Chocolate Shoes and Wedding Blues

‘Tell that to the marines!’ she said now, rudely.

‘But I have started seeing someone recently,’ Nancy confessed.

‘This is certainly not the time to get involved with another man!’ Violet said severely. ‘Who is he?’

‘The new curate. He’s been round to tea at our house once or twice and we’ve been for walks. Mother and Father like him and … well, he’s a good, decent man. I know I’ll never love anyone like I did Jacob, but I don’t really want to spend the rest of my life alone, either.’

‘A curate? Good grief!’ Violet exclaimed.

‘He was an army chaplain.’

‘Honestly, what a moment to pick to go out with a curate! Let’s just hope he never gets wind of this, because I don’t suppose he’d be very forgiving.’

‘Amen to that!’ Nancy said devoutly. ‘And I wouldn’t have encouraged him if only I’d known …’

‘Well, you didn’t, and with a bit of luck you’ll be back home before long, and can pick up where you left off.’

‘I don’t think I could – not without telling him the truth.’

‘You can never tell anyone the truth. And it’s not like you can back out of the situation now, Nan, is it? It would finish Mother off if it all came out, and as for Father …’

‘You don’t think that they’ll suspect anything eventually?’

‘They might guess, but that’s not the same as knowing – and everything will be nicely sorted out by then, no scandals. But you must keep it secret …’ Violet paused then asked, ‘You haven’t already told Florrie, have you?’

She knew Florrie was Nancy’s best friend and there were few secrets between them.

‘No, no one knows but you and me.’ Nancy sighed. ‘It suddenly feels as if I’m trapped in a horrible nightmare, but I can’t see anything else I can do, so I’ll be down on Monday afternoon.’

‘I don’t know about nightmare, but it’s all a damned nuisance,’ Violet said. ‘Tell me which train, and I’ll meet it.’

A woman walked up to the phone kiosk and stood shifting her feet restlessly outside. ‘Look, I’ll have to go – there’s someone waiting for the phone,’ Nancy said.

Stepping out of the booth Nancy pulled her warm coat around her against the chilly evening breeze. It was made of good but well-worn pre-war tweed with a little fur collar, and was now getting tight over her waist and tummy – but then, Nancy was a typical Bright, like her father, small and dark, and the womenfolk did tend to put on weight in their late twenties. Her sister, Violet, in contrast, was tall and fair like their mother, and stayed slim no matter what she ate.

Normally, the thought of the carrot cake her mother had made earlier would have hastened Nancy’s steps home, but now the heavy burden of lies, secrets and subterfuge she was shouldering made her feel distinctly queasy.

Chapter 1: Christmas Present

My name is Nancy Myfanwy Bright. My father liked the name Nancy and I was called Myfanwy after my mother. I’m ninety-two years of age and I’ve lived quietly in this cottage behind Bright’s Shoes in Sticklepond all my life, so I don’t really know why you want to record my memories for your archive, because it isn’t going to be very interesting, is it, dear?

Do help yourself to a slice of bara brith – it’s a sort of fruit loaf made to my mother’s recipe. There’s another kind they call funeral cake in the part of Wales Mother’s family came from, because it was always served to the mourners after an interment. I’ve told Tansy – that’s my great-niece – that she should do that when I pop my clogs, too. I’ve taught her all Mother’s old recipes …

Now, where were we?

Middlemoss Living Archive Recordings: Nancy Bright.

As I drove out of London and headed north for Christmas my heart lifted with each passing mile. It always did, because West Lancashire – and, more specifically, the village of Sticklepond – was always going to feel like home to me. You can take the girl out of Lancashire, but you can’t take the Lancashire out of the girl …

I would have moved back there like a flash, if it weren’t that my fiancé, Justin, was an orthopaedic consultant whose work was in London, not to mention his being so firmly tied to his widowed mother’s apron strings that he spent more time with Mummy in Tunbridge Wells than he did with me. And even when he wasn’t with Mummy Dearest, I still came second to his latest passion – golf.

Justin’s mother was only one of the many things weighing on my mind – the sharp, pointy tip of the iceberg, you might say. She’d be staying at the flat in London while I was away and I knew from past experience that by the time I got back she would have thoroughly purged my unwanted presence from it by dumping all my possessions into the boxroom I used as a studio to write and illustrate my popular Slipper Monkey children’s books.

I’d tried so hard to get on with her, but I was never going to be good enough for her beloved little boy. In fact, I once overheard her refer to me as ‘that bit of hippie trash you picked up on the plane back from India’, and though it’s true that Justin and I met after I was unexpectedly upgraded to the seat next to his in Business Class, I’m a couple of decades too young to have been any kind of hippie!

I suppose many people did still go to India to ‘find themselves’, whatever they mean by that. In my case I’d gone to find my father. Now, he was an old hippie, if you like …

Still, at least I’d tried with Justin’s mother, which is more than he did on his one and only visit to Aunt Nan in Sticklepond, when he’d made it abundantly clear that he thought anything north of Watford was a barbaric region to be avoided at all costs, full of howling wolves, black puddings and men in flat caps with whippets.

He did condescendingly describe Aunt Nan’s ancient stone cottage. set in a stone-flagged courtyard just off the High Street, its front room given over to a tiny shoe shop, as ‘quaint’. But then, that was before Aunt Nan made him sleep downstairs on the sofa in the parlour. I told him she disapproved of cohabitation before marriage so strongly that he was lucky she hadn’t taken a room for him at the Green Man next door, but he failed to see the funny side.

Still, you can see why we’d spent our Christmases apart during our long engagement, not to mention many weekends too, what with him in Tunbridge Wells with Mummy (and a convenient golf course) and me heading home at least once a month – and more often than that, as Aunt Nan got frailer …

Aunt Nan was actually my great-aunt, aged ninety-two, and as she kept reminding me, wouldn’t be around for ever. She’d brought me up and I adored her, so obviously I wanted to spend as much time with her as I could, but I also wanted her to see me married and with a family of my own, and so did she. And if I didn’t get a shift on, that last option would be closed to me for ever, another thing weighing on my mind.

I knew it could be more difficult to get pregnant after thirty-five, so without telling Justin I’d booked myself into a clinic for a fertility MOT and the result had been a real wake-up call. The indication was that I had some eggs left, but probably not that many, so I needed to reach out and snatch the opportunity to have children before it vanished … if it hadn’t already.

When Justin and I had first got engaged we were full of plans to marry and start a family, yet there we were, almost six years down the line, and he seemed to have lost interest in doing either. In fact, I could see that he was totally different from the man I fell in love with, though the change had happened so slowly I just hadn’t noticed. Perhaps it’s like that with all relationships and it takes a sudden shock to make you step back and take a good clear look at what’s been happening.

I mainly blamed Mummy Dearest for poisoning Justin’s mind against me, dripping poisonous criticisms into his ear the whole time, though she hadn’t been so bad the first year – or maybe I’d been so in love I simply hadn’t registered it.

Justin and I were such opposites, yet until the golf mania took hold, we used to love exploring the London parks together, and before he became such a skinflint, we used to go to a lot of musical theatre productions, too. When I first found out about Justin’s secret passion (we must have seen We Will Rock You five or six times!) I found it very endearing …

As the radio cheered me on my way north with a succession of Christmas pop songs, I knew that when I got back to London we would need to do some serious talking.

Aunt Nan’s mind seemed to have been running along the same lines as mine, because she decided it was time for us to have a little heart-to-heart chat the very day after I arrived.

My best friend, Bella, was looking after the shop and Aunt Nan had spent the first part of the morning shut away in the parlour with Cheryl Noakes, the archivist who was recording her memoirs for the Middlemoss Living Archive scheme. This seemed to perk up my aunt no end, despite awaking bittersweet memories, like the loss of her fiancé during the war.

I’d shown Cheryl out and returned to collect the tray of coffee cups and any stray crumbs from the iced fairy cakes that she might have overlooked, when Aunt Nan said suddenly, ‘What will you do with the shop when I’m gone, lovey?’

She was still sitting in her comfortable shabby armchair, a gaily coloured Afghan rug over her knees (she believed overheated houses were unhealthy, so the central heating, which I’d insisted she had put in, was always turned down really low), crocheting another doily for my already full-to-bursting bottom drawer.

With a pang I realised how little room her once-plump frame took up in the chair now. When had she suddenly become so small and pale? And her curls, which had been as dark as her eyes, just like mine, were now purest silver …

‘Shouldn’t you leave it to Immy, Aunt Nan?’

‘No,’ she said uncompromisingly. ‘Your mother hates the place and she’s got more money than sense already, the flibbertigibbet! Anyway, she seems to be sticking with this last husband and making her home in America now.’

‘That’s true! Marrying a Californian plastic surgeon seems to have fulfilled all her wildest dreams.’

Aunt Nan snorted. ‘She’s probably more plastic by now than a Barbie doll!’

‘Her face was starting to look a bit strange in that last picture she emailed me,’ I admitted. ‘All pulled up at the corners of her eyes, so they slanted like a cat’s. I hope she doesn’t overdo it. I didn’t realise you could have your knees lifted, did you? But she says you can and your knees show your age.’

‘She shouldn’t be showing her knees to anyone at her age. But there, that’s Imogen all over, shallow as a puddle from being a child. Except that she’s the spitting image of her mother, you’d think there wasn’t a scrap of Bright blood in her …’

She paused, as if at some painful recollection, and then said firmly, ‘No, I’m passing on the shop and cottage to you, because you’re a true Bright and you come back every chance you get, like a homing pigeon.’