A Rural Affair

7

That evening, at eight, the inaugural meeting of the Massingham book club took place at Angie’s house. Peggy, Angie, Jennie and I assembled in the vast, beautifully converted barn kitchen where Angie and Tom had entertained so splendidly and raucously over the years: sixteen for dinner sometimes and a lot of laughs. This evening, however, it was just the four of us who sat at the huge oak table under the high, vaulted ceiling, criss-crossed with original beams, the twinkle of many tiny down-lights upon us. Outside the huge picture windows, darkness had fallen, but in the soft glow of a coach light, Angie’s horses could be seen behind the post and rails, already rugged up for winter, standing nose to tail. Inside, candles had been lit above the fireplace and in great urns beside it, whilst the fire crackled comfortingly in the grate. Michael Bublé crooned softly in the background.

‘So. Everyone got a pen and paper?’ Angie, sitting at the head of the table, had clearly decided to take the chair – her house, after all. She was looking particularly stunning tonight in her delicate, Jane Asher way: red-gold hair shining, elegant despite jeans and Ugg boots. We all nodded. ‘OK. Well, we’re here tonight primarily to discuss who we want to join our club,’ she said importantly, crossing her skinny knees.

‘And which books,’ Jennie reminded her, unused to playing second fiddle.

‘Oh. Yes, of course.’ Angie was deflated in an instant. ‘Which books to read. Anyone got any ideas?’

‘Who’s Who?’ drawled Peggy. We all looked at her. ‘Then we could determine if there’s anyone within a radius of twenty miles worth hitting on.’

‘Anyone got any sensible ideas?’ went on Jennie smoothly, ignoring her. ‘Angie?’ she asked diplomatically, having usurped her so very recently.

‘Well, I have given it a bit of thought, actually,’ said Angie, going a bit pink. She’d clearly rehearsed this. ‘How about Silas Marner? It’s by George Eliot, so heavy, but look how short it is.’

She just happened to have a copy handy and whipped it out of a drawer from the side, the better for us to marvel. It certainly was delightfully slim. Not more than a hundred pages.

‘And then we could say we were reading Eliot,’ mused Jennie, flicking through.

‘Exactly,’ said Angie triumphantly. ‘And look, half of it’s Introduction, which we don’t have to read, and quite a lot of Index. Or there’s Pride and Prej?’ she said, rather warming to her role of literary doyenne in her salon. She leaned back expansively in her chair and waved her pencil about. ‘I mean, I know we’ve all read it, but just to kick off with, you know? To get us in the mood and –’

‘Who’s read it?’ interrupted Peggy.

Angie and Jennie looked smug. They stuck up their fingers. Looked rather pityingly at Peggy.

‘Poppy, you have too.’ Jennie nudged me.

‘Oh.’ I stuck up mine. I’d been looking at a spider crawling up a rafter into the roof.

‘Really?’ Peggy asked. ‘You’ve all read it, have you?’

‘Of course,’ said Jennie.

‘Or have you just seen the film?’

Three fingers wavered slightly. Then lowered.

‘I’ve seen both versions,’ said Angie defensively. ‘The Keira Knightley one and the old one.’

‘Come on, let’s not kid ourselves that we’re going to wade through the classics,’ Peggy said drily. ‘I vote we kick off with Wilbur Smith.’

Jennie looked pained. ‘Yes, we could, but the idea is to stretch ourselves a bit, isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’ Peggy lit a cigarette. ‘I thought we were here to enjoy ourselves. Thought we were doing this for pleasure.’ She blew out a thin line of smoke. ‘OK, how about Lawrence, then? He’s a bit more stretching, although admittedly mostly in haystacks.’ She gave a throaty chuckle.

‘Poppy?’ Jennie turned to me. ‘Any ideas?’

I came back from the spider. It had gone right up into the rafters, into the apex of the roof.

I stared blankly. ‘Anne of Green Gables?’

How odd. Dad had attempted to read that to me when Mum died. We’d started with Black Beauty, but had to stop when Ginger died. I remember the tears rolling down Dad’s wind-blown cheeks as he sat on my bed. I even remember my pink floral bed cover. We hadn’t liked Anne, though, had never got to the end. Found her wet.

My friends exchanged startled looks. Angie attempted to give this due consideration.

‘Yes … we could read Anne of Green Gables,’ she agreed, ‘but –’

‘Oh, let’s forget the bloody books and talk about who we’re going to ask,’ said Peggy, wriggling on her bony bottom in her chair. ‘Far more exciting.’

Jennie raised her eyebrows and shuffled her notepad. ‘OK,’ she said wearily. ‘Peggy? You’re clearly itching to fire away.’

‘How about Angus Jardine, Pete the farrier, that smoothie antiques guy Jennie fancies, and Luke the organ-grinder in church.’

We looked at her aghast.

‘Peggy, this is a book club, not a frustrated-women’s dating agency!’ Jennie spluttered. ‘I meant local women!’

‘Why do they have to be women?’

‘Well, they don’t, exclusively. But usually, you know …’

‘Usually it’s the little women who get together? When their hunter-gatherers come home? Bustle out importantly to show they have lives too?’

Jennie and Angie looked at one another.

‘Peggy’s got a point,’ muttered Angie.

‘But we can’t have the four of us, and four men. How would that look? We need a couple of women, for heaven’s sake,’ Jennie insisted.

‘Saintly Sue?’ suggested Angie. ‘If we can put up with her halo. And my sister might come?’

Jennie crossed her legs and sucked in her cheeks. Angie’s sister was a scary ex-Londoner called Virginia who worked in advertising. She’d recently moved locally on account of leaving her husband, a wealthy hedge-fund manager. Jennie had cooked Angie a dinner party one night when Virginia and various other high-achievers were guests, but she’d had problems with the turbot and, out of nerves, proceeded to get disastrously drunk. At two a.m. Jennie had crawled into the double bed in Angie’s spare room to sleep it off, unaware that Virginia, equally plastered, was already installed. The next morning, Virginia had leaped out of bed bellowing: ‘Bloody hell – I’ve just left my husband, and the first person I sleep with is a woman!’

Jennie wasn’t necessarily in a violent hurry to meet her again.

‘Yes, your sister,’ she mused, as if giving it ample thought. ‘Who’s delightful, of course. Only I wonder if she isn’t a bit high-brow for us?’

‘Oh God, yes, she’s frightfully clever,’ Angie agreed. ‘Got a first from Oxford.’

‘Fuck me, that’s no good,’ muttered Peggy, stubbing out her cigarette.

‘So,’ Jennie went on, ‘we could have Saintly Sue, but then again, d’you think that’s a good idea, bearing in mind …’ She jerked her head eloquently in my direction. It was as if I wasn’t alive any more. Didn’t exist. ‘I mean, if we do ask Luke, which I actually think is quite a good idea of Peggy’s, although not necessarily the others –’

‘Why not necessarily the others?’ demanded Peggy.

Jennie sighed. Turned to me. ‘What do you think, Poppy?’

‘About what?’

‘About inviting Luke Chambers?’

‘Who’s Luke Chambers?’

Three pairs of eyes turned incredulously on me. There was a long and meaningful pause. At length, Jennie put down her pencil. She clenched her teeth and blew out hard through her nose, making a faint whistling sound.

‘OK,’ she said quietly and in very measured tones. ‘OK. We are here tonight ostensibly to talk about the book club. To talk about who we want to join and which books we want to read. But one of our members, one of our very dear friends, is in trouble, and I, for one, cannot go another day, cannot go another minute, without finding out why. What’s happened, Poppy? What the flipping heck is going on?’

‘What d’you mean?’ I felt myself go cold.

‘Two weeks ago you were coping. Sad, but coping. Resigned to Phil’s death, to being a widow. Then suddenly – and knowing you as I do, knowing your movements as well as I do, I would be so bold as to pin it down to two weeks ago last Friday – something happened.’

I felt my mouth go a bit dry. All eyes in the room were upon me. Possibly even those of Angie’s children in their silver photo frames on the side: those beautiful poised teenagers, back at school now, whom Frankie derided as toffs but of whom I think was secretly in awe. Not so poised these days perhaps, with their father gone. Felicity, off the rails a bit according to her mother, nothing too terrible, smoking, drinking, but only fifteen. Clarissa, not working for her exams. Their eyes too, it seemed, in frames all over the room, on ponies, on ski slopes, gazed and waited.

‘I … had a visitor.’ I also had no saliva. I couldn’t believe I was doing this.

‘When?’

‘You’re right. On that Friday. At lunchtime. You were cooking a lunch for the Hobson-Burnetts.’

Miles away, in Buckingham. I knew, because my first instinct had been to go next door, to find her. Find my friend. My second instinct had been to hide, which was the one I stuck to.

‘A woman called Emma Harding came to see me.’

My friends waited, wine glasses in hand. And although they sensed what was coming was not good, there was an air of expectancy in the room. Of relief, perhaps.

‘Apparently she’d been having an affair with Phil. For four years. Since Clemmie was born.’

You could feel the air thicken, hold and set. Nobody moved. Nobody blinked. They waited. I remembered Emma’s pale anxious face as I’d offered her a drink. A cup of tea, perhaps? Her polite refusal as she sat down, putting her bag at her feet. Swallowing; pressing her hands together to compose herself.

I turned to my friends, their drinks still motionless in mid-air, and, in Peggy’s case, her cigarette about to drop an inch of ash.

‘She helped Phil set up his private-equity firm four years ago, the banking off-shoot. When he left Lehman’s and set up on his own, remember?’ I certainly remembered because it was just after Clemmie was born. I’d be sitting up in bed in the middle of the night breastfeeding and he’d stagger in, exhausted. Working day and night to get it off the ground. ‘They worked very closely. She was in charge of new investment. She was crucial to Phil. They spent so much time together, it was inevitable. They fell in love.’

In my head I scrolled back to Emma telling me this. She’d looked anxious, but hadn’t avoided my eyes. ‘When you’re doing deals like that,’ she explained, ‘working right into the night, it’s so hard.’

‘So hard,’ I murmured automatically now.

‘What? What is so hard?’ Jennie was on her feet.

I regarded my friend in Angie’s kitchen. ‘Working in such close proximity – the total absorption, handling huge sums of money, the stress, the excitement. It’s business, Jennie, you and I wouldn’t know. We’ve been out too long. Too steeped in children. It takes over their lives. And she knew I’d find out about her,’ I went on mechanically. ‘Knew, when the will was read, that she’d be revealed, because he provided for her. He told her so. So she came to see me first. And she doesn’t want anything, Jennie. Nothing at all, that’s what she came to say. Quite brave, really.’

I remembered Emma gazing up at me from under a pale silky fringe. Looking so frightened, unsure.

‘Little chit,’ spat Jennie.

‘Oh, no,’ I said, surprised. ‘No, she wasn’t like that.’

‘What d’you mean, she wasn’t like that?’ cried Angie. ‘She was sleeping with your husband!’

‘I mean – she wasn’t the mistress type. She was soft, vulnerable, even. Said Phil had been so lost. So sad. And she’d just comforted him originally.’

‘Lost?’ Jennie’s incredulous voice.

‘After Clemmie was born. Said I’d withdrawn into the world of my child. The world of babies. Excluded him.’

‘Just a bit …’ Emma had said nervously, hunched forward on my sofa. ‘You were a bit preoccupied, Phil said.’

‘And he’d felt left out?’ sneered Angie.

‘Well … yes. Yes, he had. And – I think that’s true.’ I turned to them. ‘I had been preoccupied.’

I thought back to Clemmie’s birth: my unbridled joy at having her, my darling daughter, my beautiful bright-eyed little girl, who’d brought so much joy into what was a rather dim world. Turned the light on in my marriage.

‘So Phil felt excluded and turned to a secretary at work,’ scoffed Angie.

‘Finance Manager,’ I told her.

‘Right, and this Finance Manager,’ she said, making ironic quotation marks in the air, ‘no doubt told you it wasn’t the sex that her new lover had missed, but the love and affection?’ She got up and began to pace around her converted barn kitchen. Her arms were tightly folded, chin tucked in her chest, like someone looking in the eye of a storm.

‘Yes. Yes, she did. And the thing is, Angie, if I’m honest,’ I was having trouble breathing here, ‘I did pour so much love into Clemmie, I was so consumed, that maybe he did feel rejected. Maybe he cast around helplessly for some affection –’

‘And maybe he got a stiffy in the office,’ Peggy said caustically, tapping ash into the aspidistra beside her. It was the first time she’d spoken. ‘Maybe his wife had had a difficult birth and he was a bit impatient on that front.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘but some men do need it. I mean, look at Dan and Jennie.’ I hadn’t stopped looking at Dan and Jennie since Emma had been to see me. Normal service resumed within a twinkling of Hannah’s birth. Hadn’t stopped thinking what a selfish cow I’d been.

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous,’ stormed Angie. ‘Jennie had two caesareans! Hers popped out of the bloody sunroof, not bursting through the engine room like you and me!’ Peggy, childless, crossed her legs and looked pained. ‘Don’t you be beating yourself up about that, my girl, that is no excuse!’ Angie wagged her finger.

‘I wouldn’t say “pop”,’ muttered Jennie stiffly.

‘And this Emma,’ went on Angie, still pacing. ‘She was no doubt dressed down, hm? In a sort of sweet peasanty top and flat sandals? No make-up? Freshly washed hair?’

I looked up at her, surprised. ‘Well … yes. As I say, she wasn’t the mistress type –’

‘Well, she’s not going to strut around to your house in her basque and fishnets, is she? Twanging her suspender belt!’

‘Oh, I’d find it very hard to believe she was like that.’

‘Believe it,’ snapped Angie, stopping suddenly to slap the palms of her hands on the table in front of me, making me jump. Her eyes were like flints close to mine. ‘You believe it, Poppy.’ They looked very fierce, these friends of mine. Very grim. ‘Don’t think she didn’t move seamlessly into mistress mode the moment your husband was in her bedroom.’

I had a sudden mental picture of Phil walking into her bedroom in his suit, briefcase in hand. Emma waiting on the bed, reclining perhaps in a silk robe. I felt myself rock.

‘Really?’

‘Really. And as for blaming you, with your lack of sexual favours – how low can you get? I know darned well you felt very rejected in the bedroom.’

‘Yes, but if I’m honest I didn’t really care.’

‘None of us care!’ squealed Jennie. ‘A few children down the line, none of us care if we ever have sex again, but it doesn’t mean he can go off-piste!’

‘Doesn’t it?’

‘NO!’ they all roared in unison, fists clenched.

There was a silence. The room felt very charged, very tense.

‘This is not your fault, Poppy,’ said Peggy gravely, at length. ‘Is that what you’ve been thinking, my love? These past few weeks?’

‘Well, I’ve …’ Suddenly I felt I might crumble. Her term of endearment hadn’t helped. It seemed to me I were made entirely of ancient parchment which could disintegrate to the touch. I thought back to Emma, getting up hesitantly from the leather sofa in my sitting room. Twisting her hands about and saying how sorry she was to be the bearer of bad news. I remembered feeling so shocked as I looked at her. I’d already lost a husband, my children’s father. I’d already been dealing with that. But … how can you lose someone who wasn’t there? Phil had never been there. I’d been on my own for a very long time. I just hadn’t known it. The sense of abandonment had threatened to overwhelm me. I remembered not being able to breathe.

Somehow I’d got to my feet, followed Emma to the door, where she’d stumbled out some more apologies, saying she’d only wanted to comfort him, in what he felt to be a sterile marriage.

‘Sterile marriage!’ shrieked Angie. I’d said it out loud. ‘And no doubt she said you’d been cold and unfeeling, and that, oh dear God, the poor man had felt driven away? Poppy, have I not talked to you about Tom? Run you through his lines?’

‘Well, I –’

‘This is all mighty familiar,’ she hissed. ‘And it is nothing whatsoever to do with this,’ she slapped her hand to her heart, ‘and everything,’ she seized a large courgette from the vegetable rack, brandished it priapically, ‘to do with this.’

There was a silence.

‘So she said she was sorry, did she?’ mused Peggy.

‘Yes, she did.’ I cast back to Emma. By the front door, eyes downcast. Shoulder bag on.

‘And that she never meant to cause trouble, particularly when there were children involved?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that she was mortified you had to find out this way. That you had to find out at all, even. She never wanted to add to your grief?’

‘Yes, she said all that.’

‘And then she left, trying to walk slowly and calmly down the path, but unable to resist scuttling a bit at the end.’

‘She did … scuttle, a bit.’ I frowned as I recalled her quickly shutting the garden gate; leaping into her Mini. Glancing back over her shoulder as she pulled out sharply, not bothering with the seat belt, eyes flitting up to the rear-view mirror, to me.

‘And she left you, the widow, feeling like a heel.’

‘More than a heel,’ I whispered.

‘Like a cold, unfeeling, heartless wife, who’d driven her husband into another woman’s bed.’

Buckled as I was, I caught the ironic tone.

‘She doesn’t want any money,’ I told them, almost defensively. ‘That’s what she came to say.’

‘So she’s got a conscience. Or so she says. But she’s running scared, Poppy. She knew you’d be banging on her door the moment the will was read, so she thought she’d bang on yours first. She came to see you to pre-empt the situation, before the shit hit the fan. No doubt Phil made provision for her assuming he’d die at eighty, and incidentally, how cynical is that? To plan on cheating on you for ever?’ Peggy paused. ‘Your husband was a bastard, Poppy.’ I looked up. Peggy’s eyes were unnaturally unamused. No benign, sardonic twinkle to them now. ‘He treated you appallingly. In fact he made a mockery of your marriage. He controlled you, he told you what to wear, he lowered your self-esteem and confidence, he handed you money as if you were a child, and then he compounded the crime, added insult to injury, by sleeping with another woman.’

I breathed in sharply. ‘I never thought of it like that,’ I muttered.

Jennie put her head in her hands and moaned low. As she looked up, she let her fingers drag theatrically down her face. ‘Poppy, Poppy, where have you been?’ she whispered.

‘In a fairly dark and horrible place,’ I said in a quavering voice. I didn’t tell her there’d been moments when I’d wanted to hide for ever. Moments, like that one on the way back from the shops the other day, when I’d thought I could just drive the car into a brick wall.

Jennie leaned forward. Gripped my wrist. ‘Most women would look upon this recent revelation, this visit, as a salve to their conscience. Proof that they need not feel too guilty about their lack of widow’s weeds.’

‘And yet, for someone like Poppy, I can see it could also be a crushing blow,’ said Peggy slowly.

I looked at her. Someone like Poppy. What did that mean? Someone just the tiniest bit malleable? Suggestible? Riddled with insecurities and inadequacies, prone to be a wee bit downtrodden, over time? I felt scared at what she might say next.

‘It was rejection on a grand scale,’ she went on. ‘Not just widowed, but cheated on too. By someone she felt she’d accommodated, put up with out of the goodness of her heart. How shameful is that? By someone like Phil the Pill,’ she spat darkly.

‘Phil the …’

‘Pill. Short for Pillock. It’s how he was known, locally.’

Jennie and Angie bent their heads and studied their fingernails. Locally? I gazed at my friends aghast, but their eyes were averted. How far, I wondered. As far as Aylesbury? My heart started to beat. Slowly at first, but then it gathered momentum. Something dry and withered was uncurling fast within me, thrusting out green shoots and drinking, finding some nourishment. Phil the Pill. My husband. And in a corner of my mind, I’d known. Known he was a pillock. Had overheard Angie once say to Jennie he was a bad draw at a dinner party. But I’d ignored it. Covered up for him. Like you do when you’re married to a slightly dull man. Out of loyalty. Personal pride. Told myself he had hidden depths that my friends couldn’t know about. Concentrated on how hard he worked, how dedicated and selfless he was. How he brought home the bacon. But, in my heart, I knew I’d sold out by marrying him. I just didn’t realize everyone else knew it too.

Words were finally forming in my brain, like fridge-magnet letters swirling around in a furious kaleidoscopic anagram. Simultaneously, in the pit of my stomach, which latterly had been a bit ashen, a bit shrunken, there was a rumble, as if Vesuvius, dormant for years, was making a comeback, deciding it was time for a tremor. But it had been a while. It had its work cut out. I’d been in denial for years and, for the last eleven days, severely crushed. But fury was finally on its way. Roaring in from afar like the seventh cavalry. All those long lonely evenings. All those solitary weekends with the children. He hadn’t just been working, hadn’t been cycling – recharging the batteries, as I’d tell myself stoically: he’d been sleeping with another woman. Before coming home to me. And always a shower. Two-showers-a-day Phil. Now we knew why. I looked at my friends, my three good friends, grouped tense and watchful around me.

‘How dare he?’ I breathed, softly at first. It was a surprise to hear the words. They waited. Jennie nodded eagerly.

I dug deeper, right into my very soul. As I gazed into it, his treachery stared back. I saw it very clearly, like a roll of film. Saw him coming in late, midnight sometimes; me stumbling downstairs in my dressing gown to pop his dinner in the microwave, ask how his day had been, sympathize. I saw me sitting in the audience at Clemmie’s first nativity play, an empty chair beside me, then a text: ‘Sorry, can’t get away.’ I saw me eating with the children at teatime so as not to eat alone. I saw a one-parent family. Why had I felt so ashamed these last few days, so fearful the world might discover I hadn’t been enough for my husband? Because he was dead? Death was no excuse. He’d let me down. He’d betrayed me. Not enough for him? He’d never been enough for me! I wasn’t so much seeing the light as having a full-blown epiphany.

‘HOW BLOODY DARE HE!’ I roared, the force of my ejaculation jerking me back in my chair.

‘Atta-girl,’ breathed Peggy softly.

I seized my wine glass, blood storming through my veins and knocked the Chablis back in one. Then I slammed the empty glass down on the table. ‘Fill it up,’ I demanded.

‘Lordy, Poppy,’ Angie murmured in consternation, but Peggy was already on the case.

‘Atta-girl,’ she repeated admiringly as she filled it right to the top.