The Vintage Summer Wedding (13 page)

‘Goodness me,’ said Mrs Beedle as Anna walked up to the shop. ‘Isn’t this a surprise? Early.’ She locked her sludge-green Morris Minor Traveller and pushed her massive owl sunglasses up into her grey beehive, then went round to the boot and fiddled about with the rusty lock until it clicked open. ‘Is that a guilty conscience about my clock, Anna Whitehall?’

‘No,’ she said quickly, shaking her head.

Mrs Beedle laughed, hauling open the boot with one hand. ‘So like your father.’

The words made Anna shudder. Especially with the Luke debacle and not knowing what had happened to Seb. Was adultery hereditary? she wondered, then scoffed ‒ adultery! It wasn’t adultery. One meeting didn’t equal a two-year affair with the local flame-haired auctioneer that ripped apart a little family and left her mother with the burden of a lifetime of revenge, and Anna with a lifetime of having to find different ways to agree with her fury.

What’s that, Anna? What’s that you’re wearing? Did he buy you that? With her money, I suppose. He has no money of his own, Anna. She’ll have paid for it. Or if he does have money, he’s hiding it from me. Buying you that with what? If it’s his money why are we living in this...this dump? My family had a lot of money in Sevilla, Anna. We were important people. I was from an important family. And now look. Look around. Look at that plasterwork? Look at that sink? Look at that oven? And these…baked beans? I didn’t even know what a baked bean was in Spain. Now look at them. I will die drowned in baked beans. If you want to wear that, Anna, don’t wear it in front of me.

‘Come on then, we have work to do.’ Mrs Beedle rested a hand on the boot of her car and beckoned for Anna to come over and join her. ‘Picked this up from a dealer yesterday, needs work but look at that craftsmanship.’ She traced her podgy hand over the wooden inlay and carving along the edge of a shabby chest of drawers wedged into the boot of her vintage van. ‘Don’t look at it like that. Sand, paint and varnish and it might make a dent in the profit lost on that clock.’

Anna was about to say something, offer an apology or add something in her defence when she looked over and saw the smirk on Mrs Beedle’s lips.

‘Now, let’s see if you’ve still got any muscles. Help me get this thing into the shop.’

When was it, Anna thought, as she lumbered across the road with the wooden chest, that she had lost her strength? She was yoga-fit, but if she looked at her back in the mirror there would no longer be the sinew lines of muscle. She wondered if her calves would even support her on her pointes, how good her line would be if she tried. As she put her end of the chest down on the carpet, she had a momentary pang for the self that used to untie her shoes and compare the blood, blackened toes and blisters with the girl next to her. To inspect the wounds in all their gory detail.

‘Shall I make the tea?’ Anna asked, backing away towards the counter as Mrs Beedle put her overalls on and started wrapping sandpaper round a block of wood.

‘If you want. Or you could just help me with this?’ she said, looking up over her glasses.

‘No.’ Anna shook her head. ‘No, I think I’ll make the tea and then keep on sorting.’ She indicated to the stockroom. Today felt like a day for hiding.

‘Suit yourself.’ Mrs Beedle shrugged and started pulling the drawers out of the dresser and laying them on a sheet of clear plastic. As she pushed the stockroom curtain to one side, Anna glanced back. She thought she had sensed Mrs Beedle watching her, but her head was down, concentrating on taking the first layer of grime off the top of the chest.

When Anna plonked the stewed-orange mug of tea down on the surface with the Gingernuts, she went to go back into the hot-box stockroom but, instead, found herself staying where she was. Watching.

Mrs Beedle had propped open the front door. Cloudy light was streaming in, carrying with it the smells of dewy pavement warmed in sunshine, freshly watered geraniums and the sharp tang of cut grass. The cat was basking on the front step. She could see the hazy outline of a couple standing in the square laughing, the sound just audible over Classic FM, which was playing on an old paint-splattered radio, and the steady, monotonous noise of the sandpaper rubbing.

Anna found that she’d pushed herself up on the counter and was sitting, legs swinging like when she was a girl in her dad’s outhouse, watching him drilling and sanding and sawing, pausing to ask her to hand him a wrench, a screwdriver or hold the nails in her cupped hands that he would take with his rough fingers while shouting the answers to some radio quiz and getting cross with the contestants for getting the answers wrong.

Anna sipped her Lapsang Souchong but tasted instead the Coca-Colas her dad kept stacked in bottles in the corner that, if she was good, she could have one with a straw, while he gulped his back.

In summer sun as dense as today’s, while her mum would try to defy the muggy clouds and top up her tan in the garden, Anna remembered trailing after her dad round car boot sales. They’d drive there with the top down on his vintage Merc, she’d wear her red shorts and an old Lacoste polo shirt, with white Green Flash trainers. If her dad saw something he could make a profit on, he’d walk on and get Anna to go back, briefed with how much to pay and some sob story about only having the motley selection of coins she had in her hand. Before she’d go, he’d stop her and say, ‘Show me.’ And she’d pull her sad, forlorn orphan face and he’d say, ‘Good girl. Excellent.’ And invariably they’d fleece the stallholders from here to the London suburbs of every piece of antique furniture they owned.

When she laughed, caught off-guard by the thought of it, Mrs Beedle looked up and allowed a momentary smile to toy with her lips before putting her hands on her hips and saying sternly, ‘I don’t pay you to sit there, Anna. What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t erm…’ Anna didn’t want to go back out to the stockroom where it was hot and lonely and full of horse brasses. Where there was a danger of other memories clawing their way to the surface. She might, for example, think about the holiday she’d gone on later with her dad and the mistress, Molly. Where she’d lain on a sun-lounger, massive sun hat covering her face and refused to speak directly to Molly the entire trip. Talking to her through her dad. Her aim to be as vile as possible so she’d never have to come again.
If she wants me to do that she’s going to have to ask me in a much nicer way. I’m not going with you if she’s going to wear that, it’s embarrassing, it’s far too young for her.

‘I could dust.’ Anna offered.

‘Dust?’

‘In the sunlight everything looks very dusty.’

Mrs Beedle watched her for a moment, narrowed her eyes and to Anna it felt like she too was seeing the little seven year old who would come in with her dad and sit playing with the cat while they laughed over incredulous business deals and eventually settled on a price that left one of them hand on heart saying, ‘
I’ve been robbed.’

‘OK, Anna, you dust.’ She seemed to be holding in a smirk as Anna pushed herself off the counter and scrabbled around to find some Pledge and an old yellow duster. She started by the left-hand window and polished the little enamel boxes that sat on top of a large mahogany chest of drawers. Then she picked up a bronze lamp with cherubs on the base and a skewiff lampshade and wiped it down. But instead of putting it back where she had found it, she turned it over in her hands and inspected it, thought how gruesome the fringing was on the lampshade and how dated. She glanced over at Mrs Beedle, who seemed absorbed in her sanding, and when she was certain she wasn’t looking, pulled all the tassels and the strip of braid off the edge of the shade to make it look more contemporary and less old-granny, then put it back on the edge of the chest rather than on the odd three-legged table where it had been sitting, incongruously, at knee height.

Next she moved onto a stack of plates covered in lily of the valley and bluebells. After dusting them down, she arranged them one by one on the welsh dresser that loomed on the side wall adjacent to the mahogany chest. In between the two was the emerald chaise lounge coated in cat hairs. Wiping them off into a nasty fur ball, she walked round the shop gathering up every cushion she could find and plumped them up along the backboard ‒ rich black velvets sat next to blood-red satins and jostled for space next to ornate blue toile, tartans of dense wool in soft greys and creams and beautiful gold and navy brocade ‒ the green sofa suddenly becoming more like a throne fit for royalty. Along the armrest she draped the blankets that Mrs Beedle had stacked in a dark corner ‒ patterned purple lambswool in similar plaids to the cushions and so soft that if it wasn’t so damn hot she would wrap herself in one and curl up to sleep. Rest her exhausted eyes.

To set a proper scene, she pulled over a white, shabby chic standard lamp that was sticking out from a heap of junk at the back and placed it between the chaise lounge and the welsh dresser, before hanging a collection of French christening mugs with tiny porcelain flowers and gilded script onto the dresser’s hooks and repositioning a huge gold mirror on a nail above the chaise lounge.

Standing back, she surveyed her work. All polished and gleaming, it was like the kind of room that drew you in and back to a warm, cosy past of hot chocolate and log fires or, as it was now, dancing with morning sunlight and inviting someone to lift the whole collection up as it was and place it in their front room.

‘Very nice,’ Mrs Beedle was suddenly standing next to her, taking in the newly organised quarter of her shop.

Anna turned to see if she was being sarcastic but decided she was hiding it well if she was. Then she shrugged and said, ‘I am quite good at organising.’

‘So I see.’ Mrs Beedle stepped forward and lifted up one of the cushions. ‘I forgot I even had these.’

‘I saw them, you know, in the back.’

She nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, they cost me a fortune. They look good.’

Anna paused. ‘Thanks.’

Then Mrs Beedle gave her a quick tap on the arm before going back to her sanding. ‘Not as much of a waste of space as I thought.’

‘Is that a compliment, Mrs Beedle?’

‘If you want,’ she shrugged and Anna found herself beaming as she watched the old woman walk away.

But she didn’t get to bask in the feeling for long because, when she looked back to admire her handiwork, the bell on the shop door tinkled and, while Anna didn’t look up, she felt the mood change. Then she heard Mrs Beedle suddenly gather up all the dirty mugs and say, ‘I think this one’s for you,’ before disappearing out the back to wash up.

Anna glanced around to see Seb standing in the doorway, silhouetted in the murky sunlight but then, as he walked closer, she felt herself frown at the look of him. Face covered in stubble, shirt tails hanging loose, no jacket, sweat streaking the blue of his shirt. Had he been to work looking like that? she wondered. His hair was sticking up all over the place, his eyes were bloodshot and his lips pale. There was a sheen of sweat over his brow that made her wonder if he’d slept at all or if he was just crazy hungover.

‘You look terrible,’ she said.

‘So do you.’ He stood by the chest of drawers, his hand tracing the outline of the newly sanded carving.

Anna thought of her movie-inspired leap into his arms that she’d rehearsed in her head and the idea of it seemed so preposterous that it almost made her laugh out loud, which she didn’t do, given the look on Seb’s face. ‘Where have you been?’ she said instead.

Seb ran a hand through his messy hair and then grabbed a bunch of it, looked to the ceiling and almost shouted, ‘Why did you have to make everything so complicated?’

Anna stiffened where she was standing. ‘I didn’t.’

‘Yes you did. You always make everything so hard. Why can’t you be simple? Why can’t you let life be simple?’

‘I don’t think you’d like me if I did that. I think that’s why we’re together.’

‘Oh you think so? Really. Christ, Anna, I could handle a bit of simplicity.’ He put both hands on the wooden surface and braced his body against them. ‘You know what would be my dream? A cheese fucking sandwich. Just that nothing else, just cheese. A simple cheese sandwich.’

‘OK, Seb, well you can have that any time you like.’ She made a face like he’d gone mad.

‘I can’t. I can’t have that because we only have posh cheese. We don’t have cheddar, we have brie and stilton. And I want that bread, the crap stuff that looks like polystyrene. I want crap bread and crap cheese.’

Anna didn’t say anything; Seb was pacing, small steps up and down as he listed his sandwich. She wondered if Mrs Beedle was listening out the back but she could hear the tap running, so hoped that might block his insanity out.

‘I spent the night with Melissa Hope.’ He said mid-pace. Turning to look at her with an expression of utter exhaustion.

‘You did what?’ Anna leant forward, trying to place the name and suddenly remembering some blonde girl with huge boobs from the year above them who was friends with Seb’s brother, Jamie. She angled her head slightly towards him, hoping that he might say it again and she’d hear differently if her ear was closer to his words.

‘I spent the night with Melissa Hope. I didn’t have sex with her, but I kissed her and I slept in her bed and I have no idea why I did it and I didn’t want to do it but, fuck, you made everything so complicated.’

Anna held up a hand. ‘You can’t blame me for this.’

‘I can.’ Seb nodded helplessly. ‘I can because this isn’t me. I don’t do this. I live a normal, simple fucking cheese sandwich life and now suddenly I’m waking up in the bed of the girl who shagged the whole rowing team at school.’

‘She works in the pub sometimes, doesn’t she?’ Anna said.

‘So?’ Seb had his hand back raking through his hair, and turned to glare at her.

‘Nothing.’ Anna shook her head, ‘It just means I have to see her, that’s all.’

‘That’s all? That’s all you can think about. That you’ll have to see her. Anna… I have slept in the bed of someone else when we are meant to be getting married. Don’t you think this is odd? Don’t you think you’re missing the point?’