‘Give it ’ere,’ Will beckoned. ‘I hope you’re better with bouquets than you are with bottles.’
‘I couldn’t be any worse,’ said Carla, wincing as the cork popped.
She took the bottle from Will as Lucky was too comfortable on his knee to be moved. She slowly poured two glasses and he lifted his and chinked it against hers.
‘Here’s to . . . what’s your shop called, then?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ replied Carla, after taking a mouthful of fizz. ‘I haven’t got a name.’
‘When are you moving in?’
‘Soon as possible. I’m going to be very busy buying equipment and ringing up my old clients. And designing some business cards. It’s going to be mad next week.’
Will chuckled. It was good to see her smiling. She looked like a different person to the one who had shown him around the flat at their first meeting. He searched his brain for a suitable word to describe her and found it: glossy. She was shiny and glossy today.
‘I think this merits a Chinese,’ he said, on the spur of the moment. ‘Can I treat you? Some of your good luck may rub off on me if I do.’
‘Lucky.’ Carla raised her finger. ‘That’s it. The Lucky Flower Company. That’s what I’ll call it.’
The black cat on Will’s knee didn’t acknowledge his future fame. He had everything he needed in life and it didn’t include flowers.
Chapter 75
Molly awoke on the Sunday with a happy heart and to slices of sunshine pushing through the curtains where they didn’t quite meet. Harvey was already up and was sitting in the garden with a pot of tea and some toast.
‘Ah, good morning, Molly,’ he greeted her with a beaming smile. ‘Isn’t it glorious?’
‘Beautiful,’ said Molly, lifting her face to the sun.
Just as Harvey was about to tip the teapot over the second cup he stopped. ‘Let’s go to the seaside,’ he said. ‘We can be there before lunchtime.’
‘Don’t be ridic—’ Molly started to answer, then cut off the protestation. Why not? Life is for the living. She clapped her hands together. ‘All right. We’ll go to the seaside.’
‘We’ll have fish and chips on the prom.’ Harvey grinned. ‘I might even buy you a cornet.’
‘I’ll get my handbag,’ said Molly, a thrill of excitement tripping down her spine. She hadn’t been this impulsive in over twenty years.
She had felt as light as a feather since returning home from Leni’s teashop yesterday. Harvey had been waiting for her with his arms open and she moved into them and let him hold her.
‘I love you, Molly Jones,’ he had said to her later, when they were sitting on the sofa together. ‘I will always love you and nothing in your past will ever alter that.’
‘If only I’d—’
He shushed her. ‘If only you had done this, if only I had done that . . . but we didn’t. And we can’t go back. But we have a little forward time, so let’s enjoy it.’ And they had sat watching a Burt Lancaster film together on the sofa, holding hands like teenagers, both feeling safe and content.
Chapter 76
Shaun was looking through his accounts in the pre-fab building which served as the temporary office for the site. Working at the weekend was the norm for him, he couldn’t remember the last time he had spent a Sunday at home, lazing, reading the newspapers, doing what other people did. There were few rest days for Shaun McCarthy.
The king was in his counting house, counting out his money. Shaun was happier in the company of work. It gave him a thrill to see a healthy set of figures on his balance sheets, knowing that he could finance the next project. Every pound he earned was a cock-a-snook in the face of the priests and teachers who told him that he would never amount to anything. That he was ‘illegitimate scum who came from scum and would beget scum’.
He heard a knock on the door. A quiet, hope-I’m-not-disturbing-you knock.
‘Hello,’ he called. He suspected it was Leni Merryman. No one else was around on the site today but him and her although he didn’t have a clue what she might want.
The door opened slowly and in she walked, carrying a plate covered with foil.
‘Hello Mr McCarthy,’ she said, smiling brightly. ‘I hope you don’t mind me dropping in like this, but I’m shutting up shop early today and I thought you might like these. Chicken and ham pastries. And a slice of ginger and lemon cake.’
‘I thought you usually took your cast-offs to the homeless,’ Shaun replied, immediately annoyed with himself for sounding scathing and ungrateful. He had meant it as a joke, but it hadn’t come out that way.
‘I’ve only got those couple of pastries to give away today,’ she replied, still cheery, as if she hadn’t noticed. ‘You can throw them away if you don’t eat them.’
‘No, no, that’s very kind of you.’ He stood to take them from her but she came forward and saved him the trouble.
‘They’re fresh,’ she said. ‘I baked the pastries this morning and the cake yesterday but I had a nice little run of customers this morning. Cyclists – all hungry from their ride.’
Shaun found himself trying to hide a wry smile. Had this been any other woman on the planet, he would have thought she was flirting. He wasn’t an idiot where women were concerned, he knew their subtle manoeuvres to winkle their way into a man’s heart: the soft encouraging sounds they made when they were rapt in every word a man said, the small seductive kindnesses they offered up. He didn’t consider himself handsome but his strong features sat well with each other and women seemed to like the rough cut of him: his tall strong physique, his firm jaw, his nose broken in a fight years ago, his piercing blue-green eyes. He looked like a man who wasn’t afraid of trouble, because he wasn’t. For some the draw was his Liam Neeson soft burring accent; or his aloofness, because human nature demanded that what people couldn’t have, they found intriguing. For others, the attraction was his money and that type he could sense a mile off. It amused him that he – Irish bog scum, as he’d been so often called in the past – would ever have made enough money to interest a woman.
He noticed that when his eyes locked with hers, her head turned, she blinked, her gaze skittered away. Had he got it wrong? Was she flirting after all? Wasn’t that a sign?
For a second he entertained the theory that she might be double-bluffing and appearing as uninterested to spark his attention, but no – this was Leni Merryman they were talking about, and he felt no manipulations were afoot. The woman had spare pastries and cake and she had brought them over to him as an act of consideration. It was as simple as that. She was as transparent as the window behind her.
She pressed the heel of her hand against her temple and he suspected she might be going home early because she had a headache.
‘Overdone it today?’ he asked.
‘Bit of a migraine stirring,’ she replied. ‘I’ll be okay after a lie down in a dark, quiet room.’
‘I get those too,’ he said. They sprang on him whenever he slowed down and gave his body time to rebel. So he didn’t slow down.
‘Well, goodnight. Or rather good afternoon, Mr McCarthy,’ said Leni.
She looks tired, thought Shaun. That smile on her lips looked more difficult to sustain today.
‘Thank you,’ he replied.
‘Pleasure.’
He watched her walk back to the teashop on the corner, her step less springy than usual and he wondered what else she had in her life but work and her cat. Then again, he didn’t even have the cat.
Chapter 77
They ate fish and chips sitting on a bench on the prom, watching children playing in the sand and riding donkeys. Why did fish and chips always taste so much better outside in the paper, covered in far too much salt and vinegar?
‘I haven’t had these for . . . well, I can’t remember when,’ said Molly, licking her fingers.
‘You haven’t lived.’
‘No, I haven’t really, have I?’ replied Molly, sadness tingeing her words.
Molly laughed. ‘Yes, let’s go to them all.’
‘No, you go without me,’ said Harvey, staring straight ahead to the horizon. ‘Promise me you’ll see all those places when I’m gone.’
‘I will not,’ huffed Molly. ‘Wandering around by myself like a lost old woman. What do you take me for?’
‘I’ll be with you,’ said Harvey, scrunching up his fish and chip wrapper and putting it into the bin at his side. ‘I’ll send those white feathers down from the sky to prove that I’m watching you. Go on a cruise. Fly to New York. Do it for me. We can compare notes in the afterlife.’
Molly tried to hold on to her composure, but he was making it hard.
Harvey stood up, seeing the slight tremble claiming her bottom lip. He held out his hand for her to take.
‘Excuse the vinegary fingers.’
Molly closed her equally vinegary fingers around his.
‘We never let each other go, really, did we?’ said Harvey.
‘No,’ smiled Molly.
‘Do you think it’s because deep down we knew that we’d get our second chance?’
‘Maybe,’ said Molly, standing. Is that what this was? Their chance to get it right this time?
‘Come on. I want to feel the sand between my toes and then the sea washing it away,’ said Harvey, pulling her towards the stone steps that led down to the beach.
‘I suppose you want to ride a donkey as well.’
‘I never did get to ride a donkey,’ Harvey replied. ‘I never had a holiday when I was a kid.’
Poor Harvey, thought Molly. He hadn’t been given a lot of love in his life and yet he’d been full of it himself. Too much of it, greedy for it, drinking affection up wherever he found it like a dry dog supped water.
She helped him take off his shoes and socks and kicked off her sandals and together they walked along the silky golden sand towards the gentle rush of the waves and stood there letting the sun warm their bones.
‘Why did you send me a postcard of a boy on a donkey? Was there a reason? I always thought there must be one, though I never worked out what it was.’
Harvey didn’t move his eyes away from the horizon.
‘The one thing I always wanted to do when I was a lad was to ride on a donkey, but I never did. I always envied kids at school who said they’d been to the seaside and ridden one along the beach. I never even saw a real donkey until I was a strapping eighteen-year-old, far too big to fit on one of their backs.’
His voice was weighted with such sadness that Molly closed the gap between them and slipped her arm into his. He turned towards her and looked into her still lovely dark-blue eyes.
‘I think that over the years a donkey ride became a symbol of yearning for what I would never have. I’d never be little enough to ride on a donkey just as I would never have been able to return to you.’
Behind them, the gentle tinkling of the donkeys with their bells became louder, and when they drew level Molly waved at the donkey man.
‘But you did return to me,’ said Molly, an idea in her head. ‘Wait there.’ She walked over at speed to the donkey man.
Harvey watched her explaining something to him and then they both waved over. He padded towards them, eyebrows dipped in question.
‘Get on,’ said Molly.
‘Don’t be daft. I’d flatten the poor thing.’
‘Your feet might trail on the floor, mate, but you must be only six stone piss-wet through,’ said the donkey man. ‘You should see some of the sizes of the kids these days. Right fat-arses. Thank God these are beasts of burden.’
‘Poor donkeys.’ Molly stroked the nearest donkey’s ear.
‘They’re like oxen,’ said the donkey man. ‘They don’t mind. I know what weight would be too much and you aren’t it. Come on, I’ll help you.’
He lifted Harvey onto a donkey who had the name ‘Neddy’ painted onto his bridle and put the reins in his hand.
‘Now you, missus.’
‘Oh I didn’t mean me . . .’
‘Oh come on, Molly,’ urged Harvey with a chuckle. ‘We can pretend we’re in the Grand National. Put the shoes down on the sand and mount your steed.’
‘Oh . . .’ Molly gave a resigned smile and let the donkey man help her onto ‘Bobby’. And then the donkey man led them down the beach laughing like loons, not caring who was watching them or what they were saying. Life was here and now and it was good.
After their donkey ride, they sat on a deckchair with an ice-cream, listening to the sound of the sea and the seagulls and horses trotting down the prom, pulling their tourist carriages. Then they went into the amusement arcade and fed lots of two-pence pieces into the coin cascade machines. Harvey couldn’t get rid of his: he kept winning, so Molly helped him spend them. The machine churned out a load of tickets which could be redeemed against prizes. About three million of them were needed for a pen. Harvey gave them to a delighted small boy already clutching handfuls of them, then he put a pound in a creepy-looking fortune-telling machine and a card plopped out of the bottom.
‘Apparently I’m going to have a long and happy life,’ he read. ‘Lying bugger. At least about the long. He got the happy bit right though.’ He mused to himself. ‘It’s certainly been an eventful one. Too much booze, too much gambling, too many women, a lot of beautiful sights and one true love, but at least it’s been a life. And this is the happiest I’ve been in a long time. With you.’
Molly took his hand. ‘I haven’t been this happy in a long time either, Harvey. I’m so glad you came home to me.’
‘Talking of which, let’s go home, shall we? I’ve had enough today.’
‘Yes, we’ve done a lot.’ She pulled him out of the arcade and they walked hand in hand in the cooling sunshine towards the car park. Harvey stopped suddenly and turned around for a last look at the town with its gaudy colours, the chime of the donkey bells on the beach, the arcade machine tunes, the bangs and whirrs and scents of fried onion and doughnuts. Another wonderful memory notched up. One of his best.
‘Grand,’ he said. ‘Just grand.’
Chapter 78
Ryan arrived at the teashop on the corner at four o’clock after school on Wednesday. He looked extra pale, Leni thought, and so thin. His green blazer must have been a hand-me-down because it was so obviously the wrong size. He was almost lost in it.
‘Hiya,’ he greeted. ‘That bloke’s got a problem with me, hasn’t he?’ He thumbed behind his shoulder across the square and when Leni peeped out of the window, she saw Shaun standing there.
‘Oh, ignore him,’ she said.
‘I’m not like the rest of them, you know,’ said Ryan, taking off his blazer. His shirt had a black line of pen down the sleeve. He caught Leni staring at it.
‘It’s Sharpie. I can’t get it off,’ he said. ‘My other shirt’s the same.’
‘It’s impossible,’ agreed Leni. ‘Would you like something to eat before you start?’
‘Can I?’
‘Of course you can. Toasties?’
‘Yes please.’
‘Go and put your stuff in the back room. I want you to open those boxes in there by my desk. They should be bookends. You can wait until after you’ve eaten though.’
‘Might as well get started.’
Shaun McCarthy entered just as Leni closed the lid on the grill.
‘Hello there,’ she grinned at him. ‘Are you here for shopping, sandwiches or spying?’
He narrowed his eyes at her.
‘Some thanks for making sure you’re all right,’ he mumbled.
‘I’m perfectly fine, Mr McCarthy.’
‘Was that the O’Gowan boy I saw coming in here?’
‘It was.’
‘That’s okay then. Just checking.’
‘Are you going to check on everyone who comes in?’ Leni was still hanging
on to her smile. He felt a prickle of annoyance that he amused her so much.
‘Yes, I think I might.’
It was as big a mystery to him as it was to her why he should bother. She wasn’t his responsibility – God forbid. If she wanted to get herself mugged by the most notorious family in the area, why should he really care?
‘Would you like a coffee, Mr McCarthy, whilst you’re on surveillance duties?’
‘You’re very kind, but I’ll pass.’ He gave her a smile of his own. The one he saved for the VAT man.
Leni noticed how straight and white his teeth were. They would suit a proper smile. She wondered when he had last thrown his head back and laughed.
Ryan emerged from the back room holding a wooden bookend. He stopped in his tracks when he saw Shaun McCarthy.
‘It’s okay, Ryan,’ said Leni. ‘Mr McCarthy didn’t realise it was you coming into the teashop. He thought it was a hoodlum out to murder me.’ She dropped a sly wink for Ryan’s eyes only.
‘Well, I’ll get back across the way then,’ said Shaun. ‘Oh, you’re going to be joined by a florist on the square. Thought I ought to let you know.’
Leni grinned. ‘I had heard and I’m really glad. For you too, Mr McCarthy. One less shop to find a tenant for.’
‘Two, actually,’ replied Shaun. ‘Your next-door neighbour is going to be an antiques emporium.’ The man had signed on the dotted line that afternoon. It had been a good day for Shaun McCarthy. Somewhere in a parallel universe, another Shaun McCarthy would be buying a bottle of champagne and taking it home to crack open with a good woman and celebrate.
‘Wonderful,’ said Leni. ‘I love antiques.’
The grill pinged, indicating that Ryan’s toasties were ready. Shaun McCarthy left her to it, pondering if there was anything in Leni Merryman’s life that wasn’t either ‘wonderful’ or ‘lovely’.
Chapter 79
Harvey was still talking about their visit to the seaside three days later. He chattered like an over-excited child. Molly thought they must have started putting E-numbers in fish and chips these days.
The Teashop on the Corner Page 26