The Love Letter (25 page)

‘Oh Kizzy will love the notoriety,’ Lucy said sharply.

Legs turned to her mother in surprise. Her guilt about Francis was seeping through the sides as it always did, and she couldn’t resist asking, ‘What do you know about her?’

‘Not a lot. Just that she started working for the festival last year and then set her sights on Francis.’

‘History repeating itself then.’

‘She’s very clever, I gather, and
very
ambitious.’ Lucy watched her daughter’s reaction closely, noting the pinched tightness around her red eyes as they blinked repeatedly. ‘It’s natural to be jealous, darling.’

‘I am not jealous. Francis had every right to find a new lover, as will Dad now,’ she huffed, lowering the paintbrush and using the end of its handle to dig into the gritty depths of a sea-lashed groove running through the rock she was sitting on.

Lucy refused to rise, looking out to the harbour again.

‘I heard that Kizzy might be Poppy’s daughter,’ Legs confided. ‘If so, rumour has it she’s only seducing Francis to get her hands on her birthright.’

But her mother just laughed. ‘That’s ridiculous. Aren’t these things forbidden by law?’

‘They’re not related. Anyway, Francis might not know her true parentage.’

‘Now you really are getting absurd, Legs darling. I know you love all those exaggerated crime thrillers you read non-stop, but you must learn to temper your imagination. These things just don’t happen.’

‘And there was me thinking that you and Hector have been
madly in love with each other for years without telling another soul, but of course that’s way too far fetched …’

‘Don’t be facetious,’ Lucy snapped. ‘Besides, I have always confided in one or two close friends. Babs Foulkes has known all along.’

‘Babs?’ Legs gasped, wondering how much Daisy knew. Mother and daughter shared every secret.

But Lucy was eager to get off the subject, ‘I think you must be wrong about Kizzy, darling. For a start, I’m sure Poppy’s child was a boy …’

‘How old was he when she ran off?’

‘Oh, I don’t know; he must be about the same age as you, so he’d have been about ten maybe?’

‘So he could have had a sex change in adulthood?’ She counted through the years. ‘Kizzy could be a twenty-seven-year-old transsexual, don’t you think?’

Lucy chuckled, and patted her daughter’s knee. ‘As I said, it’s natural to be jealous.’

But Legs refused to be entirely dissuaded: ‘With that boyish physique, gender reassignment is a real possibility. If Kizzy’s father was a jockey, then they’re all tiny and fine-boned, hence no give-away clues like being six foot with an Adam’s apple. It all makes perfect sense; now he/she’s returned to exact revenge for being abandoned by Poppy. Being abandoned by a mother is life-shattering,’ she muttered, adding darkly, ‘especially when she runs away with Hector Protheroe.’

‘Now you’re just winding me up.’ Lucy returned to her easel, comparing the lines on the paper with those of the harbour and letting out a dissatisfied sigh, no longer happy with her composition.

‘There’s definitely something Francis isn’t telling me,’ Legs persisted.

‘I should think there’s a lot he isn’t telling you, given what you did to him.’ She picked up her pencil and changed the outline of the headland. ‘You’re just transferring guilt, Legs.’

‘He’s frightened of her.’

‘He’s frightened of any woman that doesn’t mother him,’ Lucy sighed, getting into her Freudian swing now. She’d been a homespun counsellor ever since discovering
A Road Less Travelled
at a second-hand book fair.

‘I never mothered him!’

‘You mothered him from the age of eleven, darling. From what Hector says, Kizzy is a very different kettle of fish; more sea siren than earth mother. He dislikes her intensely.’ She rubbed out the line she’d just drawn and tried again, ‘But she is Poppy’s vassal of course.’

‘And possible long-lost transsexual son,’ Legs muttered.

Lucy pretended not to hear. ‘Given you are now Conrad’s plaything, one can hardly blame Francis for going on the rebound so wholeheartedly. And Kizzy is very pretty.’

‘How
dare
you say that!’ She threw the paintbrush back on the table where it rolled onto the shingle below.

Lucy stooped to pick it up. ‘Well, maybe not as pretty as you, although I’m not sure that tight jumper look suits you, frankly.’

‘Not that, the thing about being Conrad’s plaything.’

She turned around and crossed her arms. ‘Who sent you here this weekend, Legs?’

‘He didn’t “send” me!’

‘It’s obvious he did. He treats you appallingly, refusing to let you share anything much of his life beyond work, not wanting to meet your family and friends, abandoning you at weekends, then expecting you to be available throughout the week to cross London at all hours. Now this! You don’t have to stay with him just to prove that you made the right decision, Legs, to validate what you did to Francis.’

‘I’ve had this lecture.’ She looked away sulkily.

‘Then you have been getting some wise advice. You should heed it. If you still love Francis, tell him.’

‘I love Conrad.’ Even as she said it, she felt uncertainty prickle her scalp.

‘Don’t be ridiculous! It’s just an infatuation. That ghastly man has taken advantage of your kindness long enough.’

‘Pot kettle black!’ Legs fumed, then eyed her mother suspiciously. ‘What would you and Hector do if Francis and I got back together? Because a double wedding’s out of the question.’

‘If you two are still in love and determined to marry, we wouldn’t be able to carry on.’ She mixed a dash of French ultramarine into the wash to capture the growing intensity of the sky.

Mind whirring, Legs pulled down her cuffs and shivered, hugging herself for warmth. ‘This is a double bluff, isn’t it?’

‘Darling, you’ve lost me. I never understand bluffs and double bluffs. You’re the one who loves reading crime thrillers.’

‘Promise me that you and Hector aren’t staging this affair to try and get Francis and me back together?’

The sky in Lucy’s painting was getting ever more purple. ‘Hector and I understand one another very deeply.’

‘Oh shit.’ Legs closed her eyes. ‘You are.’

‘That’s your opinion.’ Lucy rinsed her brush in her water pot and started to mix up a wash of ultramarine, gunmetal and cedar green into a very unlikely-coloured sea, humming the tune to ‘She’.

‘Dad called you a martyr to the cause,’ Legs remembered with a gasp. ‘Is he in on it too?’

The humming stopped abruptly. The rattle of brush against water pot grew faster.

‘I don’t want to talk about your father.’ From the tone of her voice, Legs knew that if pressed, Lucy would just clam up, an evasion tactic she’d passed on to Ros, who held the family record for not speaking a word: eight days.

Instead she pulled a loose thread of rubber from her plimsolls and admitted: ‘Poppy’s invited me to supper at the hall this evening. There’ll be her usual cronies, with Francis and Kizzy in full mating plumage no doubt. It’s obvious she’s expecting me to make a big scene.’ She shuddered anxiously, imagining herself
pointing at Kizzy across the drawing room and shouting ‘I know you’re a man!’

Lucy splatted more wash onto her drawing before it was fully blended so the pigment in the brush clotted on the paper. ‘So what are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know. I have to sort out the Gordon Lapis situation. It’s too important; I can’t let it cross over to what’s happening with Francis. It’s not just my career, it’s Conrad’s, the agency’s reputation and our biggest star’s welfare at stake. If I let my personal life intrude, I risk all that.’

‘Life
is
muddled up, darling, especially if you sleep with your boss.’ A great splash of Paynes Grey hit the paper now, carving out watery rocks. ‘You can’t separate it out.’

‘I’ve already had that career lecture this week too, thanks.’ Legs rested her chin on her knees, squinting up at the sun. Remembering the previous evening made a blush of heat creep up her neck to her face.

Suddenly very hot, she tried to pull off her jumper, but it was too tight to wriggle out of without a serious amount of contortion, so she pulled it back down and shuffled into the shade. ‘I was also told in no uncertain terms that you can’t force people in and out of love.’

‘Wise words.’ Lucy had mixed a wash of sepia and umber for the foreshore which she applied with angry brushstrokes. ‘But remember you broke Francis’s heart in the first place. That was immensely cruel, deliberate or not.’

Legs looked at the painting that was forming on the paper. Already it was wrong, all the potential of the delicate pencil drawing undermined by such clumsy splashes of paint. However carefully she sketched out her life, one impetuous brushstroke could ruin it, she realised. In London, her rash decisions coloured every day, but life was too fast paced to stop and examine the detail. Here in Farcombe, surrounded by the dreams she and Francis had laid down over so many summers, she was acutely
aware of her path of destruction, like vivid red ink spilled across their clean white canvas.

Stepping back to assess the work in progress, Lucy tutted under her breath, seeing its failings too.

Legs hugged her knees even more tightly and turned her face away to hide the tears. ‘Did I really break his heart so badly?’

‘You shattered it, darling.’ Lucy laid down her brush and looked at her over one shoulder, her face incredibly sad. ‘That pretty redhead might have picked up all the pieces but she’s making a big mess gluing them back in the wrong order. He’s changed so much, and not for the better.’

‘Oh, poor Francis.’ Turning her head, Legs watched her mother pick up her paintbrush again and begin speckling ochre and umber shingle onto her painting.

‘I believe Kizzy’s no more right for him than Conrad is for you, but you both have to learn that the hard way, it seems.’ Lucy splattered and splodged the paper. ‘Just tread very carefully.’

‘I’m always cautious around vengeful transsexuals.’ Legs shuddered, wondering if she should take Byrne’s advice and head straight back to London. But if Francis was under threat, she owed it to him to stay put and go through with this. She had to make amends. ‘Have you ever heard of the Black Widow of Bideford?’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever been there,’ Lucy said vaguely. ‘Is it in the Good Pub Guide?’

‘Very popular for wakes, I’m told.’ Legs propped her chin on her knees.

Her mother was watching her closely again. ‘Do you want Francis back?’

Legs gazed at the painting, now a sludgy mess of browns and greys all bleeding into one another. It had looked so crisp and full of potential when she first saw it. ‘I miss what we once had more than anything,’ she said with feeling.

‘The two of you shared something very rare and so special,’
Lucy agreed. ‘It’s such a waste not to try to recapture it. You owe Francis that much.’ Her words echoed Legs’ thoughts.

For a moment mother and daughter exchanged a look of understanding as the wind lifted their hair with invisible fingers and the waves sighed contentedly on the shingle. Then Legs ruined the moment completely by asking, ‘And you’ll go back to Dad soon?’

Lucy looked hugely irritated, turning back to her work.

‘That’s my business,’ she snapped, ripping her wet watercolour from the easel and casting it aside before starting to mask up another sheet. ‘I might take new lovers; I might wear purple and a hat that doesn’t suit me; I might even have a sex change and enact terrible revenge on all who have wronged me. It’s
my
life, Legs, and right now I am enjoying living it.’

Legs had a sudden vision of herself after thirty years’ marriage to Francis, looking much as her mother did now and behaving much as her mother was now, although of course she’d already done that. ‘Live for the moment, live with the consequences,’ she breathed.

‘Yes!’ Lucy agreed triumphantly. After many decades of leading the younger generation by example, which quite plainly does not work, I’m finally taking a leaf out of your book and trying not to think beyond tomorrow.’

‘I’m so not like that!’

Lucy said nothing. It was clearly the beginning of one of her long silent stand-offs, Legs realised. There was absolutely no point staying to shout at the waves when she had a mystery to solve. She had a duty to find out what was going on at Farcombe Hall; she owed it to Francis, as well as to Gordon. Her detective’s nose scented intrigue and danger as surely as laying her Starbucks coffee beside a pile of new crime manuscripts. This was a task for Julie Ocean, despite being unarmed and unconvincing dressed in her undercover disguise as a young Arsenal fan.

She tried to think what Julie would do if faced with a dinner invitation like Poppy’s, hosted by a highly manipulative agoraphobic whose guests included Julie’s embittered ex-lover, now
shacked up with a vengeful transsexual, whose super-ambitious parents would also be in attendance, along with a mysterious American academic and Vin Keiller-Myles, a man intent on acquiring Farcombe at any cost. Not to mention sharp-tongued Édith, Francis’s half-sister, who had once been expelled from a top boarding school for planting a bomb beneath the headmaster’s car.

What would Julie’s first instinct be?