MILLIE'S FLING

by Jill Mansell

  ‘And while I was going through your knicker drawer, I happened to come across… this.’ Hester held up the business card with Lucas Kemp's name on it. ‘How could you do this to me? That's what I don’t understand. I’ve spent the last three days in a complete tizz, wondering if I’m ever going to track him down, and all the time you knew exactly how I could do it, because you had this card with his number on it, HIDDEN IN YOUR FLAMING KNICKER DRAWER.’

  It probably wasn’t the moment, Millie decided, to make a feeble joke about her inflammable knickers.

  ‘Okay, now listen, I haven’t had this card for days. Orla Hart gave it to me last night and I needed time to think. I was going to tell you this evening,’ she pleaded, ‘but you know what you’re like. The last thing you need is to go hurling yourself at Lucas Kemp, drooling all over him like a besotted bulldog, and letting him think you’re a complete pushover, there for the taking.’

  Hester stepped back as if she’d been slapped across the face.

  ‘A besotted… bulldog? Is that what you’re saying I look like?’

  She sounded so hurt. Guiltily Millie shook her head.

  ‘Of course not. I just couldn’t think of anything else that drooled.’

  ‘Labradors drool,’ Hester announced stiffly. ‘My auntie's Labrador drools all the time. And St. Bernards drool. You really didn’t have to say bulldog.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Anyway, I wouldn’t throw myself at Lucas! I have no intention of letting him think I’m a pushover.’

  ‘Of course you wouldn’t. Sorry,’ Millie repeated, her tone humble. Even though she knew, just knew without a doubt, that Hester had already learned the phone number on the card by heart.

  Mollified, Hester said, ‘Why did Orla Hart give you Lucas's business card anyway?’

  ‘He's looking for people to do the kissograms. Orla thought I might be interested. She was just trying to help because she feels so responsible for—’

  ‘Ohmigod!’ In an instant Hester forgot all about being stroppy. She clapped her hands like an excited child. ‘This is brilliant.’

  ‘But I told her it wasn’t my kind of thing.’

  ‘You could do it!’

  ‘I’m a travel agent,’ Millie protested.

  Well, kind of.

  ‘An unemployed travel agent,’ Hester pointed out.

  ‘Yes, but singing telegrams! They’re so… so…’ Millie floundered; they were definitely so something, she just couldn’t explain what.

  ‘Would you have to take all your clothes off?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Do it then,’ Hester ordered.

  ‘I don’t know if I want to.’

  ‘Excuse me, but is your name Victoria Beckham?’ Hester rolled her eyes. ‘No it isn’t, so you can’t exactly afford to be fussy, can you?’

  ‘I was thinking more of a bar job,’ said Millie.

  ‘Oh don’t be so mean,’ Hester pleaded. ‘At least ring him and fix up an interview.’

  Millie feigned puzzlement.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because then you can meet up with him and have a lovely chat about the good old days, and that’ll give him the chance to ask you all about me and you’ll be able to tell him how gorgeous and popular I am, and before you know it he’ll be desperate to see me again and that's when you’ll say, “Hey, why don’t the three of us meet up for a drink tonight?” and he’ll say, “Millie, that's a fantastic idea,” and it’ll all happen in a really easy, natural way. Bingo. Not a besotted bulldog, not a ribbon of drool in sight!’

  ‘And no sex either,’ Millie reminded her.

  Hester looked shocked.

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘Good. Okay.’

  This is what Orla means about me being nice, Millie realized. I hid the card from Hester for her own good, and she's managed to make me feel so guilty I’ve ended up agreeing to do the one thing I really didn’t want to do.

  Well now I’m going to be mean and it jolly well serves her right.

  Smiling like a dutiful wife, she stood at the front door and waved a deliriously happy Hester off to work. Still minus any tights and with the long-forgotten strips of loo roll like tiny red and white banners flip-flapping around her legs.

  Nobody picked up the phone when Millie rang the number on Lucas Kemp's business card. Her conscience clear once more—ah well, at least she’d tried—she decided to make the most of her unexpected freedom and pay a visit to her father instead.

  When Millie's parents had split up five years earlier, it had been at the instigation of her mother. Adele Brady had yearned for more; she had her heart set on a glittering metropolitan lifestyle.

  And in due course, a refined metropolitan husband to match.

  ‘Cornwall just isn’t me,’ Adele had told Millie at the time. ‘It's sooo parochial. I need glamour, I need opera, I need… oh God… Harvey Nichols!’

  ‘See? She's got her eye on some other fellow already.’ Millie's father, Lloyd, had winked at Millie. ‘Mind you, I wouldn’t have thought he’d be her type… an overweight ex-showjumper famous for his two-fingered salute. Can’t imagine he’d be much of a one for the opera.’

  Millie had grinned, because she knew her dad was teasing her mother.

  ‘Pathetic, completely pathetic,’ Adele had hissed back, not getting it at all. ‘I could do so much better than you.’

  ‘Jolly good.’ Lloyd wasn’t bothered; he was too used to his wife's endless criticisms. At first, the fact that he and Adele were polar opposites had been a huge novelty. But after twenty years, it had well and truly worn off.

  ‘I’m going to be happy,’ Adele had declared with utter confidence.

  ‘What, with this Harvey Nichols chap?’ There was a mischievous twinkle in Lloyd's eyes. ‘Quite sure about that, are you? Because you need to watch these horsey-types, you know. They’re known to have a bit of a thing about pointy spurs and a whip.’

  ‘A whole new life for myself.’ Adele had gazed at him with contempt. ‘A glorious new life and a glorious new man to share it with.’

  ‘Ah well, each to his own,’ Lloyd had said good-naturedly. ‘Women? I give up on them. From now on, it's a bachelor's life for me.’

  Famous last words.

  For Adele, as well as for Lloyd.

  Adele had spent the last five years racketing around London in a state of increasing desperation. She was a fifty-five-year-old Bridget Jones in Burberry silk-knits, constantly complaining that there were no decent men anywhere and that the only males who enjoyed opera were all homosexuals. In cravats.

  Lloyd, meanwhile, had settled quite happily into his newfound bachelor lifestyle for all of three and a half months. Then, quite by accident, he had met Judy.

  At a petrol station on the outskirts of Padstow, of all the exotic locations imaginable.

  Lloyd had been about to pay for his petrol at the till when a female voice behind him in the queue had declared, ‘Bugger!’

  Lloyd, swiveling round to see who the Bugger belonged to, had smiled broadly at Judy.

  Flapping her hand in half-hearted apology, Judy had pulled a face then grinned back.

  And that, basically, had been that.

  ‘I’ve just stuck twenty quid's worth of petrol in my car.’ Judy showed him the contents of her well-worn handbag: a Mars bar, several dog biscuits, one lipstick, and a wrinkled Dick Francis paperback that looked as if it had been read in the bath. ‘And I’ve come out without my sodding purse.’

  A single lipstick. And no hairbrush. Lloyd was instantly enchanted.

  ‘No problem, I’ll lend you the money.’

  He liked the way she didn’t launch into a flurry of Oh-no-I-couldn’t-possiblys.

  ‘I might be a con-artist.’

  ‘A con-artist,’ Lloyd gravely informed her, ‘would never say that.’

  ‘Okay, you’re on.’ Judy nodded, accepting his offer and jangling her car keys. ‘And I only live a mile down the road, so if you aren’t in a te
aring hurry you can follow me home and I’ll pay you back.’

  ‘I might be an axe murderer.’

  ‘I’ve got my dogs at home,’ Judy confided. ‘Axe murderers don’t scare me.’

  Without meaning it to happen, Lloyd realized before the afternoon was out that he’d met his soulmate, the woman with whom he wanted—no, not wanted, with whom he had—to spend the rest of his life.

  Judy Forbes-Adams had been widowed three years earlier. At fifty-three and with her children grown up, she too was satisfied with her life just the way it was. She loved horses and dogs and the Cornish countryside with a passion. On special occasions, she dashed on a bit of Yardley lipstick and remembered to brush her hair. She wouldn’t have recognized a designer outfit if it leapt out at her screaming Chanel, although she had both the means and the figure to wear anything that took her fancy. And, best of all, she couldn’t be doing with opera. Judy's idea of a good time involved listening to The Archers on Radio 4 while she planted out her pelargoniums.

  It drove Adele insane that the good fairy had had the nerve to grant Lloyd the happy ending.

  ‘It's so unfair,’ she complained. Frequently and extremely crossly.

  ‘You’ll find someone else,’ Millie tried to placate her. Frequently and with an increasingly weary edge to her voice.

  ‘How your father can be content with a woman who spends her life in denim jeans is beyond me,’ Adele sniped. ‘Jeans, I ask you, and she's nearly sixty.’

  ‘Don’t ask me to say bitchy things about Judy. I like her.’

  ‘Ha. Next you’ll be telling me she's a better cook than I am.’

  Adele liked to spend hours preparing tremendously ornate meals that she painstakingly arranged on plates so they ended up looking like mini-scaffolding.

  ‘She's nothing like you in the kitchen,’ Millie said truthfully. She was fairly sure Adele had never stood gossiping at the stove waving a cigarette in one hand and stirring gravy with the other. Judy was, in fact, a terrific cook but Millie had learned—for the good of her health—to be diplomatic. ‘She does shepherd's pies, steak-and-kidney puddings, stuff like that.’

  ‘Great piles of stodge. No wonder your father's happy. Peasant food,’ Adele snorted. ‘That kind of thing's right up his street.’

  Chapter 8

  PEASANT FOOD WAS RIGHT up Millie's street as well. Lunch with Judy and her father was always a treat.

  Today it was sausage-and-onion casserole, rich and gloopy and piled over butter-drenched baked potatoes. Lloyd uncorked a bottle of Shiraz and Millie began to bring them up to date with all the gossip, kicking off with how she had come to be unemployed.

  ‘But that's just appalling!’ Judy exclaimed. ‘Honestly, couples like that make me shudder. And now you’re jobless… well, we can give you some money if you’re desperate, just say the word.’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’ Millie was touched by the offer, but she shook her head. ‘Finding work isn’t a problem. In fact, there's one job Hester's really keen for me to go for.’ Pulling Lucas Kemp's business card out of her back pocket, she showed it to them.

  ‘Darling, a strippogram!’ Judy clapped her hands in delight. ‘What a scream.’

  ‘If I stripped, people would definitely scream. Either that or complain loudly and demand their money back. I wouldn’t have to take my clothes off,’ Millie explained.

  ‘They want all sorts, like people who can sing, dance, and roller-skate. Anyway, it's just an option. I’ll probably end up waitressing or working in a bar.’

  ‘You could juggle,’ Judy declared with enthusiasm. ‘That would be fabulous! Who could resist a singing, roller-skating jugglogram?’

  ‘Except I can’t juggle,’ Millie pointed out.

  ‘No, but I can.’ Jumping up from the table, Judy grabbed five satsumas from the fruit bowl on the dresser and began tossing them into the air. Deftly, she juggled them then caught them and executed a modest curtsey.

  ‘Five years,’ Lloyd marveled. ‘Five years we’ve been together and I never knew.’

  ‘Just one of my little secrets.’ Judy raised a playful eyebrow at him. ‘International woman of mystery, that's me.’

  ‘Did you run away as a child and join the circus?’ Millie was enthralled.

  ‘What else can you do?’ said Lloyd. ‘Walk tightropes? Tame lions? Balance a ball on the end of your nose?’

  ‘When I was nineteen, I spent the summer traveling with a boyfriend. When we ran out of money we learned how to juggle. Then we busked our way around Europe.’ Judy shrugged as if it were the most normal thing in the world. ‘And once you know how to do it, you never forget. Like riding a bike. Now there's a thought.’ Eyes alight, she turned to Millie. ‘You could be a unicycling, singing kissogram, that’d really stop the show!’

  Millie burst out laughing at Judy, standing there before her in her loose white shirt, faded jeans, and espadrilles, with her messy shoulder-length fair hair and her hands full of satsumas.

  ‘Don’t tell me you know how to unicycle as well.’

  ‘Of course I don’t know how to unicycle. We could never have afforded a unicycle! Heavens, we were so broke we could barely afford the paraffin for our flaming clubs.’

  When they had resumed eating, Lloyd frowned at the business card on the table.

  ‘Why does this fellow's name sound familiar?’

  ‘He's the one Hester spent her teenage years pining over,’ Millie reminded him. ‘The DJ, remember, who moved away to London?’ She pulled a face. ‘Now he's back and Hester's come over all hopeless and besotted. That's why she's so keen for me to take the job. Poor Nat. I just hope she doesn’t do something incredibly stupid and make an idiot of herself.’

  ‘I was keen on a girl once,’ Lloyd idly recollected. ‘I used to cycle past her house, peering up at her bedroom window. Then one day I saw her there, watching me. I was so excited I crashed my bike into her father's car.’

  Judy grinned and sloshed more wine into their glasses.

  ‘Oh well, if it's embarrassing moments you’re after, I was once mad about this boy in St. Ives. One day a crowd of us went down to the beach for a swim and there he was. So we stripped off our clothes—we were all wearing our swimsuits underneath—and I decided to be really brave. I sauntered up to him in front of all his friends and asked him if he knew the time.’

  ‘And?’ Millie held her breath.

  ‘He said, “Yeah, darlin,’ about time you got your knickers off.” And when I looked down I realized I still had my awful pink underpants on over my swimsuit. It's not funny!’ Judy protested. ‘Imagine the trauma. Took me years to live it down.’

  Emboldened by the urge to compete—and by her third glass of red wine—Millie immediately launched into her own embarrassing story, the one about the Wallet and the Phone Call.

  When she reached the hilarious punchline (‘For your information, my wife is dead’), Judy groaned and clapped her hands with a mixture of horror and delight.

  ‘I know, I know, I’m so ashamed.’ Millie shook her head and felt herself going bright red again; it happened every time she even thought about it.

  Lloyd patted her arm and said cheerfully, ‘My daughter, the diplomat.’

  ‘Dad, I was mortified! I just hung up.’

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t true,’ Judy suggested. ‘My darling husband always had atrocious taste in sweaters, but as soon as anyone made fun of them, he’d look distraught and say, “This was the last thing my mother knitted for me before she died.”’

  It was a nice thought, but Millie knew she couldn’t allow herself to hang on to it.

  ‘This chap wasn’t joking,’ she said sadly. ‘He really meant it. He was disgusted with me. Up until then he’d seemed so nice… he had this really warm voice.’

  ‘Oh well, that's men for you.’ Judy waved a dismissive arm. ‘So what did you do with the wallet?’

  ‘Posted it off to him. I scribbled a quick note saying sorry, but the guilt won’t go away. You’d think it would hav
e started to wear off by now but it hasn’t, in fact it's got worse.’ Millie shuddered just thinking about it. ‘Whenever I remember that phone call I get these awful icy shivers whooshing down my spine. Sometimes it's like standing under a waterfall—’

  ‘Darling, write him another letter!’ Judy exclaimed. ‘A proper one this time. Then you can grovel and apologize to your heart's content.’

  Millie wilted; she only wished she could.

  ‘I can’t remember his address. Too embarrassed, I expect. It's wiped from my memory. Gone.’

  ‘Oh well then, put it out of your mind. Just forget it.’ Judy's tone was consoling. ‘Life's too short.’

  ‘Certainly was for that fellow's wife.’ Lloyd winked at Millie across the table.

  ‘Dad! That's a terrible thing to say!’

  ‘I know. Can’t think where I get it from,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘One, two… bum.’

  ‘One, two, three… bugger.’

  ‘One… oh fuck it!’

  From the living-room doorway, Hester said, ‘I’d ask you what you thought you were doing, but it would be a dumb question.’

  ‘Oh, hi.’ Bending down, Millie retrieved the satsumas that had rolled under the table. She’d dropped them so many times they were now as soft and squishy as breast implants.

  ‘You’re juggling,’ Hester said accusingly.

  ‘I’m not, am I?’

  ‘No, actually, you’re not. You’re trying to juggle.’

  ‘I’ve spent the whole afternoon trying to juggle… one, two, three… damn. Judy's been teaching me. She said it was easy,’ Millie wailed, ‘and it's not, it's bloody impossible!’

  ‘Stop, then. Don’t do it.’

  ‘Two, three, four… sod it. And no I won’t stop.’ Millie doggedly picked up the dropped satsuma. ‘I’m not going to let this beat me.’

  ‘You even left the post sitting on the mat,’ Hester complained, waving the sheaf of letters like a poker hand. ‘I stepped on them when I opened the door. Oh yuk,’ her lip curled up in disgust as she leafed through the unexciting collection, ‘now I know why you didn’t pick them up. Water rates, phone, scary bank statement, gas bill… nightmare.’