Whatever Love Is Read online

  ‘Three minutes away!’ she shouted into the phone. ‘What, dear? Yes, of course she’s all right – we’ve been chatting.’

  Frankie felt that was a slight distortion of the facts but tried a wan smile as Nerys hurled the handset into the pocket at the side of her seat and beamed at her. ‘The family are all ready for you,’ she said. ‘Much better for you to be at Park House with the girls. You haven’t met Jemma and Mia yet, of course – well, not since you were all in nappies! Of course your lifestyles have been so different. I looked up that school you went to on the internet; ghastly looking place, you poor child. Jemma’s at Cheltenham, of course, and darling Mia – such a clever girl – has just left and is going to Switzerland to finish.’

  Frankie was about to ask what she was going to finish when Nerys stamped on the brakes to allow a pheasant to cross the lane in front of her before hurtling off again. ‘Well, here’s another surprise: Thomas has managed to get you a place at Thornton College.’

  She had turned to look at Frankie, clearly waiting for a cry of delight, and narrowly missed hitting a small boy on a mountain bike.

  ‘Thornton College, dear? One of the top rated schools in the East Midlands? State, of course, but I said to Thomas, private will be too much of a challenge for Francesca, coming from . . . Well, anyway, I’m sure you’ll love it.’

  When Frankie, swallowing back tears, said nothing, Nerys sniffed and glared at her. ‘I hope you’ll be grateful,’ she said. ‘Thornton College is totally oversubscribed but then with Thomas being who he is, it’s amazing the doors that open! And of course, they are pledged to take in disadvantaged girls, what with the new government guidelines and everything. Well now, here we are!’

  And with that she had pressed a button on the car dashboard, and a pair of wrought-iron gates had slowly opened.

  ‘That’s my little pad,’ Nerys remarked, as they drove past a small, wisteria-covered cottage. ‘It was part of the original estate – it belonged to the gamekeeper in the days when there was shooting in these parts, and, when my husband died, Thomas suggested I took it over. It’s much smaller than anything I’ve been used to but needs must. I struggle financially, but I never complain.’

  Frankie didn’t know it at the time but Nerys, who had quite enough money to live very comfortably, enjoyed pleading poverty in the same way that her sister Tina enjoyed imagined ill health.

  As Nerys had driven the car round the bend in the tree-lined gravel driveway, Frankie caught her first glimpse of Park House. It was grand, far grander than she had expected. Overlooking a huge lawn that led down to a gazebo and tennis court were three storeys of mellow, honey-coloured Northamptonshire marlstone with a huge conservatory to one side and great swathes of Virginia creeper covering the walls. It’s beautiful, she thought to herself, but it isn’t home.

  Yet now, three years on, it was home and she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. For all the teasing from her cousins, she had never once been left out of family events and had been taken to places she had only dreamt of as a child – holidays in Tuscany and Corfu, race meetings and theatre trips to the West End at least three times a year.

  At first, whenever she had returned to Brighton to visit her mother, she would deliberately walk past her old home, freshly painted and spruced up by the new owners, and recall the good times before her father had gone and she had been left to cope with her mother’s strange moods. And once, after she had been at Park House for eighteen months and her mother seemed so improved as to be moved to a halfway house in Hove, Frankie had imagined them living together in a little cottage near the sea and everything being as it once was. She had been on the verge of mentioning this to Tina when the police had arrived at Park House, and were ushered into the sitting room by an over-important Nerys who just happened to have turned up at the same time. Frankie’s mother had been found on Hove esplanade, systematically setting fire to beach huts because she believed her errant husband was sleeping in one of them. Narrowly escaping prison on a plea of diminished responsibility due to forgetting to take her medication, she was sectioned and referred to a secure unit.

  She was still there.

  ‘Frankie? Hey, Frankie!’ She was jolted out of her reverie by Jemma tapping her on the arm and peering at her anxiously. ‘It’s OK, we were just having a laugh. Please don’t cry.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Frankie protested, turning to face her, and then realising that there were indeed a couple of tears trickling down her cheek.

  ‘Yeah, sorry,’ Mia murmured, grabbing the remote and idly channel hopping. ‘It’s not your fault your family are weird.’

  ‘Mia, shut it!’ Jemma hissed. ‘So . . .’ She turned to Frankie. ‘What are you going to wear on Saturday, then?’

  Frankie frowned, her thoughts still in the past. ‘Saturday? What’s happening on Saturday?’

  ‘Like, hello?’ Mia exclaimed. ‘What’s the whole civilised world been talking about for the past month? Nick’s twenty-first!’

  ‘Oh, that,’ Frankie muttered. ‘I’m not going.’

  ‘Not going?’ Jemma gasped. ‘What possible reason could you have not to go?’

  You want a list? thought Frankie, sighing inwardly. One, Mia’s boyfriend was a chinless wonder; two, the place would, she knew, be full of super-confident ex-public-school girls flaunting their perfect figures and talking in over-loud voices about their latest boyfriend, where they’ve skied and the car Daddy has just bought them; and three, she hated parties. She always had – even the beach parties that all her mates in Brighton had regarded as cool. Sadly, her aunts both considered that it would ‘do her good’ to socialise at every possible opportunity, and Jemma and Mia, who were so full of confidence in their own charms, kept teasing her and trying to set her up with guys – usually the ones they deemed completely hopeless.

  ‘I’d die to be in your shoes,’ her friend Lulu had said a few weeks back when Frankie had shown her the gold embossed invitation card to the party. ‘Since my father dragged us to this backwater, I haven’t been to one decent party.’

  ‘Nick’s will be one of those pretentious affairs where everyone nibbles on canapés and bares their teeth in silly grins till the photographer from Tatler leaves and then gets hammered on champagne cocktails and whatever else they happen to have to hand.’

  ‘Sounds good to me!’ Lulu laughed. ‘Take photos, yeah? I want a snog by snog account of the evening!’

  ‘Even if I go – which I won’t – snogging won’t feature,’ Frankie retorted. ‘I’ll only know a handful of people anyway.’

  ‘Francesca Price!’ Lulu exclaimed. ‘Who said you had to know someone to snog them? And you have to go. The only way I get a full-on social life these days is by proxy. You owe it to me as my best mate.’

  It never failed to surprise Frankie that someone like Lulu – feisty, rebellious and a pain in the neck of practically every tutor at Thornton College – should want to be friends with her, but ever since she had arrived just weeks after Frankie, she had latched onto her and pretty much ignored everyone else.

  ‘Anyway, forget parties,’ Lulu had continued. ‘You have to promise me one thing, right?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You’ll come to all the best gigs at M-Brace? Is it really as great as everyone says it is?’

  ‘I’ve never been,’ Frankie admitted.

  ‘You’ve never been?’ Lulu gasped. ‘You live practically next door to one of the best music festivals in the whole country and you haven’t been? What’s that all about?’

  ‘It only happens every other year and last time I was down visiting Mum. Mind you, I don’t think my uncle would have been too keen on my being there, judging by the way he yelled at the others for going,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t approve of the festival – says it’s a blot on the landscape and ruins the environment.’

  ‘Well, we’re going whether he likes it or not,’ Lulu said firmly. ‘It’s the only upside of moving here. And while you’re at it, you can
make sure you drag that cousin of yours along.’

  ‘Ned?’ Frankie felt herself bristle inwardly.

  ‘No, silly, the other one – James. OMG, that guy is so fit!’

  Frankie giggled. ‘You fancy him!’

  ‘Too right,’ Lulu said. ‘Has he got a girlfriend at the moment?’

  ‘That’s like asking whether a leopard has spots,’ Frankie replied. ‘He changes them more often than most people change their socks.’

  ‘Great!’ Lulu laughed. ‘That means he hasn’t found the right girl yet. But then again, he hasn’t met me!’

  Recalling that conversation now, Frankie couldn’t help smiling and feeling more than a little envious of her friend’s confident, anything-goes nature.

  ‘Hey look, it smiles!’ Jemma teased. ‘So the thought of Nick’s party isn’t so horrendous after all?’

  ‘I don’t know, I —’

  ‘Honestly, you’re hopeless!’ Mia sighed. ‘I just don’t get why Ned kept on at me to check you’d be there. You’re a right party pooper!’

  ‘Ned?’ To her annoyance, the word came out as a squeak. ‘But he’s in Wales.’

  ‘Yes, well, I guess even he isn’t so saintly that he’d miss out on the kind of party the Rushworths throw just to camp with a load of kids from some inner-city sink estate,’ Mia said, zapping the sound on the TV. ‘He’s done some sort of swap and he’s leaving early. He’ll be home tomorrow.’

  Frankie fought to keep her face expressionless. Ned was the opposite of his twin, Mia; he detested flashy parties as much as Frankie did and no way would he cut short his placement with Kids Out There, or KOT, the charity that was his passion – unless . . .

  If he was coming back early, it could surely only mean one thing: he had missed her as much as she had missed him.

  ‘OK, I’ll go,’ she murmured. ‘I guess it would be rude not to.’

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘She regarded her cousin as

  an example of everything good and great.’

  (Jane Austen, Mansfield Park)

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Congratulations!

  Dear Frankie,

  Congratulations!

  I am delighted to inform you that your short story Look Again has been selected by our panel of judges as the winning entry in our Writers of Tomorrow competition. The judges found your story both imaginative and moving and were particularly impressed by your use of metaphor and irony. As you know, the prize consists of £250 plus free entry for the duration of the M-Brace festival at the end of the month. I would be most grateful if you could telephone me as soon as possible to arrange a time to visit our offices and be photographed receiving your prize.

  Once again, congratulations.

  Belinda Painter

  Editor, Nene Chronicle

  Frankie couldn’t stop smiling as she printed off the email. She put it into the box on the top of her wardrobe, along with her private journals and the collection of photographs which her brother William had emailed from the cruise liner Sea Siren, on which he was now, as he proudly told her, photographer’s assistant to the assistant photographer. It had been a photograph taken with a disposable camera that had won William Best Photo (Portrait) Under Ten in a schools’ competition years before and set him on course for what he hoped would be a successful career as a professional photographer. And at last, Frankie felt as if she was finally on the way to fulfilling her dream of being a bestselling author too.

  Of course, she admitted to herself, it wasn’t just the fact of winning the prize that made her feel as if she was suddenly capable of conquering the universe, it was knowing that Ned was coming home because he wanted to be with her at Nick’s party. In many ways, that mattered more than all the writing prizes in the world.

  ‘Ned.’ She whispered the word into the silence of the room – the same room where he had found her sobbing her heart out a few days after arriving at Park House. She had been angry and mortified – angry that he had burst into the room unannounced, and mortified that this gorgeous eighteen-year-old guy, his white tennis shorts revealing legs to die for, should find her wailing like some stupid kid.

  ‘Oh sorry, I forgot this was your room now!’ he had gasped, his face flushing. ‘It used to be — Hey, I thought I was the only one who was having a bad day!’

  He had squatted down beside her. ‘Here – this usually helps. Sorry, I’ve eaten half of it.’ He’d thrust the squashed remains of a bar of chocolate into her hand. ‘I guess it must be hard for you, landing here amongst a load of strangers,’ he continued, as Frankie struggled to stem her tears. ‘I know what I felt like my first term at boarding school, but at least my brother was there. Though come to think of it, that wasn’t much help considering he was permanently in trouble and everyone expected me to be a rebel too!’

  She rubbed her eyes and glared at him as he burst out laughing. ‘What’s so funny? You think I’m a baby, right?’

  ‘No,’ he assured her, struggling to suppress his laughter. ‘It’s just that you’ve now got chocolate all round your eyes! You look like a panda.’

  He glanced round her room and snatched a tissue from a box on the dressing table, which he rubbed ineffectually at her eyes.

  His fingers touched her cheek and that was the moment when something happened to her heart that she had never experienced before.

  ‘You miss your mum, is that it?’ he asked in a gentle tone.

  ‘I miss my brother more,’ she admitted. ‘He’s just got a job on a cruise ship and I promised I’d text him but I’ve run out of credit.’

  ‘Use mine for now,’ he said, tossing his phone into her lap. And just two days later, her uncle had presented her with a brand new phone and promised to pay the bill for as long as her brother was away. She knew that Ned was behind the gift – just as, over the next few weeks, it was Ned who helped her get to grips with the piles of homework from her new school and Ned who alerted his father to the fact that Frankie was the only girl in the class who didn’t have her own laptop. He was the one person she could be herself with, the one person who never made her feel small or inferior.

  A lot had happened since then but her love for Ned had never wavered. All she needed now was for him to stop thinking of her as some sort of proxy kid sister.

  She was about to dial the editor’s number when her phone rang and her friend Poppy’s name flashed up.

  ‘Hi, Poppy, you OK?’ Frankie asked.

  ‘I am so not OK as to be KO’d!’ Poppy retorted. ‘Thanks to my parents, my entire life is in pieces!’

  Frankie flopped down onto her bed, kicked off her flip-flops and suppressed a smile. If anyone knew how to make a drama out of a crisis it was Poppy Grant.

  ‘So what’s the problem?’

  ‘You won’t believe this – Boring Basil’s kids are coming to stay.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Is that ALL? My stepfather’s kids are like the most spoilt, up themselves, pretentious —’

  ‘OK, OK, I get the message,’ Frankie chipped in, ‘but surely it’s not as bad as all that?’

  ‘Not so bad? It’s dire,’ Poppy ranted on. ‘They’ve had this massive falling out with their mother because she’s just shacked up with some guy they don’t approve of. Mind you, it is the third time this has happened since she split from my stepdad, so you can see their point. Anyway, they’re coming to us tomorrow for the whole summer – can you believe it? Tomorrow, and my mother’s only just told me. And guess what? My stepdad’s only gone and given them the granny flat which, if you remember, he promised to me!’

  The two Drs Grant, as everyone in the village called them (Poppy’s mum being the local GP and her stepfather a research scientist working for one of the big pharmaceutical companies) lived at The Old Parsonage, a large, if somewhat dilapidated Queen Anne house on the other side of the village. Until the previous year, the top floor, once the preserve of serva
nts and governesses, had been lived in by Poppy’s grandmother, a feisty woman who had dropped dead at Royal Ascot, due largely to the cumulative effects of a lifetime drinking Martinis and the surge of excitement caused by having just won a sizeable amount of money on a horse coincidentally called Hurry Off.

  ‘I’d got it all worked out,’ Poppy went on. ‘I was going to go all retro and paint the walls orange with a black ceiling and . . . Oh, it’s so unfair. Just because their lives are a mess, why do they have to come and ruin mine?’

  For a moment, Frankie said nothing. She had yet to meet Henry and Alice but she suddenly felt sorry for them. She knew only too well what it was like for your life to be a mess, and also to know that despite all the polite welcomes and rehearsed phrases, the people who had to put you up often wanted you anywhere but in their home.

  ‘So anyway,’ Poppy went on, ‘see you at Nick’s on Saturday, yeah? It should be a blast. Have you got your eye on anyone?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A guy, silly. Someone you’d like to pull?’

  ‘No one,’ Frankie replied, blushing a little as Ned’s face flashed across her mind.

  ‘That’s good, because my mother’s wangled it with Nick’s mum to get Henry and Alice invited – so if you’re up for grabs, I’ll shove Henry in your direction.’

  ‘No way! I thought you said he was a pretentious —’

  ‘He’s not that bad,’ Poppy reasoned. ‘And let’s face it, there’s no one in your life right now, so you might as well spend the evening with him.’ She giggled. ‘Besides, I really fancy Charlie Maddox and no way do I want Henry hanging around, cramping my style. He thinks he’s God’s gift to the female sex.’

  Frankie was about to protest when the huge antique gong that Tina kept in the hallway and used as a means of summoning all her various offspring reverberated through the house. Her children told her that it was totally over the top, and ridiculously Downton Abbey, but she insisted that shouting to them when she wanted them was not only very common but also bad for her sensitive throat. Tina had a variety of sensitivities and allergies, none of which stopped her from doing what she wanted, but any one of which could be rustled up at a moment’s notice if the demands made on her were not to her liking. Since it wasn’t lunch or suppertime, Frankie thought something big must have happened.