It was the same with coffee. Carole’s instinctive Englishness and aversion to change had made her very suspicious of the invasion by coffees with foreign names. Resolutely resisting the siren calls of mochas, lattes and macchiatos, when offered a choice she would reply stuffily, ‘Just ordinary black coffee, please.’ And when Polly’s Cake Shop on the parade closed, Carole’s voice was strong in condemning the prospect of its being replaced by a Starbucks. The very idea was appalling. This was Fethering, after all. Fethering would never give way to the relentless march of the multinationals.
But, of course, Fethering, like so many other places, did give way to the relentless march of the multinationals. And, though Carole at first condemned the fickleness of the locals who immediately flooded into the new Starbucks, she did occasionally find herself ending up in there. She had even been heard to order, ‘A black Americano, please.’
There wasn’t a regular pattern to when she went out for coffee. Apart from mealtimes, the two fixed points of Carole’s day were Gulliver’s walks on Fethering Beach – as soon as it was light in the mornings and just before it got dark in the evenings. She had bought the dog initially so that she didn’t look lonely when out walking. After leaving the Home Office – slightly earlier than she had planned – and moving to Fethering full-time, Carole had hated the idea of locals conjecturing about her relationship status or, even worse, pitying her. So, she always looked busy – busy when walking with giving exercise to Gulliver, and busy when in Starbucks with doing The Times crossword. She had always been terrified of looking as if she had no purpose in life. In common with many shy people, Carole Seddon worried that other people were far more interested in her behaviour than any of them bothered to be.
She rarely combined a visit to Starbucks with one of her Gulliver walks. Although the management did not object to dogs, some strange puritanism within her didn’t like the idea of pets in a venue that served food.
The morning after Jude had visited Rhona Hampton, Carole decided she could justify a Starbucks coffee. It was a Thursday, when The Times crossword could be a stinker of a kind that required more than the customary twenty minutes over lunch.
Sure enough, when she sat down with her ‘black Americano’ and perused the clues, for all the sense they made they might have been written in Serbo-Croat. Some days, she knew, the crossword was like that. The important thing was not to panic. Just calm down, look at the words, break them down into their component parts.
‘Well, good morning, Carole. Fancy meeting you here.’
She recognized the voice and looked up to see Adrian Greenford, holding a mug of his customary flat white.
‘May I join you, or will I divert your focus from the crossword?’
‘Any diversion would be welcomed. It’s totally impenetrable today.’
‘It’d be totally impenetrable to me any day,’ he said as he moved a chair back with his leg and sat opposite her.
Adrian Greenford was a large, red-faced man, dressed that day in a tweed overcoat and grey trilby hat, which he removed to reveal thick hair grizzled like steel wool. He had moved to Fethering some weeks before. Carole was usually resistant to meeting new people, but she had pointed out to him where the eggs were on his first encounter with Fethering’s uniquely inefficient supermarket Allinstore. He had then introduced himself, and they’d bumped into each other more than once on the parade or Fethering Beach.
Adrian was one of those people, unlike Carole, who had no problem initiating conversation. He had the bluff, open manner of someone who’d never considered the possibility that people might not want to talk to him. His accent was from the North – he’d told Carole early on in their acquaintance that he and his wife had moved down from Ilkley – and she wondered if that had something to do with it. She shared the common Southern prejudice that people from the North were more outgoing. (In Carole’s lexicon, ‘outgoing’ was not necessarily a compliment. Its shades of meaning moved closer to ‘brash’ than ‘congenial’.)
‘So,’ she asked, ‘how are you settling in?’
‘Oh, getting there, getting there,’ he replied. ‘Place was a bit of a tip when we bought it. Fortunately, a lot of the work was done before we took up residence. The lift’s in, which is the main thing, but there’s still more to do with ramps and what-have-you.’
‘“Ramps”?’ Carole echoed.
‘Oh, silly me, I hadn’t told you. Fact is, my wife Gwyneth is confined to a wheelchair, so there was a lot of sort of adaptation needed to be done to the house.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Carole curbed the natural instinct to ask what was wrong with her. Though she doubted whether Adrian would have minded answering, it did feel slightly indelicate. So, she moved the subject on. Though they had met a good few times, the encounters had been brief and a lot of the basic background questions hadn’t yet been asked. ‘Are you still working, Adrian?’
‘No. Retired. You?’
‘Retired.’ It still caused an obscure pang to admit it. The Home Office had so much defined her life that she had never really found anything to replace it.
‘I was in the car business,’ Adrian volunteered. ‘Salesman for over forty years.’
‘Oh?’
Maybe he read some criticism in the monosyllable, because he went on, ‘Yes, a car salesman, like they make all the dirty jokes about.’
‘I didn’t know they made dirty jokes about car salesmen.’
‘Oh, come on, surely you must’ve heard …’ He looked at her face. ‘No, maybe you haven’t, Carole.’ He sighed, then chuckled. ‘Actually, it’s quite a relief to meet someone who doesn’t immediately go into a routine of car salesman jokes.’
‘Do most people you meet do that?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Most women?’ she asked incredulously.
His big face relaxed into a grin. ‘No, I suppose, to be fair, it is mostly the men. Yeah, the men tell the jokes … and the women decide which car they’re going to buy.’
‘Is that how it works?’
‘More often than you’d think, yes. Oh, the men come in with all the technical questions about spec and engine capacity and torque measurement and then, generally speaking, they go back home and ask their wives what car they’re allowed to buy.’
‘“Allowed”?’
‘That’s usually the way it goes, yes. Let me tell you a story about a man I once dealt with. Potential buyer … there was a car he was interested in … I had my own showroom back then, and mostly I was a one-man band. Well, I had a couple of boys helped me out part-time … and of course a “spivver” …’
‘Sorry? A what?’
‘A “spivver”. He tidied up the cars on the forecourt.’
‘“Tidied up”?’
‘Cleaned them. Kept them polished up. One thing you must never allow in the second-hand car business is a car to have a speck of dust on it. Whatever’s going on under the bonnet – and I can assure you I never sold a car that was dodgy under the bonnet, though there’s plenty of dealers who do – the bodywork must shine like it’s just been cleaned.’
‘By the “spivver”?’
‘Exactly. You’re catching on, Carole. He’s got one of the most important jobs. Nobody likes driving away from the showroom in a car that doesn’t gleam. Of course, within twenty-four hours, their new purchase will be covered with …’ He checked himself and selected a different word from the one he’d intended. ‘… covered with mud, but that’s not the point. When it left my showroom, it gleamed.’