A Summer Fling

by Milly Johnson

  ‘Because my dreams died with them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because . . .’

  The words dried up; she couldn’t expand on her answer. Strangely enough, she had never asked herself that. When her mum and dad died, she hadn’t even considered that she could move there without them. And live the dream for them, if she couldn’t live it with them.

  ‘I know, it’s easy for me to say,’ Al conceded. They were at a stretch of beach where the crowds had thinned. He suddenly stopped and turned to her. A sea breeze blew a strand of her hair across her face. He reached out and took it in his fingers and tucked it behind her ear. She wanted to push her face against that hand and feel his long fingers on her cheek. It was so wrong to let such thoughts trip down that road, she knew. But Canute couldn’t hold the sea back, and she couldn’t hold those feelings back. She looked up and found that his eyes were locked onto hers. He reached out again and tapped the side of her head gently.

  ‘. . . But all your dreams are sleeping in here still, Dawny. Just sleeping.’

  Dawn’s heart was booming. She daren’t move. Was she imagining things or were they leaning closer to each other with every second that passed?

  ‘Sorry!’ said a young boy, diving between them for a big inflatable beach ball and spraying them with sand. It stopped whatever was going to happen next. It was the equivalent of having a bucket of cold water thrown at them. They sprang back from each other and started wandering back to the car park in virtual silence.

  Dawn slid the sun roof fully open once they were in the car.

  ‘I am now going to drive you around some of our finest countryside,’ she said, trying to get back into Dawn-The-Tourist-Guide mode.

  ‘Sounds good to me, girl,’ said Al. He slid in a CD and they both sang along to Nicolette Larson and her smoky, soft-rock voice while Al played air guitar. She knew that had he had a real guitar in his hands, his fingers would be note perfect.

  ‘You have a beautiful voice, Dawny.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she said. She thought she used to have a passable voice, but she had lost all confidence in her ability. ‘She’s always fucking howling. She sounds like she’s being strangled,’ Calum had said many a time at Muriel’s table, making everyone laugh. Dawn had stopped singing aloud when anyone was around.

  ‘Do you do everything to music?’ she asked.

  He raised his eyebrows mischievously and she tutted.

  ‘I mean, are you like me? Do you like music in the background when you’re eating, do you cook to music, do you sing in the bath?’

  ‘Yep, all of those. And sometimes I sit doing nothing and listen to it too.’

  It sounded lovely, just lying back, eyes closed and doing nothing but listening. She could imagine what the answer would have been if she’d suggested to Calum they try that one day. Then she forced Calum out of her thoughts; it wasn’t that difficult to do today.

  They crossed moors and hopped down country lanes, taking a long and winding road back to Barnsley.

  ‘Now the pièce de résistance of your stay in England,’ she said, as they pulled into a car park by a row of old buildings. ‘The Yorkshire cream tea.’

  ‘This place is Italian though!’ said Al, laughing at the huge, stripey flags hanging outside.

  ‘Nope, it’s pure Barnsley,’ returned Dawn. ‘You won’t get portions like this anywhere in Italy.’

  She pushed open the door and the first sight that met their eyes, as was intended, was the largest sweet cabinet in the world. The cakes inside it looked as if they had been prepared to a much larger dimension than the world they served.

  ‘Oh, wow!’ said Al. ‘There are so many. How will I choose?’

  ‘Try the eeny meeny miny mo method, if all else fails,’ said Dawn, laughing with the waitress who showed them to a niche and handed them long green, red and white menus.

  Ten minutes later, they still hadn’t decided what to have.

  ‘Why don’t you go for the “Mamma and Papa”?’ suggested the waitress. ‘It’s for two people and has tasters of eight cakes of your choice.’

  ‘We have to narrow it down to eight?’ said Al, shaking his head. ‘I’m not sure I can do that!’

  He loves his food, just like me, Dawn thought. She came from a family where people enjoyed a heaving dinner table and socialized around it; that had been a big attraction of the Crooke family. When the cake plate arrived, Dawn said, without thinking, ‘Blimey, there’s enough here for my reception!’

  She wished she could have snapped the words back. All day she hadn’t mentioned her other life and now she had to drag it right into the limelight.

  Al silently poured out two coffees from the giant cafetière.

  ‘When’s the big day then?’

  ‘June the twenty-seventh,’ she replied uncomfortably.

  He sat silently for a moment or two. Then he dropped another question into the still lake of quiet between them.

  ‘What’s he called?’

  ‘Calum.’ She didn’t want to talk about him. This was a different world, a different universe and one in which Calum Crooke didn’t exist.

  ‘What kind of a man is he?’

  He sleeps a hell of a lot, he’s lazy, he drinks too much, he deals in dodgy gear, he thinks I nag and he hates me singing. But, according to my future mother-in-law, all I have to do is wait a few years and he’ll turn out OK.

  ‘He’s, er, nice-looking, he’s got a great family; they’ve been really kind to me. He’s quiet. He’s a family man. He’s close to his parents and his sisters. They’re all very funny.’ She took a long glug of coffee.

  Al ladled a spoonful of chocolate cake towards his mouth.

  ‘Sounds like you’re more in love with the family than you are with him.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ said Dawn, with a defensive edge to her voice that shocked even her. ‘It’s just that they come as a package. That’s the sort of family they are: very close. I like that.’ That was twice now he had said things that were too near to the bone for comfort.

  ‘I see,’ said Al, but she could see that he was pondering over her words as he dived in for half the coffee meringue.

  ‘Would your mom and dad have liked him?’

  Would they? She had avoided asking herself that question. She didn’t want to consider it now either. She probably knew what the answer would have been.

  ‘Mum and Dad would have wanted me to be happy. And I am. Really.’ She stuck her chin out as if that added extra weight to her statement.

  She couldn’t read what was going through Al Holly’s head as he tucked into the cakes, but she felt that something most definitely was, though he didn’t say any more on the subject.

  He picked up the bill. She protested because he’d paid for the fish and chips too but he said that he didn’t feel right that a lady would pay for him, especially when she’d used her petrol to give him his day out. Calum never saw any problem in her paying, she thought. Then she wondered how many times during that day she had compared Calum to long, lean Al Holly? And how many more points Al Holly was in front? Maybe it was just as well that it was time to go home now. It was time for this to end.

  They pulled out of town and headed towards the Rising Sun. She took the long way along country lanes, aware that she was squeezing out every last bit of his company. Down one of the lanes, Al suddenly asked Dawn to stop the car.

  ‘Here?’ she said. ‘What for? There’s nothing here.’ But she pulled in all the same, by a gate leading to a wood. They walked where the last blur of spring bluebells carpeted the ground. Late bloomers that would be gone within days.

  ‘Look at that, it’s just so pretty,’ said Al.

  ‘It is,’ said Dawn. ‘Don’t you have them in Canada?’

  ‘Not British ones. We have hybrids but they aren’t the same as these.’

  He closed his eyes and breathed in the delicate scent as a soft breeze blew towards them.

  ‘This has been a beautiful day,
’ he said at last, not looking at her. ‘I know we can only be friends, but I’m wishing there was a parallel universe somewhere out there and in it . . . you’re free . . .’ He thumped his thigh hard with his fist as if to snap himself out of the place where his imagination had taken him. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Dawny . . .’

  Dawn gulped at the way he said her name as he slowly turned towards her. She couldn’t have cut the sexual tension arcing between them with Darth Vader’s light sabre as Al Holly picked up her hand, laid a small kiss on the back of it and said, ‘You may think this is a corny chat-up line, but it isn’t. Today has been one of my favourite days ever and I’ll always remember it. Thank you.’

  Dawn couldn’t reply. Her breath was all tangled in her throat. She was glad then that he made ‘let’s go’ noises and headed back to the car because she was able to wipe a rogue tear away unseen. She wondered what she would feel like next year when she saw bluebells. She wondered if they would make her smile or cry.

  When she dropped him off at the pub, he gave her a big lopsided grin and told her that he had a surprise in store for her on Friday so she had better come to the Rising Sun and meet him as usual.

  That night, Dawn dreamed of dancing at her own wedding. But she wasn’t in Calum’s arms. She was being spun around the dance floor in a breathtaking waltz by Al Holly in his cowboy gear. The scent of bluebells was heavy in the air. She woke up at the moment when Al Holly’s lips were about to descend onto hers.

  Chapter 53

  Grace rolled her neck around on her shoulders and tried to focus on the clock. She’d give anything to stretch her arms back, but that was impossible seeing as both her hands were tied with a belt to the table leg. She tried to think what was happening to her and her last point of recall. She had been ironing. There had been a Bond film on, so it must have been Bank Holiday Monday afternoon. Gordon had made her a hot chocolate and she had sipped at it while she was doing his shirts, even though he’d put too much powder in and made it overpoweringly sweet – too much to finish it. She wanted to leave him with a clean house and all his washing done. She remembered feeling sorry for him while she was putting the shirts on the hangers. Would he manage without her? She hoped they could split up civilly. She could remember nothing after that.

  He’d drugged her, she knew he had. Then she realized he must have drugged her the other night too, disguising whatever he had used in the hot chocolate. That’s why she had slept so hard and been so tired at work. Was he testing out the quantity that would render her unconscious? It was laughably unbelievable, not the sort of stuff that happened to fifty-something suburban couples in real life. But she wasn’t laughing and it was happening, because she was tied to a table leg on the floor and Gordon was sleeping on a chair with his head on the table above her. She noticed the phone had been unplugged in the corner and the connection was snipped off, lying next to the cord. She tried to push the table leg up so she could unloop the belt strap, but it was too heavy, plus she noticed, mid-struggle, that he had nailed the belt to the wood. How long have I been like this? What time is it? What day is it?

  Grace tried to think but any detail eluded her. The only thing she knew was that she had to stay calm. Gordon was no longer acting like a spoiled child who wasn’t having things his way; this behaviour was in another league. He had totally flipped. She didn’t know what he was capable of in his state of mind. She had only drunk half the chocolate – what if she had drunk it all? He could have killed her.

  She didn’t know if it was the right tactic but she needed to take some control. She had to get out of that front door and safely.

  ‘Gordon,’ she called softly, though her throat was even drier than it had been at work the other day. ‘Gordon, love.’ The ‘love’ stuck in her craw. She felt anything but affection towards the man sleeping nearby. She had never studied him in sleep before. His face looked old and quite different from the animated man. He looked peaceful and untroubled, even though he had no right to.

  ‘Gordon,’ she called again and again, until he snorted and his eyes sprang open and he sat up as if he didn’t know where he was or what he’d done. Then his wits caught up with him and Grace saw in his face that he knew exactly what the situation was.

  ‘Gordon, I need the toilet,’ said Grace.

  ‘You’ll have to do it there,’ he said, stretching the creaks out of his back.

  ‘Gordon, I can’t do that. Please, let me get up.’

  Gordon rubbed at his temples as he sighed wearily. ‘I don’t know what to do with you, Grace, I really don’t.’

  ‘What do you mean . . .’ her voice began to rise and she had to force herself to throttle back on the volume ‘. . . you don’t know what to do with me?’

  He looked at her then as if she should have known what he was talking about. Then he was up on his feet, railing at her.

  ‘You lied to me, Grace. You lied to me.’

  ‘Gordon, I don’t know what you mean!’ Grace cowered as his fists curled up and rose, but they didn’t make contact with her on their descent, only the top of the table, and the reverberations travelled all the way down her arms.

  ‘Well, you’ve no excuse now. You’ll pack in your job, retirement or no retirement, that’s final.’

  ‘I can’t miss out on a retirement package, love,’ said Grace, trembles taking over her voice. ‘It won’t be long – there’s some coming up, I heard.’

  ‘You’ve turned down two, you lying bitch!’ This time the back of Gordon’s hand came crashing into the side of Grace’s face. And she wet herself on the impact.

  ‘Oh God,’ she managed. Grace was afraid now. He knew. How had he found out? She was to discover the answer to that in his next breath.

  ‘I went to your work and had an interesting talk with someone about you,’ he said in a horribly knowing way.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Never you mind who,’ said Gordon. ‘But he told me you’d had your chance to retire, not once but twice, and you wouldn’t. You turned it down twice and took another job.’

  Grace knew that he wasn’t bluffing. He couldn’t have guessed she had turned down retirement twice. But HR wouldn’t give out details like that. He told me, Gordon had said. He. Surely he didn’t mean Malcolm?

  Grace groaned. She was frightened and sore and her dignity was in shreds around her.

  ‘Gordon, I’m in pain. Please!’

  ‘And why are you suddenly going to the pub on Friday nights? Don’t tell me it’s with those women you work with. You must think I’m stupid.’

  ‘It is with the women I work with!’

  ‘You don’t buy new frocks to go to the pub with women!’

  Again Gordon’s hand came soaring down towards her cheek. Grace cowered, waiting for the sting, but his hand hovered an inch from her, shaking with anger.

  ‘Look what you’re making me do!’ he screamed at her, then burst into tears. They ran through the fingers that covered his eyes. Then, just as suddenly they stopped and he spat at her, ‘You’re ruining everything! You can’t leave me, Grace. I won’t let you.’

  Despite her predicament, Grace looked at him with a sudden implosion of bitter hatred. Years of pent-up anger and frustration were suddenly unleashed in her. He had got it all twisted. He thought she was having an affair – with someone at work? He was the cheat. He had cheated her out of a marriage. He had never tried to make her happy, even though he told her he would in their short courtship. Once that ring had been put on her finger, he had reneged on every promise to try and work at being a proper family. Her own desire for children had locked her into a loveless, sexless relationship.

  Grace battled against responding to him. She wasn’t in a position to inflame the situation any further, but if she had been untied, she knew she would have flown at him with every bit of strength she possessed. Instead, she forced herself to remain as still as she could. She let him think she might have slipped back into unconsciousness.

  He wiped
his eyes roughly with the back of his hands and gave himself a mental shake.

  ‘Yes, of course I’ll get you a cloth and a towel,’ he said, as if she had just asked for them. ‘Shan’t be a minute, love.’

  Chapter 54

  ‘You lost weight?’ Raychel asked Anna as soon as she had taken off her coat.

  ‘Nope,’ said Anna, smiling because she hadn’t but looked decidedly trimmer thanks to Vladimir’s ‘Darqone’ creations. They really did work. They gave her a lovely shape, even under her crappy clothes. That had a knock-on effect of making her feel, dare she admit it, sexier. They brought the swagger back to her step as she walked.

  Over the next hour, Christie and Dawn would ask her the same question about her weight. Grace didn’t, because she hadn’t come in, which was strange.

  ‘Has Grace rung in yet?’ Christie asked as she came out of her meeting with the Buyers at 10 a.m. It wasn’t like Grace to be late for work.

  ‘No, she hasn’t,’ answered Raychel.

  ‘It’s a bit funny, isn’t it?’ said Dawn. ‘I haven’t known Grace that long but I wouldn’t have thought she’d be the type not to turn up without saying anything. She’s far too much of a pro’.’

  ‘I totally agree,’ said Christie. Grace was not that type at all. And no, they hadn’t known each other all that long, but a warm current flowed between these women and pulled them together a little closer with each day that passed.

  Christie retrieved Grace’s home number from HR which she hoped would give them a result, even though they didn’t have any record of her mobile number. She was aware that ringing Grace would be viewed by HR, if they’d known what she was doing, as a form of harassment and strictly not to be done, but Christie would make her apologies to all concerned after she found that her colleague was all right. She rang and, as bad luck would have it, all she got was a dead line. Then she had a brainwave. She rang Niki at the surgery. He must have her grandson’s details on file. She could get hold of Grace’s daughter that way – it was a start at least.