by Maureen Lee
‘Is it just a coincidence,’ a voice said, ‘or do you spend most of your time in this shop?’
In the mirror, she saw that the dark-haired man was watching her with admiration. Closer up, she could see that his hair was sprinkled with silver. ‘What do you mean?’ She had no idea what he was talking about.
‘When we last spoke, it was in this shop, in the restaurant, actually.’ He shook his head. ‘Oh no it wasn’t. We last spoke in the waiting room of your husband’s surgery. You set the police on to me – or is that putting it a trifle coarsely? The police came to see me on your behalf. There, that sounds better.’
‘Captain Williams!’ She hoped she didn’t look as shocked as she felt. She couldn’t remember his first name.
‘It was Major, actually.’
She wasn’t going to apologise, not for anything; certainly not for setting the police on to him, as he put it. ‘I’m surprised you’ve got the cheek to speak to me,’ she said tartly. ‘I’m sure most people would sooner forget they’d behaved so despicably, not remind someone about it after so many years.’ She saw that Blanche was helping the woman he was with, presumably his wife, into a bright red coat that didn’t remotely suit her.
‘Just now, when I saw you,’ he said, ‘my first impulse was to run a mile.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Because I had a second impulse, and that was to say how sorry I was. You’re right, I behaved despicably. You wouldn’t believe the times I’ve thought about it and felt ashamed.’ He genuinely did look mortified. ‘I was a total cad, a complete mess. I’d had a hard time during the war, not that I’m complaining about it,’ he said hastily, ‘but when I arrived home my wife had left me for my brother and I no longer had a house. I think I might already have told you that. I couldn’t get work. I was desperate. I was turned down for the job I’d come to Liverpool to be interviewed for, came across you in the restaurant here and saw you as an answer to my prayers.’
‘You saw blackmail as an answer to your prayers,’ she reminded him.
His face flushed and he literally hung his head. She suspected he was genuinely sorry, but she still had no intention of forgiving him. What he had done, tried to do, had been truly vile. ‘Your wife wants to speak to you. I think she would like your opinion on her coat. I thought the black one looked best on her,’ she added. The woman looked dumpy in the red coat, which she was trying on for the second time. Blanche, a ruthless saleswoman, was probably trying to talk her into it because it was considerably more expensive than the black and she’d earn a higher commission.
‘I haven’t got a wife. The lady’s name is Sarah Holmes and she’s my housekeeper.’
He went over and spoke to the woman. She removed the red coat and put on the black. He nodded approvingly, produced a chequebook, and the coat was folded and put in an Owen Owen’s carrier bag. Iris noticed that his lightweight cream jacket held a hint of silk and his trousers were linen, very well cut. He returned to her. ‘She has been my housekeeper for over twenty years,’ he said. ‘The coat is a sixtieth birthday present. We are now about to have tea in the Adelphi.’ He smiled, and she remembered noticing what an attractive blue his eyes were even though he had been in the process of trying to get money off her in such an appalling way. ‘You see, it turned out to be a good thing I came to Liverpool all those years ago. That night in the hotel, I met a chap about to open a garage in Southport selling antique and vintage cars. He took me on as manager and I have never looked back since. When he retired, I bought the place off him. We remain the greatest of friends. After that meeting, I had no intention of calling on you again on the Monday as I had said I would.’
‘As you had threatened you would,’ she reminded him.
His lips twisted. ‘As I said, I’m sorry. Could I possibly take you to dinner sometime and plead for your forgiveness?’
‘I will never forgive you,’ Iris said flatly. ‘Never.’
She thought about him frequently over the weekend, though she hadn’t wanted to. He had been shut out of her mind years ago and she was cross that he had re-entered. She was even more cross that the memories weren’t of his blackmailing activities, but of the times in the army when they had made love. He had been a gentle, thrilling lover. Afterwards, he had held her for a long time in his arms, stroking her face, kissing her softly, touching her again, making her come over and over. He had been perhaps the best of the numerous men she had made love with in the hope of conceiving a child. His name, she recalled eventually, was Matthew.
Thinking about it now, all these years later, Iris caught her breath. It was so long since she and Tom had made love, and by the end it had become more irritating than enjoyable. She had lost interest, and it was only now she realised what she was missing.
On Monday, Tom’s receptionist telephoned Iris at her house in Balliol Road. Nicola was twenty-one and planning to get married the following year.
‘Mrs Grant,’ she said brightly. ‘There’s a chap with a gorgeous bunch of red roses on his way to see you. He thought you still lived here, but I told him you’d moved. He should be there any minute. He’s driving a super royal blue Jaguar. He said the flowers were to thank you for looking after his housekeeper in Owen Owen’s the other day.’
‘Thank you, Nicola,’ Iris said faintly. The message was an innocent one, nothing to raise suspicion if Tom had heard it and they had still been a proper man and wife. She hadn’t looked after his housekeeper, but only the two of them knew that.
She replaced the receiver and stood in the hallway of the quiet house. The girls were out; she wasn’t expecting visitors. Her heart was beating frantically in her chest. He had referred to himself as a cad, yet a cad wouldn’t buy his housekeeper a coat and take her to tea at the Adelphi.
He had badly wanted to apologise for his behaviour all those years ago. After a whole weekend thinking about little but him, how could she possibly refuse to accept his apology – or the roses!
The house in Beacon Hill, Boston, where the Dixons lived must have contained at least twenty rooms. Every piece of expensive furniture looked as if it had been made especially for its place against the wall, or in its own special corner, or underneath one of the beautiful curved stained-glass windows with their silk or velvet fully lined, deeply frilled curtains. Iris admired it, but wouldn’t have wanted to live there. It would have felt like living in a museum. There was nothing warm or homely about it.
It was the nursery that she particularly disliked. It was too white, there was too much lace, the century-old crib was too fussy by a mile. It was the sort of nursery a little girl would like for her favourite doll, not a real live baby, not Iris and Tom’s handsome little grandson George.
‘How our Louise stands that woman, I do not know,’ Iris said to Tom in their ornate green-themed bedroom on the second floor – she’d asked Louise to make sure that they had single beds.
‘That woman’ was Monica Dixon, Louise’s mother-in-law, a small, quiet woman with a will of iron who dominated the house and everyone in it. Iris had actually been rebuked, albeit quietly, for picking George up out of his frothy crib in his frothy gown even when he was wide awake and in need of company. He might only be a fortnight old, but Iris could tell he wanted to be held in someone’s arms and be told in a gooey voice what a smart little chap he was. She had always believed that babies should be fed on demand and never under any circumstances be left to cry themselves to sleep when they badly wanted a cuddle, as had happened with George.
‘Louise seems to get on with Monica all right,’ Tom commented. ‘Have you spoken to her about it?’
‘I don’t like to, Tom. I don’t want her to know that we detest the woman. After all, we’re going back home. Louise has to live here. You’d never think she was George’s mother. Monica has completely taken over.’
‘Is there any suggestion of her and Gary getting their own house?’ Tom asked.
‘Not that I’ve heard,’ Iris said darkly. She powdered her nose an
d combed her hair in the dressing table mirror and they left the room.
The carpets were like thick velvet. A woman dressed plainly in grey with beautiful blonde hair was standing outside a door on the floor below. As they approached, she put her hand on the gleaming brass knob. The gesture was to stop them going in. The door was to the nursery and the woman was Monica Dixon, who looked young from a distance but was deeply wrinkled close up. Iris was overcome with a feeling of deep loathing.
‘Louise is feeding baby,’ Monica said in her odd, expressionless voice. ‘Please don’t go in.’
Iris had several answers to this request. We are Louise’s parents, she wanted to scream. Tom is a doctor and it’s perfectly all right for him to see his daughter breastfeeding. If we were at home, Louise would be feeding George in the living room surrounded by the entire family. Oh, and George is our first grandchild too. You are a bitch, Monica, and I hate you.
But she didn’t say a word. Tom said politely, ‘Good morning,’ and Iris echoed it with a smile that she hoped couldn’t be read as a grimace. They made their way downstairs to the breakfast room, where the food was laid out on a side table: eggs, hash browns, ham, toast, fresh tomatoes, a pot of coffee, a jug of orange juice and a bowl of assorted tea bags. If they wanted pancakes, all they had to do was ring the bell and Alma, the lovely black woman who worked in the kitchen, would come and take their order.
Louise and George apart, Alma was the only normal human being in the house. Gary, Louise’s husband, had seemed quite a nice young chap at the wedding in London, but he was in fact in thrall to his mother, her willing slave, and would do anything in his power to please her. His father, Mervyn, was just as obedient. There was a daughter, Roberta, at university, and another son, Hank, who managed the New York branch of the bank. There was also a grandfather who they had yet to come face to face with and who had so far only been seen at a distance in the garden.
Iris had imagined the Dixons’ bank to be a small operation, but she had been amazed by the size of the impressive building in Custom House Street with its beautiful marble floors. If it hadn’t been for Monica, she would have considered her daughter had fallen on her feet by marrying Gary Dixon.
‘The Dixons must be millionaires,’ she said to Tom.
He contradicted her. ‘You mean multi-millionaires.’
A beaming Alma entered the room when Tom rang. ‘What can I get you folks?’ she said cheerfully.
‘Some of your delicious pancakes with syrup.’ Tom patted his stomach. ‘I’ll be a stone heavier by the time we get home.’
‘I’d like just one pancake, Alma.’ Iris was watching her figure.
‘What shall we do today?’ Tom asked when Alma had gone.
They’d been there three days, and Monica had made no attempt to entertain them. They usually went sightseeing by themselves. Once Louise had taken them shopping, but George had been left at home and she’d missed him.
Boston was a beautiful city, steeped in history, particularly attractive in autumn with the fallen leaves dancing in the breeze. So far, they had visited the site of the original Boston Tea Party, been on a sunset cruise, and visited the Old State House.
Monica entered the room. ‘What are you two doing with yourselves today?’ she asked briskly.
‘We might go on a walking tour of the city,’ Iris said on the spur of the moment.
‘That’s a good idea. We are having guests this evening for dinner, so don’t tire yourselves out.’
‘We won’t,’ Iris promised.
‘I have appointments for most of the day, so won’t be around.’ She left the room with a brief smile, just as Alma came in with the pancakes.
‘I suggest,’ Iris said in a low voice, ‘that once madam has gone, we take Louise and George out with us. He must have a pram and there are bound to be parks where we can take him. We can stop for coffee and even have lunch somewhere.’
George’s giant pram was in the triple garage, the bedding in the nursery. Louise seemed keen on the idea of taking him out, and once everything had been put together, they left the house.
‘This feels very strange,’ Louise said from behind the pram. She was clutching the handles nervously.
‘Haven’t you and George been out together before?’ Iris asked.
‘Monica’s worried he’ll catch a cold.’ Louise tucked the little eiderdown further around the baby’s shoulders.
‘But the weather’s lovely and mild.’
‘I know, Mum. And I know Monica’s a bit of a fusspot, but she means well.’
‘George is your baby, love, not Monica’s. It’s up to you whether he goes out or not.’ At this, Tom dug his elbow into Iris’s side. Shut up, he was saying. Don’t turn her against the woman. Iris obediently shut up, and Louise either didn’t hear what her mother had said, or affected not to.
The morning was pleasant. They strolled around Boston Common, and Louise lifted George out of his pram and showed him what grass and trees looked like, and that was the sky overhead and the sun over there, and there was a little white dog sniffing the wheels of his pram. Tom chased the dog away before he weed on one of the front wheels. He fetched coffee in cardboard cups from a refreshment stall, and later they had lunch on the way home in an open-air restaurant where quite a few people stopped to admire the baby.
Later, Louise looked worried. ‘I hope they didn’t breathe germs on him.’
‘He’s a baby, love, not a rare flower,’ said Tom, the doctor. ‘If no one’s allowed to breathe on him, he’ll grow up without any resistance to germs and start catching things at the drop of a hat.’
Once again, Louise didn’t answer. Iris said, ‘Remember what I was like, Tom, when we had babies? It upset me taking them for walks and people sticking their heads under the hood of the pram to have a look.’ She squeezed Louise’s hand and nudged Tom to shut up. It was her turn to warn that it was no use frightening their daughter. If she wanted to stay on good terms with her mother-in-law, it’d be best not to argue and just let the awful woman have her own way.
Next day, Iris and Tom went to lunch in Macy’s department store in Washington Street. It was busy, noisy and full of tantalising smells. They ordered ravioli from the pasta stall and a tiny bottle of red wine each. They listened to the other customers discussing their problems, their marriages, their clothes, their health, all sounding much more interesting when related in an American accent. They smiled at each other.
Iris thought what a nice relationship she had with Tom these days; they could actually sleep in the same room together without sex, without arguing and without embarrassment. She loved him as much as she would have done a brother or a best friend.
Tom must have been thinking along the same lines. ‘Would things have ended up between us this way if Charlie hadn’t died?’ he mused aloud.
Iris shrugged. ‘Who can say? Do you realise that if he’d lived, Charlie would have been thirty this year?’
‘I hadn’t forgotten.’ He looked at her searchingly. ‘You look so much better since you met that chap, ten years younger and quite beautiful.’
‘Thank you.’ She’d told him about Matthew and their affair, but hadn’t mentioned their previous relationship. She’d met him in Owen Owen’s and had known him slightly in the army was all she’d said.
‘Are you likely to want a divorce one of these days?’
‘Oh, no.’ She finished her wine. Although there hadn’t been much of it, she felt quite heady. ‘It’s an affair, not a marriage.’
It was a very passionate affair. They met in hotels and occasionally in the house in Balliol Road if Dorothy and Clare were out. They were in love, and what made it so utterly perfect was that she was fifty-three and he was two years older. It added piquancy to it, like old wine, the discovery of something unexpectedly precious at an age when making love with such sublime delight she had assumed was long over.
Back at the Dixons’ house, Monica was out and Louise and her parents were in the garden with G
eorge and Gary’s grandfather, Leonard, who was eighty and had fought in the First World War. He’d retired from the bank twenty years before. He kept them entertained with tales of how things had been in Boston early in the twentieth century. It was all really fascinating, and Alma brought them tea and made a small stack of pancakes especially for Tom.
All too soon it was time to return to Liverpool. Tom had engaged a locum to look after his practice, and Iris was worried about what Dorothy and Clare might be getting up to in the house on their own. She imagined wild parties and the place being wrecked.
Oh, but it was a wrench leaving Louise and George behind. Although her daughter hadn’t shown it, she strongly suspected she wasn’t happy living with her husband and his family.
And how old would George be before they saw him again? It was silly, but she imagined Monica Dixon having him dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy in a velvet suit with a lace collar. She felt a lump come to her throat.
They were due to leave at half past three in the afternoon, and were having breakfast, Tom eating the last of Alma’s pancakes, when the doorbell chimed – the chimes were similar to Big Ben. One of the maids must have answered it – Monica had gone to the hairdresser’s. There was silence for a little while, then a scream from Louise.
‘Grace! Grace Kaminski. Oh, am I pleased to see you.’
It turned out that Grace had worked her way across the Atlantic as a waitress on a cruise boat. She had then hitchhiked to Boston from New York. In her jeans and checked shirt she looked bronzed and healthy and was smiling broadly. She smiled even more broadly when she discovered Iris and Tom were there.
‘I promised Louise I would come and visit the baby when he was born,’ she said. ‘No way was I going to let her down.’