The Chocolate Collection. Trisha Ashley
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 unre-spected 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.’
She indicated the stuff on the table, which Felix was now neatly repacking into the box. ‘What are you going to do about this, if anything?’
‘I don’t know, I’ll have to think about it. It’s been a shock finding out my father might not be Chas. But there’s no point in telling any of it to Jake, because it would only upset him and anyway, it looks like she was telling the truth about who his father was, at least. She even gave him a holiday snap of them both together, though it isn’t terribly clear.’
‘He must have been nice, because Jake is,’ Poppy said loyally. She’d always adored Jake, who had never played tricks on her (apart from mild ones, like whoopee cushions and plastic flies in her coffee) and called her Auntie Pops.
‘I’m certainly not going to do anything hasty. Even if I wanted to, I have too much on at the moment, trying to keep my business running while sorting and packing and getting ready for the move. I’m dismantling my greenhouse tomorrow.’
‘I could come and help,’ offered Felix.
‘No, that’s OK, Felix,’ I said quickly, since he is pretty useless as a handyman, besides being the kiss of death to anything breakable, being all elbows and feet. ‘It won’t take me long. It was dead easy to put up and I still have the instructions.’
‘Really, Chloe, we make a good team,’ he insisted. ‘We’d get it done twice as fast.’
‘Really, Felix, we don’t – especially