The Grand Reopening of Dandelion Café

Jenny Oliver

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Copyright

Chapter One

The cafe was closed. Behind the white writing on the windows and the little red chequered half-curtains, she could see the faint outline of booth seats and a counter far in the distance. A blackboard had been pulled inside, chalk letters that started big and got smaller as the writer ran out of space advertised milkshakes, best breakfast on the island, coffee for a pound fifty and cherry pie with custard.

Annie White never had it with custard. She had her cherry pie the way her dad had had it, with cream. Just enough to make a swirl in the cherry juices. Just enough to dampen the pastry but not enough to melt the sugar crystals on the lattice. Just enough to sweeten the bitterness of the cherries. But her dad always ate it with a fork. She never understood that. Why eat a pie with a fork when you can use a spoon?

‘I like this noise,’ he’d say, as the pastry cracked against the side of his fork.

Annie would frown and shake her head like he was a fool. Mouth full of cherries, bittersweet, plump like pillows, the weird feeling of the skin popping between her teeth, she’d say, ‘You should try it with a teaspoon. You won’t regret it. It makes it last longer.’

Her dad would return her frown.

‘You don’t get enough per spoonful,’ her brother would say as he shovelled his in at the speed of light, with cream, custard and, if he could swing it with Enid who owned the place, Neapolitan ice cream.

‘No one asked you,’ Annie would turn her back on him.

He’d scoff a laugh, cherry juice staining his teeth pink.

And invariably her mum would appear, fresh from her night shift as a hospital nurse, order a black coffee, give her dad the list of things he needed to fix around the house that weekend, and tell them off for bickering. Annie and her brother would look at each other over their Cokes and snigger and their dad might wink. It was just a normal Saturday morning. But at the time it was sitting at the scratched plastic table of the cafe, hoovering up cherry pie and having the best time in the world.

Annie tried the door.

Of course it was locked. This wasn’t the eighties. No one left a door open here any longer. She pulled up the collar of her mac. The sun was that early spring morning height in the sky that made her think of walking to school. After the arctic winter they’d had, she found herself barely able to trust the warmth of the sun – constantly surprised to see it there in the sky, beaming down on her, trying to make her shrug her coat off and pause to put her face up to the rays.

But with the morning spring sunshine nearly always came the cool mist and the humidity that wreaked havoc with her teenage hair and was doing the same now. The damp that slipped like tentacles down her back, rising up from the river and threading its way round her like a twister.

She paused for a second to smell the air; the unmistakable scent of river water and dewy grass that mixed with the chiselled wood shavings from the boatyard and the engine oil from the motorboats and generators to engulf her in a smell so familiar she almost couldn’t detect it. Like the clock that had ticked so long in her flat that she no longer heard it.

Peering in the window again, she narrowed her view with her hands against the glass, there were cups on the draining board. A jar with ‘Tips’ written in felt-tip and Sellotaped to the side. Newspapers stacked up on an odd-looking cupboard with only one door. Every table had a red and a brown sauce bottle and a dispenser for those waxy napkins that never cleaned anything. If she squinted she could see the lino on the booth seats, ripped and stuck together in places with Gaffer tape. When she exhaled, her breath steamed up the window and she took a step back. Looking up she saw the sign, same as always, hanging motionless at an angle, pushed back by the storm of ’86 and never forced straight. Dandelion Cafe written in scrolled white writing over a picture of a hand clutching a bunch of the yellow weeds, the paint scratched and faded, and marked with bird poo. Next to the sign, the torn fabric from the awning hung like ribbons and the windows in the flat above had a rug pinned up as curtains.

‘Anyway, it’s yours now,’ her mother had said on the phone the week before. ‘The cafe.’

‘I know.’ Annie barely knew what day it was she’d been working so hard, but she did know the Dandelion Cafe was hers and she’d been waiting for this phone call. Her father had left it to her in his will, on the understanding that Enid, his own father’s very best friend, would have it until she didn’t want to run it any more.

‘I didn’t see you at the funeral,’ her mum carried on.

‘That’s because I only popped in, Mum, and sat at the back; I didn’t want to make a fuss. Just say goodbye to Enid.’ An email popped up on Annie’s computer screen as she was on the phone, checking she was going to meet her deadline. She swivelled her chair round so she was facing the other way. She was in the middle of the biggest design job she’d ever taken on, one that she didn’t really have capacity for so had put in a huge quote, assuming they’d decline. When they accepted she’d had a momentary flutter that she would finally be able to pay off her mortgage – and in doing so, put the past behind her – but the flutter was short-lived since she’d been locked in her flat ever since, drinking too much tea and making her eyes go funny from the amount of screen time. Taking the half a day out for the funeral had meant working all night, but Enid had been like a surrogate granny; tiny, ferocious, terrifying but marvellous. She smoked Marlboro Reds – and Cuban cigars on her birthday – drank red wine throughout the day, wore great patterned shawls and black jumpsuits, every conceivable colour of Crocs and bare feet. With a face like a little raisin and wrinkles so deep they carved up her face like a ski-slope, she must have been pushing ninety but never admitted to being more than seventy-five.

Enid had invented the famous Cherry Pie recipe and spent hours in the orchard behind the cafe tending to the cherry trees. When Annie was a kid, Enid would do things like announce an annual dandelion day, usually in early June, when she felt the little yellow weeds were at their brightest – a golden carpet on the orchard floor. They’d pick as many bunches as they could while above them the white blossom of the cherries shone like snow. As she put them in jam jars on the cafe tables, Enid would tell Annie and her friends despicable stories that made Annie nearly fall off her seat with laughter, while her own daughter, Martha, rolled her eyes at their inappropriateness. But ask Enid anything about herself, about maybe her life before Martha, and she would shut down like a Transformer. Her face would change. Her eyes would dull. And Annie would feel like she did when it thundered as a kid and it felt like the roof shook.

‘Well, we had a lovely party in her honour the next day. Lots of food and lots and lots of wine and, oh Annie, the snowdrops are out and the blossom is just starting, just the odd tree, and so we had lights strung up and a bit of a dance and then we scattered her ashes, just next to your father’s, in the cherry orchard. It was lovely. Martha read a poem and then we all went to the cafe for a cup of tea.’

Annie remembered the very same thing happening at her father’s funeral. Except at his she’d been left with not only a great, gaping hole of exquisite sadness, but also a sense of utter frustration that she had been on the verge, on the cusp, so close to paying him back, of surprising him with the fact that he could have the money back he’d used to bail her out, but then he had died. Poof. Gone. Taken. And he had never known.

‘Annie?’

‘Yes, Mum.’

‘Don’t get your hopes up. About the cafe. It’s gone a bit, well, rack and ruin springs to mind.’

‘Mum.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m not coming home to run a cafe. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Of course, darling. Of course.’ There was a pause. ‘But I’m assuming you’re going to come and just take a quick peek?’

Annie glanced back to her computer. Ten new emails. Three about the current project. The rest about the others that she’d taken on concurrently. She rubbed her eyes.

‘I have to go, I have to work. I’ve kind of over-promised myself.’

‘Well when will we see you?’

‘I don’t know. I have so much to do.’

‘Well it would be useful to know, sweetheart, because we’re doing a Come Dine With Me on Saturday and I’ll need to know whether to set another place. I lost last time to the bloody Senior Sister at work so I’m all out to win this one.’

Formed by a tributary off the Thames, in leafy West London, accessed only by a wooden footbridge, was the island Annie once called home. Quirky, odd, damp, secluded, Cherry Pie Island was a haven of artists’ shacks, houseboats, narrow lanes with ramshackle gardens overflowing with hollyhocks, a recording studio, boathouse, pub, a smattering of shops, a much-contested new-build development, and, of course, the Dandelion Cafe, where she now stood, a week too late for her mum’s Come Dine With Me evening.

Annie’s sleep patterns had been so disturbed by the now-complete work deadline that when she’d woken up at six she’d just got in the car. It was a half-hour drive from her Hampstead flat at this time in the morning, with no other cars on the road and now, as she yawned, she wished that she’d rolled over in bed and tried for a little more sleep.

At the end of the road she could see the sun ripple off the river in rings; swans gliding, brilliant white in the early-light; the pub garden twinkling with dew on the vine leaves; butter-yellow crocuses dotted along the path like goblets; the sounds in the still air of dogs barking, rowing blades on the water, a motorboat engine, the milk van. She took a step back to let it pass, and as it pulled in just past the cafe the same old milkman, Mr Lewis, jumped out and heaved up a crate of silver-topped bottles. She could barely believe he was still alive. He’d looked about eighty when she’d been little. The most miserable man on the island.

‘This place yours now I hear,’ he muttered as he laboriously hauled a crate of rattling milk bottles from the back of the van. ‘Make yourself useful. Thank you,’ he said as he thrust them at her. ‘Poisoned chalice,’ he added with a nod up towards the cafe.

‘Erm.’ Annie frowned, struggling under the weight of the unexpected milk crate, and feeling she should defend the cafe against his notoriously depressing point of view. ‘It could have potential,’ she said.

He laughed. ‘There’ll be a board on it by the end of the month I don’t doubt. You’ll have run a mile.’

He drove off at the two miles per hour that milk vans can drive while Annie was still trying to formulate a reply. The irritating point was he was probably right.

As she adjusted the milk crate in her arms she glanced to her left and paused for a second, catching sight of her very favourite view.

The cherry trees.

Planted on a slight hill at the back of the cafe, the ancient trees stood skew whiff and higgledy-piggledy. Branches like nets catching clouds from the sky, buds poised to pop in white bunches, a carpet of lush grass and wild flowers, snowdrops and crocuses, and little blue tits and chaffinches dancing from one perch to the next. The trees closest to her were so old and set now at such precarious angles, it was like their tired old branches were taking a rest on whatever they could find – their boughs propped up on the crumbling stone wall that hemmed them in, some tangled together like arms linked for support, one leaning on a huge sycamore that shaded the back yard of her cafe. This was the view on all the postcards they sold at The Cherry Pie General Store. And Annie adored it. It was the view that made her tilt her head to the side and wish she was ten years old and dressed in the new summer outfit her mum would buy her every year on a trip to London. Or maybe be seventeen and walking tipsily from one of the parties at the rowing club with the strokeman of the 1st VIII, feeling the back of his hand as it grazed against hers as the sun came up, or just lying in her bikini drinking 7Up and getting pissed off with her brother for spraying the hose at her.

From where she stood she could see, as her mother had said, that in patches here and there, from the big footballs of buds had burst candy floss blossom, iridescent, and so beautiful it was easy to see why some of the trees were just too eager to wait.

Chapter Two

‘You take our milk?’

Annie turned to see a man pull up on a moped. He’d pulled off his helmet and gave his hair a quick ruffle before reaching in his pocket for a packet of Camel Lights. She guessed he was Italian, maybe Spanish, dark skin, broken nose, and a long face that looked like it never smiled.

‘Yes,’ she said, looking down at the crate of milk and then at him with an expression that said, Why would anyone want to steal this much milk.

He shrugged. ‘Si. As long as we are clear,’ he said, before getting off the bike and strolling over to the door of the cafe and unlocking it.

Annie looked back at the milk, then at the wonky cafe sign, then at the open door. It hadn’t actually occurred to her that the place was still trading.

She followed the guy in, looking around as he switched on the lights, the tea urn, the radio. Fluorescent strip lights flickered as Magic FM boomed to life.

‘You work here?’ she called out as she saw him flick his cigarette out the back window and hang his denim jacket up on the hook in the kitchen.

‘No. I am just breaking in,’ he returned the expression she’d given him earlier about the milk. ‘With the key.’

‘I’m Annie,’ she said, sliding the milk onto the cracked Formica countertop and holding her hand out.

‘Good for you,’ he replied, tying a black and white bandana round his head. ‘You’re too early for breakfast. We don’t open for ten minutes.’

Annie had to stifle a smile, backing up and taking a seat in one of the booths with four plastic chairs bolted to the floor. Yesterday’s paper was on the table. She turned to the back and started the crossword while she waited for the time to tick away.

At two minutes to nine a scruffy-looking boy cycled up, threw his bike against the window and loped inside bringing a cool breeze with him. He must have been about sixteen. Awkward-looking and gawky, like he couldn’t quite handle the fact he might be quite attractive. Not chocolate box, but a combination of thick, floppy hair, big wide eyes and heavy eyebrows that worked to give him a handsome moodiness and baby-faced innocence that teenage girls found irresistible. Underneath his denim shirt he wore a Kinks T-shirt. His jeans were ripped everywhere, not artfully, but because he looked like he couldn’t be bothered to buy a new pair. And his trainers were like Marty McFly’s in Back to the Future. He made Annie smile just looking at him.

Chucking his rucksack in the corner he pulled an apron off the hook, swiped the unwashed mugs from the countertop and started to fill the sink with water. It was a second before he noticed Annie and the sight of her made him glance nervously at the guy in the kitchen. When he didn’t seem to pay any attention to either of them, the boy took his lead and blanked her completely.

Annie kept on doing her crossword.

Five past nine she sat back in her seat and said, ‘Any chance I could have a cup of coffee?’

The boy looked terrified. The guy in the back shrugged.

‘Black. One sugar.’

‘There’s sugar on the table,’ the boy said.

‘OK, just a black coffee then,’ Annie replied.

He scuffed about banging the coffee machine and grinding some beans.

It was maybe quarter past when he set the chipped mug down in front of her and said, again, ‘Sugar’s on the table.’

The door opened and slammed. A woman in her late sixties strode in. Apron already tied under her bosom. Hair like an electric shock. Face like a Bassett Hound; droopy and eyes sliding away. ‘Well, well, well. I wondered when you’d show up.’

‘Hi, Martha,’ Annie folded the paper up and stood up from her chair, awkward because it didn’t push back so her knees had to stay slightly bent. She decided to step out from the table completely.

‘We’re doing just fine,’ Martha said, walking straight past her. ‘Just fine. We don’t need anything. Ludo. Aren’t we doing just fine?’

The guy in the back, who was sizzling bacon in a pan, a cigarette smoking in an ashtray on the windowsill, gave a thumbs-up.

Annie licked her lips. She walked over to the counter and folded her arms so she could lean against it. The boy looked nervously between her and Martha. ‘Who’s running the place?’ Annie asked.

‘Me. Ludo. Who do you think? The same people who have been running it for the last ten years. Mum couldn’t do it. She sat where you’re sitting. And we’ve been fine. Just fine,’ Martha hung her bag up on one of the hooks and took a pad from the stack by the till. ‘Just fine. I told your mother to just leave us to it,’ she said as she walked away to serve two men who’d trudged in, leant their fishing gear up against the window and were sitting at the booth furthest from the counter, mud dripping off their wellie boots onto the lino, a black labrador flat-out in the aisle.

‘OK,’ Annie said, and pushing off the counter turned and went back to her seat and her surprisingly good cup of coffee. Sitting down she glanced around the place, the sun streaming in through the dusty windows, surreptitiously taking in the cracks in the ceiling, the spiders’ webs, the wonky pictures and dreadful paintings, the dirty path on the lino where years of feet had trudged up to the counter, the fake flowers on every table. She picked hers up and turned it upside down, the flowers stayed where they were, glued into their vase.

She was just examining the plastic menu, the laminated corner coming unstuck and peeled apart by fiddling fingers, when the bell above the door chimed and someone else walked in.

Annie glanced up, expecting another of the motley crew of waiting staff, but paused when she caught sight of the man elbowing the door closed. Tall, serious-looking, he pulled off aviator sunglasses and slid them into the neck of his dark-green T-shirt. It was the colour of seaweed, the sleeves bleached by the sun. He was wearing grey marl tracksuit bottoms, rolled up to reveal tanned, sinewy calves and flip-flopped feet that were still damp. He’d clearly just come off the water, probably been rowing or maybe paddle boarding.

She didn’t realise she’d been holding her breath until he’d strolled past her and then she had to exhale really slowly so that no one realised she’d stopped breathing.

‘Morning,’ he said to the boy when he got to the counter.

When no one replied, Annie glanced over her shoulder, intrigued. She just caught the boy hanging his head and sloping out the back to the kitchen. Martha moved into his place and nodded to the man.

‘Usual, Matthew?’

Matthew… Annie realised she knew exactly who he was. Two years older than her brother at school, he’d been head boy, won loads of sport trophies. She remembered school assembly, when all the first-formers, her included, would sit cross-legged staring up at him in awe as he sauntered on stage to collect his prizes, all cool and terrifyingly grown-up. She couldn’t remember his surname. Watson, maybe. Windsor? She could remember the scandal though, he’d got Pamela Chambers pregnant and she’d gone into labour in the middle of her physics A-level.

Annie watched as he took a seat on one of the faux-leather covered barstools, nodded to Martha and said, ‘Yeah and I’ll have a bacon sandwich. Heard anything from the new boss yet?’

Annie flipped her head back round as quick as she could as she saw Martha raise her eyebrows in her direction.

There was silence behind her. She was just wondering whether to stand up and say something when she realised there was a mirror on the furthest wall from her and she could see Matthew reflected in it.

As Martha bustled back into the kitchen, tearing off the bacon sandwich order for Ludo, she watched as he upended the sugar pourer into his espresso, granules cascading down till it seemed they might overflow. When he stirred it she was reminded of her dad, the teaspoon having trouble through the thickness of the liquid. As he took a sip she watched him watch the boy, his feet tapping against the bars on the stool, his eyes hooded, and narrowed.

When the boy came over to take her cup away she realised the two of them looked almost the same. Same eyebrows, same look like there was a whole world going on behind the slit of eyes that they allowed you to see.

Was this the physics A-level baby? ‘Are you two related?’ she asked as casually as she could while he wiped down the Formica.

The boy looked back at the guy at the counter, shrugged and then walked off back to the kitchen.

‘Wow,’ Annie blew out a breath. She’d forgotten how closed the island could be. The gossip was there, bubbling away beneath the surface, but fiercely guarded, like whispers between leaves. It was her fault for prying. She hated it when people brought up her past, so why had she tried to burrow into his? She sat back, ashamed of herself, and watched as a couple of tourists arrived with a guide book. Sitting down they asked tentatively whether the cafe still served the famous cherry pie.

Cherry pie.

Annie watched as the boy brought out two bowls of it on a tray. Custard in a jug and cups of tea with saucers. She watched as he rested the tray on the side of the table and handed the couple their pie. Watched the steam rise and twine with the sunlight. Watched as they closed their Lonely Planet and each took a bite, from a spoon, she noted.

The woman shut her eyes and put her hand on her chest and gave a little moan of delight, and the boy’s lips allowed a hint of a smile. As if even the most bored of waiters couldn’t disguise his pride in this sticky, sour cherry pie.

‘Hey, ’scuse me?’ Annie caught him as he loped past her.

‘Yeah?’ he said, the tray hanging empty by his side, his eyes narrowed at her.

‘Can I have a slice of pie?’

He shrugged. ‘Yeah.’

Annie smiled. ‘OK then, thanks.’ He began to walk away. ‘Oh, hang on, no custard. Do you have cream?’

‘Dunno, I’ll check.’

As he disappeared into the back she heard Ludo call from the kitchen. ‘Turn it up. Turn it up. This is my favourite.’

The yelling startled her and she twisted round to see Matthew leaning over the counter and twisting the knob on the radio so that Shirley Bassey’s ‘Goldfinger’ belted out into the room.

‘Ahh.’ Ludo stood with the spatula clasped to his chest. ‘I love it. I love her. River, do you love Shirley yet? Stop. Listen. Listen to that. Ahhhh. You must appreciate that volume. That depth. Your band, they could benefit from listening to Shirley.’

The boy blushed and sniggered from behind his fringe. Ludo whacked him with a tea towel and made him laugh.

Annie rested her chin in her hands and took it all in via the big mirror. The fact the poor kid was called River and then the way Matthew was watching, lips closed, muscles in his cheeks taut like he was clenching his teeth, feet no longer tapping on the base of the stool, hand stilled on the page he was about to turn on his book.

Was he jealous, she wondered. But then he glanced up and caught her eye in the mirror and she dropped her eyes to her phone as quick as she could. She could feel him still watching her. He kept his head turned her way, kept his eyes on her in the mirror, almost like a punishment for her snooping. His moody, dark gaze fixed on her blushing, embarrassed face.

‘One cherry pie.’ It landed in front of her with a slap. ‘We haven’t got any cream.’ River put down a jug of milk instead and walked away.

Annie stared down at the bowl. The same off-white china with brown flower trim round the edge. The familiarity of the sight made her breath catch in her throat. The wobbly lattice across the top, the cherries glistening, dark like velvet, sticky and squished. The thinnest layer of frangipane just coating the base, enough to sweeten with a hint of almond, Enid would say, but not so much that you would know it was there. Everything you’re doing is to bring out the best in the cherries. Let them do the work. And then sit back and watch.

Nabbing her teaspoon from her coffee cup, Annie was just about to take a bite when the bell above the door went again and her mother sat down in the seat opposite.

She was accompanied by Valtar, her lovely Latvian husband, an accountant and occasional Elvis impersonator. He’d come to the island a couple of years ago to perform at the pub and heroically taken on the job of wooing Annie’s mother. She often wondered if he knew what he was getting himself into, but he still gazed at her with adoring eyes and, for Annie, there was nothing more important than that. It was what her dad would have wanted. That her mum would be loved and looked after. He hadn’t let her mother so much as touch a bill or take any part in the business and in doing so had left her floundering when he passed away.

‘Sweetheart, you’re here. Why didn’t you phone me? I had to hear it from the bloody milkman, and you can imagine how delighted he was to pass on news that I didn’t know.’ Winifred Birzgalis (née White) huffed as she glanced at Annie over the shabby laminated menu.

Before she could reply, her brother Jonathan and his wife Suzi, their twin nine year olds, Gertrude and Wilbur, and their dog Flash, a tiny fluffy thing that was some expensive hybrid and terrified of everything appeared as well.

‘Shove over, Sis.’ Jonathan jabbed her between the ribs so she’d move chairs and then sat down with Wilbur on his lap. ‘Wil’s starving, can he have your pie?’

Chapter Three

Annie pushed the bowl of cherry pie over to Wilbur and he started scooping it into his mouth like he’d never eaten before in his life.

‘He’s always hungry,’ sighed Suzi as she pulled up a chair and sat at the end of the table. Immaculate as always, she was dressed in diamanté jeans, a jumper with a zebra sequinned on the front and a jacket with a huge fur collar. ‘Have you said thanks, Wil?’

‘Thanks, Aunty Annie,’ Wilbur said, voice muffled with pie.

Annie nodded, feeling herself shrink back into the corner of her seat. Overwhelmed by so much family. She blamed the pie. If she hadn’t ordered it then she’d have left fifteen minutes ago.

‘Aunty Annie?’ Gertrude said in the kind of up-talking singsong voice that they use in Gossip Girl.

‘Yes, Gerty?’ Annie adored her niece. She was naughty and funny and like a quirky little munchkin.

‘Granny Winifred said the other day that she thought I might be like you and Daddy pulled a face and said that he hoped not.’

Suzi gave an embarrassed giggle but Jonathan glanced up from his menu and barked a laugh as if it was the funniest joke he’d ever heard.

Valtar put his newspaper down. ‘Is not good to be like Annie? What’s wrong with Annie?’

Her mum did a little eye roll and said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with Annie. Not now anyway.’

Annie didn’t say anything, just looked up to see River standing with a huge tray of cappuccinos and pots of tea, clearly intrigued by the chat.

‘She was a nightmare,’ Jonathan said as the drinks were being divvied out. ‘She was married and divorced by the time she was twenty-one. And the less said about that the better. I’d be driving around in a 1956 Jaguar XK140 if Dad hadn’t had to sell it to pay off that disaster.’

Annie blew out a breath. ‘I can’t believe you’re still going on about that car, Jonathan.’

‘I’d like to be like Aunty Annie,’ Gerty said without looking up from her iPad, and banging her trainers against the legs of her chair. ‘I think she’s cool.’

Annie held in a smile but couldn’t help wishing that the conversation wasn’t taking place with River watching, listening.

Jonathan snorted. ‘Yes it’s just all the stuff it took to get to this stage.’

Annie suddenly felt really warm.

‘She was a bit of a terror, darling,’ Winifred said to Valtar.

‘A bit?’ Jonathan frowned as if that was a huge understatement.

River smirked.

‘Life was never dull,’ Winifred appeased.

‘Gerty, sit up straight.’ Suzi leant over and pushed her daughter’s shoulders back so she wasn’t slouched over the iPad.

Annie couldn’t sit there any longer.

‘I have to go to the loo,’ she said, starting to stand. Jonathan sighed because it meant he had to move as well, along with Wilbur.

The bathroom was outside. Through the kitchen and out into a tiny yard that backed onto the cherry orchard. On the ground, scattered over the many pots of herbs and green shoots, the winged seeds of the sycamore still lay where they’d helicoptered down in autumn. Annie didn’t need to go to the loo at all, she needed a moment just to get herself back.

It was always the same. Whatever she did, they’d still just remember her for the bad exam results, the late nights, the cigarette packets stashed in the shed, the teenage stuff that everyone did apart from her bloody brother. The arguments, the parties, the secrets, the mistakes. The marriage. The money.

She thought about her brother, raised as high as the family pedestal would allow without him bashing his head on the ceiling, with his perfect family and his degree from Oxford and his PhD from Cambridge and his GP practice and his comments about how Dad should never have had to bail her out.

Her one regret was not being able to pay that money back. She’d had these fantasies of buying her dad another Jaguar and leading him over the bridge to see it parked by the river, sparkling like the sun catching the waves.

‘You OK?’

Annie jumped when she heard the drawl.

‘Shit! Sorry, you startled me. I was just erm—’ She pointed to the cherry trees. ‘Just, you know, looking.’

The guy from the bar was standing in the doorway. Matthew. She noticed in the daylight how tanned his face was. The lines of his cheekbones rusty with sunburn and his nose freckled. His hair was pushed back from his face, like it was held back with salt water from the sea, brown with dirty-blond streaks.

He didn’t say anything and the silence made her nervous.

‘I just needed a…’ She pointed again to the cherry trees and then, not wanting him to think that she was talking about needing to go to the loo added, ‘I just needed a break.’

‘Understandable,’ he said.

‘I should probably go back inside,’ Annie said, pulling the sleeves down on her sweater and wishing she went to the gym a bit more given the lines of muscle down his arms and legs.

He strolled over to where she was standing looking over the wall at the trees. The slight breeze was making Annie shiver and the branches rub together like little animals were tapping at the bark.

‘So you own this place now?’ he said after a moment.

‘Yeah,’ Annie said with a laugh. ‘Yeah. I’m not sure anyone’s too happy about it.’

He shrugged. ‘They’re just scared.’

‘Of me?’ She shook her head as if the idea was preposterous.

He turned around so his back was leaning against the crumbling wall and raised a brow to suggest she was deliberately misunderstanding him.

Annie looked from him down to her shoes and then out across at the orchard. She spotted one of the trees that was about to burst. Tomorrow, maybe the next day, it would be full colour.

‘You gonna close the place?’ he asked.

She sucked in her bottom lip. A fat wood pigeon landed on one of the branches in front of her making it bend almost to the floor. The pigeon grappled to hold on.

‘I have no idea.’

‘Well you’d better come up with something quick,’ he said. ‘There’s people depending on you.’

Annie was surprised by the sudden queasy feeling she had in her stomach at that comment. As if someone had sliced through her and she’d just fallen to the ground.

‘Have a word with my brother,’ she said, adding a self-deprecating laugh. ‘He’ll assure them that that’s the worst situation to find themselves in. Get new jobs quick!’

Matthew put his hands in his pockets and pushed himself up from the wall with his shoulders. ‘I have very little time for your brother. As far as I can tell it’s his fault there’s that horrific development on the island. On land he’d agreed to sell to me,’ he said before walking away, back towards the door of the kitchen. He paused on the step, turned her way, hands still in his pockets, and he added, ‘I think we’re all hoping you might be a little different.’

Chapter Four

Annie refused her mother’s invitation to stay for dinner. They’d taken a family walk around the island and been back to her mum’s for another cup of tea and now all Annie could think about was going home. Gerty wanted her to go to their house so she could show her her new trampoline but Annie politely declined. Although the look of horror on Suzi’s face at the idea of an un-arranged pop-in had almost been enough to make her take her niece up on the offer.

‘When are you coming back?’ Her mum asked as she stood on the doorstep in her slippers, wrapping her cardie round her against the afternoon chill coming off the river.

‘I’m not sure. I’ve got to tie up some stuff with work. You know?’ Annie ran her hand through her hair, trying to save it from frizzing up in the moisture.

‘I like your hair like that,’ her mum said. ‘Very modern.’

Annie rolled her eyes, reached up self-concisely to touch the shorn edges of her hair. When she’d finished the shareholder document and presented the mortgage company with her stupidly large cheque, she’d decided that maybe now was the time to celebrate. She had finally achieved what she set out to do. No longer would she have to scrimp and save, squirrelling away money, in an attempt to prove herself. When she couldn’t pay her dad back her loan, it seemed vital to put that money into something else. To prove that she wasn’t the flake they all thought her. That she could create a business, she could be a success. She could invest as her father invested.

Why she never mentioned it to anyone still confused her. Especially when Jonathan’s every success was flaunted on the family WhatsApp group. But it felt like this was her little secret that none of them could take from her. She was triumphant. And none of them could tarnish it with their set-in-stone views of her character.

Sending over her finished files she wasn’t ‘Oh, Annie!’, she was Annie White, owner of White Graphics and Illustration, home-owner. For the first time she hadn’t felt like she was masquerading under a flashy title that she’d made up. It actually felt like her. Like she could relax and believe it. So, to celebrate, she’d bought herself a latte from Caffè Nero, one glossy magazine and one trashy one, a whole big round chocolate orange, and then as she was perusing a new scarf in the window of a far-too-expensive boutique she’d seen a girl walk out the salon next door with dip-dyed pink hair and she’d thought, I want pink hair. Or at least new hair. She felt like suddenly she was allowed to let a little bit more of herself back in. She had paid for her mistakes.

‘I’m all yours,’ she’d said to the hairdresser. He’d waffled on about side-swept fringes framing the face, textured ends and on-trend jagged cut layers transforming a traditional pixie cut. When he’d said that white-blonde streaks were very now she’d nodded and told him to go for it.

And when she’d left the salon, the man from the deli had wolf-whistled and given her a free cannoli.

But now, embarrassed by her mum’s attention, Annie lied and said, ‘It’s been like this for ages.’

‘Well I haven’t seen you for ages.’

‘It’s a teenager’s haircut,’ her brother called out as he came from the living room to the door and stood just behind her mum. ‘I don’t know what your clients think.’

Annie sucked in a breath. He could make her feel tiny. Like a snail on the doorstep looking up at his looming figure.

‘Anyway, look, Annie, before you go, you need to sort that business out. It’s just haemorrhaging money.’

‘Jonathan, I’ll deal with it.’

‘You can’t just ignore it, Annie. Get it sold. Better yet, tear it down.’ He crossed his arms in front of him and leant against the door jamb, talking as if there was no other possible opinion than his. ‘It’s not listed, it’s not a conservation area, they’d let you knock it down. If anything it’d be a blessing ‒ give a better view of the cherry trees. I mean, that’s why people come here, isn’t it? There’s better food at the pub, better views of the river. Flog them the cherry pie recipe and your hands are clean. I can do it for you if you want.’

‘Oh yeah, right,’ Annie laughed. ‘You must be joking.’

‘Annie,’ her mum warned.

She watched Jonathan’s nostrils flare as he breathed in through his nose. ‘I got a good price for that land, Annie.’

Annie scoffed. ‘You succumbed to a developer’s charm and you know it.’

The reminder of the land her dad had owned made Annie mad and she had to look away for a moment. Take in the rows of neatly planted mini daffodils that lined the front path and the foxgloves and delphiniums standing tall by the front gate. A lot of people moaned about the gardening conditions on Cherry Pie, too damp to grow anything. But her mother had never had any trouble. Her allotment was the same, competition-worthy vegetables every year without fail. And the Cherry Pie Veg-Off trophy on her mantelpiece year after year.

Jonathan was covering his back, waffling on about bringing the island into the twenty-first century, while Winifred tried to placate the situation. ‘Maybe you should talk to Valtar about the accounts?’ she suggested, waving away Jonathan’s snort of derision that implied the place wasn’t worth a penny.

Annie remembered the reading of the will, where it was revealed that the bulk of her father’s property portfolio had been left to her brother. Most of it she was happy for him to have; the shops in Soho, the restaurant in Vauxhall, the townhouses in Southampton. But the wasteland on the far side of the island, that her dad had been umming and ahhing about what to do with ‒ contemplating everything from a wetland centre to a cinema ‒ Annie had desperately wanted. Her intention being to preserve that land, and his dream. To do something good and beautiful with it. But it had all gone to Jonathan because he was the one they all trusted. He wasn’t the one who’d made the mistakes. He was the one with the bloody PhD. She’d ram that certificate up his nose if it wasn’t framed in his surgery.

And what had he done? He’d been duped by a smarmy developer and flogged the plot in a deal that still made people wince when they talked about it. Her father had been a wheeler-dealer, no bones about it. Alan Sugar crossed with Arthur Daley. He chucked a bit of money here. A bit there. Lackadaisical with a streak of ruthlessness. Built up an empire during the week based on shady deals done in the back rooms of pubs and cafes off the beaten track. Places where she sat at the counter and ate ice cream while he went out the back for a meeting that seemed, to little Annie, to involve mainly wild hand gestures and oodles of red wine. But however shady, it was all done with a heart of gold, a Robin Hood moral compass that made him continually bat away the very developers that her brother had fallen straight in with. A generosity of spirit that made people nod to him in the street as he walked past. Had people turning up on their doorstep at all hours needing help with their problems. He was like the unofficial mayor and while he was alive the island just knew it was safe.

Sadly, the only thing her brother had inherited from her father was his stubborn self-belief. The rest ‒ the entrepreneurial skill, the emotional intelligence, the Lady Luck chancer gene ‒ had skipped him completely. It was Valtar who had diplomatically stepped in and saved the rest of the portfolio. Securing sensible deals at good rates when the market was buoyant.

‘OK, I’ll talk to Valtar.’ Annie nodded.

‘He’ll just tell you what I’m telling you,’ Jonathan sighed.

Annie cracked. ‘Oh for goodness sake. You’re so annoying. You’re a doctor, you know nothing about how to run a cafe.’

‘Oh and you do?’ he scoffed.

‘Please don’t argue.’ Winifred held her hands up to quiet the pair of them. ‘Remember, Annie, Dad wouldn’t have minded what you do with it, so don’t feel under any pressure.’

Suzi had come to the door with the yapping dog in her arms. ‘We’ve got to go, hun,’ she said, stroking Jonathan’s arm.

‘Me too,’ Annie said, flicking the flicky hair that she was completely un-used to behind her ear, for ever ruined by Jonathan’s teenage haircut comment, ‘Thanks for having me.’

She heard her brother sigh as he walked away from the door and it reminded her so much of when they were kids that she wanted to run back in and shake him. Suzi left with him, the two of them speaking just low enough so Annie couldn’t hear.

‘Aunty Annie, are you going?’ Gerty came running out the door and down the path. Wearing lemon-yellow jeans and a fluffy pink jumper, she looked as sweet as the frosting on a cupcake.

‘Yeah, honey, I have to go back.’

‘I thought you were staying for ever now?’ Gerty said, big blue eyes staring up at her like a guppy.

‘I’m not sure the island could handle me,’ Annie laughed, pushing Gerty’s fringe back so it stuck up at crazy, curly angles and then walking away down the path and through the gate.

‘I’d like you to stay,’ she heard Gerty call from where she stood, and Annie turned so she was walking backwards and waved at the sweet little face.

Then, as she was still walking the wrong way, her attention focused on Gerty, watching as she bounded back into the house, she felt herself collide with a solid wall of person. Felt strong hands steady her as she stumbled.

‘God, sorry,’ she said, turning and trying to get her balance. She found herself staring at the bobbles of an old black woollen jumper. Glancing up, the guy’s face was obscured by the shadow of a baseball cap pulled low, and it took a moment for her to realise it was the man from the cafe, Matthew.

When she’d got her bearings, Annie stood back from his grip, smoothed down her top and said with a half-smile, ‘You following me?’

‘No,’ he replied, deadpan. ‘Buster had to take a pee,’ he said, reaching up to break off a sprig of blossom.

Annie glanced down and saw an ancient-looking pug dog cocking its leg against one of the colourful wooden planters packed full of evergreen shrubs that were dotted along the path between the cherry trees.

‘Nice,’ she said.

‘Well, when you’ve gotta go…’

The evening was just tipping into twilight. Objects had a hazy edge and the streetlights had come on over the path. Old Victorian ones that flickered with moths, their bulbs laced with spiders’ webs.

‘Well I’m walking this way,’ Annie pointed to the path ahead of her that led past the cottages to a patch of parkland that opened out onto the cafe road.

‘Us too,’ Matthew replied, twirling the sprig of blossom between his fingers and clicking for the pug to follow.

‘OK then.’

‘OK.’

In her whole life Annie had never been quite so aware of her breathing. It was like, with every step, that she forgot how to do it. And it seemed so loud. Matthew didn’t seem to be breathing loudly. If anything he was silent. Silent footsteps, silent breathing. Just a presence next to her that she was finding really difficult to ignore. Every couple of steps she glanced his way, but didn’t want to look too obvious so just caught the swing of his arm or the flick of his flip-flops. In the end she looked down at the dog, lumbering along between them, wheezing like it might drop dead any second. Looking at the dog gave her an excuse to look at Matthew’s calves. Tanned the colour of honeycomb, he had a tattoo up the inside of his leg. It looked like waves. No not waves, mountains. Maybe. Annie didn’t have any tattoos, she’d almost had one many times but never had the nerve and worried that she wouldn’t be able to pull it off, but he was managing to pull his off. Like it was part of his skin, like he was born with it.

‘You don’t strike me as a pug dog man,’ she said for something to say, instantly regretting it for its inanity.

Matthew looked down at the floor, clearly holding in a smile. ‘No?’

‘No.’

‘What does a pug dog man look like?’

‘I don’t know. Just not like you,’ Annie rolled her eyes inwardly at the conversation.

‘He’s not mine. He was Enid’s. I seem to have ended up with him.’

‘That’s nice of you.’

‘Not that nice. I couldn’t get rid of him. I tried to convince your mother to have him but he kept escaping and ending up on my doorstep. But it’s OK, I don’t think he has long left to live.’

‘You can’t say that?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’s just there,’ Annie pointed to the dog.

‘He’s a dog.’

‘So?’

Matthew didn’t reply, just raised his eyebrows and looked away with a smirk. Annie couldn’t quite tell if he’d been being serious or not.

‘I didn’t know you’d wanted to buy the wasteland off my brother,’ she said after a while of silence.

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘There’s probably a lot of things you don’t know about me.’

‘That is such an unhelpful answer,’ Annie said, stopping abruptly.

‘Why?’

‘Because I was making conversation. You’re meant to say something like, yes, I’d wanted to preserve it for the next generation and I would have said, me too. Annoying that they built ugly yellow brick houses on it, isn’t it? See, conversation. Now we have to carry on in silence.’

Matthew frowned at her for a moment, then his lips twitched with the hint of a smile. He clicked for the dog and they walked on in silence.

Where the path joined the main road on the island there was a big wooden gate that creaked on its hinges like a horror film. She remembered swinging off it as a kid, her dad pushing it like a swing. Her brother once running up behind her, stopping too late and thwacking her head against it. Both her front baby teeth were left behind in the wood. She was pretty sure the marks were still there, two little indentations, but she certainly wasn’t going to point them out as Matthew stepped forward to open the gate for her. Instead she looked at the width of his shoulders. So broad that his jumper seemed to stretch at the seams. And she looked at the way his hair curled at the nape of his neck, blond flicks that brushed the collar of his jumper.

‘After you,’ he said, a wry smile on his lips like he’d caught her staring.

‘Thanks.’

He tilted his head to one side and said, ‘My pleasure.’

Annie rolled her lips together, tried to think of something clever to say but drew a blank.

‘Well have a good evening,’ Matthew said as he leant over and flicked the lock on the gate.

‘You’re not walking any further?’ Annie frowned. There was nothing else around except the cafe, a couple of shops and the massive new state-of-the-art eco house that was bolted and gated like Fort Knox.

‘Nah, this is me,’ he said, gesturing to the huge oak doors that secured the mansion.

‘You live here?’ She said it before she could stop herself. It was the type of place that featured on Grand Designs or Who Lives In This Amazing Jealous-Worthy Property And How The Hell Do They Afford It?

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Wow.’ Annie was dumbstruck. The front gates loomed almost as high as the sycamore in the orchard next door. The floor-to-ceiling windows of the top part of the house were just visible above the wall and, if she was lucky enough to ever peek through the slatted blinds, it wasn’t hard to imagine what the view would be like. Panoramic. Sky stretching out to infinity. A blanket of blossom from the orchard, fluffy white petals that frothed like ice cream soda, then across to the boat club with its alpine fretwork and pointy roof, then the cusp of the landing stages watching the rowers in their boats, and then out across the river, wide and sparkling, the water just cruising along, taking a break from a hectic winter of storm waves, eddies and floods. Then the big church in town, the high street with the massive green Poundland sign, Starbucks, Carpetright and the McDonald’s golden arches, the patch of park and the lido with its rows of coloured changing huts. He could probably see right the way to London on a clear day; The Shard, The Walkie Talkie, St Paul’s.

‘Well it was nice to meet you…’ he paused with his key in the lock.

‘Annie…Annie White.’ She found herself stumbling over her own name.

‘Matthew. Matt Walker,’ he said, pushing the door open and leaving her with a quick nod of the head.

Chapter Five

‘As in the Matt Walker?’

It was a week later. Annie had spent her evenings at home getting more and more annoyed with emails from her brother urging her to ditch the cafe. Annoyed at the childish reactions he brought out in her. Annoyed with the phone calls from her mum telling her that Jonathan only had her best interests at heart, and in turn annoyed with her father, furious that he wasn’t still here to sort it all out.

It was like they’d all become caricatures. Their actions and reactions stacking up like a pyramid until they’d peaked, setting in stone traits that they’d never be able to grow up or move on from.

At night though, just before she went to bed, she’d have a sneaky Google on her phone of pictures of Matt Walker. There were pages and pages of images. Articles, websites, fan clubs. Someone had put a selection of clips together on YouTube to a Céline Dion song. She giggled into her camomile tea as she watched, snuggled down in her duvet, her threadbare pyjamas frayed at the cuffs and her hair all flat from a quick post-shower blow-dry. The pictures of him looped round and round to ‘My Heart Will Go On’, starting with the action adventure ‒ abseiling from a sheer cliff face in Thailand, ice-picking his way up a vertical glacier, dangling off a boulder that jutted out over a rainforest ‒ and then settling to calmer shots of him on the beach looking moody with his baby son or leaning against his car, cap pulled low. The last picture made her snort into her tea, he was cross-legged on the beach doing yoga with a bandana tied round his head. Annie had done yoga once and had thought about what she was going to have for dinner for most of the class.

Now she was standing on the landing stage of the Cherry Pie Island boat club with Holly Somers, a girl who she’d mostly got into trouble with at school. Except Holly had been far too clever to ever actually get caught and if she had, had managed to talk her way out of every accusation levied against her. With thick brown hair that was always tied back, freckles that multiplied in the sun, barely any make-up, and a wonky little mouth, Holly shouldn’t have been more than OK-looking. But she had these eyes, luminous green like the weeds in the shallows of the river, that stopped people in their tracks, and as she walked past, left a wake of confusion as to why they’d paused. Those eyes could get her away with murder.

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