A Surrey State of Affairs (17 page)

He stuttered to a halt, crumbling a biscuit (I will not say biscotto) to a fine powder with his right hand. I decided to leap in and fill the void. “It’s Miss Hughes, isn’t it?” I said. She was unmarried. Gerald jumped, slopping tea over the side of his cup and onto his saucer. “Don’t worry, I guessed a little while ago. Your secret’s safe with me,” I reassured him, while he sat there staring, his facial muscles working as if to open his mouth, but failing. “She’s a fine woman—knows her own mind, but nothing wrong with that. I’ll do my best to soften her up for you.” I patted him on the arm. Finally, Gerald snapped back to life like an elastic band that has been stretched for too long.

“Uh, yes, yes, of course, Miss Hughes. Uh, yes. So kind. Knew I could count on you. Uh. Fine woman. Bunions. Uh. Do you
know, I’ve just realized that the launderette is coming around to fix a leaking pipe in ten minutes. Shall I get the bill?”

The poor man. He was obviously overcome with emotion at the mere mention of Miss Hughes’s name. I can’t wait for bell ringing next week!

  
THURSDAY, MARCH 27

Church Flowers today. Appearing in a cloud of perfume that smelled like air freshener (a little touch of Anaïs Anaïs is all I wear), Pru informed me in a hushed voice that Ruth was doing much better thanks to therapy.

“What for?” I asked.

“You know,” she whispered, loudly enough for everyone to hear. “To help her get over the shock of what happened with Rupert. Her therapist suggested he might come along to one of the sessions. She can arrange a screen because of his—condition.”

I said that it would still be too risky, and Pru nodded sadly. It is out of the question that Rupert should attend; he is terrified of Ruth, and besides, therapy is the worst American import since Britney Spears, whom Sophie once said she wanted to grow up to be. Rupert is not so far gone down the path of
Guardian
reading that he would need to pay a stranger to listen to him witter on about himself. That’s what friends—and parrots—are for.

I got back to find the house filled with flowers. For a moment, I thought Jeffrey had made his first grand romantic gesture since 1989; but it turned out that it was all Randolph’s doing. I caught Natalia and Lydia wandering among the milk bottles stuffed with irises and daffodils giggling. Natalia explained that she had told Randolph what happened with the frog and he said it wasn’t him—and he’d then arranged the flowers to cheer the twins up. Which is all very well, except it has ravaged my borders. Jeffrey came in, eyed the floral superabundance, and said it was a sacking
offense. He seems to have taken against Randolph from the beginning. I may not have agreed with him, but there was a certain compelling fury to his speech. Even Natalia looked chastened.

  
SATURDAY, MARCH 29

Lydia is gone; silence rules. Jeffrey obligingly took her to the airport. As soon as he came back he retreated to his study, no doubt savoring the newfound calm and quiet in the house. I saw Randolph in the garden, immobile, leaning balefully on his hoe until it sank three inches into the ground.

  Monday, March 31

Back to normal. Having instructed Natalia to give all the bedrooms a good clean and check thoroughly for concealed frogs, I settled down with a cup of coffee to check my e-mail. As usual, there were a few circulars from Waitrose and the National Trust, and nothing from Sophie—even though she promised before she left that she would e-mail me a photo of herself every Monday so I could check that she wasn’t losing weight or getting her hair cut in any more unusual shapes.

And then, like a scab that one cannot resist picking, even though one knows the results are likely to make one queasy, I felt compelled to sign on to Facebook and find out whether Jeffrey had indeed abandoned his online persona. A search for his name revealed that his original identity had disappeared into the ether; but scanning farther down the page I saw something that made my stomach lurch: J Hardon, whose profile picture was Daniel Craig wearing a 007 tuxedo. I hope this is merely coincidence. I like to think of Jeffrey as a Roger Moore man to the core.

  
TUESDAY, APRIL 1

I called on Tanya today to ask her whether she thought that J Hardon was Jeffrey, and if so, what I should do. She seemed distracted, taking a bottle of pomegranate juice instead of milk out of the fridge and pouring some into my coffee, but eventually she said I should stop worrying, and gave me a thin smile. I think she’s finding her first pregnancy tough. This is hardly surprising. I remember my brain went to mush when I was expecting Rupert: how Jeffrey laughed when he came home from work one day to find me upset because I had run out of matching wool while knitting the third bootie in a “pair.” He put his briefcase down, took me in his arms, then laughed into my hair as he patted my stomach. I asked Tanya whether Mark was excited about the baby, and she shrugged and said he was never there, before opening the fridge, staring into it for five seconds, then closing it again, shaking her head.

  
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2

What a disappointment! Gerald didn’t come to bell ringing last night. I fear something drastic must have happened, because he knew full well that I was primed to butter up Miss Hughes for him. Perhaps his leak has deteriorated.

In any case, I decided not to waste the opportunity to have a quiet word in her ear—well, not so quiet, given her partial deafness and the resonance of our ringing. She is a woman with a no-nonsense attitude and a tendency to bellow “And your point is?” whenever she feels herself to be adrift in a conversation, so I decided to be forthright.

“Miss Hughes, I want to talk to you about Gerald,” I said.

“Gerald?” she replied. “I thought as much. Dreadful sense of timing, that man. Do you want me to tell him to pay attention
when he creeps back here next week? Or perhaps to smarten himself up a bit, trim that mustache?”

I considered this offer. It would certainly improve both the standard and the salubriousness of our ringing group. And yet I decided that, once started, I should not let myself be drawn off on a tangent.

“Well, that’s not quite what I meant,” I said, and paused to gather my thoughts. She frowned and began tapping her suede Footglove shoe against the flagstones, making a series of muffled thuds. Dithering was not going to help my case. I cleared my throat.

“I’m going to be open with you,” I began. “There’s no other way of saying this. Gerald doesn’t need nasal clippers, he needs the love of a good woman.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“What’s that got to do with me?” she said, wrapping her arms firmly across her cream blouse.

“Well, to put it bluntly, I have reason to believe that the good woman in question is you. He has always thought very highly of you. You have stood here, shoulder-to-shoulder, pulling together, for the best part of fifteen years. Since Rosemary left he has begun to see you in a new light.”

There was a strange expression on Miss Hughes’s face—her eyes narrowing and curling up at the corners—which brought to mind for some reason a fox standing in front of a chicken coop.

“And how do you know all this?” she asked, smoothing back an immaculate curtain of iron-gray hair and securing it with a quick stab of her hairpin.

“He told me.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

And that was that. I hope Gerald resolves his plumbing problems before next week.

  
THURSDAY, APRIL 3

I got back from Church Flowers to find Natalia reading a magazine—or rather, looking at pictures of girls with orange tans falling out of taxis—when she should have been at the supermarket. I chivvied her along. Edward, Jeffrey’s brother, and his wife, Harriet, are coming around for dinner tomorrow night and the usual slapdash fare will not do. Last time I ate at their house, Harriet had her housekeeper make a perfect cheese soufflé, an act of incalculable malice.

  
FRIDAY, APRIL 4