Chocolate Wishes

‘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 unrespected 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.’