‘Both of those guys are looking real smart tonight,’ said Winnie. ‘Maurice always makes the effort, but Sid’s gone to town too this time. I wonder why he’s decided to smarten himself up. You’re looking very stylish as well, Frank, if you don’t mind me saying. What is it with you men this evening? Are you all on the pull?’
Winnie laughed uproariously at her own question, but Frank didn’t reply. He stood up to fetch more drinks but paused when he saw Maurice coming back. This time the other man didn’t pass by their table but stopped right in front of Anthea.
‘Hello there,’ said Anthea. ‘I wondered when you’d get around to noticing me tonight. Thought I’d done something to offend you.’
Just then, the jukebox finished playing the last track selected by the celebrating ladies and the sudden lack of background noise caused most of the games players to stop talking momentarily. Maurice cleared his throat.
‘Anthea… erm… Anthea…’ he said, his voice husky.
She looked up at him and smiled. ‘That’s me, darling. Is there a problem?’
‘I hope not. I mean… the problem is, if there was one… is that I’ve waited so long.’
Everyone in the pub was obviously waiting too. Maurice had upped the volume this time and his words carried clearly right around the room.
‘The thing is, Anthea, I want to ask you a very important question.’
There was a collective sharp intake of breath, and somebody called out, ‘Go on, mate, spit it out.’
Maurice took hold of the back of Anthea’s chair and lowered himself carefully onto one knee. ‘You’re a fine woman, Anthea,’ he said. ‘I respect you and I… I love you dearly. Will you make me the happiest man alive and marry me?’
Still nobody spoke. The tension in the air was so strong that Beryl feared one of them was going to have a stroke. She fervently hoped it wasn’t her. Anthea still hadn’t replied, so Beryl gave her a nudge. ‘Answer him. Go on,’ she hissed.
Anthea looked down at Maurice as he knelt on the hard tiled floor. ‘Get up while you can still move, you silly man. Your knees aren’t as young as they were. Yes, of course I’ll marry you. I thought you’d never ask.’
The pub erupted to wild cheers and Maurice hauled himself to his feet, helped by Sam and Rick who rushed across to give him a hand. Anthea stood up too and as soon as she could see that Maurice was stable on his feet, she opened her arms and they embraced, holding each other close for so long that wolf whistles and cries of ‘get a room’ replaced the cheering.
Beryl swallowed hard, blinking to stop her tears falling. How romantic was that? She looked across at Frank and saw that he was similarly moved, pulling out a handkerchief and wiping his eyes. Fancy Anthea sayingyesto Maurice. Beryl had assumed after their recent talk that four marriages would have been enough for her friend but here she was, obviously up for another try.
‘Congratulations,’ she said loudly, joining everyone else in a round of applause. Even Ned was whooping from behind the bar.
‘Fizz on the house for the happy couple,’ he called to his staff, who busied themselves assembling a tray with glasses and popping the cork on a bottle of Prosecco.
‘You’d have thought he’d have managed a bottle of proper champagne for an occasion like this,’ said Frank under his breath to Beryl. ‘Never mind, we can have our own party with them another time, and it’ll be Veuve Clicquot for that one. There’s a lot to be said for second-chance romances.’
‘Or fifth-chance,’ said Beryl, with a grin, but Frank wasn’t smiling. He looked as if he was about to say something, but the arrival of the Prosecco distracted him, nestling in a silver ice bucket, an extra touch from Ned who was smiling at them all benevolently from the other side of the bar.
Maurice and Anthea were now accepting congratulations from all and sundry, even people they had never met before. Beryl thought she had never seen her friend so relaxed and happy. With the best will in the world, you couldn’t describe Anthea as chilled. She was a tad haughty at times, with a tendency to look down on lesser mortals, but her generosity knew no bounds and Beryl hoped to goodness that this marriage would bring Anthea the happiness she’d been searching for. So many failed attempts at finding the right partner would have soured most people but Anthea was made of sterner stuff. She was still brave enough to have another go.
When the hubbub had died down and they were all seated again, with Maurice having abandoned his game of cards to sit by his beloved, Beryl leaned over to Anthea and whispered, ‘Good for you, girl. No looking back, onwards and upwards now.’
Anthea smiled at Beryl and reached out to give her friend’s hand a squeeze. ‘The past is another country,don’t they say? I’m all for living life in the present moment, aren’t you?’
Beryl wanted to say yes to the last question, she really did, but the more she thought about it, the more the past was looming much too large in her life since Venetia Prescott had returned to Willowbrook. If only she could be like Anthea and shrug off everything that had gone before. Beryl had a feeling that even if she wanted to seize the day and forget it all, the trigger of her new neighbour rejoining the village community was going to make that task absolutely impossible.
13
Vee stretched out in the bath and twiddled the tap with her toes to let in more hot water. Her skin was already starting to turn prune-like, and pangs of hunger were making thoughts of toasted cheese sandwiches very tempting, but the water was blissfully hot, and Rick’s bubble bath was one of those muscle-relaxing ones that smelt of eucalyptus. This experience was too good to cut short.
She half-closed her eyes and let her mind drift to a time in the past when she’d enjoyed this kind of luxury. It had been a while ago because one awful day, Nigel, in the earlier years when cleanliness had still been important to him, had decided to surprise her with a brand-new wet room. He’d waited until Vee had gone away for the weekend with some work friends, got someone in to rip out the lovely old claw-footed bath that she’d adored and replaced it with a state-of-the-art power shower with a rainfall feature and room for two people inside.
When Vee returned home, he’d unveiled his reconstruction with such pride that for a few minutes she was speechless.
‘But I loved having a bath,’ she’d said eventually. ‘Why didn’t you ask me first?’
Nigel’s face fell and his bottom lip stuck out. He soon became a giant toddler if anyone dared to disagree with one of his ideas, able to sulk for several days or sometimes weeks if he was crossed.
‘I thought you’d like it,’ he said. ‘And anyway, this is my flat, in case you’d forgotten. If I want to make improvements to increase its value, you should be pleased, not stand there looking like I’ve done something bad. What’s wrong with you?’
