The Honey Queen (31 page)

Minnie glared up at her ferociously.

‘Chocolate,’ she hissed.

‘We’ll see,’ said her mother, passing the paper to Frankie. ‘I better get my shopping. You know how kids are. They get bored.’

‘Yes,’ said Frankie faintly, stowing Amy’s number carefully in her bag.

‘See you.’ And Amy set off with Minnie in the direction of the peppers.

Frankie continued on her own way round the shop, but found she couldn’t resist glancing over at Amy every few minutes. She looked so good. All glowing and happy, whereas Frankie felt terribly uptight. Amy joined the queue to pay, then turned and waved at Frankie as she and Minnie left the shop.

Sweet potato and roast pepper soup. It sounded delicious. Frankie decided that she was going to make it too. It couldn’t be that hard. There were recipe books. Sweet potatoes, where were the sweet potatoes?

Amy was right. Things needed to be calmer in Frankie’s life. Tomorrow she’d make some lovely soup and then she, Seth and Lillie might sit out on a weed-free bit of patio and eat it with the organic bread Lillie got from the bakery.

It was nice having Lillie around. She was very calming. She might even know how to make soup. Frankie paid for her purchases, buying probably more than she needed, determined that she was going to be part of the lovely golden-soup-world too. But as she carried her haul back to the car she couldn’t suppress a faint sense of unease. Something wasn’t right in her life. And soup wasn’t going to fix it.

I
t was a journey Peggy didn’t want to make but she knew she had to. Her mother’s birthday was at the weekend, but Peggy couldn’t afford to be away then as Fifi was off that Saturday and there would be nobody to mind the shop.

So she’d do it tomorrow. One day to drive up and see her mother. And her father. Stay the night, and then go back home in the morning.

Fifi was going to take over the shop for two days and even though Peggy trusted her implicitly, it still broke her heart to leave. ‘You’ll call me, won’t you, if there’re any problems?’ Peggy had said the evening before as they’d closed up and she’d carried out her nightly ritual of checking windows, cupboards, the back door, locks, everything.

‘Yes,’ said Fifi, with the endless patience she showed to first-time knitters who couldn’t quite get the hang of plain and purl. ‘It’s going to be fine, I promise you.’

‘But you might have an emergency,’ Peggy said. ‘What if Coco gets sick?’ Coco was Fifi’s six-year-old daughter, an adorable imp perfectly suited to her name, with the dancing dark eyes of her mother and the milky-coffee-coloured skin of her long-gone father.

‘Coco doesn’t get sick. She’s got the constitution of an ox,’ Fifi said. ‘Listen, all eventualities will be covered. If needs be, my mum can look after her.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Peggy reminding herself that Fifi had her mum as back-up.

That was important: back-up. She felt the wash of fear every time she thought of the baby inside her and the lack of back-up in her life. She felt so alone. She hadn’t even dared tell Fifi about the baby yet.

‘Fine, yes, I’m just being silly, aren’t I?’ said Peggy.

‘You’re not.’ Fifi’s endless patience turned itself to Peggy again. ‘You’re not being crazy at all. The shop is your baby, same as Coco will always be mine.’

‘Yeah,’ Peggy managed to say. She wanted to talk to Fifi about her
actual
baby, because if anybody knew what it was like to be pregnant and single it was Fifi.

But Peggy wasn’t ready to talk. She still didn’t know what she was going to do, what would happen and how she could go through with having this child. How on earth was she going to manage?

‘Why don’t you come over for dinner?’ Fifi said impulsively.

‘I can’t, really, I’m busy,’ said Peggy, which was pretty much what she always said. She’d only gone to Fifi’s once for dinner and it had been so gorgeously comforting and lovely, she’d felt miserable going back to her own ugly cottage.

‘I insist,’ said Fifi. ‘C’mon. Follow me in your car and we’ll go to my mum’s first and pick up Coco.’

There didn’t seem to be any option, so Peggy obediently hopped into her car.

Fifi’s mum lived a ten-minute drive away at the end of a rambling terrace of houses. Peggy pulled up behind her, outside a house that looked as if wisteria from space had come in and colonized the entire downstairs floor. Wisteria hung off the overhanging porch and crept along above the windows.

‘It’s a bit mad, isn’t it?’ Fifi said when they met outside the house. ‘Mum loves it. One day it’ll make its way into the roof and we’ll probably get branches creeping down into the bedrooms. I think it wants to take over the whole house, but she’s letting it. It comes in peace.’

Fifi’s mum Geraldine had barely opened the door before Coco rushed out yelling, ‘Mum!’ and threw herself into her mother’s arms. Peggy was used to seeing her in uniform on days when Fifi dropped into the shop after picking Coco up from school. But today Coco had changed out of her school uniform at her grandmother’s and was dressed in a riot of colours as if one wasn’t quite enough. Little turquoise jeans, orange socks, pink shoes and a T-shirt with sparkles on it in the shape of a butterfly.

‘You need a cardigan, it’s chilly,’ Fifi scolded fondly.

‘I’ve been telling her that all day,’ Geraldine said, giving Fifi a hug and then one to Peggy.

‘Is Peggy coming home to our house?’ Coco asked.

‘She’s coming to dinner,’ said Fifi.

‘Oh, how nice,’ said Geraldine. ‘Can I come too? I was going to go to bingo, but to be honest I’ve a bit of a headache and I think the noise would kill me.’

‘Sure, the more the merrier,’ said Fifi.

Geraldine fetched her coat and a cake tin and elected to go in Peggy’s car. She chatted happily as they drove to Fifi’s house, another five minutes up the road.

Normally Peggy listened to music in the car but now she turned the radio off and enjoyed the comforting sound of Geraldine’s voice.

‘She’s such a pet of a child,’ said Geraldine, who seemed to have an endless store of anecdotes about her granddaughter. ‘We did a bit of baking today after school. She said she had no homework – I don’t believe her, the minx. So we baked muffins. Coco wanted to be in charge of the weighing. They haven’t turned out too bad, a bit damp in the middle. I brought some anyway.’

Geraldine was probably the same age as Peggy’s own mum, Peggy thought. But she was so different. She was happy, there was no fear in her.

Fifi lived in a ground-floor apartment in a big three-storey house overlooking some waste ground that Geraldine informed her was being turned into a park. Behind that and the allotments, was Maple Avenue, a street of large houses with one huge run-down Victorian redbrick on the corner.

In Fifi’s light, bright home there were two bedrooms and a roomy open-plan kitchen/dining-room/sitting-room area. Gordon the guinea pig sat in his cage near the patio doors and looked delighted to see everyone while Shadow, an elegant, sleek, black cat, stalked past and ran out as soon as the door was opened.

‘Your cat flap was there for you, sir,’ Fifi said to his departing elevated tail. ‘He just likes to stay home and stare at poor Gordon to frighten the life out of him. Go on, Coco, we’ll let Gordon out for a bit of a play.’

‘Just a minute!’ Coco dumped her school bag and ran off into the bedroom. Geraldine headed straight for the kitchen area.

‘Is Coco changing again?’ Fifi asked.

‘Yes,’ said her mother, opening the fridge. ‘She likes to change clothes four times a day. The washing machine will break soon. What are we having?’ Geraldine peered up at her from the fridge.

‘I don’t know,’ said Fifi. ‘What have we got in there?’

‘There’s a little lasagne.’

‘That’s for Coco.’

Coco’s meals were painstakingly cooked and frozen on Sundays, Fifi had told Peggy. An assortment of child nutrition and recipe books were lined up on one wall of the gleaming yellow kitchen.

There was a warm atmosphere at Fifi’s that had nothing to do with heating or yellow walls. Peggy didn’t have much experience of other family homes – going to other girls’ homes when she’d been a kid had been a no-no because then, they might want to come back to hers. This was a home that was easy, light, friendly. There was no need to be afraid she was upsetting the balance, the way she would have been in her childhood home. Here there was no anxiety about visitors. Everyone was welcome.

‘You’ve loads of eggs,’ said Geraldine, poking around in the fridge. ‘Open a few cupboards there, Peggy, and see what else she has. The vegetables are in that hanging rack. We have to keep them high up or when Gordon gets out, he heads straight for them.’

Coco was now dressed in comfy sweatpants. Gordon was on the couch with her, being stroked and adored.

‘Look, Gordon can do a trick,’ called Coco as she put Gordon on one end of the back of the couch. ‘Go, Gordon,’ she said, and clicked her fingers. Gordon immediately scurried right down to the other end, turned around and came back. Everyone clapped.

‘Well done, Gordon,’ said Fifi, going to kiss her daughter on the top of her head. She gave Gordon a snuggle too. ‘Very clever guinea pig.’

Peggy, who was searching for vegetables, could have sworn Gordon smiled up at Fifi.

‘Is he house trained?’ she asked Coco.

‘Oh, he’s very good,’ said Coco. ‘Guinea pigs are clever, you know. People think they’re stupid and they’re rats or something, but they’re not. Gordon has genius IQ.’

‘Really?’

‘I don’t know for sure,’ Coco said, staring deeply into her pet’s twitching furry face, ‘but he’s clever, I can tell. Look into his eyes.’

Peggy obediently went to look into Gordon’s eyes. He gazed at her beadily. She failed to see any glint of Einstein-ness in there, but if Coco said he was a genius, that was good enough for her. She was a remarkably clever, funny little girl, full of delicious scampiness and yet kind and gentle too.

‘Peggy, you sit there with Coco,’ said Geraldine, watching them from the kitchen area. ‘You look pale. You’re probably working too hard. I’ll do a bit of fluthering around here and rustle up something.’

‘We’ll do it together,’ said Fifi companionably to her mother.

‘Oooh, sit beside me, Peggy,’ Coco said happily. She curled on the couch like a sprite with Gordon on her lap. ‘Tell me a story about fairies and goblins and elves and a mean queen,’ Coco went on, ‘who built a castle and put the princess inside it and er – what else, what else, Mum?’ she roared.

‘How about the prince who was supposed to come but his car broke down and he couldn’t fix it, so the princess had to figure a way of getting out all by herself?’ said Fifi, who was chopping vegetables.

Coco giggled.

‘I love your feminist fairy stories, Fifi,’ said Geraldine from the stove.

‘There’s too much pink fairyness in girls’ stories,’ Fifi said cheerfully. ‘I don’t want her thinking that the prince is always going to rescue her.’

‘I don’t think we want anyone to rescue her,’ Geraldine said loudly. ‘We want her with us forever, don’t we, Cocs? We want you with us forever, my bunny rabbit.’

Coco grinned.

Peggy felt as if she was watching everything from a slight distance, and yet she wasn’t. She was here in the middle. There was so much love and happiness in this home, no strain, no tension, no anxiety over what to cook for dinner. Suddenly two more people had been added to the catering and Fifi was calmly trying to accommodate them.

‘Can I have some television?’ Coco wheedled.

‘No television until after dinner, and then we can have perhaps half an hour of something on the animal channel. I know you’ll have watched telly at your granny’s and you can’t sit in front of the box all day.’

‘As if you’d let me,’ grumbled Coco. ‘Was your mummy like that?’ she demanded of Peggy. ‘Everyone in my class watches television all the time and I’m not allowed.’

‘You’ll get square eyes,’ her mother cried.

‘Won’t.’

‘Will.’

If she had a baby she’d have to have rules about television and learn how to cook nutritious meals and do things like that, Peggy thought in alarm. How was she going to do it? It wasn’t that she was incapable – she was capable of so much – but taking care of a child, the welfare of a child … How did you learn to do all that stuff?

It couldn’t just come naturally, and if it was supposed to be in you from your own childhood, well then, there was no hope for her.

The next morning the sky was dark and thunderous. Heavy clouds swollen with rain loomed ahead of her on the road as she set off for her parents’ home. Peggy had gone to bed late, having sat up at the little kitchen table with Geraldine and Fifi until half past ten, talking, laughing at their funny stories. Geraldine was having great fun recounting tales of all Fifi’s unsuitable boyfriends over the years, starting with Laurie, the one with the long hair who had gone off with her best friend.

‘She can’t have been much of a best friend,’ said Peggy.

‘He was very good looking,’ admitted Fifi. ‘I forgave her. He just had this power about him, this charisma, and you couldn’t say no.’

Eventually, talk turned to Fifi’s father, who’d died a few years before.

‘Dad was hilarious,’ Fifi said fondly. ‘Whenever any of my boyfriends came into the house to collect me, Dad would stand with them in the living room and they’d have this sort of man chat. Dad would say, “Now you look after my little girl, won’t you?” and try to look a bit menacing.’

‘Which he couldn’t really do,’ said Geraldine.

‘No,’ agreed Fifi. ‘He couldn’t do menacing at all. It always ended up looking as if he had a bad case of acid reflux. He was too much of a sweetie to be menacing. But anyway, I’d be mortified and whoever it was would go puce in the face, because they didn’t expect that really. Nobody else’s dad did it.’

‘Your dad just wanted to mind you,’ Geraldine pointed out.

‘I know, and he did,’ said Fifi, reaching over to squeeze her mum’s hand affectionately.

There were tears in both their eyes. ‘It’s nearly three years,’ said Geraldine sadly. ‘Massive heart attack. Instant. Better for him, he was such a vital man, so energetic.’