Chocolate Wishes (6 page)

I showered quickly, so I had time to do an internet search for one of Mum’s correspondents, who turned out to be an actor, printing out his photo and some information to take with me to the Falling Star, where I was meeting Poppy and Felix.

Zillah must have come into the living room just after I’d finished that and gone back into the bathroom to apply a bit of slap, because there was a plate of dinner on the table covered by a hot, inverted soup bowl. I hadn’t thought I was hungry at all until I lifted the bowl off and the aroma of steak and kidney pudding and chips hit me, but I ate it in five minutes flat, standing up, before dashing out.

Indigestion was on the cards – if I could tell heartburn from heartache these days.

We were all sitting round the table in the snug at the Falling Star, Mum’s collection of letters and the computer printouts spread over the table between our glasses.

‘So, let’s get this straight, Chloe,’ Felix said, making a valiant attempt to untangle my incoherent narrative. ‘When Lou got pregnant with you, she didn’t just tell Chas Wilde that he was your father, she told
another
man he was too?’

‘Yes, as a moneymaking scam. Since they were both married, once she threatened to tell their wives they agreed to pay her to keep quiet about it. She had quite a little racket going.’

I hadn’t thought I could feel any more disillusioned about my mother, but this sank my perception of her to whole new depths and I’m not sure anything could survive down there, certainly not love.

‘Gosh!’ said Poppy, wide-eyed. ‘So your father could be either of them?’

‘Yes – or neither, because there’s no guarantee it wasn’t someone else entirely, is there?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Felix said thoughtfully. ‘Since she seems to have got pregnant as a means to an end, it probably
is
one of them. It’s still quite likely it was Chas Wilde, like she always told you, you know.’

‘Yes, he’s always taken an interest in you and sent Christmas and birthday presents, which he didn’t do for either of
us
,’ Poppy agreed, ‘and called in to see you when he’s in the North.’

When I was a child those had been short, awkward visits, with me desperate to know why, if he was my daddy, I wasn’t allowed to call him that, or ask him anything else that puzzled me, like why he didn’t live with me and Mum. But later, when I was old enough to understand, we had grown closer and easier with each other. I hadn’t seen a lot of him since Mum vanished, but we kept in touch by phone and email.

‘But all that doesn’t prove he’s my father, just that Mum convinced him he was,’ I pointed out, and then looked down despairingly at the letters. ‘I wish now I hadn’t read these so I would still believe Chas
is
my father, because at least he’s kind and nice, despite being stupid enough to let my mother use him!’

‘But, Chloe, he may very well turn out
still
to be your father,’ Poppy said.

‘I know, and I want it to be Chas,’ I said, picking up one of the envelopes from the table, ‘because when you read this letter he sent to Mum when I was ten, after he’d finally confessed everything to his wife, he made it clear he was still going to carry on supporting me – that he
cared
about me.’

‘He is a nice man,’ agreed Poppy, ‘and he certainly paid for one weak moment, didn’t he?’

‘Through the nose – and maybe for someone who wasn’t his child after all. Have a look at these two sets of photos I got off the internet and tell me if you think I look like any of them. The ones of Chas are from when he was younger, so he looks different.’

Felix and Poppy put their heads together over the photographs and Felix asked, ‘Who is this other man?’

‘Carr Blackstock, an actor, mostly theatre work, especially Shakespeare, but he has appeared in one or two things on TV. When I Googled the name, he was the only one who came up, so it must be him.’

‘He looks slightly familiar,’ Poppy said, then added hesitantly, ‘though actually that might be because you look a bit alike. Slightly
elfin
, if you know what I mean – like Kate Bush.’

‘Elfin? I don’t look at all elfin,’ I said with disgust, ‘
or
like Kate Bush. I wish people wouldn’t keep saying that!’

‘Well, it certainly wasn’t me who got called “Pixie Ears” at school!’ she retorted.

‘No, you were “Pudding” because you ate everyone else’s jam roly-poly and custard on Wednesdays!’

‘Only because I needed the energy. I burned up loads of calories mucking out my ponies before school every morning,’ Poppy said with dignity.

‘Now, girls!’ Felix said mildly. ‘I think we’re straying from the subject in hand – and I have to agree with Poppy that if I had to pick one of these two as being related to you, then Carr Blackstock would be the man. It’s hard to tell from printouts, but he even seems to have the same unusually light grey eyes.’

‘I think my printer cartridge is fading. But anyway, Grumps has grey eyes.’

‘Yes, but ordinary grey ones,’ he said.

‘There’s nothing at all ordinary about Grumps!’

‘That’s true, they
are
a bit piercing.’

‘What do you know about this actor?’ asked Poppy, and I fished out the information sheet from the bottom of the heap. One of us must have slopped his or her drink, because it was a bit damp and wrinkly.

‘He’s been married to the same woman
for ever
and they have four children. Mum must have got him in a weak moment, like Chas. It doesn’t say a lot about men’s faithfulness, does it?’

‘We’re not all alike,’ Felix said, which was quite true in his case. He is the faithful-unto-death sort and divorced his wife several years before, only when she had a very blatant affair. ‘But your mother must have been stunning at the time, if that’s a mitigating factor? And we all make mistakes in life, of one kind or another.’

‘He must have been furious about making that one, because apart from his really terse answer to her news about the pregnancy, there aren’t any letters until my eighteenth birthday, when he sent the note saying he wasn’t going to pay any more and he’d never been entirely convinced I was his child anyway.’

‘I suppose that was fair enough, because they didn’t really have DNA testing then like they do now, so he wouldn’t have been able to prove it one way or the other, would he?’ Felix said.

‘But if he’d actually
seen
you he’d have spotted the likeness,’ Poppy said.

‘I don’t think there is a likeness.’ I scrutinised the photos again. ‘You’re imagining it.’

‘He’s just the most like you out of the two of them, that’s all,’ Felix conceded.

‘Or the least
unlike
. And whether he believed it or not, he paid up, just like poor old Chas, so Mum must have thought she was on to a good thing until the money stopped coming in altogether when I was eighteen.’ I tossed the picture back on the heap. ‘And then the truly awful thing is that she thought she’d try the same trick all over again – by getting pregnant with Jake!’

Poppy’s pale denim-blue eyes widened. ‘Oh, no, not Jake too!’

‘Yes, only this time it didn’t work out.’

‘No, well, I suppose it wouldn’t, these days,’ Felix said. ‘Things have changed and a lot of men wouldn’t care, except for being made to pay Child Support. And they could find out for sure if the child
was
theirs first, through a DNA test.’

‘Lou was never the brightest bunny in the box, so that didn’t seem to have occurred to her until too late,’ I said, then gave a wry smile. ‘And the man she tried to trick into believing he was the father was very fair, so it wasn’t going to wash if he ever set eyes on the baby! I think for once she was telling the truth when she told me that Jake’s father was an Italian waiter she met on holiday. He had to get those lovely dark brown eyes from somewhere.’

‘When she knew she wasn’t going to get any money out of it, I suppose there was no point in lying about who the father was,’ Poppy agreed. ‘So at least you don’t have to worry about Jake’s paternity, only your own.’

‘Mags and Janey both seem to have been in on Lou’s original scam and it’s clear that Mags at least thought it was all highly amusing,’ Felix said, looking up from reading one of the brief notes in his mother’s scrawled handwriting. ‘Especially about Chas, since he’d never shown any sign of
being anything other than a happily married man until he let Lou seduce him.’

‘Well, he could have said no,’ Poppy said fair-mindedly. ‘And so could the other man.’

‘They could have, but they didn’t,’ Felix said. ‘Lou knew what she was doing and she put it about a bit. In fact, all three of our mothers seem to have, though at least yours settled down after a few wild years and got married, Poppy.’

‘That was just a timely combination of desperately missing horses and falling for Dad. Once he’d gone, she started trying to work her way through the male members of the Middlemoss Drag Hunt.’

‘Quite literally,’ I said and Poppy giggled.

‘I suppose so! Still, at least she hasn’t brought any of them home since that time I caught her in a loose box with one of the whippers-in when I was thirteen. And on the whole, she’s not
really
been bad as a mum.’

‘She certainly turned out the best of the bunch from that point of view,’ Felix agreed, ‘though that isn’t saying much. Chloe’s is a bolter with a blackmailing habit, while my unre-spected parent dumped me on my grandparents the minute I was born and is still playing the field in her fifties, while nominally living with a smarmy git half her age.’

‘At least she’s
around
, Felix,’ I pointed out, because Mags got lucky with a legacy from an elderly lover and opened the Hot Rocks nightclub in Southport a few years ago. The said smarmy git is the manager. ‘If she hadn’t had a business to run, she might have decided to vanish with Mum.’

I’d never believed Mags’ version of events about the night Mum disappeared. Lou and Mags had always been thick as thieves, whereas Janey had tended to go off and do her own thing after the Wilde’s Women years were over, though they
all remained friends and sometimes hung out together at Hot Rocks.

‘God knows what Lou is up to all this time, or where she is, though I suspect Mags could give me a hint if she wanted to, Felix,’ I said.

When she’d switched from taking all those holidays to Jamaica on her own and started visiting Goa instead, I’d wondered if that was a clue to Mum having skipped the Caribbean.

He looked uncomfortable. ‘I have asked her and she swears she has no idea.’

‘Yes, that’s what she told me, but I don’t believe her.’

‘And I asked Mum if Mags had told her anything and she said she hadn’t,’ Poppy said, ‘though that means nothing when they’ve always lied and covered up for each other.’

She indicated the stuff on the table, which Felix was now neatly repacking into the box. ‘What are you going to do about this, if anything?’

‘I don’t know, I’ll have to think about it. It’s been a shock finding out my father might not be Chas. But there’s no point in telling any of it to Jake, because it would only upset him and anyway, it looks like she was telling the truth about who
his
father was, at least. She even gave him a holiday snap of them both together, though it isn’t terribly clear.’

‘He must have been nice, because Jake is,’ Poppy said loyally. She’d always adored Jake, who had never played tricks on her (apart from mild ones, like whoopee cushions and plastic flies in her coffee) and called her Auntie Pops.

‘I’m certainly not going to do anything hasty. Even if I wanted to, I have too much on at the moment, trying to
keep my business running while sorting and packing and getting ready for the move. I’m dismantling my greenhouse tomorrow.’

‘I could come and help,’ offered Felix.

‘No, that’s OK, Felix,’ I said quickly, since he is pretty useless as a handyman, besides being the kiss of death to anything breakable, being all elbows and feet. ‘It won’t take me long. It was dead easy to put up and I still have the instructions.’

‘Really, Chloe, we make a good team,’ he insisted. ‘We’d get it done twice as fast.’

‘Really, Felix, we
don’t
– especially where panes of glass are concerned.’

He looked slightly hurt, so I added, ‘But I’ll definitely need your help on moving day.’

I felt in need of another drink, so went to the bar to get a round in.

When I got back, Poppy suddenly announced, ‘I’ve got a date for tomorrow night!’

‘Where from? I thought you’d given up on internet dating sites and decided the private marriage bureaus were too expensive.’

‘Who with?’ Felix demanded, in bossy big-brother mode.

‘Just a man I met through
The Times
lonely hearts ads,’ she said casually. ‘We’ve talked for hours on the phone and now we’re meeting up.’

‘Where?’ I asked, distracted from my own problems. ‘I hope you’re being sensible and it’s somewhere very public, with other people about?’

‘Yes, you have no idea what kind of man he really is,’ agreed Felix. ‘People can say anything.’

‘I do know. I told you, we’ve talked for hours and we have
so much in common. And it’s OK, because we’re meeting in Sticklepond, at the Green Man.’

‘Do you know what he looks like?’ I asked.

‘Yes, he’s medium height and a bit like Tom Cruise.’

‘If he looked like Tom Cruise he wouldn’t need to meet women through the lonely hearts ads,’ Felix said suspiciously.

‘He’s probably exaggerating a bit, but I expect he’s very nice really,’ I said quickly, seeing Poppy’s face fall. ‘Did you tell him what you look like?’

‘I said I was fair and blue-eyed and an outdoors type and he thought that sounded perfect, because he was very energetic and loved outdoor pursuits.’

‘That does it,’ Felix announced. ‘
I’m
coming too!’

‘No, you’re not. Three’s a crowd and I don’t need a chaperone!’

‘I didn’t mean exactly
with
you, Poppy, just in the pub to see how it goes. But don’t go off anywhere with him. I’ll have my car, but I might lose you.’

‘Oh,
honestly
, Felix!’ she said, but actually I was glad to see him focusing on Poppy instead of me. I can take care of myself, but Poppy is distinctly soft-centred.

Then suddenly, quite out of nowhere, I had a blinding flash of illumination – Felix had all the characteristics Poppy had recently listed to me as being what she wanted in a man! He was single, kind, honest, not a sex maniac or a weird obsessive, and attractive.

And if Felix really yearns to settle down to a comfortable family life before it’s too late, then he’s barking up the wrong tree as far as I am concerned, but he and Poppy would be perfect for each other. Except that she only sees him in a brotherly light, of course, and Felix thinks of Poppy as a mate, only the wrong kind.