The Honey Queen (44 page)

Ursula had been in tears when Frankie told her the news.

‘But what will we do without you?’ she’d sobbed.

‘You’ll get on just fine and you’ll remember to have nail-varnish remover and a whole kit of useful things in your desk drawer,’ Frankie had said.

Her friend Anita from the legal department had been shocked. ‘I can’t believe they’d let
you
go, Frankie,’ she said. ‘I mean, you’re brilliant at what you do, everyone says you’re the best HR director ever. It’s so unfair, you must be devastated.’

‘Funny thing is,’ said Frankie, ‘I’m not. It’s not personal. It’s a commercial decision. If I took over a company, I’d want to move my team in. I understand that.’

‘But what will you do?’ said Anita. ‘You love your work!’

‘I do and I did,’ said Frankie, wondering how she was going to explain this. ‘But if it was up to me, I’d probably never retire. I’d carry on working like a mad woman, getting more stressed and stressed with age. Look at these age lines,’ she said, gesturing to the lines around her face. ‘Stress makes you age! I wish I’d known
that
years ago. This way, I can stop work and do up my house, spend time with my family, that sort of thing.’

Anita was silenced. ‘Seth didn’t feel that way, though, did he?’

‘No,’ said Frankie, feeling guilty. ‘He didn’t.’

During the week, Seth had been much more like his old self, telling her it was a great time for her to retire and discussing all the things they might do with Sorrento Villa once they got her settlement.

Frankie had been aware of Lillie watching from the sidelines, because after her tipsy phone call to Seth from her sister’s house, Frankie hadn’t been able to broach the subject of their relationship again.

The guilt was crucifying her. That last week in Dutton, where everyone had been so kind and thrown her a party on Friday night to say goodbye, Frankie had realized that she hadn’t really defined herself through her work. She’d thought of her old mentor, Marguerite, and how she’d had nothing to go home to once she’d retired. Marguerite really had lived her life through the office. But Frankie had so much in her life: Seth, the children, even the damn house with its ugly wallpaper. Nobody would feel she was less of a woman because she’d stopped working: they’d probably commend her for avoiding work-related stress. She knew Dr Felix would, for a start.

But it was different for men. Work did define them and she’d ignored that entirely when it had come to Seth’s redundancy.

So each night, she, Seth and Lillie had chatted happily about the plans for the house, and then Frankie would plead exhaustion and head to bed early, so she could be asleep – or pretend to be – when Seth came to bed.

She didn’t know how she could possibly say sorry to him. Blaming empty-nest syndrome and the menopause wasn’t enough.

Frankie thought of all this now as she looked at the garden and smiled at the herb garden Lillie had planted in a sunny corner.

‘It’s lovely isn’t it?’ said Seth, making her jump.

He put his arms around her from behind and pulled her so that she was leaning into him.

The time was right, Frankie thought.

‘Seth, darling, I am so sorry,’ she began. ‘Sorry for not realizing how hard it was to be dumped from work, sorry for being so bad-tempered with the menopause, sorry for letting all my stress land on your shoulders – just sorry. I love you so much and I’m afraid of losing you.’

With it all said, she let out a deep breath and waited. This could be the moment when Seth said, ‘Actually, I don’t love you any more, Frankie’ and what would she do then?

He gently turned her round to face him and Frankie realized that it was like looking at the old, contented Seth, not the man she’d been living with these past months.

She wanted to cry but stopped herself. Please, please let it be OK.

‘I’m sorry too,’ he said. ‘I pushed you away but Frankie, how could you even think I don’t love you. I adore you, even when you’re peri-whatchamacallit. I. Love. You. Is that enough?’

Frankie had never thought she was much of a crier, but tears began rushing down her face now as the strains of the past few months flooded out of her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed, ‘I really thought you didn’t love me, that I wasn’t what you wanted any more. And I felt so old, so ugly. Ageing is horrible for women. Men just get grizzly and handsome, women fall apart and the whole world cringes if they’re not all smooth-skinned and young.’

Seth took her half-empty coffee cup and set it on the path.

‘I love you so much I want to drag you into our room and ravish you,’ he said gently. ‘I might ravish you here, now, but it would shock the neighbours. Have we met the neighbours yet? Lillie must have. She knows everyone else within a fifty-mile radius. You’re not old, you’re gorgeous and I love you. Sex isn’t exactly on a man’s mind when he loses his job, Frankie. I’m sorry I rejected you. I felt so bloody awful, such a leech. You were earning money and what could I do? What woman would want to make love to that man?’

‘I would,’ said Frankie tearfully. ‘This menopause thing is awful too because your hormones are all over the place and it’s terrible. You feel old, Seth. When you can’t have babies any more, you do feel all dried up and old. So when—’

‘—when I didn’t want you, you felt worse,’ he finished for her.

She nodded.

‘But that was a phase, love,’ he reassured her. ‘I love you and I want you. We just went through some difficult times and every marriage goes through that.’ He smiled at her and said: ‘What would we have done without Lillie, our own guardian angel putting balm on every hurt?’

Frankie shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I think we were heading for splitting up, which is crazy.’

‘Insane.’

‘Mad.’

‘Deranged.’

Suddenly, Seth was picking her up and whirling her around, so that she felt as if she were flying.

‘I love you, Frankie Green. Never forget that.’

Holding on to him tightly, Frankie nodded, then said, ‘I won’t, darling. Never again.’

Lillie watched Ned weeding his turnips in the allotment and her fingers itched to get into the ground. Freya had brought her up here to talk to Ned and get some seedlings for Frankie and Seth’s garden.

‘There’s nothing like gardening for taking your problems away,’ Ned explained as, clad in his old brown gardening trousers, he diligently weeded.

‘I agree,’ said Lillie, lifting her head and breathing in the scents of earth and plants. The leaves were all dusted with a hint of manure and compost.

‘Is Mr Green any good at growing things?’ Ned went on, still bent to his task.

‘Not yet,’ said Lillie frankly, ‘but he will be before I leave, and it would be great if you could come round and give us your advice on where to put things.’

She would be flying home next week and she wanted to get a lot of things ironed out. Introducing Ned to Seth was one of her plans so that when he was gardening, Seth would have someone to ask about things.

‘Sure, even if he started with a grow-bag full of tomatoes, he’d love it,’ Ned said. ‘You get a lot of satisfaction from growing your own crop. And he could grow greens too, lettuce does really well around here. Now, Jimmy over there –’ Ned straightened up and pointed to another allotment that looked like a salad department in the local greengrocer ‘– Jimmy has all manner of fancy vegetable things growing, lettuces of every variety, you never heard the like. I don’t think he eats them himself, but his wife is into that sort of thing.’

‘I’m not sure if Seth is a lettuce sort of person,’ said Freya, thoughtfully, on the strength of three brief meetings in Redstone. ‘But his wife might be,’ she added. ‘Is Frankie a lettuce sort of person? You know, Caesar salad without the dressing, without the croutons, without the everything nice?’ She looked quizzically at Lillie, who shook her head.

‘No,’ Lillie said, ‘I must have given you the wrong idea about Frankie. She’s not one of those sort of people at all. But I think Seth would like to grow lettuce, just to see if he could, before he moves on to more difficult things.’

‘True,’ agreed Ned, wiping his hands on his trousers. ‘Even the most experienced gardener can have things go wrong.’

As Lillie and Freya walked back down to Sorrento Villa, their arms full of early sweet carrots and some rocket, they chatted away about what was going on. ‘I wanted to ask your advice,’ said Freya, when they reached the gate. Automatically they both looked up at the house, which had become more beloved and less decrepit to Lillie the longer she spent there. Now that she was due to go home, it had somehow become cherished for its air of dishevelment, rather like an old lady who’d had nobody looking after her for so long.

Now, finally, Seth and Frankie had the money to do it up. Frankie’s employment lawyer had come up trumps and Frankie said they were happily pensioned. They’d changed their mind about Seth’s grand extension though.

‘Let’s not run away with the money,’ Frankie had said shrewdly.

‘Come on in for tea,’ Lillie said to Freya.

Lillie boiled the kettle and made two cups of tea to take into the garden.

‘We’ll sit outside. So tell me, what’s up?’ She often thought that if Doris and Viletta knew that one of her fondest friends in Ireland was a fifteen-year-old girl, they might have looked at her with astonishment. But then, Freya was more like a ninety-year-old being who had somehow been magicked into the body of a girl.

Freya got into it straight away. ‘It’s Opal’s sixtieth birthday next Saturday and I want to do something special, but the thing is, the last big birthday was Uncle Ned’s and we don’t have the money for a hotel this time, not right now. Plus, I know Opal feels it would be upsetting for Meredith to have another big party because at the last one she was Lady Muck coming in with all the champagne but at this one she’ll be sitting in the corner looking depressed and miserable. She’s started work at the supermarket, you know. She says it’s the only job she can get with this cloud hanging over her.’

The look on Freya’s face said exactly what she thought about Meredith’s looking sad. But Lillie had a certain sympathy for Meredith.

‘You’d be miserable if the same thing happened to you, you know that, Freya,’ she said gently.

‘I’m sure I would be,’ said Freya prosaically, ‘but I wouldn’t make everyone else’s life a misery into the bargain, would I?’

Lillie laughed, ‘No you wouldn’t. Anyway, what were you considering doing for Opal’s sixtieth?’

‘Well,’ Freya went on, ‘as her birthday’s on a Saturday, I was thinking of having a big party in St Brigid’s Terrace. The problem is, people would have to go outdoors because the house is too small to have a big party indoors, and then we’d be relying on the weather – which isn’t necessarily a good thing to do in this country. I had this idea about fairy lights in the trees and lanterns and seats for people to sit on, cushions spread on the grass, all sorts of wonderful things. Maybe a barbecue and a table groaning with fabulous things to eat but …’ she broke off. ‘I can’t cook and I don’t have lots of fairy lights or lanterns, and what if the weather is absolutely horrendous?’

Lillie was thinking. ‘We need a plan A and a plan B,’ she said. ‘Plan A if it’s a nice evening and we can go outside and plan B if we can’t. I’ll get some paper, you look around for a pen. I can never find a pen in this house when I need one.’

‘You’ll help me?’ said Freya, delighted. ‘I wanted to ask Bobbi, but she’s so busy with the salon she hasn’t a moment.’

‘Oh, we’ll ask Bobbi to pitch in as well,’ said Lillie. ‘Now there’s a woman who can organize a party, I imagine. Between the three of us, we can think up something brilliant. Let’s go talk to Bobbi.’

Bobbi thought Meredith needed to be involved.

‘Freya, honey,’ Bobbi said, ‘I know you’re not her biggest fan, but I think things have been pretty tough for your cousin for quite some time. Everyone in the country now knows she was nothing short of an idiot for believing everything those people said for so long. She was the respectable face of the place and it was because of her they managed to dupe so many people. Imagine what that would feel like.’

‘I don’t want to imagine,’ Freya said crossly. ‘She’s had it tough for a few months – big deal. That doesn’t give her carte blanche to treat the world as if it was her own melodrama with her in the starring role and us as the villains. She never does anything for Opal, yet her poor mum runs around trying to make Meredith things that will tempt her appetite, worrying if it was all her fault …’

Lillie interrupted her. ‘That’s what parents do, darling,’ she said gently. ‘Worry it’s their fault somehow and ask themselves whether, if they’d done things differently, it would all have turned out another way entirely.’

‘You’ve never met my mother then,’ said Freya bitterly, and got up and left.

Bobbi and Lillie exchanged a look.

‘I can see you don’t really know much about Freya’s mother, do you?’

‘Only what Freya’s told me,’ Lillie said. ‘Have I put my foot in it?’

Bobbi grimaced. ‘You could say that. This is definitely a mug-of-tea story. Right, let’s come up with a plan to get Opal out of the house so we can transform it into party central next Saturday. She loves that new knitting shop. Peggy has classes on a Saturday now, so maybe we could book Opal in for something? That would keep her occupied for a while.’

Freya marched down the road towards the supermarket where Meredith had been working for the past week. She’d said she wanted to earn some money to contribute towards the housekeeping.

Some chance of that, Freya thought angrily. She didn’t trust Meredith in the slightest and it made her furious, watching her beloved Opal doing everything she could to try and make things better. She was sure Meredith didn’t care in the slightest about her poor mother. If she had, she’d have been there for Opal. Freya knew how much she owed to her Aunt Opal and Uncle Ned, but she supposed she hadn’t realized how angry she was with her own mother until she watched Meredith appearing not to care about how much Ned and Opal loved her.