A Leap of Faith Read online

  About the Book

  Sappho Jones stopped counting birthdays when she reached thirty but, even with her hazy grip on mathematics, she realizes that she’s on the slippery slope to the big four-oh! With the thought suddenly lodged in her mind that she’s a mere cat’s whisker away from becoming a single eccentric female living in a country cottage in Wales, she has the urge to do something dramatic before it’s too late.

  The trouble is, as an adventurous woman of a certain age, Sappho’s pretty much been there, done that, got the T-shirt. In fact, the only thing she hasn’t tried is motherhood. And with sexy potter Nye on hand as a potential daddy – or at least donor – is it time for her to consider the biggest leap of all? It’s either that or buy a cat . . .

  Wonderfully wry and life-affirming, this hilarious novel is perfect for fans of Milly Johnson and Jill Mansell.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Foreword

  Chapter 1: It’s All Greek to Me

  Chapter 2: Birthday Letters

  Chapter 3: Say It with Flowers

  Chapter 4: Dipped Wicks

  Chapter 5: And So to Bedd

  Chapter 6: Crackers

  Chapter 7: Spiked

  Chapter 8: Egged On

  Chapter 9: Chris Cross

  Chapter 10: Loosely Basted

  Chapter 11: Aces High

  Chapter 12: Spotted

  Chapter 13: Dogged

  Chapter 14: Shabby Tigers

  Chapter 15: Cat Flap

  Chapter 16: Suspicious Circumstances

  Chapter 17: Doggone

  Chapter 18: Bolted

  Chapter 19: Icing Over

  Chapter 20: Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

  Chapter 21: Punch Drunk

  Chapter 22: Stoned

  Chapter 23: Well Read

  Chapter 24: Impulses

  Chapter 25: Exposure

  Chapter 26: Rocky Horrors

  Chapter 27: Sweet and Sour

  Chapter 28: Testing Times

  Chapter 29: Gingered

  Chapter 30: High Tea

  Chapter 31: Automatic Writing

  Chapter 32: Dead End

  Chapter 33: On the Rocks

  Chapter 34: Out for the Count

  Chapter 35: Date Expired

  Recipes

  Read on for an extract from The Little Teashop of Lost and Found

  About the Author

  Also by Trisha Ashley

  Copyright

  A LEAP OF FAITH

  Trisha Ashley

  For Carol Weatherill, with love.

  Author’s Note

  The beautiful Gower peninsula in South Wales certainly exists, but the village of Bedd and all the characters portrayed within this book are the product of the author’s fevered imagination alone.

  Foreword

  Originally published by Piatkus in 2001 under the title The Urge to Jump, this is the second of my romantic comedies. It’s been long out of print and difficult to get hold of, so I’m delighted that Transworld have released this new edition.

  It features Sappho, possibly my favourite heroine, who is tall, bossy, opinionated and outspoken – but also the kind of best friend we wish we all had.

  I haven’t rewritten it, merely tweaked and polished a little here and there, so since it was created on the cusp of the new century it’s obviously very much of its time, especially with regard to mobile phones and computers. It’s amazing how things have changed in such a short space of time, but back then they were a luxury, rather than the norm.

  Happy reading, everyone!

  Trisha Ashley

  Chapter 1

  It’s All Greek to Me

  Another glorious Grecian Two Thousand day was dawning over Bob’s Creative Break Centre on the island of Lefkada, and outside the air was like warm milk, tinged with the scent of burning charcoal . . .

  Thank goodness I’m a woman of strong resolution. I needed to be, for not only did the island try to seduce me away from my morning’s work, so too that day did the stack of birthday mail on my bedside table.

  But I’m like a jogger: I need my daily buzz and I’m programmed either to write every morning or self-destruct. It doesn’t matter which far-flung corner of the globe I’m in, whether I’m boarding a ferry, sitting in an aeroplane or paddling a canoe – between the hours of five and seven in the morning I’m either muttering into a tape recorder or scribbling in a notebook. Spiral Bound.

  When I got a car of my own, I vowed I’d have a ‘Writers Do It Anywhere’ sticker on the bumper.

  Still, there were ten more minutes and the current chapter of Vengeane: Dark Hours, Dark Deeds to wind up.

  Nala, the heroine, shares with me (and Margaret Thatcher, too, apparently), the traits of needing very little sleep and having great self-control.

  Come to that, she’s a bit like a nubile Margaret Thatcher in leathers, for while she doesn’t exactly roam around the forest with a row of wizened willies dangling from her belt, she does have a nifty line in verbal emasculation.

  Wish I did.

  ‘The realm of Mirrign was now rightfully Nala’s . . . but was she fated to rule it entirely alone? During her years of outcast wandering she’d dreamed of finding a true mate, her equal in skill, knowledge and strength.

  ‘Once, she’d thought Raarg was the man, until the scales had been torn from her dazzled eyes, and she’d seen the shallow, vain, self-seeking reality behind the beautiful façade.

  ‘In the bitterness of his rejection he’d followed her like a malignant shadow, stirring his followers to vile deeds fuelled by the evil, lichen-brewed Laag.

  ‘And now the mysterious and alien Dragonslayer, tall and wraith-pale against the dark forest, had come to haunt her life. His eyes, like clear crystal, seemed to pierce her very soul . . .

  ‘Dragonslayer? What sort of place could the Darkside be, if dragons were enemies who needed to be slain? And what did he want from her?’

  ‘I don’t know, blossom,’ I told her, clicking off the tape recorder. ‘You’ll just have to work it out for yourself.’

  And I needed to find another name for the evil-inducing drink: I couldn’t have Laag Louts in my fantasy novel, it was just too much. I’d think of something else that afternoon, while the current crop of Creative Breakers were utilizing their free time by writing, sleeping, or fornicating, according to their tastes (and luck).

  I might be writing, but I certainly wouldn’t be fornicating. It’s such a meaningless quick fix without love that I hadn’t been really tempted for years, though lately for some reason I seemed to have been thinking about sex almost as much as about my novel. (That’s about every thirty seconds.)

  Perhaps it was something to do with my birthday approaching, heralding yet another upward step on the spiral stair to forty, with no vestige of a Significant Other in my life, and a decreasing chance of ever finding one.

  Let’s face it, by this stage the only available men left on the shelf were the last few date-expired ones, for whom genetic modification could only be a good idea.

  In a lesser person desperation might have set in, but I was not about to grab the nearest male flotsam like the Incredible Sinking Woman. I had a rash and ill-considered fling in my youth, so I know that the game is definitely not worth the candle.

  Raarg, my novel’s gorgeous but evil anti-hero, is loosely based on my ex-lover, Dave (so he’s pretty loose), although Dave isn’t really evil, just a bit vicious round the edges like a marginally untrustworthy dog.

  He turned a little odd after I realized I’d made a big mistake and ditched him, and he took to stalking me down dark stree
ts, making peculiar phone calls, and stuff like that. Then one night I mistook him for a mugger and laid him out cold.

  Had he known about the kick-boxing classes I was taking he might have been a little more circumspect in his approach, but the hospital let him out next day, so there was no real harm done.

  He still kept track of me, though, sending little keepsakes in the mail to let me know he was still crazy after all these years, like the postcard I’d got the other day.

  I know where you are, Sappho.

  Dave

  Well, that hardly put him in the running for the Christopher Columbus Discovery of the Year Award, since I’ve been teaching here every August and September since Bob set the place up.

  And Dave is quite a well-known freelance photographer, with contacts everywhere, so even though he’s sitting darkly brooding in the middle of his web, he can always feel me twitching on the edges, no matter which remote corner of the globe I’ve got to.

  I usually only responded to his little sallies by doing something particularly horrible to Raarg, but this time I sent him a postcard back.

  Dave,

  I know where I am, too.

  Sappho

  Then I did something horrible to Raarg.

  This was the third book in the Vengeane series, and I wasn’t too sure how the fourth and (possibly) final one would go, but I didn’t hold out much hope for Raarg.

  And where the hell did this mysterious Dragonslayer suddenly pop into my subconscious from? I mean – Dragonslayer!

  Last time I was in London I met two other fantasy writers for lunch – Tom Mac and Rana-Raye Faye – and we agreed we really ought to start a breakaway Fantasists’ Society, with rules like: 1) No More Bleeding Dragons, 2) Less of the Big Fiery Swords, and 3) Definitely No Wizards.

  Vengeane may be a wizard-free zone, but boy, has Dragon-slayer got a big fiery sword! I didn’t know why he was coming across as so strangely sexy, since I didn’t go for blond men.

  Nor did I go for handsome men, since Dave ‘call-me-Narcissus’ Devlyn, nor stupid men, nor men shorter than I am.

  The pool of tall, single, dark-haired, intelligent, attractive-but-not-handsome men had shrunk away to a small muddy puddle, so while I may have given up fornication originally from conviction, by now it was more necessity.

  I was getting older and pickier: the world was filling with married men, married men whose wives didn’t understand them, divorced men, weird divorced men, gay men and seriously mother-fixated men. Oh, and adolescents, like the only single man among the current crop of Creative Breakers: the dew’s still on him.

  Just to depress myself further, lately I’d been reading some of the women’s magazines that the Breakers had left behind, and they were all about sex, with lots and lots of ways to sexual gratification, though frankly the traditional way had seemed OK to me at the time, and if you had to do all this other stuff nowadays, well, count me out.

  The only oral gratification I was interested in came in a Cadbury’s wrapper.

  It seemed that some strange sexual tide had raced past me, and not only had it not swept me along with it, it hadn’t even left me damp around the edges: beached on the shores of love like a bit of faded flotsam.

  These were dismal thoughts for a birthday, so I reached for the stack of mail and chose a fat cream envelope inscribed in the unmistakable scrawl of my best friend, Mu.

  With what innocently happy anticipation I pulled out the beautiful, hand-made card, the numbers picked out in pearly buttons – and with what horror I found that something dark, fully fledged and monstrous had slithered out with it: my age.

  Thirty-nine? I mean – thirty-nine?

  Mu just had to have got it wrong, for although I stopped counting when I turned thirty, I was sure that was only a couple of years ago . . . wasn’t it?

  Maths is my one weakness. It took me ten minutes of furious calculation to accept that it was true, all too true! I was blind-fold on the brink of forty and the abyss loomed at my feet.

  One year, one little year away from the big Four-O. It was so unfair: I wasn’t ever expecting to be forty. You don’t; it always happens to someone else.

  Why didn’t someone warn me it was coming, before it jumped out of an envelope, smote me with the Bladder of Mortality, and capered off giggling insanely?

  And there was another thing – not only did I suddenly have to cope with the realization that I’m not immortal, it meant that the next year I’d be a forty-year-old female living alone in a country cottage in Wales.

  Do you know what that would make me? A Single Eccentric Female, that’s what – I’d need only the cat. And maybe the broomstick.

  The only upside was that I’d be unlikely to be burned as a witch these days, unless the Greeks do it too: Stathis, the local café owner, made the sign of the evil eye when I told him I just didn’t believe he regularly used the flea spray I gave him for his cat. While I don’t have any particular affinity with cats, I don’t like to see them with great bunches of fleas dangling over each eye like grapes, so I seemed to be waging some sort of one-woman campaign here. My friend Mu sent the flea stuff out: she has Cat Mania.

  And cats may just turn out to be the Immortals in feline form, and put in a good word for me, for they always looked at me as if they’ve seen everything since the Dawn of Creation and found it – ho hum! – boring.

  Almost anything seemed possible bathed in the magical early morning sunshine of a Greek island – except my being thirty-nine.

  But I supposed I’d have to learn to accept it gracefully, along with middle age, because the only alternative was to cling to the crumbling ledge of thirty-nine for ever like the very last lemming. I’d so much rather jump off voluntarily, as did the famous, high-diving, ancient Greek poetess my parents named me for.

  To Boldly Go where neither of my closest friends, Mu and Miranda, have travelled before, since I’m the eldest.

  Dave, of course, must be well into the foothills of the forties since he was a mature student when we were an item. And anyway, he’s not a friend – more an old poltergeist who pops up unexpectedly from time to time and throws things about in a fit of pique.

  Even Bob is younger than me, which is not fair, because being a man he will become distinguished, not old, and even if he gets puckers round his mouth like a chicken’s bottom he can grow a moustache to hide it. (I suppose I could too, come to that, but it’s a little frowned on by women outside Mediterranean countries.)

  Shell-shocked, I opened the rest of my cards and letters, all confirming the unwelcome truth, then went up to the cliffs to digest the implications of my future: rebirthed as a wrinkly.

  I felt much better about things once I was standing on the edge of the nearest cliff – I always do, though so far, unlike the original Sappho, I’ve managed to resist the urge to jump off.

  It might have been rash of my parents to give me the name, but according to Aunt Pops, Mother took one look at me when I was born and said: ‘Sappho!’ I thought this romantic until I read Plato’s description of the poetess as small, swarthy and having a big head on a little body. Pops, who brought me up after my parents abandoned me for the Great Archaeological Excavation in the sky, said I was never swarthy, just red and cross.

  Sappho Mark One was supposed to have jumped off to purge her anguish when her lover deserted her, but maybe they got it wrong and it was the trauma of turning forty that really tipped her over the edge.

  And lots of people did it at the time without ending up dead – it was a sort of early bungee jump, without the sixty metres of knicker elastic. Sappho was just unlucky.

  Perhaps I ought to try it on my next birthday, since I think I’ll need some form of extreme catharsis.

  Turning forty is definitely a rite of passage needing to be marked in some way. For most people it would be a time to jump off the rails and do something totally different, but unfortunately I’ve never quite managed to be on the rails in the first place.

  It might ha
ve to be the cliff jump.

  I seemed to be getting the urge to jump in more ways than one lately . . .

  But now I came to think of it, my life was going to change this next year anyway, because the tenant in my Welsh cottage had died, leaving me with no excuse not to go and settle there . . . for part of the year, at least.

  I’d never had a home of my own before. In between travels I’d stayed at Pops and Jaynie’s in Portugal, or Mu’s house in Pembrokeshire, or here on Lefkada, with Bob and Vivi.

  When I bought the cottage, plus tenants, it was with the intention of settling down there when I was much older – forty, maybe. Some great age like that. But suddenly it was upon me, and I was to move there in the spring – before I lost my own spring altogether.

  I also vaguely envisioned living there with a soulmate – maybe a writer or an artist of some kind – though when you see what comes of that sort of marriage of equals, like Plath and Hughes, I thought maybe getting a dog would be a better bet.

  But I was still not entirely without my dreams. For instance, were Daniel Day-Lewis to jump out of my birthday cake in half-naked The Last of the Mohicans mode with the words: ‘Take me, Sappho, I’m yours’ on his lips, I would be prepared to give it a go, though I expect his novelty value would soon wear off.

  While I stood there ruminating, with the sun warming my impervious complexion (brown hair, brown eyes, sallow skin – like a six-foot sparrow), time had already marched past me and I wanted to grab it with both hands and haul it back.

  I opened my eyes and came back down to earth – the crumbling bit of cliff edge I was standing on, for some reason with my arms outstretched in classic Titanic pose, Medusa locks swirling.

  Waves creamed on the rocks way, way below, and I let myself sway slightly towards them, savouring that heady feeling that down is up, and up is down, and everything is one . . .

  ‘Sa-phooo!’ shrilled a horribly familiar voice, nearly sending me into a fast Icarus down the cliff face. ‘Sa-phooo, dooon’t jump . . .’