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In her lunch hour, Polly took the folder Jeremy had given her into the canteen and sat in the corner with it. Confusingly it had ‘Auntie Marian’s Bread’ on the front, but inside was a brief pertaining to a very different company – a burgeoning Italian restaurant chain called Ciaoissimo. She unwrapped her sandwich and chewed half-heartedly on it. The catering in this place used to be top-notch but company cuts had led to detrimental changes. Alan Eagleton was always of the belief that an army marches on its stomach and quality scran was an essential. But then there was a chasm between the sort of man Alan was and the sort Jeremy was that made the Grand Canyon look like a crack in a pavement.
With an absence of anything else to occupy her she started to read about Ciaoissimo:Authentically Italianit cried, even though it was about as authentically Italian as Bjork.No wonder they’d asked for help. High staff turnover, low morale, lack of vision, crazy menu and their mission statement seemed to be ‘Get the money off the customers, feed them crap and chuck them out’. Negligible number of repeat customers –no shit Sherlock. They were a mess. She opened up an envelope in the back markedStrictly Confidentialand didn’t like what she found there. She hoped this one landed on someone else’s pile otherwise she might actually be tempted to cock it up.
She took the folder up to Jeremy after lunch.
‘Ah, straight on it, Polly Kettle, that’s what I like to see,’ he said.
‘Well I would have been had the outside matched the inside,’ she replied, bristling at the stupid name Jeremy insisted on calling her. She bet he didn’t call Jack Jones, the head of Finance ‘Jack Spratty’ or Marjorie Wright the head of HR ‘See-Saw Marjorie Daw’. Mind you, with good reason, because Marjorie would have had his balls off. She was fierce but fair: fools were not to be suffered. Polly had always really liked her no-nonsense approach, and there was too much nonsense in Northern Eagles now. Marjorie was part of the old guard, most of whom had been dispensed with when the company was sold and the new guard came in. Two of her particular favourites had been driven out: Phil Bowery, one of Alan’s brightest protégés, and Dave Deacon, a young graduate with a real nose for business. They went to the wall because Charles Butler wanted his own people in, even if they were inferior. Marjorie escaped the firing squad probably because she was female and less of a threat, but she was drafted over from the directorate to Human Resources out of the way.
Polly answered Jeremy’s confused, enquiring expression.
‘The outside says Auntie Marian’s Bread, inside there’s a business profile of an Italian restaurant chain called Ciaoissimo, not a mention of a teacake to be found,’ she explained.
‘Ah. Not sure how that happened. Just forget about this one, it needs expert handling.’ Jeremy opened up the big drawer in his desk and dropped the folder in there quickly. ‘I’ll have the proper file brought over to you.’
Interesting, thought Polly on the way out, wondering why Ciaoissimo should be classified. Anyway, let one of Jeremy’s ‘experts’ deal with it. No doubt he’d run into difficulty and need her imput so it would end up with her eventually anyway. That’s what usually happened.
DREAM TRIP FOR GRANNY
The family of May Readman surprised her with a party in her local pub, The Lobster Pot in Whitby on her ninetieth birthday and a ticket for a fully paid-for trip to Dignitas. Son Philip said, ‘We can’t wait for Mum to go there, we’ve been wanting to send her there for ages. Everyone was more than happy to chip in and we’ll be delighted to wave her off.’
Chapter 3
Polly hated lying. Lies hurt people, lies made holes in trust that could never quite be sealed up again; this she knew only too well. But she allowed herself to lie once a week and though it was quite an innocent lie, she still felt a bit bad about it. Every Monday, she left work early and drove straight to the church hall in Millspring, a village near to her home in Penistone, for a creative writing class and she hadn’t missed a single one since she joined.
She had pretended she had to work late on Mondays for over ten months now, not that it inconvenienced Chris because he was never in before her on that night anyway. He kept open longer hours on Mondays and Tuesdays for emergency jobs and those willing to stump up extra to queue-jump. Those two days were proper money-spinners for him.
Chris had his own car body-shop garage. He was good at what he did and in much demand, and his charges reflected that because people paid him a small fortune to suck out the dents and touch up the imperfections in their prestige cars. That’s where he’d mether: Mrs Jones, the ‘seven-year itch’,he called it, as if it was somehow out of his control, possibly even medical.
On the first day of April (ha!) last year, Polly found out about the affair and she’d left him, moved into the first Airbnb she could find that was available. And in the four weeks when they were apart, she started writing down her feelings and found it helped. Sometimes she wrote prose, sometimes her words bent to poetry; both formats took her out of the zone. She hadn’t written creatively since she’d been at school and had no idea why she turned to a pen instead of a bottle of wine, but she rediscovered the pleasure of spilling her innermost thoughts out onto paper. Poetry helped put her emotions into a manageable framework, story-writing allowed her to climb into the skin of characters, walk in their footsteps and find some sadly lacking control. Being in charge of a fictitious world helped her deal with a real world in which she had been flattened. Then she joined the Millspring Quillers, which had turned out to be her salvation. Sometimes they wrote haiku, or limericks for light relief. One week they’d had an assignment to make a shopping list sexy; they’d even done a letter to an imaginary lover, an exercise in subverting any intrinsic decent values they might have to release a deceptive, self-serving side of themselves, which was pretty ironic given how she’d come to be part of the group. Now, they were working through the planning of a novel: the characters, the setting, the dialogue, the plot, the story arc, as an exercise.
She didn’t tell Chris about her classes because once, not long after they’d got back together, she’d walked in on him and his daughter Shauna reading her ‘Ode to Old Tom’ in her notepad and laughing uncontrollably. Admittedly Simon Armitage wouldn’t have felt threatened but it was ahighly personal piece about a cat she’d once been fond of and she’d poured her heart into it. Their scorn burned her, humiliated her and when Shauna had gone home, Polly had taken him to task about it. But Chris was politician-skilled at spinning things on their heads, and managed to make her into the bad guy because she couldn’t take a joke. So she went underground after that, hiding her creative work out of sight. And she was glad that she’d heeded her intuition not to tell him about the classes because he’d have put her off or scoffed because he could never see how people got so much enjoyment out of the written word.
Polly found the book project really exciting. In her story she had even reimagined some of her life to bring her comfort. Her Uncle Ed and Auntie Rina featured as Sabrina’s parents and though gone now, had enjoyed a long, happy life. Her daughter Linnet was working her way around Australia, having safe and exciting adventures, doing all the things Polly would have wished for her. Polly liked to imagine that as a young adult she was pretty and petite with sunkissed skin, dark hair and a voice like a song. Even Tom the cat from next door was in it and the house Sabrina was escaping to was the cottage her uncle and auntie had rented in real life until they could find one they liked as much to buy. It was bittersweet to write about her lost loved ones, but she found more solace than pain in the exercises.
In her story Sabrina had been pushed too far at work and pushed too far in her marriage. Sabrina was based on herself, but she was much more confident and kickass. Jasper had his womanising roots in Chris, but he was far nastier, more volatile and toxic. Sabrina was excited about the prospect of being single again. So was Polly, but Sabrina didn’t wake up sometimes in a cold sweat worrying about the logisticsof breaking free. But both writer and character were united in the knowledge that cutting loose was their only option.
Polly hadn’t a clue how Chris was going to take it when she said that she was leaving him because she knew he thought that everything in the garden was lovely and it probably was from his side of things. He was looking at flower-filled borders and a verdant green lawn and all she could see was a barren wasteland; all the seeds and bulbs she’d planted hoping they would grow lay rotten under the surface of the soil.
In hindsight, the damage had been done long before his affair, but it shone the harsh light on the truth of her relationship and she saw it now fully exposed. That it was the worst kind of loneliness, to feel alone when you were with someone and how tiny scraps of shrapnel could do as much harm as big thunderous bullets, even though you barely felt them at the time. Little things that on their own didn’t amount to much, but once lumped together made a huge ugly insurmountable mound: never saying thank you to her, taking her for granted, not allowing her to get someone in to put new tiles up or a new carpet down, rolling his eyes at her with exasperation if she told him to shove his dirty clothes in the wash basket instead of dropping them at the side of it, leaving his work bag in a place where she’d always have to shift it. His lack of consideration, his obliviousness to her needs had chipped away at her love but also her self-esteem. She’d been so battered and bewildered, so reduced after the affair with Mrs Jones that she didn’t know if she’d taken him back more to salve her ego or because she really loved him, though it felt like the latter then. She’d wanted to believe his promises that he’d do what it took to get them back on track.
In the first few weeks he tried. He’d even rustled up acouple of meals – pasta in Dolmio sauce – and had letterbox flowers sent to the house for her that came with free chocolates. She really felt as if a new dawn had heralded, but in truth it was just a false spring, like the ones in January when the ground warms up and the snowdrops pop out, only for a winter frost to descend and kill them. It all started to slip back to how it was before when she was the only one making the effort in the relationship. And like a worm, in a part of her brain that she couldn’t reach to excise it sat the affair, always there, always hurting.
She told herself that if she still felt the same by the first of May, a year to the day since she moved back in, if his vow to make it all right hadn’t come to fruition, then she’d ring the final bell, stupidly hoping that in the meantime, Chris would realise what was slipping away from him. He’d refused to talk things through, he wouldn’t listen or change, so she’d kept her promise to herself and set her plan in motion. Then Camay had thrown a spanner in the works with this impulsively-arranged wedding. Polly put everything on hold but it was a mere delay, not a cancellation. She had to leave. She felt herself becoming more and more transparent with every passing day and if she didn’t leave soon, there would be nothing left of her to go.
She had no doubt she would have to absorb the blame for the end of their relationship; Chris would mop up all available sympathy and portray himself as a saint worthy of his own stained-glass church window. People who knew him would be flabbergasted that she could leave such a hardworking, good-looking, well-minted family man like Chris Barrett. Was she bonkers? Chris was popular, well-liked, but he saved his best for others, not her.
No doubt Camay would have a lot to say about it andWard would nod along in consensus. Chris’s daughter Shauna would be the most vocal. She’d never liked her stepmother, despite every effort Polly had made to build a relationship with her. Will was a different kettle of fish, a kid with a lovely aura and Polly liked being around him. She’d helped him with his A-levels when he was struggling and he’d sent her a beautiful thank-you notelet when he passed them all with flying colours. She’d kept it; it was now with the brooches in her handbag.
He and his father didn’t have a lot of middle ground and Chris had been a fool not to try to make some, she’d told him, though he hadn’t listened to that either.
In her class that evening, Polly worked on the scene of the big marital split, when Sabrina tells Jasper it’s all over. When he’d reneged on his promise not to stick his fingers in his ears and sing loud ‘la la’s whenever she wanted to talk emotions; when he continued to say that it was unreasonable for him to turn work down so they could go out for a meal or take a holiday; when sex was no longer a giving, sharing thing, but a taking, a mere scratching when an itch presented itself to him. Sabrina had given Jasper a full year to reform and if anything, he’d gotten worse.
It was all so much easier when you could control the whole thing in your head, like both sides of a chess game. Not so much when only playing with the black pieces and trying to second-guess if the white pieces would erupt, implode, cry or physically throw her out of the door when her queen checkmated his king.
Chapter 4
On her way home from class, Polly called in at the mini supermarket up the road and bought some chicken Kievs for tea. She sprinkled some frozen mini roast potatoes on a baking tray and stuck everything in the oven along with a carton of cauliflower cheese. Then she poured herself a large glass of chenin blanc from the fridge and sighed as it hit the back of her throat with an icy punch.
