All in all, Fitch felt comfortable in Withybrook. It was down-to-earth, unpretentious, unspoiled, with stunning scenery and a pub that sold decent beer. He knew he would always be an outsider, but Fitch was used to not quite fitting in, not belonging. It didn’t bother him in the least. He found it liberating, not having to put on a false front and pretend to be pleased to see people. He ticked over quite nicely all by himself for the first six months, grafting, doing up his house, and training Dido, the Border terrier puppy he’d been seduced into buying from a local farmer in the pub. The little dog dozed with him by the wood-burning stove he kept in his workshop, jumped in his pick-up whenever he went out on a job, then slept on his feet at night, and Fitch had to admit that it was nice to have the company, to have something else to worry about so he didn’t become too introspective. Not that he was desperate for company. He felt confident that the right girl would appear eventually.
Which she did.
And now he could hear her key in the lock. He took a gulp of wine, tensed for the confrontation that was so sadly inevitable. Maybe this time it would be different . . .
But no. He could feel his hackles rise as she strode into the kitchen in her four-inch ankle boots, her white jeans impossibly tight, the leather and diamanté belt digging into her flesh. She smelled toxic, of booze and fags and hairspray and too much perfume.
‘Traffic was a nightmare,’ she offered by way of a perfunctory explanation, shoving her handbag on the island. ‘Got stuck outside Bristol.’
She shouldn’t have elaborated. It proved she was lying. Fitch had checked the traffic on the internet and there had been no problems at all on the M5.
‘God, I’m knackered.’ She perched on a stool and propped her head in her hands. ‘Are the girls ready to go?’
Fitch peered at her. She looked appalling. He wouldn’t be surprised if she was still drunk.
‘You shouldn’t drive back in that state,’ he told her. ‘Are you still over the limit?’
‘You wouldn’t want them for another night, would you?’ she snarled back. ‘You wouldn’t be able to get them to school. You have to be at work by half seven. Remember?’
She didn’t forgive or forget easily. Fitch always liked to start work early, to get a couple of hours in before the phone started ringing. Somehow she had misconstrued that as him not wanting to be part of the family, seemingly forgetting that he was the breadwinner.
He sighed. ‘I’d have them with pleasure if it stopped you having an accident.’
She looked at him, over-plucked eyebrows archly raised.
‘I thought you’d be glad if I ended up under an articulated lorry.’
‘God, no!’ Fitch was horrified she should think that.
‘You hate me, don’t you?’
He shook his head sadly. ‘No, I don’t hate you. If anything, I feel sorry for you.’
She laughed at that. ‘You don’t need to feel sorry for me,’ she crowed. ‘I’ve been treated like a princess all weekend. Anyway,’ she went on, ‘Kirk gave me something to keep me awake.’
Fitch frowned. ‘What?’
She didn’t look him in the eye. He grabbed her arm urgently.
‘What’s he given you?’
She gazed back at him, all innocence.
‘Just a couple of cans of Red Bull.’
He didn’t believe her. Not for a moment.
‘If I find out you’ve been taking class-A drugs . . .’
She did a cruel imitation of him.
‘Class-A drugs . . . You are such a square, Fitch.’
Fitch looked at her witheringly. He was hardly a square. He’d dabbled often enough in his youth.
‘The Social Services wouldn’t look very kindly on it.’
She stared at him hard. ‘Is that some sort of a threat?’
‘If I catch you with coke, or speed, that’s the last you’ll see of Jade or Amber. I promise you.’
He let go of her arm. They glared at each other. He could see that he had frightened her, as she fell quiet for a moment. He felt sick. How had it come to this? He loathed the antagonism and the bitterness that hung heavy between them. He couldn’t wait for her to go. The very scent of her was turning his stomach.
‘Where are the girls?’ Hayley asked eventually.
‘Watching a DVD.’
‘Oh dear. Standards slipping?’
Why did she have to mock him? Just because he’d told her he thought the girls watched too much television, and that he didn’t approve of them watching Hollyoaks and EastEnders at their age.
‘I think it’s fine, when they’ve been outside most of the day—’
‘When it suits you, you mean.’
Fitch pressed his lips together, not trusting himself to speak, and turned to put the kettle on. Hayley tossed back her hair, got up and went through into the sitting room to chivvy Jade and Amber along. Moments later they came into the kitchen in a flurry of pink, picking up their pencil cases and hairbrushes and girly stuff.
‘Bye, Daddy.’ Jade threw her arms round his neck and squeezed hard.
Amber followed suit, not quite so demonstrative, but she held on to him longer.
‘See you both for swimming,’ he told them, ruffling their hair, which they pretended to hate.
Then they were gone, and a hostile silence fell.
He stared gloomily out of the window. Where had she gone, that girl he had fallen in love with? Would she ever come back? Somehow, he didn’t think so.
It was a bright, crisp November morning when he first saw her, so sharply cold it hurt your lungs. The hunt was meeting outside the Speckled Trout. Fitch wandered out of his workshop and along the road to view the spectacle. The horses gathered in the car park, prancing impatiently on the tarmac, the air rich with the scent of dung and diesel. The hounds were beetling around busily as the hunt members greeted each other and gossiped, slurping on their steaming stirrup cup. The barmaid was handing round sausage rolls. Fitch bit into one. It was proper homemade flaky pastry and it melted on his tongue.
He noticed her immediately. She was astride a seventeen-hand chestnut, her cheeks rosy, her lips red, her hair pulled back in a net. Her breeches clung to her thighs, her boots shone as bright as her eyes. Her black jacket accentuated her large breasts and her tiny waist. Fitch put out a hand to stroke the horse’s neck, caressing the velvety warmth.
‘She’s beautiful.’
‘You don’t fancy riding out with us, then?’
Fitch shrugged. ‘I don’t have a horse. And anyway, I can’t ride.’
She touched his shoulder with her crop, teasingly.
‘I could sort you out a horse, if you wanted. And there’re no jumps in our country. You’d just have to hold tight. I’d look out for you.’
‘Thanks, but I need to stay able-bodied.’
She looked him up and down and he felt a little shiver run down his spine.
‘You look that all right,’ she said softly.
The horns tooted, the dogs bayed. The hunt was off. Her horse danced impatiently in front of him. She wheeled it round to follow, then called back over her shoulder. ‘I’ll be in the Trout later. Mine’s a brandy and ginger ale.’
He watched as her horse did a collected canter along the village street, and felt a quickening of his heart he hadn’t experienced for a long time. It didn’t take him long to find out who she was. A brief description to Norman behind the bar did the trick. Norman was the fount of all local knowledge, and she was quickly identified as Hayley Poltimore.
‘She’s been working for her uncle over at Tiverton,’ explained Norman. ‘But they fell out. So she’s come back home.’
He gave Fitch a potted history. The Poltimores were one of the oldest families in Withybrook, and owned swathes of surrounding land. They had a decrepit farm at the end of the village: a thatched Devon longhouse that would once have been picturesque but had long fallen into disrepair, like a dissipated supermodel. The thatch was balding, the windows were ne
ver opened as they would fall apart at the touch, and the render was falling off in chunks, leaving the façade pockmarked. The yard was covered in cracked concrete, reigned over by a huge silage clamp smothered in car tyres and filled with wrecked cars jacked up on breeze blocks that the various Poltimore boys did up and raced around the adjoining fields, much to the despair of their long-suffering mother. Barbara Poltimore was the backbone of the village; chairwoman of the WI, clerk to the PCC, stalwart of the Neighbourhood Watch, hunt secretary and keen campanologist. She looked permanently washed out and harassed; it was rumoured that her family treated her like a slave. Her husband was a bearded monosyllabic bigot. There were four Poltimore boys and two girls. Hayley was the youngest.
‘Spoiled,’ warned Norman. ‘Apple of her father’s eye. The older sister’s a lezzer and has gone off to live in Bamford. They won’t have anything to do with her.’
Fitch imagined that coming out in Withybrook would be tricky.
‘Hayley’s not, though?’ he ventured to guess.
‘Hayley a lezzer?’ Norman laughed darkly. ‘Oh no, definitely not. Though . . .’ He hesitated, obviously thinking better of what he was about to say.
‘Though what?’ prompted Fitch.
‘Though there’s not much she won’t do when she’s had a few.’
Norman busied himself clearing away glasses, leaving Fitch with food for thought.
Four hours later, when Hayley came in to the pub, rosy-cheeked and mud-spattered from the afternoon’s sport, he pushed a glass of Remy topped up with Canada Dry along the bar top to her. He was intrigued, by her curves courtesy of the creamy milk from her parents’ dairy farm, by her preposterously luscious mouth and by her merry eyes that seemed to dance a jig. She was Mariette Larkin; Bathsheba Everdene; a fulsome bucolic heroine, plump with promise. She shook her hair free from its net, and he felt lust like a lightning flash zip through his veins as her curls snaked down her white neck. He watched as she put her lips to the glass and drank thirstily. He could smell perspiration on her, mixed with a musky perfume. It was hard to tell where one began and the other finished. It made his head swim.
She set her empty glass back on the bar and smiled at him.
‘So. You’re the stonemason.’
He nodded in reply.
‘You’re from upcountry?’
Fitch had noticed that everyone referred to anything north of Tiverton as ‘upcountry’, as if it was another planet.
‘Gloucestershire. Chipping Campden.’
Hayley shook her head. ‘Never heard of it,’ she pronounced, as if that meant it couldn’t possibly exist. ‘But welcome to Withybrook. Have you been initiated yet?’
Her eyes were laughing.
‘Not as far as I know,’ he replied mildly. She leaned into him.
‘Oh, you’d know all right,’ she breathed in his ear, and he shivered. Then she sat back and stretched her arms high in the air, yawning. ‘Well, thanks for the drink. I’m going to go home now. I need a hot bath full of Radox and a change of clothes.’
Fitch felt a prickle of disappointment. He’d been enjoying her company. Then she put a hand on his arm, and he felt a tingle run right through him.
‘Don’t you move an inch,’ she instructed. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I’ve cleaned myself up.’
He watched her move through the pub, talking and laughing with people, carelessly accepting and bestowing kisses, sliding her arm snake-like around people’s necks, ignoring the inevitable pats on the bum that her skin-tight breeches invited. She had the confident nonchalance of the indigenous. This was her village, her territory and no mistake. She was probably related to half of the pub.
He sat at the bar for the next hour, hating himself for the fact that every time the door opened he glanced over to see if it was her. She reappeared at last, wearing jeans, no make-up and a tight red T-shirt that read ‘I like boys but I like shopping better’. Her hair was still damp from the shower. He couldn’t imagine any other woman he knew appearing in public like that and looking so completely edible. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
‘What I need now,’ she purred, and as she leaned in he was engulfed in the scent of Radox fumes from her bath. ‘Is a Sloegasm. Have you ever had one?’
Fitch considered his reply carefully. ‘No,’ he ventured eventually.
‘Two Sloegasms, please,’ said Hayley to Norman, who proceeded to pour an inch of unctuous, incarnadine liquid into two flutes and top them up with Moët.
‘Sloe gin and champagne. It’s the drink of choice round here,’ Hayley told Fitch, passing him a glass. ‘It warms you up after a day’s hunting or shooting. Gets you in the mood.’
After one sip, Fitch could quite see how it would. The liqueur gave him a boot to his stomach and the bubbles went straight to his head, resulting in a very pleasant glow and a certain amount of oblivion. After three, all he could concentrate on were Hayley’s mouth and cleavage, both equally inviting.
He learned that she’d lived in the village all her life, she’d never been to London - unless you counted Heathrow, because she’d been to the Maldives and the Dominican Republic - and that she’d spent the last six months doing secretarial work for her uncle who had an egg-packing factory over Tiverton way, but she’d walked out when he became over-friendly.
‘Just because he’s loaded, and he’s given me a job, doesn’t give him the right to help himself.’
‘Never mind the fact that he’s your uncle.’
She laughed. ‘Don’t worry; he’s not my blood uncle. He’s married to my mum’s sister. So it makes him a dirty old man, not incestuous.’
By eleven o’clock, the pub was heaving and Norman was preparing for one of his notorious lock-ins. Fitch could feel the chemistry between the two of them; the sly glances, the banter, the laughs, and, most tellingly of all, the silences all pointed in the direction of bed. But if that was where they were heading, Fitch wanted to do it on his terms, and not in public. He didn’t want to be the source of speculation for the next few days. He hated gossip, particularly when he was the target. So he waited until she had gone to the loo, then slipped out into the cold night and strode up the road to his house, knowing full well that if she was interested that wouldn’t be the last he saw of her . . .
In the early hours of the morning, his phone rang, starting him out of his sleep. He picked up the receiver with a smile.
‘Where did you bugger off to, then?’ came an indignant voice.
‘Have you only just noticed?’
‘I thought we were getting on well. I didn’t know I was boring you.’
‘You weren’t boring me at all. I had to let the dog out.’
‘You could have brought me with you.’
‘I could.’ He wondered where she was. Not still in the pub. There was no background chatter. ‘So where are you now?’
‘Look outside your window.’
He walked over and hooked back his curtain cautiously. The night outside was smoky-grey velvet, softly wrapping itself around the rooftops.
‘I’m in the phone box.’
He looked up the street towards the post office. Sure enough, he could see the shadowy outline of a figure. It waved up to him.
‘And?’ he demanded, bemused.
‘Come and see,’ she commanded.
Fitch stood at the window for a moment, not sure what to do. He had a gut instinct that this was one of those moments where his decision would dictate his future. He let his eyes wander back to the phone box. His curiosity was going to get the better of him. He was only human, for heaven’s sake.
‘Give me two minutes.’ His voice was husky with desire as he spoke the words, then hung up and pulled on his jeans.
She was wearing a floor-length mink coat, hold-up stockings and four-inch stilettos. He opened the door, expecting to be hit with the traditional phone-box aroma of urine and stale fags, but all he could smell was her.
She pulled him inside. He ran his hands over the soft fu
r.
‘Not very politically correct,’ he murmured.
She shrugged. ‘It’s not as if I went out and bought it,’ she replied. ‘It was my grandmother’s. Not wearing it isn’t going to bring them back to life.’
She put her arms around his neck and pulled her to him. The warmth of her skin, the softness of the fur, the sweetness of her mouth, the dizzying scent, the claustrophobic confines of the phone box: add to all of these the fact that he hadn’t had sex for nearly a year and he wasn’t going to last a minute.
Marriage and Other Games Page 8
