Claire hadn’t had a firm plan about where she was going to go at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning. All she’d known was that she wanted to get out of that house, that she couldn’t bear another moment knowing that lying, scheming, rotten Nick was probably less than twenty feet away, no matter where she went in her flat.
No. Not Nick. Dominic.
Slipping up on that just made the rage swirl higher again. How could she have been so stupid? Hadn’t she told herself not to get hoodwinked? Hadn’t she told herself to be careful? How had she missed all those really obvious clues? She couldn’t believe she’d done it all over again.
Well, that was it then. No more men in her life. She obviously couldn’t be trusted to pick the good ones. Otherwise she’d choose someone like Doug, who was sweet and kind, charming and … well … rich. The only other option was to cloister herself away for the rest of her life and stay celibate. Which meant she probably should give up Doris and start crushing on Julie Andrews instead.
She threw her suitcase into the back of her car and then got in and started to drive. It was an irritatingly lovely morning. The clear golden light was dancing through the leaves on the trees that lined the roads and the birds were singing. It was the kind of morning for making love and having long lazy breakfasts that lasted until three. It annoyed her immensely that the faint possibility of those things had now been wiped completely from her horizon.
She stopped and got a cappuccino from a café she didn’t normally go in, but was far enough away from her flat that there was no danger of … him … that man … stumbling into her. Her stomach rolled with shame again.
Oh, she’d thought it was so cute that he’d kept popping up everywhere, like it had been fate or something, and all the time he’d probably been following her like a creepy stalker. She shuddered so hard that some of the foam from her cappuccino slopped onto the tabletop and she had to dab it up with a napkin.
This was good. Thinking things like this about him was good. She had to keep her anger burning bright and hot, because if she let it go out … If she got close to admitting to herself that she’d started to feel something deep for him, something real … Well, that big trapdoor might open up again inside her and she’d fall in and never, ever make it out. So she sat there, sipping her cappuccino and ignoring the gnawing feeling tugging at her insides.
After two hours of driving around North London, wondering if she should get a hotel room, she headed for the only place she could think of that might give her a friendly welcome.
She stood on Peggy’s doorstep, feeling like a stray puppy as she rang the doorbell. Peggy answered, not looking too sleepy, thank goodness, in a kimono and high-heeled fluffy pink slippers.
‘Claire!’ she exclaimed when she saw her standing there, red case at her heels. ‘Jeepers! What happened?’
Claire, who had been ready to launch into a plea for sanctuary, promptly burst into tears. Peggy, bless her, didn’t bat an eyelid, but just wrapped her arms around her friend and held her until the sobbing turned into hiccupping.
‘S-sorry,’ Claire stuttered as she pulled away, trying to mop the worst of her tears up with the ends of her cardigan sleeves. ‘I didn’t mean to do that.’
Peggy gave her another sympathetic squeeze. ‘Looks like you needed to.’
Claire sniffed. ‘And I’m sorry for barging in on you so early on a Sunday morning. It was just …’ she broke off to do a percussive little sob ‘… I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I would have tried Maggs, but she’s in Bournemouth this weekend, visiting her brother.’
Peggy waved her apologies away and shooed her into her flat. Once Claire had been ordered to sit on the leatherette sofa in Peggy’s fifties-themed living room and brought a cup of coffee and a couple of chocolate digestives, Peggy sat down in an armchair and looked steadily at Claire. ‘What on earth happened?’
Claire closed her eyes. She didn’t even know where to start. All sorts of explanations whirled round her head, most of them half finished. In the end, she grabbed hold of the simplest one – the reason why she was here.
‘Can I sleep on your sofa for a couple nights?’
Peggy smiled at her. ‘I can do better than that. My new flatmate – the one I got after Nicole moved out to get married – is away with her boyfriend in Vienna. You can have her room. I’ll send her a text. I’m sure she won’t mind.’
Claire nodded gratefully. ‘Vienna’s lovely this time of year,’ she said, her voice sounding strained and damp.
‘I’m sure it is,’ Peggy said, fixing her with a determined stare, ‘but that’s not the issue here, is it? What’s all this about, Claire? Is something wrong with your flat?’
Claire felt the tide of tears rising again, so she clamped her mouth shut and just nodded. When she felt as if she’d found that balance between letting go enough to be able to talk, but not so much she descended into sobbing, she very carefully let a few words out her mouth. ‘It’s more what’s underneath my flat.’
‘Dry rot?’
Claire shook her head. ‘Worse.’
Peggy’s eyebrows shot up. ‘A sink hole?’
Claire shook her head harder. ‘A no-good, rotten, lying scumbag of a man.’
Peggy nodded. ‘Know the breed,’ she muttered then sank back into her armchair. ‘But I thought you were seeing Nick. Is he the scumbag? And what’s that got to do with your flat?’
Claire launched into the whole story, starting with the day she’d fallen over that stupid bike in the hallway and ended up with marching out on … that man … this morning. ‘So Maggs was right,’ she said, as she came to the end. ‘There was certainly a lot more to my downstairs neighbour than I ever imagined!’
Peggy just stared at her, shaking her head in amazement. ‘Flipping heck,’ she said. ‘It’s like you’ve got your own little Doris alternative universe going on!’
Of all the things Peggy could have said, Claire had not been expecting her to say that. She leaned forward in her chair and stared at her. ‘What?’
Peggy just gave her a you-can’t-mess-with-fate kind of look. ‘Your life … It’s turned into the plot of Pillow Talk.’
Claire, despite her recent crying jag, began to laugh softly. She’d obviously crossed over from despair to hysteria, the way people did at funerals, when everything had got too much and the only way to cope was to go a little crazy. ‘No it isn’t! I haven’t got a party line and I’d definitely know if that rat had a piano in his flat and was singing to women all day long!’
‘Not the exact plot!’ Peggy said, slightly exasperated, as if Claire should know that instinctively. ‘The mistaken identity – him sussing you out before you’d realised it was him. Then there’s the emails and texts, the twenty-first century version of all those intimate pyjama-clad phone calls. The fact he’s been trying to charm you, but digging himself in even deeper.’
‘Trying to charm himself into my knickers, don’t forget!’
Peggy winked at her as she swung her legs round to drape them over the arm of her chair and dunked her digestive in her coffee. ‘Would that be such a bad thing? He is pretty hot!’
Claire suddenly wished with a passion Maggs had been home this weekend.
‘Yes! That would be such a bad thing!’ she said loudly, then frowned. Just for a moment she’d reminded herself of Doris in that scene with the phone company man, the one where she’s complaining of sharing a party line with a sex maniac and ends up coming off all uptight and frigid instead of squarely in the right. Which she was. And so was Claire.
‘Because he’s no Rock Hudson and I’m no Doris Day!’ Claire replied, feeling all hot around her ears. ‘And because this is real life, not a sixties romcom. He’s not going to come good in the end and ask me to marry him.’ She folded her arms. ‘I wouldn’t even if he did! There’s no way to gloss over what he’s done and pretend it’s okay.’
‘I suppose you’re right, but it would be cool if it did turn out that way.’
Claire sighed too. Yes, it would. She’d always thought how much fun it would be to be in one of those madcap comedies of Doris’s, but now it was actually happening to her she realised it wasn’t as nearly as much fun as she’d thought it would be.
‘So, what will you do now?’ Peggy asked. ‘You can’t let him drive you out of your own home.’
Claire nodded and contemplated that concept, let her mind wander and cook up ways she could drive him out. Fun though that was, she wasn’t being very realistic. There really was only one thing she could do.
‘I’ll just have to go back,’ she said forlornly. ‘You’re right. I’m not going to leave my lovely flat just because some scumbag happens to own the flat downstairs. I will just have to take the Doris approach.’
Peggy raised her eyebrows as she sipped her coffee. ‘Which is?’
‘Pretend the thing I don’t want to deal with doesn’t exist. I shall just ignore him. It’s been easy enough to do so far, and he’ll probably be off to God-knows-where again soon.’ She fantasised briefly about all the sticky ends he could come to on his travels – falling down a crevasse in a glacier, being kidnapped by guerrillas, eaten by head-shrinking cannibals in some remote jungle – but was interrupted by Peggy, who was being annoyingly sensible.
‘Are you sure that’s going to work? You wouldn’t have turned up on my doorstep if you were able to do that.’
Claire thought for a moment. ‘I just need a couple of days to steady myself, to get my head in the right place. I mean, if Doris can use this technique to get over everything in her life, why can’t I?’
Peggy swung her legs back over the arm of the chair and placed them on the floor, then she leaned forward and looked at Claire. ‘I hate to tell you this, honey, but I’m not even sure it works for Doris all the time.’
Claire stiffened. ‘What do you mean? Of course it works. By all accounts, Doris is happy and sunny and living to a ripe old age. Sounds good to me.’
‘Another coffee?’ Peggy asked and headed for the living room door.
Claire nodded. Last night hadn’t included a lot of sleep. The caffeine would certainly help keep her vertical for a few more hours.
Peggy turned at the threshold. ‘Even bright, perky Doris Day can’t be Doris Day all the time. I bet there are times when she’s sad or lonely or angry too.’
They stared at each other in silence, contemplating that fact, then Peggy finally said, ‘Actually, how about we go out and have breakfast at the little café down the street? They do proper Italian coffee – much nicer than my cheap instant – and wonderful pastries.’
Claire looked at her suspiciously. ‘You’re paying this time. You never did give me the change back from that Frappuccino the other week.’
Peggy looked blank. ‘Didn’t I?’ she replied innocently. ‘Okay, then. It’s my treat.’
Peggy’s treat? Those didn’t come around too often, so Claire nodded and Peggy grinned at her. ‘Give me ten minutes,’ she yelled, as she dashed to her bedroom.
Claire watched the open door for a while then picked up a book from Peggy’s coffee table. Ten minutes in Peggy time meant at least half an hour. She might as well keep herself occupied while she waited.