by J M Gregson
Agnes smiled at him as fondly as if he was the son she had never had. 'It has a layer of marzipan in its centre, as well as on top,’ she explained proudly. 'Let’s hope it tastes as good as it looks.’
It did, and Percy Peach told her that it did, and Agnes Blake was absurdly pleased. Lucy agreed that the cake she remembered from her childhood was as good as ever and went to replenish the teapot. She heard the hum of animated conversation between the two soul mates she had left behind and immediately regretted her absence. Percy’s impish sense of fun was not to be trusted at the best of times; when he got together with her mother there was no knowing what would happen. Except that whatever it was, her interests would probably suffer. She waited impatiently for the kettle to boil.
Agnes Blake looked very pleased with herself when her daughter came back into the living room, whilst Percy Peach bathed her in the blandest and most contented of his vast range of smiles. An ominous silence prevailed as Lucy replenished their teacups. With the meal completed apart from this final drink, hostess and visitor had moved from table to armchairs. Percy now stretched his short legs as far as they would go in front of him and lay back like a cat contemplating a postprandial nap.
Agnes Blake said happily, ‘We’ve been discussing the timetable for the wedding whilst you were out, love.’
Lucy knew she should never have left them alone. She said determinedly. ‘Autumn, we agreed. Some time in October, perhaps.’
‘Spring,’ said her mother decisively. She almost winked at the recumbent Peach, then thought better of it: daughters insisted upon maternal decorum, even when it was least appropriate.
From the depths of his armchair, Percy said sleepily but insidiously, ‘I don’t think we ever agreed on autumn, love.’
‘That’s right, our Lucy, we didn’t!’ Agnes Blake was in like a flash: you had to admire such reactions in a seventy-year-old, thought Percy. ‘Spring’s the time for weddings - it’s traditional.’
‘Traditional,’ echoed Percy dreamily.
‘It’s the beginning of February now,’ said Lucy firmly. ‘Far too late for us to make the arrangements for a spring wedding.’
‘I’ll do all that for you,’ said her mother firmly.
‘And I’ll help, Mrs B. It’s high time she made an honest man of me.’ Percy gave the delighted lady the smile of a man anxious to help.
‘I can’t be ready for then,’ said Lucy Blake massively.
‘Nonsense! You’re almost ready now. I should think you’ve completed your trousseau. I saw you in Lingerie Lucille last week. Aaaaaaraaagh!’ In deference to the age and dignity of his hostess, this was not the long, low-pitched growl of sexual desire which Percy was prone to when he cornered Lucy in private in her underwear. He produced instead a much more refined and high-pitched wail, which was presumably meant to encompass aesthetic as well as more basic gratification. Lucy found it a chilling sound.
‘There you are, then!’ said Mrs Blake emphatically. It was not clear whether she referred to Percy’s ululation or his earlier statement of the bride’s readiness. ‘We need to fix a date.’
‘October,’ said Lucy firmly.
‘April,’ said her mother.
‘How about early May?’ said Percy, his round face a picture of innocent enquiry and willingness to help.
Agnes Blake nodded. ‘All right. I’m willing to compromise if you are, our Lucy.’
Lucy shook her head gravely and played her trump card. ‘We won’t be able to book anywhere for the reception. May is far too early: everything suitable will be gone.’
From some mysterious recess of her armchair, Agnes Blake produced a small leather-bound diary, like a magician triumphantly concluding a successful trick. ‘It’s a good thing I made a couple of provisional reservations for the beginning of May, then, isn’t it, love?’
‘You two have planned all this!’ Lucy looked accusingly at her fiancé. He shook his head sadly at such cynicism and sighed theatrically.
‘I’d say you should be grateful for the foresight of your loving mother, my dear. Without her, it seems the dates you now seem determined to have might have been impossible.’ Percy gave her the beam he reserved for his most outrageous assertions.
Lucy Blake had the now familiar sense of being outflanked by these unlikely allies. ‘We haven’t even finalized the guest list.’
Her mother held aloft the diary triumphantly. ‘It’s all in here, love. All ready to go. We agreed it on Boxing Day, if you remember - you took several hours over it.’
‘You wore me down, you mean! And you made sure I was pissed at the time!’
‘Language, our Lucy! I shall have to watch you at this wedding. I don’t want you getting tipsy and upsetting the guests.’
‘I’ll keep my eye on her, Mrs B,’ said Percy solicitously. ‘I quite agree, we can’t have her losing control and showing her bloomers to all and sundry!’
Agnes Blake apparently found this a most amusing image, when her daughter had hoped that she would be outraged. ‘It’s this man here you’ll have to watch!’ Lucy said desperately.’
‘Why would that be?’ said Percy, looked very hurt. ‘I’m sure that on the day I shall control myself perfectly, with the prospect of a honeymoon with my beloved as the prize.’ Lucy had never seen anyone nod unctuously, but Peach now achieved it effortlessly.
‘Saturday the third looks like a good day.’ Agnes’s attention was all upon her diary and not her daughter. ‘As it happens, I have an option on Marton Towers for that date.’
‘You’ve planned this, haven’t you? The pair of you have ganged up on me. As per bloody usual.’ Lucy glared from parent to fiancé and back again. Percy managed to look as if his tender soul was very hurt by the accusation, but her mother did not trouble to conceal her triumph.
‘Language, our Lucy,’ said Percy primly. ‘Well, it looks as if I shall have to accede to your request for a spring wedding. It will be tight, but if that is what you want, your mother and I will do everything we can to help you.’
‘It’s a pincer movement.’
‘I don’t think you should talk about our love life in front of your mother. It’s not seemly.’
‘I shan’t give up my career,’ said Lucy despairingly. She looked at her mother with a sudden, disturbing shaft of love. ‘I know you want grandchildren. Mum, but there’s no immediate hurry, is there?’
‘There is when you’re seventy and counting, our Lucy.’ Agnes had had her only child at forty-one. She was determined to see the next generation whilst she still had the energy to enjoy it.
‘The law is very accommodating to working mothers nowadays,’ said Percy loftily. ‘I believe there is even paternity leave available.’ He pronounced the phrase carefully, as if naming some mysterious religious practice. ‘And don’t forget I’m ten years older than you. I know that life seems to stretch eternally for thoughtless girls like you in the blaze of youth, but your mother and I are conscious of time’s winged chariot at our heels.’ He shook his head and smiled sadly, a reaction often induced by his poetic strain.
‘I'm twenty-nine!’ snapped Lucy.
‘All the more reason to get on with married life and produce your children, then,’ said her mother triumphantly.
In the car on the way back to Brunton, Lucy Blake reiterated what she felt she had always known. ‘You’re a bastard, Percy Peach.’ But it was said with no great bitterness, almost with a note of admiration.
‘I do my best,’ said Percy complacently.
‘There’ll be a lot to arrange.’
‘I suppose so. We’ll have to hope the criminal fraternity of Brunton give us an easy ride for a month or two.’
But the events of the next few weeks would show that not even Percy Peach could control everything.
Chapter Five
Tim Hayes was getting tired of Clare Thompson. Mistresses had a limited shelf life, in his cynical view, and this one had almost run its course.
The sex was good: better th
an good. He had no complaints about that. But Clare was getting clingy - with his experience, he knew the signs. She was talking as if they had a long-term future. Before he knew it, she’d be sounding him out about divorce. Sometimes he thought that wouldn’t be a bad thing: Tamsin was a cold fish nowadays. But she was going to come into a lot of money when her parents died, and they were in their eighties.
He certainly wouldn’t move out of one marriage and into another. The sex wouldn’t be as exciting, for a start. The fact that it was all a dangerous secret was one of the things which drove things on for Clare Thompson, whether she realized that or not. The breathless evenings stolen away from her jealous husband were exciting to her, as they would never have been if the affair had been open. She enjoyed the contrast between her everyday efficiency and reliability as his personal assistant in the office and her physical abandon between the sheets. She was the librarian who took off her glasses and shook down her hair and became an entirely different creature, a force of nature exulting in her own desires.
Their working relationship was another complication, of course. She was the most efficient secretary he had ever had - he still thought of her as that, though the role nowadays extended much further. She knew how he operated, she knew the world of Hayes Electronics, and she didn’t ask awkward questions about his other and more dubious enterprises. The electronics company was the respectable face of his business empire, and Clare Thompson was eminently the respectable face of Hayes Electronics. She was patently honest herself, and if people tried to poke their noses into other and more suspect aspects of his prosperity, she would be entirely convincing because she knew nothing.
He didn’t want to lose her as his PA. But if he said she wasn’t to come to his flat in the town any more, would they be able to go on working together? She might leave, of course, might feel unable to work for a man who had cast her aside. If she didn’t, he wouldn’t want to sack her: he certainly couldn’t prove that her work was unsatisfactory and he wouldn’t want to try.
As if to emphasize that, Clare Thompson came into his office now with letters for him to sign. She had drafted three of the routine ones herself and he could not fault them. He told her so and she gave him the small, constricted, working-hours smile with which she always greeted professional compliments.
She lingered a little longer than usual by his desk, then stopped as she reached the door, looking down at the documents in her hand and not at him. ‘Tomorrow night as usual?’ she asked.
‘I can’t make it this week. I have an important meeting with a new investor tomorrow night, I’m afraid.’
‘OK. Next week, then. Unless we can arrange something before—’
‘Next Thursday night as usual. I’ll look forward to it!’
He knew her well enough to realize how much it had cost her to ask the question. She was a proud woman, who had never made the first move before. It was flattering to have her so keen, but he was too long in the tooth to let that sway his judgement. The writing was on the wall: she was getting much too involved. In a little while, she would become cloying.
As a lover, it was time to be rid of Mrs Clare Thompson.
* * *
‘I want to order a book.’ Tamsin Hayes felt she looked very conspicuous, when that was the last thing she wished to do.
She wanted to duck out and order something banal and boring like a cookery book. The story she had thought up didn’t seem even faintly convincing now. She said in as neutral a tone as she could manage, ‘I’m writing a book, you see. I’m having a go at a crime novel. It’s about someone who did a poisoning in the nineteen-sixties, but wasn’t found out at the time. I know that very few novels get published and it’s probably hopeless ...’ She tailed away, aware that she was talking too much, perhaps drawing attention to herself when she least wished to do so.
‘You fill in one of these forms. There’s a charge of eighty-five pence.’ The girl scarcely looked up from the list she was compiling.
Her boredom was a splendid sight for Tamsin. She’d thought of doing this on the Internet, but some compulsion against sending anything out in writing to the world at large had held her back. Then she had set out to place an order for the book at the bookshop in the High Street, but had decided that it would draw more attention to her than a borrowing from the library. It wasn’t a big, impersonal Waterstone’s, but a quiet little shop run by an enthusiast who would remember things.
Tamsin filled in the author, Gustav Schenk, and the title, The Book of Poisons. It looked very damning as she looked down at it: she’d have liked something less specific, but presumably a specialist book on poisons had to be clearly titled.
She took a deep breath, waited for two people taking books out to have them stamped and clear the area, and then went back to the desk with the completed card. 'This book was published in 1989,’ she said. ‘It may well be out of print now. Perhaps I should—’
The girl glanced down at the card, showing her first real interest in this nervous client. ‘Specialist non-fiction books tend to stay around for longer. I’m pretty confident we’ll turn up a copy for you somewhere within the library service. It may take a little time. We’ll let you know when it comes in.’
‘It’s just for a little research. In connection with this book I’m planning to write.’ Tamsin felt a compulsion to repeat herself, in case the young woman had not been paying attention to her explanation the first time.
‘You said that, yes. I’m sure we’ll get it for you. It may take a week or ten days.’
Tamsin thanked her and left as swiftly as she could. She might never even use whatever information the book could give her. It would be just another string to her bow, another possibility for the dismissal of this husband she had now determined was to go. There were several other possibilities; when she had the full picture, she would make her decision.
Before she went back to the big, empty house, she took a walk by the winter Ribble. The river was flowing dark and silent, looking almost as if it shared her secret. She pictured the library girl looking thoughtfully at the title she had ordered after she had gone, and wondering what unspeakable crime this middle-aged woman was planning. Even though people tended to stretch it out much later, you were middle-aged at forty-six; there was no doubt about that.
But what did that matter, when you were soon to begin a new and much more exciting life? When Tamsin Hayes arrived home, a strange, private smile was lighting up her face.
* * *
Clare Thompson felt very guilty about her husband. He had done nothing to deserve what she was doing to him. Rather the reverse, in fact: he deserved a wife who was loving and faithful. Clare told herself that she still loved him, whatever that elusive word meant. Fidelity had gone some time ago.
Jason Thompson was a year older than his wife, though she thought that he now looked considerably older than her. He was a schoolteacher and looked like one, she thought, although she was aware that teachers had as wide a range of physical types as any other profession. Jason was bespectacled; his myopia gave him a perpetually slightly bewildered air. He was of average height, but his extreme slimness made him look taller. He had carroty, unruly hair, which was fading a little but hardly improving with age. He wore the sports jacket and tie which in more conformist times had been the standard pedagogical dress: Clare had always been thankful that he had at least eschewed leather elbow patches. He knew a lot about geography, but he looked nerdish, even geekish. That didn’t prevent Clare from being very fond of him, even now, when her passion for Tim Hayes made her wonder if she had ever really been in love with her husband.
Jason, on the other hand, had never had any doubt that he loved Clare. He was highly sexed and easily jealous. It was not a good combination in a husband who was being betrayed.
He had brought home a takeaway Chinese meal, as he usually did on a Thursday. He noted that his wife was eating more than her usual share and taking her time over it. ‘Aren’t you going to badminton tonigh
t?’ he asked casually. ‘You’ll be late unless you get your skates on.’
‘I’m not going tonight.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘The women I usually play with aren’t going to be there. It’s someone’s fortieth birthday party and they’re all going to it.’ It had seemed a convincing enough story when she had thought it up. Now it sounded decidedly thin. She wondered how good a liar she was: she had never needed to lie before her affair with Tim.
‘Didn’t they invite you?’
‘I don't know them all that well. I only see them at badminton. I think they’ve known each other for years.’
‘Poor Clare!’ He stroked her hair, let his fingers linger on her neck, ran them down her spine. ‘We’ll have to make sure you have a good night in, won’t we? Make sure you don’t miss your exercise.’
She thought of Tim Hayes’s fingers on her spine, of the little tingle that brought to her, of how she had been looking forward to spending this night with him. She said hastily, ‘If you go and sit in the lounge, Jason, I’ll bring our coffee through in a few minutes.’
He sipped his coffee and studied her intently as she sat opposite him on the other side of the fireplace. She turned the pages of the paper restlessly, trying not to be aware of his scrutiny. He said, ‘I expect you’re missing your badminton. Missing the exercise and the company.’
He put a strange emphasis which she found quite disturbing on the last phrase. Clare said, ‘I wasn’t even thinking about it. It’s good to have a night at home, actually. I had a hectic day at the office.’
Jason went on as if he had not heard her. ‘It must be very dull for you, stuck at home with an old fuddy-duddy like me.’
‘It isn’t and you’re not.’ He was still looking at her in that intent way. She did not dare to look up and meet his eyes. She found that she had turned to the sports pages she never read. Some football manager she hadn’t heard of had been sacked. She stood up and was surprised how tense she was, what a release she felt in simple physical movement. She walked across and switched on the television, then resumed her seat with a sigh and affected interest in the police drama she never watched. But he was still watching her and she found she couldn’t sit still. She gathered up the cafetiere and the coffee cups and took them into the kitchen. It was an immense relief to be away from that observant presence.