Aunt Margaret's Lover (30 page)

'What's that?' she asked, suspiciously sniffing the glass of murky liquid in his hand.

'Proper cider,' he said shordy. 'They say.'

'Who says?'

'Them
...'
Sidney pointed vaguely with the stub of his pipe in the direction of a cluster of people standing by one of the huge-wheeled carts. Above the backs of heads Jill could just make out two pretty smiling milkmaids dispensing the stuff from large pitchers. People were drinking it with relish, while at the end of the cart another apple-cheeked girl cut wedges of yellow English cheese. Everyone looked so happy, and there was the added sense of well-being that comes from getting food and drink free. She was glad to be here, a part of it all. Better than being stuck indoors with someone who currently looked like a potato.

'What's it like?' she asked, cider never having been her tipple.

'Very good,' Sidney said, taking a swig as if to prove it. 'I'll get some,' she said. 'What do you think of the place?'

He stared slowly around at the rafters and the carts and the decorative drapings of horticultural produce. 'Very pretty.' He nodded and sucked at his pipe. 'They'll make a deal, I shouldn't wonder.'

'Where are they?'

'Who?'

'The owners?'

'Oh - around,' he said vaguely. And then pointed. 'There's the missus. In the blue
...'

Jill followed his pointing pipe and saw a plump, round-faced, smiling woman in Laura Ashley cornflower print. Her arms beneath the short puffed sleeves were solid and brown all the way down, and her bright, scrubbed face looked healthy and kind. Jill avoided her. Jill did not wish to associate with wholesome women like that tonight. Jill felt she had associated with wholesome women like that for quite long enough. She looked around as she made her way towards the drink cart to see if she could spot somebody louche, but she couldn't. Only Peter Piper from the local paper. She avoided him - he was already very red in the face and she did not want to get stuck with him. She could talk to him anytime - tonight she was hoping for adventure. It was a bloody silly name, anyway. She smiled to herself and promised that if he came over, she would tell him so at last.

She reached out a hand and a smiling milkmaid put a glass into it. She reached out another and a hunk of cheese was placed in it. 'Bread's over yonder,' said the cheese-giver, whose smile looked tired. Not surprising. Up here if there was anything going free the locals were wise enough to grab every ounce of it. Part of the legacy of having been milked dry by successive centuries of Southern government.

Jill moved away and towards the bread table because she had to eat something and didn't fancy the cheese. It stung her throat, it was so strong. It was the kind David liked. She placed the nibbled chunk discreetly on the edge of the cheese cart as she moved on, hoping no one would notice, and she took a drink of the cider to wash away the sensation.

If anything the cider was worse. Being somewhat uninhibited, she pulled a face and went 'Urrgh!' She looked at the glass in childlike disbelief, and was about to set it down when a voice near by said, 'You don't like our cheese and now you don't like our cider. What
do
you like?' This had to be the owner. There was something quite commandingly proprietorial about the possessive 'our'. . .

She looked up.

A man gave her a slightly sardonic smile. He had sandy grey hair and looked rather military, very straight-backed. He was wearing a countryman's check shirt and lovat tie. He had a small scar on his cheek just under the left eye, a slight ruddiness to his pale freckled skin, and navy-blue eyes with sandy lashes.
Not
her physical type. As he smiled, she noticed that the little scar crinkled up. She felt herself begin to blush slightly - both for the cheese with its little teeth marks which she could see resting accusingly where she had placed it behind him, and for the loudness of her cider critique. She looked down, then up. She had forgotten the question.

'What?' she said, going for bluntness.

His smile widened. 'I said, what do you like if you don't like the cider?'

'Champagne,' she said airily, thinking he didn't know her from Adam and she could soon slip away.

'That doesn't surprise me,' he said rather softly.

She moved away a fraction. 'Doesn't everyone?' she asked, her voice sounding like some tinny actress. She plunged the glass to her lips and took a second draught of the horrible stuff. 'I suppose it gets better,' she said as graciously as she could. She was about to generalize about the place when instead she found herself saying quite spiritedly, 'Why didn't you come and look at our produce?'

'Who are you?' he said quickly.

She told him.

He removed the glass from her hand, put it down and took her elbow. 'Will you come into the office for a moment?' he said.

No fear, she thought. She removed her elbow as delicately as she could. 'I have to be getting back.'

'The reason why,' he persisted, lounging against the edge of the cart now, ankles crossed, arms crossed on his chest, very relaxed despite the throng of people all around him, 'is that we drew a line on the map above which we decided not to venture.'

'That seems a bit of a Rupert Bear decision,' she said, regretting the personal short-form immediately.

He laughed and the scar disappeared completely. 'Rupert Bear?'

'Oh, nothing. Just a family joke - for being a grown-up and behaving like a child.'

'Considering the face you pulled and the noise you made over my cider was worthy of an eight-year-old, that's cheek.'

'Nevertheless' - she stubbed her finger against the side of the cart for emphasis - 'to draw an arbitrary line is not good business sense.'

'Otherwise we would have been looking for potatoes in Doonray. You have to stop somewhere.'

She giggled in spite of herself. 'Glowing potatoes.'

He raised an eyebrow. 'Hmm?'

'Doonray - it's a nuclear power station.' 'Figure of speech,' he said, and she noticed that he uncrossed his ankles and was a little less affably poised.

'Well, anyway,' she said, 'I have to go. My husband is ill.' He looked about him. 'Is he here?'

She laughed. The idea of David with his puffy face and pyjamas roaming the rustic displays was absurdly funny.

'No,' she said, 'he isn't really interested in my business. He's got toothache.' She giggled again. And put a hand to her mouth insta
ntly
.

'It's
your
business, is it?'

'Yes,' she said, fixing him with what she hoped was a quelling look. 'Mine. All mine.' Damn, that sounded more like a petulant three-year-old. 'I must go.'

'We should come and .
..
um
...
look over what you've got, then?'

She looked over towards the cornflower-blue Laura Ashley and back at him. Their eyes connived.

Sidney Burney, amazingly, was suddenly standing at her side. He wanted more cider.

He nodded and made some kind of gruff noise in his throat at her, which she took to be a greeting and apology for pushing past.

'One of my helpers,' she said grandly. 'Aren't you, Sidney?'

Sidney looked hunted.

The sandy eyebrows raised and lowered themselves. 'Well, you seem to think the cider is OK. Have some more.' He turned, gestured. 'Jane, more cider for the gentleman.'

Jill thought this was so patronizing she nearly threw up. This man was as bad as David for making her want to do that. She moved away, willing her rose-pink scarf not to sway. He followed her.

'Will you introduce me to your wife before I go?' she said, challenging.

He stopped. He, too, looked towards the cornflower blue. 'Not now,' he said easily, 'she seems rather busy.'

'Jill?' said a voice. It was Peter Piper. 'Jill, where's David? Come and talk to a lonely old reporter. Have you got some stuff here?'

'Not yet,' said the smiling man at her side. 'But we may rectify that if the goods
are
worth having.' There was a very slight pressure to her forearm. 'Goodbye then,' he said, and Jill's heart went a resounding thump.

When she looked back from Peter's face, the man in the check shirt had gone, weaving his way through the crowd, turning to look at her for a moment with a smile. Jill thought how unprepossessing sandy hair just turning grey was. She also wondered, driving home, how much erode Roman poetry he knew, and would he crack up over Anglo-Saxon names? She looked at the beautiful gold-tipped hills. She felt depressed. Some adventure. She was going to have a dreadful hangover in the morning.

Verity is not being kind to her wall. It was all right throughout the summer months when the door was open and the stocks, roses and sweet peas floated in their scent. Right up to the beginning of the autumn it was all right - she had a script to finish and some commissioned articles on 'The Wonderful World of the Media' and 'What Has Happened to All The New Writers?' But now, with script and articles done, money in the bank and time on her hands, she feels the chill of lonely nights descending with the early-evening darkness. And with the darkness also descends the twinkling aurora borealis of the gin
bottle
. And with that twinkling luminescence come the long monologues to the Tuscan blank-ness. 'Well, then,' she had asked it as the dreary damp days of August gave way to an Indian September, 'where shall we betake ourselves, my Italian lover?' And though she pressed her cheek against him and ran her hands longingly over his smooth skin, he offered her no solution. This was at half past one in the morning when the twinkling luminescence had done its work. Verity was lonely.
Fucking
lonely as she told her confidant. And where was Margaret? What use had she been as a single entity living down the road?
None.
Ab-sobloodylutely
none.

'You'd have thought, Wall, wouldn't you, that she could have spared a few days - a week even - to come away with me somewhere? But no. Oh no.
She's
got a bloody lover, hasn't she, Wall, and that takes care of that. Out here and there, away at weekends, pulsing with activity all the time. Or in bed - I've seen the curtains drawn late into the morning and I know
...
She certainly wasn't lying there on her own, because his car was parked outside. And I met that Harry at the Channel Four party and he
seemed
to be all right, except he threw up after the brandy and confessed, too late, that he was a lapsing alcoholic . . . Just what I needed.
What
I needed was someone fresh and alive in my life to clean
me
out - not the other way around. And when I casually suggested that we might go away together, Margaret - the old bag - says, all prissy like, that she'd love to, maybe later, only she's a bi
t tied up with going off to Nime
s with fa
rtface
to look at the new Norman Foster building. Well, Wall, she could have come here and looked at
you.
Now, couldn't she? You being so perfect and all .
..
And when I say to her "But there's plenty of time to fit something with me in as well as him," - stinkfeatures - she goes all funny around the eyes - shifty - and says, "Well, maybe, perhaps
..."'
So much for making a pact. Verity feels seriously betrayed nowadays.

Verity leaves off cuddling the wall and pours out some fizzy water. She is aware that this kind of drinking can seriously damage your looks and therefore your chances. But chances for what? 'I don't want chances. All I want is a
little
bit of friendship at a difficult time in my life. And not her looking at her watch every five minutes . . .' Verity mimics her friend to the wall - she quite often entertains the wall in this way nowadays. '"Must fly - I'm meeting Oxford at seven." "Must dash - we're getting the three o'clock flight." "Can't stop - Oxford's coming over."'

Ah well, Verity thinks with satisfaction, it'll end in tears.

She just wishes it would end in tears a bit sooner
...
She kicks the base of the dishwasher at the memory, the dishwasher now being her discarded companion since it refused to follow her drunken advice on the subject of doing a quick rinse, and wept copiously all over the floor instead. The kick hurt, making Verity feel better.

'She's even been bowling, Wall. I ask you.
At
her age! And did I want to come and make up a threesome? No, I bloody well did
not.
Gooseberrying all night. Bowlabloody-rama, Wall. I ask you. Second childhood. It'll be
raves
next, and coming home reeking of Ecstasy.'