A Rural Affair

sodding test? If it’s not yours, and it’s not your father’s and it’s not Poppy’s or Peggy’s or Angie’s, WHO THE HELL DOES IT BELONG TO?’ she screamed.

There was a silence. It seemed to me the entire village held its collective breath.

‘It’s mine,’ came a voice to our left.

We swung around as one. Twelve-year-old Jamie, not thirteen until the winter, in his M&S jim-jams, getting taller by the minute but still very much snub-nosed and freckled, still very much a child, gazed back at us. Two spots of colour were high in his cheeks and I saw him swallow. A gasp went up from the assembled company. Jennie, still in a half nelson of sorts, still in some sort of custody, went limp in our hands. She let out an anguished cry, the sound of an animal in pain. Then she bowed her head and slipped slowly down the wall on her bottom, to the floor.

28

‘Yours?’ spluttered Frankie, since their mother seemed incapable of speech.

‘Yes, it’s mine. OK?’

Jennie moaned in agony again, but not so piercingly this time: it was more the cry of a defeated fighter at the very end of their strength, very much on the ropes. Dan, however, seemed imbued with a new kind of strength. He hot- footed it from one end of the kitchen to the other, and since he was no longer in imminent danger of losing his own life, he stepped over his prostrate wife to endanger his son’s. He towered over Jamie.

‘You got someone pregnant?’ he hissed, aghast.

‘No, of course not. I was testing Leila, cos I thought she might be. I think she is.’

A profound silence followed this announcement. No eyes strayed from the small boy in checked pyjamas.

‘Leila?’ his mother finally whispered, dumbfounded.

‘Yes. She was getting all fat and bosomy, like you did with Hannah, and anyway I saw her doing it with another dog. So when I saw her having a wee in the garden, I took your test and stuck it in the puddle. I had to run back upstairs to check the instructions on the packet, and then I just chucked it in the bin. I was going to tell you, only I knew how cross you’d be with her.’ His face was very pale now under his freckles.

His mother shut her eyes. ‘Oh, thank the Lord,’ she breathed. ‘Thank the Lord.’

‘You’re pleased?’ Jamie blinked. ‘I thought you’d be, like, mental. Get her to have an abortion or something.’

‘Oh, I might still do that, but – Oh no, I am so pleased, darling!’ Jennie struggled to her feet and staggered across the kitchen to take her astonished son’s face in both hands. She kissed his forehead with a resounding smack, then both his cheeks equally roundly. ‘So so pleased it’s not your father, but even more relieved it’s not you!’

‘Me!’ he gasped, but she’d already squashed him in a face-altering embrace to her breast; so much so that his mouth became a figure of eight, denying speech.

Dan, meanwhile, once his initial relief had passed, was rapidly engaged in regarding his wife with contempt. He folded his arms in an attitude of haughty disdain. His lip curled. He hadn’t stalked off, mind, as some husbands might, in high dudgeon; had remained stoically by his wife’s side. Whatever else one said about Dan, he saw these things through. But then again, such moments of lofty moral altitude were few and far between in his married life; he wouldn’t want to miss out on them, would he? Who knows how long it might be until another came along?

‘Sorry,’ Jennie muttered to him now, over her son’s head.

Dan regarded her frostily for a moment, but then his lip uncurled. He had the grace to accept this apology for what it was: a genuine one, from a woman driven to distraction by unexplained circumstances, whose imagination had galloped from a teenage pregnancy, to her husband’s love child, to underage sex, all in the space of a few hours. He inclined his head in acceptance, and although he was unable to resist a faint gleam to the eye, she stood forgiven. And Dan forgave Jennie a lot, it occurred to me; almost as much as she forgave him. Albeit for different reasons.

‘Puppies!’ breathed Hannah blissfully into the silence. She beamed up at her mother. ‘Will Leila have puppies, Mum?’

‘No doubt,’ said Jennie darkly, resting her chin squarely on Jamie’s head; he was still squirming in her tight embrace. Suddenly her face became wreathed in smiles. ‘And there’ll be no half measures for our Leila, either. She won’t pop out a modest set of twins. Oh no, it’ll be a hundred and one Dalmatians for her!” She gave a sharp laugh.

‘And can we keep one?’ implored Hannah, her eyes huge.

‘No, darling, we can’t,’ Jennie told her firmly: overjoyed, it seemed, but not completely overwhelmed by the