Chapter 11

On Tuesday morning Caroline woke up in the dream car and checked her watch. It never failed to amaze her how that watch turned into a 19th century bracelet at Sweetwater and back into a digital watch when she returned to the 21st century, just as her clothes magically transformed to suit and changed back again when she returned.

‘I have just enough time to get showered and changed before the plumbers arrived,’ she thought. She moved her little car to park in the road, so that it was out of the plumbers’ way when they arrived, and then she put the kettle on.

As soon as the kettle whistled, Mr Jones arrived first with Bob, the boiler-suited plumber who was going to be doing the job. Bob was a cheerful chap, rather more rotund than Mr Jones, who had thought the room the plumber had to work in next to the Jaguar more than adequate. Once Bob saw the space, he demonstrated beyond doubt that the old Jaguar had to be pushed out of the garage onto the drive.

Fortunately, Caroline had had the tyres pumped up again when she moved the car from her Pop’s village, up on the Yorkshire moors, to her small town in the Cotswolds.

Mr Jones called for her to get inside and steer, while he and Bob pushed it out. Once safely on the drive, Mr Jones departed, promising that as soon as Bob finished, sometime in the afternoon, that Bob and the chap due later to insulate the garage door and entrance, would push the car back exactly where it was originally.

Bob cheerfully polished off three cups of tea and a full packet of chocolate digestives before the insulator arrived, a painfully thin young Polish man called Joss, who declined tea and Caroline’s second packet of biscuits, custard creams, as he had brought a flask of green tea with him. By this time, Bob had connected all the pipe work into the central heating system, and only had to fit the new radiator to the wall, make the final piping connections and bleed the air bubbles out of the system. The taciturn Joss finished his insulation work about ten minutes after the plumber had finished his fifth cuppa and the last of the custard creams. It was three minutes past three in the afternoon when they departed. Caroline still had time to call on the boys today.

Christmas shopping, so close to the festive holiday, is a nightmare. Anyone will tell you, but still they leave it to the last minute. The multi-storey car park was full to overflowing, but the electronic sign on the bypass informed her that it wasn’t worth the effort of trying it.

She felt guilty about it, but only a little bit; she had her late father’s disabled parking permit that some of Pop’s old friends from his local Cowboy Reenactment Society used when they gave him a lift anywhere, so she used it on her car and parked it in a Disabled Parking spot at a smaller car park. She removed a spare walking stick he had left in her car boot at some point, and she limped for a suitable distance before hooking the stick in a garden hedge to pick up on her return. The traffic was so busy that it was already well past four o’clock and starting to get dark.

She found Robert Junior straight away, and together located Adam in the loading bay, sorting out deliveries to residential houses that evening. Adam refused to see her until he finished what he was doing, “in about an hour” with Robbie’s help, so she said she’d wait for them in their office. The brothers agreed, and went back to what they were working on, and she marched out the back to the portacabin office in the yard. By this time the store was virtually empty, and staff were putting their coats on to leave, as it was just gone five o’clock closing time.

Caroline entered the portacabin and proceeded through to the single back office without knocking, being confronted by her ex-husband in a romantic embrace with one of the office secretaries, both in a state of semi-undress.

“Don’t you knock when you enter an office?” Robert Bradshaw shouted at Caroline, while the red-faced woman gathered up her clothes, and ran out of the office past Caroline in floods of tears.