A Spring Affair

by Milly Johnson

  When Lou reached the Townend roundabout, she realized she had left her notebook in the psychedelic flat. Doing did a full circle, she came back into the car park, braking in a spot just opposite Tom’s shop. The door was ajar, and through the aperture she could see Tom standing, concentrating on something, staring in front of him as if into thin air. Unseen, she allowed herself the luxury of watching him, his big powerful profile, his large gentle face, his wild, wavy black hair through which her fingers itched to weave themselves. Then Lou saw Deb move into his arms and she froze.

  Her heart was thumping in panic as she watched Deb bury her head into Tom’s shoulder. She could, at her height, whereas Lou could only have buried her head into his navel. They looked so good together–so right. Deb was leaning on him and he was cuddling her, stroking his hand down her back. Now he was holding her at arm’s length and talking softly to her, about what Lou didn’t know–she obviously couldn’t hear and her limbs were too numb to drop the window down. Then Tom cupped Deb’s face in his hands and said something else. Tenderly, lovingly. Or was he kissing her? She couldn’t tell.

  Lou ripped her eyes away and started up the car. Her sight was blurred. She blinked it clear. Her whole body seemed to be one big heartbeat. There was a pulse in her temple that would pump out a migraine if she didn’t get away.

  She should be happy for them, she liked Tom and Deb so much, but it still hurt–in just the same way that it did when she saw Liam Barlow snogging Donna Platts at the school disco. He’d looked like a young Oliver Reed and his name was written all over her jotter in her I-Spy secret pen that only showed up in the dark. Donna was her best friend at fifteen. They weren’t doing anything wrong–Donna didn’t know how much Lou fancied Liam because she had always shrugged away any suggestion that she did. Just like Deb didn’t know how much she fancied Tom because she couldn’t admit it to her.

  Not even Lou knew how deeply those feelings for Tom had taken root until she saw him holding her best friend the way she wanted to be held by him.

  Lou Casserly hadn’t crumbled at the school disco, despite that pain in her chest. She had taken a deep breath, stoked up her smile and got on with being happy for Donna. Lou Winter would just have to try and do the same for Debra.

  When Lou got home there was a message on the answering machine. It was Bloody Keith Featherstone in his poshest voice.

  ‘Erm, Mrs Winter, this is Keith Featherstone. Would it be convenient for us to call tomorrow morning at eight o’clock to start work hon your bathroom? I really must hapologize for the hinconvenience to you and the delay. Hobviously there will be a significant reduction in the price due to the hinconvenience, which I will refund to you. Could you ring me back when it’s convenient, please? I know you have my number but I’ll leave it hanyway…’

  Lou started to key the digits into the phone, then she put it down again before it could connect. This time she had the upper hand with Keith Featherstone and she was going to savour it for a little longer. This time there would be no Deb or fancy title or power suit or ‘killer heels’ to hide behind. This time it was just Keith Featherstone and Lou Winter. High Noon. She dialled again.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Winter, hI’m so glad you returned my call.’

  ‘I got your message, Mr Featherstone. Yes, it would be convenient for you to call tomorrow at eight. At last,’ she added pointedly.

  ‘Like I say, I do hapologize for all this delay,’ said Keith Featherstone with a nervous laugh, ‘HI’ve been so busy…’

  ‘I’ve been very busy myself and I just want this work done, Mr Featherstone, if you don’t mind,’ said Lou with icy politeness. ‘And done quickly after all this “inconvenience”.’ He seemed to like that word, so maybe it would strike the happropriate chord. ‘Is that understood?’

  Bloody hell, that was me talking, thought Lou.

  ‘Yes, certainly, Mrs Winter. My lads will be there at eight prompt.’

  ‘Thank you and goodbye, Mr Featherstone.’

  Lou put the phone down first. Those with the power always made the break first. Result. Lou was shaking–but smiling too. She was really proud of herself for that. She clasped her hands together and passed a quick Thank You to the Great Man upstairs for giving her the opportunity to have that moment. She felt absolutely empowered, so much so that she could have tackled Victorianna. She looked at the clock–her sister would be at work, pandering to the rich and famous with spray tans and fake toenails. Damn– because, with all this adrenaline flooding her system, Lou was ready to burn it off in her transatlantic direction.

  Chapter 40

  The evening passed in a blur. Lou was determined to hold onto and use this feeling of power inside her which came from a recipe made up of post-Keith-Featherstone-confrontation and some crazy chemical that had been shooting around her system ever since she saw Tom and Deb cuddling in the doorway. It felt not unlike something Dr Jekyll might have thrown together in his laboratory. She needed to keep it on a slow simmer to hang on to the flavour–and only bring it to the boil at 3 a.m.

  Phil misinterpreted his wife’s distraction. He thought he knew Lou like the back of his hand and so concluded that she was in psychological hell–wondering why he was hiding his phone and behaving slightly oddly, but nothing that she would be able to put her finger on. He gave it another two weeks, then it would be a feast of blow jobs and lamb dinners, and life would settle down to being blissful again. Marriage was all about keeping an even power balance. There was only room for one partner with the upper hand in a relationship. He had a good marriage–it was worth his efforts to save it. And the end always justified the means in these matters. This was his last noble thought of the day as he drifted into the welcoming waters of sleep.

  Lou watched the clock’s hands crawl towards the allotted time. With every click of the second hand she felt her resolve threaten to slip away, but cling on she did because she had never felt as ready as she did tonight. This showdown was long overdue.

  In an unsuccessful attempt to divert her thoughts, Lou watched a foreign film with subtitles on the TV. It was about some woman getting it together with a toy boy and having fantastic sex everywhere. It was fiction, obviously, because in real life she would be terrified to undress and expose her lumps and bumpy cellulite to someone she considered so perfect. She would insist on the lights out and him wearing big gloves. The thought of ever having sex with anyone but Phil in the future was both new and terrifying. Her thoughts slid towards what a first encounter might be like with Tom. He’d throw up! He’d take one look at those little red spider veins on the inside of her knees, or feel her soft cushiony tummy, and leap out of the window screaming. But what if he didn’t? What if he savoured you like a delicious main course…She shook the thoughts away before they got too graphic. She was not available, Tom Broom was not available and besides, it didn’t seem right fantasizing about grappling with your best friend’s boyfriend. She should put some distance between herself and Tom and Deb for a few days to sort out her head and clear it of all impure thoughts. There was time to think about that later, though. Now she needed to concentrate on her sister.

  At three o’clock exactly, Lou picked up the phone and dialled the dreaded number. Her heart was thumping like a bass drum laying down the rhythm for a Judas Priest-style version of ‘I Do Like To Be Beside the Seaside’. Boom boom boom. Any minute now, it was going to do a John McVicar–break out of her chest and go on the run with one of her lungs.

  There was an echoey foreign dialling tone and then that voice–that affected, jolly-hockey-sticks public-school accent of a woman who had graduated from a Barnsley comp with one O level in French (distinction for oral though).

  ‘It’s me,’ said Lou.

  There was a telling pause before Victorianna said with tight politeness, ‘Oh hello, Lou, how are you? What do you want?’

  Victorianna had already done her maths (or math as she would say) and worked out what time it was in England. She knew her sister wasn’t ringing her for a b
og standard ‘how are you?’ chit-chat.

  Lou took a big gulp of air. ‘I think you should invite Mum out there to visit.’

  Silence again. Then Victorianna did one of those incredulous laughs that would shatter crystal. ‘Lou, I’ll invite my mother out when I see fit. Not when you tell me to.’

  ‘I think you should invite Mum out there to visit,’ Lou said again. Coolly, calmly, with conviction.

  ‘Your record appears to have stuck, Lou. And, excuse me, what are you on? Who the hell are you to tell me what to do anyway? Have you been drinking?’ Victorianna was growing more and more incensed. Her posh accent was losing its grip on the Klosters slope slightly.

  ‘How long is it since you’ve seen her, Victorianna? How long have you been having her racing around buying parcel stuff for you? Do you ever think about paying her for it all? Do you ever ring her when you don’t want something? Isn’t it the least you could do? Have you any idea how much she’s missing you?’ The adrenaline factory within Lou had recruited extra staff and they were working flat out to complete this urgent order.

  Victorianna did a laugh of the ‘I don’t believe I’m putting up with this’ variety. ‘Who on earth do you think you are?’ she said. ‘I’ve had an incredibly long day doing complicated nail art on a bitch of a client who made me re-do her left hand three times and this I don’t need!’

  ‘Listen to me, Victorianna. I think you should invite—’ but as Lou started on her spiel, the line went dead.

  Lou growled and stabbed in last-number redial. The dialling tone changed to a chirpy American answering message read aloud by Victorianna and Willy Wonka in unison.

  ‘Hi, this is Edward and Torah; we’re not at home right now…’

  Lou snarled.

  ‘…but please leave us a message and we’ll gladly call you back when we are able. Bye now!’

  ‘If you don’t pick up this phone, you little cow,’ said Lou with all the control of Ben Hur over his chariot horses, ‘I will tell the good old British police and your precious Edward exactly how you financed your trip to the US of fecking A.’

  When fighting Victorianna, it was best to dredge up a few Anglo-Saxon-cum-Irish roots, thought Lou. It worked, for the phone was snatched up at the other end.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Victorianna demanded waspishly.

  ‘I know all about it, Vic. Now get two tickets over to the States for your mother and her friend Vera. They’re spending a couple of weeks in your chuffing big house with you and your amazing hospitality. You owe her that, at the very least.’

  ‘I haven’t a fucking clue what you’re on about,’ said Victorianna through her clenched new dentalwork. The posh accent had now left Klosters and was heading on public transport for Cleethorpes.

  ‘Oh, I think you do,’ said Lou, sensing the panic behind the aggression. For the second time today she was actually enjoying the feeling of power over someone. No wonder people relished it so much. She found herself playing with Victorianna–like a cat with an incredibly foul mouse.

  ‘I’m not listening to any more of this! Go to bed, Lou, or take a sedative. You obviously need one.’

  ‘Put the phone down on me again and just watch the damage I do,’ said Lou, hardening her voice to steel. ‘Allow me to explain. I opened a letter that arrived for you after you’d flown off. First-class ticket, was it? You could have afforded it, for what you got pawning your own mother’s rings.’

  ‘What?’ said Victorianna, but a tell-tale tremor had appeared in her voice.

  ‘I. Opened. The. Letter. From. The. Pawn. Shop,’ said Lou slowly, as if she was an idiot, which Victorianna wasn’t. On the contrary–she was a clever cow and a self-centred, nasty little thief as well.

  Victorianna made a few pahs and huffs on the other end of the phone, but she didn’t slam it down again, which told Lou volumes.

  ‘Let me refresh your memory, shall I?’ Lou went on, as calm as a still lake on a breeze-free night. She inspected her nails the way power-bitches did on the television whilst they spoke. All she needed was some shoulderpads and she could have got the lead in Dynasty. ‘After you left to go and live over there, a letter arrived from the pawn shop wanting to know if you had any intentions of buying back your goods, because otherwise they would be sent on for polishing and re-sale. I rang them but they wouldn’t deal with anyone but the ticket-holder. Of course, I always wondered if you had anything to do with Mum’s missing rings. Have you any idea how many times she turned the house upside down looking for them? It had to be you. All those manicure treatments you did for her, taking off her rings whilst you waxed and massaged her old fingers and painted her nails for her. Weren’t you the perfect daughter?’

  ‘You’re barmy, you,’ spat Victorianna.

  ‘I rang them back, you know, pretended to be you and said I’d lost my ticket and what was I to do? They told me I had to pick up a form from them, take it to a solicitors with some ID and swear an affidavit that I was who I said I was, then they would release the goods.’

  Lou let this sink in. Actually whilst she was saying it all aloud, she was amazed at how complicated it sounded. In retrospect, it seemed like something James Bond would have found daunting. But then, James Bond didn’t do missions for his mum.

  What Victorianna didn’t know was that luck was on Lou’s side when she found a passport that Victorianna had said she had lost (because the photograph wasn’t too flattering) and had since replaced, so she had the form of ID the pawnbrokers and the solicitors requested. The problem was, Lou didn’t look enough like Victorianna to pass for her. Deb did, though. It was Deb who stood in a solicitor’s office for her and risked prosecution as she swore that she was Victorianna Eugenie Casserly in order that Lou could go into the pawn shop and pay a small fortune for the envelope containing her mother’s rings. Then Lou had to hide them at Renee’s and stage a grand search through the house, for them to miraculously turn up under the dresser in the dining room. Thank goodness there had been no comeback from legal quarters and her mother had seemed to swallow the charade.

  Victorianna was quiet whilst her few brain cells not earmarked for sex and money matters whirred into long-overdue action.

  ‘You pretended to be me?’ said Victorianna, not quite believing that any firm of solicitors could mistake a little plump dark-haired blimp for tall, willowy beach-blonde her. Who had she got as lawyers–Stevie, Wonder & Wonder?

  Lou didn’t see the need to put her right and drop Deb in the mess. Plus, knowledge was power and she wasn’t giving any away to her sister, so she simply said, ‘Yep!’

  Thinking anyone could mix up the two of them in the looks department would probably make her spontaneously combust, thought Lou with an inner snigger.

  Victorianna’s brain couldn’t solve this one and she knew she was outsmarted–so she did what people like Victorianna do in this situation and, as Lou had anticipated, picked up anything resembling a weapon and prepared to use it.

  ‘I know what all this is about,’ she spat. ‘You’re pissed because of what happened between me and Phil, aren’t you? This is your little revenge. So how many years has it taken you to think this one up?’

  Lou steeled herself. This was the part of the conversation she had been dreading. Now, more than ever, she had to stand firm.

  ‘Nothing happened between you and Phil, Victorianna,’ she said, hoping it was true.

  Victorianna laughed. ‘No, you’re right, it didn’t. I’m not a total bitch, whatever you might think.’

  Lou breathed a sigh of relief and felt slightly sick. For so long now, she had wondered…

  When she and Phil had started courting, Victorianna was an extraordinarily pretty teenager–a bomb of hormones and untested sexuality. Putting a teenage brain in a body like that was like putting a child in charge of a Ferrari.

  She flirted with Phil shamelessly. She so enjoyed the effect her teasing had on him. Even more did she enjoy the effect her teasing him had on Lou. Victorianna didn�
��t want him because she had no use for him. He wasn’t rich enough by half–and she didn’t want to end up in Barnsley! It was enough for her to know she could have had him at any time; she didn’t need to prove more than that.

  ‘He’d have been off with me at the first opportunity if I had wanted him,’ said Victorianna with relish. ‘I drove him crazy. I made him hard just by running my tongue over my lips. I bet you any money he used to think of me when he was using you as a waste-bin.’

  Lou closed her eyes against the mental image of Phil fidgeting in his trousers when he was around her precocious sister. She needed to keep strong now because Victorianna was starting to recover her ground.

  ‘You always hated that I could have taken him away at any time, didn’t you, big sis?’

  Lou laughed. ‘You’ve been listening to “Jolene” too much,’ she said, hanging on to her bravado for grim death. She pictured Victorianna on the other end of the phone, swaying like a cobra, her neck swelling out in full attack mode as she tried to target the exact location of Lou’s main artery. So Lou located her inner mongoose. ‘I think you’ll find he was flattered, that’s all, and it doesn’t take much to do that to a man,’ she said smoothly.

  ‘Yeah, right. Well, you keep telling yourself that’s the way it was if it makes you happy. You should be delighted I moved over here. Out of your way. Out of Phil’s way.’

  ‘On stolen money.’ Lou dragged it back to the point in question. ‘On money you got from taking the rings your father gave to your mother.’

  ‘But hang on a mo, big sister, you’ve just told me you’re guilty of fraud! Swearing on oath that you were me in front of a solicitor? Tut tut now!’

  ‘Very true,’ said Lou, still sounding calm, and glad Victorianna couldn’t hear her knees knocking. ‘But I’m willing to take the risk if you are, little sister. You do your worst, Victorianna, and I. Will. Do. Mine. Let’s see who comes off better in the newspaper articles, shall we? Will you still go hob-nobbing with family-value-loving Vice Presidents when it comes out that you stole off your own mam?’