The Lost Guide to Life and Love Read online

  ‘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 Grann
y 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.

  And as for drink…Well, you could see Mum was just programmed to set up Frankie’s Coffee Shops really. Apparently, Granny Allen had brought up her younger brothers and sisters, then her own family, and then her grandchildren too, all from a tiny farm high up on some bleak northern fellside. She must have been very tough, very determined, but not, I guess, a barrel of laughs.

  ‘She was actually your great-grandmother, or even great-great, I’m not sure,’ Mum was saying. ‘I went to Hartstone Edge with my mother when I was very small. We went somewhere by train, which seemed to take forever, and then it was a very long drive after that, up high and winding roads. My great-aunt lived there then. To be honest, I can’t remember much about it, I was very young. Lots of hills and sky, I remember. And sheep. And a stream with a ford and a little packhorse bridge. I remember playing on it with some cousins. It’s probably all changed now, of course. It was always a hard place to make a living.’

  For a moment she looks miles away. ‘I’ve always meant to go back there. But the time was never right. But now you can go instead and tell me what it’s like. Anyway, it will be good for you to have a little break, even if it’s a working holiday. How long are you away for?’

  ‘We’ve booked the cottage for two weeks, but we can probably extend it if we want to.’

  ‘Take plenty of warm clothes. You’ll need an extra layer up there, especially at this time of year. High Hartstone Edge! What a coincidence.’ We look at each other and this time my mother really does smile as we say in unison, ‘What would Granny Allen say?’

  Chapter Three

  It had rained all the way up the A1. Grey roads, grey traffic, the constant spray from lorries. The further north we headed, the worse it seemed to get. I had long since lapsed into silence. Jake was concentrating hard on the road ahead as he peered past the windscreen wipers into the gloom ahead.

  ‘Shall I drive for a while?’ I offered.

  ‘Might be an idea,’ he said, ‘I could do with a break. Look, there’re some services soon. We’ll stop and get a coffee. Give the rain a chance to stop.’

  The service station didn’t look promising. The only free space was at the far end of the car park and we had to run through the rain, dodging the puddles and then into a world of flashing video games and the smell of chips. We bought some papers and some coffees and sat down at the only table that wasn’t piled high with heaps of dirty, greasy plates.

  The coffee was only just drinkable, but at least it was good to be away from the constant whoosh of the windscreen wipers. I leant back, stretched my legs and flipped vaguely though the heap of papers. Suddenly, I sat bolt upright.

  ‘That’s her!’ I said. ‘The girl from the club!’

  ‘What girl?’ asked Jake, puzzled, as I twisted the paper round to show him.

  ‘ “Supermodel sensation, Foxy, has hunted herself down a very tasty new contract”,’ Jake read. ‘“The stunning redhead, who has taken the fashion world by storm since her first appearance on the catwalks at London Fashion Week two years ago, has signed up to be the new face of Virgo cosmetics in one of the company’s biggest ever deals. No chicken feed for fabulous Foxy!” Was she at the club? I don’t remember seeing here. And’—he looked back at the page—‘I’m sure I would have…’

  ‘No. She left in rather a hurry,’ I said. And told him the story of how she had jumped out of the window and down into the street.

  I expected Jake to laugh. Instead he was furious. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this?’ he asked so fiercely that the family at the next table paused in the middle of chomping through giant burgers, nudged each other and stared at us.

  ‘Because the princes arrived, and everyone was buzzing round them,’ I said, astonished at his reaction. ‘It just put it out of my mind. Sorry. I didn’t think you’d be so interested.’

  ‘Of course I’m interested.’ He looked at me as though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘A top model jumps from a toilet window in a club full of Premiership footballers and royal princes. Don’t you think that’s just a little bit interesting?’

  ‘Well, yes, of course it is. But so was everything else that was going on. I just didn’t think…I mean, I just don’t understand why you care so much. What are you doing? It’s not the sort of story you normally do. I thought you were writing about dodgy millionaires. Or are you selling celebrity stories now? What’s happened to your famous principles?’

  That was, I know, a bitchy thing to say. And I regretted it immediately. But too late.

  Jake stood up. Very quietly, deliberately, he gathered all the papers, left his half-drunk coffee and walked out. I picked up my bag and ran after him. ‘Shall I drive now?’ I asked when we got to the car. But he just glared at me and got in the driving seat. We drove on in the rain and silence.

  He was frowning, but I don’t know whether that was because of the weather or because of me. I never seemed to measure up to Jake’s standards. Even back at journalism college, where he was the star of the course. I always thought he would team up with one of the very bright, scary girls, like the Staveley twins, Felicity and Arabella, who were heading straight into television or national newspapers. But they all went their own ways and somehow it was just Jake and me and it seemed fine, even if I went into food writing, which for Jake didn’t count as proper journalism.

  Jake practically lives at my place, but he still keeps his old bedsit, a few miles away, where the cupboards are full of his neatly labelled files and a few basic clothes hang on a hook at the back of the door.

  As we headed north, I could feel the silence between us, and wondered why he was suddenly so concerned about models and footballers. But somehow I didn’t think he was going to tell me. He didn’t tell me much any more.

  We left the motorway and turned onto a road that led through small towns, then large villages, then small villages, then just about nothing at all. The rain had finally stopped, which was just as well, as we seemed to be climbing higher and the road was little more than a single lane as we kept tucking into hedges to let cars and tractors pass. Soon there weren’t even hedges, or many trees, just a few scrubby bushes, bent from the wind, and dry-stone walls. And no more villages, just occasional houses spread out over a vast, empty moorland, dotted with sheep.

  ‘Where now?’ asked Jake. It was the first thing he’d said for an hour.

  I scrabbled in my bag for directions. ‘We come to a place called Hartstone and, just past the pub—that’s good, it’s got a pub—and the old chapel, there’s a track marked “High Hartstone only”. We turn up there and in about a mile there’s a farmhouse and that’s where we go to collect the key.’

  The narrow road suddenly rose so steeply that it was almost perpendicular. Then, as Jake steered carefully past a large jutting boulder and rounded another bend, I gasped. ‘We’re on top of the world!’

  After all that climbing, we were now on a plateau. To left and right the moors stretched out for miles. Ahead was a small group of buildings and beyond that the road tumbled down and we could see another valley, a stony blur of blues and greens and greys stretching out into a hazy purple distance.

  Never before had I had such a feeling of space and distance. I don’t think I’d ever been in such an empty space. Bit of a shock for a city girl. Even Jake in his foul mood looked momentarily impressed, and slowed the car to take in the vastness of the view. Then we drove past the pub, grey and solid and hunched against the weather, saw the old chapel, which now seemed to be an outdoor pursuits centre. Or had been. It was boarded up and looked sad. Apart from that there was only a handful of houses. Where were the people who came to the pub? Where
were the people who had come to the chapel? Were there even any people up here?

  I spotted the ‘High Hartstone only’ sign and we turned and bumped off up the track, which twisted across the vast open space of the moor. It seemed a long mile.

  Suddenly we could see a small collection of buildings, dropped down at the base of another high hill that seemed to soar right up to the sky. The road led straight into a farmyard and stopped. That was the end of it. Literally the end of the road.

  ‘Is this it?’ asked Jake.

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said, having no idea. With that a woman emerged from one of the barns across the yard. She was tall, striking, with a heavy plait of greying auburn hair and, although dressed in jeans, wellies and an ancient battered waterproof, moved with a casual sort of elegance. I’d never seen anyone quite like her before.

  Jake sat in the car, arms folded and a deliberately blank expression on his face as if to say that this was nothing to do with him. So I got out of the car, stiff from the journey, and walked towards her. She would have been intimidating, if she hadn’t been smiling in welcome. ‘Mrs Alderson?’ I asked tentatively.

  ‘Hello there!’ she said cheerfully. ‘You must be Miss Flint and’ she glanced towards the car, ‘Mr Shaw?’

  ‘That’s us,’ I said, relieved, thinking how nice it was to hear a friendly voice after the hours of silence in the car. She had deep dark blue eyes and the most amazing skin, and her wrinkles were definitely laughter lines. Tucked into the neck of her jumper was a vivid jade scarf that lit up her face and contrasted sharply with the dingy mud of her jacket.

  ‘Good journey? Found us all right?’

  ‘Yes, fine, thank you. Excellent directions,’ I said, extra brightly to make up for Jake’s silence. She gave us both a quick look and I swear she knew that we’d had a row en route. But she just smiled again. ‘That’s the cottage up there,’ she said, pointing up the hillside behind the farm.

  In the middle of its vast steep expanse of fellside, I could see a solitary grey stone house built into a hollow. It must have been half a mile from the farm and the only building for miles, apart from a few tumbledown cottages and some abandoned stone barns, with high, dark doorways. It was a weird, empty landscape. What’s more, there seemed to be no road up to it. I began to wonder just what I’d booked.