The Shooting in the Shop (2 page)

‘What about the turkey?’

‘Well . . . erm . . .’

Oh no, the ‘erm’ was one of David’s favourite
mannerisms. Carole was not being allowed to forget
her ex-husband.

‘Stephen, if you mean whether or not Lily is given
any turkey to eat, yes, Gaby and I have discussed it. I
will purée some and put a little on a plate for her. If
she likes it, she can eat it. If she doesn’t, fine. I won’t
be insulted by Lily turning her nose up at my turkey.’

‘Oh, good.’ Still he sounded hesitant. There was
something he wanted to say to her, something awkward,
something he knew she wouldn’t like.

Just before Stephen put it into words, Carole
realized, with a sickening sense of recognition, what
it would be.

‘Mother . . . I . . . erm . . . spoke to Dad last
night . . .’

‘Oh yes?’ Now she knew what was coming,
Carole’s defences were quickly in place.

‘He hasn’t, in fact, finalized his own plans for
Christmas.’

‘That’s no surprise to me. Your father was never
great at committing himself to arrangements about
anything.’

‘No. He has had an invitation to have Christmas
lunch with some friends locally . . . you know, in
Swiss Cottage.’

‘Good.’

‘But they’re not people he knows very well. He’s
not sure whether he’ll be an imposition on them.’

‘Well, that’s for him to decide, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ There was another long silence from
Stephen’s end. Knowing exactly what he was about to
say, Carole had to restrain herself from hissing out,
‘Oh, get on with it.’

‘The fact is, Mum . . .’ He was trying to soft-soap
her now. ‘. . . I was just wondering . . . erm . . .
whether, since we’re all going to be together on
Christmas Day—’

‘No, Stephen.’

‘I mean, it’s not as if you and Dad are at each
other’s throats these days, like you used to be. You
were fine at our wedding and—’

‘No, Stephen.’

‘Why not?’

She wasn’t about to quantify the reasons why
having David in High Tor on Christmas Day would be
such undiluted agony, so she restricted herself to a
third ‘No, Stephen.’

‘I was thinking from Lily’s point of view, Mum. I
mean, she wasn’t born when you and Dad divorced,
so why should she get involved in all that grief?’

‘She will not be aware of any grief,’ said Carole
firmly. ‘Christmas Day at High Tor with just you,
Gaby and me will be a very pleasant experience for
her. Whereas spending Christmas Day with her
grandfather also present would be an unmitigated
disaster.’

‘Lily wouldn’t be aware of that.’

‘But I would!’

‘Then she’d have memories of a nice, happy
Christmas Day with all the family together.’

‘Stephen – A, she is far too young to remember
anything from this Christmas, and B, where do you
get all this stuff about “a nice, happy Christmas with
all the family together”? Is that how you recollect
your childhood Christmases?’

He was embarrassed into silence, but Carole had
by now got the bit between her teeth. ‘And from
what Gaby’s told me of her family background, I
can’t imagine that her family Christmases were much
cheerier either.’

‘But we don’t want Lily to grow up in an atmosphere
that might cause her problems in later life.’

‘Lily will survive. She will not notice her grandfather’s
absence on Christmas Day. And she’s much
more likely to develop problems in later life if she’s
brought up in an atmosphere of lies. Yes, a happy
nuclear family is a lovely idea, and some people are
fortunate enough to grow up in one. But you didn’t
and I didn’t, so let’s drop the pretence, shall we,
Stephen?’

Carole had said more than she wanted to. Actually
to admit to having had an unhappy childhood, and to
suggest that Stephen had had the same, went against
all her middle-class principles of reticence. What was
worse, she had almost ended up shouting at her son.
But she was so furious about the way he had tried to
use Lily to blackmail her into doing something which
she knew would be disastrous.

The conversation had unsettled her, though.
David, even by his absence, could still sour the atmosphere
between her and Stephen. The phone call had
not been an auspicious harbinger for the week ahead.

‘So how many people are coming to your open
house?’

‘I’ve no idea. That’s why it’s called an open house.’

Carole couldn’t be doing with this. ‘You must have
some idea . . . roughly . . .’

‘Well, I can guarantee it’ll be more than ten and
less than a thousand.’

Jude was being far too skittish for her neighbour’s
taste. ‘But surely you have to think in terms of catering?’

‘There’ll be plenty of nibbles and things.’

‘And hot food?’ asked Carole, hoping for an answer
to the sit-down meal question.

‘Oh yes, some hot food,’ replied Jude, with infuriating
lack of precision.

‘And drink?’

‘Certainly drink. Plenty of wine.’

‘But the invitation says “until the booze runs out”.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, the time at which the booze runs out is
going to depend on how many people are there,
isn’t it?’

Jude nodded and immediately went into a parody
of an old-fashioned maths teacher. ‘If it takes three
men twenty-five minutes to empty a seventy-five
centilitre wine bottle, how long will it take twenty-five men to empty the same bottle and, working at
that rate, how many bottles would be required to keep
a party of sixty-three people going for three hours and
seventeen minutes?’

‘I do wish you’d treat this seriously, Jude. And,
incidentally, you clearly have done a numbers check.
You said you were expecting sixty-three people.’

‘No, I didn’t. That was just a random example for
my pretend mental arithmetic challenge.’

‘Oh. Well, you should have thought about it. Your
open house is the day after tomorrow, you know.’

‘Yes, I do know. But come on, it’s only a party,
nothing to get hung up about.’

Though Carole Seddon would never be heard to
use the expression, for her a party was exactly the
sort of thing to get ‘hung up about’. She sniffed. ‘Well,
I would want a bit more information about numbers
for any social event I was catering for.’

Someone of less benign character might have
made some sharp riposte to that, but all Jude said
was, ‘It’ll be fine, I promise you.’

And you’re confident you’ll have enough to
drink?’

Jude grinned mischievously. ‘I’ll have enough till
it runs out.’

‘But you don’t know when that’s going to be. Suppose
someone arrives at the party after it’s all run out?’

‘I promise you, there’ll be plenty.’ Jude ran a
chubby hand through the blond hair piled up on her
head. She was dressed, as ever, in an array of draped
garments which embellished rather than disguised
the contours of her ample body. ‘I’ve got plenty in,’
she went on, ‘and a lot of people will bring bottles,
anyway.’

‘Oh, is it a “bring a bottle party”?’

‘No.’

‘It didn’t say it was on the invitation.’

‘It didn’t say it was because it isn’t. It’s just that
when you invite people to a party, a lot of them do
instinctively bring along a bottle.’

Another thing of which Carole would have to
make a note. And another moral dilemma. What kind
of bottle should she take along to the open house?
Jude, she knew, had a preference for Chilean Chardonnay,
but would her other guests like that? And
then again, what sort of price level should one aim
for? Carole rarely spent more than five pounds on
a bottle of wine, but when her contribution joined
the others on the Woodside Cottage sideboard, she
didn’t want to be shown up as a cheapskate.

‘Anyway,’ said Jude, slurping down the remains of
her coffee and picking up her tatty straw shopping
bag from the ultraclean floor of the High Tor kitchen,
‘I must get on. Bit more shopping to do.’

‘For the open house?’ asked Carole, still intrigued
by the stage management details of the forthcoming
event.

‘No, I’ve got most of that. A few presents outstanding,
though.’

‘Oh, I’ve done all mine,’ said Carole, instinctively
righteous. ‘Well, I’ve done Stephen, Gaby and Lily.
Those are the most important ones.’ The last sentence
was a bit of a cover-up. They were not only the most
important ones, they were the only ones. Carole
didn’t buy presents for anyone other than Stephen,
Gaby and Lily. For many years the only name on the
list had been Stephen. But she didn’t want to admit
that, even to Jude. Once again there loomed the awful
fear of being pitied.

‘What have you got for Lily?’

‘Oh, she’s easy. There are so many things out
there for little girls. I got her some lovely baby outfits
from Marks and Spencer. Their children’s clothes
are very good, you know. And not too expensive.
I checked the sizes with Gaby, but of course, being
Marks, she can exchange them if she doesn’t like
them.’

‘Oh.’ To give something on the assumption that it
might well be changed seemed to Jude to be a negation
of the principle of present-giving. She spent so
much time matching the gift to the personality of its
recipient that no one ever contemplated returning
one of hers.

‘That’s what I do with Stephen too,’ Carole went
on briskly. ‘I always give him two Marks and Spencer
shirts. And I put the receipts in the parcel.’

‘So that he can change them?’

‘Yes.’

‘And does he often change them?’

‘How would I know?’

‘Well, if you see him wearing a shirt you recognize
as one you gave him, then you’ll know he hasn’t
changed it.’

‘I’d never thought of that.’ But now she did think
of it, Carole realized she
had
recognized some of the
shirts her son had worn over the years. Maybe he did
appreciate his mother’s taste, after all. She didn’t
allow herself the thought that he might have worn
them simply because they were her gifts.

‘And what about Gaby? What have you bought
her?’

‘Oh, toilet water. Lily of the Valley. You can never
go wrong with toilet water.’

Jude’s plump face screwed up in disbelief. ‘Toilet
water? You’re giving your daughter-in-law toilet
water?’

‘Yes,’ Carole replied defensively. ‘Toilet water’s
always a safe present.’

‘A safe present for a maiden aunt fifty years ago,
perhaps. But Gaby’s in her early thirties. If she opens
her present on Christmas morning and finds she’s
got toilet water, she’ll be depressed for the rest of the
holiday.’

‘We don’t open presents till after lunch on Christmas
Day,’ said Carole primly.

‘Well, whenever she opens it, a bottle of toilet
water is going to have the same effect.’

‘Are you suggesting I should give Gaby something
else?’

‘Of course I’m suggesting you should give her
something else. And you should give Stephen something
else, too.’

‘But what’s wrong with his shirts?’

‘They are totally impersonal. They could have
come from anyone. Come on.’

Carole’s pale blue eyes blinked behind her rimless
glasses. She didn’t think receiving a present that
could have come from anyone was necessarily such a
bad thing.

But she felt her thin hands grasped in Jude’s
plump ones as she was pulled up from her chair. Her
dog Gulliver looked up hopefully from his permanent
position in front of the Aga. People getting up could
sometimes presage being taken out for a walk.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Carole plaintively.

‘Shopping.’

‘Where?’

‘Gallimaufry,’ Jude replied.

Her neighbour’s entire body registered disapproval
at the choice of destination.

The architecture of Fethering was a living history of
its development from an assemblage of fishermen’s
huts to something more like a small town than the
‘village’ which description stubbornly remained in
all official documentation. The returning economic
confidence of the late fifties and early sixties was
expressed in the High Street’s shopping parade. This
terrace of buildings had resolutely resisted being
rebranded as a ‘shopping centre’ or, even worse, a
‘shopping mall’. It still remained essentially as it had
been built, a row of matching shop fronts, pillared by
red brick and with a residential flat over each one.

When originally completed, the shops had had
their names fitted into a strip above their windows,
all co-ordinated in identical lettering that looked like
– but probably wasn’t – brass. Continuous shifts of
ownership and corporate branding meant that most
of the original signs had gone. Only the Post Office
retained its brass lettering, though beneath it the part
that dealt with postal services was now just a tiny
corner of a large convenience store.

Over other frontages were displayed the logos of
the chain that ran the local bookies and of Allinstore
(probably the most inefficient supermarket since
records began), signs for Polly’s Cake Shop, Urquhart
& Pease and another estate agent (both apparently
riding out the slump in house prices), the hairdresser’s
Marnie, three charity shops and a couple of
other premises which seemed to change hands every
six months.

Amongst these last was Gallimaufry, which had
opened early in September with champagne, balloons
and a lot of local press coverage. It was a shop whose
contents intrigued Jude, but were dismissed by
Carole (who’d never been inside the place) as ‘overpriced
rubbish’.

The word ‘gallimaufry’ had culinary origins,
describing a dish made of odds and ends of leftovers,
but soon came to be applied to any kind of hotchpotch
or mix of unlikely elements. And the word was
certainly apt for the stock in the store on Fethering
Parade. What appealed to Jude about the place was
that she never knew what she might find there. It
wasn’t a dress shop, though there might well be some
Indian print shifts on display. It wasn’t a furniture
shop, though it sometimes sold intricately carved
stools and tables from Africa. Gallimaufry didn’t
specialize in any particular lines, and yet it was the
kind of Aladdin’s Cave where anything might be discovered.