Mrs Fytton's Country Life

by Mavis Cheek

  'If Mum didn't like the idea,' said Andrew, 'she would have sent us some money so we could stay on a bit longer.'

  ‘I think she's broke,' said Claire, when she rang off.

  'How come?'

  'She's making her own candles.'

  It was Binnie who took the phone call despite its coming through very early in the morning. Ian was in the shower; Tristan was still asleep and she did not want him woken. So she pottered down to the kitchen, collected the phone on the way and spoke into it in a low voice as she crossed to the kettle. She could even afford, in her new springtime, to be sweet and civil to her stepchildren. 'Andrew,' she said, 'how are you?'

  Pause. Binnie listens. 'Good,' she says. 'Good. And Claire?'

  Pause. Binnie listens. 'Good,' she says. 'Good. And what's the weather like there?'

  Pause. Binnie listens. 'Yes - it's raining in London too. But at least where you are is warm.'

  Pause. Binnie listens. ‘I thought it was summer over there.'

  The kettle begins to steam. Still Binnie potters about getting teapot, mugs, milk, with the telephone tucked safely under her little ear. She is safe. So she thinks. Until she asks, 'Well, where are you, then?'

  Pause. Binnie listens. She laughs a cracked little laugh.

  Her husband, father of this Andrew, this Claire, comes into the kitchen just as her cracked little laugh goes an octave higher. She stands there, in front of her husband, who is also the father of her blood child, and she clutches the milk carton to her chest while she silently hands to this man, husband and father, the telephone. He, taking it, looks at her face and thinks she must have had a very rough night, which is strange, because for the last few weeks or so they have both been sleeping like babies, as indeed has the baby.

  He speaks into the telephone tentatively. It could be anyone. But it is only his son.

  'Hi, Andy,' he says. 'How're you doing?'

  He places his free hand on his wife's little shoulder and rubs it gently in a gesture of complete solidarity and tenderness. He had no idea that the advent of his older children had affected her so much. Why, even though they are thousands and thousands of miles away now she looks half mad with fear and her face wears that crumpled look.

  'What's the weather like there?'

  A small sob escapes from Binnie's throat. Ian feels the vibration of it in his hand. But his hand is now stilled, glued to the spot just above his wife's collar bone. Then he squeezes so that she gives a little yelp.

  'Where?' he asks quietly into the telephone.

  'Heathrow,' says Binnie automatically. 'They are at Heathrow.'

  Above them the sweet, seeking wail of their son begins. A new day, a new dawn.

  'Get on to that witch,' spits Belinda. 'This is all her doing. And if she isn't there, keep trying until she is...'

  'Who?' says Ian. But he knows who.

  On the telephone, still in his hand, still at his ear, his son is saying querulously, 'So will one of you come and get us or what?'

  'What?' says Ian, and switches off the phone.

  It is to no avail. Come they will. Ian departs for work - he has to or empires will crumble. Binnie remains in the house for just as long as it takes to have a bath in her own little bathroom, dress herself, dress her child and get out. Although they now have a new one, it is not a cleaning-lady day, so she locks the door behind her and goes off to the zoo. Perhaps there will be some explanation, some comfort, in the behaviour of the apes? She weeps with rage, vexation, frustration and bile. She thinks of the former Mrs Fytton in her rural retreat, full of peace and quiet, and she begins to get a sense of having been stitched up. Who can say why she should suddenly think this, but she does. She knows that there is no justification in the world for she, Binnie, to say to her, Angela, You must have your children to live with you. They are no more her children than they are Ian's. That is equality. She is stuck. She looks at the birds in the beautiful white aviary, trapped. And she knows that nothing will ever be the same for her or Ian or Tristan again.

  She turns to go home. Wishing with all her little bruised and weary heart that when she first saw Ian she had not fallen at his feet. Wishing that she had simply leaned over and patted his hand and said a friendly goodbye - and gone, resolutely, on her way. Instead of thinking that he was attractive, rich, vulnerable and would be easy to remove from his marriage. And that she was fed up with waiting for an available Mr Right to come along. And wishing that there had never been such a thing in the world to drive her to it like the ticking of her biological clock.

  Baby Tristan waves to the birds and makes noises indicating that an ice cream is in order, despite its being the last day of January and freezing. Binnie pushes the stroller towards the cafe with damp, bowed head. Whatever is coming, she thinks, come it will. She sees her life stretching forth as a single parent after all. Hellfire and damnation, she shrieks inwardly, she might as well have gone for the IVF and saved everyone a load of bother.

  Claire said that the only way to get in was to break in. So they did.

  Thus did Binnie arrive back with the sleeping Tristan to find a howling gale blowing through the house from the conservatory where Andrew had broken a pane of glass. And her two suntanned stepchildren in the whitish sitting room eating crisps and watching TV and wonderfully uncritical of there being no thought spared for their arrival. One thing you could say about these two teenagers was that they did as they would be done by and were forgiving and without expectation in the matter of people being organized. To go out and forget to leave a key was just the kind of thing they might do themselves. And there was no harm done.

  Binnie, being of a different opinion, took to her bed, tucking Tristan up beside her and thinking that he could stay there with her in future and that Ian could get into the cot every night. That might make him see sense about his horrible, horrible children. She then threw the boomerang, the gift of her stepchildren, across the room violently.

  Fortunately, it was another failure, and it did not come back to her.

  Now Belinda, who once asked nothing from life but the chance to be cared for by a husband, and who was perfectly prepared to cede liberation for the net gain of a place in the maternal pantheon, decided to have one more go at putting things right. So she rallied. And here she was, mid-rally so to speak, sitting on the settee trying to look relaxed and commanding and in control. That last was very important, because she had been somewhat out of control these last few days and it was quite a frightening experience. Largely the out of controlness manifested itself in an urgent and recurring desire to wring her stepchildren's necks, closely followed by a bursting into frustrated tears because she was not allowed to. So, at considerable expense, and wishing to see her own son grow up and not from the wrong side of prison bars, she went to see a counsellor.

  The counsellor told her that if she wanted to preserve her marriage and retain the father of her child's goodwill, she must get some kind of solid foundation of understanding going between the interpersonal dynamics of the situation. Binnie took interpersonal dynamics to mean the opposite of strangling, so she listened to the advice. And now here she was, and here they were, and she was about to put it into practice.

  'Sit down,' she said very nicely, indicating the chairs. The pair, slightly nervous, did so.

  'Drink?' said Binnie. She had the drinks tray on a table in front of her with ice and lemon and glasses, so there was no fussing. She poured them a vodka. Grown-up drink for grown-up occasion, she thought. And, just as she replaced the cap on the bottle, from above came the wail of little Tristan.

  ‘I’ll go,'said Claire.

  She brought him down. He stopped wailing and beamed around the room at everyone, pleased to be part of the proceedings. Andrew made goo-goo noises at him, which sent him off into paroxysms of chuckling. Binnie wondered, when she looked at them all behaving together like this, whatever it was that made her so full of murderous intent.

  She said, 'You know sometimes, when they are in lo
ve, people like to spend time on their own together.'

  Two pairs of very surprised eyes stared at her, with a third pair that simply looked.

  'Y-e-e-s,' said Claire.

  'We all need our space from time to time, don't we?' Andrew said, ‘I was going to ask you about that.' Now we're getting somewhere, thought Binnie happily. 'Can I have a double bed?'

  Binnie went on sipping. This, she felt, was slipping away from her as she sip, sip, sipped. She just made the faintest of noncommittal noises. It seemed the best way. 'Umph,' she went, and waited.

  'So that Elly can stay.'

  It dawned. This was not some unimaginable trial sent by the gods. This was her stepson Andrew on sparkling form. And Elly was a poisonous creature who viewed the entire house and its contents with eyes of green glass.

  'And Claire?' she said. 'Perhaps you'd like your boyfriend to move in with you too?'

  'Oh no’ said Claire, with complete derision. ‘I haven't got one.'

  Andrew looked at Binnie very kindly. 'I wouldn't’ he added sweetly, 'mind if it was only a futon actually. After all’ he said with urbane reasonableness, 'this is my house too.'

  It seemed strange to him. After all, it was a so-called responsible adult, his very own mother, who had pointed out the veracity of that statement. And now here was another of the so-called breed going ape-shit at the very suggestion. Jeezus! Life was a minefield when all the adults surrounding you were nuts.

  'Er - isn't it?' he added, with quiet confidence.

  Which, oddly enough, though she did not know her root-stock, touched a part ot Binnie that was entirely and absolutely peasant. At the mere thought of some spotty little fuck-wit suggesting that he owned a share in her estate, she went - as she was to tell the counsellor the following day -ape-shit. It occurred to her that the likelihood of herself being a single parent and Tristan growing up without benefit of a loving dad about the place was increasing. Unless she embraced the alternative scenario, which was of Tristan growing up with a loving dad, two adoring half-siblings and a dribbling idiot for a mother.

  And so ended Binnie's serious talk, grown-up fashion. With Claire and Andrew shaking their heads at the unbelievable madness of grown-ups and their stepmother in particular - and with Binnie tucking little Tristan up and then going back downstairs and having three vodka slam-mers in a row. Or possibly four, five or six.

  By the end, if she could have seen to dial, she would have dialled the number of That Witch. As it was, she had a couple of stabs at it and got a hotel in Bannockburn, followed by the talking clock.

  'You know’ said the counsellor, 'they do not sound so bad. I myself had teenage stepsons who stole from me, set fire to my car and put a card in a telephone box saying I gave good head’ 'I do not’ said Binnie, 'pay you to tell me your problems’ Belinda decided, in that good old-fashioned way, to take

  her baby and go back to mother.

  27

  Candlemas Eve

  Isn't there any other part of the matzo you can eat?

  marilyn monroe, on being served matzo ball soup for the third time in a row

  Where do you go to get anorexia ?

  shelley winters

  It was two weeks since the funeral of Mrs Dorothea Tichborne and apart from one particular incident when old Dr Tichborne was found very much the worse for wear outside the vicarage at two in the morning and brought home by the potman from the Black Smock, an incident which the entire community thought quite pardonable, life was calm.

  These were the last of the dead days - the last of the silent world of winter before the hints of spring should be seen. Shivering bees buzzed around the Christmas roses and hungry pale-grey pigeons huddled together on rooftops. The mornings were raw and the days were scarcely drawing out again, but they were - and little peepings of green all around made the world that lived above ground renew its hope. It felt like a time to have a celebration, a party, a happy ritual -and all those things were about to take place in St Hilary's and Church Ale House and garden on the following day.

  Angela gave the piano tuner a glass of ale which he said was the best thing he had drunk for a long time.

  'Seems like you'll be having quite a party,' he said, looking around the parlour. 'Very festive.'

  When he drove off he hit the gatepost.

  In Tally-Ho Cottage the scent of oil and ginger and cinnamon hung like a warm blanket over the proceedings. In the kitchen Wanda packed the last six of her small bottles into the last of her six wicker baskets and handed them to Dave the Bread. 'Prunes in the High Street will take three’ she said, 'and two go to my private customers at the Taunton Vale Building Society. And one to the manager of the Co-op. You'll be going in there anyway to get your bread.'

  Dave put on his cap, picked up the baskets and shook his head. 'No need’ he said. 'Biscuits are done. And I should be able to bake before we go.'

  Wanda stood up. 'You're never going to risk doing the bread yourself?' she said, in admiration.

  'If I get up early enough’ he said, ‘I should be able to manage it.'

  She removed his silly cap and ran her cinnamon-scented fingers through his hair. 'If you get up early enough tomorrow morning’ she said, 'there'll be time for more than just baking...'

  Lucy Elliott passed out in her bedroom. Down she went, crump, on to the floor. She was determined to get into those leather trousers by tomorrow and had managed to not eat anything for nearly two days. Needs must when the devil drives, she told herself, every time she set down a meal for the children, or cleared away their plates without picking up the scraps and shoving them into her mouth. (Why? What was it about cold baked beans and dry toast crusts that compelled one to eat the things instead of tipping them into the rubbish bin?) Anyway, no one had noticed that she had not eaten and now here she was, up in her bedroom, about to try the things on again and then - pouf - her head went all swimmy and she needed to sit down and then everything went all black and...

  Craig Elliott tutted with irritation. He had been struggling with the imagery of Dorothea Tichborne's final moments, as told to him by the Dorkin girl, and the imagery of death is a very delicate thing for a writer, so the last thing he needed was his wife to start moving the furniture around. He had been toying with the idea of renting a little place on a regular basis in London and now he was convinced. Being so near and yet so far in the proximity of Anja was torment for the free artistic spirit in him. And the Fytton woman was entirely busy with her silly party so she no longer had time for him, and as if that were not bad enough, now even his wife could not keep the domestic arrangements quiet. And he had just got to the upturned eyes, the Gothic colours, the stillness and the dribbling too . . . and the sound of the milk going plink, plink, plink. Not easy to construct prose delicately around something like that.

  He got up from his desk, strode down the passageway to their bedroom and opened the door. He was about to speak quite curtly when he beheld his wife lying, eyes upturned, greeny-white and still as marble and giving a pretty good impression of the imagery of death upon the floor. The shadow of Dorothea Tichborne's final moments came back to him. A terrible punching sensation hit his solar plexus. Little Lucy - his wife - his helpmeet in all his needs - mother of his children - warmer of his bed - rock upon which everything was built. Was dead. What would he do now? Without her? He fell to his knees, sobbing.

  Old Dr Tichborne, coming out of the gate of the Elliotts' house around lunchtime, patted Craig Elliott reassuringly on the arm. 'Better luck next time,' he said.

  Which Craig Elliott felt was very peculiar.

  'Your wife will need monitoring, but there is nothing wrong with her. Nothing at all. Bit on the thin side, of course. But strong as an ox. Sorry.'

  Craig Elliott was not taking any chances. He telephoned a specialist in London. He would take her there next week. He ran back indoors to check that she was still alive.

  The doctor himself was feeling a mite less strong than he expected after last night. La
st night was supposed to be wonderful. Crispin came around with his guitar and some of his CDs. Old Dr Tichborne set out the chess pieces and banished the Dorkin girl, saying that even he knew how to make an omelette. And the beautiful vicar presented him with a bottle of mulberry wine. Though he would have preferred a nice Chablis, he partook of the gift, blessed as it was by the young god's hand.

  It being a cold night, the vicar accepted a glass immediately, saying it was only fruit. And then another. He was, he said, knocked out by it. The vicar then helped himself to a third and started playing his guitar. Very loudly. He then put on one of his CDs and played along with it, even more loudly, had one more ruby glassful and began singing very loudly too. He showed little inclination to eat the omelette, and even less to play chess, since at one point and giving a particularly hearty swing with the guitar he swept most of the pieces off the table and on to the floor. He then looked at them, said, 'Well, isn't that just like life ...' and burst into a wild rendering of something that sounded like 'Achy-Braky Heart', so that Dr Tichborne retired from the room wounded and had to stand outside the door for some time wondering how to regroup.