Up To No Good

by Victoria Corby

  And she’d believed him because she wanted to, because she loved him so much she couldn’t bear not to marry him. But there was always a nasty little niggle of doubt that remained, not too well buried, and which was dug up on a regular basis by Venetia, who could not come to terms with her father remarrying at all, let alone to some­one of nearly her own age. Janey’s confidence in Tom’s love for her, never rock solid, had started to dwindle and was now hurtling downwards at an incredible rate.

  She had started to sense that something was really wrong about a year ago. Tom had seemed to withdraw from her, she’d caught him staring blankly into space as if there was something preying on his mind, yet he always denied that there was anything the matter. She’d walked in on him a couple of times when he was on the telephone and he’d dropped his voice suddenly in the most painfully obvious attempt at concealment. She’d even sneaked in once and pressed the voir appels button to see who had been calling him, she admitted in a shamefaced voice, but she couldn’t get it to work prop­erly. However, it didn’t take a genius to work out that something was going on, and that something must be connected with Solange.

  ‘I tried to make myself believe it was money that was the problem,’ she said sadly. ‘God knows he’s worried enough about that, but when I offered to sell my flat he just thanked me and said I ought to keep a bolt-hole in London. It’s not worth much, to be honest.’ She absently stroked Lily with one hand. ‘I just don’t know what to do. I’m not noble enough to tell Tom to work Solange out of his system - I’m well aware there’s only one way a man ever does that - yet I can’t bear to think he’s feeling trapped. It’s going to poison everything. I’ll always be wondering if he’s hankering to be off, if he really wants to be somewhere else, if he’s going to look at me and start resenting me for restricting his freedom like this.’

  She pushed Lily away gently. ‘Maybe I ought to go off for a couple of months, take the twins to stay with my parents for a while, they’re always saying how they miss seeing their grandchildren on a regular basis. Though a couple of months of the twins’ company will no doubt cure them for ever. Anyway I ought to do something that gives Tom a bit of space. What do you think?’

  ‘That you’re completely bonkers,’ I said frankly. ‘And you said you weren’t being noble. What are you trying to be, then? Another Patient Griselda?’

  She frowned. ‘I don’t think so. What use would sitting on a monument be in this situation?’

  ‘That was Patience, silly! Griselda was one of those depressing medieval woman who proved what wonderful wives they were by putting up with everything their husbands did. Hers was a particularly unpleasant speci­men who, amongst other things, divorced her and turned her out of the house stark naked. She still went on thinking he was a nice bloke.’

  ‘More fool her. What happened? Did she marry some­one else and live happily ever after?’

  ‘Nope. The husband said he’d just been putting her through a few tests to make sure she loved him, and that she could come back now. So she did.’

  ‘Tom might have his faults but he’s never tried to do anything like that,’ Janey said, smiling through her tears. ‘And he’d think it very bad form to turf his wife out of the house in the buff.’

  ‘What - you mean he’d allow you to keep your bra and pants on?’ I said. ‘I think you’ve really got your wires crossed here, Janey. I don’t know Tom very well, but if you ask me, he adores you. You should have seen his face the other night when he saw Jed casting you languishing looks...’

  ‘That’s only because Venetia’s been banging on about old flames ready to be relit,’ she said dismissively. ‘She couldn’t be more wrong too. If Tom and I were ever to split I wouldn’t see Jed’s heels for dust, he’d be too worried I might have been taking him seriously.’ At my surprised look she laughed shortly, ‘I’m useful protective colouring, you see. If Jed was casting languish­ing looks at anyone, it would have been at Oscar.’

  ‘No!’ I exclaimed. ‘Jed can’t be gay.’

  ‘He isn’t exactly gay - his closet door is locked, bolted and has a chain on for good measure - but he certainly isn’t one for chasing skirts either. ’ She wrinkled up her nose. ‘Actually I’m not sure he’s terribly interested in sex per se. I reckon he’s what they used to call a confirmed bachelor, but if he leans in any direction it’s towards men.’

  ‘Rather like Oscar,’ I said. ‘He seems to prefer friends to lovers too.’

  ‘The perfect couple,’ Janey said with a faint smile. ‘Perhaps we ought to try and bring them together.’

  ‘Mm,’ I said. ‘It’d serve Oscar right to be dosed with his own medicine for once, except I’ve got a hot date with a female wrestler to arrange for him first.’

  I told her about my plans for revenge, pleased to hear her giggle when I described how, when Oscar first met Felicity at a barbecue given by my flatmate and me last summer, he’d been so alarmed by her that he’d started backing away and had ended up impaled on a rose bush. He’d then had a terrible choice between carefully extricating himself and staying in Felicity’s frightening company for another ten minutes, or making a quick break for it, and ruining the new silk sweater he’d bought only that morning.

  The final credit for making Janey cheer up didn’t go to me but to Solomon, who burst through a row of vines, sending small marble-like unripe grapes scattering every­where and came heavily to a halt in front of us, looking very pleased with himself. It was not such a delight to us since within about five seconds it was all too apparent that he had found something to roll in, something very dead, probably a fish that hadn’t seen water for weeks. We jumped up with a shriek, dodging behind the tree before he could come any closer and actually touch us.

  ‘You’d better take him home and bath him,’ I said faintly.

  ‘Bath him?’ she exclaimed. ‘You don’t seriously think I’m going to get close enough to do that, do you? No, it’s the other end of the courtyard with a hosepipe aimed at you, old man. Luckily he’s a real water hound, he enjoys being soaked, but I’d better deal with him before he decides to do it for himself by jumping in the pool. I don’t think even the amount of chlorine Tom uses could cope with that smell. Thanks for listening, Nella.’ She hesitated, then said shyly, ‘Did Tom really mind about Jed?’

  ‘Yes, he did,’ I said firmly. ‘And think of this, Janey. Hugh didn’t know who Solange was lunching with. If it had been Tom, don’t you think he would have recognised him, even if it wasn’t a very good view?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ she said slowly and walked off, keeping carefully upwind of Solomon, looking a lot happier than she had done a few minutes ago.

  By the time I was back at the cottage, it was already clouding over again. By mid-morning it was raining in a steady, depressing drizzle that was distinctly uninviting, yet made you feel lacking in spirit for not doing some­thing hearty and English like having a picnic under an umbrella. Everybody in the cottage was acting as if the rain was a personal affront, specifically intended to ruin his or her plans for the day. Maggie had been thinking in terms of the beach, Sally of what was supposed to be a rather spectacular ten-kilometre walk along the riverbank, and the men of investigating a fair in the local town. Perhaps, all things considered, it was a good thing that the rain prevented any decisions having to be made even if we did have to settle for a desultory and bad-tempered game of Monopoly; Charlie was accused of swiping money from the bank, Phil of gassing everybody by chainsmoking, Sally of being stupid, me of being a wicked landlady and Oscar of conducting underhand deals with just about everyone, then refusing to pay up. Your average game of Monopoly really.

  So all in all, we were rather pleased when a rap on the door broke up a severe bout of cottage fever. I even stayed pleased when it turned out to be a damp George, though I gave Oscar an old-fashioned look. ‘Nothing to do with me, I promise,’ he said, hands held up defensively in case I felt like lobbing my silver top hat at him.

  George’s exc
use for turning up out of the blue was that the atmosphere at Château Vielleroche was such that he’d felt distinctly de trop and had thought it would be more tactful to absent himself for a while. I suspected that the real reason was that, despite his frequent claims that he was completely uninterested in gossip, he was big with news and wanted the exquisite delight of being the first to tell us.

  The balloon had gone up at the château in the biggest possible way, not because anyone had seen fit to tell Napier how his wife spent her lunch hours, but by sheer mischance. Solange had knocked her handbag over, spilling the contents on the floor, and while Napier was helping her pick everything up he’d happened to glance idly at a little note and read it without thinking. It had a date and time on it; Solange might have got away with her claim that it was just her next appointment at the hairdresser except that even the most conveniently blind husband knows there’s something fishy going on when the hairdresser signs his appointment card with ‘I want to kiss you all over’. The actual phrase was probably something considerably more fruity given Napier’s reac­tion, but disappointingly George was too much of a gentleman to tell us what.

  The subsequent row had raged all over the château from top to bottom, and still wasn’t resolved. What had made Napier really go into orbit was that the note came from the expert who oversaw the making of his red wine; this added an extra, completely unacceptable dimension to Solange’s disloyalty since he couldn’t possibly continue to employ someone who was making his wife as well as his wine, and a winemaker wasn’t someone who could be replaced easily. So far she hadn’t admitted that there had been anything going on other than a bit of surreptitious handholding, which had resulted in an unfortunate exchange where Napier had asked wearily, ‘Come on, do you think I’m stupid enough to believe that?’ and she’d replied, ‘0ui.’

  At that point, George had decided it would be wiser to get out of the firing range, though most of us felt this was poor-spirited of him. Sally was so concerned about the terrible strain on him of witnessing such a scene that she was virtually wiping his forehead with a handkerchief dipped in cologne.

  It was inevitable that George would be deemed too fragile to go back and face the atmosphere at Château Vielleroche yet, so he was invited to stay for supper, though I told Oscar under my breath that I thought George ought to do the decent thing and go back to support his friend. ‘He couldn’t possibly,’ said Oscar, shocked. ‘It would be terribly insensitive to intrude on a family problem like that.’

  It had never occurred to me before that George was bothered about matters of sensitivity - but there you are. I merely warned Oscar that if he even thought about pandering to George’s delicate emotions by offering him the newly vacated sofa bed, I was moving out. But before I went everyone might be interested to see the photograph of Oscar after he’d had the accident with the lobster ...

  ‘You haven’t really got it with you, have you?’ he asked in alarm. ‘You promised me you’d destroyed it!’

  I smiled sweetly. ‘Of course I did - I keep my promises, Oscar. But I didn’t say anything about destroy­ing any copies I might have, did I?’ I’d never actually made any but what does the literal truth matter when you’re fighting to keep the sofa bed free? Besides, I’d learned the art of half-truths, or virtually no truths at all, off a master.

  Oscar looked suspicious but he didn’t press the point. He really didn’t want to risk anyone seeing that photograph. I didn’t blame him. I waggled my fingers at him, and as it was his turn for making the dinner left him to work his magic in the kitchen. I was down on the rota to be general kitchen skivvy but Oscar was trying out something new. I knew this would entail some chef-like displays of temperament and banging of pans, so I decided to keep out of the way and take advantage of the others being distracted to have a bath and nick all the hot water for myself for once.

  Maggie said in a martyred voice later that she’d had to lay the table as I hadn’t been there to do it, but I didn’t care. It was so good to feel that I was the one with the nice clean shiny hair, even if I could have done without George smirking and obviously thinking it had been washed just for him. It was even nicer to feel that for once an expensive purchase really was money well spent. Marie-Helene’s exorbitant haircut was still falling back into place so perfectly that I began to wonder if it wouldn’t be worth popping out here every so often just to have a trim. Investment hairdressing you could call it, except perhaps not in the hearing of my bank manager.

  CHAPTER 16

  A mild wind blew away the last of the clouds, and the rain had gone by the end of a surprisingly pleasant dinner. Oscar’s new dish had worked so there were no creative sulks, and Maggie had punished me for my selfishness by commandeering George and taking him to sit at the other end of the table. As a ploy for engendering remorse it backfired splendidly.

  When we had all finished, Phil took a perfunctory look at the spectacular sunset outside and said that as the rain had stopped, the fair in the local town might have got going. Did anyone fancy challenging him on the dodgems? He got an enthusiastic response from the sophisticated and cool grown ups present. In that case, he declared, we’d better start out now and leave the clearing up until later.

  Sally grinned at me from the other side of the table. Guess whose turn it was to do the washing up?

  The fair, which had been set up around the square where the old men usually played their boules, had indeed got going. We could hear the thump of music played at top volume, and each ride seemed to be playing something different, combined with the rumble from the generators powering the rides from about half a mile away. At first George and Oscar, who had been to Alton Towers with their nephews and nieces, were a bit sniffy about a fair that didn’t have any futuristic monster rides, let alone a proper roller-coaster that subjected you to some massive G force as you shot almost vertically downwards, but they soon succumbed to the lure of the dodgems and were buying five tokens at a time for their cars before going on the attack. There was nearly a row between Phil and Maggie when she chickened out of ramming Oscar head on, and Phil told her that her driving was thoroughly girly. I thought he was being unfair; she wasn’t being girly so much as having problems using the pedals with such high heels. Sally, on the other hand, was determined to annihilate the opposition. After she had crushed the men of our party into submission she set about charging various spotty French youths who were delighted to be the subject of such aggression and appeared to think it was a particularly English form of flirting. When she had to give up her dodgem she was almost swamped in the rush of offers to buy her a plastic glass of wine from the buvette.

  Oscar was dying to go on an octopus affair with little pods like inverted teacups on long arms, saying that it was perfectly safe, didn’t tip you upside down and the iron bar that went over your lap was just there because of over-cautious EC regulations. Like a complete idiot I fell for it and agreed to go with him. I should have known that nothing has quite that number of fairy lights dotted all over it if it’s perfectly harmless and the music was deliberately loud to drown out the terrified screams of those within.

  ‘Shame it didn’t go faster. It was a bit on the tame side, wasn’t it?’ said Oscar as we got out, me on legs that were shaking so much I doubted I’d ever be able to walk properly again. ‘Fancy another go?’

  I looked at him with loathing and contemplated drop­ping a plastic beaker of red wine down the front of his precious new cream linen trousers to shut him up. I didn’t, I needed every drop of alcohol for myself to soothe my shattered nerves.

  George had dropped all pretensions about being too grand for such a small affair and insisted I watch him while he demonstrated his prowess at the shooting gallery. It was that or go on the teacup again so I chose the lesser of two evils. Not content with scoring the bull three times with three pellets, he decided to have a go at winning the main prize - an exceptionally large teddy bear made of shiny synthetic pink plush. He was getting dangerously close to winni
ng the beastly thing. I could just see Oscar’s face when he realised he was going to have to drive the whole way through France - and up our street - with an almost life-sized pink teddy in his front passenger seat.

  Mercifully Venetia bounced up just as George was rooting through his pocket for enough change to buy the final three pellets and said, ‘Are the others here as well? Oh good, it’s going to be like a real party then. Robbie’s just over there. Come on, join us, do!’ While George hesitated, torn between the teddy and Venetia, she made up his mind for him by linking her arm through his and leading him off, chattering nineteen to the dozen and wanting to know everything about Solange and Napier’s epic row. Napier had rung Tom earlier that evening but her father had been unsportingly closemouthed about what Napier had actually said.

  Robert was standing by the dodgems. ‘Well, well, well, what a surprise,’ he said as he turned around and saw who it was, then he leaned over to kiss my cheek. I blinked, wondering what had prompted him to this unexpected show of warmth. Probably the thought that he wouldn’t be seeing me again. ‘Are you all here?’ he asked, then spotted Venetia still animatedly questioning George. ‘Our George gets around a lot, doesn’t he? Like sand. Gets into everything and is downright irritating.’ There was a pause, then, ‘Sorry, Nella. I forgot he was a friend of yours,’ he said insincerely.

  The teacup was disgorging its latest load of victims. I was pleased to note that even Oscar looked as if he’d had enough of being whirled around at some terrible rate and was a little pale about the gills. There was a general feeling as we gathered around the buvette that we’d experienced just about everything the fair had to offer, and more importantly, we were running low on ready cash though Charlie was making a brave attempt to regain our general fortunes with the money sweep machine. So far he’d lost about thirty francs and won two but he was still hopeful. Venetia was complaining about leaving, saying she was enjoying herself while Robert turned to me and said, ‘I never got around to giving you the sleeves for your pictures, but if we don’t see you before we go tomorrow, I’ll leave them with Janey.’