accident, I had never once seen my mother laugh.
After my father and brother died, I think my mother must have had some sort of breakdown. Understandable really. But somehow she emerged and set up a new business. Energised and determined, she wanted to give people an alternative to pubs and bars, so she set up Frankie’s Coffee Shops.
Long before Starbucks, Mum took the 1950s coffee bar and reinvented it. At a time when Britain was desperate for decent coffee, she provided it, and a great place to drink it too. Her cafés had armchairs and newspapers. Bigger branches had rooms with TV screens and table football and a jukebox and opened until late at night. They served soup, snacks, sandwiches and cakes but never, ever, alcohol. Still don’t. But, despite that, Frankie’s coffee shops are cool. She found the knack of appealing to all ages and all types. In the daytime it was the sort of place you could meet your granny, while at night you didn’t have to apologise for suggesting a Frankie’s Coffee Shop on the way home from a movie.
What started as a little, hippyish establishment soon grew. She set up franchises—very strictly controlled—until there were Frankie’s Coffee Shops in most big towns. My mother had always been the business brain when she and Theo and Bill had their restaurant, and now she went into overdrive. She often said, ‘Work is the best medicine, as Granny Allen used to say.’
Don’t get me wrong. Frankie wasn’t a bad mother. Not at all. It was almost as though she was trying so hard not to smother me that she left me almost too much alone. She didn’t want to get too close to anyone any more, not even me. And certainly not Bill.
In any case, her business took huge amounts of time and energy. And because it was such a novelty—ahead of its time, fairly traded and organic—she was always in the newspapers, on radio and television, commentating on this, that and the other. She was the absolute model of the perfect business, the perfect employer, the perfect ethical entrepreneur. What’s more, she talked well and passionately, looked stunning and stylish and even made a profit—most of which, needless to say, was ploughed back into good causes. She was a one-woman retail phenomenon.
But all that didn’t always make her easy to live with. Hard-working, high-minded, high-achieving, successful mothers with high moral standards and an insatiable work ethic aren’t always the best flatmates for day-dreaming, chaotic teenage girls with a serious shoe habit and a pathological desire to sleep till lunchtime.
Frankie’s New Road branch is aimed at ladies who lunch. It has huge squashy sofas, piles of glossy magazines and walls decorated with fashion ads. It is light and stylish and welcoming. And, as always, very busy. The place buzzes with chatter and is a glow of colours and good smells.
There, tucked in the corner in her trademark black, is my mother. She has a phone to her ear and a pile of papers in front of her. She likes to take her work round to the various coffee shops and work in the middle of it all, so she can see what’s going on and her staff and customers can talk to her. It’s another reason the media love her.
I bend over to give her a quick hug and kiss. As always, she makes me feel large and awkward. My mother apparently takes after her father’s family and is small-boned and neat. She says I have inherited characteristics from her mother’s family and that’s why I’m so tall with enormous feet. Still on the phone, she gives me a quick acknowledgment as I sit down and order a smoothie—apple, pear, ginger and beetroot. Beetroot? I have to try it. When it comes, I sip it tentatively, then with more enthusiasm. Mmm, yes, it works. As I lean back, untangling the different flavours on my tongue, I watch my mother as she discusses a problem at one of the branches. The lines round her eyes I am used to. They’ve been there from the time my father and brother died. Maybe it’s the light, but today they seem deeper. The black, stylish as it is, does little to flatter. Sorrow had aged my mother when she was young, but now she’s fifty and age is beginning to do its bit as well. She is as smart as ever but there is, I realise sadly, a hardness about her.
She finishes her call. ‘Sorry about that, darling, but you know what it’s like.’ And I do, I do. ‘Do you mind eating here? They have some wonderful fish soup today. And the new bread is delicious.’
So we sit there and have the fish soup, thick and creamy with lots of mussels. I dig each one out with the shell of another and lick the creamy, lemony sauce from my fingers. It’s all very good. But my mother’s eyes are constantly darting hither and yon, watching the staff, watching the customers, thinking, considering.
‘Oh I forgot,’ I say suddenly, producing the little bag of tomatoes, ‘Bill sent you these.’
She looks into the bag and closes it up again without taking any of the tomatoes. ‘And how is Bill?’ she asks politely.
‘Pining for you,’ I say. ‘I gather you haven’t seen him for some time.’
‘I’ve been busy,’ she says. ‘But I hear the bistro’s going well. It’s madness him having to start all over again. Why he sold his last restaurant before he went travelling, I’ve no idea, especially as he only stayed away for a few months. So much for his midlife gap year. I told him it was a daft idea.’
‘You know he hoped you’d go with him,’ I say, picking up a crumb of bread on my fingertip. Waste not, want not—another Granny Allen saying. When Bill went on his travels, I knew he had texted or emailed or sent silly postcards from every stop, hoping to tempt her out to join him. He only came home again because she wouldn’t.
My mother snorts. ‘He might have time to abandon everything and jaunt round the world like an overgrown adolescent, but the rest of us have work to do, businesses to run.’
‘Bill would maintain,’ I say, ‘that you have lives to live too.’
She gives me a withering look. And I see Bill still doesn’t stand a chance.
The waiter brings our coffees and my mother turns the tables on me.
‘So, how’s your love life? Everything OK with Jake?’
‘Mmmm.’ My mother and I don’t really do girlie chats, but I need to talk to someone. ‘I think so. But, to be honest, he’s been a bit odd lately.’
‘In what way?’ She looks at me sharply. ‘Is he working?’
‘Oh yes, doing something on the new breed of football managers. He seems quite involved in it. Thinks it could really make his name.’
My mother looks approving. ‘Sounds interesting,’ she says. ‘So what’s the problem?’
‘Oh, probably nothing,’ I say. ‘Anyway,’ I continue, trying to be more positive in the light of my mother’s sharp gaze. ‘We’re off up north for a week or two. He wants to do something about the millionaires buying up grouse moors and turning themselves into English gentlemen.’
‘You mean like, what’s the name, Simeon Maynard? Slimy Simeon?’
‘The very one.’
‘Now I’d really like to know where his money came from. Nowhere respectable, I’ll bet. If Jake can get to the bottom of that, I think it would be a real can of worms,’ says my mother. ‘Anyway, where are you going?’
‘Somewhere in the back of beyond called High Hartstone Edge,’ I say. ‘It’s literally in the middle of nowhere, it’s—’
‘I know exactly where it is,’ says my mother, surprised and almost smiling. ‘It’s where
