My Husband Next Door Read online

  He did actually turn to look, but it was only a glance. He was back to me in an instant, his face both outraged and delighted. He threw back his head and hooted up to the heavens. He was good at being teased and I loved that he didn’t try to pretend he hadn’t been had.

  ‘Witch!’ he roared, impulsively throwing an arm round my shoulders and giving them a squeeze. I leaned in, laughing. It was only an arm and a squeeze and a lean but the current took us both by surprise. He dropped his arm quickly and we walked on. I gazed fixedly at the tall hedge ahead, knowing it was terribly important to keep doing that. To watch the pendulous, creamy, elderflower heads swaying in the breeze. Ludo prattled on easily enough, about the importance of fields like this, and how other farmers should at least manage just a few acres of organic land without pesticides, but I knew we were both jolted. We’d been alone before, of course, but this was different. Up to now we’d been in professional mode, within legitimate parameters. For just as an office affords a screen to a burgeoning romance, so the workplace of my garden did it for us. We’d hide behind pruning decisions, stare purposefully at herbaceous borders or recalcitrant iris bulbs, managing to keep ourselves safe. This poppy-strewn meadow with its high-hedged seclusion was the equivalent of a city wine bar after hours: last orders called, the place deserted, except for two people alone at the corner table, no colleagues for ballast, no meetings for protocol, no structure for protection.

  As I said earlier, I knew I was in trouble when I ran out of the church and got impulsively into his car. Knew it was pivotal. As we achieved the hedge I had an overwhelming urge to give in. To stop him right there in his farming chat and tell him how much I liked him. He later told me he’d wanted to kiss me. Neither happened. We slipped easily back down the culvert, out the other side to his car, and back into the real world. The world of work and money worries and domesticity: of children and husbands and wives. But when we drove home it was in an unlikely silence, and when he dropped me off there was something soft and heavy to his eyes as he said goodbye. I watched him drive away and stood for a good few moments in the empty yard after his Land Rover had gone. I knew it was the start of admitting things to each other, things we’d hardly dared to admit to ourselves. The turning point in our friendship. For a long time I’d been aware that this man brought order, not just to my garden, but to my life. Joy, too. And I’d been joyless for too long. I’d begun to recognize the sound of his tyres on my drive, to glance quickly from my sketch pad through the attic window to make sure it was him. But thus far I’d tried not to make my eyes light up when I handed him a cup of coffee, tried not to let him see I’d seen a light in his. After this day, I didn’t try any more. And neither did he.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The swimming-pool man came today. That’s the sort of world I live in. I’m being facetious, of course. It’s my sister Virginia’s world; I just stray into it from time to time. Pool man, French-polishing man, wood-chopping man – you name it, she’s got a man for everything: a man for all seasons. The only man who comes to see me is the milkman and even that relationship is in a state of flux since I failed to comply with his last monthly contract, stuffed aggressively, and for the third time, into one of my empty bottles.

  I watched him now, this pool-cleaning chappie: white shorts, tanned legs, navy T-shirt, a cliché if ever I saw one, his handsome face as empty as the vacuum he was skimming the water with. I was reclining poolside – although I might have been mountainside for all the attention he was giving me – on one of Ginnie’s smart teak loungers that she never sits on, but hurries out every day to rearrange and cover with chic cushions. God, I thought, lifting my white legs slightly under my sundress so they didn’t look so fat, and flipping the pages of Harper’s, I’d sit on them, but Ginnie just laughed and said it wasn’t the same when it was your own. ‘You wouldn’t run a hotel and rush out to sit by the pool every day, would you?’ Probably, I’d thought, if I wasn’t busy, and the guests didn’t mind; but that was no doubt where I was going wrong in life. I didn’t have Ginnie’s towering sense of responsibility, her capable nature, her organizational skills. Which was also probably why she’d ended up living in a vast house like this with a man like Richard, whilst I lived in a house like mine, with a man like Sebastian. Or not, as the case may be.

  Sebastian and I had, as my mother would tell her bridge four with an over-bright smile and unamused eyes, a marvellously modern relationship. (Cue corners of the mouth lifting.) Modern in that we were no longer married in any physical sense, but, since we couldn’t afford to get divorced, we cohabited, albeit separately and, to most people’s minds, weirdly. He was in one of the converted outhouses in the grounds of what had once been his family home, and I was in the crumbling farmhouse itself, whose very dovecotes and dog kennels were listed, not to mention the small dark farm itself. ‘A National Treasure,’ Pevsner gushed obsequiously, going on to ask rhetorically: ‘Is not this surely one of England’s little gems?’ Well, it depended how you liked your little gems. Personally I wouldn’t mind them sparkling in my ears occasionally, not falling damply around them with dodgy plumbing and duck manure strewn about for good measure. And since Sebastian was regarded by many as a national treasure himself, I’d ended up being not just chatelaine of one, but nursemaid and guardian to both.

  I sighed and rearranged my pasty limbs, watching the tanned Adonis’s steady progress as he sucked the detritus from the bottom of Ginnie’s already immaculate turquoise tiles. Everything about Ginnie’s life was immaculate: her gutted and revamped manor house – the interior redesigned for contemporary living by one of the leading architects of the day, complete with loggia, orangery, domed hall and sky-lit kitchen – as well as her groomed acres beyond the ha-ha, her horses, her rare-breed cows, even, damn it, her children, whom I adored but who were a rare breed in themselves and couldn’t have made a more marked contrast to my own. Hugo and Araminta: the former an ex-head of house at Harrow, all-round sportsman and captain of the first eleven, currently reading Classics at Cambridge, and Araminta, slim, white-blonde and flawless, who spent her weekends home from boarding school trotting off to Pony Club events and winning all manner of best-turned-out rosettes before practising her oboe in the evening. One shouldn’t make comparisons, of course, they were bound to be odious, but neither seemed to be afflicted by any of the grunting, spotty, comatose-inducing hormones which mine had embraced with gusto.

  Seeing Araminta in the distance popping over a log on Smartie, her pony, made me whip out my phone and text: ‘Are you up?’ Not quite daring to ring, of course. To be on the receiving end of an outraged: ‘Whhaaaa—?’ Or, ‘It’s the holidays, right?’ I pocketed my phone quickly. I didn’t mind so much when I was there, in fact I found I could get more done with them snoring quietly upstairs and not lolling round my kitchen suspiciously sniffing the milk, but, sheep that I was, I had a major panic attack when I was here, knowing Ginnie wouldn’t countenance such sluttish behaviour. She’d be pulling the duvet off at nine and encouraging a hive of teenage industry by ten.

  ‘All done!’ the pool man said suddenly, jerking me back to reality. He withdrew his hose and turned to me with a smile.

  Ah. Clearly he had been aware of my existence. Just hadn’t thought it worth acknowledging.

  ‘Excellent.’ I swung my legs round and went to get athletically to my feet, but my sunglasses fell off my hot shiny nose in the process. I lunged for them chaotically.

  ‘And you can tell her I’ve fixed the automatic pool cleaner too.’ He gestured at the snake-like suction, roving menacingly round the bottom of the pool.

  ‘Oh, good, because she did say it moved but didn’t suck,’ I said, scrambling for my specs. ‘Or did she say it sucked but didn’t move?’

  ‘Sounds like the ideal woman,’ he quipped.

  I straightened up and blushed in surprise as he grinned. ‘Yes, well, anyway,’ I rushed on, flustered, ‘thanks so much. I’ll tell her.’

  ‘What’s she like to work for?�
�� he mused as I gathered my magazine and pushed my feet into espadrilles to walk house-wards with him.

  ‘Oh – I, er, no. I’m her sister.’

  He looked taken aback. Then downright horrified. ‘God. Sorry. It’s just I’ve seen you here a lot and I thought …’ He reddened, clearly regretting his lewd joke.

  ‘Yes, I can see how you might think that,’ I agreed breezily, not seeing at all but wanting to rescue us.

  Actually, it was an easy mistake to make, I thought, as I rooted in my handbag on the terrace table for Ginnie’s cheque and paid him (seventy quid! Blimey, perhaps I should clean pools), because Ginnie didn’t just employ men here, but women too. Clever women, who, in order to raise children, had given up their careers but then wisely cultivated another, one that afforded them interesting and stimulating days – restoring pictures, binding books – but still allowed them to cradle a drink with the husband by the Aga when he returned from work, and one they could turn off in the holidays too, leaving them free for the children.

  ‘Which is what you could do,’ Ginnie would insist, ‘if you went back to painting properly and had an exhibition. Instead of flogging a dead horse for a woman you hate.’

  It was loyal of her to suggest I could still paint properly and make a living from it, and I appreciated that. It was also a fair portrait of my relationship with Bonnie, my editor. It should have been the ideal job, illustrating children’s books – part time and from home – and for a while it had been and I’d enjoyed it, even though it wasn’t what I’d gone to art school for. But recently the bottom had dropped out of the Gloria the Glow Worm market and no one wanted to know how Horace the Hedge Pig buffed his prickles with an old chamois leather until they shone. It was all Debbie the drop-out at eight, with an alcoholic mother and a dope-fiend boyfriend.

  ‘Children want books they can relate to,’ Bonnie had told me gently when I’d taken my ideas for the Brenda Beetle range to her, all in dreamy pastels with rhyming couplets. ‘And children don’t really read poetry,’ she’d said more dismissively.

  ‘What about The Cat in the Hat?’

  ‘That’s a classic,’ she’d said firmly, putting me in my place.

  ‘They sing songs, don’t they? Nursery rhymes?’

  ‘That’s different,’ she’d said, looking at her watch. ‘Now, how about something on bullying? Something contemporary?’

  Bullying. I’d gone home depressed.

  ‘Publishers want nice illustrations of syringes,’ I’d tell Ginnie gloomily. ‘Not Doris the Dormouse in her spriggy apron.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense,’ she’d snort. ‘My children were brought up on that sort of thing!’

  ‘Maybe I could draw Doris the Depressed Dormouse?’ I mused. ‘Coming home from work in a gloomy heap? Or Sid the Self-harming Snail rubbing his shell against sharp grasses?’

  ‘You’re deliberately missing the point. I’m talking about proper painting again, selling pictures. The trouble with you, Ella, is you don’t want to compete. Don’t want to join in. You’re sulking.’

  Ginnie knew which buttons to press. And kept her finger right there. And up to a point, she was right. It did all seem a bit vulgar, somehow. Showing off. Bad form. This shinning up the greasy art pole. You couldn’t just leak pictures out quietly like you could a children’s book, just happen across it in a shop and smile secretly. No. You had to hire a gallery with bright lights and say: Ta-da! This is me. Please buy! Allow me to apply my red stickers! But there was a myriad of other reasons Ginnie didn’t know about which kept me from my oil palette, all of which ensured that I carried on drawing hedgehogs for no one – with the occasional adolescent drop-out thrown in for Bonnie – and supplemented my meagre income by running holiday lets from cottages in the garden. Well, outhouses, really.

  But holiday lets didn’t change their own sheets and right now I just wished Ginnie would hurry up. I went inside and gazed out of her kitchen window at the empty gravel sweep. I couldn’t just walk out, though. Ginnie was on an important mercy dash to see the parents in Buckinghamshire, where Dad, by all accounts, had done a dizzy. She’d very much expect me to stay and wait patiently. Hear it all from the horse’s mouth.

  ‘A dizzy in what sense?’ I’d asked, alarmed, when she’d summoned me to oversee the crucial pool suctioning. ‘Has he had a fall?’

  ‘No, no, nothing like that. He’s just … behaving very oddly, Mummy says.’

  I could get no more out of her. But then she and my mother had always had a sort of coded communion, a secrecy I couldn’t penetrate. It could mean Dad had refused to take the rubbish out, or drawn the line at yet another church choir practice and taken up refuge in the shed, and who could blame him? My mother’s sharp tongue and exacting standards were not for the faint-hearted. In another age she’d have run her own bank or company. Instead, she’d been the ultimate corporate wife and pushed. And Dad had got there, to the top of his stock-broking tree in the City, where he’d been an amiable figurehead – liked enormously, but perhaps not that respected – in the affable-buffoon mould. These days, of course, he wouldn’t have survived. Now he’d retired, though, he thought he’d like to enjoy himself, which didn’t necessarily mean shooting and playing bridge.

  ‘Quite right, Dad,’ I’d agreed, surprised when he’d voiced this to me recently. My father liked both of these things. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he’d said thoughtfully.

  And then a few weeks later, Mum had rung, in something of a state for her, saying Ginnie had better come quickly, and since Linda, Ginnie’s daily, was having a day off, here I was, but now I really had to go. It wasn’t just the sheets in the cottages, it was that Ludo had said he’d pop into my studio, and I dropped everything for Ludo. A year after I’d jumped impulsively into his car our relationship had tiptoed quietly on, to the extent that I’d begun to wonder if this gentle, wry man was the one I should have married at nineteen, instead of Sebastian. Sadly, though, Ludo was already married: to Ginnie’s best friend, Eliza. So no, I hadn’t slept with him. Hadn’t even kissed him. And never would, should the situation remain the same, which it very much looked like doing.

  Eliza, once an attractive blonde, was now a rather cross-looking one – apparently because she’d married an accountant who’d chucked it in for a much less lucrative soil-tilling career – and known locally as the Ice Maiden. She’d rarely un-frost for a dinner party let alone for her husband, who she found as frustrating as everyone else found charming and delightful. So Ludo was left to decorate the gardens of the local gentry – now that the recession had deepened, his spade got even more use – and I was sure many a housewife panted for him as he leaned on his fork in his faded chambray shirt that matched his blue eyes, advising them, in his mellifluous voice, to go for bigger beds, but he claimed not. And, even if they did, he loved his two girls too much to do anything about it, except stroll around the sunken garden with me now and again, wondering idly whether, if we were to lie in the shade of the pear tree together, it would still look like a working relationship.

  I texted him now, telling him not to bother to come over, that I was held up. Asked where he was.

  He texted back:

  I’m Puffy Trumpington’s bitch today. Shame. I wanted to show you my etching. x

  I smiled and pocketed my phone. He didn’t really want to show me an etching; that was just his excuse for coming to see me. If he was feeling bold he’d bound up the stairs to my attic, botanical print in hand and we’d gaze feverishly at one another over it. Eyes locked in excitement we’d pretend to discuss framing options.

  ‘What exactly are the mounting possibilities?’ Ludo would murmur and I’d dissolve into giggles, then go through the motions of showing him cardboard mounts.

  Later, over a cup of tea, he’d hold my hand across my drawing board and we’d idly spin dreams of one day being together: one day being when Eliza had finally succumbed to the charms of her tennis coach – Ludo encouraged tennis coaching even th
ough they couldn’t afford it – or perhaps her personal trainer.

  ‘We’ll sail off to sea, somewhere hot.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t do water, Ludo.’

  ‘Really? Icky-poo?’

  ‘Almost immediately. I was once carsick, airsick and boatsick all on the same trip,’ I told him, almost proudly. ‘They ran out of sick bags on the boat.’

  ‘What an extraordinarily seductive picture you paint. I’m so glad you never try to be mysterious. Does anything happen on a train?’

  ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘Great. I’ll see you there, then.’

  He ducked as I threw my pencil at him.

  All this, of course, however innocent, was nevertheless reprehensible, and kept firmly from the outside world, and in particular from Ginnie, who, although desperate to find me a man, might not be that desperate.

  ‘If you could just kick your ex-husband out it would be a start,’ she’d snap. And I’d agree that it would, although where Sebastian would go worried me. How would he manage? He could barely tie his own shoelaces.

  ‘Anywhere!’ she’d shriek. ‘Upper Ramsbottom, for all I care, but you own that house now, Ella, you bought him out. Richard saw to that. How he has the gall to stay there I don’t know!’

  She knew that by invoking Richard, I’d feel indebted to her, which, in a way, I was.

  ‘Because it’s his home, I suppose,’ I’d say, nibbling the skin round my thumbnail. ‘Not just our home, but the one he grew up in. Doesn’t seem quite right to ask him to leave.’

  ‘But you’ll never forge a relationship while he’s there, don’t you see? And is that what you want? To end up alone?’

  I’m not alone, I’d think: I’ve still got Sebastian. And, even more privately, I’d think: I’ve got Ludo.

  Neither of these would have counted in my sister’s book, of course, even had I voiced them. A cantankerous estranged husband who roared and spluttered his way out of bed at midday to stumble downstairs, horribly hungover, to his studio, where he painted angrily before destroying the canvas, and a celibate relationship with a married man? Oh, no. Having a man meant marriage, or at least cohabiting, even if it was in a cold marriage bed like the one I was sure my parents had shared for years.