Same Time Next Week

Chapter 31

It came with age, this ability to compartmentalise, thought Mel. She’d never considered she’d be capable of such a skill as to wear a dignified mask that said to the rest of the world: ‘I am totally fine. There is nothing in my life you need to worry about. I am proficient at my job and can process your deposits and weigh your bags of change and hand over cash from your accounts with a smile on my face and you will never know what is going on inside my head, which is that I am a fucking wreck. I have had to force bananas down my neck to give me some energy, I’ve had to try and cover this ginormous cold sore on my lip so I don’t frighten small children and nervous dogs and I haven’t had more than two hours unbroken sleep all week.’ Except that part was no longer true because last night, she’d woken up only the once and a decent chunk of shut-eye had really helped. She was sure that letting out her story in the back room of the diner was responsible for that. She’d felt listened to, she’d felt her feet standing on a sane oasis in a world that she couldn’t make sense of any more and it had given her a place to recharge, however temporary it turned out to be.

No one at work could have guessed anything was wrong and they saw her cold sore and maybe slightly tired look as evidence that she’d been poorly. But it took a monumental effort that day, even with her acquired skills of deportment, not to start screaming and thumping the cashpoint machine when it wouldn’t give her any money out of their joint bank account because, as she was to discover after a furious phone call to customer services, she’d been locked out of it.

Amanda rang in to work to tell them she was taking a day off. A kinder boss might have said, Absolutely, I hope everything is all right. Philip was his usual unsympathetic self; it wouldn’t have killed him to say he hoped her mother would be better soon. She knew he was more concerned that he’d now have to jiggle things around so he could keep to his original plans and sneak off for his golf date with the previous MD, an upset to his timetable that Amanda refused to feel guilty about.

She drove over to her mother’s house to make sure everything was secure. Dolly from next door saw her car arrive and came over to ask how things were. Amanda told her she’d be heading up to the hospital shortly. She’d rung the ward that morning, but no one had answered so she’d presumed that no news was good news.

She let herself into the house and the smell hit her immediately. She traced it to the carpet at the bottom of the stairs. Her mum must have wet herself as she was lying there for god knows how long. Her older downstairs hidden cameras didn’t have a record facility so she couldn’t check, but it could have been many hours; no wonder she’d been dehydrated. She filled a bucket with water and some disinfectant and gave it a scrub with the doorstep brush that she found under the sink before she went upstairs to get some things her mum might need in hospital: a dressing gown, toothbrush and paste, nighties, slippers, a book, glasses because Bradley wouldn’t have thought of it, he’d have rightly presumed that she’d automatically do it.

Now it was her turn to snoop because she wanted to get hold of her mum’s paperwork so she could find out her financial situation. It may be that she could afford to buy a bungalow outright from savings which would speed things up. It wasn’t without the realms of possibility because Ingrid was canny, a saver rather than a spender. And if her savings fell short, then she and Bradley would just have to step in and cough up and then claim back the money from the sale of this house. He was loaded if the cars on his drive, the white goods in his kitchen and the even whiter goods in his gob were anything to go by.

She tried to think like an elderly woman. It would need to be somewhere she thought was safe and not obvious at all to burglars. Her mother’s generation often favoured putting things under floorboards and mattresses and she recalled spying on Bradley looking under the mattress and she wondered if that’s what he’d been hunting around for.

Then she remembered when she was cleaning and the way the carpet gave in the corner behind the unit. It wasn’t a heavy piece of furniture by any means to shift and well within the realms of possibility that an old lady might assume a burglar wouldn’t think of moving a unit full of pot ornaments to see what was lying in the corner underneath it. Besides, thinking about it, her mother was more likely to have told her to get someone in to mend a faulty floor than to disguise it, being as houseproud as she always had been, at least until recently. There was a reason why she’d left that corner unfixed.

Amanda decided to check it out. She went upstairs, took all the ornaments off the unit, moved it out of the way, and pulled up the carpet to reveal a hole. The floorboard hadn’t rotted: it had been smashed in with a hammer by the look of the splintered, shattered edges. And there was something sitting underneath it in the dark space. Amanda shone her phone torch on it and saw what appeared to be a large brown biscuit tin, the painted flowers that once embellished the top and side gnawed away at by rust. Bingo. She had to wrest it out because it weighed a ton and had been sat there for ages by the look of it, covered in dust and abandoned spider-weavings. It felt way too heavy for a few papers, though, so maybe this wasn’t what she was looking for, but she was understandably intrigued.

It wasn’t locked but it was hard to prise open and she buggered up a nail in the act of doing so. But the nuisance of that was eclipsed by the sight of the contents when the lid eventually gave, because she found herself staring into a pirate’s chest, full of gold sovereigns, rings, chains, charms, bracelets – even spoons. She wouldn’t have liked to have guessed the value of what she was holding in her hands, but she’d paid three hundred quid last year for a locket, the like of which was sitting on top of the hoard and looking almost lost among the bigger, weightier items. The shock of it dislodged the words her mother had said to her recently about her father buying up gold and storing it like a squirrel. I’ve still got it in that same tin , she’d said.

Amanda’s heart was booming in her chest; it felt as if it were knocking against her ribcage in an attempt to make a bid for freedom. Dear god . Well, she couldn’t leave this here in an empty house, could she? It was a possibility clued-up old-school burglars might call who’d make a beeline for under-Axminster treasures. With shaking, shocked hands, she tucked the carpet back into the corner, replaced the unit with all the knick-knacks and took the box of treasure with her for safekeeping.

Bon had noticed, when he was on the phone in his office, that Sky had been sewing with a smile playing on her lips, as if she was thinking about something who had amused her. Or someone.

He hoped it was someone, some handsome young man who would bring her some happiness. It seemed to him that she didn’t have much of a life really. He knew that she rented a room in a house. He knew that she was alone in the world, that she’d lost her mother when she was a child and her father when she had just turned twenty. She’d cared for him in his last years, she’d missed out on going to university and having a wild time. He knew that she’d grown up under the long shadow of rumours cast about her father which must have impacted upon her. Woodentop and Jock had known Eddie, as they called him, and both said that Mildred the art restorer was more likely to have done what he’d been accused of. They were protective of Sky, they looked out for her because she was fragile, but especially because she was one of their own. And what Woodentop had said about her being up in the cardiac unit of the hospital as a possible outpatient had been playing on his mind.

His feelings for her were complicated and he was frightened to look at them too closely, because what good would it do. When she first approached him to ask if she might rent a space in the shop, he’d been delighted, because Tony Cropper had been turning teddy bear work away for being too busy; but also teddies weren’t something of a passion for Tony the way they were for Sky. So this sweet, refreshing young woman had been a welcome addition to the crew and fitted in with them like the last piece of a jigsaw. And she was very good at what she did, a true expert who had been taught by a true expert. What she didn’t know about the history of bears, about the construction of bears, wasn’t worth talking about.

She was always quietly cheerful, she made the most coffees out of all of them to distribute. He had no idea when he had started to think what her hair might feel like if he pushed his hand into it, what her lips might taste like against his own because it was something primal inside him that was responding to her. He had no control over it, but he did have control over what he did about it.

He had kept that all to himself because she was twenty-three years younger than him. And some would have argued that might be fine if he was a Rolling Stone but there was more than mere age separating them. Bon was life-experienced, Sky was an ingénue, an innocent. It was right and proper that she met someone her own age and they could grow and mature together. He knew she liked him. Liked him. And he would have been lying to himself if he said that he didn’t like the warmth that bloomed in his heart at the thought that she might have a fraction of the feelings for him that he had for her.

When he was eighty, she’d be younger than sixty. He wouldn’t want her to be saddled with an old man. He knew that the flame that had fanned into life for her would blow out eventually, starved of oxygen. He knew that the feelings she had for him would be diverted as soon as someone of her own generation wandered into her orbit and paid her all the attention she should have.

But yes, he thought of her far too much, and even though Erin had shared her deepest, darkest secrets with him, he would not share this with her because it would make it real, and it couldn’t be.

He tried not to be drawn to Sky any more than he was to any of the others in the shop, but at the same time, he knew he took advantage of the flimsiest excuse to be near her when it presented itself to him. This morning was one such occasion, and though he hoped that the smile on her lips was because someone else had put it there, he also hoped that it wasn’t.

‘You look very chipper today,’ he said to her.

‘I am,’ she replied.

She’d been thinking about the meeting at the diner the previous evening, how good it felt to talk, to listen to the women, to share. They were older, almost thirty-years in Amanda’s case, and yet the age gap had been no barrier, it had been melted into oblivion by camaraderie. She’d laughed so many times revisiting the moment when mouth-on-legs Janine marched out after Astrid had walked in; and the collective relief of them all that she’d gone, which they’d celebrated with top-ups of drinks and squidgy cookies.

‘Am I allowed to ask why?’ enquired Bon, not sure if he wanted to know.

‘Nothing really. I haven’t won the lottery. I just had a nice evening.’ She added, ‘With friends,’ because she felt as if they could be, and would be. This was the start of them, and she hoped the others felt it too and would be back at the same time next week.

And even better, when she went home, Wilton wasn’t in and he’d stayed out all night so this morning she’d been able to have a peaceful coffee, even though she didn’t like to think of his lips being on the same rim of the mug, but she’d given it a hard scrub first, as she did now with anything she used in the house, including the bath and the loo seat.

‘Where was—’

They were interrupted by the front door opening and Gwyn Tankersley blasting in like a Siberian wind. Polished, preened, in heels and make-up, her hair an elegant caramel-gold twist secured by a single, glittery pin.

‘Bon, where is it? I can’t wait to see it,’ she announced without preamble, lipsticked smile wide and glossy. Her eyes were only on him, they didn’t even flicker in Sky’s direction.

‘Excuse me,’ said Bon to Sky. He walked Gwyn Tankersley through the shop and Sky went back to her sewing, albeit with her smile reduced.

Gwyn had rung ahead to check that Bon was around in person to pay. She wanted to thank him to his face, she’d said. Peter, the upholsterer, who took the call relayed it to Bon with a wry smile and said, ‘And if you believe that bollocks, Bon, you were born yesterday.’

‘She’ll have sniffed your divorce like vampires sniff blood,’ said Mildred. ‘I’d get Willy to make you a crucifix if I were you.’

Gwyn Tankersley was attractive, wealthy, self-assured and she gloried in the fact that men found her qualities alluring. When she set her sights on acquiring something – or someone – she had a high success rate. She would have been in like Flynn with Bon van der Meer had it not been for the fact he was married, but now he wasn’t and she was conveniently single at present. She knew what buttons to press to make men work. They were simple machines, she’d always thought, although she did like a challenge, as those were all the sweeter for the win.

She didn’t have to affect her admiration of Bon’s craftmanship skills, though. The desk, a present for herself, was absolutely stunning and, though indulgently expensive, was worth every penny of what she was about to pay him. One of a kind, a future heirloom. She could only imagine what the hands that made it were also capable of.

Bon took out a drawer and turned it upside down so she could see that there had been no skimping where materials had been concerned, no corners cut in artistry. He demonstrated the four lockable drawers, how smooth the mechanism was. And he showed her how to access the secret compartment in the knee hole. She let him show her, all the while wondering what his skin might smell like in bed.

‘It comes in three parts, they lock together when they are positioned correctly. No one would be able to pick it up otherwise, it’s a solid, heavy piece. I can have it delivered tomorrow morning. I hope your floorboards are strong.’

‘I can’t thank you enough,’ she said, licking her lip ever so slightly, just a small poke out of tongue. Her flirting skills were so refined they kicked into automatic responses, tailored to the subject.

‘Bon, I’m having a dinner party next Tuesday night. Just a few close friends; they’re all top company. I’ve hired one of the finalists from Masterchef to do the food, it’ll be excellent. Do join us. It’ll be great PR for you too, especially when they see the man behind the desk I fully intend to show off. If you are free, it would be wonderful, and I’m sure advantageous, for you to indulge in conversation about what you do here. I’d certainly be fascinated to hear all about it.’

Over Gwyn’s shoulder, Bon saw Tony ‘Toy’ Cropper giving him a cheeky thumbs up. He wasn’t a schmoozer, but Gwyn Tankersley was very well connected and if the restorers could get some extra traffic, then maybe it would be worth doing for them.

‘Then I’ll accept,’ replied Bon.

She let out a long breath, as if she’d been holding it in expectation of a positive answer.

‘Drinks at six, dinner at seven, dress code is black tie. Don’t drive, that’s an order. Right, let me pay you for this gorgeous thing.’

Bon led her to his office. He noted that Gwyn’s eyes had still not registered Sky, she was not even of the slightest significance. But the look in Sky’s eyes when the transaction was complete and Gwyn’s parting shot to him was, ‘See you on Tuesday at six,’ was quite the opposite.