Chocolate Shoes and Wedding Blues (18 page)
Middlemoss Living Archive
Recordings: Nancy Bright.
I practised for
hours
before I mastered the till and new credit card machine … well, sort of mastered them, because I still kept jamming the till, then had ‘to void the transaction’, as the instruction manual put it, and start all over again. Also, replacing the two paper till rolls looked like an almost impossible task, so I was cravenly hoping they only ever ran out when Bella was there.
I’d put Bella in charge of the accounts, and she said this was where the spreadsheets she’d learned about in her night-school class would come in useful, though I’d no idea what those were: it was clearly all going to be a steep learning curve.
I
still
hadn’t seen any sign of Ivo, though I could certainly
hear
him whenever I went outside, because he seemed to have decided to work off his grief (which I assume was what was eating him) by single-handedly hacking down the jungle that had once been his rear garden.
By the Thursday before we opened, I’d finished making matching curtains for the entrance to what had been the stockroom and was now a sort of inner sanctum dedicated to my RubyTrueShuze stock, so Bella hung those while I finished hand-lettering a couple of signs with my calligraphy pens.
We were really down to finishing touches by then and, call me immodest, but it all looked wonderful: a sumptuous cavern of cream and old-rose pink, highlighted with touches of muted gold and curtained in bullion-edged raspberry-red velvet.
The lighting was subtle and artfully placed, the tall white mirror at the end of the inner room seeming to extend the shop for ever. There were cream bentwood chairs and a small and ancient red velvet-covered chaise longue, donated by Florrie Snowball, in front of the display of vintage shoes.
There was more lighting in the glass cabinets, where jewellery and the boxed Chocolate Wishes shoes were lusciously arrayed, and the little white rack of
Slipper Monkey
books was tucked in by the counter.
The two prints I’d bought from Felix hung below the clock with its shoe numerals. Timmy and Joe’s other gift, the string of crystal shoe-shaped fairy lights, was wound among a tall white pot of willow twigs by the door, shedding some illumination onto the step down. I didn’t want any of my paying customers to plummet down head-first, as Ivo had.
Friday was a really busy day, with lots of coming and going. In the morning I baked millions of tiny fairy cakes for the opening – plain, but with a spoonful of pink water-icing and a silver sugar ball on top.
Flash watched me hopefully from his bed and, when a cake dropped, bounced off the table and shot in his direction, it was gone with one snap of the jaws.
I hadn’t intended giving him any because I’d suddenly noticed he was looking a bit fat, like a fur-covered coffee table. He needed more exercise and less food: I think I had been trying to make up to him for his horrible past by feeding him titbits, but I didn’t want to kill him with love.
I was feeding myself titbits too – I seemed to be doing more and more baking, and eating – since moving back to Sticklepond, but oddly enough
I
seemed to have lost weight!
Florrie’s son, Clive, dropped off the boxes of champagne flutes which they were loaning me and also a crate of inexpensive fizz, which I crammed into the tall, old fridge.
Then Cheryl Noakes, the archivist, finally called in with my copy of Aunt Nan’s memoirs.
‘Here you are, a complete set, just as I promised her I’d give you,’ she said, handing over a substantial cardboard slipcase. (Aunt Nan must have rambled on for
hours
!)
‘Oh, great – thank you! I’ve so been looking forward to hearing all her memories.’
‘Well, yes, I’m sure you have,’ Cheryl said, looking slightly uncomfortable, ‘but the thing is that your aunt insisted on making an extra recording, just for you. She said you must listen to it after all the others, because it wouldn’t make sense otherwise, and she hoped she’d done the right thing by telling you.’
‘Telling me
what
?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘Oh, most families have their little secrets,’ Cheryl said breezily. ‘She was undecided whether to leave things be, then decided to to be completely open about her life.’
‘Now I come to think of it, she did once or twice drop some hints that there might be a little skeleton in the family cupboard, but I can’t imagine what.’
‘I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about: that generation had totally different ideas of right and wrong from ours, after all, and I think I’ve guessed what it is …’ She paused, then added, ‘Still, she left it up to you whether or not to make the final recording public. You’ll let me know some time, won’t you?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I agreed.
I’d given Bella the morning off, but after lunch I showed her the recordings and told her what Cheryl had said.
‘So,
are
you going to listen to them in order, or go straight for the secret?’ she asked, almost as intrigued as I was. ‘I know which it would be if I were you – but then, I never could resist a mystery.’
‘If Aunt Nan wanted me to listen to the rest first, then that’s what I’ll do,’ I said firmly. ‘I’ll start tonight and ration myself to short instalments, to make it last longer.’
‘Then I’ll just have to be patient until you find out what the secret is,’ Bella said. ‘If it’s something you can tell me, of course!’
‘I expect it will be. I’m sure it must be someone else’s little secret
they
confided to
her,
and I’m more interested in Aunt Nan’s own life.’
‘Maybe Florrie had a racy past and blotted her copybook in some way?’ Bella suggested.
‘That sounds more likely than Aunt Nan doing something wrong, and they’ve always been the closest of friends, despite being so different.’
We went into the shop and started putting price tags on the last of the jewellery, which was fiddly, because they were tiny and you had to thread one bit through the other.
Neil Seddon turned up with my new doorbell just as we were in the middle of that and, while he was telling me about it, I could see that he was surreptitiously eyeing Bella in an interested kind of way. She was looking especially attractive today, in a pale blue tunic top that matched her eyes exactly.
Bella glanced at him and away a couple of times too. Actually, he was just her type: stocky, shortish and muscular!
Hoping he wasn’t married, I left them both in the shop and went back to the kitchen, where I arranged my fairy cakes on pretty old china plates and an orange Bakelite cake stand, covered in clingfilm.
I could hear the doorbell wedding peal from the kitchen as Neil was fitting it and it sounded
perfect
, not at all jangly, but just like the real thing, but by the time I took some coffee through, he’d already gone.
‘He had another bell to fit,’ Bella explained.
‘But I haven’t paid him yet!’
‘I expect he’ll send you the bill, then, or drop in again. In fact, he said he could come back any time and adjust the volume on the bell, if you want him to.’
‘I thought it sounded about right.’ I opened and closed the shop door a couple of times. ‘It
is
louder now I’m in here … but then, it’s bound to sound loud in an empty shop, isn’t it? When the place is full of customers, you’ll hardly notice it.’
‘That’s what Neil said. And then, just before he left, he asked me out for a drink,’ she added.
‘Are you going?’ I asked, thinking he was a quick worker.
‘No, of course not. I told him I wasn’t interested in the least.’
‘He seemed very nice,’ I offered tentatively.
‘Well, so did Robert, didn’t he? I totally trusted him and look how that turned out! For all I know, Neil could have a secret vice
and
be married, too.’
‘There is that. You certainly don’t want to rush into a new relationship.’
‘Frankly, at the moment, I don’t even want to
walk
into one,’ Bella said. ‘And anyway, I’m feeling too excited about tomorrow to think about anything else!’
‘Me too, but nervous as hell and I keep thinking I must have forgotten something. But the bubbly’s in the fridge, the borrowed glasses have arrived …’
‘And the fairy cakes,’ Bella said. ‘They’ll be a revelation to anyone who thinks cakes are those giant, heavy, greasy muffins!’
‘I’ve baked squillions of them in tiny paper cases, so they’re only mouthfuls. I expect we’ll be vacuuming up crumbs for hours afterwards, though.’
‘Couldn’t we have a cake now to celebrate?’Bella suggested. For a willowy person, she certainly puts away a lot of food – way more than I do, which is a bit unfair!
‘I was just going to suggest it –
and
we’ll open a bottle of bubbly to toast our hard work!’
I was a bit tiddly when I took Flash out for his drag later, but dogs are quite non-judgemental. So long as I didn’t seem angry with him, Flash was happy.
The mad machete man was still hacking at his garden next door when we left, and Flash didn’t really want to walk past the end of the garden where the red Jaguar was parked, presumably in case he came out and had a hack at him, too. Who knew what was going on in the poor dog’s head?
Anyway, he firmly hooked his front paw over the lead and I had quite a job to get him past. But finally I half-coaxed, half-dragged him onwards and by the time we’d got back there was no sign of Ivo, though faint strains of miserable music were, as usual, filtering through the dividing wall into the kitchen.
I listened to the first instalment of Aunt Nan’s memoirs while I was preparing and eating my supper and it was lovely to hear her voice again. It made me cry, but also smile, because she was talking about handing down the recipe for Meddyginiaeth Llysieuol. That was one tradition I intended to keep going.
I’d inherited Aunt Nan’s recipe notebook, written in her lovely copperplate handwriting, though of course I’d long ago copied out the recipes for favourites like the Meddyg, Welshcakes and bara brith … and now I came to think about it, I realised I’d left six bottles of Meddyg in Justin’s airing cupboard.
He’d always declined even a taste of the drink, which was a pity, because it might have made some semblance of a man out of him. Mummy Dearest had probably found it and thrown it out by now.
Justin actually caught me on the phone later and said he’d called just to wish me luck with the opening the next day, which was big of him considering he thought the shop would bomb … or maybe that should be
hoped
it would, so I would go running back to him.
Then he said that he missed me, before ringing off, leaving me feeling edgy and unsettled and wishing he hadn’t bothered.
During the war Father did a lot of fire-watching, being too old and unfit for active service, and he was also involved in the St John Ambulance Service. I stayed home to look after Mother and run the shop. We had the hens, and grew a lot of our own fruit and vegetables, and the family who lived in the cottage adjoining ours kept bees, so we had honey too … Mother brewed Meddyg with some of it. People would barter almost anything for a bottle of Mother’s Meddyg during the war.
Middlemoss Living Archive
Recordings: Nancy Bright.
I was too excited to sleep properly the night before the opening and was up at the crack of dawn to sort out the hens and take Flash for a quick drag round the green. He was getting a little braver about going out for walks, though any sudden noise or the appearance of a man bearing anything stick-shaped, from a fishing rod to a garden hoe, set him yanking me in the direction of home in a mindless, scrabbling panic.
When we got back we had breakfast and then I changed into a quite demure (for me) dark red dress with an interestingly draped top, which I’d bought from what Aunt Nan had always called ‘your Gudrun Sodastream catalogue’.
Bella and I had debated some kind of uniform, then decided against it, apart from a Cinderella’s Slippers name badge and a sparkly bridal tiara apiece, so the customers knew who was in charge.
By the time Bella arrived I’d already switched the lights on in the shop and put the white rope across the inner sanctum where the RubyTrueShuze were displayed, together with the sign saying, ‘If you wish to try on wedding shoes, please ask a member of staff for assistance.’
We set up a pasting table in front of the shop, covered in a white sheet, ready for the refreshments, and Bella decorated the two ball box trees on either side of the front door with ivory satin bows. We hadn’t liked to do it the day before in case it rained and the bows wilted, but luckily today looked set to be a lovely fresh bright March morning.
In the kitchen I filled a white plastic bucket with ice and stuck in the first two bottles of pink fizz to chill. I only hoped Flash’s nerves would be able to withstand the popping of the corks! I think he was feeling my nervousness, because he was very edgy too, staring at me anxiously with his mad amber eyes.
Half an hour before the official opening time, the journalist and photographer from
Lively Lancashire
arrived to do an interview and we all had coffee and fairy cakes in the kitchen while I told them about the history of Bright’s Shoes and Aunt Nan. Initially, Flash had been so scared by these strange intruders that he managed to squeeze under the settle near the inglenook fireplace, though greed got him out eventually.
The journalist was still taking notes when Raffy arrived the back way in full vicar gear (as opposed to his everyday garb of black jeans and a black T-shirt printed with a dog collar), because I’d asked him to declare the shop open and bless the new enterprise.
‘Raffy Sinclair, our vicar,’ I introduced him.