A Surrey State of Affairs (22 page)

  
TUESDAY, APRIL 29

Another visit from Reginald. First he had a very kind chat with Tanya, during which he praised her nail enterprise with the words “Best keep busy—the devil makes work for idle hands,” then he sat down for a cup of tea and a chat about the procedure for our health and safety inspection this evening. After we had arranged who would check the storeroom for dead mice and who would lock Miss Hughes’s handbag away, he got up to leave and I noticed that he had three green sequins stuck to the seat of his cassock. I thought it best not to brush them off. After he had gone, Tanya came bursting into the living room with a smile on her face and said she had decided to call her new business Idle Hands.

9:45 P.M.

Dear readers, I am in a panic. Things did not go at all well at bell ringing. There was a spider in the biscuit tin. Miss Hughes was so busy staring at Gerald that she lost hold of her rope and it whipped up and then back down and smacked her in the face. Reginald tripped over his cassock in the rush to check that she was okay. The dust he stirred up gave Gerald a coughing fit. The inspector was scribbling so quickly he snapped the lead in his
pencil. To top it all, I have just come home to find Tanya worried because Mark stepped out for some fresh air two hours ago and still hasn’t gotten back, Darcy pacing side to side on his perch shrieking “Sell! Sell! Sell!,” and Jeffrey shut in his study with
Golf Monthly
and a whole bottle of port.

  
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 30

Mark didn’t come back last night. I have a horrible cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. I can’t write for long because I must get back to checking with the police and the hospitals, and force-feeding Tanya Bach Rescue Remedy.

  
THURSDAY, MAY 1

Still no sign of Mark. Tanya is distraught. I’m so worried about her, in her condition. Even Jeffrey didn’t retreat behind
The Economist
last night, but phoned all his contacts in the City in case anyone had spotted him. Natalia stopped threatening to strike, although I can’t say for sure whether this is out of sympathy or because her workload has been reduced by a quarter. Mark’s parents are flying home tomorrow. I did offer them a bed but they insisted on booking themselves into a Travelodge. How could Mark do this to them? The mattresses aren’t even clean in such places.

  
FRIDAY, MAY 2

Dear readers, mixed news. Mark has been sighted, if this is the appropriate word for the discovery on Facebook of a photo of him at Spearmint Rhinos last night, swigging champagne straight from the bottle with a nipple tassel on his nose. Tanya had alerted her entire network of online friends, including several of his old colleagues, that he was missing, and one of them noticed the picture today and got in touch. Poor, poor Tanya. The good
news is that her husband is alive; the bad is that he is an abominable, selfish pig. She has alternated between laughing with relief and crying with anger. He still has not made contact; his BlackBerry is switched off.

Darcy continues to screech “Sell!” I worry that he is suffering from executive burnout. Paratweets were unable to advise; apparently none of them has experienced anything similar.

  
SATURDAY, MAY 3

Mark is back. I was dusting the wooden blinds in Jeffrey’s study (Natalia never gets into every nook and cranny) when I spotted a lone figure walking up the drive with an odd lopsided stride. I looked closer. It was him, wearing only one shoe.

After two hours locked in the bedroom talking to him, Tanya emerged and told me everything over a cup of tea. Mark was wretchedly sorry. Needless to say, he hadn’t been able to cope with losing his job. His life had revolved around work to an extent even Tanya hadn’t guessed at: it was where he spent the majority of his waking hours, where he had gotten used to the constant pressure, the buzz, the adrenaline highs and lows, the camaraderie, and the rubber chicken affixed to his monitor. Without it, he told Tanya, he felt like he was lying in a bath of ice getting more and more numb. These are obviously not the words that a wife and expectant mother wishes to hear, but Tanya had at least welcomed his honesty.

He went on to explain that he had kept a sense of purpose by gambling on his credit cards, but when the funds had dried up and they had to move here he didn’t know how to face the future. He started noting down how he would trade a hypothetical portfolio of stocks that he followed on the London Stock Exchange Web site, but the final straw came when he made Darcy play too and my parrot’s share tips outperformed his own. I managed to
suppress a smile of pride at this point. He had dressed for work, got on a train to the City, and, in his own words, “gone a bit nuts.” Tanya did not elaborate and I didn’t press her.

Last night, he was lying on the pavement looking up at the streetlamps and the clouds, and realized that the pain he felt all over wasn’t caused by the drink or the drugs or the bits of broken paving stone he was lying on, but by how much he missed her. Tanya’s eyes misted over. I wondered what he meant by drugs and whether he had brought anything illegal into the house and whether, if he had, Jeffrey or I would get arrested and thrown into jail to rot, but once again I bit my lip and patted Tanya on the shoulder. She finished her tea and ate two oatmeal cookies, which I took as a good sign. Poor Tanya. Poor Mark.

  
SUNDAY, MAY 4

Mark is a changed man. Last night he apologized sincerely to me and Jeffrey for being “such a t
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,” and vowed that he would do everything he could to earn his keep while he was staying with us. He demonstrated this by loading our best wineglasses into the dishwasher.

  
MONDAY, MAY 5

No sooner had I waved Jeffrey off to work this morning and poured myself a second cup of coffee than I heard Mark on the phone, his voice back to its usual persuasive, bouncy tones, mentioning things like Idle Hands, microfinancing, growth opportunities, and recession-proof niches. This is another good sign. Tanya had left a tube of half-used Great Lash mascara in the bathroom. This is yet another good sign, although it suddenly made me miss Sophie, who uses the same brand. I decided to call her, on a whim.

I didn’t really expect her to answer, as I presumed she would
be in her wellies, knee-deep in the waters of the Ardèche, studiously counting stickleback, but she picked up after just two of those flat Continental bleeps. I could hear laughter and the repetitive thud of electronic “music” in the background. She quickly explained that they were celebrating after recording “s
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loads of fish”—I told her off for her language—but that everything was fine, except that her allowance had run out because she had had to buy a special silk fishing net. Having agreed to transfer some more money, and checked that she was wearing sunscreen, wasn’t drinking too much, and was eating enough, I ran out of things to say, so I decided to ask after her best friend, Zac. There was a confused silence before she said, “Zac? Oh, yeah, Zac. He’s all right. Daisy’s my best mate, she’s wicked.” This Daisy, it transpired, was an aspiring “DJ” who “rocked” on her iPod. Sophie declared that she too wanted to be a DJ. I reminded her that she had a deferred place to study sociology at the University of Bristol, which may not be the most relevant qualification, but she said, “Whatever, gotta go, smell ya later,” and hung up.