A Village Affair

by Julie Houston

  ‘Look, you don’t have to do this,’ I said, taking Mark’s arm as he continued to empty the wardrobe of his things.

  ‘Oh, yes, he does,’ Freya snapped. ‘I’m here to make sure he takes everything. That he doesn’t have to come back from Auntie Tina’s because he’s forgotten some of his pants or his toothbrush.’

  ‘Freya, go downstairs. Now. You’re too young to understand.’

  ‘Of course I understand.’ Freya was a snarling bundle of fury. ‘What am I supposed to say at school when my friends ask me where my dad is? He’s gone off with my mum’s best friend? My favourite auntie? My godmother? Well, I tell you now, she can stick it when she sends me my next birthday present. What sort of godmother chooses expensive presents for me when all along she’s … you know… with my dad, for heaven’s sake …’ Freya broke off, glaring at both of us.

  ‘Freya. Now. Downstairs.’ I yelled the words and she hurled a pair of ski gloves at Mark, catching him on his shoulder before storming out, eyes blazing.

  ‘Look, Mark, we have to talk.’

  His face was pale, its whiteness emphasising the huge black rings that had appeared under his eyes. He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Cass, I don’t know what to do. I’ve messed up.’

  My heart gave a desperate little lurch of hope. ‘Marriage guidance, a counsellor… I’ve been too bothered about the house being tidy… about the cushions on the chairs having to be vertical before we went to bed, about… about the toilet lid not being put down, about not having sex on the sofa because it’d flatten the feathers. It’s probably my fault as much as yours.’

  ‘Stop it, Cass, stop it. None of this is your fault.’ He paused. ‘Although, yes, you’re right, you were constantly going on at me about the state of the sofa, the bloody toilet seat, taking my shoes off, the fucking cushions. The house is like a show house, not a home.’

  I stared at him. ‘You never said.’

  ‘Well, that’s just you. Always reacting against Paula’s upbringing. It just gets a bit wearing.’ Mark fastened his cases, refusing to look at me. ‘Give me some time, Cass. I just need to find myself. I’ll make sure money goes into your bank account every month. I need to work out what I want.’

  And with that, he hauled the largest case off the bed and headed for the door.

  8

  Paula

  1976

  By 3.30 p.m. Paula knew that if she didn’t leave the suffocating heat of the smoke-filled office she would explode. Go Boom, just like that, all over the millionth invoice she’d typed that day. The finished invoices – three copies of each – were piling up in her finished tray, but a surreptitious glance around the sweating office of Crosland, Crawshaw & Sons (Dyers and Spinners) confirmed she was miles behind the other typists with her workload.

  Pushing back her chair, she stood and walked towards the female cloakroom at the end of the corridor. Anything to stretch her legs; anything to move on the bone-numbingly slow minutes until she could escape into the glorious July sunshine. Once there, Paula locked herself into a cubicle, laying her forehead against the white tiles, but even they were warm, absorbing the heat that was continuing, day after day, in this glorious summer.

  Paula held her wrists under the cold tap, delaying the moment when she would have to return to the office, splashing tepid water up her arms and dabbing at her armpits laid bare beneath the flimsy purple top. Angela Cartwright, the office manager, disapproved of bare arms – and probably purple, too – but even she had arrived that morning in a sleeveless dress, shedding the ubiquitous fawn cardigan she always wore, by mid-morning.

  Paula kept her hands under the water and gazed at her reflection in the fly-blown mirror. Her dark straight hair, unfashionably long in comparison to the short, angled wedges and the shaggy Farrah Fawcett Majors-style sported by the other office girls, needed a damned good cut according to Linda, Paula’s older sister. Rowan loved her hair, winding it round his fingers and pulling her mouth towards him to be kissed.

  Hell, she just had to escape. Get away from this mundane life of living at home, working in this godforsaken office…

  ‘Your little visitor again?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  Angela Cartwright stood at the cloakroom door, arms folded. ‘Paula, you spend more time in this cloakroom than at your desk. You’re always in here. Now, either you have a chronic stomach upset, a bladder problem, or a permanent time of the month...’ she paused, embarrassed ‘… any of which I suggest you take to your GP to sort. Mr Gregory keeps looking to see where you are.’

  He would, Paula thought. He was always looking: dirty old man with his sweaty hands left too long on the girls’ shoulders, his too-friendly, insinuating questions as to what they’d been up to the night before. ‘Sorry, Angela, the heat, felt a bit queasy…’

  Angela’s eyes went involuntarily to Paula’s stomach and Paula wanted to laugh. Did Old Carthorse really think she’d let herself get pregnant? Trapped by some man and have to stay forever in this Northern backwater? Paula had a vision of the next forty years, typing bloody invoices until she retired. Not her. She was off. With Rowan, travelling once she’d saved up enough money. Morocco, Afghanistan, Australia – the whole bloody world. Just a few more months and she’d have enough money. Her Post Office savings were mounting. The thought, together with the knowledge that she’d planned a surprise for Rowan that coming evening, calmed her and she quickly dried her hands.

  ‘Sorry, Angela, I’m feeling much better now. You know, we really should have some sort of air conditioning in the office. Workers’ rights; Health and Safety and all that. Perhaps you should have a word with Mr Gregory. Get him to take it all the way up to Mr Crosland himself?’

  Paula smiled beatifically at her line manager, patted Angela’s arm and walked graciously past her, back to her desk.

  *

  ‘Where are you off?’ Norman Rhodes lit a Player’s Number 6 and drew in the first lungful of smoke, his appraising eyes following his younger daughter as she walked past him and up the path to the back gate.

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Well, I can see that. Out where? Out wi’ that long-haired hippy again?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Dad, get your decade right. Hippies are a bit 1960s, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, love.’ He paused, dragging on his cigarette once more before turning back to the spring onions he was planting. ‘But aren’t you a bit hot in that long dress? Our Linda went out wearing a nice little summer frock. Letting the air get to her legs.’

  ‘God, Dad, you sound like Mr Gregory at work. He’s always going on about our legs.’ Paula tutted her disapproval, cross that her father was once again comparing her to Linda: the good girl, the sister who passed her eleven-plus, went to grammar school, Leeds University and who was, at this moment ensconced with Anthony Trinder and his parents, discussing the seating plan for her wedding three months hence. Three months away! Jesus, there could be a nuclear war before then, wipe them all out. Ha! So much for the damned seating plan then if the mushroom cloud went up. And how could anyone named Linda hook themselves up to someone called Anthony Trinder? Linda Trinder, for heaven’s sake. Paula grinned to herself.

  And what Linda, old Tommy Trinder and his parents – and her own parents, come to that – didn’t know was that by the time Linda was walking down the aisle in Midhope Parish Church she, Paula, wouldn’t be behind her, bringing up the rear in salmon satin. No way, José. She’d be in Amsterdam with Rowan, about to board the Magic Bus that would take them to Turkey and on to Afghanistan and maybe even India. Paula was a little hazy on the actual geography, despite it being her best subject at the dreadful local secondary modern she’d been allocated after failing the eleven-plus, but Rowan was planning it for both of them and all she had to do was ensure she had the money to fund it.

  She knew her mum and dad would be furious – Linda perhaps less so – at her going AWOL just before the wedding, not to mention going off with a lad she wasn’t even e
ngaged to, but Rowan said they didn’t want to leave it too long. The winter months could be harsh through that part of the world and they needed a clear run to get to India.

  ‘What have you got in that basket?’ Dot’s head appeared at the open upstairs bathroom window where Maggy-from-number-ten was assisting in the four-monthly ritual of a home perm. Dot, an alien in pink curlers and white cotton wool ear protectors, leant out further, endangering not only herself but next door’s curmudgeon of a ginger mog, who was basking in the evening heat directly underneath.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean, nothing? It’s not drugs in there, is it?’

  ‘Mum, if I was into drugs I’d have hidden them in my knickers.’

  ‘Shhh. Shut up, Paula, all t’street’ll hear you.’

  Maggy-from-number-ten appeared beside Dot, straining to see her neighbour’s wayward daughter. ‘What’s she doing with that long purple dress on?’ Paula heard her mutter. ‘She’ll be a bit warm in that thing, won’t she?’

  ‘So, what’s in t’basket then, Paula? Don’t you go leaving it anywhere. I’ll need it for shopping tomorrow.’

  ‘Cheese.’ Paula shook the basket at Dot and Maggy.

  ‘Cheese? I hope you haven’t taken all of them Dairylea Triangles? I’ve just been on to t’corner shop for ’em. They’re for your dad’s pack-up tomorrow.’

  ‘Brie. It’s Brie. And olives and taramasalata…’ Paula was proud of her purchases. She’d had to go into Midhope to the fancy new delicatessen at dinnertime instead of eating her ham sandwich in the canteen with the rest of the girls from the office. The cheese had begun to hum a bit, festering in the heat under her desk all afternoon, but the Polish chap, who’d said no summer picnic was complete without a good piece of Brie, had told her it was best eaten runny. And, presumably smelly.

  ‘What’s taramasawotsit when it’s at home?’ Maggy-from-number-ten leant out even further from the bathroom window.

  ‘Isn’t it a spider, or one of them mucky dances they do somewhere foreign… you know, whirling around until they drop.’

  ‘Tarantula and tarantella,’ Paula tutted, heading once more for the gate.

  Norman leant on his spade, flicked his cigarette butt in the same direction he’d thrown a foolhardy slug that had had the temerity to linger in his summer cabbage minutes earlier, and launched into verse quoting, verbatim, lines from a certain poem.

  ‘Oh God, he’s off again…’ Dot retreated back into the bathroom, pulling Maggy with her.

  ‘What’s he on about?’ Maggy’s voice floated down the garden on the hot evening air, following Paula as she closed the gate behind her before taking the shortcut across Norman’s Meadow towards the bus stop.

  ‘Oh, it’s his favourite poet,’ came Dot’s reply. ‘Hilary Belloc or somebody. She’s very good.’

  9

  Beginning to Survive…

  Are you doing a Gloria?

  My mobile, yapping like a Yorkshire Terrier, announced the arrival of a text. I’d thought the noise amusing when, six months ago, on directing Tom to find me a new text alert, he’d come up with the dog sound. Now it just bloody irritated me but I’d not had the time or the technical knowledge to change it to something rather more soothing, or at least in keeping with my new status as head of Little Acorns. Karen Adams, who’d pulled up at the same time as me on that Friday morning of the first week of term, glanced with a pained expression towards the yapping but sailed into school without so much as a good morning, leaving me alone to reply to the message from Clare.

  Doing a Gloria???

  Yep, a Gloria.

  As in? Hunniford? Swanson? Sfood…?

  Sfood?

  Food, Gloria Sfood. Not had time for breakfast yet.

  You’re definitely doing a Gloria and surviving if you’re thinking of food rather than your broken heart.

  Ah good old Gloria Gaynor… Going into school. Will ring you in a minute.

  I breathed deeply as, phone still in hand, I pushed open the head’s office door with my knee and dumped briefcase, handbag plus a large plastic carrier bag onto the desk. This time last week I still had a husband, albeit a cheating bastard of a husband. Six days on, and not only was I husbandless but I was still in charge of Little Acorns. And had I survived? Well, if you call crawling into bed at the end of each day and alternatively sobbing and concocting lists of ways to torture Mark and Serpentina surviving, then I suppose I had.

  I glanced at the clock. Five minutes, I told myself. Five minutes for a quick catch-up with Clare and then down to the business of the day. I had told the staff I was initiating a weekly Friday morning briefing session before school and, ignoring Karen Adams’s pained expression and arched eyebrows, had suggested we meet at eight fifteen. I’d brought in muffins and croissants, my three cafetieres and some good Italian coffee as well as fresh orange juice for the non-coffee drinkers in order to soften the blow of yet another meeting when there was so much to do in the classrooms.

  I closed the office door and reached for one of Priscilla’s biscuits. I hadn’t been able to face breakfast with the kids and was still needing three visits to the bathroom before setting off each morning, and Hotel Chocolat biscuits were all my stomach could, well, stomach at seven thirty in the morning. That and huge mugs of tea: I’d abandoned coffee as it made me jittery.

  ‘Yes, I’m getting there,’ I sighed, once I’d connected with Clare.

  ‘Well done.’

  ‘Apart from thinking of ways to torture and humiliate the pair of them.’

  ‘I heard.’ Clare chortled.

  ‘What have you heard?’

  ‘Tina told me what you’d done to her car.’

  ‘Tina told you?’

  ‘She came round.’

  ‘She came round and you let her in? Whose side are you on?’ I could feel my pulse racing and my stomach going into nervous spasms once more.

  ‘Cassie,’ Clare spoke my name calmly. ‘Cassie, I’m not on anyone’s side.’

  ‘Well, you damned well should be.’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t do sides. Not since I was ten years old, at least.’

  I fought my initial reaction to slam down the phone and burst into tears. Think of Gloria, I told myself. And your briefing session with the staff in the next half-hour. Red eyes and washed away mascara would give Karen bloody Adams the upper hand and I wasn’t allowing her that.

  ‘OK, OK. And are you going to tell me what she said? Is she going to let me have my husband back?’

  ‘Cassie,’ Clare said gently, ‘I’m not ringing you for a gossip about what he said, she said. I’m ringing to see how you are. Now’s not the right time for a dissection of what’s gone on so far. Look, come out with me tomorrow night and we can chat.’

  ‘Out? Out where?’ The very thought of getting dolled up and going out filled me with dread. ‘Why don’t you come over to me and we can have a takeaway and a bottle of wine?’

  ‘No, can’t do that, sorry.’ Clare was firm. ‘I have to be in Leeds. I have my first hen party there and I need to see it’s all going well. Fiona’s coming with me. Look, I know the last thing you’ll want to do is get your glad rags on and come with us but I think you need some adult company after a week of five-year-olds.’

  ‘We do go up to eleven-year-olds here, you know.’ I was still cross that she’d been talking with the enemy.

  ‘Right, I’ll take it that’s a yes then? I’m working so I can’t drink, but no reason you and Fiona can’t enjoy yourselves.’

  ‘Hang on, I haven’t said yes yet… Hang on, Clare, there’s someone at the door…’

  ‘Get yourself round to Fiona’s around seven tomorrow evening. Get your lippy on, girl.’ And with that she hung up.

  ‘Mrs Beresford, have you a moment?’ Jean Barlow popped her head around the door. ‘I know we have our briefing…’ She breathed the word with reverence, adding, ‘Golly, it’s rather like working for MFI all of a sudden.’

  ‘MFI?’ I
stared at Jean who continued to beam round the door at me. ‘Oh, MI5, you mean?

  ‘Probably, dear. Now have you a minute to have a quick word with Mrs Miniauskiene?’ Jean pronounced it ‘Mini-Ow-Skinny’, separating the syllables into digestible chunks, before mouthing, ‘Although it’s never a quick minute with that one,’ at me as I walked over to the door.

  ‘Plis, is Deimante. I needs quick minutes wis you, Mrs Head.’

  ‘OK, come in, er, Diamante. What’s the problem?’

  ‘Is Deimante, not Diamante. I needs more works, plis. My man laids off from buildings. Alls we wants to do is toils and works and makes pounds. But my man, he on zero-hours contracts and we can’t make our ends meeting. Is sitting at home in fronts of TVs and eatings McDonald’s all days and getting big fats belly pot…’

  ‘Hang on, Diamante—’

  ‘Is Deimante…’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ I felt myself redden, trying to get the poor woman’s name correct. Deimante Miniauskiene was tiny, no more than four foot ten, but incredibly beautiful. I stared at the long curling black hair, at her very full mouth and dark eyes, which were now fixed on me.

  ‘Deimante, I’m – at the moment – in charge of a school. I don’t employ people round here.’

  ‘No, no, Mrs Head, I already works for school.’ She said it proudly, leaving the room for ten seconds before returning and brandishing a huge red and yellow lollipop almost as big as herself.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I apologised again. ‘I didn’t realise you’re Little Acorns’ lollipop lady.’

  ‘Sat’s right. And I is very very good one. Not one childrens knocked over with cars or buses at all. “Gets back on that bloody pavements,” I shouts if they tries to put even one leetle bits of toes into roads wisout my… wisout my…’ Deimante screwed up her face in concentration, ‘… so say.’ She beamed at me and then instantly frowned again. ‘Sree month I is doing job and now I gets stress at Gatis – is my man – not having buildings jobs and I gets gyp ’ere…’ She pointed to her head. ‘Leetle pains in heads all time. So, now I sends Gatis – is my man – to pharmacy for pain pill and he comes back and says, “Deimante, you as pain in heads but you as to put pills up your…”’ she paused, frowned. ‘He say, “You as to put pills up your back bottom.”’