A Village Affair

by Julie Houston

  ‘OK for us to try again, I mean. For the sake of the children, Cass?’ he pleaded, trying to take my hand again. ‘I know I’ve let you down…’

  ‘Let me down? Forgetting to take the bins out is letting me down. Not remembering my favourite chocolate biscuits on a shopping trip to Tesco is letting me down. Deceiving me for two years with my best friend and then leaving me on the eve of my starting a brand-new job is not fucking well letting me down.’ I glared at him as my rant finally ran out of breath.

  He looked up at me with puppy-dog eyes and managed to squeeze out a small tear.

  I watched it move down his face and fizzle out somewhere around his nose. God, he couldn’t even produce proper tears. ‘Actually, Mark, it really isn’t OK.’

  ‘But it can be, Cass, I promise. I can make it all better. Just give me time. Trust me…’ Mark stood up, trying to take me in his arms.

  Trust him? I almost laughed at that. ‘I suggest you go to your mum’s, if you’ve nowhere else to go tonight. I really don’t want you here.’

  ‘But I don’t want to go to my mother’s…’ Mark’s eyes narrowed and I saw, perhaps for the first time, the spoilt little boy who’d always wanted, and usually managed, to get his own way. He folded his arms and put his head to one side. ‘So, it’s true then?’

  ‘What’s true?’

  ‘You’re seeing someone.’

  ‘And where have you heard that little snippet of gossip?’

  ‘Well, that didn’t take you long, did it?’ Mark almost sneered.

  ‘Mark, I want you to go. I don’t care where you go, but I don’t want you here.’

  Mark’s voice went back to its former pleading. ‘Cass, come on, you can’t throw almost twenty years down the drain for some holiday romance… And it is all over with Tina, honestly it is. I’ve come back to you.’

  ‘OK, that’s it. I want you to go back down those stairs the way you came up them, take your cases and go. Really, Mark, go.’

  ‘So, what’s Xavier Bamforth got then, besides a ton of money and a very gorgeous wife? You do know he’s married?’

  ‘Mark, I’m assuming Clare told Tina about me and Xavier Bamforth…’ When he didn’t say anything, I just shook my head. ‘Yes, well, what Clare wouldn’t have said, because she doesn’t actually know, is that Xavier…’ I stopped myself. This had nothing to do with anyone but Xavier and me.

  ‘Xavier is what?’ Mark narrowed his eyes again.

  ‘Nothing. Mark, I’m not with Xavier Bamforth…’ Just saying the words out loud made me want to cry. But knowing I couldn’t have Xavier, and never could have, didn’t make me want to have Mark instead. Just the opposite in fact ‘… And, do you know, you did me a big favour going off and leaving me. I actually quite like myself now. I’m not sure I ever really did before.’

  ‘But, Cass, I…’ Mark was wheedling again. ‘I like you, I love you.’

  ‘Please, Mark, go. I really, really don’t want you here.’

  *

  An hour after Mark had left, banging the door behind him, I was halfway through a bottle of red and trying to summon up the energy to clear up the mess in the kitchen when Mark’s mum, Mavis, appeared on the doorstep, rain-mate covering her newly set hair. She’d obviously spent the afternoon at the hairdresser’s as she did every Friday.

  ‘I thought it best I actually come round, Cassandra, rather than try to phone you.’ Mavis shook her rain-mate at me like a wet dog. ‘It’s tipping it down out there. It’s not a night to be driving, you know.’ She looked at me accusingly as if it were my fault she’d had to come out.

  ‘I suppose Mark sent you?’

  ‘Well, you did throw him out into the street, Cassandra. This is still his home, you know.’

  ‘I think he gave up that right when he started sleeping with my best friend. Two years, Mavis…’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure it wouldn’t have been that long,’ Mavis sniffed. ‘Things always seem worse than they actually are. Now, do you not think it’s time you forgave him? You know, forgive and forget, start again?’

  I looked at my mother-in-law and shook my head. I was feeling a bit woozy from the alcohol. ‘I’m sorry, Mavis. It wouldn’t work. You see, well, the thing is, I’m actually in love with someone else.’

  Mavis stared at me, a red flush creeping up her neck and face. ‘In love?’ she stuttered. ‘In love? Who with?’

  ‘It really doesn’t matter who with,’ I said, tears rolling down my cheeks. ‘It’s all over now and I can’t have him…’

  ‘Well, you kept that quiet, lady.’ She glared at me. ‘Married, I suppose?’

  ‘It’s irrelevant.’

  ‘So, let Mark come back then,’ she said eagerly. ‘You’ve both done wrong, so you’re quits. Forgive each other.’

  ‘No, Mavis, at the moment, no.’

  Mavis narrowed her eyes. ‘Well, if not for you, for Tom’s sake.’

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘Well, hasn’t he turned queer? Mark said—’

  ‘Queer? Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mavis…’

  ‘If his father were back, a manly influence, then he’d soon start to forget these ridiculous notions of being… gay.’ She almost spat the word. ‘Gay in my day meant happy, jolly, not, not… well, you know.’

  ‘Mavis, I’m going to ask you to go home now,’ I said slowly, summoning all my strength to speak calmly when I really wanted to yell. ‘I’m not taking Mark back…’

  When Mavis opened her mouth to remonstrate, I held up my hand like Deimante in lollypop lady mode. ‘I mean it, Mavis, go. Go back to Mark, let him stay with you, feed him some nice steak and kidney and a big slice of Battenburg.’

  Without another word, I almost manhandled her to the front door, locked up and went upstairs to bed.

  *

  It snowed in that first week of December, huge wet clumps that left rivers of grey slush in the playground too slippery for the kids to play out on. If I’d had my way I’d have had the lot of them outside in their coats, hats and wellies, enjoying the fresh air and making futile attempts to build snowmen. But this was today, not some playground of latter years where children were allowed to slip, slide and fall on their backsides without Ofsted investigating or parents ringing in to complain that their precious offspring had arrived home with wet socks or tights.

  The Friday lunchtime, after a full week of wet playtimes, had been particularly trying. Deimante, obviously fed up to the back teeth with a couple of spoiled kids who daily turned their noses up at the lunch choice, had turned on them telling them, ‘Eats, you eats this lovely grubs,’ before slapping huge spoonfuls of watery cabbage onto their plates and, in doing so, reducing the recipients to tears.

  There’d been bumped heads, fallings-out, fights and a whole queue of kids standing waiting outside my office for various misdemeanours. I’d had enough. With twenty minutes still to go until the end of the KS2 lunch break, I instructed the lunchtime supervisors to round up the whole junior school and bring the kids into the hall. They trooped in expecting a bollocking, but instead of the little ones at the front and the Year Six children slouching against the wall at the back – which every eleven-year-old saw as his or her rite of passage – I teamed up each older child with a much younger one, slotted in my special CD, turned up the volume to high and we were off.

  We started with Pharrell Williams’ ‘Happy’ – and I defy anyone, nine or ninety, not to just have to move to that – and went through Maroon 5’s ‘Moves Like Jagger’, Wham!’s ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go Go’ and Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’, finishing with that chap – I never know his name – singing ‘Gangnam Style.’

  We were all, including Grace and Deimante – who on hearing the music belting out had come into the hall and joined in – bouncing and boogying like there was no tomorrow, sweaty and totally exhausted. With five minutes to go until the end of lunch break, I brought the kids to a standstill and sat them down, legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed and took them through some calmi
ng deep breathing with the dire warning that I would be visiting every single class during the afternoon’s lessons. They were to be calm and productive or I would want to know why.

  ‘That were right good, Miss,’ Chelsea Simpson, the most formidable member of Year 6, beamed as the children led off, in silence, to their respective classrooms.

  I smiled back, pleased. ‘Good, I’m glad you enjoyed it, Chelsea.’

  ‘Yeah, it were almost as good as when we had sex with Mrs Stevenson in the dining room.’

  I looked in total horror at Grace, who was at my side helping supervise the last of the children out of the hall.

  ‘Sex education,’ Grace giggled when she saw my face. ‘If you remember, I stood in for Debs when she was off and had to teach Y6 in the dining room because all the electricity was off in their classroom.’

  ‘Jesus, Grace, I thought I was going to have to call in the police.’

  ‘I should go and cool down, if I were you,’ Grace laughed, following her class back to their classroom. ‘You look a bit hot under the collar.’

  *

  Never mind hot under the collar: dressed for the snow in black polo-necked sweater, woolly tights and boots, I was hot everywhere, sweating from boogying on down with one hundred and twenty, seven to eleven-year-olds. Thankful that I had no appointments or visitors that afternoon and that my teaching commitment was down to appearing, unannounced, on inspection of behaviour duty, I tried to run a comb through my sweating hair and flapped my armpits in an attempt to cool down a bit. I longed to take off my woollen jumper and discard my boots and tights but knew, if David Henderson or any other of the governors put in a surprise appearance, it wouldn’t look too good. Smiling at the thought of greeting David Henderson in my greying Marks and Sparks bra, I settled at my desk to go through the day’s mail.

  Jean rang through after ten minutes. ‘Mrs Beresford, there’s Mr Bamforth to see you.’

  My heart went into overdrive. Which Bamforth? Xavier? But he had made it perfectly clear he was staying out of the way. Anyway, it was obviously Edward Bamforth. He was notorious for dropping in unannounced, bent on hassling me to see his point of view over the fields and the idea of a new Trust school.

  I opened my office door. There was no sign of Edward or Xavier. A tall dark-haired woman sat in the chair outside Jean’s reception office. I racked my brains: did I have an appointment with a mother I’d forgotten about and, if so, why hadn’t Jean rung her through?

  ‘Ah, Mrs Beresford?’ The woman stood, looking me up and down with such close scrutiny I began to feel embarrassed. Was I still such a sweaty mess? I put a hand to my hair, running my fingers through it in order to achieve some semblance of authority rather than the obvious scarecrow. ‘You look rather hot.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been dancing,’ I smiled. ‘Trying to exhaust a hundred cooped-up kids before afternoon lessons… Oh, is it snowing again?’

  The woman brushed leather-clad fingers across the shoulders of her very elegant camel trench coat. ‘Just a little.’

  ‘I’m sorry, do you have an appointment? I didn’t catch your name? It’s just that Jean, our secretary, told me someone else was waiting…’ I glanced through the open door of reception. ‘Jean, I thought you said Mr Bamforth was here?’

  ‘Mrs Bamforth,’ Jean said knowingly, raising her eyebrows at me.

  ‘Mrs Bamforth? Oh…’ I was momentarily lost for words.

  The woman stood. ‘Brigitte Bamforth.’ She held out a gloved hand. She spoke perfect English apart from an occasional vowel inflection that gave away that she was French-born. ‘I do ’ope this isn’t inconvenient, Mrs Beresford?’ She glanced across at Jean, who was taking it all in while on the pretext of sorting through the box of lost property outside her office. ‘Can we speak somewhere private?’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, once we were sitting in my office. ‘I really thought Jean said Mr Bamforth. I was expecting your husband.’

  ‘Or my son?’ She looked across at me with her very dark eyes and I reddened, feeling as though I were being judged. I did hope she wasn’t here to make a fuss, demanding to know where Paula lived. ‘Mrs Beresford, I know all about you. I know you are my husband’s love child. I also know—’

  There was a knock on the door and, before I could switch on the red Engaged light, seven-year-old Ibrahim Assaf had opened the door and come straight in.

  ‘Mrs Beresford,’ he said tearfully, ‘Miss Crawford said I had to come straight to you to tell you.’ Great fat tears rolled down his face.

  ‘Tell me what, Ibrahim?’

  ‘I said that word.’

  ‘Which word?’ I glanced across at Brigitte Bamforth, who was looking amused.

  ‘You know, that word… It begins with F…’

  ‘Right, OK, Ibrahim. You can see I’ve a visitor here…’

  ‘… And I were working right hard like you said we had to. I’d even got on to doing the maths extension problem, and that’s really hard.’

  ‘Right, OK…’

  ‘… And Miss Crawford patted me on my head and said, “I bet that were hard, Ibrahim, well done.” And I said, “It was, Miss, it were fucking hard…” It just popped out, Mrs Beresford. I were concentrating so hard on it, it just popped out. You won’t tell me dad, will you?’

  ‘Ibrahim, I want you to go back to Miss Crawford. Tell her I’ve seen you, I’ve had a word and I know that that very rude word will never pop out again, either here or at home. And if it does, if it does, Ibrahim, your dad will be popping into my office quicker than you can do that extension problem.’

  Ibrahim wiped his face with his sleeve. ‘I promise, Miss.’

  ‘Sorry about that,’ I apologised as the door closed behind Ibrahim, and I immediately switched the green Come In light to red.

  Brigitte smiled for the first time. She was a very beautiful woman and I could see why Edward had fallen for her on his trip to Paris: she must have been stunning in her twenties. ‘Oh, don’t worry. I always wanted to be a teacher…’ She stopped smiling and was instantly serious once more. ‘Mrs Beresford, I was with Xavier last night. I’ve only just returned from staying with my mother in Paris. Xavier is in a bit of a state…’ She sighed. ‘It is very difficult when you fall in love but you know you cannot be with that person for whatever reason…’

  ‘Ophelia?’ I asked, praying she meant me.

  ‘Ophelia?’ She glared at me. ‘Non, non. Not Ophelia. I’m very glad she appears to be out of his life. You must know ’e’s in love with you?’

  ‘Well, yes…’

  She stared at me. ‘I need to know. Do you feel the same about Xavier?’

  ‘Well, yes, but—’

  ‘Never mind the buts, Mrs Beresford. Do you love my son?’

  ‘Yes, but—’ Did this woman not realise the problem?

  ‘Does ’e ’ave your ’eart?’ Brigitte leaned forward and took my hand, her accent becoming more pronounced in her earnestness to know whether I was serious about Xavier or not.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, wanting to cry. ‘’E ’as my ’eart.’

  Brigitte sighed and sat back in her chair but never once took those dark eyes from my face. ‘I was eighteen, Cassandra – may I call you Cassandra?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I know what it’s like to be in love. When I was eighteen I fell in love with my father’s friend.’

  ‘Your father’s friend?’ I stared at her. ‘Gosh, he must have been quite a bit older than you?’

  ‘’E was. I was eighteen and ’e was forty-five and ’e was about to be recommended to the Executive…’

  ‘The Executive?’ I wasn’t particularly up on the French political system but I knew it was something to do with being in government. ‘The French Executive?’

  ‘But of course. Which other Executive?’ Brigitte tutted. ‘Monsieur Barre, the prime minister back in 1976, was in the process of recommending ’im to the Executive and President Giscard d’Estaing. You know, from the National Assembly?’ S
he frowned. ‘Unfortunately, as well as being my father’s best friend and in a very delicate political situation, ’e also had a wife and three children.’

  ‘That must have been hard for you.’ I smiled in sympathy.

  ‘It was. In the words of your little friend, it was “fucking hard”. Fucking impossible actually.’ She smiled at what she’d just said and then went on, ‘If I’d revealed that I was pregnant, at eighteen, to a married minister in the government, it would have ruined his career.’

  ‘You were pregnant? Goodness, that could have brought down the government.’ I was pretty hazy about French politics but could imagine the sensation if, for example, Tony Blair or David Cameron was revealed to have got his best mate’s teenaged daughter pregnant just as they were heading for Downing Street.

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘So?’ I asked. ‘What? You had a termination?’

  ‘This was 1976,’ she said, never taking her eyes off me. ‘And France. We weren’t quite as liberal-thinking as England back then. In fact, a certain Marie-Louise Giraud was actually sent to the guillotine as late as 1943 for having an abortion. Termination was not adopted permanently in France until 1979…’

  ‘So?’ I felt my heart begin to pound. I knew where she was going with all this.

  ‘So, I slept with Edward Bamforth when he came to stay at my parents’ house, knowing I was pregnant with another man’s child…’

  I felt a strange buzzing in my ears and broke out into a sweat at what Brigitte had just said.

  ‘Cassandra, I have never revealed to anyone, even to my sister whom I adore, what I’m now telling you. This is why I need to know that you love Xavier – that you want to be with him – because if you don’t, I will leave here and my secret goes not only out of this room with me, but…’ Brigitte gave a Gallic shrug and stared intently at me, ‘… but also to my grave.’

  ‘How can you be sure Xavier isn’t Edward’s son?’ I asked. God, here we go again, I thought.

  ‘But I’ve explained to you. I knew I was a couple of weeks pregnant when Edward came to stay with us. It was very easy… Xavier was a couple of weeks premature, shall we say?’