The Doris Day Vintage Film Club: A hilarious, feel-good romantic comedy

She didn’t want to think of him.

If anything, she should want to think of her mother, who’d been wonderful and loving and resourceful. She’d been gone ten years now. If she’d known their time together was going to be cut short, she’d have asked more questions. Or maybe not. In her twenties, she wouldn’t have known the right things to ask. Maybe it was only now she was older with one bad marriage behind her herself, that she wished she could ask Mum if it had been the same for her.

At least she’d separated from her toxic husband. Why hadn’t Mum left her father? Why had she waited for him to do it to her? Why hadn’t she ever stood up to him? After he’d left, she’d blossomed into being the bright and funny and strong woman Claire would always choose to remember her as.

Suddenly, a question popped free, one she hadn’t realised she’d needed the answer to until it left her mouth. She glanced across at Maggs. ‘Did he ever hit her? My mother?’

They kept walking, but something about the atmosphere between them changed. The air grew stiller, thicker.

He hadn’t ever hit Claire, although she’d always been afraid he might. She could remember a specific look in his eye that had always made her stomach quiver. A tingle of cold ran up her spine now, just thinking about it.

Maggs kept her focus straight ahead. When they reached Claire’s car, she stopped and turned to face her. ‘Honestly? I don’t know … Maybe.’

Claire nodded.

She was starting to fear she’d known the answer for a long time, but just hadn’t dared face it.

She unlocked the car and opened the door for Maggs. When they were both settled inside, before she turned the key in the ignition, Maggs spoke again. ‘I know Laurie was always worried for your mother when he got into one of his moods. We didn’t talk about it. People didn’t in our day. It was the sort of shameful thing you just swept under the carpet, but I guessed she suspected what her son was capable of.’

Claire shook her head. ‘I don’t understand it. How did such a lovely woman as my grandmother raise such a cruel, dysfunctional son?’

Maggs let out a heavy breath. ‘You don’t remember much about your grandfather, do you?’

‘No,’ Claire replied slowly. Just a vague memory of a stern man with white hair.

‘I keep thinking about him recently,’ Maggs said quietly, all the usual sass and sarcasm gone from her voice. It made her sound younger, less invincible. ‘I never liked him, you know, not even right back at the start. Maybe I was jealous he stole my best friend, or maybe I just saw a little bit into Laurie’s future. I don’t know …’ She breathed in sharply. ‘Anyway, I think he had a lot to do with how your father turned out.’

Claire shook her head. She’d never heard Maggs talk like this before. Maybe it was the gin she’d been nipping from her hip flask that evening. In the darkened room while they watched the film, she’d seen little flashes in the gloom as the street lamp outside had reflected off the shiny metal.

She pondered that as she turned the key in the ignition and revved the engine, shattering the fog-like silence that had settled around them.

‘I’m surprised Gran didn’t ever marry again after he died,’ she said, her tone light, as she indicated and pulled away. ‘She was still a very attractive woman, even into her fifties.’

‘I thought the same about Cathy. Your mother wasn’t short on admirers once your father had cleared off, you know.’

Claire nodded. She had memories of a couple of well-dressed men coming to the house with bunches of flowers, of them taking her mother out to dinner while Mrs Winfield from next door babysat, but there hadn’t been many and they’d usually disappeared after four or five dates.

That had been sad too. Mum had been so pretty and funny. She’d had a way of making everyone feel included, as if she’d allowed them entrance to a special club where everything would always feel safe and warm and fun. When Claire had asked if she had a boyfriend, her mother had laughed the suggestion off. She’d said she was much more interested in taking care of Claire, and it wasn’t the right time to get serious about anyone.

At the time, Claire had assumed this was just another selfless act of love on her mother’s part, but now she wondered if there had been another reason.

‘Runs in the family, doesn’t it?’ Maggs said, as they navigated the narrow back streets almost empty of traffic. ‘First Laurie, then Cathy … And you haven’t seen anyone else since Philip.’

That was just what Claire needed to pop her out of this rather maudlin mood she and Maggs had created between them. She chuckled softly to herself. She should have known better than to broach this kind of subject with Maggs. ‘Don’t be daft,’ she replied. ‘It’s completely different. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just not the right time. I need to focus on the business at the moment …’

She trailed off and her mother’s voice echoed in her ears: It’s just not the right time, Claire, love. I think my focus should be on you at the moment …

She shook that thought away as she craned her head to see out of an awkward junction. ‘Anyway,’ she said, pulling out the trump card she’d almost forgotten about, ‘I’ve got a date tomorrow.’

She could feel Maggs’s beady eyes on her as she concentrated on the road. ‘Oh, yes?’ Maggs said, her pitch as high as Claire imagined her eyebrows were. ‘Anyone nice?’

Yes, Claire thought to herself, but that was the problem. Nice and not much else, but telling Maggs that wouldn’t get her off her back. However, there were a few pertinent facts about the man in question that might.

‘His name is Doug Martin and he’s a client. And before you ask, yes, he’s single. He’s also rich and very attentive. He’s taking me to a party at The Hamilton.’

She risked a sideways glance to gauge Maggs’s reaction. Maggs was looking suitably impressed. Claire smiled to herself. Distraction manoeuvre complete.

‘Sid and I went dancing there on New Year’s Eve once,’ she said wistfully. ‘It was the toast of the town then. Shame that it fell into such disrepair.’

‘It will be again, if the new owner has anything to do with it,’ Claire said, ‘and there’ll be some very useful contacts at that party.’

‘Hmm,’ Maggs said. ‘You’re going out with a rich, attentive man and the thing you’re most pleased about is what it can do for your career. Now tell me, what’s wrong with this picture?’

‘Nothing,’ Claire said haughtily. ‘Mixing business with pleasure is how us youngsters do it these days.’

‘Ouch,’ Maggs said, and let out a reluctant chuckle. ‘Touché, Miss Bixby. But just you make sure there’s more pleasure than business in this scenario, okay?’

She made the turn into Maggs’s road. ‘I’ll do my best.’

‘I know that look,’ Maggs muttered. ‘You’ve worn the same one since you were a little girl. It’s your “I’m pretending I’m listening, but really I’m going to do my own sweet thing” look.’

Claire pressed her lips together and tried not to smile. ‘Learnt it from you.’

Maggs mimed taking a bullet to the chest. ‘And the hits just keep on coming.’

Claire pulled into a space outside of Maggs’s house and yanked on the handbrake. ‘You can’t go all superior on me, otherwise you’ll have to admit you were a bad influence.’

‘All I’m saying, is that you could do with some male company,’ Maggs said, as she opened the door and eased her slightly creaky body from the car. ‘You work all the time and when you’re not working, you’re doing club stuff, or hanging out with girls.’

‘And George,’ Claire reminded her, smiling just a little too sweetly.

‘You’re on a roll today,’ Maggs said, her tone grudging. ‘I shouldn’t have taught you so well.’

Claire got out of the car and came round to where her grandmother’s best friend was standing and gave her a hug. Maggs shook her head, but smiled as she did it, and let Claire press a kiss to her papery cheek.

‘I’ve told you before not to meddle in my love life,’ Claire said, ‘not until you’ve got one of your own, at least.’

‘You’re no fun,’ Maggs said, as they pulled apart.

‘You want me to turn the tables on you? I saw the way George looked when you blew him off this evening. Crushed doesn’t even begin to cover it.’

Maggs shook her head. ‘He’s too young for me.’

‘So? What’s wrong with a toy boy?’

‘I’d eat him for breakfast.’

Claire laughed. Maggs probably would as well. Poor old George. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. ‘See? You need to start taking some of your own advice, Dr Maggs. You accuse me of not moving on, but I don’t see you doing much of that yourself.’

‘I’m practically in the grave,’ Maggs said wearily. ‘If I “move on” too much, I’ll just fall straight into it.’

‘Now you’re just getting dramatic,’ Claire said, although she knew Maggs was okay when she was hamming it up. It was when she closed right down, didn’t show a thing, that Claire got truly worried about her.

Maggs sighed as she headed up her garden path. ‘I do hate it when you’re like this,’ she said, with more than a touch of the martyr about her.

Claire smiled to herself as she got back into the car. ‘When I’m like what?’ she called out.

‘Right,’ Maggs replied, as she opened her front door and disappeared.

Chapter Nine

By the Light of the Silvery Moon

Claire was having the strangest dream. The sun was warm on her skin and the waves of a clear turquoise sea lapped against the edges of the little rowing boat she was sitting in. Okay, that didn’t seem strange at all. In fact, it was rather lovely, and if that had been all there was to the dream she probably would have enjoyed it.

She glanced down and saw a flash of something in the sand and rocks thirty feet below. At first she thought it must be a little fish, the sun glinting off its scales, but then she realised the shiny thing wasn’t moving.

The thought slid through her head like a whisper. Treasure …

She stood up, prepared to dive in, and that’s when things got strange. Instead of hearing a splash and discovering her body slipping through the cool water, there was something more akin to a boing and she bounced right off it. It was as if the whole surface of the sea had turned into a stretchy, rubbery, see-through skin and as hard as she tried she couldn’t break through. It was most frustrating.

Eventually, she sat down, cross-legged on the undulating surface and folded her arms. The waves ran under her, making her bob up and down, just as if she’d been on a trampoline and someone else was jumping on the other end.

The only sounds were the gentle rustle of her hair in the breeze and the slap of the waves against the hull of the boat. She wasn’t sure how the boat didn’t just sit on the water like she did, rolling over onto one side, but it didn’t. Apparently, it was just her having this strange problem.

As she sat there, wondering what to do next, she started to think she could hear music. At first it was just a tickle at the corner of her consciousness, and she wasn’t even sure if it was coming from inside or outside her head, but then it grew louder.

Outside. Definitely outside.

She got excited again. Perhaps it was mermaids. Anything seemed possible in this strange place she’d found herself in.

The music grew steadily in volume, a bass beat thrumming through the rubbery sea surface and vibrating on her bare legs. Maybe not mermaids after all. Not unless they were the kind that didn’t like operatic arpeggios, but pounding metal verging on the edge of goth …

That was when Claire woke up. The boat, the sun, the strange waves were all sucked back into her subconscious. The music, however, remained.

She sat up and pushed the hair out of her face, trying to make sense of it all, waiting for the music to disappear with the rest of the dream. It didn’t. It just carried on thumping, like the beginning of one of those headaches she got sometimes that sat right behind her left eye. She put one foot on the floor and felt the vibration of it through the polished boards.

It became crystal clear that this had nothing to do with the dream and everything to do with the nightmare who lived downstairs.

Okay. This was it. She’d just about had enough.

Not only had there been the whole bike incident, and the letterbox that ever-spouted pizza delivery leaflets. She’d also had to deal with his bins again. He hadn’t pulled them forward on rubbish collection day, so she’d had to do it. She’d have left them, and rejoiced at the thought of him rotting away in his own mess, if it hadn’t been for the very real possibility of attracting rats. Or foxes. It was bad enough pulling his stinky dustbin to the kerb, but she wasn’t about to gather up the contents once they’d been strewn halfway down the street by a vixen looking for a nice juicy chicken carcass.

Of course that had meant yet another note. And yet another cheeky reply.

She knew she should have left it at that, but for some reason letting him have the last word didn’t sit well with her. Her pile of posh stationery in the kitchen was diminishing rapidly, along with her live-and-let-live, que sera, sera philosophy. She was doing her best to ignore everything but the troubles each day brought; it just seemed that each day brought a new batch from Mr Dominic flipping Arden.

She stood up and marched across the bedroom. No more notes. This was it. It was about time the pair of them had some face-to-face communication. And, if her palm met the side of his face during that communication, so much the better.

She stomped down the stairs, growing angrier with each step, because she knew the volume of her neighbour’s music was robbing her of the satisfaction of knowing he’d heard them too.

When she got to his front door, she knocked on it. Sharply, but loudly.

Nothing. At least, nothing but that infernal music. What was he? Seventeen?

She tried again, this time pounding with her fist. Still nothing. She waited again. Five minutes she stayed there, alternately knocking then folding her arms and staring at the door, her toes tapping in impatience. Once or twice she found she’d accidentally fallen in with the rhythm of the music and that just infuriated her further.

Eventually, she stormed off back upstairs and slammed her front door as hard as she could. So he wasn’t just an inconsiderate, lazy, pasty-faced technology geek, but a coward too. She should have known.

She went back to bed and rummaged through the drawer in her bedside table until she found the earplugs she always took on long plane journeys. She squished them into her ears and lay there, shoulders tense, armed folded across the top of the sheet and stared at the ceiling.

It was no good. She could still hear it.

At least she thought she could. It might just be the memory of all that noise echoing off the inside of her skull, like hearing an extra chime after the church bells had stopped ringing. She turned over and shoved her head underneath her pillow.

Please let him leave soon, she prayed fervently, as she waited for her blood pressure to drop back down to normal. She didn’t know when, but it had to be soon, didn’t it? And she’d be crossing the days off her calendar with a fat red squeaky marker until he did.

*

Dominic woke with a start. He was lying on his sofa in his living room and had no memory of how he’d got there. For some reason, he could hear the end of the last song on one of his favourite albums playing in his head, but all around him everything was completely silent.

He looked up and noticed his iPod, still lit up, sitting in its dock.

Ah. Now he remembered.

He’d been feeling particularly restless this evening. Probably because now he’d been back in the UK for more than a week, he was noticing that his days were kind of empty. He’d decided to listen to some good music to get this feeling of being trapped, grounded, out of his system. Somewhere in the middle of it, he must have fallen asleep.

Now, for most people that might have been impossible, but not for Dominic. He’d always been able to drop off anywhere, even when he’d been a teenager, and it had served him well on his travels most of the time. When he’d gone backpacking with uni buddies, they’d always complained about noise and hard beds and strange smells, but none of it had bothered him. He just closed his eyes and he was away.

Even staying in some of the really dodgy places his work took him to hadn’t been that bad. If he ever did have problems sleeping, he stuck his earphones in his ears and played music, sometimes quite loud, reasoning that it was often silence punctuated by unexpected noises that woke him up. If he could choose something with a consistent volume level it became white noise, lulling him to sleep. It was the sudden quiet at the end of an album that often roused him these days.

The iPod blinked off and he sat up, stretched and yawned. At least he was feeling sleepy now. And it was dark. Finally, his body clock was returning to some sort of normal pattern. About time too. He stumbled off into his bedroom where he ripped off his clothes and fell into bed. A few seconds after he hit the mattress, he was sleeping the sleep of the innocent.

*

He was still in a pretty good mood when he emerged from his flat to go for a run at eleven o’clock the next morning. He looked out for a little white rectangle on his doormat and wasn’t disappointed. Somewhere along the line, the war of notes between him and his upstairs neighbour had become a source of entertainment.

Hmm. A signal that he definitely needed to get out more. He had the research for a new documentary he wanted to do on free divers – the particular kind of mental discipline required, the tight-knit community of enthusiasts, the dangers – but it was desk work, his least favourite kind, and would hardly get him out the flat much. Pete had texted him a couple of times and he’d texted back, but they hadn’t seen each other since that incident at his house last week.

Which meant he needed an alternative social life. One involving female company would be good, no matter what Pete said.

Just thinking about how his best friend had summed him up still made his jaw clench. Just because Pete had a point, it didn’t mean he had to lay it on quite so thick. He’d exaggerated, as always.

Dominic frowned. No way was he a total romantic disaster! But Pete couldn’t see that. All Pete could see was his little nest of domestic bliss and he measured – and judged – everyone, including his best friend, against that. The only problem was that Dominic knew Pete was so stubborn he was never going to let go of the idea that his best friend was a romantic pariah unless he was faced with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.

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