by Nicola Slade
‘I’m sure she’s very grateful to you,’ retorted Finn. ‘Calm down, Julia, you said yourself Rosemary’s a born doormat. A doormat needs to be trampled on, let them get on with it.’
****
At the other end of the village Ursula, another doormat, and Bobbie were taking very seriously their duties as new mothers.
‘Do come and see them, Finn,’ Bobbie urged one evening when they met on the village green. ‘We only meant to get one cat between the two of us, but when we got to the cat lady’s house and she showed them to us, we simply couldn’t resist.’
Ursula looked very much at home in Bobbie’s mother’s saggily comfortable armchair, upholstered in faded Sanderson roses. On her face she wore an expression of complete bliss combined with pride; on her lap she held, with difficulty, a very, very large tabby cat with tufty ears and a long, bottle-brush tail.
‘Oh, Finn,’ she exclaimed. ‘How nice, do forgive me, dear, but I can’t get up. Samson is inclined to fuss rather if he’s disturbed.’ She beamed besottedly at the enormous creature and stroked him anxiously. Samson raised his head and gave Finn a definite smirk.
‘But didn’t Bobbie say there were two cats?’
Finn looked round the room. Nope, no sign of a second feline newcomer. Then a black fur wrap on the settee lifted its head and yawned in her direction, showing off a wide pink mouth and what looked more than the ordinary complement of teeth.
‘Wow! And who’s this one, then?’
‘Why that’s Delilah, of course,’ Bobbie scuttled in, more brisk and purposeful than Finn had ever seen her. ‘Here we are, you’ll join us in a little toast, won’t you, Finn? Just to say hello to the precious moggies.’
She handed Finn a glass of sherry and they toasted the cats heartily.
‘But they aren’t just moggies, surely?’ Finn stroked Delilah’s sooty velvet coat and looked at her curiously. ‘For a start, they’re so huge. Are they some special breed?’
‘Well spotted—’
‘How clever you are—’
They both answered her at once but Ursula smiled and shook her head, so Bobbie explained.
‘The cat lady said they’re Maine Coon cats, you know? An American breed. She thinks Samson is pure bred but Delilah probably has some ordinary pussy cat in her, that’s why she’s smaller and smoother. Aren’t they gorgeous? They’ve settled in so wonderfully, they seem quite at home already.’
‘They sit at the window, waiting for me,’ Ursula boasted shyly. ‘And when I open the gate you should see the performance they put on, standing up and pawing at the glass and miaowing like mad.’
As their adoptive offspring deigned to curl up together in front of the fire Ursula came to the front door with Bobbie to see Finn off.
‘So sad,’ Ursula said in a whisper, so the cats couldn’t hear. ‘Their poor owner died a fortnight ago and her relatives couldn’t, or wouldn’t, take the darling pussy cats. But so fortunate for us, of course.’
****
‘Finn?’ Julia knocked on Finn’s door. ‘Charlie and Jamie are here to walk us over to Delia’s house. Get a move on.’
‘Has anybody managed to get a look inside Daisy Cottage yet?’ Finn was curious as she strolled along beside Charlie, her hand tucked in his. ‘I’m dying to see what she’s done with it, all those years of living with an expert must have rubbed off on her.’
‘I’m not so sure.’ Julia was more cautious. ‘Delia’s very pig-headed, to put it mildly, and I get the impression that she and the sainted Guy lived in a state of armed truce. I remember his TV programmes, very purist they were; everything had to be authentic and true to the period of the building. I don’t somehow see our Delia living happily alongside historical accuracy. Very addicted to her creature comforts is Delia.’
The exterior of Delia’s house gave nothing away. It was very similar in design to Charlie’s house, probably the same builder: four-square, early nineteenth century, built in a pinkish old brick, immaculately repointed in the recent renovations. The windows were newly double-glazed, certainly, but they had been done by a very expensive firm specialising in period houses. The drive was gravelled and weed-free and shrubs and heathers filled the flower beds under the windows.
‘Come in, come in,’ rang out the voice of their hostess and Delia appeared at the door, gin, inevitably, in hand. ‘Who’s this? Ah, Jamie and Charlie, how very smart you look. Thank you for coming in dinner jackets, adds a certain grandness to the proceedings, don’t you think? And your lady-loves, too. Let’s have a look at you, girls.’
‘We’ve played safe,’ Julia proclaimed, kissing Delia and doing an obliging twirl. ‘Finn’s wearing the proverbial little black dress and I’m wearing a large one. Have our guests arrived yet? I asked the new doctor and her husband but she decided they’d come under their own steam as his shifts are difficult to predict – he’s an anaesthetist at the hospital.’
Stowing their coats in the small study to the right of the front door her visitors looked around with enormous curiosity when they emerged into the hall.
‘Well?’ Delia was looking at them with a more than usually inscrutable expression as she awaited their comments.
‘Golly!’ For once Julia was almost speechless then she rallied. ‘It looks … um, it looks very … comfortable.’
‘It looks very pink, you mean,’ countered Delia.
‘Well, yes, that too.’
‘It is pink,’ Delia said, surveying the rose-patterned wallpaper and dark pink carpet with complacency. ‘Wait till you see the drawing room. Come on in; let’s see if they’ve recovered the power of speech yet.’
A mixed bag of people stood and sat in the large and undeniably pink drawing room, conversing in awkward whispers. Rosemary was standing beside Hugh Taylor and a couple of women Julia recognised as fellow daughters Rosemary had met visiting their equally incapacitated mothers at the hospital. Bobbie had dragooned a couple of her former Brownie parents into joining the throng and Ursula was there with the couple who owned the village shop. The latter pair had been dying of curiosity and were highly gratified to be invited.
Equally thrilled were the pub landlord and his wife whom Jonathan had tentatively invited, knowing he could rely on them not to let slip anything to Pauline. They had also suffered from the rough edge of her tongue when they first took over the tenancy and Pauline had tried to whip up a campaign to stop them opening all day. Like everyone else in the village they liked and pitied Jonathan.
Jamie had brought along his new next door neighbours and Marek some fellow residents of the sheltered flats. They were all nervously sipping at their drinks and watching Delia like a flock of frightened sparrows in the presence of a hawk. Mrs Parsons had declined the invitation to pay for the privilege of mixing with “a load of snobs and losers”.
‘Everyone here?’ Delia’s voice dropped, bell-like, into the low murmur.
‘I’m so sorry, Delia,’ Hugh Taylor’s voice was apologetic and a little fretful, ‘my guests will be a little late – he’s a member of the golf club, got some earlier function I think he said. He’s bringing his wife.’
‘Not a problem.’ The answer was accompanied by a genial baring of teeth and Hugh sagged with relief. ‘They can catch up on the drinking when they get here. I’ll just get the proceedings off to a start then we can get down to the serious part of the evening.’ She moved to centre stage.
‘Thank you all, very much, for coming tonight. I’m very glad to welcome you, friends and new acquaintances, to Daisy Cottage. It’s taken a long time to get things straight, much longer than I anticipated in fact, but here I am. And here I intend to stay, I don’t fancy going through the experience another time. However, if anyone wants a good builder, come to me for a recommendation.’
Waving a hand in the direction of her blushing builder and his preening wife, she paused to take a long swig from her tall tumbler. Revived, she continued her opening oration.
‘Those of you who know of my late h
usband’s reputation will probably be surprised now you’ve seen inside my own little shack. It is, as you can see only too clearly, mostly decorated in a pleasing variety of shades of pink.’
She sketched an all-embracing wave of her hand at the room. It was supremely comfortable with large classic sofas covered in hydrangea-spattered linen union chintz and plain silk brocade curtains in toning shades of pink with a cream velvet pile carpet. Through the open door the dining room was visible, this time cream-walled with pink and cream upholstered seats on the chairs.
‘Guess what colour my bedroom is?’ Delia’s terrifying leer showed as she fixed her gaze on first one, then another, of her petrified male guests. ‘It’s all right, I won’t make you go up there alone with me – a girl’s got to protect her virtue! Well? That’s right, it’s … pink.’
Finn and Charlie watched the performance appreciatively and Jamie raised a glass to her in a silent toast as she glanced his way.
‘Before I let you loose on Guy’s notebooks and his programmes which are on a continuous loop on the player in the dining room, I suppose I should explain myself, and this orgy of pinkness.’
There was an uncharacteristic bleakness about her which silenced them as she continued.
‘Guy was forty when he decided he needed a wife,’ she said quietly to her captivated audience. ‘He was what, in those days, they called “a confirmed bachelor”; these days we’d be less mealy-mouthed about it. I suited the bill perfectly. I was nearly thirty, unmarried and unlikely to be because I was too plain and too sharp-tongued for most men. Even Guy found me a daunting prospect but I had one shining advantage over any competition.’
She took another of those long, thoughtful draughts from her glass and absent-mindedly topped it up from the bottle of gin beside her.
‘Guy was the most crashing snob and my father was an earl. Never mind that he was an earl with no money or that the tumble-down wreck of a castle we called home when I was a child had finally crashed down into a pile of rubble. I provided Guy with a noble father-in-law and he had a titled wife to introduce to his impressionable friends.’
She lapsed into a brooding silence so Julia dashed to the rescue, her kind heart touched to the quick by the air of unhappiness so unusual in her hard-boiled friend.
‘How interesting, Delia,’ she gushed. ‘Let’s have a refill all round, shall we? Jamie? Charlie? How about acting as wine waiters?’
Delia nodded her thanks and waited till everyone was knocking back their generous refills, then she spoke up again.
‘Won’t keep you much longer,’ she said. ‘Good thinking, Julia. As I was saying, I had to spend more than forty years listening to my husband’s only-too-often expressed views on historic houses, interior design and the philistines who were let loose on such buildings, and I had to live in such houses, nasty draughty things they were too. I determined that when I was finally free of him, I’d find a small, comfortable house– no draughts – and paint it pink. Partly because I like pink and chintz and roses and flowers, but equally because he would have hated it so.’
She tossed off yet another of her enormous gins and stood up.
‘Enough maudlin nostalgia,’ she announced. ‘Let’s get on with the orgy. Only joking,’ she glanced round at the apprehensive guests. ‘Let the festivities commence. Anyone who wants to ask me anything about Guy and his career, just collar me and ask away.’
‘You poor old bat,’ Julia lifted her glass to Delia in a sympathetic toast. ‘He sounds a monster.’
‘He was,’ agreed Delia placidly. ‘However, one of my happiest thoughts, and one that I hug to myself in the small hours when I can’t sleep, is the fact that he died of shock.’
‘Shock?’
‘Yup, whatsisname on the telly, you know – the long-haired Fop – killed him!’
‘Delia!’ Julia was amused by half scandalised. ‘You can’t go round saying a thing like that. What do you mean?’
‘What I say,’ persisted Delia. ‘He always refused to watch what he called “the television set” but when he was bedridden I stuck a portable in front of him and made him watch things like Coronation Street and EastEnders, “pleb stuff” he called it. He had a coronary when he was forced to watch some ancient daytime re-runs of decorating shows and saw what that man had done to somebody’s regency bedroom. If I ever meet him I’m going to give him a big kiss!’
The evening progressed, if not by leaps and bounds, at least in staggers and lurches. Finn was installed, protesting all the way, in the small conservatory behind the dining room and told not to be a nuisance, just to get on with it.
Luckily her first client was the pub landlord’s wife and Finn managed to acquit herself reasonably, predicting a long-haul holiday, news of a family wedding and a baby for a close relative, all of which were received with placid goodwill.
The first of the dutiful daughters from the geriatric ward was pleased to hear of a house sale in the near future and a trip across water to a mountainous country.
‘You are clever,’ she said with admiration. ‘My hubby’s just booked us a trip to Austria.’
After a while Finn stopped feeling nervous and a fraud and threw herself into the spirit of the occasion, wondering whether she ought to have dressed in gypsy costume to add local colour and give further value for money.
‘Hi, Finn.’
It was Hedgehog, unfamiliar in a dark blue suit, and minus his bobble hat. The man beside him had to be Bunny, though at first sight he was an unlikely candidate as a best friend for a doped-up hippy. Bunny was apparently made of tweed. Tweed-mix jumper, heather tweed suit, tweedy-looking shirt, pepper-and-salt hair, ditto moustache, and shiny chestnut brogues that looked eminently suitable with all the tweed.
Finn greeted Hedgehog with an enthusiastic kiss which made him go brick-red and retreat into bashful mumbling.
‘Want your fortune told, Hedge?’ she asked. ‘I daren’t do you a cut-rate, Delia would go ballistic.’
‘Nah, I get enough of that stuff at the shop, don’t I? You could tell Bunny’s fortune for him.’
Finn ran through her spiel, surprised to find that Bunny was lapping up every word with an intent eagerness.
‘I can see you, and Hedgehog too,’ she told him finally. ‘I don’t quite know what to make of it, but you seem to be on some kind of holiday together, in fact on two holidays, one somewhere hot but the other’s different. It’s not abroad, it’s somewhere like East Anglia way, that kind of thing. And there’s a religious element to it too.’
She broke off and slid her crib sheet out from under the tablecloth.
‘Here, let me check it out. Let me see, yeah, later on a hot place, but first of all some kind of trip with a religious slant.’ She looked up at Bunny’s expression of surprise. ‘What? What?’
‘Hedgehog said you were clever,’ Bunny was regarding her with something like awe. ‘But that’s brilliant. Had you mentioned anything to her, Hedge?’
Hedgehog shook his head and also gazed in admiration at Finn. Seeing her puzzled frown he explained.
‘I don’t know about a holiday somewhere hot,’ he told her. ‘You musta got that wrong, girl. But me and Bunny, we’ve just booked Christmas week, only this morning. We’re going to Norfolk – see? East Anglia, like you said. It’s a Christian singles holiday, based in an old converted monastery. Bunny’s a Born Again, and I’m tagging along to see if there’s any crumpet on offer.’
The evening was going with a surprising swing. Or maybe not so surprising, decided Finn, when you saw the enormous pile of empties by the back door. She took a break from her oracular activities to tuck into a plate loaded with Marek’s savoury goulash and Rosemary’s salad and she was just wiping the heel of her baguette round her plate when Delia commandeered her.
‘Finn, just the girl I want to talk to. Come upstairs for a second.’
For a nervous moment Finn wondered if Delia, like her unlamented spouse, might swing both ways but no, Delia just wanted to t
alk to her in private.
‘I’ve been nagging Julia to see how you feel about our holiday plans,’ she began.
‘I’m with Charlie on this one,’ Finn told her frankly. ‘I think you’re insane and you could end up in jail for fraud.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ Delia spoke crisply. ‘Who’s going to find out? Besides, we are going to give the old folks a treat. Not just ourselves, we’ll do something for the local oldies later on. Now, what about it? Are you with us or do I have to go hunting for somebody else? I know it’s a back-handed compliment, my dear …’ she was serious for a moment, ‘… but we really would love to have you and Charlie. It isn’t every couple who would spend so much time helping out with people a generation older than themselves. It’d be good for Sue and Bobbie too. Half the time I think they forget they’re your age group rather than ours, you’d help them get young again, but you wouldn’t be obliged to hang about with us, you know. You could spend the whole two weeks on your own.’
‘I don’t know …’ Finn was trying to fight off a picture of herself and Charlie together on a West Indian beach; the image was getting in the way of her more cautious self. ‘I suppose it all depends on Charlie,’ she shrugged helplessly. ‘Have you sounded him out yet? I haven’t discussed it with him in any detail.’
‘Jamie promised to try and pin him down tonight or tomorrow,’ Delia explained. ‘He knows he’ll get a rocket from me if he doesn’t, we really do need to know – there are so many loose ends. How is Jonathan going to escape from Pauline, for example? And Ursula ditto, though I suppose the problem of how Rosemary can leave Margot is being resolved for her. What’s this?’ She turned towards a small commotion at the front door. ‘Aha, Hugh’s golfing chum and spouse. And goodness me, what a decorative spouse she is.’
Laughing, Finn turned to follow Delia’s admiring gaze.