Afternoon Tea at the Sunflower Café

by Milly Johnson

  Della took a packet of biscuits out of her bag.

  ‘No point in you opening them, I don’t like them,’ said Moira. ‘I’ve never liked them.’

  You said they were your favourites last time you had them. You ate nearly half a packet in one sitting, thought Della, but she put them back in her bag and said, ‘Oh. All right then. We’ll just see what they bring. There’s always such a nice selection so they’re bound to have something you do like.’

  When the trolley came, Moira picked three Rich Tea biscuits from the plate and dipped each delicately into her coffee before lifting it to her mouth.

  Della wanted to reach out and enclose her mother’s hand in hers and hold it against her cheek. She tried it once before but her mother snatched her hand away as if she was revolted by Della’s touch.

  Another visitor walked into the lounge holding the hand of a toddler with shoulder-length blonde hair. Moira’s mouth curved upwards into a happy smile, which was echoed in the light that suddenly brightened her faded blue eyes.

  ‘It’s Gillian. I knew she’d come. Gillian, Gillian,’ she called to the little girl who looked up at her mother with confusion.

  ‘It’s not Gillian, Mum. Gillian’s family moved away to Spain when she was fourteen, can you remember?’

  Moira’s eyes were fixed on the little girl who was now sitting on a chair next to her grandmother. ‘Such a pretty girl. I used to brush her hair and plait it when she came to play with you.’

  Gillian Goodchild had lived next door to them and was in the year below Della at school. Gillian had long shiny golden hair and a sweet round face but was all too aware that ‘Auntie Moira’ preferred her to her own daughter, and used to taunt Della with that fact at every opportunity. If ever there was a misnomer, ‘Goodchild’ was it: Gillian Goodchild made Damien Thorn look like Shirley Temple. Moira had made Della have her hair cut short in case she caught nits, but would sit and brush Gillian’s hair and plait it and pin it up whenever she came round to play. One Christmas Moira had bought Gillian a toy shop till, the same as she’d bought Della, except Gillian’s was the deluxe model with the till roll, the one that Della had been desperate for. The Goodchilds had emigrated to Spain when Gillian was a teenager and Della could remember how inconsolable her mother had been when they left.

  ‘Gillian’s over there, look. She’s my daughter.’

  ‘Gillian isn’t your daughter, Mum. I am,’ Della said gently.

  Moira slowly turned her head from the little girl to Della and when she spoke, the words were spat out with bitterness.

  ‘Cry, cry, cry, that’s all you did for the first months after you came out. It drove him mad. I couldn’t shut you up.’

  ‘I couldn’t help it, Mum. I was only a baby.’

  ‘We were all right until you came. You hid inside me so that I didn’t know about you until it was too late.’

  Too late to do anything about it. Too late to abort you is what she meant, Della knew, because she had said it to her so many times over the years.

  ‘He left me because of you.’ Moira was getting upset now. Della reached for her cup before she spilt her tea over herself and as she came close, Moira’s hand shot out and clawed her face.

  A nurse rushed over from the other side of the room and settled Moira back in her chair, at the same time asking Della if she was all right. Della nodded, but she was gulping back a throatful of shocked tears. There had been real hate in her mother’s action.

  ‘Here, you look at this magazine, Moira,’ said the nurse, opening up a Hello and placing it on the old lady’s lap. ‘She likes the pictures,’ she explained quietly to Della. ‘Let me get you some antiseptic, you’re bleeding.’

  ‘I’m okay,’ said Della, feeling something warm and liquid slide down her cheek and patting it with a tissue from her pocket.

  ‘No, I insist.’

  Della waited until the nurse returned and stood there like a child whilst she dabbed antiseptic on the scratch with cotton wool. A picture rose up of her mother doing the same once, with yellow stuff, when she had grazed her cheek jumping off the wall. She could be lovely sometimes, her mum, in between the outbursts and accusations. Moira’s moods swung from pole to pole and somehow that was always harder to deal with than if she had been consistently hostile.

  On her way out, Della bumped into Joyce in the corridor and the friendly manageress gave her arm a comforting squeeze: no words, just that soft touch that said I know what you’re going through and I feel for you. Della barely made it to the exit before the tears coursed down her cheeks, darkening the material of her plum-coloured suit.

  *

  Jimmy and Ivanka were sitting in a dark corner of a pub just outside Castleton, although Jimmy had told Connie he was going to the garage in Sheffield to have new brake pads fitted. He wasn’t in the best of moods because he had driven through the Peak District hoping to have his pork pulled in a layby and Ivanka had refused point blank. So here they were having pulled pork on hot brown baguettes instead.

  ‘I meant it, Jimmy,’ said Ivanka, as she caught sight of him scowling at her. ‘I won’t have sex until you have told your wife you are divorcing her.’

  Her resolve had been strengthened on this point after watching a documentary about Anne Boleyn on the TV that week. She had refused to be the king’s mistress and had demanded the status of queen. The story paralleled theirs in another way: Jimmy and Connie had been married for twenty-four years, just like Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon. Jimmy was getting off lightly, Ivanka had thought as she watched it. She wasn’t asking him to change religion or risk international war; she just wanted to be called Mrs Diamond, and to have secure legal access to his assets in exchange for conjugal duties.

  ‘You ought to be careful, young lady,’ said Jimmy with a sneer. ‘I might just go and resume matrimonial duties with my wife.’ He tried not to look smug when he heard Ivanka gasp at that.

  Then she said, in a barely managed stage whisper, ‘You promised you would not do that, Jimmy. Have you done this to me already? You have, haven’t you?’

  ‘Don’t be bloody daft,’ said Jimmy, dipping his eyes in case she could read the lie in them. ‘But I might if you keep withholding sex. I have needs, you know. I have a lot on my mind and sex relieves pressure,’ he added, knowing that he was so smooth he could have passed a Jeremy Kyle lie detector if he’d been wired up to one just then.

  Ivanka foraged in her bag and slapped an envelope down on the table.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘Eez a one-way ticket to Krakow dated twenty April,’ said Ivanka, with one confident eyebrow raised. ‘Easter Sunday. The first Sunday after Lent. If you don’t tell your wife that you are getting married to me by then, I will be using it. If you do, then I will rip it up.’ Anne Boleyn had been prepared to walk away to get what she wanted, she’d learned from watching the programme.

  Now it was Jimmy’s turn to gulp. He thought of Ivanka getting on a plane and never giving him one of her fantastic blow-jobs ever again.

  ‘Okay, okay, I said I’d tell her and I meant it,’ he replied, placing his tanned hand on her knee. ‘Jesus Christ, I gave you my word, didn’t I? I can’t give you any more solid assurance than that, can I?’

  ‘At the end of Lent? Not one day more.’

  Jimmy gave a concessionary sigh. ‘At the end of Lent.’

  Ivanka let loose a breath of relief and smiled. ‘I am looking forward to having sex again, Jimmy.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Jimmy but for once sex was situated far behind all the worries in his mind. Even if Ivanka had stripped off and laid down on the pub table in front of him now, he could no more have rogered her than run a marathon on a bellyful of pies.

  Chapter 41

  Cheryl was awoken at six o’clock on the Sunday morning by a sharp blip on a car horn outside, as if someone had nudged it by mistake. She was just about to drift back to sleep again when she heard a crack and then another, and she knew that
whoever was throwing eggs at her house was doing it now, at this moment.

  Cheryl flung herself across the room to the window and jerked the curtains open.

  She saw a man dive into a grotty old 4 x 4 and do a mad three point turn before zooming off, but she had seen part of the number plate and she could make an educated guess at whom it belonged to. F4 LL.

  *

  Connie delivered a full English breakfast to the table for her husband. As a rule he ate very healthily because he liked to keep his weight down, but he had always allowed himself a Sunday fry-up. Until recently she had joined him, but her appetite had waned so much recently that she had made do with a slice of toast. She had lost over a stone already. She hadn’t given Jimmy the opportunity to see that because she had kept on wearing her loose-fitting frumpy frocks around the house.

  ‘I think I need a new car,’ she said, as casually as she could. ‘Mine is ancient now.’

  Jimmy looked up from his newspaper as if she had just asked for a mink coat from Rodeo Drive.

  ‘It’s not about the age, it’s about the mileage. And seeing as you don’t go anywhere except to the supermarket, it’s virtually brand new, that car.’

  ‘The heater’s broken. It’s freezing inside.’

  ‘Get it fixed then. It’ll be a damned sight cheaper than buying another car,’ Jimmy humphed. ‘You can’t just go out and replace a vehicle every time something goes wrong with it.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say when you’re driving around in a brand new BMW,’ said Connie.

  ‘Con,’ Jimmy sighed. ‘You know how these things work, I’ve got to make myself look like a man of means. Anyway, as I’ve told you before, my Beemer is the bottom of the range. You can get Mondeos which are more expensive than that but a Beemer has the reputation, and business these days is all about image.’

  He was lying of course, again. Out of interest, she had recently looked up his car to find it was the executive model.

  ‘Can’t we get one through the business? A Mini Countryman – they’re nice.’

  Jimmy nearly spat out his sausage. ‘Have you seen how much one of those things costs?’

  A lot less than your mistress’s sports car, she was desperate to say to him.

  ‘And no, we can’t. These are rough economic times if you haven’t noticed, Con. I’m struggling to keep our heads above water.’

  Connie couldn’t resist. ‘We’ve been struggling for so many years, though, Jim. Isn’t it time to pack it in if it’s so hard to make a buck?’

  But Jimmy volleyed an answer straight back.

  ‘And do what? I can’t retire on fresh air, can I? Now is the time when I need to lay my hands on as much spare cash as I can. Roy Frog and his crappy Cleancheap are on the way out and I’m going to mop up all his clientele when he eventually swallows his pride and asks me to strike a bargain. Bloody Mini Countryman, ha!’

  Jimmy carried on chewing.

  ‘Okay,’ said Connie, smiling at him. ‘I’ll get my heater fixed and stick with my old banger.’

  ‘We’re a team, Connie,’ said Jimmy, nodding at her. ‘We have to work together. We’ve done okay so far, haven’t we, love? Things will change for the better soon.’ At least he wasn’t lying when he said that last part, they both secretly thought.

  Chapter 42

  ‘What the frigging ’ell?’

  Jimmy’s eyeballs were the size of dinner plates as he scrolled down the screen. ‘Dire Shite? “We are DIRE SHITE and that’s exactly what we supply to all our valued customers.” What the fucking hell is going on?’

  Della got up from her seat and went into Jimmy’s office, from where she could hear him ranting.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘Look at this.’ He gestured angrily towards the PC screen.

  Della made a pretence of reading the sabotaged home page for the first time.

  ‘Dear God,’ she said, sounding as horrified as she could. ‘Who’s done that?’

  ‘I wish I knew,’ growled Jimmy. ‘I’m the only one with the password to this website so I’ve obviously been hacked.’ He laid a finger thoughtfully on his lip. ‘Hang on, why would I be a target? Do you think it’s random, Del?’

  Della stroked her chin in contemplation. ‘Could it be a rival?’

  Jimmy sat in silence, his thoughts almost whirring with activity, until he slammed his hands down on his desk as enlightenment dawned on him.

  ‘It’s Roy Frog, who else?’ he said, thrusting himself out of his chair and striding up and down as he spoke. ‘Hang on, it’s starting to add up. Hasn’t he got a son doing computers at uni?’

  Actually he’d graduated last year with a masters in biochemistry, Della remembered from an article in the Barnsley Chronicle. But she wasn’t going to let the facts get in the way of a good opportunity.

  ‘I think so. A master’s degree as well.’

  ‘The f—’ Jimmy was so livid that he couldn’t get the f-word out. ‘It’s Frog, I can feel it. How long has the website been like that? How much business have I lost? Well, he won’t get away with it.’

  Della couldn’t recall Jimmy being as enraged as this for a long time. The serious look on his face made her want to laugh very badly. She pointed through to the outer office where Ivanka was sitting and mouthed at Jimmy, ‘She doesn’t know anything about it, does she?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ he mouthed back. ‘She has difficulty breaking into a bag of crisps, never mind a secure website.’

  Della nodded in agreement. ‘Well then, it seems you might be right.’

  ‘It’s definitely Roy Frog. I’m telling you, when he comes sniffing around me wanting me to buy him out, he’ll pay for doing this to me.’ Jimmy laughed humourlessly.

  ‘Yes, you should make him, Jimmy,’ agreed Della, impishly. ‘How dare he? Roy Frog has always been above himself. Remember when he snubbed you at the Mop and Bucket Award ceremony a couple of years ago?’

  Jimmy had clearly forgotten that until Della hooked the unwelcome memory out of the water and threw it at him.

  ‘Yes, yes, he did didn’t he, the twat?’

  ‘It must be killing him that you’re so successful now and he’s a few inches away from biting the commercial dust.’ Della couldn’t have stirred things up any further if she’d had a six-foot-wide spoon.

  Jimmy’s eyes narrowed. ‘Bitter little baldy bleeder. I’m going to ring him, Del, and have it out with him.’

  ‘No, don’t be daft,’ replied Della quickly, putting her hand over the phone to prevent him from making the call. ‘Think, Jimmy. Change the wording back, reset your passwords and bide your time. He’ll lose out in the end. If he wants you to buy him out, he’s playing a very stupid short game. Biting the hand that’s going to feed you is such an idiotic thing to do.’

  Jimmy’s hand fell on top of Della’s. It was so warm and big. He smiled at her, the smile that she had visualised so many times mirroring hers in bed seconds before he kissed her to initiate their love-making, and her heart seemed to kick against her ribcage.

  ‘Thank God I have you, Del. You’re my best girl and you always will be.’

  Still, after all he had done to her, Della so wanted to believe him.

  Chapter 43

  By Tuesday night Cheryl still hadn’t worked out the best way to tackle the Fallises about the egg throwing. They weren’t people you messed with, but at the same time, now that Cheryl was ninety-nine point-nine-nine per cent recurring convinced that they were behind the vandalism, she knew she couldn’t sit back any longer and do nothing.

  Della woke her with a phone call at seven the next morning to ask if there was any chance she could cover Sandra’s eight o’clock clean as she was having a menopausal turn. Apparently she’d been sweating so much during the night that she’d had to get up and put on a snorkel and was fit for nothing this morning. It was only a two-hour job, but Cheryl needed the money. She’d been tempted more than once to dip into that five thousand pounds, but a loud
‘No’ had annoyingly stopped her every time.

  Sandra’s client was around the corner from Mrs Hopkinson so Della made a couple of calls and arranged that Cheryl go to her next then onto Mr Morgan in the afternoon. Mrs Hopkinson grumbled a bit, but then she was never happier than when she was moaning about something.

  Cheryl sat on the bus journeying to the first of her three jobs of the day and wished that something would come along and help her be brave enough to march up to the front door of the Fallis family and confront them head-on.

  Sometimes the Gods were listening.

  *

  Connie had a spring in her step as she set off to Mr Savant’s house that morning. Another one of Jimmy’s cleaners – Gemma Robinson – had defected to Lady Muck and Jimmy was still utterly convinced that Roy Frog had doctored the website. He had remained in a deliciously foul mood for two days since discovering the sabotage. Lady Muck had also managed to secure a one-off bomb clean next Monday in a house that was going up for sale. Connie would tackle that together with Astrid on her first day working for Lady Muck, then she would set Astrid and Gemma on the Dartley Carpets job which would free up her time to work in the office. Small steps, but sure ones and all in the right direction.

  The weather was awful that morning, the sky dark and filled with grumpy clouds which threatened lots of rain. Crow Edge looked particularly creepy in the low light, not unlike the house in The Addams Family. Connie knocked on the door and Mr Savant opened it almost immediately, ushering her inside out of the cold. Gallantly he took her coat and hung it up for her on an ornate heavy coat stand. The same music was playing that had greeted her last week – Pygmalion. She wished she’d brought some ear-plugs.

  ‘Marilyn, do help yourself to a cup of tea to warm you up,’ said Mr Savant.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Connie, wondering why none of the girls liked working here. The house was beautiful and easy to clean because Mr Savant must have dusted and vacuumed in between her visits and he was quiet and genteel with impeccable manners. She could only put it down to them being suckered in to Crow Edge’s history as a funeral parlour.