The Lost Guide to Life and Love (2 page)

I was about to follow them. A chance to dance with a prince—well, within a few yards of one, at least—was too good to miss. I was just drying my hands on one of the neatly rolled little towels when the door suddenly burst open.

The girl who charged in wore a short sparkly dress that was definitely not a chain-store knock-off, but she could have worn a bin liner and looked stunning. Six feet tall with red hair piled on top of her head, she had the sort of cheekbones that make the rest of us just want to give up hope. She glanced quickly around the cloakroom, gave me the briefest of nods and raised her eyes to examine the high windows. Then, while I watched with my jaw dropping, she took off her shoes, stepped up onto the marble surround of the washbasins, reached up to push open the narrow window, then pulled herself up, wriggled through it and dropped out into the night.

I pulled a chair over and jumped up, twisting my head to peer down through the window. The girl was loping easily down the back street, past a surprised security guard, towards a taxi rank. Her hair had come loose and my lasting image was of her in the light of the streetlamps, her copper-coloured hair streaming out behind her, shining, dazzling.

‘So, Tilly, did you get to dance with a prince?’ asked Bill, my godfather, the next day when I called in to his bistro. He and his kitchen staff were prepping up for lunch and I stood by the door of the kitchen, out of their way. While Bill talked to me, he was still keeping an eye on the chopping, slicing, searing, stirring going on all around him. I always loved watching him, cooking with him, tasting, experimenting. His restaurant kitchens had been a second home to me, and it was all down to him, really, that I was working for
The Foodie
magazine.

‘A prince? Sadly, no,’ I laughed, helping myself to a deliciously sweet cherry tomato. ‘It was impossible to get near them—and seriously uncool to try. So I don’t think I’ll be the next princess.’

‘Shame,’ said Bill, kissing the top of my head as he came past me with a tray of prawns. ‘You’d be a perfect princess. And it would be good for business too. The princess’s godfather! Everyone would want to come and eat here.’ He grinned at me. ‘Coffee?’

‘No, thank you. Actually, I’ve come to ask a favour.’

‘Ask away.’

‘Jake and I are going up north for a sort of holiday.’

‘
Sort
of holiday?’

‘Well, yes, he’s got some project he’s working on. And
I thought I could do some stories up there too, so we’re renting a cottage for a couple of weeks. I’ve got the names of some really interesting food producers—cheese-makers, chocolatiers, and a monk who makes cider from the monastery apples, but if you know of any more, it would be really good. And as long as I keep sending them plenty of articles, the magazine’s OK about me being away.’

‘Sure,’ said Bill, ‘I can give you some contacts. If you’re staying for lunch, we can sort it out then.’

‘Sorry. Can’t. I’m lunching with Mum.’

‘Ah,’ said Bill with a sigh, ‘your mother. How is she?’

‘Don’t you know? Haven’t you seen her recently?’

‘No. She has, she
says
, been far too busy. Too busy for anyone as frivolous as me.’

Bill looked sad for a moment and I felt sad for him. He’d loved my mother for years. Hopelessly and helplessly. There was a small silence. I helped myself to another tomato.

‘These are really very good,’ I said as the juice spurted sweetly in my mouth. ‘They taste of sunshine.’

Bill’s face brightened. ‘Yes, they do, don’t they? They’re from a new supplier. Tell you what…’ He picked up a generous handful of the tomatoes and popped them into a paper bag. ‘Give these to your mother, with my love. And I’ll email you some suggestions for those foodie pieces.’

‘Right. I’ll give them to her and I hope they bring you luck.’

I gave him a hug and a kiss and set off with the usual mixed emotions to meet my mother, Frankie Flint…

Yes,
that
Frankie Flint, Fairtrade Frankie, the one who set up the chain of coffee bars. You’ll probably have heard of her. She’s always in the papers. There’s even talk of making a film about her.

About how Frankie Flint and her husband Theo started a tiny little restaurant making delicious food so even though
the chairs creaked and the tables wobbled it was quickly a huge success. Critics enthused about it, famous people ‘discovered’ it. Their friend Bill came in as a partner to help them. The day they had their first rave reviews in the colour supplements they held an impromptu party at Theo and Frankie’s house. In the middle of the afternoon, Theo popped back to the restaurant to get some more food and wine. He took Josh, their two-year-old son, with him.

And in the middle of a sunny Sunday, on an almost deserted road, a drunk driver, just nineteen years old, jumped the lights and rammed straight into their car. If Theo himself had not had a couple of glasses of wine, he might have seen it coming and avoided it. Maybe. Maybe not. But he didn’t. Theo and the other driver died instantly. Baby Josh lingered on before he, too, died three weeks later. I think my mother would have liked to have died, too. But she had her daughter, me, aged five, to look after.

Years later, probably when I was about ten, I came across a photo tucked into a book at home. It was a typical holiday snap of a family sitting around a café table in the sunshine. Father with a baby boy perched on his shoulders, a small chubby girl in big sunglasses reaching up to drink from a straw in a perilously tilted glass, and a young woman with long flowing hair laughing at the camera, eyes slightly screwed up in the sunlight, nothing more to worry about than the chance of some spilled orange juice.

‘Who are they?’ I asked my mother, who had gone pale at the sight of the picture.

‘That’s you,’ she said, pointing to the chubby toddler. ‘And your dad, and Josh, the year we went to France.’

‘But who’s
that
?’ I asked, pointing at the laughing woman.

‘That’s me,’ said my mother. ‘You won’t recognise me because I wore my hair long then.’

But that wasn’t why I didn’t recognise my mother laughing
in the sunshine. It was because in the five years since the accident, I had never once seen my mother laugh.

After my father and brother died, I think my mother must have had some sort of breakdown. Understandable really. But somehow she emerged and set up a new business. Energised and determined, she wanted to give people an alternative to pubs and bars, so she set up Frankie’s Coffee Shops.

Long before Starbucks, Mum took the 1950s coffee bar and reinvented it. At a time when Britain was desperate for decent coffee, she provided it, and a great place to drink it too. Her cafés had armchairs and newspapers. Bigger branches had rooms with TV screens and table football and a jukebox and opened until late at night. They served soup, snacks, sandwiches and cakes but never, ever, alcohol. Still don’t. But, despite that, Frankie’s coffee shops are cool. She found the knack of appealing to all ages and all types. In the daytime it was the sort of place you could meet your granny, while at night you didn’t have to apologise for suggesting a Frankie’s Coffee Shop on the way home from a movie.

What started as a little, hippyish establishment soon grew. She set up franchises—very strictly controlled—until there were Frankie’s Coffee Shops in most big towns. My mother had always been the business brain when she and Theo and Bill had their restaurant, and now she went into overdrive. She often said, ‘
Work is the best medicine
, as Granny Allen used to say.’

Don’t get me wrong. Frankie wasn’t a bad mother. Not at all. It was almost as though she was trying so hard not to smother me that she left me almost too much alone. She didn’t want to get too close to anyone any more, not even me. And certainly not Bill.

In any case, her business took huge amounts of time and
energy. And because it was such a novelty—ahead of its time, fairly traded and organic—she was always in the newspapers, on radio and television, commentating on this, that and the other. She was the absolute model of the perfect business, the perfect employer, the perfect ethical entrepreneur. What’s more, she talked well and passionately, looked stunning and stylish and even made a profit—most of which, needless to say, was ploughed back into good causes. She was a one-woman retail phenomenon.

But all that didn’t always make her easy to live with. Hard-working, high-minded, high-achieving, successful mothers with high moral standards and an insatiable work ethic aren’t always the best flatmates for day-dreaming, chaotic teenage girls with a serious shoe habit and a pathological desire to sleep till lunchtime.

Frankie’s New Road branch is aimed at ladies who lunch. It has huge squashy sofas, piles of glossy magazines and walls decorated with fashion ads. It is light and stylish and welcoming. And, as always, very busy. The place buzzes with chatter and is a glow of colours and good smells.

There, tucked in the corner in her trademark black, is my mother. She has a phone to her ear and a pile of papers in front of her. She likes to take her work round to the various coffee shops and work in the middle of it all, so she can see what’s going on and her staff and customers can talk to her. It’s another reason the media love her.

I bend over to give her a quick hug and kiss. As always, she makes me feel large and awkward. My mother apparently takes after her father’s family and is small-boned and neat. She says I have inherited characteristics from her mother’s family and that’s why I’m so tall with enormous feet. Still on the phone, she gives me a quick acknowledgment as I sit down and order a smoothie—apple, pear, ginger and beetroot. Beetroot? I have to try
it. When it comes, I sip it tentatively, then with more enthusiasm. Mmm, yes, it works. As I lean back, untangling the different flavours on my tongue, I watch my mother as she discusses a problem at one of the branches. The lines round her eyes I am used to. They’ve been there from the time my father and brother died. Maybe it’s the light, but today they seem deeper. The black, stylish as it is, does little to flatter. Sorrow had aged my mother when she was young, but now she’s fifty and age is beginning to do its bit as well. She is as smart as ever but there is, I realise sadly, a hardness about her.

She finishes her call. ‘Sorry about that, darling, but you know what it’s like.’ And I do, I do. ‘Do you mind eating here? They have some wonderful fish soup today. And the new bread is delicious.’

So we sit there and have the fish soup, thick and creamy with lots of mussels. I dig each one out with the shell of another and lick the creamy, lemony sauce from my fingers. It’s all very good. But my mother’s eyes are constantly darting hither and yon, watching the staff, watching the customers, thinking, considering.

‘Oh I forgot,’ I say suddenly, producing the little bag of tomatoes, ‘Bill sent you these.’

She looks into the bag and closes it up again without taking any of the tomatoes. ‘And how is Bill?’ she asks politely.

‘Pining for you,’ I say. ‘I gather you haven’t seen him for some time.’

‘I’ve been busy,’ she says. ‘But I hear the bistro’s going well. It’s madness him having to start all over again. Why he sold his last restaurant before he went travelling, I’ve no idea, especially as he only stayed away for a few months. So much for his midlife gap year. I told him it was a daft idea.’

‘You know he hoped you’d go with him,’ I say, picking
up a crumb of bread on my fingertip.
Waste not, want not
—another Granny Allen saying. When Bill went on his travels, I knew he had texted or emailed or sent silly postcards from every stop, hoping to tempt her out to join him. He only came home again because she wouldn’t.

My mother snorts. ‘He might have time to abandon everything and jaunt round the world like an overgrown adolescent, but the rest of us have work to do, businesses to run.’

‘Bill would maintain,’ I say, ‘that you have lives to live too.’

She gives me a withering look. And I see Bill still doesn’t stand a chance.

The waiter brings our coffees and my mother turns the tables on me.

‘So, how’s your love life? Everything OK with Jake?’

‘Mmmm.’ My mother and I don’t really do girlie chats, but I need to talk to someone. ‘I think so. But, to be honest, he’s been a bit odd lately.’

‘In what way?’ She looks at me sharply. ‘Is he working?’

‘Oh yes, doing something on the new breed of football managers. He seems quite involved in it. Thinks it could really make his name.’

My mother looks approving. ‘Sounds interesting,’ she says. ‘So what’s the problem?’

‘Oh, probably nothing,’ I say. ‘Anyway,’ I continue, trying to be more positive in the light of my mother’s sharp gaze. ‘We’re off up north for a week or two. He wants to do something about the millionaires buying up grouse moors and turning themselves into English gentlemen.’

‘You mean like, what’s the name, Simeon Maynard? Slimy Simeon?’

‘The very one.’

‘Now I’d really like to know where
his
money came from.
Nowhere respectable, I’ll bet. If Jake can get to the bottom of that, I think it would be a real can of worms,’ says my mother. ‘Anyway, where are you going?’

‘Somewhere in the back of beyond called High Hartstone Edge,’ I say. ‘It’s literally in the middle of nowhere, it’s—’

‘I know exactly where it is,’ says my mother, surprised and almost smiling. ‘It’s where Granny Allen came from.’

‘Really?
The
Granny Allen?’ We had this picture of Granny Allen at home, a faded photo of an oldish woman with thick hair tied back and a determined expression, sitting bolt upright outside her cottage, gripping her Bible firmly. She might have been dead for well over a hundred years or more, but her influence still lingered on. If I tried to throw anything away—from an old dress to a chicken carcass—then Mum always said Granny Allen would come and haunt me. She’d been told that by her mum, who’d been told it by hers, and so on and so on, right back to Granny Allen, who ruled the family back in the nineteenth century. You told the truth, kept your word, helped people when you could and, above all, you worked hard and stood on your own two feet. Lounging round, doing nothing, was condemned as a very un-Granny-Allen-like activity. Anyway, she was always there in the photograph, with her Bible and that stern expression, watching my every move.