A Rural Affair

12

The next day, I went to see Dad. There wasn’t any real need to ring, he was always there, doing what he always did, and was always pleased to see me, but I gave him a call anyway before I pitched up. He was there. And he was pleased too.

I found him lunging a yearling in the field behind his cottage: a nervous young filly trotting round him in circles on the end of a long piece of rope. My father’s face was a picture of rapt concentration, the only time it looked like that, aside from when he was pricking out seedlings in what passed for his greenhouse. Yes, young things: fillies, seedlings, children. I’d been lucky. And only my gran had known that when Mum died. Most people had looked at one another in horror: Peter Mortimer, with a child of eleven! A little girl! But Gran had known about his nurturing heart and had no truck with people who’d told her she should step in and take over. She lived reasonably close by and had popped in regularly – Mum’s mum, this is – and if she’d ever been appalled at the chaos, the confusion, the endless saddles and bridles slung over chairs, the hastily opened tins of beans for tea, she never said. Might have quietly cleaned up, but, looking out of the window as she washed up, would have seen me perched in front of Dad in the saddle of some huge hunter, or with him in the barn filling hay nets or water buckets, which could easily descend into a water fight in the yard, both of us running in drenched. I was always pretty grubby and oddly dressed, but I was always with him: beside him in the rattling old horse lorry off to the sales – never a seat belt and probably never a tax disc either. Dad wasn’t dishonest, but if he was up against it money-wise, which he always was, he sailed fairly close to the wind. And Gran would have left us to it. Stayed for tea – more beans – and gone away knowing I’d probably be awake until Dad went to bed. Knowing too that I didn’t always make it to school if we’d been up all night with a mare foaling, that I drove around the farm alone in a horse box with hardly any brakes, but also that I appeared to be thriving. That I was getting a different sort of nourishment.

Calling it a farm was pitching it high, I thought with a small smile as I stood at the edge of the flat, windy field, watching the filly, who, nostrils flaring, all her instincts telling her this was not right and she shouldn’t be on the end of this rope, was nonetheless falling for the patience and kindness of the man on the other end. The field was one of six, all patchy and overgrazed, which together totalled thirty acres. A smallholding, really, with a cottage, a few tumbledown outhouses and a barn, which Dad had personally divided into stalls. All the stalls were crib-bitten and crisis-managed, held together with bits of plywood and binder twine, but they were scrupulously clean and the occupants looked happy enough. Glossy, healthy and relaxed, rather as, years ago, the young occupant of the cottage had been: thriving on benign neglect.

‘What d’you think?’ Dad called softly. He’d slackened the rope and was walking towards her, stealthily winding the rope in loops around his elbow as he went until he was beside her.

‘Lovely,’ I said quietly, walking across. I reached out a cautious hand, making sure she’d seen it first, to stroke a silky chestnut neck. ‘Is that the first time you’ve lunged her?’

‘Second. Might put a blanket on her tomorrow.’

I smiled. Received horsey wisdom suggested one might not do this until the age of three, but Dad had his own method of breaking horses, which involved treating them like adults from an early age. He’d adopted the same policy with me. He’d never turned a hair at teenage indulgences, never joined the clucking mothers who endlessly dissected their children’s love – or rather sex – lives; indeed he had no problem with my sexuality at all. What he did mind very much, though, was whose car I got into.

‘How long have you been driving?’ he’d quiz some surprised seventeen-year-old boy, probably Ben, as he came to pick me up.

‘Um, about three weeks, Mr Mortimer.’

‘Shift across and let Poppy drive, would you?’

‘OK,’ the boy would say, stunned. And he’d shift, because of course I’d been driving untaxed cars since I was twelve.

There again, as many of the mothers muttered, it was all very well. He was lucky with me. I hadn’t rebelled. I hadn’t had sex at thirteen, didn’t get pissed on a regular basis and I hated smoking. Now if Peter Mortimer had had our Chloe, for instance, they’d say, rolling their eyes … and Dad would smile, incline his head and agree. Privately, though, he’d wonder whether, if our Chloe had been around enough whisky and overflowing ashtrays in her formative years, had sipped Famous Grouse straight from the bottle and been sick, taken a puff of Capstan Full Strength and been sick again, and not had the rules and regulations about such things almost planted in her shoulder bag, she would have been in so much of a hurry. Would it have been such a thrill?

Jennie’s mother, Barbara, hadn’t been like that: quietly tutting and waiting in the wings for Peter and Poppy to come a cropper. Barbara, like Gran, had been discreetly helpful, taking me and Jennie to Boots and letting us fill a basket each: a bit of make-up, shampoo. ‘You’ll want some conditioner now, Poppy.’ Quietly popping in some STs – ‘For your drawer, by your bed,’ she’d explained. Things Dad really wouldn’t have a clue about.

So yes, we’d had a bit of a support network. But so subtle and considerate you’d hardly know it was there, like a cobweb. When some busybody in the village had suggested Social Services look at the state of our bathroom, which at that point not only had a whisky optic on the wall so Dad could top up his glass in the bath, but also some guppies of mine living in the tub, Barbara and Gran had pointed out, metaphorically rolling up their sleeves, that it was summer, and Peter and Poppy swam in the river every day, so what was the problem? The busybody backed off and the fish stayed a couple more weeks until Dad, half-cut, accidentally pulled the plug out. I remember being distraught and Dad couldn’t have been more sorry; but then, he was always sorry after he’d been drinking heavily. I make the distinction heavily, because Dad always drank, it was just that sometimes he drank a bit more than usual. If truth be told, he was probably always faintly sloshed after midday, but so amiable and jolly no one really minded. He never got to the abusive or slurring, embarrassing stage, because when he got too tight he simply fell asleep wherever he happened to be. He’d wake up flat on his back in the garden, or on a sofa, or beside one of his mares in a stable. Then he’d blink a bit, look faintly surprised at his surroundings and say, ‘Right. Must crack on.’

These days I doubt I’d have been allowed to stay with him, I thought, as we walked the filly back to her stable. Yet would Dad have parked me with Gran while he went cycling in Majorca? Or, OK, hunting in Ireland? No, he would not. If he went to Ireland I went too, whilst the lad down the road did the horses. The one and only time I didn’t accompany him was when someone tipped the school off that I was about to have my annual day’s holiday at the Newmarket sales. Dad, rebuked by my teacher, had sheepishly gone alone. He’d been very late picking me up. I remember waiting on the school steps, getting nervous. Then panicky. Dusk had gathered. No mobile, of course, and my mouth had lost all its moisture. I had him dead in a ditch. I started to cry, which turned into hysterics. By the time Dad arrived, I was shaking with sobs, and even though he was beside me, holding me, I couldn’t stop. Wave after wave broke over me, all to do with a terrible sense of loss. Because despite Dad being so brilliant, and despite the fantastic support of Gran and Barbara, I’d lost my mother. And I didn’t have siblings. It would be too convenient to hope I’d come out of that unscathed. I was left with an impenetrable fear of being alone.

The only time I felt like that again, that terrible rising panic, just the tip of it even, was when I put down the phone to Ben on the stairs in Clapham. When he told me he’d met someone in New York. I’d recognized the signs. Felt them bubbling within me, as, with a trembling hand, I’d put the brush back in my nail varnish. And it had scared the living daylights out of me. I’d acted fast.

Gran was long dead now, though, and the support network had dwindled with her. Now it was my father who was very much alone. Not that it bothered him. Left to his own devices he went his own sweet, shambolic way. I tried not to show my despair as we left the filly in her immaculate stable, crossed the yard and went through the peeling back door, which Dad had to shoulder-barge twice, and into the kitchen. Raddled blue lino curled on the floor, bare in patches, and the Formica surfaces – what you could see of them for empty tins, cartons of cigarettes and plastic milk bottles – were chipped and pitted. Plates on the side by the sink looked suspiciously clean but then Dad put them down to be licked by the dogs, picked them up later, and later still – I swear this is true though he pooh-poohs it – absent-mindedly put them away thinking they were clean. Even if things were washed, pans and oven trays were always black and crusty. All with what my dad – who, incidentally, barely had a day’s illness in his life – would call an acceptable level of filth.

Upstairs the place smelled of ripe bachelor; downstairs of stale smoke, dogs and saddle soap. The sitting room – I poked my nose in – was, as ever, a homage to the Racing Times and Sporting Life, pagodas of which tottered in every corner. I sighed and shut the door. It was probably no more chaotic than usual, but what had seemed normal when I was growing up looked abnormal the more time I spent away from it. I went to the loo, which I won’t tell you about, but then, to be fair, it got a lot of use. When Dad realized pulling the chain in the upstairs bathroom caused plaster to cascade into the sitting room, he’d done the only sensible thing and put it out of action. Three years ago. I came back and put the kettle on, quietly pleased I’d put my cleaning things in the back of the car. Dad reached for his whisky.

‘You look better, love,’ he remarked, eyeing me narrowly. ‘Much improved. I’m relieved.’ He moved Horse and Hound from a chair and sat down, rolling a cigarette on his knee. Mitch, his Jack Russell, jumped up on his other one, whilst Blanche the beagle scavenged under the table. Elvis crooned softly in the background.

‘I am better. Completely.’

Dad raised his eyebrows.

‘Well, no, OK,’ I conceded. ‘Maybe not. It’s not that simple, is it? I’m still a widow and I’ve still got fatherless children. But that terrible feeling of blundering around in a fog has gone.’ I sat down opposite him, still in my coat for warmth. ‘I didn’t think I’d ever see my way out of that and I panicked. Then later, I think I just gave up. Like people do in the snow eventually.’ I wrinkled my brow. ‘It’s weird, Dad, but when he died, I felt pretty abandoned, I can tell you, even though we didn’t have the happiest of marriages. Even though I didn’t really love him. I’d even got to the furious how-dare-he-leave-me stage; quite normal, according to my doctor. But when I heard about his bird’ – Dad knew all the sordid details now – ‘it was like a double whammy. Like he’d left me twice. There I was, thinking at least I was coping, plodding on, when all of a sudden I was back at the starting line again. Miles behind it, in fact.’

Dad stroked Mitch’s coat and waited. He’d always known how to listen.

‘And the odd thing was,’ I stared up at the ceiling for concentration, for clarity, ‘I somehow felt I’d let him down. That it was all my fault.’ I came back, shook my head. ‘Ridiculous, really.’

‘Guilt,’ he grunted quietly, making a long arm to the tap and adding some water to his whisky. ‘And if you felt like that with your tit of a husband, imagine how I felt that Boxing Day. When your mother was haring around trying to be all things to all people as usual.’

It was said lightly but it struck me Dad’s burden of guilt must have been tremendous. And he’d never shown it. Oh, we’d cried buckets together, great torrents of grief – Dad said he never trusted a man who didn’t cry – but he’d never saddled me with the more complicated, adult feelings of culpability. He was made of sterner stuff than me. Suddenly I felt rather ashamed of my recent little collapse in front of my own children.

‘I suppose the only good thing that’s come out of it,’ I went on, feeling my way, ‘is that recently I haven’t felt so bad about not grieving him enough initially. I sort of feel vindicated, if you know what I mean.’

‘I do,’ he said shortly.

We were silent a moment.

‘Anyway,’ I swept on, taking a great gulp of my coffee which was cold. ‘I’m not here to dwell on that. The thing is, he left me some money.’

‘Did he?’ Dad said distractedly, reaching down to take something from the beagle’s mouth. ‘Well, that’s something. What have you got, you little minx?’ This, not a reference to my financial gain, his commercial acumen being about as acute as mine, but to Blanche the beagle.

‘What has she got?’ I peered as he removed something cream and pearly.

‘My false teeth. The little tyke gets them from by my bed. Oh, it’s OK,’ he said, seeing my face, ‘they’re my spare ones.’ He got up and rinsed them under the tap.

‘Well, that’s a relief. Wouldn’t want those sported on the cocktail-party circuit, would we? That wouldn’t impress the sexy widows.’ Dad and I had an ongoing joke that one day he might meet one of those.

He snorted with derision. ‘Chance would be a fine thing.’

I watched his back at the sink. ‘D’you want to know how much?’ I asked.

‘How much what?’

‘Money.’

‘Oh, all right. Go on, then.’

I did go on, and even my father, impervious to such things, dropped his teeth in the sink. He turned.

‘Good grief.’

‘I know.’

‘That’s a lot of money, Pops.’

‘I know.’

‘What are you going to do with it?’

‘Well, give some to you, for a start.’

He stared at me. Then scoffed. ‘Bugger off. I don’t want your money.’

‘To do the house up, Dad. Fix the plumbing, that type of thing. Not holidays in Mauritius or anything. I’ve got masses.’

He fixed me with a clear blue eye. The sternest Dad ever got. ‘I don’t want the money, love. Not yours. Certainly not Phil’s. I won’t take a penny. Put it in the bank. For a rainy day.’ He turned, retrieved his dentures, rinsed them again and set them on the draining board.

‘Perhaps I should offer some to Marjorie and Cecilia?’

‘Would they offer you some? If it was the other way round?’

‘No. But that’s not really the point, is it?’

‘No, it’s not.’ He shrugged. ‘Up to you, love. Entirely up to you.’ My father never told me what to do. Instead he bent and rummaged in what passed for a larder: an old pine cupboard beside the sink. ‘Now. Lunch. There’s the Full Monty but, disappointingly, no one takes their clothes off. It’s a complete bacon, egg, sausage and beans affair in a can. A new one on me. What d’you think?’

He turned and brandished it, complete with full fry-up illustration, and I knew that was the end of it. The conversation. Knew, before I came, that Dad would no more take money from me than go to the dry cleaner’s. But it had been worth a try.

I sighed. ‘Go on, then,’ I said, making room on the table amongst a pile of old newspapers. ‘Let’s silt up our arteries together.’

Worth a try? Not really, I thought as I drove home later, full of beans and bacon and something indeterminable that must have been mushroom but, as Dad said, could easily have been toenail. Not worth it, because I knew Dad had been offended I’d even suggested it. He chose to live like that. He was a free spirit in the very real sense of the expression. But I’d been toeing some conventional line which dictated I make the offer to my ramshackle father; adhering to conformist nonsense that Dad never adhered to, and always turned and regarded me with surprise when I did. I squirmed behind the wheel. I wished too that I’d taken the children. Dad had been surprised not to see them. But I’d somehow imagined I’d wanted a grown-up financial conversation, complete with spreadsheets and charts and what have you, without two small children running around. Instead the conversation had taken all of two minutes and had offended my father, who’d much rather have seen his grandchildren.

I parked and smiled ruefully as I went up Jennie’s path to collect my offspring. Interesting. As ever, a visit to my father had made me feel better and worse, both at the same time. Just as the superficial chaos was thrown into starker relief when I’d been away a while, so too was his refreshing alternative outlook. To sparkling effect. I sighed. I should see more of him.

Jennie was clearly bursting with some sort of news as she opened the front door. She didn’t allow me to push on through as usual and was perhaps even lying in wait.

‘Guess what?’ she breathed with barely concealed excitement. She faced me in the hall, eyes glittering.

‘What?’

‘Word of the book club has spread to Potters Wood. The Americans want to join.’

I’d hardly even made it across the threshold. Hardly got my foot in the door. But I have to say, her delight was instantly matched by mine, as she knew it would be.

‘Oh!’ I couldn’t speak for a second. Stared at her bright eyes. Then cautiously: ‘You’re kidding.’

‘No, I am not! They absolutely want to join our gang!’ She shut the door behind me with a bang. ‘How about that?’

The Americans were a thrillingly exotic couple who lived in Chester Square, Belgravia, during the week and rented a cottage – more than a cottage, actually, a pretty big house – just outside the village at weekends. He was a film producer and she, a beautiful raven-haired mother of two. The only time Jennie and I had come across them was when Leila went missing and I went to help find her. Having asked everyone in the village, in desperation we’d gone to Potters Wood, a pretty white house with tall chimneys at the end of a no-through lane. We knew it was owned by the National Trust but were unaware who was renting it. The most divine-looking man, tall, broad, bronzed and naked to his jeans had opened the door. His hair was brown and wavy, his lips full and he had a smile which split his face. He’d shaken our hands and introduced himself in an American accent as Chad Armitage. Then he’d offered us proper coffee and listened to our stammering story. Instantly he’d suggested he help look for Leila, at which point his beautiful dishevelled wife had appeared down the stairs, dressed only in a silk dressing gown, at eleven o’clock in the morning.

‘Oh, God. Shall we help look? Shall I get the kids?’ She swiftly tied her robe and reached for her mobile, looking concerned.

‘No, no, she’ll turn up,’ we said hastily, drinking in everything. The tumbled, post-coital look of this golden couple so late in the morning. The fabulous modern art on the walls. The children out blackberrying with the nanny, apparently. The way he called her Honey and looked at her with true love. We probably had our mouths open, and certainly wouldn’t presume to have them look for scruffy old Leila, who was probably shagging some terrible mongrel. Eventually we’d taken our leave, regretfully; thanking them as they assured us they’d call if they saw her.

Before we left, I said shyly, ‘It’s a lovely place you’ve got here.’ It was. The garden was brimming with wild flowers and it was all slightly overgrown, as if they were too busy in bed to prune the roses.

She, Hope, as we now knew she was called, linked arms with Chad on the doorstep and smiled up into his eyes. Then, in a husky voice, she said, ‘It’s paradise.’

Jennie and I crept away enthralled. I just knew I’d have said, ‘It’s heaven’, and thought how much better her version sounded. How it had truly conjured up the Garden of Eden, and how the pair of them, standing on the threshold like that, had looked like Adam and Eve. Jennie had been equally overawed and we hadn’t spoken for a good few minutes.

Later that week I’d met Jennie coming up the no-through road to Potters Wood with Leila on a lead. I’d been going down it with Archie. We’d both stopped, blushed.

‘It’s a footpath,’ we both blurted in unison. Which it was, but not one we’d ever used before.

It was obvious what attracted us. Their perfect lives. Moneyed, cultured and happy, with golden children, who we later spotted around the village with the nanny, whilst Chad and Hope no doubt tried position number forty-six beneath a Chagall. Jennie and I, having imperfect lives, were fascinated; although, interestingly, we never really voiced this to each other. Never let on. This opportunity, however, was too good to pass up.

‘Where did you see them? What did you say?’ I demanded, still in her hallway.

‘In the lane, in their huge Land Cruiser. Just Hope. She slowed down, stopped and said she’d heard about the book club and would we mind, only it was just what she and Chad were looking for, and had hoped to find here, but hadn’t.’

‘Both of them? They both want to join?’

Clemmie and Archie had now found my legs and were clamouring for attention. Sometimes I did wish my children could go blackberrying with a nanny. I hoisted Archie onto my hip.

‘Yes, because he’s on gardening leave, apparently. In between films, so slightly at a loose end.’

The idea of either part of that glamorous double act being at a loose end gave us pause for thought and almost threatened to shatter an illusion.

‘Well, relatively speaking,’ Jennie said quickly. ‘I’m sure he’s got something in the pipeline. Reading scripts, et cetera.’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ I agreed quickly. They certainly weren’t allowed to kick their heels.

‘So you said yes?’

‘I said yes, and they’re coming on Tuesday. Don’t you think Simon will be rather impressed?’ She couldn’t resist adding.

Ah. That little agenda. Her own private subplot. And yes, he would. Chad and Hope were quite a feather in anyone’s cap. Once they’d been outed as Exciting Newcomers everyone had tried to nab them. Their doorbell at Potters Wood had never stopped ringing. Hope had been asked to join every bell-ringing, tapestry-making group in the village, by everyone who had a little fiefdom to push. Sylvia had popped round to see if she’d like to help arrange the church flowers.

‘Oh, I’m hopeless at that kind of thing,’ Hope had purred at the door. ‘I just pick them and cram them in a jar any old how, I’m afraid.’ She’d indicated the cow parsley tumbling sexily from a jug on the table behind her.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Sylvia had warbled. ‘I’m a plonker too!’

No wonder Hope had looked startled.

Even Simon had tried, with the local Conservative Association, and been politely – and sensibly – declined. Angie had popped round to ask if Chad would sit on the parish council, something, as chairman, she was allowed to ask, but everyone knew you had to schmooze for years to achieve. No one had reprimanded her, though. No one objected.

‘What did he say?’ we all asked Angie avidly, about six of us in the village hall at the fete flower-arranging group, when she’d bustled in late to report.

‘Hope answered the door and said he wasn’t there. She said he’d be thrilled to be asked, though, and she knew he’d be really sorry to turn it down, but he was just too tied up right now. She was still in her dressing gown, hair all mussed.’

‘Ivory silk?’ breathed Jennie.

‘Yes, and then his voice drifted downstairs, all American and husky. “What are you doing, Honey?” And she went all pink and stammered, “Oh, I-I guess he is here, after all.” ’

We all paused wistfully in our peony-trimming.

‘Sex all day,’ pronounced Jennie at length. ‘Dreamy.’

‘And maybe he really was tied up?’ mused Peggy, going back to her zinnias.

Back in Jennie’s hall, though, facing my friend now, a thought occurred. ‘But what will we say to everyone else? You know, Frank, Odd Bob, Dickie Frowbisher and everyone else who wants to join?’

‘We’ll tell them to get stuffed,’ Jennie said firmly. She squared her shoulders. ‘This is an exclusive club, Poppy, not a free-for-all. We allowed Saintly Sue to join to show willing, and now Hope and Chad, but that’s our limit. We won’t get in anyone’s sitting room otherwise, for heaven’s sake.’

I nodded in agreement as I left with the children, but knew this was thin. Angie had a huge drawing room. And quite a few noses would be out of joint. Ours was a small village. Oh, to hell with them, I thought, as I let myself in. Jennie was right. We had to be just a little bit selfish occasionally. And the Americans would certainly inject some glamour.

As I went into the kitchen, the answering machine was flashing. I pressed it absently as I lowered Archie from my hip, watching him toddle off to his playpen, clamouring to get in. It was pretty much his favourite place these days. Wasn’t it supposed to be a prison? Would a child psychologist tell me he felt safe in there, or something heart-stopping? As I lifted him inside, a deep male voice politely asked me to make another appointment, whenever it suited. Nothing drastic, but something had cropped up and he wondered if I could pop in and talk about it. Sam, the solicitor.

Well, obviously it had been a while since a deep male voice had asked me to do anything, politely or otherwise, surrounded as I was by women and children. But had there been any need to ring back immediately? Before I’d even taken Clemmie’s coat off? I got through to Janice, who made me an appointment. When I got off the phone, I moved around the house feeling lighter, brighter somehow. More energized. I went to the window to smile out at the day. Yes, that’ll be the Americans, I thought. That’s what’s put a skip in my step. The irrational desire to play the message again – which I did, three times – was only to make sure I’d got it straight. About it being nothing drastic. And nothing to worry about. That was all. I turned up the radio as I passed and sang along with Westlife, then I swept Clemmie into my arms to twirl about the room with me. She threw her head back and laughed with delight.