GOOD HUSBAND MATERIAL
Trisha Ashley

Copyright

Published by AVON

A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Judy Piatkus (Publishers) Ltd in 2000

This edition published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers in 2013

Copyright © Trisha Ashley 2000

Cover design © debbieclementdesign.com 2019

Cover illustration © Dominique Corbasson 2019

Trisha Ashley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9781847562814

Ebook Edition © March 2013 ISBN: 9780007494088

Version: 2019-11-28

Dedication

For Mary Turner Long, with love.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1: A Dream of a Man

Chapter 2: Home, James

Chapter 3: Painted Out

Chapter 4: Wild in the Country

Chapter 5: The Bourgeois Bitch

Chapter 6: The Posy Profligate

Chapter 7: Drained

Chapter 8: Busted Flush

Chapter 9: Nutthill Nutria

Chapter 10: Just Award

Chapter 11: Nasty in the Woodshed

Chapter 12: Mayday!

Chapter 13: And the Beet Goes on

Chapter 14: In the Drink

Chapter 15: Brief Encounter

Chapter 16: Cat’s Paw

Chapter 17: A Fête Worse than Death

Chapter 18: Fencing

Chapter 19: One Big Ham

Chapter 20: No Change

Chapter 21: Through a Glass, Darkly

Chapter 22: Bugged

Chapter 23: Love Goes West

Chapter 24: Reciprocations

Chapter 25: Blood and Roses

Chapter 26: Pregnant Pause

Chapter 27: Similar Conditions

Chapter 28: Bonfire of the Vanities

Chapter 29: The Great Castrator

Chapter 30: Pupped

Chapter 31: The Least Little Thing

Chapter 32: Tie-dyed

Chapter 33: Christmas Spirit

Chapter 34: Twinkle,Twinkle

Chapter 35: Uncertain Appetites

Chapter 36: Guilt-edged

Chapter 37: The Sweet Wine of Love

Chapter 38: Unlicensed Behaviour

Chapter 39: Dress Optional

Chapter 40: Sold a Pup

Chapter 41: Green-Eyed Men

Chapter 42: Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre

Chapter 43: Out of the Dark

Chapter 44: Aftershock

Chapter 45: Issues

Chapter 46: Alignments

Chapter 47: Photo Finish

Chapter 48: Besieged

Keep Reading …

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Prologue

‘The lyrics of the new Goneril single, ‘Red-Headed Woman’, taken from the album of the same name, show a searing agony of loss and grief. Singer/songwriter Fergal Rocco plumbs new depths of helpless agony and despair in a voice that seems to have been created for that very purpose.’

New Musical Express

Fergal: 1986

My first brief glimpse of Tish seems to have been indelibly imprinted on the inside of my eyelids, for even after almost twelve years and God-knows-how-many women, I only have to close my eyes and there she is: a dryad poised far above me in the shivering green oak leaves, stretching forward with one hand reaching out, her expression intent.

Then the sharp crack as the branch gives way beneath her weight, precipitating her into a long downward swoop towards me, apricot hair flying behind her like a wild Renaissance angel – a mermaid swept by the glassy green waves – a ship’s figurehead forging ahead, one out-thrust hand clasping—

Well, not a trident, at any rate, only some small grey thing. It didn’t just then make the same impression that Tish was about to: a bolt from the green.

While I’d like to say I caught her, truth compels me to admit I merely broke her fall, ending flat on my back with the angel sprawled across me. Enormous smoke-grey eyes stared apprehensively down into mine from an inch away. I decided to give in without a struggle.

Then something scuttled shiftily up my arm on hot, pronged feet and bit me savagely on the ear.

I swore and the creature let go and gave an evil laugh.

I’m not joking.

When Dad came round the corner of the house to see what all the noise was, he found the angel still sprawled over me, incoherently apologising and dabbing at my bleeding ear with a wadded-up bit of filmy skirt.

A small, evil-looking grey parrot stood nearby (too near) regarding us with interested, mad eyes.

‘Always Fergal catches the girls,’ Dad said cheerfully, taking the scene in his stride. Then, with his usual aplomb, he removed his jumper and enveloped the parrot in its folds.

The small assassin gave a dismal squawk, echoed by a screech of outrage from behind us. A tiny, well-preserved blonde, like a piece of shellacked fluff, was advancing up the drive with the martial air of one about to rescue her daughter’s honour or die in the attempt.

‘Leticia – get up at once!’

‘Leticia?’ I questioned incredulously, looking up into the grey eyes so close to mine. (And feeling as I did so as if I’d been sucked into a Black Hole and squeezed out on the other side like toothpaste.)

Her hand stopped its rather painful and ineffectual dabbing and she glared. ‘I don’t see that Fergal is any better!’ she said defensively. ‘And anyway, I’m always Tish.’

‘And I’m always Fergal, Angel, so you’ll just have to get used to it.’

Her eyes widened slightly, then she suddenly removed herself from me in a flutter of flowing green fabric (no wonder I hadn’t seen her in the tree) planting her knee unintentionally – I hope – in a delicate part of my anatomy in the process.

‘Leticia is a nice name,’ Dad said interestedly, giving it an Italian pronunciation. ‘And I am Giovanni Rocco, your new neighbour – call me Joe, everyone does. For six months only we rent this house while our own is renovated – the cracks appear, these old houses in London, they are not well built. And this must be your mamma?’

‘I am Mrs Norwood,’ the fluffy little blonde lady said icily, eyeing Dad with the dubiously surprised expression of one meeting a tall, blond, green-eyed Italian for the first time. (My Mediterranean darkness I owe entirely to my Irish mother.)

‘So pleased to meet you – and your charming daughter. This is my eldest son, Fergal. I have four sons and one daughter. Perhaps you have heard the youngest ones playing in the garden? They love this big garden.’

‘Yes, I have heard them. Normally this is such a quiet, select neighbourhood.’

The girl turned pink and began nervously to pleat the folds of her bloodied skirt. ‘I – I like to hear children playing,’ she ventured shyly. ‘I’m glad to meet you, Mr Rocco.’

‘Joe.’

‘Joe,’ she amended. ‘And I’m so sorry my parrot bit your son, only he escaped, you see, and I was trying to catch him.’

I hauled myself up from where I’d been sitting on the grass, stunned in more ways than one, and the blood dripped down my once-white T-shirt.

‘Oh dear,’ she said guiltily. ‘But it’s only a little bite. Ears bleed a lot, don’t they?’

‘Mine certainly seems to,’ I agreed, smiling down at her, and she blushed again and looked away. ‘Perhaps you should come round later and see how I am?’ I added cunningly.

‘Yes, come for dinner,’ said Dad expansively. ‘I stay home tonight, so I will cook – and what is one or two more? You too, Mrs Norwood, and Mr Norwood, of course.’

‘I am a widow. And I am afraid I am otherwise engaged. And Leticia—’

Seeing she was about to scupper any designs I might have on the angel I interrupted rudely, ‘There’s some disease you can catch from parrots, isn’t there? Psittacosis? Tish really ought to come and check on me.’

‘I … is there?’ stammered Tish, looking frightened. ‘Oh dear, then perhaps I had! And you will put some antiseptic on it right away, won’t you?’

‘You can check on that, too – in about an hour?’

She nodded, still looking frightened, until I winked at her, when she blushed again and glanced away, stifling a giggle.

‘Leticia!’ began Mrs Norwood in a hectoring voice. ‘You—’

Whatever she was about to say was silenced by Dad helpfully shoving the wrapped, protesting bundle of parrot into her arms and tucking the jumper as carefully around it as though it were a baby.

She looked even more aghast than she’d done when she saw her daughter entwined with me on the grass, and they both retreated down the drive, accompanied by muffled squawks.

‘Such a pretty girl,’ Dad said appreciatively. ‘So tall and slender, and the hair like sun-warmed apricots. But very young, Fergal – maybe only sixteen or seventeen. The mamma is right to be careful.’

She was only seventeen, and I was her first love, but I was twenty-two and should have known that, for her, it wouldn’t last for ever.

I suppose I was lucky it lasted a year.

Chapter 1: A Dream of a Man

November 1998

Last night I dreamed I was back in Fergal’s arms.

Nothing new there, then.

I often dream about the current heroes of the romantic novels I write, who all bear a definite (physical) resemblance to Fergal. The sort of dreams that make you wake up and feel guilty when you look at your husband.

They certainly add some oomph to my love scenes, though unfortunately only the ones in my novels. I’ve come to the conclusion it would take a lot more than that to add any oomph to James.

This time the dream was of a different genre, more like a rerun of my last encounter with my first untrue love. Maybe my subconscious thought I didn’t suffer enough at the time and decided to run it past me again.

Anyway, there we were entwined like Laocoön in Fergal’s beloved second-hand Frog-eyed Sprite sports car (thoroughly cleaned inside and out with anti-bacterial cleanser by myself when he bought it, of course – after all, who knew where it had been?). Birds were singing, the sun was shining and there was a heady smell of engine oil, old leather and disinfectant … and the equally heady feel of his arms around me as he said confidently in my ear, ‘Goneril are going to make it big this time!’

Goneril was (and still is) the name of the rock band he’d formed together with his brother Carlo and a motley assortment of other art students. Why they had to choose a name that sounds like a venereal disease, I don’t know.

In the year I’d been going out with Fergal the band had gone from being a casual thing they did for fun and to earn some money, to the point of taking over more and more of their lives and time. And now they’d just been asked at the last minute to go on tour as support to a well-known group, the original support band having pulled out.

It meant leaving for the USA almost immediately: make-or-break time.

I looked up into his amazing green eyes and said adoringly, ‘Oh, Fergal, of course you’ll make it! But – I’ll miss you while you’re abroad.’

He pulled away slightly at this, his straight black brows drawn together in a frown. ‘Why should you miss me?’

‘Of course I’ll miss you. You’ll be away for months!’

‘But – you’re coming with me, Tish! I want you with me.’

Gobsmacked wasn’t in it. ‘M-me?’ I stammered. ‘Go on tour with you? But I can’t do that, Fergal – my university course starts in September. Besides, Mother would have a fit if I trailed around after you like a groupie. And, by the way, you never asked me!’

Fergal’s always volatile temper got the better of him at this point and he gave me a little shake. ‘You are my girl, not a groupie, and I want you with me. And why go to college? What does it matter?’

‘What does it matter when you’ve got me?’ was what he really meant, and it made me see red.

‘Of course it matters! I’m looking forward to the course.’

Well, I had been until then.

Fergal had just finished his MA in Fine Art at the RCA, and the plan was that he should make a name for himself with his painting while I got my degree, so that one day we could live in the country together. He would paint and I would write poetry …

Daydreams – but anything seemed possible when I was with Fergal. And of course I hadn’t then realised that although I was a poet, I was not a good poet.

The fine distinction between turning out reams of seamless drivel like a miniature stream-of-consciousness novel and writing real poetry is sometimes hard for a teenager to grasp. My literary skills, I later discovered, lay elsewhere.

But at the time I was all set to study Modern English Literature in pursuit of this, and I thought he should understand, since he seemed just as dedicated to painting until Goneril started to take off.

‘Well – have a year out, then,’ he suggested impatiently. ‘Isn’t it about time you left home and experienced some real life?’

That would look good on my gap-year CV: ‘What did you do in your gap year, Miss Norwood?’ ‘Oh, I just screwed my rock-singer boyfriend over an entire continent. Nothing interesting.’ ‘And was that with the VSO, Miss Norwood?’ etc.

As to experiencing real life, I’d packed more of that into that year with Fergal than I had in all the previous seventeen.

I looked at him in exasperation … and my heart softened a bit. He was absolutely gorgeous, and I loved him so much. But when I remembered how casually he’d assumed I’d just follow him like a little dog at the asking – or the telling – I got angry all over again.

‘Look, Fergal, I’ll be waiting here for you when you come back: it’s not even as if I’m going away to college.’ (And that was solely to be near him. Otherwise I would have applied for something as far away from Mother as possible – the University of Outer Mongolia Scholarship in Non-Rhyming Glottal Stops, say.)

He held me at arm’s length from him, his fingers biting into me. ‘Come with me or that’s it – finish!’

His eyes were as hard and cold as emeralds in his dark face.

Then I lost my temper and in a state of hurt fury said a few cutting things about how easy he’d found it to abandon his art for Filthy Lucre (well, I was only eighteen and a bit idealistic) and then we had our worst row ever. It wasn’t followed by the sort of making-up that healed such spats either, since he took me straight home and dropped me at the gate without another word.

Even then I didn’t think he meant it – he was inclined to say that sort of thing in the heat of the moment – but by next day, when he hadn’t phoned to apologise, I started to get worried and even seriously contemplated abandoning my pride and ambitions and going with him after all. So maybe it wouldn’t last for ever, but wouldn’t it be better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all?

Who knows what might have happened if poor Grandpa hadn’t had his heart attack that day, so that instead of chewing my fingernails by the telephone I was travelling to Granny’s?

In the end I was there for the whole summer: through the struggle that Grandpa fought and lost, and that of my down-to-earth and stoical grandmother to come to terms with her bereavement.

Mother was entirely useless, of course. She produced one excuse after another as to why she couldn’t come up to lend her support, and then crowned it all by being ‘too prostrate with grief’ to attend the funeral.

‘The woman’s got the backbone of a wet lettuce,’ commented Granny when I told her, and I was glad to see some slight return of her spirits.

Although Mother always disliked Fergal I had extracted a promise from her before I left to tell him where I was if he should ring, and to send on all my mail. But, as she almost gleefully reported, there was nothing to send on: he never contacted me again.

He’d meant what he said after all.

The coup de grâce was a picture cut from a gossip magazine and helpfully forwarded by Mother showing Fergal coming out of some American nightclub with a well-known and beautiful model draped all over him like clingfilm.

I was so devastated I prayed nightly that she would stab him to death in bed with her hipbones, but nothing happened, except that Mother kept sending me cuttings about all the scandalous things Fergal and the rest of the group got up to, until I told her that I didn’t want to know. I didn’t even want the name Fergal mentioned ever again. I hadn’t got time to have a broken heart that summer.

I’d adored Grandpa, and he and Granny had been a mismatched but devoted pair, so I threw myself into helping her in any way I could.

But somehow all the colour seemed to have bled away from my surroundings; having your first close experience of death and your heart broken simultaneously does that, I find. So when Granny decided, in an old-fashioned sackcloth-and-ashes way, to dye every garment she possessed (plus the inside of the washing machine) black, I put all the clothes I had with me in too.

I’d found this dyeing of the clothes a very dramatic gesture – the Dying of the Light, as it were – and I wore nothing but black for years. After all, it stopped all that bother about wondering what to wear, and matching things up, which I really didn’t care about any more. There is only one drawback I discovered with black – you can never see whether it is spotlessly clean or not. Wearing black became a habit, one I only really started to break when Mother pointed out that you can’t get wedding dresses in that colour.

When I finally went home from Granny’s I didn’t dye anything else black, just cut all the rest of my clothes up into little pieces – six-inch, three-inch and one-inch, so as not to waste any – and began on my hobby of patchwork.

But my experience with Fickle Fergal at least made me appreciate James’s steadier, mature qualities when I met him, so I’ve no regrets now over what happened so long ago.

And, look on the bright side, at least I didn’t wake up after this dream feeling guilty: just angry and tear-stained.

I gave James a poke in the ribs with my elbow, handed him a cup of coffee-bag coffee from the Teasmade, and informed him that it was time to get up.

Isn’t it strange that I should hate tea when I adore autumn leaves? But I find I don’t wish to drink dead leaf dust.

‘Day off,’ James grunted, trying to put his head under the duvet.

‘Day off to house-hunt, and I’ve got a feeling we’ll find the country cottage of our dreams today – we’ve just been looking too near London and in the wrong direction. Besides, a day in the country will do us both good. All the leaves have turned gold now, and—’

‘You’ve got enough leaves,’ he said hastily, re-emerging.

I don’t know why he disapproves of my harmless little hobbies. My patchwork brightens the whole flat up; it’s amazing just how much you can make from a wardrobe of old clothes. I’m still at it after all this time, and I’m sure the acreage is more than the sum of the original. Can this be possible? Algebra was never my strong point. Or do my clothes have a Tardis-like quality?

And my leaf collection: James had never minded going for walks in the park or the country while I collected them when we first started going out together, though it transpired that he thought I was going to press them. (And put them in an album perhaps? I know he’s quite a bit older than me, but that’s Victorian!)

‘Oh, no,’ I’d told him at the time, surprised. ‘I like them all curled and natural as they fall. I spread them out to dry, then give them a light coat of acrylic varnish.’

‘Varnish?’

‘They get dusty. This way I can rinse them off.’

‘Oh,’ he’d said, obviously struggling with this concept. Tentatively he’d enquired, ‘Then I suppose you make arrangements or pictures or something with them?’

‘No, I usually just pile them up in baskets and along the window ledges in my room. I like the whispering sound they make when I go in and out.’

He’d given me an affectionate squeeze and said fondly, ‘What funny ideas you have, darling – it must be living alone for so long.’

‘Oh, no, I’ve always had them,’ I’d assured him, only until then I hadn’t thought my little ways were funny.

Still, you can see how harmless my hobbies are, really.

‘I need some more oak leaves, James,’ I told him now. ‘I never seem to find enough of those, and I’d like a whole basketful.’ (I’m a basket person but not, I hope, a basket case, whatever James might imply.)

‘You know, I can’t think why everyone doesn’t collect them – they’re free, in beautiful colours and shapes, and perfectly hygienic if you varnish them.’ (I only collect clean-looking ones anyway, but you can always wipe them over with Dettox.) ‘Isn’t it strange we don’t value them? We could use them as money instead of a lot of germy bits of paper, or—’

There was a gusty sigh from under the bed, which heaved two or three times as if in a heavy swell and I broke off to exclaim indignantly, ‘You let that stupid dog in again last night, didn’t you? You know I don’t like breathing the same air in and out all night, it isn’t healthy. Or hygienic. You’d better get up and take her out so we can get off early.’

‘Plenty of time,’ he muttered, but determinedly I prised him out, assisted by the lure of stopping off for a fat-and-cholesterol-rich breakfast en route.

Fergal: 1998

‘DOES BRITAIN’S SEXIEST ROCKER HAVE A SAD PAST?’

Trendsetter magazine

Past is the operative word. And while I don’t think I could forget Tish if I tried, I don’t try, just go on rubbing salt into the old wound so that it never entirely heals.

Angst is so good for an artist …

My immaculate, fiery angel is the muse I still draw on for inspiration for both songs and paintings alike.

But that’s the Tish I remember. She’s probably Mrs Suburban Housewife now, her dreams stuffed into a drawer to moulder. (Or smoulder – she had a way with words.)

What has become of her now I neither need – nor want – to know.

Chapter 2: Home, James

‘This is it,’ I said, with conviction. ‘This is my cottage!’

‘What?’ muttered James absently, peering through a grubby windowpane at the small, blonde and bubbly estate agent, who was hovering tactfully outside despite the arctic November wind. Her legs below the short skirt were an interesting shade of blue.

He always gets a bit silly over that type, which makes you wonder why he married me: tall, reserved, and as effervescent as flat Guinness.

Come to that, why didn’t he just marry my mother, who is small, determinedly blonde and, if not precisely bubbly, sparkles a bit after the second Martini?

I gave him a nudge with my elbow. ‘Concentrate on the house, James. The estate agent is only being charming to you because she hopes to make a sale.’

He looked hurt. ‘Don’t be silly, darling – I was just thinking about the case I’ve got on. I really shouldn’t have taken a day off to look at houses, and I think I’d better pop into the office for an hour or two after I’ve dropped you at your mother’s.’

The mystery of why he’d chosen to wear one of his natty dark suits to go house-hunting was now clear. (Though admittedly they do set off his sandy-haired rugged-Highlander good looks a treat, a fact he knows very well.)

‘I’m sure Drew, Drune and Tibbs can solicit away without you for one day, James. Especially when it means we’ve at last found the right cottage.’

‘What? You don’t mean this one do you, Tish?’ His bright blue eyes widened in astonishment. ‘I can’t imagine why you wanted to view it in the first place – it’s too small, and it isn’t even detached.’

‘It’s twice as big as the flat: all these chairs make it look smaller. There are thirty-two.’

‘Thirty-two what?’

‘Chairs.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything? Look at the garden – it’s a wilderness.’

‘A big wilderness. There’s some sort of shed out there, too, and plenty of room for a garage at the side of the house.’

‘But the house is old, dark and probably unsanitary,’ he suggested cunningly. ‘It belonged to an old man who didn’t do anything to it for years, and probably died in it.’

‘From an overdose of chairs, perhaps?’ I suggested. ‘People have died in most old houses. Of course I’d have to scrub it from top to bottom before we brought any of our things in, and all the walls and ceilings need painting, and perhaps the floors sanding down and sealing if they’re good enough. Roses round the door … pretty curtains … And just look at the situation! Only one neighbour – and the agent says that’s a sweet little old lady – and the back garden overlooks the parkland of the local big house, so it’ll be very peaceful …’

I tailed off. James was looking stubborn and sulky, one of his limited repertoire of expressions. (And now I come to think of it, ‘indulgent affection’ hasn’t made many appearances lately, or ‘extreme solicitousness denoting a single-minded determination to have sex’.)

‘You know, Tish, I’ve been thinking lately that perhaps we should just look for a small weekend place near the sea instead. Jack’s promised to teach us to sail and—’

‘No. Absolutely not,’ I interrupted firmly. ‘My idea of a fun weekend does not entail sitting with my bottom in icy water, while being alternately hit over the head with a piece of wood and slapped by a bit of wet canvas. Besides,’ I added, hurt, ‘didn’t we always plan to move to the country once we could afford it?’

‘Well … yes, but—’

‘And then I can give up working in the library for

peanuts – which really makes no sense when you think that I could earn just as much from writing, if I had more

time – and we can start a family, and you could commute to work, and get lots of fresh air and exercise in the garden growing our own fruit and vegetables. Isn’t that what we’ve both dreamed of?’

He closed his mouth and said hastily, ‘Yes, darling, of course it is. That is, it sounds wonderful, but perhaps we ought to wait for something detached to come up and—’

‘We’ve been married six years, James. I can see the big three-0 coming up, and you were forty last birthday.’

He winced.

‘We can afford this house, it’s near enough to commute – only about eleven miles to Bedford station. I’ll come off the pill as soon as we move, and we’ll eat a healthy diet and take long walks to get fit.’

James looked slightly punch-drunk. ‘I suppose it might be quite nice here,’ he conceded reluctantly. ‘And,’ he added brightening, ‘Gerry and Viola live only a few miles away, and I’m sure he drives into work. Must leave pretty early. I’ll ask him what it’s like.’ He put his arm around me. ‘I can see you like this place, darling, but don’t set your heart on it. I think we ought to look at a few more first, and once I’m a senior partner we could afford something detached.’

‘I want this one, a real country cottage, not a detached mock-Tudor somewhere. I want to be a country dweller, with muddy wellingtons and a cottage garden. And you used to like the idea of being self-sufficient – you had all those books about it. I think they’re in the back bedroom cupboard. I’ll look them out when we get home.’

He didn’t look too enthusiastic, but he’s a man of short-lived crazes, as I’ve learned the hard way. While I would have expected someone to warn me had I been about to marry a serial killer, no one felt it necessary to inform me that I was about to marry a serial hobbyist. Perhaps it should be written into the marriage ceremony? Thou Shalt Not Become A Serial Hobbyist. Still, I don’t see why he can’t have the same one twice, like the measles, with a bit of exposure to the germ.

He was rather dampening when I enumerated the cottage’s many advantages on the way back to Mother’s house in darkest suburbia for Granny’s birthday tea. I’ll have to work on him; but I’m in love with my cottage, and am beginning to have distinctly now- or-never feelings about making the move.

I think it’s something to do with thirty looming ahead (my birthday is in February) and so few of my ambitions realised. And if I’m going to take the plunge and have a baby, then my sell-by date is just peeping up on the horizon.

One definite plus point to living in the cottage at Nutthill would be that James wouldn’t be so tempted to call in at the pub on his way home from work in the evenings if he had such a long drive ahead of him. (Networking, this is called, apparently.) And with so much to do to the house and garden he won’t have either the time or the money for his Friday night sessions out with ‘the boys’, or our regular show or film and restaurant on Saturday nights.

I never feel relaxed in big, pretentious, expensive restaurants anyway, and would always have preferred to save the money towards the cottage. I’m not much of a social animal, in fact. I like a quiet life and time to write after work, and I enjoy a trip to a museum or art gallery more than anything else.

James’s friends are all about ten years older than I am, with self-assured, well-dressed, boring wives, against whom I stand out like a macaw among a lot of sparrows. They’re all so well-groomed and taupe. If they mix two colours together in a scarf they think they’re daring.

Living so far out into the country would also distance us from James’s appalling old school chum Howard, ageing hippie extraordinaire, who has recently moved back to London after a brief spell crewing on a yacht, where I should think he was as much use as a twist of rotten rope.

He managed to acquire a rich girlfriend in the interval between jumping ship in Capri and being deported. (I hadn’t realised that he knew Comrades came in two sexes, but there you are. She must be deranged.)

James may not immediately see all the cottage’s

advantages …

He dropped me at Mother’s in mid-afternoon (and I can hardly wait to put some distance between myself and Mother – another plus) and drove off to the office to pick up some papers (allegedly) though I did tell him that if he wasn’t back within the hour I’d kill him.

I stifled the ignoble thought that perhaps he just wanted to see his ex-girlfriend Vanessa, recently reinstalled as secretary. When she got divorced and had to find a job, she pleaded with James to put a word in for her, and he felt so sorry for her he persuaded his uncle Lionel to take her on again.

He explained how it was, so I’m not in the least bit worried or jealous about her being there every day, even though she’s another bubbly blonde. From the sound of it, her bubbles may have gone a bit flat; James said her husband was a brute and she’s looking very worn and years older.

Mother was a bit pensive and hurt when he drove off, and nearly as dismal as James when I described the cottage. She only really cheered up again when he returned and fell like a famished wolf on the rather nursery spread of food she associates with birthdays.

Then the cake was brought out and we had to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ with James and Mother trying to harmonise, slightly hampered by Granny, who had already loudly announced that she didn’t want any fuss made about birthdays at her time of life, ignoring us and turning the TV up loudly, so that a repeat of Top of the Pops drowned us out.

Mother keeps trying to persuade everyone that Granny is losing her marbles, but I think anyone who can learn to preset a video recorder deserves Mensa membership, because I’ve never managed it.

‘You can’t possibly want to watch that, Maud!’ Mother broke off to exclaim crossly.

Granny briefly unglued her boot-button eyes from the screen. ‘Why not?’ she demanded belligerently. ‘All them funny clothes and lewd dancing. Best entertainment on the box.’

She returned her avid gaze to the gyrating row of young men clad in enormously baggy trousers and no tops. ‘Eh! There’s more hair on the back of my hands than there is on them poor boys’ chests. And call that a beard? Bum fluff!’

Mother sighed long-sufferingly and cast her baby-blue eyes heavenwards. ‘So vulgar,’ she whispered. ‘Dear James, she’s such a trial to me – and getting more senile by the day.’

I wouldn’t agree with that, though she certainly seems to be reverting to her Yorkshire roots at a gallop!

James squeezed Mother’s hand. ‘At least she has you to look after her, Valerie,’ he said, which I thought was pretty rich considering he knows Mother is the giddy, spendthrift widow of the two. But Mother is the tiny, fluffy fragile sort who seems to appeal to a certain type of man. (She’s tough as old boots really.) She spends large amounts of money she doesn’t have on beauty treatments, make-up and clothes, which is mainly why Granny decided to move in and take over.

I’m sure she thought she could sort Mother out and then leave things running smoothly while she moved to the retirement bungalow she’d set her mind on. Only, as she soon discovered, you can’t organise fluff, it just drifts away with every passing breath of wind.

She’s had to bail Mother out of major financial difficulties at least twice, and even the house itself now belongs to her, so it’s fortunate that Grandpa was a jeweller and had lots of what Granny calls ‘brass’. He was a warm man, she always says, though she won’t say precisely what his thermostat was set to.

Mother has entirely failed to see that she is Granny’s pensioner, not vice versa, and tells everyone she’s trying to make her declining years a joy to her.

Granny hasn’t shown much sign of declining yet, and not much joy either.

So Mother now squeezed James’s hand with sincere gratitude and batted long mascara-lagged eyelashes at him: ‘Dear James – so understanding. So very wise.’

Granny’s deafness has an astonishingly intermittent quality about it unrelated to whether her hearing aid is switched on or off (or even which ear she happens to have plugged it into).

She now remarked without turning her head, ‘Dearest James knows which side his bread is buttered on, and so do you. He—’

She broke off so suddenly that I swivelled round in my chair in alarm, only to find her attention riveted by the appearance on the screen of a dark, extremely angular face: a familiar, very masculine face, framed in long, jet-black hair and with eyes as green as shamrocks.

‘Well, I never did, Tish!’ she gasped. ‘It’s that Fergus who used to live next door – the one you were sweet on. Now that’s what I call a man!’

‘Fergal,’ I corrected automatically. And he’d been what I called a man, too, until fame and fortune had beckoned and he’d gone off without a backward look. It’s not what I call him now.

Still, it gave me a peculiar feeling to see him on screen moodily singing, bright eyes remote and hooded. And even more of a funny feeling in the stomach when the guitars crashed in and he started throwing his lithe body about the stage.

Age does not appear to have withered him or staled his infinite variety.

Top of the Pops seemed an unlikely venue, since Goneril has more of a cult following than a mainstream pop one. They sort of blend Celtic folk music and heavy metal and … and I’m sounding like a groupie, which I never was.

I became slowly aware that conversation at the tea-table was suspended, and I could feel James’s gaze swivelling suspiciously from the TV to me and back again, like some strange radar dish, but until Fergal vanished from the screen to be replaced by shots of the audience, drooling, I couldn’t somehow detach my eyes.

The surprise, I suppose.

‘You went out with him?’ demanded James incredulously. ‘You never said!’

It was a relief to find I could turn my head again. ‘Didn’t I? I’m sure I told you I’d been out with someone who let me down badly, and—’

‘Yes – but you never said it was him.’

‘Well, does it matter? It was all ages before I met you. His parents were renting the house next door and I met him when he came to visit them. We … sort of bumped into each other. But in the end he got famous and went off, and I went to university and then met you, darling.’

‘At least he was a man, and not a big girl’s blouse masquerading as one,’ Granny said with a scathing look at poor James. ‘First time I thought the girl might have some Thorpe blood in her after all, when she took up with him.’

James’s outraged stare almost made me giggle.

‘So foreign – I never liked him,’ Mother said, primly ignoring Granny’s remark, although her cheeks had grown slightly pink. ‘The whole family was volatile. You could hear his parents shouting six houses away. And look how he’s turned out – always in the papers over some scandal, and with a dreadfully cheap girl in tow.’

‘He wasn’t foreign,’ I said weakly (and certainly none of the girls I had ever heard of him being connected with could be described as cheap). ‘His father is Italian born – Rocco of Rocco’s restaurant chain, you know – but his mother is Irish and Fergal was born here in London.’

‘That’s what I said – foreign,’ Mother said triumphantly, recalling unendearingly to my mind all her tactics to blight my romance with Fergal. Not that it would have lasted anyway: Romeo and Juliet fell in love, grew up, argued, and parted. Juliet became a boring suburban housewife getting her kicks from writing romantic novels, and Romeo became a drug-crazed sex-maniac rock star.

Shakespeare for the New Era: not many dead. And all water under the bridge now.

James was still goggling at me as if he’d just noticed for the first time that I’d got two heads, so I smiled rather nervously and hastened to change the subject.

‘Are we going to eat this cake now the candle’s gone out? And Top of the Pops is finishing, so perhaps Granny would like to open her presents, Mother?’

Easily distracted, she began to bustle about, and the subject of Fergal was thankfully dropped.

In the car James was very quiet, which suited me, since it had made me feel very peculiar seeing the real Fergal in action, as opposed to the fantasy, sanitised version who lives a life of his own in a specially constructed holding-pen in my head, and off whom I’ve been vampirically feeding for several years to fuel my writing.

Actually, I should be grateful to Fergal for leaving me in that callous way, because it set me on to a really character-forming curve – even though it might have felt like a downward spiral at times – culminating in my having my first romantic novel accepted, and discovering True Worth and Dependability in James’s sturdy and attractive form.

It was therefore a bit of a shock when Dear Old Dependable James broke the silence by saying sourly, ‘That old boyfriend of yours – what’s his name? Rocca?’ He laughed but it came out as more of a disgusted snort. ‘I suppose they all change their names, but Rocca.’

‘Rocco, James. And it’s his real name.’

‘Of course you’d know that, wouldn’t you, having been the Great Star’s girlfriend? Funny you never mentioned it before, isn’t it? If your grandmother hadn’t let the cat out of the bag I’d still be in the dark.’

‘So would the cat,’ said my unfortunate mouth, which doesn’t always refer to my brain before uttering.

James’s expression became even more sombre, so I hastened on soothingly, ‘And really, James, there was no cat to let out of the bag, if by that you meant a guilty secret. If I’d thought a detailed list of all my old boyfriends would amuse you I’d have given you one.’

‘You didn’t have any other boyfriends. Valerie told me.’

I felt distinctly ruffled both by the idea of him and Mother discussing my suitability (I mean, she probably assured him I’d only been round the block once, low mileage, practically a born-again virgin), and the fact that it should matter who else I’d been out with (or in with) if he loved me. I bet she also tried to smooth over my unattractive points: i.e. my height (I always wear flat shoes), the cleft chin (Mother calls it a dimple) and the strange colour of my hair (strawberry blond).

‘I wouldn’t have thought you were Fergal Rocco’s type anyway, since he’s so extrovert and wild, and you’re as prissy as Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood rolled into one,’ he added unforgivably.

‘Prissy? I am not prissy!’ I exclaimed, hurt and angry. ‘Anyway, when you proposed you said it was my being so reserved and home-loving that attracted you in the first place!’

And then, with a sudden flash of belated illumination, it occurred to me that prissy was just the sort of wife he’d been looking for and thought he’d found, since I’d been quietly working hard at my course and my writing – and at that time wore sombre clothes, too. I probably seemed exactly the sort of girl his uncle Lionel had told him he ought to marry, since neither of them has the ability to tell ‘good girls’ from ‘bad girls’ (possibly because the distinction no longer exists).

A nice, quiet, malleable young girl … only he didn’t realise I’d been hardened into quietness by fire.

James was scowling blackly ahead over the steering wheel. ‘Suddenly discovering that your quiet, librarian wife is the ex-girlfriend of a notorious rock star is a bit unsettling, and I can assure you that Lionel and Honoria wouldn’t have welcomed you into the family as warmly as they did if they’d known.’

‘If that was warm I wouldn’t like to see them meeting someone they disapproved of.’

‘You may yet do so if they find out about this.’

‘I don’t see why they should. Or why their approval should be necessary.’

‘Of course it is! A solicitor needs the right kind of wife. They did comment at the time that you had appalling taste in clothes, but it would probably improve with a

little guidance.’

‘How nice of them!’ I said drily.

Honoria always wears things made out of hairy tweed like sacking, and high-necked shirts.

I remembered the first time Lionel and Honoria had met Granny, Mother having managed to keep her hidden until then.

But James must have told them about her, for we had all been bidden to dine at the pretentious and stuffy restaurant they favoured for such jollifications as interrogating future in-laws.

They had seemed mesmerised both by the size and profusion of Granny’s diamonds, a selection of which had as usual been pinned and hung at random over her billowing bosom. As she often says: if you’ve got ’em, flaunt ’em.

This might have had some bearing on the marked effort to be polite to her they made even after she called the waiter over and demanded, pointing at her soup,‘What do you call this?’

‘Chicken soup, madam,’ he’d replied haughtily.

‘If that’s chicken, it walked through on stilts.’

‘How very droll your dear grandmother is,’ Honoria had remarked in an aside to me. ‘A true original. You are her only grandchild, aren’t you?’

‘What? Oh – yes, Dad was her only child.’ I’d replied vaguely, wondering why I found Mother embarrassing whereas I never found Granny so.

Granny is clever, sharp, kind and loving, and if she doesn’t want to put on airs and graces I don’t see why she should. She says herself that Yorkshire folk are as good as any and better than most.

I gave a snort as I recalled James’s expression when Granny had written down a recipe for chicken soup and told the waiter to give it to the chef; then I realised he was still burbling on about my dress sense. Lack of, that is.

It wasn’t doing much for his driving.

‘Not that your taste has improved,’ he was saying. ‘All that black you used to wear was a bit gloomy, but you’ve gone too far the other way now.’

‘Because I’m happy, and I want to wear bright, cheerful colours while I’m still young enough.’

‘I suppose Fergal Rocco liked you in gaudy clothes?’

He liked me best in no clothes at all.

I just managed to button my mouth before it got away from me, and after a brief struggle in which my lips writhed silently, managed to say with supreme self-control, ‘Look, I only went out with him for a few months, then Goneril went to America and he dropped me like a hot potato. I never saw or heard from him again after he left. Satisfied?’

‘You’ve never seen him since?’

‘No!’

Only in my dreams. And let us hope James doesn’t get a sudden urge to read one of my books (unlikely though it seems) wherein all the romantic heroes are remodelled and transmogrified versions of Fergal.

Tish the literary vampire.

Frankenstein Tish, creating a new Fergal each time from the best bits of the old (and there were some choice bits), joined to new parts culled from my imagination. (I’ve got a good one. Lurid, even.)

Wonder if Fergal gets pale and listless every time I write a new novel? I wouldn’t like to think I was draining his batteries …

Who am I kidding? Yes I would! It would serve him right for breaking my heart.

James pulled up outside the flat with an over-dramatic swerve and stalked silently off without opening my door, one of the little old-world courtesies that first endeared him to me.

I only hope he’s not going to brood over this. I don’t know why he’s so upset about it, since he knew I hadn’t lived in an ivory tower before he came along. (A concrete university accommodation tower, actually – the urge to escape Mother overcame me.)

Perhaps it’s just that the type of man I went out with doesn’t match the image of me he’s been cherishing.

Sometimes lately I’ve thought the image he has of me doesn’t match me very much either.

You know, even now I’m not quite sure how I came to be married to James!

I wasn’t actually looking for Mr Right. Not even for

Mr Will-Do-at-a-Push-if-Desperate.

I remember telling him quite plainly that my life was blighted and I intended living quietly in the country devoting myself to my writing, and him saying he’d always wanted to live in the country too (his self-sufficiency phase). Then he just sort of sneaked up on me with flowers and chocolates and stuff. While spontaneity was not his middle name, dependability was: he was always there.

And being older he seemed rather suave and sophisticated. And attractive, even if not exciting, which was a plus point after Fergal: I’d had excitement. In fact James had practically had ‘Good Husband Material, Ready to Settle Down’ stamped on his forehead.

I don’t know what was stamped on my forehead, but it must have been misleading.

He was, in many ways, terribly conventional, and I think, looking back, that he thought I was too. I was so quiet and stay-at-home (or stay-at-digs) after Fergal.

On this reflection the car door was suddenly wrenched open, and I would have fallen out if I hadn’t still been wearing my seat belt.

‘Are you going to sit in the car all night daydreaming about your ex-boyfriend, or are you coming into the house?’ demanded James with icy sarcasm.

Oh dear.

Over his shoulder I observed something like a giant animated white hearth rug leap the area railing and bound off into outer darkness.

‘Bess is out, James,’ I said helpfully.

Fergal: November, 1998

‘ROCCO ROCKS ART WORLD.’

Sun

‘Is this the face of New Renaissance Man?’

Sunday Times

The painting is four foot square.

Step back, she swims out at you from the green depths.

Step forward, she vanishes.

The lady vanishes.

The gallery is crowded, thanks to the papers who have finally made the link between Fergal Rocco (infamous) singer/songwriter, and Rocco the painter.

At least most of the art critics have been kind. The gallery’s been quietly selling my work since I left the Royal College of Art, so there’s none of this ‘pop singer thinks he can paint’ stuff. That would have really pissed me off.

There are two things I’m serious about: my painting and my music.

There used to be three …

‘Oh, Fergal, you’re so clever,’ Nerissa sighs, lifting a face like a cream-skinned, innocent flower. ‘All these hidden talents.’

She’s small, pretty and curvaceous, and, judging from her short, select list of former conquests, finds fame in a man a powerful aphrodisiac. Nineteen going on immoral, and about as determined to get what she wants as Scarlett O’Hara. Sounds like her too, when she’s trying to get round me, all that fake ‘lil’ ol’ me’ stuff.

Daddy’s bought her everything she’s ever wanted – so far. He’d jib a bit at me, though, even if I were for sale, which I’m not – just available for a short loan.

She’s about the same age Tish was last time I saw her …

Tish.

Swimming out of the green paint like a mermaid; walking hesitantly into the gallery as if summoned by my subconscious.

For a minute I really do think she’s a figment of my imagination as she pauses in the doorway, gazing around. Her eyes seem dazzled by the lights, then they slide over the painting near me and meet mine, and it’s as if we are falling into each other all over again.

Someone coming in behind her touches her elbow to get past, breaking the contact, then she turns on her heel and is gone.

I only realise I’ve taken a stride forward when Nerissa’s weight on my arm brings me up like a sheet anchor.

‘What is it? Where are you going?’

I realise I’ve been holding my breath as though I’ve been swimming underwater for a long distance. ‘Nowhere,’ I sigh. ‘I’m going nowhere.’

Nerissa’s eyes flick from the painted girl behind me back to the empty doorway. She’s never going to be acclaimed as Intellectual of the Year, but she has her own sharp instinct to guide her.

‘That was the one – the girl in the picture, wasn’t it?’

‘The girl in the picture doesn’t exist.’

The lady vanishes.

Again.

She was the one.

Chapter 3: Painted Out

Oh God! What on earth made me call in to see Fergal’s exhibition? And how could I have known he would be there, days after the show opened?

It was pure (or impure) curiosity – but I certainly wouldn’t have given in to it if it hadn’t been for James’s constant snide, jealous little remarks since he found out about Fergal. He even shoved the review of the exhibition under my nose, so it is all his fault.

My heart is still going like the clappers even now I’m safely home, and there’s a feeling like a hot nest of snakes in the pit of my stomach.

He saw me too. (Oh, damn and blast!) All those people, and the minute I walk through the door they part between us like the Red Sea before Moses. Like some invisible ley line …

(Wow – that’s just given me a great idea for a novel title – Ley Lines to Love!)

One glimpse of Fergal, and the pain and hurt feel as fresh as yesterday. But also something else, something I’m ashamed of: lust, I think. All those hot snakes. Very biblical.

It’s certainly something never stirred in me by James …

When our eyes met it was just like the first time, when I fell on him from a great height – except then he felt it too, I know he did.

This time he simply froze, expressionless, with that old painting he did of me right behind him so that I seemed to be swooping out towards myself over his shoulder.

Like coming face to face with your doppelganger (except that he’s given me red hair, for some reason, though at least it means that no one will recognise me).

James goes to art galleries only if I force him to, and I certainly won’t be doing that with this exhibition.

Poor old James, steady as a rock. I can’t let this ridiculous stirring-up of past emotions affect my feelings for him.

I may be racked with anger, lust, whatever – shaken but not stirred – but it can all be safely bottled up and infused into my next book. Imprisoned by Love between hard covers.

Dear old James – he’s just as handsome in his own way, and if we have the sort of love that grows steadily rather than bursts instantly into flames and dies quickly, that’s better, isn’t it? And even if he isn’t the world’s best lover (which is something I wouldn’t have realised, I don’t suppose, if I hadn’t had the world’s best lover), that isn’t his fault.

Is it?

Perhaps he’s a bit stuck in his ways sometimes, and admittedly he’s been behaving strangely since he found out about my sordid past, pointing out any mention of Fergal in the press or on TV.

There’s been quite a lot since the press suddenly discovered that he’s been quietly exhibiting paintings and selling them for years. You’d think they’d have connected Rocco the painter with Rocco the singer by now, but apparently not, until he outed himself, as it were, with this one-man exhibition. I always thought he’d abandoned his painting at the same time he’d abandoned me.

I don’t know why James has to make all these snide remarks about groupies and rock stars. Do I go on and on about his former girlfriend Vanessa, who went off and married someone else after helpfully presenting him with a replacement companion in the form of Bess the Stupid Bitch, and then turned up drunk at our wedding reception, where she peered critically at me through a positively funereal wreath of smoke and remarked blightingly, ‘He was always looking for a virgin to sacrifice to his career. I suppose you’re the next best thing.’

Cow.

Small, blonde and bubbly cow, now back to working for Drew, Drune and Tibbs as a secretary … She’s a bit tarty. In my head I call her the secretarty and if I’m not careful, one of these days it’ll slip right out.

Mind you, one of the things we originally had in common, James and I, was that we’d both been thrown over by someone else.

We seemed to have a lot in common … only lately we seem to have more not in common, if you see what I mean.

How did I get home from the gallery? I’ve no recollection of it, so I must have been running on automatic pilot, fired by a need to dive into my dark basement like a scared rabbit into its burrow, and be quiet for a while.

Quiet, that is, except for the muffled thumps and howls as Bess alternately throws herself at the kitchen door and vociferates her desire to be with me, and the deafening silence from Toby the parrot, building himself up for the wild eldritch shrieks my eventual appearance will generate.

I can deal with Toby. He can – and often does – manage to open his cage door and escape, but let me see him fight his way out of two layers of candlewick bedspread, that’s all I can say.

As for Bess, her idea of silent sympathy is to stuff her wet, germy black nose into my hand, which breaks up the train of thought, since I then have to go and wash the said hand. A dog’s nose is so unsanitary: if they haven’t got it stuck up another dog’s rear they’ve got it stuck up their own.

It’s odd how the mundane weaves its way in among your thoughts when you’ve had a shock, isn’t it?

Thoughts of Bess, and not having defrosted anything for dinner, and what time James would arrive back from seeing his client in Worcester, and whether the spirit would move the extremely evangelical born-again Christian girl on the third floor to try once more to convert me tonight, all performed a sort of mournful morris dance through my mind, bells muffled.

I could always get Bess to drool the girl to death. Death by Drooling would probably make a saint of her. In stained-glass windows she could be depicted dripping, with the sort of wholesome, earnest, sincere expression that makes you want to take pot shots with an air gun …

After a while I became aware of the flashing light on the answerphone, reached over and pressed the playback button.

‘Hi, James, this is Vanessa. You forgot your Filofax. I’ll just drop it in tomorrow morning in case you need it over the weekend. It’s no bother – I’m practically round the corner now. Around ten? Byeee!’

‘Find your own husband, you cow!’ I told the answerphone, and it bleeped thoughtfully.

‘Merry and Little!’ boasted a gratingly cheery voice.

‘Wrong, buster: big and miserable.’

But the next words made me sit up.

‘This is Merry and Little estate agents, regarding your offer for 2 Dower Houses, Nutthill. I’m pleased to say your offer has been accepted. Could you call us back at your earliest convenience?’

The cottage?

My cottage?

Part of my brain began to function cohesively. The vendor had accepted the offer we’d made for the cottage – an offer James insisted we made ludicrously low, in the hope, I’m sure, of having it rejected out of hand.

And I had let him, spineless wet object that I am!

It seems to me that rather than going all out for things I want, I’ve just been passively letting things happen to me. Except for the novels, of course. I’m determined enough there, though I always imagined myself as a writer living in the country, and now the realisation of that ambition is within my grasp.

A rosy vision of Eden beckons enticingly: James, his interest in gardening rekindled, growing vegetables; myself inside, writing busily by the light of a log fire, and a sleeping baby in an antique wooden cradle at my feet. A clock ticking, distant sounds of cows going to be milked, birdsong …

A room of my own, even.

Not just a corner of table to work on in a dark dining room, but a whole room just for me. The little bedroom with the gable window, I think, looking out at the park.

It’s time to put the past behind me and go forward, with James, towards the future we wanted.

Only it seems to have taken a hell of a long time to get here.

Lost as I was in this healing Elysian dream the sudden clicking on of the light was a painfully dazzling intrusion.

James stood in the doorway, looking almost as startled as I felt.

‘Tish? Why are you sitting in the dark? And why is Bess howling in the kitchen?’

As usual he let his coat and briefcase drop where he stood for the little fairies to come and pick up. They do, too: I must be mad.

‘Oh – hello, James. I was just – thinking.’ I attempted to contort my features into some semblance of a pleased smile, since it wasn’t his fault that he suddenly looked sober and unexciting. I’ve had intoxicating and exciting. Been there, seen it, done it, bought the self-igniting T-shirt.

‘Do you need darkness for thinking?’ he asked, puzzled,

‘You certainly don’t need light – all these magnolia walls may suit you, but they make the inside of my head twice as worth looking at as anything in the room other than my patchwork.’

Blink! went his sandy lashes, in that ‘I register what she just said but it didn’t make sense’ way of his.

‘Has Bess been out? What have you been doing?’

‘Bess hasn’t been out yet. Isn’t she supposed to be your dog? You take her out, it’s cold out there.’

‘But I haven’t got time – I’m meeting Gerry and Dave in an hour.’

‘Oh, you aren’t going out tonight, James! You’ve only just got back.’

‘It’s Friday,’ he protested, as though it were some immutable law.

It is an immutable law: Friday night out with ‘the boys’. Not for very much longer, though! And not for much longer will I have to suffer visitations from James’s friend Horrible Howard, who infested the flat for a couple of hours the other day. (He’s not really one of ‘the boys’, more one on his own.)

‘The offer we made for the cottage at Nutthill has been accepted, there was a message on the answerphone.’

He looked aghast. ‘But—’

‘Isn’t it wonderful, darling? Exactly what we want, and at such a low price. You are clever!’ (Only the best butter.)

‘Well, I—’

‘It means we’ll have money to spare for decorating, and sanding the floors and things like that. I’ll phone first thing tomorrow and give the go-ahead.’

‘Yes – but, Tish, look, let’s think before we act hastily.’

‘I’ve thought. We’re buying it.’

He was still making stupid objections when he went out, so I spiked his guns by immediately phoning the Rosens, a young couple with whom we’ve conducted an on-off affair re selling our flat for the last year or so. They still hadn’t found anything they could afford that they liked better, and were delighted to hear that Thunderbirds were Go.

‘Sweetness is so excited!’ cooed Charlie. (I kid you not – they have to be the most nauseating couple ever.) ‘She’d set her little heart on your flat, the poor darling.’

There was a murmur of assent from Sweetness. I’d met them a couple of times (too many) and Sweetness had informed me she was a model, though since she was a five-foot anorexic I can only assume she modelled children’s clothes.

‘She’s absolutely delighted,’ confided Charlie.

Girlish cries of glee could indeed be heard in the background.

‘Your flat is such a blank canvas for her – she has so many wonderful ideas of what to do with it. We’re both over the moon.’

Excuse me, I thought, but this blank canvas just happens to be my home! However, it did look very bland and boring except for my patchwork throws, the baskets of dried autumn leaves, and the giant lime-green papier mâché bowl from Ikea.

James may insist on magnolia paintwork, but I just refuse to have a magnolia life from now on. I’ve been drifting along, thinking I’m going somewhere, and I’ve finally found where I want to go and when: now.

I must write that book plot down before I forget it: Ley Lines to Love …

Fergal: December 1998

‘Fergal Rocco, pictured with his Frog-eyed Sprite sports car. Although it is his favourite, he also has two Mini Coopers and a Morris Traveller among his rather eccentric collection. He is currently looking for a country house with more room to store them …’

Drive! magazine

Mr Rooney was a medium-sized nondescript sort of man, with surprisingly sharp blue eyes behind thick glasses, all important assets to a private eye, I expect. He’d come well recommended, at all events.

‘What did you find out?’ I asked, as he seated himself and began thumbing through his notebook to the right place, a process that involved a damp finger and more time than I could spare.

‘Well, Mr Rocco,’ he said finally, ‘I did a small check on the lady in question as you requested. She’s married to a solicitor called James Drew – younger member of Drew, Drune and Tibbs – lives in a basement flat. No children. She has a part-time position in a university library.’

‘A librarian?’ I repeated. Tish?

‘And she writes.’

‘That’s more like it. Poetry, I suppose,’ I said, an errant memory flitting through my mind of long afternoons spent in my flat – me painting, Tish wrestling with a poem, or lying on the rug with her A level books spread around her.

So I was surprised when he said, ‘Not poetry, Mr Rocco. She writes romantic novels as Marian Plentifold.’

‘Romantic novels?’

‘She seems to be doing quite well with them, too.’

‘Inspired by her husband, no doubt,’ I said, and something in my voice made him cast a doubtful glance my way.

‘Mr Drew seems to be a respected member of the firm, which was founded by his grandfather. He’s older than Mrs Drew by about ten years. His father lives in South Africa with his second wife and family.’

‘So – happily married then?’

Mr Rooney emitted a small dry cough. ‘General opinion among the office staff – obtained from one of the secretaries, a Miss Sandra Walker – is that there was some disappointment when he married. Hopes had been cherished, especially by one of the secretaries, who’d been having an on/off affair with him for some considerable time. According to Sandra, Mr Lionel Drew, the senior partner, didn’t think she was the right material for a solicitor’s wife. She married someone else, but she’s now divorced and has recently rejoined the firm. Apparently she’s been making a play for Mr Drew again, but apart from the occasion of the office Christmas party he hasn’t responded.’

‘So what did he get up to at the office party?’

‘Having drunk a little too much, he retired with Mrs Vanessa Grey into the small photocopier room.’

‘I see.’

‘There are thirty-four blurred photocopies in existence.’ He passed me a folded sheet. ‘I expect in the heat of the moment, as it were, the button …’

‘Yes.’ Well, it was a minor peccadillo, I suppose, compared with what I’ve got up to in the past. But then, I’m not a married man.

‘He seems to be able to keep his trousers on generally otherwise, then?’

‘There was no hint of anything else,’ Mr Rooney said primly, ‘and he’s been trying to distance himself from Mrs Grey ever since – very hangdog and worried his wife will hear.’

I suppose every dog is allowed one bite. Or one photocopy.

‘That was the extent of my brief, sir, but if you’d like me to proceed further?’

‘No. No, that’s fine, thanks,’ I assured him.

‘Who was that?’ enquired Carlo a few minutes later, passing him in the doorway.

‘A private eye. I set him on to find out what became of Tish.’

Carlo has big, liquid dark eyes, and can look indescribably sad-spaniel sometimes. It goes over well with the girls. He looked like that now.

‘Tish? After all this time you still care about her?’

‘No, it’s just my curiosity was stirred by seeing her at the gallery – as I suppose hers was in coming to see the show. I just felt I’d like to know how she was, what she was doing.’

‘Yeah, and I’m Titania, Queen of the Faeries,’ Carlo said sceptically.

I grinned. ‘Well, that’s what I thought I wanted, only it seems deep down I wanted to find her miserable, separated, divorced – you know? In need of rescue, anyway. So what does that make me? A complete bastard?’

‘Human. Do I take it she’s happily married and living in suburbia with two point five children?’

‘All except the children. And she’s turned into a romantic novelist.’

‘Really? So, what now? Drop back into her life like a particularly dangerous spider and invite her to jump into your web?’

‘No, of course not. I’m going to keep well clear. And I don’t think much of your metaphor, though I might just use it. I’ve got this idea for a song …’

‘I wonder if she ever feels the drain of you sucking your inspiration from her over so many years? Did the detective comment on whether she looked like the dried-out husk of a woman?’

‘Ha, ha!’ I laughed hollowly. ‘Now I’m some sort of vampire.’

‘Don’t you find Nerissa something to write about?’ he asked curiously.

‘She’s a distraction, admittedly, and she’s got more sticking power than I expected. But Pop’s threatening to cut her allowance off if he sees one more tabloid photo of his daughter with her hands all over me.’

‘She’ll be moving in with you before you know what hit you.’

‘No she won’t. You know,’ I struck a Garbo-esque pose, ‘I often vant to be alooone.’

‘Yes, and you also often say you want to settle down and raise a family. Speaking of which, you haven’t forgotten it’s my engagement party tonight?’

‘Of course I haven’t forgotten. But I just want to rough out this song while it’s running through my head.’

Carlo regarded me sombrely. ‘OK, as long as you’re not going to stay here brooding. It’s pointless. You can never go back.’

‘Of course not. “That was another country, and besides, the wench is dead?”’ I quoted lightly. ‘Something like that.’

Dead to me, anyway.

Chapter 4: Wild in the Country

While I didn’t quite achieve my dream of having my own country cottage before my thirtieth birthday, we moved in only a couple of weeks later, though early on the very first morning, when I was jerked rudely from the sound sleep of exhaustion by a deep coughing roar like a sick cougar, it struck me that Nutthill, and 2 Dower Houses in particular, was not going to be quite the quiet haven of my imaginings.

Heart pounding, I started up and stared wildly round the strange room, where James and I lay marooned among the flotsam of our possessions.

Dismal February light from the uncurtained window greyly furred every outline, but there was no cougar among them, sick or otherwise, and I’d just snuggled thankfully back into the warm embrace of the duvet when the noise was repeated, this time growing ever louder until it rumbled and snarled itself off into the distance.

Must have been a tractor – or something.

This was not the first thing to strike me about country living, though: the sliding door between the bathroom and the kitchen had already done that, very painfully, in the night. This extra barrier was due to some legal hygiene quibble about the two being next to each other, and while I’m all for germs being kept out, I don’t see what notice they’ll take of a sliding door.

Once the roaring had died away I could hear birds twittering, a muted cackling, and a faint, faraway foghorn of mooing. The walls between us and our only neighbour are so thick that yesterday, while we were moving in, I heard nothing from her, though her front curtains were twitching like mad – but now there was the slam of a door and shuffling footsteps going in the direction of the back garden.

The muted cackling was suddenly released into a cacophony of squawking, clucking and crowing, accompanied by the rattling of a bucket. Then the slow, dragging footsteps retraced their path, the door slammed, and there was silence … apart from the newly released hens, of course, and the cows, and the birds …

Yes – the birds.

I’d expected – even looked forward to – waking to the sound of birdsong, but whatever was now performing outside my window was unmelodious in the extreme.

A rook, perhaps?

I’ll soon know, because I intend learning how to identify all the wild birds, flowers, trees and little woodland creatures … except insects. I’ve absolutely no intention of being At One with Nature in the form of insects.

Snug again, I tried, half-guiltily, to recapture the dream I’d been having when the cougar woke me (back to the usual dreams again, you see) in which I was lying in a woodland glade with a dark, handsome gamekeeper next to me. His warm, lithe body pressed to mine was entirely na—

‘Urgh!’

There was a sudden jerk, a porcine grunt, and a sandy head appeared from a tangle of duvet.

‘Get up, James,’ I snapped crossly, even though it isn’t his fault that he’s not tall, dark and romantic, those not being the qualities I married him for, after all. (And I’m determined to concentrate on the qualities I did marry him for – those that come under the heading of Good Husband Material, like a length of hard-wearing Dralon.) ‘We’ve a lot to do.’

‘Whaa?’ He briefly exposed a sliver of bright blue eye. Some women get a ‘Good morning, darling’ or even a cuddle from their husbands first thing, but James is not a morning person.

Come to think of it, he’s not even an evening person either lately, but the poor thing has been under a lot of pressure at work, and with the house moving and everything, and he’s still sulking about the cottage even though we got it so cheaply that it’s a positive investment.

He’s also been convinced for the last couple of months that he’s been followed by a small, anonymous-looking man, sometimes driving a red hatchback. When I soothingly pointed out that, a) every other car on the road is a red hatchback, b) how could he know it was the same man if he was so nondescript?, and c) who on earth would want to dog his boring footsteps unless it was a member of the Drugs Squad investigating Horrible Howard’s cronies anyway? he went all huffy. You’d almost think he wanted to be followed.

So I snuggled up against him and murmured, ‘Oh, darling – the first morning in our very own little country cottage.’

‘Mmph,’ he muttered, and turned over.

The bedside coffee-maker not having yet been unpacked, I’d no excuse to lie there any longer. As I gingerly lowered my feet on to the icy bare floor Bess scuttled across with a clatter of claws, heaved herself into my warmly vacated half of the bed and lay staring smugly at me from feminine, long-lashed eyes.

‘Bitch!’

Retrieving my clothes from the top of a carton I vowed that this time I would not give in to James about the dog. From tonight she’s sleeping in the kitchen. Dogs in bedrooms are unhygienic, and anyway, three is a crowd.

Without a bedroom curtain I felt exposed, even though our cottage only backs on to the park of the local big house and we can’t see even a chimney of that from here. I just can’t suppress a mental image of Hardyesque farmhands draped along our back fence, all clutching anachronistic binoculars focused on my goose-pimpled and shivering flesh.

It’s not easy getting jeans and jumper on under your nightie, but I managed it, then went creaking down the steep stairs that complained at every step – and sometimes for no reason at all – to the bathroom.

As I passed through the kitchen, Toby, whose cage had been dumped unceremoniously on the kitchen table, opened one kaleidoscopic eye and began to scream in a crescendo, ‘Hello! HEllo! HELLo! HELLO!’

Horrible bird. Even with both doors shut (and I remembered the sliding one this time) I could still hear him. The whole village could probably hear him.

The bathroom has a certain nightmare fascination: peeling, garish vinyl wallpaper, pebble-effect lino floor, and a plastic shower curtain patterned with bulging-eyed gold-fish hanging in tatters from a rail round the bath.

I’ve already disinfected everything, of course, but it will have to wait its turn for further attention, since it’s only one of the many things that need to be done before the cottage looks and feels like the country home of our dreams. Or my dreams, now I’ve realised that James’s run more to Bloggs’ Tudor-style Executive Country Home standards. But he’ll change his mind when he sees how nice the cottage looks when we’ve finished.

It does look a lot bigger without the previous occupant’s furniture. All those chairs …

After a quick wash – icy, since we await the arrival of a missing Vital Spark for the gas boiler – I metaphorically rolled up my sleeves and went out to get on with things.

After all, James has got only a few days off work, most grudgingly given by Uncle Lionel, and we intend to sand and seal all the floorboards and emulsion the walls. (I have persuaded James into ‘Linen’, a soft, warm white, rather than magnolia – a small but important change – and I intend the insidious introduction of colour later.)

Toby paused in mid-scream on seeing me again, clinging to the side of his cage and staring at me with mad eyes. Then he gave the lunatic chuckle he usually saves for those glorious moments when he manages to bite someone and that always remind me of the time he took a chunk out of Fergal’s ear.

I hastily threw the old bedspread over the cage and silence, except for the annoyed grinding of a beak, reigned over the kitchen.

The sad, cold, cream-coloured Aga seemed to reproach me from the chimney breast, but I’m not messing about with buckets of dirty, spider-infested coal. I’ll wait for my nice new gas cooker, due to arrive today. Perhaps the Aga could be converted to gas later, but in the meantime I could make quite a nice feature of it, with copper pans and bunches of dried flowers hanging from the towel rail.

All was quiet and peaceful again, the way I always thought it would be, and while drinking coffee and eating biscuits I listed the most urgent things that need doing in my little red notebook. It’s a diary really, but I’m no Pepys (his poor wife!), and James gave it to me at Christmas in a gift set with woolly hat and gloves.

It seemed a strange combination, but one that must appeal to the Great Last-Minute Present-Buying Male, like scratchy red satin and black lace underwear, which all the recipients immediately exchange in the New Year for something less cystitis-inducing.

At least James knows me better than to present me with any of that (though now I come to think of it, when did he ever know me to wear a woolly hat?), and the poor old thing compares favourably with Pepys.

The rattle of the letterbox signalled the surprising arrival of a tabloid newspaper (an error, I presume, since we haven’t yet arranged for one to be delivered, and even if we had it would be The Times). The whole front cover, I saw to my disgust, was devoted to Fergal Rocco’s latest exploits, which seemed at a hasty glance to involve a fountain and several wet nuns.

Fearing it would spark off more sulks from James, I hastily stuffed it into the Aga, sure he would never open it.

After this excitement I rousted James out and we got to work.

Later, after a scratch lunch of bread and cheese, he went out to buy some more paint and collect the floor sander, and I made my way into the back garden to look for a dustbin.

I had to force my way through a tangle of waist-high dead weeds, and if the dustbin was out there I must have missed it. But the view of the park over the rickety fence was worth beating a trail for: black and white cows grazed the rolling green turf like Noah’s Ark toys. Some fine big trees were dotted about, and the occasional copse. (I think I mean copse … Thick clumps of trees, anyway.) It all rolled up and down into the distance like best Axminster.

It was too penetratingly cold to stand there for long, so when I got back to the house I was amazed to find a note stuck through the front door saying that the gas men had been and, not getting any answer, left my ‘appliance’ in the front garden.

Sure enough, my lovely new cooker stood forlornly in the sleety drizzle, inadequately draped in a sheet of plastic like a hippie at a wet festival.

They can barely have tapped at the door once, for Bess barks like a hysterical hyena at the least noise, so as soon as I’d covered the cooker up with a bigger plastic sheet I rang to complain.

My temper was not improved by being passed from person to person until I completely snapped and screamed that they’d better come back immediately and put my oven in, or I would take legal action.

What did I mean by that? What could I do against a big utility company?

It certainly did the trick, though, for the man on the other end of the line suddenly capitulated from his previous truculent stance and promised to send someone round to install it that afternoon.

‘And tell them to knock properly at the door this time,’ I added as a parting shot before slamming the phone down with hands trembling with rage.

My temper was not improved when, noticing the message button was flashing, I listened to Vanessa the secretarty ringing with the news that the big office photocopier was in good working order again.

So what?

Strangely enough, James was cross with me for not having stayed in the house all the time to listen for the gas men. But if radar-ears bitch didn’t hear them I wouldn’t have either, unless I’d been standing on the doorstep.

But I forgave him, because he brought back chocolates, flowers and wine – the latter two a conjunction of gifts usually signifying Interesting Intentions …

Only an hour later two rather sheepish workmen returned and installed the stove in the kitchen, mangling the quarry tiles in the process. However, I’m thankful to have a

stove that works.

As a bonus and, I suspect, as a spin-off from my telephone tantrum, a completely different man came and brought the missing Vital Spark for the boiler not half an hour later, and after some swearing and awful glugging noises, the central heating system became operational.

Who says it doesn’t pay to lose your temper?

The first person to phone us in our new home – unless you count Vanessa’s message, duly passed on to James, who looked pleased about it. Sad really! – was, of course, Mother, who has very clingfilm ways.

You know, it was such a wonderful relief when I first discovered that James’s father, stepmother and several smaller half-siblings lived in South Africa, and that he didn’t seem to care if I ever met them, because Mother is family enough. More than enough.

She was not, she now informed me, deeply hurt by my failure to call her for weeks, and she and Granny were managing very well despite this neglect.

‘Don’t be such a Wet Nellie, Valerie,’ Granny screeched in the background. ‘The girl’s moving house!’

Mother put her hand over the phone – the wrong end, unfortunately – and hissed: ‘She can still phone, can’t she?’

‘I’m sorry I haven’t phoned this week, Mother, but I’ve been so busy with the move.’

‘So far away!’ she mourned.

It isn’t really, but as neither Mother nor I drive it would make the journey a little difficult.

I was going to miss Granny, though.

‘I haven’t seen my little girlie for months!’

‘Two weeks, actually, Mother – my birthday – and yours, too, just before that.’ These celebrations come thick and fast in my family. ‘And don’t forget we’re coming over for tea on Sunday as usual. James wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

‘Dear boy! Such a good, hard-working husband.’

‘Namby-pamby!’ shouted Granny, and I grinned. James is too polite and even-tempered for her taste. If he was just as rude back to her she’d like him a lot better, but he

just carries on being urbane and forgiving.

And if James had had any romantic inclinations for our second night at the cottage, he was too exhausted to do anything about it by the time we went to bed.

The next few days were a blur of paint smells, sawdust and aching muscles, though I did let James off on the Wednesday afternoon to go to an auction.

The former contents of the cottage were to be sold, and although I’m not keen on second-hand furniture (unless

it’s antique, which is different) I had liked the big kitchen table and dresser. Our little table from the flat looked way too small and quite wrong.

I gave him strict instructions about not going beyond our agreed limit, or buying anything else, but I knew he had when he returned wearing a sheepish expression.

Since he was accompanied by a Man with a Van bearing the dresser and table I was forced to restrain myself until they’d carried the furniture in, and the last thing to come out of the van was an old chair in carved, golden-coloured wood, with an intricately woven cane seat and back. It was rather nice.

‘Where do you want the commode?’ enquired the Man.

‘Commode?’ I echoed blankly.

He flipped the seat up to reveal a white china pot painted with posies. ‘See? Save many a long and draughty journey, this will!’

‘Nice, isn’t it?’ James said defiantly, coming back out of the house. ‘And only five pounds, too.’

‘But it’s a commode, James. People have been using it for years!’

‘Oh, don’t be squeamish, Tish. I’ll clean it up, and we can use the china pot to put a plant in.’

‘Over my dead body!’

I paid the Man with a Van, who went off grinning, and returned to the battle, but James was quite determined on the thing and went all stubborn and sulky.

Still, he didn’t entirely get his own way, for it is to go into the rickety garden shed until it’s cleaned and disinfected. Once that’s been done and the lid screwed down I don’t suppose anyone will ever know that it was once a commode except me, but I’ll always see the ghosts of hundreds of former users sitting there with their germy hands resting on the arms. Hygiene wasn’t up to much then.

Although by Sunday we’d broken the back of the work (and possibly our own), we were totally exhausted and the last thing we had the time or inclination for was to drive all the way over to Mother’s for tea.

As we were getting ready James, brushing his hair at the mirror, suddenly exclaimed, ‘Damn, I’ve still got paint in my hair – look.’

‘Don’t be silly, James, that’s not paint, it’s grey hair,’ I informed him after a casual glance.

‘Grey hair!’ He blanched, aghast. ‘It can’t be. Are there any more? Oh my God – I’m too young to go grey!’

‘There’s only a sprinkling here and there,’ I assured him, amused. ‘It’ll just make you look distinguished – and look on the bright side, at least you aren’t going bald.’

He didn’t seem very comforted, and I caught him examining his hair in the driving mirror a couple of times on the way to Mother’s, which certainly didn’t do much for his already limited driving skills.

Fergal: February 1999

‘ROCKER IN UNFROCKED NUN SHOCK!

Does Rocking Rocco have dirty habits?’

Sun

Our publicity’s always been outrageous. That first tour in America, after I found out about Tish seeing someone else, I did everything they said I did and more. We all did. That’s probably what sobered me – realising my younger brother Carlo, also in the band, was going to Hell with me.

Hywel, our manager, who also does our publicity, played up on the wild image from the beginning and made it part of our hype, and on the whole we all still go along with it even if in real life we’re pretty sober types now.

But sometimes Hywel goes just that little bit too far.

At that photo shoot in Rome he really excelled himself, plumbing whole new depths of taste, and it took him some very fast talking and more than a few lire to get me out of gaol after that set-up with the nuns and the fountain.

Of course, they weren’t real nuns, and yes, they did have dirty habits. (I’m going to sock the next person who asks me that.) Perhaps that’s why they all jumped into the fountain with me.

It was supposed to be a reversal of the wet T-shirt shoot – me in the fountain wearing clinging wet clothes – only I ended up wearing six wet nuns.

Do you know what nuns wear under their habits?

Neither do I, but I know what these street-scrapings were wearing under theirs, and it’s what the Scotsman’s supposed to wear under his kilt. Nothing.

Ma was a bit upset about it all, and half my Italian relatives weren’t speaking to me, so I told Hywel if he didn’t cool it down I’d be looking for a new manager.

Ma knows Carlo and I aren’t as bad as we’re painted, but it doesn’t mean she doesn’t get hurt by seeing all this sex ’n’ drugs ’n’ rock ’n’ roll publicity about her sons.

The rumour that quickly spread that I’d engaged in sexual misconduct with one (or even several) of the ‘nuns’ in the fountain particularly upset her, but Hy swore he’d had nothing to do with that.

And just think a minute – was it likely? That water was ball-shrivellingly cold, even if I’d had the urge, which I certainly didn’t.

What I’ve never understood is why sexual misconduct is so irresistible to a lot of women?

You wouldn’t believe the mail I got.

Chapter 5: The Bourgeois Bitch

After our brief debauch at Mother’s we resumed our back-breaking toil until James returned to work.

‘It’s all right for some people who can stay at home all day doing nothing,’ he grumbled at breakfast, before setting off for his office.

This was, as usual, a full cooked breakfast prepared by Yours Truly. It’s amazing really that, if carried out by mere wives, cooking isn’t real work, nor is laundering, nor cleaning, nor painting and decorating, gardening, childcare, shopping or … well, ad infinitum.

Why isn’t there a minimum wage for housewives? Or a maximum working week?

So it was with something of a snap that I said, ‘I’ve already told you, James, that after this week spent finishing off jobs around the house I’ll be writing every morning and most afternoons, so I will in fact be working harder than ever.’

His expression remained disgruntled, since, in his opinion, a nice safe job should be seamlessly followed at the right time by a nice safe pregnancy.

I decided that this was not the moment to inform him that I forgot to take my pill for a couple of days in the bustle of moving and haven’t bothered since. You really never know how these things are going to affect men.

It could spur him on (but I don’t want to get pregnant too soon) or put him off, so I need to invest in some other form of contraception, though all the alternatives are revolting. But if I conceive I’d like it to be a conscious decision, not a sort of Russian roulette.

I must register with a female doctor locally too. I’m not having some man examining my credentials. What good would that do if I get pregnant? His only experience would be from books and we all know that they inform medical students that women feel no pain between the knees and the navel.

Mal de merde.

‘… charity work,’ James was saying. ‘Are you listening?’

‘What?’ I said hastily, sitting up.

‘Noelle doesn’t go out to work, but she runs a charity and is a Hospital Visitor.’

‘Like being visited by the Angel of Death,’ I shuddered, conjuring up the awful vision of the severely tailored wife of one of James’s drinking acquaintances (otherwise known as ‘friends’).

‘That isn’t funny,’ he said stiffly.

‘It wasn’t meant to be,’ I assured him. ‘Besides, if you think I should be out there doing charity work, I can tell you now that the only charity I’m interested in right now is the Make Tish Drew a Rich and Famous Author Society.’

‘I know you aren’t serious. When you find how much time you have on your hands you might like to ring Noelle up for a chat.’

Time on my hands? The man is mad! But then, I’ve never managed to convince him that writing is serious work and not some dubious hobby that got out of hand, like the patchwork and leaves, and once he gets an idea into his head it’s set there for all time like a fly in amber. Writing is my career.

He says I’m only an author with a little ‘a’ because I write short romantic novels. I suspect he thinks you have to be a man to be a real Author, an attitude he only allowed to come out of hiding after we were married, when he seemed to think I wouldn’t need to write any more.

I discovered I had the knack of writing romances in my last year of university, after comfort-reading so many other people’s (the literary equivalent of a Mars bar), where the hero wasn’t quite right, and certainly didn’t suffer enough before the heroine relented and let him marry her.

Fergal Rocco may have been too much for one woman, but he provides a rich vein to draw on: distilled essence of sex appeal. Just as well James has never read any of my novels! I may be a sort of literary vampire, but Fergal owes it to me after treating me like that, and anyway, slapping a series of his clones into shape is rather fun.

My pen name is Marian Plentifold and I’ve been turning out two novels a year ever since college. James annoyingly refers to the money I make from them as ‘your pin money’ and doesn’t like me to tell anyone about them because of their being romance. But I’d like to tell everyone, and anyway, Mother knows, which is the same thing.

Funnily enough, he made no objection when I had poetry published, probably because no one he knew read that sort of magazine. (Sometimes I suspect that only poets and aspiring poets read them: all very incestuous.)

He might be a bit jealous, too, since he has trouble signing his name on documents, and reads James Bond. Impure escapism.

He’s unfortunately not much of a New Man (more of an Old Man lately) and the only help he really gives me is to do the weekly large shop at the supermarket.

I was glad when he’d gone, so I could savour the feeling of being alone in the cottage, now looking amazingly different – light and spacious, with stripped and sealed mellow golden-yellow floors and freshly painted walls and paintwork. Once all my brightly coloured vases, bowls, patchwork cushions and throws are scattered about, it will look a lot livelier. And a basket or two of leaves, and later some bright rugs …

It’s surprising how little furniture we have considering we’ve been married for six years but, as I’ve mentioned, I hate second-hand furniture, except antique. There’s something very antiseptic about the expensive gloss of an antique piece.

My dresser and table are scrubbed and sealed, and I at least know where they came from. The commode has had a Total Baptism by stripping solution, and I don’t think many germs could stand up to that. James has now waxed and polished it, and I must admit that it looks very nice in the hall.

I got him to remove the bowl and screw down the lid (he suggested seriously that we keep our gloves in it!) and have told him not to mention to anyone what it was. I neither know nor care what he’s done with the bowl, except that it isn’t in the house.

Later I measured up our bedroom window and made out the order for some bright curtains (tough luck, James!), then set out with an ecstatic and panting Bess to look for the postbox. I wouldn’t have taken the stupid dog except that she can’t be trusted not to Do Something in a fit of pique if left behind.

Strangely enough it was the first time I’d walked into the village. All our journeys have been in the car: the supermarket, the DIY centre, the common to give Bess a run. We know that Nutthill has a village shop, infants’ school and bus service, and is quite pretty and peaceful, but that’s about it.

I can’t imagine why it’s called Nutthill, either, because it’s pretty flat around here.

It was with an unusually exposed feeling that I closed the door and strode off down to the lane, and, glancing across the jungle of our front garden, I was just in time to see next door’s curtains twitch and a pallid, moon-shaped face retreat behind the glass.

Bess immediately squatted in an unladylike posture on the narrow country road and assumed a determined expression, so I got as far upwind as the lead would allow and looked around the countryside with its dotting of picture-postcard cottages.

February is perhaps not a time of year when the countryside looks its best – there’s a sort of fuzzy greyness over everything, like mould.

In the distance a small squat church tower appeared over the top of some dark and gloomy trees, which might be yew, but little more of it could be glimpsed even when we walked past the churchyard, because the high wall and trees conspired to shut out any further view.

There were some interestingly ancient-looking monuments set among the short green turf, which I would have explored despite the biting wind if I hadn’t had Bess with me.

After some searching I spotted the postbox nestling inside a carefully clipped niche in the holly hedge. Gleaming with newly replenished paint, it looked as small and insubstantial as a bird-box on a post, but I pushed the letter in and walked on to look at the shop.

It was one of a row of little cottages, but the original window had been replaced by larger panes of thick greenish glass, and the displaying space was added to by an overflow of assorted goods over the concrete frontage: boxes of vegetables and sacks of potatoes jostled with hoes, rakes and spades, and a large and garishly painted selection of garden gnomes.

The low doorway was festooned with wellingtons on strings, and it all looked a bit Enid Blyton: by rights there ought to have been an elf behind the counter in a long striped apron.

It was dark and, as I halted on the threshold to let my eyes adjust, a voice from the murk instructed briskly, ‘No dogs, please! There’s a hook outside to tie it to.’

There was, too, half hidden by the onions and potatoes. A little wooden plaque above it, tastefully executed in poker-work, said ‘DOGS’, with a languorous hand pointing downwards, rather Michelangelo.

‘Sit!’ I commanded, tying Bess up. She whined and tried to jump up at me, only the lead was too short and she fell back, puzzled.

When I ventured in, a small, wrinkled woman had appeared behind the wooden counter. She smiled at me, a smile that stretched from earring to earring, showing teeth set singly and far apart, like rosebushes in gravel, but her eyes were sharp and full of curiosity.

‘Sorry about that, dear, but it’s the Law, you know – no dogs in shops what sell food. I’m a dog-lover myself. What sort would yours be, then?’

‘Borzoi,’ I replied, taking in the serried ranks of jars and tins and packets jammed from floor to ceiling all round – not to mention all sorts of things hanging from hooks in the ceiling, and the jars of sherbet dabs and other comestibles on the counter.

‘Beg pardon?’

‘Borzoi.’

‘Oh – Bourgeois. One of them foreign breeds. Labradors, I like. Nothing like a nice Labrador.’

‘She’s “an Aristocrat of the Russian Steppes” actually,’ I told her, quoting from The Borzoi Owner’s Handbook, which I had bought in the hope that it would tell me the stupid creature would acquire brain cells when mature.

‘A Bourgeois,’ she murmured, committing it to memory. ‘What can I get you, now?’

Since I’d been drawn inside by sheer curiosity this momentarily stumped me, but then my eye fell on a basket of tangerines and I said hastily, ‘Four pounds of tangerines, please.’

Don’t ask me why four pounds – it just came into my head.

‘Four pounds it is,’ said the woman. ‘That’ll be a lot of tangerines, then?’

‘Yes …’ A picture from my Complete Book of Home Preserving (a recent book club choice) flashed into my brain. ‘I’m making tangerine marmalade.’

‘Oh, yes?’ she said brightly, measuring out tangerines into a large set of scales and then wrapping them up in a bit of newspaper. ‘Right, then – you’ll be wanting some sugar, I expect? Granulated do?’

Weakly I agreed, and again when she suggested a lemon (why a lemon?). But when she started hauling out expensive-looking Kilner jars from under the counter I hastily said I had lots of empty jars, which I have. I’ve been collecting them in anticipation of such country pursuits, though I didn’t expect to be doing them quite so soon after moving in!

Disappointed, she thrust the jars back with her foot.

‘That’s all, I think,’ I said firmly, but even so, she managed to add two packets of jar labels and waxed discs to my purchases before I got away, having spent rather more than I intended.

I was aware of her absorbed gaze through the window as, hampered by the insecurely wrapped tangerines, which threatened to break out of their newspaper bundle at any moment, I untied Bess, frantic and drooling.

As I made my way along the lane something compelled me to look back; in the distance a small figure stood planted sturdily in front of the shop, staring after me. I gave a kind of half-wave, then, feeling uncomfortably aware of the eyes boring into my back, hurried on.

Even before I turned into our garden gate I could hear faint shouting, high-pitched and very penetrating, and when I got the front door open it revealed the astonishing range and power of a parrot’s lungs to the entire village. Possibly even the whole county.

How amazing it is that something the size of an over-stuffed budgie can produce so much noise! I lost no time in rushing into the living room and throwing a cloth over the cage. Bloody bird.

Silence reigned. Sometimes I wish that I could leave him permanently covered, but that would be cruel, even if he is the parrot equivalent of a mental defective.

He was left to me by an elderly neighbour, since I’d looked after the creature once when she was taken into hospital. He came together with a small legacy, and unfortunately I couldn’t keep the money and refuse the parrot.

He was supposed to be very ancient, but years have passed and, though the legacy has gone, Toby hasn’t. There’s nothing more determined on life than a parrot. He’s a dirty bundle of grey feathers touched with crimson, noisy and vicious – and doesn’t biting the hand that feeds you prove he’s stupid?

When I came back from the kitchen with a cup of coffee the shrouded, silent cage seemed to reproach me. I uncovered it and cautiously filled up the seed pot with the Super Expensive Parrot Mix he favours, and he rushed up to it on his horrible crinkled grey feet as if he hadn’t eaten for a week. All was peaceful – if you can ignore the ghastly grindings and crackings of a busy beak.

Sipping my coffee, I looked up tangerine preserve in the book. I’d make the marmalade this very afternoon, before James could return and point an accusing finger at the psychedelic citrus spoil-heap.

The recipe seemed straightforward enough, and soon I was stirring the bottom half of my pressure cooker, entirely full of liquid with bobbing bags of pips and peel in it. (The book said a muslin bag, but I haven’t got one, so in the end I used the feet of a pair of clean tights.)

Then, just at the stage where the marmalade was going critical, Toby decided to treat the world to his full repertoire: Concerto for One Parrot.

I began to feel a bit fraught. Marmalade-making is a surprisingly messy business, and both I and the kitchen seemed to have become horribly sticky. And Bess. Do other dogs eat tangerine peel?

As I thankfully slapped the lid on the last jar the doorbell jangled out its vulgar ‘Oranges and Lemons’ tune (it’s got to go!) and, with a muttered curse, I washed my hands and went to answer it.

On the doorstep was a diminutive old lady, ill-dressed against the cold in a cotton dress covered by a flowered pinny, and with long, draggled grey hair tied up in a skittish ponytail with red-spotted ribbon.

Her pink, dough-like face, set with beady black eyes, had an expression of belligerence that seemed natural to it, and which was not helped by the minor landslide that had reshaped the left side of her face, dragging the eye and corner of her mouth with it.

I’ve seen more attractive old ladies.

‘I’ve come about The Child!’ she hissed accusingly out of the good corner of her mouth.

Chapter 6: The Posy Profligate

‘Oh, yes?’ I answered politely, in case she should prove to be the local lunatic. ‘What child?’

‘What child! What child!’ uttered the old lady scathingly. ‘Why, the one I hear screaming and crying night and morning! Morning and night! Hark at it now, the poor thing! It’s a disgrace to neglect a child like that – besides going out and leaving it alone in the house, which I seen you do this morning! If it doesn’t stop I’m going to complain to the authorities, and so I warn you!’

My mind swung into gear with an almost audible click as I grasped the truth of the matter, for even now there was a raucous screaming coming from the living room.

And this must be the quiet, sweet little old lady from next door! Hardly what the estate agent led us to expect.

‘It isn’t a child screaming, it’s my parrot,’ I explained. ‘I’m very sorry if it disturbed you.’

She turned on me a look of indescribable contempt. ‘A parrot? The child was screaming and sobbing for its mother!’

‘Where’s Mummy, then? Toby want biccy!’ pleaded the feathered encumbrance from the other room.

‘Parrot, indeed!’

There was nothing for it but to invite her in to view the wretched bird, and of course Toby immediately shut up and eyed us with malevolence through the bars, turning his head doubtfully from side to side. Then he scratched the back of his head with one foot, before excreting copiously with a horrid ‘glop’.

I averted my eyes. He makes me feel quite ill, sometimes.

‘He’s not very big to be making all that noise, is he?’ said my neighbour, unconvinced. ‘I thought parrots were them big, colourful birds with curved beaks.’

‘I expect you mean macaws, but he is a parrot – a South African Grey – and it’s surprising just how much noise he can make. I have to cover him up sometimes, just to get a bit of peace, but I can’t cover him up all the time.’ (Unfortunately.)

‘He’s not saying anything now, is he?’

We both stared at the silent cage, and Toby stared inimically back.

‘But if you really haven’t got a child, I suppose it must be him I heard.’

‘I haven’t got a child hidden away, and I’m really terribly busy just now …’

She gave one last, doubtful look at Toby and turned to go.

‘Shut that bloody door!’ screeched an eldritch voice, and she whirled round as fast as her game leg allowed her.

Toby blinked innocently at her, then gave a fruity chuckle that slowly worked its way up to an evil cackle.

Backing out, still staring, she fell over the chair in the hall. ‘I never would have believed it!’ she muttered, hauling herself up by the chair back. Then she looked down and added absently, ‘Nice commode!’

‘We like it,’ I replied coldly. How on earth did she know? ‘Well, I’m glad to have met you at last, Mrs … er?’

‘Peach.’ And the dumpy figure limped away down the drive without another word.

Feeling even more ruffled than before, I closed the door and discovered a long, thin brown envelope lying by the wall, which must have come earlier. Quite a stiff envelope – probably one of the garage brochures we’d sent for.

Ripping open the end, I pulled out the enclosure – and then, with a sharp ‘twang!’ something brick red sprang out and hit me sharply on the nose. I recoiled backwards onto the commode and wept overwrought tears.

I soon had myself back under control, of course, and discovered that the flying object was a cardboard garage, ingeniously arranged so that it would fold flat to fit in an envelope. Once opened it sprang back into its garage shape by means of a system of elastic bands. The name of the firm was emblazoned on the side.

I put it back in its envelope and went back to the kitchen to label my marmalade and clean up myself and the kitchen, and when James returned home he found me arranging the jars proudly on the dresser, where they glowed like amber.

‘What a terribly domestic scene for a rock star’s ex-girlfriend!’ he sneered, and I was so cross that I handed him the garage envelope, hoping it would hit him on the nose too.

No such luck.

‘What a promotional brain wave!’ he enthused, playing with it.

‘Isn’t it just,’ I said gloomily. ‘But they aren’t such good value as the brochure that came last week. That had a garage with a white finish that would blend with the rest of the house.’

‘Perhaps. Let’s wait for the others to arrive before we decide. There’s the phone – bet it’s your mother.’

With the usual feeling of reluctance – not to mention weariness and a bit of residual stickiness – I picked up the receiver and heard her babbling even before I got it to my ear.

‘… and I simply can’t go on. I just can’t carry on like this! She grows more impossible every day!’

‘Hello, Mother. What can’t you go on with?’

‘Mummy, dear – do call me Mummy! Mother is so ageing. And I’m talking about Granny, of course. I just said. And it’s not as if I ever liked her!’

‘But you asked her to come and stay with you after Grandpa died!’

‘I felt I had to. And she never thought I was good enough for her precious son either. Really, I can’t see why I should have to like someone just because they happen to be my mother-in-law.’

‘No Moth— Mummy.’

‘Of course, you and I have always been more like sisters than mother and daughter, haven’t we, darling? But I was such a young mother – little more than a child.’

‘Yes, Mummy.’ A faint, familiar nausea rose in my throat.

‘And I need a rest from Granny. I said to the doctor, “I need a rest.” And do you know what he said to me? “Don’t we all, Mrs Norwood!” Then I said, “What about admitting her into hospital for a week?” And he said she wasn’t ill, and besides, there was a waiting list stretching right into next year! Not that I believe him, of course – he’s just afraid that I would refuse to have her back again.’

‘And would you?’

The words were out before I could help myself.

‘I hope I know my duty,’ she replied ambiguously after a short pause. ‘If my health was up to it I would, of course, be prepared to have her back whatever the strain.’

‘Why don’t you ask that nice district nurse for her advice when she comes to give Granny her injection? Mrs Durwin, isn’t it?’

There was a snort. ‘I did. I said to her, “I can’t cope any more – it’s too much for me,” and do you know what she said? She said, “Have you tried soap on the stairs, Mrs Norwood?” and then she laughed, positively roared, until the tears ran down her face. And not five minutes later I heard her repeating it to Granny! These West Indians have a strange sense of humour.’

‘So has Granny – that’s why they’re such good friends. And it was just a joke, after all.’

‘I can’t see anything funny in it. I’m at my wits’ end. I need a holiday. Now, if I could just get her off my hands for a week or two I could come and visit your sweet little cottage, couldn’t I? I’m just dying to see it. You have got a spare bedroom for Mummy, haven’t you?’

Panic gripped my heart and gave it a squeeze. ‘Oh, yes – two – but I’m afraid one is completely bare at the moment, and the other is going to be my office.’

‘Ah, yes, for your Writing,’ she said reverently. ‘How is it coming along, dear?’

‘It isn’t, there’s been too much to do. But at least I can have a room to myself here, and I’m about to start the next book.’

‘All my friends are so impressed when I tell them my little girl is a Writer!’

I winced, even though I get this sort of thing all the time. Then I braced myself to ask, ‘You haven’t been – well – drinking again, have you, Mummy?’

‘Oh, there’s the doorbell!’ she said brightly. ‘Must go, darling. I’ll let you know if I can arrange anything for Granny so that I can come and take a little holiday with you. Bye-ee!’ And the line went dead.

I hadn’t heard any doorbell, and I replaced the receiver with a feeling of deep depression. Mother generally has that effect on me.

James was immersed in his paper, oblivious both to me and to Bess, who was staring fixedly at the door. (Normal dogs whine.)

‘Bess wants to go out, James!’ I said loudly, but he pretended not to hear, so with a sigh of resignation I took the lead off the door.

Standing in the icy darkness of the lane waiting for Bess to perform, I thought: What a day!

‘You have remembered that I’ll be late home tonight, haven’t you?’ James said casually about a week later, preparing to dash out after breakfast.

He looked pretty good in his natty dark suiting, but I always think he would look even better striding about the heather in a kilt like his forebears did. He has that sort of look. Rugged. (Which he isn’t, really.)

‘Remember? How can I remember when you never told me in the first place?’ I exclaimed in surprise.

‘I told you days ago.’

‘But what about dinner? Just how late will you be?’

He looked annoyed at my perfectly reasonable question: ‘Don’t wait for me – I’ll pick something up.’

‘Eating junk food on the run isn’t healthy, James.’

‘Then I’ll go and eat at Howard’s afterwards, and stay overnight!’

‘Eating at Howard’s is even more of a health hazard. It’s all takeaways, and too dark to see what’s in them, because the electricity’s always cut off.’

‘I don’t know what you’ve got against Howard!’

‘You mean, apart from him being a drug-crazed, free-loading ageing hippie who’s never worked in his life?’

‘Howard’s all right – we were at school together,’ he protested, as if that qualified Howard as a member of the human race. ‘Anyway, I’ve decided: I’m staying there tonight.’

I didn’t say anything more, because if I hadn’t nagged him about junk food he probably would have come home instead. I don’t think I handled that too well.

After James had gone (with overnight bag, though Flit gun would have been more to the point) I went into the front garden and hammered the spike of the rotary dryer with unnecessary force into the rough grass. I can’t afford to keep using the tumble dryer all the time, although when you hang clothes out in March it’s a toss-up whether they are going to dry or be glazed like mutant frozen prawns.

With the first load of washing churning away I went up to my little writing room. I’d been working on the floorboards, which were not good enough to sand and seal, so I’d painted them cream and stencilled roses round the border.

Piled in one corner were light cardboard boxes filled with some of my varnished leaves. (James says two baskets of dead leaves are more than enough in one sitting room.) I had a brain wave, and soon there were drifts of golden leaves along the walls and piled in the corner opposite the door, where they whispered at the least small draught. It looked lovely, though I am very sure that James will say it is a weird idea. He is so stick-in-the-mud and staid about everything I do, yet he can go off and stay with Horrible Howard who really is weird.

By then the washing was done and, as I was hanging it out, the vicar called: a tall, thin, middle-aged man radiating an air of youthful enthusiasm, and wearing a bright purple T-shirt with his dog collar.

As he shambled up the drive with that strange gait some men have – knees turned out as though they have been kicked in the naughty bits and never recovered – I hastily swivelled the rotating dryer round to hide the more ancient and tatty items of my underwear. (I always put my undies in the middle with the shirts and so on round them, but I’d only just started.) The sooner we’ve tackled the back garden, so that the washing can be hung in decent obscurity, the better! However, the vicar came charging right round, stretching out his hand while still several yards away and, seizing my cold wet one in his, pumped it energetically up and down.

‘Strange lady!’ he exclaimed, excitedly.

‘Oh!’ I said doubtfully, taken aback. But it seemed that this was his name – rather an unfortunate one for a vicar.

‘Strangelady! And very pleased indeed to welcome you to our little parish. Ah! washing day, I see!’ he added, and bestowed a benevolent smile upon my black bra and shabby knickers. I went red as a beetroot.

‘Er … come in, er … Vicar?’ I invited, hastily backing away from the washing and opening the front door. (How do you address a vicar?)

Still, I recovered my equilibrium over coffee and biscuits while he admired a mercifully silent Toby, and The Bitch drooled adoringly over his knee, shedding long white hairs. (‘The Borzoi is devoted to one person, showing only aloof attention to others.’) She placed her paw on his knee whenever he stopped patting her, and assumed her best Starving Russian Aristocrat look at the sight of the biscuit tin.

(Yes, she really is the lost Anastasia.)

The vicar didn’t press me to attend church, which I rather expected, though he left me a copy of the times of the services and said we would be very welcome, and a copy of the parish magazine.

Just as he was about to leave, a florist’s van pulled up and delivered a bunch of cream roses. I didn’t need to read the card to know that it said: ‘To my lovely wife, from James,’ since he always does this when he’s got his own way or upset me. It makes him feel better.

‘Your birthday perhaps? An anniversary?’ hinted the vicar. ‘What lovely roses!’

‘Just a house-warming present,’ I muttered ungraciously, seeing him off. And the sort of gesture we couldn’t afford now – it must have cost a fortune to have them delivered all the way out here, and why cream roses? They would be invisible against all the pale walls.

If he wanted to give me a present I’d have preferred that brass stencil of vine leaves from Homebase.

You know, I used to think James’s profligacy with posies romantic, but really it’s easy enough to phone up a Teleflorist and read your credit card number. Feeling dissatisfied, I rammed the scentless and useless roses into a cream vase and stood them on a cream table against the cream wall, where they vanished.

Fergal: March 1999

‘GONERIL: FAREWELL TO ALL THAT?

Fergal Rocco says his next tour really is his last.’

Trendsetter magazine

Not only me – we’re all saying it, though no one outside the band seems to believe we really mean it. We’re not breaking up, we’ll still record together and do the odd gig, but we all have other parts of our lives we want to develop.

And we’re sick to death of touring.

Mike and Col want to spend more time with their families, Carlo’s getting married, and I want to concentrate on the song-writing and painting for a while.

Funnily enough, it was seeing Tish so suddenly at the gallery that made me really stop and take stock of myself: where I was going with my life. (And where I’d been. When I could remember where I’d been.)

She sparked off a whole new series of songs, too, but that’s by the bye.

She still looked good …

Can I be the only man who finds fiery-haired, militant Pre-Raphaelite angels a big turn on?

Chapter 7: Drained

James came home next day exhausted: some kind of party had developed at Howard’s and he had hardly had a wink’s sleep all night.

I refrained from comment with some effort (apart from suggesting he go for a shower, since Howard usually lives in some squalid squat fermenting germs), but later I wished I’d let rip when he looked up from the paper and sneered, ‘I see your boyfriend’s band are going on a farewell tour of seven countries – he must be getting a bit old for all that touring!’

‘He’s quite a bit younger than you,’ I pointed out. (‘Your boyfriend’ indeed!) ‘And age doesn’t seem to hinder the Rolling Stones much, does it?’

‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t have your musical interests.’

He doesn’t have any musical interests, but that doesn’t excuse the cheap gibe.

‘Never mind, James,’ I said sweetly, ‘at least being tone-deaf makes you able to appreciate that busty blonde country singer with the nasal whine.’

He let the subject drop then, but I wish he’d forget it altogether. I’m getting very tired of all these snide little remarks.

Later I had a sneaky look at the paper, and there was Fergal at an airport, looking jetlagged, unshaven and mildly dangerous. I hope the photographer didn’t get too close.

I debated whether to cut the article out in case it set James off again, then thought that perhaps a hole where it had been might be even worse, since he’d think I’d cut it out to keep. Besides, why should I pander to his warped imaginings?

Speaking of warped imaginings, I had a dream last night about Fergal: one of those blush-making ones. I know a wholesome drink of water is what I need, but once you’ve had champagne, part of you still thirsts for it, even if you know it doesn’t agree with you. (And I’m not even getting the water lately!)

Usually I feel guilty the morning after, but this time I was still miffed with James and decided he didn’t deserve it. I gave him a kiss of the tight-lipped variety and, after he’d gone, retired to the bathroom with the crossword, where, enthroned and mid-clue, I was startled by the sound of men’s voices from the garden right beneath the window.

Hastily flushing the loo I went out only to discover, to my complete embarrassment, three men in fluorescent orange waistcoats staring down into the swirling sewage trap from which they had just removed the lid.

I wanted to curl up and die, but they’d seen me, so I brazened it out with a cheery ‘Good morning!’

You could have roasted chestnuts on my cheeks (all of them).

The men wore uniformly blank expressions and after an answering chorus of ‘Good morning’ resumed their absorbed study.

‘Blockage isn’t here, then?’ said one, after some ten minutes of silent scrutiny.

‘No, must be further along,’ said Second Workman.

‘Yes. Must be somewhere else,’ said Third Workman.

‘Perhaps it’s further along,’ said the first. ‘Funny – I thought it was sure to be this one.’

‘Never mind, Dan – it’ll be further along.’

And so on until, after another ten or fifteen minutes of this tediously Beckett-like dialogue, they dropped the manhole cover and went off into Mrs Peach’s garden to try their luck.

It took copious amounts of coffee to soothe my shattered nerves, and even then I still wanted to cringe. I kept remembering the workmen’s blank faces as they peered into the manhole.

Later, the most stupendous thunderstorm broke over the cottage and the Wrath of God in the form of a bolt of lightning flashed down the telephone cable and blasted the answerphone into little melted pieces.

I don’t know what I did to deserve that.

Nothing like this ever happened when we lived in the flat.

Chapter 8: Busted Flush

We’ve been here a whole month now, and I’ve settled into a more professional working schedule: mornings for the book, afternoons for the house. How nice it is not to feel guilty about writing instead of doing housework, and being able to do it without James’s constant interruptions. I don’t know how Jane Austen ever managed to write a word with her family coming and going like yo-yos.

My little room is very inviting, with walls of palest pink (not any kind of cream!) though it needs a touch or two of a strong colour – lime green, possibly. When I’d said as much to James, he’d replied, ‘Why spoil a good colour scheme?’

He hasn’t seen the leaves yet. Or the patchwork curtains.

My desk is set in the little window, with everything neat and tidy: pile of manuscript on one side of the typewriter, unused paper on the other. James says I should be fully computerised, seeing we’re hovering on the brink of a new century, but I’m quite happy as I am: I type my first draft, then rewrite it onto my Amstrad word processor and print it out. I suppose publishers will soon refuse to accept typewritten manuscripts, as they do now with handwritten ones, but I bet if your name is something bestselling like Archer, they’d accept them written in lipstick on slices of bread.

The present book is going well. The heroine is about to meet the radio ham who heard her distress call when her yacht was sinking and so saved her life, and he’s going to be terribly handsome and exciting, although scarred in some way and hiding himself away because of it, only communicating through his radio messages.

I thought Love on the Waves would be a good title, but I don’t know if Thripp, Thripp and Jameson, my publishers, will like it. Mr Thripp – Mr H. Thripp – has appalling taste in titles and book covers.

I need to go into town and find some books on radio-hamming in the library, since I don’t know enough details for even a sketchy outline. It’s very tedious not being able to drive, because the bus service isn’t all that good, besides being very expensive and taking ages.

Fergal tried to teach me to drive once, but he got so furious when I inadvertently reversed into a bush and got a tiny scratch on his beloved sports car, that I refused to try again. He had a thing about that car; he even got cross just because I rubbed Leather Food all over the seats so they made rude raspberry noises when he was being romantic.

As soon as the cottage is sorted out I’ll book lessons. Sometimes I feel quite marooned out here, especially since James has now stayed overnight with Howard three times when he’s had to work late. When I protested, he said, ‘Well, that’s the price you have to pay for living in the country!’ He always comes back next day with chocolates or flowers, but I’d rather he came home, however late.

Really, I don’t know what’s got into him since we moved here. He used to talk about growing vegetables and things like that, but he hasn’t even started planning the garden yet. I’m not sure he’s been in the garden! And as for helping me with the house – it takes constant badgering just to get him to put up a simple shelf or two.

He says his work is serious and very exhausting, and he needs to relax in his spare time; but he even neglects taking Bess for her daily walk, which would do him good.

I can only hope he’s adjusting and will show some interest in the garden once the weather bucks up a bit. And he still has to drive to the supermarket once a week for the shopping, that’s something.

If I need any extras, Mrs Deakin at the village shop is very good, and I don’t really mind paying a few pence more to save the trek into town, except that she’s very persuasive, so I often come out with stuff I never intended to get.

Some things, like natural soya sauce, bran and lentils, I have to buy at the health food shop in Bedford: I’m determined we’ll have a Natural Healthy Diet, whatever James says. I bought some recycled paper loo rolls there, too, which were not a complete success since it took three flushes before it was vanquished. And I didn’t like the horrible chewing gum colour, even if they did assure me it was all totally hygienic. But there’s no point in saving trees if I’m not saving water.

Mrs Peach now delivers our eggs, which she calls ‘free-range’. Certainly the hen-runs are free-range, since they’re on little wheels so she can move them up and down her garden.

The very day after complaining about Toby screaming she came toiling up the drive pulling a little cart behind her made up of a set of pram wheels with an ark-like wooden structure on top. She wore a black cloth coat, very shiny, and a strange pointed woollen hat in magenta with ear flaps that tied under the chin and ended in huge pom-poms dangling on her slumping frontage.

When I reluctantly opened the front door she was licking the end of a pencil attached to a little notebook by a piece of greasy black string.

‘You’ll be wanting eggs, then,’ she announced tersely, without looking up. ‘How many a week?’

Over her shoulder I could see that the Perambulating Ark was stacked with battered egg boxes. ‘I get my eggs in town. Free-range ones.’ (Nice, clean ones, in new boxes!)

‘That’s right – free-range brown is what I’ve got. Save you the journey. How many?’

I capitulated. ‘Half a dozen please.’

‘Mondays. Save the boxes.’ And off she stumped, her ark bouncing on the rutted pathway, and that was that.

Now every Monday she comes, receives her egg boxes and money, hands me the eggs in return and then, with a muttered, ‘Let’s see that cunning old bird, then!’ she stumps right past me into the living room to stare greedily at Toby. Charmed by her attention he invariably runs through his entire repertoire at top speed (and volume).

Then she silently departs, only betraying her enjoyment by the occasional quiver of her collapsed cheek.

I expect she regales the entire village with the awful things he says when she does the rest of the egg round, and everyone will think he learned them from us.

The library did have a couple of radio ham books, although they didn’t look very up to date. But I don’t suppose it changes that much, and I also managed to buy a magazine on the subject, which James seized when he got home. Then he lay on the bed immersed in it, though he’s never shown any interest in that sort of thing before.

I suppose he just wanted something to read – but why can’t he come downstairs and do it? I tried snuggling up next to him on the bed, but apart from pointing out one or two interesting passages he took no notice of me, so I went back downstairs and read one of the books instead.

Bess woke me with hysterical whining at the crack of dawn next morning – she must have eaten something that disagreed with her. James pulled the sheet over his head and pretended not to hear her, as usual.

After she’d got the worst of it over I thought we might as well carry on and have our usual little morning walk up the lane. There’s an old, overgrown driveway to the Hall further up, and a rough pathway through the tangle where I can let her off.

But as I was about to release her I saw a hare, and it’s true what they say about mad March hares, because this one was bouncing all over the place. Then another joined it, and they had just begun a sparring contest when Bess whined and spoiled it; in a flash they were racing off.

Hare today, and gone tomorrow …

For some reason they reminded me of the vicar.

Bess seemed fine later, which was just as well, because I had to go up to Town to meet a literary agent who specialises in romance. Having just reached the end of a three-book contract with Thripp, Thripp and Jameson, I thought it would be interesting to see what an agent could do with my next one.

I got him out of The Writer’s and Artist’s Yearbook, although I must admit that I thought Vivyan Dubois was a woman until I got there. He’s quite young, eager, intelligent and gay. I liked him immediately.

He’s read some of my books and is sure he can get me a better contract with another publisher, and also that there would be a market for them in America!

He was very enthusiastic, and delighted that I’m such a fast writer. I’m to send various contracts for him to pore over, and Love on the Waves when it’s completed.

After this I was dying to impart the glad news to someone, so popped in to see Mother and Granny.

Granny was in a grumpy mood. ‘If you fell into the Leeds-Liverpool canal you’d come up with a trout in your mouth!’ she said dourly.

‘Aren’t you going to give me any credit for hard work, Granny?’

‘I’m sure we’re very pleased, dear,’ Mother said. ‘But when you said you had wonderful news I did hope for a moment … I mean, I know how much dear James longs for a son, and I’d love a grandchild.’

‘Let the girl alone!’ snapped Granny. ‘She hasn’t been in her new house five seconds.’

‘But it isn’t a new house, is it? There are all sorts of hazards in old houses for tiny tots – and they’re always damp and unhygienic. I did so much prefer your last home, darling, because at least you knew that no one else had ever lived in it – or died in it!’

‘Thank you for sharing that thought, Mother.’

‘Mummy, dear. And I only say these things for your own good, Leticia.’

‘Tish,’ I corrected. Fair is fair.

I set off early for home, calling off to purchase a bottle of inexpensive champagne on the way, then took a taxi from the station (but that was just because my being out for so long puts such a strain on that daft dog’s bladder).

However, she’d been good, and was rewarded with biscuits and a walk to the village pond, where she chased the four Muscovy ducks until one turned and gave her a hard stare. Then she slunk off with her feathery tail between her legs.

James was late home, didn’t eat much, and said cheap champagne wasn’t worth buying. ‘Are we celebrating something?’

‘Well, we never really celebrated moving in here, darling, and it’s almost April already! And you know I went up to see that agent today?’

He nodded, and I told him all about it, though he couldn’t seem to grasp the importance of it to me – to us – at all.

‘But is it worth it? After all,’ he said, sloshing down the despised cheap champagne like lemonade, ‘once you’ve got a baby to look after you won’t have time for writing, will you? Now I’m a full partner in the firm we can manage without your writing to bring in any little extras.’

My mouth must have dropped open several inches. It took me a few minutes to get my voice back. ‘It’s more than a little extra! Besides, I like writing, and I can’t just turn it off like a tap. I don’t want to turn it off!’

‘You say that now, and I know how much your little hobby means to you, but when you have a baby to look after—’

‘There might not be a baby.’

He smiled indulgently. ‘I don’t see why not; we’re both healthy and I don’t think we should leave it much longer. I want my sons while I’m young enough to play football with them.’

‘Sons? They may be girls, James! Or girl – I don’t think I want more than one. And my writing isn’t a hobby, so I’m not going to stop doing it!’

(I don’t think I could stop, actually. It would all dam up inside me until I burst.)

We carried on like this for some time, because James couldn’t be persuaded out of his old-fashioned, stupid ideas and just kept repeating, ‘Wait and see!’ in his solicitor’s voice.

He’ll wait and see for ever, if he keeps this up.

Although the idea of starting a family once we moved to the country was on the agenda, I find now I’ve got cold feet. I might not – horror of horrors – enjoy motherhood at all! My biological clock seems to have a very quiet tick.

Thinking back, I felt much the same about pets, before the arrival of Toby and then Bess …

And just how much of the childcare would James actually be prepared to do?

Still, I suppose babies sleep a lot, and then I would be able to write. I don’t know, I’ve never so much as held a baby and know nothing of them. They sort of fascinate and frighten me at the same time, so goodness knows what sort of mother I’d make!

Not one like mine, at any rate, who is so unsure of my love that she is incapable of letting go for a second. It’s pretty sad, really, that she never realises such tactics have the opposite effect to the desired one.

I wish I had a close female friend I could discuss it all with, only I seem to have lost touch with college friends, and my schoolfriends vanished after I met Fergal – no one else existed for me when he was around.

I do have a good friend I made when I joined the Society for Women Writing Romance (there are two organisations for romantic novelists, and I chose to join the SFWWR because my favourite author, Tina Devino, is a member), but Peggy, who is older than I am, lives in Cornwall, so mostly we chat on the phone.

I used to think James and I thought as one on all the important things and that there was nothing we couldn’t discuss, but either he’s changed or I was seeing him through rose-tinted spectacles … He didn’t even seem to be aware of the fundamental chasm opening beneath his feet.

Just to round the evening off nicely, I had a peculiar phone call. Not peculiar in the sense of being obscene: just silence, although I was convinced there was someone at the other end of the line. The caller withheld their number.

The Chinese may have the Year of the Rat, but March is clearly Month of the Lavatory.

The fatal day got off to a good start when James forgot to duck under one of the low beams and gave his head such a crack that he was writhing and swearing for a full five minutes, with Toby listening to every juicy word. One day I expect James will become accustomed to the beams, and react automatically like Pavlov’s dogs. A sharp blow to the head early in life has been the making of a lot of men – Augustus John springs to mind – but unfortunately I think James is too old now for it to make any difference.

After he’d finally driven off to work, pale, martyred and armed with a whole bottle of paracetamol, I climbed up onto the toilet lid to try to unjam the shower curtains. This proved not to be a great idea, for there was a sudden cracking noise, and I ended up with one very soaked velvet mule and some nasty scratches round my ankle. This was doubly upsetting for, apart from the shock and pain, I’d have all the embarrassment of trying to order a new toilet lid, and since the bathroom is ancient and old-fashioned I’d have to take the remains of the old one with me to ensure I got the right type. I didn’t think I could persuade James to do it for me.

I at last unjammed the shower curtains by fetching the kitchen stool, and was standing under the hot spray in my mules, directing the nozzle at the one that went down the loo, when it occurred to me that I hadn’t examined myself for lumps recently, what with one thing and another.

So I did, and when I got to that portion of my anatomy where my left breast becomes my armpit, I wished I hadn’t, because I felt something. A lumpy quality. A faint tenderness.

Fighting down panic, I felt again, and it was still there … The next thing I knew I was sitting on the side of the bath thinking: this sort of thing can’t happen to me!

Then I pulled myself together and tried comparing the other side, and there was definitely a difference on the left – although surely not that single hard lump you’re supposed to look for? Also, I thought I’d read somewhere that there’s no pain with breast cancer until it’s terminal?

Of course, once I’d let the dreaded words terminal and breast cancer into my mind, cold, shaky panic crept in too, even though I kept trying to assure myself that I had just pulled a muscle scraping paint or something. I felt perfectly fit and well, after all.

So there was no need to go to a doctor. If it was – if it didn’t go away – I didn’t want to know …

I didn’t think I wanted to know.

Only that was stupid. I decided to wait and see.

To add to my misery, the fluffy fake fur trimming on my very expensive mules went all stiff and matted like a dead cat, and I didn’t feel the same about them any more.

One week of pure hell followed.

James wouldn’t notice if I was dragging myself round on crutches, since he’s begun a new craze: ham radio. This also foiled my attempts to distract myself by getting on with my writing, since he’s cut several things out of my ham radio magazine, and hogs my library books.

I can only hope it is temporary. It’s bad enough him slipping back into the habit of meeting his cronies after work in the pub (which is turning dinner into supper practically every evening, now he has so far to drive home), or risking arrest by consorting with Howard, without him having his nose glued to my books whenever he is here and I want him to do something.

Friday morning, the Lump still being present, I went to see my new doctor, which I should have done at the start.

Not that she – brisk, brusque and overworked – was very reassuring.

She said she didn’t think it was anything to worry about, but would refer me to the hospital anyway and I’d be sent an appointment.

This meant another wait, although I knew that if she’d only been pretending not to be worried by the lump I’d be sent for instantly.

So the longer the wait, the less important she’d found it …

It didn’t do anything to stop me worrying.

Fergal: April 1999

‘WHO IS BRITAIN’S SEXIEST STAR? YOU VOTE!’

Trendsetter magazine

SEXY?

I’m not about to become celibate for life, but seeing Tish like that … well, if you crave champagne, then water is just something you quench your thirst with when you can’t get what you really want.

Nerissa – the latest thirst-quencher – is turning tricky now I’m losing interest. I don’t have much respect for women prepared to lie down at the drop of a famous name, but I don’t want to hurt her.

She was just a girl who threw herself at me, and prettier than most. Only now it turns out she used to go to school with Sara, Carlo’s fiancée, and she’s using that old friendship so that she always knows where I’m going to be next, trying to turn a casual affair into some kind of relationship, though I made sure she knew right from the start that it would never be that.

Now she’s always there. Especially after a gig, when I’m on a high …

She always seems to be there whenever the cameras flash, too.

Chapter 9: Nutthill Nutria

Two weeks later I found myself sitting in a dingy hospital corridor on a bursting plastic chair, thinking about Life, the Universe, and other more mundane things such as why James hasn’t noticed the state of panic I’ve been in for a fortnight.

He ought to have guessed something was wrong. But even last night, when I was so nervous and in need of a hug that I wound my arms round his neck and kissed him, he just sort of suffered it, then leaned over and pressed the video play button.

If he ever touched me these days he might have noticed the lumpiness himself … which is another thing: since the move our love life seems to have pretty well tailed off. (Not that I ever found the sex riveting, but I do miss the cuddles.) Our only physical contact lately seems to be James’s absent-minded goodbye kiss in the mornings – when he isn’t staying at Horrible Howard’s.

Now I’ve stopped the pill I’m back to the light, erratic periods I had before I started taking it. But I don’t really mind – it’s only the unpredictability that’s irritating, and I’m sure my body is enjoying a holiday from all those chemicals.

James did notice I wasn’t eating much lately, but thinks I am on a diet. He said if he wanted a wife who looked like a coat hanger with a dress on it, then he would have married one in the first place! I am certainly not that thin – I do go in and out in the appropriate places – but perhaps I have become too thin to attract James any more?

Mind you, if I am getting thinner, he is putting it on – especially round the waist! And his face seems to be losing some of its craggy good looks under a blur of padding and saggy eye pouches. He always looks worse when he’s spent the night at Howard’s, so he’d be much better off coming home and getting a good night’s sleep when he works late.

He was a bit miffed when I asked him if he’d weighed himself lately, and muttered that at least he wasn’t a hollow-eyed drug addict like my former boyfriend, which I ignored as beneath contempt. (I mean, have you seen Fergal Rocco? You don’t acquire a body like that through a syringe!)

With all this to occupy my mind it was some time before I began to resurface and take stock of my fellow sufferers in the waiting room – and a highly unsavoury lot they appeared to be, too, though it could have been the lighting that made everyone look terminally consumptive.

Some were talking quietly, but no one tried to exchange even a nervous smile with me, and eventually I realised that there was something that made me conspicuous from the other women – the brightness of my clothes.

I was the only one wearing anything brighter than beige, and in fact most of them looked as if they’d gone into mourning for themselves already.

James would like me to wear smart Country Casuals-type stuff and little suits, and he often says I should go and have my hair styled.

What does he mean, styled? It is deep gold, naturally curling, and hasn’t been cut since I was old enough to resist Mother, although the curls ravel it up like knitting. Isn’t that a style?

By the time I was summoned an hour later I looked more Edith Cavell than the nurse, since I’d been too afraid of missing my turn to go to the ladies.

She marched me past two men in white coats with their heads together in earnest discussion and threw open the door of a little cell.

‘In here,’ she ordered bossily. ‘Undress. Top half only.’

With the closing of the door the distant rattle of the hospital was abruptly silenced, and I turned to face the narrow room with its couch, washbasin and sliver of frosted window.

I unfastened the straps of my dungarees, took off my shirt with fingers made clumsy from cold and fear, and laid it on the end of the couch.

There was a white cellular hospital blanket folded there, clean, but marked with old stains, and I felt so cold that I draped it round my shoulders and huddled on the couch. My legs dangled, and one shoe fell off on to the chewing-gum-coloured lino. I let the other one drop too, realised my hand was pressed firmly to my Lump, and snatched it away.

After ten interminable minutes a spotty youth in a white coat breezed in. ‘Good morning! I’m a student doctor and, if you don’t mind, I’m going to examine you first,’ he said cheerfully, without looking up from the grubby clipboard he carried, and the nurse materialised from behind him and deftly removed the blanket without waiting for my reply.

He probed long and deep at both breasts like a child searching for the free plastic toy in a box of cereal. Then he straightened and let his breath go in a long sigh.

I looked fearfully at him.

‘Yes, there does seem to be the hint of a lump there, doesn’t there? I’ll just fetch Mr Thomas, the consultant, now – won’t be a tick.’

Five minutes later, while I was still visualising my deathbed scene, a small, rotund, elderly doctor with a polka-dot bow tie and an entourage of obsequious nurses swept in.

He wasted no time on polite preliminaries.

‘Lift your arm. Left arm. Higher. So?’ He probed once, fingers flat and unpleasantly warm. ‘Nothing there. You can go.’

And out he marched again.

Blankly I stared at the student doctor hovering in his wake: ‘Does that mean – does it mean I’m all right?’

‘Yes, if Mr Thomas says so. You can go.’

I exhaled deeply, and colour, warmth and movement flooded back into the world. ‘My God! I thought he was about to say I had six months to live, or something.’

‘Not this time!’ He hurried off after the Master.

The relief!

From not wanting to tell anyone about it I swung round to wanting to tell everyone. James just said I was an idiot, and he could have told me there was nothing wrong with me, but since he hasn’t got a medical degree it would hardly have been likely to reassure me.

Secretly, I’m still hardly convinced of my reprieve, and the lumpy tenderness is still there. But I expect I’ll live with it, since it’s got to be better than the alternative.

It’s put me right off checking my breasts, though. How can you spot one rogue marble in a bagful?

James’s reaction was such a damp squib that I cast about for someone else to tell, then I thought: why not phone Peggy? She’d understand.

Peggy Mulvaney, my friend from the Society for Women Writing Romance, writes raunchy books under a variety of unlikely pen names, Desdemona Calthrop being the best known of them.

She says she spends a lot of time on research.

I haven’t seen much of her since we moved here because it’s so difficult to get to SFWWR meetings as a non-driver, and I do miss her and my other friends in the Society. Being accepted as a member when my first book was published did wonders for my self-confidence. And, of course, since my books keep on selling, I do feel I’m a success at something.

Anyway, I phoned her up and we had a lovely long chat. She understood perfectly what I’d been going through, because she had a similar scare in the past and they’d told her it was some sort of benign thing and to ignore it, which she did.

She said now she’d put on so much weight it would take her a week to do a check, but Gerry, her current lover, was always willing to try.

I felt much happier after this, and thought Mother might like to know what I’d been through, too. But there was such a very long wait before the phone was picked up that I’d begun to imagine her lying in a pool of cooking sherry in the kitchen before there was a click and a cautious voice quavered, ‘She’s not in!’

‘Hello, Granny!’ I shouted. ‘It’s me – Tish.’

‘Who?’

‘Tish – your granddaughter.’

‘Why are you shouting?’

‘Sorry. Where’s Mother?’

‘Gone to the off-licence. She said the library, but when did she ever go to a library? She doesn’t fool me one bit and never has. I answered the phone.’

‘I know, I can hear you. I thought you never answered the phone?’

‘Yes, I answered the phone, and I never answer it.’

‘Then why did you answer it today, Granny?’

‘Don’t whisper, I can’t hear you. I don’t know why I bothered to answer this pesky thing. I won’t do it again.’

‘Granny, I went to the hospital today because I thought I had cancer, but I haven’t. Isn’t that wonderful?’

‘Cancer? I’m Scorpio. Not that I believe in all that nonsense. Your mother does, more fool her. What have you taken up astrology for? I don’t want my charts read!’

‘But I haven’t taken astrology up!’

‘Then why did you want to know my birth-sign?’ she demanded reasonably. I gave up.

‘How are you, Granny?’

‘Your mother is trying to kill me.’

‘Kill you? But Granny … !’

‘Yes, kill me! Brown sherry bottles left on brown carpets and green wine bottles left on green carpets. She does it on purpose. Soon I’ll be falling over your mother.’

‘She’s not that bad, surely?’

‘“My daughter-in-law drinks,” I told the doctor, and do you know what he said? “Drink is necessary to sustain human life, Mrs Norwood.” “That may be,” I told him, “but sherry isn’t!” Then I told him where to stick his stethoscope, the patronising fool!’ She cackled evilly, and I winced.

‘Oh dear – you really shouldn’t have done that, Granny! And I thought you liked Dr Reevey.’

‘Stuffed shirt. Said he wasn’t going to come and see me again. Good riddance!’

‘Oh dear!’ I said again, helplessly. ‘You’ll run out of doctors at this rate.’

‘No such luck. They breed like flies, and always looking for old people to experiment on. That’s what they do in geriatric wards – experiment on old folk. That’s why you never hear of them coming out again,’ she said darkly.

‘I’m sure you’re wrong, Granny!’

‘Can’t hear a word you’re saying. Why does everyone whisper at me? Here’s your mother coming – I’m off.’

And the phone went suddenly dead.

It rang again almost immediately and I picked it up thinking it would be Mother – only it was just silence.

‘That’s funny,’ I told James as he walked into the room. ‘No answer again.’

‘Wrong number.’

‘N-no … the phone wasn’t put down and I’m sure there was someone there. That makes four I’ve had like that, and they always withhold their number.’

‘Oh, come on, Tish: it’s just a fault on the line! But if it will make you feel better I’ll phone British Telecom from work tomorrow and get it checked out. OK? I mean, it wasn’t like it was a rude message, or heavy breathing, or anything, was it?’

‘No,’ I conceded, feeling silly. ‘You’re right – I’m getting in a state about nothing.’ (Mind you, it wasn’t me who was imagining they were being followed everywhere, though he does seem to have dropped that idea pretty quickly.)

I managed a smile, since he was looking a bit impatient, but later, when I was standing in the dark lane with Bess, the silent caller gnawed away in the back of my mind like a rat.

I want everything in my Eden to be perfect – no worms in this apple!

As I quietly let myself back in I heard James exclaim crossly, ‘Just stop doing it!’

‘Stop doing what?’ I demanded indignantly, sticking my head round the door, only to find him holding the telephone receiver.

‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow,’ he added, putting the phone down.

‘Sorry – I thought you were speaking to me,’ I explained. ‘Who was that?’

He stared blankly for a moment, then said: ‘Howard.’

‘What did he want? You sounded a bit terse with him. Stop doing what?’

‘Oh, you know Howard! He’s been moonlighting behind some pub bar and the Social Security have found out about it. Told him either to stop working or stop claiming benefit.’

I lost interest (except for a faint surprise that Howard’s phone wasn’t cut off as usual for non-payment of bills) and went to bed, where I had another of those dreams that made me too guilty to look my husband in the face next day. Fergal featured largely in it.

I am not responsible for my subconscious.

Later, I bethought myself of another person I could tell about the Lump who would enter into the spirit of the thing: Mrs Deakin.

She responded to the sordid details of my examination and reprieve with comfortingly horrific mastectomy tales and harrowing deathbed scenes she’d personally witnessed. All her relatives (female) must be either lopsided or dead. Strangely, I felt much better after this.

Then she imparted the astonishing news that wife-swapping is rife in the village on the new estate! While personally disapproving of such goings-on, as a novelist I feel that I should know all about Life, so I pumped her for more details. (I hope the rumour never reaches James’s ears – men are so strange about that sort of thing.)

Running out of wife-swapping stories at last, she changed gear and added a lengthy run of village history for good measure.

‘There was a man …’ she began, resting her elbows and bosom on a stack of sugar bags. Most of her best village stories start like that, or, ‘There was a woman …’

‘There was a man,’ she continued now, ‘lived at Rose Cottage down the other end of the village. His wife, Polly, she died two year ago. Used to teach leatherwork at the WI – a dab hand at making gloves and bags and such, she were, though a strange sort of woman.

‘Her husband, Reg, his hobby were breeding fancy guinea pigs, out in the garden shed. A farm worker, and a steady sort of man, you’d have said. Not over-bright, mind, but good-looking in a big, bullish sort of way.

‘Then Polly gets suspicious, like, that he was seeing someone else, so one night she creeps out after him when he goes down to the Dog and Duck.’

‘What made her suspicious?’

‘Clean underpants! Yes, every day he was demanding a clean pair!’

‘R-really?’

‘She was right, too – he was carrying on with a London widow what had just moved into one of they bungalows. But, as I say, Polly were a strange sort of woman and she didn’t say anything at first, thinking this smart London lady would get tired of her Reg soon, and then she could make him suffer for it at her leisure. Only one day she finds all their Post Office saving taken out, and spots the widow swanning along in a new fur jacket, and put two and two together.’

‘How awful! What did she do?’

‘Threw his traps out into the street and locked the doors against him. A fine row he made when he come back, too! But after a bit he picks his stuff up and goes over to the widow’s.

‘Next day he comes back for his guinea pigs, but Polly says she sold ’em. He was fair murderous since they was some fancy kind he’d been breeding for years, but that was that.’

Mrs Deakin paused and shifted her weight so that one bosom slid off the sugar bags into the tray of toffee apples.

‘But didn’t they ever make it up? What happened?’

‘After a bit the widow chucks old Reg out and goes off back where she come from, and he moves in with another farm worker in a tied cottage.

‘No one seen much of Polly for a long time – preoccupied, she was. Then one day she startles the whole village by appearing in a new fur jacket. Sumptuous it were, the fur all long and glossy and a mighty unusual colour. I never seen one like it. “What sort of fur would that be, Polly?” I asked her, and she give me a strange smile.

‘“Nutthill Nutria,” she says.’

‘B-but surely …?’ I stammered, startled.

‘Just goes to show what weak, untrustworthy creatures men be.’ Mrs Deakin fixed me with her bright eye. ‘Even the ones what look most steady, like Reg.’

‘Not all, though!’ I assured her, smiling, for even if he had the time, James would not have the inclination. If you sliced him up you would probably find ‘Good Husband Material’ running all the way through, like a stick of rock.

‘You have to watch them all the time,’ she assured me darkly. ‘Even if the spirit’s willing, the flesh is weak!’

I thought with sudden unease of Vanessa the secretarty, then firmly pushed the idea out of my head.

Mrs Peach would be very bored if she watched James all the time now he’s hooked on amateur radio. All sorts of stuff arrives for him with each post. He must have answered every ad in the ham radio magazine, hence all the holes I found cut out of it. He has also joined a nationwide club for enthusiasts and is going to a meeting of the local branch next week, plus some sort of evening class.

If he is so busy that he can’t even take me out for a meal, how come he can fit this in? And what about the cost?

Still, perhaps it will be one of his shorter crazes. Photography lasted ten hellish weeks, during which I couldn’t move a muscle without appearing in deathless, glossy colour. And he wanted to take pictures of me without my clothes on! But I soon told him what I thought of that and added that if he wanted a hobby he should start getting the garden straight, though I have come to the conclusion that he only enjoyed reading about self-sufficiency. When it comes down to rain and muddy wellies he isn’t interested.

But we’re well into April, after all, and someone has to make a start, so on the first reasonably clement day I went out, notebook in hand, to draw up a plan of campaign.

The front garden didn’t take long:

1) Cut hedge.

2) Dig over front garden and returf, I wrote and then, as I turned for a last look, it struck me that what the front of the cottage cried out for (besides repainting) was:

3) Rose, climbing.

Satisfied, I went round the side of the house, soon to be partially blocked by an Instant Garage, and stood, daunted, on the brink of the waist-deep sea of weeds that formed the back garden, already springing back to life after a short winter’s nap.

No trace remained of the path I had once beaten to the fence, and I never had found the dustbin. A new plastic one stood forlornly on the edge of the wilderness like the Last Outpost of Civilisation.

I could hear the cackling of Mrs Peach’s hens, and when the breeze changed direction, smell them.

Girding up my wellies, I waded out to the garden shed and found it surprisingly complete apart from one cracked and starred window. Inside was a great quantity of cobwebs, with and without occupants, a heap of broken plant pots, a rake with three prongs missing, a heap of mouldering sacking that might contain anything, and the china pot out of the commode. Clearly a job for James.

4) Clear out shed, mend window (James).

5) Scythe weeds. (Or sickle weeds? Is there a difference?)

The long, fenced sides of the garden are covered by small, flattened, spreading trees, forming a dense mass of intertwining branches, which look a bit like the espaliered fruit trees I’ve seen in books. If so, I only hope they aren’t as ancient and dead as they look.

It was all very daunting and would take a lot of hard work and yet more money before it became the pretty cottage garden I longed for.

The contrast with the smooth, well-nibbled turf of the park was revolting.

A few days later, when I popped into Mrs Deakin’s to buy dried figs, she told me that the Hall had finally been sold, but she hadn’t managed to find out who to. Workmen have moved in, but they’re not local, and she’s further hampered in her investigations by the main entrance and lodge to the house being on the far side of the park in Lower Nutthill. I suppose I’ll soon have to stop exercising Bess in the over-grown rear drive, which is a nuisance.

The house is called Greatness Hall, though Mrs Deakin says it was once Great Ness (which makes even less sense to me).

‘Some say it’s been bought by one of them foreign opera singers,’ suggested Mrs Deakin hopefully. ‘That Monster Rat Cavaliero.’

‘Greatness Hall would certainly sound like the right address,’ I agreed, puzzling over who the Monster Rat could be. Then it clicked: Montserrat Caballé.

‘They say the Dower House once stood where your cottages are, but the lady what lived there went mad and set fire to it and perished,’ she was blithely continuing.

‘How exciting! The surveyor did say that one or two parts of the house walls looked much older than the rest.’

‘A touch of Greatness!’ she giggled. ‘Now, dear, here’s your dried figs. Do your insides a world of good.’

‘Actually, I’m making fig and sesame seed chewy bars.’

‘Doesn’t matter what you do with them – clean your tubes out a treat, these will.’

The fig and sesame bars are tasty, but not only do they have the texture of sand-filled sandwiches, they look like something Bess does when she’s constipated. I gave Toby a bit and he loved it, but Bess gulped a dropped piece down and then looked as if she wished she hadn’t. I sincerely hope they don’t clean her tubes out.

James came home even later than usual, smelling of beer, and admitted he’d called in at the Dog and Duck for a quick pint.

‘If I’d known, I could have met you there!’ I said, hurt.

‘I didn’t plan it,’ he said irritably, ‘I just felt like a pint on my way past.’ He poked around in his curry, then looked up, frowning. ‘I can’t seem to find the meat in this.’

‘There isn’t any – it’s vegetable.’

He put the fork down. ‘Is there any cheese?’

‘Don’t you like the curry? I thought it came out rather well. And there’s protein in the peas and the brown rice, you know.’

He pushed back his chair. ‘Never mind, I’m just not hungry. I had a pasty at the pub – corned beef and onion.’

‘There doesn’t seem much point in my cooking dinner if you are going to spoil your appetite before you even get home!’ I snapped. ‘Not that I ever know when you’re going to deign to arrive these days anyway.’

‘I can’t help having to work late,’ he said sulkily.

‘You can help stopping off at pubs on the way home, though!’

‘I need to unwind after a hard day at work. And if there was something more appetising than vegetable curry waiting for me when I got back, it might give me a bit more incentive to rush home.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with vegetable curry! And how do you expect me to cook anything Cordon Bleu when it’s got to be kept hot for hours on end waiting for you to get back? I— Where are you going?’

‘Out for another pasty!’ he said, and slammed off before I could even mention the fresh fruit salad.

I’d gone to bed (with a headache) before he returned, and when I came down next morning discovered that he’d been brewing beer in the kitchen from a kit he’d bought from the supermarket months ago. From the look of it, he’d been drunk when he got the idea.

The top of the cooker was covered in sticky brown goo, with about a pound of coagulated sugar heaped and drifted all over it. In the sink were two of my best, expensive, cast-iron enamelled casseroles in which the goo had hardened to a tight, brown skin, and coiled around them was the run-out hose of the washing machine, also sticky and revolting.

The place smelled like a brewery and the floor stuck to my slippers.

Why doesn’t he ever clear up after himself? And when I complained about the mess he went all hurt, and said he thought I’d be pleased that he was making home brew since I didn’t like him going out to drink beer.

‘When you used to make beer before, it didn’t stop you going out drinking as well!’ I said without thinking, and he slammed off to work in a rage, and without kissing me. (And God knows, it’s our only physical contact these days!)

It took me ages to clean everything up, and I’d only just finished and was sitting down with a cup of coffee before finally going upstairs to get on with my writing, when Bess decided to empty her entire stomach contents in the middle of the clean kitchen floor.

Mornings never used to be like this.

Later, the inevitable flowers arrived, but this time a spring arrangement of daffodils in a basket, which was actually quite nice.

It probably smelled good too, except that the mingled scents of burned malt and dog vomit had permanently invaded my nostrils.

Fergal: April,1999

‘IN THIS ISSUE: an exclusive pin-up of the man you all voted for –

as you’ve never seen him before!’

Trendsetter magazine

I’ve never seen me like that before, either. Where did they dig that one up from? I don’t have any hang-ups about nudity, but still!

Maybe it’s an old picture from my early days with Goneril? I can’t honestly say I remember everything I did during that first tour. Or maybe it’s some clever computer mock-up?

And that bear rug’s a definite cliché. I’m not surprised it’s wearing an anguished expression.

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