One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [163]
‘He hasn’t ’ad your little tooshy, has he?’ I gasped.
‘Certainly not!’ She pulled her dressing gown tightly around her. I stood there, racking my brains.
‘Norman! Ooh, Maggie, is it Norm?’
Norman, from the pub opposite, was a strange young man with hooded eyes and a brooding, psychopathic expression but who, when Maggie shamelessly batted her eyelashes at him, occasionally shifted heavy furniture for us. Gormless Norm, who sent Maggie hot stares from behind the bar when we popped across for a lager, and who, I’d tell her, looked exactly like Anthony Perkins in Psycho, then I’d rock crazily in my chair like the mother. Once, when he’d collected our glasses – I swear this is true – he carefully licked the rim of Maggie’s half-pint glass on the way back to the bar.
‘Norman!’ She was incandescent with rage. ‘How dare you! Now bugger off, Hattie. You’ve got your own blissful little love nest smouldering away on the other side of town, how about leaving me to mine?’
‘Blissful little love nest?’ I snapped to attention. ‘I thought you said it was needs must?’
‘What are you, the FBI? This isn’t Channel 4 News, you know.’
‘So who’s the lucky—’
‘What the bloody hell is going on?’ a familiar voice boomed out, but one I couldn’t instantly place. It drifted from within, certainly, but not from upstairs. From down.
I peered around Maggie’s shoulder in its general direction, then back at her. She was going very pink. In fact, she avoided my eye completely and regarded her bare feet instead. From out of the sitting room, clad only in a length of burgundy chenille curtain fabric worn around his waist toga-style, revealing a bronzed and perfectly toned torso, came Ralph de Granville.
32
‘Good God.’ It was out of my mouth before I could stop it. ‘I thought you were—’
‘In Italy?’ Maggie cut in quickly.
‘Or gay?’ enquired Ralph, not in the least abashed.
I flushed. ‘Oh, no.’
‘Lots of people do,’ he conceded. ‘And I don’t always disillusion them. They like the idea of a gay decorator, feel far more comfortable with it. Can’t quite grasp the idea that a red-blooded heterosexual would want to finger their drapes.’
‘Oh, no, I’ve never thought that,’ I said, the colour of the red chenille swathed around his middle.
‘Yes she did,’ Maggie admitted as he put his arm around her. ‘We both did, didn’t we, Hatts? But happily,’ she giggled as he nibbled her ear, ‘he’s all man.’
The breath had all but left my body. I was bereft of speech. I gazed, stupefied. All man.
‘Can I offer you a cuppa? I was just going to put the kettle on.’ He turned to me cheerfully. ‘Meanwhile, I’ll leave you girls to discuss my finer points.’ He flashed me a wink. ‘Builder’s, if it’s all the same to you. Can’t be doing with the flowery Lapsang muck. I drink enough of it in my line of work.’
‘Oh, um…’ I faltered.
‘Come in, deary, you’ll catch your death.’
This last was delivered in his habitual camp manner, and I realized he was demonstrating how he could turn it on. Up until then his voice had been quite normal. Bloke-ish South London, in fact.
‘No, no, I won’t stay,’ I said hurriedly as he strode off to the kitchen, no hint of a wiggle now.
When he was out of earshot I turned to Maggie.
‘I can’t believe it!’
‘I know.’
‘I am completely floored!’
‘Not as floored as I am,’ she purred, still with what I realized was a post-coital glow.
‘But… half of London thinks he is!’
‘More fool them. Their loss is my gain,’ she grinned, wrapping her dressing gown around her.
I gaped at her, again bereft of any meaningful dialogue. She looked like the cat who’d gulped the cream.
‘You might have told me,’ was all I managed, eventually.
‘l was going to, but I knew you didn’t like him.’
‘Didn’t like him! Didn’t like him! Bloody hell, that’s rich, coming from you. Only because you didn’t. You hated him. Couldn’t be in the same room with him!’
‘Because I was afraid of him. Funny, isn’t it?’ she mused. ‘Can’t get enough of him now.’ She went a bit misty-eyed.
I stepped inside out of the cold, shutting the door a bit behind us, keen to get to the bottom