Afternoon Tea at the Sunflower Café

by Milly Johnson

  ‘I’ll stand, thanks,’ said Della stiffly. ‘What I have to say won’t take long. I can’t stay,’ she sniffed, shifting her attention back to Connie. ‘I’m just dropping the office keys off. You can tell Jimmy for me that I won’t be working for him any more.’

  Della waited for Connie to react. When she had played this scene out in her head on the drive over here, she had imagined a slow smile spreading across Connie’s face which she would then proceed to wipe off. But Connie gave no reaction, other than to say a very surprised ‘Oh.’

  ‘I suppose you want to know why so I’ll tell you.’ Della was determined to have her moment with or without Connie’s participation. She looked directly into Connie’s grey eyes. Her eyes were what Della had remembered most about her, big and shiny and beautiful, fringed with thick, black lashes.

  This was it. The moment she had been waiting for.

  ‘You see, I won’t lie for him any more. Jimmy is in a five-star hotel in Spain with his mistress, Ivanka. The office junior. It’s been going on for months. She’s driving around in the brand new car he’s just bought her. An Audi TT.’

  Della crossed her arms and waited for Connie’s mouth to fall open with shock or for her to start shouting or screaming for her to get out – anything to show that she had scored a bullseye, but, other than a small swallow, there was nothing. Della shook her head in disbelief and couldn’t help a small incredulous laugh escaping.

  This was surreal. ‘Did you hear what I just said?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Connie, her voice quiet and slightly wavering. ‘I heard.’

  ‘No, I don’t think you did hear me properly,’ Della barked. ‘Your husband is bonking a nineteen year old, and has been for at least six months.’

  ‘I think you should leave now,’ Connie replied, trying to control the shake in her voice. Inside her head she was attempting to rationalise the situation. For some reason Della was really annoyed with Jimmy and hitting out. It was preposterous to think that Jimmy and a nineteen year old were having an affair. She refused to give this woman the satisfaction of even entertaining such a ridiculous suggestion.

  ‘Good grief.’ Della shook her head from side to side at Connie’s non-reaction. Connie was even more pathetic than she had given her credit for. ‘Don’t you care?’

  ‘My husband loves me,’ said Connie calmly.

  ‘Yeah, he loves you so much that he has me running around buying boxes of chocolates for you because he can’t even be bothered doing that.’

  And then Connie Diamond gave Della the open-mouthed wounded expression that she had been waiting for. Not at the revelation that her husband was shagging around, but because he didn’t buy her the boxes of chocolates she scoffed.

  ‘Those rose creams on the table, for instance,’ Della went on. ‘Think he brought them home from a business trip in Devon last week, did you? Wrong. I ordered them from a shop in Exeter. And when he went to Bruges last month, could he be arsed bringing you anything back? No. I purchased them online for him and they were delivered to the office.’

  ‘You buy them?’ Connie said, her voice barely louder than her breath.

  ‘I have done ever since I started working for him. Christmas, birthday, even the heart-shaped boxes on Valentine’s Day,’ said Della. ‘Oh, and the one you’ll be getting on Tuesday when he gets back home will be especially impressive. I’ve noticed that the bigger the box of chocolates he asks for, the more guilt it’s been bought with. But then again he is totally smitten by Ivanka. Enough to get engaged to her as a matter of fact.’

  Della was really sticking the boot in and it felt so totally cathartic to smash up the heart of the woman whose husband had smashed her heart up.

  Connie’s brain was awash with Della’s disclosures now. Saturated with them. They flooded her whole being and whipped her strength away. ‘ Please leave . . . g . . . go,’ Connie said, her voice now a full-on wobble. She was holding onto the back of a chair as if it was the only thing stopping her from falling to the ground.

  ‘No point in you getting this upset if you’ve put up with it for at least fifteen years,’ said Della.

  Connie’s head snapped up and her eyes widened with shock.

  ‘Fifteen years? What do you mean at least fifteen years?’

  Della’s eyebrows raised. Surely she knew?

  ‘I’ve been working for Diamond Shine for fifteen years and on my first day Jimmy left me to familiarise myself with the office because he was “having a liaison”. It obviously wasn’t his first.’

  Connie blanched before Della’s eyes.

  ‘I must say,’ sniffed Della, looking round, ‘with all that money in his business and with what he spends on hotels and champagne, I’d have thought he could have at least spent some on the house.’

  ‘Get out,’ said Connie, some steel in her voice at last.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, Lady Muck, I’m off. Here are the keys and here’s some night-time reading for you. It’s better than a Thomas Harris novel.’ Della slammed both the keys and the envelope full of receipts down onto the table. ‘He can get someone else to do his dirty work and buy your bloody chocolates from now on.’

  And she turned and flounced out, wishing she had done it a second sooner because then she wouldn’t have seen Connie Diamond crumple and the tears start to drop heavily down her face.

  Chapter 9

  When Connie heard the front door slam in its frame, she sank onto the chair, put her head in her hands and sobbed hard. The noise she made was horrible, more as if it came from an injured animal than a human being. Jimmy couldn’t be having an affair. Could he? He wouldn’t do that to her. Not again. He wasn’t the type. No, no, no, no, no, she would have known. They had been together twenty-four years – she knew him inside out.

  The year after their marriage she had discovered that he had been having a fling with her so-called friend, Jessie Mountjoy. She had confronted him and screamed at him and driven him out of the house. He had come back, of course, because it was a crazy time, an awful, terrible part of their lives. But they had managed to put it behind them. ‘Trust me,’ he’d pleaded with her. ‘I promise I’ll never do that to you again. You are my best girl, always remember that.’

  And so she had trusted him, because what was a marriage without trust, and they had built a life together and had a daughter. Della was wrong. Jimmy would never be that cruel. He didn’t have time, anyway – he was always working, always chasing the money. They had an okay-ish house and when the money came rolling in, Jimmy had promised her they would do it up from top to bottom. But, though trade had increased over the years, they hadn’t exactly drowned in the profits. This was the truth she had been led to believe. Jimmy might have worked hard in the foreground, but Connie had worked harder in the background. She had brought up their child more or less single-handed, she had cared for Jimmy’s unwell parents and her own mother, not that she minded because families pulled together and looked after each other as best they could. And whenever he worked away, he always brought her beautiful chocolates and over the years those truffles had become a symbol of his devotion to her. They were his way of saying, ‘I love you and I appreciate you,’ because he never said the actual words.

  Except that he hadn’t bought those chocolates, which changed everything.

  With her fingers trembling, she reached for the envelope which Della had brought and tipped the contents out onto the table. She was immediately relieved that there were no photographs of him in flagrante delicto with other women, only sheets with writing and numbers on them: receipts, statements.

  There was a hotel bill for the Waldorf in London. Theatre tickets at one hundred and fifty pounds each. A bar bill for two three-hundred-pound bottles of champagne. A receipt for a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes, size eight. Bouquets of flowers. A gold bracelet, a Tiffany necklace . . . every receipt was a proof of sheer indulgence. But, looking at the bank statements that were also in the envelope, what Jimmy had spent on himself and ‘Ms Szczepanksa�
�� could be easily afforded.

  She didn’t know he even had an account with the Northumbria Bank. Well, two as it happens – a high interest account and a current account and he’d had them both for twenty years, or so it seemed from the letter accompanying one of the statements, congratulating him on being a customer for so long and informing him that they were enclosing a thank-you key ring. She most certainly didn’t know he was keeping that amount of money secret from her. There was only one reason why he must be doing that, and that was because of how he was spending it. No, no, no, he wouldn’t, she whispered over and over again, but she felt like Canute inside herself, trying to stem the tide of evidence as it rolled towards her like a great wave and threatened to engulf her.

  Della’s words came thudding into her head again. Jimmy is in a five-star hotel in Spain with his mistress. She’s driving around in the brand new car he’s just bought her. An Audi TT. And: He loves you so much that he has me running around buying boxes of chocolates for you because he can’t even be bothered doing that. But according to the receipts, he had bought chocolates online from Le Mansion de Cocoa. Connie had never had chocolates from there. He had bothered to buy them for his mistress but not his wife. Connie squeezed at her temples with her fingertips. It was as if a lorry had tipped its whole massive load of crap into her head. Hundreds of lies rose up like animated corpses in the memory banks of her brain from all her years with Jimmy. Connie’s tears plopped onto the table but they didn’t carry any of the hurt away from her which stayed resolutely inside her as a solid cold stone block.

  She needed to hold them back. She needed the medicine that would take all the pain away. Connie plunged into the box of chocolates on the table and grabbed a handful, stuffing them into her mouth and chewing hard, chomping, trying to concentrate on nothing but the sweet mix of rose cream and chocolate, fending off everything that tried to seize her brain’s attention. The chocolate could do that for her. The taste, just think of the taste and nothing else. Chocolate had made her feel loved, cherished. Chocolate had made her think she was still his best girl. More chocolates, you need more. She bit down on as many of them as she could get in her mouth as the questions in her head became louder and more insistent that she take notice of them, crashing through the protective chocolate wall she had built up around herself.

  Connie lifted her head and caught sight of herself in the long mirror which hung at the side of the door. She looked disgusting. Her eyes were swollen and red, her cheeks were pudgy and extended hamster-like full of chocolate; and what must the neat and smart Della have thought of her in that comfy loose pale-grey pinafore that made her seem twice the size she was.

  Connie pushed the last of the chocolates in the box into her mouth to divert the primary receptors in her brain from thought activity to taste. We’ll make everything better, they seemed to call when they were sitting brown and glossy in the box. But as soon as her teeth released the flavours, their voices changed. Fooled you. We’ll make it WORSE. A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips. Swallow. There’s a good girl. Fatty fatty fatty fatty. The voices were right; she was fat, ugly and revolting. No wonder her husband preferred to bonk outside his marital bed rather than in it. And in that one moment those years of betrayal, which ran far deeper than a few flings, and a besotted young Polish girl, became fused with the taste, the smell, the texture, the colour, everything about chocolate. The boxes he gave her didn’t demonstrate how much he loved her but how little he cared. She’d been a fool and a far bigger one than even Della could possibly have imagined.

  There were no friends she could call to pour all this out to. She hadn’t had friends for years, not since Jane was little and she’d met some nice women at the school gates, but they’d drifted away when Jane went to big school and then out into the world. Her mum had been her best friend and she was gone now too. There was the woman in the newsagent who always passed the time of day with her and the chatty girl at the petrol station – but they weren’t ‘friends’. She suddenly felt very aware of her social isolation. How had she become such a friendless, dull, stupid, trusting lump? Get a grip, get a grip said a calming voice that came from deep inside her, as if it were a secret store of sense for use only in emergencies and her despair had broken the glass that encased it and let it free. You need to think.

  She took a deep breath, and another in an attempt to chase away the shock that brought with it so many exaggerated emotions. What do you feel, Connie Diamond? she asked herself. Not what you think you should feel, what do you actually feel? And she surprised herself with the answer. Yes, she felt hurt, humiliated, fear at finding herself in an alien marital landscape, but more than anything she felt anger like a heat in every part of her.

  She wiped a tear away as a steely voice in her head growled: By God, Jimmy Diamond, I’ll make you pay for this. Rage felt vitalising as it boiled inside her. It drove her tears back to their waiting place; it put iron in her heart and steel in her limbs. The medicine of anger would allow her to function.

  She could either cave in to the tears or think up a plan for how she was going to leave her husband on a chariot of fire rather than let him unceremoniously dump her like an old boot for his ‘fiancée’. At least, by ripping her out of her bubble of false security, Della had allowed her the chance to claw back some dignity.

  She didn’t know whether to thank the woman or curse her.

  Chapter 10

  Della did not sleep very well that night. Guilt kept her awake; Connie’s sad pale moon face kept drifting across her brain. Della had accomplished what she set out to, wound Connie, kick-start Jimmy’s demise, and she had done it very successfully – so why did she feel such a cow? However much she tried to shake off the vision of Connie’s tears streaming down her face, she couldn’t. She’d been cruel to a woman who really didn’t deserve it.

  Defeated by her insomnia, she got out of bed at six and had some coffee and toast, then tried to read the newly delivered newspaper, but the words weren’t sinking in. There was only one thing which would appease her troubled spirit and that was to go back to Connie and apologise. She set off at half-past ten, calling in at Dodley Co-op en route to buy a tin of Celebrations as a peace offering – a gift of chocolate surely would stop Connie slamming the door in her face.

  She rang the bell and Connie opened her front door, carrying a mop and wearing past-their-best-by-a-long-time black leggings and a voluminous smock-top. Her face was drawn and her eyes puffy and sore-looking and Della guessed that it had been a rough night for her too. Della mentally swatted at the mosquito of guilt that was attempting yet again to sting her. She held out the tin as she said, ‘I came to apologise.’

  Connie’s eyes dipped to the tin and as she did so she made a small hiccup, or a retch – Della couldn’t tell which. Then her bright grey eyes flicked back up to Della’s face. ‘Come in. I’m glad you’re here,’ she said, her voice hard but polite.

  Della was confused. Why on earth would Connie be glad that she’d come back? Nevertheless, she followed her inside.

  ‘Coffee or tea?’ asked Connie, when they reached the kitchen. She pulled out two mugs from a cupboard. ‘Please sit down.’

  Della felt a bony hand of trepidation reach into her chest and squeeze her heart. This was getting odder. Maybe Connie had invited her in to poison her. She was very cool and collected, almost artificially so.

  ‘Whatever you’re having. I take it black no sugar whether it’s tea or coffee, thank you.’

  ‘Coffee. I’m having coffee,’ said Connie.

  Della watched as Connie tipped water over instant granules and stirred and wondered what was going through her mind.

  ‘These are for you. Peace offering,’ said Della, setting the tin on the table.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Connie. ‘That’s very kind, but I don’t eat chocolate any more so I won’t be offended if you take them back.’

  Don’t eat chocolate? thought Della. Who the hell was she trying to kid. She didn’t get a
backside like that through scoffing broccoli.

  ‘Starting Lent early?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not Lent until next Wednesday.’

  ‘Oh, is it?’ Connie replied.

  Obviously that wasn’t it; she wasn’t giving up chocolate for Lent then, thought Della.

  Connie took the chair opposite her. Della noticed there was a light in her eyes that hadn’t been there yesterday. She felt quite uncomfortable under the intense grey gaze but she deserved the disapproval. She took a deep breath and began a formal and very genuinely meant apology.

  ‘I shouldn’t have come storming over here yesterday. I was totally out of order. I was angry, that isn’t any excuse, but—’ Connie interrupted her.

  ‘Let me say something before you go on any further. I’ve been turning over in my head what you told me yesterday and I’ve gone through everything in the envelope you brought.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have—’

  Connie interrupted her again. ‘Just answer me this, would you: why are you really leaving, Della? Sour grapes?’

  Della’s back stiffened in the chair.

  ‘Look, I know how Jimmy is,’ continued Connie. ‘He’s a terrible flirt.’

  ‘If you’re insinuating that I’ve had an affair with your husband as well, let me just put you right on that.’ She and Jimmy had never even had as much as a snog. Physically she was guilt-free; emotionally she was less whiter than white. Jimmy had given her fifteen years of mental foreplay which he never meant to escalate to the physical, she knew that now. Sour grapes? Oh yes, her grapes were so sour she could have bottled them and sold them as chip shop vinegar.

  ‘So why, then?’

  ‘Because I can see what is going to happen.’ Connie wasn’t the only one who had been thinking in the last hours, going over past events, clawing and raking through months of interchanges for proof of her suspicions. ‘Jimmy will replace me with Ivanka. My years of loyalty to him obviously mean nothing.’