She poured herself a glass of wine knowing that her father would doubtless be on the phone any minute now asking if her mother was there. Hopefully her mother would be well on the way to wherever she was going. Good for Mum! It was the kind of thing that lots of married women would dream of doing, but didn’t have the guts for.
Di raised her glass. ‘Here’s to you, Mum!’
‘What the hell’s got into her – that’s what I’d like to know!’ Roger ranted at no one in particular as he downed a large gin and tonic in Nick and Tess’s laboratory-like kitchen, which came complete with a sofa. Roger couldn’t for the life of him fathom why anyone would want a sofa in their kitchen. He would have much preferred to be cosily ensconced in their sitting room, with olives and cashews in little dishes on the coffee table, and countryside views. Instead, here he was in this clinical place with only a view of Tess’s overweight backside as she bent to shove things in and out of the oven. Still, at least they were feeding him. And thankfully the boys were in bed; that would have been the final straw. Lovely though they were, when they were around he had to watch his language.
‘The thing is, Dad,’ Nick said as he filled up his father’s glass again, ‘she’s not exactly left us. She just said in her email that she needs some time for herself.’
‘And why would she need that? She’s got plenty of time to herself. I mean, what the hell’s wrong with her?’ Roger took a large gulp and sniffed. He’d noticed Nick and Tess occasionally exchanging glances; this whole thing was making him look like an idiot.
‘This doesn’t just affect you,’ Tess snapped. ‘What am I going to do on Friday if she’s not here to look after Thomas and Joshua?’
As if that was all that mattered, Roger thought. What was it this time: Pilates, yoga, stained-glass-window making? Why the hell couldn’t Tess look after her own kids like Connie had had to do? Perhaps it was no wonder Connie got fed up sometimes.
Roger couldn’t come round here every night, he supposed, but hopefully Lou might feed him tomorrow and then Connie was bound to be back. Di, of course, was no good to anyone.
‘Well,’ his elder daughter said on the phone, ‘maybe she just wants a bit of “me” time.’
‘What the hell’s that?’ he’d hollered. ‘She gets plenty of that. Life of Riley. Everything paid for. Nice new house, nice enough car, nice family. What’s she playing at?’ Restless indeed! Senses needing awakening and wings needing stretching! What the hell was that all about? Just where did she get all this drivel? Probably from reading far too much soppy women’s fiction. What was it with these women? he wondered. Never damn well happy.
Louise Morrison checked her mobile again but still nothing further from Mum; only yesterday’s email, to which she’d added some kisses and a smiley face. Huh.
‘We’d better ask your dad round for dinner, I suppose,’ said Andy, as he uncorked the Sauvignon Blanc. ‘I shouldn’t think he knows how to boil an egg.’
‘Time he learned then,’ snapped Lou. ‘Anyway, I expect she’ll be home in a day or two.’
‘Don’t underestimate your mother,’ said Andy. ‘But I’d really just like to know what’s brought this on. She never complains. You don’t think your dad’s playing around, do you?’
‘Playing around? Dad? You must be joking. The only playing around he does is on the golf course.’
‘Don’t be too sure. He’s still a good-looking man, and what about this new organic diet and the fancy haircut? Are there women members at this golf club of his?’
Her father’s trendy, short haircut had taken years off him. For the first time Lou felt some stirrings of doubt.
‘But he’s coming up to seventy! Oh, I know, I know, that doesn’t stop them. But Dad…’ Lou shook her head. ‘It’s not as if they had a row or anything, Dad says. Mind you, he wasn’t too thrilled at being marooned at the golf club last night. No reply when he rang Mum, and then he had to get a taxi home, and there was her note beside the kettle saying exactly the same as the emails we all got.’
‘Well,’ said Andy, ‘we’ll feed him tomorrow night, and after that he’ll have to trawl the aisles in M&S like everyone else. Is that the baby I’m hearing?’
‘Damn, damn, damn! I thought she’d gone down. Too good to be true – who would have a colicky baby?’
As she headed towards the door, sighing, Andy handed her a glass of wine. ‘Here, get that down you first.’
Roger McColl, home again, kicked off his shoes in the bedroom, which overlooked the garden and got the evening sunshine. He liked this room, although Connie didn’t because of her crankiness about bungalows in general and having to sleep on the ground floor. What was wrong with that?
Roger surveyed himself in the full-length mirror. He wasn’t bad looking, really. Slight paunch, of course, but he was working on it. He hadn’t told anyone, including Connie, that he’d sent away for one of those gadgets he’d seen advertised in the newspaper. It was a kind of rowing machine that guaranteed (or money fully refunded) to tighten up the tum, bum and anywhere else in need. The paunch had to go. Connie might laugh, but she wasn’t here, and he planned to start using it from tomorrow morning. It was all part of his rejuvenation, along with the haircut and the attention to his diet. He peered at his face in the mirror and already he thought he could perceive an improvement in his skin. Women, including Connie, spent a small fortune on so-called miracle creams but they all failed to grasp the fact that it was what you put into your body that mattered, not what you plastered on top of it. Well, he might be sixty-eight, but his skin was in damn good condition – better than hers, in fact. He’d been letting himself go, no doubt about it. Simon Barker’s remark at the ninth hole the other day – something about ‘old, overweight has-beens like us’ – had really got to him. He did not want to be an old, overweight has-been. He thought he was looking better already.
So why had Connie done a runner? Had she met someone else? Connie? No, of course not. But he needed to know.
He hadn’t told anyone that he’d actually gone to the local police station, because he’d wondered how to trace a missing person.
‘But she isn’t missing,’ the policeman had explained patiently. ‘She’s gone away of her own accord and she’s perfectly entitled to do that.’
Well, he certainly didn’t know where she’d gone. In their forty-one years together he’d never had to face such uncertainty. They’d gone off separately before; he for his golfing weekends and she for her so-called ‘girly’ get-togethers. (‘Girly’ – ha ha, he thought, and not one of them under sixty!) But she’d always left a well-stocked fridge and freezer, and he was a dab hand with the microwave.
He would eat out often at the golf club, that’s what he’d do. The food there was top notch, and there was the added bonus of being served by the beautiful Andrea.
Chapter Five
CULTURE VULTURE
What Connie really wanted was a glass of wine and an early night. But first she needed to find some accommodation and Stratford was bulging with tourists of every nationality; she recognised half a dozen different languages even as she walked the length of Henley Street.
The tourist information lady shook her head sadly. ‘Very few rooms left anywhere, Mrs McColl.’ She sighed. ‘There’s always the Cedars, I suppose. It’s not exactly the Ritz but it’s clean.’
Connie’s back ached after the drive. ‘Can you try them for me?’
‘Yes,’ said the tourist information lady a few minutes later, ‘they have a single room. Let me give you directions.’
‘Thank you.’ Armed with the information, she headed back to where she’d parked Kermit, stopping at a small off-licence called Wise to Wines (but not so wise that they stocked corkscrews), where she bought a bottle of red wine with a screw top. She would have to buy a corkscrew on her travels – and soon. Then she spent twenty minutes circling the outskirts of the town (she’d always been hopeless at following directions) before she came across a tall, narrow, terraced house
sporting a ‘Vacancies’ sign although, for the life of her, Connie couldn’t see anything remotely resembling a cedar.
‘You’re lucky,’ said the fat, balding owner, whose name was Len. She could read the words ‘I love’ tattooed in blue up his left arm, but the object of his love was hidden by the rolled-up sleeve of his purple shirt. ‘Not many travelling on their own, you see.’ He gave her an appraising look before leading the way across the violently patterned brown and orange carpet, which stretched along the narrow hall.
‘This is the residents’ lounge,’ Len continued proudly, opening a door on the right. What little she could see of it reminded her of the nursing home where she visited Aunt Lorna from time to time. Upright chairs round the walls, an enormous television screen and an elderly couple gazing vacantly at some noisy quiz show. The same carpet was fitted there and also up two flights of narrow stairs. Connie, dizzied by the decor, finally arrived at Room 5.
‘Full English breakfast, seven-thirty to nine,’ Len announced as he handed her the key. ‘We don’t do dinner –’ he sidled slightly closer – ‘but I could bring you up a few sandwiches.’
‘No, thank you, I’m going to the theatre tonight,’ said Connie with as much dignity as she could muster. She’d planned a two-night stay in Stratford before arriving at the Cedars. Now she was convinced that one night here would be quite sufficient.
‘I’ll give you a key for the outside door then,’ said Len, plainly disappointed.
The room was one of the smallest Connie had ever seen. Into it was squashed a single bed with a tiny table alongside, an equally tiny wall-mounted TV and a narrow, ancient wardrobe with a time-blemished mirror on the door. Next to it was the en-suite, which had obviously once been part of the room and was the size of a cupboard. A pre-formed pink plastic shell with moulded loo, basin and shower had been fitted inside. The pink shower curtain hung sadly from three metal hooks, and stopped six inches short of the floor. Still, it was clean and it was cheap, and Len had even supplied the obligatory tray, overhanging the table alarmingly, on which were positioned a cup and saucer, two tea bags, two Nescafé sachets and four pots of long-life milk. No biscuits. No teaspoon. At least there was a plastic glass on the sink for her wine. And to think that last night she’d had that gorgeous room in the Randolph!
Connie sat on the bed and turned on her phone: seven missed calls and eight texts, three from Roger, all singing from the same hymn-sheet. Not to mention countless emails.
Roger: Where are you? Why aren’t you answering your phone? When are you coming home? (Connie noted that in not one of Roger’s emails or texts did he ask her if she was OK, or say that he loved her. In fact, she couldn’t remember when he had last told her that he did.)
Nick: Look after yourself, Mum, and come home soon.
Lou: Can’t believe you could just up and leave! We all miss you.
Diana: Had enough of them all, Mum? Take care, keep in touch. Mauritius is fantastic!
Mauritius! Roger had said Diana was in Malawi. Connie sent the same brief text to them all, switched off her phone again, and decided to shower.
At least the water was hot, even if the shower curtain kept wrapping itself around her body. After she’d dried herself, Connie took in her surroundings; she most definitely wouldn’t be spending the evening in this dismal room.
Connie had never been to a theatre, or even a cinema, on her own. The thought of it was scary but here it was, a new challenge to her self-confidence, the first hurdle of independent womanhood. She reminded herself that women were assertive these days; they ran their own businesses and headed whole companies, even governed countries, so surely she could manage to park her solo bottom on a theatre seat. Nevertheless, she felt quite frightened and she probably wouldn’t understand a word of the play anyway. But she was damned if she was going to slink into the theatre, hoping for invisibility. This was not why she’d left home, to cower around in other people’s shadows! She’d left to become her own person again, to do new things, meet new people, have new experiences. She’d wear her best dress – her only dress – spray herself liberally with Chanel No. 5, and walk into the theatre with her head held high. That’s what she’d try to do. She’d like to think her mum would be proud of her.
Connie stood outside the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in awe. As far as Shakespeare was concerned she only knew A Midsummer Night’s Dream, because she’d done that for her A-Level English.
The lady in the box office was friendly. ‘Tonight,’ she said, ‘it’s Richard II. Beautiful production! Did you not check the internet to see what was on?’
‘Until this morning I wasn’t too sure I was even coming here.’
‘Really! A spur of the moment impulse, was it? How exciting! And we’ve just had some returns so I can find you a really good seat.’ Exciting it might be, but Connie knew nothing whatsoever about Richard the Second, the Third, or any of them. She bought a ticket and, in a rash moment, spent £4 on a programme, which she hoped would help her decipher the story, just in case.
As she took her seat, Connie gazed around, looking hopefully for Harry and his friend. It would have been nice to join them for a drink at the bar in the interval. But there was no sign of them, so she concentrated instead on her surroundings. It was all plainly quite different from her mother’s day. She’d read somewhere that it had had a three-year transformation, but that it had retained many of the Art Deco features of the original Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Not inside the auditorium it hadn’t, that much was certain. It looked half finished, with so much ironwork exposed and its stage jutting out into the audience. It was different from any theatre she’d been to before, but she liked it. Now she hoped she’d enjoy Richard II too.
It was easy to get lost in the play because it was so beautifully produced. The days of wobbly cardboard sets were long gone. Instead, much of the scenery was projected onto chiffon drapes, which must have been fifty feet tall. They served as cathedral columns, a forest, palace walls, or anything else the story required. The acting was excellent too, though Connie got confused between the dukes of Hereford and Norfolk, and who was killing who, and why.
By the end of the first act Connie realised she hadn’t thought to pre-order a drink for the interval – as Roger would have done, of course. There was so much pushing and shoving at the bar it was like being in one of the skirmishes she’s just seen on stage. While she tried to decide whether a glass of wine was worth the fight, she studied the rear view of the tall man with the close-cropped white hair who was directly in front of her in the queue. Pity about the tartan jacket though. She was somewhat thrown when he turned round and said casually, ‘We should have ordered these earlier, shouldn’t we?’
‘Yes, we should,’ said Connie.
American accent. His tanned face and crinkly blue eyes afforded a more attractive front view. ‘Good elevations’ as Nick, the architect, would say. And he definitely had a good front elevation. Expensive teeth; so, definitely American.
‘Say, you on your own?’
‘Er, yes, I am,’ said Connie.
‘Me too. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but may I buy you a drink?’ He’d arrived at the bar.
‘Well, I…’
‘I’d be real glad if you would. I really like company to drink with.’
Right now, thought Connie, so do I. ‘A glass of red wine would be lovely.’
A few minutes later they strolled out, clutching their glasses, to watch the river flow by. It wasn’t yet fully dark and there were still a few people on the recreation ground across the water, walking their dogs or simply meandering beside the river. The waterfowl were enjoying the last of the light too, and several swans had collected around one of the narrowboats moored opposite, begging for a share of the alfresco supper a young couple was sharing.
‘I sure like these trees, what d’you call them?’ The American pointed to a willow whose foliage was caressing the Avon’s lazy shallows.
‘Weeping willows.’<
br />
‘Such a sad name for something so pretty. Talking of names –’ he held out his free hand – ‘Aaron Forrest the Third. But I know you folks don’t say it like that.’
She shook his hand. ‘Connie McColl the First. And we do say it like that when it comes to our kings, as you’ll have noticed.’
‘I gotta admit I’m not too knowledgeable about either your kings or the great Bard himself. Forgive the cliché, but do you come here often?’
Connie laughed. ‘First time, Aaron.’
‘You too then? You enjoying it? I thought this play would be right over my head but, know what, I’m kinda liking it.’
‘Me too. Is this your first visit to England?’
‘Yeah, it is. We always planned to come to Europe but then Hannah, my late wife, got sick and we had years of not going anywhere.’
Connie sipped her wine. ‘I’m really sorry.’
‘Yeah, she was a wonderful woman. The kids clubbed together to send me over here, so I’m doing Europe on my own, which wasn’t really the idea.’
Connie took another sip. ‘Well, I’m not that used to being on my own either but I must admit I’m rather relishing it.’
‘Say, Connie, you widowed too? Divorced?’ He was genuinely interested.
‘No, I’m still married. Just having some time to myself.’
Aaron looked quite shocked. ‘Your husband’s on his own at home?’
‘Well,’ she said, consulting her watch, ‘I wouldn’t count on that.’
‘You know,’ her new friend went on, ‘Hannah and I never spent one day apart in forty years of marriage, except when she was in hospital of course. Not a single day.’ He sighed. ‘So why did you choose to come to Stratford?’
The Runaway Wife Page 4
