Poppy couldn’t wait to pack her bags and escape the gloomy confines of her Balham studio. Moving into Caspar French’s million-times-nicer house was a dream come true, even if it did have Claudia in it.
Jake Landers, Poppy’s boss at the antiques market, offered her the loan of one of his vans.
‘Thanks’—Poppy was touched by his kindness—‘but there’s no need. All my stuff fits into suitcases.’ At the expression on Jake’s face she added lightly, ‘I went minimalist when I left home.’
So minimalist that she no longer possessed so much as a living relative. Not one who would speak to her anyway. The truly ironic thing was, the shock discovery that her father wasn’t actually her father hadn’t come as that much of a shock at all. Not an awful one at least.
Surprise had swiftly given way to relief. Not being liked by your own father was unnatural and Poppy had always wondered what she’d done to deserve it. Now she knew the truth, she could stop worrying. Not being liked by a man whose wife had made you the laughing stock of Henbury twenty-two years earlier was far more understandable. Only Mervyn Dunbar’s determination to maintain outward appearances had kept the marriage going. The affair, once over, was evidently never mentioned again and Poppy, born nine months later and fooling no one, had been formally passed off as his own.
Dozens of people, including the McBrides, had known about it. Poppy continued to be amazed by the fact that she had never learned the truth before now. All in all, she felt it was a shame it had remained a secret for so long.
‘Well, if you need any help,’ said Jake, ‘you know you only have to ask.’
Poppy knew. She also knew how lucky she was to have landed a boss as brilliant as Jake. He was quiet, maybe even a bit on the shy side, but he had a dry sense of humor and the patience he exercised with Poppy—who was forever bombarding him with questions about antiques—was phenomenal. At twenty-eight, he lived alone but Poppy knew nothing beyond that. Unlike her, Jake kept his private life pretty much to himself.
Another endearing quality about Jake was the way he genuinely didn’t realize how good-looking he was. His own appearance clearly wasn’t something with which he ever concerned himself. His dark hair was cut for him in a little shop three doors up from the antiques market, by a barber who might be unfashionable but who was at least fast. Jake’s long-lashed dark brown eyes were hidden behind spectacles that looked like something his grandfather might have passed down to him. His body seemed all right—as far as Poppy was able to tell—but his dress sense was frightful. All she could say about Jake’s clothes was that they were clean.
Poppy had fantasized once or twice that beneath the Clark Kent exterior was a Superman waiting to burst out, but she knew deep down there wasn’t. From time to time Jake would find himself being chatted up on the stall, usually by women a few years older than himself in search of someone to mother. It was so sweet watching him because he obviously didn’t have the least idea what to do with them. Eventually, Poppy would take pity on him and intervene, allowing Jake to melt gratefully into the background.
He had never said as much but Poppy assumed he was gay.
‘Thanks.’ Poppy reached up to take the steaming mug of tea Jake had brought down from the café on the top floor of the antiques market. She had enjoyed her week stripping in the pub in Portobello but it was nice being back here on the stall.
For a Friday afternoon the market was quiet. In between customers, most of them browsers who preferred to be left alone, Poppy had been reading up on Georgian teapots. Jake, just back from the monthly sale at Lassiter’s Auction Rooms in Bermondsey, began unpacking a box of assorted silver photograph frames.
‘Look at that.’ Balancing her tea on the flat, glass-fronted jewelry cabinet, Poppy picked out one of the larger frames with its photograph still in place. The sepia-tinted print, dated 1925, was of a stiffly posed family. Mother, father, and assorted children stared unsmilingly up at her. ‘They all look like their father. Minus the moustache.’
‘You could polish up these frames if you like,’ offered Jake. He pointed to the hallmark on another frame. ‘Date?’
‘George the something.’ Poppy wasn’t in the mood for hallmarks. She looked again at the sepia print. A small knot began to tighten in the pit of her stomach.
‘Fifth,’ said Jake. ‘George V.’ He frowned. ‘You seem a bit… are you all right?’
‘Hmmm?’
‘You don’t look quite with it.’
Poppy broke into a grin. In his dark green cardigan full of holes, his blue and white striped shirt, and brown houndstooth check trousers, if anyone was looking not quite with it, it was Jake.
‘Sorry, I was thinking.’
Jake, who had heard about little else for the past week, said, ‘About the move I suppose.’
‘Actually no. I was wondering if I look anything like my father.’
‘Ah.’ He had heard about this too, over the course of the last three months. ‘Well, I can’t help you there.’
‘I want to find him,’ said Poppy, the words coming out in a rush. Quite suddenly it mattered more than anything else in the world. She felt like an alcoholic begging for a drink. ‘I know I probably won’t be able to but I have to at least give it a try. I have to—’
‘Are you sure?’
Poppy had been um-ing and ah-ing about this for weeks. Jake’s only experience in the matter was of an adopted schoolfriend who had managed to trace his natural mother then been traumatized by her refusal to meet him. Some things, Jake felt, were best left unmeddled with.
But Poppy had made up her mind. ‘I must. It might be impossible. But it might not. He could be living just round the corner from me. Imagine if he was and I didn’t know…’
‘How are you going to do it?’
She nodded in the direction of the phone books stacked up beneath his cluttered desk.
‘There are seventeen A. Fitzpatricks listed in the London area. I’ll start by phoning them.’
‘Try and be a bit discreet,’ said Jake. He wouldn’t put anything past Poppy. She was liable to turn up on their doorsteps armed with a do-it-yourself DNA testing kit.
The few details Poppy had been able to glean about her father had come from Dina, who had in turn learned them from her mother-in-law Margaret McBride. According to this thirdhand information, her mother had met Alex Fitzpatrick at a country club on the outskirts of Bristol. She was working there behind the bar and he had played the trumpet in the resident jazz band.
Alex had moved down from London to take the job, because even if the pay was peanuts, it was better than nothing at all. He might have been poor but jazz was his great love; it was what he lived for.
Laura Dunbar, so legend had it, was finding married life less enthralling than she had been led to expect. Meeting Alex Fitzpatrick, who kept nightclub hours, drank Jack Daniels on the rocks, and laughed at the deeply suburban lifestyles of the members of Ash Hill Country Club, had knocked her for six.
Alex had a gravelly Cockney drawl, a quick wit, and a career in what could just about be called show business. He also made Laura laugh, which mattered more than anything. She fell in love with Alex Fitzpatrick, ignored the fact that he had a wife waiting for him back in London, and threw herself headlong into a recklessly indiscreet affair. It became the talk of the country club. It wasn’t long before everyone knew, including Mervyn Dunbar.
But Mervyn, who loved his wife, sensed that if he kicked up a fuss he would only lose her. Electing to sit it out and pray that nature would run its course, he grimly feigned ignorance instead.
Six weeks later, as the summer season was drawing to a close, Alex Fitzpatrick’s wife was watering a hanging basket when she fell off a stepladder and broke her leg in three places.
Alex explained to a devastated Laura that he had to go back to London. His contract at Ash Hill was pretty much up anyway, and now his old lady needed him. They’d had a laugh, hadn’t they? They’d had a great summer together but now it was time to move on. She had a husband; he had a wife. Of course he’d loved Laura, but this was how things were. No need to get all dramatic over a bit of harmless fun.
Laura was devastated but she had her pride. To be fair to Alex, he had never talked about leaving his wife; she had just hoped he might.
Hiding her true feelings, refusing to cry in front of him, Laura kissed Alex good-bye. When she discovered three weeks later that she was pregnant she knew at once who was the father. She had been far too busy making love with Alex to have any energy left for Mervyn.
Mervyn, who wasn’t stupid, was equally aware of whose baby it was. When he’d wanted nature to take its course he hadn’t meant in this fashion.
But at least he had his wife back, which was what Mervyn wanted most of all. He also privately suspected that he might not be able to father children of his own as a result of a nasty attack of teenage mumps. Maybe in time, he decided, he would be able to forget who the biological father of this child really was. Maybe he would learn to love it as if it were his own.
Poppy knew all this because her mother had confided as much in her small circle of friends, one of whom had been Margaret McBride. Pride had prevented Laura from ever contacting Alex Fitzpatrick to let him know she was carrying his baby. Instead, she had immersed herself in the business of becoming a born-again good wife.
When Poppy had been born Mervyn had, in turn, tried his hardest to experience true fatherly feelings. The trouble was, they hadn’t been there. And he had been unable to summon up any.
But the secret of Poppy’s parentage had been kept, from herself if from no one else, and her mother’s tragic death had only compounded people’s determination to preserve it. To lose one parent was terrible enough, they whispered to each other. Imagine the effect it could have on a vulnerable twelve-year-old to discover that the one you had left wasn’t a real parent at all.
If only they’d known, Poppy thought ruefully, how glad I would have been to find out.
But it was time now to go into action. She had waited long enough. Since she’d moved to London, wondering who her real father might be had knocked everything else out of her mind—even Tom. The sooner the noisy Australian from the basement flat stopped yakking to every friend he’d ever had and got off the communal pay phone, the sooner she could make a start.
When he had at last finished, Poppy ran downstairs and bagged the phone, kneeling on the dusty floor with her list of A. Fitzpatricks in one hand and a pile of twenty-pence coins in the other. Her heart pounded against her ribs as she began to dial. Imagine, within seconds she could actually be speaking to her father…
Each time the phone was picked up at the other end, Poppy asked in a businesslike voice to speak to Alex Fitzpatrick. Ten minutes later she was three-quarters of the way through her list, having got through to an assortment of Alans, Alistairs, Alisons, and Andrews… even an Ahmed.
Then she struck lucky.
‘Alex?’ said a middle-aged sounding woman. ‘I’m sorry, you’ve just missed him. May I take a message?’
Poppy gulped. This really could be it.
‘Um… maybe I’ll try again later. What time do you expect him home?’
‘Well, nine-ish. He’s gone to scouts.’ The woman began to sound nervous. ‘Is this about Ben’s birthday party last week? Oh dear, you aren’t Lucy-Anne’s mother are you?’
Another ten minutes and she was finished. Not only a crushing disappointment, Poppy thought mournfully, but a waste of an awful lot of twenty pences.
How stupid to think finding her father would be that simple.
The next morning, bright and early, Poppy arrived on the doorstep of 15 Cornwallis Crescent.
‘Please, it’s only ten o’clock,’ groaned Claudia, opening the door in her blue and white terry cloth dressing gown.
Poppy looked hurt. ‘Caspar said any time I liked.’
‘Caspar would.’ Claudia was gazing askance at the two modest suitcases on the top step. ‘He doesn’t even hear doorbells before noon. That can’t really be all you’ve got.’
‘I do what the glossy magazines say to do,’ said Poppy. ‘I may not have many clothes, but I always buy the best.’
They both knew this was a big lie. For lunch at The Marigold, Poppy had turned up in cut-off black jeans and a Rocky Horror tee-shirt.
Claudia said gloomily, ‘God, I hope Caspar knows what he’s doing.’
‘Oh look, I’m here now.’ Poppy picked up her suitcases. ‘And whether you like it or not I’m moving in. We may as well be friends.’
‘Real friends,’ Claudia pointed out, ‘don’t wake you up at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning.’
‘I’m sorry, I won’t do it again.’ Carrying her cases through to the kitchen, Poppy heaved the smaller of the two up onto the counter and began unzipping it.
Next moment a multi-colored explosion of tights and tee-shirts hurtled out. It was like one of those trick cans full of snakes.
‘What—’ began Claudia.
‘Come on, cheer up and grab a couple of bowls.’ Having at last found what she was searching for, Poppy held them up. ‘This one’s to celebrate me moving in and this one’s your belated birthday present.’
Claudia gazed at the two tubs of rapidly melting Ben & Jerry’s. Other people celebrated with champagne, she thought. Poppy Dunbar had to do it with Chunky Monkey ice cream.