The Vintage Teacup Club (11 page)

Dad was staring out of the window. On the wall next to it, he still had up pictures I’d done when I was a teenager, sketches of him, Chris and Grandma Jilly.

‘What was that, Jen?’ he said, trying to catch hold of the conversation again. ‘A tent, did you say? Yes,’ Dad looked back towards the workshop. ‘I’m sure we’ll have something out there.’

Chris looked at me and raised his eyebrows. It was official then: Dad was acting really weirdly.

‘Dad, are you OK?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘Yes, love, I’m fine,’ he said. He put down his mug as if he was about to say something, but he didn’t.

It was getting dark, and I’d been about to leave Dad’s when I remembered Maggie’s text that morning, asking if I had copies of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking-Glass
. I left Dad and Chris in the living room watching a repeat of
Only Fools and Horses
and went upstairs to my old bedroom. This house was so tiny I almost felt like Alice myself, I had to duck my head as I neared the top of
the staircase. My old bedroom was just as I’d left it; S Club 7 stickers on the door, Letts revision guides stacked on the desk, candy-striped curtains Mum had sewn for me when I’d decided my favourite colour was pink. Everything was still there. I guess Dad didn’t need the space.

I walked over to the wooden bookshelves and touched my old picture books. There was shelf after shelf of them –
The Wind in the Willows
,
What-a-Mess
,
Where the Wild Things Are
– and that was just the Ws. All my books, here and at the flat, were in alphabetical order by title, something Dan had always teased me about. I glanced up at the other shelves,
The Hungry Caterpillar
,
James and the Giant Peach
, Barbar after Barbar … I’d always liked the bright, bold pictures and lively line drawings as much as the stories, which was why I’d kept them all through my teenage years. I could still remember the funny voices Dad used to put on as he read and Chris and I drifted off to sleep. When I was younger Dad and Mum used to do the voices together, laughing as they competed to be the most booming and dramatic, but that was before Chris came along, one of those faint memories that slips away if you try to catch hold of it.

If I tried hard enough, I could still picture Mum, coming out of the bathroom next to my bedroom wrapped in a yellow towel, her hair sticking up from having been dried roughly. ‘You still up, chicken?’ she used to say with a smile, when she found
me on the landing waiting for her, rather than tucked up in bed where I should have been. I remember her cuddling me and carrying me back to my room. ‘No, you’re the chicken,’ I’d protest, night after night, laughing, our regular game. ‘You’ve got chick hair and you’re yellow.’

I found the Lewis Carroll books, early hardback editions in good condition, and put them in the cloth bag I’d brought, ready to give to Maggie.

‘Are you OK up there, love?’ Dad called up the stairs.

‘Yes, Dad, I’m fine. I’ll be down in a bit.’

I pulled out a copy of
The Enormous Crocodile
and flicked to the page where the crocodile pretends to be a palm tree, balancing on his tail and holding up a couple of coconuts. I’d always liked that bit. I closed the book and put it back on the shelf and as I did so I spotted the side of a thin cardboard box stored vertically on the shelf.

It was years since I’d last looked at it.

I slid the box out and sat cross-legged on the floor and lifted the lid, then smiled as I took out the contents. There were chunky card pages with bold pencil drawings and pasted-on sections of typed text – it was a pretty crude production process, but I hadn’t wanted to use a computer. On the front, the title –
Charlie, Carlitos and me
.

Here’s the story: Charlie is a chinchilla, but not just any chinchilla. Charlie belongs to a little boy called Jake – the ‘me’ of the title – who loves his new pet
because he is impossibly soft and bounces from sofa to carpet like a pom-pom. One night Jake creeps downstairs and out into the garage where Charlie’s cage is kept, and it’s here he first meets Carlitos – or
Carleeeeeetos
, Charlie’s Latin alter ego. He greets Jake up on his hind legs, in a Peruvian hat, playing the pan pipes.

Carlitos explains that he’s from a far-off mountainous land called the Andes, and that he feels a little out of sorts in a cul-de-sac in Blackpool. He likes Jake and his sister but, truth be told, he misses the mountains and his alpaca friends, and he really misses his family, the Peludos … Jake vows to help him get back home.

I looked through the pages, remembering all the hours of late-night scribbling. The sketches were simple line drawings of Jake and Carlitos – a fluffy ball in a patterned Peruvian hat. I hadn’t worked out the logistics of getting Carlitos home at the end – that was a tricky one – but it was pretty funny, on reflection, and the drawings actually weren’t half bad. I turned to look at the first page again and felt a little flush of possibility that mirrored the feeling I’d had the day I’d come up with the idea. I’d started it for fun, because I’d always enjoyed writing and drawing and had wanted a project to work on. But then I’d hoped to finish writing the story and get the drawings coloured up, and I’d even wondered if maybe I’d be able to get a publisher interested. But
somewhere along the line I’d shelved my dreams.

Perhaps it was due to that nagging voice of doubt I had always heard but was only just beginning to recognise: the voice that made me believe that if I were
really
any good Mum wouldn’t have left.

But, these days, I was getting better at shutting it out. I put the book pages into their box and tied it back up with brown string. This time, it
wasn’t going back on the shelf.

The three of us stood on the seafront, the first weekend in June, leaning up against its painted blue barrier. Alison and Maggie were laughing while their hair whipped around their faces and Maggie’s skirt was swept up by the wind. I took the Flake out of my ice cream and licked it.

Our Sunday so far had passed in a heady, laughter-filled daze. It was the first really hot weekend we’d had and everyone’s spirits were high. I had called Maggie and Alison that morning to suggest we spend the day antiques-hunting in Brighton, just the three of us. They’d both leapt at the idea and just over an hour later, we were scouring the stalls and vintage hideaways of the north lanes. Luck was on our
side, we’d found four 1950s cups with richly coloured anemones on the sides, another full set with tiny primroses on them, and a trio of identical tiny milk jugs that were going to look perfect on the tables at my wedding.

We’d walked through the cobbled streets, looking around the shops, Maggie driving a hard bargain as ever. Jugglers and musicians competed for attention on street corners, distracting passersby from their shopping and entertaining families with young children.

When we’d finished our shopping, Alison, Maggie and I had walked down onto the pier. ‘Look at this,’ Maggie had said, picking up a giant souvenir lollipop. ‘I’m getting one for my niece Maisy.’ We’d walked along the wooden boards, looking out at the expanse of sea, the sun glinting off it. Alison decided to have her fortune read, but came out of the little cabin a fiver down and none the wiser. ‘I thought they were meant to tell you about abundant riches and your tall, dark stranger?’ she said. ‘But all she told me was to tread carefully, that there was a big change coming. Do you think she means the menopause?’ She bit her lip, then smiled. ‘I didn’t pay to hear that …’ After a round on the dodgems in which Maggie swore I’d given her whiplash, we’d wandered back here, to the seafront.

I took another mouthful of sweet white ice cream and laughed at Maggie’s attempts to stop her skirt blowing up. Down on the pebbled beach in front of
us an old man threw a tennis ball for his golden retriever and two colourful kites intertwined in the air.

‘How about we grab a bottle of wine and head down there for a picnic?’ I suggested, pointing down towards the pebbles.

‘Good idea,’ Maggie said. ‘Let’s stop by the car and I’ll get the rug.’

We’d set up camp at the far end of the beach, complete peace apart from the distant noise of the fairground on the pier and the squawking of seagulls. I’d opened a bottle of white and was pouring large cups for me and Alison and a more modest one for Maggie, who was going to be driving us home.

‘Maggie?’ Alison said.

‘Yes?’ she replied, taking a sip.

‘I’ve been thinking, are you interested in dancing at all?’ Alison asked hopefully. ‘It’s just, I’ve been taking a break from swing, but we could go together, there are some really nice men there I think you might enjoy meeting.’

‘Ahh,’ Maggie said, ‘I see where this is going. Thanks for offering Ali, I appreciate it. But work takes up most of my time.’ Alison raised an eyebrow at that. ‘And anyway …’ Maggie’s voice suddenly became more business like. ‘Well, seeing as I have you two here, can I pick your brains about
something?’ She rearranged her position on the rug, hugging her legs to her. ‘I’ve got a bit of a dilemma.’

‘Of course,’ Alison said with a warm smile, and I nodded. ‘Step into the surgery. What’s up?’

‘It’s a man thing, unsurprisingly,’ Maggie ventured, her cheeks colouring a little. ‘I wasn’t always the weird scented-candle-cat-lady, you know,’ she said, smiling.

‘For a woman like you, I’d say a glamorous romantic past is a given,’ Alison encouraged her.

‘Agreed,’ I said, ‘and as for the cat thing, I’ve really only heard a couple of kids call you that.’

Maggie gave me good-natured push.

‘So I was married once,’ she said, her voice gaining strength now. ‘When Dylan and I tied the knot I thought that was it, happily ever after.’ Maggie took a sip of wine and her brow creased as she searched for the right words.

‘Anyway, after three years he changed his mind.’ She shrugged her shoulders and continued. ‘He said he’d been unhappy for ages. I hadn’t realised at all, perhaps I’d had my head in the sand but it felt to me like one day, without any warning, he packed his things and left our London flat. I couldn’t afford the rent on my own, needed a change, and so I came to live down this way instead.’

‘How long ago was that?’ I asked. I was still processing what Maggie had said – how could any man leave
a woman like her?

‘Four years,’ Maggie said. ‘Four years, some difficult, some rewarding. I started up Bluebelle and bought my house.’

‘And what about Dylan?’ Alison asked.

‘We didn’t – couldn’t – speak. That was the hardest thing but also the only way the two of us could let go. We never had that many mutual friends, only one or two, and I fell out of contact with them once I’d left London. I just drew a line under the marriage and built a new life for myself.’

‘But now?’ Maggie said. ‘Something’s changed?’

A frisbee landed in the middle of our rug, missing the wine bottle by a couple of centimetres. A blond teenage boy in board shorts dashed over to retrieve it. ‘Sorry ladies,’ he said, giving us a cheeky smile. I passed the frisbee back to him, then listened to Maggie continue her story.

‘This week Dylan got in contact and made it clear that he wants to meet up. He says he’s sorry, and, I suppose this is my dilemma, I’m wondering whether to hear him out,’ Maggie said.

‘I see,’ Alison responded. ‘So he’s had all that time to look around, sow his wild oats a bit, get lonely, and now he wants you to forgive him, right?’

Ouch
. I thought, that was a bit blunt.

‘Yes, maybe,’ Maggie said, tilting her head.

‘Does he deserve a second chance, do you think?’ Alison asked, and a flush rose
to Maggie’s cheeks. She looked as if she wished she’d never brought the subject up.

‘How about we look at this another way,’ I said, feeling for her. ‘You say you never really understood what happened, and that it came as a surprise when he left. Would it help you to know what his reasons were?’

‘Part of me thinks that.’ Maggie shrugged. ‘Some closure might help me to move on with my life. Romantically, I mean.’

‘In that case, I think you should do it,’ I said. ‘Why not?’ Alison raised her eyebrows at me. ‘Give him a chance to clear the air, at least.’

‘OK, I think I will,’ Maggie said with a nod. ‘It’s all water under the bridge for me. What he’s going through now, doubting the decision he made, wanting to see me again, I went through all of that years ago. I feel sorry for him, in a way, that he’s only just at the start of it.’

‘I bet he’s kicking himself for ever letting you go,’ Alison said.

‘I can’t say I don’t enjoy that idea, just a little bit,’ Maggie said, smiling. ‘But how is it that just when everything is going well, when your life is sorted, exes seem to pop up from nowhere and try to derail it?’

‘Well I’ve had no blasts from the past,’ Alison said breaking the silence. ‘But I do have a tearaway teenager who’s driving me to my wits’ end. Might have to start saving to send her to brat
camp.’

‘Is Sophie really that bad?’ I asked.