Sharon Griffiths - The Lost Guide to Life and Love

‘Pining for you,’ I say. ‘I gather you haven’t seen him for some time.’

‘I’ve been busy,’ she says. ‘But I hear the bistro’s going well. It’s madness him having to start all over again. Why he sold his last restaurant before he went travelling, I’ve no idea, especially as he only stayed away for a few months. So much for his midlife gap year. I told him it was a daft idea.’

‘You know he hoped you’d go with him,’ I say, picking up a crumb of bread on my fingertip. Waste not, want not —another Granny Allen saying. When Bill went on his travels, I knew he had texted or emailed or sent silly postcards from every stop, hoping to tempt her out to join him. He only came home again because she wouldn’t.

My mother snorts. ‘He might have time to abandon everything and jaunt round the world like an overgrown adolescent, but the rest of us have work to do, businesses to run.’

‘Bill would maintain,’ I say, ‘that you have lives to live too.’

She gives me a withering look. And I see Bill still doesn’t stand a chance.

The waiter brings our coffees and my mother turns the tables on me.

‘So, how’s your love life? Everything OK with Jake?’

‘Mmmm.’ My mother and I don’t really do girlie chats, but I need to talk to someone. ‘I think so. But, to be honest, he’s been a bit odd lately.’

‘In what way?’ She looks at me sharply. ‘Is he working?’

‘Oh yes, doing something on the new breed of football managers. He seems quite involved in it. Thinks it could really make his name.’

My mother looks approving. ‘Sounds interesting,’ she says. ‘So what’s the problem?’

‘Oh, probably nothing,’ I say. ‘Anyway,’ I continue, trying to be more positive in the light of my mother’s sharp gaze. ‘We’re off up north for a week or two. He wants to do something about the millionaires buying up grouse moors and turning themselves into English gentlemen.’

‘You mean like, what’s the name, Simeon Maynard? Slimy Simeon?’

‘The very one.’

‘Now I’d really like to know where his money came from. Nowhere respectable, I’ll bet. If Jake can get to the bottom of that, I think it would be a real can of worms,’ says my mother. ‘Anyway, where are you going?’

‘Somewhere in the back of beyond called High Hartstone Edge,’ I say. ‘It’s literally in the middle of nowhere, it’s—’

‘I know exactly where it is,’ says my mother, surprised and almost smiling. ‘It’s where Granny Allen came from.’

‘Really? The Granny Allen?’ We had this picture of Granny Allen at home, a faded photo of an oldish woman with thick hair tied back and a determined expression, sitting bolt upright outside her cottage, gripping her Bible firmly. She might have been dead for well over a hundred years or more, but her influence still lingered on. If I tried to throw anything away—from an old dress to a chicken carcass—then Mum always said Granny Allen would come and haunt me. She’d been told that by her mum, who’d been told it by hers, and so on and so on, right back to Granny Allen, who ruled the family back in the nineteenth century. You told the truth, kept your word, helped people when you could and, above all, you worked hard and stood on your own two feet. Lounging round, doing nothing, was condemned as a very un-Granny-Allen-like activity. Anyway, she was always there in the photograph, with her Bible and that stern expression, watching my every move.

And as for drink…Well, you could see Mum was just programmed to set up Frankie’s Coffee Shops really. Apparently, Granny Allen had brought up her younger brothers and sisters, then her own family, and then her grandchildren too, all from a tiny farm high up on some bleak northern fellside. She must have been very tough, very determined, but not, I guess, a barrel of laughs.

‘She was actually your great-grandmother, or even great-great, I’m not sure,’ Mum was saying. ‘I went to Hartstone Edge with my mother when I was very small. We went somewhere by train, which seemed to take forever, and then it was a very long drive after that, up high and winding roads. My great-aunt lived there then. To be honest, I can’t remember much about it, I was very young. Lots of hills and sky, I remember. And sheep. And a stream with a ford and a little packhorse bridge. I remember playing on it with some cousins. It’s probably all changed now, of course. It was always a hard place to make a living.’

For a moment she looks miles away. ‘I’ve always meant to go back there. But the time was never right. But now you can go instead and tell me what it’s like. Anyway, it will be good for you to have a little break, even if it’s a working holiday. How long are you away for?’

‘We’ve booked the cottage for two weeks, but we can probably extend it if we want to.’

‘Take plenty of warm clothes. You’ll need an extra layer up there, especially at this time of year. High Hartstone Edge! What a coincidence.’ We look at each other and this time my mother really does smile as we say in unison, ‘What would Granny Allen say?’

It had rained all the way up the A1. Grey roads, grey traffic, the constant spray from lorries. The further north we headed, the worse it seemed to get. I had long since lapsed into silence. Jake was concentrating hard on the road ahead as he peered past the windscreen wipers into the gloom ahead.

‘Shall I drive for a while?’ I offered.

‘Might be an idea,’ he said, ‘I could do with a break. Look, there’re some services soon. We’ll stop and get a coffee. Give the rain a chance to stop.’

The service station didn’t look promising. The only free space was at the far end of the car park and we had to run through the rain, dodging the puddles and then into a world of flashing video games and the smell of chips. We bought some papers and some coffees and sat down at the only table that wasn’t piled high with heaps of dirty, greasy plates.

The coffee was only just drinkable, but at least it was good to be away from the constant whoosh of the windscreen wipers. I leant back, stretched my legs and flipped vaguely though the heap of papers. Suddenly, I sat bolt upright.

‘That’s her!’ I said. ‘The girl from the club!’

‘What girl?’ asked Jake, puzzled, as I twisted the paper round to show him.

‘ “Supermodel sensation, Foxy, has hunted herself down a very tasty new contract”,’ Jake read. ‘“The stunning redhead, who has taken the fashion world by storm since her first appearance on the catwalks at London Fashion Week two years ago, has signed up to be the new face of Virgo cosmetics in one of the company’s biggest ever deals. No chicken feed for fabulous Foxy!” Was she at the club? I don’t remember seeing here. And’—he looked back at the page—‘I’m sure I would have…’

‘No. She left in rather a hurry,’ I said. And told him the story of how she had jumped out of the window and down into the street.

I expected Jake to laugh. Instead he was furious. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this?’ he asked so fiercely that the family at the next table paused in the middle of chomping through giant burgers, nudged each other and stared at us.

‘Because the princes arrived, and everyone was buzzing round them,’ I said, astonished at his reaction. ‘It just put it out of my mind. Sorry. I didn’t think you’d be so interested.’

‘Of course I’m interested.’ He looked at me as though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘A top model jumps from a toilet window in a club full of Premiership footballers and royal princes. Don’t you think that’s just a little bit interesting?’