The Yorkshire Pudding Club Read online

  Elizabeth rooted in her bag for her fag lighter and flicked a flame out.

  ‘This’ll have to do then, Norma Jean. You’ve got to blow it and make a wish on your birthday. It’s bad luck not to.’

  Then they sang ‘Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you. You’re a big smelly tar-rrt, and your bum smells of pooh’, despite having a collective age of almost 120. Then they clinked their glasses together and made their own wishes. Elizabeth spent hers willing that Helen would be happy. Later she was to regret not saving the wish for herself.

  Helen felt her smile make its exit with her friends. If she tidied up quickly, she could be in bed by the time Simon came back, because he would know she had told them. He had so strictly forbidden her from saying anything to them about the baby.

  ‘Why not? Why can’t I tell them?’ she had asked.

  ‘Do you realize how many babies are lost before twelve weeks?’ he had said. ‘Do you want to look a fool, announcing you are pregnant only to lose it?’

  She tried to make herself believe he had her best interests at heart. She also tried to fight off the shameful suspicion that he wished she would lose it and their lives would carry on seamlessly with no one around them being any the wiser.

  She was just putting Janey’s flowers in the pretty vase painted with sunflowers which Elizabeth had bought for her when Simon came in.

  ‘What are you so jumpy for?’ he said, immediately smashing the shell of composure she thought she had built around herself.

  ‘I’m not jumpy,’ she said tremulously.

  He noticed what she had in her hand. ‘And what’s that thing?’ he said, as if she were holding a rotting fish.

  ‘My birthday present.’

  ‘It’s cheap and tacky-looking,’ he sneered. ‘I suppose Elizabeth bought it.’

  ‘As a matter of fact she did, yes.’ He never missed an opportunity to get a dig in at Elizabeth, although they had seemed to get on in the early days. He said it was because he had not realized she was such a tart back then.

  When she took it into the dining room, he followed at her heels.

  ‘You surely aren’t thinking of putting it in here, are you?’

  ‘Yes, of course I am,’ and she set it down on the table. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because, as I said, it’s cheap and tacky, that’s why not. If you haven’t any vases, I’ll go out and get you one tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s a nice vase!’

  ‘It’s disgusting,’ Simon said, his nose screwed up as if the vase affronted his sense of smell as well as sight.

  ‘It’s only a vase. Please don’t get so worked up about it!’

  ‘I’m not getting worked up, Helen,’ said Simon with increased annoyance. ‘I just can’t see the point in spending a fortune on a room and then making the centrepiece something like that. The curtains alone in this room cost me eighteen hundred pounds, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘You’re being ridiculous.’

  He leaned against the stanchion of the door and started staring at her.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. He did not answer, just continued to stare at her, in a silence that seemed to chill the room.

  ‘Simon? What are you staring at? Stop it, will you.’

  ‘I know why you’re nervous. You told them, didn’t you, Helen?’

  ‘Told who what?’

  ‘Oh, don’t play the village idiot, you know what I mean.’

  ‘No, I did not!’ Her voice was convincingly strong but her cheeks betrayed her by flushing red. She fiddled with the flowers. Simon walked around the table, rested his hands on it so he could lean over it and look squarely into her face.

  ‘Why did you tell them when I expressly told you not to?’

  ‘I didn’t, Simon,’ she said in a voice that was shaky and full of gathering tears now. ‘What is this? What have I done wrong now?’

  He shook his head slowly from side to side, despairing of her. ‘You know what. You told them you were pregnant,’ he said quietly.

  ‘No, I—’

  He slammed his hands down on the table. ‘Stop lying!’ and his shout brought the silence it demanded. He was staring at her in a way that would burn her eyes if she were to look back at his. Her body language screamed the weakness of doomed prey: her shoulders were slumped, her head bowed and she could not trade eye-contact.

  He stood back and raked his fingers through his fair wavy hair. Very quietly now, but icily he continued, ‘I really don’t believe you sometimes. I asked you not to tell anyone. You agreed–swore that you wouldn’t–and then you just go right ahead and ignore me.’ His eyes were opened so wide they were more white than blue. She hated it when that happened; he looked like some mad twin of himself.

  ‘You just can’t keep that mouth of yours shut, can you? Pleasing them is just so much more important than pleasing me, isn’t it? Never mind about me, I’m of no importance!’

  ‘Please, I—’

  ‘Oh Helen, just…just fuck off. I don’t know why I bother trying to look out for you when all you do is throw it back in my face!’ He turned away from her; she stretched over and touched his arm but he shook her off.

  Where had all this come from? thought Helen, who ten minutes ago had been laughing with her friends–celebrating a birthday and sharing the most wonderful news she would ever have to tell. She just wanted whatever this was to be over, so she confessed.

  ‘Simon, okay, I’ll come clean. I didn’t tell them, they guessed.’

  There was a terrible heavy silence and then he laughed wearily.

  ‘Oh Helen! You are only seven weeks’ pregnant–how on earth could they guess? If you could only listen to yourself sometimes. Lies, lies, lies. You’ll strangle yourself with them one day. Do you know, you make me sick sometimes, physically sick.’

  He looked down at her again, shaking his head from side to side as if she were a disappointing child.

  ‘I’ll sleep in the spare room tonight.’

  ‘Oh, please don’t sulk. I can’t stand it when you sulk.’

  ‘And I hate it when you lie, Helen!’

  The spare room was at the end of the long hallway, a small, cold space. She watched him walk slowly down to it and open the door. Then he turned back to her, his face suddenly losing that mad mask and assuming another, a softer one, one full of quiet concern.

  ‘Go to bed, darling. You should not be getting yourself upset like this, it’s bad for you. Go on, you’re tired and it’s late. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  He smiled a big blue-eyed-boy smile and yet he remained impervious to her hurt and huge eyes that were spilling such great watery drops they would have shamed other men to swift apology. His beautiful, lean body disappeared into the bedroom and he shut the door quietly behind him, which somehow seemed more of a rejection than if he had slammed it in her face.

  Chapter 3

  Barnsley School for Girls, 1977

  Latin was most categorically not a dead language, but in the past few moments Gloria Ramsay had most definitely heard it contemplating suicide. It was not so much 2F’s collective declension of the noun urbs with the let’s-try-it-on omission of the genitive plural ‘i’ which turned the correct pronunciation of oor-be-um into a very relished HER-BUM, it was more that it was delivered in a broad Liverpudlian accent which would have had Caesar spinning in his tomb.

  Her mental harrumph! was almost audible, but in fairness to the girls, Mr Walton had been their only source of intonation before he was held at Customs on his way back home from holidaying in Turkey. Yes, this confirmed her theory that Latin was not the sort of subject young men with regional accents, flared trousers and hippy shoulder bags who consulted the I Ching in the staffroom should be teaching. It belonged to those whose respect for the language was reflected in the sobriety and gravitas of their personal lives. These young male teachers were too much of a distraction to the girls and should never have been allowed into her school–as she thought of it. Old-fashioned and
‘past it’, oh yes, she was quite aware that this new wave of trendy teachers labelled her ‘Miss Rameses’, but surely here was the proof–as the class pronounced men-sas MENZ-ARSE–that her theories were grounded in intelligence and not prejudice.

  She shuffled the girls like a pack of cards, breaking their social suits, splicing the good hearts and the diamonds into the black groups of clubs and spades, sending the knaves out to the four corners of the room.

  ‘This is where you will sit from now on,’ Miss Ramsay announced to the sea of disgruntled faces and accompanying whingeing ripple of, ‘Aw, Missssss.’

  ‘Again: men-sa, men-sa, men-sam,’ she encouraged in her ripe and rounded tones.

  There was more than a cheeky hint of over-pronunciation from Elizabeth Collier, but even that was an improvement. Little monkeys like her were no match for Gloria Ramsay with her forty years’ teaching experience tucked under her brown plastic belt. Elizabeth was a very bright girl, though a little unruly–too much of her older sister Beverley in her, that was the problem. She would benefit from being seated with the gentle influence of Dr Luxmore’s daughter, Helen, quietly intelligent, if a little scatterbrained, and Janey Lee, for steady, deliberate ballast–a consistent ‘A’ for effort if not achievement. Together they made a very suitable triumvirate, although not a popular one, if their three faces, oddly similar with their masks of displeasure at this new grouping arrangement, were anything to go by…

  Chapter 4

  Cleef was around Elizabeth’s legs as soon as she had got in the house after Janey had dropped her off, a black silky shape mewing for attention, his tail a velvet curl of a question mark that asked: Where have you been? Where’s my loving?

  ‘You’ll break my neck one day, you will!’ she tutted at him, but with an affectionate smile, then she heard the snoring upstairs and her heart sank. Why did she ever let him have a key? Although to be fair to herself, she didn’t really, she just lent it to him one day and he never gave it back. Then things started to appear, as if by osmosis, from his house to hers: CDs, smelly trainers, dirty washing.

  She picked up Cleef and they did their obligatory head-rubbing thing, then she plonked him in the big furry circle that was his bed and went upstairs. However careful she was not to wake the snoring form when she pivoted herself gently into her own bed, it didn’t work and it awoke, leaned over and immediately started fumbling with her.

  ‘Gerroff, Dean,’ she said.

  ‘Oh come on, we haven’t had it for ages,’ he said.

  She did not want it then either. She did not want to feel anything inside her, so she took the short cut through all the pleadings and whining and relieved his frustrations a different way. Then he went back to sleep and Elizabeth stayed awake and stared ahead of her in the dark.

  ‘BUGGER!’ said Janey, finally landing the elusive ‘don’t forget’ that had been flitting around in her head. She had to tell Elizabeth who she was sure she had seen in the Co-op, who she had seen in the Co-op because there was no mistaking John Silkstone, even after seven years. She would have said hello, had she not been stuck at the only checkout with a good short queue and a till operator who did not click her ‘help’ light on every five seconds. She noted there was a little more grey in his still mad, dark hair and he looked even bigger than she remembered him to be, unless she had shrunk in her thirties. He stood head and shoulders above most people, like a big friendly giant holding a loaf–no, it was John Silkstone all right, there wasn’t anyone else it could have been. Janey made a positive mental note to ring her friend in the morning and tell her, although it was possible she would forget again. Just lately, her memory was getting terrible.

  Nocturnal sleep? What’s that then, because I can’t remember, thought Elizabeth with some frustration. It must have been three o’clock when she eventually got off and then wished she hadn’t. She had one of those muddled dreams that seemed to open up all sorts of cupboards in her head and dredge everything out: Auntie Elsie was in it and Sam barking at her; Julia, Laurence and his one furry snake of an eyebrow chasing her up Rhymer Street whilst she tried to run away from him in big tartan slippers; Bev holding a really ugly baby; Helen crying because Janey was having an affair with Simon; Lisa laughing at her with him. She was glad to wake up–or at least she was until ten minutes later when she felt exhausted again.

  I’m turning into a chuffing owl! she thought. A day off sick tempted her but spending it in bed with Dean set her feet in her slippers and off downstairs to put the kettle on pronto. She left him snoring in bed; he would get up at some point and make a messy breakfast no doubt. At least he would not be home when she got back from work, for the ‘Victoria’ called him like a Siren at five. That was one lady he would never disappoint with a surprise appearance.

  The rumours about the Just the Job takeover had the whole building on edge, and tension hung in the air like a bad-egg smell. Julia ‘I don’t do good-mornings’ was sitting at her desk when Elizabeth walked in. The sight of the pouty vole-like face was enough to set the hairs on the back of her neck bristling so hard she could barely get her coat off over them. Her desk was invisible under a pile of new filing and an explanatory email waiting for her from Julia. It was such a far cry from the days of the late MD Mr Robinson, who breezed in with a, ‘Good morning,’ charm and warmth billowing behind him like an invisible cape. His presence warmed up the whole building; people smiled more and moaned less. Then he was sent out to pasture so that Eyebrow Man could move in to replace him. He died not long after, which was yet another reason to hate Laurence, should she need a spare. Robbo had managed quite adequately without a power-crazed, email-reliant ‘ass-istant’ who was supposedly a languages graduate. Universities must be taking anyone in these days, Elizabeth had thought when she first heard that one, for as far as she could make out, there wasn’t a lot of furniture in Julia’s attic. However, there was an enormous chest on the floor below that might have had something to do with her ascension to the seat at the side of Laurence’s throne.

  It wasn’t hard to work out what Julia’s ‘sparkling potential’ translated as for a man who hadn’t worked out yet that bras didn’t have pupils, for the woman was a walking bouncy castle. What size her breasts were was anyone’s guess, but they were too big for the regular alphabet and had entered the realms of another–possibly 42 pi. They looked ridiculous on her baby-bird frame; her little bony legs were bowing under the weight of them, but there was no doubt that the Ice Man of business and the doe-eyed skinny runt with the overflowing cups enjoyed a rapport that lesser mortals would have killed to share with him. It was quite an achievement to connect with Laurence, seeing as his own PR department called him ‘the Prince of Darkness’, but whatever it was that was needed, Julia had it by the bucketload. Overnight, as holder of the ‘King’s ear’ she acquired status and power and she relished it like Lucrezia Borgia on PMT week.

  Somewhere, though, in all that cloud of Über-confidence was a big insecure hole, because every potential office junior who came into the department and showed any sign of popularity or nous suddenly found themselves back in the temp agency they’d come from. Pam had been very outgoing, Jenny was very industrious, Catherine was very clever, Leonora was just lovely, Jess had initiative, Lizzie was ambitious, Cindy was enthusiastic, Sally was efficient…and yet all of them were rejected as unsuitable within three weeks of their placement. They were now without an office junior–again–which left Elizabeth grudgingly holding the teapot. Even though Julia’s ethnic-cleansing process had so far only been limited to the young, colourful and dynamic, Elizabeth figured her own days were very much numbered too.

  She took a late lunchbreak that day, reasoning that it would make the afternoon session seem a lot shorter that way, and decided that she really ought to eat something if only to try and combat the relentless fatigue. There was a tempting prawn cocktail on brown in the bakery across the road. She bought it, determined for once to take her fully allotted hour. First, she would nip back up to he
r desk for her book and then return to scoff in the canteen, which would be peacefully empty at that time. It was the nearest to heaven she was going to get that day. Yep, it sounded good.

  She snagged her tights on her heel crossing the road back to Colditz and just managed to miss making a total prat of herself in front of the middle-aged suit, already in the lift, by almost trapping her other leg in the door as it closed. The lift pulled upwards, juddered, made a few weird rattles and then sighed to a halt. The lights flickered on and off indecisively then finally decided to choose off, and what seemed like 2-watt emergency lighting took over. Elizabeth made some polite quip about it being lucky that she’d had some carrots the night before, which obviously registered as a zero on the suit’s humour clap-o-meter, although, in fairness, he didn’t appear to be listening as he was too busy pressing himself backwards into the corner and showing off the whites of his eyeballs. She smiled empathetically at him.

  ‘It’ll be all right, you know, it’s always happening,’ she said with a frustrated tut, but the suit had progressed to perspiring and his breathing was getting more raspy and desperate with every fall of his chest.

  ‘Oh God, help!’ he said suddenly, sliding down the wall, clawing at his collar, his tongue lolling out.

  Oh, marvellous, thought Elizabeth. This is all I need, to be trapped in a lift with Michael from sodding Ryan’s Daughter.

  Up to this point, her first-aid experience had been limited to applying plasters and administering tapeworm tablets to Cleef, but being an avid fan of Casualty, she had seen her fair share of hyperventilating to diagnose it now. She fell into an inspired automatic pilot (hoping he wasn’t having a heart-attack, in which case she was probably about to kill him) and struggled with the Suit’s windmill-like arms, trying to loosen his tie and collar. Then she turfed her precious sandwich out of its paper bag, gathered up the neck and made him blow into it slowly, to inhale his own breath, all the while talking like super-nurse Charlie Fairhead and getting him to focus in on her eyes, although she did wonder afterwards if she had that bit mixed up with Crocodile Dundee. Anyway, it seemed to work and after what seemed like three months, he started to breathe like a normal well person. She tried to take his mind off the fact that they were stuck in a metal coffin by babbling on about anything and everything: Coronation Street, Cleef, her penchant for prawn sandwiches…just to fill the dark, claustrophobic silence and nip enough edge off his fear to stop him slipping back into lift-nightmare land. She even surprised herself with the flow of bull she managed to keep up. She had just got him to his feet when the lift jerked upwards, the lights came on and the lift juddered up to the eighth floor, where Suit apparently wanted to get out at as well. He did not want a fuss and said he felt perfectly fine although he still looked pretty vacant to Elizabeth. After bog-all thanks and not so much as a ‘Ta-ra, then,’ he meandered off in the direction of Laurence’s office.