Ella's Ice-Cream Summer

by Sue Watson

Genres: Contemporary Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

Ella's life just hit rock bottom, but can a summer by the sea mend her broken heart? When life gives you lemons... make ice cream!Life hasn't always been easy for single mum Ella, but she has just hit an all-time low; she's jobless, loveless, very nearly homeless and, to make matters worse, now the owner of a pocket-sized pooch with a better wardrobe than her.Packing her bags (and a bigger one for the dog), Ella sets off for the seaside town of Appledore in Devon to re-live the magical summers of her youth and claim her portion of the family ice-cream business: a clapped-out ice-cream van and a complicated mess of secrets.There she meets gorgeous and free-spirited solicitor, Ben, who sees things differently: with a little bit of TLC he has a plan to get the van – and Ella – back up and running in no time.Ella's Ice-Cream Summer is a heart-warming and hilarious romance that will scoop you off your feet and prove it's never too late for a fresh start. The ideal holiday read for fans of Lucy Diamond, Abby Clements and Debbie Johnson.What readers are saying about Ella's Ice-Cream Summer:'Beware! While reading this book you will get major cravings for ice cream of all sorts of flavours and depending on which page you are reading, you may end up snorting that ice cream through your nose, as you are laughing at the fabulousness of the story!' Rachel's Random Reads'This book came at the perfect time for me. It made me a little emotional, it made me smile, it made me laugh and if offered me the escape I needed. I'm looking forward to the second book in this series!' Novel Deelights'I really enjoyed reading this book! This beautifully told story really explored families and their relationships in a feel-good way. A delicious book, a must-read. Can't wait for your next book Sue Watson!' Goodreads 5*-

Release date: May 11, 2017

Publisher: Bookouture

Print pages: 334

Sample

‘Kim Kardashian came into the shop today,’ I said, helping myself to vegetables and smiling like a woman in a stock-cube commercial.

No one looked up.

My plan that evening had been to enjoy a ‘proper family dinner’, but my two teenagers and my mother (yes my mother!) were on their bloody phones. All three of them had been glued from the moment they sat down and I’d produced my delicious, laboured-over chicken fricassee.

‘I said, Kim came in to buy a frock. Kanye was with her…’ I added, ‘wanted something she could wear down the British Legion next Friday night… in blue.’

‘Oh blue, that’s nice,’ Mum muttered, her face screwed up into her phone (held only a millimetre away from her eyes).

‘Put your glasses on, Mum, you’ll ruin your eyesight,’ I said, hearing the mother in my own voice, and wondering at what point our roles had reversed. I hated being a nagging parent, let alone a nagging daughter, but it seemed I was everyone’s mother these days. I just felt like I was giving to everyone all the time and getting nothing back.

Mum looked up, then directly at me. At last, a reaction!

‘Am I going to someone's funeral tomorrow?’ she asked, feigning ignorance. 

‘No, the funeral’s Tuesday, Mum,’ I said, thinking here we go again!

‘Oh maybe I'm going on Tuesday then…’

‘Yes that’s right, it’s Sophia’s funeral on Tuesday.’

‘She never said – has she invited you as well?’

‘Yes, she’s your sister – and therefore my aunt.’

‘I know that, silly,’ she said, her face clouding over. ‘So, she invited you?’

‘No, sadly she died before she could send out the invites,’ I replied sarcastically.

Mum’s sister Sophia had passed away very suddenly the previous week and despite having been estranged for many years Mum had, quite understandably, been affected by this, though at the moment you couldn’t tell, because she was engrossed in her phone. I wondered if she felt guilty that she hadn’t seen her sister for so long. Apparently Sophia had been ill for some time, but Mum had no idea and had continued to harbour ancient resentments and the sisterly slights of decades. When we had the phone call to tell us of her death, Mum went into shock and cried, which surprised me, I hadn’t realised how much she’d cared for Sophia – yet still she didn’t want to talk about it. I’d known Sophia quite well as a child, and was also upset about her death and hoped it might help Mum to talk through what had happened all those years ago. I’d never understood what it was that had caused the sisters to fall out, but they hadn’t been in contact since I was a teen and if ever Sophia’s name was mentioned, Mum became suddenly forgetful. Her ‘memory loss’ wasn’t real, it was definitely Sophia-related – and involved pretty much every conversation around her sister. One minute Mum was fine, perfectly lucid and able to recall anything from five minutes to fifty years ago, but then at the very mention of Sophia, she would slip into her version of forgetfulness. This wasn’t serious, I knew she hadn’t really forgotten, but it was annoying, especially as the logistics of getting to the funeral had to be discussed – apparently on a daily basis, because she appeared to have forgotten.

Mum continued to swipe her phone and take me further into her foggy world; ‘Ella, there was a funeral last week too, I think…’

I looked up at the kids to see if they were with me – they weren’t. No surprises there!

‘Yes, Mum,’ I said, ‘that was Gladys’s funeral.’ I was suddenly stung by her sadness; she’d lost three friends and her sister in the same number of months. Is this what I had to look forward to in old age?

‘Dropping like flies,’ she sighed, ‘the bloody WI will be wiped out by August at this rate… mind you those mini quiches were nice at Gladys’s wake.’

‘Nothing says rest in peace like mini quiche,’ I smiled.

She giggled; we still shared the same sense of humour, even if hers was at times of her choosing.

The past few months had been a social whirl for my mother on the funereal finger-buffet front. She’d even started giving marks out of ten for hospitality and making notes about her own guest list and table arrangements for when the time came.

‘That reminds me,’ she said, looking up from her chicken fricassee. ‘I don’t want her from number 42 at my wake, she’ll eat us out of house and home. Have you seen the size of her? Never warmed to that one, always thought she was better than she was.’

‘Don’t worry, Mother, your guest list will be vetted,’ I said, tongue in cheek, but she wasn’t listening.

‘That’s where I met that Eric again after forty-five years you know… at Gladys’s funeral. Shame about those egg sandwiches…’

‘Yes, I was there – it was a good day for Eric but not the egg and cress.’

The numerous funerals of Mum’s friends and family were the only type of social event I’d attended this year – and it was June already. I think it was safe to say I wasn’t setting the North West social scene on fire.

‘Well I hope the buffet’s better at Sophia’s,’ she muttered. ‘I doubt there’ll be any mini quiches. Sophia liked to keep everything traditionally Italian, so there might be some nice pasta.’

I nodded. ‘Something to look forward to,’ I monotoned. Was this it? I was only forty-four but was this all that was left for me, being my mother’s plus one at funerals? Was the odd fancy canapé at a party for the dead followed by my mother’s post-mortem (no pun intended!) of the buffet all I had to look forward to? I wanted to cry… and drink gin.

Despite pretending she was fine, Sophia’s death had definitely shaken Mum’s foundations. Their estrangement was rather puzzling, having once been very close they apparently fell out over a box of teabags when I was a baby, which caused a rift leading to a ceasing of all communication when I was twelve. It made no sense, I’d never understood what happened and how a box of teabags sometime in the 1970s could have such far-reaching effects on a family. But Mum’s reaction to her sister’s death made me realise that the tear in their relationship had cut far deeper than she’d ever revealed.

When I was younger I’d accepted the ‘teabag’ explanation but now doubted such a chasm had been caused by something so trivial. Sophia’s death had brought the whole thing back to the surface and I hoped to finally discover what had really happened between them. This wasn’t proving successful so far as Mum refused to discuss it and when I’d pushed her, she said she’d forgotten, which I didn’t believe for one minute.

The only safe conversations around Sophia were about our summers spent at Sophia’s ice cream café in the little Devon village of Appledore. She and Mum had moved there from Italy with their parents when they were young, and Mum loved to talk about the walks on the beach, the village characters and, most importantly, the different flavours of ice cream they used to make by hand. She remembered all this in detail, but apparently couldn’t recall why she’d fallen out with her only sister, just a vague reference to teabags which didn’t seem to stand any scrutiny when I pushed for details.

I had my own memories of wonderful holidays as a child, ‘helping’ my aunt make ice cream while listening to her stories of Sorrento, where ‘the lemons are as big as your head’. I wasn’t sure about these mutant lemons but Mum confirmed this to be the case, and her eyes would go misty as she recalled the place she was born. Sophia was four years older than Mum and had been almost eleven when they’d left Sorrento. Mum always seemed rather peeved that Sophia considered herself ‘more Italian’.

‘Waving your arms about and shouting “Mamma mia’’ every five minutes doesn’t make a person Italian,’ she’d say. But Sophia’s accent, the hand gestures and the constant switching between English and Italian fooled me as a kid into thinking I was in Italy when I visited her in Devon. And later, I loved listening to her memories of ‘home’. ‘We used to sit outside in the year-round sunshine after school drinking lemon granitas and strawberry gelato,’ Sophia would tell me, whereas Mum couldn’t remember quite as much about ‘the old country’, as she called it. Consequently, Mum’s interpretation of her ‘Italian culture’ was bordering on Mafioso, having been honed from The Godfather, The Sopranos, and, more recently, Mob Wives. Her Mafioso repertoire was varied, and I doubt she understood what most of it meant, but liked how it sounded. It was mostly harmless but hadn’t gone down too well at the ladies luncheon club when, in a vaguely threatening tone, she informed Dorothy Ramsbottom: ‘You can get more with a nice word and a gun than you can with a nice word.’

Though Sophia’s Italian accent was more genuine (and less New Jersey) than my mother’s, the two women were very much alike – slipping into the lilting accent whenever they spoke of home. In their voices I heard the rustle of lemon trees, a warm Mediterranean breeze rolling over the sea, and constant summers of simmering heat, soothed only by fruity gelato.

They’d been dragged from their Italian birthplace by my grandparents, who’d moved to Devon after the war. My grandfather was a Devonian and having met my Italian grandmother while stationed in Italy had eventually brought the family ‘home’ to Appledore, a sleepy little village in North Devon. My grandmother made the most amazing gelato and they took advantage of the burgeoning youth culture of the sixties and started a small ice cream and shake bar, which eventually became Caprioni’s Ice Cream Café.

When my grandparents died, they left the café to their daughters, where both sisters worked happily together until Mum had me and Dad’s company transferred him to Manchester. We moved up North and Sophia bought Mum out of the business, going on to build the café into a huge local attraction with her husband Reginald. People would travel for miles to try Sophia’s home-made ice cream and exotic sundaes.

I was remembering the piquant taste of the apricot and amaretti ice cream when Mum broke into my reverie, ‘Ella, do you think they’d play Barbra Streisand?’ she was saying as I helped myself to more fricassee, which seemed to have disappeared even though the kids hadn’t taken their eyes from their screens.

‘When?’

‘Tuesday, at Sophia’s funeral. Me and your dad loved “The Way We Were”; they could play it as I walk out of the crem.’

Fortunately I didn’t need to answer and point out it was Sophia’s moment, not hers, because her phone pinged. Mum’s eyes were now drawn back to the screen like an alien returning to the mother ship.

‘Nan, are you sexting Eric again?’ Josh asked, without looking up from his screen.

‘That’s enough, Josh, your nan is not…’

‘Oh yes, I am. Josh showed me how to take photos on my phone and I’ve been sending Eric a few pictures.’

I glared at Josh, now smiling to himself.

‘What sort of pictures, Mum?’ I asked, almost not wanting to know. Honestly, she was more of a liability than my two teenagers.

‘Oh just ones of me naked.’

‘Oh, Mum, no…’ I started, almost choking on my dinner. I reached out my hand to touch her arm and talk her through the potential problems of the internet. I’d imagined having this conversation with Lucie, my nineteen-year-old daughter or even my eighteen-year-old son but not my seventy-eight-year-old mother. Then I saw the three of them laughing at the shock on my face. She was joking. Thank God!

‘Honestly, you lot,’ I said, rolling my eyes. ‘And Josh, after the incident at the WI I’d hoped you wouldn’t be assisting Nan in her quest to conquer the internet.’

Since Mum inherited her iPhone from Josh there had been several misunderstandings and embarrassing incidents. However, the worst had to be when Josh had told her that texting and sexting were the same, and in fact it was technically correct to refer to texting as sexting. One can only imagine the looks passed down at the OAP computer class, the library and the ladies luncheon club. Who knows what regional outrage was caused by my son’s hilarious wheeze? But it seems things really kicked off when a speaker came to the WI to do a talk on ‘technology and texting for beginners’. Right on cue, Mum informed the room that she spent ‘many a happy evening sexting the vicar’.

This resulted in me receiving a call from a very concerned Reverend James, worried people might be under the impression he was ‘grooming’ my mother.

I’d placated the vicar, and apologised profusely to the ladies of the WI, but as long as Mum had that phone in her hand I knew it wouldn’t be the last apology I’d have to make. Oblivious to the drama she was causing, Mum had continued to cut a swathe through social media, but with little idea of what she was doing. And judging by the abuse she’d recently tweeted to Dame Judi Dench (damning and disgusting words apparently meant for Donald Trump – it was easy to see how the two could be mixed up!) it was a matter of time before she was barred from Twitter. God knows what poor Dame Judi, a national treasure, made of being called ‘a big orange fascist’ by my trolling mother.

‘Mum, all I’m saying is please check who you’re tweeting before you tweet, and don’t put comments or pictures online that you don’t want the world to see,’ I said, for the hundredth time.

‘I’m not on the bloody line, I told you I’m doing the sexting,’ she snapped.

‘Mum, after all that stuff with Reverend James, please tell me you know the difference between sexting and texting?’

‘Like you do?’ Josh giggled.

‘Of course I know the difference,’ I said, not that I’d ever sexted in my life.

‘And so do I,’ Mum spat. ‘Sexting is sending a picture of someone’s big penis in the post, isn’t it?’

Oh God, ‘big’ and ‘penis’ are not two words you want to hear your mother say, let alone at dinner in front of your kids. I looked over at Lucie and Josh for help, I don’t know why.

‘Don’t ya just hate it when mums and nans try and talk technology?’ Lucie muttered while apparently trying to dump her boyfriend by Instagram – is that a thing? I’m not even sure I’d know if I’d been dumped by Instagram. I pondered momentarily on this. Did an aggressive emoji suddenly appear on your phone, or perhaps there was a particular ring tone that signified the end of a relationship? ‘Hit the Road Jack’, or Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’, perhaps? If not I was going on Dragons’ Den to claim the idea the following week.

I sat at the head of the table presiding over my oven-to-table-ware while my mother and children all just continued in their own little worlds, oblivious. I’d assumed that as the kids grew up things would calm down and I might have ‘me time’ again. But my mother had moved in with us the previous year after a nasty fall while attempting the Argentine tango during Strictly. I pointed out that just because Louise Redknapp had scored three tens for hers it didn’t mean Mum had to copy step for step – instead I just told her to come and stay with us. I’d expected this to last a matter of weeks, but four months later it seemed Mum was happy with us and had no plans to leave any time soon.

I confess I found it quite claustrophobic to have my mum living in my home. Nothing I did was quite up to her standards, from the way I cleaned the kitchen to the way I added tinned tomatoes to pasta sauce. Mum was an excellent cook, and when my dad was alive they’d have dinner parties every week where she presided over a beautiful table. Her specialities were Italian dishes, sizzling chicken cacciatore, creamy carbonara, and her buttery, aromatic home-made garlic bread was to die for. I would never compare myself to Mum in the cooking arena, but I’d tried, with my packet mixes of Italian classics. These were abhorrent to my mother, who made her feelings quite clear about my chicken parmigiana when she emptied the contents of her mouth into a napkin shouting ‘Che palle!’ which apparently in Italian means ‘What balls!’ After that I gave up trying to please her and it was usually rushed eggs and oven chips thrown together after a day at work. However, I used my culinary muscle to make desserts and ice cream; this was my area of expertise thanks to my childhood holidays in Devon helping Aunt Sophia in the family café. Mum never complained about my lemon meringue pie ice cream, or hot fudge sauce made from scratch and poured over home-made vanilla ice cream. But she rarely complimented me either – I simply had to assume the empty dish was sign of her approval.

‘Mum, can you lend me thirty quid?’ Josh was now saying.

‘No, because I’m paying for pretty much everything else in your life – so unless it’s a necessity I won’t be adding thirty quid to the financial haemorrhage I’m currently suffering.’

‘Okay, take a chill pill, Ma,’ he laughed.

‘I will “take a chill pill” when you come up with a phrase that isn’t straight out of the nineties,’ I said in a quick and fabulous comeback. Pleased with this, I leaned over my dinner to give Mum a high five, but not only did she leave me hanging, she cowered.

‘Mum, don’t leave me hanging, give me five,’ I was saying, trying to sound like my kids and refusing to be ignored.

‘Oh, Ella, we don’t do high fives any more, we do fists,’ she wafted her hand dismissively at me and returned her gaze to her phone.

‘I suppose Josh told you that?’ I asked, clearing the plates.

‘Yeah, Nan’s been fisting the vicar haven’t you, Nan?’ Josh piped up.

I gave him a warning look before going into the kitchen, a round the table discussion on fisting was just a step too far, but he was too busy showing Mum something on his phone to notice.

Being around Josh and Lucie had introduced Mum to a whole new online world, and her interest had suprised me. She had never really been very technically minded, she could barely text before she moved in with us, so her new-found silver surfer status had taken me aback somewhat.

‘Online I’m not old,’ she’d told me when I asked her why she was so keen to join Facebook and Snapchat. ‘On here I’m not invisible – I can be anything or anyone I want to be.’

I understood how she felt, and as being online had given her a new lease of life, I was prepared to put up with any teething problems, of which there were a few. Like when I’d decided to go to the gym and asked Lucie to take a before and after picture of myself in my pants and greying old bra. This was an impromptu idea to give me motivation and obviously for my own use, hence the less than glamorous underwear. But Lucie didn’t bother to delete it and when Mum ‘inherited’ her phone she’d managed to unwittingly post me all over Facebook in cellulite and old underwear. It was days before I noticed – but my ex-husband Richard and his floozy had seen it straight away and ‘liked’ it – the bloody cheek.

And it wasn’t just the internet she approached with little caution – I don’t even want to think about the time she phoned a live radio show thinking it was her friend Molly. She managed to inform the listeners of Manchester Live that ‘Ella hasn’t had sex since her husband left – and that was seven years ago!’

What she didn’t explain was that celibacy was my choice (well, mostly). The kids had been disrupted enough by the divorce, so my aim for the past twelve years had been to stay put, keep calm and earn enough to keep us all going. I didn’t want to bring another man into their life and wanted to make sure they were settled and happy before I even considered chasing my own rainbow.

And despite Mum now adding to my stress, I did owe her big time. Not only had she been a good mother, she’d always been there for the kids, and had been very supportive when Richard had walked out on me twelve years earlier. My husband’s departure had hurt like hell and that hurt soon turned into a bitter, unrelenting rage. But Mum had talked me through those long nights of tears and blame and soothed me as she always had.

I’d hoped this evening we could have a nice family meal together, share what had happened that day, dip into each other’s lives a little. Life was short, the kids would be gone soon and this would all disappear with them, this life I’d been making for the last twenty years was suddenly slightly defunct. But any hopes I’d had of having one of those perfect family meals I’d witnessed so often on my friends’ Facebook feeds had disappeared somewhere around the moment we’d all sat down.

Over the years I’d had the privilege of seeing my friends’ amazing meals out, amazing meals in, awesome husbands, spectacular long-haul holidays and stratospheric kids. I’d lived through their new kitchens, holiday sunsets and celebratory cocktails – and I’d had enough.

‘I’m fed up with my so-called friends on Facebook rubbing my nose in it,’ I’d complained to my friend Sue. ‘I don’t mind being bombarded by photos of people who’ve achieved something – a degree, an abseil for charity… even a cute new puppy, but who has the arrogance to think anyone is interested in their new Aga? It’s an oven, get over it,’ I’d said.

‘Oh the Aga queens,’ my friend Sue had laughed. ‘They might have a shiny new oven but while they’re making toad in the hole, their husband’s doing the same with his shiny new girlfriend.’

‘You’re talking about Dick…’

‘I’m not.’

‘No I mean The Dick, my ex. He was doing that toad in the hole thing with Miss Perky while I was slaving over a bloody oven. He’s now smeared all over Facebook lying next to her and her fake breasts outside their bloody villa in Spain.’

‘Forget Dick and fake breasts. You should start to follow my friends,’ she’d said, ‘at least they’re honest – most of them spend Saturday nights crying into their ready meals about the fertility of life.’

‘Futility?’ Sue often got words mixed up.

‘Yeah. And trust me, if you saw Lily Johnson’s page filled with loopy cats and lonely dinners it’d really cheer you up – raw baked beans on toast with real moggies. Your life’s a bloody carnival compared to hers.’

I knew I wasn’t the first person to look at the manufactured lives and touched-up photos of my friends online and feel resentful. No one could have so many holidays, so many meals out and so many ‘awesome’ times with friends in their new sodding kitchen, could they? All I ever did in my kitchen was wash, cook and clean, what an interesting Facebook feed that would make. It wasn’t like I was jealous. I didn’t want ‘shiny things’ – but I’ll admit, those online sunsets gave me glimpses of a world beyond my back door and the little dress shop where I worked. And I felt like I was missing something.

It all started in the nineties when I was young and carefree, with my life and career before me. I had so many plans: a pastry chef in Paris, a gelato queen in Rome, a sweet shop in London. I wasn’t sure, but I knew whatever I did it would be something sweet. Then I’d met this handsome, charming guy who asked me to marry him. As soon as he gave me the ring, I gave up my dreams.

It wasn’t Richard’s fault, he was the fork in my road – and I was the one who made the choice. But years later, my fork in the road felt like a fork in my chest when he dumped me and the kids for a life of fake breasts and luxury with his glamorous boss. And as two became one to the sound of champagne corks popping under a hot Mediterranean sun, I just went through the motions of feeding, loving and nurturing our kids – alone. But now the kids didn’t really need me any more, except at meal or money times. And I’d begun to realise that the more you do, the more your kids take you for granted. I’d become invisible, the ghost mother in the house. No, my life wasn’t the kind to brag about on Facebook, unless a photo of a pile of clean laundry and a packet of fish fingers does it for you?

Then, just when I thought my destiny was decided for me and I was hurtling towards middle age with nothing to show for it, something happened.

After my failed family dinner the previous evening, I woke to scrape fricassee crust from my oven before work when a letter landed on the mat. Mum and the . . .