The Love Letter (14 page)

Making progress?
Two identical messages awaited Legs on the iPhone, one from Conrad, the other from Gordon’s PA Kelly.

The urge to type ‘First Base’ with hyperbolic honesty was hard to resist. To give herself time to think, she called through to the Book Inn, but the voice at the other end of the line – not one of the regular team of staff she recognised – informed her that it was fully occupied all weekend.

‘Tell Guy it’s Legs North.’ She knew he and Nonny would fit her in, even if it meant bunking up in one of the attics.

‘He’s in the kitchens,’ informed the voice fearfully. ‘Can you call back?’

Wearily, Legs rang off. She had no intention of staying in the hall with Francis, and even less desire to stay at Spywood with the aged, naked adulterers. If she went for a walk along the Eascombe under-cliff to the harbour she could clear her head and pop in on Guy and Nonny at the Book Inn for a drink; they would find her a bed for the night.

As she walked she called Conrad, who was with his kids and clearly didn’t want to speak for long. ‘Easier to text when they’re here for weekends,’ he muttered as teenage voices moaned in the background that he was always on the phone and that they had pressed ‘live pause’. ‘How are you getting on?’

‘Well, Francis definitely wants Gordon on the festival bill …’ she decided to start off positively.

‘That’s great – tell me the details later.’

‘But it’s not that straightfor—’ She realised he’d already rung off.

Furious, she stomped down the cliff path and started along the shingle beach, wobbly on her feet until she reached the under-cliff and perched on the ledge, punching a thumb at her little screen to address Gordon’s PA.

Progress fine.

A reply flew back before she’d pocketed the phone.
Please elaborate so I can report more fully to Gordon.

It’s rather complicated.

He will require a full debrief.

She huffed, thinking that it was none of Kelly’s business, let alone Gordon’s. As long as she got him on the programme, surely the details were irrelevant?

She called Daisy, desperate to confide in someone, but the phone rang on unanswered.

All will be fine,
she typed to Kelly.
Trying to get Gordon star billing at Farcombe, and looks v hopeful. Will update anon.

The large A-sign outside the Book Inn announced that it was closed for a private function that night.

Holidaymakers were out in force along the seafront wearing the curious uniform of the British coastal visitor: pastel-coloured anoraks, patterned wellies and crumpled cotton shorts.

Legs sat on one of the benches overlooking the harbour and thought about Francis, uncertain whether he’d changed or whether she just saw him differently after a year apart. He seemed more mature and self-assured and distinctly sexier. Her innards squeezed deliciously as another aftershock from their kiss fizzed through her. She quashed the sensation and focused hard on a seagull dive-bombing an abandoned wrapper.

Her phone was chiming with yet another email, this time from Gordon himself.

With whom are you negotiating? Are you still unarmed and driving a red car? I hope this is being handled discreetly. GL.

Legs glared at the seagull, irritated that he wanted such forensic detail, although the joke made her smile, despite herself. She could never entirely tell whether Gordon’s offbeat humour was quirky wit or just madness, but she loved its rare appearances.

I have a close personal contact within the Protheroe family,
she assured him.

I abhor nepotism.
He popped up on live messaging now, no longer making her smile.

She sighed even more irritably, wondering whether he really wanted to appear at the festival at all. But much as she longed to call his bluff, she knew it wasn’t worth the risk.

If you would prefer to make contact yourself, it can be arranged.

That will not be necessary yet. I have heard the family can be extremely difficult to approach; I simply want assurance that this is being handled with the utmost caution and tact.

Tact! She fumed.
Tact!
The benevolent Hector Protheroe is currently shacked up with my mother in a clifftop love nest, and I’m about to upset the family applecart yet further by inventing a
romance with his son to break up this sorry union, which may also result in breaking my own heart, but will almost certainly get you top billing at the festival.

However, all she angrily typed was:
The Protheroe family has always tempted fate and they can make dangerous bedfellows. Rest assured, I am taking every precaution possible, including parking the red car in gear with the handbrake on. I am also nothing if not actful.
Too late she realised that she had omitted the first ‘t’ in ‘tact’. It seemed fitting, given that she was asking to act the performance of her life. What the hell.
And armless,
she added.

Do you take nothing seriously?
Gordon stormed back.

Biting her lip, Legs tapped at her screen as persistently as the seagull in front of her pecking its beak at the wrapper until she’d written more supplicating apologies and promises of utter professionalism than every politician ever accused of sleaze or expenses fiddling, footballer accused of match fixing and newspaper editor accused of phone-tapping combined. Satisfied, she pressed send. That should appease the irascible bugger.

He seemed slightly placated, replying a few moments later:
I don’t doubt your professionalism, Allegra, although Conrad’s is another matter. Is your close personal contact Francis Protheroe?

He was a clever bugger as well as a capricious one, she realised, typing:
Yes.

And he is the ex you said you could never work alongside?
His memory was far too good, as were his quick-fire Googling skills.
Good looking guy.

He clearly already had a picture of Francis in front of him, no doubt one of the many dashing shots that had accompanied gushing pieces in the
Mail
and
Telegraph;
she’d done the internet searches herself enough times to know how easy they were to find. And if one looked hard enough – as Gordon no doubt had – it was even possible to link her name with Francis’s. Thus Gordon had rumbled Conrad’s shabby tactics already.

Francis is highly professional, and already right behind you coming
here,
she assured him, eager to set his mind at rest. But he’d already signed out of their chat, no doubt to blast out a furious email to Conrad berating him for sending his silly, wisecracking assistant to do the job of a professional negotiator and agent.

The seagull had tired of the wrapper and flown off, a silhouette crossing the golden glow of the lowering sun. In the harbour, the masts clanked and jingled, and beyond the sea wall, waves on the shingle hissed and frothed like writhing serpents.

Walking into the glare of the sun with her head lowered, Legs trailed back up the cliff path to the jinxed red car and sat behind the wheel, willing herself to drive to Bude where there might be a B&B with vacancies even in high summer.

Yet she couldn’t face driving away from her clifftop, such a familiar corner of her childhood. It was as though she and the Honda were held tightly there by magnets.

It took almost an hour of wrestling with her conscience before she called her father, still not knowing whether she could bring herself to tell him what was going on, yet desperate to check that he was all right. But as soon as she told Dorian that she was in Farcombe he pre-empted any clumsy attempt to declare the affair and claimed in his charming, vague manner to be well aware of the situation, thank you, and dealing with it in his own way. Hot-headed and highly emotional, Legs had never been able to penetrate Dorian’s quiet, formal starchiness for all their unconditional love. He was a man who might weep through
Madame Butterfly
on Radio 3, and yet clammed up totally if asked about his feelings.

‘Your mother will come back in her own good time’ was all he would say.

No matter how much she huffed, puffed, barracked and demanded that he come to North Devon in person, he refused to engage. The only moment in which she heard his voice sharpen from its customary soft, gentlemanly clip was when she mentioned her sister.

‘No need to involve Ros,’ he snapped. ‘She simply will not understand all this.’

‘And I do, I suppose?’

‘You’re the guilty one, Allegra’

‘I’m what?’ she bleated.

‘You always feel guilty about things and get personally involved, but you are equally quick to forgive; Ros is very moral and black and white, as you know. This would hurt her very deeply. She takes after your mother on that front. They’re both martyrs to their cause.’

‘Mata Hari in Mum’s case,’ she grumbled.

Only after the call ended did it occur to Legs that her father had let something slip, given her a rare personal insight. It seemed strange that he aligned Ros and Lucy so closely; Legs had always been the Mummy’s girl, after all. She felt curiously orphaned by the drama, her entire halcyon childhood cast in doubt. She longed more than anything to speak with Daisy, but there was still no answer, nor did Conrad reply to texts. The only persistent contact on her phone was Gordon, blithering on in a long email about red cars and stalkers. He obviously had writer’s block again, hadn’t managed to contact Conrad and seemed to have been on the laudanum.

Conrad has no right to ask you to do this,
he raged.
As if the scheming Protheroes were not enough to contend with, he knows that Ptolemy Finch fans are extremely clever, especially the cranky ones. My real identity might remain one of the literary world’s greatest kept secrets – for now – but an obsessive few have long made it their business to know all about Gordon Lapis’s editor, publicist and marketing team at the publishers, and even my literary agent and assistant. They have names, photographs, phone numbers, home addresses. Access to Google and a clever mind makes for easy detective work. You are highly conspicuous, Allegra, especially in a red car.

She ignored him, deciding to be out of signal or battery as far as he was concerned. His paranoia was too much for her right now.
Even poor Kelly had dropped another line ‘strictly off the record’ to explain that Gordon was behaving very strangely and so it would help to know the exact situation between Legs and the Protheroe family.

Her stomach let out a loud rumble. She hadn’t eaten since lunchtime and it was now after nine, the last streaks of light being pulled from the sky. Yet suddenly she was too weary to face driving for food or even a bed. She was still magnetically glued to the clifftop in the car, and feeling increasingly like a kittiwake sitting on a clutch of eggs. Parked amid the gorse bushes on the headland, she was far from any public road, and tucked safely away from sight of Gull Cross and the Spywood and Spycove track. The woods and cliffs around her held no fear; she’d camped out here often enough as a girl. She clambered into the back of the Honda and curled up into a tight ball, using her weekend bag as a pillow, momentarily surprised that her duffel bag felt smaller than expected, but too tired to really care. The sound of the sea lulled her to sleep almost immediately, cocooned in her familiar old red car.

Waking to a spectacular dawn stabbing blades of sunlight through the spiked arms of gorse, Legs unfolded her stiff, cramped body and groped her way out onto the dewy grass. She was ravenously hungry. The clock on her phone told her it was five-thirty. Francis had texted at midnight:
Kizzy onside, as promised. Come for lunch. F

She groaned, hunger still gnawing at her stomach lining, but her belly was now so acid with apprehension that she knew indigestion would chase every mouthful of breakfast. She went for a run instead, pulling on her trainers from the boot of the car and
pounding the heartbeat from her ears with her feet, racing her churning thoughts along Farcombe estate’s private roads, making sure she kept out of sight of the main house. Cooling off afterwards, she waded through the shingle of Eascombe Cove at high tide, not caring that her trainers got soaked. Seaweed tied itself around her ankles before slithering away as she let out high kicks which sent up salty showers that splashed refreshingly against equally salty sweat on her skin.

She should take a shower before going to the big house for lunch, she realised. Then again, staying dirty might be no bad thing. She had decided she must put Francis off. The more repulsive he found her, the more vindicated he would feel and the less tempted to enact this bizarre farce and risk damaging either his new love, or her old, battered heart. She owed it to him and Kizzy to be in a bedraggled, salt-crusted state. It was only fair. She would, however, line up the mother of all hot baths afterwards.

Back at the car, she picked up her phone to ring Guy at the Book Inn, but it wasn’t yet seven. The sun was resting its chin on the top of the woods now, burning away the sea mist and dew. A fallow deer from the small Farcombe herd wandered out from the bracken and eyed her warily, tail flicking.

A chirrup from her phone sent it straight back into the undergrowth. It was Francis:
Did you get my message about lunch? Will you be there? We must discuss the plan. F