‘Oh, what a shame, we’ll have to keep your drink for you,’ said Rose with a disappointed pout and put her face up for a kiss. She’d missed her calling when she decided not to become an actress. ‘Don’t be too long, will you?’
‘I won’t be more than an hour, promise,’ he said, giving her a kiss that looked like it would have become something a lot more ardent if his eyes hadn’t slid sideways and he remembered he had an audience. He stood up, giving me a rueful grin, and walked off whistling slightly self-consciously.
‘You are lucky,’ I said, watching him saunter off. ‘He’s a really nice man and he adores you too.’
She pushed the sunglasses she’d been wearing like protective armour on to the top of her head, revealing red-rimmed, scared eyes. ‘He’s not going to adore me for much longer!’ she declared tragically, reaching out for the wine bottle and refilling her glass with a nervy hand. She drained it in a gulp. ‘Susie, I don’t know what I’m going to do!’ she wailed and burst into tears.
I got up and sat next to her, muttering platitudes about how she could rely on me.
‘There’s nothing you can do,’ she declared, between gulping sobs, reaching blindly for her cigarettes and lighting yet another. ‘You must tell me how you found out it was Nigel behind this property thing sometime,’ she said dully, staring blindly out over the garden. ‘It’d be all right if it was just you, I know you’d keep quiet for my sake, but Hamish knows too, or if he doesn’t he’s about to. He’s always thought there was something fishy about the company and he put an investigator on it. He rang this afternoon to say he’d let us know for sure tomorrow. He’ll tell Jeremy, I know he will, and then it’ll all be over.’
‘What will be over?’ I asked. I’d lost track of this somewhere.
‘My marriage,’ she wailed.
At first I thought this was a typical piece of Rose exaggeration. I said something to the effect, but not quite so bluntly. She looked up, hands writhing in her lap. ‘You don’t understand. Nigel’s given me until the end of this week to get Jeremy to agree to his offer.’ She sniffed loudly. ‘But once Jeremy knows it’s Nigel, he’ll never agree to sell. He’s got something against him…’
‘That he’s crook?’ I suggested. ‘Or that he tried to frame Hamish for fraud?’
‘Did he? I didn’t know that,’ Rose said with a flicker of interest. ‘Maybe. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Jeremy’s going to refuse to sell and even if he doesn’t chuck me straight out our marriage is going to be finished for all intents and purposes.’ Her face crumpled again. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do. I think I’ll kill myself if I lose Jeremy.’
‘I’m sure it won’t come to that,’ I said soothingly, patting her hand in a particularly ineffectual manner, and wondering when she’d get around to actually saying what it was that Nigel was threatening her about. What was bad enough to break up her marriage to Jeremy entirely? So he wouldn’t be too pleased, in fact absolutely livid, if he found out about her lying to him and going out with Luke, but as I pointed out to her, Luke had put the kibosh on any suggestion that they’d spent the night together by draping himself all over me in front of Hamish. He might fondly think that he had a reputation as a lady killer, but there was no way Jeremy was going to believe that Luke would have had both Rose and myself during one night.
‘Oh God! If it were only that!’ Rose declared dramatically. ‘This is much, much worse!’
What could be worse than Jeremy thinking his wife had had a fling less than two months after the wedding? I found a clean tissue and handed it over, waiting with mounting impatience while Rose dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose noisily. She gulped, swallowed hard and said tonelessly, ‘Nigel’s got a dossier on me. If he doesn’t have a written acceptance of his offer on his desk by Friday morning, he’s going to send it to Jeremy.’
‘What can be so bad in it that it’s a marriage breaker?’ I asked lightly. ‘You didn’t tell Jeremy you led a nun-like existence before you met him or anything, did you?’ I saw the expression on her face and exclaimed, ‘Oh Rose! You didn’t.’
‘You didn’t think I was going to tell him about all of them, did you?’ I could see her point. On the whole, men don’t take anything like as indulgent a view of wild oats sown by their wives as they do of their own, and Rose, who had regarded sex as a leisure activity to be indulged in as frequently as Dime bars and shopping, had sown more oats than most.
‘Perhaps Nigel doesn’t have the full list,’ I said hopefully.
‘God! I hope not!’ she exclaimed, looking shocked. ‘Even half would be bad enough,’ she added gloomily, ‘but I might have been able to swing it past Jeremy, though he’d be furious with me for… well, gliding over a few of the names…’ she hesitated, chewing on her thumbnail, ‘but even the most tolerant husband gets narked when he discovers his marriage isn’t valid.’
It took a few moments for this to sink in. Of all the things I’d been imagining that Nigel Flaxman might be able to use to pressurise Rose, this hadn’t even made it on to the end of the list. ‘That can’t be true,’ I said.
‘It is,’ she said miserably. ‘I made a false declaration on the register, I said I was a spinster.’
‘Well, that just means unmarried, doesn’t it? I don’t think you have to worry that it means “maid” in the old-fashioned sense. If it did, half the marriages in this country would be invalid.’
‘It’s not that. “Spinster” means you haven’t been married before. And I have.’
CHAPTER 21
I spluttered into my glass of wine. This had to be some sort of joke. But it was June, not April the first, and Rose didn’t look as if she thought there was anything funny about this. ‘When?’ I croaked, once I was able to speak again. ‘Who to?’
‘While you were in Montpellier.’ She looked at me over the smoke of a newly lit cigarette. ‘Do you remember what I said about Nigel not letting his possessions go, well, not for nothing anyway?’ She sighed deeply. ‘Going out with him was incredibly expensive. We used to go out to all these lovely places where, of course, he paid for everything, but he expected me to dress the part, and he didn’t mean little numbers from chain stores either. I had to borrow money from him, quite a lot actually, to buy clothes and things.’ She smiled at me wanly. ‘Don’t get me wrong, at the time I loved it. It was so glamorous and the clothes were fabulous. I’ve still got some of them.’
‘And then we you broke up he demanded to be repaid?’ I said.
She nodded. ‘He wanted it at once, with interest, or else. He threatened to go to my father though he didn’t expect to get anything out of him, it was just to show me the sort of trouble he’d make if I didn’t do what he wanted. I couldn’t pay him back, and he knew it. He probably even planned it that way. He told me I could repay him in kind,’ she said dully, ‘by marrying a Russian business acquaintance who wanted a permanent right of residence in this country. It didn’t seem like a big deal, I’d trot off to Kensington Register Office, meet my groom, marry him, say goodbye on the steps and the divorce would follow through later. And I was let off the hook about repaying several thousand pounds. Besides, I didn’t have much choice. So I did it.’
She drained her glass while I absorbed this. Eventually I said, ‘Are you properly divorced?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then does it matter that you told a little white lie on your marriage certificate? It’s not as if you’ve committed bigamy. Surely it’s on the same level as saying you were twenty-five not twenty-eight. You’d get a slap on the wrist, but that’s all.’
‘What I did was illegal, Susie,’ she said flatly, ‘and I could go to prison for it.’
‘Surely not.’
‘Nigel read me the relevant bit of the act. I aided and abetted an illegal entry into the United Kingdom by entering into a false marriage,’ she recited tonelessly. ‘If I don’t get Jeremy to agree to sell the land Nigel will make sure the authorities find out about the marriage. He’s even got the receipt I s
igned for the money he lent me which is proof I was paid to do it.’ Rose’s eyes filled with tears again. ‘Even if I didn’t get sent to prison, there’d still be a trial and lots of publicity, you can bet your bottom dollar Nigel would make sure of that. Jeremy’d be a laughing stock.’ She sniffed. ‘And bang would go his chances of being a magistrate too.’
‘I’m sure it wouldn’t be that bad,’ I said soothingly.
‘It’d be worse. Jeremy’d be going through all of that for a woman he wouldn’t believe he was married to.’
‘He doesn’t believe he’s married to you?’ I echoed, wondering if Jeremy was an imminent candidate for the funny farm. ‘What does he think he was doing two months ago in front of three hundred and fifty people? Acting in his end-of-term play?’
‘He does at the moment, of course,’ she said impatiently. ‘But he’s Catholic.’ When I didn’t respond with instant illumination she said in a tragic voice, ‘Catholics don’t believe in divorce. I’m divorced, therefore in the eyes of the Church I wasn’t eligible to marry Jeremy.’
Jeremy didn’t strike me as someone who’d be particularly dogmatic about anything, especially a registry-office wedding which she’d virtually been forced into, but when I said this Rose tossed her head and said that I didn’t know Jeremy like she did. ‘You see, he thinks I’ve told him everything,’ she said. ‘He can’t stand deceit. He’s a terribly straightforward person.’ She sniffed. ‘That’s one of his best traits, but it means he’s not going to forgive me for lying to him.’
‘But did you?’ I asked. She looked at me blankly. ‘What I mean is, did he ever ask you if you’d been married before?’
‘Of course not, but I don’t think he’ll accept that as an excuse.’
‘It’s a good start.’
She looked at me reproachfully as if I wasn’t taking this seriously enough. ‘I can’t tell you how frightened I was when I saw Nigel outside the church, I thought he was going to stand up with a just cause and impediment. Then he said he’d come to wish me well and he hoped bygones could be bygones, and I thought I could forget about it. But he was just softening me up.’
More likely he was waiting to discover if Hamish had a business connection with Jeremy as well as being best man, and of course he found that out soon enough. Luke Dillon, master manipulator, wormed it out of me, didn’t he? ‘Can’t you tell him Jeremy’s found out who owns Champion and it’s impossible to get him to agree?’
‘I tried that when I spoke to him this afternoon. He rings me at least twice a day to check on my progress.’ There was nothing like keeping the pressure up. ‘He said he doesn’t accept excuses, and if I fail I have to accept what ever happens to me. What am I going to do, Susie? ’
‘What about telling someone what he’s doing?’
‘Who? The police? You can bet your bottom dollar that Nigel’s covered his tracks and there’d be no trace of his trying to blackmail me. And the next thing you’d know one of the tabloids would have “got hold” of Nigel’s dossier and there’d be a banner headline of “Society wedding shock!” or something.’ This appalling vision silenced both of us for a minute. ‘He used to be quite fond of me at one time. If I don’t succeed I might be able to persuade him not to carry out his threats,’ she added on a note of desperate hope.
She had about as much chance of that as a tethered goat has of persuading the tiger to undo its rope and let it wander away uneaten. But she was adamant that she wasn’t going to talk to anyone, not even Hamish. Her mouth set into a thin line, ‘I couldn’t possibly, he’d tell Jeremy.’
‘He wouldn’t,’ I said, affronted on Hamish’s behalf. ‘Solicitors are like doctors. They can’t reveal what’s been told to them in confidence.’
‘Whatever,’ she said, shrugging, ‘I still can’t speak to him. Nigel told me not to talk to anyone about this, and he might find out. Then what would he do to me?’
Her logic was slightly askew here, as she didn’t seem to be worried about having told me, but maybe the all-powerful Nigel was such a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist that he didn’t reckon a woman counted. What was undoubtedly true was that he’d scared her so much she wasn’t capable of rational thought any longer, for she couldn’t see that if she didn’t tell Hamish enough to persuade him not to reveal to Jeremy who was behind the Champion bid the game was up anyway. ‘I still might be able to sweet talk Jeremy into accepting it,’ she said stubbornly in direct contradiction of what she’d said earlier. ‘Anyway, how did you find out about Nigel and Champion?’
I was pleased to see that indignation over the line that’d been fed to both of us replaced at least part of her dull despair, so that by the time Jeremy reappeared, asking plaintively if we’d finished the whole bottle, she was able to smile lazily at him as if she didn’t have a care in the world and say he had no need to complain since she knew perfectly well after he’d finished playing with the tractor he’d slipped down to the pub for a quick half with Matt and Derick.
‘Why do you think that?’ he asked self-consciously.
She sniffed the air pointedly. ‘Fee, fi, fo, fum, I smell the beer in an Englishman!’
He grinned and wisely changed the subject. ‘Are you going to stay for supper, Susie?’
I was only too glad to accept, I was hoping I could wheedle a bed for the night too. I might well have read too many thrillers, but I didn’t fancy spending the night alone in my cottage. There might be a few irritated beasties hanging around outside tonight and I’d rather stay away.
We pottered around the kitchen making a salad while a chicken something from Marks and Sparks heated up in the Aga. Maybe it was talking through her fears, or simply the influence of a second bottle of wine that made Rose start to relax, but gradually the lines of strain began to blur on her face, though not disappear altogether. ‘It’s so good to be able to talk to someone about this, I haven’t been able to think of anything else since Nigel rang,’ she said as we laid the table.
‘I don’t blame you,’ I said, remembering the snit I’d got into last night because she hadn’t rung me. OK, so I wasn’t psychic, but that doesn’t stop you feeling sometimes that you ought to be.
She stopped, with a bundle of serving spoons held in mid-air over a peacefully sleeping Phuket on his chair. ‘It’s so humiliating, isn’t it? Being taken for a sucker like this. I know it’s small potatoes compared to everything else, but I can’t bear thinking all Luke wanted from me was to manipulate my husband. I thought he was after me, not that I was going to do anything, of course.’
‘Well, I thought he was after me and I was quite prepared to do something,’ I retorted. ‘At least you only got to help change a tyre, I got put in a ditch.’
Rose stared at me, wide-eyed. ‘Surely that wasn’t deliberate,’ she said in a shocked voice. ‘He’s very proud of that car, he wouldn’t have wanted to damage it!’
‘And I’m entirely disposable, I suppose?’
She met my eyes and we both began to giggle. ‘Tell me,’ she said confidentially, once we’d both subsided, ‘is he really as bad as you said he was?’
‘Rose!’ I exclaimed. ‘And you a married woman! Let’s just say, on the evidence of his kissing you haven’t missed anything.’
‘Nothing at all?’ she asked thoughtfully, as if the last remaining vestiges of her infatuation with him had at last been dumped and torn up into tiny little pieces. I might have been ladling it on a bit, he wasn’t that bad, but it was in a good cause. Rose could forgive someone for being bad, for being weak, easily led, all the sorts of excuses that someone could make for Luke, but she’d never forgive a man being useless between the sheets.
Jeremy came in, with Dexter behind him as usual, and glanced towards Phuket. ‘That cat was in that position this morning when I left to check the barley. Darling, if he doesn’t move soon you’ll have to check him for bed sores.’
Rose made a face at him, saying cats needed plenty of rest. Not according to Dexter they didn’t. He went up and dobbed Phuket
in the stomach with the end of his nose until the cat gave an enraged growl and lashed out with one dark-chocolate paw. With an expertise born of practice, Dexter leapt backwards and the unsheathed claws met thin air.
‘You mustn’t do that. Bad dog.’ Jeremy said to Dexter in an insincere voice. I noticed that the hand that surreptitiously slipped him a cheese biscuit bore two long scratch marks. ‘So what’s your interesting news, Susie?’ he asked as he pulled out a chair and sat down.
Rose clattered the dish she was getting out of the Aga and looked at me with acute alarm. I mumbled something about Amanda thinking she was pregnant, hoping that by the time Jeremy next saw her he’d have forgotten it. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to occur to him this wasn’t exactly the sort of hot news that would have brought me rushing over without warning.
As I’d hoped, sometime around when Jeremy was being sent off to find another bottle of wine, Rose decided that she’d never forgive herself if I got breathalysed on the way home and insisted I spend the night. Despite my safe haven I refused to drink any of the third bottle, to her surprise. The prospect of seeing Hamish tomorrow was alarming enough without adding the spectre of coping with a crippling hangover while trying to stop him marching me straight back out of the door.
I might just as well not have bothered to be such a good girl, for I spent half the night tossing and turning. I fell asleep at last as light was beginning to creep across the sky, with the result that when the little alarm I’d borrowed off Rose went off at six o’clock I couldn’t wake up and felt completely drugged with sleep as I stumbled my way down the stairs. Fortunately, I was alert enough by the time I rounded the corner to the green at Little Dearsley to notice a dark-blue car parked unobtrusively in the lee of a leylandii hedge and with an excellent view of the front of my row of cottages. Shock made me crunch the gears and the noise seemed to echo across the silent green, but the golden head tipped back against the headrest in the blue car didn’t move. Like me, he must have spent half the night awake and needed more than a protesting gear box to wake him up. I hoped that when he finally did wake he’d have a stiff neck.
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