Afternoon Tea at the Sunflower Café

by Milly Johnson

  ‘It’s Wenda. She has ruined Mr Red’s carpet with some gree . . . I mean she has ruined Mr Green’s carpet with some red dye.’

  Wenda’s voice squealed out of the earpiece, giving the impression that the phone was possessed.

  ‘Put her on speaker,’ said Jimmy.

  Ivanka pressed the appropriate button.

  ‘Wenda, it’s Jimmy, what’s up?’

  ‘Where’s Della?’ asked Wenda.

  ‘She isn’t here,’ snapped Ivanka. ‘I have told you.’

  ‘I’ve just washed Mr Green’s white Tibetan lamb rug with red dye,’ said Wenda in a clipped tone.

  ‘What the fuck did you do that for?’ groaned Jimmy.

  ‘I didn’t bloody mean to,’ screeched Wenda. ‘The bloody carpet cleaner had green . . . I mean red dye in it.’

  ‘Why aren’t you using the company products?’ Ivanka said.

  ‘I was. That Des’s Discount stuff. I picked it up yesterday, you saw me load it into my bag. He’s gone, as the ancient Greeks used to say, frigging apeshit. He was bloody purple when I left.’

  ‘Who? Mr White?’ asked Ivanka.

  ‘There isn’t a sodding Mr White.’ Wenda was screaming now. ‘The rug was white until it went red. Mr Green is purple.’

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ said Jimmy, pushing his hand through his hair.

  ‘I will ring Des’s Discount Stores and complain,’ said Ivanka, making a solid executive decision.

  ‘Mr Green wants a new white rug.’

  ‘How much is that going to cost?’ asked Jimmy, chewing on his lip as he calculated which would be best – forking out for a new rug or claiming on his insurance and seeing his premium rise at renewal time.

  ‘He said it was five hundred and odd quid. He’s getting hold of the receipt for me to give to you.’

  ‘How much?’ Jimmy yelled. ‘What sort of prat spends that on a rug?’

  ‘It’s only small an’ all,’ said Wenda, which didn’t help Jimmy’s mood one bit.

  ‘Oh Della, how dare you pick this week to be ill,’ Jimmy raged into the air, and then wished he hadn’t because he knew that would send Ivanka into a massive sulk. ‘Okay, Wenda,’ he said with a resigned sigh. ‘Just tell him to send in the receipt. We’ll get it back from Des or I’ll be making his rug red when I cut his balls off.’

  No sooner had that call ended than Ava rang.

  ‘Where’s Della?’ she asked, sending Ivanka’s pout into spasm. ‘That bloody stain remover I picked up yesterday has bleached Mrs Mularkey’s handcrafted curtains. She’s gone mental.’

  ‘Am I really hearing this?’ cried Jimmy, throwing his hands up to the heavens. ‘Or did I eat too much cheese last night and I’m having a nightmare?’

  *

  Jimmy left Ivanka on the pretext of needing to see Pookie Barnes, but in reality, he wanted to sit in a pub in nearby Elsecar, have a toasted sandwich, half a Guinness, read the paper and get away from the office and from bleach, Ivanka’s sulky face and anything to do with the colours green, red, white and purple.

  You won’t be able to do this after next week, Jimbo, said a snidey little voice in his head. You’ll have to be totally accountable for your whereabouts and won’t be able to sneak off ANYWHERE.

  A woman walked past him on the way to the toilet and smiled politely at him. She had long shiny brown hair, a waist he could have circled with his hands and lips as red as the suit she wore. This time last year he would have been in there like Flynn. He’d always had the gift of the gab, without appearing slimy like some men did. The secret was in not trying too hard, in being friendly rather than flirty. He was so tempted to see if the old magic was there and talk to the woman as she was returning to the table full of friends with whom she was sitting, but he kept his eyes on his newspaper instead.

  ‘Oops, nearly tripped there. That would have been embarrassing.’

  He raised his head to find the woman had been speaking to him. She’d opened up the flirting lines of engagement. So, there was life in the old – well not really even middle-aged actually – dog yet but he’d had his wings clipped and was no longer allowed to fly. He had to remain in a coop of his making, with his young, fresh chick. But how green those fields in the distance were starting to look.

  *

  ‘Where have you been, Jimmy?’ Ivanka greeted him with furious aggression when he returned to the office. ‘I can smell beer. You have been drinking whilst I have been running around like a fly with a blue-coloured arse.’

  ‘I had a half with Pookie Barnes. He’s a drinker, he likes to do business in an alehouse,’ returned Jimmy, wishing he’d stayed out.

  ‘Why didn’t you answer your mobile? Della is not here, there is no reason to hide it.’

  ‘I forgot to bring it,’ he lied. In truth it was in his pocket but switched off. ‘Anyway, what’s up now?’

  ‘Another carpet has been dyed. Clothes have been washed with bleach and oil. I have rung Des and he said that no one else has complained and so it is our problem. He says that our stock has been timpered with . . . is that a word – timpered?’

  ‘Tampered,’ Jimmy corrected her. ‘That’s bollocks, give me the phone. Who the hell would tamper with our stock? Why would they tamper with our . . .’

  Jimmy, who had been about to start pressing numbers on the keypad, put down the phone slowly and then he looked straight at Ivanka.

  ‘Did Roy Frog go anywhere near the stock cupboard yesterday?’

  Ivanka weighed up the pros and cons of admitting that Roy Frog had been snooping around. It didn’t look good for her to admit that she had left him alone long enough to doctor their bottles. She might as well have answered him truthfully though because the long pause before she opened her mouth told Jimmy all he needed to know.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘Ivankaaa!’

  ‘I didn’t know that he would do this,’ bawled Ivanka. ‘I only left him alone for fifteen minutes maximum . . .’

  ‘You said five yesterday.’

  ‘He was only looking in the cupboard. I stopped him. I closed it . . .’ She remembered the size of his briefcase. It could easily have carried lots of contaminating liquids.

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  Ivanka winced. ‘He had a huge bag with him.’

  ‘Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Jason and the Argonauts! And was this before or after Wenda and that lot came in?’

  ‘Before. It was before.’

  Jimmy’s eyes shuttered down and that small action communicated a huge amount of despair.

  ‘Roy frigging Frog,’ he said in a quiet, nasty whisper, then he opened up his eyes and turned to Ivanka. ‘If that wanker returns my call, tell him I’m playing golf. Connie was right. I should have played much harder to get. You’ – and he jabbed his finger furiously in Ivanka’s direction – ‘were totally wrong.’

  Then Jimmy went into his office, not caring if Ivanka got the hump that he’d mentioned his far wiser wife. He calmed his nerves down with a few quid on the nags via the BET-YER-ASS internet site. He lost seventy pounds and, not for the first time recently, concluded that he was an expert at backing the wrong horses.

  Chapter 75

  Della’s house was exactly how Connie had imagined it: a neat little house on a neat little estate, snow-white lace curtains at the downstairs windows, neutral beigey-mushroom ones upstairs. They were meeting here today to bring each other up to speed. There were only nine days now until Lent ended and so much to do before then. And each had something important they wanted to say to the other.

  ‘Come in,’ said Della, who answered the ding-dong doorbell chime almost immediately. She had her hair loose from its usual tight bun: it hung thick and shiny down her back and she was wearing trousers and a bright coloured top rather than her customary dark two-piece suits. She looked years younger at leisure than she did in the office.

  Connie stepped into a super-clean hallway with a polished wooden parquet floor. There were photos of a black pug all ov
er the walls.

  ‘How are you feeling? Is your bug any better?’ she asked, with a grin.

  ‘Alas no,’ replied Della. ‘I rang into work this morning with a very raspy throat. Come through. Kettle’s on.’ She beckoned Connie forwards into the kitchen.

  ‘Have you got a dog then?’ Connie thumbed back at the pictures.

  ‘Not any more. When Bobby died eight years ago, I didn’t think I could go through losing another one. It broke my heart.’

  ‘I’ve never had a dog,’ Connie said. ‘I’d like a cat. I shall have one when I move.’

  ‘So you won’t stay in the house?’ Della invited Connie to sit down at her kitchen table. There were two chairs and Connie wondered if anyone else had ever eaten at it with Della.

  ‘No. I want a totally fresh start. Somewhere that Jane and the baby will stay sometimes, I hope.’

  ‘What did Jimmy say about the prospect of being a granddad?’

  ‘Not a lot,’ huffed Connie. ‘He thinks she’s too young. Jane and he don’t speak, did you know that?’

  ‘He didn’t talk about you or Jane much at all,’ replied Della. And she would have been the first to admit that she hadn’t wanted to hear anything about them, either.

  ‘He was never there for her. If only I’d known that he was absent from her life so much because . . .’ Connie puffed out her cheeks to calm herself.

  ‘It was very mischievous of you coming into the office to drop the granddad news to Ivanka,’ said Della, putting a mug of tea down in front of Connie.

  ‘I had no idea how I’d feel when I saw her,’ said Connie. ‘I didn’t know what I’d say. The only thing I did plan in advance was how I’d appear to her, at my drabbest. Because the next time she sees me, I’ll look very different, I can assure you.’

  ‘I did wonder if that was the case,’ smiled Della, suddenly flooded with admiration for the little woman. ‘So how did you feel when you met her?’

  ‘Angry, really angry,’ replied Connie. ‘At least at first. I had to take a moment and remind myself though who I really should have been saving my anger for. It wasn’t Ivanka who was an emotionally unavailable father to my daughter, who left me alone when I needed him most in my life . . .’

  ‘You’re being very strong, Connie,’ said Della. ‘I don’t know how you’re managing it.’

  ‘I have my moments,’ said Connie, noticing the sunflower pattern on the cup. It was as if they were everywhere, reminding her of what she had to become. ‘Sometimes, from nowhere, it’s as if a wave of sadness overtakes me and I have to fight it off. Luckily I have so many things I can focus on to make me feel angry and up rather than depressed and down.’

  ‘I think you’re marvellous, Connie,’ said Della, surprising herself as much as Connie, because she hadn’t been aware she was going to say that. ‘I’m sorry. I hope you don’t think I’m being patronising. It wasn’t meant that way.’

  Connie laughed a little. ‘I don’t feel marvellous, Della. I feel scared and out of my depth. But I also know that I have to see this through. I won’t let him throw me away like a piece of rubbish.’

  ‘You must have had good times,’ Della said softly, sipping from one of the two new mugs she had bought at the weekend. She liked the sunflower emblem, it reminded her of the poem on the wall of the Lady Muck office.

  ‘I fell in love with Jimmy Diamond on the spot,’ said Connie, staring beyond Della, seeing the young Jimmy standing there for a moment. We were young and he was a dish. I couldn’t believe my luck that he even looked in my direction. We were married within months, it was all too fast.’ Connie looked straight into Della’s eyes. ‘I was pregnant.’

  ‘Pregnant?’ Della did her maths. She knew that Connie and Jimmy had been married for twenty-four years, but Jane was only twenty-two.

  ‘Max. He was still-born. He was perfect, beautiful. He had wisps of white-blond hair and long black eyelashes but his little lungs didn’t draw one single breath.’

  ‘Oh Connie, I’m so sorry.’ Della’s fingers came out and rested on Connie’s hand.

  ‘He had an affair in the madness of the months that followed. I was mad with grief, I didn’t want to live. It was all such a mess. I forgave him and he swore that he would never do anything like that again. I believed him, of course, because I desperately wanted to. Then Jane came along. She was the baby that healed us, or so I thought. I was his “best girl” again.’

  Della thought of Jimmy grinning at her, calling her his best girl and she felt a stirring of nausea in her stomach. She wanted to grind his smiling, handsome face into the dirt as much for this gentle woman sitting at her kitchen table as she did for herself.

  ‘Can I be honest with you, Della? When we first started all this, my only thought was to crush Diamond Shine using anyone and anything I could and then walk away from it all, but that isn’t the case any more,’ said Connie, with real determination in her voice. ‘I want to make Lady Muck a success.’

  ‘And can I be honest with you? I wanted you to crush Diamond Shine, put Jimmy in the gutter and then I’d walk away from both him and you. Now, well . . . I want to put some money into the business,’ said Della. ‘How do you feel about having a partner? If Hilda and the rest don’t come after all I’ve done now, they never will, but I’m prepared to risk that they’ll be joining us very shortly.’

  Connie’s head snapped up. ‘Really?’

  Della smiled. ‘Really. Jimmy has been too reliant on me for too long and he’s become lazy. And I’ve fed Ivanka too much duff information. I know her, she will want to make a major impact this week whilst I’m away, which will include setting on cleaners who don’t know she’s my office junior and so will accept her as the boss. I can bet you she has commandeered my desk, made physical changes to the office to put her imprint on it and I can guarantee there will be absolute chaos in my absence.’

  ‘And what about Cleancheap?’

  ‘That’s the one huge fat fly in the ointment. We’ve delayed the union of Cleancheap and Diamond Shine as long as we can but it’s bound to happen. I can’t see Roy Frog choosing insolvency over selling even to his worst enemy. He’ll have to swallow his pride in the end and pick the devil rather than the deep blue sea.’ Della lifted her shoulders and dropped them again. ‘But I have to believe that we could survive the competition when that day happens, which we could do if the present Diamond Shine girls defect because they’ve got brilliant reputations.’

  ‘Does Roy Frog want a lot of money for Cleancheap?’ asked Connie.

  ‘Don’t even start thinking about it,’ Della replied, holding up her hand to warn against venturing down that road. ‘Yes he does, a ridiculous amount, which I most certainly don’t have and I’m guessing you don’t have much left of your mother’s inheritance from what you’ve said in the past. Time wouldn’t be on our side anyway for building up a business case and applying for a bank loan. I’ve already considered it. No, the only option we have is to secure ourselves to the mast of Lady Muck and hope she survives the force twelve gale which is currently featuring on the horizon. I have no other place to go.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ laughed Connie.

  ‘So – partners then?’

  ‘I think I’d better agree,’ said Connie. ‘After all you’ve told me about your dirty tricks, I daren’t be on the wrong side of you.’

  They clinked their mugs together. ‘So, here’s to us then, partner,’ said Della. She suspected that Jimmy Diamond had had too much luck in life to go down because of the plotting of two women whom he had managed to really piss off; but there was no other way for either of them except to head towards that scary horizon and hope that Jimmy wouldn’t crush them with his new super-massive company, even though they knew the likelihood was that he would try – and enjoy doing it.

  *

  Cheryl wasn’t working that afternoon because she had an appointment with Mr Fairbanks and two gentlemen from Christie’s auction house who were coming up to see her from London. The meeting
was going to be held in Mr Fairbanks’ house; he had been storing Edith’s pictures in his private vault.

  ‘I’m nervous,’ said Cheryl, bringing in two cups of tea which rattled in their saucers.

  ‘I think we all are,’ said Mr Fairbanks. ‘Is that a car I hear?’

  Cheryl shot to the window and saw a swanky black Mercedes pull into the drive.

  ‘Oh God, they’re here,’ she said, wiping her hands down her best skirt.

  ‘I’ll answer the door, Cheryl. Take a seat, dear, before you fall,’ said Mr Fairbanks.

  Cheryl sat down only to have to get up again moments later to shake the hands of Mr Elton and Mr Vamplew, two gentlemen who looked as if they came from a different world, one where nothing in it cost less than a million pounds.

  Cheryl poured them a cup of tea each and handed it over, hoping she wouldn’t spill it over their expensive-looking suit trousers.

  ‘What an amazing story,’ said Mr Elton, in very rounded vowels. ‘I nearly dropped the phone when I heard what you might have in your possession.’

  ‘I still can’t believe any of it,’ said Cheryl, hoping she didn’t sound too common to them.

  ‘I want to believe it all,’ said Mr Vamplew, who was the elder of the two. ‘Lovely tea, thank you, Miss Parker. Yorkshire Tea, I hope.’ And he smiled at Cheryl and she knew he was trying to put her at ease.

  ‘Yes, it’s Yorkshire Tea,’ she smiled back. ‘So you’ve heard of Percy Lake, then?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ The two Christie’s gentlemen shared a knowing glance. ‘He belongs to the art underworld. It’s amazing how someone of his skill has never come to public attention. Then again, one might argue that part of his talent was the ability to remain invisible.’

  Still Cheryl couldn’t believe that she might own an original piece of Van Gogh’s work. Even sitting with two men who had driven up from London especially to view it. Part of her was expecting a Candid Camera crew to appear from behind the curtain.

  ‘May we see the pieces?’ asked Mr Vamplew.

  ‘Of course, of course.’ Mr Fairbanks got up from the chair. ‘Gentlemen, follow me.’