Authors: Jane Lovering
Slightly Foxed (2 page)
edge of the chair and trying to look comfortable.
"Right. What is this problem we have?" I cleared a pile of
Florence's schoolbooks off the sofa to enable me to sit
opposite Simon.
"Do you remember my buying in a stack from an auction
down in Exeter?"
I nodded. The wondrous Theo had been one of them.
"Well, I had a call this morning from a lady who'd traced
us through the auction records. Apparently they belonged to
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some uncle who died and the books had been promised to
her."
"So? Send them to her." I coughed to cover the sound of
the rustling as I kicked Theo underneath Florence's essays.
"Ah. You see, there's the problem. You've already shelved
most of them and...ah...I..." Simon was not a man to come
out and admit that he didn't know how his own shelving
system worked. He leaned forward earnestly and his
unsupported buttock trembled with tension. I knew because I
was watching. Okay I may not currently be a player, but I can
still appreciate good action on the field. "It's quite urgent
actually, Alys. She wants to pick the books up in the morning.
Is there any chance you could come in today and search them
out for me?"
"Double time," I said firmly, as though I'd been planning
an evening filled with debauched delights instead of
Stargate
SG-1
and a Walnut Whip.
"Time and a half."
"Give me a lift?"
"And I'll run you back."
I was about to agree, as long as he threw in lunch, when
the telephone rang making all of us jump, including Grainger.
"Alys? It's Piers." Familiar, slightly American vowels,
burnished with the sandpaper of good education, as the voice
of my ex-husband's stepson drifted down the telephone line.
"Has Florrie left yet?"
"About twenty minutes ago. Why?"
"Alasdair and Ma wanted me to pick her up and bring her
over to Richmond. We're going out to lunch with some
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friends. Thought it would be better if she came straight
there."
"She's got her mobile with her, why don't you give her a
call?"
There was a bit of a pause. "I kinda thought she might still
be home."
"Sorry, no. Goodbye. Oh, and Piers, please don't let her be
late for school tomorrow, she's got an exam," I finished
lamely, suddenly realising that Florence's GCSE textbooks
were spread over the floor in front of me.
"Sure." There was another long pause, as though Piers
wanted to say something else but wasn't certain how, which
was most unlike him. At twenty-one he already possessed
more than his fair share of self-confidence, good looks and
credit cards. "Well. Okay, yeah. Bye."
"Goodbye," I said again. "Sorry, Simon. Family stuff."
"Shall we go then?" Simon sounded slightly breathless,
and when he turned politely to open the door for me, I saw
why. Grainger had stapled himself to the back of Simon's Paul
Smith shirt and was hanging between his shoulder blades like
an ill-tempered rucksack with halitosis.
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Webbe's stood at the tail end of one of York's most popular
tourist streets, where all the shops were so old and bent
together that they looked like a pensioner's outing. The
bookshop's walls hung unwillingly towards its next-door
neighbour, an antique shop which sold overpolished copper
warming pans, and with whose owner Simon carried on a
viciously polite war of attrition over pavement space. The
entire area was so self-consciously historic that I felt I should
tint myself sepia just to work there.
As soon as he had unlocked the door, Simon retired to his
cubbyhole at the back of the shop. I used his ducking out to
hasten my way through the shelves and pick out all the books
from the list. They were a diverse bunch, a couple of very
nice illustrated Dickens, two books of collected maps, a
biography of Margaret Thatcher and a very dog-eared copy of
a Jilly Cooper novel minus the back cover. Theo Wood
remained securely underneath my sofa. I planned to send him
on in a couple of days, once I'd fully appreciated him. With
apologies, of course.
Finding the books took me about ten minutes. When I put
my head around the edge of the cubbyhole, Simon was sitting
cross legged in his armchair, engrossed in the Classic Serial,
and waved me away peremptorily with one finger. Whilst I
would quite like to have been invited into the inner sanctum
with its own kettle and seemingly endless supply of chocolate
HobNobs to listen to
The Mill on the Floss
, part of me was
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glad of the fully paid chance to ring Florence to check whether
or not Piers had caught up with her.
Florence answered, breathless.
"Hello, darling. Did Piers manage to intercept you all
right?"
"Yeah, sure. We're in Richmond having lunch by the river,
looking at a car that Piers wants to buy."
Bloody Piers, I thought, teeth gritted ever so slightly. "Is it
a nice car?"
"Not bad. Porsche 911. Horrible colour though."
"Oh," I said inadequately. "Oh dear. So"—desperate to
keep any kind of dialogue going with my daughter—"he might
not buy it then?"
Florence broke into hysterical giggles. "Yeah, right! Like
there's any such thing as a bad Porsche. He'll have it
resprayed. What did you call me for? Only Dad wants me to
give a hand with the drinks."
"Just to check whether you wanted to come back and pick
up your revision stuff?" I tried to keep it light, only a
question, but Florence had the teenage ability to pick an
insult out of a shopping list.
"For God's sake. Let me enjoy my Sunday in peace for
once without nagging on about those bloody exams!" She
turned off her phone abruptly. I could just imagine her nail
digging into the rubberised button, wishing it was my neck.
"Children. Such a joy," I muttered.
"Florence is not being loveable today?"
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I jumped. "God, Jace. How do you manage to creep up on
me in those shoes?" Jacinta simply looked smug. "Why are
you here? Does no one ever take a day off except for me?"
"I was coming past and I saw that lights are on. I am
bored so in I come."
"Well, come in, don't stand in the doorway. It's like a total
eclipse." Jace beamed at me again and sashayed into the
shop. Despite standing six foot two in her sheer black
stockings, Jacinta always wore stilettos and her well-padded
frame draped with tie-dye garments. The ensemble was
completed, as ever, with a selection of dangling silver
jewellery of various ethnicities. The overall effect was that of
Glastonbury on the move. "Your hair looks nice."
"You think?" She reached up and patted at where her long,
jet-black hair lay newly coiled around her head. Jacinta had a
thing for hairdressers and regularly spent large portions of
her (pitiful) salary on them. She'd come from South America
three years ago where I assumed she'd lived under an
oppressive regime where all hairdressers were locked up for
the common good.
"It's lovely." I stacked my selected pile of books against
the till. "If you want our esteemed boss, he's in the back
room."
"I go have words with him. He owes me moneys from last
week and I want to go buy a new dress."
She shimmied her way through the curtain into Simon's
space. I suppressed the urge to tiptoe after her and listen in
on their conversation. There always seemed to be some kind
of unspoken acknowledgement between them, a shared
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secret. Nothing ever happened to give a clue to the nature of
this relationship; it was more a feeling of things unsaid which
hung in the air when the two of them were together which
made me wonder if they shared more than the occasional
HobNob in the back room.
While they were closeted, I served a couple of casual
Sunday customers and was mooching around searching the
shelves, when Simon reappeared and told me it was time to
go home. Jacinta was just behind him, with the sleek
satisfaction of a woman on a frock-buying mission. "I go
now," she announced from the doorway, "to buy wonderful
new clothe. I see you tomorrow, Alys."
I examined both their faces for any traces of residual
postcoital contentment, then berated myself. Unless there
had been a major change of taste on her part, and his
indeterminate sexuality and overwhelming diffidence had
been won over by the sight of Jacinta in a bustier and garter
belt, I didn't seriously think that any rumpy-pumpy action had
been on the cards. "See you, Jace."
"You be nice to Florence." Jacinta wagged a finger at me,
leaning against the frame. "She is a very nice girl."
"Yeah, as long as you're not her mother."
Simon politely ushered me out of the shop towards his car
where we both paused for a moment, enjoying the seismic
sight of Jace rolling her way down the street. "So Florence is
over with Alasdair today?" he asked. "I must say, she's
turning out to be a very pretty young woman. Beautiful big
eyes she has. Must take after Alasdair's family, does she?"
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I narrowed my own, by extrapolation, piggily unattractive
eyes. "Mmm. I suppose so."
My tone must have penetrated Simon's general abstraction
and he turned to me. "Oh, I didn't mean... You mustn't
think... It's not... I mean, you're a
very...ahhh...umm...yourself, Alys."
I think I might have glared at him at this point.
I was feeling distinctly jaded when I let myself into the
flat. Grainger lay curled reproachfully on the sofa, one eye
wedged open for my return, the other eye sleeping the
peaceful sleep of a blameless cat.
"I'm back," I said unnecessarily to the smell, the silence
and the cat. "Now, where's Theo?" He was finally retrieved
from beneath the sofa where he had been attracting enough
fur to knit another cat. I tucked my feet up under myself, bit
the end off a coffee Walnut Whip and opened his pages at a
poem called "Distorted Vision", when there was a sharp tap
on the front door.
"Oh bugger." I laid Theo down and answered it.
Standing there, and causing almost as much astonishment
as Simon's earlier visit, was a man I hardly recognised. I'd
known Piers since Alasdair and Tamar had married four years
ago, was used to speaking to him on the phone, but I'd not
seen him for a while. When last sighted he had been a pretty
but unremarkable looking boy, but standing on my threshold
he seemed to have a broader chest than I'd remembered.
He'd lost the startled-in-a-glue-factory spiky hair in favour of
shoulder-length, expensively unkempt shagginess. A
smattering of proud stubble adorned sharp, pale cheekbones,
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his pallid skin contrasting with his shadow-dark hair as
though he was trading on what Florence called his "Orlando
Bloom with edges" look. He'd completed the show with a pair
of D&G sunglasses. This and the black designer jeans, black
T-shirt, black leather jacket apparel made him look as though
he were on the run from a Transylvanian boy-band.
"Hello, Piers," I said, when he didn't say anything following
my opening of the door. I hoped I hadn't been staring at him
in silence for too long.
"Hey. Alys." He was gazing past me, into the flat. "I
thought, I mean, I heard Florence left her revision stuff here.
Thought I'd come by and pick it up."
Maybe Florence had changed her mind about revision.
Maybe she'd decided to spend the rest of Sunday rereading
her notes. Oh yeah, and maybe I was going to be the next
face of L'Oreal. "Did Florence ask you to come?" I was still not
opening the door wide enough to let him in, and he was still
not meeting my eye.
"Not exactly. I just bought this car—wanted to give it a
try-out, found myself over this way. I thought, well, okay,
two birds with one stone kinda thing. You know."
"Out
this way
? From
Richmond
?" Richmond was about fifty
miles north. Not exactly popping next door.
"Yeah." He took his sunglasses off and began twiddling
them between his fingers. "A19." Now he looked at me and I
was taken aback by the expression in his dark eyes. He
looked almost—nervous?
"Piers." I stood back now to let him come in. "Is
everything all right?"
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"I'm..." Again, that look of, not panic exactly, but
