A Rural Affair

2

He hadn’t always been like that, of course. Phil. Boring, meticulous, health-conscious, dedicated to his own physical well-being – the supreme vanity, in my book. Hadn’t always wanted a blood-pressure kit for Christmas or a treadmill for his birthday, hadn’t always been so inward-looking. Once upon a time he’d been quite – I was going to say fun, but I’ll qualify that with normal. He’d always been around, part of the crowd I’d hung out with in London when I lived in Clapham, but on the edges, the periphery. Somebody’s brother had known him at university, not Jennie’s because her brother went around with quite a fast lot, but it could have been Tess’s brother at Durham. Anyway, there he was, at parties, in pubs with us, probably not on the raucous beery table I was on, but next door with others I vaguely knew but not well. A nice guy. Nice Phil, if you asked. Oh, yeah, Ben would say, Phil’s a nice guy. Don’t know him that well.

Ben was my boyfriend. Had been for years. Ridiculously, on and off since we were fifteen. In fact it was a bit of a joke. We’d met at school, gone out for a year, split up for a year, got together in the sixth form, got a bit more serious, split up for our gap years, and ended up going to the same university together. We hadn’t intended to, but I had to go through clearing because I hadn’t got my grades and the only place I could read history was at York, where Ben was. I’d worried slightly that he might think I was following him up there, but he was very cool, totally relaxed, and after the first year we were back together again, and then for the next three. There were the inevitable jokes about us being a little married couple and joined at the hip, and girlfriends asked me if I’d ever been out with anyone else, but we shrugged it off. Then in London we were still together; at parties, concerts, suppers, always Ben and Poppy, Poppy and Ben.

It wasn’t that unusual. It was cosy too. But when Jennie came back to the flat we shared in Lavender Hill one evening, pounding up three flights of stairs, coat flying, cheeks flaming, like the cat who’d got the cream, crying, ‘I’ve met him! I’ve met the man I’m going to marry! He’s called Dan and he’s a wine trader and he’s a bit older than me and I love him, I love him – and oh, my God, I’ve never felt like this before. Never!’ – when I looked down into her shiny eyes as she flopped on the sofa, I wondered if I ever had. Felt that sheer, unadulterated, in-loveness. That euphoria. And when she’d gone to meet Dan for dinner in Chelsea – Ben and I could only afford the pub – still wrapped up in her happiness, I’d felt a bit flat. A bit jealous. Jennie hadn’t had a boyfriend for a couple of years, was always bemoaning the fact, but now it seemed she’d not only landed on her feet, but leaped ahead of me; sprung up the ladder, trumping me with not just a boy next door of our own age, but a proper romantic hero, who sent flowers to her office, took her on proper dates to restaurants, was older, sophisticated, and what’s more, adored her.

And then Ben had come round complaining he’d had a shitty day, kicking his shoes off like we were married, slumping down in front of the television, while I made us spag bol in the kitchen and while Jennie sat in Tante Claire, toying with artichokes and blushing prettily. And when I brought supper in to eat on our laps in front of Friends, Ben had his feet up on the sofa, was yawning widely and scratching his balls, and for some reason I flipped; I snapped at him about not being a bloody waitress. Then a few weeks later, I split up with him.

A guy in my office, in my PR agency, had been flirting with me for months. An attractive guy called Andy: slightly rough around the edges, not strictly my type, but rather thrilling, very good-looking. Hot. Andy and I had a fling. A very exciting one in his flat in Docklands. He was only the second man I’d ever been to bed with, and he whisked me off to nightclubs – admittedly more Brixton Sound than Annabel’s – and we had a laugh. We drank a great deal, smoked in Ronnie Scott’s and I thought I was living. I think I knew his family were a bit shady but I never met them. And then one night, over dinner, he admired the jewellery I was wearing; it was quite good because it had been Mum’s. A heavy gold chain and a bangle she’d always worn. And he asked me why I didn’t accidentally lose them and claim on the insurance? Because it had never occurred to me. But after that – and it took some time for the penny to drop – one or two other things did. Like the way Andy gambled a lot and spent nearly every Sunday night playing poker. And a few weeks later we argued about something, and he pushed me. Not hard, but I fell against the wall. It was enough: we were history.

When I turned around, Ben had gone. To America, it transpired. New York, where his investment bank had transferred him; promotion. So I contacted him. Asked when he was coming back, if we could meet, have lunch. I wasn’t unduly worried. In fact I was so casual I think I was even painting my toenails on the stairs in Clapham at the time, phone tucked under my chin. And he’d said not for a bit, not for a good six months, and anyway, he’d met someone in New York. Caroline. An American girl, who worked with him. Same age, twenty-four. A banker. They were going to get married.

Hard to describe the body blow felt at the time. The breathlessness. The pain. Ben, who’d always been there. Funny, clever, beautiful, blond Ben, who of course would be snapped up in New York – would be snapped up in London, but with the accent, the whole Brit bit, would go down a storm over there – but who loved me. Had always been there for me. Whilst I’d been totally complacent about him. My Ben.

Jennie had endured much grief and wailing. Much smoking of too many cigarettes, much talk of shelf life, and, eventually, the months having ticked by, much furtive hiding of wedding plans from me after she admitted she was engaged.

She’d meet me after work, samples of shot-silk organza hidden in her handbag, CDs of suitable music for bridal entrances secreted about her person. She’d counsel and sympathize and suggest suitable replacements for Ben, but all were unacceptable. All were second-bests. Will Thompson was nice enough, I supposed, when she told me he fancied me, but he didn’t have Ben’s charm, his easy manner, and Harry Eastgate was fun too, but, oh I don’t know, Jennie, he worked so hard, was very driven.

‘What about anyone at work?’

‘What, like Andy?’ I said gloomily, sinking into my cider without bothering to pick it up.

When Jennie got married it was fine, because I knew she would, to Dan, who turned out to be everything she described and was madly in love with her, but then Tess, a sweet girl on the fringe of our group, got engaged, and the following year Daisy, a really good mate, and then Will Thompson and then Harry Eastgate. Which pretty much just left me. And I can’t tell you how panicky I felt. I told myself to relax, but I hyperventilated. I went to spas with girls I knew quite well, but not like Jennie and Daisy, and lay around wrapped in seaweed. I went to the Canaries to get an early tan for the summer. I even went to see Madame Sheriza – not a fortune-teller, you understand, but a proper medium, at a reputable institute of psycho-something in South Ken, and she told me I’d meet someone through my sister, except I didn’t have a sister. Sorry, I meant your brother. Don’t have one of those either. And all the while my eyes roved around in a crazy fashion at parties, and one day I panic-bought. Those crazy eyes lit on Phil. Phil. On the periphery of society, tall, pleasant-looking, fair-haired, slim – nice Phil, surely?

‘Oh, lovely Phil,’ Tess assured me eagerly. A good friend of her brother’s. Really lovely Phil.

‘Quite nice Phil,’ Jennie said, more hesitantly. A bit sort of … bland, maybe? And don’t forget, Tess’s brother read sociology.

But I wasn’t listening. Off I went on dates with him and he was delightful. He hadn’t had a girlfriend for years and feeling, I think, he was punching above his weight, was pulling out all the stops: taking me to country-house retreats, weekends in the Cotswolds, even mini-breaks in Paris.

‘Phil’s great!’ I’d squeak, flying round to Jennie and Dan’s in Twickenham, where she’d be reading to her stepdaughter, Frankie, or getting the supper amid packing cases, poised to move to the country. ‘And he’s mad about me, and yesterday I got roses at work!’

‘Good. And you’re mad about him?’ She poured me a drink and we perched on a box.

‘Of course.’

‘And does he make you laugh?’

‘Oh – laugh. Last night we went to see Airport and we couldn’t stop laughing!’

‘I think you’ll find that was Gene Wilder making you laugh, but good, Poppy. I’m pleased. Shit. Hang on.’

She’d moved like lightning, legging it up the stairs to meet Frankie, aged four, who’d appeared damp and tearful at the top, still wetting her bed at night.

I finished my drink and left her to it; went home hugging my happiness. My settled-ness. My all-organized-ness. And if, for a moment, I had any doubts, they were only really tiny ones, like the way he spoke to waiters. The way he’d said to that young girl in the bistro: ‘I’d like my salad dressing without vinegar. What would I like my salad dressing without?’

She’d glanced at him, surprised. ‘Vinegar.’

‘That’s it.’ He’d smiled thinly. And she’d smiled too, relieved.

‘I have to do that,’ he’d confided quietly to me when she’d gone. ‘Otherwise they forget, and I can’t abide salad with vinegar.’

Of course not.

A few months later Phil proposed, and things got even better. We went around Peter Jones with our wedding list and discovered, to our delight, that we had exactly the same taste. We inclined towards the red Le Creuset rather than the blue, the retro fifties toaster, the antique weighing scales, eschewed a dinner service in favour of hand-painted Portuguese plates, more conducive to cosy kitchen suppers which we infinitely preferred to dinner parties, decisively ticking our lists attached to clipboards. Another box ticked. A big one, we felt as we gazed at one another under the bright lights of China and Glass.

We also both agreed we wanted to get out of London.

‘Too frenetic,’ Phil said, frowning thoughtfully, ‘and too …’

‘Superficial,’ I continued and he smiled. Heavens, we were finishing each other’s sentences now.

He favoured Kent, where his mother lived, but I wanted to be near Dad, so we looked at villages in that direction, within an hour’s commute of town. Eventually we decided, somewhat sheepishly, that Jennie and Dan really had done their homework. That it was hard to better theirs. Sleepy, idyllic, with two pubs and a duck pond, but a functioning village too, with a shop and a school.

‘But do you mind?’ I asked her anxiously, when a house at the other end of the village had come up for sale.

‘Mind?’ Jennie shrieked down the phone. ‘Of course I don’t mind, I’d love it!’

She had made one friend, she told me, a lovely girl called Angie, frightfully glam and rich and great fun, but apart from that was bereft of kindred spirits, and couldn’t think of anything nicer than having her best friend down the road. For moral support if nothing else, she said grimly, which she needed at the moment, what with dealing with daily tantrums from Frankie, and Dan’s increasing inability to pass a second-hand car showroom without buying a banger – they were a four-car family at present – which he drove at speed down the country lanes, parp parping like Toad. Not to mention the dawning realization that she appeared to be pregnant.

Unfortunately the house at the other end of the village fell through, but then she rang me to say there was one for sale next door.

‘Bit close?’ I said doubtfully. ‘I mean, for you, not me. I don’t want to – you know, cramp your style?’

‘Trust me, I don’t have a style. Unless you count heartburn that makes me belch mid-sentence, or piles that have driven me to adopt the post-natal rubber ring two months prematurely. Please come, Poppy, before I change the e in antenatal to a vowel I regret.’

I shot down to look at the house: a dear little whitewashed cottage, low-slung, as if a giant had sat on the roof, with bulging walls, a brace of bay windows downstairs – one on either side of the green front door – two more poking out under eaves, a strip of garden that gave onto farmland at the back and the forest beyond. It was attached to Jennie’s similar cottage on one side, and next to a sweet terraced row on the other. Inside was a mess: low, poky rooms and an outdated kitchen and bathroom, but Phil and I decided we could knock through here, throw an RSJ up there, just about have room for an Aga over there. ‘And lay a stone hallway here,’ he said, indicating six square feet just inside the front door.

‘Yes!’ I yelped, thinking how uncanny it was that I’d been thinking the same. ‘Limestone or slate?’ I asked, hoping for the latter.

‘Slate, I think,’ he said thoughtfully, and I almost purred.

We moved in, already engaged, and, once the structural work had been done, got to work. We stripped the walls together, sanded doors, rubbed down floorboards, re-enamelled baths, working every weekend, evenings too, radio blaring so not much chat, whilst Dan and Jennie, who’d got a team of decorators in to do theirs, popped round to marvel. Jamie was in Jennie’s arms now and Frankie was still sucking her hair and scowling. Well, of course she was, Jennie said staunchly; her mother might have drunk too much and run off with an Argentinian polo player, but she was still her mother, for crying out loud. She missed her.

So Phil and I scrubbed and varnished and stippled and dragged, and even found a window of opportunity one Saturday to get married, arranged with military precision by Phil, both of us agreeing on the music, the number of people, the flowers; as I say, the only fly in the ointment was the tandem to go away on, the surprise googly, as it were. Another year of tireless house restoration followed before we sat back on our weary heels and looked at each other, delighted. With the house, at least. But I do remember, as I regarded Phil that day, spry and fair, putty scraper in hand, slightly narrow lips which didn’t smile that often, remember looking at him as if I hadn’t seen him for some time, had seen only Designers Guild samples, Farrow and Ball paint charts, and it being … quite a shock. As if I’d taken a year-long nap. Was this my husband? This man, so free of jokes and wit and laughter, but full of plans for the garden? This man who had ideas for opening up the inglenook fireplace, growing roses round an arbour – both romantic notions, I felt – but who made love so quickly and quietly, almost … stealthily? Who was disinclined to linger in bed afterwards but wanted to get those tulip bulbs in, wanted to get on?

Joyless was a word horrifyingly close to my lips. And as I sat on my heels and looked at him and he asked if I’d ordered the bedroom carpet, and I replied I hadn’t yet, he held my eye. ‘That’s the second time I’ve had to ask you, Poppy,’ he said slowly. I went a bit cold.

‘There’s a sample in the kitchen drawer,’ he went on. ‘In the file marked Floor Coverings.’

‘Right.’

‘On the back you’ll find the John Lewis number,’ he added patiently, when I didn’t move. ‘Do it now, please.’

I got slowly to my feet. Moved kitchen-wards.

In retrospect that should have been my moment. Before children. My moment to take a deep breath and think: what have I done? Marrying this man who knew his way around B&Q blindfold but not the human heart? Who could spot a speck of damp at twenty paces but not a faint tremble of misgiving from his new wife? A small cry for help? But that way horror lay. And anyway, I told myself, getting the carpet sample from the file, one of seven files, all neatly labelled in Phil’s precise hand, we were so good together. Everybody said so. Such a good team. I ordered the carpet and then went quickly to boil the kettle with the curly spout, the one we both liked and had bought in a junk shop. I made us some tea.

If this all seems a trifle submissive for a hitherto sparky girl, a typical product of the twenty-first century and not the nineteenth, let me say something about confidence. Mine had taken a battering: first on losing Ben, and then, it seemed to me, losing everyone else. So many happily married. And I’d experienced quite a bit of loss in my life; didn’t want to experience any more. Which brings me to family. I didn’t have the backing of a big happy one to wade in and give advice, sit around kitchen tables cradling mugs of tea before brandishing motherly or sisterly handbags if needs be. I had Dad. Who was lovely, but – well, a dad. And I’d never missed Mum so much. Never wished so much that I could talk to her, that she hadn’t died. Which perhaps explains why I’d flown to my best friend’s side. I’m not making excuses here – of course I should have been more punchy, answered back, told him to order the bloody carpet himself. I’m just outlining mitigating circumstances. I’d only been married a short while; I wanted to keep the peace. Wanted us to be happy. Didn’t want to throw saucepans at this stage.

And after all, what would I do without Phil? Phil, who pitted his wits against the entire building industry, plumbers who plumbed in radiators upside down, tilers who used the wrong grouting, the distressed-pine kitchen fitter, who disappeared mid job, with four out of seven cupboards unfitted, and who, when we rang, leaving messages on his answerphone, seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Phil eventually tracked him down. His wife, it transpired, had had a miscarriage. But Phil had him back working in an instant, albeit looking as distressed as his cupboards, I thought, as I took him a cup of tea.

‘It’s the second baby they’ve lost in two years,’ I told Phil as I joined him in the garden, where he was tying up runner beans.

‘So I gather. But life goes on.’

I shot him a look. ‘I hope you didn’t tell him that.’

‘Why?’

‘Wouldn’t be terribly tactful.’

He shrugged. ‘Maybe not, but it does.’

We continued to do the beans in silence.

Teamwork, that was the key. And of course it would be an even stronger team when we were three. When we had a baby. Even I could spot the sink-estate mentality inherent in that notion, but it disappeared the moment I discovered conceiving wasn’t that easy; when nothing happened for a year or two, when we had something else to pit our wits against, another cause to campaign for, besides the house.

Phil read books, went on the Internet, and declared that the first thing to do was to identify the culprit.

‘The culprit?’

‘Yes. See whose fault it is.’

‘Bit soon, isn’t it?’ I said doubtfully. ‘Shouldn’t we – you know – try for a bit longer first?’

‘What, and waste more time?’

‘Might be fun. I read somewhere that if you do it every night for a month you stand more chance of hitting the egg. Blanket bombing.’

I smiled flirtatiously, but he’d already turned back to the computer. And within a twinkling, had made appointments for us both in Harley Street. Me to have my tubes blown, him to fill a test tube, assisted by a girly magazine. This fascinated me. Not that a smart Harley Street joint provided such a thing, but the idea of Phil looking at one. The results came back and we were both declared innocent, which I could tell surprised Phil.

‘Why, did you think you were firing blanks?’

‘Oh, no, I knew I’d be OK.’

After that our marriage roared into action, with Phil at the helm, morphing swiftly from house restorer to infertility doctor. He knew the temperature of my body to within a whisker, knew when my ovaries were ripe and rumbling portentously, could pinpoint to the hour when conditions were ideal for copulation. He knew when I was hot, in the strictest, David Attenborough sense of the word. There was to be no blanket bombing, but once a month he’d ring me at work to tell me to hustle home sharpish and get my kit off, and if that sounds sexy, it wasn’t. Not when your husband is grimly plunging his testicles into freezing-cold water beforehand without cracking a joke – I tried one, about cold fish, and it didn’t go down very well – and not when I was instructed to lie doggo for at least an hour afterwards, the only laugh coming when I suggested he lie with me. Personally I wondered if the tight Lycra cycling suit he squeezed back into afterwards and wore ninety per cent of the time was helping matters, but since I was rapidly losing interest in the whole project, I decided not to mention it.

Why was I losing interest? Why was I finally succumbing to what can only be described as torpor as I rumbled home every night on the train from the West End to what should have been my enviable country love nest? Because everyone has their saturation point. And happy as I wanted us to be, little by little, drip by drip, as the months, then the years ticked by, I was coming to the mind-numbing conclusion that I’d made the biggest mistake of my life.

My epiphany came as I was standing at the kitchen window one Thursday morning, on one of my precious days off from work, looking at the list of ‘Things to Do’ he’d left me, the last of which read: Have your hair cut.

I reached for the phone to tell Jennie I needed a coffee, pronto, and also to tell her I was leaving him. Her answering machine was on. I knew she was in, though, because I’d seen her in the garden a few moments earlier. I was about to go round and tell her, when I stopped off in the downstairs loo, and saw the pregnancy test he’d left me. It was open, with a note propped on one of the sticks.

Poppy – pee on this today. You’re day 14.

I sighed but peed on it nevertheless, thinking it was the last thing I would ever do for him. Then I watched the blue line darken, and realized I was pregnant.

As I slowly went back into the kitchen, the telephone rang.

‘Poppy? Did you ring?’

‘Hm? Oh. Yes, hi, Jennie.’

‘You OK? You sound a bit down.’

‘No, no, I’m fine.’

‘D’you want to come round for a quick coffee? I’ve got literally twenty minutes before I pick Jamie up from school.’

‘Er, no. Better not. I’ve got the ironing to finish.’

‘This afternoon? Cup of tea?’

‘Actually, Jennie, I think I’m going to have my hair cut.’