‘Oh, thank God you’re there. I thought I heard you. We need you right now, Poppy. Jennie has gone completely mental. Can I come in?’
Before I could reply she’d leaped the little wall that divided our gardens and nipped inside my kitchen anyway. From her own house I could hear the sound of voices raised in anger. Then an outraged scream, shouting, and the sound of things being thrown. Something smashed against our party wall. I jumped, clutching Frankie’s wrist.
‘Jesus. What’s going on?’
‘Jennie, right, has completely lost it,’ she told me breathlessly as we listened. ‘She’s convinced it’s not my test, which it bloody isn’t, and she knows it’s not yours or Peggy’s or Angie’s, or even by immaculate conception Mrs B’s, so she’s decided the only logical conclusion is it’s Dad’s. That he’s having an affair, brought someone back here, and she dropped it in the basket.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ I gasped, incredulous.
‘I know, bonkers; but I told you, she’s lost the plot.’
We listened, clutching each other, as Jennie, at full volume, which we knew to be loud enough to penetrate ancient walls, told Dan exactly what she thought of him, followed by what sounded like the toaster being flung across the room. Dan yelped in pain.
‘Shit – you bitch – my ankle!’
‘Shall I go in?’ I breathed.
‘Oh yes, please,’ begged Frankie tearfully. ‘She’s going to kill him, I know she is. I honestly think she might – Oh!’
No doubt also believing this to be true, Dan was even now leaping the garden wall. The next thing we knew, he was in my kitchen, cowering shamelessly behind his neighbour and his daughter, even going so far as to clutch my dressing-gown cord. His wife, however, was only moments behind him: in very hot pursuit, leaping the wall and brandishing a golf club.
‘Jennie, no!’ I screamed, springing forward to seize her wrist as she charged in brandishing the club. As the five iron flailed in the air Mrs Tiger Woods sprang to mind.
‘Let go of me! LET GO OF ME!’ she roared.
‘No, Jennie!’ I flung her arm to the left with a monumental effort, so much so that the club flew from her hand. She cast mad, wistful eyes after it as it hit a framed poster from the Royal Academy on the wall, smashing it. The sound of breaking glass did nothing to deter her, though; in fact it seemed to galvanize her. Her eyes came back to her prey, who was shrinking back down the kitchen, white-faced.
‘BASTARD!’ she screamed. As Dan turned and fled she pushed me out of the way, but as she ran past I managed to swing and grab her jumper. I held on tight as Frankie, with great resourcefulness, rugby-tackled her ankles and brought her down. A terrific struggle ensued, with Dan, I noticed, not helping in the least; he watched, petrified, peeping out from behind the doorway into the hall, as Frankie and I pinned his wife to the floor.
‘Let me up! LET ME UP!’ she insisted hotly.
Relenting only a fraction, we tentatively allowed her to at least struggle to a sitting position against the wall, where we crouched beside her like jailers, Frankie holding tight to one arm, me to the other.
‘In my bed,’ she was spluttering, ‘some tart, while my children slept!’
‘Jennie, don’t be ridiculous!’ I yelled. ‘You’re out of your mind!’
‘You’ve gone properly weird,’ gasped Frankie.
‘He wouldn’t, Jennie, he just wouldn’t!’ I urged. Dan shook his head vehemently, in helpless agreement, but knowing better, perhaps, than to utter. Out of the corner of my eye I could see my other neighbour, Mrs Harper, at the far end of her back garden, peering around the pyracantha on the party wall, possibly even standing on a flower pot.
‘Oh yes, he would!’ Jennie seethed, mad eyes leaping out of their sockets, her face crimson with rage. ‘That’s just it, he bloody would! He is not the man you think he is, Poppy, not harmless lovable Dan, can’t help getting into scrapes, poor lamb. He would do that and I know he did it because I found a black lacy bra UNDER MY BED!’
‘It’s mine!’ wailed Frankie, distressed. ‘I told you it’s new. I tried it on in your room because you’ve got the best mirror – I must have left it there!’
‘You lie!’ she spat, her head spinning round to her daughter like something out of The Exorcist. ‘I wash your underwear constantly, young lady, and you possess nothing of that nature. You lie to protect him! You both lie!’
‘No!’ Frankie cried, tears springing to her eyes as, at that moment, her younger brother and sister materialized in their back garden. Jamie and Hannah were even now climbing over the garden wall in their pyjamas. Jamie helped Hannah down. They crept, terrified, into my kitchen. If anything would stop my hugely maternal friend in her tracks, it was this: the sight of her two frightened, vulnerable children, little faces bewildered, Hannah still clutching her teddy, dragged from their beds by the screaming. But Jennie was too far gone. Her tether, which, as we know, some would dispute her ever having been in possession of, had well and truly snapped. Despite her jailers she struggled to her feet and balled her fists.
‘WELL, WHOSE IS IT, THEN?’ she bellowed as we held her arms tight, her face a strange purple colour. ‘The sodding test? If it’s not yours, and it’s not your father’s and it’s not Poppy’s or Peggy’s or Angie’s, WHO THE HELL DOES IT BELONG TO?’ she screamed.
There was a silence. It seemed to me the entire village held its collective breath.
‘It’s mine,’ came a voice to our left.
We swung around as one. Twelve-year-old Jamie, not thirteen until the winter, in his M&S jim-jams, getting taller by the minute but still very much snub-nosed and freckled, still very much a child, gazed back at us. Two spots of colour were high in his cheeks and I saw him swallow. A gasp went up from the assembled company. Jennie, still in a half nelson of sorts, still in some sort of custody, went limp in our hands. She let out an anguished cry, the sound of an animal in pain. Then she bowed her head and slipped slowly down the wall on her bottom, to the floor.
28
‘Yours?’ spluttered Frankie, since their mother seemed incapable of speech.
‘Yes, it’s mine. OK?’
Jennie moaned in agony again, but not so piercingly this time: it was more the cry of a defeated fighter at the very end of their strength, very much on the ropes. Dan, however, seemed imbued with a new kind of strength. He hot-footed it from one end of the kitchen to the other, and since he was no longer in imminent danger of losing his own life, he stepped over his prostrate wife to endanger his son’s. He towered over Jamie.
‘You got someone pregnant?’ he hissed, aghast.
‘No, of course not. I was testing Leila, cos I thought she might be. I think she is.’
A profound silence followed this announcement. No eyes strayed from the small boy in checked pyjamas.
‘Leila?’ his mother finally whispered, dumbfounded.
‘Yes. She was getting all fat and bosomy, like you did with Hannah, and anyway I saw her doing it with another dog. So when I saw her having a wee in the garden, I took your test and stuck it in the puddle. I had to run back upstairs to check the instructions on the packet, and then I just chucked it in the bin. I was going to tell you, only I knew how cross you’d be with her.’ His face was very pale now under his freckles.
His mother shut her eyes. ‘Oh, thank the Lord,’ she breathed. ‘Thank the Lord.’
‘You’re pleased?’ Jamie blinked. ‘I thought you’d be, like, mental. Get her to have an abortion or something.’
‘Oh, I might still do that, but – Oh no, I am so pleased, darling!’ Jennie struggled to her feet and staggered across the kitchen to take her astonished son’s face in both hands. She kissed his forehead with a resounding smack, then both his cheeks equally roundly. ‘So so pleased it’s not your father, but even more relieved it’s not you!’
‘Me!’ he gasped, but she’d already squashed him in a face-altering embrace to her breast; so much so that his mouth became a figure of eight, denyi
ng speech.
Dan, meanwhile, once his initial relief had passed, was rapidly engaged in regarding his wife with contempt. He folded his arms in an attitude of haughty disdain. His lip curled. He hadn’t stalked off, mind, as some husbands might, in high dudgeon; had remained stoically by his wife’s side. Whatever else one said about Dan, he saw these things through. But then again, such moments of lofty moral altitude were few and far between in his married life; he wouldn’t want to miss out on them, would he? Who knows how long it might be until another came along?
‘Sorry,’ Jennie muttered to him now, over her son’s head.
Dan regarded her frostily for a moment, but then his lip uncurled. He had the grace to accept this apology for what it was: a genuine one, from a woman driven to distraction by unexplained circumstances, whose imagination had galloped from a teenage pregnancy, to her husband’s love child, to underage sex, all in the space of a few hours. He inclined his head in acceptance, and although he was unable to resist a faint gleam to the eye, she stood forgiven. And Dan forgave Jennie a lot, it occurred to me; almost as much as she forgave him. Albeit for different reasons.
‘Puppies!’ breathed Hannah blissfully into the silence. She beamed up at her mother. ‘Will Leila have puppies, Mum?’
‘No doubt,’ said Jennie darkly, resting her chin squarely on Jamie’s head; he was still squirming in her tight embrace. Suddenly her face became wreathed in smiles. ‘And there’ll be no half measures for our Leila, either. She won’t pop out a modest set of twins. Oh no, it’ll be a hundred and one Dalmatians for her!” She gave a sharp laugh.
‘And can we keep one?’ implored Hannah, her eyes huge.
‘No, darling, we can’t,’ Jennie told her firmly: overjoyed, it seemed, but not completely overwhelmed by the situation before her.
Hannah’s face fell, as did Jamie’s when he was finally released.
‘Oh, Mum?’ he implored.
Dan raised enquiring eyebrows at his wife. Still in a position of power, he was keen to push home the advantage, and Jennie caught the look and hesitated, which was fatal. It was pounced on immediately.
‘Go on, Mum!’ they chorused.
She vacillated. ‘Oh God, we’ll see,’ she said finally, at which massive capitulation a whoop went up from her offspring, including Frankie. ‘I said, we’ll see!’ she cried, but everyone knew she was shot to bits.
‘Come on, you lot.’ Dan took Hannah’s shoulders and turned her about, grinning widely and propelling his family out through the open back door. ‘Back to bed for you. Sorry, Poppy.’ He turned back to me as his offspring scampered excitedly away. ‘I do apologize for intruding so brutishly on your evening, but thank God we got that one sorted out. It was only a matter of time before she accused me of harbouring a love child somewhere in the village, of leading a completely double life.’ This time he couldn’t resist a withering look at his increasingly shamefaced wife. ‘An affair,’ he said incredulously. ‘As if. Who with? And when would I have the time, or the opportunity?’ This, when his younger children were safely over the wall, Frankie in their wake.
‘Well, quite,’ muttered Jennie, looking exhausted suddenly. She ran a weary hand through her hair. ‘Or the bloody energy,’ she added ruefully.
‘And in the marital bed too. What kind of a man d’you take me for?’ He shook his head, lips pursed. ‘I worry about the way your mind works sometimes, Jennie, I really do. In fact I’m increasingly concerned for your moral compass.’ He was enjoying himself now.
‘I was severely provoked,’ replied his wife testily, not one to be contrite for long. ‘And since I’d exhausted all other possibilities – or thought I had … Of course, foolishly, it didn’t occur to me it was your bloody dog shagging around, weeing on sticks –’
‘That’s … my canine dog, I take it,’ put in Dan. ‘Only, just now you accused me of having some dog in bed with me, and I can assure you that whilst Leila and I are very fond of each other we have never crossed that –’
‘Oh, shut up, Dan,’ Jennie interrupted, irritated. ‘You might have the high ground for one split second but we all know it won’t last long. It’ll be shifting under your feet before you can say caught with your trousers down again.’
‘Which is why I’m making the most of it!’ he cried in mock outrage as they trooped off down the lawn together, taking a more conventional route than their children, via my garden gate at the end, then back through theirs. He flung his arm around her shoulders as they went. ‘Why d’you think I’m milking it for all it’s worth? Oh, good evening, Mrs Harper! Yes, the bitch is pregnant, isn’t that joyous? Doesn’t she look well?’ A grey perm scuttled inside in terror. ‘Oh, don’t go,’ Dan cried. ‘Let’s make an evening of it! Why make haste when there’s so much to celebrate? When the night is still young?’ We heard a kitchen door slam firmly. Dan grinned back at me over his shoulder. ‘Night, Poppy.’
‘Night.’ I smiled and went inside.
Jennie, however, not one to leave a drama alone for long, was through that same back door the following morning, as I was bundling my sheets into the washing machine. Clemmie, who had a cold, was playing quietly in the sitting room, and once Jennie had popped in to say hello to her, she installed herself at my kitchen table with a mug of coffee.
‘Puppies!’ she groaned.
‘Now, Jennie,’ I warned, turning round from my machine, ‘I’m not having that. It’s bloody marvellous news. You were euphoric last night. It’s yippee, puppies, remember?’
‘Oh, I know,’ she agreed. ‘And I was still in a good mood when we got in, I promise. I had a lovely hug from Frankie and we even shed a few tears together.’
‘Did you? Oh, good.’
‘Stayed up chatting for ages. She was horrified that we thought she was pregnant but understood why. She also said I’d behaved slightly better than her father, which cheered me. Said she’d had no idea her dad could go off the deep end like that. I told her it was only because he loved her so much and she agreed, grudgingly, then, being Frankie, said, “Oh, so you didn’t, because you don’t?” ’
I laughed. ‘Typical.’
‘I know, and she didn’t mean it. She was only being clever, so I didn’t react. She does that too much, of course. The clever, cynical bit.’
I shrugged. ‘It’s just a defence mechanism. She’ll grow out of it. And she is clever, Jennie. Far too clever to get herself pregnant. She’ll go far, that girl.’
‘I know she will. We talked about all that too – A levels, university. She’d like to go to Frazer House for sixth form.’
‘Oh. Can you afford it?’ Frazer House was private.
‘No. But I think we should try. She’d do so well there. I’m going to persuade Dan that we should borrow it, crawl to the bank manager.’
I was silenced. Jennie didn’t believe in borrowing, it was against all her instincts. She kept a very tight hold on the purse strings, but then again, as she always said, she had to. Dan would blow it all on the three-thirty at Kempton if he could.
‘Don’t think you’ll have any difficulty there, then,’ I grinned.
She smiled. ‘No, I know. And I do also know,’ she eyed me sheepishly, ‘that I am a controlling old bag at times, but trust me, you’d be the same with my family.’
I wouldn’t, I knew. I’d be more like Dan; but that would be hopeless, wouldn’t it? People like Dan and me frittered money until there was nothing left – like Dad, I realized, remembering too my hefty cheque to the hunt. Because it didn’t really interest me. Careful people like Jennie were crucial. But then, that’s what I’d thought I had with Phil. And look how careless he’d turned out to be? With feelings, rather than money.
‘And there is a boy,’ went on Jennie, still with Frankie. She sipped her coffee. ‘The only problem is, it’s Hugo.’
‘Hugo!’ I turned back from stuffing my sheets in. I was astonished. Hugo. Angus and Sylvia’s rather gorgeous grandson, who hunted to hounds in the holidays and was currently on his g
ap year before going to Cambridge. He was very much not what I’d expected, and very much the property of one of Angie’s girls, surely?
‘I thought he was joined at the hip with Clarissa?’
‘That’s what Clarissa thought too, and is mighty upset about it. She considers him to be her property – even though he’s never been out with her. She knows he’s with a friend of hers but she doesn’t know who. He wants to break it to her gently, which is why it’s a secret.’
I remembered Frankie running under cover of darkness to a car outside the pub, which of course was where he worked. Remembered too Angie telling me Clarissa was upset about a boy.
‘Oh. Good for Frankie.’ I couldn’t help it.
She grinned. ‘I know. He’s a lovely boy.’ Suddenly she looked defiant. ‘But then she’s a lovely girl. Interesting too. Not your run-of-the-mill, giggle at everything, flicky-haired type.’
‘Quite.’
‘She wants to grow it,’ she said absently. ‘Take it back a shade or two. More tawny.’
‘Good idea.’
We were silent a moment. My mind flew back to Jennie, years ago, struggling with this defiant, wilful child, whose alcoholic mother had become more and more disinterested. There’d been some good years after that, between the ages of about nine and twelve, when all that mattered had been getting in the netball team in the winter and the rounders team in the summer – Jennie had even bribed the teacher with chocolate brownies once – but then some tricky ones. Could it be that she and Frankie were entering a good phase again? And could it last, this time? Jennie had certainly put her back into it, even if at times she felt she hadn’t.
A Rural Affair Page 35