Amenable Women Read online

  But then, surprisingly, Lucy said, ‘Oh I know about that stone with the date on it. It’s supposed to be something to do with that king who had all the wives – and one of them lived here or something.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Flora forgetting her sinking heart. ‘Have you seen it?’

  ‘No – but old Mr Farrell came in to the school and gave a talk on local history. Edward –’ and here she paused – ‘talked about it. He said it was in the old wall somewhere.’ She laughed, but not very nicely. ‘The King divorced his wife because she looked like a horse or something and then dumped her down here. Was she local then?’

  ‘No’, Flora snapped. ‘She was German. She came from Flanders which was part of Germany.’ Flora could feel herself reddening which didn’t help her temper. There was something very unpleasant about the easy way Lucy spoke so cruelly. Flora could imagine it being said about her, Shame it had to be the husband who died first – such a good-looking man and she’s – well – she’s a bit – ‘Anyway, Lucy – you didn’t come here to talk about Tudor history . . .?’

  Lucy raised an eyebrow at Flora – a trick Flora did not know her Little Treasure could spring – and said with a smile – ‘No. And sorry to come so late but –’ She placed a large brown envelope on the table between the bottle of wine and the torch. ‘I thought I should return this.’

  She pointed to the envelope. ‘I found it pinned to the suit.’ Her eyes were gleaming oddly. If Flora had not known her better she might have considered the light in them malevolent. ‘The dress suit,’ Lucy added. ‘It’s a note from the cleaners.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, puzzled. ‘About a stain, probably.’ They both stared at the envelope. Lucy made no move to go.

  As if to be helpful she said, ‘Mum’s looking after the boys.’ ‘Oh good.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ Lucy moved nearer.

  ‘It’ll keep,’ said Flora, putting the envelope down next to the glass of wine. Suddenly and quite desperately, she wanted her drink, her private ritual. She remembered her manners. ‘Would you like a drink, Lucy?’ she said as she picked up the glass.

  ‘I think there’s something inside it,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Really?’ said Flora holding it up to the light. ‘Seems all right.’ She gave Lucy a look reminiscent of her time in the infant class. It always worked there.

  ‘No – I mean in the envelope. Another envelope.’

  Flora looked. There was. On the front of the outer envelope, the one with the drycleaners’ logo, was written ‘Found in pocket and returned.’ She took out the second envelope. On the front of it in small, much flourished handwriting, was the word ‘Edward’. Flora opened it. Lucy came closer, holding her breath. She was looking not at the envelope and its contents but at Flora’s face.

  Flora read the note, also written in the small, much flourished handwriting. It said:

  Darling Edward

  By the time you read this our weekend will be just a happy memory. Three beautiful, beautiful days. It was wonderful. You were brilliant at the shooting and I shall keep the sweet little posy pot by my bed to remind me of you. I’m so glad you liked the yellow jumper. All my own work. Next time, Monsieur, it will be Paree!

  Here’s a kiss. P x

  And there was – a pink kiss – the perfect lip imprint. Baby-pink lipstick. Now where had Flora seen such a colour before?

  ‘Goodness,’ said Flora. She was thinking on her feet, and nearly off them. So that was where the yellow sweater came from. When he wore it for the first time Flora told him he looked as if he had been dipped in custard. And he agreed. The pink kisser had obviously been given a quite different impression. Honestly, husbands!

  If the watching Lucy held her breath for much longer she would expire. Which, Flora felt, would be no bad thing. She looked her Little Treasure straight in her questioning little eye. ‘Ah,’ she said, with saccharine sincerity, ‘Edward used to call me his Poppet.’ She waited for Lucy to burst out laughing but Lucy did not. She just went on looking at Flora intently, though with just a trace of disappointment. ‘I’d quite forgotten,’ said Flora gaily, ‘That he’d left that silly note in the pocket.’ She put down the untouched glass and made a move out of the kitchen. ‘Thank you so much,’ she said. ‘Thank you for bringing it back’. By now she had reached the front door which she opened and held open widely and pointedly. ‘But you shouldn’t have bothered.’

  Lucy hesitated. Flora stood her ground. She clenched her teeth in what must have been a very strange apology of a smile. Beyond the door the evening was dark and mild with a peppering of stars. A beautiful late April night. Oddly she seemed to hear the tune of ‘April in Paris’ floating over the hawthorn hedge and rippling through the Nellie Moser. For the first time since Edward’s death she felt the beginning of tears. ‘Poppet,’ she said harshly to the hawthorn hedge, and nodded at its very sharp thorns. ‘My Poppet,’ she said loudly to the rustling new leaves of the Nellie. Then she turned towards the messenger and said ‘Poppet’, very firmly, and ‘Thank you, Lucy,’ and ‘Goodbye.’

  Off into the night went Lucy Stevens, her backward glance saying she was still unconvinced. As, indeed, she should be. Flora, feeling as if all the air had escaped from her, closed the door and looked down at the note again. Her hands trembled. ‘By the time you read this . . .’ But he never had, had he? Of course not. Whoever P was she did not know that old-fashioned husbands seldom took things to the drycleaners if there was a wife about. Which made her think that whoever P was, she was unmarried and probably young. If only the wife in question had remembered to check the pockets first, she thought. Flora wondered in a detached way what she might have said to him when confronted with the silly note but she would never know. How clever of him to wriggle out of a situation like this. She looked up at the mild night and the stars. Then she looked down at the ground. Yet again he had dropped her in it without a care in the world (quite literally) himself.

  As if the will and Hilary’s likely reaction to it were not enough to be going on with – now there was this. Whatever this might be. Or who.

  Poppet, indeed. I’ll Poppet him, she thought. Wishful thinking.

  3

  Hilary Gets a Shock

  The meeting with Ewan Davies, thought Flora, reminded her vaguely of similar scenes in Jane Austen where money and marriage and inheritance were concerned: Fanny and John Dashwood came to mind as eager-eyed Hilary leaned forward in her seat in certain expectation while Flora sat as upright as if she had a whale’s rib stuck up her back. Even Ewan, Flora saw (for with tenderness she noticed such things) was strained, which meant that with his experience of life, death and wills he, too, knew that Hilary would take the news badly. Ewan sat on the opposite side of his desk in a dark suit, with a dark, sober face. One thing was certain, Hilary, who was listening intently, was not amused.

  While the solicitor spoke Flora daydreamed. His face was sunor possibly wind-tanned, the little bald bit on the top of his head was the same, though paler, and his nose was a deep almost-mahogany, as were his hands. She quite forgot herself. ‘I’ll bet you’ve been playing golf,’ she said, sitting upright suddenly and laughing. ‘Not fishing at all.’

  ‘Both,’ he said politely.

  ‘You’re a real sports fiend, Ewan, aren’t you?’ She smiled at him fondly. Edward only enjoyed rugby and Eton fives and tolerated village cricket.

  Since the solicitor was in the process of explaining that the total value of Edward’s assets, including the house, was minimal and that everything was put in Flora’s name to avoid the – er – consequences of some of Edward’s investments, it was a strange interjection on Flora’s part. Ewan hesitated, coughed, and looking surprised and torn between ordinary human exchange, smiled fleetingly before going on to describe the rules of probate and other legalities.

  ‘Mum,’ said the scowling Hilary in a voice of such disgust that Flora blushed violently. ‘How could you? In the middle of all this?’

  Flora
didn’t know. Ewan leaned across his desk and patted Hilary’s hand and said , ‘People behave in all sorts of ways at times like these. It’s nothing to get upset about. I see it often.’

  For which Flora could have kissed him and Hilary backed off.

  ‘Now,’ said Ewan, looking more relaxed, ‘I’ll go over the whys and wherefores of everything I think you’ll need to know and then, when I’ve finished, you can ask me whatever you like.’ And he began. Eurotunnel, the Far East, an Abercrombie UK Pension, Giles’s restaurant. Disasters all. Lodge Cottage was safe in Flora’s name, so was a small annuity and not a lot else. It was enough. Flora had battled hard to persuade Edward to move from their tied house on the Estate to a home of their own. In the end she had only achieved the move by asking his father to plead for her. Her father-in-law simply said, ‘Stop dreaming, Edward, and Just Do It.’ And It was done.

  Lodge Cottage was affordable because it backed on to land where they were building the new housing complex (the new constructions were made from a curious pale grey mock stone which never grew lichen and looked forever young and whose design was wickedly mean and pinched). Edward fought valiantly, and won, to have the access road moved so that they would not have streams of what he called Yobs-in-Four-by-Fours crunching past their door at all hours. After that both sides left each other alone. The shrubbery, the old stone wall and their paddock kept them separate and at peace. Three and a half bedrooms were quite enough, and a garden of less than half an acre was perfectly adequate. She was no dedicated country wife, nor horticulturalist, and Lodge Cottage required only the minimum of care. Which was now Lucy’s undoing. Apart from the question of affording her, Flora could put her hand on her heart and say, ‘I do not need you anymore.’ And how her heart lifted when she finally spoke the words. I am a manageable woman living in a manageable house, Flora thought – and didn’t mind the idea one bit.

  What was left of the house by the time all the previous owners had picked at it was a good, solid mid-eighteenth-century building with a pretty garden which still had its original nineteenth-century iron railings to the front, good wooden gates, and a roughcast old stone wall around the rest of the plot. Sometimes noises carried from the new houses but not often – the paddock saw to that. It was dear Ewan who helped them to hold on to the scrap of land when the Edward and Giles fiasco threatened it. She loved the paddock and the way it separated her from the sparkling new little boxes and sometimes she just wanted to go out and roll in it like a cat establishing its territory. Lodge Cottage – for all its smallness – had charm and the charm was enhanced by its being lopped off and asymmetrical rather than a perfect little classical villa. It was like a sweet-faced dog that has only three legs and has learned to look cute to make up for its shortcomings.

  There was one great practical reason for their buying in Hurcott Ducis. It still had a railway station. It was remarkable that Dr Beeching had left a railway station intact here, but rumour suggested that there was a certain lady of Hurcott who knew a little more than was good for the axe-wielding locophobe and that she it was who insisted on the station remaining. Some said this was his mother, some said it was his aunt, others said it was someone of an altogether different kind of close relationship. Whatever the reason – there it was – a functioning railway station – a lifeline. Hence, very likely, its gradual expansion into something approaching a small country town. But its core was still village. Everyone was entirely interested in everyone else’s business and what they didn’t know they made up. All in all, Hurcott Ducis was the perfect place in which to live, widowed or not, and whatever Hilary might say, following the outcome of the reading of the will, that is where Flora intended to stay.

  When Ewan had finished and leaned back and removed his spectacles and relaxed a little and smiled, Hilary gripped the edge of his desk.

  ‘Is that it?’ she asked. ‘It is,’ said Ewan.

  ‘So what happened to the money?’

  Ewan kept his smile and said, ‘I’ve just explained. Your father made some very unwise decisions.’

  ‘He was far too clever to do that,’ said Hilary. ‘I know my father. And he was clever.’

  Ewan looked at Flora, who looked back at him pleadingly. Ewan coughed. Flora looked at him even more pleadingly. Flora imagined, very hard indeed, the image of a puppy on the front of a particularly sentimental birthday card, and tried thought transference. Ewan sighed. And explained to Hilary all over again – in gentle terms – how her father had been somewhat feckless. He reiterated that it was nobody’s fault but Edward’s, and that the word fault was too harsh. ‘Of course your mother did try to dissuade him –’ he crinkled his eyes at Hilary – ‘but you know what your father was like. Dynamic.’ There was a short pause and then: ‘Poor Dad,’ she said eventually. ‘He must just have got sidetracked.’ Hilary gave her mother a sideways look. The solicitor faced the daughter and the daughter faced the solicitor and it was the daughter who blinked.

  ‘Your father was always – a little – over-enthusiastic – in his choices, Hilary. And I think if he were here now he would put his hand up. He was extremely glad that the house was in your mother’s name.’

  Flora was fairly sure, now, that she could love Ewan. Loyal support breeds all kinds of affection. How very easy it is, she thought, when someone shows they like you, to dare to like them back. There was something about the serious, soft way he spoke to Hilary that gave her the feeling she had a champion. She looked at him fondly – his little bald patch, his slightly crumpled features, his pinky brown suntan which she was sure would only touch the bits of him that poked out of a shirt the way he placed his hands flat on the desk in front of him just-so – no – he would never choose to go up in a basket or wish to be associated with a Great British Eccentric. He was also – and perhaps this was why he was such a nice person – a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief – in the guise of his beautiful bibulous wife – and Flora would very much like to . . . Hilary turned to her mother and said angrily, ‘So what do I do now?’

  ‘I think,’ said Flora trying to sound nonchalant and cheerful and putting away the fond image of Ewan sitting with his very ordinary slightly balding head on her lap in the sun-drenched, daisy-filled paddock, ‘that you’ll have to wait until I pop my clogs.’ She gave Ewan a grateful smile and shrugged and said to Hilary, ‘These things happen.’ But she knew that would not be the end of it. Nor was it. Hilary squared her shoulders and said, ‘Why can’t you sell the house?’

  It always amazed her that Edward chose the name Hilary for their daughter. Hilary – the Lenten term at Oxbridge – Lent – a time for meditation, consideration, offering up the spirit and forgetting the cravings of the flesh . . . ‘After all,’ she added, with the heedlessness of youth, ‘you don’t need all that space now.’

  Ewan sucked in his breath but Flora was there before him. ‘If I did that,’ she said, with what she hoped was a bland smile, ‘then I would have to come and live with you. It’s a possibility.’ Who would blink first this time?

  Ewan did. His face no longer wore the calm professional benign expression but a look of absolute horror. Plainly what he wanted to say to Flora was, ‘Have you gone stark, staring mad?’ Wisely he did not. Instead he brought firm, professional, fiscal order to the proceedings. ‘It is a very bad time for property,’ he said. ‘And I would not recommend it. Indeed – in the light of my responsibilities towards you both – I would positively discourage such a move. I have seen too many parents and children end up in a bad way when such schemes have been undertaken.’ Flora very nearly kissed him. Hilary, it was clear, very nearly brained him.

  ‘Such as?’ asked Hilary.

  ‘Oh – parents who sign over their houses to their children to avoid inheritance tax and then the child marries someone who has no conscience – the result is often disastrous and miserable.’

  ‘Well Robin is very nice. He wouldn’t do anything like that.’ ‘All the same, Hilary,’ said Ewan, ‘I cannot, as your executo
r, agree with you.’

  And Flora thought that it wasn’t – really – Robin she was worried about. She and Hilary needed time. Time to what? Time to bond, she supposed.

  That night Flora stood at the open doorway of Edward’s empty room. She had something to say to this husband of hers. Lucy, in perhaps her last act of admiration for her deceased employer, had re-made the bed after their clothes-sorting with a smoothness and exactitude that approached the military. This increased Flora’s impatience but the bare room was so empty, so spiritually empty, that she thought this conversation would probably be like so many other conversations she could remember with her husband – without impact and scarcely listened to. Nevertheless she told him that she knew about his affair – or one-night – or one-Game-Fair – stand, or whatever it was, and that she did not mind the hands-on nature of the activity so much as she found it hard to forgive him the deceit. And that she was going to have to tickle up this Pink Lips person and deal with her so that, with a bit of luck, the disturbance she felt would go away and she could just get on with her life. And leave him to get on with his death.

  Dear Edward, she thought, suddenly, what an endlessly surprising man – she would never have thought him capable of keeping such an adventure a secret. I’ll bet, she thought, he’s giving them a run for their money right now whether it’s Satan’s or St Peter’s lot. She went over to the window. Lucy had drawn the curtains to signify mourning. Flora pulled them right back to let in the bright moonlight, and left the room. In a month or two or three she would probably get around to decorating it – lilac maybe, or apple-blossom pink. But perhaps not quite yet. As she passed the washing basket on the landing she spoke to it. ‘And I’ll deal with what you’re hiding, later.’