A Spring Affair

by Milly Johnson

  ‘Is that Clooney?’ asked Lou, receiving her change with a cool and collected ‘Thank you’. She was more than disappointed that he was asleep. At least he wouldn’t have found her so flaming hilarious.

  ‘No, it’s his brother from the litter,’ said rude-man. ‘My sister’s kids have been playing with him all morning, so he’s t-i-r-e-d out.’

  He even has the same twinkle in his eye as Tom, thought Lou, although he was too familiar with strangers for her liking, and so when he disappeared to his back office to get a receipt book, she sneaked out. She’d had enough for the time being of people thinking she was a joke.

  There were two calls waiting for Lou when she got home. One from Michelle saying it was just a quickie as Craig was in the bath, but yes, he was there and they were having a fantastic time. The other was from her mother saying that Victorianna was going to some dinner with Edward Wankystein and that the Deputy President of the United States was going to be there as well (big wow–not). Bloody Keith Featherstone still hadn’t rung. She tried to put it to the back of her mind, which wasn’t all that easy, but there wasn’t going to be any chance of getting him until Monday now. She got on with preparing Phil’s evening meal: cappuccino of pea soup, lamb fillet and treacle sponge with home-made custard. She needed him in a good mood for what she was about to tell him.

  Chapter 20

  ‘Hello there!’ said Phil, flashing his perfectly white teeth at Miss Scarlet Suit. This was the second time she had been in the showroom this week. He never forgot a face. Or a pair of tits, especially not ones as perky as those. She reminded him of someone from his past that he couldn’t quite place. An old girlfriend, somewhere along the line.

  ‘You told me to keep popping in, if you remember,’ the rather lovely punter said, refreshing his memory about the line he quoted her on her last visit. ‘Stock changes daily?’

  ‘Indeed it does,’ said Phil. ‘Have you any idea what you are looking for in particular? You weren’t quite sure last time, as I remember. Has anything inspired you since?’

  ‘Something older perhaps,’ she said, looking up at him from under a sexy little fringe. ‘Classy, though. I don’t mind a few miles on the clock if I know it’s going to be reliable.’

  Cheeky little minx, he thought. Like he didn’t know what she meant!

  ‘Have you seen this one?’ said Phil, leading the way over to a nice old Jag.

  ‘Too big,’ she said, rejecting it before he had even opened the door to thrill her with the walnut dash and the leather upholstery. Well, at least here was a bird who knew exactly what she didn’t want, and that was always one stage closer to knowing what they did want.

  ‘I want something sporty. I want something me. I want something—’

  ‘Singular?’ suggested Phil.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, as if pleasantly surprised that he knew such a word, and she was obviously very flattered that he’d applied it to her.

  Phil mulled this over, and then suddenly snapped his fingers.

  ‘I’ve got just the thing for you, although it’s not in the showroom yet. A 1960s MG Roadster, British Racing Green, absolutely beautiful–and, here’s the best bit–it’s got less than forty thousand on the clock. It’s a fantastic car–I’m expecting a rush when it’s actually here in this window. It’s even got the original green log book, and a full service history, of course.’

  ‘Is it a hard top or soft?’

  ‘Hard. You don’t want a soft top in this climate.’ He dismissed the British weather with one sweep of the hand. In saying that, had it been a soft top he would have said, ‘You can squeeze out the last drop of the British sunshine with this little beauty.’

  ‘Oh yeah, and what do you drive then?’ she tested.

  ‘Audi TT,’ said Phil, adding, ‘hardtop!’ accompanied by his best lopsided grin.

  ‘Nice. Not exactly a family car, though?’

  Ooh, she really was pressing for info, he thought. Clever.

  ‘No family,’ he said, with the tiniest regretful sigh.

  ‘So where’s the MG now?’

  ‘It’s getting the full treatment, once-overed, valeted, polished, one hundred and thirty point check and generally getting touched up by expert hands. It really is absolutely stunning. One lady owner from new and that is no lie.’ Well, one doddery old tart who drove a gorgeous little car like that at 15 m.p.h. to go to the post office once a week. How the hell she had managed to even clock up so much mileage was anyone’s guess. She must have got lost a few times.

  ‘How much are you looking at for it?’

  ‘Not one hundred per cent sure at the moment, but it will be in the region of nine…’

  She didn’t flinch.

  ‘…nine and a half maybe. Thousand,’ he clarified, just in case she thought he meant hundreds. So far, he couldn’t tell if she was a blonde inside the head as well as outside.

  ‘Obviously. When will you have it in for me to look at?’ she asked.

  ‘Couple of weeks, maybe three. Tell you what, you leave me your number and the moment I have it in, you will be the first to know about it.’

  If he did have it in, boy, she would have known about it as well, he thought lustfully. He smiled a soft, benign smile, which belied the groin-thrusting going on in his brain, and beckoned her into his office where she scribbled down her name on his desk pad.

  ‘I’ll give you my mobile number and my name is Miss Susan Shoesmith.’

  She definitely emphasized the ‘Miss’, he was sure of it.

  Sexy, sassy, spirited Susan Shoesmith, he said to himself, trying to trigger a memory that he knew was there. Who was she like?

  ‘Don’t forget me,’ she winked. She had British Racing Green eyes.

  ‘Forget you? Not a chance,’ said Phil.

  As if the day at work wasn’t good enough, Phil opened the door to his favourite smell of all time, apart from the aroma of banknotes untouched by human taxman.

  By the time he’d had a wee, there was a starter waiting on the table–a frothy pea soup and a little plait of warm white seeded bread and butter. He had only a tiny second helping because lamb fillet was to follow, in a rosemary and honey sauce with cider gravy poured over some divine buttery mashed spuds and asparagus spears.

  Lou was having plain chicken fillet, mixed vegetables and no gravy. He wouldn’t have liked to have swapped his for hers.

  ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ asked Phil, starting conversation after he had got to the end of the interesting bits in his newspaper.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Lou, shaking her head in a fine semblance of innocence. ‘I fancied chicken and I know you aren’t really keen, so I just picked up some lamb in the butcher’s whilst I was there.’

  ‘Been shopping then?’

  ‘Yes, I just nipped into town to get some fresh air.’

  ‘Accounts all up to date are they, love?’ he enquired.

  ‘Yes, of course. Treacle sponge?’

  ‘I’m so full.’

  Phil rubbed his stomach, hoping for a liberating burp. It came and left a perfect space for pudding. ‘Oh, go on then. Just a bit.’

  He had a little portion then followed it up with a big one; after all, she had gone to all this trouble for him. More trouble than usual…now the big question was why.

  Lou poured him a brandy and delivered it to him with a cigar and the matchbox. He watched her with suspicious eyes. He knew how much Lou hated lamb; he wasn’t stupid, whatever she might think. Whether she realized it or not, she served it up when she felt desperate for his approval.

  ‘So,’ he said slowly, as he puffed up a glow on the cigar. ‘What’s all this about then, Lou?’

  ‘What’s what all about?’ She wasn’t giving him eye-contact and that told him volumes.

  ‘Lamb? Treacle sponge? I know you, remember, so what are you building up to tell me?’ He gave her one of his fixed smiles that wasn’t reflected in his eyes. The one he saved for the VAT man.

  ‘Well, actuall
y there is something.’ Lou started clearing up the plates.

  ‘What?’

  She was licking her lips; they were dry as autumn leaves.

  ‘What?’ he asked again, impatiently. It had better not be bad news about his accounts.

  Lou took a deep breath and tried to begin.

  ‘Phil…’ This was stupid. Just say it, she urged herself. Why was it so difficult to say she’d met up with Deb again? She opened her mouth to speak. The sentences travelling from her brain ripped themselves apart and reformed in her voicebox.

  ‘Phil, I want to throw away the armchair in the conservatory.’

  He tutted. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Yes. I…I just wanted to make sure you were OK with that.’

  ‘You can throw it out, if you want. It’s hell to sit on anyway.’

  ‘We’ll get one of those recliners, like my mother’s.’

  Phil nodded. He liked the sound of that.

  ‘Right, well, that’s that then,’ she said, carrying on clearing.

  Phil took a big swallow of brandy and studied her as she moved around the table. That wasn’t it, though, was it, Lou? he thought. Her face might be all smiley but her body was screaming tension to him. If she had served him lamb because she wanted to get rid of an old chair, he was Johnny Depp. No, it was something much bigger. Now what was really going on in that little brain of hers?

  Chapter 21

  Lou started her Sunday morning as she meant to go on: leaping out of bed, ignoring her stomach’s plea for breakfast and getting right down to the business of ridding the house of yet more rubbish. The anger Lou felt at her own weakness ironically generated enough adrenaline-driven strength for her to drag the massive conservatory chair out of the back door, into the drizzling rain, down the path and heave it into the skip without so much as stopping for a breath. At least venting some frustration on an ugly, awkward old chair distracted her from bashing her own head against the wall.

  Talking of ugly old things…Lou snapped off a bin-bag from the roll. In her present mood, there were some things she wasn’t going to shy away from any more. Be sentimental by all means, but discriminating, the article reminded Lou, as she sprinted up the stairs into the smallest spare room like a woman possessed of a demon with an aggressive penchant for spring-cleaning.

  Phil’s mother had bought them a ceramic vase as a wedding present, which stood on the chest of drawers there. Neither of them had ever liked it; it was so hideous that it was an offence even to blind people, and thoughts of taking it to the charity shop didn’t even feature. She just wanted to blast it to smithereens so some other poor sod wouldn’t have to be tortured by the sight of it. Throw out everything ugly and broken, the article went on. Your space should only be full of things pleasing to your eye with pleasant emotional vibes giving out positive energy.

  ‘Right,’ said Lou, geeing herself up. ‘Lou Winter is in the building!’

  Grabbing the hideous vase, she dropped it into the bin-bag. The carriage clock with the dodgy movement joined it seconds later. The repro jug and wash-basin that had been broken at some stage and glued together again, shattered in the bag, as did a grotesque warped glass ornament that had been there long before Lou moved in, and a huge carved barometer that she looked at briefly for probably the first time–it was reporting that it was minus 6 degrees and snowing. In the larger spare room there was a collection of brass ornaments that Celia had palmed off on her and which Lou had always felt obliged to gratefully display. She wiped them from the shelves into the bag with one sweep of her arm–the brass teapot, the windmill, the cat, the Aladdin’s lamp, the bell, another bell, another bell, the coffee pot, the bear, the mouse whose tail was designed to hold rings, the woman with the crinoline and especially the hook-nosed pedlar who reminded her of Des.

  Next, she ripped the loathed horse-brasses off the wall. To follow were lucky pixies, castanets, maracas, some coloured glass ball things encased in knitted string which Renee had bought her as a present from Plymouth, a cheap sketch of Haworth Parsonage she had bought as a souvenir from a trip there once, and four boring pictures of seasonal flowers painted onto silk. They had been quite pricey, as she recalled, but she was way past the stage of caring. She knotted up the bag, only to unknot it again to put in another couple of pictures from the landing of lamenting Renaissance women. One crying over a dead duck and another over a bloke who supposedly wasn’t coming back from the wars. They had a sad energy about them in their scenes of pain and loneliness and Lou needed no pictorial reminders of what those feelings were all about.

  She heaved the sack downstairs like a pre-menstrual Father Christmas and swung it up onto the skip, where it made a series of satisfying smashes after she bashed it flat with a plank of wood. Her neck spasmed after that final exertion and she was forced to take a moment to rub some warmth into it to soothe the muscle.

  She needed to sink her whole body up to the nostrils in a warm bath, big-time. She wished now she’d just kept the old seventies avocado bath suite that had been in the building-site room. At least then she could have filled the big ugly thing full of Radox and climbed into it and soaked herself until she was as wrinkled as a dried apricot. Bloody Keith Featherstone. His name brought a surge of frustration. What was she going to do about the whole Bloody Keith Featherstone business? Threatening him with legal action wouldn’t get her anywhere because he would use that as an excuse never to darken her doorstep again, even if he had any intention of doing so. Plus, thanks to her operating on a basis of stupidly placed trust, there was no proof she had paid him any cash upfront, and he could simply deny everything. She had left another polite message on his voicemail during the week and was still waiting for him to return the call.

  She settled for a steamy shower. Afterwards, still wrapped up in the towel, she found more things to be cleared in the mirrored bathroom cabinet. There were loads of free sample sachets she had been storing like a vain squirrel, not to mention bottles of body moisturizer that came unwanted in cosmetic compilations at Christmas along with their dreaded counterparts–the hand creams.

  There was some four-year-old suntan lotion and Phil’s old haemorrhoid ointment, which she picked up with cautious pincered fingers. Her mother said that people were putting it on their faces these days as it had skin-tightening qualities. Yuk.

  She didn’t wear pink eye-shadows or lipsticks any more and yet she had a cache of them in her make-up basket, along with an Abba-blue eye-shadow complete with glittery bits. The article had said that old make-up collected bacteria and should be thrown away after six months. Whoops, thought Lou, as she spotted the actual lipstick she had worn at her wedding. It was a lovely dark-wine red that had worked beautifully with the autumn shades of her hair. It had been a nice wedding day, although it could never have been perfect because her dad hadn’t been there to give her away. She’d cried on her wedding morning because of that and spoiled her make-up, and Debs had to do it all over again for her.

  The sun had shone, the wedding breakfast had been superb, and her groom was the most charming, loving, caring bloke in the world. Just like her dad. A Winter family future stretched before her like a fresh field of snow, inviting her and her man to stamp their unique pattern all over it. They would have a lovely house, a big garden, a son, a daughter, a big bounding puppy, a summer villa on a Tuscan hillside, a car lot, a restaurant and together they were all going to live happily ever after.

  Lou put the lipstick in the bin bag.

  She rang Tom’s number to tell him that the skip was ready for collection and ‘Eddie’ told her that they could lift it that afternoon. Her hair wasn’t even dry from the shower when she heard the wagon reversing, and when she went out to greet it she was more than happy to see a big dog’s head framed in the passenger-side window.

  ‘Hi,’ called Lou, striding over sure-footedly, making a conscious effort to regain some of the elegance points she had lost last time. At least he was working, which meant his back hadn’t had any del
ayed shock after lifting her from the ground. She had guiltily played that scene over and over in her mind, albeit heavily edited. Now it was about ten minutes longer, full of heaving bosoms (hers) and Italian accents (his) and there was a ‘Midnight Moon’ backdrop of Mediterranean night sky and wishing stars.

  ‘Hi there,’ called Tom, while Clooney came straight over to Lou for a fuss and, obviously, a biscuit.

  Lou fed him whilst Tom slipped the hooks onto the skip.

  Looking for a point of conversation she asked: ‘Where does it all go?’ indicating the rubbish.

  ‘Well, it gets loaded into a massive ejector trailer and then goes off to a landfill site on the other side of Leeds. We recycle what we can and do our bit for the environment. For instance, we get the occasional piece of old but good furniture and there are places that can redistribute that to people who need it. And if we get some decent tins of paint, we can pass them on to charities which use it. Sometimes we find old medicine and pills and take them back to pharmacies in case they fall into the wrong hands.’

  ‘I did wonder what happened to it all,’ said Lou. She hadn’t really; she just wanted to chat to him. Still, once he started talking about it, she found it quite interesting.

  ‘You can wake up now,’ said Tom.

  ‘No, really. I wanted to know.’

  Tom narrowed his eyes at her in mock suspicion and said, ‘I shall ask you some questions the next time I see you and test you.’

  The next time I see you!

  God, she was turning into Michelle, analyzing everything he said and the way he said it. Next thing, she’d be poking about in food looking for holy images, like Michelle had done in the past, and getting on the internet to hook up with lovers on Death Row.

  ‘You must be nearly at the end though, surely?’ said Tom.

  ‘I thought I was,’ laughed Lou, ‘but I keep finding more nooks and crannies to go at. It’s neverending once you start clearing stuff out. I just can’t believe I’ve got so much that I don’t need. Or want any more, come to that.’