Onward and Upward

Chapter 30

  Following the shootings Miss Antoinette was in a quandary, she had assumed that Mr Michaels was just another visitor, passing trade, but he had actually made her genuinely laugh for the first time in her life, and for some inexplicable reason she wanted to see him again, but even if he hadn’t been in a coma she wouldn’t have had an excuse to approach him, she certainly wasn’t that type of lady. It was only when Hyacinth (that sweet little old lady) visited her gallery with friends a few weeks later, and mentioned the real reason for his visit in passing (she had assumed that she already knew) that she plucked up the courage to do something about it, but what, then she had an idea. Mr Michaels was now off to Switzerland so she wrote to him there, confirming that she would accept his offer, and wished him a speedy recovery, crossed her fingers and toes, and left it to divine intervention.

  I was receiving thousands of cards and letters of encouragement almost hourly, but somehow (destiny, divine intervention or luck) it was the one that Alice picked out of the sack that sat beside my bed. She had started to read them to me, ‘just to let you know that you are not alone Daddy’, and as she read it out aloud she faltered and read it again. The letters were usually very much of a muchness so she was turning into a bit of a automaton, but the words ‘would accept his offer’ brought her back to Planet Earth, then she recognised the headed notepaper and the signature at the bottom of the brief note. She had been meaning to ring Miss Antoinette, as everyone called her, to thank her for helping Daddy, and for saving poor Pierre’s life, but one thing had lead to another and she kept putting it off, until she read the letter. Tomorrow she would be returning home, but via El Campo for a few days, it was her turn to keep an eye on it, whilst it was Robins turn to ‘Daddy sit’, so she picked up the phone and rang her. At first she thought she was talking to an answer phone, but when she told it who she was, it burst into tears, very confusing. Then they had a ‘girlie chat’ for half an hour, the first one that Miss A had ever had in her entire life, and they made plans for her to hitch a ride over to Switzerland with Robin in the G450, and then onward with her, to spend the weekend at El Campo to show her ‘the place’, and discuss the ‘offer’, although it turned out to be a ‘very long’ weekend, she hardly ever returned to her ‘loft’ in London. Alice loved her on sight (in the biblical sense – not carnal), but Robin’s first impression was that she should have been put in the baggage hold along with the rest of the inanimate objects, but his first impression finally waned after Alice threatened to castrate him with a rusty tin opener.

  Miss A (why do they all keep on calling me that, she often wondered) quickly realised that Alice and Gerry knew all about the intended offer of employment, Daddy and Breena had pounded their ears at every stage of their project. and so they were ‘fully up to speed’ (ugh), which was more than could be said for her, but after nodding benignly a few times ‘she was quickly on board’ (ugh, ugh). Fortunately Alice was all in favour of her involvement (and Gerry couldn’t care less, it wasn’t his money) so clutching her new bit of plastic in her grubby little mitt (hand) - she had her own ‘gold card’ but this one veritably glowed in the dark - she scouring the World for calendars and chocolate box lids, and slowly her tally grew. She didn’t let Andrew down, she was such a hard barginer (is that a word?) that veteran auctioneers would throw themselves out of the windows rather than be in the same room as her (as long as they were on the ground floor), and ‘private collectors’ were rumoured to have ended up paying her to take the ‘wretched’ thing away, and over the following months she would periodically pop in to El Campo to empty her Sainsbury’s shopping bag, and top up her tan, and today was a ‘periodic’, although it had been after a particularly long and protracted brow beating, but she was triumphantly clutching her reusable, eco-friendly, carrier bag.

  ‘Hello Miss Antoinette, nice to see you again, good trip, did you get the Da Vinci? I said.

  ‘The Da Vinci was last month, this (holding up her bag triumphantly) is the Monet’, and placing it on the foot of my bed (please madam, I hardly know you) she pulled it out and held it up.

  ‘Nice poppies’ I said ‘but for all that money it could have been a bit bigger, perhaps the repro can be blown up a bit’, and that almost got her going, almost but not quite, better luck with the next attempt, so I continued ‘please can I just call you Antoinette now, after all you have been spending an awful lot of my money, and we do have our own little secret’.

  ‘Oh bother’ she thought, ‘the tape recorder had been running’, she had hoped that something had been changing its tapes when her letter had arrived’.

  Blushing profusely she said ‘do you normally call people by their surname, like those horrible Americans (no disrespect to Americans, anyone without a British passport was horrible – to her).

  ‘Sorry, I just thought it was an ‘arty thing, you know like Miss Molly, or Miss Demeanour’, I innocently said.

  And that was it, within seconds tears were streaming down her face, and she had the stitch. I was really beginning to like her, anyone that could be reduced to tears by as terrible a joke as that was OK by me. (Miss Demeanour – misdemeanour – get it? – oh, forget it).

  Finally she was able to get her breath back and gasped, ‘no, my first name is Sigourney’, but my father can trace our family tree back to the actual branch that they used to make the guillotine from.

  ‘Good one’ I thought, trying rather unsuccessfully to be serious.

  ‘That’s a very nice name’, I said, and then the penny dropped and I flung myself back on the pillow and howled ‘it starts with an S’.

  ‘I know’ she said in a very husky voice, which had nothing to do with the stitch, and my sheet started to rise to the occasion.

  Before engaging brain I blurted out ‘but you are only half my age, what will people say’.

  ‘Well’ she said, in a voice that could only be described as ‘oozing sex from every syllable, ‘if it’s only a matter of mathematics, then my identical twin Simone can always make up the numbers’, and with that my sheet was in shreds, I wonder why?

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