Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Scarlett Bailey
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Sneak Preview of The Memory Book
Copyright
Just For Christmas
Married by Christmas
Santa Maybe (digital short)
The Night Before Christmas
The Memory Book
Dearest Rose
Lessons in Laughing Out Loud
The Happy Home for Broken Hearts
The Baby Group
Woman Walks Into A Bar
River Deep
After Ever After
Growing Up Twice
The Accidental Mother
The Accidental Wife
The Accidental Family
Praise for Scarlett Bailey:
‘Festive fun from the Queen of Christmas chick lit’ Fabulous Magazine, Sun on Sunday
‘A delicious Christmas read!’ Tricia Ashley
‘I LOVE it! It was funny, romantic and the perfect book to snuggle up with – Scarlett Bailey does it again!’ Miranda Dickinson
‘Endearing and funny, we loved this gorgeously Christmassy romcom’ Closer
‘A light, fun and fast-paced chunk of chortlesome chick-lit’ Heat
‘An awesome Christmassy read with a lot of twists and turns... you can’t put it down’ Chicklit Club
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First published in 2014 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
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Copyright © 2014 Rowan Coleman
Scarlett Bailey has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
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For Debbie Ann Pokorny and Joel Llande
June 2014
Dear Debbie
Since the moment I met you, I have wanted to be with you, and it only took me eight years to make it happen! You have made me so happy, and I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with you, and our children.
So, Debbie, will you please make me a very happy man, and marry me?
With all my love, always,
Joel
xxx
It was raining, which seemed appropriate. Tamsyn Thorne’s home town of Poldore was welcoming her back in exactly the same way it had bid her farewell more than five years ago – under a cloud.
‘Nice day for it,’ Tamsyn told the cabby, who’d picked her up at the train station, as she wiped away the condensation from the side window and peered out at the grey, wet Cornish town, shining in the summer rain. Poldore looked, as ever, as if it was tumbling down the hill towards the Atlantic – as if one good nudge might be enough to send it floating out to sea, like a sort of picture-postcard Atlantis.
‘They reckon it’s going to get worse before it gets better,’ he mumbled. ‘They were saying something about a super-storm on the news, whatever that is. Apparently we’re getting all of everyone’s weather in one go …’ Tamsyn wasn’t really listening. She was too busy looking, and taking it all in.
Poldore, the place where she had grown up, not knowing or caring about what world lay beyond the moors and the woods she roamed with her sisters and brother, when they were all little. And then later the place where she had first fallen in love, first kissed a boy in what was known as Kissing Alley behind the church. It was where she’d first stayed out all night at a party after telling her mum she was at a sleepover, lost first her father, then her best friend, then her brother, who had once been her closest sibling and who now barely spoke to her from one year to the next.
This was Poldore, and Tamsyn was back, against her better judgement, for a wedding, for her younger brother’s wedding. Ruan Thorne, so close to her in age that he had felt like a twin for much of her life, was getting married.
Tamsyn was fairly amazed that she had been invited at all, never mind been asked, or rather told by her mother, who had expertly wielded all the emotional-blackmail weapons she had in her considerable armoury, that she was going to be a bridesmaid.
‘You’re sure Ruan wants me to be a bridesmaid at his wedding?’ Tamsyn had asked Laura Thorne as she’d gazed out of her Parisian office window the day her mum called to tell her the news.
‘He’s having you as a bridesmaid,’ Laura had told her. ‘All of you girls, plus Lucy is going to be chief bridesmaid – you know she and Alex are best friends now? It’s going to be so lovely. All my children back together in one place, first time in years. And as you know, it’s my first proper visit back since, well, since we lost your dad and I moved to Suffolk with Keira. I need you all there for me, Tamsyn. And there’s nothing like a wedding to smooth things over, I always say.’
‘Do you always say that, Mum?’ Tamsyn had asked her. ‘I’m fairly sure I’ve never heard you say that, and also, if you remember Keira’s wedding, that was when Aunty Jean told Esther Hamble that she was a harlot and they haven’t spoken to each other since, except to issue death threats and slanderous rumours.’
‘Well, that’s different and you know it,’ Laura had said, and the tone in her voice was enough to tell Tamsyn that she was not about to be bested. Tamsyn had heard that tone a lot during her life, and for a good deal of her life she had ignored it and done what she pleased anyway. It wasn’t until fairly recently that she had realised that when her mum spoke to her that way, it wasn’t to try and contain or oppress her; it came out of a deep-seated worry for her child. God only knew that Tamsyn had given her enough to worry about, living out her role as the family’s black sheep with quite some commitment, and yet her mother had always been there for her, whatever she’d done. Still, being a Thorne, she couldn’t entirely shy away from an argument.
‘“He’s having” is quite a lot different from “He wants”, Mum,’ she pointed out.
‘Well, Alex wants you all there,’ Laura said. ‘And Ruan would never say no to Alex about anything. That girl – she’s made the world of difference to him, Tamsyn. Maybe now is the time to set things right between you two. He’s happy and settled, and so are you at last – it’s all water under the bridge now, surely?’
Tamsyn had known there was no point in hesitating. If she’d said no at that moment, she would only eventually say yes at some point later in life, but it was more than the impossibility of saying no to her mother once she had her mind set on something. She missed Ruan, she regretted what had happened, and that was why she had left her highly successful and fashionable life in Paris and travelled all the way to Cornwall to wear a shop-bought, off-the-peg bridesmaid’s dress which her sisters had gleefully told her entailed puff sleeves, and – God forbid – a great big bow. But it would be worth it, it would all be worth it, if she could know that Ruan had forgiven her. It was time, more than time to make amends to her brother. There was only one very slight obstacle standing in their way. It just so happened that in keeping with the family tradition, Ruan and Tamsyn Thorne were two of the most stubborn people ever to be related to each other in the history of mankind.
‘You can drop me here,’ Tamsyn told the cabby as they reached the top of the town. The Poldore Hall Hotel was where the wedding reception was due to be held, and where she had booked herself a room, politely declining the offer to stay with Alex or in Alex’s mother’s cottage. (According to Keira, Alex’s mum, Gloria, was something of a force of nature.) The hotel was situated high on the hill overlooking the estuary with views out to sea and only a couple more minutes’ drive away. Tamsyn was already late for the family dinner in the Silent Man, however, and she knew from experience that walking the steep and narrow streets of Poldore was always much quicker than trying to drive them. She was nervous enough about the prospect of being back in the fold of the whole family once again, and turning up late could easily be misconstrued as something ‘old Tamsyn’ would have done, the girl who didn’t care about anyone or anything, including herself.
‘You sure? It’s really coming down out there now.’ The cabby peered out of his window, as if rain rather bemused him. ‘Seems like no one told the weather it’s meant to be June. Forecast says it’s going to rain like this for a week; there are even flood warnings in place, and they reckon it’s going to get really bad tonight. Just hope the flood defences hold.’
‘Shame,’ Tamsyn said, smiling briefly as she handed him some cash. ‘Not exactly wedding weather, is it? Still, whatever doesn’t kill you makes you thornier …’ She smiled at what had become the unofficial Thorne family motto.
‘Or gives you a nasty cold,’ the cabby smiled at her. ‘Enjoy your stay in beautiful Poldore.’
‘“Enjoy” is probably not exactly the right word,’ Tamsyn muttered to herself as she slammed the car door shut and the cab pulled away. Well, this was it; there was no turning back now. It was time to face the music.
Pulling the collar of her white 1950s Chanel raincoat up around her neck, she snapped open the handle of her Louis Vuitton suitcase and took a moment to pause and look down at her home, its edges blurred by the rain. It almost seemed as if, the moment she stepped out of the cab, she’d stepped back in time and she felt exactly the same as she had as a teenager, kicking against the constraints of her Cornish life, desperate to break out. She couldn’t wait to be free.
Hunching her shoulders against the rain, Tamsyn set off towards the harbour and the pub. Five days: that was all she had to make things right with Ruan. Five days, and then it would be back to Paris, back to Bernard du Mont Père, back to her career as a junior fashion designer at a leading cutting-edge label and back to her real life. And five days wasn’t very long to fix a rift that had lasted five years, but she was going to try. Five days wasn’t so very long at all. Especially if she could spend most of it drunk.
Her hopes of arriving at the family dinner in the local pub as a sleek, beautiful, totally transformed Paris fashion plate were being comprehensively dashed by the persistently heavy rain and the brutal wind that grabbed handfuls of rain and hurled them gleefully in her face. By the time she got to the Silent Man her hair, twisted into a chignon at the nape of her neck, would be frizzing itself into a wild frenzy and her black eyes, carefully lined with kohl, would soon mostly resemble the style statement of a panda. Oh well, Tamsyn thought, I’ll always have my Louis Vuitton case – they can’t take that away from me.
Her intention had been to go straight down to the pub, and not even look at Poldore’s central church. St Piran’s stood in the centre of a small graveyard, at the intersection of three roads, all of which eventually led back to the same place. Tamsyn started to hurry by, averting her eyes from the ancient building, as if somehow even acknowledging it would change things. But when the moment to walk past it actually arrived, she discovered she couldn’t do it. It was impossible to pass by, her pace slowing even as she determined to hurry, rivulets of running water swelling into little streams around her feet. Eventually she came to a standstill.
How could she not say hello to her best friend? Her best friend, whose empty grave was one of the most recent in the graveyard, the last to be dug before the diocese declared that it was full.
Tamsyn stopped noticing the water drenching her as she remembered the day she’d heard the news that her friend was lost at sea.
There had been a fight, a fight between Merryn and Ruan, and Merryn had gone out on her boat to calm down. It was something she had done a thousand times, a million times before. Like all of them back then, Merryn had learnt to sail practically before she could walk. Most kids in Poldore spent their lives on boats the way other children spent them on bikes. No one could have known that when the weather turned suddenly she would be taken by surprise. And even then no one would have guessed that Merryn – bright, funny, clever Merryn – the girl that used to make Tamsyn laugh so hard she couldn’t breathe, would never come back from a quick little trip out around the harbour.
Tamsyn bit her lip as she found her way to Merryn’s gravestone, the white marble shining like new amongst the old mossy stones that surrounded it. It was in a peaceful spot, set in the ground beneath the cedar tree. And there had been no coffin, just a small metal box of some of her favourite things, mementos that her family and friends had collected. Tamsyn had put a few things in, including a photo of the two of them as teenagers, sitting under this very same cedar tree. It had been on this very spot where she and Merryn had first tried their hands at smoking, where they used to drink cider on a Friday night, waiting for the boys they liked to walk by. Oh, how they had riled the vicar; he’d sent them packing a hundred times, but they would always come back. Hanging around in the graveyard, kissing boys in the alley that ran behind the church. The vicar had never been particularly sympathetic to their claims that it wasn’t their fault, they didn’t have anywhere else to go and it was impossible to get served in a pub in a town where everyone knew your name. They had been tearaways, the two of them, it was true. But they never meant anyone any harm; they had just been trying their hardest to feel alive.
For a moment as she looked down at the stone at her friend’s name, etched into the marble, Tamsyn didn’t care about rain, or the cold. Just for a moment it was that warm spring evening again, the evening Ruan had first noticed that Merryn – newly crowned the Queen of the May – wasn’t just his big sister’s sidekick any more. And it was here, under this very tree, where her brother had fallen hook, line and sinker for her best friend. At first Tamsyn had been a little jealous, but soon enough the three of them became a little unit, a band of dreamers and adventurers leading the town’s youth astray, making campfires in the woods, forming new bands from week to week, writing terrible poems and reciting them under a full moon. Tamsyn had drawn a portrait of each and every one of her friends in black charcoal, and she still had them in a folder somewhere, all except one. The one she had drawn of Merryn was buried beneath Tamsyn’s feet.
They’d had this idea that they were the first children of Poldore ever to really understand the world and what it was about. They thought that all of the generations before them had simply been sleepwalking. But even then the differences between Tamsyn and her brother had started to grate. She was always plotting ways to leave, and Ruan was always thinking of ways to keep Poldore alive. When their mother declared that she was leaving Poldore for Suffolk, to be near her eldest daughter Keira, who had been barely more than a child bride, nineteen-year-old Tamsyn had jumped at the chance to go with her. Soon after, she had escaped to university and then to Paris. Whereas Ruan had stayed, even taking on the responsibility for their baby sister Cordelia, despite the fact that he was only eighteen. It was inevitable, Tamsyn supposed, as she looked down at the plaque, that someday Merryn would have had to choose between them. She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to hide the tears that merged with the rain, even though there was no one there to see them.
‘What on earth are you doing, standing there in the pouring rain?’ A male voice, followed by a hand on her shoulder, startled Tamsyn so much that her wet, irresponsibly shod feet skidded out from underneath her for a moment, so that she wobbled like a baby gazelle, and was as much reliant on her captor to steady her as she was keen to be out of his clutches.
‘What? What do you want?’ she demanded, spinning to face the stranger, taking an unexpected slippery step towards him as if she was indeed fronting up for a fight.
‘Oh, oh God, I’m sorry …’ he said, squinting in the rain as he took in her face. ‘I thought you were someone else.’
Tamsyn narrowed her eyes.
‘Oh yes, that’s your trick, is it? See a woman, standing alone in a graveyard, for God’s sake, and use the old “I thought you were someone else” excuse as a trick to try and feel her up? What kind of a pervert are you?’
‘I wasn’t feeling you up, I was …’
‘Assaulting me?’
‘No, saying hello,’ the man said, utterly unrepentant, his grin infuriatingly cheerful.
‘I deal with far worse than you in Paris all the time,’ Tamsyn warned him. ‘Try anything and I’ll have you on the floor in under thirty seconds.’
‘Well, now you’re being inappropriate …’
‘How dare you, what do you mean? How am I being inappropriate?’
‘Threatening to throw Poldore’s vicar to the ground!’
‘The what, now?’ Tamsyn asked him, glad for a moment that the freezing rain had numbed her face into a mask.
‘I’m Reverend Jed Hayward.’ He repeated the information, offering her his hand. ‘The vicar here in Poldore.’
‘Well,’ Tamsyn spluttered. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. Grabbing a woman from behind. It’s not very … vicarish, is it?’
‘I …’ Reverend Jed Hayward laughed out loud, which made Tamsyn want to hit him a little bit. No, actually quite a lot.
‘I’m sorry. I thought you were my verger; she’s due to come and take choir practice tonight. She’s about your height, and in the rain I couldn’t make you out clearly. Although, now I look at you, I can see you are quite different. We had a few things to sort out before I left, but she hasn’t turned up. I promise you, I am a vicar and I wasn’t trying to assault you.’
‘You don’t look like a vicar.’ Tamsyn blinked the rain out of her eyes, to examine the supposed cleric. A man, in his mid-thirties, with a smattering of stubble, hair that was too wet to tell what colour it was, but with a fringe that fell into his eyes and rain running over high, Nordic-looking cheekbones. There was no dog collar, or anything as sensibly identifiable as a cassock. Instead he was wearing a shirt that must once have been white, an opaque veil that now clung to his torso, which, what with its well-defined pecs and an actual six-pack, was one that any of the male models that Tamsyn had worked with over the years would have been proud of.
‘What does a vicar look like?’ Jed Hayward asked her, apparently utterly unconcerned by the rain that punctuated every word a thousand times over.
‘Not bloody gorgeous,’ were the first words that popped into Tamsyn’s head, but she bit them back just in time.
‘Look,’ she said, grabbing onto the handle of her case and remembering what she was supposed to be doing. ‘Honestly, it doesn’t matter. You’re the vicar, you thought I was a – whatever it was you said, fine. I’ve got to go, I’m meeting my family, some of whom I haven’t seen for several years and I’m already late, so …’
‘So you’re Tamsyn Thorne?’ the vicar asked, catching Tamsyn off guard for the second time. ‘You’re the only sister I haven’t met yet, the designer who lives in France. I’ve heard so much about you.’
‘Have you?’ Tamsyn asked. That normally wasn’t a good thing.
‘I’m officiating? At Ruan and Alex’s wedding? You know … as the vicar.’
There was a moment when all that Tamsyn could do was stand there, hearing the rain thundering in her ears, acknowledging the wet seeping in through her boots to soak her freezing toes, and wishing that the wind might scoop her up and whisk her off to anywhere in the universe apart from right there, right then.
Instead, a whip of lightning cracked against the church spire, causing Jed and Tamsyn to take an instinctive step towards each other, so that they were standing chest to, for all practical purposes, bare manly chest. If Tamsyn had believed in any sort of celestial higher being, she would have put the lightning down to having improper thoughts about a vicar’s chest, but right now it didn’t seem like a terribly good idea to be standing underneath a tree, even if a sudden strike from the heavens would simultaneously solve her problem with offending vicars and having to wear puff sleeves.
‘Come on,’ Jed said, picking up her case. ‘We’d better get inside.’
‘But I’m already late …’
‘A few more minutes to regroup won’t hurt. And I’m late too, now.’
It took Tamsyn a couple of seconds to realise that he’d grabbed her freezing hand and was jogging to church with her in tow, only releasing her fingers once they were inside.
‘That’s marginally better,’ he grinned, shaking his hair like a dog. ‘Dry, at least. I turned the heating off in March; didn’t plan on needing it again before November.’
‘I don’t suppose you did,’ Tamsyn said, finding herself shivering now that she was out of the rain.
‘Anyway, like I said, my verger is in charge of choir practice tonight, not that I can see anyone coming out in this weather. I’m going down to the pub, too, so once I’ve changed my shirt we can head down there together. I’ve probably got a raincoat or something that might keep you a bit drier. It’s like a branch of M&S in the vestry, people always leaving things in the pews; once I found a flask full of whisky – that one never got claimed …’
The second Tamsyn realised that Jed was hurriedly unbuttoning his shirt, she averted her eyes, but it was a second too late not to notice how the wet cotton of the shirt peeled off his firm chest. Was it possible to be struck by lightning inside a church, Tamsyn wondered, for noticing a vicar’s wet chest? She braced herself, but the next time the lightning flashed, seemingly right overhead, it was still outside the window. A few seconds later a distant rumble of thunder followed, and Jed froze for a moment, looking up at the heavens.
‘Not a fan of thunder?’ Tamsyn asked him.
‘Worried about the town,’ Jed said. ‘It’s typical of Poldore people that everyone is hoping for the best and not preparing for the worst. They are all in the pub right now, as if they can simply drink through the worst storm we’ve seen here in years.’
‘Well,’ Tamsyn said, ‘who knows, maybe they can? Probably do more good than praying, anyway.’
Jed grabbed a towel that was hanging over the back of a pew and dried himself, before pulling on a light grey shirt and a slightly darker sweater that was also waiting there.
‘Well, of course you are entitled to your opinion,’ he said. ‘But so far I have yet to see evidence that getting drunk improves anything. Whereas prayer gives a great deal of people comfort and hope.’
‘Hope,’ Tamsyn said. ‘I always think it’s an overrated concept. Much better simply to expect that everything is going to hit the fan, and then be pleasantly surprised if things are less bad than you imagine.’
‘Sorry,’ Jed said, his brow furrowing briefly as he looked at her.
‘For what?’ Tamsyn asked him.
‘That you feel that way, so pessimistic.’
‘I’m not a pessimist,’ Tamsyn said. ‘I am a realist, and I just don’t do the whole happy-clappy thing, that’s all.’
‘Shame,’ Jed grinned. ‘You are so going to feel awkward when everyone in the congregation stands on the pews and holds hands during the wedding …’
He stopped what he was doing to take in Tamsyn’s naked expression of pure horror and then doubled up with laughter.
‘Funny,’ Tamsyn said. ‘A funny vicar, how very modern. I bet you play guitar and rap the Lord’s Prayer, don’t you?’
‘That’s a pretty good idea,’ Jed said, and Tamsyn found it was hard not to return his smile, although she did her best. She wasn’t a fan of do-gooders. She’d met a lot of them, during her life. Always trying to understand her; always trying to work her out. She never wanted to be worked out; she just wanted to be left alone.
‘I was just trying clear out the guttering when it really started coming down. I was up a ladder when I saw you there in that long coat, but then I thought it had to be Catriona, the verger. Either way, good job you turned up when you did – if I’d still been up that ladder when the lightning struck, chances are it would be a small pile of ashes leading the service at your brother’s wedding. God does move in mysterious ways. Towel? I’ll get you a fresh one, of course.’
‘I am, you know, sorry,’ Tamsyn mumbled, rather half-heartedly, as he bent down between the pews and produced another towel, from where it seemed he kept an impromptu changing room. ‘And not only because I’m dripping on your floor. I’m sorry I accused you of being a … pervert. You must think I am an idiot.’
‘Not at all.’ Jed smiled at her in exactly the way that one person who thought another person was an idiot would do, as he handed her the towel. Tamsyn made a vague effort at towelling her hair, which she let down knowing that the moment it approached anything near being dry it would snake into the same unruly, untamed curls that had blighted her teenage years. ‘I’ll just change these trousers, and then I can walk you down.’
‘Mmm,’ was all that Tamsyn could manage to say, waiting for Jed the vicar to strip off his kecks right in front of her, but it seemed that that was where his sense of propriety kicked in.
‘Great, I’ll be back in a second. I think there’s an old golfing umbrella in the vestry too …’
‘Take your time,’ Tamsyn called after him, a little weakly. So, OK yes, she had made a fool of herself with the vicar, that was true. But on the bright side, her mother couldn’t be cross with her lateness when it was the vicar’s fault, because the vicar’s lateness couldn’t be misconstrued as sullen sulkiness, like Tamsyn’s declining the offer to stay with Alex or Alex’s mother had been. After she’d refused, Tamsyn’s mother had asked her flat out if she was going to have a problem with Ruan getting married and she’d said no, of course she didn’t disapprove of the wedding. She just didn’t completely approve. Far away from Poldore, far away from this life of sexy vicars up ladders and torrential rain in June, sometimes Tamsyn forgot how everything had changed back here, and sometimes it slipped her mind that Merryn wasn’t still here, living her life with her brother. So much so that it still felt as if the wedding she was about to attend would be featuring the wrong bride, although that didn’t make any sense and she knew it.
It was odd, standing at the back of the church, so quiet and empty as it was now, only half of the lights switched on, filling the building with shadows that seemed to be watching her. The sound of the rain outside provided a sort of background static, but otherwise it was completely silent and still.
There had been a time, back in the days of the old vicar, the one they had so shamelessly baited, the one who was bald and fat and looked like a vicar should do, when she and Merryn had been in the choir. It had been her dad’s idea. He thought if she’d joined something, she might have a sense of purpose, something that might then tip over into her school life, which she had avoided as much as possible. Every Sunday they’d giggled through the family service, singing like angels and telling each other silly jokes behind their hands through the sermon, until one reached Reverend East and he sent them out, the two of them sniggering all the way up the aisle like a pair of fallen angels.
Laura Thorne had despaired of her rebellious daughter back then, and Merryn’s mum had even come round claiming that it was Tamsyn who was leading the other girl astray. Tamsyn remembered feeling especially proud of that claim, although it was not true. She and Merryn had just found everything so completely funny. There was no aspect of life they felt had to be taken that seriously, and that included school and church.
‘Right, it’s time to brave the elements!’ Tamsyn spun round to see Jed pulling on a bright orange Superdry coat, just able to catch a glimpse of an actual dog collar, now tucked under the collar of his shirt, and what looked like dark blond hair as he pulled up his hood. ‘If you promise not to attempt to have me arrested for harassment, I’ll even let you come under my umbrella.’
He brandished the object at her, like a small boy playing at swords, and Tamsyn wondered if he really was the vicar, or if she’d accidentally befriended a very attractively built delusional person, because that was normally the sort of thing that happened to her. Mad people on the Metro, angry people on aeroplanes, pretend hot vicars in rainstorms, egotistical but irresistible French fashion designers – that pretty much summed up her life.
‘I don’t think there’s much point,’ Tamsyn said, as he opened the door and they observed the sheets of water from the relative comfort of the porch. ‘After all, it’s only water.’
‘That’s what Noah said,’ Jed said. ‘And he had an ark.’
There wasn’t much small talk on the way down to the Silent Man. For one thing, the rain was coming down so hard and heavily that it was impossible to speak without having your words snatched away by the wind. Tamsyn had never known such a volume of water to come from the sky at such speed. Also, she knew that if she opened her mouth she would manage to say something unfortunate. Putting her foot in it was practically her hobby, and had been from the moment she could talk, according her mother. Like the time her Uncle Howard had come for Christmas and she had told him that he was too short to be a grown-up. She was eleven at the time.
Somehow in Paris it didn’t matter; in actual fact it was almost a positive in her profession to say exactly the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time. Within the design community she had developed quite the reputation for her cutting wit, ruthless efficiency and determination not to mince words. What no one, not even Bernard, had guessed about the Englishwoman who had somehow infiltrated the heart of the French fashion scene, was that none of it was by design. Tamsyn just had a habit of saying the first thing that came into her head and, as yet, at the age of twenty-nine, it wasn’t a trait she had managed to grow out of. So, although she was always honest, often insightful, it was only Tamsyn who knew that her reputation as the ‘Reine de Glace anglaise’, who must never be crossed, was entirely accidental.
As the rain ran down the back of her neck, she tucked her chin into the collar of her coat and allowed herself the briefest of moments to ponder on Bernard and what he would be up to now, right now, before deciding that it was probably best not to dwell on it. They had been ‘together’ for eleven months, since the night he had told her all her designs were ‘épouvantable’ – dreadful – swept them off the pattern-cutting table and her into a passionate embrace. Tamsyn, who had been raised never to let any man assume such rights over her person, had punched him very hard on the nose and broken it. To his credit, in between howling in agony, Bernard had found it all very funny. He had apologised to Tamsyn as she’d taken him to a private hospital, to have his nose reset, without any fuss. He told her he wasn’t in the habit of pouncing on women the way he had on her, and that he deserved her reaction. The flashing fury in her eyes had just been impossible to resist. Tamsyn had accepted his apology, because in that particular city it was impossible to keep a secret, and if Bernard had been a serial philanderer who preyed on the many much younger and more beautiful women he worked with on a daily basis, she would have known it. It seemed that his philandering was more sporadic and always consenting.
As Tamsyn had dropped him off at his apartment in the early hours of the morning, he’d asked her very sweetly if he might kiss her, and she had allowed it. And it turned out that Bernard, as challenging as he was as a boss, was an exceptionally good lover. So Tamsyn, whose love life up until that point could largely be summarised under the heading ‘nothing special’, had considered telling him where to go for about five seconds only. Another five seconds after that and she knew she was smitten.
Their affair could have been construed as inappropriate in the work place, of course, but Bernard had a talent for being beguiling at exactly the same moment that he was being infuriating. So despite the lack of any sort of courtship, Tamsyn had found herself very happy to be engaged in a romantic liaison with Bernard du Mont Père. The fact that Bernard insisted on keeping it a secret meant it had that extra frisson of excitement.
In the last eleven months, Tamsyn had learnt that the secret to sustaining her relationship with Bernard was never to let him see that she cared one bit about it, a trick she was rather good at as she had spent much of her life pretending not to care about anything. And as for her success coming from her association with him, well, if anything the opposite was true. So far not one of her designs had made it to the catwalk, as it was mainly the business and PR side of things Bernard let her handle, although he did sometimes let her have a belt buckle, or a pocket, in one of his designs if he was feeling very generous. And Tamsyn didn’t have a problem accepting that; it took a long time to get to the top in the fashion industry, and she’d rather pay her dues than think for even one second that her fondness for kissing Bernard had advanced her career before she had earned it.
‘We made it,’ Jed said eventually over the thunderous rain, pushing open the door of the pub for her, and for precisely one moment Tamsyn was glad to be out of the wet and in the steamy fug of beery warmth provided by the pub. And then she heard the cheers, and then she saw the banner ‘WELCOME HOME TAMSYN!’
And then she wanted to throw herself into the swollen river and try and hitch a lift back to France on the next passing boat.
‘Oh God,’ she said to a room full of smiling, familiar faces, ‘please tell me this isn’t a party.’
‘Tamsyn!’ It was her mother who came and dragged her from the door, nodding politely to Reverend Jed as she hugged her rather wet daughter and unbuttoned her coat while she was at it.
‘You’re soaked through, you poor thing.’ Tamsyn submitted as her mum dragged the sodden coat off her shoulders. ‘You look like a drowned rat, and you’re thinner. You are too thin, you know. I do hope that fashion isn’t giving you body disorders.’
‘What’s a body disorder, if it isn’t your mother always telling you that the body you were born with isn’t too thin?’ Tamsyn asked Laura, hugging her anyway.
‘Mother, let the poor woman get in the door!’ Her sister Keira grabbed her hand and pulled her over to a long table that had been made up from several separate ones, and was lined with people, most of whom Tamsyn recognised, such as professional busybody and local aristocrat Sue Montaigne and her husband, Rory, with their children. There was Vicky Carmichael, whom she’d known since childhood and who – she knew from her mother, who despite not living in Poldore for decades still had a hotline on whatever anyone was up to – was now a vet, and even old Jago and Mr Figg the chemist, still hanging in there, neither one of them looking older than the last time she’d seen them, almost as if they had been a hundred years old for all of her life. Of course, her sister Cordelia was there, knocking back shorts at the bar; and Eddie Godolphin, the town’s mayor and landlord of the Silent Man, and his wife Rosie behind the bar. Despite the horrible weather outside the pub, inside it was warm, festive and friendly, almost as if they’d decided to hold the wedding breakfast a few days early, only with a great many packets of salt and vinegar crisps in place of canapés. Smiling and waving at everyone, Tamsyn took a seat, while at exactly the same time wondering if she’d be able to wriggle out of the window of the ladies’ loo and sneak back up to the hotel in time to order room service.
‘Boys! Look who’s here!’ Keira called to her sons.
Tamsyn braced herself for the onslaught of her nephews, twin four-year-olds, bundles of pure energy and noise, whom Tamsyn always secretly thought were a bit like cats, in that they seemed to seek out the people least fond of children and stick to them like glue. She had been there, at her sister’s side, well, actually in the cafeteria a couple of floors down, when they had been born, and usually saw them just at Christmas and sometimes in the summer, if she popped over to Suffolk. The pair of them laboured cheerfully under the misapprehension that she liked them.
‘Aunty Tam!’ Jamie was the first to hit, closely followed by Joe, the force of the pair of them propelling her back into a chair.
‘What?’ Tamsyn asked as Jamie hung off her neck and Joe climbed onto her lap. ‘What do you want from me? I’ve got no sweets, no toys, no money, nothing. I’m no good to you.’
‘Say something in those funny gobbledygook words,’ Joe asked.
‘What, you mean French?’ Tamsyn asked him, amused despite herself. When Keira had brought them to visit her in Paris, she had taken them to the Louvre to see the art, and they had giggled a lot about the Venus de Milo’s bottom. They had also found the French, speaking their native tongue, in their capital city, utterly hilarious and mimicked anyone they met with the bravado that only four-year-old boys can muster. Thank God they hadn’t met Bernard, who was so French he was almost like a parody of himself, as they would have had a field day with him, and Bernard, for all his famous ego, was also rather sensitive.
‘Are you coming to sleep with us tonight in the lighthouse?’ Jamie asked her, his eyes big and round. ‘The waves are so big they are coming almost to the top of the cliff! But Uncle Ruan says the lighthouse probably won’t fall in the sea.’
‘I said, if it falls in the sea we could say it was a submarine,’ Joe said. ‘Uncle Ruan says we have to keep a watch out for pirates!’
‘You can share my sleeping bag if you like,’ Jamie assured her, as if he were offering her the rarest of treats.
‘To be honest,’ Tamsyn told him, ‘I’d rather wear something nylon and with an elasticated waist than go anywhere near your sleeping bag. You have the personal hygiene habits of, well, a four-year-old boy, to be fair.’
‘Aunty Tam, we love you,’ Jamie told her sweetly.
‘And I can tolerate you in small bursts if I’ve had wine,’ Tamsyn told him back, patting him on the head.
‘Go and play with that dog,’ Keira told them. ‘Let Aunty Tam have a rest and get warm. I’m sure she’ll play with you in a bit.’
‘I won’t,’ Tamsyn assured the boys, but as ever they refused to believe that she didn’t totally adore them. ‘Definitely don’t come back and expect me to play with you. I won’t!’
‘It’s good to see you, sis.’ Keira hugged her as their mother bustled about at the bar ordering Tamsyn food that she no doubt hoped would make her the proper weight for her height.
‘You too,’ Tamsyn whispered into her ear as they hugged. ‘I wasn’t exactly expecting this to be such a big deal, you know.’
‘I think Mum thought that the more people there were here, the less we would actually have to talk to each other,’ Keira whispered back. ‘Ruan and Alex went out the back half an hour ago, and we haven’t seen them since. Maybe they’ve done a runner.’
‘I wouldn’t blame them. Where’s Pete?’ Tamsyn looked around for her brother-in-law.
‘Couldn’t make it,’ Keira said, the corners of her smile drooping just a little. ‘Work. Again. Japan, this time. Couldn’t get out of it. You know what it’s like with futures.’
‘I really don’t,’ Tamsyn said. Her brother-in-law’s job had always been a mystery to her; she only knew it had something to do with making quite a lot of money. ‘He couldn’t rearrange, or find someone else to step in for a family wedding?’ Tamsyn asked.
‘He would have if he could,’ Keira said, dropping her gaze for a moment, and she twisted the wedding band on her finger. ‘He works so hard, and anyway, I don’t mind. In a way it’s more relaxing that he’s not here. You know what he’s like; always on email, hates wearing a suit when he’s not at work, always telling the boys to keep the noise down to a dull roar … This way, we can relax and enjoy ourselves.’
‘Enjoy … It’s a subjective term,’ Tamsyn said, returning the wink that Jago, Poldore’s oldest, grumpiest and often drunkest working fisherman sent her down the table, and raising her glass to him. ‘Anyway, you’re here, and I’m here, and …’
‘I’m here,’ Cordelia appeared at her side.
‘And we are in a pub, with alcohol, and we are all old enough to get served, so it will all be fine,’ Tamsyn said, grinning at her little sister. ‘Cordy, my, how you’ve grown. Which vampire bit you? Do you want me to stake him?’
‘You’re just jealous that I have my own sense of identity,’ Cordy said, tossing her black glossy hair off her shoulders, and Tamsyn had to admit that she really did stand out in her black skinny jeans and black fishnet t-shirt over a scarlet vest, all topped off with what could only be described as a cape, mostly because it was an actual cape. During her teens Tamsyn had bleached her hair and then dyed it pink, had got a secret tattoo of a butterfly on her left shoulder blade and pierced her own belly button with a needle, until it went septic and she needed a course of antibiotics, but she had never had the courage to wear a cape in the town that fashion forgot. That was one thing Cordelia wasn’t short of, courage … ‘Mum’s right,’ Cordelia squinted at her. ‘You are too thin – are you a size zero, or what?’
‘I’m a ten!’ Tamsyn exclaimed. ‘I’ve been exactly the same size since I was nineteen. I’m just tall and leggy …’
‘Rub it in,’ Keira laughed. ‘It’s really not fair that you were the only one to get Dad’s long legs. Well, you and Ruan, and he doesn’t even need them.’
‘I wouldn’t say that. They do come in handy, especially for running away from all of my sisters.’
Somehow Tamsyn had forgotten for a few minutes that the reason she was in Poldore in the first place was because of Ruan, for his impending wedding, and now that he was here, standing next to her, she discovered she had nothing to say, caught as she was between an impulse to hug him and to hide.
‘Sis,’ Ruan nodded at her. ‘Long time no see.’
‘No,’ Tamsyn nodded. ‘Right, well, you know how it is.’
‘Yep, five years fly by when you’re making dresses,’ Ruan said, that familiar storm brewing between his brows.
‘Well, I haven’t exactly noticed you beating down my door, asking to come and visit,’ Tamsyn said. ‘Mum did. Cordy, Keira and the kids did. Now I’m here, when have you ever been to Paris?’
‘Why would I ever want to come to Paris?’ Ruan asked her. ‘It’s full of French people.’
‘Xenophobe,’ Tamsyn said, her treacherously idiotic mouth betraying her before she could contain it. ‘Although why I should expect more of my brother, the country bumpkin I don’t know. Anyway, I see you found a replacement.’
‘You—’
‘—Are so kind for coming all this way.’
Tamsyn and Ruan broke their deadlock and turned to the newcomer. This had to be her, Alex, the woman that had got to Ruan. She was pretty, but not perhaps the siren that Tamsyn had been expecting. Lightly tanned fair skin, scrubbed clean of make-up, clear blue eyes and a thick mane of dark hair that looked enviably smooth and shiny. Pleasantly made, with hips and breasts, she was exactly the sort of woman who would never fit into one of Bernard’s dresses, which, Tamsyn realised as she took in her outfit of a pair of comfortable jeans and a t-shirt, she probably wouldn’t give two hoots about anyway. She knew Ruan had met Alex when she’d arrived to take on the job of Cornwall’s first female harbour master, but from what Cordelia had told her, it had been their roles as Mary and Joseph in Sue Montaigne’s Christmas pageant that had thrown them together, and then quite a lot of toing and froing had ensued, including Alex saving her brother’s life, before they finally got together. Alex looked like a real woman, an ordinary one, and despite certainly hearing Tamsyn refer to her as a ‘replacement’, she looked surprisingly friendly.
‘Well, of course,’ Tamsyn smiled. ‘Mum said if I didn’t come she’d kill me.’
A beat too late, she realised that what she said sounded incredibly rude, at exactly the same moment that Ruan looked like he’d quite like to tip the pint he was holding over her head.
‘Mums are very convincing that way,’ Alex laughed. ‘You should meet mine. I didn’t even know her for most of my life, then she turns up out of the blue, breaks into my home and now she’s organising my wedding. Funny, isn’t it, how just when you think there’s no hope for something or someone, everything changes? I wouldn’t be without her now.’
Alex’s smile was sweet, open, genuine, kind. She wanted this to work, Tamsyn understood. She had asked Tamsyn to be part of her wedding to bring her and Ruan together again, to heal the rift that had opened up between them on the day Merryn went out to sea. Whether she thought it was the only way to banish the last remnants of the ghost of Merryn that still hung in the air, Tamsyn wasn’t sure. But she was sure of one thing.
Alex Munro might know Ruan, but she didn’t know what had happened between them all those years ago that meant they’d never be close again.
‘Anyway, we’re really pleased that you’re here,’ Alex said. ‘And you’ve had a long journey, so have a drink, something to eat and relax. There will be plenty of time to catch up properly between now and the wedding.’
She gave Ruan a meaningful glance and, smiling once more at Tamsyn, she nodded in the direction of an older woman wearing tight white Capri pants and what looked suspiciously like a boob tube.
‘Now, I need to go and talk to my mother about some final arrangements with the florists. I’m so looking forward to getting to know you, Tamsyn.’
Tamsyn nodded, and then, catching Keira’s eye, said, ‘Me too, I’m looking forward to getting to know me too, I mean you, I mean us. I mean, I’m really looking forward to the whole massive wedding thing and all that it entails. Brilliant.’