An Affair to Remember

by Virginia Budd

  The sweat’s trickling down her neck, her T-shirt seems pasted to her breasts, she’s a feeling she’s been stung by something nasty and she knows she looks a complete mess. The only good thing, if Sel’s right, and people often aren’t when dealing with distances, is that there’s only another half mile before Brown End. It shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes to walk it, at the most half an hour, and she can carry the small holdall – newly purchased and quite smart looking, with her. The rest of the luggage must take its chance. At least the car seems to be cooling down a bit, so hopefully no danger now of it blowing up. She drags a comb through her hair, puts on a bit of lipstick, turns to check the car doors are locked…

  “Can I be of help?” A tall man walks out of the wood, opens the gate where the rook was sitting. Her first impression; everything about him is reddish brown: brown hair, streaked with grey, brown face, arms, khaki denims, shirt. After that – recognition.

  “Brian?” she hears herself ask in a voice not her own, “Brian?” Silence, while the gentle, cooling wind ruffles her hair and a blackbird whistles in the trees behind them.

  Chapter 4

  “Clarrie? Jack here. Look, love, I’m afraid I can’t make it tomorrow morning, something’s cropped up…”

  “Oh God, Jack, what? Tomorrow morning’s the only time I can make it, Roman Living’s coming in the afternoon to discuss the way forward over them re-doing that bathroom they mucked up, and I’ll have to be there – Sel’s hopeless at dealing with people like that. Then we’ve got weekend visitors – I was so looking forward to seeing you.” Clarrie Woodhead is lying on her bed (imitation Louis XV, matching hangings and duvet cover in a fleur de lis pattern). She feels humiliated. He’s such a slob – what in heaven’s name does she see in him?

  “Not my fault, darling.” The disappointment in her voice nearly gives Jack a hard on there and then. What a bird! “It’s the bloody office again. They want me back for a conference; something’s come up. What about tonight instead? I’ll be down your way early evening – I’m booked to pay a visit to old Carter at The Gables. Should be finished with him by seven o’clock – we could meet after for a quickie. –”

  “For a ‘quickie’! You make it sound as you’re giving me a free handout – who the hell d’you think I am?”

  “Oh come on, darling, don’t be like that,” Jack puts on his wheedling voice, “word of a lie; this isn’t my fault. Would I pass up a chance to see you – I mean would I? You’re the most beautiful creature I’ve clapped eyes on in years and – hang on a sec.” The line goes dead, except for some sort of knocking in the background. “Look, darling, must go, some turd’s banging on the box, but I’ll be waiting up at the Grove 7.30 pm. If you’re not there by 7.45 poor old Jack’ll drive sadly home and top himself – how’s that?”

  “Don’t get your hopes up! The new sec’s arriving today, in fact she should have been here by now so I probably won’t make it. Anyway I must go, Sel’s on his way up. Bye.” At least she’s had the last word, not that that counted for much; so subtle a victory would cut no ice with Jack Fulton.

  Clarrie Woodhead is small, dark and thirty-nine years old. She’s kept her figure and her looks and could be taken on a good day for someone in her twenties. She has beautiful eyes, peaty brown with long lashes, and an equally beautiful figure. Sel Woodhead’s women always have beautiful figures; it’s his trademark; they have to be highly intelligent as well (which Clarrie is). This is why, though perhaps not quite his type, he had warmed to Beatrice, who also has a beautiful figure, if you’re into Greek goddesses that is, and he is, although in Clarrie’s case she’s more your pocket Venus.

  Clarrie loves, even admires her husband. The snag: sex between them is virtually non-existent. Hence of course her wasting her time on the likes of Jack Fulton. She had accepted Sel on those terms; as always, he had been honest with her. As far back as their first date, he had made it clear that sex had never really been one of his things. Too much else to do, he’d told her, also there’d been a nasty experience (he’d never explained what) at the north London primary school that as an underfed, undersized six year old he’d attended sometime in the 1930s. However, as far as Clarrie was concerned, despite the lack of sex, Sel had a lot to offer and they were both prepared to accept the fact she would, within reason, seek it elsewhere. He loved her, she knew, and she loved him; he was the father and the intimate friend she’d never had, and on the whole their marriage was a good one.

  She’d met Jack Fulton in the spring while camping at Brown End. She’d gone down there for a few days to organise the builders and discuss plans with her interior designer, a morose young man by the name of Giles Pumfritt. It turned out later that Giles had been a mistake. His designs, once applied, had looked quite ghastly in the simple old farmhouse, and even Sel, who normally left such matters to her, had put his foot down. It had been a wild and windy March day, and driving back from Belchester, her Renault sustained a puncture on the way up Dog’s Head Hill. Jack, in his green Volvo, happened to be passing and offered to change the wheel for her, and they’d got talking. There was something about Jack – hard to say what, she thinks, as she swings her golden brown legs out of bed and pulls on the long, Indian cotton skirt she habitually wears about the house and makes her, so her husband says, look like a ‘high class gypsy’ – he was really nothing more than a big, boastful, rather common commercial traveller with a bristly moustache and a crude line in jokes. However, there it was; he had it, whatever ‘it’ is. Incidentally, Clarrie Woodhouse and Emmie Mallory weren’t the only ones to think this; there were many others who felt the same, and from Penrith to Plymouth, Sunderland to Southampton and all places beyond, Jack Fulton had left a trail of angry, frustrated and randy women waiting longingly for his return.

  He and Clarrie met again on the day following the puncture episode, in a pub on the main Belchester road. After a couple of drinks they’d made love in the back of Jack’s Volvo, and for Clarrie, despite the discomfort of being cramped in the back seat of a car, their lovemaking had been a revelation. After it she had felt wild and wicked, and more alive that she had for months. Before they parted Jack had given her a card with the phone number of the pub he stayed in when in the area, and although hating herself for it, when she and Sel finally moved in to Brown End, she had rung him. That was how it had started; how it would end, heaven only knew.

  “Clarrie, for heaven’s sake come down and get off the phone. I’m expecting a call from the States any minute, and anyway that wretched girl might ring, she’s already half an hour late.” Sel stands at the bottom of the stairs, he’s wearing his heavy hornrims and an ancient cardigan: he looks harassed. A smell of sub-Mediterranean food emanates from the kitchen. Juan, their Spanish chef, (also doubling as butler, manservant and general factotum) will no doubt once again threaten to give in his notice if he has to keep lunch back much longer.

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t wait, Juan can heat something up for the new girl when she finally decides to arrive.” Clarrie ignores Sel’s remark about a call from the States, there won’t be one, she knows; he’s been expecting it every day since they moved in.

  “I could do with a drink first,” Sel, removing his spectacles, leads the way into their enormous sitting room. Once the farmhouse kitchen and adjacent pantry, the room retains its massive inglenook fireplace, but the two casement windows that faced on to the garden and the road to the village have been replaced with massive patio doors. Actually, they’d had a lot of trouble with the listed buildings people over these, but got their way in the end – Sel, despite his slipping celebrity status, still had friends in high places – and now wished they hadn’t. Expensive rugs are scattered here and there on the floor over the original Suffolk pammets; carefully re-laid, sealed and polished by Clarrie’s minions. (The minions would no doubt have been greatly surprised to learn that if they’d dug a little deeper, they’d have hit the garish but equally, in its time, expensive, Roman mosaic pavement Marcus Gaetul
icus’s minions – in his case, slaves – laid down when enlarging his state-of-the art villa in the year AD 346.)

  Sel goes over to the mini bar in the corner (quite ghastly, what could Giles have been thinking about – it’ll have to go of course), and pours them both a gin and tonic. “Where has the bloody woman got to?”

  “Perhaps she’s lost the way.”

  “Nonsense, she couldn’t have. I gave her the most concise directions.”

  “Well you know how you always pick your women for their beauty rather than their brains –”

  “Balls! Are you implying you have no brains?” Drink in hand, he walks over to the window. “Oh God, what now? There’s a tractor turning in at the gate; looks like Josh Bogg. Does he have to choose lunchtime to unload his manure – honestly these people. Get rid of him quickly darling, I’m not in the mood for dealing with groundlings.”

  “It’s not manure, he’s got a passenger,” Clarrie’s looking too, “and what’s more I think it’s your new secretary.” Together they watch as Josh and his tractor, instead of keeping on towards the yard at the back of the house, turn left into the newly laid gravel sweep in front of the house, scattering wisps of straw and mud in the process.

  Sel watches, interested in spite of himself, as Beatrice, looking somewhat dishevelled, is handed down from the tractor cab by a grinning Josh. “Action stations!” He puts down his drink, straightens his cardigan and after a quick look in the Georgian mirror over the fireplace, all smiles, hurries to the front door, arms outstretched. “My dear, welcome to Brown End, what a delightfully original mode of transport. Clarrie, darling – our new helper.”

  Early evening: Beatrice sits in a chair by the window of her bedsitter looking out at the view: a wild and straggly farmhouse garden (naturally scheduled for rejuvenation but still well down on Clarrie’s priorities list) slopes gently downwards to the flat, tussocky field that borders the little river. The river, not much more than a wide stream whose name, if it ever had one, no one seems to know, is a tributary of the Levit, the river that runs through Kimbleford, and joins it a couple of miles up the valley. Though narrow it’s quite deep in places and there are plenty of fish. You often see a heron there, sometimes even a kingfisher. To the left of her view a high stone wall divides the garden from the lane; she can just see the humped-backed bridge over which it passes before climbing the hill on its way to the village. If she screws up her eyes against the setting sun she can make out the clump of trees at the top of the hill where she’d met Major Mallory, and despite the warmth of the evening she shivers. What made her call him Brian? She didn’t know his first name, how could she? He hadn’t looked surprised either, which too was odd. Perhaps he hadn’t heard her? Somehow, though, she knows he had.

  Admittedly after that things returned to some sort of normality. She’d explained as best she could what had happened. He’d said he didn’t know too much about cars, but would she like him to have a look, and she’d said yes. Together they’d lifted the bonnet and after peering doubtfully into the Mini’s seething interior, gave up and shut it again; apart from baffling them both, the heat and fumes were overpowering. “I’m afraid,” she’d said, “it needs a garage. It passed its MOT only a few weeks ago, but I have had a bit of trouble with it lately, and it doesn’t seem to like these hills. The problem is this couldn’t have happened at a worse time. I’m on my way to start a new job with the Woodheads at Brown End, and we arranged I’d be there for lunch.”

  “Oh dear,” he’d said, screwing up his eyes against the sun and smiling at her – and she had to admit he did have a lovely smile – “so you’re going to work for Selwyn Woodhead, are you?”

  “You know him?”

  “Not from the TV, although my wife’s a fan,” (he has a wife then) “but I’ve had dealings with him; I happen to be the village grocer.”

  “Oh.” She knew you shouldn’t stereotype people, but he didn’t look like a village grocer; more like… She didn’t know really what, but then nothing at the moment was as it should be.

  “Actually I haven’t been in the grocery business long, for my sins, I’m ex-army. Look, I’m sorry I can’t offer you a lift, the best I can do is ring the local garage – Battersby’s out on the main road are pretty good, I use them myself – as soon as I get home, and if you like, ring the Woodheads at the same time and let them know what’s happened. They might even send a car to collect you – unless, that is, you’d like to walk back with me?”

  Oh dear, she was beginning to feel odd again, had the feeling he was, too. Why were they talking of such mundane matters when there were other, much more important things to discuss? She looked nervously over her shoulder to see if the rook was still there; he was. A cloud passed over the sun, Major Mallory seemed to be getting blurred, was she? What was he saying? Why were they there, what was happening? She couldn’t cope with all this, it was too much, too… Then, thank God, the spell was broken by the welcome everyday sound of a tractor breasting the hill behind them.

  “We’re in luck,” the major looked as relieved as she felt, “it must be Josh Bogg on his way back to the farm for his dinner, he goes right past Brown End – if you don’t mind arriving at your new job in a tractor, that is?

  “Morning Major, got a spot of bother have we?”

  “Well yes, this lady’s car’s given up the ghost and she’s trying to get to Brown End…” So it was settled. She was handed up into the cab of the tractor together with her luggage, Radio Belchester blaring away in the background, Josh and the major pushed the Mini on to the grass verge at the side of the road, and they were off. Peering out of the cab’s rather murky rear window, she smiled and mouthed her thanks at the major, who smiled back, raising his arm in a sort of farewell salute, she thought he said something, but of course she couldn’t hear what, then they were away round a bend in the road and he’d disappeared from sight.

  Their descent into the valley had been fun, exhilarating even, and she had laughed as they bounced over the little bridge at the bottom of the hill. Josh was plainly agog with curiosity, but what with Radio Belchester and the noise of the tractor, any conversation was difficult, not to say impossible. She managed to make out a few words as the tractor slowed down to turn into the gates of Brown End: something to do with Mr Woodhead being on the telly, and was she going to help him with that, to which, not wanting to get involved with explaining about Sel’s book, let alone its subject, deeming (rightly) that he might get the wrong idea, she simply smiled and, nodding vigorously, left it at that.

  Her first reaction to the sight of Brown End had been that there was something wrong with it. It was like looking at a familiar picture that had been touched up. It was right and it was wrong at the same time. Perhaps she’d seen the house, or somewhere like it, in a dream and that was why it was so familiar. As they emerged from the trees, the Bogg tractor bumping over potholes and scattering mud, you could see the house basking in the sun, a few hundred yards up the other side of the valley. A belt of trees behind it, surrounded by undulating fields. The perfect location.

  Sel had told her earlier over their modest dinner of nut cutlets, cheese and fruit – the wine accompanying it, however, had been of top quality and extremely plentiful – that the house in its present incarnation was mostly Victorian, built over a much older foundation by the last of his line, Harold Durlston. The Durlston family had owned and farmed the land at Brown End since the Middle Ages, some said for much longer than that, but during the agricultural slump in the 1870s Harold, struggling with rock bottom prices, had been forced to diversify and branch out into the building trade. Doing this had proved so successful, he decided to demolish the ancient farmhouse his family had inhabited for centuries and build a modern house on the site. Luckily, he didn’t demolish everything: bits and pieces of the old house remained, including the inglenook fireplace in the sitting room. The farm buildings too were left, together with the great yard, whose crumbling walls had been pronounced by the local archae
ological society to be partly Roman, the Tudor barn and the small copse behind it, the latter inhabited for time immemorial by a colony of rooks. Harold Durlston died in 1920 aged nearly ninety, both his grandsons having been killed in the first World War there was no one left to inherit, and in 1923 Brown End, together with its three hundred acres, was sold at auction – the times being what they were – at a knock-down price. In the years since then it had had a fairly chequered career. Most of the land, apart from a few acres round the house, was sold off in the thirties, and during World War Two, Suffolk being a military zone, the house had served as HQ for a contingent of the US army. Post-war owners came and went. Some doing a bit of gentrifying of the property, others leaving it to rot, but seemingly no one able to make a go of it or stay there very long, and when the Woodheads bought the house it had been empty for nearly five years. The locals said there was a curse on the place; that was why no one stayed, but when questioned were unable to say what the curse was or who had made it. This, among many other things, Sel told her, was one of the reasons why he had bought the house; there was nothing he loved more than a good, old fashioned mystery.