Belle - Lesley Pearse [248]
She wished she could have told Etienne how wonderful it was to see him again, that he had been in her thoughts so often over the last two years and that she owed him so much. But a married woman could not say such things, and neither could she encourage him to stay in her shop any longer. Blackheath was a village, people were small-minded and nosy, and there would be plenty of them glad to gossip about seeing a handsome man talking to Belle in her shop.
She shook herself out of her thoughts, replaced some hats on their stands, dusted off the counter and picked up some stray tissue paper from the floor. Opening the drawer in which she kept the day’s takings, she emptied the money into a cloth bag and pushed it into her reticule. She secured her straw hat to her hair with a long hat pin, flung her cloak over her shoulders and took her umbrella from the stand.
Standing by the door, she paused before turning off the lights, and reminded herself of when she opened her shop for the first time. It had been a cold November day, just two months after Mog and Garth’s wedding, and she and Jimmy were due to be married just before Christmas. Everything had been new and shiny that day. Jimmy had indulged her by buying the small but expensive French chandeliers and the glass-topped counter. Mog had found the two button-back Regency chairs and had them re-upholstered in pink velvet, and Garth’s present to her was paying the two decorators who had done such a fine job of turning the dingy little shop into a pink and cream feminine heaven.
She had sold twenty-two hats that first day, and dozens of other women who came in to browse had since been back to buy. In the eighteen months that the shop had been open, there had been fewer than seven days in total when she hadn’t sold one hat, and those were all in bad weather. The average weekly sales worked out at fifteen hats, and though it meant she had to work very hard to keep up with the demand, and use an out-worker to help her, she was making a very good profit. During the summer she’d bought in plain straw boaters and then trimmed them herself, and that had proved very profitable. Her shop was a resounding success.
‘As is everything in your life,’ she reminded herself as she turned out the lights.
Etienne went straight to the station, but having found he’d just missed a train and had twenty-five minutes to wait for the next one, he stood at the window by the ticket office and looked at the Railway Inn nearby.
He had never quite understood English public houses: the rigid opening hours, men standing at the bar drinking huge quantities of beer then staggering home at closing time, as if they could only face their wives and children when drunk.
French bars were far more civilized: they weren’t seen as a kind of temple to get drunk in, for they were open all day and a man wasn’t considered odd if he drank coffee or a soft drink as he read the newspaper.
The Railway at least looked inviting, with its fresh paint and sparkling windows. He could imagine on a cold winter’s night it was a warm, friendly haven for men to gather in.
As he looked at it, a big man with red hair and a beard came out of the front door. He was wearing a leather apron over his clothes, and Etienne guessed that this was Garth Franklin, Jimmy’s uncle. He was looking up at water spurting out of a broken gutter and running down the front of the building, and he called out to someone inside, presumably asking the unseen person to come and look too.
A younger man joined him, and Etienne knew immediately that this was Jimmy, Belle’s husband. He was bigger than Etienne had imagined, as tall as his uncle