‘God, this takes me back,’ said Rachel. ‘My husband’s house looked exactly like this when I first met him. Single men just silt up the place with . . . stuff. Every corridor is like an ox-bow lake, ready to cut off whole rooms.’
Out of the corner of her eye Anna saw Michelle pick a tea towel up off the floor, then, finding no hook to put it on, tut and hang it on the door handle.
‘Have you known Rory a long time?’ she asked Rachel.
‘Quite a long time,’ said Rachel, ticking off some boxes. ‘He used to walk dogs with his girlfriend, then after he and Esther split up, he carried on coming with Agnes. She and Cyril let him move in here. Probably his dream flat, I should think, above a bookshop.’
‘But not Esther’s?’
Rachel looked up. ‘I take it you’ve never met Esther?’
Anna shook her head.
‘This is not Esther’s dream flat,’ said Rachel firmly. ‘Believe me.’
‘Does she still live in the town?’ Annoyingly, Rory’s flat, like Michelle’s, had no photos for her to supply a face to the name. ‘With Zachary?’ she added, in case the detail might make Rachel open up more.
It had the desired effect. ‘No, they’ve moved. She married someone else, quite soon after she and Rory split up. Poor Rory.’
Anna glanced at Michelle to see if she was taking this in, but she was too busy peering disgustedly into Rory’s box of cracked CD cases.
‘Poor Rory why?’ she asked. ‘Was it a messy break-up?’
Rachel made a face. ‘You could say that. Isn’t it always, with kids involved? But they seem to have found a way through it, so probably best to let him put it behind him.’ She paused. ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to sound pious but I know what it’s like when an old relationship follows you round. This is such a small town.’
‘He needs a fresh start,’ said Anna.
‘Yes!’ Rachel tapped her clipboard. ‘Let’s hope Tavish is part of that. It’s amazing what a catalyst for romance a dog can be.’
Anna nodded, thinking of the way Rory had been looking at Michelle in the shop, and wondered if he’d said anything to Rachel. Michelle was quite a challenge for a fresh start, but she and Rory had a lot in common. They were both single, a bit wounded, professional . . . Maybe not a shared interest in interior decoration, though.
‘Looks like he’s started making preparations,’ she said, gesturing towards the small kitchen.
Rory had put two metal dog bowls on a newspaper, written ‘FOR EATING!’ in black marker capitals next to it, and placed a big sack of premium dog food by the washing machine. There was also a lead, a tartan collar and a Santa hat from the pet supermarket, with the fifty per cent off sticker still on, and a tartan dog bed, ‘FOR SLEEPING!’.
Rachel laughed and ticked a few more boxes on her checklist.
Anna turned round to see Michelle staring at a pile of Top Gear magazines with a Thunderbird puppet balanced on top, and muttering to herself. She coughed and drew her attention instead to a big watercolour painting of a sea storm propped up against the wall.
Michelle made a ‘Yes? And?’ face and started plumping up Rory’s flat cushions.
‘There’s some outdoor access for this flat, isn’t there?’ asked Rachel, pen poised.
‘Yes, he’s got a shared yard space with the shop.’ She decided not to tell Rachel that Michelle had been talking about turning it into a café area. ‘But he’ll be taken out to the park at lunchtime and after we close. Most of the time Tavish’ll be where he always used to be, under the counter.’
‘Perfect.’ Rachel finished her checklist with a flourish. ‘Sounds like he’s fallen on his paws.’ She paused, then said, ‘And it’ll be nice for Rory to have some company.’
‘Funny,’ said Anna. ‘That’s just what I said to Michelle.’
They looked at each other for a moment, then Michelle appeared behind them.
‘Is everything in order?’ Her eyes ranged around the small kitchen, which was much tidier than the rest of the flat.
‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘All great. Ooh! Is that a pasta maker? He must be really into his food.’ She looked sideways at Michelle to see if she’d taken the hint. ‘And I love these big photos of . . . um, clocks. I wonder if he did them himself?’
‘Probably. He’s quite arty,’ agreed Rachel, nodding a bit too hard. ‘Rory did the photos for my last open day at the rescue.’
Michelle turned and looked at the pair of them as if they were mad. ‘Arty in a Tracey Emin “Look at my messy bed” way, maybe,’ she said. ‘Are we done? Because I think my jacket’s about to sprout elbow patches.’
Downstairs, Rachel made a beeline for the table of boarding-school stories Anna had set up in a corner of the front room, Anna’s favourite table, and easily the most popular with adults and children alike. She’d added rulers and apples and prefect badges to the piles of thin books, and made ‘report cards’ for various familiar characters – Pat and Isabel O’Sullivan, Mary-Lou Trelawny, Marmalade Atkins.
‘These are the covers I remember!’ Rachel held up a second-hand First Term at Malory Towers, next to one of the modern editions that Anna had just re-ordered. ‘This is how I remember Darrell Rivers, not like that. Darrell would never have worn lipgloss.’
‘Certainly not! Although Gwendolyn would have done.’
‘Gwendolyn would have been one of those lip-salve girls,’ said Rachel. ‘You know the ones, always dabbing.’
‘Wasn’t there an American girl who came to Malory Towers all glamorous with rolled hair and rouge? I had to ask my mum what rouge was.’ Anna sighed nostalgically. ‘It sounded so exotic. I still wanted to go there. I think what I really wanted was to go back in time.’
‘I wanted to have a pony at school,’ said Rachel. ‘And midnight feasts and two French teachers and magic chalk. I cried when my parents refused to send me to boarding school. I cried when they said they loved me too much to send me away.’
‘Didn’t you go to boarding school, Michelle?’ asked Anna. ‘Did they have ponies?’
Michelle was pointedly straightening the rolled-up rugs in the basket by the till. Anna thought for a moment she was actually ignoring them.
‘Michelle?’ she repeated.
She looked up, her face a blank mask of indifference. ‘No ponies at my school. No.’
‘Where did you go?’ Rachel turned round, interested. ‘I refuse to believe you didn’t have an open-air swimming pool built into the rocks.’
‘It wasn’t a famous one. No open-air pools. No midnight feasts. They only let girls into the sixth form, in case we put the boys off their Latin.’
Anna wondered if Michelle was being shy, not wanting to show off about her posh upbringing. Putting two and two together from the little Michelle had said about her family – and the story Owen had told her and Becca about learning to drive in a Jaguar – there’d clearly been plenty of money around. She wanted to tell Michelle it didn’t matter, but couldn’t think of a way to do it without drawing even more attention to it.
‘Michelle,’ she said, lifting a different title and then waggling it accusingly. ‘Were you “The Naughtiest Girl in the School”? I bet you were. Were you expelled for running the tuck shop at a profit and pocketing the difference?’
‘Ooh,’ said Rachel, joining in, ‘did you cut off someone’s plait to teach them a lesson? Were you caught making moonlit trips along the cliff path to the post office . . . but with boys?’
Two bright red spots appeared on Michelle’s cheekbones under her flawless foundation. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I was expelled. Wasn’t quite the jolly jape it is in the books. Especially not with parents like mine. My mother still hasn’t really forgiven me.’
‘You’re kidding!’ said Rachel. ‘Sorry. Obviously hasn’t done you any harm, though, has it? Local businesswoman of the year?’
Anna didn’t share Rachel’s easy recovery; she was feeling a painful wash of retrospective guilt about all the stupid things she must have
said. Being expelled would totally explain why Michelle had such a chip on her shoulder about university and books – Anna had just assumed she’d chosen to start working for her dad’s business. She cringed inwardly.
But Michelle had already plastered a rather forced smile on her face and was swinging her bag onto her shoulder. ‘My dad reckons it was the making of me. He’s the one who gave me a job, though, so he’d have to say that. Lovely to meet you, Rachel,’ she concluded, holding out her hand. ‘You’ll let me know if there are any problems with Tavish, won’t you? I’ll put the adoption donation in the post.’
‘Oh, we don’t charge a donation for oldies.’
‘No, really,’ said Michelle. ‘I’d like to.’
‘And I thought we could have a special corner of the shop for animal books, like “Tavish’s pick”,’ said Anna. ‘Michael Morpurgo, and Dodie Smith, and Dick King-Smith . . .’
Michelle flashed her tight smile again. It didn’t make her face shine like her real smile did, thought Anna. It was more like a mask, so you couldn’t see what she was really thinking. ‘Great. Whatever. Put a dog bowl out. Anyway, ladies, got to dash!’
And she was gone.
Rachel glanced at Anna and grimaced apologetically. ‘Oops. Did I put my foot in it? I thought she was joking.’
‘I had no idea.’ Anna stared at the door, where the bell was still vibrating. ‘I knew Michelle went to boarding school but I had no idea she was expelled. She’s never mentioned it.’
‘We’ve all got our sore points,’ said Rachel. ‘Maybe it’s more about the mum than the expulsion?’
‘Maybe,’ said Anna. She was starting to think Rachel was pretty perceptive. Or had she herself just been too busy to notice this stuff?
‘I should go and collect my son from the minder.’ Rachel put down the Enid Blytons with a show of reluctance. ‘But I really want to stay and flick through these and talk to you about tinned sardines and condensed milk . . .’
‘Pop in any time you want,’ said Anna. ‘Bring friends. We have chairs, we have coffee, we have many, many books. We don’t make you discuss their literary significance.’
‘That sounds like my kind of book club,’ said Rachel. She waggled Changes for the Chalet School at her. ‘Be warned. The nostalgia-hungry mummies are coming.’
14
‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is much better than I thought it was going to be, only I never worked out why he didn’t just magic himself test results and lottery tickets.’
Kelsey Maguire
As the spring mornings became lighter and the air turned softer, Michelle noticed signs of early summer creeping in on her running circuit of the town. Her sharp eyes weren’t peeled for the buds on the rosebushes in the parks, or the frothing cherry-blossom brightening the canal towpath, but for the first recycled barbecues appearing in front gardens, and the crop of her super-lightweight foldable umbrellas blooming like poppies at the bus stop. Seeing them cheered her up, sending her onto the homeward lap with a bounce in her step.
Michelle had to pick up a bit of speed on her loop because if she wasn’t back within forty minutes, Tavish let her know about it. He showed his displeasure at being kept waiting for his breakfast by climbing up onto the windowsill and barking at everything that passed by, his long grey beard trembling with outrage. His eyesight not being what it had been, he’d already dispatched one potted orchid down the back of her cream sofa, and as a result, Michelle’s lap times were improving daily for fear of what she might find on her return.
Tavish loved routines as much as Michelle did. He snoozed happily until she came back from her morning run, then he went for a pee and a sniff round the garden while she showered, and they ate breakfast together while she edited her to-do list. Then it was off to the shop, where he supervised Anna and the customers until six, when, after a hard day of being patted and fed sly Bonios, he came home with Michelle and settled into his basket under the table while she browsed the internet for new suppliers and adjusted her battle-plan for the year.
Neither of them was big on cuddles. Most of the time, Tavish maintained an aloof independence, bordering on grumpiness, apart from one brief nap-on-lap moment while Michelle watched the last news bulletin before bed. Then his head rested against her hand for a few minutes, but as soon as the weather came on, he slithered off to his basket. Tavish had his dignity – he bared his teeth when Owen tried to patronise him with a chew – and Michelle respected him for that. In any case, she decided, babying Tavish would be disloyal to Flash. She and Tavish had an arrangement, and it rather suited them both.
Rory had Tavish at the weekends, and after the fuss she’d made about how her own weekends were packed with buying trips and potential minibreaks, it was Sod’s Law that for the first few weekends, Michelle was stuck at home on her own.
She had to pretend to be out when Anna called her mobile (‘Oh, just nipped out for lunch with friends in . . . um, Oxford’), and again when Rory called to check what time to drop Tavish off (‘No, I’m in, um, London. Earls Court. You can’t hear the traffic because I’m not near a road’). She took herself off to lunch once or twice, but she didn’t have any real friends apart from Anna, and she didn’t want to intrude on Anna’s family time. In the end, she spent most of her dog-less weekends stalking around both shops, ironing upstairs where no passer-by could see her, and rearranging her wardrobe into seasonal sections.
It was the first time since she’d left Harvey that Michelle had a routine that involved someone other than herself, and almost without noticing she adjusted her internal clock to Tavish’s schedule, slipping extra cans of steak stew into her shopping basket and watching the clock at six thirty for Tavish’s Sunday night return. Secretly, she quite liked it. Everyone loved Tavish in the shop, and she was the one who got to take him home. It made her feel part of a team, or like being back at school. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but it was nicer than she’d expected.
On the last Sunday in April, Michelle had a gourmet lasagne heating up in the oven and a can of chicken supreme ready to go for Tavish when her front doorbell pealed at the usual drop-off time.
‘Don’t panic,’ warned Rory as she opened the door. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks.’
Michelle’s heart lurched. Tavish was wrapped in an old sweatshirt over Rory’s long arm, his grizzled snout drooping sadly from beneath one sleeve, his greying beard stuck together with dribble and – urgh – dried blood.
‘What happened?’ she gasped. ‘Is he OK?’
‘He’s fine. Went off his food on Friday night, so I took him to the vet’s on Saturday morning and George took one look at his teeth and booked him in for immediate surgery.’ Rory peered under the sweatshirt and moved the sleeve out of Tavish’s eyes with a gentle gesture. ‘Had to have quite a few out, didn’t you, Gummy?’
Tavish drooled and Rory mopped it up with the sweatshirt, then looked back at Michelle. ‘He’s been dribbling most of the weekend, so you’ll have to get your protective sheeting out for your soft furnishings. Keep him away from anything beige. So maybe the garden’s the best bet?’
Michelle ignored Rory’s attempt at banter – he was always trying to tell her how to look after dogs, as if she didn’t know – and reached out to stroke Tavish’s long ears. He let her, without grumbling – a sign he wasn’t himself. ‘Is he all right now?’
Seeing her concern, Rory’s expression softened and he dropped his bantering tone. ‘George said he’ll need to be on mushy foods for a while, but he’ll be less grumpy now his teeth aren’t giving him gyp. No digestives from now on. Or tea.’
‘Poor Tavish.’ Michelle felt a nip of guilt. ‘I had no idea his teeth were bothering him.’
‘Well, I didn’t either, so there you go. We’re both neglectful parents.’
They were standing at the front door and a chilly draught was blowing through from the canal. Tavish shivered, and Michelle held out her arms instinctively to take him inside.
> Rory manoeuvred the dog awkwardly into her grip. It was tricky, what with them both trying not to touch each other, and Tavish unhelpfully making himself into a floppy dead weight. When she was safely holding the dribbly bundle, Rory lingered as if he wasn’t quite ready to leave him. His eyes followed the dog with a concern Michelle hadn’t seen in his sardonic face before, and she heard herself say, ‘Do you want to come in?’
‘I need to know what to feed him, and what meds he’s got,’ she added as Rory stepped into the porch, but the truth was, Michelle didn’t mind putting off her weekly overview list for a bit longer. Not only had she not spoken to a soul all day, but this week contained an anniversary she wasn’t looking forward to very much, followed by an unavoidable trip to the Nightingale bosom to celebrate it the next day.
Michelle’s thirty-first birthday was on Friday. She didn’t want to think what Harvey might be planning for it. Something more dramatic than the weekly flowers that had been arriving in the shop and going home with a different member of staff each time. They weren’t in her house, but each time Gillian or Kelsey thanked her, Michelle felt his looming presence. She’d lost four pounds since New Year, just through nerves.
‘I’m not interrupting?’ asked Rory, reverting to his usual teasing tone. ‘You haven’t just got back from a weekend in Prague and need to unpack?’
‘I’ve already unpacked,’ lied Michelle. ‘What about you? Not rushing back to a cocktail soirée with Longhampton’s glitterati?’
‘I might be.’
‘I’ve seen your flat,’ said Michelle.
‘Then you’ll have seen my collection of sauté pans that have never been washed with water.’
‘Funny how many men have one of those. Nothing to do with a fear of washing up.’ Michelle walked through into her kitchen, conscious of Rory looking round her house. He’d never been past the porch before. She wondered what he was thinking, whether it was how he’d imagined. Did it remind him of the house he’d once shared with Esther? Had she let him put his light sabre up, or had she banned it?