A Surrey State of Affairs (46 page)

  
MONDAY, OCTOBER 13

I’ve just been on Facebook for the first time in months. As I was sipping my wine and talking to Bob and Rosa about absent friends, I suddenly felt the urge to find out what my own little online circle had been up to. Once I had logged on, the first thing I saw was a status update from Bridget, which read
is wondering if Dita von Teese is an appropriate role model for a 53-year-old publisher.
I pondered this for a while. On the one hand, from what I once read in a magazine, she would appear to take her clothes off for money; but on the other hand, it is very artfully done, and the clothes in question are beautiful and vintage. I imagined what Jeffrey would say if I asked him. It would probably be “A tart’s a tart.” I took another sip of wine and typed in the word
yes.

Then I saw that Tanya had posted pictures of little Shariah, and I forgot all about the ethics of burlesque stripping. She is indescribably gorgeous. In one photo, she is curled up in a little ball, clutching a white teddy bear, her eyes creased shut and her dark little lashes fanning out onto plump pink cheeks. In another she is looking straight at the camera as if she wants to take it
apart and chew it, her eyes blue and wide, a few curls of brown sticking straight up from her head. In the least dignified of the pictures, Tanya has dressed her in a rabbit jumpsuit complete with ears. The bonnet I knitted her, however, is conspicuously absent. She must have outgrown it already.

After a few minutes staring at these pictures and sipping my wine, all the thoughts that had been pushed to the back of my mind by Sophie’s disappearing act, Jeffrey’s arrest, and our sudden trip over here began to gather and loom. I thought about Harriet’s grandchildren, and Rupert, and how he will never hold his own baby in a soft pink blanket in his arms, and then before I knew it there were tears rolling down my cheeks and Bob and Rosa were by my side asking if everything was all right.

I felt incapable of lying. I blurted out everything about Rupert, and then this led to Sophie and Ivan and, finally, Jeffrey. Rosa put a sympathetic arm around my shoulders and said that Jeffrey sounded like a schmuck, which Bob translated for me as “idiot.” Sensing that I wanted to be alone, they got up and quietly left, leaving me free to close down Facebook and pick up a real coffee table book on the history of Argentina’s estancias, immersing myself in a simple world in which women cooked and men rode horses and that was about that.

  
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14

Is Jeffrey a schmuck? The word has a more satisfying resonance than its British counterpart. Schmuck, schmuck, schmuck. Is he, indeed, a
cabrón
? I am visualizing Jeffrey, sitting in a deck chair in the garden with a gin and tonic and the Sunday paper while I visit Mother, alone.

Rupert called this afternoon, so I asked him: “Do you think your father’s a schmuck?” He asked me if I had been out in the sun without a hat, which did not move things forward one way
or the other. We moved on to other matters, and he reassured me that Darcy and Fergie were both well, and that Boris was keeping the house tidy and developing, in his boredom, an unhealthy fixation with vacuum cleaners. He has taken apart both of my models, cleaned them thoroughly, and put them back together again. He asked Rupert for permission to spend some of the housekeeping budget on additional nozzles.

Just then, I noticed the time, and said I had to dash to go riding with Carlos.

“Who’s Carlos?” I heard Rupert ask just as I was hanging up.

  
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15

Today I looked in the mirror for a long time. Matters have improved slightly since the last time I did so. The fresh air is good for my complexion; either that, or it’s the Crème de la Mer face cream I bought from duty-free on Jeffrey’s credit card. I have lost a little weight, probably due to a combination of exercise and the lack of facilities to whip up a quick coffee cake or batch of flapjacks. My stomach is a little flatter, my legs feel more toned. My hair has grown out of its usual gently layered bob, and I’m beginning to think it suits me longer. There are wisps of gray appearing at the roots, but the sun has streaked my auburn color through with caramel, so they don’t stand out too much. All in all, I’m in reasonably good shape, should anyone happen to look at me.

  
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16

Jeffrey called this afternoon as I was lying by the pool reading a crinkled copy of U.S.
Vogue
and wondering if I should buy myself a new Versace lipstick. The line was bad, but I could just make out that he was asking me to be a bit careful with money before it cut out. I ordered a Sex on the Beach and went
back to the magazine. I think Drenched Damson would be just my shade.

  
MONDAY, OCTOBER 20

Dear God. What will you think of me? What have I done?

Looking back over previous postings, if you don’t already know, you are two currants short of a tea cake, as Mother used to say. I feel like I’m drowning in shame, guilt, excitement, and life.

This has been going on for three days and only now have I plucked up the courage to tell you. Except I’m not telling you, because you already know.

I shouldn’t have. I never should have. I have been married faithfully for thirty-four years. We have two children. For thirty-four years I have never allowed myself to seriously consider another man. It would have been ridiculous, the sort of thing I read about in Sophie’s magazines or watched on reality television until Jeffrey switched to the news. That, and the dandruff, is why I shut the door on Gerald. Thirty-four years together, thirty-four years of being a good wife, thirty-four years of breakfasts and dinners and holidays and family and sleeping with my face ten inches from his.

And those thirty-four years counted for nothing when Carlos took my wineglass from me, drank from it, then gently, knowingly, brushed his fingers against my thigh.

I hate myself. I’m loving this. What am I going to do?

  
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21

I still don’t know what to do, but I have made a start by calling Bridget. As she lives in London, where standards of behavior are considerably more lax than in east Surrey, she is unlikely to choke on her own tongue with outrage. I felt strangely nervous about talking to her, even though, as students, we used to spend
hours in each other’s rooms, sitting on the floor with our backs to the narrow bed, talking about boys when we were meant to be studying Byron. After eight rings, just as I was about to give up, almost with a feeling of relief, she picked up. It was early evening for her, midday with a piercing sun for me; I tried to imagine her curled up on the chair by the phone in her flat wearing her black-ribboned cardigan with the autumn night already darkening around her. “Constance!” she said. “I’ve been wondering what’s happened to you. How come you’ve not been in touch? I was beginning to think you’d been taken hostage by that new Polish housekeeper or something.” And she laughed, her husky laugh that hasn’t changed since she was nineteen.

I cleared my own throat. Needless to say, it took a little while to apprise her of the fact that I was marooned on a cattle ranch in the middle of Argentina, without Jeffrey, or even an adequate supply of linen blouses. Once we had gotten past her shock, and once she had asked ten times if I was okay and I had said, without conviction, yes, she seemed to sense that there was something else. So I told her about Carlos. As I was midway through—I think I was telling her about the other day, when he took me to the river and we went skinny-dipping and rode home dripping wet—I noticed that I was looping the telephone cable round my finger so tightly that it had turned white. I dropped it, and carried through to the end, and my current dilemma.

“Oh, Constance,” she said softly after I had finished.

“What on earth am I supposed to do now?” I asked, resisting a strong urge to form another telephone cable tourniquet.

She did not, of course, have the answer. Instead, she told me a little of her life now. She said she has had quite a few “flings,” as she called them, which involve dresses, and dancing, and dinner—a certain retro “scene” that has little to do with antique furniture—and that they were nothing to be ashamed of. She said that I had
to get over my hang-ups; she could tell from the tone of my voice that I was imagining my mother standing in front of me tut-tutting and wagging her finger and calling me a hussy. This image has indeed stalked my dreams.