by Sharon Owens
‘Will we go upstairs and sign on the dotted line?’ Vincent asked, eager to press ahead.
‘Oh, it's a bit of a mess at the moment,’ said Lily. ‘What with the girls packing up their things and so on. We'll use this snug here by the clock, shall we?’
‘Right you are,’ Vincent said. The three of them went in and sat down. The old men and the barmaids exchanged looks of resignation. Somehow, they'd thought Lily would pull out of the agreement at the very last minute. But Lily had decided she loved her husband more than she loved the tavern. And Jack was looking forward to a rest.
‘Now, you have put it in writing for us? That you'll preserve the tavern?’ Jack asked quietly. ‘We must have assurances on that, or else we can't go through with this deal.’
‘Oh, yes, I've had my best lawyers sorting it out. The mall will be built around this wee place and it'll be very well protected during the construction. I wouldn't pull a dirty trick such as pretending the pub got levelled in an accident. Not after the money I paid for it anyway. The new design has been approved already. They love it, in fact, at the planning office. Here you are, now. I have the papers.’ He snapped open his briefcase and slid a fat document across the table towards them.
‘Just sign there, and there, and there.’ He handed a new pen to Jack, and held his breath.
‘Do it quickly, Jack, before I break down,’ whispered Lily. Jack printed his name in a small neat hand, and Lily signed hers with a curly flourish. Vincent immediately handed them the cheque, and they all shook hands a few times.
‘Don't spend it all in the one shop,’ he advised, with a wink.
‘Don't worry, we won't,’ said Lily.
‘When do you think I can have the keys?’ Vincent said.
‘In four days, as soon as the cheque clears. No offence,’ said Jack.
‘None taken, Mr Beaumont. Just drop them into the Belfast office when you're ready. I'll send a couple of security boys round, the minute you move out. To keep an eye on the place until we get the protective scaffolding up. Good luck to you, then. I'll see myself out.’
‘And you won't let the mural get damp, will you?’ Lily said.
‘No, I won't. I'll look after it, you have my word on that.’
When he had gone, Lily and Jack hugged each other, and Lily allowed herself a few self-indulgent tears.
‘Well, that's it,’ she said. ‘It's over.’
‘Yes. I suppose it is. I hope Great-uncle Ernest forgives me for this,’ Jack sighed. ‘Do you think he's looking down on us?’
‘Oh, Jack, do you think we've done the right thing?’ squeaked Lily with her hands up to her mouth. ‘I'm terrified. Maybe we should have stayed on?’
‘Lily, we've been over all this. It was getting too much for us.’
‘But Barney and Joey and Francy Mac? And the girls?’
‘Shush, now,’ he soothed. ‘Barney and chums won't be here for ever. And sure, the girls were only here temporarily. One day, we'd have been on our own again, with a valuable artwork to look after, and we're not getting any younger.’
‘Yes, but what will we do if we miss the tavern? Or if Vincent has lied to us, and knocks the place down and then tells us it just fell apart or something?’
‘He won't do that. He showed us the new design. He reckons it will look even better than the original idea.’
‘What if he deliberately destroys the mural, in case the government tries to get involved?’
‘Sweetheart, it's only a Lavery. Not a Picasso canvas, or a da Vinci fresco.’
‘Jack! How can you say that? Lavery was a wonderful painter.’
‘You know what I mean. If it isn't worth millions and millions, they'll be happy for Vincent to restore it, and look after it.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ he said, beginning to worry.
If Lily changed her mind now, he didn't know what he would do. It was hard enough for him to let the old place go, without Lily having a breakdown at the thought of leaving Maple Street. He tried a bit of emotional manipulation: he knew Lily had a lifelong devotion to the concept of angels.
‘You know what?’ he said, doing his best to appear inspired. ‘I think our guardian angel planned it this way.’
‘What?’
‘Look at it this way, Lily. Great-uncle Ernest must have been inspired by angels to leave me this pub, in order to rescue the two of us in our hour of need. And now, it's time for us to move on, and do other things with our lives. And that is why accident-prone Bridget found the mural, so the tavern would be saved from demolition. And so that Vincent Halloran would greatly increase his offer to us. The million quid was mostly to pay for our silence about the Lavery painting, of course. But the upshot is, we're financially secure for life. And if you hadn't been an art-lover and recognized the signature on the wall, I would have ripped off all the paper and maybe destroyed the entire thing. So, you see, everything came together like the pieces of a jigsaw.’
‘Mmm,’ Lily mused. ‘That's quite a complicated plan for an angel to come up with. Why didn't we just win the Lotto?’
‘Because… because this way, we'll have to leave Maple Street to get the money! And this way, we'll get to do all the things we never had time to do before.’
‘Like visit Paris?’ She was calming down.
‘Yes, Paris. And Rome, New York, Venice, Sydney, Iceland, anywhere. We can live anywhere we like, when we've finished travelling. We can buy another pub near the seaside. Or just retire in a little apartment somewhere, do a spot of voluntary work, read books. Lily, we'll have the kind of life that everyone in the whole wide world dreams about having. We'll be free!’
‘Yes, you're right,’ she said. ‘Come on, let's say our goodbyes to everyone. It's not fair to keep them hanging around.’
24. Here's to Old Friends
It took Liam Bradley weeks to get over the shame of what had happened to him on Maple Street. That Jack Beaumont was nothing more than a knuckle-dragging caveman, he ranted to the bartender at his hotel. And Lily had turned out to be surprisingly cold too. A real cold fish. Somehow, Liam had the idea she would be tearing her blouse off within seconds of him kissing her hand, caressing her own breasts and licking her own lips with desire. But his sweetest fantasy had come crashing to an ugly halt, as he lay dazed on the cobblestones. Perhaps he was watching too many X-rated movies these days, he wondered. It seemed that not all women were nymphomaniac-floozies after all.
Even daft old Betsy Trotter didn't want him any more. Poor ignorant Betsy, who wouldn't know a book of poetry from a slap in the beak, had hung up the phone on him. She'd actually told him to bog off. It was unbelievable. And after her taking a luxury house off his hands too, in the settlement. She could have spent one measly night with him, just to say thank you. Women could be a hard lot, he consoled himself. Liam decided he was better off without them.
And that wasn't the end of the disappointment either. It was only the beginning of it, in fact.
Liam Bradley went on a week-long drinking binge in the middle of March, when he heard that Perry Shaw stood to make no less than four million pounds from the manuscript of Boom, Boom. And Perry didn't even have the decency to tell Liam the earth-shattering news himself. Oh, no. Liam had to hear it second-hand from a bookseller on Royal Avenue: a lovely girl called Maria who worked as a buyer for one of the major book stores. Her company had already placed a huge order for Boom, Boom she told him when he went in to buy a newspaper, and just happened to bump into her beside the tills. Perry had sold the Slinger franchise to a string of film-makers around the world.
Of course, Liam was straight on his mobile to Perry, but Perry's number had been changed, and nobody who knew Perry would tell him what the new number was. It seemed that Perry's days of being polite to Limo Bradley were over.
Liam lost track of two days completely, drowning his sorrows in anything and everything he could get his hands on. He was heard singing loudly to himself in his room, at midnight, by t
he other guests: ‘Anarchy in the UK’, by the Sex Pistols. And the manager politely asked him to leave the hotel at the end of the week. Liam woke up in the bath on the day he moved out. The water was stone cold and there was a bloated ham sandwich floating in it. Slinger Magee would have been proud of such a sorry scene.
Then, as if things were not desperate enough, Perry Shaw became a national hero when he donated three million pounds of his Boom, Boom windfall to a benevolent fund for retired and injured soldiers. Oh, the injustice of it! The money that should have been Liam's to squander on expensive wine and cheap women went to buy false limbs for amputees and boring things like that. Perry did the rounds of the daytime sofas, and everyone in the country knew his name and saluted him. More money began to pour in from well-wishers, and Perry promised to set up a retirement home for widowed soldiers, a retraining centre for the disabled, and a comfortable and homely trauma-counselling suite as well. It was sickening. Liam's name was hardly mentioned.
A few days after that, Perry's beloved son lost half his foot in a shooting raid and was sent home to a tumultuous welcome. Mrs Shaw came off the tranquillizers and the entire family circle gathered in London for a big celebration. Liam was not invited. It was the final insult.
Liam Bradley packed his bags and headed for the airport, to catch the first flight to somewhere warm that sold cheap liquor. He would sort out his emigration to the Bahamas when he had calmed down enough to fill out the forms. Belfast had lost its appeal for Liam altogether now, no matter what his fans would say about it. It had come to something when party-pooping wimps like Lily and Jack Beaumont and their idiot staff, and Betsy Trotter and her miserable money-grabbing relatives, were having a better time of it than was an author of Liam's calibre. He closed the little blind on his window as the plane took off, and asked the pretty hostess for a brandy and ginger, no ice.
Betsy Trotter's Tennis Club was a great success. The bank manager lent the start-up money right away when he found out she had a house to sell in the best part of town. Despite her selfish motives for setting it up in the first place, she found she enjoyed herself just as much as the other players did. She enrolled sixty-five paying pupils on the opening day in April, at the old rugby grounds on the Ormeau Road. And seventy-two nonpaying children and teenagers as well. A couple of local papers turned up for the launch. Only minor papers, but it was a start. Her nieces and nephews decided not to bother going to the modest launch-party, still sulking over the goats-for-Christmas affair. But Betsy didn't mind. The club was for ordinary people like herself: people who just wanted to improve their lives a little bit. She received a message of support from Sir Cliff Richard, and some signed racquets from several celebrity players, and she was beside herself with happiness. The start-up fees paid for her to hire a tennis coach, a nice-looking lad from Eastern Europe…
She became very fit as a result of all the extra exercise, and she found that concentrating on other people made her a much more contented person. A few days after the tennis club opened, she received several letters from wealthy ex-wives across the country; they wanted to follow her example, and set up their own projects. Betsy had to try very hard indeed to suppress the side of her personality that urged her to run to the hairdresser's and get her blonde hair extensions back. Instead, she was completely professional about the entire matter, sending out business plans and cost estimations. By the time she was finally nominated for an award, she found such things didn't matter to her any more. And when she heard on the grapevine that Richard Allen had proposed to some girl called Sarah Jones, she wasn't even a bit bothered.
At the end of the summer, demolition of the other buildings on Maple Street got under way but by then the tavern was tightly wrapped up in a protective shell of scaffolding and tarpaulin sheets. Lily and Jack's big brass bed was in storage, along with all their antique dishes and plates, but the stove was cleaned up and left where it was in the little kitchen. When the mall was completed and the tavern safely preserved inside, like an insect in amber, Vincent Halloran would reveal the long-lost Lavery mural to the general public, and reopen the tavern as a tourist attraction. He had already paid a couple of retired art-restorers to uncover one wall, and they had discovered a beautiful collection of portraits of nineteenth-century drinkers, dancers, singers, servants, ladies and gentlemen, painted right on to the plaster in beautiful shades of blue, grey and red. And then preserved in pristine condition because the owner's wife didn't like the work when it was finished, and had it promptly papered over. Fortunately, her lack of good taste had been worth a fortune to Jack and Lily.
A series of cleverly positioned floodlights would shine down onto the tavern, from the ceiling of the mall, and Vincent knew it would win a string of design awards for its originality. He felt he had done the right thing in altering his designs for the mall, even though he had lost most of his profits by doing so. But then he landed a huge contract to build more historically sympathetic shopping centres across Europe. He was so pleased he decided to treat himself and his wife to a weekend shopping trip in New York. Judy resigned, with her two-thousand-pound bonus safely banked, and headed for the airport with a jumbo bottle of suncream, a trashy paperback and a red bikini.
Trudy and Gerry completed their counselling programme, and decided to carry out a year of charity work, before settling down to a long engagement in Gerry's lovely apartment. If they were still enjoying each other's company by then, of course. But they both had a feeling they would be. Gerry got his old job back in the hospital and Trudy finished her geography degree, gaining a double first. Which came in very handy in the end, as they set off for Peru at the end of June, with nothing but two rucksacks and one double sleeping bag. And a cheque for ten thousand pounds that Lily and Jack had given to Trudy as a going-away present. Trudy's parents were outraged that she didn't invite them to her graduation ceremony in the university, but she said what was the point in them flying over from Birmingham, when her old friends Lily and Jack were only up the road?
Her worries about buttons and dirty hands and the darkness faded away too. And she realized with a surge of happiness as she sat on the plane with Gerry that she had drunk a glass of lemonade with three slices of lemon in it at the graduation party, and never even noticed.
The Beaumonts bought Betsy Trotter's townhouse in Marlborough Avenue, on their return from a dream holiday in Paris. They retrieved their beautiful brass bed from the storage depot, along with all their other things, and had great fun moving in.
The neighbours were delighted to see the back of Liam Bradley, and welcomed Lily and Jack into their social circle with a small tea party in the front garden of the house next door. Jack had taken up painting and was proving quite a talent, himself. Lily was having the time of her life making full use of Betsy's designer kitchen. Just before Trudy left for Peru, Lily baked her a celebration cake with a marzipan scroll on the top, and Jack put her picture in the Belfast Telegraph with a banner underneath reading, ‘Congratulations, Trudy!’
Then it was time to plan their next holiday. They decided to go to Australia next. Lily said she would like a few weeks to rest before they set off for Sydney, and Jack said that was okay by him, and he bought another few tubes of paint and a big stack of canvases and brushes.
David Devaney went to London on his own, to enter the talent competition, and got through to the final. He didn't win but he got a recording contract. The leather trousers were ditched by then, in favour of a lovely stripy cream suit and matching tie that Daisy had picked out for him. They were still friends, and phoned each other every few weeks to catch up. Daisy bought a small cottage on Larkspur Avenue, using her ten thousand pounds from Lily as a deposit. She took in two other lodgers to pay the mortgage, and they were all the best of friends in no time.
*
Marie and Michael found jobs on a cruise ship, and were allocated a pretty little cabin with two portholes. Marie worked as a pastry-chef and Michael was a bartender. He could pick up his guitar and sing
at a moment's notice, so that was a terrific bonus. And, of course, Marie was multilingual, which was very handy considering the flocks of tourists they met each week. Marie had also received a fat cheque from the Beaumonts as a parting gift, and she gave it straight away to her poor parents, who were going stir-crazy in the bed and breakfast in Rosetta. They used the money to rent a small chip shop with a flat above it in Portavogie, and Marie sent them postcards from all over the world. They pinned the cards to the walls of the chip shop and told all their customers how proud they were of their eldest daughter, Marie.
Bridget O'Malley went to visit her sisters in London and stayed on with them for a few months. She found a job working in a local bar, which she assured Lily was only temporary. She would find something better any day now, she told Lily, over the phone. And she was very grateful for the cheque, she kept saying. It was far too good of Lily, after all the damage Bridget had caused during her stint as head barmaid and cocktail waitress. She should be giving Lily ten grand, not the other way round, she said.
‘Not at all,’ said Lily, with great gusto. Only for Bridget half-wrecking the tavern on Maple Street and finding the Lavery, they wouldn't have the money to give her in the first place. They were happy as could be in their beautiful townhouse with all their stuff out of storage and the place was looking lovely. Jack could finally open his eyes fully without having them irritated by a fog of cigarette smoke, and he was slowly filling up the walls of the townhouse with his colourful paintings. They missed the old place, surely, but they could go and visit it when it was reopened to the public as a Lavery-theme museum and café.