Semi-Sweet Read online

  “No preferences?” she asked. “With or without nuts? Chocolate chip?”

  “Not fussed,” he said. “They’re all good.”

  “That’s true.” She selected a peanut butter and a rum-raisin and put them into a small box.

  “Hannah not around today?” he asked as he handed her a fiver.

  “She’s gone out for a bit—she’ll be back at noon.”

  He remembered then, her saying that she’d taken on someone part-time. “Tell her John Wyatt was in, would you? Just to say hello. Sorry I missed her.”

  “I will. Thanks, now.”

  “See you.”

  At the woodworking store, he handed over the two cupcakes and was thanked and scolded in equal measure by Patsy, who was trying, as ever, to lose weight. “You’re the devil, John Wyatt, you know that?”

  Hannah hadn’t been back to Vintage for the past two Saturdays. She’d seemed pleased to see him the last time, and she’d made a point of letting him know that she and her companion, whose name John had forgotten, were just friends. But she hadn’t been back. Wouldn’t she have shown up at the bar again if she’d been at all interested?

  She might come this weekend, if the part-time girl remembered to pass on his message. If she thought he still wanted to keep up the contact, she just might appear.

  Alice pulled in three doors up on the other side of the street. There was no sign of the two little boys from the last day, but the red flowers were still there—or rather their remains, hanging forlornly from the gatepost of number 37. And the curtains were still closed in the upstairs room.

  There was no car outside the house, but maybe the father had gone to work in it, or the mother. Would they be back at work, barely a month after their only child had been buried? They probably wouldn’t have had a choice—life went on, and bills needed to be paid.

  She wondered if they were married, if they had gotten around to that. She guessed they hadn’t been married when Jason had come along four years earlier. The sister saying the poem on the altar at the funeral had looked in her teens still; Jason’s mother probably wasn’t much older.

  Two girls in blue school uniforms walked past the car, both heads bent over a mobile phone. A small dog pattered across the road in front of Alice, sniffing at something on the edge of the far path, lifting a leg briefly against a streetlight before trotting away rapidly.

  A car drove past, coming up behind her unnoticed, making her start. Someone cycled by, whistling. It began to drizzle, settling silently on the windscreen. A man came out of the house beside number 37 and walked past it buttoning his coat.

  She sat for fifty minutes, a magazine open on her lap in case anyone looked at her, in case anyone approached her to know what she was doing there. The front door of number 37 remained closed; nobody came or went from the house. She thought she saw a movement once, in the uncurtained upstairs window, but it might have been her imagination, or a trick of the light.

  At twenty to four, she started the car and drove back into town.

  The dark brown UPS truck stopped outside the house, and Adam watched a man in a matching brown uniform get out, slide open a side door, and remove a package that didn’t look long enough to house a clarinet. He thought maybe it wasn’t for him, that it was a delivery for a different house, but then the man turned in to the driveway and walked up the path.

  Adam waited until the doorbell rang. He got up, walked downstairs, and opened the front door. “Morning.”

  “How do?” The man looked at the label on the package. “Adam O’Connor?”

  “That’s me.” The man handed him the clipboard, and Adam signed along the dotted line. “Thanks.”

  He brought the package into the sitting room, where Kirby was dozing. “Look what I got,” he said, tearing off the paper to reveal a black case. He opened it and saw that it was lined with dark blue velvet, and contained five pieces of clarinet.

  He took his phone from his pocket and called Hannah.

  “It’s here,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “The clarinet.”

  “Well? What’s it like?”

  “It’s in bits.”

  “So you have to put it together. Try not to break it.”

  “Hang on, I’ll call you back.”

  Ten minutes later, when he had finally figured out how to assemble it, he put the clarinet’s mouthpiece between his lips and blew.

  A low sound squawked out, like the honk of a seal. Kirby pricked his ears.

  Adam called Hannah again. “Listen,” he said. He laid the phone on the arm of the couch and pressed the keys one by one, blowing furiously, honking and squeaking in equal measure. Kirby lifted his head and regarded Adam, ears still cocked.

  He lifted the phone, breathless. “What do you think?”

  “Brilliant,” she said. “You don’t need lessons at all. Is Kirby there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Put him out, or I’m reporting you to the animal-welfare people.”

  “Good-bye,” he said, and hung up.

  He raised the clarinet to his lips again and pressed keys at random, blowing as forcefully as he could manage. Midway through this performance, Kirby shuffled to his feet, padded to the sitting-room door, and sat looking pointedly at it.

  In less than a minute, Adam was completely out of breath. He lowered the clarinet and waited for the feeling of light-headedness to pass. “It’s okay,” he told Kirby, “I won’t be doing any more of that for a while.”

  He had a long way to go. Maybe he should have started with a tin whistle.

  “I’m worried about Alice,” Geraldine said, folding her glasses.

  Stephen entered “biscuit” using a triple-word square, and his total shot up to 215. “You’re worried? Why?”

  “She’s not herself.” Geraldine slid the glasses into their soft tartan case. “She seems to have no interest in the shop anymore. Last week we made less than three hundred—I don’t ever remember a week that bad—and it didn’t seem to knock a feather out of her.”

  Stephen tried to find a word that contained l, x, two a’s, and a t. “Don’t forget, we’re in a recession. All businesses are suffering.”

  Geraldine unplugged the television. “It’s not that, though—this is different. I’m really wondering if there’s some kind of boycott going on.”

  Stephen gave up and tagged “axl” onto the e of “fable,” which earned him a pathetic eleven points. “Hardly a boycott. Surely everyone appreciates that the accident wasn’t Alice’s fault—what would be the point in taking it out on her?”

  Geraldine bundled the newspaper sections on the coffee table into a neat pile. “You’d be surprised. I’d swear Sheila Barrett crossed the street when she spotted me yesterday—she never misses the new stock, and there hasn’t been a sign of her lately.” She straightened the rug in front of the fire with her foot. “And another thing—Alice has started disappearing in the middle of the day.”

  “Disappearing?”

  “Well, she doesn’t say where she’s going, just that she has things to do, very vague. She was gone for over two hours yesterday. Normally she just does the weekly run to the wholesalers or takes half an hour around the town now and again.”

  “She’s got a lot on her mind,” Stephen said, eyeing the “excel” his virtual opponent, Stanley, had just entered.

  “She certainly has—half the time she doesn’t seem to hear me when I talk to her.” Geraldine walked to the door with her newspaper bundle. “Will I make tea for you?”

  “I might be another while,” Stephen said, determined not to let Stanley, described only as adept, beat him. “Have your own, and I’ll be up when I finish this.”

  In the kitchen Geraldine poured water into the kettle and put a tea bag into her cup. No point in a pot for just one. She took a single ginger nut from the pack and left the rest in the press.

  If you need to cut my hours, that’s okay, she’d said to Alice. Just while things are slow.
She and Stephen would manage fine—if she had no income at all, they’d manage on what he made. But Alice had shaken her head and said, Ah no, we needn’t do that.

  She must be losing money now, must be out of pocket. Ridiculous for Geraldine to be there all the time, when some days only half a dozen customers came in. Some days they didn’t sell a single pair of shoes.

  How’s Tom doing? she’d asked a couple of times since the accident, and Alice had said, He’s fine, or Bearing up, in the kind of tight voice that had kept Geraldine from saying any more.

  Come to dinner this evening, she’d suggested more than once, you and Tom. Four is as easy to cook for as two. But Alice had shaken her head and found an excuse each time, and Geraldine had eventually given up.

  The kettle boiled, and she made tea and brought it upstairs with her biscuit. Just as well she had John Grisham to distract her when she went to bed.

  “She’s getting up,” Hannah said. “Head her off at the pass.”

  Adam turned and moved swiftly through the tables of drinkers, advancing diagonally toward the back door. He reached it as Vivienne approached from the opposite direction, clarinet clutched to her chest. Tonight she wore a long black dress with sleeves to her elbows and black suede ankle boots.

  It was now or never. “Excuse me,” Adam said, smiling. At least he hoped it was coming out as a smile.

  Vivienne stopped, the color flooding into her cheeks like before. She gave no sign of remembering his earlier approach. Adam stood between her and the door. There was nowhere for her to go—unless she bolted back the way she’d come.

  “Sorry to bother you,” he said, “but I wanted to say I really admire your clarinet playing.”

  She blinked and pushed her glasses up her nose, the tiniest of smiles flitting for an instant across her flushed face. “Thanks,” she said quickly, her eyes darting to the door behind him.

  “I believe,” he hurried on, “that you give lessons, and as I’ve recently come into possession of a clarinet, I was wondering if you would—”

  “No,” she broke in, shaking her head rapidly. “Sorry.” Pushing her glasses up again, looking beyond him to her escape route. “I don’t.”

  “Pardon?” She couldn’t be turning him down out of hand. “But I was told that you’re a music teacher, and I would really love—”

  “I don’t teach adults,” she said in a rush. “Children, I just teach children.” Her voice was low, and he strained to hear it. She looked more pointedly at the blue door. The blush was receding, leaving her face blotchy. She blinked repeatedly behind her round glasses.

  Children. The one thing Adam hadn’t anticipated, that at thirty-one he’d be too old. It was a blow, but he held his ground. “Well, would you consider making an exception?” he asked. “I don’t know any other clarinet teacher, you see, and I’d really like to learn. And I promise I’m as ignorant as any child.”

  But she shook her head again. “Just children,” she repeated. “I’m sorry.” She shifted the position of her clarinet slightly and took a small sideways step toward the door.

  “Please,” Adam said, nothing left to lose. “I’ve just bought it, you see, and if you don’t teach me, it’ll sit in my house gathering dust and nobody will ever get to play it. It’ll be a terrible waste of a clarinet. You don’t want that, do you?”

  She was clearly uncomfortable. She opened her mouth and closed it again. She’d run out of ways to tell him no. He could feel her anxiety, her whole body tense with it, but his determination drove him on. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted the keyboard player approaching.

  He decided to make one last attempt. “How about you just try me out for two or three lessons, and if you’re not happy, you can send me on my way and I’ll never bother you again? Would you consider that? Please? Just a few lessons?”

  She sighed, a frown creasing the skin above the bridge of her glasses. “Half eight on a Thursday,” she said, her eyes fixed on the blue door.

  “Sorry?” Her sudden surrender caught him unawares.

  “Half eight on a Thursday,” she repeated, in precisely the same resigned tone.

  “Okay. Great.” Adam stepped aside at last and pushed the door open for her. “Where do I go?”

  She moved toward the blue door, close enough for him to smell the lemony scent that rose from her tightly bunched hair. “Ten Fortfield Avenue.”

  “And your name?” he asked, wanting to hear her say it.

  “Vivienne O’Toole.” Over her shoulder as she disappeared.

  The keyboard player arrived, and Adam held the door open, struggling to remember his surname—was it O’Toole too? Were he and Vivienne married? Was Adam’s enterprise doomed before it started?

  “Thanks, mate.”

  Nodding at Adam but not recognizing him, by the look of it. No curiosity evident, no suspicion as to what Adam might have been saying to Vivienne. Surely a husband or partner would want to know.

  “Great gig tonight,” Adam told him, and the man thanked him again as he walked through the blue doorway.

  She hadn’t asked Adam’s name. She didn’t want to teach him—he’d bullied her into it. She was more comfortable, probably, in the uncritical presence of children. Chances were, she was dreading next Thursday already.

  But she’d agreed, and in five days Adam was going to see her house and be in her company for at least an hour. He was going to be her very first adult pupil.

  And he was finally going to discover whether or not she was single.

  Ten Fortfield Avenue. Vivienne O’Toole. Baby steps, he thought, still hardly understanding what drove him on but knowing he wanted to persevere. Baby steps and lots of patience.

  As he made his way back to the bar, he noticed that the Scotsman was talking to Hannah. He managed to retrieve his drink without either of them seeing him, and he moved farther up the counter and replayed the conversation in his head.

  “You didn’t have to leave us alone,” she said as they walked home.

  “But I did,” Adam replied. “And you look like the cat that got the cream, so my cunning ploy worked.”

  Hannah smiled. “I’m meeting him for coffee on Wednesday morning. I decided I’m tired of being a hermit.”

  “Good for you.” They turned onto the bridge.

  “And you?” she asked. “What did she say?”

  Adam ran his hand along the smooth, cold surface of the metal rail. “Get this—she teaches children, not adults.”

  “Oh.” She threw him a sympathetic look. “Oh, Adam, that’s too bad—and after buying the clarinet as well. Will you try selling it again?”

  “Actually, I won’t—because she’s agreed to take me on. She tried her best to turn me down, but I nagged a bit.”

  Hannah laughed. “Are you serious? You’re going to a children’s music teacher?”

  “I am.”

  “You do realize that she’ll probably have you playing ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’?”

  Adam regarded her sternly. “We may well begin with that, yes. But I’m confident that I’ll progress to more adult material in due course.”

  Hannah tucked her arm into his. “Of course you will. You’ll be giving recitals by Christmas.”

  “Very funny.” They turned off the bridge. “But now that you mention it,” he added, “maybe I could do a bit of busking.”

  “Why not? You could be like that fellow in the Kit Kat ad—remember? Everyone throws money at him the minute he stops playing. You could make a fortune.”

  “Ha ha.” After a pause he added, “What was the keyboard player’s surname, can you remember?”

  “Who? Oh, you mean Wally, the taxi driver. Can’t remember what his surname was. Why?”

  “Well, the night we met him, he said he was driving her home.”

  “Did he? I don’t remember.”

  “So they might be together. A couple, I mean.”

  Hannah considered. “Or he might just be doing her a favor. Maybe they live near each
other.”

  “Mmm…She’s O’Toole, but I can’t remember what his surname is.”

  “Tell you what,” she said, “until we know for sure, let’s not dwell on it. Let’s plan your busking career instead.”

  They walked on, both in high good humor. Both hopeful of happy outcomes.

  “So,” Nora said after they’d ordered, after their menus had been replaced with her martini and Leah’s tonic water. “How are things?”

  The puffiness she’d seen in Leah’s face the last time they’d met was more pronounced, the earlier suggestion of a double chin now a distinct reality. Leah was still attractive—or rather the echo of her attractiveness was still there in the dark brown eyes, the regular nose, the full lips. But the overall effect was blurred now, as if her original elfin prettiness had been diluted. Little wonder that Patrick’s thoughts were straying.

  Leah sipped her tonic water. “Just wish it was over at this stage. I am so sick of being bloody pregnant.”

  “How long more?” The martini was ice cold and delicious. Nora pulled one of the olives from its cocktail stick with her teeth.

  “Four weeks, about. Seems like forever.”

  Nora smiled. “Poor you. Soon be over.”

  Leah grimaced. “Yeah—and then I’ll be up to my neck in Pampers while Patrick swans out to work every day.”

  “Ah, he’ll help though, when he’s around.” But Nora couldn’t see Patrick holding a baby with any degree of comfort, let alone changing a nappy.

  Leah nodded glumly. “Hope so. This baby…” She hesitated. “Well, it wasn’t exactly his idea. I mean,” she added hastily, “he’s thrilled, of course, but…”

  The baby hadn’t been Patrick’s idea—what a surprise. “He’ll rise to the challenge,” Nora said. “Just wait and see. As soon as he sets eyes on it.”

  “Of course he will.” Leah looked far from convinced. “Anyway,” she said, shifting her position, adjusting her weight on the chair, “enough about me. How’s the job going? Patrick tells me you’re settling in well.”

  A new note of horribly false brightness in her voice—but as far as Nora could tell, nothing more. No hint of suspicion, no sign of jealousy.