Love in Store

Bill Carmen

Description

When thirteen year old Tim Cooper's mother dies of flu in a London hospital, he could not have envisaged the cataclysmic changes her loss would make to his life's path. He takes over the running of his father's market stall at fifteen and from this small beginning attempts to build a retail empire with the help of some remarkable characters.He falls in love with a clever, attractive, young heiress, Sophie Vieri, and hopes to marry her. The couple experience a firestorm of resistance to their relationship from her upper-middle-class parents. Sophie is involved in a serious road traffic accident and is comatose. Tim sits at her hospital bedside for three days and nights waiting for her to wake up. Will she recover and be undamaged?Will his business be successful?Will her family put aside their prejudices and allow the marriage?

Sujets

• Romance

Informations

• Publié par: Brown Dog Books
• Date de parution: 06 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839521515
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

LOVE IN STORE
LOVE IN STORE
The barrow boy and the heiress
BILL CARMEN
First published 2020
Copyright © Bill Carmen 2020
The right of Bill Carmen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Published under licence by Brown Dog Books and The Self-Publishing Partnership, 7 Green Park Station, Bath BA1 1JB
www.selfpublishingpartnership.co.uk

ISBN printed book: 978-1-83952-150-8 ISBN e-book: 978-1-83952-151-5
Cover design by Kevin Rylands Internal design by Andrew Easton
Printed and bound in the UK
This book is printed on FSC certified paper
I need to thank some people for their input into the writing of this book. To my wife Clare, thank you for your patience and support when it all got a little difficult . To my daughters, Sarah and Sue, my son-in-law Rob for the website and IT stuff, and Janney Hewitt and Carol Preston, my creative writing class tutors. The kind folk who read my book and gave me feedback. Last but no means least, Douglas and Frances from SPP publishing who worked hard to teach an old dog new tricks. I am delighted with the outcome.
Thanks to you all Bill Carmen
CONTENTS
Chapter 1: London 1958
Chapter 2: Tim’s Father 1962
Chapter 3: The Meeting 1969
Chapter 4: Love Lost
Chapter 5: The Proposition
Chapter 6: The Shop 1970
Chapter 7: The Grand Opening
Chapter 8: Sophie finds the Shop
Chapter 9: The Restaurant
Chapter 10: Sophie at the Shop
Chapter 11: Bread
Chapter 12: The Proposal
Chapter 13: The Row
Chapter 14: Sophie’s Job
Chapter 15: The Promise
Chapter 16: Loaves
Chapter 17: Working at the Shop
Chapter 18: Mr Vieri’s Distrust
Chapter 19: The Business Plan
Chapter 20: The Boat
Chapter 21: The Accident
Chapter 22: Recovery
Chapter 23: Sophie’s Job
Chapter 24: Family Chats
Chapter 25: Bread and Boats
Chapter 26: Resistance
Chapter 27: Engaged
Chapter 28: Moving Onboard
Chapter 29: Wedding Plans
Chapter 30: Mrs Vieri
Chapter 31: Moving Out
Chapter 32: Best Man
Chapter 33: The Wedding
Chapter 34: The Honeymoon
Chapter 35: The Second Shop
Chapter 36: No 2
Chapter 37: Shop Progress
Chapter 38: The Party at No 2
Chapter 39: The First Day’s Trading
Chapter 40: Daisy
Chapter 41: The Will
Chapter 42: Jessica
Chapter 43: Sally and Victor at the Boat
Chapter 44: An Unlucky Cut
Chapter 45: The Miscarriage
Chapter 46: Baby
CHAPTER 1
LONDON 1958
Tim’s mother awoke and smiled at her thirteen-year-old son who was sitting beside her hospital bed. Using her thumbs, she wiped the tears from his cheeks. Then she sank back on to her pillow and closed her eyes. He heard her take a short breath in followed by a long, long, breath out. Then… nothing.
Tim spoke to her enquiringly, then more loudly, now he was shouting, ‘Wake up, wake up, Mum, please wake up.’
A nurse appeared at his side and stopped him shaking his mother’s shoulder. After checking for a pulse, she said, ‘I’m so sorry, lad, she’s gone. She’s passed away.’
Tim looked up at the nurse, unable to take in what she was saying, his mother could not be dead. The nurse could see the disbelief, the shock and the fear his face displayed.
Fifteen days earlier his mother had come down with the flu. She had been to the doctor’s, who said she would be better soon, but he would keep an eye on it. His mother had informed Tim it was nothing to worry about.
The nurse tried to move Tim away from the bed. He locked his fingers around the bars of the bed so firmly no one could move them. Seconds later there were doctors and nurses surrounding him all talking at once. Their mouths were moving but he could make no sense of what they were saying. All he knew was that his mother was dead. His whole body was shaking. The tears were cascading down his face, he was uttering a high keening sound, a product of the terrible pain he was in. The terrified voice in his head was calling out, ‘Mum come back, please, please come back.’
At home that night Tim lay in his bed shivering and crying. His whole world had fallen apart.
Tim could hear the roar of his father’s grief being torn from him as his loss overcame him. During that never-ending night Tim wandered through his nightmare crying out for his mother, sometimes he imagined her calling to him. He found himself running down endless corridors, hearing her footsteps but never able to catch her. Sometimes it was just a hint of her perfume that made him turn left or right down yet another blind turning. Once again, the tears and the pain engulfed him.
Tim slept badly for months afterwards. His mind kept replaying all the details of her death in the same terrifying nightmare. When awake he would often find himself involuntarily returning to the night his mother had been taken into hospital. The memory of it was so painful, like scratching an open wound.
He remembered being woken at 3 am by strange voices in the hall outside his downstairs bedroom. He had heard his father’s voice and had recognised his fear.
He recalled rising from his bed and opening his bedroom door, there had been voices emanating from his parents’ bedroom. Then he had seen two ambulance men backing out through the doorway, each carrying one end of a stretcher with his mother strapped to it. She had lain unmoving; was deathly pale, her eyes tight shut. He had not been able to see any sign of her breathing. Tim had been sure she was dead.
He relived the fear every time. He recollected taking two trembling paces back into his unlit room so as not to be seen. He had been a shadow amongst shadows, invisible.
No one had been aware of his growing fear and panic, nor of the silent tears that shook his small body as he stood in the dark, shivering, his arms clasped around his chest.
Tim had watched his father in disbelief as he followed the stretcher and the ambulance men out of the front door, closing it very quietly behind him as they left.
Tim had stood perfectly still for some time expecting his father to remember him.
Time slid by. He recalled he was crying and very cold when he went to return to his own bed then changed his mind, leaving all the lights on; he’d walked cautiously upstairs turning other lights on as he went. His parents’ bed had been roughly pulled together and there was still some warmth trapped by the blankets.
He remembered deciding to stay awake until his father came back, but eventually sleep overcame him.
His father had returned in the early morning, waking Tim as he closed the front door. Not finding him in his bedroom he had called out, ‘Where are you, lad?’
Tim, woken by his father’s homecoming had been standing at the top of the stairs. His father had looked up, seen him and said, ‘Sorry I left you, lad.’
Tim, terrified, had whispered, ‘Is she dead, Dad?’
‘For God sake, don’t say that, you daft little bugger,’ his father had shouted at him. ‘She is very poorly but she will get better now she is in hospital.’
Tim, shocked and in tears had run down the stairs into his bedroom and shut the door.
His father rarely shouted at him and he had never heard him swear. He knew his mother would not have allowed it.
*
It was his great aunt who came to stay with him and his father for some time afterwards. She was his grandmother’s sister. Tim always thought of her as very regal but very kind. She was an example of another age. Her diction, her manners, were impeccable. Her apparel harkened back to another far more grandiose age. Her husband, Edwin, had died in the same year as Tim was born. Old photos of him showed him to be a tall thin upright man in a three-piece suit and trilby hat with a stern demeanour. He was standing with one hand on the door of a large old black Bentley. He had inherited his father’s publishing business after his return at the end of the First World War and had become very wealthy.
It was his aunt who made all the arrangements for the funeral, notified Tim’s school, found a cleaner etc. She would cuddle Tim when his sorrow overcame him. It was she who insisted he carried on with his attendance at Scouts.
‘It will provide a break,’ she explained. She meant it was a chance to get away from the bleak environment that was now his home life, but she did not say it.
His relationship with his father became ever more difficult. The death of Tim’s mother had rendered his father incapable. As the months went by his father had slowly become more and more reclusive, occasionally Tim would find him still in bed when he arrived home from school. Often, he did not shave for days at a time.
Money became a problem; his father went to work less and less frequently. On one occasion Tim asked for money to pay the suppliers and the stall rental.
‘They will have to wait,’ shouted his father.
‘We are a week late already,’ remonstrated Tim. ‘They’ll throw us off the pitch and if the suppliers get fed up, we will have nothing to sell.’
‘Don’t you criticise me boy,’ the last word said with unpleasant emphasis. ‘Keeping you in food and clothing is a major expense.’
His father continued, ‘I will open the stall tomorrow, now get out of my sight.’
Tim left the house and wandered the streets, hands in pockets and shoulders hunched, muttering to himself, ‘How can he have changed so much? I don’t recognise him now.’ He couldn’t think of any way of altering anything. He was so desperately unhappy. His future looked pointless.
In the middle of his fifteenth year, on the days when his father got up for work Tim went with him, playing truant while he learnt the business. He often manned the stall on a Saturday on his own. The Italian stall holder next door, Harry Trentin