A Spring Affair (13 page)

Sometimes when Lou did a crossword and couldn’t get the solution, she’d put it to the back of her mind and later, when she was least expecting it, the answer would deliver itself unbidden to the front, just like that. Maybe if she employed the same strategy now, her subconscious would chew on the problem she faced about how to bring her renewed friendship with Deb into the open, and then present her with exactly what she should do. So, after saying goodbye to Deb, she concentrated on getting those pulleys sorted out for her wooden airer and drove through the centre of town where there was a small privately owned timberyard. They wouldn’t have them but they might know a man who did.

‘You want to try the
Ironmongers Tub
,’ said the ruddy-faced owner with Noddy Holder sideburns who looked more like a butcher than a woodman.

‘Where’s that?’

‘Townend. Do you know where St William’s Yard is?’

‘Side of the old Tin Factory?’ Lou tried.

‘Good girl. That’s the place. They’ll fix you up. No bother.’

‘Thanks,’ said Lou, as much for him calling her a ‘girl’ as for the directions. It was a simple but rare treat these days.

Nothing much went on in the Townend, except for graffiti. Once it had been a lively quarter but the major commercial emphasis had shifted to the other end of town. The shop rents were cheap, which attracted transient cheap businesses that held little shopping appeal, and the lack of passing trade soon spelled their demise. After fifty years in business, the old Tin Factory had closed, though the building still stood. Well, just about–a good blow and it would fall over. Lou hadn’t ever noticed an ironmonger anywhere around there, but then again, she had never had any cause to go to the back of the derelict factory.

She was surprised to find a large car park full of trucks, vans and cars there. A very old row of buildings faced her, suggesting, by the number of their doors, four shopfronts. The two on the right were unoccupied; the third, a decent-sized transport café with signage above the door reading
Ma’s Café
, looked healthily occupied inside, and the end one was the ironmonger’s–very Dickensian, with scrubbed small-paned windows and a swinging sign that read
Ironmongers T.U.B.

Lou pushed the door open and a bell tinkled. She walked into an Aladdin’s cave of floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves, drawers and huge apothecaries’ cabinets that gave her the feeling she’d just broken through a time barrier into the past.

‘Two ticks,’ said a man’s deep voice from the back.

A movement to her right caught her eye. The paws of a big dog on the floor there twitching in sleep. It looked like…

‘Can I help you?’

The man who had called out to Lou came into the front of the shop. He was out of his skip-wagon context, which confused her for a brief moment.

‘It’s you!’ exclaimed Lou with a surprised grin.

He didn’t look as bulky in jeans and a denim shirt as he did in his skip overalls, but the small shop only served to emphasize his height and bigness. The pint of water in his hand looked like a half-pint glass; his shoulders looked as if they might jam in the doorway if he walked straight at it.

‘I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on,’ she joked, although it sounded a lot funnier when Eric Morecambe said it.

‘I think you’re thinking of my twin, Tom,’ the man said. ‘Big handsome bloke, black hair? Runs the skips?’

Oh, pants. Was she going to make a total arse of herself in front of his whole family?

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Lou, feeling herself go warm on the inside, a sure indicator she was going red on the outside. ‘You’re so alike.’

Best to get down to business quick. Then she could go home and drown herself. ‘I’m looking for a couple of pulleys for a wooden airer,’ she said, adopting a business like tone. ‘I’ve been told you can knock me up with some.’

Tom’s brother turned quickly away to look through some boxes. He appeared to be biting his lip. Did they all do that in their family–laugh at people, she wondered. If so, it must have been like growing up in a house full of Frank Carsons.

‘Here we are,’ said the brother, reaching up about
twelve foot and bringing down a box. Lou would have needed crampons and oxygen to get up that far.

‘Crikey, that was quick,’ she commented. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you would know where to find them in here.’

‘A place for everything and everything in its place,’ said the brother, tapping his nose as if letting her into a big secret which, of course, it had been until she had commenced her clutter-clearing exercise.

This man was the spitting image of Tom. She had known a few sets of twins in her time, but only one other set of truly identical ones. She had gone to junior school with Robert and Robin Ramskill. The teachers had asked their mother to send them to school with some identification as they were always pretending to be the other, so she had knitted them both jumpers with RR on them.

‘You’ll need a single pulley and a double one, if you want a workable system. I presume you want to pull it up and down and not just hang it up as a decoration.’

Lou nodded and Tom’s twin brother got a piece of rope out from a drawer and fed it through the pulley wheel to show her how to set it up. It looked fairly straightforward with a little thought applied to it. He had big meaty hands, neat nails and no wedding ring either.

‘I’ll need a cleat as well,’ said Lou, taking care not to make it sound anything like
clit
(thereby avoiding giving the Broom brothers an aneurysm).

‘Call it three pounds fifty, please,’ said the nameless brother.

‘That all?’ queried Lou, who had been expecting to pay at least a tenner.

‘Pay more if you like but that’s what they cost,’ he
smiled. ‘It’s a pound for the single one, two pounds for the double. Which leaves fifty pee for the cleat.’

He mirrored her pronunciation of the word: ‘cleeet’. The length of the vowels wouldn’t have sounded out of place in a spaghetti western about Mexican bandits.

Lou flashed him a look but he was totally straight-faced. They were too similar and it crossed Lou’s mind for a moment that he didn’t have a brother at all, and this was actually Tom himself. But that would be taking a joke a bit far, wouldn’t it?

She handed over a five-pound note which he held up to the light to inspect. Cheeky so and so, Lou bristled. She hated it when people did that. Usually cocky little blighters in supermarkets who wouldn’t spot a fake Queen if she had eyebrows like Noel Gallagher. And though she and Tom might have shared the jokes about counterfeit money, she didn’t know this bloke from Adam to take such a liberty.

‘Is that Clooney?’ asked Lou, receiving her change with a cool and collected ‘Thank you’. She was more than disappointed that he was asleep. At least he wouldn’t have found her so flaming hilarious.

‘No, it’s his brother from the litter,’ said rude-man. ‘My sister’s kids have been playing with him all morning, so he’s t-i-r-e-d out.’

He even has the same twinkle in his eye as Tom, thought Lou, although he was too familiar with strangers for her liking, and so when he disappeared to his back office to get a receipt book, she sneaked out. She’d had enough for the time being of people thinking she was a joke.

There were two calls waiting for Lou when she got home. One from Michelle saying it was just a quickie as Craig was in the bath, but yes, he was there and they were having a fantastic time. The other was from her mother saying that Victorianna was going to some dinner with Edward Wankystein and that the Deputy President of the United States was going to be there as well (big wow–
not
). Bloody Keith Featherstone still hadn’t rung. She tried to put it to the back of her mind, which wasn’t all that easy, but there wasn’t going to be any chance of getting him until Monday now. She got on with preparing Phil’s evening meal: cappuccino of pea soup, lamb fillet and treacle sponge with home-made custard. She needed him in a good mood for what she was about to tell him.

‘Hello there!’ said Phil, flashing his perfectly white teeth at Miss Scarlet Suit. This was the second time she had been in the showroom this week. He never forgot a face. Or a pair of tits, especially not ones as perky as those. She reminded him of someone from his past that he couldn’t quite place. An old girlfriend, somewhere along the line.

‘You told me to keep popping in, if you remember,’ the rather lovely punter said, refreshing his memory about the line he quoted her on her last visit. ‘Stock changes daily?’

‘Indeed it does,’ said Phil. ‘Have you any idea what you are looking for in particular? You weren’t quite sure last time, as I remember. Has anything inspired you since?’

‘Something older perhaps,’ she said, looking up at him from under a sexy little fringe. ‘Classy, though. I don’t mind a few miles on the clock if I know it’s going to be reliable.’

Cheeky little minx, he thought. Like he didn’t know what she meant!

‘Have you seen this one?’ said Phil, leading the way over to a nice old Jag.

‘Too big,’ she said, rejecting it before he had even opened the door to thrill her with the walnut dash and the leather upholstery. Well, at least here was a bird who knew exactly what she didn’t want, and that was always one stage closer to knowing what they did want.

‘I want something sporty. I want something
me
. I want something—’

‘Singular?’ suggested Phil.

‘Yes,’ she said, as if pleasantly surprised that he knew such a word, and she was obviously very flattered that he’d applied it to her.

Phil mulled this over, and then suddenly snapped his fingers.

‘I’ve got just the thing for you, although it’s not in the showroom yet. A 1960s MG Roadster, British Racing Green, absolutely beautiful–and, here’s the best bit–it’s got less than forty thousand on the clock. It’s a fantastic car–I’m expecting a rush when it’s actually here in this window. It’s even got the original green log book, and a full service history, of course.’

‘Is it a hard top or soft?’

‘Hard. You don’t want a soft top in this climate.’ He dismissed the British weather with one sweep of the hand. In saying that, had it been a soft top he would have said, ‘You can squeeze out the last drop of the British sunshine with this little beauty.’

‘Oh yeah, and what do you drive then?’ she tested.

‘Audi TT,’ said Phil, adding, ‘hardtop!’ accompanied by his best lopsided grin.

‘Nice. Not exactly a family car, though?’

Ooh, she really was pressing for info, he thought. Clever.

‘No family,’ he said, with the tiniest regretful sigh.

‘So where’s the MG now?’

‘It’s getting the full treatment, once-overed, valeted, polished, one hundred and thirty point check and generally getting touched up by expert hands. It really is absolutely stunning. One lady owner from new and that is no lie.’ Well, one doddery old tart who drove a gorgeous little car like that at 15 m.p.h. to go to the post office once a week. How the hell she had managed to even clock up so much mileage was anyone’s guess. She must have got lost a few times.

‘How much are you looking at for it?’

‘Not one hundred per cent sure at the moment, but it will be in the region of nine…’

She didn’t flinch.

‘…nine and a half maybe. Thousand,’ he clarified, just in case she thought he meant hundreds. So far, he couldn’t tell if she was a blonde inside the head as well as outside.

‘Obviously. When will you have it in for me to look at?’ she asked.

‘Couple of weeks, maybe three. Tell you what, you leave me your number and the moment I have it in, you will be the first to know about it.’

If he did have it in, boy, she
would
have known about it as well, he thought lustfully. He smiled a soft, benign smile, which belied the groin-thrusting going on in his brain, and beckoned her into his office where she scribbled down her name on his desk pad.

‘I’ll give you my mobile number and my name is Miss Susan Shoesmith.’

She definitely emphasized the ‘Miss’, he was sure of it.

Sexy, sassy, spirited Susan Shoesmith, he said to himself, trying to trigger a memory that he knew was there. Who was she like?

‘Don’t forget me,’ she winked. She had British Racing Green eyes.

‘Forget you? Not a chance,’ said Phil.

As if the day at work wasn’t good enough, Phil opened the door to his favourite smell of all time, apart from the aroma of banknotes untouched by human taxman.

By the time he’d had a wee, there was a starter waiting on the table–a frothy pea soup and a little plait of warm white seeded bread and butter. He had only a tiny second helping because lamb fillet was to follow, in a rosemary and honey sauce with cider gravy poured over some divine buttery mashed spuds and asparagus spears.

Lou was having plain chicken fillet, mixed vegetables and no gravy. He wouldn’t have liked to have swapped his for hers.

‘What have I done to deserve this?’ asked Phil, starting conversation after he had got to the end of the interesting bits in his newspaper.

‘Nothing,’ said Lou, shaking her head in a fine semblance of innocence. ‘I fancied chicken and I know you aren’t really keen, so I just picked up some lamb in the butcher’s whilst I was there.’

‘Been shopping then?’

‘Yes, I just nipped into town to get some fresh air.’

‘Accounts all up to date are they, love?’ he enquired.

‘Yes, of course. Treacle sponge?’

‘I’m so full.’

Phil rubbed his stomach, hoping for a liberating burp.
It came and left a perfect space for pudding. ‘Oh, go on then. Just a bit.’

He had a little portion then followed it up with a big one; after all, she had gone to all this trouble for him. More trouble than usual…now the big question was
why
.

Lou poured him a brandy and delivered it to him with a cigar and the matchbox. He watched her with suspicious eyes. He knew how much Lou hated lamb; he wasn’t stupid, whatever she might think. Whether she realized it or not, she served it up when she felt desperate for his approval.

‘So,’ he said slowly, as he puffed up a glow on the cigar. ‘What’s all this about then, Lou?’

‘What’s what all about?’ She wasn’t giving him eye-contact and that told him volumes.

‘Lamb? Treacle sponge? I know you, remember, so what are you building up to tell me?’ He gave her one of his fixed smiles that wasn’t reflected in his eyes. The one he saved for the VAT man.

‘Well, actually there is something.’ Lou started clearing up the plates.

‘What?’

She was licking her lips; they were dry as autumn leaves.

‘What?’ he asked again, impatiently. It had better not be bad news about his accounts.

Lou took a deep breath and tried to begin.

‘Phil…’ This was stupid. Just say it, she urged herself. Why was it so difficult to say she’d met up with Deb again? She opened her mouth to speak. The sentences travelling from her brain ripped themselves apart and reformed in her voicebox.

‘Phil, I want to throw away the armchair in the conservatory.’

He tutted. ‘Is that it?’

‘Yes. I…I just wanted to make sure you were OK with that.’

‘You can throw it out, if you want. It’s hell to sit on anyway.’

‘We’ll get one of those recliners, like my mother’s.’

Phil nodded. He liked the sound of that.

‘Right, well, that’s that then,’ she said, carrying on clearing.

Phil took a big swallow of brandy and studied her as she moved around the table. That wasn’t it, though, was it, Lou? he thought. Her face might be all smiley but her body was screaming tension to him. If she had served him lamb because she wanted to get rid of an old chair, he was Johnny Depp. No, it was something much bigger. Now what was really going on in that little brain of hers?