‘It’ll be good for us all to get together again,’ said Lew, as Charlotte stripped off her apron. ‘I can’t believe you haven’t seen Gemma in all that time. You haven’t fallen out, have you?’
‘No, not fallen out as such, but . . . Gemma . . .’ Charlotte trailed off and made a nervous straightening-down her dress gesture.
‘Gemma what?’ He saw the gulp rise and fall in his wife’s throat before she spoke again.
‘Gemma’s thinking about having a baby.’
‘Gemma? Get away!’ He was gobsmacked by that. Gemma had always said she never wanted children. And now? When her business was doing so well and Jason was giving his company everything he had.
‘Yes, Gemma. She said it was like a switch going on inside her.’ Charlotte wobbled her head a little as she quoted her friend with a brittle tone to her voice.
‘Surely if Gem does get pregnant, that isn’t going to affect your friendship, is it? It’s been years since—’
‘I know how long it is since my miscarriage, Lewis,’ Charlotte snapped. ‘And I’m fully aware I should be over it by now . . .’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
Charlotte clapped her hands. ‘Let’s change the subject; how was your new assistant?’
‘She seems very good. Very knowledgeable and pleasant.’
‘More than the other one? The thief?’
‘Sooty was more knowledgeable than Vanda about antiques. I think fate was on my side this time.’ Which was an understatement, seeing as his new assistant might just have saved his business and Charlotte need never know how close he had come to failing.
‘Don’t you miss being in charge of hundreds of people and not just one?’ Charlotte asked with a loaded sigh.
‘Not one bit,’ said Lew. ‘Especially if it means I might get to live longer.’
Charlotte nodded and said quickly, ‘Of course,’ as if she couldn’t forget that the hugely prestigious job he’d once had had nearly killed him off. ‘I’ll go and freshen my make-up, they’ll be here soon. You could open the Malbec if you like and let it breathe. Are you really wearing jeans and that top, Lewis?’
Lew gave her a crooked questioning smile. ‘Yes I am, Charlotte,’ he said. ‘I’m relaxing after a day’s work. With friends, not the royal family. If you want to wear Louboutins, go right ahead though.’
She turned on her swanky heel in the direction of the staircase and Lew wondered what was going through her head that she wanted him to put on a Ralph Lauren top to eat prawns in coconut breadcrumbs and a home-cooked steak and mushrooms in the company of friends. She was turning into Hyacinth Bouquet more and more each day.
Chapter 13
Bonnie took a slightly different way home to the one she usually travelled, via Dodley. She wanted to drive past Starstruck’s daughter’s house. It hadn’t been out of her mind since Starstruck had mentioned it though the flare of initial interest had been dragged down to earth by the weight of practicality. Wishing about leaving Stephen was easy, but actually doing it would take energy she wasn’t sure she had, never mind the money. She really shouldn’t open up the possibility of renting it because she was only setting herself up for disappointment. Leaving Stephen was not the way of things. He’d drilled that message into her head over the years and she’d blindly obeyed it. At least until she came to leave Ken Grimshaw she had.
When she first realised she’d made a huge mistake in marrying, it wasn’t the right time because her dad was going downhill fast and her head had enough to deal with, but she’d made herself a promise to leave Stephen when her dad was at peace. By then, of course, she had no money to start again. Sometimes the resolve to walk out of Greenwood Crescent and never return would surge up in her like a tidal wave, only for it to immediately ebb from fear of the unknown and force her to shrink back into the dreadful familiar. Only once had she reached the point of actually telling him she was leaving him – and meant it and had her bag packed and her car keys in her hand ready to drive away for good. She hadn’t known where she was going to, or how she would live . . . and yet she was still there.
She was trapped in her dull, dreary marriage. And even if she did find the guts to propel herself out of the door of Greenwood Crescent, she wasn’t in a position to pay out seventy pounds a week for Starstruck’s daughter’s house, plus there would be utilities and rates and all the other bills added on. And she had no furniture either. She had a moment of wishing she’d kept hold of all the furniture in her dad’s old house, but she’d had no use for it at the time and nowhere to store it, so it was sold along with the house which went to pay off the bills in the nursing home. If she left Stephen today, she’d have nothing to her name, apart from a couple of hundred pounds in her coin jar, and about seven hundred and fifty in her secret bank account and her clothes, books, photos, the ashes of her old dog Bear in a wooden box and a couple of pieces of jewellery, which she would never sell.
As it stood, she could just about afford to rent the house on Rainbow Lane for a couple of months, but what if Lew Harley turned out to be the sort of boss that made Ken Grimshaw look like the angel Gabriel? She’d only known him for two days. Or what if Lew conceded defeat and shut up shop, or sacked her because he decided that he couldn’t afford an assistant after all?
But, despite the voice in her head telling her to drive past and not look, she overruled it. The house was easy enough to find, it was painted bright white and snuggled into the side of the old chapel as if claiming comfort from the old stone. It had a grey slate roof, a bright red door and an even brighter green gate. It was small and unspectacular from the outside, but Bonnie let herself imagine that on the inside, there would a furry, giddy red-coated dog waiting to greet her, a real fire glowing in the grate and an armchair waiting for her to drop into – and not a bloody beige cushion in sight.
Bonnie put her foot down and sped away before her little fantasy took root and became too hard to dislodge because its image was already sprouting sticky tendrils that threatened to burrow into her brain. She wished Starstruck hadn’t said anything about the house; it had been on her mind all day, bouncing around on a string in her head, never taking centre stage, but always there in her peripheral vision, demanding attention.
Bonnie headed for 39 Greenwood Crescent and tried to force the idea of the little house in Rainbow Lane into a mental trash box. It was meant for someone else, not her.
Chapter 14
Stephen was at home when she got in, watching the news. He turned around briefly and gave her the slightest nod to acknowledge her presence. She didn’t expect an apology for what had happened that morning because she knew that in Stephen’s mind, it was her fault it had happened. He was never wrong. His mother, the formidable Alma Brookland, had made him that way. She’d brought him up with the right to claim papal infallibility.
‘The Shadow Foreign Secretary has resigned,’ he said, adding with a sniff, ‘not before time.’
Bonnie had nothing to say to that. Politics, as a subject of interest for her, was right up there with tin-mining and calculus. She slipped off her coat and got on with making the tea. There was some fish that needed using up which Stephen had taken out of the freezer. Bonnie wasn’t really in the mood for it but she’d eat it for the sake of ease. She didn’t seem to have much of an appetite these days, as if slowly bit by bit she was fading to nothing.
Bonnie drizzled the lemon sauce over the fish, careful not to let it touch the fine green beans on Stephen’s plate. He was very particular about the components of his meal not encroaching on the space of any of the others. It was one of many of his little ways that she’d found odd but slightly endearing in the early days of their relationship; now she just found them odd. His father was the same, Alma once told her. He couldn’t read a newspaper which had been opened by anyone else first, had an abhorrence for cleaning sponges and had to throw away his toothbrush on the last day of the month.
Bonnie remembered standing at the oven, cooking this same fish d
ish, feeling Alma’s eyes boring holes of hatred into her back and knowing that she was about to be ripped to shreds. The sauce was too lemony, the fish too dry, the vegetables hadn’t been cooked enough or too much. ‘She’s a perfectionist,’ so Stephen explained his mother’s rudeness away. Bonnie took it on the chin because her dad had always told her to answer rudeness with a smile, be the bigger person. He was full of sayings was her dad, his favourite being: our family was born on the back side of the rainbow. Luck had never been theirs, he said. The Shermans came from the side without the colours, only grey and shadows. Over the years, she’d come to think he might have been right.
‘I take it you haven’t phoned Mr Grimshaw?’ Stephen asked, when they were seated at the table. He nudged a potato disapprovingly away from the lemon sauce.
‘No I have not,’ replied Bonnie.
Stephen took a large breath in through his nose and let it go the same way. ‘Well don’t say I didn’t warn you when you find out that this . . . Lewis Harley person doesn’t know what he’s doing and you’re out of a job with nowhere to go. What then, eh?’
Throw me out on the streets, Bonnie was tempted to say. Maybe if he pushed where she didn’t have the nerve to jump, she would have to learn how to survive.
‘He seems reliable enough, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken the job,’ she said instead.
‘ “Seems” and “is” are very different things,’ said Stephen, wagging his finger at her as if she were a child. ‘Mr Grimshaw described him as a flash in the pan.’
And Ken Grimshaw is the fount of all knowledge, thought Bonnie. She wondered what else he and her husband had discussed, no doubt finding common ground in how ungrateful she was. She pressed down on the inner growl that his patronising tone was inspiring within her, though her clipped tone indicated with bells on that she hadn’t forgotten what had happened between them that morning.
‘Well, we’ll just have to hope for the best then, won’t we?’
He either didn’t notice it or did and ignored it, because he then started to tell her an ‘amusing story’ about the previous day, which she knew would be anything but. He’d had to give a verbal warning to someone who’d told him to ‘go away’ in slightly more colourful terms after he’d told them to stay behind at lunch to finish off an account that refused to be balanced. Bonnie had often thought he might be the sort of boss that encouraged quite a few ‘go away’s under the workforce’s breath.
As Stephen chewed each mouthful of his meal a customary minimum of twenty times, Bonnie tried to suppress thoughts of living in the little white house in Dodley. She always bought a Saturday lottery ticket but couldn’t remember the last time she had won anything. Lottery wins were things that happened to other people, along with children and happy marriages and love.
It would have been Alma’s eighty-seventh birthday on Monday, she suddenly remembered. She’d died five years short of it. Making the lemon sauce had stirred up thoughts about her mother-in-law, bringing them to the top again.
‘Are you taking some flowers up to your mother’s grave next week?’ Bonnie asked Stephen as he placed his empty plate in the sink for his wife to wash.
‘I don’t think that’s necessary, do you?’ he replied. ‘We’ve observed the anniversary of her birthday for long enough. Any more would be unnecessary and mawkish.’
He was letting his mother go then. Did that mean he might release her also?
Chapter 15
Lew did a double-take when Patrick walked into the house. It might have only been two months since he last saw him but for all the changes in him, it could have been a lot longer. He’d put on weight, quite a lot of it too and Patrick never put on weight, because he was far too vain about his appearance. But that wasn’t the biggest difference. Gingery-blonde hair rampaged wildly over his usually close-shaved face. With his Versace shirt on, he looked like a sort of posh Chewbacca. Charlotte commented on it because it would have been strange not to.
‘My goodness, Patrick,’ she said. ‘Have you joined ZZ Top?’
‘I’m reserve bass guitarist,’ Patrick said with a meek smile and a voice full of gravel.
‘Bloody hell, Pat,’ said Jason. ‘What’s up with your throat? And more importantly is it catching?’
‘That sounds sore,’ said Gemma, with a tut of sympathy as she enfolded him in a hug of hello.
‘Red or white, Reg?’ asked Lew.
‘White. Don’t waste your sympathy on him,’ said Regina, air-kissing Charlotte. ‘It was the AGM celebratory dinner last night and guess who decided to do the full repertoire of Louis Armstrong hits on the karaoke. No wonder he sounds as if his vocal cords have been grated.’
‘Ouch,’ said Lew, delivering the wine to Regina before holding up a bottle of Peroni and a bottle of Malbec for Patrick to indicate his preference. He pointed to the very cold lager without hesitation.
‘And let’s not even get onto his speech,’ sniffed Regina. ‘You might have thought as he owned the firm he’d have delivered inspirational words about the success of the company under his leadership but oh no, not Patrick Sheffield, who thought that it might be a great idea to make anagrams of his management team’s names as an “amusing opener”.’
They gathered by the way Regina said this and from how she flicked her long dark hair over her shoulder that this had not been a good idea and was about as amusing as a killer jellyfish invasion on Blackpool beach.
‘What was it you came up with for Dean Walker, Patrick?’ She turned to the others to deliver some background information. ‘This is the guy my husband has been courting as a potential partner who came over especially for the evening from Jersey in his private jet.’ She tapped her lip thoughtfully as Patrick gulped down half the bottle of lager in one. ‘Ah yes, Lead Wanker.’
Everyone’s ‘no way’ was drowned out by the next person’s. Lew saw that Jason and Gemma were desperate to laugh but reined it in because Regina’s eyes were flashing ‘don’t you dare’ signals.
‘I have never seen so much tumbleweed blow across a room in my life.’ Regina pressed the cold glass of white wine against her forehead.
‘It broke the ice,’ Patrick shrugged.
‘Oh yes, it did that all right.’ Regina nudged up her artificial breasts with the insides of her arms like an upper-class Les Dawson. She dropped her bag onto the sideboard and Lew noticed how Charlotte’s eyes rounded at the sight of it. It was as ugly as hell but he recognised it instantly as a vintage Henri Chaput. The designer was supposedly a protégé of Hermès.
‘Is that a Chaput?’ asked Charlotte, with breathless admiration.
‘Sure is,’ purred Regina. ‘Farmed albino crocodile,’ and she stroked it as if the animal were still alive and capable of receiving affection.
‘Ugh,’ Gemma shuddered. ‘How can you enjoy carrying it around knowing that poor thing had such a shit life?’
Regina gave a bark of laughter. ‘It’s a bloody reptile not a kitten. It was fed and watered and lived in luxury all its life and had a good end. I probably saved it from starvation and poachers.’
‘It would have been a damned sight cheaper for me if the skin had still been on its back,’ sighed Patrick. Lew reckoned this was another present he’d had to stump up for to persuade Regina to forgive him.
‘It’s gorgeous,’ said Charlotte.
‘Get her an appointment with Specsavers,’ Jason said quietly to Lew before turning to Patrick. ‘How much did that set you back?’
Patrick blew out two slow cheekfuls of air. ‘Don’t ask. I could have bought a house for less.’
‘Really?’ Jason said and went for a second look. Lew suspected that it had now become a much more attractive objet to him. It amused him how money changed people, but he hoped it hadn’t changed him that much.
‘Everyone please sit down at the table,’ commanded Charlotte after she had managed to rip her eyes away from the bag. ‘We should eat straightaway before everything is overcooked so I hope you’re all hungry.
’
‘Sorry, our fault for being late.’ Patrick held his hand up. ‘We had another row,’ he added out of the corner of his mouth to Lew alone.
‘Good because I’m bloody famished,’ said Jason, shifting his gaze from Regina’s handbag to her oddly hirsute husband as he sat down.
Lew had the same problem. Patrick didn’t look like Patrick at all. Lew had only ever seen him with the faintest of designer stubble, if any, and cropped hair. And the whites of his eyes were creamy-yellow with dark shadows under them which told of more than a hangover from last night. Patrick looked drained.
The Queen of Wishful Thinking Page 7
