A Village Affair

by Julie Houston

  *

  Wayne the Wasp Man put in an appearance around ten. I’d very cautiously gone into the garden underneath my (note my – no longer our) open bedroom window and, seeing an ominously noisy black cloud, bid a hasty retreat back inside to wait for his arrival, telling the kids to keep all doors and windows shut: we were under siege.

  ‘It’s the heat, you see, darling,’ Wayne said after an initial inspection of the enemy. ‘It’s been a very busy summer and I’m being called out to wasp nests every week, three or four a day on some days. And these aren’t small nests.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ I said, pouring him coffee. ‘I’ve been stung four times. The little sods pounced on me in my own bed.’

  ‘Well, I’m not surprised,’ he grinned, looking me up and down somewhat lasciviously. ‘Where’s Mr Beresford then? Is there one?’

  ‘Not at the moment,’ I said shortly, realising that I was still assuming Mark would be back, this ridiculous thing with Tina over and done with once they’d lived together properly for a while.

  Wayne looked me up and down again and I was glad I’d replaced my nightie with a pair of Tom’s jeans and his ‘MATHS MAKES ME PERSπRE’ sweatshirt. Being a foot shorter than Tom, I realised I probably looked like a nerdy gnome but, deprived of all access to my wardrobe, I’d had to compromise my Saturday morning outfit.

  ‘Well, your average wasp nest will have about eight thousand wasps in it,’ Wayne went on proudly, as if personally responsible for the size and population of the average wasp nest. His eyes came to rest on the slogan across my chest, clocking, I was sure, that I was bra-less. ‘But some of the bigger ones…’ he leered at my bosom, ‘…have up to fifteen thousand in them. The problem you have at the moment is that they’re still growing their colonies. Some of the hives I’ve had to deal with this week have split, with a new queen setting up a new colony nearby; if I’m called to one house, I’ll be called to another nearby pretty soon.’

  He was beginning to sound like David Attenborough on speed and I was glad when Freya thumped down the stairs demanding her netball kit.

  ‘Netball kit? On a Saturday morning?’

  ‘Mum, I’m off on the new season team-building weekend with Miss Lewis.’

  Hell, I’d totally and utterly forgotten.

  ‘… And then staying over at Gabby’s tonight. You’d totally forgotten all about it, hadn’t you?’ Freya tutted accusingly, echoing my thoughts.

  ‘Not at all,’ I said loftily. ‘Er, where is it exactly you need to be?’

  Freya tutted again. ‘At school in…’ she looked at the kitchen clock ‘… an hour with a packed lunch and clean kit.’ Freya looked around the kitchen as if expecting a pile of ham and beetroot sandwiches – her favourite at the moment – and a clean and beautifully ironed and folded netball kit to float miraculously around the kitchen before packing themselves into her waiting sports bag. As this was Tower View Avenue on a wasp-infested Saturday morning and not a set from a Disney film with an accompanying fairy godmother bent on turning the bowl of manky bananas into a packed lunch from the Ritz, I turned on my daughter.

  ‘Freya, where is your netball kit?’

  ‘I gave it to you to wash last night. You said you’d do it before you went to bed.’

  Had I? I went into the utility where a sweaty pile of Freya’s socks, aertex and slogan-emblazed hoodie gazed up at me just as accusingly as my own carelessly abandoned clothes had a couple of hours earlier. Shit. I shook out the garments, giving each a perfunctory sniff before grabbing the iron and board. They’d have to make do with a quick iron: no time to wash and dry them. If Mark were here, he’d be making sandwiches while I ironed. Correction. If Mark were here, I wouldn’t have had the need for copious amounts of alcohol to blot out my despair, and the newly washed and ironed netball kit would already be sitting smugly in Freya’s kit bag with a nutritious packed lunch ready and waiting in the fridge. Bastard. I shook the iron furiously at an imaginary Mark, yelling ‘Bastard’ just as Wayne the Wasp Man appeared once more.

  ‘Hey, don’t shoot the messenger, I’m only here to kill wasps.’

  ‘Not you,’ I snapped crossly. ‘Freya, start getting the bread and ham out of the fridge yourself. You’re not helpless.’

  ‘There’s nothing in the fridge,’ she yelled back. ‘Apart from half a bottle of gin and an empty bottle of tonic. What sort of mother are you?’

  ‘You’re a tramp, a drunk and an unfit mother,’ Wayne the Wasp Man assured me while assuming a lazy Texan drawl. Freya and I both stared at him. ‘You know,’ he said, reverting to his normal Yorkshire vernacular, ‘what JR said to Sue Ellen in Dallas?’

  I turned back to the iron. ‘You’re far too young to remember Dallas. My granddad Norman loved it – never missed an episode.’

  ‘Well of course I missed the original; I bet I’m younger than you.’ He peered at my puffy face and, embarrassed, I hid my newly acquired stress wrinkles in the ironing of Freya’s tracksuit bottoms. ‘However,’ he went on proudly, ‘I happen to be the founder member of the Midhope Dallas Club.’

  ‘Freya, we’ll grab a sandwich from Tesco on the way to school,’ I shouted towards the kitchen. ‘Go and get your overnight bag packed and ready. Don’t forget your toothbrush and a clean pair of pants… The what?’ I looked across at Wayne, who was leaning against the door finishing a second mug of coffee. ‘The Dallas what…?’

  ‘The Midhope Dallas Club. We meet once a month in one of the back rooms in the town hall. We’re up to thirty members when we have a full complement.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Do you fancy it?’

  ‘Fancy what?’

  ‘Dallas in Midhope. We dress in the gear – you know Stetsons for men – and watch old episodes and discuss the roles. Sometimes we actually get hold of the scripts and act them out. You could wear a long blond wig and come as the Poisoned Dwarf.’ Wayne nodded towards Tom’s jeans, which had come unrolled and were now trailing on the kitchen floor as I finished ironing Freya’s kit.

  ‘Right,’ I said again. ‘Look I’m going to have to go. Got to get my daughter to the other side of Midhope. How much do I owe you?’

  ‘I’ll give you a ring then, shall I? I’ve got your number. See if you fancy coming to Dallas?’

  *

  Saturday afternoon and I was by myself in the house. Wayne the Wasp Man had finished murdering insects before I arrived back home, Tom had disappeared and Freya wouldn’t be back until the following evening. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I knew I should be gathering the piles of dirty laundry that had accumulated over the week, as well as running the hoover over the bedroom floor that still showed signs of broken bodies, legs and wings following Wayne’s triumphant victory in the Battle of the Wasps. Instead, I decided to get to grips with the lawn mower and attack the grass.

  It wasn’t half as difficult as I’d imagined. Nursing just one broken fingernail, I was soon tootling along with the mower, enjoying the combined smell of petrol and grass and soothed by the horizontal stripes appearing in my wake. Once in a rhythmic stride, my mind reviewed the events of the past week. I felt as though I’d lived a whole extra life in the seven days just gone. As I walked and mowed, my mind wandered: from the different ways I could make myself so gorgeous Mark would have to come back begging forgiveness, to rehearsing calm – but cutting – responses to Karen Adams’ constant undermining of my authority, and then on to mulling over the meeting with Edward and Xavier Bamforth the previous afternoon. The rolls of barbed wire I’d come across in the fields between Tower View Avenue and school, as well as the building plans already put forward for Norman’s Meadow were, I realised, just the tip of the iceberg of the Bamforths’ plans to take over the world. Well, Westenbury at least.

  Westenbury’s history was well documented. The best way, apparently, for William the Conqueror to undermine the militant rough necks Oop North was to apportion great rafts of land to his barons with the instructions that the land was theirs
as long as they kept the local pesky peasants under control. Saxon manors were given over to William’s supporters and one Gilbert De L’Ouest had the unenviable task of quashing any Saxon rebellion in these parts. The area soon became known as Westenbury, the manor house in which David Henderson and his wife now lived being built on the footprint of the original Saxon one. The village itself had grown and spread, and bits given, or sold off, to supporters of different monarchs. And then the Bamforths had come along in the fifties, buying much of the land and investing some of the huge profits their engineering company had made from its manufacture and provision of engines and gears needed for tanks and planes during the last war.

  Now, it seemed, they were determined to make even more money by covering it all in concrete. And a bloody ski slope, for heaven’s sake! I realised I’d speeded up my mowing as I became more and more incensed at the thought of Norman’s Meadow being turned into something so, so irrelevant and so ridiculous, the lawn beginning to look decidedly scalped as I took out my fury over Mark’s defection, as well as the Bamforths riding roughshod over the village, on the usually perfect lawn.

  Lost in thought and the soothing repetitive hum, push and pull of the lawn mower, I didn’t see Mark’s mother until she was standing beside me, tottering on the leather court shoes she habitually wore whatever the occasion and waving her arms like some demented windmill in order to get my attention. Mark’s mother, Mavis – or ‘M to the power of 3’ as Tom, ever the mathematician, had once dubbed her – was even shorter than me but a powerhouse of matriarchal intensity. She’d seen off Mark’s father years ago to some strange condition that was rarely mentioned, and now spent her days dusting her ridiculously large collection of Lladró figures – the grinning girl on a swing was particularly mawkish – nodding in agreement with what she read in the Express and hoovering up the dysfunctional lives of soap characters as if she knew them personally.

  By the look on her face I could see she now had her own personal soap to involve herself in, and I swore under my breath as I cut the power on the lawn mower.

  ‘I’ve heard, Cassandra,’ Mavis squawked. ‘What’s going on? What’s happened to make Mark do such a thing? Mildred and Stanley next door have just been round to tell me…’ She drew breath for three seconds, fanning the warm air around her before launching once more. ‘And with that nice friend of yours, Tina?’

  ‘Come and sit down, Mavis. You look a bit hot. I’ll get you a glass of water.’

  ‘Tea, dear, please. Yorkshire – none of those teas your mother drinks – milk and plenty of sugar; I need it for the shock.’ Mavis followed me back into the house and sat in the kitchen, fanning herself with one of Tom’s maths folders while we waited for the kettle to boil.

  ‘I think it’s Mark you should be asking, not me,’ I said as I handed Mavis her tea.

  ‘I’ve tried ringing him but he’s not answering. I’ve been ringing for ages. Where is he?’

  ‘With Tina, I presume.’ Just saying those four little words made me want to cry.

  ‘But what happened? Why? Why would he do such a thing? Had you been arguing?’ Mavis put her head to one side like a little bird, her beady eyes searching my face for clues.

  ‘Mavis, it’s as much a shock to me as you.’

  Mavis leant forward. ‘Was it the sex, dear?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Mavis sniffed. ‘Men have different needs to women, I always found. Men, if they’re not to stray, need their tea on the table every night and their… you know, their rights when they want them. We just have to put up with it.’ She sniffed again. ‘Mind you, my grandmother never did. She kept a claw hammer under her side of the bed, and any nonsense…’ She trailed off.

  ‘What…?’ I giggled, but Mavis wasn’t listening.

  ‘This new job of yours, dear. Is it taking up too much time? Are you not home to give Mark his tea? I never worked, you know. My job was to look after the house and Barry’s was to bring home the bacon.’

  ‘Good job he wasn’t Jewish then,’ I muttered, but Mavis, humourless as always, simply frowned and carried on.

  ‘It’s all right having a cleaner to do your housework and buying meals from M&S, you know, but it’s no substitute for the real thing. Maybe Mark was feeling in need of a home-made steak and kidney?’

  ‘The only thing Mark was feeling was another woman, Mavis,’ I snapped angrily. She was, I realised, blaming me for Mark’s defection.

  ‘Or a Battenburg cake? Mark could never get enough of my Battenburg,’ she said smugly.

  ‘Look, Mavis, I know this is a huge shock, but I’m hoping it will all right itself. And if it doesn’t… well, I suppose I’ll be seeing a solicitor.’

  ‘Oh, not yet, not yet, Cassandra,’ Mavis pleaded. ‘Give it time to sort itself out. Mark will be back, I know he will. I know my son. He wouldn’t intentionally hurt you or the children. And you know, there’s never been any divorce in our family. It’s not good, all this swapping of partners and sleeping around. Look what happened to Gail.’

  ‘Gail?’

  ‘In Coronation Street.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, Mavis, I’m really not interested. I need to finish cutting the grass.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be having to do that. It’s a man’s job.’ Mavis patted my arm sympathetically.

  ‘I’m actually enjoying the exercise,’ I smiled. ‘Look,’ I added, trying to get rid of her, but feeling guilty at doing so; she was Mark’s mother after all, ‘you try and contact Mark and find out what he’s up to and then report back to me. I need all the help I can get.’

  *

  An hour later and sweating profusely with the exercise and the warm afternoon sunshine, I finally cut the engine on the mower just as a large silver car pulled into the drive. My heart lurched. Mark. And then lurched again as I realised the car was nothing like Mark’s.

  Simon, Tina’s husband, walked slowly down from the drive, where he’d parked his car in a somewhat haphazard fashion, and across the garden towards me. Over the years, Mark and I had pinched more and more of the field onto which our house backed, extending the lawn and creating a vegetable garden. Even from the distance where I stood, almost in the field, waiting for Simon to join me, I could see he was upset.

  Simon had rung me on numerous occasions over the past week, always apologising profusely for outing Mark and Tina but, by the end of the phone call, threatening the pair of them with every punishment and torture going before breaking down in tears. He’d never been my favourite person but, because he was Tina’s husband, both Mark and I had put up with, rather than welcomed, him on all the social occasions we had come together for.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Cassie, I’m so sorry…’ Simon joined me where I was leaning against the fence. ‘I shouldn’t have done it, Cassie, shouldn’t have done it. It would have all blown over.’ Simon wiped his eyes beneath his Ray-bans.

  I’d suddenly had enough of all this: this sense of guilt that we’d done something wrong. That because of our behaviour – whether it was me and the sodding ninety-degree-angled cushions or Simon and his nose-picking and bad breath: yes, he was guilty on both counts – we were the ones to blame.

  ‘Bollocks, Simon. They were having an affair for two years. Two years. It wouldn’t have blown over; it would have carried on. And do you know what, Simon, it probably actually hurts just as much that I’ve lost my best friend as well as my husband. Women shouldn’t do this to one another. Best friends certainly shouldn’t.’

  ‘I know, I know, but I can’t bear it, Cassie…’

  ‘Well, at the moment, you’ll just have to.’ I felt as if I was talking to a naughty child. I’d spent hours I could ill afford on the phone during the past week, reassuring him, telling him it wasn’t his fault, agreeing that if we just sat tight the whole thing would blow over and Mark and Tina would come back to their rightful owners. Simon took my hand and, as alcohol fumes wafted in my direction, I realised he’d been drinking. ‘You shouldn’t be drivin
g, Simon.’

  ‘Do you think I could stay here?’

  ‘Here?’ I had awful visions of him moving in, unpacking his suitcases, arranging his fancy leather brogues where Mark’s trainers, until last week, had previously sat. You read all the time about the deserted partners of adulterous couples themselves getting together. I shuddered at the very thought.

  ‘I could take you out for something to eat – we could walk into the village, have a couple of drinks; discuss our plan of action.’

  ‘Plan of action?’

  ‘You know, decide my next move on getting Tina back. And Mark, of course. I just don’t want to be myself at the moment.’

  ‘Where’s Jack?’

  ‘He’s seventeen. What seventeen-year-old wants to be in on a Saturday night with his dad?’

  ‘How is he? Is he coping with it all?’

  ‘Oh, he’s fine. He’s off out with his college mates. Plugged into his music, smoking dope, probably, and shagging birds. You know what boys are like.’

  ‘I don’t think you should just assume he’s OK. I mean, on the surface, my two seem to have been pretty accepting of what’s happened. Freya is putting all her energy into netball: I’d hate to be Goal Defence on any opposing team Freya’s up against at the moment…’ I laughed, attempting levity to lighten the tension I could sense as Simon talked about his son. ‘… She’ll be taking out all her fury over Mark’s defection on the opposition. And, of course, Tom has had the advantage – or disadvantage, I suppose – of knowing for months what’s been going on.’

  ‘Disadvantage, I suppose,’ Simon said, taking my hand again.

  I withdrew it from his rather sweaty one and folded my arms tightly across my chest. ‘I’m still not sure what Tom was doing over in The Blue Ball that night he saw the pair of them together.’

  ‘Don’t you? Really?’

  I turned to look at Simon. He had a slight smile on his face and I realised I hadn’t really liked him for years. If ever.