A Rural Affair

by Catherine Alliott

  ‘No,’ he concurred. ‘It doesn’t. It can mean all sorts of things.’

  ‘And it’s not as if I need to move. Not as if, geographically, I’m surrounded by too many fond memories and need to get away,’ I said, thinking as I spoke. ‘I’m sure many widows have that problem.’

  He regarded me carefully. ‘I like that about you, Poppy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The way you tell it like it is. No flannel.’

  I thought about this. ‘I think that’s new,’ I told him. ‘I think I’ve spent the last six or seven years not telling it how it is. Particularly to myself. Living a bit of a lie to accommodate others.’

  ‘You mean, to accommodate your husband?’

  ‘Yes, Phil, but ultimately the children. Mostly the children. Who wants to rock a boat that’s holding what we love most?’

  ‘So … d’you think you’d have ever left him? If he hadn’t – you know …’

  ‘Died?’ I sighed. ‘Who knows? I’d certainly fantasized about it. Fifty ways to leave your lover and all that. But I’d never actually considered doing it.’ I shrugged. ‘The two are very different things.’ I smiled. ‘And I’ve always been a bit of a wimp. What about you, Luke? What are your family commitments?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve just got a mum and a sister.’

  My smile froze.

  ‘Not that I live with them, or anything. I’ve got a flat in town.’

  ‘Good, good,’ I said, horribly unsettled. ‘And are you … close to them? Ring them twice a week? Sometimes more? Bring them with you to choose soft furnishings, sofas?’

  He frowned. ‘God, no. My sister, Nicky, is far too busy. She works for Vogue, and Mum wouldn’t know a soft furnishing if it hit her. She lives in a hotel in Monaco, mostly.’

  ‘Excellent!’ I breathed. I liked the sound of the Chambers women.

  ‘My dad encouraged Mum to live in style before he died. He had this theory that – blimey, what’s that?’

  Sadly this fascinating insight into Luke’s exotic family – where did the organ fit in? – was cut short by a rap on the window. We all swung about to behold Sylvia, Angus’s wife, glaring in furiously. Her spectacles were glinting ominously, her steel-grey perm rigid. Angus went pale and instinctively hid his wine glass behind his back. She disappeared and then the doorbell rang, long and shrill. We all stood about like naughty children as Peggy, who’d gone to get it, could be heard placating her at the door.

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry, Sylvia, we are running a bit late.’

  ‘But you’re not even reading! Or even sitting in a circle! Just standing around gossiping like you’re at a cocktail party. I rang the doorbell, twice!’

  ‘Ah yes, first meeting, though, you see. Just swapping ideas. Batting them about, to and fro. And we thought a relaxed environment would be more conducive.’

  ‘Hello, darling, how lovely. Did bridge finish early?’ This, from Angus, in a strained voice as he hastened to greet her at the door.

  ‘No, it did not finish early. Our rubber finished dead on eight as usual. It’s you that’s late, Angus. I thought you were going to put the baked potatoes in for me!’

  Other admonishments were lost in the stiff autumn breeze. As the front door closed behind them, Sylvia’s angry voice could still be heard as she frogmarched Angus down the road, past the pond and across the street towards home. We caught her drift, but not the finer nuances.

  Peggy came back and immediately crossed to draw the curtains with a flourish. ‘Foolish of me not to have done that before,’ she remarked. Then she turned to face us, hands on hips. ‘Now. Who’s for a sticky?’

  ‘A what?’ Jennie frowned.

  ‘A sticky. You know, Calvados, Drambuie, that sort of thing. What about you, Pete?’

  ‘Er, well, I’m not convinced I’ve ever had anything like that before,’ Pete said, palpitating nervously. ‘This Muscadet’s nice, though,’ he said, pronouncing the t.

  ‘Ah, but then you’ve never joined a book club before, have you?’ Peggy murmured, slipping down onto the sofa. She patted the space beside her. ‘Come. Sit.’ He obeyed, as if in a trance. ‘So many firsts in one evening. Oh, sorry, Angie, were you sitting here?’ She moved to accommodate her irate friend, who’d clearly been usurped, having nipped to the loo to refresh her lipstick. Peggy perched on the sofa arm instead. Lit a cigarette.

  ‘Pete here was telling me earlier that he’s got a furnace in the back of his Land Rover.’

  ‘Well, of course he has; he’s a mobile farrier,’ Angie said testily.

  ‘Frightfully mobile, I should think.’ Peggy looked him up and down appreciatively.

  ‘Was Sylvia livid, Peggy?’ Angie asked nervously. Angie sat on the parish council with Sylvia; she was also very much on the same dinner-party circuit.

  ‘A bit, but she’ll live.’ Peggy flicked ash in the fireplace. ‘Must get terribly hot in there,’ she murmured to Pete. ‘In your Land Rover. Very cosy.’

  ‘Well, I’m not actually in it much, except for driving. And the furnace isn’t on then, of course.’ Pete was looking pretty hot and flustered himself.

  ‘No, no, of course not. And what else d’you make, Pete? Apart from shoes? With your furnace? I say, aren’t your thighs enormous? It’s a wonder you can squeeze them into that armchair. You were saying?’

  ‘Um, w-was I?’ Pete blotted his perspiring forehead with his cuff.

  ‘Yes, about what else it is you make. Aside from horses’ shoes.’

  ‘Oh … well, I do the odd bit of iron railings and the like. But it’s not on a regular basis. More one-off commissions, that type of thing.’

  ‘Iron railings, do you really?’ Peggy’s eyes widened. ‘D’you know, I was just thinking the other day I was bored with the white picket fence outside my house and could do with some darling little railings there instead.’ Her smoky-grey eyes gazed innocently into his. ‘You couldn’t pop round next week and give me a quote, could you? Gone down the wrong way, Angie?’ She turned to pat her friend on the back. Angie, who appeared to be having a coughing fit, shot her a blistering look and stormed off to get a glass of water. Once she’d gone, Peggy laid a hand on my arm.

  ‘I say,’ she murmured, nodding towards the other side of the room, ‘Jennie’s having a nice time, isn’t she?’

  I turned to see Jennie, at the far end of the room by the French windows, talking to Simon. He was standing with one hand resting on a beam above her head, leaning in towards her as they chatted. Jennie’s cheeks were flushed, and as she threw her head back and laughed at something he said, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her look like that for a long time. Hadn’t seen her look so pretty. It also occurred to me that I’d been incredibly dim.

  11

  ‘She’s infuriating!’ Angie stormed the next morning when she and I popped round to Jennie’s for a cup of coffee and a post-match analysis. ‘She’s like some ghastly Carry On character: how hot is your furnace, Pete? Do you ever take your shirt off, Pete?’ she mimicked. ‘I mean, honestly.’ She sank down in a heap at Jennie’s kitchen table. ‘I thought: any minute now she’ll be feeling his biceps!’

  Jennie and I exchanged a guilty glance. After Angie had left early – in a bit of a huff, it has to be said – there had been a bit of bicep comparing. Quite a few people had rolled up their sleeves in a bid to compete with Pete’s monumental brawn. But, in our defence, we had all been terribly drunk, what with Peggy’s Calvados slipping down a treat and not having had any supper apart from a few meagre bits of smoked salmon. It had all got faintly giggly. Possibly out of hand. Angie had missed quite a party.

  ‘Peggy just gets a bit overexcited,’ I assured her, trying not to recall the arm-wrestling match between Peggy and Saintly Sue, with Pete as referee, the rest of us cheering them on. Sue had turned out to have quite a wild side. Blonde hair askew, pale blue eyes on fire, a button of her already overstretched shirt popping undone, she’d slammed Peggy’s arm down on the table then punched the air, roaring, �
�Yes!’ Her halo definitely hitting the deck. Luke, hooting with laughter, had swept her into his arms where she’d clung like a slug, planting a smacker on his lips. As I say, we were all very tight.

  ‘Yes, but if anyone’s allowed to flirt with Pete, it’s me; he’s my farrier,’ Angie said petulantly. ‘She’s supposed to fancy Angus.’

  ‘Peggy flirts with everyone,’ I soothed, recalling how strangely watchful Peggy had been as Angie had flounced out. ‘Good,’ she’d observed to me quietly, taking a thoughtful drag of her cigarette. ‘Important to save Angie from herself sometimes, don’t you think? Nice to see her having a bit of fun, but we don’t want her making a complete fool of herself.’ I’d blinked in surprise. A bit of me had even wondered if Peggy had a master plan going here; if this seemingly frivolous book club she’d organized for her friends had a deeper design. One which made us turn around and take a close look at ourselves, at our motives. Before I had time to reply, though, Peggy had disappeared down to the other end of the room, where she was busy organizing a team game which involved popping a coin down a shirt and jigging about until it appeared from trouser leg or skirt, then passing it on. Simon’s coin would keep getting stuck on the way so Peggy was instructing him in the fine art of helping it along. The porcelain expert’s face had been one of pure delight, and as Peggy threw her head back and roared, I’d thought: no, no master plan. Unless it just involved getting her friends laughing again.

  ‘Simon was nice, wasn’t he?’ mused Jennie, cradling her mug and gazing out of the window, a distant smile on her face. ‘Remember him hopping around on the sofa, trying to dislodge the coin?’

  ‘What coin?’ said Angie grumpily.

  ‘He really loosened up,’ Jennie went on distractedly. ‘His family home is in the next village, that’s why he’s standing for candidacy round here. He stayed there last night. He loves this part of the world. “My little corner of England” he calls it.’ She smiled, remembering. ‘In fact he said he might not wait to buy a cottage, might rent and commute into town.’

  ‘Why isn’t he married?’ demanded Angie. ‘He must be over thirty. He’s not gay, is he?’

  ‘There’s someone he never got over, apparently. He’d known her for ages, first girlfriend and all that, and they were going to get married a few years back; they were engaged and everything, but she kept postponing the wedding. It turned out she’d fallen for someone else. He told me all about it. I really liked that about him,’ Jennie observed. ‘His lack of guile. The way he didn’t try to build himself up. Some people wouldn’t have mentioned they’d been ditched but he’s not like that. He’s a really nice man, actually.’

  We digested this quietly. ‘Bit smooth for me,’ Angie sniffed eventually, disingenuously too, I thought. She’d done quite a lot of hair-flicking when she’d talked to Simon. She made a pious face and helped herself to the percolator.

  ‘I like smooth,’ Jennie said with feeling. ‘Haven’t had smooth for years. Decades. Ever. Could very easily get used to smooth.’

  I tried not to notice her hands were clenched; just as, last night, as I’d wandered back through the village at midnight, I’d tried not to notice that Simon, as I reached my gate, had just left Jennie’s. I’d been in time to see Jennie disappear inside as Simon turned to walk the two miles up the hill to his parents’ home in Wessington, presumably leaving his car at Peggy’s. A moonlit walk. A contemplative walk, perhaps. Whilst Jennie had gone inside and up the stairs in her dark, sleep-filled house, feeling just a little bit warmer, a little bit happier. And what was wrong with that?

  ‘You won’t be getting used to anything,’ Angie reminded her brutally. ‘You’re married.’

  ‘Yes, I know. To Toad.’ Jennie threw back her head and scratched it energetically with both hands. ‘Oh, I’m not about to leap into bed with the man, Angie, but surely this old heart of mine is allowed to quicken occasionally? Even skip a beat? Allow me a little extra-marital flirting, please. It’s surely not a crime to have a tiny light shining in some dark corner of my life?’

  There didn’t seem to be much to say to that. Jennie got up to refill the kettle noisily and banged it down with a clatter on her hob. She turned and leaned on the Aga, folding her arms and staring determinedly out of the window, gimlet-eyed. Angie sat up. Cleared her throat.

  ‘Well, if you’re not going to – you know – take it any further,’ she said, ‘do you mind if I do?’

  Jennie and I turned slowly to stare at her. ‘What, with Simon!’ spluttered Jennie.

  ‘Well, as you say, he is rather nice. Much nicer than I thought, and not at all slimy when he loosens up; and I am single, Jennie. And since Peggy’s so set on Pete, who, frankly, was only a joke, some twenty-something farrier –’

  ‘You just said he was smooth!’

  ‘And as you so rightly say, nothing wrong with that.’

  ‘I think that’s a bit rich, Angie!’ Jennie snorted. ‘You can’t just cruise in and nick my – my, you know –’

  ‘What?’ demanded Angie.

  ‘My book-club partner,’ she said primly. ‘Just because Peggy’s nicked yours!’

  ‘Book-club partner?’ scoffed Angie.

  ‘We agreed to swap notes,’ said Jennie stiffly. ‘When we’d finished the book.’

  ‘I bet you did.’

  ‘Now look,’ I said nervously, as my two friends glared at one another across the room, ‘this is all getting a bit out of hand, isn’t it? We’ve only had one meeting and we are supposed to be discussing literature here, not matchmaking. Shall we all calm down?’

  Angie and Jennie looked embarrassed. ‘Sorry,’ they both muttered sheepishly.

  ‘Totally pathetic,’ added Angie. ‘Talk about frustrated housewives. And anyway, the whole point was to get you back on track again.’ She looked at me. ‘Give you a bit of fun. What did you think of Luke?’

  ‘Nice,’ I said evenly. Patiently. ‘Easy to talk to.’

  ‘When she could get him away from Saintly Sue,’ remarked Jennie. ‘I noticed she was very quick to play hide the fifty p with him.’

  I sighed. ‘I’m in no rush,’ I said, meaning it. ‘I’ve got the rest of my life, haven’t I?’

  As I said it, the enormity of that simple statement, the freedom it conveyed and the joy, threatened to explode within me. I got to my feet as Archie wailed. The feverish rage of the last few days had left me as abruptly as it had arrived. That white-hot outrage at Phil’s betrayal had gone, and in its place a kind of calm acceptance together with an astonishing clarity prevailed. After a few minutes I said goodbye to my friends. Archie was getting cranky and needed his sleep, but, also, I wanted to savour that feeling on my own. Wanted to cradle my new-found freedom to myself as I cradled my son while he nodded off in my arms. How wonderful it was: I had the whole of my life to choose better, if at all. I shut Jennie’s front door softly behind me and walked down the path. It hadn’t escaped my notice that Sue had made a major play for Luke last night, but as the coin appeared from his trouser leg and as Sue, like a crouching tiger on the floor, had grabbed it with a shriek, I’d been happy to slip away. Been happy to go quietly. I certainly wasn’t going to fight for a man I hardly knew. And anyway, aside from our earlier conversation, he hadn’t exactly sought me out.

  As I turned into my garden I wondered if it was true that everybody had a soulmate out there somewhere, or if most people just patched and made do? Met someone appropriate and in a fit of youthful enthusiasm turned a blind eye to any imperfections, thinking: perfect, you’ll do. Just after Phil and I got engaged I found a list in the breast pocket of his jacket which he’d left behind at my flat: pros and cons, with my name at the top. That should have been my moment. To call the whole thing off. Instead, I ran a fevered eye down and realized, with relief, that there were more pros than cons. One more. ‘Quite tidy’ had been the deal-clincher for Phil. Shaming. But don’t forget I’d been feeling very desperate at the time. Very much like a stale bun on a shelf.

  Well,
I wouldn’t be feeling that again, I determined as I went up my path and delved in my bag for my key, flushing with anger as I remembered. Wouldn’t be Making Do. I’d be very happy with Clemmie and Archie; yes, thank God I had children. That, of course, was pivotal in the desperation game: wanting – needing those. That biological urge. But now that I had them, we could be on our own for ever. I’d never have to panic-buy again.

  ‘I say, Poppy!’ As I turned to shut my front door, I saw Angus hurrying towards me, Spectator under his arm, fresh from the village shop. I went down the path to meet him, the autumn sun warm on my face, late hollyhocks brushing my arm. Angus raised his hat as he approached.

  ‘Hello, old girl, wasn’t that fun last night? And I gather I missed the best bit. Gather the party really got going!’

  I smiled, shifting Archie in my arms so his head lay on my shoulder. ‘Well, it was eased along by almost the entire contents of Peggy’s drinks cupboard so it’s hardly surprising.’

  I had a vague memory of her bringing out something green and vile, peering myopically at the label and saying, ‘I think I brought this back from Paxos in 1997.’ That had been my exit moment.

  ‘Yes, well, I was just going to say that next week Sylvia is visiting her sister in Cirencester, so happily I can join in the – you know,’ he winked broadly and rubbed his hands together, ‘fun and games!’

  ‘Oh, I’m not sure every book-club meeting will be like that, Angus. I mean, we didn’t have a book to discuss, did we? Next week, when we’ve all done our homework, I’m sure it’ll be much more cerebral.’

  ‘Euh.’ His rheumy old eyes looked downcast. Then brightened. ‘Oh yes, once we’ve done all that malarkey, but there’ll still be lots of time for fun too.’ He lowered his voice. ‘When I was in the army we played this terrific game at an all-ranks dance where you had to guess the bare backside. Blindfold, you know? Really broke the ice.’

  ‘I’m not convinced much ice needs breaking,’ I said uneasily, remembering Simon and Jennie chatting very quietly in a corner, heads bent so close together they almost touched.