The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton - Catherine Alliott [178]
‘Yes. Yes, I will.’ Her face lit up like a born-again Christian's. ‘One of them will be hers for ever.’ She turned to Tim and me with bright, shining eyes. ‘I'll put “Felicity” on the door.’
Tim and I exchanged weary glances. So exhausting when everyone wanted to be good.
She wasn't through, either. Two days later, she and Tim came to see me.
‘OK, we're keeping the money, but we're sharing it with you.’ She handed me a cheque.
‘He was your father too,’ said Tim firmly, as I opened my mouth to protest. ‘It's your inheritance as well. Fair's fair.’
I shut my mouth. If I'm honest, it had quietly occurred to me. I gazed down at the cheque in my hands. ‘Thank you.’ It also occurred to me that I'd never had money of my own before. Only my husband's. I looked up at them, a slow smile forming on my lips. ‘Thank you very much.’
34
As I pulled up outside the shop, parking defiantly on the yellow lines and putting the hazard warning lights on, Caro was waiting for us. She shot her hand in the air and waved as she saw us. She looked stunning in chocolate linen trousers and an ice-blue cashmere wrap top, happily not stick thin any more, but with a wonderful curvy figure and fuller face. Tanned from a recent holiday in Italy, her bronzed, and not insubstantial, bosom jingled with jewellery as she hastened towards us.
‘You're early!’ I wailed, as I got out.
‘I know, but I thought I'd help you set up.’
‘You're a guest, Caro, you don't have to do that.’
She bustled round to open the boot. ‘Nonsense, many hands and all that…’
Old habits died hard, I suppose, and actually I was glad of her: as we unloaded the contents of the boot onto the pavement I realized I needed muscle.
‘Where's Tim?’
‘Here,’ she jerked her head as he came down the road. ‘He went to park the car. What about Ant?’
‘He's got a meeting, but he'll be along later.’
‘Now, what can I do?’ Tim appeared, rubbing his hands.
‘You could set up the trestle table at the back of the shop – I've left it leaning against a wall in there – and take some boxes in. Girls, go with him and line up the glasses on the table.’
‘Can we make the Pimm's?’ asked Anna.
‘You can, but don't put the ice in yet.’
‘Cloth?’ said Stacey.
‘Good thinking.’ I reached into the boot and handed her a white linen one.
They disappeared, the three of them, carrying a box of booze apiece, and then Tim came back for more, carting them back and forth; nimbler on his pins these days now he wasn't on them twenty-four hours a day, and without that look of continually suppressed pain about him.
He was selling agricultural machinery now, a rep; getting out to all the many farms around here, and indeed the whole of the southwest of England, which, as he said, meant ‘seeing all my mates but not doing the sodding donkey-work. I wave bye-bye as they stand in the shit admiring my company car.’ He pointed it out to me now as he came back for the final box of lemonade, parked just down the road: a brand-new silver Saab. I saw Caro smile as she shut the boot, and we listened as he eulogized about the turbo charged something-or-other, the fuel-injected what-not.
At the back of the shop the girls had laid the table with the cloth and were lining up glasses. Caro was paring a cucumber like a demon, and Stacey was attacking the lemons.
Mint?' She glanced up.
Oh. I darted back to the car. As I came back with it, though, I paused a moment midway through the shop; took a second to gaze around. Yes, the duck-egg blue really had worked, I decided. Cheered the place up no end; made it – all due respect to Malcolm and Ludo – less like a gentleman's club, and more feminine; more sophisticated. But not remotely intimidating. I'd been nervous of going down that route, since that was something it had never been in Malcolm's day, and I certainly didn't want to alienate his old customers. I needn't have worried. As the door opened behind me, I turned