Mrs Fytton's Country Life

by Mavis Cheek

  'I'm not very good.'

  ‘I could initiate you.'

  The word hung between them. Old Dr Tichborne nearly fainted at the thought.

  'Which reminds me’ said Dorothea, 'we must think about Sandra's baptism. A full immersion, I really do feel, would have covered the sins. But, alas, she is far too large to fit into the font.'

  'Indeed she is’ said the vicar.

  'Which is a very great pity.'

  The vicar did not look entirely in agreement with the sentiment. But Dr Tichborne nodded vigorously.

  Mrs Tichborne looked over her spectacles at the vicar. 'Nevertheless, she should suffer. Cold water in the font, I think. To cool the blood ... Unless you can think of a way of getting all of her in?'

  The vicar hoped to God that God would forgive and that to all others his mind remained a private place. What was going on in there was terrible... terrible.

  Old Dr Tichborne gave him another cheering smile.

  'Our new resident at Church Ale House’ said the vicar quickly, to calm himself down, 'is very keen to participate in the affairs of the community’ He thought, afterwards, that there might have been a better way of putting it. Affairs was such an ambiguous word. 'Not only does she intend to rein-stitute the ale on our behalf, but she has offered us the water from her well for the - er -'

  'Good, good,' said Dorothea. 'That will lend an air of gravity to the proceedings. The baptism, vicar, will take place sooner rather than later, I think. And you will give Sandra some careful instruction.'

  The vicar swallowed. His eyes watered.

  Old Dr Tichborne was full of sympathy for the afflicted. It would be a rotten job, most unpleasant. He thought of the new resident at Church Ale House. Free. Free as air. 'Such a very merry widow,' he said.

  Both pair of eyes looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  So, tomorrow was Ian and La Bin-bag's wedding anniversary, was it? I'll show them, thought the former Mrs Fytton. I shall become a pillar of the local community. And with that somewhat comfortless item of rhetoric, she went for a walk to catch the last of the fading light. If Sammy was right and the weather was about to change, then there would be few opportunities in the coming weeks.

  She headed off towards the eel river, behind the Tich-bornes' house. This was where the best wild hops grew. She could now, quite proudly, identify the pretty pale green Humulus lupulus at any stage of its development. At the moment they hung like fragrant ochre lace. She crushed one, smelt it and nodded with satisfaction. They were coming along very nicely. One more day of sun, Sammy said. She would leave them one more day then.

  Bread of Idleness, she thought, turning back. I'll give them Bread of Idleness. Then she heard a voice, from somewhere beyond the Tichbornes' hedge. Faint, so that she probably misheard, because it seemed to be saying 'Black king to white queen. Checkmate.'

  16

  October

  Our Homo erectus ancestors spawned another monstrous burden - the teenager... Not only did women now bear exceedingly helpless babies, but childhood also became extended. Hail the origin of teenage; another hallmark of the human animal... another distinct divergence from the apes

  helen fisher The Anatomy of'Love

  In London Binnie sat in her glistening white Pogenpohl kitchen and sipped her passiflora tea and sighed. It tasted foul. But it was true, it did calm one...

  Creak, creak. She won't be in my bloody bath.

  Sip, sip. Will she?

  The footsteps overhead ceased. The faint sound of a water cistern flushed up above. The further faint sound of taps gushing issued forth. As did Binnie. Knocking the passiflora tea aside in her rage. She was up those stairs and banging on the door of her own bathroom - from which issued the vapour of sweetened steam - and screaming, 'Out, out, damned Claire.'

  Who calmly replied, through the door, that she couldn't use the other bathroom because Andrew's new jeans were soaking in the bath.

  And then the telephone rang. It was Ian. 'Hi, baby,' he said. He liked to sound hip and young for her.

  'Your fucking children,' she began.

  Sweet little Belinda, who used only to say 'Ouch' if someone trod on her toe. Ian was shocked. 'What-Tris?'

  'You know perfectly well who I mean.' 'I've booked a table at the Caprice.'

  She burst into tears. 'Well, you can just unbook the sodding thing. I shall be in bed by ten and I don't want waking up..’ 'It's our first anniversary, darling.'

  'And it may be our last! Do you know what your daughter is doing now? Do you? Do you ?'

  Ian smiled sheepishly at his secretary and sat back to listen.

  When the tirade was done, his secretary, a wise and agreeable woman whom he called Moneypenny, although she patently did not adore, or even see, the Bond in him, suggested that it might be a good idea for just the two of them to go away.

  Just for one frightened moment he thought she referred to him and her and he actually felt his testicles shrink - but she meant him and Binnie.

  'Good thinking, Moneypenny.' And then he shuddered. 'Better make it Sunday and Monday, Moneypenny,' he said, remembering the tone of little Binnie's voice. A couple of months ago he would never have believed she could sound so frightening. 'You'll just have to rearrange my Monday appointments.'

  Privately Moneypenny wondered how he could have got himself into this mess. He had once had the perfect wife and an untrammelled life. The office, the business, the sum of their world together ran smooth as a nut in butter. And then this.

  He cancelled the Caprice and rang All Hallows Inn in Beckingfield, where they had spent their first sinful English night together. Moneypenny scribbled him a note, 'Check they have a baby-listening service', on his pad - he did and they did - and he relaxed again. Saved by the bell, he thought.

  And so a mollified Belinda, a contentedly dribbling Tristan and an Ian so entirely bound up in not cracking the eggs beneath his feet that he kept forgetting to breathe, set off for Beckingfield and a couple of nights of rekindled love.

  It is a well-known fact that, up to a point, the more youthful one is, the more swiftly one's liver recovers itself. It is also a well-known fact that the three points at which this particular phenomenon displays itself to its best advantage are (1) around the age of eighteen, (2) after an all-night party, particularly an all-night party in which a wide variety of generously poured alcoholic beverages are available, and (3) after frequent vomiting. This last often being aided by a fourth consideration - that in the course of the twin meeting of youth and alcohol, and before the vomiting, there is often fitted in a colourful item called pizza.

  All of these phenomena had been brought together in South Common Road, Wimbledon, on a mild Monday evening at the beginning of October.

  On the preceding Sunday night, the baby-listening service of All Hallows Inn, Beckingfield, was available. But on the following day, which just so happened to be their real anniversary, it mysteriously vanished. Babies were, apparently, seasonal at country house hotels. Therefore when the season died down, and it did so at the beginning of October, there was none to be had. Tristan, being an Olympic qualifier in the tooth department, was cutting a few. The prospect of being up and down the stairs from the All Hallows famous restaurant did not excite either his father or his mother. Ian, fearful, told Binnie about the lack. Binnie, contrary to his expectations, was kind. They cancelled their second night and vowed, instead, to take a lovely, slow drive home. Thus did they and their little now eight-and-a-half’’-toothed babe set off for home early. Why push it, they both agreed. They had enjoyed their Sunday night. Why push the treat?

  The night away had been bliss. Binnie was her sweet little self again. Sex had been accomplished with reasonable success after a superb dinner and a good amount of fine wine. It was enough. Domestic responsibilities lay upon them. Ian could not help thinking that they lay upon him rather more than upon his sweet little wife, who had not got out of bed when Tristan called at three a.m. And again at four-thirty a.m. But stil
l. Something was accomplished. A state of peace between them. They set off after breakfast feeling good about the world. He kept his mobile turned off.

  If Ian felt it was unfair that he should have to work so hard at the domestic arrangements and his marital arrangements, as well as spearheading the marketplace, he kept the thought to himself and wove the car lazily around the edge of the New Forest. Tristan certainly had a mighty pair of lungs on him. He could not remember either of his first two being quite so uncontrolled. For a moment, and only for a moment, he remembered how simple life had been in the old days. Focus. He was then a man of focus and concentration. And now the focus was blurred, and the concentration broken into a thousand shards of other calls on his time. He was not losing his grip, only finding it harder to hang on. He'd say one thing for the former Mrs Fytton, she knew how to organize a household. Whereas Binnie, which was one of the reasons he loved her, needed his input for everything. Even - he could smile about it now as the autumnal trees danced past the car in the breeze - even down to organizing baby-sitting. Though in this instance it was baby-sitting of a very peculiar kind...

  For a hefty sum - and he could not believe he was doing this - he hired the cleaner to baby-sit his sodding teenagers. She would stay at the house on Sunday and Monday night and, with her solid Christian principles - and the hefty sum aforementioned - he felt he could rely on her to keep the wiles of his elder children at bay.

  But he was - no other word for it - wrong. The wiles of his children were deeper and stronger than the ocean's tides and pulled them, irredeemably, towards having a good time. This, they both argued, was what they were meant to do. Having negotiated those pulling tides, their wiles were now sharper than the vixens who howled outside their absent mother's door. They had a plan.

  Sunday and Sunday night at South Common Road passed well enough. The cleaner sat on the white settee and watched Songs of Praise, enraptured. A supper was prepared, to which the elder progeny were summoned. They came and they ate. And they went to bed. But on the Monday, somewhere around three p.m., the Christian Trisha departed. She departed never to return to that evil house. Not as baby-sitter, not as cleaner and certainly not as a woman of Christian principle up for a bit of extra pocket money. Why was this?

  This was because on rising that day, somewhere around noon, her charges, Andrew and Claire, had sought to engage her in a bit of fun. With a bowl of crisps, a couple of lagers and one of their father's lightly pornographic videos. Which they said was The Wizard of Oz. She had taken her place on the settee again, settled down, nibbled a couple of crisps and waited for little Dorothy to cling to Toto as she whirled away in the sky. The young woman she saw on the video clung to something quite different. Andrew and Claire, stuffing cushions in their mouths and smelling of sweet, scented smoke, turned up the volume. Trisha departed forthwith. The house, by early afternoon, was theirs.

  It is amazing how much change can be wrought on a house between the hours of four and eight-thirty p.m. Amazing. Long, long after Claire and Andrew are up and grown with children of their own, and Binnie is grey and Ian draws his pension, the experience will be remembered. How, as the car turned the corner of South Common Road, Ian had a sense of foreboding. Perhaps hardly surprising since, in the distance, picked out in the headlights, he saw two staggering youths apparently kicking a ball around in the road very close to his private residence, and two staggering girls dancing along the low (fortunately) front wall of his home, possibly screaming, possibly singing, and from the upstairs middle front window saw two more youthful creatures hanging out, apparently entirely comatose. Ian did not drive into the garage but parked on the road in front of the house and suggested to the shocked, puzzled, weary Belinda that she stay in the car with their son while he, Ian, Sorted This Out.

  At which point the apparent ball that the staggering boys were kicking landed with a sharp crack on the front window of the car and was observed to be - why - not a ball at all but one of the second Mrs Fytton's carefully chosen Italian brass doorknobs. At which point she felt a wholly uncontrollable wave of rage. She it was who leapt from the car and, to the twitching of curtains up and down the road, screamed obscenities at the two staggering boys and the two staggering girls (who promptly fell backwards into the pyracantha and crushed it) and shook her fist up at her bedroom window, from which the two comatose hangers-out, waking like a pair of rudely assaulted sleeping beauties, began to give as good as they got in the offering of one finger to the aggressively inclined woman below them, together with a stout rendition of 'Stick it up your arse...'

  Ian watched it all in helpless horror. He could not stop his wife because he could not leave his son. Into the house Binnie went. Ian watched her pretty little bottom gird its metaphorical loins and he felt his sense of foreboding deepen. Part of the deepening sense of foreboding was that further sexual union within his marriage seemed highly unlikely for some time after this. Another was that, if it was like this out here in the street, what the hell was it like indoors? It was as if the devil himself had come to perch upon Ian's shoulder and whisper in his ear the very terrible words, 'You ain't seen nothing yet.'

  And so it was. A veil will be drawn over the scene that greeted Binnie as she entered her hallway and stepped over body after body before turning to one side and entering her once-white sitting room. Though the howl of pain could, certainly, be heard in the street. A veil should also be drawn over the sight that greeted the reeling Binnie as she made her way to the kitchen, in which, at exactly the moment she arrived, a tall young lad with a penchant for sport climbed on to her once-spotless draining board and pissed very accurately, to the sound of cheers, into first her full-sized sink and then, not at all accurately, also to the sound of cheers, into her half-drainer.

  Like a phantom ascending, Belinda made her way past the bodies that lined the stairs and up towards her bedroom. And here it was that her soul appeared to leave her body. Not because of the pair of bottoms hanging over the window ledge, still gesticulating to the garden below; not because of the several cigarettes that smouldered in her Lalique ring tray; not even for the couple clasped in an embrace of deep sleep and pizza dreams under her strangely patterned duvet that was once merely pale peach. No, none of these - appalling though they were - caused the split of temporal from spiritual in the second Mrs Fytton. But the state of her own dear once-pristine and now no more bathroom did. It was here that perhaps the marriage of that great triple alliance - a youthful liver, a goodly supply of alcohol and rather a lot of deep-pan pizza - came together in horrible fruition.

  It was to no avail that the weeping Claire, swaying like a willow in a breeze, begged her stepmother to beat her for her sins. Just as well since, when the weeping Claire sobered up the next morning, she felt - on the whole - that the party had been a great success and that everything was her father and stepmother's fault for coming back early. If they had stayed away as promised, they might never have known - a fantasy brought to its knees by the need to hire the services of a cleaning contractor to put the house back together again. Nevertheless, had her stepmother taken advantage of the peach-schnapped pleadings of her stepdaughter the night before and taken a paddle to her, Claire would have got in touch with Child Line straight away, as soon as she was sober enough to tap out the number.

  'I thought you liked me,' wailed Binnie.

  'But I do,' said the wide-eyed Claire.

  Andrew, who was found some time later flat on his back two gardens down, offered to pay for a replacement doorknob out of his next month's allowance. He was very surprised, astonished really, when his father did not exactly think that he was due an allowance for very many years to woman's shame then for egging him on, as much as the man's for being egged. Some women just had to stand there and you wanted them. Not like these.

  He smiled. She ran off that time, of course. A decent woman would. Haws bouncing in the hedgerow as she pushed past him. But he'd done keepering. He knew how to set a trail. She came back again eventually
. And there was Renata, eyeing them. Pigs can't talk, he told her. And it was warm and secret in there. And she asked him to do it again. Never mind pigs -that was men's work. Archie's eels were never up to his wife's causeway.

  'What's the joke, Sam?' called Daff Blunt.

  If only they knew. 'You women,' he said. 'Should watch out for the chill. Wear a bit more.'

  'Embarrass you, does it?' she called archly.

  He did not bother to reply but brushed at the verge with his stick. Used to be full of elecampane around here. None now. But after the war, when that feeble husband of hers got pleurisy, she cured him with the stuff. Gwen's mother passed the knowledge on. The herbal. Like breathing. They all knew it once. Elecampane - what she called Helen's tears, pleurisy root, bit of liquorice. He could curse those women and their dribs of this and that and their herbs and cure-alls. Let him be taken, he prayed in the church. But the weak man lived. Elecampane. There was no doubt in his mind that the first girl born to them was not Archie's. Not by a long chalk.