The Marrying Game (35 page)

‘That’s not a fair question – you didn’t want to be looked at.’

His voice was as gentle as he could make it. ‘The Man would have made me feel I was messing about with his little girl – he never could accept the fact that you were grown-up. Neither could I, when I came back here after the army – it seemed to me that I’d been taking you all to the pantomime incredibly recently. But even I couldn’t help noticing that you’d turned into a woman. An astonishingly beautiful one.’

‘Did you? I mean, had I?’

‘Oh, God.’ Edward was laughing softly to himself. ‘I don’t believe it. I’ve never actually spelt it out to you.’ He held her face between his palms. ‘Rufa, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Even with make-up running down your face.’ Smiling, he wiped the smudges under her eyes with his thumb. ‘All the times
I
’ve watched you – whether you’ve been happy, or sad, or angry – I’ve never seen one mood of yours that made you anything but beautiful. Your soul shows in your face. And that’s beautiful too.’

He was deeply moved to see how eagerly Rufa drank in his tribute.

She said, ‘Then I don’t need to worry that you’re sorry you married me.’

‘Absolutely not.’ Sorry? He wished to God he had the words to tell her that his happiness was almost too great to comprehend. ‘I wish I knew how to stop you being so anxious, Ru. What are you afraid of?’

‘I don’t really know.’ She looked at him in silence for a minute, searching for an answer. ‘Of not being good enough for you. I still think you deserve something better.’

He smiled down at her. ‘Then it’s up to us to build something better. The real Marrying Game is only just beginning.’

PART TWO

Chapter One

‘HER NAME’S POLLY,’
Linnet said. ‘I call her Smelly.’

Rufa tipped fat beads of Arborio rice into her new kitchen scales, doing her best to swallow an unholy snort of laughter. ‘She’s not that bad.’

‘Yes she is. She’s as smelly as a fart. She keeps whispering with Daddy.’

Linnet was severe, but dismissive. Though she never approved of Ran’s girlfriends, she seldom lost much sleep over them – they came and went too frequently. Rufa was glad she had not yet noticed that this affair seemed to be far more serious. She reached over to caress the dark head. Touching Linnet gave her a blessed sense of control, when she felt power slipping away.

‘Look on the bright side,’ she said, ‘Polly might persuade Daddy to buy a television.’

Ran thought television was the new opium of the people, used by the Government for mass brainwashing; but Rufa could not see Polly surviving a child in the house without one. Television was certainly the opium of the Linnet.

‘Might she?’ Linnet’s face was inscrutable as she considered this. Then she became brisk. ‘Can I watch some now?’

‘All right. As long as you don’t make a fuss when it’s time to go home.’

‘I won’t.’ Linnet jumped from her chair and scampered along the stone passage to the drawing room, completely and unquestionably at home in Edward’s house because Rufa lived there. Rufa only wished she could accept change as easily. Her own head was swimming with the strangeness of everything.

Ran had dropped his daughter off at the farm. He had stuck his head out of the car window long enough to shout, ‘Hi, Ru – hope you had a nice honeymoon – can’t stop – I expect you’ve heard about Polly.’

Rufa had heard. She and Edward had returned from Italy at eleven the previous night. In the middle of carrying his bride over the threshold, Edward had found a Post-it note from Rose stuck to the front door. ‘Guess What!!! Ring me. Mum.’

‘Typical,’ Edward said. ‘Not a word about you and your honeymoon. Just the headlines about the latest drama.’

But he had encouraged Rufa to ring Rose as soon as the cases had been set down in the hall. He was curious too. This morning, Rufa had found the whole countryside seething with the news – in a small community, as Edward was always saying, everyone was ten feet tall and bathed in a permanent spotlight. There was no such thing as privacy. In the village post office and store, while buying bin bags and furniture polish, Rufa had heard it all again from Sandra Poulter, whose husband was managing Edward’s farm. Then the landlord of the Hasty Arms had mentioned it – indeed, had come out of the pub specially to tell her, though he pretended to be asking after Nancy. It was the sensation of the hour.

Ran had a new girlfriend: a posh blonde who had made rather a fool of herself at the shop asking for balsamic vinegar. This blonde had left a fiancé standing at the altar, chucked in her job, and moved stacks and stacks of luggage into Semple Farm.

If Rufa had not spoken to Rose first, she would not have believed it. She had seen Ran and Polly together at her wedding, but had no idea their heated glances could have boiled over into this, in just three and a half weeks. Polly Muir, of all the unlikely people. Had she lost her neat and tidy mind? This was a woman who lay awake worrying about place settings, and Semple Farm was a dump. Edward, who considered Ran anything but a catch, laughed every time he thought of her among the floor cushions and joss sticks.

Now, with Linnet safely immersed in Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Rufa examined her own feelings again. Her concern for Lydia and Linnet added to her sense of things slipping out of her grasp, beyond understanding or control. Nothing was predictable. Nothing was simple. Even Polly Muir valued passion above good sense. She had won herself a splendid prize in the Marrying Game, and thrown it all away on the very eve of her triumph. What cared she for her goose-feather bed?

Rufa wished she could relearn the mysteries of passion. It must be something I’m doing wrong, she decided. With Jonathan, her only other lover, passion had been instinctive – but she now saw that she had only responded to him, without first having to win him. The Tuscan honeymoon had been paradise seen through a sheet of glass.

She had been enchanted by the hard blue skies, the hot nights ringing with crickets, the beauty that dripped
from
every medieval gable. They had arrived, euphoric with lack of sleep and the sense of escape, in the afternoon of the day after the wedding. On the journey, Edward had become more relaxed, more attentive and generally more fun than he had been for weeks. When they sat on the terrace of the villa, he had been tender with her; gentle and loving. It had seemed natural to Rufa to go ahead of him up to their shuttered bedroom. Her throat dry with anticipation, she had slipped off her dress and stretched naked under the lavender-scented linen sheet.

But Edward had not come. She had fallen asleep, and by the time she woke up, everything had changed. She had found Edward tight-lipped and abstracted. There were patches of sweat on his shirt – he said he had been out walking, as if still on his bracing Gloucestershire farm. His manner to her had been as considerate and courteous as ever, but something had upset him.

Later – in no detail at all – he had told her. Prudence had called him, and although the conversation had not been easy, they were, essentially, reconciled. What did this mean? If the news was good, why did Edward seem so angry and anguished? And how had Prudence found the number of their honeymoon retreat? Edward had forbidden her to give it to Rose or Nancy, on the grounds that they needed a holiday from the everlasting demands of her family – but had he given it to Prudence? Rufa did not want to consider why the woman thought she had a right to intrude. At the time, she had been too confused and fearful to ask him.

The official delayed wedding night had been a washout. Not knowing what else to do, Rufa had once again gone upstairs first, and once again lain in naked
anticipation
under the single sheet. And Edward had bewildered her by reacting with anger. He had told her no performance was necessary; he could not make love to her until he had lost the sense that he was collecting a purchase.

Rufa, numb with humiliation, had spent the night clinging to the extreme edge of the bed, muffling her sobs in the hard pillow, while Edward – forbiddingly clad in pyjamas – had slept beside her.

The following morning he had apologized very sweetly. They had spent a magical day together, strolling round a local market and eating lunch under a vine. Edward had honoured her by confiding in her. He explained that he had more than Prudence on his mind – he was engaged in a long and painful correspondence with the War Crimes Commission in The Hague, concerning his experiences in Bosnia. For the first time, he talked to her about the disillusion with soldiering that had made him leave the army. Almost in passing, he had added that Prudence kept the power to hurt him because she was almost his only family, and Rufa (who knew only too well how tiresome families could be) was not to worry.

He had been fascinating, charming. Rufa had wrapped herself in his undivided attention, always so difficult to win at home. And at the end of this golden day, they had gone up to bed together, and still not made love. Rufa, sizzling with embarrassment over her failed ‘performance’, had covered her nakedness with a T-shirt. The tone of the honeymoon was set.

Not making love had become a routine. Night after night, Rufa had lain awake beside her husband, listening to his steady breathing. Incredibly, he slept. He had been trained to fall asleep in tanks and trenches, and
other
places even more uncomfortable than a double bed with an unfucked wife in it. Rufa would have worried that there was something wrong with him, or with her, if not for that one time.

The memory made her breathless and clumsy. She returned to it obsessively and a little shamefully, as if clinging to the memory of a dream.

‘It’s a sort of local version of brandy, I’m told,’ Edward said. He poured two measures of pale golden liquid, and handed one to Rufa. The scent, like the concentrated essence of a million grapes, mingled giddily with the scents of lavender and pine, and the thick hedge of rosemary that grew under the terrace. Silvia, the elderly housekeeper whose services had been hired with the villa, had cleared away the remains of a long, lazy lunch. They were both languid with heat and repletion.

Rufa knew she was not good at drinking, and usually limited herself to one glass of rich red wine. But the brandy was different. Each mouthful spread lassitude and dumb contentment through her body.

They sat in the shade of a big green umbrella, on fat calico cushions that smelt of baked dust. Whitewashed tubs brimmed with scarlet geraniums. The walls of the villa were splashed magenta, where bougainvillea climbed around the shuttered windows.

‘This is heaven,’ Rufa said. ‘Total heaven. I never want to leave.’

Edward said, ‘Have some more,’ and refilled their glasses.

They had been talking, as they often did, about the
work
still going on at Melismate. Edward was making Rufa laugh with some of Rose’s dottier suggestions for improvements. She was drowsily aware of his fondness for them all, and the feeling of ultimate safety this gave her. The brandy flooded her senses with sweetness. She held out her glass again.

Edward, relaxed and affectionate, was laughing at her. ‘Don’t be silly, you’re completely pickled already.’

‘Why not? I never get pickled. I didn’t realize it felt so lovely. I think I’m discovering alcohol – I never knew what all the fuss was about, until now.’

‘It makes you wonderfully mellow,’ Edward said. ‘At last you’ve stopped looking round for the next thing to do.’

‘I wish Mum could see me. She’d know how good you are for me.’

Rufa sipped more brandy. She lay back against the cushions, gazing out across the patchwork of ochre and umber fields, and her whole self was miraculously free from any kind of pain. Profound peace swirled around her – though when she moved her head, the world rocked alarmingly. It was better if she shut her heavy eyes, but she did not feel she wanted to sleep. Her body ached with tenderness. Every cell felt alive. She was dreamily conscious of her nipples brushing the inside of her silk dress, and the swollen warmth between her legs.

Edward’s arms were around her. His voice was soft and teasing against her ear. ‘Look at you – drunk and incapable. You’d better lie down.’