On the television, one of the Antiques Roadshow experts, a silver-haired man in a striped blazer, was admiring a porcelain racehorse with a round, analogue clock set into its midriff. The expert was extolling its virtues as a fine, rare, example of Art Deco.
Claudette Penze-Weedell, feeling decidedly sloshed, watched with sudden interest. She held a glass of prosecco in her hand from one of the bottles Maurice had bought for Christmas, which she had insisted he open tonight.
He’d been reluctant at first, telling her she had really drunk quite enough at the pub at lunchtime, and that they needed to watch the pennies, but she had played the card that always worked, telling him to open a bottle if he wanted any hope of action in the bedroom tonight.
She unwrapped and scoffed a Green Triangle, her least favourite of the chocolates, which were all that now remained of the Quality Street collection. She would need to pay a visit to the supermarket tomorrow to buy another tub, or realistically two, to last her through the holidays – so long as she hid them on Christmas Day when all their greedy relatives would be with them, most of them Maurice’s. She’d married a man who came from a family of gannets.
‘And now to put a value on this,’ the expert said. ‘Well, if I were to put this to auction, I would place a reserve on it of at least twenty thousand pounds.’
The woman on the screen, in tight close-up, gasped.
Claudette gasped, too. Her eyes shot to the glass cabinet. To the porcelain donkey with the sombrero on its head and the square quartz clock in its belly, which she had picked up in the Martlets charity shop in Brighton for ten pounds.
Twenty thousand pounds!
‘Maurice!’ she called out, excitedly.
There was no response.
‘Maurice!’
She smelled cigar smoke.
‘Maurice?’
The smell of cigar smoke became stronger.
‘Maurice? What do you think you’re doing? You’re smoking indoors – you know that I—’
A shadowy figure, with a glowing cigar, passed the open doorway to the hall.
‘Maurice, what on earth do you think you are doing?’ She jumped up, angrily. Had he taken leave of his senses, smoking indoors? He knew how asthmatic she was. Hurrying to the doorway, with the smell of cigar smoke even stronger there, she yelled, ‘Maurice!’
To her right, at the end of the hall, she heard the rattle of a lock. The front door opened and Maurice, returning from his evening constitutional, wrapped up in his coat, hat and gloves, entered.
‘Bloody hell, love, it’s cold out there tonight!’ he said.