The Yorkshire Pudding Club (6 page)

Over the years, each of them had found their own individual ways to unwind. Helen had always been into photography and was official recorder of their various hairstyles and gallivanting. She owned bulging albums that would have been worth millions in blackmail money if any of them ever became famous, especially ‘the perm years’ for Janey, and Elizabeth’s Mod phase in which she turned up to all things in a parka and a long, dangerous pair of winkle-pickers. Janey liked to sew and was an absolute whizz with a needle or a machine, even though it almost constituted a domestic chore. Not that she was dirty or would have had a germ-ridden house had George not been so handy with a duster and a Dyson, but she didn’t get the same sense of achievement that Elizabeth did from scrubbing a floor or polishing a room until it shone.

Janey had always been a big girl–tall as well as broad–and in the days of their youthful exploits, the fashion industry seemed to be under the impression that women of a certain size might prefer to cover up their substantial attributes in shame rather than decorate them. Hip, funky clothes for figures like hers were
very thin on the ground so the only solution was for her to make her own, especially during the New Romantic era. She was the appointed dress designer when they went out in frilly white shirts and dandy satin cummerbunds to dance to Ant Music, and when full circle skirts were in vogue, she had run them all up matching grey ones for school. They had gone around together looking like three rejects from
Grease
and Helen had the picture to prove it.

For Elizabeth, her number one way to relax had been with a quiet place and her artbox, especially when she felt the need to escape from the world. At school, Art had a secondary place on the curriculum as a useful hobby but was never afforded the same respect as the more ‘serious subjects’ like History or Latin. Then, when Elizabeth was twelve Miss Fairclough arrived as a new teacher and saw in Elizabeth a real flair for the subject and she nurtured her like a precious plant. The residing Head of Art, Mr Pierrepoint, was bored and unenthusiastic and ticking off the days to his retirement but Miss Fairclough was a passionate teacher. She set up an after-school club for interested parties, for which Elizabeth was first in the queue. There, Miss Fairclough showed them all the finer points of perspective and shading, as well as enthralling her students with lively tales of the great artists and their wild and wicked ways, and how the various phases in their lives would reflect in their drawings. The example that always stuck in Elizabeth’s mind had been one of Picasso’s later works,
Grande Maternité
. She would never forget the flowing lines,
the serenity of the picture of a mother feeding her baby at the breast that told of the inner contentment of the artist. Miss Fairclough might only have been at the school for a year, but it was at a time when Elizabeth had needed a safe and quiet expression for her confused emotions. She was to find what she learned with Miss Fairclough useful for the rest of her life and she would always be grateful to her old teacher for it.

Before she went up to tackle the bedroom, Elizabeth relaxed with a glass of juice and a sandwich in her bright little kitchen. She’d had it done up last year after one of the ancient units fell off, taking half the wall with it. Now it was bright and yellow, more so in the afternoons when the sun streamed full in through the large window, which framed the neat little back garden like a pretty picture. Cleef was gently snoring on the seat next to her, one leg sticking out like Superman mid-flight. She had the sudden urge to draw him and reached behind her to the drawer where she kept her pencilbox and sketchpad. She would need a new one soon; most of the pages had been torn out of that one. She used a 3H pencil for a delicate outline and it moved quickly over the paper to capture Cleef before he shifted into a more conventional position, although there was a fat chance of that unless a mouse-flavoured bomb went off under his nose. His paw twitched a little and his claws made a brief appearance as if he was dreaming of an adversary. Then he was still again and allowed her to finish. Elizabeth had never kept a diary, but in the forgotten pictures stored up in the loft was a graphic record of her young life.
Unlike the picture of Cleef, there was no delicacy in them, only great outpourings of emotion in thick, black, angry strokes, as in the recently ripped-out pages of her sketchpad.

As Elizabeth entered her bedroom, she saw the room for the first time through Janey’s eyes and it was just like she said, in desperate need of a makeover, although it was faultlessly clean. In comparison to the bright pink paint in the tin the present beige walls looked extra dull and boring and tired, but not for much longer. She climbed the ladder, dipped her brush and started the job off. The problem was that painting walls gave Elizabeth far too much time to think. It was all very well ‘letting her mind wander’, as Janey put it, but it wandered straight over to John Silkstone and stayed there, wondering.
Had he actually got divorced or was it just a temporary split from Lisa? Did they have any kids? Was he courting someone else? Did he ever think of her?
God knows, she had tried not to think about him these years past. There was little point, for she didn’t imagine they could ever be friends again. When you hurt someone like she had hurt him, you didn’t deserve the privilege anyway and Lisa, for all her fluffy dolly looks, had been head over heels about him. He had deserved some good loving; Elizabeth had missed her chance and that was that. Still, that knowledge did not stop the image of all he had once meant to her start to reconstitute itself out of the ashes in her head and rise up slowly like a great big black-haired Phoenix with massive builder’s boots on. Her mind wondered about him a bit more and then the phone rang.

‘It’s me, I can’t stay long, I’m still at work,’ Janey said. ‘You all right?’

‘Yeah, I’m painting like you said,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Lots of pink. Then I’m going to go down and pick a nice new red carpet.’

‘It’ll be like sleeping in a flaming womb!’

Elizabeth laughed.

‘Oh, by the way,’ Janey said suddenly. ‘I meant to tell you, guess who I saw in the Co-op?’

‘Elvis?’ said Elizabeth.

‘Give over.’

‘Shergar? Lord Lucan?’

‘Aye, them an’ all.’

‘The
Picnic at Hanging Rock
girls?’

‘I’m being serious!’ said Janey, being serious.

‘John Silkstone?’

‘How the bloody hell did you know that?’

‘I saw him in Just the Job when I was picking up the paint.’

Janey gasped. ‘Did you talk to him?’

‘Briefly.’

‘And?’

‘And what? We said hello and how are you, end of story.’

‘You must have got something more out of him than that!’

‘Flaming hell! How long have you been in the Spanish Inquisition?’

‘Oh come on, spill the beans, woman!’

Elizabeth sighed. ‘He’s living back here and it sounds like his marriage is over.’

‘Oh, really now,’ Janey said lasciviously.

‘Don’t say “Oh, really now” in that way,’ said Elizabeth, knowing exactly what she was thinking.

Elizabeth was right in her assumption. Janey’s mind had romped ahead and was seeing a second spark of hope for Elizabeth and John now that he had split up from the wad of cottonwool he had married. She had never liked Lisa, she had always thought of her as vacuous and dull as ditchwater, and believed that John Silkstone had only taken up with her on the rebound from Elizabeth; any idiot could have told any other idiot that.

‘Do you think you’ll see him around?’ Janey asked.

‘I don’t know. Probably, if I hang around do-it-yourself shops and building sites,’ she said.

‘He didn’t ask you out for a drink or anything?’

‘No, of course he didn’t!’

‘Oh well,’ said Janey, disappointed that her news was so anti-climactic, ‘that’s all I rang for, really. Helen’s vomiting for England, by the way.’

‘Oh dear, poor love. I’ll ring her later. Are you all right then?’ said Elizabeth.

‘Fine–more than fine, actually. I had a coffee with the Mr Big in Personnel and, guess what, he wants me to apply to be Manager of Customer Services.’

‘I hope you’re going to then!’

‘Too flaming right I am. Anyway, I’ll have to go because I need the loo. I think I must have a bit of an infection, you know, because I can’t stop going. I’m nearly as bad as you.’

‘It’s probably a mix of cold weather and us being old bags.’

‘Thank you for that. See you later then,’ said Janey, putting the phone down, thinking,
Funny.
She thought Elizabeth would have been a lot more affected, bumping into the man with whom she had once been so totally and utterly in love, according to that letter anyway. But then you never could tell with Elizabeth what was really going on in her head.

As Helen leaned over the toilet bowl for the five-millionth time that afternoon she wondered why they called it ‘morning sickness’ when she didn’t get a wave of nausea until at least lunchtime. Mornings were reserved for being so tired that she did not feel she had slept during the night, and then for the rest of the day she felt so sick she hardly dared step out of the house.

Her work colleagues were very sympathetic–thank goodness. The office was full of clucky old hens in early grandmotherhood who suspected she was pregnant and gushed over her, deluging her with helpful tips, although the ginger biscuit anti-vomit idea made her heave so much at one point she felt she was turning inside out. The only things she was managing to keep down were lemon juice and small baked potatoes covered with tuna and vinegar. She found she had even gone off tea and coffee–they left a really odd taste in her mouth, as if she was drinking them out of a tin can. Even her alltime favourite meal, grilled sole, had her clamping her hand over her mouth and aiming like an Exocet missile for the nearest cistern.

She would be so glad when that stage of things was over–touch wood–in another five weeks, earlier if
she was lucky. At the moment, all she could think about was the pulsing headache in her temple and she felt terribly guilty that she could not fully concentrate on what Janey had just been telling her on the phone about an interview, and that John Silkstone was back, and that Elizabeth had met him somewhere. Not that she knew him as well as the others did, but he had been very sweet when he came to take the little black kitten away from her for Elizabeth. She had made a total fool of herself by crying buckets and he had given her his hankie, which had been roughly the size of a double quilt cover. However, she did think that what happened between him and Elizabeth had been such a stupid shame, even more so when they read her letter. Helen loved her friend dearly but sometimes she wished she would open herself up more and let people in. Then again, who was she to say that, really?

Elizabeth had to stop painting to take a nap and then she woke with a blinding headache, which served her right for going to sleep in a room full of fresh paint. At least it gave her the perfect excuse to text Dean and tell him not to come over, as there was nowhere to sleep. He sent one back saying
WE DON’T HV
2
SLEEP
!!!! She fired one back saying
I M REALLY TIRED
. One came back straight away with his intelligent spelling:
YUOR ALWAYS BLUDDY TRIED
.

It was not a relationship; it was just a habit and one that needed stopping. Dean was a casual labourer who had lingered too long after doing a job next door and
he had knocked on the door and bothered her for a cup of tea. She could not tell where the job ended and they began, but he had stuck his feet quickly and firmly under her table. Then again, Elizabeth wasn’t exactly renowned for her judgement of character. Funny, that–all the people she ever grown fond of she had taken against when she first met them: she thought Janey was thick, Helen was a stuck-up cow, George was a lump and she thought her Auntie Elsie was the Wicked Witch of the West with her flaming boiled ham and over-diluted orange juice. As for John Silkstone, dressed from head to foot in black leather with that stupid cowboy hat on, thinking he looked cool and interesting! She really did not want to like him, but he sneaked up on her heart over the years and so she did the only sensible thing in the end for Elizabeth–she got rid. She sent him away to another woman and another life, yet Dean and his snoring and his mess and his laziness and his revolting habits were there taking up space in her existence. Now really where was the sense in all that?

The job vacancy went up on the noticeboard Thursday and they interviewed Janey on the Tuesday following, three of them: Barry, Judith Booth–the HR woman–and Barry’s second-in-command, Tony Warburton. Janey had crossed paths with them all in the past and they had seemed very fair, capable and decent people. The last Customer Service Manager had left quickly and suspiciously, despite having been young and supposedly dynamic, and Janey knew they needed to
fill the position as soon as possible. They called her after lunch and asked if she would be available for an impromptu meeting and thank goodness, she’d had the foresight to come to work especially smart and prepared, just in case they sprang something like this on her.

She was a little nervous, but not so much that it made her give daft answers to their questions. All in all, she thought she had done quite a good job and they nodded a lot at what she had to say and seemed quite impressed at how she conducted herself. The stress of it told later though, when she walked out of the interview room with her head held high and went straight to the Ladies, where she threw up the contents of her stomach and three other people’s besides.

As Janey was composing herself in the loo, Elizabeth was standing back to admire her handiwork in her new, nearly finished bedroom. It looked so different from the old look that it could almost have been a new extension rather than a revamped space. Even the window looked twice the size with a pair of new pale-pink curtains at the window instead of the old heavy tapestry drapes. She had thrown out the bulky bedside cabinets and tugged and heaved the furniture about, experimenting with a different arrangement, and was surprised at how much larger and lighter the room felt. As she was cutting up the old carpet into strips for the Council to take away, she knew that she did not want Dean staying in this fresh, clean space and that she must now finally end this non-relationship
they had. Then she drove into one of the trading estates on the outskirts of town and picked a carpet–a soft strawberry red with a lovely thick pile. There was plenty of it in stock so it could be fitted the following Monday.