Mr Henley, the college principal, tapped the question cards impatiently on the table. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to hurry you, Lower Sixth.’
Elsie had felt giddy as she raised her hand, an act which seemed to require every shred of confidence she possessed. She was almost one hundred per cent certain of the answer, having seen the album in question on Guin’s bedroom floor when her sister had recently gone through a period of self-loathing after a particularly bad break-up, but the thought of being wrong terrified her. What if she was mistaken? Lucas would be sure to ignore her then, remembering her merely as ‘the girl who lost the End of Year Quiz’. But it was too late: eagle-eyed Henley had spotted her hand.
‘Elsie Maynard?’
‘“King Leer”,’ she had said, her voice a cracked whisper when it first appeared. Glancing sideways at the beautiful dark eyes now intent on her, she cleared her throat and repeated, louder: ‘The song is “King Leer”.’
Pausing for dramatic effect, Mr Henley eventually relieved the tension by shouting, ‘Correct! Lower Sixth wins by two points!’
And that had been it: from that day on, Lucas had noticed nobody else but the quiet history student with her dyed hair and supreme knowledge of obscure musical trivia. He had followed her around Brighton that summer: appearing at the family furniture shop where she was working with a highly dubious cover story of searching for a particular brand of beeswax polish; persuading a mate to ask Clara out to give him an excuse to request a double date (which Elsie refused out of sheer embarrassment) and timing his walks along the beach to coincide with hers. Eventually his persistence paid off and Elsie agreed to a date – without the company of Clara or Lucas’ spot-endowed friend. Lucas took her to a burger bar for lunch, followed by a long walk around the town. They talked for hours, slowly discovering a shared love of art films, Douglas Adams novels and U2, the August Saturday slipping past until, at eight-thirty p.m., he kissed her in the porch of the Maynard family home and Elsie knew immediately she had found The One that she had heard so many authors and songwriters describing.
‘Penny for ’em?’ Cher appeared at Elsie’s side.
‘Sorry?’
‘Well, I know mixing your Popping Candy Cookie dough can be fascinating, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t warrant your current level of deep thought.’
Elsie smiled. ‘Ah. I was just remembering how Lucas and I met.’
‘Oh honey.’ Cher squeezed Elsie’s arm.
‘No – it’s all good. You know it is. I don’t know why it’s been on my mind this morning. I was looking at one of his daft fridge magnets and it brought it all back.’
‘And after that awful date I made you go on … I’m so sorry, Els. I had no idea Jake’s colleague was going to insult you.’
‘Cher, I’ve already said it’s OK. You couldn’t have known what would happen.’
‘All the same, he had no right to make you upset.’ She sighed. ‘You know, it’s odd. Even now I still expect Lucas to walk into the café. I miss him.’
‘I know you do. You two were always thick as thieves. Especially when you let him play with the ice cream mixer.’
Cher laughed. ‘Big kid. This place has a lot to thank him for. That Blueberry Choc Chip ice cream he concocted has been one of our best sellers. Heck, I’m still buying our cupcakes from Crawley because Lucas loved them so much.’
Elsie smiled. Lucas had fallen in love with the small cupcake café in Crawley town centre when he had been working for a large technology company on the outskirts of the town and had insisted Elsie and Cher accompany him to the vivid pink café one Saturday to taste their wares. As a result, Cher had placed a regular order for Cupcake Genie’s beautiful handmade cupcakes, despite the distance from Brighton, and the association had remained ever since. But then, that was typical Lucas: he made anything seem possible.
‘I wonder what he would have made of your choir,’ Cher said, scooping a teaspoonful of cookie dough and popping it into her mouth. ‘I reckon he’d have given that Sasha short shrift. The thing I remember about your Lucas is that he didn’t suffer fools gladly.’
Elsie had to laugh at that. The thought of Lucas unleashing his merciless wit on Sasha Mitchell was one she would definitely store up for the next time the brassy young woman kicked off at choir practice. ‘All the same, there has to be some way to encourage her to connect with the others. She’s probably the most talented singer we have but if she keeps causing trouble like last night she could be counterproductive to the choir’s success.’
The little brass bell above the door rang out as a customer entered. Cher frowned. ‘Blimey, they’re early this morning. I’ve only just flicked the sign over.’
‘What it is to be a woman in demand, eh?’
‘Oh yeah, fantastic.’ Cher pulled a face as she walked through into the café. Moments later, she reappeared, an odd expression on her face. ‘Someone for you, sweets.’
Intrigued by Cher’s expression, Elsie grabbed a cloth to wipe her hands and followed her boss. There, standing by the counter dressed in a smart suit and grinning broadly, was Olly.
‘Morning, Elsie.’ He looked around the empty café interior. ‘I’m not too early, am I?’
‘Hi. No, you’re our first customer of the day.’
There was a pronounced cough and Elsie turned to see Cher’s conspiratorial smile.
‘Ah, sorry. This is Cher, my boss.’
‘Charmed,’ Cher smiled, extending her hand a little too far to reveal a view of her ample chest perhaps not particularly appropriate considering the early hour of the morning. ‘Elsie’s told me nothing at all about you, I’m afraid.’
Elsie sighed. She was never going to hear the end of this all day, judging by Cher’s delight. ‘Olly’s building a website for my dad’s business.’
‘Ooh, handsome and clever,’ Cher gushed. ‘And presumably hungry too?’
For a split second, Olly seemed mystified until Cher seductively waved a menu in front of her too-low-cut blouse. ‘Oh. Right. Yes, breakfast would be good.’
‘Well, you just rest your cute bum somewhere and Elsie will take your order,’ Cher purred, turning on her stilettos and tip-tapping back into the kitchen, swinging her hips dramatically as she went.
Elsie smiled at the visibly shaken young man by the counter. ‘The table by the window is a good one.’
Olly laughed as he sat down. ‘Your boss is ferocious! Is she like that with everyone?’
‘Only the good-looking ones.’ Instantly, Elsie felt herself flush as Olly smiled at her.
‘Why, thank you.’
‘You’re welcome. So, what would you like?’
He held her eyes for a moment before turning his attention to the menu. ‘The maple and bacon muffins sound fantastic. And a coffee, please – cappuccino would be great.’
As Elsie wrote his order on her pad, she could feel her hand shaking. Pull yourself together, Elsie, she scolded herself, annoyed at her reaction. ‘Right, I’ll just go and …’
‘Actually, there was another reason I came,’ Olly said suddenly, looking up at her.
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. The thing is – well – I haven’t seen you since the evening of your first choir meeting and you did promise we would meet up for coffee a few weeks back … I’m sorry, forgive my ramblings. I’m just going to ask you straight because, frankly, I’ve gone over and over this all the way here and I couldn’t come up with anything better, so …’ he took a breath, his eyes fixed on hers ‘… how about dinner? With me, that is? Not a “sometime in the future” thing that’ll never happen. This week? Like, say, tomorrow evening?’
‘Oh.’ The suddenness of Olly’s question, coupled with the fog of thoughts in her own mind this morning, rendered Elsie temporarily speechless.
Olly’s face fell, interpreting her reaction as the precursor to a rejection. Dropping his gaze from hers he did his best to appear uninjured. ‘Look, it’s fine. I just thought I’d ask.’
Elsie felt her pulse jump into life. ‘No,’ she said quickly – and a little too loudly, her word causing a slight echo in the café. Lowering her voice, she placed her hand lightly on his warm shoulder. ‘Actually, I’d love to. And tomorrow evening would be great.’
Olly’s delight was impossible to hide. ‘You would? Great!’
Elsie flipped over the page with his breakfast order on her pad and scribbled something else before tearing it off and handing it to him.
‘That’s my address. Want to pick me up about seven-thirty?’
His fingers brushed against hers as he accepted the piece of paper. ‘Wonderful.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘You said yes?’
Elsie frowned at her middle sister. ‘I did. So what do you think?’
Guin smiled. ‘I think Dad’ll be over the moon. He’s been going on about that bloke for weeks. More importantly, how do you feel about it?’
Elsie shrugged. ‘Good. I mean, I sort of surprised myself when I agreed to it, but after that awful blind date with Torin I figured the worst had already happened. I like Olly. He’s charming, funny, interesting …’
‘And fit as, according to what you said to Daisy,’ Guin interjected, wincing as her baby kicked inside her. ‘Oh, great, now I’m being censored by my own unborn child. Just what I need.’
‘Well, I think it’s fabulous,’ Daisy said, bringing a Bodum teapot over to the elegant glass table in her luxurious apartment where the Maynard sisters had gathered after work that day. ‘You said you were going to start dating and you’ve done it. Never let it be said that Elsie Maynard doesn’t finish something she begins.’
‘Talking of which,’ Guin added, winking at Elsie, ‘I can’t believe you ended up on a blind date with your knight-in-shining-armour. What are the chances, eh?’
Elsie turned to Daisy. ‘Thanks for that, sis.’
‘What? I couldn’t not tell Guin, could I?’
While Elsie couldn’t really object to her sisters sharing stories, the topic of her exchange with Torin was still decidedly uncomfortable. There had been no word from him since the event and Cher – who Elsie knew for a fact was still seeing Jake – had remained tight-lipped about the details of the aftermath of her flight from the pub. ‘I suppose not. Let’s talk about something else, though.’
‘I bet he felt awful,’ Guin said, ignoring her. ‘I mean, he obviously had you down as some man-hating woman and then you slapped that on him.’
Elsie looked out across the harbour where a small speedboat was leaving a silver trail across the calm ocean waters. She didn’t want to consider what Torin’s reaction to her revelation had been. The events of last week had served to show her that she didn’t like the person she became when Torin was around. She wasn’t a mean person, didn’t enjoy verbal combat and was unused to having to avoid people. The reason why these traits reared their ugly heads whenever she was in Torin’s presence was beyond her – but what she did know was that the best way to avoid it happening again was to steer well clear.
‘I can’t imagine he would have intended to say what he did,’ Daisy was saying to Guin. ‘Even though he was a bit too pleased with himself when we met him.’
‘You mean when you and Els crossed over to the dark side,’ corrected Guin, the opportunity to rib her older sister obviously even more alluring than continuing to embarrass Elsie was. ‘If only Dad knew …’
To her considerable relief, Elsie watched the conversation steer safely from Torin onto safer ground. She didn’t want to think about him any more. Dismissing him from her mind, Elsie settled back to enjoy the Maynard sibling banter.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Getting to know you …
I love you because you’re everybody’s friend
xx
Elsie stared at the new piece of paper in her hand. How could Lucas have written that? Even given her general lack of enemies, Elsie would never have classed herself as everybody’s friend when they were married. And especially not now, given her recent run-in with a certain too-smug lawyer. But then, compared with her late husband, Elsie would probably appear to make friends easier than Snow White in a forest full of woodland creatures …
Lucas was known for forming opinions of people at lightning speed – and holding fast to those opinions despite their best efforts to prove him wrong. He was rarely unkind, but, as Cher had observed, he was unwilling to pander to people’s vanity or thoughtlessness. Following his diagnosis, it was as if this trait had been magnified within him, fuelled perhaps by the realisation that it didn’t matter any more – or his new theory that he could be forgiven any failing on account of his new life-status.
‘I’m a dying man. Who is likely to pick a fight with me now?’
His bloody-mindedness had always been a flashpoint between him and Elsie and, while in many ways it made him who he was, his ability to maintain his ground to the bitter end was a constant irritation to her.
‘Why can’t you back down, just this once?’
‘And celebrate their ignorance? Not likely!’
In light of this, what did his message in the Box of Love mean? Had he secretly admired Elsie’s peacekeeping ability over the years? Was this evidence of end-of-life regrets or just his acceptance of how different they were in this respect?
One thing Elsie had always been careful to do after Lucas died was to ensure she remembered the annoying things about him alongside the lovely. She had witnessed, first-hand, the unwarranted canonisation of her maternal grandmother who had died years before. Friends, family and neighbours had gathered at the wake and spoken in glowing terms about a benevolent, saintly woman who bore absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the mean-spirited, cantankerous old lady who had made her father’s life a living hell for years. Granny O’Shaughnessy had actively encouraged Elsie’s mother to desert her family in favour of an acting career in London that never happened and, when Jim had sought to maintain his relationship with the woman for the sake of his girls, she had taken great delight in using each visit as an opportunity to remind him of his unsuitability for her beloved daughter.
‘Moira’s glad she left you, James,’ she would sneer, in full earshot of his three young girls as they played at her house. ‘Her life is so much better now she doesn’t have the shackles of you and those kids around her feet.’
At Granny’s wake, Elsie had listened to people who had undoubtedly hated her grandmother in life praising her in death and, when she questioned a neighbour about it, was told in hushed tones that it was ‘not good to speak ill of the dead’. Lucas had laughed when Elsie had relayed the events of the day to him. ‘Well, if you go before me, I’ll make sure everyone knows about all your failings.’
Now, it gave Elsie a great deal of comfort to remember her annoyances with Lucas. It made his memory more real, more tangible. Making him into some plaster saint in her mind would only have served to take him further away, to make him untouchable and distant.
His latest message sat uncomfortably in her pocket as she walked along Gardner Street towards Sundae & Cher. Tonight was the night of her date with Olly and her heart was a mix of anticipation and anxiety about it. As the peppermint-green façade of the ice cream café came into view, she decided to focus on positive things for the rest of the day. Her mind had been occupied by doubts too much recently.
With no sign of Cher, she set about preparing the café for the day’s custom. Down in the basement work kitchen she considered the latest batch of new ice cream flavours in the freezer, deciding on tubs of Mint and Apple, Clotted Cream and Honey and Ginger Snap Biscuit. She placed the selection in the glass display cabinet before firing up the coffee machine. At nine a.m. she turned the door sign to Open and picked up the brightly painted A-board from its overnight resting place in the kitchen to carry it outside.
Elsie loved the early morning busyness of working here, especially when she did it alone. This was always the moment when the day seemed most promising, full
of unseen delights yet to happen. Gardner Street had an air of expectancy about it this morning, its brightly painted buildings sparkling with a sheen of morning dew under a cold blue sky. Elsie had stood here many times before, but every day she found something new in the street. Today, a collection of slightly bedraggled pigeons were doing their best to balance on the neck of the enormous guitar mounted on the yellow and red frontage of the Guitar, Amp & Keyboard Centre on North Road at the bottom of the street. As they tiptoed up and down the neck it looked like they were attempting to play a group version of a rock classic. She smiled to herself. Woody would definitely approve.
Her positivity thus restored, she paused on the quiet street to wave to Sandra who owned the fabric shop opposite, when a voice suddenly spoke behind her, making her start.
‘Elsie.’
She turned to see Torin standing in the doorway of the café. He was dressed in his work suit and held a folded copy of The Times under one arm with a heavy-looking rucksack slung over the opposite shoulder. His face was slightly flushed as if he had just sprinted and Elsie noticed the pronounced rise and fall of his chest underneath his suit jacket. His sudden presence shook her recently-found equilibrium and she felt intense irritation prickling across her shoulders. Averting her eyes, she said nothing, walking past him into the café.
He followed her inside, his footsteps quick on the black and white floor tiles. ‘Elsie, please …’
‘I’m really busy.’
‘Yeah, I can see that from the complete lack of customers.’
‘Go away.’
‘Not until you talk to me.’
She stepped behind the counter, keen to put a physical barrier between her and him. ‘I don’t have anything to add to my last statement.’
He dropped his newspaper and rucksack on the nearest table. ‘Well I want to say something.’
Suddenly vulnerable, Elsie crossed her arms in front of her body. ‘So, say it and go.’ She cursed herself for recognising conviction in his eyes as he faced her. It would be so much easier to dismiss whatever it was he was about to say if she hadn’t seen sincerity there.
When I Fall in Love Page 10
