Boy, Snow, Bird(22)

Having sent Sidonie out to buy RC Cola, Mrs. Fletcher returned and asked what she should bring to my dinner party that evening.

“Oh, thanks, but I can handle this.”

She dealt with three letters in rapid succession, writing NO at the top of one, A THOUSAND TIMES NO at the top of another, and OKAY in the margins of a third. “I’m not asking to be helpful,” she said. “I’m asking so as to make sure there’s something there I’ll want to eat.”

I handed her the menu I’d been working on for weeks.

“‘Pear spread and crackers,’” Mrs. Fletcher read aloud. “‘Anchovy ham rolls. Stuffed tomatoes ravigote. Potato salad. Chicken à la King. Banana chiffon cake. Peach pie. Postdinner cocktail: Rye Lane . . . a stupendous blend of whiskey, cura?ao, orange squash, and crème de noyaux, stirred, not shaken, as recommended by the International Association of Bartenders.’”

She leaned back in her chair. “Why on earth are you putting yourself through all this on your own birthday? And what’s pear spread? Life has changed a lot, you know. You didn’t used to get all this food inside food inside food when I was a girl. The other day I was eating a mushroom and found it had been stuffed with prawns. I’ve got so many misgivings over this craze, Boy. It’s flying in the face of nature. A mushroom is a woodland fungus and a prawn comes from the sea. People have got no business stuffing one inside the other. Are the Whitmans treating you well?”

“What?” My mind was on the pear spread. I’d already made it the night before, over at Arturo’s. It was sitting in a bowl in his refrigerator looking radioactive.

“The Whitmans. Arturo Whitman’s family. Are they treating you well?”

“Oh. Yes. Gerald keeps issuing orders to Arturo not to let me get away and Viv’s very sisterly and Olivia’s very motherly and—it’s nice.”

She nodded. “Olivia Whitman looks so young, doesn’t she?”

“Yup.”

I typed I hope this finds you well, which was pretty high up on the list of phrases Mrs. Fletcher would never include in a letter if she was writing it herself.

She lifted a lock of her hair with a pencil and gave it a baleful stare. This was the first gesture of concern about her appearance that I’d seen from her. She cut her own hair carelessly, with regular kitchen scissors, and it showed. The ends looked like a bar graph. The hair itself was fine, though—rich brown streaked with gray. “I’m about the same age as she is,” she said. “I just don’t know how she does it.”

Olivia made Mrs. Fletcher nervous. That was difficult to process. I’d recently come across a proverb about not speaking unless you’d thought of something that was better than silence. So I kept typing.

Mrs. Fletcher wanted to know if she could ask me a personal question. I gave her an “mmm hmmm” that Snow would’ve been proud of.

“Do you know what it is you want from Arturo?”

An impressive U-turn, but I didn’t look up from my work. “You guessed right, Mrs. Fletcher. I’m a gold digger. If you know anyone richer and more gullible, let me at him.”

The bell above the shop door jangled—Sidonie or a customer. There was a quiet exchange of words in the next room, followed by the sound of caps falling off soda bottles. Sidonie, then.

“Nobody’s calling you a gold digger,” Mrs. Fletcher said. “Let me explain myself.”

“You don’t have to.”

She reached over and took my hand, patted it. “But if I don’t, you’ll poison me tonight, won’t you? I want to be able to enjoy my cocktail, just as the International Association of Bartenders recommends. Listen—I’m not a Flax Hill original, either. I’m from a market town in the South of England.”

“So that’s why you talk like that!”

“Well, what did you think?”

“I thought you just went to one of those . . . schools.”

“Oh, good grief. I’m not in the mood for this. Don’t interrupt me anymore. My husband died nine years ago, and I came here looking for some trace of him. He was my right-hand man for twenty-three years. No children; we married late, liked books, and liked each other and that was all. His heart was dodgy—anatomically speaking, I mean—and it killed him. I was all undone. That man. The first time we met, he called me cookie. I said ‘I beg your pardon?’ and he said ‘You heard. When are we having dinner?’ so I said ‘We might as well have it now.’ Then a week later he agreed to marry me—”

“You asked him?”

“I don’t mess about.”

“And he never brought you here while he was alive?”

“No. He told me he was a misfit in his hometown. But it wasn’t true. I barged into people’s homes and found him in their photo albums, being carried around on people’s shoulders. Homecoming King! People here are nice to me just because I’m his wife—was his wife, I mean. When I opened this store, so many people came by and bought books. Not to read them, I don’t think. Well, Joe Webster might read The Canterbury Tales one day . . . anyway, it was a gesture, to help me set up. I’d never seen anything like it.”

“I didn’t know you cared about being liked.”

“It isn’t a matter of like or dislike, and you know it. People are nice to me for his sake. They remember him. It’s a different Leonard they remember—he was becoming the man I ended up falling head over heels in love with. But that’s fine. We’ve all got different pieces of him to put together. It means I’m closer to him here than I would be in Newton Abbot.”