Mrs Fytton's Country Life (22 page)

She watched a globally warmed, unseasonal white butterfly settle on a nettle head. She knew she was supposed to kill it because it was after her cabbages, but she had not got to that murderous stage yet.

Sammy had said it would only take one cabbage eaten through and she'd be convinced. 'Same with foxes,' he said contemptuously. 'Nice little beggars till you've seen a henhouse when they been visiting. If you're doing herbals you want great Valerie round the coop. That'll stop him.'

She said demurely, 'Thank you. I'll make a note of that,' putting the extraordinary picture of some tank-like female parading round the henhouse to one side. She saw him dart a quick, amused look at her notebook and the segmented diagram she had copied from Maria Brydges.

'Stinks like death underfoot,' he added, and waited for her to write that down too. She did. 'Not red-spurred Valerie,' he said. She wrote. Sammy was playing the country sage to the letter. 'Likes wet feet.' She did not write that bit down. He'd be suggesting
Wellingtons
next.

'When my herb beds are finished,' she said,
‘I
hope they'll be as good a working arrangement as Wanda's. That's my goal.'

'Wouldn't be hard,' he said wryly. 'You do it your way. Let her do it hers.'

‘I
might ask her for advice.'

'Ask me.'

She closed the notebook. Enough was enough. 'Tea?' she said. 'And one of my fruit biscuits?'

To the pulp of any kind of fruit, put the same weight of sugar, beat them both well together for two hours, then make them into forms, or put them in paper cases, and dry them in a cool oven; turn them the next day, and let them remain until quite dry, then put them in boxes.

True, she had cheated on the beating time - by about an hour and fifty minutes - but they looked good to her. He took one bite and asked if she had any of Dave the Bread's Old Somerset butter biscuits.

Back in the garden, offended about the biscuits, she said, 'Did you know that once upon a time women did most of the medicine and curing. It was part of their job. And then you men came along and took it away
...
Or called it witchcraft.' She looked up at the Mump. 'There were probably a few of them strung up there.' She could not resist copying Mrs Perry's knowing words.

'Really now?' he said. 'No. I didn't know that at all.'

Their eyes met. Somebody was laughing at somebody.

'You better tell the bees first,' he said. "Fore you go digging. Always tell them everything. Then they won't be offended and they'll stay.'

That bit was probably true. She watched him walk off, an old man, slightly stooped and slow. What did he know of love-ache?

She went up to the hives, hoping the bees liked herbs. She was still very cautious with them. Mrs Perry told her they stung you only for a reason, unlike wasps, which will sting you regardless. This was encouraging until she realized that 'a reason' could well be incompetence. However, she persevered, with Sammy's help, and began to like their black faces and yellow and black stripes and the extraordinary noise of their industry when she put her ear to the hive. Sylvia Plath called it their 'furious Latin'. But she never went so far as Sylvia in saying aloud, 'They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner
...'
It was not to the bees, but to the miscreant husband and selfish children that she should be suggesting - metaphorically, of course - that they could die and she would feed them nothing. No more bits of her. Well, not for the time being anyway.

She had finished turning the fresh-scrubbed, newly painted still room into a cool white shrine and had begun stocking it. In it she placed the three bottles of mulberry wine, radiant as rubies in the light, and the first of her preserves and stores, as well as a row of golden jars of her own honey. Every time she looked at them her heart swelled with love, as if they were yellow-haired babies asleep in their cots. Most of the honey went to a shop in Taunton which collected it exactly as they had done with the Perry honey, but nevertheless she had achieved it. Money rattled in a tin box. At least the hives were giving something back to her.

With the still room now finished, she would turn her attentions to her wilderness outdoors. She would give something back to the earth and create new herb beds to tantalize those bees. Verily Demeter herself could not have felt more proud.

Fytton honey. When Ian returned she would spread it on the soles of his feet.

13

September

Be you wise and never sad, You will get your lovely
lad...
And if that makes you happy, kid-You'll be the first it ever did.

dorothy parker

While Mrs Angela Fytton of Church Ale House in the county of
Somerset
was
stomping
around
in Wellington
boots as she dug her new herb gardens, her ex-husband was tiptoeing around, treading on eggshells, in his large, well-appointed family house in Wimbledon.

A state of anxiety that Mrs Belinda Fytton of South Common Road, Wimbledon, in the county of Surrey (now defunct) found oddly conducive.

A husband who is so angry with his ex-wife that he has gone from mild guilt to being unable to speak her name without spitting, combined with a husband who cannot do enough for his current wife to compensate for the arrival of his two large teenagers, is quite a nice mixture to have around the place, decided the Second Mrs Fytton. For while he was in that unnerved condition she felt less anxious herself.

Less anxious about her complete loss of mental faculties, about her limp, morning wakening when she could not be sure she had ever been asleep and immediately thought about going back to bed that night, about the permanent smell of old milk that she was sure hung about her, though Tristan was supposed to be giving up the breast. And -deeper and darker than all of these - about her complete lack of libido. While her stepchildren were there, and perceived to be imposing so much, Ian just wouldn't dare raise the matter (or anything else) of a sex drive. If he liked his sex (and he did, which was how she got him), he loved her more. Of that she was quite, quite certain. He always said that he liked her vulnerability. After all, at their first meeting she fell down in front of him. Well, here she was, vulnerable in the extreme. Therefore, as long as Claire and Andrew did not actually bounce Tristan down the stairs, or assault the cleaner with handguns, she accepted the situation. She was wholly dependent on her husband now. And she didn't care if she never did another stroke of root canal or bridgework ever again. Ian liked her vulnerable? Binnie would oblige.

For his part, Ian scheduled his business diary so that he could be around and not travelling the world as he used to do, and he kept up the jogging, which was good. He kept it up because he was anxious to stay youthful and fit, and she encouraged it because he got so puffed that there was very little energy left over for even
remembering
conjugal rights. And if he looked like faltering, she had only to hint that perhaps he needed to slow down at his age to send him off with even more determination to make an extra circuit around Wimbledon pond. And just in case the lowering effect of all this worried her husband, she hid all newspapers and magazines that mentioned Viagra. She did not want him to even
think
about restoring what early morning vigorous exercise and the arrival of his children had so successfully kept at bay. In short, the advent of Claire and Andrew had, like their father of late, hardly penetrated.

Besides, it was a very large house. Chosen - originally and in that sweet, innocent far-off time when Tristan was no more than a small fluttering bump, and Binnie still raced around the bedroom saying 'Catch me' and 'You can have me' - so that one day Binnie could have her own practice on the ground floor. There were acres of pale, fawn carpeting and three floors of spacious rooms and not even a nanny living in because, when she and Ian had discussed how things would be once this new baby arrived, when they were cuddled up on the white linen sofa together, on the white sheepskin rug, staring into the real fire and making their plans, life seemed so perfect that the very idea of an intrusion on their privacy was unthinkable. Ian, bearing in mind his past experience, did not feel they needed a nanny to live with them at all. Maybe a good, reliable cleaning lady, but who wanted strangers on the stairs each morning? It all came naturally to mothers anyway.

Binnie, hands clasped happily around her tiny fluttering bump, agreed out of love for him. She would go back to work eventually, she supposed, and then they would need someone more vocational. But that was a long way off. As long as Ian rearranged his working schedules so that he was based at home most of the time, they could manage perfectly well together. And the cleaner would be useful. Cleaners always were, thought Binnie vaguely. They therefore found and employed one crisp, clean young woman, of Christian principle, called Trisha, who came four days a week and kept the house like a new pin. It was all going to be fine, just fine.

As for Ian, well, it was a new sensation to feel needed. The former Mrs Fytton seemed capable of conquering everything - even his job, if he had let her. As for fatherhood, why, he had scarcely ever changed a nappy. Things would be different this time. This time they would be a team. So they thought as they sat, in happy harmony, in front of their living fire. Before Tristan. Before Andrew. Before Claire.

Of course, now that the baby
was
here, Binnie wanted a full-time nanny, a full-time masseuse, a full-time chauffeur and anything else you could think of. But she persuaded herself that two young adults who both loved their new little brother would more than compensate. Truth was, though Ian was doing very well, he was not Croesus, and with paying off his witch of an ex-wife and supporting his elder children, money was not infinite. Binnie kept quiet about this since she did not want to remind him that she could, if she chose, earn a good whack herself. She just didn't want to. She was just too, too tired.

'The house is large enough to absorb two young adults
’
she said sweetly to her husband. And he, who had been very afraid of her reaction, loved her the more. That scheming, malicious wife of his down in Somerset who had gone through such a run of men and
still
remained alone to haunt him would find that he was made of stronger stuff than she was. At last.

'Why
’
said Binnie, 'you have only to close the door of your own bedroom and you are at peace.'

Binnie thought endlessly about closing her own bedroom door, and having her own relaxing bath, and getting into her own soft and silent bed. Even in rare moments of mental alertness, Binnie did not stoop so low as to think that Ian's ex-wife had brought the situation about with any ulterior motive. What ulterior motive could there be? Indeed, the prospect of Ian's ex-wife leaving London for the remoter parts of Somerset was a very pleasant, very wise one. The further away she went, the better. She feared her predecessor much more when she was a short car ride away. But stuck out in the wilds of beyond with hens and hives and all those other nutty things she owned, what possible threat was she? What possible damage could she do? Binnie, in her new fragrant guise of motherhood, reinvented herself as a lily-clad Madonna, above intrigue herself and therefore seeing no evil in others. She was just too tired to think anything more complex or devious.

Ian just thanked his lucky stars and went on jogging and walking on eggshells. He even felt the stirrings of something called Being Masterful.

Claire and Andrew's worldly goods arrived in Wimbledon, as they themselves did, two days before their mother's departure and three days after their last exam, when they had just about recovered from their hangovers. Tristan spent a lot of happy hours crawling in and out of the boxes as they were emptied and left strewn about the house. Trisha kept her mouth clamped in a very thin line as she went about the business of making sure the baby did not become packed into one and mistakenly left out for the rubbish men.

Eventually, a week or two on, the very last box was unpacked and carted round to the side of the house, found to be empty of baby and removed for disposal. And gradually the house came back to something approaching normal. Within reason they could play their hi-fis, within reason they could invite their friends to visit, within reason they could treat all the facilities of the house as if it was their own home. This was no revelation to them. Before they moved, their mother told them that from now on it
was
their home. 'You have two homes,' she said. 'Wimbledon and Somerset. But Wimbledon is the
home
home.'

‘I
suppose,' said Claire.

'It is
...'
said Andrew.