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To my Mum, who is magnificent

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

PART ONE: EVERYTHING CHANGES

THEN

NOW: CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

PART TWO: RELIGHT MY FIRE

THEN

NOW: CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

PART THREE: NEVER FORGET

THEN

NOW: CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

PART FOUR: BACK FOR GOOD

THEN

NOW: CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Copyright

PART ONE: EVERYTHING CHANGES

THEN

Eloise Charlotte Preston’s Diary: Do NOT read or you will die.

17 June 1998

My life is actually officially over. And my mum has gone stark raving bonkers. She woke me up while it was still dark yesterday – and it was Sunday, it wasn’t even a school day.

She said we were going somewhere really cool and all sorts of other mad stuff about starting a new life. I just listened to my Discman because she was acting weird. But the way she was going on, I thought we were moving somewhere cool, like New York or Disneyworld. And then where did we finally end up… After hours and hours of driving… Wait for it… FLIPPING WILTSHIRE! And not just Wiltshire, but a commune. That’s right, a commune. Obviously someone forgot to tell the people here communes went out of fashion a million years ago when hippies went extinct.

Mum said I’m missing school for the rest of the term, which could have been good. But it’s not. I miss my friends. It’s PE tomorrow and I even miss that! And I won’t get to go to Laura Gilchrist’s end of year party.

And all this horrible stuff is happening because she’s divorcing Dad. But I don’t get why we have to leave London and come here? Why can’t Dad leave instead? That’s what happened when Jess’s parents got divorced – she ended up with two cool places to live, her mum’s house and her dad’s new flat in Chelsea. And I’ve ended up living in a field.

I keep telling Mum I hate it here, but she just keeps smiling.

Mum’s friend Pam is here and she’s all smiley too – like me having my whole life ruined is a good thing.

I hate them both. There’s not even a TV so I’ve already missed one episode of Sex and the City – which I’ll probably never see ever again now. Or Friends. Or Beverly Hills 90210 (although that’s not so bad now that Luke Perry’s hardly even in it). And, even worse, forget about a computer or the internet, this place doesn’t even have a phone. So I can’t even ring Jess. She’ll probably think I’ve been kidnapped. I had to write her a letter. How tragic is that?

The woman that runs this place is called Laura and she’s a total psychopath. But her son Art is THE WORST. He’s only a year older than me, but he’s really scary. He’s sort of good-looking, if you fancied Jack in Titanic you’d probably fancy him too. He’s got a tattoo on his arm– which I thought was a little bit cool (it’s a big red rose with thorns) until I got a closer look at it today, and realised the petals are actually drops of blood. Yuk! And anyway, no one has a tattoo who isn’t a criminal or a biker. All the other kids here, who are miles younger than me and him, follow him around like a pack of wild dogs and treat him like he’s God. Which he is so not.

I bet he’s never smiled in his entire life. His jeans are ripped, but not in a good way, and covered in stains like he’s never cleaned them ever. And he doesn’t seem to go to school, so we were the only kids here today. He totally ignored me when I said hello. Then when I told him the room my mum’s given me here is nowhere near as pretty as my room at home (just to make conversation, like a normal person), he made a mean comment about me being like Princess Di. As if that was a bad thing. When EVERYONE loves Princess Di, especially now she’s dead.

He called me Princess Drama at supper, so now all the other kids have started calling me it too. They all hate me (AND Princess Di probably) but I don’t care because I hate them back.

I told Mum what Art said about me (and Princess Di) and she just smiled AGAIN and told me I shouldn’t judge people too harshly before I get to know them properly.

Like I want to get to know Art properly! As if!! Honestly, Mum acts like it’s my fault Art’s so mean to me. Why is she on his side? When she should be on mine?

I want to go home. I wish I was dead. I might have to kill myself if we stay here. I think I’ll start a hunger strike tomorrow and see what Mum does.

If you’re reading this, Mum, I’m not kidding!

NOW
CHAPTER ONE

‘Mom, this pie has Jell-O in it. It tastes weird.’

Eloise Granger eased her foot off the accelerator, to see her son’s face screwed up in comical disgust over the remains of his Melton Mowbray pork pie.

The gamey taste and meat jelly was obviously too much of an acquired taste for an American twelve-year-old brought up on meat that had been processed to within an inch of its life. Even for one who had never been a fussy eater she thought, taking in the dimpled skin where Josh’s tummy peeped above the waistband of his ‘husky boy’ shorts.

‘Have some popcorn chips instead then.’

‘I ate all the popcorn chips already,’ Josh whined, his usually sweet nature finally beaten into submission by jet lag and boredom after seven hours in a plane and a total of fifteen hours on the road since they’d left Orchard Habor in Upstate New York yesterday.

‘Once we get to Grandma’s, I’m sure they’ll have supper ready.’ Whether it would be edible though was another matter.

If Josh was struggling with the concept of pork pies, what were the chances he would wolf down kale stew or tofu casserole or whatever other vegan weirdness the commune had on the menu tonight?

‘Are we almost there?’ he said.

‘Very nearly.’ The rental car hugged a curve, the high-sided banks on either side of the road topped with wild grass and nettles. The stretch of road was familiar, even if it had seemed never-ending too, when she was fourteen and arriving here for the first time with her mum nineteen summers ago. ‘Twenty minutes tops.’

At which point I will get to time-travel back to the worst summer of my life.

So I can top it. And possibly myself in the process.

Why did I ever think running away from Dan and our disaster of a marriage to a place I haven’t been in nineteen years would be a good idea?

The simple answer was, desperation had set in a week ago when Dan had levelled her with his I’ve-just-been-caught-with-my-dick-in-someone-else’s-cookie-jar-again look and told her his latest mistress was accidentally pregnant. And it had all gone downhill from there – because Ellie hadn’t been angry, or upset, or even remotely surprised. She’d just been numb. Numb enough to think that taking her mum up on the invitation she’d been extending to her and Josh for the past four years, ever since Ellie had received that first tentative, white-flag-waving Christmas email from Dee, was a good way of escaping the shit storm that had wrecked her life and her business in Orchard Harbor in less than seven days. Because announcing you were divorcing the town’s Golden Boy was the opposite of good publicity for a woman who made her living as a wedding and events planner. Who knew?

Unfortunately, she hadn’t stopped feeling numb until she and Josh had boarded the plane at JFK… And she’d actually had a moment to contemplate the new shit storm she was flying into.

‘You said that ten minutes ago.’ Josh’s whine drilled through Ellie’s frontal lobe. But she resisted the urge to snap at her son.

He hadn’t complained when she had wrenched him away from everything and everyone he knew, without giving him a proper explanation, and dragged him across an ocean, not to mention two hundred miles of the M3 and the A303 in a tiny Ford Fiesta because that was the only hire car they had left. And he always got cranky when he was hungry. Right now he was probably ravenous, because she’d had to make do with the limited options at the small service station near Stockbridge. Hence the Melton Mowbray debacle.

And, anyway, even a cranky Josh was a welcome distraction from the flood of memories that had kept her awake during the red-eye flight to Heathrow.

What had she been thinking? That swapping one shit storm for another would somehow cancel them out?

‘I said that less than a minute ago,’ she corrected. ‘But you’re right, that means it’s probably only nineteen minutes now.’

Why was it that when you knew something bad was headed your way, it always took that much longer to arrive? Was it just life’s equivalent of slow-motion replays on America’s Funniest Home Videos? Because she could remember another sunny June day nineteen years ago, when her mum had driven her to Wiltshire, their whole lives packed into the back of the family Range Rover. She had drowned out her mum’s fake cheerfulness by listening to Take That’s break-up album on a loop, and it had taken for ever to get there then, too.

‘I’m bored.’ Josh interrupted her maudlin thoughts.

‘Why don’t you play on your DS?’

‘It’s out of charge.’

‘Why don’t you listen to your iPod then?’

‘I’m bored with the songs on it. I’ve listened to them over and over.’ She knew how that felt. After that summer, Robbie and his pals had been dead to her for ever.

‘Then have a nap. You must be tired.’ Because I’m exhausted.

Although she doubted she’d sleep any time soon. All the nervous energy careering round her system made her feel as if she were mainlining coke.

‘Naps are for babies,’ Josh moaned.

‘You’re my baby, aren’t you?’

‘Mom!’ She could almost hear Josh rolling his eyes. ‘Don’t say that in front of the new kids, OK. They’ll think I’m weird.’

The smile died as she heard the anxious tone, generated by a year of being the ‘weird kid’ at Charles Hamilton Middle School in Orchard Harbor.

‘They won’t think you’re weird, honey.’

Because I won’t let them.

She didn’t doubt that if the kids at the commune these days were anything like the ones that had been there when she’d arrived at fourteen for that one fateful summer, she’d have a job keeping Josh’s self-esteem intact.

But she was ready for the challenge. This summer she had no job to go to, or marriage to pretend to care about, giving her ample time to concentrate on the two things she did care about: her son, and creating a new grand plan to give him the settled, secure, idyllic family life he deserved.

‘Will they think I’m fat?’ Josh asked.

Ellie’s head hurt. ‘No they won’t, because you’re not. Your weight is perfectly healthy.’ Or healthy enough not to risk giving Josh a complex about it with weight charts and unnecessary diets. That’s what the nutritionist had said at any rate, at a cost of two hundred dollars an hour. And, at that price, he must have been right.

‘Mom, there’s a sign. Is that it?’

Josh’s shout jogged Ellie’s hands on the steering wheel. She braked in front of the sign, which was no longer a childish drawing of a rainbow on a piece of splintered plywood, but a swirl of hammered bronze. The sign appeared sophisticated, but it announced the entrance to a rutted track that looked like even more of an exhaust-pipe graveyard than it had nineteen years ago.

Sunlight gleamed on the metal swirls which read: ‘Willow Tree Organic Farm and Cooperative-Housing Project’.

Underneath was another smaller sign listing – shock of shocks – an email address.

So they’d finally managed to dynamite themselves out of the 1960s then. Was it too much to hope the hippies who ran the place even had Wi-Fi? Perhaps they’d also realised that calling it The Rainbow Commune had conjured up images of stray dogs and filthy children in badly tie-dyed clothing? Unfortunately, the state of the track suggested the name change was nothing more than a cynical rebranding exercise.

A housing co-op is probably just a commune in disguise.

Josh bounced in his seat. ‘Let’s go, Mom.’

He sounded so keen and enthusiastic. How could she tell him this was likely to be a disaster?

Whatever reception she got, Josh was a sweet, sunny, wonderful boy, and anyone who tried to hurt him would have his big bad mother to answer to. Plus, they didn’t have to stay, there was still the Madagascar option, which she had considered a week ago, before settling on Wiltshire.

Ellie crunched the car’s gear shift into first, determined to be positive, no matter what. ‘I’m sure Granny can’t wait to meet you.’

The car bounced down the track, the nerves in Ellie’s stomach bouncing with it like a team of obese gymnasts wearing hobnail boots, as she clung to the one bright spot she’d managed to eke out of her dark thoughts during her night flight.

At least Art Dalton, the scourge of her existence that long ago summer, wouldn’t still be here. Her mother had never mentioned him or his psychotic cow of a mother Laura, or even her lover Pam, in the emails they’d exchanged in recent years. And Art would be pushing thirty-five. He must have buggered off and got himself a life by now – or at the very least, got himself arrested.

*

‘Arthur, they’re nearly here.’ Dee Preston burst round the side of the farmhouse in a swirl of gypsy skirts and jangling bangles brandishing her mobile phone as if it held the Eighth Wonder of the Universe. ‘I got a text from Ellie that she sent from the service station outside Tisbury.’

She grasped Art’s arm. His chopping arm. And the axe thunked into the stubborn trunk he’d been trying to shift all day inches from his boot.

‘Jesus, Dee, calm down.’

Her round, flushed face beamed at him and his heart shrank in his chest. He knew how much Dee had invested in this visit. If Ellie Preston was the same high-maintenance drama queen now that she’d been at fourteen, though, he didn’t hold out much hope of Dee getting the Kodak moment she was hoping for with the daughter who hadn’t bothered to come visit her once in nearly twenty years.

‘I almost took off my big toe,’ he added.

‘Stop being such a killjoy.’ Dee shoved the phone at him, only stopping short of inserting it into one of his nostrils by a few millimetres. ‘Read the text and see for yourself. She sent it twenty minutes ago, she should be here any minute.’

Art plucked the phone from her fingers, before he ended up with a nosebleed, and checked the text. He managed to decipher the words “Josh” and “Love Ellie” from the jumble of letters. Without his thirteen-year-old daughter Toto on hand to read it for him properly or the spare time available to decipher each individual word himself and then compile them into a comprehensible sentence, he had to wing it.

‘If she sent it twenty minutes ago, I guess you’re right.’ He handed back the phone. ‘She should be here soon, unless she’s got lost.’ And, given his present run of shitty luck, that was highly unlikely.

‘You have to come,’ Dee said, grasping his arm. ‘We should welcome them properly, like a community.’

‘You’ve spent the last week redecorating their rooms and the whole weekend baking, isn’t that enough?’ But even as the grumpy words left his mouth, he was being dragged round the side of the house to the front yard, to join the other families who lived on the farm and had already been assembled.

The twin tides of pride and panic assailed him, as they always did at the endless get-togethers Dee was always organising to build a sense of community.

Toto was corralling Rob and Annie Jackson’s twin toddlers. Ducks and geese from the nearby millpond roamed over the for once not too muddy yard, and everyone stood around in small groups. The sunshine glinted off Maddy Grady’s spectacles as she flirted with her boyfriend Jacob Riley. The only two unmarried members of the Project apart from him and Dee, they’d started dating a few weeks after Jacob had come to volunteer for a weekend and then never left. Art shuddered at the memory of the rhythmic thumping coming from Jacob’s room the night before and keeping him awake. Even after close to a year, the shine still hadn’t worn off their sex life, that was for sure.

‘Please smile, Arthur. I don’t want you to scare Ellie when she arrives, like you did the first time.’

‘What do you mean?’ Did Dee know? About the cruel things he’d said to Ellie the night before she’d left that summer? Did she know Ellie wasn’t the only one who’d behaved like a selfish little shit? Guilt coalesced in the pit of his stomach.

‘You ignored her.’ Was that all?

‘Did I?’ Relief coursed through him. Even though that was not the way he remembered Ellie’s original arrival at all. Truth was he’d been fascinated by Dee’s daughter that day. She’d stepped out of her mother’s car, flicked back her Rachel from Friends hair, the pastel silk blouse emphasising the buds of her breasts, and the superior scowl on her face making her look like a fairy queen who’d just swallowed a cockroach.

He’d stared, dazzled by how pretty and pristine she was. And she’d pursed her lips into a brittle smile, wrinkled her nose and looked right through him.

Dee glanced his way, before returning her attention to the road. ‘To a fourteen-year-old girl, when a good-looking boy doesn’t notice you, that’s tantamount to a knife through the heart.’ Dee craned her neck, eager to see round the corner of the barn, her knotted hands a testament to her nerves as she waited for her prodigal daughter’s return. ‘Especially one as vulnerable as Ellie was.’

Vulnerable? Was Dee kidding? Beneath the petite figure and the baby-doll face, Ellie Preston had been about as vulnerable as Maggie Thatcher.

‘She didn’t want me to notice her,’ he muttered in his defence. Because she’d done nothing but give him grief when he had.

Dee’s gaze flicked away from the road, her pale blue eyes beseeching. ‘I know you two never did get along. But please, will you try and be nice, or at least not hostile towards her. It would mean so much to me.’

‘Don’t worry, I’m not fifteen any more,’ he said, trying to keep his voice devoid of tension. ‘And neither is Ellie. I’m sure we can act like grown-ups if we put our minds to it.’

And stayed the hell out of each other’s way – which was precisely why he hadn’t planned on being part of the welcoming committee.

‘Ellie runs a very successful event-planning business in America, you know,’ Dee said, her voice thick with pride. ‘She might have some ideas that could help with our financial troubles.’

‘We’re not in financial trouble,’ he said, determined to take away the worry lines forming on her forehead.

‘I know it’s nothing you can’t fix,’ she said, reassuring him instead. ‘But maybe Ellie could help you run the place, take some of the burden off your shoulders, while she’s here.’

‘It’s no burden,’ he murmured, thinking of the cramped office he’d escaped from for the afternoon, furnished with a dying Hewlett Packard of indeterminate vintage and floor-to-ceiling shelves bulging with folders full of spreadsheets and order forms and invoices, which he had inherited from Dee’s dead partner Pam four years ago – and still hadn’t got to the bottom of.

While he’d have been more than happy to hand the lot of it over to someone else and run like hell, no way could he hand the mess over to Dee’s daughter. As a teenager she’d hated this place with every fibre of her being.

While he might not have the right skills to manage the farm, he wasn’t going to let it be bludgeoned to death by a woman who would happily tap dance on its grave.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll figure out something useful for her to do while she’s here,’ he said wearily, hoping like hell Ellie wasn’t planning to stay for the whole summer.

Maybe Princess Drama could shovel the manure into biodegradable bags? Or collect eggs from Martha, their prime layer, who had a homicidal personality disorder that would rival Caligula? Or better yet, help Jacob set the rat traps in the back barn? If he remembered correctly from the summer he’d spent with Ellie, she had a pathological phobia of mice. And the rats in that barn were big enough to give the farm’s fifteen-pound ginger tom post-traumatic stress disorder.

The vice around Art’s ribs loosened as he imagined the many ways he could persuade Ellie Preston to bugger off back to her very successful event-planning business in America long before the summer was over.

‘I know you will.’ Dee placed her sun-spotted hand on Art’s forearm. ‘You always know what to do. You’re such a credit to us all.’ She gave his arm a reassuring squeeze, the gesture full of maternal affection. The way she’d begun doing nineteen years ago. The day her daughter Ellie had climbed into her father’s Mercedes and driven away.

He caught the comforting scent of vanilla essence and lavender while Dee nattered about all the exciting things she was going to do with the grandson she’d never met. And his spirits sank.

Bollocks. He wasn’t going to be able to torture Ellie into leaving without upsetting Dee. The headache at his temple hammered at the base of his skull.

Perhaps he’d be able to set Martha the psycho hen on Ellie, but locking her in the barn with the mutant killer rats was probably a non-starter.

‘That’s them.’ Dee’s remark cut into his thoughts.

He lifted his head as a red Ford Fiesta bounded into the yard, then stopped. A boy popped out. About Toto’s height. His short caramel-brown hair stuck up in a tuft at the crown. He wore high-top sneakers, a grey and blue New York Mets T-shirt, a baseball cap backwards and baggy cargo shorts that slouched on his hips but did nothing to hide his pronounced belly.

‘Hey, I’m Josh,’ he said in a broad US accent. He shuffled his hand in a half-hearted wave that was both eager and shy.

Dee rushed over to gather him close in a hug. ‘Josh, it’s so wonderful to meet you. I’m your Granny Dee.’

The boy smiled, his expression both curious and uncomplicated. And Art spotted the railroad-track braces on his teeth.

Ellie’s kid couldn’t have looked and sounded more like an all-American stereotype if he’d tried. He reminded Art of one of the characters from Recess, the cartoon Toto had devoured like kiddie crack a few years ago.

Ellie stepped out of the other side of the car and Art’s breathing stopped as he absorbed the short, sharp shock of recognition.

In a pair of faded Levi’s rolled up at the hem and a snug lacy vest top that emphasised her small frame, her wild strawberry blonde hair tied up in a haphazard knot to reveal dangly earrings, she looked summery and sexy and casual, and nothing like the pristine, polished, too perfect girl he remembered. But then Dee placed a hand on her daughter’s arm, and Ellie’s spine stiffened as if someone had shoved a rod up her arse.

Dee began introducing everyone, while the younger kids swarmed round Ellie’s son, who seemed astonished by the attention. Toto, like him though, held back.

Then it struck him, as he watched Toto watch the boy, that as the oldest kid here, a card-carrying tomboy and as good as a surrogate grandchild to Dee, his daughter might feel as uncomfortable about the new arrivals as he did. Maybe he should have spoken to Toto about Ellie and her son coming to visit? Was this one of those situations that required the sort of ‘parent–child’ conversation the two of them generally avoided? How was he supposed to know that?

But then Toto stopped watching and marched up to the boy, said something to him and grabbed his hand. The boy’s doughy face lit up as he nodded and allowed himself to be dragged off. Toto in the lead as always, like the Pied Piper.

Nope, we’re good.

Thank Christ. This situation was enough of a head-wreck already.

Give or take the odd drive-Dad-mad moment, Toto was a brilliant kid. Smart, independent, straightforward and unafraid. And, like him, she wasn’t the share-and-discuss type.

So yeah, it was all good. No feelings talk required.

Ellie’s body remained rigid as she chatted to her mother, while Mike Peveney and Rob Jackson – who had both bought into the Project with their young families a couple of years ago – set about unpacking her car. A few minutes later, they had disgorged enough bags from the two-door compact to spend six months on safari in Kenya rather than a few weeks in Wiltshire.

Digging his fists into the pockets of his work overalls, Art strolled towards the dwindling welcoming party, prepared to follow through on his promise to Dee.

There was no reason why Ellie and he couldn’t be civil to each other. She might not even remember him. Much.

But then his gaze snagged on her strappy top and the way the thin cotton stretched tight across her breasts. The firm nubs of her nipples stood out against the fabric.

He heard a cough, and lifted his gaze. A pair of grass-green eyes glared at him. The flush burned the back of his neck, at the thought that he’d just been caught checking her out before he’d even said hello. But then the intriguing tilt at the edges of her eyes went squinty and he noticed the bluish hollows of fatigue underneath.

She looked exhausted.

Her lips pursed and the puddle of pity dried up. The tight smile was as unconvincing as the one nineteen years ago.

‘Hello, Arthur,’ she said, using the name he hated except when Dee used it. ‘You’re still here then.’

It wasn’t a question, more like a declaration of war.

CHAPTER TWO

Bollocks on toast.

Art Dalton was still here. And still hot. And most definitely still an arsehole, if the insolent way he’d been inspecting her boobs was anything to go by.

‘Yup,’ he said, in the gruff tone that had always unnerved her when they were teenagers. As if there were a million things he could say, but wasn’t going to.

The nervous tension that had been sitting in her gut during the flight over and the drive here, snaked up Ellie’s torso to wrap around her ribs like an anaconda.

Stop freaking out, you ninny. He’ll think it’s on account of him.

She took two calming breaths, drowning out her mother’s information about sleeping arrangements, and took a moment to glance around the yard. Studiously ignoring the man in front of her.

The pungent smell of wet earth and manure hadn’t changed, but everything else had. The place didn’t look like the site of a recent zombie apocalypse any more. There were no rusting vans and trucks propped up on breeze blocks, no broken furniture lying about. Just a carefully segmented vegetable garden, laid out in rows with a section under glass. There were geese and ducks poking around, but no pack of wild dogs or wild children, just two well-dressed toddlers and a skinny little boy about Josh’s age who had taken him off somewhere.

She would check on her son in a minute, after three hours in a car he could do with a run about, but she was reserving judgement on the motives of that skinny boy.

The barn behind the two-storey stone farmhouse had a new roof, the corrugated iron gleaming silver in the sunlight. Even the mud looked industrious. And all three of the men she’d been introduced to had seemed young and ordinary, instead of old and weird. Not a nose ring or multicoloured Mohican in sight.

The anaconda released its stranglehold on her ribs. The place didn’t feel as hostile any more.

‘Exactly how long are you planning to stay?’

Art’s dry enquiry interrupted her mum’s running commentary on how pleased she was to meet Josh.

Not hostile – except for Prince Not Charming.

‘Because that’s a ton of stuff,’ he added, the rasp suggesting how much of an effort it was for him to put a whole sentence together.

In worn boots and oil-stained overalls, Art Dalton looked as intimidating as ever – the strong, silent, stroppy type. His tall, whipcord-lean build had a solid strength, accentuated by the workman’s biceps that moulded the rolled-up sleeves of his overalls. The old tattoo caught her eye, the once blood-red lines having faded to a dusky pink against sun-browned skin. She dragged her gaze away, before she got fixated. His dark messy hair matched black brows, permanently lowered over his prominent aquiline nose. Sensual lips twisted in a cynical attempt at a smile. At fifteen he’d been the ultimate rebel without a cause, the original Lord of the Flies – both terrifying and exciting.

Not a good combination for a fourteen-year-old girl in the grip of rioting hormones, who missed her friends terribly and had about as much common sense as Daffy Duck. Luckily, she’d kicked Daffy to the kerb nineteen years ago – give or take the odd ill-advised marriage – after Art had rejected her the first time. So it really didn’t matter now that he looked like the walking embodiment of ‘a bit of rough’. Or exuded the earthy eroticism of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

‘Stop interrogating her, Arthur.’ Dee threaded her arm through Ellie’s and led her towards the farmhouse, and away from Art and his surly questions.

‘How long are you planning to stay?’ Dee asked, as they approached the farmhouse.

Lavender bushes, sunflowers and fire-red foxgloves spilled out of the flowerbeds by the door, giving off a heady perfume. A wisteria vine, clinging to the stonework, wound its way around the peaked portico.

‘Because you and Josh are welcome to stay for as long as you want,’ her mother added.

From the forbidding scowl on his face, she wasn’t convinced Art Dalton agreed.

‘I don’t know. We haven’t made any concrete plans yet.’ The only concrete plan so far had involved escaping from Orchard Harbor before news of Chelsea Hamilton’s pregnancy hit the local gossip grapevine – and turned her and Josh’s lives into a soap opera worthy of Argentinian daytime TV.

Ellie would have been able to cope with all the ‘well-meant advice’ and faux sympathy once the news was out, because she’d been doing that for years, but she wasn’t sure Josh could, without eating his own weight in Oreos. The truth was she hadn’t even had the guts to tell him yet that Dan and her were separating.

‘Then I hope you’ll consider staying for a while,’ Dee said, the generosity of the gesture making Ellie feel even more uncomfortable.

Her mother had been suggesting she and Josh visit for a while now, not long after that first tentative email with the subject line ‘Merry Christmas, Ellie’ had appeared in her inbox four years ago. But, prior to that, they’d lost contact for over a decade – separated by the huge chasm that had developed once Ellie had chosen to leave the commune after that one fateful summer and go back to live with her dad. And her mother had opted to stay put with her new girlfriend.

‘But there’s no need to make a decision yet,’ Dee added quickly, obviously picking up on Ellie’s reluctance, as she walked ahead past a rack of coats and jackets positioned over a crate full of scuffed sneakers and wellington boots. ‘All you and Josh need to do today is settle in, and relax after your long journey.’

The long journey had been a picnic compared to the week that had preceded it, but Ellie allowed herself to be led.

‘I’ll be serving dinner in a couple of hours,’ Dee said. ‘But I could get you something to snack on first if you’re hungry.’

Her mum’s voice drifted over Ellie. ‘I’m fine.’

She refrained from suggesting she skip dinner and crash now as her mother opened the door to the communal kitchen. It would be an ordeal attending the communal supper tonight. She didn’t find eating with people she didn’t know particularly relaxing, but it was the penance she would have to pay for being deranged enough to accept her mum’s invitation in the first place. And at least the people who lived here now didn’t have inappropriate piercings or judgemental scowls on their faces – every one except Art.

Then again, she hadn’t seen Art’s mother yet, or her mother’s girlfriend Pam. Reunions she was not looking forward to almost as much as the one with Art.

She raised her head to ask about them both, and gasped.

She recognised the sturdy butler sink and the scarred butcher’s block table – around which numerous discussions about whether Tony Blair was really a Tory plant had been conducted in her youth – but nothing else looked familiar. The boxes of pamphlets and home-made placards she remembered stacked in every available corner, the wolf-like dog that snarled whenever she ventured into the room and the teetering towers of dirty dishes in the sink were all gone.

The commune’s hub had been transformed from revolution central into the set from a country cooking show.

An industrial dishwasher stood in one corner next to the cast-iron splendour of a traditional Aga cooker. The flagstone flooring had been scrubbed clean. The door to the pantry – which had once housed an antique printing press – now stood open to reveal shelves groaning under jars of home-made preserves, while a collection of potted herbs stood in aromatic abundance on the windowsill over the sink.

The delicious smell of garlic and melted cheese drew Ellie’s gaze to the home-baked lasagne and tray of roasted vegetables resting on the Aga’s hot plate.

Ellie blinked, expecting Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to pop out of the pantry at any moment and start demonstrating how to make sloe-gin ice cream.

‘What happened?’ Had she slipped into an alternative reality?

‘What happened to what?’ Her mother turned from the cooker, where she’d been taking another tray of vegetables out of the oven.

The light from the window illuminated the streaks of grey in her mother’s dark blonde hair. In the shaft of sunlight, Ellie noticed for the first time the speckle of sun blemishes on her mum’s skin and the slight thickening around the waistband of her gypsy skirt. But otherwise, Dee Preston, unlike her kitchen, had hardly changed. With her sky-blue eyes, the thick tangle of hair tied up in a topknot, the collection of bangles on her wrist jingling as she basted the vegetables, she looked a good fifteen years younger than her fifty-nine years.

‘To the kitchen? To the whole place?’ Ellie felt a bit ridiculous when her mother sent her a quizzical look, as if she couldn’t imagine what Ellie was getting at. ‘It doesn’t look anything like I remember it.’

‘Oh, well, yes.’ Dee glanced around, attempting to locate the differences. ‘I suppose it is a bit less cluttered these days.’

‘Mum, it was a shit-hole,’ Ellie said. ‘There was that feral dog that lurked in the corner like the three-headed hellhound from Harry Potter.’

‘Fluffy?’

‘That dog was called Fluffy?’ Clearly someone back then had a sense of humour she’d been unaware of.

Her mum smiled. ‘No, the three-headed dog in Harry Potter’s called Fluffy. Laura’s Irish wolfhound was called Scargill, I think.’

That figured, because Art’s mum had been in the forefront of all the revolutionary bollocks Ellie remembered from the bad old days.

‘He died years ago,’ Dee supplied helpfully. ‘He’s buried in the back pasture.’

‘But it wasn’t just the dog,’ Ellie continued, silently hoping the Hound of the Baskervilles had died in agony, because it was the least the cantankerous old beast deserved. ‘No one ever washed up or cooked anything remotely edible, except you. The whole place stank of unwashed bodies and stale marijuana and it was a hotbed of born-again hippie anarchy.’ She swept her hand to encompass the scene before her now, which could have illustrated a feature article in Country Living. ‘Not home-grown herbs and home-made preserves and home baking. The place looks as if it’s been given a makeover by the Shabby Chic Fairy. Seriously, what happened?’

Because she wanted to know.

‘Well, Laura left us a few months after you did. And most of the activist element left not long after that, too.’

Laura Dalton had left? Nineteen years ago? So why was her son Art still hanging about? Ellie stopped herself from asking though, because she wasn’t interested in what had been going on with Art.

‘Where did Laura go?’ she asked, deciding that was a safe question.

‘She ran off with the local Lib-Dem member of the county council. His name was Rupert something.’

‘You are joking?’ This was beginning to sound like a Little Britain sketch. And not in a good way.

‘We were all a bit surprised to be honest, given that Laura had insisted even New Labour were traitors to the cause.’ Dee’s smile became rueful.

‘I thought Laura was a lesbian?’ She’d never managed to get to the bottom of how Art had been created, because no one had ever spoken about his father. But given how demonstrative Laura had always been with Delshad, her partner at the commune, Ellie had begun to suspect Art might have originated from a petri dish in a sperm bank.

‘So did Laura, I suppose.’ Dee tucked a stray tendril behind her ear and picked up a dishcloth to wipe the already pristine table. ‘But apparently she wasn’t. Or not where Rupert was concerned. She left a note for Art, explaining why she’d left, but he never told me what it said.’

Had his mum just left him behind then? With a note? He’d only been fifteen.

The spurt of sympathy though was blasted into submission by a disturbing memory flash of Art at fifteen. His lean wiry nut-brown body lying in the long grass by the millpond, the bloody ink on his left bicep rippling as he held his…

Heat blossomed in her stomach and crawled over her scalp, the same way it had all those years ago, when she’d watched him unobserved from her vantage point in the derelict mill house and realised what he was doing.

She cut off the memory. But the heat refused to subside as she had another memory flash, closer to home, of the same ink peeking out from the rolled-up sleeve of Art’s overalls a few minutes ago.

Note to self: jet lag, a failed marriage and a year with only the occasional duty shag can seriously mess with your mental health. Enough to delude you into fixating on an arsehole like Art Dalton and his tacky tattoo.

She needed to crash, and soon.

‘So Laura never came back?’ she said. ‘Delshad must have been devastated.’

Any sympathy for Art on the other hand would be misguided. She couldn’t imagine him being devastated. His mum had probably run off with Rupert the Lib-Dem – and jettisoned her political beliefs and her sexual identity in the process – to get shot of him. After all, he’d been more wild and feral at fifteen than that bloody dog.

‘Actually she did come back in a manner of speaking,’ Dee said, throwing the dishcloth into the sink.

‘Oh?’

‘A young man called Jack Harborough turned up five years ago with her ashes in a Tupperware container. He said he’d been living with her in a squat in Tottenham. He had photos of the two of them together. Apparently she died of lung cancer. She did look terribly thin in the photos. Like someone from a concentration camp. Awful,’ Dee said mildly. ‘That’s what roll-ups can do to you.’

Ellie was still trying to get her head around the thought of Laura coming back in a Tupperware container. The thought of the stunningly beautiful radical socialist looking like a Belsen victim simply wouldn’t compute.

And she thought her life had become a soap opera.

‘Where’s Pam?’ Ellie heard herself say, deciding she would have to kick the elephant in the room eventually. And getting sidetracked with Laura’s story had given her a headache. And some memory flashes she really didn’t need to go with the foggy feeling of exhaustion.

Dee’s smile didn’t falter, but the warmth in her eyes died. ‘She’s dead, darling. She died four years ago.’

‘I didn’t know. I’m… I’m sorry, Mum.’ The words felt inadequate. And somewhat hypocritical, given the emotion arriving on the heels of the revelation was a massive surge of relief. ‘Why didn’t you tell me in any of your emails?’

Was Pam’s death the reason why Dee had decided to get in touch again out of the blue? Surely it had to be.

Ellie’s spine stiffened a bit more. Get over it.

It was churlish to feel cheated that her mother’s grief had been the only thing prompting her to build bridges that had been broken for so long. Why should her mother’s motivations matter? After all, she and her mother weren’t close, would never be close – and Ellie’s reasons for being here were equally as self-serving as her mother’s reasons were for wanting her here.

‘I didn’t want to bother you with it,’ Dee said easily enough. ‘After all, you and Pam didn’t care for each other.’ The words were said without any censure, but Ellie’s chest tightened.

Pam had tried to get on with her. It was she who had refused point blank to get on with Pam.

She headed round the table, and laid a palm on her mother’s arm. ‘Yes, but you cared about Pam.’ While Ellie might once have managed to convince herself her mother’s affair with another woman was nothing more than a juvenile mid-life crisis, it was hard to escape the fact the two of them had lived together for fifteen years. ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

Her mother’s skin felt soft and cool. And the gesture felt awkward, and insincere. Especially when Dee said: ‘Thank you, Ellie. You know, it was Pam who begged me to contact you, to re-establish a relationship with you before she died,’ she added, confirming Ellie’s suspicions. ‘And I’m glad I did. It’s wonderful to finally have you here.’ Dee’s hopeful expression did nothing to ease Ellie’s guilt or her discomfort. Exactly what was her mother expecting from this visit? ‘And I’m so looking forward to getting to know Josh.’ Dee patted her fingers. ‘He seems like a lovely boy. So open and so very American.’

The mention of Josh gave Ellie a jolt. In the shock of seeing Art and the new improved farm and hearing about Laura’s Lib-Dem love shock and Pam’s untimely death, she’d completely forgotten about her son.

‘I’m sure he will. But who was that boy he went off with?’ she asked, her protective-mother instinct charging to the fore.

Actually, it was a bit surprising Josh hadn’t returned already. He wasn’t usually confident with strangers. Especially strange kids. And the boy who had led him off had reminded Ellie of the wild kids who had roamed the commune before. Skinny with a smudge of something on his chin, his short dark hair sticking up, wearing torn jeans and a grubby T-shirt, his eyes too big for his freckled face, the boy had looked decidedly feral.

‘Toto, you mean?’ Her mother smiled as if enjoying a private joke.

‘Yes, Toto, that was it. He said he was taking Josh to their clubhouse. Is it safe?’ She should have asked this before. Josh wasn’t the most agile of children. And she didn’t want him to feel awkward. Or worse, end up in some hideous initiation ceremony. Like she had. ‘Isn’t Toto a dog’s name?’ Why would anyone give their child a name like that?

‘Toto’s short for Antonia.’

‘That boy’s a girl?’ The obese gymnasts relaxed. Surely a tomboy would be less feral than an actual boy.

‘Yes, she’s Art’s daughter.’

The obese gymnasts began doing backflips in Ellie’s stomach.

Less feral, my arse.

CHAPTER THREE

‘Dad, Dad, Dad, you’ve gotta come quick.’

‘Damn it!’ Art wheeled back the axe to stop himself from nearly hacking off his foot a second time in one afternoon. ‘Toto, what is wrong with you? Don’t run up and shout at me when I’m chopping.’

But Toto already had her hand buried in his overalls to drag him who knew where. ‘You’ve got to come. Josh is stuck up a tree and he’s going to die if you don’t rescue him.’

He placed the axe by the tree stump and gripped his daughter’s shoulders to stop them shaking, from either exertion or terror, it was hard to tell.

‘Calm down. Who’s Josh and what tree is he stuck up?’ They’d deal with the dying bit in a minute.

‘Josh is the new kid.’ Toto gasped between breaths. ‘Dee’s grandson.’

Crap. Just what he needed, Ellie’s kid breaking his neck after they’d been here exactly half an hour. She was just the type to sue them into the ground for child endangerment.

‘What tree’s he stuck up?’

Toto tried to drag him towards the woods. ‘The Clubhouse tree.’

‘Can’t he just climb down again?’ he said. ‘There’s a ladder. I built the thing myself.’

‘No, it’s the ladder he’s stuck on.’

‘How can he be stuck on the ladder?’ Had the thing broken? The cost of the lawsuit spiralled up.

‘I don’t know,’ Toto wailed. ‘He just did. And now he can’t get down and he’s afraid and he could fall. And he’s way way up, right near the top. If he falls, it’s gonna hurt.’

She yanked his overalls. Grasping her wrist, he lifted her fingers off. ‘Stop tugging me. I’ll go sort it out.’

Toto tried to shoot off ahead of him, but he grabbed her arm.

‘Dad! Don’t hold me. I need to run back; he’ll be scared without me.’

‘I’ll go. You need to go tell his mum what’s going on.’ He’d be more than happy never to have Ellie know about this, but just in case her son did end up injuring himself, it was the only responsible thing to do. ‘And show her where the tree is.’

Toto nodded. ‘Oh, OK.’ But, as she tried to dart off towards the farmhouse, he yanked her to a halt again.

‘But do me a favour.’

‘Yes, Dad?’ She waited for his instructions, total and utter trust radiating from her.

And he got light-headed.

He knew Toto’s complete faith in him was unlikely to last much longer, but it was still a heady feeling for a man who had spent the first twenty-one years of his life convinced he could never do anything right. He’d strived for the last thirteen years never to abuse Toto’s trust, but he was going to have to blur the lines a bit today, to ward off a punitive lawsuit.

‘Take your time getting Josh’s mum to the Clubhouse,’ he said. ‘I want to have Josh down before she gets there.’

‘OK, Dad.’ Toto nodded, her acceptance of the instruction unquestioning as she sped off to find Ellie.

He jogged off towards the forest, hoping like hell the boy hadn’t already fallen off the tree and broken his bloody neck.

It took him less than five minutes to get to the Clubhouse. A simple A-frame design he’d built two summers ago in a hundred-year-old horse chestnut near the edge of the coppice woods with Toto’s help – or rather hindrance. He hadn’t given much thought at the time to the access. Toto could climb like a monkey and would probably have been able to get up the damn tree without the aid of the boards he’d nailed into the trunk. And as the thing had been built precisely so she’d have a refuge from the younger kids when she needed it, the ladder, such as it was, had been an afterthought.

He regretted that decision big time when he spotted Ellie’s son stapled to the trunk – a good twenty-five feet off the ground.

How had he got up that high before he froze?

And how was he going to get the kid down? Although the boy wasn’t exactly light for his age – he looked about twice as wide as Toto – Art would probably still have been able to sling him over his shoulder. But no way would those boards take the weight of both of them, assuming of course the kid would let him carry him. From the death grip he had on the board, Art figured he was going to have a hell of a time even getting the boy to let go.

Which left only one solution. He would have to talk him down.

Wonderful. Because he was so good at conversation.

‘Hey!’ he shouted up and then winced, as the boy nodded, butting his forehead into the trunk with a hollow smack. ‘It’s Josh’ isn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Sir?

Was that an American thing? He’d never been called ‘sir’ in his life. Not even by the bank manager.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the boy continued and Art winced again at the plaintive, terrified whimper. ‘I got stuck and now I can’t get down.’ More tremors wracked the kid’s body and Art lifted his arm, suddenly worried he might shake himself right off the tree.

‘You don’t have to be sorry, Josh. Happens to the best of us.’

He climbed the rungs, ignoring the give in each one and hoping he didn’t end up breaking his own bloody neck.

‘I won’t do it again, sir. I promise,’ the boy said, sounding more miserable than Toto when she had to do maths homework.

‘Let’s not worry about next time yet.’ He reached the boy. ‘I’m right here beneath you, Josh.’ He stared at the rungs above the boy’s feet, partially hidden by his legs and torso. One of the rungs was a little longer than the others, and if Art eased himself up carefully, he could hold on to it and effectively cradle the kid. Maybe that would help with his fear? Knowing that he’d be caught if he did let go.

‘You should get my mom,’ the boy said. ‘She’ll know what to do. And she wouldn’t want me bothering you.’

‘I’m here now, so I might as well help.’ And the last thing he wanted was Josh’s mother finding her son in this state. Forget about bothering him, she’d probably murder him. ‘I’m going to put my arms around you, Josh. And hold on to the rung under your belly, OK? So I can catch you if you fall.’

The boy nodded, headbutting the trunk again.

Art grasped the rung and hauled himself up, until his chest was resting securely against the boy’s back. The child’s whole body trembled as if he were in a high wind.

The kid was absolutely terrified.

Then Art heard the whimpers. Craning his neck, he could see the side of the boy’s face. The silent tears leaked out and dripped down to disappear into the roll of fat where he had pressed his chin into his neck.

‘Don’t cry, Josh. You’re OK, I’ve got you.’ Balancing carefully, he lifted one hand to pat the boy’s back, and felt the vibrations, and the heat of the boy’s body through the thin cotton.

‘Please don’t tell Toto,’ the boy said.

‘Don’t tell Toto what?’

‘That I cried. I don’t want her to think I’m lame as well as fat.’

The boy wasn’t exactly thin, but hearing him call himself fat in that sadly accepting voice had a shaft of anger shooting through Art.

‘She won’t think that,’ he said, because he knew his daughter. She didn’t judge people by their appearances. ‘But if we get down before she gets back, she won’t even know.’

‘How will I get down?’

Good question. There wasn’t a lot of room to manoeuvre. ‘Do you think you could move down a step, while I stay in place?’

He heard the sound of swallowing. The shaking was still pretty pronounced. ‘I’ll try.’

‘Good boy,’ Art said. He didn’t usually bother with positive reinforcement with Toto. But with this kid, he had the feeling it was required.

After what felt like ten hours, but was probably only ten seconds, they’d negotiated one rung down.

He lavished the boy with more praise, the relief loosening his tongue more than usual. The stillness of the summer air seemed eerie as Art waited to hear the boy’s mother crashing through the undergrowth ready to issue an injunction. But as they spent an eternity inching their way down the ladder, one tortuous rung at a time, until Art could finally step onto the ground – the sound never came.

Good girl, Toto. She must be escorting Ellie to the Clubhouse via Plymouth.

‘You can let go now, Josh.’ Relief surged through him as he grabbed the boy round the waist and lifted him the rest of the way down. ‘Well done.’

The boy huffed, and then to Art’s astonishment wrapped his arms tight around Art’s midriff and buried his head against his sternum.

‘Thank you, sir. Thank you so much.’ The words were muffled against Art’s overalls. ‘You saved my life.’

Containing his surprise – Toto had never been a big hugger – Art cupped the boy’s shoulders to ease him back. ‘No thanks necessary. You saved yourself.’

The boy loosened his hold to gaze up at Art. He had a dusty green smear across his cheek and red indentation marks on his forehead. Truth be told, he looked a mess, but then he smiled. His eyes were hazel, with flecks of green in them, and his round face was impossibly young and open, but, in that moment, Art could see the resemblance to his mother — which was weird, because Art was fairly sure he could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’d seen Ellie smile her real smile — as opposed to her tight smile, or her sarcastic smile, or her you-are-such-anarsehole smile.

But that rare real smile had been exactly like her son’s. It had made her eyes shine, as if someone had lit a furnace behind them.

‘I didn’t think I could, but I did, sir.’

‘Yes, you did.’ Art patted the boy on the shoulder, relieved when Josh let go of him. ‘But you don’t have to call me “sir”. It makes me feel a hundred years old.’

The furnace behind the boy’s eyes flared and he giggled. The childish chuckle made Art feel for a moment as if he were lit from within too.

And that’s when he heard the sound of someone charging through the forest, from the opposite direction to the farmhouse. That would be Ellie and Toto, back from Plymouth.

‘Josh, Josh, are you OK?’

Ellie catapulted from the wooded path that led down to the millpond. Her hair flew out behind her where it had escaped its knot. Even Toto, who was fast as a whippet, was struggling to keep up with mother bear come to rescue her cub.

Josh stepped back out of his arms as Ellie rushed past him to grab her son’s shoulders. ‘Thank God you’re safe.’ She stroked his cheek and then touched the abrasions on his forehead. ‘What happened to your face?’

‘It’s OK, Mom. It doesn’t hurt.’

A blush had suffused Josh’s cheeks.

Ellie was totally overreacting, and she was embarrassing the boy. Her son was twelve, not two. Art figured it was none of his business, though, as she crushed Josh to her bosom, running her hand over his hair. She peered at the treehouse, then fired a glare at Art that could laser stone.

‘What was he doing up there? He’s afraid of heights.’ Her glare travelled back to the treehouse. ‘And that thing’s a bloody death trap.’ Then the glare hit Toto. ‘What were you trying to do, kill him? Or just humiliate him?’

Toto shook her head, her eyes popping wide, but remained mute. Art figured she had to be in shock, because his daughter was usually incredibly hard to shut up.

‘Mom, I wanted to go up there,’ Josh offered in Toto’s defence. ‘It’s a clubhouse and it’s cool.’

Maybe the boy was scared of heights, but he only seemed embarrassed by his mother in full Valkyrie mode. Art gave the boy points for bravery, because the woman looked ready to commit murder.

The killer glare shot back to him. ‘Why does it not surprise me that your daughter is as much of a sadist as you used to be?’

Crap, she’d just made it his business.

*

‘Chill out, Ellie.’

‘Chill out?’ Ellie hissed, the obese gymnasts ready to explode out of her ears.

This man and his vicious little minion had nearly killed her son. Not to mention taken her on a trek across most of Wiltshire when she was so exhausted she was ready to faceplant for a week.

She’d chill Art Dalton right into the freezer cabinet if he wasn’t careful.

‘I will not chill out. And the name’s not Ellie, it’s Eloise to you.’

His brows wrinkled. Fine, maybe it sounded a bit pompous. She didn’t care.

‘OK, Eloise.’ He rolled the name off his tongue as if it were the punchline to a particularly unfunny joke. ‘There’s no need to flip out.’ He swung a hand towards Josh, who had wriggled out of her arms and was standing beside Art’s evil minion. The two children edged closer to Art, as if he were the sane dependable adult in this scenario.