by Nicola Slade
At the other end of the village Jonathan Barlow was also writing a note.
“I shall be away for three weeks,’ he wrote, pausing to chew anxiously on the end of his biro. ‘I’ve left you enough money for food and other expenses in the tin on the kitchen shelf. Don’t try to draw anything from the joint account because I’ve transferred all the money from it and re-arranged our finances. In future my pension will be paid into my personal account. I’ll pay all expenses from it and I’ll allow you pocket money if you behave in a proper wifely manner. Don’t try to find me, it won’t help. You’ve got three weeks to practise and I’ll see how you cope. If you don’t change your ways I shall have to take more drastic action.”
Trembling with nervous excitement at his own daring Jonathan signed the note, sealed it, and left it on the kitchen table, then checked his pocket for his wallet and passport and crept out into the December chill.
****
Rosemary Clavering looked wistfully out of her kitchen window towards the huge old oak tree in the eastern corner of the field behind her house.
‘I hope Margot can see me now,’ she told Hugh, who had spent the night with her. ‘She did love me, in her own eccentric way, and I know she’d be glad to see me so happy now.’
Hugh’s manly responses about love and duty were drowned by the sound of the minibus drawing up outside and the clamour of excited voices urging them to hurry.
‘Come along, come along!’ cried Delia. ‘We’ve no time to lose. I’m not missing the plane while you check if you’ve turned off the gas, Rosemary.’
‘No chance,’ her victim retorted. ‘Are we the last ones?’
****
To Finn’s relief nobody burst into song on the journey to Heathrow. She had been afraid that the gang’s exuberant high spirits might lead them to excesses such as Ten Green Bottles, but no, although high as kites on excitement they were, as she reminded herself, civilised people.
Much the same thought had struck Julia as she turned to speak to Rosemary, sitting behind her.
‘Help! Didn’t we say right from the start, that we weren’t going in for old folks’ outings? And look at us now.’
‘Come on, Julia,’ Charlie chimed in. ‘You’re hardly run-of-the-mill old folks, are you? But seriously, I do hope you’re all going to behave when we’re away, and not embarrass Finn and me. I don’t want to have to spring anyone else from the police station, eh, Bobbie?’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Julia was intrigued and at the same time Bobbie turned on Charlie reproachfully.
‘Oh, Charlie! You promised!’
Charlie was overcome with remorse and apologised handsomely to Bobbie, who nobly forgave him when he smiled at her. The others were not to be silenced, however, and Finn found herself elected to explain.
‘It was a couple of days before the wedding,’ she told them. ‘Hedgehog and I were hungry so I nipped out to the coffee shop in The Square to buy a couple of Cornish pasties for lunch. When I got there I saw Bobbie and Ursula being arrested!’
‘But what for?’
Finn glanced at Bobbie who was blushing deeply.
‘Shall I go on?’ she asked and continued when Bobbie nodded bashfully. ‘They were being had-up for drug pushing,’ she announced dramatically.
When the clamour of disbelief died down Bobbie rallied and took her turn at the story.
‘It was such a silly mistake,’ she told them. ‘You know Ursula and I have been helping out at the Cat Rescue lady’s? Well, we’ve decided that after Christmas we’ll go on with our fund-raising as it’s been such fun, only this time we’ll raise money for the Cat Shelter. The day Finn’s talking about, Ursula and I had been to Andover by bus. I met the mother of one of my former Brownies a few days earlier; she and her husband moved a year or so ago. I don’t know how we got on to the subject of cats, I suppose I told her about our darling pussies, and she said what a pity she hadn’t known as she’d got a lot of catmint she picked and dried in the summer. If she’d known she would have brought it into town for me.’
‘Yes,’ Ursula joined in eagerly. ‘Bobbie told me and we thought it would be such a good idea to make up little sachets to sell if we have a stall someday, so Bobbie rang up and we arranged to go over to collect the catmint. Such a nice little outing, and such a nice lady.’
‘Well,’ Bobbie took over the conversation again as Ursula paused for breath, ‘we were enjoying our day out so I said, why not have a cup of tea and a toasted teacake in town before we went home. So we did, and while we were having our tea, we opened up the bag of catmint and tried to work out how many little sachets we could make up from it.’
She gazed at her listeners with round-eyed awe.
‘And after a few minutes a young man who was sitting at the next table, got up and came over to us. We had no idea who he was and I must admit I felt very nervous; he was rather … I suppose “rough” would be the word, … you know, a shaved head and an earring, but he was quite scrawny and young. He just stood there for a moment looking at the bag I had on my lap, then he asked how much we reckoned to make with it.’
Julia began to snigger quietly and Finn, who was tucked in between her and Charlie, nudged her to be quiet. Bobbie went on with her gripping tale.
‘I didn’t quite know how to answer; he didn’t seem the type to be interested in animal welfare, but then I thought how uncharitable that was. After all, the most surprising people can be cat lovers. So I said I thought it would make up into about ten generous sachets. He sort of grunted and then he asked how much would I be expecting to charge per sachet?’
‘And Bobbie said,’ Ursula butted in again. ‘Bobbie said about one-fifty, which I thought was a reasonable price, and the man looked really surprised, then just nodded and reached in his pocket.’
‘What did he do?’ Sue and Rosemary were hanging over the seat to hear the story.
‘He asked would I sell the lot to him?’ Bobbie told them. ‘He was rather pathetic; he said, “I really need it, man, but I ain’t got much cash and you’re asking way too much.”’
‘And I said,’ Ursula put in. ‘I said, do you have a lot of cats, then? And he looked a bit startled and just mumbled again.’
Bobbie nodded. ‘So I thought, why not? My friend had said she’d got plenty more catmint if we needed it, so I said, of course he could and he could pay what he had, so I shut the bag and handed it over to him. That’s when I got the shock of my life!’ She rocked backwards and forwards in her seat as she recalled the moment. ‘He handed over a wad of notes and just took off with it.’
‘That’s when the plain-clothes CID officer, who was on a break in the café, took a hand.’ Finn was dying to get in on the act. ‘And that’s when I came on the scene. He was just reading Bobbie and Ursula their rights when I walked in and a police car drew up outside. He wouldn’t listen to me and insisted on bundling them into the Panda car and carting them off to the nick.’
‘So Finn called me on her mobile,’ Charlie joined in. ‘And I rushed round to the cop-shop and met her on the doorstep.’
‘Yes,’ Finn went on. ‘Luckily I spotted that Bobbie had dropped the loot in the confusion so I picked it up and shoved it in the glove compartment of Charlie’s car while we went in to spring the criminals out of jail.’
‘You can laugh now,’ Bobbie said with dignity. ‘But it wasn’t funny at the time. Ursula and I were terrified and we had no idea what we were supposed to have done wrong.’
‘But how did you convince them you were innocent?’ Julia wanted to know.
‘Luckily I still had traces of catmint in my shopping bag,’ Bobbie said. ‘And I gave them my friend’s phone number so they could check. I’m hoping it’ll be a nine-day wonder amongst my ex-Guiding cronies and that they’ll have forgotten about it when we get back.’
‘Besides,’ Finn was bubbling with laughter, ‘they picked up the skinhead and checked out the stuff. You should have seen his face when they told him!’ She
shook her head in amusement at the memory. ‘Meanwhile, in the interview room they asked Bobbie where the money was. She couldn’t find it so she said she didn’t know, she must have dropped it in all the confusion.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ put in Jonathan, who was looking confused. ‘Why did the man give you so much money? When you’d told him you only expected to get fifteen pounds?’
‘Why, don’t you see, Jonathan?’ Ursula was almost stammering with excitement. ‘He thought we meant a hundred and fifty pounds, not one pound fifty; no wonder he thought it was expensive. When the police realised we were telling the truth, they laughed and laughed and then they let us go and that’s when Finn gave us back the money – there was nearly sixty pounds! We didn’t know quite what to do, but Charlie thought we ought to keep it because the police would hardly allow us to give it back to the young man. Charlie advised us to sit on it for a bit, then to feed it gradually into our fund-raising for the cats.’
‘You can say it’s from an unknown benefactor,’ grinned Charlie appreciatively.
****
The flight was uneventful, but for Bobbie, Ursula and Jonathan, who had never flown before, it was enthralling from start to finish. Even the weary waiting in the airport lounge took on the glamour of the unknown. Marek was very conscious of his superiority, having flown in a transport plane during the war and to Australia, so he had to conceal his own thrill at being served with food and drink on the plane. Even the rather mature stewardesses with their grim smiles were entrancing to him and he blossomed into a stilted flirtation with one.
Finn and Charlie spent the journey still wrapped in their happy dream and they joined in very little with the cheerful banter from the rest of the group. At one point, however, Finn roused herself to speak to Jamie.
‘Tell me,’ she asked him. ‘Do all the Stuart men have to have the same names? I mean, will we have to have a James or a Charles? What was Charlie’s grandfather called? I don’t think I’ve ever heard?’
‘It’s not written in stone,’ he assured her. ‘It’s just a family tradition and no, there isn’t a distinct pattern. Other Stuart names are Henry and Maurice, or Anne and Henrietta, Elizabeth too. My father? He was christened Rupert, after Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Charles the Second’s brilliant soldier cousin. Why do you ask?’
‘No reason,’ she said. Rupert, she thought, that’s nice, or maybe Elizabeth. Not Henrietta, I wouldn’t want to be reminded of Ursula’s Ugly Sister.
As the plane circled in to land on the island the group’s flagging spirits began to revive. ‘We are getting on, after all, some of us at least,’ Delia murmured to Julia. ‘We tend to forget that, don’t we? We ought to be in bed after a day like this and that includes our honeymooners too.’
After a bone-shaking half-hour drive in two ramshackle minibuses to the north of the island, they tumbled out and looked around them as they staggered stiffly towards reception.
‘You ought to enjoy this place,’ Julia remarked to Delia as they surveyed the pink-washed walls of the original plantation house. ‘Might have been made for you.’
The harassed young man at the reception desk scanned the lists in front of him.
‘There seems to have been a little mix-up,’ he told them disarmingly. ‘We have only three double rooms for you and then there are three twins and two singles. Will that be in order? I can only apologise.’
‘That’ll do nicely,’ Delia told him graciously. ‘We’ll sort ourselves out, don’t you worry.’ She followed his eyes as he gazed uncertainly at the motley assortment of tourists in front of him. Finn and Charlie, well, no doubts about them, nor Jamie and Julia, Rosemary and Hugh. He was staring in fascinated surprise as Hedgehog stood with his arm clamped possessively round Bobbie’s thin shoulder, while Bernard draped himself around a shrinking Ursula whom he insisted on referring to as ‘sweetie pumpkin’ and planting loud, juicy kisses on her blushing, fluffy cheek.
The receptionist withdrew his appalled gaze and looked pleadingly at Delia, who just grinned and nodded.
‘I’ll have one single and Mr Barlow will have the other,’ she told him, nodding towards Sue and Marek who stared at her in shell-shocked horror. ‘As you can see, all our lovebirds have sorted themselves into pairs.’
This encounter gave Delia a new lease of life and she ignored the vociferous recriminations of her troops as they were shown to their rooms. When the house-boys had left she turned on them.
‘What a load of old women,’ she told them frankly. ‘What a fuss! Here we are, sort yourselves out, I’m having a single room and I suggest you do too, Sue. Unless you and Marek have other ideas? No, well go and stake your claim. No, Jonathan, it was a joke, you’re sharing a twin room with Marek, don’t worry. See you all at dinner.’ She nodded to Charlie and Finn. ‘That doesn’t include you two, by the way. We won’t be upset if you don’t speak to any of us for the next three weeks.’
Late that evening Hugh and Rosemary sat on the beach looking out at the silver sea.
‘Rosemary,’ Hugh coughed as he broached a delicate subject, ‘you know how much I loved Joan?’ She nodded, surprised, and he continued. ‘She was a wonderful wife and we had a very happy marriage, but when she knew how little time she had left she made me promise that if I met someone I could care for, I must take the chance. She said …’ he shook his head in wonder, ‘… she said I wasn’t the kind of man who should be single, I’d been too well looked after and I’d need someone else to look after in turn. She was right.’
He looked into Rosemary’s wondering grey eyes.
‘Marry me, Rosemary? I know we’re not young but I do care for you. Joan was right, I’m not the bachelor kind. Make me the happiest of men, please.’
Julia would have laughed at his formality but Rosemary was enchanted by it.
‘Oh, Hugh,’ she sighed, leaning her head on his shoulder. ‘Oh yes please.’
‘I had a word with both the girls when we met up with them before we came away,’ he told her, glowing with satisfaction. ‘I told them what was in the wind and they both wished me well. They liked you so much, in fact they both said, quite independently, how much like their mother you are. So how about it, Rosemary? Shall we get married here, on this island? You only have to give seven days’ notice.’
****
Elsewhere under the tropical dusky sky Jamie and Julia were paddling in the waves which lapped at their toes.
‘Julia …’ Jamie cleared his throat. ‘I wanted to ask you something, something important.’
‘Oh no, Jamie,’ she looked at him, her green eyes anxious and loving. ‘Don’t, not if you’re going to say what I think you are.’
‘What do you mean?’ He sounded nettled. ‘I was going to propose to you, my dear.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ she said mournfully. ‘And I don’t want you to. It isn’t that I don’t love you, Jamie. I do, with all my heart. But I’ve been married and it wasn’t a success, so I don’t want to repeat it. And you were married so happily to Janet. Let’s just go on as we are, as loving friends, with me in my little house and you in your little flat just down the road. We can have such fun visiting each other, it’ll keep the excitement going; and when I’m tired and cross, or if you want to mug up on your ancestors, we can agree to have some time apart.’
****
Christmas morning dawned brilliantly, blue and sparkling and the disparate members of the gang straggled in to a late breakfast. Charlie and Finn bounded in looking insufferably smug after an early swim in the bay.
‘And we jogged along the beach for a stretch,’ Finn boasted.
‘How nauseating.’ Julia was unimpressed. ‘And what are you two doing up and about like this? Honeymoon couples are supposed to spend all day in bed.’
‘You are so old-fashioned, Julia.’ Finn rolled her eyes. ‘It was only like that in the Stone Age when you were young because people hadn’t had sex before marriage.’
‘Says who?’ Julia was all set to
argue but was distracted by the sight of Bobbie and Ursula trotting into the open-sided tent that served as the hotel dining room. Neither of the women could ever have been mistaken for anything other than an Englishwoman abroad. Bobbie, as always, dressing to suit someone twenty years older, wore a sensible royal blue button-through dress that had to be a relic of her Brown Owling days, accessorised by a floppy white sunhat. Ursula, despite the beginnings of a cold, had arrayed herself, with unbelieving delight, in a rose-patterned skirt and short-sleeved white lawn blouse. She, too, wore a hat, in her case a garden straw that had belonged to her mother in the 1950s and in her hand she carried her grandmother’s parasol.
‘It was in the umbrella stand in the hall,’ she explained. ‘Wasn’t that lucky?’
In spite of the urging of the others Finn and Charlie decided to eat with the gang.
‘I’m not saying we’ll do it every day,’ Finn told her sister. ‘But it’s nice to catch up now and then – and it is Christmas. Aren’t they enjoying themselves?’
They truly were.
Marek and Jonathan had also taken a stroll along the beach earlier that morning and were full of their plans for a joint venture when they reached home.
‘We thought perhaps we could make a little pocket money,’ Jonathan explained. ‘Doing rather what we’ve been doing as a group, but charging for it, you know, odd jobs, repairs, a spot of gardening? Marek’s going to be in charge of the business side and I’ll provide the allotment and the garden tools.’ When the others applauded this enterprise, he looked slightly anxious and continued. ‘Naturally we won’t be charging amongst ourselves. We will be carrying on, won’t we?’
The rest of the group looked at him and at each other. They had achieved their objective magnificently, as well as handing over a handsome donation to Hampshire Age Concern to salve their consciences. But what of the gang?