said Cat, turning her phone off.
She allowed the make-up girl to touch up her face, and stood in front of the shiny hot plates on which she was about to demonstrate making her twist on a traditional Shropshire stew.
‘Hello and welcome to Cat’s Country Kitchen, where I’ll be showing you recipes old and new from Shropshire, the food capital of Great Britain,’ she said, trying with all her might to forget about errant daughters and concentrate instead on cooking. After all, that’s what she got paid for.
‘And, cut.’ Eventually Len was satisfied. It seemed to have taken ages to get the exact shots he’d wanted, and Cat had been itching to get off the premises for the last half hour. As soon as she decently could, Cat made her excuses and, heart hammering, dashed to the door. She switched her phone back on, to one text message from Noel: Got her. Thank God for that. Cat felt herself unwind slightly. At least Mel wasn’t in danger. But now she knew they were going to have the sort of confrontation Cat always dreaded, with Mel screaming in their faces and her losing her rag. She tried to stay as calm as Noel somehow managed to, but Cat found herself bewildered by their daughter’s unreasonable behaviour. Mel had everything she wanted, why did she have to put them through the mill like this?
Noel was always saying she should try and see it from Mel’s side more. Mel would no doubt say that she had everything but her mum’s time, Cat reflected. Guilt, guilt, guilt. Her default position. They’d left London so Cat could spend more time with the family, so how was it she seemed to spend less? And now there was more guilt, when she discovered Noel had had to leave an important meeting with Ralph Nicholas’ nephew, who had just joined the firm. If it had been Ralph, Noel was sure he would have understood, but Michael Nicholas was still an unknown quantity according to Noel, and while he hadn’t said anything, Noel had felt awkward about curtailing the meeting to deal with an absconding teenager.
‘Next time, it’s your shout,’ said Noel. ‘I can’t keep doing this.’
‘I know, I know,’ said Cat, thinking well, I can’t either. The trouble was she had been so busy filming over the last few months she had dropped lots of balls into Noel’s lap, from dental appointments to meetings with Mel’s teachers. She sighed and wished more than ever Louise hadn’t become ill. Life in Hope Christmas with Louise on hand to help out would have been perfect.
‘So where was she?’ asked Cat while rooting around in her bag for her keys.
‘I found her in the café,’ said Noel. ‘They were a bit dim, really. It wasn’t hard to track them down.’
‘And where’s Mel now?’ said Cat.
‘In her room, sulking,’ said Noel.
‘Oh joy,’ sighed Cat. ‘I’ll be home soon.’
She got in the car and put her foot down, and soon found herself escaping the gloom of Birmingham’s high rises for the snow-capped hills of her adopted county.
‘Blue remembered hills indeed,’ she murmured, as she drove down the main road towards Hope Christmas, seeing the hills she and Noel loved to walk on looming in the distance. It was a grey winter’s day, and shafts of light streamed out underneath the louring clouds, as she sped her way home.
Snow had started to fall as she finally drove into the large gravel driveway in front of their oak-beamed house. Their home in Hope Christmas was so different from their London abode – a converted farmhouse with a fabulous kitchen, its gleaming modern steel apparatus still managing to retain a traditional feel when married to grey flagstones and marble-topped work surfaces; creaking stairs, wooden beams, and a huge wood burning stove in the middle giving it a cosy aspect, particularly on a gloomy January day, like today.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Cat as she walked through the door, into their lounge, where the fire was already lit and the sweet smell of wood smoke filled the room, ‘I just couldn’t get away.’
‘No worries,’ said Noel, looking vaguely up from his laptop. He pushed his glasses up his nose in an absentminded gesture and smiled in a way that still made her go weak at the knees. ‘At least I found her.’
‘Did she say why she did it?’
‘Nope,’ said Noel with a sigh, rifling his fingers through his greying hair. ‘I read the riot act, and all that did was produce floods of tears. I couldn’t get her to say a word about what she’s been up to. So I’ve just left her to stew on it. Now might be a good time for some softly softly.’
Okay, time to gird her loins. Cat made her way to the top of the house, and to Mel’s low-beamed bedroom where she spent a huge amount of time in splendid teenage isolation. She disappeared up there for hours, plugged into either her iPod, her phone, or her laptop. (Cat was vaguely aware Mel had an anonymous blog, but she had no idea what it was called and despite her massive curiosity about it, at Noel’s suggestion had kept away – ‘Give her some space,’ Noel was always saying, ‘if you read her blog, it will be the equivalent of your mum reading your diary.’ Except she’d never written anything worth hiding from her mum in her diary. At fifteen, Louise had known all Cat’s secrets.) Mel was only secretive as far as Cat was concerned, hiding anything dodgy on Facebook, and chatting to God knows who on BBM, and for all Cat knew making a bunch of unsuitable friends.
It had been so different when they’d first got to Hope Christmas, four years earlier. Having been bullied at her old school, Mel had been happy to fall in with a bunch of self-confessed geeks, and not felt the need to worry about it. But in the last year Mel had drifted away from them, becoming close to a girl called Karen whose entire raison d’être seemed to be going out and getting as drunk as possible. She hadn’t been a very good influence in Cat’s opinion – but she didn’t dare say so. The more Cat and Noel criticised Karen, the more intransigent Mel got.
‘May I come in?’ Cat poked her head round the door. Mel was lying on her bed looking moody, listening to her iPod.
‘Suppose,’ was the ungracious response. ‘But if you’re going to give me a lecture, it’s okay; Dad’s already done the third degree. And now I’m like, grounded, forever.’
‘Mel, what did you expect?’ said Cat, her hackles rising. ‘You weren’t at school and we were worried about you. You can’t just bunk off because you don’t feel like going in.’
‘I was okay,’ said Mel.
‘Yes, but we didn’t know that,’ said Cat trying to keep her voice level. ‘And besides, until you’re sixteen you have to go to school every day, like it or not.’
Mel just grunted, and shifted awkwardly on the bed.
‘So who’s this boy then?’ said Cat after a pause.
‘A mate,’ said Mel.
‘Does his mum know he’s been bunking off, too?’
‘He’s not at school,’ said Mel.
‘Christ, how old is he?’ Mel was still only fifteen. Cat had visions of her dating a twenty-one-year-old.
‘Nineteen,’ said Mel sulkily. ‘And before you go off
