Bert made a rude sign, while Sam stuck out his tongue.
Philly, referring to the latter protrusion, expressed the opinion that its owner should leave the object to medical science, as it owned more coats than most women’s winter wardrobes.
‘Clever,’ said Sam.
Philly picked up her handbag and went through to the washroom. She locked the door, sat on the lid of the lavatory and tried to get her mind in order. It shouldn’t have happened. It couldn’t have happened. Knowing her luck, it probably had happened. She followed instructions to the letter, stood, and stared in the mirror while waiting for her fate to be decided.
Several minutes later, she shot through the shop like a deer with a dozen stalkers on its heels. Where had he gone? She dashed back into the shop. ‘Where did Dave go?’ she asked.
‘Memory’s buggered,’ was Sam’s delivered opinion.
‘Market – for trousers,’ said Bert. ‘He’s going to slide down the bath plughole if you keep starving him.’
Philly blinked, then backed away. ‘You’re in charge,’ she told the two elderly men as she moved. ‘Bert – books and papers. Sam – Reading Room teas, coffees and whatevers.’
‘We want bloody paying this time,’ yelled one of them as she disappeared altogether.
Philly stood on Fullers Walk wondering what she was supposed to do next. She couldn’t do next, because Dave was supposed to be next. He was the father, so she should talk to him first. She felt sick. Feeling sick was probably part and parcel of the situation in which she found herself. Unable to keep still, she marched up and down outside the florist’s and the salon. ‘Stop it,’ she said under her breath. ‘He’ll be here in a minute.’
‘Philly?’
She turned to find Lily Latimer behind her. ‘Oh. Hello.’ Their names rhymed. Was this an omen? ‘Can we go inside?’ she asked. ‘Only I’m not myself today.’
They entered the flower shop and Lily shut the door, turning the sign to CLOSED. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.
Philly pointed to the ceiling. ‘I told Dave I’d see to her, because she whips the rug from under his feet every time he visits. So I decided to stop her. She hurts him. She’s been hurting him since the day he was born.’
Lily nodded encouragingly. ‘You’ve done a lot for him. He’s even had a proper haircut, hasn’t he? No more plastering down the long bits to cover the baldness. And he’s a lot thinner.’
‘Yes.’ Philly looked round the shop. ‘Has Babs started next door?’
‘Maurice has begun to re-educate her. Cassie’s with Valda.’ Lily paused. ‘What is it?’ There was definitely more than the old hag behind all this. ‘Are you ill? Is Dave ill?’
Philly shook her head. ‘No, no, we’re fine. I want Dave, but he’s gone into Bolton again to get trousers from the market. He’ll have three different sizes now. All he needed was a bit of love and encouragement.’
Lily stared hard at her visitor. ‘You have to tell him first?’
Philly nodded.
‘A baby?’
Philly stayed very still.
‘You haven’t told me. You haven’t said anything, my lovely.’ Lily ordered herself to fight the jealousy. It was normal, but it was ugly. It was probably impossible for Lily to ever go full term, but she must not resent this lovely woman who had to fight her own guilt. The Catholic Church thrived on guilt, nurtured it, drummed rules into the heads of infants, some of whom then grew up with a distorted view of life. If the worst thing a woman ever did was to get pregnant before wearing a wedding ring, that was a small crime. In fact, it wasn’t a crime at all, and Lily said so.
‘But we have to get married.’
‘You are getting married.’
Philly began to pace about the shop. ‘It has to be quick. Father Walsh is arranging it, because we’re a mixed couple, but it has to be now.’
‘This minute?’
‘Almost. Only I can’t speak to my priest before telling Dave, can I?
Lily supposed not. ‘Stop marching, Philly. You’ll be wearing out the floor if you carry on like this.’
‘Sorry.’
‘And don’t panic. If you are carrying a child, you don’t want to make yourself ill.’ Why were men never where they should be when you needed them most? Did they follow a different clock, or a calendar women hadn’t heard of yet? ‘When did he go?’
‘Don’t know. Can’t remember.’
‘When did you buy the test kit? I’m assuming you’ve done a test?’
Philly nodded. ‘Nine o’clock, when the chemist opened.’ She coloured. ‘I told a lie, said it was for some young girl.’
‘And Dave had already left for town?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you do know. You know he left before nine. Sit down.’
Philly sat while Lily opened the door and stood waiting. Feeling as if she carried someone’s proxy vote, Lily lingered in the doorway,
coming inside only to serve three customers who arrived at roughly ten-minute intervals. ‘His van’s coming now. Look. I’ll go upstairs and you get him in here. Go through to the back. If I get a customer, let me know. You can’t tell him in his own shop – it’s full of computer loonies. Do it here among the flowers.’
So, after announcing that he was now the proud owner of two more pairs of trousers, Dave Barker was standing alongside buckets of summer blooms when he learned that he was to be a father. He blinked stupidly as if waking from a long sleep, then wept a few tears of happiness. ‘We’d better track your Father Walsh down,’ he said when he regained some composure. ‘I’ve never been happier, Phil. Thank you so much for loving me.’
Lily sat at the top of the stairs, skirt held tightly to her ankles, head bowed onto her knees. She was empty. There was a part of her that was so empty that sometimes she wanted to die. Not now, not at this moment. She was happy for Philly and Dave, because they were wonderful people who deserved to be fulfilled. Nevertheless, Lily’s pain was almost physical.
But she was an adult and she would cope. She would sell flowers, make wreaths for the dead and bouquets for the hopeful. She would sleep in a house where a beautiful man sometimes stayed, and she would be sensible, as would he. The wheel of life turned daily, and she had to carry on.
‘Feather it.’ Maurice Jones stood back and cast a critical eye on the workmanship of his new trainee. ‘What did they use in Devonshire?’ he asked. ‘A flaming ploughshare?’ He stepped forward and demonstrated again, explaining to the model that the styling was free, that she was a guinea pig, that she would be all right once he had put Babs’s small mistake to rights.
‘I think I’ll give up,’ Babs moaned.
‘No, you won’t. You’ve got promise.’
Babs laughed. ‘Well, God help any bad hairdresser who comes your way. I’ve not had any praise from you at all, and I was very well thought of down south.’
He grinned at her. ‘You think I’m difficult? The bloke who trained me’s a tartar, but he gets results.’
‘Was Paul better than me?’ she asked.
‘Of course he was, because I trained him all over again, didn’t I? Also, what you’re doing isn’t necessarily wrong – it’s just not what we do at Pour Les Dames. Right. Come here, madam, and do this bit. Round the ear – shape it back. Now, we want a couple of tendrils feathered down – that’s right. See? You’re not as daft as you look.’
‘I couldn’t be.’
Sally drifted in. She was having what she described as a sleepy pregnancy, because she could scarcely keep her eyes open for more than an hour at a time. ‘I’ll go and heat my wax,’ she told her husband. ‘And I’d love a cuppa, if anyone’s offering.’
Babs went to brew the tea while Maurice finished off the model. Up to now, Babs had been allowed to wash and put finishing touches to hair, but Maurice’s style of cutting was a whole new world for her, and she was enjoying learning in spite of the exchanges of words and the heavily applied advice.
Sally returned
from her little space next to the store room. ‘Mo?’
‘What, love?’
‘I’ve no wax, the trolley’s been taken apart, the clients’ couch is slashed to shreds, and everything’s in a right mess.’
Maurice paused and laid down his implements. ‘What?’
‘Somebody’s broken in and ruined everything. There’s acrylic nails everywhere, nail polish poured all over the place, towels soaked in God knows what. I can’t do manicures, pedicures or waxing. All I can do is Indian head massage on your clients in here.’
Maurice stormed into the back of the shop. Babs looked at Sally. ‘Who do you think did it?’ she asked.
‘Paul, of course.’
Babs went to finish off the tea-making. Paul was a nightmare. Keen to wipe his ex-partner off the face of the earth, he had set up Impressions and had overbooked himself, failing to account for travelling time between appointments, and ignoring the fact that some clients needed more attention than others. Paul Smith was an extremely angry and aggressive man. If he had done this, he needed dealing with, and pronto.
Maurice looked grim when he returned. ‘Stay out of there, love,’ he told his wife. ‘It’s a crime scene. Let’s get the police.’
Babs’s head was suddenly filled with a scenario that might damage Maurice and Sally. ‘Just a minute,’ she said before drawing the two into the rear end of the shop, well away from today’s guinea pig. ‘He can make things worse,’ she advised. ‘From what I’ve heard, he was head over heels with you, Mo.’
Maurice shook his head. ‘If you want to meet a real bitch, choose a jealous and furious gay. If he’d loved me, he wouldn’t have done all this to Sally. This isn’t love.’
‘No,’ Babs agreed, ‘it isn’t love – it’s territory. Mo, if this goes to court, he can call you a stinking good-for-nothing bisexual man who hurt him. They won’t know the truth. Why did you let it come to this? Why did you allow the world to think of you and him as partners in the closer sense?’
Mo hung his head. ‘We were already well known as a drag act. Some on the circuit knew we weren’t a couple, and those who came on to me were aware that I was straight. I just drifted into it, Babs. Psychology. A woman likes a hairdresser she can talk to. Women talk to gays rather than to other women or straight men.’
‘Sally?’
Sally answered Babs. ‘I hated it. We were man and wife upstairs, but Mo was a caricature down here. Everyone thought I was the lodger, and yes, I was unhappy about all of it. Now that I’m pregnant, Paul is as mad as a frog in a box.’
‘Then don’t let him tear you to pieces in court. I’ll deal with it. Well, Pete will.’
Mo stared at his new recruit for several seconds. ‘Thanks, Babs,’ he said.
Babs was only too pleased to help. ‘I can’t promise anything,’ she said. ‘But I’ll do my very best.’ She wished she could do the same for Lily. But the threat to Lily’s well-being was not visible, was more than a slashed couch and some spilt polish. If Chalmers ever got to her . . . She shivered.
‘Are you cold?’ Sally asked.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘Something just stepped on my grave.’
Eve Boswell and her husband were in their forties, yet they seemed to have retained a youthful and open attitude to life. Eve, especially, was a lively soul, and every time she visited Lily in Hope House she arrived overflowing with ideas, material swatches, paint charts and photographs of furniture. These offerings were often a mixed bag, so Lily guided her through the portfolio, explained about direction of light, where to place the first length of wallpaper, how to best enhance crudely plastered walls and bare stonework.
‘There’s only one room for wallpaper,’ Eve explained. ‘Some soft sod skimmed over the original walls, like my husband suggested.’
‘Chas? He didn’t.’
‘He was joking. He knew it would be a capital offence.’
‘Ah.’ Lily opened one of her files. ‘Look at this one. Same shades from front to back, lighter colour in the same group on curtains and cushions, darker for the carpet, take the carpet through to the rest and you have continuity without boredom.’
‘Let me have a study of this lot, then.’
While Eve did her studying, Lily set the kettle to boil. She was grateful to this Liverpudlian woman, because she had not expected to make close friends at this end of the country. But Eve was amazing and amusing. She carried her own mental portfolio filled with pictures of her youth in Liverpool, word sketches that she drew in her own inimitable manner.
Her husband, she had explained, was in women’s underwear. Lily smiled as she remembered how confused she had been – wasn’t he in wines and spirits? But Eve had returned a ready answer. Chas’s brother and Chas had been a pair of knickers, though the K had been dropped from the front of the garment. Nickers were thieves, so the point became clear eventually.
There had been generations of nickers in the Boswell family, and one of the more famous had been hanged for accidentally killing a chap during a theft from the docks. The Boswells spoke of their deceased ancestor with pride, because he had paid the ultimate price for his chosen vocation. Chas and his brother had been luckier, though Robbo had been caught robbing – there sat another pun that was not allowed to pass unnoticed – while Chas was a lucky bugger and had avoided a criminal record by the skin of his teeth. Had he been caught, he would never have obtained the licence to sell alcohol and tobacco. ‘He’s going to have to let his special customers down,’ Eve said now. For some reason she could never explain completely, she trusted Lily Latimer. Lily knew all about bother – it was written on her face.
‘Special customers?’ Lily passed a mug to her visitor.
‘Boswell business,’ replied Eve. ‘They still manage to release the odd case of spirits from prison in a bonded warehouse, and Chas sells the stuff round the back of the shop – from the garage. There’s ciggies as well. That’ll have to stop now, because Paul Smith’s moving in.’
‘Oh.’ Lily didn’t like Paul, but she said nothing.
‘My Chas is a good man, Lily. You can be a villain and still be a good man.’
‘I know.’ Lily also knew a villain who was so bad that he was not allowed to mix with normal, decent criminals. At least, she hoped he was still segregated . . . ‘Have a look at this second folder, Eve. Notice how magnolia doesn’t need to be a cop-out.’
Eve stared steadily at her hostess and guru. She knew an awful lot about interior design, so why was she in flowers? The new file, which depicted the interior of a country cottage, rang a muffled bell in the deepest recesses of Eve’s mind. She experienced a déjà vu moment, but everyone had those. ‘Lily?’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you mind if I ask you what you did before you came here?’ There were secrets. Most people had one or two of those, but Lily’s careful guardianship of her past was not typical. There was something big there, the sort of event that left emotional scars.
Lily tried not to look afraid. ‘This and that. Some party planning, wedding flowers and so forth.’ Her heart raced. This should not be happening. She was a fool to think she could use Leanne’s portfolio and get away with it.
‘And Babs?’
‘Was a hairdresser.’ Well, that was the truth.
‘Ah.’ Eve leafed through the pile. She had seen the photographed house before, but she couldn’t quite place her finger on where. Then it crashed into her mind like a jackknifed articulated vehicle on the East Lancs. ‘Leanne?’ she said quietly.
Lily staggered back a couple of paces. She swallowed painfully and looked through the window.
‘Leanne Chalmers? Dark hair, dirty laugh, the interior version of Wotserface Dimmock that did gardens with her bouncy boobs?’
Lily remained silent.
‘Not that Leanne Chalmers had bouncy boobs, but she was every man’s idea of feisty high-class crumpet.’ Eve paused for a few beats of time. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? You’re Leanne Chalmers off Makeover Madness. Your cat
chphrase was we do the impossible, miracles only if pressed. You’re so thin, so changed . . .’
Lily nodded. Eve Boswell was an all right person; Eve Boswell would not let her down.
Eve covered her face with her hands. ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ she whispered. ‘They put it about that you’d moved abroad, but that was because of . . . Oh, Lily. Oh, my God. And here am I sitting and saying that criminals aren’t all bad. I am so sorry, queen.’ She was. ‘You’re smaller, blonde . . .’
‘It’s all right.’ Lily sat at the table.
Eve was weeping openly. ‘Who knows?’
‘Just you. Babs does, of course. No one else. Oh – Pete has access to details. Mike can tell there’s something major wrong with me, but he hasn’t placed me yet. He probably never watched the programme. Don’t cry, Eve.’
Eve saw the headlines, read them all over again. Jill Dando, God love her, had died. But this wonderful, vibrant, cheeky and opinionated woman had survived. Hadn’t she? Had she? It had been so horrible when it was printed. Seeing something written down was somehow far worse than hearing it. Lily was a shadow now. ‘You don’t look right with blonde hair,’ was all Eve could manage.
‘It had to be done, Eve. He has friends – well, he knows a lot of criminals who aren’t doing time.’
Eve could see Leanne strutting about, ripping off wallpaper, consigning a householder’s belongings to a skip on the path. ‘Where is he?’
‘Walton. Just been moved from the Scrubs.’
Eve jumped up and began to pace about. It was like Philly all over again, back and forth, stop and think, back and forth like a quickened pendulum.
‘Keep still,’ said Lily. ‘And dry your eyes. I don’t want tears all over my bits and pieces, thanks.’
Eve sat down. ‘I know people in Walton. Chas even knows a couple of the screws who’ve been good to their Robbo in the past—’
‘Don’t waste your breath. He might well be segregated.’
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