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Authors: Virginia Budd

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BOOK: A Change of Pace
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Oh God! Why
did
he have to make her giggle? Odd how she’d never connected sex with laughter before. She became aware she was still clutching the bag of wine. ‘But Simon, what shall I do with this?’

‘Put it down on the grass, my love, first things first. Don’t worry, we’ll come to the wine later. Meanwhile ... ’

Much later — it could have been a minute, an hour or even a century — Bet, lying on her back on the warm, damp grass, heard someone cry out. Such a strange, triumphant, happy, mournful cry. Then she felt the tears on her face, Simon’s warm wetness between her legs, his limp body on her own, and knew that it was her voice that had cried out. Somewhere quite close she could hear a blackbird singing, far away the drone of a tractor. She wanted to sleep; despite the dampness, it was deliciously warm in the bed Simon had made for them in the angle of the Old Minster walls. But she mustn’t sleep, there wasn’t time to sleep, normality must somehow be restored. But how could normality be restored when one was lying on one’s back in a fifteen-hundred-year-old church with a comparative stranger on top of one, and when one had experienced something so ... so ...

Simon stirred, rolled off her and sat up, shaking himself like a dog coming out of water. Absurdly, with the memory of their love-making still everywhere around her — it would be gone soon, she knew, like a dream one tries to retain after waking but never can — Bet found herself trying to think of something to say. In the end, all she could come up with was that she wondered what she’d done with her sweater. Simon sat up, found his and pulled it over his head. ‘You’re not angry with me, are you?’ The words came muffled from inside the sweater.

‘Of course not, why ever should I be?’ she said, surprised that he should ask — this was returning to normality with a vengeance.

‘That’s all right, then. I only wondered. You see, sometimes — ’

‘Sometimes what?’ Jealousy, unbidden, prickled somewhere deep down in her intestines.

‘Sometimes after making love people get angry. Sad too — have you never heard of post-coital blues? There’s a school of thought that says, the better the sex, the sadder or angrier the participants become when it’s over. I suppose the reasoning behind it is that just to nip out and clean the car, or pop on your rubber gloves and do the washing-up, is rather too much of a jolt to the system after all that sublime exercise, so you burst into storms of tears or have a blazing row instead.’

‘Oh,’ she said, wondering about herself and Miles. She had to admit that what rows they had were usually after sex, at least in their early days. ‘If that’s the case, what about you?’

‘Me?’ There was a pause while he found his packet of cigarettes somewhere under her left leg. ‘Me, I simply try to please. And if you go on looking at me like that, Mrs Brandon, we’ll never get any lunch, which would be a shame after all the trouble we took over those Marmite sandwiches.’

After lunch in a patch of sunlight at the edge of the clearing, languorous with wine, they made love again, but this time it was a gentle, sleepy thing; no angst, no urgency, no crying out. And afterwards, with Simon asleep and Bet beside him with her head on his shoulder, she felt she never wanted to think about anything again; just to exist, to be aware of the tingling of her re-awakened body, the sun on her face, was enough. Of course, such a state of things had to come to an end, she knew that, and all too soon it did. The sun, perversely, went behind a cloud, Simon woke up and looked at his watch, and it was time for them to go.

They drove home sleepily through the late afternoon sunshine, chatting desultorily of this and that, and it seemed to Bet that although what had happened at the Old Minster wasn’t mentioned between them, it didn’t matter, for on the whole they were at peace with each other. She wasn’t absolutely sure of this, had to admit to a small, niggling doubt, but on the whole she thought they were. He did say at one point, giving her a quick sideways glance, ‘That was your first time, wasn’t it? I mean, you never had a lover while —’

‘As it happens, no,’ she said, feeling rather ashamed that she hadn’t, ‘there never seemed to be the time.’ This made him laugh, although she hadn’t intended it to, but since his laughter somehow managed to dispel the tiny spiral of tension that had unaccountably risen between them, she was glad it did. He leaned over and kissed her on the top of her head. ‘You ain’t ‘alf a caution, Mrs Brandon, as our old nanny used to say. Who needs time, for God’s sake.’

Back at Hopton, it was raining, and by the look of it had been raining all day. In the yard, horrendously, was the Sparsworth Volvo; they must have come home early because of the weather. ‘Oh my God, Simon, what am I going to do now? They shouldn’t be home for hours yet.’

‘There’s no need to panic, for a start. Why shouldn’t they be back, poor things, if it’s been raining like this at Felixstowe I don’t blame them. I —’

‘There you are, you naughty minx! Flu, my arse — if you’ll pardon the expression. Why don’t you bring the boyfriend in for a cuppa? I’ll pop the kettle on, it won’t take a jiffy.’ Reg, grinning like a horse-collar, was waving a tea-towel out of the kitchen window. Rain was pouring down, the dog was barking ...

‘Simon,
please
come in with me, you must — I simply can’t face them all on my own.’

‘Oh, don’t be such a baby, of course you can.’ Simon was laughing so much he could barely speak, only splutter and hold on to the steering-wheel. At any other time she would have thought it funny too. ‘Look, I’d love to join the sar’-major for a brew-up, but you see I promised old Cyn I’d be back by six.’

‘You bastard, you cowardly, feeble, traitorous bastard!’ ‘Don’t forget your picnic basket, and let me know about the wine, I don’t want you to get into trouble —’

‘Bugger the wine!’ Bet snatched the picnic basket and slammed the car door as hard as she could. ‘A bientot.’ Simon, still laughing, gave a quick thumbs-up sign to, the goggling Reg, blew Bet a kiss and roared out of the yard. Seething, she watched him go.

‘Come on in out of the rain, dear,’ said Reg from the shelter of the back door, ‘you look worse than I feel ... ’

 

 

Chapter Nine

 

‘We would like to have stayed an extra day, dear, we really would’ — Maureen whisking through the washing-up next morning, her pink rubber gloves a blur in the foaming, fairy liquid — ‘but Reg has this meeting tonight. He must be there, he says; if he isn’t, they might do something he wouldn’t like.’

So would I if I were them. ‘I do understand, Maureen, I’m only sorry you couldn’t have seen Diz — but perhaps another time.’

‘Come along now, girls, no yacking! We must be on the road in half an hour. I want to get away a bit early, I promised I’d pop in at Sid Kettle’s garage on the way and give him that address.’ (Lucky old Sid Kettle).

To Bet’s surprise Reg had appeared to accept her explanation of the previous day’s change of plan — she’d suddenly felt better, the sun had come out, Simon had appeared unexpectedly — entirely at its face value. ‘Had a picnic, then, did you, you and young what’s-his-name?’

‘Simon Morris, actually. Yes, it was so nice and sunny by that time, we thought ... why not?’

‘Bloody cold on the beach,’ he’d said, forgetting to pardon the expression. But ‘Picnic, my arse’, he’d confided to Maureen in the privacy of the spare bedroom, ‘that’s not what I’d call it.’

In fact Bet’s arrival home at the end of that extraordinary afternoon had turned out to be something of an anticlimax. It reminded her of her first weekend at her parents’ house after losing her virginity — she and Miles thrashing about on the lumpy old divan in that bedsitter she had in Chelsea Manor Street; the gas fire had run out halfway through, and Miles, naked, stubbed his toe quite badly in the dark trying to find a sixpence to put in the meter. Proud of her newfound womanhood — amazingly, she had thought like that in those days — she was sure her mother would notice the change in her at once; an extra glow perhaps, a certain languor. Didn’t mums always know? But this mum hadn’t, she’d just carried on as normal, and Bet, although relieved, had also been a little disappointed. And now it was the same. Ludicrous, when one came to think of it — did one ever grow up?

The Sparsworths left at last, the junior branch having departed for work a couple of hours before. Maureen waved tearfully out of the Volvo window and Reg kissed her goodbye, his moustache tickling her nose and making her want to sneeze. ‘Mind how you go then, girl, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ he whispered, giving her bottom a friendly pinch and looking at her a little too searchingly for comfort. Bet yawned and smiled and yawned again, and prayed for them to hurry up and go, and for the phone to ring. She’d slept little the previous night; really, in fact, she had simply lain in bed waiting for it to be time to get up.

Perversely, however, the utter silence that followed their departure was almost uncanny; she’d never known the place so quiet. She would have liked the radio, but if she were upstairs sorting out the Sparsworth bedroom — not that there was anything to sort out, Maureen had seen to that, even put her and Reg’s sheets ready for washing in the machine — she might not hear the telephone. She looked at her watch, she’d been looking at it ever since nine o’clock — so what? Eleven-thirty. Surely Simon should have rung by now? Perhaps he’d been unable to get through; perhaps their phone was out of order. It had been on the blink, now she came to think of it, for weeks. She hurried into the hall and picked up the receiver, only to be met with the dialling tone buzzing mockingly in her ear. ‘I’m ready and waiting,’ it seemed to say, ‘if people don’t want to use me that’s their look-out.’

When it did finally make up its mind to ring, about half an hour later, she only just heard it above the Hoover. She was upstairs, giving Diz’s bedroom a going-over. Quite unnecessary, and he’d be furious if she moved any of his things, but one had to do something. She tore downstairs, mouth dry, heart beating, tripped over Tib who’d placed himself strategically at the bottom for that very purpose, sprinted across the hall minus a shoe, only to discover it wasn’t Simon at all. It wasn’t even Pete, but some dim-witted girl selling double-glazing.

After that, she knew with the absolute certainty born of despair that Simon wasn’t going to ring. To be honest, he hadn’t actually said he would, indeed he had arranged no further meeting. But what with Reg butting in when they got back yesterday, and all that rain, he never really had a chance to. That was why she had been so sure he would ring this morning. She had been so sure that during the course of her long, sleepless night she had rehearsed — using, she now realised in the cold light of day, every cliché in the book — what she would say to him when he did. How she felt they should go carefully before making any decision about the future, how she had been so unprepared for what happened that she had had no time to assess her feelings, and no doubt he hadn’t either. And so on and so on. Make a decision about the future — was she mad? They were nowhere near that stage yet, quite possibly never would be. Simon, she was sure, was the last person to spend his time making decisions about the future, Simon ...

Simon is a person who plays games with people.

Unbidden the words jumped into her head from nowhere — and were immediately repudiated. What did she know of people who played games with people? Mercifully, in her so far protected and uneventful life — and she was beginning to realise just how protected and uneventful her life had been — nothing; she had never encountered such people. Read about them, yes, heard about them, yes. If Miles were to be believed, the Civil Service was absolutely jam-packed with them. But she herself had never known one. To be the object of such people’s games, though, one surely must be involved, quite deeply involved, with them before their games could work? And she wasn’t deeply involved with Simon — well, not yet, not exactly. There was, however, no earthly point in denying that she was most terribly attracted by him, and found him funny, intriguing and good company to boot. And wanted to see him again, wanted that very much indeed. But above all, she wanted some sort of reassurance from him that the step she’d taken yesterday at the Old Minster — for her so great, for him possibly no more than routine — had been the right step; hurting no one, betraying no one, not even Miles.

And there, of course, was the crunch. Still standing by the telephone, she extracted a cigarette from the packet in her trouser pocket, lit it, and willed herself to think about Miles. She’d tried to think about him last night; bring him back to her, however briefly, in the way she had been able to since within a few weeks of his death; but she had failed miserably. She’d been too tired, too tense, and perhaps she hadn’t really wanted to face up to him anyway. But today was different, today she knew that she must. She shut her eyes and thought about Miles so hard it hurt. What would he feel about Simon? Would he feel betrayed? That she’d cheapened the memory of their marriage by allowing, indeed wanting, another man to make love to her so soon? A man so different to himself, a man who ...

‘Darling, for heaven’s sake who d’you think I am? If you’re going to spend the rest of your life racked with guilt every time you look at another man, let’s face it, it’s not going to be much of a life, is it?’ Outside in the garden a pair of magpies hooked worms from a patch of grass under the hall window; Bet watched them through the smoke of her cigarette, a watery smile on her face. Miles’s presence was all round her now; his special brand of common sense, slightly acerbic humour and love washing over her in a warm, comforting stream, revitalising her as it had done so often during their life together.

He was right, as always. Of course there was no need for her to feel guilty. And if feeling guilty was making her behave like a jilted teenager, it was high time she stopped feeling guilty. All this rubbish about people playing games with one another — pure paranoia! There were no doubt a hundred perfectly good reasons why Simon hadn’t rung, and if she was so desperate to make contact, why not ring him? She thought about this for a moment and then decided not to. She didn’t, for a start, know Smike McGregor’s number, and Simon probably wouldn’t want her to ring him at work anyway — Miles hated to be rung at work — and besides, what on earth would she say? OK then, she wouldn’t ring him, at least that was settled.

But it was about the only thing that was settled, and she was still left with this overpowering urge to do
something
— issue a statement to the Press, publish a poem, make a speech, scream — anything but just fiddle around with the Hoover waiting for the bloody phone to ring. It was then, just as the two magpies flew away in a sudden noisy blur of black and white, to be replaced by a rather tatty sparrow, that the idea came to her.

She would give a party!

Why not, and what could be simpler? After all, she did owe several people hospitality, including Cyn Westover. She could ring the Manor, issue a verbal invitation casually including Simon, and
voila
. Simon would naturally accept — well, if he didn’t at least she would know where she stood — and everything would then be out in the open with no more of this absurd hole-and-corner stuff. What’s more, he and the children would be able to meet properly, and who knew, once they got to know him better they might even come to like him. In fact the possibilities of the whole idea was absolutely boundless ...

What about trying for next Saturday? It would have to be at a weekend, and the sooner the better. Bernie could organise the drink, Nell would at last have a chance to make those wretched tuna fish vol-au-vents she was always on about, Diz could ... Seething with plans and excitement, she finished the first cigarette, lit a second and decided to ring the Manor there and then, before she lost her nerve.

“Allo, ‘Opton eight-four-nine?’ Oh God, bloody Alfonso! She’d forgotten about Alfonso. ‘Yo ablo Senorita Westover, por favor?’ She’d gone to evening classes in Spanish one winter at the City Lit’, thinking it would be useful on holiday. Somehow it hadn’t been, no one ever seemed to understand what she was saying. The silence at the other end of the line was deafening. Then a click and a different voice. ‘Yes?’

‘Oh ... Miss Westover, it’s you. Betty Brandon here.’

‘And what can I do for you, Mrs Brandon?’ She hated people who said that, there wasn’t really any proper answer one could give; anyway, it made one feel small. ‘Well, actually I was wondering whether you would like to drop in for a drink on Saturday evening, and ... and do of course bring anyone who might be staying.’

‘Adore to, my dear, and most kind of you to suggest it, but afraid no can do. I’m off to the States on Thursday for three weeks. Si could probably make it, I’ll ask him. He’s gone back to London, but he’ll be down while I’m away, he’s promised to caretake. He’s taking some time off work — whether off his own bat or Smike McGregor’s one doesn’t enquire. Says he’s going to make a start on his book, but as he’s been going to do that for more years that I like to remember, I have my doubts. Anyway, even if he does actually get down to it, I’m sure he could take a break and come to your party. He did so enjoy taking you to the Old Minster yesterday — splendid spot, isn’t it? Look, my dear, must fly. I’ve a host of things to do before Thursday. ‘Bye.’

Bet, feeling sick, sat down on an adjacent chair. So Simon had told his precious cousin about their love-making, had he. No doubt they’d enjoyed a good laugh together, discussed the whole thing in detail. Don’t be absurd, Brandon, you’re being paranoid again. Of course they didn’t discuss it in detail, why ever should they. She swallowed, trying, not wholly successfully, to regain her earlier confidence — and Tib, seeing the state she was in, jumped on her knee and licked her face. She kissed the top of his head and sat there fondling his ears, wondering what to do next. Well, if she really intended to give a party — and it seemed she was committed to do just that —she’d better pull herself together and invite a few people. Now, what about Old Monty Cornwall ... ?

*

The guest list, when completed, was, to say the least, unimpressive. Desperate, she’d been reduced to asking the vicar and his wife. Yes, he and Angela would be delighted, he’d shouted down the phone and Bet, surprised at his enthusiasm, added the Snatelys’ name to her list. It was only afterwards she wondered if he had thought her someone else. He was known to be rather deaf ...

And of course Ron and Emmie Stokes. She’d first met Ron Stokes, a tall, elderly, skeletally thin man with a suspect smile, who wore sandals all the year round and never drew breath, when he appeared in the vegetable garden one afternoon with a petition. Developers, he said, were seeking the Council’s permission to build on Church Green and must, at all costs, be prevented. He was sure she would agree; he only had to look at her, he said; to know she was one of us; he knew these things, people had an aura. Bet, in her wellies, mud on her nose, sowing broad beans in the damp, clay soil — like trying to plant currants in uncooked chocolate sponge — had not wanted to talk to anyone, let alone Ron Stokes. Smiling too eagerly because she felt guilty, she said, ‘How awful, of course I’ll sign, Mr — ?’

‘Oh, call me Ron, everyone does.’ Much cheery laughter on Ron’s part when a gust of wind blew the petition out of his hand and Tib stood on it. ‘I’m not afraid of a peck of healthy mud, my dear, and I’ll wager you aren’t either.’ His little eyes flickered down the front of her tweed jacket — the ancient one with the tear in the elbow which Diz said made her look like Worzel Gummidge — and rested meditatively on the curve of her breasts. ‘Come to tea, my dear, drop in at any time, my wife Emmie and I keep open house. It must be lonely for you here.’

Luckily she was saved by the phone. ‘I’ll have to dash, I’m afraid, my sister from London — she’ll talk for hours, she always does ... ’ She wasn’t, however, saved from tea, Emmie Stokes saw to that. She rang the very next morning. ‘My hubby was so delighted to meet a kindred spirit, Mrs Brandon, it quite made his day. He gets a little lonely sometimes, Hopton’s so different to Singapore — that’s where we used to live. Our bungalow is opposite Kettle’s garage — The Haven — you can’t miss it.’

BOOK: A Change of Pace
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