The Great Village Show (18 page)

‘Yes, fine. And thank you,’ she says solemnly, lifting her mug of tea, ‘for everything this afternoon … I’m so sorry for crying on you like that. And for being so bad tempered and aggressive with Millie, I feel so asham—’

‘Hey, please … Jessie, it’s fine. Like I said earlier, no need to apologise. We all have our limits, we all snap sometimes. You’re only human, and children can be extremely challenging at times. Trust me, I know, I see it every day – parents at the end of their tether, telling their darlings to “behave or else …” through gritted teeth, smiles firmly in place, hoping nobody notices how exasperated they really are. And you must be exhausted – moving house is a major life event,’ I say diplomatically, while thinking her husband, the charming Mr Cavendish, clearly isn’t very charming at all. No, in fact, he’s an utter shit. He’s responsible for the burn mark, it turns out. Yes, Millie told me what she saw when Jessie was in the bathroom. She said, ‘Daddy got cross because his shirt was creased up; he tried to help Mummy, but when he took the iron from her it dropped on Mummy’s arm. Because she’s so clumsy, Daddy told me that.’ Poor Millie, she seems to have the weight of the world on her little shoulders, her face was very earnest, her little brow furrowed in concern as she asked me if this is the reason why Mummy cries all the time. ‘Even at night, when she’s supposed to be asleep.’ Millie said she’s heard her and is worried about it.

I think I managed to hide the feelings of anger and shock from my face. And now I need to work out what I should do with this information, because as a teacher I have a duty of care to the children. They attend the nursery that’s attached to my school, and if they’re witnessing domestic violence, which might explain their withdrawn behaviour, then I can’t pretend that I don’t know … I should tell Becky, she’s the designated person for safeguarding the nursery children. Jessie may not thank me if she thinks I’m interfering, but I trust Becky implicitly – she’ll know what to do.

‘Strawberry or vanilla?’ I ask the children, before turning to Jessie. ‘Would you like one too?’ And she hesitates before replying, ‘Um, yes please …’ and she smiles, albeit a weak, watery one, but it’s a start.

‘Good. So hands up who wants vanilla …’ I lift myself out of the deckchair, and none of the children moves. ‘Strawberry?’ I laugh, figuring it important to lighten things up a bit for them. They don’t appear to have had much fun for a while, and Becky has told me, in confidence of course, that the triplets also seem very withdrawn when they come for their sessions with her at the nursery. Three spindly short arms fly up. ‘With sauce and sprinkles?’ and the arms reach up even higher, accompanied by three very wide grins and bobbing bodies, bouncing up and down in excitement. ‘Perfect.’ I smile too, thinking how nice it is to see them behaving like ordinary, happy, bubbly children for a change. ‘Shan’t be a minute then.’ And the children run off down to the long grass, laughing and whooping as they go.

Jessie smiles properly for the first time this afternoon, grinning proudly as she watches the triplets tumbling around happily. Earlier, when the children were at the end of the garden and out of earshot, Jessie told me how unhappy she is in her marriage, how controlling Sebastian is, how she allowed herself to be swept away by him at first, only to feel lost and isolated later when she found out about his affairs … but she couldn’t elaborate further as just then Millie came rushing up to show her a nice hairy caterpillar she’d found.

Ten minutes later, I emerge from the house with a tray holding five bricks of strawberry ice cream, each wedged between two wafers and slathered in raspberry sauce and rainbow sprinkles. I’ve added a couple of glasses of my fizzy elderflower wine for good measure – we might as well go the whole hog. Talking of elderflower wine, Lawrence called by last night to pass on a message from Dan – can he spend the day with me tomorrow to go through my wine cellar? He’s very keen for us to put together an ‘eclectically appealing selection of beverages’ for show day, apparently, which should be interesting. I’m going to try not to revert to my scary teacher persona, seeing as the village does actually need his help – so as long as he behaves himself, then everything should be fine. I’m sure I can put up with Dan Wright for one day …

The children come running and, after I’ve dished out the ice creams and set them up with a length of kitchen roll each to mop their fingers and faces, they go and sit contentedly back on the blanket with Blue.

‘Here you go,’ I say to Jessie, offering her the tray. She takes an ice cream and tears off a piece of kitchen roll. ‘And after that, there’s a glass of chilled elderflower wine for you.’

‘Not for me, thanks. I don’t feel like drinking. But the ice cream is lovely.’ Jessie licks her lips after running a finger down the side of the ice-cream slab. ‘I haven’t had one of these for years.’ She pauses to ponder. ‘I must have been a kid, last time, back home …’ she nods. ‘Yes, Dad used to make them. He’d buy a box of these wafers in our village shop. They were happy times.’ Jessie’s face softens.

‘Ahh! Well, guess where these came from? Yep, the village store,’ I laugh, tapping the side of my wafer, remembering last time Jack was home – he was getting over the end of freshers’ flu and asked for an ice-cream sandwich – said it was the only possible thing to make him feel better … He was exactly the same as a little boy. ‘Heaven knows how long the wafers have been on the shelf, I’m not sure Tommy is very particular when it comes to checking the stock.’ I shake my head and take a bite of the deliciously creamy treat.

‘Well, it tastes fine to me,’ Jessie says, slipping her ballet pumps off and wiggling her toes in the warm grass. ‘Mind you, the wafer is a little chewy come to think of it.’ And we both giggle.

We finish eating, and I hand Jessie some more kitchen roll. She has a blob of raspberry sauce on her floaty white long-sleeved T-shirt.

‘Thanks,’ she says, dabbing the sauce. ‘I’m so clumsy …’ She smiles wryly and a short silence follows.

‘Clumsy? Are you really?’ I ask her gently. And Jessie looks at me before lowering her eyes. We both know what I’m referring to.

‘No, I’m not,’ she eventually says, in a quiet voice. ‘How did you guess?’ She glances at her arm, where the burn mark is. I pull my top lip down and bite hard, stalling for time, as I don’t want to break Millie’s confidence.

‘Well, the burn is on your left arm and you’re left-handed, aren’t you, so I figured you probably didn’t catch the iron on your arm all by yourself …’ We sit in silence for a few minutes more, watching the children making a sticky mess with their ice creams. ‘I don’t have all the answers,’ I say eventually, ‘but I’m a good listener.’

She turns away. ‘Yes, sorry, I do want to talk, but not about that … It isn’t what you think, anyway – I was ironing and things got out of hand. He got cross because I hadn’t ironed his shirt the way he likes it, so he grabbed the iron intending to show me, and I went to stop him, figuring I wasn’t going to let him take control of me all the time, and well …’

‘I’m so sorry.’ I smile sympathetically, and wait for her to continue, but she doesn’t, so I do. ‘Jessie, you don’t have to explain to me. I just want to help. Please tell me what I can do for you.’

‘Thanks Meg, that’s very kind, but I really don’t know yet … I need some time to think – at least I can do that while he’s away. And he was sorry after the iron incident – he said so as he left for the airport. Yes, he can be controlling, but he’s not violent. Not really … It’s not like that.’ She looks away. ‘Honestly, it isn’t,’ she adds, when I keep quiet, unsure of what else to say, but why then did she flinch when I tried to console her earlier?

‘So when does he get back?’ I ask tactfully. There’s a short silence.

‘Will you think I’m ridiculous and pathetic if I tell you that I don’t actually know for sure?’ Jessie leans forward in her deckchair and clasps her hands together, as if willing herself to draw strength. ‘It’ll be at least two months this time, but I only know this because his PA’s secretary told me – I think she feels sorry for me.’ She shakes her head, while I wonder what a big cheese her husband must be if his personal assistant has her own secretary.

‘I don’t understand, how come?’ I ask. It seems odd.

‘He doesn’t tell me the exact day that he’ll be back. He says the element of surprise is exciting, stops marriages from becoming dull; that it’ll keep me on my toes … whatever that means.’ Jessie pulls a face and shakes her head.

‘Oh Jessie, I’m so sorry,’ I say, unable to imagine a life like that, always on tenterhooks, dangling on a string like a puppet. It’s clearly no way to treat the person you’re supposed to love. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Do?’

‘Well, you seem pretty stressed and unhappy …’ I begin carefully, looking into her eyes as I try to gauge how far I can go in projecting my own opinion on her personal situation. At the end of the day, we haven’t known each other very long, and I also don’t want her to feel I’m wearing my head teacher’s hat and being interfering, but it’s clear the situation is putting her and the children under a huge strain.

She seems to come to a decision. ‘To be honest, if it were just me, I would leave him. But there’s the children to consider …’

‘What do you mean?’ I ask. From my perspective it seems likely they’d be happier out of the current situation. They’re clearly unhappy, and it can’t be good for them to see their mum so miserable.

‘Sebastian would stop me from taking them, I know he would. He said as much, when …’ Jessie pauses. She presses her lips together and inhales deeply through her nose. Her hands are trembling again. ‘When he found out that—’ She stops talking abruptly as Max yells from down by Jack’s old tree house.

‘Mummyyyyyyyy!’

‘Um, I’d better see to him.’ And Jessie shoots out of her deckchair and darts off down the garden, a mixture of relief and anxiety etched on her face, leaving me to sip my wine and wonder about what she was going to say next.

An hour or so later and the children are exhausted. It’s been fun seeing them play in the garden. I found Jack’s old paddling pool in the shed and used my bicycle pump to inflate it; they splashed around in the water in their pants before wrapping up in some beach towels, still warm straight from the airing cupboard. I’ve really enjoyed having a house full of children again; it reminds me of the long summer days gone by, when Jack and all his school friends would rush in from school, pull off their uniforms and make camps or dens in the garden until the sun went down. It sometimes felt like an extension of my school, with around twenty or so children here at any given time. Running in and out of the garden, asking for lollies and drinks and ‘please can I use your toilet, Miss Singer?’ and generally keeping me busy and very happy. Ahh, those were the days … Noisy and chaotic, and my home feels so quiet in comparison now.

I glance at my watch and see that it’s nearly six o’clock.

‘We should go,’ Jessie says, gathering up the children’s clothes.

‘I’ll come with you, if you like,’ I say, thinking about Sebastian making one of his sudden appearances. And if he does, then I’m not sure I won’t want to have a word with him. I shan’t, of course, it could make things worse for Jessie and the children, but he can’t just carry on making their lives miserable.

‘Thank you, but there’s no need, really, we’ll be fine. If we go now, we can catch the bus from the stop opposite –
on the hour, every hour
,’ she says, already sounding like a local, having picked up a familiar Tindledale saying. ‘I’ll pick up the Mini from the village tomorrow.’

‘OK. If you’re absolutely sure?’ I ask, figuring she’s a grown woman who knows her own mind and I mustn’t treat her like one of my school children.

‘Definitely. I’m absolutely sure.’ She touches my arm as if to emphasise her point. She pauses for a second, before saying, ‘Meg, can I tell you something?’

‘Sure you can. What it is?’

‘I’ve felt so isolated since moving here.’ She pauses. ‘Well, and before then actually – Sebastian has never really liked me having friends; he says he likes to keep me all to himself. So I lost touch with all my old school friends soon after the wedding, and then if I got close to any of the baby mums, or women from my yoga class, they tended to drift away once they met him.’ She stares at her hands. ‘And it’s hard to put yourself forward and get involved, make new friends … and, well …’ Her voice fades.

‘I bet it is,’ I nod, thankful that I’ve never had to move away and start all over again. Familiarity and a sense of belonging suit me. ‘But you’ve settled in so well – the children are in nursery and you’re making lots of friends in the village; getting involved in the show and so on …’

Jessie grins back, and suddenly I get a glimpse of a much younger, more carefree woman – a girl, almost. The contrast in her is remarkable. Her skin is slightly flushed from the heat of the sun and her hair mussed where she was leaning back against the deckchair – the country girl look suits her so much more. And suddenly, her expensive blonde highlights, perfectly polished manicure and fashionable yoga clothes with designer shoes seem so misplaced, like they aren’t really hers; like they belong to somebody else … a trophy wife – one of those women I’ve seen on the telly, a lady who lunches and looks after herself in salons and spas and so on. A ‘real’ housewife. Although they never seemed very real to me … the stay-at-home school mums I know don’t spend hours on their make-up before setting off on the school run.

‘Thanks, Meg. That means a lot to me,’ Jessie continues. ‘You’re so strong and together, and meeting you has made me feel … well, empowered I guess.’

‘Oh well, appearances can be deceptive,’ I laugh, feeling flattered but a bit embarrassed too. I’m not used to people saying stuff like this about me. ‘And it can’t be easy running an efficient household and looking after three young children under five – it’s obvious you are a pretty determined woman yourself.’

‘Perhaps I was, a very long time ago, but all that seems to have drifted away somehow …’ She falls silent for a moment before adding in a quieter voice, ‘I have some big decisions to make about my life, I know that.’