The Honey Queen (30 page)

‘Let the old bat hear me. I don’t envy you tonight – or,’ Molly added thoughtfully, ‘sharing a wedding with her. She’ll be all set to outshine you, no matter what you wear, you mark my words.’

Opal hugged her friend goodbye. Molly had cheered her up, but she felt that what she wore to Brian’s wedding was the least of her problems.

Miranda waited until they were all in the middle of Opal’s chicken casserole before she brought up the matter of bridesmaids and how it would be a mistake to upset the symmetry of having just the one.

‘You wanted me to have four,’ said Liz angrily, knowing exactly where this was heading.

Briefly, Miranda looked discomfited. ‘Those were girls from school,’ she said quickly.

‘I think it would be nice to have Meredith and Freya,’ said Liz defiantly, and was rewarded by a smile from Opal.

‘Thank you, love,’ said Opal, ‘but I don’t think Meredith would be up to it. And Freya’s not a frock person, really.’

‘Thanks, Liz,’ said Freya, poking her nose round the dining-room door. She’d been keeping out of harm’s way in the kitchen in case she felt the need to take the electric carving knife to Miranda, but had been listening in. ‘I’m more of a biker boot sort of person.’

She grinned as she saw Miranda’s mouth purse. ‘Although I’ll wear a bridesmaid’s dress if I can wear my biker boots?’

‘Now, I really can’t—’ spluttered Miranda.

‘She’s pulling your leg, love,’ said Ned calmly. ‘It’s all right, we won’t ruin your plans. As long as Brian and Liz are happy, that’s all we care about.’

He stared at Miranda with such intensity that she slowly closed her mouth and lowered her head to her dinner.

‘I couldn’t have put it better myself, Dad,’ said Brian, wishing his future mother-in-law wasn’t such a bitch.

‘Exactly, thank you, Ned,’ said Liz in a shaky voice. She was trying to ward off the tears, but it wasn’t easy. She wanted her wedding to be beautiful and, unsurprisingly, her mother was doing her best to ruin it. Well, she wouldn’t: Liz was determined about that. It would be a marvellous day, no matter what Miranda wanted.

F
rankie hadn’t seen Seth this excited in months. Every day, he was up before she was, and out in the garden come rain or shine, helping the young gardener that Lillie had recruited via an ad in the newsagent. Dessie had abandoned his course in landscape gardening, he’d told them, because he couldn’t afford to finish. Instead, he did heavy lifting work in gardens, cut lawns in summer and hired himself out for all sorts of labouring work in winter.

Working in the garden at Sorrento Villa was sheer joy. ‘Now, I don’t want to be the interfering sister,’ Lillie had said to both Frankie and Seth before Dessie came on board, ‘but since you won’t take a dollar of rent from me and I’ve been here for so long, I’d like to pay Dessie and help him work on the garden. You have no idea how different the place will look with a strong lad to help us.’

‘Does he have a JCB?’ Frankie had asked with a grin, and only Lillie had seen Seth’s face fall at his wife’s joke.

‘No,’ Lillie said evenly, ‘but he can get a loan of one of those compact diggers, and that’s what we do need. And who knows, if he’s good enough, he might be the man to help us work on the inside of the house too – room by room.’

She felt angry with Frankie for being so pessimistic, particularly when the prospect of taming the wilderness had cheered Seth up so much. But there was no way Lillie could tell Frankie that. Not just yet, anyway.

‘Fire away,’ Frankie said. ‘But don’t feel that you have to spend your money, Lillie. We don’t want you to pay your keep. It’s lovely having you around, particularly with Emer and Alexei gone.’

She might as well have come out and said that Lillie was welcome to stay for ever because Frankie and Seth were no good together any more, that they were only held together with the glue of another person.

Lillie pretended not to understand.

‘Give us three weeks,’ she said cheerfully, putting an arm around Seth, ‘and you’ll see what we can do.’

In fact, Frankie had been astonished at what the three of them had accomplished in just one week. Dessie and his mini-digger had ripped up dead shrubs, a broken patio and an apple tree that had died long ago. Thanks to him, Seth was able to clear away the brambles and toss them into the big skip they’d hired. By the end of the week, they needed another skip.

‘I love this garden,’ Dessie said excitedly on Friday morning as he, Lillie and Seth stood outside with their mid-morning coffee warming their hands. ‘I can see it in my mind – just the plan to make it beautiful.’

‘Can you draw it up for us?’ said Lillie. ‘You are a landscape gardener, after all.’

‘Only half-qualified,’ Dessie said.

‘Nonsense,’ said Seth. ‘It’s obvious that you know what you’re talking about. Maybe we can do some drawings together. I’ll tell you what I had in mind before and we can see what we can make of it now.’

Lillie busied herself collecting the cups and went indoors. Out of their sight, she gave a whoop of joy.

See, Sam
, she said:
he’s taken the bait.
If that’s not the old Seth Green, then I’m a monkey’s uncle.

Frankie was getting better at clever shopping. Clever shopping meant good food for bargain prices. Once, she’d have gone to a big supermarket and bought everything. She’d have loved to have had the time to meander in and out of the greengrocer’s, the delicatessen, the butcher’s, to get the perfect things, but she was time-poor. Now, however, she was just poor because they were living on one salary, so she worked very hard at getting the best value for her grocery shop. Seth had done bits and pieces in the beginning, but he’d never been a careful shopper and Frankie had found it irritating when he bought the wrong food.

‘We don’t need more chopped tomatoes,’ she said one day when he came home with a dozen tins and nothing suitable for dinner.

‘They were on special offer,’ Seth said. ‘I thought we were saving money.’

‘Yes, love,’ she said, trying to rein her temper in, ‘but there’s saving money and there’s buying things you don’t need. Buying that many tomatoes is like buying cat food when you don’t have a cat.’

‘Fine. You can do it in future,’ Seth said, clearly stung.

‘I didn’t mean …’ Frankie began, feeling bad for letting her irritation show. It was counter-productive. He was doing his best. She started to apologize, but he was gone, marching out of the kitchen.

So these days, although Lillie sometimes helped, Frankie mostly did it herself. It turned out that having less money meant you spent an awful lot of time when you were shopping. She bought much less meat and they had vegetarian meals a couple of nights a week. When she did buy meat, she bought it from Morton’s butcher’s at the crossroads, which turned out to be a saving compared to the days when she’d recklessly thrown more meat than she needed into the trolley in the supermarket. Sometimes, she’d buy a few slices of the delicious ham they sold in the delicatessen to serve with the pecorino cheese she bought in the cheap supermarket. The men in the deli were lovely and chatty though Frankie knew she was being unsociable when she refused to rise to their conversational gambits. Once she would have, but at the moment, she didn’t have the energy. Everyone else seemed to treat the delicatessen as an unofficial meeting place. People stood around chatting in the queue, discussing the merits of buffalo mozzarella compared to goats’ cheese mozzarella.

‘There’s a certain tang from the goats’ cheese,’ one of the men behind the counter was arguing, and Frankie wanted to yell, ‘Get a move on, some of us don’t have the time for this.’

One Saturday morning, exhausted after trailing around the ordinary supermarket, the low-cost supermarket at the crossroads and the butcher’s, Frankie finished by visiting the greengrocer’s shop because she’d forgotten to buy enough vegetables for tonight. She’d never ventured in there before. They sold organic vegetables as well as ordinary ones and the very word
organic
had put her off. Organic meant more expensive. Frankie didn’t have the money for more expensive. Seth was lucky he wasn’t living on white bread and chips.

Inside the fruit-and-veg shop, there was an air of absolute relaxation as if everyone in there had all the time in the world. People browsed among the vegetables with baskets over their arms, squeezing things to see if they were ripe, the way nobody ever did in the supermarket. Frankie scanned the shelves, trying to work out what she could get to make the special-offer salmon steaks for that night more exciting than the cucumber and a bit of lettuce she’d already bought. She found some avocadoes and reached over, giving them an exploratory squeeze, when somebody said her name.

‘Frankie, it is you! I thought it was when I saw you cross the road.’

She turned, recognizing the voice, but for a moment she couldn’t place the woman who stood there. And then she did. She had worked in Dutton Insurance but had left several years ago. Amy, that was it. Frankie never forgot a name, a useful asset in her business. The woman had a small child with her.

‘Hello, Amy. Goodness, I didn’t recognize you for a moment,’ she said, then added hastily, ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to sound rude.’

‘You don’t.’ Amy smiled and gave Frankie a kiss on each cheek.

‘This is Minnie,’ she said, introducing the small cherub at her side. The little girl was wearing denim dungarees, a purple T-shirt and a mutinous look on her face. ‘Minnie, say hello.’

‘No,’ said Minnie grimly, burrowing her face in her mother’s leg.

‘Is she shy?’ said Frankie.

‘No,’ Amy said, grinning, ‘just cross because I won’t bring her into the café and get her a hot chocolate.’

Frankie took a moment to get used to this new Amy. The woman she’d known at Dutton had been the ultimate corporate mummy, with dark circles under her eyes, perfect hair, manicured nails, and an air of permanent rush. Amy had worked under Frankie in HR.

One day she’d complained to Frankie how
hard
it was being a working mother.

‘It’s impossible, I don’t know how you did it, Frankie. I’ve only got one child and I am run ragged from the moment I go to the crèche in the morning to the moment I get into bed in the evening. It’s like being on a speeded-up hamster wheel.’

‘You’ll get used to it,’ Frankie said comfortingly, remembering her own experience when the kids had been young. ‘You’re wonderful at it all, Amy, and you’re doing so well in the company.’

Amy had responded with the slightly deranged stare of the working mother who doesn’t get enough sleep and was clocking up marathons on the guilt treadmill.

‘Do you know what, Frankie? I don’t want to get used to it. I’ve had it.’

Frankie had been quite shocked.

‘Jack and I are going to downsize,’ Amy said. ‘I don’t care about the job. What use is a great career if I go mad trying to combine it all?’

She and her husband were going to move out of their city-centre apartment and find a house in the suburbs. Hopefully, the money they’d make on the sale would enable Amy to give up work and have more children.

Frankie did her best to get her a decent deal from the company.

‘I only hope you won’t regret it,’ she’d said anxiously.

‘Don’t worry, I won’t,’ Amy said firmly. And here she was, four or five years later, looking as though she hadn’t regretted it for a moment.

Her once coiffed hair was now a soft-streaked blonde that hung in waves down to her shoulder blades. She didn’t wear make-up and instead of the chic suits Frankie had been used to seeing her in, she wore a comfortable cream sweater and worn jeans, with her feet shoved into soft suede clogs.

‘You’re looking fantastic,’ Frankie said, genuinely believing it.

‘Oh thank you,’ said Amy, looking down at herself. ‘Once I stick something on in the morning, I never really look at it again. Jack’s at home with the baby.’

‘A baby as well?’ said Frankie.

‘We’ve three children now. Minnie is three.’ Amy reached down and ruffled her daughter’s hair. ‘Jules, who I had when I worked in Dutton, is nearly seven, and the baby is Raphael.’

‘Wow.’

‘Wow indeed,’ said Amy, and there was joy in her face. ‘It’s crazy, I never get a moment to myself but I love it. I’m happy, Frankie. No more rushing around being consumed with guilt. My friends and I say that we’ll go back to work when the kids are older. We don’t have as much money to buy them stuff, but that’s all it is, isn’t it, Frankie – stuff?’

‘Yeah, stuff,’ said Frankie.

She had stuff. The desperate dilapidated old house was stuff, and she didn’t have any of the peace that glowed from Amy’s face.

‘We moved here last year,’ she told Amy, ‘bought a house to do it up, but Seth lost his job, so it’s been very difficult.’

Saying it out loud felt like a big thing to Frankie, but it was true, why should she hide it?

‘I’m sorry,’ said Amy. ‘You should come around for dinner some evening. I grow a lot of my own vegetables now, and Jack is in the process of getting hives.’

‘Hives,’ said Frankie. ‘You mean bees?’ She remembered Lillie and Seth talking about putting a couple of hives in the garden. Seth had seemed quite enthusiastic, but Frankie wasn’t sure. Why add to their burdens?

‘Yes, Jack’s done a beekeeping course and he’s going to get two hives. Two is apparently a good number to start up.’

‘And … for what?’ said Frankie. ‘To sell honey?’

‘Oh no. Just for ourselves. It seems such a nice idea.’

‘What if someone gets stung? Are you sure it’s safe with small children?’ Frankie said.

‘Perfectly safe,’ said Amy. ‘Bees don’t randomly sting. Here,’ she said, reaching in her bag for a scrap of paper. ‘I’ll write down my number. When you get a chance, give me a call and we’ll catch up and set a dinner date, OK? The great thing is, these days I don’t go to Marks & Spencer’s and buy ready meals, I cook. Imagine, me cooking!’ She laughed as she scribbled her number on the paper. ‘Today we’re making roast pepper and sweet potato soup. Aren’t we, munchkin?’