They gazed at each other, silently, above the little packet of ribbons. He went on. "At first my visits here were entirely for the sake of business. But there are other dales and other farms and mines. I confess the frequency of my visits to this particular corner of England has much to do with the conversation and company of its inhabitants, one in particular."
He looked momentarily uncertain, as Matilda Allen"s expression betrayed no reaction to his words, but he gathered his confidence and continued. "In fact, Mrs Allen, I am taking steps to move my business to this very dale. I have been looking at premises just five miles from here. Stanhope House, perhaps you know it?"
She nodded the tiniest acknowledgement.
"It would provide comfortable accommodation for a man and his occupation. And his family."
The last three words hung on the air.
"Do I understand you are considering marrying again, Mr Peart?" asked Matilda Allen quietly, still gazing directly at him. He took a deep breath.
"If you will have me, Mrs Allen. If you will do me the honour of accepting my offer of marriage."
She looked at him. But for a moment she didn"t see him, this middle-aged man with his greying hair and his good tweed suit. Instead she remembered her husband. A tall, solemn young man of high principles, willing to take on her brothers and sisters. He had been a worker, drove a hard bargain but a fair one, had not wasted his money on drink or pleasure but made sure his family were well cared for. It had been a good enough marriage.
But he had never given her ribbons...
She realised William Peart was waiting for her to speak. She glanced down at the ribbons in her hand. She knew what she had to say.
"Thank you for your offer, Mr Peart, but I am sorry I cannot accept it."
"But-" He rushed to say something but she shook her head.
"I have enjoyed your visits. I have learnt a great deal, not just about photography but also of the world. I thank you again for the photograph of me to send to my sons and for the frames to hold their pictures. That was a great kindness. But I fear you still know little of it, really, or how we live." She gestured to her clothes, her faded heavy skirt, the darned blouse, the patched jacket. "I am a working woman, Mr Peart. I cannot be of help to you in your business."
"You could be a companion," he said eagerly. "I have had better conversations with you than with many of the men I meet in my travels. It would be a comfort to a man to come home to a wife like you to ease the loneliness. You wouldn"t need to work. But you could have the care of some hens, if you wish. No sheep, but we could have a house cow. There is s.p.a.ce enough...
"And your son. He could leave the mine and work for me. I would train him up in the business. He wouldn"t have to travel to the ends of the earth to make his way."
He could see the hesitation in her eyes. But then her mouth firmed.
"I"m sorry, Mr Peart. Your offer is good and kindly meant and I thank you for it. But you and I live in different worlds. I can no more live in yours than you could survive a winter in mine."
"But Stanhope House...it could be the best of both worlds for us both," he said eagerly.
"Or make us equally unhappy as we both miss what we know."
He was about to say something else, then stopped, thought for a moment and then said, "Mrs Allen, I am sorry. Perhaps my offer was so unexpected that it has taken you by surprise. May I ask you, please, to consider it for a little while? I shall return in a few weeks and ask again. If your answer is still no, then so be it. I shall not trouble you again, but please give my offer the benefit of some consideration."
"I will do that, Mr Peart, because you ask me. I fear the answer will be the same in a week or a month or a year, but I cannot stop you coming back to hear me say so. I do not think I could become a photographer"s wife in Stanhope House. Not even-" and the corners of her mouth lifted slightly-"not even with a house cow."
He gathered his hat, his big cape and went out to the patient pony and the little cart. Matilda Allen watched him for a moment. Then, as he turned to look back, she moved away from the window.
In her hand she still held the packet of ribbons. He hadn"t taken them back from her. She put them down on the scrubbed table. A hint of cherry-red velvet glinted through the tissue paper, tempting, tantalizing.
Chapter Twenty-Four.
I don"t know if you have ever been hugged by an Italian mamma full of grat.i.tude that you have saved her son"s life. But trust me, she will squeeze the breath out of you even more than pneumonia will. But it was wonderful. She hugged me. She cried. She hugged Sandro. She cried. She hugged me again. All while my mother tried to make tea.
The Santinis-Sandro, still looking a bit battered, his arm in a very high-tech splint, and his mother Claudia-had come round to my mother"s flat, where I was still convalescing, to say thank you. Claudia spoke very little English, though she managed to say "Thank you, thank you" over and over again while hugging me. She certainly got the message across. Then she handed me a small package. "A small thank you," said Sandro, almost shyly. "My mother chose it herself."
I unwrapped the package. Inside was the most beautiful gold bracelet, a striking design of elaborate curls and loops-delicate, elegant and unusual. I slipped it onto my wrist. "It"s beautiful. I don"t know what to say. Thank you."
And Claudia hugged me again. My mother, who speaks some Italian, offered everyone tea and cakes. Then she and Claudia sat chatting away, both of them constantly looking towards Sandro and me, as if they could scarcely believe we were there.
"So you"re back in training?" I asked Sandro.
"Yes. Just a very little, but every day. That way I will soon get fit again I hope. It is good to be training, good to be outside. But it"s not good at the club now. There is no heart, no joy in it. No one knows what will happen."
It still wasn"t certain that Shadwell would survive. If it did, it would certainly be much changed. The minority shareholders had cobbled together some sort of rescue package. But without Maynard"s millions, they were desperately short of money. It looked as though they would have to sell a lot of their players in the January transfer window and Shadwell would slide ignominiously out of the Premiership. They hadn"t won a game since the day of the Halloween party. They were a team in total disarray. Fighting off administration meant they didn"t have a lot of points deducted from them and get relegated. But as it looked as though they would get relegated anyway, it seemed a pretty pointless battle.
Whatever happened, it seemed Shadwell"s glory days were gone.
But what did that matter to me? I still felt so cheated by Clayton Silver. After all he had said to me about his father...
With so much time on my hands, I"d done a lot of Googling of Clayton, trying to find out more about his son. It was so long ago that the original stories weren"t online. There were occasional pa.s.sing references to the scandal, but nothing that told me exactly what had happened. But there were plenty of other stories about him and various women. None of them seemed to stick around for long. No surprise there, I thought, angry with myself for wasting so much time even thinking about him.
"Clayton is very unhappy, I think," said Sandro, giving me a careful look.
I shrugged my shoulders, showing it was nothing to me whether Clayton Silver was unhappy or not.
"He is very..." Sandro groped for a word. "...very encouraging for me. But otherwise I think he is angry. They all are. They don"t care. They give up. They go out, they drink, they play cards."
Two nights earlier he said, there had been a mammoth card game. Clayton had lost tens of thousands of pounds. "Clayton does not like losing," said Sandro.
"Looks as though he"ll have to get used to it," I said tersely. "But not a good time to be throwing lots of money away."
Sandro nodded. "We are not sure how long there will be money to pay us. Already so many people have left."
Behind the scenes the agents were already busy doing their work, ready for the opportunity to transfer players.
"We wait till then, I try and get fit by then. See where I go."
"Would you mind leaving Shadwell?"
Sandro shrugged. "It will be good to be at a club that wins." Then suddenly he cheered up and smiled, his lovely baby-faced smile. "Becca is much better. She is recovering. We talk every day. When she is better she will meet my mother." He grinned. "I think they will like each other."
"Bound to."
Catching the sound of Becca"s name, Claudia turned to look at Sandro and then back to my mother, clearly asking her what she knew about Becca. I couldn"t grasp much of the Italian, but by my mother"s tone I reckoned she was giving Becca a cracking character reference.
Claudia and Sandro left after many goodbyes and thank yous and a torrent of Italian that Sandro had given up attempting to translate. When they had gone, my mother leant on her stick for a while as if to catch her breath, and then she reached out and hugged me hard, harder even than Claudia had, harder even than when she was at my hospital bed, harder than I could ever remember her hugging me before.
"Oh, Tilly," she said, her eyes full of tears, "I"m sorry."
"Sorry?" I was completely wrong-footed. I"d never seen my mother like this before. Frankie Flint didn"t do tears.
"I"m sorry," she repeated. "I think I must have been a b.l.o.o.d.y awful mother."
"You weren"t! You aren"t!" I said, shocked.
"No. After the accident, your father, your brother...it was as if I was scared of losing you too. I was too frightened to love you properly."
"Mum, I know. I understand."
"I wanted to keep you by my side all the time. I never wanted you to go out to play or to school even in case something happened. I knew that was wrong, so I had to make myself let you go. I know sometimes it seemed as if I didn"t care. But I did. Too much. I would come into your room when you were asleep and just watch you. Sometimes, I wouldn"t be able to hear you breathing and I would have to touch you just to be sure."
"I know. I remember."
"You remember? You knew?"
"Once, I must have been about seven or eight-there was still pink princess paper on my bedroom walls-I woke up and you were kneeling by my bed, stroking my hair. I pretended I was still asleep but you knelt there for ages. All night, perhaps. It made me feel safe."
"It did? Really?"
"Yes, Mum, really. I know things weren"t easy for you and I know you sort of closed yourself down and threw yourself into work. Maybe we weren"t like other families"-and I thought with a brief pang about the cheerful, noisy Aldersons-"but, believe me, I knew I was loved. Always."
"But when Kate rang and told us about your accident and I thought that you could have died, and you would never know how much, how very much I loved you, it seemed such a waste of all those years."
"They weren"t wasted, Mum, far from it. You"ve been terrific. You"ve built up a fantastic business and you"ve shown the world you can be successful and principled at the same time-and made sure I did my homework. I"m really proud of you. It was pretty cool at school to have a famous mum. Did my street cred no end of good, you know. Anyway," I said, trying to lighten the suddenly serious tone, "I can honestly say, hand on heart, that you"re the best mother I ever had."
Mum looked at me and laughed, rubbing her hand under her eyes to wipe away her tears as she did so. "Well that"s all right then, isn"t it?" she said. "And I"m very lucky to have a daughter like you."
Then both of us, exhausted by emotion and convalescence and the grat.i.tude of Sandro"s mother, collapsed back on the sofa in the sitting room. And when Bill came round later with his gourmet version of meals on wheels, he found us sitting on the sofa, with a box of chocolates between us, watching Gone with the Wind on one of the movie channels. He looked at us both enquiringly. He could sense a difference in the atmosphere but he was too sensible to ask directly. Instead, he moved the chocolates and sat on the sofa, one arm around each of us, and the three of us watched happily as Clark Gable, my dear, frankly didn"t give a d.a.m.n.
Mmm, a bit more cinnamon, I thought. And a bit more of the perry for the pan and-glug-a bit more for me. I let the mixture simmer for a little while and tasted it again. Yes, that was it. Already it smelt wonderfully Christma.s.sy. Oh, it was good to be back in my own little kitchen, even if it was only a fraction of the size of Mum"s. Carefully I poured the mixture over the pears in the waiting dish and popped it into the oven. It would have been so easy to stay with Mum until Christmas and then over Christmas and then...
"You go, Tilly," she had said cheerfully. "You have to make your own life. And after all, you"re only going a few miles. Anyway, your room is always here..."
"I know, Mum, I know." Since her unexpectedly emotional outburst, life had become strangely more relaxed. It was somehow easier to move out again. No guilt. No pressure.
Bill had helped me move my stuff back to the flat-how had I acquired so much stuff in just a few weeks?-and as he dumped the last of my bags in the small sitting room, he perched on the arm of the chair and said, "Your mum"s looking better, isn"t she? And not just her ankle."
"Much," I said, as I whacked up the heating and filled the kettle. "She"s different somehow. Less driven."
"I thought I"d ask her-both of you-to come over for Christmas again."
Every year since he set up his first restaurant alone, he had asked Mum and me to join him and his staff for Christmas dinner. Every year my mum said no.
"Why have you never given up on her, Bill?" I asked as I started putting food away and getting the coffee out. "Why have you always been there for her?"
"Because I fell for her the moment I saw her walk into the kitchen at Bistro Nineteen," he said simply. "It was her first proper job and her shiny new whites were too big and too stiff. But," he shrugged, "she fell for your dad and that was that. When your father died, your mum needed someone to look after her. And I thought I was the best person to do that."
I raised my eyebrows at the thought of my mum needing looking after as she launched her mega-career with single-minded determination. Then-in the middle of spooning the coffee into the cafetiere-I suddenly in a flash saw it all again...
Mr Cheeseborough, Mum"s brilliant accountant and now finance director had come recommended by Bill. The lovely Eileen who was Mum"s PA until she retired and Penny took over had worked for Bill. And all that publicity Mum had, all those write-ups in the paper that really got her going..."It was you, wasn"t it?" I said, waving the coffee spoon at him. "Yo u organised all that publicity for Mum."
"Journalists have always liked my restaurants," he said innocently. "And of course I talk to them, tell them anything that might amuse them, help them fill a few column inches...But only in the early years," he added hastily. "After that, your mum generated all the publicity she needed herself."
"And that"s when she didn"t have so much time for me..." I said slowly, remembering all those times I had spent in the warmth and chaos of Bill"s kitchens, recalling that it was Bill who had taught me how to slice an onion so I didn"t cry, how to make a smooth white sauce, the perfect pastry or chicken stock. Bill who"d always been there when Mum couldn"t be.
"I just tried to fill in the gaps she couldn"t cope with. The sort of things your dad would have done if he"d still been around. Take some of the load. Give her less to worry about."
"But there must have been other women. Weren"t there?" I remembered one or two. Brisk cheerful women who worked in the kitchens with him and then eventually went off to other restaurants, other chefs, as is the way in the restaurant trade, taking some of his recipes but none of his heart with them. Or if they weren"t in the catering business, they found it hard to cope with the hours. Tricky to conduct a relationship when you"re working in different time zones.
"Oh, yes. There have been other women. Quite a few here and there. But after a while..." He shrugged again. "Anyway," he said briskly, as if the conversation was in danger of getting too revealing, "I shall ask her again if you would both like to join me for Christmas dinner."
"And this year might, just might, be the year she says yes," I said, hugging him hard. "Worth a try, Bill, definitely worth a try."
And now here I was two days later, trying out recipes. Life was almost back to normal. The human body is truly amazing, I thought, looking at my feet. Just a few weeks ago they had been battered, bruised and bleeding, so horribly swollen that I couldn"t walk. And here they were now, all perfect again, with lots of pale pink patches of new skin. If only battered hearts healed as quickly.
I was just clearing up the kitchen when the entry-phone rang. Soon Matty was bursting into my tiny sitting room.
She wore a minute skirt, thick tights, slouchy boots and a huge cashmere sweater under an emerald green trench coat, topped off by one of Becca"s scarves. It was her version of London scruffy and she looked, of course, amazing. She was also carrying a huge bunch of flowers. Very striking. Very hand-tied. Very exclusive florist.
"For you," she said handing them over, "to say welcome home."
"Thank you," I said, admiring their style and also their lovely scent. "How did you know?"
"I was working round the corner from Bill"s Bistro so popped in to say h.e.l.lo and he said you"d vacated the Frankie Flint convalescent home, recuperation wing and force-feeding camp."
During the weeks I"d been recovering, Matty had been a regular visitor at my mother"s flat. She had cheered me up, brought me treats and got on really well with Mum and Bill. She had become part of the family-part of this new family I suddenly seemed to be part of and liked a lot.
"Bill said you were back in your own flat and going back to work. Is that wise? I thought you"d wait till after Christmas. Oooh, lovely smells. Cooking something nice?" She peered into the oven.
"Well, I thought about waiting till after New Year, but that was just putting it off really. If I go in for the next week, I"ll have done the tricky bit, got myself sorted, got over all the questions and stuff, so after Christmas I can just go straight back in. And it"s pears in mulled perry and they should be ready now. Would you like some?"
"Fantastic, yes, please."
Carefully I took the dish out of the oven and spooned some out for us both. The flat filled with a lovely steamy, spicy smell.
"Wow. Proper food," said Matty, "but just one, please. I"m not running up and down fellsides at the moment." She tucked in happily. "Delicious. Nicest thing I"ve eaten since I was up at home." She looked longingly at the dish but resolutely refused any more.
"Oh, by the way," she said, slinging her long skinny legs over the arm of her chair, "guess who I saw in The Brit last night?"
"Who? And what were you doing in The Brit?" The Brit was an uber-trendy bar, theoretically open to all but generally occupied by the ritzy-glitzy set who could afford their ridiculous prices.
"Your footballing friend, Clayton Silver. There was a whole gang of them in there, mainly from Shadwell, getting absolutely smashed. Very loud, very objectionable. Total pains in the a.r.s.e. No wonder they can"t win a match. I"m amazed they can stand up. You are well shot of that one."
"Yes, I am, aren"t I?" I said, shivering as I remembered the Halloween party. "But come on, who were you with in The Brit?"