Old Dogs, New Tricks. Linda Phillips

whirred into action and began to scorch her scalp as Angie wielded her fiercest, most root-tugging brush. Tufts of hair were tortured and teased, blasted and blown, yanked this way and that without mercy, as Angie contrived to puff them out where they should have been allowed to lie flat and flattened them where she ought to have puffed. It was all Marjorie could do, not to wrest the brush from the girl’s hand and beg to finish the job herself.

      ‘There!’ Angie declared at last, adding to Marjorie’s agony by giving her a glimpse of ragged neckline with her hand-held mirror. ‘That all right for you now, do you think? Yes? All right? OK?’

      ‘Fine. Fine. Lovely. Thank you very much.’ Marjorie nodded at herself in the mirror, turned her head and nodded again.

      Angie began rubbing her hands together then – with satisfaction Marjorie thought at first, only realising her mistake on finding waxy stuff being fingered through her hair. Why on earth had the girl done that? Now it looked greasier than before she’d walked into the salon.

      She wanted to steal home by dead of night; crawl under the nearest stone. No one must see her like this. Instead, she stood up, scattering hair round her feet, and fished in her handbag for her purse. Angie conveyed her usual surprised pleasure over her generous tip, and the frightful ritual came to a close.

      Only as Marjorie handed her credit card to the girl at the desk did the news hit her again. Could it possibly be true that Spittal’s was closing down?

      She pulled open the door to the street and stepped out into the late afternoon sunshine of a perfect spring day. No, it was absolutely inconceivable. Spittal’s was a successful, modern and go-ahead company. They made microprocessors and other hi-tec components. How could they think of closing down?

      And Philip, occupying a senior position with the company, would surely have had advance warning of any such possibility. But he’d not breathed a word about it. Not a single word. So of course it couldn’t be true.

      At home, Marjorie reached for the flexible spray on the end of the bath and waited for the water to run warm. Kneeling on the bath mat she bent over the tub and set to work with shampoo. Soon she had erased most of Angie’s efforts in a glut of medicated foam. Wax, mousse and all kinds of gunk were banished down the plug hole, along with a few more hairs. At this rate, she thought grimly, chasing them round the bath, she would be bald. As well as a little too heavy round the hips. And droopy round the mouth. She sighed. Life could be so cruel.

      And what if Spittal’s really did close down? Not only would it be dreadful for the hundreds of people who worked there – and God help all of them and their families – but for her, personally, it would be disastrous. Particularly right now. Because just as she’d been thinking events were swinging her way and her months of hard work were beginning to pay off, it looked as though she’d be having Phil hanging about at home with time on his hands while he looked around for another job. Time to get under her feet and throw all manner of spanners in the works. Time to dismantle the plan that she and his parents had been secretly hatching for the past couple of months. He might even – for want of something better to do – try muscling in on her act!

      Now that simply wasn’t to be borne. Phil had always refused to have anything to do with his father’s business, so why should he be allowed to step in at this late stage? No, not now that she was about to do that very thing.

      Although elderly, Philip’s father still ran the three small hardware shops that he’d started as a young man, but recently he had been forced to admit to Marjorie that they were really getting too much for him. Philip’s mother was already semi-invalid and had not been able to assist for some while. In fact, had it not been for Marjorie’s unstinting efforts in recent times, both with helping Eric in the shops and in doing all she could for Sheila, some other arrangement would have had to have been considered.

      Marjorie hadn’t planned to help out her father-in-law; it was something she’d fallen into one day when she’d dropped by at the largest of the shops for a bag of rose fertiliser and found him agonising over VAT.

      It so happened that she had a talent for all types of figure-work: taxes, book-keeping, cash-flows – all these she could handle with ease. She had worked for a firm of accountants on leaving school and would have trained up to become one herself if Becky, their first daughter, had not put in an appearance. Family life, she had then discovered, suited her even more than accountancy, and she had never felt the urge to go back to doing anything like that – until she saw Eric huffing over his official forms.

      ‘My oh my,’ he’d said gleefully, when she’d asked if he needed a hand, ‘I’d quite forgotten. This is right up your street, love, isn’t it?’

      He’d gladly handed her all the paperwork – along with a back-log from an old cardboard box – and from then on she’d been fully involved in all aspects of the business, learning as she went along.

      And now the plan that the three of them – Eric, Sheila and herself – had been working on was that, since neither Philip nor his siblings had ever shown any interest in the shops, Marjorie would take over the complete running of them from the beginning of next month. She was to accept a proper salary, which she had never been offered before and wouldn’t have dreamed of accepting if she had, since she was only too happy to help out, and she would be allowed carte blanche to make of the business what she could.

      Eric and Sheila would take things more easily from then on, although Eric said he would still ‘pop in now and again to keep an eye on things’. And they would only draw from the business what little they felt they needed to live on.

      ‘But –’ Marjorie’s face had clouded a little after her initial burst of euphoria ‘– what are Colin and Chrissie going to think of all this?’ Her brother-in-law and sister-in-law might raise all sorts of objections to their inheritance being ‘taken over’ in this way, even though they wouldn’t want anything to do with the shops themselves.

      Both Philip’s brother and his sister had elected to go their own ways, just as he had done. In fact, much to his father’s disgust, it was Philip who seemed to have set the trend, paved the way, made it easier for the others to stand up to parental authority and say no. Heedless of Eric’s protests, Colin had gone into the leisure industry and Chrissie was married to a trout farmer in North Wales.

      ‘Colin and Chrissie can think what they like,’ Eric grunted. ‘They’ve had their chances and blown ‘em, as far as I’m concerned. They’ve not been forgotten in our wills, if that’s what’s bothering you, and that’s all they can rightfully expect.’

      Marjorie noticed that he’d not included her husband in his condemnation. Philip had always been his favourite in spite of everything, though he would never admit it. Did he still harbour a hope that his firstborn might yet one day step into his father’s shoes? And was Marjorie merely the next best thing?

      But she swept the notion aside. Eric’s proposal had touched and flattered her; why should she look a gift horse in the mouth? She had always felt as much loved by the couple as their own children were – perhaps even more so since her own parents’ tragic death – and to be trusted with Eric’s pride and joy … well, it was surely to be taken as an accolade. An accolade that she had been hoping for all along but one that she’d dared not expect.

      She’d not whispered a word to anyone about her troubles of late, but the truth was that she had been feeling a little low and oddly insecure, what with it being that time of life when a woman feels less than her best and society conspires to make her feel utterly useless – fit only for the scrap-heap. The future had begun to look so empty and she had been desperately seeking something she could look forward to, with pleasure or even zeal.

      Next year she and Phil would be celebrating twenty-five years of marriage; and with modern medicine being what it was, and people living longer and more healthily, it looked as though they stood a fair chance of maybe twenty-five more together. What on earth were they going to do with all that time? Or more to the point, since he at least had a busy career for a while, what was she going to do? These were the thoughts that had begun to haunt her, even before their two daughters had left home