The Yorkshire Pudding Club (2 page)

The following February

Her arms and legs spasmed outwards, she let loose a very loud scream and then Elizabeth awoke to find herself
not
on a nose-diving plane but on the seven thirty-six to Leeds and the focus of half a crammed carriageful of ‘glad that wasn’t me’ faces. However, not even their cold-water stares, the probability that she had been snoring and two mega-strength coffees slopping around her digestive system could keep Elizabeth’s eyes from shuttering down again–she was exhausted. She was last off the train and, in fact, had the fat, sweaty bloke sitting next to her not caught her with the hard edge of his briefcase as he heaved his carcass out of the seat, she might well have slept through to Barnsley again on the return trip. She had better buck up for later; she was hardly going to be the life and soul of Helen’s birthday party face down and asleep in her minestrone.

As usual, the train station was full of suits zipping in straight lines to their destinations clutching a laptop case in one hand and a grabbed breakfast bag in the other. As usual, there were a few early shoppers making
a leisurely way up to the main city stores and managing to get in the way of the rushing executives, who did not take too kindly to having lumpy human obstacles on their own personal work paths. And as usual, there was a large contingent of big-bellied workmen staring at women’s breasts from the scaffolding as their more industrious colleagues worked on extending the station, yet again. The train used to dump Elizabeth right in front of the ticket barriers, but these days it deposited them all so far away on one of the new platforms that she almost needed to catch another train from there to the exit. That morning, it felt a particularly long way.

At least the ten-minute walk in the crisp February air served to startle her brainwaves into some activity, and by the time she had reached the great, smutty-bricked offices with the giant blue
Handi-Save
sign above the entrance she felt considerably more human and less like a dormouse again. It was an old, weary-looking building in the middle of a sea of younger, more dynamic structures, with its exterior reflecting the majority of the people on the inside–dull, tired and uninspiring. She pushed open the giant stiff revolving door that had given everyone who had worked there for any length of time a deformed bicep. It was easy to spot a long-timer at Handi-Save for they all had one arm bigger than the other, like a male Fiddler crab. Yep, she felt decidedly better for the walk.

‘Flaming Norah, you look rough,’ said Derek the security man. He, being ambidextrous, had two massive arms. ‘Good night, was it?’

‘I was in bed for nine,’ Elizabeth held up her best shushing finger as his mouth sprang open, ‘and before you say it, yes, I was alone. I don’t know what’s up with me at the moment. I think I’ve been bitten by a tsetse-tsetse fly.’

‘Tsetse-tsetse? Going round in pairs now, are they?’ grinned Derek. ‘Maybe you’re coming down with something. Mind you, in a place like this someone’s only got to say “cold” and everyone gets it through the air conditioning.’

‘I feel all right in myself, just tired,’ she said, hunting in her bag for one of her menthols. She proffered the packet to him. ‘Want one?’

‘Do I chuff!’ he said, warding them away like a vampire who had just been offered a garlic bulb. ‘If I want mints I’ll suck a Polo, if I want a fag I’ll have an Embassy, thanks for asking.’

‘Please yourself then! Right, now, I better do something with my face then if I look that bad.’

‘I’ve a carrier bag behind Reception. I could poke two eyeholes in it for you.’

‘Thanks a lot, Ras.’

He nudged her playfully. ‘Ah, you still look bonny!’

She turned away, mock-insulted. ‘Nope, sorry, the damage has been done, you can get stuffed,’ and though she could hear him laughing behind her, the smile slid off her face as if it had been greased with three pounds of melted butter. Not that she had taken offence, for it took a lot to wind Elizabeth up–at least it had done until recently, when this infernal tiredness threatened to turn even her cool disposition to something
as brittle as the toffee she used to get as a kid that snapped off into artery-severing shards.

Derek, or Rasputin as everyone called him, would have been mortified even to suspect that he had upset her because they went back such a long way. He had only been at Handi-Save a week himself when she had turned up at the Reception desk aged sixteen, all wide grey eyes, smashing blouse buttoned up to the neck and her dark gypsy curls tamed into a ponytail. She had been half-fearful, half-excited by her important-sounding destination–‘the typing pool’–to where Ras volunteered to escort her. She’d had a picture in her mind of lots of typists working around a pool full of warm, blue water and was critically disappointed when it turned out to be just an airless office full of women with perms and frumpy frocks banging away on word processors. Ras was string-thin back then, with a number one haircut and a moustache like Ron from the pop group ‘Sparks’. He ended up getting them both hopelessly lost which caused a standing joke that was still running.

Twenty-two years later, they were both still there, crossing paths in Reception each morning, though Elizabeth had long since left the pool and was now the Managing Director’s secretary. Ras, on the other hand, had concentrated his energies over the years into evolving physically into a heavyweight wrestler who would fail a Roy Wood’s Wizzard audition for being too hairy. He’d had four kids, three wives, two motorcycle crashes and a steel plate in his head. The only things that seemed to have stayed constant about him
were those friendly facial features and the warmth in his morning greetings. He alone these days put a smile on Elizabeth’s lips at work, or as she preferred to call it, ‘the Hammer House of Handi-Save’.

The worrying part in all this was that if Ras thought she looked rough, then Julia definitely would–and the only reason Elizabeth had pushed herself out of bed that morning was because Julia and Laurence had made it perfectly clear that being absent on a Monday was tantamount to admitting to a hangover. So ironically, there she was dutifully turning up but looking as if she had been on a weekend ciderfest. A picture of the pair of them flitted across her mind, which made her growl inwardly. She was wound into the ground before she had even set eyes on the Gruesome Twosome and it was
so
not like her to feel this way. Hardly anything ever got to Elizabeth and even if it did, she never showed it.

She grabbed a coffee from the machine and slid into the tiny and horribly smoky room that the militantly anti-tobacco Laurence had ‘allowed’ the smokers to have and, as he said ‘pollute as their own’. The rebellious air in there usually calmed her down before she had even lit up, but that morning it felt thick and unpleasant, and welded itself like glue to the back of her throat. She sat on a table in the canteen instead, gulping back the lukewarm gritty coffee whilst pitter-patting with her fingertips at the fluidy swellings under her eyeballs. She didn’t dare risk another look in the mirror in case it threw back a worse reflection than the passable one she imagined was there before making her way to the lift.

She pressed the button (only four times that morning) before it started to shudder and rattle upwards at a pace that a snail with a weight problem could beat–even the machinery didn’t want to work here! She hadn’t always felt like that, for there had been a time when she used to belt up the staircase in the mornings, glad to get to her desk. Obviously that was before the days of that well-known double act Laurence Stewart-Smith, a name impossible to say without hissing, and his wonderful side-kick, Julia Powell–Powell as in the contraction of ‘power crazed troll’.

Laurence Stewart-Smith: also known as ‘Eyebrow Man’ on account of the long furry caterpillar which ran the width of his forehead before scuttling into his hairline to hide the
666
. Laurence Stewart-Smith: in the opinion of the City,
The Man
–business genius, whizz-kid, darling of industry, multi-millionaire man-of-the-people, demi-god of the hoi polloi–but in the opinion of anyone who really knew the man behind the title: total plonker.

Julia did not lift her head as Elizabeth walked past her desk, which had long since failed to surprise her. Julia could not communicate with females on a lesser grade unless it was by email, even when sitting two metres away as Elizabeth did. There were bagfuls of evidence to substantiate the theory that Julia was threatened by other women, who were creatures to be ignored, or destroyed. Men, however, were a different kettle of fish. Then she would start flirting and sticking out her chest and batting her eyelashes in the general direction of the flirtee–the number
of bats being directly proportionate to the quality of his suit.

Sometimes, to be controversial, Elizabeth would open a mail and shout across the reply to Julia as it really seemed to annoy her, but this past week or so she was just too tired to play the dissident. Was this the onset of old age, she wondered. Was she about to start dribbling and nodding off after a morning Rich Tea biscuit and exchanging her cappuccinos for a nice cup of cocoa? She was only eighteen months off being forty, after all.

Laurence’s first visitors arrived early and hung about the entrance foyer in nervous anticipation. They were the ladies from the Blackberry Moor council-house estate and he kept them waiting an extra quarter of an hour for no other reason, it seemed, than because he could. A gum-chewing photographer from the
Yorkshire Post
announced himself at Reception and Elizabeth collected them all and escorted them up. Jolly poses ensued, in Laurence’s open-plan meeting area, with the great man himself, who did not manage to fully lose that uncomfortable look on his face which seemed to say,
Ooh, I’ve touched a council-house person! Which way is the de-louser?
Then the photographer departed with his PR snaps and the three women perched awkwardly on the ends of the big squashy seats, blushing and stuttering like 1970s teenagers who had just been granted an audience with Donny Osmond. Elizabeth could never understand the effect Laurence had on such visitors. Half the time she
expected to have to go and find a mop to clean up excited puppy-like puddles at their feet, but on that occasion, so far so good.

She scribbled some notes down as Julia and Laurence both held their heads at the same angle of sympathetic tilt as they listened to babble about how grateful the Blackberry Moor estate was for the support of Handi-Save. Julia flicked through the folders the ladies had brought full of Before and After pictures of dreary communal dog-toilet areas, which had been converted impressively into playgrounds and thoughtful squares of garden thanks to donations and fundraising. Laurence sat, fingers templed in front of him, head nodding in all the right spots, his one long eyebrow managing to both crease in all the appropriate places and hood a pair of eyes that showed a mixture of boredom and disgust.

‘So hif you could…er…just continue to let hus have that turkey or something at Christmas for hour raffle,’ said the lady with the crocheted hat, trying desperately to stuff a few posh aitches in.

‘The money mainly goes for the kids’ benefit,’ butted in another as if it were in some dispute.

‘We don’t want much, just a few bits a couple of times a year, to raffle hoff like.’

‘We’re just starting to get some community spirit going, you see.’

The great Laurence Stewart-Smith nodded regally, and as if his head was attached to his assistant’s by an invisible puppet-string, it set Julia’s off as well. Neither would have looked out of place on the back parcel shelf of Elizabeth’s old Vauxhall.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’m sure we could fix you up with a little more than that.’ He scribbled something with an important flourish on a piece of paper and handed it to Julia. The ladies’ eyes followed the handover of the note with great anticipation. They could not have been more thrilled if he had just written down the secret of eternal life.

‘That would be just marvellous,’ said the one who had the pencilled-on eyebrows, and her face lit up so much they were in danger of melting.

‘Good, good.’

Laurence smiled, raised his watch hand theatrically, flicked his eyes towards it, and then stood to signify their audience time was at an end.

‘Well, I’m sorry it’s been such a short meeting but I do have another appointment, albeit not as entertaining, which I regret I’m a little late for,’ and he flashed his charming smile again and added, ‘My assistant Julia will show you out.’

The ladies twittered their way out of the door and as Laurence and Julia made to follow them, the piece of paper twirled to the floor from Julia’s file. Elizabeth picked it up. She just managed to sneak a look before Troll snatched it back rather hastily.

Let’s just give these old scrubbers some money and get out of here quick,
it said.

Elizabeth was disgusted but not surprised. She watched the smiling little trio from Blackberry Moor meander down the office to the temperamental lifts, blissfully ignorant of what their hero Laurence Stewart-Smith was really like. So long as he flung them a few
tombola pressies every so often, they would continue to idolize him as a local saint, although Elizabeth knew that one did not get to be in his position by being a nice bloke. Somewhere in mid-management, they cut out the heart and replaced it with an axe. And once a man held power, she had found, he was almost certain to misuse it.

Janey snapped around the room, tossing tissues and lippy into her handbag, occasionally stopping to rub her stomach.

‘What’s up with you?’ said Elizabeth, watching her.

‘Dodgy Chinese last night.’

‘Get stuffed with your dodgy Chinese!’ said Janey’s hubby George, twisting round from watching the preamble to the big match on the television. ‘I had half hers and I’m right as rai—’

‘In fact, if it hadn’t been Helen’s birthday I’d have cried off,’ Janey cut in.

‘You couldn’t have done that, we haven’t seen each other since Christmas!’ said Elizabeth.

‘Yes, well–that’s another reason why I’m making the effort,’ said Janey. ‘Anyway, I’m not drinking so no point in us getting a taxi. Sod it, where’s my purse?’ She shoved George to one side to see if he was sitting on it. Not that he would have known, even if it had been full of razor blades, the dozy sod, she thought. Now what was that other something else that was bugging her to remember it?

‘Don’t be so wet!’ said Elizabeth.

‘Ring a taxi and get a few gins down your neck, that’ll sort you out,’ said the Bagpuss-like bloke, taking a slurp from a can of beer.

‘I might have known you’d side with her!’ said Janey, thumbing at her butter-wouldn’t-melt-faced friend.

Elizabeth grinned at her and looked, for a moment, just like she did at school, give or take a couple of sunrays at the eye corners.

‘Oh damnit–flowers!’ Janey threw her hands up in despair and blamed George. ‘I told you to remind me not to forget the flowers. You’d have let me walk out without them!’

George smiled indulgently, taking her in his stride as usual and sighing like an inflatable shire horse that had just sustained a fatal puncture.

‘Flowers, Janey, don’t forget!’ he said, clicking his fingers as if it had just come to him. Janey hit him with a cushion, although flowers were not the ‘something’ that was buzzing around in her head, refusing to be pinned down.

‘How’s work then?’ George said to Elizabeth.

‘Oh don’t ask!’ she said. ‘The latest thing is’–and she did a fair impression of her arch enemy–‘“Would you please ask permission if you’re going to be longer than five minutes in the loo?” Can you believe?’

‘Never! What did you say?’

‘I smiled sweetly and said that I wasn’t in the habit of timing myself. I’m forty next year, for God’s sake. I stopped sticking my hand up to ask to go to the loo twenty odd years ago. Honestly, that woman.
Heil
Julia!’
She gave a Nazi salute and started goose-stepping up and down on the carpet in front of the television.

‘Dear God!’ belled Janey from the kitchen, she’d always imagined that at this age they would be mature and talking about the news and what charity Bob Geldof was collecting for these days. George chuckled and Janey thought, He’s got a lovely laugh. They had somehow fallen out of the habit of laughing together these days.

‘Didn’t I read somewhere that you lot were getting taken over?’ said George.

‘There’s been talk for a while,’ said Elizabeth, dismissing it. ‘Just the Job, the DIY chain, was supposedly interested in buying us out. Laurence loathes the bloke who owns it though and is standing firm. Not that I get to know much, being a mere pleb.’

‘Is it really that bad, working there?’

‘Worse. Well, the place is okay–it’s just her, Camp Commandant. As for him, I just can’t find the words. Hang on, I’ve just found some–he’s a tosspot.’

‘Aye, it’s tough working at the top,’ George teased, and smiled at her fondly. He loved Elizabeth like a sister, funny old thing that she was. In her he saw a vulnerability that a caring soul like him could not help but respond to, despite her frosty independent ways and her fruity language. He might have had plenty to say if Janey had been as free with her expletives, but with Elizabeth, it was just part and parcel. Not that anyone would think she had a mouth like a sewer to look at her, all little and slim with lovely, dark gypsy curls and startling grey eyes that his Janey had always
envied, but in a nice way. She wouldn’t swap what she had for what her friend had in a million years, she’d assured him tenderly, even if Elizabeth
could
eat a double chicken korma and half a chocolate cake and not put an ounce of weight on.

‘Do you think there is something going on between those two at work then?’ asked George.

‘Shouldn’t think so,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Laurence is too smart for that. He’s got his eye on “higher things” and he needs to be squeaky clean, though it’s not for the want of trying on her part. Office politics! I tell you, Georgy boy, they’re worse than political politics!’

‘I can imagine,’ said George, nodding, although he had never really understood what could be so complicated and difficult about going into an office and sitting on your backside all day typing and answering the phone.

‘It just galls me how everyone thinks he’s some sort of hero when I know what a really horrible bloke he is. I mean today, right, we had these women in from the Blackberry Moor estate. Honestly, you would have thought they were meeting the Pope! One of them even had her autograph book. Prostrating themselves they were for a couple of boxes of Milk Tray and a Christmas turkey.’

‘Blackberry Moor? Where’s that? Sounds nice,’ said Janey.

George sucked in a long whistley breath. ‘Nay, you must have heard of it, Janey love. It’s always on the news for drugs raids. The only time any of that lot will have seen a blackberry is if it’s been drawn on the back
of an acid tab! It’s a massive council estate, pet–a right dump as well.’

‘But, give them credit,’ Elizabeth butted in, ‘a few people who live there have got together to get a bit of community spirit going. Laurence linked up with it for the free publicity, but you can tell he doesn’t give a toss. He’s too busy sending stupid emails to Julia about how fat and ugly people are, which is rich considering he’s one step away from being a werewolf and she’s got legs you could drive a bus through!’

George stared at her in amazement. ‘Here, grind your teeth on these before you give yourself a jam-tart attack,’ he said, lifting his bowl of peanuts out to her. ‘I’ve never seen you in a stew before, Elizabeth.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Elizabeth, refusing the nuts. If other people were noticing the change in her, it was not in her imagination then.

‘Eh, I’ve just thought,’ twinkled George. ‘If this takeover thing goes through they could call the company “Hand-Job”! Geddit? Hand. Job.’ A great snort of laughter came down his nose and joined Elizabeth’s loud and dirty laugh that fed his own even more and so it snowballed, then Janey’s laugh added to it, despite her pretending to disapprove. When George and Elizabeth got together, they bounced off each other like a comedy double act. Like they used to.

‘Ready!’ announced Janey.

‘Hang on a mo, I need the loo,’ said Elizabeth.

‘Again? You’ve been once.’

‘Oh no! It’s Julia, she’s got to you!’ said Elizabeth, pretending to scream as she disappeared to Janey’s
downstairs bathroom, wondering why she seemed to want to go every five minutes these days.

Janey leaned over the back of the sofa for a habit kiss from George.

‘She’ll be bloody forty by the time you get there, never mind thirty-nine!’ he cracked.

‘Oh, get lost, George,’ Janey said, but she was smiling at him.

‘Bye, Georgy,’ said Elizabeth, soon after, and ruffled up his sandy hair with both hands as she passed him. She followed Janey out and they jumped into the car quickly to escape the freezing night air.

They drove down the lane and joined the long-drawn-out curve of the main road that took them past the park and St Jude’s Church and the two big secondary schools that had united to become one huge one in recent years. Within five minutes, the redbrick houses had given way to a sprawling grey council-house estate, then five minutes after that, all buildings dropped away and they were in the country outskirts of the town. They passed the local Scout Camp wood and a garden centre with its quaint café by a duck-popular stream in the centre of semi-rural Maltstone. The village was the unofficial warm-up act for the next one: Higher Hoppleton, with its beautiful park and country house set in the grounds like a square exquisite jewel. Higher Hoppleton was the Barnsley Beverly Hills; a Higher Hoppleton postcode had the kudos to make people raise their eyebrows in admiration–which is why Simon, Mr Swanky High-Flying Advertising Exec, had decided that he and his
wife Helen would live there when the right property came up on the market.

Four years ago, the Cadberrys had bought a long, impressive bungalow with its own black iron gates, a small, separate office building, and plenty of parking space for their his and hers black BMWs. Although ‘
they
bought’ was stretching it a bit, as Elizabeth had always suspected that most of the money came from the Luxmores’ coffers. It was a show-house, the stuff of high-class glossy mags: cushions perfectly arranged, pictures spirit-level straight and yet bizarrely, in the midst of it all was their guest room–a chaos of Simon’s old junk that he refused to deal with
yet
. Their old house in quieter, gentler Maltstone was far prettier than this pretentious pile, in Elizabeth’s opinion, though not in Janey’s. She said the same thing then as she always did as her car crunched up Helen’s gravel drive, ‘I wish this was mine, isn’t it gorgeous?’

Elizabeth didn’t answer her; she would rather have had Janey’s half-finished warm, friendly house than this big, fancy thing anytime.

When Simon answered the back door, Elizabeth could have sworn that he and Helen had just snapped off an argument. Janey never noticed, she was too busy turning into her usual puddle of drool when in the presence of her friend’s husband and his dazzling toothpaste-advert smile.

‘Only us,’ she announced and they both went into Helen’s gleaming high-tech kitchen. They gave her a big birthday kiss and a hug and then they handed over their birthday presents and cards. Elizabeth had made
hers and it featured a little watercolour of a tabby cat. Simon hated cats.

‘Good evening, ladies.’ Simon smiled at Janey. The smile made a grand arc over to Elizabeth where it died on its feet.

Janey smiled back, aware that her heart-rate had increased as it usually did in the presence of this gorgeous man with his wavy golden hair and toned physique. He had blue eyes that could undress a woman at fifty paces and, in her imagination, she had often pictured that woman as herself. She bet he was fantastic in bed, a master of special tricks and foreplay that went on for hours and would make a girl scream aloud, and he would know exactly what to say to make her spine turn into runny oil–like a Mills & Boon hero. Alas, these days, she and George, when they could be bothered to do it, were more of a ‘scratch an itch’ couple. Then again, they had been together fourteen years and exciting sex was usually a casualty of a long relationship.

‘You just caught me telling Helen to keep clear of the gin–she’s been feeling a bit off,’ Simon said in his plummy posh voice. He reached over and gave Helen’s hair a stroke and Janey tingled for her.

‘You as well?’ she began without thinking. ‘We had a dodgy Chinese last night and I’m…’ She stopped herself just in time before she launched into a full rundown of her confused digestive system in front of Love-God Man and showed herself up totally ‘er…better now, thank goodness.’

His little sneer wasn’t lost on Elizabeth, but Janey
missed it. She was too engaged in watching him move fluidly over to the coat-hooks on the wall through her rose-tinted spectacles. He slipped on a brown leather jacket which looked butter soft, not like the cheap one George had that was so stiff he needed five minutes’ notice to bend his arm. The CD-player in the background was oozing out Sade’s ‘Smooth Operator’. Appropriately so, thought Elizabeth, watching Simon shmooze back across to his wife.

‘Right, darling, I’m going and leaving you girls to it.’

‘Off to watch the football?’ Janey asked.

‘Football?’ He said it like the word was not in his vocabulary. ‘Not really interested in it, to be honest.’

‘What’s cooking? Smells gorgeous,’ said Elizabeth to Helen, thinking how very pale and wispy she looked.

‘Prawn cocktail, scampi and Black Forest gâteau,’ said Simon.

‘Ooh, lovely!’ shrieked Janey.

‘He’s joking, it’s just a pasta thing,’ Helen replied, flashing him a look. Janey nodded but would have preferred Simon’s menu, especially the Black Forest cake. It never got any easier fighting the urge to indulge her sweet tooth.

‘I’m going.’ Simon kissed his wife quickly and whispered something in her ear that had a bit of an odd effect on her. She looks like she’s just had a bucket of cold water poured over her head, Elizabeth thought, wondering what
that
was all about.

‘Enjoy yourselves, ladies.’

‘Oh, don’t you worry, we will!’ Janey trilled, sounding
just like the crocheted-hat woman of Blackberry Moor in the presence of Laurence.

‘I wish George was like that,’ she sighed as the door closed behind Simon and puffed the wake of his expensive aftershave in her direction. ‘He’s so romantic, just like Mr Darcy.’

Elizabeth fought back the desire to stick her fingers down her throat. Whatever he had just whispered to Helen before he went out didn’t look like flaming sweet nothings to
her
.

Helen didn’t comment; she just reached for three glasses and said, ‘Gin, girls?’

‘Oh, go on then, just a treble,’ said Elizabeth keenly. If she was going to be running to the loo all night, she might as well make it worth her while. Janey shook her head then thought better of it and relented, asking for a small one–so long as she had plenty of slimline tonic in with it.

‘“Just a small one”,’ mimicked Elizabeth. ‘“With minus calories, no fat, and a no-carb tonic, please!’”

‘I don’t care; you can take the mick all you want. I have no intention of putting all that weight on again after it took me all that time to get it off!’ said Janey, taking the glass.

Helen thought Janey had put a little weight on since she last saw her at Christmas, although she didn’t say that aloud. Janey looked nicer with a bit of flesh on her bones. She had always been a big, red-haired girl with a great curvy body and a round friendly face, and she looked scrawny and pinched now she had become a diet convert. She was built for ‘comely’ and used to
exude a sexy earthiness that she had somehow lost with the lard. Elizabeth thought the same. Not that either of them wanted to start World War III off by telling her so.