexander would have made her hot chocolate and Mrs. Tregowan would have told her about her fourth husband and she could have watched TV until she’d fallen asleep.

Sophie never thought she’d feel nostalgic for her tiny B & B room, her twin beds and candlewick bedspread, but just at that moment she was homesick for the Avalon, for St. Ives and its constant cry of gulls. That room had felt like a place for a new beginning.

Carmen had told her not to leave.

Sophie had been throwing things into a suitcase while simultaneously brushing tears from her eyes, while Carmen and Cal sat side by side on her spare twin bed.

“I’m just saying,” Carmen had pointed out. “If this Wendy is as crafty as you say she is, then why are you going now and leaving her an open field? You should be decking her. I’ll deck her for you, if you like. You don’t diss a Chelmsford girl or her mates and get away with it, not unless you don’t like having teeth. Better still, give me her address, I’ll send her a cake laced with rat poison.”

“Can I just say,” Cal interjected, “I’d still eat one of your éclairs even if I knew it was going to kill me.”

“Thank you, darling.” Cal and Carmen beamed at each other. “But anyway, even if you won’t let me hurt her, I don’t think you should run away, Sophie. You should stay and fight for your man!”

“It’s not Wendy who’s the problem, not really,” Sophie said. “It’s more about Louis. He’s supposed to be marrying me, I am
supposed to become his wife, and yet when one of the most serious and important things in his life happens, he doesn’t want me around. I don’t think he’s thought past our wedding day. I don’t think he’s thought through what being married is really about.”

“Have you?” Cal asked her.

“No,” Sophie said thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose I have. I suppose that I’ve been just as caught up in the drama and the romance as Louis, and I was looking for my fairy-tale ending. But that’s not the ending, is it, getting married. It’s only the beginning, and it’s then that you have to work out what marriage is really about.”

“I can tell you what marriage is really about,” Carmen said. “I’ve been married, still am, technically, and let me tell you this. Marriage is about compromise. It’s about accepting your choices and dealing with the consequences. It’s about waking up every day and making the decision to try your best even if your hearts are not in it. That’s what marriage is about and that’s mainly why I left my husband for a younger man. That and the fact that he was terrible in bed.”

“Hang on a minute,” Sophie said as she jammed her suitcase shut. “A few weeks ago you couldn’t wait for Louis and me to get married. You were practically dragging me up the aisle!”

“I know,” Carmen said. “And that’s because you two didn’t look like you were settling for second best. You didn’t look like you were getting married because you needed something to do. You looked—
look
—like you were in love.”

“Love,” Sophie sighed as she attempted to shove another pair of scarcely worn shoes into her suitcase because she knew that trainers and boots would not cut it in the capital. “What the bloody hell is love anyway? What does it mean? And you don’t mean that about marriage. You’d marry James, wouldn’t you?”

Carmen sighed and looked down at the perfectly polished tips of her boots.

“James wants to marry me,” she said. “But I won’t let him.”

“Really?” Sophie asked, sitting down on the suitcase with a bump so that her clothes spilled out of the zipper like so many lace-trimmed guts. “Why, because you are still somehow married to your ex? James adores you!”

“Yes.” Carmen nodded. “Yes he does, he loves me and he adores me and I’m his girlfriend, his babe, his woman. And I love him …” Carmen’s smile was wistful. “I have never been happier than since I moved down here to be with him. All those years before this, all those flat, gray, married years seem like a dream, a life that happened to some other poor bugger. It’s now and here that I’m awake and really living my life.”

“So why not ditch your husband and marry your boy toy?” Cal asked her.

Carmen shrugged. “I’m fifteen years older than James, I’m still married, and I …well, I can’t have children. Not without a lot of bother and injections and IVF and even then, at my age there’s not much chance of it working. I’ve got fibroids, you see. I’ve known for years. It’s never been in the cards. None of that matters to James now, he says all he wants is me and he doesn’t care about kids. But he’s only twenty-four. In another few years, two or three, he might feel differently. He might realize how much he wants to be a dad, he might meet a girl he can have children with. I can’t tie him down to some old bird who might not be able to give him what he wants. So even though I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life, I don’t ever think about us as permanent. I think of him as my bit of luck I have to enjoy and make the most of until one day it finally runs out.”

“Oh, Carmen.” Sophie reached across the narrow divide between the twin beds and picked up her hand. “It’s just silly not to let yourself be happy. We’re only on this planet once; if we don’t take chances then what’s the point …” Sophie trailed off as she
listened to her own words. She had taken a chance, a huge chance in coming down to St. Ives to be with Louis. And now for the first time she wasn’t sure if it was a chance that was going to work out.

“Look, I’m as happy as I need to be,” Carmen stated, then changed the subject. “Are you sure you really have to go all the way to London to think? Are you sure you can’t just give Louis a ring over there later and get things back on track between you?”

“No …I want to, but I just don’t think I can,” Sophie said.

“I’ll keep an eye on the girls and that Wendy while you’re away, but don’t be gone too long.”

Sophie sighed and looked at her watch; it was just after ten. She knew that she’d promised to phone Louis, but the girls were already in bed and she wasn’t sure that she had anything new to say to him. Instead she texted him. “Got here safely, I love you. Speak tomorrow. xxxx”

Spread out on her bed were the fledgling plans for her wedding-planning service, ideas and notes she had stuffed hastily in her suitcase as she’d packed. Her rational brain, the part of her that longed for action and purpose and to make her idea into a reality, had thought she might go over this and finesse her ideas while she was staying in London, start researching possible venues or designers she might recruit. But with her own wedding still so unformed and suddenly seeming to hang in the balance, the idea had lost some of its shine. The rational part of her brain told her that a good business idea was a good business idea whether she was based in Cornwall or London, or wherever, and that whether or not things worked out with Louis, it was still a business she could make her own, start from scratch and build to success. But in her heart her plans were all tied up with Louis and her new life. Without him, they seemed, for now at least, irrelevant. What she needed was a sense of herself again.

She stood up and looked out her window, over the rooftops and at the sky that always glowed orange over London’s thousands of streets, swamping any hope of starlight. This is home, Sophie thought, pressing her hot palm against the cool glass of the window. Just out there on the other side of the glass was the town that was always open for business. The city she’d grown up in, the streets she’d known like the back of her hand all her life, pounding down them in her three-inch heels, insulated by the layers of grime and fumes and indifference that years of London living had built up, cocooning her from anything that might startle her out of her routine. Always dressed to the nines, always ready for that last-minute conference call with the New York office, always ready to troubleshoot, to fix, and to achieve, Sophie had once been the only woman in the city who knew where to get, after 5
P.M
., one hundred fairy lights within half an hour. She might not have been happy here, if happiness meant feeling and loving, but at least she had known where she stood, and she’d been the master of her own destiny.