A Rural Affair

by Catherine Alliott

  ‘And I thought I’d walk up to the nursery with you later.’

  ‘You don’t have any children at the nursery.’

  Jennie’s children were older: Jamie, twelve, and Hannah, seven, were both at the local school, which didn’t chuck out until three-thirty.

  ‘I know, but Leila could do with the exercise. And I daren’t go back into the forest with her.’

  Leila had been known to chase the deer up there, an offence which carried a fifty-pound penalty from the deer warden, who had threatened to shoot to kill next time. ‘Can I watch?’ had been Jennie’s riposte. I’d been with Jennie on this last occasion, when, as usual, she’d foolishly let the dog off the lead, then, as usual, spent the next half-hour crashing through undergrowth hissing, ‘Leila! Leila, you bitch, come here!’ Not too loud, you understand, so as not to alert the warden. We’d crashed about some more, when suddenly, in the distance, there’d been an ominous rumble of thundering hooves. To get the full Serengeti effect you have to imagine the stampeding does, the whites of their eyes, the clouds of dust as we flattened ourselves against a tree, pulling Archie’s pushchair in sharpish, and then, in their wake, an Irish terrier, shooting us a delighted look, tongue lolling, galloping joyously. Obviously the warden was crashing through the bracken moments later in his Land Rover, puce in the face with rage, and obviously Jennie was given a fine on the spot and sensibly hadn’t been back. But still, a walk to the nursery, two minutes up the hill, hardly constituted exercise for our Leila. And don’t be deceived by the terrier word, incidentally. With Irish before it, it’s more like a small horse.

  I sighed. ‘OK,’ I said obediently, as I tended to these days.

  ‘And then, later on, I thought you might like to come to choir practice with me.’

  ‘Really? Why?’ I felt alarmed.

  ‘Because we’re singing the Gloria tonight, and you’ll enjoy that.’

  ‘But I don’t sing.’

  ‘Anyone can sing. And anyway, I’ve stood next to you in church and you’ve got perfect pitch. Frankie’s going to babysit for you.’

  ‘Right,’ I said flatly. Sing. I couldn’t remember how to talk.

  Sure enough, as I set off with Archie an hour or so later, Jennie appeared miraculously from her front door with a straining Leila – I’d swear Peggy’s curtain twitched opposite – and we set off up the hill. We collected Clemmie, and walked back down the hill, all of which took about fifteen minutes, a little longer than usual as Jennie had a furtive word with Miss Hawkins, but still not enough for Leila, who needed a good hour.

  As Jennie said goodbye, she bent down to talk to Clemmie.

  ‘That’s a pretty dress, Clem.’

  ‘I know. It’s got a rabbit on the front.’

  ‘It has. And a bit of gravy. You were wearing it yesterday, weren’t you, darling?’

  ‘Yes, and every day. Six. I’ve counted. Mummy said I could.’

  ‘Good, good.’ She straightened up. Looked anxious again. I must remember to ask about Dan.

  ‘Seven o’clock, then?’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘Choir practice. I’ll send Frankie round, but I’ll have to meet you there because I need to take Jamie to scouts.’

  ‘Righto.’

  Submissive. Punch bag. Best way.

  The children and I had just about finished our tea when Frankie appeared sometime later. She was a sulky, skinny girl with a washed-out face, not helped by heavy, dark eye make-up, and over-long, bleached blonde hair. She was at the local comp where everyone tended to look like that, but where had that sensitive, rather pretty eight-year-old gone, I wondered, as she sat in a heap at the kitchen table, picking gloomily at her black nail varnish. Archie grinned and banged the table enthusiastically. He responded well to her sulky charms.

  ‘Hi, Arch.’ She took his soggy offering of a masticated biscuit and his eyes widened delightedly. ‘Crackers and lemonade, yum. We’re never allowed that for tea.’

  The children beamed proudly.

  ‘Yesterday we had a Hula Hoop sandwich,’ Clemmie informed her grandly.

  ‘Good for you, Clem. Why bother with the old five a day, eh?’ She turned to me. ‘Jennie says you’re going to choir practice with her. That’s a bit sad, isn’t it? You’ll be doing the church flowers with her next.’

  ‘Your mum’s very busy, Frankie,’ I told her. ‘And someone’s got to do it.’

  ‘Why?’ she said belligerently. ‘No one would notice if there weren’t any flowers in church, would they?’

  ‘Some people would.’

  ‘People like Jennie. So she does it for herself, in fact.’

  I could see she was pleased with that. Was probably storing it away to deploy on her stepmum later, when Jennie came home, tired. Normally I’d defend her, tell Frankie if everyone thought like that there wouldn’t be any community in the village, but somehow I couldn’t be bothered. Couldn’t raise the energy.

  ‘It’s like dusting,’ she was saying. ‘She’s got this thing, right, that you don’t do it any more, don’t hoover either, but what does it matter? So what if the dust builds up? Who was it said it gets to a certain level and doesn’t get any thicker?’

  ‘Quentin Crisp,’ I said distantly. Dust? Why were we talking about dust? Oh, as in ashes to ashes.

  ‘You see?’ she said admiringly. ‘You know things like that. Cos you read, which is more than Jennie does. Who was he, anyway?’

  ‘The last of the stately homos. At least that’s what he called himself. D’you want a cracker, Frankie?’

  ‘No, you’re all right. You’d better go, though. She’ll get stressy if you don’t turn up. D’you want to brush your hair?’

  ‘No, thanks. Do you?’

  ‘Not really. Shall I do Clemmie’s?’

  ‘Sure.’

  My daughter slipped down shyly from the table and ran off to get her Barbie hairbrush. Such was her admiration of Frankie, she could hardly speak for the first five minutes of her visit. I got heavily to my feet and went to pluck my coat from the back of the door.

  ‘School breaks up soon,’ Frankie said abruptly, apropos of nothing. ‘Half-term. Can’t wait.’

  ‘So it does,’ I agreed. Ages away, actually; but for a sixteen-year-old it was like a drink in the desert. A reprieve from the daily grind winking away in the distance: lie-ins in the mornings, night life in the evenings. Never quite the reality, obviously: lashings of rain and endless boredom with the odd gnomic exchange with an equally bored mate in McDonald’s, but the idea was good. Like most ideas. Marriage. Children. In fact wasn’t most of the joy in life derived from the planning, the theory? I must remember that. Plan more, do less.

  ‘So what are you going to do with yourself this holiday?’ I forced myself to say conversationally. Never let it be said I couldn’t string two words together, something I’m sure I heard Yvonne in the shop say about me to Mrs Pritchard, as I left her premises earlier today with my pint of milk.

  ‘I thought I might get pregnant.’

  I was shrugging my coat on at the door, facing away from her. I turned.

  ‘Why not? Mum did it.’

  ‘Jennie didn’t –’

  ‘No, my mum. She was sixteen.’

  ‘Oh.’

  We stared at one another. She gave a hint of a smile. ‘You’re not that far gone, are you? Not completely mental.’

  Ah. Shock tactics. ‘Nice one, Frankie.’

  ‘Still, I might, though,’ she said defensively.

  ‘Got anyone in mind?’

  ‘No,’ she said sulkily, deflated in an instant, alive to the poverty of her plan. I wished I hadn’t asked. ‘There’s Jason Crowley at school, but he’d never shack up with me. Just want a quick shag. That’s the whole point,’ she said, dark eyes flashing.

  ‘What, a quick shag?’

  ‘No, to shack up, get out of there.’ She jerked her head next door. ‘Or there’s Mr Hennessy, my biology teacher; he’s really fit, but he’s got a wife and kids which i
sn’t ideal, is it?’

  ‘Not … ideal.’ Where was I going? I stared at the door. Oh, yes, church.

  ‘Single mothers get priority with council flats, though,’ she told me. ‘You jump the queue.’

  I sighed. ‘Frankie …’

  ‘Anyway, he doesn’t fancy me. Mr Denis does – physics – but he’s properly weird; he fancies everyone. Or I suppose I could nick your new intended? Come along to choir practice.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She got to her feet as Clemmie came back with her brush and a mirror from my dressing table, struggling under the weight.

  ‘Oh, salon stuff!’ Frankie relieved her of the mirror and hoisted it onto the table. ‘A French pleat, madam, or shall we cut it all short?’

  ‘All short!’ sang Clemmie, jumping up and down, ecstatic with excitement.

  Frankie grinned. ‘Nah, yer mum might notice that. Then again,’ she grimaced and shot me a look, ‘in her state she might not. Here, give me that.’ She took the brush from her. ‘We’re going to go for a pleat, right? And then we’ll give Archie a comb-over.’

  My son had yet to collect much hair, but what he had was long, wispy and very much around the edges. Archie beamed and offered her some more cracker, clenched and soggy in his fist. She took it and put it on her tongue, which was pierced.

  ‘D’you dare me?’

  Clemmie nodded. Frankie swallowed. The children roared with laughter, delighted.

  ‘Don’t underestimate those harpies, though,’ she went on as I turned to go out of the back door. ‘Once they put their heads together, you’re sunk. Trust me, I should know. Oh, and you might want to take your dressing gown off under your coat. They’ll need smelling salts if they see that.’ I glanced down to where two inches of pale blue towelling protruded from my navy reefer. ‘Then again, you might not. Personally I like the layered look. But our Jennie’s got ever so bourgeois recently. She’s not so into the Quentin Crisp philosophy.’

  I took her advice, removed the dressing gown, replaced my coat, and putting one foot in front of the other, went off down the road to choir practice. In a small corner of my mind I was dimly aware that Frankie had given me a searching look as I’d left and, for one crazy moment, I’d almost turned and shared with her. Almost come back in, shut the door and blurted out my troubles, just as she’d blurted hers. I hadn’t, though. Of course not. Because there was no one I could tell. Not even Jennie. Not because I’d be mortified – I would – but because once it was out, I’d have no control over it. Dan would know. Then someone in the pub would know. And my children, so damaged already, must never know. Never hear from someone at school. I clenched my fists fiercely in my coat pockets in resolve. It must be a closely guarded secret. My secret. No one must ever know that their father, my husband, hadn’t found me enough, emotionally. That he’d had another life with another woman. That she’d been to see me ten days ago, paid me a visit. That she’d been there at his funeral and I’d never known. Been in our lives and I’d never known. Filled a void in Phil’s life I hadn’t been able to. They must never know that their father had been unhappy, desperate. It was my shame and I must bear it alone. Tears fled down my cheeks, soaking my face as I walked on.

  5

  Carefully wiping my face as I stood on the church step, I gave myself a moment; breathed in and out deeply. Then I pushed open the heavy door. The choir were already assembled in their stalls up by the altar, but then I was ten minutes late, having lingered to talk to Frankie. Most people I knew: friends and neighbours, who turned and smiled as I came in. But as I let the heavy oak door swing shut behind me, I wondered what on earth I was doing here. I hadn’t been in since Phil’s funeral and the familiar smell of cold stone, candle wax and damp, which I usually found rather comforting, seemed to ambush my senses as if a hood had been slipped stealthily over my head. I felt even more breathless than usual. I turned and with a shaky hand reached for the door handle again. I could pretend I’d forgotten something, then not come back. But the handle was stiff, and anyway, Jennie was beside me in a moment, having slipped out of her stall and down the aisle. My arm was in her vice-like grip.

  ‘Good, good, you’re here,’ she purred. ‘We haven’t started yet because we’re waiting for the organist. Come along, I’ve saved you a place.’

  She frogmarched me down the aisle in seconds, which wasn’t hard, because our church is tiny. And rather beautiful, or so I usually thought. This evening, though, the domed ceiling with its rows of blackened beams seemed ominously lofty and towering; the figure in the stained-glass window, St John the Baptist, I think, less kindly and benevolent, more threatening as he turned to glare at me over his rippling shoulder in his rags, eyes flashing. Angie was beckoning hard from the back row. No Peggy, but then she was a firm non-believer.

  ‘Papist nonsense.’

  ‘It’s C of E, Peggy.’

  ‘Still. All those smells and bells.’

  ‘Not in the Anglican church.’

  ‘I’ve got my own, thank you very much.’ And she’d puff on her ciggie and tinkle her beads.

  ‘Hello, Poppy.’

  Molly, a widow of about seventy, was sitting in the front row with her carer. She looked a bit dishevelled and smiled toothlessly at me, most of her tea down her front, shaky paws, slippers on. Molly wasn’t quite like other budgerigars.

  ‘Hello, Molly.’

  ‘Would you like to sit beside me, dear?’

  ‘Of course.’ I moved to do so.

  ‘No – no, because Angie and I have saved you a place, haven’t we?’ Jennie’s grip tightened on my arm and she shot me, then Molly, a look.

  But, actually, I had a feeling I didn’t necessarily want to be squeezed between my two best friends tonight. And anyway, Molly would be hurt. I sat firmly where I was. Jennie hesitated – I think for a moment considering heaving me bodily to my feet and bundling me away – then she rolled her eyes, shrugged helplessly at Angie, who rolled her eyes back, and sat huffily beside me, which put her next to Jed Carter, a local farmer from down the valley. Molly wasn’t the only one with an appendage this evening. Jed didn’t go anywhere without his sheepdog, Spod, a randy old boy lying at his feet who was in love with Leila. The joy in Spod’s eyes as he sniffed Jennie’s ankle, got a whiff of his beloved and realized he could shut his eyes and pretend her left leg was Leila, was hard to describe.

  ‘You see why we don’t sit here?’ hissed Jennie as Spod attached himself to her like a limpet, eyes glazed, humping hard. She shook him off furiously.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘And Spod’s not the only reason, as you’ll discover to your cost,’ she muttered grimly, as Sue Lomax, flaxen and inclined to furious blushes, took up her position at the lectern, tapping it smartly for our attention. We obediently got to our feet. Sue, or Saintly Sue as she was surreptitiously known, was attractive in a buxom way, but preachy. Ex-head girl, county lacrosse player and choir mistress, Sue was an all-round goody-goody – although Jennie and I privately thought her frustrated and man-hungry. She cleared her throat and looked important.

  ‘Right. Welcome, everyone. Now since you’re all here I think we’ll crack on with just Ron on the piano because Mr Chambers has just sent me a text saying he’ll be a bit late.’ She gazed down at the phone in her hand with a look I’d seen very recently in someone else’s eyes. Ah yes, Spod’s.

  ‘The organist,’ Jennie informed me importantly.

  So crack on we did, straight into Mozart’s Gloria, with Just Ron, who played mostly at the pub, thumping away valiantly. Everyone belted it out, myself included surprisingly, bounced as I was into behaving, into opening my mouth and remembering it from school. It was quite a shock, and not altogether unpleasant. I even felt a sensation approaching the warmth of blood in my veins. Molly was a bit distracting beside me, though, because she was singing something different.

  ‘She’s singing “Nights in White Satin”,’ I muttered to Jennie when Sue tapped the lec
tern to stop us because Ron had lost his place.

  ‘Always does,’ muttered back Jennie. ‘But she’s been in the choir for thirty years, so what can you do? We just don’t sit next to her,’ she added pointedly.

  At that moment the church door flew open.

  ‘Oh, good – you made it, Luke!’ Saintly Sue swung around delighted, even more flushed than usual and her colour was always high.

  A tall, rather attractive sandy-haired man in jeans, a biscuit-coloured linen jacket and gold-rimmed specs bounded down the aisle.

  ‘New organist,’ Angie leaned forward from behind to murmur in my ear, as we lunged to catch our hymn sheets, which were fluttering up like a flock of doves on the blast of cold air.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said, bouncing towards us with a wide smile. ‘Bit of a cock-up at work and I couldn’t get away.’ There was a definite puppyish charm: long legs, floppy hair, eyes that glinted merrily from behind the specs in an open, friendly face.

  ‘Oh, no, not at all,’ purred Sue, smoothing back her hair and straightening her blue lambswool jumper over her ample bosom. ‘We were slightly early in fact. But then I’m always a bit keen!’

  It might not have been entirely what she meant to say – Jennie sniggered – but I find that often happens to me, and as her hand went to her darkening throat, I sympathized.

  ‘Well, I’ll pop up, shall I?’ Luke said, after a slight pause during which their eyes met, his slightly more amused than hers. He indicated the organ above us, aloft. ‘Press on?’

  ‘Oh, yes, do,’ said Sue, as if it was a terrific idea, and one that hadn’t occurred to her. ‘Super!’

  ‘You’re all sounding great, by the way,’ he told us. ‘I could hear you halfway down the street – wonderful stuff!’

  He bestowed on us another winning smile, gathering everyone in, and everyone beamed delightedly back. All except one. I might have remembered how to do the Gloria, but I wasn’t up to beaming yet. My mouth did twitch politely, but later, after the event, as I find is often the case these days.