by Maeve Haran
He started them off with singing exercises which, to Claudia’s novice ears, sounded distinctly odd.
All around her, voices began to sing: ‘R-r-r-r avi-oli and spagh-etti! . . . ‘R-r-r-r avi-oli and spagh-etti!’ . . . ‘R-r-r-r avi-oli and spagh-etti!’
And then, equally rousingly:
‘Maybe My Mummy Will Move to Miami
And Maybe My Mummy May Not!’
Self-conscious at first, Claudia soon found her lungs beginning to expand as she got braver and joined in with the best of them. To her astonishment, she could hear her own voice, surprisingly confident and clear, holding the note as it soared higher and higher until only the purest voices could follow it up.
‘OK, very good. Let’s do some work now. Has everyone got a copy of the score?’
‘I haven’t.’ Claudia put up her hand.
‘Ah, yes, today we’re welcoming a newcomer. Would you like to introduce yourself?’
‘I’m Claudia Warren and I’ve just joined.’
‘And what attracted you to the Minsley Choral Society?’ Daniel quizzed her.
Claudia grinned. ‘The fact that I don’t have to audition and you all go to the pub afterwards.’
Everyone laughed, including Daniel Forrest. He really did have rather nice eyes, Claudia decided.
The rehearsal passed quickly and was surprisingly enjoyable despite the challenging nature of the music.
When she heard herself definitely off-key several times, she whispered to Betty, ‘I think this would be a lot easier if I could read music.’
‘Don’t worry, it’s fiendish, isn’t it? But next time, Dan says, we’re doing The Sound of Music!’
She was flattered when Daniel singled her out at the end. ‘Congratulations, that was no picnic, I can assure you. You did excellently to keep up when this is your first rehearsal, especially since the others have been singing it for weeks. I hope you’re coming on to The Laden Ox with the rest of us, seeing as that was why you joined up?’
Claudia realized that to refuse would have been churlish, even if she had wanted to. She walked along the village street next to Betty who was riding the demon mobility scooter towards the village pub.
The pub was empty on a Tuesday night, so the choir members had it almost to themselves.
‘What can I get you?’ offered Daniel Forrest. ‘I’m afraid they don’t run to pink champagne, Betty. Tell me, did the gentlemen really drink the stuff out of your slipper?’
‘Dan, dear,’ Betty replied roguishly, ‘You’re thinking of the Cancan dancers at the Folies Bergère. I was at the Paris Lido in the 1950s! It was all dry Martinis and the occasional absinthe.’
‘The Green Fairy!’ Daniel sighed. ‘Well, they won’t have that here.’
‘And just as well. It’s made from wormwood and rots the brain. They didn’t ban it in France for nothing, you know. I’ll settle for a G and T. Large, now that you ask.’
‘Betty!’ Daniel teased. ‘I’m shocked. How suburban! Not even a cognac? How about you, Claudia?’
‘G and T will do me nicely too.’
‘Ladies, you disappoint me. I suppose you want ice and a slice as well?’
‘Well,’ Claudia replied, ‘we have an image to keep up. We are in Surrey.’
Daniel bought their drinks, then disappeared to circulate among the other choir members.
‘Yes, he is rather dishy, isn’t he?’ Betty commented.
Claudia hadn’t even realized she was watching him. She stirred her drink, embarrassed. ‘I haven’t heard that expression for years.’
‘It’s quite a good one for our Daniel, though. Daniel is like a gourmet meal, a treat for now and then but not the meat-and-two-veg of everyday. Though I’ve sometimes wondered what he’d be like if he met the right woman.’
Claudia was about to ask her what she meant when Betty produced another of the roguish looks she somehow carried off despite being over eighty. ‘But then I have always found men rather a disappointment. The interesting ones are no good at ordinary living and the ordinary ones always bored me. On the whole I prefer dogs.’
When she got home, a little giggly after two G and Ts, Claudia was greeted by the delicious aroma of frying onions. Sausages were also sizzling away on the hob and there was a pile of mash as big as a pyramid on the hotplate.
‘How absolutely delicious!’
‘You’re not as sloshed as Schlegel, then?’
Claudia giggled and put her arms round Don, resting her head on his shoulder.
‘The diva returns. I thought singing might be hungry work. I’ve opened a bottle of red, if you fancy a glass.’
‘Just as long as we recycle the bottle?’ Claudia poured herself some.
‘Sorry, I got a bit carried away earlier.’ Don grinned.
‘And I’ve been a bit of bitch. It’s been even more of a culture shock than I was expecting. For both of us.’ She raised her glass at the same time as he did. ‘Let’s have another go, shall we? To country living!’
Laura was replenishing the tins of Heinz beans, always a big seller at LateExpress, when the boss’s wife suddenly appeared in the stockroom, on one of her lightning visits. It was early for Mrs A, who didn’t usually surface until late morning unless she’d run out of milk or cat food for their enormous British Blue.
‘Good morning, Mrs Minchin,’ she perched herself, still in her quilted dressing gown, on a stack of boxes. ‘How are you enjoying working for my husband?’
‘Very much, thank you.’
‘I have one question. How come posh lady like you wants to serve in supermarket? None of my sons even agree to work here in holidays!’
‘I needed a job,’ Laura explained simply. No point in lying. ‘My husband left me quite suddenly. My children are grown-up and I hadn’t worked for a very long time.’ Something told her Mrs A would share in the sisterhood of the stay-at-home wife. ‘As a matter of fact, not for twenty-five years.’
‘And then husband left?’
Laura nodded.
‘For floozy?’
Laura couldn’t help laughing. ‘For a colleague.’
Mrs A nodded sagely. ‘For floozy. It is sad world, Mrs Minchin. My husband says you are very good worker, also nice lady.’
‘Thank you. He’s a nice boss.’
It was true. Mr A liked to oversee what everyone was doing more than would be usual in another kind of business, but he was unfailingly cheerful and always had a kind word.
On the whole, Laura liked working here much more than she had expected to. It was the other side of town from her home so she didn’t get her neighbours coming in and being quietly shocked at her doing something so menial. Simon’s partners and the high-ups from his office had started to buy their sandwiches elsewhere, which was a relief. Fortunately, Mr A had not worked out the connection between the drop in his superior sandwich trade and Laura’s presence. There was a camaraderie here she doubted she would have found in somewhere more aspirational.
She was just checking the day’s delivery, and wondering how Simon would take it when he finally discovered that his daughter was due to give birth before his mistress, when she heard a commotion out on the shop floor and put her head round to see what was happening. She was greeted by a truly memorable sight.
Mrs A, every inch an operatic diva in her pink dressing gown, was confronting Suki Morrison, while her husband hung on her arm trying to deter and persuade her to go upstairs and leave the matter to him.
‘Leave it to you, Mr No Balls? I just heard young lady there’ – she pointed to an embarrassed Elaine, Simon’s secretary – ‘tell her friend that this is floozy who stole Mrs Minchin’s husband! I am telling this trollop she can leave our shop. We have a rule here. No slags. No Jezebels. Out!’
Laura watched as her rival, wearing a quite unnecessary maternity dress, was ejected from LateExpress by the wife of the proprietor, to the sound of muffled laughter.
Laura had a good idea what the fall-out from this little sc
ene would be, but what the hell.
She was enjoying every moment.
CHAPTER 17
Was it a brutal irony or an amazing gift, Sal found herself wondering, that she loved working at the magazine as much as she did, and that it was all going so well?
The very eccentricity of the place, which previous editors had found so hard to cope with, actually appealed to Sal. She began to see how much she’d hated working for increasingly large and faceless conglomerates, often run from Europe or the US. She had no objection to Rose McGill wandering in and giving her opinions, especially since, once she’d delivered her thoughts, Rose didn’t seem to mind if they were followed up or not; she just liked to have her say. Occasionally, only she and Rose were left in the office, the last to leave, and she saw that they had something in common: two women alone. In fact, there were moments when she felt an overwhelming temptation to confide in Rose. Then she reminded herself of Rose’s fearsome reputation, and that their relationship was professional, not private.
Her treatment seemed to be progressing well but it would mean a very lonely and peculiar Christmas. But at least she could just spend it recuperating. Claudia, Ella and Laura would easily be persuaded that she was going away as usual. It had better be somewhere cold or they would wonder about her lack of tan. Sal was a dedicated sun-worshipper who was perfectly happy to risk leathery skin for the sake of those blissful rays. She usually made the others jealous with her winter colour. Not this year.
What would happen, she asked herself as she packed up her work things, if the cancer didn’t go, if it actually spread and she got seriously ill? There would be a time when she would have to ask for help.
Stop all that! She would recover. Breast cancer, she reminded herself of Mr Richards’s words, was one of the good ones.
The prospect of Christmas not at some glorious hotel surrounded by hot and cold running waiters bringing her strawberry daiquiris but in her own flat was deeply unappealing. At this rate she wouldn’t even be able to drink. Sal plonked down the fur hat she’d taken to wearing on top of her wig. She glanced in the mirror and saw she looked almost the same as usual. But she wasn’t.
She would not cry.
It struck Sal that there was one person she’d enjoy meeting up with around Christmas.
Rachel.
Rachel, with her indomitable nature and utter lack of pretence about her condition. Of course she might be with her family, but it was worth a try. Stupidly, she hadn’t taken Rachel’s number. Even though she wasn’t due for another session till January, she stopped off at the hospital’s chemo suite. She knew them well enough now that they might bend the rules and give it to her.
‘Excuse me,’ she asked Lucy on Reception, ‘but do you know if I could contact another patient I met here? Her name’s Rachel Freeman.’
A look flashed between Lucy and a passing nurse. ‘I’m afraid Rachel’s no longer with us.’ Lucy reached under the desk. ‘As a matter of fact, she left this for you. I didn’t want to give it to you around Christmas, but now you’re asking . . .’
It was Rachel’s pink wig. And this time Sal did cry.
Ella stood back to admire the vegetable wreath she’d just hung on her front door, complete with Bill’s raffia bow.
It looked absolutely splendid.
The house on her left sported an enormous one made of fake golden apples, pine cones, dried orange slices and cinnamon sticks, complete with angels, baubles and a fake robin.
Her neighbours on the other side, ever the minimalists, had fashioned theirs from a few old birch twigs and a lone Christmas star. Viv and Angelo were still away, which was a pity, since they came up with a creative new design each year which the whole square eagerly awaited. Once it been made out of the serrated tops of old baked-beans tins; the next from torn-up white T-shirts, attached by rubber-band plaits; and yet a third, and possibly most memorable, a wreath made entirely out of old keys. Ella had assumed these were not to the front door.
It was a glorious day and Ella opted for a frosty walk down to the allotment which could do with one last tidy-up before Christmas.
The plan this year was that Julia, Neil and the boys were coming for Christmas Day and then Julia and Neil would head off to the other in-laws – probably a blessed relief. Cory was joining her to celebrate a Polish Christmas Eve with Wenceslaus.
The walk by the Thames always lifted Ella’s spirits. She stopped to watch the rowers as they glided in among the occasional geese and swans that had stayed for the winter. The clouds were massing over the far bank, purple, grey, lavender, blue, with a touch of pink that heralded the beginning of sunset. Despite the planes that descended incessantly into Heathrow like a row of divers queuing for a diving board, it was still heart-stoppingly beautiful.
How lucky I am to have all this, Ella thought. A lot of people might look at her life and imagine she was lonely, but it wasn’t true, especially since Wenceslaus had come along.
The sight of a young mum pushing a buggy prompted a sudden memory of a line from Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: No hungry generations tread thee down. And it struck her that no matter how young she and her friends might feel, they would not live forever. They had seen amazing times, maybe unique, and they thought they’d never grow old like their parents, but the truth was they were no different. She had two grandsons and now Laura was going to be a grandmother as well!
Despite the lateness of the hour, the allotments were busy.
‘Hello, boys,’ she greeted Bill, Stevie and Les, who stood like three wise monkeys arguing over the finer points of potting compost versus well-rotted manure.
What Ella felt like today was a bit of digging to loosen up her muscles but the ground was so hard she had to abandon the idea and content herself with hard pruning and sorting seeds into wooden boxes. She had just sat down to admire her handiwork when Julia burst in through the gates. She looked as if she might have been crying. This was so unusual in unemotional Julia that Ella stood up and started walking towards her.
‘What on earth’s the matter?’
‘Oh, God, Mum, it’s all so stupid.’
‘What’s happened? Is it you and Neil?’
Julia looked away. ‘It was all about the stupid camera!’
‘What, my camera?’ Ella felt a flash of decidedly unmaternal irritation.
‘It was really dumb, but I turned out to have had it after all. I’d just downloaded a photograph – a really nice one in the woods – and Neil came across it and went berserk.’
‘Where had you put it?’
‘I’d transferred it to my phone.’
‘Look, Julia, who was this photo of? I’m assuming it wasn’t of me and there was only one other person there. Was it Wenceslaus?’
Again Julia looked away.
‘It was, wasn’t it?’
Julia shrugged in exactly the way she had always done whenever she was in trouble ever since the age of five.
‘Anyway, there was this massive over-reaction from Neil and he threw my phone on the ground, and now it doesn’t work.’
‘Julia,’ Ella insisted firmly, ‘you are going to have to take responsibility for this. Why did you have a photograph of Wenceslaus on your phone?’
‘It was just a really nice photograph.’
‘No, it wasn’t – well, it might have been, but that isn’t the point. You’ve fallen for him, haven’t you?’
‘OK, maybe a bit.’
‘Not a bit. I’ve seen how you follow him around. But, look, Julia, he doesn’t have feelings for you, that’s the point.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He said you were a very pretty lady but that you didn’t smile because your husband didn’t notice you enough.’
‘You mean you’ve actually talked about me with him?’ She thought Julia would be furiously angry but almost the opposite was true. ‘What did he say?’ she demanded. ‘Did he really call me pretty?’ She was blooming suddenly like a bud opening in the sunshine.
‘That’s all. That was all he said.’
‘I knew he’d thought about me. I can see it sometimes when he looks at me.’
‘Julia, darling, I’m so sorry to say this, but this is a fantasy.’
‘What would you know about it anyway? You’re over sixty. And you and Dad were comfortable together. There wasn’t any passion between you, even when we were little. You didn’t even go in for cuddling like other parents did.’
Anger coursed up in Ella. ‘Of course we were passionate! I loved your father very much. And fancied him!’
‘Fancied?’ mocked Julia. ‘What a ridiculous word.’
‘OK,’ Ella was shouting now, ‘desired, wanted, lusted after. Is that clear enough for you?’
It was certainly clear enough for Bill, Les and Stevie who moved, as one man, up to the opposite end of the allotments in case Ella should turn her wanton woman’s eyes in their direction.
‘You have to stop this, Julia. You’re behaving like a lovesick schoolgirl and it’s clearly affecting your marriage.’ She almost added: Look, I’m no great fan of Neil’s, but I can see his point, but thankfully stopped herself in time. Words, once uttered, could never be taken back and went on to have a dangerous, corrosive life of their own.
‘Julia, if you’re unhappy in your marriage, I’ll do all I can to support you. I’m your mother and I’ll always be there for you. But don’t throw it away for a silly fantasy.’
‘I might have known you’d be like this.’ Julia delved into her parka pocket and pulled out Ella’s camera. ‘Here’s your stupid sodding camera and much joy may it bring you!’
For a moment Ella thought Julia would throw it on the ground but she shoved it into Ella’s hand instead and disappeared off in the glowing light of the sunset.
Ella sat down, not sure if she were more angry or worried. All the time she’d been thinking she was going doolally, losing her new camera, Julia had had it. And this thing with Wenceslaus. He was Ella’s lodger. Ella really liked having him around. He was helpful yet unobtrusive, friendly but never pushy, with an almost female instinct for when to talk to her and when to leave her alone. And now, because of Julia, she was wondering if she ought to ask him to leave.