Whatever Love Is (2 page)

‘You need to know something,’ her mother had said, fiddling abstractedly with a strand of prematurely greying hair. ‘Your Aunt Tina – the one you’re going to stay
with – she’s not your real aunt. And neither is Nerys.’

She had shuffled in her chair, avoiding Frankie’s penetrating gaze.

‘You see, I was adopted.’

For a moment, Frankie had thought that her mum was fantasising, that the drugs she took to keep her symptoms at bay were confusing her thinking. Her mother, Ruth, had always referred to Tina
(one-time model whose face had graced the covers of
Elle
and
Vogue
and who had married the founder of the hugely successful Bertie’s chain of high street clothing stores), and
Nerys (wife of Gabriel Lane, rising star in the diplomatic service until he disgraced himself by leaking confidential documents, took to drink and died of alcohol poisoning), as her sisters. On
good days, they were the sisters she adored and missed; on bad days, of which there were rather more, they were the smug, self-satisfied so-and-sos of whom she was well rid.

But they were always her sisters.

‘So Grandma and Grandpa . . .’

‘Weren’t your real grandparents, no.’ Ruth’s voice had flattened and she had stood up and begun pacing the room. ‘In fact, I reckon the only reason they upped
sticks and moved to Florida was to avoid any risk of ever seeing me – crazy weirdo Ruth – again!’

For some reason she didn’t understand, Frankie felt defensive of the not-grandparents who had been been killed in a freeway accident when she was still a toddler.

‘I love you, you know that?’ Ruth had pleaded, changing the subject as rapidly as she had started it. She hugged Frankie. ‘You’ll come and see me?’

‘Mum, I don’t have to go. I can stay with you.’

‘And be taken into care? I don’t think so.’ For just a moment, her mother had sounded more rational than she had for weeks. ‘William’s got his own life now and I
want to know you’re safe and being looked after.’

She brushed a tear from her cheek. ‘I’ve failed, Frankie, I’ve failed you all. I’m useless, worthless . . .’

Frankie hugged her mum tight and waited for the trembling and arm-scratching to pass – just as she had countless times over the years. ‘Mum, you’re not – you’re
just not too well right now,’ she repeated, almost by rote.

‘Yes, you’re right, I just need a little rest. And this is an opportunity for you, Frankie,’ her mum replied. ‘Posh lifestyle in a big house, meeting all the right
people, and Nerys says you’ll go to a really good school. The teachers always said you were bright but then I was bright once, only life dealt me a cruel blow and now I guess you’ll
forget I exist . . .’

Frankie had curtailed her mother’s increasingly manic outpouring with another hug. ‘Mum, of course I won’t!’ she’d insisted. ‘I’ll come and see
you.’

‘You will? Frankie, I love you so much. I never meant it to be like this. I’ll get better, I promise I will.’

She smiled bravely and pushed Frankie towards the door.

‘Now go – you’ll miss your train.’

‘Mum . . .’

Frankie couldn’t remember which of them had begun sobbing first. She had spent years struggling to care for her mum, manage her schoolwork and deal with the increasingly infrequent and
unpredictable visits from her father. She had become adept at pretending to the world that life was totally normal while longing for an escape from it all. But that day, as she’d hugged her
mum goodbye, a hole opened in her heart that still hadn’t completely closed. Sometimes she wondered whether it ever would.

She would never forget the stomach churning misery of the long journey from Brighton to Northampton, during which she’d discovered that her new mascara, boldly advertised as a hundred per
cent waterproof, clearly wasn’t, and that the further you get away from the sea the heavier the air becomes. She remembered in sharp detail the anxiety of finding no one waiting as promised
on the platform at Castle Station when the train pulled in. She had waited for what seemed like an age, but was probably no more than five minutes, and was just fumbling in her bag for her phone
when a large woman in a pleated skirt and maroon gilet had come panting down the steps from the opposite platform.

‘Francesca, dear – oh, let me just catch my breath! Ridiculous man at the barrier said you’d be coming in on platform three. Honestly, these days no one knows how to do their
job properly! But all’s well. Now come along, the car’s outside and I don’t have all day.’

‘Auntie, are we —?’

Nerys had stopped dead in her tracks. ‘Oh darling, just call me Nerys! Auntie sounds so pedestrian, don’t you think?’

‘OK, I —’

‘Tina would be the first to agree with me, but of course your Uncle Thomas – well, you’ll have to sort that out with him. Not that he’s at home right now what with the
troubles in Peshawar.’

At the time, Frankie hadn’t a clue where Peshawar was or the nature of any troubles except her own, so she had merely kept quiet as Nerys led her to the car park and unlocked the door of
her Toureg. As she climbed in, a pungent smell of wet dog assailed her nostrils and two Springer Spaniels began barking and hurling themselves against the protective grille dividing the back seat
from the boot. It explained to Frankie why her aunt had smelt so strange on the very infrequent visits she had made to Brighton.

‘Quiet!’ Nerys shouted and the dogs slumped sulkily down onto the floor as she fired up the engine and rather jerkily reversed out of the parking space.

‘Meet Bonnie and Bridie – frightfully well bred but still wet behind the ears. We’ve got dog training class tonight, however, so that should move things on.’

‘Is it far?’ Frankie ventured to ask as Nerys swung the car out of the car park, narrowly missing a bollard. She was feeling nauseous and tearful and while her mother had repeatedly
told her to ‘make intelligent conversation so they know you’re just as good as their lot’, she was afraid that if she opened her mouth for long she would either throw up or
cry.

‘Thornton Parslow? Ten miles,’ Nerys said, turning onto the dual carriageway. ‘Just enough time for me to fill you in on the plans. Of course, it’ll all seem very strange
to you at first – coming to live with a normal family.’

Frankie’s sharp intake of breath alerted Nerys to the tactlessness off her last remark and she reached across and patted Frankie’s knee.

‘Don’t get me wrong, dear, it’s not your fault,’ she said hastily. ‘Your poor mother was always, shall we say, a little strange, even as a child. Blood will out,
you know, and rumour has it that her background . . . Well, enough said about that. And then of course, marrying that no-hoper Sean. Sorry, dear, I know he’s your father but I said at the
time it would end in disaster, and I was right.’

Frankie had been too overwhelmed to comment, not that she would have been able to get a word in edgeways. It didn’t take more than ten minutes for her to realise that Nerys Lane loved the
sound of her own voice.

‘It was me, you know, who suggested you came to live here. Well, after seeing the state of your mother when I popped down to talk with the doctors after that first nasty little episode . .
. It was always me that knew my duty to poor Ruth. None of the others made the effort,’ she continued, speeding up as they left the town behind them and headed into open country. ‘She
may have behaved atrociously but as I said to Tina, that’s no reason her children should suffer. Oh for goodness’ sake, move!’

For a moment, Frankie looked at her in alarm, but realised the last remark was addressed to an elderly man in a rusting Ford Escort who was hogging the outside lane at a sedate thirty miles an
hour.

‘Honestly, they shouldn’t let geriatrics out on busy roads,’ Nerys sighed. ‘Anyway, where was I? Oh yes – living arrangements. Thomas suggested that you should live
with me at Keeper’s Cottage, but of course, that was a non-starter. I’m here and there all the time, never a moment to myself: chair of the WI, church warden at St Peter’s –
we’re in an interregnum, you know, and without me the whole place would fall apart – and then there’s all my voluntary work not to mention the dog shows: I judge spaniels, you
know, very well respected, and —’

There was a sudden jolt as she crashed the gears. ‘We turn off here for Thornton Parslow. There are the three Thorntons – Thornton Lacey, Thornton Parva and this one.’

Frankie craned her neck as the car weaved its way down a narrow, twisting lane, dark and shady from the beech and oak trees that formed a canopy over the road. Nerys grabbed her phone from the
glove compartment, and with one hand on the steering wheel, punched a button.

‘Three minutes away!’ she shouted into the phone. ‘What, dear? Yes, of course she’s all right – we’ve been chatting.’

Frankie felt that was a slight distortion of the facts but tried a wan smile as Nerys hurled the handset into the pocket at the side of her seat and beamed at her. ‘The family are all
ready for you,’ she said. ‘Much better for you to be at Park House with the girls. You haven’t met Jemma and Mia yet, of course – well, not since you were all in nappies! Of
course your lifestyles have been so different. I looked up that school you went to on the internet; ghastly looking place, you poor child. Jemma’s at Cheltenham, of course, and darling Mia
– such a clever girl – has just left and is going to Switzerland to finish.’

Frankie was about to ask what she was going to finish when Nerys stamped on the brakes to allow a pheasant to cross the lane in front of her before hurtling off again. ‘Well, here’s
another surprise: Thomas has managed to get you a place at Thornton College.’

She had turned to look at Frankie, clearly waiting for a cry of delight, and narrowly missed hitting a small boy on a mountain bike.

‘Thornton College, dear? One of the top rated schools in the East Midlands? State, of course, but I said to Thomas, private will be too much of a challenge for Francesca, coming from . . .
Well, anyway, I’m sure you’ll love it.’

When Frankie, swallowing back tears, said nothing, Nerys sniffed and glared at her. ‘I hope you’ll be grateful,’ she said. ‘Thornton College is totally oversubscribed but
then with Thomas being who he is, it’s amazing the doors that open! And of course, they are pledged to take in disadvantaged girls, what with the new government guidelines and everything.
Well now, here we are!’

And with that she had pressed a button on the car dashboard, and a pair of wrought-iron gates had slowly opened.

‘That’s my little pad,’ Nerys remarked, as they drove past a small, wisteria-covered cottage. ‘It was part of the original estate – it belonged to the gamekeeper in
the days when there was shooting in these parts, and, when my husband died, Thomas suggested I took it over. It’s much smaller than anything I’ve been used to but needs must. I struggle
financially, but I never complain.’

Frankie didn’t know it at the time but Nerys, who had quite enough money to live very comfortably, enjoyed pleading poverty in the same way that her sister Tina enjoyed imagined ill
health.

As Nerys had driven the car round the bend in the tree-lined gravel driveway, Frankie caught her first glimpse of Park House. It was grand, far grander than she had expected. Overlooking a huge
lawn that led down to a gazebo and tennis court were three storeys of mellow, honey-coloured Northamptonshire marlstone with a huge conservatory to one side and great swathes of Virginia creeper
covering the walls.
It’s beautiful
, she thought to herself,
but it isn’t home
.

Yet now, three years on, it
was
home and she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. For all the teasing from her cousins, she had never once been left out of family events and had
been taken to places she had only dreamt of as a child – holidays in Tuscany and Corfu, race meetings and theatre trips to the West End at least three times a year.

At first, whenever she had returned to Brighton to visit her mother, she would deliberately walk past her old home, freshly painted and spruced up by the new owners, and recall the good times
before her father had gone and she had been left to cope with her mother’s strange moods. And once, after she had been at Park House for eighteen months and her mother seemed so improved as
to be moved to a halfway house in Hove, Frankie had imagined them living together in a little cottage near the sea and everything being as it once was. She had been on the verge of mentioning this
to Tina when the police had arrived at Park House, and were ushered into the sitting room by an over-important Nerys who just happened to have turned up at the same time. Frankie’s mother had
been found on Hove esplanade, systematically setting fire to beach huts because she believed her errant husband was sleeping in one of them. Narrowly escaping prison on a plea of diminished
responsibility due to forgetting to take her medication, she was sectioned and referred to a secure unit.

She was still there.

‘Frankie? Hey, Frankie!’ She was jolted out of her reverie by Jemma tapping her on the arm and peering at her anxiously. ‘It’s OK, we were just having a laugh. Please
don’t cry.’

‘I’m not,’ Frankie protested, turning to face her, and then realising that there were indeed a couple of tears trickling down her cheek.

‘Yeah, sorry,’ Mia murmured, grabbing the remote and idly channel hopping. ‘It’s not your fault your family are weird.’

‘Mia, shut it!’ Jemma hissed. ‘So . . .’ She turned to Frankie. ‘What are you going to wear on Saturday, then?’

Frankie frowned, her thoughts still in the past. ‘Saturday? What’s happening on Saturday?’

‘Like, hello?’ Mia exclaimed. ‘What’s the whole civilised world been talking about for the past month? Nick’s twenty-first!’

‘Oh, that,’ Frankie muttered. ‘I’m not going.’

‘
Not going?
’ Jemma gasped. ‘What possible reason could you have not to go?’

You want a list?
thought Frankie, sighing inwardly. One, Mia’s boyfriend was a chinless wonder; two, the place would, she knew, be full of super-confident ex-public-school girls
flaunting their perfect figures and talking in over-loud voices about their latest boyfriend, where they’ve skied and the car Daddy has just bought them; and three, she hated parties. She
always had – even the beach parties that all her mates in Brighton had regarded as cool. Sadly, her aunts both considered that it would ‘do her good’ to socialise at every
possible opportunity, and Jemma and Mia, who were so full of confidence in their own charms, kept teasing her and trying to set her up with guys – usually the ones they deemed completely
hopeless.