‘A pint of snakebite, please. And a double Cointreau chaser.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t assume anything about me.’ Frankie smiled. ‘Don’t stereotype me, please. Just because I’m a female of a certain age, it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m congenitally attached to a wine bottle.’
‘Er, no.’ Dexter looked slightly nonplussed as they negotiated the spindly-legged bar stools. ‘OK, so I’ve learned my first lesson. What was it again, snakebite and … ?’
‘Actually, Chardonnay would be lovely, thanks.’
Dexter laughed. ‘I can see you’re going to be a worthy adversary.’
Several nattily dressed and very bored bar staff stood in a row behind the gleaming chrome and looked hopefully at them. Customers were, as always, very thin on the ground. As soon as it was clear they were going to order drinks, a sort of Mexican wave of barmen moved forwards to serve them.
Frankie thought it was sad that the bar staff never greeted any of the customers by name, and the customers had no idea who the bar staff were. Everything in the Toad was carried out with antiseptic anonymity. She was determined that when Francesca’s Fabulous Frocks was open she’d make a point of knowing names and using them.
Once Dexter was armed with the wine and a bottle of extremely expensive and unrecognisable beer, he peered round the Toad’s emptiness. ‘I don’t know if we’ll manage to find a seat – oh, look, there are about thirty over there.’
Frankie laughed, following him to the deserted island of chrome and glass and spiky legs.
‘Here’s to us.’ Dexter raised his bottle once they were perched precariously on high chairs with very tiny, shiny seats. ‘And the success of our new ventures.’
They clinked drinks.
‘And,’ Frankie said, having taken her first delicious glug of wine, ‘to you settling in to your new home. Welcome to Kingston Dapple.’
‘Thanks.’ Dexter drained half his beer and examined the bottle. ‘Oh, great, I’m not sure what it is, but I needed that.’
‘So.’ Frankie looked at him over the rim of her glass. It was no hardship. He was very, very beautiful. ‘What really made you leave Oxford and take over Ray’s flower stall?’
‘Oh, you know … ’ Dexter shrugged. ‘This and that. Time for a change. Things had gone stale. Honestly, it’s part of my life that’s over and behind me now. I’m just moving on and starting over.’
Frankie sighed. Whatever the Oxford badness had been about, Dexter clearly had no intention of divulging it to her. It must have involved a woman, she decided. Oh, well, she had things in her past that she wouldn’t want to make public knowledge either, didn’t she?
‘What about you?’ Dexter’s tawny eyes asked a million questions. ‘I know you live here in Kingston Dapple with Lilly, and I know you’ve worked for Rita for some time before you took over the shop, but what else makes you tick?’
‘Oh, this and that,’ Frankie said artlessly, determined that she’d could play Dexter’s game as skilfully as he could. ‘Nothing much. I’m not very interesting at all, really.’
Dexter grinned. ‘Touché. And as I don’t believe you for one minute, I think I’m going to have a lot of fun finding out the truth about you.’
Chapter Seven
‘There!’ Frankie smoothed down her short red wool ra-ra dress, and stood back and admired her handiwork. ‘What do you reckon?’
No one answered. Which was hardly surprising as she was alone in the shop. She’d found, rather disconcertingly, that since Rita’s departure she’d taken to talking to herself. Or the softly playing radio. Or sometimes even the dresses.
It was late Friday afternoon. Tomorrow she’d open the doors of Francesca’s Fabulous Frocks for the first time.
And, thanks to the valiant efforts of her friends during the week, she may just be ready.
Rita’s shop had been totally transformed. There was now an area for each decade, from the 50s onwards, with suitable pictures, posters and nick-nacks adorning the walls for each era.
Biff and Hedley had been wonderful in reciprocating the donated clothes by providing some absolute gems.
Now the cream walls were barely visible as Audrey Hepburn graced the 50s with elegance and style and lots of swept-up hair and nipped-in waists, alongside a floaty, pouty Marilyn Monroe; Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton strutted their slender miniskirted white-booted stuff for the Swinging Sixties; Toyah and Siouxsie did the same for the punk 70s only with more chains and aggression; the ladies from Dallas graced the 80s with bright colours, power suits, massive shoulder pads and huge hair; and the Spice Girls and Princess Diana jointly illustrated the variations of the 90s.
The Noughties had caused some trouble because no one – not even Lilly – had been able to pin down what exactly that era had provided by way of style. In the end Frankie had decided to go for enlarged culled-from-the-internet pictures of the more outrageous designer collections – including Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney – and anything since then currently sat beneath a huge poster of Cheryl Cole.
Frankie surveyed the shop again. She’d changed the lighting – well, she’d added spotlights in the areas where they were needed and used pretty pink bulbs to soften the harsher corners – and had old-fashioned hatstands for each section draped with hats, of course, scarves, bags, suitable jewellery and every other accessory she could find – ostensibly for decoration only. But if anyone offered her hard cash for them, she knew she’d sell them. She was determined to make a success of this.
The dresses, now arranged on hanging rails according to size in each section, were a wonderful riot of colour. From one side of the shop to the other, you could walk from the 1950s into the twenty-first century, savouring all the fashion glories of the intervening years as you went.
It looked, Frankie thought happily to herself, like a proper fabulous frock shop.
And she’d managed to sort out the computer system, so pricing, stock, selling – everything she needed – was to hand. And Lilly had also promised to talk to ‘this really cute guy I know who owes me a b-i-g favour because I never breathed a word to his fiancée – not that I knew he had a fiancée at the time, the cheating slimeball’ to design a Francesca’s Fabulous Frocks website.
So, if the local paper did their stuff and sent someone to the opening, and the posters she’d made and plastered everywhere that wouldn’t have her arrested for fly-posting, and the flyers she’d printed off and distributed round Kingston Dapple and the neighbouring villages on one of the nights when sleep was simply a luxury she couldn’t afford, created some interest, then tomorrow should be one of the best days of her life.
In fact, it should be the best day of her life for, well, at least three years. Three years ago, when Joseph Mason had broken her heart and wrecked her life and her dreams, she had not thought that she would have had the resilience to clamber back, and rebuild not only herself, but also her entire future.
She wrinkled her nose. She’d come this far on her own. No one was ever going to take it away from her. Not again. The success of Francesca’s Fabulous Frocks was the only thing that mattered now.
Walking across the shop, Frankie gazed at the two huge display windows in delight. In the absence of sourcing proper mannequins, although she was still looking, she’d plastered red crêpe paper everywhere and several waterfalls of long tinsel strands twisted and danced in the rising heat. Red, green and gold party frocks from all eras were draped artistically over festive boxes wrapped to look like the most enticing Christmas presents. The windows glittered in silver and gold, surrounded by baubles and more tinsel and masses of twinkling fairy lights.
Considering that all the decorations had been borrowed from her and Lilly’s collection at home – even their ancient artificial Christmas tree had a place of honour – Frankie reckoned it looked almost professional.
And the rain had stopped.
Oh, and there hadn’t been any sign of a ghost.
Mind you, Frankie tho
ught now, staring out across the marketplace, the whole of Kingston Dapple looked pretty spooky today. The wind and rain had given way to a cold, dark sullenness and a dawn to dusk swirling pea-souper fog. The Christmas lights across the square gleamed feebly in the grey, shifting gloom and the shoppers were spectral figures as they appeared and faded in the murk.
Across the cobbles, Dexter’s flower stall had also undergone something of a transformation. It looked, Frankie thought, like Santa’s grotto, with cascading fairy lights, fat shiny swathes of holly and ivy and mistletoe draped everywhere, big glossy Christmas wreaths with crimson ribbons piled high on the decking, and scarlet poinsettias and winter red begonias studded like rubies between the dark green foliage. Inside, Dexter had used Ray’s contacts well, and had massive vases of hardy cut flowers and ferns. From outside it smelled like a rural branch of Lush.
Frankie laughed to herself. In a very short space of time, Dexter had managed to attract far more customers than Ray had ever dreamed of. Female ones, of course.
The news of Dexter’s arrival had spread, as everything did in the village, like wild fire, and the flower shack was almost always surrounded by women: Kingston Dapple’s young mums with their babies snug in buggies, looking, giggling, texting, but not buying, the country ladies who seemed suddenly to need to turn their homes into Kew Gardens and every hue of female in between.
Dexter flirted and chatted with them all, and – even if he didn’t know much about his stock – managed, Frankie thought grudgingly, to sell far more flowers than Ray had ever done.
She wondered, again, what jobs Dexter had done in the past. In fact she wondered what exactly Dexter’s past had involved full stop. So far he’d been charmingly reticent about it, like the night in the Toad, and cleverly fielded any questions she or Lilly had asked.
Which, she thought now, she couldn’t complain about as she’d managed to avoid answering his own questions about her. Two could play at being enigmatic. And anyway, what did it matter what they knew about one another, really, as they were never going to be involved in anything other than business? All that mattered was that her frock shop was a success so that she didn’t let Rita down.
OK, she looked round the prettily lit interior, what next? Coffee, she decided. Before she tackled the last of the price tickets. And then, maybe tonight she could go home before midnight and catch up on some very much needed sleep.
Shivering, she opened the door, and managed eventually to catch Dexter’s attention through the fading light and the cold, clammy fog, indicating with elaborate hand gestures that she was putting the kettle on.
As Ray’s stall had no food or drink facilities, Rita had always included Ray in their refreshment breaks, and throughout this week Frankie had continued the practice, making Dexter a drink whenever she had one, carrying it carefully across the cobbles.
He grinned at her and gave her a thumbs-up sign. Several girls, clustered shivering round the holly and mistletoe, glared at her.
Minutes later, with the girls glaring even more, she hurried across the square with a steaming mug.
‘Great, thanks.’ Dexter wrapped his hands round the mug, staring at Frankie over the rim. ‘And you look very, um, festive. Really pretty. That’s a fabulous dress. Are you wearing the stock? If so, you’ll be the best advert the shop could ever have.’
Frankie, unused to compliments, blushed and quickly shook her head. ‘Er, thanks, but no, it’s one of mine. From someone else’s charity shop. Ages ago. Um –’
Dexter, clearly sensing her discomfort, smiled gently and changed to a universally safer subject. ‘This coffee is ace. Freezing today, isn’t it?’
‘Mmm.’ Frankie shuddered. ‘I think I preferred the rain to this. It’s real Dickensian weather. You can almost imagine how Kingston Dapple was in the old days when it’s like this, can’t you?’
‘Full of ghosts?’ Dexter laughed. ‘Yeah.’
Frankie pulled a face. ‘I never want to hear that word again. Hopefully, it’ll all be forgotten now. I can’t see Maisie making a return visit somehow.’
‘No, I’m sure she won’t.’
‘You … you don’t believe in all that haunting stuff, do you?’
Dexter shook his head. The streaky hair moved silkily. ‘No way. I’m with you on all things that go bump in the night. In fact I have a pretty low opinion of the majority of people who say they can talk to the dead. I’m sure there are genuine psychics out there, and possibly real mediums too. It’s just that I’ve never come across them, and until I do I’ll stay on the dis-believing side of the fence. But it worries me that the charlatans are simply trying to cash in on the raw grief of the bereaved. That is pretty cruel.’
‘It is,’ Frankie agreed. ‘Although I don’t think Maisie does that sort of thing, does she? I think she just thinks she can see ghosts in a kind of general way. Like we see living people everywhere, she says she sees the dead. I can’t see her holding forth with random things like “I’ve got a message for someone here whose name begins with A from someone whose name begins with B and if you give me twenty quid I’ll pass it on”, somehow.’
Dexter laughed. ‘No, neither can I. Barking she may be, but Maisie struck me as a kindly, well-meaning soul.’
‘Me too. Anyway, I’ve got far more important things to worry about than Maisie the useless medium. Opening tomorrow morning and getting at least one customer through the doors being the main one.’
‘You’ll be fine.’ Dexter looked towards the shop. ‘The windows look amazing and you and Lilly have worked your socks off with the PR.’
Frankie laughed. ‘Oh, Lill’s been surprisingly brilliant. She’s handing out flyers to everyone at the beauty salon where she works, and she’s got our other friends doing the same. Clemmie runs a firework display business with her husband and she’s popping my flyers in with theirs. Amber’s got posters up at all Mitzi Blessing’s herbal cookery outlets, Phoebe’s plastered Cut ’n’ Curl with them and Sukie has done a mail drop with her aromatherapy business. And they’re all telling everyone they know, too.’
‘Word of mouth is the best publicity ever,’ Dexter agreed. ‘I wish I had friends like yours. No, I just wish I had your friends – they’re absolutely gorgeous.’
‘Shame, because they thought you were a right munter.’
‘Did they?’ Dexter looked stricken. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘Oooh, what a delicate ego you have,’ Frankie chuckled. ‘Hands off my friends, Mr Valentine. They’re all very happily and very firmly attached, but you’ll be delighted to know that really they all thought you were pretty damn hot, too.’
Dexter preened.
Frankie gave him a mock-glare. ‘You’re truly terrible.’
‘Thank you. Oh, excuse me a second.’
Causing a bit of a stir among the girls in their jeggings and skimpy tops and no coats despite the freezing temperatures and who were now going blue with the cold, Dexter pushed his coffee mug into Frankie’s hand and moved away towards a pretty blonde in a long camel coat who was looking at the holly wreaths. After a lot of laughing and deep discussion she parted with several ten pound notes and waved goodbye.
‘Sorry about that.’ Dexter took the mug again. ‘But as a fellow entrepreneur I know you’ll appreciate that business comes first.’
‘Funny business. She gave you money. You didn’t give her anything.’
‘Not yet.’ Dexter’s tawny eyes sparkled. ‘It’s my new service – home delivery. Saves the ladies having to lug heavy festive greenery all round the village. And so far they’ve all been, um, extremely grateful.’
Frankie shook her head. ‘Unbelievable. Is that why you had to leave Oxford? Too many grateful ladies and lots of less-than-grateful husbands?’
‘Something like that, yes.’
Frankie sighed. Just as she’d thought. ‘Oh blimey, it’s cold out here. I’d better get back and carry on with the pricing. And then I’m going to have to vacuum the shop from top to bottom before I go
home.’
‘Good luck.’ Dexter took another mouthful of coffee. ‘I think I’ll be calling it a day soon, too. See you later.’
The girls clustered round the flower stall, Frankie noticed, looked no warmer but definitely much more cheerful as she hurried away across the cobbles.
‘Oooh, lovely,’ she said, relishing the heat as she pulled the door shut behind her. She picked up her own coffee and took a gulp. ‘OK, let’s just finish this, then I’ll crack on with the pricing and – oh!’
Frankie’s heart skipped a beat. She wasn’t alone.
A small figure was standing on the far side of the shop, between the 1950s and 60s sections.
With her pulse racing, she tried to keep calm. ‘Goodness, you made me jump. And I’m sorry –’ still shaking, Frankie attempted a friendly smile ‘– but we’re not open until tomorrow. I should have locked the door. Please come back tomorrow morning and have a proper look round then. We’re opening at half past eight.’
‘All right, duck.’ The figure moved away from the rails of dresses and out of the pink-lit shadows, sounding very apologetic. ‘I’ll do that. I must have got it wrong. Sorry to have bothered you.’
Frankie frowned, relieved now that she wasn’t about to be mugged, or worse. The man – it hadn’t been possible to discern the figure’s gender earlier – was wearing an old-fashioned shiny suit, and now he was in the light, Frankie could see he was really quite elderly, with grizzled hair and a cheerful-goblin wrinkled face.
Not an axe-wielding murderer, then. ‘Um, now Rita’s gone we’re not renting stuff out any more. I’m just going to be selling dresses. Um, were you looking for something for, er, a lady?’
The man shook his head.
Oh great, Frankie thought, I’ve got Kingston Dapple’s only geriatric cross-dresser.
‘Well,’ she said brightly, ‘I’m sure you’ll find something to suit you here. Tomorrow.’
Never Can Say Goodbye Page 7