Afternoon Tea at the Sunflower Café

by Milly Johnson

  ‘You okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Totally okay,’ she smiled.

  ‘I am so sorry; I didn’t think it would be this mad.’

  ‘It’s great. Everyone seems to be loving it.’

  ‘Some are enjoying themselves too much,’ said Brandon, casting his eyes over to his ex-wife’s new husband who had just staggered into a group of women and caused one of them to spill red wine all over her – luckily – black dress.

  ‘You always get one at the best parties,’ said Connie. Her eyes drifted up to his and neither of them seemed to want to break the contact.

  ‘I just wanted to check that you were all right. Thank you.’

  And to her shock and delight, he bent towards her and kissed her softly on the cheek. The effect on Connie was ridiculous. It sent shockwaves through her whole body. No, no, this couldn’t be happening. The last thing she needed was to start falling for Brandon Locke. Her body was overreacting, she tried to tell herself. She had been starved of affection for so long it was merely responding to a friendly peck from a nice, kind man the way that a ravenous dog would to a scrap of meat. She was glad Brandon moved away then because she knew she was blushing hard.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t Brandon’s little bouncer,’ said a nasty, slurred voice in Connie’s ear.

  Helena.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Connie, trying to edge past her, but Helena pushed Connie with everything she had, sending her careering into the table to the side of her. Chocolates jumped into the air and landed all over the floor and the full wine glasses on Connie’s tray splashed all over her. She banged her hip hard on the corner of the table as she went down and there were multiple cries of horror before a couple of people flew quickly over to help her up from the mess of liquid, glass and chocolate.

  Connie’s side was throbbing but that was nothing compared to the pain of embarrassment that she was suffering, knowing that everyone’s eyes were upon her. Concerned people were picking up the debris around her and fetching over kitchen roll and tissues for the bleeding wounds on her hands and arms which compounded her humiliation. Through the huddle of kind people around her, Connie spotted Brandon speaking angrily to Dominic. Then Helena butted between them and Brandon held up his hand to cut off whatever she was saying.

  ‘Oh Marilyn, are you okay?’ Louisa rushed at her. ‘Come on, let me get you out of here,’ she said. ‘Brandon’s throwing that bloody awful woman out. I haven’t a clue why he invited her. Are you hurt? Oh my, you’re bleeding.’

  They walked out of the kitchen towards the staircase, the stares of sympathetic people following her. Connie was trying to walk as normally as possible but her hip was killing her. She didn’t want to draw more attention to herself, she didn’t want Brandon’s evening ruined.

  ‘I hope I haven’t spoilt things,’ Connie said, trying unsuccessfully to stop tears from constricting her throat.

  ‘You haven’t, she has,’ hissed Louisa. ‘It’s his ex-wife. She’s an absolute cow.’

  Brandon took the stairs quickly to catch up to them.

  ‘Marilyn, I am so sorry. Are you okay?’

  ‘No, she isn’t,’ Louisa answered for her. ‘What the hell did you invite that lot for, Bran?’

  ‘I’m perfectly fine,’ said Connie, not wanting an argument between brother and sister to ensue on top of everything else. ‘Please just leave me for five minutes and I’ll be right as rain. Both of you.’

  Someone was calling Brandon downstairs.

  ‘Really. I’ll just dry myself off. I don’t want a fuss.’

  ‘You take your time,’ said Brandon. ‘People are starting to leave anyway.’

  ‘Go on, you help your brother,’ urged Connie as Louisa was reluctant to leave her.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Connie locked the bathroom door, sat on the edge of the bath and looked at herself in the full length mirror. Her hair was wet, her tights were ripped, there were pulls in her new dress and her mascara had run. She turned her face away not wanting to see more. Her hands were throbbing with cuts; there was still a piece of glass in the base of her thumb which she wriggled out with her fingernails. Her whole right side hurt. Her brain hurt. God, what a mess she was in, inside and out. She could die at the thought that Brandon had seen her sprawled all over the floor covered in wine. Everyone in the room must have been glad that it hadn’t happened to them. People would remember the woman on the floor and laugh more than they’d remember Brandon’s magnificent chocolates and his hospitality. She wished she could have teleported out of there and back home without anyone noticing her.

  She opened the door and saw that the hallway was empty now. The few remaining guests seemed to have gathered in the dining room. Holding her hip, Connie walked as quickly and quietly as she could down the staircase and into the kitchen to get her bag and her coat. Madeleine was in there and came over, brow furrowed in genuine concern.

  ‘Marilyn, are you all right? You look shocked. Can I get you a taxi home?’

  ‘No really, I’m fine. I can drive. But if you’d tell your brother that I’ve gone home, that would be very kind of you.’

  ‘I’ll go and get him,’ Madeleine said.

  ‘No, please, I just want to leave quietly.’

  ‘I understand,’ replied Madeleine, sympathy heavy in her kind, brown eyes. She gave Connie a tight hug.

  ‘You take good care. Brandon is absolutely furious. I told him that Helena was not someone you kept as a friend after a disaster of a marriage. He can be ridiculously nice, my big brother.’

  ‘Will you tell him I’ll see him tomorrow, as normal,’ said Connie and slipped out of the back door. She wanted to get home, and to bed as quickly as possible in the hope that sleep stopped the images bombarding her brain of what had happened tonight.

  She had just opened her car door when she heard Brandon’s voice calling her.

  ‘Wait, wait,’ he was saying. ‘Please don’t go.’

  She tried to pretend that she hadn’t heard him, but he was with her in seconds and she couldn’t very well carry on ignoring him when he was standing next to her.

  ‘Please come inside, I want to talk to you when everyone has gone,’ he said.

  ‘I need to get home,’ she replied.

  ‘I know who you are, Connie,’ he said.

  Chapter 89

  Connie froze.

  ‘Please come back inside.’ Brandon took her elbow and guided her carefully into the house and pulled out a chair at the kitchen table for her to sit on. ‘Give me five minutes. I need to say goodbye to a couple of people and then I want to talk to you. Is that okay?’ he asked.

  Connie nodded, her brain whirring with questions. How did he know? What did he know? Did he know she was a married liar? One of those bitter women who wanted revenge on their ex-husbands? She couldn’t bear it if he thought ill of her.

  Connie didn’t know how long she sat there, feeling like a naughty kid parked outside a headmaster’s office waiting her turn for a showdown. It was only five minutes in reality, but it felt like much longer with the thoughts that were torturing her. Eventually Brandon appeared, shut the door behind him and pulled out the seat next to her.

  ‘My sisters are seeing off the last stragglers. We won’t be disturbed.’ She felt the heat of his big brown eyes on her face.

  ‘Connie . . .’ he said eventually.

  She couldn’t look at him. ‘How do you know my name?’

  ‘Because you’re a terrible liar,’ he said, with an amused smile. ‘I picked up on a few things you said that you probably didn’t mean to. And you told me that you were born on the day that Betty Grable died, so I knew exactly how old you were. And that your primary school had a green uniform. Ours was the only one in the area that had a green uniform, did you know that?’

  ‘Ours?’

  ‘You went to the same school as me. I’m a couple of years above you and you wouldn’t remember me, probably. Hardly anyone called me Brandon,
most people called me Chubb.’

  Connie understood the reference straight away. ‘Chubb – Locke, I get it.’

  ‘No, they called me Chubb because I was fat. Fat with those awful blue standard issue glasses on. I was your prototype typical school nerd.’

  ‘You?’ Connie couldn’t help the exclamation. There was no way on earth that someone like Brandon Locke could ever have been an ugly duckling.

  ‘Yep. Imagine the stick I got at school because I, the fat kid, wanted to work with food for a living. And I never lost sight of that dream, because I saw this little girl trying to do a handstand in the playground, but she couldn’t. And then she did.’

  Connie was the fat, clumsy kid of her year. The one who couldn’t do the handstands that the other girls did. Then her mother put a package in her hand. ‘These are magic,’ she had said. ‘You can do anything when you wear these.’ Bright pink pants, magic pants. And Connie had worn them and managed the handstand.

  ‘I never forgot her,’ said Brandon. ‘Over the years she became the one person I used to recall whenever I thought I was punching above my weight. When teachers said I couldn’t go into cookery because I was a boy, I thought of her steely determination. Whenever anyone said that a tiny backstreet chocolatier couldn’t compete with the big boys in the industry, I thought of her, never giving up. And here she is again, inspiring a range of chocolates that I am convinced will lift my company into a different league. That little girl was you. It was, wasn’t it? She had bright pink frilly pants on.’

  Connie lifted her head. That detail was the proof. She was the actual girl he remembered. Connie didn’t know what to say. Her first thought was that the fact that the sight of her young gauche, ridiculous self – and those nuclear magical pants – had made enough impact on Brandon to stay with him for over thirty years was hardly flattering. Then again, hadn’t he just said that she had motivated him to succeed? And kept on motivating him through his career?

  ‘It wasn’t hard to piece things together,’ he went on. ‘There was only one Constance in the school records at the time I was there. I traced where she went and what she did. I know your married name is Diamond and that your husband runs a cleaning firm which isn’t Lady Muck. So . . . do you want to fill in the missing bits for me?’

  Connie rubbed her forehead with her fingertips. She felt as if she had just been arrested and was being urged to tell all and incriminate herself.

  ‘You’re Lady Muck, I presume?’ asked Brandon. His voice was calm, he wasn’t cross with her.

  ‘My marriage is going to end in the next couple of days.’ Connie plunged in with the facts, hoping she wasn’t going to sound like a total bitch. ‘I recently found out that Jimmy – my husband – has been unfaithful to me for the whole of our twenty-four-year marriage and he was planning to dump me after Lent. So, I decided to fight back. I set up a rival company, stole his workforce and am gearing myself up for the moment when he tells me that he is moving in with the nineteen-year-old fiancée he recently became engaged to and I tell him that I know and that’s why I’m divorcing him and have tried to smash his business to smithereens.’

  She stood to go. Hearing that was enough to make him never want to speak to her again. She made bitter Helena look like Pollyanna. She hadn’t expected Brandon to leap up and push down on her shoulders so that she was sitting again.

  ‘You must be very hurt,’ he said.

  ‘Hurt, angry . . . oh God I’m so angry. More than anything else I’m that.’

  ‘It can’t be easy, knowing he deceived you so much.’

  ‘He did worse to other people in my life.’

  Brandon was waiting for her to go on. And she wanted to go on, so she did.

  ‘All the time I was telling our daughter that Daddy wasn’t around because he was working so hard, he wasn’t there because he was with other women. He said we couldn’t afford to buy her a car when she passed her test and yet he bought his . . . mistress a top of the range sports model. Jane’s grown up in a traditional family unit, yet I might as well have been a single parent. My mother worked her fingers off for us, setting up the business, cleaning, even when she was riddled with arthritis. But when she became ill and I could have put her in the best place for her, Jimmy said we couldn’t afford it. She went in an inferior nursing home because Jimmy was too busy squirrelling his money away and spending it on his harem. I can live with the fact that our house is draughty and rotten because he’s got better uses for his cash, but I can’t forgive him for what he denied my mother and his own child. Even his own parents. We could have had hired nurses, someone to help me deal with three sick old people over the years; we had enough in the bank, but he kept it secret from me and let me bear so much more than I needed to. He stole time from me, which is so much more precious than his stupid money.’

  Hot angry tears were dropping from Connie’s eyes, leaving a burning trail down her cheeks. She noticed that Brandon was holding her hands, though she couldn’t remember him taking them. Both of his were closed around hers. She could feel his warmth travelling up her arms and reaching her heart.

  ‘I trusted him. He bought me chocolates whenever he went away “on business” and I took that as a sure sign that he loved me. But he didn’t buy them, ever. His office manageress did. He didn’t care enough to do even that for me. So that’s why I’m taking his business from him.’

  ‘Ah.’ Brandon’s one-word reply carried with it total understanding. What she had told him explained her aversion to chocolate perfectly. His finger rose to touch her cheek and carried one of her teardrops away. ’It would have been far easier to cut holes in his trouser crotches,’ he said and she laughed, without meaning to. She lifted her eyes and found his waiting for her, intense in their gaze, which might have been rather nice had she been confident and beautiful and not plain, plump Connie who was covered in wine and squashed truffles. She felt herself starting to blush.

  ‘I’d better go home,’ she said, pulling her hands from his.

  ‘No, you’ll stay here for a few more minutes until you’re fit to drive. You don’t want to have an accident on the way home, do you?’

  I’m more likely to crash if you don’t let me go, thought Connie. Her nerves were twanging like overwound harp strings in such close proximity to Brandon Locke. This man was too kind, too considerate, too handsome, too sexy to be a calming influence. He was making her insides sing, just like Jimmy did all those years ago when she was seventeen and she had a momentary marvel at how that heady feeling of fancying someone didn’t lessen with the years.

  ‘You deserve better, Connie,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I do. And I’m going to have it,’ replied Connie with steel in her voice, if not in her quivering limbs. ‘I’m going to make sure my business is a success. I’ve got a lot of women working for me now. I have to carry on and do right by them.’

  ‘Oh, I have every belief you will,’ he said. His hand came out to cup her damp cheek and the palm was soft as cocoa-butter, gentle on her skin. She hadn’t been touched so tenderly for years and it made her gasp. Her eyelids dropped as she savoured the contact and when they opened again it was to find him so close to her that his breath was melding with hers. She stiffened in shock when she felt his lips against her own, soft and searching, and a mingle of scents and tastes assailed her: the foresty zing of his aftershave, wine and chocolate. Surely he wasn’t going to kiss her, was he? Oh my GOD he was.

  Then the kitchen door opened, crashed immediately shut again and a female voice cried, ‘Oh whoops, I’m so sorry.’ The moment had been broken and they moved apart, laughing at Louisa’s ill-timed interruption.

  ‘Dear Connie,’ Brandon said. ‘My little girl in the pink knickers. Why didn’t you say it was you when I first started telling you this story?’

  ‘Oh come on, what were the chances that I was the same kid you saw? Besides I was plump with no front teeth and scabby knees from all that falling over. It’s not the first impression that I’d want an
yone to remember,’ laughed Connie softly.

  ‘I’ve never forgotten her. I’ve carried her in my heart for years,’ said Brandon.

  Connie stood up. Her head felt like a loaded party popper and if Brandon Locke touched her again tonight, it would blow off her neck in a shower of confetti.

  ‘Come tomorrow, Connie,’ he said. ‘As usual. But we’ll talk. No work.’ He picked up her bag for her. ‘Are you all right to drive?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Promise you’ll come.’

  ‘I promise. I’ll be here after I’ve finished at Mr Savant’s house. Twelve latest.’

  He kissed her on the cheek and she wanted to breathe in his chocolatey scent until he filled up her lungs to the very top.

  ‘Good night, Connie,’ he said.

  ‘Good night, Brandon.’

  She tried not to limp to the car, aware that he was watching her from the window. Oh God, as if life wasn’t complicated enough, she was going to be hobbling in the morning. And she was in love with Brandon Locke.

  *

  When Connie pulled up in car, Jimmy was in the bath.

  ‘Con, is that you?’ he called from the midst of suds. ‘Where the hell have you been? I’ve rung your mobile loads of times.’

  ‘I didn’t have it with me,’ she replied, glad that she could get out of her wine-sodden clothes before he saw them and the questions started. ‘I went late-night shopping in Meadowhall. Waste of time though. And I fell over in the car park. Tripped over a pot hole.’

  When Lent was over, she would never lie again. It was too much hassle, there were too many ‘truths’ to remember, and she hated it.

  ‘Couldn’t do me a favour could you tomorrow? Have a trawl on the internet and see if you can find anything about someone called Lady Muck.’

  There was a long pause before Connie repeated the name, ‘Lady Muck?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Never heard of them.’

  ‘Me neither, but have a look for me, will you?’

  ‘Okay.’

  Jimmy settled back into the suds. It was only later that he would remember how similarly Della and his wife had reacted to the name Lady Muck.