‘With the freak and the cops.’
‘Why do you call him the freak? Oh.’ She looked around again. ‘Oh, I get it! That’s what happened, with that tourist, right? He just freaked out? Wow.’ She shook her head gravely, noting, with satisfaction, the grins on the faces of Frog and the Tadpoles fading to frowns. Hamming it up, she hissed, ‘You didn’t hear it from me but he’s still at the police station. Rufus said it was self-defence but,y’know.’
A pause for effect, then she hurried back into the tearoom and watched through the window as the three boys gazed at each other and madewhat the fuck?faces.
Content with her first foray into reinventing Ru as a badass, she danced into the kitchen and reached around to untie her apron. Robina looked up from sliding a heavy fruitcake into a green-and-white tin. ‘We’re stopping serving, now, so I thought that, as you’re working out so well you could stay another hour and help us with the clean down.’ She made it sound like a treat that Honor had earned by merit.
It turned out that ‘help us with the clean down’ actually meant ‘help Sophie with the clean down’, while Robina slid sponge cakes destined to become tomorrow’s gateaux out of the oven and on to cooling racks, carrying them tenderly off to spend the night on a marble shelf in an adjoining pantry, safe from blasting bleach sprays.
Honor helped wash counters and polish stainless steel so that it didn’t dry streaky, joining in when Sophie sang James Taylor songs as she worked. Her dad had just about every track that James Taylor had recorded.
‘Time for a treat for the workers!’ Robina sailed back into the kitchen and frothed up three mugs of coffee, then sandwiched together coffee cake with leftover chocolate frosting, spread some over the top, sprinkled the frosting with chopped nuts — blithely undoing much of the clean down — and led Sophie and Honor outside to one of the as-yet-to-be-sanitised green-painted tables.
Sophie seemed quite unfazed by having her kitchen mucked up in pursuit of a jolly calorific break. Robina obviously wasn’t a routine kind of woman. At this rate, Honor would finish at nearer six than four-thirty. But, anyway. Having served delectable cake to other people for most of the day, she really did feel that she deserved a piece. Her waistline would forgive her, especially when she re-established her planned routine of running and dancing.
Following their lead, she propped her feet on the rungs of the table and tipped her chair just enough to relieve the pressure from the base of the spine, as the last few customers finished up at other tables, people strolled the street and the traffic built up.
‘There he is!’ Robina burst out, just as Honor took her first bite of the beautifully moist coffee cake, the chocolate frosting melting like music on her tongue.
Sophie snorted. ‘Oh, Robina!’ Her brows curled crossly. ‘You’re really sad, sometimes, Robbie. A sad old bat.’
Honor paused mid-bite, astounded that Sophie could, apparently, be something other than sycophantically approving of Robina.
Robina’s expression was tragic, her eyes welling real tears. ‘Isn’t he gorgeous? Look at those eyes. Look at that body! Isn’t it knicker-wetting? I love him, I love him, Ilovehim.’
Bewildered, Honor followed Robina’s gaze. It was fixed on one of the cream-and-red buses that rolled down The Butts several times a day in the direction of Marine Drive. On the bus side was an advertisement for men’s cologne from le Dur, a two-deck-high black-and-white image of a man whose dark stubble defined a cleft chin and hollow cheeks, his naked torso sculpted and spare, his stretchy, sketchy cotton trunks clinging.
‘I love him,’ Robina whispered.
Chapter Eleven
‘Holy shit!’ Honor inhaled half her cake.
Hacking and coughing through a suffocation of crumbs, she blinked streaming eyes to gaze at about fifteen feet of smouldering Martyn Mayfair as the image moved slowly down the street. ‘Martyn’s amodel?’
‘Don’t we all know it?’ sniffed Sophie, patting Honor between the shoulder blades with enough force to suggest she was mad about something.
‘I sure didn’t!’ She looked over to Robina. ‘And you, um . . . ?’
Robina, eyes still glued to the bus, was hugging herself and rocking. ‘I’m in love with him. And he rips my guts out on a regular basis because he hardly seems to know that I exist.’
‘Right.’ Honor wiped her eyes. She could have told Robina that Martyn certainly did know that Robina existed — but, classic stalker avoidance, he was ignoring her. Refusing to engage. Refusing to feed her obsession.
She felt sorry for Robina but, wow. For his picture to be fifteen-feet high on a bus, Martyn must be ‘someone’. Possibly he dealt with unwanted attention all the time. Images of his near-naked body were in the street for any crazy lady to drool over. Holy freakin’ Joe. When he’d mentioned Twitter and Facebook he probably meant that people could ‘like’ his pages and join as ‘fans’.
Slowly, her image of Martyn broke and reformed. It wasn’t that he didn’t have much work.
He just didn’t have to work much.
She cringed when she remembered trying to tip him ten pounds for shopping for her groceries. Zoë had just sent him off on the errand like he was her little brother. Not a male model, with his picture on the side of a bus.
Him from the buses.That’s what Rufus had called him.
We’ve been shooting on Brighton beach.Shooting photos, dur-brain!
One of the Mayfairs doesn’t hide very much.Honor had brushed Peggy’s schoolgirl giggling aside as incomprehensible English humour but now . . . well, those tight trunks weren’t hiding much of Martyn Mayfair.
The bus trundled off to pick up passengers in Saltdean and Rottingdean. ‘And you’re in love with him,’ Honor repeated, blankly.
