by Karen Swan
Fee shook her head. ‘She kicked him out. It’s not happening.’
Tom looked at Laura and she gave a helpless shrug. ‘I didn’t do the maths.’
‘Her temper got the better of her, is what she means. You’d better take the bottle back, Tom. We’ll just be on the one glass tonight.’
Tom shook his head. ‘Pity,’ he muttered, taking the bottle back to the bar.
‘Well, I was still right to turn him down,’ Laura spluttered finally after they’d both downed their glasses and were sliding their fingers round the rims. ‘I mean, it’s the principle, isn’t it? You can’t just let people run your life because they’re richer than you are.’
Fee hiked up her eyebrows, completely unconvinced. ‘And that’s what you’re going to say to Jack, is it? That you turned down, on one piece of jewellery, nearly as much as he makes in a year?’
‘He makes more than that,’ Laura argued tetchily. ‘The workshop has never been busier. The reupholstery business is recession-proof.’
‘Yeah, but you get my point, though. It doesn’t matter how many people want their sofas resprung – he’s not ever going to be doing so well that you can afford to turn down that kind of money. You’ve got to be really raking it in before you can afford to sniff at seventeen grand. And just before Christmas too.’
Laura slid her elbows along the table and dropped her face on her arms. ‘I just won’t tell him,’ she mumbled into the table. ‘There’s no point in torturing him with what could have been.’
‘What was, you mean. It was all signed and sealed when I put the phone down to him. There were no ifs or buts about it.’
‘Yes, yes, all right! Stop going on about it, will you?’ Laura snapped, more furious with herself than Fee. Fee had been right. She had allowed her temper to get the better of her. ‘There’s nothing I can do about it now. What’s done is done.’
They sat in miserable silence, which was punctuated by the solitary beep of an incoming text on Laura’s phone. She read it and sighed. ‘Dinner’s nearly ready. I’ve got to go.’ She stood up and looked over at Fee, who appeared genuinely crestfallen. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you next time.’
Fee tried to raise a smile. ‘Sure.’
‘Hey, look. Slow and steady wins the race,’ Laura said, trying to raise her spirits. ‘I’ve always believed that. We’ll be okay.’
‘You might be. You’ve got Jack. Meanwhile, I’m fifty short for my rent this month.’
Laura looked down at her friend, who would no doubt be eating a Pop Tart for dinner again. She reached down and rifled in her purse. She handed over a twenty- and two five-pound notes. ‘All I’ve got, I’m afraid.’
Fee cracked a grateful smile that made even Laura respond in kind. ‘You’re a true friend, you are.’
‘Huh, you think?’ Laura murmured. ‘One who undoes all your good work.’
‘Nah, you’re just principled, that’s all. There’s not many people about like you.’ Fee’s slender tapered fingers reached up and squeezed Laura’s knobbly ones. ‘You’re a contrary fairy all right. You might be an acquired taste, but I love you, babes.’
Chapter Three
Jack was expertly chopping parsley and Arthur was nosing around for the last morsels in his gleaming food bowl when she walked through the front door seven minutes later. ‘The terrible two’, she called them. They were inseparable: Arthur, an Irish terrier, slept soundly in the workshop as his master stuffed and wove and reupholstered rickety chairs on the point of collapse.
‘Hey, boys,’ she said, dropping her handbag and the new shoes on the pine bench in the tiny porch as Arthur bounded over to her, hair flying off him like dandelion puffs in the breeze. ‘You beat me to it, then.’
‘Well, I knew that if I wanted something more than beans on toast for supper . . .’ Jack teased, pausing in his chopping and reaching over the worktop with puckered lips.
‘Good day?’ she asked, kissing him and then watching him as he crushed a clove of garlic beneath the knife. He was so pretty – girlish almost, with his lanky frame, shaggy light brown hair and fine nose; only his bright blue eyes with their distinctive dropped irises that fell into slits like cat’s eyes gave him any kind of edge. Fee was always saying he looked like a boy-band singer, although at thirty-four he was probably more like their manager – but she took the point.
‘Well, I finished that chesterfield finally. Wept my way through it, of course. I mean – tartan? With all that buttoning? It gives me a headache just looking at it.’
‘Yes, but what the client wants . . .’
‘Mmm. Well, it’s done now; nothing a run home couldn’t shake off. Which Arthur loved, of course.’
‘Of course.’ Laura smiled, bending down to scratch the daft mutt lovingly around the neck.
‘The downside is, the car is still at the studio, so I’ll have to leave early to walk there in the morning.’
‘And yet again, Arthur’s a winner!’ Laura cheered, waving the dog’s forelegs in the air.
She stood up again, investigating the chopped ingredients, all placed in separate bowls, practically colour-coded along the worktop. ‘I thought you said dinner was almost ready,’ she said.
‘Ah, busted!’ he grinned. ‘Well, I’m afraid Arthur and I were missing you. This is going to be another half-hour. Why don’t you take the paper – it’s on the table there. I’ve already run you a bath, and I’ll bring a glass of something cold up in a minute.’
‘Oooh.’ Laura smiled, nicking some red pepper. ‘Mr Ambassador, you are spoiling me.’
She meandered lazily upstairs and peered into the bathroom. Fresh, fat bubbles foamed at the rim tantalizingly, and the scented oil burner was already lit on the windowsill. Undressing quickly, she climbed in, listening to the clatter of Jack in the kitchen below as she opened the local paper.
It was Thursday, publication day, and she always liked to start with the classifieds at the back, her keen eyes eager for a bargain. Most of what they owned had been ‘pre-loved’, as she preferred to call it – the grey linen Habitat sofa adopted after a customer never returned for it, the iron bedstead in their room (which had been a mistake: it creaked like an arthritic knee every time they turned over), the French painted armoire with the mesh front where she kept the towels in the spare room.
Jack came in with a glass of wine a few minutes later, true to his word as ever. ‘Here you go,’ he said, planting a kiss on the top of her head. ‘Seen anything you like?’
‘No. Not really,’ she sighed. ‘Although I see you did.’ She indicated an ad at the bottom that had a faint pencil mark around it.
‘Oh, that,’ he said dismissively. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘It’s for a beach hut,’ Laura said, reading the ad more closely.
‘Yes. A private sale. That was why it caught my eye.’
‘I thought you could only get them through the council? Fee once told me there’s a crazy waiting list.’
‘Everything’s crazy in Fee’s world,’ he grinned. ‘But yes, she’s right on this occasion.’ He sat on the edge of the bath and began gently ladling the water over her shoulders. ‘You either have to get your name on the list and wait until you’re in your mid-eighties to get one, or you remortgage to get one that comes through a private seller like this.’
‘Remortgage? For a glorified shed?’
‘Mmm-hmm.’
‘I bet that’s just hype. It says POA here. Why don’t you ring them and ask how much they want? It can’t be much. I mean, those things don’t even have running water, do they?’
‘No power,’ he corrected. ‘I rang when I got in. They’re asking fifteen for it.’
‘Hundred?’
‘Thousand.’
‘Fifteen thousand? No! No one would spend that kind of money on a glorified shed.’
Jack smiled at her outrage. ‘And that’s a bargain, trust me. It must be fairly shabby. The really smart ones go for well over double that. They’re investments
as well as heirlooms.’
‘How do you know that?’
He sighed. ‘I’ve wanted one for years. When I was a kid, my grandma had one in Sandwich. We used to spend all summer messing around in it.’
‘I never knew that. What happened to it?’ she murmured as he soaped her shoulders.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It got sold, I suppose. Such a shame, though. I really loved it.’
Laura looked up at him. She could tell by his tone that he really had.
‘Well, do you want to go and look at it, maybe?’ she asked after a minute. ‘I mean, if you really want one that badly, we’ve got some “rainy day” savings we could dip into. And with my business taking off, it’s providing us with a nice little extra income too.’
Jack shook his head. ‘I’m sure, but it’s not coming in quickly enough for this, sadly. That baby will be gone by dinnertime tomorrow. And we won’t see another one for ten years.’
‘No!’
‘Rarer than hen’s teeth.’ He reached a hand down and gently squeezed a soapy breast. ‘Anyway, I only came up to do that.’ He grinned, kissing her on the lips. ‘I’d better go back down and check Arthur’s not sitting in the wok.’
Laura sighed as he shut the door gently behind him. Her earlier victory was growing evermore hollow by the moment: the biggest opportunity of her career, Fee’s Visa bill and now Jack’s boyhood dream – all dashed with one tantrum. She’d messed up properly this time. She’d blown it for them all.
Hadn’t she?
Chapter Four
‘You seriously need to get a boat,’ Fee panted as she slid the straps of the rubberized waders off her tiny shoulders the next morning.
‘Yeah, well, if this comes off, I’ll be able to afford one,’ Laura replied, hanging hers on a rusty nail banged into one of the stilts and rooting around in her tote for her red Converse.
‘I still don’t see why we couldn’t have waited till low tide. I mean, what’s the rush? Why do you have to ring now? It’s barely eight o’clock.’
‘Because I didn’t sleep a wink last night. Time quite literally is money, Fee.’
‘Something I never thought I’d hear you say. But I don’t understand what’s changed your mind. You were adamant yesterday that you wouldn’t work with him.’
‘That was before I realized that working for him would allow me to make Jack’s dream come true.’
Fee pulled a face. ‘Come again?’
‘There’s a beach hut for sale in the Echo. They want fifteen thousand for it, and Jack’s desperate for one. He tried to play it down, of course.’
‘So, what – you’ve told him about the commission, then, have you?’
‘Don’t be daft! There’s nothing to say Robert Blake will take me on again, and even if he does, the beach hut might have already gone – that’s if Jack’s to be believed and these things really do walk off the shelves. But if all the stars do line up, it’ll be his Christmas present. A surprise.’ She gave an excited grin. ‘I thought I’d put a Christmas tree and his stocking in it. You know, insist on taking Arthur for a walk on the beach first and then – ta-da!’
‘Not getting ahead of yourself, then,’ Fee quipped.
Laura smacked her lovingly on the arm.
‘So what about all the very legitimate objections you had to working with him, then, like too many other jobs?’
‘For knocking on twenty grand I’ll mine the damn gold myself! No, I’ll make it work somehow. It’s not that bad. I didn’t like his attitude more than anything. He got my back up from the start, staring at me like I was some kind of freak. I bet he’s never seen a woman without a fake tan before.’ She threw a sly smile at Fee. ‘He’d bloody love you,’ Laura said, double-knotting her laces as Fee pulled on her Uggs. Laura looked over at her orange-streaked, bare-legged, mini-skirted friend who had all the fat – and therefore warmth – of a string bean. ‘You know your legs look like threads hanging down from your skirt when you wear those boots, right?’
She could feel Fee stick her tongue out at her back as they started climbing the stairs.
‘And God forbid you should put on a pair of tights. It is November, you know,’ Laura called from in front.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Fee said, pushing her on the bum.
Laura swiftly unlocked the door and they bundled into the studio, Fee automatically shivering in the cold all-whiteness.
‘So have you worked out what you’re going to say to him? I mean, you, Laura Cunningham, apologizing? It’s never been done before, has it?’
Laura bit her lip and shook her head. ‘Oh God, I feel sick just thinking about it. He might not even take the call. I completely humiliated him, Fee.’
‘Well, there’s no point in torturing yourself with it. The sooner you get it over and done with, the better,’ Fee said, handing her the phone.
‘I think I’ll just make a cup of tea first.’
‘You’re delaying.’
‘I know. Want one?’
‘Go on, then. I’ll need an extra sugar this early in the morning.’ Fee flopped down on the sofa, her denim mini flashing a pair of pink polka-dot pants and her terrific legs.
Laura, as ever, was in Jack’s jeans – he was, depressingly, the same size as her – a Metallica tour T-shirt she’d found in the Heart Foundation shop and a navy M&S cardie. It was as far from Fee’s pretty, girly look as you could get, but that was how she liked it, and Fee had long since given up trying to get her into stripes or florals or pastels. She preferred camouflage clothing of the ‘don’t look at me’ kind.
‘Have you got his number?’ Laura asked as she stirred three sugars into Fee’s tea.
‘Yup, it’s right here,’ Fee said, fishing it out of her bag.
Laura set down the teas on the driftwood coffee table and read it. ‘That’s a London number.’
‘You don’t think he works in Walberswick high street, do you? Cayman Islands more like.’
Laura took a deep breath. ‘If anything should happen to me, tell Jack I love him, all right?’
Fee laughed and tossed a cushion at her as Laura punched in the numbers.
It rang only once before it was picked up and a woman who sounded like Joanna Lumley’s daughter breathed down the line. ‘Mr Blake’s office.’
Laura closed her eyes and prayed for an out-of-body experience. ‘Er, hello. I’d like to speak to Mr Blake, please.’
‘I’m afraid Mr Blake is in a meeting. Who may I tell him called?’
‘Uh, uh, it’s . . . I’m, er . . .’ she stammered. ‘My name’s Laura Cunningham.’ There was a silence and Laura wondered whether the woman had hung up on her. ‘Hello?’
‘The jeweller?’
So her reputation preceded her, then. ‘Yes, that’s right.’ She braced herself for the click – the sound of the death knell on Jack’s dream.
‘Hold, please.’
Laura clamped her hand over the receiver. ‘Shit! She’s actually putting me through,’ she whispered, grimacing anxiously. Fee was kneeling on the sofa, quite literally gnawing on her own fist. Her Visa bill was huge this month.
‘Robert Blake.’ His voice was brisk.
‘Mr Blake,’ she almost whispered down the phone as her nerve fled. ‘This is Laura Cunningham speaking.’
Slight pause. ‘Yes?’
‘I’m ringing to . . .’ She swallowed hard and thought of Jack. ‘I’m ringing to apologize for my dreadful behaviour yesterday.’
‘That’s decent of you,’ he said after a moment.
‘And I also wanted to say that if you would, uh . . . still like me to make the necklace for your wife in time for her birthday, then it would, uh . . . be my pleasure.’
‘I see,’ he said, following up with another long silence.
Laura didn’t know what to say. What else was there to say? She had apologized for the first time ever and offered to do the job on his terms. She’d given him all the power. He got to choose now whether to take it or leave it.<
br />
‘So I’ll leave that with you, then, to think over,’ she mumbled. ‘You’ve got my number if—’
‘What made you change your mind?’
The question stumped her. She didn’t think her boyfriend’s childhood dreams would be of interest to him. ‘I just took another look at my diary. I figured if I can fit in four charms, I can surely squeeze in another three.’
‘Fine.’
‘You mean you want me to do it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh. That’s great, then,’ she said, trying to keep the squeal out of her voice, amazed he’d made the decision so quickly. She’d guessed he would string her along at least for a day or two. ‘Well then, how do you want me to proceed with this? If I can’t meet your wife, I mean?’
‘I want you to interview her family and friends.’
Laura’s heart sank. For seven charms? That meant seven separate interviews. She’d been hoping he was just going to ask her to interview him, get his stories. That would have meant she had a chance of getting all the material she needed in one day. ‘I see.’
He had obviously heard the hesitation in her voice. ‘Is that a problem?’
‘No, no,’ she replied quickly. ‘I’m just thinking about the time it’s going to take to collect all the material I need from so many different people. Most people aren’t used to being interviewed. It takes them a while to relax before they really start to share and confide. And then there’s the travelling time as well. Where are they based?’
‘London and Surrey mainly. Although one’s in Milan and there’s another in Frankfurt.’
‘Milan! Frankf—’
‘I’ll do what I can to streamline the process for you. I might be able to get them over here. But if not, I’ll cover all your expenses, naturally. My PA can arrange your flights.’
He wanted her to fly around Europe collecting stories for his wife’s necklace? ‘Or I could interview them over the phone,’ she suggested hopefully.