A Family Affair Read online

  Also by Julie Houston

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  A Village Vacancy

  A FAMILY AFFAIR

  Julie Houston

  AN IMPRINT OF HEAD OF ZEUS

  www.ariafiction.com

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Aria, an imprint of Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Julie Houston, 2021

  The moral right of Julie Houston to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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

  ISBN:

  eBook: 9781789546668

  Paperback: 9781800246140

  © Cover design © Cherie Chapman

  Cover illustration © Lucia Segura Art (woman); all other images Shutterstock

  Aria

  c/o Head of Zeus

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  www.ariafiction.com

  ‘you are enough; a thousand times enough…’

  Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part 2

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part 3

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Become an Aria Addict

  Prologue

  Two years previously

  ‘Frankie, you’re not thinking straight. You’ve had a shock, I know that. But running off, leaving your nursing career that you love…’

  ‘Career?’ I snarled back, shaking off Aunty Pam’s outstretched hand and, in doing so, rendering it redundant, hanging useless in mid-air. ‘What sodding career? I’ve been training for all of three months. Florence Nightingale, I can assure you, Pam, I most certainly am not.’

  ‘But you love this new career of yours,’ Pam protested, trying to take my hand once more. ‘You know you do. Don’t throw it away because of what’s happened. Stay and make the best of it. We’re all here for you. How about you come and live with me for a while? I’d feed you up a bit and be there for you. I can help you get through this. You can have your old bedroom back; you know, how you used to come and stay with me when you didn’t want to be with your mum…?’

  ‘Aunty Pam, much as I love you – and my old bedroom – I’m a big girl now.’ I tried to smile but, as I’d done nothing but cry throughout the previous week, I was a bit out of practice.

  ‘Yes,’ she said gently, ‘and hurting as much now as when you were a little girl.’ She broke off, her own eyes welling up, and I stared. Aunty Pam, strong Aunty Pam who’d always been there for me when my own mother hadn’t, never cried. ‘Look, Frankie,’ she sniffed, ‘I’ve sort of got used to you being around again; you know, settling down in Westenbury, with your new career and with…’

  ‘Yes well, that’s the whole point isn’t it? I’m no longer with…’ I trailed off, unable to say his name.

  ‘Frankie, I don’t want you to leave.’

  ‘I’m not leaving you, Aunty Pam; this isn’t personal. I just, you know, I can’t stay round here now.’

  ‘Frankie, I have two daughters: Carla, who I hardly ever see because she went and fell in love with a Canadian – and you…’

  ‘Aunty Pam, you’re not my mother…’

  ‘Thanks for that, Frankie.’

  ‘Don’t sulk, Pam. You know as well as I do, I love you as though you were my real mum instead of just my aunt, but I’d be off even if you were my real mum. I can’t stay here any longer.’ I turned, car keys in hand, going home to the granny flat where I lived with my dad, desperate to set the ball rolling now that I’d made up my mind. ‘I just can’t stay here…’

  ‘Running away from your problems never solved anything,’ Pam said gently. She hesitated before adding, ‘I stood my ground when things got tough round here; stayed and fought my corner.’

  ‘Sorry, Pam, but I’ve already told my course tutor at university and at the hospital.’

  ‘Oh, Frankie, you haven’t?’

  I nodded. ‘I just need a couple of days to sort a few things out.’ I rubbed at my eyes once more. ‘And then I’m off… I’m going…’

  PART ONE

  1

  Frankie

  Now

  I felt sure there would have been some changes – Luca would have seen to that – but the offices, and particularly the entrance to the boardroom, on the top floor of Piccione’s, didn’t actually appear to have altered one little bit in the two years I’d been away. I hesitated, touching the raised lettering – PICCIONE’S PICKLES & PRESERVES - on the glazed double door that led to Angelo’s inner sanctum, in the same way I always had ever since I was four years old and beginning not only to reach up on tiptoes to trace the black lettering, but also to understand that we were important. The Picciones were important and Nonno Angelo the most important of all.

  ‘Francesca?’ Margaret Holroyd – Angelo’s secretary, PA and, if rumour were to be believed, also his bedfellow these past forty-five years or so – peered over both her spectacles and computer.

  ‘Hello, Margaret. Yes, it’s me. How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine, dear. I’m fine. Angelo will be so pleased you’re back. Does he know? I mean, he didn’t say anything to me.’

  Goodness, she must be in her late sixties now, I calculated. Margaret Holroyd was as much a feature of Piccione’s as the heavy oak furniture and fittings which, despite Luca’s attempts to dispense with the former and update with glass, chrome and blonde Amtico, remained mulishly in situ, along with the steadfast Margaret herself.

  I nodded. ‘Nonno knows I’m back. I had dinner with him and Nonna last night.’

  ‘And how is your grandmother, dear?’ This wasn’t Margaret simply making polite conversation re Nonna. As Angelo’s mistress, as well as his PA, Margaret Holroyd had been poised and on the starter’s block to step into Nonna’s shoes for as long as I could remember, and she really w
as interested in the state of my grandmother’s health. Despite having had everything removed – her gall bladder, part of her bowel, her womb and, apparently while I was away, her bunions to which she’d long been a martyr – Nonna was still determined, at the age of eighty-eight, not to let ‘that bloody Yorkshire interloper’ (said with some glee and triumph in her broken Yorkshire and native Sicilian accent every time she came round from dispensing with yet another part of her anatomy) make Angelo entirely her own.

  Margaret was patient, biding her time like a croc in the shallows: she had almost twenty years on Nonna, went to Pilates on Mondays, Hatha Yoga on Wednesdays (rumour had it she could sit for ten minutes with one leg wrapped round her neck) and Cook Italian for Your Man every Thursday. If she could get her legs around her own neck, God knows what sexual gymnastics she got up to with Angelo. Whatever it was, it was keeping Angelo, now eighty-six, on his feet (or maybe his back?) and he was as sprightly and upright, with every one of his marbles still in place, as he’d ever been. While Nonna Consettia was short, grey-haired and – despite the rapidly disappearing internal organs – plump, with her matronly bosom a quite outstanding feature of her physique; her rival, Margaret, was tall, bottle-blonde and The Fast Diet-slim with inner thighs that could – allegedly – crack a Brazil nut cleanly from its shell.

  Nonna, despite her lack of physical attributes, had one major advantage over her rival: she was The Wife, joined to Angelo for the duration on this earth, (and the next if Father O’Leary from St Augustine’s who was a regular visitor to High Royd, my grandparents’ monstrosity of a house, was to be believed). She was bound by her Catholic beliefs in the sanctity of marriage as well as in the constant battle of seeing off her rival, while Margaret remained The Mistress.

  For some reason I felt ridiculously nervous about being summoned to join this family meeting. If only Aunty Pam was in there with the others: pulling one of her daft faces behind Luca’s back in order to intimate just how pompous my brother was being; putting Nonno Angelo in his place as only she could…

  ‘Oh, Francesca, you’re here?’ My brother Luca, our mother’s inherent Viking genes expressed through his blond hair and blue eyes rather than the Picciones’ Sicilian ones, opened the boardroom door and motioned me in. ‘What are you hanging about out here for?’ he asked irritably. ‘Come on, we’re all waiting for you.’ He brushed at a minuscule thread of lint on the lapel of his immaculate grey suit, ran a hand through his hair and frowned. ‘You’re wearing jeans.’

  ‘Is that a question or a statement of fact?’

  ‘This is a board meeting, Francesca.’ Luca frowned once more as he looked me up and down, taking in the faded Levi’s and scuffed Timberlands that had accompanied me home from Sicily. I’d disposed of most of my clothes in a skip near the Da Nang International airport in Vietnam, and certainly had bought very few new ones while living in rural Sicily during the past eighteen months or so, but my beloved jeans had been washed in Mum’s all-singing, all-dancing Bosch machine and were – almost – as good as new.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, get over yourself, Luca. It’s a family get-together.’

  ‘Bit more than that, actually. Come on.’

  My dad, Joe, as Angelo’s only son in the family business and, as such, company director to Angelo’s presidency, was already in his place on Angelo’s left-hand side and Luca passed me a grey buff folder before retaking his place on Angelo’s right. I bent to kiss my grandfather and then my dad, and went to sit on the brown leather chair that had been pulled out and was very obviously waiting for me.

  ‘God, I feel like I’m being interviewed.’ I smiled as I looked up and across at the three men in my family sitting like the three wise monkeys opposite me. Dad winked at me and Angelo smiled.

  Luca didn’t. ‘You are,’ he said, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘Hang on.’ I frowned. ‘Nonno said just to come in for coffee and see what was going on down here these days.’ I turned to Angelo. ‘You did, didn’t you? I don’t see any coffee. And I could do with one.’

  ‘Look, love,’ Dad said, cutting to the quick, ‘we’ll get round to coffee in a couple of minutes. The thing is, we want you in, Frankie. With your Aunty Pam retiring, there’s an opening for you here and, more importantly, your grandfather wants you in Piccione’s.’

  ‘In?’ I glanced over at Luca whose face was impassive. He and I had never really got on. Despite my fantasy of having a big brother who would always be there for me and let me be a big part of his life, Luca had remained steadfastly uninterested in me either as a sister, a playmate or, as he grew older and into girls (lots of girls) his confidante.

  ‘Francesca, cara,’ Angelo purred, ‘enough of the travelling now. You have a duty to the name of Piccione…’

  Oh Jesus, had the old man been reading Barbara Taylor Bradford again?

  ‘…and we need you here. You big girl now. You grown woman and you need take on responsibility for the family firm.’

  Or, was it Mario Puzo?

  ‘You don’t appear, Francesca, to be wanting to settle down, to find good man like your Nonna Consettia did with me, and have the babies?’ he went on.

  ‘I’d actually love to find good man and have the babies, Nonno, but unfortunately good men seem to be very well hidden from me, and those who aren’t are either taken, gay or ugly.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, Francesca, about the ugly ones.’ Angelo sniffed, pointing a finger in my direction. ‘You’ve tried the taken ones – we all know that; I don’t advise gay ones, and if all that is left is ugly ones then beggars cannot be borrowers.’

  ‘Choosers,’ I murmured.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I told you she wouldn’t want to be back here,’ Luca said dismissively, reaching for the grey folder. ‘Why on earth would she want to be back in Yorkshire when she’s been bumming round the Far East and then sloping off to live in Sicily for almost two years instead of coming home?’

  I snatched the folder back from Luca. ‘Hang on a minute. You’ve all been talking at me, but not given me any idea what this is all about.’ I opened the folder and tried to make some sense of Luca’s facts and figures, the line graphs in red and black and the pie charts that I could have turned upside down and they would have made as much sense.

  Luca turned his chair, addressing Dad and Nonno in an attempt to shut me out. ‘Francesca was given the opportunity to start at the bottom like I did.’ Luca reached for the folder once again. ‘You know when she’d finished at university? She wasn’t interested then and she’s plainly not interested now. We’ll confirm the American chap we’ve been looking at. With Pam retiring, there’s a big hole to fill here, and I need to get him on our side with a decent package before he gets taken on elsewhere.’ Luca glanced at his watch. ‘He came up from London last night and I’m meeting him for lunch at one.’

  ‘Will you stop talking about me as if I wasn’t here, Luca?’ I said crossly. ‘And you never started on the shop floor with the pickles and beetroot. Oh no, it was suit on and sitting round the boardroom table from day one for you, wasn’t it?’ Worry about what my darling Aunty Pam would think about me coming into Piccione’s was making me sound more irritable than I’d intended. Was I being invited in to take over from her? If so, how on earth could I even contemplate stepping into her shoes? The shoes she’d worn to help steer Piccione’s ever onwards and upwards during the last forty years?

  ‘Francesca, enough,’ Angelo snapped. ‘If you don’t want to be part of Piccione family then that fine. I’m very disappointed in your decision, but if you want to waste life playing football and drinking fishbowl of dodgy cocktails under full moon in Thailand, then so be it.’

  ‘What did you have in mind, Nonno?’ I folded my arms, noticing the frayed cuffs of my shirt and the – non-trendy – hole in the knee of my Levi’s, and made a conscious effort to ignore Luca and appear grown up. I was almost twenty-nine, with very little to show for those years. Making the England Schoolgirls’ football
team had been my greatest achievement, but it had all gone downhill from then on. I had a (rather poor) Business Studies degree from Northumbria that Dad and Nonno had insisted I take rather than the sports science degree at Loughborough I’d craved. I’d always understood that the master plan for me would be that these business skills accrued would be utilised within the family firm. I’d gone along with their plan up to a point, but after three wonderful years at university, when I did far more drinking and socialising than studying, the last thing I wanted was to come home and bury myself in small-town pickles and preserves. Instead, university was followed by a couple of years working the bars in Australia and New Zealand with my mate Daisy Maddison before we’d both joined Flying High, based in Liverpool, for a stint as air stewardesses. I shuddered at the memory. Then, two and a half years ago, full of zeal and convinced I’d make a brilliant nurse, I’d started my nursing degree at Midhope General.

  I actually loved the nursing. I was a whizz at hospital corners when bed making, and absolutely brilliant at finding veins in which to stick needles and cannulas (‘send for Frankie’ – the call would go up if one of the other student nurses was in danger of turning an increasingly alarmed patient into a pincushion as she struggled to draw blood) and the kids on the children’s ward loved shouting ‘Goal, Frankie’ every time I kicked a rolled-up bandage into a bed pan.

  The senior ward sister didn’t share their enthusiasm.

  I’d have been just about qualified by now, I mused as Angelo sat back in his chair, waiting impatiently to go into detail as to what he had in mind for me while one of the office juniors brought in a tray of coffee and cantucci, the hard Italian almond biscuit that Angelo had first imported from Italy before shelling out on the machinery to develop, make and sell his own brand ten years or so previously. It had been a major diversification for Piccione’s at the time and, as far as I knew, so stressful for Angelo being persuaded out of his comfort zone by Luca that it was the last time any real new product development had been attempted.