Bewildered, Izzie put down her fork. “I will have to leave in a bit, but I’m all right just for a moment.” She laughed uncertainly.
“No, no. I won’t have you rushing. It’s just not fair on those poor little children of yours if you’re late. I won’t have it on my conscience! It was such a nice surprise that you decided to stay on for lunch, but we won’t keep you any longer. Thanks for the cake. Smashing.”
Now on the other side of the front door, Izzie shook her head in puzzlement. What on earth was going on there? It was only when she was parked near St. Boniface’s, a good twenty minutes before the children were due to come out, that it all fell into place. With a sickening lurch, Izzie realized she hadn’t been invited for lunch at all. She was supposed to drop the cake off and go—or have a glass of wine at the most. Sue had set the extra place only when it was clear she wasn’t budging—and the strawberry tarts! Of course, there had only been five.
Quite out of character, Izzie felt tears pricking in her eyes. She leaned her head on the steering wheel and howled.
Maddy awoke the following morning full of resolve. She had escaped Sue Templeton’s at a time she hoped wasn’t indecently early, only to be swamped by a wave of despair, not helped by the misery a couple of glasses of wine at lunchtime can precipitate. Those two hours had confirmed her greatest fear—that this was the way life would be from now on.
As she had pulled into the Eagles’s car park, she had vowed that the minute she got home she would hurry along the completion of the spare room and invite friends for every weekend stretching out as far as the eye could see. Turning off the engine, she had sat in the car and glanced back at the children asleep in their car seats, soft little mouths fallen open, oblivious to the world as only sleeping children can be. Sequestered there, warm in the early autumn sunshine, she had decided she would wait until Will’s teacher opened the school door to let out the flood of children before she got out to greet him. Just at that moment, she couldn’t have borne another second of banal chat and provincial platitudes with the other mothers.
Now, as soon as the radio burst into life at six thirty, she jumped out of bed and headed for the shower.
“What the hell’s got into you?” mumbled Simon, without even opening his eyes. As a rule, Maddy never stirred until she had downed a mugful of Earl Grey and she was sure Colette had dealt with the messy business of Coco Pops, toast, and baby mush with Will, Florence, and Pasco downstairs.
“I want to get a move on.” She stomped across the floor, wincing as she stepped on a nail sticking out of the floorboards. When would the goddamn carpets arrive?
“Well, wonders will never cease.” Simon yawned as he swung up onto the side of the bed, crumpled and tousled from sleep. He sat for a moment, summoning the energy to stand up. Maddy paused for a second and looked at her husband. With his broad shoulders and thick unruly fair hair, he was such a good-looking man, she thought, and God I must love him to have sacrificed everything.
She stopped and put her hands on her hips. “I’m just fed up of waiting on everyone—carpenters, carpet layers, the decorators—today I’m going to be dynamic and kick some butt.”
“I love it when you get arsey.” He chuckled, pulling her by the arm so she tumbled on top on him onto the bed. Her nose filled with the scent of his body. “You know you’re in your element really.” He kissed her nose. “This place will be beautiful when you’ve finished—you are so clever”—his mouth moved to her ear—“and so sexy,” he murmured softly, his breath sending delicious shivers right down to her toes.
“Oh, you English boys, you love to be dominated—must be all that boarding-school repression.” She could feel her body responding to him, despite her resolve. “Shall I play matron?”
“Oh please,” he groaned, “I could really go for you in one of those uniforms.”
“Right, Hoare Minor.” Maddy playfully rolled him over, as he started to pull at the drawstring on her pajamas. “A cold shower for you, my lad, and PE on the lawn—look sharp!” and slapped him on the backside.
“Spoilsport!” he called after her, laughing, as she headed for the bathroom.
She was like a woman possessed over the next twenty-four hours. The builder, who went under the implausible name of Crispin, positively reeled under the barrage of Maddy’s requests and deadlines. Suddenly the woman who had wafted around, waving her hand vaguely and talking dreamily about bleached-string-colored walls and obscure door handles made by companies from London he had never heard of, was behaving like a whip-cracking foreman. Maddy wasn’t completely green. She knew he’d been hoping to stretch out this job for a while, when she’d accepted his estimates without question. She was prepared to bet that, when he’d smelled the size of the budget involved, he hadn’t shied away from adding a zero or two. Now perhaps he’d begin to panic that the holiday he’d no doubt planned on the back of this little earner might not happen at all.
When she wasn’t barracking Crispin, Maddy stormed from room to room, with the phone glued to her ear.
“I don’t care what the warehouse says,” she shouted imperiously. “You said three weeks for the carpets and it’s been four. I want them by the end of the week or you can forget it.” She jabbed her finger on the disconnect button, confident that she’d see the carpet-layers’ van in the drive on Friday. At sixty-five quid a square meter, they weren’t going to risk losing this contract.
Sure enough, eight thirty Friday morning, two surly-looking blokes were carrying rolls of carpet upstairs and the rest of the morning was spent to the accompaniment of banging. Excited at the prospect of being able to step out of the bed the next morning to feel soft wool under her feet, she rang Simon at work.
It took a bit of time to get through, and Maddy was impatient in her excitement. Lillian, Simon’s secretary, seemed to be stalling her. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hoare, he’s rather tied up at the moment. Can he call you back?”
For a brief moment Maddy was disconcerted. Simon would usually interrupt anything to speak to her. She hung up and instantly forgot it as Pasco crawled across the hall toward her. She scooped him up into her arms and nuzzled her nose into his soft neck.
“I do think, Mr. Pasco Hoare, that we just might be getting somewhere with this blasted house. Now all we need to do is find someone half decent to invite here.”
“Let’s celebrate,” she said, when Simon finally called back, sometime after lunch. “The carpet’s gone down. How about supper at that new place in Ledfinch? I’ll book, though I can’t imagine they’ll be that busy. Do these peasants go out for meals?” He agreed but sounded a little distracted. She reckoned he must be dealing with some new client—not entirely confident she knew what exactly Simon would do in a discussion with someone in business. Funny, she mused, grabbing her keys to go off and collect Will from school, you can marry someone, share their bed, and have their children, yet you haven’t a clue what they do for ten hours a day.
“I thought I might go down to London on Monday and have lunch with Pru,” she ventured after they were seated at their table that evening and had ordered. Simon looked weary and not terribly interested in the menu or the surroundings of the Vinery in Ledfinch. To Maddy it was an amusing, and not completely unsuccessful, stab at mixing country pub with brasserie. Large leather sofas had replaced pub seating, and instead of beer mats the tables were minimalist, with a single flower in a tiny vase and a bowl of olives.
“It would be fun to see her,” she continued, “and I thought I might go back to the house. The new people have found a couple of things in the attic we’d forgotten. Some old stuff of Mémé’s.”
Obviously suspecting that somewhere between these two appointments, Maddy would find the lure of Selfridges irresistible, Simon smiled indulgently. “Go easy on the autumn collections, will you? Or at least stick to just one complete new outfit.”
“Oh, darling”—Maddy laughed—“you can’t honestly expect me to find anything half decent in Ringford, can you?”
>
“Whatever,” he replied and took her hand over the table. “You are happy here really, aren’t you, darling?” It was an odd question. Simon was usually so upbeat, never one for quiet introspection. He was a bull-by-the-horns man, equally capable of doing a hard day’s work and then being the life of the party until the wee hours whenever they went out in London, which had often been four or five times a week.
“Once we get the house shipshape I will be.” She tried to sound as jolly as possible in an attempt to shake off her slight feeling of unease. “How’s everything at work?”
“Oh fine, fine,” he replied and leaned back, yawning and stretching in his chair. “Couple of problems to iron out and it’ll be fine. These damned American venture capitalists are proving tricky, but we’ll get there. Jeff Dean is flying in from New York on Monday. I thought I’d go and collect him at Heathrow and try and soften him up before we get to the meeting at the office.”
They chatted on about the children and Maddy’s idea for making a cottage out of the ramshackle sheds in the garden, then she finally made him laugh with her description of the Templeton lunch. “The whole house was a shrine to a DFS furniture showroom. Sue is absolutely ghastly. There was this Izzie woman there who seemed like she might be quite fun. In fact, she’s refreshingly different from the appliqué brigade—a bit boho, sort of reminds me of a little elf. Anyway, she arrived with this extraordinary cake for Abigail’s birthday. Christ, the poor woman! I thought she was the nanny or something. Sue treated her like dirt.”
Later as they lay in bed, wrapped around each other and satiated in the aftermath of comfortable and familiar lovemaking, Maddy fell asleep to the still unfamiliar silence outside and the strong smell of new carpet.
Simon lay wide awake beside her.
Instead of Selfridges on Monday, Maddy spent an hour or so, after a giggly lunch, absorbing the familiar smell and bustle of Knightsbridge. A couple of hours with Pru Graves was always a tonic. As usual they’d gossiped about old school mates, and Pru updated her with tales from the world of PR. Maddy in turn had regaled her with anecdotes from Huntingford, the school playground, and the neighbors, playing up their awfulness.
“God, darling”—Pru’s heavily made-up eyes had been wide at her tales of hop-festooned kitchens and “country” pubs with play barns—“as your townie therapist, I insist you come down twice a month for treatment.”
Later, as Maddy ran her hands over the soft leather trousers on the racks in Joseph, she wasn’t convinced twice a month would be enough.
She returned to her car, bearing some stiff carrier bags and a satisfied smile. But as she pulled up outside their old house in Milborne Place, her euphoria turned again to panic. It was almost desperation by the time she was greeted with a big hug by the new owners, a Sunday newspaper editor and his petite wife. How Maddy had loved this house, with its beautifully regular façade, its high narrow hallway, floor-to-ceiling windows, and French doors to the garden. Simon and she had sat so often there on the terrace reading the papers and drinking coffee on summer Sunday mornings. Letting go of the house had not been a bereavement. It was more like relinquishing a lover, and having to watch him go off and marry someone else. Houses, thought Maddy, are fickle things.
Thankfully, yet somehow painfully, little had changed inside except for the furniture. She cast her eye covetously over the chrome kitchen units she had so carefully chosen and thought about the dinner parties they’d had. Friends drinking wine and laughing late into the night. Even the grandeur of Huntingford House seemed to diminish. This was her real home. Suddenly she felt tired and resentful. What the hell had she agreed to relinquish here? She had lived in London all her life, except for a year living with her adored grandmother Mémé in Paris to perfect her French. Slice her in half and she was city girl through and through.
After tea and conversation about a London she was beginning to know less and less about, she squeezed the box of Mémé’s dusty bits and pieces from the attic into the boot of the car, careful not to crush the carrier bags containing her new purchases, and headed out of town and onto the A40 toward Huntingford and what, to Maddy, felt like purdah.
As she opened the front door, the children, fresh from their baths, flew into her arms, and the next half hour was spent opening presents she had bought them. Florence pranced about, enchanted by her new pink tulle dress, and Will disappeared with a remote-controlled car he had coveted from the Harrods’s toy department. Okay, so it was a spoil, but Maddy felt that somehow she had to make up for the deprivation she felt sure the move had inflicted on them.
Later and with Simon not yet home, she poured herself a glass of wine, lit a cigarette, went through the post, and tried to seek inspiration for supper from the rather pathetic contents of the fridge. Then she noticed the light flashing on the answering machine.
“Maddy, it’s Sue. Sue Templeton.” Maddy raised an eyebrow. “Lovely to see you for lunch last week. We’re planning a little get-together for the mums from class, Thursday week. Do hope you can come. I’ll call back.” I bet you will, thought Maddy. Beep.
“Er Maddy, it’s Izzie. You know from the lunch last week. The one with the horrendous cake. I just wondered if you wanted to come over for lunch or something er . . . sometime. I’m sure you’re too busy but if you’re not . . .” Beep.
“Er Maddy, sorry, Izzie again. I forgot to leave my number. It’s 225571. Speak to you soon.”
Maddy took a slug of wine and smiled slowly. Yes, that just could be fun.
Chapter 3
Izzie crouched down beside the phone and groaned, covering her furiously blushing face with both hands. What a cock-up! And after all the preparation too! She had started psyching herself up to call Maddy Hoare last week. The question was, would Maddy want to get together with her for lunch or a coffee? Izzie, frankly, couldn’t care less about being rejected by the Stepfords. She’d have rejected them first if she could have. But if Maddy gave her the cold shoulder, it really would be upsetting. Thank God Marcus hadn’t witnessed her lamentable performance. He’d have teased her mercilessly.
Or maybe he wouldn’t. He’d appeared quite uninterested when she told him about Maddy. Normally people were his favorite subject. She’d only mentioned her in the course of relating the story of the Templeton debacle anyway, because she’d thought it would make him laugh. He’d been a bit down about the tedium of his temporary work lately, and the best way to cheer him up was usually to poke fun at herself. He’d always hoot with laughter, tousle her hair, tell her she was a scream. Somehow, having him laugh along with her at the Stepfords made the whole thing seem different, less hurtful. Together they’d made up daft names for Sue and the crew, speculated on their sex lives, marveled at the blatant malice. But when she told him about Maddy, and their quick-fire conversation, how good it had made her feel, he’d frowned.
“She sounds ghastly, sweetheart! Just the sort of person we left London to avoid. God preserve us from that kind of Eurotrash with their highlights and Vuitton bags, and those horrible shoes with little knobbly things on the back!”
She happened to covet some driving shoes, but she didn’t mention Maddy again.
After the fiasco of the Templeton lunch, the rest of Izzie’s week had gone pretty much as usual. She’d pottered around at home, trying to help Marcus with a new idea he’d had—taking photographs at weddings and other dos (she was at a loss for a moment to think what these other dos might be). Of course, it was fantastically expensive setting up with all the equipment—the cameras he’d had as a student were hopelessly out of date—and it had made a bit of a dent in their holiday fund, but he’d been so excited about the possibilities it would open up for him. He’d carried her along with his enthusiasm—just like he had when he’d bought that old Triumph bike before they were married, and they’d spent weekends zooming around the countryside, her clinging onto him for dear life.
By Friday, she’d run out of excuses not to call Sue Templeton to thank her for lunch.
Fortunately, the answering machine had been on.
With the unexpected arrival of a knitting book to copyedit superfast, Izzie was head down over the manuscript, and it gave her another excuse to put off the nerve-racking business of calling Maddy. Knitting was really not her thing, and she’d fibbed to the editor that she could take it on. She’d had to get some background info from the library even to begin to make head or tail of the manuscript. God alone knew if she was doing it right, but it was work! So the last few days had passed in a blur of “knit one, slip one, purl one, pass slip stitch over.”
By Monday she couldn’t delay it any longer. If she didn’t call now, Maddy wouldn’t even remember who she was. So that was how she’d come to leave those pitiful messages.
The following day she’d finished the blasted book and sent it off, after carefully checking that each jumper had a front, back, and two sleeves—beyond that, she couldn’t be too sure. Picking up the children at three fifteen made a pleasant change from the eye-crossingly dull work. Waiting in the drizzle, she shifted restlessly from foot to foot with her arms crossed and shoulders hunched against the cold breeze that always seemed to race across the playground. She’d come out without a coat again, but at least she’d remembered to bring the kids a snack.
True to form, Charlie was out first, a disheveled eight-year-old torpedo streaking through the doors as soon as they were opened. He dumped his bags and coat at her feet, took the offered muffin as if it were his due, and was sharing it with two friends, but there was still no sign of Jess. Year Ones were always last. Eventually she came mincing out, socks pulled up neatly and her book bag clutched firmly in one hand, her classmate Susan Summerscales holding grimly onto the other. Izzie groaned.
“Jeth ith by betht fred!” announced the permanently congested Susan. “She thayth I cad cub for a thleepover thoon.” Her parents couldn’t have predicted the lisp and the adenoids, but surely even they should have realized that christening a child Susan Stephanie Summerscales was making oneself a hostage to phonetic fortune.
Goodbye, Jimmy Choo Page 3
