A Summer Fling (2 page)

She had always said that she would leave him when the children grew up. She wondered how many other women had resolved to do the same and were still there years after the kids had moved out because they simply weren’t brave enough to go. Her son and two daughters had left a huge, gaping hole in her home when they left, as if they had taken its heart along with them.

Her eyes caught Malcolm refilling his cup with wine. He wasn’t a happy man by any stretch. She could easily believe the rumours he was being moved to the much less prestigious department of Cheese because he wasn’t efficient enough to handle the growing Bakery department. Malcolm Spatchcock was neither liked nor respected, although his ego was so big that he was oblivious to that fact.

Grace only hoped that she wouldn’t be wishing Malcolm back after meeting her new boss. Still,
Mrs Christie Somers
would have to be really bad to knock Malcolm off the unpopularity stakes, ghastly little gnome. She had worked under his inefficient management for too long.

The wine and crisps were gone now and people were starting to pack up and drift off. Grace’s weekend stretched out long and stark in front of her. Same old, same old. Babysitting her granddaughter tonight while Gordon went to the Legion and her daughter and son-in-law went out for some posh meal. Shopping, washing and cleaning tomorrow, then on Sunday morning she would make the lunch, clear up, iron and then sit down in front of
Heartbeat
– or really break out and watch
Frost
– before a hot bath and bed, ready for the week ahead.

She looked at the office youngsters from other departments filing out of the door, full of Friday night beans. She hadn’t done that whole donning lippy and going out with friends thing for well over twenty-five years. She said goodnight to Brian and her three co-workers. They all seemed nice women, although they didn’t really mix much. Still, the atmosphere at work was so much lighter than it was at home. Gordon’s hair had gone grey in his thirties, but when did he get so grey in his head? Life would have been so much easier for Grace had she done the same.

Calum was virtually sitting on the telephone but it would have rung forever had Dawn not come in from the kitchen and picked it up. She mouthed ‘Idle beggar’ at him, but he was too lazy even to look up.

‘Hello, love,’ said the cheery voice down the line.

‘Hi, Muriel,’ said Dawn. Calum exhaled loudly and waved his hands like an irate air-traffic controller. The message was clearly
I’m not here if she asks.

‘So, what time are you picking me up tomorrow, pet?’ asked her future mother-in-law brightly.

‘Half-past ten all right for you, Mu?’

‘Well, I’ll make sure I’m up, seeing as it’s a special occasion,’ said Muriel.

‘I’m so excited, I bet I don’t sleep much.’

‘Knock yourself out with a few lagers. That’s what I do when I can’t sleep, lass!’

Dawn laughed. Muriel was ever so funny sometimes. She had laughed with Mu from the first time they met, over two years ago, in the miserable hairdressing salon where Dawn used to work. Dawn had given her a perm and Muriel had chattered on for two solid hours. She had been an absolute tonic that day with her rough, bawdy sense of humour. She had exploded into Dawn’s life when she badly needed some laughs.

‘Is our Calum back?’

‘Yes, but you’ve just missed him.’

Calum stuck up a satisfied thumb.

‘Aw well!’ said Muriel with a deep sigh. ‘Mind you, it is Friday and a bloke deserves a pint after a hard week at work.’

Dawn didn’t know about the hard week. All he seemed to do was faff about on a fork-lift truck and have fag breaks.

‘Anyway, when you see him, tell him Killer’s brought him a box of DVDs.’

‘I will.’

‘See you tomorrow then, pet.’

‘See you, Mu.’

Dawn clicked the phone off and Calum stood up and stretched like a lean, scraggy street cat.

‘Killer has brought you some DVDs apparently,’ Dawn delivered the message.

‘Oh, cheers.’

‘Not pirates, are they?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘Don’t be daft, they’re from house clearances.’

‘And what do you do with them?’

‘Questions, questions,’ he sighed. ‘Sell them on for him down the pub – for a cut.’

‘OK,’ said Dawn, temporarily satisfied by his answer. ‘So, what do you want for your tea?’ she asked.

‘Thought we were having a Chinese?’ he said.

‘And I thought we were cutting back. I’ve got a wedding dress to buy tomorrow.’

Calum scratched his head, leaving his hair all sexily mussed up.

‘We’ve got to live, Dawn! We’ve both been working all week. We need a bit of a treat.’

‘OK then,’ she reluctantly agreed. He could always talk her round. ‘I’m hungry now; shall I ring up and order? I’ll have chicken and mushroom with fried rice and
won tons
. Are we sharing? If we are, don’t get that black bean thing.’ She went to the drawer for the Chinese menu. It was at the top of a stack of takeaway menus all clipped neatly together. Her fastidious organizational skills were something Calum teased her about on a regular basis.

‘I’ll share if you want. But I thought I’d go out for a couple and then pick it up on the way back.’

‘Aw! Don’t go out!’ Dawn tutted, disappointed.

Calum yawned. ‘Just for a couple. Won’t be any more than that, ’cos I’m shattered.’

‘Now, where have I heard that before?’

Calum grinned his cheeky schoolboy smile that had got him into and out of all sorts of trouble ever since he was old enough to use it to its full advantage. It disarmed Dawn, as usual.

‘I promise this time,’ he said. ‘No later than ten past nine. You have the plates warmed up for us.’

‘Oh, anything else I should do?’ asked Dawn with her hands on her hips.

‘Funny you should ask. You couldn’t lend me twenty quid, could you?’

Dawn opened her purse and handed over the money with a sigh, hating herself for being unable to say no. Especially as she knew that at ten o’clock she would, most likely, have given up waiting for Calum to come home early. She would go and make herself a cheese toastie. Calum would roll in after midnight, having forgotten the Chinese. She hoped one day he would break the pattern and surprise her, but so far he hadn’t.

‘Oh bloody hell, I’ve burned the garlic bread!’ said Ben as the smoke alarm went off.

Raychel followed his mad dash into the kitchen and laughed.

‘It’s not funny, Ray, I was really looking forward to that,’ said Ben, looking like a little kid who had just watched his ice-cream drop off his cornet and get eaten by a lucky passing mongrel.

Raychel grabbed the broom handle and poked up at the smoke alarm, but she was too small to reach it.

‘Shift yourself, shorty,’ said Ben, pushing her gently out of the way. He stretched up his long, muscular arm to depress the button with his big thumb. ‘God, that’s better; it was deafening me!’

‘Look, it’s not that bad, Ben,’ said Raychel, inspecting the damage. ‘It’s only the top bit that’s burned. I can cut it off.’

‘Can you really do that? For me?’ He sank to the floor and pretended to thank God.

Raychel slapped him playfully. ‘You’re so easily pleased.’

He grabbed her around the legs and pulled her to him as she squealed. He was almost as tall as her full height on his knees.

‘I’m not actually. I’d say I was rather fussy myself.’

Raychel looked down into his lovely, sweet, smiling face. The stubble was growing back even though he’d had a good shave that morning. Dark and manly, his arms were tight around her. His body was hard with muscle and solid against her. She loved him so much.

‘I’ll get the pasta dished up then, shall I?’

‘In a minute,’ he said, savouring the feel of her, curling strands of her long, black hair around his finger, taking in her long-faded perfume. He could have breathed her in for hours.

‘Am I enough for you?’ she said, eventually. It was a question he had heard so many times and he answered it as always.

‘Ray, you’re all I could ever want.’

Grace got up the next morning at five-thirty and watched the
Teletubbies
,
Bob the Builde
r and
Thomas the Tank Engine
for a brain-numbing two and a half hours with four-year-old Sable. The combination of a young child’s energy and an early morning following a restless night made her feel far older than her fifty-five years. Gordon was, of course, in bed. It was women’s work getting up and seeing to the children. Or, at least, that was the regime she had always been used to – first at home with Mum and Dad, then when she married the widower with the four dependants: Laura aged six, Paul aged five, Sarah aged three and Rose aged fifty-four. It was funny to think she was older than her mother-in-law was when she died. Rose had seemed like an old, old woman.

Sarah arrived at eleven with her customary ‘Sorry I’m late. Thanks for letting her stay the night. I know it was last minute.’

‘It’s all right, love,’ said Gordon, up and dressed now in his gardening clothes, his thick, steel-grey hair still wet from a leisurely shower.

‘Any chance you could look after her for another hour?’ asked Sarah in her best wheedling little girl tone. ‘Just so I can go to the supermarket?’

‘ ’Course she can stay here,’ said Gordon, his voice drowning out anything Grace might have had to say on the subject. He chucked Sable under the chin. ‘She can come out and watch her grandad plant some seeds.’

‘It’s far too chilly for her to be outside,’ said Sarah, wrapping her fur-trimmed maternity coat a little further around herself at the mere thought of it.

‘Well, she can stay inside with her grandma then,’ said Gordon.
Grandma.
The word grated on Grace’s nerves like a fingernail scraping down a blackboard. She preferred Nana and Gordon knew that. It was as if he was using the word on purpose – a Chinese water torture slow drip, drip: ‘you
will
be old’.

‘I promise I won’t be longer than two hours,’ beamed Sarah, happy at having an extension to her freedom. ‘Three at the most.’

She tried to ignore how tired her mother looked and concentrated on her father’s expression of bonhomie instead. Gordon disappeared out to his allotment. Grace wrestled with trying to get the washing done, the beds stripped and entertaining a hyper Sable. She needed to go out shopping herself but she was exhausted. Gordon was so generous with other people’s time.

Sarah came back after lunch, just as Sable had drifted off to sleep. And just as the postman arrived with two catalogues for caravan sites in Blegthorpe-on-Sea.

Calum’s loud beer-snoring awoke Dawn. She went downstairs to try and sleep on the sofa but what she gained in peace levels, she lost in comfort. The sofa was old and past it; they really could do with another one but every spare penny was being put aside for the wedding. Well, every spare penny of hers, that was. At least Calum had a job at the moment, and one he was sticking at – not that it brought in mega-bucks. But where she was saving everything she could, Calum contributed what was left out of his ‘social fund’. She would have to get a loan out at this rate for the honeymoon, but she was going to have the fairytale. If it took her the rest of her life to pay off her wedding day, she would have the frock, the flowers and the fancy cake. She knew it was the start to a marriage that her mum and dad would have wanted for her. Then, when the wedding debt had been paid off, they could start looking at something a bit better than Calum’s dump of a house. Dawn had moved into it eight months ago and not managed to persuade Calum to do anything to it. There were still wires hanging down from the ceiling, bare plaster walls, furniture that looked as if it had been dragged out of a skip. He was five years younger than her. Dawn rationalized that as some sort of excuse for his student-like existence.

Calum was still in bed when she pulled up in front of her future mother-in-law’s council house semi at the other end of town. She beeped the horn of her antique, but thankfully reliable Fiesta, and a minute later Muriel wobbled down the path in tired leggings, a grubby-looking fleece and flip-flops. Not that Dawn would ever have been ashamed to be seen with her. Muriel was Muriel, and Dawn loved her to bits, just as she was.

‘Morning, lovely,’ said Muriel with an excited little half-toothless grin. The Crookes were a rough family, but they had taken Dawn to their bosom. This was especially important to Dawn since her own parents had died in a car crash sixteen years ago and left a gaping hole in her heart. She missed them so much. She wished it was her mum sitting in the car beside her now, helping to pick out her wedding clothes. But Muriel Crooke was the next best thing.

Their first stop was ‘Everything but the Bride’ on the out-skirts of town by the new Tesco. The tired display in the window was awful and was a perfect indication of what lay inside. A cracked, headless mannequin with no bust was wearing a white dress that was the colour of old greying knickers and would have better befitted a toilet roll doll of the 1970s. The accompanying bridesmaid mannequin did have a head, and a face that had been painted on by someone with a very shaky hand and no artistic talent: she wore the pained expression of a kid being given a wedgie. She looked uncomfortable in her lilac satin dress that had long faded in the sun. Yellowing confetti was sprinkled around their feet, resembling bird poo.

Dawn went in but knew instantly that she wouldn’t find her dress in here. The buyer wanted a slap. There wasn’t a lot of choice because the owner was obviously phasing the wedding dresses out and prom dresses in. Each one seemed the same as the rest but in a different colour. It was as if there was only one standard pattern for all the frocks – big wide skirt and puffy sleeves – with slight variations of neckline or ribbon/sequin detail. They weren’t harassed by the sales assistant whose ear was stuck on the phone.

‘. . . it can’t be too short, you were there when we measured you. I asked you if that length felt comfortable and you said yes. Well, maybe you should have had on the shoes you’d be wearing for your wedding. If you come in here in flats to be measured up and you’re wearing heels on the day, how can that be our fault?’