The Flavours of Love Read online

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Part II

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Part III

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Part IV

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Part V

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Part VI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Part VII

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Part VIII

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  Chapter XL

  Part IX

  Chapter XLI

  Chapter XLII

  Chapter XLIII

  Chapter XLIV

  Chapter XLV

  Part X

  Chapter XLVI

  Chapter XLVII

  Chapter XLVIII

  Chapter XLIX

  Chapter L

  Chapter LI

  Chapter LII

  Chapter LIII

  Chapter LIV

  Chapter LV

  Chapter LVI

  Chapter LVII

  Chapter LVIII

  Chapter LIX

  Part XI

  Chapter LX

  Chapter LXI

  Chapter LXII

  Part XII

  Chapter LXIII

  Chapter LXIV

  Chapter LXV

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  The Rose Petal Beach

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  Quercus Editions Ltd

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 2013 Dorothy Koomson

  The moral right of Dorothy Koomson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  HB ISBN 978 1 78087 500 2

  TPB ISBN 978 1 78087 501 9

  EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78087 502 6

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Dorothy Koomson is the author of eight previous novels: The Rose Petal Beach; The Woman He Loved Before; The Ice Cream Girls; Goodnight, Beautiful; Marshmallows for Breakfast; My Best Friend’s Girl; The Chocolate Run and The Cupid Effect, all of them Sunday Times bestsellers. She lives in Brighton.

  For M & G & E

  I love that we’re on this super-plane together.

  prologue

  ‘Are you going to tell the police?’ she asks.

  ‘I think I have to,’ I say. My mouth is dry, my mind is racing to so many different places and thoughts and decisions all at once, I can’t keep up. I can’t hold a single thought in my head for too long because another dashes into its place. Air keeps snagging itself on the way in and out of my lungs so I haven’t taken a proper breath since my daughter started to speak, and my heart is running cold with the knowledge of who it was that killed my husband. And why.

  I have to tell the police this, of course I do.

  ‘Please don’t, Mum.’

  ‘But, Phoebe—’

  ‘Please don’t, Mum. Please. Please. Please.’ Her twelve-year-old body, nestled on my lap, shakes with fretful sobs. ‘Please. Please. Please. I’m scared. I’m really scared.’

  ‘Phoebe, we can’t—’

  ‘Please, Mum. I’m really sorry, but please, don’t.’

  ‘Shhh, shhhhh,’ I say, rocking her, trying to hush her. This isn’t fair. None of this is fair. ‘Let’s not talk about it now. It’ll be OK, I’ll make it all OK.’

  I

  What’s the difference between folding and stirring?

  I’m sure I knew that once upon a time, I’m sure someone told me. Apparently, you can tell whether an ingredient has been folded in or stirred in. I’ve always been a bit dubious about that, have often wondered if it’s one of those things that cooks/chefs add to the instructions to make a recipe sound more interesting or more difficult than it actually is.

  Fold or stir. Stir or fold.

  ‘Ah-he-hem!’ The man sitting across the desk from me, whose body and clothes bear the hallmarks of a man deeply mired in a mid-life crisis, clears his throat in an uncomfortable manner. He’s obviously got something big to say. He needs my attention, even though my attention, my gaze, causes him to squirm a little in his seat every time I direct it at him. Every time. He doesn’t know how to share space with the woman whose husband was murdered. With me.

  I know that’s how he refers to me in his head, how he talks about me to other people, because that’s how everyone refers to me – I’ve heard the whispers at the two different playgrounds I drop my children off at, in the toilets at work, in the conversations of people in the local shop and supermarket. It’s not meant nastily, it’s simply an easy, defining shorthand of someone on the edges of their life. Even now, eighteen months later, I am The Woman Whose Husband Was Murdered. Or, to give me my full title: The Woman Whose Husband Was Murdered And His Killer Was Never Caught.

  ‘Ah-he-hem!’ Another throat clear. Another squirm in his seat when I look at him.

  The last time I met this man properly he wasn’t having a mid-life crisis and we were discussing how to reintegrate my daughter back into school after what had happened. He’d avoided eye contact, shuffled papers on his desk, clicked his pen on and off, and fumbled over his words, scared and uncertain of what to say. And here we are again today: same room, same nervous unease but with different clothes and a different form teacher standing beside him.

  This form tutor, positioned like a silent bodyguard beside his headmaster, is male. I know him by reputation – he’s The Mr Bromsgrove. ‘The’ having been installed by playground mothers because he is youngish and good-looking, the subject of some scandalously outrageous sexual comments (despite how married they are and him not necessarily teaching their children).

  Across the room, on the same side of the desk as me, sitting in a chair that couldn’t technically be further away from me unless it was outside the room, is my daughter. Phoebe Mackleroy. I don’t know, yet, what she’s done, why I’ve been called up here on my first day off in nearly a year.

  She’s a good girl, I want to be able
to say. This is just a blip; she’s a good girl really. But I’m not going to be able to say that, am I? Things don’t work out like that for people like me.

  ‘Ah-he-hem!’ Another throat-clear before the headteacher speaks: ‘Mrs Mackleroy. There is no easy way to break this news to you. Phoebe has made a disclosure today to her form tutor Mr Bromsgrove.’ The headmaster’s chubby, pale hand goes up to indicate the man he’s referring to. I want to correct him, remind him that he is in fact The Mr Bromsgrove, but I know that wouldn’t be appropriate so instead I allow myself to briefly glance at him and in return, The Mr Bromsgrove continues to studiously avoid my eye. The headteacher continues to speak: ‘He was unsure what to do, so came to me. We thought it best to contact you as soon as possible. Especially if it looks like we’re going to have to involve social services.’

  My heart skips three beats at those magic words. I’d braced myself when the school secretary had called, I’d put down the pile of recipes scrawled on different types of paper I was leafing through and readied myself to hear the worst. But when they’d asked me to come in here and not to a hospital, when I arrived and saw Phoebe sitting in a chair, moving, breathing, living, I’d allowed myself to unclench a little, to almost fully relax.

  Stupid woman that I am. I’d let myself to forget that your life can be devastated on the whim of the wind, the change of mind, a friendly push that becomes a deadly shove. Your life can change when you’re looking right at it but don’t notice the tiniest cut in a major artery.

  ‘There’s no easy way to tell you this, Mrs Mackleroy.’ The headmaster is still talking, as though mentioning social services doesn’t merit allowing me a moment to take that in properly, to steel myself because everything is heading in a direction that has a destination marked: ‘Hell’. ‘I’m sorry you have to hear this from me instead of Phoebe herself. We felt – all three of us – that this was the best way to tell you.’

  It took two police officers to tell me an ‘incident’ meant I’d never see my husband again, why shouldn’t it take three people to tell me whatever it is that my daughter has done?

  I shift to study her. The way she sits in the tulip-shaped seat – turned away like she is a sunflower and the sun is situated in the opposite direction to me – means I can’t see the top part of her body. Her grey, pleated uniform skirt exposes her knees; her long, grey regulation socks with the turquoise edging hide all the skin below her knees, disappearing into her flat, black shoes. Her hair, which she is presenting to me instead of her face, is split into two equal sections and secured into two perfect afro-puff pigtails by matching black elastic hairbands. She doesn’t look like a troublemaker, but then she never does. She looks like a girl who follows the rules, does as she’s told and is mortified at being sent to headteacher’s office.

  I know what you’ve done, I think at her.

  ‘Ah-he-hem!’ goes the headteacher’s throat again, and I swivel back to him. I should know his name but I don’t. It’s a piece of information that has skipped right out of my head, replaced by the knowledge of what my fourteen-year-old daughter has done. I don’t need him to say it because I know what’s going on.

  He says it anyway, because it needs to be uttered out loud, this needs to be confirmed.

  ‘Mrs Mackleroy, I’m afraid to say, Phoebe is about four weeks pregnant.’

  II

  16 years before That Day (June, 1995)

  My fingers were curled tight into the edges of the armrests, my body forced back into the seat as the aeroplane, Flight 4867 to Lisbon, lurched sickeningly to the left, then was immediately flung to the right. This was why I hated flying. This was why I’d thought long and hard about whether I really, actually needed to ‘get away from it all’. I hadn’t been sure that my need to escape the anxiety and stress of being at home was worth this. Was worth taking the chance of being trapped in a metal box with only the thought of teetering in the air, waiting for the aeroplane to either glide into calmer skies or to suddenly plummet meaning I’d have to scream or cry or pray my way to impending death.

  Go to Portugal, I’d told myself. It’s only two hours on a plane, I’d told myself. It’ll be fine. It’ll only be one hundred and twenty minutes. How much turbulence can be crammed into that short amount of time? Some movies are longer than that. You’ll be fine, Saffron. Absolutely fine.

  I was not fine. I was clinging to the armrests of an aeroplane seat, securing my mind firmly to the present, refusing to allow my life to replay itself before my eyes because if I could stop that happening, the rest of it, the screaming/praying/crying to impending death wouldn’t happen, either.

  The man seated next to me, whose girlfriend had his left hand in a vice-like grip, turned to me as the plane rollicked sideways and held out his right hand. ‘You can cling onto this hand if you want,’ he said. My gaze went from his large hand with its square, neat nails to his girlfriend. Her green eyes were wide and terrified, her straight red hair ruffled, it seemed, by fear itself, but she still managed a nod to me to communicate: ‘Go on, you idiot, grab on and squeeze tight. We’re all in this together.’

  The plane swooped into a dip and his girlfriend and I both closed our eyes after letting out simultaneous ‘Ohhhhhhh’s. I immediately clamped my hand over the one proffered and clung on for sheer life as we rocked and rolled our way into Lisbon.

  *

  I’ve fallen through a pothole in time, been to one of the places in my past with Joel, and I have come back to the present with a rising and falling tide of nausea at the pit of my stomach. Usually, the memory pockets that feature Joel and our life before that day give me an unexpected little boost, a little something to allow me to carry on in the present, but not this time.

  This time, the cauldron of uncertainty and worry that lives where my stomach should be continues to whisk itself into a frenzy because I’m one of those parents. Those parents. The ones you read about in the papers or magazines and shake your head at; the ones you think Where were the parents? about when you hear of something terrible involving a child. I know I’m one of those parents because here I sit with my hands folded on my lap, my face set in a neutral expression, replaying the secrets a stranger has seconds ago revealed to me about my own life.

  I hate feeling sick.

  I hate feeling sick even more than I hate being sick because at least once you’ve vomited, have excavated your stomach of its contents, apart from the ache in your ribs or your throat, it’s done with; gone. Nausea, though, sits at the pit of your being, mixing itself slowly and potently, occasionally rising up, threatening to spill out, before it subsides again, folding and stirring, stirring and folding itself a little more intensely as a sensation that won’t be shifting any time soon.

  Right now, I feel sick.

  My daughter, who still wears a school uniform, who I have to take shopping for shoes, who still has teddy bears on her bed, is pregnant.

  ‘Are you going to say anything, Phoebe?’ I ask my daughter, revolving in my seat to her.

  Her slender, fourteen-year-old body, already twisted away from me, cringes ever so slightly – a tiny reflexive tensing of muscles – at my voice but she does not move or otherwise acknowledge me.

  ‘Phoebe?’ I say her name gently, carefully.

  Nothing. Nothing from my daughter.

  I return my line of sight to the men in front of me and focus on the youthful one, the handsome one. The Mr Bromsgrove. Why did she choose to tell him? Of all the people in the world, in this city, in this school, why did she choose to tell him? He is young, but not especially young, probably about my age, actually. Certainly old enough to be her father. He has a grade-one haircut all over, his features are strong – a man who can look like he takes no nonsense very easily, but also able to look soft and understanding an instant later. He’s slender, bordering on skinny, and wearing a form-fitting white shirt, navy suit jacket and tan corduroy trousers. His eyes, from what I can see behind his gold wire-rimmed glasses, are the same dark hazelbrown o
f his skin and seem kind. This is the first time I’ve regarded him properly, have noticed him, and now I can understand what the others in the playground have been whispering about. Why they have crushes on him. Why I would have had a crush on him if I were a teenager. Does my daughter? Is that why she told him this thing first? Because she thought it might bond them? Or is it more nefarious than that, does he have something to do with her condition?

  My gaze goes to the headteacher. How could you allow this to happen? I want to say. When she’s not at home, she’s here, at school, so this thing must have happened on school time.

  I contemplate The Mr Bromsgrove again. Has she mentioned him a little too much? Have I seen anything with his name on in her bedroom when I go in to check her computer? I am plundering my memory, trying to see if there is a moment that featured this man, this potential father of my daughter’s child. Nothing. Nothing comes to mind, or pricks my memory. He doesn’t even raise a suspicion of anything untoward happening between them.