Afternoon Tea at the Sunflower Café

by Milly Johnson

  Ernest Gardiner had built the cottage for his new bride and they had lived happily together there until his death thirty-three years ago. Brambles itself wasn’t huge, but the garden which surrounded it on all four sides was, and until eight years ago, when she was eighty-five, Edith had maintained it alone. Now she employed the services of a local gardener: something which Lance, Edith’s nephew, had been less than happy about when he arrived on the scene a few months ago. He obviously didn’t want to see any of his inheritance frittered away on ‘domestics’. Despite only living a few miles away in Wakefield, he hadn’t ever visited his aunt before last August. There had been a huge falling out in Edith’s family years ago and it was only when Lance’s parents died that he made contact with his aunt again via a Christmas card promising to come and see her when he wasn’t so busy. Ten years passed and he had never done so, although he rang to enquire after her health every few months. Then Edith had let it slip in a conversation with him that she was considering increasing her bequest to ‘those kind people from the Maud Haworth home for cats’ and suddenly Lance could find the time to drive over – and quite often too, always with a pack of cheap biscuits by way of a sweetener. They weren’t even branded biscuits: they were Pricechopper’s own. Cheryl didn’t like Lance, he was spiv-smarmy with greased dyed black hair and a lot of sly activity going on behind his little piggy eyes. It wasn’t her place to say anything but whenever she happened to be in the house when he was there, she kept her eyes peeled. She was very fond of Edith and felt fiercely protective towards her.

  ‘Only me,’ said Cheryl, knocking twice on the door before opening it and walking in. Oh, how she wished Brambles was hers. It had such a lovely feel to it, as if all the people who had ever visited had left a smile behind.

  ‘Good morning, dear Cheryl, I’m in here,’ Edith called from the light-filled kitchen which doubled up as her garden room. She was taking bulbs out of pots and wrapping them up in newspaper.

  ‘I shall repot these before Christmas so they flower again and brighten next January. Such a dull and depressing month,’ she said. ‘I do love hyacinths. Now, let me put that kettle on for us.’

  ‘No, don’t worry,’ said Cheryl. ‘I won’t have time for a cuppa today. Sorry I was late. There were roadworks. But don’t you worry: I’ll be here for the full one and a half hours. You do remember I’m only here for half the time today?’

  ‘Sorry, dear, remind me again what’s happening,’ said Edith, nudging a stray lock of snow-white hair back in place. ‘Why is the other lady coming?’

  ‘Because I’ve got another job booked in straight after this one,’ Cheryl explained clearly and patiently again. ‘Someone wants their offices spruced up because they’re having a visit from some top brass tomorrow so rather than me do a three-hour clean by myself, there will be two of us doing an hour and a half. ’

  ‘Ah yes, I remember now. The other lady hasn’t turned up yet. I imagine she’s been caught up in the roadworks too,’ said Edith.

  ‘Probably,’ Cheryl nodded, though she doubted it. Ruth was notorious for always arriving at jobs late and leaving them early. Jimmy had employed Ruth Fallis, she wouldn’t have got past an interview with Della.

  ‘Everything all right, dear? You don’t look yourself,’ Despite her age and rheumy eyes and foggy memory, Edith could spot that Cheryl wasn’t on top form.

  ‘Bit tired,’ said Cheryl, pushing out a smile. ‘I’m ready for a rest at the weekend.’

  She noticed two cups by the sink and an open packet of Pricechopper ginger nuts on the work surface.

  ‘You’ve just missed Lance,’ said Edith, following her line of vision. ‘He brought me some biscuits. I asked him to try and find me some Gypsy Creams but I don’t think they make them any more. I like them better with cream in the middle. These are a bit hard for my teeth.’

  Cheryl tried to stop her lip from curling at the thought of him smarming around Edith. As she went over to wash the cups, she noticed Edith’s chequebook was wedged in the runner of the odds and sods drawer, preventing it from closing. Cheryl had to manipulate it back and forth to free it.

  ‘What is it, Cheryl?’ asked Edith.

  ‘It’s your chequebook. It’s jammed and I don’t want to tear any of the pages.’

  ‘Oh it doesn’t matter,’ said Edith. ‘I don’t write cheques anyway.’

  When Cheryl managed to release it, she made a pretence of examining it for rips, but noticed five cheques had been taken out and no details had been recorded. They weren’t in sequence, either, as if they had been removed in order not to arouse suspicion. It didn’t take a genius to work out what was happening. What she could do about it was another matter.

  ‘You should check your bank accounts from time to time, Edith. Just to make sure you know where you are with them,’ said Cheryl, not wanting to distress Edith, but trying at the same time to put her on her guard.

  Edith flapped her hand. ‘I can’t be doing with all those figures. Oh, by the way, you’ll notice that I’ve moved the Renoir. I thought it might look better in the lounge than in the hallway.’

  Cheryl turned around sharply. ‘Edith. How the heck did you get it off the wall, never mind back up on another one?’

  ‘Step ladder of course,’ replied Edith. ‘Don’t you tell me off; I took it slowly.’

  ‘You should have waited for me.’ Cheryl shook her head. The old lady was incorrigible. ‘Or asked your Lance to do it.’ Then again, it would probably suit Lance if his aunt fell off the ladder and snuffed it. He wouldn’t have to sneak around stealing blank cheques. ‘Please tell me that you don’t take that ladder upstairs and change the paintings around.’

  ‘No, silly.’ Edith dismissed such a ridiculous suggestion with a roll of her eyes. ‘Only the downstairs ones. All my artists upstairs are happy where they are and I think the downstairs lot are too now, so there will be no more changing. I feel Mr Renoir will be much happier in the lounge with Mr Monet. They were great friends in person, you know.’

  Bless her, thought Cheryl. Edith was, like the ginger nuts, a few biscuits short of the packet. She truly believed that all the paintings in her house were originals: the Monet and the Renoir, now in the lounge, and a Mona Lisa hanging in the spare bedroom, amongst others. Edith’s grandfather Percy Lake, so she said, was a painter himself who’d been friends with Van Gogh.

  ‘My Sunflowers are the most precious of all the works here, you remember that,’ Edith once confided quietly in her. If that were true then Van Gogh must have done them in his blind drunk phase, thought Cheryl, because the painting was terrible. A five-year-old kid with a blindfold on could have done better.

  Cheryl felt Edith’s small bony hand on hers. ‘Cheryl, I have something to tell you. Something you’re going to like. Guess what I’m going to do…’

  Then there was a knock on the door and the moment was broken, and Cheryl didn’t find out what Edith was about to say. Ruth had arrived. Edith went to let her in.

  ‘Freezing in here,’ she shuddered as she walked into the kitchen. She nodded at Cheryl. ‘Alreight?’

  ‘Fine. Are you?’ replied Cheryl, catching a whiff of Ruth’s smoky aroma.

  ‘Aye, not bad.’

  ‘Lance is always cold here too, but I never am,’ said Edith, shaking her head. ‘I can’t understand it.’

  If anyone was going to feel the cold, it would be Edith, who was tiny, with paper-thin skin. Cheryl never felt it either. Maybe the house only saved its inviting warmth for nice people, she thought. And Lance was not nice. He looks like a Lance had been her first thought when she’d found him a few months ago ensconced in the lounge drinking tea. He was tall, straight and skinny, with an angular face and a beaky nose which had a precise black line of moustache running underneath it. He had long thin fingers, a mean mouth and sharp little bird eyes, He had looked Cheryl up and down with disdain and suspicion, and she’d heard him say to his aunt, when she was barely out of earshot, ‘Can you trust that woman in your house?�
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  The bloody cheek of it, even more so from seeing Edith’s plundered cheque book that morning. She would make sure when their paths next crossed that she let him know that she’d asked Edith to check her bank account for fraudulent withdrawals.

  Ruth had a cup of tea and five ginger nuts before unzipping her cleaning bag, by which time Cheryl had already done Edith’s bedroom. They met on the landing. Ruth shivered as she squirted some polish onto a duster and tackled all the surfaces she could find at waist height. Trust her not to get down on her hands and knees and wipe down the skirting boards, thought Cheryl.

  ‘Creepy, this house, innit?’ said Ruth when they had moved downstairs. ‘I heard this whole area was built on an old Red Indian burial ground.’

  Cheryl fought the urge to laugh out loud. ‘Really?’ she said, thinking that Ruth Fallis had about as many brain cells as she did work cells. Norma Know-it-All, the others called her.

  ‘Not that it bothers me. There’s no house creepier than Mr Savant’s. Eh, she’s got a bob or two, ’asn’t she?’ said Ruth, in a loud stage whisper. ‘Jock would love to have a look around here.’

  Her husband Jock Fallis was a local antiques dealer. At least that’s what he imagined himself to be. His shop was a mucky little hole full of junk down by the Carlton village scrapyards. Jock Fallis was the type who would rip off his own granny for a penny; Cheryl hoped he wouldn’t come sniffing around here asking if Edith had anything to sell, and so she tried to put Ruth off the scent.

  ‘Naw, it’s all car boot rubbish,’ she said. ‘She’s only got her pension. House is falling to bits.’ As if to validate her story, at that very moment a chunk of plaster fell onto the floor from the side of the window. Now would you believe that, thought Cheryl with a secret grin. The house seemed to be on her side.

  Cheryl rinsed out her cloth and washed down some fingerprints on the walls. She needed to keep busy, keep her mind from second-guessing what Gary would be doing now, what would be going through his head. Where would he sleep tonight? Cheryl assumed at his mother’s or his sister’s – either way she’d feel her ears burning because Gary’s account of the split would be twisted to make her the villain of the piece. However much she tried to firewall them though, questions she didn’t want to answer broke through: How would she manage to pay all the rent by herself? How would she cope without having use of the car? What would it be like to sit in the house by herself night after night?

  She hadn’t planned her life to be like this and it scared her that she couldn’t see past this present depression. Material things had never been top of her wish-list, but a family was. She wanted a child to love so much, a child to bring up in the sort of family she had always wanted for herself: mum and dad, a strong unit, a warm house – not necessarily big – but clean and comfortable with plenty of food in the cupboards and lots of love in it. She and Gary had been given two chances at IVF on the NHS but both had failed and now it was down to them to fund it. She did cash-in-hand work cleaning the local pub when their regular woman let them down to bring in some extra money, and put away as much as she could in the building society. The joke wasn’t lost on her that she’d lectured Edith on keeping an eye on her savings when she hadn’t done so with her own. But Gary hadn’t just emptied their account; he had emptied her trust. He had emptied her heart. He had emptied her womb.

  The text alert on her phone went off and she dived out into the hallway to see if it was Gary. She pulled the phone out of her coat pocket, heart springing with anticipation, then felt the heavy plunge of disappointment to find it was Dominos Pizzas informing her that there was a special offer on. As she was returning to the lounge, she was aware that something wasn’t quite right. She took a few steps back and swept her eyes around the hallway but couldn’t put her finger on what was bothering her. Odd, she thought. But then, this whole day had been odd.

  Five minutes passed, then Ruth appeared in the doorway with her coat on.

  ‘There, that’s me done. I’m off.’

  Cheryl looked across to the clock on the wall. ‘Er, I don’t think so. You’ve half an hour to go. You were twenty minutes late, remember.’

  Ruth pulled a face. ‘Hark at you, the cleaning police.’

  ‘No I’m not, but I do the hours I’m paid for.’ Cheryl jiggled the rocking chair back into place and caught her ankle on the edge. The pain that flared up made her want to kick something. Or someone. But she couldn’t stop Ruth going home, could she? The most she could do was look annoyed and huff a bit.

  ‘Have you any spare window cleaner?’ asked Cheryl. ‘I’ve run out.’

  ‘Loads. I’ll get it for you,’ said Ruth. It was probably the same bottle she’d started out with two years ago, thought Cheryl.

  She followed Ruth back into the hallway and again that odd feeling visited her. As Ruth foraged in her bag for the window cleaner, Cheryl’s eyes roved slowly up and down and along the walls, determined to discover what was bugging her. It was when they came to the console table in front of the radiator that she realised what it was: a small oval porcelain trinket box with a pink rose on the lid wasn’t there. She had been cleaning for Edith for five years and it had always stood between the pot of artificial violets and the carved lucky imp. And the big giveaway that something was amiss was that Ruth, being Ruth, had done a slap-dash polish, and there was a tell-tale perfect oval of clean wood on the table, where the box had sat, surrounded by dust.

  A prickle of unpleasantness stabbed Cheryl in the back of the head.

  ‘Here you go. See you later,’ said Ruth, handing over a half-empty bottle of ‘Kristalglaz’. Then she picked up her bags and bobbed her head into the kitchen. ‘Bye, love. It’s been nice meeting you,’ she said in a voice that intimated Edith was both daft and deaf.

  As soon as the door shut behind her, Cheryl called to Edith.

  ‘Edith? Have you moved that little box off the table in the hallway?’

  Edith was still busy with her gardening pots. ‘No, Cheryl. Why?’

  The thieving cow. First Lance and now Ruth trampling over Edith’s vulnerability. Today was not a good day to get on Cheryl’s bad side. She threw open the front door, and marched down the path to catch up with Ruth Fallis.

  ‘Oy.’

  Ruth turned. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Give it back,’ snarled Cheryl, beckoning the item’s return with a flutter of her fingers.

  ‘Give what back? What you on about? Oy, gerroff,’ Ruth protested as Cheryl grabbed her bag and rasped the zip down.

  ‘Don’t come it with me. You frigging know what.’

  ‘I said gerroff, you mad—’ But Ruth’s words died in her throat as Cheryl’s hand touched on something hard secreted in a nest of dusters. She pulled it out, it was the missing box.

  ‘I were only tekking it to show to our Jock. I’d have brought it back,’ Ruth huffed.

  ‘When would that have been then?’ Cheryl growled. ‘Edith isn’t one of your ladies, this job is a one-off for you. I’m not an idiot – you nicked this and meant to keep it.’ She opened up the box. There was a gold ring inside with a diamond cluster sitting proud. ‘Gonna bring this back an’ all, were you?’

  ‘I didn’t know it were in,’ stuttered Ruth, her chins wobbling.

  ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘Oh fuck you, you self-righteous bitch,’ Ruth came back at her.

  Cheryl stuffed the trinket box in her pocket and grabbed Ruth’s coat at the collar, pulling her face close.

  ‘I’m telling Della. You shouldn’t be in anyone’s house, especially not old people’s.’

  ‘You better not,’ said Ruth, struggling to free herself, but years of frustration and hurt and anger were concentrated in Cheryl’s hands which remained locked on Ruth’s tatty work coat.

  ‘Or what? What you going to do? Send Fat Jock around to sit on me? You’re a lazy, heartless bitch, Ruth Fallis, and you’re lucky I’m not going to tell Edith because she or her nephew would have the coppers round at yours b
efore you had chance to catch your breath. Now fuck off.’

  Cheryl released her hands, pushing the red-faced Ruth backwards.

  ‘You mad bitch,’ she snarled, rubbing at her neck. ‘You’ll be sorry when I tell our Jock.’

  Cheryl took a step in her direction and Ruth snatched up her bag and toddled away sharply, looking over her shoulder every few steps to make sure Cheryl was at a safe distance.

  Cheryl put the dish back on the table so that Edith would be none the wiser. She didn’t want Lance to get to know about this incident because it would give him all the excuse he needed to tar all cleaners with the same brush.

  Cheryl hoped that the answering machine would pick up her message to Della rather than have to speak to her directly. She really couldn’t face any more drama today.

  Chapter 5

  Revenge is a dish best served cold, so the saying went. Well, bollocks to that, thought Della. Her whole body was taken over by the desire to avenge herself on that lying bastard of a man she worked for. How dare he treat her with such disdain after all she had done for him? And not just Jimmy, but Ivanka. Even though she had known the girl for only six months, the deception hit hard. She had bent over backwards to make her feel at home in the office. She wouldn’t have given anyone else as much leeway. Della was shaking with shock and hurt at the realisation she had been made a complete fool of, but mostly she felt rage.

  Calm yourself, she said, hearing her heart race dangerously in her chest. She didn’t want to die of a heart attack before she had made James Arthur Diamond sit up and notice. She took a long deep breath in and let a long deep breath go; she had to think. She needed to backtrack over several months; the last six to be exact. When had his affair with Ivanka started? And how had that little madam been able to dupe her so easily – Della hadn’t even had a sniff that something was going on between them under her very nose. The earliest receipt was for the car – four months ago. But had it been going on for longer?