A Rural Affair

by Catherine Alliott

  ‘Hope Armitage.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Clever girl.’ I grimaced.

  He nodded. Glanced away.

  ‘A lovely one too,’ I said quickly, in case he thought I was knocking her. ‘She’s got pretty much everything, actually. Beauty, charm, brains. Chad,’ I added foolishly with a laugh, then wished I hadn’t. I could feel myself colouring. Why was I gabbling? ‘But unfortunately we couldn’t match her in the cerebral department.’ More quotation marks in the air around cerebral. Why? ‘Well, not that we could match her in any department,’ gabble gabble, ‘certainly not the looks department, obviously! Not that we were trying to, or anything.’ Do stop, Poppy.

  ‘I hadn’t realized she was in your group.’ He’d moved to the window to look out at the street below; had his back to me. He’d gone a bit clipped and terse suddenly. Not so shiny-eyed.

  ‘Well, as I say, it’s pretty much defunct now anyway. Although one or two people were talking about forming another one, a sort of radical offshoot, but minus the highbrow literary slant.’

  Peggy had indeed scurried across the road a few days ago to suggest we read the latest Philippa Gregory, and then meet at her place to discuss it. Thursday at eight, oh, and by the way, it was themed. What you were wearing when the ship went down. And bring a bottle. Angus had got his costume already, apparently.

  ‘Oh no, we can’t, Peggy,’ I’d said, appalled. ‘What will Chad and Hope think?’

  ‘Chad and Hope won’t know,’ she’d told me firmly, stubbing out her cigarette in my clump of asters by the front door.

  I wasn’t sure I could share this disreputable secret with Sam, though. The Armitages were his friends, they rode together – hacked out, I believed was the expression – and anyway, he’d moved on from holding my eyes for longer than was strictly necessary and was gazing abstractedly at the traffic. I’d lost his attention and had his back.

  ‘Well, I’ll be away,’ I said shortly, after a pause. I felt faintly uncomfortable. ‘Thank you so much for the erm … water. And the couch.’ And the terribly strong manly arms sprang to mind too, but happily not to my vocal chords, although it was nip and tuck.

  ‘Don’t forget your papers.’ He seemed to collect himself suddenly and turned to cross to his desk, handing me a large folder, full, no doubt, of the details of my stonking great inheritance: the wherewithal to educate my children at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and Eton, to put me in the Hope, Chad, Simon and Sam brigade, I thought suddenly. Yes, Henley and Harvey Nichols, here I come. Why then, was there less of a spring in my step than there should have been, as I left his office?

  I carried Archie down the stairs. He’d woken up and was beaming at me, cheeks flushed with sleep, drumming his corduroy bootees against my tummy. I seized one of them and kissed it hard. It was the mention of Hope, I knew, that had rendered him a bit mute; had heralded a change of mood. Was he in love with her? Wouldn’t be difficult. But she was so happily married. So very unavailable. We all knew she and Chad couldn’t keep their hands off each other, couldn’t keep out of the bedroom. I remembered the first time Jennie and I had met them whilst looking for Leila, both looking very post-coital. Still, that didn’t stop the old ticker disobeying orders, did it? All the evidence being against one? When had that ever stood in the way of true love, or even, I thought wryly, true infatuation? I sighed.

  Out in the high street I popped Archie back in his pushchair and was about to head off down the street, when I glanced back over my shoulder. To my surprise, this time he was there, at the window. Was he watching me go, or had he returned to his reverie, the one that had so saddened him earlier? Either way, we both turned away sharpish as our eyes met and I hurried on my way to Waitrose.

  When I got back to my house, I found Jennie coming away from my locked front door. She was hastening down the cobbled path, a look of utter despair on her face.

  ‘Oh, thank God!’ she cried, stopping in her tracks at the gate when she saw me approach, Archie in my arms.

  ‘What is it?’ I hurried towards her.

  ‘Quick, get in.’ She seized the key from my hand, ran back to unlock my door and hustled me inside. Then she slammed the door behind us, her eyes wild as she turned to me in the hallway.

  ‘What?’ I breathed, terrified. ‘What’s happened?’

  Clemmie, was my first thought: fallen out of a tree at nursery, or an accident with the scissors. At my very first parents’ evening Miss Hawkins had told me, in a doom-laden voice, that Clemmie had a problem. Heart in mouth I’d anticipated bullying, early anorexia. On being gravely informed her scissor control was not all it should be, I’d been unable to suppress a laugh. I wasn’t laughing now. They’d tried to reach me, obviously, but my mobile was off.

  ‘Quick, tell me quick.’

  ‘Frankie’s pregnant,’ she gasped.

  I’m ashamed to say my heart kicked in. Not me. Not Clemmie. Not my darling girl. I had to take a moment to recover. Regroup. I set Archie on his feet and he toddled off. Frankie …

  ‘Oh my God.’ As I straightened, my hand went to my mouth. I stared at my friend. Her face was very pale, her lips bloodless. ‘How d’you know? Did she tell you?’

  ‘No, I found this!’ she hissed, producing a pregnancy-test stick from her coat pocket. ‘In the bathroom, in the waste-paper basket!’

  ‘Oh.’ I stared. There was very much a bright blue line in the window. Very positive. Very much pregnant. My head spun. I took her arm and led her into the sitting room.

  ‘But … is it definitely hers?’

  ‘Well, it’s not mine and I certainly hope to God it’s not Hannah’s!’

  ‘No, but … it could be a friend’s?’ I hazarded.

  ‘Oh, come on, Poppy. I know which friends she’s had in and out of the house and she hasn’t, recently. And I only emptied that bin the other day.’ Jennie paced around my sitting room, arms folded, eyes over-bright, her chin tucked in as if looking into the eye of the storm. ‘That’s why I was surprised to see it full again, with rather too much fresh loo paper, which had been stuffed on top to hide this. Of course it’s hers, the little –’ She stopped herself.

  I sat her down on the sofa, perching beside her. She was hyperventilating a bit.

  ‘Breathe, Jennie, and think. Don’t go off the deep end. You’ve got to help her in this, not tar and feather her.’

  She nodded, compressing her lips, her face grim, staring straight ahead. She knew that; but still, it was hard.

  ‘And if she’s just done the test, she’s probably only just pregnant, so all is not lost.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ she muttered.

  ‘No, not necessarily, but let’s wait until we know the facts. Is she seeing someone? Has she got a boyfriend? Who could it be?’

  ‘Well, that’s just it!’ she cried, turning to face me. ‘No! No boyfriend, not even a friend who’s a boy, and trust me, I would know. I keep a very close eye on that girl. And she hasn’t even mentioned anyone, ever! Not to me, anyway.’

  Suddenly Frankie’s words came back to me in a rush. What are you going to do in the holidays? ‘I thought I might get pregnant.’ And I thought she was being droll, ironic, sardonic, as she could be: brighter than she looked.

  I got up quickly from the sofa; walked to the mantle to hide my face, reached ostensibly to fiddle with the clock, wind it. Something else had occurred to me too. Jennie knew me very well, though.

  ‘What?’ she pounced, on her feet. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing, I –’

  ‘Poppy, you know something – what?’ She swung me round.

  ‘No, Jennie, honestly, I –’

  ‘Poppy – you have to tell me!’

  I did. I knew that. She held my arms and my eyes. Hers were blazing with emotion.

  I flicked my tongue over my lips. ‘OK. OK, but I swear to God I’m sure it was just Frankie being flippant, you know how she is.’

  ‘Poppy …’

  ‘Well, the other night, after
babysitting, she dashed off across the road to get in someone’s car. The engine was running and they drove off together.’

  ‘She doesn’t know anyone with a car.’

  ‘And earlier, at the beginning of term, well – she told me she fancied a teacher.’

  Jennie stared. Then shock registered on her face. She gave a strangled cry and staggered back, subsiding into the sofa, one hand covering her mouth. Then she looked up at me in disbelief. At length she removed her hand.

  ‘Which one?’ she whispered.

  ‘Which teacher? Um, I’m not sure.’ I wasn’t. I wracked my brains. ‘Could it be maths? Or biology? Yes, biology. But, Jennie, it was probably said as a jest. I’m sure she was just winding me up.’

  ‘Hennessy!’ She sat up with a sensational hiss.

  ‘Um, I’m not sure, and as I say – Jennie, no!’

  She was on her feet now, striding out of my sitting room looking very dangerous, about to leave my house, car keys in hand. Jennie’s tall and strong, much bigger than me, but I sprinted past her down the passage and in one fluid movement got between her and the front door, quickly turning the Chubb key, locking her in.

  ‘No!’ I gasped, flattening myself against the door, arms out like a starfish. ‘You are not charging up there like this. You are not hoiking Mr Hennessy out of his reproduction class and making an exhibition of yourself and of Frankie in front of the whole school. I will not let you!’

  She glared down on me, eyes blazing, nostrils flaring. ‘Out of my way.’

  I quaked briefly. ‘No, Jennie!’

  ‘Out of my way!’

  Glaring back defiantly and fully anticipating being manhandled, I braced myself. Then, suddenly, I saw her collapse. Her eyes dulled and her mouth drooped. She almost staggered backwards, to sit, as if her legs wouldn’t hold her, on the tiny Victorian chair in my narrow hallway, by the table with the phone. She bent her head and clutched at the roots of her hair with her hands, pulling hard. Then she sobbed. She sobbed and sobbed and I crouched down before her, holding her knees in her jeans, letting her cry.

  ‘My fault!’ she gasped, when she was able. ‘All my fault! I wasn’t there for her – didn’t help her enough. Wasn’t a good enough mother!’

  ‘Not true,’ I told her, gripping her knees, shaking them. ‘So not true, Jennie! It’s nothing to do with you, just a stage, a rebellious teenager stage, and you’ve always done your best by her!’

  ‘Yes, but if I’m honest,’ she gulped, raising her head and giving an almighty sniff as she pulled a tissue from her sleeve, ‘I’d slightly given up recently. I tried so hard when she was little, Poppy, out of love for her, of course, but out of a lot of love for Dan. But lately – oh, I don’t know. She’s been so tricky, and of course these days I don’t look at Dan any more and think: I worship the ground you walk on. So maybe I took my eye off the ball. Maybe I sort of thought: to hell with the lot of you, if you know what I mean.’ Her body shuddered.

  I did. Jennie was a strong woman and kept that family firmly on track with lots of robust shouting and yelling, which I’d hear through the wall and smile at, knowing it was nothing more than hot air and knowing, as she told me, that if she didn’t, they became feckless. ‘Feckless!’ she’d snap. And she had her work cut out with the two boisterous younger ones, not to mention a husband who got into scrapes, and a stepdaughter who could be surly and unhelpful. But recently I hadn’t heard the familiar hollering through the walls. Certainly not with Frankie. That didn’t mean it was Jennie’s fault she was pregnant, though, and I told her so.

  She gazed glumly at her hands, clutching the tissue in her lap; a bit calmer now, but shattered, I could tell.

  ‘Still. I could have hustled more. Probed. Questioned the interminable sulks.’ We were silent a moment. ‘Poor Frankie,’ she whispered at length. ‘Poor, poor darling. She must be so scared.’

  She balled the tissue hard in her hand. I knew what she was thinking: that terrible moment when the blue line had appeared, the horrific shock Frankie must have got, sitting on the side of the bath last night, perhaps, or in her school uniform this morning. Then the walk to the bus stop, sitting on the bus, blankly watching the world go by, thinking: everyone else is having a normal Thursday. White-faced; devastated.

  ‘I’ll talk to her tonight,’ she whispered.

  ‘D’you want me to do it?’ I ventured.

  We both knew Frankie talked to me. Quite a bit. Sometimes Jennie had been jealous. I knew she wouldn’t let a bit of jealousy get in the way of her daughter’s welfare now, though. She thought about it.

  ‘No,’ she said at length. ‘I think I’ll do it. And I promise I won’t scream and shout. No recriminations. Hopefully I’ve done all that in your sitting room.’

  I nodded. ‘And you’ll let her choose?’

  She stared down at me, appalled. ‘She’s sixteen, Poppy! Quite possibly pregnant with a teacher’s baby!’

  ‘OK, let me rephrase that. You’ll let her think she’s chosen?’

  She gazed opaquely at me, her pale face streaked with tears. ‘Oh. Yes. I see. Suggest. Point out the difficulties should she keep it. But let her know I’d nonetheless be very happy to be a grandmother.’ She clenched her teeth.

  ‘Exactly, so the whole thing horrifies her and she instantly says, “Oh God, no.” But if you bully her and tell her what’s going to happen, she could go the other way, just to spite you.’

  Jennie blinked. ‘You’re right. I’ll paint a picture of her aged thirty, with a sixty-year-old man on her arm, plus his middle-aged children and a stroppy fourteen-year-old of her own. She’ll be in Harley Street before you can say knife.’

  ‘Well, I can think of more comfortable analogies but that’s the general idea.’

  She swallowed hard. Leaned her head back on the wall and looked beyond me, over my head. ‘We had such hopes, Poppy, you and me, didn’t we?’ she said softly. ‘When we set out? You with Phil. Me with Dan.’

  I knew what she meant. Where she was. In our first flat, in Clapham. Which we’d painted lilac and hung with Chinese lanterns. Jennie, after a particularly barren patch socially, flying off to dinner with her handsome older man; me, well, casting around rather desperately, as we know. Settling for second best. Which Jennie hadn’t done. So, in fact, sharing a flat in Clapham was where the similarity ended.

  ‘You hang on to those hopes, Jennie. It’s not over yet. I never got off the starting block.’

  She looked down at me, recognizing, perhaps for the first time, the brave face I’d put on my terrible mistake. ‘I suppose not,’ she said absently. ‘But you will now.’

  I had a feeling she meant with Luke. I stood up quickly. Too quickly probably, bearing in mind I still hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours. I steadied myself. ‘Yes, I will now,’ I repeated.

  Jennie got wearily to her feet, looking about a hundred years old. Her face was drawn and she was hunched in her tweed coat, the one we’d thought so edgy with its frayed collar and cuffs when she’d found it in Primark, such a clever high-street find, but which now looked like a tatty old tweed coat. Archie was wailing from the kitchen, initially delighted to have been left for so long without supervision, but indignant now at being ignored. And it was time to collect Clemmie. Jennie gave a last gigantic sigh as she turned to go, her head bent, shoulders sagging. I hugged her hard.

  ‘Good luck,’ I muttered in her ear.

  ‘Thanks. I’ll need it.’ I held her close a long moment. Suddenly her voice came in a frantic rush in my ear. ‘Poppy,’ she gulped, ‘imagine if she’s four months gone, imagine if it’s too late, if –’

  ‘Don’t imagine,’ I said fiercely, pulling back and holding her shoulders, looking hard at her panic-stricken face ‘Don’t. We don’t know anything yet. Don’t think the worst.’

  She nodded, frightened.

  ‘Stay calm,’ I urged.

  ‘I will,’ she whispered.

  ‘And listen to her. Don’t’ – and this was brave – ‘pr
each.’ Jennie could surely preach.

  For a moment she seemed about to erupt, then, recognizing another truth, she nodded wordlessly, turned my Chubb key in my door, and left.

  25

  The following day, as I drove along the lanes to Wessington, I considered the whirlwind that had whipped through our village these past few months. First Tom had left Angie and the mini tornado had settled on her house; then Phil had died and the mistral had torn up the road to me; and now Frankie was pregnant and the twister had shot next door, spinning savagely over my friend. Was that just life, I wondered? One family lurching into crisis, then climbing out of it, only to be swiftly followed by another? Did we all take it in turns to fall into holes? It seemed to me, though, that some people never fell; led permanently gilded lives and were immune to the slipstream of life’s grimy undercurrent; never so much as felt a ripple. For some reason the Armitages sprang to mind. I sighed.

  And naturally, in our close-knit little community, word spread like a bush fire. I hadn’t told anyone about Frankie, of course I hadn’t, but when Dan came home from work yesterday, and Jennie told him what she’d found out, calmly, reasonably, with neither blame nor censure, he’d had the reaction Jennie had had in my sitting room. Of course he had. He was shocked, distraught, horrified. His little girl. A fucking teacher! Fucking hell! And then Frankie had come in late from school, not at the usual time, and before Jennie could stop him, he’d lost his rag. I knew because I heard it in my kitchen. Even though I went into the sitting room and turned the television on. Put my fingers in my ears. And then Jennie had lost it with Dan and the whole thing, as she told me this morning when she came round, red-eyed, not having slept a wink, hair standing on end, had degenerated into the worst and most terrible scene imaginable.

  ‘I preached, I didn’t listen, I wasn’t calm, I wasn’t strong,’ she gulped, horrified. ‘Everything you said I shouldn’t be, I was.’

  ‘But not at Frankie,’ I said anxiously. ‘You didn’t lose it with her?’

  ‘No, I suppose not. Dan, mostly.’ She looked grey and defeated as she slumped at my kitchen table, still with her pyjamas under her coat. ‘Trying to fend him off Frankie. But nothing about it was very attractive, Poppy. Neither adult’s behaviour would stand up to too much scrutiny. You didn’t hear, did you?’ She passed a weary hand through her chaotic curls.