A Rural Affair (11 page)

‘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?’