Muddy Waters (34 page)

Adrian fidgeted uncomfortably, feeling the eyes of all the women turning on him in moral judgement. All except Abigail, he suddenly thought, she didn't go in for moral anything. ‘Well, I haven't seen it, yet,' he shrugged. ‘I mean, Bernard is fairly renowned and all that,' he said feebly, ‘I expect it's perfectly above board . . .'

‘No, it isn't,' Ruth said quietly. ‘But it's my choice, I haven't been exploited or used. I wanted him to paint me, it felt like an honour. I wanted him to make love to me too,' she admitted, looking across at Abigail as if drawing courage. ‘And he did,' she added simply, her brave face blazing with spots of pink colour.

‘It's not that,' Stella said more quietly, ‘it's just the pose. If he'd asked you to be photographed like that you'd have given him a sharp lecture on feminism. But you'd do it for a painting,' she sighed, puzzling to find a viable difference and wondering how much of a philistine she was for failing. The painting hadn't been on view the day before when she'd visited the gallery, she recalled. Perhaps even cowardly Bernard had thought it better to keep it away from the general neighbourly preview.

‘It's just that she's your daughter,' Abigail contributed.

‘Well yes, Abigail, I think that it probably is. But only partly. Thank you for reminding me of that,' Stella fumed.

‘Why don't we just go and get some lunch at Ellen's and talk about this later?' Adrian suggested, feeling a change of venue and a degree of levity was called for. Stella glared but everyone else immediately headed for the door, causing a sudden crush. Abigail squeezed past him, and Adrian could feel Stella watching as she slid her breasts across the front of his sweatshirt. Involuntarily his hand came up to brush at the fabric as if she'd left a trail, sticky like a snail over carpet.

‘I'll stay and do the selling,' Melissa told Ruth, looking relieved at the prospect of being left alone.

The MacIvers' garden was full of island residents who'd either sold out of stock or given up for the day. Empty bottles sat among the begonias and salvias. Venetia and James sat tormenting Ellen's aged tortoise, trying to get it to race between them for dandelion leaves. Toby was sprawled on the MacIver's lawn with his eyes closed, one hand on Giuliana's golden thigh and the other clutching a can of beer.

‘He looks like he's gone to heaven,' Abigail commented to Stella. Stella felt like a child having difficulty coming out of a severe sulk. Perhaps she had over-reacted to thd painting of Ruth. It wasn't that it was
recognizably
her. She wasn't feeling ‘what will the neighbours say' about it at all.

‘Giuliana's a beautiful girl,' she agreed. ‘Well,
woman
really, isn't she?'

‘Oh, she's not that much older than him,' Abigail commented, making the contrary Stella feel that she was being humoured.

Adrian headed quickly for the barbecue, collected food for all of them and went to join Toby and Giuliana. He had a basic parental certainty that they'd all feel better when they'd eaten something. And drunk something too, he decided, swiftly dashing into Ellen's kitchen and stealing a bottle of Chardonnay from the ice-filled coolbox under the table. Stella sat on the lawn next to her son and gazed out at the river. She could hear the gentle tinkle of Enzo's wind chimes. The afternoon should have been idylic.

‘It'll be much better when you're in Sussex,' Abigail suddenly announced to Stella as Adrian returned with the opened bottle. ‘I'll give you the key now, shall I?' She fumbled in her bag and pulled out a bunch of keys, disconnecting the one for her car and handing all the others to Stella. ‘I'm keeping the car,' she said with a grin, looking around at them all, ‘I hope that's all right.'

‘Why do I need the keys to your house?' Stella asked, mystified, and offering them back to Abigail.

Abigail laughed and pushed Stella's hand away again, ‘To get in, of course! Take it, the whole place is yours, just like we said!'

‘
Said
? Said what? When?' Stella trawled her memory to see if she'd agreed to house-sit or something, but nothing came to the surface. Perhaps Abigail had booked a sudden holiday for herself and the children.

‘Oh, you remember,' Abigail was laughing, her hand on Adrian's arm, ‘I asked you if you could live in my house and you said yes. So you can. It's simple.'

‘I like it here,' Adrian said.

‘But you're staying here of course, darling,'

‘Darling?' Stella questioned, eyes widening. Something told her that Abigail wasn't using the word in the theatrical sense. Across the garden, Venetia was holding the tortoise too high. Tortoises were heavy things, she thought, it was going to be dropped, and hurt.

‘
Yes
,' Abigail insisted. ‘I would have thought it was no problem for people like you. Artists. Living here,' she waved her arm round, imperiously including the whole population of the island, ‘swopping round, change of partners, all that. I told you ages ago I should have settled for what you'd got. And now I can. But
you
,' she pointed a spiky finger at Stella, ‘you get what I've got. So it's all right, isn't it?'

‘No,' Adrian and Stella spoke together. Stella looked at him sharply, trying, like someone who suspects they're being short-changed in a smart shop, to do some complicating adding up. However she added the one and one, it didn't come to three.

She resorted to straight questioning, the only possible way, ‘Are you telling me that you and Adrian are having an affair?' she asked incredulously, lateral thinking taking her to the only possible, though unlikely conclusion.

‘Yes,' Abigail confirmed.

‘No,' Adrian denied.

‘Well, which is it?' Stella sipped her wine, spilling some down her chin as her hand trembled. Toby got up quietly and wandered away. Stella watched him detachedly. He looked like just any man walking across a garden, avoiding some truth he'd rather not hear.

‘He asked me to marry him,' Abigail explained, leaning forward in a confiding sort of way. For a second, still watching, Stella thought she meant Toby.

Adrian laughed suddenly, loud and raucous with relief. ‘Oh
that
,' he yelled, ‘
that
was twenty years ago! I'm pretty sure I asked every woman I ever slept with to marry me in those days.' He turned to Stella and topped up her glass with wine, ‘Gratitude, probably.'

‘Sorry,' he then said, looking suddenly terribly young and penitent, ‘you didn't know I'd slept with Abigail, did you?'

Stella smiled coolly, ‘I assumed you had,' she lied in an attempt to keep some kind of dignity. ‘After all, she'd slept with everyone else, why leave you out? It would have been insulting.'

‘But then there was the next time. It was just the same, same place, same sort of time of year, same everything really,' Abigail said, her eyes wide, marvelling at the coincidence. Stella thought she sounded as if she was describing a return visit to a monument. ‘At Chameleon, you know, week before last,' Abigail prompted, looking to Adrian for confirmation.

‘Oh fuck,' Adrian said, staring at the grass.

‘Fuck's the word,' Stella agreed.

‘Well not quite, not all round,' Abigail laughed mockingly, ‘I mean, you didn't
quite
go to bed with that Simon you picked up at the hotel, did you,
Samantha
? I expect you will with the next one.'

‘Who the hell's Samantha?' Adrian asked.

‘Your oh-so-saintly wife, of course, who's always fancied a bit of the wild life on the sly, just like mine. And now she's got the chance. I'm beginning to think you two hardly know each other at all.'

Stella stood up, surprised that she still could. ‘Look, I'm going home. To
my
home, the one down the lane. When you two have decided what you both want, do come and let me know.'

She walked out of the MacIvers' garden, passing Peggy and Ted on the way, pushing another over-loaded trolley between them. A straggle of curious town visitors followed them, animatedly discussing art as a whole-life experience. Stella's feet, on the ground, felt like sponges full of water, heavy and hampered as they walked. At the gate, too shattered to go in and face possessions, furniture, sitting there just as if nothing had changed, she turned away and walked down the garden to Peggy's barge and clambered aboard. Ruth was there, down in the cabin surrounded by bin-liners and holding a duster. An unusual sight, Stella registered.

‘This is all mine now,' Ruth explained, grinning hugely. ‘Peggy's given me the barge. She says it would make a good studio and that we all need our own space. She says there's more than enough of it in Cornwall so she and Ted are going there to live.'

Stella smiled, ‘That's lovely for her. And for you, of course. At least you won't have to go to Sussex.' She felt dangerously close to tears.

‘God no, why? Who
does
have to go?'

Stella slumped down on the nearest bin bag and leaned on the wall, exhausted. ‘Oh no one. Well Abigail, as soon as I can get her out of the house.' With or without your father, she added mentally. There was no point loading it all onto Ruth, she knew. Grownups' problems, to teenagers, were for magazine columns that weren't like ‘Go Ask Alice'. They were something middle-aged and only slightly salacious in the back pages of sensible magazines, turned to in boredom in a supermarket queue.

Adrian drove to the airport, Abigail beside him, this bit of sorting out, for now, done. In the back of the car, Venetia and James jabbered excitedly about Concorde and their daddy. Abigail said nothing but sat looking contrite. ‘It's all gone pear-shaped,' had been the last thing she'd said in the MacIvers' garden, which he'd assumed had been an admission of defeat. She hadn't uttered a word since. Even her hair was starting to droop.
She'd
never be pear-shaped, he was appalled to catch himself thinking, even now, as he drove her as fast as was legal out of the town. It had taken only three phone calls, he thought proudly, wondering where in his idle brain such organizational skills had been kept. Just three phone calls and he'd found Martin, persuaded him to accept the return of his wife and children and booked their immediate flight to New York. He didn't trust Abigail to a taxi. She, in her strangely deluded state, might just have gone round the block a couple of times and come striding back in to claim him. Even now, and he glanced at her nervously, she might be under some mad impression that he was running away to the States with her. Martin would sort her out, he thought with optimism, as the car turned off the M4. That's what husbands were for. And after he'd checked Abigail and the children safely into the Concorde lounge, he'd go home to Stella (‘Samantha' he thought with a tingle of excitement) and she could sort the two of
them
out. That was what wives who happened to be agony aunts were for, too.

The house was calm and empty now Adrian and Abigail had gone. Nothing of Abigail's remained at the house except a faint scent of perfume and the little cat curled up comfortably on its cushion in the kitchen. ‘You can stay here if you like,' Stella told it, stroking its translucent ears. ‘With me. Possibly even with
us
– we'll just have to see what happens.'

While she waited for Adrian to come back, Stella looked through the bag of problem post that had arrived that morning from
Get This!
, distracting herself with other people's problems. She wasn't too surprised when she picked the letter out and read its angst-filled confession about having a quick fling with ‘my girlfriend's best friend'. Adrian had even used the same distinctive cream paper he used for his manuscripts and his hopeless lack of subtlety made her smile. The letter, just like the hundreds of similar ones she got, was full of too-late remorse, rueful regret. I should bloody well think so, Stella murmured, reaching across to the dresser for a pen. Next week's star letter, I think, she decided, beginning on the back of it to sketch out the reply she'd give.

‘Well, for a start, she's not much of a friend, is she . . .' she wrote.

Judy Astley was frequently told off for day-dreaming at her drearily traditional school but has found it to be the ideal training for becoming a writer. There were several false starts to her career: secretary at an all-male Oxford college (sacked for undisclosable reasons), at an airline (decided, after a crash and a hijacking, that she was safer elsewhere) and as a dress designer (quit before anyone noticed she was adapting
Vogue
patterns). She spent some years as a parent and as a painter before sensing that the day was approaching when she'd have to go out and get a Proper Job. With a nagging certainty that she was temperamentally unemployable, and desperate to avoid office coffee, having to wear tights every day and missing out on sunny days on Cornish beaches with her daughters, she wrote her first novel,
Just For The Summer
. She has now had eight novels published by Black Swan.

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MUDDY WATERS

A BLACK SWAN BOOK : 0 552 99630 0
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN: 9781446487488

First publication in Great Britain

Black Swan edition published 1997

5 7 9 10 8 6

Copyright © Judy Astley 1997

The right of Judy Astley to be identified as author of this