The Wife's Revenge

by Deirdre Palmer

  I emphasise the word ‘important’, implying that the description does not apply to Tessa. A whisper of disappointment crosses her face and she brushes it away and pastes on a smile.

  ‘That’s okay then, as long as you’re happy.’

  I frown at her odd choice of phrase. ‘Yep, it’s all good. And now I’ve got to get home.’

  I tap across the empty hall and down the stairs. I hear Tessa locking the kitchen door and following me down, but I don’t stop or look back. I can’t wait to get away from her.

  But Tessa hasn’t finished with me, and I’m compelled to turn round as she catches up with me at the front entrance.

  ‘I’m pleased you’ve managed to put the cat business into perspective,’ she says, in an annoyingly patronising voice. ‘But you know, you can never truly leave the past behind.’

  She smiles, and I freeze, one foot on the second step down. I almost break into a run as I hit the pavement and head for home.

  Eight

  FRAN

  There’s nobody in when I reach home.

  Hazel, of course, will still be at the trampoline park with Zoe – and Ben. They were having lunch in the café there; I remember Hector mentioning it after Ben and the girls had left. There’s a scribbled note by the kettle from Kitty to say she’s gone to meet friends, and not to make dinner for her as she’ll have something out.

  Hector has left a message on my phone, which I kept switched off during the coffee morning, to say he’s taken Caitlin with him to his workshop. She loves going to work with her dad. He lets her use the simplest, safest of tools on odd pieces of wood, and she enjoys the peace of the place. Hector’s workshop is part of a courtyard development of converted stables attached to a glorious old house in which furniture, pottery, and garden ornaments are sold, with a café housed in the conservatory. Also in the courtyard are pottery and artists’ workshops, and a few shops of the type that sell overpriced hand-dyed scarves and essential oils. There is also, to Caitlin’s delight, a sweet and ice-cream shop.

  It’s almost two o’clock but I’m not hungry, so I make myself a mug of tea and sit with my hands curled round it at the kitchen table. Miss T is slumped on the table in a patch of sun, her furry, tortoiseshell bulk steadily rising and falling in sleep. The clock on the wall ticks loudly into the silence. I don’t want to sit here; I’m wired with nervous energy, and the house’s emptiness is too conducive to the chain of disconcerting thoughts that wind through my head.

  Taking a rational slant on it – not easy in my current frame of mind – I concede that Tessa probably thought she was being friendly and helpful by passing on Mirabelle’s gossip. But why add the bit about not being able to leave the past behind? And what was it supposed to mean? It sounded almost like a warning; too heavy to be a reference to Mirabelle’s accusation about her cat.

  My mind refuses to contemplate the awful possibility that Tessa knows about the affair. It can’t be that, it just can’t. Tessa wouldn’t waste time passing on trivial gossip if that was on her mind, and in any case, Ben would have found some way to warn me.

  My mind trips on, regardless. Is Tessa lonely? The idea induces a pang of guilt. Does she over-dramatize ordinary things to induce an intimacy that would not otherwise be there? I pull my phone towards me, thinking I might call Grace and ask her what she thinks, until I realise I can’t do that without making her wonder why I find anything Tessa says important, or interesting.

  Five minutes later, I leave the house, intending to clear my head with a walk, but as I reach the gate, I change my mind and take the car instead. I have no particular destination in mind, yet somehow I’m not surprised to find myself driving through the hamlet of Lower Hovington and past the petrol station, to where the public footpath sign points a finger up the narrow track leading to High Heaven.

  It’s a fine day, and there are three other cars parked. Two whippets cavort on long leads near the crest of the hill; dogs are not usually let off their leads up here because of the drop. Their owner is a middle-aged woman I’ve seen around the village, and we exchange nods and smiles as we pass. A thirtyish couple hold the hands of two small children as they amble along, staying well back from the edge. They all have rucksacks; the children’s shaped like animals. The third car must belong to two walkers I can see in the near distance.

  It is possible to walk a fair way along the tops of the hills in a westerly direction before you meet fenced-off farmland where sheep graze. The east offers no more than a sharp descent into impossibly tangled bushes bordered by beds of nettles. Ben and I almost got stuck down there once as we wandered on, our heads in the clouds, our minds on nothing but each other and being alone. Footholds were few and far between, as we discovered when we made our way up again, after we’d perched, kissing hungrily, on an uncomfortably sharp, chalky ledge.

  Not our first time together. Third or fourth, perhaps. The first time, I’d sat self-consciously in my car while Ben had sat, with no visible trace of self-consciousness, alongside in his. I would even go so far as to say his expression held a touch of arrogance, but if that was true, in my heightened emotional state, I would have found it appealing and sexy.

  I had arrived a few minutes before him, my feet hardly able to operate the pedals, my hands sweat-glued to the steering wheel, while I alternately prayed that he would or wouldn’t turn up. When I saw his car, I switched on the engine again and turned the wheel, intent on getting myself out of there as fast as possible, asking myself what on earth I thought I was doing. Then, seeing my car, he raised a lean, tanned forearm out of his window in laconic greeting, his expression solemn, and my car straightened as if of its own accord as he pulled in.

  It was ten o’clock in the morning – a ridiculous time for a date, if you could call it that. Ben and I had skived off work, me by arrangement, him, well, I don’t remember now, but he always seemed to be able to do what he liked with his time, work notwithstanding. High Heaven doesn’t have many visitors – apart from the view, it’s not a beauty spot that draws the crowds. Even so, we could have bumped into anybody; friends, neighbours, clients from the vets’ surgery with their dogs, anybody. Had we considered that? I don’t remember that either, but ten in the morning seemed a time of innocence, of ordinariness, and I suppose we just ran with that.

  Natalie had Skyped just before I left to meet Ben; it was nine-thirty in the evening in New Zealand and my parents were already sleeping.

  ‘Their heads are all over the place from the flight,’ she’d laughed. ‘I won’t tell them I’ve spoken to you or I’ll be in trouble for letting them miss out. Fran…’ Her pixelated frown reached me from the other side of the world.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mum and Dad love both of us the same, you know that.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ I felt the familiar sadness that claimed me whenever I remembered Mum and Dad were no longer an hour-and-a-half’s drive away.

  ‘Only Mum’s worried you’d think she was favouring me and my kids.’

  ‘Nat,’ I’d sighed, ‘Mum and I talked about all that before they went, and I do understand, I honestly do.’ Did I? ‘Once they’d gone out for a holiday and Dad’s emphysema was so much better, they couldn’t stop rattling on about how much they’d loved New Zealand. I could tell then how it was going to go. It took them a while to tell me what I already knew.’

  I could only think that my sister was dragging me over old ground because she felt guilty about having persuaded our parents to take up residence in the bungalow at the end of their garden. But we both knew it was the right thing for them; an opportunity to enjoy endless sunshine and more comfort in their later years than they’d have had in Harlow. Naturally, I missed my big sister like crazy when she and her husband Jonny emigrated with their two boys, but that was ten years ago, and I’ve got used to not having her around. I’ve had no choice. With Mum and Dad, it was different. It seemed like a kind of bereavement, but not one I could share, and I didn’t try.

  The rest of th
e Skype conversation was fairly brief, mainly due to my inability to focus on anything other than what I was about to do. I didn’t even tell Natalie about Caitlin’s suspected – by then almost certain – autism. The appointment with the child psychologist, although only five days previously, had seemed unimaginably distant, as if it belonged in another lifetime. But we ended the call on a happy, sisterly note and I finished getting ready to meet Ben while kidding myself I was simply going to meet a friend for coffee.

  The woman with the whippets has gone. The walkers have disappeared. I can see the family way ahead, the children clinging to the rungs of the dividing fence, watching the sheep. I move away from the cliff edge where I’ve been deep breathing the invigorating air and trying to order my brain into some sort of calm. I succeed, almost, and as I step onto the grassy scar of the path, I slot Tessa and her weirdness back where she belongs, inside my mind-box of slightly irritating incidentals that don’t deserve any more attention.

  As I stroll on, my thoughts return to that first meeting with Ben. He got out of his car and waited while I fiddled with this and that and eventually got out of mine, and then we stepped towards one another and hugged in a perfunctory way, like friends.

  Friends. Was this how it was going to begin – and end? I admit, at that point I had no idea. Then I remembered the way we’d looked at each other, the touch of his hand, and I was gripped with fear. But still I felt compelled to say ‘Yes, fine’ when he asked me if we should walk for a while. There was no other answer. We were on the path I’m on now when Ben reached for my hand, and we strolled along the crest of High Heaven, not talking, wrestling with the novelty of being together. At least, I was wrestling. Ben’s face, when I dared to glance, showed none of the tightness I felt in mine.

  We hunkered down in the grass amongst the rabbit-holed hillocks, and I managed to relax as we chatted about nothing in particular – at least, nothing I remembered later. When we lapsed into silence, Ben reached for my hand and I thought he was going to help me up. Instead, he pulled me towards him, and we kissed. The whole thing felt unreal, as if I had fallen down one of those rabbit-holes.

  Ben is still on my mind, but only in a ruminative kind of way, when I arrive home to find the man himself on my doorstep. I spend some moments composing my face into a neutral expression as I walk up to the front door, where Hector is seeing Hazel in and thanking Ben. He swings round as I approach, and I add my thanks to Hector’s and hurry indoors without a backward glance. Ben takes the hint and, seconds later, he drives off with Zoe.

  Hector follows me to the kitchen. He asks me how the coffee morning went, and I tell him it was one of Tessa’s undeniable successes.

  ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Well, that’s great. Maybe we should invite Ben and Tessa and Zoe over here for a barbecue or something, one day?’

  ‘Maybe.’ I shrug, while inwardly something quietly gives way. Casual encounters with the pair of them I can handle, but being sociable for hours on end is another matter.

  Caitlin is sitting on top of the table, swinging her legs. She holds her arms out to me and I oblige with a hug and a kiss on top of her head, inhaling the scent of her at the same time. She shies away from physical contact and doesn’t often invite it, so that when it happens, it feels like a gift.

  ‘I had a lovely time,’ she says, sliding down from the table. ‘I planed some wood and I put all the shavings in a bag and brought them home. They’re like little curls and they smell nice.’

  ‘More mess.’ Hazel lifts her eyes theatrically, as if she is the tidiest person ever. ‘There’s already shavings all up the stairs.’

  Caitlin pouts. ‘I couldn’t help it. There was a hole in the bag.’ She looks at me. ‘Shall I hoover them up for you, Mum?’

  ‘No, it’s fine. A few wood shavings won’t hurt.’

  ‘You’re too lax with her,’ Hazel scolds. ‘If that was me, I’d be made to clear it up right away!’

  Hector, washing out mugs at the sink while the kettle boils, gives me a sideways grin. He agrees with Hazel, but also knows it’s something too trivial to worry about. I look at the four of them and feel a rush of love for my family cascade over me, like a warm shower.

  ‘Caitlin was a great help today,’ Hector says, flicking the wet dishcloth playfully at our youngest daughter. ‘Now I have some perfect pieces of wood, ready for when I need them.’

  Caitlin ducks the cloth, and giggles.

  I turn to Hazel. ‘How was the trampolining?’ I venture.

  ‘Fine. Natch.’

  ‘Natch.’ I smile. ‘And Zoe’s dad, what did he do while you were on the trampolines?’

  Hazel shrugs. HaH‘I don’t know. Whatever you would do, I suppose. Went for a drive, whatever. We met him in the café at lunch and he got us burgers and chips. Why d’you want to know?’

  Good question. ‘I don’t really. I was just asking.’

  Hazel shakes her head at my complete hopelessness and slopes off to watch TV.

  Nine

  TESSA

  That little comment I made about never being able to leave the past behind was a fitting end to the morning, I thought. Just a little warning, that’s all it was. I don’t know what she made of it, but she didn’t like it, that was obvious.

  I hadn’t been there to witness her brief entrapment in the lift – there was no way I could have been – but when I saw the look on her face as she came up the stairs behind the two oldies, I knew it had worked. Grim-faced, clearly annoyed – she threw a cross remark at me – she was also a little shaken. Not as much as I’d have liked, but it was something.

  The caretaker had told me about the lift being out of action when I arrived. Once his back was turned, all I had to do was remove the notice. Such a useful coincidence after I’d read Caitlin’s jottings, as if it was meant to be.

  Meeting Mirabelle Hayward was another bit of good fortune. I wouldn’t normally have stopped for someone like her – I’d have exchanged a few words out of politeness and moved on. I don’t know why I didn’t do that. Perhaps it was because I bumped into her at the art shop, and my brain made the connection with Fran and her daughter, and the lost bag.

  I’d barely spoken to Mirabelle before that day. I knew of her – who in this part of Oakheart doesn’t? – and had witnessed her waylaying passers-by with her ramblings. She had never targeted me before, but she needed to talk, and apparently I would do.

  She spoke about the traffic to begin with, her voice well-modulated and cultured, which made me wonder about her background. Didn’t I think the council should do something to stop the lorries using the village as a shortcut? Wasn’t it dreadful how they thundered by with no regard for man nor beast?

  Actually, Oakheart doesn’t suffer in that way, and most of the time it’s an oasis of calm; too calm, Ben once said. He is a city boy, he likes bright lights, not endless swathes of green. Moving to a rural village was my dream. Ben went along with it, pretending it was his dream, too – I’m under no illusions about that. Sometimes I think I know Ben better than he knows himself. If he didn’t have his other life in the capital to look forward to each day, he’d go out of his mind.

  I agreed with Mirabelle about the traffic; it would have been pointless not to.

  And then she changed the subject, and through my half-listening and wanting to get away, I heard Fran’s name. I tuned in fast at that point.

  ‘Do you know her, the woman who killed my Humphrey?’ Mirabelle began. ‘Oliver, that’s her name. Francesca or something – I saw it on her badge. She’s a receptionist at the vets’.’ Mirabelle leaned close to me, too close, wafting something that smelled surprisingly like Dior. ‘She denied it, of course. I made a formal complaint but got nowhere. The vets believed her, you see.’ Mirabelle snorted. ‘Although why they took her word over mine when I’m such a good client of theirs is a mystery.’

  ‘Quite,’ I said, not certain of what I was hearing. I asked Mirabelle to tell me exactly what happened with Humphrey, in detail, and she ob
liged. Well, I was a sympathetic ear, and I doubt she encounters many of those.

  But when I passed this nugget of information on to Fran, it didn’t quite achieve the desired effect. Oh, I could see she was rattled, but not enough. That was why I pursued her down the stairs and flung my parting shot.

  She won’t get off scot-free. Nobody who is evil enough to have an affair with my husband gets away with it. It’s time I upped my game, took it a step further on from simply using whatever falls into my hands to stick pins in her. I could confront her, force her to admit to me what she did, but what would it achieve? A little satisfaction for me, but nothing much would change for her.

  It will take more than that to finish this once and for all.

  Much more.

  Ten

  FRAN

  It’s Monday, and Caitlin’s school is closed while the staff are having a training day. I’ve taken the day off work, and last night I asked her if she would like to do something special.

  ‘She gets all the treats,’ Hazel complained. ‘Her school’s always shutting for something, plus she gets longer hols than we do.’

  ‘Yeah. Spoilt little madam with her posh school,’ Kitty said, then she’d grinned at Caitlin and poked her tongue out to show she didn’t mean it.

  If Caitlin’s in the right mood, she takes her sisters’ ribbing in good part, which she did last night.

  ‘No, you’re spoilt,’ she said, pointing a finger at each of her sisters in turn. ‘You are and you are.’ Then more playful teasing and laughter broke out all round, and Hector and I grinned at each other.

  Unusually, we were all together, playing a favourite board game involving ‘driving’ little coloured plastic taxis around in a race to reach certain destination points. We’d not seen much of the girls during the day. Hazel went to a friend’s house – not Zoe’s, I was pleased to note – and Kitty had gone swimming with a group of friends, including boys, whom I am, under no circumstances, permitted to question her about. I try to oblige whilst keeping everything crossed that there’s nothing going on that I wouldn’t like. Fifteen is a tricky age, for those who are fifteen and for those who care for them. I try not to think too hard about that.