by Maeve Haran
‘Is horrible,’ Wenceslaus replied, angry on her behalf. ‘Internet scam, perhaps? They did not get away with it, I hope?’
‘I don’t think so. Anyway, the bank will cover it.’
‘So you will not lose?’
‘Convenient, eh?’ Neil said nastily. ‘Victimless crime. Except that it isn’t victimless. Somebody ends up paying. Curious it happened in Poland, don’t you think?’
Wenceslaus was about to leave the room when he suddenly understood what Neil was implying.
He turned towards him.
Ella saw that his whole body was taut as an athlete’s. ‘You think, because in Poland, is something to do with me?’
The final word hung in the air, sharp and dangerous.
‘It seems quite a coincidence, I must say, given the address they offered was right here.’
Wenceslaus didn’t look at Neil again. He simply bowed to Ella and announced: ‘I go now’, then ran upstairs.
From the top floor they could hear the sound of something being pulled across the floor. Ten minutes later Wenceslaus appeared with a large backpack. The movie posters he’d had on his walls were rolled up and tucked into the front pouch and he was holding a pair of walking boots in one hand. In the other was a key he held out to Ella.
‘I thank you from bottom of my heart. I was weary traveller like at Christmas table and you let me live in your beautiful house. I will go now, El-la.’ He held out his hand in a gesture of farewell. ‘And I give so many thanks to you.’
‘Wenceslaus, look, there’s no need . . .’ Ella began.
‘Yes,’ Wenceslaus nodded, and she glimpsed a pained sadness in his eyes that made her want to weep herself, ‘there is need.’
‘Very convenient,’ Neil whispered under his breath. ‘And I don’t suppose you’ll leave a forwarding address for when the police come.’
Wenceslaus looked at him and shrugged as if Neil were not worth wasting any anger on. ‘I work at coffee shop in High Street. Easy to find me.’
‘Unless you scoot off suddenly.’
The expression on Wenceslaus’ face announced that this was not worthy of an answer.
‘Goodbye, El-la. Goodbye, Julia.’
With great dignity he walked through the hall and down the front steps, calmly putting his stuff in Minka’s car, while she ranged round the room, eyeing Julia with dislike. ‘Wenceslaus is good man. The best.’ She pulled herself up to her full five feet nine and stood her ground, with all the presence of a female leopard protecting her cubs. ‘You all make mistake about him. I know men. Bad ones too. Wenceslaus is honest, if not honest, he be much richer man.’
‘If he’s so honest, why did he try and steal my wife?’ Neil burst out.
Julia gasped.
‘He did not try and steal your wife.’ Minka looked at him pityingly. ‘Your wife throw herself at him because you make her unhappy, never think of her, treat her like she not exist. Wenceslaus tell me this. He wish for her sake she were more happy.’
Quietly, behind them, Julia began to sob.
‘Julia, for Christ’s sake, deny this cobblers,’ Neil insisted angrily.
Julia’s head went up. Her whole body changed and she sat with sudden queenly dignity. ‘How can I deny it when every word is true?’
Before she left for her shift, Laura knocked on Sam’s door and took him in a cup of tea. He had another appointment at the dentist this morning and she didn’t want him to miss it. She wondered how his online job applications were going. So far he hadn’t even got a single interview, despite his degree.
She put the tea down beside him.
Only the top of his head was showing under the duvet, his fair hair sticking up like an old-fashioned corn stook. Laura couldn’t resist stroking it, which brought the expected protest.
But at least it meant he was awake.
‘I’m off now, don’t forget your appointment at ten-thirty.’
She hurried off to the bus stop, feeling pleased that she was only doing a half-day today since she was meeting Bella to look at prams – well, not prams, since no one used prams any more, but buggies or car-seats that, like Sam’s old Transformers, could be magically converted into buggies. It seemed very early days to Laura, since Bella wasn’t yet five months pregnant, but though she might look like the bride of Frankenstein, her daughter had always been a planner, and she wanted to really study the different models before starting to save for her favourite one.
When Laura arrived at LateExpress, the proprietor’s wife was paying one of her surprise visits to the shop. ‘Morning, Mrs Minchin,’ she greeted Laura enthusiastically. ‘How are you? No sign of your husband’s harlot today?’
Laura shook her head, trying to suppress a grin.
‘And a good thing too. We wives need to stick together or you never know where husbands would be sneaking their trouser-snake.’
Mr A’s trouser-snake, Laura suspected, would have no chance of escaping with so many unscheduled visits from his wife.
Laura spent most of the morning checking orders and bundling up the unsold newspapers to go back to the distributor, until it was time to supervise the midday rush for crisps and fizzy drinks that constituted lunch for half the school children who invaded the shop. Then she took off her LateExpress overall and said goodbye.
She’d arranged to meet Bella in Oxford Street and, since she was ten minutes early, had the opportunity to immerse herself in the brave new world of baby transport. This had changed beyond recognition since the days when she’d wheeled Bella around in a striped pushchair that rolled conveniently up until it was no bigger than an umbrella.
The stately lines of the Silver Cross hadn’t changed much. They still looked like the sort of pram only a Norland nanny would be permitted to push. A Viktor and Rolf special edition made her jaw drop at the cost, as did the various ‘Baby Joggers’ for the active yummy mummy. One or two had a marvellous invention called a ‘buggy board’ designed for older siblings to hitch a ride instead of screaming the place down. She wished she’d had one of those for Bella and Sam.
The Bugaboo seemed to be flavour of the month, as wheeled by celebs everywhere, with a celebrity price-tag so that when Laura came across a no-nonsense Maclaren stroller, the asking price seemed almost a giveaway.
‘Hi, Mum.’
Laura turned and had to do a double take. Bella was looking almost conventional. She still wore black, but the Miss Havisham-meets-Count-Dracula look had disappeared without trace. Instead, she had on a figure-hugging crepe dress, plus a silk scarf that completely hid her bump, and knee-length black boots. If she’d added a little pillbox hat with a veil she could have been a particularly ravishing Sicilian widow.
Drawing on years of experience as a mother, Laura didn’t comment on the new look. It was, she had learned, safer to say nothing.
But today, contrarily, Bella seemed to want her to.
‘What do you think?’ She twirled around the baby department. ‘All from Oxfam, the Notting Hill branch. The cast-offs in Portobello Road are from Dolce and Gabbana.’
‘You look lovely, darling.’
Laura’s eye was caught by a tiny knitted hat shaped like a strawberry in the baby section. ‘Oh look, you had one just like that! Isn’t that the sweetest thing? I suppose it would be bad luck to . . .’
But Bella wasn’t listening. Her gaze was fixed on the maternity department where a voluptuous redhead was holding up an Isabella Oliver ruffle wrap dress in a glorious shade of amethyst. Standing next to her stood Bella’s father Simon.
‘Oh God,’ muttered Laura as Bella headed straight for them, clearly relishing the encounter.
Simon, on the other hand, looked as if he’d seen the ghost of Christmas Past. He almost covered his ears to stop the chains jangling.
‘We meet again,’ Bella addressed Suki, who shot a puzzled look at Simon. The new Bella looked so different and they had met only once before, at night, and under somewhat stressed-out circumstances. Unsurprisingly, Suk
i had no idea who she was.
‘Do we?’ she enquired blankly.
‘When’s the baby due?’ Bella persisted.
‘The end of July.’ Suki smiled, beginning to relax.
‘That’s nice.’ She looked her father in the face, challenging his nervous grey eyes with her bold brown gaze. ‘You’ll be a grandfather for two months before you’re a father, then. Congratulations, Dad.’
‘Look, Bella,’ Simon was clearly having to hold on to his temper. ‘What is this nonsense all about?’
‘Me. Your daughter.’ She lifted the scarf, revealing almost five months of baby bump. ‘I’m due on the twenty-fourth of May.’
Simon’s face crumpled like a used paper bag. ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know!’
‘No,’ Bella replied calmly, ‘I didn’t tell you. Seeing as you’re not part of this family any more, there didn’t seem much point. Besides,’ she pointed cheerfully at Suki, ‘you’ve got a new family now. Come on, Mum,’ she turned back to Laura who had been standing on the perimeter, not wanting to make things any worse, ‘let’s go and buy that baby buggy!’
She marched off, leaving Suki livid at being upstaged and her parent satisfyingly shaken, appalled that he was going to be a grandfather before he was a father again. Which was exactly what Bella had intended.
‘Bella, darling,’ Laura attempted, as they inspected the twentieth buggy, all of which seemed largely identical to her, ‘you’re not really going to ban your father from seeing the baby?’
‘Too right I am. He has to see there are consequences to his behaviour.’ God, how confident she was, how black and white the world seemed to her. Was that just the certainty of youth?
On the other hand, Laura could see why abandoned wives felt so bitter at a world that seemed so all-accepting. Your husband did the wrong thing and you were the one who suffered. But the law, and society with it, didn’t believe any longer that falling in love with someone else was wrong, it was just seen as one of the messier aspects of modern life. And what power did children have when their parents walked away from a marriage? All they could do was stand helplessly by. Unless they were Bella.
Laura was exhausted by the time she got home. As she opened the front door, TomTom came and wound himself round her legs, but otherwise the house was eerily quiet. Sam must have gone out somewhere.
She went up to her bedroom to kick off her shoes. Oddly, the cat followed her and started scratching at Sam’s door.
With a sudden lurch of panic she pushed it open. The room was in complete darkness and had that boy smell of trainers and unwashed clothes that men took so long to grow out of. As her eyes got used to the lack of light, she made out a form under the duvet.
‘Sam! Sam!’ She bent down and pulled off his covers. ‘What on earth are you doing?’
‘What does it look like?’ was the gruff reply. ‘Sleeping.’
‘But it’s five o’clock in the afternoon!’
‘So?’
‘Did you go to your appointment?’
He shrugged infuriatingly.
‘That cost me forty-two pounds! Twice what I earned today. How could you be so bloody selfish?’ She snapped on his bedside light. He seemed lifeless and dull-eyed as a cod on a fishmonger’s slab.
‘What’s the matter with you? You haven’t been taking anything, have you?’ she panicked.
‘Of course I haven’t. Nothing’s the matter. I just don’t happen to like my life so there’s not much to get up for.’
‘Oh, Sam. Sammy. C’m here.’ She tried to put her arms round him as she had when he was little but he shrugged her off.
‘Just leave me, Mum.’
She still sat on the bed, feeling helpless, until he turned away from her, with his face to the wall, and she realized for the first time what that expression meant, how much despair lurked in those few simple words.
She stayed on the bed until his breath became regular and she knew he had fallen asleep. How long could a twenty-two-year-old young man sleep? What the hell should she do?
What she did was go back to her bedroom, shut the door, throw herself on the bed and weep. When she stopped crying she went downstairs, poured herself a glass of wine and got out her ancient Nokia. It was actually so old that it had push buttons and total strangers occasionally came up to her and smiled reminiscently as if, in an age of word processors, she had insisted on using a manual typewriter.
She sent a text to Claudia, Sal and Ella. It read: Feeling shit, isn’t it time we met up again? Grecian Grove Wed 16th at 6?
Ella, who was alone in her kitchen, thinking about the unravelling disaster of her daughter’s marriage, instantly texted back: Yes!
Sal, who was feeling sick and sorry for herself and wondering if she was the stupidest woman in the world, opened it and texted back: You betcha!
Claudia, who was sitting on the sofa in her dressing gown, cuddling Vito, saw the response of the others and thought Halleluiah, which she translated into a text reading: Hell yes!
But before she felt like sharing a bottle with her friends, Ella had something else to do that had been on her mind.
She walked the ten minutes between her house and the coffee shop where Wenceslaus worked.
He was just wiping down a counter before finishing up.
‘I have something to say to you. I should have stood up for you when my son-in-law was so rude to you the other night. I just wanted you to know that I didn’t believe that tripe about you opening up bank accounts in Poland for a single moment.’
She turned and waved, almost shyly.
‘Thank you, El-la,’ he replied with a catch in his voice. ‘This mean a lot to me. I hope everything work out very well for you. You are very kind lady.’ He paused a moment as if not sure what to say next. ‘And for Julia as well,’ he added finally.
Sal dressed extra carefully in a nicely cut black dress with her best boots. She took longer than usual applying her make-up and she shampooed and blow dried the wig. The wig, she had convinced herself, looked better than her real hair.
She took one last look in the mirror and burst into tears. It was the first time they would have seen her since the cancer, and one glance would tell them something was desperately wrong.
They would guess she was ill the moment they saw her.
It was one thing fooling Rose McGill, but these were her oldest friends, the friends she’d known since she was eighteen, who had witnessed every triumph and disaster of her life. Except this one.
She slumped onto the bed. Would it be so terrible if she told them? They would be supportive, sympathetic, full of offers to help.
Sal knew it would be hard for her friends to grasp why she needed to do it this way, but that was exactly why she couldn’t tell them. Support and sympathy would undermine her resolve. She might even collapse. Strength was what she needed. Strength and the determination that she was going to pull through, triumphantly, and still have a means of supporting herself for the years ahead. And that strength was easier to maintain if no one but she knew the truth.
She put the wig back on its stand and texted Ella that she couldn’t come owing to a crisis at work. She might share her friends’ love-hate relationship with technology, but she had to admit it was brilliantly useful when you had to tell a lie.
Ella was the first to arrive. As she sat in their usual alcove at The Grecian Grove, she decided even the nymphs and satyrs looked pleased to see them. ‘Business not been so good without us?’ she enquired of the nearest nymph. ‘Never mind, it’ll pick up tonight!’ She summoned a waiter and ordered a bottle of their usual wine.
Claudia rushed in five minutes later. ‘Sorry I’m late. Don had disappeared with the dog.’
‘How is he?’
‘Don?’
‘No, the dog.’
‘The dog’s great. Don, on the other hand—’
‘There’s Laura!’ Ella interrupted.
Laura, looking pale and pretty, waved from the other side of the restaurant
. ‘Where’s Sal?’ she asked as she sat down.
‘Not coming,’ Ella replied. ‘A crisis at work, she says, but I’m a bit worried. There’s something funny going on. She cancelled the last arrangement we had as well. I suddenly realized that though I’ve emailed and texted her, I haven’t actually seen her for ages and ages.’
‘Maybe it’s this new job,’ Laura suggested. ‘She’s throwing herself into it because it was so hard to actually find a job.’
‘Because she’s OLD!’ Claudia snapped. ‘Do you know, for the very first time I’ve started to feel old?’
They looked at her, shocked at this heresy. It was their declared belief that they all felt the same as they always had.
‘I was driving along the other day to Bruce Springsteen’s Greatest Hits,’ Claudia expanded. ‘And I could hear this ticking sound. For half an hour I thought it was part of the music till a policeman stopped me to tell me my hazard lights were on!’
‘Claudia,’ Laura said solemnly, ‘I’m worried about you.’
‘I know,’ conceded Claudia. ‘I was worried myself. It’s the sort of thing only old people do.’
‘Forget the hazard lights. It’s the music I’m worried about. Bruce Springsteen?’
‘Let her be,’ Ella protested. ‘She just wants to strap her hands across his engine, don’t you, Claudia?’
Claudia laughed. ‘There are so many things I’m starting to notice that make me feel ancient. Hairs on my face. No one ever told me after the menopause I’d get a furry face!’
‘Or forget my best friends’ names.’
‘Or why I went into a room.’
‘Or that I’d get into a panic if I’m ten minutes late.’
‘Or hate looking at my turkey neck in a mirror.’
‘In fact,’ Ella sighed, ‘I’m beginning to feel not just old but really old. Proper old, like my parents were old.’
They both looked at her, silently. Ella was always so quietly competent, never making a fuss about anything. ‘It’s my daughter Julia.’
‘They’re not on at you to move again?’
‘Worse. Julia has only fallen for my lodger.’