I stared at it for a moment. I felt cold. Then I swallowed hard. Of course. Yes, of course, he was married, for God’s sake, to her. What was I thinking of? I touched my forehead. Was I going insane? You’re the frigging next-door-neighbour, for God’s sake, Rosie, that’s all, and apart from anything else, that man in the photo doesn’t exist any more. He’s moved on. To something more – exotic. And who d’you think you are anyway; the second Mrs de Winter? Or maybe even the third?
I snapped the book shut, flung it aside and marched off down the corridor. Back to the kitchen. Back to my stamping ground, back to – yes, back to where a cook belonged. When I got there, all three children were at the table armed with spoons, digging furtively into a tray of my special fudge cake pudding I’d prepared for the pub. Neighbours blared from the kitchen television. They looked up guiltily as I came in, their faces covered in chocolate, poised with contrition, feeble excuses ready on their mendacious lips, then stared in amazement as I totally ignored them. Ivo, wide-eyed with wonder, slunk between Toby and Lucy and dug his hand eagerly into the tray, delighted to take advantage of this uncharacteristic aberration in his mother. I went straight to the dresser, picked up the telephone and punched out a number determinedly. It rang for a while, then he answered.
‘Hello?’
‘Alex? Hi, it’s Rosie. Listen, are you still thinking of going to the pub on Saturday night? … Good, because I’ve changed my mind … Yes, I’d love to come.’
Chapter Sixteen
Saturday night turned out to be more fun than I’d bargained for. The village pub was positively heaving with people and you could practically smell the Christmas spirit and see the walls pulsating as we approached. As Alex and I pushed our way into the crowded, smoky bar, it became clear that the entire village was in situ. Most of them were wearing silly hats covered in mistletoe, holly and tinsel, and all, it seemed, were intent on one thing and one thing only. To have a riotously good time and get as rip-roaringly drunk as possible. Now in the normal run of things, bearing in mind my recent troubles and demeanour, this might have appealed about as much as colonic irrigation, but funnily enough, tonight, my demeanour was different. Tonight I was In The Mood. Sod it, I thought as I squeezed purposefully through the merry throng. It’s Christmas, it’s the first time I’d been out in weeks – I don’t count late night shopping – and I’m too young to hide my light under bushels. I was also buoyed up by a fairly certain knowledge – affirmed by the twins’ clasped hands and gasps of ‘Ooh!’ and ‘Aah!’ as they’d sat on my bed and watched me get changed – that for the first time in a very long time I looked, well, if not exactly glamorous, at least clean and solvent.
I’d swapped my habitual bobbly jumper and leggings for a snappy little Donna Karan red jacket that I’d hardly recognized in my wardrobe it was so long since I’d worn it, applied a modicum of make-up – not the usual London faceful, no point in frightening the natives – and even dried my hair with a hairdryer, which was a first since I’d moved to Gloucestershire. The size 10 – yes, size 10 – jeans that I’d bought in Cirencester fitted like a glove, and together with a white top under the red jacket, I looked, if I say so myself, pretty passable. I wouldn’t go so far as to say heads were actually rotating as we pushed our way through the Yuletide throng, but there seemed to be a certain amount of interest. Eyes were definitely trained my way – quite a few eyes actually; blimey, I must be looking better than I thought. I flicked back my hair – or hang on, was it … ah. I see. It was Alex.
Well, I have to admit I could see why. Having never previously seen him in anything other than Barbour, wellies and a fair amount of sheep shit, I have to say he scrubbed up rather nicely. His reassuringly broad shoulders sat snugly in a distressed brown leather jacket, his russet waves curled seductively on to the back of his collar and those magnetizing green eyes, deployed with that fatal, sexy, tigerish grin, had all the Lucindas and Sophias of the hairband and skiing tan persuasion dribbling into their spritzers, reaching for their Marlboro Lights, tossing back their fringes and generally parting like the Red Sea as we made our way to the bar.
For the first time in a very long time I felt I was in the right place at the right time with the right sort of man. And why not? I thought, throwing back my own recently washed blond tresses with the best of them. I can still do this. Oh yes, I can still flirt and smoulder, thank you very much. I’m not so old that I can’t cast my mind back and remember how to do it. I think. Just.
Once we’d made it through the seriously well heeled, we reached the seriously hard drinkers on the outskirts of the bar.
‘Gin and tonic?’ asked Alex.
‘Please.’
‘Anything to eat?’ He grinned. ‘I hear it’s not bad in here.’
‘No, thanks. Funnily enough I can never face my own food when I’ve been making it all day.’
I waved to Bob who I could just about see behind the bar.
‘This braised venison is going down a storm, Rosie!’ he shouted. ‘They can’t get enough of it.’ A couple of people in the restaurant area turned and raised their glasses to affirm this. ‘Had to ban one cheeky git though,’ Bob went on as he pulled a pint. ‘He said the food in here was nearly as good as some river café, so I said it was better than any bleedin’ caff and he could take his custom elsewhere! We’re getting a bit low on that Ozzy Bocco though, luv, you might have to make two batches next time.’
He hurried off to serve someone and, with Alex at the bar, I suddenly found myself surrounded by red-faced, inebriated farmers, all pouring strong dark beer down their thick red necks and clutching pint mugs to their enormous paunches. There was no question of stepping aside to let me follow Alex either, they all leered openly and deliberately blocked my way to get a better view. One florid labourer with trousers up to his armpits leaned his huge beery face down to me.
‘Young veterinary’s gone public now, ’as he? That’s going to set the cat among the pigeons. We knew ’e was keen on you all right but you can’t come in here with ’im and not have ’alf the tongues in the county waggin’, you know!’
I smiled politely. ‘So it appears.’
Another one dug me hard in the ribs. ‘’E’s got quite an eye for the ladies has that young lad, but only the very prettiest, mind! ’E’s that fussy like!’
‘Really. Well then, I imagine I’m flattered.’
‘And so you should be. There’s enough young totty round here for a man like ’im never to have to get out of bed all day. Look at that lot over there makin’ sheep’s eyes at ’im. Strewth, if I was a younger man I’d snap a few of them up meself, but I reckon I’d look to you first, luv. Reckon ’e’s got ’is head screwed on all right.’
‘Shut your great big vulgar mouth, Albert Parsons!’ admonished an apple-cheeked lady to my left. It was Mrs Fairfax from the shop. She swatted his shoulder. ‘What would she be wanting with the likes of you? ’E’s ever such a nice young lad though,’ she confided to me, nodding towards Alex who was waving a tenner at the barman. ‘But if you’ll take my advice,’ she leaned across and hissed in my ear, ‘you’ll not give it away, neither. Make ’im wait. There’s too many young girls dropping their drawers for too little these days – our Sharon, the little hussy, for starters, and for what? Half a shandy and a packet of crisps, that’s what! You hold out for a bit more, my luv. You go for a slap up meal in a Berni Inn and don’t hold back on the Black Forest gateau and liqueur coffees neither. Pretty girl like you can make ’em wait for it, and they will, too.’ She prodded my hips. ‘You’re sitting on a bleeding gold mine there, luv, and don’t you forget it!’
‘Thank you so much,’ I muttered faintly. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’
Alex returned with the drinks to catch the tail end of this.
‘Half a shandy and a packet of crisps all right for you, luv?’ he muttered as he steered me away. ‘Then back to my place?’
I giggled. ‘Dream on, mate, it’s Black Forest gateau or nuffink for me, and I wou
ldn’t mind parking my gold mine somewhere neither.’ I scanned the bar. ‘Although I don’t suppose there’s much chance of that in here.’
Alex looked around. ‘Not a hope with this multitude, except – hold on, there’s a space over there.’
We began to squeeze our way through to a table until Alex abruptly stopped. He turned about. ‘Er, no. Change of plan. Think we’ll stop here actually.’
‘Why not over there? There’s an empty table, isn’t there?’
‘True, but sadly it’s next to Flora and I’m not exactly flavour of the month with her at the moment.’
‘Flora?’
‘Ex-girlfriend.’
‘Oh really? The one you lived with?’ I peered behind him with interest and saw a pretty, fairly pneumatic girl, with long blond hair, shooting the filthiest of looks in our general direction.
‘No, that was Amanda. Flora came after her, and it was never really serious, I only went out with her a couple of times. It came grinding to a halt on her birthday actually. She had a dinner party and threw a complete wobbler in the middle of it. Apparently I behaved badly. She hasn’t spoken to me since.’
‘Why? What did you do?’
‘Ignored her, so I’m told, and talked to someone else during dinner.’
‘Doesn’t sound too heinous.’
‘Oh, and I forgot to bring her cake in too. Apparently she kept shooting me meaningful glances which I totally ignored, so in the end she stalked out to the kitchen, lit the candles and brought it in herself.’
‘What, to get some attention?’
‘Oh, she did that all right. She’d taken her top off. She was stark naked from the waist up.’
‘Blimey!’
‘And unfortunately her hair caught fire in the candles, so just as we were all dragging contentedly on our mid-course ciggies, this extraordinary vision appeared in the doorway, hair ablaze, tits dangling in the butter icing.’
‘Oh God!’ I gasped, trying desperately not to laugh because I was suddenly aware of Flora’s eyes boring into us and I just knew that she knew that I knew, etc.
‘Rather heroically I punched the cake from her hands and rolled her up in a Casa Pupo rug, thus minimizing the damage, but of course she’s never quite forgiven me.’
‘I can imagine,’ I giggled.
‘And she’s been known ever since as Flaming Flora, which hasn’t helped much either.’ He shrugged his shoulders in an innocent what’s a boy to do? kind of way. But the green eyes glinted and I knew better.
‘I see. In other words she fell madly in love with you and you treated her shoddily.’
He opened his eyes wide. ‘Lord, no, that couldn’t be further from the truth. I had no idea she was even serious about me, honestly, Rosie.’
‘Relax, Alex, I’m not about to spontaneously combust should you neglect to speak to me.’
He grinned. ‘I’m delighted to hear it.’
‘But does the entire village always take such an avid interest in your affairs?’ I nodded towards the bar where Mrs Fairfax and her cronies still had their heads together, smiling and nodding and speculating in our general direction.
‘Oh, all the old biddies round here have known me since I was a baby and they’ve been trying to marry me off since I was about eighteen. Can’t wait to get their best frocks out of mothballs and dust off their hats. That’s why they all got so excited about Amanda, thought she was the one. You could almost hear the collective groans of despair when she packed her bags and left and I became Sad Single Man again.’
I grimaced. ‘I know the feeling. My mother began agitating for the champagne and the orange blossom the moment I hit puberty, and she wasn’t happy till I was floating up the aisle in a sea of raw silk. She couldn’t have cared less whose arm I was on, it could have been Bernard Manning’s for all she cared.’
‘Is that why you married him then? Bernard Manning? Family pressure?’
I giggled. ‘Perhaps, but that’s no excuse. The bottom line is it was my own stupid fault. I just didn’t examine the goods thoroughly enough.’
He looked thoughtfully into his pint. ‘So … it’s a bit of a relief in a way then, is it?’
‘You mean now he’s dead?’ I said sharply.
‘Well, you know, I was just thinking –’
‘Well, I didn’t dance on his grave and give the sherry a good bashing, if that’s what you mean.’
‘No, I didn’t mean that. I just thought – well, maybe it’s about time you were honest with yourself. About how you really felt about him. I reckon it’s the best way for you to get over all this, Rosie.’ His eyes were soft and steady.
I looked into them. ‘There may be something in that,’ I admitted slowly.
He raised his glass and held my eyes over it. ‘Good. Let’s drink to that then.’
‘To what?’
‘To honesty.’
I shrugged. ‘Okay. To honesty.’
We drank, and then we drank again and, let’s face it, we drank a whole lot more that evening. We danced too, to a staggeringly awful ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ style band, that was by no stretch of the imagination jazz, but such was the enthusiasm of the sweaty, raucous crowd that we couldn’t help punching the air and joining in with the ‘Brown Sugars’ and the ‘Nut Bush City Limits’ with the best of them. The lead singer was energetic, overweight and about forty-five, with a toupee that kept slipping as he tried to have sex with his microphone. Alex and I fell about laughing and I have to say I felt ridiculously, absurdly young again. Carefree, almost. Then came the clinchy numbers. ‘Lady in Red’ was crooned so badly that the entire dance floor felt honour bound to join in the chorus in a drunken, dog-howling manner, and all the while, as we clutched each other and laughed ourselves sick, I was aware of his hands on my waist as we danced, stroking the small of my back. It wasn’t unduly unpleasant.
Finally, to spectacular applause, the band played its last number, and we made our way with the rest of the world to the door. Except that no one seemed to be actually going through the door. Coats stayed slung over the backs of chairs, more cigarettes were lit, and an awful lot of pint glasses appeared to be filling up at the bar again, even though it was well past closing time. It made me wonder if this pub actually closed at all and – good heavens, wasn’t that Ed Spire the local bobby knocking back a pint over there in the corner? In the crush, Alex and I got separated. He was accosted by a bucolic farmer with important calving news, and I by a florid woman in a squashed hat who appeared to know me intimately, and lest I was in the dark proceeded to fill me in.
‘Your sister lives over yonder, down Tigg’s Bottom!’ she declared triumphantly.
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘She’s married to Miles Hampton, Bill Markham’s cousin!’
‘That’s it.’
‘And you’re rentin’ that cottage, up at the big house, belongs to them Americans don’t it!’
‘Yes, it does.’
‘’E’s a sculptor ’e is, that Joss Dubarry. Famous too, been on the telly!’
‘That’s right.’
‘You’ve got a kiddie yourself, you have.’
‘I have, yes.’
And so it went on. On and on, until I thought that unless I presented her with a cut-glass rose bowl and declared her the outright winner of the Rosie Meadows specialist subject category, it just wouldn’t stop. I nodded and smiled gratefully as she imparted yet more details of my life to me, desperately casting about at the same time to find Alex and catch his eye. Instead I caught someone else’s.
‘Miles!’
I broke away from my would-be biographer and pushed my way through to my brother-in-law who was leaning against a wall, cradling a pint and watching me thoughtfully, with a half-smile.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Well this is my local you know, and I am occasionally allowed out for a pint in it if I’ve been a good boy. Especially at Christmas.’
‘Is Philly here?’
&
nbsp; ‘Don’t be silly, she’d rather stick needles in her eyes than join this common, marauding crowd. No she’s on tree trimming and present wrapping duty tonight. I’ll tell her I saw you though.’ He gave a sly glance over in Alex’s direction. ‘She’ll be most interested.’
I groaned. ‘Oh God, Miles, no, please! Philly means Mum, and you know what that means.’
He smiled sadistically. ‘Ah yes, Mum. Address book open, sweet sherry in one hand, telephone in the other. Armed and lethal. What’s it worth?’
‘All my worldly goods, frankly. As it is I’ll probably have the local paparazzi snapping away on my doorstep tomorrow. God, if I’d known I was having a drink with Pennington’s answer to Liam Gallagher I’d have curled up with Joanna Trollope and an Ovaltine.’
‘Ah well you see, he’s about the only red-blooded unattached male left in these parts who doesn’t walk around in small circles and hold conversations with himself all day. They all feel duty bound to find him a mate.’
‘Yes well it’s not me, okay?’
‘Sure? You could have fried an egg in the looks you two were exchanging on that dance floor.’
‘God – bloody spy!’ I spluttered. ‘Miles, just do me a favour and keep your observations to yourself, will you? I don’t want half of Gloucestershire speculating on –’
‘Alex! Good to see you!’ Miles stretched past me and shook Alex’s hand as he came up behind me.
‘Hello, Miles, I didn’t spot you in here!’
‘He was lurking,’ I muttered grimly. The two men did a lot of hearty back slapping and hand pumping as men do when the lager’s been swilling about with the testosterone and we chatted for a bit, or shouted rather, over the drunken carols that were now being bellowed at full volume. But when Oh-Come-Let-Us-Adore-Him reached fearsome heights, Alex jerked his head inquiringly towards the door. I nodded energetically back and the three of us pushed and shoved the final few yards to freedom. Finally we emerged into the welcoming, cold night air.
Rosie Meadows Regrets... Page 29