The Magnificent Mrs Mayhew

by Milly Johnson

  Edward waved over to Sophie. So Rebecca the redhead had not supplanted the vapid Davina then. Sophie found herself a little disappointed by that. Rebecca looked infinitely more fun and a much better match for a genial personality such as Edward’s.

  The gong sounded for them to go through to the dining room. Thank goodness there were place names because without them, everyone would have rushed to be seated near John at the top end of the table. Sophie was lumbered with germ-free Giles and Victoria, who didn’t eat the lobster starter as she feared her tablets were exacerbating a sensitivity to seafood. Giles talked to Edward at his other side, Victoria chattered to Davina. Sophie thought that if she walked off and disappeared, no one would even notice she had gone.

  ‘Elspeth Bryant is moving house, did I tell you?’ Alice Calladine called down to the bottom of the table.

  ‘Who?’ asked Giles.

  ‘Neighbours on the left,’ Annabella explained. ‘The house has been in the family for three generations. Not as large as Elm Manor but still a substantial pile. I thought the Bryants would only move from there if they were carried out in a box.’

  ‘Where are they going to live, Mother?’ asked Victoria.

  ‘Phoenix, Arizona. They have an estate there and prefer the weather. Morris was telling me they’ve used a new estate agent who usually deals with sales of houses for Saudi royalty. Very good by all accounts. Excellent service.’

  ‘Haven’t you ever thought about selling up, Angus? Moving to somewhere smaller?’ asked Robert, the middle Mayhew brother.

  ‘Whatever for?’ said Angus. ‘Elm Manor is perfectly manageable.’

  ‘Perfectly manageable when you have three live-in staff, Daddy,’ chortled Victoria.

  ‘Edward always wanted to be an estate agent,’ said Robert, with a laugh that bordered on the derisive. He was the biggest snob in the Mayhew stable and, considering the competition he had, that was quite an achievement.

  ‘Oh yes, you did, didn’t you, Eddie?’ said John. ‘I’d forgotten about that. Used to sell us Lego houses complete with the deeds.’

  ‘Aren’t you a sort of estate agent with your “property portfolio”, John?’ Edward put to his brother.

  ‘Hardly the same, Edward,’ said their father. ‘You can’t equate a few terraced houses with the sort of property your brother buys and sells.’

  Robert snorted at the mere suggestion that John, in Edward’s eyes, was a glorified estate agent.

  ‘I’d love to have a job looking around houses. They fascinate me,’ said Sophie, sensing the start of a familiar ‘Edward-goading’ episode and moving to nip it in the bud. She loathed bullies and Robert Mayhew was a bully of the highest order when he was allowed to be.

  ‘Me too, Sophie,’ agreed Edward, smiling at her. Out of all of the people around this table, Sophie felt that Edward was by far the kindest. He was the one who had always tried to include her, bring her into conversation. He considered other people. Probably that was why he seemed to be at the bottom of the family pecking order.

  Beef Wellington for the main course, the beef served too rare for Sophie to stomach.

  ‘You’re not eating much, Sophie,’ Edward observed.

  ‘She can’t eat, she’d lose her figure,’ said Victoria, with a habitual wry twist to her mouth. Victoria had never quite forgiven Sophie for being beautiful so if any opportunity presented itself to stick a pin in her sister’s side, she grabbed it.

  ‘I do eat and well,’ replied Sophie. ‘But I run. You should try it. It’ll release some endorphins in your system, then you wouldn’t need all those tablets.’

  Victoria raised her eyebrows at her youngest sister.

  ‘Thank you, Doctor Mayhew. Running can’t cure the storm happening in my brain.’

  Maybe not, but it would reduce the size of your enormous bottom, Sophie wanted to say but it would have been unkind, so she didn’t.

  At the other end of the table, her father and father-in-law were guffawing loudly at something John had said. He was entertaining them royally, but then he was a brilliant raconteur. As prime minister, he would hold everyone in the palm of his hand, she was sure. Even the monarch. He was an amazing orator, he’d have gone down a smash in the Roman senate.

  ‘How’s Stanley doing, Annabella?’ Victoria asked after her nephew. ‘Settled yet?’

  ‘Not really, but he will. Can’t soft-soap them at that age.’

  Sophie opened her mouth to say something to that but Davina dived into the conversation first.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘My son’s at boarding school,’ said Annabella. ‘Can’t settle. Being a bit of a cry-baby.’

  ‘He’ll adjust,’ said Robert. ‘We did.’

  ‘Precisely,’ agreed Davina. ‘They need to learn.’

  ‘We’ve told him no phone calls at weekends until he pulls himself together,’ Annabella went on.

  ‘He’s seven years old. Of course he’s going to cry. He’s virtually a baby.’ Sophie stabbed at her horrible beef. She’d asked Margaret to make sure it wasn’t too rare and if anything it was even more rare than she’d expected. It was almost mooing.

  ‘He isn’t a baby at seven, Sophie,’ countered Annabella. ‘We had to go away to be educated and it didn’t do us any harm.’

  ‘We didn’t go until we were eight, if you remember,’ Sophie threw back. ‘And as I recall hearing, you cried so much you hospitalised yourself, nearly choking to death.’

  Oh, she really shouldn’t have said that, judging from how Annabella coloured and pursed her lips. Annabella did not like to be corrected or reminded of her shortcomings.

  ‘What’s happening down at that end of the table?’ called John.

  ‘Sophie’s just telling us how to live our lives,’ said Annabella, with a tinkly laugh to offset any humiliation. Her mother’s laughter joined it and Angus Calladine muttered something which Sophie didn’t hear but Robert evidently found amusing. Something sarcastic about Sophie, that much was clear, and something that her husband did not jump in to quash. In a moment of astounding clarity, Sophie realised that, with the possible exception of Edward Mayhew, she was in the midst of people who never put the feelings of others before themselves. She wasn’t even sure if she liked any of them enough to miss them if she were to get up from her seat, walk out of the door and never return. She loved John, but at the moment she was still smarting from being told to take off her dress and change, as if she were a child. Life ran smoothly when things were going well for him: when they weren’t, he could be volcanic. The higher up the political ladder he rose, the more the yes-men gathered and the more used he became to having his own way without exception. It had been drilled into her at St Bathsheba’s that in order for a man to fulfil his true potential, it was often necessary for him to be totally self-centred. He would achieve success both for himself and for his own much more expediently if he worshipped at the altar of his ego. It was a quality to be admired, so Miss Palmer-Price had taught her.

  Annabella, emboldened by the response to her comment, decided to capitalise on it.

  ‘So if . . . when you become prime minister, John, are you going to ban boarding schools, is the question?’ she asked her brother-in-law with a smirk.

  ‘Why on earth would I do that, Bella?’ asked John.

  ‘All children should be sent away to school,’ said Robert. ‘Teaches them discipline and independence.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Giles. ‘As Davina has so rightly put it, they need to learn.’

  ‘Is that what you did at boarding school, Giles. Learn? Is that why you’re such an advocate for them?’

  The words were out before Sophie could stop them. Despite speaking through an orchardful of plums, Giles had attended a rough comprehensive in the East End of London until he’d received a scholarship for a local grammar school. After completing a degree at Oxford he wrote his family out of his life because they didn’t fit in with this new grand(iose) version of himself. They hadn’t even been invi
ted to his and Victoria’s wedding. Sophie had found that disgusting. She had never liked him, but managed to like him even less for that.

  Giles spluttered.

  ‘Go on then, because we’d love to hear what your experience of them is.’

  ‘Sophie?’ John’s use of her name was delivered with a smile but it was loaded with warning.

  Ordinarily, Sophie would have heeded that warning and remained silent now, but something long pushed down inside her was inching upwards like a jack-in-a-box with a rusty, yet determined, spring. He had called her beautiful dress a rag. A flume of anger was building inside her and she didn’t know if it was more directed at John for the insult and his manhandling of her, or towards herself for not standing her ground. For never standing her ground.

  ‘I’m sure we’d all love to hear Giles’s take on sending small children to boarding school. Small children who miss their parents and so naturally cry, even though their parents are glad to be rid of them for the inconvenience that they so obviously are to them,’ said Sophie sweetly.

  Now it was Annabella’s turn to splutter.

  ‘What . . . how . . . what do you mean? Pearson. Say something.’ She nudged her husband hard.

  ‘I say, what’s going on over there?’ called Angus Calladine.

  ‘What would she know?’ Victoria to her sister, feeding her a line.

  Annabella, smug now: ‘You don’t have children, Sophie, so how could you possibly know what being a mother means.’

  A silence fell on the room like a blanket, like a deluge of water so big that it engulfed a fire without allowing a single swirl of smoke to escape. Sophie felt her sister’s words like a knife slicing through her breastbone and finding the centre of her heart. Inside she crumbled like a dynamited building, but outside Sophie barely flinched. Because that was what St Bathsheba’s had taught her to do. The inner was a separate animal to the outer. The two could function independently from one another.

  Annabella’s triumphant grin bled out and she paled into immediate embarrassment.

  ‘My apologies . . . John . . . Sfff. . .’ Sophie’s name was reduced to a low hiss.

  Victoria leapt in with, ‘I don’t think you started it to be fair, I think—’

  ‘Enough,’ said Pearson, his tone hard, slicing off the head of the conversation. Pearson Briggstaffe was near the top of the list of wanting to keep his brother-in-law on side.

  ‘A toast,’ said John, reaching for his glass, spinning the topic back onto safe ground with a skill that would impress Len Spinks. ‘We are all here to celebrate fifty wonderful, happy, golden years of marriage. All of us around this table with our differing views . . .’ He made a point of scanning everyone with an accompanying twinkle in his eye, totally diffusing all tension, except from behind the calm, composed façade of his wife, ‘. . . are united in wishing my parents our heartfelt congratulations, respect and love. The most wonderful love is that which submits to the arbitration of time. Mum, Dad, may all of us follow in your footsteps and be sitting with our loved ones, in time to come, being toasted as we toast you. Happy Anniversary.’

  ‘Happy Anniversary’ echoes rippled around the room, together with applause; chatter exploded, enmities were put aside for now. Glasses were filled, plates were taken, dessert and cheese were brought out. At the bottom end of the table, talk veered expertly away from the slightest of contentious issues, but still resentment simmered under the surface of their lightly delivered words like a latent poison. By the time their guests had started leaving, there was a headache drilling into the side of Sophie’s skull so fierce she could barely keep her eyes open. She craved restful darkness and quiet.

  Sophie and John stood on the doorstep waving off the cars; the doorstep where, in a few days’ time, she would be standing, facing the full glare of the press.

  ‘You look worn out, darling,’ said John. ‘That bitch of a sister of yours had no right to say that to you. She knew she had overstepped the mark and had it not been my parents’ day, I would have shot her down.’

  Sophie hadn’t expected him to say that. She’d thought that as soon as the cars were gone, as soon as the hired hands for the evening had left, he would have torn into her. She was relieved because she felt ill, worn down by the pain in her head, felled inside. Annabella’s words had stung like a scorpion. No, she didn’t have children but still she knew she would never have let her own go to a cold, faraway boarding school, such as the one young Stanley was attending. What parent gives a child a puppy for his birthday, then a week later, without any warning, dumps him in a school in the highlands of Scotland?

  John kissed her head. ‘Have an early night,’ he said. ‘Be rested for tomorrow.’

  Sophie didn’t resist. She was tired, so incredibly tired. Tired from maintaining a smile that she wanted to drop like a hot rock, tired from dredging up small talk, tired from feeling as if she were living half a life.

  She stripped off and laid her head on her cool pillow, knowing that sleep was inches away. Oblivion, she needed that tonight. She’d always wanted a house where family gathered around a table, chattering, passing bread, laughing, loving. That ideal was a solar system away from what she had.

  Have an early night. Be rested for tomorrow.

  The hospital. The old people. Her last thought before she drifted off was again that she really hadn’t expected John to be on her side after everyone had gone.

  Chapter 7

  Three days before Doorstepgate

  Vintage Alexander McQueen if anyone asked: pink dress and jacket. Shoes Valentino, as was her handbag. Sophie loved this outfit and she’d pushed the boat out to be colourful for the old people in the hospital. She had worn it once before, when she opened the new retirement village in Cherlgrove and one of the gentlemen there, who had been a tailor by profession, had told her that she should wear that colour more often because it added a freshness to her skin tone. And she needed to add some freshness to her complexion today because she felt drained. The headache hadn’t been blasted away by the two ibuprofen she took before bed and she’d had to get up at dawn for two more and a warm cloth to hold against her temple. John hadn’t been disturbed by her moving around. He could sleep through an earthquake, thought Sophie, remembering that he’d done so once in Crete. He had a solid seven hours sleep every night, no nightmares or tossing and turning, but proper, deep rest, no matter what was happening in his life: the Devil’s sleep, some called that ability to collapse into a restful void as soon as his eyes were closed. He was never groggy in the mornings; he was bright and alert from the moment he became conscious. Sophie often took tablets to sleep and even then, she was accustomed to waking up in the early hours. She’d read once somewhere that sleep doesn’t help if it’s your soul that’s tired. Sophie Mayhew always felt tired yet always slept badly and she had no idea why.

  ‘Sophie, help me with this damned tie,’ said John. ‘I’m all fingers and thumbs today for some reason.’

  ‘Of course.’

  The tie needed completely redoing. She felt his eyes on her as she unknotted it. His brown chocolate eyes that could melt hearts if they chose to.

  ‘Windsor or ordinary?’

  ‘Ordinary. Don’t want them thinking I’m a posh twit,’ he said, grinning. He was so ridiculously handsome. Age had only added to his appeal, accentuating his bone structure; in ten years he’d make George Clooney look like Quasimodo by comparison.

  ‘I love you, you know,’ he said, his voice tender, soft.

  Sophie’s eyes left his tie, found his, went back to the tie.

  ‘I love you too,’ she said.

  ‘You’re an amazing wife, a beautiful woman. I’m so lucky. I hope you know how much I value you, even if I don’t say it as often as I should do because I’m working so intently to secure our future.’

  ‘I know you work hard. Damn.’ She’d made the tie uneven, started again.

  ‘The knives are out though. Norman’s toppling and his old guard are rushing to his
defence. The backbenchers who’ve been snoring have suddenly woken up and are rattling their fists at the prospect of change.’

  ‘Nothing you can’t handle,’ said Sophie.

  ‘Might be some waves in our waters. Dirty tricks brigade.’

  ‘There.’ She stood back to admire her handiwork. ‘What sort of waves?’

  ‘You tell me, Sophie. Politics can be evil. But with you at my side, I think we have all bases covered. I’m under a lot of pressure, which is why yesterday I blew up at you.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. It was his way of apologising without saying the actual ‘sorry’ word, which he never did, but she appreciated the acknowledgement that he’d overstepped the mark. Every day brought more rats, deserting the sinking ship of Norman, leaping onto John’s deck. Norman had scuppered his own vessel with his obdurate disdain for the NHS.

  John’s phone vibrated. He answered it quickly, said just the one word – ‘Okay’ – and then switched it off again.

  ‘Car’s here.’

  Sophie picked up her bag and gave herself a quick check in the cheval mirror that stood by the door. She looked perfectly colourful for the old people, a flash of brightness and glamour to cheer up their day.

  There was quite a welcoming committee waiting for them at the hospital. Lots of press, both local and national TV vans. Slightly over the top for a casual visit to the geriatric unit, thought Sophie, but then Len was an expert at drumming up interest in anything the Mayhews were involved in.

  ‘Thank you for coming, Mrs Mayhew, because we need all the publicity we can get,’ said the chairman of the hospital trust, shaking her hand warmly. ‘You especially being here will send out a loud message.’