“Oh! Next Tuesday is my birthday.”
“Sorry, is that a problem?”
So, did I come out and admit that I was such a miserable old sod that my birthday evening was to have been spent admiring Johnny Depp’s very particular walk in Pirates of the Caribbean, possibly after a swift gin and tonic in the Ha-Ha bar with Jace? And Mrs. Treadgold had made me a cake. Coffee Victoria sponge, my favourite. “Well, I had been intending to catch a gig at the jazz club, but I can easily give that a miss. Maybe we could go for dinner.”
“Meet you at the station at eightish? The best train for me to catch is due in York at seven forty-five. Look, sorry Alys, but I really have to rush off now.”
“I’ll see you next Tuesday.” But I was talking to a dead line, he’d already gone. I hugged myself in an over-rush of silent glee, seizing a senile gypsophilia stem and whirling it over my head. “She shoots, she scores. And the crowd goes mad!”
“They’re not the only ones. Have you gone completely off your elderly trolley, Mother?” Florence had her entire wardrobe spread over the floor in the living room and was piecing together outfits which looked more like piece than outfit.
“Oh Lord. You’re off tomorrow, aren’t you? Piers not here, helping you to pack?”
“Nah, he’s busy looking at flats.”
Piers currently lived in a self-contained flat attached to Alasdair and Tamar’s house. I wasn’t surprised he wanted to move. It must be tricky having a constant procession of girlfriends pass by right under your mother’s eye. It would be like permanently having sex in public. Unless that was what turned him on. Eww, I did not want that thought. “You’ll miss him when he’s not there every time you go over.”
Florence stuffed another pair of micro-knickers into her bag. “Yeah. Piers is cool. Oh, by the way Mum, before I forget.” She pulled a long, heavy-looking parcel from underneath the bag. “Happy birthday for next Tuesday. You can open it now, if you want.”
“Oh, thank you, darling.” I tried to pretend surprise but I could feel the glass weight in my hand. It felt as though she’d already framed the photographs. “Oh. What a lovely—chopping board.”
“Yeah, well, I noticed the worktop’s getting a bit scratched. Oh, and there’s a card.”
This one bore a joke at which I guffawed appreciatively and silently swore to get Jacinta to explain to me. Maybe the photographs hadn’t come out as well as Florrie had hoped. She was self-indulgently vain, in the way that only a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl could be.
I went to bed and left her to her packing, so that I could lie under the deep gaze of Theo Wood. Better take that down before next Tuesday, I thought to myself. Not many men like having an oversized version of their own faces criticising their seduction techniques.
Chapter Twelve
Next morning I waved Florence off on the early London train, in company with Tina, Keisha’s mother, both of us looking as though we were sending a couple of five-year-olds off on their first day of school. “They’ll be fine,” Tina reassured me. “Lex has turned into a sensible girl now she’s got the baby and Stevie to look after. What’s Florence most keen to do down in London?”
“She wants to spend loads of cash, obviously, and her Dad’s decided to indulge that particular whim so…”
Tina sighed in sympathy, having brought up her three girls with the minimum of paternal contribution, although hers had been the result of a decamping husband rather than a moral stand. “You’re from London, right, Alys? Is she going to visit any relatives while she’s there?”
Now it was my turn to sigh. “No. My parents died when I was at university, I’ve no relatives there any more. She’ll be quite happy to go along with whatever Keisha wants to do, I should think.”
Tina and I glanced at each other nervously, full of memories of what we had wanted to do when we were sixteen, and imaginings of what we would have done if let loose with pockets full of money and only a twenty-two-year-old sister in charge. “They’re sensible girls,” Tina said hopefully. “They’ll have fun.”
Yeah, I thought miserably as I caught the bus to take me from the station to Webbe’s. They’ll have fun and sex and booze and dancing and boys and wild nights, and it’s not fair! I was going to miss having Florence and, by extension, Piers around the flat. She might be a grumpy, uncommunicative devourer of all the biscuits, but she was my grumpy, uncommunicative devourer.
“Wish I was going to London with not a care in the world,” I muttered to Jace as I slumped over the till.
“But then you would not be seeing your lovely man,” she pointed out. “You cannot have everybody’s life, Alys.”
“I know, I know. Take no notice of me, I’m just feeling peevish.” Also depressed at the awfulness of my flat. Even if Leo did seem to run his own home in a cross between junkie-chic and Oxfam, it was still furnished in the eccentric way of someone who could buy better, but wasn’t bothered. My place was furnished but only just. I couldn’t afford a lifestyle. I couldn’t even afford lifestyle magazines.
“I go make tea. I must adjust my makeup.” Jace shimmied off towards the cubbyhole, leaving me making faces at myself in the shiny surface of the desk.
There was a pile of literary magazines propped up to display their artfully designed covers next to the till and I glanced over them. “Slightly Foxed. That’s me to a tee that is. More than slightly, more like bloody completely foxed. Probably hedgehogged as well. Wouldn’t be surprised.” I pulled another series of huffy faces. When the bell clattered, I hardly even bothered to look up.
“Wind’ll change y’know.”
I glanced in the direction of the doorway. It was the postman, bearing our usual bundle of mail and a large wrapped parcel.
“That looks exciting,” I said, in an ironic way.
“Now, now. It’s not for you anyway. It’s for Jacinta. She about?”
Curiosity overcame me. “No, sorry, she’s”—I lowered my voice, although I knew Jace couldn’t hear anything behind the curtain—“gone home. Women’s troubles, you know.”
“’Nuff said.” He handed me the wedge of brown and buff envelopes in one hand, and I signed for the parcel with the other.
I waited until he’d stepped back into the street before I gave the package a good scrutinising. Okay, it was wrong of me but, well. I spilled the beans to Jace about every detail of my life whilst she didn’t seem to see anything wrong in keeping secrets from me.
The parcel was soft. Squashy. I turned it every which way, but there was no clue to the contents. It was addressed by hand in bold biro and covered in what looked like enough stamps to mail an elephant. I shook it and was just about to “accidentally” tear one corner when Jace emerged, newly made-up.
“This is for you.”
Her eyes went round and she let out a little squeal. “Oh, this is very very good. In time for my weekend too!”
I waited expectantly for her to tear off the wrapping. Instead she shoved the whole thing into her capacious bag. I opened my mouth to ask but closed it again. If she’d wanted me to know she’d have told me, wouldn’t she? I huffed off into the darkest reaches of Biography where I sat on Stephen Fry. Jace obviously thought this all stemmed from my morning whinge and left me to get on with it. Although, to her credit, occasional emergency cups of tea were left at the entrance next to consolatory piles of biscuits for the rest of the day, as if she were feeding the Minotaur in its lair.
I began cleaning and tidying the flat. At least with Florence away, areas that I tidied stayed more or less that way. The bathroom I couldn’t do much about. Cracked tiles and damp walls were still very much in evidence. I went shopping and laid in supplies from the discounted shelves where they sold those items nearly out of date, what Florence always referred to as the “botulism counter”. Dips and mousses, finger foods which would taste their best eaten in bed. Oh dreadful thought, perhaps he wouldn’t want to come back here at all. But, that kiss—that had promised such a lot.
I bo
ught a new duvet set for the bed, crisp Egyptian cotton in classy off-white. Calm tranquillity in my bed was not quite what I was aiming for though. How did I conjure up torrid sex with a tiny hint of long-lasting passion? Unfortunately the years of single parenthood had given me such a complex about spending money on myself that I was almost overcome with guilt at the whole expense. I had to bite my fingers to prevent myself from taking the bed set back to the shop. In the end I bought (in the charity shop, to assuage my mother-guilt) a throw in glowing red velvet and made some scatter cushions from some old curtains, although my sewing technique was not the best and the stitches were so large that the cushions looked like accident victims. With the hint-of-yellow walls and light blue woodwork, the pine dressing table and bedhead, the throw made the bed stand out throbbingly, like a boil on a suntanned bum. It was, to put it mildly, obvious.
Ah well, I thought, standing back to admire my efforts, better obvious than diffident. I mean, look at Simon. I bet he hadn’t had sex since 1989. With anyone. Of either gender. I bet his bedroom was wall-to-wall beige and he could only find the bed by running his hands over the carpet.
Urgh. I shook myself out of this unhealthy preoccupation with my boss’s sleeping arrangements. (Maybe he didn’t have a bed at all. Maybe he rolled himself in sacking and lay on a stone floor. He looked the type.)
“You come to my home on Tuesday,” Jacinta advised on Monday. “Before you go to the station, I will make you up.”
Which certainly made sense since Jace lived midway between Webbe’s and the station. So after work on Tuesday the two of us made our rather giggly way to Jace’s tiny house. It was a one-bedroomed terrace, so tall and thin that on first seeing Jacinta at home, I’d assumed that she could only turn round by going outside. Jacinta opened a bottle of wine. “How many birthday cards are you getting today?” she asked while I struggled into the green dress.
“Um. Well. Simon’s never remembered my birthday, Florence has already given me my card, the book group gave me a joint card yesterday, so did Piers, oddly enough. So—one.”
“One? And what about the card I am giving you?”
“That was the one.”
“Ah, Alys.” Jace sighed and drained her glass in one mouthful. “You need a good man.”
“Perhaps today I’ll actually go about getting one.” Another spark of anticipation fizzed inside me and I gave a beaming smile.
“Well.” She looked me over appreciatively and smoothed some wrinkles out of the dress as she did so. “You are certainly going to grab some eyes. You are lovely woman, Alys. Lovely.” Jacinta gave a small sniff and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Now, are we going to make you a face?”
By the time the wine was finished, we had indeed made me a face. I barely recognised myself in the mirror. “Good God,” I said, impressed. She had been spending so long over applying my makeup that I had begun to wonder if I would emerge looking like a drag queen. But, in the best traditions of makeup artists everywhere, Jace had made me look as though I were wearing none at all. “I look—pretty.”
“Stand up and go around,” she ordered and I obliged, feeling the green skirt flare away from my thighs as I twirled. My hair, which Jace had pinned into a casually tumbled style, flowed around my face. I was impressed. My hair normally made me look somewhere between an auburn poodle and a seventies footballer, but right now it was coming in just to the left of Nicole Kidman. “Beautiful.” Jace quickly sliced away another tear. “You look so certain of yourself.”
“Right now,” I said, pouting at myself in the mirror, “I could proposition Johnny Depp.”
“Then let us hope he is not at the station. You would not be wishing for punching and fighting.”
I felt out of place standing on York station at seven thirty. Around me milled a crowd of returning commuters, all wearing workaday suits and office-dishevelled hair, whilst I stood like a misplaced ageing ingenue, overglamorous and hyped to distraction. I watched the Arrivals board, the seven forty-five which Leo would be on was running ten minutes late, so I bought myself a coffee. I had to ditch most of it on account of my bladder being overwrought with nerves. In the Ladies, I sprayed on more perfume, then worried I would smell too pungent.
As I crouched at the sink trying to wash off the worst of the excess, the creeping self-doubt began. Was I cut out to be a girlfriend anyway? Shouldn’t I be at home, baking cakes for my daughter, whilst she crayoned in the next room? All right, maybe sixteen was bit old for crayoning—perhaps I could bake while she revised, calling out the odd question about the causes of the First World War, or the structure of the ear?
I fished a handful of paper towels from the dispenser and dabbed at myself where the water had splashed over my dress, and thought of Florence’s reaction the only time I’d tried to help her with her homework. She’d fixed me with a baleful glance from an overmascaraed eye, corrected my Latin pronunciation and told me she was going round to a friend’s house to revise. Where it was quieter, apparently.
By the time I emerged, the Exeter train was being announced on Platform Three. I placed myself casually, but with my heart thundering, against a pillar. It would give me maximum time to make an impact particularly if he thought I wasn’t there.
In the event, it was he who wasn’t there. I watched every passenger from the seven forty-five off the train, and every passenger from the eight twenty-nine, and from the nine oh-six. Leo was none of them. By twenty past nine I was so blasted with misery that I got a taxi home and as soon as the front door enclosed me into the safety of my flat, I started to weep.
When the phone rang I wanted to ignore it. But eventually maternal instinct took over. What if it was Florrie? It was Leo.
“Alys! Thank God you’re there at last.”
“Mmmm. I am,” I said, somewhat coolly.
“Only I’ve been trying to get you since ten o’clock this morning. I’m so, so sorry I couldn’t make it. Believe me, I would have if I could, but I’ve had a mare go into premature labour here. The vet’s just left, poor old girl’s absolutely exhausted. I really cannot apologise enough, Alys.”
“I’m sorry you couldn’t come too.” I tried not to sound forlorn. “But I know how animals are. Unpredictable.”
“Yeah, so, look. Um. I know this might be difficult for you and everything.” To his credit he really did sound quite distraught. “Happy birthday by the way. There’s an all-day screening of The Lord of the Rings trilogy at the Odeon in Exeter on Friday and I wondered—if you could get here and everything—if you’d like to go. With me, obviously. We could have dinner afterwards and…”
Oh, please Leo, don’t bother with the “and”. My imagination was already working on that.
“I’d love to,” I said, now enormously cheered. He hadn’t rejected me. We parted telephonic company after an exchange of pleasantries and normal small talk, and I put his picture back up on the bedroom wall; it was only slightly creased from where I’d jumped on his face.
Chapter Thirteen
When I walked into Webbe’s next morning, Simon was pricing up some new books and placing them on a stand. “Good morning.” He put down his pencil and looked at me critically. “And how are you feeling today?”
For one horrible second I thought he was making some kind of ironic reference to his having overworked Jace and I chronically over the last few days. Then she appeared over his left shoulder and started making boggle-eye faces at me.
“Oh, I’m fine.”
“Only Jacinta said that you might not be in today. Says that you were feeling really rough yesterday.”
“I…” I hesitated, uncertain as to the nature of my supposed complaint, until I saw Jace making hand cupped to mouth and heaving gestures. “It was something I ate. Much better now. Up all night though. Terrible. And once I stopped being sick, it started coming out the other end,” I added smoothly so as not to waste his sympathy just in case I felt like sloping off work early.
Simon’s face registered
a mixture of concern and repulsion. He began to back away. “Well, if you feel at all—you know—today, you get off home.” Jacinta was making obscene gestures and rolling her eyes towards the door, and it dawned on me what this was all about. She thought I’d have such a sex-soaked night I’d be unable to get in to work. “No, it’s fine. All over now.”
As soon as Simon was safely away in the cubbyhole, Jace marched me into the cover of Biography. “Well? Is he coming passionately at you?”
I wrinkled my nose. “He wasn’t coming in any sense whatever.” I gave her the details of the attempted telephone calls.
“Hmm.” Jace looked critically into my face. “He is sounding like an unreliable man. Does he have nobody to be petting his horses if he is not there?”
“He did try. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, I’m going down tomorrow for the weekend.”
“I am thinking that it matters very much, if he cannot leave his horses to come and see his woman.” Jace turned away. “I hopes you are taking some care, Alys. Hearts should be given to those who earn them.” I would have credited this with more philosophical depth if I hadn’t noticed the Mills and Boon she’d shoved under the counter, bookmarked halfway through. She and Mrs. Searle were obviously kindred spirits.
I began dusting Queen Victoria since no one seemed to have taken any interest in her for quite some time. This meant lying along the floor to blow dust off the angled edge of the bookcase. I was thusly prone when a shadow fell over me and a voice said, “It’s okay, Alys, you can worship me later.”
“Piers!” I tried to jack-knife to my feet but ended up on all fours performing a sort of press-up manoeuvre with my duster in my hand. “How are you?”
“I’m cool. Listen, when is Florence due back?”
I hauled myself to my feet with judicious use of the shelving. “Not for another week, did she not tell you? She’s having far too good a time, if you ask me.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jace lurking in Poetry, wiggling her eyebrows, and I made shooing motions. She just winked broadly and lasciviously, and pretended to be rearranging books in order to earwig our conversation.
Slightly Foxed Page 7
