woman with thick hair tied back and a determined expression, sitting bolt upright outside her cottage, gripping her Bible firmly. She might have been dead for well over a hundred years or more, but her influence still lingered on. If I tried to throw anything away—from an old dress to a chicken carcass—then Mum always said Granny Allen would come and haunt me. She’d been told that by her mum, who’d been told it by hers, and so on and so on, right back to Granny Allen, who ruled the family back in the nineteenth century. You told the truth, kept your word, helped people when you could and, above all, you worked hard and stood on your own two feet. Lounging round, doing nothing, was condemned as a very un-Granny-Allen-like activity. Anyway, she was always there in the photograph, with her Bible and that stern expression, watching my every move.
And as for drink…Well, you could see Mum was just programmed to set up Frankie’s Coffee Shops really. Apparently, Granny Allen had brought up her younger brothers and sisters, then her own family, and then her grandchildren too, all from a tiny farm high up on some bleak northern fellside. She must have been very tough, very determined, but not, I guess, a barrel of laughs.
‘She was actually your great-grandmother, or even great-great, I’m not sure,’ Mum was saying. ‘I went to Hartstone Edge with my mother when I was very small. We went somewhere by train, which seemed to take forever, and then it was a very long drive after that, up high and winding roads. My great-aunt lived there then. To be honest, I can’t remember much about it, I was very young. Lots of hills and sky, I remember. And sheep. And a stream with a ford and a little packhorse bridge. I remember playing on it with some cousins. It’s probably all changed now, of course. It was always a hard place to make a living.’
For a moment she looks miles away. ‘I’ve always meant to go back there. But the time was never right. But now you can go instead and tell me what it’s like. Anyway, it will be good for you to have a little break, even if it’s a working holiday. How long are you away for?’
‘We’ve booked the cottage for two weeks, but we can probably extend it if we want to.’
‘Take plenty of warm clothes. You’ll need an extra layer up there, especially at this time of year. High Hartstone Edge! What a coincidence.’ We look at each other and this time my mother really does smile as we say in unison, ‘What would Granny Allen say?’
It had rained all the way up the A1. Grey roads, grey traffic, the constant spray from lorries. The further north we headed, the worse it seemed to get. I had long since lapsed into silence. Jake was concentrating hard on the road ahead as he peered past the windscreen wipers into the gloom ahead.
‘Shall I drive for a while?’ I offered.
‘Might be an idea,’ he said, ‘I could do with a break. Look, there’re some services soon. We’ll stop and get a coffee. Give the rain a chance to stop.’
The service station didn’t look promising. The only free space was at the far end of the car park and we had to run through the rain, dodging the puddles and then into a world of flashing video games and the smell of chips. We bought some papers and some coffees and sat down at the only table that wasn’t piled high with heaps of dirty, greasy plates.
The coffee was only just drinkable, but at least it was good to be away from the constant whoosh of the windscreen wipers. I leant back, stretched my legs and flipped vaguely though the heap of papers. Suddenly, I sat bolt upright.
‘That’s her!’ I said. ‘The girl from the club!’
‘What girl?’ asked Jake, puzzled, as I twisted the paper round to show him.
‘ “Supermodel sensation, Foxy, has hunted herself down a very tasty new contract”,’ Jake read. ‘“The stunning redhead, who has taken the fashion world by storm since her first appearance on the catwalks at London Fashion Week two years ago, has signed up to be the new face of Virgo cosmetics in one of the company’s biggest ever deals. No chicken feed for fabulous Foxy!” Was she at the club? I don’t remember seeing here. And’—he looked back at the page—‘I’m sure I would have…’
‘No. She left in rather a hurry,’ I said. And told him the story of how she had jumped out of the window and down into the street.
I expected Jake to laugh. Instead he was furious. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this?’ he asked so fiercely that the family at the next table paused in the middle of chomping through giant burgers, nudged each other and stared at us.
‘Because the princes arrived, and everyone was buzzing round them,’ I said, astonished at his reaction. ‘It just put it out of my mind. Sorry. I didn’t think you’d be so interested.’
‘Of course I’m interested.’ He looked at me as though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘A top model jumps from a toilet window in a club full of Premiership footballers and royal princes. Don’t you think that’s just a little bit interesting?’
‘Well, yes, of course it is. But so was everything else that was going on. I just didn’t think…I mean, I just don’t understand why you care so much. What are you doing? It’s not the sort of story you normally do. I thought you were writing about dodgy millionaires. Or are you selling celebrity stories now? What’s happened to your famous principles?’
That was, I know, a bitchy thing to say. And I regretted it immediately. But too late.
Jake stood up. Very quietly, deliberately, he gathered all the papers, left his half-drunk coffee and walked out. I picked up my bag and ran after him. ‘Shall I drive now?’ I asked when we got to the car. But he just glared at me and got in the driving seat. We drove on in the rain and silence.
He was frowning, but I don’t know whether that was because of the weather or because of me. I never seemed to measure up to Jake’s standards. Even back at journalism college, where he was the star of the course. I always thought he would team up with one of the very bright, scary girls, like the Staveley twins, Felicity and Arabella, who were heading straight into television or national newspapers. But they all went their own ways and somehow it was just Jake and me and it seemed fine, even if I went into food writing, which for Jake didn’t count as proper journalism.
Jake practically lives at my place, but he still keeps his old bedsit, a few miles away, where the cupboards are full of his neatly labelled files and a few basic clothes hang on a hook at the back of the door.
As we headed north, I could feel the silence between us, and wondered why he was suddenly so concerned about models and footballers. But somehow I didn’t think he was going to tell me. He didn’t tell me much any more.
We left the motorway and turned onto a road that led through small towns, then large villages, then small villages, then just about nothing at all. The rain had finally stopped, which was just as well, as we seemed to be climbing higher and the road was little more than a single lane as we kept tucking into hedges to let cars and tractors pass. Soon there weren’t even hedges, or many trees, just a few scrubby bushes, bent from the wind, and dry-stone walls. And no more villages, just occasional houses spread out over a vast, empty moorland, dotted with sheep.
‘Where now?’ asked Jake. It was the first thing he’d said for an hour.
I scrabbled in my bag for directions. ‘We come to a place called Hartstone and, just past the pub—that’s good,
