First Friends

by Marcia Willett

  ‘Kate!’ he shouted and saw her head come up and round. For one glorious second he saw the unmistakable expression on her face. He ran across the road. By the time he reached the pavement she had regained her composure but he took her cold hands and she made no effort to prevent him.

  ‘Come and have some tea,’ he said. ‘Please. I need to talk to you. We can’t just go on like this.’

  He drew her a little closer but before she could speak, a voice spoke from behind him.

  ‘My dear Alex! You’re a positive menace to the female sex. It was three o’clock when I finally levered you out this morning and here you are making up to poor Kate in broad daylight in the middle of Duke Street. There should be a law against you!’

  At the sound of the hated voice, Kate shook herself free and, climbing into her car, set off at speed, leaving Alex and Pam standing on the pavement.

  CASS, SELECTING HER CHEESES in Creber’s, heard a familiar voice and glanced round.

  ‘Well, well,’ she drawled. ‘If it isn’t Felicity. How are you?’

  Felicity, who was obviously more than able to restrain her delight at the sight of her old sparring partner, raised her eyebrows. ‘Bit early in the day for you, isn’t it, Cass? I didn’t realise that you knew that the day started before eleven o’clock.’

  ‘And me with four children?’ Cass’s eyes swept Felicity’s spare, bird-like form. ‘Still barren, I see.’

  Felicity glanced around, scandalised, and met the sympathetic glances of at least two of the shop assistants.

  ‘You know very well . . . ’ she began furiously, in a lowered voice.

  ‘And I hear that you’re spreading terrible lies about Kate.’ Cass did not lower her voice. ‘I know she ruined your little extramarital affair with George but you shouldn’t be vindictive, Felicity. There is such a thing as slander, you know. Love to Mark II. Special love, of course.’

  She went out, smiling graciously upon the young man who hastened to open the door for her.

  Felicity saw that the glances now were not so sympathetic and her lips thinned. Boiling with rage she went to the cold-meat counter. She was damned if she’d be made embarrassed enough to feel that she had to leave. ‘I want some ham,’ she said and did not add the word ‘please.’

  Cassandra sauntered along Duke Street smiling to herself. Damn, she thought, I didn’t get my cheese! Ah, well, coffee, I think.

  She paused for a moment and then, crossing the road, made her way by side and back streets to the bookshop. Alex looked up as she came in. He looked tired and preoccupied and there was no sign of Kate.

  ‘I was hoping to carry Kate off for a cup of coffee,’ she said when they had exchanged greetings.

  ‘She’s not in,’ he said, rather abruptly. ‘She phoned to say that she’d got a migraine.’

  ‘Oh?’ Cass looked concerned. ‘Of course. She took the twins to Exeter yesterday, didn’t she? She’s probably worried sick that Mark’s going to beat them up or something.’

  Alex looked so patently puzzled that Cass smiled.

  ‘Sorry. Just thinking aloud. Are you OK? You look pretty rough yourself.’

  ‘Just tired. What did you mean?’

  Cass looked at him for a long moment. ‘I’m going to do something quite unforgivable,’ she said at last. ‘I’m going to interfere. I suspect that you know next to nothing about Kate’s marriage or what the situation is between her and Mark? Or what she thinks about you?’

  ‘I know she thinks I’m the biggest philanderer since Casanova,’ said Alex bitterly. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his cords and stood, head bent, jingling the coins in his pocket. ‘I saw her yesterday,’ he said eventually without looking at her. ‘She was just standing there in the rain looking so vulnerable and alone. I called her and when she looked at me . . . I could swear there was a look on her face that . . . ’ He shrugged. ‘Well, I just grabbed her, you see.’ He took his hands from his pockets and rubbed them over his face. ‘Should I be telling you this?’

  ‘Definitely!’ said Cass firmly. She moved over to the door and turned the OPEN sign round so that it said CLOSED. A woman peering in looked affronted and Cass beamed at her before turning back to Alex who was watching her, nonplussed. ‘I see that I have much to say to you. Kate’s migraine is obviously an excuse not to face you this morning?’

  ‘Obviously.’ He shrugged again. ‘What can I say to her? She stonewalls me at every turn and yet, underneath, I was so sure that there was something. And yesterday . . .‘ He sighed. ‘I’ve read enough between the lines to realise that there’s not much of a marriage there but she tells me nothing. I suppose that she thinks that I’m hoping for an affair but it’s not just that. I’ve let her know that I’m divorced, have been for some years now, and there are no children. There have been women in that time—why not? But she seems to view me as a local Don Juan and herself as the next scalp on the list.’

  ‘I can see that I’m quite right to interfere. Now, why don’t we go somewhere where we can have a long, quiet chat? I’ve been Kate’s closest friend since we were twelve years old and you’ve got an awful lot of catching up to do.’

  ‘THE TROUBLE IS,’ SAID Kate as she followed the General into the kitchen, ‘that I’m just so afraid of trusting to my own judgment. Let me make the coffee. Are you really better?’

  ‘Perfectly well,’ he assured her. ‘And Mrs Hampton leaves everything ready as you can see. She’s up at the Rectory this morning. You sit down at the table and tell me all about it.’

  ‘It’s not fair to burden you.’ Kate sat down on one of the Windsor chairs. ‘I just thought that, being a man, you may know how his mind is working. He knows I’m married so I can only assume that he must be thinking about having an affair. Is that logical?’

  The General put the kettle on to boil and added another cup and saucer to the tray. ‘Of course, there is such a thing as divorce,’ he said, cautiously. ‘He may well be thinking of marriage. He must have gathered that Mark plays no part in your life. Have you talked about that to him?’

  Kate sighed. ‘It would have been so much easier if Mark had been unfaithful to me or beat me up. Mental cruelty is so insidious. How do you explain to people what it’s like to live with someone who chips away at your confidence, puts you down in public? It’s so difficult to verbalise without sounding like a wimp. Eleven years of small, unrelated incidents calculated to keep you in your place. I realise now that Mark worked on the Gamesmanship principle—if you’re not one up you’re one down. I think he really believed that.’

  She put her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands. After a while, she spoke again, so quietly to start with that the General could hardly hear her.

  ‘He asked me to go up to Faslane when he was driving, you know. The boat went in for a week and he wanted the car rather than be stuck in the base. I was rather excited about it even though the impression was that the car was more the object than I was. I hoped that Mark was finally beginning to gain confidence and might see that I could be allowed to share in his life. I packed some pretty clothes and drove up.’

  Kate paused and looked up at the General.

  ‘It took me about ten hours and when I got there he’d forgotten to arrange with the gate sentries for me to get in. Can you begin to understand how I felt? Me, saying all happy and excited, “Oh, hello. I’m Mrs Webster. My husband’s expecting me,” and him, looking at his clipboard, very puzzled, saying, “I’m sorry, ma’am, he hasn’t notified me. No arrangements have been made.”

  ‘I felt such a fool. It’s a very high security base and there’d been a lot of problems, a lot of IRA bomb threats and so on. There were two sentries. One kept walking round and round the car, peering in, as I gave the other chapter and verse and tried to persuade him to phone the boat to check with Mark. At long last he agreed. I was kept waiting at the gate until, finally, he tracked Mark down who said that he’d forgotten I was coming. The sentry stood talking into his telephone and stari
ng at me and the car, saying things like: “Do you authorise her to come into the base, sir?” “And what model, please, sir?,” “Registration number, sir?,” “What colour hair?,” “What colour eyes?,” “How tall?” and things like that. He smiled at the end and when he’d put the phone down he said, “Your husband doesn’t know the colour of your eyes, ma’am. I shouldn’t let him get away with that!”

  ‘Even then it wasn’t all over. They searched the car and then realised that I had Megs with me. Dogs just were not allowed but Mark hadn’t bothered to tell me that either. Suddenly I felt very tired, I remember, and I very nearly decided not to bother; to go and find a hotel, have a rest and drive back home again. I kept telling myself how busy Mark was and that he wasn’t very good at details. Anyway, after a lot of fuss they agreed to let me through providing that Megs wasn’t let out of the car for even a second because of all the guard dogs on patrol. I remember wondering how on earth I was going to cope with taking her in and out of the base for exercise and so on. If Mark had told me I would have left her with someone in Devon. It would have been so easy.’ Kate smiled at the General, who seemed to have forgotten all about the coffee. ‘I’m sure you would have had her for me, wouldn’t you?

  ‘Anyway, I drove round to the Mess and a steward took me up to Mark’s cabin. He was down the boat and the hall porter phoned him to tell him I’d arrived although he knew that anyway having spoken to the sentry. He said he’d be up in about half an hour. I rushed about, had a bath, put on my fancy gear and sat down to wait. The hall porter sent me up some tea. When more than an hour had passed, I phoned down to the hall porter and asked if a problem had come up. He sounded very surprised and told me that Mark was in the bar. I wondered whether to go down but I was too shy. It’s a totally masculine world. So another hour passed and then he strolled in, very casual.

  ‘I was really upset by then and I asked him where on earth he’d been and whether he’d got my messages. One doesn’t speak to Mark like that. He paused just inside the door, raised his eyebrows and told me that he’d been drinking in the bar with a man he hadn’t seen for ages—his life assurance man who’d come all the way from Glasgow. I pointed out—somewhat heatedly—that he hadn’t seen me for ages and I’d come all the way from Devon!

  “He stood there and looked me up and down, took in the special clothes, all the trimmings, and smiled with a sort of amused contempt. When he’d let it sink in he said that he was going back down to this chap. When I’d pulled myself together and could behave myself I could join them downstairs in the bar. Then he walked out.’ She paused and laughed mirthlessly. ‘My humiliation was complete. He always liked me to know where I stood in his life.’

  There was silence apart from the sound of the kettle boiling, which neither of them noticed, and the steady tick of the old clock on the mantel.

  Kate stood up and walked towards the window. ‘It was just one of so many similar incidents,’ she said. ‘How do you explain to people, that after eleven years of that sort of thing, you get to the point where you have to get out to hold on to any self-respect that you may have left? If he’d formed any sort of relationship with the twins I might have hung on but he’s totally uninterested in them and they don’t like him. I was just wasting my life!’

  She returned to the table and sat down.

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ said the General at last. ‘I am so sorry.’

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter any more. Not really. The trouble is that Mark left my sense of self-worth on the floor and I simply can’t bring myself to take another chance with Alex.’

  ‘All men are not like Mark,’ observed the General grimly, suddenly realising that the kettle was boiling. He had felt a terrible and impotent rage during Kate’s recital and tried to calm himself. He must remain detached if he was to be of any real use to her.

  ‘You see, I couldn’t bear to be just another woman he tires of like that awful Pam.’

  ‘If he’s been alone for a while there would naturally be women in his life,’ suggested the General, making coffee. ‘If he’s like me, he enjoys their company. Nothing wrong with that. And if women like him it’s a good sign, I should think. Is Mark popular with women?’

  ‘Gracious, no! He doesn’t like them and they can sense it and leave him well alone.’

  ‘Well,’ the General shrugged, ‘speaks for itself. What you want is time to get to know each other. Could you tell him that?’

  Kate remembered the previous afternoon and her reaction to Pam’s sudden appearance. The General watched the flush creep up her cheeks and prayed for guidance. He put her coffee before her and passed her the sugar.

  ‘I’m afraid that I shall lose what reputation I’ve got left if I’m seen around with him,’ she said. ‘There’s so much Navy around here and there are enough rumours about why I left Mark.’

  She explained that she had given Mark carte blanche and her suspicions that he had told everybody that she had been unfaithful to him. The General was deeply shocked.

  ‘The man’s a bounder!’ he said and Kate smiled.

  ‘He’s taking revenge for hurt pride. But I worry in case Alex has heard these rumours and thinks I’m easy pickings. And then there are the twins. I’m afraid that someone at school may pick something up. I suppose that in some ways it’s lucky that Mark’s not interested in them and that they’re afraid of him. Well, Giles is.’

  ‘Afraid?’

  ‘Mark’s what I describe as an arm-twister,’ said Kate, after a short pause. ‘A bit of a bully. An inflicter of little pains, bodily as well as mental. All in the way of fun, of course—can’t you take a joke?—and one is made to feel pathetic and inadequate if one actually feels hurt. He seems to enjoy creating that tiny touch of fear. Turns him on. You learn to cope with it yourself but you can’t bear it for your children. It teaches you to hate.’

  She saw the General’s expression and pulled herself up short.

  ‘I don’t really know why I am telling you all this. Oh, let’s forget it—it’s not important any more. I shouldn’t have phoned Alex this morning and said I had a migraine, then I wouldn’t have felt guilty and come and poured out all my sorrows on you. Running away won’t help and I need the money.’ She grinned at him. ‘Now, if only you’d asked me to marry you when I left school, none of this would have happened! We were all in love with you, you know. Cass’s dashing father roaring up the drive in that sports car! All the mistresses rushing about and powdering their noses and the sixth form hanging out of the windows!’

  ‘Oh, my dear!’ The General began to laugh and Kate felt a wave of relief.

  I simply must not burden him, she thought. It really isn’t fair.

  ‘Well, there’s still time,’ she said, making eyes at him across the table. ‘Don’t you think I’d make a wonderful step-mother for Cass?’

  Fourteen

  The barbecue to celebrate the twins’ birthday was held on the Saturday before they went back to school. This term Oliver was going with them. He showed no signs of first-term nerves but viewed the proceedings with his usual calm poise and expressed tolerance for adult flap and anxiety. Giles was to be his ‘escort’—an older boy who was chosen to guide the new boy through the first difficult weeks—and it was obvious that he intended to take his duties seriously.

  ‘I’m glad it’s not me,’ said Charlotte as she helped Mrs Hampton to prepare the statutory birthday tea. ‘I’d hate to go away. But Giles will look after him.’

  ‘ ‘Course ‘e will, my lover,’ said Mrs Hampton, comfortably. ‘No need to worry about either on ’em.’

  ‘He’s going to have some presents when the twins have theirs. I’ve got him an address book. It’s dark blue leather. Mummy’s got him a writing case with a zip and Daddy’s giving him a special pen.’

  ‘Sounds as if ‘e’s goin’ to be doin’ a whole lot of writin’.’

  ‘He has to write home once a week on Sundays. Mummy bought a pencil case for Saul to give him with pencils and rubbers and t
hings in it. It’s really nice.’

  ‘And what about Gemma?’

  “Well, she’s going to give him a toy. They’re allowed to take a few, you know. It’s a helicopter. A proper naval one and it’s got a hook on a string that winds right down so that you can hook people on the bottom to rescue them out of the water. There’s a little rubber boat with two little men in it. You can put them on the hook and wind them up and then they go inside through the little door.’

  ‘Well!’ Mrs Hampton put the cake tin into the oven and straightened up. ‘No prizes for guessin’ which o’ they presents ‘e’ll like best!’

  ‘I WAS GOING TO invite a few grown-ups this year,’ said Cass to Kate as they stood watching Tom cooking sausages and beefburgers with Charlotte, wrapped in a large apron, in attendance. ‘But it’s a bit early in the evening and Tom said that it wasn’t fair on the Smalls so I’ve decided to give a lovely big party when Oliver’s gone.’

  ‘Sounds like fun. Any special reason?’

  Cass shrugged. ‘Does one need a reason? I just felt like it. You’ll come, of course? Bring Alex.’ She glanced out of the corner of her eye. ‘How’s it going, by the way?’

  ‘Well. Fine, actually.’ Kate sounded puzzled. ‘It was quite strange, I had a bit of a scene with him the day I took the boys to Exeter and I was really upset. In fact the next day I pleaded a migraine. You weren’t here and I went and drained all over your pa. I felt really bad about that afterwards. Anyway, I went in the next day and Alex was super. Made no mention of, well, of anything. He was just friendly and nice and it was like it had been before.’

  ‘Well, that’s good then.’

  ‘Ye . . . es.’ Kate sounded doubtful.

  ‘So what’s wrong now?’

  ‘Do you remember I told you about when the twins were little? When they cried I worried and prayed that they’d stop and go to sleep and when they did I thought they’d died? So I’d prod them just to make sure and then they’d cry again?’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’ Cass chuckled. ‘What a twit you are. What’s that got to do with Alex?’