She went pink.

‘In Oxford. I took them off in the car outside the Randolph.’

‘Good grief.’

‘I got the idea from that paperback of Dulcie’s,’ Pru confessed. ‘The one that bossy old woman nicked from me outside Elmlea nursing home.’

‘Let’s hope she doesn’t try it out too. She could give the male residents heart failure.’

Eddie stroked Pru’s ears, smoothing back her glossy dark hair.

‘What?’ The urge to flinch was strong, but she resisted it. Why was he looking at them in that way?

‘Nothing. I like your hair like that. You’ve got beautiful ears.’

Pru smiled. She knew she could tell him about the surgery; he wouldn’t laugh. But there was no need now. Another day. Reluctantly she looked at her watch.

‘I could stay here for ever, but we really should get back.’ Eddie didn’t want to.

‘Why?’

‘Houses to clean,’ she reminded him lightly. ‘Sinks to scour, floors to scrub.’

He didn’t want Pru doing that either. She shouldn’t have to. She deserved so much better.

‘Give it up,’ he said flatly.

‘Oh right, great idea, why didn’t I think of that?’ Pru laughed at the expression on his face. ‘Why pay rént when you can live in a cardboard box?’

‘Come and live with me.’

‘Eddie!’

‘I mean it. Please, don’t laugh, I’m serious. I want you to live with me.’ The words came tumbling out. He had been so unhappy for so long and Pru was everything he’d ever dreamed of.

‘I want you to marry me. Oh, Pm, you’d make me the happiest man on earth. Of course, I know I’m not much of a catch ...’

He really did mean it. Pru’s eyes filled with tears. Frantically Eddie kissed them away. ‘God, don’t cry! I don’t want to make you cry. I love you—’

Pru wiped her wet cheeks on his shirt. How on earth could this kind, wonderful, adorable man think he wasn’t much of a catch?

‘—and if you really couldn’t bear to 1-live with Arthur,’ this time Eddie stumbled on the words; this was the ultimate sacrifice, ‘well, I understand. I’m sure we could find him a good home.’

She stared at him, astounded.

‘Why couldn’t I bear to live with Arthur?’

‘You know ... the allergy thing ...’

Pru struggled to keep a straight face.

‘I’m not allergic to Arthur. I just didn’t want him leering at us from the back seat while we were ... well, otherwise engaged. I thought we could do without an audience.’

It took a while to get themselves respectable again. Finally they were ready to leave.

‘I’ll drive,’ said Eddie.

‘That’s silly. What if you get stopped?’

He flicked open his wallet and showed her his licence. ‘You had it all this time.’ Pru’s eyes widened. ‘You cheat!’ Eddie kissed her as he reached for the car keys. ‘I know. But it did the trick.’

Chapter 46

As she plunged her reddened hands into the washing-up water, fishing for the last elusive teaspoon, Dulcie marvelled at the idea that only a month ago she had actually possessed nails capable of wearing polish. Twelve hours a day in Rufus’s kitchen had changed her hands beyond all recognition and the rest of her had taken a bit of a battering too.

With no time for any more sunbeds, facials or mud treatments, Dulcie was feeling pale and decidedly uninteresting. Her hair, badly in need of a cut, flopped into her eyes. Finding the teaspoon at last, she held it up and studied her reflection in it.

I look like Liam Gallagher, she thought miserably, on a bad day.

Not that this seemed to bother Rufus.

It hadn’t taken Dulcie long to realise that Liza had been right. Thankfully though, Rufus’s crush on her was a discreet one. He was clearly the bashful type. He hadn’t tried to push his luck and Dulcie, not wanting to hurt his feelings, simply pretended she hadn’t noticed. When he asked her out — in extremely casual, just-good-friends fashion — she invented plausible excuses. When she mentioned in passing one day that her favourite aftershave was Eau Savage and Rufus came into the café the next morning reeking of it — rather than his usual Old Spice — she didn’t say a word. And when he confided in her that he was lonely, Dulcie sympathised and pretended she wasn’t.

‘Finished? Great.’ Rufus came charging through the swingdoors with a pile of dirty plates.

Dumping them on the drainer, he turned his attention to the oven packed with trays of whole-wheat samosas and foil-wrapped garlic baguettes. ‘It’s getting busy out there. Could you take the order from table three?’

Dulcie ached all over; she actually felt as awful as she knew she looked. Praying she wasn’t going down with flu, she dried her hands on a towel and reached for the order pad.

‘If they’re undecided,’ said Rufus over his shoulder, ‘push the samosas. We’ve got enough here to feed India.’

Wholefood cafés tend to attract a particular breed of customer, the kind that favour natural dyes and fabrics. There were usually plenty of long, droopy cotton dresses and even droopier hand-knitted sweaters in every shade of brown. The choice of perfume ranged between anything from the Body Shop, the musty tang of patchouli oil, and dope.

It wasn’t difficult to spot Liam in his dazzling Persil-white tracksuit, and Imelda in a shocking-pink Lycra dress. Even if she’d been blind, Dulcie would still have been able to find her way to table three. Nobody else on the planet doused themselves in Obsession like Imelda.

‘My God, it’s true!’ Imelda squealed when she saw Dulcie watching them from the doorway.

Giggling, she nudged Liam. ‘She’s really here. Dulcie, it’s been ages! And you look .. . you look ...’

Lank-haired, knackered and altogether skivvyish, thought Dulcie, who was under no illusions. At this rate she could end up giving Ruby, the maid from Upstairs Downstairs, a run for her money.

‘Are you ready to order?’ She forced herself to sound polite, loathing the way Imelda was gazing around the tiny café, as if she expected a mouse to run over her feet any minute.

Imelda waved a manicured hand dismissively in the direction of the menu.

‘Nothing for me thanks, darling. We only dropped by to see how you are. Everyone back at the club’s simply dying of curiosity. When they heard you’d actually got yourself a job’ — here Imelda adopted a mocking, EastEnders-type accent – ‘in a caff, like, they thought it must be some kind of April Fool.’

Smiling thinly, Dulcie turned her attention to Liam, who was basking in the surreptitious attention of the other customers. He had had his hair streaked again, and his tracksuit top was unzipped to show off, through his T-shirt, the chiselled outline of his tautly muscled torso. Liam was intensely proud of his six-pack.

Dulcie was ashamed of herself for having once fallen for that awful pseudo charm. You prat, she thought wearily. What did I ever see in you?

‘I’ll have a coffee,’ said Liam, ‘black, and a green salad.’

‘Please,’ said Dulcie.

‘And no free-range caterpillars.’ Imelda shrieked with laughter and squeezed Liam’s knee. The smell of Obsession was suffocating but Liam didn’t seem to notice. Maybe, thought Dulcie, he’s been injected with the antidote.

‘Go on then, I’ll have a glass of mineral water,’ Imelda said generously. She watched Dulcie write it down. ‘With a slice of fresh lime. Got all that? Sure you can manage?’

‘I’m going to spit in her water,’ seethed Dulcie when she was safely back in the kitchen.

‘You are not!’ Rufus looked up, startled. ‘What are you talking about? Whose water?’

When Dulcie had finished telling him, he said, ‘Do you want me to serve them?’

‘What, and let them think they’ve got to me? No thanks.’

Table four needed clearing and the floor beneath it was strewn with coleslaw and bits of chewed-up, spat-out radish. Silently cursing the two small children who had left the mess, Dulcie crawled under the table on all fours with her dustpan and brush.

It wasn’t dignified and she knew her bottom was sticking out at a less than flattering angle, but she still had to exert every ounce of self-control when she heard Imelda behind her murmur to Liam, ‘Darling, if this is what wholefood cafés doto you, remind me never to work in one.’

Dulcie carried on grimly sweeping up debris. When she heard Rufus’s voice, saying breezily,

‘Everything okay here?’ and Liam replying, ‘Fine thanks, couldn’t be better,’ she knew Rufus had come out of the kitchen to keep an eye on the situation. He was making sure she was okay.

When Rufus had gone and she had finished clearing up the mess, she rose creakily to her feet.

By this time, Imelda had thought up another jibe.

‘Well, well. Now we know why you’re working here,’ she declared with a smirk. ‘Who’d want anyone as boring and ordinary as Liam when they could have a hunk like your new boss?’

Having to listen to their sarcastic remarks about her had been bad enough, but Dulcie had gritted her teeth and willed herself not to react.

Making fun of Rufus, though, was too much.

‘I think it would be nice if you apologised for that.’ Glancing down at the contents of her dustpan, Dulcie now found herself wishing the children could have made a bit more mess.

Liam was smirking like a sixth-former.

‘What, apologise for calling your boss a hunk?’ Imelda’s eyes widened in mock amazement.

‘Darling, why so sensitive? Don’t tell me you really are having a thing with him. You can’t seriously be serious,’ she affected horror, ‘about a man who wears weave-your-own sandals and a Fair Isle tank top.’

Dulcie spun round and marched into the kitchen. She was back in less than three seconds with a thirteen-pint stock pot and a ladle.

The café went quiet.

‘This,’ said Dulcie, conversationally, clutching the stock pot to her chest and dipping the ladle in,

‘is ratatouille.’

‘Oh Christ,’ muttered Liam, his fork clattering on to his salad plate. His chair scraped back like chalk on a blackboard.

‘Dulcie, it was a joke,’ Imelda protested lightly. ‘Come on, where’s your sense of humour?’

‘I don’t have one any more. I lost it along with my brain when I got involved with him.’

To indicate who she meant, Dulcie flicked a ladleful of ratatouille at Liam. It went splat against his chest and slid down inside his tracksuit top.

Imelda screamed and tried to dodge behind Liam but Dulcie was too quick for her. Splat went the second ladleful against the pink Lycra dress.

‘Terrific shot,’ someone murmured admiringly on table six. ‘She’s mad,’ shrieked Imelda,

‘someone stop her!’

‘Come on, we’re out of here.’ Liam grabbed her by the arm and yanked her towards the door.

‘Dulcie, where are you going?’ shouted Rufus from the kitchen doorway, but she was already outside.

The gleaming red Lamborghini was parked across the entrance to Rufus’s garage. For all Liam’s obsession with exercise, he never parked his car an inch further away from his destination than was humanly possible.

Imelda was still struggling into her seat when Dulcie launched the contents of the stock pot through the open passenger door.

A tidal wave of garlicky ratatouille shot everywhere, drenching the inside of the car. It looked, Dulcie realised, pleased with the effect, like John Travolta’s famous accident in Pulp Fiction.

And oh, how Liam loved his precious Lamborghini. Almost as much, Dulcie thought happily, as he loved himself.

‘My car!’ howled Liam, clawing lumps of courgette and tomato out of his hair. ‘My fucking car.

You bitch!’

‘Never mind your car,’ Imelda screamed, ‘what about my dress?’ Her voice rose another octave.

‘It’s a Galliano!’

‘You’re blocking a garage,’ said Dulcie. She pointed to the No Parking sign Rufus had pinned up only last week. ‘I’d move if I were you. Before you get clamped.’

‘Sorry about the ratatouille,’ she told Rufus, dumping the empty stock pot in the sink and running the taps.

‘Lucky it wasn’t hot.’

Dulcie pushed her sleeves up and began scrubbing the pot clean.

‘I wish it bloody had been.’

She was white-faced and shaking. Rufus’s heart went out to her; he knew how awful she must be feeling. When his wife had left him for the bank manager he would have given anything to have flung a pot of ratatouille in their faces. He just hadn’t had the nerve.

When he saw the tears sliding down Dulcie’s face, Rufus didn’t hesitate. Crossing the kitchen, he put his arms around her, as he had dreamed of doing for so long.

‘There, there.’ He patted Dulcie’s heaving back as if she were a child. ‘Don’t let them upset you.

You deserve better than him.’