Mothers and Daughters Read online

  ERICA JAMES is the author of twenty-three internationally bestselling novels, with recent Sunday Times Top Ten bestsellers including Swallowtail Summer, Coming Home to Island House and, most recently the hardback bestseller, Letters from the Past. Her books are loved by readers looking for beautifully drawn relationships, emotionally powerful storylines and evocative settings.

  In 2020, Erica received the Nielsen Silver Award for sales of over a quarter of a million copies for both Love and Devotion and Tell It to the Skies; she has previously won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award for Gardens of Delight and is a Number One bestseller in Norway.

  A keen gardener herself, Erica lives in Suffolk and has a fondness for Lake Como, Formula One motor racing and travel.

  Also by Erica James

  A Breath of Fresh Air

  Time for a Change

  Airs and Graces

  A Sense of Belonging

  Act of Faith

  The Holiday

  Precious Time

  Hidden Talents

  Paradise House

  Love and Devotion

  Gardens of Delight

  Tell It to the Skies

  It’s the Little Things

  The Queen of New Beginnings

  Promises, Promises

  The Real Katie Lavender

  The Hidden Cottage

  Summer at the Lake

  The Dandelion Years

  The Song of the Skylark

  Coming Home to Island House

  Swallowtail Summer

  Letters from the Past

  Copyright

  An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2022

  Copyright © Erica James 2022

  Erica James asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook Edition © March 2022 ISBN: 9780008413729

  Version 2022-02-24

  Note to Readers

  This ebook contains the following accessibility features which, if supported by your device, can be accessed via your ereader/accessibility settings:

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  Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008413699

  For Samuel, and Edward and Ally, and the mighty Mr T and

  the mightier still Beanster!

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Booklist

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Note to Readers

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Martha made sure the bathroom door was firmly shut. Which was stupid. The door was either shut, or it wasn’t. Just as there were no degrees of being pregnant. You either were, or you weren’t. And that was something she knew all about. The not being pregnant part, that was. She was all too familiar with that state of affairs.

  Opening the package which she had bought on the way home, she followed the instructions to the letter. Not that she needed to read the leaflet contained within the small box; she knew what she had to do.

  Afterwards, and while counting the seconds away in her head, she flushed the loo, then washed and dried her hands. When she had reached a hundred and twenty, she added on an extra thirty seconds in the hope they would make all the difference.

  They didn’t.

  As before, the appearance of the minus sign told her that once again she and Tom had failed in their attempt to create a baby. This time she had really thought it might happen, that she was pregnant. She had convinced herself that this month she felt different, that her body was already nurturing a tiny speck of miraculous life. But it was just a cruel false alarm. Or no more than a case of wishful thinking.

  Cross with herself for putting too much store in being eight days late, for allowing her hopes to be raised, she stared at her face in the mirror above the basin. Too soon to panic, she told herself; she was only thirty-five, there was plenty of time yet for her to become a mother.

  The important thing was to remain relaxed about it.

  Anxiety, she reminded herself, would only make things worse. Besides, she wasn’t the worrying kind.

  She was Martha Adams.

  Cool-headed and practical Martha.

  Efficient Martha.

  Reliable Martha.

  As Dad used to say of her, if you needed a steady pair of hands, then Martha was your girl.

  Pep talk over, the disappointment in her face now replaced with a determined smile, she put the pregnancy kit back inside the chemist’s bag, screwed it up, and put it in the bin under the basin in the marble-topped vanity unit. She then scraped her shoulder-length dark hair
back into an obedient ponytail. Mum had described her hair that way when she’d been a child.

  ‘You’re lucky to have such obedient hair, Martha,’ she would say while brushing it ready for a day at school, ‘it’s so perfectly thick and straight, it will always do what you want it to do.’

  In contrast her sister, Willow, had baby-fine blonde hair that had a careless way about it. As a girl, Willow’s plaits had nearly always worn themselves loose by the time the lunchtime bell rang.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, Tom was chopping onions with an ostentatious dexterity he had learned while on a cookery course Martha had given him for his fortieth birthday earlier that year. An avid fan of Masterchef, he never missed an episode, he loved to cook. He read cookery books the way most people read novels, devouring them page by page, word by word.

  ‘There’s a bottle of wine open in the fridge,’ he said, tipping the onions into a large ceramic frying pan.

  When she’d poured out two glasses of Cloudy Bay, Martha asked him how his day had gone.

  ‘Oh, you know, same old same old for a Monday,’ he said, deftly crushing a garlic clove beneath the blade of a knife by banging it with his fist. ‘How about you?’

  She tried to think back to her day in the office, before she came home with the pregnancy test kit and the day was ruined. Before that small seed of hope that had taken root in the last few days was ripped from her. Before she felt … well, never mind all that. ‘A bit like yours,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Same old same old.’

  He smiled and added the garlic to the frying pan. ‘Pass me those mushrooms, will you?’

  She did as he said, then sipped her wine. Her friends and family said she was lucky to have married a man like Tom, a man who was the perfect embodiment of patience and so handy in the kitchen. They were right; she was lucky. A previous boyfriend had dumped her with the damning criticism that she was too organised and sensible. She didn’t think she’d ever felt more insulted, but had then rallied with the acknowledgement that she was who she was, and that was that.

  Amazingly Tom loved her for just that reason.

  ‘If I wanted an impractical and empty-headed girlfriend, I wouldn’t now be sitting here with you,’ he’d said when she’d warned him what she was like on their third date. She hadn’t seen any point in things progressing between them if he was hoping to discover that hiding beneath the tough exterior there was actually a hopelessly incapable girl longing to have her life organised by a strong man. There really wasn’t.

  As for how she felt about Tom; she loved him with her head as much as her heart. She loved that he regarded the two of them the way she did, as an equal partnership, a strong team that together could face any challenge thrown at them.

  Their life goals were probably the same as most people’s – the desire for a fulfilling work life, combined with having children and a nice home. Two of those things they had accomplished with relative ease, it was just the small matter of conception they had yet to achieve.

  ‘What are you making?’ she asked.

  ‘Mushroom risotto topped with a sprinkling of toasted walnuts and a drizzle of walnut oil. That okay with you?’

  ‘More than okay.’

  ‘Do you want a salad to go with it? Or what about some kale?’ Feeding her with good wholesome food was Tom’s way of preparing her body for creating and carrying a new human life. He regularly scoured the internet for the latest super-foods that would aid their ability to have a child. Cutting out alcohol should have been on the list of dos and don’ts, but they had both agreed a glass or two on alternate evenings would help them relax. Of course, the moment Martha became pregnant, she wouldn’t dream of touching alcohol. Or caffeine. Or soft cheese and whatever else was deemed harmful.

  If there was one thing she was good at, it was abiding by rules. She was a stickler for rules. She was pretty good at making them too.

  ‘Thou shalt not break my ten commandments, so says Martha Miller.’

  That was what her sister used to say when they were children and when Martha would invent a game for them to play. It would start simply enough, like pretending they were shipwrecked on a deserted island and had to make a camp before it was dark. It was all imaginary play; the island was the Turkish rug in the hall and the tent was an old sheet pegged over Mum’s clothes airer. But at some point, Willow would lose interest because Martha would keep devising things they could or could not do, like why Willow’s oversized cuddly polar bear couldn’t join them on the island.

  ‘We’re not on an island in the Antarctic,’ Martha would point out – helpfully in her opinion – ‘we’re marooned on a tropical island. Polar bears would find it too hot and they don’t eat coconuts, do they?’

  ‘They might if they were given the chance,’ Willow would say.

  They had finished eating supper and were loading the dishwasher when Martha was seized with a depressingly familiar cramping sensation in her stomach. It was confirmation, as if she needed it, of what she already knew. It drew a defeated sigh from her, which she immediately tried to cover up by pretending to cough.

  ‘You all right?’ asked Tom.

  ‘A tickle in my throat,’ she said.

  She rarely lied to Tom, and when she did it was usually a white lie to keep a surprise from him, like the time she had organised a secret weekend away in Venice for their first wedding anniversary. Just as she did with everything, she had planned it down to the last detail, other than factoring in that Tom had planned a surprise of his own.

  ‘That puts paid to the dinner reservation I’d made for us,’ he’d said with a laugh when she’d presented him with a card and their flight reservations.

  But now she found that trying for a baby – what a ghastly phrase that was! – had turned her into a wife who regularly sneaked around behind her husband’s back.

  They were only small indiscretions that she committed, like not telling Tom about the pregnancy test kits she bought, or about the baby clothes she had smuggled into the house and kept hidden in the wardrobe in the guest bedroom.

  She couldn’t bring herself to share any of this with Tom for fear of him thinking she was becoming obsessed with having a baby. Because if he suspected that was the case, he might also start to think that was all she cared about, to the exclusion of him.

  It happened all the time; couples torn apart through not being able to conceive. She didn’t want that to happen to them. They were stronger than that. She was stronger than that. Through sheer force of stubborn tenacity she would make life bend to her will. She was not her father’s daughter for nothing.

  But she was getting far too ahead of herself. They had only been trying to get pregnant for ten months. It was no time at all. It was just that she was so used to getting things done, methodically ticking items off her list of things to do. As an inveterate list maker, she liked to start her day with a list of tasks she had to achieve, both at work and at home. It gave her a sense of purpose and achievement. She never actually wrote down the words ‘make a baby’, but it was there in invisible ink right at the top of every list.

  Thinking of today’s To Do list, she had one other outstanding job to tick off and that was to speak to her sister. She would need Willow’s support if there were to be any chance of convincing their mother that it was time now to consider the future and do the sensible thing.

  Not that Willow knew the first thing about being sensible, and really Mum wasn’t much better either. During the Coronavirus pandemic Martha had nagged her mother constantly to be careful and not risk leaving the house, but Mum had been adamant that she should do her bit to help in her local community. Along with a team of others, she had shopped for the elderly and vulnerable and made sure they were coping with the fear and loneliness of lockdown. Martha had been convinced that her mother would catch the virus, just as Tom’s poor mother had.

  Having lost Dad only months before anything was known about the Coronavirus, the thought of losing Mum as well would have just been
too much to bear. It was the aftermath of that worry that was behind Martha’s determination now to make Mum accept that it would be better if she sold Anchor House and moved from West Sussex to be conveniently nearer to her daughters.

  Especially if there was a grandchild for her to help out with.

  With Willow onside there might be a greater chance of convincing Mum that it would be the sensible thing to do.

  Chapter Two

  Willow was fast asleep when her mobile rang.

  It had been a deliciously deep sleep, the sort that didn’t respond well to being disturbed, but in fumbling for her mobile on the bedside table she woke with a jolt, realising two things.

  Firstly, she wasn’t in bed, she was in the bath.

  And secondly, by flinging out her hand for her phone, she had knocked over whatever had been on the wooden stool next to the bath.

  She had found the sweet little stool in a junk shop and carried it home triumphantly, filled with plans to do it up with some pretty chalk paint and then sell it on eBay. She had thought it might be the start of something new and creative for her to do, a bit like Mum’s old gardenalia business. She had imagined gathering enough stock together to open a small shop called Willow’s Emporium. Full of enthusiasm for the idea, she had bought the necessary tins of paint, brushes and whatever else was required, but had somehow never got around to painting the stool.

  If ever she needed a symbol to capture the complete lack of achievement in her life, that stool was it.

  ‘Willow, are you there?’

  At the sound of her sister’s voice in her ear, she shook herself fully awake, then she shivered at the coldness of the water. Leaning forward to turn on the hot tap, she said, ‘Yes, I’m here.’

  ‘Are you in the bath?’ asked Martha above the noise of the gushing water. She said it as though Willow had been caught doing something indecent.

  ‘I am,’ she said.

  ‘So what do you think?’

  ‘What do I think about what?’

  ‘What I’ve just been telling you.’

  Oh Lord, thought Willow, she must have been so busy thinking of that wooden stool, she hadn’t heard a word of what Martha had said. Attention span of a goldfish, that’s what Dad used to say about her. In one ear and out the other.