by Judy Astley
‘Jeez, you do look funny,’ she told him.
‘You don’t. You look amazing,’ he said before he could stop himself.
Kate felt her face going pink under the powder. She wondered if it showed, as a blush now bloomed on Simon, though perhaps they didn’t smother the men quite so much in cosmetics. ‘What have you got to do?’ she asked. ‘Do you have to say anything?’
‘Definitely not, they’d never let me. I have to wander round with a tray of drinks and look busy. Shame I’ve not been cast as another guest, then we could talk to each other.’
‘True. Though I could be one of those women who runs off with the butler.’
‘Talking of parties . . .’ Simon started, seeing an opportunity that might not come again, along with Kate in a good, almost flirty mood, ‘there’s going to be an outdoor one on the island, probably on Friday, we thought, if it’s a really hot night. Would you like to come? Loads of people will be there, I mean even kids, so it’s no big deal, but it might be fun. I thought you’d want to be invited. I mean, it’s not as if there’s much to do round here.’ He shrugged dismissively as if he didn’t care one way or the other, just thought he’d let her know then she wouldn’t feel left out.
‘Yeah. I’ll come,’ she told him, watching out of the corner of her eye the cast of extras being assembled for their scene. ‘Though on one of the days I’ve got this funeral to go to. I’ll need cheering up after that.’
Driving over to Nigel’s nursery that afternoon, Heather’s thoughts were concentrated determinedly on plants for shady areas. She drove out of the village behind the council estate and thought of hellebores and polygonatums and tellimas. Martagon lilies could be good, she thought, as long as the client was interested enough to check for lily beetle, otherwise the plants would be a complete waste of time. Her mind ran on to violas and hostas and euphorbias, and possible colour combinations. Delia sat quietly by her side, now feeling slightly concerned that her new hat still wasn’t grand enough to rival the glorious lime green straw cartwheel that Clarissa had been wearing at Margot’s barbecue. For all its ribbons and roses that she had been so thrilled with, it somehow wasn’t magnificent compared with the careless flamboyance of Nigel’s mother. All her life Delia had aspired to discreet good taste only to discover that there were social circles in which this was simply prissy gentility. It was all to do with class, she concluded, sighing to herself. She was, though, very much looking forward to the promised tour of Clarissa’s famous rose garden and some tips on the eradication of black spot. In Putney she had a small row of hybrid teas out in the small garden at the back of the flat.
‘Do you think Clarissa will be able to tell me, without actually seeing them, whether I’m over-pruning? My roses do seem to end up a bit on the scraggy side,’ she asked Heather anxiously.
‘I can tell you that – you are over-pruning. But you have also got some varieties that really aren’t going to get very big, anyway. Why not intersperse with the odd shrub rose, plus a climber or two along the wall behind them? Then you’d have a wonderful display, much more extensive. And think of the heavenly scent.’
‘Hmm, perhaps. I’ll see what Clarissa thinks.’
Heather smiled to herself and understood the subtext: her mother couldn’t believe that Heather really knew about plants, especially roses: that was for her own generation, and best of all it was for men, preferably the sort who grew exhibition standard onions and the sort of long, pale, flawless carrots that always made her think of underused penises. It would go well against the grain to acknowledge that Heather actually knew something that Delia didn’t. Delia wasn’t sure about rambling roses either, Heather recalled from the days when, as a young and self-conscious teenager, she’d been uncomfortably certain that the creepy man next door was always fiddling with his marrows whenever she went out to sunbathe in her bikini. She’d crossly suggested to her mother that trellis and a good thick and thorny climbing rose might keep the man’s prying eyes away from her. Delia had said that climbers were untidy things and got out of control. Heather had argued that it was the man next door who needed controlling and Delia had told her not to be so silly, he was perfectly respectable, an executive in Local Government and a member of the Round Table, so he couldn’t be spying on her, could he? ‘And besides, if you will go making an exhibition of yourself . . .’ had closed the conversation on rambling roses.
They’d reached the far side of the village, out beyond the estate and the green, when Heather’s phone rang. Delia tutted and muttered something about concentrating on one thing at a time as Heather fumbled with the aerial.
‘Don’t you ever look in your rear-view mirror?’ Iain’s voice, jaunty with amusement, purred down the line to her. Heather’s right hand twitched on the steering wheel as she glanced into the mirror, trying to look indifferent through her soaring blood pressure. The scarlet Mercedes was following her round a slow bend at a discreet but unnerving distance, and she felt in danger of driving into a ditch.
‘Yes Kate, I’ll be home for supper, no problem,’ she heard herself saying, sure that her nose was growing from telling lies.
Iain laughed softly. ‘How about having supper with me? We could go out somewhere, go to London if you like.’
Heather could feel Delia listening hard and wondered if her hearing was still so sharp that she’d be able to make out that this was a man’s voice, nothing like Kate’s. She jammed the phone hard against her ear, just in case, and thought how out of practice at this sort of thing she was – she should have pretended it was the plumber. It would have been better not to do any pretending at all, but she felt it wouldn’t be half as much fun.
‘Er . . . no. Well not tonight anyway,’ she replied rather squeakily, hoping she wouldn’t giggle.
‘Another night? There’s something I really need to talk to you about,’ Iain persisted, clearly enjoying her predicament.
‘Maybe, I’m not sure – we’ll talk about it later. Oh and be an angel and get the spaghetti out of the freezer for me would you please?’ Heather felt quite delighted with her inventiveness, but instantly realized there would be no defrosting pasta sitting on the kitchen worktop when they got back. Delia would notice, no question. Kate would be told off and not know what on earth was the problem, and so the web of falsehoods would weave itself in awful knots.
‘Certainly, no problem. I’ll be the perfect angel,’ Iain said, and then rang off.
‘Was that Kate? I thought she’d gone off filming,’ Delia said with a disapproving sniff.
‘Hmm. Yes, just wanted to know, er, if I’d be back later. I expect she wants to borrow money or something. Perhaps she’s going out with Annabelle.’
They’d reached the nursery by now. Delia stepped out and looked across the Renault roof at Heather. It was a look of deeply speculative suspicion, one Heather, with her life of more or less tedious respectability, hadn’t seen for years. It told her that her mother thought she was Up To No Good, and it made her feel quite sparky inside. About time I had some fun, she thought as she returned her mother’s frown with a wide and uncontrollable smile.
She was wrong if she thought she’d heard the last of Iain for that day. Delia was dispatched to Nigel’s ancestral home for her rose-garden tour and a cream tea, while Heather went into the unusually spruce coach-house office to meet her new client. ‘Nigel, you’ve tidied up,’ she commented as she sat down next to the window and stroked his enormous cat.
‘Did it for you. Didn’t want this chap to be put off you by the appalling state of me. I want him to want you to buy everything I’ve got out here.’ He waved his arm in the direction of the greenhouses and poly-tunnels beyond the stable yard. ‘Then I can sell up and get rid of the whole sodding lot. I quite fancy a gallery next . . .’ Nigel was off into dreamland, and Heather glanced out of the window. The cherry Mercedes slid round the corner and pulled up across the yard with Iain’s hand waving gently to her out of the window. The car then circled with hardly a sound and dr
ove away, back towards the road. She stifled a giggle. The awful man was following her, surreptitiously chasing her, blatantly amusing himself. How much more fun Iain was as a new secret than as the old one. She was feeling just as she had when he had boldly driven the E-type into the staff car park at school, blocking everyone’s exit, and waited for her Latin class to finish on Wednesday lunch-times. Then he’d whisked her to the pub, sometimes cramming a friend or two into the seat with her, her white PVC mac covering her uniform, and her tie stuffed in its pocket.
While Nigel ranted on about the awfulness of trade and the despicable tendency of plants to die on him, she realized that if she got the opportunity she would definitely take the chance of a night of passion with Iain. If Tom was about to leave her, she no longer had anyone who cared whether she did or not. She counted up in her head the number of men she’d slept with in her life. Only five (three of them eager but hopeless boys from college) seemed a minute collection for someone who’d been part of the free-love end of the sixties. Iain wouldn’t even add to the total, and besides, surely one’s very own ex-husband didn’t count?
Chapter Fifteen
Delia really felt she could have done justice to a house like Clarissa’s. It was Palladian and golden, with parterres and rose gardens, and plenty of sheltered sunny niches for outdoor tea with cakes she would neither have made herself nor bought in Safeway. You had to have servants, a cook, staff to enable you to rise above the mundane and to glory in the architecture, the vista, the sumptuousness – although what Delia could see of the curtains seemed to be shockingly faded. But there was a certain nobility about the rotting away of grand things, she thought. Polyester/cotton velvet falling to shreds could only look tawdry, ancient silk velvet could not. She could have adapted to this sort of thing very easily, had life’s cards been differently dealt. She could have locked the door of the Putney flat and walked away without ever once looking back if she’d had somewhere glorious like this to move on to. Perhaps if Heather had only . . . but that was long ago, and in Scotland, and only the damp and the chill and the loneliness had made any impact on her. What a silly child she’d been, stupidly impulsive and with neither staying power nor sense of history. For now, Delia was content to sit on the upper terrace, looking across the fancy iron balustrade towards Clarissa’s magnificent roses, waiting for tea and enjoying the certainty that her new hat from Oxford was, after all her trepidation in the car, just right. Clarissa, who was wearing a straw hat so ragged Delia at first thought it was a piece of old sacking, had actually been impressed enough to make just the right admiring comments before disappearing into the house to organize tea. Delia trusted she had done this by pulling on a bell-rope of age-matted petit point, as in a historical TV costume drama.
‘Sorry to be so long, Julia’s just arrived and we thought we should water her dogs first.’ Clarissa plonked a large butler’s tray down on the dark green wooden table. Delia inspected the crockery with interest, hoping to see some delicately patterned Meissen, but being disappointed to recognize a floral tea-set identical to the one her friend Peggy had bought in the John Lewis sale. Delia thought it entirely appropriate to put the dogs before humans: it was suitably aristocratic.
As tea was being poured, Julia came out carrying a large chocolate cake and accompanied, as always, by her labradors. ‘Hello! How lovely to see you! Oh and don’t touch the dogs, one of them has been in something disgustingly foxy and he stinks.’ She put the cake on the table and waved her arms at the dogs. ‘Boys! Get away! Go and roll on some fresh grass!’ she commanded.
‘Lovely cake,’ Delia commented.
‘Mmm. These weekly WI sales are marvellous aren’t they? I buy all my cakes and jams at them,’ Clarissa said with enthusiasm, shattering another of Delia’s illusions. So much for the teams of cooks and kitchen maids. It was probably like anyone else’s kitchen really, all Magimix and muddle. It probably wasn’t even ‘below stairs’. ‘So is the whole village still in chaos with the film company? Or are they almost finished? I heard a rumour they were going to take over the churchyard and that everyone’s furious that all their old Auntie Doris’s graves will be vandalized. We’re so on the edge of everything out here, I hardly know what goes on,’ Clarissa asked Delia.
‘We don’t see much of them,’ she replied, wondering at the same time why there were no cake forks, and if it would be rude to ask for one. The chocolate icing was very gooey, and she hoped there wasn’t any caught on her lip-edge.
‘Not even that attractive chap staying at Margot’s? That writer, Iain whatsisname, Ross?’ Julia asked through a mouthful of cake.
‘I haven’t seen him at all, in fact I’m afraid I don’t recall him being mentioned,’ Delia confessed apologetically. She felt she was disappointingly under-informed. Both women had a rather beady gleam in their eyes as if he was someone who should have been the talk of the village, and that somehow she was supposed to have brought with her a useful amount of gossip.
‘Of course Ross is just the name he writes under. You must have heard of him, surely, all those gory crime novels?’ Clarissa was saying. ‘His real name is Iain Ross MacRae. Sir Iain, I should say. Owns an awful lot of Scotland.’
Delia suddenly found it impossible to swallow her cake. She had the same feeling she’d had on the train at Reading, short of breath and with her blood pressure going haywire. She immediately had no doubts, none whatever, that Heather had known all along that he was there in the village. She’d been keeping secrets again, of that Delia was suddenly certain. She thought about leopards not changing their spots. Then she thought about the phone call in the car and Heather’s silly girlish grin and knew there would not be spaghetti defrosting in the kitchen when they arrived home. She unfastened the top button of her blouse, tangling her fingers awkwardly in the pussy-cat bow ribbons, and tried to regulate her breathing. The tea was making her perspire.
‘We used to know his people,’ Clarissa was continuing, calmly pouring more tea. ‘I should have had him over for drinks of course, dreadfully remiss. Father knew his father out in Kenya. Old Sir Cuthbert died out there, I believe. Couldn’t stand the frozen north, so he stuck to his plantations and the decadent ex-pat life – all gin and giraffes I imagine.’
‘Do you know,’ Julia leaned forward towards them both in a confiding manner, ‘when Heather came round to bring my camellias, she did make the slight suggestion that he might just do for a lonely widow like me!’
‘No, oh no he wouldn’t do at all.’ Delia heard her own voice coming from somewhere. They were looking at her in polite surprise and she looked back blankly, feeling much as she had the last time she went to the dentist and had come out of the anaesthetic murmuring about cushion covers.
‘No, you’re quite right my dear, I’ve heard he only likes the young ones. Absolutely typical man! Think they can have anything they want!’ Clarissa said with a snorting laugh.
‘They usually can,’ Delia added grimly.
‘Did you have a good look round the roses?’ Heather asked her mother as they both climbed into the baking hot car for the homeward journey.
‘Yes. Quite lovely,’ Delia replied briskly.
Heather waited for her to be more forthcoming. She thought that she’d at least, on this occasion, done the right thing by Delia. It was just her sort of outing, not only a visit to a historic house, but tea with its owner who could quite reasonably be referred to as a friend. She’d been thrilled enough to be joined for tea by an Earl, the previous summer, when on a Townswomen’s Guild visit to a famous garden. She’d mentioned it, as if in passing, then quipped, ‘Well of course it’s probably included in the entry fee,’ but there’d been no disguising how delighted she’d been.
‘Were there any you took a particular fancy to?’
‘Any what?’
‘Roses. Did you jot down any of their names? Nigel might have some in stock, we could come back again before you go back to Putney and have a look.’ Delia seemed vague and Heather’s insides
tensed, wondering if her mother was actually ill. Now that the strain of Uncle Edward’s care was removed from her, the sudden relaxation, combined with the August heat that had been grilling the car when it was parked, might be enough to bring on a stroke.
‘There was a very striking “Masquerade”,’ Delia said pointedly.
Heather, driving along the narrow road, risked a sideways glance at her. Her mother sat impassively, staring straight ahead through the windscreen. It was a very intense stare into the middle distance, Heather thought, for someone who didn’t have to think at all about where she was going.
‘Are you all right? Shall I open the sunroof?’ Heather asked, reaching up for the handle.
‘I’m fine. Nothing wrong with me,’ was the reply which made Heather smile. It was just so exactly like when she was young and she was supposed to guess what she had done wrong, while her mother fumed and brooded and sulked and cultivated an atmosphere that reminded Heather of a severe choking fog. Then, once she’d worked out that it was probably because she’d been an hour or two later home from the college than she’d said she’d be, she would resolutely play a game in which she behaved with complete cheerful normality. She’d bang around the kitchen making cups of tea for them both, make a start on her homework, switch on the TV and chat about how envious she was of Val Singleton presenting Blue Peter. It was like staring someone out, waiting for her mother’s patience to crack when she would at last blurt out her grievance. I must have grown up at last, she thought now. Life is much too short for these grudge-games.
‘OK, so what’s wrong?’ she asked as they turned on to the main road leading to the village.
