A Surrey State of Affairs (24 page)

When I went on Facebook, I saw that Bridget had joined a group called “I don’t give a s
^*
*
*
about footballers’ wedding.” Though I disapprove of the language, the underlying sentiment was sound, so I joined anyway.

  
TUESDAY, MAY 13

The Surrey Psychic just called to check the details for Friday, when Ruth and David will finally be brought together. I felt like telling her that if she were really psychic she wouldn’t need to ask for my address, but once again I bit my tongue.

  
WEDNESDAY, MAY 14

Everyone seemed to be getting used to the new safety gear at bell ringing last night; even Miss Hughes jammed on the helmet without complaining. Incongruously, Gerald already had a large yellow bruise around his left eye. Perhaps he was set upon by hoodlums on his way home from the tea shop. Nothing would surprise me these days. Miss Hughes was strangely silent, however, and failed to exude any sympathy whatsoever toward the poor man. This does not bode well for their fledgling romance. I decided to invite Gerald for a glass of sherry this afternoon to find out what was going on. He will be here any moment, so I had better dash.

  
THURSDAY, MAY 15

Well, I had a rather dramatic evening last night. Gerald arrived promptly at 5:30
P.M.
with a bunch of wilted carnations and a box of Cadbury Milk Tray, which struck me as a simultaneously paltry yet excessive offering. At least Darcy will enjoy the chocolate Brazils.

His bruise had faded slightly, but he still winced as he lowered himself into an armchair. I asked him if had been beaten up by hoodlums, but he replied that his attacker had been much, much worse. Good God. Did he mean rabid Alsatians or unemployed eastern Europeans? Again he said no, and sighed deeply. “Constance, I don’t know where to begin.” He exhaled, looking at me across the rim of his teacup.

“Well, you could start by telling me what’s going on with Miss Hughes. I did my best to put in the groundwork for you, and I thought it was going swimmingly until last night. Do you have any idea why she was so frosty? Have you had a lovers’ tiff?”

He put down his teacup with an abrupt clatter and appeared to be choking. I went over to pat him on the back, but this only exacerbated the situation. Once I had sat back down and he was calm enough to speak, he looked at me with reddened eyes and said, “What you have to understand is that it was, it was—
that woman
—who did my eye in.”

It was my turn to put down my teacup in consternation.

“Whatever do you mean? Why? How? What happened?”

In a quavering voice, he said that when he went to her cottage at the appointed hour to help with the paperwork, it soon became apparent that distressed cats were not uppermost on her mind.

“She sat me down, looked me in the eye, and said: ‘You are a man.…I am a woman. Neither of us is getting any younger. It’s about time we dusted off the cobwebs before we both seize up. I want you to come upstairs and—and—’ Dear God, I can’t repeat it, I can’t!”

I wasn’t sure what to say. She was clearly a bit more forward than I had anticipated, but wasn’t this, ultimately, what Gerald had been wishing for, albeit perhaps with a few more nice dinners and a night out at the Rotary Club dance first?

Gerald shivered, shook his head, and told me that I’d completely misunderstood him. I was shocked. I like to think that I am a perceptive judge of character. Still, caught up in the drama of his story, I asked him what had happened next.

“I panicked,” he said. “She had her gnarled fingers on my thigh and was leaning into me. Her breath smelled of Fisherman’s Friends. My mind went blank.”

“And then?”

“And then I told her the truth. I said that I could not go upstairs with her because…because I was in love with someone else.”

“Gerald!”

“And then she struck me in the shin with her walking stick, belted me in the eye, and left.”

“But who else do you mean? Who are you in love with?”

At that moment, the door opened and Jeffrey arrived. He is not the suspicious type—such things are beneath him—but he did look a little disgruntled to see Gerald in a prone and emotional state in his favorite armchair.

Poor Gerald’s nerves must be shot, because he leaped from his chair like an electrocuted ferret and hurtled to the door, jabbering something about a plumber.

I cannot bear the suspense. Who has won his heart?

  
FRIDAY, MAY 16

I have to admit that after Gerald’s shocking news yesterday I’m starting to feel a little less confident about my matchmaking skills. David and Sophie ended in disaster. Rupert and Ruth ended in disaster. Gerald and Miss Hughes ended in a livid bruise and a mystery. Yet what can I do? Every time I think I should end my meddling, I think of Reginald’s earnest face as he tells me how he despairs of David, and I feel that it cannot be beyond
me to put some things right in the universe. Besides, I’ve already invited Ruth and David to arrive at six o’clock today, and sent Natalia out to pick up
Top Gun
from Blockbuster. Tanya has been briefed to help, although she did raise her newly tweezered eyebrow when I told her about the plan. I’ve made sure that Jeffrey will be going out for a glass of wine straight after work and Mark is closeted in the study drawing up spreadsheets for Idle Hands. Everything is set. In fact, I can hear something now. It appears that the Psychic of Surrey has arrived, early, in a purple Ford Ka.

10 P.M.

Dear readers, triumph! Ruth and David have swapped numbers. Rupert, Ruth, Gerald, Miss Hughes—these are all temporary aberrations in my matchmaking career. I suppose I should also give Tanya some credit, given that she slipped the psychic a ten-pound note to tell Ruth that the man of her dreams would be a pale stranger born under the sign of the cross, currently wearing a green Marks & Spencer polo shirt. But it was, after all, my idea to bring them together. I sent a text message to Reginald and Pru saying
Mission accomplished!
As soon as I have aired out the house and got rid of the smell of incense my joy will be complete.

  
SATURDAY, MAY 17

Just a quick post to say farewell for two weeks. The Bahamas beckon. I am uneasy at the prospect of leaving home at a time when warfare threatens to erupt between Natalia and Tanya, Gerald is shrouded in romantic mystery, and Ruth and David may need my guidance to progress to their first date, but such is my lot. Rupert has promised to pop around and check on Darcy. Jeffrey has tested out his new snorkel in the bath. I have
packed capacious swimwear, SPF 50 sunscreen (Mother always told me I looked like a peasant when my freckles came out), a broad-brimmed hat, beach towels, insect repellent, two Maeve Binchy novels, and a family-sized pack of wet wipes. I cannot bear it when my sunglasses get smeared. We leave first thing in the morning.

I went on Facebook and updated my status to
is off to the Bahamas,
but then realized that this might give legions of Internet thieves an open invite to ransack my house, so I went back and changed it to
is sitting just behind the front door with a gun.

  
WEDNESDAY, MAY 21

I did not expect to be addressing you again for another week and a half, and yet I couldn’t stop myself. My first reaction to the dreadful events of this holiday was to find somewhere to pour my heart out to you. My surroundings are not salubrious. I am writing from a clammy Internet café in Crab Hill, flanked on one side by a youth playing a computer game that appears to involve driving a car and shooting people and on the other by an elderly man studying the Web sites of Japanese secondary schools. The keys are sticky. You will understand that I am in desperate straits.

The holiday got off to an aggravating, though not a catastrophic, beginning. I had hoped to have a good tête-á-tête with Jeffrey, telling him all about Gerald, Ruth, David, and the preparations for the regional bell-ringing championship. However, he was so busy twiddling on his BlackBerry that even when I stopped midway through a sentence about the Surrey Psychic he did not notice. It took all my wifely duty and restraint not to hurl the accursed gadget into the Caribbean. However, these trials are as nothing compared to what happened next.