The Teashop on the Corner

by Milly Johnson

  Mr T was holding a clipboard and a pen. He could tell from Will’s expression that he knew why they were there.

  ‘I’m here for your car sir, unless you can give me a cash amount of . . .’ he referred to his paperwork ‘. . . two thousand, eight hundred and sixty two pounds exactly.’

  Will sighed and moved his head slowly from side to side.

  ‘I only wish I could.’

  ‘Or I could put the car in our pound and you have twenty-four hours to claim it back.’

  Will looked over at his pride and joy Jaguar sitting on the drive. He would be so sorry to see it go. But go it must.

  Across the road in the seven-bedroomed detached with the stone lion sentries, he saw the lounge curtain twitch. Then Mr Roy ‘Koi-Carp-Pond’ Wright next door emerged from his house, briefcase in hand, just in time to witness some more of Will’s humiliation.

  ‘If not, could I have your car key, sir,’ the man said with a look, I feel for you mate so let’s make this as simple and pain-free as we can tone to his voice.

  Will foraged in his pocket and took out the car key. He hadn’t thought it would be repossessed quite so soon, but now the moment was here and he had no fight left to contest it.

  Roy Wright was taking an age to get into his car. Will could see him over their adjoining low hedge, pretending to look through his briefcase but really eavesdropping on his poor unfortunate business-failure of a neighbour.

  ‘Do you need anything out of the car, sir?’

  ‘No thanks,’ said Will. They could keep the windscreen sponge and the wine gums in the glove box.

  ‘Do you have spare keys, sir?’

  ‘Yeah, course.’ Will stepped back inside the house and took the two spare car keys from the hook behind the door. They were still on a Linton Roofing promotional keyring. He handed them over with the MOT certificate and the service book.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Nicole was sitting silently on the stairs, her head in her perfectly manicured hands and hostile vibes missiling out from her every pore. After he had finished his business with the repossession men, Will shut the door and hurried to comfort his wife. As soon as his arm fell around her shoulder, she erupted like a volcano. She pushed him violently away, lashing out at him, then jumped up, her forehead as creased with fury as the Botox would allow.

  ‘Don’t fucking touch me,’ she said.

  ‘It’s just a car, love. A lump of metal . . .’

  ‘I have never been so ashamed. The neighbours watching—’

  ‘Sod them,’ said Will. ‘It doesn’t matter. There are greater men than me who have found themselves in this position. I don’t care what a few nosey neighbours think . . .’

  ‘Well I do,’ screamed Nicole, thumping herself in her three-thousand-pound boob job with her fist. ‘I fucking do.’

  ‘Nicole . . . darling,’ he took one step towards her and she took a longer one back.

  ‘It’s the last straw, Will,’ she said. ‘The shame, the humiliation. I can’t live with it any more.’

  He caught her arm as she turned up the stairs. ‘You can’t live with the humiliation or you can’t live with me?’

  Her head swivelled slowly on a smooth arc to face him. He had the funniest feeling that if she had wanted to, she could have turned it through three hundred and sixty degrees. Like an owl. Or the possessed kid from The Exorcist.

  ‘Okay then: you,’ she said, fixing him with her cold eyes. ‘You and the humiliation are one and the same. You’re a failure, Will Linton. And I don’t do failures.’

  ‘For richer or poorer, remember those words?’ he reminded her, calmly, although his heart was thumping inside. She couldn’t abandon him as well. His life as he knew it was landsliding away from him. ‘You married me, not my money, Nicole. Six years ago, you said your vows to William Benjamin Brian Linton, didn’t you? Not William’s bleedin’ bank account.’

  She didn’t answer; and then he knew. He didn’t want to let himself believe it because it would really hurt. She had never known him poor. He had owned a business, a big house and a flash car when they met. Being married to Will Linton was not the main attraction of being Mrs William Linton.

  ‘I’m not made for being poor and struggling,’ she said, removing his hand from her arm with careful pincered fingers, as if it were diseased.

  ‘Nicole. I love you,’ he said, unable to fully comprehend he was hearing this. She was going to turn around in a minute and say, ‘ha ha, not really.’ But in the seven years he had known her, he suddenly realised, he had never heard her once make a joke.

  ‘You’ll get over it,’ she said in her elocution-lessoned voice. ‘Don’t try and stop me leaving. I’m going home to my parents. If you follow me, Dad will set the dogs on you; and when they’ve finished with you, if there is anything left to arrest, he’ll call the police. My solicitor will be in touch. Let’s make it quick and painless, shall we? It’s over, Will. You can go down with your ship but don’t expect me not to catch a lifeboat.’

  He didn’t follow her. He poured himself a scotch and sank onto the huge cream leather sofa, imagining her moving about, packing her suitcase, taking her jewellery out of her safe. There was no point in fighting for her. She wasn’t doing this for effect, so that he would bounce upstairs and seduce her into staying. He knew her too well. Nicole’s idea of roughing it was there being no lobster option on a business-class flight menu. She didn’t even bother to say goodbye an hour later when he was half-wrecked on single malt, tears cutting down his cheeks. She just climbed into the sports car that daddy had bought her last year instead of an Easter egg and drove off, viciously spitting gravel in his direction.

  Chapter 12

  By some miracle the Barnsley Chronicle had not reported what had happened at Martin’s funeral. There had been some armed robberies in the off-licence chain The Booze Brothers, which had grabbed the headlines for two weeks. The first report covered the actual robbery, the second the arrest of the culprits after one of the thieves had pasted his own Crimestoppers photo on Facebook, adding the caption ‘Fame at Last’. Carla was only glad to know there were idiots like that in the world to keep what potential press interest there might have been in her fully occupied. By an even bigger miracle, it had also bypassed the Daily Trumpet, the sensationalist South Yorkshire newspaper and the most inept publication in the history of mankind. Carla had checked it every day for a week and a half after the debacle, by which time she would have qualified as being ‘old news’ and unworthy of column inches. Most of the Daily Trumpet was taken up with apologies for stories it had wrongly reported in the past few days. By rights, it shouldn’t have made any money, but it had acquired a certain cult status with its readers who purchased it merely for the errors and pushed the privately-owned business into decent profit.

  A letter had arrived from Julie’s solicitor demanding that Carla vacate the property by the last day of June. Carla didn’t know if she should see a solicitor as well. She felt numb and, for the first time, very hungry. She tipped three Weetabix into a bowl then realised that the two-pinter of milk in her fridge had the lumpy consistency of old yogurt. She walked to the shop down the road for some fresh and a loaf and a tub of butter. It was the first time she had done any shopping since before Martin had died. The Weetabix tasted bland and unappetising in her mouth, despite her ravenous hunger, but she forced it down. Before that, she couldn’t remember when she had last eaten. Her jeans were hanging from her.

  She didn’t know what to do with herself. She didn’t even know what day it was. How long was it until the end of June? Where would she go? How could she pack up and leave – she barely had enough energy to brush her teeth. She wished Theresa was home; then again she wished she wasn’t. She didn’t want Theresa to walk through the door all full of smiles and sunshine and for Carla to fall on her sobbing. She couldn’t remember when Theresa was coming back. The last Monday in May was ringing a bell for some reason.

  There was a knock at the back do
or and it was pushed open by whoever was on the outside and in walked Theresa, all smiles and sunshine.

  ‘Coo-ee. Guess who?’ Then the smile dropped from the tanned face. ‘Jesus. Have you been on a diet?’

  And despite her best intentions not to, Carla fell on her best friend sobbing.

  Chapter 13

  Molly was determined to find the Royal Doulton figurine. It had to be in this house somewhere because she wouldn’t have thrown it out. Her compact and pen might have been mislaid or accidentally fallen out of her handbag, but a figurine was harder to lose and it was needling her that she couldn’t find it. It wasn’t in any of the obvious places, so she started to look in the more obscure ones, secretly hoping that she wouldn’t find it at the back of a drawer or in a box of photographs – because what would that say about her mental state if she had put it in there and couldn’t remember doing so?

  There was nothing in the wardrobe or the large bedding chest. There was no trace of it in the beautiful old rolltop desk which used to belong to dear Mr Brandywine senior, which he always promised Molly she would have – and the family had honoured that promise. Molly could never think of Emma and George Brandywine without a fond smile. They were the kindest, most gentle couple she had ever met. She had loved them and grieved for them as a true daughter would when they died.

  Molly kept a treasure box in the deep bottom left drawer of the old desk. If the figurine was anywhere other than on the shelf, the odds were that she had mistakenly put it in there – but when she took off the lid, it was clearly not inside. Top of the pile of contents was a card from Emma and George congratulating her on getting her first job as Dr Dodworth’s receptionist. Inside, Emma’s scrolling sentiment was written in her scratchy fine ink pen. We are so proud of you, Molly. We know you will make a wonderful receptionist. With Lots of Love, ‘Ma & Pa’.

  It had begun as a joke, Molly referring to them as Ma and Pa, but it stuck. She suspected the Brandywines knew how much she wanted someone to call parents and they accepted their titles willingly. Molly’s eyes filled with unshed tears and she blinked hard to stop more rising. A thought of Ma and Pa Brandywine visited her every day without fail.

  Underneath was a twenty-first birthday card to her from Bernard and Margaret. It had been scented, but the fragrance of roses was long gone. Molly couldn’t even remember how she celebrated that birthday. She was married then, but her life was a sham, she was miserable and low and the youthful years that should have been filled with hope and a new beginning were worse than those of her earlier life of confusion and helplessness. There was no reference to Edwin Beardsall in her box. She had not carried one single good memory of her ex-husband forward.

  Next in the pile was the Mother’s Day card Graham had made at primary school. The front had a picture of a daffodil on it, a cup from an egg carton painted orange forming the flower’s trumpet. It was the only hand-made card she had ever received, and that was because the kind teacher at school had posted it to her directly. She had been under strict instructions to send any Mother’s Day cards he made to his paternal grandmother, not to Molly, and so she had helped Graham make another in secret at playtime. The glue was failing and the cup had almost fallen off entirely. Molly’s finger lightly traced the large heavily-looped letters: ‘To My Mother’. He had never called her mum, only ever mother.

  There was her school report card. It read:

  Molly is quiet, unconfrontational and works very hard. Her attention to detail should be praised and her hand-writing is exemplary. She would make an excellent secretary.

  The ‘unconfrontational’ comment was an indirect reference to her sister, whom Miss Wolf had found very confrontational. Their teacher was a horrible old bat, Molly chuckled to herself. She hadn’t liked any of her pupils very much, and Margaret least of all. She had been terribly unfair to . . . what was her name . . . Phyllis . . . Phyllis Wood, that was it. Phyllis came from a very poor family: her clothes were often stained and tatty and she wore the same socks day after day. Miss Wolf had made Phyllis stand on a chair as an example of how not to dress for school and Phyllis had been crying until Margaret grabbed her hand and pulled her down from her pedestal of ridicule. Before Miss Wolf could get her words out, Margaret had told her that she was evil and that their uncle was a solicitor and Margaret was going to tell him what she had done to Phyllis and persuade Mr and Mrs Wood to press charges.

  Miss Wolf had stuck her face in Molly’s and demanded of her: ‘Is your uncle a solicitor?’ She had known that Molly wouldn’t dare lie to her.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Molly, hoping Miss Wolf hadn’t noticed the nervous gulp in her throat. ‘Our mother’s brother, Uncle Frederick. He works in Leeds, for the court.’ Deception didn’t come easy to Molly, but she would rather tell a lie than get Margaret into trouble.

  Molly hadn’t been able to sleep properly for weeks, thinking that Miss Wolf was going to ask their mother and father if Uncle Frederick really was a solicitor. They didn’t even have an uncle. But Miss Wolf never did. And she never put Phyllis Wood on a chair again and mocked her either.

  Molly shivered. Miss Wolf had turned out to be an angel compared to some people she had encountered in her life. She could have laughed when the next card in the pile came from him. A postcard, from Blackpool. Harvey Hoyland. The biggest devil of them all.

  My dear Molly,

  Wish you were here

  H x

  He always had such lovely handwriting. She had once looked up his wide-spaced, slanting style in a graphology book to see what it said about him: Trustworthy, loyal and well-adjusted. Enjoyed freedom and didn’t like to be hemmed in. Well, the last part of that analysis was as true as the first part wasn’t.

  He had been gone three months when that postcard had arrived and she hadn’t known what to make of it. Even now she could recall the quickening in her heart when she plucked it out of the letter-box. She analysed it for days: did it mean he wanted her to go up to Blackpool and find him? Did he really miss her? Why had he sent it if he didn’t miss her? What would his fancy-piece think about him sending a postcard to his estranged wife? Did he mean he wished Molly was there as well as, or instead of, her? Was the front picture of a child on a donkey of any significance? Or was he rubbing it in by telling her that life was so good for him now that he wished she were here to witness it? She didn’t know and never would.

  He didn’t write again. He slipped out of her life like a shadow runs from the sun, never asking for anything in the divorce settlement. She had hated him so much for the silence which was a torture. Why had she kept that damned postcard anyway? It held a ridiculous power to stir up settled waters within her where old feelings still subsisted in glorious technicolour, even now after twenty-eight years. Molly made to tear it in two, rip it in shreds the way that Harvey Hoyland had ripped up her heart. It wasn’t the first time that she had tried to rid herself of it, but she had never managed to. This time was no exception. She hurriedly put the lid on the box and stuffed it back in the desk drawer. Out of sight, out of mind.

  She wished she could have wiped the blackboard of her life clean and started again: been more like Margaret, stood up to Edwin, run away with her son and never let his father or grandmother see him again. And what about Harvey Hoyland? A voice in her head asked her. And she didn’t know the answer. Half of her would never have said yes to agreeing to go to the pictures with him that frosty November night when she had slipped on a patch of ice in the town centre and he’d caught her. Half of her would have given him free rein to all the parts of her heart and her mind to which she had denied him entry.

  Molly shook her head as if trying to purge it of the vision of her second ex-husband. There was no point in philosophising about him. She would never see him again. He could even be dead and buried. He smoked, he drank rough spirits, though he was more likely to have been murdered by some husband whose wife he had stolen or by a gambling-house owner to whom he owed money than to die peacefully alone in a bed.
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  Molly carried on with the business of searching for the figurine, but she didn’t find it.

  Chapter 14

  Will went out at nine a.m. exactly to catch the train for a meeting with his accountant in Huddersfield, who sighed and shook his head a lot at him, and then he went to pick up his new vehicle – a battered Nissan white van which his regular car mechanic had bought at an auction and kindly offered him first refusal on after hearing about his troubles. Will was touched by his thoughtfulness and said yes on the spot. Cosmetically, it looked shot at, but it was still a snip at eight hundred pounds. A very short time ago, eight hundred pounds would have just about covered the cost of two wheels on his Jaguar, and he wouldn’t have thought twice about the expense. Ironically, his first ever car had been an old Nissan and now he had gone full loop back to the beginning. Still, it would be a useful runaround with a sound engine and it would get him to where he wanted to go without haemorrhaging petrol and he would just have to get used to travelling from A to B without turning heads for the foreseeable future.

  By the time he arrived back home, he opened the front door to find that Nicole had returned and gone through the house like a locust. It was stripped. He didn’t mind that she had taken the dining table and ten upholstered chairs or the swanky Harrods dinner service that had been a wedding present to them both – or even the display cabinet that housed the swanky dinner service. He didn’t even mind that the huge leather sofas were gone, or the baby grand piano that she had insisted she wanted for Christmas but couldn’t even bang out Chopsticks on it. He even laughed that she had taken the Christmas tree from the garage – and the box of baubles and tinsel. Jesus – she must have had a team of joiners primed to disassemble their ornate four-poster and the huge French armoire wardrobes and transport them to waiting delivery vans.

  She did have the decency to leave him the double bed in the spare room – and the bedding on it. One bath towel, one cup, one plate, one knife, one fork and one spoon. She also left the kettle and all the food in the cupboards and the built-in fridge, dishwasher and washing machine. But what he couldn’t – and wouldn’t – stomach was the sight of his open safe in their bedroom. When he checked it, it had been wiped clean of the Tag Heuer watch she bought him for Christmas – not surprisingly – but also of the small shell box in which he kept his mother’s wedding and engagement rings, his dad’s wedding band and his sister’s twenty-first emerald ring, which their parents had bought her two months before she died of leukaemia.