Muddy Waters (8 page)

Abigail looked puzzled, ‘And does no one really want the bridge? I'd have thought it would be a godsend, loads easier than turning that awkward great handle on the ghastly raft-thingy.'

‘Well, if even I can still do it . . .' Peggy interrupted scornfully.

‘Perhaps what you really need is two bridges,' Abigail suggested casually, lighting another cigarette. ‘One to connect the other bank as well. Wouldn't that be rather nice? Especially for you older folks?'

‘Over my dead and buried body. And I mean that. Do you know, he said I should be in sheltered accommodation. I told him I was, I was sheltered by friends.' Peggy glared at Abigail and thumped her fist on the table before levering herself up and shuffling as fast as she could out of the door and back to the barge.

‘You've upset her now,' Stella accused Abigail. ‘She's too old for fuss and bother and she doesn't need any help to start imagining the worst.'

‘Sorry.' Abigail looked contrite. ‘Putting both feet straight in it seems to be a speciality of mine. I just can't seem to help it.'

Toby sat in a quiet corner of the pub with four of his friends and together they flicked through magazines salivating over the glossy photos. Girl students from the sixth form college perched cutely on bar stools with their tiny skirts stretched high across their thighs, swinging their legs and eying the boys, waiting in vain to be noticed and bought drinks.

‘God, just look at the bodywork on that will you,' Nick, a tall broad boy with a black ponytail was saying, ‘and check the bumpers.' He passed the magazine across to Toby who groaned longingly, ‘What I'd give . . .' he said.

‘Not sure about the colour though. A bit washed out for me,' he then decided after a few moments close inspection.

‘Yeah, maybe,' Nick agreed, ‘pale blue's all right for polishing up and showing on the concourse, but a bit poncey for daily driving.' He turned the page and found another VW Beetle. ‘What about a nice little 1302 in British Racing Green? Classic. You can't go wrong with that.'

Toby had seen the girls looking. He was used to that. One of them wasn't bad in a gawky-legged sort of way, but he was a methodical boy, handling his bank account with a responsible maturity that would be the envy of any middle-aged man. He had a job at a car showroom from which he was saving diligently to take the Beetle round Europe before university. All girls always proved to be expensive, a serious threat to the cash flow, however much they'd been brought up on caring, sharing and independence. Older women were better, not just better about money but not so silly and clinging and wanting reassurance. He suddenly thought of Abigail and her long slim legs the way he'd seen them from ground level. She'd arrived by taxi but he was willing to bet she flashed around Sussex in something like a BMW convertible or possibly a Discovery and hadn't the first clue about how to open the bonnet. She'd probably never needed to. There wouldn't be much point discussing the progress of the Beetle with her: if he mentioned a flywheel gland nut she might think he was talking dirty and start avoiding him in the house. Lucky, he thought, as he gave the girls at the bar another idle looking over, the spare room she was occupying in the attic had its own bathroom, shared only with Ruth, otherwise the scope for embarrassing clashings outside the door might just be too much. He'd have to go and crash at Nick's. There was something about her, that just-been-shot-at look probably, that made him want her to like him. He felt like being kind to her, in the way he had been to a terrified squirrel the previous autumn when the MacIver's Corgi had chewed off half its tail. It would be interesting to try and get her to smile properly, not just in that hard glassy way he'd seen so far, he thought cautiously, flicking unseeingly through
Volksworld
.

Abigail paced the bedroom floor and wondered how she was to be expected to manage for money if Martin never came back. After generous settlements from both Johnny and Noel she could reasonably claim to own most of the house – the children would need somewhere to live during the holidays and Martin and the blond bimbette wouldn't want to have to entertain them. But the bills for running the house were huge, so Martin might manage to force her into selling it by simply being mean about paying them. She didn't really have much to do with that side of things. He'd always made such a point of finding her ‘adorable' that she'd played along with it by handing him any envelope that came through the door looking as if it might be a bill. He paid for her astronomical health club membership, her hairdressing, Harvey Nichols account, American Express charges, car expenses, blissful holidays, the Colefax and Fowler fabrics, National Trust paints and the teams of designers and artisans who came in to apply them, the garden landscapers, pool maintenance, children's school fees – everything that made her luscious lazy life the comfortably privileged way it was. The room she now fretted and paced in was pretty in a home-spun sort of way, she thought – though if it was hers she'd have chosen a shade of yellow closer to unsalted butter than to lemon. The bed on which Cleo was curled up and purring was brass, but not the new luscious sort, rather the aged and tarnished type as if it might conceivably have been Adrian's grandmother's. Perhaps she'd died in it, Abigail thought, recognizing that she was getting morbidly fanciful. Abigail preferred her antiques to be scrupulously anonymous, polished and restored (authentically, of course) till no trace of undesirable age-stain was left. She liked history to be a simple matter of which century, which king and which auction room. She could not bear the fact that a linen press might actually once have contained less than perfectly Persil-laundered sheets; that mice three centuries ago might have been trapped and suffocated in her Tudor chest. Beside the window overlooking Stella and Adrian's waterside garden stood an old pine chest of drawers that someone, perhaps Ruth as a ten-year-old by the look of it, had had a go at painting in two shades of sludgy blue. It looked like jolly poster paint, whereas in her house only the sleekest, most authentic Dead Flat Oil was permitted. Cleo was dozing on a patchwork quilt that Stella must have made – Abigail recognized Liberty prints and bits of Laura Ashley from dresses she remembered her wearing years and years ago. Stella's whole house was put together with bits and pieces of happy memories. Paintings on the yellow walls were of flowers and boats, and there was a jolly one of the rowing club she'd seen as she stood with Toby by the ferry, perhaps also done by Ruth or Toby. She thought of the smart prep school where teachers who were paid to get results had the brief chance to admire but then throw away her children's artistic efforts, keeping only the ones suitable for showing off on open days. And she thought of her own Picasso etchings, an investment but not a treasure it seemed to her now, carefully grouped in her golden drawing-room where she'd never allowed her small son and daughter to blemish the cream silk cushions with their sticky fingers and uncontrolled feet, and she shivered with lonely misery.

Stella sat in the kitchen in the early morning sorting through her mail and waiting for Abigail to come downstairs. It was almost ten, and Abigail's non-appearance suggested either that she'd lain in anxious misery till sleep had finally caught up with her in the early hours of the morning or that she could manage the effortless rest of the innocent. Her cat had already got up, pattering downstairs as soon as it heard kitchen noises and Stella had fed it. She'd then accompanied it into the garden where it had nervously, on this unfamiliar territory, scratched several experimental holes, dislodging Stella's young foxgloves before daring at last to pee, closing its slightly crossed blue eyes in blissful relief. Stella had also felt relief that the cat hadn't taken the chance to run away or been chased off towards the fox-inhabited wilderness by Willow's cats prowling in from up the lane. Imagine, she thought, having to tell Abigail that she'd been abandoned by her cat as well as her husband. Back in the house, the little cat snaked itself up onto a kitchen chair and purred loudly, settled on the cushion and started washing its back left leg. Stella watched it as she made herself some tea, admiring its obvious contentment. Cats are just like small children, she thought, only really happy with what's completely familiar and undemanding. The trouble with grownups, she decided as she sat at the table next to the cat, was that they thought they couldn't be happy unless they were forever searching out new, stimulating novelties.

She turned her attention back to the post and to her work. The weekly Jiffy bag had arrived from
Get This!
, well stuffed with the multi-coloured envelopes that all adolescent girls seemed to collect, containing another batch of teenage anguish. Now this was one group of people who were
supposed
to go out and look for the novelty value in life, she thought, wishing she couldn't accurately predict what would be bugging them all this week. In terms of teenage magazines, it was a truth universally acknowledged that a fourteen-year-old girl in possession of her right mind must be in want of a boyfriend. If it wasn't for that ‘truth', she thought as she risked her nails tugging the staples from the envelope, there wouldn't
be
problem pages, which would be a very good thing if it didn't involve biting off one of the hands that fed her. She tipped the contents of the padded bag all over the table, chose a bright pink envelope addressed in urgent purple pen and opened it carefully. ‘Dear Alice, I got drunk at a party and did something really stupid . . .' Stella would put £50 on the chances of there being at least five more letters in the pile that started with exactly the same words.

‘Some time today,' Adrian said as he walked into the kitchen, ‘is there any chance of you collecting a couple of reams of paper from the stationer's? And is it today my grey jacket's ready at the cleaner's?'

Stella looked at him across the heap of mail he hadn't noticed and then closed her eyes, pleading with the heavens for patience. What's the phrase, she thought? Could it be ‘too busy?' She should have taken it all up to her desk – it was her own fault for opening work mail in the kitchen where she was easily confused with a domestic item.

‘I've got all this,' she told him, waving her hand vaguely across the table. ‘Perhaps Ruth could go on the way back from college, or maybe Abigail – don't forget I've got her to take out and entertain as well. I've got to go to the printers too with the art fair map.'

Adrian latched on to the last statement and looked pleased. ‘Oh good, well while you're there, perhaps you could pick up the paper at the same time, it's only down the road.' He leaned across the table and kissed her forehead. ‘Thanks, darling. I'm nearly at book-end, and while it's on a roll, you know . . . Ruth and Toby still upstairs?' He glanced rather furtively at the door, opened a drawer in the dresser and pulled out a copy of
Mayfair.
‘Popped it in here last night,' he said, flicking through to the readers' letters page from where many of his ideas for books, over the years, had come. ‘Didn't want to leave it lying around.'

Stella stopped opening letters and looked at him intently. She felt suddenly curious. ‘Do you ever really get off on reading that stuff?'

He looked at her over the top of the magazine, like a professor expressing scholarly outrage. ‘Of course not!' he declared with a hoot of laughter. ‘Do you imagine I sit out in the hut all day in a state of horny frustration? Good grief, it would have dropped off by now! You know this is just
research
.' He was munching a piece of cold toast and reading with as much calm detachment as if it was a leader in
The Times
.

‘Do you think they make it all up?' she asked, ‘or do people really get up to all that odd stuff like doing it while they're driving up the M4 and under the table at weddings and such.'

Adrian shrugged, ‘I don't know, never thought about it. I just find it occasionally useful when I'm stuck for a chapter. Do
yours
make it up, do you think?' He looked at the pile of letters.

‘Probably, but all these problems are universal whatifs, really. A sixteen-year-old girl dating a man of her father's age, parents who won't let their precious only child out after nine p.m., and she's seventeen, that sort of thing.'

‘Well, there you are then. It's much the same with this, though most of it's showing off, not grumbling. Could be anyone's sex life in here.' He went back to his reading.

Stella though was still searching for something, ‘But what
really
turns you on, you know, in that instant . . .' she waved a hand vaguely over her colourful heap of letters, ‘in that
teenage
sort of way?' She felt somehow she shouldn't be asking this, she should already know the answers, be fully
using
her knowledge of the answers. She was sure she used to know – they'd never have had any kind of relationship otherwise. Now, thinking about it, it seemed an awful long time since they'd had one of those delicious, spontaneous bouts of sex, say in the open air on a thundery summer night, or fast and frantic, rummaging away among the piled-up coats while a terribly sedate party went on downstairs. ‘Sex is a bit like cooking, isn't it,' she said, mostly to herself as Adrian seemed to be absorbed in his reading, ‘you know, after some keen experimenting you tend to stick to the things you're familiar with and that you know you like and are easy.'

‘Hmm,' Adrian agreed vaguely, adding rather oddly, ‘can't beat a good risotto.'

She couldn't imagine Abigail wondering about the secret sexual fantasies of any of her husbands. She'd simply assume (till now) that they were all based on her, make
sure
they were, in fact. She'd wheedle out all their deepest naughtiest secrets and serve them up with positively cordon bleu panache. Adrian had put down his magazine and was looking out of the window, far across the river. He thought for a long moment, tapping his ear with his pen. ‘You look so studious,' she said, ‘just like when we sat together in bed at the college revising war poets together. Do you remember? And Abigail used to join us sometimes. She always sat on my feet. I got cramp.'