by Lynn Watson
‘Yes, of course, you must get there right now. Wait a moment.’
She unzipped her shoulder bag, taking care to keep it well to the side, away from the girl. ‘How much is it, the ticket?’
‘Five quid, it’s a long way. The near one’s got no space; they won’t take me anyway.’
Fran suspected that five quid was over the top for a single bus fare, but she just wanted the wretched-looking girl to go away and leave her alone. Panicking in case she didn’t have a five-pound note and might have to pay her off with a tenner, she scrabbled unseeing in the depths of her bag to avoid bringing out her coin-heavy purse. Thankfully, her fingers soon found a fiver.
The girl half-grabbed the note out of her hand and mumbled, ‘Cheers, lady’ before taking off at a lolloping run, weaving through the morning traffic and disappearing towards the green. Her pink canvas trainers were coming apart and gaping at the heels. A lorry driver hooted as she darted across in front of his cab. Fran felt rattled, disturbed by the intrusion into her tranquil space more than by the girl’s predicament.
She decided to have a coffee and one of the mini fruit flans. Pushing the café door open, she was immediately seduced by the smell of fresh bread and bought a tuna baguette as well, to have later for lunch. Nothing much has changed, she mused as she waited for her order. In the days of the old village there would have been beggars, together with a ducking stool for the witches, the stocks on the green and a pile of rotten vegetables for respectable folk and local kids to throw at the miscreants and misfits. It wasn’t all that long ago.
The morning crowd had thinned to a trickle by the time she emerged. Making sure the girl was nowhere in sight, she paused at the dress shop, Frocks and Chocs, to note the small changes in the window display. Walking on past the door, two large black words on a printed poster caught her eye: Sales Vacancy. It was for a sales assistant with substantial retail experience and a strong interest in fashion – part-time hours to suit, good rate of pay, apply within. She studied the poster to memorise the details and continued on down the pavement, thinking hard. Her retail experience was back in the mists of time, and rudimentary at that. After art school, she had spent most of her career as a secretary and director’s PA and, when that went pear-shaped, as a marketing manager in an international home furniture company. Still, these various jobs had depended on being persuasive and personable and she shouldn’t find it difficult to sell nice clothes and fancy chocolates.
She made a mental list of the plus points as she carried on with her walk, no longer looking into the shop windows as she passed. It was local, it could help her get to know people, the clothes looked lovely and she would probably get a decent discount, not to mention the occasional free box of chocs. And then the minus points – the ‘good rate of pay’ would be less than she was used to, it could get boring if sales were slow and she may have lost the patience or inclination to deal with disgruntled customers. Against which, both the shop and the local area were definitely classy.
Too distracted to continue exploring, she walked back to the green and stood watching at the edge of the pond. A single female duck was swimming round in circles, while two drakes competed for her attention with various aerial and diving antics. Fran turned and retraced her steps. She was meant to be reinventing herself and this was a good way to begin, close to home and without a twice-daily battle to elbow her way on and off a tube train. Even so, it was nerve-racking having to present herself in a certain way, judge it right and quite possibly end up being rejected.
Standing at an angle to the shop window so she wasn’t obviously visible from inside, she inspected the cleverly laid-out display in more detail, then walked home and changed into a tailored skirt and cream blouse, summer jacket and black patent, low-heeled shoes. It was probably too conventional a look, but after some dithering she had decided it was better to play safe and feel comfortable. When she got back and entered the shop, a bell tinkled in the background and she heard rapid, light footsteps coming down the stairs behind the sales counter.
She would not forget her first sight of Daniela framed in the doorway, the tripping footsteps belying the figure of a large, shapely woman with a thick mane of highlighted golden hair, dark eyes and a pretty face. Her yellow-and-black dress was patterned in bold, abstract shapes, and the belt with its extravagant silver buckle emphasised her generous curves. It was hard to tell her age, but she was probably mid fifties, maybe sixty. She strode round the counter with a dimpling smile and a wide, welcoming gesture.
‘Good morning, madam. Please excuse me for keeping you waiting. I was packing up some items for collection.’ There was just the hint of an accent, possibly Spanish.
The job interview was held in the shop, as there was no one else to look after customers. Daniela didn’t offer Fran a seat but took her on a whirlwind tour around the four walls of the boutique, sweeping her left hand along the clothes rails and picking out special items to swish about on their hangers.
Fran explained that she had recently moved to London and gave a somewhat embellished account of her retail experience and knowledge of fashion and style trends. Daniela nodded encouragingly throughout this spiel but showed most interest in her marketing experience at the home furniture business. Fran pretended she had enjoyed the job, although in fact her manager had turned into a bully after being over-promoted and she had considered herself constructively dismissed following several heated run-ins and a final dramatic bust-up in the office. In her jaded and no doubt old-fashioned opinion, such incompetent bozos with their ridiculous marketing-speak and half-baked ‘creative’ ideas had taken over the world, with disastrous effect.
After almost an hour, with brief interruptions to check on browsing customers, Daniela concluded the interview, putting her hands together as if in prayer and contemplating Fran over her winged, purple-framed glasses. Fran fixed her gaze on a pink feather boa hanging on a hook behind Daniela’s head. She would return to buy that feather boa whatever happened, either as a reward or a consolation.
‘It’s good, Fran. I want to offer you the position on a trial for six months. It will be four half-days a week and alternate full days on Saturday, with the usual staff discounts. Do you need time to consider?’
‘No, that’s great, thank you, and I’m happy to accept right now. I’m going away to see friends and want to finish sorting a few things, but I can start a week on Monday, if that suits you.’
As she was about to leave, a woman walked past the window and turned to enter the shop. Daniela beckoned her across and touched Fran lightly on the elbow to guide her forward. It was the dark-haired woman from the café, the one who had appeared to scrutinise her so closely and almost catch her out.
‘You have great timing, Vicky! This is Fran, who will be joining us as our new sales assistant. Vicky is our IT consultant and tech wizard. She keeps me up to date and makes sure the online operation runs smoothly. And on the chocs side, we’re setting up a new venture together, selling a distinctive brand of chocolate truffles.’
This time, Vicky gave Fran a full sweeping glance, instantly taking her in from head to toe as Fran did the same in return. It was more than the usual casual exchange of looks, rather that rare experience of instinctual, clocking recognition. Vicky was petite, especially next to the statuesque Daniela, with smooth olive skin, blue-green eyes and black hair cut in a long bob with a full fringe touching her eyebrows. A neo-’60s look, very chic.
Fran was eager to find out more about the online business and their new joint venture, the special chocolates. However, Daniela was ushering her out and it would have to wait.
As she walked past the pond, where the female duck now swam round happily on her own, she wanted to tell someone the news. Max and Chaddy were studying and working in San Francisco and Hong Kong and it wasn’t the right time of day to call them. It would have to be Judi then, her fondest and oldest friend who was inescapably dying and was still waiting for her to call back and confirm her visit this wee
kend. She would do it today, now, as soon as she got home.
Chapter 2
Fran’s first best friend, Wendy, had fallen ill and died when the two girls were just six. Her mother said that Wendy had moved away, but then Fran overheard her telling a relative that it was ‘terribly tragic, losing little Wendy like that, and to think she was dressing up here with Francesca just two or three weeks before.’
Little Francesca knew then, from the tone of voice as much as the words, that Wendy was gone forever and wouldn’t come to visit, as she had been half-promised. She remembered creeping forward on tiptoe to the sitting-room door, not showing herself but staying hidden in the hall, her fingers picking at a crack in the paint of the door frame and her bare knees shaking uncontrollably. She realised straight away that this was going to be another of those big and somehow shameful secrets that she must never mention and that would remain unexplained.
Some years later, when she knew a little more about childhood diseases, she concluded that Wendy had died of leukaemia. However, this was simply to bring an end to the story, rather than being based on actual knowledge. Wendy herself, a chubby girl with red cheeks and a blue plastic hair slide, was replaced by another girl as Fran’s best friend and gradually faded out of her imagination and longing.
Reliving this ancient episode, she was finally on her way to see Judi, speeding by train out of London and through the lush countryside of full-blown spring. She glimpsed a fox picking its way across a field, and then a whole family of rabbits darting about on the steep railway embankment. Towards the end of primary school, Judi had invited her to make a solemn declaration of ‘best friends forever’. Over the following years, turning into decades, their friendship had ebbed and flowed through successive phases of education, work and family lives. Now, and especially since the onset of Judi’s illness, they were closely bonded again.
It was Andy, Judi’s partner, who had answered when Fran phoned to say she was coming. He told her that Judi only wanted to be with her, Fran, this weekend and they had put off other friends. This made her even more ashamed of her reluctance, her conflicted feelings about seeing Judi in this final and protracted stage of her decline. She had used moving house and settling in London as an excuse for not going to the coast over the past weeks and months. Judi had gone along with it and said she wanted to visit Fran’s new place, but they both knew it was too late. It wasn’t going to happen.
The boy hunched in the opposite window seat wasn’t at all thrilled by her sightings of foxes and rabbits, and barely nodded when she called, ‘Look, there’s a…’, sweeping her pointing finger backwards as the train rushed past whatever she had spotted. She was intermittently trying to entertain him, as his mother had asked if he could sit there and implicitly assumed Fran would keep a watch on him. The boy was about eleven and obviously travelling back to boarding school after the half-term holiday. He was in uniform and had a battered old suitcase, probably his father’s handed down, and a thick coat that was too heavy for the time of year. His mother said he had plenty of games and things to do, but throughout the journey he had left the case unopened and kept remarkably still, staring fixedly out the window.
Fran now noticed that his eyes were welling up and he was rubbing the backs of his fingers across his eyelids to stem the tears. She thought of her own son, Max, at about this age, and the bouts of breakfast-time sickness during his first term at secondary school. From this distance in time, she felt she had been too harsh on him, making light of the problem and not trying to find out what was really troubling him. She managed to catch the boy’s eye and offer a sympathetic smile.
‘Are you okay? Worried about going back to school?’
He nodded miserably. ‘I hate it, all of it. I want to blow it up – boom, like that!’
‘You’ve got a best friend, maybe – someone you like?’
He looked blank and shrugged his shoulders. She decided not to venture further, and anyway, he was standing up now. As the train slowed, she saw a group of schoolboys on the platform, all in the same uniform and herded by two tweedy teachers. She craned her neck against the window to watch her boy take a flying leap, his case thrown out first and his feet landing squarely on the ground, no wobble. Several boys saw him jump and ran forward, yelling and tugging on each other’s blazers to reach him before the others. The last she saw of them, a smaller boy was struggling to carry the unwieldy suitcase, while her boy strolled confidently at the head of the group to the station exit and the teachers shouted and waved their arms ineffectually at the rear.
Twenty minutes later, she was in a taxi approaching the small village where Judi and Andy had lived since they got together ten years before. It was little more than a narrow main street with a number of lanes branching off in the direction of the chalk cliffs, which dropped precipitously to the beach about half a mile away. Fran walked the last little stretch along the rutted lane, past the row of stone cottages and the field where Judi’s daughter’s grey pony was grazing next to the fence. She stopped to stroke her muzzle and hold out a swatch of long grass, reminded as always of Judi’s frisky childhood pony Jambo and the yellow wooden trap they had been allowed to drive on the family farm and along the criss-crossing, high-hedged lanes, all those years ago.
As she passed the second row of cottages and came to the one at the far end, she could see Andy’s top half framed in the kitchen window. He smiled and raised his soapy hands in welcome, then disappeared to open the front door. Fran stopped at the gate and drew three or four long breaths to slow her heart. She knew Judi would look physically worse, even thinner if possible than she was on her last visit, but she had no idea what her mood would be like, or if she would be as confused and incoherent as in some of their recent phone calls. She and Andy had a brief, tightly clasping embrace in the front porch and he gestured her in towards the sitting room.
Judi’s voice was surprisingly strong and her tone imperious. ‘Frankie, come here, right away! I’m in here, let’s see you!’
Judi was the only one to call her Frankie, she and Andy, since her dad died.
A bed was now set up near the window and positioned to give the best view across the wide sloping fields towards the sea, which was out of sight from this level. Judi was propped up among brightly patterned cushions, her expression strangely altered by the changing shape of her face, almost spectral. When Fran leaned over to hold her, she tried not to exert pressure on the fragile shoulders under the white cotton pyjamas. Judi grasped her hands and laughed in that irresistibly infectious way she always had; still had even now.
‘Just don’t tell me I’m looking great, ’cause I know I’m a living skeleton.’
‘You’d be good on the catwalk, girl, that’s what I’m thinking.’
Fran produced the box of miniature cakes she had selected in the patisserie on her way to the station. Somehow she had managed not to squash them on the journey.
‘Beautiful, Frankie, they look much too gorgeous to eat. And I’ll need to have all of them to myself, if you and Andy are so determined to fatten me up.’
Andy sat with them at first while they continued the light chat. He owned a small building company and was in great shape for his fifty-two years, his toned muscles and flat stomach accentuated by a close-fitting black T-shirt. Although they didn’t know each other that well, he and Fran had developed a shy, half-acknowledged attraction to one another, which Judi appeared to enjoy and had never done anything to dispel, confident in her love of them both and her easy assumption that she, Judi, was and would remain in charge. It was only in the last year or so, when she became unable to travel and Fran began to visit her at home, that Andy had stopped being a background figure and come clearly into focus. Even now, he tended to hover watchfully in the corner or find some reason to make himself scarce. This afternoon he seemed more ill at ease than usual and soon left to walk the dog on the beach.
As he shut the front door behind him, Judi touched Fran on the wrist.
�
�Will Andy be okay, do you think, on his own?’
‘I think he’ll be fine. He’s got plenty of mates and there’ll soon be women in hot pursuit. Like bees round a honeypot, I suspect.’
She could say this kind of thing to Judi; anyway, it was just a new variation on an old theme.
‘Yes, but he’s so shy. He’ll hide out in the pub with all the old sailor boys.’
‘It’s hardly a hideout, Judi. It’s not just men going to pubs! And from what you’ve told me, some of those old sailor boys aren’t exactly leading boring and blameless lives.’
Judi winced with pain and held her side for a few moments, then relaxed.
‘Andy fancies you, you know – he always has. He likes super-intelligent women, finds them sexy; that’s you and me both, Frankie. And let’s admit it – we both go for his lovely bum.’
Fran laughed and then leaned forward to whisper in Judi’s ear. ‘You’re dead right we do.’
Whoops, wrong word, ‘dead’, but Judi just gave a rueful smile. Fran wanted to ask about her memories of the yellow pony trap and the high drama of a particular episode, a summer picnic by the river.
‘Did you ever tell Andy about the games we got up to on your farm, me coming to stay with you when we were kids?’
Judi grimaced and held her side again before breathing out gradually, as she’d been trained to do.
‘Not especially, just that you and I were inseparable back then, before I was sent off to boarding school.’
That was right; it was that last summer, when they were eleven. Fran longed to go to boarding school with Judi, having devoured endless children’s stories of midnight feasts, pillow fights and escape plans, but she never mentioned her desire and her mother had not concealed her satisfaction at Judi’s departure.
