A Rural Affair

wanted to hide for ever. Moments, like that one on the way back from the shops the other day, when I’d thought I could just drive the car into a brick wall.

Jennie leaned forward. Gripped my wrist. ‘Most women would look upon this recent revelation, this visit, as a salve to their conscience. Proof that they need not feel too guilty about their lack of widow’s weeds.’

‘And yet, for someone like Poppy, I can see it could also be a crushing blow,’ said Peggy slowly.

I looked at her. Someone like Poppy. What did that mean? Someone just the tiniest bit malleable? Suggestible? Riddled with insecurities and inadequacies, prone to be a wee bit downtrodden, over time? I felt scared at what she might say next.

‘It was rejection on a grand scale,’ she went on. ‘Not just widowed, but cheated on too. By someone she felt she’d accommodated, put up with out of the goodness of her heart. How shameful is that? By someone like Phil the Pill,’ she spat darkly.

‘Phil the …’

‘Pill. Short for Pillock. It’s how he was known, locally.’

Jennie and Angie bent their heads and studied their fingernails. Locally? I gazed at my friends aghast, but their eyes were averted. How far, I wondered. As far as Aylesbury? My heart started to beat. Slowly at first, but then it gathered momentum. Something dry and withered was uncurling fast within me, thrusting out green shoots and drinking, finding some nourishment. Phil the Pill. My husband. And in a corner of my mind, I’d known. Known he was a pillock. Had overheard Angie once say to Jennie he was a bad draw at a dinner party. But I’d ignored it. Covered up for him. Like you do when you’re married to a slightly dull man. Out of loyalty. Personal pride. Told myself he had hidden depths that my friends couldn’t know about. Concentrated on how hard he worked, how dedicated and selfless he was. How he brought home the bacon. But, in my heart, I knew I’d sold out by marrying him. I just didn’t realize everyone else knew it too.

Words were finally forming in my brain, like fridge-magnet letters swirling around in a furious kaleidoscopic anagram. Simultaneously, in the pit of my stomach, which latterly had been a bit ashen, a bit shrunken, there was a rumble, as if Vesuvius, dormant for years, was making a comeback, deciding it was time for a tremor. But it had been a while. It had its work cut out. I’d been in denial for years and, for the last eleven days, severely crushed. But fury was finally on its way. Roaring in from afar like the seventh cavalry. All those long lonely evenings. All those solitary weekends with the children. He hadn’t just been working, hadn’t been cycling – recharging the batteries, as I’d tell myself stoically: he’d been sleeping with another woman. Before coming home to me. And always a shower. Two-showers-a-day Phil. Now we knew why. I looked at my friends, my three good friends, grouped tense and watchful around me.

‘How dare he?’ I breathed, softly at first. It was a surprise to hear the words. They waited. Jennie nodded eagerly.

I dug deeper, right into my very soul. As I gazed into it, his treachery stared back. I saw it very clearly, like a roll of film. Saw him coming in late, midnight sometimes; me stumbling downstairs in my dressing gown to pop his dinner in the microwave, ask how his day had been, sympathize. I saw me sitting in the audience at Clemmie’s first nativity play, an empty chair beside me, then a text: ‘Sorry, can’t get away.’ I saw me eating with the children at teatime so as not to eat alone. I saw a one-parent family. Why had I felt so ashamed these last few days, so fearful the world might discover I hadn’t been enough for my husband? Because he was dead? Death was no excuse. He’d let me down. He’d betrayed me. Not enough for him? He’d never been enough for me! I wasn’t so much seeing the light as having a full-blown epiphany.

‘HOW BLOODY DARE HE!’ I roared, the force of my ejaculation jerking me back in my chair.

‘Atta-girl,’ breathed Peggy softly.

I seized my wine glass, blood storming through my veins and knocked the Chablis back in one. Then I slammed the empty glass down on the table. ‘Fill it up,’ I demanded.

‘Lordy, Poppy,’ Angie murmured in consternation, but Peggy was already on the case.

‘Atta-girl,’ she repeated admiringly as she filled it right to the top.

8

Of course, it took more than a couple of glasses of white wine to sort me out. More than an evening with the girls. Apparently I hadn’t been terribly well. Hadn’t been … coping. And evidently going without sleep for nights on end wasn’t normal. This was all explained gently and carefully to me by my friends, and then the very next day Angie marched me off to see her GP, a pleasant, middle-aged woman who had seen Angie through her separation from Tom. She gave me some little white pills. They certainly helped me sleep but also made me feel an awful lot better in a matter of days, although that could have been psychological.