‘Earth to Beth, earth to Beth.’ Daisy waved gently at me from across the little table and I realised the waiter was clicking his pen on and off over his pad and looking at me, clearly waiting for us to finish making our order. ‘I thought we’d have a bottle of Pinot Grigio and three glasses. Is that all right with you, or did you want something else?’
‘No, no, Pinot Grigio’s fine,’ I said, as brightly as I could. I didn’t want her going back down the ‘Why does Beth seem so distracted?’ route that I’d managed to head her off from this morning.
‘You do seem distracted today, Beth. I thought so this morning.’ Seemed I was in for a disappointment. ‘I suppose you must be missing Alex?’
‘Alex? Alex who?’ I wanted to say. I actually had been as distracted as Daisy thought today, but it was by the sudden arrival of Marvin Halliday. And in that distraction my runaway husband had, essentially, slipped out of my mind altogether for now. But of course I couldn’t actually say that to Daisy and Nick, so I mumbled, ‘Oh, you know how it is,’ ignoring the voice in my head that told me no, they, in fact, didn’t. Here were a happy couple who obviously enjoyed each other’s company, having a drink together to unwind at the end of their working weeks. They unwound, as they probably did most things, together. They couldn’t be expected to understand the version of Alex’s departure I’d given them. And they’d be even less likely to understand what had really happened.
I noticed them giving me sympathetic looks. Blimey! It was bad enough when a female friend thought you needed sympathy, but when her boyfriend thought it too, things must look really bad. ‘Don’t you two worry about me.’ I pumped up the cheeriness level in my voice. ‘There was no point at all in me going to Dubai and twiddling my fingers in a hotel room until Alex could find us an apartment. I don’t have any work to go to there and I love working at Sitting Pretty, so this was the ideal thing.’
How many times had I told that lie? I was getting a bit fed up with it and actually, having told one person the truth, I was itching to blurt it out to someone else. Or even to everybody and be done with it. What would they say if I came out with ‘Hey, you’ll never guess what that little shit of a husband of mine did to me?’ But if I handed in my notice next week, I still had at least a week to work with Daisy and I didn’t want any awkwardness. There was plenty of time to tell her the truth when she was giving me a lift to the station to catch my coach to London.
The waiter brought the wine and poured a little into Nick’s glass for him to try. He swigged it back, said it was great, and waited for us all to have been served and the waiter to have walked away before saying, ‘I wish they wouldn’t do that. Why do they bother? It’s a wine bar, what they serve has to be good otherwise they’d lose all their customers.’
Daisy rolled her eyes at me. I knew from our many little chats over lunchtime pizzas or morning cups of coffee that her boyfriend, who was a lovely guy and seemed very outgoing, was actually painfully shy and hated to be singled out for anything. ‘Never mind.’ She kissed his cheek. ‘And just think, if there was ever a disgruntled employee at the winery who put something in one of the bottles and we got it, you could save my life by having that first taste of it.’
‘That’ll be a great comfort to me while I’m writhing round on the floor in agony.’
Nick grimaced at us both, then smiled as Daisy said, ‘Then I could save you by giving you the kiss of life …’
‘You’d risk giving me the kiss of life, knowing there might be poison on my lips that could kill you too?’
‘Of course I would, Nick. Any woman would for the man she loved.’ She looked at me as if expecting me to agree with her. ‘You’d do that for Alex, wouldn’t you, Beth?’
Not bloody likely, was the first thought that entered my head. Just a few short weeks ago I would have. Now I thought I would just tip the rest of the bottle down his throat and clamp his lips shut with my fingers for good measure. But of course I couldn’t say that, so I came up with a rather lame, ‘Oh I don’t know, I’m useless in a crisis. I probably wouldn’t think of it until it was too late. Cheers.’
We clinked glasses and spent an hour or so chatting about work and gossiping about our Russian co-workers like three fishwives. Nick was completely on our wavelength in a way Alex had never been. It suddenly occurred to me just how many couples’ nights I’d missed out on because Alex had refused to make any effort to fit in with them.
Daisy and Nick were going somewhere to eat, but I turned down their invitation to join them, thinking they should be left to enjoy the rest of their Friday evening without me playing gooseberry. So after I’d switched to orange juice and they’d polished off a second bottle, I paid my share of the bill and drove Harriet carefully, and even more slowly than I usually did, through the country lanes back to Netley Parva.
It was a relief to see Marvin on his own in the front lounge through the open curtains as I drove past before parking down the little lane at the side of the church. I wondered if he’d done that on purpose to let me know. Walking back across the dark village green and up the front path, I rang the doorbell – which was a first, but as Eleanor at the shop knew Marvin was here, then the whole village probably did too, so I thought it would look more normal if I behaved like any old visitor popping round on a Friday night.
‘Hey, Beth! Come on in.’ Marvin ushered me inside. ‘Have you eaten yet? I wasn’t sure what to do about dinner. I got your message – which I’ve deleted so Henry can’t come across it by accident – but you didn’t say if you were eating while you were out or not. I was about to order a pizza from that place in Netley Magna.’
‘Pizzicatos?’ My eyes must have lit up. Their pizzas were good – much better than the place in Wintertown which we always ended up ordering from at work just because it was nearby and quick. That and the fact that Davina had opened an account with them.
‘Yes, here you are.’ He handed me the menu, which I would be willing to bet was the first delivery menu ever to cross the threshold of this cottage and not end up straight in the recycling bin. ‘I was thinking of a medium meat lovers’ feast and cheesy garlic bread. So we could make that a large or you could choose another medium of what you want.’
‘No, the meat lovers’ feast is just fine by me, thanks,’ I agreed. ‘But don’t add any extra garlic bread for me, I won’t be able to manage it.’ I wouldn’t even have been able to finish a medium on my own – I never had. Usually I just had a small pizza with a side salad – so I would probably just have a couple of slices and Marvin could pig out with the rest of it.
‘There’s some white wine and beer in the fridge – I didn’t know what you liked. Help yourself,’ Marvin said, picking up the phone and dialling the number. So I did just that. It was Chardonnay, not my favourite, but it had been nice of him to think of it. ‘It’ll be about half an hour,’ he told me.’ There’s nothing worth watching on TV. Do you want to have a look through the DVDs and find something to watch? Nothing soppy though, eh.’
Soppy was the last thing I wanted, so we both agreed on a comedy. The choices in Henry Halliday’s DVD collection were rather limited as he seemed to prefer detective series and historical documentaries. If I wanted to learn all about the fall of the Roman Empire I was in the right place, but as far as comedies went there was a choice of Father Ted, Fawlty Towers, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, Yes Minister, and Yes, Prime Minister. And yes, they were all in alphabetical order.
‘Father Ted!’ we both shouted at the same time.
We were watching the episode where they enter a lookalike competition and all three of them dress up as Elvis when the pizza arrived forty-five minutes later. I had a vision of twitching net curtains from one end of the village to the other, like a row of falling dominoes – a pizza delivery motorbike turning up at Henry Halliday’s cottage? Whatever next?
The pizza was so good I ate three slices, while Marvin demolished the rest of it with no problem at all. I noticed he hadn’t ordered garlic bread after all, unless they’d forgotten to deliver it.
‘Did they forget your garlic bread?’
‘Oh, I changed my mind,’ he said, ‘as you weren’t going to be having any. I didn’t want to be unsociable and breathe garlic all over you.’
I couldn’t imagine that would have been a problem – we weren’t going to be getting that close – and if he had any plans in that direction he was going to find himself going to bed disappointed. And very much alone, unless Talisker decided to ditch the spare room for the master bedroom.
It was probably silly of me to even think it – he hardly seemed the type of man who needed to jump on an unsuspecting woman whether she wanted him to or not – but Marvin’s comment about the garlic made me ever so slightly uneasy. There wasn’t a lock on the spare room door so when I went upstairs to get ready for bed, I put the dressing table stool up against it so the door would bang into it if it was opened. Then I thought how ridiculous I was being and took it away again. Who did I think I was, Gisele Bündchen? After the way Alex had left me, I suspected I more in common with Father Ted’s Mrs Doyle.