Best of Fiona Harper

He put up his fists and nudged me on the shoulder with one of them. ‘So? Who’s this girlfriend? Do you think you can take her?’

I swatted his hand away, but he kept jabbing me gently on the upper arm, the way boxers did when they warmed up with one of those swinging punch bags.

‘I’m going to take you down in a minute, if you don’t cut that out!’ I said, laughing.

The devilish twinkle was back. ‘Promises, promises,’ he said.

‘It’s that awful Louisa Fanshawe,’ I said, not rising to the bait. And if we were talking fisticuffs, I probably could take her. She was another one of those willowy sorts who’d blow away in a stiff breeze. I wouldn’t risk breaking a nail on her, though, so she was safe on that count.

‘Oh, yes. I’ve heard how awful she is,’ Adam replied. ‘All that charity work…visiting sick children in hospital and campaigning for the homeless. It’s positively disgusting.’

I jabbed him in the ribs with my elbow. He was supposed to be on my side, so why was he practically bouncing up and down? What had he to be so happy about? I decided to direct my ire at the absent Louisa.

‘When she’s not swanning up and down a catwalk for some pretentious designer,’ I pointed out.

I thought about Louisa Fanshawe and her stick-like limbs and big doleful eyes. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but I’d allow for the fact she was striking—in that understated, slightly duck-faced way some high fashion models were. The women on Nicholas’s arm always looked frighteningly similar. Duck-faced and stick-thin was obviously his type.

I sighed again. Louisa was the less Adam had been talking about. I looked down at my chest. Less wasn’t something I had a lot of. I was doomed.

I was about to point this out to Adam, but when I looked up at him he was paying an inordinate amount of attention to the last of the prawn toasts. I think he felt me looking at him, because he offered me the foil tray. I shook my head. ‘You have it.’

He demolished it in one bite, and then turned to look me straight in the eyes. ‘Like I said…’ The seriousness there made my pulse kick. ‘The guy’s an idiot.’

I felt a smile start somewhere deep in my chest and work its way up to my mouth. ‘I love you, Best Bud,’ I said, and wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him close.

For a long time he was silent and he just held me, soothing me with the rhythmic warmth of his breath on my neck. Then the inhaling and exhaling stopped. Seconds and seconds seemed to drag past before it started again, and when the next breath came there were words floating on it.

‘It’s hard not to,’ he whispered into my neck.

And then I hit him again.

CHAPTER THREE

The Very Thought of You

Coreen’s Confessions

No. 3—You’d think that someone as vain as I am would enjoy looking in the mirror, but sometimes I just can’t face it.

I CONTINUED to mope around for the next few days, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought that maybe Nan was right about something ticking inside me.

Of course I didn’t tell Nan that I might be on the verge of getting serious with someone when I visited her the following Sunday. She’d have had me up at the church to book a date so fast my head would’ve spun. Baby steps. Just thinking about being with one man for a considerable chunk of time was about as far as I wanted to go at present.

No, when I visited Nan we did what we always did—ate roast dinner, drank tea, and planed to watch an old black-and-white movie on the telly. After lunch I observed a further ritual. I went into the spare bedroom, opened the rickety wardrobe, and looked at all the dresses hanging there in their clear plastic covers.

They had been my mother’s. She’d died about ten years earlier, in a shabby little bed and breakfast in Blackpool, killed silently, invisibly and senselessly by a faulty boiler spurting carbon monoxide. And when she hadn’t turned up to go on stage that night at the club they’d just slotted another singer into the bill and carried on. It shouldn’t be that easy to replace someone, should it? People ought be remembered for their unique qualities, even if the choices they made in life weren’t ones you respected, or even understood.

As I did most weeks, I pulled out just one of Mum’s stage dresses and studied it more closely. This one was all shoulder pads and sequins, probably from around the time she’d met my dad. I could imagine Mum, her big Joan Collins-style hair stiff with half a can of hairspray, singing a soft rock ballad into a microphone, her eyes closed and her heart on her sleeve. She’d had a lovely voice. I had a few cassette tapes at home, but I didn’t play them much—too scared they’d warp or wear out.

Her voice had been rich and husky, able to catch every nuance of emotion in a song, whether she was belting it out or making the audience hang on every note. By rights she should have had more success than she did. And maybe she would have done if she’d put all the energy she’d wasted trailing round the country after my father into her career instead.

Despite my love of vintage, I never tried on these clothes. The eighties weren’t my thing, for a start. I knew the dresses would probably fit, but I didn’t want to look in the mirror and see my mother staring back at me. I didn’t want to see that same broken hopelessness in my eyes.

‘Go on—take them down to that shop of yours and get a few quid for them,’ Nan said from behind me.

I hadn’t heard her come in the room. I shook my head, carefully put the dress in its place on the rail and shut the wardrobe door. Nan gave me a sympathetic smile.

‘Cuppa? And that Dirk Bogarde film starts in a few minutes.’

I shook off the sadness that had collected like dust on my mother’s abandoned clothes and smiled back. ‘That would be perfect.’

I loved my Nan. I’d never seen her feathers ruffled, and for someone who’d produced two generations of drama queens she was as sensible and grounded as they came. I hadn’t minded living with her when I was a kid. There had always been cake and cuddles at Nan’s little terraced house. And Nan made everything seem warm and cosy. She never got that far-off look in her eyes that made you feel as if she was thinking of someone else, wanting to be somewhere else, while you tried to tell her about the gold star you’d got for your school project.

It had been easy to fall into the trap of believing I lived with Nan because Mum was always up and down the country, singing in clubs and pubs, or off on cruise ships. While there was a certain amount of truth in that, after her death I’d started to see another reason for her not giving up the club circuit and settling down. Leaving that life behind would have meant giving up hope—hope that she’d bump into Dad, hope that he’d fall in love with her all over again and come home. While she sat in a never-ending succession of grubby backstage changing rooms, putting her false eyelashes and sequins on, she could still deny the truth, pretend that day still might come, when really the dream had expired many years before.

But I didn’t like to think of Mum like that, sad and alone, pining for a man who would never love her the way she had loved him. I liked to remember the happy times. Like when she came home and stayed in the spare room at Nan’s. When I was really small I used to come over all shy at first. I’d be awed by the glamorous lady sitting on Nan’s old-fashioned brown sofa. But it hadn’t taken me long to get all loud and demanding, to be clambering all over her and tugging her to my bedroom to see my toys. I even used to make her hold my hand while I went to sleep.

My favourite memories of her were the times she’d let me dress up in her clothes. She’d even backcomb my hair and put silvery eyeshadow on me. And then I’d clump around the spare bedroom in her shoes, singing one of her songs, doing all the actions, and she’d fall back on the bed and laugh until she cried. My mum had a lovely laugh.

‘Custard Cream?’

I looked up to see Nan offering me a battered tartan tin that, back in 1973, had once contained Christmas shortbread. I’d been so lost in my memories that I’d followed her into the living room and sat down in an armchair on automatic. The titles of the film were staring to roll, so I nabbed a couple of biscuits, balanced them on the arm of the chair, and prepared myself to slip into a world where men were noble, women had impossible eyebrows, and violins expressed every emotion while the actors stayed stiff-lipped, clenching their fists. I quite liked the idea of standing motionless at a moment of crisis, all elegant and dramatic, while an orchestra swelled around me.

I looked down at my floral Capri pants and red suede ballet pumps. Not sure I’d like to live in black and white, though. I’m a Technicolor kind of gal, I suppose.

We were ten minutes into the film when my mobile rang. Nan tutted, but didn’t swerve her gaze from Dirk, looking all square-jawed and beautiful on the screen, so I picked up my cup of tea and walked into the kitchen to answer it. ‘Oh, God, sweetie! I’m so relieved it didn’t go to voicemail!’

I’d recognise those upper-class tones anywhere. Unlike her brother, whose rich voice was even and restrained, Izzi Chatterton-Jones had a dramatic delivery that made booking a table at her favourite restaurant sound as if it was a life-and-death event. If Izzi had been a character in a novel, her dialogue would have been riddled with italics.

‘Hi, Izzi. What can—?’

‘I’ve had the most fabulous idea, darling, and you’ve simply got to help me with it.’

Knowing Izzi, whatever she was planning would be probably be last minute and extremely stressful to say yes to. On the other hand she was bags of fun, and I might even get to see Nicholas again.

‘I’m going to host a country house party!’ Izzi squealed. ‘Mummy and Daddy are going to the South of France for the whole of July, and they’ve said I can borrow the house for an entire weekend. Isn’t that the most super idea ever?’

She paused, probably waiting for me to recover from swooning with excitement. Only I wasn’t. I couldn’t think of anything worse—mud, rain, horsey laughs, everyone dressed in drab tweeds and shooting anything that twitched? Count me out. I was eternally grateful that Nicholas seemed to spend most of his time in London, in his tall white house with black railings in Belgravia. Now, I wouldn’t object to spending a weekend there, given half the chance.

‘Well, what do you think?’ Izzi asked, a hint of impatience in her tone.

‘Super,’ I said, borrowing her vocabulary. None of the words I had in mind would have gone down well. ‘But what’s this got to do with me?’

‘It’s a murder-mystery weekend!’

Okay. I know that compared to the Chatterton-Joneses I’m merely a commoner, but did I really look like the kind of girl who knew how to do someone in? It must be the accent. Although mine was a lot softer than true Cockney, Izzi and her sort probably thought I knew the East End like the back of my hand and was distantly related to the Krays or descended from Jack the Ripper.

‘I…er…don’t think I’ve ever been on one of those,’ I said. ‘What’s involved?’