‘Poisonous Eliza?’
‘Well, obviously, he doesn’t think so.’
‘Or he’s being terribly loyal.’
‘Yes. Yes, he is loyal,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘When I was drafted in to play bridge, Helena told me quietly – when Ginnie was out of the room – that he would never entertain the fact that he’s made a terrible mistake. Has always maintained he has a lovely wife and a perfect marriage.’
‘Because that’s what he wants to believe.’
‘I suppose. And you know, she could be perfectly sweet?’
‘She’s not,’ Lottie said shortly. Eliza was a patient of hers, and although medical professionalism prevented her from telling me anything about the in-depth, one-hour consultation she kicked off with before the needles, I knew she’d been curt and abrupt to Lottie. Had thought it impertinent that an acupuncturist should be asking her anything personal, saying: ‘I only came here to have my migraines sorted out, so kindly stop asking me about my private life and get on with it!’
I recalled Ludo telling me how Eliza liked to grow blackcurrants at the bottom of their orchard, because the smell reminded her of her childhood in Devon: what a sweet and wholesome image he’d created of her. How I, in turn, had talked about Sebastian being so inspired by the colours this spring, which wasn’t true either. Sebastian had said he couldn’t wait for autumn, when at least everything had a death-like quality, which was how he felt. How we protected them.
‘And does he always work in his studio? Not outside?’ Ludo had asked as we returned from our inaugural inspection of the vegetable garden that day, nodding across to the Granary which, mid-morning, still had the bedroom curtains closed and which he politely didn’t draw attention to. Of course he knew, though. Everyone around here did. The famous painter who’d lost his bottle. Found another.
‘Yes, mostly. Well, pretty much always, actually.’ I’d never seen Sebastian with an easel in the fields. ‘He’s doing portraits at the moment, which is something of a departure for him, and by its very nature tends to be inside.’
‘Oh. Right. Do you sit for him?’
‘I haven’t yet,’ I said lightly.
Hadn’t been asked. The children both had, and Ottoline did, quite a bit. But not me. Was he afraid of what he’d see, I wondered? Once, in one of our more bitter moments, I’d voiced this.
‘I think I’m more afraid of how I’d interpret you,’ he’d said, giving me a cold look. He’d apologized the next day, saying he hadn’t meant it, but I carried it around with me nonetheless. Even unto the vegetable garden with Ludo.
‘He’s hugely talented,’ Ludo said reverently, and I realized I was in the presence of an enthusiast. A fan, even.
‘He is,’ I agreed.
‘I went to art school. Would have loved to have gone down that route and done fine art. Been a proper artist.’ The sun caught his startlingly blue eyes. ‘But I wasn’t gifted, not like that. I followed the design route instead and somehow ended up in landscape gardening, which at least combines art with fresh air.’
‘I heard you were in the City once?’ I asked shyly as we walked. He’d realize he’d been discussed, but hey.
‘Oh, yes, I was,’ he said, surprised. ‘When Eliza and I were first married. I felt I should provide properly, have a proper job, so I retrained. Sat all the exams and got a job courtesy of one of her relatives. But I hated it. Had to get out.’
‘And Eliza was supportive?’ I prompted naughtily, feeling pretty sure she hadn’t been.
He looked uncomfortable and I wished I hadn’t said it. ‘Of course,’ he answered finally, lying.
I liked him for it.
That was back then. These days, however, eighteen months since he’d arrived as a gardener and well into our rather more ambiguous relationship, Ludo and I were more honest with each other about our spouses. I knew, for instance, that Eliza was sharp and sarcastic and capable of wounding him deeply with her taunts, her rages about lack of money, just as he knew Sebastian could hurt me, but for different reasons. We’d discuss them in hushed tones as we ostensibly inspected the greenfly on the gooseberry bushes down by the duck house on the river, as far, geographically, as we dared go without arousing suspicion.
Today, though, as we strolled around the runner-bean canes closer to home, canes which now positively dripped with bounty thanks to his green fingers, I didn’t want to talk about Eliza or Sebastian. I had something else on my mind. Along with the fruit and flowers Ludo had left on the step recently for my birthday, he’d given me another present: a Mulberry handbag, which once, in an idiotic moment, whilst we’d been flipping through a magazine in my studio together remarking on the sleek celebrity hand luggage, I’d laughingly said I’d go to my grave without owning. He’d handed it to me in the orchard the following week, wrapped in pink tissue paper with a velvet bow. I’d actually dropped it I’d been so touched.
‘I love it,’ I told him now as we walked in the sunken veggie garden together, out of view of the farm. ‘More than you’ll ever know and for so many different reasons. But it’s far, far too generous. You’ll have to take it back.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, I’m not doing that.’
‘But, Ludo, you can afford it about as much I can.’ I’d nearly fainted when I’d gone on the website.
‘Who cares? And, anyway, I’m not going back to that shop; it frightens the life out of me.’
‘Which shop?’
‘Harvey Nichols. All those terrifying women armed with sprays ready to zap you as you walk in, wanting to know if I use moisturizer. I was in a muck sweat by the time I reached the handbag department.’
‘You went all the way up there?’ I said in wonder.
‘I have been to London before, you know. Don’t just chew a straw in a cabbage patch. Anyway, I had lunch at my club.’
I stopped in my tracks.
He laughed. ‘Important to keep you on your toes, Mrs Montclair. No, I had lunch in Pret A Manger.’
I imagined him eating his sandwich with the handbag safely stashed under the table in a stiff white carrier bag. Glancing at his watch as he waited to get the train back. Felt a warm glow.
‘Thank you.’ I breathed, happily. We stopped in the shelter of the crumbling wall and he put his arms round me, holding me close. We were hidden from sight but a bit of me thought: Who cares?
‘It’s beautiful,’ I told him.
It was. And it went everywhere with me. To the loo, to the bath – sitting on a chair well away from splashes but where I could gaze at it – and once to show the sheep. Josh hadn’t noticed, of course, but Tabs jolly well had. I told her I’d won it in a raffle.
‘A raffle!’ she’d shrieked incredulously, riffling through it with all the efficiency of the drugs squad, searching for the magic label. ‘Where!’
‘At some charity do,’ I’d said blithely, hiding my flaming cheeks in the fridge as I pretended to clean it. Oh, the tangled web …
‘But, actually, there is a condition to the bag,’ Ludo told me now as we emerged up the garden steps and walked back towards the house. I glanced at him, alarmed.
He hooted with laughter. ‘Oh, no, not that! Although, actually – good point – why not? Whip your kit off, would you?’ I shot him a withering look. ‘No, it’s just – I had a thought the other day. Why don’t you start painting again? You know, properly?’
That old chestnut. The one everyone who cares for me asks eventually. I didn’t tell him I couldn’t bear to set up an easel in the fields and splash away in front of Sebastian’s nose, that I loved him too much to do that. Or even to be up in the attic in a smock, happily stacking up the canvases. I knew I told him more than I’d told most people already. This man with his kind smile and his frank blue gaze.
‘Yeah, I might do,’ I agreed breezily. ‘Too busy getting a guaranteed income from my punters at the moment, though.’
‘And does Sebastian help a bit more with said punters these days?’ Ludo asked lightly as we pas
sed the Granary, almost at his Land Rover.
I glanced at him quickly, knowing I’d promised to ask. ‘Not really,’ I said shortly.
He didn’t press it. He knew Sebastian could barely give my paying guests more than a curt nod when he passed them in the yard, lugging their cases into the cottages, let alone help, and had begun to realize there wasn’t much point in asking, either. Why couldn’t Sebastian lend a hand, though? Do a bit of grouting or decorating? Didn’t he know these were the people who put bread on his table and, more to the point, liquor down his throat? Or maybe that’s why he was rude. Because in some convoluted way he despised them for being the means of his inactivity. I sighed. Life was so complicated these days. I sometimes longed for the Cadogan Terrace days, before children. Before responsibility. For simpler times. I was still only thirty-seven, but sometimes it seemed more like fifty-seven. I felt ancient, careworn and exhausted. Probably looked it, too. I straightened up a bit, un-creasing my forehead.
Tabitha emerged from the house in her old Barbour, the one with the big pockets which housed her cigarettes, and which she knew I knew about but tacitly didn’t mention. Joshua was one thing, but I wasn’t going to give carte blanche to my fifteen-year-old.
‘Hi,’ she said shyly to Ludo.
The three of us chatted a moment as he asked her about school – the same one as his daughters – and which subjects she was doing, and then he said he had to go, as indeed he did. I watched his long, slim back with regret.
Josh came out of the kitchen in bare feet as his sister sloped off to the river. Ludo’s Land Rover reversed in the yard then swung out through the gates.
‘There he goes,’ Josh said, pulling his rug round his thin shoulders. He squashed his felt hat further down on his head. ‘Oblivious to the chaos he causes.’
‘What d’you mean?’ I asked, turning sharply.
‘Ludo. Ginnie’s lust generator. Araminta says Ginnie puts on perfume before he comes round. Isn’t he the one getting the juices flowing amongst the menopausal set?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. And, anyway, I’m nowhere near menopausal!’
‘No, but Ginnie is. Anyway, we weren’t talking about you. You do look a bit flushed, though.’ He peered into my face. ‘Have you got Tabs’s lippy on?’
‘Of course not!’ I lied. I had, in fact, nipped to the loo before Ludo arrived and pinched my daughter’s Hot Pink Surprise, which had been sitting on the shelf. When I put it on, my face had looked even more surprised, but it had been hard to rub off.
‘Looks remarkably like it. Hardly your usual Pearl ’n’ Shine.’ I flushed as he regarded me with ironic eyes. ‘Hope you can handle yourself, Ella. You’re at that dangerous age.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘When the spark has gone out of your marriage and your children are growing up and getting boyfriends and girlfriends of their own. Exploring their own sexuality. You look around and think: Is this all there is for me? All that’s left? Domestic drudgery? And all the time the hormonal soup bubbles up inside you and ebbs and flows, ebbs and flows …’ He swayed back and forth in his rug, lurching like the tide. ‘Sloshing this way and that –’
‘Joshua!’
‘Hot and cold …’ He swayed, his eyes half shut as if in a trance. ‘Tearful and moody –’
‘That will do, thank you!’
Josh wanted to be an actor and was not without talent. He was currently rehearsing George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and took every opportunity to be as caustic and In Character as possible. He stopped swaying and looked mock-affronted. Readjusted his rug.
‘Well, shit, Ella, only trying to help. I mean, you could pop down to Lottie’s funny farm – sorry, Holistic Centre – and get one of her cronies – sorry, alternative therapists – to sort you out, but why bother when you can get it all here for free? In your own back yard? Any little niggles, any loss of identity – the disappearing-woman syndrome, I’ve read all about it in the Daily Mail, any – pant pant – inappropriate hankerings?’ He winked. ‘You just bring it all here to Uncle Josh. We have a remedy for most things down on the farm.’ He grinned. And then, tweaking my cheek affectionately, he ambled off, no doubt for a smoke with his sister by the river. I watched him go as he picked his way carefully in his bare feet, tartan rug dragging, the dogs and Ladyboy at his heels.
CHAPTER EIGHT
That little exchange with Josh stayed with me. Jocular though it had been, I thought about it on and off, and later that week, as I drove through the Buckinghamshire countryside en route to see my father – Ginnie had decided I was the best man for the job, the perfect envoy – I considered my children’s position. Reconsidered, should I say, because, let’s face it, I examined it often, from every angle. Of course it hadn’t escaped their notice that their parents didn’t actually live together let alone sleep together. They weren’t stupid. Teenagers thought about sex a great deal – every four minutes for boys, according to Radio 4 – so they were bound to notice these things. And even though they’d been relatively young when their father had the affair with Isobel, that wouldn’t have passed them by, either. He hadn’t exactly been circumspect about it. Hadn’t exactly slipped off to Brighton to conduct a secret dalliance with her – no, he’d conducted it reasonably publicly from the local pub, under everyone’s noses. Admittedly this was where Sebastian spent a great deal of time anyway, but not as much as that. Not all night. She was the barmaid – or publican, I suppose, since she owned the Fox and Firkin – and she sat for him a lot, too. She was attractive, in a streaky blonde, throw-your-head-back-and-roar, slightly raddled sort of way, but no tremendous shakes.
Sebastian liked a sitter like this. Not a raving beauty but someone who’d seen a bit of life. He liked to get that in a face. Bring it out. So she sat, and sat nude, for weeks; and he’d make charcoal drawings and many sketches, but I never actually saw a finished picture. When the light faded – Sebastian could only paint in natural light these days, which made him a nicer person to live with in the summer than in the winter – the curtains upstairs in the Granary would close and Isobel’s car would remain in the yard. All night, on occasion. You’d have to be a very unusual sort of person, a very unusual child, not to notice that. I forgave Sebastian a lot over the years because I loved him – I even forgave him the time I found them in our bed together, knowing he’d been making a point: ‘We’re finished, Ella’ – but I couldn’t forgive him that. Such blatant tossing of his infidelity in his children’s faces.
Usually, after an episode of sleeping rough for a while at the Granary – in those days it had only a sofa bed – he’d wander back to the farmhouse eventually. But after Isobel, I locked the doors. I didn’t even have to change the locks. He tried only once to get in, found the back door locked, and sauntered back to the Granary. It was as if he’d wanted it to happen. Had forced my hand and was – if not happy – accepting of the outcome.
I went to see him after that, knowing Isobel wasn’t there. Stood shaking in his studio. I told him that if he wanted to have an affair could he please do it elsewhere. Sebastian had been sober at the time and had agreed that he could indeed conduct the affair elsewhere. He said he had no desire to hurt the children and since he’d finished his portrait of Isobel – not quite true, he never finished it – he’d be happy to bed her exclusively in her flat above the pub, and would do so with the utmost circumspection. Looking back, I saw it was his way of ending our marriage, but as we glared at one another that day, alone in the studio, me with fists clenched, still trembling, all I remember is the strange guarded expression in his eyes as he regarded me and the hurt and love I was afraid might show in mine. To this day I couldn’t see Sebastian slouching across the yard barefoot, paint-splattered shirt hanging out over frayed jeans, without my heart turning over, and sometimes, as I saw him look at me, feeding the chickens or running to chase an escaped sheep, I liked to think I glimpsed his heart tipping too. Not spilling, but tipping. Not recently, though. I gripped
the steering wheel as I wound down the snaking lane that led to my parents’ village. Recently there’d been hate there as well. He’d said to me snidely the other day, as I’d taken his sheets across: ‘I see that johnny gardener is still circling, Ella. You’re obviously giving him what he wants.’
I’d turned to him in outrage as he stood at his easel, brush in hand. ‘I’m giving him precisely nothing except the run of the garden, the digging of which you clearly think is beneath you! I wouldn’t be so tacky as to dirty my own doorstep, like you and Isobel.’
Such was the mud-slinging we’d descended to. He’d regarded me coolly out of the corner of his eye as he’d carried on painting.
‘You know, weird as that is, I think I believe you. You wouldn’t want to lose the moral high ground, would you? Wouldn’t want any grains of that precious terrain to slip through your fingers.’
I’d thrown the sheets on the floor and stalked out, tears stinging my eyelids, knowing, in a sense, he was right. Even had I wanted a proper affair with Ludo – which I increasingly did – I wouldn’t want to live with the person I would then become. As Sebastian so often said, it was all about appearances with me. But what he hadn’t also said, but perhaps knew, was that my not having a physical relationship with Ludo was my way of keeping my family together. Viscerally I knew that if I descended to Sebastian and Isobel’s level, that would be it. The farm would have to be sold and the children would lose their father across the way. My resistance was all that kept us tottering along in the precarious position we found ourselves.
No such restraint for my father, though, I thought in alarm as I purred through the picturesque village of my childhood and approached the Old Rectory gates. They glittered back at me in the sunlight, black and glossy between attractive stone walls dripping with purple aubrietia. The man himself was whistling his way back cheerfully from the village shop even now, looking like the cat who’d got pints of cream. I watched as he approached, oblivious to me. The Telegraph was tucked under one arm, a silk hanky flowed even more luxuriantly than usual from his tweed jacket and his cheeks were ruddy and flushed. Hopefully from the wind, I thought with a sudden qualm.
My Husband Next Door Page 11