Tea. Drums And Speed

  Part One

  Fred Fowler, fattish, fiftyish, single and self-unemployed, felt uncharacteristically happy. Joyous and ecstatic wouldn't have been inappropriate words to describe his state either.

  So what had brought on this singular state?

  Fred had speculated a few quid on lottery tickets and had suddenly become richer. In fact he'd become richer by almost exactly forty two million after taking into account his overdraft, loans, credit card debts and the few tenners he owed to his mates in the pub.

  He endured the frustration of a short period between discovering he had a winning ticket and actually gaining access to his money, but with hindsight it really wasn't too bad. Then, with almost indecent haste, he bought himself a million pound mansion in Lincolnshire – all the property programmes on TV said it was the county where you got most for your money – and hired a personal assistant. Naturally, the PA lived in.

  Then his attention turned to cars. A Rolls Royce was a necessity, although perhaps not in the colours of his favourite football team, but he bought a Bentley too, just for fun. A Ford Focus was good enough for the PA, though; there was no point spoiling him, he needed something to aim for.

  A holiday home seemed like a good idea. Fred thought that somewhere warm would suit, so he acquired a rather pleasant hilltop home in the south of France with a nice view of the Mediterranean Sea. Because Fred liked his Rolls Royce, he bought another, this time left hand drive but still in the colours of his football team, to keep at his new French house.

  So far, thinking about all that had kept his mind fully occupied but after the excitement of acquisition it occurred to him that it would be pleasant to have someone to share it all with. To that point his attributes – too fat, too old and too broke – had not seemed to endear him to women. But he'd always been a reader of those red-top tabloid newspapers and while the question 'do you want to go out with Fred Fowler' would usually be followed by a swift refusal, a slight rephrasing might improve things. So the question became 'do you want to meet the multimillionaire Fred Fowler' and the one doing the asking was his PA.

  As well as reading tabloid newspapers, Fred watched soap operas on television. And he'd seen somebody who appealed to him wandering the grimy streets of a fictional northern town. She didn't seem to be a main character, rarely had a line to speak, but she had virtues that appealed to Fred far more than a good speaking voice. An apparently self-supporting bust and a liking for improbably short leather miniskirts told Fred all he needed to know. The PA was despatched to make whatever arrangements were necessary to deliver the vision of loveliness to Fred's Lincolnshire home.

  Fred guessed it hadn't been easy but eventually she – seven stones of 35-pretending-to-be-25 improbably called Shady Lane – was duly delivered to Fred's mansion. Shady was sufficiently impressed with Fred – certain aspects of Fred – to forego any post-dinner subtleties and undertake a meticulous study of his bedroom ceiling whilst granting her host unrestricted access to her person.

  To any casual observer they would have made an odd couple: Miss make-me-happy-buy-me-something and a smug, overweight multimillionaire.

  Odd or not, Fred, no doubt conscious of his increasing age and giving a nod to the quaintly old-fashioned values he held dear, proposed. Shady accepted his ring with glee without even a passing reference to a pre-nuptial agreement. Remarkably swiftly she became Shady Fowler, coincidentally the name of a leading (male!) character in one of Fred's favourite, low-budget, British crime films of the 1950s.

  The Fowlers fell into the habit of chartering a private plane to fly them to their French bolt-hole whenever the British weather became too chilly or too wet. If the same should happen in France they would fly on to a five star hotel wherever the climate appealed to them. It was an idyllic existence.

  Fred would hire Shady's favourite bands to perform for her birthday, for anniversaries or Christmas; he lavished gifts upon her which she accepted demurely before showing her gratitude in the conventional but nonetheless hugely enjoyable way in the privacy of their bedroom. A cynic would expect Shady to be doing it all for the money, but it really was all for love. Fred knew she loved him, and she did.