Good Husband Material (22 page)

That’s Tish.

I never thought James would get permission to put that enormous, unsightly radio aerial up on the house, but he did. He said his uncle Lionel knew someone in the planning department, or somewhere. He would. It looks awful, really awful.

Now his radio equipment is functioning (I’m glad something is!) he spends most evenings in the Shack, and his friends visit him there, bypassing the house completely. They do say ‘Hi!’ if they happen to catch sight of me in the garden, except Horrible Howard, who just smirks.

If I’m very lucky I get to give James an evening meal between his arrival home (at an undisclosed time), and his going over to the Shack: this is what my married life has degenerated into. Not quite how I envisaged our rural idyll, I must admit.

Sometimes ghostly-sounding voices waft over on the night air from the little hut, and crackling noises, but when it all goes silent I know they’ve adjourned to the pub.

I don’t know what Mrs Peach is making of all this. She hasn’t said anything when she comes round with the eggs and to see Toby. He increasingly avidly anticipates her arrival, and gets very excited – as soon as he hears the doorbell he starts to scream hello. It’s a true communion of souls. (Pity I can’t give her the bloody bird, but I’m not sure that I wouldn’t forfeit the legacy, which has long since been spent … and I suppose I am sort of used to having him around after all this time.)

One evening James actually came home early, but it was only because he was in a panic and wanted to ring the doctor up for reassurance. One of the junior partners has gone down with mumps.

‘I don’t suppose you’ll get it anyway,’ I consoled him. ‘It sounds such a childish sort of ailment.’

‘You can kiss goodbye to any chance of having children if I do!’ he retorted melodramatically.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It often leaves men infertile.’ Sweat broke out on his forehead.

I didn’t know that, although something about mumps did ring a bell somewhere at the back of my mind. Then I remembered: ‘It can’t always have that effect, James, because Granny told me once that Dad had it just after he married Mother, and they still had me!’

‘They didn’t have any more, though, did they?’ he pointed out unarguably, but actually, I’ve always thought that was because Mother disliked the whole messy, undignified business.

‘And I’ve got this rash under my arms,’ he added as a clincher.

‘You know very well that’s heat rash, James,’ I said unsympathetically. ‘You always get it in the summer.’

Fortunately the first flush of fear (and the rash) had worn off by the night of the Wrekins’ barbecue on the ninth of July.

I wore a new pair of designer-label jeans, a short-sleeved silk blouse, and my one and only cashmere cardigan (twenty-first birthday present from Mother), in case it got chilly when the sun went down. Also the sandals with high heels that James hates, because they make me nearly as tall as he is – but nuts to him.

When I came downstairs ready he was dressed in a lumberjack shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a very old pair of corduroy trousers.

‘Good God, Tish! You aren’t going to a Garden Party, you know!’

‘At least I don’t look as if I’ve spent the evening cleaning the sewers!’ I retorted, annoyed. He goes from one sartorial extreme to another.

We walked there in silence (once we were out of earshot of Bess’s anguished howls.)

The Wrekins’ doorbell plays ‘Oranges and Lemons’ like the one I just got rid of.

A head popped over the garden wall. It had a beaky nose set between chubby cheeks and a tonsure of hair. Rather like a squished-up André Previn.

‘Hi! Come round the back – there’s a gate here. Like the doorbell? Amusing, isn’t it? Hear it at the bottom of the garden!’ He gave a snort and vanished.

Our host, presumably.

He proved to be a very small Welshman, and had been standing on a beer crate to look over the wall. I was glad he wasn’t one of those extremely tall, thin people with very small heads, because I find that type physically very repulsive, like spiders.

There were about twenty other people there on an enormous patio with an assortment of swinging seats and lounging chairs. Margaret emerged briefly from behind the barbecue and introduced us generally as ‘Marian Plentifold, the novelist – I told you all she was coming – and her husband, of course …?’

‘James,’ I said, not daring to look at him. ‘I’m really Tish Drew. Marian Plentifold is only my pen name.’

James hissed furiously at me, ‘Now look what you’ve done! Everyone here knows your name and the sort of drivel you write.’

‘I don’t write drivel!’ I hissed back, equally furiously, and then was drawn away from him by the interested questions of all the other women there who could, of course, have written novels every bit as good, ‘if only they had the time’.

I expect some of them could, but several looked as if they had abandoned such minor skills as writing (other than cheques) once they’d acquired a husband.

But I’d misjudged them, for it transpired that they’d all read at least one of my books, which was gratifying. One haggard older woman said that there ought to be more sex in them – they were too tame – and I wondered if she’d enrolled in the Wife Swappers yet. But her husband is a desiccated shrimp of a man with glasses an inch thick, so I don’t think there would be much call to swap anyone’s husband for him.

Once we’d divided up into male and female camps, the women got down to grilling me about Fergal Rocco, and seemed a bit disappointed when I told them that I knew him only briefly years ago.

‘He’s so sexy!’ sighed the haggard woman.

‘He certainly is! He can leave his slippers under my bed any time,’ agreed a horsy-looking girl. ‘Do you think it’s true about those six nuns in Rome? You know, when they said he—’

‘I’ve absolutely no idea,’ I said shortly. ‘And, what’s more, I’m not very interested.’

They eventually gave up in disgust.

There was an enormous bowl of punch and all the ladies had been automatically handed great tumblers of the stuff as they arrived, which were constantly replenished by the Welsh gnome. It contained fruit salad, and a Sargasso of strange purple flowers floated on top.

I was just wondering what the flowers were, and whether they were supposed to be eaten or not, when James lost his footing and fell into a prickly bush and I inadvertently swallowed one.

He was not so terribly drunk that the shock of being picked out of the prickly bush and dusted down didn’t sober him quite a bit. Then the kebabs and pitta bread were handed round, which gave his stomach a respite from an almost totally fluid diet.

Margaret wandered up with a plate of little sausages on sticks and, to my horror and embarrassment, James suddenly said in an all-too-audible aside to me, ‘Pricks on sticks!’

Luckily Margaret burst out laughing, then told everyone else, as though it was the most amusing thing she’d heard for years. (Maybe it was.)

After that everyone went round offering each other ‘a prick on a stick’ and being very vulgar about comparing length and width, and telling James how frightfully witty he was.

I expect he might seem to be, if you’re not married to him, and I do seem vaguely to recall his exerting his charm on me in the way he now does only with other women, too.

‘You are lucky being married to such a handsome, romantic man!’ sighed the haggard woman, whose one-strap trousered garment was in danger of becoming a no-strap one at any minute, since there wasn’t much up-front to stop its downward progress, as it were. ‘It’s easy to see what inspires you to write your novels.’

Romance? There isn’t a drop in his veins! (There may have been, once, but it has all been well flushed out since.)

Margaret’s husband insisted on taking me for a tour of the garden in the half dark, where I floundered reluctantly about in the loose earth in my high heels with Ray hanging off my arm like a folded raincoat. I was glad to get back to the light and solidity of the patio, particularly since he is the sort of man who must touch women if he is near one – the hand on the arm, the pat on the rear, the hand sliding round the waist. Ugh!

(Though come to think of it, that’s better than the ones who check their crotches right in front of you every five minutes, as though afraid something might have fallen off.) More kebabs were circulated and, as it was getting really dark, flares on sticks were lit all round the garden, which looked very pretty. I couldn’t see what was in this kebab, and I suspect I got some grease on my silk blouse. I hope not.

My glass had been refilled to brimming point, and the trouble with punch is that you don’t know what’s in it: it always tastes innocuous, even when it isn’t.

Ray Wrekin had an inexhaustible fund of ghastly jokes with which to bore the assembled throng between rushing in and out of the house changing records. (Why did he bother? One Barry Manilow sounds very like another.) Everyone else laughed at the jokes just before the punch line, so they’d probably been just as amused last time he told them.

Margaret, tall and stately, towered fondly above him, reminding me of a picture I’d once seen of a zoo giraffe whose favoured and inseparable companion was a pygmy goat.

I felt a sudden need to sit down, and fortunately there was an empty swinging seat behind me. It rocked dangerously, and I hastily drained my glass before it spilled, then put my feet up and sat drowsily listening to all the murmuring voices.

James was nowhere to be seen. The Welsh comedian hadn’t been in evidence for a bit either … and I had definitely had more than enough to drink without intending to. I closed my eyes.

‘Oh, there you are!’ said James, and I woke with a start, feeling stiff and a bit sick.

‘Where have you been, James? I haven’t seen you for ages.’

‘Oh, Ray wanted to see my radio set-up. I wasn’t away very long. He’s coming round tomorrow too. Come on – everyone’s going.’

And indeed, the garden was emptying fast and the flares were beginning to gutter.

We thanked our hosts and tottered out (well, I tottered, but that was the high heels rather than anything) into the night, where the sound of voices in inebriated conversation and the slamming of car doors enlivened the previously peaceful and sleeping village.

As we walked, he put his arm round me and we talked to each other as we haven’t done for ages about all kinds of things, like what Bob had done in the garden, and whether to have wrought-iron furniture or wooden on the patio (when we have a patio), and whether Bess was capable of being obedience-trained, and things like that.

Neither of us mentioned the sticky subjects like radio hams, novels, money, Fergal or babies, and so we went to bed in perfect amity.

Then I woke up at five with awful indigestion (probably those purple flowers in the punch) and had to go down and root in the kitchen for milk of magnesia.

Bess glared dolefully at me.

James didn’t let her come upstairs with us last night, though from what I recall of the proceedings they were so routine, boring and inconclusive that she might have been able to offer some good advice.

When I got up for the second time I felt much better, but James refused to speak to me, and when I brought him some tea and toast he put a pillow over his head.

I left him to his misery and went down to Mrs Deakin’s for some more milk of magnesia, since I’d finished ours and I could see it would be all my fault if James couldn’t find anything to dose himself with.

‘I’m not surprised at you wanting this,’ she remarked, reaching the blue bottle down from a high shelf with the aid of a little pair of steps. ‘You was eating offal last night, and that’s a thing I don’t never do.’

‘Offal? But I never eat offal!’

‘If you ate them kebab things you did.’ (Mrs D. knows everything!) ‘Mrs Wrekin herself told me what was going on them – peppers and courgettes and tomatoes she got here, and liver and bacon she got in town, though some was to be lamb, too, I think she said.’

No wonder I felt ill! Fancy someone like Margaret Wrekin serving offal to her guests. I wouldn’t dream of buying liver except to give to Bess.

‘The trouble is, everything just tasted of barbecue.’

‘Seems silly to me.’ Mrs Deakin brushed dust off a card of bootlaces with her pinny. ‘I mean, why go cooking outside over a little smoky fire, when you’ve got a good electric oven indoors? And then sitting about in the nasty night air, bitten by midges and getting grease down you.’

‘That reminds me! Do you know how to get grease off a silk blouse?’

‘I’ve got just the thing,’ she said.

Fergal: July 1999

    
‘STAND BY YOUR MAN

    
Girlfriend of shock rocker Fergal Rocco

    
says she’ll stand by him in nuns row.’

Sun

I don’t know how you define girlfriend – but how nice of Nerissa to stand by me for something I didn’t do. It seems to me she doesn’t care what I get up to provided she can present herself as my girlfriend.

She’s haunting me, although it must be obvious I’ve long since lost interest in her body and I never was interested in her mind. If she’s got one.

No, that’s unfair: she may have the intellectual depth of a very small puddle, but she’d win
Mastermind
on the subjects of fashion, or Who’s Who in the In crowd.

Maybe I’m just getting old.

Still, Nerissa provides a smokescreen in case Tish suspects I have any interest in her, there is that … and I realise I may not sound like a very nice person, but I did make it clear from the start I wasn’t looking for any kind of relationship and, given her track record, it had seemed unlikely that Nerissa was, either.

I really hate people trying to manipulate me.

I thought the night of the barbecue would change things between James and me a bit, but it hasn’t really – in fact, I don’t think he remembers very much about it. (Not, admittedly, that it
was
very memorable. And I’m so out of practice with James that it felt rather more adulterous than my lapse with Fergal.) He’s seen more of Ray Wrekin in the last couple of weeks than he has of me! They’ve struck up some sort of friendship and Ray is constantly round at the Shack in the evenings.