be misinterpreted by alien (or even sisterly) eyes, and me because I didn’t have a huge amount of stuff…apart from the Chocolate Wishes equipment and stock, about a million ornamental angels and dozens of potted geraniums. And I had to make arrangements to move the geraniums, the mini greenhouse and all the pots and tubs of plants in the courtyard myself, since the removal firm refused to take them.
‘Poppy and I found some rose-patterned Laura Ashley curtains for the cottage in a charity shop in Ormskirk yesterday,’ I told Grumps, when I went in to collect the latest chapter of Satan’s Child and a letter that seemed to consist of several pages of barely veiled but mysterious threats. It was addressed to a book reviewer who had dared to say rude things about his last novel, The Desirous Devil. ‘And a lovely coffee table – it’s a big brass tray on knobbly black wooden tripod legs.’
Grumps had generously given me a cheque to buy anything I needed for my new home, but I was making it stretch as far as possible. Anyway, it’s much more fun (and a lot more ecologically sound) to search out stuff from charity and junk shops, though there wasn’t much time. It was just as well Stirrups was quiet at this time of year, so Poppy could get away occasionally and help me.
I wasn’t really expecting Grumps to be terribly interested in what I was saying, so I was surprised when he stopped scribbling on a bit of paper, looked up and said, ‘I seem to recall that there are one or two pieces of furniture stored in the attic. Perhaps there might be something you would want among them? In any case, someone should decide what is worth taking with us, or can be left for the Meerlings.’
‘Marlings,’ I corrected. ‘OK, I’ll sort that out, Grumps. And you’ve reminded me – that’s where I put Mum’s stuff, so I’d better go through it, hadn’t I? She isn’t going to want any of her clothes when she does come back now – they’ll be out of fashion – though I suppose I’ll have to keep her personal possessions.’
The day I put them up there was not a happy one. For some reason, Jake had been totally convinced Mum would turn up on the first anniversary of her disappearing trick and was correspondingly so deeply upset when she didn’t, in an angry, thirteen-year-old sort of way, that he took it out by trashing his bicycle with a tyre wrench and then vanishing for hours. In his absence I had shoved all her possessions into old suitcases and boxes, clearing the flat of any lingering trace of her presence, and I hadn’t thought about them since.
‘Label anything Lou might still want and it can be transferred to the attic of the new house,’ Grumps suggested.
‘OK. There shouldn’t be much.’ I paused. ‘Do you think she will ever come back? It’s been a long time.’
‘You would need to ask Zillah that, but I would much prefer she didn’t. Life is more tranquil without her, and Zillah assures me that she is alive and well.’ He held out the slip of paper he had been covering in his black, crabbed writing and added, ‘The ancient Mayan chocolate charm I gave you was, if you remember my saying so, incomplete. I think I have managed to translate a little more with the help of my friend in Cordoba. He wrote to me this morning with some suggestions. You might want to add the additional lines when you are preparing your chocolate.’
‘Since the ancient Mayan people didn’t have a written language, I can’t imagine how they could pass down a charm for chocolate making anyway, Grumps!’
‘There is such a thing as oral history, you know, Chloe, and no reason why such a thing should not have been written down by one of the early Spanish conquistadores – as it was – and carried back to Spain.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Just have faith. The last version worked, to a certain extent, did it not? Business boomed.’
‘My sales did rise,’ I admitted, though I was sure that had more to do with the excellence of the chocolate and the novelty of the concept, rather than the brief incantation of some probably spurious spell over the tempering pot.
Just out of curiosity, when he had managed to decipher the whole thing I thought I should try a sort of blind chocolate tasting session, with Felix and Poppy as the guinea pigs, to see if they thought it made any difference to the taste.
I found one or two dust-sheeted gems among the rolls of moth-eaten carpet and broken furniture up in the attic – a white Lloyd Loom chair and matching small ottoman that would be lovely in my bedroom. I put them to one side and labelled them for the removal men, along with a small mirror that some long-gone Victorian miss had adorned with a frame of shells. A few were broken or missing, but I had an old sweet jar full of seaside treasures that Jake and I had collected when he was a little boy, so I could easily replace them.
Other than that, there was just a sad huddle of Mum’s stuff. There weren’t any books (like Zillah, she didn’t read anything except magazines) and not much paperwork, since when it became clear that she wasn’t coming back any time soon, Grumps had taken her bank and credit card statements so he could settle her affairs, though I was sure he was under no legal obligation to do that. We thought escaping her spiralling debts was part of the reason she took off in the first place.
I’d packed up what was left, together with her costume jewellery, makeup and beauty aids. Most of her extensive wardrobe I’d crammed into a huge cabin trunk that was already up here.
Now I opened the lid, releasing a wave of Je Reviens and a lot of unwanted memories of when I had been a small child, convinced it was my fault that my mother didn’t seem to love me very much…
I’d brought a roll of strong plastic bin bags with me and began to fill them with clothes. There were a lot of expensive labels in there, and even though they were out of date I could probably have made some money selling them on eBay. But there was not much time and, besides, I just wanted to clear as much of her out of our lives as possible. Time for Jake and me to have a whole, fresh new start.
As I filled the bags and repacked the old suitcases, I carried them all the way down to the front hall and stacked them ready to go to a local charity shop, so I was getting tired, hot and grubby by the time I reached the last couple of boxes. The first and largest one was full of bric-a-brac, teddy bears and various trashy holiday souvenirs, so I labelled that for the attic and moved it over with the furniture that was going to the new house.
Finally I was left with just a large shoebox of old letters. I hadn’t looked at them when I was packing her stuff up, but now I found myself sitting under the skylight on the Lloyd Loom chair with the contents spread across the top of the ottoman. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to read them; I didn’t really think they would suddenly illuminate some depths that my shallow and self-centred mother had kept hidden because I was sure she hadn’t got any. What you saw was what you got.
There wasn’t a huge collection, though some dated back to just before I was born. My mother had scrawled remarks on a couple of the envelopes like ‘Yes!!!’ and ‘Result!!!’ so I started with those – and hit pay dirt with the very first one. Then, with horrified illumination dawning, I went through all of the rest, finishing with a couple of notes in Mags’ distinctive handwriting.
After that, I just sat there unconscious of time passing, my lap full of secrets and lies, until I heard the unmistakable thumping of Jake’s big boots on the wooden attic stairs. Hastily bundling all the letters together, I thrust them back into the box and crammed on the lid, wishing what I had learned could be as neatly packed away and forgotten.
‘What on earth are you doing up here?’ Jake demanded, ducking his head to get through the low doorway. ‘The lights and radio are on in the flat, but Zillah hadn’t seen you for hours. I thought you’d vanished.’
‘Like Mum’ was the unspoken inference. I’m sure that’s why he had always got rid of my boyfriends – every time I’d gone out with one of them, he’d been afraid I wouldn’t come back.
‘Sorry, Jake. Grumps asked me to sort things out up here ready for the move, and I lost track of time.’
‘You look a bit pale.’
‘I’m tired, I’ve