locked away. Memories not only of my first love, Raffy, which even after so many years evoked feelings of loss and betrayal far too painful to dwell on again, but also of my ex-fiancé, David.
We met in Merchester’s one upmarket wine bar and he had seemed so different from any of my other, short-lived boyfriends. He was several years older, for a start, solid and dependable. Maybe I was looking for a father figure, having never had one? He was a partner in a firm of architects, so more than comfortably off, and even Jake’s attempts to get rid of him (culminating in the plague of glowing green mice in David’s flat – I have no idea how he worked that one) just made him go all quiet and forbearing. He said Jake would grow out of it – which he had, only not until David’s presence in our lives was history.
And Jake had been the sticking point in the end. It was odd how I had remained completely blind to the fact that David was so jealous of my close relationship with my half-brother until that last day, only a couple of weeks before our wedding. I’d also assumed he understood that whenever my mother was away, Jake would stay with us after we were married, for the first few years at least. But as Zillah often says, men don’t understand anything unless it is spelled out for them in very plain language.
‘Jake could live with your grandfather and his housekeeper,’ David had suggested when Jake was twelve and my mother had performed her latest vanishing trick.
I let the ‘housekeeper’ bit go, since although Zillah certainly wasn’t that, her role in our lives defied definition. ‘Hardly, David! Social Services aren’t going to take kindly to a twelve-year-old living with a warlock, are they?’
‘Now, Chloe, don’t exaggerate, when you know that’s just a nom de plume he adopts for his books. He may be a little eccentric, but the whole persona…’ He smiled indulgently, his teeth very white against his tanned, handsome face. ‘It’s a publicity thing, isn’t it?’
‘No, it’s how he is. I keep telling you.’
‘You’ll be saying your mother is a witch next, Chloe, and has simply flown off on her broomstick.’
‘Oh, no, she never showed any inclinations that way and although Jake is interested in witchcraft, luckily it’s only from a historical point of view. It’s just a pity Granny isn’t still around to help me bring him up, but he isn’t a bad boy really, just lively.’
David shuddered.
‘What? You like him, you said so!’
‘Yes, of course I do, but that doesn’t mean I want to live with him. And there’s no reason why you should have to sacrifice your entire life to bringing up your half-brother, is there? Fostering might be the making of him.’
‘Fostering? I can’t believe you would even suggest that!’ I stared at him with new eyes. ‘Anyway, it’s going to be only for a few weeks at most, until Mum comes back. The longest she’s ever been away is three months.’
David’s expression softened and he came and put his arms around me. ‘Darling, you have to accept that she isn’t coming back this time – she’s dead. I know it’s hard, but look at the facts.’
The facts, as Mum’s friend Mags had reported them, were that Mum had simply vanished into thin air one night from the cruise ship taking them between Caribbean islands (a holiday won by Mags, who was ace at making up advertising slogans).
‘Mags was lying and she isn’t dead,’ I explained. ‘She’s probably somewhere in Jamaica with a man, and when she gets tired of that, she’ll come back again. She has a very low boredom threshold.’
‘Look, darling, she was seen on the ship the evening after it left Jamaica, wasn’t she?’
‘Someone wearing one of her more flamboyant dresses and with dark hair was seen, but I suspect it was Mags.’
‘But your mother’s friend is blonde – and why on earth should she go to so much trouble anyway?’
‘A wig? My mother often wore one when her hair looked ratty. And they were in the habit of covering up for each other.’
‘Come on, Chloe! Look, it’s been several weeks now, and I think, however hard it is, you’ll have to accept that she had too much to drink – which you know was one of her failings – and went over the side in the small hours without anyone noticing. This time she isn’t going to reappear as if nothing has happened. Which brings us back to what to do about Jake.’
‘Nothing, because you’re wrong. I expect she’ll be back in time for our wedding, but if she isn’t, then Jake can come and live with us, can’t he? I mean, you always realised he would have to do that whenever Mum was away, didn’t you?’
David was slow to answer, probably imagining the chaos one very lively boy could cause to his immaculately ordered life and minimalist white flat. I had already unintentionally caused enough of that while cooking chicken with a dark cacao mole sauce in his kitchen: chocolate does seem to get everywhere…And evidently he hadn’t understood the strength of the bond between Jake and me.
‘I’d like it to be just the two of us, for a while at least, darling,’ he said eventually. ‘You have to accept she’s not coming back and that other, permanent arrangements need to be made. I mean, your grandfather’s got a private income, hasn’t he? He could send Jake to boarding school.’
‘I don’t think his private income would stretch that far and anyway, Jake would hate it. He’s always seen me as more of a mother figure than Mum. I’m the security in his life, and so it would simply be another betrayal. And his friends are all here in Merchester.’
‘Then he’d hate being transposed to a city flat, wouldn’t he?’ David said quickly.
‘Yes, but we did say we’d find a house in the country, one you could commute from. That could be somewhere round here, couldn’t it?’
‘I meant much later, when we want a family. I’d like to have you to myself for a bit. Anyway,’ he added with a wry smile on his handsome face, ‘I’m starting to think I’m allergic to the country because I come out in this damned rash every time I visit Merchester.’
‘You can’t really call Merchester country,’ I objected, but it was true about the mysterious rash, because even now an angry redness was creeping up from the collar of his shirt.
I reminded myself to speak to Grumps about that…He and David had not really taken to each other, mainly because David spoke to him like an adult humouring a child: big mistake. He tended to take that tone with Jake too, and according to most of the locals, he’d never been any kind of child at all, but an imp of Satan.
‘Look, Chloe, I really can’t live with your brother. It isn’t fair to ask me.’ He ran his fingers through his ordered dark chestnut locks in a distracted way that showed me just how perturbed he was. He even loosened his silk tie – good grief!
‘You’ll have to find some other solution,’ he announced with finality.
‘I keep telling you Mum isn’t dead!’ I snapped, losing patience. ‘She bolts all the time, but she’ll be back eventually: I’ve read the cards and I know I’m right. What’s more, so has Zillah.’
But although they had told us that Mum was alive, they couldn’t, of course, show us where she was or how long she would be gone.
‘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,