A Spring Affair

by Milly Johnson

  ‘She didn’t make me, she asked. I could have said no. Oh Lou, why are you always so aggressive where Victorianna is concerned?’ snapped Renee. ‘What on earth did she ever do to deserve all that sniping?’

  Mum, you really don’t want to know the answer to that one, Lou said inwardly.

  ‘You were so close when you were young as well,’ said Renee, shaking her head in exasperation.

  That wasn’t quite the way Lou remembered it.

  ‘Anyway, are you going to do it for her or do I have to get a taxi?’

  ‘Yes, of course I will,’ sighed Lou, adding to herself, but I’m doing it for you, Mum, not Goldentits.

  When it was time to go, she woke up Phil who was snoring in the armchair. Fed and watered, he had dropped off stretched out on Renee’s enormous leather recliner next to the radiator that was pumping out heat. When Renee shuffled off this mortal coil, he thought sleepily, he would have to make sure Lou got him that chair.

  It occurred to Lou, as she walked out to the car, that she couldn’t remember the last time anyone had said they loved her.

  Chapter 13

  ‘Hello, Keith Featherstone,’ announced a voice thick with the smoke of twenty years of filterless fags.

  ‘At last, Mr Featherstone! It’s Mrs Winter,’ said Lou, with half-shock, half-relief at finding herself speaking to his actual voice and not the gravelly answering-machine message.

  ‘Ah, Mrs Winter, I am so sorry, everything’s been mad. I was going to ring you later on today.’

  Yeah, right. Lou steeled herself.

  ‘Mr Featherstone, I really need you to finish this bathroom. It’s been over six weeks now since you left it.’ Lou dropped her voice so Phil wouldn’t hear the next bit, as he would have gone totally bonkers. ‘And I did pay you cash in advance so you’d treat this as a priority. As you promised you would.’

  Lou felt sick saying it. Sometimes she was like a stupid daft puppy that trusted everyone and invariably got booted, although no one could have kicked her more over this whole bathroom business than she had kicked herself.

  ‘You are totally right, Mrs Winter. I feel awful about it, and I will be along as soon as I can. I’ll ring you this afternoon when we’re a bit closer to completing this job that we’re on with now.’

  ‘I’ll be at work. Have you got my mobile number?’

  ‘I have indeed, Mrs Winter, and your home number just in case.’

  ‘I must have this finished. It’s not very fair of you.’

  Crikey, talk about the hard-line tactics she had planned. She’d stamp her foot in a moment and that would really show him.

  ‘I can’t leave what I’m on at the moment, that’s the problem. Old lady, you see, got broken into and her windows and doors are all totally smashed. You should see it, Mrs Winter. Terrible. I couldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t sort her out.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Lou, feeling humbled and a little like a child screaming for cake after just being told there were children starving in Africa.

  ‘I’ll be there as soon as this is finished, Mrs Winter. I promise.’

  ‘OK, Mr Featherstone. As soon as you can then. Thank you.’

  She could have sworn she heard sniggering before the line went dead.

  Her phone bleeped the arrival of a text message as Lou pulled into the office car park. It was from Michelle.

  LETS GO OUT FRIDAY TO CELEBRATE YOUR BIRTHDAY. SORRY HAVEN’T RUNG. MET G8 BLOKE. BEEN IN BED ALL W/END. WOW!! NEED TO TALK SOON XXX

  Lou shook her head. She thought back to the one and only time she had agreed to go out with Michelle on a Friday night after a campaign of constant badgering. Needless to say, Phil hadn’t been very pleased about it, so Lou had underplayed the excitement she felt about getting dressed up and going for a rare girly night out on the town.

  Once she had been released into the town, it took Lou about five minutes to discover that she wasn’t an integral part of their evening at all. Her whole evening consisted of being dragged from pub to pub whilst Michelle trailed after various fanciable men and then, when she got an audience with one of her quarries, Lou was pushed off to entertain ‘the mate’. At one point Lou spent an exhilarating half-hour with a drunk who had a bruise under his thumbnail in the shape of the Phantom Flan Flinger, so at least they had a talking point (well, in his case a slurring point). At the end of the evening, just when she thought her feet might drop off from shoe-pain, Lou was forced to stand for another three-quarters of an hour at a freezing taxi rank whilst her ears rang with the echoes of the weird and over-loud electro music that had been playing in the club. But before Lou could end her evening, she had to take an extremely drunk and sobbing Michelle home and make sure she was locked in safely and tucked up in bed with a pint and a half of water and two paracetamol in her stomach. Then, and only then, could she jump back into the waiting taxi to head across town to her own house. The taxi driver could barely steer for imagining how much his passenger was going to have to fork out for this fare. It would have been cheaper for Lou to charter the QE2 home.

  She had never really bonded with Phil’s house but felt like throwing her arms around it and kissing it when the taxi pulled into its drive. It was worth every penny of the exorbitant fare just to take off her shoes in the porch. Going around town at seventeen in skyscraper stilettos with mates like Deb was brill, but doing it in her thirties, with someone like Michelle, had been excruciating.

  Lou remembered trudging up the stairs, stripping off her clothes and leaving them in an uncharacteristic heap on the bathroom floor because she just wanted to go to bed and snuggle into Phil’s back. However, he was sulking and shook her off. He continued to sulk until the following Wednesday. Not even a lamb roast and a chocolate brandy roulade, the size of a Californian Redwood trunk, could bring him round, although Lou thought her cooking magic had worked on the Monday because he had woken her up in the middle of the night by silently caressing her and they had made love. Lou gave herself wholly, glad this was the end of his drawn-out tantrum, but when he was satisfied, he had once more turned his back in bed and carried on ignoring her for another forty-eight hours. Boy, that had hurt.

  When Michelle finally did ring her that weekend, it was to ask if Lou was up for another ‘fun night out’ as she laughingly put it. ‘When the disciples partied in hell’, was the phrase that crossed Lou’s mind at the time. Lou used Phil as a convenient excuse, saying that he wasn’t keen on her going out at nights. That exchange marked the start of the first big crack in their friendship as Michelle made a couple of snide comments about Lou being under the thumb, saying that she should stop letting herself be manipulated. Under pressure from Phil’s punishing, cold attitude, Lou had snapped back that she was trying to hold her marriage together and chasing men around pubs wasn’t the best way to go about it. Michelle had burst into tears and said she had felt very depressed recently and wasn’t thinking straight. It had the desired effect of making Lou feel like a right old cow and she’d dashed round to Michelle’s house with a couple of strawberry tarts from the bakery and a bottle of wine. She hadn’t seen then that Michelle could out-manipulate Phil when she wanted.

  Maybe, once upon a time, Lou might have been under the illusion that Michelle’s birthday invite was borne of selfless motives. But not now. She texted back: GLAD ABOUT THE MAN. TALK LATER. CANT DO NIGHTS SORRY XXX.

  The reply came back almost instantaneously.

  PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE XXX

  Lou thought again of that interminable wait at the taxi rank to get home with her feet throbbing like an AC/DC track.

  SORRY SORRY SORRY. LUNCH WOULD BE GOOD THOUGH XXX

  The few lunches she and Michelle had together in the beginning were nice.

  IF WE MUST text-sulked Michelle, although Lou knew it wouldn’t happen. There weren’t that many desirable men to stalk at noon in the Edwardian Tea Rooms over giant scones.

  Lou walked into the office and her heart sank immediately on seeing that Karen’s space
was unoccupied. Stan wasn’t in either and Zoe was gazing intently at her screen and looked as if she had been crying or was just about to. Nicola was sitting at her desk. She made a deliberate head-swivel towards the clock after spotting Lou. It was a move intended to needle because they both knew Lou was never late. But as usual, it didn’t work.

  ‘Where is everyone? It’s like the Marie Celeste in here,’ said Lou to Zoe when Nicola had marched off with a very important walk and a folder.

  ‘Stan’s wife phoned him in sick–migraine, apparently–and Karen’s little boy is poorly so she’s taken a day off,’ said Zoe in a voice more cracked than Keith Featherstone’s smoke-ravaged voice.

  ‘Hell, girl, you should be at home with that throat!’ said Lou.

  ‘I rang in this morning but she said that if I didn’t get in here then I’d be in trouble, what with everyone else being off.’

  ‘Someone really should have a quiet word with HR She can’t do this sort of thing.’

  Although, as they all knew, there was no such thing as a quiet word or an ‘off-the-record’ chat with Human Resources. It was a department full of cans of worms and as soon as you opened your mouth in there, you turned into a tin-opener.

  ‘Yes, but she can do it because she is doing it, isn’t she, Lou?’ croaked Zoe.

  The skip was just being lifted by the truck when Lou arrived home. She spotted it from the end of the street and was all too aware that as soon as she had, her foot pressed down on the accelerator. She tore down the culde-sac like Nigel Mansell.

  The big skip man acknowledged her with a nod, but to her disappointment it wasn’t Tom. She had been really looking forward to seeing Clooney too. She had a bag of dog biscuits with his name on in the house–safely hidden away from Phil, obviously.

  ‘No dog today?’ she said lightly, despite the sensation of a cannonball in the pit of her stomach. ‘I was really looking forward to seeing him. The German Shepherd,’ she clarified.

  ‘Clooney, you mean? He’s the boss’s dog. Only ever goes with him,’ said the skip man.

  ‘Oh, what a shame. That’s the bloke who usually comes, is it? He’s the boss?’ Lou said with breezy innocence. ‘I didn’t realize he had anyone else working for him.’

  ‘There’s a few of us,’ said the skip man, pulling at the net, which had snagged on some wood. ‘There’s me, Steve and “Part-Time Eddie”, except those two are off at the mo’ and Tom’s not been working the last couple of days, which is why we’re short handed and I’m having to do this so late on.’

  ‘He’s not ill, is he?’ said Lou, poking a little further.

  ‘No, he’s not ill, but someone in his family is.’

  ‘Not one of his children, I hope?’ said Lou, slightly ashamed that she was being so nosy, but she was unable to stop herself all the same.

  ‘Tom’s kids?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tom ain’t got any kids. I think it’s his sister who’s poorly.’

  Tom ain’t got any kids.

  That little cloud nudged in her chest although she was then cross with herself for not having the forethought to say, ‘Not his wife or his children, I hope?’ If she had got it wrong about the children, he might not be married after all. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, but then she didn’t half the time–well, when Phil wasn’t around anyway. Then again, what difference did it make if he was married with forty-five children or single, gay or celibate, for God’s sake? She was married, and Tom Broom was a bloke who was nice and chatty because he had a business to run and he was probably extra nice and chatty to her because she was probably bankrolling his business from all the skips she was hiring. Anyway, even if he was straight and unattached, he wasn’t exactly going to be interested in a dumpy little married woman coming up to the back end of her thirties with a bum so big it could be seen from orbit. Considering she wasn’t interested, she was spending a lot of headspace on not being interested, she realized. What the hell was up with her?

  Lou went inside and checked the phone when the skip man had gone. There had been no missed calls, which meant bloody Keith Featherstone hadn’t rung her on the house phone either, because he certainly hadn’t rung her on the mobile. But then, had she really believed that he would?

  Chapter 14

  Spring had to be Lou’s favourite season for flowers. It was so pretty when the sun shone and woke up the buds. Her stocky hyacinths on the windowsill were releasing their pungent scent into the kitchen. Outside, the cherry blossom was thick on the tree branches, banks of daffs nodded to each other in the breeze and there was a blur of violet in the woods as early bluebells unlocked. But according to the weather forecast, Sunday was going to be the last day of good weather for a week at least, and so Lou was up early to make the most of it. She had decided that the garden was next in line for an overhaul.

  She had rung for one of the larger skips midweek, dictating her order to an answering machine, and it hadn’t been Tom who had delivered it either. By nine o’clock today, it was already half-full of the bonfire pile that had been waiting for a match for a year and a half. It was far too sodden to burn now and would have ended up smoking out the estate if she had tried. It was only since she had started this clutter-clearing that the sight of it had begun to annoy her. Every time she looked out of the kitchen window, she saw it staring at her, like the mountain from Close Encounters. She had the distinct feeling that if she didn’t shift it before long, she would start recreating it everywhere in mashed potato.

  She set to, sawing all the huge wooden tree branches into smaller pieces, then she wheelbarrowed them over to the skip. Phil hadn’t ever shared the male obsession with arson, so goodness knows what he was thinking of in the first place, making the pile so big. It was as if he had been moving the problem rubbish from one place to another but never actually getting rid of it. Not surprisingly, the clutter-clearing article highlighted such action as a total waste of energy.

  Lou wrestled with a garden chair possessed by a clingy weed behind a row of conifers with a force that suggested she was battling something else, but triumphing over a bulky bit of plastic could not quite take away the frustration and disappointment she was trying not to put a name to. Well, she might not be able to control who delivered her skips, but at least Lou could have the upper hand over the chair. A cameo of Nicola’s face with its scary chrome canines popped into her head for no reason at all, which made the next tug a mightily aggressive one.

  Phil teased back the curtain to see Lou pulling at something white from behind the line of firs. He knocked on the window, but she was too involved with the silly bloody nonsense to hear him. His stomach growled like a caged bear and, in his pyjama bottoms, his penis bobbed like a charmed snake. He could have done with some attention this morning and where was his wife? Out wrestling rubbish like a small Big Daddy–again. Slipping on his dressing-gown and moccasins, he went downstairs, padded across the slate-tiled kitchen floor, opened the back door and called out to Lou.

  His shout coincided with her last heave and Lou, feeling as victorious as Boudicca, dropped the chair on the grass as if it were a dead Roman, before strolling back across the lawn to the house. Her hair was tied back in a girly ponytail but strands of it had fallen across her face, and she pushed back at them with the clean heel of her hand. Her arms and clothes were filthy. She was panting like an animal.

  It must have been his imagination, but she looked leaner. Actually, he thought, she looked quite sexy. For Lou, these days, anyway.

  ‘I’m awake,’ he announced.

  ‘Yes, I see you,’ Lou replied breathlessly. It was back-breaking work but exhilarating. Letting her body work whilst her head was free to butterfly had an effect similar to sticking herself in a battery charger. The harder she worked, the more energized she felt, and it had the unexpected side-effect of revving up a libido she thought had been waiting for its last rites.

  ‘Break for breakfast?’ queried Phil, who really meant: Leave the sodding trees alone and get
the Big George grill out.

  ‘Yes, OK,’ said Lou, stripping off her gloves.

  Her lips are blood red, thought Phil. He steered Lou into the house with his hand on her bottom, not for a moment expecting what would happen next–for no sooner had they made it through the door when Lou turned around, they collided and then he couldn’t believe what sparked between them, but he wasn’t going to turn it down. He struggled her bra off and started rolling her nipples around in his hands, a quick grope before he moved in for the main event…but Lou, it seemed, had other ideas. He undid the belt on his robe and just as he was about to take her hand to guide it down to the bulge making a bid for freedom out of his pyjamas, Lou grabbed his hand first and made it do a bit of bidding of her own. He barely had to do anything before she was gasping out her orgasm, and judging from the noise she was making, it had a few seismic waves attached to it. Then, before Phil had a chance to protest, Lou pushed him onto a kitchen chair, sank between his legs and pleasured him in his absolute favourite way. It was over in seconds, his orgasmic scream borne out on a blasphemy of the highest order.

  ‘Wow,’ said Phil breathlessly, popping his spent equipment back under cover as Lou stood up and started dressing. If the truth be told, he had been getting a bit annoyed with all this skip and cleaning business, and had decided not to let her carry on with it any more, but if this morning was anything to go by, maybe he should, because advantages were starting to manifest themselves. The sight of the constant skips outside the front window was beginning to piss him off, but in saying that, he had really noticed changes in the house. It sounded daft, but every time a skip left, he could have sworn the house felt lighter.

  ‘I think we could definitely do with some breakfast now,’ Phil grinned. ‘I’m starving.’