A Surrey State of Affairs

by Ceri Radford

  A new month, a new school year. I remember how much Sophie used to love choosing a new pencil case and sharpening all her coloring pencils before the first day back. She would test them out by drawing colorful mustaches on the serious men in Jeffrey’s newspaper. Once she gave John Major red and green dreadlocks. Where did that little girl go?

  That is the question that poor Jeffrey, in the most literal sense, is desperately trying to resolve. Every day he calls, and every day his voice sounds more dull and mechanical. He says that at least work is so quiet he’s hardly missing anything—I suppose that’s one advantage to this seemingly endless recession. He’s managed to glean from Ivan’s business contacts that the unspeakable man is still in London, and probably staying somewhere in the West. Jeffrey spends his days driving in circles, asking at hotels, loitering in vodka bars.

  And if he finds her, what then? I know Sophie’s temper, and her stubborn streak. How will he persuade her to come home? I should have given him a Topshop voucher to take with him as bait.

  It seems my best hope is that Ivan will grow bored of her. This is a terrible thing for a mother to say, but I want my daughter to have her heart broken in two.

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3

  Jeffrey came home this morning. He did not bring our daughter, but he did bring Fergie. For a while, I felt too bitter to report this. He has now left again. He spoke as little as possible, and drank only two sips of the iced tea I handed him.

  He discovered the ill-fated mynah in a bus shelter in Shepherd’s Bush, on the same street as a dry-cleaning business where, according to a tip-off, Ivan was meeting a business contact. Both cage and bird were daubed with graffiti. It has taken Boris two hours of work with a prewash Vanish stick to clean her feathers. Inside the cage was a note: “Pls sum1 look after Fergie! She doeznt bite! Xx” and a half-open packet of dry-roasted peanuts, which had been pecked at. When I recognized Sophie’s handwriting, I cried.

  Fergie is now recovering in the conservatory. Darcy is cagey, as I suppose is a parrot’s prerogative, but he will just have to learn to cope with the cruel realities of life, like the rest of us. Jeffrey has gone back to London.

  Earlier, as I was towel drying Fergie, I looked into her dark eyes and recognized a fellow victim of Ivan’s callousness and Sophie’s fecklessness. She blinked. With her eyes shut, she is not quite so ugly. I have fed her some linseed to improve her plumage.

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4

  Does anyone else get the feeling that Armageddon is upon us? Glaciers are melting, wildfires are rampaging through California, my son is gay, my daughter has run off with a Russian, and now, to top it all, Fergie the mynah bird has begun to speak.

  It is an eerie sound, and an eerie sight. Every few minutes she scrunches up her wings (which still bear traces of spray paint), shuts her eyes, opens her beak, and belches out a few hoarse, indistinct syllables. It sounds a little like “Nothing, kill, hate.”

  I had no idea mynah birds could be so nihilistic. I’m not the superstitious type, as you well know, but my nerves are frayed at the moment and Fergie’s horrible utterances are adding to my sense of foreboding and dread.

  I have covered her up with a tea towel. I hope she finds the scenes of rural Kent soothing.

  11 P.M.

  At last, another clue! I was on the phone earlier with Bridget, who, unlike Harriet, can always be relied on to keep calm and say the right thing. She made sympathetic noises as I told her everything that had happened, mixed with just the occasional muted gasp, but when I got to Fergie and her grim pronouncements, she went suddenly quiet. Then she said, “Constance, perhaps she’s trying to say Notting Hill Gate.”

  I’ve alerted Jeffrey.

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5

  Another breakthrough! Rupert called. He has finally managed to access Sophie’s Facebook page, by setting up a false account in the name of one of her distant school friends, with a kitten as the profile picture, and asking her to add him as a friend. She did so today. He can confirm that her status is in london, baby!! More important, she had added a photo of the pool at the hotel where she and Ivan are staying, to show off to her friends. Rupert managed to zoom in on a monogrammed towel, which read “Abbey Court.” He had checked online; there is indeed a hotel of this name in Notting Hill Gate. He has called Jeffrey, who is driving there as I type.

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6

  Sophie is back home. It is with giddy relief, once again tempered by lingering anger, that I write this.

  Jeffrey called yesterday afternoon to inform me that Sophie was in the back of the car and that he was driving her home. I still do not know all the details of how this came about.

  I paced back and forth as I waited for them to get back, trying to work out whether I would feel more like hugging her or throttling her. First I asked Boris to tidy her room and put a vase of fresh-cut flowers from the garden on her desk, then I took it away and replaced it with an unopened letter from the Bristol University accommodation office. Then I took this away and put the flowers back.

  My stomach tightened when I heard the sound of Jeffrey’s car. I rushed to the door. Jeffrey got out. He opened the door for Sophie. She got out. She was wearing a gem-encrusted green silk minidress, which I could tell with one glance was extortionately expensive, but in all other respects she was clearly the same old Sophie: slight, pale, and tetchy.

  She stumbled in her new high heels as she walked up the drive, avoided my outstretched arms (which was perhaps prudent given that I was still undecided on the hug/throttle dilemma), and dashed to her room, kicking the shoes off behind her. I followed. I heard the dragging sound of furniture being moved toward the door, the crash and tinkle of a vase falling and smashing, then a series of swear words that do not bear repetition.

  At the time of this writing, she has not left her room, with the exception of one furtive midnight raid on the last of Ivan’s pickle jars. If only we had not given her a bathroom. I have tried gently knocking and cajoling, and I have tried hammering in anger, but all attempts are in vain. She refuses to open the door and declares herself, once again, on a hunger strike. I called Rupert to ask his advice and he said to give her time. I hope it doesn’t take much longer.

  Jeffrey has been more approachable, but only just. Once it was clear that Sophie would not be venturing out anytime soon, I made Jeffrey a cup of tea and urged him to tell me exactly how he had succeeded in extricating our daughter. He was more than usually evasive. He simply said that he had gone to the hotel, found their room, and dealt with the situation. He reassured me that Ivan would be unlikely to trouble us again; then he opened the newspaper to catch up with the weekend’s rugby union results.

  Good Lord. A terrible thought has just occurred to me. You don’t think he’s killed him, do you?

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7

  Sophie is out. Much like her brother, I suppose you could say, except that I had been waiting for this to happen. Last night, I was just drying my hair after a bath when I heard the television. I went downstairs to find Sophie sitting on the sofa, her feet tucked up underneath her, gorging herself on a plate of cheese and crackers, with America’s Next Top Model on in the background.

  “Sophie!” I said.

  “All right, Mo,” she replied, hardly looking away from the screen.

  “Do you want to talk?”

  “Nah.”

  This morning I skipped church to keep an eye on her. She spent a long time feeding Fergie and talking to her. When I went into the conservatory to top up Darcy’s water bowl, she told me, while staring at the floor, that she’d left Fergie at that bus stop only because they were going to be thrown out of the hotel if they kept her, and that Ivan had made her do it. Then she went quiet for a few moments, before saying “Mum, did you ever notice that Ivan’s breath was really minging?”

  Guessing what the word minging meant, I smiled and said that I had.

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8

  10 A.M.

  Jeffrey’s PA just calle
d. He has been arrested. I am shaking.

  Should I hide his hunting rifle?

  4 P.M.

  The good: Jeffrey has not, it would transpire, shot Ivan the Terrible with his hunting rifle.

  The bad: He has been arrested on suspicion of fraud.

  I cannot say any more. I must go at once to the police station.

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9

  How to describe the trauma of yesterday’s events, the stomach-knotting shame?

  The phone call from Jeffrey’s PA was followed shortly afterward by the low rumble of an engine and the sight of a police car pulling into the drive, in full view of the neighbors. I do not think I possess the necessary sangfroid to be a successful accomplice. I would have made a poor Bonnie to Jeffrey’s Clyde.

  I shouted to Boris to deal with the visitors, then I ran upstairs. I knew I had to hide the hunting rifle. I did not know where. I took it from the cabinet in Jeffrey’s study, holding it in a sport sock so as to avoid leaving fingerprints. I hurried from room to room in search of inspiration, knowing that at any moment the police would be upon me. The only relevant image I could summon was of some dreary gangster film Jeffrey had once subjected me to in which the criminals hurled their murder weapons from a bridge into a raging torrent. There were neither bridges nor torrents at hand.

  Finally, with the sound of voices in the hall, I seized upon the idea of burying it in the newspaper at the bottom of Darcy’s cage. I opened the cage. A policeman opened the door to the conservatory. I paused. Darcy, who is not the sort of bird to spurn a spontaneous opportunity to stretch his majestic wings, launched himself out of his cage like a cruise missile and swooped across the conservatory, narrowly missing the police officer’s head. He swore. I stood aghast, gun in one hand, extra-large men’s tennis sock in the other.

  I expected the officer to grab the weapon and inspect it for blood. I imagined that at any moment I would feel the cool metal of handcuffs against my wrists. Instead, the officer—who looked only about Rupert’s age—merely showed me his search warrant and said he needed to look through all of Jeffrey’s business documents. I was confused, and then relieved, and then angry. What on earth has Jeffrey been up to?

  That, of course, is the question which dictates our fate, and which kept me awake, trembling, all last night. He is being held on suspicion of making false passports and driver’s licenses and submitting inaccurate tax returns. I do not understand. He insists that he is innocent; of course he is innocent. As soon as I saw him yesterday, my anger dissipated. His eyes were red, his skin white, his tie loosened about his neck. He was the only man in the police station—aside from the policemen—who was not dressed in polyester sportswear. He told me in a small, quiet voice that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that this was all some horrible misunderstanding.

  He should be charged within days. Needless to say, he is being represented by the best possible lawyer: a business acquaintance named Simon, who resembles some strange hybrid of hyena and bald eagle. I can only hope that he gets a result before the world, and in particular Miss Hughes, finds out what’s going on.

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10

  6 A.M.

  I’ve woken up and I can’t get back to sleep. It’s pointless trying. If I do, I’ll slip back into my horrible dream that Jeffrey has been jailed for life and Sophie and I forced to visit him on a public bus wearing velour tracksuits, having to press the button for our stop without any antiseptic hand gel. Why me? What have I done to deserve this annus horribilus? The most distressing thing that is meant to happen to a woman in my position in the fifty-fourth year of her life is the advance of a few more wrinkles. Not all this. Dear God, not this. What if he really is jailed? What if we lose the house? What if I have to start buying discount tins of baked beans?

  4 P.M.

  Shame upon shame. The police officer on Jeffrey’s case, a soft-featured young man who looks only about Sophie’s age, took me to the station for questioning this morning. My only comfort was that I really do know diddly-squat about Jeffrey’s financial affairs, and could assure him as such with no hesitation. It was a short interview. Afterward, I saw Jeffrey. He had missed his morning shave for the first time since he was under general anesthesia for a hernia operation in 2001. He didn’t have much to say. Neither did I.

  I declined a lift home from the kind officer, who has a boyish cleft in his chin and a disconcertingly high-pitched voice. One police car sighting in our village in the space of a day is more than adequate.

  Rupert is coming around this evening to have dinner with me and Sophie. I am going to bake a large and elaborate fish pie, thus hopefully engrossing myself for at least an hour and a half. I have told Boris to take a few days’ holiday. As quiet and discreet as he may be, I cannot bear anyone else in the house right now.

  What will become of us? And where on earth has Boris hidden my hand whisk?

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11

  Gerald visited today. I was polishing the silverware in a futile attempt to alleviate my stress through monotonous labor when the doorbell rang.

  I opened it, and there he stood, my fellow ringer and onetime admirer, dressed soberly in dark trousers and a blue shirt, with neither low-grade milk chocolates nor petrol station flowers in his hands. I was taken aback. He said, “Hello, Constance.”

  I said, “Come in.”

  I made the tea myself while he waited in the sitting room, then I brought it in on a tray with some of his favorite currant biscuits laid out. He didn’t touch them. He took a few sips of his tea, knitting his gray-streaked eyebrows together, then said that if the feelings he’d mentioned once before were still disgusting to me I should tell him, and he would never trouble me again. He said he’d tried everything to distract himself from them—gardening, Sudoku, teaching Poppy to walk backward—but nothing had worked. He said that he had heard what had happened to Jeffrey (How? How had the news got out?), and that he couldn’t bear the fact that I’d been put in this distressing position by a man who was not worth a single one of the glossy auburn hairs on my head. He said that, in short, he had come to assure me of his deep, his sincere, and his passionate love. Then he spilled a little tea onto his lap and looked away.

  I am sure you will spare me your harshest judgments if I tell you that I was not unmoved. I value loyalty above all—bar cleanliness—but my patience with Jeffrey has been sorely tested. I think it was only at this moment, with someone else insisting that I had been badly treated, that I truly began to feel it. And it wasn’t just because of Jeffrey’s arrest. Through all the distressing events of this year—Sophie’s escapades, Rupert’s revelation—he has not exactly been my rock. If I am to be honest—really, ruthlessly honest—I would have to say that he has been more gravel than rock. He spends more time talking to his BlackBerry, or to Ivan, whose name I shudder to type, than to me. He has stopped noticing things: a new dress, a haircut, a few pounds shifted for summer—all these pass him by. Of course I still love him—almost in the same way I love the children, or the garden, even, as part of the fabric of my life, a constant—but our relationship is not quite what I imagined when I studied the Debrett’s guide to homemaking thirty-four years ago.

  And there sat Gerald, staring fixedly at my curtains, rigid. In the beginning I was shocked, and rather horrified, when I found out what those notes meant. But after his outburst at Sophie’s birthday party, I admired the way he withdrew, became quiet, dignified, yet always concerned about my feelings. The clock ticked. I studied the pale floral pattern on Gerald’s chair. In the background, Fergie squawked “humps humps humps.” I knew what I had to do. I am not entirely lost. I told Gerald in a gentle voice that I thought he should leave, and escorted him to the door. He paused on the doorstep and said: “Constance, can I still hope?”

  I met his eye for a long moment before shutting the door.

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12

  Wonderful news! Jeffrey is free. Simon the hyena-eagle has pulled it off: there is insufficient evidence to p
ress charges, and I can collect him this very afternoon.

  Our future is secure, our reputation restored.

  Why, then, do I feel a certain heaviness to my tread?

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13

  Jeffrey is back. He is a changed man. Patient readers, I have turned to you again and again in times of crisis and you have not let me down. Please do not abandon me now. This is my darkest moment.

  When I went to collect Jeffrey, I wasn’t immediately troubled by his altered appearance. He may have been pale, rumpled, and dejected, but this could easily be explained away as the strain of an unexpected stint behind bars without hot baths or brandy.

  We said little on the way home, beyond a few remarks on the slight chill in the air and the first few autumn leaves on the road. He asked after Sophie and I told him that she was well. Then I said that I had bought steak, his favorite, for dinner.

  When we got home, I made him a cup of tea and expected him to slowly resume his old ways: fending off my questions, flicking through the Financial Times, sauntering off to his study. Instead, he sat me down, looked me in the eye, and said the words that no man or woman can hear with equanimity, even after thirty-three years of relatively harmonious marriage.

  “Constance,” he said, in a quiet voice. “We need to talk.”

  He began by apologizing, unreservedly yet unemotionally, for the ordeal he had put me through.

  He explained that Ivan had always dabbled in risky business ventures, and that he had long suspected that his latest venture, the “Recruitment Solutions” initiative, had been something of a front for smuggling young eastern Europeans into London. I was shocked. I hadn’t imagined that there were any further available depths for Ivan the Terrible’s execrable character to plumb, or that Jeffrey could possibly have condoned such activities.

  Jeffrey apologized, again, for his lack of judgment. He explained that he felt such a deep loyalty toward Ivan, one of his oldest friends, that he had always willingly turned a blind eye to his faults. He said that spending time with Ivan made him feel young and adventurous again.