Hello, Again Read online

  ‘Is he something to do with sheep?’ she asked, to which Pepper burst out laughing.

  Josephine chuckled.

  ‘You are fun,’ she said. ‘And what’s more – I trust you, Philippa, I really do. Which brings us to why I was thinking about you earlier. I want you to come with me.’

  ‘You what?’ Pepper stopped laughing abruptly.

  ‘It’s high time you had a holiday. I will pay for everything, of course. You would be acting as my companion, but I promise I won’t cramp your style.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Pepper garbled. ‘I have work. My schedule is full.’

  And what would my mother say?

  She could see that Josephine was not going to give up easily.

  ‘I’m very flattered you would think of me,’ she interjected, as the older woman opened her mouth to speak. ‘But surely there’s someone else you’d rather go with? Someone who actually has some experience of travelling for a start.’

  Josephine finished what was left in her glass.

  ‘I appreciate that I have rather flung this on you,’ she allowed. ‘Of course, you must go away and mull it over. All I ask is that you do really consider it – do you think you can do that?’

  Pepper chewed the inside of her cheek.

  ‘For me?’ Josephine pleaded.

  It was all so much to take in, the story, the offer, the fact that it had landed on her lap on this day of all the days – Pepper felt as if her brain had been spiralised.

  ‘OK,’ she said at last, returning Josephine’s wide smile with a more uncertain one of her own. ‘I promise I’ll think about it.’

  Chapter 5

  The Maltings didn’t look like a care home from the outside. With its immaculate white stone walls, tall arched windows and vast entrance flanked by a pair of neatly clipped Japanese maples, it looked more like something that would pop up in a BBC period drama. Pepper always half expected young ladies in bonnets and corsets to come skipping down the steps as she approached.

  She had been volunteering here for almost a year now, ever since the duty manager – a woman named Jilly Howarth – had turned up at one of Pepper’s life drawing classes and the two of them had got chatting. Because she was able to choose the hours and days she ran her sessions, Pepper was the ideal candidate for voluntary work, and she enjoyed it immensely. Not only did it feel good to be helpful, it was also a great way to meet lots of new people, and she had become quite friendly with several of The Maltings’ staff.

  Jilly, a kind but crumpled-around-the-edges woman in her mid-fifties, greeted Pepper warmly as she arrived at the front desk.

  ‘Hello, Philippa love. Nice to see you. Gosh, is that all for our fête?’

  Pepper was wheeling a large suitcase behind her and carrying two boxes. Most of the bric-a-brac items she had collected came from the cupboard under Josephine’s stairs, which the older woman had insisted Pepper rifle through and take whatever she wanted. There were also a host of knick-knacks from her own home, but nothing from the box her mother had given her had made the cut. Pepper could not face parting with anything that had once been played with by her sister.

  ‘Yep,’ she said now. ‘All for you. I’m so glad you gave me bric-a-brac rather than cakes – I’m afraid cheese straws are about my limit when it comes to baking.’

  ‘Not to worry,’ Jilly said, retrieving her glasses from where she’d pushed them up into her salt-and-pepper nest of hair. ‘We put our resident culinary expert on the case. If you hurry through, he’ll let you know where you can set up. Fête kicks off at two.’

  Pepper ventured further into the house before turning right and making her way down a wide corridor. There were doors spaced at regular intervals along one side, while the other consisted of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over a wide, paved courtyard. She knew from earlier visits that there was a well-stocked pond in the middle, as well as raised flowerbeds, a sprawling herb garden and, come the summer, so many tomato plants that you could smell them the moment you stepped outside.

  There were no residents in the main sitting room as she passed, and nobody in the kitchens when she peered through the propped-open door, but she found the wide lawn at the back of the house littered with colourful tents, picnic blankets and an array of mismatched garden furniture. Pink and purple balloons were tied to the surrounding trees and many of the residents’ wheelchairs, and Pepper recognised lots of faces as she made her way across the grass, smiling back at anyone who called out a greeting. There were a large number of elderly folk living at The Maltings, but Pepper spent most of her time volunteering with the younger contingent, all of whom were here because they needed round-the-clock specialist care.

  ‘Oi, Taylor – over here!’

  She turned to see a tall, slim, black man beckoning her over, and grinned. As well as apparently being a culinary expert, Samuel was one of the home’s most popular carers – and a wind-up merchant of the highest order. A born-and-bred Londoner who proudly referred to himself as a ‘Bantersaurus Rex’, he was a hero among his young charges and often sat in on Pepper’s sessions. Samuel seemed to have an uncanny ability to make every single person he came into contact with feel special, and despite the taxing nature of his job, always made time for people. The two of them had settled quickly into an easy friendship, and Pepper invariably came away from her encounters with him feeling as if the world was a better place, even if he did have a fondness for taking the mickey.

  ‘That’s quite a haul you have there,’ he said by way of a greeting, running an approving eye over Pepper’s boxes. Plucking a rather deformed-looking stuffed cat from the top of the nearest one, he laughed.

  ‘This is . . . interesting.’

  Pepper tutted good-naturedly.

  ‘I’ll have you know,’ she said, ‘that is an original Arts For All creation, hot off the sewing lesson press – highly sought-after and a true one-of-a-kind.’

  ‘In that case,’ Samuel rummaged in the pocket of his shorts and pulled out a ten-pound note, ‘consider me your first customer.’

  ‘It’s actually twenty quid,’ she told him, then laughed at his expression of pure horror.

  ‘Not really! You should see your face.’

  ‘Do you want the stall between my two?’ he asked. ‘I mean, obviously you’ll get way more footfall if you’re hanging out near the Chief.’

  ‘I assume by Chief, you mean yourself?’ Pepper shook her head in mock exasperation. ‘Let me guess – you gave yourself that name?’

  ‘A man’s gotta believe in himself,’ he said, as she followed him across the grass.

  ‘What are you selling other than the cakes?’ Pepper asked, peering at the plain blue sheet Samuel had tossed over the front of his second stall.

  ‘Glad you asked that,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I thought, seeing as it’s such a sunny day, that I would . . .’ He paused to bend over and pick up a bucket of water, lifting a big dripping sponge up and holding it out for Pepper to see.

  ‘Wash cars?’ she guessed, and Samuel slapped his free hand across his face.

  ‘Now that would have made sense,’ he said. ‘Where were you when I needed you, eh? In the planning stages? But I’ve made my flyers now and handed them out. Here,’ he added, digging one out of his back pocket and giving it to Pepper.

  ‘Soak a Bloke?’ she read out loud. ‘You’re going to let people lob wet sponges at you?’

  ‘For a fee!’ he protested. ‘I reckon a quid a go is reasonable.’

  ‘In that case,’ Pepper said, getting her purse out of her bag and extracting her own ten-pound note. ‘You can count me as your first ten customers.’

  Five hours later, dripping wet but swelling with pride at having raised over four hundred pounds, Samuel helped Pepper pack up the few items she had not managed to sell.

  ‘I can’t believe nobody wanted this,’ he exclaimed, picking up a truly grotesque ornament of a naked man sitting cross-legged on a toadstool.

  ‘Or this,’ Pepper rep
lied, pointing to an Ultimate Pan Pipes CD.

  ‘I dated a girl once who could play the pan pipes,’ he said. ‘Her name was Aurora and she was obsessed with Wuthering Heights.’

  ‘My last boyfriend played the guitar,’ Pepper told him with a grimace. ‘Very badly. I’m not sure if he was obsessed with anything – certainly not me, in any case.’

  ‘Mother-plucker.’ Samuel beamed his mega-watt smile as she rolled her eyes.

  ‘I see what you did there.’

  ‘Not just a hat stand.’ He tapped the top of his head.

  ‘Is that what it says on your dating app bio?’ she joked.

  Samuel made no secret of the fact that he was looking for a girlfriend and seemed to have a new dating-disaster anecdote every other week.

  ‘I might have more luck if it did,’ he said, pretending to sound sad. ‘Although, saying that, I did meet up with someone just last night.’

  ‘Oh?’ Pepper loved a good first-date story. ‘Any sparks?’

  Samuel considered. ‘We’ll see,’ he allowed. ‘Gotta let these things develop naturally, right?’

  ‘You don’t believe in love at first sight, then?’ Pepper replied, thinking of Josephine.

  Samuel laughed. ‘Lust maybe – love is the big one, innit? You can’t go throwing out the L-word to someone you barely know – therein madness lies.’

  ‘What about Romeo and Juliet?’ she protested. ‘Or Anna and Vronsky?’

  ‘Who-sky?’

  ‘He’s from Anna Karenina.’

  ‘So, fictional characters only, right?’

  ‘It happens in real life, too,’ she insisted, only just stopping herself from blurting out Josephine’s story. ‘Trust me,’ she went on, crouching down to zip up her case. ‘It can happen.’

  ‘Have you got a net?’ Samuel asked.

  Pepper stared up at him in confusion.

  ‘You know, to catch all the tiny birds that are flitting around your head,’ he said, giving into a laugh. Pepper arranged a look of fury on her face as she stood.

  ‘You’re mocking me,’ she stated.

  ‘Maybe a little . . .’

  ‘Where’s your sense of romance, man?’

  Samuel put his head on one side, his eyes bright with amusement.

  ‘If you ask me,’ he said, ‘love is a trap, out to get us. It wants us to fall but falling is dangerous.’

  ‘Falling in love isn’t like jumping into a well,’ Pepper retorted, as Samuel started to fold up the sheet that had been spread over the stall.

  ‘I think I would prefer that,’ he said. ‘At least in that scenario, there would be a rope and bucket to help me climb out.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Pepper felt as if she’d overstepped a mark somewhere, but she wasn’t sure how.

  Samuel turned to face her, the sheet bundled up in his arms.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ he said. ‘Pay no attention to me, I’m just bitter and twisted because nobody has swiped right for me all day.’

  ‘You’ll meet the perfect person one day,’ she said, wanting to reassure him even though she knew as soon as she’d said it how clichéd it sounded. ‘And when you do, you’ll know.’

  Samuel looked as if he was trying not to laugh. She could see the merriment dancing in his eyes and shifted uncomfortably. He thought she was a fool, but Pepper knew she was right.

  Love was out there somewhere, waiting to make everything better.

  All she had to do was find it.

  Chapter 6

  If you asked a roomful of people to choose their favourite day of the week, Pepper would be willing to bet that most of them would opt for Sunday. As tranquil as Saturday was tumultuous, the latter half of the weekend undoubtedly felt to many the more enjoyable, like a second sip of wine, or series two of a sitcom once you knew and loved all the characters.

  Pepper understood the reasoning, but she was not in agreement. She would have preferred to work, but barely anyone booked into the Sunday sessions she arranged, while the charity shop she volunteered at was closed and The Maltings was busy with visiting family members. It had been a strange week, what with Bethan’s birthday and Josephine’s offer, but by keeping herself busy throughout most of it, Pepper had managed to delay actually thinking too deeply about either. Now it was Sunday, and time had caught up with her.

  In a half-hearted attempt at some self-care time, Pepper decided to start her day with a bubble bath, into which she promptly dropped the latest Katie Marsh novel. After letting out the water and making her way downstairs to make a soothing camomile tea, she discovered that her temperamental kettle must have blown a fuse in the night, because half the contents of her freezer were now soggy. Turning on the oven to cook the three packets of vegetarian sausages before they went off, she knocked a stack of plates off the draining board and swore as two of them broke across her bare feet. Now, fighting back tears of pain and frustration, Pepper hobbled outside to deposit the shards straight into her pot of odd bits and bobs she used for art projects, and found that next-door’s cat had left her a little present on the mat.

  ‘Shitting hell!’ she swore, which pretty much summed up the situation.

  All of a sudden, the house felt as if it were closing in on her, the ceilings too low and the furniture too small. She couldn’t settle and limped on her bruised feet from room to room, fussing and fidgeting until she became irritated with herself. Picking up her mobile, she scrolled to Josephine’s number, only to change her mind before pressing the button to call. Her friend would definitely know what to say to snap her out of this strange mood. She would beckon Pepper into her cluttered front room and feed her ginger cake and eye-wateringly strong beakers of gin and tonic, make her laugh by shouting at the racing on Channel 4 or fill her in on the latest slice of town gossip. Josephine’s house was a treasure trove of trinkets, paintings and sculptures, and Pepper loved to poke through them all, asking questions about how they came to be there. Josephine could remember the details of every gallery she and her late husband had visited on their forays through the French countryside, every flea market where she’d uncovered a treasure, and every back room of an antique shop she had talked her way into. She remembered things in a sensory way, recalling not just events and words exchanged, but smells and sounds, too – it made her stories all the more vivid.

  The problem was, Pepper still did not have an answer to Josephine’s question, and until she did, she was steadfastly avoiding her.

  After solemnly chewing her way through two slices of toast coated in three inches of crunchy peanut butter, Pepper headed to her studio at the end of the garden, thinking that she may as well get on with the grouting from last week’s mosaic class. It took forty-eight hours for the glue to properly dry, so none of her customers could do the finishing touches to their pieces during the day-long session. Instead, Pepper offered them a small bag of grout to take away, along with an instruction sheet, or promised that she would do the work herself and drop the mosaics off once they had dried.

  Turning her plug-in radio up as loud as she could get away with, so the chatter would keep her company, Pepper rolled up her sleeves, donned her mask and latex gloves and got stuck in. The work was simple yet satisfying, the dark grout transforming the mosaics from pretty pictures to something with far more clout. She spread the grainy goo over the top of each piece in turn, using her fingers to ease it into all the gaps between the cut tiles, then leant in closely to search and destroy any remaining air bubbles that could ruin the overall effect.

  The dust from the dry grout hung in the air, coating Pepper’s disposable face mask with grime and making her sneeze behind the protective cardboard barrier. It was a bad idea to breathe any in, but that didn’t stop Pepper loving the smell. It was earthy and rough and reminded her of sitting in her parents’ front garden as a child, Bethan beside her and the two of them elbow deep in mud. Pepper would dig until she uncovered something exciting – a broken piece of pottery or soft-edged lump of glass – holding it up triumphantly for h
er sister to admire, before dropping it into her plastic bucket. They’d had one each, Bethan and herself, a blue one for her and a yellow one for her sister.

  Pepper shook her head, dislodging the memory before it gained too much clarity, and began removing the excess grout with a wet sponge. It never failed to lift her mood when she saw the picture below beginning to emerge, and for a while, the repetitive action was enough to soothe her. She tried to recall the last time she had made anything for herself and couldn’t. As a child, Pepper had drawn, painted, moulded and sculpted obsessively – art was all she ever wanted to do and the only subject she really cared about at school. It was what she turned to for solace after her sister died, and how she expressed her dismay when her father left not long afterwards. Painting was what she loved most of all, and she experimented with all sorts of materials and canvases, spurred on by her own need to create, but also by the reactions of those around her, all of whom seemed to think she had serious potential. When asked by her careers advisor what she wanted to do, Pepper had replied simply that she was going to be a world-renowned artist – not that she ‘wanted’ to be, but she ‘was going’ to be – and she had believed it, too.

  Brimming with confidence having breezed through her A-level exams, Pepper began her degree foundation course without so much as a tremble of trepidation and dashed out her first assignment – a collage that told a story from her life – with easy self-assurance. When she presented it to her teacher, however, the woman’s face fell.

  ‘I can see what you tried to do,’ she had remarked, her tone straying close to pity. ‘But where is the emotion? Where are you in this work?’

  Impossibly stung but determined to prove her worth, Pepper started the project again from scratch, only to get much the same feedback again. When it came to creating a self-portrait, her marks slipped even lower, with the same teacher telling her that although she was technically gifted, she was so far failing to create anything that would make people stop and feel something. It was that connection, she explained reverently, that separated a good artist from a great artist, and sent Pepper home with a list of examples to look up.