Summer at The Little Duck Pond Cafe_A gorgeous, heart-warming story of love and new beginnings Read online

  SUMMER AT THE LITTLE DUCK POND CAFÉ

  A gorgeous, heartwarming story of love and new beginnings

  ROSIE GREEN

  Published by Rosie Green

  Copyright © Rosie Green 2018

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons (living or dead), locales or events is purely coincidental.

  Edited by: Cara Armstrong

  Cover design by: Berni Stevens

  FOR MY LOVELY FAMILY

  You inspire me and keep me grounded!

  SUMMER AT THE LITTLE DUCK POND CAFÉ

  This is the second of three short stories in

  The Little Duck Pond Café series

  SPRING AT THE LITTLE DUCK POND CAFÉ

  Coming soon and available for pre-order:

  CHRISTMAS AT THE LITTLE DUCK POND CAFÉ

  Contents

  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

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Dear Reader

  Acknowledgements

  DECEMBER

  CHAPTER ONE

  It’s late afternoon on Christmas Eve and festive shoppers are out in force on Palmerston’s high street. Colourful fairy lights wink from every shop window and the snow that fell the day before adds that perfect festive touch.

  I buy my last gift then begin slip-sliding my way home, laden with bags.

  I’ve always loved Christmas – and now that I have Titch in my life, it’s even more special. She’s eight and I like to think she still believes in Father Christmas. If she suspects it’s Grant and me supplying the presents, she’s definitely not letting on!

  My festive spirit has taken a while to get going this year – but as I round the bend into our cul de sac, my heart lifts thinking of the look on Titch’s face when she opens her gifts in the morning. My shopping bags are full of things I know she’ll love, and I’ve had such a fab time choosing them for her. Her mum died of cancer when Titch was four, and I think my desire to heap wonderful presents on her at Christmas time is a way of making up for the terrible tragedy in her young life.

  Her daddy does the same.

  My heart sinks, thinking of Grant. We moved in together much too quickly – after being together just six months - and now, eighteen months later, the shine has well and truly worn off our relationship. I’ve seen Grant in his true light and it’s not a great picture. The row we had last night was the worst for a while. But I’m determined to stay positive and make sure Titch has the best festive season ever.

  The house looks really cosy from here, all lit up. I can see the faint glow of the silver Christmas tree with its coloured fairy lights by the window in Titch’s bedroom.

  As I draw nearer, I spot something odd in the front garden. Peering through the gloom, I decide it’s too angular a shape to be one of Titch’s snowmen.

  What on earth is it, then?

  A large parcel?

  But why would the postman leave a delivery slap bang in the middle of the front lawn? Especially when it’s inches deep in snow?

  Walking up the driveway, I can see Titch in the living room watching something Christmassy on TV. Grant must be in the kitchen making dinner. After last night’s terrible confrontation, I’m hoping he might have decided to let it lie. But his moods are so unpredictable these days, it’s impossible to judge.

  My greatest worry is that he’s gambling again.

  I always knew he liked a flutter on the horses but I’d no idea, when I moved in with him and Titch eighteen months ago, that he was a seasoned casino goer. He took me along once, in the early days of our relationship and I found it quite a novelty because I hadn’t been to a casino before. But I’m not a risk-taker so it wasn’t really my scene. I remember thinking Grant seemed quite at home there, but I didn’t really think anything of it.

  It was a shock when I found out a year ago that he’d started gambling regularly – large amounts at a time. He said he’d got into the habit of stopping off at the casino on the way home, to unwind after a stressful day at the bank where he worked.

  He promised he’d stop and I was desperate to believe him. But lately, his erratic behaviour has been worrying. Now, whenever he phones to say he’s working late, I immediately think of the casino.

  I take a deep breath and paste on a smile.

  Be positive! Christmas is going to be lovely!

  My heart lurches. I can see now what the shape in the garden looks like.

  A suitcase?

  I step off the path and my boots sink into the snow. I pick up the case. It’s mine and it’s heavy.

  What on earth . . . ?

  Perhaps it’s Titch’s idea of a joke.

  Feeling faintly alarmed, I leave the case where it is, dig out my key and slide it into the lock. Except it won’t go in properly. It seems to be stuck.

  I wiggle it about for a moment then I decide there must be something wrong with either the key or the lock, so I ring the bell.

  No one answers so I ring again.

  Titch must have the TV turned up too loud to hear the bell and Grant might have his music on in the kitchen. Pressing the bell five or six times and making it jangle, I wait for a while then I nip along to peer in the living room window. And right at that moment, the curtains are swished together, effectively blocking me from looking in.

  A pang of worry hits me. What’s going on?

  I start banging on the window, softly at first because I’m still sure there must be a reasonable explanation. When I start banging more loudly, the curtain suddenly twitches open and Titch is there, an anguished expression on her face, staring out at me. She opens her mouth and says something to me - but immediately, Grant appears and moves his daughter firmly from the window and shuts the curtains again. He fiddles with the edges, making sure there’s no gap.

  I stand there, on the doorstep of my home, dazed with disbelief, feeling as if I’m having an out-of-body experience. A cold hand clutches my heart.

  Bending to the letterbox, I push it open and shout through. ‘Grant? Can you let me in, please? It’s freezing out here. What the hell’s going on?’

  There’s only silence. So I shout again, louder this time. Still nothing.

  He’s thrown things in a suitcase, dumped it on the lawn and changed the locks!

  Panic surges up inside me. I really hate Grant at this moment. Not just for what he’s doing to me, but for how poor Titch will be affected by Grant’s ridiculously childish display of anger.

  A couple passing by stare at me and hurry on, clearly not wanting to have any part in a messy domestic dispute. Tears prick my eyes. There’s no point trying the back door. Grant will surely have locked it.

>   I glance back at the suitcase. It looks so incongruous, sitting there on its own in the snow.

  It’s Christmas Eve.

  I’ve got whatever Grant threw in the case for me. But I’ve no idea where I’m going to sleep tonight.

  *****

  ‘The bloody bastard!’ says my best friend, Jules. Her mouth is open in disgust as she tries to comprehend what Grant has done. She looks as incredulous as I felt, standing there on the icy garden path, barricaded out of my own home.

  She reaches for the wine bottle and sloshes more into my glass and I take a huge gulp. The kitchen is warm and inviting after my ordeal in the snow, lamplight gleaming on Jules’s blonde hair. Her daughter, Chloe – Titch’s best friend – is watching Frozen on her TV upstairs, leaving us to talk freely down here.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ I say for about the five hundredth time, still feeling completely dazed. There should be a big fat question mark hanging over my head, like in a cartoon.

  ‘You’ve argued before,’ says Jules, frowning. ‘But he’s never thrown you out.’

  I sigh, running my fingers through my snow-damp hair, which must look like brown rats’ tails. ‘When we rowed this time, I told him I didn’t love him any more. He must have been stewing over it all last night and planning his revenge.’

  She shrugs. ‘You only told the truth. And does he really love you if he can put you out in the snow on Christmas Eve? You can do without the Grants of this world, Jaz. Seriously, you can.’ Seeing the tears spring up, she covers my hand with hers.

  I swallow hard and whisper, ‘Yes, but I’m not sure I can do without Titch.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Much later, after a lot of wine has been drunk and I’ve shed a fair few tears, Jules takes me up to the spare room and says it’s mine for as long as I need it.

  I’m so grateful, but I tell her it won’t be for long because I’m sure Grant will reconsider and decide to forgive me. (Even though I didn’t actually do anything wrong because my ‘affair’ with Johnny at work was all in his head. Johnny is actually gay and has no interest in me at all, except as a friend. But would Grant believe me? No, of course he wouldn’t.)

  Grant takes to the bottle when the going gets tough. He always has, but during these last few months, it’s got worse. He seems to be angry at me all the time - and the more angry he is, the more he drinks, which makes him volatile and completely illogical in his thinking. There’s no reasoning with him when he’s in that state.

  He started drinking heavily again around the time his car was repossessed in October. He bought a cheap second-hand run-around outright, with a loan from his mum, Evelyn. He wanted me to sell my shares but I knew I needed to hang on to them. They were my insurance in case something happened.

  I think Grant felt emasculated when he lost his car. It represented success to him and so I suppose he thought he’d failed. And I knew, even though he kept denying it, that he was visiting the casino again. He’d go after work and tell me he’d been held back at the office. I knew this because I rang his office at five one day and was told he was on his way home. He didn’t arrive back till after eight.

  Drink changed Grant’s personality. He became maudlin and suspicious, mainly of me. He got it into his head that I was carrying on with a guy I worked with and however much I tried to reassure him that I’d never been unfaithful and never would, he refused to believe me. In fact, my protests just seemed to anger him even more.

  It got so bad, I wanted to just take Titch and run away somewhere Grant couldn’t find us. But I knew I couldn’t do that. He would track us down and I’d be charged with abducting her. And anyway, Titch needed her dad. He scared her these days with his explosions of anger and his unpredictability, but that didn’t stop her loving him.

  I knew I had to stay if I wanted to look after Titch.

  The big mistake I made was telling Grant I no longer loved him. That, to him, was rejection on a massive scale. And I knew that was why he’d banished me from his life.

  Christmas Day is pretty miserable.

  Curled up in my dressing gown with a mug of tea and some aspirin to combat my aching head, I try to put on a happy face, watching Chloe open her presents. But I just keep thinking of Titch and how I should be with her, this morning of all mornings. I’ve tried to phone her but it just keeps going to message, so eventually I conclude that Grant must have blocked me or changed Titch’s number. Every now and then a wave of panic washes over me, when I think that I might never see her again. But I keep telling myself not to be so dramatic. Grant would never be that vindictive. Even if he’s determined to cut me out of his life, he’d still let me see Titch. Wouldn’t he?

  I wrap the presents I bought Titch yesterday and take them round to the house at nine, but there’s no reply when I ring the bell. This time, though, the house seems sad and deserted, and I can tell there’s no one at home.. Grant must have taken Titch up to Cambridge to spend Christmas with his mum, Evelyn. My name will be mud in that household because in Evelyn’s eyes, her son can do no wrong, so the split is bound to be my fault. I bet he doesn’t tell her the bit about locking me out in the snow.

  I walk slowly back to Jules’s house, my arms full of the gifts I bought with such hope the day before, feeling as if my heart will break. Jules makes me get back into my pyjamas to keep her and Chloe company and she pours me a hot chocolate with whipped cream that looks amazing but I can’t drink because I feel so sick with anxiety.

  Jules and Chloe are going to her mum’s later and she invites me along, but I tell her I’d be best staying where I am. I don’t want my glum face spoiling their Christmas lunch. So instead of spending Christmas with my little family, I end up lying on Jules’s sofa channel flicking, all the time hoping to hear from Titch. Every time my phone pings with a message my heart soars. But it’s never her.

  I spend the following week hoping for word from Grant, while Jules tries her best to keep my mind off the situation. She’s really into line dancing and manages to persuade me I should go along and try it. I take the outfit she gives me and sling it in the back seat but when I’ve driven her there, I tell her I’ve changed my mind and just want to go home, watch crap TV and eat chocolate.

  She grins. ‘Okay. Leave some chocolate for me. And pick me up at nine?’

  I spend a lot of time during Christmas week sitting by the window, hoping to catch sight of Titch walking along with her friends. It strikes me that without Titch in the picture, Grant and I would have been just another relationship gone sour and I’d have walked away more or less unscathed. But having grown so close to Titch over the past two years, for me it’s an altogether more complicated scenario.

  I feel more and more desolate as the week goes on and there’s still nothing from Grant. He must know I’m staying with Jules because my car is parked outside her house, but he’s obviously forbidden Titch to come over and see Chloe because she hasn’t appeared even once, which is very unusual. Chloe is totally fed up, missing her best friend.

  On New Year’s Eve, Jules and I make tapas and drink a lot of wine.

  I keep thinking how last year, I helped Titch make her New Years resolutions. We stapled together a booklet and she drew pictures and coloured them in, one resolution to each page. Then she placed it carefully in the drawer by her bed where she keeps all her special things.

  Bright and immensely lovable, with large hazel eyes and a dimpled smile, she was given the nickname ‘Titch’ at school, ironically because she’s tall for her age, and it’s stuck ever since. She has a passion for horses and we bonded early on, over our weekly riding lessons at a local stables.

  I couldn’t love Titch more if she was my own daughter and Grant knows that.

  ‘He’s never going to let me see her, is he?’ I slump over the kitchen table with my chin on my arms.

  ‘Well, he’s pigheaded enough these days,’ says Jules. ‘I wouldn’t put it past him.’

  ‘What am I going to do?’ I hate myself for whining,
but I’m really at a loss.

  Jules sighs and stares up at the ceiling for a while, thinking. Then she says slowly, ‘Maybe you need Grant to think you’ve given up and gone away. Left Palmerston and gone back to your parents in Scotland.’

  I stare at her in horror. ‘But Scotland is another country!’

  She smiles. ‘Yes, but you wouldn’t really be going back to live there. You’d just be making Grant think you had. It would be easy enough to spread the rumour and next time I bump into him, I’ll tell him.’

  ‘But where would I be?’ I gaze at her doubtfully. It seems all very cloak and dagger and I’m not the most adventurous person in the world. ‘I couldn’t stay in the village, obviously.’

  ‘No, but you could live somewhere fairly near. Far enough away so that no one you know in Palmerston is likely to run into you and tell Grant where you are.’ Her eyes gleam. ‘But close enough that you could meet Chloe, Titch and me at the stables every Tuesday!’

  I stare at her, hope leaping in my chest. ‘It’s a pretty radical plan. Do you think it would work?’

  She shrugs. ‘Don’t see why not. Obviously you’d have to lie low for a while to convince Grant it’s safe to let me take Titch to her riding lesson with Chloe, without you going along. But eventually, when everyone thinks you’re in Scotland, you could start joining us. You know Mariella would keep our secret.’

  I nod. Mariella owns the stables and has become a real friend in the few years we’ve been going there.

  ‘And of course you could come to my place any time to see her,’ adds Jules. ‘She’s always over for play dates with Chloe. Although that might be more difficult because you’d have to drive into the village and your car might be spotted.’

  I nod slowly, seeing a chink of light in the terrible gloom. ‘The stables are out in the country, so that would be the perfect meeting place. I’d have to give up my job, though.’

  ‘You didn’t like it much anyway. And you could start up your exercise classes wherever you end up living.’