A Rural Affair

And Phil was; had been. Had increasingly regarded the children as an irritant, particularly when he was trying to work. But I didn’t like the way she’d had to search her memory bank to come up with even this picture. Then again, I hadn’t provided her with one.

Clemmie sat back on her heels and looked triumphant. ‘And he had a pink shirt.’

I smiled. ‘He did, didn’t he, Clem.’

Later, when she was watching CBeebies with Archie after lunch, I went through the drawers in the bureau. Eventually I found what I was looking for, but it had been a search; I’d hidden them well. I found a couple of frames and popped one in each of their bedrooms. Photos of Phil, smiling. Yes, of course he smiled occasionally. Archie’s was taken on holiday in Majorca, and Clemmie’s on our wedding day. He may not have been perfect, but he was their father and you only get one. Clemmie could only remember him grumpy, but that would surely fade, and then she’d have this smiley photo to take its place. I didn’t put them in obvious positions, by their beds or on their walls, but on top of their chests of drawers, so that they’d come across them later, by accident maybe, when they were a bit older, then assume they’d always been there. I didn’t want Clemmie remembering a cross father. I wanted her life to be perfect, to the extent that I would erase those memories and replace them with nice ones, just as I took her dirty clothes and replaced them with clean ones. And I’d talk about him more, I determined, as I went downstairs. Remember happy times; make them up. Lovely picnics, bluebell walks. I could do that for them, my children. Lie. Let’s face it, I did it already. As I filled the dishwasher I wondered if he could become a bit of a hero, secretly in the SAS, trouble-shooting in Afghanistan, which would explain why he hadn’t been here much? But then one day, when she was a famous actress and on Who Do You Think You Are, she might discover he’d been a cycling nerd with a mistress in the next village. Perhaps not. Stick to the smiling photos and the bluebell woods.

So that was her memory sorted out. But what about her life? What about replacing Phil with something better, so that, blink, and she and Archie wouldn’t know any different? They were so young, any stepfather would soon be like a real father. Like Becky. She called her new daddy Papa. He was a farmer, and Linda, her mum, had never been happier. I knew Linda. Knew the family Clemmie had been talking about. Linda wasn’t automatically my type at the school gates – bottle blonde, very short skirts, chewed gum constantly – but I liked her. Her husband had walked out on her one Easter Sunday and taken up with a younger model. He’d bought a motorbike too; leathers, the whole bit. Two months later he’d been killed on the A41 when his bike hit black ice. Linda now lived on a dairy farm with her little girl, Becky, and Becky’s papa. The manic gum-chewing had stopped, I noticed. Jeans instead of micro minis. Hair slightly darker. Because perhaps Becky’s papa didn’t need the peroxide? Happy endings. Don’t knock them. And don’t pass them up, either.

The rest of the week was taken up with calming my best friend’s sartorial nerves. As Jennie frenziedly pointed out, she hadn’t been to a ball for years, had nothing to wear and anyway, what did one wear to balls these days? Was it long and slinky, or short and cocktaily? These, and other such burning issues, mostly to do with shoes and accessories, consumed us. For just as I couldn’t think for myself, Jennie couldn’t dress herself – something I found as easy as falling off a confidence log. Her lack of taste baffled me.

‘How about this with these?’ she’d say as she ran through my back door wearing yet another heinous combination, this time bursting out of a black dress of such sequined monstrosity, together with high red shoes, it fairly took my breath away.

‘No to both,’ I said firmly. ‘And certainly not together. The only thing black goes with is black, Jennie. Take the shoes back to Angie and the dress to Peggy. She’d get away with that because she’s eccentric and it would hang off her.’

‘Whereas I’d just look like a tart?’

I shrugged, slightly pleased to have the upper hand occasionally with my bossy friend. But then I took pity and, piling the children in the car, took her shopping.

She ended up looking terrific in a grey slinky number I’d found in Coast: to the floor, high at the front, but low at the back. As did Angie in her black velvet, which she shook from a Selfridges bag and slipped into in the middle of my kitchen; and Peggy in the sequins which she’d generously offered Jennie, but which, with black pumps and on her rangy frame, looked stunning.

‘If only you were coming,’ they all said and Jennie looked a bit guilty, feeling perhaps she should have refused the tickets and insisted I go.

‘Oh, I really don’t want to,’ I said, meaning it. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you go to alone, is it?’

‘No, no,’ they chorused, as it occurred to us that Angie, and ostensibly Peggy, were doing just that.

‘It’s not really your sort of thing, is it?’ consoled Angie.

‘Absolutely not,’ I agreed, stung. Why wasn’t it? Why? ‘Anyway, I’m going to Dad’s,’ I said quickly, to save them. ‘Haven’t seen him for ages. I’m going to cook him supper.’

‘Oh, good.’ They all said, relieved, feeling much better. They bustled away content.