Muddy Waters

Stella works as an agony aunt for a teenage magazine. She lives on Pansy Island, a self-consciously arty community on the Thames, where her husband Adrian writes erotic novels in a summerhouse by the river, while her two teenage children prepare themselves for adult life in various ways not necessarily recommended in the pages of their mother's advice columns. Stella's friends assume that she has no problems of her own, and shamelessly come to her for the advice she dishes up for a living on the magazine; Stella, however, finds herself with a problem she cannot handle when Abigail, her rich and glamorous friend from university, comes to stay. Abigail has been deserted by her husband, and has decided that Stella's life, and more particularly Stella's husband (with whom she once had a fling in their younger days) will fill the gap nicely.

Cover

About the Book

Title page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

About the Author

Also by Judy Astley

Copyright

‘Martin has taken a
tart
to New
York
!'

Stella, holding the phone containing Abigail's shrill anger a little away from her ear immediately pictured a peach flan, neatly parcelled in one of Maison Blanc's pink and white patisserie boxes. She imagined Martin, tall, dark and thoughtful, hesitating before allowing the pretty package to be passed through the X-ray machine at the airport, afraid that it might later irradiate those who were to eat it. In her mind he was swinging it gently and indecisively from its silver ribbon bow, while co-travellers (the female ones anyway) wondered why so attractive a man should look so concerned. Her attention meandered back to Abigail, who could, she thought, at least have started the call with ‘Hello Stella, how are you?' after what must have been at least a year (not counting the gilded-Virgin Christmas card) without communication.

‘Stella, are you still there?' Stella looked at the phone as if expecting Abigail's skinny body to follow her sharp voice out of it. The Archers theme music, drifting through from the kitchen, sounded quite gently soothing by comparison.

‘The tart's got
yellow hair
,' Abigail hissed.

Stella's sympathy was at last hooked and landed. ‘Oh goodness, poor you. How completely dreadful.' She sat down on the window seat and prepared to give Abigail her full attention.

‘I don't care what they say about blondes having more fun, she won't be having much of it with
him,
I can tell you,' Abigail told her. ‘He's forgotten what it is. At least I thought he had,' Abigail continued, and Stella heard her pause for a deep intake of breath and a Rothman's kingsize.

‘Is it serious? Permanent? Do the children know?' Stella wondered if somewhere in a guidebook to modern etiquette there was a list of all the correct things she should be saying. She might be making things worse for all she knew. She could hear Abigail sniffing, which might mean tears, but it wasn't far off summer and she did get hay fever, Stella remembered.

‘I don't know.' Abigail's voice sounded smaller, as if having psyched herself up to say the big thing, she'd now run out of energy. It must have taken a lot to admit she'd been
left.
Stella couldn't remember any of Abigail's previous men doing the leaving, that had always been her role. She'd always fancied herself as something of a bolter, like Fanny's mother in
The Pursuit of Love
. After her own mother had met Abigail, Stella remembered her saying, with wary admiration, ‘She's a heartbreaker, that one,' as if it was some sort of dubious talent like being able to do the splits or hail cabs by whistling. Stella remembered at the time feeling quite grumpily envious that such a disreputable description was unlikely ever to be applied to her. ‘Responsible' and ‘conscientious' had been the most used words on all her school reports. ‘Flighty' might have been fun occasionally, ‘temperamental' even better, but only to be dreamed of.

‘He hasn't taken much with him, just the usual business trip clothes and this slut called Fiona. You wouldn't think a “Fiona” would do a thing like this, would you? It's such a good-girl name. Though of course being blond . . . Oh Stella, could I come and stay for a little while? Please? Just till I know what's going on? It's so awful here all alone . . .'

Stella had said yes because that was what you said to your oldest friends when they asked you for help. You didn't stop to think about whether it was a good time to have a visitor to entertain, or how the rest of the family might feel. ‘That's how they get to be your oldest friends,' she told her reflection in the driftwood mirror as she paused by the kitchen door on her way out to break the news to Adrian, working down in the summerhouse at the end of the garden. She hoped he'd be pleased. At college the three of them had been such close friends – she and Adrian the settled cosy couple while Abigail's boyfriends came and went from her room next door to Stella's and, Abigail liked to half-boast, were changed almost as often as her knickers. Back in those days, if life could have been compared to a box of chocolates, sex definitely resembled After Eights, with everyone secretly getting through as much as they thought they could get away with and later pretending it wasn't
them.
Sex didn't come, in those days, with government health warnings and the threat of a grizzly death. Stella, who had only enjoyed rampant promiscuity vicariously through the giggled-over Adventures of Abigail, nevertheless felt quite sad that her own teenage children, bombarded with warnings about everything from sexually dreadful diseases to the dangers that might lurk in eggs, beef, tap water and sunshine, didn't even have the option of wild and perilous living.

Stella had met Abigail on the first day of their first college term twenty-five or so years previously. They'd been a pair of awkward new girls, eighteen years old and trying to look nonchalant, waiting to be shown to their rooms in the once grand, but now gently decaying, Queen Anne premises by a volunteer band of mostly male second-year students. Other new students were accompanied by parents who wouldn't leave until they'd made sure their first-time-away-from-home babes had somewhere suitable to settle, somewhere they could picture them cosily making coffee, making friends. Abigail and Stella stood aloof and together linked by their sophisticated independence, scorning the embarrassingly fussing mothers and the tetchy fathers who looked at their watches.

‘Bit bloody far from town,' Abigail had grumbled half under her breath, eying with hostility the once grand building's crumbling portico and peeling paint, and cursing the former protectors of young ladies' virtue for siting teacher training establishments just that bit too far from urban temptations.

The second years eyed the newcomers and took their time, loitering with cigarettes and insider gossip. Abigail had tapped her long slim foot and made complaining, what's-keeping-them faces at Stella. Then the two of them were joined by a third lone girl on whom the boys suddenly swooped like ravens on a carcass, bearing away girl and baggage with over-eager speed, leaving both Stella and Abigail open-mouthed and outraged.

‘Are we so truly repulsive or something?' Abigail had asked the empty air.

‘She's tall and gorgeous and blond,' Stella, small, and roundish had pointed out.

‘
I'm
tall!' Abigail had fumed, leaving the ‘and gorgeous' unsaid but implied and undeniable.

‘That leaves the blond then. It's just because she's blond, that's all. That's all men
see
,' Stella said. She'd looked at Abigail whose shaggy-layered hair was a deep rich red, about the colour of a wet fox, she'd have guessed. Her own was conker-brown, shiny, short and straight and cut, as it still was, in a childlike bob.

‘Idiot men fall over themselves for any old dog with yellow hair. They get
everything.
I hate them,' Abigail had stated with considerable venom. She meant blondes, not men. It had quickly become clear that she didn't hate men.

As she thought about what to tell Adrian, Stella noticed that her own hair was looking quite a lot lighter these days. It would never be a youthful, man-snaring yellow of course, not now, but it seemed to be well on its way from its original deep chestnut to an almost golden walnut. Most of this was thanks to Wayne the hairdresser who, just lately, had been tactfully highlighting with ever-paler streaks.

Becoming more or less blond herself one day, she realized, was not now completely out of the question. Unfortunately I'll be far too old to get the benefit by then, she decided gloomily, not to mention all those women like me and Abigail who would distrust me on sight.

Adrian, in the octagonal summerhouse built onto the riverbank wall, was putting the finishing touches to his day's writing. He closed down the computer with enormous care, murmuring the small procedures out loud just to make sure he'd done them all. He barely trusted either himself or the computer to remember its password from one day to the next. Then he went outside, double-locking the door on the chaos of paper and reference books and abandoned crosswords. The computer was stuffed full of the highly erotic fiction that earned him a comfortable, though uneasy living. Sometimes when he'd written a particularly carnal passage, he wondered why the computer didn't explode, or why a message of indignant moral protest didn't appear on its screen, as if he had his Methodist grandmother reading over his shoulder. The password and the double-locking were left over from when Ruth and Toby were young and inquisitive – now they'd probably not give his works a second glance, on the basis that, when it came to sex, what could an idiot
parent
possibly know? From what he remembered about being a teenager, they could get sexually frantic from just the thought of a word like ‘nipple'. They didn't need whole novels full of titillation. Still, something that resembled a wary conscience kept Adrian securely locking the door as if the lustful shameless writings had a nightlife of their own like the undead in a horror movie. He couldn't help feeling the words just might slither out under the door and spread themselves into the sleeping psyches of the other Pansy Island residents, giving them dreams of unspeakable pornography that would haunt their horrified days and send them scurrying to counsellors and therapists. He could imagine Willow, the aging hippy, wondering which aromatherapy oil would be best for soothing away unbidden thoughts of dissipation and sweet young Charlotte, who painted naive street scenes, wondering why she felt a sudden urge to splash her canvases with lurid genital close-ups.

He put the keys in his pocket and sniffed at the air, identifying a roasting chicken wafting down the garden. From the path beyond the hedge he could hear the chatter of eager would-be artists on their way to Bernard's evening life-drawing class at the boathouse gallery. He'd always wondered why, when Bernard himself (quasi-famous artist-in-residence) specialized in nudes of teenage girls, he always gave his pupils a gnarled and shivering pensioner to paint. Probably something to do with light and texture, Adrian supposed charitably. Down below him on the river, a family of mallards had drifted across to the island from the opposite bank and was squawking urgently round old Peggy's houseboat, expecting to be fed that day's food scraps. I wonder if they have a sense of smell, he thought, closing his eyes and breathing in, along with the chicken from his own kitchen, the tempting aroma of Peggy's sausage and beans supper wafting up the barge chimney.