Valerie’s lips assumed a serious line. ‘Happily?’
‘What?’
Valerie sat back against the scrolled ironwork of the chair and studied Bonnie thoroughly for a few moments before speaking again. ‘We have an untypical friendship, don’t we, Bonnie, you and I? What is it – four or five years since we shared our first pot of tea over a café table and yet I’ve known you all your life and seen all the changes that have happened in it. But we talk about the weather, the news and we never pry into each other’s business, do we?’
‘I like that we do that,’ replied Bonnie. ‘I like that our friendship takes me away from . . . th . . .’ she struggled, finding the right way to put what she meant ‘. . . from . . . what I . . . everything else.’
‘And so do I, dear Bonnie. So do I. But that does not mean that I don’t notice how pale you are, how little light there is in your eyes, and it concerns me greatly.’
It was the first time Valerie had lifted the veneer of their relationship to probe underneath it and Bonnie felt a stab of panic. If she opened up, even a little, everything would come pouring out and she couldn’t let it.
‘I’m fine, Valerie. Really. Working for Ken wore me down, that’s all, and I’ve got new-job nerves.’
Valerie’s slim hand closed over hers and gave it a squeeze. ‘Dear Bonnie,’ she said again and Bonnie knew that her wise old friend hadn’t been at all convinced by what she had said but would leave it at that. For now.
Chapter 19
Lew got home later than expected because there was a steady stream of customers in until three o’clock. He found Charlotte in a very chirpy and affable mood. She’d been shopping in Meadowhall with Regina who, despite her alcohol overload, had awoken fresh and fit for spending. Charlotte said that she hadn’t bought a thing. Lew knew she was lying but he didn’t press it. He didn’t want to fuel any fire that he was a skinflint and he’d had too good a day to argue. He’d rented a couple more units out and sold some pipes to a delighted Pied Piper who had been lured to visit by tales of those Petersons. Stickalampinit not only sold the revolting statue but the woman who bought it wanted another as a garden pair. One man’s rubbish really was another’s treasure, thought Lew with a smile, and he thanked God that was the case.
Lew volunteered to cook and rustled up a simple pasta dish for them both – arrabiata sauce, olives, mushrooms, ham and loads of parmesan – and pushed a part-baked baguette into the oven. Cooking relaxed him, whereas it was just something on the chore list for his wife.
He spread the warm bread with chilli butter and put it on the table, then poured two glasses of crisp, cold Chablis.
‘I had an amazing day sales-wise,’ said Lew when Charlotte had taken her place at the table.
‘Did you?’ she replied, sprinkling the tiniest amount of extra parmesan over her pasta.
‘My best day yet, I reckon,’ he smiled.
‘I bet your share price is just racing up,’ sighed Charlotte.
‘Ouch,’ replied Lew, making light of the wounding comment.
‘I’m sorry,’ Charlotte said immediately. ‘That came out as more sarcastic than the jokey way I intended.’
Lew suspected she meant it exactly as she had said it and felt a cloud drift across the sunshine of his mood. ‘I thought you’d be happy that I’d put some money in my till.’
‘I am, of course I am,’ she tried to enthuse, but he wasn’t fooled. What he had taken probably didn’t even cover what she would have spent in Meadowhall. He’d bet his life on the fact that if he went on a search in her wardrobe, he would find a very classy designer carrier bag with a handbag or shoes in it. Possibly both.
It worried him that his marriage worked better when they saw less of each other. He’d read about other marriages suffering the same fate: women married to soldiers coping fine with their long-distance relationship, until the soldier left the forces and the extra contact broke them up. He hadn’t made an issue of it, because the last couple of years had been full of pressure what with the house move and then nearly making Charlotte a widow. But things should have been levelling out by now. The shop was up and running, Lew’s health checks were coming back with great big positives and their lives were as stress-free as they could be. But now they were together more, Lew had started to notice traits in Charlotte that he’d not been aware of before, especially how bitchy she could be; and though she’d always had the makings of a snob, she could earn a doctorate in pretentiousness judging by what he’d heard her come out with recently. In a couple of years she’d morph into a blonde version of Regina if she wasn’t careful. He’d been sober the previous evening, unlike most of his guests, and he’d eavesdropped on some of the cruel comments his wife and Regina had been saying about Gemma and it didn’t sit well with him. He liked Gemma immensely, especially for how she’d hardly changed at all over the years. She’d been behind Jason one hundred per cent when he left the car salesroom which he deputy-managed and struck out on his own, selling prestige cars. They remortgaged their house to buy stock, Gemma had doubled her hours in Sparkles to bring in extra revenue and had been the unheralded wind beneath his wings. And when the big money started to come to Jason, Gemma didn’t give up work and spend her day gardening, playing tennis and blowing cash on crocodile handbags, but put even more effort into Sparkles. She was a grafter, a down-to-earth Yorkshire girl and she deserved a better set of friends, he was sad to admit.
Charlotte looked faraway as she was chewing.
‘Penny for them,’ Lew asked her, wondering what was making her smile so wistfully. He hoped it was him, but thought it more likely it was a purchase.
Her jaw froze and she looked at him as if he were slightly mad.
‘What?’
‘Your thoughts? You looked miles away.’
‘I wasn’t thinking anything.’ The smile had dropped and been replaced with a scowl.
Lew was slightly taken aback at the sudden change in her. ‘You okay? Something on your mind, love?’
‘Like what?’
He shrugged, unsure why her tone had suddenly acquired a sharp, defensive edge. ‘I don’t know. Just . . . something?’
She stared at him with her large blue eyes and then, as if a thought had landed with a bump in her mind, she nodded. ‘Oh I see, you mean because we haven’t had sex for a while.’
Lew’s eyebrows shot up his forehead at the same time as his jaw dropped open.
‘I didn’t mean that at all. It hadn’t even entered my head.’
‘Yeah right.’ Charlotte’s fork left her hand and clattered to her plate. ‘I haven’t been in the mood is the answer to that. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m going through the change. Mum went through it at forty-two.’
‘Charlotte, where’s all this coming from?’ He half-laughed at the ludicrous leap from her reflective smile to the symptoms of an early menopause. But Charlotte was so caught up in a loop, she didn’t hear him.
‘Maybe I’m still adjusting to our new circumstances even though I know I should have accepted them by now and I hear what you’re saying about us being okay, but I can’t help worrying when I know you can’t claim your pension for years. Maybe I haven’t got over the fact that you nearly died. Maybe I’m just a bit pissed off that my best friend wants the fucking baby that I’ll never have and I don’t think I’ll be able to be around her if she gets pregnant.’ Then Charlotte dropped her head into her hands and made a strangled noise of distress. Lew sprang from his chair and threw his arms around her. He kissed her hair and held her as her shoulders jumped as she sniffed. His poor wife. No wonder she was all over the place. They needed a holiday. Venice maybe – a city of beauty and good food where they could have some ‘us’ time and he’d buy her all the handbags she could carry if they stemmed the empty hungry hole in her heart.
*
When Bonnie got home, Stephen was sitting at the kitchen table drumming his fingers impatiently on the surface. She wondered how long he’d been doing that. He could d
o it for a very long time when he was annoyed about something.
‘Where on earth have you been?’ he said, before she’d even got both feet through the back door.
‘It was surprisingly busy at the shop,’ she said.
‘It closed at two.’ His lips were a grim line of annoyance.
She forced herself to stay calm. ‘It stayed open until three because there were customers.’
She saw him look at the clock, almost heard his brain whirring as it calculated that if the shop shut at three, getting home at twenty-past was reasonable.
‘You should have rung,’ Stephen said.
‘I didn’t see the problem,’ replied Bonnie. ‘We don’t eat until seven on Sundays anyway. The timer’s kicked in on the oven to cook the roast so what’s the panic?’
‘It’s just not the way of things,’ he snapped, before snatching up the newspaper and storming off into the lounge, muttering to himself the entire Roget’s Thesaurus word listing for disorder.
It was not the way of things was his stock phrase. Anything that differed from the norm in Stephen’s life threw him into a panic. She could blow his whole world apart by not having carrots with their Sunday lunch because that definitely was not the way of things. It was then that Bonnie was reminded how blown apart the ‘way of things’ would be when he came home and found out that she had left him.
Chapter 20
As usual, Bonnie woke up early on Monday to breakfast with Stephen, wash up his cereal plate and cup and wave him off like a dutiful wife. Things were once again calm because order had been restored the previous night when she had served up a delicious dinner at exactly seven, with carrots, and then soothed any remaining ruffled waters by asking about his fishing expedition as they ate. He showed off the trout he had caught, gutted and frozen for next Saturday’s tea and Bonnie had wondered if she would be still here then to have it.
When Stephen drove off to work, Bonnie sat at the kitchen table and began to plan out her future properly in an A4 pad. She wrote down all the things she would take with her and the bare essentials she would need to buy and found that she could get away with very little. She could make do with a flip out chair-bed that unfolded into a makeshift mattress. Even a sleeping bag would do for a couple of nights. She found a plastic box on a high shelf in the garage and put a couple of towels and some soap and toilet rolls in it, a few teabags, a pan to to cook from and to boil water in until she got a kettle, a spare toothbrush and toothpaste and one each of the following: a mug, a plate, a dish, a spoon, a knife and fork. She’d keep it under the bed for now, ready and waiting.
Then she pressed some confetti at the table and took photos of it, downloading them to eBay. The Rainbow Lady was open for business. She tipped her two-pound-coin jar onto the table and counted it to find that she had actually £304 in it. She nipped to the bank in Maltstone to update her passbook and found that with interest she had a few pounds more than she’d thought; not enough to go wild and buy the latest sort of smart TV, but every little counted. Her dad’s voice came to her as the counter assistant was printing out her new balance, Poor men throw away their pounds, Bon, and rich men look after their pennies. She deposited the two-pound coins in her account so they were safe and started to feel a stir of excitement that she could really do this. She had taken the next step towards leaving Stephen, after merely wishing she could. There was a giant leap to the third, though; she was under no illusions.
She packed a few of her clothes in a suitcase and gathered up her treasures into a box: family photos, her parents’ wedding rings, her mother’s modest pieces of jewellery, her dad’s notebook, his giant watch and the locket he had bought for her twenty-first birthday, plus Bear’s ashes, and put it in the bottom of her wardrobe. Stephen thought it was oversentimental how she kept the ashes and gave her permission to put them in the garden if she must, but she didn’t want to. She and Joel had bought Bear together as a pup. He’d been a tiny ball of red fluff that had grown into a huge teddy of a dog, as gentle a soul as Joel but with no crippling demons. She had cried into his fur when she found out that Joel had left her and he had stood there, letting her use him as something to hold on to as if he knew that she might slip off the edge of the world if she let go. Her father had loved Bear and Bear had loved him too. Even when her dad sometimes failed to recognise her, he always knew Bear. The place at her side had grown very cold when she’d had to let Bear go, and like Joel and her father – he had gone far too soon.
She had an eBay notification at two o’clock that she had her first order: three packets of rainbow hearts for table scattering. The money was already sitting in her PayPal account. She pressed out the pieces at the dining table, although she knew she wouldn’t be able to fulfil any future orders in front of Stephen, as he’d get annoyed by the constant clicking sound and he’d wonder what she was up to. She packaged the order and took it straight to the post office, rather than put it in the post box, so she could get a proof of sending. A clear profit of about six pounds was hardly putting her in the Alan Sugar bracket, but her little business was up and running. As she hoped she would be soon.
There was a florist on the same row of shops. Bonnie picked two bunches of freesias. Alma loved them. When she was at the end of her life, she had a bunch on either side of her bed so she could smell the scent. She’d been so very poorly with that horrible imprisoning disease. You get what you deserve in life, I always say. That’s what Alma had said to her once, deliberately provocative, when she heard that Bonnie’s father had pneumonia, on top of everything else. She’d said it in front of her friend Katherine, her audience, her witness. To this day, Bonnie didn’t know how she’d stopped herself from tearing across the room and slapping her round, flabby face, sending her jowls juddering. See that look in her eyes, Katherine? She’d kill me if she could, Alma had smirked at her friend. And Bonnie had played right into her hands by answering, Yes, Alma, right now I think I could kill you if I had the chance. If only she hadn’t.
Alma had hated her from the off. Even at her wedding, she had dressed from head to toe in black, refusing the pink carnation corsage which Bonnie had bought for her to wear. She’d done her best to ruin the day with her far from whispered remarks to Katherine, who’d been invited because Alma said she wouldn’t attend otherwise. Alma had taken her son aside before they went into the registry office, but not too far away that Bonnie couldn’t hear what she was saying to him. ‘It will end in tears, Stephen. Do not marry this woman. You are worth more. She’s after your money and she does not love you. It is not too late to back out. You’ve only known her two minutes and she’s saddled with an invalid father. Look at him. And don’t you be thinking now you’re wed to her, you’re going to stuff me in an old people’s home like she did that poor thing sat dribbling who hasn’t a clue where he is or why.’
It was her wedding day and she had said her vows with tears pricking at the back of her eyes. And afterwards, Harry Grimshaw, who had sat with her dad, holding his hand through the ceremony, had told her that he would drive her away right now if she wanted and help her undo the binds of the promises she had just made.
She should have taken him up on the offer and gone.
Bonnie gave her head a small shake to dislodge the picture of Alma from her inner vision because the tears it brought with it were clouding her eyes as she drove to the cemetery just outside the town centre. Despite all the money Stephen had inherited, he hadn’t splashed out on a fancy stone for his ‘beloved mother’ as he’d called her in his eulogy at the funeral service. She rested in the next plot to her husband who had had a much taller, grander headstone, paid for by his widow.
Bonnie placed the freesias in the pot and tore up the long grass that was covering the dates and the words: Alma Elizabeth Brookland. Into your Care, my God.
‘Happy Birthday, Alma,’ said Bonnie. ‘I came to tell you that I’m going to leave your son. As you knew I would.’
Chapter 21
Jackpot was there
bright and early at the Pot of Gold the next morning to set up his unit. He was a stocky, craggy-faced man with huge muscly arms and twinkling blue-green eyes. His voice was fag-ravaged, smoky and gravelly, his accent the broadest Yorkshire imaginable. Lew wasted no time in asking him about the Chinese items from Mrs Twist’s hoard. He picked up the saucer with fingers thick as cigars.
‘Very nice,’ he said, pulling a loupe out of his pocket so he could view the character marks on the bottom. ‘Where the ’ell did you get it?’
Lew smiled. ‘An old lady brought it in with this.’
Jackpot put the saucer down and his hand reached out greedily for the cup.
‘Bugger me,’ he said, viewing that also through the loupe. ‘It’s as genuine as my arse.’
Behind him Vintage Valerie tutted her disapproval at his crudity. Jackpot threw her a look over his shoulder.
‘Get back to hanging up your frocks, you,’ he growled at her.
‘No wonder they never called you to present the Antiques Roadshow, Jack dear,’ she said with a haughty sniff.
Jackpot ignored that and switched his attention back to the Chinese duo.
‘This is very special, lad. This is no fake. Get in touch with Christie’s, look on the internet, there’s a valuation process you have to go through. They’ve got an oriental specialist. Send them as full a description as you can, close-up photos of these two pieces from all angles, measurements, weight and if they’re interested they’ll come back to you. But I guarantee they will. They’ll want you to send it down but I’d take it personally if I were you.’
Valerie came to peer over his shoulder and Bonnie noticed how she momentarily rested her long chin on it. Over the years she had witnessed rare little intimacies like this between them and it crossed her mind more than once to wonder if they had any shared history, only for it to be dismissed as nonsense. It would be like finding out that the Queen had a thing for Hulk Hogan.
The Queen of Wishful Thinking Page 10
