A Rural Affair

children and a stroppy fourteen-year-old of her own. She’ll be in Harley Street before you can say knife.’

‘Well, I can think of more comfortable analogies but that’s the general idea.’

She swallowed hard. Leaned her head back on the wall and looked beyond me, over my head. ‘We had such hopes, Poppy, you and me, didn’t we?’ she said softly. ‘When we set out? You with Phil. Me with Dan.’

I knew what she meant. Where she was. In our first flat, in Clapham. Which we’d painted lilac and hung with Chinese lanterns. Jennie, after a particularly barren patch socially, flying off to dinner with her handsome older man; me, well, casting around rather desperately, as we know. Settling for second best. Which Jennie hadn’t done. So, in fact, sharing a flat in Clapham was where the similarity ended.

‘You hang on to those hopes, Jennie. It’s not over yet. I never got off the starting block.’

She looked down at me, recognizing, perhaps for the first time, the brave face I’d put on my terrible mistake. ‘I suppose not,’ she said absently. ‘But you will now.’

I had a feeling she meant with Luke. I stood up quickly. Too quickly probably, bearing in mind I still hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours. I steadied myself. ‘Yes, I will now,’ I repeated.

Jennie got wearily to her feet, looking about a hundred years old. Her face was drawn and she was hunched in her tweed coat, the one we’d thought so edgy with its frayed collar and cuffs when she’d found it in Primark, such a clever high-street find, but which now looked like a tatty old tweed coat. Archie was wailing from the kitchen, initially delighted to have been left for so long without supervision, but indignant now at being ignored. And it was time to collect Clemmie. Jennie gave a last gigantic sigh as she turned to go, her head bent, shoulders sagging. I hugged her hard.

‘Good luck,’ I muttered in her ear.

‘Thanks. I’ll need it.’ I held her close a long moment. Suddenly her voice came in a frantic rush in my ear. ‘Poppy,’ she gulped, ‘imagine if she’s four months gone, imagine if it’s too late, if –’

‘Don’t imagine,’ I said fiercely, pulling back and holding her shoulders, looking hard at her panic-stricken face ‘Don’t. We don’t know anything yet. Don’t think the worst.’

She nodded, frightened.

‘Stay calm,’ I urged.

‘I will,’ she whispered.

‘And listen to her. Don’t’ – and this was brave – ‘preach.’ Jennie could surely preach.

For a moment she seemed about to erupt, then, recognizing another truth, she nodded wordlessly, turned my Chubb key in my door, and left.

25

The following day, as I drove along the lanes to Wessington, I considered the whirlwind that had whipped through our village these past few months. First Tom had left Angie and the mini tornado had settled on her house; then Phil had died and the mistral had torn up the road to me; and now Frankie was pregnant and the twister had shot next door, spinning savagely over my friend. Was that just life, I wondered? One family lurching into crisis, then climbing out of it, only to be swiftly followed by another? Did we all take it in turns to fall into holes? It seemed to me, though, that some people never fell; led permanently gilded lives and were immune to the slipstream of life’s grimy undercurrent; never so much as felt a ripple. For some reason the Armitages sprang to mind. I sighed.

And naturally, in our close-knit little community, word spread like a bush fire. I hadn’t told anyone about Frankie, of course I hadn’t, but when Dan came home from work yesterday, and Jennie told him what she’d found out, calmly, reasonably, with neither blame nor censure, he’d had the reaction Jennie had had in my sitting room. Of course he had. He was shocked, distraught, horrified. His little girl. A fucking teacher! Fucking hell! And then Frankie had come in late from school, not at the usual time, and before Jennie could stop him, he’d lost his rag. I knew because I heard it in my kitchen. Even though I went into the sitting room and turned the television on. Put my fingers in my ears. And then Jennie had lost it with Dan and the whole thing, as she told me this morning when she came round, red-eyed, not having slept a wink, hair standing on end, had degenerated into the worst and most terrible scene imaginable.

‘I preached, I didn’t listen, I wasn’t calm, I wasn’t strong,’ she gulped, horrified. ‘Everything you said I shouldn’t be, I was.’

‘But not at Frankie,’ I said anxiously. ‘You didn’t lose it with her?’

‘No, I suppose not. Dan, mostly.’ She looked grey and defeated as she slumped at my kitchen table, still with her pyjamas