What Became of You My Love?

by Maeve Haran

  ‘Is it going to be all right between Mum and Dad?’ whispered Izzy anxiously.

  Stella hugged her. ‘Let’s go home and leave them to talk things over. They probably need a bit of time together.’

  Roxy, meanwhile, was working her magic. ‘You’re a very attractive man,’ Stella heard her murmur as she carried Hal off to the pub garden, ‘you don’t need to go getting involved with married women.’

  In fact, Roxy was doing such a sterling job in distracting Hal that Stella decided not to point out the fact that she happened to be married too.

  Just as they were about to leave, Roxy reappeared and started to help them pack up.

  ‘Thank you for distracting Hal,’ Stella said quietly. ‘I thought it might turn quite nasty.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Roxy smiled ruefully, ‘I’ve got plenty of experience in defusing dramas. A mother like mine tends to attract them. Believe me, I’ve defused from Monaco to Marrakech.’

  It was amazing, given her ghastly childhood, that Roxy had turned into the delight she was. So many children like that ended up having to be the parent instead of the child.

  As if in endorsement of this, Roxy stopped packing up Suze’s bric-a-brac. ‘By the way, I’d like to thank you for letting Mum take over – the food, the tango lessons and all that. She can be a bit full-on.’

  ‘Actually, we were really grateful. She must have made us a mint with her Argentinian barbecue – and she got the meat free!’

  ‘The thing is, she hasn’t had much of a shot at ordinary life. It’s her own fault, obviously, but the glam image, it’s only skin deep. She’s having a tough time at the moment. Following bands isn’t the greatest career choice. Definitely not to be recommended.’

  Stella smiled encouragingly, wondering if this was an element in Roxy’s decision to split with Cameron.

  ‘She had high hopes of the guy who gave her the coat, until she realized it was a goodbye gift.’

  ‘Poor foxes,’ Suze said, and almost added, ‘sacrificed to be a romantic kiss-off’, but caught Stella’s eye. Roxy was trusting them with this revelation.

  ‘I think she’d be happier if her life were more normal. Look at your life here. It’s a real place with friendly people. You know she’s being chucked out of her flat in London? Maybe, if she does get this shop she’s talking about, she should move in upstairs.’

  Stella and Suze exchanged a very speaking look.

  When Emma came round the next morning to fetch Ruby and Izzy, it was obvious from her clear skin and shining eyes that Stuart and she had had a reunion. Perhaps the involvement with Hal had been what Stuart needed to remind him that his wife and family couldn’t always remain behind asylum seekers and refugees on the list for his attention.

  ‘Is everything OK, Mum?’ Izzy asked anxiously.

  ‘Absolutely fine, darling. I just need to get myself something else to do or I’ll go mad.’

  ‘I know it’s not the same,’ Stella suggested, expecting to have her head bitten off, ‘but why not come and join us in the campaign? There’s still lots to do. Three shops that need tenants – well, two, if Fabia’s serious – and the cinema show to organize. And what the council really wants is cheap office space for start-ups. Your experience with –’ Stella stopped, deciding it wouldn’t be wise to mention Hal – ‘in tech would be really useful.’ Emma hadn’t said no yet so Stella ploughed ahead. ‘Even if you just did a day or two a week. You could bring Ruby with you or leave her with me in the pet studio.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ Emma conceded.

  Stella remembered that she had an appointment with a rather dashing Dalmatian. ‘I’ve got to get off to see a dog owner, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I really will think about your offer,’ Emma said as she hugged her. ‘I don’t suppose I’d be paid? Oh well. I didn’t think so.’

  ‘You’d have to look on it as work experience.’

  ‘Work experience! At my age? Where’s Jesse, by the way? Still in bed?’

  ‘Jesse?’ Stella asked.

  ‘Yes, Jesse. My son. Tall and dark with floppy hair. Your grandson. He told us he was going to stay with you.’

  ‘But he didn’t!’ Stella immediately started to worry. ‘I texted him to come but got no reply. I assumed he’d just gone home.’

  A dreadful thought occurred to Stella. ‘Oh my God, what if something’s happened to him?’

  But Emma seemed more angry than concerned. ‘I don’t think we need worry about that. I’ve got a pretty good idea where we’ll find him. I bet you Miss Grade Eight Cello sneaked him under the headmaster’s nose. That’d be just like her.’

  Feeling reassured, Stella was relieved to have half an hour to herself, even if it was with canine company, after all the emotional buffetings she’d been through. The trouble with grown-up children was that they could behave exactly as they liked but to you they were still your responsibility. If they decided to wreck their lives, you couldn’t help feeling it was your fault.

  If Hal hadn’t walked in yesterday and made a scene that forced Emma to choose, Stella suspected she would have gone on having an affair with him. Stella, who told herself she believed in marriage, found it hard to understand. On the other hand, now Emma was beaming like the cat that had got the cream. Maybe, if she’d behaved more like Emma, Matthew would have stopped seeing her as part of the furniture; more interesting than a bookcase, but a lot less beautiful than a William Morris fireplace. Hang on, Stella put her chin up rebelliously, you are beautiful and useful. Well, Matthew wasn’t going to tell her, so she’d have to tell herself.

  The funny thing was, now that it had departed, she was missing the caravanserai of Cameron, Duncan and even Bernie much more than she’d expected. Camley was suddenly dull in a way it had never been before they’d swanned into her life and turned it upside down.

  But her boredom didn’t last long. Around lunchtime Fabia arrived, dressed in black jeans and a black shirt with a huge floppy black hat like the one she’d owned herself from Biba aeons ago. She was clutching a vast black bin bag which she deposited on the floor before fetching another dozen from the back of her car.

  ‘Fabia! How nice to see you. What’s all this stuff for?’

  ‘My retro emporium! I’ve decided to make Camley fashionable. I know, I know, you will say it isn’t possible. Why should anyone come out to this . . . this suburb! But I have made a little bet with myself, to see if I can do it, because if I, Fabia de Rosza, cannot do it, nobody can!’

  Clearly Roxy had been right about her mother putting down roots. Stella just wasn’t sure about wanting her to put them down in Camley. ‘OK. I’ve got the keys. Let’s go and take a look at the empty premises and see what you think.’

  Fabia thought they were all hideous and entirely impossible, but the final one, which adjoined the garden of the King’s Arms, was slightly less entirely impossible than the other two. This unit had two sides made of glass. At the moment it was boarded up and dingy as Dickens, but Fabia could see a vague glimmer of potential. Stella tried not to let herself get discouraged. If Fabia could see the potential, she certainly ought to as well, but it seemed to Stella that there was so much to be done, stripping, painting and, from looking at the state of the leads hanging from the ceiling, probably rewiring too. How on earth were they going to find anyone to do it without being paid?

  ‘Bernie!’ Stella suddenly exclaimed, making Fabia wobble on the ladder they had borrowed from the bookie’s next door. ‘Bernie used to have a painting firm that employed Cameron’s dad. Maybe he’d still have some contacts!’

  Since Bernie enjoyed a pint or two of IPA every day, they were able to pop into the King’s Arms and enquire.

  The reaction to Fabia’s arrival would have put Jamie Oliver in his place. Les, the landlord, rushed across and almost kissed her feet. ‘We had the best day here on Saturday since Charles and Di’s wedding!’

  Stella smiled to herself at the idea of the King’s Arms regulars doing a commentary on Pr
incess Diana’s fairy-tale wedding dress as they toasted the happy couple in bitter and stout.

  ‘Have you seen Bernie, by any chance?’ Stella enquired.

  The landlord looked up at the clock. ‘He’ll be here in ten minutes. You could set your watch by him. Now, what can I get you ladies?’

  Stella opted for a G and T since that was pretty safe anywhere. Fabia was made of sterner stuff. ‘I would like a sea breeze please, landlord.’

  ‘The name’s Les, Fabia. It’s short for Leslie. And what’s a sea breeze when it’s at home?’

  ‘Vodka, with grapefruit and cranberry juice.’

  Les reached down below the dusty bar, ringed with the imprints of years of wet glasses. ‘We have grapefruit.’ With a beaming smile he produced a small bottle of Britvic. The ten or so assorted regulars gave him a round of applause at his foresight in stocking so exotic an ingredient. He held the bottle up to the light. The sediment at the bottom was an inch thick. ‘Hunky dory, if you shake it a little. Cranberry’s a bit beyond our touch.’

  ‘I’ll settle for a screwdriver, then,’ Fabia conceded. Les looked so puzzled that she enlightened him. ‘Vodka and orange juice. You do have orange juice, I take it.’

  Les poured it out. ‘Well, blow me, I never knew that was a screwdriver. Hey, lads, we can do cocktails!’

  Behind him a clock, consisting of nothing but photos of Elvis, chimed midday by playing ‘Hound Dog’.

  ‘Isn’t that clever!’ Stella laughed.

  ‘Not when you’ve heard it every bloody hour for ten hours,’ mumbled the prune-like octogenarian who served as pot man, collecting the empty glasses, and downing any abandoned dregs as his perk.

  Any further discussion of horrible fates for Elvis were cut short by the arrival of Bernie, as predicted, on the dot of midday.

  ‘Bernie!’ Stella welcomed him as an old friend.

  Bernie pretended not to show even a blink of surprise to find two ladies sitting at the bar, one of them sipping a screwdriver, in the entirely masculine ambience of the KA.

  ‘Morning, girls.’ His welcoming smile made his small eyes disappear into the furrows of his face like a friendly Shar Pei. ‘Rare to see someone of the fair sex in here on a Monday and, I must add, a great improvement.’

  Stella glanced round. Bernie was right. Of the twenty or so tables scattered through the vast echoing Victorian tavern, not one was populated by another female. There were probably more women on Mount Athos.

  ‘Actually, we came in especially to look for you.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Fabia is hoping to take over the shop next door and turn it into a retro emporium.’

  ‘What, Mount, the draper’s shop on the end there?’

  ‘I don’t really know if it was a draper’s.’ To be honest, Stella wasn’t even sure what a draper’s was. But Bernie had disappeared back into his childhood. ‘We used to buy all our clothes there when I was a kid. They had this old cash-delivery tube they put the money in and it went upstairs to old Mrs Mount who’d send back down a receipt in the tube. I always wanted to put a gobstopper in and see what the old girl made of that.’

  ‘What is a gobstopper?’ enquired Fabia to a raucous response from the drinkers.

  ‘It’s a large boiled sweet you suck,’ Stella enlightened her. ‘They lasted for hours. People at school used to take them out for lessons and wrap them in a hankie and put them back in again afterwards.’

  Fabia shuddered. ‘How uncivilized.’

  ‘Fancy a pickled egg or a pork scratching?’ Les offered, eager to impress his exotic guest. ‘They’re local delicacies.’

  ‘Leslie.’ Fabia turned to him haughtily.

  ‘Les.’

  ‘Les. I may have a foreign accent but I have lived in this godforsaken country for years. Long enough to know that I never, ever, want to eat a pickled egg.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘So what do you want to do with Mount’s?’ Bernie took a long swallow of his beer and gave them his full attention.

  ‘We want to completely renovate it. Wiring. Carpentry. Any plumbing that’s needed.’ Stella smiled at him winningly.

  ‘And you want to pay as little as possible?’

  ‘Exactly.’ At least they’d have the money from the fox painting and that was a start. ‘It’s all part of our campaign to regenerate the high street. Make it more like it was when you were a boy.’

  Bernie laughed. ‘They still had trams and horse-drawn carriages in those days.’

  ‘We won’t be bringing those back, but we do want to stop this block being demolished and turned into a huge superstore.’

  ‘Is Cameron involved?’

  ‘He’s doing a fundraising concert in our garden. Rock for Regeneration. You’ll have to come along.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about Cameron.’ Bernie turned his head away as if lost in contemplation. ‘He loved his dad but Billy Keene was a bad lot. I feel responsible, in a way, as Billy was my worker and I turned a blind eye, but I knew what was going on. I’ll do what I can to help you.’

  Bernie glanced around the bar. ‘Stan over there’s a spark, Norman’s a plumber. I still have contacts in the decorating trade. We’ll sort something out for you, won’t we, lads?’

  An inaudible grumble arose from the assembled drinkers.

  ‘Just leave it to me.’

  ‘Bernie’ll see you right,’ asserted Les. ‘And next time you come in here we’ll be doing cocktails. You see if we don’t!’ A hideous thought struck him. ‘You will be coming back next Saturday with your parill-wotsit, won’t you?’

  ‘Parillada. That would depend on whether I can get the free meat again.’

  ‘I can get the meat for you. In the market.’

  ‘I will choose my own meat,’ Fabia announced grandly, as if any meat Les purchased would turn out to be horse.

  ‘And the ballroom dancing too?’

  Fabia treated him to a deathly stare. ‘Argentine tango is not ballroom dancing. It is an act of passion, more erotic even than making love.’

  ‘Blimey,’ the pot man murmured, ‘and in broad daylight too!’

  ‘Goodbye, Stella,’ Fabia announced. ‘Can you let me know when the workmen can start?’

  Stella watched her departure in slightly stunned amazement.

  The force of nature that was Fabia was clearly coming to join them in Camley. If Fabia was getting stuck in because she was looking for a more normal life, Stella had had the opposite motive. She had been looking for a change from a routine that had become all too predictable. She hardly even needed to keep a diary because she knew exactly when everything would be happening in their peaceful and ordered life.

  But not today. Stella’s heart lifted at the sight of something she certainly hadn’t been expecting.

  The giant toaster was back in her driveway.

  She rushed inside the house to find Cameron installed in a large wing chair in the sitting room with his leg up on a stool watching Sky Sports on television. Matthew was with him and they had opened a bottle of Matthew’s best red wine. Behind them the French windows were open to the garden. There was no sign of Duncan. To Stella’s relief her guest seemed to be perfectly sober.

  ‘Cameron!’ Stella exclaimed anxiously. ‘What on earth’s the matter?’

  ‘Oh, good, you’re back’ announced Matthew, stating the obvious in a highly irritating manner. ‘I was just wondering what we could have to eat.’

  ‘But what’s happened to the tour? Why are you back here so soon?’

  ‘We’ve got two days’ break and I needed a bit of peace and quiet away from all the fans. They worked out I was living in the Airstream and wouldn’t leave me alone.’

  Stella had visions of Cameron besieged by crowds of screaming sixty-year-olds.

  ‘I can see that would be uncomfortable.’

  ‘Uncomfortable! I couldn’t even get out of the door to buy a pint of milk!’

  As she doubted Cameron had bought a pint
of milk in forty years, Stella decided there had to be another more convincing reason for his sudden departure.

  ‘Also I discovered I’ve got a rather awkward medical condition.’

  All sorts of possibilities raced through Stella’s mind, from prostate problems to sky-high blood pressure.

  ‘Cameron! What is it?’

  Cameron grinned broadly, raised the large glass of red wine and indicated his foot resting on the embroidered Arts and Crafts footstool Matthew had paid far too much for in a chi-chi antique shop. ‘Gout!’

  He and Matthew rocked with laughter. ‘Obviously, I’ve got to be pretty careful it doesn’t get out. OK for overweight country squires in the seventeenth century, but not so hot for ageing rock stars relaunching their careers. Not to mention that it was bloody painful! I can see why Oliver Cromwell massacred the Irish when he was having an attack of gout. In fact, he was being quite lenient, really.’

  ‘So what’s the treatment for it?’ Stella had visions of rolls of bandages and men being wheeled in basket chairs.

  ‘Just these nice little pills. As long as I remember to take them I should be fit as Yehudi Menuhin’s fiddle. The only thing is I have to walk with crutches till they work, which isn’t very rock ’n’ roll, but it’s better than a wheelchair. You can just see the headline in the press: Don’t Wheel Me in the Morning, or some such crap. I am telling everyone I’ve cracked a bone in my foot. Preferably a metatarsal like David Beckham. I’m hoping his glamour can help me carry it off. Matthew, you couldn’t pour me a glass of that excellent Malbec, could you?’

  Matthew, Stella noted, filled his own glass at the same time. Clearly he wasn’t keeping to his rules in Cameron’s company.