Muddy Waters (7 page)

‘Delicious food – but just the teeniest morsel for me, please,' Abigail said as she took Stella's usual seat next to Adrian. Stella sat down opposite and gave Ruth, who was about to comment, a look that told her it would be petty to suggest a swap-round.

‘I hope you haven't gone to lots of extra trouble just because I'm here. I don't want to be any more than just one of the family,' Abigail smiled wanly and added, ‘I've been rather missing that, you see.' Her smile ranged the room and settled on Toby, who beamed back at her. ‘It's so lovely to see you two again as well – so much more grown up and . . .' she looked hard at Ruth and then at Stella, ‘and so very much
bigger
than last time.' She laughed and put her hand on Adrian's leg, squeezing hard at his thigh, ‘Not
you
of course, darling,' she said as he flinched and shuffled. ‘You men are so lucky, aren't they, Stella? Their bodies stay just as hard and firm as always, unlike us.' She looked at Ruth, who was glaring, and gave a hard little laugh, ‘Oh don't look so shocked, sweetie, Adrian and I, and Stella of course, go back to the dark ages. I'm sure
I'm
allowed to touch him, aren't I, Stella?'

‘Goodness, I don't know.' Stella laughed, helping herself to more salad and wondering if she was imagining she'd been somewhat insulted. ‘You'll have to ask him – he's a big boy now.'

It was time, Stella decided as she started clearing away the dishes after supper, for Abigail to do some proper talking – to tell her exactly what had happened so momentously between her and Martin that could make him take off suddenly with someone else. At least, she assumed it was suddenly. Perhaps Abigail hadn't spotted the signposts that would have told her he was going. Probably, given a complacent habit of vanity, it hadn't occurred to her that there might be any to look for. Ruth and Toby disappeared, one out to see friends and the other to the TV as soon as they could reasonably claim to have tidied the kitchen, and Adrian wandered off to the sitting-room to watch a European Cup match.

Abigail and Stella faced each other over the kitchen table with a newly opened bottle of wine and a box of Bittermints that Abigail had thoughtfully bought at the station on her way. This was the point at which Stella wished Abigail had simply written to her instead, she was far more used to giving advice at a distance, and, she thought, better at it. She could have looked up the relevant counselling services, carefully thought over possible arrangements for the children. Once people knew she worked as an agony aunt they sidled up quietly and asked her about all sorts of things — Ellen MacIver whispered to her about Fergus's haemor-rhoids. Charlotte asked her about the Child Support Agency and her baby's ear infections. She did her best but felt she was much better at the job she actually did, advising on acne and abortions, bullies and boyfriends, failed exams and whether a pair of budding teenage breasts were supposed to be of identical size. She took a large sip of her wine and started carefully dissecting Abigail's misery.

‘Didn't you have any idea he was having an affair? I'm sure I'd have found out, Adrian couldn't resist letting me know, one way or another.' Stella opened the discussion, trying to keep it light.

Abigail grinned, but without real humour. ‘Well I did wonder, just a teeny bit. He'd started getting terribly vain, forever preening, coming home with cosmetics for men and special shampoo and all that. I put that down to him working round the corner from Selfridges – and his age, of course.'

‘What, like the male menopause type of thing?' Stella said. ‘You do hear about sensible VW Golf types suddenly rushing out to buy a scarlet Porsche, don't you, or accountants with an urge to go to work in snakeskin cowboy boots.'

‘Exactly. And would you believe it, in Martin's case I thought it was just going to be skincare. How naive can you get . . .' Abigail drank some wine and looked around to see if any of the herb pots on the window ledge might be sitting in an ashtray.

‘I'll get you one,' Stella offered, recognizing the panic-stricken expression that smokers adopt when suddenly realizing they might have accidentally trapped themselves in a smokeless zone.

‘He's always worked late at the office, that old cliché, ever since I've known him. He wouldn't get paid so deliciously much otherwise. I can't think where he found the time for an affair,' Abigail told Stella, with an involuntary satisfied smile at the thought of the earnings. She sighed, ‘He was such an improvement on Johnny who was around all the time, always getting in the way.'

Stella smiled, thinking of Adrian. ‘I suppose working from home does have a sort of tricky intimacy about it,' she agreed. Abigail's first husband had been a successful pioneer in home-based desk-top publishing, rigging up computers all over the house (more of a tele-mansion than tele-cottage) and being constantly smug about strike-bound commuters and the wrong sort of snow disrupting Network South-East.

Abigail grimaced and chuckled, ‘Sorry, I mean it obviously works for you and Adrian, it was just that with Johnny, he couldn't stop checking up on what I was up to all the time, as if I was . . .' She hesitated and her glance wavered away from Stella's and she watched her cigarette ash scattering over the ashtray. ‘Well, for a trial run at marriage I suppose he wasn't a bad effort.'

‘And what about your second one, Noel, wasn't it? I never met him,' Stella prompted, feeling like a doctor trying to get to the origins of an awkward patient's problems.

Abigail shrugged, as if dismissing the entire marriage. ‘Ah well, he was American and we were only married just a teensy short while, so I hardly count him. No Martin was
the
one. The forever one.' She smiled, her grey eyes full of the dream-like past. ‘Do you remember at college we used to wonder how we'd know, out of all the boyfriends, which would be Mr Perfect, Mr Rest-of-your-life? Goodness, and we were supposed to be intelligent, not to believe all that magazine romance shit.'

‘I'm pretty sure
I
didn't believe it,' Stella laughed. ‘I just wondered if there was such a thing, or if you just ended up marrying whoever you happened to be going out with at the age when it seemed the thing to do. Or if the family pressure got too much, like when your mother started shopping for elaborate hats and dropping awful hints like, “There's some
lovely
Wedgewood in the Debenhams sale”.'

‘Yeah, I thought you were being cynical, I remember,' Abigail laughed.

‘I thought
you
were,' Stella countered, ‘You said you'd only marry someone rich enough to afford a huge house with no mortgage. And then you actually did! Three times!'

‘Yes, I know. Silly me, but that's the way I am. I have this need for comfort, an absolute craving. All that love-in-a-starving-garret stuff would never have suited me. And of course way back
then
, it never occurred to me you could maybe have love
and
money.' She looked wistful, gazing round the kitchen. Stella looked round with her, noticing that the pink paint was cracking over the sink (where no one had yet got round to choosing tiles) and that Mrs Morris had still, after several casual remindings, never managed to reach the cobwebby corner of the ceiling by the window. The dresser was permanently cluttered with loose change, homework, bits cut out from newspapers, bunches of keys and gardening magazines. It was a big enough house, comfortable, colourful and haphazardly furnished with a mixture of Heal's best, combined with car boot and junk shop bargains and mis-matched arty pieces that suited them all. Stella remembered Abigail's Sussex rectory, on the other hand, as being a meticulous work of tasteful splendour in shades of cream with gleaming antiques. It had the kind of highly polished grown-up grandeur that could only be maintained by sending, as Abigail and Martin had, their pair of boisterous children to boarding school and then whisking them safely away from the pristine premises for skiing, pony club camps and Corsican beaches during the holidays. She wondered suddenly, if those children, only aged about ten and eight, ever thought of the house as a proper home.

Abigail must have been reading Stella's train of thought. She sighed, her eyes fixed on the ceiling cobwebs. ‘I'm sure I got everything wrong. If only I'd been able to settle for what you and Adrian have got. Perhaps it isn't too late to settle for it
now
– I'm sure I'm owed some kind of
contentment
, don't you think?'

Stella frowned. ‘What do you mean, “settle for”?' she demanded defensively, ignoring Abigail's rhetorical question. ‘It's hardly impoverished inner-city misery we're living in. We do OK. A lot more than OK, actually.' She's shameless, Stella thought, half-admiring Abigail's lack of tact. Generally relatively polite as she was to chosen friends, she was just the kind of woman who'd come swanning up to those less favoured at a party and say, ‘Goodness, darling, have you still got that ghastly jacket?' without her brain connecting fast enough with what her mouth was saying. Stella used to find this rather enviable, and had done ever since Abigail had queried a low essay mark she'd been given by bluntly challenging her male tutor with, ‘Are you quite sure you aren't marking me down because you're shorter than me and feel inadequate?' It must be bliss, Stella imagined, to come straight out with whatever daft thing was in your mind without having the thought of possible consequences hopping in first and slamming the emergency good-manners brakes on. She tried a practice attempt at being blunt, ‘So why did he want to go and have an affair in the first place? What was going wrong? Was it sex?' Abigail's eyes widened and she fiddled with her cigarette lighter, turning it over and over, watching the gold catching the light. If she'd been a child, Stella thought, that might be construed as guilty fidgeting. For once, she really was choosing carefully what to say.

‘Everyone all right? Not finished the wine? Good.' Adrian came bustling in, reached across the table and picked up the bottle to top up his own glass. ‘Sorry, am I interrupting?' he asked cautiously, wary of their silence.

‘We weren't talking about you, if that's what you were thinking.' Abigail beamed a sweet smile at him, reaching out a hand to caress his fondly as if she was reassuring her cat. Sweet of her, Stella thought, to be as pleased to see Adrian as to see her – men could be so nervous of women
ganging up
.

‘Never crossed my mind,' he assured her, scuttling nervously backwards to the door, suddenly eager to return to the TV and the second half of the match.

‘You didn't answer my question,' Stella reminded Abigail. There was more to this than she'd been told, she decided. Martin's defection might not be so completely out of the blue as she'd been encouraged to think. At college, though she'd probably now deny it could possibly have happened. Abigail had once set herself a personal target of sleeping with a different man every night for a week. Stella remembered her joking about having knickers with days of the week embroidered on them, peering under her skirt and joking with something like, ‘If I'm wearing Wednesday it must be Paul.' One of the men, a brawny rugby player with far less sexual experience than bar-room bragging would have the rest of the team believe, had even left a grateful £20 on the pillow which Abigail had been so thrilled about she'd taken Stella out and treated them both to extravagant steak and chips at the pub. It had been there that she'd confessed with a lot of drunken giggling just how ill-gotten was her sudden windfall. Perhaps, Stella thought, she still liked a spot of casual, anonymous sex now and then, in the same way that Ellen MacIver had joined a local sports club because she still nostalgically enjoyed the occasional schoolgirlish game of lacrosse.

Abigail was again saved from being trapped into an honest reply by a sudden urgent rapping on the door. Peggy came in without waiting for an answer, bringing with her the cool spring night air. Abigail sprang to grab her cat before it escaped into the night. ‘Council man just came round again. Sneaked round in a rowing boat in the dark, the bugger. They usually come in two's, nice and nasty like on police programmes, but this time it was Nasty on his own,' Peggy said to Stella glumly, eying what was left of the wine. She sat down heavily next to Abigail who clutched Cleo on her lap.

‘At this time?' Stella said, fetching her a glass. ‘Whatever was he doing harassing you this late?'

‘Harassing's the word,' Peggy complained. She coughed and shifted her arthritic legs till the least painful position was achieved. ‘He said I couldn't pretend to be out if the light was on. He brought another reminder that they want me off the mooring. It's not as if I'm going to be in the way of their precious sodding bridge.' She looked depressed and defeated, Stella thought, angry at council bureaucrats.

‘They're obsessed with suburban tidiness,' Stella said angrily and then explained to Abigail who was looking bewildered but politely interested, ‘Peggy's got the last houseboat left here, just by the end of our garden. There used to be about ten of them. She's lived here for fifteen years, all wired up and more or less plumbed in. It's absolutely no harm to anyone.' The ‘plumbed in' was definitely less rather than more, Stella remembered. Peggy had a fresh water supply but had long ago dispensed with the heavy and complicated chemical toilet, preferring to cut out the middle man, as she put it, and dump bucket contents over the side. ‘If ducks and rats can put shit in the river, I don't see why I shouldn't,' she'd declared, leaving Adrian and Stella wishing she simply hadn't mentioned it.

‘The bridge is supposed to be much further round the other side, nearer to the ferry, so it's not as if Peggy's in the way. But they can't build it till she's gone because she's keeping open the rights to ten other moorings that in theory could be claimed and then occupied.'