Marriage and Other Games

by Veronica Henry

  He picked up his replenished glass.

  ‘My parents bought a place here in the sixties. I went to the village school till I was eight. And the locals still view me with suspicion.’

  Charlotte took a gulp of her wine. She felt unnerved, as if she was about to receive some portentous warning not to stray off the path.

  ‘Oh,’ was all she could think of in reply.

  ‘Sorry.’ He gave her a rueful smile. ‘I’m not trying to put you off. I’ve had too much too drink. As usual. Call it the Sunday-night blues. My wife’s gone back up to London and I’m faced with the prospect of a week in my own company.’

  He mimed putting a gun into his mouth and pulling the trigger.

  Now she was up close, Charlotte could see fine lines at the corners of his eyes. He was much older than she’d first thought. Definitely over thirty. Not a boy, at any rate.

  ‘What does your wife do, then?’

  ‘She’s an agony sister. Like an agony aunt, only younger and hipper. Talks about clitoral piercing and Facebook stalkers. It’s just a pity she doesn’t know how to repair the cracks in her own marriage,’ he added bitterly.

  ‘Too much information!’ Norman the barman intervened. ‘I’m sure the young lady doesn’t want to know all this.’

  For reply, Charlotte’s new acquaintance slid his glass back for another refill. Norman looked at it askance, but picked it up nevertheless.

  ‘So. What brings you to sunny Withybrook?’

  ‘I’m doing up a house.’

  He nodded knowingly. ‘Pushing up the prices so the locals can’t afford to buy?’

  Charlotte was starting to get annoyed. ‘No. Just hoping to get a fair price for my clients.’

  ‘You’ll be lucky.’

  Charlotte turned away, wishing that Norman would hurry up with her lemon pudding. This bloke was obnoxious, bordering on unbearable. And he didn’t need any more to drink - he was already swaying slightly on his bar stool. And he had that disrespect for personal space that only comes from a surfeit of alcohol. He was leaning into her again . . .

  ‘What’s your name, then?’ he asked.

  ‘Charlotte,’ she told him slightly reluctantly, not sure if she wanted to venture any further on this relationship.

  ‘Charlotte.’ He savoured her name appreciatively, then held out his hand. ‘Sebastian. Turner.’

  ‘Hello.’ Of course. Now she twigged. Gussie had mentioned that he lived down here, and on closer inspection Charlotte recognised him from photographs and chat shows. And that explained his raw, chapped hands - oil paint and turpentine. And his wife was Catkin Turner. Charlotte had seen her on morning television occasionally, when she’d been at home nursing a cold.

  ‘Welcome to Withybrook,’ he carried on. ‘I’m sure you’ll be very happy here. As long as you fit into one of the categories.’

  ‘Which are?’

  Sebastian counted carefully on his fingers. ‘There’re four, roughly. Category One is the landowners and farmers. Mingy bastards for the most part. Tight as a mouse’s ear. And they don’t like change. Spend their lives killing things and counting their money. Category Two is the posh, potty brigade who flutter round the vicar and organise coffee mornings and open their gardens to the public once a year. Then Three is the incomers, who’ve bought down here cheaply in the hope of living the dream, but who are rapidly getting pissed off and now can’t get out. Finally, Category Four is the great indigenous unwashed with their delinquent youths, who go round joyriding and sniffing glue and dropping illegitimate babies.’

  Charlotte raised her eyebrows. ‘You don’t paint a pretty picture.’

  Sebastian narrowed his eyes. ‘No. Well, behind all the scenery, it’s not awfully pretty. Despite what the Sunday papers might tell you.’

  Charlotte considered his reply. ‘So which category are you?’

  ‘We don’t fit in. We’re the token bit of local colour. Minor celebs, eccentric, more money than sense. Dabble in lots of wife-swapping and drug-taking.’

  ‘You’re winding me up,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘I’m just repeating what the locals say. It’s a bloody hard reputation to live up to, I’m telling you.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ replied Charlotte drily.

  ‘What about you? Nice-looking bit of posh totty moves down here on her own? There’s got to be history.’

  Charlotte felt panic rise in her throat. This was the first time she had been challenged about her reasons for being here. And she sensed Sebastian wasn’t the type to be fobbed off. She could feel him observing her, with his painter’s eye, looking for clues, for details.

  ‘I needed a change. And a challenge. And some time out.’

  ‘So. You’ve come here to find yourself?’

  Charlotte considered his interpretation. ‘Maybe.’

  Her voice must have sounded very small, because Sebastian suddenly looked guilt-stricken.

  ‘Hey. Listen. Tell me to fuck off and shut up. I just live in the perpetual hope that someone is having a harder time than I am.’

  ‘Are you having a hard time, then?’

  ‘On paper, I’m the luckiest man alive. I’ve got the Midas touch, a stunning successful wife, a house most people would kill for . . .’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Living everyone else’s dream is a bloody nightmare,’ Sebastian admitted gloomily.

  Norman came over and wiped the counter with a cloth.

  ‘Sebastian isn’t happy unless he’s suicidal,’ he informed Charlotte, with the air of someone who had listened to this diatribe every Sunday night for years.

  ‘Nobody understands how difficult it is.’

  ‘Being the tortured artist?’ ventured Charlotte. ‘I should think it’s hell.’

  ‘Really?’ said Sebastian, looking at her with renewed interest. ‘You’re about the only person who does, then. Everyone else thinks it’s a doddle, slapping a bit of paint around.’

  ‘A blank canvas? All that expectation? Knowing you’re only as good as your last piece of work and that your next one’s got to be better?’ Charlotte shook her head in disagreement.

  Sebastian narrowed his eyes. ‘Are you taking the piss?’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ she retorted stoutly. ‘You must be under terrible pressure. And I know exactly how you feel. Everyone thinks all I do is faff about with paint samples and curtain swatches.’ Oh God. She was saying too much. She’d drunk far more than she was used to. She better be careful or she’d start spilling her life story. But she was into her stride. ‘Someone once said to me I was just good at choosing!’ she went on indignantly. ‘Nobody understands that you’re trying to recreate somebody’s dream and bring it in on budget. It’s not easy.’ She put a hand on Sebastian’s arm. ‘So I totally sympathise. They haven’t got a clue.’

  Norman shot her a warning glance. ‘Don’t pander to him. You’ll only make him worse.’

  But it was too late. Sebastian was already hanging on her every word.

  Fitch had slung the sack of dead rats into his workshop, ready to burn the next morning, then went inside to make a beef sandwich out of the remains of Sunday’s roast.

  He knew the whole village would already be speculating about his mercy mission. They would feign disinterest in front of Charlotte, of course. But behind the kitchen curtains they would be chewing over every little morsel of detail. You could bet by now her registration would already be being checked on the police computer by someone’s cousin who worked at the station in Bamford.

  Fitch had felt it his duty to come to her rescue. There was no way of knowing which way the inhabitants of Withybrook would jump, whether they would choose to co-operate or simply stand back and watch her suffer. He could see she was terrified, and he didn’t want to watch her being toyed with by the locals. They had known better than to mess him about when he arrived, but a naïve city girl like Charlotte would be perfect bait.

  It had certainly given him something else to think about. He had been he
ading to the pub to drown his sorrows, so a bit of rat-catching had been a welcome distraction. He hadn’t really wanted to go and get drunk. There had been a time in his life, in his mid-teens, when the answer to everything seemed to lie at the bottom of a can of Tennant’s Extra, so Fitch knew that he had a weakness for alcohol, that it could easily take over his life, just as it had taken over his parents’.

  The temptation to drink himself into oblivion was always particularly sharp on a Sunday. He was worried sick about Hayley. Correction, he was worried sick about Jade and Amber being in her care. When did a mother start becoming unfit? he wondered. When she began to put herself first, which Hayley undeniably did? He knew the girls would be looked after at the farm. Barbara would make sure they were fed properly (if you counted crispy pancakes as food) and their clothes washed and ironed. But it wasn’t a healthy environment. The house, despite Barbara’s best efforts, was a tip. The dogs - two collies, an Alsatian and a fluctuating number of rescued greyhounds - had the run of the house and shed their hairs everywhere. The sink was always piled high with washing-up, and even when you picked a clean cup out of the cupboard it was stained with tea or coffee rings and was slightly greasy. There was no proper heating, just a motley collection of night storage heaters and open fires, and Fitch was petrified that a blaze would break out one day: being thatched, it would gallop through the building with little hope of survivors. There definitely weren’t any smoke alarms. And the room the girls were sharing was damp, with two outside walls and rotten windows that the wind howled through. They might be the biggest landowners in the area, but the Poltimores lived in squalour.

  How best to extricate Jade and Amber from the situation had been bothering him for weeks now. He had to tread very carefully. He knew they weren’t in any real danger, but it wasn’t the life he wanted for his daughters. And if he went steaming in, the Poltimores would close ranks. Hayley would make life as difficult for him as she could. He knew he only had the girls at the weekends because it suited her to be able to dump them and go to see Kirk, but she could soon make it difficult for him to have access just to spite him.

  He still didn’t know why she was so incredibly volatile these days. A result, no doubt, of guilt, tiredness and over-stimulation. Fitch couldn’t reason with her, or get her to see that this was not the ideal way to bring up children. Barbara was spread thinly enough. All her offspring were demanding, bar Lesbian Lindsay who had been banished to Bamford. Jade and Amber deserved an environment where they were automatically the centre of attention. They shouldn’t have to fight for it. He was pretty sure they fended for themselves when they got home from school. He had subtly tried asking their teacher if they were keeping up at school, and had been reassured, but somehow he couldn’t see anyone sitting down and doing their reading or their spellings with them. He tried his best to have an input at weekends, but he felt strongly that they deserved a break as much as anyone else and he certainly didn’t want to hothouse them.

  Gloomily he went back into his house and switched on the telly for company. It was so quiet without the girls, he needed something to fill the silence. What should he do? he wondered. Should he try to talk to Hayley? Have a sensible, grown-up conversation where they put all their cards on the table and came up with the best plan possible for Jade and Amber? But he knew it wouldn’t work. At the moment, Hayley seemed incapable of behaving like an adult, or thinking about anyone other than herself. He leaned back and shut his eyes, praying for inspiration, for a solution, for a way out of this mess.

  Penny Silver cleared away the last of the supper dishes, feeling a Sunday-evening gloom descend upon her that she didn’t deserve. The kids had slithered away from the table as quickly as they could, citing homework as their excuse, but Penny knew it was just that neither of them wanted her or each other’s company. If she thought about it too much, it would make her cry, but she told herself it was just their ages. Teenagers just didn’t do sitting around a meal table chatting. They wanted to go into their own space, inhabit their own self-centred little worlds, plug into their zones.

  She had thought it would get easier. The loneliness, the sense of isolation. And, quite frankly, the boredom. But if anything it was getting worse, largely because she was losing hope. She had been so determined to manage, calling upon her endless reserves of optimism. But after three years the reserves were running dry. And she had proved nothing to Bill, except that he was right about moving to Withybrook being insane, but she was never going to give him the satisfaction of knowing she had made a huge mistake.

  When he’d fucked off to Bristol with his new consultant’s post and his bloody registrar, with her strawberry-blonde hair and her overbite, Bill had expected Penny to plump for one of the three-bedroom boxes on the Pickwell estate in Bamford with her settlement - she’d be near to the shops, the cinema, the railway station. But she would rather have died than live in one of those rabbit hutches, whose walls were so thin you couldn’t put up a decent-sized chunky curtain pole. She didn’t want the kids playing out in the street, or worse, the neighbourhood kids traipsing through her token patch of garden. Bill, of course, had set himself up with a very nice garden flat in a Victorian house in Clifton, but was very swift to point out that, if Penny insisted the children carried on going to Lodminster School, with its crippling fees, then she shouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t much left over for a house. She resented him making out that it was her decision, because she knew perfectly well that he wanted what was best for Tom and Megan too, but he was mean-spirited enough to make it look like extravagance on her part. But Lodminster wasn’t extravagance, it was a necessity, because of Megan being a child prodigy on the cello and Tom being, well, Tom - clever but difficult: impossible to diagnose by a child psychologist but definitely not quite right and in constant need of the sort of channelling you only get when you fork out for private education. But by making out it was at Penny’s insistence, Bill absolved himself from any guilt that all she could now afford was a little stone cottage on the outskirts of Withybrook.

  They had been here three years now, and Penny was still struggling. She was still not over the shock of Bill leaving her. She hated being on her own. And now the kids were teenagers, they hated being stuck out in the country, miles from their mates and the shops and the swimming pool. Was she going to have to capitulate and sell the cottage that she had strived so hard to make a home, and move back into Bamford, thereby giving Bill the satisfaction of knowing he was right?

  She sat in the kitchen, and poured another glass of red wine. Then looked at the clock: half past eight. It was at least another two hours before she could go to bed. She didn’t sleep well as it was. She’d be up at four if she tried to sleep now.

  There was nothing on television. Penny had stopped watching medical dramas because they repeatedly taunted her by proving that consultants were inveterate shaggers, and she couldn’t bear soaps. And reality television was anathema - why watch other people’s reality when her own was hard enough to deal with? Curling up with a book was admitting defeat. It was ironic - when the children were little and she had been rushed off her feet, she had often longed for half an hour with the latest novel, but now it seemed like the most depressing option in the world.

  She pulled her secret fag stash out of the little wooden box on the dresser. Only it wasn’t a secret stash any more, because the children no longer cared if she smoked. When they were little, they used to find her cigarettes and snap them up to stop her filthy habit. Now she felt as if she had their permission to smoke herself to death if she so wished. She pulled out a cigarette, looked at it, then decided it wouldn’t go any way towards suppressing her malaise. She snapped it in half herself, irritably.

  She looked at the clock again. Three minutes later than the last time she looked. She picked her coat off the back of the chair. She’d pop down to the Speckled Trout, see if there was anyone in there.

  She ran up the stairs.

  The sound of Megan’s cello ca
me through the bedroom door. It wasn’t right, to have a child who practised studiously without being nagged. She tapped lightly and walked in. Megan looked up, scowling that her near perfect rendition of Saint-Saens’ ‘The Swan’ had been interrupted.

  ‘I’m popping down to the pub,’ Penny told her, and Megan nodded absently, pushing back her mane of dark hair and peering back at her sheet music to find her place.

  She didn’t knock on Tom’s door, just poked her head round. The smell of paint and glue hit her, and she wondered if she should open the window. He was painting the hideous plastic models that all thirteen-year-old boys seemed to be obsessed with. She had been assured that, unless he was a total loser-freak, he would grow out of the obsession almost overnight some time in the near future. Which would seem rather a waste, Penny having spent the price of a small second-hand car on boxes of the stuff. Guilt money. A mutant army to make up for the fact that he came from a broken home and his father only saw him one weekend in four.