‘And I’d never heard of you and didn’t know Tansy knew you, so your name wouldn’t have meant anything to me, either,’ Bella said.
‘We bought the cottage as an investment and for holidays. It was my wife’s idea, because her best friend lives up here. She’s an actress with a part in
Cotton Common
, and Kate was offered a role too, but then –’
He broke off abruptly, his expression bleak and anguished. Clearly the accident that killed his wife was still too terrible to talk about.
I wondered if his wife’s best friend could be my ex-stepsister, Marcia. It’s a small world …
He seemed to brood on dark memories for a moment, eyes flat as silver pennies, and then, just as I was starting to feel a little sorry for him, he went back into Attack Mode. ‘When we viewed the cottage it was very quiet down in this little courtyard, so when I needed some peace and quiet, I thought it would be the perfect place to come …’
He stared at us in an intensely antagonistic way, as if we were conspiring to drive him mad. Maybe he was halfway there already, or he
had
had a nervous breakdown, because he was thin to the point of gauntness and the dark shadows under his eyes revealed a lack of sleep.
I certainly didn’t want to be responsible for tipping him over the edge, and Bella obviously felt the same way, because she said soothingly, ‘It’s not likely to be as noisy as this in future; it’s a one-off. There’s nothing to be done about the church bells, though, but I expect you’ll get used to them.’
‘“For this relief, much thanks,”’ he said sarkily.
‘I love to hear wedding bells, it’s such a joyous sound,’ I said.
He looked at me broodingly. ‘I didn’t think I would ever see you again,’ he said, but not as if he was glad he had. Then he turned on his heel and left, slamming the door behind him, so that the brass bell clanged merrily for ages.
‘Was that Shakespeare he kept quoting?’ Bella asked me. ‘You’re the one who had the Bard drummed into you in Miss Harker’s class, while I was doing Extra French.’
‘Yes, though he paraphrases it a bit, to suit the context. I suppose it’s an occupational hazard.’
‘He’s rather gorgeous, in an angry sort of way, isn’t he? But he seems very fine-drawn and edgy, to say the least,’ Bella commented. ‘Do you think he’s had a nervous breakdown?’
‘If he hasn’t already, then he probably will, the way he’s carrying on.’
‘I expect he’s still traumatised by his wife’s death. It must have been quite a shock,’ Bella suggested.
‘I suppose so, though he seems to have carried on working afterwards, doesn’t he?’
‘Delayed shock?’
‘Maybe. Something’s clearly wrong, or his nerves wouldn’t be so very frazzled. But I expect it has been very noisy all day, even if it wasn’t as bad as he made out.’
Bella giggled suddenly. ‘You know, I thought those two women were going to come to blows over the last pair of glittery plastic overshoes, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, though I can’t imagine why either of them would want them.’
‘I expect they each wanted them because the other one did,’ Bella guessed shrewdly. ‘People bought the strangest things!’
‘The Friends of Winter’s End said those really long white tape laces would be perfect for lacing their buskins … at least, I
think
it was buskins,’ I said. ‘The shy, balding man with brown eyes said his role was to play Shakespeare at Winter’s End on open days, so perhaps we should introduce him to Ivo?’
‘Then they could fling quotes at each other,’ she agreed.
I locked the front door and put the Closed sign up. When I turned round the shop looked dark, bare and empty, with only the lingering, familiar smell of leather to comfort me.
‘It looks so desolate now, doesn’t it? Oh, Bella, do you think I’m doing the right thing and I can make a success of Cinderella’s Slippers?’
‘Yes, of course you can,’ she assured me. ‘It’s a brilliant idea! And you can draw in the tourist trade as well as the bridal one, with all the shoe-inspired gift items you’ve ordered – the silver charms and stuff.’
‘And the Chocolate Wishes shoes,’ I said. ‘If the shop fails, I can always eat the stock!’
‘It won’t come to that, you’ll see.’
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘you’d better get off home and remind your daughter what you look like.’
‘Yes, her granny should have dropped her off with Mum again by now. I’ll be back on Monday to help you with the redecorating, though. I love doing that.’
‘Same rate of pay as minding the shop,’ I said, ‘though I think really it should be more.’
‘I’m just grateful for any paid work, the situation I’m in. I’m hoping to get a little bit more that I can fit into my own time through that card I put up on the village notice board, advertising my home secretarial services.’
‘I’m so glad you can work in the shop, so I can carry on with my books. I love doing them, and they’ve been my bread and butter for years. But I don’t miss the foot modelling – all that faffing around making sure they looked their best and worrying in case I bruised them or bashed my toenail!’
‘Are you
ever
going to break out into silly shoes?’ She looked down at my sensible Birkenstock clogs.
‘I will eventually – occasionally!’
‘There’s another thing you could stock – those glittery plastic dressing-up shoes for little girls, and maybe wands.’
‘No, I think one of the gift shops has those, and anyway, I want the shop to be an upmarket bridal one rather than a branch of Tinkerbells R Us.’
Before she left we quickly Googled Ivo Hawksley: I don’t know why I hadn’t done it before!
He seemed to have spent his entire career with the Royal Shakespeare Company, apart from one or two brief forays into cameo roles in West End plays and an obscure film. We found pictures of his late wife, and details about the accident, which I quickly scanned, noting that they alluded to him as the ‘acclaimed Shakespearian actor, Ivo Hawksley’. Kate was rather unkindly described as a bit-part actress who’d just unexpectedly landed a plum role in the hugely popular
Cotton Common
series and was driving home from a meeting with the directors when the accident happened.
It also turned out that she’d been staying up here with Marcia at the time, who was quoted as saying that her friend had been under the weather, but insisted on setting off home that day, and she would be a huge loss to the acting profession.
So I was right, Marcia
was
the best friend Ivo referred to – and she must have known him for years too, yet never mentioned him to me.
‘The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together,’ as Shakespeare put it, one of the many snippets Miss Harker had inserted immovably into my brain at school. Marcia had always seemed to have a suspiciously Iago aspect to me: good at stirring things up behind the scenes. I bet she had something to do with Ivo standing me up.
When I was in the kitchen later I could hear faint strains of gloomy classical music coming from next door. Because the building was all once one, the dividing wall wasn’t as thick and solid as one might expect.
I hoped Ivo’s taste in music was not always quite so sombre.
On his next leave, Commander Poole came to see us and he seemed a very steady, kind sort of man, though more my father’s age than Violet’s. Many men who’d been in the forces and taken early retirement came back again during the war, and he had a lot of knowledge of the Far East, which is where he ended up … but all that came later.
Anyway, he expressed himself very well and said all the right things, and Mother and Father thought he’d be a steadying influence on Vi, because once she’d left home it was evident even to them that she’d become a bit of a giddy kipper.
What? No, lovey, I don’t know where the phrase ‘giddy kipper’ came from, it’s just one of those sayings.
Middlemoss Living Archive
Recordings: Nancy Bright.
I was still pretty exhausted when I woke the next morning, but by the time I’d drunk several cups of coffee I’d recovered a bit of bounce, and dragged Flash as far as the village green, stopping every few minutes when some alarming sound or sight had caused him to clamp his lead to his chest and refuse to go any further. On the way home, he towed me and I considered trying his technique, though I suspected it only worked if you had four legs.
The black cat, Toby, appeared while I was cleaning out the hens and taunted Flash by sitting on the fence post and staring down at him, until I shooed it away.
What with Cedric having been in such a perky mood that he’d been shrieking out a strangled crow every five minutes since dawn, and Flash’s furious barking, my neighbours couldn’t have been having a terribly quiet Sunday morning. Mind you, apart from Ivo, everyone else was some distance away, the other side of the lane at the back of the cottage, with our long gardens between us. The car park of the Green Man bordered the other side of our garden to Ivo’s, also separating us from the pub.
The church bells loudly ringing for the service were obviously the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as Ivo was concerned, for an upstairs window in his cottage suddenly slammed shut, but at least the church bells weren’t
my
fault!
I had a bacon and egg brunch to fortify myself, then girded up my loins, metaphorically speaking, and gave the desolate and empty shop and stockroom a jolly good clean, squashing all the empty boxes flat (though Ivo had inadvertently made a good start on that) and bundling them together, to go out with the recycling bin.
Then later a moonlighting joiner came and removed the old wooden sliding doors between the shop and the stockroom, opening the space up. He made such a neat job (he even borrowed the vacuum cleaner afterwards!) that I booked him to return and put up some shelving when we’d redecorated. Instead of having a separate stockroom, I was going to have open storage units beneath the display shelves, so I could see at a glance what styles and sizes we had in.
The joiner was inexpensive too, which was a consideration, because my financial resources weren’t infinite: Cinderella’s Slippers really would need to start making a profit pretty quickly …
I did some more calculations while eating a modified version of the high tea that Aunt Nan had always taken on Sunday afternoons, attired in her wedding dress, though she would unbutton the tight cuffs of the lace coat and turn them back, in case they got in the butter.
She had so loved to talk about her fiancé, Jacob, who had been her childhood sweetheart, and who sounded such a kind man that it was not surprising that she never got over losing him in the war.
In tribute today I was wearing a pair of vintage wedding shoes from my collection – Salvatore Ferragamo strappy open-toe stilettos in cream leather and ruched pale pink satin, with pearl and crystal flower detailing – and I felt like a little girl wearing dressing-up shoes as I click-clacked to and fro across the quarry-tiled kitchen floor.
Financially, my books gave me my basic income and the foot modelling had provided some sporadic icing on the cake. I had a little nest egg put by, but Aunt Nan had been able to leave me little more than the property, though she had been putting money by for years for what she called ‘a good send-off’. I’d made sure she’d had that, right down to the buffet for the mourners afterwards, in the function room of the Green Man.
I’d ordered a lovely stone angel, which she hadn’t asked for, though that wouldn’t arrive for quite some time yet.
‘
Waste of good brass
!’ I could hear her saying severely in my head, but when I’d asked Raffy about it, he’d said a churchyard could never have too many angels, and to go ahead if that was what I wanted.
There was such a lot to do to the new shop, which would be almost twice as big now it incorporated the stockroom, and though Bella and I could manage the repainting, I’d certainly need an electrician to put new lighting in.
It ought to have carpeting too, and I decided what I could afford for that, bearing in mind it had to be hard-wearing, but also go with the colour scheme. I’d have to try haggling with the nearest big carpet store next day …
My musings were interrupted by a crescendo of mad barks from the garden, which had been a recurring theme of the day – every time I’d let Flash out, in fact. I’d assumed Ivo’s cat was purposely taunting him again, but at least Flash had come back to the house when I’d called him.
But this time he didn’t, so I went down there and found Flash doing his leaping-up-and-down-on-elastic thing, trying to get at Toby on top of the post.
‘Go away, you silly creature,’ I said, trying to shoo the cat off, but he just stared at me balefully – a bit like his owner had the previous day, in fact. And, speak of the devil, there he was, emerging from his overgrown jungle of a garden like a pale wraith of Mr Rochester and looking more wound-up than a clock spring.
‘Look, all hell broke loose in your shop yesterday, and today it’s been nothing but hammer, hammer, hammer, yap, yap, yap! Can I not even have an hour of peace? Can’t you shut that dog up?’
‘Your cat is just sitting there winding him up. You don’t think I
want
him to bark nonstop, do you?’
‘I don’t believe you have any control over that animal.’
‘I’ve certainly got more than you have over your cat.’
‘Cats roam about, it’s in their nature.’
‘And dogs bark at cats on their territory; that’s in
their
nature too,’ I snapped back.
‘He’ll be through that trellis in a minute!’ warned Ivo, distracted, as Flash made one of his balletic leaps upwards.
‘“O villainy!”
’
‘Don’t be so melodramatic! He can’t get through now I’ve stuck that piece of board across the broken bit, and I’ll have something stronger put up as soon as I can.’