‘Do you want to talk about how you feel?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘I’m not sure that I can find the right words to say it.’
‘Me neither,’ he said.
‘Perhaps later.’
He nodded his consent. ‘I’ve arranged a picnic hamper for us tonight,’ he said. ‘I thought we could find somewhere quiet across the fields.’ His eyes searched hers for approval. They were softer, bluer, more vulnerable than she’d seen them before.
‘That sounds lovely.’ That sounds dangerous!
Ben glanced over to where the tea was being served. ‘I could do with a nice cup of tea.’
It was just what Jeffrey would have said. ‘I think we both need one.’
He grinned. ‘What do you think the chances are of us getting a biscuit now that Sonia’s left us to our own devices?’
‘Infinitely better, I should say.’ Kate laughed.
‘Shall we try it?’
He took her hand and pulled her to her feet and, for a moment, the bubble cocooned them once again. What were the chances of getting something infinitely more satisfying than mere digestive biscuits, Kate mused, now that they were indeed left to their own devices?
chapter 34
Jeffrey sat nursing his head in his hands. He still felt like an alcoholic in the throes of recovery, and had swallowed Resolve hangover remedy all of Thursday, standing the packet on his desk at Hills & Hopeland as a tangible reminder of his foolishness and his resolve to pull himself together. There had been a few behind-the-hand sniggers pertaining to Natalie’s phone call, but the others were all wise enough to see that he needed handling with kid gloves.
Like Joe’s project, Jeffrey felt he was a dormant volcano, with something simmering deep below the surface, just waiting to break through. He was clearly giving off handle with care vibes as no one had commented on his radical new hairdo and the word ‘peaky’ had been bandied about by several of the secretaries—enough for him to leave work early and retreat to the safety of Acacia Close.
He swung the car onto the road towards Leighton Buzzard and home—glad to be ahead of the crawl of home-ward-bound traffic, but unsure whether his home was still the haven it had once been. Wasn’t it now a place where danger lurked?
The danger came in the very welcoming form of Natalie, who relieved him of his briefcase and handed him an ice-cold beer as soon as he walked through the door.
‘You’re early,’ she said.
‘I couldn’t take any more,’ Jeffrey sighed. His suit felt as crumpled and jaded as he did and his non-iron shirt looked distinctly as though it had never seen an iron. But how his crestfallen spirit had lifted when he had seen her standing there with her legs going all the way up to her Australian armpits.
‘Take a shower,’ Natalie instructed. ‘I can start dinner now that you’re here.’
‘What’s on the menu today?’ he asked, enjoying the refreshing shock in his parched mouth.
‘I have to confess,’ she said, looking suitably penitent, ‘to veering from Kate’s brilliantly prepared regime. Thursday was supposed to be pork casserole and new potatoes, or we could have had the spaghetti Bolognese that we should have had on Monday when we had the chilli.’ Natalie wrinkled her nose. ‘I thought it was too hot for any of them.’
‘Right,’ Jeffrey said, still sweltering unpleasantly inside his suit.
‘I’m preparing some traditional Australian fare instead,’ she said with a grin.
He raised an eyebrow. Didn’t they eat kangaroo, termites and disgusting-looking grubs?
‘Barbie!’ Natalie gave one of her raucous laughs. ‘Sometimes you have to revert to native stereotyping.’
Jeffrey smiled with relief. ‘It sounds great.’ At least he would be responsible for burning the food tonight.
‘Don’t be long,’ she warned. ‘The coals are just about ready.’
‘You’ve lit the barbecue already?’
She looked perplexed. ‘Yes.’
‘Oh, fine. Fine,’ Jeffrey said, trying not to sound completely in awe and truly thankful that he’d been saved the usual embarrassment involving fire-lighters, lighter fuel and several boxes of matches in an attempt to tap into his long-abandoned caveman instincts and produce flame.
Jeffrey stood in the shower and let the soothing water wash over his body and cleanse the grime from his skin. His soapy hands massaged his belly and he was pleased to assess it as still firm. It hadn’t sagged despite years of sitting behind a desk—so golf must be good for something, if not for the soul. Other parts of him were equally firm, he thought as his fingers travelled farther down, which wasn’t so good—not when your wife was on the other side of the county looking for the meaning of life. Perhaps the meaning of life was here, after all, growing hard in his hand. Everything these days seemed to revolve round a man, a woman and you know what—films, books, television, newspapers, politics—they were all littered with images and stories of sex. It was surprising in a way that he hadn’t been tempted earlier. Tempted to do what? Seduce a girl young enough, if not to be his daughter, then at least his younger sister? What was happening to him? Where had the straight, sensible, work-focused, family-loving husband and father of two gone? Where had he gone and when was he likely to come back?
Jeffrey turned off the shower and immediately punished himself with a rub down that was more brisk than it needed to be. He threw on his shorts and a clean T-shirt from the pile of ironing that Natalie had left neatly stacked on the bed and looked at himself in the mirror. Grief, he could feel himself ageing by the minute. He picked up his aftershave, Givenchy Gentleman, and splashed himself liberally with it. His side of the bathroom cupboard was bursting with matching soap, skin balm, shower gel and antiperspirant—none of which he had cared to use before. But now he went downstairs with a light step, glad to know that he smelled of ‘a delicious blend of exotic, mood-enhancing spices’.
Natalie was standing over the cooker, an apron tied round her slim waist, stirring a pan intently. She looked up and smiled, and his spirits soared even higher.
‘Try this, Jeffers,’ she coaxed, wafting the wooden spoon laden with sauce at him. ‘It’ll blow your socks off.’
He wasn’t wearing socks. Kate had long since dinned it into him that socks and sandals didn’t mix.
‘This is Mrs Lambert’s patented barbecue sauce,’ she informed him. ‘Guaranteed to make your barbie go with a zing.’
Jeffrey approached cautiously. It looked like the sort of sauce that could melt work surfaces. Natalie held the spoon aloft. He offered his mouth up to accept the spoonful of sauce, resting his hand on the tiny span of her waist. Their eyes met and he held her hand as he steadied the spoon and closed his mouth carefully over it. Natalie swallowed hard, as did he. His fingers curled round her wrist and stroked the tender skin on the inside with his thumb, completely oblivious to the scalding piece of onion that was gleefully welding itself to the roof of his mouth.
‘Isn’t that the best thing you’ve ever tasted?’
Jeffrey nodded, mute in his emotion.
Natalie moved towards him and he could hear her breathing; he could feel it fast and hard in her breast beneath the plastic apron.
‘You smell nice…’ she said huskily.
Although he wondered how she could tell above the cloud of garlic that was emanating from Mrs Lambert’s barbecue sauce. Perhaps the Givenchy Gentleman was more potent than he thought.
‘…like an old English country house.’
Most of them smelt musty and damp to Jeffrey, as if there was a rancid relative left rotting in a cupboard somewhere, but Natalie was Australian and probably had little, if any, experience of old country houses and, therefore, harboured romantic notions about them. At least, he hoped that was the explanation.
She reached up and stroked her fingers tenderly across his lips and he caught them with a hesitant kiss.
‘Sauce,’ she said.
‘Daddy!’ Kerry ran into the kitchen. S
he stopped in her tracks and stared at them. They jumped guiltily apart and Kerry regarded them each in turn, narrowing her eyes imperceptibly. ‘The barbecue’s ready,’ she said crisply and turned and ran out again.
Natalie stirred the sauce furiously.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jeffrey said.
She shook her head, but didn’t look at him. ‘Don’t be.’
‘I can assure you, I don’t normally do that sort of thing.’
‘I know.’
‘I’ll take the salad out, shall I?’
‘Yes,’ she said tightly.
He didn’t know what else to say, so he picked up the salad. When he turned back she was staring out of the window, spoon still clattering round the pan.
Contrary to expectations, the sausages weren’t burnt and neither was the lettuce limp. Natalie, it appeared, was a mean cook when it came to deliberately trying to burn something rather than trying not to.
Kerry, amazingly, had eschewed her all-meat-is-murder stance and was tucking into one of Natalie’s home-made beefburgers. It was a good job it hadn’t been down to him to go out and club the odd mammoth to death to provide food, Jeffrey thought, for he was totally knackered and would probably struggle to pull the wings off a few innocent flies. The fine art of barbecuing had always eluded him and he tried to avoid being pressed into service more than once or twice per summer. Wasps were always a good excuse. His chicken was always incinerated to the point of charcoal on the outside, yet still raw and bleeding inside. A bit like he felt now. He sat in the garden lounger, plate balanced on his lap, and tried to admire his flourishing geraniums rather than flourishing parts of Natalie’s anatomy. What was the opposite of Viagra? Whatever it was, he needed to take some and quick, before his errant libido went completely off the rails. He bit the end decisively off his perfectly grilled sausage.
To prove he was a new man, Jeffrey offered to tidy up while Natalie served dessert—also unburnt—in the form of a cream and meringue calorie mountain that she pronounced to be a pavlova. Kerry helped him to clear up the debris. He was scraping chicken skin and sweetcorn husks into the swing bin when she cleared her throat.
‘You and Mummy aren’t going to divorce, are you?’ she asked, studying the colourful array of magnets that adorned the fridge freezer in commemoration of every family holiday they’d had over the past five years.
‘No.’
‘Not ever?’
Jeffrey folded his arms and regarded her paternally. ‘No.’
‘Children of divorced parents don’t grow as tall,’ she informed him. ‘The continued wrangles over custody and maintenance stunt the growth of the developing vertebrae and I want to be a supermodel.’
‘I thought you were going to be a QC?’
‘I want to be the first QC who can also earn twenty thousand a day for getting up in the morning.’
‘I see.’
Kerry kicked at the kitchen table. ‘Are you?’
‘I love your mother.’
‘That’s not the same. Clarissa Roddick’s parents say they still love each other, but they just can’t live together any more.’ Kerry eyed him directly. ‘That’s why Clarissa has to spend every weekend in a pokey flat being nice to her daddy’s silly new girlfriend.’
‘That must be difficult for her.’
‘She’s always sick.’
‘Clarissa?’
‘No, the girlfriend. Clarissa says she spends half the night groaning.’
‘Oh.’ Jeffrey covered the smile that played at his mouth with his hand.
Kerry looked sullenly at him. ‘I don’t want to spend my weekends in a pokey flat,’ she said. ‘I like it here. I’ve got my own CD player.’
‘Is that all?’
‘And I shouldn’t have to live with uncertainty at my age.’ He noticed she was fingering her belly-button ring distractedly.
‘The only thing in life that’s certain is uncertainty, Kerry,’ he said kindly. ‘But, don’t worry, your mother and I are very happy together.’
Are we? He pulled his daughter to him and cuddled her, kissing the top of her head. If so, why was his wife currently away trying to find what was missing in her life, and why was his penis suddenly behaving like a jack-in-the-box at the mere sight of a leggy blonde?
At least, his daughter looked appeased. ‘I don’t want any pavlova,’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘All that cream!’
Jeffrey was looking forward to it immensely.
‘Too many dairy products are bad for your arteries. Can I have an apple instead?’
‘Have whatever you want, darling,’ he said. This is probably the only time in your life when things that are bad for you hold no hint of temptation.
Food finished, the children decided to go inside to watch TV and Natalie brought another bottle of wine out of the fridge. She poured Jeffrey and herself a glass and sat in the swing chair, rocking backwards and forwards, studying the horizon. The sun was still high in the sky, the longest day recently past, and the garden looked soft and mellow in the golden light. The clear yellow flowers of the evening primrose had opened and their heady scent was hanging in the air.
‘That was wonderful.’ Jeffrey massaged his straining stomach appreciatively.
‘We’re born with an inbuilt ability to barbecue,’ she said. ‘Can’t do much else though.’
‘You seem to get by all right,’ he said.
Natalie patted the cushion next to her. ‘Come and sit here.’
‘Is that wise?’
She shrugged.
Reluctantly, he left the safety of his lounger and crossed to where she sat. He flopped into the flowery comfort of the swing, catching its genteel rhythm and trying to keep a sociable distance between his and Natalie’s legs. Neither of them spoke, only the squeaking of the springs that he had been meaning to oil for months, filling the silence.
Jeffrey gulped his wine. ‘I’m sorry I overreacted the other night,’ he said.
‘It was my fault,’ Natalie replied, curling one leg under her. ‘I should have asked your permission to mutilate your daughter.’
‘I wouldn’t have given it, you know.’
Natalie stared at him frankly. ‘That’s why I didn’t ask.’
They giggled at each other.
She ran her finger round the top of her wineglass. ‘You’re a very nice man, Jeffrey.’
He snorted derisively. ‘Very nice, very boring, very married.’ ‘You’re a potential himbo, Jeffers,’ she said. ‘But, you just need to let go a little. You take life too seriously.’
He rested his head against the back of the swing. ‘I can’t help it,’ he said. ‘Even at school I was the only one who’d be worrying about equilateral triangles while all the other boys were reading the Beano. I’ve always been like this.’
‘But sometimes you feel trapped?’
I didn’t used to. Not before this week.
‘You love your wife, you love your family…’
‘I hate my job.’
‘… But, occasionally, you want some time on your own, to be yourself, to forget your responsibilities, to let your hair down.’
‘Yes.’ No, it was never like that.
Natalie rested her hand on his thigh. ‘I understand how you feel.’
His eyes were glued to the slender suntanned hand that was burning its imprint into his shorts. Do you? How? I don’t understand myself.
He’d never expected marriage to be all moonlight and roses. It was a bit like the descriptions in a holiday brochure. In the pictures, everything looks idyllic, but it’s only when you’re there that you realise that the hotel isn’t quite as glossy as it seemed, and they omitted to mention it’s the rainy season which means it’s going to bucket down for the best part of the fortnight. And every time you do manage to go on the beach, you get sand in your picnic lunch. He’d never minded the sand in his sandwiches, that was an intrinsic part of what it was all about. It was the good bits that you took away with you, that carried you through th
e rest of the year. That was marriage. Lots of gritty sandwiches with a bit of snatched sunbathing in between.
Natalie sat up in the swing. ‘Let’s do something mad tomorrow.’ Her eyes were twinkling with excitement. ‘Have some fun. It’s my last day. We should do something special to mark surviving the week.’
‘Like what?’ He wasn’t sure what constituted Natalie’s idea of fun.
‘I don’t know.’ She twirled her wineglass absently. ‘I’ll have to give it some thought.’
It sounded terrifying. ‘I’ve got to go to work.’
‘Ah, phone in sick again, Jeffers. They’ll never suspect you’re bunking off. I bet you’re a model employee.’
It was true, he hadn’t had a day off sick in years. Even when he had a cold he just dosed himself up with Day Nurse and struggled on. The idea wriggled deeper into his brain and, like the pavlova, it was very tempting. ‘What about the children?’
Kerry and Joe came out and sat on the grass.
‘What about the children?’ Kerry asked warily.
‘I’m trying to persuade your father to do something wild tomorrow.’
‘We’ve got school.’
‘Couldn’t you give it the flick for the day? It’s nearly end of term anyway. I bet you’re hardly doing any work—right?’ Natalie was well into her stride.
‘We could go to Alton Towers,’ Joe piped up.
‘I’ve always wanted to go there.’ Kerry added. She was clearly having a night off from being an eco-warrior, and forgetting for once that one of her passions in life was to save the countryside, not contribute to its erosion by supporting what she called tacky commercial enterprises.
It was possibly the last place in the world that Jeffrey wanted to go. A damp day out in Dorking would be infinitely preferable.
‘Yes, yes, yes!’ Joe said, starting to dance round the garden.
No, no, no! thought every fibre of Jeffrey’s being.
Natalie was looking blank.
‘It’s a theme park,’ he explained. ‘White-knuckle rides. Everything designed to induce vomiting in those of a nervous disposition. Like Disney but without Mickey Mouse.’
The width of Natalie’s grin could have broken records. ‘Sounds great!’
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