Mrs Morris Changes Lanes Read online

  Table of Contents

  Mrs Morris Changes Lanes (A Second Chance Novella)

  1 Jools

  2 Mrs Morris

  3 Mrs Dent

  4 Mrs Jenkinson

  5 Gems

  6 Mummy

  7 My Wife

  8 Dilly

  9 Anonymous

  10 Love

  11 Juliet

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  To Elizabeth, Jane & Susanne

  “Regret is a sterile emotion.”

  Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat,

  Nobel Peace Prize Laureate 1995

  “Why does no-one ever use my proper name these days?”

  Juliet Morris

  1 Jools

  “But it’s my day off. My only me-time all week.”

  Juliet glared at the single key her husband Rob had dropped onto the kitchen table beside her bowl of ChocoPops. It wasn’t the master that shared a fob with the keys to their front door, his mum’s house, and the lock-up from which he ran his plastering business. That fob also boasted a miniature personalised licence plate, ROB 999, a gift from their kids years before.

  Not that Rob’s car bore a personalised licence plate, and it likely never would, but now and again, getting his round in at the pub, he would casually drop the key fob on the bar, as if offering the barmaid a passport to ride in a fancy sports car. The only personal touch Rob had acquired for his succession of tatty vehicles was a collection of dents, inflicted by pesky drivers who failed to get out of his way or who thoughtlessly parked too close to where he wanted to manoeuvre. He claimed he was just a magnet for bad drivers, but Juliet had long ago accepted he took no greater care of his car than he did of her.

  Whenever this solitary key came out of the kitchen junk drawer, Juliet knew it meant he’d booked the car into Dave’s Magic Motor Repairs, just off the Cirencester ring road. This only ever happened when the car had become illegal or unsafe to drive. Tied on to the key with a grubby piece of string was a battered cardboard luggage tag, on which Dave had written his real licence plate number in thick marker pen to make it easy to spot on the pegboard in his office.

  “Oh, go on, Jools, it won’t take you long,” he said. Somehow, it always fell to Juliet to drop the car off for repairs and pick it up again. She collected the used cereal bowl he had left on top of the dishwasher and placed it inside the machine. “Besides, what else have you got planned today? You’ll probably just have your nose stuck in a library book all day as usual.”

  Juliet opened her mouth to disagree but couldn’t think what to say. Yes, she would spend some time reading. One of the perks of her part-time job as a counter clerk in the local public library was constant access to books. Just as well she didn’t have a job in a bookshop, or she’d spend all her wages without leaving her workplace. But before she allowed herself to escape into a novel today, she had planned to catch up with the laundry, hoover through upstairs and downstairs, and tidy up.

  She had expected that when the kids left home, the house would be tidier. Instead, Rob seemed to have become even more slovenly on their departure. She wished he’d done so to stop her missing them so much, but she knew he was neither that thoughtful nor that strategic. Early in their marriage, she had realised it was far less stressful to tidy up after him than to try to change his ways.

  “Oh, all right, just this once,” said Juliet, knowing it would not be.

  “Cheers, Jools.”

  She handed Rob a flask of tea and the lunchbox she’d packed for him. In the early days of his plastering career, when he still worked cash in hand (he’d assured her that was standard practice in his trade), he’d bought his lunch from takeaways or at the pub. Since that nasty run-in with the tax inspector, packed lunches were one of many economies they’d had to make to cover his tax bill.

  Juliet had expected to be more affluent with each passing year of their marriage, especially once the kids left home. Her empty nest and meagre bank balance left her feeling impoverished. Still, it could have been worse. Rob could have been sent to prison for tax evasion. Then where would she be? In a tidier house, that’s where. Tidy and peaceful.

  As usual, she watched Rob walk down the front garden path and climb into his van without waving goodbye. Then she shut the door and leaned against it, closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  “Goodbye, Rob,” she said quietly. “And don’t call me Jools.”

  Today she felt more than usually irritated by his use of the hated nickname, a hangover from their schooldays. While some of her friends’ nicknames sounded cute and affectionate, ‘Jools’ seemed lazy and disrespectful, as if she wasn’t worth the extra effort it took to pronounce the final two syllables.

  When she’d started going out with Rob, she’d told him she preferred to be called by her full name, and when he’d persisted with Jools, she’d let it go, not wanting to nag – a decision she’d regretted ever since. She couldn’t bear his continuing desecration of perhaps the most romantic girl’s name in the English language. Her namesake’s romance hadn’t ended well, either.

  Jools to rhyme with fools, she thought, heading for their compact lounge. It’s not the sort of name you call the woman you love. She wouldn’t have minded so much if he’d pronounced it French style, as in Jules Verne, with a soft J and silent s. In her teens, Jules Verne had been one of her favourite authors, fuelling her dreams of adventure and discovery. The closest she’d ever got to emulating Verne’s heroes was ‘Around the Ring Road in 80 Minutes’.

  Ironically, it had been Rob’s car that had first attracted her to him. Or at least, his offer of a lift home on a rainy night after a sixth form disco. As one of the oldest boys in their class, he’d passed his driving test early in the academic year. He had worked in a factory during the previous summer holidays and saved up enough money to buy an ancient Hillman Imp. A ride in an old banger had seemed a better offer than being walked home in the rain by the other boy keen on her, Thomas Jenkinson.

  Tom had passed out of her life all too soon. Even before he earned the best set of A Levels in the school, he was a dead cert for university. Juliet had no idea what he’d gone on to study, but assumed he’d be earning a fortune now. What if she’d married him instead of Rob? She should have had the wit to wait for him to finish his education and launch his career, instead of rushing to the altar with Rob. If she hadn’t been in such a hurry, she could have been living in luxury now, in a big fancy house, with a cleaning lady to do all the chores, and a husband who truly loved her.

  But on life’s journey, Tom had taken a different exit from the roundabout, heading for the motorway of academic excellence in distant parts, while Juliet took the earlier turn-off for non-motorway traffic only. Their paths had not crossed since. She’d never even moved away from her hometown and was still employed by the library where she’d worked as a schoolgirl.

  As Juliet straightened the sofa cushions and binned three empty crisp packets, she told herself an optimist might count this as me-time. Wasn’t it a treat-to-self to make the house nice and tidy? Juliet delved between the side cushions of Rob’s armchair to dig out the remotes and return them to the shelf beneath the television.

  She would appreciate the more orderly surroundings, even if Rob didn’t. Rob wouldn’t notice if the corduroy scatter cushions were in the fish tank glugging away on the sideboard, or if the fake sheepskin rug was on top of the coffee table, as long as his view of the television was uninterrupted. Once, catching the end of a psychology documentary while waiting for the football to come on, Rob had told Juliet it wasn’t his fault he was so untidy. It was his mother’s, for conditioning him. In his formative years, she’d always tidied up after him.

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nbsp; Next on her to-do list was to clean the bathroom and load the washing machine. Not having to look at the overflowing dirty clothes basket would also make her happier. Rob said she was always in a better mood after folding and putting away the laundry.

  After a couple of hours of housework, Juliet decided to treat herself to a more self-indulgent reward. At eleven o’clock, she would eat one of her favourite chocolate bars with her morning coffee. Alone in the house with no-one watching, she would dip the chocolate bar in her coffee – a cheaper alternative to buying a mocha from a café – just like the television adverts which present chocolate as the perfect companion for lone women. She brought her cup and saucer from the kitchen into the lounge and set it down on the coffee table, now pleasingly free of used tissues, discarded socks and toenail clippings.

  Juliet reached for her knitting bag and unzipped the small side pocket in which she kept her secret stash – a place that Rob, peckish after an evening at the pub, would never think of raiding for snacks. Nor would the kids before they’d left home a few years before.

  Using a delicate cup and saucer, the only piece of bone china in the house, also counted as a treat. Jessie had bought it for her from a jumble sale for Mother’s Day when she was about ten. Juliet only ever used it when she was alone for fear of anyone else breaking it.

  On the days she was at work, morning coffee was taken in one of an assortment of chunky mugs bearing brand names of the library’s commercial suppliers. Too often, she ended up with the one promoting the sanitary disposal bins in the ladies’ toilets.

  Juliet peeled the plastic wrapper from the chocolate bar and dropped it neatly into the wastepaper basket beside the sofa. Slowly, in a practised movement, she dunked the chocolate into her coffee, lowering it almost to the bottom of the cup. At the point of optimal softness, she pulled it back out and raised it to her lips, keeping her cup and saucer beneath her chin to catch any drips, because chocolate stains are hell to shift. Inserting the bar into her mouth, she felt like the Little Crocodile in Through the Looking Glass, whose description she’d enjoyed sharing during Junior Story Time the day before.

  How cheerfully he seems to grin,

  How neatly spreads his claws,

  And welcomes little fishes in,

  With gently smiling jaws!

  She closed her eyes in rapture as her teeth sank into the chocolate at the point of least resistance, the indentation between the first two segments.

  Then – crunch! Her jaw rebounded from something more solid than melting chocolate. Juliet winced as hard as Rob had done on his car’s most recent encounter with a traffic island.

  This made no sense! Even if she’d eaten the chocolate straight from the fridge, it should not have provided that much resistance. Had she inadvertently bought a bar studded with whole hazelnuts? It wouldn’t be the first time.

  Juliet set the rest of the bar on her saucer as she examined the severed chunk with her tongue. Nope, no nuts – but there was something sharp embedded in the molten mass of chocolate as yet unswallowed. When she spat it out into her teaspoon, a tiny meteorite glinted back at her. Running her tongue over her teeth, she discovered its origin: a jagged upper right tooth. Journey to the Centre of the Cavity.

  It didn’t seem fair that only that morning, she’d crunched her way through a bowl of bland breakfast cereal without mishap, but had met her tooth’s nemesis in a softened bar of her favourite chocolate. Maybe the crunchy cereal had created a fault line. The hole felt like a crater on the moon.

  As Juliet gritted her teeth in resignation, a searing pain shot from jaw to temple, making her cry out. When she stopped biting down, the pain didn’t recede.

  Her appetite for chocolate destroyed, Juliet set her cup and saucer on the coffee table. So much for her me-time. Such agony called for emergency treatment. And no, ending the agony would not count as me-time.

  She went into the hall and picked up the phone to call the dentist.

  “You’d like an emergency appointment today, Mrs Morris?” The receptionist’s tone suggested there was no question she would rather be asked. “Well, it’s your lucky day. I’ve just put the phone down from a cancellation. Can you get here by midday? Good. I’m sure the dentist will be very pleased to see you.”

  I bet he will, thought Juliet sourly, feeling as if she’d just booked a trip to the confessional. Not that she was Catholic, but visiting the dentist always made her conscious of her sins of omission and commission – not flossing regularly, eating too many sweets.

  “Yes, noon would be perfect, thank you,” she replied. “I can just fit that in before I take my husband’s car to be repaired. My lucky day indeed.”

  2 Mrs Morris

  Juliet had tried not to transfer her fear of dentists to her children. She was relieved that Jessie and Jake had grown up with reasonably intact teeth, at least until they’d left home a few years before, Jessie to work at a fancy hair salon in Bristol and Jake as a plumber in Gloucester. Juliet was glad they were close enough to come home for the occasional weekend, even if they did bring their laundry. Jessie had offered to do Juliet’s hair for free at home when she had time, and Juliet was still looking forward to that moment. She liked to think she and Rob could rely on Jake to fix any plumbing issues, should the need arise. They were good kids really.

  Juliet’s fear of dentists wasn’t a rational aversion to pain, but more an embarrassment at exposing her vulnerability. She considered each cavity a personal failure, proof of her poor life choices. Some errors of self-care were reversible. A bad haircut or over-plucked eyebrows would grow back eventually. Which was just as well, given the abuse she and her best friend Maisie had inflicted on their appearance in their teens.

  Changes to teeth, however, were less reversible, unless you had the huge disposable income required for private cosmetic surgery. Juliet had to depend on the NHS for her dental care. At least it made treatment affordable.

  Just before noon, she entered the premises of her regular high-street dentist. Well, regular for the kids, at least. She’d left it so long between her own last two visits that the dark-haired dentist, Mr Allsop, had in the meantime turned grey. At first, she’d assumed he was a different dentist altogether, and she’d been taken aback when he greeted her as if he knew her. Then she recognised above his mask his distinctive blue eyes. One had an iris larger than the other, like David Bowie’s. Sometimes, while he was at work on her mouth, she’d pretended he was David Bowie to take her mind off the drill. David Bowie had naturally wonky English teeth before he succumbed to expensive veneers. She felt as if they were kindred spirits.

  After registering at reception, Juliet took a seat in the pale mauve waiting room and watched the neon tropical fish swim up and down their tank. She was glad they had the hardier cold-water type at home, otherwise she might get toothache every time she looked at them. The fish and the tank had been Jessie’s fifteenth birthday present. When Jessie moved into her cramped city-centre flat share, she was unable to find space for the tank, nor indeed most of her belongings. Jake’s flat was also quite small, so the children’s bedrooms were still much as they’d been when they’d left home. The only difference was that Juliet didn’t have to tidy them so often, only after their occasional weekend visits. Both kids preferred the minimalist look for their flats, a style Juliet could only fantasise about in the cluttered family home.

  A pretty young dental nurse in sugar-pink scrubs appeared in the doorway. The practice’s soothing pastel colour scheme made Juliet think of sugared almonds. The other waiting patients looked up eagerly from their magazines and phones. You’d think the nurse was about to announce a winning lottery number, thought Juliet.

  “Mrs Morris, please.”

  Losing number, more like. Clumsy with nerves, she gathered up her coat and bag.

  The nurse led Juliet up a pistachio-coloured stairway to the plain white door of the treatment room, chatting to put her at her ease.

  “How are you today, Mrs Morris?”
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  Even after thirty years of marriage, Juliet felt odd being called Mrs Morris, a name she associated with her late mother-in-law. Juliet had never liked calling her Mum. That title belonged to her widowed mother, who had struggled to raise her alone for nearly two decades.

  “Fine, thank you,” Juliet replied automatically, wondering how the nurse might react if she told her the truth: fed up, put upon and in pain. “Thank you for fitting me in at such short notice.”

  The nurse opened the door to the treatment room and stood back to allow Juliet to enter first.

  “It’s a pleasure. Glad we can help. Just pop your things down there, then take a seat in the big chair and the dentist will be with you in a moment.”

  Juliet deposited her coat, bag and car keys on the side table before lowering herself into the dentist’s chair, already in a semi-recumbent position. Just pretend it’s a beach recliner, only without the sunshine and cocktails, she told herself. Make the most of this rare chance to sit back and relax.

  As she wriggled to make herself comfortable, the squeaking of the cold plastic upholstery was the only sound in the room, apart from the brisk rattle of a computer keyboard beneath the dentist’s lean fingers. Perched on a wheeled stool at the counter that ran round three sides of the room, he had his back to Juliet as he called up her records on his screen.

  Juliet wondered when Mr Allsop’s hair had reverted to its original black. Why such vanity in a successful professional? Immediately, she admonished herself for judging him. She wouldn’t have criticised a woman for retaining the hair colour of her youth. In fact, she had been thinking of asking Jessie to colour hers when she finally found time. Her natural chestnut was fading to pale tangerine, diluted by ever more greys.

  If only Jake had become a dentist instead of a plumber, he might have rejuvenated her smile, too. Not that her smile had much use these days.