“SHHHH!” The usher by the door put a finger to his lips. Gaynor pulled out a tissue and watched the object of her fantasy addressing the magistrates.
Claire shook her head. “Not surprised he’s objecting to her,” she said out of the side of her mouth. “Look at her! Nineteen!”
On the stand was a pale, skinny girl who looked about twelve. She continually bit her lip and pushed lank dirty-blonde hair out of her eyes as the landlord of the Horse and Gristle made an impassioned plea for her to become a licensee of his premises. There was no-one else. His wife had left him, his manager had absconded with the Bank Holiday weekend takings and his chief barmaid had never recovered from her hysterectomy. The three magistrates looked rather glazed.
“And it was him who said –” the landlord’s huge frame swivelled to look at the policeman, “that there had to be two of us. And,” he finished, jabbing a finger, “she don’t lack experience.”
PC Whitehouse was big on experience. Gaynor remembered the interview he’d given Sarah and Claire, demanding to know the full extent of theirs. She’d sat in a corner flashing him smiles. He was completely gorgeous and she’d rather regretted that she hadn’t been subjected to his stern line of questioning herself.
“Huh,” muttered Claire, as the landlord ended on a resounding crescendo of woe, involving imminent closure of his business and personal bankruptcy if Lanky wasn’t approved. “Can just see her dealing with a punch-up!”
“How long will they be?” asked Gaynor as they all rose for the magistrates to retire. She jiggled her keys. “I’m going to have to put another ticket on the car.”
Claire glanced back at the clock. “God knows. But let’s hope they take ages. You really don’t have to stay,” she added, “since you’re not going to be on the licence.” Gaynor imagined her sending up a short prayer of thanks. Claire might be pleased to have her as an investor but Gaynor was under no illusions as to what she thought of her abilities. Roughly the same as Victor’s view, probably – that Gaynor could certainly fix a piss-up in a brewery, but that was about all.
“I want to support you.” Gaynor was adamant. “You and Sarah.”
Claire sighed impatiently and looked at her watch again. “Where IS she?”
At that moment, Sarah appeared, visibly breathless, hair damp.
Gaynor waved – glad she’d arrived before Claire got any more twitchy – and tried once again to catch PC Whitehouse’s eye. But only Jonathan Darling, solicitor to the licensed trade, nodded unsmilingly in her direction. She pushed open the heavy door and went down the stairs of the court building and hurried out across the square to her car.
She didn’t want to miss anything. This was the last link in the chain of events that had started the day she’d met Sarah in the High Street, looking white and exhausted. She hadn’t seen her for weeks but, that day, Sarah had hugged Gaynor, pulled her into La Joules for a cappuccino, and spilled it all out about Paul and the messy end to her marriage. Finishing with how she and Claire had this idea about buying Greens, making it a proper wine-bar, filling it with the wealthy and glamorous of Broadstairs. Gaynor, who remembered it as a filthy, dark bar where only those with tough stomach-linings dared to tread, had looked at her wide-eyed.
It would be perfect, Sarah had explained. There was a flat above for her and the children, but she and Claire just couldn’t raise enough money between them. Gaynor had felt that strange excitement inside. Told Sarah how she was looking for something to do, now the boutique where she’d worked had been sold. “You know,” she’d said, already wondering how to best persuade Victor. “I’ve always fancied owning a wine bar…”
Shit! She’d arrived in front of the parking meter before she remembered why she’d only put an hour on it in the first place. She looked into her purse and swore again.
By the time she’d been to the bakers and cajoled them into providing the right coins (Notice: sorry we cannot give change for parking meters – Gaynor homed in on the only bloke and secured a handful) and belted back up to Court Two, Claire and Sarah were standing up at the front and Jonathan Darling was in full spiel.
“Miss Claire Banks…publican’s daughter…lifetime’s experience of the licensed trade…” Gaynor tried to close the door quietly.
“Ms Sarah Cartwright...” Gaynor stopped as the door clunked loudly shut. The magistrate in the middle, an elderly tortoise-necked man with a shiny bald pate, squinted at the papers in front of him. “Cartwright?” he queried.
Sarah leant forward. “I’ve recently changed back to my maiden name…”
Jonathan Darling spoke over her. “Cartwright, formally Stanford,” he said briskly, as the tortoise adjusted his glasses. “Ms Cartwright is a chef with considerable catering expertise and proven experience in the running of ...”
Gaynor’s heels clattered across the wooden floor. Several people looked round.
“And Mrs Warrington, the third investor who will be a sleeping partner – she and her husband are well-known in the community – is at the back of the court…”
He turned his head a fraction and inclined it to where Gaynor was sliding into her seat. She gave the magistrates a small wave. They ignored her.
PC Whitehouse rose from his seat. Mmmm all over again. Gaynor wondered if she’d get a mention from him, too. She held her breath as he stood up.
“No objection,” he said, and sat down again.
“That’s that then.” Jonathan Darling shook hands with
Claire. “So you’re open now?”
“Oh yes. Last night. It was terrific. We were…”
“Splendid. Now the problems really start eh?”
“Ha, ha,” said Claire as they walked away. “He thinks because we’re women we’re not going to cope.” She smiled. “But we’ll show ’em, eh?”
“Course we will!” Gaynor flipped her handbag on to her other shoulder and bestowed a huge smile on the usher who’d reprimanded her earlier.
Sarah swallowed.
“I know she’s right,” she said to Gaynor when they were installed in the Wine Lodge over the road with, respectively, a large coffee and a hair of the dog. “I know we’ve got to start trading before we miss the season but we’re really not ready.”
“It was good last night.”
“Yes, but that was a party. When we’re open properly, people will expect it to be professional. We still haven’t got enough staff and it’s all very well for Claire to say we’ll manage, but if you have a busy night when the bar’s full and the restaurant is packed then you do need… are you listening to me?”
“Sorry?”
Sarah stopped, exasperated. “Look, Chloe is pregnant – you’re not going to change that but you might be able to change what happens to you. Why don’t you talk frankly to this guy this afternoon and see what can be done, and then go home and tell Victor how you feel and how much you want a baby. He may think he’s past all that but I’m sure once you were actually pregnant…”
“It’s not going to happen.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Look!” Gaynor picked up the carrier bag she’d collected from the car and emptied the contents on to the table. “Victor’s shirt! Which he’d put straight into the washing machine so I wouldn’t see it. Which I wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t wanted to wash my denim skirt and needed to check there was nothing in there that might turn blue…” She pushed the shirt towards Sarah. “It’s got lipstick on it!”
Lipstick! If it hadn’t hit her hard in the solar plexus, if it hadn’t made her heart pound, then she might have laughed at the sheer, ludicrous, cliché-ridden, bad-movie melodrama of it all.
“Hang on. Don’t jump to conclusions.” Sarah frowned. “There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation.”
Of course Sarah would say that – good friends are duty-bound to try to make you feel better even when the evidence that you should be sitting in a darkened room, eating lots of chocolate, is overwhelming.
Especially whe
n they don’t know the full story.
“It doesn’t mean a thing,” Sarah went on confidently. “You know what these advertising types are like – kiss anyone. I expect some silly girl was doing the luvvie bit and missed. Happens all the time, I remember I once kissed…”
“On the inside?” Gaynor picked up the shirt and waved it at her. “Look!”
They both did. There, indisputably, on the inside of Victor’s pale green fine Egyptian cotton shirt, was an unmistakable smear of red lip gloss.
“Could it be something else?” Sarah asked hopefully.
“Like what?” Gaynor held out the cloth for Sarah to examine. “And it even looks like a bit of foundation as well. The bitch has had her whole bloody face in here. Inside my husband’s shirt. What was she doing?”
“Perhaps,” began Sarah slowly, clearly calling on her deepest creative skills. “Perhaps one of his clients spilled red wine down her white top and Victor, being a gentleman…”
“Always smarming over anyone who spends money with him, you mean.”
“Being considerate, whipped off his shirt and let her wear that while her top was being sponged down. And she had a load of slap on and some of it came off when she put the shirt over her head.”
Gaynor looked at her. “You believe that?”
“Or,” said Sarah, inspiration striking again, “they’ve just won the Estee Lauder account and they were feeling the texture of the make-up – you know so they could write some really good lines and Victor just…”
“Decided to rub some of it on the inside of his clothing. Come on! You know it doesn’t add up.”
Sarah put a hand on Gaynor’s arm. “It doesn’t constitute grounds for divorce, either.”
“He’s always staying away. I found a bill from a nightclub – Victor, in a nightclub! He finds fault with me all the time, he never wants to talk, he…”
Gaynor stopped. She thought she could tell Sarah anything but it stuck in her throat.
Sarah spoke gently and calmly, as if Gaynor were one of her children. (There were times, Gaynor thought ironically, when she almost wished she was.) “Then you’ve got to talk to him. Don’t shout or scream or accuse him – just ask.”
Gaynor snorted. “Yeah. Good evening, darling! Who are you shagging?”
Sarah sighed. “Look, he might not be shagging anyone. He might just be tired or stressed. Worried about something at work. The nightclub was probably with a client – you know Victor, you say yourself he’ll do anything to win an account.”
“Then why did he tell me it was a boring dinner at Langhan’s and he went to bed early?”
“I don’t know, but perhaps he forgot, or knew you’d take the piss. You could be imagining a whole lot of things here. You know how it is – once you get worried about something your imagination can run riot. Why don’t you just sit him down and pour him a drink and make him a nice meal and say he hasn’t seemed himself lately and you’re concerned about him and is there anything worrying him?”
Gaynor smiled. “Is that what you did when you found out about Paul and The Bimbo?”
“No, I went through his pockets, read his phone bill and then beat it out of him with the sink plunger.”
“And I really don’t want to go to this appointment,” Gaynor said as Sarah hugged her. “I’ve been putting it off and off ’cos I’m due for a smear this time.”
She looked at Sarah, suddenly stricken. “Oh God, I hate smear tests, really I do.”
“Well nobody likes them,” said Sarah. “But I’d rather have one than a filling.”
Gaynor shook her head. “I wouldn’t.” The mere thought gave her a wobbly feeling on the inside of her knees. Made her wake in the night, sweating and counting speculums. “They hurt me, they really do.”
Sarah squeezed her hand. “I’d suggest a large vodka and two Nurofen, but, in your case,” she said, looking at Gaynor’s empty wine glass, “you’d better just take the painkillers.”
She rummaged in her handbag. “If you just swallow these down and relax, you won’t feel a thing…”
4. Irouleguy Blancs
An earthy concoction with bitter aftertones.
“OUCH!”
Gasp. Squirm. Yuck. Gaynor grimaced. She was distinctly light-headed, and wanted to put her head between her knees. Trouble was a bloke she’d never met had got there first.
“Ugh! Aggh! Errrk!”
He lifted his head for a moment and sighed.
“If you could just try and relax!”
I am bloody trying. Gaynor stuffed her fist into her mouth.
Mr Bradley-Lawrence – Consultant Gynaecologist
F.R.C.O.G and unfeeling bastard – extended a pin-striped arm towards the nurse. “Bigger speculum please!”
“Eeegh!” The yelp she’d tried to muffle made its way through her scrunched knuckles and her thighs, generally better-known for having a will of their own in the opening department, clamped themselves tightly shut.
“Actually,” Mr Bradley-Lawrence said wearily, “a bigger one can be more comfortable. One doesn’t have to open it so far…” The reassurance was too late. Gaynor fell back against the pillows, head swimming, the room transformed into a dizzying array of black and white spots. Breathe! Swallow. Breathe! In, out. In, out.
“That’s better.” He bent forward again, his head twisted sideways. She noticed that he too had come out in a light sweat. “If you could just move your shin,” he said tightly as he
leant closer and she shrank away up the bed.
“OW!”
He gave another long, loud sigh as the nurse sprang forward and took Gaynor’s clammy hand in hers. More out of duty than compassion, Gaynor felt, having already inferred from her tight-lipped expression, that she thought squirming and whimpering just because you had a cold piece of steel and half somebody’s arm rammed up inside you was an indication of the worst sort of weakness.
“Don’t know how you’d manage childbirth,” she quipped sourly – clearly the sort with a pelvis like a bucket, who’d just lifted her leg and let her own children drop out while barely pausing in scrubbing the front step.
“With difficulty, I expect.” Oh God, don’t cry . “Can’t I lie on my side?”
Mr Bradley-Lawrence made an impatient noise in his throat.
“I can’t see it in that position.”
Old Peterson could. He always took smear tests like that. Encouraged her to curl up, hugging her knees while he deftly went in from behind. By the time she’d got her mouth open to shriek, it was all over. “I’ve been doing it for forty-four years, dear,” he’d said calmly.
But he’d retired. Mr Peterson, who’d patted her so kindly on the shoulder, who’d sat and made small talk about his azaleas for twenty minutes and then said; “Well, shall we have a little look, dear?” and went to wash his hands, humming, waiting patiently while she disappeared behind the curtain, had gone.
Now it was pin-stripe! The tall, thin, unsmiling Mr Bradley-Lawrence, who moved nowhere without a hatchet-faced nurse two paces behind, who had probably concreted over his entire garden so he didn’t have to bother with greenery at all, and whose pager beeped at regular intervals throughout.
She saw him glance longingly at it lying on the desk, its flashing screen clearly infinitely more interesting than an overwrought, weeping patient, old enough to know better.
Then he turned back to Gaynor.
“Try a cough.”
“Sorry?”
The nurse gave up on Gaynor’s hands and grabbed a knee.
“Cough!”
“Ahem.”
“There!”
“Eeek-ouch-ughhh!”
He was back in and Nurse had one whole arm wrapped round Gaynor’s thigh. She smiled manically. “That’s it, just relax!” (Was she mad?)
Mr Bradley-Lawrence poked and prodded. “Nearly done…”
Christ! There was a nasty, burning pain.
“Ouch, ouch!”
“There!”
He looked at her briefly then away as she scrubbed at her face. God, what was it with internals? It was the only time she ever cried.
“I think we got enough that time,” he said heavily. “You can get dressed.”
“You have a retroverted uterus,” he said when they were once more safely divided by his desk. “Back-tilting womb,” he added, as if she wouldn’t possibly know what he meant. “That’s what makes it difficult to get hold of. But you shouldn’t be that sensitive.”
It sounded like an accusation.
“They’ve always hurt.”
He looked at a sheet of paper in the folder in front of him.
“Hmmm. Any pain on intercourse?”
“Umm…”
What intercourse? She wasn’t having any. It was weeks since Victor had touched her in bed. If he was here and not at endless client dinners which necessitated him staying over in town, then he was either asleep before she got to bed or stayed downstairs until she was. Gaynor knew Victor well enough to know he was avoiding her. Why? Her stomach contracted to a tight ball of misery.
She recalled Sarah scraping the barrel of marital excuses. Victor was fretting about something, or exhausted by the long hours he worked...
But more likely, thought Gaynor bitterly, he’s permanently shagged out ’cos he’s doing it four times an afternoon with someone else.
“Sorry?” Mr Bradley-Lawrence was frowning at her, waiting for the answer to his question.
His biro tapped against his notepad. The nurse made a show of shifting her large bottom on the chair in the corner to remind everyone she was still there.
“Er, no.” The last time she’d had sex it hadn’t hurt. Actually the last time she’d only nearly had sex, and that was a blur. She squirmed at the memory.
“Hmmm.” Mr Bradley-Lawrence was still peering into the cardboard folder. Gaynor twisted her head to try to peer with him.
One Glass Is Never Enough Page 4