Bittersweet

by Sarah Monk

Genres: General Fiction; Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

A bittersweet story in a beautiful setting - get away from it all with this touching, romantic tale Nell and Ange have their whole lives mapped out with their fiancés - brothers Marcus and Justin. But when a trip to Prague goes pear-shaped, the plane brings them back down to earth with a bump. Desperate for a change of direction, Nell sacks off her job and her sorry excuse for a boyfriend, and sets off to see her much-loved Aunt in Cornwall with Ange in tow. The girls soon settle into village life - Nell opening up her own cake shop and Ange pulling pints (and men) as a buxom barmaid. But not everything in this quaint seaside town is quite what it seems...

Release date: December 15, 2016

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 356

Sample

Being woken up by someone screaming was never a good thing.

What was far worse, however, was being woken up by someone screaming whilst three thousand feet up in an aeroplane.

Nell’s life didn’t exactly flash before her eyes, more parade, like a row of cancan dancers in the middle of the Moulin Rouge: manic music, arms linked in a row, each high kick smacking her hard in the face, harder even than the turbulence was booting her firmly up the bum every couple of seconds as the bloody plane dropped as terrifyingly stomach-lurchingly as a ride at a fairground.

‘Holy Mary Mother of God!’ she heard Ange utter breathlessly, and then felt her hand take her own and grip it hard, too hard, painfully hard. But Nell had no voice with which to ask Ange to ease up on the death grip.

Her voice was gone, frightened away.

The sudden plummet of the aeroplane as they literally fell into a pocket of violent turbulence had terrified her beyond belief, but the sudden summary of her life so far was far, far scarier.

‘Where did it all go wrong?’ she rasped.

‘I don’t know, but I blame it on the bloody pilot,’ said Ange.

And then the free fall stopped and the screaming stopped; in fact the plane fell eerily silent as the pilot set them flying lower to get out of the pocket of turbulence that had assaulted them with all the vicious stealth and violence of a mugger in a dark alleyway.

Despite falling faster than the Dow Jones in a recession, Ange had somehow managed to hang on to her vodka and tonic without spilling a drop.

‘Well, that’s a bloody miracle, so it is,’ she laughed, taking a reassuring swig and then offering one to Nell.

Nell too took a swig of the strong drink and began to laugh.

And then the woman in the seat behind them began to cry.

Which set off a group of hungover girls in pink feather boas and matching T-shirts stating ‘Hilary’s Hens Hit Prague’ who all began bellowing like a bunch of overtired toddlers.

The air stewardesses, finally released from their own seats by an announcement from the captain, who was confident he had completely recaptured control of his wayward plane, sprang into action with boxes of tissues and reassuring voices.

If she was honest, despite the laughter, Nell felt like crying too. Which she supposed was nothing new, as she had felt like crying most of the time over the last two days.

Initially she had been really looking forward to the trip to Prague.

Her boyfriend Marcus’s father Charles was marrying his long-term Czech girlfriend Dita. Everyone had been invited to the city for a weekend of celebration. Nell loved the place, loved its history, its architecture, its shoe shops. She was also so tired, she really needed a break. She was moving in with Marcus when they got home, and had spent the last two weeks packing up her own house, the sale of which was due to complete on the following Friday. And work had been so manic lately; work was always manic. A break was definitely needed.

This weekend had turned out to be a break all right.

As in painful, and fractured.

It had all started when the two couples met up at Stansted airport.

Marcus and Nell, Justin and Ange.

Marcus and Justin were brothers.

Despite the fact that there was almost two years between them, they could easily have been mistaken for twins. Same height, same hazel eyes, same mouth, same brown hair, same dress sense, so much so that they often independently bought the same outfit and then laughed like drains when they turned up somewhere looking like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

They had the same sense of humour, which was a bit of a crass cross between toilet and rugby songs, and the same likes and dislikes, except when it came to women, which explained why Nell and Ange were so different.

They were handsome, smart, funny, successful in their own way: Marcus as a manager for the same company as Nell, which was how they had met, although fortunately for a completely different department, which meant that they could easily keep work and home separate; and Justin as an underwriter for a large insurance company.

Unfortunately they also had the same capacity to make you feel when they got together that you were completely and utterly invisible.

As well as being brothers they were best friends, which was lovely really, unless you were their other half.

They had arranged to meet up in the airport bar, and by the time Ange and Nell, who hadn’t seen each other since Christmas, had finished embracing each other and exclaiming their pleased hellos, the boys were already halfway down their first pint and ordering their second, and engaged in a conversation that had left no room at the table for anyone else to sit down.

Ange had simply raised her eyebrows at Nell and, linking arms, suggested a trip to the duty-free shop.

‘I’m not in the mood to get leathered before we even hit the air,’ she murmured, pulling Nell towards the exit.

‘Shouldn’t we tell them where we’re going?’ Nell looked back at Marcus and Justin, who, heads together, were guffawing over an anecdote Marcus had just told about a rugby game he had played at the weekend.

‘You’re kidding, aren’t you? They won’t even notice we’re gone. And what’s more, I bet you a pound to a penny they won’t even notice when we come back.’

Ange was probably right. In fact if Nell was honest, there was no ‘probably’ about it. When they got together, the boys always went off into their own little world, a world that usually revolved around consuming copious amounts of alcohol and catching up on each other’s lives in detail that was so minute it would be kicked out of Lilliput for being too small.

By the time Nell and Ange returned with their perfume and their chocolate bars the size of a small country, the boys were three quarters cut and raring to go the full pint.

Fortunately they managed to pull themselves together enough to be allowed on to the plane, where they promptly fell asleep for the entire journey.

‘Thank heavens for small mercies,’ Ange whispered across the aisle as they both began to snore, and Nell nodded as if she agreed but couldn’t help thinking back to how she had imagined their take-off would be, hand in hand and half a bottle of champagne between them to celebrate their own forthcoming change in status from boyfriend and girlfriend to cohabiting couple.

And so she shared the champagne with Ange instead, whilst listening to Marcus snore, and thought how funny it was that for a girl who was so focused, so structured, so ordered, life never seemed to turn out at all how she planned it.

They had arrived at Charles and Dita’s beautiful Prague home from home to find that an impromptu stag night was being held the night before the wedding. The lads were on the town. Meanwhile the girls were expected to take the luggage to their hotel and unpack, and then return to the house for a ladies’ night in.

This on the whole didn’t sound too bad, although they would have both preferred a ladies’ night out, but visions of giving each other manicures and facials in order to look beautiful for the following day were sharply elbowed by the reality of Dita’s choice of hen night, which was a movie evening. A Czech movie evening. Where no one could work out how to get the subtitles running, and the English contingent were far too polite and claimed it really didn’t matter to them if they watched Sliding Doors and Love Actually in Czech, which was fine for Marcus and Justin’s Great-Aunt Mabel because she could lip-read, but not so much fun for everyone else, apart from when Ange, who had seen Love Actually about thirty times and knew the words almost off by heart, began to speak the parts.

Her impressions of Martine McCutcheon and Hugh Grant were enough to send Nell into one of those fits of giggles where you just can’t stop and people who don’t know you and most definitely people who don’t speak your language think you’re laughing at them or being rude, and so Ange had to stop and the room fell into a bewitched silence for the Czech contingent and a bored silence for the English. After this Nell and Ange decided the only thing left to do was get drunk, and so they drank too much Czech vodka, which was fortunately pure enough to negate the hangovers they were expecting the following morning, and went back to the hotel and to bed early.

Justin and Marcus crawled in at four in the morning, full of not so pure Czech vodka, a rake of Czech, English and indeed multinational beer, and several shots of something that looked like a toad had crawled into the bottle and died. They both fell into bed, and once again began to snore.

Amazingly enough, they woke up the next day raring to go, no hangover in sight. Nell and Ange decided this was because they were still actually drunk, a state that continued and worsened as the wedding day itself progressed.

They had got stupidly drunk together – even more so than they already were – and danced with everyone in sight. Well, everyone but Nell and Ange, that was; Nell and Ange they had somehow managed to ignore for most of the day.

‘You know what it is, don’t you?’ Ange had said, frowning as Justin positioned himself within the ample cleavage of a stunning Czech girl for a slow one.

‘Enlighten me,’ Nell had said drily.

‘It’s because it’s a wedding. They’re both petrified we’ll be getting ideas ourselves.’

‘And what? They’re making themselves look as unattractive as possible by behaving like complete arseholes?’

‘Well, I meant that that’s why they’re avoiding us, but I can see where you’re coming from with that one as well.’

Nell watched Marcus stagger round the dance floor with a well-built German girl, trip over the bride on his way back to the table, grab hold of an elderly lady to stop himself from falling and then fall anyway, taking the poor old dear down with him. She decided that as much as she didn’t want to do it, it was time for an intervention, especially when as soon as he got back to their table, he grabbed hold of some lethal Czech concoction called slivovitz and poured himself a very large shot of it.

As he raised the glass to his lips, Nell put a hand on his arm and asked him very gently, ‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough to drink?’

To which he replied, ‘Doesn’t the very fact that I’m getting myself another one answer that in the negative?’ in that awfully haughty way only the very drunk can master.

It was two in the morning by the time Nell could persuade him to leave, and that was only because he no longer had the capacity to think for himself.

Justin was only slightly better, the two of them intertwined and staggering, bouncing off each other and the objects around them in hazardous oblivion.

Their father’s best English friend and his well-built wife, who were staying at the same hotel, helped Nell and Ange wheel them back there, a feat that they wouldn’t have been able to manage on their own, and there they literally toppled into bed like felled trees, beginning to snore even before they hit the pillow face down.

It was small consolation that their hangovers the following day were monumental.

Marcus wanted nursing and Nell was damned if she was in the mood to do it.

Fortunately, after she’d fetched the Lucozade and chocolate he was demanding from the nearby shop, he fell back into the sleep of the dead, and she was able to escape the drink-drenched confines of the hotel room, and out into the fresh air of Sunday morning.

What to do now?

Their flight wasn’t leaving until late evening, and there was a lunch being held at Charles and Dita’s house in the suburbs, but Nell wouldn’t go on her own.

Sightseeing?

In Prague, great; doing it on your own, not so great.

Shopping? Better idea, but what would be open on a Sunday?

She decided she’d start with a walk, and set off down the road, determined at the very least to find a shoe shop that was open, but she’d only gone a hundred yards when she was hailed from the café on the corner.

‘Thought I might spot you escaping from here. Is yours as sick as mine?’

‘In the head,’ Nell muttered, flopping down into the empty chair next to Ange and pulling her coat around her to keep out the breeze that was blowing.

Ange laughed and signalled for the waiter. ‘Two coffees, please, young man, and you’d better bring us a very large cake as well.’

‘You want piece of cake?’

‘No, not a piece,’ Ange explained carefully. ‘The whole cake. The entire thing. Two spoons.’

Then she grinned at Nell and told her quite happily that Justin had thrown up four times already.

‘. . . and he was talking in his sleep – well, not so much talking as yelling and calling for someone called Jelena. So I told him he can get Jelena to clear up his mess and fetch him sweet tea and bacon sarnies, and left him to it. Honestly, the cheek of them: act like twats all weekend, then, come Sunday, expect us to be Florence effing Nightingale . . .’

‘I know.’ Nell grimaced. ‘They were so embarrassing yesterday, weren’t they, and the people at the wedding were so lovely. What must they think of us?’

‘Well, they most probably think the fellers are total eejits and that you and I are saints for putting up with them, that’s what I say. I also think that when we’ve had our cake we should sod playing nursemaid and go and indulge in a spot of retail therapy.’

‘Shoes,’ said Nell, smiling for the first time that day, and then she frowned again. ‘You don’t think we should go for lunch at Charles and Dita’s?’

‘Goodness no, girl! Don’t you think we’ve done our duty for this visit? We may as well salvage something good from this bloody weekend. And talking of good . . .’ Ange nudged Nell in the ribs as the waiter returned to their table bearing an obscenely large amount of cake.

‘Wow, you’re right, that does look good. Do you think they’d take back the spoons and bring us a trowel each?’

Ange grinned. ‘I say sod the spoons and hold on to my hair.’

Ange and Nell had known each other for five years, ever since Nell had started dating Marcus. Ange had been engaged to Justin for about six years now. At thirty-one, she was four years older than him and often referred to him as her outgrown toyboy.

The two girls had always got on really well; always wondered when they did meet why they didn’t do it more often. They placed their excuses firmly in the fact that Nell lived on the outskirts of Hemel Hempstead and Ange in Battersea, and even though they were only separated by the river when they were at work, Ange worked 24/7. A complete workaholic, my Ange, her mother would tell friends and family with a proud tinge to her voice, little realising when she boasted about how well her daughter had done for herself that it was to the detriment of many other things in her life.

It didn’t help that Nell too spent most of her waking hours at work. She also wasn’t that good at girlfriends. Her godmother, Maud, told her it was because she was too nice. She wasn’t a doormat, but because she gave people the benefit of the doubt, always replied to messages, was there whenever she was needed and didn’t take offence if she was not, people sometimes thought she could be walked over. And because she wasn’t a doormat but people still tried to walk all over her anyway, Nell walked herself away from them.

And Nell’s office wasn’t exactly the place to meet lifelong friends. Everyone was far too competitive, more likely to stab you in the back than pat you on it. If someone at work invited you out for drinks after, it was only so they could get you drunk and steal your ideas. If they asked you to join them for lunch, you could guarantee a partner in crime was raiding the files on your computer whilst you were chowing down at Pret A Manger.

Ange wasn’t like that. Ange was different.

Nell liked Ange’s caustic wit, her honesty; she was fresh and fun and feisty, she spoke her mind, and did as she pleased, but under the spiky exterior, Nell knew there was a big marshmallow.

As for Ange, she genuinely liked Nell. In Ange’s line of work it was rare to meet someone as genuine as her. Everyone always wanted something from you. Ange was in A & R for a large record label. It was funny how many people in this world wanted to be a singer, longed for recognition, a record contract, gold discs and a slot on MTV Cribs. She had got to the point where she told people she was a dinner lady. Funny how no one ever questioned this lie.

Nell was real. Nell was the kind of person you just knew that if you called her at two in the morning from a lay-by in the middle of nowhere, with a flat tyre and a bad attitude, she’d turn up with a smile, a jack, a spare, a cake, a flask of coffee and a hug.

And today, whilst both were furious with their respective other halves, each was pleased that it gave them the chance to spend some girlie time together.

They wandered the city arm in arm, darting in and out of shops, buying things they couldn’t afford, didn’t need, but couldn’t resist. They guiltily but gleefully eyed up the handsome Czech men with their Slavic cheekbones and hooded eyes, and got wolf-whistled several times, much to Ange’s delight.

‘I should go out with you more often.’

‘Yes, you should, but it’s not me they were whistling at.’

‘Utter bollocks!’ Ange retorted.

Ange envied Nell.

With her shining black curls dyed a bright flame-red and dove-grey eyes, Ange was an attractive girl, but being a normal healthy size fourteen, she was always on a diet in search of the elusive size ten, a diet that seemed to consist of eating everything and anything and then complaining about the fact that she’d done it, as if the very act of contrition for her gluttony would burn off the extra calories.

Ange thought that she was average in looks and above average in size. Justin had, in unkinder moments, been known to burst into the bathroom whilst she was in the tub and pretend to harpoon her with his snooker cue: not very good for a girl’s self-esteem.

Nell, however, was far from average. She wasn’t conventionally beautiful, but Ange had come to the conclusion that this was what was so attractive about her. She had chestnut-brown hair to her shoulders, straight when she’d had time with her GHDs but naturally slightly wavy, big golden-brown eyes, full lips, fifties-film-star cheekbones, and a nose that she always protested she hated because it was too long and too big, and perhaps it was a little, but not on Nell’s face; on Nell’s face it looked perfect.

The irony was that Nell also envied Ange.

She thought that Ange was incredibly pretty, with the kind of cleavage that Nell could never hope to achieve without the help of plastic surgery, but it was her confidence that Nell wished she could emulate. Ange was always so certain about everything. No fear, a slogan that could have been written for her rather than a T-shirt.

Spending time with each other was fun and easy.

It particularly helped that they both loved to shop.

Laden with bags, Ange easily managed to overrule Nell’s half-hearted suggestion of ‘Don’t you think we should go back and check on them?’ and persuade her into a late lunch in a little restaurant near the river.

‘I live my life by my own set of rules,’ she told Nell firmly, ‘and rule number three on my list is never let your man rule your life.’

Nell smiled. ‘What’s rule number one?’

‘Well, you see, rule number two is never tell anyone what rule number one is.’ Ange shrugged enigmatically.

‘Rule number four?’

‘Oh, I can tell you that one, no problem. Rule number four is that when men drive you to drink, don’t stop the car before you reach the bar.’

And sitting down at a terrace table, she waved for a waiter and ordered a bottle of wine.

An hour later and they were putting the world, or rather their world and the men who were ruining it, to rights.

‘Do you know what really gets my goat?’ Nell took a slug of her wine, feeling the rhubarb-tinged white tingling on her taste buds. ‘When once in a blue moon with no R in the month they do the washing-up, or the washing, or hoover or something, doesn’t matter what, just something trivial and domestic that we do every day with no thanks, and they look at you like a kid who’s just got a gold star for their homework and is expecting a big fat pat on the back and a bag of sweets for it.’

‘Oh I know, that totally does my crust as well.’ Ange rolled her big grey eyes. ‘I do the washing-up every bloody day; he does it once a year and expects praise. If I only did it once a year I wouldn’t get praise, I’d get called a lazy slut.’

Nell laughed. Ange had a way of saying it like it was.

‘Thing is,’ Ange continued, ‘you can’t rely on a man to look after you any more, and if women have realised that, why haven’t men woken up to the same fact?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, how things used to be, yeah, men and women, it was an exchange, wasn’t it? I hesitate to add the word “fair” because that’s a calculation that could take some working, and my maths and my social politics aren’t that good, but the bottom line was that they looked after us, so we looked after them. The weekly wage in exchange for the necessities of an easy life: cooked food, clean shirts, clean underpants, house that isn’t caked in dust and grime. Now we go out to work, but they still expect the same. They want someone who will earn enough money to take the pressure off, to help pay the bills and the mortgage, to ensure decent holidays, and still provide a home-cooked meal and clean sheets to snuggle down in at the end of the day.’

‘They want Superwoman!’ Nell nodded her agreement. ‘What was that thing Jerry Hall said, about cook, whore and mother? Well, you can add bank manager to that just to update it.’

‘Although,’ Ange conceded, ‘I suppose we can’t blame it all on men. People expect more from life nowadays. Fifties Stepford Wife didn’t want new shoes every other week and a fortnight in the Maldives at Christmas. Higher expectations need higher incomes, which means a woman has to work. It’s not just want, it’s necessity. You never used to have to pay out twenty years’ wages in advance just to buy yourself the smallest house in Britain.’

‘Yeah. Most girls nowadays want to marry a footballer and live in a mansion, and never have to lift a manicured fingernail again.’

‘It’s the modern-day great expectations.’

‘I’d settle for a bit of respect,’ Nell said wistfully.

‘Respect for what, though? You earn respect how nowadays?’

‘By being good at what you do? Though nowadays nobody knows what the hell they’re supposed to do any more. Nothing is ever enough. You learn how to cope with life, how to live your life, from the previous generation. If everybody’s lost, how on earth can anyone lead the way?’

‘If you had a daughter, what would you teach her?’

‘That’s a hard one, Ange.’

‘I know, but we’re sitting in the sunshine in a foreign country, half cut. If you can’t wax philosophical now, when can you?’

‘I’m not sure that I can, actually. It’s kind of a biggie. Thinking about what advice you’d give your own kids to set them up for life. It’s hard enough to even imagine having my own kids.’

‘But you do want them? Kids?’

‘Well, I’ve never really thought about it in great detail, but I think I’ve always just assumed that I will, yeah. Not that Marcus would be keen.’

‘No?’ Ange asked in surprise.

‘Nah!’ Nell hiccuped and leaned in on Ange’s shoulder. ‘He’d have to share his toys. Heaven forbid, one day they might even want to have a go on his PlayStation.’

Ange nodded. ‘Him and Justin used to fight like crazy when they were younger.’

‘Not like that now, are they?’

‘Nope. Thick as thieves.’

‘As tight as arseholes,’ Nell added. They both shrieked with laughter, and then Nell swallowed the laughter as rapidly as it had erupted from her and suddenly looked mortified. ‘Oh my Lord, he is an arsehole, isn’t he, Marcus, a complete arsehole?’

Ange’s own laughter hiccuped to a halt. ‘Does that mean that when you picture your kids they don’t have Marcus’s eyes?’ she asked carefully.

Nell thought for a long moment. ‘Only if they’re using them as marbles,’ she said, and started to cackle again.

Ange’s face joined in the laughter, but her eyes were showing a different emotion.

Concern.

‘If I had a kid? Now there’s a thought . . .’ Nell was musing, waving her half-full glass so that the wine sloshed dangerously close to the edge of it. ‘If I had my own daughter, I suppose I’d probably say to her that life is too short. It’s hard to find which way you want to go, but if . . .