Marriage and Other Games

by Veronica Henry

  Hold on a minute. Sex in a phone box?

  ‘Everyone will see,’ he objected.

  ‘Well, you’ll have to be quick, then.’

  She wrapped the capacious coat around the two of them and he sank into its warmth. Her warmth. It was, quite simply, bliss.

  Six months later they got married. It was a proper country wedding, in the church in Withybrook, then back to the Poltimores’ farm where the brood had made an enormous effort to clean the place up - the scrapped cars had vanished, every square inch of concrete was jet-washed, the fences were repaired, and although it would never merit a spread in Country Living it looked a thousand times more presentable. The barn was filled with hay bales and trestle tables and everyone ate pork pie and coleslaw and got totally smashed on pints of Exmoor ale and scrumpy. Fitch remembered thinking it was positively Hardyesque: flushed wenches in low-cut frocks dancing with young men awkward in their best suits and dusty work boots. And he adored his beautiful bride, who danced with every man at the wedding but who only had eyes for him.

  Less than a year later, Amber was born, followed almost indecently quickly by Jade. Fitch thought he was the happiest he’d ever been. He was delighted with his new little family, his dark-haired, round-eyed baby girls. The house became a home. He worked hard, but at the end of the day he looked forward to finishing and coming home. Marrying Hayley gave him automatic acceptance by the locals. He went out to the pub with the lads on a Thursday night, though he didn’t take the piss and stay out till gone midnight like some of them. At last he had found somewhere he belonged. He knew that technically he would always be an outsider, but at least he had a place in Withybrook. He knew where he was in the pecking order. Marrying a Poltimore meant he was higher up than some people who had been born and bred in the village. He enjoyed his status, his work, and being a husband and father. He figured he’d worked out the equation at long last. It was as if his past had never happened. He blotted it out of his memory. He was living for the present.

  But his contentment was to be short-lived. It soon became apparent that motherhood didn’t suit Hayley one bit. She put on weight, lost her spark, became sulky and resentful and found even the most menial of tasks beyond her capabilities. She’d stopped hunting after her mare had been put down two years ago. She could barely be bothered to cook, just chucked unidentifiable frozen food into the deep-fat fryer every evening. Fitch found himself taking over the catering, getting up extra early to put a casserole into the slow cooker before he left. He didn’t want to argue with her, or put his foot down, or make unreasonably sexist demands. It was easier to do it himself. Meanwhile, Hayley plummeted further into a deep fug of sluttishness, chain-smoking John Player Specials which one of her brothers got off the back of a lorry and watching endless daytime telly. Fitch hit the roof when he got the phone bill and realised she had been calling prime-time competition numbers.

  ‘It’s the only chance I’ve got,’ she shouted, ‘of anything exciting happening to me.’

  As he looked at her, her hair now lank, her skin lacklustre, her eyes bloodshot, the realisation came to him. She’d seen him as a way out. Whereas he’d seen her as a way in. And the fact that he seemed to so enjoy the way of life in Withybrook that she was hoping to escape seemed to enrage her.

  ‘I’m trapped!’ she screamed at him one night. ‘Fucking trapped in this God-forsaken place.’

  ‘You’ve got no idea how lucky you are,’ Fitch fired back, but he knew he couldn’t convince her.

  He thought she’d turned the corner when she decided to go beating with the local shoot. It was the beaters’ job to stride through the rough flushing the birds out for the guns to take aim. Fitch was pleased. Beating was tough work but good fun and would get Hayley out of the house; get her some fresh air, as well as giving her a social life. It would give her something to think about.

  Perhaps too much to think about. The strenuous exercise meant the weight fell off her, and she enjoyed the social side of it so much that she frequently didn’t come back till gone midnight, having followed the other beaters and loaders back to the Speckled Trout for liquid sustenance. And then one day she met Kirk Lambert, who belonged to the shooting syndicate and had caught sight of her inviting cleavage during lunch.

  With his shaved head and his thick neck and his dark glasses, his top-of-the-range Range Rover and shiny, shiny new shotguns, Kirk represented everything Fitch loathed. Conspicuous consumption, status symbols, disregard for everyone who didn’t treat him as if he was the dog’s bollocks. Kirk was an ex-boxer who now had a string of what he called ‘elf’ clubs. Fitch had a mental image of a gym full of pixies and leprechauns. Hayley told him he shouldn’t laugh, because Kirk was loaded. Beyond loaded.

  He could see she was hooked. The weeks Kirk came shooting, she became effervescent, spending hours on her appearance before venturing out in her tightest jeans underneath the wax jacket and Dubarry boots that were prescribed beating gear. And although the shoot was incredibly feudal, and the guns didn’t really mix with the beaters, it didn’t seem to bother Kirk. Fitch reasoned he was the type who didn’t care who he got his leg over; he was the sort who would happily fork out for a private dance in a lap-dancing club and would think it a fair transaction. But Hayley, poor, naïve Hayley, who was clearly on a quest for something that was never going to make her any happier, couldn’t see that Kirk was morally bankrupt. His actual bank balance blinded her to the fact.

  Fitch felt sad. Incredibly sad. He knew he was going to lose her. He tried his best to stop it happening, but he knew that, at this point in her life, he wasn’t what she wanted. After all, he’d seen it before with his mother. His feckless, dissatisfied, slattern of a mother, who blamed everyone else for her unhappiness, who had slept with every other Sunday fisherman on the banks of the river Severn in the hope of finding escape. She’d trawled the riverbanks in her too-short denim skirt, her tanned freckled breasts bursting out of skimpy tops she might as well not bother with. Fitch’s father had known what she got up to only too well, but had tolerated her behaviour with a lugubrious passivity because it had been his own fault, for being a loser, for not earning enough for them to buy their own house, for not having a flash enough car.

  Fitch knew all about unsatisfied women, and how they nearly always came to a sticky end.

  ‘Hayley,’ he pleaded, ‘I’m begging you not to go near him. Not because of me, but because he’ll hurt you.’

  She just rolled her eyes and gave him a look that said it all. The next time she went beating, she didn’t come home, and didn’t even attempt to apologise for the fact that she had spent the night in Kirk’s hotel room when she eventually turned up.

  Fitch didn’t put up a fuss. He figured it was best for her to get it out of her system. He was confident that Kirk would show his true colours before long. All that concerned him was that Jade and Amber were looked after and kept happy and secure and had no inkling of the hideous cracks in their marriage. So he didn’t rock the boat. He felt sure it was a phase.

  It wasn’t. Hayley professed herself in love with Kirk, declared their marriage over and insisted on moving out of the house and back to her parents’ farm. Fitch was accepting, until he realised that she intended to take Jade and Amber with her. She broke his heart the day they all left, but somehow she managed to make him feel that it was his fault. That he had in some way neglected her. Fitch was bewildered. How had he become the enemy, when he had done nothing but support her? It didn’t occur to him that perhaps she didn’t like herself very much, that she knew her behaviour was appalling, and that Fitch’s tolerance only made her feel more unworthy, and that was why she was leaving.

  Every weekend she dropped the children off with him after school so she could drive full-pelt up to Kirk’s place. During the weeks she didn’t bother with her appearance, but she clearly spent all day Friday on it. On Sunday nights she returned, her skin pasty, her eyes swollen and her breath smelling of stale booze and cigarettes. They had got us
ed to the routine. To her credit, she wasn’t usually late, which was why he had been so concerned when she hadn’t turned up on time.

  Fitch sighed and looked at the kitchen clock. Another two hours till opening time. He’d go down to the Trout, have a couple of beers and maybe a game of darts. He slumped onto the sofa and put his head back on a cushion. He’d shut his eyes for ten minutes. He always felt exhausted after a confrontation with Hayley. Dido jumped on his lap and he scratched between her ears. He should have stuck to being a loner with just his dog for company, he thought ruefully. But then, he wouldn’t have had his girls, his beautiful girls. Frankly, they were all he lived for these days.

  Five

  Charlotte prayed that her truck didn’t give up the ghost while she was crossing the moor. She had no idea where she was, or how far away Withybrook might be. The last sign had clearly stated three miles, yet she was sure she must have been at least six since then. She’d passed nothing that might give her a clue as to her whereabouts. Just miles and miles of bleak, scrubby, dun-coloured moorland that stretched as far as the eye could see. It was, allegedly, an area of outstanding natural beauty, but Charlotte shuddered as she took in its relentless emptiness. Dramatic, maybe, but beautiful? She was yet to be convinced, although to be fair she wasn’t in the most forgiving of moods and the sulky grey sky wasn’t doing the landscape any favours.

  There had been times in the last few months when Charlotte had thought she was going to go under, and if it hadn’t been for the stalwart Gussie, bolstering her up, then she might well have lost the will to carry on. The stress had been huge. She’d blanked most of it out of her mind, but it had been a living nightmare. The house had been sold, to pay back the charity - at least Ed had been gentleman enough to insist on that straight away. But there had been nothing left, once they had paid the debt, and the mortgage, and the legal fees. All their years of hard work, evaporated into nothing. Then there was the trial. Charlotte had stayed away. She’d had no desire to see Ed in the dock, or listen to him being sentenced, or to have her photo taken as she left. Two years, he’d got, though he’d probably be out in six months.

  In the meantime, Charlotte had hidden in Gussie’s attic, virtually a recluse, although Gussie had tried to drag her to the cinema, to the gym. Finally, she had felt strong enough to take on Gussie’s project. She needed a clean slate, to start again. After all, she had her entire self to rebuild. There was nothing left of her former life or identity. She was just an empty shell.

  And so here she was. The journey had taken her twice as long as she expected, as she had barely been able to urge the truck past sixty on the motorway. She’d bought the tired old pick-up for two hundred quid off the car dealer down the road. It had six months’ tax and MOT left, but after that it would be ready for the dump. At that price she could afford to run it into the ground and then chuck it away, but in the meantime it would be perfect for trips to the builders’ merchants. If there were builders’ merchants on Exmoor. She hadn’t seen a shop of any description for the past thirty miles.

  Or a garage. She eyed the petrol gauge warily. It was hovering just below a quarter. She prayed it didn’t suddenly plummet and show empty. She hadn’t brought a petrol can. You didn’t bother with petrol cans when you lived in London, not when there was a garage on every other street corner. But now she wished she’d put her Girl Guide head on, and packed a blanket and a Thermos and a packet of chocolate biscuits into the bargain. If she ran out of fuel and was stranded here, it could be weeks before she was found. She imagined herself being discovered by a passing sheep farmer, stiff at the wheel.

  Finally she saw a sign that told her Withybrook was only half a mile, and she felt suffused with relief. She was desperate for a wee, a cup of tea, and to stretch her legs. The truck rumbled over a cattle grid that signalled they were leaving the national park, and Charlotte felt comforted by the sight of ranks of trees assembling at the side of the road. Civilisation, she felt sure, was nigh.

  As if to welcome her, a watery sun began to push its way through the cloud cover, which wearily stepped to one side as if it had become too weak to resist. She passed an isolated farmhouse, and imagined a weather-beaten shepherd and his red-cheeked wife taking tea by an inglenook fireplace. As she rounded a corner, the misty horizon boasted a line of ancient pollarded oaks crowning the heathland. The sun finally burst through the remaining clouds, lighting up the landscape. The colours were extraordinary: donkey brown, khaki and burned orange - a palette that no interior designer worth his or her salt would propose, but that worked to dramatic effect when set against the bruised pinks and purples of the late-afternoon sky. As the road dipped down she was overjoyed to see a sign proclaiming Withybrook. She went over a medieval stone bridge, holding her breath as she negotiated its narrowness, not yet used to the pick-up’s width. A shallow river burbled away underneath, the water rushing over the fat stones in a hurry to get somewhere.

  Just past the bridge was the village cricket pitch, then the line of houses that made up Withybrook began, grey stone edifices squaring up to their opposite neighbours, some standing upright, square and tall, some slumped as if the effort was too much, their rooflines sagging dispiritedly. Her expert eye could tell the houses that had been purchased by out-of-towners, their front doors sporting National Trust estate paint in muted tones of grey, green and cream. Others had committed the cardinal sin of succumbing to double-glazing salesmen, their windows ripped out and replaced with UPVC. No doubt the owners gave thanks repeatedly for the warmth and protection they gave from the bitter moorland winds, not caring that they had ripped the heart and soul out of their homes.

  As she carefully negotiated a sharp bend, a car came flying round the corner. Charlotte had to slam on the brakes and swerve to the left to avoid a collision. The other driver wound her window down. A girl with a pale face and a mane of dark, straightened hair glared out. Two small children peered over her shoulder from the back seat.

  ‘Look where you’re fucking going!’

  Charlotte opened her mouth to defend herself, but the girl threw her car into first gear and raced off. Shaking, she put her hand on the ignition key to restart the car, which had stalled. She was only two inches away from the wall of the house she had been passing. Did people always drive like that round here? she wondered She’d have to be more careful in future.

  The engine didn’t respond to her coaxing. The truck seemed to have died completely. She tried again and again, feeling more and more desperate. She jumped as someone tapped sharply on the window.

  ‘You’re flooding it.’ A pair of rheumy, bloodshot eyes gazed at her from an unshaven face. It was an old man dressed entirely in sludge green from head to toe; a jaunty piece of baler twine around his waist. ‘You sit and wait there while I let the cows go past. It’ll be all right in a minute.’

  Charlotte smiled her thanks and sat in the car nervously. A moment later she was surrounded by a sea of black and white as a herd of dairy cows swarmed round her and made their way majestically up the little high street, hips swaying, udders swinging like chandeliers. They walked obediently to the top and disappeared through a gate, followed by their master. Moments later it was as if they’d never been there.

  Tentatively, Charlotte switched on the engine, and it sprang into life. Relieved, she made her way slowly along the street, her eyes peering in the half-light as she tried to find Myrtle Cottage.

  There it was. Halfway along, tucked a little way back off the main drag like a shy wallflower. It looked tired and weary, but its proportions were pleasing, it was in keeping with its neighbours, and best of all it had the benefit of a cobbled area in front where Charlotte could park her truck. She got out just as the sun retreated bashfully back behind the clouds, its duty as official greeter now over, and the rain began to fall.

  The air smelled of wood-smoke, and the sweet scent of dairy cattle, and wet tarmac. The wind buffeted her and teased her hair. The rain lashed sideways. Charlotte felt in her pocket
for the big key that Gussie had given her. Her fingers closed around the cold iron as she looked up and down the high street. It was still and silent, no sign of life, and she wondered if she had imagined the cows. Only the evidence of several gently steaming khaki pats convinced her she hadn’t been hallucinating.

  She pushed back the hair from her eyes, shivering. It had been sweatshirt weather when she left this morning; now she needed her thermal underwear and duck-down anorak, which were packed away in the back of the truck somewhere. Gussie had warned her Withybrook would probably be a few degrees colder, but she hadn’t mentioned icy blasts from the tundra.

  It wasn’t too late to turn round and drive back to London. If it wasn’t for the fact that she wasn’t sure she had enough petrol to get to the nearest garage, she would have leaped into the driver’s seat and driven hell for leather out of Withybrook, across the moor and back to the bright lights.

  Catkin pulled back the curtain and peered out of the drawing-room window. She was relieved to see headlights making their way up the drive. Tommy Yeo was bang on time, and so he should be. It wasn’t often that a taxi driver had a new car bought for him. Sebastian and Catkin were his best clients, but she couldn’t bear the stifling squalor of his ancient Renault Scenic any longer, so she’d subsidised his purchase of a smart Chrysler Grand Voyager with leather seats and blacked-out windows. In return, he ferried Catkin back and forth from the station in Tiverton, as well as the Turners’ many guests when they came to stay for the weekend. There were things Tommy had seen in the back of the car that you wouldn’t believe, but he kept his mouth shut. Until he’d worked for the Turners, the mainstay of his work had been taking old ladies to the supermarket and the odd airport run. He knew which side his bread was buttered all right.