Rosie Meadows Regrets...

by Catherine Alliott

  There was a pause. He filled the kettle and put it on the hob. The batter was ready now but I carried on stirring it with the balloon whisk, knowing he was moving around behind me, sensing he hadn’t quite had his say yet. He cleared his throat.

  ‘Rosie?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I was thinking. Why don’t we go away on holiday or something? Just the two of us, leave Ivo with your parents. We haven’t been away together since our honeymoon and it would do us both the world of good.’

  I sighed heavily.

  ‘You’re always saying we ought to get away without all the hangers-on, without Boffy and Charlotte and the rest of the crowd. Well, why not? We could go to Scotland or – no, even better, go somewhere you’d like to go for a change, away from the midges and the heather and the boring old shooting, go somewhere hot, like – oh, I don’t know, Spain, Majorca. Have a bit of a here-we-go-here-we-go. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  I had to smile. This was Harry’s idea of pleasing me. Except that it was so long since he’d tried, he couldn’t remember what I liked. Clearly he thought a kiss-me-quick hat and a few calamaris would do the trick.

  ‘Harry, it’s no good,’ I said quietly. ‘I’ve told you. I’ve made my decision.’

  There was a silence. I thought, hoped, he was going to slip back into his usual venomous polemic which was much easier to deal with than this wheedling appeasement. But he didn’t.

  ‘Don’t give up on me, Rosie.’

  I caught my breath. This was wheedling appeasement gone wild. This even had the merest smack of sincerity to it. And I could see why. I mean, when all was said and done and the decree nisi was on the doormat, who else would want him? Who else was going to take him on?

  He laughed hollowly. ‘I mean, let’s face it, who else would take on an old sod like me, eh?’

  I almost turned round, but managed not to. I didn’t want to look at his eyes. Even Harry had the capacity to make himself, not loveable, but vulnerable, and it was something I didn’t want to see right now.

  He came round the breakfast bar, forcing me to face him. ‘We could make a fresh start,’ he urged. ‘I could change, I really could. Give up the booze, be a proper husband to you, and I meant what I said about getting a job. I know I said a lot of stupid things last night, but I did mean that. I’ll go into the City, earn an honest crust. And I’m sure you could forget all about that silly young teenager, couldn’t you? Forget whatever line it was he was spinning you. Filling your head with lies. Come on, Rosie, don’t let him come between us.’

  I looked up from the batter. ‘Harry, I’m sorry, but I’m not changing my mind. I’m going. I’m leaving you, and it has nothing whatever to do with anyone else. I just want a divorce. That’s it.’ I held his eyes but I also held on hard to the side of the glass mixing bowl, aware of the bubbles in the batter popping one by one. His eyes hardened.

  ‘Is it, by Jove?’ he said slowly. ‘Well, well, well. Look at you getting all pink-faced and forceful. Quite the little tough nut now, aren’t we?’ He smiled darkly. ‘Well, we’ll soon see about that. We’ll soon see who’s got the real nuts around here. Meanwhile, I suppose it’s too much to ask you to make me some breakfast. I mean technically speaking I am still your husband, tedious though that clearly is.’

  I heaved a sigh of relief. Thank God for Harry’s empty stomach. Thank God for his priorities.

  ‘Not too much trouble at all,’ I said sweetly, reaching for the frying pan. ‘One egg or two?’

  ‘Two, and since I don’t believe in going to war on an empty stomach, I shall adjourn momentarily to the garden to gather some mushrooms to go with them.’

  ‘Nice to see you haven’t lost your appetite, Harry.’

  ‘Oh, it would take more than a shot across the bows from you for that to happen. You don’t know what you’ve let yourself in for, Rosie.’

  And with that don’t-mess-with-me missive hanging in the air, he turned round and flounced out, bound for the bottom of our garden where the woods met the fields and, even at this time of year, the wild mushrooms grew in abundance. I moved to the window above the sink and watched him go. He hastened across the lawn, slippers lapping the damp grass, his dressing gown flapping round his knees, bottom swaying heavily from side to side, a large man in a hurry. For all Harry’s supposed love of the country, he only showed any alacrity in it when he ventured out to hunt for food to fill his belly. Whether it be grouse, salmon or mushrooms, the great outdoors was only ever a means to the great indoors and thence his stomach.

  As he scurried along, my father and Miles came up the slope of the garden towards him, deep in conversation. I held my breath, wondering how this little encounter would go, wondering whether I’d suddenly be called upon to act as Harry’s seconder as he and Miles arranged pistols at dawn, but as they passed, the two men acknowledged each other with an economic but not altogether hostile nod of the head. I breathed again and turned back to the Yorkshire pudding, pouring it out into a roasting pan. The front door clicked as Daddy and Miles came in. I heard them discussing crop rotation or low rain yields or some such other crucial topic in low voices. Through the open kitchen door I saw them go into the drawing room to join Mummy and Phil who were kneeling on the carpet with the children, showing them how to make paper-chain dollies out of the business section of The Sunday Times. I smiled. There’d always been this strong sexist demarcation in our house, the men pairing off to do something macho like polish hub caps and clear gutters while the women made fairy cakes, and it occurred to me that Harry had never really fitted into either of these camps, being too lazy to clear gutters and, well, too lazy to make fairy cakes either come to that.

  He returned a few minutes later, wheezing with the uncharacteristic exertion and clutching his bounty – two great handfuls of beautifully fresh mushrooms. As he dropped them on the kitchen table, my father came in.

  ‘Ah, Harry, you’re up. No hard feelings, I hope?’

  ‘None at all, Gordon, just a bruised ego and sincere apologies. Can’t think what got into me.’

  ‘The best part of a bottle of whisky, I should imagine. Speaking of which, I’m about to have one myself.’

  I glanced up at the clock. ‘It’s only quarter to twelve, Dad.’

  ‘So I’m fifteen minutes early, but this is my house and I need a drink, so I’m having one. I see you’re about to tuck into your breakfast, Harry, so I won’t offer you one.’

  Harry watched him go, torn between two loves, like a little boy watching the opening credits of his favourite television programme and being told a trip to the zoo is in the offing, but only if he departs now. Liquor won.

  ‘Check the mushrooms over for me, would you, Rosie old girl, and then give them a quick fry. Churlish to let your dear papa drink on his own. I won’t be a minute.’

  He scurried after Daddy. I smiled, knowing, as Harry did, that in this house, it was now or never. Aware of Harry’s predilection for excess, Daddy kept a stern eye on the drinks cupboard and I don’t think Harry had ever recovered from an occasion, early on in our marriage, when he’d swaggered over to Daddy’s decanter, an empty glass in his hand, and said casually, ‘Would it be very rude to help myself, Gordon?’ To which Daddy had replied mildly, ‘Yes, I believe it would, Harry.’ Even Harry, with his thermal sensibility, had not had the gall to overturn this.

  I cracked the eggs into the pan, prodding them despondently with a spatula. It was all going to turn incredibly nasty now, wasn’t it? Harry was definitely not going to let me go quietly. Bugger, bugger, bugger. I sighed and picked the mushrooms over, peering at the gills. By sheer fluke we grew the most spectacular wild fungi here, but some had been known to be just a bit too spectacular and they needed checking carefully. On one famous occasion when Mummy had made wild cep and porcini soup for supper, we’d all come down the following morning boggle-eyed at the lasciviousness of our erotic dreams. Over the breakfast table we’d swapped in hushed, awed tones tales of orgies, donkeys,
Negro slaves, satsumas – oh, it had all come out, and got incredibly giggly too, especially when Mummy kept saying, ‘But what on earth was I doing with all those naked midgets?’

  Diverting though this had been, there was always the chance one might pick something a little more than merely hallucinogenic, and since somewhere in my distant cookery past I’d once done a course with Antonio Carluccio, mycologist supremo, it was my job to ascertain that there were no life-threatening spores among them.

  No such luck with today’s little clutch, I thought gloomily, prodding them about. Quite a lot of ordinary field, a couple of cep, a few chanterelles and one or two other varieties, but nothing that was going to make Harry choke, turn purple, clutch his throat, gasp ‘Poison!’ and fall to the floor in a heap, sadly. I left the pan on a low heat, put some ice in a glass and wandered out to the hall where the drinks cupboard lived under the stairs. Since there was no embargo on my intake, I helped myself to a hefty gin and tonic. I sat on the bottom stair for a moment, swirling the ice around, savouring my flight of fancy. Yes, wouldn’t that be wonderful? I mused dreamily. A dodgy mushroom. With no known antidote. A couple of days in intensive care, a brief coma, then – lights out. Pull that curtain round that bed. I smiled and sipped my drink. How marvellously convenient that would be. No divorce, no court case, no tug of love over Ivo. It would be much less messy, infinitely more final and altogether more satisfying somehow.

  And if not a mushroom, well then, why not something else? As my three years of research had shown, there were plenty of other ways of dying these days. I slipped happily back into one of my familiar old fantasies, the one about the car with the faulty brakes, the momentary loss of concentration, the perilous coast road and – AAAaarggh! – the sea. ‘Death would have been instantaneous, Mrs Meadows,’ the coroner would assure me sympathetically over his half-moons as I sat, white-faced and black-suited, at the back of his court. ‘He really wouldn’t have felt a thing.’ I’d nod sadly, and gripping Ivo’s tiny hand, turn and walk, head bowed, through a throng of sympathetic relatives. As I got into the car I’d acknowledge the sombre condolences of the mourners, drive slowly down the road and then just round the next bend, YA-HOOO! Off would come my black hat, out would tumble my blonde hair and with Ivo bouncing excitedly beside me I’d put my foot down and zoom over the horizon with ‘Born To Be Wild’ blaring from the stereo. I sighed. Bliss.

  I sucked an ice cube thoughtfully. The problem with this particular whim, though, was that it relied heavily on various components coming together simultaneously, like dodgy brakes and a clifftop drive, and since Harry’s car was in peak condition and we lived nowhere near the sea, that seemed unlikely. However, there were plenty of other annihilations closer to home, weren’t there? I mean, what about a gas leak? In Meryton Road? With me, Ivo and the guinea pig tiptoeing safely out of the back door leaving Harry upstairs, horizontal on his sofa – comatose anyway, for God’s sake, so halfway there already – in his habitual, après déjeuner position? He wouldn’t feel a thing, would he? Just snore gently, soporifically and peacefully into the next world. Except that we didn’t have any gas. Ah. I chewed thoughtfully on a piece of lemon. Well, crikey, gas wasn’t everything, how about a rucked-up paving stone outside his club in St James’s? Out he comes, pie-eyed as ever, trips over the slab, cracks his head on the pavement and falls into an irreversible coma on the spot? Or, okay, say there was no handily ricked pavement, how about he just falls down the club steps, cuts his knee, contracts gangrene, has his leg cut off, then his other one, then all the other bits connected to it, until there are no bits left to cut off? Or how about – blimey Rosie, what are you on, for heaven’s sake? I blinked and peered at my drink. Amazing what a generous slug of gin did for one’s imagination mid-morning.

  I frowned. No, no, this was all getting much too far-fetched. Something altogether more subtle and believable was called for to do the job properly. His diet, for instance. The last time Harry had visited his doctor he’d been told that if he carried on eating and drinking at his present rate he’d be dead in five years. Promises, promises, I’d thought bitterly at the time, but what if it was true? And how about if we speeded that process up a bit? How about if, instead of just giving him eggs for breakfast, I made it eggs Benedict, added a bottle of port, a packet of Marlboro and a banoffi pie with double cream for pudding? Surely he’d be dead within the year? I hesitated. For all the good doctor’s assurances, I somehow thought it would take more than a cream sauce and a few fags to see Harry off. I could just see him getting more and more colossal, so huge in fact that he filled the house, cigarette smoke and port fumes belching from every orifice like some horrific suburban Caliban, so that in the end I’d just slit my own throat instead.

  So that just left the mushrooms then. I stared down into my almost empty glass. Frowned. What, are you serious, Rosie? You mean, nip down to the woods, pluck out one of those greenish-yellow ones that we’d always thought looked a bit suspicious, steal back and add it to the pan? Well, why not? a little voice in my head said. Who on earth would be any the wiser? Who on earth would suspect you? I mean, let’s face it, Harry gathered the bounty himself, didn’t he? You didn’t have anything to do with that, and the fact that he asked you to check them over is between you and him, isn’t it? No one else was party to that conversation, and since he won’t be there to spill the beans, what on earth have you got to lose?

  My heart began to beat wildly. Think of it, Rosie. No court case. No nasty smear campaign. No ghastly aspersions on my character as an unsuitable mother. No grief for Ivo. No appalling grief for me. I stared down at the ice slowly melting at the bottom of my glass. Then I glanced next door. Mummy was talking loudly and ostentatiously to someone on the telephone, probably Marjorie. Daddy and Miles were both in armchairs, hidden behind broadsheet newspapers. Philly was playing on the floor with the children, showing them how to draw round saucers now. Harry was at the fireplace. He had his back to me and was slowly supping his whisky, still in his dressing gown, one arm outstretched and propping up the mantelpiece. He was staring intently into the flames. It would be the work of a moment to slip out, unnoticed. Do a little harvesting. And I’d be back in a trice to fry it up. Slowly, very slowly, I stood up. Suddenly Harry spun round. He caught my eye like barbed wire.

  ‘Isn’t my breakfast ready yet?’

  I flushed, started guiltily, and as I did I spilled the remains of my drink on my skirt. ‘Oh! Yes, probably. Sorry, I’ll go and see.’

  ‘No, don’t worry, I’ll go.’ He set his whisky down and glared. ‘Good grief, Rosie, it’ll be lunchtime before you get your act together.’

  Philly looked up and gave me an outraged glance, but I was pleased to see him go. Pleased to let him sort that frying pan out for himself. I brushed down my wet skirt and noticed my hand was trembling. Before I went to join the others in the drawing room, I stood for a moment, holding on to the banisters. I felt decidedly shaky. I touched my forehead. It was damp. Good God, how extraordinary. For a moment there, I think I’d been about to kill my husband.

  Chapter Nine

  Of course I didn’t kill him. But I awoke in London the following morning with a mixed sense of excitement, guilt and trepidation. Because today was the day for the softer option. Today was Monday, and I was off. All I had to do was wait for Harry to leave the house to go to the club, and then a few minutes later swiftly follow suit in the opposite direction. Oh, he knew I was going, of course, Harry’s a fool but he’s not a complete fool, but what he didn’t know was that I was jumping ship today.

  Or did he? As he sat, slumped in his pyjamas at the kitchen table that morning, I could sense him watching me as I stood at the stove frying his usual side of pig. Perhaps it was the way my hand shook slightly as I manoeuvred the pan to the table, or the way I couldn’t quite catch his eye as I slid the bacon on to his plate. Whatever it was, I could tell he was suspicious. He pushed the bacon around with his fork in a sulky, desultory manner, keeping his eye on me
the while.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ he said suddenly, and pushed his plate away like a petulant child.

  This, of course, was highly unusual and Harry knew it.

  ‘Oh. Really?’ I hovered nervously. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know, I just don’t feel too good this morning.’ He shot me a hurt, pitiful glance. ‘Feel distinctly unwell actually.’

  ‘Oh dear. Oh well, never mind.’ I took his plate, and shovelled the bacon guiltily into the bin, turning my back so he couldn’t see me redden. Suddenly I had an awful thought. I stared intently into the rubbish.

  ‘Think you’ll be able to manage lunch at the club?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said instinctively. Then he remembered. He pouted. ‘Well, I think so. I’ll see how I feel.’

  I straightened up from the bin and turned round to look at him. ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine, Harry,’ I said gently. ‘Really, you will.’

  I meant it. I honestly believed that if Harry employed a housekeeper, which I’d strenuously urged him to do, he wouldn’t even know I’d gone. As long as there was someone around to cook his meals, clean the house and iron his shirts, I couldn’t see how his life would change. Of course, if she could also see her way clear to taking off her apron, adopting a horizontal position and thinking of England once in a blue moon, so much the better, but if she didn’t, well, I really didn’t think he’d miss that either. It was only ever done out of a dreary sense of obligation on both our parts these days, a sort of unspoken, ‘Oh, come on, the sooner we get this started, the sooner we can get it over with,’ as Dame Edna would say. No, Harry wouldn’t really miss me. He was congenitally unsuited for marriage and he’d realize that the moment I’d gone. What’s more, he wouldn’t even have to get remarried, he’d have the dignity of being a cool divorcé, not an ageing Lothario still roaming around looking desperately for a wife. He could say he’d been there, done all that, sired the son and heir, and now what better than to get back to the bachelor life he was really suited to? Think of all the dinner parties he’d be invited to as the ‘spare man’, think of the jealousy he’d inspire in like-minded men friends who longed to be shot of their spouses on golfing holidays or shooting weekends. Oh yes, I was doing him a huge favour if he did but know it.