Jane made an excited face at her mother. The sky loomed large and unwelcoming and, as they rose, the field and church shrank and became toys arranged tidily on a patchwork quilt. The air was as nacreous silk, the type so thin that, allegedly, it can be pulled through a wedding ring. As they rose higher and higher, the propellors tore it apart.
Still placed vertically in the sky, the sun spread blinding light across their vision. The pilot altered course. An ant colony of cars moved along the A13. Beyond that, the curves of the Danebury Rings were peeled back for intimate scrutiny. Further away lay Stockbridge and sweeps of downland country that had settled to the cultivator. An ancient landscape, hugging the past, woven by the resonance of past lives.
Poised, free of earth, lit by a wash of light, Prue was rocked into quiescence and, for a moment, she struggled free: of love, anger, fear of the past and fear of the present.
The earth tilted and the sun beat down on her daughter’s head. All lives should have such a moment, she thought gratefully.
Violet phoned during the week - Prue could hear the hum of office life — and invited herself and the family down for the following weekend. The baby, she said, could do with some fresh air.
‘You’re not known for your love of the country weekend,’ commented Prue.
‘Yes, well,’ said Violet. ‘People change.’
They arrived on Saturday morning with a heap of baby equipment, and the house no longer belonged to the Valours. Once the chaos had subsided, Edward was changed, put into the second-hand cot Prue had bought at Oxfam, and Emmy was dispatched back to her family. Violet cornered Prue in the kitchen.
‘Have a drink,’ said Prue, who was behind schedule.
Violet ignored the invitation and came straight to the point. ‘What’s up with Dad?’ she said, in the tone that Prue recognized from the days of failing to be a good stepmother.
She chopped at the onions. ‘Nothing. Your father is fine.’
‘No, he isn’t. I know Dad. He’s worried about something.’
Prue’s knife reduced the onions to pulp. ‘He’s fine,’ she repeated.
Violet regarded the mush on the chopping board and a plucked eyebrow arched upwards. Prue followed the line of her gaze and tipped the onions into the frying pan on the stove. Losing one’s moral superiority was harder than Prue had imagined, particularly when dealing with Violet. She gave a final savage chop to a segment of onion and caught her finger. Red trickled over the board. Prue stared at it. ‘I can never see French blood,’ Joan said, ‘without my hair standing on end.’ Joan, perhaps, might have understood how it was easy to hate the non-sinner for his reminders of your imperfections, and to love the sinner who shared your darkness.
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Violet. ‘He’s not ill, is he?’
‘No.’ Prue’s wooden spoon hovered for a second or two above the frying pan. ‘No. But he might be worrying about work, of course.’
At that point, Max came into the kitchen holding a pair of secateurs. Violet swivelled around.
‘I was just asking Prue if you were all right.’
And Prue, who knew Max’s repertoire of expressions well, was aware that he did not look as surprised as he could have done. Max dropped his free hand on to his daughter’s shoulder and let it rest there. Violet smiled up at him.
‘I’m fine,’ he said, looking directly at his wife.
Prue scrubbed at her wet cheeks with an elbow. ‘These onions’, she said, ‘are very strong.’
Max snapped the secateurs open and shut. Open and shut.
‘I’ve been asked to tackle Mrs Ryder’s jasmine,’ he said, and did not sound particularly pleased about it. ‘It’s growing across her window and blocking the light.’
‘Don’t be late for lunch.’ Prue turned back to the stove.
Violet said she had to unpack.
Someone once wrote that to cook divinely required love. Nonsense. Guilt did just as well. Prue fried mince and the onions in virgin olive oil until they were the colour of a sun-tanned thigh. She opened a tin of plum tomatoes and mashed them into the mixture, added orange in the form of grated carrot, and green basil. Then she melted butter in a cast-iron saucepan, spooned in flour and waited until the roux solidified into yellow and back to white before pouring in the milk. A good cheese sauce should be made with Swiss cheese to give it that stringy, tangy flavour, suggesting clean air, hot sun and cafe life.
A layer of mince, a layer of pasta, a layer of sauce.
A layer of blameless married life. A layer of adultery. A layer of . . . then what?
I don’t really want a love affair. I don’t want this upheaval, this realignment, this mess.
We have the power to choose, Richard, the vicar, had preached in one of his better sermons. That’s what distinguishes us as spiritual beings. Our sense of good and evil sets us apart from the animal kingdom. Rubbish to that. Prue had reacted strongly. We have simply specialized in intelligence, as the lion has specialized in speed and strength, and intelligence feeds on convenient fantasies. Good and evil are myths.
Nevertheless, we do possess the power of choice.
She was conscious of Jamie’s presence in the kitchen before he said anything. The hairs rippled up her arms and tightened the muscles in her pelvis. Then came a rush of blood flooding into her chest.
‘Prue.’
She waited until she had smoothed the final layer of mince and poured the white sauce before she turned round.
‘Jamie.’
He was standing just inside the door, cradling a sleepy baby in his arms. Years later, when other details had slipped away, she savoured this epiphany, for that was what it was. She remembered thinking how odd it was to see Jamie in her kitchen and how her kitchen, cluttered with so many familiar things, was the wrong place for him. She remembered thinking: I love him above all else and I have no choice.
Jamie looked tired, a little transparent and worn at the edges. She did not know him well enough - yet - but if Max had worn the look that sat on Jamie’s face she would have known that he needed her. In return, Prue ached for him, her body suddenly limp, out of control.
She shoved the lasagne into the oven and shut the door with extra emphasis.
‘Edward needs some fresh air,’ said Jamie. ‘Why don’t you come with me if you’ve finished? Violet’s doing some phoning.’
As they pushed the baby up the main street, Prue said, ‘This feels very odd.’
For a second or two, Jamie looked grim. ‘Are you going to say you regret everything?’
She considered. ‘That would be another lie.’
His expression relaxed. ‘Promise me you won’t ever say anything remotely like it.’
‘Hush,’ she said quickly. ‘I see Molly coming our way,’ and she asked him about the atmosphere in the City.
‘General gloom.’
‘Nice day,’ said Molly, her tone drier than usual as she passed on her way to the vicarage with a bag of spinach.
Mrs Ryder’s jasmine did not look pruned and neither, Prue noted, was there evidence of Max. Normally, Prue never gave a moment’s thought as to the whereabouts of her husband but now she ran through the places he might be. Now it mattered. Of all the anticipated consequences of an affair, compulsive checking up on the whereabouts of one’s spouse had not figured on Prue’s list.
‘If there is banality in evil,’ she said, as Jamie helped her to heave the pushchair up the bank, ‘there is, certainly, banality in adultery.’
‘Quite,’ said Jamie, and held her hand a moment longer than necessary.
The pushchair creaked over bumps and outcrops of dried mud. Prue’s skirt was much too thick for summer, and her beaten-up walking shoes had acquired a patina of dust. She took off her jersey and slung it over her shoulders.
Across the pushchair, Jamie looked at Prue.
Memories of what had passed between them surged back - hot, strong, trembling with astonishment and the slap-slither of flesh that had been turned by the
ir wishes into the witchery of high emotion. A rage to possess Jamie, to dig deep under that transparent skin, down into blood and bone, and to seize the sinews of his spirit between her teeth and tear at it, filled Prue.
Embarrassed, she quickened her pace.
‘Hang on,’ said Jamie.
Prue led them up a track, only just negotiable with a pushchair, towards the footpath leading between Jacob’s Farm and the tongue of hazel copse. She gestured towards the latter.
‘I wanted you to see it. Old England. Apparently, the copse is medieval and the Heritage people are watching it like a hawk.’
At the top of the rise where the path widened, Jamie wedged the pushchair into a root bole and snapped on the brake. Lulled by the bumpy ride, Edward had fallen asleep, his heavy head pulled to one side.
Jamie reached out and pulled Prue towards him. She felt his face join hers, felt the outline of his teeth through his lips, tasted him, smelt him. A fire leapt in her and incinerated her disbelief that this should be happening to her, Prue Valour.
Hampered by their clothes, Jamie undertook an awkward passage towards her breast. Prue was still. His hand slid under her blouse and under her bra. His touch was rough - so, too, were his finger-tips on the smoother, warmer skin under her breast. She closed her eyes. Jamie stopped what he was doing.
‘Silence, Prue?’
She opened her eyes. ‘I don’t honestly know what to say. I’ve not had many lovers. I have not committed adultery before, certainly not in front of a baby. Neither do I understand.’
Jamie’s hand now cradled her breast and she added crossly, ‘I’m not a cup-cake either.’
He laughed but kept his hand where it was. ‘What don’t you understand?’
‘This is egocentric to the point of eccentricity. But why me, Jamie?’
Obviously not that well acquainted with the female psyche, he seemed genuinely puzzled at the question. ‘I could ask, why me?’
It was on the tip of her tongue to list his advantages in looks, intelligence, etc., etc., and that she had none of those things, but she stopped herself in time.
Jamie was persistent. ‘Well, Prue, why me?’
She turned her head away and presented him with a profile softened by emotion and lust. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t choose you. It just happened.’
Can you retrace the pathways of desire back to source? Pick your way through threads of memory? Select a precise moment when a decision was made?
Oh, yes.
She turned back to Jamie and he brushed the hair back from her eyes.
‘I don’t know what to do, Jamie.’ Prue disengaged herself. ‘I can’t find it in me to resist.’
‘Stop talking,’ said Jamie. ‘It spoils things.’
‘Yes, I suppose it does.’
For the second time, he kissed her, and again, further down the path, against an oak tree.
Edward slept on, a picture of innocence.
Because there were so many of them, Prue served the (overdone) lasagne in the dining room. Max opened a couple of bottles of Bulgarian pinot noir. Due for her next assessment at the gym, Violet only sipped hers. Jamie left his almost untouched, whereas Max was into his fourth glass before the cheese.
Outside, the sun shone down on Dainton, revealing smudged windows, curtains in need of cleaning, cracked roads and peeling paint. It shone, too, on FOR SALE notices that had been up for months on end, on the blue rusting Volkswagen, dumped by the village pond, which the owner could not afford to repair, and on the newly heaped grave in the churchyard covered by brown-edged bouquets. Unemployment had finally got to Clive Carter and he had killed himself in the company car before it was impounded by the firm.
The sun warmed, promised, and clarified.
Inside Hallet’s Gate, Prue’s body was irradiated with lust and what remained of her resolution disappeared as easily as the pinot noir.
I cannot not love Jamie.
Chapter Sixteen
He was nothing if not persistent.
Emmy could not understand why Angus continued to single her out when there was luscious Sal and the rest of the London tribe of hummingbirds for him to, well, . . . Emmy did not dwell on the precise nature of what Angus might be doing.
What exercised her was the exhaustion of living with the five senses operating on red alert. She hated her vulnerability, and the way Angus ate up her time.
So much for the independent Emmy Horton.
How about this: when she woke, Angus was there occupying her mind; when she washed up or changed Edward’s nappy, vacuumed the hall, listened to the telephone ring, he strutted, preened and made as free with it as only a usurper can. The Daily Mail, Neighbours and a novel by Virginia Andrews were no antidote. Neither were her plans to watch for the tawny owl that she hoped would be nesting at Tarrant’s barn back home. She had been taken over by an image, a voice and a shape whose powers extended deep into her subconscious. In had slipped cunning Angus, demonstrating to Emmy the limits of her power - and the extent of his.
She learnt that there is no release from the suffocation of a head occupied by the squatter who will not be evicted. As yet Emmy was unaware that time would do the job efficiently.
Come on the hike on the last weekend in June, Angus invited her. The gang’s going and there’s a good pub to get ratted at the other end. We go in the van.
Thus, one Saturday morning, an Emmy made boneless with nerves laced up her Doc Marten’s and ironed her best black T-shirt and jeans and, in the well-rehearsed tradition of Ruth following Boaz, followed Angus to a village near Midhurst on the South Downs.
The group — all right, the Londoners — were displayed incongruously against the green and chalk of the Downs . . . black-clad, flowing-haired townies splattered across the green turf that swept over the ridge and down the fields.
‘It looks so green,’ said Sal, shading her eyes with her hand.
Feeling superior, Emmy said nothing. Any fool knew that a landscape looked uniform but contained within it variations of colour and texture so minute and myriad that it made the word ‘green’ meaningless.
On this weekend, the sun chose to beat down and it was hot. Sweat sprouted on Sal’s upper lip and her hair hung lank against the tartan lumberjack shirt she wore over her leggings. In desperation, Emmy had bundled her hair into a scarf where it lay on her neck like unaired washing.
Half-way to the pub, Sal and Cherry began to flag. ‘Not used to this.’ Sal hoicked up one breast with a hand. ‘It’s tough on the tits.’
Emmy strode over earth crusted into chalky lumps and pitted with flint, felt it crumble under her boots and, framed against the expanse of the world, cautiously admitted to herself that she was happy.
The grass was young, sappy and tough. She bent to pull up a stalk and it bit into her finger. Angus came up behind and poked her bottom.
‘Move on.’
Emmy did not appreciate the prize heifer treatment or her mood being broken. ‘Naff off.’
They reached the summit of the chalk ridge and the path turned and ran east—west towards a large patch of woodland. Under the tree canopy the sun was filtered of its heat, and the change in temperature made Emmy shiver. The air was still and the light spread in patches over the woodland floor. Violets edged the paths with occasional red and blue splashes of other flowers.
So much texture and so much nourishment on which the senses could feast. Emmy breathed it in, and knew then that her roots ran deeper than she had supposed. She belonged here and her body responded to the changeable light and unmistakable scents of leaf mould and growing things. In a dream she walked on.
‘Have some cider,’ Angus urged in the pub. It was one of those resolutely fake-beamed and horse-brassed places which served everything in a basket, even the crisps. In a fine example of British inability to handle the weather, a fire had been lit and the place was tropical.
Sal and Cherry were into the vodka, Vince and Nails into the draught bitter. Emmy sipped her cider.
The talk was not of jobs for, Emmy and Angus excepted, the group did not have one between them. Neither was it of job prospects, because those had been discounted and the future was something to ignore. No, sensibly the talk was of films, benefits, gigs and Sun scandal.
By two thirty, Cherry, Sal and Vince were drunk and Nails had retired to the gents where he remained. The heat inside the pub had become oppressive: Emmy was sweating and Angus’s pony-tail was wet.
‘Let’s go,’ she said.
Sal moaned. ‘Why don’t the health freaks go back, get the van and pick us up?’
Too late, Sal realized she had ceded an advantage to Emmy. She shrugged - and made an additional mistake of underestimating the enemy.
Emmy could not get out of the pub quickly enough. Angus trod behind her and they walked in silence in single file towards the wood. Once there, the tantalizing, elusive smell of flowers and new leaves again sifted over Emmy and brought her to an abrupt halt. If she could absorb this rioting life perhaps she could steal its confidence and vigour for herself.
Angus’s hands slid around her waist. Her thin, whippy, inelegant waist.
‘What are you doing, Emmy?’
Drugged by scent and her feelings, Emmy turned and waited the second or two until Angus kissed her. Behind her closed eyelids light splintered across her vision.
‘Nice,’ said Angus, and released her. ‘And you smell nice. I’ve fancied doing that for a long time,’
Emmy thought about the breasts swinging beneath a black T-shirt. ‘What about Sal?’
‘What about her? I fancy you both. Have you both. No point in being exclusive.’
‘Get off, Angus.’
‘Not yet,’ he said and turned her face none too gently towards him and kissed her again.
The out-of-body dimension to Emmy’s pilgrimage vanished, replaced by a tension that quivered, almost visibly, between the two. Emmy endeavoured to concentrate on the now milky sweep of sky spread between the horizon and the sun, and failed. She thought, instead, of lust, all flesh and tumbled limbs - not that her experience amounted to more than could be written on a full stop. Her good sense also warned her that at this moment her feelings were not reliable.
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