‘I’ll send you the recipe, if you give me your email address?’ he suggested.
‘I’d love the recipe, but I don’t think even then I can compete with the lure of yours.’
‘I’ve left David in charge of the shop while I have my lunch,’ Jago said. ‘It’s really busy on Saturdays, but his fiancée, Sarah, comes for the weekends to help out. In fact, I tend to feel a bit of a spare part and I’ll feel even more so when Sarah gives up her job and moves into the flat over the shop with us permanently.’
‘I suppose three is a crowd, even if they don’t mean to make you feel left out.’
‘It doesn’t help that I got disengaged about the same time David proposed to Sarah,’ he said, and his thin, handsome face became gloomy. ‘Very disengaged.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said sincerely.
‘Don’t be, because she went off with another man a couple of weeks before the wedding, so it was better she did it then than after we were married.’
‘That’s true, I suppose, though it doesn’t stop it hurting, does it? I was engaged before I had Stella, but my fiancée signed up for a second long contract abroad without telling me and then dumped me for someone else he’d met out there.’
Jago raised his coffee cup. ‘Here’s to a fresh start for both of us, then,’ he said, and smiled at me. His mouth went up a bit at the left corner when he smiled and so did the corner of his eyebrow on that side. I found myself smiling back.
‘So, how did the Happy Macaroon come about?’ I asked. ‘I’ve only just emailed David my questions for the article.’
‘It was literally a stroke of luck. We both worked for Gilligan’s, as you know, and we were in the lottery ticket syndicate when our numbers came up.’
‘Wow!’ I said enviously.
‘It wasn’t millions, nothing like that, but our shares were enough to change our lives, if we wanted them to. Some of the older members of the syndicate just paid off their mortgages and took holidays, or bought new cars, but David and I decided we wanted to get out of London and set up our own businesses.’
‘Great idea.’
‘David found his premises first, so I came up to help him start off and fell in love with the area. Now I’m hoping to find somewhere nearby to run my croquembouche wedding cake business, and the sooner the better. We thought it would take quite a while to get the Happy Macaroon off the ground, but actually business took off like a rocket from the first day.’
‘But what made him choose Ormskirk? When I heard about the shop, it seemed the most unlikely place – yet I can see it’s a huge success.’
‘David comes from Southport and fell for the old bakery after he spotted it on the internet, and luckily there was an empty flat above it, too. What about you,’ he asked tentatively, ‘why did you move up here?’
‘I sold my flat near Primrose Hill and we moved in with my mother because I needed to raise some capital quickly to fund treatment for Stella.’ I took a sip of coffee, which was strong and good. ‘Perhaps you noticed how small and frail she looks for her age?’
He nodded, his eyes soft and sympathetic.
‘It’s because she was born with a heart condition, a serious and complicated one.’
‘Hence the hospital appointments you mentioned? I’m so sorry – it must be an enormous worry to you and she’s such a bright, lovely little girl.’
‘Yes, it is,’ I confessed. ‘The hospital here has taken over monitoring her progress, but they’d really like her to put on some weight before she goes to America in autumn for an operation … It’s very risky, you see, experimental surgery, but without it the consultant in London said that eventually her organs would begin to suffer under the strain of coping.’
I don’t know what came over me, but I found myself describing in detail Stella’s problems and what the consultant said, just as if I’d known Jago for ever. It felt that way.
‘But surely she could have the operation here, on the NHS?’ he demanded. ‘You shouldn’t have to go abroad for it.’
‘They can do so much these days with surgery, but in Stella’s case, they’d reached the end of the road over here. But Celia and I – that’s my best friend – researched on the internet and found a surgeon who’d pioneered the operation she needed in Boston, but he’s the only one who can help. I got the hospital in London to send him all the X-rays and her notes and stuff, and he’s willing to do it, but of course it’ll cost an absolute fortune.’
‘So you sold the flat and moved here? I see …’
‘We thought we’d have longer to raise the money, but Stella was ill back in January and they advised us to move the operation date forward to this autumn, so I put the flat on the market. I’ve put the profit I made into the charitable fund that Celia and her husband, Will, helped me to set up and run, called Stella’s Stars. Donations are coming in all the time, though not big ones – people are so kind, even strangers.’
‘Stella’s Stars? That’s a good name.’
‘She’s my little star,’ I said, feeling better for telling him all about it. ‘Some of the people I know in London have fundraised, but even after selling the flat I’m still around twenty thousand pounds short, even though the surgeon has generously offered to waive his fee for doing the operation. But the operation is booked for the start of November and we need to fly over at the end of October, so I’ll have to find the rest of the money quite quickly somehow.’
I smiled at him ruefully. ‘It looks like we’ve both taken a gamble in moving up here – you and David on the success of your new businesses and me on being able to raise the rest of the money.’
‘Your gamble is much more important than mine … but couldn’t Stella’s father help?’ Jago asked tentatively.
‘Stella’s father is my ex-fiancée that I told you about. He’d left me by the time I found out I was pregnant and he wasn’t remotely interested in being a father when I told him. In fact, he suggested I have an abortion, and when I refused, he cut off all contact with me – changed his email address and everything. He was back in the Antarctic by then, which made him even more uncontactable.’
‘The Antarctic?’
‘Yes, he was working out there as a marine biologist. I don’t know where he went after that. He could still be there, for all I know.’
‘He doesn’t sound much of a loss.’
‘No, I think he probably comes under the heading of “lucky escapes”.’
‘That’s pretty much what David said when my fiancée ran off with someone else,’ he said wryly. ‘Sarah works in a Mayfair hair salon so she’d heard lots of gossip about my ex, Aimee, and she was pretty blunt about telling me what she thought of her. Aimee organised events for her rich friends for a living, and she was beautiful, smart, classy and connected – way out of my league, but I did think she loved me …’
They sounded an unlikely combination: a rich social butterfly and a hard-working baker, even if the said baker was the quietly handsome sort that you might pass in the street, but then turn round and go back to have another look at.
He shook off his fit of abstraction. ‘Well, at least the lottery winnings gave me the chance of an exciting new start somewhere where I’ll never come across Aimee again.’
‘Stella had already turned my life upside down before I moved here. I had