Good Husband Material (25 page)

As I said, there were some strange people at Howard’s party.

Then a thin wailing began, piercing even through the music and the strange barrier between me and reality, and turning my head with infinite slowness I saw Alice reach down into the darkness beside the sofa and produce a wrapped bundle of baby.

The wailing seemed to go on for ever, but at last Alice managed to locate the front opening of her dress through a plethora of limp frill, and, casually attaching her offspring, sank back again with closed eyes.

After about ten minutes or so she woke with a start, looked down with a puzzled air at the baby, which had fallen away from her breast, then just as casually clapped it like a poultice to the other side.

I was amazed by her lack of attention to the poor thing, not to mention exposing herself so openly in a room full of people. I know it is all entirely natural and everything, but I wouldn’t do that so indiscreetly for the world, even if it was semi-dark!

James suddenly plonked himself down on the sofa and put his arm round me. He watched Alice and I felt quite embarrassed for her, but she didn’t seem to notice. After a bit he turned to me and said: ‘’S’ lovely baby. Isn’t it a lovely baby?’

I nodded and tried to smile, and he looked more closely at me, breathing a wine-laden gust so that I recoiled.

‘Whasser matter? You all right?’

‘I’m not feeling very well,’ I admitted.

‘’S’ not like you to get pissed!’ He laughed unfeelingly.

‘I’m not! I think it’s just because it’s so stuffy in here, and I don’t think Alice’s seed cake agreed with me.’

He began to laugh.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘You – eating Alice’s seed cake!’

‘Shh! She’ll hear you! Anyway, what’s so funny about that?’

‘Special seed cake! You know …’ He nudged me, grinning. ‘Perhaps you’d better ask her for the recipe.’ And he started his silly giggling again, while it dawned on me that I’d probably been eating nicely baked cannabis resin or something.

I grabbed his arm and shook him. ‘Where’s the loo?’

‘The loo?’

‘Come on – I feel sick!’

‘First door at the top of the shtairs … but look here, Tish—’

I left him babbling and stumbled over legs and bodies to the hall and up the stairs. There was a solitary candle in a saucer on the floor outside the loo, and since the light switch wasn’t working I took it in with me. I didn’t actually feel as if I was going to be sick, just queasy and a strange sensation about the head.

I quickly stuck two fingers down my throat, but this was not entirely satisfactory since quite a time had elapsed since I ate the cake, but after I’d washed my face in cold water and dried it on the hem of my blouse, I felt a bit better.

But angry – very, very angry. I thought of popping out to the telephone and tipping the police off about the goings-on here just before we left, but this is not a very salubrious area to go looking for a phone box in. I expect they’ve all been vandalised and used as urinals.

But it’s a nasty thing to force that sort of drug on your unsuspecting guests disguised as cake.

I went back downstairs, determined on sobering James up enough to drive me home, and found him still slumped on the sofa next to Alice. I went looking for the kitchen to make some coffee, but it was disgustingly filthy, with what looked like years’ worth of unwashed dishes piled in the sink. There were only candles in here too, and I discovered that the electricity was off when I tried to plug the kettle in.

He would probably have caught typhoid or hepatitis from the cup anyway (though that would have served him right).

So I gave up the coffee idea and shook him awake. He was very reluctant to leave, but when I looked at my watch it was a quarter to three. I seemed to have lost about three hours somewhere.

I wanted to call a taxi, but as usual he insisted that he was perfectly all right, the idiot. Another occasion when I wished that I could drive.

We were silent until halfway home, when I remembered something. ‘There was a peculiar blonde girl there tonight, James – staring at me.’

The car wavered. ‘What? Blonde girl? Staring at you?’ parroted James. ‘When? Where? What do you mean?’

‘At the party. I’d fallen asleep – that awful cake I expect – and when I opened my eyes there was this girl glaring at me.’

‘You dreamed it.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Oh, come on, Tish! You’re imagining it. Or – I know – maybe it was Alice’s sister trying to find her in the dark. She’s blonde, though I didn’t think she was there tonight.’

‘Alice’s sister?’

‘Her younger sister, Wendy. She’s a fashion student, so she lives with them during the week. I expect she’s been helping Alice with the new baby.’

‘I suppose you could be right,’ I conceded slowly. After that cake it was a bit hard dividing the real from the imagined. ‘Do you think you could slow down a bit?’

His driving had become even more erratic than when we started out, if that was possible, and I felt queasy again.

‘I’m not driving fast!’ he protested, but ten miles an hour would be too fast when you’ve drunk that much.

This is it: I’m never going to be a passenger in the car when James has had a drink again. If I can’t persuade him not to drink and drive, I can at least not be a party to it.

The Bourgeois Bitch had left a great steaming Welcome Home gift in the hall from sheer pique at being left behind. James stepped straight over it and carried on upstairs, saying he had to go to work in the morning and it was very late.

Dealing with that didn’t make me feel any better, but afterwards, when I’d cleared up and let the silly bitch into the garden, propitiated Toby with a biscuit, and disinfected my hands – then I sat for a while in my lovely clean kitchen, drinking coffee out of a clean porcelain mug, feeling better at last.

But I’m never going to one of Howard’s parties again!

Fergal: July 1999

    
‘BAND ON THE RUN:

    
Goneril take the plunge with naked Nordic blondes’

Exposé
magazine

I absolve Hywel from this one. We all wanted to try the sauna/jumping in the icy lake bit after our gig in Stockholm, and someone set the girls on to us.

As they streamed naked into the sauna we all bolted for the lake and jumped in, and they followed us.

I have this affinity for water …

‘What the hell do we do now?’ Carlo yelled, surfacing next to me like a wet seal.

‘Try and rise to the occasion?’ I suggested, treading water.

The boys have got some explaining to do to their wives/girlfriends. The camera doesn’t exactly lie, but it can certainly be manipulated to show a parallel universe.

Nordic Blondes – what every swimmer is wearing this year.

I think I’m managing to shake off the tummy bug at last. My diet should certainly be healthy enough, with all this stuff Bob produces in the garden. He seems to have gone overboard with lettuce: we’ve had lettuce soup, braised lettuce, and salad, salad, salad. I wonder if you can make lettuce wine?

James hates salad (and anything else remotely good for him), and I’ve sent Margaret so much lettuce via Ray that she is probably sick of it too.

(Ray and James have had T-shirts printed with the slogan: ‘
NUTTHILL HAMS.
’ How can they be seen like that?)

Then I had a brain wave and sent Bob with a note asking Mrs Peach if she’d like the excess lettuce for her rabbits, and she returned it with ‘many thanks – will reciprocate in kind later’ written on the bottom.

Does this mean she’s going to give me her excess vegetables? I didn’t think she grew much.

Bob was quite amenable to all this trotting to and fro with messages. Bob, in fact, is amenable to most things, although he has very stubborn notions about what he’s going to grow in
my
garden. We have an unspoken agreement about produce: he divides everything ripe into two portions and takes one lot home after presenting me with the other.

So as not to hurt his feelings I frequently have to sneak down and feed excess vegetables to the cows at dusk over the garden fence, which is what I was doing this evening when my Lurid Past came striding out of the small spinney in the park towards me.

He was wearing a dull green chambray shirt and black jeans, and for once his long black hair was not pulled tightly back into a ponytail, but loose and blowing about his angular face. He looked like an updated Red Indian Brave, and from his scowl when he caught sight of me I wasn’t sure if he was going to take my scalp or just sheer off.

Guiltily I hid the lettuce behind my back. Stupid, really – the cows all had stalks dangling from their mouths, which was a dead giveaway.

‘So that’s why they nearly had that old fence over!’ he remarked coolly, coming to a stop before me with his hands thrust into his jeans pockets.

‘I’ve only just started doing it,’ I said, thrown on to the defensive. ‘Bob produces so much stuff that I don’t know what else to do with it.’

Black brows twitched together in a frown: ‘Who’s Bob? The husband?’

‘No, that’s James. Bob does some gardening for me.’

‘Why doesn’t James do it?’

‘He’s too – too busy. And I don’t know what business it is of yours, anyway.’

‘I’m told he’s a radio ham. That where his stuff is?’ He nodded over to the Shack.

‘You’re very well informed!’

‘I’ve furthered my acquaintance with the excellent Mrs Deakin, Proprietoress of the Nutthill Home Stores.’

All was revealed, then – or if it wasn’t, it very soon would be.

‘Poor Mrs D. was getting terribly frustrated at not being able to find out anything about you,’ I told him.

A smile softened his mouth and radiated little lines around his eyes that I hadn’t noticed before. He was older, of course … we were both older. But he had rather more years of hard living under his (admittedly narrow) belt than I did.

‘The vicar told me she was the local
Enquire Within Upon Everything
, so I asked her about cleaning ladies. I now know large amounts of information about all sorts of local people – including you.’

‘Oh –
us
!’ I said brightly. ‘There’s not a lot to tell about us.’ Surely even Mrs Deakin can’t know what is happening under the skin of my Idyllic Marriage? ‘We planned to move to the country ever since we got married, so living here is just a dream come true.’

‘Really?’

I met those cool, clever, jade-green eyes and looked hastily away.

‘Strange then, that I got the feeling in London that you weren’t entirely happy. A little – desperate, even. But then, we didn’t really have a chance to talk, did we, Angel?’

I went so hot my skin sizzled. ‘No, I don’t think we talked at all, because it must have been obvious that I’d had so much to drink I didn’t know what I was doing!’

‘On the contrary, you seemed to know
exactly
what you were doing. And I didn’t think you’d had that much to drink.
I
only intended killing an hour or two before my flight by having a little chat with you about old times, I wasn’t expecting to have to re-enact them.’

I clenched my fists and glared at him in impotent, red-faced fury.

‘And you did speak to me, you know – mostly short sentences like, “Yes, oh
yes
, Fergal,” that kind of thing.’

‘I didn’t! And if you were a gentleman, you’d never mention a sordid episode that I deeply regret.’

‘How Victorian of you,’ he mocked. ‘Do I take it you haven’t confessed all to James yet?’

‘There’s no reason why I should risk harming my very happy marriage by confessing to doing something so stupid as getting drunk and letting myself be seduced by you!’ I snarled.

‘Ah, yes, your blissfully happy rural idyll. And as a bonus to all that, you’re a romantic novelist, I hear.’

‘A very successful one.’

‘Everything in the garden is lovely, then,’ the husky voice said lightly.

‘Yes, perfect.’ Ungraciously I added, ‘And thank you for the fence – it’s much nicer than the old one.’

‘Don’t mention it. Well, I’d better get back.’

‘To Nerissa, wasn’t it?’ (Unless he’d traded her in for a new model.)

‘Yes, Nerissa …’ he said thoughtfully. ‘And you’d better get back to your James.’

‘Oh, he won’t be home yet.’

‘Well, someone’s glaring at me from the window. Or is that his normal expression?’

My heart sank as I turned. James was indeed home and, instead of coming out to be introduced, was glowering like a schoolboy through the casement.

‘He – didn’t like that picture of us at the fête in the local paper,’ I explained lamely.

‘Funny, Nerissa wasn’t too keen either. But the photographer deserves a prize for producing something out of nothing, don’t you think?’

‘Let’s hope it hasn’t been syndicated for worldwide publication!’ I snapped.

‘It wouldn’t do me any harm, but your husband might not feel the same.’

‘Oh, James quite understands, now I’ve explained it all.’

‘Not
quite
all, I take it.’

‘I’ve told him any interest I ever had in you vanished permanently a long time ago. What did you tell your girlfriend?’

‘Much the same.’

I became very conscious of James’s eyes on my back and wished he wouldn’t behave like such a prat.

‘It’s unfortunate that we should end up as neighbours again,’ I said, ‘but these coincidences do happen, and we’ll just have to behave in a civilised manner.’

‘Never mind, Tish, I don’t suppose our paths will cross much.’

‘No … Are your family well?’

‘Fine. Mother had little Bianca after we moved, and Dad has now got six restaurants and is busier than ever. Lucia is married – three children – and it would take for ever to tell you what the rest are up to. Carlo, of course, is still in the band, but he’s more interested now in the production side.’

I remembered Lucia and Carlo, of course, but Bianca was a surprise. His voice had softened when he said the little girl’s name: he’d always shown a very Italian love of babies and small children, which might have astonished his fans.