A Change of Pace (12 page)

‘And you were right, my love, you were right.’ He turned away from the mirror and put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Now tell me frankly, without resorting to the dog’s comb, am I tidy enough to meet your guests?’

And then, for no particular reason, they started to giggle. They were still doing this when Diz appeared at Bet’s elbow; suspicious, not really wanting to be friendly, but determined to be correct — so like his father. ‘Hullo, sir, can I get you a drink or is my mother looking after you?’

Your uncle is, or so he promised, but thanks for the offer. Incidentally, the name’s Simon. Being addressed as ‘sir’ by a member of the younger generation makes me feel a hundred.’

‘I’ve no desire to do that, sir ... I mean, Simon. It’s just that we were rather strictly brought up, I suppose, but I’ll try to remember in future. Did your car break down?’

‘No, I walked — took the short cut through the wood, but it turned out to be further than I remembered.’

Bet watched the hostility flicker between them, it both frightened and excited her. Was this what power felt like? ‘Come on, Simon, now you’re here at last, let me introduce you to a few people, we can’t spend the evening standing in the hall, it’s too cold.’

‘Mum, the Snatelys are about to leave. Mrs Snately’s looking for you to say goodbye.’ Diz, who’d been chewing an olive stone, took the stone out of his mouth, tossed it into a nearby ash-tray and turned to Simon. ‘Nice to have met you ... er ... Simon, but I must dash. I promised Bern I’d get some more ice from the Redford fridge. See you later, perhaps.’

Simon looked after him. ‘What a very well-behaved boy, Titania, he surely does you credit. You —’ But before he could continue he was engulfed by Kitty Cornwall. ‘Si, how are you? We never had a chance to talk the other night, and I so wanted to ask you about the dog in that chocolates commercial of yours. How on earth did they manage to make it do that?’

‘All a trick, Kitty, you gullible old thing. And it’s not my commercial, I simply had one small hand in it. You see ... ’ Bet left them to it.

And after that, somewhat to her surprise and, she had to admit, her slight disappointment — she’d expected at least some small display of fireworks from him — Simon’s party behaviour was exemplary. With the exception of her own family, who remained obstinately and inexplicably impervious to his particular brand of upper-crust charm, he was plainly considered by her ill-assorted guests to be the evening’s star attraction — members of the Westover family were seldom seen at village gatherings of this sort, and Simon never. However, from her own little orbit — it was extraordinary how easy it was to switch to automatic pilot on these occasions, at one point she’d even agreed to let the garden be used for this year’s village fête — Bet watched his antics with irritation. Admittedly, he did wink at her once over the top of Angie Snately’s hat — she’d stayed on, of course — but that was the only contact between them until he suddenly came up behind her in the old pantry, where she’d fled to fetch a floor-cloth. Tib, having pinched a plate of Nell’s tuna fish vol-au-vents, had regurgitated the whole lot all over the sitting-room carpet.

‘“And greasy Joan doth keel the pot”! Are you trying to avoid me?’

‘No, of course I’m not,’ Bet, unnerved, went on ringing out the floorcloth.

‘Do leave that wretched thing alone, Titania, and look at me.’ He spun her round so she was facing him. Obviously a little drunk — not too drunk, just a little — he looked, Bet thought, like a dissipated Italian film star. ‘The Cornwalls are giving me a lift back to the Manor, so I must go. We can’t talk here, anyway, with all this riff-raff about. What about lunch on Monday?’

What indeed? But lunch on Monday didn’t mean just lunch on Monday, did it? Oh, to hell with it! Why shouldn’t she have some fun sometimes, everyone else did. Besides, he was looking at her in that way again; the way that made it more or less impossible not to accept.

She let out a long sigh. ‘All right then,’ she said, noticing he wore gold cuff-links and that they had a crest on them. ‘Your place or mine?’

‘That’s my girl!’ Simon took the hand that wasn’t holding the floorcloth and gently kissed it. ‘I thought perhaps yours, if that’s OK by you, then we could finish the leftovers.’

And that was when it really started.

*

‘Seems a nice enough chap, if you like that type,’ Pete said to his wife over a tough steak at The George. ‘Can’t understand what all the fuss has been about. He and Bet hardly spoke all evening.’

‘It’s no good, Pete, I simply cannot eat this steak. It’ll have to be sent back to the kitchens; these people mustn’t be allowed to get away with such slipshod cooking ...’

*

‘And what did you think of Mum’s boyfriend, then?’ Nell to Bernie, as they bounced about in their brand new Heals bed.

‘Not a lot, if you really want to know.’ They were trying a new position and Bernie needed all his concentration for the job in hand.

*

‘I do hope Si Morris isn’t after that nice Brandon woman,’ said Kitty Cornwall, putting the finishing touches to her rollers and preparing to climb between the sheets, ‘because if he is ... ‘

But old Monty Cornwall was already asleep.

Chapter Ten

Sunday was got through somehow, with everyone, as usual after a party, thoroughly bad-tempered. Bet was much the same. Odd, this; surely she ought to be full of effervescence, prancing about metaphorically speaking, on cloud nine? Wasn’t that how one was supposed to feel at the start of an affair? Well, she didn’t, and there it was, although she did admit to a sort of ice-cold shivering excitement whenever she thought about Monday. Things weren’t helped by the fact that she and Nell had a row. Rows with Nell were fairly rare these days, but they did still happen occasionally.

This one was over washing-powder, or rather the lack of it. Deciding to do the weekly wash on Sunday — this particular Monday promising to be altogether too fraught for such a mundane domestic chore — Bet found her plan frustrated by the infuriating discovery that although she had bought a new packet of soap powder, jumbo sized, only three days before, they were already out of it. The fact that this was always happening, because of Nell’s scarcely credible prodigality with the stuff — Bet sometimes wondered if she didn’t supplement Bernie’s diet with it — only added fuel to the flames of her wrath. And Nell’s excuse, that perhaps Bet’s generation wasn’t quite so hot on hygiene as Nell’s, because of being brought up during the war and having to learn to do without, merely added insult to injury.

Why, she wondered as she turned the roast potatoes and burned her fingers on the baking tin, when one was going through the vast emotional changes one was going through, did one have to be so continually bogged down by irritating trivia?

Mercifully the Redfords were out all day, having lunch with some of their posh friends, and she only saw Pol for a quick sisterly peck on the cheek before they left for London in the evening. No one mentioned Simon — whether by design or otherwise, Bet wasn’t sure. She couldn’t help wishing they
had
mentioned him, even thought any remark they made would almost certainly have infuriated her.

Sunday came to an end at last, and then it was Monday. Thank God she’d told Simon not to arrive before twelve-thirty! Christine Barnet always stayed until twelve-fifteen on Mondays, later if she spent too much time gossiping with Bet. And this morning, what with the party, there did happen to be an awful lot to gossip about, so that by the time Christine said, ‘Gracious, I must go, I said I’d be home early and give Dad his dinner, it’s Mum’s day for the hospital’, Simon was due to arrive at any minute, and Bet had to dash round like a maniac, getting everything ready.

She needn’t have bothered; by the time he did arrive, nearly an hour late, she’d consumed an entire packet of salted peanuts, drunk two glasses of sherry, and decided he’d got cold feet and wasn’t coming after all. She was out in the vegetable garden, checking whether any more broad beans had emerged — she had to do something — when he appeared at last, a bottle of wine under one arm and a rather tired-looking fern in a pot under the other.

‘What on earth’s that?’ She pointed to the tired-looking fern. Not what she’d meant to say, but the sherry was beginning to work.

‘Some sort of fern, it was the only thing I could find in the greenhouse that seemed suitable. Old Tom appears to have given up pot plants.’

‘Old Tom?’

‘Our gardener.’

‘Won’t he be livid, you pinching one of his ferns?’

‘I doubt whether he’ll notice. He must be ninety if he’s a day. But Alfonso was livid about the wine. He refused point blank to give me the key of the cellar, that’s why I’m so late, we had a bit of a barney. He always plays up when Cyn’s away.’

‘But you got it?’

‘Oh yes, I got it, I usually do — get things, I mean — if I make up my mind to.’

‘Should I be impressed?’ Again the look of surprise she had noticed on the night of the party; this time his surprise was mixed with a barely detectable flash of annoyance. What supine women he must go in for!

‘No, just stating a fact. And before we go any further, may I say how very pretty you look, standing there in your wellies among the sprouting cabbages — or are they marrows?’

‘Broad beans, in fact. Being a member of the ruling class and having a gardener, I suppose one can afford to be so ignorant. Anyway, come and have some lunch, that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it, and if we don’t get a move on the kids will be home. Look, I’ll take the fern in case you drop it.’

But they never got round to lunch, or not the one she’d planned. Somewhere on the way to see to it, other things beyond their control took over. And instead of making for the kitchen, arms entwined they were climbing the stairs to her bedroom.

And after that the other things took over altogether.

*

‘What about lunch, then?’ A long time later, Simon, sitting up in bed, reached for a cigarette. ‘Christ, it’s nearly three, won’t things start happening soon?’

‘Not for a bit. Actually, I don’t think I could eat anything just at the moment.’ Bet lay naked beside him, her body warm, exhausted, at peace. And her soul? She wasn’t too sure about her soul, but decided on balance to leave worrying about that until later. Meanwhile ...

Simon looked down at her, one eye screwed up against the smoke from his cigarette. ‘I believe you enjoyed that, Titania; that I did goes without saying. I always thought under that decorous façade there was one real, wild woman trying to get out.’

‘Do I have a decorous façade? It’s the first I’ve heard of it. Is that why you wanted to go to bed with me — to find out if you were right?’

‘And I took you for an intelligent woman! I make love because I love making love, not to find out things; that’s why it always works.’

‘What a conceited creature you are! What do you mean, always works?’

Simon stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I mean, always works. And as you don’t seem interested in lunch, what about another demonstration ... ?’

And for three whole weeks it was like that, the pattern set on the first day, weekends and the remainder of Bet’s life to be got through as best she could. It was for her three weeks of discovery, angst, elation, guilt, enchantment, fear, and all the other things in between. I’ve become a hedonist, she told herself proudly as she worked in her garden — rampant now in the warmth of early May — or took Tib for his daily walk in a countryside which, despite pesticides, prairie farming and ditches full of empty fertilizer bags, remained almost overpowering in its spring freshness and beauty. Simon, the magician, the wizard met in the woods — Oberon surely, not Bottom? — had shown her the way. How to become, in fact rather than just in principle — she’d always been one in principle, or liked to think so — the liberated woman everyone talked and wrote about. Free, uncommitted, loving sex for its own sake, not for the love of her partner. Mistress of her soul, captain of her fate.

And yet, and yet — and this was where the angst came in —as the days wore on she was increasingly, disturbingly aware that, far from becoming more liberated, she was becoming less so by the minute. In other words, she was breaking all the rules, she was getting too fond of Simon; although obsessed might better describe the way she felt, as she seemed to spend most of her waking hours thinking about him. If, only a few short weeks ago, someone had asked her whether she thought it possible she could be in this state over a man several years her junior with whom she had almost nothing in common, she would have laughed in his face. Chastened, she knew better now. It was, alas, only too possible, and there was little she could do about it but live from day to day and hope, none too optimistically, for the best.

And what of Simon’s feelings for her? Ridiculous to have to admit that she had no idea how he felt, but she didn’t. ‘This is going to be fun, Titania, I promise. No regrets. No tears?’ he’d said, his voice uncharacteristically anxious, as they kissed goodbye at the end of that first afternoon, and she’d nodded reassuringly. If non-commitment was the order of the day, then so be it, and who was she to complain? But despite his words, sometimes — when he thought she wasn’t looking — she would catch a light in his eyes that surely wasn’t mere lust, or the spirit of easy camaraderie that had grown up between them in their efforts to keep their idyll secret from the prying eyes of the rest of the world ... Time alone would tell.

‘Morris, why did you never marry?’ she asked him one day when they were sitting up in bed after a particularly strenuous bout of love-making, eating their sandwiches. She prepared these each day after breakfast and left them on a tray in the bedroom — nothing wrong with her powers of organisation; she sometimes wondered if a life of deception didn’t suit her.

‘Why do you want to know?’ Simon had his wary look. ‘And anyway, how am I supposed to answer? I don’t know why I’ve never married — I haven’t, that’s all. I do admit to being engaged once.’

‘Oh. Who broke it off?’

‘She did, of course.’

‘Oh.’ Bet munched her cold beef sandwich, not knowing what to say. Sometimes he told her things that weren’t true, just to see how she would react. However, she had a feeling this was true.

‘OK, I’ll tell you about it, though why you should want to know beats me; it was years ago and not a particularly edifying story. Caroline was a truly golden girl. We met at university, and for some unknown reason she fell for me. I fell for her, of course, but she could take her pick. We got engaged — much to my family’s delight and amazement; hers weren’t so delighted, but they made the best of it. Everything was arranged; announcement in
The
Times
and all that rubbish, a great big pukka wedding with all the trimmings. Then, to cut a long story short, she turned up unexpectedly at my digs a couple of nights before the wedding and found me in bed with some bird I’d picked up in the local. She just stood there in the doorway, not saying anything. Then she went away. The next day she sent the ring back, her father offered to horsewhip me, the reception at the Hyde Park Hotel was cancelled, the vicar was informed, and that was that. And if you’re going to ask the question I see already hovering on your lips — Why was I in bed with a bird I picked up in the local when I was going to marry a gorgeous girl like Caroline? — I can only say I’ve no idea; it was incredibly bloody stupid, that’s all.’

There was a long silence. Then Bet said: ‘If it hadn’t happened, I mean, if Caroline hadn’t found you, d’you think you’d still be married?’

‘Gracious me, I’ve no idea, probably not, but you never know. She was one hell of a girl, and to coin a cliché, a damned sight too good for me.’ He yawned and ran his finger down her backbone in the way she loved. ‘That’s enough of reminiscences, it’s time you did some work, you lazy bitch ... ‘

Nell was the first to notice a change in her mother and, as was her habit, consulted Bernie. They were driving home from work one Friday. ‘Noticed what?’ Bernie said, not interested; he was busy planning their visit to a boatyard the following morning. A mate of his from the Life department had said What was the good of living in an area like this and not having a boat? It would revolutionise his life, the mate said, and Bernie had decided to look into it.

‘Noticed that Mum’s, well, different; sort of dreamy and off-beam. You don’t think she’s on drugs, do you?’

‘Of course she isn’t on drugs! You worry too much about your mother, she’s perfectly capable of looking after herself. Now, can you be finished by half-ten tomorrow, then we can arrange to meet John at the boatyard at eleven, and that should give us time ... ’

Diz was too immersed in last-minute revising for A-Levels to notice anything much. As always, he’d left revision far too late for comfort, relying on his formidable memory to pull him through. However, even he began to wonder a little about his mother, and went so far as to wake her up one evening when he found her unexpectedly asleep in her armchair at the early hour of nine o’clock, to ask if anything was wrong. ‘You do look a bit pale, Mum, and there’s that place on your neck. Perhaps you should see the doc, get a tonic or something. We can’t have you cracking up while the Duponts are here.’

‘Bother the Duponts!’

‘There
is
something wrong with you. I knew there was.’

But it was Pete who hit the jackpot. It happened one Saturday evening a couple of weeks after the affair with Simon had started, when he popped in to Bet to borrow some ice, the Redford super-de-luxe fridge being once again on the blink. ‘Anyone at home?’ And as Bet turned round from peeling potatoes at the sink, Pete knew at once — you only had to look at her. He knew too that it must be that chap Morris, it couldn’t be anyone else. What a damned shame! Pete wasn’t given to thinking serious thoughts, he didn’t happen to be made that way, but he was fond of Bet, very fond, and it did seem such a waste that all that integrity and sex appeal should be lavished on someone like Simon Morris. OK, he was jealous, wouldn’t at all mind being in Morris’s shoes himself, but that was neither here nor there.

‘Get me a drink, will you, Pete, while you’re at it. We’re out of everything but sweet cider and Ron S.’s dandelion wine, and I feel badly in need of a stimulant.’ Pete extracted the little cubes of ice from their plastic cases with the expertise born of long practise. ‘You don’t look in need of a stimulant to me, ducky, quite the reverse. But I’ll gladly bring you a drink — a whole bottle, if you like — on one condition.’

‘What?’

‘That you tell all.’