Here Come the Girls

by Milly Johnson

Dress Code: Smart Casual

  Chapter 49

  They were at anchor for Korcula, which meant a ride on the tender boats from the ship to the island. Ven opened up the curtains on yet another sunshiney day. The vista was dominated by a huge mountain studded with cream-stone houses with cheerful orange roofs. She could see the tender boats full of early-rising eager passengers crossing from the ship to land.

  Her cabin phone rang just as she was blotting her lipstick on a tissue.

  ‘It’s me,’ said Roz’s voice. ‘We’re up in the Buttery. Come and join us. We’ve saved you an almond croissant.’

  ‘Go and get me another one, I’m starving,’ said Ven, grabbing her handbag and sunglasses and wishing Jesus a cheerful ‘Good morning,’ on her way out.

  Eric and Irene were just going up for breakfast as Ven and the others were heading off to get their tickets for the tender boats.

  ‘We had a lie-in for once,’ said Eric. ‘My, I can’t remember sleeping for that long in years.’

  Irene looked a bit bashful, as if she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t.

  ‘Do you think they . . .?’ began Olive as the lift doors closed on the old couple.

  ‘Course they did!’ said Frankie. ‘Nice to know someone’s getting some.’

  The tender boats were great fun. They bumped against the Mermaidia like rooting babies then, loaded with passengers, jiggled naughtily on the water, making a few passengers shriek. Not exactly a white-knuckle ride, but maybe a light-pink one. As instructed, they had ‘familiarised themselves with the location of the life-jackets’ although secretly Ven wanted to fall overboard and be rescued by a dolphin – it might be the only way she got to see one. A far too short (in her opinion) five minutes later, all the passengers were being helped onto the shore by the gallant crew taking their hands as they did a little leap from the bobbing tender boat onto the island. Behind them was a private yacht, sailing like a preening black swan and looking like something a James Bond villain would own. It had a sigh factor of at least an eight. In front of them was a huge round tower, part of the ancient defensive walls that surrounded the town. Ven thought she might just defy anyone not to fall in love with Korcula from the very first sight of it.

  ‘Oh, this is pretty!’ said Olive, echoing her thoughts. ‘What a lovely place.’ Café tables flanked the curving narrow road that led up to the main part of the town. Diners sat under the shade of umbrellas with large seafood platters and pizza, enjoying the view of the sea which was a sheet of blue and silver today. The grand ship was in the distance, and the orange tenders crossed in the water like playful goldfish. White cats slept in gardens, old fat dogs with collars on hovered near the café tables wagging their tails in anticipation of snack donations.

  ‘I spy sunglasses,’ said Ven, as they rounded the corner and strode over to the first of many stalls full to the gills with football shirts, sunglasses, hats, bags, watches, souvenirs.

  ‘How much do you think the real thing would be worth?’ asked Olive, picking up a huge pair of Jackie Onassis ‘Dior’ sunglasses with a white frame.

  ‘In that case, about three hundred quid,’ replied Roz.

  ‘Blimey! I’d be scared of taking them on holiday and losing them,’ said Olive. ‘However rich I got, I don’t think I’d spend three hundred quid on a pair of sunnies.’

  ‘But at ten euros a pair, you could take them and not worry too much, couldn’t you?’

  Olive nodded, then suddenly wondered why she was even looking at more sunglasses. It wasn’t as if she would be going on holiday for a few more years. Then again, at least she wouldn’t be held back from booking one by her mother-in-law’s poor health, seeing as she was probably fitter than Olive. Or David’s claim that he didn’t want to go away because he liked to sleep on his own firm mattress at home ‘for his bad back’. There was nothing wrong with either of them that a good stretch and a few pounds off their bulk wouldn’t cure.

  ‘Isn’t that your mate over there?’ Roz nudged Frankie. Frankie turned round to look at where Roz was pointing and she felt her heart gallop a few strides down the road. There, in the near distance, looking at postcards like a touristy Viking, was Vaughan.

  At last, she mouthed under her breath. Then to her friends she said, ‘Do without me for a while, will you? I’ve got a big fat thank you to deliver.’

  ‘Yeah, see you later,’ they called. Olive added cheekily, ‘Good luck.’

  Frankie tried not to run towards the tall blond man with the much shorter hair now, but there was a definite skip in her step as she neared him.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, with a croak in her throat.

  ‘Oh hi, Frankie!’ He seemed genuinely pleased to see her. ‘Where have you been hiding?’

  ‘Where have you been hiding, you mean. I’ve . . . we’ve all been looking for you to say thank you for helping us in Dubrovnik.’

  ‘Oh, no worries at all,’ said Vaughan. ‘I was just glad we were there for you. It was pretty scary, wasn’t it? Especially for the old people.’ Then he added with a grin, ‘And the short ones.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, mirroring that grin. She hadn’t a clue what to say now. All words were lost, however much she scrabbled around inside herself to find some. She was so out of flirting practice.

  ‘I owe you a beer,’ was the best she could manage. Damn damn damn. How weak was that?

  So she was totally gobsmacked when he replied, ‘Yep, I could go for that.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’

  ‘There’s a place down here I was going to check out.’

  ‘Lead the way. I might even throw in a pizza.’

  ‘The way to an old rocker’s heart. Pizza and beer.’

  Frankie didn’t answer that. She was too busy trying to stop herself salivating as she followed him towards a small taverna around the corner from the town square and alongside a narrow stretch of beach.

  They sat under the awning of the café and he and Frankie ordered a pint and a half of lager, two giant slices of pizza and a salad. She hoped the café-owner would take his time delivering it so she could sit here and bask in the company of this drop-dead gorgeous Nordic-looking man.

  ‘You cut your hair,’ she said. ‘If it hadn’t been for your tattoo I wouldn’t have recognised you in Dubrovnik.’

  ‘I was so hot,’ Vaughan replied. You’re telling me, thought Frankie to herself.

  ‘It suits you just having a thin line.’ She swept her finger along her own jawline.

  ‘I was worried I’d feel like Samson and lose all my strength,’ he smiled. ‘It’s certainly a lot cooler with it all off.’

  Frankie had a sudden flash in her head of him astride the prow of a ship, horned helmet on his head, sword aloft, ready to leap out on shore and plunder a village and seduce a maiden or two.

  ‘Frankie?’ he prompted, as she seemed suddenly a million miles away.

  ‘Oh sorry,’ she said. ‘I was just thinking about Vi . . . violins.’

  ‘Violins?’

  ‘Yes.’ Oh help! ‘This place looks like the sort of café where a couple with gypsy violins would suddenly appear.’ She cringed at how stupid that sounded, but Vaughan only smiled.

  ‘Rustic, isn’t it?’ he said, looking up at the windows with their pretty white-painted shutters. He paused until the waiter had delivered their beer then pointed to the black yacht cruising in the water. ‘Doesn’t that boat look like Darth Vader’s head?’

  Frankie laughed and agreed with him, then took a sip of the cold, cold beer and wondered if this day could get any better. She doubted it.

  ‘Are you all enjoying yourselves?’ Vaughan asked, gasping with delight himself as the beer cooled his parched throat.

  ‘Oh boy, are we!’ said Frankie. ‘Are you? Where are your family today?’

  ‘They’ve gone off on a sailing trip,’ replied Vaughan. ‘I wanted to feel land under my feet today though, and have some time to myself.’

  Frankie gulped. ‘Oh I’m sorry, and here I a
m forcing you to have company.’

  Vaughan raised protesting palms. ‘No, I didn’t mean you. This is lovely. I wanted to watch the world go by with a beer and not be part of a crowd for once. Two’s much better.’ He looked at her with unblinking blue eyes and she couldn’t recall the last time someone had looked at her like that. She might have been out of practice with men, but she knew he liked what he saw and her whole insides responded. It was like a machine revving up after a long period of being rusty.

  Over the beer, she learned that he lived in a small rural village called Bucklow in Dorset. The thought of an ex-Hell’s Angel biker transplanted into a Miss Marple setting of country cottages made her laugh out loud. Bikes were his true love and he mended them for a living. She discovered that he had married young, had his daughter Kim and been divorced before he was twenty. But it had been an amicable split and they had shared custody of Kim. His ex-wife had married again and had two sons, one of whom worked for Vaughan in his bike shop. How civilised was that for a wild man?

  The pizza arrived, and it wasn’t exactly brilliant, but it didn’t matter, because Frankie wouldn’t have swapped it for the best pizza in the world, nor would she have chosen to be anywhere else. The salad was fresh and green though, with peppers and oily olives and fat slices of herby scattered tomatoes.

  ‘So where are the husbands then?’ asked Vaughan, dipping some torn-off bread into his salad. Frankie prepared to give an answer that didn’t sound too much of a come-on but at the same time made it perfectly clear that she was on the market. If he was the shopper anyway.

  ‘Well, Roz has a partner and Olive is married, but Ven and I are both on the shelf swinging our legs.’

  ‘Happily on the shelf?’ Vaughan asked, his blue eyes sparkling as much as the sun-sprinkled sea.

  ‘I’d like to see Ven with a nice man,’ mused Frankie. ‘She’s such a lovely person and hasn’t had a great deal of luck in the past. Her ex-husband didn’t treat her very nicely and she deserves someone who’ll take care of her.’

  ‘And you?’ Vaughan took a long swallow of beer and Frankie watched his Adam’s apple bob slightly in his throat. He really had been an idiot to cover that handsome face up with a big silly beard.

  ‘Well, if the right man came along, I might relinquish my place on the shelf for him,’ Frankie replied with a straight face and a twinkle in her eye.

  ‘You live in Barnsley?’

  ‘The others do, I moved to Derbyshire.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, I followed Mum and Dad when they moved down there to be near to my brother and his children.’ And I needed to be with them when I got cancer. ‘I bought a beautiful old house in Bakewell.’ I thought I could manage it, but I was too ill and had to sell it and move back in with my parents for a while. ‘Then I sold it and found a tiny little cottage instead.’ When I got better. When I wanted to get back to normality again.

  ‘No children for you?’ asked Vaughan. He was deliciously nosy, thought Frankie. Interested. That was a good sign then.

  ‘God no,’ she said. ‘I’ve never had a partner that I could honestly say I thought I’d end up sharing my pension with. And if I couldn’t visualise that longterm, there wouldn’t have been any point having children with them. I was never very good at picking men. Out of all the ones I’ve gone out with, I’m not sure they’ve got a full set of balls between them. What about you then?’

  Even before Vaughan had opened his mouth, Frankie felt a shift in the atmosphere as clearly as if a cold wind had blown between them.

  ‘Happily single,’ said Vaughan, biting down on his pizza crust and ripping it off hard. ‘In fact, the reason I agreed to come on this cruise was that I thought it would be the sort of place where I definitely wouldn’t meet anyone. A holiday romance is precisely not what I want or need.’

  Frankie was knocked. What the heck did I say to make him drop his smile like that? The warmth had drained from his eyes. They were chips of blue ice now rather than tropical-ocean-coloured.

  ‘Have you been single long?’ Frankie asked in a soft voice, hoping to recover the ground they had lost somehow.

  ‘Four years,’ said Vaughan, tilting the beer glass and draining it.

  ‘Four for me,’ said Frankie. ‘Give or take a couple of months.’

  To her dismay, Vaughan then stood and reached in his back pocket for his wallet.

  ‘No, I said this was on me,’ protested Frankie.

  ‘I couldn’t let a woman pay for me,’ said Vaughan, pulling out some kuna notes.

  ‘No, I insist—’

  But Vaughan had already hijacked a passing waiter and pushed the money into his hand, telling him to keep the change.

  ‘Thanks for the company,’ he said to Frankie, coolly polite. ‘Listen, I’m going to get off and stretch my legs. Hope you enjoy the rest of your holiday, yeah?’

  ‘Er yeah,’ said Frankie as Vaughan waved, turned and strolled off. Just like that. One minute he had been gently flirting, the next he had pulled all the plugs out, things had gone very dark and he had gone. Frankie sat, heavy disappointment weighing her down, thinking back, dissecting her words to find the sharp pin in them which had burst the lovely atmosphere. Had she dissed men too much and come over like an ‘all men are bastards’ type? Had she insinuated that she had a string of lovers and was a bit of a slapper? Had she sounded desperate? A child-hater? A gold-digger? She hadn’t a clue. All she knew was that she was sitting on a beautiful, beautiful island and felt more desperately alone and sad than she could remember being in years.

  Later on, they watched the sailaway from Korcula from the top deck. The sea was bright shades of emerald and sapphire at the coastline, like something off an old Bounty advert. Churches sat on the huge mountainside, seemingly impossible to reach except by the extra-devoted with a sturdy set of crampons. The whole scene looked as if it had been painted with a limited palette of cream, green, light-blue and terracotta, but no other colours were needed to make the view any more perfect than it was. Frankie, however, couldn’t appreciate it because her heart was drenched with too much sadness for even the warm sun of Korcula to dry up.

  ‘I just can’t understand men,’ she said to the others as they headed down to the shops which opened when the ship had left the confines of the harbour. As it was Fiesta night, the on-sale specials were hair flowers, very loud Hawaiian shirts and bright shorts – the sort that Royston wore every day. ‘I mean, we were getting on just fine and then he couldn’t bolt away fast enough.’

  ‘Well, don’t ask me,’ said Ven. ‘I’m as much in the dark as you about them.’

  ‘I don’t even want to think about men,’ said Olive, putting a huge red flower next to her ear and asking how it looked.

  ‘Buy it,’ said Roz. ‘It looks gorgeous. You should wear more red.’

  With a light mocha tan Olive’s green eyes looked super shiny and all the sunshine had lightened the streaks in her hair. She felt fresh and pretty, and as if a light had been switched on inside her.

  As luck would have it, just then Vaughan descended the big staircase that led to the shops. If I’d been looking for him, I wouldn’t have found him, Frankie huffed to herself. Wasn’t sod’s law a marvellous thing. She wanted to turn and look at him, see if he waved or smiled, but she knew he wouldn’t. She managed to keep her eyes forward, but in her peripheral vision she saw that he suddenly took an abrupt right where he made an obvious pretence of looking for his party. Then he moved totally out of sight. She had thought better of him than that. Another wanker to add to the long list of wankers she had been attracted to. The fact that she was drawn to him should have told her that he was a wanker. She grabbed a huge orange flower which matched the top she had bought for tonight. Something wildly bright and confident and everything she didn’t feel at that moment.

  ‘Sod him,’ said Roz’s surprisingly soft voice in her ear. ‘We spend far too long looking backwards and trying to work out what went wrong.’

  ‘Sod
who?’ said Frankie, getting out her cruise card to pay for the flower. It was something the old Frankie would have said, but then the old Frankie would have felt it too.

  Chapter 50

  Vernon Turbot walked into 15, Land Lane in a very smart black suit and tie. He walked straight over to Doreen and kissed her bull’s-eye on her peach-painted lips.

  ‘Thank goodness that’s over,’ he said with a heavy sigh. ‘Now I can look forward to life with you.’

  ‘Did you give her a good send-off?’ asked Doreen as he sat down on the sofa next to her and held her hand possessively. ‘David, put the kettle on.’

  ‘No, I need something a bit stronger,’ said Vernon, pulling a quarter bottle of Scotch out of his pocket. ‘Have you got a couple of glasses, lad?’

  When David handed him two tumblers, waving away the invitation to join in, Vernon poured two generous measures into them and handed one to Doreen.

  ‘To Beryl, rest in peace,’ he said, raising his glass and chinking it against Doreen’s. ‘And to us, may we enjoy whatever time we’ve got.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ said Doreen. David noticed she had painted her nails as well. Prostitute red. That bottle of nail varnish must have been in the cupboard for twenty years.

  ‘David, lad, I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to take your mother to live with me as soon as possible. I’ve got a huge house on Kerry Park Avenue, with a live-in housekeeper who is packing up Beryl’s stuff as we speak to make way for yours, darling.’ He turned to Doreen, then shifted his attention back to David. ‘Your mum will want for nothing. I’ve got a villa in Cyprus and when I retire we’ll spend weeks out there.’

  ‘Ooh, that sounds wonderful, Vernon! When are you going to retire?’ asked Doreen.

  ‘Tomorrow morning,’ replied Vernon.

  Blimey, he’s a fast worker, thought David, with a splash of admiration.

  ‘I don’t want to wait any longer,’ said Vernon masterfully. ‘Doreen, you are the love of my life and I want us to enjoy the chance that Beryl’s death has given us. Terra firma, my love. Time flies – and we have wasted enough of it.’