A Village Affair

by Julie Houston

  ‘Matthew, my husband,’ Fiona indicated with her glass of wine. ‘He hates wearing a suit, collar and tie.’

  ‘Doesn’t he have to wear one for work?’ I asked, smiling at the other guests on our table as they began to take their seats.

  ‘The cattle might appreciate some sartorial elegance every now and again but getting cow shit out of his overalls is bad enough. Don’t fancy trying to get it out of a pin-striped suit.’ She laughed at the very idea.

  ‘He’s a farmer?’

  ‘Yes. Adores everything about it. Farming’s in his blood. I’m a city girl myself – from Leeds. Never understood the point of the countryside really.’

  I laughed. ‘So how do you know Luke?’

  ‘Matthew and Luke were at school together. Known each other years.’

  The rest of our table were settling themselves in, making introductions, taking off too-high heels and headache-inducing hats, and I suddenly felt a bit shy, wishing, as I so often did, that I had a partner of my own to pull out my chair and give me a knowing wink when it was time to go home.

  A tall and very elegant blonde, wearing a hat almost as big as Mum’s, sat herself on my left and immediately re-applied lipstick from a nifty little mirrored case she deftly flicked open. I made a note to buy one for myself. She offered a hand. ‘Hi, I’m Tina. Davina said she was going to put any singletons together, and to look out for you.’

  ‘Oh?’ I had an awful feeling Davina must have told Tina to look after me in the same way Auntie Linda had always made a reluctant Davina include me in the many outings, parties and sleepovers arranged for her as the spoilt princess she undoubtedly was, and I could feel embarrassment rising.

  ‘Yes, she thought you and I would get on. Davina and I are both in the same law firm in Leeds, at the very bottom of the slippery career pole.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Fiona sighed. ‘What I’d give to be at the bottom of a slippery pole, inching my way up the career ladder instead of heading for another bout of displaying my bits and pieces to all and sundry.’

  ‘What did you do before you became a mum?’ I was curious. ‘Can’t you go back to it once you’ve had this baby?’

  ‘Don’t believe a word she says,’ Matthew interrupted, laughing. ‘Fiona was temping – spending her days filing other people’s invoices as well as her nails – when I met her. She was more than happy to be whisked off to the country to play at “The Farmer Wants a Wife”.’

  ‘You continue to think that if you must,’ Fiona said loftily. ‘Once I’ve popped this one out I think I’m going to apply for a place at Leeds University. I quite fancy law…’ She beamed across at Tina. ‘You’ll have to give me some tips.’

  ‘Now, aren’t all single girls promised a bonk of some sort at weddings?’ Tina turned to survey the rest of the tables, straining her neck for a better view of any possible bonkers. ‘Can’t see any promising candidates at the moment…’

  ‘What about the best man?’ Fiona suggested, turning her bulk awkwardly in the general direction of the top table.

  ‘Yes, have to admit, he’s in the running. Although—’ Tina broke off, ducking down in her seat. ‘Sorry, I’m just trying to avoid that woman in the huge purple hat. She cornered me in the loo and asked me, if I was local, if I might be interested in joining her Astroshamanic workshop at some point next week.’

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

  ‘Any bonking involved?’ Fiona asked hopefully.

  ‘Apparently, it’s a practice that – hang on, what did she say – “involves a practitioner reaching altered states of consciousness in order to perceive and interact with a spirit world in order to channel these transcendental energies into this world.”’ Tina laughed. ‘I told the purple hat that I’d already been known to lose consciousness after an interaction with spirits on a Friday night out in the middle of Leeds and to give me her card.’

  ‘You got off lightly.’ A devastatingly pretty girl dressed in yellow, whose pert behind had caught the attention of every male at our end of the hotel dining room, took the one remaining empty chair at the table. ‘I’ve just spent fifteen minutes trying to escape from some guy determined to sell me Personal Breakdown Cover.’

  ‘I could do with some of that,’ Fiona sighed, massaging her bump. ‘I think I’m on the point of a personal breakdown myself.’ She began to laugh. ‘I remember one of my first boyfriends, when I knew absolutely nothing about, you know, sex and all that goes with it, asking me about mutual orgasm…’ She broke off, holding on to her bump as she continued to giggle. ‘I was convinced he was trying to sell me some sort of insurance cover and I said, “Oh, no, it’s fine, thanks, I’m more than able to sort that kind of thing on my own.”’

  The girl in yellow laughed, downed her entire glass of champagne and grinned round the room at the rest of us. ‘Hi, I’m Clare. I think I’m down for the singles table so I’m assuming that’s all of us?’ She raised her huge brown eyes questioningly and pushed an escaped strand of glossy chestnut hair behind one ear.

  ‘Not me,’ Fiona said. ‘But this is Cassandra and Tina, and I think the chap next but one to Matthew is by himself.’

  I took a closer look at the fair-haired man whom Fiona had pointed out and who was now deep in conversation with the girl on his left. He must have realised he was under scrutiny because he lifted his head and looked in our direction, meeting and holding my gaze until I felt myself redden.

  *

  ‘Would you like one of these?’ I looked up from my place in the queue at the bar and saw that, close up, the man from down the bottom of the table was ticking even more of the boxes on my ‘The Man I’m Going to Marry’ list, first created at the age of eight and refined ever since. Tall, blue eyes, smiley face, no (visible) tattoos and wearing a suit. Tick, tick, tick, tick. And tick.

  ‘Thanks.’ I moved away from the post-speech scrum at the bar and followed him across the wooden dance floor, where the DJ was revving up to blast our ears with eighties’ favourites, towards an empty table at the back.

  ‘I didn’t realise you were Davina’s cousin,’ Mark smiled, pouring me a glass of champagne and managing to brush my hand with his own as he did so. When I didn’t reply – couldn’t reply because, in my nervousness at being alone with this man I’d spent the last two hours surreptitiously gazing at over the megalithic floral decorations, my ability to swallow appeared to have deserted me. I’d taken a ridiculously huge gulp of extremely gaseous champagne and now it appeared to have nowhere to go except into my lungs, which would result in it being spat out over Mark’s morning-suit trousers or down my nose, which would surely be the end of a beautiful relationship before we’d even begun.

  I managed to smile as well as one can smile with a mouthful of gas and liquid and hoped I appeared somewhat enigmatic as opposed to mentally deranged.

  ‘Davina?’ Mark tried again, obviously puzzled at my silence.

  The enigmatic smile, slightly more manic, returned and Mark began to look worried.

  ‘Are you OK? Can I get you a drink of water or something?’

  Mustering all my strength, I willed my throat to open and swallowed the recalcitrant champagne. The resulting coughing fit and streaming eyes drew the attention of my nan who, seeing me struggling, bustled over and thumped me firmly on the back of my new and expensive little designer jacket.

  ‘Are you all right, love?’ Nan turned to Mark and said confidentially, ‘Used to be a bit asthmatic when she were a little girl. If ever she got over-excited – Christmas, birthdays, a day out at Southport and the like – we had to watch her, you know.’

  ‘Nan, I think I had one wheezy attack one Christmas,’ I managed to splutter through another bout of choking. ‘The drink’s just gone down the wrong way, that’s all.’

  ‘Come and get some fresh air,’ Mark smiled, standing and wrapping his jacket round my shoulders. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Fiona, Tina and Clare – who’d obviously bonded over the lemon tart – nudging each
other and making surreptitious thumbs up signs in our direction.

  The rain had finally stopped and quite a few of the guests were outside sharing a crafty fag or simply enjoying the cool summer evening breeze after the stuffiness of the hotel reception room.

  Once outside, Mark led the way across the wet lawn to a dry-stone wall that separated the hotel grounds from a glorious wildflower meadow sporting cowslips, early purple orchids and the tiny blue flowers of leadwort.

  ‘How do you know what they are?’ Mark asked, impressed as I rattled off their names.

  ‘My granddad. He doesn’t believe in planting lupins and gladioli in his garden. Beyond his allotment there’s a small field that no one seems to own and over the years he’s thrown tons of wildflower seeds at it and now it’s almost famous: “Norman’s Meadow” it’s called locally…’

  ‘And you? What are you called locally?’ Mark smiled down at me from his six-foot height and, as he reached out a hand and gently rubbed mascara from my cheek with the ball of his thumb, I felt such an unexpected lurch of anticipation and excitement that I was in danger of toppling over into the meadow and happily drowning in the sea of beckoning wildflowers.

  Before I left home and Yorkshire for Derby I’d not clocked up a great deal of experience of men, and any dates I did have I’d made sure had finished at the bus stop in town: there was no way I was bringing anyone back to our house to meet Paula. Once away at university and now living in Derby, things had been a bit different and I’d had what I suppose was my fair share of men, but relationships had never lasted long. If I felt they weren’t going anywhere – which in my book was finding a man who wanted the same things that Paula scoffed at and I craved: a mortgage, semi, two kids – I generally ditched them. ‘I’m “Our Sandra” to my nan…’ I took a deep breath, ‘… Cassandra Moonbeam to my mum. And Cassie to everyone else.’

  ‘Well,’ Mark said, smiling and bending his face to mine, ‘I shall call you Cass, if that’s OK with you?’

  There was something wonderfully erotic about standing on this wet lawn, the sound from the hotel wedding party fading into the background while the heady scents of a summer evening invaded my senses.

  I smiled right back. ‘That’s very OK,’ I breathed, leaning into him. ‘Very OK indeed.’

  3

  Could It Get Any Worse…?

  The week before Easter, a couple of years before what would become known as ‘the night of the auction’ I was having a discussion with my class of eleven-year-olds as to whether Jesus knew he was actually going to die. We’d just introduced a brand-new RE syllabus and, rather than regurgitating the same old story with the accompanying pictures of Jesus on a donkey and the crowd waving palm leaves – or the actual palm trees, in a couple of cases where the illustrator had obviously been more intent on what was happening outside the window rather than the underlying theology – we were philosophically exploring the idea of destiny and whether Jesus could have done anything to change the path down which he was heading. He knew Peter was about to betray him (I’d been in the chorus of an amateur production of Jesus Christ Superstar a few months earlier and remember pointing a dramatic finger and singing to the somewhat bemused class, ‘One of you will betray me, one of you will deny me…’) so why the hell didn’t he leg it while he had the chance?

  Curled up in a foetal position on the sitting-room sofa in the early hours of the Sunday morning following my own betrayal at the hands of the twin Judases – namely my husband and my best friend – I ventured the same question to Clare who, together with Fiona, had brought me home after the auction and was refusing to leave me on my own. ‘So, is this destiny?’ I asked her as she passed me tea. I’d wanted gin, wine, the disgustingly cloying cherry brandy that Mark’s mother kept buying for us at Christmas, anything alcoholic to numb the terrible pain that was coursing through every part of me but, apart from the half-bottle of wine the two of us had shared earlier, Clare had refused to let me have any, saying I’d only feel worse once its effects had worn off.

  ‘Destiny? Is what destiny?’

  ‘You know, the path I have to take in life. Was it all mapped out for me by God and whatever I did, this was his plan.’

  ‘God’s plan?’ Clare snorted angrily. ‘I rather think it was Mark and Tina’s plan, don’t you?’

  ‘What I’m saying is, was there anything I could have done differently or is that irrelevant?’

  ‘Cassie, I hardly think this bombshell is your fault, for heaven’s sake. But, did you really have no idea? Two years?’ She shook her head. ‘I’m sure I’d know if the man I was with was sleeping with someone else.’

  ‘Nope, not a clue.’

  ‘You seem to be taking this remarkably calmly.’ She peered over her mug of tea at me. ‘I’d have expected you to be sobbing, tearing your hair out.’

  ‘I think it’s because I don’t actually believe what’s happened. It’s this destiny thing: if we hadn’t gone to the auction none of this would have come out. We’d have taken a different path.’

  ‘Oh, bloody hell, Cassie, I’m sorry but that’s just bollocks. Of course it would have come out. Probably Tina was hoping it would. You know she and Simon haven’t been getting on for ages.’

  ‘Two years, Clare. Two bloody years. My husband and my best friend have been having it off for two years.’ I sat up suddenly. ‘But when? Where? Hotels in Brighton? Cosy little weekends in Paris? I just don’t get it.’

  ‘Well, you might not get it, but they were obviously getting their fair share… Sorry, that wasn’t funny.’ Clare frowned. ‘To answer your question, they both have fairly high-powered jobs that take them away a lot. Particularly to London. Weren’t they always in London together, getting together for a drink after their meetings, staying overnight?’

  ‘Well, yes, but it was all so innocent…’

  ‘Obviously not. So, sweetie, what are you going to do?’ Clare looked at her watch. ‘It’s after four, Cassie. You need to get some sleep. Show me to your spare room; there’s no way I’m leaving you by yourself.’

  *

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ Freya, pouring enough chocolate Shreddies into a bowl to feed an army, looked up from the task, spilling cereal onto the kitchen floor as she did so. ‘Bugger.’ She bent to pick up the escaped squares and shoved them all into her mouth. ‘Five-second rule,’ she managed to say before drowning the Shreddies that had actually hit target in full-fat milk. At fourteen Freya was tiny – the smallest girl in her year at school – but she still managed to put away twice the amount of food in a day that I consumed in a week. How did one tell an adolescent girl that her father wasn’t at his usual Sunday morning place at the kitchen table, eating bacon and eggs and toast and lime marmalade, because he’d been shagging her auntie Tina for the past few years and her mother had subsequently banished him from the house?

  The banishing of my husband bit hadn’t been quite as calm and stiff-upper-lip as I might pretend. There was no scenario such as you might find in a 1920s-silent movie, where the heroine (me) holds one hand to a pale forehead and points to the door with the other while the baddie (Mark) falls to his knees, wringing his hands and pleading forgiveness, while the other baddie (bloody Tina) slinks off into the night like the she-snake she had suddenly become. Au contraire. In reality, it was like something off The Jeremy Kyle Show. After Simon’s shouting out to Mark, there was a deathly silence as shocked, bemused and amused – I did hear a couple of drunken guffaws – faces turned as one in the direction of our table. Then, as the loud and totally unexpected crashing to the floor of a pile of plates being wheeled in for the main course broke the silence, all hell had let loose. Mark, deathly white, had left the auctioneer’s stand, hurrying through the excited rubber-necking guests to get to me and, taking my arm, had tried to drag me with him out of the room. Simon pushed Mark away from me, took a swing at him, missed and, skidding on an escaped vol-au-vent, landed on the floor at Tina’s feet.

  ‘Get up, you fucking idiot,’ Tina
hissed in a voice so full of venom I would, forever after, name her Serpentina.

  Mark, pleading with me to leave the room with him, had taken both my hands in his but I shook him off, whereupon Tina had thrust her Louis Vuitton over one shoulder, grabbed her drink with one hand, my husband with the other (my husband, Serpentina) and together they’d exited the hall.

  ‘Had to be done,’ Simon had mumbled from the depths of the floor. ‘Sorry, Cassie, sorry to spoil your evening… sorry, everybody… just carry on as if nothing’s happened. Don’t suppose we’ll be wanting that Portuguese villa now…’

  Matthew had reached his big solid farmer’s hands down and pulled Simon to his feet, dusting him off and holding him upright while both Clare and Fi had ushered me out of the emergency exit and into Fiona’s car before driving me back home.

  Shock is a funny thing. It can render one hysterical or, in my case, totally calm. I’d felt as if I were in a play, that some drama was being acted out around me in which I just happened to have a walk-on part. And now I’d walked offstage and back to the dressing room.

  ‘Your mum has a bit of a headache – boring night, anyway – we’ve left the men to it…’ Clare had executed her lines perfectly, shouting them up to my daughter as Freya leant over the stair banister, wondering why we were back so early.

  ‘You all right, Mum?’ Tom had appeared at Freya’s side, his short fair hair askew from his habit of running a hand constantly through the front of it while grappling with maths and science problems set for those already at university.

  ‘I’m fine, really. Go back to what you were doing. Clare, Fiona and I are going to have a drink here.’ Amazing what lies come glibly out of your mouth in order to protect your kids.

  ‘Did you two know?’ I’d demanded, closing the sitting-room door behind us and turning to face these two women, with whom, along with Tina, I’d shared all my hopes and dreams, ups and downs since we’d bonded at Davina’s wedding. Surely Fiona and particularly Clare, whose proud boast was that she had supercharged antennae that could detect exactly what men were up to – and with whom – must have known what was going on.