A season for love, p.1
A Season for Love, page 1
A Season for Love
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue
A letter from Ally
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
For the Naughty Kitchen. All the caseum, all the love.
Prologue
Once upon a time…
This was it.
Two years after they’d started planning for Emma’s mother and stepfather to retire and hand the business over to Emma, one year after her stepfather had collapsed with a heart attack while jet-washing the blockwork driveway, and six months after her stepbrother had turned up on the family doorstep, newly separated and unemployed, Emma’s mother decided that it was time for her to take the first steps into her new life.
The taxi was outside. The apartment in Torre Del Mar, forty minutes’ drive from the airport at Malaga, had been rented for a year to give Emma’s mum time to look for somewhere permanent. Emma would stay in the family house in Richmond until her mum was ready to sell, and, given the four bedrooms available, there was really no way she could morally object to her step-bro, Josh, having moved back in as well.
None of which was her mother’s main concern as she stopped on the kerb and clutched Emma’s hands. ‘Now you’ll email me your full proposal as soon as possible, won’t you?’
Emma nodded. The plan for the next phase in the development of Love’s Love, her parents’, and soon to be her, business.
‘With proper costings. No back of an envelope nonsense.’
‘Of course.’ Emma wouldn’t dream of putting in a poorly costed business plan. Her mother had raised her better than that. Everyone had agreed that Love’s Love couldn’t continue to stagger on as a traditional dating agency. The world had changed. They’d kept up as far as having a website and letting people register online, but her mother, Emma senior, was a matchmaker of the old school. She liked to look people in the eye and find out what made them tick. She had a database of clients, but most of her matches were made by knowledge and an instinct for how two people would spark when put together. It was an instinct Emma liked to think she’d inherited.
‘It’s time for me to move on.’
Emma nodded.
‘People don’t want a widowed matchmaker. They don’t want the ghost at the feast. They want to see a picture of how perfect their lives will be when they find The One.’ Her mother frowned. ‘I didn’t mean…’
‘I know.’
‘I mean you’ve got plenty of time to find someone. You’re young.’
Not that young, Emma thought. ‘And I’m focused on the business at the moment.’
‘Quite right. Well, you can dip into Trev’s life insurance if you need to.’
‘I won’t.’ Emma was adamant. That money was for her mum’s retirement. Trevor would be turning in his grave at the idea of it being invested in the business.
The cabbie cleared his throat. ‘Could be forty-five minutes to terminal five this time in the morning, love.’
Emma’s mother nodded. ‘Average driving time at this hour on a week day is thirty-eight minutes.’
If it were possible to roll one’s eyes loudly, the cab driver would have managed it. ‘If you say so.’
Mrs Love released Emma’s hands and moved to hug her step-son. Emma pretended not to be listening to the whispered instructions to keep an eye on his sister and make sure she ate properly and not to let her work all hours. Emma bit her tongue on that one. Her mother had never been off duty for a moment in her life.
Then it was Emma’s turn. Her mum was actually leaving. Emma put on her smile. No place for glum faces in the business of love, she told herself. ‘Have a good trip. Let us know when you land.’
‘I will.’ She wrapped Emma in a hug. ‘I know that you can do this. My little girl won’t let me down.’
* * *
Emma stood on the pavement and watched the taxi all the way to the end of the street. Once it was out of view she stayed a moment longer watching the empty space being filled by other cars, other people, other lives going on as normal.
‘Come on, Stilts.’
Emma had been 4 ft 8 as a thirteen-year-old, when she and her mum had moved in with Josh and Trevor, and her much anticipated growth spurt had taken her all the way to the heady heights of 5 ft 1. ‘Stilts’ had been the fifteen-year-old Josh’s idea of high comedy. And it had stuck.
She followed him back into the house.
‘Do you want to do anything with the house?’ he asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothing major. Maybe paint a bit before it goes on the market?’
‘Why?’ The décor was perfectly neutral – cream, pale oatmeal and light grey throughout – and there was not a spot of clutter anywhere. Her mum’s love of organisation had found its perfect partner in Trevor’s ex-military precision and everything always had a place. It was perfect.
‘No reason. Just something to do.’
She frowned at him. ‘We have plenty to do.’
‘Right. So come on then. What’s the grand plan to save Love’s Love?’
She didn’t answer.
‘There is a plan, isn’t there, Stilts?’
‘Of course. I’m going to go and work on it now.’
She left him lounging in front of the telly and went into the dining room that had served as the business office ever since they’d lived here. Emma opened her laptop. She hadn’t lied when she said there was a plan. There was a plan, well, not so much a plan as an idea.
Josh, of course, was all in favour of going fully app-based – the new Tinder was his vision for the future, but Emma was sceptical. They’d be starting from nothing in a crowded market. Even with Josh’s IT expertise they’d be lost in the noise from other more established apps. They needed to find a point of difference, a new way to bring dating into the twenty-first century, something that set them apart from everything else that was out there. Matchmaking, Emma’s mother had always said, wasn’t about data and formulas; it was about connection. They needed to find a way to make real connections.
Emma scanned the bookshelves that lined the room. Her love of reading was another inheritance from her mother, who, in typically efficient style, had loaded everything she could ever imagine wanting to read onto her e-reader and left her physical library behind for Emma’s enjoyment. Austen. Heyer. The Brontës. Nora Roberts, Jilly Cooper, Sophie Kinsella. Reading those stories, and listening to her mother – those were the two places that Emma had learned her trade. Her job was to bring people together in a world that was conspiring to keep them apart. Even her own industry, which was supposed to create bonds between people, seemed determined to have people boxed in behind their screens. If Emma was going to ensure that the business her mother had started from nothing would survive she needed to smash that mould. There had to be something more – a world where people could go back to meeting, talking, flirting face to face. No filters. No refreshing an app waiting for a reply. Nothing virtual. Online dating encouraged people to make snap judgements and to hide their true selves. If she could only find a way to persuade people, who were genuinely looking for love, to come together in person and give them the time and space to get to know one another, she might be able to create something great. It was the beginning of an idea.
An idea born out of a different era, the era of Austen, a time when young ladies and young gentlemen of good breeding would engage in a social season with the express intention of finding a suitable spouse. Things would need to be updated, of course. ‘Good breeding’ sounded questionable enough when applied to cockerpoos, and Emma had no interest in simply running a social club for toffs. And Love’s Love had always been an inclusive agency. That wouldn’t change. It was going to be a huge financial risk, and an almost unimaginable amount of work.
She put her fingers to the keyboard and started to type:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that any twenty-first-century singleton in possession of good sense is in want of some genuine human contact.
Chapter One
Tom Knight knew he ought to get out of bed. That had been true an hour ago, and two hours ago, and three and four and five hours ago. He dreaded coming to bed at night, knowing that sleep was going to elude him, but in the daytime he couldn’t drag himself out. He was supposed to be doing better by now. He knew that. He got told it often enough. Give it a year. That had been so many people’s advice. Live through one year of birthdays and Christmas time and all the tiny anniversaries you never even thought about when someone was alive. Live through all of that and then you can start to move on.
It had been two years now.
Another impatient knock.
He opened the door to his downstairs neighbour. Glenda? Gwenda? Glinda? Was Glinda even a name? He knew she’d introduced herself when he moved in. She thrust an armful of unopened post at him. ‘If you don’t empty your box it all just piles up on the floor,’ she told him. ‘And that’s not fair on the rest of us.’
‘Sorry.’
‘We don’t have anyone in to clean that entryway you know. I do it, and I don’t mind doing it, but it’s not on to have your mail cluttering the whole place up.’
He mumbled another apology as he closed the door. The post was a combination of bills and circulars, which he dropped on the kitchen worktop without opening. One handwritten envelope stood out. Lilac coloured, neatly addressed in tiny copperplate script. He carried it back to bed. Inside was a short note and a newspaper clipping.
He read the note first.
I thought this might suit you.
The newspaper cutting was headlined:
Jane Austen style dating comes to London.
Tom screwed it up, threw it in the general direction of the bin and went back to scrolling through nothing on his phone. It rang in his hand.
‘Hi Mum.’
‘Did you get my note?’
He feigned ignorance, but she was never going to let him get away with that. ‘It’s on the website as well. I’ll ask Hilly to send you the link.’
‘I don’t think dating is what I need right now.’
‘So you did get it then?’
‘Maybe.’
His mother was quiet for a moment, planning her next move, he assumed.
‘It would do you good to get out more.’
He couldn’t agree.
‘I know you don’t think you’re ready.’
Correct.
‘But you can’t hide forever. And I’m not getting any younger. It would do me the world of good to know you were meeting people again.’
‘I meet people.’
‘Where?’
‘I just had a lovely chat with my new neighbour.’
‘Hmm. I just think it would be good for you. And you never know. You might meet a chap, or a young lady, who’s just perfect for you.’
Tom pulled the duvet up around him. ‘I’m not ready to replace Jack.’
‘Nobody would ever think you would. And nobody could replace him. But you’re young. Life goes on, whether you join in or not. Just think about it.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘For me?’
He could picture his mother sitting by her window, books in a pile alongside her, blanket over her knees, glasses perched on the end of her nose. Him being like this was breaking her heart as well as his own.
‘I only want to see you happy,’ she continued.
‘I’m happy now,’ Tom protested.
His mother didn’t dignify that lie with a response.
‘I’m happy enough,’ he tried. ‘You don’t need to fix things for me.’
‘Thomas, I’m your mother. I will always try to fix things for you.’
‘You don’t need to.’
He could picture her pursing her lips in just the same way she used to when he hadn’t learned his practice pieces or when he’d tried to steal biscuits from the kitchen right before dinner. ‘Well, if you’ll be happy at my funeral, knowing that you could have done just this one thing to cheer your old mother in her final days.’
Tom knew when he was beaten. It was time to fold. ‘All right. What do you want from me?’
‘Just that you’ll try. Be open to meeting someone.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ he promised.
* * *
Annie (Miss Keer, English Literature and Language) finally made it to the staff room, ten minutes from the end of her ‘free’ period, and had barely sat down, when Lydia (Miss Hyland, PE) thrust her phone under Annie’s nose. ‘What am I looking at?’
Lydia turned the screen back to herself and read aloud. ‘You are invited to participate in the upcoming social season.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s like in one of those books Jane won’t let us read.’ Forming a book club had been one of Lydia’s many, and various, past attempts to get them to do something during the school holidays since the three of them had formed their unlikely friendship group. Unlikely, because Jane was thoughtful, studious and contained, and Lydia was wild and impulsive. Annie saw herself as the point at the middle of the scales, holding the two sides in balance.
Across the staff room, Jane (Miss Woods, History and Religious Studies) put her copy of Candide, which she was rereading in the original French to stretch her language skills, down in front of her. ‘I’ll let you read Jane Austen. In fact, I’ll let you read whatever you want. I’m just not paying for good red wine unless you’re going to make a bit of an effort.’
‘And a bit of an effort means nothing that we might actually enjoy.’ Lydia pushed the phone across the table to Annie. ‘We should do it.’
Annie stared at the Facebook advert in front of her:
Are you sick of swiping right, of remote relationships, and of 21st century dating altogether?
Then we request the honour of your company at a series of glittering social events. You are invited to make a debut in society and meet single people of good character and good standing with a view to forming real attachments and finding lasting love.
Was she sick of swiping right? She hadn’t been on many dates recently. She thought back. Not for a couple of years. Closer to three or four even. But when she had been out on dates it had been all right. She’d got to try lots of things she wouldn’t have otherwise. She’d had skiing lessons with George, and tried dining in the pitch dark, for reasons she’d never fully understood, with Frankie.
‘So what do you think?’ Lydia interrupted her thoughts.
‘I’m not sure. If you want to do it…’
Jane had come over to them. ‘What are you looking at?’ She peered at the screen. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake. It looks horrendous.’
Maybe Jane was right.
‘Bollocks.’ Lydia scrolled down the page. ‘Eight events over eight weeks, and most of it’s during the summer, so you have time.’
That did sound like it might be fun.
Lydia raised an eyebrow. ‘Come on.’ She turned to Jane. ‘You too. It’s time you got back out there.’
Jane shook her head. ‘I’ve only been single a week.’
‘You’ve only been divorced a week. You’ve been single for months. When did he move out?’
‘Before Christmas.’
‘And when did you last have sex with him?’
‘Lyds!’ Annie shook her head. ‘You can’t ask that.’
Jane came over to the table and grabbed the phone from Lydia’s hand. ‘It’s seven hundred quid.’
‘But for eight events, and there’s a 20 per cent early sign-up discount. And another fifty quid off for keyworkers. Health, emergency services and school workers it says. Come on. It’s cheaper than the holiday none of us can afford would be.’
Jane shook her head. ‘I’m not paying five hundred quid for a few parties with strangers.’
It was a lot of money.
‘Why are you so keen anyway?’ Jane continued.
Lydia shrugged. ‘Summat to do, isn’t it?’ She turned back to Annie. ‘Come on. Do it for her. She needs to get back out dating and meeting people. Imagine how miserable summer will be for her stuck in that flat all on her own.’
Annie thought about it. Jane’s divorce was only a week old and summer would presumably be her first time alone in the flat for more than a few days. Maybe the three of them getting out together would be a good thing. It would be helping Jane. ‘All right…’
‘You’re right.’ Jane spoke at the same time. They looked at each other and then at Lydia.
‘Which one of us do you think will be miserable on her own?’ Jane demanded.
Lydia shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter, you’ve both agreed.’
‘I have not…’
‘And anyway,’ Lydia smiled. ‘I signed us all up this morning. You both owe my credit card five hundred quid.’
Chapter Two
