by Judy Astley
‘Hmm,’ Kate mumbled, through a mouthful of cheese. She perched on the edge of the kitchen table and inspected her mother, waiting for questions.
‘Nice evening?’ Heather enquired.
‘Not bad. Just the pub, you know.’
‘Anyone there?’
‘Not many. Bloke from “Inside Story” rabbiting on about how his cat shredded his seagrass carpet or something. Some people talking about the robbery at the hi-fi shop. The whole village thinks Shane Gibson did it, which isn’t fair. I mean, they don’t know, do they, and it’s just because he did something before. If this was the old mid-west they’d probably hang him from a tree on the rec.’ Kate finished the cheese and jumped down from the table.
She’s waffling, Heather thought, and then felt angry with herself. She was truffling out deviousness just like her mother did, and she wasn’t being either straight with Kate or fair. ‘All that cheese, you’ll have nightmares,’ Heather commented as she poured boiling water into the mug.
‘Not me. I’m going to have wonderful dreams. G’night,’ Kate said, whisking out of the room and taking the stairs three at a time.
Heather drank the tea and then continued to lie awake, this time blaming the caffeine. She gave up at about 2 am and started leafing through Gardeners’ World magazine, trying to get terrifically interested in the various forms of euphorbias available. She thought about making notes towards planning the new client’s shady garden, but couldn’t make her hand reach out for a pencil and notebook. She did, though, make her hand reach out for the phone the second it rang.
‘Heather? Hi it’s me. How are things?’
‘Tom? “Things” are fine. Apart from Uncle Edward dying, but that wasn’t unexpected. Things with you aren’t so fine, though, I gather,’ she said, wondering if this was the moment at which she’d be told she was about to become a lone parent. Surely he wouldn’t, not over the phone, not after all these years. Just let him dare.
‘Aren’t they? Oh.’ Silence followed, which Heather refused to help him with.
‘Oh you mean Hughie,’ Tom continued eventually. ‘Well he’s got things all wrong, the silly sod. That’s all I can say. I’m really sorry. He shouldn’t have phoned you. I did tell him.’
‘Things’ again, Heather thought, nothing specific. She sighed wearily.
‘I’ll be back next Thursday night,’ he said, recovering some of his usual cheerfulness.
Heather laughed softly. ‘Well that’s good, just in time for the funeral.’ Jetlag was not going to be an excuse for getting out of it, she decided, replacing the receiver. If Tom wanted to come home and be remorseful, he would have to do a bit of joining in. She couldn’t recall the last time they’d both chosen colours from a paint-chart, or gone together to a parents’ night. Perhaps she should encourage him to do more of it, she thought as she switched off the light; perhaps he felt, perhaps he’d felt for years, that he was too much a visitor in his own home. No wonder he had found it so easy, when working, to behave as if he hadn’t really got one.
‘I’ve made a decision,’ Margot said, watching Heather hoeing the herbs. ‘I’m going to tell Russell I’m leaving him, and then check into a health farm.’
‘Do they still call them “farms”?’ Heather said, straightening up and rubbing her aching back. ‘It makes it sound as if you’re to be fattened up for slaughter, not thinned down and sent home looking gorgeous.’
‘True. But it’s the only way I’ll stop drinking and get myself put back together. I feel like a car that’s got a good-enough engine, but needs its rust dealt with. And perhaps then Russell might spend more time with me and not be forever running off to “conferences” with “secretaries”.’ Margot’s lip wobbled and Heather led her to the bench from which they could see the placid cows on the opposite river bank, stolidly munching grass and being enviably free of cares and pressures.
‘I think he likes you now, deep down. He’d be devastated if you really left him.’ Heather briefly thought about Tom: he’d be devastated if she left him, too.
‘They’ll be going next week, all those people, so we can move back into the house. I think I’ll let Russell do all the organizing, then he’ll see what it’s like.’ Margot dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. ‘Some woman called Delphine keeps phoning. At first I thought, well what kind of a name is that? It sounds like a brand of lavatory paper. Then I thought, it’s a young sort of a name, that’s what. Now we haven’t got an au pair, he’s up to the usual with someone else’s. He told me this morning he’s got a big trade dinner in Coventry next week, staying over of course. Pull the other one I told him – couldn’t stop myself, it was last night’s gin talking.’
‘Couldn’t you two do some proper talking? Or see someone from Relate or something? Going off is a bit drastic,’ Heather said, biting her lip and wondering if, having said this, she could actually ask Margot the favour she had been planning to.
‘Later. First I’m going to make myself feel good, then I can deal with him from a stronger position. You know, I could never be unfaithful to him,’ Margot confessed, twirling her crumpled tissue.
‘Couldn’t you?’ Heather said, making Margot look directly at her.
‘No,’ Margot insisted. ‘It would be just the worst thing. Don’t you think?’
‘Er, not necessarily. There must be worse things,’ Heather said evasively. She wondered how Margot would react if she told her about Tom and Hughie. She partly wanted to tell her, but couldn’t. If Hughie had been another woman, she could have run round to the Garden Cottage at drinks time and wailed, ‘Guess what the bastard’s done now,’ and been able to count on sympathy and comfort and a tactful forgetfulness when the episode and upset were over. But Tom with another man was somehow what Kate would call ‘beyond’. Once told, it would be like cut skin where a silvery trace of pale scar could be always just seen. And then there was Iain. She looked round the garden rather furtively, half expecting her mother’s beady eyes to be peering through the ceanothus by the wall.
‘Margot I need to tell you something, just for a kind of insurance. I hope you won’t mind.’
‘Go ahead. Don’t tell me you’re up to something?’
Heather laughed nervously. ‘No I don’t think so. Unless you count going out for dinner with my ex-husband. Pretty innocent stuff really. It’s just my mother, you know. She always thinks the worst. She now knows who Iain is, thanks to the village old-girl mafia, and she’s hopping mad I didn’t mention it before. As if that would have improved things.’
‘So where and when are you going out?’
‘Wednesday. The Manoir au Quatr’ Saisons, and I’ve told them all I’m seeing a client miles away. I wish I hadn’t.’ Heather sighed, wondering if lying had been such a good idea. She could have just brazened it out and tried to ignore Delia’s pointed looks, sniffs and huge hints of disapproval which would eventually have had the girls asking questions. ‘Thing is,’ she went on, ‘when you tell a whopper like that, so that no-one knows where you really are, it’s like saying, “Come on lightning, strike the chimneys and burn the house down”, or willing the car brakes to fail on the M40. That’s why I’m telling you, so at least someone will know just where I am, in case of emergencies.’
‘Especially if you don’t come home at all because Iain has strangled you in a fit of jealous passion because he realizes he should have hung on to you.’ Margot laughed but Heather didn’t.
‘I think I’ll cancel—’ she said.
‘Don’t be silly, it’s only a meal, what can it hurt? What time are you supposed to be back, so I know when to worry?’
‘Ah. Well, er, that’s the thing. Don’t start to worry till lunch-time the day after.’
Margot’s eyes widened and she gulped. ‘Oh, like that is it? You are up to something!’
Heather stared hard at the river rather than risk seeing Margot being appalled at her Russell-like lack of morals. ‘No. Well not yet, probably not at all,’ she said with a shrug, stabbing
at the ground with the hoe. ‘Really it’s just in case . . .’
‘Well I don’t suppose he counts, really,’ Margot conceded kindly.
‘Just what I’ve been telling myself,’ Heather agreed.
It was what-to-wear time again. Heather felt as dithery as the first time she’d ever gone out with Iain, when she’d known she was in for something a lot more sophisticated that the inept breathless snogging that boys of her own age could just about manage. She remembered then worrying about her body and having a good look at its smooth, sleek lines in the bathroom mirror. Was it all right, she’d wondered, as probably all girls did, or would Iain’s marauding hands and probing fingers come to an abrupt, alarming halt, confirming the unmentionable certainty that there was something odd. Years on she was looking at it again, this time sure that the mechanical bits and pieces were all much as everyone else’s (Margot and her ‘We’re all the same down there’ coming into her head). But this time she wondered if her bottom could only be described, à la Noel Edmonds as ‘crinkly’, and if her small breasts, which she’d thought more or less all right, perhaps twenty-five years on would remind Iain of overstretched empty woollen mittens. She would have to count on age having given him failing eyesight.
Le Manoir and its famously delicious food had been a smooth and irresistible temptation down the phone. ‘Have you been there before?’ Iain had asked. Heather had, and said so, though, still childishly in pursuit of sophistication, didn’t mention she had only been once.
‘Did you spend the night there?’
‘Yes, actually.’
‘Oh.’ He’d sounded slightly miffed.
‘What is it? Did you think I’d have a truly dull life with anyone other than you? Never go anywhere scintillating?’ she teased.
‘Did you go with your husband?’ he asked.
‘Well, yes, why? Who else would I spend the night in a hotel with?’
‘Oh, no reason for asking really, just wondered,’ was the unsatisfactory reply.
Now, as Heather dried her hair, she was ninety per cent sure what he’d been getting at. Obviously he intended they should stay the night there, though she wished he’d made that absolutely beyond-doubt clear. She stashed spare knickers, toothbrush and moisturiser in a large handbag, too wary to take anything more and risk looking foolishly presumptuous. Surprises were one thing, but she was a grown-up parent with arrangements to make, even if the arrangements were just a suitable set of lies to be prepared. She wanted to stay there all night, she was quite certain. Tom had been a complete sod and he owed her one, more than one, if anyone was to do any painful counting. She shut the hairdryer away in a drawer and thought of Uncle Edward in his coffin. That’s what we all come to, she thought sadly, toying with the tarnished brass handle of the drawer – just faded out, and dead and gone as a pæony flower. At least, she thought, the pæony plant gets to revive in time for the next spring, keeps having another go at getting things right, which is more than we do.
When she left the house at seven, Heather, guilty at being so devious and sly, was only half ready to meet Iain – decorative trimmings would have to be added in the car, just like back in the days when she’d skilfully used the mottled mirror in the swaying train compartment to stick on her individual false eyelashes and dot freckles on to her nose. ‘I’m having dinner with the client, and then staying in a little B&B – it’s just too far to drive straight back,’ she’d told Delia and the girls. ‘I’ll take the phone in case you really need me, but I’m sure you’ll all be all right.’
‘Must be a very generous client, taking you out for dinner,’ Delia commented.
‘It’s a very big garden,’ Heather replied. ‘It’ll be a good lot of work for me. These customer relations, planning stages, are the most important you see.’
‘You do look nice Mum, hope you have a great time,’ Suzy told her.
Heather felt hot, wondering if the sky-blue rough silk suit, even without the heavy silver necklace and earrings that she’d got hidden away for later in her bag, was too give-away dressy for a simple ‘business’ dinner. She felt a spiky twinge of guilt. It didn’t feel right having Suzy wish her a lovely evening, when she was all keyed up for a spot of hectic adultery. At least Kate was still out dog-walking for Margot – that made things slightly easier.
As she drove out of the village, she could see her plodding across the rec with a basset hound lumbering along inelegantly at her side. The Gibson brothers lurked among the swings watching her, and Heather wished, for Kate, divine intervention – a heavenly gift-pack of gorgeous and admiring young men that all good and lovely teenage girls deserve. She drove past the pub, checked her rear-view mirror for cars that would recognize hers and, seeing none, turned quickly up the lane past the church towards the golf course car park. The scarlet Mercedes was already there waiting for her, like a spy waiting for a contact in one of Iain’s own books. As she parked under the chestnut tree she could see his hand out of the window, tapping rhythmically on the edge of the roof. She tried to imagine what music he was listening to and realized she couldn’t even begin to guess. It could be anything – Beethoven or Blur, or the closing music of The Archers, for all she knew. All she knew about him, in fact was very, very little, and always had been.
‘This is all very clandestine, meeting up here,’ she said as she approached the Mercedes.
‘Well what would you prefer, this or me swanning up to your front door and escorting you out under the eyes of your entire family?’ he said with a grin as he opened the passenger door. ‘It’s all for your own protection – you’re the one who thinks secrets are for keeping.’
Heather’s mouth felt dry with nerves. She looked back at her little Renault, abandoned under the trees, as they drove out of the car park. Perhaps she had left it just that bit too close to home. Suppose Julia Merriman took it into her head to have an early nine holes the next morning? Suppose Kate went walking a Great Dane that needed extra leg-stretching miles? Or Suzy and Tamsin braved the fury of the golf club squirearchy and trotted their ponies up this way? By the time she got home in the morning, police from three counties could be out searching for her body, which instead of being horribly mangled in a ditch would be deliciously ravished in a four-poster. Fingers crossed, anyway, she thought.
They were early, as Iain had planned. ‘I thought you’d like time to look round the garden,’ he told her as the car swished over the car park gravel.
Heather smiled and nodded. ‘I’ve only seen it in winter before,’ she told him. ‘There wasn’t much to see then, of course.’ A little doubt nibbled inside her as they strolled past the lavender-bordered beds of herbs. They could surely have wandered round the grounds in the morning. Wouldn’t that have been just the thing to follow a lazy breakfast? And besides, she was thirsty.
‘So where are you this evening?’ Iain asked as they approached the lake.
‘Gone to see a client about his garden. A nice far-away client,’ she added.
‘Are they often “far away”?’
‘Sometimes as far as Banbury,’ she teased. ‘You can see how famous I am.’
‘What are you going to advise the client?’
‘Not to have a box-hedge knot garden,’ she said, ‘unless he’s planning on living to at least a hundred so he can see it at its best.’
They stopped at the edge of the lake and Iain leaned on a tree, looking at her. ‘What plants would you advise for me?’ he asked.
Heather grinned at him. ‘At your great age, I’d say not to count on anything more long term than hardy annuals.’
He laughed, but without conviction, Heather thought, and then took her hand. ‘Come on, let’s get a drink and look at the menu. You must see the dovecote too. It was voted one of the ten best hotel rooms in Britain.’
The dovecote was a two-storey, circular brick building, a grassy, flower-flanked path away from the main building. A miniature house, like something gorgeous for a big child to play with. How lovely, she thought, u
ltimate privacy. Iain ordered champagne and they went through to the hotel drawing-room, where he showed her the inside of the dovecote in the hotel brochure.
‘Perfect for honeymoons, I should think,’ he said. ‘Remember ours?’
‘Such as it was,’ Heather murmured, looking at the photo of the pink-and-white circular room, the bed drapes suspended by doves that looked, magically, as if they were in flight. She and Iain had spent their wedding night at a hotel in Edinburgh, whose splendour must have started fading into dingy shabbiness at least fifty years before their visit. Their arrival had caused a flurry of outraged disapproval throughout the bleak reception area, the manager to be sent for and their marriage certificate scrutinized for several long minutes in which the breathing of the staff could be heard, filtered through gritted teeth as if terrified that immorality was an air-borne infection like chickenpox. Heather had been giggle-smitten as Iain, presenting a face comically composed into a caricature of sobriety for the manager, had at the same time been fondling her bottom with his hand up the hem of her tiny skirt.
‘Goodness, remember that hotel, all faded mahogany and dirty cabbage-rose wallpaper? It all smelt of old age and depression,’ he reminisced. ‘I wish there’d been somewhere like this to take you. You were much too young for a place like that.’
‘Everyone was too young for a place like that, even you. Even – let me think, who was really old back then? Churchill was already dead wasn’t he? OK, General de Gaulle.’
‘Are you sure it’s politically correct to be so ageist?’ Iain asked her, putting on a mock-hurt expression.
‘Probably not. Strange though, the age gap between us isn’t anything much now, is it? I mean, I don’t know whether I’ve caught up or you’ve stayed youngish or if, when you get past, oh, thirty-five or so, everyone’s much the same till they fall seriously foul of the ageing process.’
‘You’re right,’ Iain told her as they walked into the dining-room and attracted no curious attention from other diners. ‘Everywhere I went with you back then, heads turned, and not just in amazement at your stunning beauty.’