Roz had switched on her phone that morning with the intention of texting Missing you to him. But then she thought: what if he didn’t reply? How would that make her feel? So she didn’t send it, after all. She clicked her phone shut and imagined that he was thinking the same, scared to get in contact for fear of rejection. This break had to be one of her most stupid suggestions ever, and boy, did she have some making-up to do. The damage would need much more than a couple of bottles of Limoncello to mend. Dragging her focus away from Frankie had made her realise the full picture of what a bitch she had been to him. She couldn’t just turn on being nice again. Not at this distance. She needed to give him space too.
‘Get dressed, Ven, and we’ll have a sit-down breakfast in the Ambrosia this morning instead of slumming it in the Buttery,’ said Frankie, popping another truffle into her mouth.
‘You can’t “slum” it anywhere on here,’ said Roz. ‘It’s impossible.’
‘Give me five minutes then,’ said Ven, jumping off the bed, gathering up some fresh clothes and disappearing into the bathroom.
‘Roses from the Captain?’ Frankie raised her eyebrows. ‘I’m sure that doesn’t happen to everyone who has a birthday on the ship.’
‘It is her fortieth,’ said Roz. ‘And he is sitting next to her at the dinner-table.’
‘Still . . .’ said Frankie with a mischievous glint in her eye, ‘that would be rather nice, wouldn’t it – a little dalliance with a tall, dark, handsome man, especially one in a sexy white uniform? She’s well overdue a snog.’
‘Da-da!’ Ven was ready in a flash and burst out of the bathroom clad in a white top with a pretty frill and a bright green short skirt. It showed off her tan to perfection. She put her birthday heart-shaped locket on, saving the diamanté one for that evening, applied a slick of lipstick, grabbed her bag and announced that she was ready. ‘Oh, and my ears were burning in there. You were on about those flowers from the Captain, weren’t you?’
‘Course we were,’ said Roz, following her out of the door. ‘I’ll be very interested to see what happens at dinner. Wonder if you’ll get a gypsy violinist instead of the waiters’ choir.’
‘Oh God,’ said Ven, visibly cringing. ‘I’d forgotten about that ordeal.’
Chapter 45
In 15, Land Lane, David was dusting in preparation for the arrival of the mystery visitor. A grey film had landed everywhere since Olive had gone on holiday and it annoyed him. He had taken a clean house for granted and he now realised that muck didn’t shift by itself. He flicked the cloth and sent the dust motes swirling in the air. They’d fly around a bit and then settle again so he wouldn’t actually get rid of them, he thought. What a waste of time. How anyone could do cleaning for a living was beyond him.
At twelve, Kevin made lunch for everyone. Over the past couple of days he’d turned into Gordon Ramsay in the kitchen – or at least a cut-price version. He had poured boiling water over three chicken-and-mushroom pot noodles and stirred them. Then he had tipped them on a plate with some slices of turkey burgers and sprinkled the whole thing liberally with dried parsley and a dash of soy sauce. Sweet had been a slice of swiss roll each and squirty cream with a Cadbury’s chocolate finger stuck in the middle of it like a totem pole. Then he made himself scarce for a couple of hours, as Doreen had asked, until the mystery man – or woman – had left. Now Doreen was sitting in her smartest dress and had even applied some make-up and curled her hair with her hotbrush. David couldn’t remember ever seeing his mother in make-up. Her non-existent eyebrows were now two high brown arches, her eyelids seventies blue as if she was in Abba, and her lips had been extended by very pink lipstick that he was sure would have shown up in the dark. It was like some awful ventriloquist doll come to life.
‘Put that duster down now and get the kettle on ready for our visitor, David.’
‘Who is it, Mam?’
‘Wait and see.’
Right on cue as the kettle heralded its boiling point with a shrill whistle, there was a sharp tattoo of raps on the front door. Doreen nodded at David to go and answer it whilst she straightened herself up and patted her curls.
At the door, David wasn’t sure he dare open it because his imagination was going into overdrive about who he would find there. The police was one option – come to arrest his mother for her part in The Great Train Robbery. But when David did take a deep breath and open the door, his brain experienced the biggest anti-climax imaginable. For there stood Vernon Turbot, the owner of the local fish shop who definitely wasn’t the someone his mother had done herself up like Danny La Rue for.
Or maybe he was, because Vernon was dressed in a very sharp black suit, complete with a black band on one arm and holding a very nice and expensive bunch of tightly petalled velvety red roses.
‘Hello lad,’ said Vernon with that odd fondness in his voice that was present whenever he spoke to David in his shop. ‘I’ve come to see your mother.’
‘Come in,’ called Doreen, in such a high voice that David wondered if she’d just sucked some helium out of a canister.
David stood aside to let in the man they’d always bought their fish and chips from. Just the ordinary man who lived a few streets away and who was hardly George Clooney. So why would his mother have got herself tarted up like that for him?
Vernon handed over the flowers to a very twittery Doreen, who coo-ed over them before telling David to get a vase to put them in.
‘Add a bit of sugar to the water and they’ll last a couple of extra days,’ threw in Vernon. David obediently got a vase out of a kitchen cupboard, put in sugar and tapwater whilst shaking his head and muttering under his breath that he wished someone would tell him what the bloody hell was going on. Shrieks of delight from his mother and Mr Turbot were filtering through from the lounge.
‘I was just saying, it’s lonely being a widower,’ said Vernon to David when he returned with the flowers in the vase.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know your wife had passed on, Mr Turbot,’ said David, mustering up a bit of guilty sympathy then. ‘When did that happen?’
‘Friday,’ said Vernon.
‘Friday!’ echoed David. It was only Monday now. Crikey, he didn’t let the grass grow beneath his feet, did he?
‘Aye, lad, but you can’t afford to muck about wasting time at our age.’
‘That’s why we’re getting married as soon as we can,’ said Doreen, wiggling her left hand which was now sporting a serious diamond ring on the third finger.
‘You’re doing what?’ said David, reaching a finger in his ear to unplug the wax that must have been distorting his hearing.
‘Obviously we’ll wait until after tomorrow’s funeral,’ said Vernon, stroking Doreen’s knuckles and then placing a tender kiss on the back of her hand.
‘Obviously,’ said David. If he had thought today and all that trunk business didn’t make any sense, that was nothing to all this!
‘You see, lad, ours is no ordinary love story,’ Vernon went on.
‘Love story? Since Friday?’ cried David. He was going mad. Sure as eggs were eggs. Maybe they weren’t, though. Maybe eggs were bananas – anything was possible in this world in which he now found himself.
‘No, silly boy,’ Doreen giggled. ‘Our story begins forty-one years ago.’
David opened his mouth to say, ‘What?’ but no words came out. They were glued to a big ball of shock that was stuck in his voicebox.
‘I was married to the late Mrs Turbot then,’ continued Vernon. ‘Her parents wanted me to marry her and my parents wanted it as well, so we did. Like you did in those days. We were both virgins and didn’t know owt about passion.’
‘Or orgasms,’ added Doreen.
Oh God, thought David, hoping another one of those sex speeches of his mother’s wasn’t going to start up. He’d been having nightmares ever since she revealed that his dad didn’t know what foreplay was. He didn’t have a part of his brain that was comfortable storing information about his
parents swapping bodily fluids, however rare an occurrence that seemed to have been.
‘Then one day, into my chip shop walked this slim, leggy, dark-haired beauty,’ continued Vernon wistfully.
‘Who was that then?’ said David.
‘Me, of course,’ said Doreen, her laugh as tinkly as a crystal glass being gently rapped by a dainty silver spoon.
‘I’ll never forget what you ordered,’ said Vernon. ‘Fish and chips twice, scraps and a pickled egg.’
‘And they say romance is dead,’ said David to himself under his breath.
‘I thought, She’s ordered two fish, I bet she’s married, and my heart sank,’ said Vernon.
David wondered if he should be jotting this down and writing it up later as a Mills & Boon.
‘I was married too, but I couldn’t resist him,’ said Doreen. ‘Our passion knew no bounds. Pogley Top Woods in the summer, in the open air, we—’
‘No, no!’ said David. He didn’t want to have Pogley Top Woods blighted with a picture of his mum and the local fish-and-chip magnate rolling around in them.
‘. . . consummated our love,’ said Doreen, unstoppable now.
‘We were young and daft and in love,’ said Vernon. ‘I’d never felt owt like it. I was hook, line and sinker in.’
‘I couldn’t think about anything but him!’ smiled Doreen.
‘Obsession. That’s what it was. We couldn’t have fought it. Not even with a Sherman tank and two Foreign Legions. In vino veritas – I came, I saw, I conquered.’
‘We never thought there would be consequences . . .’
A silence hung in the air then. A heavy one, full of secrets.
‘What sort of consequences?’ asked David suspiciously. He dreaded to think. He hoped the answer didn’t involve the word ‘crabs’.
‘Pregnancy,’ said Doreen in a very soft, warm voice.
David’s mouth moved over the word, but his voice was gone. What the hell was she telling him? That he had an older brother and they were all going to meet up on The Jeremy Kyle Show?
‘I didn’t shirk my duties,’ said Vernon, straightening his spine. ‘I gave your mother a lump sum and have paid her something every week since. And you never went short of extra portions when you came to my shop. I always gave you large peas but charged you for small.’
‘It was a travesty because your dad was a good man, David love, but he was crap in the bedroom. Alas, that’s what you get for marrying a much older man,’ sniffed Doreen. ‘Ask him to put a shelf up and it would be perfect, ask him for cunnilingus and he’d disappear to his shed.’
David missed the last half of that sentence because he started to ‘la la’ loudly to drown out Doreen’s voice.
‘Mrs Turbot fell ill shortly after your mum got pregnant,’ said Vernon. ‘I wanted to leave her, but I couldn’t. It wouldn’t have been right. Eeh, Beryl was a creaking gate for forty long years.’
‘We had to end the affair, we didn’t want any scandal, but at least I had my little souvenir,’ smiled Doreen, looking at her son fondly with lipstick all over her teeth.
‘I used to see you walking past the chip shop to the bookies and sigh,’ said Vernon, gazing deep into Doreen’s eyes. ‘I never fell out of love with you.’
‘Or I with you, Vernon. We vowed that one day we’d be together, when it was right in the eyes of God.’
‘When Herbert and Beryl had died.’
Jesus. Move over, Barbara Cartland.
‘Where’s this baby now?’ asked David. He wished there was an inhaler handy because he was losing his breath. ‘Did you have him adopted?’
Doreen held out her hand towards David. He took it and then felt his other hand being squeezed by the man who sold fish suppers on Lamb Street.
‘That’s why you’re called D-A-V-I-D,’ said Doreen, gazing alternately at him then Vernon with the look of someone who was in raptures – or on crack cocaine. Her eyes were almost pulsing out big cartoon hearts in Vernon Turbot’s direction. It was quite sweet in a horrible, macabre way how they looked like a cover of a Mills & Boon for geriatrics.
‘Eh?’ said David. What the frig had his name got to do with anything?
‘It stands for Doreen – And – Vernon – Immortally – Devoted.’
‘You’re my son, lad,’ said Vernon. ‘You are baby Turbot.’
Chapter 46
The phone in Manus’s pocket rumbled and he snatched it out and quickly looked at it, then threw it angrily down on the desk. He didn’t want a special offer on Domino’s Pizzas. He wanted Roz to send him a text or ring – anything to let him know she was missing him. He had been on the brink of dialling her number so many times since she went on holiday, but had successfully fought the temptation. Roz was the one who had made the rule of non-contact so she must be the one to break it. She would only resent it if the first move came from him. He wondered if she was missing him. He didn’t want to think about missing her, because he did and it hurt. He combatted those feelings by working hard until he was dog tired and then coming home and going straight to bed. He didn’t know how much longer he would be doing that though, because it was no way to live. But then neither had the past four years been any better.
The phone rumbled again, this time an incoming call – an unknown number. He picked it up and pressed connect.
‘Hello, Manus Howard.’
‘Hello, Manus, it’s me again. The pest.’ Jonie. With immaculate timing and a voice as soft as velvet.
‘Hello, Jonie.’ Manus felt his frown smooth, his grimace soften.
‘Listen, I’ve been thinking. I told you Layla and Tim were coming over for dinner soon. Well, we’ve fixed a date for Saturday – why don’t you come too?’
Manus opened his mouth to refuse automatically, but no words came out.
‘I know I’m putting you on the spot,’ Jonie went on, ‘so think about it and let me know. I was telling them that we’d met quite by chance and they said they’d love to see you again. And I’m a damned good cook!’ She laughed. A nice sound that said she was happy to be talking to him and really hoped he’d join them. ‘It’s better than sitting in the house by yourself, surely? It’ll give you a break from buying a Greggs pasty on the way home from work too. Please say you will come.’
‘Cheeky!’ replied Manus. ‘I can look after myself, you know. I’m not an entirely useless man.’
‘I never for one minute thought you were,’ said Jonie. ‘I don’t want to hold you up or pressure you – but please come, please, please, please. It’ll be fun, I promise. We’ll have a laugh.’
And Manus, sick of his own company in the house, sick of eating by himself, sick of being constantly lonely, sick of having no one to laugh with, found himself saying, ‘Thank you, Jonie. Yes, I would love to come and have dinner with you all on Saturday.’
Chapter 47
Breakfast in the Ambrosia was a very relaxed affair. Instead of queueing with a tray and helping themselves, the four women sat at a table, perused a menu at their leisure whilst being served coffee and orange juice by waiters, then gave their order.
‘Why don’t we do this every morning?’ said Roz, buttering a slice of toast.
‘I kind of like the Buttery, though,’ said Olive. ‘The view is lovely up there. Plus I’m not sure I could eat this amount of food every morning.’ She pointed to the plate of Full English which she had just been given. Admittedly the portion was a perfect dainty breakfast size, not too over-facing: two-pound-coin size black pudding, dinky sausage, but it was still far more than she was used to in the morning. ‘Nice for a treat though,’ she added with a sigh, as the waiter appeared from behind her to grind some black pepper over the plate for her.
After a quick teeth-brush and loo call in their cabins, the four women headed out of the ship and got on the launch boat that would take them from the portside directly to Saint Mark’s Square. It turned left past a huge Italian cruise ship and bumped across the water, buffeted by a mischievous swell. Ven looked
out of the window and her disappointment at the view changed to one of delight as things began to look a lot more ‘Venicey’ the nearer they got to the square. Buildings started to appear which were in pretty Saint Clement’s colours: lemon and cream stone with earthy-orange roofs; domes and towers came into sight on the skyline, and on the water cheeky little boats moved to and fro next to the berths of luxurious private yachts.
Half an hour later and they were in the beautiful Venice of films and books. To the left, gondolas rocked in the water, gondoliers with hats and stripy tops balanced on the backs of them. To the right was the covered Bridge of Sighs, the intricate stone façade of the Doges Palace, and the pigeon-heavy Piazza San Marco. Bells were ringing, and even they sounded as if they had an Italian accent. They wouldn’t have made the same sound anywhere else in the world.
‘Of course we’re going on a gondola first,’ said Roz, joining the queue. ‘Although if anyone tries to sing “Just One Cornetto” I will chuck that person overboard.’
‘I’d take that red T-shirt off,’ said Venice to Frankie. ‘You look like that homicidal dwarf maniac in the film Don’t Look Now. We’ve no chance of getting a gondolier to take us whilst you’re wearing that.’
‘Ha ha, very funny,’ said Frankie. She had bought the red T-shirt in Market Avenue the previous evening after noticing how drab her wardrobe was looking these days. For the first time in ages, she felt brave enough to risk attracting attention to herself with a bright shade or two of her old favourite colour red.
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