Jill Mansell - Mixed doubles

‘But you poor thing, how terrible for you. Um ... how did she die?’

‘She killed herself.’

Dulcie was appalled. It wasn’t as if she’d even wanted to know, she had simply remembered that bereaved people got upset when you tried to pretend it hadn’t happened. They didn’t like you changing the subject.

But this was too much. For possibly the first time in her life Dulcie didn’t dare speak.

It seemed safest to keep her mouth shut and just look as sympathetic as she could.

‘Sorry,’ said Eddie, ‘that was awful of me:’I shouldn’t have said it.’

‘You mean it was a wind-up?’ squawked Dulcie, her eyes wide. ‘You total bastard.’

‘No, no, it wasn’t a wind-up.’ Hastily he shook his head.’She did kill herself. I meant I could have put it a bit more subtly. Not dumped it on you like that.’

Dulcie hung her head. ‘I kind of asked for it.’

She looked so forlorn Eddie began to wish he’d stayed in his office.

‘Anyway,’ clumsily he patted her arm, ‘that was all a long time ago. And it isn’t why I’m here now. Actually, I wanted to talk to you about your friend.’

Another one bites the dust, thought Dulcie with an indulgent smile.

‘You mean Liza?’

‘No,’ said Eddie. ‘Pru.’

What people say is true; word of mouth is the best form of advertising. No sooner had Marion Hayes at Beech Farm boasted about Pru to her friends than they were on the phone bagging Pru for themselves. Within a week she was booked up with two hours here, three hours there ... and as much extra work as she liked.

It wasn’t exactly a glittering career but at least she was in demand. And cleaning other people’s bathrooms all week had one major advantage; it definitely made you appreciate your days off.

Which was why, at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, Pru was still in bed when the doorbell rang.

She buried her head under the pillows. Donovan had been bellowing up through the floorboards until the early hours. The bell continued to ring.

Finally — because what if it was Phil? — Pru crawled out of bed and flung a dressing gown over her nightdress. Since the building didn’t stretch to luxuries like intercoms and buzzers, she had to stumble downstairs and pull the door open herself.

If it was Dulcie, she thought with bleary outrage, she jolly well wasn’t going to let her in. It wasn’t even midday; this was too much.

It was weird, opening the door expecting to see thin, laughing, spiky-haired Dulcie and coming face to face with paunchy, thinning-haired Eddie Hammond instead.

‘Oh,’ exclaimed Pru, startled by the sight of him on her doorstep and characteristically wondering what she must have done wrong. ‘Is it the car, has something happened?’ Her huge grey eyes grew defensive. ‘That scratch on the boot was there before I borrowed it.’

‘I know.’ Eddie couldn’t help admiring her slender figure, wrapped in an obviously expensive sage-green satin robe. ‘Sorry if I woke you up. May I come in?’

Pru automatically ran her hands over her slept-on hair, checking her ears weren’t sticking out.

She nodded, bemused by the request, and led the way back upstairs.

‘Tea? Coffee? Um ... would you like to sit down?’

Hurriedly she swept last night’s clothes off the only chair in the room. God, the place was a pit.

It was horrible seeing it through a visitor’s eyes. She must look a berk, too, she realised, prancing around such a dump in her best La Perla nightie. Like Zsa Zsa Gabor camping out at Greenham Common.

‘Dulcie tells me she offered you a room at her house.’ Eddie didn’t think Pru looked a berk but he was shocked by the state of the bedsit. There was mould on the ceiling and strips of wallpaper were peeling themselves off the damp walls. ‘Why didn’t you go?’

Pru busied herself making coffee. She shrugged.

‘I don’t know ... pride? Shame? Something like that.’

‘Come on, she’s your friend. What d’you think she’s going to do, gloat?’

Pru turned and looked at him. Clearly Dulcie had brought him up to date with the story so far.

Where gory details were concerned, holding back wasn’t Dulcie’s style. She couldn’t exercise discretion if she was strapped to a Nautilus machine.

‘She might not mean to gloat, but she’d find it hard not to say I told you so. She and Liza did warn me, you see. They told me what my husband was getting up to and I refused to believe them.’’But still—’

‘Anyway,’ said Pru, handing him his coffee and sitting down on the unmade bed, ‘that’s not the only reason. Dulcie’s still got her house. She doesn’t have to worry about money. I couldn’t bear to feel like the poor relation.’

Eddie shook his head.

‘You’ve had a rough time,’ he said gruffly. ‘I had no idea, until Dulcie told me.’

Cheers, Dulcie, thought Pru. What could she look forward to next, she wondered, charity fundraising? Collecting tins being rattled outside Sainsbury’s? Give generously to the humiliated wives appeal?

Save Pru from Poverty?

‘Here,’ said Eddie Hammond, ‘I’m sorry about the other day, in my office. I shouldn’t have doubted you.’

Pru took the cheque for fourteen hundred pounds. She bit the inside of her mouth and smiled a wry, lopsided smile. Maybe Dulcie wasn’t so bad after all.

‘Thanks.’

‘And I noticed your club membership had run out,’ Eddie went on, handing her a card made out in her name, ‘so I renewed it for you.’

Pru felt herself going red.

‘The thing is ... I can’t really afford ...’

‘You don’t need to,’ Eddie cut in brusquely. ‘It’s my way of apologising. I’m not usually that crass.’

Pinker still, Pru said, ‘Well, thanks.’

‘My pleasure.’ He cleared his throat and looked embarrassed. ‘That’s when you need somewhere to go, after all. When your marriage has just broken up.’

Pru giggled.

‘Now you sound like Dulcie.’

‘It’s what she told me last night,’ Eddie admitted. ‘Still, it seems to work for her.’

‘She’s man-hunting,’ Pru said simply. ‘I’m not.’

* * *

‘Bloody taxis,’ stormed Eddie half an hour later. He peered out of Pru’s second-floor window and yanked up the aerial on his mobile, jabbing out the numbers he had soon grown to know by heart. ‘Hello, hello? Yes, it’s me again. Where the bloody hell’s my cab?’

Pru, still in her dressing gown, watched him scowl into the phone.

‘I said Medwell Crescent, not Street! Just get on to him, will you, and tell him it’s Medwell Crescent. What? You mean he’s picked up his next call? So how long am I supposed to wait before someone—? No, I cannot hang on another twenty bloody minutes!’

The unsatisfying thing about a mobile phone is you can’t slam the receiver down. Eddie, ready to explode with frustration, did the next best thing and tried slamming the aerial down instead.

It snapped off.

‘This is silly.’ Pru dangled her car keys at him. ‘Here, go and sit in the Mini. It’ll take me two minutes to get dressed.’

‘Thanks,’ said Eddie when she dropped him at the railway station with two minutes to spare. The Mini might be a banger but Pru knew how to handle it. She was, he had to admit, an extremely good driver.

As he struggled to open the passenger door he joked, ‘Next time I need a lift, I’ll phone you.’

Pru wondered if it was sitting at the wheel of a car that gave her more confidence. She said, ‘Lots of people hire chauffeurs when they’ve been banned.’

‘I know.’ Eddie sighed. ‘But I don’t need a full-time chauffeur.’

‘You could do with a part-time one. My hours are flexible,’ Pru went on rapidly. ‘The people I clean for don’t mind when I turn up, so long as the job gets done.’