‘Hello, you two, nice to have you back,’ he said as they presented their cruise cards to him. ‘Your husbands are around somewhere. They’ve been waiting for you.’
Selina’s eyes widened. Angie smiled at her. ‘See. Maybe this has changed him too.’ Emerick, his duty done, waved, called ‘Good Luck’ to them and stood down until some other poor sod needed his help.
‘Here come the boys,’ said the officer, pointing towards the hill. Angie whirled around to see the bright ginger hair of her husband bobbing up and down as he ran. Behind him, at a much slower pace, was not Zander, but Vernon.
Gil’s long legs would have given Usain Bolt a run for his money as he tore towards Angie. His arms were extended yards before they closed around her and he lifted her up and kissed her face until she was dizzy. Then, as suddenly, he set her down and pulled her at arm’s length and studied her.
‘Are you all right, my love? God, is that what you look like without make-up on?’
Angie let loose a hoot of laughter. ‘I am fine, we are fine.’ She beckoned Selina over. ‘Gil, this is my friend, Selina,’ she said.
Gil, took her hand gently and planted a kiss on her cheek.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know where your husband is… I’m sure he’s around somewhere,’ Gil stammered, obviously embarrassed. He was a rubbish liar. Selina had been right after all, Zander hadn’t turned up to greet her. He really was a thoughtless, selfish, uncaring, cold bastard after all.
‘Don’t you worry. And thank you, Gil, for arranging my flights,’ said Selina. Angie thought she just might be glad that Zander wasn’t there for her. His absence made the next steps she was about to take that much easier.
‘Hurrah, she’s back,’ said Vernon eventually reaching them and giving Angie a huge hug.
‘Vernon insisted on being part of the welcoming party,’ explained Gil. ‘So did Ken but alas Doreen got him ratted on Tia Maria last night. You should have seen him on the dance floor – he was like John Travolta. He’s having his very first ever hangover ever this morning.’
‘Aw, bless,’ smiled Angie.
‘Everyone’s been brilliant,’ said Gil, giving Vernon a squeeze on his shoulder. ‘He and Ken offered to pay for the flights for you… both obviously. Vernon has been camped outside Reception bullying them for updates, Doreen has been plying me with Baileys…’
‘Oh, how you’ve suffered, darling.’
‘I have,’ Gil nodded, his eyes twinkling.
‘You’re all so kind,’ Selina said with quiet gratitude. Angie felt for her. Total strangers who hadn’t even met her had treated her better than her own husband. Her soon-to-be-ex-husband. Good.
‘And I’m happy to announce that I’m fit and well and will make up for lost meals now that you’re back,’ said Gil, rubbing his stomach.
‘And how are…’ Angie formed her fingers into a crucifix, ‘… Jerry and Yvonne?’
‘Not on our table anymore,’ said Vernon. ‘Isn’t that a lovely surprise to come back to? Gil here, saw him off like a pit-bull terrier.’
‘No,’ gasped Angie. Gil was about as much a pit-bull as Alan Carr.
‘I didn’t think he had it in him,’ said Vernon.
‘Neither did I,’ Gil exclaimed.
‘Jerry brought down a sheet of jokes down about silly women. My
Doreen told them to stick them up his arse,’ Vernon beamed proudly. ‘Obviously he didn’t realise she was serious, so Gil made him see that she was. He was like an orator in the senate – a great person – a persona non grata. Jerry and Yvonne decided they’d be happier on a table where their humour would be better appreciated. They won’t find one. Gil was our hero that night.’
Angie looked at her husband with his beaming face and eyes full of love. There was no reserved place in her heart for Zander Goldman anymore. It all belonged to Gil. He was the only hero she wanted.
She turned to Selina. ‘Looks like we’ve got a spare place on the table if you want to join us.’
‘I’d like that,’ she replied. ‘It would be good to start my new life with some lovely company.’
‘Come on, girls,’ said Vernon. ‘Doreen has a bottle of ice wine with your name on it waiting for you in the Crystal House bar. If we don’t get back soon, she’ll have drunk the lot.’
‘I’ll have to change first,’ said Angie.
‘Shame. I rather like that dress,,’ said Gil. ‘Are you smuggling any other people aboard inside it? Darling, why are you putting your sunglasses on now?’
‘I don’t want anyone to recognise me as that stupid woman who missed the ship,’ she said.
‘Oh, everyone knows who you are,’ laughed Vernon. ‘You two will be quite the celebrities on board. Be prepared to take a lot of ribbing. You and your husbands. I hope your man has a sense of humour, Selina. He’s not going to know what’s hit him, I think.’
‘How right you are,’ grinned Selina as they set off down the jetty together towards the bobbing tender boat.
Read on for an exclusive sneak peek of Milly’s new novel,
The Teashop on the Corner, coming in June 2014
Chapter 1
‘Man, cl-that is born of a woman, hath-cl but a short time to live, and is-cl full of misery. He cometh up, and is cl-cut down, like a flower; he fleeth-cl as it were a cl-shadow, and never continueth in one cl-stay.’ The Reverend Duckworth relished the grave drama of his monologue as he sprayed the principle mourners on the front row with a light shower of saliva.
Behind Carla, her eighty-three-year-old neighbour Mavis Marple muttered under her breath to whoever was sitting next to her. ‘He sounds like Louie Spence.’
Mavis Marple didn’t do discreet very well. Still, she did love a good funeral, and a wedding. She’d attend anyone’s in the hope of getting invited to the post-event buffet.
‘They should have umbrellas on the front row.’
‘Shhh,’ someone else attempted to whisper, although the angry-python hiss echoed just as loudly around the church.
‘Well he does,’ went on Mavis. ‘All those cl-sth sounds.’
‘Thou knowest-cl, Lord, the cl-secrets of our hearts-cl,’ the Reverend Duckworth went on, raising his left hand heavenward in a grand sweep. In his own head he was Laurence Olivier holding up Yorick’s skull.
But the words were mere white noise to Carla, whose sad dark brown eyes were fixed on the coffin behind him. She couldn’t believe that Martin, her husband of ten years, was in there. In a wide wooden box. She had the mad urge to run up to it and prise off the lid with her fingernails to see him again, just one last time, to touch his face and tell him that she loved him. He had been torn from her too quickly. One minute he was eating a pork pie and mint sauce in the kitchen, the next he was dead on the garage floor. She wanted to see in his eyes that he knew how much she loved him and how much of a hole he had left in her heart.
‘Arshes to arshes, dust to dust.’
‘Did he just say “arses to arses”?’ Mavis Marple asked no one in particular and set off a ripple of involuntary giggling. Carla wasn’t angry though. Funerals were a powder keg of pressure. Had she been watching all this on a sitcom, she would probably have giggled too. The pantomime effect wasn’t lost on her: old Reverend Duckworth in his thick brown wig attempting a National Theatre delivery, doing his best to enunciate all those elusive pure ‘s’ sounds. But this wasn’t a sitcom, it was real life. This time last week she had been a loving wife to Martin, washing his socks, waiting for him to come home to her on Friday nights after a hard week working all around the country; and now she was a widow, holding a fat red rose that she would place on his coffin which would soon be incinerated in a giant oven with him.
Someone’s stomach made a loud gurgling noise as if water was rushing down a plughole.
‘Sorry,’ said the stomach’s owner.
At the back of the church the huge heavy door creaked open and banged shut again, making a sound that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Hammer Horror f
ilm. Pronounced tappy footsteps followed. Carla sensed people shifting in their seats to turn and see who the latecomer was, but she didn’t join them. It couldn’t be anyone important. There was no one here who meant anything much to Martin. There were a few neighbours, including Mavis Marple, who might have been inappropriately loud, but was also a good woman and was kindness itself. There was Martin’s cousin Andrew over from Bridlington, whom they hadn’t set eyes on since their wedding; a few people that Carla didn’t recognise, some probably men from the local club where Martin used periodically to play darts; and someone who looked suspiciously like a tramp who had come in for the warmth. Martin didn’t have friends and there was no one from his workplace, at which Carla’s disappointment edged towards disgust. Her husband had given Sugg’s Office Equipment a lot of hard-working years and yet when Carla rang them up to inform them of his passing, the woman on the switchboard didn’t even seem to have recognised his name. She’d said she’d email the head of sales, and took Carla’s number, but no one rang her back.
Carla mouthed a silent message to her friend Theresa. Oh, I wish you were here. Theresa was in New Zealand with her husband Jonty, visiting their son. How could she have rung them with her news and spoilt their holiday? Even though a little part of her wanted to spoil it, wanted to smash up their holiday with a hammer because she suspected they were going on a fact-finding mission, to learn if they could live over there. Their daughter-in-law was pregnant with her first child, in a part of the country that had all-year sunshine, so who could blame them? Selfish as it made her, Carla wished she could teleport her friend over to sit at her side today, instead of Andrew and his overpowering odour of sweaty feet.
Forty-eight was no age at all to die. Carla and Martin had been robbed of many happy years together. Carla had been saving up to take him on a cruise for his fiftieth birthday, at least until she’d been made redundant last month. It was so unfair. Martin had worked too hard – all that driving every day, constant stress to sell to clients and meet targets – no wonder he’d had a massive heart attack. Carla dabbed at her tears with her black gloves. Her foundation stained the material. She didn’t care. She didn’t care about the swish of whispers that was rising behind her like a tidal wave. She didn’t care about anything at that moment in time. Martin had gone out to the garage alive and well to carry in the dressing table which Carla had finished stripping down and hand-painting. Wait for me, it’s too heavy, Carla had called after him. Just let me finish basting this chicken. But he hadn’t waited. He had lifted it single-handedly then collapsed and died on the spot. Their marriage, snuffed out, just like the candle on a birthday cake.
‘The Lord bless-cl Martin Pride, the Lord maketh-cl his face to cl-shine upon him and give him peace-cl. Amen.’
There was an echoed chorus of Amens.
‘I now invite Carla to lead you to cl-say your goodbyes-cl to Martin before he leaves-cl us to join his Lord in eternal peace-cl,’ said the Reverend Duckworth, holding out his arm towards her to head up the final acknowledgement.
Carla pulled herself wearily up from the pew. She was totally distraught and felt twice as old as her thirty-four years. She was clinging on to her long-stemmed red rose as if it was the only thing keeping her on her feet. She walked slowly over to the coffin and laid the rose gently on top of it.
‘Goodbye, Martin. Goodbye, my love.’
Then it all happened so quickly. Before anyone else could stand, a tall, grim-faced woman in a black coat and high red heels flounced forwards, picked up Carla’s rose, threw it on the floor and placed her own red rose on the coffin instead. It had a head the size of a football. There was a churchful of gasps as Carla turned to her with shocked confusion and both women locked eyes.
‘What do you think you’re doing? Who are you?’ Carla asked.
‘I’m Martin’s wife,’ the woman in the red shoes replied. ‘Or should I say “widow” now.’
Chapter 2
‘Mrs Williams, I am on my knees. Just one more week, please. I am begging you.’
Will Linton was indeed on his knees as he pleaded with Mrs Cecilia Williams from the West Yorkshire Bank. He was desperately playing for time, even though he suspected an extra week wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. He had exhausted every avenue which might have saved his company from closing and his workforce from the dole. The bank had been more than fair, really. They’d given him two extensions already and no miracle had occurred to save him, however hard he had prayed for one. His accountant had warned him that they wouldn’t listen and it was time to give up and throw in the towel, but Will felt duty-bound to try to give it everything he had.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Linton,’ said Mrs Williams, her voice firm but not unkind. ‘We can’t.’
She was probably a nice woman who was kind to animals, a mother, a wife, a convivial host at dinner parties, but at work her job was to know when to say, ‘No. It’s the end.’
Will opened his mouth to remonstrate, but he knew it was over. He could hear faint strains of Simon and Garfunkel in the back of his mind. Cecilia, you’re breaking my heart. This Cecilia had also broken his balls. But he didn’t blame her – the fault was entirely his.
The massive Phillips and Son Developments had gone into receivership and in turn had taken down Yorkshire Stone Homes who, in turn, had taken down Linton Roofing, whose director had been idiot enough to put all his eggs in the Yorkshire Stone Homes basket. A chain of businesses had toppled like dominos, but this was no innocent child’s game. Men were going to be out of work – good men with families and mortgages. He’d intended to retire in ten years max, when he was forty-eight. Throwing his all in with Yorkshire Stone Homes should have set him up for life. It was a no-brainer whether or not to trust them – they had been a rock solid and highly profitable business for over fifty years. Oh, the irony.
‘Thank you, Mrs Williams, for all you’ve done. I appreciate it,’ he said, his throat as dry as one of the bags of cement in his builders’ yard.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, and sounded it. ‘I’ll send you a letter confirming our conversation and advising of the next steps to be taken.’
He didn’t say any more before putting the phone back on the cradle. He didn’t know what those next steps would consist of. He couldn’t handle even thinking about them just yet. He had a big wall inside his head, holding back the questions, the fears, the confusion, the shame. It was going to crumble at any moment, but until it did, he would savour the blankness.
He heard the front door open and close and smelt his wife Nicole before he saw her as she swept in on a wave of her perfume, something sickly and sweet and reminiscent of chocolate limes, which she used as liberally as if she were crop-spraying. He hated that smell, not that he had ever told her that.
She had shopping bags in her hand, of course. He wouldn’t have recognised her had she not had bags in her hands. And all the bags had names on them: Bibi, Karen Millen, Chanel. Actually, he didn’t recognise her at all for a moment – the last time he had seen her she’d had short blonde hair, now she looked like bleedin’ Rapunzel.
‘So, what did they say?’ she asked. There was no softness in her voice. ‘I’m gathering by you kneeling on the floor that it isn’t good news.’
Nicole had dropped the bags now and was standing with her arms crossed, her artificially inflated lips attempting to pucker.
‘It’s the end,’ he said, turning his face towards her. He wanted her to stride up to him, put her arms around him, tell him that it was all right and they’d weather it. Instead she said, ‘Fuck.’ And looked furious.
‘We’ve lost the lot, love.’ He shrugged and gave a humourless dry chuckle.
Nicole’s head jerked. ‘Don’t “love” me.’
She’d had hair extensions put in and had been in the hairdressers’ all day. It was two hundred pounds a pop to have a squirt of shampoo at Mr Corleone’s in Sheffield – especially as Nicole always had the head stylist, the don himself: so with tha
t in mind, what had those extensions cost? And God knows how much she’d spent shopping. Then again, daddy cleared her Visa bill every month. She was a married woman of thirty-two and yet daddy still gave her pocket money, although Nicole didn’t know that Will knew that.
‘I’ll get it back. Everything,’ said Will. ‘I might have lost it now, but I’ll bounce back stronger than ever. If I let them take the lot – the house, the car, the company, clear the accounts, I can avoid bankruptcy. I can start again.’
Nicole didn’t say a thing in response. She just flicked her new hair over her shoulder. The irony didn’t bypass Will that at least one of them had been successful in getting some extensions today.
‘You’ll be living in a mansion this time next year,’ he said, trying to coax a smile out of her. ‘It’ll make this place look like a pig-sty.’
Her expression didn’t falter.
‘It’s the end of Linton Roofing. There’s nothing I can do.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. There has to be something.’
Ridiculous? She didn’t know the meaning of the word. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept properly, without waking up in a sweat of panic. Or eaten a meal that he didn’t want to throw up again. His anxiety levels were off the scale: he’d lost two stone in weight, he got dizzy if he climbed past the fifth rung of a ladder, and yet his darling missus was always out sitting under a dryer, shopping in House of bloody Fraser, having someone put false nails on the tips of her fingers or being wrapped in seaweed as if she hadn’t a care in the world. That was ridiculous.
‘I’ve tried everything, darling,’ he said, which was a slight lie, as there was one thing he hadn’t attempted and that was asking Nicole’s father for a loan. But his pride was saved from going down that route because he knew that Barnaby Whitlaw would have burnt his money note by note in a barbecue before he lent it to a nouveau-riche vulgar type like his son-in-law.
‘I’ll get it all back, love, I promise,’ he said again.
Here Come the Boys Page 9
