When Good Friends Go Bad (11 page)

'How much for this, my dear?' Tuesday, two o'clock, and a woman in her eighties handed a Donna Karan black pleat-belted dress over to Jen for inspection.

'I'll just check.' Jen gently fingered the delicate fabric, admiring the nipped-in waist and fine netting around the shoulders. She turned it over and examined the label. 'For you, Mrs Cartwright,' she pulled off the fifteen-pound price tag, 'nine pounds.'

Mrs Cartwright beamed delightedly, rifling through her threadbare old purse. 'I'll take it. Be marvellous for my granddaughter.'

Anamaria sashayed across the carpet, long black hair skimming her slim waist. 'I found these,' she said, showing Walter a dark cloak and an
Addam's Family
wig. 'Will look good in our new display, no?'

'Perfect, my dear.' Walter took it. At an age when most people were retired, the spry bespectacled seventy-year-old ex-navy serviceman and his wife Enid had found their niche managing the hospice charity shop where Jen and the Spanish girl, Anamaria, volunteered. 'Jenny, why don't you stick this on the dummy in the window?'

Usually the part-time helpers came in on alternate days, but with Halloween just around the corner Walter had decided to fight back against the so-called credit crunch and taken it upon himself and his 'valiant team' to cheer up the whole of Huntsleigh with a magnificent window display.

'All hands on deck,' he'd bellowed down the phone to Jen when he'd called her that morning.

'OK, right, where are we?' He consulted his clipboard. 'Three. Ceilings to be festooned with fake cobwebs, spiders hanging by threads. Any spiders, Enid?'

'There was a couple of rubber insects in with a box of farm animals, I think. And a big soft one with all the stuffed toys. It had a leg ripped off though.' Enid, a soft rotund woman who favoured pink, was fussing over a rack of fancy-dress clothes, hanging a home-made lion costume next to a pint-size ballerina's tutu and tiny slippers.

'Doesn't matter. No one's counting. Now for the fake cobwebs – any suggestions?' He tapped his dentures with his pen.

'There's about a yard of black lace in the linen section,' Jen offered, 'And I think they sell fake cobwebby stuff in Poundstretcher.'

'Not in our budget. See what you can do with the lace, will you, love?' He looked at his board again. 'Four. Any yellow or orange clothes pass to Anamaria, as she's offered to be a pumpkin for the day.'

Better her than me, Jen thought. Her mind flashed to a Halloween past where she and Ollie had gone to a party, Jen dressed as Bride of Dracula in a tattered wedding gown with pretend blood oozing from her mouth, Ollie as Dracula, of course. She sighed, focusing on arranging the cloak Anamaria had found around the window dummy's shoulders.

'I can give you some real pumpkins from my allotment,' a grey-haired old man with side whiskers piped up.

'Great. How many?' Walter's pen poised over his clipboard.

'Er . . . four? Would be more, but the wet weather's played havoc with my crop this year.'

'Four's plenty. We can have one on the counter, one on the stand in the corner and two in the window making eyes at each other.' He winked at his wife. 'You can do the carving, dear.'

'I'd be happy to, love, if you'll take out your teeth and model for me.'

Jen smiled, feeling a pang as she pulled out tablecloths looking for lace. Enid and Walter were like a double act. Constantly bickering but clearly wild about each other. Nothing like her and Ollie, who seemed to have sunk into that most deadly of emotional states – terminal politeness. Not even a spark of good honest hate to put a little zing into their domestic doldrums.

Anamaria was now serving the old man with the allotment. 'So how old do you think I am?' he was asking her.

She screwed up her dark eyes, pretending to ransack her brains. 'Er . . . fifty? Sixty, no?'

'Ach, away with you, I'm ninety-four years young,' he replied in a quavery voice. 'And how long do you think I've been married?'

'Sixty years?' Anamaria guessed again.

'Forty-nine. 'Twas my second wedding.' He chuckled away, enjoying his joke. 'First wife ran off with my regimental sergeant, Nobby, in 1935.'

'I know a Nob,' Mrs Cartwright broke in from the book corner where she'd been rummaging through the Barbara Cartlands. 'Not the same one, I'm sure.'

'I've known lots of Nobs,' said Walter airily. 'In the navy. At least that's what I called them.'

Jen spluttered. Sometimes she couldn't tell whether Walter was being playful or not.

'Nobby Haversham,' Mrs Cartwright went on, 'from my church. He went on that World Wide Web place, got talking to his childhood sweetheart and before you could say Jack Robinson he went and proposed to her.'

'How romantic,' said Enid, carefully wrapping the wool scarf and leather gloves the old man had chosen with tissue paper. Jen wouldn't have been surprised if she'd added a blast of her ever-to-hand violet eau de toilette.

'Romantic? Weren't romantic.' Mrs Cartwright suddenly turned indignant. 'He's been married to poor old Myrtle since the war.'

'Good grief!' Enid exclaimed. 'He must be a lively one for his age.'

'Well, not the first to do a runner and certainly not the last,' Walter chirped.

'Oh I saw a programme on that,' said Jen. 'Trisha's show. Internet romances.' Everyone looked blank. 'Trisha? She does a kind of chat show on TV. They discuss issues, like a UK Oprah?'

'Who's Oprah?' asked Enid.

Jen gave up and went back to her tablecloths.

'They were a happily married couple, I tell you, until Nobby lost his marbles.' Mrs Cartwright glared. 'What gets into men, I don't know. They say she's shacked up with him in a flat above Waitrose. Myrtle's spitting blood. Years of marriage down the drain. Downright immoral.'

Jen saw Anamaria grin in her direction, tickled by the thought of pensioners' lust, but her response was feeble. The childhood-sweetheart story had struck a chord. All the time she'd wasted mooning over Starkey. The effort she'd made in putting that part of her life behind her. And now Meg's email threatened to stir it all up again.

'I tried to learn the computer myself at night classes,' Enid told Mrs Cartwright, 'but the teacher said my mouse and me were incompatible.'

'Lucky for me, eh?' Walter winked at Jen. 'No Internet romances for her. Still, I feel sorry for the poor old codger.'

Everyone stared at him, Anamaria frozen with her hand in the farm animals box, looking for spiders.

'Sorry for
him?'
Enid arched her brows that were more liner than hair, unlike Anamaria's which were strikingly thick and unplucked. While the twenty-four-year-old Spanish girl didn't even use – or need – make-up and was wearing ripped jeans, the old lady looked ready to foxtrot the afternoon away, face carefully powdered, her wrinkled lips defined by a fresh coat of lipstick and a string of African ruby-red beads accessorising her pink cowl-neck sweater and magenta wool skirt.

'Can't have been easy for him now, can it?' Walter took off his wire-rimmed glasses, polished the lenses with his shirt cuff and put them back on. 'Married to the wrong woman all those years. Never able to forget his one true love. No man breaks up his home for nowt.'

Anamaria was laughing as she carefully placed a plastic arachnid on to its black lace web. 'Oh ho, Walter,
you
are the romantic, I think.'

'Well!' Enid made the word sound like a choir solo. 'And don't you think the silly old fool might have sorted himself out earlier? What took him so long? Who's going to take care of that poor wife he abandoned?'

'Codswallop!' Mrs Cartwright slammed her walking stick into the ground. She looked from Jen to Enid to Walter, shaking her head. 'Downright immoral,' she repeated. 'You young 'uns don't know anything nowadays.'

The whole building shook as the door slammed shut. The whiskered old gentleman startled, shaken out of his daydreams.

'You're right though, Walter, my son.' He pulled a string bag out of his pocket with a trembling white hand and carefully placed his parcel inside. 'Life's too short. Have to grab your happiness where you can.' He nodded courteously at the ladies. 'And good day to you all. I'll drop round those pumpkins tomorrow.'

The shop was busy for the rest of the afternoon. By four thirty Walter's list was almost completed and everyone was occupied with their allotted tasks.

'You all right, love?' Enid addressed Jen as they sat on the floor together emptying a box of toys, throwing away the broken ones and putting the rest on to shelves.

'Yes, fine.'

'Just seem a little quiet today.'

'I'm all right,' Jen smiled. 'Honestly.'

'If ever you want to talk, you know. I may not be the world's best listener with my hearing, but I'll nod a lot and make the right noises.'

Jen laughed. 'You're very sweet.'

Enid yawned. 'How about a nice brew and a biccy? I'll make it.'

'No, I will.' Jen stood up and stretched. 'I could do with moving around. Get my circulation going again.'

She walked into the back room, where she found Anamaria sitting at a table making a poster.

'For the window display?' Jen asked as she leant over Anamaria's shoulder.

'No, this is something else. I found a dog yesterday. Running along the road. Starving and so frightened. Maybe someone threw him away, because he is
so
ugly.' She said it affectionately as she pressed hard on the paper with a thick black marker. 'But then if they lost him, they can come here, no?'

'Good idea.' Jen switched on the kettle and pulled out four mugs. 'My daughter Chloe's forever pestering me for a dog.' She emptied the teapot of old tea bags and plonked in three more. 'But I've always said no. One more thing to look after. And think of the mud.'

'You never had a dog when you were a kid?' Anamaria asked. Only she pronounced it 'keed'. She always said 's' with a lisp too – thtarving.

'No. I wanted one. But my dad used to say it was too big a responsibility.'

That's what she'd told Chloe too. And Ollie. Who will end up looking after it? Who'll have to take it for walks? Clean up the mess? I know it won't be either of you, she'd said.

'So you like working here, no?' Anamaria asked.

'It suits. You?'

'Yes, very much.' Anamaria nodded. 'I learn the English, I listen to the jokes and I speak to people. And I don't have to pay for study classes. And you? How long you have been here?'

They'd not had the opportunity to chat. Anamaria was new and more often than not they were on different shifts. How long? Jen closed her eyes as she tried to calculate.

'About ten months now.' Seemed unbelievable. 'We've been in Huntsleigh almost three years.'

Ironically, just as the wheels were set in motion for them all to move, she'd finally found part-time employment she really loved, helping a friend in her photographic studio. It was always the way, wasn't it? Like discovering the single uncrowded beach on the last day of your holiday, or meeting your ideal man the day before he emigrated for good or married someone else. It was interesting, learning shutter stops, lighting and the ins and outs of Photoshop, after all those years of tedious office work, and another thing she found herself uselessly regretting.

Her wages had been essential until Ollie graduated; she'd been able to quit her hated clerical work to take over the childcare the day he brought home his first big pay cheque. Until the photography gig had showed up, just as Chloe started primary school, she hadn't missed the daily grind one jot.

These days Ollie was working for an oil-exploration company for a ridiculously high salary, going abroad for ten-week stretches. If Jen was in a real job they would hardly have seen each other. Better they should both be free on his leave dates, Ollie had reasoned, catch up on weeks of missed intimacy, do things together as a family. And it had been like that, at first.

Besides, local jobs were scarce and Ollie earned more than enough to support them all comfortably. It would be wicked to take bread from the gaping maws of people who really needed it. But this last year she'd increasingly missed the stimulation of being needed outside the home. And so she'd gone the 'helping a good cause' route.

If taking in pennies for other people's old junk didn't have the same zing as assisting in a photo shoot where she'd met actors, celebrities and even a famous writer or two, to whom could she complain? It was all going to change now anyway, she thought, stirring her tea. As Helen kept reminding her, soon she'd be responsible for putting her own bread on the table.

'You want to start with that lot in the corner, Jenny?' Walter asked an hour later.

'Sure.'

Behind the beaded curtain she untied one of the black bin bags and pulled out a pile of glossy magazines. She idly flicked through the first pages – candid snapshots of celebrities with spots on their faces or, horrors, underarm hair, followed by a feature on things readers wished they'd known in their twenties, thirties and forties. In Jen's case, she pondered, her twenties list would read something like:

Don't marry someone just because you're pregnant.

If you suspect you might have post-natal depression you probably do.

Relationships can be extremely fragile.

She picked up the next magazine, the cover line blaring
When Good Friends Go Bad.
Kneeling, bottom on heels, she scanned the opening lines.

Lara Smith is only twenty-three but she knows first-hand the pain of deception.

'My best friend got pissed one night and confessed she'd slept with not one but two of my boyfriends,' the bubbly air hostess told me at her high-rise flat in Stansted. 'We've been mates since we were six. To be honest, I like her much better than I liked either of them. I don't want to stop seeing her but I can't trust her any more. It's a dilemma.'

'Oh, now what we have here?' Enid had come into the back room. She pulled a cardboard box towards her and started sifting through unsorted stock alongside Jen. 'Nice set of bedsheets and couple of pillowcases. Look expensive – fancy.'

And familiar, Jen thought, her eyes drawn to the design.