Summer Daydreams (2 page)
‘I know. It’s… what’s the word?’
‘Unique,’ I supply, ‘and fun. And all my own work.’ My living room has pink candy-stripe wallpaper with matching spotty chairs. I sanded and stained the floorboards myself and whizzed up some cushions that look like big cupcakes. ‘We could do something like that here. Jazz the place up.’
Phil brightens. ‘You think so?’
I shrug. ‘Why not? I’ll make a mood board tonight.’
‘Mood board?’ Jenny and Phil exchange a puzzled look.
‘I can start tomorrow after we close up.’
Now Phil looks surprised – and not a little terrified.
‘Tomorrow?’
‘No time like the present.’
‘I’m not doing anything tomorrow night – more’s the pity,’ Jenny offers.
She is currently man-free – a fairly rare occurrence. My friend is a curvy brunette with ample comely charms and, as such, is a big hit with the gentlemen. Though cads and bounders feature heavily on the menu and none of them ever stay around for long.
‘I’m not exactly a dab hand with a paintbrush,’ she admits, ‘but I can do labouring and make tea.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ I say.
We both look at Phil expectantly.
‘I’m not doing anything either,’ he confesses with a shrug. Phil is in his early sixties, I would think, and his wife left him about five years ago for a younger man who’s been giving her the runaround ever since. He doesn’t get out much unless we drag him to the pub or for a pizza. Live and Let Fry is pretty much his life. But he looks good for his age. Dapper, you could say. He’s a bit portly due to his largely chip-based diet, and we all tease him about his hair being a bit thin on top. But bald isn’t a bad thing now, is it? Jenny is always trying to fix him up with sundry women, but he doesn’t seem very interested. I think secretly he’s probably worried that he’d end up with someone just like Jenny. And she’s way too much woman for him to handle.
Phil purses his lips in thought. ‘How much do you think it would cost?’
‘No idea.’ I normally have to beg, steal or borrow paint if the decorating urge comes upon me, so I’m somewhat out of touch with B&Q’s current price list. Most of our house is painted with leftover half-tins purloined from my parents’ garage and all mixed together. I’m thinking that Phil might want a slightly more upmarket approach than this. ‘But say you stump up three hundred pounds and see what we can get with that?’ I know that paint’s expensive now – what isn’t? – but the café is only small. ‘If we start on Saturday night, we could work all day Sunday and be open for business again on Monday.’
Phil looks a bit teary. ‘Did anyone ever tell you that you’re a little treasure, Nell McNamara?’
‘All the time,’ I say, lightly batting the compliment away before Phil gets into full blub-mode and starts me off too.
‘You lot might get on my nerves most of the time,’ he jokes, ‘but you’re all like family to me. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
‘If we don’t get some more customers through the doors you might well be finding out,’ I remind him. And I, for one, need this job. So if it means spending my precious weekend slapping a bit of paint on, then that works for me.
As always when we shut up the chippy, I take great pleasure in liberating my long blonde bob from beneath my utilitarian cap, and then I always steal ten minutes for myself and walk a circuitous route home, passing my favourite shop. Today, the crackle of autumn is in the air and I enjoy being outside, breathing in the scent of coffee that drifts from a dozen different cafés that I pass.
We live in the small market town of Hitchin, in the heart of the beautiful county of Hertfordshire. It’s a nice enough place to live, though I’m sure some of its charms have been lost on me after living here for so many years. You take things like that for granted, don’t you? I think if you came here as a visitor you’d love it, but for me, well, it’s just where I live. You don’t really stop to look around and think how fab it is.
My love, Olly Meyers, and I were both born and brought up here and sometimes I think we should move somewhere more obviously cool, more creative, like Brighton or… well, wherever else is more happening. Petal would like it by the sea too. Though this place isn’t exactly a cultural desert when it comes to style. There are some trendy independent boutiques selling weird, wacky and wonderful stuff which I love. Olly and I are both mad keen fans of the sixties – music, films, clothes – and one thing I can say about Hitchin is that we’re well served here when it comes to our passion.
There’s a great market that has been here since time began. I get a lot of clothes cheaply from the vintage stall that’s always there, and the rest I run up on my trusty sewing machine. There are also a couple of fantastic haberdashery stalls that are brilliant for picking up cheap ribbons, buttons and the like. Olly’s favourite pit stop is the second-hand record stall and we have a mountain of vinyl in our spare room. There’s a scooter shop run by one of Olly’s mates – my dearly beloved’s other obsession – and a couple of great retro lifestyle shops that keep us supplied with cheap furnishings.
The chippy is located in one of the small shopping arcades that radiate off from the Market Place. It might be Victorian – I have no idea – but it’s decorated with pretty ironwork and has an arched glass roof. Marvellous for pigeons to settle in, but it’s quaint and full of character. The place isn’t without its fair share of the unsightly 1960s carbuncles that most English towns now harbour, but there’s actually a lot of the centre that’s managed to survive untrammelled by council insanity.
I wander away from the Market Place, turning from the rash of chain stores and down through the old part of town where the shops are in small alleys, still packed tightly together in quaint, timbered buildings, all higgledy-piggledy. This is where my favourite shop is tucked away. Betty the Bag Lady is an oasis for me. When people are stressed they might go to yoga classes or take a swim or down a good glass of Pinot Grigio. Me, I head for Betty the Bag Lady.
The Betty in question isn’t an ageing lady with a blue rinse as her name might suggest. This Betty is young and trendy. She’s even smaller than me and I’m not exactly an Amazonian woman. My mum bought me a school blazer with ‘room to grow’ when I was eleven and it was still way too big for me when I hit sixteen. My mother was clearly overly optimistic about the size I would eventually attain. Betty has her immaculately straightened hair dyed white, whereas mine is a golden blonde and is often tied up so someone doesn’t enjoy a portion of it with their chips. Betty is probably about twenty-five, I’m fast approaching thirty: it’s fair to say that I’m hideously jealous of her. Fancy having your own shop! Oh, I’d think I’d died and gone to heaven.
Clearly Betty paid attention at school and did her homework and went on to do ‘good things’. I stared out of the window and daydreamed and wondered how much better our uniform would have been if it wasn’t fashioned from nylon and had been in luscious shades of pink instead of bottle-green. I lost my homework on the way home, hung round with boys in the park and, so, never amounted to much. I wanted to learn – I really did – I just didn’t want to learn about Pythagoras’s Theorem or Ox-bow lakes or the Tolpuddle Martyrs. I wanted to learn about ‘interesting’ things, even though I had no clue what they might be. I just know that I felt like a very square peg in a very round hole. So I left school at sixteen, ignoring my parents’ despairing pleas and cries of ‘university!’, and drifted. I worked in Tesco and a shoe shop and a dozen other dead-end jobs before I rocked up at Live and Let Fry. Some days I wish I’d tried harder. Some days I love my work. Let’s face it, how many jobs come with free chips?
Betty also runs with the London crowd, whereas I married young and settled down. She ‘knows’ people in the ‘know’. I know no one. If I get another turn at life, I think I’d like to come back as Betty.
This afternoon, Betty the Bag Lady is open for business. The shop has been here for about a year and in my humble opinion, it’s a welcome addition to the Hitchin shopping experience. At night, when I’ve finished my shift and the shop is closed, I actually press my nose against the window and dream of things that might have been.
Betty’s handbags are not mere bags but are veritable works of art and, as such, are completely beyond my price range. I might be a regular visitor here but I’m not a very good customer. I’m purely a window-shopper, but Betty doesn’t seem to mind too much. I come in to coo and purr at the bags, but I always have to put them back on the shelf.
‘Hi, Nell,’ Betty says as I push through the door. ‘All right?’
‘Fine.’ The shop is a calm oasis. If I could ever have my own shop one day, this is the atmosphere I’d like to create. It’s done out like someone’s living room and I can feel myself unwind as soon as I’m over the threshold. The only thing that I’m conscious of is that until I’ve been in the shower, I bring with me the lingering odour of cod and chips. ‘What’s new?’
‘Get a load of these,’ she moons as she strokes a bag I’ve not seen before. ‘New in today. Bought them from a designer up in Manchester.’
The bags are all handmade in felt, vintage-style, and smothered in buttons of all different shapes, sizes and colours. They are luscious and I’m instantly in love. I pick up an oversized one in differing, shimmering rainbow tones – red, yellow, green, blue, orange, purple – and hook it over my arm. It’s mesmerising. And it fits me perfectly.
Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved handbags. My earliest memory is taking my mother’s out of her cupboard and parading round the house with each of them in turn. Looks like I inherited the handbag-fiend gene from her. I am hoping to pass it on to my own daughter, too.
My mum’s responsible for my interest in fashion – compared to my friends’ parents, mine were a tiny bit bohemian and fun. Every Saturday when I was growing up, we’d go into town and look at what was new in the shops. Even if we couldn’t buy anything, we’d spend hours trying stuff on. She often made my clothes for me so I didn’t look like all the other kids and she taught me how to sew and knit, do patchwork and crochet. We’d spend hours together painting in our old, lean-to conservatory – something I’d like to do with Petal if she didn’t have the patience of Attila the Hun. It’s a shame that I hardly see my mum now that I’m older and she’s moved away. Retirement to a small town in Norfolk was something that I hadn’t seen on the cards for her, but she loves it.
My own extensive collection of handbags is in a wardrobe in our spare room, which drives Olly mad as he’d like to take over the entire space for his precious collection of vinyl records. Sometimes I take all the bags out just to look at them. Occasionally I let Petal play with them, just as my mum did with me. Men just don’t get the whole handbag thing, do they? Though they come in surprisingly useful when they want us to carry all their stuff in them. Right? All my handbags are in their own dust bags, each one with happy memories attached. A woman can never have too many handbags.
‘I love it,’ I breathe, admiring myself this way and that in the full-length mirror.
‘Suits you,’ Betty agrees.
‘I can’t even bring myself to ask how much.’
‘A hundred,’ she says. Then, at my sharp intake of breath, ‘I could do you a discount. As a regular.’
I don’t point out that I’m a regular who buys nothing.
‘Even with a discount, I can’t consider it,’ I say reluctantly. Even though it’s much cheaper than many of her bags, Betty might as well have asked me for a million quid. ‘Olly would kill me.’ In a particularly painful manner.
My handbag-buying has been severely curtailed in recent years. Frankly, I can’t even think of the last time I bought one. But I can all too easily bring to mind the mountain of bills sitting on our sideboard: gas, electricity, council tax. The rent is due and as always, Petal needs more shoes. The very last thing on earth that I can afford to splash money on is a fancy handbag.
‘Want me to put it to one side for you?’ Betty cajoles. ‘I could keep it for a couple of weeks if you put a small deposit on it. A tenner would do it.’
I can feel myself weakening. In my purse is a tenner. My last one. In my wardrobe there is the perfect outfit to go with this bag. If there’s a greater temptation than the perfect handbag, then I certainly can’t think of it. Running my fingers over the buttons, I chew at my lip. Surely my child wouldn’t mind wearing scuffed shoes for a while longer for the greater good?
Then I come to my senses. ‘I can’t, Betty. Much as I’d love to.’ Taking the handbag off my shoulder, I reluctantly hand it back to her.
‘Another time,’ she says.
‘Yeah.’ I leave the shop, crestfallen. Another time. Another life.