Afternoon Tea at the Sunflower Café

by Milly Johnson

  ‘Roy Frog, here for a meeting with Jimmy Diamond at eleven,’ he said, in a voice gruff from years of cigarette smoking.

  ‘Oh, come in, Mr Frog,’ said Ivanka politely. Mój Boże, was it that time already? So where was Jimmy then? ‘Please take a seat here. Can I please get you some refreshment?’

  ‘I’ll have a tea, very strong, milk and two sugars please,’ he replied, sitting down in ‘reception’ and picking up the Daily Trumpet from the table.

  ‘I will make you tea whilst you wait,’ said Ivanka. ‘I am sure that Jimmy is on his way.’

  Ivanka went into the kitchen area and switched on the kettle. The teabag tin was empty and strangely there was no jar of coffee either. Nor was there any milk in the fridge. She would have to go to the shop at the entrance of the estate, which was a nuisance.

  ‘Please wait here, Mr Frog. I am just going out to get some tea,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll have a coffee instead.’

  Ivanka gave him a painful smile. ‘I need to buy coffee too.’

  ‘Oh.’ Roy Frog wasn’t very impressed. Not only was there no Jimmy Diamond, but there wasn’t even a cuppa to be had whilst he waited. It gave him too clear an indication of how he was regarded.

  ‘Are you good to stay here alone?’ Ivanka asked.

  ‘Yes, I suppose I’ll be all right,’ he said flatly.

  Ivanka chuntered to herself all the way to the shop. How come there was no coffee or tea in the cupboard? There was always a plentiful supply of it. She bought a box of teabags, a jar of coffee, a two pint container of milk, a packet of biscuits and asked for a receipt so she could claim the money back. She walked into the office to find Roy Frog passing time by examining the cleaning supplies on the shelves.

  ‘Let me guess, Des’s Discount Warehouse?’ he said to Ivanka with a smirk. ‘Not even I use that crap. You never know what’s in it.’

  If Della had been there she would have been cheering because she would never have been able to plan this better.

  ‘We like it,’ said Ivanka firmly but with a smile, closing the cabinet doors. ‘Please take a seat and I will refresh you.’

  Nosey sukinsyn, thought a narked Ivanka as she prodded a teabag in a mug so that Roy Frog could have the strong brew he had asked for. She heard the door open and let loose a sigh of relief. Jimmy had arrived for his meeting, thank goodness. But when she walked through with the drink and a plate of biscuits, it was to find Meg, Ava, Wenda and Val carrying empty supermarket bags-for-life.

  ‘We’ve come for supplies,’ said Ava, bristling at the sight of Ivanka. The feeling of dislike between Ivanka and the girls was mutual. The girls thought Ivanka was up her own arse, Ivanka thought that they belonged to an underclass.

  ‘Okay,’ said Ivanka. ‘But please be quiet, there is a visitor waiting to see Jimmy.’

  Ava pretended to zip up her mouth.

  ‘Maybe you would prefer to wait in Jimmy’s office,’ said Ivanka, hoping to spare Roy Frog the sight of Meg’s enormous backside poking out of the store cupboard. She led him through and set the mug and biscuits in front of him, closing the door behind him so she could ring Jimmy and find out where the hell he was. Except that she couldn’t ring Jimmy whilst the girls were in the office because everyone knew he didn’t have a mobile phone. There was nothing for it but to try and ring him on his secret mobile from outside, so she slipped out of the door and down the stairs. Her call went straight through to voicemail. She tried again and the same thing happened. Ivanka left a message. ‘Jimmy, where are you? Roy Frog has an eleven o’clock meeting with you and you are not here. Please ring the office.’

  She met the girls with their bags full on her way back up.

  ‘Should you be leaving the office unattended with a stranger in?’ Meg asked her.

  ‘You just clean and leave the office to me,’ snapped Ivanka, striding past them and ignoring the amused ‘oooh’s behind her. They needed some more staff, she decided. Women who respected her and knew their place. She would make sure she set some on this week.

  *

  ‘What sort of hand grenades?’ asked Connie.

  ‘Well,’ Della began with relish, ‘Ivanka had pencilled Roy Frog in for an eleven o’clock meeting. I might have accidentally erased a digit so it reads as if Roy Frog is actually arriving at one. And then I might have booked a meeting at eleven thirty with a firm in Worksop. I know that whenever Jimmy has to go to that area, he likes me to ensure it’s in the late morning so he can go straight from home to Sizzles, which is a café on the edge of the town, where he likes to read the newspaper at leisure and have a grill special with a full cafetiere of coffee before he engages in any business talk.’

  ‘Blimey, you do know him well,’ said Connie.

  ‘I gave him a typed-up list of this week’s appointments on Friday, as I always do. His face lit up with joy when he saw that he had a Monday morning meeting in Worksop. “I suppose you’ll be going to Sizzles,” I said. “That will fortify you for your afternoon meeting with Roy Frog.”’ Della grinned. ‘I only wish that I could do something to stop Ivanka phoning him on that mobile that no one is supposed to know he has, and telling him that Roy Frog is in his office at eleven. The chances are that they’ll just reschedule the meeting and no harm will be done. But as a contingency plan I did throw all the tea and coffee away.’

  Connie tilted her head in a puzzled way. ‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

  ‘Well, Ivanka only drinks water. I’m hoping that she didn’t realise there was no tea or coffee until she came to make one for Roy Frog. So she will have had to go to the shop to buy some, leaving Roy Frog alone in the office.’

  Connie was still not with her.

  ‘And what would he do in the office?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ smiled Della, throwing up her hands. ‘But maybe somebody else did something in the office and he gets the blame for it.’

  ‘Like what?’ Connie stifled a giggle.

  ‘Put dye and bleach in bottles of products, for instance . . .’

  ‘Oh Della, you didn’t.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Della, sipping from her mug. ‘As if I would do anything as destructive as that.’

  Chapter 72

  After his second cup of strong tea, numerous glances at his watch and a lot of heavy sighs, Roy Frog got up from the chair in Jimmy’s office and marched through to Ivanka.

  ‘Where is he?’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting over forty minutes now.’

  ‘Mr Frog, I have been trying to get hold of Jimmy, but I can’t. Please let me make you another tea,’ said Ivanka, attempting to smooth things over. She was furious with Jimmy for not picking up his phone. She had engineered this meeting with Roy Frog herself after persuading Jimmy that the time was now ripe for negotiation, so she couldn’t work out what had gone wrong.

  ‘I don’t want another tea, thank you,’ said Roy Frog, unable to keep the growl out of his voice.

  ‘I don’t understand what has happened,’ said Ivanka.

  ‘I do. He’s taking the mick,’ said Roy Frog. ‘First he won’t take my calls, then he summons me here but doesn’t bother turning up himself. He’s on a bloody power-trip, isn’t he?’

  ‘I assure you, Mr Fr—’

  Roy Frog buttoned up his coat with angry fingers.

  ‘I’m off. And you can tell Jimmy Diamond that he’ll come crawling to me over hot coals before I’ll agree to another meeting with him.’

  ‘Please, I can try and ring again . . .’

  ‘Sorry, Miss, I’ve had enough of being treated like a pillock for one day.’ Roy Frog charged past Ivanka.

  The office phone rang.

  Ivanka brightened. ‘Please wait. That will be him now.’ She dived to the phone and pressed the speakerphone button gambling that it would be Jimmy, just in time to rescue the situation. ‘Hello, Jimmy.’

  ‘Hello, this is Harris Marketing Research, could we have a few moments of your time to answer some questions which may benefit
your business.’

  Ivanka snatched the phone up and shouted impatiently into it. ‘Go away, you stupid people.’ She turned back to Roy Frog. ‘Let us reschedule a meeting at your convenience, Mr Harris, I mean Mr Frog. What do you think?’

  ‘I think you should shove your rescheduled meeting up your Harris,’ he said and slammed the door behind him.

  Within five minutes of Roy Frog’s bat-out-of-hell exit from the car park, Jimmy rang the office.

  ‘Where have you been?’ screamed Ivanka down the mouthpiece. ‘You’ve missed your appointment with Roy Frog.’

  ‘Where I’ve been is on a sodding wild-goose chase,’ barked Jimmy. ‘Who the hell took the fucking booking for Mr Kersov in Worksop?’

  ‘I don’t know. It does not ring any bells with me. It must have been Della,’ fibbed Ivanka.

  ‘A Mr Nick Kersov. A joke name for a frigging joke company. I’ve been driving around Worksop for far longer than I care to imagine. In fact I never want to see the sodding place again for as long as I live. And what are you talking about? Roy Frog isn’t booked in until this afternoon.’

  ‘You should have been here at eleven for a meeting with him,’ Ivanka matched him for volume.

  ‘Della’s list says one. She wouldn’t have got it wrong.’

  ‘And I would?’ Ivanka was incensed. She stomped through to his office and threw open his desk diary. ‘I am looking at your diary now and it says meeting with Roy Frog at . . . wait a minute, how could this have happened?’

  ‘It says one, doesn’t it? You’ve written it down wrong, haven’t you?’ Jimmy grumbled something nasty and dark under his breath.

  ‘Why didn’t you pick up your mobile?’ Ivanka yelled. ‘Then you might have known he was here.’

  ‘I don’t go into Sizzles with a mobile. I go into Sizzles to have peace and quiet.’ Even from you, said Jimmy to himself. In fact especially from you at the moment with your nagging about Connie and Della and flaming wedding talk.

  ‘What is Sizzles? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Look, I’m driving back. I’ll see you in about an hour.’

  ‘I will . . .’ But she was talking to thin air because Jimmy had put his mobile down and, as she found when she tried to ring it back, had switched it off.

  *

  ‘Nick Kersov? Knickers off?’ Connie wiped the tears of laughter away from her eyes.

  ‘Oh, there’s more to come. I had a very very enjoyable time thinking of potential clients. I will be ringing Ivanka later to book meetings with other people for Jimmy.’ And she treated Connie to her best Fenella Fielding silky-voiced PA .

  ‘That is amazing. It doesn’t sound anything like you.’

  Della was grinning and Connie thought what a very different face she had when she smiled. Della had lovely brown eyes and her lips, in laughter, looked plumper than when they were set in her usual slightly ruched line.

  ‘You should get some of those rimless glasses, Della,’ said Connie. ‘You need to show your eyes off.’

  ‘They’re expensive though, aren’t they?’ said Della. ‘You have to buy toughened glass.’

  ‘When was the last time you spent anything on yourself? You’re like me, I reckon, we don’t think we’re worth it. Well we are, and we should realise that.’

  Della took the glasses off her head to inspect them. She’d had them for so long, she never noticed them any more and she didn’t tend to look in a lot of mirrors. They were pure Olive from On the Buses frames.

  ‘I’m hardly a style queen. You can tell me to sod off,’ said Connie, watching Della scrutinise them.

  Della didn’t answer for a few moments, then gave Connie a soft smile and said, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What for?’ said Connie.

  ‘For trusting me. And for not judging me too harshly.’

  It was irony heaped on irony that Della felt that the wife of the man she was in love with would be the first person not to let her down.

  Chapter 73

  Jimmy didn’t so much walk into the office as barge into it like a human battering ram and, not realising they had a new ‘reception area’, nearly went flying over the coffee table. They’d only been without Della for one morning and the place was in chaos.

  ‘Get Roy Frog on the line,’ roared Jimmy, kicking the table against the wall. ‘And who put this bloody furniture here?’ Ivanka jumped to the phone. She was feeling uncharacteristically cowed after finding the mistake in the diary. She couldn’t believe she had written it down incorrectly and was really annoyed with herself. It wasn’t on her radar that there had been skulduggery afoot from her office manageress.

  ‘His secretary says he is playing golf and will pass on the message,’ said Ivanka, putting the phone back down and wincing at having to deliver that news.

  Jimmy tightened his lips. Roy was no more at golf than he was presently driving a tractor through a field of turnips. Frog was teaching him a lesson and Jimmy was furious that he had been handed the ammunition gift-wrapped in order to do that.

  ‘You did look after him all right when he was here?’ he asked Ivanka.

  ‘Yes, of course. Although Della did not tell me that we had no tea or coffee so when I came to make him refreshment I had to go to the shop and buy some. But I also buy nice biscuits whilst I am there.’ She allowed herself a self-satisfied smile knowing she had won some brownie points there. And plunged perfect Della right in the crap.

  ‘Okay,’ Jimmy conceded and stepped into his office, then as quickly, he was back out of it again. He circled his finger in the air. ‘Rewind that conversation, will you? Just for my own peace of mind, tell me that you meant you went to the shop before Roy Frog arrived.’

  ‘No,’ Ivanka tutted. ‘How could I have seen that there was no tea or coffee in the cupboard until I come to make it for him? I don’t drink it so how would I know?’

  Jimmy cleared his throat. ‘So, let me get this right, you left him here whilst you went off to the shop, did you?’ His voice was deceptively calm and at total odds with the rage building inside him.

  ‘Of course. I could not exactly ask him to go with me, could I?’

  Jimmy rubbed his forehead and laughed, not a pleasant laugh, but one of total exasperation.

  ‘You left my major business rival in my office alone with access to all my files, my diary, my contacts, everything? Is that what you’re saying?’

  Ivanka was now realising what she had done. And she had dropped herself in it too deep to get out of it. But still she tried.

  ‘For five minutes only. At most.’

  ‘Usain Bolt couldn’t have got to the shop and back in five minutes, Ivanka. And you certainly couldn’t because you take half an hour to walk to the bloody bog and back.’

  Ivanka’s mouth puckered into a tight furious pout. ‘What do you mean? Are you calling me fat?’

  ‘Fat?’ exclaimed Jimmy. ‘When did I say you were fat?’

  ‘You want me to be fat like your wife – is that it, Jimmy?’ shouted Ivanka.

  Jimmy spun. ‘Oy, don’t you dare bring Connie into this. She’s a good woman.’

  Ivanka’s mouth fell open into a long, indignant oval and her black, stencilled eyebrows rose so high, they almost touched her hairline. ‘You say to me that your wife is a good woman? And yet you have cheated on her all your marriage and you are leaving her next week for me?’

  Jimmy shook his finger at her as he attempted to answer, but all the words he wanted to say crowded together in his mouth and wouldn’t come out because deep down he knew that Ivanka was right and he would have been a first-class hypocrite to argue with her. Which, though it had never stopped him in the past, was doing so now.

  ‘Just put the bloody kettle on,’ he said, went into his office and shut the door emphatically behind him.

  Chapter 74

  It was a new day. Jimmy had to write off the fiasco of yesterday or he would have gone insane. He walked into his office, late morning, determined that today would be bett
er. Della wasn’t back, but he supposed he’d have to treat her absence as a trial run because in nine days’ time, she wouldn’t be working there at all. What madness had made him agree to Ivanka’s terms? Della’s non-attendance was just wrong, and made him feel as if he was about to climb the north face of the Eiger without a safety rope.

  Jimmy opened up his diary whilst sipping the very good coffee which Ivanka had just made for him. He was quietly impressed by the number of appointments which she had booked in this week. Tomorrow morning he was seeing a Mrs Blige at the other side of Sheffield. Apparently, Ivanka told him, Mrs Blige had heard a lot about Diamond Shine’s reputation and that is why she wanted Jimmy’s girls to work in the offices she owned. Then in the afternoon, he had a meeting with a Major who was enquiring about contracting a team to clean ten British Legion clubs in the county. The day after that, Thursday afternoon, he was to hook up with the head of maintenance in Asda HQ in Leeds and Friday was equally full with another two clients who wanted to talk shop with him. He hadn’t been this busy ever. He had to hand it to Ivanka, today she was shining in her position as office manageress. Yesterday’s debacle with Roy Frog, who still hadn’t rung back, was obviously just a rogue blip. Plus they’d just had a snog and a bit of a grope in the new reception area which made everything seem a little better.

  He was just calculating how much richer he could be every month if he were to successfully secure all the business possibilities that Ivanka had sourced for him when his ear picked up on a conversation happening between his lover and someone on the phone.

  ‘It’s gone green? What do you mean it’s gone green? . . . Oh, red. Well, why has it gone red then? . . . She isn’t here, you will have to deal with me.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Jimmy shouted through.