by Mavis Cheek
Later she gathered up the used bedding. She had left the door locked after the lovers had departed, but as her daily woman was now beginning to act as if she had Grace Poole shut away in there, she could no longer avoid dealing with the practicalities and did so with a certain painful tenderness. She carried the used linen as a vestal virgin might carry the robe of some deity, her arms out rigidly before her, her back straight, and she was aware that she looked slightly mad. Going down the stairs, she paused to press her nose into the soft bulk of the fabric and she thought she could smell the scent of desire and joy in its folds.
When Margaret rang a day or two after the visit, Jill responded as best she could to the 'Well, what did you think?' and the 'Thank you for having us'. But with an excuse she put the telephone down as soon as she could, with relief. She had a creeping, depressing feeling that nothing would ever be the same again - not with Margaret, not with David, not with hearth and home, and not - most certainly not - with her long-term love affair with the production of vegetables. She straightened her back, told Sidney that she wished him to take on more help in the busy growing season, and loafed nervously around the house reading magazines and having long scented baths to while away the time. This strange behaviour lasted for a few days, though it felt as if it were much longer, and was terminated one afternoon when David returned early with a toothache that had dramatically begun to turn into an abscess. His ravaged, swollen face appeared round the bathroom door and his eyes, puffy as they were with pain, extended themselves in uninhibited wonder at the sight of his wife up to her neck in bubbles of lavender oil and listening to Cole Porter love songs.
Guilty to see her husband suffering and harrowed to have her secret discovered, Jill could not forgive him in her heart. Something died in her affections for him as she climbed soapily out of her delicious, watery cocoon to hunt down the oil of cloves and the aspirins.
'What on earth were you doing in there?' he asked peevishly as he hovered behind her while she sought the necessary medicaments.
'Riding a bloody bicycle, David!' she said, peering into the cabinet. The resultant irritation made her spitefully put more oil on the cotton-wool swab than was proper, so that his mouth stung for hours.
'Some men,' she said, having dressed herself and made him tea, which he could not drink because it tasted of cloves, 'might have found it exciting to come home unexpectedly and find their wives naked at four in the afternoon.'
'Some men,' he said in a muffled, grumpy tone, 'might find it suspicious.'
Jill felt cheered. 'Oh,' she said. 'Do you?'
'Not at all,' he said with confidence, smiling bravely through the pain.
Later, when the aspirin and the antibiotics he had collected on the way home had begun to have an effect, Jill poured him a very large whisky. He declined because of the drugs and so she drank it instead.
'Women in the country do have affairs, you know. They get bored and they - well, look elsewhere.'
'Yes,' said David, not looking up from the crossword, his free hand pressed to his cheek. 'But not you.'
'And why not me?' She had another whisky.
'Because you are not bored. The reverse, thank God.'
'How do you know?'
'You always say how busy you are - rushed off your feet, busy, busy, busy . . .' He filled in some squares.
Jill wanted to pour her whisky over the newspaper, but sipped it instead. 'Busy may not be the same as not being bored.'
'Hellespont!' he said, throwing down the paper in triumph. 'Cracked it, tooth or no tooth.' He smiled at her, looking quite horrible with his misshapen face.
'There's no need to be so smug,' she said defiantly, 'I'm not exactly past it. Look at Margaret.. .'
He patted the space next to him on the settee and extended his arm. A familiar gesture that both wrenched her heart and made her want to throw up. 'Come and sit here,' he said.
'Now you've finished the crossword?' 'Exactly.'
She did as he said. Maybe any touching would be a comfort. He tried to take the whisky glass from her, but she held on to it like a child with a sweet.
'Nobody's past anything in this house,' he said comfortably. 'And despite my aching tooth I did pause to notice how you looked as you stepped out of the bath. Not bad at all.'
Jill had the nauseating feeling she was being addressed as a carrot. That was the kind of thing David used to say when she inspected the crops and pulled one from the earth to show him. 'Not bad at all . ..' Yes, it was exactly as if she were being held up for inspection, with a careless hand grasped around her young green shoots.
'I thought Aunt Margaret looked well,' she said, tracing circles round his knee. 'Didn't you?'
He pulled her towards him, arm round her shoulder, so that her head came to rest on his chest. 'You can always tell a woman in love,' he said. 'It just shines out of them. She'd dropped about ten years. Amazing the way she was showing her legs.'
Jill snapped bolt upright, banging her head against David's swollen cheek as she went.
'Shit, Christ, fuck!’ he yelled, pushing her away and holding the place tenderly with his hand. He moaned softly and rocked himself for comfort.
'Oh God, I'm so sorry!' she said. But secretly she was pleased.
She stood up, draining the rest of the whisky. 'Do you want dinner?' she asked, looking at her watch. It was nearly six. She didn't feel like cooking for herself and was glad when he mumbled that he certainly did not now, and instead stumped off to bed to watch television and let the pills do what they could.
Bad cess to you then, she thought, wandering off to her office for no particular reason, aware that she was slightly drunk. Showing her legs, was she? Yes, she was . . . And stretching out a bare toe as she sat on the carpet near her Lover Boy, so that she could touch his leg with it. Provocative, really outrageously provocative, just like a teenager. And quoting Roman poets all over the place, with him chiming in the odd word here and there as if they were Romeo and bloody Juliet. Eyes across the dinner table and touching all the time. Private jokes! She swiped at a seed catalogue, which went tumbling to the ground along with a cascade of assorted paperwork. She would have left the mess by way of personal revolt were it not for the card that caught her eye. She bent and picked it up. Did the hungry, she wondered, still get sent signs like manna? For the card invited her to the opening party of the organic farm shop over the hill and far away. It was tonight, six-thirty onwards, and it was only just past six now. She could just get in the sodding car and go. Leave David to his bulging cheeks and bed-bound TV and be social somewhere. Anywhere, even if it was only an organic farm shop.
She skipped upstairs and plugged in her curling tongs. David, propped up on pillows, already in his pyjamas, said, 'Curling tongs?'
And she said, 'Pyjamas?'
She chose a long white pleated dress from the wardrobe, the one that David said made her look like a refugee from an E.M. Forster film. Why not? she thought, rubbing scent beneath her armpits. With her hair in random curls and a rose-pink scarf round her hips, she thought she looked - well, if not like Helena Bonham-Carter yet, then the way she might become over the years.
The drive felt like a liberation. Empty roads, a short cut she knew past fields of young corn and the dying yellow of going-over rape fields. Poppies made their blood spots in the hedgerows and among the waving sunlit fields. The air was surprisingly warm. Or perhaps it was the whisky? Her bare arms were, she noticed, brown and healthy-looking up to the elbows, but white as milk above. It was the mark of a field worker. She turned on Radio Three but the undulations in the landscape caused interference - anyway, it was only some old medieval dirge being played. What she wanted was Elgar's Enigma. Corny but perfect, like all good cliches. But there was only a tape of Gerontius in the car. Well, that would do. She fast-forwarded it to the Good Angel's sweet farewell as Gerontius prepares to step into purgatory. She would have wept for the pleasure of it, only she did not want to mess up her mascara. She felt alive, wh
ole again, like a young girl. Even the white dress seemed part of the sensation. She looked down and smiled as the Angel's voice soared -she had never tied a scarf round her hips in her life before. Well, well. And why not? And that was how it began.
When she arrived, the first person she saw was Sidney Burney. He was standing his ground in a large, contrivedly rustic room that had once been an immense barn. Swags of herbs hung from the rafters next to sides of bacon and impossibly decorative strings of white onions and pink garlic. Clean, white refrigerated displays of live yoghurts and butter and cheeses were chastely admonished for their modernity by renovated farm carts containing assorted, old-fashioned, nobbly vegetables. The nobblier the better for purveyors of the organic, she thought, smiling to herself. She picked out a dried apricot from a handsome wooden box and chewed on it as she wove her way towards her employee. As she approached, his eyes went shifty, lighting momentarily on the rose-pink scarf before looking away. She sashayed her hips dangerously, pretending it was necessary to pass by the various obstacles en route. In fact she was trying herself out, like a teenage girl who has suddenly discovered her attractions, and, like a teenage girl who has just discovered alcohol, she also wanted another drink. If Sidney Burney was hardly Mellors, he was a start.
'What's that?' she asked, suspiciously sniffing the glass of murky liquid in his hand.
'Proper cider,' he said shordy. 'They say.'
'Who says?'
'Them ...' Sidney pointed vaguely with the stub of his pipe in the direction of a cluster of people standing by one of the huge-wheeled carts. Above the backs of heads Jill could just make out two pretty smiling milkmaids dispensing the stuff from large pitchers. People were drinking it with relish, while at the end of the cart another apple-cheeked girl cut wedges of yellow English cheese. Everyone looked so happy, and there was the added sense of well-being that comes from getting food and drink free. She was glad to be here, a part of it all. Better than being stuck indoors with someone who currently looked like a potato.
'What's it like?' she asked, cider never having been her tipple.
'Very good,' Sidney said, taking a swig as if to prove it. 'I'll get some,' she said. 'What do you think of the place?'
He stared slowly around at the rafters and the carts and the decorative drapings of horticultural produce. 'Very pretty.' He nodded and sucked at his pipe. 'They'll make a deal, I shouldn't wonder.'
'Where are they?'
'Who?'
'The owners?'
'Oh - around,' he said vaguely. And then pointed. 'There's the missus. In the blue ...'
Jill followed his pointing pipe and saw a plump, round-faced, smiling woman in Laura Ashley cornflower print. Her arms beneath the short puffed sleeves were solid and brown all the way down, and her bright, scrubbed face looked healthy and kind. Jill avoided her. Jill did not wish to associate with wholesome women like that tonight. Jill felt she had associated with wholesome women like that for quite long enough. She looked around as she made her way towards the drink cart to see if she could spot somebody louche, but she couldn't. Only Peter Piper from the local paper. She avoided him - he was already very red in the face and she did not want to get stuck with him. She could talk to him anytime - tonight she was hoping for adventure. It was a bloody silly name, anyway. She smiled to herself and promised that if he came over, she would tell him so at last.
She reached out a hand and a smiling milkmaid put a glass into it. She reached out another and a hunk of cheese was placed in it. 'Bread's over yonder,' said the cheese-giver, whose smile looked tired. Not surprising. Up here if there was anything going free the locals were wise enough to grab every ounce of it. Part of the legacy of having been milked dry by successive centuries of Southern government.
Jill moved away and towards the bread table because she had to eat something and didn't fancy the cheese. It stung her throat, it was so strong. It was the kind David liked. She placed the nibbled chunk discreetly on the edge of the cheese cart as she moved on, hoping no one would notice, and she took a drink of the cider to wash away the sensation.
If anything the cider was worse. Being somewhat uninhibited, she pulled a face and went 'Urrgh!' She looked at the glass in childlike disbelief, and was about to set it down when a voice near by said, 'You don't like our cheese and now you don't like our cider. What do you like?' This had to be the owner. There was something quite commandingly proprietorial about the possessive 'our'. . .
She looked up.
A man gave her a slightly sardonic smile. He had sandy grey hair and looked rather military, very straight-backed. He was wearing a countryman's check shirt and lovat tie. He had a small scar on his cheek just under the left eye, a slight ruddiness to his pale freckled skin, and navy-blue eyes with sandy lashes. Not her physical type. As he smiled, she noticed that the little scar crinkled up. She felt herself begin to blush slightly - both for the cheese with its little teeth marks which she could see resting accusingly where she had placed it behind him, and for the loudness of her cider critique. She looked down, then up. She had forgotten the question.
'What?' she said, going for bluntness.
His smile widened. 'I said, what do you like if you don't like the cider?'
'Champagne,' she said airily, thinking he didn't know her from Adam and she could soon slip away.
'That doesn't surprise me,' he said rather softly.
She moved away a fraction. 'Doesn't everyone?' she asked, her voice sounding like some tinny actress. She plunged the glass to her lips and took a second draught of the horrible stuff. 'I suppose it gets better,' she said as graciously as she could. She was about to generalize about the place when instead she found herself saying quite spiritedly, 'Why didn't you come and look at our produce?'
'Who are you?' he said quickly.
She told him.
He removed the glass from her hand, put it down and took her elbow. 'Will you come into the office for a moment?' he said.
No fear, she thought. She removed her elbow as delicately as she could. 'I have to be getting back.'
'The reason why,' he persisted, lounging against the edge of the cart now, ankles crossed, arms crossed on his chest, very relaxed despite the throng of people all around him, 'is that we drew a line on the map above which we decided not to venture.'
'That seems a bit of a Rupert Bear decision,' she said, regretting the personal short-form immediately.
He laughed and the scar disappeared completely. 'Rupert Bear?'
'Oh, nothing. Just a family joke - for being a grown-up and behaving like a child.'
'Considering the face you pulled and the noise you made over my cider was worthy of an eight-year-old, that's cheek.'
'Nevertheless' - she stubbed her finger against the side of the cart for emphasis - 'to draw an arbitrary line is not good business sense.'
'Otherwise we would have been looking for potatoes in Doonray. You have to stop somewhere.'
She giggled in spite of herself. 'Glowing potatoes.'
He raised an eyebrow. 'Hmm?'
'Doonray - it's a nuclear power station.' 'Figure of speech,' he said, and she noticed that he uncrossed his ankles and was a little less affably poised.
'Well, anyway,' she said, 'I have to go. My husband is ill.' He looked about him. 'Is he here?'
She laughed. The idea of David with his puffy face and pyjamas roaming the rustic displays was absurdly funny.
'No,' she said, 'he isn't really interested in my business. He's got toothache.' She giggled again. And put a hand to her mouth instantly.
'It's your business, is it?'
'Yes,' she said, fixing him with what she hoped was a quelling look. 'Mine. All mine.' Damn, that sounded more like a petulant three-year-old. 'I must go.'
'We should come and . .. um ... look over what you've got, then?'
She looked over towards the cornflower-blue Laura Ashley and back at him. Their eyes connived.
Sidney Burney, amazingly, was suddenly standing at
her side. He wanted more cider.
He nodded and made some kind of gruff noise in his throat at her, which she took to be a greeting and apology for pushing past.
'One of my helpers,' she said grandly. 'Aren't you, Sidney?'
Sidney looked hunted.
The sandy eyebrows raised and lowered themselves. 'Well, you seem to think the cider is OK. Have some more.' He turned, gestured. 'Jane, more cider for the gentleman.'
Jill thought this was so patronizing she nearly threw up. This man was as bad as David for making her want to do that. She moved away, willing her rose-pink scarf not to sway. He followed her.
'Will you introduce me to your wife before I go?' she said, challenging.