CHAPTER ONE

      Hope Parker let the shopping bags sit in a heap at her feet as she stood in front of the cookery books section. Her eyes flicked past Perfect Cakes, The Definitive Chinese Cookbook, Catering for Parties and Easy Meals. A recipe book full of easy meals was not what she was looking for. They were all she ever cooked in the first place. No, she wanted a comprehensive and simple cooking book, something big, fat and informative and full of explanations of what a bain marie really was and precisely what you did with yeast and did you have to have an airing cupboard handy when you cooked with it? That was all she wanted: a book that would finally explain how to cook something that didn’t involve chicken pieces and a can of ready-to-go tomato sauce.

      Her gaze moved past a massive advanced French cooking manual and she leaned closer to the shelves, trying to ignore the bookshop’s lunchtime rush. Then she spotted it, a fat tome with bright gold writing on the spine: Cooking for Cowards: Become the Queen of Your Kitchen.

      Queen of her kitchen? Yes, that was exactly what Hope wanted. No more ready-made lasagne and frozen solid stuffed chicken dinners in tinfoil. But lots of home-cooked meals that would have Matt beaming from ear to ear, no longer able to tease that he never put on weight because she couldn’t cook.

      Hope pulled it free from the other books and stared at the cover, hoping there was no mention of the word ‘advanced’. There wasn’t. Instead, there was a picture of an ordinary looking woman standing smiling behind a veritable feast of glistening, delicious food.

      Hope flicked inside and found an introduction that was funny, easy to understand, and made no mention of buying complicated utensils before you started. She couldn’t afford to buy lots of new pots and pans and strange things for chopping up herbs.

      ‘Cooking really is easy,’ cooed the introduction. ‘If you’re one of those people who’ve never had the chance to learn, then let me show you how, the easy way.’

      There was no implication that you had to be a twenty-something newly-married to be buying this book, no implication that thirty-seven-year-old women should be ashamed of themselves to be purchasing a cookery bible that included a section on ‘how to buy meat’.

      Hope never bought meat from the butchers’. She never knew what to ask for or even what you’d do with rack of lamb if you got it. She bought her meat ready packed from the supermarket where nobody could look down on you for not knowing what a gigot was.

      ‘There’s no need to be scared of buying meat,’ continued the introduction, as if the writer had read Hope’s mind. ‘It’s easy once you know how.’

      Sold. Hope collected her shopping, paid for the book and hurried up to Jolly’s department store, already lost in the fantasy of being a superb cook. Imagine the dinner parties they could have: Matt wouldn’t have to entertain important advertising clients on his expense account in Bath’s elegant restaurants any more. Instead, he could bring them home, and she, dressed in something elegant but sexy, would waft out of the kitchen with the scent of crème brulée clinging to her while jaded businessmen gobbled up melt-in-the-mouth things in delicately flavoured gravy, asking her why she’d decided to work in a building society instead of starting up her own restaurant?

      And Toby and Millie would love it. Well, when they were older, they would. They’d think that home-made chutney and made-from-scratch mayonnaise were the norm and would smugly tell their schoolmates that their mother was the ‘best cook in the world, so there!’ Hope remembered this type of culinary boasting from her own schooldays. But she and her sister, Sam, had always stayed out of the ‘whose mother is the best cook’ arguments, knowing that whatever could be said about their aunt Ruth, that she was an excellent cook wasn’t one of them. Hope wondered, as she often did, if her mother had been any good at cooking? Aunt Ruth had never talked about things like that. Maybe Mum had been a wonderful cook. It might even be genetic: all Hope had to do was move beyond instant chicken sauces to discover that she was the next Escoffier.

      In Jolly’s, she got sidetracked in the women’s department. She couldn’t resist stopping a moment to finger the pretty floral skirt, running her fingers wistfully over the soft cotton with the delicate sprigged pattern of roses. In the middle of all the new season’s dark wintry clothes, the rail of prettily patterned skirts had stood out like a wildflower meadow in a landscape of muddy ploughed fields.

      Feeling the plastic grocery bags threatening to cut off the circulation to her left hand, Hope unhooked them from her wrist before indulging in a proper examination of the garment. The background colour was the pale blue of delicate Wedgwood with tiny lilac flowers mingling with tiny raspberry pink ones. Hope sighed wistfully. This wasn’t a skirt, it was a lifestyle. A lifestyle where the wearer lived in a pretty cottage with lovely, well-behaved children, cats, maybe a rabbit or two, and an adoring husband who appreciated her. This woman sewed her own cushion covers, knew how to dry lavender and could bottle fruits and vegetables instead of buying them from the supermarket. She didn’t need a safety pin to hold the top of her skirt together and she never raised her voice at the children in the morning when an entire carton of milk was spilled all over the said children’s clothes, necessitating a complete change. No. This woman wore floral perfumes that came in old-fashioned bottles, never got angry with her children and wafted around with a basket as she bought organic vegetables that still had bits of earth clinging to them. People would say things like ‘Isn’t she lovely? Wonderful mother, fantastic cook, have you tried her apple crumble? And she still manages to work…’

      Yeah right. And pigs might fly. Hope patted the skirt one last time and picked up her shopping. She wasn’t Mrs Floral Skirt and she never would be. She was Mrs Tracksuit Bottom, whose two children were quite accustomed to her roaring ‘Stop that right now or I’ll kill you!’ She never wafted anywhere – difficult when you had a spare tyre and stocky legs – and she never talked to the neighbours long enough for them to have an opinion of her. Apart from the woman two doors up who let her dog do its business in Hope’s garden, resulting in an un-neighbourly stand-off one morning. And as for sewing cushion covers she still hadn’t managed to sew the button back on her work skirt and it had been held up with a safety pin for months. Although the good part of that was that the safety pin was of the big nappy variety and was more comfy than the constricting button had been. Thinking of work, she’d be terribly late back if she didn’t get a move on.

      She shook her head as if to rid it of the remnants of the idyllic floral skirt fantasy and, collecting up her shopping, hurried into the men’s department and over to the ties. It took ages to find one she thought Matt would like: an expensive buttermilk yellow silk with a discreet pattern. Hope held the tie up against every shirt on the display; it looked lovely against the blue shirts and went particularly well with an azure striped one. She groaned in indecision.

      Matt didn’t go in for blue shirts much. The grey tie was more versatile, definitely, and cheaper, but Matt loved expensive things. He’d adored that ugly key ring his boss had given him one Christmas, purely because of the designer logo stamped into the leather. She held both ties up and squinted at them, dithering as usual.

      OK, the