Muddy Waters (26 page)

‘Will Daddy be there?' Venetia slid down from her chair and stood in front of Abigail, looking, Stella thought, like a sulky little girl reluctantly about to present a bouquet to a visiting Duchess. There was a sharp intake of breath from the house mother, who was waiting behind them all, hovering in the doorway, anticipating drama, hoping to have to do mopping up of emotions.

‘Er . . . no, I don't think so. He's working, in America. It's too far.'

‘I expect he'll bring me a present then,' Venetia declared confidently, the hint of a smile drifting across her face. Goodness, Daddy's girl, Stella thought, she's going to be no end of trouble, and troubled if Martin doesn't come back.

‘I'll go and turn the car round,' she told them, escaping out into the daylight.

They were very
good
children, Stella could only think as she drove them the thirty-five miles back to their home. James and Venetia said little, didn't whine for crisps or chocolate or turn a nerve-wracking shade of green in the back of the car. Through the mirror she could see Venetia sitting with her arms folded as if she'd got a grudge about something and was biding her time before coming out with it, silently watching the countryside pass by. James, who had developed manners acute enough to want to avoid silences, politely answered questions his mother hadn't actually bothered to ask about sports teams and friends and the horrors of early French. During the quiet moments, she could feel him
not mentioning
something, and wondered how many chilling hints his house mother had been unable to resist dropping in the hope that he could, even at his age, fill in the interesting newsy gaps.

‘Where's Cleo?' was Venetia's only comment when they arrived at Abigail and Martin's palatial but spookily deserted house. She dashed off to run from room to room searching for her cat, speeding and looking and slamming doors and sending hollow echoes down the long, broad passageways. Stella heard and felt her small pounding footsteps overhead, and then on up to the attic level where the suites of children's rooms and the former nanny's quarters were. Venetia hurtled down the stairs and then darted back to the hallway.

‘Sorry, darling, what did you say?' Abigail was busy pressing buttons on the Ansaphone and not listening to her child.

‘
Cleo!
' Venetia shouted, bunching up her fist and thumping viciously at Abigail's thigh, ‘Where's my
cat
?'

‘She's at my house, on Pansy Island,' Stella explained quietly. ‘When your mummy came to stay she didn't want to leave Cleo here all by herself so she brought her along to us in a basket. She's very happy there, really. You'll see her very soon.' She smiled at Venetia, trusting she was being reassuring.

‘Have you got Daddy there too?' the child demanded, frowning.

‘No, just Cleo,' Stella told her.

‘
Fuck
,' Abigail muttered. Venetia smirked and flounced off up the stairs again. ‘Not so much as a “hello, how are you,”' Abigail complained, switching off the machine. ‘In fact, “Hello, how are you, the house deeds are in the safe,” would be nice.'

‘Almost as nice as “Hello, I'm coming back”?' Stella asked, grinning.

Abigail laughed, ‘Oh
much
better than that! Come on, let's find you the very best of the spare rooms and then we'll go into the garden and see what the pool temperature is. If the thermostat's working as it should be, it'll be warm enough for a lovely, lovely swim.'

Adrian typed the words ‘The End' at the bottom of the page, leaned back on his ergonomically perfect leather chair and closed his eyes. Behind the lids, where he'd trusted he would see nothing but reddish-black blankness, he pictured Abigail's small breasts gleaming in the moonlight like smooth pale stones on a sandy beach. They were only breasts, he told himself, just quite small, ordinary breasts, no more magical or different or more thrilling than anyone else's. What on earth had he hoped to discover inside that pink and white gingham bra? What soul-transforming, life-enhancing, holy treasures had he expected to find in there? It was as if he'd gone right back to being a horny nineteen-year-old again, constantly checking that women would really
do it,
as if nothing useful, not one sense-endowing truth had been learned in between. He rubbed his eyes, trying to erase the pictures, and stared out of the window at the river, rising fast on its afternoon tide. The roof of Peggy's boat was bobbing on the rising tide just visible over the low wall and he wished that the rhythmic movement didn't remind him of youthful sex in the backs of cars parked alongside others, rocking in the misty dark in quiet lanes. It's only because I've finished the book, he thought, looking at the rather childlike ‘The End' declaration on the screen in front of him, like a neat, keen schoolboy triumphantly underlining a piece of difficult Latin prep. Any other time he'd be grateful to have his surroundings make him think about sex, terrifically helpful for his job.

‘You look as if you have the problem,' Giuliana's soft voice interrupted Adrian's thoughts and made him jump. When, he wondered as he swivelled the cream leather chair, had it become customary for people to start wandering in to see him, not just carefully, apologetically, but without even knocking? So pretty, though, he thought, admiring Giuliana's carelessly piled up hair, skewered loosely into place with a piece of metal that could easily have been purloined from one of Enzo's mighty works. She had such a long neck, he thought, such a perfectly free-moving, uncomplicated body.

He smiled at her and waved her into the ancient cane peacock chair. ‘What problem do I look as if I have?'

She shrugged and sat down, her long slim feet neatly side by side as if she was waiting for a job interview. ‘I don't know, just a problem. You look like you can't mend it.' She laughed suddenly, ‘I know, you must ask your wife, she does the mending the problems – you ask her.' She leaned forwards, her hands resting on the chair either side of her thighs and he tried not to look down the front of the simple cotton singlet she was wearing, just in case he glimpsed yet more disturbing pink gingham. ‘
I
have a problem,' she confided and he held his breath, ‘I can't find Toby and he said he would be here.'

‘Isn't he in the house?' Adrian asked, rather stupidly. After all, the summerhouse would hardly have been the first place she'd look. She smiled, looking kind and he felt immediately very silly. ‘This morning,' Adrian managed to recall, ‘he did say it was his turn to go to Willow. Perhaps he is still there.'

Giuliana laughed, her one gold filling catching the sunlight. ‘I'll go and find him. I shall watch him being plastered.' She got up and went to the door, looking back and giving Adrian a wicked, all Italian glance, ‘It's now the time that I see his body,' she said, grinning at him.

Adrian watched her stroll elegantly up the garden path, slowing to stroke the foxglove flowers and trail her hand along the tops of the geraniums. He wished Stella would come home. She should be at Abigail's by now, he calculated, looking at his watch and picking up the phone. He wanted to tell her he'd finished the book, wanted to tell her he missed her. He flipped open his diary and started tapping out the number, but hung up quickly halfway through, realizing that the person who answered would most likely be Abigail. He opened a new folder in his computer and started experimenting with a few thoughts towards a new piece of work. It might, he thought, involve a lot of pink gingham underwear . . .

‘This is absolutely
definitely
the life,' Stella stated, shielding her eyes from the sun and watching Venetia dive like a pink seal into the swimming pool. She reached out to the table beside her and picked up her iced white wine. A few freezing drops spilled from the edge of the glass and went through her swimsuit, giving her tummy an icy chill on the outside to match the cold on the inside as she drank.

‘Comfortable, are you?' Abigail teased, ‘Anything else I can get for Madam?'

Stella stirred lazily on the cushioned steamer chair and stretched out a foot to admire her Chameleon pedicure. ‘No, I don't think so, thank you, just for the moment. Though perhaps a little later a well-muscled slave could come over and waft a large, cooling fan across my sun-kissed body.'

They both giggled, looking across the lawn to where Abigail's young, blond gardener, naked to the waist and gleaming from effort and heat, clipped carefully at the yew hedge.

‘He's awfully good,' Abigail said, still staring admiringly at him.

‘What at?' Stella spluttered into her drink.

‘Gardening, of course! Whatever did you think?'

‘You know what I thought. In fact, was he one of the ones?' she asked out of simple curiosity. Did people, people like her really have sex with young and gorgeous men or was it just tabloid talk? Surely Abigail couldn't really still be that promiscuous, not at her age. Grown-ups just weren't.

‘What a thing to ask!' Abigail put on a mock-shocked face, ‘I told you, he's here for the gardening. You should see his red hot pokers . . .'

‘Oh should I,' Stella laughed, feeling that one way or another she'd been done out of the truth. Would she, she wondered, have told Abigail if she'd gone off to bed with that Simon the night before? Probably not.

‘I'm bored.' Venetia's face bobbed up by the pool steps and she stared at her mother, expecting instant relief from her problem.

‘How can you be bored?' Stella asked her, appalled. ‘It's such a lovely day and there's so many fun things to do.'

Venetia ignored her. ‘I'm
bored
,' she insisted again, glaring at her mother.

Abigail sighed, ‘Are you, darling? I'm sorry about that but you'll just have to amuse yourself for a while. Why don't you go and find James? Perhaps he'll think of a game you can both play.'

‘He's in his room with his computer. He's boring.' Venetia started slapping her hand up and down on the surface of the water, slyly watching the small droplets, calculatedly just not quite enough for complaint, landing on both Stella and Abigail.

Stella felt a small nag of impatience with the child. Hers had never been allowed to say they were bored. Her own mother had said, and she could remember it clearly, ‘Only boring people get bored – they're the ones who can't think for themselves what to do.' ‘You could read a book,' she suggested, ‘or make something.'

‘
Make
something? Like what? How?' Venetia stopped splashing and her face expressed a wary interest. Stella thought quickly, rifling though her memories for the entertainments she'd helped Ruth with.

‘I know,' she said, ‘paper dolls – the ones with tagged clothes. Have you ever played with those?'

An extra big splash followed along with a scowl and, ‘They're
boring
.'

‘Not if you make your own, they're not,' Stella said patiently. ‘Not if you decide just what you want them to look like and design all their outfits yourself. They can be space people with green faces or they can look like your best friend or your cat, whatever you like. If you go and get paper, coloured pencils and some scissors and bring them out here, we can sit under the big umbrella and I'll show you what to do.' She closed her eyes, giving the child time to think over the idea and after a moment or two heard her climbing out of the pool and padding past her towards the house.

‘You're so good with her,' Abigail said. ‘With me she'd just have demanded a trip to the nearest shops to buy five minutes worth of rubbishy plastic toy. Martin, of course, would probably have driven her up to Hamley's. She should have had you for a mother, not me.'

‘Garbage,' Stella told her, putting her face up for the last moments she was likely to get of the sun that afternoon. ‘She just needs a bit of company, that's all.' She smiled, loving the heat on her face and feeling recklessly heedless of wrinkle danger.

‘We really should swop places,' Stella heard Abigail say. ‘You'd be so much better at my children and my house than I seem to be. I bet you could even keep Martin here too.'

‘You make him sound like a straying pet. And what would you do, exactly, while I'm swanning about taking over all you possess?'

‘Oh, I'd be all right,' Abigail assured her. ‘I told you, I'd be really, truly happy with exactly what you've got. We really should swop. Tell me honestly, you wouldn't mind living here, would you?'

Stella sat up and looked around the vast garden. Beyond the yew hedge where the young gardener was clipping at off-shoots, was the all-weather tennis court. The garage block, outside which gleamed Abigail's little silver Mercedes, (complete with new front wing) was just the other side of it. The L-shaped house, the colour of Cornish cream, immaculately maintained, beautifully tended by a team of cleaners, was the sort that featured in the most up-market decorating magazines. When it came up for sale, if ever, it would merit a whole page in
Country Life
and would be so expensive that a price would not be mentioned. Whoever had to ask how much wouldn't be able to afford it.

Stella thought about the island tides, the cobwebs in her kitchen, the petty squabbles about the proposed bridge, Peggy's scruffy barge, Bernard's pathetically inflated ego. ‘Well, of course I wouldn't mind living here. Who would?' she declared. ‘You didn't even need to ask.'

Ruth lay face down on Willow's big table, resting her chin on her hands and staring at the patterns in the wood grain. I'm at her mercy, completely, she thought. Too late to back out now, she could only trust that what Willow was smearing greasily all down her back, bottom and thighs really was protective vitamin E and Vaseline. It could be anything, Ruth thought dreamily, enjoying the procedure and the possiblity of danger. It could be a dollop of Toby's precious Beetle's axle grease laced with loo bleach, or some kind of evil acid that would etch down through her skin and burn huge layers off. Willow wouldn't need to do a cast then, she could simply hang up the peeled and ragged skin and call it an art piece. Perhaps she collected them from all her rivals in love, like scalping, for trophies – there might be a lifetime's collection of other women's bug-chewed, leathery skins heaped in a trunk under a bed, ready to be hung and displayed at Willow's old age retrospective exhibition. She imagined them smelling slightly rancid, like Adrian's old Afghan coat that still waited in a bin liner in the cellar, ready for many years to go to a jumble sale. They'd probably need ironing, like mildewed sheets, Ruth thought idly.