A Rural Affair

They agreed again an hour later, when I was still sitting composed and silent and I don’t think particularly white-faced, whilst they’d been bustling around boiling kettles and checking children and going into huddles and sitting and stroking my back muttering, ‘Poor poor Poppy’.

A bit later on, they wondered, tentatively, if I’d like to be alone? Jennie’s children had been heard making merry hell through the wall, which she’d banged on a few times, and now there was an ominous silence. She’d texted frantically, but no response. Angie started muttering in her cut-glass accent about a parish council meeting which, as chairman, she was supposed to be addressing, but of course she didn’t have to, and Peggy had been seen glancing at her watch on account of Corrie. ‘Although Sylvia might have recorded it,’ she murmured into space when no one had moved.

‘Do go,’ I said, suddenly realizing; coming to. ‘I’m perfectly all right.’

Angie and Peggy were already on their feet.

‘Sure?’ said Jennie anxiously, still stroking my back on the sofa.

‘Positive.’

‘You’ll ring if you need me? I’ll come straight round. You can call me at three in the morning if you like.’

‘Thank you.’ I turned to my best friend, her hazel eyes worried in her pretty heart-shaped face. If my eyes were going to fill, it would have been then. I knew she meant it.

She gave my shoulders another squeeze and then they trooped silently out, shutting the door softly behind them. The cheese sandwich Angie had made me curled in front of me on the coffee table, the dusk gathered coldly outside the windows, the fire Peggy had put a match to smouldered in the grate.

I gazed above it to Phil’s cycling medals and trophies on the mantle. Got stiffly to my feet. My legs had gone to sleep beneath me. It was still early, but I wanted it to be the next day. Not the day my husband died. So I went upstairs, checked on the children, who were sleeping soundly, and went to bed.

At precisely three in the morning, having stared, dry-eyed, into the darkness for six hours, I sat bolt upright and seized the phone. Jennie answered immediately. Drowsily, but immediately.

‘The children!’ I wailed. ‘My children won’t have a father!’ Tears fled down my cheeks. ‘They’ll be fatherless – orphans, practically!’

She was there in the time it took to throw a coat over her nightie, fish in her fruit bowl for my spare key, run down her path, up mine, and leg it upstairs. She hugged and rocked me as I sobbed and grieved for my children, gasping and spluttering into her shoulder, choking out incoherent snatches about how their lives would be wrecked, asking her to imagine distorted futures, scarred psychological profiles, looming criminal tendencies, broken homes of their own and dysfunctional children. Eventually, when my body had stopped its painful wracking and my hyperbolic ranting had subsided, Jennie sat back and held me at arm’s length.

‘Except he wasn’t exactly a huge presence in their lives, was he?’ she said quietly. ‘Wasn’t around a lot.’

‘No,’ I admitted with a shaky sob, a corner of my mind rather shocked. ‘But he did love them, Jennie. There’ll still be a vacuum.’

‘Oh, sure, he loved them. He loved Leila too.’

Leila was Jennie’s dog. A crazy Irish terrier who liked nothing more than to accompany Phil on his bike rides, lolloping along for miles beside him.

‘Yes, he loved Leila,’ I conceded, wiping my eyes on the duvet.

‘Spent a lot of time with her.’

I knew where this was going. ‘More than he did with the children?’

She made a non-committal not-for-me-to-say face: cheeks sucked, eyebrows raised.

‘Not everyone embraces fatherhood,’ I reminded her. ‘Particularly when the children are little.’

She looked me in the eye. ‘No, but he almost resented it. Remember when you used to bundle Clemmie in the back of the car in the middle of the night and head for the M25 to stop her crying? So Phil could get some sleep?’

‘He worked so hard. Needed his sleep.’

‘True. But at the weekends, did he ever change a nappy? Push a pram?’

‘Once or twice,’ I said, wishing I could remember him doing any of those things. But Phil was dedicated to his work, his bike and his body in three equal parts; he didn’t like other distractions. We didn’t really see him. It was just me and the children. Which was how it was going to be now. No change. I shut my eyes. Prayed for courage. Wondered if I could tell her. Eventually I opened them and took a deep breath.