A Spring Affair

by Milly Johnson

  Lou bit down hard on her lip. She tried to make sympathetic noises but, as usual, Michelle wasn’t really listening to her, only using her as a sounding board.

  ‘I’ll have to go, Lou, someone’s at the door,’ she said mid-sentence and put down the phone. As usual she hadn’t even asked how Lou was.

  Phil came downstairs rubbing his eyes. Lou stiffened.

  ‘Thanks for leaving me out a dried curry last night,’ he said.

  ‘I can reconstitute it for breakfast, if you wish,’ she said coldly.

  ‘No, it’s all right, thanks. Anyway I ate out.’ He waited for her reaction. She twitched slightly, but his radar still picked it up. ‘And thanks for waking me, by the way,’ he prodded, just to annoy her even more.

  ‘You told me you weren’t going in until lunchtime today, didn’t you?’ There was an edge in her voice he didn’t like.

  ‘Did I?’ said Phil, all too aware that he had. ‘And what if I’d changed my mind?’

  ‘You’d have set your alarm, as always.’

  ‘Humph.’

  ‘Bacon and eggs then?’ said Lou.

  ‘Yes, that would be wonderful, love,’ said Phil. Switch to being nice now–keep the ground like quicksand under her feet.

  As Lou griddled the bacon, she let her mind float away from this house and Phil, to a fantasy house where she was cooking for a nameless figure with black unruly hair who treasured and wanted and loved her to distraction. She delivered Phil’s breakfast to him automaton-style and missed his compliment on the perfect-looking egg, so lost was she in her fantasy.

  As Phil chewed on the last of his toast he said, ‘Isn’t that your daft mate coming up my path? She’s got a sore eye, by the look of it.’

  He didn’t 100 per cent blame whoever gave that to her. If he had to spend longer than five minutes in her presence he’d probably thump her himself–and he abhorred bullies who hurt women. But no bird over thirty-five should be going around in mini-skirts and cowboy boots, especially with legs like bleached knitting needles. She was barking! Silly cow fell in love with a multiple murderer on Death Row and would have wired her life savings across to his sister, had Lou not stopped her. Then there was that time she made a total arse of herself sending pictures to the Barnsley Chronicle of the image of Roy Orbison that she’d found in a pork pie. These were not the actions of a woman who was the full shilling.

  ‘What did you say?’ said Lou, coming out of the kitchen to see.

  The front doorbell rang.

  Phil grabbed his jacket, sensing a heavy female session with tears and tissues and ‘all men are bastards’ philosophies. He escaped out of the back door to the car. At that moment, his showroom seemed even more attractive than it usually did.

  Lou opened the front door to see Michelle sobbing and looking as if she’d done ten rounds with a pre-menstrual Mike Tyson.

  ‘What the heck happened to you?’ said Lou, marshalling Michelle gently inside away from the fat summer raindrops and into the dry warmth of her kitchen.

  ‘Craig…’ she managed in between big snorty tears.

  ‘Craig did this to you?’ Lou was horrified, although not really surprised. He had looked a total thug when she passed him in the street.

  ‘Nooo, Craig’s…’ more snot, more tears ‘…wife!’

  Lou was even less surprised.

  ‘Remember when we were talking this morning and I had to go because there was someone at the door?’

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ said Lou, guiding Michelle’s hand towards a box of tissues.

  ‘Well, I opened it and there was this woman–really hard-faced, ugly, fat, horrible thing.’

  Well, she would be, thought Lou. Michelle would hardly admit to Craig’s wife being a Claudia Schiffer lookalike.

  ‘Anyway, she says, “Are you Michelle?” and I say, “Yes”, and she says, “I believe you’re seeing my husband?” and I say, “Craig?” and she says, “Yes” and then she just punches me right in the face. “Keep away from my husband, you cow, or I’ll fucking kill you next time”. Then she gets back into this old car and drives off. There were kids in the back, Lou. Two little kids strapped in baby seats. He never said he had kids!’

  ‘It must have crossed your mind, surely, that something wasn’t quite right?’ said Lou.

  ‘Why should it? I trusted him!’ said Michelle, wanting more sympathy than this.

  ‘Well, you didn’t have any phone numbers for him, for a start, and he was still living at home with his wife, wasn’t he? Didn’t you think that was a bit odd?’

  Michelle dissolved into a fresh cascade of tears. ‘How could he do this to me?’

  ‘How could he do that to her?’ said Lou fiercely.

  ‘I don’t give a shit about her!’ spat Michelle. ‘I’m going down to the police station in a minute to report her for assault.’

  ‘Don’t you think she’s had enough crap?’ snapped Lou. ‘If she has got two small kids and a husband who is playing about, no wonder she’s in a state. He most likely would have blamed you for leading him astray and the wronged woman will nearly always pin it on the other woman rather than her own man.’

  ‘Whose side are you on, Lou?’ said Michelle.

  Lou looked hard at Michelle. ‘Well, if I’m honest, anybody’s but Craig’s,’ she said. She wasn’t in the mood for her usual ‘There, there.’ Besides which, all that tea and sympathy hadn’t done Michelle any good in the long run. All Lou had ever done was patch her up with PG Tips and digestive biscuits and watch her go out and make the same mistakes over and over again. She shouldn’t have to pussyfoot around a true friend.

  ‘You can’t really be taking her side! Look at what she’s done to my face!’ Michelle half-screamed through her staccato sobs.

  ‘She shouldn’t have hit you, no, but I can understand where she was coming from,’ said Lou.

  Maybe one of Susan Peach’s friends had told her the same thing after Lou had decked her in Boots. Maybe that’s why she had never heard any more about it. She hadn’t considered that possibility until now.

  ‘How can you say that?’

  ‘She doesn’t deserve to be arrested.’

  ‘Why not? Because your husband had an affair and you ended up hitting the other woman?’ snarled Michelle, before Lou sternly cut her off.

  ‘This isn’t about me, Michelle. I’m trying to help you here. Draw a line under Craig now and move on. Learn the lesson!’

  ‘But I love him!’ More sobs.

  ‘How can you love someone who treats people so badly? He’s hurt his wife, his children and you, because he can’t see past his own needs. He’s an animal. You’re well out of it, surely you can see that now.’

  Michelle pulled a mobile phone out of her pocket. ‘No, I’m ringing the police and I’m ringing them now.’

  A vision came to Lou’s mind of a woman in pain lashing out like a wild animal to cling onto her man. She grabbed the phone from Michelle’s hand, snapped it shut and put it firmly down on the table.

  ‘Oh no, not in my house you’re not!’

  Lou’s words hung in the air.

  Michelle was trapped in shock for a few seconds, then she rose to her feet and grabbed the phone back, stuffing it deep in her hip pocket.

  ‘Well, I see where your priorities are,’ she said, snuffling loudly. ‘Call yourself a friend? Well, fuck you, Lou Winter. Just because your man pissed about doesn’t make you patron saint of married women, although I suppose the fact he had plenty of money and a big house didn’t have anything to do with you taking him back. Anyway, you can stick your friendship, if you can call it that.’ And with that, Michelle flounced to the kitchen door and slammed it behind her.

  Lou replayed Michelle’s parting speech to herself–a strangely objective operation for someone as emotional as her. When she had fully processed it, she concluded that these weren’t the words of someone upset by a few home truths, they were the tip of a surprisingly deep resentment and jealousy that had no place in friendsh
ip. Her whole relationship with Michelle passed before her eyes: the honeymoon weeks, where they laughed and conversed and bonded, and after that all the self-pity and slammed-down phones, false judgements, recriminations and long, boring conversations in which Michelle starred as the tragic misunderstood heroine. Lou realized then that she had been waiting for the ‘real Michelle’ of the first few weeks to come out to play again–but the ‘real Michelle’ was the one who had just exited her house. The first Michelle had been the illusion, and Lou had merely been one of those temporary ‘friends’ who happened to have a little more patience than the others.

  Lou allowed herself to savour these thoughts, standing there leaning on the radiator with her eyes closed. Whatever she had with Michelle was not friendship in the Deb sense of the word, but it didn’t matter now. When Michelle slammed that door, it had locked behind her. The relief, for Lou, was almost tangible.

  Chapter 44

  To Lou’s horror and delight it was Mr Clarke who received them into his inner sanctum on the following Tuesday, the same business manager who had interviewed them for their first attempt at Casa Nostra. Lou took as much care now as she did then in presenting their financial case to him, dropping the proposals off beforehand so he had a chance to go through them. This time, they had some capital so didn’t need to borrow as much as before. Deb had savings and Lou, unbeknown to Phil, had a nest egg tucked away too. She’d started squirrelling funds away for the Casa Nostra project years ago and, though it fell through, she’d never stopped adding to the account. After Phil’s affair, it became a security blanket–just in case history repeated itself and she found herself needing a new place to live. She’d actually felt deceitful in keeping it secret from him. Something, however, had always stopped her from telling him about her private stash and she was glad of that now.

  Mr Clarke gave a nervous laugh as he recalled Lou leaping over the desk to kiss him when he had agreed to the bank lending them the money to finance their project three years ago.

  ‘I hope you’re going to stay in control this time when I deliver the good news,’ Mr Clarke said.

  ‘When–not if?’ said Lou, hardly daring to breathe.

  ‘You’re giving us the money?’ said Deb.

  And as he nodded, Lou leashed in the desire to let history repeat itself and settled for a vigorous handshake instead.

  Mr Clarke had to admit to being somewhat disappointed.

  The next stop was the solicitors to sign the lease and then Deb ran off to work, leaving Lou to pay Tom a cheque and start the fun business of ordering equipment.

  This was it. Debra Devine and Lou Winter were in business.

  ‘Tom, I can’t pay you the rent,’ said Lou, with the chequebook held limply in her hand.

  Tom came round to her side of the table, already loosening his belt.

  ‘Then I’ll have to exact what you owe in other ways. Get on the bed, Elouise, and take all your clothes off…’

  There was a loud knock on the flat door which shook Lou out of her daydream and almost gave her a heart-attack. Tom walked in to find her quite red-faced.

  ‘I’ve just seen you come up. Wow, you look hot!’ he said.

  Had he really said that or was she still dreaming?

  ‘Are you all right? Shall I open a window for you?’ he went on. Oh, that sort of hot. Stupid woman.

  Lou put her hands over her cheeks. ‘Oh, er, just excited,’ she said. You can say that again, echoed her ovaries. ‘We’ve just been to the bank–we got the finance!’

  ‘Fantastic!’ Tom beamed. ‘We’ll have to celebrate.’

  ‘We signed the lease and I just came back to write you a cheque for the rent.’

  ‘Lord, there’s no rush for that,’ said Tom.

  He seemed to have substituted his grinning thing for that intense caring look that a parent gives to a small child on his first day at school. His grey eyes were soft and intently trained on her face.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Lou. Had she smudged her make-up? Did she have something green and leafy in her teeth?

  ‘No, there’s nothing,’ said Tom, giving himself a mental kick up the backside. ‘I was, er, just thinking that maybe you could both pop around to the house and we’ll crack open a bottle of champagne.’ That invitation was as much a surprise to Tom as it was to Lou. He hadn’t been thinking anything of the sort, not consciously anyway.

  ‘That sounds nice,’ said Lou.

  ‘Good. Right, well, I’m a boring bloke with no social life, so you pick any evening and come round and I’ll cook something. Italian?’

  ‘Wow, super nice,’ said Lou. ‘We’re pretty boring too, so I think any night will be good for us as well.’

  ‘Tomorrow then?’ said Tom.

  ‘Fine by me. I’m sure it’s clear for Deb too.’ She knew it was because they had arranged to go to the pictures, but this seemed a much more unmissable event.

  ‘OK,’ said Tom quickly. He needed to get away and stand in front of a mirror and practise how to look at nice people whose husbands, he knew, were having an affair.

  Phil was virtually beating Sue Shoesmith off with a stick. It was all very nice to be so sexually desired but he didn’t really want to have an affair again–and affairs, to him, were anything more than snogging. The last time had been a big mistake. Susan Peach was a sleazy barmaid who paid him some attention when Lou was neglecting him for her stupid café idea. He had never meant to let it get that far. He was flattered, and the idea of going out for an innocent meal with someone who looked at him with such adoring eyes wasn’t doing Lou any harm when she didn’t know about it. However, when Susan had unzipped his trousers under the dining table and started doing things, there was no way he was going to stop her. After that, he figured he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, and as Lou was virtually ignoring him, he had the perfect excuse for his behaviour, should he need to explain himself. Anyway, he doubted it would ever come to that, seeing as he hadn’t been found out the other two times he’d done the dirty behind his wife’s back. So wasn’t it just bad luck that in the grotty, back-of-beyond place he had picked to take Susan Peach for a meal and a grope, there was her best friend Deb with a group of her cronies. It was very hard to pass it off as a harmless drink in a quiet corner with a business associate, when his tongue was trying to tie knots in Susan’s tonsils and her fingers were wriggling about in his flies.

  He had expected Deb to call into the office and rant and rave at him. What he didn’t expect in a million years was for her to go marching round to Lou to tell her everything. He didn’t like to recall Lou’s face that day when he walked in from work. She looked as though she’d had all her stuffing taken out. It had been far easier to pack a bag and run away than sit there amongst all that devastation.

  He was in the wrong–what more was there to say? What good would analyzing it all have done either of them? Hit and run.

  He went round to Susan’s place and she took all the immediate guilt and pressure away from him with some very energetic sex, but three weeks later, her tiny dank flat, a constant stream of Australian soaps on the TV, a diet of takeaways, oven chips and Walls Balls and constant references to the divorce proceedings she presumed he was now going to initiate, were driving him stark staring mental.

  In the end, Phil had gritted his teeth and turned up at the house, hoping that Lou would be so upset at the prospect of spending Christmas alone that she would let him in to talk. He wasn’t looking forward to all those questions and tears, but if it got him home again without too much muck-racking he reckoned it would be worth it. He had a suitcase full of dirty clothes and a bag of prepared excuses about why he had left her, which amazingly he had never had to use. She just pulled him back into the house and never mentioned it. If he’d known how easy it was going to be, he’d have been back a fortnight sooner.

  Now he just wanted life to return to how it was before all that stupid skip business starting kicking off. No Deb on the scene, no talk about stu
pid cafés and businesses and less of Lou’s lip–then they could get back to being happy again. He would do whatever it took to achieve that. Lou would thank him in the long run, when their marriage was better than ever.

  He texted a suitable reply to Sue’s steamy request to do various things to her with strawberries. There was no harm in it–they were just words that he didn’t have any intention of backing up with actions. His resolve was firm. He wanted to live his life with the Lou who gave him sex on Sunday mornings and cooked him lamb dinners. He was happy with her.

  Lou was very much on Deb’s mind too. She had never got over the feeling that she could have tackled it so differently last time. She could have confronted him rather than lay everything on her friend. So what about this time–what could she do?

  Despite promising Tom that she wouldn’t interfere, and despite promising herself the same thing, she waved goodbye to Lou outside the solicitor’s office and set off in the opposite direction from the bakery, towards the industrial estate where P.M. Autos was situated.

  She parked around the corner, took a deep breath and marched into the showroom, straight past Bradley, with his oily welcoming smile that dropped like a brick when he saw that she was about to barge into Phil’s office.

  ‘Oy, missus, you can’t go in there,’ he called, in lumpy pursuit behind her.

  ‘It’s all right, Bradley,’ said Phil with a calm smile. ‘I’ll deal with this lady.’ He imbued the word ‘lady’ with all the qualities of ‘trouble-making cow’.

  ‘How can I help you, Debra? Coffee?’ said Phil, coolly pouring one for himself from his percolator. He had nothing to fear from his visitor.