The Love Letter (9 page)

Before first-borns Rosalind and Freddie were a year old, the dinner parties in Kew and Richmond had already become legendary. By the time second children Daisy and then Allegra came along, the families were taking summer holidays together to remote
corners of the West Country, amongst which was an amazing clifftop estate belonging to a client of Nigel’s.

Legs, who had been just four at the time, remembered little of their first trip to Farcombe, although it had been the holiday on which she and Daisy became true summer best friends, bonding over a sandcastle on Fargoe Beach that they decorated with pebbles and shells, photographs of which still rested on both the Spycove and Spywood mantels, shown off by its two little architects in swimming costumes holding buckets and spades. In those days, the families had stayed in a pair of pretty, ivy-clad cottages close to the main hall. Their enigmatic host, Hector Protheroe, hadn’t been in residence, so the girls had enjoyed free range around the amazing Farcombe estate, running through the courtyards, swimming in the pool, pretending they were princesses in a fairytale castle. They imagined Hector must be a king.

Much later, Legs realised that this first summer holiday at Farcombe must have been the year that Hector’s wife Ella died. The Protheroes had been living in America to enable Ella to have the best of cutting-edge treatment in an attempt to turn the tide on the huge tumour growing in her heart. After he was widowed, Hector continued to live between New York and London, and the king of Farcombe eluded his princesses.

The annual holidays at Farcombe continued for the Norths and Foulkes as the go-getting eighties were replaced by the caring nineties and the main Hall fell into increasing disrepair. Allegra and Daisy played in their magical kingdom each summer, their friendship deepening. At six, the two girls had made a friends-for-life pact in the woods above Eascombe Bay, burying their favourite Barbies side by side beneath a beech tree as a symbolic gesture of for ever friendship. As far as Legs knew they were still there, faded little plastic effigies with pert breasts and slim ankles nestling in the deep Devon loam. They knew every nook and cranny around Farcombe, every hiding spot. One summer, they even discovered a way of getting into the big house along the sea passage from
Eascombe Cove that tunnelled up through the cellars, marvelling at the tapestries and panelling, the huge oil paintings and furniture all covered with dust sheets. It became their secret play castle.

Then the king came back, and that was shattered. Hector had sold his company, Smile Media, to return to Farcombe and renovate the house in honour of his late wife. He would start up a jazz festival in his magical corner of North Devon; Farcombe Festival was going to be pure pleasure, a sabbatical project to enable him to take a much-needed rest from big business and spend time with his only son, Francis, who had been brought up and educated thus far in America.

The North and Foulkes children were told there would be no more holidays at Farcombe. The cottages where the families had stayed each summer for half a decade were earmarked for staff accommodation. Legs and Daisy mourned their lost North Devon palace.

Legs wrote a heartfelt letter to Hector, princess to king, begging him to reconsider his plans. It ran to three pages of lined A5, complete with pencil illustrations and a lucky four leaf clover that she’d found one year at Farcombe and kept pressed in her diary ever since. She Sellotaped it beside her signature – a swirly confection that she’d been perfecting all term, which made ‘Allegra’ indecipherable.

Thus Hector Protheroe’s reply came addressed to Miss Alligator North. In flamboyant, spiky handwriting on beautifully embossed, headed paper, he apologised profusely for interfering with her summer holidays and offered a solution. There was a small farm-holding on the edge of the Farcombe estate for which he had no use, and which he was happy to sell to the two families.

Abandoned for over a decade to seagulls and rats, the small, ugly farmhouse known as Spycove and its neighbouring thatched cob cottage Spywood, were little more than tatty implement sheds perched on a cliff above Eascombe Cove, made from the same bleak grey stone as the distant hall, on the outskirts of the high
woods with gardens that literally dropped away into the sea. In the years that followed, Nigel Foulkes had lavished money and attention on Spycove until it resembled a Miami beach house. Spywood Cottage, by contrast, had changed little in the seventeen summers the North family had owned it, still possessing two interlinking bedrooms beneath the eaves upstairs, and one large kitchen/living room downstairs, with a chilly lean-to bathroom jutting out amid the trees behind.

The close friendship between the families had endured for almost thirty years now, although Nigel’s death four years earlier had changed the way they all thought of ‘the Spies’ as he’d always called them.

Daisy still clammed up on the subject of losing her father, more so than ever since her mother had remarried, settling down with quiet gallery owner Gerald, whom Daisy thought of as a very poor replacement for larger-than-life Nigel. It was a sore point, and Daisy had a lot of sore points these days, her touchiness having increased tenfold since having her own children. Unlike Legs, who wore her heart on her sleeve as she fought her way through life via the scenic route, cutting to the chase even if it meant drawing her own blood, Daisy had always been more circumspect. Her ability to see everybody’s point of view had made her a terrific diplomat in her youth, and was the secret to her ability to write raucous scripts for comedy ensembles, but nowadays she saw as much bad as good in people. This newfound cynicism could be refreshingly honest, but that didn’t always make her easy company.

Today was no different. Of all Daisy’s sore points, the topic of Francis was always destined to hurt most.

‘Why
does he want to see you?’ she asked ungraciously.

Legs tried to stop her heart racing madly. ‘Perhaps it’s time to forgive?’

‘Hmph,’ came the cynical raspberry. ‘You know he’s got a new girlfriend?’

‘Don’t talk rubbish.’

Daisy eyed her through her fringe. ‘You mean you haven’t heard about Kizzy?’

‘Kizzy de la Mere the poet?’ She remembered the self-publicising redhead on the festival website.

‘I hear they’re practically engaged.’

‘We’ve only been apart a year!’

‘And you and Conrad have been together how long?’

Legs brooded silently, casting aside her half-eaten apple. ‘We’re hardly “practically engaged”.’

‘Well he
would
have to get divorced first,’ Daisy mused. ‘But, assuming one is unattached like Fran, it doesn’t take long to go from thinking one can never live without a lover to finding a future spouse. Look at my mother. Dad’s hardly been dead long.’

Legs winced. Four years seemed a respectable amount of time to her, but she had no first-hand knowledge to compare. If her father died and her mother remarried afterwards, perhaps she would be just as angry? The thought of Francis getting measured up for a morning suit was certainly making her blood boil.

‘He can’t possibly marry somebody called Kizzy,’ she groaned. ‘It’ll play havoc with his lisp.’

Daisy was spared answering by the loud, rattling arrival of Will in the rickety MPV, returning from the farm park with two sleeping daughters and a panting pair of lurchers.

‘Gorgeous, gorgeous Legs – you look fabulous!’ He immediately scooped her up into a huge hug, earning a jealous scowl from Daisy.

Neither tall nor handsome, Will nevertheless possessed a fawn-eyed kindness and ebullient energy that made him instantly disarming, the boyish looks now acquiring wise crow’s feet and wolfish grey streaks to the hair as he aged. He was an incorrigible flirt, which more than made up for his moderate looks. When married to Ros, he’d become a background character, as comfortable as a reassuring armchair, easy to like and talk to, but rather flat and drab and in need of his cushions plumping. With Daisy at his side,
he had been reupholstered with confidence and everybody wanted to perch on his arm.

But there was only one true love rival in Daisy’s relationship with Will, and he burst in through the back door now, grass stains on his knees and twigs in his hair. ‘Dad!’

Nico hurled himself at Will, as hazel-eyed and bouncy as his father. Daisy turned to Legs. ‘Let’s get the girls in from the car. They’ll be thrilled to see you.’

Waking grumpily and hungrily to find an unfamiliar face lowered over her grappling with the car seat straps, Eva was not at her cheeriest to greet ‘Aunt Legs’. Beside her, Grace was equally wary, clutching a fluffy dog fearfully to her face. Both started to mewl.

‘How are you getting on with Conrad’s kids?’ Daisy asked pointedly as Legs hastily handed over wailing Eva.

‘We’re taking it slowly.’ She pulled comedy faces at Grace who looked horrified and hid behind her mother’s legs.

‘You never take anything slowly,’ Daisy laughed.

The tension between them bubbled again. Legs guessed this wasn’t about Conrad at all. ‘If this has to do with Francis, say so,’ she rounded, preferring to get it out in the open.

‘Just be careful,’ Daisy warned. ‘Try to read the situation before you rewrite any rules. Things have changed a lot down there.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ she sighed.

‘Well you did rather cut yourself adrift, chucking him out without so much as a kiss goodbye.’

‘I wrote to him to apologise.’ She turned to Daisy indignantly.

‘What good manners.’ Daisy watched Grace chasing a chicken around the driveway.

Legs gazed down at her feet, her Nike Lunars looking stupidly urban alongside Daisy’s dusty clogs. It was the first time she had confided about her letter to anyone: ‘Actually, I told him it had all been a huge mistake.’

Daisy turned to her sharply. ‘When was this?’

She dug holes in the gravel drive with her toes, ‘About a month after we split up.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He never replied.’

Eyebrows shooting up behind the collie fringe again, Daisy blew out a puff of surprise.

‘He must have hated my guts back then.’ Legs carried on staring at her feet. The truth of it still hurt like glass shards through her nerve endings. She’d wept such bitter tears over that letter, writing and rewriting it, pouring her heart out. Looking back, she knew she should have been brave enough to talk face to face instead of hiding behind purple prose and clinging to Conrad for security. ‘And now you say he’s engaged.’

‘Practically engaged.’

‘It hardly smacks of a broken heart, does it?’ She suddenly felt feverishly angry. Nor did it smack of one of Britain’s Most Eligible Bachelors as recent press had branded him. Increasingly neglected by Conrad out of work hours, Legs didn’t like to admit to the amount of time and effort she’d spent tracking down and reading the many articles that had featured Francis in recent months, but she’d been on the
Daily Mail
website so often that it now ranked high on her Explorer drop down list, and the corner newsagent had suggested she might like to take out a subscription to
Tatler
because she bought it so often. Its glossy pages regularly featured photographs of him ranked highly in Most Invited, Most Wanted and Sexiest charts, praising this good-looking heir to Farcombe, with his literary bent, healthy outdoor lifestyle, boyish sex appeal and an untarnished reputation, all of which made for a great catch. His long relationship and engagement to Legs was clearly deemed too trivial to mention, making her feel that their thirteen years together had been struck off his romantic CV entirely.

She had friends who were ex-obsessed, Googling previous boyfriends on a regular basis, and she hated the thought that she was similarly afflicted. (Surely with just the one ex to her name, an
active interest was not unjustified?) But, talking to Daisy today and confessing to sending the letter that could have changed the way the past year had panned out entirely, she already suspected that her personal motivation for returning to Farcombe was less about work and more about finally making peace.

Daisy was still looking up at her through her fringe, lips pressed to the top of Eva’s downy head. ‘Men react to rejection in different ways. Some go straight on the rebound. Look at Conrad.’ Then, before Legs had a chance to snap back that the two situations could not be compared, she added, ‘What does
he
think about your long weekend in Farcombe?’

‘It was his idea.’

Daisy almost dropped Eva in shock. ‘Please don’t tell me he’s joining you at the cottage?’

‘What d’you take me for?’ As they headed back inside to prepare lunch, Legs explained that she was going to Farcombe on festival business.

Looking ever more disapproving, Daisy buckled Eva into a high chair before fetching salad ingredients from the fridge. ‘So that’s what this is all about? Nothing to do with trying to get back together with Francis?’

‘Well, fate is playing a bit of a card, don’t you think?’

‘No! I don’t think that.’ A cucumber was being waved about like a conductor’s baton now. Grace and Eva were entranced. ‘I think that you have a horribly guilty conscience, and want to do anything in your power to lance the penitent boil.’

‘Nicely put.’

Daisy glanced out of the garden window to check that Nico and Will were suitably distracted and out of earshot, kicking a ball about. Then she turned back to Legs, voice hushed, cucumber lowered. ‘I think you believe you’ll never forgive yourself for what you did to Francis unless you create some sort of emotional Tardis, where you try to go back in time and recreate the moment you left him,
Groundhog Day-style,
and take the other path to see where it leads.’