A Spring Affair (12 page)

‘Debra Devine,’ was how Deb had introduced herself to Lou many years ago on their first day at college. ‘I know, I know, I sound like a crap nightclub singer or at best a porn star. Let’s go and get a coffee and have a natter.’

Lou had laughed, following her to the college cafeteria where their friendship was born over cappuccino and biscotti. In a way it had ended over the same, she thought. She had missed that friendship so much these past three years. The ache of loss had never faded completely and, like arthritis, had flared up often, making its presence felt.

The two women arranged to meet at the weekend in
Café Joseph
just behind Barnsley Park. The phone conversation had been short and polite and consisted mainly of the social niceties of, ‘How are you?’ and, ‘Lovely to hear from you.’ Lou decided that there would be plenty of time for talking more freely when they met.

Needing a distraction, Lou reached for Phil’s accounts. They really did need to be done–
cleared from her agenda.

It was midnight by the time she had completed them, heaving a huge sigh of relief. Thank goodness she hadn’t left them much longer. Even at the best of times, they
were like unravelling a ball of wool that a barmy cat had tried to decimate.

Thursday and Friday were just ordinary days at work; they passed without incident. She had long since abandoned any hope of getting job satisfaction there, but since finding the old
Casa Nostra
file, it did make Lou realize she wanted more for herself than a part-time job in an accounts office.

She desperately tried to keep a cap on being excited about the imminent prospect of meeting Deb again after so long, but various thoughts tortured her. What if they had nothing to say to each other? What if Deb changed her mind and didn’t turn up? It wasn’t unlike the anticipation that preceded a blind date.

She was so preoccupied with the what-could-go-wrongs that she over-spiced Phil’s curry on Friday night. He still ate it but wasn’t best pleased and made a point of fanning his mouth and drinking copious amounts of water throughout his suffering.

There was no text message from Michelle, so Lou happily presumed that Craig the still-married-but-separated mechanic had turned up. A good man was just what Michelle needed, but was Michelle what the good man needed? Lou just wished her mixed-up friend would chill out a little and allow anyone she hooked up with to breathe occasionally, but it was impossible to tell her that without phones being slammed down or dramatic walkings-away occurring. These days, Michelle seemed determined to take everything Lou said to her as a lecture, and it was, quite frankly, becoming a nuisance to have to screen everything Lou intended to say for potential double meanings.

Lou arrived at
Café Joseph
ten minutes before time. The place really irked her. It couldn’t make up its mind what it wanted to be, she thought–an ice-cream parlour, a cake-house, sandwich shop or a pretentious bistro–and as such, it did none of them very well.

She had just found a table next to a giant paper flower display when Deb arrived. Lou stood and waved tentatively with a nervous but excited smile that was half-afraid to show itself. Deb came over and they both missed the moment when an embrace would have been natural. They scraped their chairs back on the tiled floor and sat down opposite each other.

‘Hello, Deb,’ said Lou. ‘It’s really nice to see you.’

‘Hello, Lou. How have you been?’

Lou opened her mouth to reply, ‘Fine,’ but nothing came out.

Deb looked just the same as always, give or take a very different hairstyle. It had been cropped when Lou had last seen her; now it was almost bum-length and made Lou realize just how very long they had been apart.

Lou suddenly felt ashamed, unable to put this right, unworthy even to be asking. It was such a terrible, terrible thing that she had done. How the hell had she ever let that happen? Lou couldn’t speak; something roughly the size of Everest was blocking her throat and wouldn’t be gulped away. Then, against all her best intentions, Lou started to cry. And the more she tried to stop it, the faster those tears oozed out of her ducts, as if they were being pumped out by a saltwater artery.

Deb immediately came around to her side of the table and hugged her.

‘Give up, you daft tart. Now look what you’ve made me do! Everyone will think we’re lesbians.’

Lou snorted with involuntary laughter, still crying even though she desperately wanted to stop. She couldn’t bear it that she was drawing attention to herself, but Deb’s perfume was the same as she always used to wear and it hurt her heart to smell it. Scents were very powerful at dragging Lou back to a past she couldn’t otherwise access. She couldn’t smell Aramis without being back on her dad’s knee whilst he read
The Magic Faraway Tree
, putting on the voices of Moon-Face and the mad deaf bloke with all the saucepans.

A young fresh-faced waiter arrived to take their order and jiggled about behind them for a while, not knowing whether to melt off and come back again in a few minutes.

‘Two coffees, please, and two of your biggest pieces of cheesecake if you have any,’ said Deb, in her best Hyacinth Bouquet voice which made it sound as if big pieces of cheesecake were the norm for ladies of quality who lunch.

‘I’m sorry,’ Lou said, as Deb handed her a serviette. ‘I wasn’t prepared for this. I don’t even know where to start saying what I feel.’

‘Elouise Winter, if I had any negative feelings about us meeting again, I wouldn’t have turned up. You don’t know how many times I’ve wanted to pick up the phone and see what we could do to sort this out. I have a few sorrys of my own to say too, you know.’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘I bet I look gorgeous now, don’t I?’ said Lou, tipping
her head up to let the last of the tears drain back from her eyes.

‘Absolutely gorgeous. Besides, I’ve always liked pandas,’ said Deb.

Lou smiled a red-eyed smile as she did a quick repair job on her face with her powder puff.

‘How’s your mum these days?’ asked Deb, sitting back down again.

‘Oh, she’s…just the same. Still playing one-upmanship with her mate Vera, although Vera is up on points with a holiday to the Bahamas.’

‘And Victorianna?’

On the sound of her name, they instinctively both held up their fingers in the sign of the cross and chuckled together.

‘She is most definitely still the same. She gets us to send over parcels of English stuff. She’s shacked up with this bloke who’s stinking rich and looks older than God’s dog.’

‘There’s a surprise!’

‘Any man on the scene for you?’ asked Lou.

‘There’s been a couple, but…well, one wasn’t special enough and the other one thought
I
wasn’t special enough,’ said Deb. ‘I’m having a rest from the unfairer sex for a while, and jolly nice it is too.’

‘How’s your mum then?’

‘Oh, we lost her last year, Lou.’

Lou felt her eyes filling up again, especially when Deb carried on, ‘It was a toughie, I have to admit. You know how lovely she was. I had my sister there but I wished I’d had you to talk to.’ She held up a warning finger as Lou started wiping at her eyes with her serviette. ‘Look, Lou,
we can’t change the past, but we’re here now, so let’s make each other a promise to not look back. Please, let’s just go forward.’

They clutched hands over the table, just as the waiter arrived with their coffees. He had never actually seen any real-life lesbians before, and the image of these two good-looking mature women ‘at it’ would feature in a few of his future fantasies.

‘He definitely thinks we’re a couple,’ said Deb, pointing at his back. ‘I think we’ve turned him on. Pervy little bugger.’

Lou laughed. She realized then why she liked Karen so much. She was a good girl in her own right, but there were so many echoes of Deb in her.

‘It’s quite a varied menu here, isn’t it?’ said Deb with raised eyebrows as she read from the ornate leaflet propped up beside the cruet. ‘What the frigging hell is Olivian Chicken?’

‘Don’t know, but it’s offset by Simple Vegetables,’ said Lou.

‘How’s Phil?’ asked Deb, unconsciously making the small leap in subject-matter. ‘More to the point, how are
you
and Phil?’

‘Oh, we’re fine,’ said Lou, aware that they had temporarily strayed into Polite Land again, where they would only skim the surface of the subject. ‘We’re still together. He works six or seven days a week–he’s still obsessed by cars.’

She didn’t say she was happy, Deb noted.

‘You ever…managed…did you have any…?’

‘No, no children,’ said Lou, saying ‘the word’. ‘It obviously wasn’t to be.’

‘You never went for IVF or anything?’ Deb was amazed. She knew how much Lou had wanted a child of her own.

‘It’s pretty gruelling, is IVF, and I know that Phil just wouldn’t do all the stuff it entails. We know he’s OK, of course, because of his twins, so it’s obviously me who has the problem. Anyway, I know he doesn’t really want children, so there’s not much point in me going to be prodded and poked, is there? I’ve come to terms with it. I’m fine, really,’ said Lou.

Yeah right, thought Deb, changing to a lighter subject about their jobs. There would be plenty of time to catch up on what was really happening in Lou’s life. It was so good to see her, she thought. She had a couple of extra lines around the eyes since their last meeting, but so what? She looked a hell of a lot nicer than the last time Deb had seen her, reduced to the image of the gaunt, walking dead. Deb noted her friend’s still-lovely kind face and her curvy pink smile, but she wasn’t as content-looking as Deb would have expected her to be. Not after all she went through to get that piece of crap back anyway. There was definitely something going on behind those cat-green eyes of Lou Casserly…Winter.

‘Are you still working in Sheffield?’ Deb asked.

‘Yes, I’m still stuck in Accounts. Great bunch of people, except for the office manageress who is a total witch, but it’s a job. You?’

‘Yes, still living just outside Maltstone, still running Mrs Serafinska’s bakery, still the same bunch of Derby and Joaners working for me, plus an absolutely delicious eighteen-year-old student called Kurt. And yes, I’m still
dreaming of opening up
Working Title Casa Nostra
and ruling the world.’

‘Cheesecake,’ interrupted the waiter, slightly disappointed that they just looked like two old friends having coffee now and there was no sign of any girl-on-girl action.

‘Thank you,’ said Deb, poking the hardened exterior of a dessert that was as fresh as one of her Uncle Brian’s jokes. When the waiter had gone to another table she whispered over to Lou, ‘We would never have served stuff like this in our establishment. This cheesecake is so old that I don’t know whether to eat it or buy it a pension book cover.’

Lou smiled and speared a forkful of her portion. It was passable, although it had far too much sugar and not half enough lemon in it.

Deb had another look at the menu and put it down with a huff.

‘The owner has been watching too much Marco Pierre White on the telly!’

‘You still fantasizing about him?’ said Lou with a grin.

‘Of course,’ said Deb. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘Absolutely!’

‘The only man we were ever likely to scrap over bedding.’

‘Why didn’t you go it alone and open up a coffee shop?’ Lou asked Deb midchew.

‘Didn’t want to,’ said Deb. ‘Plus I don’t think
I
could have. It was always a joint or neither thing.’ She melted into a soft couch of nostalgia. ‘It was fun planning it all, wasn’t it? Mum was more excited than me, I think. Oh–and remember you snogging the bank manager?’

‘I didn’t snog him, I just hugged him.’ Lou smiled. ‘Do you know, I found the big file recently? Remember the “Brando” you were going to invent?’

‘Oh yes, my Brando! I never did find anything good enough to bear the holy name. Talking of good enough, I’ve never yet been in a coffee shop where I didn’t think we could do better, and I’ve been in lots of them. I’m stuck in a state of eternal research.’

‘I know how you feel. It didn’t die for me either.’

‘Really?’ said Deb, tilting her head. ‘Because I’ll tell you this, Lou babe, it certainly didn’t die for me.’

Their eyes locked and each transmitted something to the other that wasn’t quite formed yet. Psychic microbes made up of memory cuttings and the raw, thrilling emotions associated with them of what could have been. Lou felt a glimmer of excitement that she tried to stop reason and sense and thoughts of Phil and her mother spoiling. She looked at Deb who was feeling it too, she just knew it.
This is crazy! We’ve only just met again. Let’s not get carried away. Let’s be sensible!
But Lou’s mental processes were in overdrive.

‘So, where do we go from here?’ she said. ‘Are we going to see each other again or have I turned into a hideous old bag and you’re sorry you came?’

‘Yes, of course you have, darling,’ said Deb. ‘But let’s meet up anyway.’ She dropped her eyes and inspected her nails. ‘Will you tell Phil? I presume he doesn’t know you’re here.’

‘I haven’t thought that far ahead.’

‘You don’t have to tell him anything, of course. He won’t like it and it would only stir up trouble. ‘

‘I’ll pick my moment then tell him we bumped into
each other in town. I’ll take it from there. He can’t stop me having friends.’

But he can and he did, thought Deb. However, she stayed silent.

Lou paid the bill as Deb said that it was the least she could do after poisoning her with old cake on their reconciliation. Lou laughed and hugged her tightly before they got into their respective cars, much to the waiter’s delight as he observed them through the window.

Lou watched her friend drive off with a thrill akin to having a secret affair. That was how Phil would definitely see it, anyway–a threat to his marriage, an illegal union. There was no way he would countenance her friendship revival with Deb. But equally there was no way Lou was going to stop seeing her now. She realized, as she climbed into the driver’s seat, that she really hadn’t thought this through at all. She couldn’t live a lie and she couldn’t tell her husband the truth about what she had done. So, what the hell
was
she going to do?