Not that this seemed to bother Rufus.
It hadn’t taken Dulcie long to realise that Liza had been right. Thankfully though, Rufus’s crush on her was a discreet one. He was clearly the bashful type. He hadn’t tried to push his luck and Dulcie, not wanting to hurt his feelings, simply pretended she hadn’t noticed. When he asked her out — in extremely casual, just-good-friends fashion — she invented plausible excuses. When she mentioned in passing one day that her favourite aftershave was Eau Savage and Rufus came into the cafe the next morning reeking of it — rather than his usual Old Spice — she didn’t say a word. And when he confided in her that he was lonely, Dulcie sympathised and pretended she wasn’t.
‘Finished? Great.’ Rufus came charging through the swingdoors with a pile of dirty plates.
Dumping them on the drainer, he turned his attention to the oven packed with trays of whole-wheat samosas and foil-wrapped garlic baguettes. ‘It’s getting busy out there. Could you take the order from table three?’
Dulcie ached all over; she actually felt as awful as she knew she looked. Praying she wasn’t going down with flu, she dried her hands on a towel and reached for the order pad.
‘If they’re undecided,’ said Rufus over his shoulder, ‘push the samosas. We’ve got enough here to feed India.’
Wholefood cafes tend to attract a particular breed of customer, the kind that favour natural dyes and fabrics. There were usually plenty of long, droopy cotton dresses and even droopier hand-knitted sweaters in every shade of brown. The choice of perfume ranged between anything from the Body Shop, the musty tang of patchouli oil, and dope.
It wasn’t difficult to spot Liam in his dazzling Persil-white tracksuit, and Imelda in a shocking-pink Lycra dress. Even if she’d been blind, Dulcie would still have been able to find her way to table three. Nobody else on the planet doused themselves in Obsession like Imelda.
‘My God, it’s true!’ Imelda squealed when she saw Dulcie watching them from the doorway.
Giggling, she nudged Liam. ‘She’s really here. Dulcie, it’s been ages! And you look .. . you look ...’
Lank-haired, knackered and altogether skivvyish, thought Dulcie, who was under no illusions. At this rate she could end up giving Ruby, the maid from Upstairs Downstairs, a run for her money.
‘Are you ready to order?’ She forced herself to sound polite, loathing the way Imelda was gazing around the tiny cafe, as if she expected a mouse to run over her feet any minute.
Imelda waved a manicured hand dismissively in the direction of the menu.
‘Nothing for me thanks, darling. We only dropped by to see how you are. Everyone back at the club’s simply dying of curiosity. When they heard you’d actually got yourself a job’ — here Imelda adopted a mocking, EastEnders-type accent – ‘in a caff, like, they thought it must be some kind of April Fool.’
Smiling thinly, Dulcie turned her attention to Liam, who was basking in the surreptitious attention of the other customers. He had had his hair streaked again, and his tracksuit top was unzipped to show off, through his T-shirt, the chiselled outline of his tautly muscled torso. Liam was intensely proud of his six-pack.
Dulcie was ashamed of herself for having once fallen for that awful pseudo charm. You prat, she thought wearily. What did I ever see in you?
‘I’ll have a coffee,’ said Liam, ‘black, and a green salad.’
‘Please,’ said Dulcie.
‘And no free-range caterpillars.’ Imelda shrieked with laughter and squeezed Liam’s knee. The smell of Obsession was suffocating but Liam didn’t seem to notice. Maybe, thought Dulcie, he’s been injected with the antidote.
‘Go on then, I’ll have a glass of mineral water,’ Imelda said generously. She watched Dulcie write it down. ‘With a slice of fresh lime. Got all that? Sure you can manage?’
‘I’m going to spit in her water,’ seethed Dulcie when she was safely back in the kitchen.
‘You are not!’ Rufus looked up, startled. ‘What are you talking about? Whose water?’
When Dulcie had finished telling him, he said, ‘Do you want me to serve them?’
‘What, and let them think they’ve got to me? No thanks.’
Table four needed clearing and the floor beneath it was strewn with coleslaw and bits of chewed-up, spat-out radish. Silently cursing the two small children who had left the mess, Dulcie crawled under the table on all fours with her dustpan and brush.
It wasn’t dignified and she knew her bottom was sticking out at a less than flattering angle, but she still had to exert every ounce of self-control when she heard Imelda behind her murmur to Liam, ‘Darling, if this is what wholefood cafes doto you, remind me never to work in one.’
Dulcie carried on grimly sweeping up debris. When she heard Rufus’s voice, saying breezily,
‘Everything okay here?’ and Liam replying, ‘Fine thanks, couldn’t be better,’ she knew Rufus had come out of the kitchen to keep an eye on the situation. He was making sure she was okay.
When Rufus had gone and she had finished clearing up the mess, she rose creakily to her feet.
By this time, Imelda had thought up another jibe.
‘Well, well. Now we know why you’re working here,’ she declared with a smirk. ‘Who’d want anyone as boring and ordinary as Liam when they could have a hunk like your new boss?’
Having to listen to their sarcastic remarks about her had been bad enough, but Dulcie had gritted her teeth and willed herself not to react.
Making fun of Rufus, though, was too much.
‘I think it would be nice if you apologised for that.’ Glancing down at the contents of her dustpan, Dulcie now found herself wishing the children could have made a bit more mess.
