Tickled Pink

by Christina Jones

  TICKLED PINK

  Christina Jones

  CHIVERS

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available

  This eBook published by AudioGO Ltd, Bath, 2012.

  Published by arrangement with the Author

  Epub ISBN 9781471309021

  Copyright © Christina Jones 2002

  Christina Jones asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  All rights reserved

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental

  Jacket illustration © iStockphoto.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Tickled Pink is about friendship and laughter, loyalty and love, and is dedicated to two people who have given me more of these than anyone has a right to expect.

  Pat Powell (31.12.67-30.6.01) my best friend for ever and Hilary Johnson without whom none of it would have happened

  The names of the major characters in this novel have been shamelessly plundered from my friends. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the following for allowing me to pinch their nearest and dearest: Bridget Billany for Ellis; Norrie Allan for Norrie; Lesley and Phillipa Cookman for Posy; Emma Fabian for Lola and Mimi; and Lorraine Osborne for Flynn Malone.

  I also want to thank Rob and Laura, Hilary Johnson, Sarah Molloy and Mags Wheeler, and all my friends – in and out of the RNA – who so tirelessly supported me with so much kindness while I was writing this book under the most difficult of circumstances.

  You’re all stars. I couldn’t have done it without you.

  Chapter One

  Watching Ritchie Dalgetty marry Sonia Tozer in Steeple Fritton’s parish church was absolutely the worst thing that Posy had ever done. Sitting halfway down the nave, on the bridegroom’s side of the aisle, naturally, she witnessed the man who had been hers since childhood plight his troth to another.

  Once the register had been signed – Posy hoped upon hope that it was in blood dripping from one of Sonia’s more vital arteries – the happy couple emerged from the vestry, followed sullenly by five frightening prepubescent bridesmaids in candyfloss pink nylon.

  After pausing for a victorious moment on the chancel steps, the entourage then swept back up the aisle to the heart-rending cries of Whitney Houston swearing that she would always lurve yoooouuuu.

  For Posy and the churchful of guests, this came as something of a melodic relief after an interminable descant version of ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ from the First Lesser Fritton Brownies.

  Posy, who had been staring hard at her dusty hassock with its lopsided embroidery throughout the whole service, clenched her teeth even more fiercely as Ritchie and Sonia passed the end of her pew, and prayed for an omnipotent lightning strike.

  None came. God, it appeared, wasn’t listening to dumped fiancées.

  Instead, the bells pealed their triumphal celebration and the congregation poured joyously out into the frosty January sunshine. Cameras rattled, cigarettes were lit, and women in hats and unfamiliar high heels shrieked at each other, their breath flowing out in smoky plumes. Disbelieving and totally stunned, Posy shivered in the brightness and just wanted to crawl away into the graveyard and join the slumbering incumbents beneath their mossy headstones.

  Sonia, all floating swan’s-down and stephanotis, beamed at everyone. Ritchie beamed at Sonia. Posy, who knew she’d never beam again, pulled her conker-brown hat low over her eyes so that no one would see if she cried.

  ‘Lovely wedding,’ Vi Bickeridge from Steeple Fritton’s corner shop bellowed in Posy’s ear. ‘And you’d never guess she were almost six months gone, would you? Don’t show at all, do she? Mind, them skinny ones usually carries well. I remember –’

  Posy gave a noncommittal please-please-leave-me-alone snort, and slithered away across the frosty hummocks of the unmarked graves.

  How could Ritchie have done this to her? How could he? How could he have cheated on her? How could he have created an accidental baby with the pale-eyed, adenoidal Sonia?

  Although, Posy reckoned, as it was rumoured throughout Steeple Fritton that Sonia nee Tozer wore thongs and very little else, that may account for something. But how could Ritchie have married her, and then added insult to injury by allowing Posy to watch the ritual culmination of his folly?

  Of course, she didn’t have to be there. She shouldn’t have come. Everyone told her she shouldn’t have come. No one believed that she would go.

  Until the last minute, she hadn’t actually believed it herself.

  Her entire family had been shocked rigid that she’d planned to be at the wedding. She’d never tell any of them that she’d fondly believed that Ritchie, turning from his seat in the front pew, and spotting her there in her natty burnt orange suit and the floppy brown hat, might just realize his mistake and at the eleventh hour put The Graduate into reverse, and cancel the whole thing.

  But he hadn’t. And now simpering Sonia was Mrs Dalgetty: the name Posy had scrawled on everything she’d possessed since first clapping eyes on Ritchie in the playground of Steeple Fritton Mixed Infants twenty years earlier.

  Twenty years! An entire lifetime wasted! Ferociously, Posy ground the toe of her matching burnt orange boot into the shingle path. The air was thick with the fragrance of low-hanging smoke and the chill of a winter afternoon, and a clash of expensive scents which wafted and entwined and enticed, making her feel sick.

  ‘You coming in the car with me, Glad, Rose and Tatty for the do?’

  Never one to take push off for an answer, Vi Bickeridge had yomped across the graveyard to seek her out. ‘They’ve got salmon roulette for a starter.’

  There was no way on earth that Posy was going to sit at a trestle table in the village hall – the very place where she and Ritchie had exchanged their first kiss at a youth club Christmas party – and watch murderously as the new Mr and Mrs Dalgetty took the floor to the strains of ‘Three Times A Lady’.

  ‘Er, no, probably not. I’ve, um, got to help Mum and Dad.’

  Vi Bickeridge pulled her shaggy eyebrows together in disbelief. ‘They won’t need you this afternoon. They’re hardly rushed off their feet, are they? No one wants B&Bs no more. Not when they can have five-star country house stuff with sauna and gym and a golf course just down the road at Colworth Manor. Sunny Dene’ll probably go bust afore too long.’

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ Posy muttered. ‘It’s all I ever hear at home. And why won’t anyone look at me?’

  The entire village population was milling around in the churchyard, trying to keep warm, and all seemed unable to meet her eyes. Even people like Rose Lusty, Glad Blissit and Tatty Spry – people she’d known all her life – seemed to find reading the headstones suddenly irresistible.r />
  Posy gazed at the sea of familiar faces all hellbent on drinking themselves silly at the expense of someone else. How many of them, she wondered, had slipped her surreptitious glances throughout the ceremony to see how much she really minded Sonia stepping into her white satin shoes?

  ‘They won’t look at you because, although they feels sorry for you, they all knows you shouldn’t be here. Damn daft idea of yours if you asks me. Oh, bless them!’ Vi Bickeridge clapped her hands in delight as a swoosh of children – most of them Tatty Spry’s – in the latest Tesco designer gear started to clamber on to the crumbling catacomb of Sir Arthur Fritton, village founder and one-time Lord of the Manor. ‘They soon gets bored, don’t they? I wonder what sort of mum young Sonia will make, eh?’

  Longing to snatch off her hat, kick off her silly high-heeled boots, and run as far from Steeple Fritton’s churchyard as possible, Posy gave a sad shrug. Children . . . She and Ritchie had planned on four. Sonia and Ritchie definitely couldn’t have planned on any. The thongs obviously had a lot to answer for.

  The protracted photographic session seemed to be coming to an end just before everyone succumbed to frostbite. Having twice managed to avoid the photographer’s urging that she should join in on the ‘friends of the happy couple’ set piece, Posy watched as everyone surged towards the gates.

  ‘Come on!’ Vi Bickeridge had got her second wind. ‘Don’t want to miss the confetti throwing, do we?’

  Unable to shake off the manacle grip of someone who had spent the last forty years unscrewing the tops from recalcitrant Kilner jars in the corner shop, Posy found herself amongst a crush of overexcited villagers all clustered round the white Mercedes.

  ‘Why, in God’s name, do Ritchie and Sonia need a car to drive them the couple of hundred yards through the village to the reception?’

  ‘Because,’ Vi Bickeridge hissed from the side of her mouth as she ferreted in her handbag for her cut-price confetti, ‘they’re not having their do in the village hall. They’ve booked the banqueting hall at Colworth Manor, with the ballroom for afters.’

  Colworth Manor? Posy sighed angrily. Why was she surprised? Why should she even care? When she had planned her wedding to Ritchie, here at this church on such a glorious winter’s day, she’d imagined that they’d walk to the village hall, all country-simple, followed by the congregation in a sort of rustic Thomas Hardy configuration.

  She’d be carrying a tumbled sheaf of holly and ivy, and have winter roses in her hair. Ritchie would be wearing an artistically crumpled linen suit with a freshly picked sprig of mistletoe in the buttonhole, and the tiny bridesmaids would be skipping along in seasonal dresses of crimson and green . . .

  She stared into the dark and flower-filled recesses of the Mercedes, her eyes drawn helplessly towards the happy couple like a Paul McKenna victim. Ritchie was grinning inanely at no one, still starchily unrecognizable in top hat and tails, while Sonia had the victorious bared-teeth grin of brides the world over.

  Posy felt the knot of pain rise from under her ribs and hover somewhere in her throat. At any moment she’d burst into tears and ruin the whole cool ‘I don’t give a damn façade.’

  She blinked and swallowed, and at that moment Ritchie turned his head and looked at her for the first time. His eyes, deeper blue now in the darkness of the limousine, met hers and asked a million questions. Feeling the shiver of pain and revulsion and – sod it, yes badly timed but unmistakable stirring attraction, Posy jerked her head away just as a shower of confetti rained down on her, mercifully blurring the awful vision.

  Spitting out bits of pastel tissue paper, Posy freed herself from Vi Bickeridge’s grasp at last and sprinted away from the church. Hurling her hat in a cartwheel of pique into the nearest field and longing to do the same with the boots and the stupid clingy suit, she didn’t stop running until she’d reached the crossroads which dissected Steeple Fritton’s two commons.

  The village dozed drowsily, silently, snugly, beneath the weak January sun. For once, the white lanes were deserted, the cottage windows closed and soundless. Everyone was joining in the celebrations. Everyone except Vi Bickeridge’s Clive who’d been ordered to keep the store open for the sale of headache tablets and Alka Seltzer, and Posy’s own parents who had never shut up shop even on Christmas Day. Just in case.

  Her mum and dad and Dom, her younger brother, had been uniformly outraged on her behalf when Ritchie’s duplicity had been discovered. It had only added to their incredulity when she’d told them she was going to the wedding. Her best friends in the village, Amanda and Nikki, had told her she was barking.

  Not knowing her reasons, and loudly voicing fears that she’d interrupt the service at the ‘does anyone here know of any reason why . . . they’d all advised her not to go within a mile of the event. And of course, Posy thought, sinking down on the bench by the war memorial, they’d been right.

  Now she’d have to live the rest of her life in Steeple Fritton, with her Ritchie, who she sadly realized she’d love forever, and the bug-eyed Sonia happily ensconced in one of the Bunny Burrow starter homes. She’d have to bump into them at every claustrophobic village occasion, and probably even be expected – within weeks – to coo at the bat-eared, cloven-hoofed baby in its tartan Mothercare sling.

  No, she bloody wouldn’t! She stood up angrily, shivering, brushing bits of grit from the seat of her girlie tight skirt. Steeple Fritton wasn’t big enough for her and damn Sonia nee Tozer. One of them was going to have to leave. And quickly.

  It took less than five minutes to stomp the distance between the war memorial and Sunny Dene. Posy paused for a moment and gazed at the sprawling three-storey, much-built-on cottage with pure pleasure. Overgrown with ivy, jostled by flowers in the summer and shaded by a horse chestnut tree, it was straight from the front of a chocolate box. The back garden, of course, was straight from the front of a Hornby Double O catalogue, given over as it was in its entirety to her dad’s model railway layout.

  Sunny Dene may be odd, but it was the only home she’d known – and now, because of Sonia Tozer and her thongs, she’d have to leave it for ever.

  Posy scrunched up the drive and thundered through the open door beside the faded lettering that told the world that Norrie and Dilys Nightingale offered a home-from-home welcome, comfy beds and a full English breakfast. Dinner optional. Rates on application.

  The dogs, Trevor and Kenneth, loped joyously towards her, their claws scrabbling on the flagstones.

  ‘Oh, why can’t men be more like dogs.’ Posy breathed in the warmth of home and fondled their silky heads. She smiled as they both attempted to chew the toes of her orange boots. ‘You know exactly where you are with dogs.’

  Clattering across the spotless flagged hallway with its 1930s furniture and huge vases of mop-headed chrysanthemums and with Trevor and Kenneth dancing attendance, she pushed open the kitchen door.

  ‘Is it all over? Oh, shit, Pose, you look awful. Do you want to talk about it?’ Dom, her eighteen-year-old brother, was sitting at the kitchen table, and peered short-sightedly up from the intricate innards of a 1950s Hornby locomotive. It was really difficult to tell where the miniature railway engine ended and Dom started. For something so tiny, the oil and grease were all-encompassing. ‘Shall I get you a coffee?’

  ‘Yes. Cheers. No. Yes. Thanks.’ Posy kicked off the boots. Trevor and Kenneth immediately dragged them under the table. ‘Are Mum and Dad around?’

  ‘Taking the opportunity to snooze by the fire as the village has turned into the Marie Celeste,’ Dom put his specs back on, poured black coffee into a Tweenies mug and added several spoonfuls of sugar. ‘Shall I shout for them?’

  Posy shook her head. ‘No. Not yet. In fact, not at all. I don’t want an inquest.’ The coffee was hot and strong and burned her tongue. She liked it. It resited the rawness away from her heart.

  ‘Was it really scabby?’ Dom picked up a pair of tweezers.

  ‘Very. And don’t say I told you so – I know I
shouldn’t have gone.’

  Dom disappeared into the mechanical entrails again, using a magnifying glass to carry out the repair with surgical precision. ‘No, you shouldn’t. Not unless you were going to black both their eyes just before the photographs.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have been able to reach. They’re both descended from giraffes.’

  And that was another thing that was so galling: they’d looked so right together. Ritchie and Sonia: tall and elegant. Posy gritted her teeth in mute anguish against the grainy rim of the mug. She, being not a lot over five-foot-four, had always bobbed along beside Ritchie like a Yorkshire terrier frantically trying to match strides with a greyhound. Not only had she been saddled with the name of a Noel Streatfeild heroine, but with her cloud of dark curls and bird-delicate frame, she actually looked like one.

  Which was pretty appalling for someone whose only other life ambition, apart from becoming Mrs Ritchie Dalgetty, had been to become the motorcycling champion of the world.

  ‘I’m going to leave.’

  Dom’s eyes widened. ‘Leave? Leave where?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Home, you mean? The village? Sunny Dene?’

  ‘All of them, yes. I should have done it months ago. When, well, you know . . .’

  Dom nodded kindly. He knew. The whole village knew. ‘But where will you go? Down to Auntie Cath’s for a while, or something?’

  ‘Miles away. Forever. This isn’t something that can be sorted by me spending a couple of weeks with various relatives. This is crunch time. I’ve got to do something on my own.’

  ‘But the business. The B&B . . . I mean, you can’t do anything else, can you?’

  Posy paused on the coffee dregs. No, she couldn’t, but it was pretty galling to be told so. Especially now. She could make a bed to her mother’s exacting standards in three minutes flat; she could cook and serve a dozen fried breakfasts in her sleep; and if they were going to get into listing life-skills, she could also ride a motorbike, strip it down and fine-tune it with the best of them, and even shared some of her father’s and Dom’s knowledge on the repair and upkeep of all things steam-driven.