Slightly Foxed Read online

  Dedication

  To my father, James Playle Lovering, 1928-2008. A man who loved books.

  Chapter One

  I fell in love, in the bath, with a man who had been dead for a century.

  Typical for me, this inclination towards unsuitable men. This particular one was the author of a poetry collection, a faded dowager of a paperback grown floppy with mildew and bent-paged with waiting to be read. How much more unsuitable could you get, I mean—dead? Even for me, that was a first.

  I let the book drop across my chest and stared up at the damp patch on the wall of the tiny, unventilated bathroom, which formed the exact shape of the land mass of Sweden. Or, to the more uncultured eye, a limp willy. I could measure the length of time I had been wallowing in the scummy water by the increasingly priapic nature of that spreading stain, which was presently set to annex Finland. Or star on Channel Five.

  “Mum!” A shoulder banged against the door which was only held shut by the weight of the laundry basket propped against it. The lock had been wrenched from the woodwork by Grainger in his one evening of frenzied kittenhood, and never replaced. “What are you doing in there? On second thoughts, don’t tell me, I’ve just eaten.”

  Slowly I rose from the grimy depths. “Sorry, Florence, did you want the bathroom?” A sixteen-year-old girl with a healthy social life? Does, as the saying went in our literary household, toyevsky?

  “Nah. I’m just telling you I’m off to Dad’s.” A small silence. “Okay?”

  I bit my lip. “I wish you’d told me earlier that you were going over there.”

  “Well I’ve told you now. I’m staying over. I’ll get Piers to drop me at school in the morning, right?”

  My fingers tightened on the bath’s crumbling enamel edge, but the wetness of my palm made it slither with a sound identical to a tremendous fart.

  “I’ll take that as a ‘yes’ then.”

  I sighed, more deeply than I had meant to. In consequence, the waters lapped at the edges of my new love, who lay upon my bosom like a suitor to whose charms the lady has finally succumbed. “Do you have money for…” slam went the front door, “…the bus?” Duty bound as a parent to finish my sentence so that at least I could say, “I told you so,” even though she might not have been listening at the time. Or, even, present.

  I stared down the length of my body at the too-white flesh. I was still reasonably trim “for my age”, as Florence would no doubt have pointed out. Thirty-six isn’t old, is it? Not these days anyway. But it is old enough for outlying regions to start bearing a slight resemblance to mascarpone cheese and having a distressing tendency to go their own way, i.e. downwards. To distract myself from the uncomfortable thought that my daughter would, as soon as she arrived at her father’s house, be comparing my loose shape to her stepmother’s expense-account-gym-membership litheness, I unpeeled the book from my chest and flipped it open again.

  The new object of my affection (I wondered how he would have felt, coming runner-up to such luminaries as Florence, our psychotic cat, Grainger, and Johnny Depp) was a man called Theo Wood. Underneath the mould and the water creasing, his pages were virginal and the spine was uncracked as though the book had never been opened. I could imagine him, all those years ago, crouched over candlelight, pouring his never-to-be-read soul out onto the pages of a notebook. Dark eyes fixed on the page, (he’d have deep, poetic eyes of course) hand rubbing uneven stubble in an attempt to conjure the words onto the paper. But despite its historical nature, this book was reasonably new, privately published two years previously. Had someone discovered the poems lying in a dust-haunted attic and decided to make a few quid out of the current vogue for arrhythmic autobiographia?

  At the back of the book, almost as though unimportant, came the picture. Black and white, befitting a man born, the biography informed me, in 1850. I shifted my weight to allow the spindly light from the forty-watt bulb access to the pages and was confronted by a thin face, high-cheekboned, with eyes of such depth and substance that I felt exposed being naked in front of his gaze. Dark rumpled attractiveness mingled with a distant stare, making him look almost suicidally creative and also slightly short sighted. He also seemed to be wearing a Marks and Spencer pullover, which was impossible.

  I laid the book face down on a towel so as not to cause further damage to the already leprous pages. After all, I had only started reading it in order to find out where best to shelve it. I suspected that Florence would have credited my work with far more dignity had I worked in WH Smith. But it paid the bills and the rent on our dingy little flat in an area which was up and coming in much the same way as an exploding muckheap. I got myself out of the bath, careful not to drip on Theo, and had scuffled my way into the kitchen, when there was a knock at the door.

  “Alys?” There in the hallway stood Simon, blond and aristocratic to the point of looking as though he’d been built out of teeth. “I wasn’t sure of the address.”

  In the five years I’d worked for him, Simon had never shown any desire to take our employer/employee relationship further than the local book auction. He also suffered from borderline agoraphobia, which meant that on unfamiliar territory he was liable to collapse hyperventilating. I was therefore so astonished to see him on my doorstep that I nearly dropped my towel.

  “Come in. I was just…”

  “Having a bath?” Simon’s expression was gradually returning to its usual resting state of benevolent arrogance. “I’m sorry to have to come over like this on your day off and everything but—we’ve got a problem.”

  We were only “we” when there was a problem. When things went well, Webbe’s was a very them-and-us establishment, with Simon being the us, and myself and my coworker Jacinta being the opposition. We didn’t really mind and got our revenge in subtle ways, quite a few of them revolving around Simon’s HobNobs.

  “It must be a big problem, to bring you all the way out here.” I readjusted the towel to cover as much of me as possible. Although I’d spent the better part of the last five years trying to determine in which direction his sexual proclivities lay, now was not the time to discover Simon’s compass definitely pointed north. “Sit down a moment while I get dressed.”

  I left him staring at the only chair in the room still decently covered in its original upholstery rather than shrouded in a dubious throw. The reason he was staring rather than sitting was that this chair was occupied by Grainger, a cat whose reputation spread further than his discarded coat, and stuck every bit as hard. He was the only cat I’d ever met who slept with a snarl on his face to avoid having to change his expression on waking. By the time I returned, dressed and—Simon’s sexual leanings notwithstanding—heavily coated in mascara, Simon was resting one buttock carefully along the edge of the chair and trying to look comfortable.

  “Right. What is this problem we have?” I cleared a pile of Florence’s schoolbooks off the sofa to enable me to sit opposite Simon.

  “Do you remember my buying in a stack from an auction down in Exeter?”

  I nodded. The wondrous Theo had been one of them.

  “Well, I had a call this morning from a lady who’d traced us through the auction records. Apparently they belonged to some uncle who died and the books had been promised to her.”

  “So? Send them to her.” I coughed to cover the sound of the rustling as I kicked Theo underneath Florence’s essays.

  “Ah. You see, there’s the problem. You’ve already shelved most of them and…ah…I…” Simon was not a man to come out and admit that he didn’t know how his own shelving system worked. He leaned forward earnestly and his unsupported buttock trembled with tension. I knew because I was watching. Okay I may not currently be a player, but I can still appreciate good action on the field. “I
t’s quite urgent actually, Alys. She wants to pick the books up in the morning. Is there any chance you could come in today and search them out for me?”

  “Double time,” I said firmly, as though I’d been planning an evening filled with debauched delights instead of Stargate SG-1 and a Walnut Whip.

  “Time and a half.”

  “Give me a lift?”

  “And I’ll run you back.”

  I was about to agree, as long as he threw in lunch, when the telephone rang making all of us jump, including Grainger.

  “Alys? It’s Piers.” Familiar, slightly American vowels, burnished with the sandpaper of good education, as the voice of my ex-husband’s stepson drifted down the telephone line. “Has Florrie left yet?”

  “About twenty minutes ago. Why?”

  “Alasdair and Ma wanted me to pick her up and bring her over to Richmond. We’re going out to lunch with some friends. Thought it would be better if she came straight there.”

  “She’s got her mobile with her, why don’t you give her a call?”

  There was a bit of a pause. “I kinda thought she might still be home.”

  “Sorry, no. Goodbye. Oh, and Piers, please don’t let her be late for school tomorrow, she’s got an exam,” I finished lamely, suddenly realising that Florence’s GCSE textbooks were spread over the floor in front of me.

  “Sure.” There was another long pause, as though Piers wanted to say something else but wasn’t certain how, which was most unlike him. At twenty-one he already possessed more than his fair share of self-confidence, good looks and credit cards. “Well. Okay, yeah. Bye.”

  “Goodbye,” I said again. “Sorry, Simon. Family stuff.”

  “Shall we go then?” Simon sounded slightly breathless, and when he turned politely to open the door for me, I saw why. Grainger had stapled himself to the back of Simon’s Paul Smith shirt and was hanging between his shoulder blades like an ill-tempered rucksack with halitosis.

  Chapter Two

  Webbe’s stood at the tail end of one of York’s most popular tourist streets, where all the shops were so old and bent together that they looked like a pensioner’s outing. The bookshop’s walls hung unwillingly towards its next-door neighbour, an antique shop which sold overpolished copper warming pans, and with whose owner Simon carried on a viciously polite war of attrition over pavement space. The entire area was so self-consciously historic that I felt I should tint myself sepia just to work there.

  As soon as he had unlocked the door, Simon retired to his cubbyhole at the back of the shop. I used his ducking out to hasten my way through the shelves and pick out all the books from the list. They were a diverse bunch, a couple of very nice illustrated Dickens, two books of collected maps, a biography of Margaret Thatcher and a very dog-eared copy of a Jilly Cooper novel minus the back cover. Theo Wood remained securely underneath my sofa. I planned to send him on in a couple of days, once I’d fully appreciated him. With apologies, of course.

  Finding the books took me about ten minutes. When I put my head around the edge of the cubbyhole, Simon was sitting cross legged in his armchair, engrossed in the Classic Serial, and waved me away peremptorily with one finger. Whilst I would quite like to have been invited into the inner sanctum with its own kettle and seemingly endless supply of chocolate HobNobs to listen to The Mill on the Floss, part of me was glad of the fully paid chance to ring Florence to check whether or not Piers had caught up with her.

  Florence answered, breathless.

  “Hello, darling. Did Piers manage to intercept you all right?”

  “Yeah, sure. We’re in Richmond having lunch by the river, looking at a car that Piers wants to buy.”

  Bloody Piers, I thought, teeth gritted ever so slightly. “Is it a nice car?”

  “Not bad. Porsche 911. Horrible colour though.”

  “Oh,” I said inadequately. “Oh dear. So”—desperate to keep any kind of dialogue going with my daughter—“he might not buy it then?”

  Florence broke into hysterical giggles. “Yeah, right! Like there’s any such thing as a bad Porsche. He’ll have it resprayed. What did you call me for? Only Dad wants me to give a hand with the drinks.”

  “Just to check whether you wanted to come back and pick up your revision stuff?” I tried to keep it light, only a question, but Florence had the teenage ability to pick an insult out of a shopping list.

  “For God’s sake. Let me enjoy my Sunday in peace for once without nagging on about those bloody exams!” She turned off her phone abruptly. I could just imagine her nail digging into the rubberised button, wishing it was my neck.

  “Children. Such a joy,” I muttered.

  “Florence is not being loveable today?”

  I jumped. “God, Jace. How do you manage to creep up on me in those shoes?” Jacinta simply looked smug. “Why are you here? Does no one ever take a day off except for me?”

  “I was coming past and I saw that lights are on. I am bored so in I come.”

  “Well, come in, don’t stand in the doorway. It’s like a total eclipse.” Jace beamed at me again and sashayed into the shop. Despite standing six foot two in her sheer black stockings, Jacinta always wore stilettos and her well-padded frame draped with tie-dye garments. The ensemble was completed, as ever, with a selection of dangling silver jewellery of various ethnicities. The overall effect was that of Glastonbury on the move. “Your hair looks nice.”

  “You think?” She reached up and patted at where her long, jet-black hair lay newly coiled around her head. Jacinta had a thing for hairdressers and regularly spent large portions of her (pitiful) salary on them. She’d come from South America three years ago where I assumed she’d lived under an oppressive regime where all hairdressers were locked up for the common good.

  “It’s lovely.” I stacked my selected pile of books against the till. “If you want our esteemed boss, he’s in the back room.”

  “I go have words with him. He owes me moneys from last week and I want to go buy a new dress.”

  She shimmied her way through the curtain into Simon’s space. I suppressed the urge to tiptoe after her and listen in on their conversation. There always seemed to be some kind of unspoken acknowledgement between them, a shared secret. Nothing ever happened to give a clue to the nature of this relationship; it was more a feeling of things unsaid which hung in the air when the two of them were together which made me wonder if they shared more than the occasional HobNob in the back room.

  While they were closeted, I served a couple of casual Sunday customers and was mooching around searching the shelves, when Simon reappeared and told me it was time to go home. Jacinta was just behind him, with the sleek satisfaction of a woman on a frock-buying mission. “I go now,” she announced from the doorway, “to buy wonderful new clothe. I see you tomorrow, Alys.”

  I examined both their faces for any traces of residual postcoital contentment, then berated myself. Unless there had been a major change of taste on her part, and his indeterminate sexuality and overwhelming diffidence had been won over by the sight of Jacinta in a bustier and garter belt, I didn’t seriously think that any rumpy-pumpy action had been on the cards. “See you, Jace.”

  “You be nice to Florence.” Jacinta wagged a finger at me, leaning against the frame. “She is a very nice girl.”

  “Yeah, as long as you’re not her mother.”

  Simon politely ushered me out of the shop towards his car where we both paused for a moment, enjoying the seismic sight of Jace rolling her way down the street. “So Florence is over with Alasdair today?” he asked. “I must say, she’s turning out to be a very pretty young woman. Beautiful big eyes she has. Must take after Alasdair’s family, does she?”

  I narrowed my own, by extrapolation, piggily unattractive eyes. “Mmm. I suppose so.”

  My tone must have penetrated Simon’s general abstraction and he turned to me. “Oh, I didn’t mean… You mustn’t think… It’s not… I mean, you’re a very…ahhh…umm…yourself, Alys.”


  I think I might have glared at him at this point.

  I was feeling distinctly jaded when I let myself into the flat. Grainger lay curled reproachfully on the sofa, one eye wedged open for my return, the other eye sleeping the peaceful sleep of a blameless cat.

  “I’m back,” I said unnecessarily to the smell, the silence and the cat. “Now, where’s Theo?” He was finally retrieved from beneath the sofa where he had been attracting enough fur to knit another cat. I tucked my feet up under myself, bit the end off a coffee Walnut Whip and opened his pages at a poem called “Distorted Vision”, when there was a sharp tap on the front door.

  “Oh bugger.” I laid Theo down and answered it.

  Standing there, and causing almost as much astonishment as Simon’s earlier visit, was a man I hardly recognised. I’d known Piers since Alasdair and Tamar had married four years ago, was used to speaking to him on the phone, but I’d not seen him for a while. When last sighted he had been a pretty but unremarkable looking boy, but standing on my threshold he seemed to have a broader chest than I’d remembered. He’d lost the startled-in-a-glue-factory spiky hair in favour of shoulder-length, expensively unkempt shagginess. A smattering of proud stubble adorned sharp, pale cheekbones, his pallid skin contrasting with his shadow-dark hair as though he was trading on what Florence called his “Orlando Bloom with edges” look. He’d completed the show with a pair of D&G sunglasses. This and the black designer jeans, black T-shirt, black leather jacket apparel made him look as though he were on the run from a Transylvanian boy-band.

  “Hello, Piers,” I said, when he didn’t say anything following my opening of the door. I hoped I hadn’t been staring at him in silence for too long.

  “Hey. Alys.” He was gazing past me, into the flat. “I thought, I mean, I heard Florence left her revision stuff here. Thought I’d come by and pick it up.”

  Maybe Florence had changed her mind about revision. Maybe she’d decided to spend the rest of Sunday rereading her notes. Oh yeah, and maybe I was going to be the next face of L’Oreal. “Did Florence ask you to come?” I was still not opening the door wide enough to let him in, and he was still not meeting my eye.