The Teashop on the Corner

by Milly Johnson

  ‘Not alone, I see.’

  ‘Sherry’s upstairs.’

  On cue, the toilet flushed and Molly thought she must have been mistaken about the bedroom. Sherry was in the bathroom after all.

  ‘Sounds like a herd of elephants,’ said Margaret, as Sherry’s leaden footsteps began to descend the staircase. ‘I’m presuming the diet hasn’t worked.’

  Molly held a finger to her lips. ‘Behave,’ she warned.

  ‘Fee fi fo fum . . .’ said Margaret, mischievously, winking at her reproving sister.

  ‘Oh, hello Margaret,’ said Sherry, re-entering the room. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’

  I’ll bet, thought the twins in mental unison.

  ‘Hello, Sherry,’ smiled Margaret. Molly knew it was her fake smile because she was baring her teeth and she never did that with her genuine smile. ‘How nice to see you again. How’s the family?’

  ‘Very well, thank you. Gram is working hard as usual and Archie is in his second year at university now.’

  ‘What’s he studying?’ Crab-torturing? Genocide?

  ‘Sociology.’

  Sociopathy more like, thought Margaret.

  ‘He’s a brain box. Just like his father,’ said Sherry proudly.

  ‘I’ve forgotten what they both look like,’ said Margaret, holding on to that scary smile which looked as if it had been fixed by rigor mortis. ‘I don’t think Graham had started puberty the last time I saw him.’ And had it been up to me, I’d have drowned the little bugger before he got to it as well.

  ‘Ha ha,’ laughed Sherry. ‘I think our wedding came after puberty. He’s very busy. He wishes he could spend more time with his mother, of course. C’est la vie. I hardly ever see my little Archie, either.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ whispered Margaret under her breath. Archie was as much a mini-me of Graham as Graham was of his father Edwin. A selfish blighter put on this earth to serve his own interests and sod everyone else. Archie made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, not that she had ever admitted that to her sister. Even as a little boy, there was something about him that made his father look like St Francis of Assisi by comparison – and that was no mean feat.

  ‘Well, I’d better get back home then and polish my brasses,’ said Sherry, sliding her coat from the back of the chair. The coat looked expensive. It had a plush satin lining and a gold chain inside the collar to hang it up by. ‘I’ll see you very soon, dear.’ She bent over her mother-in-law and kissed her cheek, leaving a red-lipsticked imprint. She blew a kiss towards Margaret. ‘So nice to have seen you again, Margaret. You look well.’

  ‘So do you,’ smiled Margaret, teeth still exposed.

  And with that, Sherry exited the room, leaving a fug of scent and hairspray hanging behind her in the air.

  Margaret wafted the smell away from her before it contaminated her lungs.

  ‘What is that perfume? Zoflora? She must have put a bucket on. And a full can of Silvrikin.’

  ‘She’d just come from the beauticians.’

  ‘Were they shut?’

  ‘Naughty Margaret,’ chuckled Molly.

  Margaret reached for a biscuit. ‘I suppose it’s too much to ask why Graham hasn’t been to visit you in months.’

  Molly shrugged her shoulders. She hadn’t seen her son since Mother’s Day, and then it had been a rushed ten-minute visit. ‘I sometimes wonder if he remembers I exist.’

  Margaret bit her tongue on what she’d been going to say. She leaned over and put her arm around her sister instead. ‘I’m sure he does. You raise them, teach them to flap their wings, then have to stand and watch when they fly off to their own lives. That’s a mother’s duty.’ Except in Molly’s case, she’d never really had the chance to raise him. Margaret doubted it would have made much difference though. Graham was intrinsically rotten, the way his father was. He wouldn’t have turned out well if he’d been raised by an abbey-ful of Julie Andrews in a jolly singing nun ensemble. ‘We ask them not to look back once they’ve left the nest and it breaks our hearts when they obey us.’

  ‘That’s not what Melinda is like.’ Molly’s reply was weighted with sadness.

  ‘Boys are different, love.’

  Margaret injected as much tenderness into her voice as she could, although she hated her nephew with a vengeance, ever since her six-year-old daughter had run in screaming that her twelve-year-old cousin was trying to hang their cat Claude with her skipping rope. Margaret had given him the spanking of his life and they’d loathed each other ever since. Claude had been so traumatised that Bernard was the only other male he would tolerate afterwards. Graham had only invited her to his wedding because his auntie Margaret had a few bob and he was banking on a big present, she was sure of it. He hadn’t got one though.

  ‘Darling. I’ve got something to tell you,’ said Margaret, changing the subject. ‘It’s about our holiday this year. We’re taking a cruise. We leave in just over a fortnight, on the first of June, and we’re back on July the seventh. It’s all very last minute. I’m sorry.’

  Molly brightened up instantly. ‘Oh are we? I’ve always wanted to . . .’

  There was something about her sister’s expression that made her words dry up.

  ‘Ah,’ she guessed at it. ‘I’m not going, am I?’

  ‘Oh love,’ said Margaret, softly. ‘Bernard has found a cancellation that we can’t turn down and booked us on a leg of the world cruise for our Golden Wedding. Just the two of us, for once. Are you dreadfully upset?’

  Molly shook her head wildly. ‘Don’t be silly, Margaret. I’ve been on holiday every year with you for a quarter of a century. I think you’re overdue a little couple time. You must go, and of course I’m not upset.’

  ‘Just for once. You will be all right, won’t you?’

  ‘I should think I’ll manage,’ smiled Molly, gulping back a throatful of tears. She had never been apart from her sister for anything like as long as that. Margaret was likely to come back and find her in Autumn Grange with her beloved Willowfell sold and the proceeds transferred to Graham’s bank account, if that’s what he and Sherry were after.

  ‘Bernard was worried about how you’d take it,’ said Margaret, squeezing Molly’s hand. ‘He says he’ll make it up to you and we shall all go on a cruise together next year.’

  ‘Ooh, now that is something to look forward to.’ Dear Bernard, thought Molly. She had been looking for her own Bernard Brandywine all her life. Twice she thought she had found him and twice she found she hadn’t.

  ‘Come and have lunch with us,’ said Margaret. ‘Bernard is cooking coq au vin. And we’ve just had a case of ice wine delivered. I think we should test it to make sure it’s a good year.’

  ‘Oh well, that’s convinced me,’ said Molly. ‘I’ll be over soon then. I want to put some sheets through the wash.’

  Margaret returned home and Molly went upstairs to strip her bed as today’s warm breeze was too good to waste. The door to the third bedroom, which was always kept shut, was slightly ajar. She’d been right, then. Sherry Beardsall had been snooping around in there after all.

  Chapter 7

  Margaret’s long drawn-out sigh as she walked through the back door into her kitchen answered her husband’s question before he had even asked it. He put his broadsheet paper down on the table.

  ‘She didn’t take it well, I gather? Poor Molly.’

  ‘Molly took it very well, actually,’ said Margaret, sitting down with him. ‘She gave us her absolute blessing to go.’

  ‘Why the long face, then?’ said Bernard, reaching across the table to put his hand on hers.

  ‘Sherry Beardsall was there when I went in.’

  ‘Sherry? What was she doing there?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I don’t like it. I smell a rat.’

  ‘Maybe, just maybe, she didn’t have an ulterior motive. Maybe she called to see how Molly was,’ Bernard suggested.

  ‘And maybe I’m the Shah of Persia,’ said Margaret. ‘No, the B
eardsalls don’t do anything out of the goodness of their hearts. Sherry was up to something, you mark my words.’

  Her lip pulled back over her teeth when she thought about the Beardsalls – past and present. She understood why the young twenty-year-old Molly had fallen for the tall, well-built charmer and older man Edwin Beardsall. She had wanted to find her own guardian angel, as Margaret had found hers in Bernard. Edwin Beardsall had whisked pregnant Molly up the aisle before she had a chance to breathe; and when Bernard had to step in and rescue her poor sister from the violent brute a year later, Edwin had refused to let her take the baby with her. He could prove Molly was mentally unstable, he said. And even Bernard with his legal connections couldn’t win against Edwin and his family’s old-established masonic ones. Molly always maintained that growing up with Edwin and Thelma, his old bat of a mother, had ruined young Graham. Margaret was more inclined to think that young Graham was a bad lot from the off, and her intuition had always been spookily accurate. Even if he had been allowed to live with his lovely sweet kind mother, Margaret doubted that Graham Beardsall would have turned out any differently to the way he had.

  ‘I wish Molly had found her Bernard Brandywine,’ said Margaret, savouring the warmth of her husband’s hand on top of her own.

  ‘What a lovely thing to say,’ replied Bernard, smiling at her. He was still able to make her knees go a bit weak at the thought that she was the sole recipient of that smile.

  He had been her knight in shining armour from the moment he laid eyes on her at the bus stop on her sixteenth birthday. Her umbrella had blown across the road and into Maltstone churchyard and he had chased it; a strapping nineteen-year-old on his first term break from a law degree at Oxford, climbing over the wall to retrieve it for her. She had been in love with him within the first five minutes and that love had only deepened over the years.

  ‘I think she’s been looking for someone like you her whole life,’ said Margaret, with a heavy sigh. ‘She thought she’d found you, both in that awful Edwin and in Harvey Hoyland. I only wish she’d married someone who had been kind to her. She deserved much better than either of them. Good God, even Graham has found a soul-mate. If there is someone out there for him, there must be someone out there for everyone.’

  ‘I always liked Harvey,’ mused Bernard, shocking his wife.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Harvey. I always thought he and Margaret made a good couple.’

  ‘After what he did to her? Don’t be ridic—’

  Bernard held up his hands to quieten his wife. ‘I often wonder if they talked. I wish I’d interfered at the time, you know, taken Harvey to one side.’

  For once Margaret didn’t have a comment to make. She had always presumed that Harvey knew. That’s what made his walking out so extra cruel. She and her sister were close as twins could be, but there were some things that Molly would never talk about, not even to her.

  ‘What Harvey did was wrong, of course, but I don’t think we know the whole story. It was far too easy for us to bring down the protective curtain over Molly. I know it, and you know it, my love.’

  Margaret swallowed hard. Over the past twenty-eight years she had discarded all the warm memories of Harvey Hoyland making her sister the happiest she had ever been. It would have been disloyal to Molly to admit, even to herself, that she had liked him enormously and had felt an honest, genuine vibe from him. It was much easier to admit that her intuition was wrong on this occasion. After all, how could he have been a decent man when he walked out on Molly for a floozy barmaid with hair like a haystack and breasts that announced her arrival five minutes before the rest of her appeared?

  ‘We will all go somewhere warm for a week in October,’ said Bernard, changing the subject. ‘We will make it up to Molly with a lovely holiday. Wherever she wants to go, we will let her choose. Then next year we will take her cruising with us, as I said.’

  ‘That will be lovely, darling,’ said Margaret. She was such a lucky woman: she had her Bernard and their beautiful daughter Melinda, a vet working in a gorgeous part of the Dales. Molly had an unhealable broken heart and a son, daughter-in-law and grandson who made the Addams Family look like The Brady Bunch.

  Poor Molly.

  Chapter 8

  When Carla opened the door to the house she had shared for ten years with Martin, it didn’t feel like her home any more. It had been somehow transformed into a stranger’s domain in which she was an interloper of the highest order. She had expected to return to rooms full of reminiscences, happy ones that might lessen the sadness of the funeral day, of her newly-widowed circumstances, but every thought of Martin sliced into her like a knife and her eyes couldn’t bear to rest on anything. It was as if everything retained a poisoned memory. Even the kettle. He had made her a coffee the night before he died. What was going through his head as he waited for it to boil? How to tell her that he was leaving her? When to say the words? What words to say? She switched the kettle on and made herself a cup of tea. The mid-May sun was shining through the window, warming the kitchen, bathing it in a cheerful yellow cast as the light filtered through the lemon curtains, but Carla was frozen to the core and felt black and dead inside.

  She sat at the table and tried to draw some comfort from the heat permeating the cup. They’d had sex on the Friday before he died. He’d been really up for it, for a change. They’d eaten a delicious Chinese takeaway that she’d paid for as a treat, because he said he’d had a bad week sales-wise and wouldn’t hit his target. Oh God, the lies. He’d opened two bottles of Peroni for them and they’d sat in companionable silence watching a Poirot which she had recorded on the TV. Then they’d gone to bed and she’d known he was in ‘that mood’ because he had slipped between the sheets without his pants on and had sprayed himself liberally with the Joop she had bought him for Christmas. Carla had welcomed his attentions – although he was hardly Mr Foreplay and those ‘attentions’ were short and perfunctory. But if he was happy, she was happy. Satisfied, he slid off her and directly into a snoring contented sleep and Carla had cuddled up to his plump, hairy back.

  Until she heard the splash, she wasn’t aware she was crying into her cup. How much of the past ten years with Martin had been a lie? He’d had an affair in the first year of their marriage, a brief stupid fling that she’d found out about because he hadn’t been very good at covering it up. She had known without a doubt that if it ever happened again she would have seen it coming a mile off because he was rubbish at deception. But she hadn’t, had she? Somewhere in their marriage he had acquired a master set of duplicitous skills. But why? He had to have been unhappy to have started up another extra-marital relationship, didn’t he? What had she done wrong? She kept a clean house, cooked and washed for him, never gave him grief about being away from home so much with his job, always greeted him with affection when he came home on Fridays. She looked after herself, she was always clean, and nicely dressed. She might have been carrying a few extra pounds on her but she could still squeeze into a size fourteen and she was curvy rather than fat – her waist was ten inches smaller than her bust and hips, just as her Italian mother had been built. So why had he wanted to leave her for a woman he hadn’t seen for thirty years? Her mind wanted to rip apart the last year and scour it for answers to the questions which were banked up in her head but she knew if she let them, she would be drowned by them, destroyed by the sheer weight of his dishonesty.

  She felt as though she would never be able to sleep again. As soon as her brain was off its leash, it would begin its quest to dissect every single part of her life with Martin from the phone calls he made to her from ‘hotels’ when he was supposedly on the road to the ten days he spent ‘team-building’ playing golf in Scotland last October when he’d returned as brown as a berry and blamed a freak Indian summer up there. On Christmas Day, he had gone out for a lunchtime drink with ‘an old friend’ who had come over from Los Angeles and she hadn’t batted an eyelid when he came in at four p.m. apologising t
hat he hadn’t been able to get away. And because she’d served up a very dried-out dinner, she hadn’t blamed him when he hadn’t eaten all that much. Had he had his Christmas dinner with her? Did the friend from Los Angeles even exist? He had never mentioned him before or after so what did that tell her?

  She hadn’t doubted a single thing he’d said to her. How stupid was she? He could have told her that he was late home because he’d been abducted by aliens and she would have believed him because she loved him and trusted him. She picked up her mug and then noticed it was one Martin had bought her. ‘World’s Best Wife’. He had given it to her on Mother’s Day. He always bought her some trinket on Mother’s Day because she didn’t have a child’s card to open. Something like a mug was supposed to take that pain away. She’d thought he was kind to do that.

  Carla launched the cup, still full of tea, at the wall with a primal scream. Then she watched the brown liquid roll down the pale-painted wall, which it would stain indelibly.

  Chapter 9

  ‘Ah, good morning, Mr Singh,’ said Leni, as the bell above the door jangled and the handsome Sikh gentleman came into the shop as immaculate as ever in a suit and dark blue turban. Leni thought he must have been a very handsome man in his youth. He had a generous mouth, large, beautiful dark eyes and thick eyelashes that any young woman would kill for.

  Pavitar Singh had just earned the title of her very first ‘regular’ and that thought made her smile inside. This was the fourth time he had been in the café now. They had both introduced themselves formally last week. He called her by her first name now, yet it didn’t feel right to call him by his.

  ‘Good morning, Leni. It’s a nice bright one.’

  ‘Rain forecast this afternoon, Mr Singh. So don’t hang out your washing,’ laughed Leni. ‘Now, what can I get for you?’