Chapter eighteen
Iwoke up the next day with a euphoric Christmas Eve feeling bubbling in my stomach, and it took me a moment to remember why.
Fraser. I had a date with Fraser.
I wasn’t imagining it, was I? He’d seemed happy enough to see me, he’d specifically wanted to know if I was single, and we were meeting up the following weekend.
I hugged these facts to myself. No, it was incontrovertibly great news.
The universe’s reward for facing up to the office this week? Maybe.
I would have lain there hugging my happiness longer, had Jackie not phoned to ask if I could give her a hand moving some stuff back to the garage. ‘Sorry to bother you so early on a Sunday,’ she said, ‘but I need to leave in an hour. And I wouldn’t mind a quick word, if that’s OK?’
I said it was fine. I hoped the quick word would involve Fraser.
‘Mum’s having a lie-in,’ Jackie explained when she opened the back door to let me in. ‘Yesterday took a lot out of her.’
I followed her into the house, trying not to look too obviously over her shoulder to see if he was about. ‘The food looked amazing. Did she enjoy herself?’
‘I think she did, yes. Perry’s taken the boys into town to give her some peace and quiet. Fraser’s gone with them, of course. Cara and Heather have gone for a run. First sign of any tidying-up, and everyone disappears, don’t they?’
The kitchen table was stacked with the caterers’ dishes, crates of glasses, flower arrangements, everything washed and dried, ready to be collected.
I felt disappointed by the mass desertion; I’d imagined they’d be having a post-party brunch in the garden, scrambled eggs and bloody Marys, Nigella-style. ‘Is Fraser staying here?’
‘He stayed last night but he’s getting the noon train. Says he’s got things to prepare for a new role on Monday. He’s being typically mysterious about what it involves, but then I suppose that’s the whole point about cybersecurity.’
‘To be honest,’ I confessed, ‘I never really knew whether I didn’t understand his explanations or if being super-discreet was part of the job description.’
Jackie laughed. ‘Well, he found his vocation. I don’t know anyone who’s as hard to get information out of as Fraser.
Not just about work, about anything. We only ever knew what he was doing when you two were together because we could check your social media.
’ She stopped, and grimaced. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean it to sound like that’s the only reason we’d .
. . You know what I mean. Can you imagine if he had taken over The Cellars, though?
No prices on the shelves, customers having to text their orders several times before Fraser told them how much it was . . .’
‘Were you and Perry not interested in carrying on the business? Or Heather? Did it have to be Fraser or no one?’
Jackie flicked on the kettle. ‘It’s interesting that you ask that, Beth.
I don’t think we ever considered it. It was always just assumed Fraser would take over, and to be fair, Fraser never said he wouldn’t, until the moment came, and he announced that he didn’t want to.
Dad took it very personally, to be honest – family businesses, you know.
I’m guessing Mum encouraged him to sell up, though she’d never admit it.
He’d already had one lot of bypass surgery. ’
‘Did he see it as a snub? Fraser not seeing his future here?’
‘I suspect he did.’ She spooned coffee into the cafetiere.
‘Mum was furious, but in her very silent, controlled way. She took herself away on holiday for a week – Dad went to the Algarve to play golf with his friend Brian, but she didn’t even tell us where she’d gone.
She probably saw it as Fraser putting himself above Dad’s health, because Dad had to struggle on for another year or two before the sale happened.
It took Mum and Fraser a while to make it up. ’
I noticed a hardback book on the table next to a big box of chocolates. The Love Story of Martine and Ray in gold swirling embossing on a blue velvet background. It was the same swirling font as the lettering above Longhampton Cellars.
Jackie saw me looking. ‘That’s the present we gave Mum last night. Heather designed it. It’s got some funny photos in, have a look.’
I turned the pages. It began with black-and-white baby pictures of a chubby Ray on a crocheted blanket, and an even chubbier Martine wrapped in a lace christening shawl, and progressed through their post-war school days, through bare knees, school caps, ponies, quiffs, petticoats, and Christmas trees, to their engagement photograph, taken at a party where everyone already looked fifty, including the teens and the happy couple.
As announced on the formal invitation reproduced next to it, Martine and Ray had celebrated their engagement at the Green Dragon Hotel, on the fifteenth of September, 1967.
Elsewhere in the world, students were gearing up to revolt and LSD was turning the world into an acid-drop kaleidoscope but in Longhampton’s hotel ballroom, the sixties were not swinging.
Ray looked comfortable in a sports jacket and cravat, while Martine sported a three-strand pearl necklace, flat buckled shoes and a piled-high bouffant with a tiny bow in it like a Yorkshire terrier.
Even without the invitation to their engagement drinks, hosted by Martine’s mother, Mrs Martin O’Shaughnessy, I’d have put it at about 1967.
Regular exposure to the photograph albums of Rosemount had made me something of an expert on provincial mid-sixties fashion.
Ray’s dimpled smile was identical to the mayoral portrait taken fifty years later, give or take a couple of extra chins.
He’d barely changed – the jacket, the beefy arm around Martine, the confident planting of himself at the centre of his own world.
Martine, though, looked different; her face was rounder, her expression less straightforward than Ray’s.
She wasn’t quite looking at the photographer, and her mouth was twisted as if she was already regretting her choice of shoes.
Interspersed with the photographs were other invitations, a thank-you list for wedding presents, receipts, postcards, and so on, to reflect the Hendersons’ honeymoon, their early travels and first purchases.
Monochrome images of the sixties abruptly gave way to orangey technicolour in the seventies, just in time for the birth announcements in The Times, the Telegraph and The Longhampton Gazette of Jacqueline Rae Henderson in 1971, and a fresh flood of baby photos in the same christening gowns.
I turned the pages quickly, trying to get to the arrival of Fraser Raymond Martin Henderson – and there he was, the round-faced Cabbage Patch baby I recognised from the few baby photos I’d seen, truly his father’s son. My heart swelled.
And there he was again, smiling in red hand-me-down dungarees and yellow wellies, holding a spade, helping Dad with the gardening.
And again, on the mahogany counter of Longhampton Cellars with a Nebuchadnezzar of wine that was almost as tall as him.
And again, a spotty face peering out from between classic nineties ‘curtains’, at school prize day with his proud parents.
And again, at a wedding. I frowned. Hadn’t I been at that wedding with him?
‘You can see where Fraser gets his Desperate Dan jaw from, can’t you?’ Jackie leaned over and pointed out one I’d missed. ‘There, there he is with Grandpa Henderson – see? Two peas in a pod.’
‘I don’t know about Desperate Dan.’ Fraser had a strong jaw, like a Regency hero. ‘I always thought he was more Mr Incredible.’
‘Ha! Did he tell you to think that?’ She paused, her finger lingering over a candid shot of Martine, caught unawares on a sunlounger in big sunglasses, mid catlike stretch.
‘I wish I’d inherited a few more of Mum’s genes, instead of Dad’s.
She’s got that bone structure that just looks more and more elegant as the years go by. ’
I turned the pages, and in a sequence of passport photos, school photos, the soft-focus ‘hand under the chin’ author headshot I’d seen before, Martine slowly morphed from the willowy teen into a capable mother of four, and then into the distinguished older lady.
Always immaculately dressed, always smiling.
The mayor’s wife, president of the Mothers’ Union, all-round pillar of the community.
Something wriggled at the back of my mind: not a question, more an observation, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
Jackie was flipping through the book, looking for something.
‘Ah. Here it is,’ she said. ‘This is my favourite photograph of Mum and Dad. Can you believe Mum didn’t have a copy? I had to get it from my godmother.’
She turned the book round and showed it to me: it was a very similar photograph of Ray and Martine at their engagement party, but this one was in colour, so you could see the bold tangerines and browns of Ray’s sports jacket, and the egg-yolk yellow of Martine’s minidress, and the cheerful pink and green streamers trailing down the wall behind them.
But what really popped in the photograph was Martine’s glorious, piled-high beehive.
I stared at it, as the unspecific thought swam into sharp focus: Martine’s hair was a burnished copper-red, a fabulous warm orange like a sleek fox.
Or the same vibrant copper as a polished jam pan.
Wait. Was it her? I stared as words and images swam together in my head.
Was Martine the teenage fruit picker with the transistor radio?
I stared at the ambiguous half-smile on the young Martine’s face, trying to fit the lovelorn words of the anonymous memory to this person. Was it? Was she the confident young woman who’d skipped out of Longhampton to live in Manchester with the lover no one knew about at home?
Nessy. I turned back discreetly to the engagement invitation. Martine O’Shaughnessy. Of course!
More to the point, who was the completely head-over-heels man who’d fallen so hard for her? Because it couldn’t be Ray.