‘I was just about to open up – you’ve been ages,’ Bella said. ‘Had Flash got out?’
‘He chased a cat over the wall into next door’s garden, so I had to go after him. I suppose it was just instinct but, Bella, it was the actor’s cat and he was really cross!’
‘I thought you looked a bit upset, but there’s no way you could have known he had a cat, is there?’ she asked reasonably. ‘Anyway, it must have been in your garden to start with.’
‘Yes, that’s what I told him and I don’t suppose Flash could resist chasing it. There’s a broken bit in the middle of the trellis on top of the wall near the henhouse, which is where he got through. I’ve just shoved a bit of board across it, but I’ll have to get something more solid put along there eventually.’
‘Or
h
e can,’ she suggested. ‘If he’s an actor, he’s probably loaded.’
‘I don’t know – I don’t suppose they all are, and didn’t he tell Aunt Nan he was with the Royal Shakespeare Company? Are they paid a lot?’
‘I expect so. I don’t suppose he’s short of a few bob. Did he introduce himself?’
‘He didn’t have to. I recognised him instantly, though it took him a bit longer to recognise me. I must have changed more than he has.’ (That ‘plump’ was still rankling!)
‘You mean, you’ve
really
met him, you don’t just know him from the telly or films?’
‘Yes, and I don’t think he’s been in films or anything. His name is Ivo Hawksley.’
‘Sounds slightly familiar,’ she mused. ‘So, where do you know him from? Was he one of your mother’s friends?’
‘No, he’s not much older than I am – two or three years. I met him that first summer when I moved down to London to begin my graphic design course. We went out for a couple of weeks – and I
did
tell you about him, only you’d just started working for British Airways at the time, so you’ve probably forgotten.’
‘I do remember you were pretty upset because you’d broken up with some boy you’d been going out with, but next time I saw you was ages afterwards when I came down for that visit, and you never mentioned him then. Was that him?’
‘Yes. Mum used her contacts to get me on the books of a specialist agency as a foot model the moment I got down there, because she said the only beautiful bit of me was my feet.’ I smiled wryly. ‘I struck lucky with my first assignment, because it was a TV advert for shoes, based on the Prince Charming and Cinderella story. You must remember that, at least?’
‘No! You were Cinderella?’ she asked, impressed. ‘How did I miss that?’
‘Of course I wasn’t Cinderella, I was only her feet! There was a proper actress for the rest, with golden hair and blue eyes – just like my Wicked Stepsisters – but she didn’t have perfect feet, so that’s where I came in. Ivo was the young actor they’d hired for the prince. He kneeled down to put the glass slipper on my foot and when I looked down into his eyes … well, that was it.’
Those smoke-grey eyes, the edges of the iris ringed in smudgy black, the angles and planes of a face that would have looked perfectly at home under an Elven crown in a Lord of the Rings film and that beautiful voice proclaiming, ‘Whoever this shoe fits, I will marry’ – well, they all might have had something to do with my head-over-heels tumble into first love.
And
my subsequent recurring dreams.
I realised that Bella was staring at me, eyes wide. ‘It was serious, wasn’t it? And I must have been too self-obsessed at the time to realise! I’m so sorry.’
‘Oh, it was only puppy love, really. I took it so seriously because I’d never been in love or had a serious boyfriend. But he asked me out and he did seem to feel the same way. The only fly in the ointment was that Mum had taken me to the studio when we met and she told my stepsisters I’d got off with the actor playing the prince. They teased me horribly about it.’
‘What a pair of cows they’ve always been to you,’ she said sympathetically, because she’d spent a weekend with me in Lars’ London house soon after I moved in, so she’d seen me get the full Rae and Marcia treatment. ‘Still, never mind, you soon moved in with Timmy. What happened with Ivo?’
‘Not an awful lot, looking back,’ I said frankly. ‘Maybe I quickly bored him. We were meeting during the day, because he was understudying a part in a West End play, and mostly we sat in museums and coffee shops talking, or went for walks in the park. It felt as if we’d known each other for ever. It was quite intense, but then after a couple of weeks he went off somewhere for an important audition …’ I frowned in recollection. ‘And you know, now I come to think of it, that might have been for the Royal Shakespeare Company!’
‘Well, that would fit. Presumably he passed the audition.’
‘He must have done, but I never saw him again, so I didn’t find out. We were to meet in the Tate Gallery café for lunch so he could tell me all about it and I waited
hours
for him but he never showed. I never heard from him again, even though he knew where I lived and had my phone number,’ I finished.
‘But what if something had happened to him?’ she asked, pale blue eyes wide. ‘Didn’t you try ringing him?’
‘I didn’t have his number. He was in digs, and we didn’t all walk about with mobile phones permanently glued to our ears then, if you recall, because this is, what, seventeen or eighteen years ago?’
‘No, I suppose not. It’s odd how quickly you forget it hasn’t always been like this,’ she agreed. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t much support at the time. I must have been too wrapped up in my own career!’
Bella had always wanted to be an air hostess, though when she did finally achieve her dream, she said she felt like little more than a glorified waitress. Of course, you saw lots of other countries, but you were generally too exhausted by the time differences to do anything other than slump in your room and to try and remember what day it was.
‘I did actually see him once more, a long time later – just across a crowded café. He was with Marcia.’
‘What, your stepsister Marcia?’
‘That’s the only Marcia I know. They had their heads together and were talking very seriously.’
‘Probably just shop, because she’s an actress too,’ Bella suggested.
‘Who knows? I hadn’t completely got the measure of Rae and Marcia when I first moved into Lars’ London house with them all, but later I wondered if Marcia had somehow managed to meet Ivo and get off with him and that’s why he stood me up.’
‘I suppose it’s possible.’
‘It was certainly the pattern of it after that. They managed to take any boy who ever showed any interest in me, even when they didn’t want him.’
‘They’re a right pair of cows,’ Bella said passionately. ‘I don’t know how such a nice man as your stepfather could have had children like that!’
‘I’ve often wondered that myself.’ I shrugged. ‘Still, it was all a long time ago and I’d almost forgotten about Ivo.’
That was a bit of a porkie really, since I don’t think you ever do quite forget your first love and the might-have-beens. Or I hadn’t, anyway, or I wouldn’t keep dreaming about him. But clearly it hadn’t been as serious on Ivo’s part.
‘I expect you were well out of it really,’ she said. ‘I mean, he might have had a good reason for standing you up, but there isn’t one for not calling to explain why. And if it was because he was seeing Marcia instead, then he’s not exactly a nice man, is he?’
‘I certainly don’t think he’s going to be the perfect neighbour. He frightened poor Flash half to death by shouting at him, and he looks dreadfully strained and edgy. I wonder if he’s had a nervous breakdown.’
‘That would account for why he was so ratty, I suppose,’ she agreed. ‘Or perhaps he’s still grieving for his wife. I mean, the accident was only last year, wasn’t it?’
‘True, it could be that. It’s odd that his wife had just been offered a role in
Cotton Common
when she died in that accident, and Marcia was already playing a part in it: perhaps she’s known them both all these years and never mentioned it?’
‘You’ve hardly seen each other, though, Tansy, so she wouldn’t have had much chance for small talk about what ancient boyfriends were up to, even if she remembered you’d once gone out with him,’ Bella pointed out, which was true. I’d mostly managed to avoid meeting up with Rae and Marcia unless Lars was over here and insisted we all had dinner together.
‘Oh, well,’ I sighed, getting up, ‘it’s ten past the hour and we’d better go and open before people start to think we’re never going to! There’s still loads of stock to shift.’
Another queue had formed and the afternoon proved just as busy as the morning.
Then, when it got to three o’clock and we put a big sign up in the window saying that everything was now half the sale price to clear, utter pandemonium broke out.
Word quickly spread and half the village (and many total strangers) began fighting over the most unlikely things. By four thirty, when the last customer departed, triumphantly clutching a bargain box of Meltonian shoe creams in strange colours to his bosom, we just looked at each other, exhausted and amazed, among the debris of discarded boxes.
‘My God, but they like a good bargain round here!’ Bella said limply.
‘They certainly do, but thank goodness that’s the last one,’ I said, and then we both groaned as the door was flung open, setting the brass bell on its spring bracket jangling.
‘Spoke too soon,’ I muttered.
But this time it was no customer but Ivo who stood there, a dark and glowering figure against the light, the Demon Prince, rather than any kind of Charming.
‘What in the name of hell’s been going on in here?’ he roared. ‘There’ve been crowds of people outside the windows all day, chattering and giggling, children screaming, and then in the last hour it sounded as if World War Three had broken out!’
‘I suppose it has been a bit like Blackpool on a Bank Holiday,’ Bella admitted, but he ignored her, his ireful gaze fixed on me.
But as he opened his lips to speak again, the bells of the nearby church of All Angels sent out yet another merry wedding peal to quiver on the air and when the last reverberations faded, he said wildly,
“‘Can no one silence that dreadful bell?”’
‘It is late in the day for a wedding,’ I agreed, ‘especially at this time of year. I haven’t been counting, but I’m sure there have been at least three today, so Raffy must be doing them on special offer, or something.’
‘“I do begin to have bloody thoughts”,’ he quoted, ‘and who the hell is Raffy?’
‘The vicar,’ I began to explain, just as he took a hasty stride forward and, being too angry to notice that there was a step down into the shop, fell headlong into a pile of empty cardboard cartons.
That’s how she became a driver when she joined the Wrens, where she spent all her time driving the top brass about, it seemed to me. Anyway, the next thing we knew she’d gone and married one of them, Commander Poole, a man more than twice her age, and without a by-your-leave. Mother and Father were that upset – especially Father, she was the apple of his eye. I wasn’t upset, but I was surprised she didn’t hold out for an admiral.
Middlemoss Living Archive
Recordings: Nancy Bright.
‘Boxed in,’ I said, without meaning to.
‘Great corrugated catastrophes!’ added Bella, sounding like the old
Batman
TV series.
Ivo emerged like some chancy-tempered mythical beast from its lair, and Bella and I instinctively drew together for support.
But dusting himself off, he said quite mildly,
‘
“The portrait of a blinking idiot.”’ Then the emptiness of the shop seemed to strike him for the first time and he suggested, hopefully, ‘Closing-down sale?’
‘Well, yes, in a way –’ I began.
‘We’ve been having a big clearout of the old stock at knockdown prices, that’s why it’s been so busy today,’ Bella explained.
He stared at her, frowning. ‘This is
your
shop now?’ he suggested. ‘Tansy’s working for you?’
‘No, it’s the other way round,’ she corrected him. ‘Bright’s was Tansy’s great-Aunt Nan’s shop and now it’s hers. I just work here.’
His attention – and those lucent grey eyes – switched to me. ‘Oh? Then you must have got the offer from my solicitor about my wanting to buy the premises. Are you going to take me up on it? It’s very generous.’
‘I didn’t know it was you who wanted to buy it, but it’s as I told my solicitor: I’m not selling.’
‘But if you’re having a closing-down sale, you obviously don’t intend keeping the shop going, and I don’t suppose you actually want to
live
here, so what if I up my offer? It would be worth paying through the nose for the sake of peace!’
‘I
do
live here: this is my home, and we may have closed Bright’s Shoes down, but there’ll be a grand reopening as Cinderella’s Slippers, wedding shoe specialists, in a couple of weeks – March the twentieth, if you want to write it in your diary.’
‘“Don’t trip down the aisle, float down it,”’ Bella said, helpfully quoting one of our slogans.
‘Cinderella’s Slippers?’ Ivo repeated blankly, then light seemed to dawn, for he added, ‘Oh, right, I suppose that’s a dig aimed at me, since we met while they were filming the Cinderella advert?’
‘Oh, don’t be so daft, it’s not all about you,’ I snapped. ‘I thought of the name months ago and I didn’t even know you’d bought the next-door cottage until I saw you in the garden! And why would I have a dig at you, anyway? I haven’t given you a second’s thought for years.’
Well, that was almost true: I’m not responsible for what my subconscious gets up to in my dreams.
‘But you must have known I was Kate Windle’s husband, because it was in all the papers after the … accident,’ he pointed out, the short pause and small break in his voice reminding me that he had lost his wife only the previous year.
‘I was away in Italy with my fiancé at the time, and though Aunt Nan told me about it when I got back, she didn’t mention you by name. So I really didn’t have a clue. I’m so sorry about your wife,’ I added.