Chapter 19
Lew got home later than expected because there was a steady stream of customers in until three o’clock. He found Charlotte in a very chirpy and affable mood. She’d been shopping in Meadowhall with Regina who, despite her alcohol overload, had awoken fresh and fit for spending. Charlotte said that she hadn’t bought a thing. Lew knew she was lying but he didn’t press it. He didn’t want to fuel any fire that he was a skinflint and he’d had too good a day to argue. He’d rented a couple more units out and sold some pipes to a delighted Pied Piper who had been lured to visit by tales of those Petersons. Stickalampinit not only sold the revolting statue but the woman who bought it wanted another as a garden pair. One man’s rubbish really was another’s treasure, thought Lew with a smile, and he thanked God that was the case.
Lew volunteered to cook and rustled up a simple pasta dish for them both – arrabiata sauce, olives, mushrooms, ham and loads of parmesan – and pushed a part-baked baguette into the oven. Cooking relaxed him, whereas it was just something on the chore list for his wife.
He spread the warm bread with chilli butter and put it on the table, then poured two glasses of crisp, cold Chablis.
‘I had an amazing day sales-wise,’ said Lew when Charlotte had taken her place at the table.
‘Did you?’ she replied, sprinkling the tiniest amount of extra parmesan over her pasta.
‘My best day yet, I reckon,’ he smiled.
‘I bet your share price is just racing up,’ sighed Charlotte.
‘Ouch,’ replied Lew, making light of the wounding comment.
‘I’m sorry,’ Charlotte said immediately. ‘That came out as more sarcastic than the jokey way I intended.’
Lew suspected she meant it exactly as she had said it and felt a cloud drift across the sunshine of his mood. ‘I thought you’d be happy that I’d put some money in my till.’
‘I am, of course I am,’ she tried to enthuse, but he wasn’t fooled. What he had taken probably didn’t even cover what she would have spent in Meadowhall. He’d bet his life on the fact that if he went on a search in her wardrobe, he would find a very classy designer carrier bag with a handbag or shoes in it. Possibly both.
It worried him that his marriage worked better when they saw less of each other. He’d read about other marriages suffering the same fate: women married to soldiers coping fine with their long-distance relationship, until the soldier left the forces and the extra contact broke them up. He hadn’t made an issue of it, because the last couple of years had been full of pressure what with the house move and then nearly making Charlotte a widow. But things should have been levelling out by now. The shop was up and running, Lew’s health checks were coming back with great big positives and their lives were as stress-free as they could be. But now they were together more, Lew had started to notice traits in Charlotte that he’d not been aware of before, especially how bitchy she could be; and though she’d always had the makings of a snob, she could earn a doctorate in pretentiousness judging by what he’d heard her come out with recently. In a couple of years she’d morph into a blonde version of Regina if she wasn’t careful. He’d been sober the previous evening, unlike most of his guests, and he’d eavesdropped on some of the cruel comments his wife and Regina had been saying about Gemma and it didn’t sit well with him. He liked Gemma immensely, especially for how she’d hardly changed at all over the years. She’d been behind Jason one hundred per cent when he left the car salesroom which he deputy-managed and struck out on his own, selling prestige cars. They remortgaged their house to buy stock, Gemma had doubled her hours in Sparkles to bring in extra revenue and had been the unheralded wind beneath his wings. And when the big money started to come to Jason, Gemma didn’t give up work and spend her day gardening, playing tennis and blowing cash on crocodile handbags, but put even more effort into Sparkles. She was a grafter, a down-to-earth Yorkshire girl and she deserved a better set of friends, he was sad to admit.
Charlotte looked faraway as she was chewing.
‘Penny for them,’ Lew asked her, wondering what was making her smile so wistfully. He hoped it was him, but thought it more likely it was a purchase.
Her jaw froze and she looked at him as if he were slightly mad.
‘What?’
‘Your thoughts? You looked miles away.’
‘I wasn’t thinking anything.’ The smile had dropped and been replaced with a scowl.
Lew was slightly taken aback at the sudden change in her. ‘You okay? Something on your mind, love?’
‘Like what?’
He shrugged, unsure why her tone had suddenly acquired a sharp, defensive edge. ‘I don’t know. Just . . . something?’
She stared at him with her large blue eyes and then, as if a thought had landed with a bump in her mind, she nodded. ‘Oh I see, you mean because we haven’t had sex for a while.’
Lew’s eyebrows shot up his forehead at the same time as his jaw dropped open.
‘I didn’t mean that at all. It hadn’t even entered my head.’
‘Yeah right.’ Charlotte’s fork left her hand and clattered to her plate. ‘I haven’t been in the mood is the answer to that. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m going through the change. Mum went through it at forty-two.’
‘Charlotte, where’s all this coming from?’ He half-laughed at the ludicrous leap from her reflective smile to the symptoms of an early menopause. But Charlotte was so caught up in a loop, she didn’t hear him.
‘Maybe I’m still adjusting to our new circumstances even though I know I should have accepted them by now and I hear what you’re saying about us being okay, but I can’t help worrying when I know you can’t claim your pension for years. Maybe I haven’t got over the fact that you nearly died. Maybe I’m just a bit pissed off that my best friend wants the fucking baby that I’ll never have and I don’t think I’ll be able to be around her if she gets pregnant.’ Then Charlotte dropped her head into her hands and made a strangled noise of distress. Lew sprang from his chair and threw his arms around her. He kissed her hair and held her as her shoulders jumped as she sniffed. His poor wife. No wonder she was all over the place. They needed a holiday. Venice maybe – a city of beauty and good food where they could have some ‘us’ time and he’d buy her all the handbags she could carry if they stemmed the empty hungry hole in her heart.
*
When Bonnie got home, Stephen was sitting at the kitchen table drumming his fingers impatiently on the surface. She wondered how long he’d been doing that. He could do it for a very long time when he was annoyed about something.
‘Where on earth have you been?’ he said, before she’d even got both feet through the back door.
‘It was surprisingly busy at the shop,’ she said.
‘It closed at two.’ His lips were a grim line of annoyance.
She forced herself to stay calm. ‘It stayed open until three because there were customers.’
She saw him look at the clock, almost heard his brain whirring as it calculated that if the shop shut at three, getting home at twenty-past was reasonable.
‘You should have rung,’ Stephen said.
‘I didn’t see the problem,’ replied Bonnie. ‘We don’t eat until seven on Sundays anyway. The timer’s kicked in on the oven to cook the roast so what’s the panic?’
‘It’s just not the way of things,’ he snapped, before snatching up the newspaper and storming off into the lounge, muttering to himself the entire Roget’s Thesaurus word listing for disorder.
It was not the way of things was his stock phrase. Anything that differed from the norm in Stephen’s life threw him into a panic. She could blow his whole world apart by not having carrots with their Sunday lunch because that definitely was not the way of things. It was then that Bonnie was reminded how blown apart the ‘way of things’ would be when he came home and found out that she had left him.