That'll Be the Day (2007) (2 page)

Judy appeared at her side. ‘I’ve brought you a slice of toast and marmalade as well. I often feel a bit odd myself if I’ve forgotten to eat when I’m painting.’

Betty pulled herself out of her reverie and managed to find her voice sufficiently to thank the young woman for her thoughtfulness.

‘You’re a good lass. That might be just the ticket.’

If only it could be so simple. If only a slice of toast warmly offered, could resolve all her problems. Betty knew in her heart that she hadn’t suffered a nightmare, nor an hallucination brought on by her fondness for Welsh Rarebit.

As she nibbled on the toast, the constriction in her throat making it hard for her to swallow, Betty kept glancing anxiously about the busy market hall, worried lest the ghost from her past might again appear like the demon king in a bad pantomime.

Ewan Hemley, the husband from whom she’d escaped and finally divorced in nineteen forty-five, seemed to be back in her life and that could mean only one thing. Trouble!

What could he be doing on Champion Street Market? She hadn’t set eyes on him in thirteen years or more, so why would he suddenly turn up now?

Money! Why else?

Was he still around? Was he following her now that he’d found her again? Yet everything looked perfectly normal: stacks of yellow cheeses beneath striped awnings, women in headscarves buying strings of Ramsay’s pork sausages or patiently queuing for one of Poulson’s pies. There were the Higginson sisters gently squabbling over how best to display a hat. Racks of gaily coloured skirts standing before the fabric stall and Winnie Watkins as was, Mrs Barry Homes as she should now rightly be addressed since her recent marriage, skilfully measuring out several yards of net curtaining for a customer.

Winnie smiled across at Betty, giving a little jerk of her head by way of acknowledgement and making the bob on her woollen hat quiver. She was rarely seen without that hat, even on a warm September day like today.

Betty put back her head and stared up at the blue sky through the dome of windows high in the iron frame of the Market Hall roof. The sunlight slanting in was as bright and golden as any other ordinary day. Everything perfectly normal, exactly as the market had always looked in all the long years she had occupied it.

Yet for Betty, nothing would ever be normal again.

What if Jake, her nineteen year old son, still filled with anger even after all this time, and blaming her for his father’s apparent desertion, returned unexpectedly early from his delivery round and discovered what was going on? Lord above, that would never do. That would be even worse than Lynda finding out.

Yet if Ewan Hemley was indeed back in her life, how could she keep it from them? He was still their father after all, even if he was a pain in the backside and hell-bent on making trouble.

Betty drew in a long shaky breath. Goodhearted and caring she might still be but not so trusting nor half so stupid as she once was. That innocent young girl who had been so easily taken in by a man’s charm and seen her life ruined as a result, was long gone. Betty had seen too how he’d damaged her two children, and had made a private vow to put him six feet under rather than allow anything of the sort to happen to them ever again.

Chapter Two

It was an hour later and her mother still hadn’t returned to the stall, which was worrying Lynda. She couldn’t even see any sign of Judy. Where were they? Had Mam been taken ill? She was about to ask Barry Holmes to keep an eye on the stall for her while she went to find Betty when a customer came up. ‘I’ll take a dozen of them roses. Yellow ones, long stemmed.’

‘Yellow roses for lost love. I do hope not,’ she teased. The man raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

Embarrassed by her
faux pas
, Lynda concentrated on selecting the tightly folded buds, wrapping them in tissue paper while she surreptitiously examined him from beneath her lashes. He was a man in his late fifties, dark haired and of a thin wiry build, no doubt reasonably good looking in his youth but now rather well used; his grey striped suit seemed a bit frayed around the edges, worn with the collar turned up despite the warmth of the day. He didn’t look as if he could afford a jam buttie let alone long stemmed roses.

Frowning slightly she asked him to repeat his order. ‘Did you say a dozen? They’re two shillings a bud, you know.’

‘A special purchase for a special lady,’ he said with a smile and Lynda considered him with keener attention.

There was something vaguely familiar about him. She felt certain that she’d met him before but couldn’t quite remember when or where, then gave a mental shrug as she took the notes he offered and dug in her apron pocket for change. No doubt this old codger was one of her mother’s regulars. After nearly twenty years she’d built up a loyal band of customers.

The man smiled at her. ‘Am I right in thinking you’re Betty Hemley’s daughter? I would’ve known you in an instant. You’re every bit as attractive. You have her hair and eyes.’

Lynda was used to men flirting with her, particularly old ones like this who should know better, but she’d never been compared to her mother before. Lynda saw Betty as plump and really quite old at fifty-three, her cap of short grey hair which framed her round wrinkled face nothing like Lynda’s own abundant auburn tresses.

She’d elected to wear her hair loose today, allowing it to curl upwards where it rested on her shoulders, though she did like to ring the changes, perhaps putting it into a chignon or a French pleat. But then that was one of the advantages of having long hair and, as with boy-friends, Lynda did so love variety.

Despite a fondness for flirting yet she hesitated, not quite sure how to respond, and far too worried about her mother to raise more than a faint smile. She certainly had no intention of encouraging dirty old men to leer at her quite so lewdly. ‘My eyes are hazel. Mam’s are brown,’ she coolly remarked.

‘Of course. Yes, I can see they are, now that I look more closely.’

Lynda wasn’t sure she wanted this old geyser to gaze quite so intently into her eyes. For some reason he made her feel uncomfortable and her pretty rosebud mouth slid back into its accustomed sulky pout as she counted six shillings on to his palm. It was smooth and white, she noticed; not a working man’s hand, and with the hint of a tremor to it. Maybe he hit the bottle a bit hard. ‘Your change. Good day to you, sir,’ she said, offering a practised, dismissive smile.
 

Lynda thought he might have been about to say something more but a short queue had formed behind him and she was able to turn her attention to the next customer without appearing rude.

But even as she helped Joyce choose a begonia plant for her hairdresser’s shop, and made up a bouquet of asters, freesias and gypsophila for Amy George to give to her mother-in-law on her birthday, she couldn’t help but be aware of the man still hovering in the background. After a while he disappeared through the doors of the Dog and Duck, so maybe she’d been right about the drink problem.
 

By dinner time, her mother still hadn’t returned from her tea break and Lynda had forgotten all about him. He wasn’t, after all, any of her concern.

Lynda guessed Terry Hall was coming over to speak to her long before he appeared. She heard the swell of Buddy Holly’s
Oh Boy
! grow suddenly louder when he opened the door of his father’s little music shop that stood on the perimeter of the market hall, and some instinct warned her he was approaching.

She watched him walk towards her, surreptitiously admiring his long-legged stride. Terry always wore black, generally tee-shirt and jeans, his smooth dark hair combed high at each side of his brow to form the required fashionable quiff. This morning he also had on his biker’s jacket. He looked fit and muscular and her mouth watered at sight of him.

Lynda Hemley was a lively, warm-hearted, sexy young woman who liked a good time and plenty of fun in her life. She viewed love as a delightful game. Delicious fun and not to be taken too seriously. She really rather enjoyed the excitement of the chase, the enticing moments of seduction. It made her come alive to feel emotion pulsing through her blood like electricity, as if every caress proved how beloved she was, how cherished. Of course, she realised it was all flim-flam, nothing but shallow pleasure and didn’t mind in the least.

She saw nothing wrong in making the most of the attributes with which nature had endowed her: a slender figure going in and out in all the right places, glossy auburn curls that fell in rich waves to her shoulders, and a face that was a near perfect oval with high cheekbones, small pert nose and round strong chin. Admittedly her mouth might be a bit smaller than she would have liked, but she saw its perpetual pout as sexy rather than sulky. Lynda laid no claims to being a ravishing beauty but knew herself to be sufficiently attractive for men falling in love with her to be considered a natural occurrence. Terry Hall was one such in thrall to her charms, but then she’d been aware for some time that he was smitten.
 

She half turned away, pretending not to notice as he approached, glad suddenly that she’d opted to wear a new pink blouse with a Peter Pan collar this morning, and a swirling navy blue cotton circular skirt with white polka dots. She guessed that he intended to pester her for another date and found great difficulty in suppressing a giggle when she was proved to be right.

‘Hiya Lynda.’

‘Hiya Terry.’

‘What you doing this evening?’

Terry could never be accused of subtlety. Nor did he ever have much in the way of small talk. With numerous false starts and offhand shrugs, he finally managed to convey that he wanted her to go to a dance with him at the Ritz. Lynda fluttered her lashes, automatically turning on the charm even as she declined the invitation.

She curled her mouth into a slow sexy smile for the benefit of this, her latest conquest, hazel eyes sparkling with instinctive seductive appeal. ‘Terry love, I think it would be best if you picked someone your own age. I don’t go in for cradle-snatching.’

A painful flush spread from his neck up over his jaw and Lynda felt a momentary burst of pity for him, yet she was surely right to refuse? He was only nineteen, nearly six years younger than herself.

Six years
! She gave a silent inner groan. How she hated to remind herself of her own great age. At twenty-five, okay nearly twenty-six, as her mother kept constantly reminding her, she should be married and with children of her own. Secretly, Lynda wished that she was but somehow Mr Right had so far refused to put in an appearance. A good man, she’d discovered, was hard to find.

Once, when she was very young, no more than seventeen or eighteen she’d fallen passionately in love with a man almost ten years older than herself. Lynda had imagined he would be more reliable than her usual here-today-gone-tomorrow boy friends and had allowed herself to believe his protestations of undying love. Then quite out of the blue he’d announced that he couldn’t see her any more as he was getting married the following month.

‘But I thought you loved
me
,’ she’d cried, like some sort of love-sick fool.

‘Don’t be silly, sweetheart, you know that we agreed from the beginning that what we had together was fun and nothing more.”

For the sake of her pride she’d pretended to agree, saying that of course she’d only been teasing and wished him every happiness in his coming marriage, but her heart had been utterly broken. It had taken weeks before she could even bear to look at another man.

The experience had left her even more wary of commitment. She still dreamed of meeting a man she was willing to give her all to, someone she could trust implicitly and wish to be with for the rest of her life, but beneath the dream lay a growing panic that he might not even exist.

On the other hand, she certainly had no wish to repeat her mother’s mistake of rushing into marriage with the wrong man and spending the rest of her life regretting it.

Terry was talking about the band now, promising there was a supper included, doing his utmost to persuade her to go to the dance. Lynda found herself giggling over his intensity. He really was keen, poor boy. What if Mam did sometimes accuse her of seeking attention? Where was the harm in that? There was nothing Lynda loved more than to bask in masculine admiration.

It was true that she could also be moody and difficult, and feel quite vulnerable and emotionally insecure at times. Lynda was aware that most of her boy friends, and she’d had several, saw her as an enigma. One minute she would be all over them, openly affectionate, perhaps too much so; the next cool and distant, or casually off-hand.
 

Perhaps, like her mother, she really didn’t care for men at all. Yet unlike Betty, just as a moth is attracted to flame, Lynda simply couldn’t resist them.

‘Bit gullible, that’s me. Indecisive and flirtatious,’ she would laughingly explain. ‘A typical Libra.’

The true cause of the confusing signals she sent out was far more prosaic. As a child, until the moment he’d walked away, Lynda had believed Ewan to be a loving father. She remembered him bringing her presents; a rag doll one of his comrades had made, a pretty brooch which she still had to this day. She would excitedly pull them out of his kitbag and he would swing her up high in his arms and tell her she was his most precious gift of all.