A Crowded Marriage (21 page)

“But of course, darling. Rural life is much more civilised. In France, the postman even stops for a tincture. When I first moved to Provence I went out and greeted him with, “
Bonjour, monsieur. Un petit calvados?
” To which he'd replied, “
Oui, mais pourquoi petit?
”

I'd laughed, but had drawn the line at offering Paul whisky at ten o'clock. Tongues might wag if I was known, not only to be saying it with flowers to the headmaster, but getting the postman pissed too.

“Morning, Paul, what have you got for me?” I said cheerily, buoyant now that I'd done the deed with Kate: ready to face the day.

“Just a brown one and some junk mail, I'm afraid.”

“Shame. Nothing exciting?”

“Not unless you count a garden hose catalogue.”

“I might,” I grinned. “Got to take your thrills where you can these days!”

As soon as I'd said it, I wished I hadn't. Paul looked startled, then reddened and hopped back smartly in his van. As he roared off up the chalky track, I scurried inside, smarting.

There's cheerful banter and there's idiotic rambling, Imogen, I said to myself as I shut the door. Try not to come across as too much of a frustrated housewife, hmm?

As I went to the kitchen to chuck the junk mail in the bin, simultaneously opening the brown envelope, I frowned. Sat down. A hundred and fifty pounds? For what? My eyes shot to the headed paper, Marshbank Veterinary Practice, and then, itemised:

April 5…Home visit and consultancy £75

May 18…Home visit and consultancy £75

My eyes bulged in disbelief. A hundred and fifty pounds? For a couple of visits? Oh, for heaven's sake. I reached for the phone and punched out a number.

“Marshbank Veterinary Practice?” purred my friend on the other end.

“Can I speak to Pat Flaherty, please?”

“Mr. Flaherty is on a call at the moment,” she said icily, perhaps recognising my demanding tones.

“Is he. Well it's Imogen Cameron here. Perhaps you can ask him from me why I've been charged a hundred and fifty pounds for absolutely nothing! All he did was prod a cow with his foot and show me where my chicken house is. Is that what he went to veterinary college for?”

“We have a basic call-out charge, Mrs. Cameron. A home visit is more expensive.”

“Well, I could hardly bring the cow into the surgery, could I! Although I might just, next time.”

“You do that, Mrs. Cameron. It might be worth watching.”

And with that, she put the phone down. I stared into the buzzing receiver, outraged. Ooh…I seethed.
Bloody
woman. Well, it would be the last time I'd be calling on Marshbank's services. There must be other vets in the neighbourhood; I'd patronise them next time. Take my animals elsewhere. Meanwhile, though, there was the vexing little problem of this bill to pay. I got up from the table, biting my thumbnail savagely. Alex had gone ballistic the other day because he'd seen a new carrier bag—what was he going to say about this?

“New shoes, Imogen!” he'd yelped, taking them out of the bag where I'd hidden them at the bottom of the wardrobe. “What the hell are you up to? You know we're on a shoestring at the moment.”

“They're flip-flops, for God's sake,” I'd said, snatching them from him. “Hardly handmade Italian mules, and I can't live in sweaty trainers all summer!”

I couldn't, but a totally unnecessary vet's bill would justifiably send him into orbit. No, I had to sort this one out myself.

Money again, I thought, sitting down and raking despairing hands through my hair, a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. If only I could make some of the filthy stuff. If only I wasn't so hopeless. If only I could
do
something…

Half an hour later saw me driving very fast down the country lanes into town. Fast, because if I slowed down and thought about what I was doing, I might stop, turn round and go home. My hands felt sweaty on the wheel and my heart was full of fluttering and trepidation, and not only that, I had a very full car too. Packed to the gunwales. And no doubt I'd come straight back with my full car, with my tail firmly between my legs, but as Dad said, if you didn't stick your head above the parapet, how the hell did you know if it was going to be knocked off? Although as a caveat, he'd always add, “But never agree to play Macbeth in drag,” something he'd done to his cost. Well, I wasn't about to do that. No, no, something much more terrifying.

I parked squarely outside the wine bar that Sheila had assured me the other day was just the place—“Just opened, luv, and right poncy it looks too”—and regarded it nervously. It did look poncy. With its smart, bottle-green livery and “Moulin Rouge” written in loopy gold scroll above the two bow-fronted windows, it looked chic, smart, and expensive; just exactly how I didn't feel right now.

It was a full five minutes before I steeled myself to get out of the car and walk through the door. Inside it was dark and dimly lit, and I had to adjust my eyes to the cavernous depths. The walls were painted a dark matt red, and bentwood chairs were grouped around polished wooden tables dotted about the room. A long mahogany bar ran the entire length of the left-hand side, and behind it a pretty girl with a shiny dark bob and a cupid's-bow mouth was polishing glasses. Aside from that, the place was empty. She smiled.

“Can I help?”

“Yes, I…is the manager in, please?”

“I am the manager.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, I know, I should be drinking café cognac in my little back room reading
Paris Match
while someone else does this, but due to sluggish business I'm also the washer-upper, glass polisher and general dogsbody.” She grinned.

I grinned back, relaxing slightly. “I know the feeling. I mean, the dogsbody one. My name's Imogen Cameron, by the way. I'm an artist.”

It was an old trick, but she looked suitably impressed as she offered me her hand.

“Hi, I'm Molly. Should I have…?”

“No, no,” I said humbly, instantly regretting my bravado, “you won't have heard of me. But I was just wondering—well, someone said you occasionally have local artists' work hanging in here, and I wondered if you'd consider taking mine?”

There. It was out. “Oh, right. Who said that?”

“Sheila Banks.”

She threw back her head and laughed. “Sheila Banks! Well, you've been misinformed. I've never had art here—haven't been open long enough—but if Sheila sent you, I'd better take a look. Don't want my legs chopped off, do I?” She balled her cloth and tossed it down on the bar. “What are they, watercolours?”

“No, oils actually. Rather large ones. They're in the car, I'll—”

“Oh.” She stopped, looked disappointed. “Might not be our sort of thing then. Watercolours tend to go best, apparently. Cheaper, I suppose, and I think people find them more accessible.” She must have seen my face fall. “Tell you what, let's take a look. She came out from behind the bar, slim and elegant in a white shirt and black jeans, a long white apron tied over them. “You go and get them, and we'll spread them out on this big table here.”

Of course, by the time I'd made various trips to the car and struggled back with them, puffing and panting whilst she'd looked on wide-eyed, they wouldn't all fit on the table, so we ended up putting them on the floor around the room, propping them against the dark red walls. There was another, smaller room through a low archway at the back and Molly took a few in there, which I thought was encouraging. I then waited an agonising few minutes, what felt like the longest few minutes of my life, as she walked around them all, biting her thumbnail; really looking at them properly, head on one side, squatting down to get a better look, peering closely, then moving back to get the perspective. Finally she straightened up, turned and smiled.

“I'll take them,” she said. “What the hell, they're huge, but they look great. And even if the customers don't go for them, I like them. They certainly go a long way to brightening up my bar.”

What I wanted to do was leap up and punch the air and shout “
Yesssss!
” before jumping, footballer style, into her arms, but I managed to restrain myself and gasp “Thank you!” instead.

“What shall we say—sixty forty on the price tag if they sell? To you, of course.”

I gaped. I hadn't got as far as that. “Perfect,” I said dazed. God, I'd have given her ninety per cent; would have agreed to anything if she did but know it. We then spent the next ten minutes writing prices on sticky labels—rather high ones, I felt, but who was I to argue?—and putting them on the frames, and then Molly went upstairs to borrow a hammer and a fistful of nails from her builders who were working in her flat above the bar. When she came back down, we set about hanging the pictures there and then. As I passed nails up to her, I felt as if I was walking on air.

“No time like the present,” she'd declared, halfway up a ladder and banging one in, taking a painting from me and hanging it carefully above the low archway. “And it's not as if I've got any bloody customers!”

We hung eleven in all, and one, my largest and favourite, a Parisian street scene, we put right behind the bar under a convenient picture light. As I stood back and surveyed it, nestling there amongst the bottles of Martini and vermouth, then turned slowly round and took in the rest of my work, above tables, over the archway, a couple in the back room, all cheaply framed but at least on walls, and not in an easel or stacked away in a wardrobe, I felt such a rush of pleasure I was nearly sick.

“They look great,” said Molly in surprise, turning about. “Really—you know—professional. And they transform the place. Looks like a proper French café now.”

It did. What had been a dark, gloomy bar with north-facing bow windows, now looked cheerful and atmospheric, like a nineteenth-century Impressionists' retreat. One could almost imagine them in here, in fact, in their smocks and berets, smoking their Gauloise, knocking back their pastis, bitching about Toulouse-Lautrec, before bustling back to their easels in their garrets.

“You need some of those ashtrays,” I said suddenly. “The yellow ones, triangular, with something written—”

“Pernod! Got some—I just haven't put them out.” She dashed behind the bar and tore open a box. Polystyrene bobbles spilled everywhere, and we then had a very jolly time dealing out the ashtrays, one to each table. She hesitated.

“What I really want is candles. You know, in bottles, with the wax dripping down the sides, but it's so tacky and seventies, I just wonder…”

“Why not?” I said staunchly. “This is a retro French café, isn't it? You're being intentionally kitsch.” She looked at me a moment, and then, in another, she'd whipped a whole load of waxy bottles from a cupboard behind the bar where she'd clearly stashed them, uncertain as to what they said about the proprietress.

“Let's light them,” I said decisively, taking a few from her and popping them round the room, adrenalin making me bossy.

“What, at lunch time?”

“Well, it's a gloomy old day, and people will see them flickering invitingly through the windows. Might lure them in.”

We lit the whole lot in the end, and even put a few on the bar, and then, with the place glowing soft and sumptuous in the candlelight, my paintings shimmering magically in the flickering flames, Molly went to the fridge and took out a bottle. She popped the cork expertly.

“Come on, we need a drink. Even if no one else in this sodding town does.”

I laughed and we moved to perch on stools at the bar. Molly poured us each a large glass of Chablis, and as we sipped companionably she told me about her hopes for this place; about her dream of bringing a little bit of Paris where she'd worked for some years to this small market town; about her sleepless nights as she'd borrowed more and more money to open it, about her bank manager's misgivings, and about her despair as the clientele walked resolutely by to the Dog and Duck. To console her I told her about my own gnawing guilt that I wasn't a real artist at all, just a dilettante fake—unwise perhaps, since she'd just taken eleven of my pictures—but she seemed to take it in her stride, and we were on the point of going beyond work to our more personal lives—which, in my case, fired by two glasses of wine on an empty stomach would probably have gushed forth torrentially—when we were saved by the bell. A tinkly one over the door that Rufus would have liked. A young couple stuck their heads round. The man looked apologetic.

“Oh. We didn't know if you were open yet, or—”

“Yes! Oh, yes, we are.” Molly nearly fell off her stool, just managing to save herself, as she slipped, with a ravishing smile, behind the bar. “What can I get you?”

I drained my glass, shooting her a wink, then, gathering up the solitary landscape we hadn't been able to find space for and attempting to leave some money on the bar which Molly refused with a firm “On the house,” I went out into the street.

The air was still and calm, and a soft rain was falling, so light it was almost a mist. I stood there for a moment, relishing it, letting it cool my cheeks, flushed with wine and success. I'd found a home for my pictures. I'd found a new friend—who, if I was honest would probably turn out to be more of a soul mate than Sheila. I'd had a good day. Not the first since I'd been here, but the best for a while. Still smiling foolishly and with my warm glow threatening to reach furnace proportions, I tossed the solitary picture in the back of my car, and headed off out of town.

Thank you, Mr. Pat Flaherty, I thought, gripping the wheel tightly and raising my chin as I swept off down the narrow lanes, cow parsley brushing the sides of my car. Thank you very much indeed. If you did but know it, you've given me the very kick up the backside I needed.