Читать книгу The Chocolate Collection - Trisha Ashley - Страница 12

On the way back to the flat, with a lot to think about and a chapter of Satan’s Child and three letters to type up, I found Zillah still in the kitchen stirring something savoury-smelling in a large pot. The cat, Tabitha, was draped around her neck like a black fur wrap, her tail practically in the stew.

Hygiene was possibly not Zillah’s strong point but neither she nor Grumps (nor even Tabitha) ever seemed to suffer ill effects. Nor did Jake and I, come to that, because although I did some of our own cooking in the flat, we shared quite a lot of meals. We must all have been immune.

‘Zillah, if you have time, maybe you had better read my cards,’ I suggested. ‘Grumps just told me that we’re on the move.’

Zillah silently turned down the heat and put a lid on the pot, then fetched her Tarot pack and handed the cards to me to shuffle. Under my fingers they felt cool, snakily smooth and almost alive.

‘You could read them yourself,’ she grumbled as I gave them back, but she began to lay them out in a familiar pattern on the table. The cat, bored, disentwined herself and stalked off, holding up a tail like a bottlebrush that has seen better days.

‘You know I’ve given up reading them, especially for myself, because there never seemed to be good news. I simply don’t think I could bear it if I saw yet another dark stranger scheduled to enter my life bringing change, because it never turns out well,’ I added gloomily.

It would have been really useful if the cards had ever given me some helpful hints about whether the changes would be good or bad too, especially regarding my ex-fiancé, David.

‘It’s all in the reading and how you interpret it, Chloe, you know that,’ Zillah said. ‘You don’t have to make a self-fulfilling prophecy.’

While I puzzled over that one, she looked at the cards that showed what was currently going on in my life.

‘Hmm…no surprises there, or in what will happen if you continue on your current course.’ She turned over more cards and pondered.

‘But my course is about to be changed, isn’t it? Not only are we moving, but Jake will be off to university later this year.’

I’d had the maternal role for my half-brother thrust upon me and I’d done my best, torn between love and resentment, but although I adore Jake, I couldn’t say I wasn’t relishing the idea of being my own woman again.

That my own childhood had been a happy and secure one was entirely due to Granny but, though kindly and affectionate, Zillah seemed to have been born without a maternal gene and could not take her place. That hadn’t stopped Mum from thinking Zillah could quite easily assume Granny’s role as mother substitute when she was off with her latest lover, though – but then, she didn’t have the maternal gene either.

At least Zillah loved us in her own unique way, even if, like Grumps, she didn’t find children terribly interesting until they were capable of holding a conversation.

‘It doesn’t say anything about Mum turning up again, does it?’ I asked, following this train of thought. ‘Only it would be just like her to walk back in, now there aren’t any responsibilities for her to shoulder, what with Grumps having paid her bills and Jake an adult.’

My mother had spent less and less time at the flat until she had finally vanished altogether from a Caribbean cruise six years previously and was currently presumed by everyone except the family to be dead. We presumed her to be fornicating in sunnier climes, even if this time her absence had been inordinately prolonged. Her disappearance had coincided with David jilting me, too: cause and effect.

Zillah ignored me, turning over the cards showing what was happening with my relationships, which was not a lot apart from a platonic and fraternal one with my old friend Felix Hemmings, the bookseller of Sticklepond.

Through the thin spiral of smoke from her latest cigarette I automatically began to read the meanings upside down, and groaned. ‘Oh, no, please don’t tell me another man really is coming into my life? I can’t bear it!’

‘Maybe more than one person,’ she said, frowning. ‘Perhaps there’s unfinished business with someone you knew before?’

‘No way! Now I’ve realised I’m stuck in some endless Groundhog Day cycle of love and rejection, I’m not even going to look at another man.’

‘You can’t call two failed relationships an endless cycle, Chloe.’

‘Two? Have you forgotten Cal, or Simon or—’ I stopped, unable to remember the faces, let alone the names, of some of my more fleeting boyfriends.

‘I did not mention men, but in any case they were obviously unmemorable. And can we help ourselves if love strikes?’ She thoughtfully fingered the card depicting a tower struck by lightning.

‘We can if it strikes twice,’ I snapped. ‘But even if I’d been tempted to take any boyfriend seriously after David jilted me, they weren’t prepared to take on Jake too. He’s the ultimate love deterrent.’

I shuddered, recalling some of the hideous pranks my inventive half-brother had got up to over the years in order to get rid of my boyfriends. I was sure Grumps had had a hand in some of the more fiendish tricks.

‘He was, but he’s now an adult, and once he’s at university he’ll have other things to think about.’

‘So he will…and it seems like only five minutes since I went off to university, too,’ I said with a sad sigh, for that had been my one, abortive bid for independence, the year after Jake was born. It had been all too easy for Mum to absent herself for longer and longer periods, leaving me literally holding the baby, but I’d thought if she didn’t have me to fall back on, then she would be forced to stay at home and behave like other mothers.

How wrong I was! I got back at the end of the first term to find she had dumped the baby in Zillah’s unwilling hands, leaving me a scribbled note with no idea of when she would return. Jake was touchingly happy to see me, making me guilty that I had been so engrossed in my love affair with Raffy that I had hardly thought of him for weeks. Grumps and Zillah were also happy to have me back, in their way, but I was the one who could have done with a mother’s tender care just then, rather than have to take on the role myself.

But surprisingly, in the end, Zillah proved to be a tower of strength when I most needed one…

I looked at the spread of cards again and asked hopefully, ‘Can the future be altered, Zillah?’

‘People can change, and then the future also changes. Or perhaps the true future remains fixed, the other is merely a warning to put us on the right path to our fate.’ Her gnarled hand reached out and flipped over the final cards. ‘Your future has interesting possibilities.’

‘What, you mean interesting in the Chinese curse sort of way?’

‘Well, what are the angels telling you?’ she asked acerbically.

‘That change is coming, but it will all turn out right in the end.’

‘Whatever “right” means, Chloe.’ She swept the cards together, tapped them briskly three times and wrapped them up in a piece of dark silk.

Back in the flat I felt unsettled, which was hardly surprising when a positive Pandora’s Box of painful recollections kept escaping from where I thought I’d had them safely locked away. Memories not only of my first love, Raffy, which even after so many years evoked feelings of loss and betrayal far too painful to dwell on again, but also of my ex-fiancé, David.

We met in Merchester’s one upmarket wine bar and he had seemed so different from any of my other, short-lived boyfriends. He was several years older, for a start, solid and dependable. Maybe I was looking for a father figure, having never had one? He was a partner in a firm of architects, so more than comfortably off, and even Jake’s attempts to get rid of him (culminating in the plague of glowing green mice in David’s flat – I have no idea how he worked that one) just made him go all quiet and forbearing. He said Jake would grow out of it – which he had, only not until David’s presence in our lives was history.

And Jake had been the sticking point in the end. It was odd how I had remained completely blind to the fact that David was so jealous of my close relationship with my half-brother until that last day, only a couple of weeks before our wedding. I’d also assumed he understood that whenever my mother was away, Jake would stay with us after we were married, for the first few years at least. But as Zillah often says, men don’t understand anything unless it is spelled out for them in very plain language.

‘Jake could live with your grandfather and his housekeeper,’ David had suggested when Jake was twelve and my mother had performed her latest vanishing trick.

I let the ‘housekeeper’ bit go, since although Zillah certainly wasn’t that, her role in our lives defied definition. ‘Hardly, David! Social Services aren’t going to take kindly to a twelve-year-old living with a warlock, are they?’

‘Now, Chloe, don’t exaggerate, when you know that’s just a nom de plume he adopts for his books. He may be a little eccentric, but the whole persona…’ He smiled indulgently, his teeth very white against his tanned, handsome face. ‘It’s a publicity thing, isn’t it?’

‘No, it’s how he is. I keep telling you.’

‘You’ll be saying your mother is a witch next, Chloe, and has simply flown off on her broomstick.’

‘Oh, no, she never showed any inclinations that way and although Jake is interested in witchcraft, luckily it’s only from a historical point of view. It’s just a pity Granny isn’t still around to help me bring him up, but he isn’t a bad boy really, just lively.’

David shuddered.

‘What? You like him, you said so!’

‘Yes, of course I do, but that doesn’t mean I want to live with him. And there’s no reason why you should have to sacrifice your entire life to bringing up your half-brother, is there? Fostering might be the making of him.’

‘Fostering? I can’t believe you would even suggest that!’ I stared at him with new eyes. ‘Anyway, it’s going to be only for a few weeks at most, until Mum comes back. The longest she’s ever been away is three months.’

David’s expression softened and he came and put his arms around me. ‘Darling, you have to accept that she isn’t coming back this time – she’s dead. I know it’s hard, but look at the facts.’

The facts, as Mum’s friend Mags had reported them, were that Mum had simply vanished into thin air one night from the cruise ship taking them between Caribbean islands (a holiday won by Mags, who was ace at making up advertising slogans).

‘Mags was lying and she isn’t dead,’ I explained. ‘She’s probably somewhere in Jamaica with a man, and when she gets tired of that, she’ll come back again. She has a very low boredom threshold.’

‘Look, darling, she was seen on the ship the evening after it left Jamaica, wasn’t she?’

‘Someone wearing one of her more flamboyant dresses and with dark hair was seen, but I suspect it was Mags.’

‘But your mother’s friend is blonde – and why on earth should she go to so much trouble anyway?’

‘A wig? My mother often wore one when her hair looked ratty. And they were in the habit of covering up for each other.’

‘Come on, Chloe! Look, it’s been several weeks now, and I think, however hard it is, you’ll have to accept that she had too much to drink – which you know was one of her failings – and went over the side in the small hours without anyone noticing. This time she isn’t going to reappear as if nothing has happened. Which brings us back to what to do about Jake.’

‘Nothing, because you’re wrong. I expect she’ll be back in time for our wedding, but if she isn’t, then Jake can come and live with us, can’t he? I mean, you always realised he would have to do that whenever Mum was away, didn’t you?’

David was slow to answer, probably imagining the chaos one very lively boy could cause to his immaculately ordered life and minimalist white flat. I had already unintentionally caused enough of that while cooking chicken with a dark cacao mole sauce in his kitchen: chocolate does seem to get everywhere…And evidently he hadn’t understood the strength of the bond between Jake and me.

‘I’d like it to be just the two of us, for a while at least, darling,’ he said eventually. ‘You have to accept she’s not coming back and that other, permanent arrangements need to be made. I mean, your grandfather’s got a private income, hasn’t he? He could send Jake to boarding school.’

‘I don’t think his private income would stretch that far and anyway, Jake would hate it. He’s always seen me as more of a mother figure than Mum. I’m the security in his life, and so it would simply be another betrayal. And his friends are all here in Merchester.’

‘Then he’d hate being transposed to a city flat, wouldn’t he?’ David said quickly.

‘Yes, but we did say we’d find a house in the country, one you could commute from. That could be somewhere round here, couldn’t it?’

‘I meant much later, when we want a family. I’d like to have you to myself for a bit. Anyway,’ he added with a wry smile on his handsome face, ‘I’m starting to think I’m allergic to the country because I come out in this damned rash every time I visit Merchester.’

‘You can’t really call Merchester country,’ I objected, but it was true about the mysterious rash, because even now an angry redness was creeping up from the collar of his shirt.

I reminded myself to speak to Grumps about that…He and David had not really taken to each other, mainly because David spoke to him like an adult humouring a child: big mistake. He tended to take that tone with Jake too, and according to most of the locals, he’d never been any kind of child at all, but an imp of Satan.

‘Look, Chloe, I really can’t live with your brother. It isn’t fair to ask me.’ He ran his fingers through his ordered dark chestnut locks in a distracted way that showed me just how perturbed he was. He even loosened his silk tie – good grief!

‘You’ll have to find some other solution,’ he announced with finality.

‘I keep telling you Mum isn’t dead!’ I snapped, losing patience. ‘She bolts all the time, but she’ll be back eventually: I’ve read the cards and I know I’m right. What’s more, so has Zillah.’

But although they had told us that Mum was alive, they couldn’t, of course, show us where she was or how long she would be gone.

‘It’s Jake or me,’ he said quietly.

‘But, David—’

‘Do you love me?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said, which I did, even if not with the searing passion of my first love. ‘But—’

‘Me, or Jake,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t want to be hard-hearted, but it simply won’t work having him to live with us – and I’m certainly not moving here, which I’m sure you were about to suggest next.’

‘Well, yes, but it would be only until Mum comes back.’

He sighed long-sufferingly. ‘Which she isn’t going to do.’

He put on his jacket, which had been hanging neatly over the back of a chair in the chaotic kitchen area of the flat, where the paraphernalia of my budding Chocolate Wishes business covered every surface. In fact, there was a glossy smear of tempered couverture down one immaculate sleeve, which I decided not to point out.

‘The wedding’s in less than a fortnight, so you had better make your mind up fast, Chloe, hadn’t you?’

‘You can’t really mean you’d end it all over this, David?’

‘Yes, I do. Make other arrangements for Jake or you can call off the wedding.’

I still didn’t really think he meant it and I might have tried to soften him up a little, but I was distracted at that moment by catching sight of the imp of Satan himself through the window. He seemed to be closing the bonnet of David’s car…But no, David was always careful to lock it, so how could Jake…?

The door slammed behind David and he strode across the gravel and got into his sports car without, so far as I could see, a word or look at Jake, who was standing innocently by with his hands behind his back.

The engine roared into life and then coughed a bit, before the car sputtered off down the lane. It sounded pretty ropey; I’d be surprised if it got him home without breaking down.

It hadn’t, either. He’d phoned me when he finally got back, incandescent with rage. ‘That child did it – and that’s the last straw, Chloe, I mean it. Make other arrangements for him, or this is the last you’ll ever hear from me.’

So that was it, and though I was heartbroken, I was also relieved that I had discovered how jealous he was of my love for Jake before we got married. I’d already known he resented my closeness to my old friends Felix and Poppy, but thought he would get over that. Funny how you can be so blind, isn’t it?

I called off the wedding, which was both expensive and difficult at that late stage, and, resigning myself to perpetual spinsterhood, settled back into my life as before.

Except that this time, Mum didn’t come back. And the awful thing was, none of us missed her.