Polly sniffed and stalked out to put the kettle on.
As she waited for it to boil, she thought about Mam and Dad. He’d gone first, the gentle giant who had worked damned hard all the days of his life. Mam had never picked up after the bereavement, and she had given up her beautiful ghost two years later to breast cancer. The dreadful losses, with Mam’s death followed three years later by Cal’s accident, had welded the twins together. When daydreaming, she imagined two houses side by side, Cal and wife in one, herself and . . . and Frank in the other. Or perhaps one big house for all of them.
Frank. She should have accepted him, because she loved him. And the silly bugger had gone missing.
Where was he? Mrs Lewis collected rents, while Frank seemed to have disappeared altogether. She missed him as badly as she might have missed a limb. He was the other part of her; he was her completion. His mother wasn’t his fault. Oh, why wouldn’t he come and talk about things? ‘And why am I such a bloody fool?’ she whispered before carrying the tea tray through.
They were holding hands again. Cal deserved Linda, and Linda was good enough to deserve him. Oh well, that was fifty per cent of the family sorted out – possibly. As for herself, she would get by. Full-time hairdressing once again, onwards and upwards, except for Frank. No one else would be acceptable. As for Greg and Lois, well, they didn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance.
‘Elaine, aren’t you going to be late for your meeting?’ Christine called up the stairs. Her daughter was taking rather a long time to prepare herself for an evening business chat with a man who was not her type. The unmistakable scent of Chanel No. 5 drifted down to the ground floor, and Christine gasped when her little girl appeared at the top of the flight. ‘You are certainly dressed to impress,’ she said.
‘For a couple of gins in the Liver? I don’t think so, Mum. This is a business suit, white blouse et cetera. So what’s different?’
‘The et cetera, dear daughter, being sky-high heels, that wonderful patent leather bag, your hair loose and flowing and half a pint of Chanel.’
‘It’s a briefcase containing legal pad and pens for notes. And my hair’s been scraped back all day, so I’m giving it a rest. The shoes make me feel confident and you’re exaggerating about the perfume – quarter of a pint at most.’
‘You are beautiful.’
Elaine struck a pose, one hand behind her shining blonde hair. ‘And he does have lovely green eyes – you were quite right.’
Christine swallowed. She dreaded losing her girl. ‘Is romance in the air?’ she asked.
‘Flirtation, libation and pork scratchings, I imagine. He’s a fabulous piece of decor, no more than that. I shan’t be late.’ She kissed her mother and went out to the car.
As she pulled away from her parking space, Elaine waved.
Christine watched, sighed and waved back. She loved her only child, but she knew Elaine very well, because they spent hours talking. There was something about the girl that worried her mother. The clever, well-groomed and beautiful lawyer was almost cynical when it came to men; some were toys that could be thrown away or passed on to another owner once outgrown, while others, steadier and wealthier, formed an assortment from which one might select a life partner because of his position and riches.
She closed the front door and went to sit in the cosy living room. Looking up at a wedding photograph, she smiled at Jim. There had been a deep, abiding love in the marriage, and Elaine was the result, so why hadn’t she been born full of that love? Her childhood had been happy, she’d liked school, made friends, enjoyed the usual pyjama parties and birthday treats. She’d taken riding lessons, had a pony for a while, and then . . . and then, university.
University had changed her radically. ‘The girls are prostitutes and the boys are clients, though I’m not sure about payment,’ she had announced. ‘I shall keep my head down, do the work and get a first.’ Younger than the rest, she had sailed through her degree on a definite first-class ticket, before moving into law. ‘What’s she up to now, Jim?’ Frank was attractive . . .
In the kitchen, Christine washed dishes and concentrated further on her daughter. She was probably still a virgin, but tonight, she was advertising herself. Frank was likely to be a toy, yet he loved Polly Kennedy who, though very different from Elaine, was equally lovely in appearance and definitely the more approachable of the two. ‘Don’t make a mess of your life, Elaine. And marry for love. You must marry for love.’
The Liver, a very old pub on the corner of South Road in Waterloo, was untypically quiet. At twenty minutes past eight, late but not indecorously so, Elaine Lewis strode in at business pace. She expected him to be waiting at the bar, but he wasn’t. Frank Charleson was seated with three men of advanced age, and he was playing dominoes. He probably fitted in anywhere and everywhere, she told herself before ordering a gin and tonic.
She knew he’d seen her, because her peripheral vision was excellent, and she never missed a trick. He’d raised his head, glanced at her, then carried on playing the game. Cool customer, then. Well, two could play games, even if one lacked bits of wood with dots on. She took her drink to an empty table. ‘I’ve some work to catch up on,’ she called in his direction. ‘I’ll be over here when you’re ready.’
She scribbled a draft letter to the lawyer on the selling side of the property threatened by that defunct law. The game of dominoes continued. After a further fifteen minutes, she looked at her watch. Ah. She had been twenty minutes late, and he was preparing to leave his companions at precisely eight forty. So Frank had kept her waiting for exactly the same length of time. This was a form of communication that went beyond a business relationship. He had noticed her, then.
He sat down. ‘You were late. I don’t do late.’
‘You do. You pay back by being as late as I was. Now, this property you’re buying, do get a full survey first.’ Businesslike was the way to go. Her hair drifted as if by accident over a shoulder and tumbled onto the notes. He bought her another drink, but she asked for orange juice, as she was driving. A trip to the Ladies gave him the opportunity to see flawless legs made more glamorous by high heels and black stockings.
She returned and carried on with business. The address of the property was noted, as was the solicitor representing the seller. There was a large shop downstairs, some storage to the rear, and a three-bedroom flat above. ‘You’ll be living there?’
‘Yes. The business will be advertised as Aladdin’s Lamp or Aladdin’s Cave. I thought of Curios and Curios-er, but people might not get the Lewis Carroll allusion.’
‘And you’ll be dressing up as Aladdin?’
‘Only in private.’
She rewarded him by showing him perfect teeth behind a broad smile. ‘We all have our guilty secrets, I suppose.’
Frank studied her while she scribbled. Despite poise and panache, she failed to conceal the fact that she was available. Very much a man of the world, he had not been celibate since Ellen’s death. Polly was still his indisputable future, he hoped, but until she saw sense, he remained available at a level that didn’t really matter.
Elaine stopped scribbling and looked up. There was a modicum of desire in those unusual eyes. ‘I’ll start the search tomorrow, make sure the property is clean in legal terms.’ She handed him another card. ‘That chap’s a good surveyor. If you need a structural engineer, he’ll let you know. We’ll keep this one out of my office so that I can give you special rates. After all, we’re almost family, aren’t we?’
He realized that she had an agenda, and he was on the list. For several seconds, he knew how a rodent felt in a cage with a motionless snake that would kill when hunger enlivened it. The warning bell was clear, but her beauty was undeniable. ‘Thank you,’ was all he said.
She packed her bag. ‘You’ll be able to go back and play now.’
‘Not my favourite game, Elaine.’
She stood. ‘Do you have a favourite game?’
‘Doesn’t everyone?’
Each maintained eye contact with the other. But as Frank stared at her, he saw Polly’s face in the space between them. ‘Still, since dominoes is the only game in town, I’ll get back to it. I’ll telephone you in a day or two.’ He returned to the protagonists’ table.
Outwardly unfazed and inwardly seething, Elaine Lewis left the scene. He desired her, but something or someone stood in the way. It was Polly Kennedy, who probably stank of bacon and black pudding or perm lotion and peroxide. Sitting in the car, she gripped the steering wheel so hard that fingernails dug into her palms. What was the matter with her? She’d always been so controlled and so . . . so indulged.
Oh yes, she’d wanted a certain doll, and she’d got it; she’d demanded riding lessons and a pony, clothes, makeup, perfume, private digs well away from her peers at university, and somehow Mum had come up with the goods. Christine Lewis, left comfortably off because of her husband’s insurance, was by no means rich, yet her daughter had been spoilt.
‘I want him,’ she said to herself. Her body had responded automatically; even with a table between them, she had become aroused. This had never happened before, so was it as a result of her decision to pencil in fun time? Oh, it was so annoying. For the first time in almost twenty-three years, she felt at a complete loss. Like a window shopper, she had picked out what she wanted, though it wasn’t going to come to her easily.
There was another way. At university, she’d watched it work. A girl would come clean by going ‘dirty’, an adjective much bandied about in the union bar. A female would proposition a boy and shrug if she got nowhere. Very rarely did that happen, since most men when offered sex without complications snapped it up. It was nothing to do with love; it was about feeding a type of starvation that would not be appeased by food.
Could she do it? Was she capable of begging Frank Charleson to relieve her of her virginity? Apparently, men liked the idea of being the first, but this one was possibly suffering from the disease named love, a chemical imbalance that occurred several times in the lives of most people. Suicides, murders and mental instability often resulted from the illness, as possessiveness and jealousy lay at the core of it. ‘Never,’ she muttered as she pulled into traffic on Liverpool Road. ‘Love is for birds and idiots, not for intelligent women.’
‘You’re early,’ Christine commented when her daughter walked in.
‘There wasn’t much to do. Oh, and I can’t tell you any details about where he’s settling, because I promised, and anyway, it would be unprofessional. Although it wasn’t discussed, I get the impression that his mother’s lost her place on his Christmas card list.’
‘She thinks so, too.’
‘Right. I’ll have a bath and get changed.’ Elaine started up the stairs.
‘Did you like him?’
Elaine paused halfway up the flight. ‘He’s all right. Played dominoes with some old men, bought me an orange juice. He’s very attractive.’
Christine slid back into the living room. There had been an edge to Elaine’s tone, a quality that expressed disappointment, almost dismay. The beautifully dressed young lawyer had reached out for a plaything, and had failed to acquire it. Frank Charleson might not have had a university education, but he was a real man, a gentle person with ambition and charity occupying equal space in his soul. She sat and looked again at the wedding photograph. Was Frank too good for Elaine? Was it possible that Christine’s perfectly polished daughter was substandard in some way?
There was something else, too, something Christine could almost smell beneath liberal applications of Chanel. No. She laughed at herself inwardly. It surely happened only to animals. Had Elaine been a canine, she might have . . . No. But yes. It was as if Elaine had come into season at last. Oh, dear. Christine went to make a cup of tea. Sometimes, her thoughts were too ridiculous, too fanciful.
Upstairs, Elaine was beginning the first of many difficult nights. In the past, she had seldom contemplated her level of sex drive. It had been the main concern of many colleagues at university, but she had eliminated it from her life. She wanted a first with honours and a passport into law. Those who had been taken up by the social agenda and by finding a partner had emerged with lower seconds, which might just open a door into teaching, and she was sure that they’d all lived to regret the neglect of books and essays.
Was she a late developer? Why were these feelings so intense? He was just a man with a shop to buy. Was she normal? Did other women experience such vivid and graphic imaginings? And he was in every one of them. How had she expected the evening to end? In a hotel room between silk sheets, champagne on a bedside table, strawberries in a dish? Why him? Why not Bob Laithwaite? How could she, a woman totally devoid of experience, judge Frank to be amazing and Bob to be ordinary?
‘Questions, questions, bloody questions,’ she said, beating her pillow with every word. There were no answers except for one. Elaine Lewis began to suspect that she was oversexed and needful. She must find a way to get some relief. But it had to be Frank.
Earlier that same evening, Polly and Cal had experienced a different kind of discomfort.
They finished their meal and listened to the news on the Home Service before Polly went to wash dishes. She expected just two hair clients tonight, which was just as well, because she felt tired. Helping her brother was hard, exhausting and worth every minute, as he was definitely on the mend.
Hattie and Ida were the pair on tonight’s agenda, and they were always good fun, though not intentionally. Between them, they came out with many inaccurate and hilarious statements, asked several daft questions and provided Polly with a great deal of entertainment.
But they arrived early and via the rear yard.
‘We had to come,’ Hattie babbled. ‘I seen them and Ida seen them.’
Ida echoed. ‘She seen them and I seen them.’
Cal glared at the invaders. ‘I could have been having a bed bath.’
‘Well, you aren’t, so shut up,’ Hattie snapped. ‘They keep on walking past your front door. Everybody’s watching them. You have to face up to this, young Kennedy clan.’
Polly dried her hands. She had no need to ask for the identity of the people at the front door. ‘Hattie’s right. Time we got this over and done with, Callum. We can’t have these poor folk walking up and down Scotty making fools of themselves every night, can we?’
‘No, it’s a shame,’ he said. ‘Feel free to stay, ladies, seeing as I’m not having my bed bath at the moment. We could do with witnesses to stop me from strangling somebody. Polly?’
Hattie and Ida stood open-mouthed while Polly helped Cal out of bed. With one arm round her shoulders and the other on a crutch, he hopped over to the sofa. ‘Well, that’s a nice surprise,’ Ida cried. ‘We know you’ve worked hard, because we’ve heard you two and that young nurse screaming and laughing.’ She dried her eyes. ‘Will you walk proper again, Cal?’
‘I hope so, Ida, though my left foot doesn’t seem to know what the right’s doing. Linda says nerves join up as and when they like, but there was a bit more damage to that leg. Anyway, never mind me. Just stop crying and look tough. We don’t want Lois and Greg wearing our pavements out, do we? So they have to be frightened off, and your tears make us look soft. Come on, now. We have to be hard. Dead hard.’
Ida wasn’t good at dead hard, but she did her best while Polly combed her own hair and applied a bit of powder and lipstick. ‘Do I look all right?’
‘You do,’ said Hattie. ‘Now, I’ll go out the back way and into my house. When I see them, I’ll knock on this wall. Then I’ll come back as if I’m getting my hair done. But don’t worry about our hair, eh? Ida?’
‘No, don’t worry about our hair.’
They should have been on the halls, Polly thought. Ida and Hattie had no idea of how funny they were. Just lately, Ida had started to repeat almost everything Hattie said, because she was determined to stop being a gossip. She’d have had less trouble teaching a goldfish to samba, but she was m
aking an effort, bless her.
Hattie dashed out. Ida, Hattie’s shadow, was not uncomfortable in the Kennedy home, as she had looked after this pair of twins since their late teens. But she was nervous. Greg Johnson and Lois Monk were unforgivable, and Ida was afraid of rows. She’d been a bit shaky since a direct hit on Bootle had taken out her sister, two nieces and a nephew and, though she loved a good gossip session, she was seriously terrified by any kind of fighting; even a vigorous verbal exchange could upset her, though she was good at speaking her own mind when riled.
The knock on the wall arrived. Polly dashed through the cafe and flung open the door. ‘Get in here,’ she ordered. ‘Showing us up, pacing about like a pair of kids up to no good.’ A foot tapped as she waited, arms akimbo, face creased into a frown. ‘Now,’ she snapped. ‘Come in unless you want to spend more weeks trailing round in circles like Hansel and bloody Gretel.’ In truth, they currently imitated a pair of statues, though their sculptor deserved few congratulations.
They stepped in, and Polly bolted the door. ‘My brother’s through there, Lois. I think you may want to explain to him why you bolted without a word while he was trapped in hospital. You wrote him off, didn’t you? Well, he’s on the mend and almost ready for a Cordon Bleu education. Do go in, dear.’ These last four words were delivered in Polly’s posh voice.
When Lois had left the cafe, Polly took the bolts off the door and threw it wide once more. ‘Out,’ she told her ex-lover. Shocked, the man stood his ground uncertainly.
‘Listen, you,’ she continued. ‘Yellow-bellied, lily-livered no-good bundle of trash – shift yourself now before I remove your face. There’s no excuse for you. Your mother wants a slap in the gob for bringing you into the world.’
He opened his mouth to speak.
‘Don’t you dare talk to me, Johnson. This is a time for listening, not for conversation. You said all you needed to say by getting the London bus. What if I became ill or crippled? Would you put two hundred miles between us if I was run over and bedridden? So shut your gob and make yourself scarce. Come near here again, and you’ll be met by a posse.’ She pushed him through the door and made it secure once more.
A Mersey Mile Page 17