“In that pull-down section of the sideboard, the old one. Flo called it her bureau. You’ll have your work cut out sorting through that lot. I think she kept every single letter she ever got.”
Bel was right. When I opened the bureau I found hundreds, possibly thousands, of pieces of paper and letters still in their envelopes, crammed in every pigeonhole and shelf. I felt tempted to close it again and snuggle on the sofa with sherry and a book, but I’d been irresponsible for far too long. I sighed and pulled out a thick wad of gas bills addressed to Miss Florence Clancy, which, to my astonishment, went back as far as 1941, when the quarterly bill was two and sevenpence.
I wondered what the flat had looked like then—and wasted ages envisaging a young Flo, living alone and pining after Tommy O’Mara. Perhaps that’s what the row with Gran had been about, Flo going out with a married man. Gran was incredibly straitlaced, though it didn’t seem serious enough to make them lifelong enemies.
The cardboard boxes I’d brought were in the bathroom so I fetched one and threw in the bills. Then I almost took them out again. Flo had kept them for more than half a century and it seemed a shame to chuck them away. I pulled myself together, and more than fifty years of electricity bills quickly joined them. I decided I deserved a break, made coffee and helped myself to a packet of Nice biscuits. On my way to the settee, I jumped when something clattered through the letterbox.
It was a book: The Admiralty Regrets. I opened the door, but whoever had delivered it had disappeared.
Fiona was leaning against the railings, smoking. “Hi,” I said awkwardly.
She glared at me malevolently through the railings.
“Sod off,” she snarled.
Shaken, I closed the door, and put the book aside to read later. I returned to the bureau with my coffee and continued to throw out old papers. One thick wedge of receipts was intriguing. From a hotel in the Isle of Man, they were made out to a Mr and Mrs Hoffmansthal, who had stayed there for the weekend almost every month from 1949 until 1975. I decided to ask Bel about them, then changed my mind. Bel had mentioned that Flo went on retreat to a convent in Wales once a month. Perhaps Flo had kept a few secrets from her old friend and I certainly wasn’t about to reveal them after all this time. I threw away the receipts with a sigh. How I’d love to know what lay behind them, and especially the identity of Mr Hoffmansthal.
The contents of the bureau were considerably diminished by the time the unimportant papers had been discarded. All that remained were letters, which I had no intention of throwing away until I’d read every one.
Some looked official, big fat brown envelopes, the address typed, but most were handwritten. I tugged out a wad of letters held together with an elastic band. The top one bore a foreign stamp. It had been posted in 1942.
It dawned on me that I hadn’t found the rent book that had prompted my search, or a pension book. Flo might have had them in her handbag, which, like Gran, she had kept hidden. After a fruitless search through all the cupboards, I found what I was looking for under the bed, where dust was already beginning to collect.
I took the black leather bag into the living room and emptied the contents on to the coffee table. A tapestry purse fell out, very worn and bulging with coins, followed by a set of keys on a Legs of Man keyring, a wallet, shop receipts, bus tickets, cheque book, metal compact, lipstick, comb . . . I removed a silver hair from the comb and ran it between my fingers. It was the most intimate thing belonging to Flo I’d ever touched, actually part of her. The room was very still, and I almost felt as if she was in the room with me. Yet I wasn’t scared.
Even when I opened the compact to compare the hair with mine in the mirror, half expecting to see Flo’s face instead of my own, I didn’t feel frightened, more a comfortable sensation of being watched by someone who cared about me. I knew I was being silly because Flo and I had only set eyes on each other once, and then briefly.
“One day my hair will turn that colour,” I murmured, and wondered where I would be and who I would be with, should I live to be as old as Flo. For the first time in my life, I thought it would be nice to have children, so that a strange woman I hardly knew wouldn’t sort through my possessions when I died.
I came back to earth, told myself to be sensible. The cheque book meant that, like Gran since she’d been robbed, Flo’s pension had probably been paid straight into the bank. I flicked through the stubs to see if cheques had been made out for rent, but most appeared to be for cash, which was no help. I would have asked Charmian for the landlord’s address, but glancing at my watch, I saw it was past midnight.
Good! It was a perfect excuse to sleep in Flo’s comfortable bed again.
One by one, I returned the things to the bag, glancing briefly in the wallet, which held only a bus pass, a cheque guarantee card, four five-pound notes, and a card listing a series of dental appointments two years ago. I was putting the bag away in the bureau when there was a knock on the door.
James! He’d been to my flat, waited, and when I didn’t arrive he had guessed where I would be. I wouldn’t let him in. If I did, he’d never keep away and this was the only place where no one could reach me. It was one of the reasons why I always seemed to forget to bring my mobile phone. I fumed at the idea of him invading what I’d come to regard as my sanctuary.
“Who is it?” I shouted.
“Tom O’Mara.”
I stood, transfixed, in the middle of the room, my stomach churning. I knew I should tell him what I’d intended to tell James, to go away, but common sense seemed to have deserted me, along with any willpower I might have had. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d opened the door.
Oh, Lord! I’d thought this only happened in books—turning weak at the knees at the sight of a man. The jacket of his black suit was hanging open, and the white collarless shirt, buttoned to the neck, gave him a priest-like air. Neither of us spoke as he followed me inside, with that sensually smooth walk I’d noticed the night before, bringing with him an atmosphere charged with electricity. I patted my hair nervously, aware that my hand was shaking. He was carrying a plastic bag that smelt of food. My mouth watered and I realised I was starving.
He held it out. “Chinese, from the takeaway round the corner. Joe said there was someone in when he came with the book so I thought I’d see if you were still here on me way home.”
“What’s this in aid of?” I gulped.
“Peace-offering,” he said abruptly. “Flo would have slagged me off for behaving the way I did last night. No one can help the way they speak, you and me included.”
“That’s charitable of you, I must say.” I’d worked hard to get rid of my accent, and felt annoyed that Tom O’Mara seemed to regard the lack of one as an affliction.
“Shall we forget about last night and start again?” He bagged my favourite spot on the settee and began to unpack the cartons of food. “You’re Millie, I’m Tom, and we’re about to have some nice Chinese nosh—I don’t know if you want to use these plastic forks, Flo used to fetch proper ones, and she’d warm plates up in the microwave. She didn’t like eating out of boxes.”
I hurried to do as I was told, sensing that he was accustomed to giving orders, when he shouted, “Fetch a corkscrew and some glasses while you’re at it. I’ve got wine.”
“It’s red,” he said, when I obediently brought everything in. “I’m an ignorant bugger and I don’t know if that’s what you have with this sort of food.”
“Neither do I.’James always knew what sort of wine to order but I’d never taken much notice.
“I thought you’d be one of those superior sort of people who know about such things.” He shared out the food on to the plates.
“And I thought we’d made a fresh start.”
“You’re right. Sorry!” His smile took my breath away.
His face softened and he looked charmingly boyish. I could understand what the nineteen-year-old Flo must have seen in his grandfather.
“Did you and Flo do this often?” I asked, when he handed me my plate.
“Once a week. Mondays, usually, when I finish work early.”
“Where do you work?”
“Minerva’s. It’s a club.”
I’d heard of Minerva’s, but had never been there. It had a terrible reputation as a hang-out for gangsters and a source of hard drugs. Scarcely a week passed when there wasn’t something in the Echo or on local TV about the police raiding it in search of a wanted criminal or because a fight had broken out. As I sipped the rich, musky wine, I wondered what Tom O’Mara did there.
“The wine’s nice,” I said.
“So it should be. It’s twenty-two quid a bottle at the club.”
“Wow!” I gasped. “All that much to have with a takeaway!”
He dismissed this with a wave of the hand. “It didn’t cost me anything, I just helped meself ‘You mean you stole it?’
He managed to look both amused and indignant. “I’m past the stage of nicking things, thanks all the same.
Minerva’s belongs to me. I can take anything I like.”
I felt a chill run through my body. He was almost certainly a criminal—he might have been in prison for all I knew. If he owned Minerva’s, it meant he was involved in the drugs trade and other activities that didn’t bear thinking about. But the awful thing, the really appalling thing, was that he became even more desirable in my eyes. I was horrified. I’d never dreamed it was in me to be attracted to someone like Tom O’Mara. Perhaps it was something passed down in the blood: Flo had wasted her life on a scally who, according to Bel, wasn’t fit to lick her boots, Mum had fallen for my loathsome father. Now I found myself weak at the knees over possibly the most unsuitable man in the whole of Liverpool. I thought about James, who loved me and was worth ten Tom O’Maras, and for a moment wished it really had been him at the door.
I put my plate on the table and Tom said, “You haven’t eaten much.”
“I’ve eaten half,” I said defensively. “I haven’t a very big appetite.” He’d already finished, the plate scraped clean.
“I tell you what, let’s have some music” He went over to the record player and lifted the lid.
“Flo’s only got the one record.”
“She’s got a whole pile in the sideboard. Neil Diamond and Tony Bennett were her favourites. I got her this last year when she started humming it nonstop. She’d play it over and over.” The strains of “Dancing in the Dark” began to fill the room. “She said something once, she was half asleep, about dancing in the dark with someone in the Mystery years ago.”
“The Mystery?” I wondered if it had ever crossed his mind that the “someone” might well have been his grandad.
“Otherwise known as Wavertree playground. There’s a sports stadium there now.” He removed his jacket, saying, “It’s hot in here,” and I felt my insides quiver at the sight of his long, lean body, his slim waist.
“You were very fond of Flo?”
“I wasn’t just fond of her, I loved her,” he said simply. “I dunno why ‘cos she weren’t a relative, but she was more like a gran than me real one. Christ knows what I’d have done without Flo when me dad died.’
Surely he couldn’t be so bad if he’d thought so much of Flo. Bing Crosby was singing and I had no idea why I should have a feeling that history was repeating itself when Tom held out his hand and said with a grin, “Wanna dance, girl?”
I knew I should refuse. I knew I should just laugh and shrug and say, “No, thanks, I’m not in the mood,” because I also knew what would happen when he took me in his arms. And if it did, if it did, the day might come when I would regret it. The trouble was, I had never before wanted anything so much. My body was crying out for him to touch me.
The lamp continued its steady progress, round and round, casting its dark, blurred shadows on the low ceiling of the room, and I stared at the shifting patterns, looking for the girl in the red coat. Tom O’Mara came across the room, put his hands on my waist and lifted me out of the chair. For a moment I resisted, then threw all caution to the wind. I slid my arms around his neck and kissed him. I could feel him, like a rock, pressing against me. My veins seemed to melt when our exploring tongues met, while his hard, eager hands stroked my back, my waist, my hips, burning, as if his fingers were on fire.
Still kissing, swaying together almost imperceptibly to the music, we moved slowly towards the bedroom. Outside the door, in the little cold lobby, our lips parted, and Tom cupped my face in his hands. He stared deep into my eyes, and knew that he wanted me every bit as much as I wanted him. Then he opened the door, where the bed with its snowy white cover was waiting, and led me inside. By now, I felt weak with longing, yet once again I hesitated. There was still time to back out, to say no. But Tom O’Mara was kissing me again, touching me with those hot fingers, and I couldn’t have said no to save my life. He kicked the door shut behind us.
In the living room, “Dancing in the Dark” played through to a glorious crescendo. When it finished, I imagined, in a little corner of my mind, the needle raising itself automatically and the arm returning to nestle in the metal groove. There was silence in Flo Clancy’s flat, though I knew that the lamp continued to cast its restless shadows over the walls.
I was woken by Tom O’Mara stroking my hip. “You should have eaten the rest of that meal,” he whispered.
“You could do with a bit more flesh on you.”
Turning languorously into his arms, I began to touch him, but he caught my hand. “I’ve got to go.”
“Is there nothing I can do to keep you?” I said teasingly.
“Nothing.”
He got out of bed and began to get dressed. I could have kept James in bed if the building was on fire. I lay, admiring his willpower and his slim brown limbs. His skin was as slippery as polished marble, the hollow of his neck as smooth as an egg. There was a tattoo on his chest, a heart with an arrow through it, and a woman’s name I couldn’t make out. I’d always thought tattoos repulsive, though it was a bit late in the day to remember that.
“What’s the hurry?” I enquired.
“It’s nearly seven o’clock. Me wife doesn’t mind me staying out all night, but she likes me home for breakfast.”