Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

colleagues. What a bore, it said. Pity me.

Now that I was close up, I could catalogue changes. Small, tense lines had been drawn round Minty’s mouth by a light pencil. A suggestion of disappointment? There was a hint of defiance, rancour even, in the way she was holding herself. But, most of all, determination to see through what she had begun.

Minty had no idea of the indescribable pain she had caused – or perhaps she had, and those lines were the result. Even so, I surprised myself by regretting the change to the pretty, greedy face on which shadows had settled.

Again, I cut across the history of the wind turbine. ‘If you wouldn’t mind, Minty’

Clive was arrested mid-flow. He was about to take the coward’s option of slithering away when Minty laid a hand on his arm. She had always possessed excellent fighting instincts. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Shall I catch up with you in a moment, Rose?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Now.’

Clive seized his chance and bolted. ‘So,’ I said, ‘what are you doing gatecrashing Poppy’s wedding?’

Minty licked her glossed lips. ‘Pots and kettles,’ she said.

‘And what does that mean?’

But I knew.

I wore white at my wedding to which, in a manner of speaking, Hal came, and for which Nathan’s parents paid – tactfully, of course. Thus, I was not married from Pankhurst Parade – no loss there – but in an alien Sussex village with a picturesque church.

I longed to be at Yelland where, at that time of year, the straw would have been baled in the fields. If I closed my eyes, I could see pictures: the wash of soft colours, the umbers, burnt yellows, tired greens and the grey-blue sky. Up there, the air would be cool and pure and everything so much simpler. But maybe I was remembering it wrongly, through a childish filter, and I kept my feelings private.

If Nathan was the groom, Hal was the knight who kept vigil through the violet summer night. Somehow he discovered where the wedding was being held. Perhaps Mazarine told him. If she did, she never admitted it.

Hal was the spectre at the feast, the beautiful, rackety, solid flesh of love’s witchery, the personification of the poet’s sweet madness and disordered senses. Nathan was collected, rational, sure and loving. He was the rock that Hal would never be.

I remembered his sureness particularly.

Syringa and lilies perfumed the Saxon church. In the beamed village hall, a cake drowsed in three white boxes of graduated sizes. Covered by a protective sheet, my dress hung on the wardrobe in the hotel bedroom. I laid out tissues, lipstick, scent on the dressing-table. The last thing I did before getting into bed was to replace my engagement ring in its leather box.

It was dawn, and someone had moved across the gravel in front of the hotel. Confident and practised. The tread of a person who was used to darkness and tough terrain. In a second I knew who it was.

I slid out of bed, parted the curtains and saw Hal outlined in the milky grey light. I saw him so clearly. I saw right through him even, with the X-ray vision of my put-aside love and desire.

I pulled on my clothes and slipped down the staircase, which smelt of occupancy and cheap pot- pourri, and let myself out into the hush where every sound was magnified.

I had loved Hal so much that I couldn’t stand it. I knew this love was too ferocious and demanding to have a long life, and I did not trust it. It would burn for those moments when, my feet leaving black smudges on the dewy lawn, I fled towards him on the morning of my wedding and we held each other. Flesh chilled and damp, breath on each other’s cheek. Then burning love would consume itself, and the darkness would be the blacker for it.

‘You can change your mind,’ he muttered, covering my face with kisses. ‘You can, you can.’

Shakespeare’s Prince Hal renounced the chimes at midnight, the madness and the passion. So did I.

Later, with Nathan resting his hand on my waist at the point where the heavy satin dress curved over my hips, I looked up from cutting the cake and through the window to where Hal was walking down the road. He did not look back.

With a steady hand, I grasped the knife and plunged it down. I loved Nathan, too, and I was quite, quite sure.

Sweet goodbye.

‘So you see,’ Minty pointed out politely, ‘it is pots and kettles. Nathan guessed it was Hal at the wedding. He told me, when you were cutting the cake… He saw him through the window.’

‘Did he?’

‘Yes, he did, and he’s never forgotten it.’

I stared at the hateful, but now shadowed, face. What had I done in my life? How had I arrived at this point of dismemberment, blown, decaying, finished? Bitterness and despair rose and elbowed aside the peace and stillness I had striven to cultivate. We choose between certain paths we label ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and it is important that we believe in the goodness and badness. Or I think so. What else is there? I had believed in Nathan: he had been good, and so, too, had been what we had made together.

Nothing lasts.

Minty smiled, a smug little flicker of her lips, and it burst from me: ‘How dare you? How dare you come here? You have no sense of compassion. None. Go away and take your curiosity with you.’

Under the lash of my words, Minty’s eyes narrowed. She glanced around quickly. ‘Shush,’ she muttered, much as Ianthe might have done. ‘People will hear.’

I paid no attention. ‘Have you no kindness at all, Minty?’

‘And you have a monopoly on goodness, I take it? So much so that your lover comes to your wedding. That’s how you used Nathan.’

‘It’s none of your business.’

She shrugged: careless, knowing, triumphant. I took a step towards her and Minty took a step back and the too-tight dress rode up her thigh. ‘You will never have what I have had with Nathan.’

She turned deathly white. ‘We’ll see.’

Chapter Twenty-three

Vee intervened. She had been observing this exchange and came over to rescue me. ‘I’ve been sent to find you by Poppy. Speech time.’ Ignoring Minty, she slipped an arm round my waist and steered me expertly in the direction of the wedding cake. ‘Take no notice of her,’ she hissed. ‘All red hat and no knickers, as Grandmother would say’

‘She’s not wearing a red hat.’

‘She is mentally’

I clutched at Vee. ‘Until I saw her here I had no idea I was capable of murder.’

‘Keep it to yourself.’ Vee changed the subject skilfully by poking me in the flank. ‘I hate you for being so thin. Picture the scene at home and pity me. Everyone tucking into baked potatoes plastered with butter, and me grazing on a lettuce leaf.’ She giggled, because she was happy with her lot. ‘Have you heard from Mazarine?’

‘Of course. She couldn’t come because of an opening. Apparently another of our national traits is to economize on champagne and she warned me against it.’

Vee glanced round the guests. ‘No fear of that.’

The wedding cake was extremely pretty and different – chocolate, iced and decorated in nineteenth-century American fashion with fresh violets, roses and voile ribbon. Pure Louisa Alcott. Hands around each other’s waist, Poppy and Richard were poised to cut it.

Applause broke out as they did so and, under its cover, I whispered to Nathan, ‘Get rid of Minty. That was the deal. She was not to be here.’

Nathan looked astonished, then furious. ‘I didn’t know she was here.’ He pulled at his cuffs. ‘We’ll discuss it later.’ He stepped forward to make the speech.

Poppy’s contact lenses were making her blink. The tiny sapphire earrings I had given her swayed above her