11 The Teashop on the Corner (5 page)

Margaret wafted the air in front of her nose. ‘What is that smell?’

It was Sherry’s perfume. Cloying and thick, it welded itself to the insides of nasal passages. The army could have used it as a replacement for CS gas.

Margaret noted the large, gaudy leopardskin handbag and paired it to the smell pervading the room. There was only one person she knew who might carry around a bag like that. Barnsley’s
answer to Bet Lynch with a thyroid problem.

‘Not alone, I see.’

‘Sherry’s upstairs.’

On cue, the toilet flushed and Molly thought she must have been mistaken about the bedroom. Sherry was in the bathroom after all.

‘Sounds like a herd of elephants,’ said Margaret, as Sherry’s leaden footsteps began to descend the staircase. ‘I’m presuming the diet hasn’t
worked.’

Molly held a finger to her lips. ‘Behave,’ she warned.

‘Fee fi fo fum . . .’ said Margaret, mischievously, winking at her reproving sister.

‘Oh, hello Margaret,’ said Sherry, re-entering the room. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’

I’ll bet
, thought the twins in mental unison.

‘Hello, Sherry,’ smiled Margaret. Molly knew it was her fake smile because she was baring her teeth and she never did that with her genuine smile. ‘How nice to see you again.
How’s the family?’

‘Very well, thank you. Gram is working hard as usual and Archie is in his second year at university now.’

‘What’s he studying?’
Crab-torturing? Genocide?

‘Sociology.’

Sociopathy more like
, thought Margaret.

‘He’s a brain box. Just like his father,’ said Sherry proudly.

‘I’ve forgotten what they both look like,’ said Margaret, holding on to that scary smile which looked as if it had been fixed by rigor mortis. ‘I don’t think Graham
had started puberty the last time I saw him.’
And had it been up to me, I’d have drowned the little bugger before he got to it as well.

‘Ha ha,’ laughed Sherry. ‘I think our wedding came after puberty. He’s very busy. He wishes he could spend more time with his mother, of course.
C’est la
vie
. I hardly ever see my little Archie, either.’

‘Lucky you,’ whispered Margaret under her breath. Archie was as much a mini-me of Graham as Graham was of his father Edwin. A selfish blighter put on this earth to serve his own
interests and sod everyone else. Archie made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, not that she had ever admitted that to her sister. Even as a little boy, there was something about him that
made his father look like St Francis of Assisi by comparison – and that was no mean feat.

‘Well, I’d better get back home then and polish my brasses,’ said Sherry, sliding her coat from the back of the chair. The coat looked expensive. It had a plush satin lining
and a gold chain inside the collar to hang it up by. ‘I’ll see you very soon, dear.’ She bent over her mother-in-law and kissed her cheek, leaving a red-lipsticked imprint. She
blew a kiss towards Margaret. ‘So nice to have seen you again, Margaret. You look well.’

‘So do you,’ smiled Margaret, teeth still exposed.

And with that, Sherry exited the room, leaving a fug of scent and hairspray hanging behind her in the air.

Margaret wafted the smell away from her before it contaminated her lungs.

‘What is that perfume? Zoflora? She must have put a bucket on. And a full can of Silvrikin.’

‘She’d just come from the beauticians.’

‘Were they shut?’

‘Naughty Margaret,’ chuckled Molly.

Margaret reached for a biscuit. ‘I suppose it’s too much to ask why Graham hasn’t been to visit you in months.’

Molly shrugged her shoulders. She hadn’t seen her son since Mother’s Day, and then it had been a rushed ten-minute visit. ‘I sometimes wonder if he remembers I
exist.’

Margaret bit her tongue on what she’d been going to say. She leaned over and put her arm around her sister instead. ‘I’m sure he does. You raise them, teach them to flap their
wings, then have to stand and watch when they fly off to their own lives. That’s a mother’s duty.’ Except in Molly’s case, she’d never really had the chance to raise
him. Margaret doubted it would have made much difference though. Graham was intrinsically rotten, the way his father was. He wouldn’t have turned out well if he’d been raised by an
abbey-ful of Julie Andrews in a jolly singing nun ensemble. ‘We ask them not to look back once they’ve left the nest and it breaks our hearts when they obey us.’

‘That’s not what Melinda is like.’ Molly’s reply was weighted with sadness.

‘Boys are different, love.’

Margaret injected as much tenderness into her voice as she could, although she hated her nephew with a vengeance, ever since her six-year-old daughter had run in screaming that her
twelve-year-old cousin was trying to hang their cat Claude with her skipping rope. Margaret had given him the spanking of his life and they’d loathed each other ever since. Claude had been so
traumatised that Bernard was the only other male he would tolerate afterwards. Graham had only invited her to his wedding because his auntie Margaret had a few bob and he was banking on a big
present, she was sure of it. He hadn’t got one though.

‘Darling. I’ve got something to tell you,’ said Margaret, changing the subject. ‘It’s about our holiday this year. We’re taking a cruise. We leave in just
over a fortnight, on the first of June, and we’re back on July the seventh. It’s all very last minute. I’m sorry.’

Molly brightened up instantly. ‘Oh are we? I’ve always wanted to . . .’

There was something about her sister’s expression that made her words dry up.

‘Ah,’ she guessed at it. ‘I’m not going, am I?’

‘Oh love,’ said Margaret, softly. ‘Bernard has found a cancellation that we can’t turn down and booked us on a leg of the world cruise for our Golden Wedding. Just the
two of us, for once. Are you dreadfully upset?’

Molly shook her head wildly. ‘Don’t be silly, Margaret. I’ve been on holiday every year with you for a quarter of a century. I think you’re overdue a little couple time.
You
must
go, and of course I’m not upset.’

‘Just for once. You will be all right, won’t you?’

‘I should think I’ll manage,’ smiled Molly, gulping back a throatful of tears. She had never been apart from her sister for anything like as long as that. Margaret was likely
to come back and find her in Autumn Grange with her beloved Willowfell sold and the proceeds transferred to Graham’s bank account, if that’s what he and Sherry were after.

‘Bernard was worried about how you’d take it,’ said Margaret, squeezing Molly’s hand. ‘He says he’ll make it up to you and we shall all go on a cruise
together next year.’

‘Ooh, now that is something to look forward to.’
Dear Bernard
, thought Molly. She had been looking for her own Bernard Brandywine all her life. Twice she thought she had
found him and twice she found she hadn’t.

‘Come and have lunch with us,’ said Margaret. ‘Bernard is cooking coq au vin. And we’ve just had a case of ice wine delivered. I think we should test it to make sure
it’s a good year.’

‘Oh well, that’s convinced me,’ said Molly. ‘I’ll be over soon then. I want to put some sheets through the wash.’

Margaret returned home and Molly went upstairs to strip her bed as today’s warm breeze was too good to waste. The door to the third bedroom, which was always kept shut, was slightly ajar.
She’d been right, then. Sherry Beardsall had been snooping around in there after all.

Margaret’s long drawn-out sigh as she walked through the back door into her kitchen answered her husband’s question before he had even asked it. He put his
broadsheet paper down on the table.

‘She didn’t take it well, I gather? Poor Molly.’

‘Molly took it very well, actually,’ said Margaret, sitting down with him. ‘She gave us her absolute blessing to go.’

‘Why the long face, then?’ said Bernard, reaching across the table to put his hand on hers.

‘Sherry Beardsall was there when I went in.’

‘Sherry? What was she doing there?’

‘I don’t know, but I don’t like it. I smell a rat.’

‘Maybe, just maybe, she didn’t have an ulterior motive. Maybe she called to see how Molly was,’ Bernard suggested.

‘And maybe I’m the Shah of Persia,’ said Margaret. ‘No, the Beardsalls don’t do anything out of the goodness of their hearts. Sherry was up to something, you mark
my words.’

Her lip pulled back over her teeth when she thought about the Beardsalls – past and present. She understood why the young twenty-year-old Molly had fallen for the tall, well-built charmer
and older man Edwin Beardsall. She had wanted to find her own guardian angel, as Margaret had found hers in Bernard. Edwin Beardsall had whisked pregnant Molly up the aisle before she had a chance
to breathe; and when Bernard had to step in and rescue her poor sister from the violent brute a year later, Edwin had refused to let her take the baby with her. He could prove Molly was mentally
unstable, he said. And even Bernard with his legal connections couldn’t win against Edwin and his family’s old-established masonic ones. Molly always maintained that growing up with
Edwin and Thelma, his old bat of a mother, had ruined young Graham. Margaret was more inclined to think that young Graham was a bad lot from the off, and her intuition had always been spookily
accurate. Even if he had been allowed to live with his lovely sweet kind mother, Margaret doubted that Graham Beardsall would have turned out any differently to the way he had.

‘I wish Molly had found her Bernard Brandywine,’ said Margaret, savouring the warmth of her husband’s hand on top of her own.

‘What a lovely thing to say,’ replied Bernard, smiling at her. He was still able to make her knees go a bit weak at the thought that she was the sole recipient of that smile.

He had been her knight in shining armour from the moment he laid eyes on her at the bus stop on her sixteenth birthday. Her umbrella had blown across the road and into Maltstone churchyard and
he had chased it; a strapping nineteen-year-old on his first term break from a law degree at Oxford, climbing over the wall to retrieve it for her. She had been in love with him within the first
five minutes and that love had only deepened over the years.

‘I think she’s been looking for someone like you her whole life,’ said Margaret, with a heavy sigh. ‘She thought she’d found you, both in that awful Edwin and in
Harvey Hoyland. I only wish she’d married someone who had been kind to her. She deserved much better than either of them. Good God, even Graham has found a soul-mate. If there is someone out
there for him, there must be someone out there for everyone.’

‘I always liked Harvey,’ mused Bernard, shocking his wife.

‘You what?’

‘Harvey. I always thought he and Margaret made a good couple.’

‘After what he did to her? Don’t be ridic—’

Bernard held up his hands to quieten his wife. ‘I often wonder if they talked. I wish I’d interfered at the time, you know, taken Harvey to one side.’

For once Margaret didn’t have a comment to make. She had always presumed that Harvey
knew.
That’s what made his walking out so extra cruel. She and her sister were close as
twins could be, but there were some things that Molly would never talk about, not even to her.

‘What Harvey did was wrong, of course, but I don’t think we know the whole story. It was far too easy for us to bring down the protective curtain over Molly. I know it, and you know
it, my love.’

Margaret swallowed hard. Over the past twenty-eight years she had discarded all the warm memories of Harvey Hoyland making her sister the happiest she had ever been. It would have been disloyal
to Molly to admit, even to herself, that she had liked him enormously and had felt an honest, genuine vibe from him. It was much easier to admit that her intuition was wrong on this occasion. After
all, how could he have been a decent man when he walked out on Molly for a floozy barmaid with hair like a haystack and breasts that announced her arrival five minutes before the rest of her
appeared?

‘We will all go somewhere warm for a week in October,’ said Bernard, changing the subject. ‘We will make it up to Molly with a lovely holiday. Wherever she wants to go, we will
let her choose. Then next year we will take her cruising with us, as I said.’

‘That will be lovely, darling,’ said Margaret. She was such a lucky woman: she had her Bernard and their beautiful daughter Melinda, a vet working in a gorgeous part of the Dales.
Molly had an unhealable broken heart and a son, daughter-in-law and grandson who made the Addams Family look like The Brady Bunch.

Poor Molly.

When Carla opened the door to the house she had shared for ten years with Martin, it didn’t feel like her home any more. It had been somehow transformed into a
stranger’s domain in which she was an interloper of the highest order. She had expected to return to rooms full of reminiscences, happy ones that might lessen the sadness of the funeral day,
of her newly-widowed circumstances, but every thought of Martin sliced into her like a knife and her eyes couldn’t bear to rest on anything. It was as if everything retained a poisoned
memory. Even the kettle. He had made her a coffee the night before he died. What was going through his head as he waited for it to boil? How to tell her that he was leaving her? When to say the
words? What words to say? She switched the kettle on and made herself a cup of tea. The mid-May sun was shining through the window, warming the kitchen, bathing it in a cheerful yellow cast as the
light filtered through the lemon curtains, but Carla was frozen to the core and felt black and dead inside.

She sat at the table and tried to draw some comfort from the heat permeating the cup. They’d had sex on the Friday before he died. He’d been really up for it, for a change.
They’d eaten a delicious Chinese takeaway that she’d paid for as a treat, because he said he’d had a bad week sales-wise and wouldn’t hit his target. Oh God, the lies.
He’d opened two bottles of Peroni for them and they’d sat in companionable silence watching a
Poirot
which she had recorded on the TV. Then they’d gone to bed and
she’d known he was in ‘that mood’ because he had slipped between the sheets without his pants on and had sprayed himself liberally with the Joop she had bought him for Christmas.
Carla had welcomed his attentions – although he was hardly Mr Foreplay and those ‘attentions’ were short and perfunctory. But if he was happy, she was happy. Satisfied, he slid
off her and directly into a snoring contented sleep and Carla had cuddled up to his plump, hairy back.