Afternoon Tea at the Sunflower Café

by Milly Johnson

  ‘Oh, it’s er . . . I’m just trying it out.’

  You never could accept a compliment, could you? That’s going to change, girl.

  ‘It’s nice. Really nice.’ Gary drank some coffee and his eyes didn’t leave her. ‘My mum says hi. She’s sorry about, you know, being a bit off with you. It upset her seeing you and she didn’t know what to do for the best. She said she really wanted to give you a big hug.’

  Yeah, course she did, and I’m Celine Dion.

  Gary gave her his best pair of big round apologetic eyes. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve been a bit of a tosser, haven’t I, Cheryl?’

  You’re telling me.

  Cheryl shrugged. ‘I don’t know what you want me to say, Gary.’

  ‘We’ve been through a lot together you and I, haven’t we?’

  Well, you’ve been through my bank account.

  ‘Well, we were together for ten years, Gary. A lot happens in that time.’

  ‘Do you remember that holiday we had in Kos?’ he grinned.

  She remembered it too well. The weather had been perfect, they found a small café where the food was great and the lagers ice-cold and delicious. The sea was clear and blue. They made love on crisp white sheets as a gorgeously refreshing breeze blew through the green slices of shutters at the window.

  ‘Yes, I remember.’

  Gary coughed. ‘I’ve been thinking . . . Say no, but what if we went back there. Started again. Did it properly this time?’

  No.

  Cheryl smiled. That phantom limb of her relationship was starting to throb. It was a trick of the mind, though, according to what Marilyn had taught her. The limb was gone for a reason. ‘Did it properly this time?’ she echoed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Started again, you say?’

  ‘Yes.’ Hope was shining in his eyes.

  ‘It was so lovely in Kos. I felt truly happy that week.’

  ‘Me too.’ He reached for her hand. Cheryl stared at it, but her own stayed curled around her mug.

  ‘The thing is, Gary, I thought I did it properly last time. I didn’t cheat on you, I didn’t deceive you, I loved you, I respected you, I supported you, I gave our relationship my all. You, however, lied through your back teeth, ravaged my savings over and over again, broke my heart, won a fortune thanks to a battered sausage, shagged a teenager and now you’re back here for what reason?’

  Oh my God, did you really just say that. Did you REALLY say that, girlfriend?

  ‘Cheryl, I knew you’d think that I came back because I heard . . . because . . .’

  ‘Because you heard that I inherited some money. Let’s be honest. Well, you’re right, I did. Loads of it. Enough to set you and me up for life, and to have as much IVF as my body could take. Enough to let me buy Kos, never mind holiday on it. Enough to give you a battered sausage every day for the rest of your life. Oh Gary, I loved you so much.’

  She realised she had used the past tense. The shaking in her hands had stopped. She could see the phantom limb sitting across the table, but the ache was quickly fading to nothing.

  ‘I still love you, Cheryl.’ Gary reached further forward with his hand, almost demanding by the gesture that she hold it. Cheryl studied his slim fingers and thought of John Oakwell’s hand which was large and square and would have dwarfed Gary’s.

  ‘No, you don’t. You killed us. And now I’d like you to leave, because I’ve got a date with an absolute hunk of a man and I need to finish getting ready.’

  He thought she was joking. It was only when she swiped away his mug, poured the contents down the sink and opened the front door wide for him to leave that he realised she wasn’t.

  Gary looked winded.

  ‘You’ve changed, Cheryl,’ he said as a parting shot.

  ‘I know. And isn’t it bloody marvellous,’ she replied, hearing the voice in her head cheer as she closed the door on him. Boy, she was so glad she hadn’t texted John Oakwell to cancel their date to go and see a film about devilish activities which happened underneath a house.

  Chapter 84

  As Jimmy tucked into his Sunday morning fry-up, he wondered where he would be this time next week and what he would be feeling. He looked across as Connie whilst he chewed a mushroom, and his heart gave a heavy thud as if it had just fallen off its perch. She didn’t know he was studying her; her hair had an angelic halo of brightness, courtesy of the strong sunlight in the window behind her, and her eyes were large and grey and amused at something she was reading in the newspaper. She looked lovely and it wasn’t just her thinned-down cheeks that made him think that she had a spark in her that hadn’t been there for years. As if she were lit up from the inside, like she used to be in the early days.

  He put down his knife and fork; he didn’t want the breakfast. ‘Shall we go out for lunch?’ he asked on a whim.

  Connie’s eyes snapped up from the newspaper. ‘Lunch? You and me?’

  It shouldn’t have been such a shock to her, he thought. He couldn’t remember when the last time they’d gone out together had been.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, that would be nice,’ said Connie. She had agreed to it before she had chance to think about it.

  ‘The Boat?’ It was up on the moor and tucked out of the way.

  ‘Okay. I’ll go and wash my hair,’ said Connie. They were having their last supper early, it seemed.

  *

  Cheryl woke up in bed and stretched and smiled like a contented cat. What a lovely evening she’d had with John Oakwell. He’d picked her up in his car, getting out of it to open the door for her like a proper gentleman. They’d driven to Sheffield, eaten Chinese food and seen the film. He’d reached for her hand in the dark and gently tickled her arm and she thought her head was going to blow off with pleasure. They’d had a drink in the cinema bar afterwards and talked some more and she learned that he hadn’t had a relationship for five years, had no children, owned a Burmese cat called Pong that he adored, lived in a mortgage-free house in Maltstone, played rugby for the police team and would be forty next Christmas Day. She hadn’t thought about Gary Gladstone once all evening. Or battered sausages. She also learned that he did a fantastic goodnight kiss on the doorstep and that her insides turned to liquid when he playfully pinched her nose and said that he’d ring her tomorrow. If Van Gogh could have painted the colours of her spirit now, he would have had to load his brushes with his best bright golds and bold sunshiney yellows.

  *

  The Boat wasn’t half as nice as Jimmy remembered it from the last time he had been, with a rep from a bleach factory. The cheeky cow had ordered lobster and champagne. Now the sticky menus featured pies, burgers and typical microwave fare.

  ‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’ he asked Connie.

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ she said. ‘It’s a treat for me not to cook anything.’

  He ordered a red wine for her and a white wine for himself. It was piss-water and he asked for his money back and told the barman that they wouldn’t be dining there after all.

  ‘Come on,’ he told Connie, and steered her outside and back to the car. ‘We’re not eating in that shithole.’

  Jimmy drove on towards Holmfirth where he knew of a gastropub called the Slaughterman. Despite the name, it had a five-star reputation for food. Today Jimmy didn’t want to think about Ivanka and a new life, he had gone into full-throttle reverse thrust. He wanted to pretend that he and Connie’s paths hadn’t split all those years ago – that they were the couple they should have been.

  ‘So, what’s the occasion?’ asked Connie with a put-on smile when they were seated at a window table facing out onto a dramatic landscape of the moody moors. Jimmy had a crisp glass of white Mouton Cadet, Connie a robust Pinotage. The Slaughterman was stylish and clean and everything the Boat hadn’t been.

  Jimmy shrugged. ‘I honestly don’t know. I just felt like it. I really enjoyed that chat we had about Roy Frog the other week . . . well, I didn’t enjoy talking about him, but
I did enjoy talking to you. You know, when you made me those chocolate pancakes.’

  And, for once, Connie knew he was telling the truth. These were their dying days and things felt so much more intense near the end. She so very much wanted to take with her a souvenir from them. She wanted to enjoy a little window through to another world of what might have been. Suspend all plans and hostilities, just for an hour or two and have lunch with her husband, the father of her daughter – and her son. She wanted to have lunch with the man that the boy she had loved so much had grown into.

  ‘Very hard man to deal with is Roy Frog,’ said Jimmy, absently breaking a toothpick in half.

  ‘So you’re still negotiating the deal, are you? Employing your delaying tactics?’

  ‘Yeah. Anyway, I shouldn’t talk about work.’ He closed off that world from his head and all it entailed, and that included Ivanka.

  ‘Isn’t the scenery beautiful, Jim?’

  He watched Connie sipping a glass of wine from a bottle which probably cost more than the crappy frock she had on. She had never asked for much in their marriage, and the little she had asked for, he hadn’t given her. She didn’t even give herself anything.

  Feeling him staring at her, she turned away from the window and towards him again. ‘You look tired, Jim. You should give yourself a break at Easter,’ said Connie, meaning it. She’d never seen him with fluidy bags under his eyes before. His cheeks looked pinched and pale.

  ‘A bit of proper sun would be nice,’ he said. ‘We haven’t had a holiday for . . . God, how long, Con?’

  ‘We couldn’t have left your mum in the state she was in,’ returned Connie. ‘And when she passed away, I wouldn’t have left mine. I couldn’t have sprawled out on a sunbed knowing either of them would be panicking.’

  ‘God bless them both, wherever they are.’ Jimmy raised his glass in the direction of heaven. He didn’t doubt that if there was such a place, they’d both be there. He wasn’t sure he would be headed for the same destination, though.

  ‘They’ve got chocolate waffles on for dessert,’ said Jimmy, catching sight of their listing on the splayed pages of the menu underneath the glass surface of the table.

  ‘Lent isn’t over until Thursday,’ replied Connie.

  Lent. Jimmy was really starting to hate that word.

  ‘Still holding fast?’

  Connie thought of Brandon placing the chocolate between her lips.

  ‘Still holding fast,’ she fibbed.

  ‘I’m glad I’m not a sheep,’ said Jimmy, looking across at the white balls of fluff on the hillside.

  In the window, Connie could see Jimmy’s faint reflection, washed of lines and stress and he looked like the boy again, the boy whom she had fallen in love with in a matter of seconds and who had made her insides feel as if someone were stirring them up with a huge whisk. He’d set off fireworks in her head when he asked her to go for a walk with him and she thought she would die from happiness when he kissed her under the big oak tree in the park.

  Their meals arrived – they had gone straight to mains. Fillet steak for Jimmy, halibut for Connie. He noticed that Connie looked at the platter as if it were a rare piece of artwork. She should have been used to dining like this, he thought, it shouldn’t have been a novelty for her.

  ‘Looks lovely,’ said Connie. She was glad it was nouvelle cuisine tiny portions because she wasn’t all that hungry. She tried not to think that this would be the last time she and Jimmy would ever go out together because she would cry. Despite all the crap, she would sob for what could have been.

  ‘I fancy buying a villa in Spain,’ said Jimmy. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have a home from home in the sun?’

  ‘One day, when the money comes rolling in, eh?’ said Connie.

  ‘Oh yeah, yeah of course. I meant that.’ Connie saw him puff out his cheeks as if he’d swerved his foot away from his mouth just in time.

  ‘How’s your steak?’ she asked.

  ‘Really good,’ he said, and held a forkful out for her. ‘Here. Try a bit.’

  She looked at it without moving.

  ‘Come on, there’s no chocolate on it, Con.’

  Connie leaned forward and took the chunk of meat with her teeth. It was uncomfortably intimate to eat from her husband’s fork.

  ‘They’ve cooked it nice for you.’

  ‘Sorry, I forgot you don’t like it rare. Fish good?’

  ‘Beautiful.’

  A couple came to sit at the next table, about the same age as them. He reached for her hand across the table and absently played with her fingers as they read the menu. He ordered champagne, telling the waiter that it was their twentieth wedding anniversary.

  It would have been our silver wedding anniversary in July, thought Connie. Twenty-five years and yet they were strangers, plotting against each other.

  Jimmy dipped into the conversation taking place on the next table. The couple were happily conversing as if they talked a lot to each other. Ivanka wasn’t a chatty person although she was obsessed by studying people in restaurants: the quality of their clothes, the cost of the wine they ordered, the excellence of their plastic surgery. She never made Jimmy laugh like Connie used to with her incessant banter. He suddenly wanted to hear her cheery voice, filling him in on details of her day and what she’d heard on the news or read in the Daily Trumpet. But he knew he never would again.

  He put his knife and fork down on his plate, swallowing the emotion which was filling his throat.

  ‘You’ve not finished, have you?’ asked Connie, looking at the half-steak he’d left.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m full.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Connie, grateful for an excuse to stop pretending to enjoy the meal.

  ‘Do you want a pudding or a coffee?’

  The couple next to them were clinking glasses.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  On a parallel planet, it was Connie who was cherished and loved and married to a man who put shine in her eyes and champagne in her glass, thought Jimmy. He didn’t want it to be too late to do that. They were only in their early forties, he could turn their ship around and set it on another course. One with soft winds and sunshine.

  Jimmy paid the bill, then helped Connie on with her coat.

  ‘Thanks, Jimmy, that was a nice treat,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll do it again.’ He meant it as he said it.

  Oh Christ, what a mess.

  Chapter 85

  When Della walked back into the office after her week off ‘ill’, the first thing she couldn’t help but notice and be amused by was the appearance of the two ‘reception area’ chairs, the small coffee table between them and the cactus in a pot stood on it. The cactus had two long prickly stems which appeared to be flipping the bird. Della grinned. This was Ivanka’s stamp, a hint of the new regime. She also knew that her chair had been used because it was lowered. Well, Ivanka would be welcome to it very shortly because this time next week, Della would be sitting on a chair in a small office in Maltstone working her magic for Lady Muck. The King was dead for her. Long live the Queen.

  When Jimmy arrived, he appeared genuinely pleased to see her.

  ‘My best girl is back,’ he cheered. But her heart didn’t lose a beat as it had done before whenever he had called her that.

  ‘I see there are some changes,’ Della remarked, looking at the paperwork scattered untidily over her desk.

  ‘Oh . . . er . . . yeah . . . the furniture . . . and I think Ivanka had to sack someone . . . gross misconduct. She’ll fill you in, whenever she decides to show up.’

  Well, Jimmy had been in for five minutes, so Ivanka was due, thought Della, casting her eyes on her watch. As the big hand swept to the o’clock position, in came the girl herself. She wasn’t happy that Della was back at the boss’s desk. Less than ten minutes ago she had warned Jimmy to instruct Della that there had been an adjustment of seating arrangements.

  ‘Hello Ivanka,’ said Della. ‘My, you have
been busy.’

  ‘It was difficult week,’ came the reply. ‘I had to make some tough decisions.’

  ‘So I see.’

  Out of the corner of her eye, Della could see that Ivanka was communicating some kind of message to Jimmy with her eyebrows. It didn’t look a very friendly one.

  ‘I was . . . er . . . thinking of giving Ivanka some extra duties,’ said Jimmy, nervously. ‘Just in case you are ever away again. I thought . . . maybe . . . you could exchange desks and she . . . she could practise being office manager for this week. Maybe?’ He winced then, as if he expected Della to throw the long-armed stapler at him by way of response.

  But his jaw nearly hit the floor when Della said, ‘Very sensible idea. Let’s do it. It will be nice to ease myself back into work gently. I have to say that I don’t exactly feel one hundred per cent.’

  She picked up her filing tray and pen pot and placed them on Ivanka’s desk.

  ‘I’ll make some coffee,’ she said. ‘It’ll be a change to play the office junior for a few days.’ She turned to Ivanka and tried not to let the tongue in her cheek get in the way of her words. ‘Judging by how much you achieved last week, I think you’ll bring the house down as an office manageress, Ivanka.’

  And Della grinned for the full duration of the kettle-boil.

  *

  The Daily Trumpet was first to cover the story of local woman Cheryl Parker who had inherited some very valuable paintings, including a sketch by Van Eyck. They reported that the paintings were presently with the art agent Christie’s. It wasn’t a very large article and it was tucked away on the left-hand side of page six, presumably because not even the sensationalist Trumpet believed that a great master’s work of that magnitude could turn up in Barnsley.

  John rang Cheryl just as she got off at her bus-stop.

  ‘I’ve been reading about you in the paper,’ he said. ‘Is it true?’

  ‘No,’ she replied.

  ‘I thought as much.’ He laughed.

  ‘It’s a Van Gogh, not a Van Eyck.’

  ‘Ha.’

  ‘No, I really mean it.’

  There was silence on the phone then.