Chocolate Shoes and Wedding Blues (16 page)
‘Don’t bother, I’ll have it properly fenced all along my side,’ he said shortly, then scooped the indignant cat off the post and went off back into his cottage, slamming the door behind him, which I heard but couldn’t see through his garden’s impenetrable jungle.
It took Flash a moment or two to realise that his quarry had vanished, but when he did, he came to sit at my feet, ears down and tail flapping anxiously.
I patted his head and he flinched, as usual. ‘It’s all right, I understand,’ I told him. ‘When that cat is winding you up, you just can’t help yourself.’
I wasn’t entirely sure Ivo could help himself either. Grief must have sent him half crazy, because I don’t remember him having such a short fuse. In fact, he was a sweet boy.
Now he seemed set to turn into the neighbour from hell, though I expected he thought
he’d
already got one of those.
Bella arrived bright and early next morning and, attired in cheap overalls and with plastic shower caps over our heads, we got on with painting the shop ceiling before tackling the walls.
I’d got the joiner to remove the bit of existing shelving, but refused to allow him to take down the tiny shelf, held up by brass brackets, above the shop door. You could hardly see it there, but it held a deep green glass bottle with a marble stopper, full of mysteriously-shaped objects.
‘Aunt Nancy said it was a witch bottle,’ I explained to Bella. ‘A charm to protect the shop and cottage. Florrie Snowball gave it to her and she put it there to please her, so I want to keep it. I don’t suppose it’ll matter if I take it down for long enough to paint the wall behind it, though.’
‘Do you think Florrie really
is
a witch?’ she asked.
‘Aunt Nan said Florrie herself certainly
thought
she was, but it was all a lot of tomfoolery thought up by Gregory Lyon. But there’s a long tradition of witchcraft in the village anyway, isn’t there? Only think about the Winters, what with Hebe brewing up her potions and lotions and Sophy calling her little girl Alys, like the family witch!’
‘There seem to be lots more little girls than boys in Sticklepond,’ Bella observed. ‘I think three-quarters of the babies in Chloe’s Mothers’ Circle are girls, including hers.’
‘Yes, that’s true, now I come to think of it. And there are so
many
babies and toddlers, too.’
It had already forcibly occurred to me that Sticklepond had become a seething mass of fecundity, which rather rubbed in the painful fact that motherhood was never likely now to happen to me.
For the next few days we renovated and repainted, using the chosen colour scheme of cream and old-rose pink, with touches of gold and deep raspberry red here and there, to set it off.
Carpet was selected and laid, and an electrician came to put in new light fittings, including the spotlights in the window that Joe had suggested. They would be angled to highlight the old tilting-topped round wooden stand, now painted gold, where I would display a different shoe each week. The idea was to make the whole window look like a little stage with curtains at the back and I’d already bought yards of deep raspberry-red furnishing velvet and oodles of gold cord and tassels from Ormskirk market, ready to run those up.
The hanging wooden shop sign outside, and the one fixed to the wall at the High Street end of Salubrious Passage, had been removed and taken away to be repainted with ‘Cinderella’s Slippers’, though I’d also asked them to letter ‘Bright’s Shoes’ around the top too, because I thought Aunt Nan would like this link with the past.
And it was not only the shop that was transformed, for we got carried away and repainted the interior of the rest of the cottage in the same cream and old-rose pink colour scheme too, though without all the gold trimmings.
I also gave the cottage a good clear-out and spring-clean while I was at it, and Florrie Snowball, who had been popping in and out daily with good advice served up with lashings of curiosity, volunteered to help me sort out Aunt Nan’s clothes and personal effects.
Many things went to her favourite charity but I asked Florrie to choose any little mementoes she would like, and she picked out some costume jewellery, and a dressing table set of tortoiseshell brushes and a mirror, which I thought was
hideous
.
I’d already found the good bits of family jewellery in the bottom of Aunt Nan’s tin trunk, but her mother’s Welsh gold wedding ring hadn’t been with them and although I’d hoped we might discover it somewhere else in the room, there was no sign of it. Florrie had no idea where she might have put it, either. I only hoped it would turn up at some point!
There was not so much of Aunt Nan in the front bedroom by the time we had finished, but enough so that when I moved into it, I still felt comforted each night, just as I did when, as a frightened child, I had slipped into the tall, brass bed with her. And I slept deeply there each night, probably from exhaustion – and dreamlessly too, for the Cinderella dreams had stopped dead from the moment I saw Ivo again.
Strangely enough, I found I missed them …
Ages ago, when Timmy and Joe had brought my tilting-top drawing desk from London, I’d got them to carry it upstairs to my small bedroom overlooking the garden and we’d just managed to fit it in, even if I did have to climb over the bed to get to the window.
But now I set about turning the room into a studio, squeezing my white-painted wooden bed into the tiny boxroom ready for any unexpected visitors, though they’d have to share with me the even tinier bathroom on the half-landing, a later addition built out at the back.
While Aunt Nan had not hoarded personal possessions, one kitchen cupboard was crammed full of tins and jars of food, some ancient for, like many, the privations of the war years had turned her into a squirrel.
I fear I’d been making an awful lot of noise – and so had Cedric, who seemed to be increasingly revving up his crowing for spring. And then there was Flash, barking at the cat, of course, though I’d got quite used to that. Besides, it gave him something purposeful to do, seeing the creature off our garden.
Despite all this racket, however, there had been no more sudden Demon Prince appearances. In fact, I’d seen nothing of my neighbour for the entire week, though I heard his back door slam late each evening, after I’d returned from my dog-drag, so he must have gone out for a walk then. Perhaps he was a vampire. He was certainly pale enough for one.
But then on the Friday I caught sight of the vicar being admitted through Ivo’s front door, so maybe not … Also, supplies were delivered one day by an upmarket supermarket chain, so presumably there
was
food in the house, even if he didn’t look as if he was eating any of it.
Since the Saturday between the sale and the reopening was the only one Bella was likely to have free for quite some time, she’d decided to take Tia to Blackpool for the day. I would have gone with them, except that Timmy and Joe were up in Ormskirk for the weekend and were going to come over and see how things were going.
They brought me presents of a sparkly ‘glass’ pantomime Cinderella slipper, a string of fairy lights like little crystal shoes, and a wall clock with shoes marking the hours … I could see a certain theme developing there.
They also gave me lots of good advice on how to ‘dress’ the shop, and Joe adjusted the spotlights in the window for me. Then, since they were in their camper van, they kindly drove me to the nearby Ikea store (bribed by the lure of a Swedish meatball lunch, followed by those lovely green marzipan cakes for dessert), so I could buy two glass display cabinets, a long free-standing mirror in a white frame and a few other bits and pieces, including some light fittings for inside the cabinets, which Joe fitted before they left.
That was quite late, because once I’d told them Ivo was living next door, they’d hung around the garden for ages, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. They said he was a renowned Shakespearian actor, just as the newspapers had put it, and if I’d ever mentioned to Timmy that Ivo was the boy who’d broken my heart in a previous existence – one when I was very much younger and also very much thinner – then he’d entirely forgotten and I didn’t remind him.
Timmy did ask me if I was missing Justin, and I said quite truthfully that for days I’d been either too busy or too exhausted even to think of him, though every time I checked my phone or emails there were messages from him, which I deleted unread.
Immy had never been any kind of mother to me – it just wasn’t in her – so it was Aunt Nan I thought of on Mothering Sunday. I even made one of my rare appearances at the church for the special service. But then all the services were special – and packed – since Raffy became our vicar, not just because he was once a famous rock star, but because he was so charismatic.
I’d put a little pot of those miniature Tête-à-tête daffodils on Aunt Nan’s grave before the service, and the bright yellow blooms nodded bravely in the brisk, cold March breeze. She’d always like daffodils. I was sure she would like her stone angel when it arrived too, whatever she thought about the expense …
Later, my moonlighting joiner came back and put up some shelves, fixed the curtain track around the window and moved the heavy, glass-fronted counter (the old one, with the woodwork repainted cream) into position.
The new clock ticked on the wall: it was ten past sparkly pink stiletto time and I felt as if, despite all the loss and heartbreak, I was standing on the edge of something magical.
My fiancé, Jacob, was killed on a convoy quite early on in the war. A direct hit, his ship took, and not many were rescued. It was a hard blow and for a time I was inclined to resent Mother and Father for persuading us not to marry until after the war – though of course they meant it for the best, and none of us knew how long it was going to drag on for or we’d all have acted differently. But after a while I picked myself up, as you do, and carried on, because it was easier to keep busy and help others. Moping about wasn’t going to do anyone any good.
Middlemoss Living Archive
Recordings: Nancy Bright.
First thing on Monday morning the new electronic till arrived and I left Bella trying to work out the instructions while I was running up the deep raspberry velvet window drapes on Aunt Nan’s old Singer sewing machine, the sort with a handle and a little metal footplate that made a cheerful chinking noise against the needle holder as it sewed.
I’d made curtains before and it wasn’t hard, but each time I began hurtling down a straight seam, the handle would drop off and I’d have to stop and screw it back on again with the end of the butter knife.
While I was sewing I heard a few deliveries arriving and when I went into the shop later I found that Bella (who’s much more technically minded than I am) had sussed out the till and unpacked a carton of our printed carrier bags, which looked
very
swish.
‘There’re packets of shoe-shaped confetti in that small box over there, and this one’s the tissue paper, reams of it,’ she said. ‘Are you expecting any more deliveries today?’
‘A small consignment of silver shoe charms – remember, I showed you the picture on the internet? The enamelled bluebird ones should come with them. I thought they could either be sewn inside the wedding dress or worn on a chain as the “something blue”. There’ll be some handbag charms, too. But the initial consignment of RubyTrueShuze will arrive later.’
‘All those smaller bits and pieces had better go in one of the glass cabinets, hadn’t they?’ Bella said. ‘Do you want me to explain how to work the till?’
‘No, let’s postpone the evil moment until later in the week. It terrifies me,’ I confessed. ‘Let’s put my shoe ornaments out, instead.’
I’d had a high narrow shelf put up around what had been the stockroom specially so I could display all the decorative shoe-shaped items I’d collected, or been given, over the years, most of which had been languishing in boxes under my bed here in the cottage, since Justin was so averse to what he called ‘clutter’. Minimalists don’t collect anything except empty spaces.
As we unwrapped them I discovered forgotten treasures: flowered china shoes, brass slippers with upturned toes, a wooden pincushion boot from Bavaria and a pair of exquisite fairy-sized high-heeled shoes in deep green glass.
‘They’re all so pretty,’ Bella said, standing on the step-stool to put them on the shelf as I handed them up.
‘You’ve given me several of them over the years, and so have Timmy and Aunt Nan. I started with just one or two and it quickly snowballed.’
‘Like me with my china pigs – I’ve got about a hundred of them,’ she agreed. ‘But the shoes are certainly coming in useful now. They look lovely in here.’
She arranged a little embroidered Eskimo shoe next to a gilded porcelain one. ‘Where are the chocolate shoes going to be displayed when you’ve got them?’
‘In the bigger glass cabinet, I think,’ I said, ‘because they’ll be quite breakable, even with the special packaging. Did I say I’ve also decided to stock my own books and ordered a small revolving rack for them? I thought I might as well, starting with
The Slipper Monkeys and Cinderella’s Slippers
.’
‘Oh, I’d entirely forgotten that one. Anyone would think you’d written it especially for the shop!’
‘I suppose I did always dream of opening a wedding shoe shop, even if I never thought it would happen, so I expect that gave me the idea for the book. The stand is another
expense, though. I’m going to have to be careful with the money now until the shop takes off –
if
it does!’
‘Of course it will, it’ll be a huge success!’ she assured me. ‘Think about it – you’ll be the only stockist for RubyTrueShuze in the whole Northwest, and probably the only place in the country where you can buy
real
vintage wedding shoes.’