The Honey Queen

David’s brow furrowed.

She looked at the face she wanted to touch, so she knew each contour and felt a yearning gap inside. It had to end and soon.

‘I can’t see you having fights,’ he said finally. ‘You’re too gentle. You’re joking, surely?’

Peggy summoned up a smile in the middle of her misery. ‘No, I was a tomboy, honestly.’

‘Apart from the knitting and sewing, then,’ David said, still looking as if he didn’t believe her.

‘Oh, yes, apart from that,’ Peggy agreed.

He was too clever, too able to see inside her, she thought. How had he got inside her head so quickly?

In bed that night, unable to sleep, she practised different ways of telling him it was over: ‘I’m too young, David, too young for the picket fence and the two-point-five children.’

Even in her head, the mental David had an answer to that argument: ‘How do you have two-point-five children? I’ve always wondered.’

She’d never left anyone properly before. She’d had dates and boyfriends over the years, but nothing serious, nothing that couldn’t be undone by packing up and moving on. She had no experience of how to handle this.

Two days later, she was so preoccupied trying to come up with a way to end it that she somehow found herself agreeing to go back to his house for dinner on their third date.

‘The lads are out for the evening – I almost had to bribe them. They want to see this woman I can’t stop talking about,’ he told her on the phone.

Peggy beamed at the thought of David talking about her.

‘And I cleaned the house and told them that, if they messed it up, I would destroy Brian’s electric guitar and put Steve’s precious football jersey, the one signed by the Irish team, into the wash.’

They both laughed.

‘You’d never do that,’ Peggy teased.

‘What, you don’t think I can be cruel and dangerous?’ he said, laughing.

‘No,’ she said quietly.

How easy it would be to let herself fall further in love with this man and spend a lifetime with him. It seemed there would be no arguing, no fights, none of that constant tension in the house. But what if he changed? That’s what men did, and you had to know how to deal with that. Peggy already knew that she couldn’t. She was better off on her own.

‘What happened there?’ he asked, picking up on the change in her voice. ‘You sounded so sad. Tell me, please.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Sorry, I can’t.’

‘There’s a lot about you, Peggy Barry, that I don’t understand. Yet,’ he added.

‘Gosh no, I’m very boring,’ she said lightly. It was her standard response and she’d used it during their first dinner, but she knew he wanted to know more now and that her made-up family background wouldn’t keep him satisfied for long.

‘Hey, Ms Knitting Shop Owner and future entrepreneur of the year,’ he said, ‘I don’t think you’re boring for one moment, but if that’s the story we’re running with right now, then being allegedly boring hasn’t turned out too bad for you.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ she said. ‘I’m trading the Beetle in next week for a Ferrari.’

‘Red or yellow?’ he asked.

‘Do they only make them in those colours?’ Peggy demanded. ‘Red is so obvious. If a guy gets a red Ferrari, he has to have pouffed-up hair, an open shirt, a medallion and a supermodel beside him.’

‘At least I’ve got the supermodel sorted!’ he joked.

On the night of their dinner date, David offered to pick Peggy up from her house but she suddenly decided that she might need to get away under her own steam.

‘No need for you to come out,’ she said brightly. ‘Give me directions and I’ll get there myself.’

‘It’s complicated if you don’t know the area – I’ll drive to the shop and you can follow me in your own car,’ he said.

She pulled up behind him as he parked the car outside one of a row of attractive townhouses. He came round and opened the car door for her then led her through a tiny front garden, and unlocked the door …

‘It’s not such a bad place really, for three men living alone,’ he said, as he showed her inside.

The house was very obviously a bachelor establishment. There was a big leather couch in the living room, the inevitable enormous television and fabulous stereo system, and a coffee table littered with papers and sports magazines.

‘Steve,’ he growled, moving swiftly to the coffee table and tidying the papers into a neat pile. ‘This was spotless this morning. He’s a menace.’

She couldn’t have imagined any of the other men she’d dated hastily organizing it all the way David did, sorting out the cushions on the couch.

‘Steve sits here eating breakfast and when he’s finished, he just goes off leaving all the papers left scattered around. I think he imagines we’ve a maid. That’s the only explanation.’

‘Is he an older brother or younger?’ said Peggy, looking at the family photographs crowded on the mantelpiece.

‘Youngest,’ David said, showing her a picture of a smiling young man holding a football. ‘I’m the second eldest after Meredith, then Brian, then Steve. Brian’s the one who’s getting married. He’s spending a lot of time in his girlfriend Liz’s flat so he doesn’t contribute as much as he once did to the mess, but he doesn’t tidy up any of it, either.’

‘It must be nice, coming from a big family,’ Peggy said idly, examining the photos. There were several big family groups. Three tall young men standing with an equally tall father and a shorter woman who was obviously David’s mother, big smiling face and fluffy white blonde hair clustered around her face. Beside them was a thin, dark-haired teenager wearing Doc Martens, ripped tights and a mini skirt, with a huge grin on her face. There was another young woman in some of the pictures.

She was always a little apart, a tall woman in her early thirties with long blonde hair and elegant, expensive clothes. In each one she was standing apart from the rest of the group.

More photos decorated the shelves loaded with CDs and video games. There was a Christmas shot, everyone except the tall blonde woman in Christmas hats at a table; and what appeared to be a family holiday snap, taken on a beach with everyone very wet because it was pelting with rain, but with genuine smiles for the camera. They all seemed so happy, so at ease with each other.

There was something almost voyeuristic about looking at these photos, Peggy felt: this was proper family life. She felt a void inside her.

‘Big families are great fun,’ David said. ‘It’s a support system, a team who are always there for you.’

She noticed that he didn’t say any of the stuff she’d half-expected him to say, like: ‘Big families drive you mad.’ No, he loved it, relished being part of it.

‘Is that your mum and dad?’ she said, pointing to the older couple all dressed up, smiles on their faces but still a bit stiff and formal in front of the camera, as if they weren’t entirely at ease with posing.

‘Yes, that’s their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. We sent them to Crete. Mum hates flying, had to go to the doctor to get something to calm her down for the flight. Dad said she was funny because she took one tablet and fell asleep. He practically had to carry her off the plane.’

‘They look lovely,’ Peggy said wistfully.

‘They are.’ There was real warmth in his voice. ‘You’ll have to come and meet them. You could come for lunch next Sunday, if that’s not all going too fast? Mum would love that. Freya would love it too – I’m warning you, she’ll interrogate you. She’s a junior Miss Marple. Nothing escapes her.’

Peggy smiled at the vision of the teenager with the lumpy shoes as a Miss Marple.