Just Another Day

by Patricia Fawcett

  Francesca had been irritated at that, as if something as lightweight as shopping could help, but in an odd way it had. Egged on by the expert, she bought several new outfits, enjoyed a girly lunch at one of Selina’s favourite restaurants, got ever so slightly sozzled and when they returned, heavily laden, Clive had worked his magic. The wardrobes and drawers in David’s dressing-room were empty, all the masculine stuff, razors, aftershaves and so on removed from the bathroom. Even so, Clive had missed one or two little things, his spare glasses in their case for instance and boxes of cufflinks which he kept in a small easily missed drawer in his dressing room.

  A new start was what she needed and she began to feel excited at the prospect of moving to Lilac House and putting her own stamp on it. She bought a heap of glossy magazines seeking out some ideas for furnishing it. She could easily afford to employ an interior designer to help – Selina of course knew of this marvellous woman – but she had all the time in the world and she wanted to do it herself. After the bustle and floral chaos that was Pamela Sanderson the house needed calming down a little but she hated minimalism and would have to get the balance just right.

  With most of the furniture gone, she moved out of the bedroom she had shared with David and, wrapped in a quilt, camped instead in one of the guest rooms where his presence was not so keenly felt.

  The new people planned to turn this room into a nursery so she imagined it would soon be stripped of its present wallpaper and replaced with a pretty baby theme in pink or blue. Quickly she whipped through similar nursery schemes in her magazines for she would not need them.

  With lamps lit and a cup of cocoa at her side, she spread the magazines on the floor, scissors at the ready to cut out pictures of her favourite schemes, and, because her sleep pattern was still wildly astray, she was still sitting there in the small hours planning what she would do.

  Most of the necessary business to do with the house and David’s effects was concluded within days and Francesca was anxious to get back to Devon – home – but first she needed to fit in a visit to Selina’s. That was no mean task with Selina so busy working and Francesca’s offer of having lunch together somewhere special met with a muted response. With one day only remaining before Francesca was leaving she was beginning to think that they would not be able to fit in a face-to-face chat with not even a hint of a window in Selina’s diary until her phone call that morning.

  ‘Darling, I’ve had this shocking cold so I’ve been ordered to take the day off,’ Selina had said. ‘Do come round if you don’t mind catching it.’

  In fact, Selina was over the worst of it and feeling considerably better by the time Francesca arrived, but she had distributed her germs far and wide over the previous couple of days and they were all becoming extremely annoyed at her continued presence in the office.

  They sat in Selina’s kitchen drinking coffee, not just your average coffee either because Selina took her coffee making seriously. The cups were unusual, bought at a French market, a bargain for which she had haggled. They were cream, as big as soup dishes and the generous cup would provide Francesca with her caffeine intake for the whole day. She reckoned that, as she was doing cold turkey with no helpful calming pills following David’s death that she was surely entitled to her daily shot of caffeine.

  ‘Have a biscuit,’ Selina said, pushing the container her way. Only women like Selina could manage to look chic with a red nose and little make-up but somehow she did. She was dressed in a leisure outfit, pyjamas for want of a better word although expensive Italian ballerina pumps graced her feet rather than slippers.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Selina’s kitchen was the hub of the house and as she listened to her friend, Francesca found herself thinking back to the dinner parties she had attended here with David when even he had to shrug off his prejudices and eat here in the kitchen. They were jolly noisy affairs with eight people crowded round the big table sitting on roughly matching chairs. The food was plentiful and Selina called it rustic in a throwaway manner as if she had just clobbered it together with one hand tied behind her back when even the bread rolls were home-made.

  Francesca felt more at home amongst those people, the lower end of David’s social acquaintances, and had been more genuinely welcomed into this group. She had started to relax knowing that eventually entertaining like this would become part of her life and, for all their sakes, she would learn to do it properly. The kitchen in the house up in Yorkshire, the one they very nearly bought, had had a huge kitchen with potential for a large table and she had thought that perhaps she might wean David away from the formality of the dining-room someday.

  That had been a forlorn hope.

  Selina’s kitchen was the size of Francesca’s previous flat with a cheerfully messy area off to one side which she called the snug. It was where she could keep an eye on the children whilst she cooked. It was full of battered sofas, cushions and colouring books, building blocks and heaps of board games with the contents spilling out. Somewhere amongst the mountain of soft toys a cat, a real one, or two, might lurk.

  Clive did something in the city very boring, but very lucrative, but he looked harassed all the time and Selina told her that David suddenly popping off without warning had scared the shit out of him. He had stopped the jogging which he was only half hearted about anyway but was starting to cycle to the office where he had taken to using the stairs instead of the lift.

  ‘Silly man,’ Selina said with a fond wifely smile. ‘The office is on the third floor. He’s knackered before he starts.’

  Clive was driving her mad, she confessed. The house was now a cholesterol-free, Flora-rich zone and he had bought a blood pressure measuring device and he took his BP every morning, sometimes several times if he didn’t get a sensible reading straight off. He was even muttering about a personal fitness trainer because he couldn’t fit the gym into his schedule.

  ‘Will you have a word with him, Francesca?’

  ‘About what? He won’t take any notice of me.’

  ‘He might or at least he’s far too polite to tell you where to stick your advice. The poor darling has to get a grip,’ Selina said. ‘We’re all on death row if you like and, like most of those poor souls we don’t know how long we’ve got either. The appeals system in some of those American states can go on for years and years.’

  ‘Don’t get technical. Those poor souls you talk about have committed murder,’ Francesca reminded her.

  ‘They are alleged to have committed murder. You have to question some of those verdicts.’

  Francesca shook her head as, undeterred, Selina in full grumble-mode happily moved on to the horrific problems facing them regarding their boys’ education. Smiling sympathetically but hardly listening, Francesca switched off and looked round the kitchen. The whole kitchen, the units, the bespoke shelving, granite work surfaces, limestone floor and top of the range appliances cost a bomb but they did not actually look pristine for Selina had a carefree attitude to cleaning. A few germs, she maintained, did nobody any harm and we were far too anxious these days.

  She practised what she preached. The cleaner’s work from the previous day was sabotaged already with barely an inch available on the worktops, children’s junk all over the place, crayons dipped in the sugar bowl, a collection of homemade items – unrecognizable as to what – and scribbled paintings stuck on a pin-board. On the floor, as Selina continued her rant, one of the cats was upturned, licking its nether regions with great delicacy. The children were out with the nanny so they had a bit of peace.

  ‘Are you listening?’

  Francesca sat up straighter. ‘Of course.’

  ‘So, Francesca, I’m not going to say you’re barking mad moving back there. You must do what you think fit,’ Selina said turning her cold-induced irritation towards Francesca.

  ‘Which means you do think I’m barking mad?’

  ‘Not exactly, but in my opinion you should have taken more time to think about it. It was an impulse
buy and what you should have done was buy yourself a huge box of chocolates instead of a house. You are grieving, darling, in shock, and you have to be careful you don’t make a cock-up of a decision. Whenever I’ve bought something on impulse it’s always turned out to be a complete disaster. Remember that flowery frock? Six hundred quid and I look like Bo Peep in it.’

  ‘Do you mean that pink one? I think it’s lovely.’

  ‘I only bought it because I was in mourning because one of the guinea pigs had died that very morning. So let that be a lesson to you. I can see you don’t believe me,’ she said with a slight smile. ‘I’ll find you the picture in the nursery rhyme book. My dress is a dead ringer and it took Cosmo to tell me as much. Anyway …’ she frowned. ‘Country living is not all it’s cracked up to be.’

  ‘You’ve changed your tune,’ Francesca reminded her. ‘You’re always on at Clive to buy something in the country.’

  ‘I know but seriously it would just cause more problems. Imagine the hassle of getting the children ready to go every weekend. It would be torture. This vision I have of sunny meadows, buttercups and lazy picnics is totally barmy. The reality is different. For one thing, all those farm animals give me the creeps. Have you ever seen a cow close up? And I don’t mean Angela Dickson, darling.’

  Francesca smiled a little.

  ‘I know your own flat is sold but there’s nothing to stop you from buying another one round here,’ Selina persisted. ‘Why don’t you? You can afford something nicer and you would have me close at hand. I can help you look if you like. You’ve not signed on the dotted line yet so it’s not too late to back out of this silly Devon thing. You can plead temporary insanity. Everybody will forgive you under the circumstances. If you like I’ll explain for you. You can leave the whole thing to me.’

  ‘No, Selina. I’m not going to back out now. I’ve met the Sandersons and they are very nice people.’

  ‘It’s business, darling. Nothing to do with now nice people are.’ Defeated, Selina sighed and settled into a sulk, looking suddenly very like Crispin. ‘I’ll have you know it’s not going to be easy for me to get over to Devon with my tribe. It’s such an almighty trek. Frankly it’s easier to cross the Atlantic.’

  ‘It was a chance in a lifetime and I had to move fast because I didn’t want to miss it. Look, I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing either and I don’t want to start having second thoughts. Please try to understand and be happy for me.’

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to put you off. How are you these days?’

  Francesca shook her head knowing that, as Selina had not experienced close family bereavement – for you could hardly include the death of a guinea pig in that – it would be impossible to explain how she felt. It was early days as everybody kept saying and she knew that the hurt and pain would become a little less sharp as time went by but that, for a very long time, the grief could come at you like a tsunami and for a while it would be as bad as it ever was.

  ‘I’m still as annoyed as hell,’ she told Selina. ‘Why David? He was fit for his age. He looked after himself, didn’t drink or smoke excessively and we should have had years together.’

  ‘And that’s what you looked forward to?’ Selina opened the container and foraged for a biscuit. ‘He would have been eighty when you were sixty.’

  ‘So? I knew that when I married him.’

  ‘I have to say this, Francesca, because it looks as if you’ve shut your mind to it, but David Porter was an exceptionally difficult man. Let me tell you he was impossible to work with, never mind all that ‘wasn’t he wonderful’ business at the funeral. He was so bloody irritatingly good at his job, but he had a particular way of doing it and he made a lot of enemies and there were a lot of people glad to see the back of him. In other words, professionally, he was a total shit.’

  ‘For goodness sake, Selina …’

  ‘Sorry, I must do something about my language before the children start picking up on it. What I’m trying to say is that he would have made your life a misery long term. I did try to warn you. Take all that ghastly furniture for one. He would never have let you get rid of that. You would have been stuck with it.’ She stirred her coffee thoughtfully. ‘What’s happening with those paintings? I hope you’ve put them somewhere safe. They’re worth a lot, you know.’

  ‘I do know. It’s all in hand. They’re going under the hammer next week.’

  Selina gave what might have been construed as a snort of disapproval causing Francesca to glance sharply at her.

  ‘Have you a problem with that?’

  ‘None at all. They are yours now so it’s your business, Francesca.’

  Exactly.

  ‘He should never have got married,’ Selina continued, a faraway look on her face. She was out of sorts today and coping with her in a melancholy mood was not helping Francesca’s cause one little bit.

  ‘Oh come on, Selina, he was desperate to get married. And he didn’t exactly force me at gunpoint either.’

  ‘He once asked me, you know. He got down on his knees, the whole caboodle.’

  ‘I didn’t know that. Obviously you said no.’

  She smiled. ‘Ah, well … I asked for time to think about it and then the next day he came up to me in court and whispered that I was perfectly right, it was an insane idea and would I ever forgive him. So, he sort of withdrew the question before I had time to answer it. He must have been thinking it over and realized what a mistake he’d made. He was a devious bugger.’

  ‘Would you have said yes?’

  ‘I don’t know. There wasn’t much happening in my life at the time so I suppose I might have. He was charming, wasn’t he? And so powerful and that is a real turn on for me. That’s why I married Clive in the end. There’s something very attractive about a man who can command a six figure salary.’

  They laughed, the sombre mood broken, although Francesca was still stung by what Selina had said; sometimes her directness was hard to take.

  ‘I asked for time to think about it too,’ she said. ‘But he kept on at me and of course eventually I said yes.’

  ‘Poor David.’ Selina’s eyes filled with tears and she reached for a tissue, blew her nose. ‘Have you had a good cry yet?’

  Francesca nodded, unwilling to admit it.

  ‘Thank the Lord for that. I told you to let it out. Did you feel better for it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose so. I’d only got used to being with him and now I’ve got to get used to being without him.’

  ‘They say it gets easier,’ she said, face flushing. ‘Oh God, I swore I would never say that to you. But they do say that, don’t they, whoever they are.’

  ‘People who have gone through it presumably,’ Francesca said, remembering how grief had affected her mother, how she had drowned in it, how it had changed her, hardened her heart and all because she was unable to forgive. ‘Come and stay with me when I get settled in Devon,’ she went on, trying to find a lifeline for Selina. ‘You can help me choose some colour schemes. You know how I worry about that.’

  ‘I would love to, darling,’ she said and Francesca could tell she was working up to saying no. ‘But I have the children and arrangements are so complicated. Once my plans are made …’ she indicated a huge spread-sheet pinned on the board. ‘They’re written in stone. We’re spending a chunk of the summer holidays in Italy at Clive’s mother’s villa so that’s my holiday entitlement gone in one fell swoop. Thank God we don’t have to fit round school holidays yet but that will come soon enough. Then when we get back there’ll be a million and one things to sort out so as you see, fitting in a visit to Devon, dragging us over there, is just impossible.’

  ‘That’s OK.’ Francesca smiled, hiding her disappointment. She wanted Selina to see the house, to be enchanted by it so that perhaps she might understand. The chat had proved to be disturbing rather than consoling. She thought Selina was wrong about David. Given time, she might have been able to change him.

  Selin
a’s negative reaction also prompted a reappraisal of the move. When she needed to talk whom did she immediately think of? Selina, of course because she was near at hand and, providing she had a slot in her schedule, was always willing to talk; she was her link with David which meant a lot.

  She would miss Selina and the calculated chaos that was her life, but there would be other friends and there was always Gareth.

  She was not sure how she felt about Gareth.

  Chapter Eleven

  IF GARETH MEANT nothing to her, if he was just the friend she told Selina he was, then why did she keep thinking about him?

  Next day she went over the conversation with Selina. She had made the mistake somewhere along the line of mentioning Gareth which led to question after question including the telling one ‘what colour are his eyes?’ Francesca avoided answering that, although, curiously enough, she did remember exactly what colour they were which must mean something.

  ‘What is this?’ she had asked at last. ‘The Spanish Inquisition?’

  ‘Oh come on, I’m just interested that’s all. You’re the only person that I can talk to about silly little things like this. Bethany is far too young and impressionable and, dare I say it, a bit puritanical.’

  ‘That’s been said about me.’ Francesca laughed.

  Selina gave her a shrewd look. ‘Deny it all you will, but I can tell that this Gareth chap has made quite an impression on you.’

  ‘He’s just a friend,’ she exclaimed in a flurry as she caught the knowing expression in Selina’s eyes. ‘For heaven’s sake, I’m not looking for another man. I’ve only just lost David.’

  ‘I know that. I’m just trying to cheer you up, darling, by talking a load of nonsense, but isn’t it great to know you’ve obviously still got it if another man fancies you? Believe me, it’s the one thing that keeps us ladies going and a little lighthearted flirtation never did any harm to anybody.’

  It worried her that, subconsciously, she might have been doing just that but then he was the sort of guy who just invited it. He was good looking enough to be pleasurable on the eye without any of that cocky awareness that some handsome men have. Even Professor Rosemary Wetherall had not been averse to casting twinkling glances at him. Next time she met him, she would be much more circumspect so that if he did have any ideas he would forget them.