The Yorkshire Pudding Club Read Free Page A

good.’
    Laurence smiled, raised his watch hand theatrically, flicked his eyes towards it, and then stood to signify their audience time was at an end.
    ‘Well, I’m sorry it’s been such a short meeting but I do have another appointment, albeit not as entertaining, which I regret I’m a little late for,’ and he flashed his charming smile again and added, ‘My assistant Julia will show you out.’
    The ladies twittered their way out of the door and as Laurence and Julia made to follow them, the piece of paper twirled to the floor from Julia’s file. Elizabeth picked it up. She just managed to sneak a look before Troll snatched it back rather hastily.
    Let’s just give these old scrubbers some money and get out of here quick, it said.
    Elizabeth was disgusted but not surprised. She watched the smiling little trio from Blackberry Moor meander down the office to the temperamental lifts, blissfully ignorant of what their hero Laurence Stewart-Smith was really like. So long as he flung them a fewtombola pressies every so often, they would continue to idolize him as a local saint, although Elizabeth knew that one did not get to be in his position by being a nice bloke. Somewhere in mid-management, they cut out the heart and replaced it with an axe. And once a man held power, she had found, he was almost certain to misuse it.

Chapter 2
    Janey snapped around the room, tossing tissues and lippy into her handbag, occasionally stopping to rub her stomach.
    ‘What’s up with you?’ said Elizabeth, watching her.
    ‘Dodgy Chinese last night.’
    ‘Get stuffed with your dodgy Chinese!’ said Janey’s hubby George, twisting round from watching the preamble to the big match on the television. ‘I had half hers and I’m right as rai—’
    ‘In fact, if it hadn’t been Helen’s birthday I’d have cried off,’ Janey cut in.
    ‘You couldn’t have done that, we haven’t seen each other since Christmas!’ said Elizabeth.
    ‘Yes, well–that’s another reason why I’m making the effort,’ said Janey. ‘Anyway, I’m not drinking so no point in us getting a taxi. Sod it, where’s my purse?’ She shoved George to one side to see if he was sitting on it. Not that he would have known, even if it had been full of razor blades, the dozy sod, she thought. Now what was that other something else that was bugging her to remember it?
    ‘Don’t be so wet!’ said Elizabeth.
    ‘Ring a taxi and get a few gins down your neck, that’ll sort you out,’ said the Bagpuss-like bloke, taking a slurp from a can of beer.
    ‘I might have known you’d side with her!’ said Janey, thumbing at her butter-wouldn’t-melt-faced friend.
    Elizabeth grinned at her and looked, for a moment, just like she did at school, give or take a couple of sunrays at the eye corners.
    ‘Oh damnit–flowers!’ Janey threw her hands up in despair and blamed George. ‘I told you to remind me not to forget the flowers. You’d have let me walk out without them!’
    George smiled indulgently, taking her in his stride as usual and sighing like an inflatable shire horse that had just sustained a fatal puncture.
    ‘Flowers, Janey, don’t forget!’ he said, clicking his fingers as if it had just come to him. Janey hit him with a cushion, although flowers were not the ‘something’ that was buzzing around in her head, refusing to be pinned down.
    ‘How’s work then?’ George said to Elizabeth.
    ‘Oh don’t ask!’ she said. ‘The latest thing is’–and she did a fair impression of her arch enemy–‘“Would you please ask permission if you’re going to be longer than five minutes in the loo?” Can you believe?’
    ‘Never! What did you say?’
    ‘I smiled sweetly and said that I wasn’t in the habit of timing myself. I’m forty next year, for God’s sake. I stopped sticking my hand up to ask to go to the loo twenty odd years ago. Honestly, that woman. Heil Julia!’She gave a Nazi salute and started goose-stepping up and down on the