Best Laid Plans (4 page)

She would ring Monique instead, knowing that her beautiful, shy daughter-in-law would be much more agreeable to dropping whatever she might be doing for a girly chat. In the event the phone line was busy and she did not bother to leave a message. She would try later.

M
onique Fletcher was on the phone to her lover Sol.

‘Hello darling,’ he said at once, when she picked up even before she recited the number.

‘How did you know it was me?’ she asked irritably. ‘I could have been anyone.’

‘There’s never anybody else there. You are neurotic these days.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t ring me at home on this phone,’ she persisted. ‘To be honest I’d rather you didn’t ring at all but if you do, use my mobile.’

‘You are joking? How could we have an intimate conversation if you’re in the middle of Tesco?’

‘Text me, then.’

‘Like hell. Texts can be traced, darling.’

‘And so can phone calls,’ she replied tartly.

‘What’s your problem? Is he having you watched? Is the phone bugged?’ His voice was full of derision and she very nearly slammed the phone down on him. Solomon Diamond – yes that really was his name – could be rude and arrogant, qualities she abhorred, but on the flip side there was this sexy languorous man that she found unbelievably exciting and attractive. One touch from him and she took leave of all her senses and she hated that she was so in thrall to him. ‘What’s your problem, Monique?’ he repeated. ‘It’s the middle of the afternoon. That husband of yours is at work,
isn’t he?’

He never referred to Mike by name, always a variation of ‘that husband of yours’.

‘He is but that’s not the point. He could have answered the phone and then what would you have said?’

His laugh was low, untroubled. ‘Wrong number or I could have pretended I was calling about double glazing and he would have put the phone down pretty damned quick. What happened last week? I was all ready for you, my darling. I even ironed the sheets because I know how pernickety you are.’

She smiled a little at that word but he was not getting round her as easily as that. ‘It’s all very well for you but it’s not easy for me to get away.’ She perched on the chair beside the little table where the phone sat. On the table there was a vase filled with her favourite cream roses. Mike had come home with them the other day. It wasn’t even her birthday but then he was so thoughtful on occasion. She touched one of the petals, dipped her head so that the scent drifted up, feeling suddenly a little sick. This deception was beginning to eat away at her. She was playing a dangerous game and she had to stop. ‘I told you at the start that you mustn’t expect too much of me,’ she said speaking softly although she was quite alone. ‘Christine always wants to know where I am and what I’ve been doing. I’m worried that she’s going to get suspicious if I keep sneaking off to Lancaster for hours on end.’

‘Why should she? You must learn how to lie. It’s a useful trait, Monique. The alternative is to pack all this in, leave that fuckwit of a husband of yours and come and live with me.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said knowing that he would run a mile if she took him up on that. Sol was a loner and liked the single life. She knew she was taking a huge risk. She also knew that he could turn nasty and start to blackmail her any time he liked but she did not think that would
happen. Sol was too lazy and too unconcerned about money to be a blackmailer. She had known him for a long time, long before she met Mike, but it was a chance encounter a few months ago that set it all off again. He had been living down in London for years but had grown tired of city life and come home. Meeting up with him unexpectedly, she was pleased to see him again. They were both grown-ups so there seemed no harm in going for a coffee with him to have a chat about old times but she had never meant it to escalate, never meant to accept his invitation to pop round to his flat, never meant for things to take off from where they had been left all those years ago. Walking round to his flat that day she had known what was going to happen by the look in his eyes and had felt faint with anticipation. In the event, they never made it as far as the bed that day. It was exciting and dangerous and stupid and she was risking a lot just for a few hours with him, at his flat, in his bed. It was also unbelievably sordid and that was exactly why she had made the decision to put a stop to it. She had tried to end it before but it had not worked. She was weak where Sol was concerned; she had to find strength from somewhere to put an end to it once and for all.

‘Where
are
you?’ she asked wondering if he was at his shop, if there was anyone listening in as she rewound the conversation in her head. It would be just like him to do something like that, to want to shock anybody who might be browsing amongst his bookshelves. If so, it was asking for trouble because he only had to mention her name and that would be a potential giveaway for there were very few women named Monique around here. ‘Are you at the shop?’ she went on, her alarm making her voice raise a notch.

‘No, of course not, I’m at home. I’ve closed early. It’s been dead all week and Rose wanted to do some shopping so I let her go.’

Rose was the middle-aged lady who helped him out. Rose was an astute woman and that was why Monique
was careful never to set foot in the shop in case the sexual electricity that sizzled between her and Sol somehow showed on Rose’s radar. It was unlikely that Rose would know Christine but there was no point in taking undue risks.

‘Will I see you before Christmas?’ his voice was low and confident for he knew damned well the effect he had on her. ‘Here I am all alone about to spend Christmas in solitary confinement with nothing to do except watch crappy programmes on television.’

‘I can’t help that and there’s no way I can escape the family,’ she said, twisting the flex of the phone and wondering how to tell him what she knew she must tell him. ‘Look, Sol, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately and—’

He laughed. ‘Don’t bother. You’re about to tell me yet again that all this deception is killing you, that you love your husband and that you don’t want to see me anymore.’

There was a moment’s silence.

‘Well, yes and please listen to me. It’s been a mistake, Sol. I’m a married woman,’ she said, the words comically prim, looking at her reflection in the mirror and pushing at her long silky fair hair. ‘I have to be sensible.’

‘Why, for fuck’s sake?’ His exasperation rose. ‘We are discreet. Nobody need ever know. If you won’t leave him then we can just carry on as we are for years. You need me, darling, so don’t even think of ending it.’

The threat was there, unsaid.

She waited for him to plead with her, to tell her he loved her, words he had never used, not ever. She had never used them either, not to him. She used them to Mike but that was because it was expected of her. Mike was not overly demonstrative, rarely said the words but whenever he did he meant them and she always dutifully replied that she loved him too, which she supposed she did if love could be defined as feeling an affectionate fondness.

It was just sex for Sol, she told herself, as she replaced the receiver.

Looking at her bright eyes in the mirror, her flushed face, she knew that it was the same for her, that and the danger of playing with fire.

On her part there was one added ingredient, though.

There were no doubts where Sol was concerned.

She loved
him
.

Number Eight, River Terrace was a small cottage bang in the middle of the row, a narrow riverside path and a steep bank separating it from the river itself. It was little more than a fat brook at this point but when the rains came the water thundered down, although thankfully never in enough quantity to reach and spill over the top of the bank.

It was Monique’s first proper home that she could call her own, bought with the help of a hefty deposit gifted by Mike’s parents. Mike had been reluctant to accept financial help but she persuaded him that they must not allow silly misplaced pride to get in the way of taking the sensible course.

She did not tell him that Christine had also privately given her a substantial sum to help with the initial furnishing and that even now, years on, she could be relied on to hand over little helpful monetary gifts from time to time. Christine was from a family of means and in fact, as she told Monique, her marriage to Frank had been seen by her parents as a most definite downgrading of her social position. Her family tree was sound – Lancashire aristocracy no less – and when her parents died, blessedly instantly and together in a car crash, Christine copped the lot and an impressive lot it was and it was she who was propping up the business now that they were going through a lean spell.

Monique needed Christine’s help because she earned very little from her paintings and Mike was paid a paltry sum by his father for the privilege of being humiliated
at every turn. She suspected that the workforce laughed at him, the boss’s son who was plainly useless. It was no wonder that Frank had no thoughts of retiring for it would go bottoms-up if it was left in Mike’s hands. At least that was what her dear father-in-law thought. Of all of them she sometimes thought that Frank could see right through her to the core of her being, not taken in as the others were by the shy sweetness she chose to portray.

The truth was she had been a wild child although she kept that quiet because she knew Christine would not approve. Christine was quaintly old fashioned and she imagined that her mother-in-law thought of her as a one-man woman just because Christine had probably never slept with anybody other than Frank.

If only she knew. It was with some amusement that Monique could not actually recall the exact number of men she had slept with.

Monique quickly learned that you had to use the assets you were blessed with and she knew from an early age that she was the pretty one, the child people fussed over, and later she realized that attracting a man was easy. Men were becoming tired and bored these days with the glut of hard-faced ambitious competitive women. On the contrary, they loved vulnerability and she knew exactly how to play that part.

All her life her parents had largely ignored her, her father never quite forgiving her for not being the son he craved and her beautiful mother irritated by her because it meant the curtailing of some of her amorous activities. The marriage had been a sham and the divorce when it came was no surprise. Following the divorce, her parents both moved from Lancaster going their separate ways and, at eighteen, neither of them was keen on making a home for Monique so when she went off to art college, that was very much it. She was on her own. She had known Sol from the sixth form at school and they chose the same course at
college, supposedly by pure coincidence.

She decided early on that a life of poverty, making ends meet, was not for her and although she knew the chances of meeting and snaring a millionaire were slim she was willing to settle for a comfortable existence. She and Sol became an item at college but she ditched him when she realized he was totally without ambition and would never amount to anything.

It was much more than a brief fling. He had meant a great deal to her and breaking it off with him had been one of the hardest things she had ever done. There might have been a child from that liaison but disaster was averted when she lost it naturally at nine weeks. She never told Sol for it was nothing to do with him but she was right to ditch him for her instincts were spot on. Sol, after a brief spell teaching art at some inner-city comprehensive down south, was now content to bum along. He lived now in a flat down by the canal in Lancaster in an area largely frequented by students so that nobody really knew anybody else and she could pop in and out of the flat without question.

Sol had been injured in an accident a couple of years previously, injuries from which he had recovered but the compensation had been immense and he now lived off that and the small income he managed from buying and selling second-hand books in the little shop he ran.

After college, Monique returned to Lancaster because she needed the familiarity of it and she had no wish to beg either of her parents to take her in. She took a lowly paid job and together with a girlfriend managed to rent a little flat in town. All she wanted out of life was a nice home, her own car and sufficient money to go shopping without counting every single penny because that really was a bore. At that point she decided to go for the marrying-a-man-with-money option.

For a time she had to face the prospect of going for an
older man but then as luck would have it Mike came along. She sussed out his background before the second date, liked the fact that he dressed well, wore good shoes, drove a new car and had an affluent air about him. Without actually checking out his bank balance she recognized him for what he was, the only son, a little spoilt, maybe, not particularly bright but that did not worry her unduly for she was bright enough for both of them.

As soon as she saw the family home, Snape House, she was suitably impressed knowing that few people could afford the upkeep of a house like that and, if she married into the Fletcher family, she saw she would be cushioned and cosseted and protected and what on earth was wrong with that.

In the absence of a good-looking millionaire, Michael Fletcher would do very nicely. He was of the right age, reasonably good looking and most important of all he absolutely adored her. Of course she could be a homemaker, he assured her earnestly, saying how refreshing that was in this day and age and there was nothing he would like better and he wanted a woman who was happy to stay home and look after the children when they came along.

She could live with that. Love, at least on her side, was not necessarily part of the equation. She liked Mike and that was enough. She accepted that he was laid back, had a genial nature, hated to upset people, but now he needed to be more assertive and his painful slowness in learning how to do that was beginning to upset her. She despised Frank and the way he treated his son; even Christine seemed unaware of what went on in the office. The business was going nowhere fast because Frank was such a tyrant and the workforce generally disliked him every bit as much as she did. She knew the feeling was mutual, that Frank did not like her, that he thought her paintings crap, that if he had her way she would be out there seeking a proper job.