Rumours and Red Roses (2 page)

W
HEN SHE WAS
young, Becky Andrews always had her head in a book.

It was seen as a fault, particularly by her mother who used to sniff her disapproval and tell her to put it down and go out and do something. What she might go out and do was never specified but she wasn’t one for hanging around with the crowd, preferring the company of her best friend, an equally quiet, shy girl called Janet.

They had a lot in common. They were both creative, dreamers, the kind of pupils who were never a problem at school and, having known each other since they were in the infants, they had no secrets from each other. Janet lived in the next street from Becky in an identical terraced house. Like Becky, Janet’s mum was a widow but there the similarity ended, for Janet’s nervous, elderly, perpetually beige-draped mother was as far removed from Becky’s mother as it was possible to be. Becky’s mum, the bright, energetic, smoulderingly sexy Shelley, did not do beige.

Janet was prettier with the dark hair and deep brown eyes Becky had always wished for, taller and slimmer, but just as awkward with the boys for all that. They used to laugh about it together and it never bothered either of them much, although as they approached their middle teens things began to change.

In the space of a few months, following her sixteenth birthday, Janet blossomed in every way, shaking off her shyness, finding both a new-found confidence
and
a boyfriend. In that instant, their
relationship
changed and although Janet did her very best to stay friends, tried
indeed to fix Becky up with one of
his
friends, it was never quite the same again. They still did the girl talk but suddenly, despite their previous openness, Janet now had things she did not want to talk about.

And then, just after Christmas that year, after a disco where Janet had sparkled and danced the night away in a red dress – perfect with her very nearly black hair – Becky accepted that fateful lift home. She remembered shivering on the pavement outside the disco waiting for Gerry, one of their friends from school, to bring his mum’s car round. Like the rest of the girls, she was not wearing a jacket because she only had her school navy blue anorak and it would have ruined the effect of the dress, a short sleeveless pale blue number that would be spattered with blood before the night was over.

It was a cold clear January night, the sky a velvety midnight blue with a full moon and a scattering of glittering stars in the sky. Dancing about on the pavement in an attempt to warm herself, Becky found her eyes drawn upwards to the dark depths, more and more twinkling stars becoming visible like flashing diamonds. Finding herself entranced by it, she announced to anyone who cared to listen that the Plough was clearly visible this evening.

Janet’s weary look her way just as clearly said ‘So what?’ as she giggled and turned back into her boyfriend’s arms.

Becky, rebuffed and chastened with no boyfriend to put his arms round
her
, allowed her gaze to drop and fell silent. Suddenly, she felt quite alone. It was a sobering thought but, at that moment, she was not sure any more if she even liked Janet.

There was already a twinkling of frost on the road as they piled quickly and noisily into the car when it finally appeared, Gerry proudly and delightedly at the wheel. ‘Don’t get it into a mess,’ he warned, ‘or she’ll kill me.’

There were too many of them to fit in easily and Becky found herself squashed beside a boy she fancied and on whom she had tried to make an impression this evening. The perfume she had sprayed on her wrists and neck and the eye fluttering she was trying to perfect had obviously not worked, for the boy had paid her scant attention, but maybe now was her chance and she was not at all unhappy to find herself rammed up close to him, glad that she had refreshed her lipstick just before coming out of the building. Her mum had helped her get ready, doing
her hair for her – it was good to have a hairdresser as a mum – and issuing some cheerful instructions about the perils of dealing with the opposite sex.

‘Mum, I know …’ she had said, embarrassed.

‘You’re only sixteen, too young for any of that,’ her mum said with a smile, waving her cigarette as she spoke. ‘Don’t you let me down. Don’t you let yourself down. I don’t want you getting knocked up. If you think I’m ready to be a grandma, you can think again. Give yourself another couple of years before you let a boy start any funny business. And remember, it’s different for them. They soon get carried away. It’s up to you, love, to say no.’

She remembered the advice as she was forced, under the
circumstances
, to adopt rather an intimate closeness to Paul. She could smell his strong aftershave, see the rash of spots on his face at close quarters – but then they all suffered in varying degrees from those. Her skirt had ridden up to her thighs but it was a waste of time trying to do anything about it and she caught the look Paul gave her legs. She knew she had good legs; a short body and surprisingly long legs. She wouldn’t mind just a kiss from him at the end of the night. The thought of anything more – and she wasn’t sure what Janet was up to these days – scared her to death. Janet, laughing, had to sit on her boyfriend’s knee, her head against the car roof, as Gerry, who had only passed his test the week before, started up the car.

‘Hold tight!’ he yelled at them.

They roared off into the night.

Not one of them had bothered to wear a seatbelt.

It took her a year to get over it. No, that wasn’t true. Twenty years later, she still wasn’t over it.

Until she met Simon Blundell, only her father had called her Rebecca. It mattered that the two men who meant the most to her in the whole world should both think of her as Rebecca, so much prettier a name than Becky, although she thought of herself as that. Rebecca was so much softer, rolled off the tongue, whereas Becky … well, she thought of the Becky in
Vanity Fair
. Becky equalled feisty and she had been called a lot of things but never that. She was soft as putty, according to her mum, which was all very well but sometimes it paid to let people know that you weren’t a pushover.

It was easy for her mum to say that but then her mum spoke her mind and wasn’t much bothered whom she offended.

Becky Andrews was in her late thirties when she met Simon and she had had a chequered love life before that. Twice engaged and the last time she had very nearly made it to the altar before her feet iced over. She managed to sell the frock – ‘beautiful cream satin off-the-shoulder wedding dress, size 14, never worn’ – for half the price she paid for it and within a disturbingly few months Terry had taken up with an
ex-girlfriend
and married her instead, so his new suit was not wasted.

Her mum hadn’t spoken to her for three whole weeks following that debacle because she had bought the outfit and the hat and the
arrangements
were in hand for a fantastic post-wedding fish and chip supper and karaoke with a spot of line dancing thrown in to boot. Shelley had intended to send Becky off in style, booking a white stretch limousine to transport them from the church to the reception.

Shelley was hell-bent on it being something a bit different from the usual boring reception with speeches. It was a good job her dad was dead, her mum said, because he would have died a death if he had had to make a speech in front of people, although they would be lucky to keep her Uncle Geoff from launching into something after he’d had a few. Becky sometimes wondered if the thought of Uncle Geoff doing his bit or seeing her mum in the wedding outfit, a tantalizingly see-through chiffon number, had not played a small part in her decision to abort the proceedings. That and the dreaded fish and chip supper, of course. She had no objection to fish and chips – loved them – but there was a time and place.

‘We’ll have
plates
,’ her mum had said, her voice rising in exasperation when Becky dared to mutter about her reservations. ‘We won’t be eating them out of newspaper. And I’ve ordered individual custard tarts for pudding. Everybody likes a custard tart and it’s nice to do your own thing. We don’t want a boring buffet with sausage rolls and pork pies and stuff like that. That’s been done to death.’

Her mum had always been a source of embarrassment. Her mum had always stood out from the other mums with her flashy hair and
make-up
and choice of clothes and Becky remembered the parents’ evenings at senior school with particular horror for her mum had, for some insane reason, thought they were occasions to ‘dress up’. Dressing up for
her meant sparkle and fancy earrings and fake fur and the highest heels you could imagine. Plonking herself in a perfumed flurry in front of her form master with Becky beside her, Becky had seen him do a double take and could only imagine what might be said in the staffroom later.

Heads turned when her mum came into a room. She drew the eyes like a lit Christmas tree and it got no better as she grew older. Try as she would, Becky could not persuade her mum to dress appropriately for a woman of her age. Her mum did something to clothes, even the chaste variety, simply by undoing one button too many or shortening the hem by a few worrying inches. She had an enviable figure, true, better than her daughter’s, but that was no reason to flaunt it. Becky was well aware that she had a lot of her dad in her, his shyness and his tendency to worry in a daft way about what other people might think. Her mum had no such inhibitions.

‘For God’s sake, Becky, what’s the matter now? You talk as if I’m in my dotage,’ she said when she saw Becky’s reaction to the would-be wedding ensemble that she had tried on for her. ‘No way is it
see-through
. Would I wear see-through to my only daughter’s wedding? Would I heck as like. It’s all in the mind. I know it looks it but I’ve got a nude body top underneath. Anyway, I’m hanged if I’m going to look matronly. It’s not my fault if Terry’s mum’s in her seventies. I mean to say, you can’t do a lot when you’re that old so she does right to play safe. She’s got herself a navy blue and white spotted suit from a mail-order catalogue, I believe. But I’m not sixty yet. I’m younger than Cilla Black and would you look at her. She wears short tight skirts and high heels too. And she has that lovely red tint to her hair.’

Shelley’s hair was, at that time, honey blonde but as she was forever switching and changing both the colour and the style as was the way with hairdressers, you could never be sure from one year to the next.

It was the last time
she
would make any effort, Shelley said, when they eventually started talking again because she couldn’t keep up the not talking for very long. If Becky got engaged again – and chance would be a fine thing because she wasn’t getting any younger and was proving to be too picky for words – then Becky would have to do the organizing of the wedding herself. A do like that didn’t organize itself and the worry had nearly sent her mental. There was the cake and the flowers and the photographs, the little gifts for the guests, not to mention the invitations and the announcement in the paper. A million
and one things. The presents had started to arrive and that had been a hassle and a half returning them to their rightful senders. And she had had to deal with the bridesmaids and their disappointment. Shelley hadn’t known where to put herself at the club where she had paid the deposit and arranged the fish and chip supper. She had been looking forward to starting the ball rolling in the karaoke stakes with Shirley Bassey’s ‘Big Spender’.

Saved by the bell then.

B
ECKY LEFT SCHOOL
at the first opportunity, which had caused grief to some of her teachers who had her down as a likely candidate for taking up a college course and doing something with her life. Doing something for them seemed to mean getting a qualification that would give her the chance to escape this town, this big northern sprawl of a town,
her
town, and move to somewhere nicer and cleaner. If they hated it so much, why didn’t they move then? That was what she thought but she wouldn’t dream of saying it, not to a teacher.

The last year had been horrible, of course, following the accident, with five members of her class short, and when she had gone back to school after her stint in hospital she had been overwhelmed at the kindness shown to her. Her leg had mended well but even now,
sometimes
, it ached and, whenever it did, she was reminded of why it ached.

She could draw beautifully, producing a passable sketch with just a few deft touches of the pencil, and was the sort of pupil her art teacher dreamed about, one of those rarities, somebody with natural talent. There were much mutterings of ‘wasted opportunities’ and ‘throwing chances away’ but Becky had made her mind up and wasn’t for changing it. After the accident, a tiny bit of feistiness had attached itself to her and this was her way of showing it.

Her mum had been called in by the headmaster for a ‘chat’ but for once in her life she had supported her daughter’s decision. Becky had almost wanted her not to, to be on the side of the teachers, to tell her she had to stay on and that was that, no arguments. She had, after all, only needed a little push. She had a feeling that if her dad had been alive that’s what
he
would have done but he wasn’t around and although she
half wanted to go on to the sixth form and then art college, she was pulled in the other direction too.

She wanted to get a job, any job, just so she had independence and some money to call her own. Also, although she would never admit as much, she knew her mum was struggling with just her hairdresser’s wage coming in – no great shakes – and, although it was never said, she really needed Becky to get off her backside and help out.

She had had a variety of jobs since leaving school, mainly in shops, and just now she worked in a shoes and accessories shop. It was in a central position in town and it stocked quality goods, medium to expensive.

Becky was not a morning person, her mum’s constant breakfast chatter wafting around in direct competition with Radio 2. At 8.15 on the dot, they left the house together, parting company just before the bus stop because her mum worked at Crystals Unisex Hair Salon on the main road. This morning they had been whistled at by some guys on a building site. Becky had not liked to look at them too closely,
particularly
the one who had already whipped off his vest at this ridiculously early hour, his bronzed, toned body glistening, and tattoos everywhere you cared to look.

The wolf whistles continued as they walked by, plus some choice macho shouts of appreciation about what they would like to do to them.

‘You’re not supposed to wolf whistle these days, you cheeky sods,’ her mum had yelled back at them with a big smile, remarking to Becky as they walked on that it lifted your spirits, something like that.

It hardly lifted Becky’s because she knew damned well they were whistling at her mum. From a distance, with her long hair – coppery brunette just now – dancing round her face, clicking along on high heels with a wiggle she had perfected over the years, she looked half her age. Becky, slap bang in one of her bloated times of the month, was wearing her shop’s uniform of unflattering black calf-length skirt and white spotty blouse and her comfy workaday sandals so she knew she wasn’t a target for wolf whistles, even from short-sighted brickies.

At the shoe shop in town, Becky had to work for her money this morning and shoe boxes were piled around the potential customer as she hummed and hawed about which pair to have. Fretting a bit about
the number of shoe boxes and loose shoes littering the floor, nicely
positioned
for another customer to trip over, Becky started to put aside the obvious rejections. She had spent more than enough time on these two customers already and she was determined they weren’t going to slip through her fingers. The danger point had arrived for there was now too many shoes to choose from and the girl was losing concentration and wavering. With no decision yet, it could easily go the way of ‘thanks but no thanks’ and she would be lumbered with a no-sale and a lot of clearing up all for nothing. The man was starting to fidget – a bad sign.

‘What do you think, sweetheart? Which ones do you like best?’ the girl asked him.

She wiggled her foot, showing a lot of tanned leg in the process, and looked first at him and then at Becky. ‘What do
you
think?’ The girl turned the question on her, as the man merely shrugged. He had been, Becky realized, intent on looking down the front of Becky’s blouse, momentarily flustered by the question his fiancée – Becky had already clocked the enormous ring – had posed him.

‘I like the red ones,’ Becky said, straightening and depriving him of the view. ‘I have a pair myself.’

The man winked at her and she felt herself blushing but luckily the girl did not notice, busy removing the silver shoes and squeezing her ugly-sister feet back into the red ones. Becky did not actually have a pair of the red Italian leather shoes, not at that price. She could not afford over £100 for shoes, not even allowing for her staff discount, but it was a sales ploy that sometimes worked, although she never could fathom why. It wouldn’t work with dresses, would it?

The man was starting to grumble, saying he was desperate for a
cigarette
and could they get the hell out of here, so the girl, clever girl, ended up with the silver
and
the red plus a matching handbag, her beloved handing over a credit card and not even bothering to check the amount.

Becky sighed as she watched them go, the girl swinging the bag containing her purchases and clutching his arm possessively. He had a nice bum in the tight jeans and she quite liked the cheeky smile but he would be a wild one, she reckoned, and she hoped the girl had the sense to make it tough on him if or rather when he eventually moved on. For herself, she wanted a man who was reliable and sexy at the same time but it was beginning to look like an impossible combination.

The smile that guy had shot her way left her with a good feeling for it was nice to know she still had it in her, after the disaster of Terry and her mum’s prophesies of doom, to attract a man. Terry had called her a cold cow at the last but she had not resorted to a slanging match with him, keeping her cool, knowing that, underneath it all, she had upset him a good deal more than he was letting on. Finally, the certain
knowledge
that her dad would have been none too keen on Terry and his decidedly dodgy family had tipped the balance. What was wrong with her? Next time, if there was a next time, she would have to be very sure before she let a man slip an engagement ring on her finger.

The air conditioning was making her shiver and she slipped on a cardigan when she reached the staffroom for her lunch break. She went to the loo and checked her make-up before trying to flatten her wayward naturally blonde hair. She had quite distinctive green eyes, like a cat’s, and although men had complimented her on them, she was never sure. One guy had once accused her of having coloured contacts. As for her hair … it was the bane of her life. It was meant to be smooth and newsreader smart, but it never quite managed it, for the curls just refused to be squashed. She had her hair done at Crystals but she would like to try one of the salons here in town because Ivana, her mum’s employer, was a bit hit and miss depending on how she was feeling that day. Her mum had taken the huff and refused to do her hair any more after she had once complained so Ivana had come to the rescue – which was OK when Becky was eighteen but not so good now. Going to the same hairdresser’s for nineteen years was loyalty gone mad.

She had to find a way to disentangle herself from Ivana’s flashing over-zealous scissors without causing an international incident. Ivana was scary. She was from Eastern Europe originally, still with that heavy accent, and if Becky left her client list she would take it as a personal insult and very likely spit on her or give her a tongue-lashing in her own language. Ivana had bagged her as a client and she couldn’t escape.

How pathetic was that.

Becky sighed as she ate the ham sandwich she had prepared at eight o’clock this morning. That, plus an apple and a strawberry yoghurt, was her lunch, the same lunch, give or take the flavour of yoghurt, for the past year. Throwing her rubbish in the bin, she checked the time and pulled a paperback out of her bag. She had time in her lunch hour to
escape the shop but if she did that she spent money and this week money was particularly tight.

She slipped down into the only comfortable chair in the staffroom and opened the book. Since the break-up with Terry, she was into escapist romance, a genre she normally steered clear of. The beautiful girl in the book with the impossible name of Trinity had two men chomping at the bit and could not make her mind up between them. Her dotty dithering was beginning to annoy Becky for she could make it up for her, no problem. As she saw it, there was no contest and she was just willing the girl to make the right decision.

Like the girl in the book, she must stop being such a wimp. Being a wimp had very nearly landed her as Terry’s wife because she had got on with his mother so well and hadn’t wanted to upset her by calling off the wedding, but she had rallied at the last, thank goodness. She did have it in her to be strong if she was so minded but it would help if just
sometime
her mum could be on her side.

Shelley was too often caught up with her own unsatisfactory love life. In spite of doing her best to look it, she was not promiscuous and there had been just the one man since her father died. You couldn’t blame her mum for that for she had been widowed young but that relationship with Alan had petered out, even if it had continued to be on and off for years. The trouble was, the way she dressed put most men off and that upset Becky because how could she tell her mum something like that without offending her? She had tried the discreet approach, trying to steer her away from anything too tarty or tacky when they were
shopping
together, but that hadn’t worked. Her mum always made a bee-line for the rack adorned with the most sparkle, which ought to have had a warning sign over it saying that nobody over the age of fifty was allowed to make a purchase.

Ever since she had broken up with Terry, even though it had been the right thing to do, Becky had felt down in the dumps, with the future looking increasingly bleak. She was a born saver, had managed somehow to put together a few thousand in a savings account, but that was for emergencies, her backup. She was fed up of scratching around. Even though she had a steady job, it didn’t pay that well and she still couldn’t afford to move into her own place. Unless she won the lottery, there was no hope of that happening in the near future. Living at home with her mum, even though there was loads of room with just the two of them, 
was not ideal for a woman in her thirties. And, although she hated to admit it, her mum was right in a way. She was not getting any younger and it was no longer quite so easy to meet a man. The options were closing in on her.

She checked her watch as the staffroom door flew open and her colleague Marina rushed in. Marina’s chestnut-brown hair was cut into a perfect structured style, silky smooth with never a hair out of place.

‘What a shitty morning I’ve had. I hate kids,’ she said with a shudder. ‘I’m never having any. Motherhood is overrated in my opinion. I can’t believe that child I’ve just had in. I mean to say, school shoes are school shoes, aren’t they? Crap style, black and boring. Her mummy kept asking the little cow if she liked them and she kept on shaking her head. What sort of question is that? My mummy never asked me. I just had to wear whatever she bought me. On second thoughts, I don’t believe she ever took me shoe shopping. I used to go with Nanny. I know …’ She smiled at Becky’s little snort of disbelief. ‘My upbringing wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. At least your mum stayed around. She didn’t shoot off at the first opportunity to shack up with a guy half her age. She even stopped sending birthday cards after the first year. At the last count, she was somewhere in Switzerland. God alone knows where and do I give a shit.’

‘No, well …’ Becky floundered, never knowing what to say when Marina uttered these indiscretions about her family, whether to
sympathize
or simply laugh it off as Marina seemed to do. They were a funny lot and no mistake. She had never realized before that there were so many goings on in Marina’s world. She had always thought of her own upbringing as
colourful
with Uncle Alan taking root for a few months before disappearing but Marina’s mum made her mum seem like the reverent mother.

Marina worked part-time, Friday and Saturdays only, and she did not take the job remotely seriously. Behind her back, some of the other girls scathingly called her a posh bitch but, because she liked her, Becky didn’t join in. This job was all a bit of a lark for her, but despite that, despite the fact that Marina did not really need the money but was just doing it because her father had threatened to stop paying her allowance unless she did
something
for a while, Marina was still immensely
likeable
. Being a shoe fanatic, forty-two pairs at the last count, working with shoes was her idea of heaven.

‘Now, Becky …’ She poured herself a cup of coffee, black no sugar. ‘Put that book away. You are coming to a drinks party at my place next Friday, like it or not. You’ve got to get over that Terry guy. You were wasted on him. You could tell that a mile off. You’ve got to raise the stakes, believe in yourself a bit more. You’re not your average scrubber,’ she added cheerfully. ‘I can’t think what you’re doing in a job like this. You’re a very bright girl, a hell of a lot brighter than I am anyway. I can’t think when I last read a book, trashy romance or otherwise.’