Sunshine Over Wildflower Cottage Read Free Page B

why Viv was here.

Chapter 2
    ‘Bloody hell, Stel, what’s up? Your head’s the colour of a stick of rhubarb with high blood pressure.’
    Linda leaned over the coffee table and handed her friend a plastic fan. There were five women in the room and all of them had small whirring blades cooling their faces, even Iris, Linda’s eighty-two-year-old mother. And surprisingly Caro too, who was floating through the menopause as if she was aboard an enchanted craft with an anti-menopause cloaking device, had beads of perspiration pushing out of the pores on her forehead. She dabbed at her temples with her fingertips.
She even makes sweating look elegant
, thought Gaynor.
    ‘Thought you didn’t get hot flushes,’ she said, tapping her fan on the table, hoping that would somehow rev up the dying battery.
    ‘I don’t usually. My thermometer might be getting more and more on the blink, but I haven’t had that experience you seem to get where you say you feel it rising up from your feet,’ replied Caro.
    ‘I used to sweat so much in bed, Dennis used to have to sleep in a wetsuit,’ sniffed Iris, putting down her fan in order to sip delicately from her special china cup covered in irises which she lifted from a matching saucer.
    ‘Slight exaggeration there, Mother,’ said Linda. Her hair was plastered to her face with perspiration. ‘Dear God, this can’t be normal.’
    ‘I didn’t get the sweats until I was over a year into the full-throttle menop— oh bugger, my battery’s knackered as well,’ said Stel, banging her fan on the side of the sofa in an attempt to revive it.
    ‘Here, Stel.’ From a drawer in the dresser behind her, Linda retrieved another fan from the job-lot stored there and tossed it to her. Linda’s husband Dino was a market dealer (Aladdino’s Cave) trading in allsorts and novelties which he imported from the Far East.
    This quintet of friends always jokingly referred to themselves as ‘The Old Spice Girls’. They’d known each other for ages; but two years ago they’d decided to make their meetings a regular Sunday event from 5.30 until 7 p.m., to galvanise them for the week ahead with pots of tea and finger food.
    If they had been actual Spice Girls, it wouldn’t have been too hard to choose their names. The preened and perfect Caro would have been Posh Spice. With her rounded vowels and cultured ways, she made Victoria Beckham look like Pat Butcher. Iris would have been Blunt Spice, since the brake on her mouth had long since failed, much to the frequent embarrassment of her daughter. Linda would have been Bountiful Spice because everything about Linda was big: her hair, her bum, her appetite and her heart. Gaynor would have been Bitter Spice. She was twisted up in knots about her husband running off almost a year ago with a cheap young tramp, and fed off his frustration that she wouldn’t give him a divorce. And Stel Blackbird would, at the moment, be Sad Spice. Her much-loved only daughter Viv had left home that day in order to work in a godforsaken place up on the moors. She’d said she only intended to work there through the summer, but Stel had said the same to her parents and then had never moved back to the family nest.
    ‘Linda, you do know the central heating’s on, don’t you?’ said Gaynor, feeling the radiator. ‘No wonder we’re all wilting.’
    ‘It’s what? But it can’t be . . .’ Linda broke off her sentence as the penny dropped and she turned slowly to Iris, her eyes narrowing to slits. ‘It’s you again, isn’t it, Mum?’
    ‘I must have forgotten to turn it off,’ said Iris. ‘I thought I’d warm the room up a bit for everyone.’
    Linda bobbed next door to turn off the heating, chuntering profanities in her mother’s direction.
    ‘It’s always cold when you first come in. I was only trying to help.’ Iris lifted up her shoulders and dropped them as if hurt.
    ‘It’s seventy degrees in the shade today,’ Linda batted back. ‘You can fry eggs