Afternoon Tea at the Sunflower Café

by Milly Johnson

  Connie’s mouth froze in a long O. She pressed end call and growled at herself. Come on, Con, she geed herself up. This isn’t going to knit the baby a bonnet. She thought of her auntie Marilyn and the confidence she oozed. Even when she was very ill and no doubt frightened and depressed, the face Marilyn showed to the world was a bright and beautiful one full of strength. Connie hit redial. The same voice answered.

  ‘Hello, Dartley Carpets, how can we help you?’

  ‘Hello there. I’m so sorry, I’ve just rung but I was cut off.’

  ‘Oh, it’s always doing that. Our phones are rubbish, sorry about that.’

  The girl believed her. That’s what a confident delivery did for you.

  ‘I hear that your company is looking for office cleaners. I may be able to help you on that.’

  ‘Really?’ The girl on the phone sounded as if Connie had just offered her front row tickets to see the Chippendales. ‘I’ll put you through to the manager, Jeff Froom.’

  Connie barely had time to take in a breath before a gruff voice answered.

  ‘Hello. Jeff Froom, Dartley Carpets, who is it?’

  Connie straightened her spine and became the auntie who was sassy and sexy with a great figure and a fluff of Marilyn Monroe hair and who had died, much too young, of womb cancer. As Marilyn Smith incarnated, Connie answered him with confidence. ‘Good morning, Mr Froom. My name is Marilyn Smith. I hear that you are looking for cleaners for your factory.’

  ‘Oh aye. And who have you heard that off?’

  ‘Industry gossip, Mr Froom. I’m ringing on behalf of Lady Muck cleaners. Can we step in to help?’

  Jeff Froom gave a throaty laugh. ‘Lady Muck? Like it. Not heard of you before though. Are you Barnsley based?’

  ‘Indeed.’ Connie was amazed by how confident she sounded. Or rather how confident Marilyn sounded. ‘And we are new. The present firms can’t cope but we know we can. And our standards and prices are better.’

  ‘Really?’

  The tone of his voice told Connie that she definitely had Jeff Froom’s full attention now. He was a Yorkshireman, after all – and they loved a bargain.

  ‘Yes, really.’

  Five minutes later, Lady Muck had its first customer on its books. Connie smiled with relief – if she could hook one person, she could hook more. She rang the second name on Della’s list to find an automated message saying the firm was no longer trading. Then she rang a third number which was picked up just as Connie was about to put down the phone presuming no one was going to answer.

  ‘Hello, hello, sorry about that,’ said a breathy male voice.

  ‘Mr Brandon Locke?’

  ‘That’s my name,’ he answered cheerfully and continued in the same vein. ‘Now please, I’m in the middle of something quite important so if you’re someone about to ask me to help you with a survey or ask me if I’ve had an accident recently which wasn’t my fault, I’m going to have to tell you that I can’t talk to you.’

  Connie grinned. He was far more polite than she would have been if she’d been interrupted by a nuisance caller.

  ‘No, I have no interest in asking you lots of questions about your current mortgage or possible cuts and bruises,’ she answered.

  ‘Good. So, how can I help you then?’

  ‘My name is Marilyn Smith and I’m calling from Lady Muck, a firm of house and office cleaners—’

  Mr Locke cut her off.

  ‘Please tell me you have a lovely lady who has space in her diary for me.’

  ‘I was just about to.’

  ‘Oh, deep joy.’ Mr Locke sounded even more delighted than Dartley Carpets had. ‘What a well-timed call. What firm are you again?’

  ‘Lady Muck. We’re new, although all of my staff have been cleaners for many years.’ Connie instinctively touched her nose to see if it had grown.

  ‘Lady Muck?’ Mr Locke rolled the name around. ‘Have I rung you? I’m sure I would have remembered the name.’

  ‘No. We have links with other firms. Occasionally we share client lists and help each other out.’ Connie was amazed how easily the lie slipped off her tongue and how equally easily it was believed.

  ‘How kind,’ said Mr Locke. ‘Well, I would be delighted if you could give me a cleaner. And the sooner the better.’

  ‘I need to come out and make an assessment, initially,’ replied Connie. ‘Is tomorrow too soon?’

  ‘It’s not soon enough, but I’ll survive,’ said Mr Locke. ‘Do you have my address?’

  Connie looked down at the file. ‘Yes. Box House, Outer Hoodley.’

  ‘Ah, well officially it is Outer Hoodley, but it’s actually “outa” Outer Hoodley. As you turn off the Barnsley-Wentworth Road it’s on your left before you get into the hamlet. If you’ve passed the Dick Turpin’s Arms, you’ve gone too far. There is a sign but it’s been overgrown by a tree. I haven’t been in here very long and it’s number four hundred and seventy-six on my list of jobs to sort out.’

  ‘Half past ten okay?’ asked Connie, liking the sound of Mr Locke and wondering what he looked like. She was going into Dartley Carpets to assess their cleaning needs just after nine.

  ‘Just perfect,’ said Mr Locke. ‘Thank you so much. See you then.’

  Connie was grinning as she put the phone down. ‘This is going to be easier than I thought,’ she said to herself, even though Lady Muck had no bank of cleaners yet. Not that it mattered at the moment because Connie would do the houses and offices herself if she had to. There were proper cleaners and those who pushed the dust around from one place to another and Connie’s mother and granny before her were proper proper cleaners. These days, good cleaners were needed everywhere and Lady Muck was going to supply that demand.

  By end of business that day, Connie was ready to eat her own words in a big fat sandwich with disappointment-flavoured mayonnaise. After her initial luck with Dartley Carpets and Mr Locke, there had been no other clients for Lady Muck. Despite the ‘beat any price’ and quality of service guarantee, most of the people she had rung today seemed reticent to trust a brand new company. Connie went home and put on the kettle to make a commiseratory cup of tea and, without thinking, opened the box of chocolates which Jimmy had brought for her.

  Then the smell drifted up to her nose and she came to her senses. But oh, they were so pretty with their pink piped icing toppings. Every one a poisoned apple. Every one a fusion of cream, sugar, lies and deceit. She had always loved the chocolates he brought her, always hand-made. They made her feel that however hard Jimmy worked, or whatever was going on in his head, that her presence in his life and in his heart was both needed and wanted. That act of buying them for her kept them attached to each other with an unbreakable bond. Or so she had thought before she had come to realise that chocolate had been the thing which ripped them apart.

  She lifted one out with careful pincered fingers and touched it to her lips. Her teeth bit through the double-dipped shell through to a soft sweet scented truffle and her brain sighed with old familiar pleasure. Chocolate had comforted her for so many years. Chocolate had reassured her and given her pleasure whenever she needed it. Chocolate had been a friend. No – chocolate had been an enemy. Chocolate had lied to her and laughed at her behind her back. Chocolate had made her into an idiot.

  She spat the chocolate into the sink and then took eight more out of the box and squashed them between two squares of kitchen roll. The sickly perfume of rose filled the air around her, the odour of so much hurt, the scent of the end of her marriage. She buried them in the bottom of the bin and replaced the lid back on the Hampshire Simone le Bon box. Never again would chocolate pass her lips.

  Chapter 19

  Connie studied Jimmy as he stuffed the pancakes into his mouth whilst reading the newspaper. Butter had dribbled down his chin and made it glossy.

  She was fascinated by her own feelings as she watched him. It was as if she were viewing a stranger, even though this man had shared her marriage bed for twenty-four
years. Did Ivanka know that they still slept in the same bed, she wondered. Mind you, all they did in it was sleep. She couldn’t remember the last time she and Jimmy had made love. Not had sex, because she could remember that – last Easter. They’d both had a bit too much to drink and he’d been booze-horny. There was no foreplay, no kissing, just an in-and-out bonk that he couldn’t finish off because he’d had too much alcohol. He was snoring seconds after falling off her and, tipsy as she was, she’d had a moment of total clarity that she might as well have been a hole in the wall. She couldn’t remember when he had last cared enough to bring her to the heights of ecstasy. She couldn’t even remember when he had last kissed her on the mouth.

  Did he ‘make love’ to Ivanka? she thought watching him lick the gloopy home-made chocolate sauce from his fork. He had been capable of great tenderness in their youth. He liked sex and Connie had enjoyed it too. He couldn’t have gone to someone else because she denied him his conjugal rights, because she never had. Well, maybe a couple of times when she had been pregnant, which was to be expected. When had the fabric of their marriage started to unravel? When had she begun to find the missing part of her marriage in chocolate? Did she get plump and that’s what turned him to other women or did he turn to other women which made try and feed her starved heart as she would feed a hungry stomach?

  ‘What’s up with you not having any pancakes on Pancake Day?’ asked Jimmy, turning from his newspaper and catching her staring at him.

  ‘I just feel a bit off,’ replied Connie, patting her tummy.

  ‘You must be if you aren’t having anything with chocolate on it,’ he laughed.

  ‘Yes I must, mustn’t I?’ Connie tried to laugh too but the sound that came out was hollow and false. Luckily for her, Jimmy didn’t notice. He was too busy eating and reading.

  Connie tried not to retch as a fresh wave of chocolate scent overcame her. It was as if she had suddenly become hypersensitive to it. It seemed to stick to the inside of her nostrils and pump its strong sweet aroma into her lungs. She had hated making the sauces earlier on, but she wanted life for Jimmy to appear as normal as possible and he always had pancakes with a trio of chocolate sauces on this day. She didn’t want him to have any inkling that he was about to be toppled from his throne before it happened.

  Connie sat at the table nursing a coffee in her hands as Jimmy shovelled forkfuls of pancake into his mouth and cooed with pleasure, like a pigeon on happy pills.

  ‘This is my favourite dessert of all time,’ he said through the contents. ‘We should have Pancake Day every day.’ He pointed to the pink box on the work surface with his fork. ‘You eaten all your chocolates yet?’

  ‘I’ve had quite a few but I’ve got some left which I’ve decided to save for Easter because I’m . . . I’m going to give up chocolate for Lent.’ She hadn’t planned on saying that, but it fitted. He didn’t need to know that she would never eat it again for now. She didn’t want to arouse even the slightest suspicion that things were about to change.

  Jimmy grinned

  ‘You, give up chocolate? I’ve heard everything now.’

  ‘I am,’ she said decisively. ‘Just for Lent though.’

  ‘What for? What good will it do anyone?’

  ‘I want to prove to myself that I can.’

  ‘I’ll bet you a tenner that you can’t.’

  Connie held out her hand. ‘Check the box now, and then check it again on the seventeenth of April. There won’t be any more gone.’

  Jimmy grinned and put down his fork so he could shake his wife’s hand.

  ‘You could no more give up eating chocolate for Lent than I could give up breathing,’ he said, his tone more mocking than joking, she thought.

  ‘You’re probably right.’ She nodded, but knew that he was very, very wrong.

  Chapter 20

  When Cheryl came home she found an egg splattered on her front window. Today had been awful from start to finish. She had been sent to do an all-day clean on a ridiculously scruffy house belonging to a recently deceased old man, whose relatives wanted it blitzing before they put it on the market. Usually that would have been a two-woman job but there was no one else available. It had been more of a task for environmental health services and if Della had known how bad it was, she would never have agreed to taking the job on. It had upset Cheryl to see how the old man had lived. It was a part of the job she hated, encountering old people who had no hope left and who sat all day, every day with no company and nothing to do. She had cried whilst she had vacuumed up months of crumbs from the carpet and scrubbed at the grime and filth which covered everything he had owned.

  Della had rung to say that she’d had to carve up Ruth Fallis’s rota and had given Cheryl Mr Morgan on Wednesdays, starting tomorrow. ‘Morgan the Organ’ as he was known locally, had been the organist for the local church in Maltstone for over thirty years and appeared sometimes in the Barnsley Chronicle or the Daily Trumpet standing next to the giant Wurlitzer which he had in his house. A fine upstanding citizen. Mr Morgan was just around the corner from Cheryl’s two-hour slot with fussy Mrs Hopkinson. Cheryl was grateful for the extra hours because she needed all the money she could get. Gary still hadn’t returned her call and she supposed he wouldn’t now. Over and over she had imagined Ann Gladstone telling her son what a nightmare he had escaped from. Cheryl didn’t want him to think that and wished more than anything he would ring just so that she could hear in his voice that he still cared about her.

  ‘I’ve told him you’ll do everything Ruth did,’ said Della. ‘His upstairs, his downstairs, and convinced him, I hope, that his Wurlitzer was in good hands with you. He’s obviously one of those types who likes things done a certain way so just make sure you do what she did . . .’ Which probably means eat all his biscuits and nick from his house, thought Della. ‘He might be a bit awkward because unfortunately some types would rather keep an old familiar bad cleaner than have a new strange good one. He’ll give you a key when you go tomorrow.’

  As Cheryl looked at the mess on the front of her house, she wondered if this was a message from the Fallis family because Ruth knew that she’d been the one who had reported her to Della. It was unlikely to be a drive past random egg-throw because she lived in a quiet cul-de-sac. Jock Fallis was a nasty beggar and so was their son Jock Junior. Then again, Jock Fallis’s M.O. was more horse’s head in the bed than yolk dripping down her glass. Still, it niggled her that the two might be connected.

  She scrubbed the mess off her window then put on some beans on toast for her tea; not that she was in the slightest bit hungry but she was shaking from not eating. Her appetite had been zero since Gary had gone. She felt as if she were treading water, surviving rather than living, and she didn’t think she’d ever laugh again. God knows, life with Gary was hardly high octane, but she believed they had sorted out all their problems and she had been content in her little world. Now, she felt as if the top layer of her skin had been peeled back and she was sensitive to everything. Even when a thought of him brushed against her brain, it made it ache.

  They’d been so close to affording a cycle of IVF and this time she was convinced that it would work, because she had been doing yoga to de-stress, eating healthily, abstaining from alcohol, following every faddy tip – however daft – that the internet had to offer to give her body the best chance of growing the baby. She had imagined spending the summer with a swelling belly and shopping for tiny baby outfits – the dream had been so near she could have touched it. But as with even the most vivid dreams, it was all gone in the blink of an eye.

  She switched on the TV to divert her attention but it was a thriller about a man who gambled away all his fortune and then killed his wife to claim on the insurance. Cheryl switched it off and went to bed. She came down the next morning to find six broken eggs all over her window and front door.

  Chapter 21

  ‘How’s my best girl this morning?’ Jimmy said, swaggering into the office the next day with his m
agic grin on full beam.

  Della’s heart still quickened slightly, betraying the more measured and sensible activity going on in her brain. She had adored Jimmy Diamond. She would have done anything for him, but her feelings had been exposed as one-way traffic. How had she fooled herself into thinking that a man who rode so rough-shod over his family would genuinely treasure her? It was the first day of Lent today and Della was going to give up being a mug.

  ‘I’m fine, as always,’ said Della – her standard response. She switched on a smile, but it took an effort today.

  As she put the kettle on she noticed that Ivanka walked in five minutes after Jimmy had and it came to her that that was the standard pattern of every morning. She hadn’t noticed it before, because she hadn’t been on the look-out for any suspicious activity, but Ivanka always turned into the office five minutes after her boss. They must meet before work, Della realised, and Ivanka waited around the corner so they didn’t arrive together. A huge technicolour high-definition picture of them both passionately clawing at each other in Jimmy’s car rose up in her brain and a sharp ache spread underneath her ribs. She felt as betrayed as Connie did.

  ‘I’m going out for a long business lunch today,’ Jimmy announced as she handed him his coffee in the World’s Best Boss mug she had bought him for his birthday.

  ‘There’s nothing in the diary,’ huffed Della.

  ‘Sorry,’ he slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. ‘Forgot to tell you.’

  He was always forgetting to tell her about last-minute meetings recently, which made her life awkward sometimes, but she had forgiven him anything until now.

  ‘Naughty,’ she said, as usual in this situation, but she couldn’t manage to sustain her smile.

  ‘Is it okay if I take hour and half for lunch today? I have cousin’s present to buy for birthday tomorrow,’ Ivanka asked Della as she was taking her coat off.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ It came out as a hiss that a king cobra would have been proud of. It had just struck her how many cousins Ivanka claimed to have: a cousin whose birthday was tomorrow, a cousin who dealt in cars, a cousin who had a sunbed, a cousin who was a model and gave her cast-off designer clothes, a cousin who bought her a silver Tiffany necklace for Christmas. So very many of them.