Now and Then Friends (9 page)

Her mother winced but then lifted her chin in what looked like a pantomime of bravado. “I suppose I'll have to, won't I?”

“Yes, I'm afraid you will.” Her voice came out sharper than she had meant for it to. She was starting to feel savage; everything today seemed to be crowding her in, reminding her of how small and suffocating her life was and always would be.

She fetched a bottle of ibuprofen and poured her mother a glass of water. Janice Campbell heaved herself up against the pillows.

“Sorry, love.”

“It's not your fault.” Bloody Meghan. With an impatient breath, Rachel helped her mother to rest against the pillows and then handed her two tablets.

“Better make it three.”

Wordlessly Rachel shook out a third and handed it over. After her mother had swallowed the pills, she headed upstairs to where Lily's music and Nathan's wailing were competing in both volume and aggravation. Rachel decided to tackle Meghan first.

“Meghan, why didn't you deal with the prescription before I came home?”

“Say again?” Meghan glanced up from the mirror propped on top of her dresser, a lipstick in one hand. Nathan was wrapped around her legs, his head peeking out between her knees. At Rachel's entrance, he'd stopped crying, at least for a second.

“Ray-Ray!”

“Hey, Nath.” She patted his head before turning back to Meghan.
“Mum's prescriptions. She said you dropped half the pills down the toilet this morning. But you had all day to deal with it, and you didn't.”

Meghan stared at her for a moment, nonplussed, and then turned back to gaze at her reflection. “Oh. Yeah.” Slowly she leaned forward and outlined her lips in carmine red.

“
Meghan.
Seriously? That's all you're going to say?”

Meghan shrugged, her eyes still on her reflection. “What would you like me to say?”

“Oh, I don't know. Sorry, maybe?”

“Okay. Sorry.” She smacked her lips together, unrepentant.

“Why didn't you phone the prescription in, or text me? I could have picked it up on the way home.” Meghan didn't answer, and for the first time since she'd come into the room, Rachel registered her sister's outfit: tight miniskirt, clingy top, and way too much makeup. “You're not working at the pub tonight, are you?”

“Nope.”

“Then why . . . ?” Nathan started crying again, a halfhearted attempt that told Rachel he was either exhausted or knew it wouldn't get him anywhere. Probably both.

“I'm going out.” Meghan nudged Nathan with her foot. “Oy. A little quieter.”

“Going out? And I'm babysitting Nathan, I suppose?”

Meghan flicked her gaze from her reflection to Rachel. “I'll put Nathan to sleep first, if you can't be arsed.”

“He's your son,” Rachel snapped, then took a deep breath. This wasn't Nathan's fault. “Sorry.”

“You should be.”

Meghan hauled Nathan up onto her hip, and he hooked one hand around the neckline of her top so Rachel could see the strap of a cherry red bra underneath. It looked new.

“Are you going out on a
date
?”

“Maybe.”

Meghan had always been tight-lipped about her love life. No one even knew who Nathan's father was, only that he wasn't in the picture and never had been. One day she'd announced she was pregnant, she was keeping the baby, and no one was to question or even discuss it. Rachel had been overwhelmed at the thought of coping with a newborn along with their mother and Lily, but she could hardly demand Meghan not have the baby. And she loved Nathan, even if she felt as if her maternal affection had been spent on Lily.

Since Nathan's birth Meghan had gone out on the occasional Saturday night with some girlfriends, but never on a Wednesday and never looking like . . . that. “You're not dressed like a maybe,” Rachel said, and Meghan smiled smugly.

“Just because you haven't been able to get it on with Rob Telford doesn't mean I can't try.”

“You're going on a date with
Rob Telford
?”

“No, but then neither are you.”

Rachel shook her head, exasperated. “So who, then?”

“Never you mind. Come on, Nath.” Meghan yanked a pair of Thomas the Tank Engine pajamas from the top drawer of the bureau she shared with her son. “Time to get ready for bed.”

“I haven't even started tea yet—”

“Nathan and I had toasties down at the beach café.”

“In this weather?” It was still raining outside, the drops hitting the windows like bullets.

Meghan shrugged. “It gave us something to do, and Nathan likes to play with Noah.” She picked Nathan up and plopped him on the bed, stripping the clothes from his toddler-belly body with practiced speed.

“If you need something to do, how about cleaning the house? Or making tea? Or getting Mum's prescription refilled?”

For a second Meghan's eyes flashed with ire. “I took care of my own tea, and you'll find the sitting room is actually decent.”

“And Mum's prescription—”

“I forgot. I'm sorry, okay?” Her voice rose, and alarmed, Nathan let out an experimental cry they both ignored. Meghan took a deep breath and flipped her hair over her shoulders. “Look, I told you I'll put Nathan to bed before I go out. What's the big deal?”

The big deal was Rachel wanted to go out. She wanted to escape the confines of her life for an evening, flirt with Rob Telford or anyone,
forget
for a few minutes. She stared at Meghan for a few seconds and then sighed. “There's no big deal. Come on, Nathan.” She scooped the little boy up into her arms. “How about we do some coloring?”

“He could use some Calpol before bed,” Meghan said as she grabbed her jacket, a red scrap of cotton that looked as skimpy as her top. “He's still teething.”

“I believe you,” Rachel said, and started for the hallway.

“Rachel?” Meghan called, and for once her voice sounded uncertain. “Thank you.”

“You're welcome.” Rachel set Nathan up with a coloring book and crayons while she tidied the kitchen; the sitting room might have been decent, but the kitchen was not. Then she put some sausages in the oven for dinner and went back upstairs to confront Lily. Meghan had already left, banging the front door behind her.

“Lily?” Rachel poked her head into her sister's bedroom. Lily was lying on her stomach on her bed, music blaring, a sketch pad in front of her.

She looked up warily. “Yeah?”

Rachel leaned against the doorframe, trying to summon the energy for what had the potential to be another difficult conversation. “Hey, your parent-teacher conference was yesterday. Why didn't you remind me?”

Guilt flashed across her sister's face. “You seemed tired.”

“I still wanted to go,” Rachel said. She studied Lily's face; her sister looked as if she was hiding something. Rachel recognized the downcast gaze, the bit lip, from when Lily had been small. But this wasn't a
case of sneaking a sweet. “Did you tell me about the conference in the first place?” she asked carefully.

“No,” Lily said after a second's pause. “I didn't want to.”

“Lily.” Rachel tried to keep the hurt from her voice. “Why not?”

“Because I knew what the teachers were going to say. You didn't need to hear it.”

“Maybe I should be the one to make that decision. And I am going to hear it, because your biology teacher called me this afternoon. I want to be involved, Lily.”

Lily's face took on a closed, pinched look. “What did she say?”

“Just that I missed the conference. I'm seeing her tomorrow afternoon. And I'll see the others too, if you give me their details.” Besides biology, Lily took further maths and business studies. She'd dropped Design and Technology after she'd completed her AS level.

Wordlessly, Lily wrote some names down on her sketch pad, tore off the strip of paper, and handed it to Rachel. “Their e-mail addresses are on the school Web site.”

“Thank you,” Rachel said, wishing this wasn't such a battle. Didn't Lily realize how lucky she was? How much opportunity she had? She knew Lily wouldn't appreciate her reminders, and so she said nothing.

The smell of burning sausages brought her back downstairs. She had just taken them out of the oven—blackened on one side, raw on the other—when the front doorbell rang.

With a groan Rachel dumped the tray of sausages onto the stove top and went to the door.

Her mouth opened in shock and no words came out when she saw Andrew West standing there, his expression as serious as ever.

“Hello, Rachel,” he said. “Can we talk?”

After throwing on her clothes and grabbing a banana, Claire bolted out of the house and sprinted down the lane towards the village shop. She was going to be at least twenty minutes late for her first day of work. She'd probably be fired.

She weaved between the trickle of late commuters heading for the station and squeezed past a farmer coming out of the shop with a loaf of bread under one arm and then stood in front of the till, panting, disheveled, and twenty-five minutes late.

“Sorry.”

Dan Trenton didn't even look up from the till. “You're late.”

“I know. I overslept. I didn't hear the alarm.” She'd slept on her good ear, which she hardly ever did, but the persistent pattering of the rain last night had bothered her, and if she slept that way, she couldn't hear anything, including the alarm. Somehow she didn't think Dan was interested in her excuses. “I'm really sorry. It will never happen again.”

Finally he closed the drawer of the cash register and looked up, his expression as unwelcoming as ever. “You can start on the newspapers.”

“The newspapers?”

He nodded towards the empty rack to the right of the counter. Several stacks of freshly printed and delivered newspapers were pushed up against the wall, each one bound with plastic cord. “They need to go on
the shelves. The
Telegraph
at the top, the
Times
underneath, then the
Guardian
and the local papers at the bottom. Think you can manage that?”

“
Telegraph
,
Times
,
Guardian
, local. Yes. Right.”

Dan handed her a pair of scissors. “To cut the cords,” he explained when she looked at him blankly.

“Okay. Thanks.” He'd turned away even though no one had entered the shop, and so Claire went to work.

It wasn't particularly interesting work to cut the cords binding the stacks and then slide the newspapers onto the shelves. She glanced at some of the headlines on the national papers; they were the usual dreck about the royal family, an MP who was accused of corruption, troubles with a large bank.

She glanced back at Dan, who was ringing up a loaf of bread and a tin of cat food for a middle-aged woman Claire vaguely recognized. When the woman had gone, she decided to try a little light conversation.

“Do you carry any tabloids?”

“No.”

“They must sell pretty well, though.”

“So does porn, and I don't sell that either.”

Startled, Claire tried for light. “A man of morals, then.”

“Principles, maybe.” Finally he glanced over at her. “When you're finished there, you can unload the milk.”

Claire glanced around the little shop; the refrigerated section that usually held milk, butter, and a few pots of yogurt was nearly empty. “Where's the milk?”

“It hasn't arrived yet.”

A jogger decked out in a lot of bright spandex came in for a bottle of Vitaminwater and Claire got back to stacking.

By the time she'd finished, she felt tired and dirty, and it was only a little after nine o'clock in the morning. Still, she'd accomplished something, and that felt good. While she'd been working, the milkman had arrived, wearing the Cumbrian farmer's uniform of flat cap, wool jacket,
plus fours, and mud-splattered Wellington boots. He unloaded the milk from a huge plastic crate, chatted with Dan in a nearly incomprehensible accent, and then disappeared.

With the newspapers finished, she started on the milk, developing a rhythm of lifting, swinging, and putting down. She'd finished about half the crate when Dan's voice, sharp with irritation, stopped her cold.

“What the bloody hell do you think you're doing?”

Claire's mouth dried and her mind spun. She
hated
confrontation. And Dan Trenton was looking extremely confrontational, with his massive hands planted on his hips, biceps bulging, and his face contorted into the darkest scowl Claire had yet to see him make.

“Stacking the milk?”

“You've smeared the newspaper ink all over the bottles,” Dan exclaimed. “Don't you even look at what you're doing?”

Claire blinked, and then saw the black ink smeared across the glass of the pint bottles. She looked down at her hands and realized they were covered in ink smudges from the freshly printed newspapers. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn't realize . . .”

“Obviously.”

She could feel heat surging into her face. “I'll wipe it off—”

“Go wash your hands,” Dan ordered. “There's a sink in the back.” He pointed towards a door in the back of the shop, by the post office counter.

Feeling like a scolded schoolgirl, Claire went. The door opened onto a narrow passage that led to the area behind the post office on one side and on the other to what she realized must be Dan's living quarters.

She was just stepping through to the kitchen when she heard Dan call, “Mind the dog.”

“Dog . . . ?” She looked around nervously; she really wasn't a dog person, and Dan Trenton didn't seem like the type to have one of those cute little keep-in-your-handbag ones.

“She doesn't bite,” Dan called, which wasn't all that reassuring. “Just don't pet her.”

Claire stepped cautiously into the kitchen, but she didn't see any dog. She breathed a sigh of relief and then glanced around, taking in the tiny room with its ancient appliances and big stone farmhouse sink, a window overlooking a small courtyard of cracked concrete. The kitchen was tidy to the point of barrenness, the only sign that anyone actually lived here a single bowl and spoon drying in the dish drainer.

Claire washed her hands at the sink, her gaze moving around the room. She was curious, wanting to pry a little into Dan's life, but there was nothing to see. As she dried her hands on the tea towel hanging on the railing of the small cooker, she saw a flight of steep, narrow stairs leading to the second floor. She couldn't see what was at the top, and she wondered if the rest of Dan Trenton's little house was as clean and empty as his kitchen.

Deciding she'd spent enough time speculating, she turned to go back into the shop, and that was when she saw the dog cowering under the table.

“Oh . . .” She felt a surprising dart of sympathy for the animal. It was trembling with what could only be terror. “Hey,” she said softly to the dog, and it cringed back. It was white with brown and black patches and looked like some kind of springer. Maybe. She'd never been good at identifying breeds.

She heeded Dan's warning about not petting it and hurried back into the shop. An elderly woman was standing by the newspapers, squinting at the cover of the
Telegraph.

“Can I help you?” Claire asked, and the woman's head jerked up.

“I can pick out my own paper, thank you,” she snapped, and tucking the paper under her arm, she reached for a pint of milk.

Dan must have polished the bottles, for there were no traces of smeared ink to be seen on the glass. Claire stood there uncertainly while the woman took her purchases to the counter.

“That will be two pounds twenty,” Dan said. He wasn't friendly to anyone, it seemed, except maybe the milkman.

The woman retrieved a little coin purse of faded embroidered silk. “I knew your mother,” she said as she counted out several twenty-pence coins. “We were both in the embroidery club.”

It wasn't until the woman had pushed the coins across to Dan that Claire realized she'd been speaking to her.

“Oh, did you? I didn't know Mum embroidered.”

“Every Tuesday for ten years,” the woman said as she collected her paper and milk. “Until she moved down to London.” She glanced at Claire, her eyes small and shrewd in her wrinkled face. “You can tell her Eleanor Carwell says hello.”

“Yes, of course I will, Mrs. Carwell,” Claire answered.

“It's ‘Miss,'” she said, and left the shop.

Claire sagged a little. She'd been at this job for less than two hours and already she wanted to go home. She didn't think she could stand Dan Trenton's unfriendliness along with a potential parade of villagers who knew her or her family, not to mention the fact that she'd done a rubbish job at the most basic thing Dan had asked of her.

Resolutely she turned to him. She wasn't going to give up now. “Thank you for wiping off the milk bottles. I would have done it, though.” Dan grunted in reply. “What should I do now?” Claire asked.

For a second she thought she saw something flicker on his face, some semipositive emotion, but it was gone so quickly she couldn't be sure. “You can check the expiration dates on all the tins,” Dan said, and pointed to a shelf of baked beans, tomato soup, and other basic items. “Throw out anything that's expired.” He reached under the counter and produced a cardboard box. “Think you can manage that?”

“Yes,” Claire answered a bit sharply. She could only take so much sarcasm. “I know I am new to this, but I'm not an idiot.” Dan didn't reply.

“I didn't know you had a dog,” she remarked as she started searching for the expiration dates stamped on a variety of unappealing-looking tins.

“Why would you?”

“I don't know. He never comes into the shop?”

“She, and no. That wouldn't be hygienic.”

Claire pictured the dog cringing under the table. “But she must get lonely.”

“I take care of her fine. I walk her at lunchtime and at the end of the day.”

“I . . . I didn't mean . . .” Claire began, and Dan sighed.

“I know you didn't,” he said, and turned away.

A few hours into her first day and Claire ached with exhaustion, not just from bending and straightening from hours of stacking or checking and then chucking tins, but from sharing the same small space with a man who radiated tension. Dan Trenton seemed like the most unlikely person to run a cozy little shop. He should be smiling and chatty and leaning over the counter as he talked to people. Instead he simmered with latent anger, seeming almost to resent anyone who dared come through the doors. She wondered what had possessed him to take this job, but she didn't have the courage to ask.

She'd certainly seen enough tinned goods to last a lifetime. “Tinned golden syrup pudding?” she asked as she chucked a tin into the nearly full box at her feet. “It expired three months ago. Does anyone buy this stuff?”

“I stock a full range of tinned items,” Dan answered. He was feeding scratch cards into the Lottery ticket dispenser.

“I know, but if no one buys it, surely you shouldn't stock it?” Claire returned. “Tinned deviled eggs . . . How do they even
do
that? And does anyone eat Spam anymore?”

“I do,” Dan said, and she didn't think he was joking.

“What about getting in some different things?” she suggested. “Something people actually want to eat?”

“Like caviar or black truffles?” Dan filled in. “You might be used to such luxury items, but most people in Hartley-by-the-Sea are a little more plebeian.”

She turned around, pressing her hands to the pulsing ache in the small of her back. “You think I eat truffles and caviar?”

“You know what I mean. You're wealthy.”

“My parents are wealthy,” she corrected. “I'm not really.” Although her parents had always subsidized her lifestyle, so she couldn't quibble too much. “I certainly don't eat caviar. Anyway,” she said, trying for brightness, “here I am working in a shop.”

“Your choice.”

“I know.” She gazed at him for a moment, wondering if he had a particular problem with her or just with everyone. “Sorry I said anything about the tins,” she said at last. “Clearly you're not looking for suggestions.”

Dan didn't answer.

At noon he gave her a half-hour break for lunch. She bought a meat-and-potato pie from the warming oven that was propped on one end of the counter. The pies, she'd already learned, were delivered by a local baker at eleven.

She'd eaten the pie standing outside, under the awning, because the rain had still been sleeting down, and watched a few people hurry down the pavement, heads ducked low as if somehow that helped in avoiding the rain. The pie was mushy and tasteless, but at least it was hot, and the street seemed to be washed in gray, a muted landscape of somewhat dingy-looking terraced houses under a heavy, dark sky. She'd grown up here, walked down this street a thousand times during her five years at the primary school, but it felt unfamiliar to her now. The years at uni, and then in London and Portugal, had separated her from the life she'd once had in Hartley-by-the-Sea. She felt as if she were looking through the wrong end of a kaleidoscope when she recalled her years here.

And yet, for a second, she could picture herself, as if watching an old film, walking up the street in her pinafore and plaits. She could see Rachel at the top by the school lane, waiting for her. They always went
in together, linking arms. That sense of solidarity had been so welcome, so needed. Claire didn't think she'd experienced it since.