‘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.
Chapter Three Chocolate Wishes
I was jarred back to the present by the realisation that Radio Four was now traitorously playing ‘Darker Past Mid night’, yet another damn song of Raffy’s! Is there no escape from him?
You hear it everywhere since it was used as the theme song for a film. And it’s still running as the soundtrack to that hugely popular car advert – the one in which a man is driving through the night alone, when suddenly a girl appears, sitting next to him, and you’re never quite sure if he’s imagining her or if she’s a ghost…
This time it was the introductory music to a supernatural story, so clearly no radio channel is safe any more. But still, at least the hated sound of it brought me back to the present, because sitting about in a murky swamp of unwanted memories, feeling like one of love’s rejects, was not going to get me anywhere.
My first impulse (apart from switching off the radio) was to phone up my best friend, Poppy, who together with her mother runs a riding stables called Stirrups just outside Sticklepond, and tell her the news about the move. But she was probably taking a lesson, or was out with a hack, and, even if she wasn’t, half the time she forgets to take her mobile phone with her, or it isn’t working because she’s dropped it in a bucket of water.
Felix, my other best friend, was going to an auction that day to buy more books he didn’t have room for: Marked Pages was bursting at the seams.
So in the end I just did what I always did at that time: typed up Grumps’ letters on the computer and put them into envelopes ready to post, then started on the latest instalment of Satan’s Child.
The new episode was surprisingly gripping, with a very scary bit when the tall, dark and compelling warlock hero (who from the detailed description looked amazingly like photographs of Grumps when younger) was inside the pentagram, while a really nasty demonic beast was testing the boundaries and trying to get in.
In fact, the scene was so realistic that I started to wonder if Grumps…But no, surely not? He just has a fertile imagination, that’s all, as evidenced by his constant hints that some mysterious rival was loosing the slings and arrows of outrageous magic at him, which was probably, as Zillah said, ‘all my eye and Betty Martin’ (though don’t ask me who Betty Martin is, I have no idea).
But I made a mental note that once we had moved to the Old Smithy I would take care to avoid entering the museum area when the coven was meeting. Maybe I could make a little sign for Grumps to hang on the connecting door between the cottage and the barn:
DO NOT DISTURB: IN FOR A SPELL
I’m a fast touch-typist so it didn’t take long to input everything. Then I printed the manuscript out ready to take it across in the morning when I collected the next lot.
I sort of fell into being Grumps’ PA when I returned after that disastrous first term at university. It gave me something to occupy my mind with, while looking after Jake and waiting for Mum to come back from her latest fling, other than worrying about my future and what would happen when Raffy finally got my letter telling him everything…
I wrenched my mind back from the brink of yet another pointless trip down Memory Lane and reflected that I seemed to have managed pretty well without a Significant Other for the last few years. Among my blessings I had good friends (OK, only two, Felix and Poppy, but it’s quality not quantity of friendship that counts) and a social life, though that mainly involved meeting up with them at the Falling Star in Sticklepond.
I didn’t think I’d made a bad job of bringing Jake up either, considering his lively disposition: the police never pressed charges, even when he painted the Arbuthnot statue in front of the Town Hall blue. (Luckily there was a downpour soon afterwards and the emulsion was not quite dry, so most of it washed off.)
And the saying ‘Who needs men when you’ve got chocolate?’ was literally true in my case, since discovering a passion for it and then building up my successful Chocolate Wishes business had certainly put the icing back on the slightly jaded cupcake of life.
Little did the purchasers of my expensive chocolates know that they were whipped up practically on the kitchen table in the kitchen end of our living room. I made the chocolate shells in big batches and often spent the evenings sitting putting in the Wishes and sealing the two halves together with melted tempered chocolate (because if you don’t use tempered chocolate, you get a white line round the join). I had the TV for company if Jake was out with his friends, or shut into his room, doing whatever teenage boys do – and whatever that is, it’s probably much better that their big sisters don’t know anything about it.
The flat – and probably me, too – always smelled deliciously of chocolate. Maybe that’s why Felix, who has a sweet tooth, had started to look at me in a new, slightly appraising light…unless I was imagining it? I didn’t think I was, though, unfortunately. I first noticed it about the time Grumps gave me that allegedly Mayan chocolate charm to say over the melting pot