The Yorkshire Pudding Club

by Milly Johnson

  She had called around to Helen’s to show off the new classy blue company car she had just picked up and noticed the souvenir key ring on the work surface.

  ‘Ocean View?’ she asked with an immediate huff, presuming Elizabeth had brought it back for Helen, and if that was the case, where was hers, seeing as she had been the one feeding Cleef whilst Elizabeth was away?

  ‘Yes, Simon went there last Wednesday. Some business dinner function thing, no partners allowed.’ Not that she had wanted to go anyway, and be ignored all night. ‘Have you heard from Elizabeth? Did she enjoy her night away? Where was it she went again?’

  ‘I forget,’ lied Janey, thinking on her toes. ‘Some place in Somerset, I think.’

  As she drove the fifteen-minute journey home from Helen’s, Janey’s mind was busy forcing pieces together in a mad jigsaw puzzle that was starting to give her a very weird picture. She thought about how vague and distracted Elizabeth had been when she had rung to say she was back, and to thank Janey for looking after Cleef. In fact, her answers had been virtually monosyllabic when Janey asked all the normal things. Had the place had been nice and did she have a good time? Did she see anyone she fancied…ho ho? She hadn’t mentioned seeing Simon at all, but surely she would have done, if they were at the same function. Why did she seem to dislike him so much anyway? Who was this bloody mysterious father of her child?

  Then the day after, as she was driving home from work, Janey saw them together–Simon and Elizabeth–those two adversaries who always acted so coldly towards each other, meeting furtively and befittingly in the Old Mill pub car park where Elizabeth had once bonked Wayne Sheffield when they were nineteen.

  Elizabeth had not said anything to Janey about Simon’s affair. Janey could be a bit of a loose cannon with her mouth sometimes and she did not want this going any further than it had to. Janey would only go straight away and tell George, then there would be twice the chance of the information getting out. So, for a full week, she struggled alone with it, eventually coming to the conclusion that she could not just sit back and pretend it was not happening. She would at least have a go at sorting this out before any more damage was done.

  For once she took her car all the way to work, then rang Simon’s office, lied about who she was to bypass his Rottweiler of a PA, then as soon as she heard his voice, she told him to be at the Old Mill car park at six that evening. Then she slammed the phone down before he had the chance to refuse her.

  She picked the place because it was just at the side of the motorway, two minutes away from the penultimate slip road before their junction, and both of them would pass by it to get home. The fact that Janey passed it too on her way back from Wakefield hadn’t even entered Elizabeth’s head, but then this was no well-thought-out plan because, beyond getting Simon to the venue, she hadn’t a clue what to say or do. This was one she would have to play by ear.

  In the beginning, she had thought Simon was quite nice and just what Helen needed. Her friend had coped with the loss of her father bravely and was getting on with her life, she and Janey had both thought, but because they had been distracted by George and John, they didn’t see the big breakdown coming until their friend was lost in the middle of it. Simon could not have timed his arrival into her heart more perfectly. Successful, handsome, authoritative…they all thought she had landed Prince Charming. That was, until the wedding reception, when Elizabeth saw a very different side of him that too much bally champers could not have been wholly responsible for. She had always felt guilty that she had not spotted what he was really like until he was safely down the aisle, wedded to a considerable Luxmore fortune to come. Well, she had sat back long enough. Her smashing-faces-in days might have gone, but her protective feelings towards her friends were still in place and as strong as they ever were.

  She got there ten minutes early and was shaking so hard she wished for the first time in ages that she had a cigarette handy to hang onto. There was no sign of him, but that was to be expected–he would not have wanted her to have too much control. Six o’clock came and went, five past, ten past…She decided to give it until half past but a few minutes later, a black BMW with his personalized reg plate pulled into the car park and came to a stop a good thirty yards from her bright yellow car as if it were afraid of contamination. Simon got out of it, looking extremely bored and as if he wanted to get whatever this was out of the way quickly so he could get on with the rest of his life.

  ‘He wouldn’t be here, if he wasn’t rattled,’ Elizabeth said to herself, and she tried to focus on it. ‘What I know could lose him access to all that lovely Luxmore money.’

  Although no one would have suspected that Simon was the slightest bit agitated, from the smug look on his face as he said, ‘Elizabeth, how lovely to see you! Should we embrace?’

  ‘Let’s not. We both know why we’re here.’

  He sighed and got out his chequebook. ‘Okay, how much?’ he asked wearily.

  ‘How much?’ She wanted to smack that oily smile off with a weighted right hook. ‘How much for what?’

  ‘You know what.’

  ‘What’s the matter, can’t you say it? Too ashamed to admit you’re screwing a tart behind your wife’s back, Simon? So you bloody well should be, as well.’

  ‘Come on, cut the crap, your sort always has a price,’ and he tapped his pen impatiently on the chequebook cover.

  ‘My sort? And how would you classify your sort, Simon? I won’t ask if bonking Julia Powell was a one-off. I wondered how the gossips seemed to know more about me than I knew about myself.’

  She didn’t blame Helen for telling Simon the little she had told her about the baby’s father. Wives talked to husbands; they just did not expect they would pass on the pillow-talk to their mistresses, and for those mistresses to gossip with their business contacts.

  ‘I really haven’t a clue what you’re talking about,’ said Simon, looking highly amused now by it all.

  ‘What is it with you?’ said Elizabeth. ‘You have someone as lovely as Helen at home and yet you have to chase the likes of Julia? What’s up, Simon? Can you only get it up with tarts?’

  Simon’s self-satisfied smile dropped enough for Elizabeth to realize that her wild shot had landed surprisingly near the bull’s-eye.

  ‘Why are we here then?’ he snapped. ‘Surely you can’t be jealous–is that it?’

  ‘Ambitious little slags like Julia Powell might make you feel you’re irresistible, Simon, but trust me, you aren’t.’

  ‘Really?’ He licked his lips.

  Elizabeth ignored it. ‘Are you going to leave Helen?’

  He threw back his head and laughed then as if she had just told him the funniest joke in the world.

  ‘Why on earth should I leave Helen? She loves me!’

  ‘Because you’re a lying, cheating scumbag?’

  ‘And you’d tell her, would you?’

  Would I? thought Elizabeth. They both knew she wouldn’t and that’s why he laughed.

  Then he leaned down to her ear and said quietly, ‘Do both try not to die in childbirth, won’t you?’ and he patted her stomach before she had time to avoid it. Then he climbed back into his car and zoomed off, squealing his tyres, leaving Elizabeth shivering in his wake, as if he had just delivered a curse.

  Janey had spotted the daft-coloured car when she was on her way home down the motorway, and it was unmistakably Elizabeth’s. There might have been other bright yellow cars on the road, but none with a big pink flower on the back.

  What on earth is she doing in an empty pub car park? Janey thought, and pulled off at the next exit and headed back towards the pub down the B road, thinking she might have broken down.

  By the time she had got there, Simon’s car with the easily recognizable registration plate had just arrived, and she saw Elizabeth walking over to it. Janey drove quickly past, she was in her new car so Elizabeth wouldn’t have spotted her. She did a full circle at the roundabout and came back for a second surreptit
ious peek to see Simon leaning back on his car talking to her, casual as you like, and laughing. They looked nothing like a couple who hated the mortal sight of each other, that was for sure. Then again, maybe all that false-smile stuff was an act to throw her and his wife off the scent. It wasn’t impossible; she’d read far worse in magazines like Women by Women: daughters bonking fathers-in-law, sisters bonking brothers-in-law, friends doing the dirty on each other…and Elizabeth’s emotions were off-kilter to say the least.

  Janey sped up the bypass and turned around again, waiting for the Benny Hill music to start up and accompany her, but by that time they had gone and luckily for them too, because Janey was in confrontational mode. There was absolutely no legitimate reason that she could think of in a million years why Elizabeth and Simon should be meeting in private behind Helen’s back. As such, it didn’t take an Einstein to add this particular two and two up.

  Elizabeth rang her that night, but when Janey saw her number flash up on the caller display she let George take it instead and told him to tell Elizabeth that she was in bed. She wondered if Elizabeth had somehow spotted her and was trying to head her off at the pass. Well, it would do her good to be worried, if she was doing what Janey suspected she was doing with Simon. Let her sweat it out until the morning, until I’m ready for her, she thought.

  ‘What’s up with you not wanting to natter?’ said George, after he had put down the phone.

  ‘I’m just tired,’ said Janey, and it wasn’t a lie. Twenty-four hours’ worth of angry thoughts had worn her down and she badly wanted the oblivion of sleep before she tackled it all head on tomorrow.

  Elizabeth had not even considered the possibility of dying in childbirth, but since Simon’s parting shot, she could think of nothing else. She rang Janey in a blind panic but George said she had gone to bed. She could not face talking to Helen at the moment but she was desperate to hear someone else’s voice, for someone to tell her that she was getting things out of perspective. In tears, she started to dial John’s number, but on the last one, she put it down. How could she start turning needy on him now?

  So instead, she curled up in bed and mentally tortured herself with a mind video of what would happen to her baby if she died, and how she would feel if he died. She saw herself following a tiny white coffin out of the church, knowing he was going to be tucked up in a cold earth grave where she could not hold him. And the more she tried to stop the thoughts, the stronger the tormenting images forced themselves upon her.

  A six o’clock alarm awoke Simon as he lay in bed close to his wife. Golden-haired and pale-skinned, Helen was everything a man should be proud of in a wife, but he felt no stirring in his loins at all. His finger traced down over her long neck, to her small pointy breasts and further down to the swelling in her stomach that made him instantly recoil. Suddenly he felt suffocated, resentful. He had to get away from her. From ‘it’.

  Helen’s looks had attracted him at first, of course, and together they made a striking couple, as he knew they would. But she was never intended to be the keeper of his heart; her purpose would always be to embellish his essential executive image. She was attractive, wealthy–thanks to a legacy from her father–and she would be even richer when her widowed mother died, something he hoped would be sooner rather than later. Helen was so vulnerable when they first met, easy to charm and to seduce, and she adored him. Together they had almost everything that was important to him.

  The yin that Simon presented to the world was proficient, successful, in control. His yang, however, was a darker being who desired women with ridiculously sized breasts who could purr like wildcats and talk dirty to him. There was no reason he could think of for this quirk–it was just how he was. Only with these women could he reach sexual ecstasy, but afterwards the self-loathing was waiting to envelop him like a heavy, dirty blanket. Then, and only then, would he try to force his wayward persona back into ‘respectable Simon’. He would buy presents for his wife, fuss over her, even occasionally make love to her, until the urge to break free from his domestic repression came upon him again, making him kick out at the life he had to be seen to be living–an unfulfilling, banal, frustrating existence. He ricocheted between the two poles of his character, projecting the self-hatred for his weakness towards the soft target of his wife, and that dirty slut of a friend of hers, whom he despised even more because she was able to stir that animal inside him.

  He didn’t want children. He had acquired the perfect image without them. Look how they had softened his friend Con, made him lose his bite. Simon didn’t want snotty-nosed brats with sticky fingers making him lose his focus, draining his time, piling on even more guilt.

  Elizabeth worried and cried all night, and in the morning her eyes were red and puffed-up and she looked awful when she answered the door after a knock that was worthy of a drugs raid. In stormed Janey, who’d had a restless night herself building up to this moment. She pushed past Elizabeth to get in, then stood in the middle of her front room, swaying with barely contained rage.

  ‘I know. How could you?’

  ‘Know what?’ said Elizabeth, worn out from crying and now confused as well.

  ‘About you and him, so you might as well tell me.’

  ‘What?’ said Elizabeth, who really looked as if she did not know what Janey was talking about, which poured more petrol all over her flames.

  ‘Don’t you dare look at me like I’m nuts! I know you spent the night at that posh hotel together and…and…I saw you both yesterday, in the Old Mill car park–that ring any bells?’

  The wind fell from Janey’s sails a little because Elizabeth really did look terrible. She was shivering as if she was cold, despite the morning being full of promise of a warm day to come, but then the hard part of Janey reasoned that she was probably that way because of the weight of her guilt. That thought made the wind rise and billow up the sails again.

  ‘Me and Simon?’ Elizabeth said quietly.

  Janey laughed grimly, taking this as some kind of admission. ‘Ah! I see you know who I’m bloody talking about then!’

  ‘Us together? You’re off your head.’

  ‘I know he was in Norfolk in the same hotel as you on the same night, and I SAW YOU TOGETHER in a flaming pub car park. So you tell me what that was all about, if it isn’t the obvious!’

  ‘It isn’t the way it looked.’

  Janey laughed hard. ‘People always say that when it’s exactly as it looked.’

  ‘Trust me.’

  ‘That’s a good one! I’m not blind; I went round a few times to make sure I wasn’t dreaming what I was seeing. Don’t treat me like an idiot, Elizabeth. For a start you look as guilty as sin. You can’t look me in the face, can you? Go on, I dare you!’

  Then Janey gasped as a new notion presented itself to her overworking brain. She pointed out at Elizabeth’s stomach.

  ‘Please don’t tell me that’s his in there!’

  Elizabeth flopped down on her rocking chair and wearily put her head in her hands. ‘Oh God, what a mess,’ she said. ‘It’d be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. Me and Simon? It’s enough to bring my morning sickness back!’

  ‘There’s nothing funny about someone shagging a pregnant woman’s husband!’ Janey screamed at her.

  ‘No, you’re right there,’ said Elizabeth. She lifted her head, stared Janey straight in the face and realized she would have to tell her the full story after all.

  A ready-for-work Simon leaned over the bed and kissed a sleepy Helen on the cheek and she smiled at his sweet, ‘Good morning.’ She listened to his footfalls down the hall, the door open, his car drive away, then she mulled over the events of the previous night. He had brought in some non-alcoholic wine for her, then he had made supper–pasta and chicken and asparagus–and they had relaxed quietly in the lounge, listening to mellow music. He had drunk rather a lot of scotch, she silently noted, but then stress was coming off him in waves. She rubbed his shoulders and then, after a while, he took her hand in
his and led her to bed. They had not made love, but it did not matter for she had woken in the night at one point and felt his arm around her. They were at a turning-point, she was sure of it. There was hope.

  ‘Why didn’t you say something before?’ Janey almost snarled when Elizabeth had finished talking. Her aggression was masking a deep shame. She had handled this so wrong and was only glad she hadn’t gone storming off to Helen first, as it had crossed her mind to.

  ‘I’d hoped to try and sort it, and I thought the fewer people that knew about it the better,’ said Elizabeth. ‘You’d go and tell George and then that would be another person who might open their gob, mistakenly or otherwise.’

  Janey did not argue with that, she knew Elizabeth was right.

  ‘Okay. So how come you’ve never liked him?’ she asked. ‘Proper answer this time, none of your mumblings that it’s just a clash of personalities.’

  She had to press her a bit; Elizabeth wasn’t keen to tell her.

  ‘Okay, if you must know, he came onto me at the wedding. His own wedding,’ she said eventually. ‘He was standing outside by himself and I’d gone out to have a fag so I walked over to him and starting chatting–you know, “Have you had a good day?”–all that sort of stuff you say. He lunged at me and no, he wasn’t that drunk before you ask. He said he’d seen the way I’d been looking at him. I thought he was joking at first. I mean, it was his wedding, for God’s sake, and I was one of his wife’s bridesmaids. His hands were…all over me.’ Elizabeth shuddered at the memory of him pawing at her.