Mrs Fytton's Country Life (36 page)

In Wimbledon Binnie and Ian sat on their now even dingier white settee, surrounded by a much-stained white carpet, and gazed into the fire. They were holding hands and they were
happy.

'This is more like it,' said Binnie.

Ian grunted.

'I hope they
never
come back.' Ian tensed.

Binnie recalled that they were, after all, flesh of his flesh. 'Well, not until summer.' Ian relaxed again.

'Middle of May at least,' he said. 'They're really looking forward to it all.'

Binnie did not care if they were really looking forward to it or if they were planning to commit hara-kiri on Bondi Beach. But she managed, just, to keep the thought to herself. One thing was for sure,
tier
little Tristan would never be like them.
Ever
...

'Then they'll go and stay with um-er for a while.' (He never quite knew how to refer to his ex-wife.) "Then university. It will all be fine from now on
’
He smiled with satisfaction. Once a manager of people, always a manager
...

'What was it like seeing
her
again?'

'Who, sweet?' Ian said sleepily.

'Well, you saw you ex-wife again, didn't you?'

Ian sat bolt upright and began coughing.

'It's all right,' said Binnie. 'There's no need to hide it from me.'

Ian swallowed and spoke as nonchalantly as he could. 'Mm? What did you say?'

'Seeing Angela? At the airport today?'

He breathed out. Closed his eyes again. Snuggled up to her all the more. Said through sleepy lips, 'Fine. It was just fine. We hardly spoke at all.'

'What did she think of our little boy?' said Binnie.

'Oh,' said Ian comfortably. 'She was all over him. Practically had to tear him away
...'

'Good,' said the second Mrs Fytton.
'Good

24

January

Giving parties is a trivial avocation, but it pays the dues for my union card in humanity.

elsa maxwell

Mrs Angela Fytton
warmly requests the pleasure of your company at a party to celebrate Candlemas and the making of the Traditional Ale

2
February,
6-
Midnight rsvp church ale house

Another blackbird keeled over and died in the Rudges
^’
garden. Angela pushed it gently to one side with her foot so that it lay among the winter-flowering pansies, half hidden, only its stick-like legs on view. Odd, she thought, but she put it down to the extreme cold. She delivered her invitation and heard it plop into the silent hallway, then went on her way.

The Rudges,
in absentia,
were busier than ever this New Year. The likelihood of their getting to the Ale Blessing, or the party afterwards, was - as Mrs Rudge said in her note -unlikely. They would try to make an appearance and they would probably fail. Mrs Rudge was in court, with Judge Julius Potter, appearing for the prosecution on a media high-profile case involving a giant fast-food chain and a couple of hippies who maintained that half a rain forest disappeared every time the fast-food chain opened its boardroom mouth.

Mrs Rudge was enjoying the fight, except that Judge Julius was not disposed to having women in his court in any capacity other than a minor secretarial one, or as the accused. He showed his disapproval wherever possible. Which meant that Mrs Rudge must wear Clarkes Skippies, pale stockings, a calf-length skirt and no make-up. The judge, had he been asked, would have requested that all women in court below the age of ninety-two wear a
chador.
Fortunately no one asked him. But he still managed to draw the line at being importuned in his own court by legally qualified painted Jezebels. And Mrs Rudge wanted to win. She was passionate about ecological causes.

Mr Rudge, on the other hand, could wear what he pleased, so long as it was a dark flowing garment first designed in the seventeenth century and a wig. He was prosecuting the water board for failing to give a good service; in particular, for failing to give a good service to the Fenmore Tarlocks fire brigade, who could not get enough water pressure for their hoses to quell the sinisterly unseasonal forest fires west of the Levels the preceding summer. It was argued that the lack of necessary water power was caused by the local water board's having turned down the pressure so that the leakage ratio would not look so bad, thereby saving their shareholders the unnecessary expense of replacing the worn-out system. Mr Rudge was known to be a Rottweiler when it came to such breaches of conservation business morality and it was not thought likely that a government ombudsman's whitewash would suffice to cover this one up. Mr Rudge was confident. Mr Rudge could not abide hypocrisy. Mr Rudge was sure he would win.

As the blackbird lay in the garden, slowly stiffening, a small blue pellet attached to its inner thorax, the Rudges were off at these important tasks. Whatever the outcome
’
like a decent international boxing match, everybody won. Win, lose or draw, they were going to reward themselves. It was from these twin mighty oaks that their little acorn, in the shape of a swimming pool, would grow.

The cat from Tally-Ho Cottage, passing through, watched Angela shut the gate. Angela watched the cat, her dugs dragging, slink over to the upturned stiff, contemplating, perhaps, a nice bit of game for her tea. Angela, not quite at one with nature red in tooth and claw, clapped her hands. 'Shoo
’
she said. The cat shooed. The cat was irritated. The cat, seeking to vent its irritation on an irrational world, took the path over the back, along th
e hedge and up through the Tich
bornes' garden. There was a nasty little snapping dog who lived there and she could drive him absolutely mental just by giving him the merest shadow of a flick of her tail from the undergrowth.

There were some, and not only the cat, who might have wished, in the weeks to come, that Angela Fytton had minded her own business in the matter of the colour of nature's dental endowments and pointed, horny extensions. But shoo that cat she did.

In search of revenge for the
shoo, the cat reached the Tich
bornes' garden just as Angela arrived on her bicycle and delivered her invitation into the hand - not very clean, she noticed - of the Dorkin girl, who was hovering at the back door.

'And this one is for you and your mother
’
she said.

The Dorkin girl barely looked at it. She was scouring the lane with her luminous, hopeful eyes. How cold she must be, thought Angela, wearing so little in this frost. She clicked the gate shut and departed.

Unobserved, the cat slipped slowly through the shrubbery. Pimmy growled. Mrs Tichborne tutted. Pimmy barked and barked. Dr Tichborne imagined shooting the bad-tempered creature. Come to that, he imagined shooting both the bad-tempered creature and the dog. But only for a moment. What, after all, had the dog done to him?

Dr Tichborne was not a violent or evil man. Nor, as he might admit with regret, in his darkest hour, was he a courageous man. And he was having one of his darkest hours now.

He was not a courageous man - and he was having
by far
his darkest hour now, as he buttered his toast and tried not to look through the window at the young Dorkin girl. It was January, for God's sake, January. Whatever possessed her to have her chest out in the garden in this kind of weather?

As if he didn't know. As if his darkest hour was not in direct correlation to his knowing. She was out there and so was Crispin Archer. Somewhere. Golden as Helios in the faint morning sun. Either on his way to the church or on his way back from it, and she, the mammoth-fronted Dorkin, knew his every step. And worse - O fearful thought whose lucidity came suddenly, yesterday, when he saw the Reverend Crispin Archer's eyes as he watched the girl, or certain bits of her, leaning out of an upstairs window - he knew
hers.

It cut Dr Tichborne to his very soul to see this beautiful young man throwing his private urges away on a girl with half a brain and twice as much chest as Treasure Island. He looked at his wife. She had never appeared more serene or untouched by human hand. Even her tutting was no more than the automatic response of one who knows she will, if she must, rule the world.

Dr Tichborne wanted to shout, to let all those years out in one long cry. Or hurl the marmalade. He fingered the jar. But he never would. He had never spoken to his wife above an acceptable, unaroused pitch, nor she to him. How he would love to roar like a lion. But he had only ever bleated like a lamb.

Pimmy barked for the third time. You see a cat, you don't like a cat, you react. The dog owned and expressed every emotion that his mistress did not. Dorothea Tichborne winced. Her husband winced to see it. In this morning's buttery light she suddenly looked unappealingly grey. Dorothea had never liked loud noise of any kind. Never. Which is why they had lived together so quietly.

She was poring over the ancient book of baptismal instruction. She wished the forthcoming baptism of her servant to be held as an example to the rest of the parish youth. Mrs Dorkin, who put on her pink pl
ush hat to take tea at the Tich
bornes', had remained firm. Total immersion. 'In the old days the water was taken from the well to the church. Now
that's
true repentance for you
’
said the elder Dorkin with satisfaction. 'Because it's
that
cold.'

Mrs Dorothea Tichborne could see the point about the mortification of the flesh, but she disagreed about the tradition of it. The font would do perfectly well. It was a big one. Not big enough for full immersion, but you couldn't - alas - expect that nowadays. Shame. But there it was.

Mrs Dorkin had brushed the crumbs from her lap, readjusted her pink plush hat and returned home. She was not a woman to accept defeat, but then neither was Mrs Dorothea Tichborne. The font it would be. It was, after all, a Devereux font. She read on. The dog barked again. She looked up, tutted and said, 'See what it is out there, Percy, please.'

'It's a cat, dear.'

He watched, miserably, as the Dorkin girl tottered up the path in her extraordinary high heels, frontage forward, to greet the beautiful Crispin as he cycled to a halt by the wall. He watched as the vicar dismounted th
ose adorable thighs of his, lea
ned over the gate, reached out his adorable hand in the frosty air and touched the loathsome girl on her foul cheek in an adorably tender way. Rage w
elled in old Dr Tichborne's bre
ast and rose up like an angry bubble in his throat. He put all he had got into it. Now or never, he thought, and he yelled with a voice that had been stored deeper, even, than under a hat.

'Oi
’
he cried.
'Oi
’
And he banged on the window long and ha rd as if both his heart and the window would break. 'Clear off! Get off! Go away! Oi, away!' He roared even more loudly. There was a rushing of wings in his head. The Angel of Rage
held
spoken. He banged on the window anew.

'Bloody cat
’
he yelled at the Dorkin girl, for his wife's benefit. 'Bloody, bloody cat.
Bloody cat!'

He forgot that the
sine qua non
of their marriage was to never raise your voice. He forgot that when his wife, as Dorothea Devereux, accepted him, she begged that their married life please be as quiet and as pious as a convent. For which she would be very much obliged. She would also retain her private income.

He saw the Dorkin girl's and the vicar's startled eyes, and how they drew closer together as the gate swung away and they stared wonderingly at his frenzied window-banging. Bang, bang, bang, he went on the glass. Words he knew not that he knew came into his mouth. Good words, rich words, ancient words dredged up from a depth hitherto unplumbed. Saxon words, deep from within the historical psyche.

'Oi!'He banged again. 'You can just fuck off out of it. D'you hear? Go on - clear off! Piss off - sod off - vamoose!' This last sounding a little tame, he added,
'Bloody vamoose
’
which felt a lot better.

Then he began a little tantrumming dance of rage - something he vaguely remembered doing from long, long ago, before he had words, before someone chidingly told him not
to...