Good Husband Material (30 page)

I think I can, though it’s pretty alarming since my income is irregular. (Promising, but irregular.) If the house has increased in value, it’s because of my hard work.

A thought: I must find out how much all the radio stuff cost, and the Shack. I’m sure that was all a fortune, and will have to come out of his share, as will the car …

He might end up owing
me
money!

I wrote him a letter appending the list and stating my terms, and hoping we could settle everything in a civilised manner. It was very restrained, considering the sort of thing I would really like to say to him now I’ve discovered he has the fidelity quotient of a tomcat.

If he agrees to it, then I’ll have an agreement drawn up by a solicitor of my own who can get started on the divorce right away, for I now want to divest myself of James permanently.

When I went out to post the letter, I automatically reached for Bess’s lead.

What would I do if James broke into the house while I was out? I suppose he has a perfect right? Or does he?

However, there was no sign of him when I returned, so I forced myself to stop worrying about it all and do some work.

I’m typing out the final draft of
Love Lies Bleeding,
but don’t like the Bleeding title.

Mother phoned in the evening, but I’d been expecting James to go and bleat out his version to her first, so I wasn’t too surprised when she took his part. She said I was hard-hearted, and the Other Woman was all a misunderstanding.

Pretty much what I expected really.

Fergal: September 1999

    
‘THE NUN’S TALE

    
Baby not Rocco’s, rules judge.’

Exposé
magazine

I already knew that. So far as I know I haven’t got any offspring – I’ve always been too careful. When I have children I want to be around.

As soon as I got back to Nutthill I went straight down to the horse’s mouth. I knew Mrs Deakin would tell me any news going.

And she did, too. Word is that Tish has thrown James out and he’s staying with some friends in the village.

She said it was probably over another woman – it usually was.

I wouldn’t bust up a marriage, but if he’s fool enough to bust up his own …? And, love me or hate me, she isn’t indifferent to me. A fling with me could be just what she needs.

Could be just the medicine
I
need too: Tish – take regularly until symptoms vanish.

First thing next morning I phoned the office and asked to speak to Vanessa Grey.

‘Mr Oliver Drew’s personal assistant?’ said the voice.

Why do all receptionists sound snooty? PA? That’s one up from being a secretarty, I suppose.

‘Vanessa Grey,’ said a familiar voice.

‘This is Tish Drew – James’s wife.’

There was a small pause. ‘One minute,’ she said, and there was the sound of a door closing before she came back on. ‘Yes?’

‘What colour is your hair?’

‘What?’

‘Your hair – what colour is it?’

‘Chestnut brown. Why?’

‘How long has it been that colour?’

‘About a year. It’s my natural colour. I got tired of being a dumb blonde. Do I take it from these strange questions that you’ve at last found out about James’s bit on the side, and thought it was me?’

‘I just wanted to be certain. Anyway, there was the office Christmas party, wasn’t there? Someone sent me a photocopy.’

‘Oh, that was me. I thought someone ought to put you on your guard. Not that there was anything much in that – James isn’t exactly the world’s best lover, is he? And anyway, I’ve got other, bigger and better fish to fry now.’

‘
You
sent it?’

‘To be quite honest, I thought it would cause a bit of trouble and you’d find out about this girl he’s been seeing. It was obvious to me as soon as I came back here that he was bored with you. It was just a friendly warning.’

‘Thank you!’

‘I did think at first I might get him back, but then – well, someone else came along. And then I saw him with that tarty-looking bit. She used to hang around outside the office, sometimes, waiting for him.’

Takes one to know one.

‘But did you and James – at the Christmas party—’ I began, but the phone went dead.

Really, I suppose it doesn’t matter now whether he was unfaithful with
one
girl or hordes … and my suspicions are growing that the Bit On The Side may be Alice’s sister.

After this I popped down to Mrs D.’s for some essential supplies. I was still afraid James would get in, but I mustn’t get paranoid about it.

I made myself walk on as far as the village pond for some air first, though. The bottom of it is coated with leaves like a golden bowl set in mud. There didn’t seem much point in walking further without Bess.

Bob’s mother had sent me a big basket of cooking apples and I’d decided to make apple chutney with them, so I needed a bottle of malt vinegar and some sultanas, though as usual I came out of Mrs Deakin’s with more than I intended to buy.

As I turned into the drive with my shopping, I was startled to see Fergal sitting on the doorstep, looking like an expensive advert for something: Sex Appeal, possibly.

He was holding a small cardboard box and, at the sound of my feet – and my shopping bag hitting the ground – he looked up, grinning. ‘Someone’s left you a present.’

Bemused by the beguiling grin (so different from the last time we met), I accepted the box as he rose lithely to his feet. ‘A present?’

The box moved suddenly in my hands like a jumping bean and said, crossly, ‘Mmrrow!’

I nearly dropped it.

Fergal proffered a grubby bit of lined paper. ‘This was underneath it.’

Clutching the rocking box to my bosom I read the following words with mounting horror: ‘
ONE OF TIBBY
’
S
KITTENS AS PROMISED. JARED SMITH.
’

Tibby!

‘Oh, no!’ I moaned, my knees beginning to sag. ‘I can’t – not if it’s got millions of toes …’

Fergal neatly caught the sliding box and supported me with his other arm.

‘Millions of what?’ he asked, then added quickly, ‘Never mind, you aren’t well. Where’s your key?’

Things seemed to be spinning a bit, so I shut my eyes, grateful for the feel of a muscular arm around me, and when I opened them again I was sitting in a kitchen chair.

‘Here – drink this.’ He handed me a glass of water.

‘I don’t want—’ I began, looked at his face and meekly reached out a hand for the glass.

‘That’s better. I thought you were going to pass out on me. What’s the matter? Pregnant?’

I gave a startled gasp and burst into tears. ‘No! Yes! I – I might be, but—’

A gentle hand fleetingly touched my hair. ‘I thought so. Don’t forget I come from a big family, and there’s a certain look …’

‘I – is there?’ I mopped my eyes and sat up. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t think what got into me.’

‘It takes you like that, so I’m told. Congratulations – I expect your husband’s delighted?’

‘He – he doesn’t know. I’m not even sure myself, so – so would you mind not mentioning it to anyone yet?’

He gave me a long, uncomfortably searching look, and I went pink. But if he hasn’t heard about our Great Schism I don’t feel up to telling him about it just now. I’m not playing for sympathy with Fergal Rocco.

‘All right,’ he agreed coolly. ‘But you don’t look very well. I thought so last time I saw you.’

‘I’m OK.’ I managed a shaky smile and ran my fingers through my dishevelled locks. The chimera of pregnancy was thrust back into its pit until I could deal with it. I sat straighter. ‘It was just the heat, and then the kitten …’

‘The dust, the flies, the natives?’ He smiled sardonically. ‘Didn’t you want a kitten?’

I looked with a shudder at the box, which was now on the table. ‘No, especially not one of Tibby’s! She’s a deformed village cat, and an awful old man did threaten to give me one of her next litter.’

He began opening the lid of the box. ‘Just because the mother’s deformed, it doesn’t follow that the kitten is.’

Inserting his hand he removed a spitting ball of black fluff. A pink mouth opened in a tiny meow.

‘There doesn’t look to be much wrong with that.’

‘How many toes has it got?’

‘Toes?’ He captured a small foot. ‘One, two, three …’ He paused. ‘Six. That can’t be right, can it? Not that I’ve ever counted a cat’s toes before, but—’

‘It’s just like Tibby! She’s got about twenty on each foot!’

‘You couldn’t fit twenty on a cat’s foot,’ he pointed out.

‘Well, that’s how many it looks like!’ I snapped sulkily. ‘And I don’t want it.’

‘If you’re pregnant, it’s not a good time to house-train a kitten anyway – there’s some bug they can pass on if you aren’t careful with the litter trays. I remember my sister Lucia telling me.’

‘Is there? But what on earth shall I do with it, then?’ I mean, it might look quite sweet, really, but …

‘I’ll have it. God knows, there’s enough room up at the Hall for a hundred cats, and just think how interesting the pawprints will look on the new cement.’

The kitten, resisting to the last, was thrust back into the box.

‘Thank you, Fergal. I’m very grateful – I really couldn’t have coped.’

‘Yes you could. You were already starting to weaken. You’re too soft-hearted to do anything else. At least, I used to
think
you were.’

He slanted a considering glance at me from those devastating green eyes and added abruptly, ‘Why didn’t you answer my letters?’

‘What? Which letters?’ I stammered, confused. ‘Do you mean the one about the fence?’

‘Not that one, stupid! The letters I wrote to you from America, after you refused to come with me. God, they must have been
really
memorable!’

My jaw nearly hit the table. ‘But you never sent me any letters!’

‘I did.’

‘But – you can’t have done!’

‘Are you trying to tell me you never got them?’ he demanded incredulously.

‘Of course I never got them,’ I said shakily. ‘You know I would have answered if you’d written to me.’

Turning away, he stared out of the window, shoulders tense, while I cast my mind back to that terrible summer.

‘The day after we argued, Grandpa had a heart attack and I went up to stay with Granny – you know how useless Mother is in a crisis. Grandpa had another heart attack later and died … so I was there right up to the start of the university term.’

‘I’m sorry. I liked your grandpa.’

‘Mother promised to tell me if you tried to get in touch with me, and send any letters on.’

‘Did she? And did she happen to mention the phone calls?’ he enquired bleakly, turning to face me.

‘Phone calls?’ I faltered.

‘Phone calls. The ones I made when you didn’t reply to my letters. You were never there – she told me you were going out with someone else and didn’t want anything to do with me.’

‘Of course I was never there – I was at Granny’s! And I certainly wasn’t seeing anyone else. She did send me a cutting from a magazine, though – you and that American model coming out of a nightclub … How could you, Fergal!’

He shrugged. ‘I’m only human, and if you didn’t want me … or that’s what I thought, anyway. Your mother should be put in a sack and drowned,’ he added pleasantly.

There were a couple of things I’d like to do to her personally before she went in the bag.

‘I even went round to your house when I got back from America, you know, and your mother told me you were living in college, and she was sorry but you’d found someone else almost immediately. I should have suspected something when she was so nice to me!’

‘She always thought you were too unsteady – she was afraid I’d get hurt.’

‘And were you hurt?’

I looked away, blinking rapidly, and tried to summon a smile. ‘It’s all water under the bridge now, isn’t it? But you should have known I’d have answered your letters.’

‘And you should have come to America with me when I asked you.’

‘Asked? You never
asked
me! You just assumed I was going with you.’

‘I can’t have been
that
arrogant, Tish,’ he protested, looking taken aback.

‘Yes, you were! That’s what made me so cross, I suppose, though if you’d asked me again next day I would have changed my mind, I think. Still, it wouldn’t have lasted, would it? You need someone more glamorous and sophisticated – like Nerissa.’

‘And you need someone steady and dull and safe, like your James? You didn’t waste much time, did you?’

‘But I didn’t even meet James until the final year of my course, and we only got married after I finished college!’

I got up and wandered abstractedly about the kitchen, the pain of reopened wounds warring with the underlying spectre of pregnancy that Fergal had dragged, kicking and screaming, out of my subconscious. And yet, my heart was warmed by the thought that he
had
cared about me after all. Even our arguing had a cosy familiarity about it.

He took me by the shoulders and turned me to face him, gazing deeply into my eyes. I never could look away when he did that. ‘I suppose I should have known you better,’ he muttered. ‘But you were so young … I should have realised.’

He let me go so suddenly I staggered. ‘So you settled for respectable dullness, Angel, while I settled for—’

‘Disreputable excitement!’ I finished for him, rather tartly. ‘And I don’t know why you think my life is dull – especially since we moved here.’ (That was true at least!) ‘Anyway, I’d rather have dullness than be a hanger-on on the fringes of the sort of life you lead.’

‘You know nothing about the sort of life I lead.’

‘The papers and magazines—’

‘So you were interested enough to keep track of me?’

I flushed. ‘Not on purpose! But you can’t open a magazine without seeing your goings-on plastered all over it.’

‘Publicity stunts, most of them. And, as you’ve discovered, the camera – and journalists – can lie.’

‘And is buying a country house a publicity stunt, too?’

‘No. It’s a mark of the parting of the ways. The band haven’t exactly split, since we’re still going to record new material together, but we all want to go our separate ways. I’m settling down – I’ve had more than enough of life on the road. And when I saw the Hall … Have you seen it?’