A Rural Affair (12 page)

‘Well, I –’

‘This is all mighty familiar,’ she hissed. ‘And it is nothing whatsoever to do with this,’ she slapped her hand to her heart,
‘and everything,’ she seized a large courgette from the vegetable rack, brandished it priapically, ‘to do with this.’

There was a silence.

‘So she said she was sorry, did she?’ mused Peggy.

‘Yes, she did.’ I cast back to Emma. By the front door, eyes downcast. Shoulder bag on.

‘And that she never meant to cause trouble, particularly when there were children involved?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that she was mortified you had to find out this way. That you had to find out at all, even. She never wanted to add to
your grief?’

‘Yes, she said all that.’

‘And then she left, trying to walk slowly and calmly down the path, but unable to resist scuttling a bit at the end.’

‘She did … scuttle, a bit.’ I frowned as I recalled her quickly shutting the garden gate; leaping into her Mini. Glancing
back over her shoulder as she pulled out sharply, not bothering with the seat belt, eyes flitting up to the rear-view mirror,
to me.

‘And she left you, the widow, feeling like a heel.’

‘More than a heel,’ I whispered.

‘Like a cold, unfeeling, heartless wife, who’d driven her husband into another woman’s bed.’

Buckled as I was, I caught the ironic tone.

‘She doesn’t want any money,’ I told them, almost defensively. ‘That’s what she came to say.’

‘So she’s got a conscience. Or so she says. But she’s running scared, Poppy. She knew you’d be banging on her door the moment
the will was read, so she thought she’d bang on yours first. She came to see you to pre-empt the situation, before the shit
hit the fan. No doubt Phil made provision for her assuming he’d die at eighty, and incidentally, how cynical is that? To plan
on cheating on you for ever?’ Peggy paused. ‘Your husband was a bastard, Poppy.’ I looked up. Peggy’s eyes were unnaturally
unamused. No benign, sardonic twinkle to them now. ‘He treated you appallingly. In fact he made a mockery of your marriage.
He controlled you, he told you what to wear, he lowered your self-esteem and confidence, he handed you money as if you were
a child, and then he compounded the crime, added insult to injury, by sleeping with another woman.’

I breathed in sharply. ‘I never thought of it like that,’ I muttered.

Jennie put her head in her hands and moaned low. As she looked up, she let her fingers drag theatrically down her face. ‘Poppy,
Poppy, where have you been?’ she whispered.

‘In a fairly dark and horrible place,’ I said in a quavering voice. I didn’t tell her there’d been moments when I’d wanted
to hide for ever. Moments, like that one on the way back from the shops the other day, when I’d thought I could just drive
the car into a brick wall.

Jennie leaned forward. Gripped my wrist. ‘Most women would look upon this recent revelation, this visit, as a salve to their
conscience. Proof that they need not feel too guilty about their lack of widow’s weeds.’

‘And yet, for someone like Poppy, I can see it could also be a crushing blow,’ said Peggy slowly.

I looked at her. Someone like Poppy. What did that mean? Someone just the tiniest bit malleable? Suggestible? Riddled with
insecurities and inadequacies, prone to be a wee bit downtrodden, over time? I felt scared at what she might say next.

‘It was rejection on a grand scale,’ she went on. ‘Not just widowed, but cheated on too. By someone she felt she’d accommodated,
put up with out of the goodness of her heart. How shameful is that? By someone like Phil the Pill,’ she spat darkly.

‘Phil the …’

‘Pill. Short for Pillock. It’s how he was known, locally.’

Jennie and Angie bent their heads and studied their fingernails. Locally? I gazed at my friends aghast, but their eyes were
averted. How far, I wondered. As far as Aylesbury? My heart started to beat. Slowly at first, but then it gathered momentum.
Something dry and withered was uncurling fast within me, thrusting out green shoots and drinking, finding some nourishment.
Phil the Pill.
My husband
. And in a corner of my mind, I’d known. Known he was a pillock. Had overheard Angie once say to Jennie he was a bad draw
at a dinner party. But I’d ignored it. Covered up for him. Like you do when you’re married to a slightly dull man. Out of
loyalty. Personal pride. Told myself he had hidden depths that my friends couldn’t know about. Concentrated on how hard he
worked, how dedicated and selfless he was. How he brought home the bacon. But, in my heart, I knew I’d sold out by marrying
him. I just didn’t realize everyone else knew it too.

Words were finally forming in my brain, like fridge-magnet letters swirling around in a furious kaleidoscopic anagram.
Simultaneously, in the pit of my stomach, which latterly had been a bit ashen, a bit shrunken, there was a rumble, as if Vesuvius,
dormant for years, was making a comeback, deciding it was time for a tremor. But it had been a while. It had its work cut
out. I’d been in denial for years and, for the last eleven days, severely crushed. But fury was finally on its way. Roaring
in from afar like the seventh cavalry. All those long lonely evenings. All those solitary weekends with the children. He hadn’t
just been working, hadn’t been cycling – recharging the batteries, as I’d tell myself stoically: he’d been sleeping with another
woman. Before coming home to me. And always a shower. Two-showers-a-day Phil. Now we knew why. I looked at my friends, my
three good friends, grouped tense and watchful around me.

‘How dare he?’ I breathed, softly at first. It was a surprise to hear the words. They waited. Jennie nodded eagerly.

I dug deeper, right into my very soul. As I gazed into it, his treachery stared back. I saw it very clearly, like a roll of
film. Saw him coming in late, midnight sometimes; me stumbling downstairs in my dressing gown to pop his dinner in the microwave,
ask how his day had been, sympathize. I saw me sitting in the audience at Clemmie’s first nativity play, an empty chair beside
me, then a text: ‘Sorry, can’t get away.’ I saw me eating with the children at teatime so as not to eat alone. I saw a one-parent
family. Why had I felt so ashamed these last few days, so fearful the world might discover I hadn’t been enough for my husband?
Because he was dead? Death was no excuse. He’d let me down.
He’d
betrayed
me
. Not enough for him? He’d
never
been enough for me! I wasn’t so much seeing the light as having a full-blown epiphany.

‘HOW BLOODY DARE HE!’ I roared, the force of my ejaculation jerking me back in my chair.

‘Atta-girl,’ breathed Peggy softly.

I seized my wine glass, blood storming through my veins and knocked the Chablis back in one. Then I slammed the empty glass
down on the table. ‘Fill it up,’ I demanded.

‘Lordy, Poppy,’ Angie murmured in consternation, but Peggy was already on the case.

‘Atta-
girl
,’ she repeated admiringly as she filled it right to the top.

Of course, it took more than a couple of glasses of white wine to sort me out. More than an evening with the girls. Apparently
I hadn’t been terribly well. Hadn’t been … coping. And evidently going without sleep for nights on end wasn’t normal. This
was all explained gently and carefully to me by my friends, and then the very next day Angie marched me off to see her GP,
a pleasant, middle-aged woman who had seen Angie through her separation from Tom. She gave me some little white pills. They
certainly helped me sleep but also made me feel an awful lot better in a matter of days, although that could have been psychological.
I took them avidly, marvelling at the change in me. After a while, though, I began to feel a bit turbocharged, as if I might
take off, exhaust fumes billowing out behind like a cartoon character, so I flushed the rest of the pills down the loo.

Meanwhile I seethed, rumbled and roared around my house. It seemed to me it trembled with me, like the one belonging to the
giant, the one with the beanstalk outside. Fee fi fo – I strode about with eyes like saucers, pausing occasionally to ask,
‘What? He did
what
?’ incredulously of the fireplace, or the bookshelves, pacing in circles which got ever larger, and encompassed the upstairs
bathroom where I showered every morning long and hard, washed my hair furiously and came down clean and steaming, hair tied
back, wearing freshly laundered jeans and a shirt, nostrils flaring.

The house was tackled next. I dusted and hoovered it
from top to bottom, then I hired a steam cleaner. I washed the windows, polished the furniture, mended a broken curtain track
in Archie’s room, scrubbed the tiles in the shower – getting right into the grouting with something so toxic it nearly took
my fingernails off – and tidied all the drawers and cupboards. I then removed all traces of my husband. I saved cufflinks,
a watch and his dinner jacket for Archie and a watercolour he’d liked for Clemmie, but I took all his clothes to a charity
shop, and the rest, the things no one would want, I burned in the garden when the children were asleep. I stopped short of
burning photos or anything hysterical like that and put them in a box in the cellar, but there was, nonetheless, a faintly
heretical gleam to my eye as his Lycra cycling shorts (three pairs), his gloves, silly shoes, ordnance survey maps and stopwatch
went up in acrid flames. As the tongues licked high into the velvet sky, crackling and popping in the night, I felt a profound
sense of exorcism. Of release. Humming – yes, humming – I turned and strode back into the house for more. Trophies and medals
had gone into the cellar along with the photos, but all those sci-fi books could burn, along with his self-help manuals –
how to be rich, how to be popular, etc. – and one which I’d never seen before and had found nestling under his side of the
bed and was charmingly entitled:
How to Live Without the One You Love
. Screeching, I ran downstairs and frisbeed it into the flames. Glancing up I saw Jennie’s startled face at her bedroom window.
She took in the situation in an instant, gave me a huge thumbs up and went about her business.

The children were next, spruced to within an inch of their lives. All clothes were washed and hung out to dry on the line,
faces scrubbed, sweets and crisps banned, the television turned off, and there were lots of cuddles at bedtime and
chat at teatime, which included broccoli and carrots. In other words, business as usual. The smiles and laughs came back too,
not slowly as they might with adults, but instantly, children being so forgiving and immediate, which made my heart lurch.
But if I had any temptation to beat myself up about their past eleven days of enacting life on a sink estate, I told myself
it had been only that: eleven days. And that real grief, and the side effects on a family, could last a hell of a lot longer.
That hadn’t been grief; that had been shock. A very nasty one at that. I rang Dad and told him not to panic, I was fine, and
knew he could tell by my voice I meant it. His relief was tangible and he rang off with a cheery goodbye and an assurance
that he’d try not to come off the enormous chestnut hunter he was breaking in for somebody else to fall off on the hunting
field.

In the mornings, after I’d taken Clemmie to school, I went for long bracing walks in the forest above my house, borrowing
Leila, Archie’s hand in mine. The three of us would stride through the autumn leaves, Archie kicking them up in his wellies,
laughing as colours as bright as jewels – amber, ruby and gold – fluttered down around his head. Just occasionally I’d stop,
in this five-thousand-acre wood with not another soul in sight, to clench my fists and shout, ‘Bloody hell!’ to the treetops.
‘Bloody HELL!’ Archie laughed delightedly and they were, unfortunately, his next words. The burnished autumn colours seemed
to inflame me more than ever, though, like that fire in my garden: fury was in my heart, my belly, and I’d return refreshed,
but incensed. Truly incensed that Phil could have done that to me.

Thank God he was dead, I thought, surprisingly, one morning. At least, it was a surprise to me. I voiced it too, to the bird
table, as I had a piece of toast at the kitchen window,
then glanced guiltily to the heavens as two sparrows fluttered up to tell. But suppose he hadn’t died; suppose he’d carried
on with Emma for years, deceiving me, making a mockery of my life – yes, thank God he was dead, I decided fiercely, throwing
my plate in the dishwasher.

‘Thank God,’ repeated Archie gravely behind me, eating his Weetabix. Ah. I’d have to watch that.

The following day I saw Jennie in the shop as I went in for my paper. My newspaper. Which I hadn’t bought for weeks. Had had
no interest in the outside world.

‘Choir tonight, isn’t it?’ I said cheerily.

A couple of elderly women in the post office queue turned, surprised.

‘Yes, seven o’clock. Oh,
look
at you, Poppy, you look so much better.’ Jennie beamed. ‘You’ve had your hair cut!’

‘Doesn’t she look a treat,’ agreed old Mrs Archibald, nudging her neighbour, Mrs Cripps, who agreed with a toothless grin.
‘Like the whole world has lifted from your shoulders, love.’

‘It has,’ I assured them, taking the apple Archie had grabbed from the fruit rack and passing it to Yvonne to be weighed.
‘In fact,’ I told them, ‘I feel blooming marvellous. Better than I’ve felt for years.’

If the old dears looked a trifle surprised at this, it was only to be expected, I thought, as I went on up the hill with my
children to nursery: they didn’t know the minutiae, the background. Not many young widows could go from catatonic inertia
to full-blown euphoria in days, but this one could. Oh, yes.

Miss Hawkins, too, looked delighted to see the three of us looking so clean and sparkling, and for the first day in a long
time, Clemmie skipped in with her friend Alice without hanging on to my leg, or Miss Hawkins’s, or both.

That evening, when Frankie arrived, I was almost waiting by the door, keen to be off.

‘God, look at you,’ she said, struggling with her enormous bag of books to the kitchen and dumping it down on the table. ‘You’ve
got make-up on and everything. You look loads better.’