Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?. Claudia Carroll

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      Chapter One

      OK, two things you need to know about me: firstly, I’m really not the sort of person to mortgage my entire future on a whim. Secondly, if life in The Sticks has taught me anything, it’s this: the lower you keep your expectations, the less likely you are to get let down. And above all, do not, repeat, do not, expect miracles to happen in this neck of the woods. Long and unbelievably boring conversations with Audrey, my mother-in-law, about the correct way to make a poinsettia entirely out of icing for the Christmas cake, yes, but miracles…no, sorry, love. ’Fraid not. Not in this neck of the woods.

      So when the phone calls start coming from about eleven-thirty in the morning onwards, you’ll get some idea of how utterly, unbelievably staggered I am by this bolt from a clear blue sky.

      I’m up a ladder in the dusty back room of our local book shop, stacking shelves with copies of a hot, new young adult series which we’re hoping will bring in some badly-needed footfall over Christmas. Because considering it’s only a few weeks off, business is worryingly quiet and so far this morning I’ve already had the owner, Agnes Quinn, who’s been around for approximately as long as the Old Testament, explain to me that she’s really very sorry but she just doesn’t think there’ll be a job for me here after the holidays.

      Not her fault of course, she was at pains to explain, people just aren’t spending cash in the same way that they used to…more and more people are buying books online now…Amazon are squeezing her out…rents are too high…recession is still having a massive knock-on effect…blah-di-blah…

      I know the story only too well and sympathise accordingly. Try not to worry, I say positively, and look on the bright side. Yes, business is slack I gently tell her, but just think, it’ll give you more time to work on your own book. Her round, puffy cheeks flush at this, as they always do whenever she’s reminded about her as-yet-unfinished magnum opus. It’s a cookbook, by the way. Agnes has spent the last three years eating her way through her granny’s recipes with a view to publication.

      ‘Anyway, I’m sure you won’t miss working here, will you now, Annie, love?’ she twinkles knowingly at me from where she’s standing over by the till, surveying a shop floor so empty it might as well have tumbleweed rolling through it. ‘Because it’ll mean you’ll have far more time to spend up at The Moorings with your in-laws, won’t it?’

      I do what I always do: smile, nod and say nothing.

      Then she rips open another cardboard box that’s just been delivered and sighs disappointedly, ‘Oh, look at this. More books.’ In much the same manner as someone who’d been expecting petunias.

      Anyway, just then I feel my mobile silently vibrating in my pocket. I ignore it and quietly get back to stacking shelves. Audrey, most likely, ringing from my house to whimper down the phone at me, in her frail, reed-thin, whispery, little-girl voice, like she does every day, even though she knows right well that I’m at work and therefore not supposed to take personal calls.

      OK, three possible reasons for her ringing: a) she wants to have a go at me, in her best passive-aggressive way for still not having put up the Christmas tree yet; b) she’s having one of her little ‘turns’ and needs me home urgently, even though I’m at work. Not that she doesn’t have a daughter of her own at her permanent beck and call, who’s unemployed and therefore has far more time on her hands than I do. But somehow, it’s always, always me she’ll call, like I’m some kind of nicotine patch for her nerves.

      Or worst of all, point c). Whenever Audrey runs out of things to guilt me out about and yet feels the need to use me as a kind of emotional punch bag, she’ll have a right good nose through the house when I’m not there, then pick on me for making some supposed change to The Moorings behind her back. Any minor shifting around of furniture or rearranging of china on the kitchen dresser by the way, all fall under this category and if I even attempt to deny said change, she’ll usually resurrect one of her favourite old gripes. Namely the fact that I had the outright effrontery to strip the flowery wallpaper from our bedroom wall and paint it plain cream instead. Not a word of a lie, when I first brought her upstairs to proudly show off my handiwork in all my newly-married innocence, honest to God, the woman’s intestines nearly exploded. The local GP had to be called, sedatives had to be administered and to this day, I still haven’t heard the last of it.

      This, by the way, would be the one, single decorative change that I’ve made since moving into the house; the first and the last. How could I have even thought of doing such an insensitive thing? I’ll never forget Audrey whimpering at me, laid prostrate on our sofa like Elizabeth Barrett Browning having an attack of the vapours and glaring accusingly at me with her pale, fishy eyes. No messing, all the woman was short of was a hoop skirt, a cold compress on her forehead and a jar of smelling salts. Not only had I completely destroyed the look of that whole room, she sniffled…but did I even appreciate that the wallpaper had been there since she first came to The Moorings as a bride?

      Ohh…way back in the early eighteenth century, most likely.

      The Moorings, I should tell you, is a vast, seven-bedroomed crumbling old mansion house; relentlessly Victorian, with huge, imposing granite walls all around it – exactly the kind of location that film scouts would kill to use on an Agatha Christie-Poirot murder mystery and decorated in a style best described as early Thatcher. Which is a crying shame, because with a bit of TLC and if I was really allowed to get my hands on the place, I know it could actually be stunning. I often compare it to Garbo in a bad dress; you can see the bone structure’s there, if you could only strip away all the crap. All the house’s features are intact and perfect: the coving, the brickwork, the stunning, sixteen-foot high plastered ceilings, but layered in a blanket of someone else’s old-fashioned, long-faded taste. With the result that I permanently feel like I’m a guest in my own home.

      From the outside though, it’s so scarily impressive that the very first time Dan took me here, aged fifteen, I remember joking to him that it was half posh mansion, half the СКАЧАТЬ