40

As Sally drove into Monks Bottom black rain clouds hung heavy over the deserted high street, giving it an eerie, dayfor-night darkness, but briefly there was clear gap in the sky. Fleetingly, a fiery sun blazed down, lighting up the slate tiles on the village hall roof with a fierce, opalescent shimmering. In Sally’s love-besotted head this beautiful refraction of the light lifted her to a rare sense of the spiritual, and words of the old Victorian parlour song “All in the April Evening” sang out to her. She began to mouth the words, and as she passed the church a choir of heavenly tenors joined her in full voice.

On approaching the village green The Dower House became visible behind its high yew hedges, and she turned into the drive – a long sweep of ancient paviers that ran to nearly fifty yards – but every inch as familiar as the contours of her own face. Was it only three days ago she’d opened up to the parody of herself in the bathroom mirror and promised the angry, revengeful wife to find the young bride she used to be? Promises honoured. She’d returned as a soft, doe-eyed woman in love.

Women in love have the name of their lover tattooed on their tongues. They taste the sweet rain as nectar and smell the brown earth as a sensual musk. They find beauty in every subtle change of nature that can occur in less than three days. The front lawn had become a thicket of overgrowth, interspersed with worm casts and luminous green moss, the bold, erect profusion of tulip heads were now bowed low in subservience to several heavy showers and the first leaves had burst out on the copper beech. She stood and stared at the garden with a weak, silly smile on her face. Closing her eyes she felt Ewan’s soft beard on her face, his sweet damaged lips on her own and his tongue entwining with hers. Love for Ewan was turning her into a befuddled simpleton. In a visionary future life she could see them moving around each other with flawless coordination: walking, talking and ageing together in perfect harmony, welded together with the symbiosis of twin souls.

She left the car and walked to the front door to see a cobweb, shaking and shimmering with diamond-bright droplets of rain. Nothing unusual – the odd spider was always welcome to spin – but this one was over the lock. So soon. So obvious. Why destroy a thing of such perfection?

She walked round to the rear of the house, searching for her key to the back door, but as she turned the corner, she saw a freshly dug mound in the centre of the bonfire-charred lawn. The shock caused her to draw in her breath. What symbolism could she read into that choice of grave site? What thoughts had gone through Roger’s mind as he’d thrust the spade into the thick, sodden layer of her furious destruction? What misery had he felt as he laid the huge remains of their beloved Wolfhound to rest?

Her thoughts immediately swung back to the day, three years ago, when an excited Roger had walked through the door holding the already huge eight-week-old Finnegan. A surprise present for his girls, and a clever ploy to unite a house where a strange atmosphere prevailed. His traumatised wife, depressed and retracting from the discovery of Tim’s invasion into her life, and his bewildered daughter, who knew that some sort of serious problem between her parents was being glossed over for her sake. Finnegan imposed harmony. Collars, leads and feeding bowls to buy, house-training to teach, grooming to learn, trips to the vet for inoculations and obedience classes to attend. Then, at last, long family walks on the common, where laughter at his crazy, gangly antics replaced the silences and forced dialogues. Laughter now blown away. The family officially at war. Finnegan lying silent beneath the angry ashes.

The sky glowered, the rain poised for another hammering, and the first slow, old-penny-sized raindrops began to fall. Sally unlocked the door and walked into the kitchen, seeing the obvious signs of Roger’s return: an untidy pile of opened post, the parish magazine and their two goodbye notes on the table. The chairs pulled out in untidy positions, and some used glasses and coffee mugs on the draining board. The room, so normally a warm and cosy Aga’d retreat, was brutally cold, and she could smell the sour waft that always came from the sink drain after heavy rain. But the thing she most noticed was the alienation of the house and she sensed she no longer belonged. As if the wrists of the house had been slit and its lifeblood had ebbed away.

She turned on the central heating, but she knew it wouldn’t be enough. Nights like this were traditionally accompanied by a blazing fire in the inglenook. She would light one later on, hoping her beloved guest might not take up his option of silent isolation upstairs. She climbed the stairs slowly, trying to decide which of her spare bedrooms to prepare for him. All were decorated with her own, idiosyncratic choice of décor: the stark minimalism of white walls and heavy black Tudor beams colliding with soft furnishings in the bright colours of fruit. The orange room, the lemon room, the cranberry room, the lime room. She chose the lime room, with the stupid, stupid self-embarrassing notion that the colour contrasted rather well with her red hair. What on earth was she imagining? That she would be awoken in the night by a crashing electric storm and rise to find a power cut. To enter his room holding a lighted candle wearing a Victorian nightdress? That he would awake to see a heavenly vision of her, throw himself out of bed and take her in his arms?

She embraced herself tightly, as a pubescent girl might conjure up her pop-idol, but she was more than aware that her actions were those of lust. Lust shouted out its decadent name, but why should she be so ashamed of herself? She’d been long estranged from its delights and her infatuation enhanced its value a hundred fold. An idiotic flightiness came over her again, but … Oh, but. Throughout her long drive home an anomaly that she’d refused to analyse had been sweeping round her head.

As if a drawbridge had dropped like a guillotine, the mad spinning of her mind stopped. Had he loved Marina? Loved her as ‘being in love.’ This morning his head had been bowed and his silence spoke of a hidden agenda. If so, surely it had been a chaste love kept within his own mind? On the other hand, might it have been a pure, mutual love, recognised by them both and never consummated? Or could they really have had a full-on, all-consuming love affair? If she, herself, felt so overwhelmed by him after just three days, of course the grieving, lonely widow could have fallen for his magnetism. Was it not also feasible that the cloistered celibate had succumbed to the stunning beauty of Marina, despite the obvious age gap? Yes. Sally had been her personal nurse, and she knew it was more than feasible.

Her unwrinkled facial loveliness was obvious and renowned, and although Sally had secretly looked for the hairline scars of cosmetic surgery, there were none. Her body was just as fortunate. A series of thin, silver stretch marks to the sides of her abdomen were her only flaws, and to complete her hand of aces her body was as soft and smooth as that of a lingerie model. Neither had she any gravitational drooping of her breasts, no pads of flesh around her waist or hanging slack between her thighs. But Marina had been no china doll with only her body and her beauty to offer. There were also the qualities and charm of her persona. Her graceful swooping movements, her soft, upper-crust Irish lilt, her ready smile, her ability to listen carefully and her well thought-out replies. Her generosity, her sense of humour, her witty quips and, above all, her complete lack of malice or snobbery. It would have been so easy for Sally to be jealous. To use the sneer of the green-eyed monster, as any other woman might, but it was not the emotion she felt. Having known the lady so deeply she recognised the emotion as admiring sisterhood.

She walked to the airing cupboard and removed a set of lime coloured bed linen.