As It Is On Telly (14 page)

Bunty swallowed hard. There was. There was definitely other exercise. And the length of her legs really didn’t matter for that. Ben’s black eyes were boring into her own; she manoeuvred her way out of the beam and kissed his cheek. ‘Soon,’ she whispered. God knows she didn’t really want to be so coy, but the ‘talking about himself’ thing was definitely working, and she had to assume that the ‘keep him wanting’ adage was working too. Weekend, she told herself, nuzzling his earlobe. I’ll allow myself to … at the weekend.

*

It was five days away. Four. A little chat with Ben, looking forward to their next meeting. Three. Two. An early phone call, even before Graham had made it out of the house, where Bunty had been forced to be a bit evasive, and Ben had sounded a bit tense. Or terse. The tone reminded her of something. And then it was the day, D-Day, Drop-em Day as Kat had started to call it. But before she’d even left the house a terrible foreboding had filled her chest cavity. And sure enough, he didn’t show up. That was what it had reminded her of – the terseness. It was the tone he’d used when getting worried about the children. As if it were somehow her fault.

At least this time she didn’t wait around for hours, hoping. She knew he’d gone. But she blamed herself. Again, and again, and again.

*

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Dear Bunty,

Just to inform you that I have this morning deducted four hundred GBP from your VISA card as the Love Lottery payment. The lovely Ben tells me you have now been on several dates so this is quite within the terms of the agreement.

Yours

Priscilla

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Priscilla, you can shove your payment, your Love Lottery, and Lovely Bloody Ben. I have never been so miserable in my life. Well, I have but it was very long time ago. GIVE ME HIS NUMBER!!!!

Bunty x

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

No can do, I’m afraid.

PX

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Yeah, well I was joking. Sort of.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

I see. Ha ha.

You have now exhausted your three introductions through the Croesus Club. If you wish to meet anyone else there will be a further 300 GBP charge and we will trawl our database again.

Do let me know if you’d like to meet someone new.

Priscilla

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

I liked the one I’d met. Don’t think I can stand any more.

Bye

Bunty x

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

With the energy and direction of a sleepwalker, Bunty ploughed on through the next few days. There seemed to be nothing to do but wait for the inevitable and try to cling on to what vestiges of a normal life she still had. As Kat had told her that she was not, under any circumstances, to trail around wondering what Ben was doing (although, of course, it was nearly impossible to do that), she took to stalking Graham instead. Might as well find out what he was really up to – when he was actually going to be moving Kylie Minogue into their home and asking Bunty to leave.

Sunday strained her nerves until Bunty wanted to weep, but she avoided it, emptied and cleaned her cupboards, and knocked herself out with a bottle of wine until Monday appeared. Everything after school drop-off, which she agreed to for want of anything else to do, seemed likely to be uneventful. She flicked listlessly through the channels, catching snippets of
On
the
Sofa
with Pearl and Finn, and ordering two different types of Supermodel face creams and an Air-Master Super-Walker that would stow neatly under the bed when not in use and give her buns of steel when it was. Ha. Bloody Kylie had better watch out. She made an over-elaborate healthy lunch for herself and then couldn’t be bothered to eat it, so instead she wandered out into the garden and peeked hopefully over the fence. Maybe Mary had a nice pie in the oven or something.

To her immense surprise, and slight chagrin, there was a party going on in Mary’s garden. Mallory was regaling Mary with some hilarious tale, at which she squeaked and squealed like a five-year-old at her birthday party. Bunty stared at Mary. She looked exactly the same in every sense, apart from, well … a glow as tangible as a Ready Brek outline. Her aura was practically pulsating. Sex, thought Bunty. She’s having sex.

And then she heard another laugh, a fulsome honk, from behind the tree, and there was Dan, beer in hand, stamping his enormous foot on the little patch of ground beneath which Flinders used to lie. ‘He’s full of rubbish, Mary. Take no notice of him,’ he was saying, shaking his head, clearly enjoying the story even more than Mary. ‘There,’ he continued, stamping one last time, ‘no more problems there. I think it was just a bit of residual water backed up from the …’

Bunty coughed. ‘You’re not going to blame my garden, are you?’

Dan looked up in surprise and then beamed. ‘Well, Mrs McKenna. Why aren’t you this side of the fence?’

‘I was beginning to wonder that myself.’

Mary waved her over and she went to join them at the neat cast iron table. It was an unseasonably warm day, and the sunlight bounced off the golden leaves of the beech trees between their two gardens, suffusing the whole of Mary’s patio with a burnished shimmer. How had she not noticed? How had she failed to notice that it was a glorious day and that some kind of festive harvest lunch was taking place just yards from her back door? Ben had a lot to answer for, thought Bunty furiously. But then she corrected herself. Not Ben. It wasn’t his fault that she’d found herself in need of a new husband and had hoped he might turn out to be the one. It was Graham’s fault. Graham who was philandering. Creating a vacuum in the ‘husband’ area of her life.

‘I made this,’ said Dan proudly, showing her an intricate looking terrine. ‘You can have a piece, you know. I do wash my hands.’

‘Thank you, I will,’ said Bunty primly, and she balanced the pâté and a piece of French bread on her knee, and followed it with a glass of wine and a home-made Madeleine, courtesy of Mary. This was actually nice. Normal. What normal people did when they met up casually of a lunchtime and enjoyed each other’s company. It felt refreshingly unforced.

It felt the same when Dan stood up to leave. Realising that Mary and Mallory were getting more and more touchy-feely behind the platter of home-grown radishes (Mallory’s, she presumed. They reminded her of Graham’s ears.), Bunty got to her feet too. But she didn’t want to leave. The afternoon stretched ahead of her with no respite, nothing until Charlotte got home from school, and the thought of … well, thoughts, really, filled her with dread. ‘Have you got a job to go to, Dan?’ she said lightly. God, did that sound like a proposition? She’d have to keep that flirt gland in check now it had been released.

‘’Fraid so. Clearing a rat out of a drainpipe two roads over. Seriously.’

Bunty shuffled around for a moment and then blurted, ‘Can I come?’

‘Sure.’ Dan cocked his head on one side for a moment. ‘Funny way to spend an afternoon though. Wouldn’t you rather stay and have a cup of tea with Mary?’ They both looked at Mary, who was laughing so hard and so flirtatiously that her teeth could have been in peril. ‘Okay. No. You come with me then. How are you with rotten vermin?’

‘Dan, I have plenty of experience,’ she said with feeling. ‘I’ll just put my wellies on.’

She felt ridiculously excited at the prospect of an afternoon in Dan’s van, and scampered out of her driveway feeling happier than she had since Ben’s last phone call. ‘You are seriously strange,’ said Dan, seeing her enormous grin.

‘Oh, I’m strange?’ Bunty slammed the door shut behind her. ‘Dan, Dan the Drainage Man makes terrine and cat gravestones in his spare time, and takes his mother to the movies.’

Dan grinned, fluttering his black eyelashes at her. ‘Well, you are aware that sticking my hands up people’s drains wasn’t exactly my first calling. But modelling school was full. And I like helping people.’

Bunty looked at him sideways as his plate-sized hand shoved the van into gear and they juddered around the corner. Help me, Dan, she thought. Could he help her? Right at that moment he looked so enormously capable, so … big, that she was pretty sure he could lift up the whole planet and rest it on his shoulder like Atlas. Or was it Zeus? Anyway, if he could cope with all that, he could certainly cope with her.

‘Graham’s having an affair,’ she said suddenly.

Dan looked momentarily surprised, and then he nodded. ‘I thought there was a strange vibe between you at that dinner party. Have you got proof?’

‘He keeps telling me he’s playing squash with Ryan.’

‘Ryan’s got bad knees,’ said Dan, in a cruelly accurate impression of Petra. ‘Hasn’t he?’

‘So he’s not playing squash.’

‘Or working extra late,’ offered Dan, taking a guess.

‘And I’ve seen him get out at the squash club and kiss this little blonde chippy with a bottom, no, not a bottom, a derrière, and he said he’s going to football –’

‘With Ryan?’

‘With Ryan. And Ryan did drop him off after this weekend away but there was something weird about it, and they definitely hadn’t been to football.’

Dan tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. ‘Threesomes with Petra?’

‘Nah,’ they said together.

‘Has he got a bag?’ he asked finally, after a few minutes of concentration.

‘A bag?’

‘Yeah, like a bag he takes everywhere even when he’s not likely to need it, with a change of clothes and a bottle of Lynx.’

Bunty paled. ‘He has. A shag bag. And new clothes too.’

Dan nodded. ‘Then I’m sorry to have to say it, Bunty, but there’s your proof. It does sound very much as though your husband is having an affair.’ He blew out his cheeks. ‘Silly bastard. Are you okay?’

Was she ok? He hadn’t actually left her yet, that was true. And she wasn’t sick, or dying, and there were people far worse off in the world and all that. But … ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘Not really.’

Dan nodded slowly. ‘Okay. We’ll clear this drain. And then you and I are going to do something really fun together.’

‘What?’ said Bunty, mildly alarmed but more excited than she’d been in quite a few days.

‘Spy on Graham,’ he said. ‘MWAH, ha ha haaaa. Evil genius laugh,’ he added by way of explanation.

Bunty couldn’t help but smile. ‘Look, I’m smiling. Miserable as I am, I’m actually smiling. Dan, you are a very nice man. How come nobody’s snapped you up?’

‘It would be denying the rest of womankind if I got spliced, wouldn’t it? It would have to be a special kind of woman to nail me down these days. One with a very big heart.’ And he spread his hands in a ‘catch-Kat’s-breasts’ fashion. ‘Yeah. But just because I like to play the field a bit, doesn’t mean I approve when a married geezer does it. Especially when they’re married to someone as nice as you. We’ll sort him, Bunty. Don’t you worry.’

She believed him too. True to his word, as soon as they had extracted the decomposing corpse of the rat from the pipe work (which Bunty had to do in the end as her hands were small enough to grab the tail and pull), they piled back into the van, he handed her a cap with his company logo on it, and they set off towards the town centre. ‘Where does he work?’

‘Coleman Street. Farraday Financial Advisors.’

They parked outside for a time, while Dan went in and made spurious claims about the poor drains to the receptionist at Farradays. He emerged ten minutes later, shrugging his door-wide shoulders. ‘They have a squash ladder, and guess what? Graham’s not on it. And neither’s Ryan. But it’s coming up for five now, so we can tail him and see where he goes. He won’t recognise you in my van.’

‘I’ve got to get home for Charlotte!’ Bunty had been so involved in the investigation she’d completely forgotten the one thing she actually had planned that day. ‘She can let herself in but she’ll be wondering where I am.’

Sure enough, her phone bleeped at that very moment. ‘Look, she’s missing me.’

She showed him the text. ‘
Wots
4
t
,
im
starving
? &
where
r
u
?’

‘
Home
in
five
,’ she tapped in quickly. ‘I have to go home, Dan.’

‘Sure?’ Dan looked immensely disappointed. ‘We could pick up young Charlotte and come back.’

‘I don’t really want her spying on her own father. Although I think he may be playing her off against me already, taking her to meet the derrière woman.’

‘Silly, silly bastard.’ Dan shook his head again and ferried her home. ‘Tell you what,’ he said, leaning across to open the passenger door for her, ‘you text me when he says he’s going out this week, and I’ll tail him for you.’

‘Yes! And I could come with you if Charlotte’s out.’ Bunty paused before she closed the door. ‘Thanks, Dan. I really appreciate it.’

Dan doffed his cap. ‘All part of the service, ma’am.’ Mellors. He definitely had a Mellors sort of appeal about him.

Bunty almost skipped inside, feeling more positive than she had in ages. Since the vasectomy letter even. What was that about? As Charlotte opened the door to her, hand on hip as she took in Bunty’s flushed face and her clod-covered wellingtons, it came to her. It was a grand gesture. Dan’s assistance was a big solid handshake in her direction, a grand gesture that was enabling her to fulfil her own grand gesture. If she could find out what Graham was up to she could confront him with it. Find out why he’d done it. Perhaps, even so, find something to save their marriage? If there was anything left to save. She threw her arms around Charlotte, planted a huge kiss on her cheek, and swept past her up the hallway.

‘Mu-um. Mu-ud,’ crooned Charlotte behind her.

She’d left a trail of soggy footprints right along the ‘deep vanilla’ carpet. ‘Oh well,’ said Bunty airily.

Charlotte’s eyes boggled. ‘If I’d done that you’d have totally murdered me.’

‘That’s true,’ conceded Bunty. ‘But as it was me, and it’s my carpet, and I always have to clean it anyway, I’m prepared to live with it. I’ll wait till it dries. Cleans up better that way.’

In a funny way, she thought, as she pulled open the freezer door looking for something for dinner, that was like an analogy for her life at the moment. There were muddy marks on the path of their marriage. Was she prepared to live with it? What she was actually doing, she realised, was waiting for it to dry so she could clean it up more easily. Better to sit it out and wait until Graham’s affair was over or he actually ended it, than end it herself. Better, even, to have sorted herself out with an alternative for when the crunch time came. It was all just waiting for mud to dry.

But now she felt invigorated. With Dan’s help she could get to the bottom of the mystery, face up to Graham with it and take some positive action to sort out the sorry mess that had become her marriage. Her life, in fact. After some more spying.

*

Next evening, with Kristiana supposedly overseeing Charlotte’s homework while Graham ‘played squash’ and Bunty ‘went to the pictures,’ she texted Dan as instructed. ‘Pick you up in ten minutes,’ came the reply.

It was really quite exciting. The date that wasn’t a date. The date that was actually, as a matter of fact, rather like espionage. She felt like Pussy Galore, although she didn’t imagine that Pussy would have been quite so happy to clamber into a Ford Transit that smelt of a strange mixture of sewage, damp earth, and Jazz aftershave.

It was not a van that pulled up further down the street, however, but a rather smart Alfa Romeo. Dan peeked out from under the visor. ‘Well, get in,’ he hissed. ‘Don’t want everybody knowing you’re driving around town with strange men, do you?’