The Tea House on Mulberry Street by Sharon Owens Read Free Book Online Page A

looked at her watch. Maurice and Daisy had been on their own for two hours. Arnold’s parents lived with them in the bungalow, following a serious operation on Daisy’s knee five years earlier. They would be fidgeting for their lunch. With great reluctance, Sadie gathered up her coat and bag, and hurried to pay the bill. She dropped her receipt into a wastepaper basket on the way to the door. Arnold’s sharp eyes missed nothing. She would buy some flowers on the way home, and say she had gone out to get them for Daisy, to cheer her up following a cold. Her trip to the tea house would be a secret.
    Unfortunately for Sadie, Arnold had a guilty, little secret of his own.
    As she was leaving the shop, Sadie saw her husband’s distinctive Jaguar come gliding up Mulberry Street and she shrank back inside the door. She could not bear to be caught coming out of a cafe. He would know instantly that she had eaten rich food. She peeked out from behind the blind. His spotless car approached at a leisurely pace, glittering in the weak, morning sunlight. He was smiling, and patting the knee of a very thin blonde woman, and saying something intimate to her. Sadie could tell by the way he raised one eyebrow that he was saying something obscene. He took his eyes off the road then, something he never did when Sadie was in the car, and looked hungrily down the front of the woman’s blouse. The woman threw back her head and laughed out loud, showing long, predatory teeth. She reached over to Arnold and straightened his tie and he caught her hand in his greedy fingers and held it to his mouth. As Sadie pressed her round face to the glass in astonishment, Arnold kissed the ring-encrusted hand of his companion as if he were a pantomime prince and she were his Sleeping Beauty. Then, they were turning into Camden Street. And then they were gone.
    Sadie stumbled out of Muldoon’s and stood in the street, looking after them with her mouth wide open, like a landed fish.
    Her husband, Arnold, was a pompous businessman. He sold over-decorated conservatories to the nouveau riche. He was utterly unremarkable-looking, and a tiny bit overweight himself, but he made up for these shortcomings with his overbearing personality. When Arnold was in the room, no-one else could say a word. He had an opinion on everything, and he was always right. It didn’t matter if the subject was world politics, or the general decline in the flavour of mass-produced bread, Arnold was always right.
    But Sadie loved him. She loved the spirit of determination in Arnold. He never gave up. Unlike Sadie and her failed diets, when Arnold decided he was going to sell a conservatory, he kept on going until he had sold it. He had a knack for assessing people, and he would appeal to their vanity, their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. He convinced them that a conservatory was the answer to all their problems, and he got that all-important signature. He was arrogant, but he was effective.
    Sadie forgave his arrogance, and he forgave her disappointing appearance. Their love life was dull and predictable and had produced two sons, now living in Australia. How would she tell them the awful news?
    She waited, desolate, for the bus. When it pulled in at the stop, she accidentally spilled all the coins in her purse into the gutter. She couldn’t even be bothered to pick them all up. She handed a shiny pound coin to the driver. He punched out a ticket. Sadie didn’t say thank you, and neither did the driver. On the way home, she did not allow herself to think about Arnold and his secret love. She did not know what to think. Her brain had turned into a lump of cheese. High-calorie cheese, mature cheddar. She felt foolish and fat and a failure. She got off at her stop, in a daze.
    As she trudged up the avenue, the heavens opened, and she was drenched, along with the bouquet of pink carnations she had managed to buy for Daisy. She’d left her umbrella on the tea-house doorstep, she realised, as