In the Summertime by Judy Astley Page B

with a cane, before she headed off down the hill. Although maybe back home among the thousands of fit young fashion-forward mummies pushing top of the range baby buggies it would count as retro enough to look kind of edgily ironic.
    The shop was busy. It had been extended a long way back from how Miranda remembered it and was no longer gloomily dark-shelved, tatty and a bit forbidding but all light wood fittings, smart rubber flooring and pale turquoise paint. A big heap of wicker picnic baskets was down by the deli counter, each of them name-labelled for customers. The place seemed to be doing a tremendous trade, making up gourmet picnic lunch orders for those who were too holiday-relaxed to want the bother of putting together a sandwich or two for the beach. Good call, whoever had thought of that. Children hovered around their parents, scooping up extras in terms of fancy crisps (no Monster Munch here) and heritage apples displayed in wooden trugs. Someone was also being very enterprising with ready-cooked food and the shop’s freezer was crammed with home-made, hand-labelled lasagne, fish pies, organic chicken casseroles and aubergine moussaka.
    ‘Bloody ’ellfire, they see you coming, here,’ a northern-accented voice commented to the shop in general. A stout woman in a navy and white striped toppeered into the freezer cabinet and held up a pack of monkfish goujons. ‘Would you look at the price of these, and they’re not even Bird’s Eye. I didn’t expect to have to take out a bleedin’ mortgage for a packet of fish fingers.’
    Miranda couldn’t see any wire baskets so used her shopping trolley to collect what she needed, piling in an extravagant few packs of ready-cooked frozen boeuf bourguignon that they could have the next day. For tonight, she chose a fish pie for Clare and the children, realizing she’d be off doing the airport run for most of the evening and wouldn’t be home for supper. She grabbed brown paper bags and loaded them with tomatoes, mixing up a chic selection of red, stripy and yellow ones, plus knobbly pink fir apple potatoes, a stack of grubby-looking mixed salad leaves, avocados, chicory and some dark, crinkly cavolo nero which she was pretty sure Silva would eat so long as the word ‘cabbage’ wasn’t mentioned. Just as she was studying the deli counter in search of ingredients for a sandwich she could eat in the car on the way to Newquay, a man came in from the back of the shop and spoke to the assistant, whom Miranda recognized as the rude blonde girl who’d snapped about ‘bloody trippers’ at the pub the night before. And he was the one she’d thought resembled Steve. She edged away to a safe distance to get a good look without his noticing her. If it wasn’t Steve, it was someone incredibly closely related to him. It if was him, she didn’t particularly want him to see her, not just yet anyway. In fact, to be honest, not without fair warning and a good go at her make-up.
    ‘Cheryl?’ he said. ‘I just dropped off your order out back. Three dozen oysters, ten lobsters ready cooked-off and five more kilos of langoustines.’ Miranda hung back behind a party of browsers who’d gone silent, possibly mesmerized by the £3.50 price tag on the small lumpy loaves of sourdough bread. ‘They’re in the left-hand fridge. Anything else, just give me a bell.’ The girl – Cheryl – looked up and smiled. ‘Thanks, Stevie, babe,’ she said, almost purring at him.
    So it was him. That unsettling, briefly glimpsed lookalike from the pub really was Steve – or Stevie babe . Yuck. Miranda, from behind the stocky frame of the fish-finger-seeking holidaymaker (now grumbling about the lack of white sliced bread), had a good stare as he fondly tweaked the girl’s thick, untidy blonde plait and went through to the back of the shop again. He’d aged well, she’d give him that. Twenty years certainly hadn’t given him a paunchy middle or cost him his hair, which was still quite