Tickled Pink

by Christina Jones

  Flynn, obviously eager to prove himself the world’s best would-be barman, was busily dispensing treble brandies. She watched him, happy in this strange place, confident that he could handle his future, shape it, mould it into something that he wanted, rather than the other way round. She sat beside the grey-ashed fire and pulled her coat more closely round her. Well, if he could grab this second-best life by the throat and be excited by the possibilities, then so could she.

  He handed her the balloon glass. ‘Here’s to survival in the depths of rural England.’

  ‘To survival, and success,’ Lola let the brandy fire liquid warmth into her veins, instantly filling her with a heady optimism she hadn’t felt for months. She smiled at him. ‘And to friendship.’

  Flynn nodded. ‘Yeah, to friendship, and to whatever else comes along.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  By the time the snow had thawed, and the slush had drained, and Steeple Fritton had stopped resembling a paddy field, Posy was almost twitching with impatience.

  Much as she’d loved the snow, it had meant that her beloved motorbike had had to stay under wraps, that village life had ground sluggishly to a halt, and that there had been no new visitors at Sunny Dene. However, with the first signs of spring the plans for the carnival seemed to be galloping forward – at about the same pace as Sonia nee Tozer’s pregnancy, Lola’s refurbishment of The Crooked Sixpence, and Ellis’s relationship with Tatty Spry.

  Posy couldn’t help feeling that she was being left behind.

  It was March, and with the surge of new green life, came a feeling of intense restlessness. She’d even wondered, a bit treacherously, if Persephone’s owner had given her the best advice about coming home and picking up the threads that day. What would have happened if she’d really run away, found Swindon, started a new life? Would it really have been worse than this feeling of stagnation that swamped her now?

  Keeping away from Ritchie and Sonia had become a boring ritual rather than a cloak and dagger game. Even Amanda and Nikki had stopped ringing her on their mobiles every time the Dalgettys were spotted in the vicinity. She simply avoided being where they were, although the Glad, Rose and Vi coven were always on hand to fill her in on the more intimate details of their marital bliss.

  Flynn was all wrapped up in Queen Mab, and Ellis was all wrapped up in Tatty, and even the pub was a no-go area now that Lola was in charge.

  Standing on the edge of the common in the early morning dampness, watching Trevor and Kenneth snuffling happily through the undergrowth, Posy sighed heavily. Everyone else was busily engaged in doing something – and she was doing nothing – and the inertia was driving her mad.

  ‘Wassup?’

  Posy jerked her head round towards the road. Ellis had stopped the minibus on the bend and was leaning from the window.

  ‘Nothing. Just thinking.’

  ‘Dangerous at your age. Hang on . . .’ Ellis swung from the Dormobile and sprinted towards her. ‘I was going to come and see you at the B&B anyway. Haven’t got time to talk now, got to drop the brats off at school –’

  He indicated the minibus. Tatty’s brood, plus various other village children who now used the minibus for the school run, all stuck their tongues out.

  ‘Love ’em,’ Ellis said with heavy sarcasm. ‘Anyway, will you be at home later?’

  She nodded, ‘It’s bed-changing day.’

  ‘Christ! Your life is one big whirl of excitement, isn’t it? However, I may just be able to alter all that.’

  ‘Why? How?’

  ‘Wait and see,’ Ellis winked, kissed her cheek, and ran back to the minibus. As he pulled open the door, a blast of ‘Goody Goody Gumdrops’ assaulted the pastoral bliss.

  Posy wandered round the edge of the common, exchanging weather forecasts with the other dog-walkers, still wondering if life was passing her by. She was pretty sure that nothing Ellis could suggest would inject her existence with any pizzazz. It was all such an aftermath now. Before, when she’d been really, really hurt by Ritchie’s defection, and then angry with Lola for being a husband-stealer, and annoyed with everyone generally, it had given her a sharply spiked focus. Now, apathy had overtaken anger and her life was in the doldrums.

  Even the carnival plans, which had seemed so exciting before, were threatening to evaporate into nothing more than a slightly enlarged village fete. The parish council had been far more enthusiastic about holding a weekly car boot sale on the common than a huge glittering once-a-year event. The carnival proposals had been deferred for a couple of weeks while the car boot sales were organized.

  They were now up and running, and admittedly bringing in shoals of visitors every Sunday, so the previous week the parish council – those that hadn’t dozed throughout the proceedings – had spent about fifteen minutes discussing the carnival. There was a great deal of lack of interest.

  Eventually, because Posy had shouted and woken people up, Steeple Fritton Carnival had been fixed for early June.

  ‘No point having it any later,’ Mrs Bickeridge’s Clive had said. ‘Everyone goes off to Benidorm and suchlike then to make the most of the kiddies’ ’olidays.’

  As Posy had never noticed a huge village exodus to the Costas during the summer, she-could only imagine he meant the weekenders. And surely the weekenders weren’t going to make one jot of difference to the carnival anyway? And what had they got organized so far? What had actually materialized from those enthusiastic dreams of a few weeks ago?

  The usual conglomeration of stalls: tombola and white elephant and bath and beauty, because the vicar said they always went down well; fancy dress for the kiddies which would probably mean Tatty’s offspring turning up in their everyday clothes and walking off with the spoils; a carnival queen contest which the vicar had pooh-poohed on the grounds of political correctness but had fortunately been outvoted; Flynn’s traction engine; and her dad’s model railway . . .

  Posy groaned and whistled the dogs. Trevor and Kenneth, who had discovered a dead hedgehog and were taking turns to roll in it, ignored her.

  When she returned with two foul-smelling dogs and a worse temper than she’d set out with, Posy discovered that Sunny Dene was in a state of high excitement – and it wasn’t just because it was bed-changing day.

  As the roads were now clear, Flynn, Norrie, and Mr D and Mr B had decided the conditions were perfect to remove Queen Mab from Fritton Magna and install her in The Crooked Sixpence’s shed. They’d looked shocked when Posy said she didn’t think she’d be joining them.

  It was, Posy thought, shoving umpteen floral duvet covers into the washing machine, a true reflection on the state of her social life when a lot of old men – well, Flynn wasn’t old of course, but still – seemed to think she’d be jumping through hoops to join them in trundling along the country lanes on a machine that had been obsolete for at least sixty years.

  ‘We’ll have a cup of coffee, dear,’ Dilys said, ‘when the men have gone.’

  Oh, whoopee-do.

  Sadly for Posy, Dilys, who was looking very springlike in daffodil yellow with a lot of sunny sequins, was in one of her optimistic moods. Since Ellis and Flynn had repaired her car, and Flynn had fixed some dicky lighting in one of the en suites, and Ellis had helped Norrie clear all the weeds away from the model railway and unstick the points at the Crewe interchange, she’d rarely stopped singing their praises. Posy was pretty sure it wouldn’t be long before one – or both – of them was mooted as a possible Ritchie-replacement.

  Which in the normal run of things, as she and Amanda and Nikki had discussed over many a vodka and Coke, wouldn’t be the sort of choice you’d hate to have to make. Both Ellis and Flynn were gorgeous, bright, funny, friendly and very, very sexy.

  The drawback was that they were men.

  And since Lola’s irritatingly brilliant suggestion to link the food at The Crooked Sixpence with that of the B&B – the pub was now offering Nightingale’s Nibbles: light lunches, prepared, cooked and delivered by Norr
ie and Dilys, and there were Sunny Dene evening meal menus on all the bar tables, a ploy which had already seen the B&B’s dining room almost full nearly every night this week – all was more than all right in Dilys’s world.

  For Posy it was nowhere near enough.

  She knew that Sunny Dene still needed more money to keep it afloat, and was increasingly frustrated that no one shared her sense of urgency. Norrie, once he’d become accustomed to doing the accounts, was simply happy with breaking even – profit-making, it seemed, hadn’t yet been considered.

  It would be great when Dom was back for the Easter vac and could point out the financial pitfalls to their Mr Micawber-inclined father. In the meantime there was no way that she could keep on taking money out of the B&B, even her paltry salary as a family member, when her whole aim was to get money in.

  She still needed to have a job both to restore her self-confidence and shore up the Sunny Dene coffers. But where on earth was she going to find one?

  ‘Lola is doing a roaring trade at the pub seeing that she’s only been open for just over a week,’ Dilys said artlessly, dunking a custard cream into her coffee. ‘Surprised you haven’t been along to take a look-see.’

  ‘I will when I have time, and I think “roaring trade” is relative. If you mean she’s doubled the regular customers, well, six is hardly a full house, is it?’

  Posy dunked her own custard cream and watched in dismay as it disintegrated into a gooey mess and sank below the surface. It was one of those days. ‘I’ll have to speak to her about stuff for the carnival anyway.’

  ‘Good idea. She can put up a poster for you.’

  Posy tried not to groan. Dilys already had a handwritten carnival poster in the hall of the B&B. There was one pasted on Vi Bickeridge’s corner shop window, too. Another one in the pub – and that was all it would take to pull the crowds in! Watch out Notting Hill!

  ‘It may be a bit early for posters and we do need to go further afield . . .’

  ‘It’s never too early, or too local, to advertise. Look what Lola’s done for our evening trade by advertising us in the pub.’

  Posy pushed away the half-drunk coffee and the packet of custard creams. She really couldn’t bear to hear again how Lola was turning The Crooked Sixpence into the twenty-first century equivalent of Berni Inns, or how Ellis was diversifying his Highwayman role on a daily basis. And now Flynn had got Queen Mab – and Sonia nee Tozer had got Ritchie . . .

  ‘I’m going out on the bike. If Ellis turns up tell him I’ll see him later.’

  ‘Okay, dear, go and blow away the cobwebs. And don’t forget to pop into the pub to see Lola.’

  She’d just manoeuvred the BMW on to the driveway, and was sitting astride it, pulling on her crash helmet, when Ellis arrived.

  ‘When I was at uni I had a poster just like that on my wall.’

  ‘What, scruffy urchin on ex-police motorcycle?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He eyed the bike. ‘Real turn-on. Do you want a passenger?’

  ‘Not really. I was going to belt around a bit and be introspective. Introspective is difficult if you’re going to be trying to lick the back of my neck.’

  Ellis grinned. ‘You’re too smart for your own good. Which is why I was going to make you that offer you won’t be able to refuse.’

  ‘Does it involve money?’

  ‘Some. Not much at the moment, but who knows. How do you fancy being a courier?’

  ‘You mean drug running?’

  ‘Sadly, no. Nowhere near that amount of cash involved. I was thinking more of urgent same-day letters, small packages, stuff like that.’

  ‘And I’d get paid for it?’ Posy looked at him closely. ‘Properly?’

  ‘Yes, we’d spilt the money. I’ve done a leaflet drop round all the Frittons advertising the minibus service and added a few extras. Like shopping for the weekenders. A gap in the market, you see. All those people wearily trudging out of London on a Friday night, not wanting to have to queue in Sainsbury’s for their provisions or start stocking up when they get here – all they have to do is e-mail their lists through to my laptop before Friday lunch time, pay by credit card, and it’ll be sitting there waiting for them when they arrive.’

  Posy couldn’t help smiling. Like the bus service, it was an extremely enterprising move.

  ‘And is it working?’

  Ellis nodded. ‘Really well. Big runs on coronation chicken and Chilean Merlot – and milk and eggs and loo rolls and ciabatta bread, and anything that Jamie Oliver throws together. And I’ve kept it local. No point in taking trade away from the village, so the Bickeridges have extended their product range for me. I collect from them, deliver to the weekenders, and everyone’s happy.’

  Posy wondered just what Vi Bickeridge made of buffalo mozzarella and couscous.

  ‘I’m impressed. And amazed that after hours of romping with Tatty you still have the energy. So, where does the courier bit come in?’

  ‘I’ve also offered a localish same-day delivery service. I remembered that you’d told me there wasn’t a post office any more in Fritton Magna or Lesser Fritton, so I’ve done a leaflet drop round there, too. I’ve been pretty overwhelmed on that front. I need to off load some of it and wondered if you and the BMW would be willing?’

  ‘Dead willing,’ Posy nodded. ‘As long as it fits in round the stuff I do at Sunny Dene.’

  ‘Count on it.’ Ellis leaned over, lifted her curls, and kissed her ear. ‘Are you sure you don’t want a pillion passenger?’

  ‘Quite sure,’ Posy said sternly, again trying not to tingle. ‘And thanks for the job.’

  ‘I told you weeks ago we’d make a great team. If you weren’t still pining for the love of your life you might just realize it.’

  ‘No we wouldn’t and no I’m not and no I won’t.’ Posy rammed the crash helmet over her curls. ‘Now leave me alone and go and play with Tatty.’

  After that, roaring around the damp and bosky Berkshire lanes on the BMW certainly made Posy feel better. At least here she was in control. At least, with the pulsing power at her fingertips, and the roar in her head, and the feeling of freedom, it gave her time to be alone and to think about the future.

  Which was the problem, really: apart from Ellis’s more than welcome part-time job, there wasn’t a future. She had no direction any more.

  Before, with Ritchie, her life had been mapped out. Okay, so it might have not seemed a particularly excitingly contoured map for motivated urban women who wanted to climb the career ladder and become chairmen of multinational companies, but it had suited her.

  Was she the last woman left alive in the have-it-all society who had actually wanted to become a wife and mother first, and maybe have a job, later?

  She’d been contented with her life: happily working in the B&B, enjoying her friends and her motorbike, having a good local social life, and being the fiancée of the only boyfriend she’d ever had.

  Then there’d been the excitement of the wedding plans, and the knowledge that she and Ritchie would move into the attic flat of Sunny Dene after the marriage. She’d carry on working at the B&B, and Ritchie would carry on managing his furniture department in Reading until such time as they’d saved enough money to buy the closed-down shop, then they’d turn it into Steeple Fritton Bric-a-Brac, and when she’d been Mrs Dalgetty for a few months they’d start a family. And their plump and sweetly-smiling babies would come to work with her and Ritchie, and life would be idyllic.

  She hadn’t been aware then of how broke they were at home, of course. She’d realized that Colworth Manor had nicked a lot of business, but she’d put Dilys and Norrie’s grumbling down to just that: miffed small business having nose put out of joint by bigger one.

  It seemed she’d been blissfully unaware of so many things . . .

  So, it was just as well, Posy thought, pulling the BMW to a halt at the Lesser Fritton junction, that she knew all the facts now. If Flynn and Ellis and Lola could change their lives, then she could to
o. With renewed vigour, she revved the engine, leaned low across the handlebars and zoomed back towards the village.

  Ten minutes later, sitting astride the BMW outside the parade of shops, she unfastened her helmet, shook free her curls and took stock. She was the only person who could do anything about herself. She could change her own life, she could improve Sunny Dene’s finances and she could make the carnival happen the way she’d planned.

  It was no good moping and mooching and feeling sorry for herself. She had to do something – and now – and while the idea that had sprung into her mind as she cruised round corners at a reckless speed was probably totally ridiculous, if she didn’t ask, she’d never know.

  Propping the motorcycle against the kerb, she marched into the Bickeridges’ corner shop.

  The place was packed with headscarves. The head-scarves were attached to Glad Blissit, the female Pinks, and Rose Lusty. The headscarves all turned and stared at her.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Morning, Posy,’ Glad grinned with her gums. ‘Bit early to be in here for your pension.’

  Oh, ha-ha-ha. ‘I’m in here because I want to take over the shop on the end and I wondered if anyone knew who owned it.’

  There was an awful and embarrassed silence.

  Mrs Bickeridge straightened her paisley wrapover and peered from behind the post office’s counter grille. ‘You wants to do what?’

  Posy repeated the apparently outrageous statement.

  Vi Bickeridge turned her lips inside out. It’s a den of iniquity that place and I’ve got no idea who owns it. We don’t rent. Me and our Clive owns this place outright, and Rose owns hers, too, don’t you, Rose?’

  Rose Lusty, who had obviously been practising pin curls on herself if the frizz under the headscarf was anything to go by, nodded affirmation. ‘Young Tatty rents hers though. You should ask her if the same person owns the end shop. Although you do know what went on there before, don’t you?’