Читать книгу Good Husband Material - Trisha Ashley - Страница 11

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.