Dora suppressed a smile. ‘You surprise me.’
Satisfied, Lillian looked up. ‘Okay, all done,’ she said cheerfully. She glanced at Dora. ‘Calvin said you were going out to lunch, would you like to come with us?’
Dora felt Calvin bristle. She smiled and shook her head. ‘That’s really very kind, Lillian, but no thanks, actually I’ve been invited to my sister’s.’
‘We could drop you off on the way,’ continued Lillian. ‘It wouldn’t be any trouble, would it. Bunny?’
In spite of herself, Dora felt a rush of affection for her alter ego. She shook her head again, Calvin shuffling uncomfortably beside her.
‘That’s very nice of you, Lillian, but it’s not far and I enjoy the walk.’
At the top of the stairs, Lillian thanked her for tea, buttoned up her jacket and was gone. Calvin adjusted his crombie.
‘Nice girl,’ he said, teeth closing on his cigar.
Dora grinned. ‘I hope you’ve got a licence.’
‘Uh?’
‘Dangerous animals act, you’re supposed to apply for a licence.’
Calvin snorted. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to be dropped off anywhere?’
Dora shook her head. ‘No thanks, Calvin, just make sure, between the pair of you, you don’t drop me in it.’
Calvin squared his shoulders. ‘Have I ever let you down?’ he murmured and lifted a hand in farewell.
Dora didn’t feel he deserved an answer.
On a corner plot in the newly, dismally developed Harvest Meadows, Sheila was already busy in the kitchen, slipping a tray of gold-tinted roast potatoes back into the oven.
Dora hung her coat in the hall cupboard. ‘Everyone out?’
Sheila wiped the steam from her glasses.
‘Uh huh. You’re late. Have you taken your shoes off? That Axminster’s new. Lunch will be ready in half an hour.’ She peered at Dora. ‘I don’t know how you stay so slim, all the rubbish you eat. Doesn’t seem right. I only have to look at a cream cake and I put on half a stone.’ Sheila tugged her apron down over her ample hips. ‘Is that the dress we got from Marks?’
After the cool sharp air outside, the kitchen seemed uncomfortably hot. Dora glanced round at Sheila’s immaculate work surfaces, and sighed. ‘It was the only thing I’d got left that was clean. I’ve had company this morning –’ And on reflection the company had left her with a disturbing sense of unease.
Sheila was oblivious, setting out gleaming cups and saucers on a doily-covered tray.
‘You ought to take more care of yourself. I’ve told you I’ll come and give you a hand with your housework if you like; two fifty an hour. Cash of course.’
Dora grinned. ‘Pinkerton’s going rate?’
Sheila shook her head and wiped up an imaginary sugar spill. ‘Never heard of them. An agency, are they?’
‘It was a joke. Can I help you with anything?’
Sheila sniffed. ‘It’s all done now. You didn’t come through the Milburn Estate again, did you?’ she demanded, arranging bourbons on a small silver plate.
‘Never miss.’ Dora leant over and prised a broken biscuit from the crinkly red plastic packaging before Sheila could consign it to the swingbin. ‘It’s a really pretty walk through those new little designer houses round the back. They’ve landscaped the parking bays now. Weeping willows and red hot pokers, very Sunday supplement.’
‘It’s sick. You didn’t put flowers down again?’
‘A single cream rose.’
Sheila sighed. ‘People talk, you know.’
‘It seems very fitting to mark the place where my husband died.’
‘That would be all very well if he was dead.’
Dora crunched the biscuit, hoovering wayward crumbs into her mouth with her tongue. ‘He might as well be. I like to mark the spot where our marriage finally passed away.’ She lifted her hands to add dramatic emphasis. ‘One final, fatal collision between magnolia and sage-green emulsion that changed two lives irrevocably.’
Sheila pursed her lips and picked up the tray. ‘Sick.’
‘I’m much happier now.’
‘People do not get divorced over emulsion.’
‘It was the final straw.’
Sheila sniffed. ‘Twenty years.’
‘Do we always have to talk about this? You always bring it up, it’s over, gone, dead.’
Sheila stood to one side while Dora opened the sitting-room door for her. ‘Talking about dead. Did you see they’re having Jack Rees’ funeral next week? Taken their time to get it organised. I suppose it’s getting all those bigwigs down here. It’s all over the Gazette. They did a special pull-out bit. You’d think he was royalty, the fuss they’re making.’ She took a newspaper out of the magazine rack. ‘I kept it for you.’
Dora stared down again at the familiar stranger’s face. Jack Rees was a local legend, a heroic tribal warrior woven into the fabric of Fairbeach history. She scanned the article – he’d been in his sixties. The report said it was his heart.
A small pain formed in her chest which she recognised as grief. It took her by surprise, though she knew the pain wasn’t personal, but an abstract, unexpected sense of loss for the passing of someone of worth.
The pain, mixed with her earlier unease, made her feel faint. She stood very, very still, aware of Sheila’s voice like a distant echo over the roar of the wind. The sitting room suddenly seemed as if it were a bright patchwork quilt of colours and light, all sewn together by Sheila’s insistent running-stitch voice.
Sheila rearranged the tray on a coffee table and picked up the newspaper, glancing over the same front page, talking all the time. She stepped closer, into sharp focus, every last stitch of her best Sunday dress and her best Sunday face caught in a spotlight’s glare in Dora’s mind. Sheila, Calvin and Lillian Bliss were just too much for anyone on a quiet Sunday morning. She suddenly felt sick.
‘… I used to see him in town sometimes in that big car of his.’ Sheila leant forward to pick up her reading glasses, her tone cruelly derisive. ‘Coronary it says here, too much fancy living, if you ask me, “found dead on Saturday morning in his home in Parkway by his housekeeper.” The rest is all stuff about how much he will be missed …’ Sheila flicked the glasses off the bridge of her nose and dropped the paper back onto the coffee table. ‘Well, I won’t miss him. They’re all the same if you ask me. Out for what they can get, all of them.’ She sniffed again. ‘Housekeeper, I ask you –’
Dora smiled,
