When Helen had invited the whole family over to Sunday lunch, Isabel had been thrilled at the invitation, their first since coming back to the UK. Now, standing outside Helen's large Victorian house in the countryside outside Milbridge, she was not so sure. She hardly knew Helen, and had never met her husband, George. The links between the two women - both new to the area, both having gone to the same school - didn't seem enough to justify the formality of a Sunday lunch. Neil rang the bell, an ornate piece of cast-iron work that pulled out on a chain.
Silence.
'Perhaps I've got the wrong day,' Isabel said, shivering. It was cold out of the sunshine and she wished she'd brought a coat She wanted to tug Neil's sleeve and whisper, 'Let's not bother, let's just go home.' But that would be childish.
'Sunday lunch, you said. It's Sunday.' Neil rang the bell again.
'Perhaps I've got the wrong week.' But no, there were footsteps inside, and Helen opened the front door, her cheeks flushed. Then it was introductions, children being sent off to the playroom, and drinks for the adults - mean dribbles of gin and vast slurps of tonic. George and Neil recognised each other from the station platform and Helen exclaimed about yet another coincidence.
'Hardly,' snorted George. His eyes were pale blue and surprisingly large in his red face, like a Hanoverian portrait. 'Everybody takes the seven twenty.' His voice was contemptuous and Helen seemed to shrink down a size.
'What a lovely house,' Isabel said quickly, although she thought the house depressing.
'We were so lucky to find it,' Helen said, brightening. She launched into a long story of estate agents and probate, surveyors and footpaths. 'It took nearly a year.' They talked about houses and house prices, then moved on to soft furnishings. Helen confided that you could get amazingly cheap fabric from the market that really wasn't bad at all. It was the sort of conversation that is excruciatingly boring to anyone not involved but completely absorbing if you are, the equivalent to snuggling down on a Sunday afternoon with a fresh cup of tea and a packet of chocolate digestives in front of a black and white film starring Bette Davis.
Isabel couldn't remember having had such a conversation before; the houses on the compounds just existed, rented boxes for living in for a few years at the most. Now she leaned forward to listen to Helen talk, a feminine conspiracy of sofa throws and beaded tea light holders. She wasn't sure if it was her attention, or the fact that George and Neil were deep in some masculine bonding session of their own that seemed to be based on the best way of travelling from Hull to Bristol, but Helen became positively girlish. Although Helen and she hadn't been exact contemporaries at school Isabel could imagine her discussing the merits of pale blue eyeshadow or whether Rimmel mascara was better than No17.
Helen was in the middle of describing some magic netting (available by mail order) that stopped rugs from creeping on solid floors, her teeth gleaming with enthusiasm, when Rufus and Michael came in, on the scrounge for food. Helen flapped her hands while Rufus helped himself to handfuls of crisps.
'Oh dear. Don't do that. We're eating any minute.' Rufus continued to cram his mouth with crisps. He had the same hair as his mother, the colour of wet sand and growing straight down, dense as a shaving brush. He was nearly a head taller than Michael who had followed him, hands in pockets. Isabel raised her eyebrows at him, wordlessly checking that he was happy, but he frowned at her. She assumed that meant he was happy, but would be embarrassed by any maternal displays.
'Where do you go to school, Rufus?' she asked.
'Benedict's,' Rufus muttered through crisps.
'Weekly boarding,' Helen said. 'So much nicer than full time.'
Isabel loathed the idea of sending Michael away to school, however "nice" it was. It would be like paying to have your arms ripped off.
'I don't know how you can bear it,' she said.
'Oh, but he loves it, don't you darling? And you'll find at St Joseph's that most of the boys leave for boarding school by the end of Year Four so it must be a bit lonely for the ones left behind. Benedict's is hardly any distance away so I can always go and watch matches and things. Can't I, darling?' She reached out an arm for Rufus.
'Mu-um.' He shrugged her off. 'When's lunch? I'm starving.'
Helen got up, her face suddenly anxious. 'I'd almost forgotten about lunch.'
'Can I help?' Isabel offered, but Helen told her to stay sitting, she could manage, and hurried to the kitchen. In ten minutes they were all sitting round a large polished table in a formal dining room while George hacked chunks off a large joint of overdone beef. The walls were painted green and hung with framed prints of dead pheasants. An elaborate bowl of fruit stood on the highly polished mahogany sideboard, framed by twisting silver candlesticks. It could have doubled as a stage set for a Sunday teatime family drama series. All that was missing were starched pinnies and maids saying 'Lawks!'
George was making a sterling attempt at impersonating a Victorian paterfamilias. Isabel looked across at Neil, wanting to share her amusement, but he was talking to Helen. Helen was nodding, but with an abstracted air as if counting spoons. Isabel could imagine the litany in her head - pepper, salt, mustard, gravy, horseradish sauce - and realised with a stab of sympathy that Helen was not going to relax until all the food had been eaten and the children were running about in the garden or watching a video. It was as if she felt that her whole value as a woman was measured by her ability to produce a traditional Sunday roast.
'This is wonderful, Helen,' Isabel said. 'Such a treat. We haven't had a meal like this for ages, have we Neil?'
'No, more's the pity,' Neil said, tucking in with gusto. Isabel felt guilty. She'd forgotten how much Neil had always enjoyed his mother's cooking when they'd come back to the UK on holidays. But they weren't on holiday now; they were home for good. She ought to be preparing this sort of meal for Neil.
'In hot countries you often don't want to eat big meals, do you?' Helen said with her soft voice, smiling sympathetically across the table at Isabel. 'Just salads and pasta and things.'
Isabel smiled back and opened her mouth to speak, when George butted in.
'Got to have decent food. Sunday wouldn't be Sunday otherwise.'
Isabel tried to think of witty things that, while not actively offensive to her host, would show him up for being a pompous twit. But the phrase that would allow her to be both exquisitely polite and downright rude at the same time escaped her, so she made no reply. She talked a little to Helen, mainly about the PTA, and helped Katie cut up her meat despite a few derisory comments from George about mollycoddling.
As she had predicted, Helen didn't relax until the last apple crumble plate was ensconced in the dishwasher and the coffee was on the table. Rufus slid off his chair with a sidelong look at his father, busy expounding on the follies of the euro. Michael hesitated, looking across to Isabel. 'Is it okay for the children to get down?' she whispered to Helen, who nodded. 'Run along and play, darlings.' Katie and Millie scampered off hand in hand. Isabel watched them wistfully. She quite fancied running along and playing, rather than sitting in the formal and stuffy room with her waistband threatening to cut her stomach in half.
George brought out brandy and two glasses, which irritated her. Not that she wanted a brandy but he should have asked, not assumed. She looked across to where Helen was sitting, listening to the men talk. George was persuading Neil to join the Golf Club, and for some reason Isabel thought of Mr Sherwin. Patrick. She stirred her coffee slowly, watching the cream swirl into psychedelic patterns. She'd hardly thought of him all weekend but now she had, she could imagine him all too clearly - leaning back on his chair, relaxed, his deep voice mocking George's pretensions. She frowned. She should have been pleased that Neil was getting on so well with George, but instead she felt slightly disturbed. Both men were now leaning back, George's red checked shirt straining across his stomach, the squares distorting into op-art patterns like a Bridget Riley painting. He lit a small cigar.
'So,' he said between puffs. 'How did you two meet up?'
'At a party,' Isabel shrugged. 'Same as most people.'
'Come on, darling. Hardly like most people.' Neil was beaming at her, brandy glass in his big hand. She smiled tightly at him, hoping that would be an end to it.
'Aha. There's a story here, I can tell,' George said, cheeks shining like a raddled cherub.
'It was a very hot summer night, a mini-heatwave in fact, and -'
'Neil, they don't want to know. It's too long a story,' she said to Helen, shaking her head.
George thumped the table. 'Come on, spit it out.'
'As I was saying, it was a very hot night -'
George topped up his brandy glass. 'You've said that before,' he crowed.
'So I have,' Neil said, amiably, blinking at George's interruption. He'd had more to drink than she'd thought.
'Neil, I really don't think -' Isabel started, but Neil cut her off.
'It's a good story. Don't be silly.' He waved his hand dismissively at her. 'Anyway, this party. A joint eighteenth and twenty-first, I think. So long ago I can hardly remember.'
'Lin's eighteenth and Peter's twenty-first,' Isabel said, trying hard to think of a way out of this conversation. 'Lin was at Richmond House too,' she said to Helen, 'Did you come across her - Lin Hetherington? Her mother drove a very smart sports car.'
But whether Helen could remember Lin or not, Neil was determined to carry on. 'Whatever. The parents had really pushed the boat out, marquee, dinner, band, dancing. The works. Really good do. But it was boiling in the marquee. So, some bright spark jumped into the swimming pool - fully dressed, you understand - and soon everybody was going in. Including Isabel.'
'Neil, you didn't save Isabel from drowning, did you?' Helen sounded impressed.
'Better than that,' Neil said with satisfaction. 'Now, I'd spotted Isabel earlier in the evening. Obviously she was the prettiest girl there, but she was also dressed differently from the other girls in this long, floaty thing.'
'It was a second-hand dress I'd bought from Portobello Road market.' She could remember the dress clearly. Fine navy crepe, splashed with scarlet and white flowers, buttoned down the front with strawberry-shaped buttons, seams piped in scarlet reaching to the ground. It had a sharply defined waistband and was the sort of thing worn by Hollywood actresses in the Forties. A collector's item now; then it was a cheap way of dressing. She thought back, how lacking in confidence she had felt alongside the other girls with their generous clothes allowances and shopping trips to Harrods on Mummy's account card. She couldn't compete with that, but her market dress had sidestepped any question of competition. And the Forties style suited her, emphasising her small waist (those were the days) while skimming over her more generous hips. 'I loved that dress,' she said, more to herself than to the others.
'So, what happened?' prompted Helen.
'Isabel was one of the swimmers, but then she got out and went into the marquee.'
'The water was cold - it was Surrey, not the Tropics after all. I wanted to warm up again.'
'She starts dancing, right? But each time she moves, this dress tears a little.'
'Tears?' Helen looked at Isabel, eyebrows raised.
'I think it must have been the chlorine in the swimming pool. I don't know if the dress was synthetic, but the fabric just couldn't cope.' It was like candy floss, the damp fibres pulling apart. Not tearing or ripping, more melting, dissolving with each gesture, each movement. She could remember so clearly, looking down and seeing -
'This is so embarrassing,' she said to Helen, hopeful of female solidarity.
Helen looked confused. 'Perhaps we should have coffee in the drawing room.'
'Nonsense. Get on with it, Neil,' George said, patting his stomach.
Isabel tried to send telepathic messages to Neil. She hoped her face was smilingly casual, with an underlying hint of steel that Neil would pick up. 'Please Neil, stop there.'
'But this is the good bit. You see,' Neil said, untouched by telepathy, utterly unmoved by her embarrassment, 'she wasn't wearing anything underneath.'
Isabel wanted to curl up and die. They were all looking at her, Helen wide-eyed, perhaps slightly shocked, Neil pleased with the effect his story was having, and as for George, his eyes had been designed for boggling.
'It was a very hot night,' was all she could think to say.
'I should say,' said George. He didn't actually wink and nudge Neil in the ribs and say Phwoar', it just felt to Isabel as if he did. She tugged at her cardigan, barricading herself against George's prying eyes that were fixed firmly on her chest. And suddenly she felt eighteen again, exposed, distressed, with people laughing and pointing. She had scanned the faces in the darkness round the dance floor, looking for help, for a friend, and with each turn the dress quietly shred a little more. She crossed her arms over her breasts, feeling the back give way, and walked to the side, moving slowly to minimise the damage and the humiliation, laughter echoing in her brain, and then there was a man holding out a dinner jacket. 'Take this,' he'd said and wrapped it around her shoulders. It was still warm from his body, the satin lining slippery against her damp skin.
'But that's so romantic,' Helen exclaimed, her eyes shining, as she smiled at Isabel. Isabel shrugged, sliding a look across at Neil, one-time saviour, now humiliator. How could you? she asked him wordlessly, but his eyes weren't focused on her.
George's eyes glittered. 'I hope she was properly grateful.'
'I think so,' Neil said smugly. He even winked at George as if to convey all sorts of sexual adventures, whereas Isabel knew that the evening had ended with him driving her back to the flat she shared in Fulham, then a few kisses over the transmission of his Ford Mondeo, gear-stick acting as a latter-day chastity belt. She would have asked him up, probably would have slept with him, but being the sort of man he was it didn't occur to him to ask. 'Nice girls don't on the first meeting' was so ingrained in him that he'd not registered the opportunity.
For some reason an image of Patrick came into her head. Would he have rescued her, or would he have been part of the laughing crowd like George? A rescuer, she thought. She could see him, slipping his jacket over her shoulders, but then he would have happily taken advantage of her gratitude and ravished her behind the marquee. She gave herself a little shake. What an extraordinary thing to think, she told herself.
Katie came into the dining room and sidled up to her, thin arms about Isabel's neck.
'What is it?' Isabel said, relieved at the distraction, slipping an arm around Katie's waist.
Katie put her mouth by her ear. 'I want to go to the loo,' she whispered, her breath hot.
'Can't you ask Millie?' Isabel whispered back.
'I want you.' Katie's face was small, eyes screwed up in embarrassment.
Isabel excused herself to Helen, grateful for the reason to escape, and went with Katie into the hall. She realised that the loo door had no lock, which was why Katie was anxious. Isabel stood outside, guarding Katie against unwanted intrusion, not that the boys were anywhere to be seen or heard. This seemed to her what motherhood was about. The little things. Tiny noses gently wiped. Small clothes washed, dried and ironed, woolly socks in pairs. Cool hands placed lovingly on hot foreheads. Eggs boiled and then dunked in cold water so the whites were hard but the yolks were runny, and the toast soldiers buttered with the crusts cut off just so. Bumps that could be cured with kisses. Love bound by a thousand daily intimacies, a thousand daily acts of service.
Katie came out, unselfconsciously pulling up her knickers with both hands. Isabel smoothed her dress down.
'Shall we go and find Millie?'
Katie nodded. Isabel took her hand and they went to the playroom where Millie was playing with a doll's-house. Katie left Isabel and crouched down beside Millie. Isabel watched them playing, enjoying the freshness of their skin, the seriousness of their conversation. Millie had very decided ideas about what went where, and which dolls had to do what. Mother dolls were in the kitchen, the babies and children were upstairs in bed, or being naughty in the sitting room. Isabel knelt down beside them. She could remember her own doll's-house, random furniture of different sizes so the house looked as if it belonged to the Three Bears rather than a pallid felt doll with a faded smile and curly wool for hair.
'What about the father doll? What does he do?' she asked.
Millie paused in her arrangements. 'There isn't a father doll,' she said, matter-of-factly, and went back to discussing with Katie where the cat should go in their exclusive little world of mothers and babies. Isabel picked up a tiny teapot, painted with a carrot, carefully holding it in her palm. But although the lid came out there was no hole for the spout. The teapot could never function. There would be no dollies' tea parties. Isabel turned it round between her fingers, feeling as disappointed as Hunca Munca in the Beatrix Potter tale, although she restrained herself from bashing the plaster lobster with the miniature coal scuttle.
The little girls were talking, a continuous murmur. They were not excluding her; rather there was no place for her in their self-absorption. Isabel got up, feeling her knees creak. I'm getting old, she thought, and went back to the world of adults.
- ooo -
They left late in the afternoon, George promising Neil to nominate him for membership of the Golf Club. Isabel was cross with Neil on the way home for what she saw as his betrayal, but he was unrepentant, unwilling to acknowledge any problem.
'I've told that story to loads of people,' he said yawning, despite two coffees.
'And I've never liked it,' she snapped back.
It wasn't strictly true. But a story told to friends under the relaxed blue skies of the Middle East was quite different to hearing one's past revealed under the gaze of George's bulging eyes on a grey English afternoon. Would she have minded Neil telling Patrick? She wondered what Justine would say about Patrick when she came to tea.
'I like this house,' Justine said looking around Isabel's kitchen, the bell of her hair swishing round like a girl in an ad.
'I don't,' Isabel said, then realised how odd that must sound. 'I mean, it's all right, and there are enough bedrooms and the kitchen functions and all that, but it's not what I wanted. Still, that's what comes of looking in a hurry.'
'You must have stunning views over the town from upstairs.'
'Mmm.' Isabel sipped her tea, thinking about houses. 'I would rather have lived in something older. We've been living in modem houses for such a long time, and I dreamed that when I got my own house it would be more traditional. And in the country rather than a town.'
'A cottage with roses round the door?' Justine sounded amused, her eyes sparkling with gentle mockery. Isabel couldn't decide if she liked her, but she enjoyed Justine's acerbity after Helen's cosy conformity.
'Something like that. I don't know, I spent all my childhood traipsing around from one house to another, and I always promised myself that my own children would be settled in one place.'
'Was your father in the army?' Justine asked.
Isabel drank the rest of her tea, hoping that Justine would think she hadn't heard the question, then carried on talking exactly as if she hadn't. 'The alternative was going into rented accommodation and I didn't want to do that. We only had a couple of months' notice you see. This time last year we didn't know we would be here.'
'How come?'
'You never know. That's the way the company works. Oh, you can put in your preference about where you want to be sent but you take what's available. If we'd stayed abroad our next posting would have been either Nigeria or Eindhoven, neither of which appealed. And I wanted to come back to the UK anyway, so Neil applied to go into management at Head Office. We looked at anywhere close to a station that ended up at Waterloo. So here we are.'
'Well, it seems very nice to me. Very spacious.'
Spacious. Isabel winced inwardly when she heard it; it seemed such a non-word, the sort of word used by estate agents. A bland word, like pretty, and tasty, and saying you were fine. Don't be mean, she told herself. Justine's only trying to be positive about it.
'Magnolia everywhere works wonders.' She looked around the kitchen, her own personality asserted over the blandness by the addition of copper pots from Morocco and a string of scarlet chilli peppers like an archaic coral necklace. 'We're lucky, we had a house in London which we let out while we were abroad, so it meant it wasn't such a shock when we came back.'
'Do you still have it? It must be worth a fortune,' Justine said.
'I don't know about that,' Isabel said, embarrassed. 'But we've still got it. If we'd had more time we'd probably have sold up and bought something else down here, but we've got good tenants and the way prices are rocketing in London it's probably best to hang on to it.' She frowned. Neil had wanted them to sell her father's house, complaining about the cost and hassle of maintenance, but she knew her father would have preferred that his house be saved for her children rather than financing a more impressive home. Secretly she hoped it would provide whatever fees the children needed to go to university: her father had always regretted that he didn't have the chance to go. Thinking of the children brought her back to the present.
'I suppose I ought to start getting the children's tea ready. Does Rachel like pasta?' Justine nodded. 'I try and think of different things for them, but they won't try anything new and I end up eating it, so I tend to stick to the old reliables,' Isabel said. 'Neil said the other day that only three things in life were certain: death, taxes and pasta for lunch.'
She began preparing the children's meal, putting water on to boil, getting out a saucepan and cheese grater. 'Do you know Patrick Sherwin well?' she asked, as nonchalantly as she could.
'Oh, Patrick,' Justine said, leaning back on her chair. Isabel hoped the chair back was up to it and waited to hear what Justine had to say about her new employer.
'Do I know him well?' Justine said slowly, as if buying time before her answer. 'I've known him for about...um...eight years.'
'Quite a long time.'
'It seems like forever. Goodness, we were both married when we met.'
'So he has been married,' Isabel asked, feeling guilty about talking about Patrick behind his back, but unable to resist. 'But he's divorced now, isn't he?'
Justine let out a snort of laughter. 'Don't you already know? I thought you'd already started working for him.'
Isabel prodded the spaghetti down into the saucepan, watching the stiff strands bend and become supple in the hot water. She felt foolish and naive.
'Perhaps it's not surprising you don't know. Patrick can keep very quiet when it suits him.'
'I wouldn't expect him to talk about something personal like that in the work place,' Isabel said, feeling she was sounding prissy.
'But you want to know, don't you?'
Isabel shrugged, not wanting to say yes. But she did very much want to know.
Justine stared up at the ceiling. 'I don't think Patrick or Caro were suited from the start. She was very much part of the hunting and shooting set round here. Still is, in fact. After their divorce she married some man with two thousand acres towards Petersfield.' Justine fiddled with a biscuit on her plate. Isabel realised Justine hadn't actually eaten any of the hand-made cookies she had bought from the WI market especially for the occasion. No wonder she was so slim. Isabel had already eaten four.
'It's funny how the rich always seem to marry the rich, isn't it?' Justine said.
Isabel blinked. 'I don't know. Do they? Perhaps that's how they get to be rich.'
'How they stay rich anyway.' Justine crumbled a bit of biscuit, squashing it flat under her index finger. 'One thing you'll learn is that there are an awful lot of people with money round here. Not so much in the town, but outside in the villages. Stupid money. Some of it's from the City but a lot of it's inherited.' She sniffed.
Isabel didn't know what to say. The conversation seemed to have nose-dived rapidly away from Patrick and Caro, and she wasn't sure how she could steer it back again.
'So Caro's rich?' she tried.
'Rolling in it,' Justine said. 'You'd have thought with all that money she could afford to dress decently.' She sounded as if the way Caro dressed was a personal affront. Then Isabel realised that it might be.
'Did you do your wardrobe thing with Caro?'
'Sure, she had the full wardrobe consultancy, colours, clear-out, the works. Not that it did her much good. Or me come to that,' Justine added like an afterthought. Isabel wondered what she meant but Justine looked cross so she didn't like to pry.
'Tell you what, the pasta's nearly ready. Why don't you call the children down?' Justine got up and went out of the kitchen. Isabel quickly laid the table with three places, drained the pasta and made a sauce by adding a knob of butter, some cream and a mixture of quickly grated Gruyere and cheddar. At the end of this activity she was slightly surprised that none of the children had yet appeared and went out to the hall.
'Hello?' she called up the stairs. 'Children. It's tea.' Silence. She called again, and this time she heard sounds of movement. Michael came first, slouching down the stairs in a manner that would befit a teenager, Rachel and Katie next and lastly Justine, who was saying, 'Come on girls,' in a rather hearty manner. Isabel had the distinct feeling that she hadn't been fetching Rachel and Katie for tea but had been having a quick scout upstairs. Justine smiled as she passed her, shooing the children into the kitchen. Isabel shrugged. There was nothing she could do about it, except hope the bedrooms weren't disastrously untidy.
Justine was very complimentary about Isabel's cooking skills, gushing about how clever she was to knock up something so delicious, so quickly. Isabel was uncertain how to react. It was obvious that the dish was simple, so Justine's praise seemed excessive. She was now standing and looking along the mantelpiece at the clutter of postcards, finger paintings, dusty treasures and 'to do' lists.
'Is that Neil?' she asked. Isabel turned in her seat to look. Justine was pointing to a photograph of a man standing, hands on hips, relaxed, confident, while behind him a massive sky was streaked with the beginnings of sunset, turning a range of jagged mountains gold.
'Mmm. That's the Arabian peninsular, the Empty Quarter.'
'It's not empty, you know,' said Michael, shovelling in pasta. 'That's just what they call it.'
'Don't speak with your mouth full,' Isabel said automatically. 'And don't interrupt.'
'That's all right,' Justine said, making Isabel feel like a harsh and repressive mother. 'What's in it if it's not empty?'
'Lots of things. Birds and animals and people.'
'Sand?' Justine's voice had an attractive lilt to it, almost as if she were flirting.
'Oh yes,' Michael said, oblivious. 'There's lots of that. Can I have some cake?'
'When the girls have finished.' Isabel noticed that Rachel was struggling and said she didn't have to finish. Justine cut in quickly.
'I have a rule that children have to finish what's on their plates.' She smiled tightly at Isabel, who was nonplussed. Rule twenty-three of mothering: never interfere with another mother's discipline. But it seemed unfair to expect the child to eat food she didn't want in a strange house. And unnecessary. Nobody benefited from forcing a child to eat.
'I gave Rachel quite a big helping in the first place,' she said carefully. 'I should have asked how much she wanted. It's quite filling so perhaps this once...' She smiled across at Justine, who rather grudgingly said Rachel didn't have to finish.
Isabel collected up the plates, then cut the cake. Out of the cardboard packaging it seemed smaller than she'd thought. In her hurry, she cut pieces individually, with no regard to where the centre of the cake was, rather than cutting a cross and then halving each piece.
'I seem to have made rather a mess of this,' Isabel said, licking her fingers, puzzled at how the cake had turned out. 'From the WI market I'm afraid. I used to make my own, but now...' One piece was short and fat, the others long and thin, like a trigonometry question in Michael's homework - how many of these are scalene triangles, how many isosceles? Michael and Katie squabbled over who had the largest piece. Isabel felt flustered, especially as Rachel was sitting quietly eating her own misshapen slice. Her manners were impeccable. Perhaps Justine was right to insist on good table manners at all times, regardless of the circumstances. Justine was looking at Neil's photograph again.
'I've always liked that photograph,' Isabel said. 'We'd only just got married, and Neil had given me a camera.'
'He looks young.'
'We've been married forever. Neil was twenty-six and I was just nineteen.'
'Nineteen!' Justine's eyes were alert with speculation. 'Nobody gets married at nineteen nowadays.'
'I know.' Isabel pulled a face. Yet again she'd have to make it clear that she and Neil didn't have to get married because she was pregnant. 'Neil was just about to start a two-year contract in Saudi, and I couldn't go with him unless we were married. And then, under their law, I became his property and so they paid for my airfare, and provided us with suitable accommodation for marrieds. Otherwise Neil would have had to stay in a ghastly sort of hostel place.' She shrugged. 'And there wasn't much to keep me in the UK, so we got married, went off to the desert and lived happily ever after.' Occasionally - usually after a row - she wondered what would have happened if they hadn't had to get married so quickly. Recently the thought had become more insistent, popping up in unlikely places. 'More cake?' she added, handing round the plate of squished triangles.
Katie and Michael, having finished their cake, pushed their chairs back and ran from the kitchen, but Rachel lingered. 'Please may I be excused from the table, Mrs Freeman,' she said, her hands neatly in her lap.
'Call me Isabel, do, Mrs Freeman makes me feel so old. And of course you can get down if you've had enough to eat. Go and find the others. What lovely manners she has,' she said to Justine, while Rachel ran after Katie.
Justine smiled, gratified, and started to clear up.
'No, no, leave it. I'll do it later. More tea?' Isabel asked, thinking wistfully of the sitting room and a conversation that didn't involve children and domesticity. A conversation about other things. Like Patrick Sherwin. But Justine had taken over, clearing things away. Isabel felt embarrassed at the number of utensils she seemed to have used to make such a simple meal. She really wanted to dump them in the sink and sort it out later. They had just finished clearing up when Neil came into the kitchen.
'You're home early,' Isabel said as he kissed her cheek.
'I caught the four twenty.' He turned to Justine and held out his hand. 'Hello. Neil Freeman.'
She took his hand. 'Justine Torens.'
'Justine's daughter is in the same class as Katie,' Isabel chipped in, hoping that Neil would go upstairs or into his study and shut the door. But he didn't. He stood there drinking tea and chatting to Justine and showing no sign of disappearing. There were things she wanted to talk about, to ask Justine. Instead they were talking about one of Neil's favourite projects, a huge dam which had provided hydro-electricity for hundreds of thousands of houses but in the process had also drowned several villages in a remote valley. Isabel glowered. How could Neil imagine that Justine was interested in all that? Justine was nodding and asking questions, but Isabel could see that her attention wasn't held.
Finally Justine ended it. 'I really must be going,' she said, picking up her bag. 'I've completely outstayed my welcome.'
'Not at all,' Neil and Isabel said together, Isabel mechanically and Neil with a beaming smile as if he meant it. 'Stay for a drink,' he added.
'That's so kind but, no, thank you. I must be on my way.' She went into the hall and called up to Rachel then turned back and held her hand out to Neil. 'It was so nice to meet you. Your work sounds fascinating.' Rachel came clattering down the stairs, followed by Katie. 'Thank you so much for having us, we've really enjoyed ourselves, haven't we Rachel?'
Rachel nodded obediently. Isabel found herself opening the front door. Normally it took hours for people to go: children disappeared, one shoe lost, toy left in the garden, that sort of thing, but Justine was leaving rapidly. As she passed through the doorway she paused.
'I was going to tell you all about Patrick, wasn't I?'
Isabel nodded, conscious of Neil hovering in the hall behind her. 'Another time, maybe.'
'There's really not much to tell. I mean, he doesn't keep his skeletons hidden in his cupboard. If anything, Patrick's skeletons are thoroughly out and probably drinking with him down at The Mason's Arms.' She shot a glance past Isabel towards the hall and whispered, 'You know what they say about him, don't you?'
Isabel shook her head. 'What?'
'They say...' Justine looked sideways at Isabel as if gauging her reaction, 'he's very good in bed.'